You may be looking into both Affilorama and Wealthy Affiliate and want to know the difference and which one is better. This post will give you a breakdown of each website and will compare the two so that you can make an informed decision.
For each site, we’ll be looking at:
- What you can learn
- If there are other tools available
- Their communities and how active they are
- Costs
Let’s dive into this and find out:
Affilorama vs Wealthy Affiliate – which one should you choose?
What is Affilorama?
Affilorama is a free member site from internet marketer, Mark Ling. It has loads of great affiliate marketing lessons. The lesson topics include:
- Introduction
- Market Research
- Content Creation
- Site Building
- Marketing Ideas
- SEO
- PPC
- Affiliate Outsourcing
You can see that everything is nicely laid out on the website and easy to get to.
Each of these topics has a various amount of lessons within it. For instance, Affiliate Outsourcing only has 3 lessons, but Site Building has 11!
All the lessons are easy to get to when you scroll to the bottom of a topic introduction page.
And they’re also displayed on the right side of the page. As you go through each lesson, you can mark it completed when you’re done. You’ll also be shown your progress on the top of the left menu.
All the lessons have both video and text components. This is great because people learn I different ways and having the ability to choose is a huge benefit.
There is also a forum in Affilorama in case you have questions or just want to chat…if you can find someone to chat with. We’ll talk about this a little more later.
What is Wealthy Affiliate?
Like Affilorama, Wealthy Affiliate is an educational platform. Wealthy Affiliate was started by Kyle Loudoun and Carson Lim in 2005 and its main purpose is to teach people the skills necessary to create a successful online business.
They have step-by-step training (both video and text for each lesson) that takes you through the entire process of building an affiliate marketing website.
They also have domain name purchasing and management right inside the platform, web hosting included for up to 25 websites, a keyword research tool, a huge community of over 1 million people and much more.
Wealthy Affiliate has a Free Starter Membership as well as a Premium Membership, and we’ll go over this a little later when we compare costs.
These are the free lessons that you get as a Starter Member:
The lessons are:
- Getting Rolling
- Understanding How to Make Money Online
- Choose a Niche
- Building Your OWN Niche Website
- Setting Up Your Website
- Getting Your Site Ready for Search Engines
- Creating Your Initial Website Content
- Creating Custom Menus on Your Website
- Understanding Keywords
- Congratulations and Your Next Steps
Like Affilorama, each of these lessons have tasks to complete to help you keep track of your progress:
By the end of the these 10 lessons, you will have your own affiliate website up – at no cost!
There is a lot to Wealthy Affiliate – much more than we’ll have time to go through here. But you can read my full Wealthy Affiliate review to see everything that’s included.
Affilorama Complaints
I really couldn’t find any complaints online about Affilorama. Which is a good thing because it’s completely free, so there’s not really anything to complain about.
I did see some complaints on the forum of people who asked questions about AffiloJetpack and their questions went unanswered for a while and they were getting upset about that.
However, it’s because the forum really isn’t very active. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
Wealthy Affiliate Complaints
I have seen some complaints online about Wealthy Affiliate, and I tackle some of those in my Wealthy Affiliate review. It’s a little unfair to compare complaints with Affilorama (a free membership site) to Wealthy Affiliate (a site with a Free Membership and a Premium Membership).
It would be more fair to compare Wealthy Affiliate’s Free Membership to Affilorama. And in that case, I think they’re about equal. Because who’s going to complain about a free membership?
Affilorama Pros and Cons
The biggest benefit of Affilorama is that all the lessons are free. And the lessons are quite comprehensive! But there are some downsides too. Let’s go over the pros and cons.
Pros
- You get a lot of great, free content
- Both video and text is included in the lessons
- Large following of over 870,000 members
- The site is very easy to navigate
Cons
- Some of the lessons are more complicated than they need to be
- Some of the lessons are a little out of order and it’s confusing
- Some of the lessons seem to be outdated
- Affilorama is JUST lessons and doesn’t have web hosting or other tools (they have other paid-for programs that may include these)
- There is a forum, but it’s not super active
I just want to touch on a few of these things. I think it’s awesome that you get a great amount of training. The videos are high quality and the text portion is laid out nicely and everything flows really well.
When I went into some of the lessons, I was really surprised. They seem to be outdated!
For instance:
When looking at the lesson on building a website, they go over 2 ways you can do it:
- Use Dreamweave
- Build it out in HTML
What?!
These were the options I had and used back in the late 90s / early 2000s. Trust me, you do not want to do either of these.
Building a website is so easy now. I can create a website on Wealthy Affiliate via WordPress in just seconds.
Also, I saw some of the lessons here were a little out of order. Like, they have a lesson on linking your domain with your hosting. And then the next lesson is finding good hosting.
Not a deal breaker, but it could be confusing to someone who’s brand new.
The other bigger issue I saw is that the forum really isn’t very active. When you’re building an online business, you really do need a place to ask questions – and get answers quickly.
To be fair, there seems to be more active forums for the paid products.
Wealthy Affiliate Pros and Cons
Pros
- Like Affilorama, the Free Starter Membership is free for as long as you like
- No credit card needed for the free membership
- Great information in the first 10 lessons
- You’ll be shown how to build your own website in the first 10 lessons, step by step
- Up-to-date training
- Super active community
Cons
- The free membership isn’t enough information to really be successful
I know it seems like I’m being biased here but I really can’t think of any other cons for the free membership. However, I think that con is pretty big.
I also don’t think the free Affilorama training will allow you to be super successful either because some of the information is just too outdated and confusing and because there’s not enough support.
With that said, let’s see what you get when you start to pay for things.
Wealthy Affiliate vs Affilorama Paid Products
Let’s see what how much Mark Ling’s paid products are and what they get you. This won’t be super in-depth, but it’ll give you a good idea.
- Path2Passive – A guide for affiliate marketers to learn how to create passive profit website the right way: $37
- AffiloTools – A beta product that helps you keep track of rankings and keywords: Free for Affilorama members
- AffiloJetpack – Done-for-you niche website that includes web hosting for a year, a Premium WordPress theme, and a year’s worth of emails (90 emails) – $997
As mentioned, Wealthy Affiliate is a membership site. There aren’t any other products. It’s a Free Starter Membership or a Premium Membership. The Premium Membership is $49 / month and includes:
- Comprehensive video and text training
- An awesome keyword research tool
- Live weekly trainings
- Full 24/7 Site Support
- Live Chat with other members for quick questions and answers
- A blogging platform (which can rank in Google)
- A commenting platform
- A platform for writing posts (I’m using it right now)
- Fast and secure web hosting for up to 25 websites
- Domains for $15 that includes privacy and SSL
The best thing about Wealthy Affiliate is the community support. With over 1 million members, the community is very, very active. If you have a question, someone will be able to answer it – and quickly.
Not only that, but the owners Kyle and Carson are active within the community too. I’ve had quite a few times when Kyle has personally helped me!
Also, there are no upsells. It’s $49 / month. That’s it.
That’s why Wealthy Affiliate remains my #1 recommendation.
Conclusion
You really can’t go wrong with Affilorama or Wealthy Affiliate. They are both fantastic programs run by nice internet marketers (there are plenty of not-so-nice ones out there) who truly want to help people succeed.
Both free programs will only get you so far. But they’re both a great first step in learning the affiliate marketing process. (Just watch out for Affilorama’s outdated lessons.)
Both have paid programs that can help push you toward success. It just depends on what you’re looking for. Do you want to build your own website and have complete control over it? (I recommend this.) Then, Wealthy Affiliate is your answer.
Would you rather have a done-for-you system? I personally believe there are some issues with done-for-you websites, but that’s your choice. In that case, you would go with Affilorama / AffiloJetpack.
Check out both free programs and see what works for you.
As a beginner to all this building a website thing, I need comprehensive, easy and up to date. It is why I personally prefer Wealty Affiliate. Although there is the added cost of it, there are so many more benefits. I love the ability to search keywords so I can write efficiently and really get my articles out to my readers. Isnt that the point?
I also appreciate that they do get back to me very quickly if i have issues or questions. I don’t like to be held up, waiting for someone else to reply.
The community and support at Wealthy Affiliate is invaluable to me. I can’t say how it is for the paid customers at Affilorama, but I can’t imagine anything can compare to Wealthy Affiliate. It’s the absolute best community online, I’m convinced of it. There’s always someone available to help, answer a question, or just chat.
This is quite a comparison. Both networks have valuable resources and they have taken their time to lay out the training.
I am currently in the Wealthy affiliate program and I cannot complain. Though WA has both free and paid membership, I choose the premium as I get a lot of value from the training. The community there is awesome and everyone goes out of their way to see that every member succeeds.
I have not tried Affilorama as Wealthy Affiliate has everything I need.
Thank you for this thorough comparison.
Thanks so much for your thoughts! I’m glad you’re happy at Wealthy Affiliate!
I like the idea of having the same lesson be in both a video and text format. That’s helpful because a lot of times I would rather actually read since it’s more active for my brain. If it’s just someone talking on a video I lose interest quickly. I am doing the premium membership of wealthy affiliate now. I never tried affiliorama. I am pretty new to affiliate marketing altogether so I wouldn’t have had time to try them both. I think I’ve got a good value out of my $34 and my first two weeks of the premium membership. I wanted to give it a good try for myself. So far I have replaced the time that I would have spent playing video games or watching movies or shows with time on wealthy affiliate and so I think that’s kind of a cool way 2 use my spare time and my brain’s been a lot more active which I like.
I’m with you on the text lessons. I usually prefer them over video. Some people say that we no longer have the attention span for text. I think the opposite! I don’t have the attention span for video! They usually just go too slow for me.
Wealthy Affiliate is a perfect way to spend your time. Why not learn a new skill instead of watching TV? (Although, enjoy watching some TV too!)
Hi Christina, excellent review.
I’ve never even heard of Affilorama but, as a WordPress web developer, I am indeed shocked to find out that it wasn’t part of the choices available. I mean who uses Dreamweaver and HTML when they have WordPress (and other CMS if WP is not your cup of tea)?
I also agree that you can get the founder to help you. I had a massive problem when I first moved hosting and in frustration, messaged Kyle. And he replied! Wasn’t that a shock?! So, that alone is worth every penny to me. Highly recommend. 🙂
I was shocked at the whole Dreamweaver and HTML thing too! Crazy! The thing is, if you went with their AffiloJetpack product, they do have a WordPress theme there that they include. So, I think it’s just the free training that’s outdated.
I love that Kyle and Carson are so involved at Wealthy Affiliate. To be fair, Mark Ling may also be involved in his community. I didn’t deeply dive into it to see.
But I know that Kyle has even liked my personal posts on Facebook (posts that have nothing to do with websites), and I have a feeling that’s something that most “gurus” don’t do.
Hi Christina
When you are faced with two options, it is always difficult to choose to which one to go for. This is where your comparison review comes into play, where helpful pointers for both programmes are highlighted. The Tyke in me, say go for free as it the best feeler to know if I should loosen my purse strings or not. It is always good to wet your feet before going head in. My personally use both to find gaps that both programmes have and then overcome them.
The fact is that no programme is perfect and it is what we make out of it that is the most important. I thank you for writing this article as it has cleared a lot of uncertainty.
Thanks
Antonio
Yes, you can try both options out at no cost, which is great. I always admire companies that let you test drive their product to see if it will work for you. That’s a green flag in my book. (Is there such a thing as a green flag? I’m going to go with yes. A green flag is a good thing!)
Great review, enjoyed reading through it.
From your review, it is clear Wealthy Affiliate is the best option for one who really wants to succeed in Affiliate marketing. For which i would like to do. Like the saying goes, ‘You spend money to make money’! I have been searching for such opportunities and i just might have found what i am looking for!
I would like to ask though, how long can one be on the Free Starter with Wealthy affiliate?
Hi Mariam! I mentioned it somewhere in the post, but you can stay a Free Starter Member with Wealthy Affiliate as long as you like. The issue is that after 7 days your access will be limited.
Hi Christina,
I am hearing about Affilorama platform for the first time and happy to know it is legit. It is nice it is free but you pay for hosting,
Wealthy Affiliate has all the tools and training to be successful. The success at wealthy affiliate had been proved over and over.
Affilorama is not comparable to WA which is constantly upgrading its infrastructure. It is very little money to have all these advantages to be successful.
Who wants to live in an outdated world with online marketing scenario where things are evolving everyday.
But trying out free version of Affilorama can help beginners to learn online business.
Thank you for offering a great comparison of Affilorama and WA.
Well, Affilorama is just a training platform. If you got AffiloJetpack, hosting is included for a year, but it’s pricey at $997 for the whole program. (Could be worth it if you can get the right traffic to your site…)
But I do prefer Wealthy Affiliate because I think it’s good to learn ALL the ins and outs of creating a website and getting traffic to it. And because it is at a much lower cost.
Thanks for this informative post, In my opinion, Wealthy Affiliate is the best option, even though it’s very inexpensive compared to Affilorama, by quite a margin. Both the Starter and Premium membership options offer great value. The training, website builders, and web hosting are worth more thanthe membership alone, and the interactive community is also an advantage to having a successful online campaign. This would also be my recommendation
Thank you for your thoughts!