My Wealthy Affiliate Review

Affiliate Marketing is where I got my first big break online:

And this is where you can learn how to start making money online too

Let me first give you a bit more of my own story and then I’ll explain how the Wealthy Affiliate community and training can help you get your breakthrough to making money online.

I was brought up in Essex, UK and attended a good grammar school in Southend. After that, I went off to Portsmouth and got a degree in Electronics. Everything seemed good and I was very excited to get to work and start earning money.

Big plans, high hopes. Such is the life of a 20 year old!

My first job was working for a big defence contractor in Basildon but the hours were long and during winter I hardly saw the sun because there were no windows in the building because much of the work on site was “top secret”. It was a pretty tough start to my working life. The days soon ran into weeks and the weeks into months and so on. I pretty soon realised that school wasn’t so bad after all. Was this how I was going to live the next 40 years of my life?

No way! I started trading the stock market – nipping off to the payphone to call the brokers to buy and sell shares I knew very little about. I was reading the tips in the newspapers and sure enough some weeks I would make more money trading that I would working 37 hours in my job. Wow. Perhaps this was the answer?

Not bad eh? But that was pre-internet bubble so I got lucky on a few tech stocks and made some good money but then the bubble burst and guess what happened?

Roll on a couple more years and I decided to get out of Electronics and try my hand at Technical Sales (I didn’t want to feel I had totally wasted 4 years of my life getting a degree in electronics!)

After a couple of job interviews I landed a job with a small family run business in Hertfordshire. I was the 15th person to join the company and I thought “Yeah, this is it – I can go to the top and run this show!”. It was VERY different to working with a company of 2,500 people. Initially I LOVED it. But roll on another 7 years and guess what? Yep, I started to realise this wasn’t going to be my ticket to freedom either.

By around 1996 I started trying to work out what this “internet thing” was all about. I could see it had the potential to really change the world. I even bought the domain name “moviewatch.co.uk”. Remember, this was way before anyone thought you’d be able to watch movies online – the internet was crawling along at 9.6kbaud (i.e. it was very slow).

However, there was a “domain gold rush” similar to the gold rush. Domain names like “business.com” and “broadcast.com” were selling for $billions! It was crazy times. This was all revolutionary and no-one knew where it was all heading.

Anyway I didn’t make a fortune in domain names. (I’ve since cancelled almost 1,000 domain names I purchased over the years). However, once I started buying domain names, I also started working out how to create websites to go with them. Not only that, I also worked out how to get to the top of Google search results. BOOM! I now had a business I could run by myself. Or so I thought.

My initial plan was to create a website for industry where I could simply charge companies for listing their details on my site. The site was getting a good number of views and the idea seemed simple enough. I was basically created a yellow pages for industry online. I had a plan but I couldn’t go any further with it whilst I was in a job. I needed to TIME to get it off the ground. Firstly, I persuaded my boss to let me work a 4 day week and this gave me 1 day a week to work on my new project. But the time came pretty quickly where I had to make a leap of faith.

So, on Feb 1st 2001, I QUIT my job and went self employed. Wow, it felt GOOD but also a little bit scary. My wife was expecting our first child so I had to make it work. I gave myself 6 months and said if it didn’t work, I’d go back to a job.

Well, within 6 months of picking up the phone, trying to persuade people they should pay me to list their company phone number on my site, I worked out this was not going to make me enough money to survive on – at least not enough to keep my wife at home and pay for the new baby clothes and nappies we seemed to be buying with alarming regularity. A decision had to be made.

I took a job very briefly with an internet company just down the road but within 2 months I had quit again. I had tasted freedom and it tasted good and I guess I was now no longer employee mentality.

I could make my own way thank you very much. One thing I soon realised when I worked for the internet company was that I was doing the right thing – getting to the top of Google and creating sites – but I was not selling the right product. I had come across something which by this stage was called “affiliate marketing” and realised I could just put links on my websites sending people to other websites and those companies would then pay me for any resulting sales. No need to phone up companies trying to persuade them to pay me. Instead there were sites I could go to to get a link from another company wanting to pay me!

How cool was that? No talking to anyone, no selling anything. Just build website after website and put links on them. kerrching!

That was indeed my breakthrough moment and by the end of 2001 I was earning a full-time income from the internet. Goal achieved. And it’s all thanks to “affiliate marketing”.

Which brings me back now to you! If you want to make money online, you need to UNDERSTAND what affiliate marketing is and how you can benefit from it. My story above shows you the years it took me to get to that breakthrough moment. But, times have changed (they’ve changed a lot). You do not need to spend years learning the skills it took me to learn. And you shouldn’t need to make the mistakes I made.

If you could have attend an “affiliate marketing university” online, that was free or certainly very low cost to attend, would that help? Learn from people who are actually DOING it.

You can of course do it the long way if you want  and spend the next 4 years trying to work it out for yourself. But I really would advise you there is a much easier way.

So that’s where I want to introduce you to Wealthy Affiliate. They have trained THOUSANDS of people to become full-time internet marketers. Here’s some real testimonials I’ve taken from members inside Wealthy Affiliate

[box type=”bio”] They gave me the tools I needed to start my online business from the ground up. Without them, I would not be where I am today. The training and support at Wealthy Affiliate was what I needed to grow my business to the point where I was able to achieve my dream of having the free time to travel the world and get some adventure in my life!

Nathaniell[/box]