Can Wealthy Affiliate Community Engagement Pay for Your Membership?

Wealthy Affiliate has been one of my Top 5 Programs since I launched this website in 2017.

That’s not because I think it’s some magical system for making money online. Quite the opposite. I’ve stayed with Wealthy Affiliate because it provides the things I actually need as a blogger: WordPress hosting, training, tools, strong technical support and a large community of people building online businesses.

I’ve also been a member since 2015.

But recently I discovered something about Wealthy Affiliate that I had largely overlooked.

The platform now has a community engagement points system that rewards members for participating in the community. And those points can translate into actual earnings.

That got me thinking:

Could active participation in the Wealthy Affiliate community eventually pay for your Wealthy Affiliate membership?

I think there’s a good possibility.

Watch the video

I made a video about my discovery and show how the system works, including some of the community activity I’ve been doing myself.

The video is really the starting point for this article. Here I want to explain why I think this relatively new feature is worth paying attention to.

Wealthy Affiliate has been one of my Top 5 Programs for years

I’ve been using Wealthy Affiliate since 2015, and it has remained one of the five programs I feature on this site since Top5Programs launched in 2017.

My primary reason for using it has actually not been its affiliate program.

I’ve mainly used Wealthy Affiliate as a home for my WordPress websites.

That gives me access to managed hosting, site support and a range of tools designed specifically for people building online businesses. Wealthy Affiliate also provides training covering affiliate marketing, SEO, content creation and other aspects of building an online business. The platform has increasingly incorporated AI-powered tools as well.

The current Premium plan includes three websites, AI credits, Pro AI models, unlimited support and a traffic and SEO blueprint. Premium Plus+ increases the allowance to ten websites and adds features including private expert mentorship, priority support and advanced market research.

So there is already a substantial amount included in the membership.

But the community engagement system adds another interesting dimension.

You can now earn by participating in the community

Wealthy Affiliate isn’t simply a collection of courses and tools. The community has always been an important part of the platform.

Members ask questions, answer questions, publish posts, share ideas, comment on other people’s content and generally help one another.

The newer engagement-points system gives members another reason to participate.

You can earn points for activities such as:

• commenting on other members’ posts
• replying to comments
• answering questions
• publishing community blog posts
• creating video blogs
• responding quickly to other members

There are also different areas of the community where you can participate, including subjects such as WordPress, SEO, affiliate marketing, AI, YouTube, social media marketing and email marketing.

In other words, you aren’t being asked to perform completely artificial tasks just to generate points.

The activities are connected to things that people building online businesses might reasonably want to do anyway.

And the points have monetary value

This is the part that caught my attention.

Wealthy Affiliate’s community activity system doesn’t simply give you badges or leaderboard points. Your activity can generate community earnings.

When I looked at my own account, I was earning only a tiny amount because I had barely been participating.

But that was precisely what made me curious.

If minimal activity was producing something, what might happen if I actually started using the community regularly?

I began looking at the different ways to earn points and thinking about what a realistic level of activity might produce.

I don’t want to suggest that everyone is going to earn a particular amount. Your results will depend on how much you participate, the quality of your contributions and the limits built into the system.

But I can certainly see the potential for regular community participation to offset part of the cost of membership.

And potentially much more than that.

What does membership currently cost?

Wealthy Affiliate currently has three main levels:

Starter: Free

Premium: $497 per year when paid annually

Premium Plus+: $588 per year when paid annually.

That means Premium Plus+ works out at roughly $1.61 per day when the annual cost is spread across 365 days.

The question isn’t therefore necessarily:

“Can I afford Wealthy Affiliate?”

A more interesting question might be:

“Can I use Wealthy Affiliate actively enough that the platform helps pay for itself?”

That’s a very different way of looking at the membership.

You don’t need to spam the community

There’s an important qualification here.

The idea isn’t to sit inside Wealthy Affiliate all day posting meaningless comments simply to collect points.

That would be counterproductive.

And, frankly, it would make the community worse.

The value of the system is that you can combine genuine community participation with building your own online presence.

If someone asks a question that you can answer, answer it.

If someone publishes something interesting, comment on it.

If you have useful information to share, create a community blog post.

If you have something worthwhile to demonstrate, make a video.

That’s how you build relationships and establish yourself as someone who contributes something useful.

The points are then an additional benefit.

There is another potential benefit: exposure

This is the part I find particularly interesting as a blogger.

Your Wealthy Affiliate profile can provide links to your own online properties.

So while you’re participating in the community, you’re also building a presence for yourself.

You might have a personal blog, an affiliate website, a YouTube channel, a Facebook group or another online business.

The community can therefore become another place where people discover what you do.

There’s also an interesting SEO angle.

Community blog posts published inside Wealthy Affiliate can be publicly accessible and potentially discoverable through search engines. That means a useful post isn’t necessarily limited to the people who happen to be browsing the Wealthy Affiliate community at the time.

Of course, there are no guarantees that any particular post will rank in Google or generate traffic.

But it’s another potential benefit of creating genuinely useful content.

My own experience

This is where my perspective is perhaps a little different from that of someone making a conventional Wealthy Affiliate review.

I haven’t been aggressively promoting Wealthy Affiliate for the last decade.

I’ve mainly been using it.

I’ve hosted my WordPress blogs there. I’ve used the support. I’ve used the tools. I’ve benefited from the training and the community.

And despite relatively little promotional activity on my part, I’ve generated some Wealthy Affiliate affiliate revenue over the years.

That revenue has already gone a long way toward offsetting my membership costs.

Now I’m looking at the community engagement system and thinking that there may be another way of reducing the effective cost of membership.

That’s what makes this interesting to me.

It’s not simply another affiliate marketing opportunity.

It’s potentially a way of getting more economic value from something you’re already paying for.

Could community engagement completely cover the membership?

That’s the big question.

I wouldn’t make that claim as a guarantee.

The current system has limits, and your earnings will depend on your activity and the amount of money allocated to community engagement.

But mathematically, the target isn’t enormous.

At the current annual prices, you’d need to generate an average of approximately:

Premium: $1.36 per day

Premium Plus+: $1.61 per day

to cover the annual membership cost.

Those figures don’t mean that Wealthy Affiliate promises you can earn $1.36 or $1.61 every day from community activity.

They simply show what the target would be if you wanted your community earnings to cover the annual subscription.

And that’s why I think the idea is worth exploring.

You’re building something while you participate

There’s another reason I like this approach.

If you’re going to spend time participating in an online community, you might as well participate somewhere that is relevant to what you’re trying to accomplish.

Wealthy Affiliate’s community is focused heavily on online business, websites, blogging, SEO, affiliate marketing, AI and related subjects.

So if you’re building an online business yourself, helping other people in that environment can serve several purposes at once.

You can:

• learn from other members
• help other members
• develop relationships
• build your reputation
• create content
• attract visitors to your own properties
• earn community engagement points

That’s a pretty interesting combination.

This doesn’t replace building a business

I think this distinction is important.

The community engagement system shouldn’t be viewed as a shortcut to making money online.

If you’re joining Wealthy Affiliate because you want to build a successful website or affiliate business, that’s still the main game.

The community earnings are potentially an additional benefit.

And in my opinion, that’s exactly how you should think about them.

• Build useful websites.
  
• Create useful content.
  
• Learn SEO.
  
• Develop your audience.
  
• Help people.
  
• Participate in the community.

And if the platform rewards you financially for some of that participation, that’s a nice bonus.

My take

After using Wealthy Affiliate for more than a decade, I’m still finding new reasons to pay attention to what the platform is doing.

The community engagement points system is one of those reasons.

I had largely ignored it because I was doing what I normally do: logging in, going to my websites and getting on with my blogging.

But once I started looking at the community activity system, I realised that there is potentially another layer of value sitting there.

I’m now going to experiment with it myself.

I’m particularly interested to see what happens when I move from my previous minimal participation to more consistent, useful engagement.

Can I generate enough community earnings to substantially reduce the cost of my Wealthy Affiliate membership?

Can I eventually cover it completely?

I don’t know yet.

But I think it’s worth finding out.

And that’s why Wealthy Affiliate remains one of my Top 5 Programs.

It’s not because everything it offers has remained exactly the same since I joined in 2015.

It’s because the platform has continued to evolve.

And sometimes the most interesting opportunities are the ones you don’t even realise are sitting inside a service you’re already using.

Find out more about Wealthy Affiliate

Wealthy Affiliate currently offers a free Starter membership, so you can explore the platform before deciding whether to upgrade. The current Premium and Premium Plus+ plans are also shown on the official pricing page.

Disclosure: Wealthy Affiliate is an affiliate program I have recommended on Top5Programs since 2017. If you join through one of my links, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. My comments above are based on my own experience and my current understanding of the platform; earnings from community engagement are not guaranteed.