Learning where to start and who to trust in the world of internet marketing and making money online can be difficult. There are more scams out there than there are legitimate programs that can actually help you build a successful business.

It’s a sad state, but there’s no way to get around it.

I can tell you right now that when a product creator or entrepreneur is telling you how you can download their system for only $97 and start making hundreds of dollars a day with just a few clicks of the mouse, that they are selling you a bunch of hot air.

However, every now and then, systems do come along that can help take you from beginner to successful business owner and shorten the amount of time it takes you to get there.

Wealthy Affiliate claims to be one of those products.

If you’re not familiar with Wealthy Affiliate, it’s a program run by the founders Kyle & Carson, and has been laid out with step-by-step guides to help you get a handle on building an internet based business, and the tools and training necessary to turn your dreams into a reality.

But is it too good to be true? Let’s take an in-depth look at it.

The Good

After digging through the training program, Wealthy Affiliate does have a lot to offer. At the surface level, there’s a lot going on. When you dig deeper, you realize that the meat and potatoes of the program is exactly what most people need to get started making money online.

Step-By-Step Training:

The training inside of Wealthy Affiliate is always up to date and full of information.

There are numerous lessons that cover every aspect of internet marketing that is constantly evolving to keep up with the times. From videos to written tutorials, there really is no area that you’ll need to learn about that has been left uncovered.

As the industry evolves, the training evolves, too. Members are able to create their own training material and then share it inside of the Wealthy Affiliate community.

If you do have questions, there are quite a few people from every walk of life that are eager and ready to help you get through the process. There’s no real “secrets” being held back inside of the community.

Easy To Use Tools:

Creating websites can seem like a daunting task when you’re just getting started, but Wealthy Affiliate wants to make the process as simple as possible and gives you the tools needed to create the types of websites they’re training you to build.

For instance, you can go through the keyword research training modules and then get straight to work with the Keyword Research tool that helps you find the perfect keywords to target on your own website.

This means you don’t have to spend even more money on external tools to help build your business. If there’s something you’re going to need to keep moving forward, Wealthy Affiliate provides it to you as part of your membership.

Weekly Live Webinars:

As it stands right now, there are more than 350 videos that are included in the training and webinar vault. These webinars have been recorded each week and include fresh training from Carson and Kyle themselves, guest experts, other members that are making big moves, and even beginners that are getting very specific help to grow their business.

Every week, Carson and Kyle take questions from the community and convert those questions into new training, in the form of weekly webinars. The videos are then recorded and added to the vault for members who weren’t able to attend the live webinar showing.

Free Website Hosting:

One of the many expenses that beginners are going to face when they’re building their business is the monthly cost of hosting their websites. Wealthy Affiliate has a feature to help with that cost, too, though.

Whether you’re just starting the Wealthy Affiliate program as a free subscriber, or you have multiple websites that you already own, there are free hosting options available for everybody.

Free Wealthy Affiliate members are able to host 2 websites for free, while premium members can host up to 25 websites for free, including websites that they’ve owned before joining the Wealthy Affiliate program.

One-On-One Support:

Many programs that are currently available offer “support”, but it’s only in the form of a third-party support desk. Some do not even offer support to their members, expecting them to figure out how to proceed forward on their own.

Wealthy Affiliate is one of the few programs that do offer one-on-one coaching, without charging a massive price tag for the opportunity. Both Kyle and Carson are actively involved in their forum live chat room, and are constantly monitoring questions from members to ensure that they can always move forward.

The Bad

Even with all of the good that Wealthy Affiliate has going for it, there are still areas where we believe the program could be improved. While going through their training, there’s one area that kept jumping out at us that could present problems to new members.

A Ton Of Information Available:

We’ve noticed that the amount of information that’s available to new members can be potentially overwhelming. While having a huge amount of information is generally a good thing, and ensures a completely thorough training program, when people are just getting started they may not necessarily know where to begin.

If, after joining, you happen to find yourself being overwhelmed, you’ll want to reach out and take advantage of the additional support, the community forums, and the one-on-one coaching that’s available.

The Ugly

We’ve also noticed that there’s a couple areas that could be worked on, but we’re not necessarily sure how Kyle and Carson could manage to pull it off. No review would be complete without breaking down every aspect of the program, and we do believe there are some ugly areas that make it hard for beginners to see the success they’re looking for.

The Community Can Be Excessively Busy:

A huge community full of active members can be a blessing, and a curse.

On one hand, you have people that are using the training in the program and are working on pursuing their dreams.

On the other hand, though, you have people that are constantly asking questions.

That means that if you have questions yourself, you may find that they’re getting buried inside of the forum, getting pushed down by other people’s questions.

Most times, you’ll receive answers fairly quickly, but if you find yourself asking super technical questions, or aren’t completely clear in the information that you’re asking for, you may have a hard time getting your questions answered.

If that’s the case, try reframing your question, or “bumping” your thread back to the top, and someone will come along and answer it eventually.

They Push You To Promote Wealthy Affiliate:

Some people that join Wealthy Affiliate aren’t going to have a business model in mind, a niche that they want to pursue, or a product that they want to promote.

For those people, Kyle and Carson are going to push for them to promote Wealthy Affiliate as a program to help them make money. This seems somewhat slimy on the outside, but when you look at it on a deeper level, it only makes sense that they’re helping their members make money by helping themselves.

Promoting Wealthy Affiliate when you do not have another program or product to promote can be a great way to get your feet wet and start making money.

This does make the program feel similar to a multi-level marketing scheme, but if you have a product that you want to promote before you join, or a niche that you want to pursue, you don’t have to worry about promoting Wealthy Affiliate as part of your training.

Is Wealthy Affiliate Legitimate?

At the end of the day, Wealthy Affiliate gives you the necessary training and support needed to build your internet based business. Whether or not you make that information work is entirely up to you.

One of the best aspects of Wealthy Affiliate is that you can try the entire program for free, taking all of the risk away. If there’s any chance that you think the program could work for you, you would be a little crazy to not take them up on at least the free trial offer.

Join the program, give them 30 days, go through the training, and put to work what they’re teaching you. If, at the end of those 30 days, you feel like you can’t make it work, or the training didn’t live up to their claims, no harm, no foul. You can cancel your account and move onto the next program.

However, we firmly believe that if you put in the time and do what the Wealthy Affiliate training teaches you to do, you will make money.

You can try Wealthy Affiliate for free by clicking on the button below.

In some industries, the best way to get started is to buy an existing business and work on increasing the profits, rather than starting completely from scratch.

When it comes to making money online, the best way to get started is to do exactly that -- buy a website that’s already making money and work on increasing the monthly revenue so you get to see a return on your original investment.

The technical hurdles faced by many people trying to get into the affiliate marketing industry, and making money online, is one of the biggest reasons so many people fail to see the income goals that they’ve set for themselves.

Since buying an existing website requires you to know what you’re doing already (usually by having built a successful website before, by yourself) and learning how to build one of those sites can take years of experience (and often times, failing more than once), what are you left to do?

One option you have is to outsource the building process of your website to a company that already has the experience needed to know what to do right, and what to avoid to keep you from making mistakes that could potentially harm your site’s long-term growth.

There are companies that create “done-for-you” websites to keep you from having to battle the technical hurdles, and put you one step closer to making money from the internet.

One of those companies is Brand Builders, and they are looking to help you get started as quickly as possible by building the foundation of your business so you can focus on promoting the site, and growing it’s monthly revenue.

Buying a turnkey website sounds like a great idea on the surface, because of the amount of time you’ll save and how much closer to making money you’ll be, but can Brand Builders really deliver on their promises?

Let’s find out.

Who Are Brand Builders?

The Brand Builders themselves are actually Jon and Andrew. Two long-term marketers that have made their money by using niche marketing websites and the Fulfillment by Amazon business model.

Over the last 8 years, they’ve learned what it takes, and made a massive amount of mistakes along the way that they learned from, pivoted, and used to their advantage to grow their own businesses even further than what would have normally been possible.

In other words, these guys know exactly what they’re doing, and have teams in place that help them execute their ideas on a regular basis.

What Does Brand Builders Offer?

As it stands right now, Brand Builders has 3 different offerings, depending on the type of business that you want to run: done-for-you niche websites, Fulfillment by Amazon focused websites, and turnkey pre-built websites.

If you want to run an eCommerce based business that utilizes Fulfillment by Amazon to handle all of the warehousing and shipping needs of your business, Brand Builders provide some of the best platforms in the industry.

Some Fulfillment by Amazon models require you to have a website before they’ll allow you to do business. Providing these websites to FBA sellers is how Brand Builders got their start, and FBA sellers are still some of their biggest clients.

However, they’ve recently begun helping niche marketers get their start in the industry by building beautiful websites that are focused solely on Amazon’s Associates program.

To do this, they offer two different types of websites.

If you already have a niche market in mind that you want to target, they can build a website with all of the content and marketing in place.

If you don’t already have a niche market in mind, they have also begun selling turnkey pre-built websites that are built around low competition niches, ready for you to get your feet wet and start making money.

The websites themselves aren’t all that Brand Builders offers, either.

When you purchase a site from them, depending on the package you choose, they are going to load the site down with a ton of content that your future readers are going to want to see. That content is optimized for both the search engines and your visitors to ensure that more of the visitors that land on the page are going to convert into sales (and money) for you.

The combination of search engine optimized content, along with conversion optimized content is the perfect recipe for making more money over the long-term than what most people could pull off by themselves when they’re just learning how to get started in the industry.

Brand Builders really takes the guesswork out of learning how to build a successful Amazon based business by yourself, which makes their offers highly attractive to beginners.

Advanced marketers are also finding out that Brand Builders can save them time by creating the foundation that they can build on without having to outsource the process to 20 different people.

Can You Really Make Money With Amazon?

Now comes the million dollar question.

There’s no mistaking that Brand Builders creates amazing looking websites, and the content that they populate the websites with will work to keep the search engines happy and convert more visitors into paying customers, but is it really possible to build a legitimate business off of the back of Amazon?

If there’s one thing that has been proven over the last 10 years, it’s that the Amazon Associates program is one of the best ways for people to get started making money online.

Then, as time progresses and you start seeing success from your niche website building efforts, the Fulfillment by Amazon program makes it easy to continue growing your income by allowing you to source the same products you’ve been promoting and start selling them on the Amazon platform for increased profit margins.

Brand Builders creates websites for people on both ends of the spectrum.

For beginners that are trying to get the hang of the industry, and looking to make their first few dollars online, Amazon Associates focused websites are the best option.

For advanced marketers looking to either scale the earnings from their Associates based websites, or looking to make even more money by sourcing the products themselves, the FBA based sites that Brand Builders creates are going to be critical to growing their business.

Depending on where you’re at, and what your level of experience is, Amazon provides ways for everybody to make money. There have been many millionaires created by simply promoting products on Amazon or selling them yourself through Amazon’s platform.

Amazon has carved out a substantial portion of the global market, ensuring that they are not going anywhere, anytime soon. That means the opportunities you have to make money from their programs are available today, and will continue to remain available in the foreseeable future.

You do not read reports about affiliates having issues with their payment dates being missed, or getting denied checks that they’ve earned from promoting products through Amazon.

They also have millions of different products, which means that nearly every niche you can possible think of can be promoted through Amazon.

To sum it up, yes, it is possible to make money (and a lot of it) through Amazon’s different programs.

Are The “Brand Builders” Legitimate?

It’s already been stated that, when it comes to making money online, Amazon provides some amazing opportunities for both beginner marketers, as well as marketers that have been involved in the industry for years.

With how easy it is to make money through Amazon, it’s only natural that some companies have popped up that help other marketers get involved in the industry, and save them time and money in the process.

Brand Builders is one of those companies. They are providing a legitimate service to marketers, and have been in business long enough that if they were not reputable you would be hearing about it from other people who have used their service.

When you search the internet for the Brand Builders company, people that have used their service in the past have nothing but great things to say about them, which says a lot about the company itself.

People are more inclined to provide negative feedback than they are to go out of their way to say something positive about a service that they’ve used.

For Brand Builders to not have any complaints, even after being in business for as long as they have, is huge and something that can’t be ignored.

Then, you look at the founders, Jon and Andrew, and realize exactly how much experience they have building the same types of sites that they build for their clients, and you can see why they’ve had so much success taking their company from nothing to one of the major players in the done-for-you affiliate marketing website building industry.

In our opinion, Brand Builders are legitimate, and they are doing great things for both beginner and advanced marketers, and are going to be around for a long time to come.
They provide one of the very few shortcuts to making money online, and are making a name for themselves while doing it.

When it comes to building niche websites in 2017, there is information scattered all across the internet. It seems like more, and more people are building these sites and documenting the process to help other people get started making money online.

Very few business models can deliver the level of “passive” income that building niche websites can. Over the last few years, though, the niche website industry has evolved enough, and the rules have changed, so can Cloud Income actually help you make money with them in 2017?

Let’s dissect exactly what Cloud Income can teach you, and then we’ll figure out whether or not they are a good source of information that you should follow if you’re wanting to build a digital business and make money online.

What’s A Niche Website?

In a nutshell, niche websites are small websites that are generally built around 5 to 10 pages of content that are focused on a very small “niche”. Niches, in terms of this type of website, are small markets of people that all have a very tightly focused interest.

To give you an example of a niche market, let’s take a look at badminton. It’s a sport similar to tennis, and played by thousands of people all over the world.

If you wanted to build a niche website around badminton, you would start researching the sport itself so you’re familiar with what people who play it are looking for.

Once you know what the people who are active in sport are looking for, you can begin creating content around those topics. This is where the term “niche” comes in.

In general, it’s best to keep these sites on the smaller side when they’re first being built, focusing on a few key areas of the topic that are going to have a high probability of generating an income.

In other words, you only want to write about content that’s going to provide useful answers to the people who land on your site, and answers that are going to help them purchase products that you recommend.

When you perform proper research on the topics you’re going to write about, you can identify low competition “long tail keywords” that will rank highly in the search results pages of major search engines like Google and Bing.

Whenever someone searches for topics that you’ve written about and your pages rank near the top of the search results, they will click the link to land on your site and start reading through the content you’ve created.

Search engine traffic is what makes niche websites so lucrative, and allows them to generate a “passive” income stream. People can search for your website 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, from all over the world.

You do not have to continue working on the site once you’re ranked at the top of the search results pages, allowing you to move onto other projects and increase your income through even more niche websites.

How Can You Make Money With Them?

Building the website, creating content that people in the badminton niche want to see, and getting your website to rank at the top of the search results is only half the battle. To build a business, you’re going to need to make money and, with niche websites, making money is fairly straightforward.

One of the best (and easiest) ways to make money with niche websites is the Amazon Associates affiliate marketing program. Amazon allows you to promote products on their website and earn a commission for each sale that you refer.

Let’s run some basic numbers to give you an example of what’s possible when you build a successful niche website. Keep in mind, too, that these are random numbers. Many niche websites make substantially more, while some niche websites do not make a dime. This is just to give you an example of how you can make money with them.

Let’s assume you rank near the top of the search results for 10 different keywords, and those 10 keywords deliver 20,000 visitors per month to your website.

Of those 20,000 visitors, 10% of them will take a recommendation that you’ve made, click one of your links that lead to Amazon, and purchase one of the products that you’ve featured on your website.

That means 2,000 people are going to make a purchase from Amazon, allowing you to make a commission on the products that they’ve purchased.

Let’s also assume that each one of those products is selling for $20. Amazon pays between 4% and 8%, depending on how many sales you’ve made throughout the month. Let’s assume, again, that it’s towards the end of the month and you’re at the 8% comission range.

Of those 2,000 sales, and $20 average product price, you’re going to make $1.60 per sale, which totals out to $3,200 per month.

That $3,200 per month is delivered automatically because of the website ranking near the top of the search results pages, and the traffic coming into it on a regular basis without having to continue working for it.

Is Cloud Income A Legitimate Source Of Information?

Now that you know what niche websites are and how you can make money with them, should you trust the Cloud Income website and it’s founder, Lewis Ogden to help you make your business dreams a reality?

When you’re looking over their website, one thing that you’re going to notice is that there is a ton of information already available, and the process of building a successful niche website has been documented from beginning to end.

Lewis Ogden has devoted a substantial portion of his website to showing people what is possible, and documenting the process that he’s taken to get to where he is at today.

That being said, there are some things that you’re going to need to watch out for when you’re taking advice from him, in regards to building a successful niche website business.

First, some of the information on his website could be considered outdated. Just by looking at his homepage you can see that the Cloud Income website hasn’t been updated regularly for a very long time.

In fact, the last case study update he provided was in June of 2016. If there’s one thing about building niche websites and relying on search engines to deliver the traffic you should watch out for, it’s that the search engines constantly update and evolve their algorithms which makes some of the information already available for building niche websites obsolete.

When you want to build niche websites, you need to ensure that the information you’re reading is up-to-date and that they are following the search engine’s best practices. Relying on search engine traffic means that you’re putting your business in the hands of the major search engines, so you have to follow the rules that they’ve laid out.

If you fail to follow those rules, or take outdated information that could potentially harm your website’s rankings, you’re going to have a hard time driving traffic to the site, which means that you’re also going to have a hard time making money.

One of the biggest red flags that we saw on the Cloud Income website is his use of private blog networks. Done right, private blog networks can help you rank at the top of the search results pages. Done wrong, though, and your website could be penalized and never make a dime in income.

Using private blog networks is an advanced strategy that most beginners will have a hard time properly pulling off. Because of this, we highly advise you to avoid using the information that he provides, in relation to using private blog networks to rank niche websites at the top of the search results.

The remaining information that’s available, though, is solid, and can help you build a successful business based around niche websites.

You will need to spend a good amount of time going through all of the blog posts Lewis Ogden has written, though, to decipher the information you need to start building your first website.

The more time you spend figuring out what you’re doing, and watching his process evolve as he builds out the case studies that he’s documented, the easier your job is going to be when it comes to building out your own websites.

Conclusion​

As far as I’m concerned, Lewis Ogden is a legitimate source of information for niche websites, and if you’re interested in building a business around niche websites, you would benefit from reading the information that he’s made readily available.

You could also benefit from learning the rules of the major search engines, and learning other methods of promoting your websites (outside of using private blog networks) so that you can ensure that your websites aren’t going to be penalized down the right.

As your skillset evolves, and your income increases, you can begin using riskier strategies -- like blog networks -- to make even more money than what you would make without using them.

Building niche websites and making a healthy income from them is a real possibility in 2017, and Cloud Income can help you do it.