This article may contain *affiliate links. Please see our affiliate disclosure for more details
We have a real heavyweight fight on our hands today. Two of the biggest affiliate marketing training solutions currently available on the market today.
It’s a head to head showdown between the old veteran Wealthy Affiliate and the up and coming Savage Affiliates.
Can the younger upstart dethrone the aging Wealthy Affiliate program or does the wily old veteran still have some tricks left up its sleeve?
If you are interested in the full reviews for either of these programs check them out in the links below.
If you are just looking for a quick comparison of these two very good training systems then take a look at the table below. For more in-depth analysis of these two products keep reading for my full head to head review.
[rwp_comparison_table id=”0″]
The Products And Their Owners
Savage Affiliates
Savage Affiliates is an A to Z affiliate training course created by Franklin Hatchett. It has dozens of training modules that explore every aspect of affiliate marketing from a basic blog to advanced marketing funnels.
Franklin Hatchett is well-known in the affiliate marketing space and has a popular Youtube channel that provides a wealth of free information about passive income and online businesses.
Wealthy Affiliate
Wealthy Affiliate is an entire marketing platform that was started in 2005, making it an elder statesman in the affiliate marketing industry. It has tons of training modules and webinars available for its members.
Over the years some of the training has become outdated and it seems to be in a bit of a lull right this minute, but it should be improved in the coming months and years.
Wealthy Affiliate was founded by Carson and Kyle. I am sure if you dig deep enough you can find out their last names but they are both reclusive and hard to find information about.
I assume they are real people and their personas will pop into the Wealthy Affiliate live chat every now and again but I have never had much of an interaction with them as they seem to only be readily available to super affiliates.
Still, the training product that they have created is pretty good.
The Cost And Value Of The Contenders
The Price-Value Of Wealthy Affiliate
Wealthy Affiliate costs $49 dollars a month, just under $600 dollars a year making it by far the more expensive option of out two contenders here today.
There is a free membership that you can use to get a feel for the overall vibe of the program. And you can bring the price down by paying for multiple months at once, you can check out my article on the Wealthy Affiliate Discounts right here.
By paying yearly you can get the price down to about $30 dollars a month, still quite a bit more expensive than Savage Affiliates but much more reasonable.
Price, however, is only part of the equation. The more important thing to consider is the value of the product that you are purchasing.
Wealthy Affiliate is a pretty good value at $49 dollars a month and an even better one at $30 dollars a month if you go for the yearly payment plan.
But it is a yearly subscription so you will need to pay it or risk losing your website if you choose to have it hosted by Wealthy Affiliate.
You can move it to new hosting and I recommend you get your own web hosting service and never use the integrated hosting that comes with the subscription to Wealthy Affiliate. It is simply not worth the hassle.
And that brings us to the thing that really keeps the value of Wealthy Affiliate from skyrocketing. Most of the added features are subpar or just fluff.
The web hosting and word processor are nice but they pale in comparison to other options available.
You get a keyword tool that has barely any use because it was created in a time when direct match keywords actually mattered. It all looks good and make a great sales presentation but it is lackluster in the application.
The training alone, provided they keep it up to date, is worth the subscription fee and the added tools would be a great addition if they were more useful.
The added tools are just crying out for a real developer to move in and get to work on them. The current dev team just seems in over their head or they are just so rich at this point that they don’t care anymore. Either way, something needs to change.
To wrap it up. There is a lot of value at Wealthy Affiliate for the price. Especially if you can afford a 6-month or yearly subscription. Most of that value is from the training itself and not from the added benefits.
The Savage Affiliate Price Value Proposition
Savage Affiliates cost $197 for the base package and $297 for the more advanced package that includes some advanced training in funnels and other marketing techniques.
For the vast majority of people, I recommend the $197 version. It has a ton of content that will keep you busy for years before you even need to think about the advanced stuff.
Here is the important part. The part that makes Savage Affiliate the best value in affiliate marketing. It is a one-time fee. That’s it.
You spend around $200 bucks for all the training you will need to build a passive income business that could earn your 10’s of thousands of dollars a month for years to come.
It is an incredible value that Wealthy Affiliate can not even come close to. Wealthy Affiliate is good value, don’t get me wrong. Savage Affiliates is the best value on the internet right now.
I can’t put more simply than that.
Who Is The Target Audience?
Who Is Savage Affiliates Designed For?
Savage Affiliates is a product design for quite a wide range of knowledge levels when it comes to affiliate marketing.
It is certainly great for beginners there’s a lot of content that is going to help you get your passive income website off to a great start.
Savage affiliate is an A to Z affiliate marketing training program. And there is a ton of content that is great for advanced affiliate marketers there’s a lot of content specifically for paid ads and more advanced systems like funnels and email marketing.
The only real problem with all this content is it that can be confusing for those beginners that don’t stay focused on exactly what they need to do.
The best course of action when starting Savage Affiliates is to pick one type of traffic source and become an expert in that before you start moving into the others.
That means that some of the modules you’re just going to have to ignore for 6 months or a year before you’re ready to actually dig into him.
It can be kind of daunting but it’s one of the reasons why Savage Affiliates is such a great value for the price you’re going to pay for it.
What Audience Does Wealthy Affiliate Target?
Like Savage Affiliates, Wealthy Affiliate is targeted at beginners in the affiliate marketing space. In fact, it’s one of the most beginner-friendly training programs that you’re going to find in the entire affiliate marketing industry.
You’re going to find all types of systems and tools that are going to make your life as a brand-new affiliate marketing much much easier. It really is remarkable how well they’ve designed everything with the beginner in mind.
The problem is once you get a little bit experience under your belt you begin to see maybe some of the training is not as good as it could be and a lot of the tools or just fluff that are not as good as the equivalent tool that you can use for free somewhere else.
A great example of this is their content creation system. It’s essentially a word processor that you can upload your articles directly to your website from.
In theory, it sounds like a great idea but there are so many problems with it that it really is almost useless to use any practical sense.
You better off using Google Docs or WordPress itself to write your articles and then edit add photos and do all the things you need to do instead of using their site content system.
Perhaps in the future, it will get better but this is just one of the examples of pretty good ideas to help beginners out that just fall flat because they were fleshed out enough.
The good thing is that all these tools that are designed for beginners aren’t the only thing that you would use Wealthy Affiliate for.
They do have a decent web hosting service so you don’t have to go out and find your own.
They have pretty good site support so you can get help when you need it, theoretically anyway.
And probably the best and most beginner-friendly thing that they have is there free Start a membership.
You get 2 free websites, but you really can’t do anything with them because Google doesn’t like these types of free websites.
What the starter membership does give you is a look at how everything works and you can decide within a relatively short amount of time whether or not Wealthy Affiliate is going to be right for you.
A Look At The Communities
The Wealthy Affiliate Community
Here is where the real problems with Wealthy Affiliate begin. This should be an amazing community given its size and scope. It should be welcoming and helpful to anyone who plunks down their $49 dollars a month.
But it is not. Getting real help is like pulling teeth at times. Often people will simply reply to your posts or questions just to get a higher rank in the Wealthy Affiliate internal ranking system. It is complete lunacy.
I know it sounds awful and this is just my personal experience with the Wealthy Affiliate community at large. There are a lot of good and helpful people here you just have to dig a little to find them.
Stay out of the general chat and don’t bother trying to get help from the super affiliates or the owners and you can find a nice little clique to call your own. Do that and you might have a decent experience for the most part at Wealthy Affiliate.
The Savage Affiliates Community
The Savage Affiliates community is a pretty small one. The best way to interact is through the Savage Affiliates Facebook group.
I personally despise facebook so I am a little biased when it comes to having it as the hub of your online community.
The people of the community are knowledgeable and ready to help but it might take a few hours or so for someone to reply just because the community is so small right now.
It is still nice to have a place where you can discuss things with other members and Franklin Hatchett is active in the community and will frequently answer questions.
How’s The Support Of These Programs?
Post-purchase support is a huge part of any affiliate marketing training product. Both Wealthy Affiliate and Savage Affiliates have a decent level of support but Wealthy Affiliate pulls well ahead with its group of full-time support staff.
The Wealthy Affiliate Support System
Wealthy Affiliate has a pretty robust support system both for their training modules and their web hosting.
You can often get a response within an hour from the web hosting team which is always nice if you have problems with your site.
It is a professionally run part of the Wealthy Affiliate experience, the issue is that you will need to call on them far too often. Downtime is a huge issue with their web hosting along with slow site speed.
With all that said it does add some value to the overall package and is one of the most complete support systems, you are going to find in the affiliate marketing space.
The Savage Affiliate Support System
Savage Affiliates has a more traditional support system. One you would probably expect from this type of product.
Emails to support are usually responded to within 24 hours and many questions can be answered in the Official Facebook Group for Savage Affiliates(you get access when you join up).
It works ok but it is leaps and bounds behind what Wealthy Affiliate has to offer for support.
Wealthy Affiliate is the clear winner for the Support category.
A Look At Some Key Features
Both of these training programs have some pretty great features to go along with their core training.
Here are a few of my favorites that really stick out when you are going through each product on your way to building your own passive income website.
Key Features For Savage Affiliates
- Top-Notch Modern Affiliate Marketing Training
- Tons of relevant content
- Great Price Point
- Just Updated To 2.0 That Modernozes Much Of The Training
Key Features For Wealthy Affiliate
- Integrated Webhosting
- Lots of extras
- A built-in content creation system(but not a very good one)
- Well laid out and easy to navigate hub
- Live Chat to get help any time of day(theoretically)
- 24/7 Support
Issues With These Programs
Neither Of These products is perfect either. They have a few, mostly minor, issues.
None of these issues are deal-breaking but you should be aware of these shortcomings before plunking down a few hundred dollars for either of these products.
Savage Affiliates Issues
- Not a lot of extras
- Community is still relatively small
- Videos are well-made but nothing fancy(the info is great though)
- Its Easy To Get Overwhelmed By The Amount Of Content
Some Issues With Wealthy Affiliate
- Somewhat Outdated Training
- Integrated Webhosting is well below the standard
- Expensive at $600 Dollars A Year
- Support Can Give You The Run-Around
- Lot’s Of Useless Extras That Add No Value To The Platform
And The Winner Is…
Savage Affiliates Wins It In A TKO.
[rwp_box id=”0″ post=”8644″]
Wealthy Affiliate Is Still A Decent Option
[rwp_box id=”0″ post=”643″]
Savage Affiliates is clearly the better solution for the vast majority of people coming into the affiliate marketing space. Its training is modern. It is pretty easy to follow and get started in.
It does not have all the bells and whistles that Wealthy Affiliate has but it beats it by a large margin where it counts.
In the training.
Which is why you would buy a product like this anyway. Fancy addons are nice but you want the core training to be the best it can be and Savage Affiliates delivers this in spades.
But that doesn’t mean Wealthy Affiliate is terrible.
It is actually a quite decent training solution that has just been left to decay with no updates for seemingly years, or relevant updates anyway. And it costs about 3 times as much.
If you are a complete beginner to affiliate marketing then Wealthy Affiliate might be the best option for you as it will hand-hold you through a lot of the technical aspects of website ownership.
The flip side is that it takes away control from the business owner by limiting what you can do one the back end of your website which will be off-putting for a lot of people.
Wrapping it up we have 2 good solutions for getting the affiliate marketing training you need to be successful in this tough online business.
Pick the one that you think fits you best and get to work. The surest way to fail at affiliate marketing is not to start as soon as possible.
Thanks for visiting and have a wonderful day.