This is going to be a long post, but an important one. So grab a coffee, tea, or beer and give yourself a 10-15 minutes to get through it.
It is an important milestone. Today Wealthy Affiliate turns 20. This truly marks a significant day in our business, and one that few businesses ever get to experience.
As a company, we have defied all statistical odds.
Most companies SHOULD have failed at this point, but we haven’t. Not only have we not failed, we have continued to evolve and improve as a service over the last 20 years. But how did we do it? And why are we still motivated to continue with the same brand after all this time?
I want to answer these questions and more in the coming post. I know that you can learn a lot from our experiences, our successes, and just as many failures over the years.
How It All Started…
Carson and I met in college where we were attending for Computer Science back in 2001. In fact, Carson “tipped’ me off about this “affiliate marketing” thing in one of our classes. He told me that people were making money online with it (and he was), so I figured I would try to figure it out.
It was quite secretive as he didn’t want to “give me the secrets”, so I went to work and figured it out. It took me three months to make my first sale, and at just over the year mark I was earning more than my profs at school through this “affiliate marketing” thing. So was Carson, independently successful with his own affiliate marketing business.
But we didn’t start Wealthy Affiliate then. In fact, it was years later when we bumped into each other and we pitched each other the idea of joining forces and building something together within the online world. We knew that between us and our differing skill sets, we could create something substantial.
But where do we start?
We Started Meeting Weekly to Brainstorm Business Ideas…
We didn’t come up with the idea for Wealthy Affiliate right away. In fact, we came up with many other ideas.
One of them was Uber, before it became Uber (we missed the boat on that one).
Another one was a health platform that would offer personalize diet plans, supplements, and workout schedules.
Another one was a kiosk at a mall that would be digitized and that would allow the stores to offer real time coupons (which also exists now).
But none of those stuck. After spending months meeting with Carson at a local restaurant (in Victoria, BC), we had come up with the PERFECT idea for a joint business. Why don’t we teach people exactly what we are doing and how we are succeeding with Affiliate Marketing. The idea was born.
A short week or two later, on September 10, 2005, Wealthy Affiliate officially came to life when we clicked the button bring this platform alive. A platform that was purely focused on PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing, and each week we gave people a keyword list, and ad samples, along with a few affiliate programs. It was $29.99 per month, or $359.88 per year…and that is ALL we offered.
It started to sell, we had our first sale the day we launched, and then from there it started to snowball. We were helping people, they were loving our service, and people started to share our platform.
It was simple. We were two friends with a vision. We hit “publish” on what seemed like a small idea at the time: create a place where people could learn affiliate marketing in an honest, straightforward way. What started as a simple platform for research and training has become a global community, a hub for entrepreneurs, and a living, breathing ecosystem that has supported millions of people in building businesses online.
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