Wealthy Affiliate vs Six Figure Mentors - A Comparison of the Main Differen
If you are looking into Online Marketing and Affiliate Marketing platforms you will have come across Wealthy Affiliate (wealthyaffiliate.com) and Six Figure Mentors (thesixfigurementors.com). Yes, there are other platforms out there but these two I would consider to be two of the market leaders.
High Achiever vs Beginner Intermediate Affiliate Marketer
Wealthy Affiliate (WA) and Six Figure Mentors (SFM) are really talking to two different audiences. As its name suggests, SFM is essentially designed to create High Achievers, six figure earners. In order to do that they focus a lot on self development, motivation and life purpose as well as the step by step approach to affiliate marketing. This makes perfect sense, as if you are going to achieve that level success then you need the necessary motivation and self development.
Wealthy Affiliate (WA) is more about the fine-grained step by step approach of getting your affiliate marketing sites, pages, blogs, up and running with not so much of a focus on life purpose. They simply cover niche selection.
Website links (opens in new tab):-
>>> www.thesixfigurementors.com
Mentoring & Support
SFM Essential level member (see below for costs) will be assigned a coach/mentor that will help to guide you. This is one of the main reasons that SFM is more expensive than WA. With WA, you will get what they call a Personal Coach, which will be whoever introduced you to the platform. WA has a very active community where you can get help and support. WA is almost like the Facebook of affiliate marketing and its community is huge.
SFM also has higher levels of membership where you can receive even more personalized and dedicated mentoring but if you are currently at the stage of deciding which of these two providers to go for I wouldn’t worry too much about that for now as if you do go with SFM you will want to get to Essential level first and get some initial success before you consider higher membership levels. With WA it’s just the one paid membership level which is nice and simple.
Commissions
Both SFM and WA have their own affiliate program enabling you to re-sell their affiliate marketing training and platform tools and earn commissions while you learn and develop your own niches and sell products and services in your niches.
If you convert a lead to sign up to WA, the current ‘average’ commission you will earn from the lead is £121. SFM don’t publish this average lifetime commission figure but the commission structure at Essential level membership is $20 per application, $200 (sometimes it will be $100) if someone becomes an Essential level member and then $20 per month for each month they stay at that level of membership.
There are higher (Elite) levels of membership with SFM. If you are an Essential member and a lead opts to go for these higher levels, you get $250 and if you yourself are an ‘Elite’ member you get $1000. However, most of the people reading this article will most likely only really be concerned with Essential Level so these are the commissions that you will get at that level.
Now, whilst SFM holds the potential for higher commissions to be earned, WA has a very strong ‘free to paid’ upgrade conversion record which they claim is 6x the industry average.
Website links (opens in new tab):-
>>> www.thesixfigurementors.com
Bang for your Buck!
SFM Essential level member costs $297 to join ($197 if you join quickly after applying) and then $97 per month. To many this might sound high, but I put this down to the level of mentoring you will get at that price. You also need to consider that if you were starting up any kind of ‘bricks and mortar’ traditional business such as franchising etc, you would be typically looking at $10K, $20K or more.
SFM Essential level gives you access to all of their training modules and the weekly supplemental training videos and online conferences as well as their Digital Business Lounge (DBL) where you can set up you ‘sales funnel’ (or Lead Capturing pages) along with 3 websites to represent your main niche or niches. Lead capture tooling is not part of the WA platform so this is a bonus for SFM, however, there are different ways this can be done in WA, setting up you own lead pages so I wouldn’t hold too much weight over this decision point.
WA membership is $49 per month which is pretty much half of the SFM monthly cost, but no joining fee and you get 25 sites, which can be increased to 50 sites through ‘add-on domains’ I believe. This might sound like SFM are being a bit stingy on the number of sites they will host for you, and there may be some truth in that, but SFM advise that you should really only concentrate initially on ONE site/niche and make a success of that, which actually makes a lot of sense, but it means you can’t really test out a number of ideas at the same time as you can with WA.
The WA membership cost also includes a keyword research tool which can really help with content and SEO and you don’t get this with SFM. SFM would probably question the usefulness of keyword research but it is still generally recognized as beneficial to long term traffic.
Summary
In short, if you believe in the self development, life purpose approach to building on online business / affiliate marketing business enough to pay the extra monthly cost, then SFM could be for you. In my case though, I really did want to try out a number of niches at the same time and I liked the look of the more granular step by step training on Wealthy Affiliate.
In closing, I would also say the following. If you are beginner or intermediate with online marketing and websites in general, you might struggle more with SFM. For me, SFM is for the more experienced in these matters. The reality is that if you are a beginner or intermediate, Wealthy Affiliate is going to get you up and running quicker than SFM and with a greater chance of initial success. If you have a ‘life purpose’ niche/idea in mind and want to go all-in on it, including the additional costs, then SFM may be the way to go for you.
The choice is yours!
Website links (opens in new tab):-
>>> www.thesixfigurementors.com