Is free affiliate marketing training worth it? The answer depends on a number most people never work out: how many hours it has taken so far, and what those hours were worth to you. Free material has no price on it, so the hours go unrecorded. They still came from somewhere, usually from evenings you would otherwise have spent on something else.
This article gives you a way to count them using only your own figures. Nobody else’s income claims or averages go into it, just your calendar and your honest guess at what an hour of your time is worth.
The hours nobody counts when the training is free
A paid course announces its cost on the checkout page. You decide once, you pay once, and you know the figure. Free training works differently: the cost arrives in small pieces, twenty minutes here and an hour there, and none of the pieces feels large enough to write down.
A typical week of piecing it together might include a video on keyword research, a forum thread about site speed, a blog post that contradicts the video, and a second video to settle the disagreement. Each of those is reasonable. Added up across weeks, they become a part-time job with no manager, no syllabus and no way to tell whether you are finished.
The work also gets repeated. Information that is free usually comes in fragments, written for different readers at different stages and often at different times. You spend part of your hours working out how the fragments fit together, and that sorting is time you were not trying to spend.
How to put a price on your own evenings, with your own numbers
You need four figures, and you can write all of them on the back of an envelope. Use real ones from your own calendar. If you are unsure, pick the more conservative guess.
- Weeks. How many weeks have you been gathering free information? Count from the first video or article you took seriously.
- Hours per week. On an average week, how many hours went to watching, reading, searching and bookmarking? Check your browser history or your phone’s screen time if you can.
- Hours that produced something. Of those hours, how many ended with a finished piece of work, such as a live page, a published post or a configured setting? Be strict. A tab you meant to come back to does not count.
- Your hourly figure. This is what an hour of your free time is worth to you. It could be your hourly pay at work, or what you would pay someone to take over a chore for an hour. Choose a number you believe.
Now multiply. To show the arithmetic only, 5 hours a week over 12 weeks is 60 hours. Multiply your own hours by your own hourly figure and you have a price for the training that was labelled free.
Then subtract the hours that produced something from the total. The remainder is the time spent searching, comparing and deciding. That remainder is what a clear path would most directly give back.
Where the time actually goes: open tabs, advice that disagrees, starting over
When people tally their hours honestly, the time usually sits in three places.
Open tabs
Every tutorial links to three more, and each of those links to something else. You open them to read later, and the pile grows faster than you can work through it. Keeping track of what you have and have not read becomes a task of its own, and it takes real time each session just to remember where you stopped.
Advice that disagrees
One source says to publish every day and another says to publish twice a week. One recommends a particular tool and the next calls it a waste. Neither is necessarily wrong. They come from different situations, and nothing in a free video tells you which situation resembles yours.
To resolve a disagreement you need a way to judge it, and a beginner does not have one yet. So you read a third source, which usually adds a third opinion.
Starting over
This is the largest cost for many people. You build a bit of a site, then find a source that recommends a different structure, and you redo it. Or you stall, return after a few weeks, cannot remember the plan, and begin again from the top. Hours spent twice buy you nothing the second time.
If you suspect this is your pattern, the piece on how to tell when you’ve researched enough to start building covers where the research should stop.
The cost that does not fit on a spreadsheet: feeling behind everyone else
The arithmetic above covers hours. It does not cover what those hours do to your confidence, which can be the heavier cost.
When you assemble your own education from scattered pieces, there is no marker that says you are on schedule. Each new video shows you something you did not know existed, so the list of what you do not know seems to grow while you work. People in that position often conclude they are slow, or that others found an easier route.
Usually the explanation is simpler. Without an order to follow, effort does not accumulate in a visible way. You can work hard for weeks and have nothing to point to, and the lack of anything to point to feels like a verdict on you. It is a verdict on the setup.
This matters for a practical reason as well as an emotional one. Feeling behind makes people look for another source, and another source adds more tabs and more disagreement. The cycle feeds itself. Naming it is useful because it changes the question from “what is wrong with me?” to “what does this setup fail to give me?”
What one clear path gives back: the Guided Path in your first weeks
The Guided Path is Wealthy Affiliate’s way of putting the first weeks in a set order. Its value for someone in the situation described above is simple: it answers “what do I do next?” so you do not have to answer it yourself every evening.
Compare that with your four figures. The hours spent deciding what to study disappear, because the next piece of work is already chosen. The hours spent on disagreeing advice shrink, because you follow one sequence from start to finish. Starting over becomes less likely, because your site is built in one consistent direction.
There is also a visible record. At the end of a week you can see what you completed, which answers the “am I behind?” question with something more solid than a feeling.
A defined path does not remove the need to do the work. You still write, build and publish, and results still take time. What it removes is the overhead of organising your own curriculum, so more of each evening goes to the work itself.
When free is still the right choice
Free material is the better option in several situations, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise.
- You have a narrow, specific question. If you need to know how to change one setting, a single good tutorial is faster than any structured program.
- You enjoy self-directed study. Some people like sorting sources against each other, and for them the hours are part of what they want from the project.
- You have a lot of spare time and little pressure. If the hours really are cheap for you right now, the cost calculation looks different.
- You already have a working structure. If you know what to build and in what order, free sources fill gaps well.
The calculation in this article is for people whose hours are scarce and whose progress has stalled. If your numbers show a small remainder of searching time, you may not need anything beyond what you already have.
If your remainder is large, the piece on what changes when you finally follow one path describes that shift in more detail.
Add up your last month before you decide anything
Before you commit to any change, spend ten minutes with last month. Open your calendar, your browser history and your notes.
Write down how many evenings you sat down to work on your site. Next to each, write what you finished. Be plain about it: “read two articles, watched one video, nothing published” is a useful entry. Then total the hours, apply your hourly figure and look at the number.
You now have your own cost for free training, and you can make the decision on that basis. If the figure is small and you are making visible progress, keep going as you are. If it is large and the finished-work column is mostly empty, you have a clear reason to look for a different way of working, and the choice will rest on your numbers instead of on a mood.
If you recognised your own last few months in this, take a look at how the Guided Path works and see what your first week would look like with a clear next step in front of you.