If you have just joined, or are about to, the first thing you will notice is how much there is to click on. That is normal, and you do not need to understand all of it today. This article covers how to get started with Wealthy Affiliate in a single sitting of about an hour, with one small action at the center of it.
Read it through once, then work down the sections in order. Anything not mentioned here can wait.
Before you click anything: what day one is and isn’t for
Day one has a short job list: get your account ready, have somewhere to keep your work, look around, do one small piece of learning, and find out that help exists. Nothing on that list earns money, and none of it needs to.
Beginners often feel they should be further along by the end of the first day. They open six tabs, start three lessons, and end up remembering none of them. A smaller target works better, because a small action finished gives you something to build on tomorrow.
Set a timer for an hour if that helps. When it ends, stop, even if you feel like carrying on. You will come back more easily to something you left in a good place.
Set up your account and Hub so you have somewhere to work
Start with your account. Fill in your profile as far as the prompts ask, and use a name and photo you are comfortable with other members seeing. Other members will read your questions and replies, so a real profile makes those conversations easier.
Next, open your Hub. A Hub is the container for one project of yours: your profile of the audience you want to reach, the topic you are working on, and the work you do for it. Everything you create later belongs to a Hub, so having one open means your first tasks have somewhere to go.
If you are asked what your project is about, give a rough answer in plain words. You are not signing a contract, and a first-day answer does not need to be perfect. Something like “I want to help people with X” is enough to begin.
Give this part about fifteen minutes. If you are still deciding on a topic when the time is up, pick the one you feel most curious about and move on. The topic matters, but you will learn far more about it by doing the next few sections than by thinking about it now.
Take a quiet look around Learn without trying to finish it
Learn is the tab where the teaching lives. It is where you will spend most of your time as a beginner, so it helps to see it once before you need it.
Spend about ten minutes just looking. Scroll through the Focus options and read the titles. Notice that live classes and their recordings sit in Live, inside Learn, which is worth knowing about for later.
You are not choosing a course for the next six months. You are getting familiar with the layout so it stops feeling like a foreign place. If a title makes you curious, remember it. If something looks over your head, skip it without any guilt, because nobody expects you to understand it on day one.
A useful question to hold while you browse is “Which of these sounds most like where I am right now?” Total beginners usually do best starting with whatever is closest to the basics of getting an online project going, rather than whatever sounds most advanced.
Pick one Focus and do just the first move
This is the center of the hour. Choose one Focus and open it.
A Focus is made up of moves, and each move is one of three kinds: Ask, Watch or Read. You do not have to do them all. For today, do only the first one.
Here is how to choose:
- Pick the Focus whose title you understood most easily while browsing.
- If two seem equal, pick the one you felt more curious about.
- Do not spend more than a couple of minutes choosing, since the choice is easy to change later.
Then do the first move. If it is a Watch move, watch it with a notepad open and write down one thing you did not know before. If it is a Read move, read it slowly once, and write down one sentence in your own words about what it said. If it is an Ask move, go on to the next section, where we cover asking in more detail.
When the first move is done, stop. You might feel you could easily do a second, and you probably could, but a second move belongs to tomorrow. Finishing one move properly tells you more about how the platform works than rushing through five.
Plan about twenty minutes for this, including your note.
Ask one question so you know help is there
Many beginners hold back from asking questions because they assume theirs is too basic. A good first question is almost always a basic one, and basic questions are the ones that save you the most time.
Ask something real. It might be about the Focus you just opened, about how to choose a niche, or about what a word in the lesson meant. If you do not have a question yet, “What would you do first if you were starting today?” is a fair one to ask.
Write it in full sentences with a little context. “I just joined and I’m working through this Focus. I got confused by this part. Can someone explain it simply?” gives people enough to answer you well. A vague one-line question often gets a vague reply.
Then leave it. You do not need to sit and refresh the page. The point of asking today is to find out that the question gets answered, which makes tomorrow’s work feel less lonely. Five or ten minutes is enough for this part.
If your first task involves an Ask move, this can be the same thing, so you may finish early.
What to leave alone until tomorrow
A lot of the platform will look tempting, and you can ignore all of it today. Here is a list of things that do not need your attention in the first hour:
- Building out a full website. You will get to it, but a site goes better when you have learned a little first.
- Writing articles. The Writer is there when you are ready, and you can ask it for help then.
- Making images with the Artist. This is fun, and it can wait.
- Worrying about Credits. Credits are what your work costs, and the platform charges you for what a piece of work actually cost. A run that fails costs you nothing. You do not need to plan your Credits on day one.
- Exploring the Studio in depth. It is a good place to visit once you have something to make.
- Comparing yourself with members who have been here a while. Their first hour looked a lot like yours.
- Chasing commissions or promoting anything. Promotion makes more sense once you understand what you are promoting.
If you want to know more about what the platform is before going further, there is a plain overview in What Is Wealthy Affiliate? A Plain Answer for Complete Beginners. It is a separate read from this one, and you do not need it to finish today’s hour.
How to tell your first day went well
At the end of the hour, check four things:
- Your account is set up and your profile is filled in.
- You have a Hub open with a rough idea of what it is for.
- You have done the first move of one Focus and written down one note.
- You have asked one question.
If all four are true, the day went well. That holds even if the hour felt slow, and even if you still do not know what your site will be about. Beginners usually feel unsure for a while, and the feeling fades as the notes and the moves add up.
If you finished only two or three, that counts too. Pick up the rest tomorrow, starting where you stopped. The aim is a habit of showing up for a short, focused sitting, and one hour does a lot toward that.
Tomorrow, return to the same Focus and do the next move. After that, check whether your question got an answer and reply to it. By the end of the week you will have a feel for how things work here, which is a much better base than a long list of half-started lessons.
Your first action
If you’re ready to try it, join Wealthy Affiliate through my link and do only the first action from this article today. Come back and tell me how it went.