Kyle and Carson are the co-owners of Wealthy Affiliate University.
WAU has just celebrated it’s 7th birthday. In 2005 these two friends started a keyword membership site. To facilitate this, Kyle ( who was broke at the time) actually borrowed money from his girlfriend to start the business.
The little site grew and grew, added a Forum feature so that the members had a way to communicate and eventually started adding servers and emplyees
In 2007 the site added a website builder called Site Rubix that was a way for members to build their websites. While this was being developed a few things occurred. WordPress was starting to gain traction as an open source website builder and the Site Rubix required some serious upgrades and attention. Eventually it had to be abandoned but many sites were built using this software utility.
2009 rolled around and more enhancements arrived. The site Rubix utility was discontinued and WordPress Express was rolled out. This allowed members to create a website quickly. The Express feature added some very powerful plugins to WordPress and made the installation fast and painless. Hosting servers were added and WA included free hosting with the paid membership.
2010 was an incredible year. This is the year that I joined WA. The forums were hopping and every day I learned a huge amount of stuff about Marketing and Backlinking, keyword research and many other related things. WA developed and rolled out an absolutely amazing keyword tool that provides a wealth of information about how a market is performing. The WordPress Express tool was refined and enhanced.
2011 the owners rolled out two related utilities. Now these are not actually in Wealthy Affiliates but they are owned and maintained by the same folks. The first is a free Article Directory. There is no cost to be a member and the Articles are seen by thousands of people. This site is called Street Articles and can be accessed at http://www.streetarticles.com/. The second Utility is Jaaxy. This is by far the best keyword tool that I have ever seen. This keyword tool is not free but only cost $19.00/ month. You can get 30 free searches to check it out and see if it will work for you. http://www.jaaxy.com.
2012 Kyle and Carson rolled out the OEP. This was a total rebuild of the site and more enhancements. OEP stands for Open Education Project. This has allowed the members to capitalize on their strengths. Any and all members can create training and share their expertise with others. Many of our members have a wealth of experience to share both technical and marketing related.
This brings us to the current days, Kyle is present on our live chat system every day (including Sunday). Carson works in the background on site enhancements. The OEP progresses daily. Today a set of training was released that takes a new member step-by-step through the early stages of creating a website. Each day is a new relevelation.