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There’s been somewhat of a recent trend in MLM to collectively refer to affiliates and retail customers as just “customers”. No doubt the brainchild of a PR firm and compliance team conceived in a dank basement somewhere, the idea behind the constant use of this marketing tactic is to infer that affiliate customers equate to retail customers.

With affiliates being participants in the business opportunity this couldn’t be farther from the truth, but it doesn’t stop some MLM companies from trying. One such example is Empower Network’s David Wood.

In a series of Facebook posts today Wood, totally channeling the “there no difference between affiliates and retail customers” vibe, made some rather interesting suggestions to Empower Network’s affiliate-base.

The first wall post contained advice for affiliates who ‘want to REALLY take off in your business in 2014‘. Alright, I’ll bite… I’m an Empower Network affiliate struggling to recruit new affiliates, sorry “customers”, so what can I do that’ll take off my business Mr. Wood?

As of TODAY, commit to starting:

a) a weekly recruiting presentation (at least)

b) a weekly training (at least)

I have 5 years of data in front of me that says that if you don’t do that, your chances of ever making consistent money past a couple thousand dollars a month border on winning the lottery.

So… recruit affiliates and then train them to do the same. And if I don’t do that, my chances of making consistent money in Empower Network past a couple of thousand dollars a month (which still sounds like an awful lot of recruiting and recruitment training), is about the same as winning the lottery. Got it.

Wood’s next nugget of training wisdom addressed the logical followup question: “So uh, how many affiliates do I need to recruit to get one of those obnoxiously gaudy rings?”

I’m personally going to sponsor 300 new customers a month in 2014.

Why?

Because I feel like laying it on.

If I can get 10 a day, every day while building a company, being a dad, doing corporate conference calls, redesigning sales messages, taking vacations, and otherwise being busy as hell — it should then demonstrate that getting 2 customers a day is relatively simplistic of a task for someone without most of those responsibilities

(I.E. none of you have to build the company, which actually takes most of my day)

Right?

(and I can’t even compete in the contests. I’m just doing it because I want to)

Who can get 2 customers a day in 2014?

Two customers a day… for a year? Huh?

On their website Empower Network claim to have 155,000 customers. Let’s be abundantly generous and say that 66% or so of those customers are affiliates. And for the sake of simplicity I’m going to round that down (in Empower Network’s favour) to a flat 100,000.

What I won’t do though is pretend that anybody within Empower Network is signing up retail customers. Surely I’m not the only one who noticed the open shift towards open affiliate customer recruitment after the “WordPress-killer” Blog Beast flop?

Anyway so using Wood’s two customers a day prescription, and starting at 100,000 affiliates – after just five days we’d have a 1.2 million affiliates in Empower Network.

Ten days? 38 million.

After fifteen days that’d be 1.2 billion… and at day 18 a whopping 9.8 billion affiliates customers – that’s over two billion more people than the current population of Earth.

If you were even more generous and reduced EN’s affiliate count to 33,000, the company would still hit the wall after the exact same eighteen day period, albeit only 1.4 billion people over the population of Earth.

But don’t let that deter you… after all, two customers a day is for wussies. David Wood is going to go out and get ten customers a day for a year. Not because he needs to mind, just because he “wants to”. It’s just that easy.

Two customers a day is “relatively simplistic”, no excuses.

First it was “dominate the search engines by blogging about anything”, then it was “WordPress training”… and after the facade of selling access to a third-party product that was free became too large an elephant in the room to ignore, the inhouse “viral blogging system” was launched. That went nowhere so now it’s just recruit 2 affiliates customers a day and “train” them to do the same.

I guess Wood really wasn’t kidding when he declared Empower Network was “not about the product” back in December. But at this point you’ve got to wonder, how many more “that was totally our best ever call/event/hangout/sales video” reboot pitches the Empower Network affiliate-base can stomach before things get truly stale?

 

Footnote: It’d be nice to use Empower Network’s actual retail customer numbers but the company doesn’t make that information public.

At one point they were claiming 67% of people paying for access to WordPress were affiliates, but after it was pointed out that most of the revenue would be coming in from the upper tiers of the training sold as products, this changed to “37% of sales are retail“.

The amount of actual paying retail customers in Empower Network (excluding expired affiliates, affiliates who have not yet recruited another affiliate and retail customers who no longer pay a monthly fee), versus their currently active fee-paying affiliate-base has, to date, never been publicly disclosed.

Nor has the company-wide revenue ratio sourced from retail customers (excluding affiliates who have not recruited other affiliates) versus revenue sourced from affiliates.