Empower Network Review: Customers or affiliates?
Despite frequent requests to review Empower Network over the past year, I’ve consistently knocked back further analysis of the company initially believing it not to be MLM.
I briefly looked over it initially and all I saw was a blog platform members sold for $25. When people contacted me about it this is what I told them and that was that.
Over time and with keeping general tabs on the MLM industry, the odd article about people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in Empower Network has caught my eye from time to time.
This did on occasion did make me wonder how the numbers added up but then I always figured that if people were achieving these commission amounts on nothing more than selling access to a $25 replicated blogging system, then more power to them. It still wasn’t MLM.
Recently however things changed I ran into a discussion about Empower Network where the terms “inner circle” and “going all in” were mentioned.
With these terms frequently used in the more shadier MLM opportunities out there (particularly “going all in”), I figured Empower Network warranted another (and more indepth) look.
Here’s what I found.
The Company
Empower Network was launched in November 2011 with a suite number and street address in the US state of Florida on the company website. Heading up Empower Network are founders David Wood (CEO) and David Sharpe (President).
Update 6th December 2013 – In December 2013 Empower Network appointed Jonathan Cronstedt as CEO, with former CEO David Wood being assigned the role of Chairman.
Cronstedt appears to have more of an affiliate marketing background than MLM, having been previously involved in Digital Marketer (2013, e-learning), Kajabi (2012, digital publishing), Affiliate Awesomeness (2012, consulting), the Glazer-Kennedy Insiders Circle (2011, training and coaching), Traffic Geyser (2009, website traffic generation). Prior to that Cronstedt was employed in the finance sector (mortgages).
/end update
A Google search on the provided Empower Network address reveals that the building is named the “Palais Royale”. The Palais Royale rent out “virtual offices” for $90 a month.
The Empower Network domain whois information provides a different street address in Florida, however this appears to be a residential area so I’m not sure what’s going on there.
To make matters even more confusing, the company provides yet another address in their Terms and Conditions, this time in the UK:
UK office address: (please do not send mail to this address)
Empower Network Limited, 66-68 High Road, Bushey Heath, Herts WD23 1GG
Why Empower Network do not wish to receive mail at this address is not known.
In their Privacy Policy, the company officially refers to itself as “Empower Network, LLC, a Florida limited liability company“.
I also couldn’t help but notice the apparent ties to Costa Rica, where founder David Wood lives and company events and “retreats” are regularly held.
Costa Rica has a flexible corporate regime and bank secrecy is enshrined in law. A high degree of corporate anonymity is possible; there is no legal requirement to reveal beneficial ownership of companies.
Costa Rican companies pay no tax on income generated outside of the country.
Make of that what you will.
As far as the founder’s respective histories in MLM go, the official marketing spiels propagated all over the internet state Wood was living “homeless” in a van prior to Empower Network. Similarly Sharpe’s backstory is also a rags to riches hook that heavily leans on him being a former drug addict who cleaned himself up, something something and now he earns a bajillion dollars a month.
A more detailed look into their histories reveals several years of online marketing experience.
Prior to Empower Network, I’ve seen Wood tied to a few “traditional” network marketing companies (Prepaid Legal was one name that popped up). From what I’ve been able to piece together Wood worked these companies for a few years and then moved to Hawaii in the hope that he’d be able to live off of a residual income. Whilst living in Hawaii, Wood lived in a van which is where the whole “homeless” backstory originates from.
Not entirely focused on recruitment anymore, Wood’s commissions eventually dried up and he re-entered the internet marketing niche. Wood became an affiliate with My Lead System Pro (MLSP).
As the name suggests, MLSP is an affiliate driven MLM lead generation opportunity.
Sharpe was also in MLSP at the time and this is apparently where the two met. In mid 2011 Wood held a $2997 “event” in Costa Rica (where he lives) which Sharpe attended.
Although not officially referred to as such, this appears to be have been somewhat of a founders meeting and laid foundation for Empower Network, with the company launching just months later that same year.
The Empower Network Product Line
Empower Network operate in the internet marketing niche and offer members access to a blogging network as well as digital marketing training product.
The Empower Network Blogging Platform
Officially referred to as the “Empower Network Viral Blogging System”, this appears to be a blogging network powered by WordPress with a custom template designed to encourage people to join Empower Network.
Empower Network members pay the company for access to the network (which is hosted exclusively on the Empower Network domain), and for a monthly membership fee are able to blog about any topic of their choice.
Each blog published by its members is then slapped into the Empower Network recruitment theme. Little emphasis is placed on the content itself, with all of the “above the fold” real estate dedicated to advertising Empower Network itself (signing up new members).
In this sense Empower Network functions as a content farm, with the idea being that the more information their members pump out onto the internet, the more exposure their recruitment theme gets which in turn translates into more signups to Empower Network itself.
Inner Circle
Empower Network’s Inner Circle is an audio based training program that is updated “2 to 4 times a week” with “new audio material from marketing experts within the online marketing, direct sales, and network marketing“.
The Costa Rica Mastermind Intensive Video Series
As the name suggests, this is a 12 hour video marketing series of
a retreat held in a 10,000 square foot home, overlooking the ocean near David Wood’s mountain home in Costa Rica.
(It covers) in detail the entire business structure of starting, maintaining, and growing an online information marketing empire.
I believe this is the same $2997 retreat held at Wood’s Costa Rica house prior to the launch of Empower Network.
The Empower Network Compensation Plan
The Empower Network compensation plan is most easily explained when split up into three separate recurring one-up compensation structures.
Each of the three products above has its own compensation plan attached that operates independently of the others, and each requires an Empower Network affiliate to qualify for commissions.
In order to qualify for commissions on each of the three tiers of the compensation plan, an Empower Network affiliate must either buy into that tier themselves (and continue to pay the monthly fee if applicable), or sell access to the tier to a non-affiliate (customer).
Empower Network Viral Blogging System and Inner Circle Commissions
The commissions structure on the Blogging System and Inner Circle tiers of the compensation plan ($25 and $100 a month respectively) is essentially a perpetual 1-up style compensation plan.
In a traditional 1-up structure you sell something to someone and pass the first sale up to your upline and then earn commissions on all future sales.
Empower Network continue to apply this idea on future sales, expanding it from the 2nd sale to include the 4th, 6th and every 5th sale thereafter. When applied to “every 5th sale” after the 6th initial sale is made (3rd commission passed up), in this sense the 1-up system is perpetual.
Eg. You sign up to Empower Network and buy into the $100 membership level, your upline gets the money.
You then sell “A” membership and you keep their money. Your next sale (2nd) from “B” is then passed up to your upline (who might pass it up to their upline depending on what number commission it is for them).
Your 4th and 6th sales are also passed up and then every 5th sale after the 6th, with the first being the 11th and then every 5th thereafter.
Commissions are paid out at a rate of 100% of the membership cost, meaning you and your uplines receive either $25 or $100 a month from each new member depending on what membership tier is bought into.
Note that the Blogging System and Inner Circle tiers are able to be stacked, resulting in a total $125 ongoing monthly commission provided membership fees continue to be paid.
Costa Rica Mastermind Intensive Video Series Commissions
With no monthly membership fee attached to the Costa Rica video series, this equates to a simple $500 commission paid out per sale of the series.
Commissions on the sale of the video series follow the exact same perpetual 1-up style that the Blogging System and Inner Circle commissions are paid on.
First an affiliate must either buy the series themselves or sell it to a non-affiliate to qualify, and from there their second, fourth, sixth and every fifth sale thereafter it passed to their upline.
Joining Empower Network
Membership to Empower Network as an affiliate is $19 a month.
Conclusion
Out of the three tiers that make up the Empower Network compensation plan, the video series would appear to be the most viable in terms of sales to non-affiliates.
It’s a product that can’t be used to market the income opportunity directly, and relies on those purchasing it to actually feel there’s value in the series itself (assuming of course that affiliate’s aren’t just buying it to qualify themselves to earn $500 commissions by then trying to sell it to others).
According to Empower Network’s Earnings Disclosure statement however, over the last 30 calendar days (14th November to the 14th December 2012), 87% of their members made $499 or less.
With commissions for the video series coming in at $500, this means that by and large the overwhelming majority of commissions being paid out in Empower Network are coming from the Blogging System and Inner Circle tiers.
Both of these tiers can be stacked and they have ongoing monthly payments, which quite obviously, according to the Earnings Disclosure, appears to be a more attractive proposition for Empower Network’s affiliates.
Before we continue, let’s get the obvious out of the way first. It’s entirely possible to join Empower Network, pay your $19 affiliate fee, $25 for blogging commissions and $100 for inner circle commissions – and earn money solely by signing recruited affiliates up to these two tiers.
They pay their monthly fees and you continue to get paid. If they wish to earn anything then they have to recruit new affiliates and sign them on.
Due to the 5th sales being passed up company wide, money then trickles its way up. How fast depends on how wide the base of your downline is. As long as those at the bottom continue to recruit new affiliates and sign them up at the $25 and $100 tiers (or ideally both) though, sales will continue to trickle up.
For those who got in early with downlines in the thousands and the fact that everybody’s paying monthly membership fees, it’s then easy to work out where commissions of thousands of dollars are coming from.
The photo below was taken from an Empower Network event and shows founders David Wood (left) and David Sharpe with other top earners holding up giant checks:
The check being held totals $778,779 and is dated June 6th, 2012. Both affiliates in Empower Network, Sharpe and Wood are no doubt positioned #1 and #2 in the compensation plan and enjoy the eventual rollup of commissions company wide (again, remember that every 5th sale is perpetually passed up by everyone).
Now if this money was primarily coming from affiliates, then we’d of course have a big red flag right there. Whereas your traditional membership based 1-up scheme has only one tier of membership, here we’ve got two with an additional $500 once off tier thrown in to boot.
Simplified, this would equate to joining Empower Network as an affiliate for $19, buying into both the $25 and $100 tiers and then earning money by recruiting new affiliates who buy in (and can then only earn money by doing the same).
If people participating in Empower Network as an income opportunity (affiliates) made up the majority of people paying monthly commissions at both the Blogging System and Inner Circle compensation tiers, essentially you’ve just got affiliates paying affiliates with no retail level to the company.
What’s worse is those affiliates at the bottom have no possibility of earning anything unless they themselves go out and get more recruits. These new recruits will of course then inadvertently also become affiliates based on the fact it’s the opportunity that sells rather than the services attached.
Unfortunately Empower Network do not publicly disclose (at least not anywhere I could see) how many of their paid monthly members are affiliates participating in the income opportunity vs. how many are customers.
I’m hesitant to use the term “retail customer” here because the only difference appears to be payment of an additional $19 a month. As far as the Blogging System goes, whether you are an affiliate or not it still generates Blogging System commissions meaning that passively “customers” are earning commissions.
Not being qualified to earn said commissions (they didn’t pay Empower Network an additional $19 a month), these commissions are passed to their effective uplines. $19 a month qualification does not change the fact that they are still generating commissions directly via use of the Blogging System.
And that brings us to an important point: The probability of customers outweighing affiliates participating in both the Blogging System and Inner Circle tiers of the Empower Network compensation plan.
As mentioned previously Empower Network themselves do not publicly reveal this information so all I can work with is probabilities.
In analysing this our first port of call is the Blogging Network. Typically the Inner Circle appears to only be advertised after a prospect has shown initial interest in Empower Network itself (through prominent advertsing of the opportunity via the Blogging Network).
Once signed up for and paid, Blogging System users are able to create blog entries that are hosted off the Empower Network domain. They look like this:
Now you’re probably wondering if I’ve cropped out the actual blog article, and the answer is I haven’t.
On my (admittedly) small laptop screen, the entire above the fold (content viewable without scrolling down) is taken up by Empower Network opportunity advertising – regardless of whether the blog article author is an Empower Network or a customer.
If I bother to scroll down, it is only then that the blog entry can be viewed, but again approximately a third of the horizontal viewing area is taken up by yet more Empower Network opportunity advertising.
Given this it’s hard to see the blog entry as anything more than secondary content (or more cynically, SEO ranking fodder), with the advertising for the Empower Network opportunity itself being the primary focus of the page.
From a customer viewpoint, I’m at a loss as to why they’d pay $25 a month for this. Advertising aside, Empower Network runs on WordPress, which is free and host all blog entries on their domain.
So for $25 a month an Empower Network customer can write their blog entries up on a blogging platform that itself is given away for free, have it hosted on a domain they don’t own or have any control over and have whatever content they upload plastered with dominant ads marketing an income opportunity they don’t earn any commissions on. Even if someone signs up using an ad shown on one of their blog article pages.
Let’s face facts, in today’s blogging landscape even if Empower Network was free you’d be hard pressed getting anyone to signup given that complete opportunity based above the fold advertising dominance over the actual content published.
Now remember, without any official numbers this is simply an analysis of the probability of non-affiliate customers making up the majority of revenue Empower Network is paying commissions out with.
Why is this important? In tangible product based MLM companies you have to be selling your products to retail customers, otherwise you just end up with a bunch of affiliates stockpiling inventory in their garages month after month to keep the commissions rolling throughout the company.
Of course those at the bottom of the compensation structure eventually get sick of this (or can’t afford to continue paying the top earner’s commissions) and quit, resulting in commissions stalling and sales in the company collapsing (or expansion into new countries to keep the recruitment drives going).
In online based service or product MLM companies it’s no different. If you’re not selling to actual end-user retail customers who are not in any way shape or form part of the compensation plan, you’ve got a problem. Not to mention the casting of a big question mark over the long-term sustainability of the company itself.
As a prospective Empower Network member at a bare minimum I’d be making enquiries with my potential upline into exactly how many non-affiliate customers they have paying monthly membership fees (either $25 or $100 a month, it doesn’t matter which), and if possible the numbers for their upline.
Be careful about how this information is relayed back to you and ask to see some hard figures if possible, ditto your upline’s upline. Remember that you’re trying to guage whether or not you’re going to be making money recruiting affiliates or selling to actual end customers, so vague answers aren’t going to cut it.
If your upline is hesitant about sharing this information with your or just flat-out refuses, then that’s probably a good indication that there’s more affiliates in their downline than customers.
Naturally I’d also encourage those that do find out this information to share it here to help others looking into the opportunity (and provide the rest of us with a more accurate insight into the customer/affiliate ratio within the company).
If the customer balance is there (preferably a dominant majority then there’s nothing to worry about. If we’re looking at an affiliate populated opportunity though… well, we all know how those wind up.
Good luck!
Footnote: I’m entirely aware of the sheer depth of marketing nonsense surrounding Empower Network that exists out there (“wussies” this and “badass” that) and just so we’re clear, please note that this is not the place for that sort of crap.
Due to the abundance of painfully cringeworthy marketing material I had to wade through during my research for this review, I anticipate that I might need to explicitly clarify that on top of the no recruitment comment rules already in place, any rubbish about just being too afraid to jump in, affiliates earning money proving legitimacy or any other such feeble marketing strategy rebuttals will just be sent straight to the spam bin.
As with any review published on BehindMLM, open and objective discussion about any points and potential issues and concerns raised in the review are always welcome and encouraged.
Update 2nd November 2015 – As of November 2015 Empower Network changed their compensation plan to a two-level unilevel style structure.
BehindMLM published a review of Empower Network’s new compensation plan and product lineup on November 2nd.
The UK address is simply that of a company registrar.
http://www.openaeuropeancompany.com/general-pages/contact-us.html
I can’t help but notice that the “other check” in that “holding up big check” photo is that of Ola and Shola, i.e. “MLM Brothers”, who wrote fluff reviews of every MLM under the sun, cross-links to their EmPowered blog, and sells the lead generation system endorsed by Wood and company.
Lol. Badass and Wussies, these are not the type of people you want to build a business with and that will last a long time. Mark my words………
Thank you for such a great review. I knew about the founders being with MLSP, So figured sooner or later they be asking you for a $20,000 check. At least that’s what Carbon copy Pro does.
My issue with empower network, Is that Everyone bills themselves as an Internet marketing expert and coach. I prefer being the messenger and not the message. These marketing sites and blogging sites all seem to make it about the person, And not what’s in it for the prospect.
If you have an exceptional product and a good financial opportunity that’s what matters to the prospect. They are always thinking what is in it for me.
Networking is first and foremost a relationship business! Blogging is talking… Building relationships is listening!
Not forgetting that Tony Rush from Liberty league aka polaris media aka “insert new name here” is high up in this too. Anything he is involved with is sure to be sketchy.
Your article made me want to join!
I have been pitched on EN for over a year now, by quite a few people. As i saw exactly what your article states, i had the same question and request for every one of the recruiters.
QUESTION: How many people in your group are making money from the actual leads that come in from the blogging service itself? So if Joe the Plumber signed up, is he making money for his plumbing business?
REQUEST: Once you have someone in your group that is making money from the actual Blogging Service, please let me know!
Not to my surprise, it’s been a year and about 10 of their promoters, and nothing! Great article by the way!
A few months ago I asked over at another board if EN could be used for a regular (I.e. non-EN and non-mlm)business and was assured that there were people using it that way. But no one gave proof.
I’ve been watching Tony Rush for a long time. If you join whatever his newest company is just after him, I really think that you can make some serious money. But there are two catches: 1. He and/or the company won’t be around long term and 2. people will get financially hurt. It’s that second one that I can’t get past.
Tony is a great marketer and has a huge base of followers. Why he doesn’t form his own company and teach marketing skills is something I don’t understand.
I’ll hypothesize that it is because the only marketing he teaches is “recruiting”.
All his followers are basically clones of himself (or wannabe). Because each business has its own saturation point, he leaves before that to look for greener pastures. I am not sure if he can actually sell a product by itself. I doubt it.
He’s “recruiter star” type in my MLM personality index. 😀
http://kschang.hubpages.com/hub/Six-Types-of-Network-Marketers-which-type-are-you
Here’s a great video of a LIVE Stream Recorded just a few days ago at the Empower Network Headquarters in Florida.
with appearances by ‘Million Dollar Earners’ crowded around a festive, Holiday like setting… If you can’t tell me that this is a recruitment video, well then I don’t know what else to say.
Stop Being a Wussy, Oz!!!
So what is the recommendation?
I have learned alot about SEO, backlinking, writing and so forth in the 30 days I have been with Empower.
I am open to any suggestions about online companies that have a better platform and ranked higher than Empower for visibility. Fire away…
That’s up to you. This is only a review looking at Empower Network as an MLM business opportunity and wasn’t written to tell you what to do.
Google doesn’t like content farms and has been pursuing them aggressively through their Panda updates over the last year.
Is it something you could NOT have learned anywhere else? Or is it something you could have found with about 10 minutes of Google sesarch?
As Oz said, “content farms” are heavily frowned upon by Google, and SEO no longer works, as SEO basically is a way to make your content seem MORE relevant than it actually is.
You don’t own your blog at the Empower Network. You are adding content to their site. Honestly, it’s like renting a house and fixing it up for free and letting the landlord benefit from your hard work.
The guys who own the site, David Wood and David Sharp…they are the “landlords” and are profiting from your work.
But back to your content (what you write)…What if you end your subscription? You lose what you’ve done and Empower profits from it for many years to come. Or the site could go down.
That’s because he is prepared to lie to get members underneath him.
Simply look at his tactics through out the whole Polaris media group debacle… His video blog was lies about how if you are sick of being scammed and listening to lies and rubbish about making money on the Internet then you should join Polaris Media Group.
Yes he is a top earner, because he sells people and family’s down the drain to make a buck.
Great job as usual, Oz!
We don’t know anyone who analyzes as thoroughly as you, and everyone should be thankful for your hard work and unbiased reporting.
We, like you, did not take Empower seriously in the beginning, and wrote just one article called “100% Commissions on Magical Mystical Manure!” at http://togethertothetop.com/?p=9908
It’s based on their inane claim to pay out 100% commissions. A little basic math tells us that if 100% commissions are paid, the product has a value of zero.
Any scheme based on a product or service that can be found cheaply or free elsewhere is a money swap, pyramid or Ponzi. And it’s surprising how many of the scams use a variant of the Aussie Two Up.
“How Many Can You Screw Up In An Aussie Two Up?” http://togethertothetop.com/?p=10734
Thanks again for your investigations on our behalf, and we plan to be quoting you lots in the future.
Bob and Anna Bassett
I have been in empower network since Nov 2011 …As a long time blogger anyway I have 12 personal blogs in various niches.
I joined empower network because for me for $25 to have the ability to blog on an authority type site and back link to it was a no brainer to me.
I have been making very good money every month I have been in, I have also brought people who have never marketed online before and make money for the first time.
With that said, a lot of people talk about the blogging plate form and getting leads like somehow empower network blogs magically should be able to suck in leads.
The truth is: Your only going to get leads based on your content value and marketing strategies.
For example: Are you using strong call to actions in your blog post? Do you blog frequently? Like 7 days a week frequently?
…Also some would say you can get a free blog. While this is true, you also have to agree to a strict t.o.s especially with free wordpress blogs.
With an en blog, you can market/sell/promote any business you want.. (assuming it’s legal of course). Personally, after 12 years of marketing on the internet, failing for the first 6 spending tens of thousands of dollars I finally found something that I would sell to my grandmother because it’s that good.
As far as all the other products en sells..
The blogging platform is a tool, the other products are textbooks.. You should use what you learn from the text books on your blog etc… Compare the cost of going to a 4 year college or start a offline business from scratch and then you would have to agree en is priced right.
Just my 2 cents 🙂
In the end there are only 2 types of people in the world.
1. Those that wait around for something to happen
2. Those that make things happen
Empower Network attracts the latter to it..
BTW: This is one of the better reviews I’ve read 🙂
I agree with Larry, of all of the mlm schemes I have seen, I would say that Empower Network is the best one.
Best transparency and best money making potential from any other mlm. I just know that Tony Rush is dodgy. But there is a good opportunity for people to make money with EM.
What happens if Google all of a sudden deems EN to be a content farm and/or for some other reason, kicks EN and all of its blog to the bottom of the barrel? I believe Facebook already blocked links to EN blogs so it could very well happen.
Then a lot of people will be up a certain creek without a paddle.
It is a scheme. I can sign up get paid to get other people to join. The blog is not a product, it is a marketing tool for affiliates to recruit other affiliates.
I think it is just a matter of time before the feds come poking around and that will be the beginning of the end of EN.
So you agree that EN blog is a marketing platform for marketers to blog about marketing and marketing stuff.
Just because EN has a lot of content on marketing does not make it an “authority” type site, does it? Esp. when the staff exercises no editorial control over it. You can still find **** on EN pushing scams like Zeek, TVI Express, and other scams that were shut down by the government.
And the first thing you see when you go to an EN blog is… an ad about EN itself, above the fold.
Your content, your “call to action”, is basically free SEO for Wood and company to bring in viewers advertising EN, and you are PAYING THEM for it, instead of they paying you for your content to make their site relevant.
You are viewing the world through their reality distortion field. You may want to take a few steps back.
There are plenty of different ways to create authority or pr7 and up backlinks to a blog or website.
Just like in the old days… hubpages.com and squidoo ‘lenses’ used to get indexed onto google within minutes, google deemed them to be considered ‘Link Farms’ that were used for much of the time to promote affiliate programs or spam.
With the increasingly fast pace of the Google search algorithm updates, EN will eventually start to fall down on the search results. What will happen then?
I mean, from a 3rd Party point of view- EN is a pretty ingenius concept. It’s extremely simple and has attracted thousands of members from all over the world.
But what will happen once the bubble pops?
Answer = Complete Mayhem.
Typical rugs to riches scheme. What happens if Google all of a sudden deems EN to be a content farm and/or for some other reason, kicks EN and all of its blog to the bottom of the barrel?
I believe Facebook already blocked links to EN blogs so it could very well happen. Not recommended.
All the comment above are correct. Expect for the one that’s talking positives about EN.
First of all I do think this review was very thorough and thank you for that.
But I would like to address at least two of the concerns. First of all is the blogging platform worth the $25 when we can get a WordPress or Blogger platform for free. Well that answer lies in the Alexa score and your page rank.
I see countless and absolutely worthless websites or blogs, which business owners have spent thousands of dollars on….that have incredibly bad rankings and scores. I have free blogs as well, about 9 of them besides my EN blog and the rankings and scores take quite a bit of time to become effective at what I am trying to get out of them.
But because the EN blog is attached to the EN domain…you get instead ranking that is huge (506 today) and worth the $25/mo. I am just getting it from the subscription rather than paying for PPC until the score rises over months and months of tweaking.
SO does it have value to a customer only, well I certainly do think so….especially if they have a totally ineffective site for their business.
As far as the above the fold ads go…..well then change it. It’s based on a WordPress template and you can change the picture, the space layout or what ever you want. You can add pages and re-create your business branding and just enjoy riding on a domain with a great Alexa score.
Will Google smack it down as a content farm? I don’t know. Will I be bummed out if I start wasting my $25/mo for a score that reverses and becomes useless….well yes and I will stop payment on the subscription at that point. Will I cry over it….no more than crying over $25 spent on PPC….which could also become useless.
The banner ads are there for newbies to online marketing. They can concentrate on blogging and learning. And the affiliate leads that come in through their site…..well the conversion rate is up around 30% so a newbie could never do that on their own anyway. So for them it’s a winner until they learn.
For a business…..well change the picture with a few clicks of the mouse…..change the page layouts… or hide those pages and show your own pages.
I personally have learned a tremendous amount about online marketing from EN. I really wish that the founders (which by the way share position #1) would speak in language that was a little more fitting for those who would like to build a business. But maybe that will come with age.
If I wanted to build the business, as expressed above, it’s about relationships and I could do the whole business with my own meetings or webinars and not go near the hype.
But for now…. I get a killer Alexa Score and page rank….which when you look at the score of blogspot or WordPress….did absolutely nothing for me. With EN….I get the score immediately. Then with keywords and targeted result pages….I get the page ranks as well….and really fast.
Is that worth $25 for my biz…yes. Will Google come down on it as a content farm….who knows. Does Facebook hate them…yes.
FB offers a free platform for folks to share their opinions and then FB KEEPS the billions generated from it. With EN people share their opinions and get paid for it. Can that be a problem for FB some day? I would think so.
Again thank you for the great review!
Dave W
What blogging platform? Empower Network is powered by WordPress, available for free.
All they did was slap a spamtastic theme onto it advertising the opportunity and pushing content well below the fold.
Domain pagerank and individual page pagerank are entirely different. A domain’s authority will have an affect an individual page’s authority but they aren’t one and the same.
This naturally affects link juice passed on to linked sites, with most pages on EN being worthless (despite the marketing garbage out there).
As it stands EN’s main website is PR4, that’s borderline on the low end of being considered an authority site.
And blogspot/wordpress subdomains are counted with their parent domains, with both trumping EN authority wise so there goes that argument.
So where are all the customers then? And please don’t waste my time with official made up testimonials.
You can’t. The Empower Network theme pushes the content well below the fold.
Is Empower Network a content farm? Yep. That should answer your question.
I personally believe it’s only a matter of time before they get slapped.
Face it, you wouldn’t be a member without the attached recruitment driven business opportunity.
I’m not if you’ve actually *seen* how Empowered Network works, despite your claim that you have a blog there. Without the ads for itself, EN is nothing. You don’t control the template, THEY DO. So WTF are you talking about?
Empower is an article farm, and everybody who post on it are feeding it… and PAYING THEM for the privilege. Why?
Empower already lost pagerank from the Panda update (as did every other article farm in the biz).
Yes…EN controls the DEFAULT TEMPLATE. The newbies are already to go. If you don’t like it and you understand how to set up your links properly….change the template…delete the pages.
It’s a template….you can use what ever you want. But if your are a newbie and delete the template or pages you can’t get it back. So you need to understand how to make your links work with their system and your pages.
And the ads of course promote EN FOR YOU if you want to build the business. They are all connected to your affiliate link just like any other affiliate program.
And I do have a blog with them and it is WordPress….which I also have for another blog. I can do what I want with it! But the newbies should leave it alone and they do leave it alone for a good reason.
Have a sparkly day!
So why pay $25 a month for a default WordPress install you can do yourself for free?
Oh… for the income opportunity.
Why buy Tea Tree Oil from an MLM….when you could get it cheaper at CVS? Why buy vitamins from an MLM….when you could get it cheaper from Walmart?
Why buy cell phone service through an MLM…..when you just get it from any carrier or Boost? Why buy a protein bar from an MLM when it is cheaper just about anywhere else!
And let’s not even talk about water filters!!
During the course of building an MLM business, products move and customers are created.
Are the EN products touch and feel like a vitamin? No! Does it have value for every person….maybe not? Does it appeal to the folks who have never created a blog or website? Yes it does! And the thought behind it’s creation was to be a way of the masses to become a blogger….with out the years of learning and trials and errors.
Plug and play…instant gratification!
For $25/ month they get the blog system….push the green button…enter opinion….push the blue button. Poof they are a blogger. They get hosting, autoresponder and training as part of their $25/ mo.
Should they be an affiliate…why not? Make one sale and their monthly subscription is paid for. Make a 2nd and 3rd sale and now the affiliate payments for their subscription and their admin payments ($19.95) for their merchant account (where in the world can you get a merchant account for free or $19.95/mo), back office and follow up on their leads are now also paid for.
So why would someone not want to be an affiliate, especially if they have never built a blog or website…..did all sorts of back linking, SEO…..setting up domain names….getting an auto responder and setting that up. And getting a merchant account and shopping cart!
It can be overwhelming for a person just starting out.
OR they can pull out their credit card and in about 10 minutes have a merchant account with no credit checks and hassles, have a blog….have training….an auto responder to handle sales leads (thats all set up….you don’t have to set it up) and now they are up and running while they start to learn how to blog.
How about conversion rate % for a brand new blogger? Oh yeah they have to take a couple of copy writing courses first and if they are not good at sales, well that is another hurdle.
OR they buy a subscription to EN and get an automatic system with capture pages and auto responders and a 31.9% conversion rate. Well that would sure make it easier for a new person to get rolling….while they learn how to do it like the rest of us.
Can they buy other products to increase their education….if they want? Sure if they want. Does some retreat with a bunch of successful online marketers talking and throwing around various things that they have tried and what the results were…..turned into hours and hours of DVD’s have any value to it?
Well if you never had the opportunity to sit and talk to online marketers that have made significant sums of money…..well then it may have some value to you. But you certainly don’t have to buy it if you do not want to.
And if you don’t and someone deep down in your downline does buy the product, well then just like any other MLM the over ride or commission will keep going up until it hits someone who is qualified.
And finally is this like every other MLM compensation plan….NO!
It is a cross or hybrid of an affiliate program / direct sales and MLM. If it were used for some other products it would be the pits…..because of the 2,4,6 and every 5th pass up. BUT with an online marketing or blogging platform….the leads come in from the blogging and are very automated.
So who cares about where your sales end up….vs sponsoring warm markets or friends.
And if you have friends or warm market prospects….you give them to your downline for their 2,4,6,11th etc pass ups….and your friend or prospect comes right back up to your payline.
So you are helping your downline as you should and still getting your sale….and your personal prospects are not being passed up.
Do I like wide programs where lot’s of recruiting occurs, as compared to getting paid on downlines 6 levels or so deep….no! But then again I don’t care if it is structured wide….because I ALWAYS build deep anyway.
And that always gets my down line paid and creates solid incomes for everyone!.
Do I like the hype and the language from some of these guys….nope. But a few clicks and my team is online with GoToWebinar with me….and not dealing with the hype.
Look if some of the folks in this forum do not like this company…..fine! I read a pretty fair review up above and there were some areas that the author was not quite sure of. I personally wouldn’t go near this company for about a year.
When I got some answers to my questions….and I saw some of the results that some of the other business owners got I was pleasantly surprised.
You know business owners who have websites or blogs that were not producing. But they reinforced those sites with an EN blog and got results. They got sales….they got booked with a waiting list for their services.
Some of us are really good at our careers…..but maybe not so much with blogging, SEO and getting a page rank up. But this system has done it very well for some business people and thats why I got in.
My sponsor is very successful at online marketing and me….well….trying like heck but certainly plenty of room to grow.
Is this system, with the hosting, template, auto responder and the training worth it to me? Heck yeah it is! Oh and now I am front line to a guy that knows what he has been doing for years. That alone is worth $25/month.
Is this the only affiliate program or MLM that I am involved with or will be involved with…..nope!
But I can use this one to grow my other efforts. IS it for everyone….no I don’t think so. So don’t buy it and don’t get involved.
Will it last for the next decade or even only 5 years? I don’t know. But what I am getting out of it is worth the journey. And very few people put all their eggs in one basket these days anyway….so it is what it is.
But we are either working to make our industry better….and seeking answers or facts. Or we are just bashing anything that we are not involved with.
Personally I believe reviews and getting answers are fine. Getting facts are fine. Tearing down our own industry is not good for any of us in the long run.
I respect your opinions and your views. You certainly have the right to do so. Does EN have value to you? It appears not at all. Perhaps you have a ton of blogs and sites and are even an expert.
But there are millions of people out there that need work or need to reinvent themselves. And not only do they not know how to build a blog or site…..they want to find an income stream while they reinvent themselves.
When I see a lady who is blind, or another physically handicapped individual earn money from blogging and they knew absolutley nothing about it…I think that is awesome!
I was disabled for over a year from something that I didn’t do…..I just got lucky I guess. Fortunately I can walk and now get back to work. But even if I couldn’t you could just prop me up in bed and I could blog! And thanks to EN I could get paid too.
Will it last…..will Google take it out….I don’t know. But by then I will have more blogs of my own. I will learn online marketing from some of the best producers in the country.
So to me it has value. To a lot of others it has value. To you…no it doesn’t. Oh well, I guess you prefer vitamins or something else. And what ever program you are into….well thats cool. We pick what we like.
And lastly….100% pay out? Well I have studied copy writing for a couple of years and copy writers and salesmen twist all sorts of things. Is it 100% pay out of the $25 / month subscription? Yes! Does it equate to 100% in reality considering the compensation plan….NO! Duh…..nothing is for free!
When considering the pass ups….that money skips here and there to your sponsor…..and does not go further up. Just one level for the subscription payment. (unless you quit…then it goes to your sponsor)
On the other products, does it just go one level up? NO! It goes to the next qualified affiliate….which could be many levels. And that is a lot of the bigger money is.
Like most MLM comp plans, the smallest number is usually where most of your income comes in. Except instead of over priced products like vitamins or protein bars…..its education.
Do you have to buy it….nope. If you don’t and someone in your downline does buy it….does it go to your sponsor? It goes to the first individual that is qualified….who ever that is.
So it’s like a compensation plan within a compenstation plan. And for those who beleive that education and an investment into your own being is a valuable investment…well then it has value to them.
Can that be watching a video of online marketing types sharing secrets? Heck some times that can be the best education by far. Is it worth the money that they charge? What is the value of a painting or a house? It’s value is in the eye of the beholder. They are the only people that can determine it’s actual value.
Anyway…..I wish you the very best Oz. My feable attempt to answer some of the areas that the author did not have firm concrete facts on, which he probably wouldn’t have if he wasan’t in it….well let’s just say I should have just clicked the X on the browser and done something more constructive.
My first time to this site…and probably the last.
But in any case….I wish all the contributors and the author the very best in the New Year….and in what ever program you are in…I wish you the best of success!!!!
P.S. I hope my rant and lengthy words add to your page rank .. 🙂
Uh, a WordPress install with the default template is free champ. Talking about buying anything is redundant.
Yes that’s what’s supposed to happen. Yet with EN all I see are affiliates selling the opportunity itself (membership).
Given that it’s just WordPress with a recruitment spam theme installed, would you buy it without the attached income opportunity? No.
Again, WordPress is free so you’re not paying for “the blog system”.
As for subdomain hosting… $300 a year. Yeah, what a bargain.
Face it, you’re paying for the income opportunity (and your fellow affiliate’s commissions).
Also please don’t tout ridiculous numbers like a 30%+ visitor conversion rate. We both know that isn’t happening or EN would have a lot more active members than it does.
Yeah, paying affiliates to recruit other affiliates on multiple levels. That’s never been done before :rolleyes:.
“They” this and “they” that. Who are “they”? Oh right… those dodgy looking “official testimonials”.
All evidence I have seen points to there being no retail customers in EN. Infact it’s actually impossible, given that there’s no seperation between affiliates and customers.
“They” don’t exist.
This isn’t a blog review site, we review and discuss MLM companies here.
Recruitment driven pyramid schemes are a blight on the industry and no amount of justification changes that. You can try and hide behind “the industry”, but your participation in EN is being called out for what it is: getting paid to recruit new members and keeping them paying monthly membership fees.
That just happens to be the textbook definition of a pyramid scheme.
It does if your sponsor has to pass up the sale, and their sponsor, and their sponsor. Over time this is a lot of passups finding their way to the founders, who (surprise surprise) are sitting at the top of the pyramid.
I see the sad reality that blogging has nothing to do with it. They recruit new members and as long as said new members pay their monthly membership fees, earn a 100% monthly commission.
Or in other words, EN just shuffles affiliate money around to existing members. There’s nothing “awesome” about that. Infact it’s tragically despicable that EN affiliates are targeting those most vulnerable.
I imagine the “wussy” and “badass” marketing techniques of Empower Network are most shamefully effective on blind and otherwise disabled members of society who are down on their luck.
I’m not in a program, that’s why I’m able to review MLM opportunities objectively and without the BS marketing spin. I’m not trying to sell anybody anything (or in the case of EN and other pyramid schemes, recruit).
Ah the dummy spit. Yeah we see that alot around here, it’s commonly what happens when MLM marketers meet the brick wall of common sense.
Toodles.
Way to go Oz, I’m sick to death of people thinking their helping everybody and really just ripping them off!!!!
Oz,
The classic definition of a pyramid scheme is when money exchanges hands without a product or service. Like gifting.
Empower Network offers a SERVICE. A “ready made” blogging system … along with the hosting … for $25/month.
There’s no question about the validity of the product.
Legitimate people/companies PAY THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS (and some even a lot more) to have someone set up their blog for them.
It’s a skill that’s not easy to learn from scratch.
Can people go to WordPress for free and start from scratch?
Of course!
Will they be able to create a sexy blog that successfully promotes their product or service without any other knowledge?
Probably not.
Your definition of a “pyramid” ought to include universities.
After all, why should people ***PAY*** a school for the privilege of learning … when they can just go look up the information for free on the internet?? :)~
And here’s the REAL bullshit of schools …
They don’t even GUARANTEE a good-paying job upon graduation!!!
What a SCAM!! LOL
Empower Network is simply online education for people who want to learn how to market any product and/or service online.
Which, here in the early 21st Century, is one of THE most valuable commodities on the planet!!!
Empower Network is legitimately structured, operating within the laws of the United States, headquartered in St. Petersburg, FL with a corporate staff of 40 (and growing).
In their first few months, yes, like any company, they did some things wrong. But, they were authentic about their mistakes, and learned from them.
Isn’t that the kind of authenticity you’d like to build a relationship with?
Meanwhile, you won’t even publish your name or photo.
So enough of the rubbish of Empower Network being a pyramid.
@Pyramid Buster
Seriously… how many times do we have to go over this?
Empower Network use WordPress. WordPress is free and developed by the WordPress Foundation.
Empower Network are not selling WordPress, nor do they own it.
Want proof? When you sign up, 100% of your membership goes to your upline (direct or indirect). Empower Network as a company make no money on the so-called sale of “a service” ($25) to their members.
All that is happening is members are joining Empower Network with their membership fees being shuffled around to existing members, or “cash gifting” as you put it.
You could make the argument that EN are selling hosting, but shared hosting at $300 a year is gargantuanly overpriced and clearly reflects membership fees are propping up the compensation plan (easily proveable at 100% commissions).
As for the WordPress theme they’re using? Please. It’s a giant spam ad above the fold with another giant spam ad on the toolbar. There is no “system here”. It’s a capture theme that was either developed inhouse or would have set them back a few hundred at most.
Thousands of dollars my arse.
Universities aren’t MLM companies, so please take that crap elsewhere.
a scheme where members pay money to sign up and are paid commissions for signing new members up as long as they continue to pay monthly membership fees.
There are no retail customers within the scheme (everyone has access to the compensation plan making them affiliates) and the only way for new affiliates to earn commissions is to sign up new members.
Or in other words, an obvious pyramid scheme. Enough deflecting already, facts are facts.
Well done Oz! I couldn’t of said it better. Glad you have shown the light of this “over” hyped program.
Yes WordPress platform basically free and simple to create a home “Splash” page collecting info. Basically a “disguised” cash gifting/ponzi scheme that gets alot of traffic too. Rank 504 on Alexa dot com.
Can you provide one website that promotes a person’s own business that does not promote EN? The claim is that people can use the EN sites to promote their own business but I have yet to see one that doesn’t include EN.
The “brilliance” of EN is in that it managed to convince people like PB that instead of authors getting paid for hosting content there (like Hubpages or Squidoo) authors are PAYING (i.e. spending money) for hosting content, mainly for that perceived value of domain pagerank.
However, these authors fail to realize that the domain pagerank is due to their content. Basically, all they paid for is making EN seem more relevant, not their own page.
In other words, it’s like EN invented a way to get PAID for doing its own SEO, instead of PAYING for relevant content and/or SEO… by promising a share of payment from everyone who is paying, to the “referrer”.
Is this legal? Difficult to say. Goes back to the “ultimate consumer” question… (i.e. Webster vs. Omnitrition)… Is there such a thing as ultimate consumer in EN? I.e. someone who really pay EN for hosting?
Or do they really pay EN for the right to earn commission by referring OTHERS (just like them)?
The former’s legal, albeit way over market price. The latter’s a pyramid scheme disguised with a service/product.
THIS…
Is the “Empower Network”
http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network
Then, just add the Affiliate Module…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/affiliates/
and use the element of an extremely compelling story about homelessness, drug use, recovery and living out of a “Van” to pull in thousands upon thousands of people.
Then, create some videos using Camtasia that teach people how to post an article on wordpress, get the people to blog consistently (boosting Pagerank) and you’ve got the “Empower Network”
I agree that selling a membership and teaching people how to do OTHER things like perhaps selling on Ebay, creating an online store, building a work at home business that sells something tangible– is a valid ‘Product’
But Teaching people to Blog about selling the same product that they are blogging about is recruitment, plain and simple.
People also use the pagerank of EN to blog and recruit for many of the scams that have been posted here including TVI Express and more (K. Chang would agree with me on that).
I will agree that the two ‘Daves’ are MASTERS of the art of persuasion. They are VERY good at what they do and that is why the Empower Network continues to thrive.
But, when you strip it all down and take it apart– It’s exactly what I just showed you: A word press ‘Multi site Network’ and the Affiliate Module Add on. That’s it.
Woahhh…. Tis a Good review.. But it is only a review from the outside.. Let me tell you some thing from the inside from a complete novice to practical online marketing.
I have been in offline mlm for 13 years…. medium success if you measure success with $/mnth.
6 years ago i noticed that telephone prospecting was losing its efficiency … and so i decided to take a look for a business online..
within 4 hours i realised that i needed technical skills in many areas and that the internet (especially with the slow speed i was getting in a 3rd world country) was just a time sapping go-nowhere-fast proposition.
My friend and colleague did not listen to my warnings… he ended up broke after 3 years trying an online business. Many products seemed to be just a ruse to get you to the next step but never to the finish line.
So, for 6 years i have been waiting and looking online… then i saw Empower network. Remember i am being forced to especially look for a system that would not need too many technical skills or set up time etc.
I joined EN and within 30 minutes had a wordpress Blog up and running and i was IN BUSINESS. US$25per month is a steal.
You don’t just get a Blog with ALL the bells and whistles which probably would have taken me 6 months to 2 years to get to the same level of Online “Efficiency””.. you also get:
10+ high click thro capture pages – DONE for you
A high converting Sales Video – DONE for you –
A back Office with 8 Fast Start Training Videos –
and the ability to recoup your product cost with just 1 customer.
Just the Blog alone must have saved me Months of set up and from what i know now.. it probably saved me US$100’s in other trainings that i would have needed.
But with the rest of the stuff added i can say, to me it is worth much more than US$25per month.
With Zero previous experience online – I earned more in one month (after 2 months experience) than the highest monthly earning of my friend during the whole of his 3 year experience.
Empower Network’s Training is quite frankly.. superb.
And of course there is a chance that (like ANY company in this type of industry) it will be closed down…. So are you nay-sayers going to just stay on your soap Boxes all your life and not take any risks..?
Most MLM cmpanies have more “internal customers” than retail customers and CAN with clever accounting … be shown to be “illegal”…. The “legals” COULD, based on the current laws ‘justify’ shutting down MOST mlm companies.
Empower has opened up the online world for me and many other newbies — without the need to shell out US$10,000’s over a 2 to 4 year period …. I applaud them.
I too am not fond of the language and some of the hypeee style.. but i am also NOT blinded by it.
Good business practice, common sense, great hands on trainings. I recommend it to anyone who is looking to go online.
Several of my friends who own brick and mortar business are seriously looking at Empower for lead generation purposes and i believe it would be perfect for them… but that’s another story…
Most of my Blogs HAVE NOT BEEN ABOUT Empower Network Business.. i can attract many eyeballs using many topics of interest… but just like the TV or bill boards on the street.. They see the ads and banners on an opportunity AND my endorsement and will click IF THEY choose to.
I know several people who started out Just using The Empower Platform purely as a Blog to endorse their business website.. but then became an affiliate as well due to the high response and interest to EN.
Blessings
Kevin A.
@Kevin
Wonderful backstory, but it does nothing to change the Empower Network business model.
By recruiting new members into the scheme, with them only able to earn commissions if they too recruit new members into the scheme.
That’s the problem, as it’s the textbook definition of a pyramid scheme.
Please don’t waste our time with that “wussy” marketing garbage here thanks.
but they are plastered with above the fold advertising trying to recruit new members into the scheme.
That’s the primary goal of the blog, regardless of what the actual content is (it’s pushed below the fold where it’s just SEO fodder).
Err, pardon my ignorance, but, how does pointing out the fact Empower Network allows itself to be used as an endless chain recruiting scheme equate to: staying on a soap box all your life and not taking any risks
Does Empower Network membership come with free psychic abilities thrown in now ???
How on earth do you know what else posters do with their time ???
Hello people. I just read all of this and I have yet to run across any of it althought I DID sign up, I signed up in a totally different spill.
I did listen to David Wood’s spill with the wussy word’s and there was no way to either forward or reverse the video so I listened to the ENTIRE 30 mins of it and seen the pay this amount to get this yada yada. BUT then I ran across another marketing video and It was touting buy nothing, just replacate this and market to youtube ect..
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS click in one of the icon’s which were for various bookclubs, I got the four book’s for a dollar from the military book club and it came up to 12 something. There was also proactive product, various credit card services and it was three pages of stuff.
I now have a capture page and url add for where ever I post the same thing that I looked at inc. the video and had a choice as to how all of this looked with the click of the mouse. I have not bought anything from EP network but I did notice that another person was holding a giant check from the same company EP network.
The company that I seen at first is Instant payday network so I backed up and split the screen and sure enough there was the same check from EP. So there are one in the same. I can sell the brand new Navy Seal book and get my money back, so I haven’t figured out how this work’s YET.
I have all the tools to start and I started at the min. They want you to click on two other “buys” I will wait and see before I click on anymore of that. This comes after I almost got in with the Vidacup which was $150.00 NO WAY, that’s just way to much plus the comp plan is alittle to involved for me.
Now I have not researched YET for Instant payday only for EP, but as I said they ARE one in the same and the same people, anyone run across this? Happy New Year!!
If I’m understanding correctly, sounds like someone is marketing a recruitment driven ebook club via Empower Network.
EN themselves don’t run all the marketing material for EN, alot of it comes from affiliates.
Of course, the question is… what shows above the fold… EN, or this opportunity?
Or is all that marketing stuff for this eBook club just drive SEO traffic to EN?
Look at results, not intentions. Ask yourself: what do you see first when you click on the page?
And EN doesn’t do that? There’s the hosting, then there’s the advanced video courses taught by Woods (i.e. gloating over his Puerto Rico place, while teaching marketing) and if you pay enough, you can go for a live-in-person seminar.
You are selling EN for EN, while *thinking* you’re selling your own stuff. Why pay $25 a month when you can have a Blogger or WordPress blog for free in a few minutes?
It’s clearly NOT the blog, but all the *other* stuff that’s worth money. So what exactly *are* you selling?
I miss the good old days where I mailed a dollar for the first 5 names on a list provided to me, and waited for my return to come in the mail from various senders possibly amounting to more than my $5 invested..
It as much simpler back then to make money..
/S 🙂
good review.
i have indeed seen some good blogs on EN, who deleted that bloated top banner. probably they also could have used wordpress.org or blogger or …..
maybe convenience, extra suport they found. price is not everything (also seen domainregisters selling cc-tld domains for $200, where the registry only took $20)
can turn into something good, but am afraid that if it are only affiliates, it will run out of new members during 2013. (or much later… how long does amway etc exist)
but as they adapt, maybe make the blogging system a little cheaper with extra templates thrown in the affiliates can attract a lot of blogger customers.
I have signed up for EN, I am in my first month. I came looking for valuable training I could take away, I didn’t even know what the structure of the system was, all of their sales funnel barely mentions it, just the dream you can have by being in the system.
I was looking for marketing training. Now, I may be able to glean some value (unintentional to them) just by looking at their recruitment structure, but I have yet to see anything that is of real inherent value to the system.
I may stick around for this first month to see if there is anything, but I doubt it, and will likely cancel after this.
I see their 8 committment videos, some comments contributed by other users, and links to upsell to more expensive training. I can’t claim that there isn’t going to be good stuff there, but I can’t afford it, and what they’ve given me so far isn’t enough of a compelling reason that there IS good content there of their own.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, their discourse is 99.5% selling you on the system, and maybe .5% on what value the system actually is without you selling it on to someone else.
As has been mentioned, my core concerns are, what does it do for me without selling it? Is there a real product here? Can I really get a faster page rank by using their blog template?
Assuming I can actually truthfully get rid of their above the fold ad. Because, if you’re trying to promote a business of your own, why make it look like you’re promoting someone else’s as a higher priority than yours? Are the special wordpress ad-ons, and the hosting really worth keeping it up?
They talk a lot about the value of the complete system, about taking care of payouts and merchant accounts and sales funnels, landing pages, videos for you. But all of that is related to your affiliate status, not the actual blog system itself.
I want to sell a straight up product that adds to value to a customer, not a system of self-perpetuating uroborus type recruitment.
William Ackman’s bet against Herbalife by going short on $1 billion shares, accusing Herbalife’s business model of being a Pyramid Scheme is failing with other major Hedge fund managers rallying in defence of the company by buying long.
It really looks like Ackman is going to catch a cold on this one because like many main stream investors, he got his facts wrong about MLM in general and Herbalife in specific and he also underestimated popular opinion.
He should have picked a business model like Empower Network to turn his cannons on. Granted they are only small fry and he would have had to chose a different strategy than the short sell but the practise would have been good and all his accusations fit like a glove in this case.
One main stream analyst who bothered to look at Empower Network described it as ‘Cash Gifting with joke false glasses and moustache’.
Uh… Empower Network is a publicly traded company say what now?
“… Granted they are only small fry and he would have had to chose a different strategy than the short sell…” (because they are privately held)…did I really need to spell that out?
The omplication in the words in commas wasn’t enough to point to that for you? Really? I do apologise Oz, my bad.
With the Herbalife case involving the stock market and Ackman being a hedge fund manager you didn’t have to spell it out but I did think it was a rather long bow to draw.
I don’t think Ackman’s going to give up the stock market and take on cleaning up the MLM industry anytime soon :).
sigh…. It wasn’t meant to be a serious suggestion that Ackman would ….. oh dear…..you know what, just leave it.
Perhaps I should have just made my point with the last sentence and left it at that 🙂
I wholly agree Ackman’s points are pertinent to Empower Network. Hell they’d fit a lot of MLM companies snugly.
Let’s chalk it up to multitasking brainfart on my part shall we. It’s been a hell of a week so far and it’s only Tuesday!
done 🙂
@Richard
Bill Ackman and the other hedge fund managers (Einhorn, Chapman, Loeb) have been discussed in the Herbalife thread (where it belongs).
https://behindmlm.com/companies/herbalife-review-pyramid-scheme-or-not/
I don’t think he’s interested in MLM in general, or interested in pyramid schemes in general.
Yes, thanks for the guidance there M_Norway.
Especially your forthright words in parenthesis which would have been particularly useful and educational had they been relevant and on point.
However, as my comment’s conclusion was fully about Empower with only reference made to Herbalife to give background relevance to Ackman’s activity which itself was the vehicle for the irony that you seem to have missed completely…they were not…
but thanks again anyway 🙂
@Richard
It was factual info in the parenthesis, not “educational”.
I simply stated the NAMES of the other hedge fund managers in that parenthesis. The other parenthesis was about “It’s better to discuss the topic in that thread rather than here”. Actually, I responded to comment #50, not to the dialogue between you and Oz.
Factual information isn’t solely meant for you, it’s meant for other readers as well, e.g. anyone wondering about “WTF is Bill Ackman, and what is that case about?”. My comment will answer most of those questions, via the link to the other thread.
I got stopped before I got started. Which was good. I realized that I just want something simple to do for cash. Not a leg up and a leg down. Or getting paid every other number or wondering if my people are gonna stay with it, having to keep getting people involved and constantly talking about it. Bla, Bla, Bla.
Just buy then sell and be done with it and go on about your day with something else. Good luck people.
A couple of quick, useful pieces of information:
1. Empower Network actually has an office, with employees who pick up the phone in Florida. It’s on the contact us tab, they have nearly 50 employees.
2. Your information about Costa Rica corporations is not accurate. I’m not going to correct it, but it should have been researched better. You make assumptions that are not true, or useful to the rest of your article. In addition, the purpose of the UK corporation is because one of Empower Network’s merchant accounts is based in London. They also have corporations in Asia for asian business. A lot of international companies do this, it’s normal, smart business.
3. The Empower Network customer blog doesn’t have any Empower Network branding whatsoever, and huge amount of people use it. You probably didn’t run into them, because you were looking for information about ’empower network’. Empower Network customers are blogging about other stuff.
Looking for ‘Empower Network’ is obviously only going to run into affiliates writing articles to capture attention, people writing negative marketing articles to sell other stuff, and also the occasional outside person who for whatever reason enjoys writing semi-objective articles – although I’ve actually found none of those in search.
Just thought I’d point out why you wouldn’t have ran into them.
4. Your information on both Wood and Sharpe is also inaccurate, and would have been extremely easy to research. The combined inaccuracies of these four points alone makes your article a bit less credible, although it does appear you thought it out – some of this information is extremely easy to find.
For example – Wood got involved in online marketing in 2009 – not when he started Empower Network. That information is right on his blog. Sharpe also started marketing around 2010.
When Wood started the company, he had been the top personal producer in MLSP for 2 years, and still is the #1 all time producer there, although he hasn’t sold it at all in over a year. Old school network marketing experience came prior to 2009, and was always mediocre success.
5. There is no law by any government body that says a majority of commissions have to come from retail customers. The laws talk about income needing to come from product sales.
Amway North America only has about 10% of their sales volume coming from customers, but they still have been growing in North America for nearly 70 years. This is a common misunderstanding in Network Marketing Law, that’s repeated by virtually everyone.
There is exactly 0% of commissions that are paid out from recruiting, at all. All income is derived from the sale of products – whether to reps, or customers.
Since I know both David and David personally, and have an organization in Empower Network, I’ll tell you that the affiliate/customer ratio is about a third customers currently.
I’ve also had the privilege of looking at them company wide. They’ll be releasing that information publicly sometime later in the year.
Last thing: I know David Wood, and David Sharpe – they’re good guys. It’s easy to assume because you met a huckster years ago, doing a 2 up, that they aren’t good folks. They care about their teams, more than any other leaders I’ve ever worked with.
You can believe that or not – I don’t care if anyone here decides to join here.
Your criticism of the compensation plan also isn’t founded in reality. Every 5 passing up organization wide doesn’t go to Dave and Dave, it goes to the powerline sponsor – whoever that is.
But I’ve never been treated so well by a company owner, ever, in my life, and I’ve been around Network Marketing for a long time.
I know you didn’t spend a lot of time questioning it, but someone here was complaining about charging for a $25 blog – claiming you can get equivalent value for free.
Nonsense. There are both free and paid blogging services online. Large networks of blogs, all over online have a proven business model selling wordpress blogs, themes, and services.
Hosting costs money, design costs money – I’ve paid significantly more for blogs outside of Empower Network that weren’t half as efficient for what I’m trying to do. I love the product.
$25 a month for that is nothing. If you want, I can stop by and give some examples of the customer themes, people can do whatever they want with them. Actually, I’ll probably forget to check the email, ask around for them, they are easy to find.
My two cents. Normally I don’t participate in rebuttals, but found the inaccuracy of easily accessible information in this fairly off putting, however, I don’t think you meant to do that.
-Sam
Y’huh, address please?
The office listed on the EN website is virtual, in that it doesn’t physically exist (beyond being a mailbox).
Sure it is, Costa Rica is widely promoted by offshore tax haven pushing corporation registrars. The quote in the article is from this particular one. (Ozedit: server not found as of June 2019, link removed)
A feeble attempt to keep EN’s assets offshore, the Asian companies only convolute the money trail further. Look don’t waste my time with the “all corporations do this” crap, these tired “badass” excuses might work on EN prospects but it’s not going to fly here.
There’s only one type of MLM company that engages in the above offshore accounting practices.
1. Let’s not pretend that advertising wasn’t mandatory for customers until only very recently.
2. 33% isn’t a huge amount, it’s a third. Furthermore thankyou for confirming that EN is as it stands a pyramid scheme which approx 66% of all revenues generated being affiliate money.
In reality when you factor in customers only paying $25 and not the $100 “inner circle” affiliates are paying, this 33% revenue figure is going to be much less.
What do we have? A company mostly full of cash gifting affiliates.
Well it came from the horse’s mouth, so you’ll have to better than “it’s inaccurate yo cuz I said so”.
Seriously, are you reading from a “badass” rebuttal script? I never claimed specific dates these two got involved in network marketing.
Oh dear.
You might want to call up Burnlounge, Zeek Rewards and Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing and see if they agree with you.
And you know this how? Did they divulge their corporate secrets with you?
Regardless, within the context of this article Amway is irrelevant, we’re talking about EN and “but but but everyone else is doing it” is not justification for the foundation of a cash gifting scheme funded primarily by affiliates.
Well except that WordPress is free, the EN template is already paid for and lord knows replicated website hosting isn’t $25/$100 a month.
That and when you consider EN members pay eachother, EN network members are paid to recruit. Period.
I don’t care if they’re homosexual monkeys living in a zoo, orphanage owners or freaking astronauts charged with saving the world – this is about the EN business model. Any background provided is an offshoot of that.
Never said it did, only that you don’t have a very good concept of the compensation plan if you can’t see how everyone passing up their 5th commissions will result in payments making their way to the top of the pyramid (where “Dave and Dave” sit), without them actually doing anything.
This money is clearly being gifted as nobody is paying EN anything.
Look you’ve got a clear hard-on for the Daves and that’s great. We’re discussing the business model here so if you could keep the gushing praise out of it?
That’s great but we’re not discussing “blogging services online”, we’re discussing EN. Empower Network runs on WordPress (free) with a custom template (already paid for which knowing my WP templates would have cost no more than a few hundred) on web hosting (paid for) and domain ($10 or less a year).
Collectively hosting could be paid for with a few hundred affiliate’s membership fees every month, leaving the other thousands merely participating in what is identifiable as an affiliate funded cash gifting scheme.
But you don’t pay $25 to EN so how are you even claiming to buy anything? You pay $25/$100 to your upline, who pay $25/$100 to their upline (5th) and so on and so forth.
It’s no co-incidence that this is the definition of a cash gifting scheme with the higher up a position in the pyramid you are the more monthly payments being gifted to you by affiliates.
How can you claim anybody is buying anything when all moneys (100%) are simply distributed from affiliates to affiliates who joined the gifting scheme earlier than those paying did?
I can see why. This type of “badass” marketing BS is exactly what I was talking about in my review footnote.
And Bernie Madoff had hundreds, and so did Zeek (dozens), Enron (thousands), and so on and so forth. So what?
No one’s saying that Woods is operating a one-man shop. You don’t need to be a one-man shop to be a scam.
In my opinion, the truth that is NO perfect MLM company in the world, just like there is no perfect person in the world either!!
but my question is , if you compare all the downs of EN and the other MLMs, and if you compare the results from all other MLMs with EN results what do you get?
is that any other MLM in the planet right now that have the ability to pay as much as EN does and it has such a in depth marketing training as EN does? please let me know!!!
yes we do like to have a perfect world, but is that really possible?
That’s great son. There’s also no asparagus powered flying fish shaped balloons either.
An irrelevant answer to a question that has nothing to do with Empower Network’s business model?
“Other MLMs” are irrelevant. This review isn’t about “other MLMs”.
Again, relevance?
Oz,
A couple of things, although I don’t have time to respond to all of this.
Here’s the address, I’ve actually been there:
You can actually see some of the employees in this video:
empowernetwork.com/company.php
Again, I have actually been to the office (the address on the contact us page) and seen the employees, so you telling people that it doesn’t exist, when it’s on the contact page… there’s no need to keep doing that.
If you really have the desire, stop by and say hello – but your telling a person standing on a beach, that the ocean doesn’t exist, if that makes sense.
If you don’t think you can talk with anyone, call the number on that page. Depending on the time of day, you might have some hold time. They have USA based hours (people in the states are picking up the phone, not some foreign country.)
Next:
The model of customers paying affiliates is actually eliminated now, customers pay the company, the company pays commissions, so may want to update that, too, so the review is accurate.
However, there is fundamentally nothing wrong with customers paying an affiliate directly for a product, versus paying a company, as long as the product is sound. I don’t actually understand your issue with that.
Also, how does a customer paying an affiliate, versus paying the company make them less of a customer? How is that paying to recruit? Is mcdonalds paying to recruit when a customer walks in, buys a cheeseburger, and the individual franchise charges the transaction on their own merchant account, versus paying mcdonalds corporation?
I say people are not paid to recruit, because the purchase process for becoming an affiliate (someone you recruit) and buying a product are entirely separate. The only requirement to participating in the comp plan is to pay a $19.95 per month affiliate fee. No commissions are paid on it, so therefore nobody is paid to recruit. Commissions are on product sales only.
Amway customer ratios – that comes from Kevin Thompson (MLM Lawyer), so you’re right in the sense that it is second hand information. Ask him where he got it, if you want. If not, feel free to ignore it. Maybe it’s not true, I assumed it was, since Kevin usually gives me relatively accurate information.
Second to last – if you think that every fifth sale means money passes to David Wood somehow, I think you misunderstand the compensation plan, and how those powerlines work.
If Jill is connected to me on say, the blog – it looks like this:
Me – Jill is connected to me on the blog
Jill passes 2, 4, 6 and every 5th sale to me – none of those sales are ever ‘passed up’ – aka, when a powerline is connected to you, their passups don’t ever ‘passup’ even if they land on a 5th sale.
That makes it so a vast majority of the people in Empower Network, at this point (more than 93,000 people) are outside of the company powerlines. I could understand how you would think that, if you assumed that those 5th sales could land on a 5th sale, and also pass up – that’s not how it works.
Last – I don’t know why you’re insisting in this rubbish with the products having no value. Because you blog on an ugly site and it’s almost free?
(no offense, I’m sure you’ll say the EN site is ugly, too – still, not as ugly as yours)
And yes, there are massive business models built around re-selling wordpress as a paid service, outside of MLM. edublogs.org is an example of a large multisite network, that sells paid blogging memberships for a specific purpose. Because you don’t want to buy it, doesn’t mean it’s not a good product. I don’t want to buy Amway products, but they are quality.
Later.
-Sam C
…No idea what you’re talking about. I merely noted that Palais Royale sell virtual office space. If EN actually do have a physical office there that’s good to hear.
Psuedo-compliance, it’s still customers paying affiliates. EN keep none of the money (which would constitute an actual sale.
Customers and affiliates pay money, blahblahblah, the person who recruited them is gifted all the money.
Nothing is bought or sold.
Who owns the EN domain and hosting? It sure isn’t the affiliates – yet these are the people supposedly being paid for access to it?
EN merely reward participants in the gifting scheme with access to a WordPress multi-user account. Nothing is sold because nobody is paying EN for it.
This will come down to how many affiliates are there in EN vs. customers.
Wanna take a guess? I’d peg it at well over 95%.
Pay to play. That’s a big red flag there.
If a regulator in the US asked EN where their revenue was sourced they’d only be able to reply “affiliate fees”.
What do those fees cover? Participation in the income opportunity.
No products are being bought or sold.
Every affiliate passes up sales at some point. Money trickles up the gifting pyramid to whoever is at the top of it. The bigger the base of the pyramid the larger the overall amount of money being gifted up.
Who’s at the top of the gifting pyramid? Wood and Sharpe.
In pass-up plans a sale is a sale, whether it’s passed up or not. That’s how the top positioned people in the pyramid make their money. They’re not recruiting thousands upon thousands of people themselves…
You seem to fail to understand the comp plan structure. Pick any bottom level affiliate, trace their upline and eventually you’ll reach Wood and Sharp.
As long as their is recruitment at the base of the pyramid, money is being perpetually shuffled up to the owners of the company (and being shared along the uplines along the way, as per the 5th passup rule).
Wood’s dream is to have lots of people “give him money, all the time”. You don’t seriously think he’s out there trying to recruit people do you?
After he placed his buddies directly under him and set them off recruiting he just sits back and has money gifted up to him each month.
Being ugly has nothing to do with anything. Nobody is paying EN for its blogging platform.
Follow the money, it’s gifted between affiliates. EN doesn’t charge anything for it – they only charge affiliates to participate in the gifting scheme.
Something nobody is paying for has no monetary value. Whatever other value you choose to attach to it is irrelvant for the purposes of MLM business model analysis.
I couldn’t care less about companies “outside of MLM”. MLM is a completely different kettle of fish when it comes to products. And even if you forget about MLM rules and regulations, basic common-sense analysis dictates that running a gifting scheme under the guise of pretending you’re selling a free product is not on.
Edublogs clearly acknowledge on their homepage that they offer a “free blog”.
All EN has done is attach a free blogging platform to a cash gifting business model. It’s really that simple.
If you’re going to reply to any of the above, I ask you answer the following three questions first:
1. What is the customer:affiliate ratio for the blogging platform?
2. What is the customer:affiliate ratio for the Inner Circle membership?
3. What is the customer:affiliate ratio for the video series?
Do not waste my time with excuses or explanations, hard figures only.
I have been in Empower Network since July 2012. I am actually someone who could claim disability but instead made a decision to become an Entrepreneur and not become a dependent on the largest ponzu scheme in the world, the federal govt.
I went to the San Diego event. 3000 people showed up. A lot of big checks were displayed and not just DW and DS were the big check holders.
I missed the Austin Tx event due to health problems. 6000+ showed up and even more big checks walked across the stage. Some names of people making nice quarterly income, larger than the average annual income, came out of nowhere.
Learning to rank a personal blog on your own takes a lot of work and a lot of time and a lot of “the right plugins”.
The first thing google looks at is “domain authority”. It will take someone 90-120 days of daily bogging and darn good content in order to get ranked. Once that happens, are you selling anything that someone else wants?
I am happy that the founders of Empower Network make a lot of money. From what I have seen, they put a lot of time and effort into raising people up, and teaching them to develop confidence in themselves and to strive to achieve goals and success.
Empower Network affiliates are customers and students of marketing training that is only taught by those who make over $15,000 a month.
The system passes up far less than they get to keep if they are able to implement what they have learned and re-sell the educational training products.
Compare that to cost of marketing education in the traditional world that has produced a failed economy and trillions of dollars in debt while students struggle to find money for college tuition at universities that have dowries large enough to put entire student bodies through for free and for four years…
You cropped your photo of David Wood and David Sharpe on stage with those checks. There were at lot more people surrounding them with quarterly checks much larger than 80% of marketing grads will make in their first year after graduating.
It’s easy to critic something and present a biased view. While selling and marketing is not easy and while attraction marketing certainly is not easy, I can tell you that David Wood and David Sharpe are sincere about helping others and they are attracting people who want to do the same.
It’s not easy, success never is and your critic of David Sharpe and David Wood describes people who were involved in “schemes” instead of the process of success built on failures and never giving up.
Re. check waving – This is a big red flag in MLM. I can’t cite any specific examples but in my research and observation it’s been cited as a regulatory “OMG PLEASE INVESTIGATE US” beacon a few times.
Having the two owners of a company doing it is, quite frankly, just embarassing for the MLM industry.
Re. “domain authority” and general SEO – Empower Network has none. Alexa ranks them 501 in the world with 1.3 million indexed pages in Google and over 40,000 sites linking in.
Yet just 5% or so of the domains traffic originates from search engines. The rest is just affiliates directly promoting the income opportunity. Even the 5% of search traffic is mostly search terms featuring “empower network” in the string which is again the income opportunity.
Hell, these guys can’t even rank their own exact name match domain for the search term “empower network”
You don’t need to be a SEO expert to realise the whole “authority blog/domain” spiel is just garbage to mask the gifting scheme they’ve got going.
Alexa is by no means accurately perfect but as an indication, the EN domain’s domain authority simply doesn’t exist.
Finally, your disability is no excuse to support and participate in a cash gifting scheme.
Yes. See Paragraph 57 of Federal Trade Commission, State of Illinois, Commonwealth of Kentucky and state of North Carolina vs. Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing Inc. et al.
http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/1123069/130128fhtmcmpt.pdf
Other popular MLM “programs” that featured check-waving in recent years include Narc That Car (defunct pyramid scheme) and MPB Today (defunct MLM scheme married to a purported grocery-delivery business whose operator recently pleaded guilty to racketeering after the Feds filed a forfeiture complaint against the company’s Florida headquarters building).
Things got so bizarre/creepy during Narc That Car’s run that affiliates were videotaping themselves depositing commission checks at FDIC-insured banks and even making bank employees or other third parties part of their video pitches — as though the banks and third parties had endorsed Narc.
MPB Today affiliates produced video after video of check-opening ceremonies. Some of the videos showed the name of a bank that was operating under a consent agreement with the FDIC.
On a side note, virtually all of the HYIP scams feature check-waving in one form or another.
PPBlog
I joined empower network last week and havent made a single sale yet despite following all of the instructions. As you watch each tutorial video you can see that they want you to buy each package.
Both Dave’s have a very aggressive and rude attitude especially when they say ‘Wussy’. Maybe those who got in at the very beginning are making big bucks but for the likes of me its a saturated market.
Make 15K a month selling what? EN and/or other make-money-fast schemes, or honest products?
The motto of income scheme promoters is “fake it till you make it.” I think PPBlog called it “badassdom”, in that they want to appear to be “badasses” and they want to make you believe that if you adopt their attitude you can be like them raking in the $$$.
Personally, I think you just end up being asses, but that’s my opinion. 🙂
That’s the whole idea. “Make people BELIEVE they will become successful by following instructions from mentors, paying for the training”. It will make the MENTORS make lots of money if enough people are willing to follow instructions blindly.
You CAN replicate that idea, but you’re not replicating it by following it yourself. It’s about making OTHER people believe you have what they really want, and that you’re willing to share it with them for an affordable price.
It’s about making people believe in the idea that they EVENTUALLY will make money. The longer you’re able to keep OTHER people on the hook the more money you’ll make. But the market will become saturated very quickly.
I lied in bed from spinal disease and typed my way to $33,000 in my first 90 days.
Thats Funny right there. Good one Mr Stein.
That story can be found all over the internet, from Cristina Munoz in Australia.
“All over the internet” was an exaggeration, I only checked a few pages on Empower Network. BS like that sounds better when it’s posted on EN’s own pages.
You’re PAYING to learn junk like that?
Jeez – man lighten up. Read #68 and lay off the coffee. If you still don’t get it go buy yourself a sense of humor. You’re not the only one with an internet connection that reaches all the way to Australia.
Now that Empower Network finally has competition – all of this is probably a mute point. Making a comparison side by side, I don’t see how anyone could pick EN.
So the affiliates who still have big checks will stay until the money dries up. But those who just get in and then find an alternative – well they will jump ship without even blinking.
(I already got my team out)
So I think EN’s days are numbered and if nothing else I could see their growth slowing down real fast as their competitor starts to take off. I know the tone of their emails have changed this week. They know the battle has started.
So a few months from now you may have nothing to write about – at least about EN anyway.
I was approached by a friend about EN. My Husband is an attorney and took a hard look at what EN was “selling”. After his research his response and mine were “NO”.
I am of the generation that says If it sounds to good to be true then it probably is. Buyer Beware. I will find another way to monetize my own Blog.
Oz, you are awesome. ( Ok, I won’t say badass). You refuse to let them spin and confuse. You bring it back around to the simple truths and you do it relentlessly.
It is indeed sad, the most desperate are the most preyed upon because they are often at the point of just grasping at things without the critical thinking necessary to make an informed choice.
Thank you again, I know I have said it before, but I am in awe of the way you can stop the spin dead in its tracks with simple truth. I wish I had found you a long time ago during a desperate time in my own life.
Thanks for the kind words Naabo.
Once you start seeing or hearing that “everyone is doing it”……you can rest assured its almost over.
I started with EN This past November 2012 and “Followed The Steps” but asI went along I actually am getting tired of this “Rude Upsell” that they attempt to force on you by yelling.
YES, Yelling in most “Private retreat “Make Money Now Videos…..“GET ALL IN, GET TO THE EVENTS, GET ALL IN OR YOU FAIL!!”
I see that as meaning…Gift us more money, Pass More money up, Come to our Event so we can UPSELL you to pay more money…Then magically, out of nowhere all of these people start running to your page and lining up to get involved on “YOUR” site.
This tactic of Yelling, “DON’T BE A WUSSIE, GET ALL IN, DO IT NOW!!” is a tactic that really pisses off…For the record.
After reading this entire blog..I AM THANKFUL TO OZ FOR DE-PROGRAMMING ME FROM THE EN CULT!!! Or should I say THe Badass Cult!!!
That seems to be Empowered Network’s target demographic: People who respond to being called names and yelled at.
Allegedly they’ve found 100,000 or so such people thus far.
It’s probably about self development gone wrong.
They have introduced a “style”, e.g. “to stand out from the crowd” or similar ideas. It may work, but it will often lead to an exaggerated “style” after some time.
After a while it becomes parody rather than “style”.
That’s one of the possible explanations. I’m not very eager to try to find other explanations.
It’s difficult to believe. A part of the same style is “act bigger than you are”, or “fake it till you make it”.
I had hardly heard about EN before the first review here. It’s hardly visible on the internet, I have only seen it ONCE in search hits (BidXcel, 3 weeks ago).
It’s the old-fashioned schoolyard dare that belongs in kindergarten, now transplanted as “self-help motivation speak”.
Really, what’s the difference between that and “Are you chicken/yellow/wussy?” Biff kept asking Marty McFly in Back to the Future series?
@M_Norway
That’s probably because only 5.5% of the domain’s traffic comes from search engines. The rest is affiliates promoting the business opportunity directly.
I see the domain pop up in search results from time to time when researching various companies. It’s usually “Company X sucks”, join EN!” style marketing or a thin review plastered with EN recruitment ads via the EN capture template.
Nobody but nobody calls me
yellerwussy. Now where do I sign up and pay you thousands of dollars?Which means any claim of Empowered’s “domain SEO advantage” is utterly bogus. 🙂
After so many great opinion you shared about EN, why did you all of a sudden change 180 on your mind? And what competition do you speak about?
@Snake
Yes I did like the concept of a network blog and yes I did defend EN. However I have been building websites and blogs off and on again for almost 10 years. I have no trouble getting on page 1 of the SERP’s. But I couldn’t do it to save my life with EN.
Yeah their domain rank is in the 400’s – but I couldn’t even find my pages and I knew where to look. About a day or two after I joined EN I started a Free blog because I wanted to compare the performance sided by side. And that is because I saw some chatter on the internet about EN.
So since December when I joined EN I have a grand total of 191 visitors of which 77 was organic. My FREE blog is almost 2400!!!
Then Level ONE Network came out and I watched Dan Miller tell us why that was. And he nailed it on the head. So for that reason – I don’t think that I will ever get traffic from my EN site.
So I bought a blogging system from Level ONE and did nothing with it for about a week and a half so I could build my website. Then I went back to the LON site and started to blog and promote my site.
I get on the first page usually in less than two hours. In about 2 weeks I have 97 visitors on the LON blog. Weeks not months! And really all my concentration was on my site – not the LON blog.
Dan Miller teaches online marketing at a level that I have never seen anyone teach in public before. And he teaches everyone to make money with Adsense, Amazon and other affiliate products from click bank etc. And all the widgets are set up for those programs.
Oh and of course he shows how to grow your LON income by marketing online. But he teaches all the affiliates how to be online marketers and how to use the tools.
So yes I defended them until I found out why I couldn’t get traffic. And now I get on the front page very fast with the blogging system, the Gateway pages and the Video Network. Oh yeah – EN doesn’t have the Video Network or the Gateway pages.
There is no comparison. And based on the comments from others who have bailed out from EN – there is no comparison.
I’d show you the pre-launch webinar but I don’t want to do something that Oz would not want in his room here. But then again I am easy to find. Just type in Level ONE Network and my name and you will find me. Just don’t try to do that with EN.
So I love the concept of a network blog. But now that Level ONE is on the scene – I certainly can’t defend EN. I think that as soon as LON gets going there will be a mass exodus from EN.
When you compare hype to value – hype doesn’t win.
I think it’s worth stating that you can’t really credit having a blog on a shared domain for SE rankings.
There are too many variables, first and foremost being the strength of your competition. This will naturally vary depending on what keywords you are targeting.
Empower Network or Level One Network, you’ll rank regardless if your competition is low to nonexistent. Hell in that scenario you could put up content anywhere and still rank.
Interesting, I confess I am a bit torn, for one side I watch and respect Vick from BIM on EN a lot.
He really knows what he’s doing and he formed what appears to be a great team on EN, and many thousands are trully giving them great props and respect so will keep watching since one level is still fresh “out of the water”..
And I don’t personally know the guys, but the “front face” looks a lot similar to EN..
@Snake
Yeah I hear you. My mentor is still promoting EN and he can’t possibly risk losing his income. I wish I would have offered him a deal where I would have “managed” his spot on LON, but I didn’t.
And that is one reason why I still pay my monthly to EN. Because I respect my mentor. And then the second reason is selfish. I want to watch the traffic compared to my LON blog 🙂
But the only comparison is that they are both blogs and both affiliate programs – like both being Ford products I guess. But it ends there.
I told my mentor that I wasn’t leaving EN and that they are just affiliate programs and I am in a dozen different affiliate programs. So what is the big deal if I add one more to my stable of product lines?
But this one is growing and my team is growing and in EN they would come in and quit the next month. Always embarrased to show it to anyone. Not so here – they are reproducing and going gang busters.
So stick with them especially if you have a mentor. But when his income starts dropping you will see him flip too. I think it is just a matter of time.
Good luck Snake!
Well, it could just be BABB… Bigger and better buzzwords. 🙂
SEO is supposed to mean “help” search engine find your page. It since then morphed into “how to mess with your page so you rank above other people’s stuff in search engines”. Google is spending plenty of money on engineers writing algorithms to actually *read* the content of the page and UNDERSTAND the context of the info and thus return RELEVANT results. Which basically means Google is going to DESTROY (or at least severely curtail the effectiveness of) SEO.
So any sort of people claiming to hold magic formula to SEO… well, it’s a time-sensitive market… because it is a SHRINKING market. 🙂
This was Mark Hughes philosophy in Herbalife.
Now, now, that’s offtopic. 😀
After reading the reviews, I want to know, what is the problem of buying or selling a membership and earn money for it?
The product does not matter, neither is useful to me, but I want to make money. I want to learn what is the problem? I’m not part of Empower Network, thanks.
Membership is not a product in MLM. Paying commissions on recruitment of new affiliates is what’s known as a pyramid scheme.
Those who recruit more earn more, with those recruited having to recruit new recruits to earn commissions (whatever else is attached to the scheme is irrelevant).
This model is not sustainable as an MLM business opportunity due to the reliance on recruitment over selling products to genuine retail customers.
The difference is are you recruit members as CUSTOMERS, or as more RECRUITERS?
Recruiters recruiting recruiters, who recruits more recruiters, and you have the Borg (from Star Trek: The Next Generation). (And get paid for doing so). No real merchandise or service was sold to people NOT involved in MAKING money from it.
In other words, no real customers who really bought merchandise or service just for merchandise or service. They all bought it to “make money”.
I know people in Herbalife, Zrii, Organo Gold, TLC, they do not focus on the product, people earn money by enrolling people.
You can throw the product away or give it away, but always win for enrolling people. What is the problem with that? Does the product is just an excuse to make money?
Did I not understand why is a problem not having real customers? Who is affected, to get money without real customers? Who determines how the money is supposed to be winning? Sorry but I need to understand this.
If no product (or service) is really being sold, then what you have is a pyramid scheme.
Let’s put it this way: without real customers, it’s just the late joining members paying the early members, thus, pyramid scheme.
I don’t know about your country, but in the US, the pyramid scheme is defined by the “Koscot Test”
The product-based MLMs are less likely to be pyramid schemes, but in some cases, can still be, due to lack of separation between “ultimate user” (i.e. consumer) and affiliates.
Or perhaps I can put the question in a different way: what are you selling? The product/service, or the “opportunity”?
In case of Herbalife, Zrii, Organo Gold, etc., they should be selling the products (nutritional shakes and tea, energy drink, fancy coffee, respectively) Are the reps actually selling the products, or are they just recruit more people to join their respective business as downlines?
REAL MLM BUSINESS can only pay for SALES of products, as explained by Koscot Test above (specifically, item 4). If you “pass” the Koscot test, you’re a pyramid scheme. So they try to get around the Koscot test by combining membership with sales (“starter kits” or “inventory loading”)
Looks like they’re having a recruitment drive via a $10,000 sweepstakes. I came across it on a sweeps site I frequent. I entered, and it says you can earn an additional entry by visiting a scammy “Sign up Now!” page. I was all like “WTF is this excrement?”
Then I remembered seeing references to Empower here.
Great, now I’m going to be inundated with stupid spam. Grrrr.
Thanks I get it better. But I still think. I’m a blogger and I do not need something I do for free. I do not like wordpress, so I do not need Empower Network, but if I can make money for enrolling people what is the problem? Is the government enforces laws?
I do not see anyone in this pyramid scheme is affected or who are stealing money. What I can see is people benefited money. Who rules the world and established that the only way to make money is for a product or service?
I earn money from advertising on my websites, I have no customers, just people who see the ads. I know this has nothing to do with the topic of MLM. Someone might say that I provide a service, but still I have no customers, and I do not own a business.
What is the problem if the people through a pyramid scheme earn money? They are not stealing anything from anyone, not causing problems for others. Are the rules the government sets the problem in this kind of business? Can not we create systems that benefit the people and not just one sector?
I think this only because I see that people have economic problems, but not everyone has the same skills, what can we do as humans to help most people to have access to basic resources?
Mate if you can’t see the problem with recruiting people on the promise of earning money if they recruit people and the fact that there’s a finite population on Earth…
I’m consistently floored at some of the conversations we get into on here.
I’ve been coming to this website for a few months now, learning what I wish I had know before I found it. But one question … what exactly makes cash gifting and recruiting recruiters illegal?
Laws are based on moral and ethical guidelines. Murder is illegal because it is immoral to rob someone of their right to live. So if someone has figured out a way to manipulate the flow of money so that everyone benefits, what about that is illegal?
If I can offer someone a way to make money, who will then in turn offer someone else the same opportunity, exactly what is illegal about that?
I’m not involved with anything now other than my plain ole J-O-B. I am not involved with anything because of the things I have learned here and how to go about due diligence.
I just need to know the why now.I think it has something to do with how it is not sustainable, but am not really understanding that either except in the case of a Ponzi.
Well naabo, that’s the problem. There is no such way to manipulate the flow of money so that everyone benefits.
In a pyramid scam, the top recruiters and early birds benefit. If you are a good recruiter, you can still pocket some hefty cash just about any time you come in, but the earlier the better.
The EN blogging platform is an overpriced product that would never stand on it’s own without the comp plan attached. So people are essentially just selling the opportunity to earn money by selling the opportunity to earn money.
The majority of “affiliates” will never turn a profit and once the opportunity plateaus, later reps get to watch their business crumble from the bottom up.
@nabbo
As time goes on those at the top, specifically the money they earn is used to rope in new recruits/gifters.
There’s no way they stand a chance to earn what those at the top of the pyramid/gifting scheme can earn (finite populations) thus it becomes an excercise in false marketing. And it only gets worse as time goes on and these schemes suck more people in.
All the while nothing is actually being bought or sold, typically other than membership to the company itself. MLM by law in the US has to be about product sales to retail customers for this reason.
You understand why Ponzi schemes because of the investor money running out meaning those at the bottom will lose out. Ditto pyramid schemes but replace investor money with recruits.
Remember that these schemes always suck money from affiliates one way or another, money they wouldn’t part with unless they thought they were going to earn money – which they can’t because sooner or later there’s nobody left to recruit.
Oh! a finite population, now I understand the danger of this point. It’s like a bubble that could burst at any time. But if this finite population makes a monthly payment for a product that does not need, in some way can be sustainable?
Many people buy various things in the month, things that are useless, and enrich corporate monopolies.
If a company offers me earn money for every person I invite to “consume monthly,” but do not use the product, I think it would be a good alternative, because the system is supported by a continuous consumption.
For example is the case of Talk Fusion, I’m not part of that company, but I see many people who do not need their services and yet people make money by recruiting people paying for something that really is not useful for them.
People without jobs or businesses by the crisis in Spain, can eat and pay basic expenses thanks to Talk Fusion.
I do not want to defend Empower Network, but I find it interesting that people earn money for a monthly payment for an unnecessary product for most people.
I would like on this website behindmlm, in which I am learning a lot, propose an idea to help people to generate extra income.
Something that not only selfishly benefit from a single sector, but rather that the opportunity for any person to get a real economic benefit. You guys can suggest or recommend something to help people?
In pyramid schemes you aren’t buying products, you’re paying for membership which allows you to participate in the scheme.
Often what is bundled with membership/a comp plan position is attempted to be passed off as a product, but it’s not what is actually being bought or sold mechanically (in that, nobody would buy the product without the attached recruitment opportunity).
Therein lies the difference between retail sales and pyramid schemes.
What you refer to as a “useless product” is better looked at by analysis of the intent of purchase – to participate in an income opportunity or out of genuine value in the product itself?
You recruit people who directly pay you money each month, some of which you pass up to the person who recruited you.
The product is entirely irrelevant and a large section of affiliates obviously would not be gifting eachother if they didn’t have downlines gifting them. EN have revealed in the past that they have just 33% retail. Dunno what the figure is now but I imagine it’s probably less.
And it will continue to drop as the scheme is marketed solely on income potential. This can be seen from the top of the company at corporate in the regular events they hold all the way down to the company’s affiliates in their marketing efforts.
We review and analyse here. Your personal income generation falls beyond that scope.
@ Chris and Oz, thanks for answering my question.
@naabo
Google “pyramid scheme”, look for the Wikipedia article, click on the links to “Albania, 1997” and “Colombia, 2008” under “Recent cases”. That will give you an idea about WHY pyramid and Ponzi schemes are illegal. Here’s a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_scheme#Notable_recent_cases
MORE OR LESS HARMFUL?
The more money involved from the individual participants the more harmful they are. So a low cost “typical scam” can be less harmful than a high cost “investment” (e.g. Madoff). The collapse of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme eradicated several charities, damaged several pension funds and ruined several individual investors.
Schemes trying to attract vulnerable groups in many small geographical areas are more harmful than others, e.g. TVI-Express in South Africa.
Schemes with “additional frauds” are more harmful than others, e.g. Zeek was harmful in that way by having “frauds inside the fraud”.
OTHER FACTORS?
Pyramid schemes do usually not “produce” anything of importance, anything to add to a nation’s GDP.
* recruitment isn’t WORK or “entrepreneural activity”, even if it’s being taxed like that.
* redistribution of money doesn’t generate more money, like other types of work or investments do.
Illegal activity will usually attract other types of illegal activity, e.g. tax evasion, money laundering, identity theft, etc.
Pyramid schemes will usually harm other parts of the market, the legitimate parts of a market.
* by drawing money away from investments or businsses
* by keeping people occupied with meaningless activities (e.g. by doing some fake work, used to make a scheme look like a real business)
THE POSITIVE SIDE OF IT?
People will usually become “immune” and “experienced” to certain types of schemes, in a much higher number than the ones who gets “addicted”. That factor has some value.
Some schemes are cleverly set up. They can probably teach people something useful.
Thanks for the answers, they are right this is a critical and research site I get carried away by the conversation.
I will keep researching to learn more about these issues, thanks again.
You need to review the new program available with EN in the next 60 days. Far better than previous and more value for the same dollar.
@Jock
Bit hard to review it when it hasn’t come out yet. Rest assured I’ll have a look when something concrete develops.
Can ponzi and pyramid experts explain us about empowoernetwork? What is actually empowernetwork and future of this company? Is this ponzi or not?
I wouldn’t classify EN as a Ponzi. They (claim to) shuffle 100% of the affiliate money around to other affiliates each month so it more closely resembles a gifting scheme with an attached blog platform and videos.
Nobody actually pays EN for anything other than the $19.95 affiliate fee.
Thank you OZ for your review.
I want to address the several questions of what makes a pyramid scheme illegal/immoral/wrong because I think it is a hugely important question that wasn’t explained clearly enough for people with no background understanding of the subject.
The very basic reason that pyramids are illegal is because in an infinite chain recruiting scheme, the vast majority are guaranteed to always lose money. Regardless of the spin, this is a mathematical fact as sustainment of the chain/pyramid relies on infinite markets, which don’t exist in the real world with a finite population.
If one distributor recruits 3 people, who each recruit 3 people, and so on after 24 levels you’ve surpassed the entire population of Earth. In fact, half of all affiliates will always be in the bottom level, equal to all other levels combined.
With no one left to recruit, the majority is guaranteed to lose money, and since most schemes share money up several levels of the pyramid, affiliates several levels up from the bottom lose money as well, albiet less.
In reality, many different studies & anaysis have found that between 95% – 99.5% of all distributors in real life pyramid schemes lose money.
Using Empower Network as an example, the product in this case is a front used to attempt to legitimize the transfer of money up the pyramid. The company earns nothing on the “sale” of the blog as the money is returned to affiliates, and you yourself admitted that you find no value in the blog, only the income opportunity.
With nothing of value being exchanged with customers outside Empower, the company essentially exists solely to funnel money up the pyramid and that money comes from affiliates themselves. Therefore, for those at the top to make money those at the bottom MUST LOSE money because there are no external sources of revenue.
Eventually the pyramid will run out of people to recruit, and all those in the bottom levels (always the majority of participants) will lose their entire investment.
Thats why people say Empower Network is nothing but a pyramid scheme hiding behind the sale of a worthless product. The way it works in real life is that markets get saturated very quickly before getting anywhere near reaching the entire population because there is a limited number of people that will buy into the scheme.
At some point, there becomes more distributors than the number of recruits necessary to turn a profit and the scheme collapses as affiliates leave and the commissions run dry without a new market to enter & saturate.
So sure, you may be able to make some money by recruiting affiliates to recruit affiliates, but any money you do earn will come at the expense of those you have recruited! In practice money is heavily concentrated at the top within the top .5%, with more earning very little money and the vast majority losing money. It is a mathematical certainty.
I won’t go into the many social problems with Pyramid Schemes, but I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that I’m making money by defrauding my recruits out of theirs.
Super explanation and conclusion. I’d like to hear your take on the social problems associated with Pyramids if you care to comment.
Well for starters they’re not very wheelchair accessible…
Really? I thought there were ramps on all four sides.
Well yeah but what flat-arse pyramids are you looking at? Good luck powering your way up them without an electric-assist chair.
The blatant discrimination against poor is outrageous.
polyhedrons don’t discriminate.
Review updated with appointment of Jonathan Cronstedt as CEO of Empower Network. David Wood is now Chairman (higher/lower ???).
As a follow up, in the past month I have had my email addresses scraped and added into auto responders so far at Aweber and GetResponse without my permission promoting Vick Strizheis’ “team” at Empower Network.
Seems like the are resorting to traditional SPAM now a days.
It’s probably the response to David Wood’s latest “recruit, recruit, RECRUIT!” motivational speech in late February.
We expected something like that …
* First two or three weeks delay (he didn’t tell HOW to do it)
* then some random activities (we’re there now)
* before they all return back to normal activity.
Motivational speeches often have an effect like that.
The speech was something like this …
Chairman is higher than CEO.