Wood’s training would exhaust EN within a month?
There’s been somewhat of a recent trend in MLM to collectively refer to affiliates and retail customers as just “customers”. No doubt the brainchild of a PR firm and compliance team conceived in a dank basement somewhere, the idea behind the constant use of this marketing tactic is to infer that affiliate customers equate to retail customers.
With affiliates being participants in the business opportunity this couldn’t be farther from the truth, but it doesn’t stop some MLM companies from trying. One such example is Empower Network’s David Wood.
In a series of Facebook posts today Wood, totally channeling the “there no difference between affiliates and retail customers” vibe, made some rather interesting suggestions to Empower Network’s affiliate-base.
The first wall post contained advice for affiliates who ‘want to REALLY take off in your business in 2014‘. Alright, I’ll bite… I’m an Empower Network affiliate struggling to recruit new affiliates, sorry “customers”, so what can I do that’ll take off my business Mr. Wood?
As of TODAY, commit to starting:
a) a weekly recruiting presentation (at least)
b) a weekly training (at least)
I have 5 years of data in front of me that says that if you don’t do that, your chances of ever making consistent money past a couple thousand dollars a month border on winning the lottery.
So… recruit affiliates and then train them to do the same. And if I don’t do that, my chances of making consistent money in Empower Network past a couple of thousand dollars a month (which still sounds like an awful lot of recruiting and recruitment training), is about the same as winning the lottery. Got it.
Wood’s next nugget of training wisdom addressed the logical followup question: “So uh, how many affiliates do I need to recruit to get one of those obnoxiously gaudy rings?”
I’m personally going to sponsor 300 new customers a month in 2014.
Why?
Because I feel like laying it on.
If I can get 10 a day, every day while building a company, being a dad, doing corporate conference calls, redesigning sales messages, taking vacations, and otherwise being busy as hell — it should then demonstrate that getting 2 customers a day is relatively simplistic of a task for someone without most of those responsibilities
(I.E. none of you have to build the company, which actually takes most of my day)
Right?
(and I can’t even compete in the contests. I’m just doing it because I want to)
Who can get 2 customers a day in 2014?
Two customers a day… for a year? Huh?
On their website Empower Network claim to have 155,000 customers. Let’s be abundantly generous and say that 66% or so of those customers are affiliates. And for the sake of simplicity I’m going to round that down (in Empower Network’s favour) to a flat 100,000.
What I won’t do though is pretend that anybody within Empower Network is signing up retail customers. Surely I’m not the only one who noticed the open shift towards open affiliate customer recruitment after the “WordPress-killer” Blog Beast flop?
Anyway so using Wood’s two customers a day prescription, and starting at 100,000 affiliates – after just five days we’d have a 1.2 million affiliates in Empower Network.
Ten days? 38 million.
After fifteen days that’d be 1.2 billion… and at day 18 a whopping 9.8 billion affiliates customers – that’s over two billion more people than the current population of Earth.
If you were even more generous and reduced EN’s affiliate count to 33,000, the company would still hit the wall after the exact same eighteen day period, albeit only 1.4 billion people over the population of Earth.
But don’t let that deter you… after all, two customers a day is for wussies. David Wood is going to go out and get ten customers a day for a year. Not because he needs to mind, just because he “wants to”. It’s just that easy.
Two customers a day is “relatively simplistic”, no excuses.
First it was “dominate the search engines by blogging about anything”, then it was “WordPress training”… and after the facade of selling access to a third-party product that was free became too large an elephant in the room to ignore, the inhouse “viral blogging system” was launched. That went nowhere so now it’s just recruit 2 affiliates customers a day and “train” them to do the same.
I guess Wood really wasn’t kidding when he declared Empower Network was “not about the product” back in December. But at this point you’ve got to wonder, how many more “that was totally our best ever call/event/hangout/sales video” reboot pitches the Empower Network affiliate-base can stomach before things get truly stale?
Footnote: It’d be nice to use Empower Network’s actual retail customer numbers but the company doesn’t make that information public.
At one point they were claiming 67% of people paying for access to WordPress were affiliates, but after it was pointed out that most of the revenue would be coming in from the upper tiers of the training sold as products, this changed to “37% of sales are retail“.
The amount of actual paying retail customers in Empower Network (excluding expired affiliates, affiliates who have not yet recruited another affiliate and retail customers who no longer pay a monthly fee), versus their currently active fee-paying affiliate-base has, to date, never been publicly disclosed.
Nor has the company-wide revenue ratio sourced from retail customers (excluding affiliates who have not recruited other affiliates) versus revenue sourced from affiliates.
Maybe he’s referring to the pass-ups… So he wouldn’t have to do a thing. Everybody else recruits, he gets the pass-ups and sips maitai on a beach.
I have looked at the RESULTS of the training. There’s absolutely no risk for that Wood’s training will lead to a massive recruitment, and exhaust the market by running out of people.
Wood’s message seems to be a standard “recruit, recruit, RECRUIT” motivational speech used by some people. “Work harder” is a very popular method to motivate people.
Empower Network seems to have had a member flee in the last few months. “Recruit, recruit, RECRUIT!” is probably a method to solve that problem. If people are busy trying to recruit others then they will have less time feeling dissatisfied = it will slow down the member flee.
If Wood can get members to commit themselves to do at least ONE weekly presentation each for a few months, e.g. 120 months, Empower Network will last for an additional 10 years without any member flee.
That was about the home made marketing videos I watched, and about a few blog posts.
Empower Network’s training ideas are primarily designed to keep people busy for a long period of time, rather than to train skills and generate results. “Keep people busy, and make them willing to pay” IS actually the main purpose of the training.
“Do at least ONE presentation per week for 120 months, and you will EVENTUALLY become successful” is about the same, it will keep people busy but it won’t generate any significant results.
Present crap 520 times and it’s still crap.
I haven’t seen any videos other than a couple short ones by David Sharpe on his FB page. Are the paid ones for marketing EN only or are they geared toward marketing any company in general? i.e. are they of any value (and I use that term loosely) to anyone who is not promoting EN?
I was talking about videos produced by the members themselves. I googled “Empower Networks Training” and looked at some random videos among the search results.
The training revolves around “8 core commitments”, what people will need to do to become successful.
From vague memory:
1. Be willing to pay (unlock income streams). 🙂
2. Be coachable, follow instructions.
3. Be flexible.
4. Blog each day.
5. Marketing efforts each day
6. Listen to audio training each day.
7. Read motivational and educational stuff
8. Attend events
I’m not sure I got all of the correct, but the training will surely keep people busy for a long period of time.
One of the videos I watched spent 13.5 minutes repeating those 8 core commitments (mostly #6). EN doesn’t exactly teach any sales skills or marketing skills, people mostly used their OWN methods.
@zoe
All the EN marketing videos I’ve seen follow a similar “rah rah I made infinity money, just go “all-in” and so can you!”
Absolutely zero relevance to anyone not interested in becoming an EN affiliate and recruiting.
I also watched 2 of Tony Rush’ videos, and he clearly used identifiable sales techniques, e.g. “foot in the door” techniques.
Each and everyone clearly used the skills (or lack of skills) they had BEFORE Empower Network’s training. The only thing Empower Network have taught them seems to be to repeat the 8 core commitments.
Since David Wood’s training haven’t managed to exhaust the market by now, it probably won’t do it either. 🙂
People if your going to start a business. Stop looking at hype! Look at fundamental basics. You should ask 2 questions.
How many active people on my team do I need to make 10k a month net?
And
How many people does the company have make that or higher?
If you can not get good answers to those questions, DON’T JOIN!
Simple
Not how much product do me or my team need to sell? If you are counting people and not product sales, then it is a pyramid and not a legitimate business.
All the people who already are making (and have made) money will actually make it more difficult for you to make money, if there’s too many of them.
If you’re using that factor to make decisions, you will be joining opportunities near the end, right before they collapse.
I wish this mess would end real soon, please pretty please. I am getting tired of the ridiculous, self- important, a**hole attitudes of a couple I know. Seriously, this thinly veiled money game is either attracting these types, or brainwashing them into one.
You can take a look at some of the RESULTS people have got, e.g. videos or blogs? Then you will have something to make jokes about.
I don’t need to look at anything they have produced, the only thing I read MLM related is this blog.
Yesterday Wood posted the names of everyone who had sponsored five or more people so far this month. To do his “2 a day” would mean that people would need to have sponsored at least 24 new people. Only 11 people in EN have done that so far this month. So I don’t think ENs in trouble of running out of people…this month.
What was interesting is that there were only 113 people who sponsored 5 or more people (the top person did 58 which was 12 more than the second person).
The largest portion of the list were the ones that got 5 (29). If you were generous and doubled that number for those that got 4 (approx. 60) and again doubled that for those who got 3 (approx 120) and so on – there is maybe 900 to a 1000 people that have brought anyone in this month.
Granted this is only half a months worth, but I would gamble that there will only be about 1,000 people out of the over 155,000 they claim to have that will actually sponsor someone this month.
I think the change in gears to promote generic internet marketing courses through the network is indicative of a decline. Of course I’ve been saying all along charging people $25 a month for someone elses blogging platform wasn’t legit.
Charging people for an inferior platform has only increased exposure on the lack of retail activity within. If Wood posted a leaderboard of people who had brought in non-affiliates (people who signed up as retail customers and were never affiliates (he likes to include ex-affiliates as retail customers)), it’d be a ghost town.
All we’re seeing here is the standard decline and eventual collapse of what was always a shallow gifting scheme. It doesn’t matter how many internet marketing course cash grabs they throw at it now.
I’m not familiar with WHERE Empower Network / David Wood usually post updates? Do you have a link or information about it?
I don’t focus on each and every program, only on some of them. And EN has only temporarily been on my list a few times.
It’s on his Facebook page:
facebook.com/empowernetwork