Level One Network Review: $29 a month content farm
Level One Network went into prelaunch in late February 2013 and is headed up by CEO Dan Miller.
No contact details for Level One Network are provided on their website, however the company’s domain registration provides a Minnesota based address in the US.
On official Level One webinars, in which he claims to have been ‘involved in online marketing for over a decade‘, Miller also credits himself as being the CEO of “Click Marketing Inc”:
Click Marketing Inc. appears to Miller’s parent company from which he launches other companies from.
Prior to Level One Network Miller launched Lead Net Pro in October of 2010, with the opportunity still being active today.
Lead Net Pro is a $300 “harvesting and extraction” tool that scrapes the internet for “names, addresses, emails, phone numbers 365 days a year, 24 hour a day”.
Once this information is scraped, Lead Net Pro then allows affiliates to mass mail owners of the harvested information.
A “phone broadcasting service” is also included, allowing Lead Net Pro affiliates to harass call up owners of the harvested information and market to them.
Affiliates in Lead Net Pro are paid 100% ($300) commissions upon recruitment of new affiliates into the company.
Read on for a full review of the Level One Network MLM business opportunity.
The Level One Network Product Line
Level One Network’s flagship product is $29 a month blogging platform, powered by WordPress.
WordPress is a free and open-source blogging platform developed by the WordPress Foundation.
Level One Network also sell various marketing tools to their affiliates:
- SEO Pro Direct ($99) creates something called “gateway pages” in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. Level One Network claims that by using their SEO Pro Direct software, that ‘page one ranks can be easily accomplished‘.
- PDF Pro Express ($199) can be used by affiliates to create PDF files.
- Master Training Series ($599) is ‘an in-depth training course teaching you advanced techniques to maximize any affiliate program’.
The Level One Network Compensation Plan
The Level One Network compensation plan is similar to that of Lead Net Pro, in that affiliates pass up 100% commission sales to their uplines as well as receiving 100% commissions from their downlines.
Using the Level One Blogging Network as an example, once an affiliate joins the company they pay 100% of their fee to use the blogging network to their upline.
Then, as an affiliate of the company, they earn a 100% commission from the first affiliate they recruit who buys into the blogging system (a mandatory purchase).
The second sale they make is 100% passed to their upline, with every 5th sale (counting from the first original sale, not the second “qualifying” sale) then passed up their upline.
The commissions paid on the other product tiers operate in exactly the same manner, with each affiliate being required to make two sales of each product in order to qualify for future commissions on any newly recruited members.
Note that only access to the blogging platform is a mandatory purchase with the other products being optional.
Joining Level One Network
Membership to Level One Network is $19.95 a month, with a mandatory purchase of Level One Network’s Blogging Platform ($29 a month).
With Level One Network automatic affiliation is integrated with our system. This means to become an affiliate, you must have an active blog within our network.
Level One Network state that the purchase of blogging platform and payment of monthly membership fees is required keep an affiliate’s account “active”.
Conclusion
In researching Level One Network I was surprised to see them referring to their blogging network as “Level One Network’s proprietary blogging system”.
Although not mentioned anywhere on the company’s website, Level One Network is powered by WordPress. Here’s a screenshot showing Dan Miller initially installed WordPress on the Level One Network server in November 2012:
I might be mistaken but I’m pretty sure neither Dan Miller or Click Marketing own the WordPress Foundation. How they can then claim their blogging platform is proprietary, I have no idea.
With blogging networks (both free and paid) a dime a dozen these days, Level One Network attempt to differentiate themselves by showcasing affiliate’s blogs on their main website.
Everytime a Level One Network writes a blog post, an excerpt is placed on the main Level One Network website. A basic feature of WordPress, why this is a marketing point I also have no idea.
Additionally anyone with half a brain should see the lack of value this feature will have as more affiliates join the company. With just a thousand affiliates blogging daily, chances of your post being seen on the main Level One Network homepage is pretty much non-existent.
And if it does pop up, with that level of post excerpts being published on the main page daily, you’ll be lucky to see it up there for barely a minute (and that’s being generous) before it’s lost in the constant stream of new articles being published and indexed.
Longevity wise I’d also be a bit concerned about that level of new content being published daily on the main page swiftly attracting a “content farm” status by Google and other search engines.
A content farm in its simplest form is basically a bunch of unrelated articles on a single domain primarily written for search engines as opposed to actual human readers.
Taken directly from the Level One Network website,
Level One Network is specifically designed so that marketers in any industry are be able to build a powerful online presence for their marketing efforts through a powerful network that was distinctively created for search engines.
Google began to heavily penalize content farms in their search rankings over a year ago.
As with the other MLM blogging networks out there, Level One Network also heavily push the purported SEO benefit of blogging on their website. And what with a $99 SEO product of their own available, you’d want to hope they have somewhat of a basic grasp on the concept of SEO.
Unfortunately that doesn’t appear to be the case.
On their “Opportunity” page, In browsing the Level One Network claim that
Every time you publish content though our network, you immediately receive main page exposure on our website’s main page allowing it to be indexed quickly by search engines.
the entire network is able to enforce page rankings as a whole with search engines, meaning your marketing efforts can receive higher page rankings very easily with our system.
Pagerank is a pretty basic fundamental in SEO (with diminished relevance over the years), and the above claims are sheer nonsense. Individual pages on a domain are assigned their own individual pagerank.
Domain authority is a small part of the algorithm but the pagerank of Bob’s Level One Network blog article on red buttons is going to have a negligible effect on my own Level One Blog articles.
And on the topic of SEO, as the above image showing Dan Miller installing WordPress on the Level One Network domain shows, content first started appearing on the domain back in November 2012.
Five months later and Level One Network can’t even rank first for their own company name:
And these are the guys who expect people to pay them $99 for SEO services?!
Good luck with that. Especially when, for all the SEO orientated marketing that exists on the Level One Network website, just 3.8% of the site’s traffic comes from search engines (Alexa 30 day snapshot).
One could argue that this figure will improve over time but with Empower Network sitting at just 5.5% and being just under a year and a half old, that seems highly unlikely.
The purported SEO benefits of MLM blogging networks are a myth, with a consistent 90%+ of the traffic being the direct marketing efforts of the company’s affiliates marketing the income opportunity itself.
Compensation plan wise things aren’t much better. Again, as with the other 100% commission offering MLM blog networks out there (Empower Network and the recently launched Pure Leverage being the most prominent), Level One Network effectively functions as a cash gifting scheme.
You join the company, gift 100% of your access fee to a product the company can’t sell because it doesn’t own (you pay for access), and then you earn by recruiting new affiliates into the company.
Whether you use the blog service or not is irrelevant to your commissions, you are paid to recruit new affiliates. And once recruited, these affiliates gift 100% of their fees to you each month.
Furthermore in making the blog platform a mandatory purchase and requiring affiliates to pay a separate monthly fee just to access it, there is no retail offering in Level One Network.
What your left with is a free blogging platform powered by a third-party company, affiliates directly paying those that recruited them each month and via the pass up system, one in every 5 payments company wide trickling up to the top of an effective gifting scheme.
Who is at the top of the scheme I’m not certain but I wouldn’t at all be surprised if it was Dan Miller himself (for reference, co-founders David Wood and David Sharpe sit at the top of Empower Network’s gifting scheme).
With the abundance of red flags present, affiliate membership with Level One Network is definitely not something to be taken lightly.
It’s ANOTHER Empowered Network clone. *yawn*
Doing a review on this company and getting some of the facts wrong is easily understandable as it is only 4 weeks old. What ever Dan was doing in your screen shot back in November of 2012, was probably still in the development stage because Level ONE Network is not a Word Press platform. Not even close. I have Word Press blogs so I know what Word Press looks like.
Seeing that the company Pre-Launched on February 25, 2012 and Launched on March 15, 2012 – I would have to assume that the November 2012 screen shot that you reference was a development stage of some sort.
The SEO course for $99.00 – again – wrong. It’s not a course at all. It is a Gateway Page system that is optimized through a built in SEO module to promote various marketing efforts.
It allows the online marketer to back link / cross link using separate pages with different domain names – and yet get a high spot on a SERP due to how it’s built – and it is automatically linked back to the LON bloggers main blog page. But for an online marketer or a business trying to capture traffic from a SERP or closely related SERP – the system provides other tools to use to accomplish that.
I can write a blog post about a specific keyword phrase. I can then write a Gateway Page on a related keyword and back link it to my blog post. I could also make a YouTube Video and add that to my Video Network blog and again – have all my links right there in front of the visitor to promote my blog post or my website.
All of it is created using the same SEO module that Dan installed on the blogging system – so the blogger already knows how to use it. And all of these tools although right there in my back office – are on 3 different domains.
So instead of hitting the SERP once – I can hit it 3 times instead. All from within one back office and can be done quickly.
And sure perhaps experienced online marketers can do this on their own – but new people are being taught how to do it very easily. I have a Dr in my team pounding away and driving new patients to her website – which is very ineffective in doing what she thought a website would do for her. But she is being taught by an online marketer – how to market online for more patients for her practice.
So LON is a far cry from EN with the training. A huge difference from “you slam someone for 3 k and teach them to do the same thing. And if they don’t buy the stuff – call them names”.
His course – that is offered at $599.00 – is about online marketing and I am very surprised that he spills all the beans. I have had the pleasure of having a mentor and I know my mentors, mentors and what I have learned from them is rarely shared anywhere. But Dan Miller freely exposes this kind of information to the students and doesn’t hold anything back.
Some of the attendees are ex-Empower Network people and are blown away with real training. And not the hype and show you how to slam someone with over $3,000 in products – which don’t have much value to begin with.
And if a person cannot afford the products in Level ONE – and they miss 3 sales – Dan Miller will give the products to that person. So it is the exact opposite of Empower Network.
With EN you are called names if you don’t get to one of the hype fests or if you don’t get “all in”. With Level ONE – the products are to help you build a marketing business online. If you can’t afford them – you can get them for free after missing 3 sales.
As far as the company domain placement on the search engine result page – there is no company page. Level ONE Network.com is the main page. That is the blog page and the bloggers write the posts.
In addition the category list is on the menu bar where visitors can search for topics that they are interested in. And posts or articles in those categories are again – written by the member bloggers. So they can write about anything that they feel like writing about – and that would be listed in a category and visible by anyone who searches the category list. That is what Dan is talking about front page exposure.
The blog written by the bloggers is the Level One Network .com page. In Empower Network you are hidden. The main page is the company and the only way that you can be found is on a SERP.
I have an EN blog but never promoted it because I could never get on a SERP. In fact according to Google Analytics since December of 2012 – I have only have 77 visitors that came in organically.
I started a free blog the day after I joined EN and have 2400 visitors on the free blogger site. So I know first hand that the EN blog is useless. Heck I can’t even find myself and I know where to look. And my LON blog already has more traffic in 4 weeks than what I got since December on EN.
So I already see the difference and I got off to a slow start so I could build my own blog – and also one for my team so they have something to promote right out of the gate.
Level ONE Network, because I get front page exposure – I have hit targeted first SERP results in less than 2 hours in some cases. And that is with 3 of the 4 ways to do that with Level ONE. #1 with the main blog. #2 With the Gateway Pages. #3 With the video network – which is so much easier to get found than on YouTube itself. I have not tried it yet with the PDF products.
The compensation plan looks familiar but there are things that everyone misses. First of all there are 4 comp plans. One for each product. Each is an affiliate marketing comp plan – so you get paid on one level. There are pass ups in the system that accomplish two things.
First of all it encourages people to help their people. If it was just a flat out 1 payment commission affiliate marketing plan like Amazon, Netflix or GoDaddy – people would take their commission from a product sale and go off to the next sale.
By getting pass ups, you will make sure that people on your front line succeed – or you will never get pass ups. It also provides leverage to get the affiliate marketers to take it seriously and promote it for an extended period of time because they can build an income for life.
Because the comp plan is actually 4 comp plans – you may have a pass up in the blogging system product – but does not mean that you will never get paid from that product sale. They may buy the Gateway Pages, they may buy the PDF product or they may buy the training.
So just because someone gets passed up for one product doesn’t mean that you miss out on commissions from that passed up sale. And the pass ups only go to the first qualified affiliate – they do not keep going all the way up to Dan and Joel.
So far – I think 99% of Level ONE affiliates don’t even understand how this comp plan works, so I certainly would not expect someone on the outside understanding it at first blush.
Level ONE network is nothing like Empower Network. It’s not even apples and oranges. It’s more like Model T Ford compared to a stretch Lincoln Town Car. And as far as a content farm is concerned – it is more like about.com. It’s a blog with a lot of bloggers – writing about a lot of information and in a lot of categories and Google loves a blog set up properly with a good category index.
Right now the spiders hit LON about 7 times a day. That means if a blogger writes a new post – it can be on the SERP within an hour or two but certainly it will be scanned within a few hours. Well if the SEO is proper of course.
I made a mistake on a link with a YouTube video and the darn thing hit the 2nd spot on the SERP within an hour. I had to quickly fix it because there is no room for error when you get front page exposure and the search engines are cruising through frequently.
As an online marketer – I LOVE this thing. And although there are a few ex- Empower Network people flashing checks – so far everyone is just stuck on the value of what we have for a system that helps us with our online marketing efforts.
Is it an affiliate marketing program. Yes it is. Do you only get paid on one hit like amazon – no. We get paid recurring commissions just like we would get paid marketing an affiliate program like Site Sell or other paid for websites of blog sites.
But I love it and I think what Dan is doing will go a real long way in cleaning up the garbage left in the streets by someone else.
Thanks for the input Dan.
1. The Google WordPress screenshot was taken on the day the review was published. I also viewed the source-code of the Level One Network homepage and spotted 1 or 2 familiar WP “div” names.
That said, if Level One Network aren’t using WP, what are they using then?
2. A pass up system is definitely not single level marketing. You get passups from your downline and their downline. In turn you pass up sales to your upline who pass up sales to their upline etc.
3. It is possible for payments to trickle up to the top. Everyone is passing up to their uplines on specific sales. Every payment will no trickle up but as the base of the … pyramid (for lack of a better word) grows, more and more sales will be passed up at each level to the top.
4. As for the SEO package, sounds to me like it’s backlink spam from generated pages. If these pages are on the Level One Network site they are practically useless (internal domain linking isn’t worth much).
If the software creates a bunch of pages on other domains, Google is going to catch on pretty quickly and domains will start getting de-indexxed.
SEOs go to a lot of effort these days to maintain private blog linking networks and even then they get busted. Some automated backlink software being advertised as such is probably going to get penalised rather quickly.
The “pass-up” system is usually referred to as the most horrible comp plan in MLM by MLM comp plan experts, such as Len Clements. Search for “MLM Aussie 2-step Len Clements” and read the article for yourself.
I don’t agree with Mr. Clements on many things, but his analysis on this particular topic is spot on. Only the shadier versions of MLM use “pass-up” or “x-up” comp plans, because it sounds far more impressive than it is.
@OZ,
How do I add a screen shot in this forum?
If it’s your own hosting you can link to it directly or use HTML.
If not, you can’t.
Rather than publish a screenshot, why not just state what backend they are using? (assuming that’s what the SS is in relation to)
(Or you can upload the screenshot to imgur and link it here)
@K.Chang
I guess I am old school MLM trained – via Don Faila – so I always believed in going deep and not wide. Going wide is a kiss of death and usually recruiters and sales types do that. Not teachers and trainers.
So looking at a one level plan with pass ups – well that is the kiss of death scenario so I imagine that is what Clements is referring to.
Now I haven’t been in MLM for many years. But the only reason why I would do this type of a plan is because I use webinars to teach. I could teach one – or I could teach 1,000. In addition I create tools for my team to make it easier for them to survive – and I teach them to go as deep as they can even though they can’t see anyone below their 1st level.
So I agree with you about a pass up plan. But the way I teach and the tools that I use – modern not old school – I still think that I can make it work and get my team to be successful.
I can’t fix the world so I can do little for the other teams unless they find my site and see the recorded trainings that I will be posting in the next few weeks.
But seeing that brand new people are hitting some of the top spots – who knows. Maybe Dan Miller knows something about the SEO module that I just don’t have a grasp on yet.
I’ll get you a screen shot too.
But I guess we will see.
Thanks for this analysis: I found it by searching for “Level One Network scam”, after an anonymous Wikispaces user vandalized several wikis by replacing existing links or creating new ones that lead to a post by a certain “Brian Kidd”, apparently an affiliate of this Level One Network.
I had already reverted all the changes made by the anonymous user, but I was still curious.
Dave Webber said it best. Level One is far superior to any other blogging platforms. For all of the people reading this, don’t join if you’re skeptical. Leave the first page rankings to us.
Thanks to Level One, I went from having NO RESULTS ever to now being able to rank on the 1st page of google for almost everything and consistently making $3,000+ per month (results not typical).
If Level One can do that for me, and provide me with solid education of SEO… enough to allow me to rank whenever I want… then yeah, I’d say it’s worth way more than the $50 to join.