by secure_admin | Jun 28, 2022 | Multi Level Marketing
Growing up, I always wanted to be a stock trader. You know, like on Wall Street.
Yeah!
I was gonna have a $3,000 suit, a lambo, and a supermodel secretary.
Problem was, I didn’t know the first thing about stocks.
I started dabbling with some pocket money. I thought it was a good idea to buy the highest priced stocks. Because they were the highest, right?
Duhhhh… Great logic, I know.
Let’s just say it took me a while to realize that wasn’t necessarily how trading stocks worked.
But at least I had a taste for it. I was young, bro. I couldn’t help it.
At least I was keeping the dream alive.
Actually, my uncle was involved in Wall Street for a while.
These guys were living the dream I wanted.
I managed to do some work experience there.
This was back in the 90s, so the internet was still in it’s infancy.
People were buying and selling stocks over the phone and shiz. I know, crazy right?
Anyway, I soon learned that regular stock trading wasn’t as glamorous as I’d thought.
My uncle had been in the game for a decade and still didn’t have a Lambo.
He had a Buick.
Okay, I’m not hating on Buicks. Stable car. No hate here.
But his secretary…. definitely not a supermodel.
But hey, why am I being so negative?
It was still a cool week of work experience.
Only those parties and cocaine-fuelled nights. They didn’t really exist.
Not at this firm, anyway.
Ain’t nothing wrong with a Buick!
I guess the glamour of becoming a Wall Street trader was kinda wearing off.
Most of the time they were just studying graphs and making phonecalls. It wasn’t very high-octane.
So when I was choosing my majors, I kinda went in a different direction. The Wall Street dream had died down a bit. But I still respected that as a profession. I knew one day, when I had a bit more money, I’d like to get back into stocks. Not as a way to have a high-octane career. But as a way to actually grow my savings.
I actually got more into the internet marketing side of things over the next few years. Let’s just say this wasn’t always easy, either. No sir.
I failed a lot, but eventually started getting some success.
That was with Local Lead Generation, which I’m gonna tell you more about soon.
What did this success mean? It meant I had more money lying around.
Yeah boy!
No, not Lambo money. Bummer.
But at least I was starting to thing about investing it. Helping it grow a bit more. while I took care of the day-to-day stuff.
That’s when I started hearing about the World Financial Group. I liked the name. Sounded grand and legit. Was it? Hmm… check out this World Financial Group Review to find out.
It’s one of the more legit World Financial Group reviews you’re likely to find. After all, I know if you banged “World Financial Group review” or “World Financial Group scam” into Google you’ll have seen a lot of spam there,
Some of that stuff is there just to convince you that World Financial Group is legit. They’re trying to sell you it.
I’m not trying to sell you it, so you can read my review with a bit more peace of mind.
World Financial Group Review
So as you know, I was looking for somewhere to invest my money. I wanted some advice, so I chatted to some WFG advisors.
I soon learned that apart from giving me the financial advice I wanted, WFG was actually a way that I could make more money. It was a marketing opportunity.
I was always on the lookout for more marketing opportunities. I liked to hustle online. So I saw this as a great way to learn a bit more about the financial world (like I’d always wanted to) and hopefully make even more money on the side.
Did I make any money with World Financial Group?
Short answer… No.
Long answer… Nooooooooooo.
You see, I soon learned that if it looks like a pyramid, sounds like a pyramid and smells like a pyramid. It’s a pyramid.
That’s right, a pyramid scheme.
I’d learned long ago to avoid these things like the plague.
“But wait! Aren’t pyramid schemes banned?!”
Yeah, they are.
“So how are these people still operating?!”
Well, they manage to get around this by calling themselves Multilevel Marketing opportunities, or MLM.
Now let’s get this straight. Not EVERY MLM is bad news. In fact, some of them are super cool. They’re generally a way of promoting products through a network, and qualifying for a different level of commission depending on what level of the network you’re on.
The main problems start for two reasons.
One, if they make you pay to move up levels.
Two, if the products at the bottom of the pyramid are completely worthless, scammy or way overpriced.
That’s my main gripe with pyramid schemes like this. What’s the actually products you’re supposed to be promoting like?
Well WFG promoted a number of different financial products. Things like financial advice, insurance, etc.
All good so far,.
But the main way they do it is with pushy sales pitches. And by recruiting sometimes-desperate “advisors” who’re more like salespeople than actual advisors,
Actually, that’s where things first start falling down.
Their main business model is recruiting students and other people without much experience in the working world. They show some flashy cars, expensive suits and entice the sort of people who aspire for that sort of life.
Kinda like the life I aspired to before I grew up.
These salespeople are referred to as associates. That’s because it sounds less pushy.
Like this…. Only internet-based.
But the sales pitch they’re encouraged to give is REALLY pushy.
And get this—you gotta pay $100 for the opportunity.
That’s right, to become an associated you gotta stump up the cash before you’ve even made any money.
As I soon learned form some guys who’d been in this for a while. Some of them never made that $100 back.
This was NOT the money-making opportunity I was looking for.
It wasn’t really the financial advice I’d been looking for either.
Very few people were actually making money here. The only real way to make money was to recruit more associates under you. Like all good pyramid schemes.
What a bummer.
I was disappointed.
But I was also determined to finish this review so that guys like you could have a bit more info. And so you could know whether World Financial Group was really for you.
The only real people making money from WFG are the top guys in the pyramid. That’s WFG themselves or the early adopters.
It’s a bad deal for advisors, especially if you didn’t get in early. It’s also a bad deal for buyers, who’re charged exorbitant prices for stuff that isn’t actually that great.
Listen, if you’re sitting there thinking that the WFG is a completele scam, it isn’t. They do have financial products and some of these are actually worth SOMETHING.
But they’re worth a lot less than you’ll pay for them.
If you want to get into the World Financial Group to make money as an advisor. Don’t bother. It’s as simply as that. There are better ways to waste your time and money. There are even better pyramid schemes.
The main gig is basically recruiting more advisors under you rather than actually selling products. This leaves the people at the bottom vulnerable.
You’ve also got to keep recruiting every 30 day period to maintain your level or get promoted. This keeps the pressure on at all times.
It’s simply not a fun way to work.
I’d already chatted to a few advisors who had recently left the company. I didn’t blame them in the slightest. WFG wasn’t a cool gig.
It’s always super fishy when the only real way to make money is by convincing more people to become salespeople. That’s how the dodgy pyramid schemes really work.
It means those at the bottom who’re just trying to sell the actual financial products can’t really make any money.
And believe me, hardly anyone was making money with this stuff.
It was enough for me. I can’t recommend World Financial Group.
Is it a scam? Maybe. Is it worth it? No.
There are far better ways to make money online these days. I’ve tried and failed at a few of them, but I also know that Local Lead Generation is one of the best new ways to make real income every month. I even got
by secure_admin | Jun 23, 2022 | Multi Level Marketing
I jumped into ACN so you don’t have to…
I remember a few years back, when my buddies were on a big health drive to try and get back in shape. There’s nothing wrong with that.So when I first started hearing them talk about ACN, I thought it was part of that.”Hey bro, you tried ACN yet?””Yeah man, I couldn’t stomach the taste. Too sharp for me.””Wait…. What?”
I thought they were talking about Apple Cider Vinegar. Ha! I know there was a lot of hype in the health and supplement world about that.”Haha! Bro! Not Apple Cider Vinegar, ACN! The telecoms company!”Oh… Right. No, I hadn’t tried ACN yet. But the amount they’d been talking about it, I thought I needed to give it a try. After all, my boy Bud had just bought a new motorboat thanks to ACN. Months before, he could barely afford to pay rent, so that got my interest for sure.Over the next few weeks, I dived into ACN. It was quite a journey. In this ACN review, I’m gonna tell you my story about how it all went. Then you can decide if ACN is really for you or not. I might be bias, but I think this is one of the best ACN reviews around.
And remember, this was a while before I found a real legit way to make money online—and that was with Local Lead Generation. I’ll tell you more about that in a bit. But first, you wanna know about ACN…ACN ReviewOkay. We’ve got this far and you still don’t really know what ACN is, right? That was me, too.ACN stands for American Communications Network. This was much harder to find out than it should have been. Oh, and they aren’t just American, either. There’s an ACN Europe Division. Actually, my research into ACN threw up quite a few people in the UK as well as the States promoting ACN.They’re a telecom company. Ok. Got it. They sell phones, landlines, video-call software. Stuff like that. When I found this out, it was something I could get behind. I knew I’d be trying to sell their products, and I’d already done a bit of affiliate marketing myself so I knew how important knowing about your niche is when trying to promote stuff like that. I used phones, right? I was sure I could sell them.Only the more I learned about ACN, I soon realized that this wasn’t standard affiliate marketing. It started smelling a bit more fishy. And I started to doubt these “products” I was selling.The first rule of sales is to believe in your product.
I made that up, but I think it makes sense.
And if you can’t believe in your product, you’re gonna have a hard time selling it. I soon starting doubting both my products AND the way I was expected to sell them with ACN, and that’s not great. But we’re jumping ahead. Let’s start at the beginning.
And oh yeah. I STILL don’t know what ACN actually stands for. Your guess is as good as mine. This sort of info simply isn’t that easy to find. It should be, shouldn’t it?When I first enquired about ACN I was introduced to this guy who was gonna be my “upline mentor”, Colin. I didn’t really know what this meant. I was expecting someone who was actually employed in an official position at ACN, but this guy just seemed like someone who’d got involved with the system a bit earlier than me. He actually told me that he’d tried a few other MLM schemes before settling on ACN.This set a few alarm bells off in my head.
I hadn’t heard much about ACN by this point, but I HAD heard about MLM. I thought that meant a pyramid scheme. So I asked Colin about it. His answer was a bit vague. Was ACN a pyramid scheme?
I soon did a bit more research myself and found out that not ALL MLM schemes are as bad as those pyramid schemes that you see in the news. MLM stands for Multilevel Marketing and it CAN be a legit way to promote things. But wasn’t always. Was it gonna be legit with ACN? I was soon gonna find out.So first I had to go to this meeting. I was suspicious, but willing to give it a go.
There was a wide range of people there, some of them were pretty cool.
But here’s one other thing… Some of them had been told some pretty wild tales to get them there. One guy thought he was just showing up to look at some luxury cars, and now they had him sitting down listening to a sales pitch. He wasn’t happy.Anyway, at this meeting—we all learned a bit more about ACN. But only a little bit.There was a bit of a hard-sell to sign up straight away. We were told it was a limited offer. So i jumped in.A few weeks later, I heard they were doing the same “limited offer” to a bunch of other people. Seems like that’s just a tactic. They do it every month. Not good.Anyway, back to the meeting. We’d be selling a range of telecoms products. But in order to “qualify” to sell them, we had to buy them first.
More alarm bells.What?No affiliate marketing network I’d ever signed up to made me actually buy the product before I promoted it.But I thought I’d give it a go anyway as the video-phone looked pretty cool. I signed up to a $40 plan. Not cheap, but I thought I’d be rolling in more sales soon enough.
I was wrong.And oh yeah… the phone didn’t really work. I tried getting them to fix it, but to no avail. I was stuck paying $40 a month for a product I didn’t really want. One that didn’t really work properly either. I was starting to feel a bit less happy about trying to promote this product, too.Remember that rule I made up? Believe in your product. I didn’t believe in this.So the first people I was gonna sell it to were friends and other people I knew well. As soon as my phone broke, I realized I didn’t wanna promote it to people that already trusted me. This isn’t a great business model, is it? I didn’t feel THAT happy about promoting it to people I didn’t know, either.
Then we got to what ACN was REALLY about. Recruiting more salespeople. I told Colin I thought this was a marketing deal where I was gonna promote the product.That’s when he broke the news. The real way to make money is to recruit more salespeople.
Oh… you mean like a pyramid scheme?I soon started wondering if ACN was just a network of affiliates, or sales reps. Colin had recruited me, and got a cut from my signup fee. I was gonna get a cut for anyone I recruited. They’d each be buying a phone to “qualify” and then probably not selling any more. The only way to sell the phones was to convince more sales reps to sign up.The biggest problem I had with this was the quality of the product. And what happens to the people at the bottom of the pyramid who didn’t manage to sign anyone up?
At the moment, that person at the bottom of the pyramid was me.And then I remembered some of the people at the first meeting about ACN. Some of these guys were pretty desperate for money. I didn’t like the idea of convincing more people to be a part of this thing.
Especially when they told me the best place to start was with my close circle of friends. There was no way I was gonna be involved with getting these guys into a pyramid scheme.
Yeah, I know a few of my buddies were going on about ACN before. But that was just a select group of guys who’re always involved in some scheme or another. I wasn’t about to promote this to my OTHER pals.They wanted me to set up my own meeting. Like the one I went to. They even suggested I made up a bullshit reason for the meeting OTHER than ACN—to get people to turn up.At this point, I was out.But I still wanted to know more about ACN. I wanted to know how my buddy bought a boat. I wanted to know if I’d jumped off that boat too soon.So I did some more research. I actually went to one of the meetings that was arranged by a guy I met at my first meeting. Just to see how it went.It didn’t go great. Half the people there thought they were coming to a pool party.They weren’t happy when it turned into a sales pitch. Most of them left. The guy who set the party up didn’t seem happy either.That’s why I recommended he got some real affiliate marketing training from one of a number of different legit online courses. There are real ways to make money and be your own boss, but ACN doesn’t seem like one of them. He just needed pointing in the right direction. He needed to look for some real internet marketing training. A few months later, I’d heard he’d done just that. He was much happier now.The ACN ScamIf you got here, you’re probably wondering if ACN is a scam or not, right?Look. It’s not great. I don’t like calling ANYTHING a scam, especially as I ducked out super-early. But it’s not a cool deal for anyone. It’s not a cool deal for the people buying the phones, or the people trying to promote them.My opinion on MLM schemes like this is that as long as the product is good, there’s nothing wrong with a few people up and down the line making money promoting it via a network. But if you’re trying to trick people into buying a piece of crap, and the only way to really make money is by increasing the size of the sales-rep network, then it’s not great. That’s really just a pyramid scheme. I went to a few more of these “meetings”. Sometimes there were guys there who’d done a bit better out of ACN. One of them turned up in a real flash car. When the meeting didn’t go well and most people left (like always), this guy told us not to invite anymore broke people. Nice. Not.I wasn’t a fan of the hard sell, and I wasn’t a fan of their “product range”, either. Or their marketing practices. I’m not gonna tell you that you can’t make money with ACN. You can. But if you ask me whether there are better ways—then yes, there are. If you’re using predatory practices to sell stuff that doesn’t have much value to people who don’t need it—then there are definitely better ways.
It’s not a scam in the “they’re gonna run off with all my money” kinda way. They DO have products. But as a money-making idea, it’s not great. And it won’t leave you feeling too happy. Or with too much money.
But what about guys like Bud? Bud had got lucky. He got in at just the right time. He was at the top of the pyramid. Guys like me and the other people I met didn’t have it so good.
But get this, even Bud stopped with ACN a few months later. Even he’d realized that it wasn’t as great as he first thought.
At least he got a boat out of it.
This all happened a while before I’d found a real way to make actual money online with Local Lead Generation. This idea was legit, and it was a way to own a slice of virtual real estate, where I could start collecting monthly rental checks quickly and easily. You should check out Local Lead Generation too.
by secure_admin | Jun 21, 2022 | Trading
Let me tell you about this cool story from way back when.
This was way back before I’d started making proper money with Local Lead Generation. This was before I’d even left High School. I’ll tell you more about how cool Local Lead Generation is later on. But I guess I was working with local leads in a slightly different way back then.
I was camping out by the lake one summer, it was pretty dope. Loads of cool places to explore and have fun.
Once, me and my buddies were digging and we found this old tin. It was like lost treasure!
We just thought it was gonna have some old crap in it, but when we opened it—it was actually a neat find.
Baseball cards. Nice
These were from the 50s, too. I knew already that they might have been valuable. They needed a little clean, but they were still in good condition. I guess the tin was well buried and air-tight.
I already knew a few people I could sell these cards to.
Anyway, the problem was—this wasn’t our land. One of my older pals said we should get permission from the landowner. It was his land after all.
Now I’m a stand-up guy. So I was cool with that. I wasn’t about to steal these cards if someone else owned them. I knew the guy who owned the land and he was a chill older guy too. Used to give us sweets sometimes.
I didn’t think he’d have much use for some baseball cards.
I was wrong.
But don’t worry, it’s not all bad.
You see, the baseball cards WERE his. But when I told him about them, instead of simply thanking me and asking for them back… He had another idea.
Not only did he have an idea. He had MORE. More baseball cards. From the 50s, 60s and beyond. Rare stuff. You name it.
And these hadn’t been buried either. They were in mint condition.
So we struck an agreement. I’d try and sell his cards, bit by bit, and I’d get a nice 30% cut. I was happy with that. He had tons.
I’d been saving for a new bike at the time so it was a cool deal. Over the rest of the summer my mind was focussed on shifting these baseball cards. I sold them to the shops around town, some older collectors, and even some people over at the local baseball clubhouse. I was soon raking in my sweet cut of 30%.
By the end of summer, I’d paid for more than my bike. Way more.
But where am I going with this? Why am I telling you it? I’m telling you this story because it was my first taste of affiliate marketing. I just didn’t know it yet.
So I guess you can say my entrepreneurial efforts started early. But over the next couple of decades, I tried my hand at a lot more.
When the internet first got big, I even made some nice affiliate cash. But I still hadn’t got to where I really wanted to be. In a Lambo, of course! What else? Every online marketing guy needs a Lamborghini.
Anyway, I devoured a lot of different internet marketing courses and products over the next few years. I learned the basics, and then some. I found out what autoresponders were, why emailing lists were important, and all that stuff.
Eventually, I started building up some nice savings. No, still not Lambo money. But I wanted to see this money grow, so I needed some cool investments.
I’d heard a fair bit about something called iMarketslive at the time. This seemed like the perfect product because it was gonna teach me how to trade Forex and other stocks online instantly—but also because I’d get to promote the product as part of my affiliate marketing efforts.
That’s when my heart sank a bit.
This sounded a lot like a pyramid scheme. But I was assured that wasn’t the case. So if you found this page by banging in “iMarketsLive reviews” or “iMarketsLive scam”, then here you are. I’ve gotta give you one of the best iMarketsLive reviews going. Here it is:
iMarketsLife Review
First thing’s first. You wanna know what iMarketsLive is. I got you.
It’s an online Forex trading platform. Now I didn’t know the first thing about Forex trading at this point. I’d seen how volatile the USD could be on a day to day basis, and I knew there was money to be made. I just wanted to know how.
The second part of iMarketsLive was the network marketing part. They call this MultiLevel Marketing, or MLM. Instead of just trying to promote the iMarketsLive training course, I’d be trying to recruit more sales reps, move up levels and gain more commission.
That’s a lot like a pyramid scheme.
My main issue with these sorts of deals is when desperate people are forced to sell worthless products. When the ONLY way for anyone to make money is simply building more levels to the pyramid and getting more sales reps to sign up-that’s not good.
I didn’t have a problem with using networks to promote products if the product is actually good. That means people at the bottom of the pyramid still get value—the training course.
Although I did question why you’d need multiple levels of sales reps to make real money. Why couldn’t I just find people that wanted the base product (the training course) and make money selling it? That’s what I did with my other affiliate marketing ventures. That’s what I did with my baseball cards.
So I was already a bit suspicious. But firstly, I needed to know if the product was any good. That was what I was there for, anyway. The Forex training. Then if it went well, maybe I’d be happy to be part of the pyramid-shaped thingy to help spread the word a bit.
So what’s the iMarketLive Forex training actually like? Let’s have a look…
To start with, there’s a ton of info in there. It was hard to work out where to start.
I was a bit sceptical as to why they were giving this stuff away.
I mean if they’d really cracked how to make money in Forex, why don’t they just keep the info to themselves and invest their own money?
Surely if it was that easy, they could just become Forex investors. That’s the problem with a lot of these sales pitches. Not just Forex training academies, either. All sorts of IM offers fall over because if they really did what they say they do—then the people selling them wouldn’t NEED to sell them. It might even be better if they didn’t. So as you can tell, suspicions were high.
And I’ve already answered my own question. The reason they need to sell this stuff is because it simply ISN’T that easy to make a ton of money on Forex trading. I soon learned that.
There was some cool stuff in the training course. I learned all the basics and then some. Great. The thing is, this info is available elsewhere, sometimes for free. Or at least at a fraction of the cost.
The good news is that I learned how to read graphs, and a lot of other stuff that was crucial to Forex trading. Not just basic graphs, CANDLESTICK graphs. Nice. These made a lot more sense much quicker than I thought they would.
And there are loads of other alert tools and some other good stuff in the iMarketsLive software. You also get access to the trading room which lets you learn from some much more experienced traders. You could see the sort of moves they were making as well as the ones to avoid.
The thing with Forex trading is you don’t have to hold thousands in stock or currency. You can simply “bet” per point it goes up or down. This is called spot betting. What it means is that you can become mega-rich without risking tons of money. But you can also lose a lot, too.
So how did I do? It was a mixed bag.
I started making some losses over the first few days. But after I learned from a few of my mistakes, I’d finally recovered and was even making a nice profit. Woo!
Awesome, right?
Well…
I thought I’d cracked it. I was already dreaming of Maui or my new Lambo. I hadn’t cracked it. It was beginner’s luck.
I took the wrong position on my next trade and was wiped out pretty quick. And then some. Bummer.
I spent about a month on iMarketsLive and trying to become a Forex trader. There was too much up and down for my heart to handle. That stuff was stressful.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Some people do make money from this stuff. I didn’t, but that’s just how it is.
My overall evaluation of the course is that’s it was good. It wasn’t groundbreaking, and I’m not sure how many people are actually making money. I’m also not sure if it was really worth the fee. But it wasn’t terrible.
There are actually a load of different tools aside from simply using the trading course. Some of them you’ve gotta pay a bit more for, so I didn’t get to try them.
There’s an FX Signal package which basically does it all for you. They say you get the instant trades that pros are making and you simply set the system up to automatically follow them. Again, I’m not sure if this is really legit. But I can’t knock it down because I didn’t try it. I do have that same nagging question about why someone would give this info away if it was guaranteed to work? And wouldn’t it affect the market in some way? I’m no Forex expert, so I don’t really know the answers to these questions.
Answers on a postcard, please!
So the next step was seeing whether I could make money promoting the trading course. That’s where things get a bit pyramid-shape.
The real money wasn’t to be made from the actual info you get in the course.
It wasn’t even really to be made from selling the course to individual users.
It was from getting more salespeople to sign up under you, and taking a cut of all their commissions.
That’s kinda how MLM works, which is cool if the product at the bottom is good. But I’m always a bit suspicious of these MLM schemes because if the product was THAT good, you’d have loads of normal customer-facing affiliate marketing guys lining up to promote the product directly to users. That’s not really how this works, which is a bummer.
Also, there’s one MASSIVE catch here as well.
You can only really open up the multi-level earning potential if you buy their $195 customer product. Yep, read that again if you want. Let it sink in.
Now where I come from in the affiliate marketing world, you don’t even have to buy the products you promote at all. Let alone pay nearly two-hundred bucks just to start selling at the higher levels.
THAT’S just how pyramid schemes work. At least there’s a reasonably good product at the bottom, but it’s still not a great deal. You shouldn’t have to pay to promote, and the main way it seems like people are making money off of this is by selling more of these promoter packages. Very pyramidy.
There’s a complex matrix of membership tiers that I won’t bore you with here. But basically—As you move up a level, you’ll get higher commission bonuses. But it’ll cost you to get there.
So you think it’s an iMarketsLive scam, right?
I did too.
What do I think now?
I’m not sure.
It’s not a definite scam. I think that’s clear. They’re not running off with your money.
The other good thing is that there is a product at the bottom of the pyramid. That’s something that has value and COULD help people. It’s not the best product around, but it’s ok. I learned something from it. You could too.
However, I didn’t learn much that did me any good. Forex trading wasn’t for me. I question how much people are making money from this stuff, too. I wanted an investment to put some of the money I’d been making from internet marketing in. This wasn’t it.
I also wasn’t really that happy promoting the product to other people. After all, it was something they could lose money on. A lot of it.
The only way people were really making money was with the MLM network. There are people doing well there, but that wasn’t for me either. I prefer not to pay to promote products. There’s also a pretty small market of people who’d be willing to buy a product at this price, especially when similar stuff is available for free elsewhere. Oh yeah, the trading platform costs $145 a month if I forgot to mention.
Nowadays, I prefer pointing people in the direction of Local Lead Generation if they’re looking for a way to make real money online. It’s not a pyramid scheme and is a genuine way to make real money. It’s how I made most of mine. Check it out.
by secure_admin | Jun 20, 2022 | Affiliate Marketing
Heard about some kind of Global Affiliate Zone scam? I’m gonna drop the info you’ve been looking for
I’ve been making money online for a good few years now. But it hasn’t always been that easy.
Actually, right now I’m making real bank with my own Local Lead Generation venture. It’s legit, and I’m gonna tell you more about it in a bit.
But first, I need to drop some info on this OTHER online venture. It’s called Global Affiliate Zone. I like to call it GAZ. But not when my buddy Gaz is around, that gets confusing.
Anyway, a few years back I realized that I had some titanic-sized gaps in my internet marketing knowledge. I knew SOME stuff really well, but I was still missing the basics elsewhere.
I wanted to know more.
I was kinda a bit jealous of my buddy Ken who’d recently got back from Antigua. Not only that, but he’d also just bought a Lambo.
What is it with internet marketers and Lamborghinis? Where’s the Ferrari love? Anyway, at that point, I’d be happy with either.
Ken had his finger in about fifteen different pies. The thing is, he knew so much about internet marketing I didn’t know where to start.
I needed to know more.
Ken was away for a bit so he wasn’t on hand to fill me in on where to get the education he had. He was in the Pacific this time, was hard to reach even online.
But I didn’t think this’d be a problem. You see, there were SO MANY different online training courses out there—I knew that finding a bit more info shouldn’t be too hard.
But where was I gonna start? It’s like when you go for Pizza and there are too many choices. No, not the pineapple one. Eww.
If there were only two pizzas on the menu, I’d be able to choose easily. Just not the pineapple one, right?
And that’s the thing with internet marketing courses. There are SO MANY of them. Some of them sure do look a lot like scams, but I know there’s some valuable info in there somewhere, surely?
Trouble was, Ken was out of reach. My other buddies were more interested in getting yucky and passing out each night. Or staying in and playing Call of Duty. They didn’t know the first thing about internet marketing. Even less than me.
That’s when I heard of Global Affiliate Zone. It looked pretty good. I thought I might need to give it a go.
One of the cool things about Global Affiliate Zone was that it wasn’t as much to join. Some of those other plans cost thousands, and I wasn’t about to drop that much money right away.
However, I soon learned that things weren’t what they seemed with our friend GAZ. It was NOT what I was expecting.
So keep reading my Global Affiliate Zone review to see what went wrong. I’m dropping this info for you so you don’t have to make the same mistakes I did.
Global Affiliate Zone Review
Okay, so what I THOUGHT I was getting with Global Affiliate Zone was an online marketing education. It’s marketed A LOT like a course. Something where I could learn general info and set up my own independent venture.
Slowly, I started to realize that this wasn’t exactly how Global Affiliate Zone worked.
I started to see some stones.
Stones?
Stones.
Like the Rolling Stones? Stoners?
No.
Stones like you get in a pyramid.
A pyramid scheme.
More on that in a minute.
First, let’s start at the beginning.
What is Global Affiliate Zone?
Global Affiliate Zone is a network marketing company. Nope, I didn’t really know what that meant at the time either. But I do now, and it’s not great.
Here’s what they say about themselves:
“Global Affiliate Zone is dedicated to providing the most comprehensive coaching and resources regarding online marketing strategies.”
Okay, great. That sounds a lot like a coaching course. It sounds a lot like the sort of thing I was looking for. Except it wasn’t.
Global Affiliate Zone was founded by two guys called Mathieu Jang and Julian Sherman. These guys had been part of the much bigger AWOL Academy that had been getting a fair bit of attention.
Membership for Global Affiliate Zone was pitched at $99 per month. Okay, this still seemed quite high to me. But at least it wasn’t asking for three grand up-front like some of those other courses. I thought I could just sign up for a month and give it a go. If it wasn’t any good, it’s only a hundred bucks, right?
For that, you’re offered a half-hour coaching call with one of their experts, as well as 3-hour mentor training online. This seemed like good value to me, I mean that’s 3 and a half hours of someone else’s time, which is worth the $99 alone.
As well as that, there were also team group chats, access to the Global Affiliate Zone community, weekly workshops, training and tutorial videos, and tools like autoresponders and funnels. Awesome! Right? Well…
I was expecting to see a load of general info and then help picking from a wide range of niches. Something where I could carve my own way, so to speak. Start my own venture. That’s what a lot of these online coaching courses were for.
I slowly started to realize that these guys wanted me to promote THEIR OWN affiliate products, and that all the info was built towards doing just that. Yeah, there was some stuff I could take elsewhere, but practically everything was geared towards being part of the Global Affiliate Zone network.
And what products did they want me to promote? Oh yeah, that same $99 a month membership I just signed up to.
That meant I wasn’t learning how to research niches, pick products and promote a range of other affiliate products. It meant I was paying $99 a month to learn how to convince someone else to sign up for this $99 a month thing.
That sounded A LOT like a pyramid scheme.
You probably thought they were banned, right? I did too.
These days, a lot of them get around it by calling themselves “network marketing” or “Multi-Level Marketing”. I soon learned about that.
The thing is, not EVERY Multi-Level Marketing scheme is always bad. They sometimes get a bad rap, but there’s some reasonable stuff in there.
I tend to think that if the product at the end of the network is of good value, there’s nothing wrong with people networking and marketing it on different commission levels. The problem comes when it’s just a cycle of marketing a product with no real value.
So what about Global Affiliate Zone?
You’re probably wondering what the commission was like. That’s what first got me interested. You get $29.70 for every member you sign up. That’s about a third of the first month. Not bad.
But I was feeling a bit uneasy about trying to convince people to sign up to what I thought was an education course, but turned out to be an education in how to promote this education course. That wasn’t really an education course. Are you still with me? It was like a never-ending circle. Wait, isn’t that like most circles?
So you’ve gotta sign up to the $99 a month thing before you can start making sales. Most other affiliate programs don’t actually make you buy the product before you can promote it.
I also saw some of the smallprint on their site. This shocked me. I regretted not having a closer look BEFORE I signed up.
That’s where I saw the estimate earnings for Global Affiliate Zone. They predict an average return of about $500-$2000 a year. Remember, you’re paying $99 a month which works out as $1188 annually. That means you might not even clear any profits at all. Even if you earn the upper-estimate, that’s about a grand profit for A LOT of work. You’d be better off getting a normal job.
And can you really trust these guys on their estimates, either? I wasn’t sure if I could.
At this point, I felt a little like I’d been scammed. The reality was, I could still make money by convincing OTHER people to join this thing. But then I’d be convincing people to sign up to something like THIS?! I didn’t feel comfortable with that.
And that’s the problem with a lot of these MLM schemes. Once you’ve paid your money, you’re kinda incentivized to keep promoting this stuff even after you’ve realized how bad the product is. Some people might be desperate to make sales, and that’s not great for anyone.
A lot of this is marketed as you promoting a filtration company called Enagic. There are a load of different tiered sales levels. You’ll get more commission the higher up you get. Should I say, higher up the pyramid?
So there is kinda a product at the end of this. Enagic is a legit company. Only this affiliate network promoting them doesn’t seem it. And here’s the thing: You can actually sign up to promote Enagic independently, if you’ve really got a passion for ionization and water filtration. They’ve got their own affiliate system with training, tools, and everything else. Guess what? It’s free. No $99 a month membership, and no convincing people to sign up to another $99 a month membership.
So, it’s a Global Affiliate Zone scam, right?
It’s starting to look a lot like that. Especially when you look at the Global Affiliate Zone Affiliate Demo Walkthrough Video. That’s what I saw before I signed up.
In it, your told how you’re gonna find the best products and services in the course, and loads more is implied. A lot of this didn’t turn out how I thought it would. There’s only one product, and you’ll also be competing with all the other GAZ members to drive traffic from the same channels they mention. The training and pre-made tools are all to help get people involved with GAZ and Enagic.
So is it a scam? I’m starting to think so. If you do a search for Global Affiliate Zone BBB you’ll find some info on the Better Business Bureau. These guys rate all sorts of different companies, from the well-known to the not-so-well-known.
They give Global Affiliate Zone a C-. This isn’t great, I’ve seen better. But I’ve also seen a lot worse. There are some complaints on there, but not too many.
The problem is that the more people you recruit, the harder it’ll actually get for each of them to make money. That’s how diminishing returns works.
When I learned all this, I decided I wasn’t happy promoting any of this stuff. You can decide for yourself if it’s worth it. But I decided it wasn’t. I cancelled. I wasn’t expecting THAT to be easy, but I managed after a bit of calling around. So it cost me $99, but at least that wasn’t TOO much. And at least I hadn’t wasted years trying to promote this stuff before I realized.
When Ken got back from the Pacific, he laughed at me when I told him. He said people had been avoided GAZ for years.
Ken! Why couldn’t you have been around earlier?!
The truth was, I never got that Lambo, OR that Ferrari. Not for a few years, anyway.
Recently, I’ve started doing a lot better online. I’m now making real money. That’s thanks to Local Lead Generation. With it, you own your own slice of digital real estate and can start to get real passive income checks within a month or two. I’ve started getting them, and I’m looking forward to getting more. You should check it out.
by secure_admin | Jun 17, 2022 | Multi Level Marketing
Hey, remember way back when you had to use your own phoneline to connect to the internet? And listen to those stupid noises for a few seconds every time it connected?
Those were the days. I remember that too.
The internet sure has come a long way since then. I actually made my first few affiliate marketing bucks back in those days. I like to call them the Wild West days of the internet. It wasn’t ’til I started making bank with my new Local Lead Generation business that I started to love the NEW internet.
There was one other benefit to those old-school internet times. When you were surfing, your phoneline was blocked from annoying cold calls.
Yeah—I know those cold calls have kinda just been replaced by spam emails, but I really used to hate those things.
Since we live in the 21st Century—I’ve got a separate internet connection and phoneline. So I’ve started getting annoyed by those cold calls again. I don’t know why these guys bother.
No, I did NOT have any problems with my computer.
And no, I did NOT recently have a car accident. What is it with these people?
Then one day I got a call. These guys asked me if I’d heard about Team National and if I wanted a place.
I was like: wait… Me?
You want me to join the national team? Awesome!
Which sport?!
I know I’d played a bit of basketball in college. But I was never THAT good. I know they’re struggling for players these days. But come on. Surely you don’t want me to play for Team USA?
No, they didn’t want me to play any sport for the national team. The USA national team or anyone else. Bummer.
They wanted me to sign up to some sort of sales network. I was gonna make loads of money. Or so they said.
Naturally, I thanked them for their time and hung up. Or, I just hung up.
I don’t get involved with ANYTHING that’s pitched over the phone like that. I don’t even know if it was the guys from Team National itself or someone else who’d got involved with the scheme. As I soon learned, that’s kinda how it works.
So I quickly forgot about Team National. A few months went by when I heard a colleague mention them too. He’d had a similar call, and was taking it a bit more seriously than I did.
I decided I needed to do a bit more research. I didn’t want this guy to lose any money. The more I heard about Team National, the more fishy this “money-making opportunity sounded.”
So if you’re looking for one of the best Team National reviews you can find—then keep reading to see what I found out after a bit more investigation. Check out my Team National review.
Team National Review
The first think you obviously wanna know is what exactly is Team National? That’s what I wanted to know too. The name doesn’t really help much, does it?
So what exactly IS Team National?
Let’s have a look…
So Team National is what they call a “membership savings company”. They offer a range of discounts on regular retail purchases and from a range of different retailers.
To get these discounts, you gotta sign up.
And it ain’t cheap.
$795 for a 2-year membership.
Woah.
That’s a LOT more than most other discount clubs I’ve seen. You can get tons of different discounts these days for FREE.
But even for the discount schemes you DO have to pay for (like Coscto), we’re talking MUCH lower fees.
So that’s the first thing that jumps out about Team National.
I had a closer look at the actual specific retailers and discounts they were offering—and nothing was particularly groundbreaking. In my opinion.
But wait a minute. I know what you’re thinking.
What about Team National as a money-making opportunity? After all, that’s what you’re here for, right?
Okay, so the real way Team National affiliates make money out of this is by convincing OTHER people to sign up to the discount membership. Team National agents get a cut every time they get someone to sign up to the main offer.
That’s generally how Multi-Level Marketing networks like this work. They’ve taken a lot of flak in recent years. Some people still call them pyramid schemes, which MLM has become a byword for in some quarters.
Personally, I don’t think ALL MLM schemes are pyramid schemes. I don’t think they’re ALL scams. The way I look at is like this: is the actual product (in this case discount membership) ACTUALLY worth it? If it is, then there’s nothing wrong with people marketing it and taking a cut. The problem is, the Team National discount scheme looks a bit scammy. And it’s super-expensive for what you get. That’s where I think there’s a problem when you get highly-motivated (sometimes desperate) salespeople pushing worthless products ONLY for personal gain.
But what about Team National? Where do they fit in all this?
It’s not looking good so far, but we need a bit more detail.
I first heard about the Better Business Bureau a while back when I was researching another venture. They’ve normally got the low-down on things.
Let’s be real here, their BBB page isn’t that bad. I’ve seen a LOT worse. They’ve actually got a 5-Star A+ Rating.
There ARE quit a few complaints though. And they don’t look good.
I’ve seen some other Team National complaints elsewhere too. People complaining about not being able to even get any discounts, or simply being charged far too much for stuff that isn’t actually that much value.
One big negative for Team National here is that they only offer a THREE DAY refund policy. That’s hardly any time at all to really evaluate what you’ve just spent money on. What if you’d been working all week and didn’t have time to check until the weekend? It seems like a cut-and-run attempt.
There’s also some noise about pushy salespeople and a lot of hard-sell pitches.
That’s another problem with Team National. They use a few questionable tactics, and these create sales agents that are arguably forced to push pretty hard for the sale. Let’s have a look at them:
Sales agents have to make two sales a year in order to qualify for payouts. That’s already forcing them to make sales before they’ll even get any money. They’ve also gotta pay for things like a starter kit ($55) and more. This puts them out of pocket before things have even started. It looks like another way for Sales National to make even more money off the people who’re SUPPOSED to be helping them make money.
That first sale? You’re not gonna see any commission from it.
So how have the sales agents actually done? Not great.
The income figures aren’t too appetizing. Over 85% of Team National Agents aren’t making any money at all. Average earnings weren’t much more than $600.
What’s the most anyone made as a Team National agent? $5,435. That’s the top earner. Hardly a get-rich-quick scheme. Get poor slowly, more like.
One important thing to remember with Team National is that you don’t ACTUALLY have to buy the discount membership plan yourself in order to become an agent and sell it. That reduces costs a bit. But you might have a hard time selling the product if you don’t even have it yourself. Or maybe not.
So if you DID buy the plan before becoming an agent, the average earnings don’t even cover the cost of it. It looks like barely anyone is even making any money from Team National. Apart from Team National themselves, naturally.
There are other tiers to the sales agent system. Like a pyramid. You’ll get more money if you recruit your own set of sales agents. This is how those pyramid schemes work. It’s not just about getting people to sign up to the discount membership product. That’s the ACTUAL Team National product. It’s also about getting more AGENTS to sign up under you. And who keeps making money from this? Team National. You got it.
Team National Scam—Yes or No?
Okay, to answer this we gotta look at Team National on two levels. Is the discount membership a scam, and is the sales agent scheme a scam? I’m gonna answer both of these questions.
If you want discount stuff, there are much better places to go. Especially with the internet these days. There are plenty of places to get cool discounts for free. There are also discount clubs that are legit and charge WAY less than Team National.
However, it’s gonna be hard for me to outright say that the discount club is a complete scam. There are national retailers on there offering legit discounts. Nobody is running off with your money.
BUT. And that’s a big but…. It’s still a bit scammy. That price. The TWO year plan (WHY?!). And most of all… the refund policy. There’s no reason a legit business like this should be offering a THREE DAY cancellation policy on something that costs so much and is for a two-year membership. It simply doesn’t add up.
Now we come onto Team National as a money-making opportunity for sales agents. I’d say: Steer clear. It’s a bit scammy too.
You don’t get commission straight away. You have to keep making sales to make any money. You’ve gotta pay a fair whack to even be an agent and most of all: barely anyone is making any money with this. Are those enough reasons to NOT wanna join Team National as either a discount member OR a sales agent?! I think so.
Now I don’t wanna rat out the entire Multi-Level Marketing industry. It gets a bad rap already. Many people think ANY MLM scheme is automatically a pyramid scheme. Again, it the product is good at the base of the pyramid, I don’t see a problem with different levels of marketing and agents making money off of it. The problem REALLY starts when the actual thing people are selling is a load of crap, but people are still pushing it anyway.
So what’s my verdict? Steer clear of Team National. It is possible to make a bit of cash, but it’s not easy. You’ll also be promoting a product that simply isn’t that great.
So you’ve read this entire article looking for a money making opportunity, and I’ve told you to avoid one? What next? Easy. You need to try something where you really can make money, and that’s what I’ve been doing with my own Local Lead Generation business. It’s legit, and it’s making me good money for a while now. Check it out.
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