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.
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