A friend put me onto Empower Network – so to check it out I checked the search engines for “Empower Network Scam ” - and found lots and lots of articles claiming that Empower Network was NOT a scam or a pyramid system.
My crap detector went into over-drive. Each and everyone of those reviews were in fact positive. Hmmm, I checked out pyramid schemes a bit more, as personally I’ve always been confused about the of a pyramid scheme, and why some MLM schemes were OK and some weren’t
Why was it important to me to get this right? Pyramid schemes are illegal in most of the work including the UK, US, Australia and Canada. The definition is quite simple – Does the system offer something of value except for the scheme itself?
In normal multi-level marketing, you can buy a product – Tupperware sells plastic containers, Amway sells household cleaners. You can also get someone to signup as a salesperson and you get a percentage of their sales – but plenty of people just buy Amway or Tupperware and aren’t salesmen.
Empower on the other hand – what is it selling? Empower subscriptions. That’s it. It claims to offer an exclusive blogging system and a video course. Can you sell those products to other people – nope. All you can do is set them up with an Empower subscription. What happens when the last person on the Internet buys into Empower – it collapses – because that person won’t be able to make any money!
But surely the exclusive blog system plus videos have some value? Possibly – about $1 in my opinion! Certainly not the $625/month you will end up spending with Empower if you believe the hype.
The thing is that the you can get the “empower exclusive blogging system” for free – just sign up for a free blog at wordpress.com. Yup, its just wordpress. At least at wordpress.com you will have your own sub-domain – Empower will only allow you to set up a domain on their own domain – which means you are giving them your content for free (really: read the terms of service).
But you say – Empower is offering me all this traffic to my blog. Yeah right I say. The traffic stats may even be correct (maybe) but they are in fact inflated by all the other Empower Network victims – who are busy updating their blogs daily on the domain. They aren’t your customers (they’ve already signed up) – they are meaningless traffic.
So sorry despite all the positive Empower Network scam articles – it is a scam, and an illegal one at that!