July 2016

Beware of Jordan Daniels’ My AE Success and Other Online Coaching Scams

Last Updated:November 11, 2016

What do My AE Success, Online Success Plan, Ultimate Online Success Plan, and MOS (Millionaire Operating System) Success Plan all have in common?

These are all products promoted by someone who goes by the name of Jordan Daniels. These products also offer the same setup:

You are promised a millionaire website- you just pay for the domain name and hosting.
You are guaranteed to make at least $500 in just 4-6 weeks.
You get coached by an expert in the field, who will conduct regular calls with you.
You get free additional products such as “The Wealth Factor, Mindset for Millions.”
There are a limited number (i.e., 50) of spots available.

So, how do these success plans really work? And just what is their angle?

It’s all about “online coaching.”

When you go to a site like My AE Success, you are told that, for just $97, you’ll gain access to actual millionaires who made their money online using My AE Success. These millionaires will coach you on how to also become an online millionaire.

The truth of the matter is that, your $97 purchase of My AE Success, or Online Success Plan, Ultimate Online Success Plan, or the MOS Success Plan, is just a way for Jordan to get your personal details and phone number. Once this information is captured, you’re caught inside his system’s long-term sales funnel.

You’ll know you’re in a sales funnel when you get your first call from your “success coach.” This coach will ask you a few questions about your personal and financial situation to gauge how much money you can spend. Once you’ve answered those questions, your coach will try to convince you to purchase expensive educational and training programs.

As for the actual millionaire coaching, it’s going to be lackluster. You’ll most likely talk to a person who not only isn’t an Internet millionaire, but who will be reading to you from a script. If any money-making techniques are recommended to you, they will be outdated, spammy or just plain illegal.

You get a millionaire website.

The My AE Success, Online Success Plan, Ultimate Online Success Plan, and MOS Success Plan all promise a ‘millionaire website’ that will generate money for you on auto-pilot. All you have to do is pay a small one-time fee for the server that hosts this website. In the case of My AE Success, that fee is also just $97.

The real deal behind these millionaire websites is that Jordan is either an affiliate of a website host, or he owns his own server. So, you’re paying money to support the website host and/or server. As for your ‘millionaire website,” it’s going to be a poorly executed sales page that contains a few affiliate links…and not much more.

You’ll gain access to traffic sources.

Your coach will recommend that you spend money to promote your website by buying traffic, ad packs, etc. Naturally, all those traffic exchanges, ad pack sites, etc., will be Jordan’s own affiliate products. These traffic sources will cost you money so that you can drive traffic to your “guaranteed to make money” website.

Once you get your paid traffic sources to come to your website, your leads will be delivered to Jordan and his coaching team. That coaching will consist of educational and training product upsells. In fact, this is noted in the below descriptor derived from the MOS Success Plan:

You get guaranteed money (and a Mercedez Benz!)

My AE Success Plan makes some outrageous claims about how you are guaranteed to make $500 in just 30 days following the set-up of your millionaire website. In fact, if you don’t make $500, you’ll get $500 from AE. If you do make $500 in your first 30 days, you’ll qualify for a free Mercedes Benz car.

The truth is far less glamorous and can be gleaned from the site’s earnings disclaimer:

So, if you don’t make the additional product purchases (purchases that might cost several thousand dollars), you won’t see that ‘guaranteed’ $500. As for the free car, it might as well be imaginary: Nothing is mentioned about it either on the site or disclaimer area.

You pay only once and get your money refunded.

My AE Success states that you have a 30-day money-back guarantee on its products. However, there are numerous online complaints about this system regarding how it has charged its buyers repeatedly, and how it has not processed refunds as promised. Here are just a few such complaints:

It’s a unique product.

My AE Success claims that it’s a brand new and never before seen or launched program. However, AE has existed under different program names in the past, including MOS Success Plan and Online Success Plan. As of November 2016, this program is now being touted as Ultimate Online Success Plan- complete with the same bogus promises of $500 and a Mercedes Benz.

Why so many iterations of the same BS?

As these past programs were tried out, angry consumers posted multiple complaints about them. So, Jordan merely shut down those sites and re-launched the same product but under a different name.

Apparently, Jordan’s motto must be, “When you can’t escape bad press, rename yourself.”

We don’t recommend Jordan’s coaching products.

If you’re looking for an online business that will help you attain financial independence, My AE Success (and its many other iterations) from Jordan Daniels isn’t it. Also, the other online systems that Jordan has promoted, and which are now defunct, are also not going to make you money. Save yourself the hassle and heartache.

I’ve Tried That has been reviewing products since 2007. In that time, there’s one program that stands above the rest. It’s free to get started, has no ridiculous hidden charges, and will help you build a sustainable income from home.

Click here to see our top recommendation.

Instant Profit Funnel & Email Cash Funnel: A 2 for 1 Deal

Written By:Steve Wrzeszczynski

Published On: July 15, 2016

I love email marketing. It allows you to connect directly with your followers, to segment them up and is not reliant on outside forces like Google shifting the goal posts.

The thing is, I’m not very good at it.

That’s why when I see internet marketing products saying that they can help me to improve my email marketing, I have to pick them up and take a look.

Some are good, some contain content I already know and some are pretty bad.

I recently picked up Instant Profit Funnel by Mark Wightley.

What is Instant Profit Funnel?

The product comprises of two systems to make money via email marketing. This is based on making squeeze pages (sometimes referred to as landing pages), which are designed to make your visitors sign up to your email list.

The Sales Pitch

The pitch for this product is typical marketing blurb: lots of bolded and underlined text, grand promises, and very little in the way of actual information.

There was nothing overly scammy about the sales page which is refreshing, though there was the usual unprovable proof of earnings, and unverifiable statements of how much Mark and his customers have earned.

The testimonials look real, at least more real than most testimonials I see, but there’s still no way to check them.

Purchasing Instant Profit Funnel

The product is an e-book and it’s designed as a loss leader, as the affiliates for the product actually get 100% of the money from it.

This is because it’s designed to get you into a funnel (oddly enough) and that’s where Mark makes his money, if you buy the upsells that is.

The first upsell is a video course of the same eBook you just bought, plus some added extras for $27. After that you’re offered the videos only for $17.

If you decide to buy one of those, then the funnel continues and the cost starts to increase with a monthly recurring fee for updated training for just $47, and finally a done for you funnel at $97.

Do you need any of that? Not really, though some people may get benefit from them, especially the videos.

Inside Instant Profit Funnel

The member’s area is fairly standard: you’re offered a lot of extras mixed in with the purchased products and of course upgrades to the upsells you didn’t buy to begin with.

The e-book comes with some added extras such email swipes, a checklist and a podcast of the course which is a nice bonus.

You get access to both the Instant Profit Funnel course and the Email Cash Funnel courses. On top of those you get a landing page builder plugin which is actually white labelled version a $19 product on Code Canyon. I don’t think you get updates though which isn’t ideal.

Instant Profit Funnel

A solid 56 page eBook, the text is nicely sized, has plenty of useful images and contains very little fluff.

The eBook covers finding a niche, autoresponders, products to promote, offers/bribes, squeeze page creation, high ticket offers, list setup, tracking, follow ups and traffic.

Of course, if you pick up any eBook on email marketing, it will contain most if not all of these.

However, Mark does offer some good information. For example in the niche selection section, he covers points on finding a solid niche specifically for email marketing that most other writers and product creators fail to advise on. It’s still common sense, but it’s nice to see written down.

The focus on the email marketing is very much a hard sell: you are being advised to email people basically daily.

This might well work as a separate website and system, but I wouldn’t advise you to use this tactic on an existing business website, it’s more likely to annoy your customer base than help.

If you’ve ever signed up to a “make money online” product yourself, and then received countless emails, it’s that style that Mark’s product promotes.

The traffic generation section has some interesting tips, but only covers a few methods and then only in brief which is a shame, as traffic generation is usually the biggest hurdle for most people.

It also seems a bit rushed. As an example he gives you 4 rules to follow for niche selection, but then actually only provides 3.

Email Cash Funnel

A longer eBook at 99 pages, Email Cash Funnel has the same formatting and useful images included.

This eBook is very similar to Instant Profit Funnel in that it follows a similar process (select niche, autoresponder etc).

However it goes into much more detail about how to set up a campaign in Aweber. It also promotes things slightly differently. Instead of focusing on 2 or 3 products it pushes 10 or more. The style of promoting also seems a little less hard sell and more focusing on the consumer.

I really liked the fact that Mark included several example emails that look like they would work.

There’s definitely more detail in this e-book, mainly with Aweber but also with creating landing pages.

The traffic generation section is also bigger and more detailed than the other eBook.

The Bottom Line

This products isn’t a scam, in fact you actually get a lot of value for money for the $7 bucks you initially outlay. Sure you have to navigate the upsells and choose wisely but overall the value is there.

The two eBooks you get as part of this purchase are very similar, yet they are also different enough to expand and complement each other.

If you have had success with email marketing before, then you may not get much out of these, but if your fairly new to it or have been struggling to make money with it, then there is a lot of quality advice in these 2 eBooks.

I didn’t like the hard sell aspect of the first book, but it’s been proven to work – if it didn’t you wouldn’t see it in your inbox every day.

Overall I was surprised by the quality of the Instant Profit Funnel & Email Cash Funnel systems, and would actually recommend it for a good grounding in email marketing.

Have Car, Will Earn: 14 Ways You Can Get Paid to Drive

Written By:Steve Wrzeszczynski

Last Updated:January 18, 2022

Did you know that you can get paid to drive your own car?

You may have already heard of things like driving people around (e.g., Uber and Lyft), but there are other ways you can turn your car into a cash-generating machine.

Let’s look at all the ways you can earn money from driving!

How to Get Paid to Drive Your Car

Here are 14 ideas for you to consider:

1. Deliver groceries

If you live in an urban area and/or can find lots of customers that live in one location (e.g., assisted living facilities), you can earn $25/hour or more.

Grocery delivery sites need people to shop for and deliver groceries to customers.

2. Deliver Amazon packages

Amazon Prime Now and Amazon are both hiring delivery drivers through their Amazon Flex program in major urban centers across the country. To qualify for this job, you’ll need a smartphone so you can download and use Amazon’s delivery app. Positions pay up to $25/hour.

3. Be a mystery shopper

Mystery shopping, sometimes also referred to as shadow shopping or secret shopping, involves being tasked to go into different establishments, giving feedback to the mystery shopping company and eventually to the owners of these establishments.

The aim of this feedback is to improve the establishments’ products, policies and procedures, customer service, and overall customer experience.

Examples of establishments that hire mystery shoppers include restaurants, convenience stores, automotive shops, grocery stores, and many more.

Plenty of these mystery shopping companies give out assignments in multiple stores in multiple locations, so they normally prefer to hire those with their own transportation.

The pay for mystery shopping assignments varies from $3-$80, and you can earn bonus money if you complete deadline-sensitive assignments.

4. Rent out your car

If you aren’t interested in actually driving your car to earn money, sites like Turo offer you the opportunity to rent it out to others.

Yearly earnings from renting your car out vary by the value of your car and how many days it can be used, but some sites estimate yearly earnings up to $13,000. I give more details as well as a list of car-sharing websites in this article.

5. Turn your car into ad space through car wrapping

Believe it or not, there are legitimate car wrap sites that will wrap your car in advertising and pay you good money for it. You essentially get paid to drive a moving billboard for advertisers and businesses.

One such site is MyFreeCar, which offers up to $400/month if you end up wrapping your car with an ad.

Other car wrap sites include Wrapify, Carvertise, and Nickelytics.

You’ll have to be careful with car wrap scams, though. I’ve explained one of them here, and in a nutshell, it involves baiting with promises to give you thousands of dollars in exchange for renting out your car.

6. Perform microjobs and microtasks

Sites like TaskRabbit and Thumbtack need people to pick up dry cleaning, get movie tickets, assemble furniture at someone’s house, etc.

To complete these tasks, you’ll most likely need a car. Payouts from microtasks range from a few dollars to maybe $20; however, if you can schedule a series of tasks at nearby locations, you could earn at least $25/hour.

7. Move large stuff

If you have a larger-sized vehicle like a van or pickup truck, you can offer moving services to people who are moving houses, taking home a large item they just bought from a store, or taking junk and scrap metal to a dump or recycling center.

You could list your moving services privately, such as through sites like Craigslist and Nextdoor. You could also sign up with websites and apps like Dolly, BuddyTruk, Lugg, and GoShare.

Check out our list of jobs for pickup trucks to learn more about earning from your large vehicle.

8. Host sightseeing tours

If you live in an interesting urban or natural locale, you can create custom sightseeing tours and charge tourists to take them to places they want to see: both the usual tourist spots and the off-the-beaten-path ones.

To advertise such services, consider teaming up with other local businesses and offering them a “pit stop” on your tour in exchange for advertising the tour and maybe even helping to sell tickets.

To make your tours a success, you’ll need a larger vehicle with big windows, such as a van. Also, consider jazzing up your tour with custom brochures, maps, and even souvenirs.

I’ve written about being a local tour guide here, including which companies employ local tour guides.

9. Chauffer for a wedding

If you have a custom, vintage, or sports vehicle on your hands, you could offer rides in it for wedding parties and guests. Being at the beck and call of a wedding party for rides to and from the church or courthouse, reception area, hotel, and/or airport could fetch you an easy $500 or more for the entire day.

Bonus: you might even get to eat some cake!

To get started as a chauffeur, it’s best to set up a website and post plenty of gorgeous photos of your vehicle(s) and offered services. You may also wish to take out liability insurance for your business.

10. Deliver newspapers or even the mail

These days, the old neighborhood paperboy route has been mostly taken over by drivers who cover larger territories and deliver newspapers, magazines, and USPS mail.

Some of these jobs can be found by perusing standard job sites like Monster and Indeed. You should also check with your local USPS office to find out if there is a need for a driver to cover a (usually rural) geographic location. Local distributors can also give you some routes to cover.

The pay varies based on your employer, but if you cover the same territories for multiple employers, you could easily make an extra $1,000/month.

11. Drive children around

Childcare for school-age kids doesn’t just mean caring for children in their homes anymore.

It now involves picking kids up and driving them to and from school, doctor’s appointments, sports practices and events, other afterschool programs and extracurricular activities, and of course, their homes.

HopSkipDrive is an app where you can sign up as a driver and be connected with families who need rides. The requirements are a bit stringent: you need to be at least 23 years old, have at least 5 years of caregiving experience, an excellent driving record, a clean background check, and a four-door vehicle no more than 10 years old.

But the pay is greater than what you can make through the usual ridesharing apps; you can make up to $60 per hour driving kids around.

12. Drive safely

Yes, we now live in a world where you can get paid to drive safely.

Auto insurance companies are gathering information about drivers’ habits through smart devices in the covered cars or through smartphone apps.

For instance, State Farm has Drive Safe and Save, Progressive has Snapshot, Allstate has Drivewise, and so on.

The payment comes in either cashback or discounts on your premiums. For instance, Allstate’s Drivewise gets you up to 10% cashback just for signing up, and up to 25% cashback every six months for safe driving.

13. Deliver cars from one point to another

If you love long drives, there are companies who would pay for you to scratch your itch, as long as you’re okay not driving your own car.

Driving for hours on end can be lonely, but if you have a great sense of adventure, you might find this gig quite enjoyable.

Learn more about delivering cars from Point A to Point B.

14. Drive elders

The number of elderly people in the US is steadily growing, so if you live in an area with plenty of retirement communities, getting paid to drive elders to various appointments and errands can be a lucrative gig for you.

You can look for driving errands and gigs on websites such as SilverRide (San Francisco and Kansas City areas only), ElderCare.com, and Care.com.

Other ways to make money from your car (besides selling it)

There are numerous other ways you can profit from your vehicle, including the following:

Posting car repair/detail videos to YouTube and then marketing those videos.
Taking pets to and from vet appointments.
Driving people to attractions that have limited/expensive parking.

Final Thoughts

Generally speaking, if you own a car, you’re in a great position to get side hustles for a few hours a week.

Cars are one of those properties that always depreciate in value over time. But getting one or more of these side gigs can at least offset that depreciation and put a little more change in your pocket.

Have you tried any of the above ways to get paid to drive? Can you think of other options for making money with your car, truck, van, SUV? Share these with us in the comments!

Is High Traffic Academy by Vick Strizheus Worth Its $997 Cost?

Written By:Halina Zakowicz

Published On: July 4, 2016

If you are a newbie affiliate marketer or website owner, you know how hard it is to get traffic to your site(s). It can be disheartening when you write a brilliant blog post, publish it, and get no comments or even views.

That’s why High Traffic Academy initially caught my interest. High Traffic Academy is the creation of Vick Strizheus, the “King of Online Traffic,” who also offers group and one-on-one coaching/consulting sessions ranging from $5,000 to $100,000.

A guy who charges such hefty fees for his time and expertise must really know what he’s talking about, right?

So, Vick is now offering an online version of his coaching sessions, called High Traffic Academy.

What is High Traffic Academy?

High Traffic Academy (HTA) is a membership site, created and operated by Vick, that teaches its members how to get quality traffic to their websites. To this end, Vick offers video tutorials, webinars, e-books, traffic campaign examples, and select products.

The HTA operates on three basic pillars:

Website development

Here you learn to purchase a domain and hosting, create your landing page, and link your landing page to an email autoresponder. To this end, Vick gives you access to his landing page builder.

Traffic Generation

This is the meat of the program and Vick tells you of several paid methods that can help you generate traffic to your landing pages. The PPC methods are provided through his software programs and traffic exchanges including Offline Goldmine Traffic, The Penny Traffic, The Underground PPC Traffic.

There is also software that teaches you how to work with Google image ads (i.e., Secret GIA Traffic), software that tells you about buying email lists (i.e., Email Media Traffic), and software that teaches you about using banner ads (i.e., Banner Media Traffic). You are also introduced to CPA networks and ad swaps.

List control

In this section, Vick instructs you on what you need to do after you have paid traffic coming to your landing pages. For example, how do you get a customer to become a repeat customer? Vick also shows you a secret method for following your competitors’ traffic online and building your email list off of this traffic.

You get the following items with your paid subscription:

Email autoresponder
Click tracker
URL scarper
Sales page templates
Video/YouTube marketing tutorials
Social media traffic generation techniques
Lead capture techniques

Is HTA worth its hefty $997 price?

HTA isn’t cheap, and a full membership plan costs $997. Even at its occasional promotional rate, HTA still costs $197/month to get started. So, is HTA worth the money?

I say no, and here are my reasons why.

1. Vick focuses on traffic, not content.

The HTA training is focused almost exclusively on generating traffic with PPC ads, banner ads, image ads, etc. There is very little time devoted to creating a quality website and filling it with valuable content. In fact, Vick makes it appear that you don’t even need a website, just a bunch of sales pages.

Google won’t even index your site if it contains nothing but a sales page. You’ll get no organic traffic whatsoever if you don’t have content for your viewers to peruse. And therein lies to key to Vick’s methods…

2. The recommended methods aren’t free.

Vick tells you next to nothing about generating free, organic traffic by creating a quality website, publishing tutorials and videos, etc. He also says nothing about content SEO and how you can get your web pages to rank well on search engines like Google. The only SEO that’s mentioned is ad SEO (e.g., how to match headline and ad keywords).

However, Vick tells you quite a bit about how you should buy traffic and email lists. Most of the recommended exchanges and marketplaces just happen to be his own products, which he generates a profit from when you make your purchases.

3. You’ll be spending more than $997.

The full year membership to HTA costs $997. However, you’ll be spending much more than that after you shell out the $997.

Vick’s trainings and webinars are nothing more than dressed-up sales presentations where he attempts to have you buy paid traffic, paid email lists, paid ads, etc. Even though Vick claims that you’ll get really cheap traffic (“as low as $0.05/click!”), you’ll still need to spend money to generate that traffic.

Vick also proposes that you test out his traffic-generating scenarios within your PPC and ad campaigns. To complete many of these scenarios, you’ll need some really deep pockets. Furthermore, without an optimized website to back up your sale pages, you’ll be paying high fees to Google due to your low Quality Score.

4. Getting a refund can be tricky.

Current HTA members are complaining about their difficulties with getting refunds. For example, here is a complaint posted by Geoffrey:

5. The online reviews might be biased.

Several HTA members report being offered monetary compensation in exchange for a positive review of HTA just days after first joining HTA. It’s one thing to ask for an unbiased review and offer some kind of compensation, but quite another to pay for biased reviews.

6. Some of the material is outdated.

HTA members have made online comments such as the following regarding the outdated nature of HTA trainings:

7. Vick isn’t exactly innocent.

We found this YouTube news video showing his 90-day sentencing on a charge of grand theft in South Dakota.

We’re passing on High Traffic Academy

Affiliate marketers and website/product owners who don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on paid traffic, email lists and advertising won’t find HTA of much use to them. Also, HTA spends little if any time teaching about building quality websites that are indexed well by search engines like Google, Bing, etc. Almost every recommended method has to be paid for, and the commissions from those payments invariably go to Vick.

If you are interested in generating traffic and sales in ways that won’t kill your wallet, there are plenty of other quality affiliate marketing platforms out there, including Wealthy Affiliate.