Something interesting happened to me yesterday and it inspired this post today. I know I have lots to catch up with when it comes to posting payments but bear with me, this is important. One of my husband’s cousins visited us yesterday in an attempt to get us to “invest” in his latest venture; Eadgear.com. All six of us (my household), stood around as he sat at the computer and explained to us how this website worked. It took me by surprise because although I’ve been making money online for a while now with things like paid surveys, affiliate marketing, and Google Adsense, I never really mentioned it outside my immediate family. This guy, let’s call him John, had NO idea that I had some knowledge about how to make money online.
So he continued with his presentation, telling us about how many people were making tons of money from this program. He talked about all the people who he had signed up, including many of our friends and family. Off course being that this was right up my alley of making money on the Internet, I was very interested. I began asking a ton of questions.
My first question off course was:
1. Is it free?
John smiled and said, no it’s not. In fact, these were his exact words. “Off course it’s not.. how could it be free?”
How could it be free? I have been making money online for the past four years and have never spent any money to make money. In fact, I always advise all my readers of this blog, that if you have to spend money to sign up to a program that promises you will make a ton of money, it is most likely a scam or scheme. Note the difference between the two terms. A scam may be considered as something you will never get paid from and lose your upfront investment. A scheme on the other hand, most likely will pay you. However, there will be a few “tricks” in order for you to get paid (or at least make as much as the big guns are making), and most of the time it involves recruiting others. This is what is known as a pyramid scheme, and that’s exactly what Eadgear is. Look at the diagram below which shows why a pyramid scheme becomes unsustainable and unrealistic.
2. How much is it to join?
John informed me that there are various packages with the lowest being $300, however because of the monthly fee and low benefits of that package, he does not advise any of his referrals to sign up with that package. He advises them to sign up and “invest” in the $2000 package.
Are you kidding me?!?! I don’t even believe in spending a dollar to make join any website that promises you will make money online, and you’re asking me to spend $2000?
According to John, since you start of getting paid 10% of your investment, you make your money back within 10 months, and faster if you can get referrals. You would get a 10% commission on your referral’s investment as well as 2% of their total clicks per month.
Besides the insane upfront “investment”, 10 months seemed like a pretty long time to me. And getting referrals did not seem easy either since there was such a huge upfront investment. I can tell you from experience. Many of the sites I promote here on my blog give me a small bonus for getting referrals, and ALL of these sites are free to join. The fact that it is free doesn’t make it any easier to get referrals. Why would you think getting someone to spend $2000 would be easy?
Although the fact that the program was not free already turned me off, I decided to still hear him out about how exactly this program works.
3. What exactly does the program do?
He described the program as an “SEO program”. Basically, when you sign up to the site, you become a member. The site has thousands of members and these members get paid to “rate” or basically “visit” websites everyday, which is set on an auto-rotate with a timer. This is basically what you would be getting paid to do.
John claimed that because these thousands of members were visiting your site everyday, this traffic would cause your ranking on Google to increase. This made me laugh because it is a misconception that has been proven time and time again to be exactly that… a misconception. Traffic alone does not cause your rank to increase. In fact, this type of traffic which is basically “paid traffic” (because you’re paying for a package from this site, which in turn means paying these people to visit your site), is awful in the eyes of Google. It might even cause your site to be penalized!
Don’t just listen to my word. Here’s a thread that I found on SEOmoz.org’s forum, which is one of the top SEO forums around: What is Eadgear.com?
In the thread above, many experts expressed their concern about the traffic coming from this site to their own websites, and some even went as far as blocking the site from their servers. This type of traffic does not send targeted customers to your website, and so since they’re usually just sitting there waiting for the timer to count down so they can go on to the next site and finish their daily rounds to get paid, this increases your bounce rate and decreases your clickthrough ratio… all things that Google looks at when determining rank.
4. Does the site do any other kind of SEO for those that purchase packages?
John talked a bit about the fact that they would make sure your site had good keywords and correct meta tags. I asked whether or not they did any type of backlinking and he had no clue what I was talking about.
After John left last night, I decided to do some of my own research. I visited the main website eadgear.com. They claimed that they optimized websites based on W3C compliance, Web Design, Social Media, and SEM.
Giving them the benefit of doubt that they do, I can’t see how they could afford to pay their workers, SEO specialists, etc., in addition to paying the “clicking” members. It just seemed a bit fishy to me. Also, if they were so versed in good SEO tactics, they would know that search engines like Google do not see this mass traffic with a high bounce rate going to sites as good.
In my opinion, this site was a paid traffic site running under the idea of a SEO site.
SEO is something that’s always changing. In fact, Google just posted that they had 52 changes for the month of April in their algorithm that they use to rank sites. And these are the ones they publish. Many of their changes are unpublished so as to avoid SEO specialists from tampering with the search results.
But off course, this shouldn’t concern the members though as they’re just there to make money right?
As long as they’re getting paid, why should they care about whether or not the site was doing legit SEO work?
Well they should care for a few reasons:
1. The upfront investment to be a member of this site is not a small amount. Whether you go in at the lowest level of $300 or higher level, you take approximately 10 months to make back your initial investment. With the monthly fees, etc., it might even take longer. If this site goes down for some reason before that 10 month period, there is no insurance on your investment. In other words, you risk losing everything.
2. If Eadgear.com cannot show proof of their SEO results on various websites, then others will be skeptical to purchase SEO packages from them, which means you as a member will eventually have less sites to view/rate everyday.
3. A bad reputation can also cause webmasters to stay away from Eadgear’s SEO services which will have the same result as above; less sites for you to view, therefore you make less money unless you can get referrals.
This was my initial review of Eadgear.com based on what I was told yesterday by John, as well as a little of my own research, knowledge and past experience, and a gut feeling. Will I “invest” in this company? HIGHLY UNLIKELY. I’d say 99% NO; the reason being that I’m trying to make money at the moment and I do not have the large upfront investment that this requires, especially since I’m uncertain whether I’d even get it back… much less make any kind of profit! However, I’ll continue to keep an eye on this and continue to be in touch with John to hear about his profits and I will be sure to update you guys in the future if my gut feeling and review about this site is proven to be wrong.
My real name is Reanna but around the web, especially in the MMO (make money online) world, I'm referred to as TriNi. On this blog, I aim to teach people that it CAN be done; that there are legit and 100% free ways to make money online.
