I do not usually do "reviews" of people, but this person has branded herself as a product. Ellie Drake seems to be a very, very intelligent and determined woman, having escaped from the Iranian dictatorship and made her life in America. She put herself through medical school and made a huge success of her life in network marketing. She is truly a success story and her style is inspirational.
However, there is not a great deal of substance in what she teaches. I would call it "a lot of fluff". Don't get me wrong. Ellie Drake is an inspiration to many people. But most people could NEVER imitate her, much less hope to achieve what she has done.
Ms. Drake is also a very pretty woman, a point that she takes full advantage of with her "movie star" quality photographs. Again, not a very realistic characteristic for the average networker to copy.
Recently, Ms. Drake teamed up with Mike Filsaime to do a "joint venture" in what they called "The Death Of Network Marketing". I'm sure both of them made a lot of money, but I seriously doubt if a networker made more than a few dollars.
I have seen this theme carried out over and over again. Gurus joint venture with one another to double their profits. They talk about the hundreds of thousands of dollars they make and laugh about it. I'll give a good example of this in another review at another time. Just believe me, they are not doing these joint ventures for the benefit of network marketers or even affiliate marketers. They do it to double and triple and quadruple their own income.
I posted the following review on our Power-Teams.Com Reviews in May, 2008. I thought it would be good to share it on this blog.
Incidentally, the whole web site for this scam has now disappeared. I know quite a few people joined and I wish we could find a way to contact the proprietors and ask for our money back. Not that it would do any good, but it would feel good to bug them.
Here's my post from May, 2008:
We joined Gibolution in December, 2007. In a private email to me, they promised to build the downline in Giblink for ONLY $39.95 per quarter (every 3 months).
Looking back, I can see how foolish I was when I believed people like this. I was so busy at the time that I did not have any spare time to promote Giblink. So, I decided, "what the heck?" and signed up for these guys to do the promotion and business building for me. After all, Giblink is a "straight line downline", so it made sense to me that it would benefit both me and them for them to do this work.
During the 3 months, I sent several emails to these guys asking, "how's it going?" and "what are you doing for me with the money I spent?"
Absolutely NO answer whatsoever.
That didn't stop them from charging my PayPal again in March, 2008. I filed a complaint with PayPal. Since this was not a physical product, they couldn't help me at all.
BEWARE of signing up for services like this that use the "subscription service" PayPal offers unless you are sure it's something you really want and can believe in. If I had used my VISA card, I could have reversed the charge, but not with a subscription service with PayPal.
I still think PayPal is one of the finest payment processors on the internet, but I failed to read the fine print. When I asked, their very professional staff showed me where I was wrong.
However, even though I made a mistake in trusting these guys at Gibolution, I won't make it again. Unfortunately for them, their record now contains a permanent public record showing they were investigated for possible fraudulent activity.
They could have at least answered one email. Too busy counting money, I suppose.
I noticed a few days ago that Giblink is still advertising and apparently reorganized.
I posted the following in May, 2007 on my original Power-Teams Reviews and wanted to share it here on the blog:
We joined Giblink in September, 2007 while the hype was at its peak! It really sounded so good. We made enough from commissions to pay for one extra quarter (3 months) of membership.
I really did not promote Giblink very much, due to a lack of time and probably a lack of commitment on my part, so I realize I didn't give it a fair chance from that point of view.
However, the program was promoted as if a person did not really need to promote it in order to make money. It was supposed to be a force-filled matrix or single line downline. Well, we never saw anybody added to our group except for the people we personally invited who joined.
I also joined a group called "Gibolution" who promised nearly in blood to build the group and add people directly to our membership. They just took the money and ran. I couldn't even get them to answer emails. More about them on their own "review".
Giblink is supposed to be a community of businesses and the quarterly $150.00 price is for advertising to that community. I did go into the site and set up all the advertising and personal web page to promote my primary businesses. I never heard from a single person in the Giblink community who expressed an interest. That could, of course, be my own fault. Maybe they didn't like the way I looked in my picture. Maybe they had no interest in our service or product. Regardless, our advertising there produced not one particle of interest.
Overall, this is a gorgeous web site. Very nice technical abilities. The debit card on which they pay is difficult to obtain and costs an additional $19.95, but I did manage to get it done. The payment process worked well and they did deduct the cost ($150.00) from my commissions for the first quarter (December, 2007). However, there was not enough money in that account for the second go around (March, 2008), so I did allow them to draft my bank account. Unless I see something new, I will probably drop this deal before the next deduction from my account.
The reason I am negative is mostly because I have never received a single inquiry due to my advertising within the community. That tells me the community is not very active and the advertising is not reaching many people. If I were selling ice cubes to polar bears, I would have had at least one inquiry.
I also cannot recommend them because of the hype promoted originally. Perhaps things will change in the future, but right now I would stay away.
Stumble It!
