“Don’t let others convince you that the idea is good when your gut tells you it’s bad.” -Kevin Rose
I’m not gonna sit here and try to convince you that this is a good idea. Bottom line, I’m not an affiliate and I don’t care if you choose to do this.
But if you’re reading this four percent review, then my mission is to give you the facts so you can make the best decision for yourself.
So what exactly is the Vick Strizheus Four Percent Challenge?
Basically, Vick Strizheus has created an affiliate opportunity within the program, which allows for many people to join for the single intent of promoting it to other people.
Due to this it is very common to find many disingenuous four percent reviews and to the way his program system is set up, it can look very similar in scope to a mlm.
This does not bode well for the creator as it is something he has been involved in, in the past.
My opinion stands to reason that there is no real fault in this model if by promoting your product to others, for others to sell, so long as your product is worthy enough to generate similar outcomes for other people.
Will this be another Vick Strizheus scam?
Only time will tell really, however what I plan to do with this four percent review is to provide some of the obstacles participants of the four percent challenge have faced and how you can prevent similar traps that seem to plague many affiliate marketers today.
I will also explain exactly why I left the affiliate marketing game and instead chose to follow the path of lead generation sites instead.
Which is the current business model I follow now that has helped me generate a 45k+ monthly income to date.
Who Is Vick Strizheus?
If you Google Vick Strizheus, you will undoubtedly come across many articles, reviews, and opinions of the man and his offerings being complete scams.
Which really makes his company the Four Percent Group a hard sell.
While there may be some truth to those accusations and we can’t deny actual proof as well; there is a lot of people out there who are unabashedly putting all blame on one man for not getting them the results they expected (yet he never actually promised) and forgetting to hold a little self-accountability for their own actions or lack thereof.
Vick grew up in the Ukraine, only moving to the states when he was a teenager. With that came a pretty preordained sense of what life is supposed to be like.
You go to school, you get a degree, you get a job and then take a vacation every year. However, once living in the states he started to envision something bigger for himself.
He set out to be the best at whatever job he was in. Once he got married, early in his twenties, he wanted to continue raising the bar so he invested $30,000 into learning internet marketing.
Which turned around and bit him because he was not able to make that investment back and ended up losing it all. For most people that would be enough to quit.
Yet, he didn’t. Vick found a mentor and took his small email following of twenty people to over a 7 figure income by being an affiliate influencer.
In 2000, when Vick was a 19 year old kid at an insurance company, he made the decision to write faulty claims so he would get commissions.
Knowing he was committing a crime but due to “financial hardship” thought it was his only escape, thinking he could pay it all back; no harm no foul.
Only to have it come full circle in 2009 when he was arrested for said grand theft. Within 90 days here is what happened:
- Received a 90-day work release
- Had to stay in county jail on the weekends
- Completely lost his $50,000 a month business
- Labelled a “scammer” and con artist
- Cost him friends and associates and his own confidence and self-image
Vick claims what he did was an honest mistake and has since vowed to make a comeback and let the world know he is legit.
He started with that curated email list and something he coined as the “48-hour Cash Machine.”
From there he realized the idea of creating products to help push what his list wanted became the fuel to getting his income potential back.
He became very successful at building these support structures that he endorsed to push other products and training for others to endorse as well and that allowed him to earn back his initial marketing investment of $30K in just shy of a month after his release.
The short of it is this, Vick’s intentions always seem to be in the right place but his choices don’t always seem to match nor do his promises.
However, I will say this about the guy he does know his way around this affiliate marketing business so my strongest piece of advice when taking anything from Vick Strizheus is to make sure the program is officially up and running AND has positive reviews.
So for his sake and yours lets go over the Four Percent Group and what you would actually receive from it.
How the Four Percent System Works
There are SEVEN steps to his program:
- New Member Orientation
- Quick Setup and Activating Multiple Streams of Income
- Funnel Setup
- Power Base Activation
- Plant Your Flag
- The Miracles of Live Events
- Operation $100,000
What exactly do all these steps help you accomplish?
The idea here is to activate multiple streams of income, so Vick wants you to promote multiple affiliate offerings at one time.
One of the reasons Vick feels so many affiliate partners fail is because they are only promoting one offer that isn’t necessarily the right fit for their audience.
I absolutely align with this because my lead generation mentor always taught me the importance of having “multiple lines in the water,” or “multiple shoes on the shelf.”
Vick is absolutely right here.
However, I am of the opinion that the reason most affiliates fail is their inability to generate consistent profits.
One pitfall of this course is that it is only educating and training its students on paid advertising for traffic flow but doesn’t teach anything on FREE traffic.
Vick is doing a huge disservice to his students IMO.
What Vick does do is tell you exactly which products you should be promoting, again remember this is affiliate training on affiliate programs he is a part of; so it is a pretty ingenious way of also getting more affiliate commission checks in Vicks very own bank account.
Quite frankly there wasn’t anything new on his list as I feel most affiliates tend to promote these products anyway.
There is Tecademics (should be noted this product is no longer available), ClickFunnels (the offers costs more than the Four Percent Group membership), LeadPages, Click Magick, GetResponse, AWeber, Udimi, and NameCheap.
The kicker here is you first have to buy these products to promote them.
Which comes at an additional cost to you on top of the program cost.
The easiest part of affiliate marketing is picking the products and creating the funnels, determing how exactly you’re going to generate the traffic to those funnels is the hard part.
How do you generate traffic?
Here is where it gets a bit disheartening because there aren’t many four percent reviews actually confirming any real proof that this program’s students are actually creating positive results with this strategy.
I have used the paid display advertising plan and my personal results were pretty terrible.
For someone just getting into this business model, you really don’t have access to profits upfront to use for your ad spend.
You are just hoping to make commissions that can get you to break even, or at least stay just above the red.
The way to make it as an affiliate partner is in free traffic but that is a challenge in and of itself.
Have you ever tried ranking for “Aweber review”? Yeah, good luck with that as it is commandeered by Herculean websites.
In 2012, it used to be crazy easy for new guys to make money with affiliate marketing, but it is now 2020 and affiliate marketing is one of the most competitive online marketing strategies.
This is why I am so passionate about sharing lead generation as a viable option and it is still very much a game even amateurs can profit from.
This review is on how The Four Percent Group is successful, so how are his students actually seeing success without any official SEO training?
The answer is…YOUTUBE. Technically, this is a free strategy that only requires making a simple video, right?
How can one be successful with YouTube videos?
There is one example of a student of the Four Percent Group who seemed to have success after he uploaded a video every single day for nine full months. EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
If he chose to go out of town or knew he wouldn’t be available he would make several videos a day and would schedule them to post daily.
That is the intense sense of hustle and grit that is necessary to make money from affiliate marketing on the YouTube platform.
This insane methodology is only going to get more intense and more competitive as more and more people make the same types of videos with the same types of products.
With so much of the same happening how will your videos stand out above the crowd? How can you be sure your affiliate link will be the one used?
For someone who promotes multiple streams of income but only relies on one platform to generate all the traffic to those streams through mass volume, doesn’t really seem conducive to success to me.
If you are already experienced with YouTube videos and that is something you feel you truly could dominate then by all means maybe this is the business model for you.
However, this is why we search for mentors, to help guide us to our ultimate potential, to show us multiple skills to get us there, and by being examples for us to model.
We go to them so they can show us how we can be the most effective with our time.
Why affiliate marketing isn’t the business model I recommend
Success comes from action, action causes momentum, and momentum causes motivation. This is the cycle I strive to accomplish with my businesses.
If you are trying to garner traffic for your affiliate links, that’s like trying to climb Everest without any conditioning training.
You will have no idea what you are doing, you may find some goals attainable but you will never reach the ultimate prize.
I’m not saying it’s impossible, there are plenty of successes to show that it is. But it’s not for the faint of heart and it’s not the easiest path to success in online business.
Trying to make a profit can be even less attainable and will take a significant amount of time and energy which can ultimately kill your sense of motivation.
It seems to me the only ones making money within the four percent group are the ones promoting the four percent group, which is something that is recommended numerous times within the training.
That hits a little too close to a multi-level marketing program to me, the kind where you are promoting the program itself and not the actual training material.
I cannot see how that is a sustainable business practice. Not only that, with the lack of training on traffic creation; how will you beat out your competitors or even the students who came before you and finished the course?
Or, even people such as myself who are masters within the ranking levels and know how to dominate the search engine again and again. This review is an example of that very skill!
Conclusion & why I recommend lead gen (it did take me to 45k/mo after all)
With the Vick Strizheus Four Percent Group, you are shown how to use Vick’s funnels, to promote Vick’s affiliates, to gain a small commission, while he gains a lot of commissions.
You are not given tools to learn how to properly educate yourself on SEO or ways to gather free traffic to help you with your own affiliate partnerships.
I don’t know about you, but I would much prefer a program that gives me all the tools and a complete comprehensive knowledge to succeed while filling MY bank account and not someone else’s.
After all we become entrepreneurs to become our own bosses not work under someone else!
My recommendation to you is to check out this lead generation program instead.
You will learn how to build aesthetically pleasing and functional websites, while learning how to effectively rank those sites, and gain the confidence and skills to build your very own digital real estate empire that will pay you monthly.
Below is an example of one of my sites. It’s been paying me $1000 ever single month since the beginning of 2019 and I haven’t touched it since.
Mailbox money.
If you are looking for a new skill, if you are looking to make a 6 figure income, if you are looking to have a truly passive income that makes you money while you sleep…
