I know a little bit about each of these organizations because I have helped Empowerism and SFI become what they are by being an active, paid member. I am no longer a member of either opportunity and have not been for some time.

I will write about my experience as a Newcomer with each opportunity and will start with Empowersim. I came to Empowerism as a member of Stone Evans' Plug-In Profit (PIP) opportunity because joining Empowerism was a requirement of PIP.

I came to SFI the same way, through PIP. The only difference was my membership in Empowerism required a monthly fee of $19.95. While I was not required by PIP to become a paying member of SFI, I did choose immediately to upgrade my membership in SFI with a qualifying purchase of $29.95 monthly.

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that both Empowerism and SFI are opportunities that some affiliate marketers have developed successfully. I am not one of those marketers.

Almost all Internet Marketing opportunities tell you that even the village idiot with no experience can make fantastic money when you follow their training programs, advertise like mad, and hang in there until you die.

They, of course, are dead wrong, but it certainly would hurt sales if they suggested that there are some marketers who could not build successful businesses even if their life depended upon it.

Smart, successful marketers know this to be true. If you do not have the skill set, ability, interest level, determination and initiative to make something happen, it will not happen, but who wants to tell a newcomer that they might actually have to do something and invest some money to even have a chance of succeeding.

Even if you try your level best to do everything right, the likelihood of it happening is still problematic.

The owners of the company that present the opportunity and a few distributors may earn some money, but I bet any company would be hard put to show that even 10% of its subscribed members are actually profitable after they subtract their expenses from any commissions earned.

Each of these opportunities give affiliate marketers a connection to a company server which generates a no-charge Internet site to promote their business as well as the company business.

Empowerism allows you to send prospects to any page on your website except the sign-up page. As a newcomer to Internet Marketing, I did not immediately pick up on the significance of this necessity, but it is this: Every prospect my paid advertising generated went to Empowerism and became part of its mailing list, whether my prospect signed up or not.

Every large, successful business tries to leverage its efforts to increase productivity and profits, and Empowerism and SFI are examples of this practice.

Once Empowerism has the e-mail address of a new prospect, whether they join or not, the new prospect is immediately inundated with e-mail pitches by auto-responder, which could potentially sent e-mails to a prospect every day for a year.

When newcomers, eager to learn the nuances of Internet Marketing, respond to dozens of free offers for software programs, secret techniques and insider information from gurus and assorted lesser lights, you can imagine the result.

This barrage of e-mails has nothing to do with the fact that you took advantage of the opportunity. They will continue until you opt-out of the sender's offerings.

I found Empowerism's iSend.info auto-responder to be beyond my technical skills and made little use of it. It annoyed me that unless you upgraded your membership Empowerism put its messages on top of your messages, calculated to not miss another opportunity to promote themselves even though the system was advertised to be of greatest benefit to its members.

Then the new Get Response system arrived, apparently because the iSend.info auto-responder system was not working as advertised. After using the Get Response system, it struck me as overpromoted, overused and not very effective.

I used paid advertising to drive hundreds of prospects to Empowerism's sign-up page, and received the benefit of the 50 leads Empowerism threw in monthly. After months of experience I would learn that Empowerism's 50 free leads monthly was one of the greatest examples of tokenism known to man. The result was that I sponsored in no one.

Remember that my paid advertising and the advertising of thousands of other members was adding prospects to Empowerism's ever growing, massive mailing list. I suspect the powers to be at Empowerism were merely recycling names that they already had faster than a hungry man could chow down on a bowl of Cheerios and milk.

I was sitting there, looking at the list of my hundreds of prospects who chose not to sign up and speculating that "you would think that someone would see Empowerism as the best thing since chocolate chip cookies."

Copyright © 2006 Ed Bagley