Complaint Review: Higher Impact Inc. - Phoenix Arizona

THANK YOU Ripoff Report for warning me about these scammers!  Somehow they got my phone number and called me on 10.24.2011, first I talked to a nice-enough sounding guy who said his name was Tim Johnson and simply asked me to listen to a 7- or 8-minute marketing recording, which I did although I didn't pay a whole lot of attention because I was busy doing other things too and it was all standard marketing hype I've heard before without a lot of specifics.  Toward the end it was sounding pretty cookie-cutter boring and I got the idea to check them on RipoffReport.com where I found THIRTEEN unanswered reports so I just hung up but they called me back only this time it was someone else besides Tim whose name I didn't catch. 

What the hell I thought, give 'em a chance to explain their program and I might learn something useful, who knows.  That second guy then went on and on about how their fabulous opportunity cost "only $99" to get set up with several moneymaking websites that they would provide for (he later said) hosting at only $4.50/month.  Okay I could handle that but I wanted to know how they were special, what exactly could they do for me, and mentioned they had pretty bad reviews on RipoffReport.com.  WOOWIE that set the guy off with all kinds of accusations about RipoffReport.com like it's an "offshore website" run by a "convicted felon" named Ed Magedson (not sure if I got the spelling right) and a "scam to extort $100,000" from them to get rid of the bad reports. 

Well I asked to see a demo site and the second guy sent me to communityadvertisingnetwork.com where I was able to quickly determine it was all about affiliate programs (which I can just as well build my own website for, I don't need them) and I tested the domain higherimpact.com which redirected to higherimpactinc.com which surprised the guy when I told him because he didn't think it worked yet, he told me it was under development.  It was all right, playing some bad music I couldn't turn off except with the mute button on my laptop.  Along with the website comes marketing advice so I stuck around listening to him a while longer about that because that MIGHT be useful I thought, but then I looked more closely at some of the RipoffReport.com reviews which said they weren't very good or very responsive and you had to pay big money for advertising too, which Guy Two wasn't mentioning at all. 

He kept saying I'd make "up to" 20% of sales and I asked him numerous times to give me a little more detail about their commission structure, where the cutoffs were, and the guy just couldn't do it.  I must have asked him ten times or more in at least ten ways, even giving him specific examples I made up like "if I sell $1,000 in a week do I get 20% of that or $200, or something less?" and STILL the best he would tell me is that I'd make "up to" 20% or "up to" $200.  Eventually it became clear he just didn't know, even though he said he'd been working their 3 years!  Finally he put me on the phone with his "supervisor" in hopes he could answer my question.

That supervisor, whose name I regret I did not write down, was a real piece of work.  At first he tried to smooth-talk me with his sales schtick, trying to get me to say "yes" to things one after the other and asking for my name and address etc. like I had already agreed to buy into their deal and he was gonna show Guy One what a fantastic salesman looked like while he took my order information.  Well I stopped him and asked him the same pointed questions that I had asked Guy Two about their commission structure and the RipoffReport.com unanswered complaints at which point he just lied to me and said I'd make 20% on ALL sales no matter how small (which I didn't believe for a minute if the first guy had been working there for three years and was conditioned to only promise "up to" 20%) and he got kinda crazy and heated up like the first guy about the RipoffReport.com reviews, repeating pretty much the same stuff the first guy said only he went on to say that Ed Magedson just "makes them up" which I know isn't true because I've filed a few of my own. 

By this point there was no way I was going to buy into their program but I let him go on hoping I might learn something useful.  He did reveal that there was an extra $30 setup or some kind of fee that WASN'T covered in the 30-day money-back guarantee and which the first guy had never mentioned to me, so that was interesting.  He then started getting a little testy with me and trying to force the sale and I told him I didn't think so, he wanted to know why and I told him that he wasn't being entirely straight with me about all the costs.  He hadn't mentioned the $4.50/month hosting fee for example I told him, and that really set him off, talking in a dismissive manner about "pennies" and saying he was a graduate of Harvard Business School and he'd been with the company since its inception ten years ago yada yada yada and trying to lecture me on entrepreneurship and how you have to take risks and so forth.  I didn't tell him I'd had a graduate-level college course in entrepreneurship and a good entrepreneur does due diligence before jumping into something new, I just let him rant for a while and then mentioned he hadn't told me anything either about the expensive Pay Per Click advertising that was also going to be needed. 

That was fun!  I could practically see the veins on his neck jumping out even over the telephone!  He became quite upset and went on for a while about how advertising was "optional" (how is it optional if it's required for success, I wondered?) and got more and more excited in a bad way about how any business is gonna have startup costs yada yada but after he started getting a little verbally abusive about how he didn't have to take such and such from me I just said "Fine" and hung up on the creep.  Hell, I had given him far more time than he deserved and felt I wasn't going to get anything more from him or his outfit.  But I did get one gem I want to share with you all: the list of their affiliate programs at communityadvertisingnetwork.com/Affiliate.aspx .  Those are the ones they've found that people actually will buy from, and they should work for you too.

Folks, you don't need to pay anyone to setup affiliate programs on websites for you, there are plenty of free website options (start with (((redacted))) if nothing else) and you can setup your own affiliate links on them all day long without paying anybody a dime.  The bottleneck is ALWAYS getting the traffic you need to generate sales, which the sleazeballs like these Higher Impact scammers are never gonna tell you up front, but only later after they've sucked you in.  In many cases you may have to pay for traffic but if you have time and are patient enough to develop a site that's interesting and you do some SEO to get halfway decent search engine rankings on Google and some of the others you can draw traffic for free.  No, I haven't made it pay that way yet but I haven't given up yet either.  My next project is going to be to apply to the affiliate programs of every one of the sites on (((competitors' names redacted))) and start integrating them into my own websites.  THANK YOU HIGHER IMPACT SCAMMERS FOR AT LEAST GIVING ME SOMETHING WORTHWHILE FOR ALL THE TIME I WASTED ON YOU!

sorry, allowing you to give a competitors name would instigate others to just file against their competition, to only come back later to suggest their company, ..plus, if you post a competitors name more than likely they will show up on search engines as a Rip-off! - - your comments on this policy are welcome. CLICK here to see why Rip-off Report, as a matter of policy, deleted either a phone number, link or e-mail address from this Report. In this case we removed an alleged competitors name