Product Name: Pure Leverage
Website: pureleverage.com
Price: $24.95 + $19.95/mth, $141.90/mth
Owners: Joel Therien
Recommended: No
Verdict: Some Quality Products/Tools, Lots of Upsells
Pure Leverage, Another Pyramid?
Described as the “only” program that you will ever need, the Pure Leverage launched in 2013 with a price point of $24.95, lower than most other competition “pyramid” style MLM schemes out there. Their offerings are a mish mosh of a number of different concepts and tools, none that really fit in well with the others.
Many of the listed services or tools were in development prior to the launch, even though Joel Therian began accepting payment. This was a major concern (and frustration) for many folks that initially got involved with Pure Leverage, which is part of the GVO (Global Venture Opportunities). This is the umbrella company that was founded in 1999 and provides hosting and autoresponder services to marketers.
The GVO utilizes a downline/powerline structure to sell it’s product and essentially you buy into the tools so that you can sell the tools to others. These include auto-response, lead capture systems, video email services, video conferencing. The intention and quality of these tools are not bad, but the nature of the company and structure of a scheme naturally creates an artificial demand for the products. They are inferior to many of the main services available online.
There are also far more serious concerns about this scheme and I am going to be discussing this in more detail.
Pros vs. Cons
Little good, mostly negative when you really break down what the pure leverage program actually offers.
Pros:
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An A-to-Z study guide is provided.
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The cost of this program is far lower than most similar schemes
Cons:
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The program claims to give 100% commission payout. In smaller print, you will see that this is for a limited time and only for top level commissions, but even then it is a questionable business practice.
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The “uplines” and “powerlines” in the commission program are foggy at best.
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Many portions of the program are listed but are not yet available.
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Affiliate reviews for the program offer bogus claims and outright lies and are often delivered in angry, accusatory tones.
- When confronting any of his detractors, the founder takes on an aggressive demeanour often threatening his critics with legal action and more.
Unfortunately the cons outweigh the pros and as I explain this system in more detail, you are going to realize what is really happening here when you join Pure Leverage. You are joining the program just to promote the program in many cases. This is not creating a REAL niche business, for that you need to get a service that can help you with that.
Who is This Scheme (yes, scheme) Intended to Benefit?
Pure Leverage is meant to be used by any marketer regardless of their previous experience or knowledge however, this is not quite the case.
Without any real product or service to market, most people would find this program to be nothing more than a collection of tools that they cannot use. Most savvy people would recognize that the biggest money is to be made from the affiliate program rather than from the “main” tools that offered. But, even that is problematic because of the confusing payout process.
Here is the “powerline” structure of the program. When you join Pure Leverage, the purpose of the program itself is to get other people to join under you. They claim you get 100% commissions and they tout this as one of their big selling features, but you only really get 100% on the first month for referring others into this scheme.
Here is the payment structure breakdown for Pure Leverage:
As you can see the purpose of this product is to sell the product itself. This creates artificial demand like many of the MLM schemes popping up, where the way to make money is to sell the same product to others, regardless of whether or not the products is inferior or more expensive than other products that exist online.
Pure Leverage Complaints Stem From the Actual Quality of Services…
In addition to the A-to-Z home study course, there are other tools that are supposed to be easy to use and very effective.
Pure Leverage includes the following tools:
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Elite Coaching Program – This is training on “attraction marketing”. In a few words, this training is going to teach you how to promote Pure Leverage to others. The focus is less about getting people to join a quality service, rather it is far more about how to get other folks to join underneath you or what is termed in this program, part of your powerline structure.
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Easy Lead Flow Lead Capture System – If you cannot build web pages, this is a system that allows you to put up pages that allow you to collect leads. It also includes pre-written follow up emails that you can incorporate into your campaigns. This caters to the lazy marketer and is intended solely for the promotion of, you got it, Pure Leverage.
It is no good having these sort of lead pages if you don’t understand how to get traffic. The Elite Coaching focuses on attraction marketing, not the principles of traffic and without having a solid understanding of how to properly build out a website you are not going to be able to effectively get traffic (without paying large sums of money for paid advertising).
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Authority Blog – With Pure Leverage, you get your own blog. The problem with these blogs is that they are centric around the promotion of Pure Leverage itself. If you want to promote something in another niche or of another interest you have, these blogs serve little to no value. Plus they don’t rank well, deeming them completely useless for SEO.
Reliability is also an ongoing issue. There are many complaints about “downtime” with websites that are hosted by GVO (which is the company behind Pure Leverage). Here are just some recent examples of complaints:
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Turbo Traffic Generation – To get traffic, you must understand how to properly build content. What some companies do to is try to fool folks that have no knowledge of traffic and tout things like “Alexa Rank” which really has little to do with your ranking ability, nothing to do with SEO, and Alexa really doesn’t have much street cred in terms of of website rankings.
Yet, Pure Leverage boasts about this as one of their main abilities.
At the time of this post, the Turbo Traffic Generation program hasn’t fully been launched yet either. It is sparse and incomplete training at best. -
Video Email Service – You are going to see a theme with absolutely every “tool” included within the Pure Leverage service. The Video Email service is simply another system built around getting you to promote Pure Leverage to others. The product is the promotion of the product itself and building as big of downline as possible. It has nothing to do with the actual quality of the service.
Sending videos via email is nothing new and there have been high level of complaints in regards to the delivery rates of the autoresponder service. No delivery = no opportunity.
- Live Meeting Room – Unfortunately there are much better services better than the Live Meeting Room service offered within Pure Leverage, namely Google Hangouts. Most people these days within the MLM world are using Google Hangouts and it offers everything that the Live Meeting Room offers and then some…and it is free with any Google Account. You can get a free Google Hangout account here.Again, the intention of this service is to help folks within this program help build their downline, it is not actually a tool built for business and it is inferior to every video conferencing tool that professionals and niche marketers online would actually use. Like I said, there are free tools like Google Hangouts that are superior to this and paid services like GoToWebinar that offers a much better, more established service.
You Want Support. Get Ready For a Flame War.
Insiders’s Club access is provided to members and is listed as “top notch”. On a third party forum, one member expressed some issues with the support and was then publicly attacked by someone else, presumably another member. This is a common issue which suggests that member generated support is little more than backstabbing and name-calling even on its best days, in particular if you question the system itself.
Joel Therien (the owner) has also been known to be very defensive/on the attack on forums and comment boards if he finds complaints or negative comments instead of properly settling the cases. This has been reported in a several instances. One thing that I really do like is that he offers that level of support though.
They definitely do offer several ways to get in contact with them and they have improved their lines of support, but some complaints definitely do remain. One of the biggest being their ongoing promotions once you sign-up to their baseline service. In fact, you can expect over 50 emails in the first month! (see real feedback below)
Support should be a big part of any system (and a focal point) when you are trying to educate yourself how to make money online, so tread carefully when you see a trend of complaints about a particular product or service.
The Price of Pure Leverage is NOT $24.95. It Starts There…
The one bright spot in the Pure Leverage program, the price is only $24.95 per month. There are upsells during the sign up process but they are all optional and mostly unnecessary and these upsells are definitely not as inundating as some products out there.
For the basic program, the cost of Pure Leverage is $24.95 per month. However, if you want to become an affiliate and resell any of the programs and products, you will have to pay an additional $19.95 per month for a total of $ 44.95 per month. There is an additional level called the VIP program which offers exclusive training with “top” internet gurus as well as pre-built, turnkey campaigns. This program will cost $97 per month for a total of $141.90 per month.
Something that is not thoroughly covered in the sales pages and compensation discussions is the need to pay to the level you want to earn. For instance, if you want to earn at the lower levels, you can stay paying the lower fee every month as long as you have that amount coming into your account. However, if you want to make the higher commissions, you have to pay up to that level.
So if you want to earn money promoting the VIP level, you are going to need to be invested at $141.90 per month. Not quite the $24.95 you signed up to! This is the sort of bait and switch that can reside within the MLM industry, in particular within the “make money online” space. Although there is a product there, you selling people into your downline in essence is the real business model here. There are tangible tools and products within the platform, unlike many of the counterparts in the industry that are instituting the MLM model.
My Final Opinion of Pure Leverage
Pure Leverage is a program that offers what some would classify as OK tools that have gained artificial value because of the upline/downline architecture of this program, to the exaggerated claim of “100% commission”, to the belief that you can join for $24.95/mth and feel that you have everything (there real cost is $141.90 per month if you want everything).
Asking questions about the program will only expose you to the angry affiliates who all threaten critics and then turn on one another like wolverines. This is natural behavior of folks that are involved in a program such as Pure Leverage from conversations shown above.
Pure Leverage Simply Didn’t Make the Cut.
Name: Pure Leverage
Website: pureleverage.com
Price: $24.95 +$19.95/mth, $141.90/mth
Owners: Joel Therien
VERDICT: Some Quality Info and Tools, A Myriad of Upsells, A True “Scheme”, Inferior Products to What is Available In Some Cases, Support Complaints
Do you have experience with the Pure Leverage program or do you have any questions about this product? If so, please leave your comments or questions below and I will be more than happy to get back to you.
Tired of Scams? Read about my #1 Ranked Product Here!
Please cancel my order and refund me the $49.95 charged on 9/23
Any refunds you will need to contact the product support/owner in respect to the actual product you purchased. These details should be contained with the actual purchase you made. All the best Bobbie.
I just entered their training platform named “hostthenprofit” for one dollar but when i read your review, Kyle, i don’t feel very confident to get hosting or any kind of further affairs nor informations with them. I knew about empowernetwork and I tried too. They are the worse thing i’ve ever seen! No serious training at all and just laughing at you!
Indeed, they lie to you, because they promise you 4 free domain names and unlimited hosting to steal your first one dollar but when you enter their platform for one dollar/a week trial now, you have also to pay for your domain names and hosting too. Then you’re redirected to a strange “domeny.tv” hosting site from Poland. Their “easy video producer” redirect you only to a beautiful white blank page on your pc screen. What else?
This is a very similar tactic that many of these companies use. They get you in a very low price point (like hostthenprofit) and then start overloading you with new costs, in this case domain costs, hosting costs and a myriad of other upsells. These types of schemes are very transient and they have to continually rename their companies so that the negative reviews can only temporarily shine some realism on the scams they are offering.
There are much better choices out there and definitely do make sure you do your due diligence before you buy into any program online.
Thanks for posting this. I am a web developer and had a client ask me about Pure Leverage. Before then I had never heard of them and didn’t know whether or not to recommend them. You’re not the only bad review I saw on Pure Leverage, and I also took a look at their website, as well, just to get the info form the source.
From what I could tell, Pure Leverage tools seem to be mainly geared towards selling Pure Leverage to others. Another guy I came across, Zach Crawford, who was apparently a promoter and user of PL in the past found out PL was sending multiple emails/day in his name to his downline promoting PL upsells to them, even though he didn’t invest in those parts of PL himself and had no knowledge of those emails.
Thanks to yours and Zach’s reviews, I will not be recommending PL to my client, who is starting up a service business and I don’t want to risk him getting his contacts spammed with unrelated biz-op upsells in his name, using a domain I designed.
That is the purpose and like many programs that are similar to this, the very people promoting them often times do not use the service themselves (host elsewhere, use aweber for their email marketing, etc). Why? Because these are superior services to what is available within Pure Leverage and are far more cost efficient. And there is nothing cool about using your name without your knowledge, sorry to hear about Zach having to deal with this.
Thanks for all the comments here from past members, you have just saved me from making a big mistake my wife has been telling me its all a scam how right she was phew run for the hills and take your money with you.
In June of this year all of my sites were down for 2 weeks because GVO had a server fry. As of today, the same has happened and we are on day three with 7 business days until Christmas and all of my businesses are essentially offline.
On the GVO website Joel states, “we are obsessed with your support”
On the GVO hosting page you state, “It is the same online – if your server goes down, the customers cannot access your site or the information you provide. It reflects badly on your reputation and on your balance sheet. That is precisely why you need reliable business web hosting.”
I say bullshit. Their overseas support staff is quick to tell me they are working on it however, I am still down.
I can’t seem to get through to any of the GVO principals to follow up on this disaster which is costing me thousands of dollars.
i joined GVO at 1 time and got a virus or trojan. Maybe the website was spoofed to begin with, and I just didnt realize.
The funny thing is some marketers use Aweber to promote Pure Leverage. See the irony here?
That is exactly my point. I personally would always recommend using an established autoresponder company like aweber.com for email management. It is the expertise and where they specialize (and the have 30-40 employees dedicated solely to their service). It is hard to compete with that when you are offering a “catch all”.
Hi Kyle,
Thank you for the generous sharing. I came across Pure Leverage when I signed up for Russell Brunson’s DotcomX program.
Inside DotComX program, Russell ask members to buy Pure Leverage for autoresponder, hosting and the landing page (It is a recurring paymen).
I felt so uncomfortable to all their upsell when you sign up for their program.
Could you help us to do a review on iPAS 2 -not sure it’s related to empowering network as well?
I saw many famous affiliate marketer promoting it. & the claims sounds too good to be true.
Thanks again for all the hardwork.
Regards,
Alexander Ang
Yes, they are all interconnected. You will find that many of the folks involved in one scheme are involved with others…there is a lot of handshaking going on within the industry and guru circles that promote each others products. My suggestion is that when you see this taking place, you run as far away as possible from those taking part in this behaviour as they cannot be trusted Alex.
I will definitely be investigating iPas because I have had MANY complaints now from folks that have been “taken” by this program.
I came across Pure Leverage when I suddenly discovered their name against charges on my credit card statement in mid August. Before that, I had never heard of them nor do I have any interest in the products and services the company offers.
I did send a query about the unauthorized payments to the pureleverage.com web site and received a prompt and polite reply from GVO Support (India) asking for more (non-identifying) details so they can follow up.
After reading your comments I’m not so keen to reply.
I have instead contacted my bank and asked them to reverse the transactions. It now looks like they / someone has set me up for monthly payments so there are even more transactions to be reversed. To ensure all further contact is cut my bank has decided to cancel the existing card and swap me to a new account
Keep up the good fight, Kyle.
Ian
Yeah, contact your bank in this situation as your card has likely been compromised. This might not actually be a case of Pure Leverage being involved at all, it could be the fact that someone purchased their program with stolen credit cards.
You may want to escalate with your bank to make sure your card hasn’t been compromised.
Once upon a time I was happy trying to get an online business going. This business was called Copy & Paste. The training bore no resemblance with what I needed to do and I asked for my money. It was then I got this strange message “please don’t go, give us another try” Darn it I got scammed into linking up with GVO/Pureleverage and Safe Swap. I was very unhappy after only 2 days! I asked for my money again and someone said they would help and hold my hand. After 3 weeks of grueling back and fro emails, I finally got the grips of the Copy & Paste training and how it matched with GVO/Pureleverage….then everything collapsed. The ready response messages fell by the way. I have written so many times to have them stop collection on my card and yet they continue. I am now over my limit and with fees I think I am just about to rip out the last two strands of hair I have left!! Why me? Why? I only wanted to make some money!! How am I going to pay this credit card bill when I do not have the funds?
Gosh Darn it!!
Hi Kyle,
I have been a Pure Leverage customer and affiliate for nearly 2 years,I have never made a single penny. Also my sponsor left 6 months ago not saying why he left.
I have stopped advertising as I feel bad introducing people to something I no longer believe in, plus advertising is costly especially when you have ZERO return.
Like me, I think many join not knowing what it really is!! You are told that you need no previous experience (a lie) with the use of comparisons such as ‘you don’t need to know what’s under the bonnet to drive a car’ all help to make you believe in the Pure Leverage family we all love you and each other hype.
I would like to know what you think of Joel’s Facebook marketing funnel ‘Instant Income System’? Advice from Pure Leverage training is that you should contact people via Facebook using a search term such as ‘people who like internet marketing and live in Liverpool’ Make friends with them if necessary!! I have tried this and found that people get angry with you.
I am currently still in there but not for long as I am exploring other options which will have nothing at all to do with internet marketing as I have been scammed too many times.
Great review thank you.
Elenor
I remember running into this guy through some other site he is running, and the compensation plan for using his tools was not what I saw as good business. If anyone is thinking of using GVO, then I would advise that you reconsider.
Yeah, they are definitely both related. GVO is the hosting platform that is run by these guys, and again in the industry of hosting there are many better options in terms of affordability and quality. There is also the scheme based “buy to promote” aspect if you want to promote the hosting to others.
Thanks for the “full” disclosure. It helps to know the ‘whole’ story before you wade into the water. Thanks for being at the top of the page.
No problem Jerry, unfortunately within the online world you have to tread very carefully because of the sheer amount of low quality products and “schemes” that are out there with the sole intention of taking your money. Pure leverage does have some decent products, but they are inferior to other products/services that are available by much more reputable companies (and at a lower cost).
I had first-hand experience with Pure Leverage as it is my first ever auto-responder that I’ve tried and I was totally dissapointed with their service.
It’s extremely slow, it crashes from time-to-time and the video tutorials are outdated but the most annoying part that really upsets me is their customer service.
I’ve been sending countless tickets to ask but none replied until I decided to cancel my membership and that’s when decided to reply me which shows only one thing – They’re more concerned on getting money out from you. They also will try to upsell you stuff whenever you log in which gets really annoying after some time.
Any product that has something to do with Russel and Joel Therien is a no-no. Glad to have found your review Kyle! And it’s a great one too, I hope this wards off many other people from getting tricked like me.
Sorry to hear about your experience Riaz, but it is inline with what most folks feel about Pure Leverage (other than those that are actively promoting it). There are much better auto responders and web hosts out there and ones that will actually get to your support prior to you saying you want to cancel.
What autoresponder would you recommend?
I would recommend the following:
aweber.com
mailchimp.com
getresponse.com
madmimi.com
These are all services out there that operate within the email space and that is their focus. Although the email platform at PL is definitely decent, it is tough to compete with the big players in the industry where their sole focus is offering an autoresponder service…and where it doesn’t rely nor is driven on the MLM model.
Thanks for the very honest and detailed review of pureleverage.com. I hope other reviews online will be as more detailed as you have to avoid readers like me looking for opportunities online be scammed over and over again.
Thanks Kyle more power to you!!!
Mercy
No problem Mercy. Thanks for stopping by.
Thank you Kyle for the informative review. l joined GVO through the chief of scams, Peng Joon’s Easy Money Access website. The package included a purported free one paged website with Host Then Profit (GVO:9.95/mnt for web-hosting, Pure Leverage (purported training to promote GVO costs 24,95/mnt, an email-autoresponder $24.95/month and the privilege to sale PL costs $19,95/month). The third scam included on the website is Empower Network ($24,95/mnt for the name EM, $19/month to sell the name EM to others,$19/month for an e-wallet if you want to get paid, $24,95 for EN auto-responder, $25/month for blogging on the so called Blog Beast). Not mentioning up-sells going up to thousands of dollars to watch selfie videos by those higher up the pyramid. Surely, is it worth it to pay all this much for systems whose results are not guaranteed – always read their small print.It is very unfair to show Joel Therien’s account as an example of how you can earn money using their ‘tools’ to a novice.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and it sounds like Peng Joon is involved in all of the “schemes” out there. Unfortunately there are folks in this business that are in it for the money versus actually helping folks. All of these business were built of the business model of artificially inflating product value by creating a product which in essence, is selling the product itself. It is a viscous cycle and these pyramid type schemes continue to show their face.
Kyle great review.
I joined GVO way back when they first started.
Spent a lot of money and time using and promoting their program. (Sorry people). Fortunately not to many jumped
on board.
They went to “Host Then Profit” and several other names including “Pure Leverage”.I have not been involved with them for many years now.
However, I still come across posts and ads online now and then where they say Ken Pringle Recommends… This is certainly NOT TRUE!
It was not a good experience for me.
Hello, Kyle
I used to be a member of GVO, making good use of at least 2 great tools that came with the program and promoting GVO for a little income on the side.
I always thought Joel Therien’s programs were legitimate but after reading your review on his Pure Leverage, I’m not so sure any more.
Neil
Some of the tools are definitely OK and if you joined for these tools and got use out of them that is great. The “opportunity” is something completely different though. The creation of the tools and the training is to promote the system itself, masked as a network marketing opportunity.
The value of the products are artificially inflated because of this, because honestly speaking there much better hosts, much better autoresponders and much better training out there.
Another one of the very many recycled self-promotion programs out there.
As Joel Therien grows financially people that probably can’t afford it lose their cash getting swindled.
Thanks so much for this very eye opening review!
Great job!
Gary
I’ve signed up for many, many scams, so-called “guru” programs, and every single one of them tries to upsell the very minute you sign up.
It happens absolutely everywhere you look these days. It is also what is taught and what people are becoming accustomed to. It has nothing to do with value (“do you want fries with that”), but that is the angle that they all argue. It all comes down to generating the uplines more money and feeding the ponzi…the last thing on the minds of the product owners or the people recruiting others into the program is value. It’s all about the money unfortunately…and taking it out of someone’s pocket and putting it into your own.
It has to stop!
Kyle,
Thanks for this review on Pure Leverage, I had received a few e Mails from another acquaintance of mine regarding this Pure Leverage Program.
I had not taken the time to investigate them myself, sure enough when I checked back in at your site Kyle, you had them laid out beautifully as the scammers they are.
Thanks again, I always love reading your viewpoint, best regards,
Gary
Get ready for an argument if you ever ask these folks any “hard” questions.
Like, what is the advantage of this service over aweber.com? Why should I use this hosting over an established or managed hosting service? Why is it going to cost me over $1,000 per year, when there is much cheaper alternatives? I heard the training is really lacking, can you show me an example of a success you have hadas a result of the training?
People that are blind to what they are promoting simply cannot answer questions like this and I think that is what you will find here.
Hi Kyle Unfortunately, I have even been part of the circus, and is still struggling a bit with GVO to have moved my domain name over to namecheap. I was unfortunately with the wrong team when I wanted to learn how to generate an income online. I came to pay both expensive solo ads but the training is very much as you described very deficient. The team that I belonged used Empower Network in combination with GVO. and all training was divided up according to what I had upgraded to. Fortunately, I have become wiser, albeit by accident but that’s another story
Sorry to hear about your experience Steen and the fact that there is a interconnection with another well known scam in Empower Network really goes to show what category that Pure Leverage program (and the base of users) have classified it as.
When the sole purpose of a program and all of its training is to teach how to get other people in the program, there is a real problem. The products are secondary and there just to try to legitimize what is really going on. Anything that says 100% commissions and requires multiple upgrades in order to promote the “upgraded” products screams of a scam and there are many programs like this in the MLM industry, Pure Leverage being one of them.
I think it’s funny how all the scammers are jumping from one product to another while people continue to fall for these scams. Thanks for an awesome review on Pure Leverage!
It is all too typical John. There are so many programs that are similar in structure and the people that tend to get involved in these (and realize that they are part of another pyramid style program) fail and then go looking for the next “hit”. This leaves room for more and more new programs like Pure Leverage, which btw at least has some mediocre services which many of them don’t.
Hopefully one day these folks will wake up!
Great post Kyle I got scammed by GVO s few years ago I had to file a complaint with my bank to cancel their horrible hosting. Keep the good stuff coming.
Thanks for the feedback Bob. Sorry to hear about your experience Bob with their hosting service and I hope you are on to bigger and better things.