Who/What is EDC? What did they do before that they have done again? This is the question I asked myself when I found myself on the website daily1kpayday.com listening to someone who identified himself as Craig Garcia talk about a program that offers the ability to earn ’staggering incomes’. My scam radar was going off well before I’d read a single word on the daily1kpayday.com website or listened to Craig Garcia’s message, but my scam radar goes off instantly every time I come across a website where someone is selling a money-making program. I’m just not convinced that there’s anyone out there who cares that much about my financial situation that they will actually sit down and take the time to come up with a money-making system that will truly make money for me. What I do believe is that there are way too many people out there who will actually sit down and take the time to conceive plans for how they can make millions of dollars selling useless things to hundreds of thousands of people.

Nevertheless, I can’t arbitrarily go off labeling something a scam when I don’t even know what it is to begin with, so I decided to do a little digging to find out what this EDC/EDC Gold and now EDC Diamond is all about.

After listening to Craig Garcia talk about EDC Gold my understanding of the program is that it is a business opportunity involving selling information to people wanting to know how to get traffic to their website. In Garcia’s own words:

It’s hard to determine what’s real out there and what’s not. I understand. I’ve been through twenty-something programs myself…. EDC is the #1 company on the Internet because we know how to drive traffic; our traffic gets converted because our marketing sites are awesome; and we pay out 100% commission when you make a sale.

EDC Gold is a 3-tier program ranging from 70 dollars up to 1000 dollars.
So price is never an issue with any of your customers. We have great selling products.

Our products are products that teach people how to drive traffic to the website. So who’s our customers? Well anybody with a website can use our product to drive more traffic to them. Thats only about a hundred million websites out there.

Both traditional businesses and home based businesses are our customers. Now if you’re looking for an opportunity out there you need to cut through the fat to see what’s real and what’s not.

But what does any of that actually mean? I spent several hours trying to find clear and precise information about EDC Gold. In my research I found this explanation provided by someone going by the name Aaron:

EDC Gold is a business where once you buy in you have access to thousands of low quality software which you now have the resale rights to. This can be beneficial to someone looking for freebies to give away or to someone with some Ebay savvy…. Besides having access to the software you have the ability to make 100% commission on a $997 sale. This is why people join this business.

When you join EDC Gold you have to pay your sponsor $997. You also pay a one time admin fee of $49. You also pay a monthly fee of $49 which can be eliminated by a onetime payment of $350. The last three fees are fees you don’t find out about until you begin your payment process…. (You can click here to read the full article)

I also found this bit of commentary posted on a blog by a blogger identifying himself as a former EDC Gold rep. This individual was actually trying to sell an alternative to EDC Gold so there’s every possibility he might only be claiming to be a former EDC Gold rep in the hope that his discrediting of the program will be given more credence:

Now, let me tell you, I am a former EDC Gold Rep. I did due diligence before entering the program and felt that it was a great opportunity. It has good training, reputable owners, and what looked to be good product offerings (more on that in a bit). However, after working with the company, I discovered that EDC Gold is nothing more than a glorified pyramid scheme.

Keep in mind, this is from a former rep who was having success with the company. This is not a disgruntled representative who feels that their money was scamed or taken. I paid to become a member because I saw potential in their business model and their apparent product offerings. It appeared to be a good business opportunity on the surface.

The problem with EDC Gold came when I began to look into their products. I downloaded a number of their software products and ebooks. And what I found was crap! The software was garbage and the ebooks had nothing that was useful for today’s Internet marketers. They may have been useful 5 years ago when they were written, but now that the Internet has changed so much, they are worthless. You can find a number of these products offered for free on other sites!

This is a big problem! A business without a good product, isn’t going to be a business for long! You need to have a stand alone product to be a success in the long term. No one would ever buy the EDC Gold products without the business opportunity attached. This is a major warning flag. Most of the reps don’t even look at any of the products!

And I came across a large number of websites providing great reviews about EDC Gold, but interestingly enough, they were all sites by EDC gold members trying to sell the program or people trying to sell programs to EDC members designed to help them procure sales.

One thing is evident, people have made money and, presumably, are still making money with EDC gold; but it appears largely that the people making money are the sellers of the EDC products and EDC memberships, not the customers they target with promises that using their products will help them achieve success with their business.

One EDC distributor happily reports the following stats on her blog to excite/entice her potential recruits:

-There are 25,000,000 U.S. Businesses

-There are over 3,300,000 businesses with 1-5 employees.

-It is estimated that over 10,000,000 U.S. employees work in the areas of marketing, advertising, and sales.

-According to PriceWaterhouseCoopers the Internet will remain the fastest-growing advertising medium, growing to a projected $18.9 billion in 2008 with a 12.7 percent growth.

-Less then 10 % of all businesses are proficient with internet advertising. They desperately want to become effective using the internet. (visit referneced blog site)

Let your imagination run wild for a minute. As an EDC Gold member you will have resell rights to the EDC Gold suite of products. Craig Garcia claims there’s no one better than himself to teach people how to get traffic to their website. Of course he doesn’t actually say that the products he sells that teach website owners how to get website traffic are any good. What he boasts about is his ability to teach EDC Gold Members how get traffic to their EDC marketing site and convert that traffic into sales. But for the purpose of this illustration it’s irrelevant whether or not the programs that are sold to those business people who ‘desperately want to become effective using the Internet’ are worth anything.

The point is you’ll have these products you can sell to the desperate business people of which, according to the aforementioned EDC distributor, there are millions. Can you imagine what it would be like? If less than 10% of all businesses are proficient with Internet advertising and there are over 25 million US businesses, that’s over 22,500,000 potential customers. And these are not just any customers. They’re desperate customers.

Now let your imagination run a little wilder. Imagine on top of having the rights to resell all these ‘fine’ programs, you can also recruit new EDC Gold members and keep all the profit after your sponsor has been given your first two sales. And for everyone you recruit, whenever they recruit someone they have to give you their first two sales. They call it a 2-up business model. You can click here and read 1Up And 2Up Compensation Plans Exposed! for more on the 2-up business model. The money-making potential of the EDC Gold program is almost limitless. Even if it turns out that the desperate business people you were hoping to sell your line of software products to aren’t quite so desperate after all, at least not in large enough numbers to make you a millionaire overnight, you still have the ability to make money recruiting new EDC gold members. And at $997 per membership sale, after you’ve turned over your first two sales to your sponsor, you can start dreaming about those ’staggering incomes’ Craig Garcia talked about in his video. You can conceivably make a hundred thousand dollars per year selling fewer than 5 memberships per month, provided each member you recruit is able to recruit at least 2 new members.

Clearly a program like this will not work for everyone; but it can and has worked for a number of people. Frankly, it’s difficult to call it an outright scam; but making money with it still depends on deceiving people by utilizing marketing strategies that intentionally blind people to all but the potential dollars. The reality is, the potential is there to make money. Wherever there is a product to be sold there is always the potential of making money if you can find a way to convince people to buy whatever it is you’re selling in large enough numbers to make a decent profit. So in that regard EDC Gold doesn’t make any outright false promises to the people joining their program. All they do is what every other company with something to sell does to get people to buy. They convince people that their product is what they need, that their product can change their lives. If people buy into it and discover that the product doesn’t live up to the hype for them, that’s no fault of the company.

The short of it: if you don’t mind turning around and suckering people after realizing you’ve been suckered, and if you have a gift for suckering people yourself, EDC Gold might just be the money making program you’re looking for. Or perhaps I should be saying EDC Diamond rather than EDC Gold, since it appears EDC Gold is relatively outdated and the new program being tooted by Craig Garcia and his partner Mike is EDC Diamond. Actually skip all of that, what this is in a nutshell is a program you join knowing the only way you’re going to make money off of it is by finding other people who are willing to join knowing that the only way they’ll make money off of it is by finding other people willing to join knowing that the only way they’ll make money…. You get the gist right? You’re making a choice to be suckered for $997 in order to be able turn around and sucker for a potential 6-figure yearly income.

My advice: unless you’re confident you can sales, and you don’t have a guilt complex, don’t play the EDC Gold 2-up game. Even if it is not legally classifiable as a scam, it’s still dishonest, and you’re more likely to lose $997 than earn single dime.

Upload -> Share -> Get paid - that’s how easy it is to make money online sharing your pictures via shareapic.net.

Shareapic.net operates a revenue share program whereby you can make money uploading and sharing pictures. In their own words:

Shareapic is a free service that allows its users to upload and host images on our servers. What makes us different from the rest? Shareapic has a unique revenue sharing model that compensates users for directing their friends and family to see their hosted images. When a member hosts a gallery, they can then show this gallery to others. Each time this is done, the member is paid.

So all you do is upload your photos, send the link to your friends and family, tell them to freely share the link with their friends and family and every time someone views one of your photos you make some money. How much money? Here’s what shareapic.net has to say:

Earnings vary each month based off the amount of income Shareapic generates from advertising. Once this number is finalized a percentage of that is distributed throughout Shareapic members depending on how many image views they have accrued.For example, if in month one Shareapic calculates to distribute $1,000 to our members, we will first tally up the total number of image views for that month. Using these two numbers we can determine the respective payouts for each user. If there were a total of 500,000 image views for the month, image views will equate to $0.002 each (1,000 divided by 500,000), or $2 per 1000 image views. If you’re posting lots of pics in forums, MySpace or eBay, you can see how easy it is to earn quite a bit of money!

Although we do not disclose the revenue share, we do display the amount paid for previous pay periods in the members section. Our goal is to pay out enough to keep users happy, while still being able to sustain development costs, hosting fees, salaries, etc.

The gist of this is that the average person will not make thousands via shareapic.net. In fact, it’s possible for it to take as many as 6 months to build up to just a single dollar in earnings; but if you’re aggressive as some of shareapic’s top earners, if you upload a large number of pictures and find ways to get them viewed by a large number of people, your share of the shareapic revenue becomes that much larger.

If you love sharing your pictures on the Internet, shareapic.net is a good way to do something you love and make a dollar or two doing it.