Four Percent Review

The Best Affiliate Marketing Course?

We’re on a mission to find the best affiliate marketing course, based on our own extensive research plus feedback from real students.

The Four Percent training covers much more than affiliate marketing, but most students seem to focus on that aspect of it.

Unfortunately, Four Percent doesn’t come close to topping our list of the best affiliate marketing courses…

How does Four Percent help you make money?

Four Percent is an entire suite of courses, all focused on online business.

The full Four Percent Gold Membership gets you access to such courses as…

• Communication & Copywriting Mastery
• Affiliate Marketing Academy
• SEO Mastery
• Facebook PPC Secrets
• Ecom Entrepreneur

However, most people who sign up to Four Percent seem to focus on the affiliate marketing aspect of the training.

This is likely because Vick invites you to a webinar about affiliate marketing right after you join Four Percent, calling it “the fastest way to make money right now.”

Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people’s products or services, and collect a commission for every successful referral.

Four Percent’s affiliate marketing training is somewhat unusual in that you’re mainly taught how to promote Four Percent itself.

At least that’s the impression I’m left with having researched successful 4% students and browsed through the private Facebook community (more on this later).

So essentially Four Percent teaches you how to become a commission-based salesperson for Four Percent. The more new customers you refer to the training, the more money you make.

Below is a video from Vick’s YouTube channel so you can get a feel for his style. He also gives an overview of his affiliate marketing philosophy (ie. the “hub” model).

• Learn more about affiliate marketing

Who is Four Percent for?

Having researched Four Percent extensively, I would say it is mainly aimed at people new to working online who are looking for training and coaching that will help speed up their progress.

Vick Strizheus has had big success with Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) in the past, and there is a strong MLM vibe from the Four Percent training. So if you’re down with that sort of thing, you’ll probably enjoy being a member of Four Percent.

That said, I do consider Vick’s pitch for his affiliate marketing training to be quite misleading. I have significant experience with affiliate marketing, and I flat out disagree with many of the claims I’ve heard Vick make.

Such as:

“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, simpler or more lucrative than affiliate marketing”
“This is the easiest money you can ever get yourself into online right now”

Affiliate marketing is great in many ways, but to call it easy money and make it out to be a very simple type of online business is grossly misleading, IMO.

Vick acknowledges this – and thereby contradicts himself – by citing a statistic that 95% of people who try affiliate marketing fail 😳

Given that the Four Percent training is so focused on affiliate marketing, I’d say that it’s actually NOT great for newbies.

• Full list of ways to make money online (including easier options)

Does Four Percent have a good reputation?

I’ve reviewed lots of affiliate marketing courses over the years, and in terms of reputation, Four Percent is one of the more questionable I’ve seen.

It all starts with Vick Strizheus himself.

Google around a bit and you’ll soon find two big skeletons in his closet…

• Convicted of insurance fraud
  Apparently one of Vick’s first jobs was working for an insurance company, and he was convicted of submitting fake policies to earn more commissions. Some sources say Vick spent time in prison because of this.
• Heavily involved in Multi-Level Marketing
  For a few years in the mid-2010’s, Vick was one of the leading promoters of an MLM company called Empower Network, which eventually went bankrupt. MLMs are notorious for enriching their founders and early promoters at the expense of everyone else involved.

Indeed, Vick still seems to be a big advocate of the MLM business model.

During his affiliate marketing webinar, he names “network marketing companies” – another term for MLM companies – as his #2 source of products to promote…

There’s even a premium course within Four Percent showing students how to promote 7K Metals.

And, as mentioned, there is a strong MLM vibe from Four Percent itself, in that the students earning commissions mainly seem to be earning them by recruiting other people to Four Percent. (See examples below.)

Another red flag for me are the regular complaints about Vick not following through on his promises.

For example, there are many complaints in the private Four Percent Facebook group about a training program called Coop that Vick launched a few years ago. Apparently it fell through and many students were left hanging indefinitely for refunds and commission payouts…

There certainly seems to be a pattern of Vick promising students of Four Percent various things, and then either failing to deliver or keeping them waiting for a very long time…

That last comment speaks to another issue: anyone in the private community who criticises or questions Vick or Four Percent is often dismissed as a naysayer and told to “stop whining”.

Vick himself seems to encourage this “shouting down” of critics, saying in his webinar that he succeeded by doing whatever his mentors told him to do, without question…

I was smart enough to listen. I did not question my mentors. If I had a mentor and I knew the mentor knew what he was doing, I did not question anything.

But wait…

You might have seen that Four Percent has thousands of positive reviews on Trustpilot…

Unfortunately, those reviews and the overall rating must be taken with a large pinch of salt.

I say that because most of them come from excited newbies taking the free Four Percent training, who are asked to leave a review after every lesson…

Accordingly, most of the Trustpilot reviews are empty platitudes that don’t tell you anything about the quality of the premium Four Percent training.

For example…

When I searched the Trustpilot reviews of FourPercent for words like profit and revenue, the results were sparse. Indeed, searching for words like refund and scam brought back more results 😕

All that said, Vick has managed to build multiple successful online businesses over the years. He is clearly doing a lot of things right, and so there’s plenty to learn from him, especially if you’re a fan of MLM.

Are Four Percent students getting results?

I spent several hours researching Four Percent, going through the private community, and searching for reviews online.

In one session I found 16 people in the Facebook group reporting that they’d recently earned commissions.

• 13 were commissions earned from recruiting someone else to join Four Percent
• 3 were commissions for a product called WebinarFuel

Here’s an example from the first category…

WebinarFuel turns out to be a product that is promoted within the Four Percent training, so ultimately all 16 of the those “success stories” I found were Four Percent students earning commissions from other Four Percent students.

I would much rather see success stories that show students earning affiliate commissions from other sources, and not being so dependent on convincing other people to join Four Percent.

But maybe that’s just me.

Coincidentally, that WebinarFuel software is owned by Anthony Morrison, who also has an affiliate marketing course called Partner With Anthony (reviewed here).

The “success stories” for that course look very similar to Four Percent, with students mainly earning income by referring other people to the same training.

This wouldn’t be so bad if such income was scalable and sustainable, but it doesn’t appear to be. For example, the person responsible for the above screenshot elaborated in the comments of the same post…

That means it cost him $200 to generate $229 in revenue, leaving him with $29 in profit.

Granted, he could go on to earn recurring commissions on those referrals, if the people he referred stay in the training for several months. But as of this writing he has been a member of Four Percent for 5 years, and the above screenshot is the only income he’s ever reported 😕

Given the popularity of the Four Percent program – there are 24,000+ students in the private Facebook group, and Vick claims the course has more than 300,000 members from 130 countries – I would have expected to see lots of legit success stories. But as illustrated above, they are sorely lacking.

Especially when you consider that Vick promotes his affiliate marketing training as a way to “make a minimum $5,000” in only 30 days…

All that has me skeptical that anyone who signs up to Four Percent today can earn a decent income from it 😕

How much does Four Percent cost?

You can sign up to Four Percent and take a couple of courses for free, namely 7 Steps to Freedom and Mass Traffic Blueprint.

This will also get you access to the private Facebook group.

To unlock the other courses within Four Percent, you will need to upgrade…

Unfortunately, the silver plan shown above seems to have been discontinued. Clicking on it, I get an error message that reads:

We’re currently not accepting new members for Silver level. Get started with Gold.

So Gold Membership is the cheapest plan available. 

The price for Four Percent Gold:

• One payment of $1997
• Or 12 monthly payments of $297 (total = $3564)

Your Gold membership includes:

• All 4% premium courses
• Weekly live coaching calls with Vick
• 12 months access to ESTAGE Website Builder
• 12 months access to the ChickyBoom affiliate network

After 12 months, I assume you will have to pay the regular monthly price to retain access to ESTAGE and ChickyBoom:

• Estage = $97/month
• Chicky Boom = $97/month

So as you can see, if you stick with Four Percent for more than a year, you’ll likely be on the hook for $196 in monthly payments to retain full access 😱

Furthermore, while it seems you can become an affiliate for Four Percent without paying anything beyond the cost of Gold Membership, Vick does have an upsell to the Four Percent VIP Partner Pack, which gets you 40% commissions instead of 30%. 

That costs another $497 per year.

I’ve heard reports of other upsells within the training, but I’ve been unable to verify them. It seems Vick regularly launches and tests new offers and pricing plans, so best not take the above info as gospel.

But based on reports I’ve seen from students, it’s a safe bet that you’ll need to spend at least $3000 in the first 12 months to make the most of the Four Percent training.

Four Percent Discount?

I haven’t seen any legit discounts available for Four Percent, and didn’t find anywhere to enter a coupon code at checkout.

You can of course save some money on your Four Percent Gold Membership by signing up for annual instead of monthly. The annual costs $1997, whereas the twelve monthly payments add up to $3564.

Refund Policy

The refund policy for Four Percent is a bit confusing.

Per their terms and conditions…

Due to the nature of the The Four Percent Group business and the accessibility of our products immediately upon purchase, there is a strict 30-days refund policy, which begins on the date of purchase. This 30 days refund policy is relevant to programs only. Any subscription based products such as The Four Percent Group Membership, The Four Percent Group Member promotional rates, Summit and/or event tickets are non-refundable.

From that, it sounds like you can get a refund on one-time payments so long as you request your refund within 30 days of purchase.

But if you sign up for a payment plan, it seems you are not entitled to a refund. But you should still be able to cancel future payments.

It’s worth reminding you here that I saw several people in the Four Percent Facebook group saying they were waiting several months and even years for a refund on a 4% training called Coop.

And I’ve seen a few claims that Four Percent makes promises to keep you in the training past the refund period, but then fails to follow through.

For example…

“I have lost about $2300 due to four percent and got nothing in return. When I asked for a refund I didn’t get it because the 30 day refund policy was over. Throughout these 30 days we were promised a lot of stuff that never came true and therefore didn’t ask for a refund. We were promised that we would get traffic to our landing page for free which never happened. They switched the affiliate vendor at some point because too many people were applying for credit card refunds.” ³

How is the program structured?

Here’s how the Four Percent program looks once you’re logged in…

You get access to a couple of basic courses with the free Four Percent membership.

With a Gold Membership, you also get access to the following courses and coaching programs…

• Success Challenge for Affiliate Marketing 3.0
• Success Challenge for 7K Metals
• 7 Steps to Freedom Mastery
• Internet Traffic Mastery
• List Building Mastery
• Communication & Copywriting Mastery
• Conversion Mastery
• Tribe Building Mastery
• Affiliate Marketing Academy
• ESTAGE U
• Mindset of a Champion
• Business Launch Blueprint
• SEO Mastery
• Insta Traffic Mastery
• Facebook PPC Secrets
• Facebook Fan Page Domination
• Ecom Entrepreneur
• Irresistible Influencer & Persuasion
• Taxes & Business Structures
• Irresistible Offer Blueprint
• Beyond Results
• Instagram Secrets
• Ecom Secrets

Not all of those courses are taught by Vick. For example, the two Facebook courses are taught by Anthony Morrison.

The content is mostly video. Vick also does a live coaching call for students each week.

All members of Four Percent – even free members – get access to the private FourPercent Facebook group, which has 27,000+ members and is very active.

Green Lights 🟢 

Here are a few things to like about Four Percent:

• Offers some training and community for free.
• Premium training looks comprehensive.
• Weekly live group calls with Vick.
• Strong emphasis at becoming the best at what you do.
• Active private community.
• 30-day money-back guarantee.

Red Flags 🚩 

A few things about Four Percent that might give you pause:

• Lack of significant student success stories.
• Too MLM-y for my liking.
• Some big skeletons in Vick’s closet.
• Expensive compared to most other affiliate marketing courses.
• Full cost of implementing the training undisclosed when joining.
• Claims affiliate marketing is an easy way to make money online.
• Misleading ratings and reviews on Trustpilot.
• Many students complain about Vick not keeping his promises.

Other things you should know

• Vick is big into old-school self-improvement and positive thinking. Accordingly, you’ll regularly see him mention and refer to concepts like the Law of Attraction and books like Think And Grow Rich.
• I would be wary of using the ESTAGE website builder that comes included with the Four Percent Gold Membership. It looks like a slick product, but apparently it is only free to students for the first 12 months of their membership. After that, the price is $97/month, which is very expensive for a website builder.
• One of the dangers of Four Percent is that many students end up promoting Four Percent itself. So if you are successful in earning money by following the 4% training, you are likely to end up dependent on Four Percent for your income. If at some point Vick Strizheus decides to stop selling his products or stop paying affiliates – and there is evidence that he has shortchanged affiliates in the past – then you no longer have a business.

Should you join Four Percent?

If you are new to entrepreneurship and are looking for a quick and easy way to make money online, you’ll likely end up disappointed with Four Percent.

Vick Strizheus may tell you that affiliate marketing is “the easiest money today” and that you can quickly “turn your passion into a 6 or 7-figure business”… but the results of his students – or rather the lack thereof – seem to prove otherwise.

Furthermore, Vick’s past misadventures – eg. convicted of insurance fraud and being a big proponent of network marketing – combined with reports of him often failing to follow through on promises to students… well, it all makes me hesitant to trust the man.

Lastly, while there does seem to be lots of courses on offer inside Four Percent, the price tag is quite steep compared to other affiliate marketing courses. Sure, 4% will teach you more than affiliate marketing, but I’ve yet to see compelling evidence that students are successfully building all kinds of online businesses.

In summary, I’d recommend steering clear of this one unless you’re a big fan of Vick Strizheus and the MLM approach to affiliate marketing.

• Learn more about affiliate marketing

Four Percent Alternatives

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