Caroline Hannay calls herself The Momtrepreneur, says she does affiliate marketing.
But after looking into how she really makes her money, let’s just say it’s not as wholesome as you might think.
Rewind back. She was seven months pregnant, looking for online side hustles when good ole Facebook gave her one.
She saw some chick’s Reel talking about this 15 Day Online Business Builder Challenge.
Caroline was skeptical but the algorithm wore her down with retargeting ads. So she ends up signing up.
Best. Decision. Ever. Goes from $0 to $800k in seven months.
How? Mainly by posting short little videos to Instagram and TikTok about passive income and remote gigs and digital marketing and whatnot, to build her following.
It was awkward and cringey at first.
She had never done anything like it before. She actually hid it from her husband till he caught her filming in the closet one day.
She was all: I’m doing this thing, I don’t know if it’s gonna work but I think it will, I think I’m gonna make thousands of dollars with this.
And he was like: Go for it, babe. Let’s see it. I believe in you.
That helped.
So Caroline kept pushing through the discomfort, kept posting, stayed consistent, got better, gained confidence, and whaddya know… the followers came.
“DM me to get started,” she’d write in her captions.
When they did, she’d give ’em her affiliate link for the same 15 Day Online Business Builder Challenge she had originally bought.
Same as the chick from the Facebook Reel had done to her. Right?
And when someone purchased, Caroline got a commission. Not a big one, though, ’cause that product only cost $7.
So wait, how’d she make $800 Gs promoting a $7 product, you might be thinking.
Even if they paid 100% commission, that’s like 114,000 sales. Which is like half of her entire IG following.
No way one out of every two people who hit the Follow button went on to buy from her, you reason.
And you’d be right. So here’s where it gets dirtier than hotel carpet.
This Challenge is sold through a company called Legendary Marketer. David Sharpe is the founder.
Before that, Dave was the cofounder of Empower Network, which everyone thought was a pyramid scheme.
Top earners begged to differ. They were making bank like Caroline is now.
“It’s totally legit,” they’d say. “It’s just affiliate marketing. You don’t understand. Clearly you’re just a hater.”
Only it wasn’t affiliate marketing. It was multilevel marketing.
Products were similar to what Legendary Marketer offers. Make money online courses, basically.
They got you in the door with a cheap one. After that, upsells galore. And they got way more expensive.
You could sell each one for a commission but you had to buy it first. That’s what everyone on the leaderboard had done.
If you wanted to make the kinda money they were making, you had to as well.
No one would’ve bought the products otherwise.
And sure, you could’ve used what you were being taught to sell other products as an affiliate but no one did.
You joined and bought all the products… so you could tell others to join and buy all the products… so they could tell others to join and buy all the products… to infinity.
But there aren’t infinity people in the world, are there?
So it replicates rapidly, saturates the market, and eventually dies. Which is why Empower Network was hot for like a year and then they went bankrupt.
Legendary Marketer is following the same playbook.
Chelsea exploded her income because Legendary Marketer has tens of thousands of dollars worth of upsells everyone has to buy in order to qualify for commissions on those products. Gross.
All of her recruits will then copy her zero-value Instagram and TikTok strategy.
And their recruits will do the same. And their recruits will do the same.
And so on and so forth, until no one can make any more money or the FTC pulls the plug – whichever comes first.