My Thoughts On Circle of Profit & Profit Academy

1st Product Name: Circle of Profits
2nd Product Name: Profit Academy

Product Owner: Anik Singal

Book Price: $1.99 (digital) $4.75 (paperback)
Membership Price: $2997 (one time fee) or $3188 (4 Payments of $797)

Book Rating: 65/100
Membership Rating: Too Expensive!

 

What Is It?

Circle of profits is a book that explains the basics of how to make money with affiliate marketing and email marketing. Profit Academy is a membership website and training course to teach you the steps to profit from these two things.

Short Review

Surprisingly, the book was pretty good, and worth more than $2 in my opinion. However, it’s clearly a lead-in to the membership website which is astronomically overpriced for what they provide.

Before You Buy

Circle of profits was recommend to me by a friend of mine for something to review. When I heard who it was written by, I couldn’t resist. Ever since my review of Future of Wealth and the junky products I’d seen before from Anik Singal, I was prepared to rip apart the book..even more so after reading all the negative reviews on Amazon.

Singal has a very negative reputation in some internet marketing circles. He also has a long history of creating products that fizzle out, including

• Inbox Blueprints
• Future of Wealth
• Income Kickstart
• Lethal Commission
• IMTarget
• …more?

It seems to be, he's taking the same core concept and re-selling it over and over again. Anyway, I was ready to dislike it with all my heart, but it’s a good thing I actually read the damn thing. Don’t judge a book by its writer?

What I Liked About Circle of Profits

The book was just well written, and very basic. I think it could be a great introduction to internet marketing for someone that’s never heard of a “funnel” or “autoresponder”, and doesn’t know how email marketing works.

There are some nice infographics in there, it’s well organized by chapters, and the information flows well (not very confusing).

He’s currently giving the book away for free, but if that event ever stops, you can get it on Amazon Kindle for $2. Even if you kind of understand what “building a list” means, but want to refresh your memory, this book isn’t a bad buy.

If you are clear about how an email marketing funnel is created, then you probably won’t learn much new.

• Build a landing/squeeze page
• Offer an incentive to opt-in
• Send some affiliate offers to earn commissions
• end of story

What I Didn’t Like About Circle of Profits

There are some negatives to mention about Singal’s book.

For one, it’s very basic. If you understand how email marketing works but just haven’t made any money in it yet, you don’t need to read this.

There’s also plenty of hype in the book, like when he promises that you'll start generating income immediately, and then says that you'll be making $10k a month in just a few weeks. All you have to do is follow his system! Anyone that actually does make $10k a month, knows that it doesn't happen in 2 weeks.

It’s also a blatant recruitment tool for his new membership website Profit Academy, which I’ll discuss below. The book is basically a new twist on an old method: Give away something free (or cheap), and include something more expensive as an upsell.

It’s a smart move, for sure, but it will turn some people off.

I think this is in part because the information in the pages doesn’t contain any real actionable steps. It explains what you should be doing in broad terms, but it’s not really a roadmap to success.

It’s like reading a business book on how to make a million dollars and chapter 1 is called, “Think of your million dollar idea”.

Despite this, Singal does actually provide some good examples of niches, landing pages, and some other examples throughout the book. So I guess I can’t knock him too hard for this point.

More Hype (book images)

My Thoughts on Profit Academy

I’ve got to preface this part by saying that I haven’t joined the Profit Academy, so my impressions are based on what I personally know about internet marketing, and what I can see on their main sales page.

Unproven Community

A brand new community is a shot in the dark – you don’t know how many other members there are, or if they are going to be friendly and helpful. Without access, you can’t really tell if this is just another Facebook group with people posting useless SEO articles, or a place where people share practical business tactics and help each other out.

Many communities offer a freemium version, or a $1 trial access to help you decide if it’s worth the cost. Not here!

Silly Guarantees

The “instant profit system” is supposed to guarantee us profit in 14 days or less. With promises like this, there’s usually a catch

Limited Support

If you are paying $2k-$3k for training, it’s shocking that they would limit your support to 90 days! Are you going to have a full blown business in 90 days? No way.

Are you still doing to need help? Probably so. This is where they pitch you the private coaching course for $XX,XXX.

Vegas…Kind of

Ok, so two tickets to Vegas sounded pretty sweet, and are probably worth a couple hundred bucks depending on where you live. But if you read the details carefully, you get tickets to the “event”, which means you’re still going to have to pay for your plane tickets, hotel, etc.

Not exactly a free trip, now is it.

But what are the tickets to? A conference. I have seen these live event conferences, and they normally run just for trying to sell you junk. They may include some good powerpoint presentations or motivational speeches, but are NOT going to ‘move the needle’ for your business.

Just Plain Stupid Valuation

I rarely use the word “stupid” on my blog, but it’s hard to use any other word when Singal has valued his course at $55,000+. This is exactly what I dislike so much about this guy’s marketing style.

Can you please please please just tell us what we’re getting, and how much it’s going to cost?

There is absolutely no way that this number is even close to what the actual value is of this course, when you can get very similar courses for under $1k, even less than $500.

Shockingly Expensive

There's just no reason to pay $3k for a course that will cost you $300 at other places. There's nothing revolutionary about teaching people how to create a landing page, collect emails, and send affiliate offers. If you want me to spend that much money bro, I need more than a few cooked-up testimonials and empty promises.

A Comment from one of Anik's Students

Recently, I've been talking to one of Anik's former students, and his review of how he felt inside the community was much different from the testimonials that you see on YouTube and on the sales page for whatever Singal is selling. Here was what he had to say:

I know that he has only webinars which he uses to get clients to buy into his schemes. But just as he teaches in his webinars, you become client today and the following week he “upsells” you to a different scheme and if you can't buy the upsell, he proceeds ahead leaving you stranded if you did not follow him to the upsell program.

If you follow him to the upsell program their  again he takes you to the “backend” program. If you don't pay for that again, he disapears. Meanwhile he has take a ton of your money. I stopped following him in 2013 when I realized he was not being straightforward. He is the one who instructed Hostzillar to give us five websites each as part of the deal we had bought into when I was following his webinar business.

Singal recommended this person sign up for 2 years of hosting from the get-go, before he even understood what hosting was and how to use it. It sounds a lot like the typical hosting scam that I feature reviews of on my site. This is just one review, but it's the silent voice you don't hear about 2 years after figuring out that making money isn't as easy as promised.

Circle of Profits Final Review

Profit Academy Final Review