Six Figure Mentors (SFM) Review – Fact Check before Fat Checks

Six Figure Mentors…If you are looking to learn affiliate marketing or to learn how to earn money online, you must have bumped into them.

I did, and I can attest that AT LEAST their Money Back Guarantee works.

Why am I saying that?

Is it the go-to place for aspiring affiliate marketers, or a scam you should avoid?

Quick Summary

SFM Six Figure Mentors Affiliate Platform Review

Six Figure Mentors is an online training platform, hosting provider and community for affiliate marketers of all levels. While their training program is almost decent - although very basic - new affiliate marketers should stay away from SFM. The Student Level provides no value for the money, the higher membership levels are way overpriced. There is aggressive upsell and strong emphasis on becoming an affiliate for SFM, while the knowledge you can gain with their training won't take you far if you'd like to promote anything else as an affiliate marketer.

Editor's Rating:
1.5

People can earn money with SFM, though it is almost entirely limited to those who promote SFM.

My Experience with SFM

Thank God I did not lose any money, I managed to flee and I have never looked back. So this Six Figure Mentors (SFM) review will be somewhat limited, opinionated but at least honest.

Affiliate Disclosure: I am NOT an affiliate of the Six Figure Mentors, but you do find affiliate links to other products and services on this page. As I only recommend products that I believe in, you can assume that if I recommend a product, you will click on an affiliate link. This means that I may earn a commission if you later purchase that product, however it costs no extra money to you.

Why? Is Six Figure Mentors a SCAM?

Strictly speaking it isn’t, I can’t say that, but there are some really strange things going on.

What was clear that SFM was definitely not for me. I was trying to find a step-by-step training course that would teach me how to start affiliate marketing.

They do have a few really good things in their pockets (later on that), but when I came across Stuart Ross’s videos I wanted to learn and start affiliate marketing on a very small budget.

They claim that their training program does exactly that, but I had to find out soon enough that it was very far from the truth.

What is SFM?

In their own words, they ‘give you the tools, training, resources and community support to help you succeed in the online arena – why serve a business until retirement when you can learn to create a business that serves you!‘

The Six Figure Mentors is basically a training program to get your online business started. Or shall I say affiliate marketing business? There’s a bit of a confusion here.

They position themselves as the go-to training provider for newbie affiliate marketers. Serious entrepreneurs will be scared away early on by the irrelevant, almost scammy videos and the ‘strangely aggressive’ marketing strategy of the programme.

Newbies will struggle and give up, thinking affiliate marketing is a scam.

So let’s talk about why everyone is asking if Six Figure Mentors is a scam? Why did I ask that question just a couple of weeks into their training program?

Smoke and Mirrors

There are some things that should make your alarm bells go off.

First, if you have ever seen a cheesy ‘This is how I changed my life and you can do it too’ type YouTube / Facebook video advert, I am pretty sure you saw an SFM advert. Even if you did not know it.

What is common in them that they are beautifully shot, they are quite long. A guy, a girl, or whoever speaks for minutes about how they have changed their life and how fantastic it is that they have found their freedom. They trying to manipulate your emotions (which is fine), but if you have ever sat through an MLM meeting the panels will be very familiar.

That was Warning Sign #1

They don’t even tell you what the ‘opportunity’ is, how these people achieved what they have achieved. Some of them don’t even tell, what the company is they are promoting, but Stuart Ross (founder of SFM) appears in the background talking in front of people who look happy. The only point of these videos is to direct you to Stuart Ross’s video series – effectively a sales funnel – the makes you want to sign up for one of their membership levels.

SFM ‘Student Level’

After much hesitation I though, what the heck, they have 30-days money back guarantee, but if they teach me how to start affiliate marketing, it’s worth $29.

I thought it was going to be easy to sign up, but then hey, there is a job interview, sorta’…or I though. It seemed that I needed to book in a conversation with one of their business consultants (it is not the person who you have seen in the video). Fortunately, I could access the Introductory Modules in the meantime (the first free slot for this consultation was some 2 weeks away).

I did wonder what was going on, it felt like I could be kicked out if I was not giving the right answers or not having the right mindset etc. Of course it was not the case, but it was my impression anyways.

That was Warning Sign #2.

The Introductory Modules

If you think that you will learn ANYTHING at this membership level, you can’t be any further from the truth. Actually, it is a walkover of what you can access if you upgrade to the Essential Membership ($297 initial fee and then $97 monthly)

I can’t exactly remember how many videos I watched, but it took me a while to realise, that those were not a long intro for the actual training material, those modules WERE the training itself at this membership level.

In the last module, I remember, Stuart started to talk about how to promote affiliate products. I though: FINALLY! Ooops sorry, ONE PRODUCT ONLY: Six Figure Mentors.

That was the Final Warning.

Well, it pissed me right off.

It was the first time I googled ‘Is SFM a scam?’

I emailed their Customer Service team straight away, I was well within the 30 days. At least they gave my money back.

What Is The Problem With SFM?

So there were quite a few reasons – warning signs if you like – telling me to stay away from Six Figure Mentors.

1. They make you pay for watching their long sales video. Yes. The Introductory Modules within the Student Level membership (for $29 a month!) are nothing more than a 4 hour long sales pitch about SFM and the higher membership levels.
   I thought it was ludicrous.
2. You are effectively paying for their sales agent to convince you of an upgrade. I must admit it is very clever. They create a sense of scarcity in you. As soon as they say you must speak with their Consultant but they are not available straight away, they change the dynamics. Now you are on the wrong side. You are waiting for THEM to be available for you.
   Normally, sellers chase leads, trying to sell their stuff. Not here. You MUST wait. THEY will decide if you are WORTHY of their time, worthy for their ESSENTIAL membership.
   And – of course – they will tell you that if you are serious about this, then you must invest in your future success. $297 exactly.
3. NO VALUE for money at the lowest tier Student membership. There’s not much to add. I think it is shameless to ask for any money for those introductory modules, but now that they do, you are more likely to think you that you actually have gained something.
   It is reverse psychology again: you rather trick your brain into thinking that it is something that is worth the investment than admitting that you have thrown money out of the window. Like it was your fault that you’ve let yourself tricked into this (it was not), and your ego wants to play along rather than to admit that you have been cheated.
   And if you have paid already for literally smoke and mirrors, its much easier to convert you to Essential or Elite. You are not a cold lead anymore, but a paying customer.
4. Promoting SFM – building the pyramid. At least it felt like that straight away. Well, the intro modules did not give any value. Yet, the last video sort of pre-empts the possibility that promoting SFM is an unmissable opportunity (because of the high pay-outs).
   Promoting SFM at this point would have felt like I was promoting something for the sake of getting as many others signed up as possible. Who then can promote the stuff too. No additional value involved, other than the $29 monthly subscription fee that you can earn a share of. Or more. Much more.
   And from what they tell you about the Essential level and above, all they teach you, all SFM provides the tools for, is for the sole purpose of promoting SFM.
5. DONE FOR YOU methods are actually DONE FOR THEM.
   Done-for-you system are flawed at the very basis of their existence. What they make you do is that you compete against them and other members of the program.
   With done-for-you landing pages and sales funnels you will never be able to rank on Google. So you’ll end up paying for showing up on search engines and social media platforms.
   That does not cost them any money, it comes out of YOUR POCKET. If you f.. it up it is YOUR LOSS. If you make it work, it’s THEIR PROFIT.
   And then, only then, they pay you a share of their profit. How generous!

Is Six Figure Mentors an MLM?

As far as I am aware, it is not officially an MLM business. But if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.

Rumors have it that they were on the radar of the FTC (financial authorities in the USA) owing to the remarkable resemblance to some MLM scams that had been shut down on consumer protection grounds.

SFM had to re-structure to demonstrate that they not purely an MLM / Pyramid scheme. So they might have a $20,000 (or I don’t know how much) private tutorship (Digital Experts Academy) that is available outside the MLM scheme, why wouldn’t they have? It demonstrates that they truly teach people to succeed online.

And if someone accidentally buys it, well, it’s heck a lot of money so they have nothing to lose.

They have removed the FREE (Affiliate Only) membership level too. In the past, anyone could have just signed up as an affiliate, to promote SFM.

Is SFM a SCAM?

The reason I can’t say that, is because they do have products and training later on, at higher membership levels.

You can use these products, and one of them actually is quite great if you are willing to invest in your online business.

What Is The Confusion About?

As I said, I was looking for a place to learn how to earn money online with affiliate marketing. I am guessing a lot of people are in the same shoes, but don’t know where to start. SFM position themselves as a starting point for this journey. From daydreaming in front of your computer screen straight to becoming a millionaire.

Well, it probably won’t happen with SFM unless you already know how to create beautiful but cheesy videos, you pay a voice actor to dub it and then you shoot it on YouTube (and pay a sh..load of money upfront on advertising fees)

In other words, it was not for me, that was not what I wanted to learn. And SFM is probably not the best place to start for most people.

So, for whom SFM is a good match?

It took me a while to find out…

SFM Essential Membership

If you do manage to keep your blood pressure low during your Student Membership, or you go blindly straight to Essential Membership, there are quite a few things that are worth your attention.

• Plenty of video training (gosh these guys love videos…)
• Step-by-step guidance
• Hosting
• Page Builder
• Basic graphic designer

So if you really don’t know how to start, where to start, Six Figure Mentors will hold your hand; and in good time they will teach you how to adopt their system, how to use the tools they provide.

If you are lucky, you will have access to your mentor who will be happy to help you. The sooner you (earn enough money to) upgrade to ELITE membership, the more money they earn.

The sooner you start promoting SFM, the more money they earn through the Tier 2 commissions.

I don’t want to be mean…the point is:

The longer you stay with SFM, the more money they earn (through recurring commissions). If it takes moral support (convincing you to stay, success can happen tomorrow), or if it takes giving you a helping hand in progressing faster, they have a vested interest in your success.

(The question is, is it the system you’d like to master? Is it the method you’d like to invest your time and money in?)

Even if your mentor has gone awol, you have the community, which is essential for the support (and the push) you need in the first few months.

Related post: 12+1 Reasons Why Most People Fail in Affiliate Marketing

So if you take action and not afraid to ask, not afraid to GET what you PAY FOR, SFM might be what you have been looking for. With one caviat.

How Useful Is The Training in SFM?

From what I have seen, there are some tricks that you can take away and apply OUTSIDE Six Figure Mentors. I mean, marketing is marketing. THEIR marketing strategy and sales funnel – I must admit – is very well thought out.

It is disgusting, but professional.

Their training on Email Marketing must be pretty great. I had received at least 17 emails (and some more probably landed in the Junk) before I signed up. And they were not bad at all.

However, looking at the way they built up their marketing system, this is not something I would ever want to replicate or adapt. Why? Because it does not look sustainable.

• If you don’t have the budget to fund advertising, you are stuck
• If you stop paying for advertising, your revenue stops
• If you recruit more people who promote SFM too, the CPC will increase as they will target the same keywords too.
• If the FTC pulls the carpet from under their feet, you are stuck. You will have nothing but a landing page for a product that is no longer available.

This is a risk you have to consider before buying into their training.

Having said that, if the only reason you buy into their training is because you’d like to learn how to promote their products…well…I have never seen an affiliate merchant who makes YOU pay for letting you promote THEIR products.

You must be a paying customer of the membership level you’d like to promote. So you can’t promote ELITE unless you pay $2500 on top of $297 (Essential) and paying further $97 monthly.

It is normally the other way around, through affiliate commissions. Making affiliate marketers pay for them to be able to promote SFM is truly unique on the entire internet.

What Else Makes The SFM Training Programme Unique?

Here’s and actual excerpt from their website. If you click ‘What makes SFM different’ it opens in a pdf (I am not kidding!! I could cry, actually.)

You have the ability to plug and play with our existing affiliate products, you don’t even need to go out there and find affiliate programs. To the point where imagine receiving one thousand dollars in commissions for each and every sale that you make on a product. That is known as high-ticket commissions and we have that all built in the system should you want to take that route.

So what that means is rather than going out and spending time researching products to sell, or going out and putting everything together to set websites up it’s all ready-to-go. We give you your links and then we teach you how to go out there and actually market and promote on the internet including a topic called list building which you’re going to understand through our educational modules.

The date on the bottom of the page says 2015, so it might not have been updated for a while…

But just to emphasise that all the negative, mean stuff that I have said about SFM are not strictly ‘subjective’, not just my opinion, it is what they actually say about themselves:

• You don’t even need to go out there and find affiliate programs = you won’t learn how to find affiliate programs for other (any) niches
• Plug and play with our existing affiliate products = we only interested in teaching you how to promote SFM products
• Rather than going out and spending time researching products to sell = you won’t learn how to research a niche, how to understand your audience, how to explore and respond to their needs, how to find viable affiliate products
• (Rather than) putting everything together to set websites up = you won’t learn how to launch and set up a website and optimise it for Search Engines, or how to create content that ranks
• We give you your links and then we teach you how to go out there… = pretty much sums it up what the training program is about

There are plenty of programs out there that teach you everything you need to start your online affiliate marketing business, without the pushy upsells, without the borderline unethical marketing strategy, without the risk of being shut down at any minute by the FTC.

Courses that give you a set of skills for life, that you can adapt to any product, any service, and on the side you can start your own web-design business too.

And they do it for much less money, or even for free.

Related post: How to Create a Website for Affiliate Marketing

Also worth checking out: 7 Step Fast Track To Affiliate Marketing | Save Months!!

What Is It That Still Makes SFM Worthy of Your Money?

All in all, if you just want to have a website and promote affiliate products here and there, SFM is an overkill on one hand, inadequate on the other.

If you need a high ticket affiliate program and you don’t really care whether its worth the money, you might have found a goldmine.

But there is also a ‘hidden’ treasure if you like, if you want something different, SFM might be interesting for you for this one reason.

If you already have your own product, or you have an idea, SFM can be really helpful in launching your product and making it successful.

They have a platform to hook you up with manufacturers in China, training for Amazon FDA and teach you how to create a marketing strategy for your own product.

I am not sure this can be found in a structured manner like this anywhere else.

Does this worth your investment?

If you think of this as an investment into a physical / online business, than it is not a lot of money. Any start-up business would cost more to kick off, and you’d save a lot in the mid- to long-term by not running in circles for years.

It’s a shame they position themselves as the go-to training provider for newbie affiliate marketers. Serious entrepreneurs will be scared away early on by the irrelevant (for them), almost scammy videos and the ‘strangely aggressive’ marketing strategy of the programme.

Newbies will struggle and give up, thinking affiliate marketing is a scam.

There will be a few – there is always a few – who does not have any moral issues with promoting products like SFM. After all, if they can make money with it, it proves that it is not a scam, and that others could make money too, right?

How Much Money Can You Make With SFM?

Strange…So you can see that people, apparently, making a sh*tload of money with SFM. Correctly: making sh*tload of money promoting SFM. We are talking 5-6 figure incomes a month. In US dollars. That’s the perks of promoting a high ticket affiliate program with a killer sales funnel, and a dedicated salesperson closing the sale on your leads.

If you already have a website in the MLM niche, or in the Make money online niche and have a list of emails, it will be much easier for you to earn money with SFM. And you only need a few sales to stack up the recurring commissions nicely, and earn a lot of one-off commissions too.

But if you start from scratch, you better brace yourself for making a marketing strategy, budgeting for it etc. If you promote SFM, they will give you all the tools and training to do that.

But if you don’t want to promote SFM, don’t have the budget, stomach etc…I am not sure if the training is good enough for that. There are a few useful things that you can pick up, but if you are new to affiliate marketing, I think the training is not good enough to teach you how to promote ANY product from zero.

Related post:How Much Can You Earn in Your First Year of Affiliate Marketing? (Real-life Example)

SFM Six Figure Mentors Affiliate Platform Review

Six Figure Mentors is an online training platform, hosting provider and community for affiliate marketers of all levels. While their training program is almost decent - although very basic - new affiliate marketers should stay away from SFM. The Student Level provides no value for the money, the higher membership levels are way overpriced. There is aggressive upsell and strong emphasis on becoming an affiliate for SFM, while the knowledge you can gain with their training won't take you far if you'd like to promote anything else as an affiliate marketer.

Editor's Rating:
1.5

What Can I Recommend Instead of SFM?

So if you are looking for something that could provide you with the transferable skills you need for ANY online business where there is a website involved, and you want in-depth training on affiliate marketing and how to monetize your website, how to build up traffic etc; here are my recommendations:

SFM vs Income School – Project 24

Income School has a slightly different approach. Rather than (over)charging you for hosting you don’t need they simply teach you how to find your own hosting provider for your website(s).

Rather then chasing the wild goose, or the next shiny object, they teach you how to build an entire network of websites that will earn passive revenue for you for many years to come.

You need minimal investment in terms of costs (training, hosting, domain(s)), and quite a lot of time to build those websites up.

Good news, that they also teach you how to speed the process up by outsourcing, and they give you the tools that you can use to teach freelance writers write the type of content you need: informative posts that rank on Google.

Their promise is to take you from Ground 0 to earning a full time passive income – $3-4000 a month – in 24 months.

Affiliate marketing is only part of their revenue structure: you’ll learn how what you need to join premium ad networks and how to develop and promote your own info-products.

Read my full IncomeScool Project 24 Review here: End Of False Pretenses? – Income School Project 24 Review

SFM vs Wealthy Affiliate

Good old Wealthy Affiliate, where you have everything you need to kick off as an affiliate marketer. The training is simple, informative, easy-to-follow; but that does not mean that you don’t learn everything you need.

Quite the opposite: by the end of the free training modules (Online Entrepreneur Certification Level 1) you will have a website fully set up for SEO, running the latest WordPress on it with other state-of-the art hosting arrangements in place. You will have already posted some content on your website and know how to find topics and easy-to-rank-for keywords for many more posts. All free

The rest of the training is for members only, but there are 4 more levels just on the beginners’ course. On top of this, you have access to tons of other training materials, and the community is very lively too: any question you have, plenty of other, more experienced affiliate marketers can answer your question.

In the comparison between Six Figure Mentors vs Wealthy Affiliate, the latter is clear winner in terms of long-term skills and knowledge. If you try both, you’ll be shocked by the difference between what SFM gives you for $29 a month, and what Wealthy Affiliate gives you access to for free.

You may also be interested: Where can you learn affiliate marketing for free? or What Is the Best Affiliate Marketing Course for Beginners?

If you are new to affiliate marketing and looking for a good place to start your journey, one piece of advice: don’t start it with the Six Figure Mentors.

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Greg

Aspiring entrepreneur online and offline for the last 14 years who is not afraid to share his trials, errors, failures and successes to help you avoid the same mistakes. Owner of 2 websites and 2 online shops, making websites ever since FrontPage Express was a thing and earning a side-income online since Amazon was a small business.

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