I hesitated to write this Padlock Income Review, because my gut tells me it'll be gone before I finish the first few paragraphs. I’ve been wrong before though, and I may be wrong about Padlock Income too. So, you're here because you have some questions about it… is it legit, is it a scam, can you make money with it and so on… Here’s my review (and opinion).
Disclaimer:
Please note, I am not a member or an affiliate for Padlock Income. This review has been researched with information and/or testimonials that are available online in the public domain. Any recommendations and/or conclusions are strictly opinions and may not to apply to, or agree with, all persons or situations. See full disclaimer for more info
What is Padlock Income?
Padlock Income is the brainchild of British entrepreneur Jeremy Rush who is known for some of the other products he has promoted such as Penny Matrix, DS Domination, and MMO Cashout. Jeremy’s most recent creation, prior to Padlock Income, is called Zukul.
Padlock Income is an internet marketing training program that provides a “done-for-you” sales funnel. The introduction video suggests it could eventually earn you upwards of 60K in a couple days. At least that’s how much Jeremy made according to his video. I assume he’s telling us that because… well, I’m not sure why he’s telling us that, because in my opinion, I have doubts that it’s be possible for others to make that kind of money with Padlock Income. I’ll explain why in a moment.
How Does It Work?
The way you earn money and progress through Padlock Income is by completing tasks and recruiting others. The requirement to progress from Padlock 1 to Padlock number 2, is to recruit 10 more people.
Normally, at this point, I’d continue explaining how this program works, but I'm going to deviate from that for a moment so I can qualify my original comment when I said that Padlock Income will probably be gone before I write the first few paragraphs.
We don’t have a lot of information about Padlock Income because each successive level is a secret. But, we do know some things.
We know that to get past Padlock 1 you need to sign up 10 members. We also know (as I’ll discuss in a moment) that the method of doing this is to post your link into chosen groups on various social media platforms.
With that information alone, we can run some numbers…
The Unfortunate Numbers?
Let’s say you were the first person to join Padlock Income and recruit your first 10 people. Great! You’re onto Padlock 2.
Then, those 10 people post their links, and they each get 10 people. That’s 100 more new Padlock Income members. Moving on…
100 people (those new members) each get 10 and you now have 1000 new members.
1000 each get 10 which is 10,000.
10,000 get 10… and now Padlock income can boast that 100,000 new people have joined…
100,000 each get 10 and you’re at a million people. I don’t need to go any further. I’m sure you get the point.
This is only 5 layers of recruiting… and you have a million people each posting the exact same link, on the exact same social media networks, to the exact same people.
Either 2 things will happen here… either Padlock Income will saturate and finish within a few weeks. Or, a high percentage of people will realize that getting 10 people to sign up isn’t as easy as they thought, and they’ll quit (and you won’t receive any commissions from them if they were under you).
Everyone Is Promoting the Same Thing
The problem here (and with most “done-for-you” type systems) is that everyone is promoting the same thing. It’s already extremely competitive, and the more people that join, the more competitive it gets.
This isn’t a program like Wealthy Affiliate for example that teaches you to build businesses and develop assets in “non-competitive niches” of your own choosing… which could be anything from Alaskan travel to Garden Sheds, Jazz guitars or gourmet coffee beans (among millions of other niches).
The fact that done-for-you systems can only promote the same thing (everyone is using the same funnels) is why they have short life spans, while a company like Wealthy Affiliate that focuses on education has been steadily growing since 2005.
What you’re really doing here, is recruiting people to compete with you.
A model that instead teaches you the skills required to build a proper business (in any niche) is a better long-term strategy.
Padlock 1
Okay, I didn’t mean to get off topic, but let’s assume you understand the numbers and the odds, but still want to go ahead.
There are 12 padlocks total. Padlock 1 is free, and Padlocks 2-12 you have to pay for. How much do they cost? That’s a good question. Jeremy doesn’t share that information with you, which to me is a serious Red Flag.
In fact, when you land on the Padlock Income website, you’re not told much at all. You need to sign up first before you really learn anything about it. So, I signed up…
You will be emailed a password which you can then use to gain access. A quick video describes what Padlock Income is… sort of. You still don’t know what is beyond the first level.
Jeremy Rush provides you with a unique referral link which you will then post (as per his instructions) which leads to what he claims is a web page that converts at 25%. In other words… for every 100 people that click on your link, you will get 25 new recruits.
You will also be building an email list from the recruits who sign up under you, and Padlock Income will automatically send out product offers (or “marketing emails” as he calls them) to the people on your email list.
There is no way of knowing whether or not the sales page actually converts at 25% (which is much higher than average) until you start sending traffic to it yourself. And, he doesn’t mention the type of traffic he used to get that number. He may have sent it out to his email list of established readers (warm traffic) which is something entirely different than posting a link in random Facebook groups to strangers who don’t know or care who you are (cold traffic).
I mention Facebook because that’s your first task. To progress to Padlock 2, you need to sign up to 30 Facebook groups recommended by Jeremy with the provided images and text, and then post your links.
That's another red flag.
Simple link posting is not an effective way to market products. It was common in the web's earlier days, but these links rarely get clicked anymore.
People have become blind to them, and while I can’t say link posting never works… the numbers are not in your favor. As an example, below is a well-crafted Facebook video Ad. If you look at the bottom of the image you'll see it has 265 reactions, 13 comments and 145 shares.
It doesn’t say how many clicks Mel Robbins has received from this advertisement, but from my experience with Facebook Ads 1 click for every 25 reactions would be good number. But, let’s say her numbers are much better than what I’ve experienced and she’s getting 1 click for every 10 reactions. That means she’s received a total of 26.5 clicks. (hypothetically speaking)
Now, look at how many times this Ad has been viewed. 95,000 times!
These numbers are for an Ad that has likely been optimized for the best audience, and even split-tested against other Ads that have not performed as well. If Mel Robbins needs 95,000 views to get a couple dozen clicks, what are the chances a generic link posting campaign is going to perform better?
Even if every reaction was a click, which they are not, that would be 265 clicks for 95,000 (paid) views. Those are not conversions… and Mel Robbins already has a huge following of 122,000 people on her fanpage.
I’m not saying that posting your link won't work, but looking at the numbers (and going from my experience with social media marketing), the chances are not good.
What Are You Selling?
My second issue with this strategy, is that those who join are posting their link and hoping to recruit people into a program they, themselves, know nothing (or very little) about.
What are you actually selling here?
I originally signed up to try this program out and see if it actually works (and maybe even earn a little money in the process). But I knew immediately it wasn't for me when I found out the “secrets” behind each successive padlock are not shared with you.
I had no idea what I’d be getting others into (or getting myself into for that matter).
You may be pulling people into a sales funnel that (not only) gets them excited for a future you have no idea is possible or not, but, you may also be setting them up to get scammed out of thousands of dollars.
I’m not saying that you are. What I’m saying is that you don’t know.
I don’t know either… which is why personally, this isn’t for me. I have no interest in spamming links to random Facebook groups, and I’m certainly not going to recommend a product I know nothing about… just so I can earn the ability to “unlock” the next door.
Facebook Hates Spam
It should be mentioned that your efforts may be for nothing anyway because Facebook absolutely hates spam.
Facebook is popular because it provides a good user experience to most people. Those of us that use Facebook, for the most part, enjoy it… which is why we use it (even when we don’t want to) We feel comfortable there.
But Facebook users are not going to stick around if they’re getting spam in their newsfeeds all of the time.
So, even after all your hard work joining groups, posting images and links, the chances are you will have your links reported and removed. Here is an example…
The same goes for the other social media platforms as well, although to a lesser extent.
I mentioned earlier that I had originally signed up to Padlock Income thinking I would try it out. But, I should have known better, because the way I found them was from people spamming links on Google+.
I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but it all made sense once I found out that this is the method of promotion Jeremy teaches. Below is a single screenshot of one community on Google+. Each one of these is a Padlock Income post from a different person. As I continued down the page it continued like this, which is expected based on the saturation numbers I presented earlier.
This is Not A Business (In my Opinion)
Link posting like this is not building an online business. It’s not teaching you the proper skills to become a real online marketer, to not only run your own business, but to develop skills you can use to acquire clients, teach others, and create real assets of value. Even the funnel that’s being used is Jeremy’s. You’re just posting a link.
As someone who’s been doing this awhile, I can promise you… posting links is not a business.
Jeremy does say you can export the list of emails collected from your referral link, which is definitely an asset. But with the lack of information provided, I can’t tell you if it's free. You may have to pay to export the list, or it may only be available in the higher levels which will undoubtedly cost a significant amount of money (an assumption I’m making because of the secrecy).
Padlock 2
Although I couldn’t find anyone who had reached Padlock 3 (perhaps because of the saturation issues I mentioned earlier), I did find some that had reached padlock 2. Once you get 10 people to sign up, you can pay $10 to upgrade to the next level. At this tier, you can start earning some money.
They say it’s not multi-level marketing or a pyramid scheme, but it does have multiple tiers of payouts.
It works like this (at least at padlock 2 it works like this). When you pay $10… seven dollars of that goes to the person who recruited you, and a buck-fifty goes to the person who recruited them.
The other buck-fifty goes to Jeremy.
So… when YOU reach padlock 2, you can expect to earn $7 for every paying member you get to sign up, and $1.50 for every paying member those people sign up.
Obviously, if you’re to earn tens of thousands with Padlock income, the math doesn’t add up (at this level). If you were signing up 1000 paid members per month that would get you to $7000. If those people collectively signed up 1000 paying member as well, you’d get $1.50 for each… so another $1500.
That’s 2000 paying members per month to earn $8500. Not bad money… but remember how many views it took Mel Robbins (from the Facebook Ad example above) just to get (an assumed) 2 dozen clicks.
Ninety-five thousand!
And those are clicks… not conversions.
I realize that these are assumed numbers based on one Facebook Ad example, but it’s clear, that to earn significant money here you will need a massive audience (hundreds of thousands), relatively little competition (which is impossible when you're recruiting people to sell the same thing as you), and products that pay out considerably more than $7.00 per member.
Is it A Scam?
This is probably the question you really want answered. There’s a lot I don’t like here (as you can probably tell) and some things that are not above board in my opinion. But, as long as Jeremy Rush is reporting your sales accurately and honestly… and paying you as promised, I can’t call it a scam.
I think some of the marketing is deceptive, but that’s just my opinion.
It’s a simple numbers game, and although you don’t know those numbers going in (because you don’t know what the higher levels will cost to join, and you don’t know what products and commissions will be made available to you)… if you can somehow make the numbers work for you, it can pay off.
Padlock 3-12
I’ve been reading comments, reviews and searching online for a definitive answer here, and although it’s only speculation, it’s likely that Padlock Income is a funnel to market Jeremy Rush's other business, Zukul. Or at least a variation of the same products offered in Zukul.
Zukul is also a system based on sales funnels and list building with membership prices that start with a $17.98 subscription and climb up into the $250/month range.
I did some background research on Zukul and like Padlock Income, it did not seem like a great opportunity. If you’re going to sign up for, and promote Padlock Income, I'd encourage you to do some research on Zukul as well. I don't know for certain that these are the products being sold in the higher tiers of Padlock Income, but it makes sense that Jeremy would at least re-brand them for this program.
These are the Zukul products and prices.
Here are my concerns.
The first, is that some of the of the comments I’ve found (example below) are not very kind.
But you can't always rely on comments. What I usually do when looking into online programs such as these is check out their communities. It's not just the comments of others I want to read, but the responses and engagement from the program owners and/or staff.
However, the links on Zukul’s website to their social media communites are pretty much non-existent. Their Facebook page is gone, the last (and only) Twitter post is from 2014 and the most recent YouTube video posted is 2 years old. These are not good signs for a company that sells internet marketing training.
By no means is this a definitive indication that Zukul is a poor product. There are lots of social media platforms that I don't even have accounts with, but I do find it strange that a company that uses (and teaches) social media marketing doesn't put much effort into it themselves.
What I Liked
There’s not much I like here, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t. I’m just stating my opinion and sharing some of what I know about online marketing. You have to look past the hype (for any program) and reverse engineer the numbers so to speak.
If I had to grasp at straws to find something I like about Padlock Income, I’d say…
- I like that it’s free to sign up (although you can’t make money with the free membership) and…
- You can leverage Jeremy’s funnel to build an email list.
- Although link posting is a thing of the past and not a real business in my opinion, it may be suited to your current situation. It's not as time consuming or complex as setting up an online business for example.
What I Don’t Like
- If it’s effective, it’ll quickly be saturated. If it’s not effective… well, then it’s not effective.
- I’m not into spamming links.
- The secrecy. I want to know what I’m getting myself into, and more importantly, what I’d be getting other people into if were to promote it.
- Paypal is not available as a payment, or payout, option… which is another red flag.
Final Thoughts
In my opinion, Padlock Income is not offering a viable solution to people who aspire to own their own online business. It doesn’t teach you how to build the infrastructure of your business, or how to create income producing assets.
At least, it doesn’t teach any of this at the entry-levels, and the only way to progress beyond that is to promote a product you don’t fully understand or trust yourself. That’s a non-starter for me.
Is There a Solution?
The key to a successful online business in my experience is sustainability. It has to be affordable, so you can keep plugging away even when you’re not making money (which can be awhile… longer for some than others). For me… that threshold to keep going was about fifty bucks a month. Your’s may be more or it may be less. You can certainly do it for less.
It also has to be something you enjoy because I can tell you from experience, there are plenty of times when it’s tedious and it's frustrating. If you’re trying to build a business in a niche you don’t enjoy or have no interest in, it’s hard to sustain the level of effort and motivation required to make it successful.
I also talk about how I got started and built my online business on my getting started page, which may or may not be the right path for you, but certainly worth checking out.
I hope you found my Padlock Income review helpful and thanks for stopping by.
Please leave a comment below; I’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you have experience with Padlock Income or one of Jeremy Rush's other programs?
And, if you found this article useful, or think it might be helpful for others… Please share. 😀
Cheers,
Jay
