Crowd Mountain Review

If you are like me you have spent more than a few dollars on some of the many training courses available from the internet marketing gurus out there.  The latest for me was Crowd Mountain from Michelle McPhearson.

The first thing I’d like to say is that overall I don’t regret it.  The first six weeks were terrific.  I learned a lot, and made some money using her techniques.

The second thing I have to say is that I quit after 3 months because apparently Michelle quit after the first 6 weeks.

The first 6 weeks of Crowd Mountain consists of her “Boot Camp,”  6 modules, each a week long,  where Michelle walks you through keyword research through setting up your site, SEO, and promotion with social networking.

Boot camp is excellent.  Michelle has a great way of explaining everything concisely and to the point.  She walks you through everything step-by-step in several videos per module. The videos are not available for download, but there is a pdf transcript available for download for each module.

Each week there is a Q&A webinar covering the topics of that particular module, which fill up very quickly…I couldn’t join one of them.  Fortunately a video of the webinar is made available afterwards though.

Michelle’s method uses WordPress, and she does make available some pretty good plugins, but to be honest they are not really essential.  The YouTube dropper plugin, for example, allows you to search YouTube for videos and drop them in your post from the WordPress edit post page.  That’s nice, but it’s not a big deal to open another tab in your browser and search YouTube. And I like the SmartYouTube plugin which makes embedding a YouTube video in  WordPress easy.

One of the best features of Boot Camp is that Michelle demonstrates exactly how she uses Market Samurai, which is also essential to the program. Her way of cutting to chase, ignoring the irrelevant and only considering what is truly important makes the keyword research process clear.  For a beginner or intermediate internet marketer this is absolutely terrific.

It cost $127 per month for a basic membership of CM, with the option to become a “mastermind” member for an additional $70. Mastermind members get an additional Q&A as well as the ability to access all the Boot Camp modules at once (rather than waiting for access from week to week), and access to the archives).

Personally, I found the levels of membership a bit of turnoff, but all things considered Boot Camp was absolutely worth it. After Boot Camp is when nothing happened.

And I do mean nothing happened. Everything just sort of stopped, except for the monthly billing.

Posts on the members message board ranged from concern to outright anger.  Slowly we started getting some answers from Karen,  Michelle’s right hand woman. Michelle is moving, Michell has the flu.  OK. Great.

I figured she will make good on this lapse. After all, Boot Camp was so good, and Michelle seems to be a woman of integrity.  I waited it out.  I watched the message board.

It turned out that negative comments were not to be tolerated. Karen chastised those who would complain, and the negative posts were removed. Let me be clear that I did not post anything, no sour grapes here, I only watched. It had a Soviet Russia feel to me.

After a couple of weeks it was promised that Crowd Mountain would be getting back on track. Lessons on outsourcing and email marketing were promised.  The calendar was filled with workshops etc.

And then nothing happened again.

The silence was deafening, the message board filled up with angry comments, which remained a longer time before being removed because no one was monitoring them! The Crowd Mountain staff, including Michelle were nowhere to be seen!  Michelle did send out a few tweets to her twitter followers, but her paid subscribers were being ignored, it’s that simple.

After about a week of that I decided to cancel my membership.  I logged into the support forum and asked that my membership not be renewed when the current month ended. I explained that boot camp was great, but not much had happened since then.  To their credit they canceled my membership when I asked.

It seems that Crowd Mountain lost a lot of subscribers after boot camp.  What I have discovered since is that pretty much the same thing happened the first round (this was the second round of CM).

If I had to do it all over again, I would, but I would pay for mastermind access, get the info and get out after the first month.

To be honest, I thought Michelle was terrific at first. She’s very smart and her explanations are straight to the point with no nonsense.  It was very disappointing to find that she is indeed lacking in integrity.  Her disregard for her paid members is shameful.

Now she is sending out emails promoting her new free outsourcing webinars, with Joel Peterson. It seems to me that these webinars may have originally been for her paid members, but now that she has lost so many of us she has adjusted her strategy. This will no doubt be followed by a a pitch for something, possibly to get new Crowd Mountain members.

If you do a Google query for “Crowd Mountain Review” you will mostly find 2 kind of sites: those that are Crowd Mountain affiliates, which tell you how fantastic it is, and those that are complaining about how after Boot Camp CM went to hell. I’m not going to link to any of her affiliate sites, but you may want to read this thread on the Warrior Forum.

To be clear, I take no pleasure in writing this post.  I wish it could have been a glowing review. I welcome comments from people who either agree or disagree with me.  I especially welcome comments from Karen or Michelle. You guys have a lot to offer, and I would love to see you set things right.

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