Rediscovering the Integrity of the MLM Industry

The Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) industry has become interchangeable with pyramid schemes, all because someone at the top of the “pyramid” gets a bit greedy and is too lazy to come up with a real product or service they could otherwise sell legitimately without getting rich off of the backs of desperate people in their down-time. That’s the difference really – the thin line between selling a product or service as part of the MLM industry and as part of a Ponzi scheme is that of the existence of a product or service to sell and that product or service should not be a spot or position in the scheme itself, so your ability to make money should not depend on any recruiting.

If you actually just take the time to study any affiliate marketing/selling structure, what you’ll realise is that the most successful of these are actually operating some sort of multi-level marketing structure. In other words, most successful multi-level marketing businesses don’t go around marketing themselves as MLM businesses.

That is how I rediscovered the integrity of the MLM industry, something which can be very hard to find these days because quite a lot of us find ourselves in somewhat of a desperate position and so we become very susceptible to just about any promise of the easy money that supposedly comes with just paying some joining fee and following a set of pre-set instructions to work your way to relative riches.

That element of generating some of your income within the MLM industry through recruiting others doesn’t automatically render it a pyramid scheme, however. If you get some commission from referring new sellers to an affiliate marketing platform for example, if you and the new recruit primarily make your money through selling something tangible then that’s what keeps things legit.

The problem which often comes into play is that the product or service which is meant to be marketed and sold is often not even in the slightest bit valuable and so multi-level marketers have a hard time making even one sale. Forex trading training courses have become that “product/service” which is sold by quite a few multi-level marketing businesses, which is a typical example of a pyramid scheme which wears the mask of being an MLM business.

How many people who take those classes actually use the knowledge they learn to trade forex successfully, for example? They then inevitably have to turn to the “secondary” method of generating profits for themselves, which is to recruit other members to join and sign up to the same forex trading classes that proved to be useless for them.

There is one test to determine the legitimacy of a multi-level marketing, which is asking yourself one question, that being whether or not the main product or service you’ll be marketing is indeed one which you’d actually pay money for and be satisfied with after having paid for it. So the product or service must not invoke any buyer’s remorse.