First, all business is about one person getting others to work for him so that he can reap the benefit of their labor. Nearly every corporation is a pyramid. The people at the top are always paid the most, and the people at the bottom work their butts off and can barely pay their bills.

But that doesn’t make these corporations a scheme. If the corporation is building products or providing services that people want simply want to pay for — where there is no business opportunity — then clearly there’s no ponzi scheme going on.

Likewise, as more competition comes into the MLM arena, more of the bums will fall away and you’ll see the winners are those who either produce something not available elsewhere in the marketplace, or they provide something at a competitive price. In this way, even the “last person in” is getting a good value and it’s irrelevant if s/he’s able to recruit people. This is the only kind of MLM I get involved with.

(One way to spot these: if the MLM has a lot of customers who are not part of the business opportunity. Yes, these exist.)

I believe this will become more and more commonplace as other forms of advertising fail to get through due to how many ads we now see in a day, and thus how strict our filters are becoming.

Affiliate marketing addresses a lot of the problems inherent in MLM, however a lot of affiliate programs seem to best be marketed online, which requires a steep learning curve for much of the population. I like affiliate programs that can be easily taken offline for the bulk of people.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents in support of the article in a “Yeah, but …” kind of way.

I fear and again I suggest a rereading you have mistaken my use of the term MLM to be some larger bracket to include franchising and marketing in general. But the article was and still is all be it one sided a warning to people not to fall into pyramid schemes under a “new” name.

Perhaps I should have included a quick paragraph on franchising to have helped those who may have heard the term MLM in a traditional business setting.

affiliate programs and multi-level programs are merely methods of marketing

of course one has to choose the right company, most don’t know how to choose a quality company as they do not do their due diligence (having been introduced by a friend who hasn’t done their due diligence either).

if people will do their own research they will find many blue chip $multi billion companies trading on the NYSE and elsewhere. I am not sure the writer of this blog really does understand the network marketing industry but clearly he has had a bad experience … I had one in Starbucks but I wouldn’t write them all off.