Far too many people write misleading headlines when promoting?

They often start with “Is (name your MLM or product or service) a scam?  They try to act as if they are neutral reporters, but in a large majority of cases the message is a morph of the marketer’s canned email sequence.

As T. Harv Eker says: “The way you do anything is the way you do everything?”  Why should any of us trust a marketer or promoter who is dishonest with him/herself (and us) from the get-go?

For all but a privileged few, the age of male workers earning the bacon and wives staying in the home has all but come to an abrupt end.  Evidence of that change is stark.

Japan, once home to families with five or six children, are now dotted with double-income, no-children families out of economic necessity.  Children dig too deeply into the prosperity of modern-day couples and the birthrate has thus taken a precipitous drop, threatening the prosperity of Japan for the rest of the Twenty-First Century.  And Japan is not alone in this trend.

A sobering truth is that the cost of caring for the silver population in conjunction with the drastic drop in birthrate spells disaster for many countries unwilling or unable to embraced the paradigm shift to the Internet.  Statistics bear out that most of us will need to die before eighty or live in dire poverty.  If you struggle to live on two incomes during your working years, then living on half that gross salary after retirement will surely be a living hell.

The clarion call from the most sincere Internet maestros instills us with a new lease on life.  We suddenly feel like we have a legitimate chance to move from living on the edge to living in the big house on the hill.  We have delicious visions of traveling the world while earning phenomenal income which far surpasses any that could be accrued in the time-for-money linear income world.

I truly believe that with proper training and perspective, a rank amateur of ANY age or circumstance can find a road to success which was totally unavailable to the average bloke of the last century.

Here is the truth, believe it or not, about online success:

There are very successful, high-integrity people online who have built marketing empires from scratch with little to no investment capital to start.  Moreover, many of them have then gone on to teach others their proven, duplicative systems from which the founder earns additional residuals every time an affiliate/partner makes a sale.

Many novices – once taught a given success strategy or system – are able to surpass their mentors by once again developing an affiliate network based on their own unique product and training system.

The whip cream on this cake is that quite a number of the success stories were, at first, technically challenged.

The drawback is that less than one percent of the wannabes will ever finish the book or install the system they purchase from the maestro…and develop a very unhealthy skepticism of Internet Marketing and its future.

Grasping technology or outsourcing your grasp is essential for online killings.

Nothing is forever.  It matters not whether you have a comfy job as the board chairman or a position cleaning the toilets at Yankee Stadium – nothing is forever.  It matters not whether you think things should be stable and predictable.  Things are not.  Today’s success stories can easily be tomorrow’s bankruptcies.

All maestros understand how money is earned.  It is earned by providing true value and true after service to present customers and clients.  Although some of them talk of totally self-running Internet kingdoms, they have not been on top of the heap long enough – because ecommerce has only been vitally around for about a decade – to give us convincing advice about what it takes to stay on top.

For that very reason, I didn’t write a book on how in three years, from the age of 52 to the age of 55, I lost 80 pounds (255>175) and didn’t rebound.  (I partially did!!)

The reason I didn’t write that book is that a former fatman, like an alcoholic, can never delude himself that all he wants is just a teensy weenie piece of pizza or a small scoop of rum raisin ice cream.  Those who say such things are usually fatter than ever a few years later.  I still struggle with weight control much like a mental dyke that could burst at any moment.

On a financial level, the same holds true.  The maestros who can claim more than five years of continued success on astronomical levels know that a business neglected is a business in disrepair.  Nobody can run your business with the same passion you do.

Being an enterprising adult is no longer the domain of eccentric and exceptional people.  A typical employee spends nearly half his day involved in activities which are work-related.  We go home tired and ready to escape in online messaging, watching videos or just crashing on the couch after a fat-laced dinner which Henry VIII might have enjoyed.

Warning:  In our changing world, if you are not moving forward then you are falling behind.  That’s why many of the super successful online maestros got out of the time-for-money trap and learned how to leverage their time more profitably using Internet technology and acquired knowledge of how to make it work for them.

Edison was a man flowing down a river of interest. I don't think he had the word failure in his vocabulary.

Dream stealers are almost as common as cockroaches. If we listen to those who wish to defang our dreams and reign in our passion, then our lives will be similar to a dog on a short leash. The dog on a short leash becomes discouraged and choked up every time he leaps forward to sniff a patch of grass. Finally he just walks passively at the pace of his master, which suits his master fine. And if we were dogs, then the short leash would be fine for us as well.

The maestros are not on leashes (but some will put you on one in a New-York minute!). They know who they are and what they wish to accomplish. They are far from perfect but they are willing to fend for themselves regardless of whether others approve of what they do. They are not caught up in endless guilt. They are not trapped by the fear of failure. They thrive on chaos and see opportunity where others see trouble and insurmountable problems.

Who are you? What do you stand for? What do you value? What do you want? Where do you want to live and with whom? How do you define success? What do you deep down inside want to become?

Success does leave clues.

When you were a child, what was it that tickled your soul? What kind of people touched you deeply? What was your vision of how the world should be? What did you want to be when you grew up?

The maestros asked and answered those questions, and then proceeded with purpose and self-confidence to make their dreams a reality. They live on purpose and so should we.

So find your passion and then march with the self-assurance that life will bring you what you desire most. Be the best and do the most you can. The people you are about to touch are action people and they appreciate those who mirror that behavior.

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MLM is a case where it is far too easy to throw away the baby with the bath water...especially if you believe you've been burned.

It is easy and understandable why MLM – despite growing scrutiny and regulation – remains a scandal, in most cases. Overpriced products being bought and flogged to others is not a legitimate business model, though it is alluring (maybe hypnotic) to lazy, something-for-nothing thinkers.

After all, we are taught that MLM is nothing more than the same action as when we share a good movie with a friend and that friend with his friend to infinity. Eventually, we will all see the movie, right? And why not get a piece of the action for the simple and natural act of sharing a good thing, right?

Now some people are bad sorts and they may diss the “opportunity,” thus we better recruit, recruit, recruit until we get that big hitter just waiting to be discovered who will then, logically, through his huge downline of happy worker-ants make a fortune for himself and us, the upline, and ultimately we can all sip daiquiris in a Caribbean concubine and live off the residuals until the sun don’t shine.

The truly affluent buy what they want directly. They don’t need clubs or discount membership organizations as a buffer zone or to save a few quid. They purchase quality or conspicuously consume by need or want alone, regardless of the price sticker. They are not MLMers or are ex-MLMers who have sapped out the opportunity seekers’ pocketbooks and got out while the getting out was good.

MLM is, in reality, a business that just keeps reselling the opportunity to sign up more distributors. Nobody in their right mind would buy a seriously overpriced product line on a regular basis unless it meant that they could in turn sucker other people into the losing cause. One can get pretty winded, however, doing that for a lengthy time, and must also feel a gnawing pang of guilt that they are passing a lie from one human being to the next based on what they have been told is possible rather than what they have experienced personally.

I have read in multiple sources that even in the biggest and oldest MLMs, less than one percent of the distributors ever make more than $50 gross per month. That is gross! And in the process you may lose the trust and respect of friends, colleagues and family.

Ah, but the modern online versions of MLM – using the cover of affiliate programs – tell you that you needn’t go after that warm market anymore – that the world is at your beck and call and ready to buy your aloe gel, healthy chocolate, travel excursions or green computers. The market, they claim, is infinite and you are at the ground-floor level of a debt-free, can’t-miss company that’s exploding like a porno star.

UR UR UR URRR!…the roosters are crowing. Wake up. How insane is it to chase these rabbits. They come and go, and leave a lot of death and destruction in their wake. I can’t recall how many times an addicted MLMer will approach me with Project X MLM one month, Project Y a few months later, and still another scheme a half-dozen months hence.

I can’t tell you how many times distributors are forced to front-load their wares, despite legal regulations against such practice.

I can’t tell you how often I have heard personally or read in forums online about distributors who were stacked with downline because the system rewards the deeper levels exponentially more than the first downline level. I can’t bear to tell you how many distributors initially made some chicken-feed profits with the winking upline’s assistance, invested more in the “can’t lose” MLM, and then watch their company close down with their commissions unpaid /their inventory unsold.

So here’s a funny question: Am I totally against MLMs and the concept behind them? No, the industry is evolving and a few companies are leading the way in transparency and in offering really useful products and services at non-extortionist prices.

Some of the key factors that I use in determining the transparency of MLMs are

1) Is the product comparable or better in price and quality with those available in normal retail channels?

2) Are the leaders accessible?

3) Is the product or service consumable and does it require continued use?

4) Is it necessary to jump through many convoluted hoops in order to get money for the retailing of the product or service?

5) Does the company lead with hype or with training? (The latter is what I’m searching for.)

6) Other than the top echelon of the company, do many of the user/distributors have effusive praise for the founders and are hundreds rather than a few of them long-term fans of the founder, his company and his philosophy?

7) How many members/users have made and are continuing to make more than $50 a month? (If it is more than five percent, it’s a winner!)

I FOUND A WINNER…..GVO

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