But all the same, it keeps us on our toes…
Good luck if you're one of the afflicted. And long live blogs!

Gill Clark

Protection of trademarks and copyrighted intellectual property for one.

Compliance with FTC regulations and other legal requirements for two.

Third: The business was to be built by building personal relationships with your own people (distributors and
customers) and building business through that.

The internet has spawned an attitude that you can put up a page or site and get ridiculously rich with zero effort.

I enjoy seeing people having to work for a living.

The trouble with most MLMs is they're bordering on scams themselves. I was on a "call" one night with one of those biz-in-a-box deals for several thousand dollars. The person responsible used only her first name. What they were pushing would likely land them in trouble with every state attorney general in the country.

Amway and a few others run a clean shop. It's the scams that tarnish their reputations combined with the stupidity of some of the people who get involved.

Here's some real MLM:

Company X manufactures a product. They recruit a factory rep to sell the product to a master distributor who sells it to a lower-level/volume distributor who sells it to the retailer or local mechanic or (whatever), who sells it to John Q. Consumer.

Commissions paid by Amway (and presumably some others, but not all) are based on a 30% gross margin for the retailer, 25% for wholesalers/distributors, plus an allowance for factory reps. Those numbers match what I saw in retail while I was in college and had a store.

Now, big box retailers sell something for $10 that they pay the manufacturer $20 for, and it's from China. That's instead of the 30% or so in the US back in the 1970s.

Things change. Get used to it.

Google's a private company. They can do any cotton pickin' thing they want.
And anyone who builds a business based on what they do right now is asking for trouble every time they change things.

You'd do the same if you were the one selling ads, so no whinin'.

The bottom line is this, until MSN and Yahoo! get their acts together, you have to balance your PPC marketing with SEO, Affiliates and other forms of traffic.

Jarrod Morris

Should Google become the Internet Police? Maybe not they are the librarian not the FBI.

Should the Scammers be stopped? Absolutely, we live in one of the most unprecedented economic upheavals of all time due partly to sinister financial dealings. The last thing broke people need is the chance for redemption from a damn Black Widow.