One time not so long ago I remember reading a statistic that claimed that 95 out of every 100 people who started a network marketing business would fail. That meant that only 5% of the people who join an MLM business actually succeeded with it.
I would be willing to bet that the majority of people who were in network marketing prior to the year 2000 are no longer in the same company that they started with. This would include some of the major companies that have been around for a while such as Amway, Herballife, NuSkin, Mary Kay, and so on.
My parents were involved in network marketing in the late 1970s. My wife and I tried a couple of MLM businesses, but dropped out of them. I tried Retire Quickly in 2002. It had a lot of potential, but unfortunately it is no longer around at all.
Some of the oldest network marketing companies are still in business today. Many of the early pioneers of these companies continue to earn residual checks, but most of the successful distributors are people who are fairly new to network marketing.
Today a more current success rate for network marketing is around 10%. That still means that 9 out of every 10 people who joined an MLM company are going to fail.
I suppose you need to define what success is. A very small percentage of people will ever earn a full-time living in network marketing. An even smaller percentage of those will actually develop a residual walkaway income.
The reasons for this are fairly simple. For the most part you are asking average people to do things that they are not accustomed to doing.
It takes work and so, on and they will not succeed at them either.
I do think it’s proper to point out, however, that most compensation plans do require people to sponsor a fairly large number of front-line distributors if they expect to succeed. If you do the math correctly you understand right up front that 9 out of 10 people you sponsor are probably going to quit.
From a business standpoint you can still make real good money in network marketing. If you’re representing a quality product line you believe in you can make money selling the product.
If you learn how to use the Internet enrolling new distributors into an mlm business is not that difficult. You can actually automate much of your business so you are prospecting and enrolling new distributors 24 hours a day around the clock even when you’re not working.
If you learn how to use the Internet correctly you can be one of the 10% of people who succeed in network marketing.