Before the Internet

The need to make money has always been with us. One of the earliest strategies to accomplish this was the "chain letter". Don't worry - I'm not promoting a chain letter - rather explaining a lesson we can all learn from that ill-fated methodology.

The power of the chain letter lay in the fact that it allowed people to leverage their investment. It worked like this.

You get a letter that asks you to:

* Send a small amount of money to the person whose name is at the top of a list of future recipients.

* Delete the first recipient on the list, and put your own name on the bottom of the list.

* Copy and mail the letter to as many people as you can.

If you sent the letter to 100 people, and each of them sent it to 100, and so on, by the time your name got to the top of the list it would be in the hands of many thousands of recipients - each of whom would send you a small amount of money.

How Chain Letters Didn't Work

The principle problem with the chain letter was that your small donation to the person at the top of the list was a gift. You got nothing in return. For this reason, our country's lawmakers got into the act.

The "End" of the Chain Letter

Lawmakers don't like to see large amounts of money changing hands without getting their own hands on some of it - to tax it in other words.

So the "authorities" outlawed the chain letter as you might expect. The public rationale was that the process would sooner or later "saturate", because 100 x 100 x 100 x etc. would eventually include everyone on the planet, and those joining toward the end would never receive the "reward" they had been "promised".

This action ignored the fact that no chain letter in history ever actually "saturated". But the concept looked good mathematically and seemed popular with the voters; so the public remains "protected" from chain letters to this day.

The Invention of Multilevel Marketing (MLM)

In the early sixties, a little vitamin company called Nutrilite invented the marketing strategy we know today as multilevel marketing.

This was a very clever idea. It built on sequential recruitment, the basis of the chain letter; but it sold real products: vitamins. Now there was value received in every transaction.

Two young men partnered up and got really successful at this business and wound up buying Nutrilite. Out of this grew the giant multilevel company known as Amway. Its annual sales hit a billion dollars around 1986, and is approaching seven billion dollars a year today (2008).

MLMs and the Law

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took Amway to court, claiming that the sequential recruitment of distributors violated the anti-chain-letter laws.

Amazing! The courts finally did something right. They recognized that there is nothing basically wrong with sequential recruitment, and completely exonerated Amway.

When the dust had settled, the FTC and the Department of "Justice" agreed to re-define the chain letter and the MLM so the chain letter remained illegal while the MLM was officially legalized.

Many people learned from this that sequential recruitment is legal when the customers actually receive something they want in return for their money.

Mail-Order MLM

Still talking pre-Internet lore: it wasn't long before enterprising individuals began building mail order businesses in which the products sold were documents (small booklets) that provided the reader with useful information.

Such documents were easy to create, cheap to produce, and inexpensive to mail. Employing sequential recruitment similar to that used by chain letters, such businesses provided (for a price) the document products and the methodology of distribution.

It was up to each participant to reproduce the documents, to advertise them via the mail, and to deliver them via mail as promised.

This system of doing business meets all the legal standards of current MLM laws and provides for a very high return on investment. A document that cost 50¢ to produce and another 50¢ to mail might sell for $10 or $20. This business model is still much in use today, and huge profits are being made.

The use of the Internet to facilitate this money making process further amplifies the method's profitability and makes it accessible to almost anyone. Its development was the next step towards creation of the first online money making machine.

Enter the Internet

On the Internet today, free or inexpensive email to opt-in lists, cheap classified advertising, and highly targeted (though not-so-cheap) search engine advertising make it possible to advertise much more cheaply than can be done by conventional mail.

The cheap and, often automated, creation of personal websites puts large amounts of information in the hands of would-be "infopreneurs" at a fraction of the cost of snail-mail distribution.

Instead of printing and mailing booklets to their customers, businesses of this sort simply receive payment via secure credit card transaction, and then permit the buyer to download the product at the click of a mouse at essentially no cost to the seller.

Thus the properly equipped "infopreneur" creates a virtual money-making machine that handles all the formerly laborious tasks associated with mail-order document sales.

By combining the best features of sequential recruitment, MLM sales, and mail-order document sales with the computer automation provided by the Internet, today's infopreneur can make large amounts of money in record time. This is the basis of virtually all the big online money-makers.

The worse the economy, the higher the unemployment level, the fewer the jobs available, the more attractive this kind of business is to the public.

The Best Online Money Machine - So Far

Examples of this newly developed business technology come in many styles. Some are well explained and easy to implement; some are more complex and not so well documented. If you don't want to build your own online money machine from scratch - a major undertaking - I recommend that you plug into an existing one that works.

To see the best example of this technology that I have found so far - one that is simple, legal, honest, and ethical - you don't have to look far.