There’s an old saying: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” It goes hand-in-hand with another saying: “Those who don’t know what they’re doing in business will be eaten alive by those who do.”

It always puts me in mind of the story of the Gingerbread Man (“Run, run, run as fast as you can; you can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man!”) whom nobody could catch.

One day, he came to a river he couldn’t cross.

A fox offered to carry him to the other side and, to allay his anxiety about riding on a fox’s back, the fox suggested he ride at the tip of his bushy tail.

As they crossed the river, the fox’s tail slid deeper into the water, panicking the Gingerbread Man. “Climb onto my back — you’ll be safer there,” suggested the fox. The further they swam, the further into the water the fox sank, and the higher he advised the Gingerbread Man to move, until only the tip of the fox’s nose was out of the water. Upon moving there, the wily fox quickly snapped his jaws around his hapless prey and swallowed him whole.

Network marketers often tell me, with great pride, that they’ve never been caught by scammers. When I ask them what kind of compensation plan their MLM company operates, and they extoll the virtues of that plan using all the latest, highly plausible spin used by network marketing companies to deflect attention from the hidden realities of those plans, I’m forced to bite my tongue and smile.

They need to discover for themselves that they’re crossing the river on a fox’s tail, sadly. I can warn and plead all I like… they’re deaf, blind and impervious to reason, because their choices have been made on pure emotional appeal to the Five Fatal Failure Factors in any business — but especially in MLM:

• Fear of Loss
• Greed
• Laziness
• Ignorance
• Gullibility (or, if you keep on falling for it, Stupidity)

I can point out the multitude of features that indicate massive breakage flowing up to the company in hidden, windfall profits. Features like:

• Personal group volume qualification requirements
• Downline qualifying rank requirements
• Limited number of legs you can sponsor (the fewer legs, the more breakage)
• Bonus payouts buried deep in the downline levels (“so you make much more money on all those people — geometric progression, you understand?” Yeah, right… when the typical part-timer never reaches more than 2-3 levels deep)
• Your personal share of the bonus pool is determined by your downline results (instead of your own results, thereby protecting you against a do-nothing downline)

… and so on. It’s so depressing — and so utterly predictable.

Download this series of FREE Insight Reports about MLM compensation plans and the booby traps and snares they contain.

Report #1 The Differences Between First, Second, Third and Fourth Generation Business Systems		Report #2 REAL Network Marketing versus Counterfeit “Network Marketing”		Report #3 21 Ways to Identify Fourth Generation Compensation Plans

Feel free to share them with others — and don’t forget to use them when evaluating compensation plans. You’ll find yourself wondering how so many companies get away with such blatant rip-offs and scams.

The answer is simple and obvious: IGNORANCE on the part of part-time (and full-time!) network marketers, combined with vehement defensiveness because of their emotional choices.