To be good at selling the MLM “opportunity” on social media a Bot has to sell the lifestyle.
The amazing, amazeballs fakey-pants lifestyle an MLM provides.
They know going “BUY MY PRODUCT NOW, OOH LOOK BUY MY PRODUCT, OOH LOOK” over and over again on FB turns people off. So, instead they focus on just how amazing their life is since they joined [Herbalife, Juice +, Forever Living, {insert name here}] in photos with carefully placed products.
It’s so important that Bots do this that it’s even part of their training:
Happily it also gives us some really entertaining photos. Like this one:
thanks Bot!!!
Timeless Vie 
Hi Mnetters.. (I’ve seen the endlessly entertaining threads, lol), I just wanted to let you guys know that whilst i’m a lurker, I’m a normal person but 90 percent of ”my” income comes from MLM/what you call a scam. I don’t hassle my friends, I don’t hassle anyone. I post a couple times a day, am always 110 percent honest upfront and only have 2 team members. My recruiting would be a lot more successful if I went ”LOOK GUYSSSS LETS MAKE YOU THOUSANDS AND GET YOU A NEW CAR” etc etc etc… But no, I don’t do that. I ask people if they want to make a little extra cash, they say yes. Great, they say no, great. I don’t really care, don’t bother me I won’t bother you, in terms of social media, if i’m one of your friends feel free to block me/unfriend me whatever. I understand that MLM looks pretty bad, just scour your local buy and sell sites for 10 minutes and you’ll see lots of women offering the newest amazing mascara/body wraps/weight loss tricks and half of them can’t even distinguish between lose/loose, been/bin… so why would you trust them with your weight loss, health or skin? Its a copy and paste message that they probably didn’t even write themselves. I don’t lie to people, I never do. If someone asks me what I make I tell the truth, my most successful month I made around £1200, However some months I’ve made just £25, My earnings got better as I built a steady customer base, and tried to stay away from mass recruitment, But I can honestly say most months (Around 7/12) I walk away with about £400-500, ish. and lets be honest, its not a ”fair” trade off, is it? When I put in about 10hrs or so a day, 5-6 days a week, But unfortunately I’m unable to leave the house, So I have to work from home.
If I could, like you, go out and leave the house and make even minimum wage doing data entry, cleaning or waitressing, But unfortunately my agoraphobia prevents me from doing this, I do not have a single qualification to my name, not even a GCSE. Nothing at all, How many businesses will pay me a steady wage, even minimum, to work from home full time?? Not many, I have searched far and wide for phone work, social media work. Lots of demand, Little product.
This is my lifeline, this is all I have,
I’m not a bot, I’m not a fake. I’m as honest as possible and only promote products I have personally tried, I am a person, I am a mother just like many if not all of you and I do what I have to to survive, After months of my money being reduced, taken away, cancelled and changed by DWP I had no choice but to do something. My husband works all hours god sends and it still wasn’t enough, we were behind on rent, we couldn’t afford a car so he was having to cycle 6 miles every day, which isn’t the easiest when you already do a physical job, for up to 15hrs a day. We had to go to a foodbank twice. One week when I had to sell a jewellery box I’d had since I was 5 to go and buy my DS formula I knew that shit had to change. No way could we carry on like that! We still live frugally (In fact, looking for the credit crunch category was why I found your thread/site) but at least we’re paying the bills now.
I think that while its annoying for you, Its hard for MLMers too. Its bloody horrible to do a job where you get told you’re a scammer/you’re part of a pyramid scheme or whatever, Strangers comment or inbox you abuse (Or you get eggs thrown at you, Which is what happened to one of my team members when she was going door to door with leaflets), Friends shunned me, Family laughed at me. I’m working gruelling hours to make £20 a day, The other 75-80 goes to someone who probably does very little in comparison.
Some of us don’t have a choice due to high childcare bills, low wages etc. Many MLMers work too, I have someone in my wider team (So one of my ”managers” other team members) who works 65hrs a week while doing what we do,
Who WANTS to work like that and do MLM too??? Can’t be easy to have a life like that.
We’re people too.
I apologize if this isn’t written very well, I’m ”working” while writing this.
Thanks for reading.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lurking, have you read the threads on mn?
Have you read Merchants of Deception?
Have you read the links to the overwhelming evidence that proves MLMs are not a sustainable way to develop a real income for more than 99% of the people who do it; they are left feeling that they are a failure when they don’t succeed but in reality they can’t succeed.
Only those at the very top of the pyramid stand any real chance of making money, everyone else loses money.
It is a travesty of justice, and it makes me very angry when decent people get caught up in it and end up spending money they don’t have investing in ‘their business’ when all they are doing in lining the pockets of their upline.
I feel sympathy for your predicament, Lurking, but reiterate that MLMs as a money-making concept fail almost everyone.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Hi Lurking; thx for reply. You didn’t say which MLM you worked for – but if its Forever Living then they run an advised 30% profit margin. So if you net £500 per month that’s ~£1500 per month gross retail revenue. Do you really sell that much Aloe Vera toothpaste at £7.50 a tube? To your peers, who, like us all, are struggling? Anyway, best of luck but please be careful. The easiest person to fool is oneself 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Sorry for not replying, I thought my comment wasn’t posting and have only just checked back.
I don’t work with forever living, and at 200 (Don’t ever be daft enough to spend that) for a start up kit I never would. I tried one of the products it didn’t work(after 2wks of using it daily) and tasted awful. Whilst I’m well aware that Aloe is good for skin you can purchase aloe infused products in pound stretcher/B+m for a much lower price (A couple of quid generally) if you really need it (chances are you don’t)
I have a relatively large customer base online and the husband will also take a catalogue and some samples into work once a month, once his team have all had a look the catalogues are left in a place open to the public. so far, so good, I get around £100 in sales from this. He doesn’t get the impression he pisses anyone off, thankfully. I do like the products I sell, But rarely buy them at cost(I have done this once when I needed a product for an online party giveaway and forgot I’d sold the only one of that product I did have, oops) . every month I get 10-50 pounds ”store credit” to buy products, so only get products that way. It cost me less than £50 to sign up and looking back I did do it out of desperation, But luckily I have earned far more than I’ve ever spent. I sell to around 100-300 people a month, With orders ranging from £10-£150(However do be aware that orders going over 100 are quite rare) I know MLM is not sustainable and when the market is flooded with ”my” products I’ll likely change to a newly launched company/less popular company and start again. I do genuinely earn about 400-500, Which takes approx 1700-2000 a month in sales to make, but trust me it took hard work to get here, you may laugh at that but it really did take days where i was stuck to my laptops 20+ hrs a day, joining networking sites etc and talking to the ”huns” (Trust me, their over cheeriness and hash tags piss me off as much as it does you), Which isn’t something i’d wish on my worst enemy, Its false when they say you can do this in part time hours cos you can’t. okay you can, But you’ll maybe earn 100 a month if you spend every moment you’re not caring for your kids/working in another job doing MLM. I feel guilty, I have less time with my son than someone who is working 9-5 mon-fri in an office sure i’m there when he needs food and the like, but then i’m back glued to the sofa just keeping half an eye on him, thankfully he is in school now so I can work around him a little easier. If my husband is home, I’m upstairs in our bedroom at my desk working. How does that mean I spend more time with my son? I don’t. So please don’t buy the ”Don’t go to work and spend x amount a month getting others to look after your child! be an aloe mummy!’ Because frankly, its bullshit. A lot of it is bull shit. Which is why you’ll never see me say that (If I happen to be your mlm ”bot” anyways), I didn’t come here to tell you MLM wasn’t bad, It is. Who the hell wants to drum up 2000GBP of custom for someone else, to only personally see 500 of it?? lets be honest its no trade off but its all i’ve got I don’t really have much of a choice, Unless I fancy doing sex chat lines (hell to the no) those are my only two options. I know MLM is a mugs game, I really do. What I agree with, Is challenging MLM as a whole. Challenging shitty self employment regulations and laws. (Which currently means these companies can get away with taking advantage of people in poverty), But as annoying as your ”bots” are, I refuse to condone you taking the piss out of them when they probably have very very few options, I think I said before but i’ll say it again, I have someone in my team (not my downline but my uplines downline,so the equivalent of an MLM ”sister” if you think of it as a family tree) who works 65hrs a week, while having 2 kids and working MLM. Who the hell wants to work like that??? when does she go to sleep ffs? I think a better idea would be to campaign for an MLM minimum wage, even if it was the apprentice min wage (currently sitting at approx 3 pound an hour) plus commission, that would be a hell of a lot better than it is now. I’d happily sign that petition. I am not asking you to stop hating MLM, I Hate it too, I know i’m being taken advantage of be under no illusion that my last post was a ”oh its really nice hunnnnn xxxxxxx” far from it, I agree with you guys. what I want you to do is look deeper and see the real problem here.
If you wish to contact me further, as wordpress doesn’t like my laptop (Keeps reloading every minute. ugh, can you not), Please feel free to contact me on imnotabot2@gmail.com, I’ll check this account every couple of hours.
Thanks for reading.
PS, have not read merchants of deception, Will try and find it now.
LikeLike
Lurking, everyone has options. Don’t kid yourself that those pursuing MLMs don’t. It takes energy, mobility, generally skills that you need for the workplace (where, yano, you actually get paid for the work you do fairly) – and so far I’m not aware of a cause celebre that has a disability or is materially advantaged in some way. That’ll be the next Emma Cooper now I’ve said it…
I refuse to condone MLMs or those who peddle them, particularly with their eyes open as yours seem to be: they’re deeply unethical businesses practises which are predicated on duping people into believing they can get something (their very own buisness omg) for comparatively little (£200 for a legitimate and profitable going concern is a good deal. Sadly – and obviously – it’s not true).
How would you propose anyone were to campaign for a minimum wage? Who would we lobby, the Mormons? How would it be enforced, given you all work odd hours and would require to self-certify? This is pyramid selling; those lower down aren’t supposed to make money. They’re to be exploited for all they can give. It’s sick, particularly as many of them are in need of cash. They’re drawn in with promises but the likliehood of them achieving these dreams is infinitesimally small.
You asked us to look deeper into ‘the problem’ of MLMs but you only alluded to the pay. There’s been much analysis on MN on the lack of pay, the way in which you have to prey on friends and family, the cult-like tactics encouraging you to abandon your friends and family for your ‘new family’ that ‘love’ you… Let me know if I’m missing anything you want us to consider please.
I agree that many of the bots are victims; but it is for their sake and that of their intended marks that we raise awareness. I hope by reading our mumsnet posts and, if you can, merchants of deception that you can see that your being an apologist for an unethical system makes you part of the problem.
LikeLike
Lurking, sounds like you are using fl like Avon, and building a customer base to sell products to rather than pestering people to join your downline. It works for you because you can do it solely at home.
Please read Merchants of Deception, you will see the full horror of how some MLMs operate. Fl is moulded on the Amway model.
LikeLike
Astounding. A minimum wage for MLM distributors. You know that defeats the purpose of running an ‘own’ company? MLMs would have to significantly reduce their salesforces. Thing is, if they did they wouldn’t make money from people signing up, they’d have to pay corporation tax, supply a wage and a pension, provide FREE training with all expenses paid…
FL only has 111 odd employees. They have thousands of distributors who all pay x amount to join. So they only have overheads for 111 people and the thousands of distributors are taking all the risk.
LikeLike
Hello, I am reading up on Forever Living Products and the employees as I am being recruited by someone. I haven’t signed anything as I have alot of research to do and I have found this blog. Its great by the way. I have my own business idea – having a fairtrade and organic/eco-friendly shop and webstore – so I guess I might be competition. I guess my so-called new “friend” is trying hard to recruit me and I haven’t said yes yet as I have decided to do my own research. I have no idea why some people who are intelligent and well-educated of which this person is, be duped into this scheme. My gut feeling is run for the hills and I also have not got the personality for Direct Selling or marketing. Also I feel like a mug as I thought I made a new friend. My gut says do not sign say no and accept that this person wanted my compliance and to give up my idea for a retail fairtrade shop or boutique. I am dreading Wednesday as this is when I give back my sample pack and never to see her again and she probably will defriend me on facebook and never contact me again or be my friend. I am socially isolated with some illnesses and I have Aspergers.
My gut says that its a scheme that cannot deliver on it’s promise and it might pray on vulnerable people – she commented on my shyness, timidness and lack of confidence – I guess I look pretty gullible! I am starting to feel a bit upset, a mug and a bit stupid – thankfully I haven’t signed up to anything and, if what I fear is the case – praying on vulnerable and pretending to be friends, then it’s pretty toxic and I might even get the word out where I live to beware of it but I might not.
I will be defriended and I don’t think I will see or speak to her again – I actually like this person and she even said she might help me with my business idea which I don’t think is the case as she doesn’t seem interested in it but threatened by it.etc….why the hell doesn’t she just go into business with me as a business partner of a limited company or something but that is my dream to have a business partner/director as I think I do need help. Don’t think that will happen as I don’t think she even wants to be proper friends with me.
I am very sceptical how sustainable the company is and their products they use alot of chemicals in their personal care products and still use palm oil in their soaps which is not, as least, certified as sustainable (even though it is a bit of greenwashing and Palm Oil free is the way to go). I make my own soap and beauty products and I am quite knowledgeable about natural and organic products. For example I know you can get organic aloe vera juice in the health shop locally for a fraction of the price without with preservatives in it.
All the research I found so far has been very negative and I think that I need to think with my gut and if she doesn’t want to know me after me saying no then its a shame. Lets see who is going to be a success and who isn’t. First thing’s first is to see someone who will help me with my confidence so I am not projecting “mug” to people.
Role on Wednesday………………
LikeLike
it’s a much better idea to pursue your own business. Good luck!
LikeLike