Corey Rudl and MLM

Corey’s death actually took me back to the heady days when I first started to think about “starting something” on the Internet. Like so many I’d been made redundant and started browsing the Internet for “work from home”, “work at home” and similar search terms.

Unwittingly I had foraged into one of the largest Internet market niches of all time: the Work (from, at) Home” or MLM (Multi Level Marketing) niche. This is the land where computer dummies are promised instant Internet empires, overnight, with no experience, no effort, using “set and forget technology”, to quickly generate multiple income streams of up to six figures a month…

Clever MLM program owners have long realised that:

• increasing numbers of redundant/disenchanted workers would flock in increasing numbers to the Internet gold rush


• the power of dreams, however unrealistic, is indomitable

If you sat down with anyone drawn to these “instant fortune generating opportunities” and reasoned calmly with them, they would soon see the error of their ways. If anyone, regardless of previous experience, business acumen or even sheer intelligence for that matter, could get rich from shaky MLM schemes, then we’d all be rich (and paradoxically, we’d all also be poor)!

But in the privacy between the Internet and the desperate fortune seeker, there is no voice of reason to intervene and the power of dreams prevails.

And so, millions have thrown themselves at MLMs, most simply losing money, some making a few dime a month, some making a little more, very few making anything substantial (like a living). Those that do make some are often self-confessed keyboardaholics, spending more time that ever at work, a far cry from the promised “automated income streams”.

Together with the birth of MLM came the emergence of an entire cottage industry of self-help ebooks, traffic generators, traffic boosters, motivational ebooks, how-to ebooks, tutorials, half-baked "business plans" etc, designed to tap into the ever increasing army of MLM members that simply couldn’t find the gold…

Corey was a master at exploiting that market. No one mastered the skill of appealing to the people’s power to dream of a better life on an island in the Caribbean, occasionally checking your order influx and bank account from your flashy laptop and doing little else beside it. Corey literally sold dreams.

And managed to live the dream. If he could do it so could you… But looking at Corey’s body of work, he too must have worked extremely hard and the playboy, Internet-kid-made-good image was largely a smoke screen. Sure, he played hard but he worked hard too.


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