As June arrives, are you having the year you expected?  Are there trends which have played out and trends which surprised you?  At the beginning of the year, Tom Now writing for
Writing for StartUp Nation identified 20 of what he believed would be the hottest Internet Marketing Trends for 2009.

As the year slows for summer, I wanted to take a closer look at one of the trends which disturbs me.

Trend #19:  – There’s No Place Like Home – Tom predicted:

With the growing unemployment numbers, expect a surge in home-based businesses and in mom entrepreneurs in 2009. Correspondingly, expect a surge in marketing directed at this segment of the market. If you can help these individuals be successful, start getting the word out now.

I have definitely seen an explosion in home based and MLM marketing as people look to supplement their income or replace it completely.   Maybe it is just me, but many of these “schemes” concern me.  While the introduction of the internet means business owners down have the same large upfront investments they did in the early “Amway Days”, these home based business owners still start out at with a deficit because they must ” subscribe first”

Marketing  products they don’t really understand or believe in, they focus on finding other unsuspecting people to join their down-line and pay the monthly subscription fee. One online MLM product I looked at required an investment of $79/month and paid out $3/month for each first line subscription, which meant the “biz owner” had to convince 27 people to subscribe before they broke even.   Even a novice mathematician figures out pretty quickly there aren’t enough people in most communities for anyone who is 3 or 4  steps downline to break even.

There is money to be made, if you are at the front end or the top of the popular pyramid schemes, but most people enter too late, and don’t really have a strategy to market the product, which they are not passionate about, and the business fails.

It does nott have to be this way.  Lots of people run successful home-based businesses, by adding value to their clients,  selling something more then a chance to be a rung on the pyramid ladder.