Recently I have been digging into the Salty Droid (you can’t make money online) archives. Salty Droid is an attorney in Chicago who writes about scammers who pitch their wares on the internet. I’ve been aware of the site for a while. But little did I know that Salty Droid has been covering a number of scammers that I’ve had my eye on for a while: Chris Brogan, Kevin Trudeau, Alexis Neely, Sean Stephenson, Mindy Kniss, Darren Rowse, Stephen Pierce, and Yanik Silver. We also have a mutual interest in assholes like Mark Shurtleff and  Crystal Cox.

But what struck me today as I was perusing the archives of Salty Droid is how similar “internet marketing” and “multi-level marketing” are. They take a product which is either non-existent or has very little interest to actual consumers (i.e. third party purchasers, rather than the pushers/distributors themselves) and build a “business” around convincing others to push the same “product.” Continue reading