Network marketing is a brutally unforgiving business if you do not do your own due diligence. In essence, choosing the right network marketing company is similar to choosing the right boyfriend or girlfriend. Inevitably, bad choices will affect your finances and career in ways that you will never imagine when you fall in love for the first time (yes, it applies to companies you fall in love with as well!)

How does one differentiate between a legitimate network marketing company compared one that is not?. Most of the time, there are many grey areas and some companies stand on that thin line where it sounds legal but is in fact unethical!

Here are a few ways to differentiate between a good opportunity and one that you must avoid like a plague:

Always do a thorough check on the background of the business. Do they have a good management team? Do the people in the company move from one business to another? You must be very careful with this because if they uproot and move to another company or project, you will lose thousands of downlines overnight!

Is the company selling legitimate products? A litmus test of a good product is one that sells very well even at its retail price. Most companies will try and force a huge mark up on their products in order to pay out down to many levels in the organization but in actual fact, the product is only consumed by the people who are doing the business and are useless competitively when sold outside the network.

Would you get more of the product when the company shuts down or would you try and auction them off on eBay at a very, very low price? Never fall for the trap thinking that the product is very good just because you are doing the business.

Do they require you to purchase a lot of inventory? Do they require your downlines to get lots of stock before anyone can earn money? Beware of those hit-and-run companies because they will disappear when the market hits saturation.

Is your upline a network marketing junkie who treats the company as a fad rather than a long term business? It is better to join a team that is here to stay compared to one that moves from fad to fad. You will never know when your current upline might leave and will even pinch your downlines to his or her new opportunity so beware who you ally yourself with.

As you will be spending a lot of time and money with the company, these are all important areas to consider. So make sure you do your due diligence!