MLM compensation plans are notorious for being difficult to understand. Please note that every compensation plan is not created equally. With that said, this is an essential part to joining any MLM business because you need to know exactly how you will get paid. That's why we get involved in the industry right? So lets go over the different features that are available in MLM compensation plans across the board.

First, lets go over the main feature of these comp plans, the residual income component of each MLM business. This is usually in the form of a binary or a unilevel matrix structure. The binary is a plan that has two legs and you usually get paid on your weaker leg. The unlevel matrix is structured with three legs that you will get paid on every one of your legs for however many levels deep the company pays out. Pay attention to this one particular feature with the residual part of the comp plans. If someone in your downline stops their autoship, how does that affect your payout? Do the people below the newly cancelled autoship move up a level or do you get paid on $0 of autoship. This is where you have to read the fine print.

You also have the ability with many MLM compensation plans to earn an "infinity bonus" that allows you to make a percentage of your downlines autoship past the last level of the binary or unilevel matrix structure. This is a cool feature to get paid on especially if you have plans to grow a very large organization.

Up front commissions are great when you bring someone into your business. You want to get paid something for your effort up front and most MLM companies offer this type of feature in their comp plan. So if the company you are looking into doesn't offer upfront commissions, then you can't show prospects that you can make money from enrollment. If you are a power enroller, you must make sure the company you are researching offers this because this will be a solid stream of income for you.

The next type of bonus is a community profit sharing bonus. Here, you want to be sure that if you reach a certain status with the company, that you will be part of an elite group that will be able to share in a money pool. This is where you can make a lot of money and it provides great incentive to climb the ladder of the company.

The matching bonus is one of the better bonuses especially if you enroll serious business people and leaders into your organization. This type of bonus allows you to get a matching bonus from whatever your personal enrollees bring in on their residual income each month. If you have 10 personal enrollees who are making 10k a month and you make a 20% match on them...you just made an extra 20k for the month. Pretty cool, right?

The last type of bonus is called a lifetime or founder bonus. If you are fortunate enough to get involved with a company in it's prelaunch stage and you ascend to a certain level within the business before a certain cutoff date, then you will be granted a lifetime bonus that will get paid out to you annually. It's another form of a profit sharing bonus but only to a closed number of people.

There are many different ways to get paid in MLM, but you do have to do your due diligence and really do some number crunching to see what it's going to take to make a certain amount of money with each plan. Every plan is not created equally. Remember that.