Introduction: According to the Census Bureau, at least half of American children will spend at least a part of their developmental years in a single parent family. A very large majority of them are being raised by single moms. Studies show that nearly 60% of this sub-group now live in poverty.

With the rising costs of daycare and transportation, increasing numbers of single parents are finding it difficult or impossible to generate even a subsistence income by working outside the home.

Not surprisingly then, more and more single moms (and single fathers as well) are looking for alternative ways to generate more income. Having a home business has become increasingly an enticing option in this regard, and large numbers of single parents are choosing this pathway as a solution to their financial woes.

If selected VERY CAREFULLY, a home business can, indeed, be an ideal alternative to having an outside job. Clearly, it has many potential benefits. One of the main ones, of course, is that it simultaneously eliminates child care and transportation costs while greatly increasing the amount and quality of time available to spend with one's children.

This solution also offers other major advantages, such as greater flexibility in working hours, reduced work stress, more freedom in choosing where to live, generous tax benefits, and the potential for achieving much greater prosperity--to name just a few.

On the other hand, however, its many attractions are counter-balanced with a long list of potential pitfalls. At the very head of this list is the huge challenge of making a wise selection from the vast array of possible options. Anyone who enters "home business" into a search engine, for example, can be quickly overwhelmed by the seemingly endless possibilities.

It's very important, therefore, to have some helpful guidelines for finding one's way through this jungle of possibilities.

A Quick Basic Primer on MLM or Network Marketing as a Major Option: This article focuses on the single most common type of home business opportunity--namely, the kind that is offered by various network marketing or multi-level marketing (MLM) companies. Although these opportunities seem endlessly varied in many ways, they all have three basic defining characteristics in common:

1) They all market one or more products through an organization of independent distributors, instead of through retail outlets.

2) They all pay commissions to their distributors for advertising and marketing these products.

3) They all pay an additional form of compensation that rewards distributors with what is called "residual income." This income is somewhat similar to royalties that are paid to someone who has written a book or a song or who has a patent on some invention. It's an extra reward that a distributor gets from the company for building a distributional team.

Typically, this team consists of several levels or generations, which is the basis for the term "multi-level marketing." The first level for any distributor includes everyone that s/he has personally recruited and enrolled; the second level includes everyone that THEY have enrolled, etc. down through, potentially, an infinite number of levels.

The residual income that is earned by a particular distributor represents a certain percentage of the earnings of all other distributors on one's team down through a specified number of levels. The details regarding the specific number of levels and how this percentage is calculated are highly diverse among different companies and often they're quite complex.

One's degree of success in all network marketing, therefore, is directly proportional to the size of the distributional team that is built and, correspondingly, to the total volume of products that are sold by this team.

In order to achieve success within the traditional network marketing model, new distributors generally start by promoting the company's product(s) to their "warm market"--that is, to their family, friends, and acquaintances. Similarly, they typically try to recruit people within this "circle of influence" to join their distributional team. After exhausting this market, the next step, generally, is to utilize various strategies to promote to, and recruit within, the "cold market" of people they do NOT know. This is generally much more challenging and this is specifically where many newbies "hit the wall."

Part II of this series will present the advantages and pitfalls of traditional network marketing and also describe a very new alternative that promises to bring a higher degree of success for a greater number of people entering this industry.

Anyone who is interested in investigating this new option in much greater detail can get started by clicking on the URL provided below.

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