"The Next Millionaires", by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business, July 2007.

More on
The Next Millionaires:

"Crisis or Opportunity - The 6 Myths and Realities of Economic Opportunity," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, October 2006.

"Crisis or Opportunity - The 6 Myths and Realities of Economic Opportunity," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Your Business Magazine, July 2006.

"Creating Fortunes in the New Economy," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success From Home Magazine, September 2005.

"A Tale of Two Industries," by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success From Home Magazine, November 2005.

The Next Millionaires, by Paul Zane Pilzer, Direct Selling News Magazine, June 2005.

The Next Millionaires, by Paul Zane Pilzer, Success at Home Magazine, published March 2005.

A vast amount of wealth is being created over the next ten years. Here's why--and how you can be a part of it.

Network Marketing in the Years Ahead

I have always been keenly interested in education; I taught college students for 20 years at New York University, and in the 1990s, I developed an educational software product line. One of the most exciting things I’m seeing about this new crop of 10 million millionaires is that they are more often teachers at heart, rather than conventional businesspeople. They are people who learn about a new product or new service and adopt it for themselves and their families— but they don’t stop there. They then go out and teach new people what they just learned.

Network marketing is both the oldest method of sales communication and also the newest. And it’s the best method we have today to change someone’s paradigm and teach them about a new product or service—a new way of doing something that they wouldn’t have gotten by reading a magazine, surfing the Internet or watching television.

Person-to-person, word-of-mouth communication represents the cutting edge of intellectual distribution. Th is is why we are seeing so many Fortune 500 companies jumping into the direct selling arena, and Wall Street investors such as Warren Buffet entering the business.

Network marketing has grown steadily over the last 20 years, increasing 91 percent in just the last decade. With more than 13 million Americans and 53 million people worldwide involved, it is now a $100 billion global industry. Yet as impressive as this is, it’s not hard to see that the real growth in this business model has only just begun.

For one thing, demand is increasing exponentially. Because of the ever-accelerating pace of technological advancement, there is a growing flood of new products and services that desperately need their story told in the marketplace—stories which no amount of screaming TV ads or sprawling Internet pop-ups and banner ads can eff ectively tell.

Neil Offen, president of the Direct Selling Association, predicts that, at the current rate of increase, worldwide some 200 million people will enter this industry over the next 10 years, effectively quadrupling its current percentage of the population.

Network marketing is already a force to be reckoned with—but its growth will explode in the coming decade.

The Home-Based Business Boom

The advent of intellectual distribution is one reason that network marketing offers such a favorable opportunity, but it is not the only reason. Another powerful factor is the current boom in home-based businesses.

Only 20 years ago, people who worked from home were immediately suspect, as if that implied there was something wrong with them, that they couldn’t get a “real job.” Today, the sharpest and richest people we know are the people who work at home.

One factor in this change is a massive shift in the dominant unit of technology, the building block of our total economy.