If you're reading this article, you may already have a network marketing company that you are working with. If that's the case, by no means am I suggesting that you switch. These criteria are the elements that I feel make up a great, modern network marketing company.

1. A great product. Would people by your product if there were no opportunity attached? If the answer is no then you have no opportunity.

2. A great website that will turn your visitors into distributors. This is key for building a duplicable system. Anyone can put people in front of their website and let the site do the work from there. You should have one product based website and one opportunity based website. If your company doesn't have a quality internet site then you will either need to create your own, or work with the company on creating one.

3. Low, or no sign up fee. Most people that are looking to make extra money don't have an extra thousand dollars laying around to sign up in an opportunity (I know I didn't). If your sign up fee is too high it will be very hard to build a large organization.

4. A Binary or Matrix compensation plan. These compensation plans require placing new recruits under other distributors in your organization.

5. An exclusive "non-me too" product. If your product isn't unique and hard to replicate, it will be copied as soon as your company catches some steam. You don't want to see the exact product you're offering on the shelves of Wal-Mart or Costco.

6. Compensation plan that pays on volume, so that you're getting paid on every single dollar that moves through your organization and required to generate new sales every month to qualify for bonuses and such.

7. Single product focus. The most successful companies in the industry over the past ten years all have a single product focus. Your company may offer a catalog of products after you join, but marketing should all be around a simple easy to market product.

8. Easy to do. Can you answer yes to this question: Could someone with no experience, and little to know knowledge of my company do what I am doing? If so, then your opportunity is easy to do. Let me elaborate a bit. There are companies out there that require their distributors as part of their "system" to hand out two DVDs a day. Now, obviously anyone can physically hand out two DVDs a day but who really wants to approach perfect strangers about their opportunity every day, and who has the time? In much less time a person can expose hundreds, if not thousands of people to their opportunity on the internet (and you don't have to psych yourself up to do it).

9. Get in before the curve. Many companies out there tout "35 years in business," and "publicly traded," or "this many millionaires created" and while they should be applauded for their great success, the fact is there probably isn't much opportunity left with those companies. You don't want to join a company that just opened it's doors yesterday, but you probably don't want to join one that is more than a few years old either as you may have missed the boat.

By finding a company that contains these elements and following their "easy to do" system, you can build a global network marketing empire in no time.