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It is a marketing strategy in which the sales force is compensated not only for sales they personally generate, but also for the sales of the other salespeople that they recruit. This recruited sales force is referred to as the participant's "downline", and can provide multiple levels of compensation. Other terms used for MLM include pyramid selling, network marketing,and referral marketing.
If your a researching what company to work with in multi-level marketing(network marketing) make sure your do your research. A great source of information about the industry is 
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Possibly the most successful network marketing company of all time, Primerica was founded by Art Williams and in the process many part time school teachers, firemen and policemen became multi-millionaires doing a good thing for the families they converted from expensive whole life insurance to the better more effective term life.
Art is the guy who DID IT! Not just an author, but a business founder and his advice comes from building a major company from a "peanut" of 85 folks.
The "Coach" teaches and shares the breathtaking saga of "average-ordinary" people who teamed up to do the impossible. In the history of American business, there's never been a story quite like it.
Art Williams was born in 1942 in Waycross, Georgia, to a middle-class, Christian family, and grew up in nearby Cairo, with the dream of becoming a football coach. After college and two high school coaching jobs, he took the head coaching job at Kendrick High School in Columbus, Georgia, where he built a newly-formed team into champions in only three years. In the midst of a rewarding career as a winning high school football coach, boasting two “State Coach of the Year” awards, Art made a decision that would change his life dramatically. His decision had its roots in a personal experience. In 1963, his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, leaving his family with no will and very little life insurance. Art, in college at the time, knew little about life insurance, but several years later at a family reunion, a cousin introduced him to a different concept—“buy term and invest the difference.” Art was shocked to know that he could provide $150,000 of term coverage for the same premium he was paying for $15,000 of whole life. Remembering his parents’ experience, and believing that his father had been misled, and doing some research on life insurance, Art became a crusader for the term insurance concept. Williams was taken back by the idea of not knowing that there was a choice when buying life insurance and described the whole conversation as "disturbing," recalling his father's death and referring to the fact that people had no idea of such a product. Believing that families were paying too much for whole life policies that left them poor in the wallet and deeply underinsured, Williams joined his cousin at ITT Financial Services in 1970. In June 1973, six months before ITT went out of business, he left and came on board with Waddell & Reed, another BTID company that saw early success. Williams gained momentum at W&R and became regional vice-president (RVP) the same year, having a sales force that covered 6 states. Despite the numerous benefits of working at W&R in comparison to former ITT, it became clear to Williams that with a corporate structure where the executives, not the sales force, owned the company, financial decisions would always have priority over the clients and there would be limits on how much the company could grow.
On February 10, 1977 Williams and 85 associates founded their own company A.L. Williams & Associates on a simple philosophy: "Buy Term and Invest the Difference." He convinced many customers to switch from their conventional whole-life insurance to term policies. The company's rapid growth to the largest seller of life insurance in the U.S. was enhanced by his emphasis on "pushing up" his people. He was one of the first to have weekly video conferences on the company's private television broadcast system. This allowed him to personally speak to each of his 100,000 plus agents and to create a family feeling that inspired them to want to please him, by succeeding. Today, what was formerly ALW Marketing is now Primerica Financial Services.
