It never ceases to amaze me the sheer numbers of listings online for “work at home”, “home … … … “make money”, “home based … “making money”, “make money online”,
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It never ceases to amaze me the sheer numbers of listings
online for “work at home”, “home business”, “business
opportunity”, “make money”, “home based business”, “making
money”, “make money online”, “home-based business”, “home
business”, and all the other terms you can come up with for
researching work at home business opportunities. The
competition is staggering, and it seems almost everyone
wants to give you information on his or her own business
opportunity. What’s worse is many of these would be “good
Samaritans” offer you information and links based on the
marketing materials provided by their chosen company to
promote rather than their own real life experiences
promoting those companies. Which would you rather have from
these promoters, their companies marketing professional’s
copy write touting the benefits of pushing the company
products/services or the real life experiences the promoters
have experienced and the success they have enjoyed through
promoting the home based business? Worse yet, what happens
when you run into someone new to the home-based business
they are promoting who has nothing they can offer when it
comes to their success in promoting the home business and
how well they have done with their online endeavors of
making money online?
In researching the “work at home” keywords mentioned above,
there are 73,636 daily real world searches according to Web
CEO for those keywords alone. These statistics show that you
can make money in work at home opportunities and it is a
driving force for would be entrepreneurs to flock to the
internet as a means to make money online. An even more
staggering statistic is that according to Web CEO there are
36,145,000 competing web pages for these terms. That’s quite
a bit of information to sort out if you are researching work
at home opportunities to make money on the internet. With so
much competition out there and so many web sites wanting you
to visit them for your work at home needs, how can you know
what home business opportunity works and which home based
business idea is a flop that will leech your hard earned
cash from you? With all that competition, the nature of the
web as a home for the unscrupulous to take advantage of our
naivety, and the lack of credible information available
through such web sites, it all adds up to a dangerous
combination for the would be work at home enthusiast.
Almost everyone has visions of the “Great American Dream”.
And there probably isn’t a one of you reading this article
that hasn’t been fed up and sick with their present job.
Faced with the hype of these work at home hucksters combined
with the get rich quick dream and more and more people
hating their jobs, more and more people are being lured to
these sites as a means to solve their making money from home
needs. People will sign up for every home business program
they can, copy and paste some text into their hastily built
websites, add a signature line to their emails and forum
posts, add lines of text to their business cards, and then
sit back and wonder why they aren’t too successful with
their newly found business opportunity. All too often these
home business opportunity seekers get scammed into self
perpetuating programs or other get rich quick schemes. Most
of these schemes only pay off for those at the top of the
chain who found the program in it’s infancy before everyone
and their brother was promoting it, or are the ones that
founded the scheme and a way to entice people to promote it.
The reality is this. There are only a couple sure-fire ways
to start a home based business to make money at home through
online endeavors. The first is to create your own product or
services and find ways to sell them online. This type of
work at home business opportunity is always a sure bet but,
like everything else, takes time, effort, and money. You
will make money at home quicker in a work at home business
based on this business opportunity model because you are the
one receiving the profits; not some other company you are
promoting which decides what it is going to give you in
commissions. You call all the shots, you own the products or
services sold and you determine what they should cost your
customers. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about the
credibility of the home based business opportunity.
The next best way to realize your dreams to make money from
home in a work at home business opportunity is to sell other
people’s products or services. This is the tricky part where
affiliate programs come to mind. This particular home
business can help you make money on the internet if you are
careful in the way you go about it. The first thing is to
check the company’s credibility. Is it a realistic home
business opportunity where you can make money, or is the
company’s information so full of hype and promises that it’s
just to good to be true? Keep in mind that a realistic home
business opportunity takes time, effort, and money. But
there are also limitations to spending that money too,
especially when a work at home business opportunity promoter
wants you to pay money in exchange for making money online.
Don’t get me wrong; the old adage “It takes money to make
money” is true. But the money spent should be money spent in
producing your products or services, or spent in marketing
you products or services for sale, NOT to show someone you
are “serious” about their work at home business. Be very
careful of these types of home based business opportunities
where they want you to pay for the “privilege” of promoting
their products or services. From my experience, most of
these work at home or work at home opportunities are scams,
or self perpetuating programs. Remember that the only ones
that prosper from these types of home business opportunity
are either those that start them, or those that find them
before everyone else is promoting them and before people
begin to learn the truth behind this type of scam.
Think of it this way. It’s like going to a job interview at
a local corporation for a job you feel you are qualified
for. Common sense says that you are already interested in
this job. You have done the research, dressed the part, and
you have spent your valuable time to get there; not to
mention the amount of time you will be spending in the
interview. The interviewer is professionally dressed in a
business suite and shakes your hand firmly when you arrive.
Before sitting down to interview you, he suddenly states
“Before we can start this interview process, I need to
collect $10.00 from you just to make sure you are serious
about this position. We’ve had allot of ‘tire kickers’
coming through here lately and this is the only way we can
make sure that you will benefit from our job position and
ensure that you are really ready to accept this position”.
Would you hand over the $10.00 to “prove your sincerity” or
would you be insulted? Personally speaking, I would be
insulted, but you are welcome to your own feelings on this
subject.
The point is when you decide to promote another person’s
products or services as the choice of your work at home
business, you become an employee of sorts. Although you set
your own hours and choose your own means of promoting their
products, which makes you an independent contractor or an
affiliate by definition, it’s still the same concept as the
$10.00 interview. If a company has to ask you to pay money
for their business opportunity so you can make money from
home, then how good is the business opportunity to begin
with? Legitimate and successful businesses offering a home
based business opportunity have already figured expenses
into their marketing budget and know that budget is tax
deductible. They realize it’s a cost of doing business, and
absorb that cost instead of passing it on to their work at
home affiliates. The business opportunities asking you for
such fees more than likely make their living by charging
those fees and NOT selling the products, or services, they
want you to promote. If they aren’t making their money from
their own products or services then how do you expect to
make money on the internet by promoting their products or
services?
There are many business opportunities that will offer you
additional things for their fees; like your very own hosted
website. Although you are getting a website, you are getting
a cookie cutter website that you can not control, and you
are stuck with their design and layout. If their products or
services don’t make you money, you have no means to insert
additional work at home business opportunities into that
site as a means to help make money online. But there’s
another thing they don’t want you to know about this
process, and that is that the website will not be indexed by
the search engines, or if it is, it will show up in hundreds
of pages listed for the same business. Worse yet, it is
likely that NONE of your pages will even be shown close
enough to the top to get you any real benefits from your
spending; if you see any benefits at all. The other problem
is that your page will look just like everyone else’s page
who are promoting the same product or service. What benefit
does that give you for the cash investment? You’ll do much
better hosting your own web site where you can post as many
work at home business opportunities as you want. By building
an interesting, content rich web site, you will bring
visitors to your cyber doors while being found and ranked
decently by the search engines.