Lots of testimonials from supposed happy participants.

Many sites include testimonials from people who have supposedly signed up for the opportunity and made tons of money with it. These are designed to give the visitor the impression that real people have made money with it. Now here’s the problem: very often, these testimonials are not real. They are simply made up by the site operators. As for the pictures, they are either generic stock photos found on the internet, or simply models that posed for a picture. What about video testimonials? These must be real, correct? Well… no. You can find plenty of people on the internet who would be more than happy to record a short video of themselves reading a script that you’ve prepared and acting all happy on camera for a few bucks. This is very often what happened here. Or they are simply friends of the owners posing as customers.

Proof of income and earnings.

You will often see pictures of checks, bank statements, Paypal screen shots, etc. These could be photoshopped in 5 minutes. Even if they are not fake, there is no way for you to know whether all this money was made by doing the things that the site promotes.

But the site gives a real address for their company and shows their business certificate! Must be real, no?

The address you see on scam sites is very often nothing more than a “virtual office” or mail forwarder. For a small sum each month, anyone can get a mail box at a prestigious office building in downtown Manhattan. This doesn’t mean they actually have an office there. Furthermore, just because a company is registered doesn’t mean that they are running a legitimate business. In many jurisdiction, all it takes to register a company and get a shiny certificate complete with a business registration number is to fill out a form or two and pay the registration fee.

If a work at home site is scamming people, why haven’t the authorities shut it down?

Many reasons. First, they have limited resources and can’t spend their time scouring every “make money online” site to determine whether it is legitimate or not. Also, add the fact that many of these scam sites are “fly by night” operators. They set up their site, collect the money and then when complaints start pouring in, simply shut it down and re open under a different name or slightly different approach. Furthermore, there is also the question of jurisdiction. Many of these operations are based offshore in locations where there is either little legislation regarding online businesses, or the government is simply too inept or corrupt to do anything to stop them.

What To Watch Out For When Looking At A Work From Home Website is a post from: Websites For Sale

Payment processor / Money transfer agent.

This is actually a very big scam that can cause you to lose a lot of money and also get into trouble with authorities. It works like this: you are contacted by someone claiming to have a company in a foreign country where it is difficult for them to accept payments from customers in America or Europe. They offer you a job where you will receive payments from their clients in the form or checks or money transfers. You will then deduct your commission and forward the rest of the payment to the company that hired you via a money transfer service such as Western Union.

The problem is: there are no “clients”. The checks they send you are either stolen or forgeries. The electronic money transfers you receive come from accounts that were hacked. What will happen is that all the transactions you processed for the “company” (which doesn’t exist) will be reversed, leaving you out of your money. You will probably also have to explain to the authorities as to why you were receiving fraudulent funds.

Shipping agent.

Same scam than above, but with a twist. You will be receiving merchandise for a “company” and then forwarding it to some third world country. Items ordered are often electronics, jewelry, or industrial equipment, basically high value items that can be resold easily. They say they will pay you for each item that you ship to them. Problem is, all of that merchandise was paid for with fraudulent funds. You are quite likely to get in trouble with authorities here again. This scam is often run by the same people who run the payment processor scam as well.

Cash gifting.

The exact way this scheme operates varies. However, in general it works this way: you are told that you can make plenty of money by sending cash “gifts” to people. It all comes down to this: it’s basically a pyramid scheme. For example, you are told that you can make $500 by having 5 people send you $100 each. Then, these people get 5 people each to send them $100 and so on and so forth. Eventually, the scheme collapses as there will come a time where there won’t be enough people in the world left to sign up. The only people that will have made money are those who started the scheme and are at the top, while pretty much everyone below them will lose. This form of “business” is also banned in most jurisdictions, no matter what the promoters say that it is completely “legal and legitimate”. It’s simply not.

Work At Home Offers – Know Which Ones ARE NOT Legit – Part 2 is a post from: Websites For Sale

Envelope stuffing.

This is quite an old scam and has been around even during the years before the internet even came into existence. The company claims that you can make money by stuffing envelopes and mailing them. They say that you can make $10 to $30 per envelope that you stuff and mail. Now let’s stop and think logically here: a machine can do the same thing for mere pennies. Even if they can’t afford one, they can hire a worker for minimum wage who can stuff hundreds of envelopes each day. WHY would they pay YOU such a high amount just for folding a piece of paper? Well… you’ve guessed it: they won’t. They make money by having you pay for a “starter kit”. You will soon notice that they want you to promote the same “make money stuffing envelopes” spiel by sending envelopes with information about the “opportunity” to other victims. If someone signs up, you then get paid. This is actually quite close to a pyramid scheme and is illegal in many jurisdictions.

Product assembly.

Another one that has been around since before the internet. Often promoted by the same people who run the envelope stuffing scam. You are told that you will be paid to assemble items, such as toys and other trinkets at home. They offer you what looks like a really good payment for every item that you assemble. Now the problems start when you sign up. You are told that you must first order a “start up kit” which contains the materials to be assembled. This kit can cost well over a hundred dollars, but the materials that it contains are probably worth a few dollars at most. You can assemble and send back as many products as you want, but they will always tell you that they weren’t done correctly and thus they can’t pay you.

Data entry / “online typist” jobs.

Here, you will be told that you can make from $10 to $50 to type in a short 3 line ad on a website. Alarm bells should be going off in your head now. Why would someone pay you that much for what is basically 2 minutes of work? After signing up and paying a fee (of course), you will soon realize that what you will need to do is to enter ads on online pay per click advertising services such as Google Adwords which promote the same website that you just signed up for. You get paid only when someone clicks on the ads you typed and signs up for their site. The issue is, YOU will have to pay for each click that you receive. And not everyone who clicks on your ads will sign up. If you have no experience in pay per click marketing, you will probably end up just losing your money.

Work At Home Offers – Know Which Ones ARE NOT Legit – Part 1 is a post from: Websites For Sale

Now the main question remains, WHY did these people actually fail. And did they really “fail” or simply gave up? Don’t believe for a second the “gurus” out there who tell you that people fail in IM because they didn’t know the “top secret success formula” that they are selling. This is simply a marketing tactic and nothing more. In the online world, there is no such thing as “lack of information”. In fact, there is plenty of information available out there, for free, to anyone that wants it. People can find free ebooks, guides, blog posts, videos, discussion forums, etc. where they can find all about online business methods, techniques and strategies. You just have to find the information and apply it.

But you have to ask yourself a question: are you an entrepreneur, or just someone looking for a quick buck. There are some differences between the two. The true entrepreneur will always look for ways to make their business achieve its goals and grow. He is willing to adapt to change and learn new ideas to make money. Someone thinking that internet marketing is about “making money fast from home” simply wants that: to make some money easily. The problem is, once they have made the money they needed this month to pay their bills or go shopping, they are happy. They stop. They don’t think of ways they can reinvest their profits to make even more money. What’s more, they don’t structure their business properly.

In the online world, diversifying your activities and having multiple backup plans available will make or break you. Bad things happen. Affiliate programs fold without paying members. Servers can crash. Products could lose their popularity, etc, etc. Someone who is actually building their online business understands that and will have multiple tools, strategies and income streams at their disposal so that they can continue operating no matter what happens. And if a project they are working on doesn’t give them the results they want, they ask themselves why. Then they apply the necessary corrections and try again, until they found something that actually works and let them achieve their goals with regards to the income they want to generate.

WHY Do People Fail In Online Business? is a post from: Websites For Sale

Simply put, having multiple streams of income means that you are making money online through various different sources. It’s actually as simple as that. And it is also a concept that can be applied to any online money making activity, whether you are running affiliate offers, selling your own products, providing services or publishing pay per click advertisements on your site.

Now is it something that is really necessary to have? If you are running a business that is bringing you a full time income, then the answer is yes. Now why is that? So that your business can keep operating even if one of your income sources declines or dries up completely. Sure, you may think that it won’t happen to you, but if you’ve read any internet marketing forum, you will find plenty of stories about it happening to other marketers.

There are certain products or offers which are only popular during a certain time and then their popularity decreases. Think of the Acai Berry CPA offers that were all the rage about a year ago. Sure, a lot of marketers made money from them. Some made very serious amounts of cash. But a few months after it peaked, the offer started going down due to the fact that the product received some negative press due to questionable claims made by manufacturers, plus many people complaining that they were having a hard time canceling their subscription to this rebill offer.

There has also been cases where some smaller CPA or affiliate networks were having trouble paying those who run their offers. Some people were getting paid late, others ended up not getting their money at all in some cases. Obviously, if you only work with one network and they have trouble paying their affiliates, this will spell trouble for your business as well.

Organizing multiple streams of income is not difficult at all. Say if you are a CPA marketer, you simply have to work with a few different networks and run some different campaigns on each. You don’t even have to do it all at once if it would be too hard for you to manage. For example, you could run offers from network A for the first half of the month and network B for the other half.

If you are a freelancer such as a content writer or web designer, advertise your services on a few different sites and not only one. Also, work with a few different clients if possible. That way, if one of your regular clients who you’ve worked for during many months suddenly doesn’t need any work done during this month, you won’t be left scrambling to find other ones.

Why Multiple Streams Of Income Are Important In The Online World is a post from: Websites For Sale

Watch out for hidden costs and other tricks

Many business opportunity sites try to entice you to join a program without fully telling you how much it will cost you up front. The most common tactics are:

The free (or very low cost) trial. Here you are told that you can get your very own money making website, training, or tools for nothing or just a tiny cost. The problem is that once the trial period, which can vary between a few days and a few weeks, runs out you will be dinged a hefty monthly fee unless you cancel. Many people have reported that they were still charged even though they had called to cancel and needed to call the company several times to get these charges reversed.

Hidden fees to join that are not disclosed up front. Some business opportunity sites tell you that all you need to get information and join is to pay a relatively small amount of around $50. The problem is, once you pay that fee, you quickly realize that in order to truly take part in the opportunity and earn money, you would need to make additional investments which would often run up into several hundred or even thousands of dollars.

Incessant pressure to “upgrade”. You may be allowed to join a site for free or at a very low cost. But then, as soon as you sign up, you will be incessantly pressured to take the “premium/platinum/gold/big boss/etc.” package. They will tell you that by upgrading your membership, you will get even more opportunities to make money that you wouldn’t have with the free option. This is a widely used marketing tactic called an “upsell” in which you are baited with a free offer and then constantly pressured to upgrade/

Ask yourself, do you really NEED to join this site?

Many business opportunity sites promise you things such as: free hosting, free website templates and building software, access to “exclusive” information such as lists of wholesalers and “top secret” money making training courses. Are these really worth the $99.95 a month that you are being charged? While, I admit, it may be convenient to have all these tools in one place, anyone with a bit of time and resourcefulness (things that you will need anyways to succeed in ANY business) can put together their own toolkit.

Think about it: a webhosting account with unlimited websites costs less than $10 a month. Free web design software and website templates are available to be downloaded all over the web. Very often, the “secret” money making techniques are the same ones that you will find in online business forums for free and the “exclusive wholesaler lists” are little more than links to well known sites such as AliBaba or iOffer.

Finding Legitimate Online Business Opportunities – Part 2 is a post from: Websites For Sale

Research what the opportunity is truly about

What will you be doing to earn money? What products will you be selling, what kinds of offers will you be promoting? Is it physical goods? Is it digital products? These are all questions that you need to ask when checking out a business opportunity. A flashy page with pictures of luxury villas, stacks of money and sports cars can definitely look attractive. In fact, it is a very common marketing tactic in the business opportunity world. Beware of any site that asks you to pay money in order to join “the business of a lifetime” without giving you any clue as to what you will be doing to actually earn money. If you blindly join an opportunity by simply looking at the dollar signs, then you may very well end up with a box full of products that are nearly impossible to re-sell at a profit, or otherwise realize that this is not something that you would have been interested in had you known what their business was actually about.

Check out the company’s reputation

This should really be a given before starting out, but many people are so impressed by the flashy sales page and claims of “this opportunity may not be here tomorrow so join today!!” that they forget to do their due diligence before jumping in. A quick way to start would be to simply Google the name of the company or their website and scan through a few pages of search results. Do you see any complaints being made about them? Do you see any negative reviews? While EVERY company, even giant corporations such as American Express and Microsoft have their detractors and people who weren’t happy with their services, seeing a large number of complaints and warnings about a company is a bad sign.

Also, do not base your decision on a few glowing testimonials or reviews that you found on the first page of Google. These could, and frequently are, fabricated either by the company itself or by affiliates who are promoting them for a quick buck without actually caring about what they are promoting.

Finding Legitimate Online Business Opportunities – Part 1 is a post from: Websites For Sale

The ability to work independently.

When you run an online business, no one is constantly breathing down your neck to make sure that you are actually working instead of just goofing off and wasting time. For many, this is a good thing. But for some, it can present a challenge in itself. You will need to be motivated to do the work that needs to get done in order to get your business operating even if no one is “forcing” you to do anything.

The willingness to learn… on your own.

To my knowledge, there are only a few internet marketing courses taught in universities. And based on what I have seen, they are usually not worth the money, as all the information given in them can be found online either for free or for far less money.

It comes down to the fact that you need to be able to not only work, but also learn independently. You will have to locate the information you want online, analyze it and take action on it. As the world of internet marketing is constantly evolving, you will always need to be ahead on new developments and do research on new ways to make money. This means devoting some time to continued learning.

The ability to plan and organize things efficiently.

Any successful internet marketer will tell you that the key to earning a lot of money online is having multiple sources of income. The advantages of this are quite obvious, even to someone with no experience in online business: if one of your sources of income dries up for whatever reason, you always have other ones that you can fall back on and scale up. This means that you would probably be operating several websites, dealing with various vendors and service providers, have accounts at multiple affiliate networks, etc.

If you want your business to work well, all of this will have to be neatly organized. You will have to make decisions as to which projects you want to work on, which affiliate offers you will promote this week, which tools and services you will need to accomplish your goals, etc. Needless to say, if you don’t even remember which sites you own or where you are running your ad campaigns, things won’t work out too well for you.

Want To Become An Internet Marketer? Do You Have What It Takes? is a post from: Websites For Sale

You can try searching for article writing work on classified ads sites such as Craigslist, Gumtree and Backpage. Although it is not guaranteed that you will find something there, if you do it will more likely be long term projects rather than just people who seek to order a few articles. This can work out to your advantage, as you will then have some regular clients who will pay you for your writing. Some of them could even offer you full time work for many months in a row.

Another way to find work is simply by networking with others. By participating in various online marketing communities, you will make contacts who could offer you some projects if they need content written for their sites or introduce you to someone who does. In the internet marketing industry in general, networking can be very profitable for you. Just because you are self employed doesn’t mean that you can’t share ideas and information with others in the industry. Networking will also give you the chance to learn new things or find additional sources of income that you wouldn’t have discovered on your own.

Now that you have some ideas on how to find some projects to work on, you are probably wondering about some ways to increase your earnings from freelance writing. The first thing that you need to keep in mind is that the amount you can earn will increase gradually. While it is possible to make a full time income from article writing, it may take a few weeks or months before you are able to reach that level.

Here are some tips to maximize your profits:

Always do the best quality work and follow the instructions of the clients. By doing so, you will increase your chances that they will either give you repeat work or recommend your services to one of their friends or business partners that could use them.

Respect deadlines by submitting your work on time. Believe me, there is nothing worse for a client than to have a service provider not complete a project by the time they need it. Clients don’t want to hear excuses or be left wondering as to whether you are actually going to complete their order or not.

Seek out long term partnerships and projects. These tend to pay more in the end as you will be spending a lot more time actually writing rather than searching for work all over the place. You are also more likely to get work on a niche that you are familiar with, which will be easier to write about than a few different articles on various topics that you are only vaguely knowledgeable about.

Getting Started In Online Writing – Part 4 is a post from: Websites For Sale

Online freelancing sites.

Online freelancing sites are marketplaces where both clients and service providers meet. Think of it as a marketplace for online freelance work, kind of like eBay is for buying and selling merchandise. Examples of sites include RentACoder, GetAFreelancer, oDesk, Fiverr and Microworkers. In general, you would create a profile that includes information about you and samples of your work. With the exception of Fiverr, on most freelancing sites you would actually need to bid on projects to show your interest in doing them rather than the client seeing your profile and then contacting you.

Advantages:

• Lots of work is available in the writing field. This includes not only articles, but also copywriting, ghostwriting ebooks, translating documents and web pages, etc.
• Good security. Most sites have a system that prevents the client and service provider from scamming one another and have a dispute resolution process. This decreases the chances of not getting paid for your work.
• Ability to build a positive reputation as you complete projects, similar to iTrader on forums or the eBay feedback system.
• Multiple ways of cashing out your earnings. Freelancing sites offer you payment methods such as PayPal, check, bank wire, Western Union or can put your earnings on a Visa or MasterCard debit card. This can be very useful if you would like to be paid by something other than PayPal. Take note, however that certain withdrawal methods, such as Western Union or bank wire could carry a relatively large fee so it is best to check the withdrawal fees before you select a way to get paid.

Disadvantages:

• Lots of competition. You won’t be the only one offering your services and far from it. If you live in the “West”, know that you will be competing against writers from countries such as India or the Philippines, who often take up projects for far less due to differences in the economy.
• Can be quite difficult to get accepted for projects if you are new and have no feedback. Clients will be wary of assigning an important project to someone new who has not yet built a reputation on the site. Therefore your first projects will probably be small ones worth a few dollars, such as writing one article.
• Possible delays in getting paid. While the money will be credited to your account at the freelancing site as soon as the client approves your work, the freelancing sites sometimes require a waiting period ranging from a week to a month before you can withdraw the amounts that you’ve earned to your payment method.

Getting Started In Online Writing – Part 3 is a post from: Websites For Sale