One question that a lot of people who want to work from home ask is: are MLM opportunities a good way to earn some money on the internet, or are they just overhyped scams? There is no definite answer to this, as some people have built a good income from them, while others hate this form of marketing.

MLM, or multi level marketing, is involves independent distributors reselling products of another company. However, a large aspect of MLM is not simply the sale of products, but recruiting others to be part of the business opportunity. But there are a few issues with the industry that some people may not like. This doesn’t mean that the entire industry is a scam or that it is a bad business model. But there are some issues that you should be aware of before you join any such business opportunity. Here are some of the most common problems that you will face in a lot of MLM businesses.

• Low quality, overpriced, or “fad” products

Ask yourself this: if the products are so great, how come they aren’t being sold through traditional e-commerce, or at retail stores? You don’t see Coca Cola or Apple running MLM programs now, do you? In a lot of cases, the majority of the money comes from recruiting new participants in the business opportunity. The products are simply there so that the whole thing would not be called a pyramid scheme.

A lot of the time, you will see products that are overpriced and can be found for much less than what you need to sell them for to make a profit. Or they are simply “fad” products, such as the latest hype in weight loss or beauty. Of course, it is possible to make money from a fad (think Acai Berry, merchants and affiliates made MILLIONS from it), but if your entire business is based on that, know that you are running a “temporary business” and not something that will be sustainable for years to come.

• Reliance on recruiting friends and family into the business

While it is definitely possible to market MLM opportunities online, a lot of companies make people rely on people marketing their offers to friends and family members, telling you that they will be the easiest prospects.

But quite honestly, this is really not the case. Most of them will just not be interested in having a business and if they listen to your speeches or presentations, it is only out of politeness or because they don’t want to get into an argument with you if they say no. Now if you push this kind of marketing too far, you will soon be joining the NFL (no, not the National Football League… but rather the No Friends Left club) and will have people avoid talking to you. After all, if you invite someone for dinner, would you really like them to start handing out marketing materials to your family? Probably not.

In the online world, there are plenty of business opportunities that you can take advantage of. But is the one you are looking at legitimate? Here is part 2 of some of the things you should be looking at.

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.

There are various business opportunities that you can take advantage of in the online world and make money from them. Many have allowed people to build successful online businesses and achieve whatever goals they had, whether it was to create a part-time side income or to replace their full time job entirely. Unfortunately, the internet is full of “business opportunity” offers that either don’t deliver on their promises or worse, are run by outright scammers who disappear soon after collecting enough money from unsuspecting people. There are some things that you can do if you want to find some legitimate earning opportunities and being taken for a ride. Keep them in mind before you join any program or online business opportunity.

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.

Promoting free biz opp offers by using online classified ads and various offline methods can be quite profitable indeed, you just need to know what to do in order to attract people’s attention and encourage them to sign up.

Basically here are the things that you will need:

• CPA offers to choose from (they need to be free biz opps that don’t require a credit card)
• A hosting account and domain (could be a cheap .info domain)
• A good looking landing page
• An free email account
• A PLR product related to the niche of the specific Biz opp offer you are targeting.

What you will be doing is offering the client a free download (usually an ebook or some training videos) that are related to the biz opp. So if you are promoting an offer about earning cash with eBay, you would offer a download that is related to selling on eBay. If it’s an MLM offer, you would give something related to network marketing, such as a guide on “getting unlimited leads for your network marketing business”.

Now you don’t have to write an ebook or even pay for one. The “gift” that you will be offering will be a free PLR (private label rights) item that you can find for free just by doing a quick Google search for [insert your niche here] +PLR +free.

If you are promoting the offer by online classifieds, you would write an ad that looks like this: “Looking to earn some extra cash? Contact me for FREE information – No obligation and no payment required – Plus, get a FREE training guide worth $299 that is yours to keep no matter what!”

However, instead of linking to a website, you would ask the client to email you for more info. You will probably get a few dozen responses for each ad. Respond to everyone individually, calling them by their name and write something like “Hi Bob! This is John from Craigslist. To join this business opportunity for free and receive your free training guide (normally worth $299) go to [your site here]. Thank you for your time and wishing you great success, John Smith.”

For your website, simply use a free template that looks appropriate for a business opportunity page. Write some information presenting the opportunity in a very good light and emphasize on the fact that it is completely free to join. Include your CPA affiliate link. But also say that out of your great generosity and due to the fact that you want the visitor to succeed, you’re giving them a guide that normally sells for $XXX totally free and that it contains invaluable information on succeeding in online business.

You could also use offline marketing in order to promote your website. It is possible to either give out fliers in public places or place an ad in a local newspaper. Remember to emphasize the free guide that you are giving to draw people’s attention and want them to visit your page.

Here’s another way to earn money quite easily from a certain category of CPA offers. This method focuses mainly on business opportunity (biz opp) lead offers. Before we begin, let’s take a look at what these offers are and how they work in order to gain a better understanding of what we will be doing here. Biz opp lead offers are CPA offers where the visitor fills in some contact details in exchange for information about joining a business opportunity or getting some tools to make money online. This could be anywhere from a single field email submit to complete contact details with name, address, phone number, etc.

The main difference between these and other biz opp offers is that the buyer will not be required to provide a credit card number or pay anything for you to get credit. The merchant makes money either by trying to upsell a paid membership (similar to dating offers) or by attempting to have the client join a paid business opportunity (most often used for offers related to multi level marketing programs). In any case, you don’t earn any additional money if they buy something later on and you also don’t lose anything if they don’t. The goal is just to get the visitor to provide their contact info.

How much do these offers pay? The exact payout will vary from offer to offer. It can go anywhere from $1 for a simple email submit to $6 for submitting 2 pages of information.

Now that you know a bit more background information about these offers, the question remains, how to get good quality traffic to them? Of course, there are various ways to send traffic to CPA offers. However, they won’t all be profitable for you. Advertising via Google Adwords is pretty much out. The competition for keywords such as “make money online” or “make money with eBay” is very intense and the price per click can get very high. Due to the fact that the payout is only a few dollars per lead it will be quite difficult to make a decent profit.

You will need to use a traffic source that is both free and can bring a relatively large amount of visitors to your site. There are two traffic sources that you can use for this: offline marketing and online classified ad sites.

Now in online classifieds it may sound easy to just post ads and send clicks to your website, this is not the way to go. Your ads will often be either ignored by the viewers or marked as “spam” and deleted. There is another approach that you can take in order to increase the effectiveness that your ads have and make viewers much more willing to sign up for the offer you are pushing. Check back tomorrow for part 2 to see more details on how to give people that extra “something” to convince them to pay attention to your ads and offer.

MLM / Multi Level Marketing

These offers are often touted as a great way to own your own business and be your own boss. Very often, the advertisements that you will find for these type of opportunities will be worded vaguely and appear to be quite generic, rarely going into detail as to what exactly this “business opportunity” will consist of. In a nutshell, MLM consists of becoming an “independent distributor” for a company where you will resell their products at a commission. You will also need to recruit more independent reps into the business, for which you will also earn money.

This isn’t to say that the whole industry is bad or that it is not possible to earn money in it. Indeed, there are many people who have been quite successful in it. However, in many of these opportunities the sales pitch to get you to join will be quite misleading and only present the positive aspects of the business. While it is often touted as being something “easy”, in reality you will have to do a lot of work to achieve success. Depending on the program, you will also need to pay in order to join or to buy merchandise, the costs of which could end up quite significant. If you decide to pursue such as opportunity, be sure that you do some independent research on what the company is, what products are they pushing, what their compensation plan is and what the general rules are. Unfortunately, many people don’t do this and are thus out of the fee they paid to join and stuck with boxes full of useless, overpriced merchandise that is hard to sell. They then realize that the only way to recoup their losses is to dupe other people into joining the business.

Forex Trading

While retail Forex trading has been around for many years, it has just recently seen a surge in popularity and is often advertised as a way to make money on the internet. You see ads touting that you can make $1000 a day or more just by trading foreign currencies online. If you are a beginner and have zero experience in the foreign exchange market, you will be in for a very rough ride indeed. The whole point of Forex is to take profit from the fluctuations in the value of foreign currency pairs that occur each day. You will of course, you need money to invest. The problem is, most people who sign up for these sites and play the market end up losing money rather than making the large amounts that are claimed in the ads.

If playing the foreign exchange markets interests you, start by reading as much independent information as you can. Then, open a practice account and trade with play money until you are confident enough to risk real funds. Remember that in addition to the opportunity to earn money, you will have plenty more “opportunities” to lose some if the markets don’t move your way.

When you are promoting an affiliate or CPA offer, you obviously need to advertise in order to get traffic to your site. After all, people will not magically type your affiliate link in their browser if they don’t know it exists. There are various ways to post ads online, let’s take a look at one of them:

Classified Ads Sites:

Some examples of these sites are Craigslist, Backpage, Gumtree and Kijiji. Of course there are many others but they all have one thing in common: the ability to place classified ads for free. Using these sites to get traffic to your CPA offers has brought great results to many people, but it needs to be done properly in order to be effective. Furthermore, you would need to check with your network manager to see if promoting a certain offer on a classifieds site is allowed. Some networks may ban this type of promotion altogether or restrict it only to certain offers.

There are also a few points to remember if you don’t want to get in trouble.

Don’t post ads that are misleading or deceptive. Some examples of this is posting business opportunity offers in the “Jobs” section and making it appear like you are offering an actual job, then requiring the applicant to fill out a lead form to prove that they are “qualified”, or requiring someone to sign up for a video conferencing trial for an “interview” that will never take place.

Due to complaints to merchants and in some cases investigations by the FTC, networks are cracking down on such “blackhat” advertising.

What you should rather do is post in the appropriate category and explain what the offer is about and what benefits it could bring to the customer. Since many affiliate sites are immediately flagged as “spam”, you will probably be better off getting your own domain name and landing page for your offer.

While this flagging of ads which are not spam and posted in the correct category could get annoying, remember that these sites are mainly there for local businesses to get clients and not to push affiliate offers. If there was no system in place to deal with overposting or postings in the wrong section, these places would soon be over run with hundreds of spam messages drowning out any legitimate content.

On certain offers, such as car loan or mortgage leads, another tactic that works would be having people contact you by email. You would then send them a reply with details of the offer and your affiliate link.

While posting is usually free, some sites allow your ad to be placed on top for a certain period of time or highlighted for a small fee. This will bring some additional attention to your ad and will ultimately result in more clicks for you.

In any case, remember that some networks may forbid advertising on these sites mainly due to past abuses. Therefore, be sure to get the OK from your affiliate manager before beginning.

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