My Adventures in the On-line Marketing games

Recently, I have been exploring several opportunities in the online business area. There are thousands of these available.  In fact, it you happen to put in an email address asking for more information, you will get deluged with hundreds of offers by email and phone.  If you do request more info, be prepared to some heavy traffic. 

Given this result, I would strongly suggest that you create a new email address specifically for this type of activity. Grab a new gmail, Yahoo, or other email address.  These are free and you can have as many as three gmail addresses that you can be signed into at the same time.  Just enable multiple login feature.

With the high unemployment rampant in this this and other countries, many are turning to home based businesses as a solution.  Thousands are making it work.  Unfortunately, millions more are getting scammed out of money they can little afford to loose.  Sorting out the real deals from the scams is tough.

Scams, Scams and more Scams!

There is no end to the amount of scams you will be exposed to if you choose to pursue this course of action.  There ARE good, workable online businesses out there but they are often masked by the "noise" that the scammers make.  Strident claims of "instant money for no work" are just blatantly stupid. If you fall for one, you will be sucked into the downward spiral to oblivion where all stupid people eventually end up. You can make money but you have to throw your ethics out the window and sink to the level of the scammers and become one of them yourself. Do you really want to go there?

The usual mechanism is to sign up "for free" and then get pounded by relentless "up-sell" and promotion to sign on to yet another tie-in offer to make even more money. The more money part is for THEM, not you, unfortunately. 

I recently stuck my toe into the water as an experiment on one "opportunity" that looked interesting and doable.  By the time I had had enough of the increasingly strident demands that I step up to the next level of the program "where the real money was" I had spent about 30 minutes wading through pages and pages of their "long form sales letter" pitch.  The capper was when I was going to be forced sign up for yet another "affiliate marketing" tie-in program that I had absolutely no interest in doing, in order to continue.  At this point I stopped and sent a request for my money back, including a rather scathing comment about there deceptive practices.  They quickly refunded my money ($19.95) so that at least was a good mark in their favor.  I sort of expected that this test was going to go this way so I was not really surprised that it did.

So, what is a person to do?

There are good programs out there, I'm running at lest two of them right now and I am making money.  Yes, there was some minimal investment to really make it work. There really is "No Free Lunch" and sometimes one needs to fuel the fire a bit to get it going. Ultimately, I got an ROI (in a pretty short time actually) that was many times my initial investment. WIN!  It's not a lot of money but a few hundred dollars a week is nothing to sneeze at in these tough times.  For some, it's the difference between paying a bill or talking to the bill collectors. If you are just sitting around at home being depressed because you are unemployed, its worth a shot. A little money is much better than NO money. Just be careful and read all the fine print and look out for the "gotchas" buried way in the back or the Terms of Service etc.

Be Careful!

Do a search on "home based business scams" and you will be surprised. In my research I ran across a few sites that "rated" home based businesses.  The one I discusses above was top rated on one of them yet turned out to be pretty scammy itself.  I strongly suspect that at least some of the "rating" sites are scams themselves that are simply set up to mask the scammers.  Like many "review" sites, the reviewers are paid to write positive reviews.  What value does that type of review have? NONE in my view. This even happens on well known sites like CNET for computer and technology products and software.

The bottom line is that one can make money on the internet, millions do every day. If you are careful and do your due diligence and research before plunking down your money or signing up, you can find one that works for you.