Work at Home - How to Choose a Home Based Business and Make Money Without Getting Scammed Part 2

Increasingly more people work out of their home to supplement their income every single day. Home based businesses offer a level freedom and flexibility unmatched by traditional means. This is a $430 Billion a year industry, that's more than the consumer industry, food industry and the pharmaceutical industry combined. By the time you finish reading this sentence someone new would have entered into a Home Based Business venture.

Don't buy into the hype, you will fail unless you go into this with a concise plan of action, the right mindset and start making the smart decisions from beginning. You've all heard of doing it right the first time. This begins with picking a work at home job or home based business opportunity that fits you, not the one claiming to make the most money in the shortest period of time. I would know, I've been down that road.

To start you out in the right direction here are a few work at home offers to avoid. Beware of paid survey and data entry scams. These seem to be all the rage these days. They promise an easy buck of course, but the facts are that very few people make any money filling out surveys and those that do make money make very little.

Here's how paid surveys work in a nut shell. You are paying for a list of companies who supposedly would pay you $1-$15 for filling out surveys which are sent to you by email. The companies on these lists are just as easily found by doing a search engine query yourself. You now have to sign up with each individual company on the list which does take a lot of time. Each company wants in-depth demographic data about you and your household under the guise of only sending you surveys you qualify for. You start receiving surveys almost instantly, though not all have an offer of cash most are points for various sweepstakes. The surveys that do offer cash initially would more than often enough claim that you did not quality for the cash after you filled out the survey and may then offer you points towards prizes and such.

Just about now you would be wondering why you had to fill out the demographic data if they were not going to send you qualified surveys. That question would soon be answered when your telephone starts ringing off the hook with sales calls conveniently geared towards you and your lifestyle, along with your junk mail intake going through the roof.

Another heavily promoted scam is data entry jobs. The technique itself is not the scam but more the language used to promote it. These are promoted as get rich by doing simple data entry; this is far from the truth. These Data Entry Jobs are simply affiliate programs, you are told to write ads promoting various products and services in hopes of getting a commission from any possible sales. This has gotten so bad that Google among other payment providers have been actively canceling owners and promoters of so called "data entry jobs" from their system.

Juan Mendez is a web entrepreneur and aspiring writer.

Starting Out on the Web to Make Money

This article is for people who are just starting to get online and make money. In this article, I will detail what needs to be done in the first few days starting out in the internet marketing realm. Please be aware that in most cases you will not start making money immediately online. There are some ways to earn money online in the first few days, but do not expect to pull in $100 or even $10 in your first few weeks. Regardless of what any website says, people did not fall into $1000 or $5000 in their first few days online. They laid a foundation of links, research, web pages, and marketing efforts before they were able to pull in large amounts of money. Keep in mind the old phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” when starting your online business effort. It might be a week, a month, or two months before you start making consistent money. The important aspects are research, patience, and persistence. Take the time to lay a strong foundation and avoid the pitfalls of trying to make money online in a short amount of time. This is KEY starting out. If you fall down too many times, eventually you don’t want to get back up

That being said, there are a couple of easy and inexpensive ways to start making money online.

1 – Paid Surveys/Product Trials
2 – Blogging and AdSense

1 – Paid Surveys/Product Trials/Email Reading

I’ll start off by saying you should be skeptical of any site that charges you money to give you surveys or try out products. When was the last time you had to pay someone to interview you for a job? Same principle. Before you sign up with any of the sites listed below, create an alternate email address in Yahoo or another Email provider. This can be your Survey/Product/Spam email address. This will keep your main email box from getting filled with stuff you don’t want or need.

Now the sites listed below offer to pay you money for completing surveys or testing out products. Sounds pretty easy right? For the most part it is, but be careful with the product trials. If it’s a limited time trial, you may start getting charged if you aren’t careful.

Check out the sites listed below. They are samples of blogs that have been monetized with Google Adsense so you’re not in danger of losing any money.

lowcapventuresgroup.com
nascarfanblog.com

2 – Blogging and AdSense

Go to www.blogger.com and setup a blog (short for Web Log). You can choose from a variety of templates. Name the blog something that will distinguish what the blog is about. If it’s about gardening, name it “gardening tips” or “how to garden” or “make your garden beautiful”. The title is important as you’ll see later. Once you’ve got your blog setup, you can start posting information about your topic. Once you’ve successfully created a post, go into your blogger settings and go to the template tab. You should have an AdSense link up there. Now you are asking, what is AdSense? AdSense is a program that delivers content relative ads to web pages. For instance, go to http://www.lowcapventuresgroup.com. Notice the small ads above and below some of the postings. Those are AdSense ads. How do you make money off those? A company or individual has paid Google to run these ads. Whenever someone clicks on these ads, the person who has the ads showing makes money. Granted it may only be $.20 or $.30 (or less sometimes), but it’s basically free money for the webpage owner. Now before you think you are going to make yourself rich by clicking on your own ads, DO NOT DO IT!!! Google is smarter than you think. I know of more than one person who has been banned from the AdSense program due to “click fraud”. Besides, if someone told you that you could make $.20-$.30 based on someone clicking on an ad based on something you wrote and they could do this 24 hours a day/ 7 days a week/ 365 days a year and you would pay nothing (NOTHING) for this to happen, why would you risk losing it? Don’t click on your own ads…..period!

Now some of you may be seeing a nice business idea here. If you aren’t, here it is. You can setup multiple FREE blogs on different subjects and have the AdSense code on all of them. This means instead of one page getting a few clicks a day, you could have 5 pages getting a few clicks a day. I would recommend updating your blog content every 2 or 3 days. This is crucial if you want your blog to get picked up by search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. If you blog on gardening is specific to organic gardening, then you want to make sure you mention organic gardening a few times each entry and put it in bold. This will help the search engines pick it up faster. You can also use http://ping-o-matic.com to let blog engines know that your blog has been updated. More Traffic to your page = more potential ad clicks = more money in your pocket. See how easy this is? You are not going to make a fortune this way, but it would not be unreasonable with 5-10 quality blogs to make an extra $5-10 a day depending on the amount of traffic you are getting.

Creating residual income

Well, you all have heard it before; "Have a computer, connected to the Internet, you can make extra money".  Sounds simple doesn't it?  In fact it takes a lot of research, dedication, effort, and quite a bit of time.  The money does not come rolling in instead, it drips in like a leaky faucet.  Not to worry though, time, patience, and perseverance overcomes all things.  Create your blogs, a lot of them, keep track of them, write everything down so you can refer back if necessary.  Keeping good notes is part of the drill to becoming successful.  Get yourself a Clickbank, and Commission Junction account.  Sign up for Google Adsense. Let's not forget Amazon.  Sign up there also and build an Amazon aStore that you can link to from your Blog Posts.  If you have the spare time in your retirement or just have some spare time, this is the place to help yourself.  The internet is not getting smaller, it is in fact getting bigger and more people are buying online now than ever before.  Good luck, and don't give up.