How To Make Money from Home Without Scams

April 16th, 2010

Kmcgraw

Let’s face it: the work-at-home industry has a bad reputation, and unfortunately, a lot of it is well deserved. There are countless programs to make money from home out there that, when you break them down to the essentials, are really nothing but scams. So how do you protect yourself? This article will explain how to make money from home without scams.

A common problem among people looking to work from home is that they have no idea about what kind of opportunity is right for them. They will jump on just about any advertisement they see without doing any due diligence and the result is that they end up getting caught in a scam opportunity or an opportunity that is unworkable for them. They lose money, heart, and end up going nowhere.

The first thing you should do is to make a list of what you want in an opportunity and all of the things that you will or will not do in your quest to make money from home. For example, if you hate MLM, note that, and by all means, if there is an MLM opportunity that you come across, no matter how good it sounds, don’t sign up for it. Why even start something you know you’ll end up quitting because you hate it?

Once you have an idea of the kind of opportunity that you are looking for, you can use the following list as a sort of "scam litmus test." Apply the tests on this list to the online opportunities you come across to help you to sort out the scams from the legitimate ones.

Test 1: Does the program involve selling either a service or a product and does it have a realistic plan on how you can go about doing that? A lot of "make money" products are just bits of useless information and platitudes that amount to nothing more than "dreaming yourself rich" carefully disguised as a product. These types of programs make no one, except maybe the creator, money.

If there is only one fact that you take away from this article it is this: In order to make money you must have a product or service that you can sell that is demand and a plan to advertise it. If the program you are looking at doesn’t have that, odds are it is either a scam or, at best, completely unworkable.

Test 2: Check to see if the seller offers a money-back guarantee. Although it doesn’t necessarily mean the program is a scam if there is no guarantee offered, it is safer for you to go with those that do offer them. Why? Knowing that there is an "out" for yourself that lets you get your money back will help you to feel confident putting the program in action. It makes smart business sense, too.

Test 3: The FTC recently introduced new guidelines about how testimonials on sales pages are handled. What the new guidelines say is that it is no longer enough for sellers to use the disclaimer "results not typical" if they use testimonials that list exact results, such as "I made a bajillion dollars using so and so’s program!" The seller must also disclose exactly what the "typical" results are.

What this means for you is that if you see a sales page using testimonials like the above example and there is no disclosure of typical results provided anywhere on the sales page or linked to from the sales page, then you can be pretty sure it is a scam. It doesn’t mean that it is a scam for sure, because you could be dealing with a merchant who lives outside the U.S. and whose servers reside outside of the U.S., but it sure is a good red flag.