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Home Based Internet & Computer Business Franchises

Is the Opportunity Real?

by Amy Covington

These days, it seems like everyone is connected to the Internet. Just yesterday, my 80-something-year-old grandmother sent me an invitation to join her for an online chat. With an estimated 4 trillion plus distinct Web pages on the Internet, business opportunities abound. Hundreds of entrepreneurs have made thousands, and in some cases millions, of dollars doing business through the Internet. The flip side of the coin is that just as many people have lost money, including life savings. The key to earning money versus losing it is to do your due diligence when analyzing an opportunity.

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The World Wide Web is a borderless entity, a frontier town without a sheriff where unscrupulous enterprises are relatively unregulated in their recruiting efforts. How do you differentiate the good from the bad? Your first weapon is your sense of reason. If you think something doesn't seem right, listen to your inner voice. Another way to protect yourself is to use the Internet as a research tool - there are actually legitimate resources out there in the ether.

Buyer Beware?

We are bombarded on a daily basis with messages from television and radio commercials and billboards, Internet pop ups, and newspaper and magazine advertisements. As a society, we have become skilled at deciphering and filtering which messages apply to our lives and upon which we take action. These skills are useful when deciding to invest in a business concept, especially one through the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, fraudulent business operators had it easy but now, with consumer watch dog groups on to them, they've had to get craftier. If you visit almost any job site you can find ads for home based schemes being touted as real employment opportunities.

Recently, I did a search under the Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations category on a major job site. Among the matches was an ad claiming to need "27 Key People" immediately to work from home. The ad itself stated that part-time workers could earn $500-2,000/mo. and full-time workers $2,500-7,000/mo. Not an unreasonably high figure, I decided to continue reading the remaining four pages of the ad. However, by the end I still had no clue what the job entailed, only that I needed to dedicate at least 10-15 hours a week to the endeavor and that I could receive "tax advantages" from this business opportunity. The contact information listed was an anonymous Yahoo! email address but when I clicked on the "Apply Online" button I was taken to a website, which made the impressive claim that by the year 2010 company sales will reach $1 trillion. I'd invested this much time in the process that I was determined to find out what job this company was offering. I clicked through 16 pages of content when it was finally revealed (by design, you could not scroll ahead) that for a small investment of $165 I could get started selling herbal supplements. I decided not to take the chance.

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