Legitimate online business opportunity or scam?

The first thing you should look at when you are checking out online opportunities is their product or service they (and subsequently you) are selling. Is it a tangible product that has real value or is it something that seems priced way higher than it's actually worth? If they are not selling a good product at a reasonable price, it is probably a scam. Especially if buying the expensive product is a condition of joining the program.

You will find some 'opportunities' that won't really be clear about their products or services or what you have to do in the program. The 'hype' page will be just paragraph after paragraph telling you what a great program it is, how rich you will get, how rich others have gotten, etc., etc., then a join form, but nothing about how the program actually works. If they don't want to tell you what you're joining, then you should take it as a pretty good sign that you don't really want to.

Some of the online 'businesses' or 'opportunities' you will find on the internet are actually pyramid schemes and illegal in most places. One of the easiest tip-offs to this kind of 'business' is that they won't be selling a product at all. They will charge you money just to join the program. You buy a place in the 'matrix' and when others join below you, you get paid part of the fee that they pay to join. What they do is use the money from the new members to pay the people at the top of the pyramid.

The only people that actually make money with these things are the people at the top and believe me, you will never be at the top no matter how new they say the program is. The people that run these things have a select group that they invite to fill the top positions before it ever hits the internet . When you see it being promoted, it is already too late to "get in at the top" and you will just lose your money. Once the program dies down, the "owners" move on and start another program and find a whole new batch of victims.

Other programs will tell you that all you have to do is just join and pay your money and pretty soon you will be hip deep in cash. They claim you don't have to do anything at all and you will get rich. It's a scam for sure. Ask yourself one simple question, "If I don't have to do anything, why do they need me?" The answer is, they don't need you. All they need is your money in the form of the join fee.

Now, don't be afraid of a program that uses the terms, 'affiliate program', 'MLM or Multi Level Marketing' or that lets you recruit people under you. It's also referred to as 'direct marketing' and there are a lot of legitimate programs with good solid products out there that use this business structure such as Tupperware, Avon, Mary Kay, Watkins Products and others.

A legitimate MLM or direct marketing program will let you join and sell their products without paying any fee to join. They will even provide you with a free, personalized webpage to promote as well. Once you join, you should have total access to all of the information in the member's area and the better programs will have a lot of helpful information and educational materials to show you how to get started. Some programs may ask you to purchase a sales kit or advertising materials such as business cards, flyers, etc. which is fine as long as the cost is reasonable for what you get.

The main thing to consider with these programs are the products and services they are offering. Take a look at it from a customers standpoint. Is it something that you would be willing to buy yourself? If not, you probably won't have much success selling it to anyone else. Think about it, would you buy anything from someone that told you, "You know, I sell this stuff but I don't really use it myself"? I don't think so.

If the company is offering viable products that are in demand and at a reasonable price and they encourage you to join and sell for them at no cost to you, that is what you're looking for.

On the other hand, if the product is something you can find elsewhere much cheaper or something you wouldn't really see a need for, you're not going to be able to sell it. And, if the company charges a big fee for the 'privilege' of selling their overpriced, undervalued product, guess what, their whole business is collecting join fees from unsuspecting online opportunity seekers. Don't fall for it.

Click the banner below and you'll see an example of a program that is free to join, offers multiple products and services at reasonable prices and provides you with extensive training to successfully market online.

In your search for online opportunities, if you come across the 'get paid to read email' programs. While you actually can make money with them, you won't make more than a few pennies for clicking the links and visiting websites. If you're looking to actually make money and have a real online business endeavor, in my opinion, they're not worth your time. If your online activities are nothing more than a hobby, well, they might be fun to play with.

They only pay pennies and sometimes only fractions of pennies to click the links in the emails and visit websites and while there are legitimate programs out there that do pay, there are a lot of scams as well. If you look at the minimum payout level you must reach to get paid and it's anything over a dollar, it's probably a scam. If they are paying you fractions of a cent per email and the payout minimum is $50 or more, believe me, you will never reach the payout level. Most will collect advertising revenues as long as they can, then fold the program and disappear before anyone ever gets paid.

You can't always tell just by the front page of a site if it's legitimate or not. So many of these programs come and go, you never know if the program you join will be around long enough for you to actually get paid by it. Fortunately, there are two sites that will give you good information on the paid to read sites. The first one is GPTBoycott where they list the programs that are not paying or are clearly scams and the other is BeenPaid where they list sites that they know are legitimate and do pay.

I don't follow these programs much anymore but there is one program I know of and would recommend that is worthwhile. It's called Quick Rewards and they have paid email, paid surveys and many more 'get paid to' activities on their site so you actually can make a few bucks with this one and they pay promptly with a very low minimum payout.

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You can make a little cash with paid surveys. You just have to find the right programs and read all the fine print. You will see websites that offer to sign you up with paid surveys and promise you'll make $100 per hour or more for taking surveys. And they'll give you this valuable information for just a small fee. Right... Don't believe the overblown hype of these sites and don't ever pay a fee to find paid survey sites. There are plenty of survey sites out there that you can find and join for free so you don't have to pay to find them.

There are lots of companies out there that do market research to find out how people feel about their products and services and one way is through surveys. Some companies will try to get their customers to fill out a survey without offering them any incentive to do so but they don't get as much response as they like. The paid survey sites offer these companies a ready and willing group of people to survey and they can also target any demographic they are looking for. Companies marketing products are very willing to pay the survey companies for this valuable information so you can make money for participating in the market research by joining the survey site.

You're not going to make $100 an hour either. This is simply unrealistic. First of all, how much you make depends on how many survey opportunities you get and you won't qualify for every survey available because you might not fit the demographic the company is looking for in any particular study. You will qualify for some and your account will be credited after you complete the survey. You may also get some free products now and then for product trials and get paid for filling out a survey afterward.

Realistically, you can make a few hundred dollars per year if you join several survey sites so they are worthwhile. More so than paid email. I still participate in surveys because I enjoy giving my opinion and getting paid for it. I usually fill them out in the evening while sitting in my easy chair in front of the TV with my laptop in my lap. Ya, it's a tough job but somebody's got to do it...

One last thing you absolutely MUST do when you are considering joining any program is to read the TOS or Terms of Service and/or membership agreement. They will have a link to it at the bottom of the page or somewhere on the site and you will have to agree to it when you fill out the form to join. If there is any "fine print" to be found, it will be here.

This is where you'll find out how you get paid, how often you can get paid, minimum payout levels, how you can promote the program, etc. etc. If you have trouble finding the agreement or TOS, then that's another sign it's a scam. Any legit program will have there TOS page easy to find and they will spell out all the details of how the business works.

If you have questions that aren't answered in the TOS, have a look at their FAQ's (frequently asked questions) and see if you find answers there. If you still have questions, there should be contact information somewhere so you can email the program administrators. Again, if there is no contact info on the site, it's a pretty good indication that it's a scam or at the very least a poorly run operation. Either way, you don't want to get involved with it.

There are a lot of clues to whether a program is a legitimate business opportunity or a scam but the most important thing to remember is the old adage, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and you'll never get taken. If you're checking it out and you begin to feel doubt or start hearing that 'little voice' in the back of your head, you need to slow down and do some more checking.

One easy thing to do is to put the name of the program into any of the major search engines and see what comes up. I'll guarantee that if it's a scam, you'll see plenty of webpages warning about it. Of course, there will always be some who will badmouth a company or program just because they didn't succeed or they had some little problem, so you need to read what they are actually saying and if there are several people that are saying the same thing, I would tend to believe what they are saying.

You can also go to the BBB (Better Business Bureau) website and do a search there. They'll tell you how many complaints have been made against the company and how and if they were resolved.

Chat rooms and bulletin boards are another way to get feedback from real people who have actually tried or are participating in a lot of the opportunities you'll find on the net.

The best piece of advice I can give you about online business opportunities is to beware of the programs that want to charge a fee to join. And the bigger the fee, the faster you should run in the other direction! Trust this and your own instincts and you'll be ok.

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