Video Rating: 5 / 5

by Erik Mallinson

Nowadays many people are making money working from home via the internet.  There are many different ways this can be done but there are also many scams out there so one must be very careful.

First let me start of with a legit no fee work from home business.  There aren’t too many of these types of home internet businesses, but this is one of the few.  It is called “Niche Marketing” among other similar names.  The basic principle is to create a website about a certain topic that has the ability to make it to the first or second page of the Google search results.  The main reason being that if you can get to the first or second page of Google then it’s highly unlikely anyone will ever find your site.

This Niche Marketing has no fee whatsoever attached to it.  That doesn’t mean however it is without costs.  You will need to buy a domain for each site you make (about per year) and also have webhosting.  It is by no means a scam but of course it is by no means easy either.  You need to have some computing knowledge as you need to buy domains and create websites.  Many use WordPress which is fairly easy to use but even for an experienced computer guy setting up your first WordPress website will take some time.  Once you have done one, of course, it gets very easy.

Further you will need to do “keyword research”.  This is possibly the longest part of the job as you need to find “niches” i.e. keywords where the competition is low so that there is a good chance you will reach the first page of Google, or close to it.

Once you have found your topic then there are a couple of ways you can make money with your new website.  The most popular and perhaps easiest is with Google Adsense.  This is completely free to join and you basically give Google some space on your website and when people click on the ads you earn money.  Very easy!

You can expect to make about per day with Google adsense on a niche site.  (Unless you are lucky enough to find a niche with high search traffic – very hard to find).  The idea is to have many of these websites so that you can make possible 0s per day depending on how many sites you have.  The nice thing is that once the site is set up and running it shouldn’t need any work afterwards.  So you spend a lot of time creating the sites but then you just relax forever as the sites earn money.

You can also make money through affiliate programs.  So if your site is about Pet Toys then you can find another website that sells pet toys and become an affiliate for that site making a commission off of each sale that is made from the customers you send to that site.  Therefore you can have 2 potential forms of income from the same site.

Now perhaps you aren’t very good at creating websites but you are eager to try to make money online.  The other very popular way is by joining some sort of MLM or Pyramid scheme.  Many people think that these are scams but they aren’t really.  Sure there are many that are scams, but just because some are scams doesn’t mean that all of them are.

Things to avoid are anything that sounds like “Google Cash Kit” or “Make Money With Google”, these are very scammy in that they try to sell you a kit for – (very low price).  They make it out that this is all you pay, a small fee for the shipping but what you don’t realize is that you have just signed up for a subscription service that might cost you -0 per month.  The crazy thing about this is that it’s completely legal.  The reason being that at the bottom of the page where you provide your credit card details there is some very small writing about the monthly fee.  Of course it is never mentioned anywhere else and all the sales pages make you think that it is just a cheap kit you are buying and all you have to do is pay the shipping.

Another scam to avoid is the work from home stuffing envelopes scam.  The websites promoting this supposed work from home job make it out to be that many companies are willing to pay people to handle and process their mail for them.  This is by no means true.  I should know because I used to fix the machines that are used to perform this job.  Companies like Francotyp Postalia, Pitney Bowes and Neopost all make machines that automate this process and work infinitely faster than any human can.  Further many companies offer this service in bulk (because they have these machines) and it works out to pennies a piece.  So what company in their right mind is going to pay anyone or more per hour to do a job that can be done by a machine at 100 times the speed and therefore much cheaper?  

If you have seen any sites trying to promote this type of work you will notice that you will need to pay a fee in order to do the work.  This is your first alarm signal.  They say the fee is to weed out the people who aren’t serious or to purchase the names and contact details of companies who want this work done but it isn’t true.  You are just buying into a scheme whereby you try to get others to do the same and earn a commission for doing so.  The companies promoting this are not very up front about this so that’s why I would label it as a scam.  You can of course make money from promoting this, but you make your money by duping others into falling into the same trap.  Not a really nice way to make money.

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Other scams should be easy to identify.  Any site that has a “guarantee” about the income you can earn is a scam as no one can ever guarantee anything.  All success is down to how much work you put in and a little bit of luck.  This is something that no one in their right mind can make a guarantee for.

Another very popular way to make money legitimately online is to join a real MLM scheme.  One of the most popular and well known schemes is GDI (Global Domains International Inc).  You basically pay per month to be a member and that gets you a very basic webhosting service.  Illegal MLM schemes don’t give you anything for your money (ie no product), but this is a real product.  It just so happens that most people don’t really care about or use the product.  Nevertheless it’s real and legal.  They have been going for about 10 years now and I even think they are traded publicly on the stock market (I could be wrong).  

You earn money by getting others to join, so you advertise on the internet wherever you can.  Most people use free advertising like traffic exchanges and so forth.  The commission is per month per person.  But you also get the same commission if one of your referrals gets a referral.  This happens up to 5 levels down.  So, simply speaking, if you got 1 person per month, and everyone did the same, you would be earning 00s per month after your first year.  It’s very slow going in the beginning but it picks up as you stick at it and the idea is to get the snowball rolling.  Now the goal of 1 person per month seems very easy but in reality it isn’t.  Not necessarily for you, but perhaps for others.  The numbers all seem very easy in theory, but in practice it just doesn’t happen that way.

However, if you are very skilled in sales and marketing then you will likely be successful with GDI.  They also offer a very good bonus scheme.  If you get 5 signups within a week you can earn a 0 cash bonus.  This is possibly the best bonus scheme available on the internet.

The drawbacks with GDI is that it’s been around for so long so almost everyone is in it or already has been.  The only possible or potential customers are the new people who come to the internet in search of work and haven’t heard of or tried GDI yet (like me a year ago – I am no longer a member now however).  These people can be considered “fresh fish” for GDI marketers.  The thing is there are thousands of thousands of GDI marketers online.  It’s kind of like fishing in a lake where there are thousands of people fishing at the same time.  If 1 new fish enters the lake what are the chances that you will catch it ?  So in the end I dropped out of GDI as I didn’t see a great future in it.  However, that may not be the case for you so by all means give it a try.  The most you can lose is per month.  Don’t let me put you off if you were considering trying it out.  Nothing ventured nothing gained right ?

However before jumping into GDI, you might want to consider some of the new competition that has come on the scene in the last year.  One of the best, in my opinion, is Teamwork Revolution.  They are very similar to GDI in that they are /month and the product is again webhosting.  Their webhosting product however is far superior to GDIs.  GDI only offer 100MB of web space or 10 pages, whichever comes first.  Teamwork Revolution offer full blown cPanel webhosting service with 700MB of space and unlimited pages as well as unlimited traffic and other necessary things like MySQL Databases.  Therefore GDI can’t even hold a candle to Teamwork Revolution when it comes to product comparison.

Their compensation plan is also much better.  First of all it is a forced matrix program.  If you aren’t familiar with what a forced matrix is it basically means you have the possibility of getting spillover.  The whole point of these MLMs is to get people to join under you.  Well, if you are in a forced matrix it’s possible that you will receive spillover from your upline thereby earning commissions without even doing anything.  This isn’t only a great benefit for you, but it is also a huge selling point for future potential recruits.  Everyone loves forced matrices, so if you