If you are looking for online earning opportunities then be aware that there are a lot of scams out there. People will try to sell you a program that they claim will give you information that will help you to start earning online but they forget to tell you that you will have to actually work to make it happen. These advertisers will make it sound like there are all kinds of Internet business opportunities that you can get into which will make you rich, basically over night, and will allow you to spend all day on the golf course or laying on a tropical beach. But this is not reality.
Oh sure, there are a lot of people who have built up good online businesses but they didn’t do it by playing golf, laying in the Sun, or even watching TV. They applied themselves to learn the basic of the business and then they did a lot of work. Most people who start trying to make money on the Internet don’t really make hardly any income the first year. Then, during the second year as long as they are working hard, they can start to see some income. It usually is not till about the third year that the real money is starting to be made. This is true for two reasons. First, even though you can buy all kinds of programs that claim to tell you how to earn money online, in reality it takes a lot of trial and error in order for you to develop your own style and to find out what works for you. And second, if you build a website and expect to get people visiting it by way of the search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, you can expect that it will take about a year before you see any appreciable traffic visiting your sites.
Now this is not to scare you away from Internet marketing. I think it is a great business model that has created a lot of millionaires. And it can provide a lifestyle of living on a beach, playing golf every day, or doing whatever you want to do. But, you need to understand that the Web is not some place where business fundamentals get thrown out the door. In fact, the Web is nothing more than a marketing medium for your business.
There are legitimate programs out there for people who want to build a good income. But it is not magic. If you want a successful Internet business then you will have to put in a lot of work. This means you are basically starting a second job that won’t pay you for a year or so. Most people will not put in the work required to build this sort of successful business because they want there rewards right now. Unfortunately, that is not how working online plays out.

People see an advertise about Online Google Jobs and instantly the following conversation goes through their head.  First they think that Google is a big corporation that makes lots of money, therefore, if I get a job with them, then I will make a lot of money and be set up well.  It is true that Google does have some great jobs and it pays well for the people that have the technical skills they need.  But this is not what the ads are actually selling.

These programs are based on a business model that works quite well but it is still a business and not a guaranteed income job.  Basically, you set up a website with information that people would like to know.  Then you work on getting the Google search algorithm to list you high up on the search result page every time someone “Googles” the term your site is based on.  Then when the people come to your site, they read what you have and then they see some other advertisements form Google advertising.  If they click on one of these ads, then you, as the business owner receive a commission.  But no matter how many people you get to your site, many of them may not actually click on anything so you don’t get paid.  Also, it usually takes a lot of work to get your site ranked well when someone searches.

There is nothing wrong with this Internet business opportunity but you need to understand that it is a job without any kind of a guarantee.  You may make a good income or you may get absolutely nothing.  Like any business, this is how it works.  As long as you understand the getting a Google job is not really what these sites offer, then you can decide if this business opportunity is right for you.

No legitimate home based business opportunity is going to come in an email message that you haven’t requested. If you get an email telling you about some fantastic opportunity then send it on to the scam center. These are often times based on the Nigerian scam. Some one will send a message saying you can get several millions dollars just by giving them your bank account number. Once you provide the number they clean out our account and are gone. Do not respond to any unsolicited messages about making money.

There are some assembly work jobs that are legit but a lot of them are not. What they do is charge you a fee up front for the material to make the item. You then spend your time creating the crafts or whatever and then when you send them back to the company for payment they deny them saying they aren’t of quality. You are out the money for the materials and the time you wasted on the project and they are off to scam the next victim. For a real work at home job you shouldn’t have to pay up front in order to do the work.

Another scam is based on high tech so it seems more like it is based in legitimated home based business opportunities. This one involves recovery shipping charges from UPS and Federal Express. The add says you can make boat loads of money by tracking packages for companies and then recovery shipping charges if they are late. Not only is no business interested in this but it is against the shipping agreement of UPS. You spend hundreds of dollars up front for the software and then have no where to use it.

Envelope stuffing and data entry are two more classic work at home scams that have been updated for the new century. With envelope stuffing the ad says you can make hundreds stuffing envelopes. You buy the information booklet and find that you are supposed to place ads for envelope stuffers and collect the money when they buy the booklet you just bought. There really are not envelope stuffing opportunities any more because of automation. With data entry you often times are forced to buy a training package and then once you have completed the training they tell you to go out and find some people to transcribe for like doctors and lawyers. What? They don’t really have any jobs they just make money by selling the training to unsuspecting people.

Medical transcription goes along with data entry above. This is a great skill to have if you know someone to work for but there are a lot of scams out there that sell you training and software that supposedly is going to help you get a job. Once you have spent all that money they tell you to call doctor’s offices and see if they need transcription done. The vast majority won’t even talk to you.

It is very hard to find a Legitimate Home Business that involves working at jobs that don’t require business skills. If you are looking for a way to make extra money then you would be better off trying to find something in your community like child care, making craft items to sell locally, or putting together gift baskets to sell locally or by specification. If you want to start a business online then that is a different matter that takes a different skill set than just sitting in your bathrobe drinking coffee and waiting for the money to arrive.

What I want to talk about today is a disconnect that is happening when a lot of these high dollar programs are hawked to people trying to start an online business. Here is how the process is sold.

• Buy my expensive program.  It is filled with all kinds of stuff
• Build a web site
• Offer the stuff I tell you to sell
• People come and buy it
• You get rich

The problem with this plan is a big assumption is made that an unwary internet marketer usually doesn’t pick up on. They think, great, I pay $995 or $1995 and I get rich that seems like a reasonable deal. So they spend the money and set up the web site, which costs even more money, and then they wait to get rich. The problem is they wait forever because there is one aspect of a successful internet marketing program that is missing from the above plan. It is the ingredient that is absolutely vital to every business endeavor under the sun. It has been called the lifeblood of any successful enterprise whether it is on the internet or a corner grocery store.

You gotta have customers. If you don’t have customers you will not make any money online or offline. Period.

The problem with the majority of these high ticket get rich quick schemes is they don’t talk at all about how to get customers. They lead you to believe that all you need to do is “build a site and they will come.” There is nothing further from the truth. You have to learn how to give people a reason to visit your site before they will come and you can have a hope of selling them anything.

I almost bought this program about two years ago but then I happened onto a group of guys who really understand how the internet can work to help everyone, not just themselves. They don’t rip off people who are looking to start a business. Instead they will show you how you can build successful money generating websites in which everyone wins. This is the key to a successful online business .

If you are looking for an online business idea then do a search in Google for the term Make Money Online. The top spot is held by one of these guys. He goes by the name Grizzly but he is really just a big teddy bear. Read every thing he says and you will understand a lot more about being successful in a win/win way than all these so called Guru’s who just want to take your money and run.

The second guy is a fellow named Vic at Blogger Unleashed. Vic is a great guy with a whole lot of information but he has a tendency to talk like a sailor so if your ears are tender be aware.

The third person is Court Tuttle. He is now offering a course on internet marketing that will take you step by step through the process of how to make money with an online business. The great thing is the course doesn’t cost $1995 or $995 or even $195. You can join for one dollar and try his method for a month. If you don’t like it you are out a buck is all. But I am sure you will like it and you will find his teaching methods are easy to follow.

Any time you are looking at a course on Internet Marketing or starting an internet business online you have to be sure it doesn’t gloss over the missing ingredient. It must have a component that speaks to the question of how to get customers to your site. If you don’t learn that you will never make any money in this business and you will certainly not get rich with an online business opportunity.

Today I was reading Courtney Tuttle over at his Keyword Academy blog. This site is packed full of great internet marketing information you can use to make your Christian home business a success. Look in his archives and you will find over two years of posts chocked full of tips and tricks.

The post today is titled I Bet The FTC Smokes The ‘Posting Links On Google’ Facebookers. Have you seen the ads recently that say you can make thousands of dollars a day by posting links on Google? Well, Court was talking about the Landing Page that is used when you click on one of those ads. On the page there is a picture of a guy named Paul Steinbach who just happens to be from Provo Utah where Court lives. Kind of strange but not unreasonable right. Well a few days after clicking on the ad Court was in Arizona and clicked on the ad again. This time the landing page said Paul Steinbach was from Phoenix, Arizona. So Court writes a post about the program and how they are marketing it and lists a link to the landing page.

In the comment section of Court’s blog people starting leaving notes about seeing the ad in their area and each time the ad says Paul is from the town where the people lived. One said he lived in Arkansas, one said he lived in New Jersey, one said he lived in Perth Australia and there was even one from Malaysia.

So how can he be from all these places? It is really quite simple. When someone clicks on the ad he has a program that checks to see where the person doing the clicking lives. The program then inserts that location in the landing page sales copy. It’s a trick that is used to try to build rapport with the customer. You are more likely to have an affinity for the guy if you think he is a neighbor.

Come to find out the program is nothing special. People make money every day from posting links to Google. All you do is get a webpage and place Google Adsense on it. Those are the little Google ads you see on blogs including this one. In the near future we will be doing some posts on how to utilize Adsense for you to make money with your Christian home based business opportunity.

There are a lot of people on the web selling programs that really don’t have any more information than you can find for free if you look around. Before you spend money on a $300 program see what you can find in the blogs on my blog roll. You can be successful with your Christian business without spending an arm and a leg.

I bought into a program that said I would make a fortune on line if I only followed their advise. When my $197 program arrived I read it and studied it but I didn’t make any money. Why? Because it really didn’t tell me what I needed to know to actual generate any income. They basically said, “put up a website and people will come and they will buy stuff from you and make you rich.” I guess it was my fault because it sounded too good to be true and, as usual, it was.

I have learned you can make money with an online business but it takes a lot of work. I read something very telling in a blog the other day. “Making money online is easy but most people are not willing to do the work required to be successful.” Like all good things an online business requires work. You first have to find out what people are looking for. You do this with market research tools. Next, you find out how to fill their need whether it is a product, service, or information. Finally, you use the search engines to drive traffic to your site by getting keyword anchored backlinks. That is basically all there is to it. It’s simple but it takes work finding the market, finding out what the market wants to buy and building the back links to get the search traffic. These are all things we have talked about and I will continue to explore because although it is simple there is a lot to know. If you find a program that offers you success with no work run away because it is probably a scam.

I have really noticed lately that there are more and more people who are shedding the light on scams. The Passive Income Online blog has had several posts about programs that claim more than they deliver. The post Get Paid To Blog: Is It A Scam talks about Today.com blogs and their claim that you can make money by blogging on their site. Go check her blog out after you get done reading this.

Lately, the big scam I have seen directed at people who want to start a Christian home based business is cash gifting. This is a despicable ponzi scheme that I have posted about before at Fight Christian Opportunites Online Scam. The scam goes like this: you join the program and then pay a gift to the people above you in the pyramid. The more you gift the more you supposedly get back later. Thus people give as much as possible because they are told 10 times more will come back. Then you get other people to join and they give cash gifts to you and the people above you. This is a classic pyramid scheme because eventually there are no new suckers to bring into the “business” and the whole thing collapses. The only ones who make out are the ones on top who set the whole scam up. Please don’t get sucked into a scheme like this because you are just throwing your money away.

If you truly want to start a Christian online business then continue to visit here and check out Grizz’s site. You have to offer people something they want and you have to get them to your website. That is all there is to it. You can be successful with a Christian home based business without spending a fortune on less than worthwhile programs and schemes.

There seems to be an increase in the number of people who are trying to scam Christians with so called opportunities online. I wrote several posts about this including Christian business scam. In these times of economic turmoil and upheaval everyone is trying to make a little extra money to make ends meet. Some people reading this blog have lost their job and were at the end of their rope when a scammer came along and took what little they had left.

Several people have visited this blog wondering about a site called Christian opportunities online and whether or not it was a scam. I visited the site and reported back to my readers what I found. You can read that post at Christian opportunities online scam. As part of my investigation I had to input an email address in order to view the program. I have not heard anything back until today.

Christian Business Scam

When I checked my email there was a message from ChristianBusinessNewsletter with the subject line, “Your financial future is in your hands and God’s guidance.” I had never heard of the Christian Business Newsletter before so I decided to open it. They had my name and email address so I figured I must have been in contact with them before.

When I clicked on the message it opened to a landing page with Christian Home Based Business as the title. The subtitle was the same as the subject line of the email. Then there was a three sentence paragraph telling me their opportunity was unique because it valued integrity and honesty. It then talked about my destiny again and finally told me how God had blessed me with this opportunity. The email was signed by Maggy L. (I wouldn’t want to give my full name either if I was trying to take advantage of people). It then had a Start Today button to click. I clicked it and was taken back to the site I have explored before in the posts I mentioned above.

They have made some changes including a button to click entitles “Beware of At Home Jobs”. I found this interesting considering what they advertised before turned out to be a Cash Gifting Ponzi Scam type of program. I clicked the button and found that it took me to another site talking about how everything but their programs are scams. Apparently they don’t know who is advertising their programs or maybe they are really the same people.

Anyway I wanted to alert you if you get an email from Christian Business Newsletter this is what is contained in side so you don’t have to open it. I will continue to report on any Christian Business Scams I find while providing you with free home based business and Christian online business ideas. Starting and running an online Christian business opportunity can be lucrative but you have to watch out for scammers because the internet seems to draw them like flies.

A few days ago I wrote a post explaining how I would try to find out more information about Christian Opportunities Online and determine whether or not it is a scam site. Since then I have visited the site and entered my name, email, and phone number. As I said before, the web page has no information regarding what the actual opportunity is. This is always a red flag for me. If a website wants your email address and especially your phone number without informing you as to why, you can usually be assured you will be getting a lot of unsolicited emails and phone calls trying to sell you some big money making scheme.

Christian Opportunities Online Website

The main page on the website Christian Opportunities Online says you can “earn money helping others,” “Join the thousands of home entrepreneurs who…embrace traditional values like honesty, integrity, work ethic, and family relationships,” and “Use your God-given talents and experience to do something unbelievable for yourself, your family and your financial future.” It sounds nice doesn’t it? It sounds like the perfect Christian business opportunity. You get to make money while helping others and your own family. These are hot buttons most people have and a good copywriter can push them at will. Who ever wrote the copy on this page knew how to push buttons.

I found something interesting once I entered my information and clicked the “Click Here” button. I was immediately taken to a completely different web site called Abundant Living System. This is another very pretty site. There is a picture of a fancy car and $20 bills flying around in the air. The headline reads, “The Original Creators Of The Abundant Pay if Forward (PiF) Gift Program). They then go on to talk about how their members are receiving $20 – $2000 daily with zero effort.

Note: If someone trys to sell you a system that allows you to make money with no effort you need to instantly turn around and run, not walk, away. Every scam known to man uses the idea of Money For Nothing as a center piece. It plays on our greed and gullibility. Usually this type of offer is focused on the least fortunate of us all, someone who has lost their job or have massive bills that need to be paid. When we are drowning financially it is easy to grasp at any type of potential help available.

Back on the Abundant Living System page there is another “I Want To Learn More” box for you to input your information into again. In the subtitle of this box, we finally find out what the offer is all about. This is a Cash Gifting program. If you are not familiar with Cash Gifting it works like this:

You join the program by giving a “gift” to the people who brought you into the system. In this case the minimum gift is $75 with a $50 administration fee. You then sign up other people who give you gifts of money. The people who you bring in then add more people who pay not only your first level of members but also you. This is a classic operation that is based on continually getting more people to join. Wikipedia has a great article on Cash Gifting. In this system, you have the option of giving an original gift from $75 to $12,000. The kicker is if you give a small amount, like $75, then whenever anyone below you enters the system and gives more than your original amount you do not receive any part of that gift because you did not trust enough at the beginning. Does this sound like a way to get people to give as much as they possibly can for a future big payout?

Christian Opportunities Online Cash Gifting Scheme

According to Wikipedia, Cash Gifting is a Ponzi Scheme which is illegal. The Abundant Life System people claim that it is not illegal because all the money changing hands is in the forms of gifts. Apparently, the United States IRS does not agree. There is a great article on the Abundant Life System at Cash Gifting Watchdog. They lay out exactly what the Abundant Life System says about the legality of the site. Then, point by point, the Watchdog disputes these claims. Regardless of how the government feels about cash gifting (it is illegal) I think it is morally reprehensible. It is nothing more than a scheme to get money from honest, hard working people and put it into the pockets of the few people who start the scheme. Whenever you here about cash gifting as a legitimate business model you can be assured that someone hopes you haven’t read any articles like this one.

There are a multitude of legitimate Christian Business ideas that can be implemented on the internet. I am dedicated to finding the Christian Business opportunities you can implement to make a profit on line. One thing I will never do is promote a program or system I have not used or investigated myself. I hope this clears up the question of Christian Opportunities Online scam or not. Continue to visit this Online Christian Business Opportunity blog to find out legitimate ways for Christians to make money.