Home Business – Don’t Get One Of The 3 Stooges! (Part 1 – “Home Data Entry”)

Making some extra money by working at home sounds great, doesn’t it? Choose your own hours, work as much or as little as you want to, fit it all around your other commitments – it sounds wonderful! And it can be, if you give very careful consideration to what I call “The 3 Stooges of Home Business.” This article is the first in a series of three articles.Please be aware that these articles offer you only my own personal experiences and opinions. This article focuses on the concept of making easy money for typing at home.If you have been investigating the possibility of starting a home computer business for very long, you have probably seen several websites promoting home data entry, filling out forms, etc. These websites often mention that you will be writing simple, short ads for hundreds of companies, your ads are never turned down, they will take only minutes to write, etc.Although I have, by no means, tried every single one of them, my experiences with that type of product have been pretty consistent.Basically, the “forms” you fill out are Google ads. When you go to Google and enter, say “dog training,” you get pages of results. Notice the little listings on the right-hand side of the results page. Those little entries look a lot like regular newspaper classified ads.They are, in fact, the internet equivalent of classified ads. Let’s say that you have some camping equipment that you no longer use, and you put an ad in your local newspaper advertising that camping gear. You would pay for the ad, based on how many lines your ad used and how many days you wanted it to run. You might even pay extra to have it run on the weekend or to appear near the top of the “used camping gear” section. If someone buys your camping gear, you make money. If no one buys your gear, you’re out the cost of the ad.It’s basically the same thing on Google. People who want to advertise a product write ads, pay to place those ads on Google, and wait for someone to buy the product.That’s where you come in with many of the home data entry products. When I bought these products, what I received was, essentially directions to choose internet products that I would like to advertise, write Google ads for those products, pay Google to run the ads, and hope someone bought the product so that I could make some profit on my Google ad costs.(As you might imagine, the products were not nearly so clear in explaining the “big picture” as what I just wrote to you.) But back to the promises of easy, fast, big money from my home computer in only minutes per day.It didn’t happen.Here are the major problems I encountered.It’s true that there are hundreds and thousands of companies that would like you to write ads for them. Of course there are! Those companies would love for you to pay for ads for their products. When someone buys, they make a sale (that costs them nothing to get), and they pay you a commission. When no one buys, they lose nothing. You, however, pay for the Google ads even if not one single person buys the product.It’s also true that your ads are never rejected (unless you write an ad that offends Google’s publication rules – obscenity, etc.). But it’s the same thing as above. No buyers equals no money for you.Remember the part about paying more for your camping gear ad to get it running on the weekend, or placed near the top of the section on camping gear? It’s the same basic situation with Google ads, only the higher costs are related to the most popular products.So if you decided to advertise a product for making money on the internet (a very popular content area), your advertising costs would probably be pretty high.If you decided to advertise a product that teaches people how to train chimpanzees to waltz, you could probably get pretty inexpensive ads on Google. But how many people will be likely to actually buy your waltzing chimpanzee product?It is possible to make money by promoting products through Google, but it’s a sad fact of internet life that most Google advertising beginners lose money and give up quickly.The people who do make a lot of money with Google ads have invested a lot of time, study, comparative ad testing, and money in their success. Unlike those people, I must count myself as someone who tried Google, lost money, and quit before I lost more.So – in summary – if you are considering the home data entry type of products, investigate thoroughly before you commit. Write to the “contact us” or “help” links on the website, and ask for specific information about what the product will deliver to you, and exactly what you will need to do in order to really make money with the product. Be sure you understand exactly what the refund policies are (when I requested a refund from one company, they simply sent me automated emails saying that my email request could not be delivered to them – until the refund period had expired).Whenever you buy any information product on the internet, be sure to save your receipt and keep track of it. You will almost certainly need the information on your receipt if you ever decide to request a refund for the product. In addition, be careful to keep track of time. Once their stated refund period has expired, any company can quite fairly refuse to return your money.Reprint Rights: You are free to copy this article and reprint it as long as you adhere to the following requirements. You must reprint this entire article, exactly as it is now, with no changes. You must include in your reprinting the full Resource box at the end of this article. You must not change the title or the content of the article in any way. 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