The Challenge of Distinguishing Between Legit Work at Home Businesses From the Fly-By-Night Rip-Offs
Are you looking for a legit work at home business opportunity to help you start generating some income for yourself? Quite understandably, it can be rather challenging to be able to distinguish between a legit work at home business opportunity versus some fly-by-night scam operation out to take your money and run. There are, sadly enough, far too many of them out there.They cleverly disguise themselves as so-called “financial gurus” who have somehow “unlocked” the “secret” to financial independence and are withholding some carefully guarded, patented “formula” to help you “get rich quick”. They use false testimonials to feign their credibility. They promise you the world. They make it sound like anybody can just quit their day job and start earning double or triple their former income by working for themselves at home, in just a matter of weeks or months, with very little effort on their part.But little do we know, they are really in the business of selling their turkey business model and not actually running the actual business they are trying to reel you into. When you do finally buy into their business, you quickly realize that what you once thought was a legit work at home business model, is in fact, nothing more than a scam, a rip off. The product doesn’t deliver as promised. The peddler has over-promised and under-delivered.But the fact of the matter is that there are quite literally thousands of legit work at home business opportunities out there. You just have to know how to distinguish between the scammers and the real deal. While that may not always be easy, it is something that you need to be able to discern before you go out and buy into some program. Here are 3 simple ways you can learn to tell the difference between a legit work at home business opportunity versus a scam:1. While there is nothing wrong with wanting to sell information rather than offering it for free, you should know that if a business opportunity is legitimate, than somebody, somewhere on the Internet has already spilled the beans and discussed it at great length on the Internet, for free. So you should be wary of paying for information on some “secret” business model that guarantees overnight wealth.2. While it is not uncommon for businesses to rely on the testimonials of other satisfied customers to bolster their credibility when seeking out new customers to buy into their home business opportunities, you would be wise to take these testimonials with a grain of salt and approach them with a little bit of healthy skepticism. You will find that many businesses will cross the fine line of business ethics by using paid endorsements. In other words, the people you see giving their testimonials on TV, on the radio, or on the Internet, are oftentimes being paid to make the statements that they do, when in fact they haven’t actually used the product nor do they actually care for it in reality. Fortunately, the FCC issued some new regulations in the latter part of 2009 that place restrictions on how testimonials may be used, in an effort to curb the rampant misuse of fraudulent testimonials.3. If a work at home business opportunity truly is legitimate, then that would imply that other people have already bought into it before you, wouldn’t it? That being the case, you should be able to find discussion forums and support groups online (or even offline in the real world) where you can meet and interact with other people who are running the same business as you. You can learn from them, network with them, gain inspiration, and support from them. And you can also provide your own input as well. If there is no support for a particular home business opportunity on the Internet, then you may want to question whether it is a legitimate, let alone viable, opportunity after all.In this economy, it makes sense to try to launch your own legit home work at home business. Perhaps you have been laid off and your prospects for finding new employment are grim. Perhaps you have been downsized and you need to earn some extra income to help pay the bills and make ends meet. Perhaps you just want to get out of the rat race altogether, pay off your debts, and become financially independent. Or perhaps you have dreams of retiring at an early age. Whatever your motivation is, there are millions of people out there, just like you, who are interested in starting their own businesses.