For anyone that watches late night television and infomercials it is not news that there are many business opportunities on the internet. There are advertisements in print media, television and a few months ago I heard a commercial on the radio. With all the hype about home based and internet based business opportunities I decided that I would look into it to see if I could supplement our income.

There are many sites that make huge claims about making money online. In my research I found that some of them are complete scams and others are complicated business ventures. I did come up with a few pitfalls and tools that I used in sorting out the opportunities. It is very easy to get caught up in spending money to obtain information. That is the first pitfall that I fell into. When looking into making money online do not pay for information about the opportunity.

We have all come across the sites that claim that you can make thousands of dollars a week spending a few minutes a day whenever you want to. Most of these sites call themselves data entry opportunities. They tell you that if you can type an email you can do the job and make thousands of dollars a week. The information that is not shared prior to buying into the company is that you need to spend a great deal of money posting the advertisements that you type up. I paid to learn more about the data entry positions. In the hype portion I was told that all I needed to do was to fill out forms and post them on the internet. I was not told that I first had to pay to get the forms and then had to pay to post them. I also had to research which company had the greatest potential of helping me recoup my money as well as make a profit. It was a very complicated and misleading experience. The next pitfall that I fell into in trying to make money online was the completion of surveys. This is the biggest rip off that there is on the internet. For one thing you can join companies to get mailed the surveys without going through a third party. The third party has you pay money then they simply give you the websites of the survey companies. I ended up spending money joining music and make up clubs as well as ordering magazines. There was one survey that I took that I was paid $1.50 for taking. The third party company stated that you could make hundreds of dollars a week spending fifteen to twenty hours. This was not a sure bet in making money online for me. The person that was making money online in this case was the one that found the survey takers for the companies, who in turn bought from the companies.

Making money online is possible, but it is not a get rich quick scheme and the old saying “if it sounds too good to be true it probably isn’t” definitely applies.