Home-Biz-Help BizOpp Review: Cash This Check and Keep The Change

There is a scam going around the internet - and spilling over into snail mail as well. It has been going on for years, but only recently has it been getting much attention, probably because it seems to be becoming more common.



It comes in almost infinite varieties, but when you strip away all of the details, you are left with the basics, which never change.



Someone offers to send you a check, usually for way more than fair compensation for what ever goods or services you have contracted to provide. They have some cock-and-bull story as to why but always always always you are to deposit the check and send them the difference.



The check is never good, and you are on the hook for the entire bogus amount. Because this does not get discovered until you have already sent off the check to these perpetrators, you are responsible for reimbursing your bank for the entire amount. You may also be subject to criminal charges for money laundering.



Yup. You are the victim and you are charged as a criminal.



These "offers" turn up on Craigslist, as mystery shopping jobs, as used vehicle purchasers, as almost anything.



Please do not fall for this scam. If you have received such an offer, show it to your bank manager. Perhaps they can work with the FBI and set up a sting operation to catch the perpetrator. I have heard of it happening.

Other that that,

Under no circumstances, for any reason, cash one of these
checks.

If you do, as I said above, you are responsible and liable to pay back to money to the bank.

Home-Biz-Help BizOpp Review: Project Payday

For some time now I have been concerned about the ethics of "Project Payday."

From information posted in various forums, it seems that what participants in Project Payday do is sign up for offers from credit card companies and others who pay the signer a certain dollar amount just for signing up. The company that is paying is doing so in hopes of gaining a new customer.

The Project Payday member has no intention of becoming a new customer: They just take the money and run - by immediately opting out as soon as they get the money.

In other words, instead of being scammed, Project Payday members are doing the scamming!

While some have posted that this sort of thing is just a cost of doing business, from a "Golden Rule" perspective, it certainly isn't ethical and I can't even believe it is legal!

It appears the lack of ethics flows both ways. Here is a link to a post by someone who thought she was doing everything according to the instructions she received, and instead would up with hundreds of dollars on her credit card without being paid anything.

Project Payday sounds like very bad news. My recommendation is to avoid Project Payday as if it were the bubonic plague!

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Back on October 7, I posted that it would be rather difficult to find work from home that did not have any up-front cost. That is still true.

HOWEVER, there are people who make hundreds or even thousands of dollars every month by working ads into their blogs. If they are skillful enough, the advertisers will pay them for what they wrote. Some only pay $5. Some pay w-a-y more than that. Remember when your English teacher made you learn punctuation and grammar? Remember when you protested because you would "never use that stuff?" Use your blog to apologize to your teacher once you start cashing those checks!

It does not cost anything to start up a blog. Once your blog has been active (posted several times per week) for at least 90 days, you can apply to PayPerPost. It does not matter what you blog about- there are categories galore! Once you have enough accepted (paid) posts, you can add another blog. You can add them one at a time as long as you keep the quality up and the quantity of posts up.

Word to the wise from the voice of the observant: you will want to host your blog on your own host rather than blogspot.com or wordpress.com because the advertisers that pay serious money don't accept blogs hosted on free sites. For information on very inexpensive web hosting, click here. For information on getting paid to post to your blog, click here.

Another no-cost way to make money from home that is taking the internet by storm (as "they" say) is My Power Mall. My Power Mall is a 9-Tier Shopping Rebate System. People are invited to have their own FREE online Power Mall. All they do is shop and then invite others to have their own FREE Mall. As people shop for things they are going to buy anyway, everyone receives a % of the shopping rebates. Buy stuff you would buy anyway and get a percentage back - 9 tiers down. The way I figure it, if you were going to buy the stuff anyway, why not try it? Have people sign up under you and they do their internet shopping from their own malls, etc. By the time you get down a few tiers with people just doing normal shopping, you could rake in a few hundred bucks.

So there you have two ways you generate income from home on your computer with no initial out-of-pocket expense at all. With PayPerPost you will eventually need to get your own web hosting, but I pay $6.95 per month (billed monthly - I do not have to pay for a year in advance) with AllWebCo. With My Power Mall you (theoretically anyway) don't spend anymore than you are spending now - you just spend it differently.

Home-Biz-Help BizOpp Review: SFI - Part 1 - Veriuni All-Purpose Cleaner

SFI (which used to stand for "Six Figure Income" and now - I think - stands for "Strong Future International") has been around for abiout 20 years. They are members in good standing of the BBB.

You make money through SFI two ways: you market the busines opportunity as you build a downline, and you sell products. Ideally your downline does the same thing! Because SFI is quite complex, there will be a series of posts on various methods of making the system work, and on some of the products.

You can be profitable with SFI by never selling even one product while you build an active downline. You can be profitable with SFI by totally ignoring the downline concept and marketing the outstanding products they feature.

Today I am going to talk about Veriuni All Purpose Cleaner, or VAPC for short. IMHO, it is the best all-purpose cleaner you can buy. It smells great, it works great, it is totally non-toxic. Click HERE to see some of what it can do.

I live in the San Diego, California, area and we have been through our own local version of "Hell Week," an unfortunate repeat of what we went through 4 years ago. Around half a million people were evacuated from their homes because of huge wild fires. Smoke and ash are everywhere.

To get the ash residue off the car, I hosed the car off, sprayed it all over with a diluted solution of VAPC, hand-watered the lawn while the VAPC worked its magic, went over the entire surface of the car with a soft micro-fiber cloth, hosed the car down again and dried it off.

Cost: pennies
Time: a few minutes
Appearance: like a $20 car wash (or better)

The product is outstanding. If you are good at marketing, you can make money with this product. If you like swap meets and flea markets, buy this at wholesale, (buy a lot!) and sell it for a profit. Do demonstrations - you'll see! Be sure to check about your local resale laws, etc.

This is just one of many ways to make money through SFI. I will be discussing others over time.

Home-Biz-Help BizOpp Review: Ignotius Associates Program

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If this is you, seriously consider signing up for the Ignotius Associates Program. Once you sign up you have access to a wide variety of employers who are looking to hire people to do assorted office work from home. There are also other ways that you can make money from home without actually starting a home-based business.

More and more employers are realizing that "offshoring" their customer service is not good for their own business image, is not good for the local economy, and is not good for the customers, who often wind up frustrated. Ignotius puts you in touch with companies who have elected to provide excellent customer service through "homeshoring" options.

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Home-Biz-Help BizOpp Review: Make Money Taking Surveys

The ads would have you believe that you can actually make a good living. or at least make your car or house payment or send your kids to college or . . . . by taking surveys on line.

Don't believe it.

Ironically, those who need the money the most stand the least chance of making it taking surveys. Why? Because those conducting the surveys are interested in the spending habits of people who spend money on their type of product. The people who most need to make money don't have any money to spend, so if they are honest in their responses, they don't qualify for many if any of the surveys.

In other words, the people who conduct the surveys ask questions like "Do you plan on buying a new car in the next 2 years or did you buy a new car in the past 2 years?" Or they ask about electronics purchases, furniture purchases, home remodeling, your investment accounts (!), how many credit cards do you have, all the prepackaged groceries and snacks you buy, how often do you eat out, etc.

People who are struggling to get to the end of the month before they get to the end of the money do not spend what little money they have on those things, so they don't qualify for the survey. Instead, they get a sweepstakes entry or some such. Nobody can pay any bills on that.

People who qualify for most surveys already have money to spend, and the survey takers are most eager to find out how they spend it so they can manipulate the market and get more of it! But unless they get into a focus group (this is rare) the pay-off is still $1-$5.

So just what happens when you buy a list of survey companies and start to sign up for them? I can't speak for everyone, I can only tell you what happened to me and it wasn't pretty.

First of all I used an email address designated only for surveys. That was good, but not good enough. I should have had a different unique address for each one. I immediately began getting spam e-mails from "affiliates" and "associates" and "partners" (oh, my!) of the people I signed up with. My inbasket overfloweth.

Some of the companies were only interested in trial offers and samples of products I had no interest in or use for. I opted out of them right away, but somehow even though I got into the company immediately it took weeks to opt out! There is no legitimate excuse for that. I was especially annoyed at having to opt out of lists I had not opted into but who had gotten my address from someone else who "shared."

It gets worse. After I began opting out and was actually off a few lists, I began to receive the most vile of pornographic spam. I suspect at least one if not more of the people I opted out of sold my e-mail address to a pornographic spammer so they could at least make some money off of me, but I can't prove it.

Remember I said to use a different unique address for each company? This is why. If each survey company uses a different address to send communications to you and passes that address on to a spammer, pornographer, or both, you can nail them dead to rights because NOBODY else had that address!

I contacted the people I bought the list from, but they were useless. They claimed they had anonymously signed up for each offer before they put it on their list. Maybe they did, I don't know. It sounds good, anyway. I suggested they opt out of some as I had done to see what would happen. I never heard from them again.

My recommendation? Go ahead and sign up to take online surveys if you want. Once you have your list, be sure to use a different address for each company. It can be fun to influence market choices such as newly designed labels for familiar products, but don't expect to get rich.

For more and better ways to make money working from home visit
123 I Work From Home 4 Me or
123 Home Based Business Works 4 Me

Wise Ways To Multiply Your Home-Based-Business Sales

By: Sandi Moses

When you are in marketing, no matter what your product or service might be, and no matter whether you work from your home, from an office, or from a brick-and-mortar store front, you need to make sales. Studies show that once you have made a sale to a new customer it is wise to maintain a good and trusting relationship with that customer in order to keep that customer for the long term and have that customer make repeat purchases from you. It is also much cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. With that in mind, here are a few ways to maintain the relationship and bring that customer back for more of what you have to offer.


1. When you make your first sale, follow-up with the customer. Send a "thank you" email or post card and make sure they are happy with your product. Include an advertisement in your email signature or as the picture on the post card for other products you sell. Follow-up every few months to see if they need more of what they bought. Keep the lines of communication open; make sure you are always on their mind - in a good way, or course!


2. Gently upsell to your customers without being pushy or obnoxious. Make sure you tell them about a few extra related products you have for sale, such as matching or coordinating accessories, nail polish, etc. If they like what they see, they can add it to their original order. If there is some ancillary product they will need to make what they just purchased produce at it’s best, make sure to offer it. (Have you ever purchased a new computer printer only to discover at home that the clerk did not bother to make sure you had the right cable and ink or toner? Ever bought something that needed batteries but nobody thought to make sure you remembered to buy some? Gr-r-r-r-r!) Upselling is more than just asking if “you want fries with that.”


3. Give incentives for referrals. Companies that sell products through home parties discovered this gold mine years ago. If enough product is sold at the party, the hostess gets a freebie from the product line. The more product sold, the better the freebie. Sometimes if a guest decides to book a party, both that guest and the hostess receive an incentive, and so it goes. Some internet web hosting services give free hosting or actually pay for referrals. With a bit of creativity, you should be able to make this concept work for just about anything.


4. When you sell a product, consider giving your customers the option of joining an affiliate program so they can make commissions selling your product, thus multiplying the sale you just made. Clickbank and PayDotCom are internet examples of this concept. Some of the home party companies do this, too.


5. Sell the reprint/reproduction rights to your products. Include an ad on or with each product for other products you sell. You could make sales for the reproduction rights and sales on the back end product. This of course is an option only of what you sell is your own original work. Two types of products to consider would be internet information or some type of art work or original craft idea.


6. Cross promote your product with other businesses' products in a package deal. You can include an ad or flyer for other products you sell and have other businesses selling for you. This type of arrangement has become known as a “joint venture” or “jv” for short and is enormously effective. Do you walk or groom dogs? Consider a “jv” with someone who makes doggie sweaters or home-baked doggie treats. Or, promote your friend’s scented candles at your cake decorating parties, and she will promote your cake decorating service at her scented candle parties. This is another area where you are limited only by your creativity.


7. When you ship out or deliver your product, include a coupon for other related products - or even more of the same product. This has worked for decades for almost everything. Many items you buy in your local supermarket have coupons either on the packaging or tucked inside to entice you to buy more of the same when you run out of what you just bought.


8. Whoever said you had to limit yourself to just one type of home-based business? It is perfectly OK to combine more than one type and make customers from one business customers from both. For instance, if you run a family day care center and sell environmentally friendly cleaning and personal care products, your daycare moms would be more than interested in these products for their own homes. Do you clean offices or work organizing homes or offices or do freelance bookkeeping? Those customers would buy such products from you, too.


9. Sell gift certificates for your products. You'll make sales from the purchase of the gift certificate when the recipient cashes it in. They could also buy other items from your web site. You may have to be well-established before you begin this one, but what a great idea for the holiday season as well as birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, graduations, etc. You will have made two happy customers from the purchase of each gift certificate and widened your customer data base!


10. Send your customers free products with their product package. The freebies should have your ad printed on them. It could be bumper stickers, ball caps, t-shirts etc. This will allow other people to see your ad and order. Get a logo professionally designed or better yet barter your product or service in exchange for the logo design. Cross-market each other’s business afterwards!


Sandi Moses has been involved in internet marketing since November, 2003.
For more information on Work-At-Home Business Ideas and Opportunities, visit
123 I Work From Home 4 Me
and
123 Home-Based-Business-Works-4-Me