Are you tempted by offers that promise you can make thousands of dollars a week working from home? Stop and think before you get involved. While there are legitimate opportunities to work at home, offers that promise instant riches with little work are generally scams. Legitimate opportunities to work at home come in the form of franchises or non-franchise businesses, or if you’re good at sales and recruiting, direct selling.
How can you tell the difference between what sounds too good and what is good?
I suggest you test any opportunity for three things : suitability, legitimacy and marketability. Start by asking yourself if there’s a match between what you can and want to do and the work involved in the homebased opportunity. Consider direct selling, for example- only about 5 percent of people who sign up with direct-selling companies have the skills to make money at it.
To determine a business opportunity’s legitimacy, check out Entrepreneur.com’s FranchiseZone and BizOpp Zone , and the Better Business Bureau‘s site. Be aware that not finding complaints is no assurance of legitimacy, and if you contact a fraudulent company, they may provide false testimonials.
Checking for marketability means determining if you have access to enough potential customers to make a particular business viable. The market may be saturated, and what will sell in one community might not sell in another.
Remember, if a work-at-home offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is. By taking time to do a triple check, you can become a victor, not a victim.
From this vantage point I can honestly say there’s a universe of opportunity out there for those with the same sort of ambition and drive that I had, but only if you follow the right path and don’t go astray.
Here’s my advice for determining what sounds too good, in a nutshell:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
Not only would I skip the empty promises of the self-help/personal development genre, I’d also steer clear of the entire Web 2.0, social media, user-generated content space. Nobody makes a living there except Google and Facebook.
In the real world, one can’t be branching out and have the ability to franchise straight out of Facebook and LinkedIn. If that’s news to you, check out this excerpt of “You Are Not A Gadget” by Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier and a facebook page that share some experiences of those who has been through it.
2. Make your own luck.
Successful people make their own luck by putting themselves out there, listening to their instincts and taking decisive action, even if it seems risky or impulsive at the time. And that means getting out from behind your computer, talking to real business leaders and making smart career decisions that make sense.
3. Rinse and repeat.
Once you get out, gain some experience and start to learn how the real business world works, you’ll begin to observe certain patterns. Perhaps the most basic of these is that opportunity can’t find you if you’re not where the action is and nothing good will happen if you don’t take action. Be there, listen and act. Turn the crank. Simple as that.
So, be careful when looking for the next opportunity in your life, and remember that just because something sounds great, doesn’t mean it always is.
Do some due diligence work and don’t fall for something that sounds too good to be true.
Achieve Goals You Never Thought Possible 4X Faster
