Over the past 9 years of doing business on the web I’ve purchased several thousand dollars worth of e-books and online courses, all guaranteeing me the opportunity to earn millions online.  I didn’t purchase any of these so-called blueprints to online entrepreneurship success because I’m a sucker.  In fact, I was skeptical about most of what I purchased, but purchased them anyway as a matter of on-going research and not because I was so much interested in the author’s moneymaking system, but more so because I felt I could pick up a few good useful tips along the way — tips I wasn’t already aware of at the time.

That said, when I look back on these purchases and realize I’ve outlived most all of the web entrepreneurs I’ve bought from, it becomes quickly evident that most work at home guru websites fall far short of their promises.  Some are even nothing more than another internet scam to make money. 

How can you spot a work at home scam when you come across one?  There’s no guaranteed way of spotting a work at home or work from home scam, but a few pointers I can offer are as follows:

• Read the testimonials on the entrepreneur’s sales page and try to visit the sites of every person providing a testimonial.  Many times you’ll find they are no longer operating.  So ask yourself this question, “If this plan is as good as the author or website owner claims it is, why has former purchasers of his moneymaking system gone out of business?
• Read the moneyback guarantee closely, seeing how it is worded.  Every web entrepreneur selling an e-book will have a moneyback guarantee.  If you find one that doesn’t offer a 30-day or more moneyback guarantee, then move on to another site.  On the otherhand, if they offer a guarantee, read it closely for trickly language or loopholes that would give the seller an easy way out, living you holding the bag.
• Make sure all links on the sale page works.  Only today I found a website that was offering a terriffic moneymaking tool for webmasters.  I wanted to find out more about the product, but couldn’t because most of the links to online videos and audios covering the product were broken links.  Thus, ask yourself this simple question — “If the system the webmaster is peddling is so great and he’s selling so many copies, why does he have so many links that are not working?”  This is typically the sign of a guy who has given up and moved on to something else, but will still take your hard-earned money if you’re willing to part with it.
• Lastly, do some online research to see how popular the guy’s website really is.  After all, you can’t make money online without traffic. I recommend typing the search phrase site:thedomainnameinquestion.com in a Google search box to see how many pages of his website does the guy have indexed in Google.  I also recommend going to Alexa.com and determining how popular the website is.

Although these pointers don’t represent all the ways you can determine if someone is running a work at home business plan scam or not, they will end up saving you a lot of money in the wrong run and will prove to be pretty true indicators for a very long time.

Blog and Ping is a buzz phrase that became popular in early 2005 once it was found that blog sites that most good blog content management systems ping several blog directories each time an article is published, and search engines routinely spider most blog directories (thus providing yet another way for search engines to find your site).

I write this brief article today to make you aware of a new site I created for a friend who loves gardening.  He was very interested in getting up to speed and learning not only what a blog (i.e., web log) is, but how to become a blogger himself.  I recommended that he use Wordpress, an excellent content manager for blogs that is openware (i.e., free).  It’s simple to use and there is a large Wordpress community that routinely creates and contributes free pluggins to make all Wordpress user’s experiences with the program even easier.

Within 3 days of creating the blog he was already getting traffic from Google and Yahoo without promoting his site through other means.  He spoken to a couple of his gardening friends and they contributed a link to his site.  Now, only 5 weeks after he published the first article on his blog, he is ranked in one of the top 3 positions on several gardening search terms and is getting 25 to 35 unique visitors per day without any other marketing methods.  What more, traffic is growing daily and all 23 of his web pages have been fully indexed by Google.

Running your own blog is easy and there’s numerous blog hosting networks available at reasonable rates.  Most all of them ping other directories each time you submit a new blog article.  If you’ve had problems getting traffic to your website I highly suggest you look into using Wordpress as a content managment system (CMS) for your website.  You’ll be glad you did.