If you’ve worked online long at all, you’ve seen plenty of hype. It probably made deciding what you wanted to do to earn a living online that much more difficult. All those images of wealth, all the people claiming their massive success was a matter of months from poverty, or just a few hours a week of work. It sounds nice, but most people know with a little thought that it’s usually not that way.

That doesn’t keep people from wanting to use hype in their own sales process. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business product, a health product, a parenting technique or whatever else. It’s more fun to sell to the dream than to the reality.

That doesn’t make it a better idea, especially if you want to build a relationship with your customers.

There are many good reasons to avoid hype in your sales process. Perhaps the most important is that in the United States the FTC is clamping down on the claims you can make about your products. You have to be able to prove what you say, and you have to know typical results.

In home business products, I suspect typical results is the ebook gets read (well, partially, anyhow) and little to no action is taken. It’s probably similar in other areas.

Certainly there are people who go for hype. There’s a reason why people use it. It’s fun to brag about the more exceptional results people can get from what you’re selling, so long as you keep it honest.

But if you want to build a good relationship with your customers and don’t want to get in trouble for overstating the benefits or possibilities of the things you sell, don’t rely on hype. Go for honesty.

The single greatest thing about being honest about what you’re selling is that you aren’t likely to get in trouble with it. Not from the FTC and not with your customers. Give them more realistic expectations, and they won’t wonder why the miracles aren’t happening.

Ok, so that’s a little hype right there. You’ll always get customers who don’t understand why something isn’t working for them the way it does for others. Nothing works exactly the same for everyone. Still, you should have fewer problems when people know what to expect from what they’re buying from you.

The other great part about honesty is that it brings people back to you. If you tell them straight up what’s good and bad about what you’re trying to sell, they’re more likely to trust you. That gives you more chances to sell to them. Customers who come back are quite valuable.

This also means don’t use many of the common online sales tricks. Do you really need to use a bunch of exclamation points? Do you need to pretend that quantities are limited when they really aren’t? Keep it real and make the benefits of your product make the sale.

Yes, you can use a good sales page to manipulate people into wanting your product, whether or not it’s what they need. That will make you sales. It won’t build your reputation as an ethical marketer. If you want the long term trust of your customers, don’t dazzle them with b.s. Dazzle them with your upfront techniques that help them to buy exactly what they need.

A problem many online marketers face is their tendency to jump from one type of marketing to another. The latest, greatest marketing tools just sounds so much better than whatever they’ve been doing, and there are some big names out there telling them how wonderful it is.

There’s one problem many don’t consider. If you don’t know your basics, you probably won’t do so well with the new things. Chasing the shiny new ideas won’t help you.

That’s the point of a post over at The Lazy Marketer I read over the weekend, and I have to agree with it. New doesn’t mean better. Not with razors and not in marketing. It just means new.

Some ways I find that kind of funny. Take a look at what we’re doing when we market online, all of us. It’s basically all pretty new in one sense. We’re using a relatively new technology to sell our products and services or to earn commissions.

But at the same time, the principles aren’t all that different. You have to know who you’re selling to. You can’t sell if you don’t know your target market. It doesn’t matter if you’re doing pay per click, article marketing or social media marketing. Any of it can be a waste of time if you don’t know something as basic as what your target market wants. That’s true even if you’re sending print ads through the mail.

If you’ve had an online business for long, you’ve probably had some successes. What were they? Are you still using them? Why or why not?

These are things you need to ask yourself, especially when you are considering going into some other sort of marketing. Sure, you don’t want to be behind the curve, but what does that really mean? Do you understand what you’re doing now well enough to make a different tactic worth adding on? Can you manage both?

It’s rarely a good idea to drop something that’s working for something new. Even if you’re just starting to make it work, why bring yourself lower on the learning curve with a new marketing method? Are you really ready for that change or should you keep working on what you know something about?

Don’t get me wrong. There are benefits to be had from using social sites such as Facebook and Twitter if you know what you’re doing with them. There are people gaining huge benefits from having their businesses on those sites. That doesn’t mean you will.

The other problem is that you may not get the whole story on how to make the new idea work. Does it really help you to just hear that having a Facebook page for your business is beneficial? What does that really tell you about how to set one up?

Your first priority in your online business should always be the things that are making money for you. When you have time after those are taken care of, then look at trying new things. If they don’t work for you or take a while to learn, you’ve still got your basics taking care of your income needs. You can make the growth happen as you learn in your own time.

Use the new things as appropriate, but remember they don’t always produce the income you’re after. Knowing where your paying customers are, where the money will come from, and targeting that area, will produce a far more stable online business than chasing after new techniques just because they’re new.

A lot of people feel as though they have no experience when they want to work from home. Some may never have held a job before and indeed have no traditional work experience. Others may be concerned about their lack of experience in working from home.

A lack of experience doesn’t mean you can’t work from home. It means you need to figure out what kind of work you are qualified to do.

First and foremost, don’t expect employers to be after you for any work at home position when you don’t have any relevant work experience. They get tons of applications from people who aren’t qualified, and some from people who are qualified. Which group do you think they’ll look at first?

Second, you may not have experience in the kinds of jobs you know can be done from home, such as data entry, customer service or transcription. That doesn’t mean all hope is lost. It means you need to look at the kinds of work you can do.

The main thing to remember is that there’s more to working at home than finding a list of employers and applying for jobs. You can do freelance work. You can set up an online business. You can go really traditional and start a daycare or other home based business.

The better your choice matches your skills, the better chance you have of success with any of these. It’s going to be a real struggle to write for websites if your writing skills aren’t that great, yet writing is one of the easiest ways to get paid online for many people. There are a lot of websites that will pay you a small amount per article you write for them, so long as it meets basic criteria.

There must be something you know more about than other people do. How can you translate that into a way to work at home? That’s your challenge.

You probably will need to pick up new skills no matter which kind of work you do. If you decide to start a website about your hobby, you need to learn to create the website, write for it, market it and earn money from it. With most hosting companies offering one click installation of programs such as WordPress, it’s not too hard to get a basic site up. The big challenge comes in making money from it.

If working from home is what you want to do, you can’t let your lack of experience stop you. Figure out what it is you want to do and find a way to do it. Success may not come right away, but when has it ever? There must be something you can do well enough to at least try to earn money from home.

As many families continue to struggle financially, more and more stay at home moms are having to get serious about earning some money. For most, it seems as though everywhere you look are scams. Where are the stay at home mom jobs that are not scams?

They too are all around. They surround you. They’re just hard to see through the haze of work at home scams.

Just because they’re all around doesn’t mean it’s easy to get a stay at home job or to earn any sort of decent income from home. It’s difficult for most people. It’s a lot of work added onto a busy lifestyle.

Want a stay at home job that doesn’t involve getting scammed? The simplest way to do that is to go into business for yourself. And it’s really not that simple.

Offering your skills as a freelancer takes some work, but it’s something many of us can do, and doesn’t involve paying someone for the business opportunity. It does involve risk. You don’t know when you’ll get your first jobs. You don’t know how good a particular client will be about paying you. You have to check with your city hall to see about home business licensing and business name requirements. You have to set up bank accounts.

All that is still usually faster than landing a job working for one of the usual stay at home jobs. Get good at it, and it’s more profitable as well.

You might be amazed at how many opportunities there are for freelancers. You can do freelance bookkeeping, writing, programming, marketing, website designing, graphic design, be a virtual assistant, just look at your skill set and figure out a way to offer your services to local businesses or to businesses online.

There are plenty of traps to fall into as you get started, however. The most common is to set too low a price for your services. That may not get you more clients. That may get you clients who are looking for cheap but still want everything they’d get for a higher price. It’s better to set your prices based on what you need to earn for your efforts.

The other traps are when you do look at your stay at home work options. You don’t want to fall for the scams. Be careful any time you spend money on something and any time you share your personal information. Do your research first, make sure you’re signing up for something legitimate and that you want to do, then sign up. It’s not going to do you any good to sign up for random things and never get anything done, even if you avoid the scams.

There are other sorts of home based work you can do, of course. There’s daycare if you don’t mind taking care of a lot of kids and have the room to do it. Take a good look at licensing requirements in your area if that’s what you want to do. Be prepared for long hours. It’s very much not for everyone, but if you love kids and don’t mind the hours, it could be the way to go.

The thing to remember is that the lists of employers who hire people to work from home is only a small part of the story. If you want a stay at home job, you’re better off taking it to the next level. Make your own opportunities. You might fail, you might succeed, but you’ll learn more than if you never tried at all.

Running a home business online takes a lot of time and effort. You work so hard building up new skills and trying to make it all work. If you work hard and find the right market for what you’re offering, you can have some pretty good success.

Odds are you’ll also have some things just not work out.

It happens to everyone, even the big marketers out there. Not every idea pans out. Not every marketing plan brings in enough business to be worth the effort you’ve been putting into it. If you’re paying attention to where your results come from, you should eventually realize it’s time to cut some things out.

Most obvious is the website that isn’t working out. If you keep any track at all of your stats, you have a pretty good idea as to which sites are getting traffic and/or sales. This information should make it clear to you that some ideas just aren’t working out.

A website not working out means you have a couple of options. You can dump it, either by selling it on a site such as Flippa, or by dropping the domain registration and just let it go. If you want to keep it, on the other hand, you must figure out why it isn’t producing and make it work.

It’s not always the fault of the website itself or the concept behind it. Sometimes it’s your marketing.

What are the results you’re getting from your marketing? Which activities are bringing in the most income for your sites or otherwise making themselves worth continuing. If you don’t keep track, you may not know this.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been trying something that you’ve been told produces fantastic results for others. The question is whether it produces worthwhile results for you. You’re never going to get the exact same results as someone else, no matter how carefully you follow their plans.

Let’s take article marketing, for example. It’s a popular way to market a website on a budget because it can be done for free. You can do your own writing and article distribution. As things get better, you can outsource the tedious bits.

But is article marketing working for you? It doesn’t work for everyone.

There can be a range of reasons why any marketing tactic fails for you. Maybe you’re missing a finer point that will help it work for you. Are you doing the research and testing necessary to make it work? Do you know which sources are best for that particular type of marketing? Which customers come from that kind of marketing? Are they the ones you’re really targeting?

Using article marketing as an example, there are several things that could be going wrong. You may not have done your keyword research correctly or at all. Poor keyword choices can often lead to poor results.

Your titles could be too boring or seem unrelated to your topic, leading to few people choosing to read your articles.

Maybe you just haven’t developed your writing skills that well. Are you engaging the reader or reciting dry facts at them?

Is the failure at your resource box? Why is it failing? Is it not sufficiently related to the article? Is it not pointing out where you have more related information for the reader?

Once you’ve looked at these factors, you have a decision to make. Do you feel that you can fix the problems you’re having? Is article marketing for you or no?

Sometimes the answer is no. It’s not working out for you for one reason or another. Hopefully you have another promotion method you are having more success with, and so you can more easily give up on the stuff that isn’t working.

You should be considering similar factors for your other marketing activities. The question comes down to which activities are bringing in the best profits for the time, money and effort spent. If you’re struggling with something that is taking a lot of time but really isn’t bringing in any income, why are you working so hard for it?

It’s easy to be in love with the idea of a particular marketing tactic or website you’ve worked on for a time, and to not want to give it up when rationally you know you should. A couple times a year, at the very least, you should take a look and make sure you aren’t wasting time or money on projects that aren’t helping your make your goals. Focus instead on the things that are working. You can always come back to the other things later with a fresh perspective and more knowledge about the subject if you want to give it another try.