For one reason or another, envelope stuffing is one of those jobs that a lot of people look for when they want to work at home. Usually, they become quite discouraged by the lack of such jobs available. Aren’t there any legitimate envelope stuffing jobs out there?

Sorry to say, not really, at least not when you see them advertised. The usual “envelope stuffing job” you see out there is a scam. You put up ads around town, in the newspaper or online, then mail people instructions on how to do the same for a fee. It’s not a legitimate job and it can get you into trouble. Just take a look at this article on the FTC’s website about a promoter of an envelope stuffing opportunity and the legal trouble he got himself into.

Why Are Envelope Stuffing Opportunities Always Scams?

The reason why these opportunities are always scams is because machines stuff envelopes faster and cheaper than humans can. It’s simply not cost effective for businesses to regularly hire people to stuff envelopes for them.

If you think about it, the claim that you can make a few dollars per envelope stuffed doesn’t even make sense in terms of legitimate advertising. Just think about it. Does it really make sense for a business to pay $3 or so per envelope stuffed? Not even if you include postage for a standard letter. A machine can do it for far cheaper, and the business can probably get bulk rates on their mailings.

Don’t Believe the Testimonials

Just because an opportunity has testimonials from people who say they’ve earned good money through the opportunity doesn’t mean they have. Testimonials are easy to fake. They’re just words. Anyone willing to promote an envelope stuffing scam isn’t going to stress about the laws against using false testimonials.

Aren’t There Any Legitimate Ways to Stuff Envelopes for Pay at Home?

Once in a long while, you can find a business willing to hire an individual to do their mailings for them. The pay rate is naturally far less than what you see in an envelope stuffing scam.

If you want to earn money mailing out advertisements for other businesses, you’ll probably have to make your own opportunity. Contact small, local businesses and see if they’d like help in that area. You might find something. It won’t be as easy as the scams like to make it sound, as that’s a lot of work to just find someone to hire you, but it may not be impossible. Just don’t call it envelope stuffing when it’s really about helping a business advertise.

Clickbank products can be a lot of fun to promote if you find a good one. There are a few problems, however. The first is mostly a problem of internet marketing and health niches, which is that many of the products have questionable claims by FTC standards, but Clickbank is trying to improve that situation. Another problem is that some merchants’ pages are quite leaky from an affiliate perspective. You need to check the pages out before you start promoting any Clickbank product – any affiliate product, really.

1. Opt-in forms and mailing lists.

A good merchant who tries to get visitors to sign up on his or her mailing list is a wonderful thing for an affiliate. It can also be a terrible thing. Some merchants use that list to place one of their own cookies on the customer if they buy due to clicking through a newsletter link, rather than crediting the affiliate who brought the person to the list. Most recent affiliate gets the sale when it goes through Clickbank, so this is an easy and tempting switch for someone to make.

This isn’t entirely unreasonable some ways, as the merchant made some extra effort to make the sale by providing more information to his or her list, but at the same time, without the affiliate, that customer wouldn’t have been on the list in the first place. You don’t want to lose customers to the merchant’s list.

Check for this by signing up for their list through your own affiliate link. You’ll find out what they’re saying to their list, and you can see if your affiliate link continues to be good during it. Some merchants even program their list to include your link in mailings, but so long as there’s no other affiliate link used, you should get the credit for any sales. It’s a good practice as an affiliate to go through as much of the merchant’s sales funnel as you can. You need to know what you’re promoting.

2. Merchant sells other products on the sales page.

Some merchants aren’t all that focused on selling their own product. They want to sell other products too, and do so right on the sales page. It doesn’t bother me if they do that later on, that’s their business, but if it interferes with the sales of their own product that you’re trying to generate, it’s a problem.

This problem may also include ad units such as AdSense on the page. Some merchants feel that they aren’t getting enough sales of their products, and so they slap up some AdSense or other ad units to improve their earnings on their pages. The problem is that this can decrease the sales of their own product tremendously, which decreases your commissions.

Sometimes they even have links which don’t help them to earn anything. While these may be useful

Take a look and see if the sales page is focused on the product you’d like to promote or not. Links to other websites, whether they earn for the merchant or not, are leaks for your earnings. You may do better with products that don’t have so many leaks.

3. Merchant takes payments through other processors as well as Clickbank.

It’s a nice idea for the merchant, not so good for you when they take payments through other processors. The problem, quite simply, is that you won’t get a commission through any system that doesn’t have you as an affiliate. Those sales are lost to you.

What Can You Do to Avoid Affiliate Page Leaks?

You do have options to avoid these kinds of leaks. You can ask the merchant to set up a special landing page without all these leaks, for example. It shouldn’t be that hard, and they can continue to use their leaky page for people who come through non-affiliate sources. If you have a proven track record as a promoter, you have some leverage to encourage this.

Now, just because you’ve checked the product you’re promoting and found a page without any leaks doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. You should recheck periodically, as pages do change over time. Sign up for the newsletter again to make sure your links are still going through during that process. Look over the page. Generally keep an eye on things, especially if your conversion rates suddenly drop.

You can also start your own mailing list by signing people up on your own site, and then referring them to products. This is a generally good practice in any case, as it gives you the chance to make still more sales.

You can link directly to the Clickbank checkout page if you like. It’s recommended that you check to see if the merchant minds if you do this at all, and definitely keep your sales page honest about the product. You’ll have a furious vendor as well as customers of that vendor who bought through your link if you aren’t providing utterly accurate information while linking to the checkout page.

The format for linking to the checkout page is:

http://prodnumber.affiliate_vendor.pay.clickbank.net

You can get the product number and vendor name by looking at the checkout link on the sales page. Prodnumber is often 1, but some vendors have multiple products, so be sure you have the right number. Affiliate is your Clickbank ID, and vendor is the vendor’s Clickbank ID. Make sure to test the link before using it live on your site so that you can see if it’s working. This method is somewhat unofficial, but some affiliates like it not only to bypass leaky pages, but poorly written sales pages for products they think are otherwise good. Just keep an eye on it, and make sure your link continues to work.

Most of us working at home end up subscribed to a lot of newsletters. It’s a result of wanting and needing a lot of information, and hoping to get it from one source or another. Many times, we subscribe to a list to get a free download that sounds like the information will be useful, but it never actually gets used. Then we’re on a newsletter list and receiving email after email offering products promising success.

Reading about all these supposed methods to bring success can be a problem. It’s not just that too many people spend money on product after product, hoping that one will bring success. It’s that all these sales pitches sound like everyone is succeeding while we’re still struggling. It gets frustrating.

The Simple Solution

My simple solution is to avoid reading about all these products and the people claiming grand success. Unsubscribe from any newsletter that isn’t giving you information that is helping you to build your online business.

Many newsletters are little more than regular sales pitches for one product after another. They’re about making money for the list owner, not so much about helping you build your business. If the products they offer are good quality and relevant to your needs, great, stick with it, but if it’s promotion, promotion, promotion with little relevance to you and little free information, why are you staying on that list?

It takes just a little time to unsubscribe from each list, but if you’ve subscribed to more than you can manage to read, that little bit can add up fast. It’s worth the time. Your inbox will fill much more slowly, and you’ll better be able to find the emails you actually want to read.

You may feel that they aren’t doing any harm by filling your inbox, but they’re a distraction. At the very least, you’re having to skim the titles and/or senders to figure out if there’s anything you need to open each day. At the worst, you’re opening every one and being distracted by the offers, and tempted away from whatever you’re working on now.

You don’t need to be in on every new product launch. Sure, you’ll miss some business building and marketing ideas, but there’s only so much information you can use at one time. If you need more information, look for it when you need it. Pay for information too long before you will use it, and some of the details are likely to change, and the information will be out of date at least in part. That’s how online business goes.

Just think. Fewer shiny new ideas to pull you away from something you’re trying to make work. It’s not a bad thought at all.

If you just can’t stand to unsubscribe to a newsletter because you think you’ll want to be on the list later, you have a couple of options. The first is to make a filter that will remove the emails from your main inbox and set them aside. You can read them at your leisure when you need the information, or do a mass delete more easily.

The other is to bookmark the subscription page and then unsubscribe. You can add yourself to the list when you’re more interested in what the newsletter has to offer.

I gave my inbox a major cleaning about two months ago, and I’ve been loving it. The inbox gets very little now. Most emails are sorted into folders for a quick scan as appropriate for the topic. Just a few go straight into the inbox, and they’re more relevant. It’s so much easier to find the emails I’m after with all the clutter removed.

It’s official. Amazon should be reinstating California affiliates over the next few days as Governor Brown has signed the bill giving Amazon a break on collecting sales tax in California until September 2012. Amazon is to create 10,00 jobs in California, which makes it sound to me like we have some hope of affiliate marketing with Amazon lasting beyond that point, whether or not the Federal government acts.

I’m happy but antsy. I really want to see what happens next year, which is going to make me quite cautious about how I promote Amazon over the next year. I don’t want to be stuck in the scramble to change things over again. I mean, sure, there’s Skimlinks, but I prefer the regular Amazon program overall.

I believe that goals are important to the long term success of any home business. How can you get somewhere if you don’t know where you’re going. And so it’s common to say your goal is to make a certain amount of money a month or get so many leads.

Those are nice goals, but how are you going to reach them? It’s important to have actionable goals as well as goals relating to the results of those actions.

What Are Actionable Goals?

An actionable goal is one that requires action, such as writing a certain number of articles a day/week, submitting a guest post to certain sites, blog commenting, contacting leads and so forth. They’re the actions you take to reach the results you’re after.

Earning $5000 a month is not an actionable goal. It’s a lovely goal, but your earnings are a result of actions you took earlier.

Why Actionable Goals?

If there’s one thing true of all businesses, it’s that there’s a certain degree of uncertainty. You don’t know exactly how much you’re going to earn each month or if your business will be successful when you first start it. All the goals you have relating to your success mean little without action.

Your actionable goals are things you can control. You can control how productive you are. You can control whether or not you hire help and what you expect of them.

You can’t perfectly control the results of your actions. You can write articles you hope will go viral, and they’ll sit there no matter how you try the initial promotion. You can have a goal of contacting a dozen leads a day, but you won’t know for certain how many will take you up on your offers.

So long as you’re taking action, however, you’re improving your chances of success.

Pay Attention to the Results of Your Actions

If you don’t pay attention to the results your actions get you, you don’t know what’s helping your home business succeed. If your blog posts aren’t getting any attention, why isn’t that happening? If leads are saying no to your every offer, how can you improve how you get the leads or how you present to them?

Blind action, with no attention to the success of that action, isn’t going to help you a whole lot. It relies too much on hope and not enough on information.

Keep some track of the benefits you get from the actions you take to grow your home business. This isn’t always easy to do. Link building, for example, does not always provide results you can clearly define. You can track when you got a particular link and perhaps whether or not it brings in traffic. Figuring how much benefit it’s bringing in your search engine optimization efforts is more difficult, although you can check to see if the page with your link has been indexed recently enough to include your link.

Traffic to particular blog posts is more easily tracked. You can use a good analytics program to see if that page is getting visitors. If you use tracking codes for any sales links on your pages, you may be able to tell which pages are generating sales for you. This helps you to figure out which pages are bringing in the most profitable traffic, information you may be able to use elsewhere.

It takes time to figure out which actions are most worth your time. Setting goals and working hard to meet them can help you to stay more focused on goals you can achieve and help you to grow your home business.