Oh, I’m not at all surprised about this one. It’s been coming for a while.

But now it’s official. The FTC expects bloggers to disclose payments and freebies given in exchange for product reviews.

Reading through things, I would expect that it could be applied to affiliates as well. After all, that’s one of the major sources of false reviews.

What I think they will need to make more clear is how disclosure is done. I have a standard disclosure on this site that I may accept payment of various sorts. Is that enough or do I need to specify exactly when a particular product review is paid?

Of course, what it basically comes down to is be honest in your reviews.

But this also means that if you are selling products you need to be aware of the rules. If you pay for a review or have affiliates, you could be held responsible for false statements made about your products. That’s not an easy thing to control, but still something you’ll have to watch out for.

No doubt there’s going to be a lot of talk about this over the next few days.

Not me, sigh.

Just not up to dealing with what it would take to have someone else care for the baby during that time. She doesn’t take a bottle well still, and while by the time BlogWorld actually starts I expect her to be eating some solids, this just isn’t a year I feel will work for me.

Pity, because last year was a blast. Very much worth my time and money.

The cheapest passes are gone already, making me wish I had noticed this sooner. But you can still get passes at a good price, as full price doesn’t hit until September 14, 2009.

I had a blast going to sessions and meeting other bloggers in person that I had only known online before. Admittedly it was a pretty tiring experience for me, since I was pregnant with Selene at the time. But fun, very, very fun and educational.

Now is a great time to register if you know you can make it, so you can also get your rooms reserved, maybe find a roommate if you want to save money, and get travel plans made. Best to do that early most of the time!

So… anyone going? I promise I’ll be jealous.

I earn some pretty decent money from home most months (well, except last month, which was pathetic, ouch!). A fair bit of it comes from Google AdSense, which can be a pretty good program or a really lousy earner, depending on a lot of factors. That’s why all these ads proclaiming “Google Pays Me $(large amount of money) Per Day/Week/Whatever” drive me nuts.

I know it’s not that simple. But I had to look at the program’s page, just to see what’s going on with it.

Nope, not going to buy it. I really don’t like the looks of it.

First of all, make sure you look at lots of these ads and the sites they lead to. Yes, sites, plural, as each ad will lead to a different site. They’re all the same, just with different names and your city automatically entered into it by a script. Sometimes you’ll even see the same photos appear under different names. There are hundreds of these sites out there, apparently.

Some details they have flat wrong. They’re talking about checks from Google, then they say pay is weekly. Wrong. Google pays monthly. Then they even say the first check should be on its way within 48 hours. Someone is seriously mixed up here.

Google isn’t paying you as such for the links you post either. You’re getting paid when people click on those links, and you’d better not expect $5-$30 per click. Individual ads may eventually add up to that, but getting paid that high on a single click is quite rare.

They’re promoting two programs. Nope, not going to link them. Both are what are called forced continuity programs.

They may offer their products on either a free trial basis or for a small fee, say $3. However, you have 7 days from the time you order to cancel, or you get hit with a larger fee, which recurs monthly. They do have this listed in the Terms and Conditions, which is why it always pays to read these things. They’re sending a physical product by mail in this case, so 7 days after you place your order is hardly any time at all.

Their sites also mention being talked about on various news sources.

Know what? I never trust that if you haven’t linked to the story about your business so I can read it for myself. If a major news site referenced my business in a positive way, you’d better believe I’d be linking.

The “blog” pages promoting this have a variety of comments at the end, but if you take a look at least some of the comments will be the same. Comments are disabled due to spam. I guess the poor folks never heard of Akismet.

They also show all these wonderful pictures and tell a great story of rapid progress to amazing earnings.

I don’t care if it’s the best system on the planet. Most people will not be able to achieve such earnings. Doubly so in such a short time. It’s an ugly truth that most home businesses fail. Some people will do amazingly well, more will do adequately, but for a wide range of reasons many people just won’t succeed at all.

Not to mention, most are nearly impossible to cancel. They don’t want you to be able to cancel easily, after all.

These sites that call themselves “Google (something or other)” are almost exclusively scams. It takes time to take them down, but almost nothing to put one up, which is why they will likely continue to pop up under a variety of names.

Yes, they will give you some information on how to start a home business earning money through AdSense. But with the quality of information on the sales page, I have a lot of doubts as to the quality of the rest of it.

These sites are so common right now that Google has even seen fit to comment on it in the AdSense blog, noting that they aren’t associated and you don’t have to pay anyone to join AdSense.

There’s a fascinating and very long thread on Scam.com about a very, very similar offer. Make sure you read the last few pages as well as the early parts. Things were good for a while, with an employee making sure people got their refunds and then… kaBOOM!

All this is just a part of why you should never assume that because an opportunity uses Google’s name or any other big company’s name that it is in any way legitimate or associated with that company. It’s easy to get a domain name with some other company’s name in it. Doesn’t mean anything, other than that the company is willing to risk having their domain taken for trademark infringement.

These are also the kinds of “opportunities” that the FTC is most likely to be watching out for. Fake blogs, hugely exaggerated earnings… they’re practically begging for trouble. Nothing of what their sites say is remotely likely for the usual buyer, no matter how hard they try.

A post over on Jessica Knows about her experience with some reporters misreporting how she discloses on her blog got me thinking about how mom blogs in general seem to be the ones getting an awful lot of the attention when it comes to disclosure issues and advertising. There’s been a lot of talk lately about more regulation of social media marketing and how bloggers disclose. For some reason, mom bloggers seem to be a popular focus of attention.

This drives me nuts. Mom bloggers are far from the only ones getting merchandise to try in order to review it. That’s something that has been going on for a long time in many other areas, as commenter Crunchy Carpets pointed out, and as I’ve been wondering as well. I’ll quote her, as she has it right:

What I am curious about is why the ‘mom’ bloggers seem to be getting more heat about reviews than other areas on the blogosphere. Are the male tech writers getting scrutinized by mainstream media and the FTC? They all get sent free stuff. Are the video game or movie sites getting grilled for their ‘promotional’ efforts. They all get sent free stuff.
Movie sites get sent to sets and on press junkets and given all sorts of freebies in return for ‘good reviews. Their morals have been argued about for years. It is all nothing new.

All this doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with appropriate disclosure. It just means that I don’t see why it’s suddenly a big deal when mom bloggers get the things other sites have long been getting.

It strikes me as sexist too.

Momblebee makes similar points, as do some of the other commenters.

Free samples have been given in exchange for review for a long time, longer than blogging has been around. It’s nothing new. Perhaps the only new thing about it is that just about anyone can start a blog, and not have the costs associated with starting a print magazine or newspaper. It’s very open.

Yes, that means some people will lie about the products because they think only a good review should be posted. Yes, some people will be fooled into buying things they wouldn’t have if an honest review had been posted. Goodness knows that dishonest reviews are common enough in the work at home arena!

But does that mean we need special disclosure rules?

I tend to think not. I would expect the standard rules on making false advertising claims should be sufficient. Best aimed at the blogger, and at the advertiser more if there seems to be a pattern of encouraging false claims. It’s awfully hard for advertisers to control what bloggers say, after all, and still keep things honest in both positive and negative comments about the product.

There’s no doubt that the internet is very much a wild frontier in many ways as of yet. It’s much harder to control what goes on when it’s so easy for content to be created. That’s not a call for speedy, harsh regulation. There’s an advantage to the wild growth and free flow of information that the internet provides.

Should buyers beware when they read online reviews? Absolutely.

Should reviewers disclose if they got products free or have a relationship with the business whose product they are reviewing? Of course.

But no matter how the disclosure is done, it comes down to a matter of trust. A good source will be trusted with or without the disclosure.

A bad one may be trusted once or twice, but if they share false information people will learn. Certainly not as quickly as the FTC would like, but that’s going to happen even with regulation, as new sites and blogs will pop up faster than they can be reviewed… not to mention everything that is based from outside the United States.

Much as one might like all reviews to be honest, it’s not going to happen.

As a blogger or business owner, all you can do is keep yourself honest. Being transparent about when you get something for free is a generally good idea. If nothing else, it will help you if the FTC does keep getting serious about this. It also makes it clearer why you’re talking about a product that maybe you wouldn’t have otherwise. Say what you really feel, even when it’s not 100% positive.

Of course, the focus on mom bloggers may in large part be simply due to the media. And if you think the disclosure issues are going to be a problem, you’ll also want to pay attention to the part about “atypical results”. Lynn Terry has a really good post on this issue. The FTC doesn’t even want atypical results to be used, even if they’re your own experience. They only want typical results, which strikes me as beyond problematic. How can you discuss your own experience then? How do you know what’s typical?

If you review products, whether you’re paid to do so or just receive them free, or even if you’re hoping to get an affiliate commission for sales through your links, it’s really going to pay to think about what you’re saying. Have a disclosure policy and stick strictly to it.

And, of course, keep paying attention to the story as it develops. It doesn’t matter what kind of blog or site you have, if you’re talking about products you need to know what’s might impact your business.

There’s quite a storm of posts out there right now on how the FTC is taking a look at viral marketing as it is performed online. Overall, it’s a good thing too. But it also means you need to be very careful in what you say about products you recommend on your site if you’re getting anything in return for the recommendation.

If you do any paid blogging or affiliate marketing on your site, a disclosure policy is a generally good idea anyhow. I got one when the whole Pay Per Post storm hit and they realized it made sense.

The most basic thing you need to think about this is that you shouldn’t be making claims you can’t prove. You also need to be upfront about if a particular experience is not the usual. That’s just good marketing even if there aren’t legal consequences to consider.

The big areas of concern are probably areas such as make money online and diet claims, as those are quite prone to exaggerated claims or excessive focus on atypical results. But don’t start exaggerating results in other areas. You could get in trouble anywhere.

Some good reading:
FTC To Clamp Down On Social Media Marketing
FTC and Viral Marketers May Square Off

Do you have the skills to create and maintain technical documentation? A technical writer can write online help for programs, write scripts for instructional videos and prepare technical information for the end user.

Skills Required

A tech writer not only has to be an excellent writer, but must be capable of understanding the topics they write about. You may have to get technical information across to a non-technical audience. The information must be precise and complete.

Common Expenses

To start out a technical writing business, your main need may be a computer. A machine dedicated to your business has advantages, especially if other family members will be wanting to use a computer while you work.

You may need specialized software, depending on the requirements of the job. Some will require fairly common programs such as Microsoft Office. You may also need Project, Visio, RoboHelp, Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat and familiarity with some scripting languages.

A domain name and hosting can be useful for your online portfolio.

There may be expenses associated with finding clients. You will want to print business cards. You might look for work on boards that will have either an upfront cost or take a percentage of your earnings from projects found there. You might try pay per click advertising.

Possible Income Streams

Hopefully you can attract clients over time through your site. However, sites such as Shelancers, Elance or Guru are also good places to search for work.

Related Scams

When you’re running your own business dealing with clients, your main concern may well be getting paid by your clients. Sometimes this will be really difficult. But there are fewer flat out scams out there when you have your own business. They do exist, however.

Fake job boards, for example. Any time you pay for membership you should first research to be sure that you will be getting something for your money, or at least have the chance to. Sometimes a legitimate source just won’t have a match for you. Other times there may be deliberate deception about the possibilities present on a site.

Recommended Reading

Technical Writing 101: A Real-World Guide to Planning and Writing Technical Documentation, Second Edition
Technical Writing Basics: A Guide to Style and Form (3rd Edition)
Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications

Working as a virtual assistant can be done as either a work at home job for a virtual assistant service, or as an independent home business. There are advantages and disadvantages to each. Which works for you is a very personal decision.

Today I will be focusing on being a virtual assistant as a home business. I have a number of articles on being a virtual assistant you may enjoy reading to go into more depth than what I have here.

Skills Required

The skills you need will very much depend on which virtual assistant services you choose to offer. The title virtual assistant can cover a lot of ground:

• answering customer service phone calls and emails
• sending mail and faxes
• taking inbound phone calls
• following up with previous clients
• letter writing
• data entry
• website design and maintenance

You can specialize in any of these or a combination and market yourself as a virtual assistant. The key is to be great at whatever you offer. And there are many more skills you can offer.

Common Expenses

Once again, this depends on what you specialize in. You probably already own a computer, although having a work specific one can have its advantages if such is in the budget.

You will need a domain name and hosting if you’re going it on your own. You need a good place to showcase your skills and portfolio. If you have the skills, build on your own, but otherwise services such as SBI can be a great way to build a site to attract clients. The expense for either solution, when calculated by the year, really isn’t too bad, especially in comparison with renting an office space outside the home as with traditional businesses.

You may need to buy software both to help you complete your work and to keep track of billing, income and taxes.

There may be expenses associated with finding clients. You will want to print business cards. You might look for work on boards that will have either an upfront cost or take a percentage of your earnings from projects found there. You might try pay per click advertising.

Possible Income Streams

Your clients should be your main income stream. If you provide good service, those who have more work for you may choose to continue using your services.

To maintain a professional look, I would not suggest placing ads on your business website. You don’t want to distract potential clients from the reason they came to your site.

While you hope to attract clients through your site, you may need to consider other sources to bring in business. You can sign up with sites such as Shelancers, Elance or Guru to find work.

Related Scams

When you’re running your own business dealing with clients, your main concern may well be getting paid by your clients. Sometimes this will be really difficult. But there are fewer flat out scams out there when you have your own business. They do exist, however.

Fake job boards, for example. Any time you pay for membership you should first research to be sure that you will be getting something for your money, or at least have the chance to. Sometimes a legitimate source just won’t have a match for you. Other times there may be deliberate deception about the possibilities present on a site.

This post kicks off my new weekly posts on starting a home business. I will be offering a range of ideas for things you could do as a home business. No guarantees that any idea will be the right one for you or that it will earn any money at all. Sharing ideas is more about getting you thinking about what it is that you would like to do.

Blogging Your Hobby

Blogging is a pretty popular thing to do right now, and people are realizing that it can be a way to earn money. Not a guaranteed way at all; just take a look at this poll on blogger earnings done at Problogger. 29% of bloggers reported earning $10 or less per month. Only 30% made $500 or more per month from blogging.

But keep in mind that most home businesses fail in the first year. That most bloggers do not make a lot of money doesn’t mean you can’t try.

So why the heck am I suggesting it??

Blogs are an affordable way to start out in home business. Take it seriously and you may earn a respectable bit of money from it. You also have plenty of ways to monetize as things go along.

Skills Required

A hobby you’re good at and the ability to write about it in an interesting way.

Resources to Build Your Skills

There are two skills you need to build up for this. One would of course be the skills required in your hobby. Blogging what you do may help you with this. There’s something about explaining what you’re doing that can help you to improve.

But also read up on it. Follow other blogs, join forums, buy books or check them out at the library.

Same for learning to blog. You can read tips for free on sites such as Problogger, subscribe to the free blogging ecourse at eMoms, or you can buy ebooks such as Blogging to the Bank.

Common Expenses

Domain name
Hosting

Note that you don’t have to pay for either if you really need to get a free start. You can get a free site from Blogger, for example. However, you have less control and look less professional when you go with a completely free source. For the low costs of a domain name and basic hosting, I strongly recommend paying. A small investment makes you look more professional and can help to remind you that you are trying to start a business, not just a new hobby.

Possible Income Streams

1. Affiliate product recommendations.

These can be worked into your posts. Talk about the products you are actually using in your hobby. Find companies that will pay you a commission to sell that product. Amazon.com’s Associate Program is an easy one, but you may get better commissions by searching for other companies too. Commission Junction and ShareASale are also good places to look. You may need a site to join these programs.

2. Sell your own products.

Blog about your hobby, maybe share how you create something, and put it up for sale. You’ll need a payment processor and shopping cart software to do this one well. Paypal is a way to test out the waters, so to speak, but there are advantages to other payment processors as you build your business.

3. Sell ads.

You can sell ads in your sidebar, in the footer of individual posts and even within posts. You will probably need some traffic to really earn anything worthwhile.

4. Paid posting.

Sites such as SocialSpark will pay you to write posts on particular topics. There are a lot of rules to consider with paid posting, particularly disclosure issues that you should be aware of. Many of them are things you should consider for any sort of advertising you do on your site. Transparency is a good thing for your site.

I have more paid blogging companies listed in my blogging work at home jobs section.

5. AdSense

AdSense is one of the simplest ways to monetize, but in many niches you will not make much money from it. It’s not a bad choice as you research better options and just want to get going. In the long run, however, I recommend finding products you can recommend and link to, and ads you can be paid for more directly. More work, but more potential for earnings.

Related Scams

If you’re doing it all on your own, you are limiting your exposure to being scammed. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be taken advantage of.

If you post advertising on your site, you risk not getting paid at times. This can be particularly true with affiliate programs where you do not get paid until after an action is taken. Sometimes a company is dishonest, or maybe just has money flow issues.

Skip anything that talks about submitting your sites to the search engines for you for a fee. It’s not necessary.

You’re better off learning how to bring the search engines to your site. This is a business, and there’s more to it than just creating the content and waiting for the world to beat a path to your site.

I’ve always found linking to appropriate affiliate programs to be one of the more tedious things about blogging. Mostly because it’s a pain to remember individual links or go retrieve them. I have quite the .htaccess file from making manual links to affiliate products, but it’s getting dull.

So one of the things I’m working on these days is figuring out which plugin will make my life simplest for linking to affiliate products. I can remember an awful lot of links, as I make them logical, but remembering to add them in does not always happen.

Free Option

GoCodes

This one is pretty simple. Rather like using TinyURL and similar services, but you have more control. Once installed, you manage your URLs by entering a key and where you want the link to redirect to. Rather like what I do now in .htaccess, but the list might be easier to look through. Plus you don’t have to upload a new file every time you add a new link.

On the other hand, it’s not automatic. You have to add in the link to the post. This simplifies things somewhat, but still requires me to remember that I ought to be putting in a link.

Paid Options

Wordpress Link Cloak

This is more advanced than GoCodes, and will automatically replace the keywords and phrases of your choice with 301 redirected links to the pages of your choosing. It also limits how many times replacements are made in posts, so you aren’t overdoing it.

This sounds really nice for sites where you mention products a lot. I don’t, even though I probably should.

Wp Affiliate Elite

Does much the same as Link Cloak. However, I see that they offer link tracking as well, so you know if your links are getting clicked at all. That’s some valuable data.

It also allows you to add in the “nofollow” attribute. Affiliate links don’t need to be followed by the search engines. There’s no benefit to your site, and in most cases none to the site you’re linking to. Adding the “nofollow” attribute is something that makes good sense to me.

It also allows for the maximum number of replacements in a post for a given keyword. Once again, you need this as you may use the same phrase over and over in a post. You really don’t want to overdo the links most of the time. It just gets to looking bad.

So Which Will I Try?

I’m thinking Wp Affiliate Elite. Price looks good. Features look good. The only reason I haven’t bought it yet is that I need a bit of time to get things settled around here with baby Selene. If by any chance I don’t like it, I don’t want to run out of time for returns, or to forget that I bought it in the first place, which at this point I could easily do.

Here I am, 38 weeks pregnant and really, really ready to go whenever this baby girl of mine decides to make her move. So what am I doing online?

Getting things ready to run smoothly while I’m busy, of course!

My husband jokes that I nest online. It’s true enough.

It amazes me that I’ve managed to get so much writing done in these past few weeks. If I’m lucky, I’ll have things pretty well done through February, and be able to just work lightly when I feel rested enough after baby comes. It’s a really nice feeling. But I’m not that far ahead yet.

Of course, I’m leaving room for those times that I want to make a more time sensitive post. Most of what I’ve written lately I could post any time of the year and it would work just fine.

I like that because it means that if I want to blog more for some reason, I can just move things around. Or not. Nothing wrong with multiple posts on a particular day, even if that’s something I rarely do.

This is also a lesson in just how much can be achieved in more normal times. If I were this productive normally, I’d probably be earning more. That’s quite a thought.

I’ve had some delays in my work, of course. Lots of heavy duty Braxton Hicks contractions one night meant I was just plain too tired the next day to get much done. That’s how it is when you’re pregnant. Sometimes your body makes it clear that a day off is the smarter choice.

But I’m thinking right now that it’s probably a good thing I don’t have a laptop, much as I want one. It would be fun to have in the hospital, but could I really trust myself to not overdo it? I don’t know. Free Wi-Fi….

Nah. I know how tired I get after childbirth. I don’t really think I’d be that tempted to work. But I’d sure hate to find out that I was wrong. Do you think the nurses would get mad if they came in for their middle of the night blood pressure check and caught me working?