Researching an online home business is tough these days. It’s not just the ever present scams, it’s detecting them as those who promote them get smarter about how you research opportunities.

The big example is that searching for the opportunity or ebook name plus “scam” is often taken up by people promoting the opportunity. They’ve come to realize that this is a big term people use to check them out, so they try to claim it for themselves on the positive side of things.

These “reviews” can be hard to tell from the real thing. However, if you see a review of an opportunity or ebook starting out with something along the lines of “Is (opportunity) a Scam?” and then go into a glowing review of how it’s not a scam, be wary. Be doubly wary if all they have to say is positive. Just about any opportunity is going to have some negatives. A good review should note these.

Be even more wary if you see more or less the same review on site after site. Odds are it was provided by the business itself and the affiliates or promoters were too lazy to change it for their own sites.

So Where Are the Real Reviews??

Ah, that is the question, isn’t it? And it’s not easy to do sometimes.

Persistence is your #1 tool. Search on the business name. Use the name plus review. Use the name plus scam.

Check the testimonials on the site and see if you can contact the people giving the testimonials. If they have domain names with their testimonials you may be able to find a way to contact them on your own.

A lot of the big launches have big name marketers giving testimonials. That’s nice, but to me it doesn’t prove much of anything. A person who has been having success for a long time is going to see things quite differently from someone just starting out, and what they like may not be as useful to you if you don’t have the background knowledge yet.

Check their contact information and whois. Contact email addresses should be related to their business website in most cases. If you own your domain name, this is easy and comes with the hosting. Whois information can be kept private, but if it shows names and contact information it must be honest.

Read all the fine print, privacy policy, terms of service and so forth. Some sites don’t make it nearly clear enough that there’s a monthly expense for the information or opportunity. You need to know what your real expenses will be.

Try to figure out how it is you will be earning money. Mistrust any opportunity where either that’s not clear or you realize that you’re earning for recruiting rather than selling, especially if you only earn for recruiting.

Check Ripoff Report. Check scam.com. You can even check with the BBB, but honestly they have their problems as a resource.

Be wary if the site looks like a newspaper review of the business opportunity. That’s a popular way to present some programs just now, but they really are not news stories. Take a good look and you will realize that pretty much everything clickable on these sites relates to the opportunity being presented.

Ask on any work at home forums you know, such as the one here.

Think about if you can really afford to risk the money. No matter how good the opportunity, even when it is legitimate, you face the risk of failure. Not every person will succeed in any particular business. Sometimes it’s not a good match; other times it’s a scam. Either way, be sure that you can afford the risk.

Will This Guarantee That You Don’t Get Scammed?

Sorry, no, can’t promise you that. But you can cut down the odds that you’ll be scammed, which is a great place to start.

Always remember, be skeptical. Know the difference between home businesses and work at home jobs. Know what’s likely and what’s improbable. Ask questions. Do your due diligence. You are the one responsible for your decision in the long run.

And if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

I posted about the new home party network, Emily Rose @ Home the other day. I think it’s a great opportunity for moms and daughters who love the American Girl style dolls.

They’ve started a contest now to win a free Platinum Starter Pack. If you’re thinking about joining this opportunity, I suggest going over and checking it out.

You have until July 21, 2009 to enter, and there are a few ways to earn entries.

The package includes @Home Business Builder manual, products samples, catalogs, business cards, marketing materials, and even membership in the “Founder’s Circle”.

This is the kind of business you can do to encourage your daughter’s entrepreneurial skills, while having fun yourself. Getting a free start isn’t a bad way to go. Give it a try and go enter!

Are you a little artistic? Great at coming up with short quips that make people laugh? Designing your own t-shirts might be a fun home business for you.

There are a few sites that allow you to create your own designs and then sell them printed on t-shirts through their sites. The cost varies depending on the site, as do the products you can offer.

Skills Required

Creativity, artistic skills, something to make your designs catch people’s attention. You will probably want to be comfortable with Photoshop or similar software to create your designs.

Common Expenses

You will need a computer and internet access, of course. There may be a cost to have a premium versus basic store.

Possible Income Streams

CafePress, Zazzle and Spreadshirt all allow you to create designs and sell them on various products. All offer free stores, although CafePress does have a monthly charge if you want a premium store.

You can coordinate your stores with any other of your home business efforts that will allow you to do so.

How you earn varies a bit with each site. You may get to set your own prices or be paid a percentage of sales of the shirts you made. You can also use associate programs to earn from referring people to other people’s products.

You will want to market your shop through a separate website, Squidoo lens, etc. in order to make sales.

It generally takes a LOT of designs to make much money at this. It’s not a quick business.

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.

I haven’t done a sponsored post in a long time, but this is one. I’m doing it because it’s relevant and might just be fun for some of you out there looking for home party opportunities.

The business is called Emily Rose @ Home. It’s a Business Opportunity for Amerian Girls. That is, you’d be selling clothing and furniture for 18 inch dolls, which is the size of the American Girls dolls. A part of the idea is that it’s a business moms and daughters can do together.

My daughter loves those dolls. That’s a part of what caught my eye for this opportunity. She got one for her birthday this year.

The business is set to launch July 14. There’s a video on the site about a contest to win one of their Platinum Starter Packages.

There are of course risks to joining a new opportunity. It’s hard to say who will make it. This one looks to be offering products that are really fun and appealing to other parents of young girls. That’s not a bad way to start, and Emily Rose has been open as a business for two and a half years. They know they’re growing and feel ready to open things up to the party plan business model.