Every single one of us, at one time or another during our lives, has logged on to a search engine, and searched for one of those gosh darn work-from-home programs. There are literally thousands of these awful things, and most of them, if not all of them, totally stink. There might be a few decent work-from-home businesses out there somewhere, but about 99% of them are pure garbage.

We will begin our discussion with websites that claim to have a database filled with job opportunities from legitimate companies who are looking for people to telecommute. These sites will try to entice you with some exciting testimonials from so-called satisfied members who found what they were looking for, and you can too, if you pay a membership fee. For $39.95, you can have access to their job postings.

Unfortunately, almost all of the jobs listed on these sites are either not feasible, not real jobs, pyramid schemes, or all of the above. Some examples of the opportunities you will find include ads for websites looking for freelance writers, jobs for customer service reps willing to work from home on their own phone, or stuffing envelopes. Try applying for one of these jobs and see what happens. Every last one of them is bogus, and no one from the company will ever respond to your application.

The next scam you will likely encounter in your search for work-from-home jobs is called Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM). MLM programs are pervading the internet. You have probably come across these MLM companies on the internet before. They have this thing called a downline where you recruit people to join the business to sell some sort of newfangled product or device, or vitamins perhaps, and those people then recruit people, and then the recruits of the recruits bring in more recruits, until your downline is equal to half the population of Earth. However, neither you nor anyone in your downline will ever make a significant number of sales. There is really no way to market the product you are trying to sell other than by cold calling or going door-to-door, which never works anyway. So, an MLM is a complete waste of time.

A discussion about online work-from-home scams would not be complete without mentioning my absolute favorite; making money by filling out surveys. This is the biggest flimflam of them all. There are literally thousands of these survey companies that say they will pay you a fee for each survey. No one ever gets paid! Millions of people have tried this, but when they reach the end of the questionnaire, there is always some sort of excuse or request for additional information in order to qualify for some other survey where they can actually get paid. Basically, they are just collecting your personal information from the survey and selling it to other companies who are paying for leads.

The best advice you can extract from this reading is to not pursue work-from-home programs at all. None of them are what they seem, and there is no way to make a steady income with any of them. The only way to make money in cyberspace is by starting your own legitimate business where you sell a tangible product or provide a meaningful service. There are no shortcuts to success.

BlueWaterArticles.com: - Working From Home Does Not Work

About the Author

Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make email forms.