Although we can’t say that ALL of those advertisements are scams, it is safe to say that home-based money making opportunities have an extremely bad reputation. The odds are that you will not be that one person sitting on the beach with a fancy laptop, sipping pina coladas, whose picture caption says “I’m here but making thousands $$$ of dollars without having to do a thing!”. There are ways to make money online without having to be doing something. However, this is not to say that you have not done a lot previously to get to that point.

Most making money at home opportunities today will fall into 1 (yes, just 1) category: Getting paid for someone buying something.

These “opportunities” really are just the bad word “piramid scheme” dressed up in tech-jargon (computer terms) or business lingo (smooth ways to force someone to do something they don’t want to do). The idea behind it is you sign up by paying someone who paid someone else who also had paid someone else to be able to offer this service. You then SPAM as many people, bulletin boards, blogs, etc. as possible trying to get people to go to your Web site and buy something so that then you get the commission for the person’s purchase.

You may be asking: But in our advanced age things really happen like this? The answer is: “Yes!”. Businesses are willing to may top dollar for you to bring in a new customer. The Web hosting industry, for example, is an extremely cut-throat industry. The services Web hosting companies offer are nearly all the same, but each company is trying their best to bring in new customers. Having worked in the Web hosting industry for several years, I’ve seen it from the inside. In a conversation with an owner of a Web hosting company, I was shocked to find out that many of the top Web hosting companies lose money on customers until the customer has been with the company for at least 2+ years. So if you sign up with XYZ hosting and leave them anytime before 2 years that company has lost money for the services you used.

Companies use Google, Yahoo, and other ad placing companies like Commission Junction, Clickbank, etc. to find ways to bring in more customers. Especially since the Internet has sold out on traditional ways to improve the placement of Web sites, companies have to resort to paying the search engines to give them better search rankings. Ever clicked on a link inside a blue box on a Google search results page? If so, a company has been charged for that click….whether you’ve purchase something or not.

In any case, many of these make money at home offers are trying to get you to continue the piramid so that others above you can make money. Some companies will offer incentives like a free Web site for you to make money. Think about it, some company out of the goodness of their hearts just wants to give you a “free” Web site so you can fire your boss and go live on the beach for the rest of your life? No. They want to make money. They will offer you free Web pages, that are exactly the same for every single one of their customers IF you buy a hosting account. When you buy, the company makes the commission on your sale. Then, you are on your own to do something with that “Free” Web site, and that company will never be heard from again.

So next time you go to Monster.com or Careerbuilder.com and are tempted to look into that “Make $1,000,000,000,000 in seconds, you’d be a fool to not click here!!!” job offer, stop and think about who will really be making money off of this.