Mark Hultgren   Wordpress Specialist
Hello everyone! I am honored to be asked to be here this week. So to start this off, here is a little helping hand for you new folks looking to start a home business.

How to Avoid Home Business Scams.


If you're thinking of working from home you have to realize that at least 99% of the offers out there are scams. Now really if is so easy to pay a few dollars and make thousands, wouldn't everyone be doing it by now? Here are the biggest scams out there, how to recognize them, and how to avoid them.


First where did you see the "Big Money" work from home offer? If you got by email, saw a poster tacked to a bulletin board or one of those little signs on the side of the road then I can almost guarantee you that it’s not a legitimate offer. If you saw an ad in a newspaper, a job magazine or job website, then it’s more likely to be legitimate but not always. Remember always check out any offer, and assume it’s a scam until you have proof it's not.

Envelope Stuffing is one of the most established work from home scams. The way it works is once you pay your money and sign up to work from home, you are sent a set of envelopes and ads just like the one you responded to. Then you stuff your envelopes and pay to send them out. You could make some money if someone responds to your ad but the chances are slim. Don't waste your money on this one.

Home assemblers wanted. Charging for supplies is hard to pin down to any one scam it’s the way almost all work at home scams work. First you will be asked invest in the materials needed to do the work and then you will be sent very cheap materials that aren't worth anything like what you paid for them. Once the product is assembled you'll find that there’s no one who will buy it.

Quick tip: If anyone asks for money up front run away fast. A real company should be willing to deduct any ‘fees’ from your first pay check if they won't do that for you, then that’s because they don't ever plan to pay you.

A variation on the scam common with crafts is that you might be asked to work at home making clothes, ornaments or toys. Everything seems legitimate you've got the materials without paying out any money, and you're doing the work. Unfortunately for you, when you send the work back, the company will tell you that it didn't meet their ‘quality standards’, and will refuse to pay you. Never do craft work from home unless you're selling the items yourself.

Home Typing and Medical Billing scams. There are lots of work from home scams that will lead you to believe that they have more work than they can handle so they need people to work from home. What will happen. You will be told that you would be typing documents, or entering medical bills into a computer. These scams have one thing in common. They say all you need is your computer and then all you have to do is buy their special software to do the job.

This software might appear to be from a completely unrelated company, but don't be fooled the whole reason the ‘work from home ad was there to begin with was a sneaky way to sell you their software.

I hope this helps you see running a home business that involves you working for one company is a bad idea. You don't know who you're dealing with. Remember even with entirely legal work at home offers that does pay you for your work, you still won't make near as much money as you can with your very own home business.

Dec 8th 2007 08:49   

Cheryl Baumgartner   Medical Billing/Coding/Insurance
Scams, Pyramid schemes Ponzi schemes. It's hard to know what is legitimate. One of the things I found is to see if they are publicly traded. If they are then by law they are required to make information public and are regulated under the SEC. You can also look at the stock prices and see what kind of money the stock prices are generating, if the company is truly growing or sliding downhill.

Also one of the things I personally do is request a copy of company documents, contracts etc. I fax them to my law firm for review. That's when you truly see what is up with companies and the type of liability you are incurring.
Dec 8th 2007 09:10   

Mark Hultgren   Wordpress Specialist
Not many questions for me in here yet! Well, to follow up on my first post, most of you have heard to not spread your self too thin or don't put all your eggs in one basket. That is essentially the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to internet marketing. So how DO you balance yourself and programs?

The best method that I have found to do this is through automation. For instance, If I am promoting multiple affiliate products, I look at putting the banners that correspond with my topics into a rotator. That way, I can upload all of my banners, add the links to the program into the database and then just place a small snippet of code onto my blogs. Each time someone comes to my site, they see a new banner promoting a product or program that corresponds with the post or category.

Now good rotator scripts will allow you to place that snippet of code on any server including ones that are not on the same server or domain.

If you have seen many of my posts here, you can probably tell that I am a big promoter for automation! I have quite a collection of other automated methods and software too, so I guess I can start posting some of the other methods during the rest of the week.
Dec 10th 2007 18:39   

Cheryl Baumgartner   Medical Billing/Coding/Insurance
Well Mark you must be doing a great job since you are getting topped. But I'd like to have you go into a little more depth on robots and spiders if possible. I noticed on my other site in the last 30 days I've had 176 visits from the Google crawler and 147 from the Yahoo crawler. So that would be a good thing?
Dec 12th 2007 10:49   

Mark Hultgren   Wordpress Specialist
Robots and Spiders can be a good thing or a Bad thing. It depends on which ones are visiting your site. You should have a robots.txt file on your server that will tell your server which robots to allow access to your site as well as which areas of your site they can actually visit.
For example, if you have all your downloads located in a specific folder, you would NOT want to allow any spiders or robots into that folder. You want to hide that folder from all the search engines! Otherwise, if people could figure out what a filename is, they can do a search for that filename and get a direct link to your download.
The robots.txt file can deny access by IP address or by name (if you know the actual name of the spider or robot).
Dec 12th 2007 11:14   

Mark Hultgren   Wordpress Specialist
To build a Robots.txt file, simply open any ASCII text editor (NOT MS Word!) and save it with a txt extension.

Here are some snippets of a robots.txt file showing some of the settings that you 'could have'

This setting will stop all bots from indexing your site.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This will stop the Google Image Bot from indexing any images (helps to save bandwidth)

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

This setting will disallow access by any bot to specific folders and the file MyHiddenPage.htm

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /myhiddendir/
Disallow: /tutorials/MyHiddenPage.htm

This setting will allow only the Googlebot access to your root folder

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

And then you can add the robots meta tags to your pages indiviually too.

1) This disallows both indexing and following of links by a crawler on that specific page:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />

2) This disallows indexing of the page, but lets the crawler go on and follow/crawl links contained within it.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

3) This allows indexing of the page, but instructs the crawler to not crawl links contained within it:

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

4) Finally, there is a shorthand way of declaring 1) above (don't index nor follow links on page):

<meta name="robots" content="none">
Dec 12th 2007 11:31   

Mike Hunt   
G`day,

great post MK, I was checking stats before uploading a new script to one of my sites last night and I noticed i`m getting visited by several unnamed bots. Just wondering if your getting them to or just me ... there is a lot of new search engines being created but i`ve not noticed quite so many visiting, usually just one along with Google/MSN/ect ... stats show 5 unnamed bots so far this month.

Your thoughts mate ... : )

Christopher J.
P.S. Had to laugh at this ... your Quote MK ...

"Envelope Stuffing is one of the most established work from home scams"

Google Ad right above this box .... LOL

Stuffing Envelopes
Earn $1,576 Plus Weekly At Home!
$5 Per Envelope You Stuff-Start Now

Shouldn`t that be a FIVE on the end at $5 per envelope?? ... LOL
Dec 13th 2007 12:32   

Mark Hultgren   Wordpress Specialist
Hi CJ,
Many of the New SE bots haven't been 'Named' as yet. There are plenty of scambots out there doing searches too though (I think these are where we are starting to get our Penis and Breast enhancement emails from:-) ). I will usually send an email to the contact address of a SE and ask them if their bot has been named and if not what IP it is coming from to allow it to search my site. Most of the time, they are more than happy to let you know what the bot is named, but many are a bit skeptic when it comes to giving out the IP.
Here is a listing of the spiders and bots that have hit my site this month:

Yahoo Slurp 12 Dec 2007 - 10:52
Googlebot 12 Dec 2007 - 09:04
Unknown robot (identified by 'crawl') 12 Dec 2007 - 05:23
MSNBot-media 12 Dec 2007 - 05:48
Unknown robot (identified by hit on 'robots.txt') 11 Dec 2007 - 18:54
Ask Dec 2007 - 23:32
Unknown robot (identified by 'bot/' or 'bot-') 12 Dec 2007 - 07:15
MSNBot 08 Dec 2007 - 05:48
Voila 11 Dec 2007 - 14:01
Alexa (IA Archiver) 12 Dec 2007 - 11:00
Unknown robot (identified by 'spider') 08 Dec 2007 - 13:52
Unknown robot (identified by 'robot') 10 Dec 2007 - 12:30
Netcraft

You can see that the newer ones are starting to add a name to theirs, but the unknowns are still questionable. You can look at your stats and find out the IP of the unknown bots and then do a who-is on that IP to see if you think they should be blocked or not.
Dec 13th 2007 12:44