The promos are everywhere, click here and in 5 min you'll be rich. Although it's true that there are alot of legitimate free internet businesses out there. However as for making money in the next 5 min, well this is very miss-leading and in most cases you never make money. First of all, be realistic. Who is going to simply hand over the reigns of a successful business to a total stranger for free? That being said, the offers for a free online, home-based business are real and in some cases offer the very real possibility that you can make some money.
However, as in all things, you get what you pay for and when you are given something free of charge, you can't really complain about how well it works. Before you get into an online business, consider what it will cost to get customers to your site. No internet business on the planet can make money without customers and in order to have customers, you have to have traffic.
There are 100s of ways to get people to your site, however it's getting them to spend money that is the tricky part. So, How do you get traffic to your site? You have to pay for it, of course. Email marketing will cost money for a list of current prospects and buying qualified leads is not going to be cheap.
While some offer deep discounts on leads, the quality of the leads may be questionable. The return on your investment may be so low to make them worthless and with lead marketing, it is all a numbers game. The more times you get into your prospects inbox the more likely you are to close the deal. However, more leads equals more cost. Search engine marketing plans will help make you site more "high profile," so when someone is looking for you skills you can appear first in google.
Now to have a website search engine friendly is very costly, however now a days you can obtain alot of Web2.0 strategies that are very effective and mostly free. Article marketing is another popular method of driving traffic, but unless you are an experienced, and have the time to write your own articles, you will have to pay someone to write them for you.
Also, you can pay to have your site advertised by using things like pay-per-click or newspapers, ezines and many other ways as well just do a bit of research. Essentially, making money on the internet is possible, but a lot will depend on how much you can afford and are willing to pay to market and advertise in order to make money with your free home business.
Michael Van-Masters is a work from home consultant helping people around the world build internet based business with free internet marking resources. Michael's can be found on Yuwie