Too many people today look at an opportunity online, fall
for the hyped claims and signup without thinking. You
really need to take a step back and examine it before
joining. Here are some things to consider.
One of the first things you should do is go through
the site of the program you are interested in and
determine who is running it, where they are located
and what their contact information is. Know who you are
dealing with. If you can't find any of that, that should
bring up a red flag!
If you were referred to the program by someone, email them
or call them and find out what they know about the program,
who runs it, how long they have been involved and are they
making money. If they can't give answers, ask them for
their sponsor's name and email. Maybe they have information
from being able to access the program's member pages, from a
welcome email they received upon joining or maybe from
checks/statements that they might have received. If they
don't have any information or are reluctant to tell you,
they may be promoting it in the dark.
If they have some company information, i.e., telephone
number, address or email addresses, contact the company
and ask questions about how many people they have in the
program, how long they have been in operation, do they
have any business references you could talk to and
whatever else you want to ask. If you email them and they
don't get back to you timely or at all, pop up another
red flag. This may be an indication of the type support
you are going to get.
If you can't find any information on them through the above
avenues and you still want to do some research take the
URL (web site address) i.e., www.theirname.com and go to
one of the major search engines and enter the address
(theirname.com) or the name of the company.
The other day I searched on a company that has been around
for a number of years. I entered the name of the company in
quotes at Iwon.com and got a list of almost 25,000 sites.
By doing this you can then check out some of the sites that
you find for contact information or at least find other
members who you could contact.
Another place you can go if you can't find any contact
information on the company is a domain registration
site. Take the URL of the company you are checking and
go to:
Network Solutions Whois Site
http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois
and enter the URL. You should in most cases be able to
determine who registered the domain name, where they are
located, a telephone number and/or email address. This
will be under the Administrative contact section. You can
also determine who hosts the site.
If the URL ends in one of the new domain types i.e.,.tv,
.ta, or.de for example I generally use the register.com
site since it has info on these type domains:
Register.com http://www.register.com
There are a couple of discussion boards that may have
information that may help you. They are:
Victims Against Scams
http://pub31.ezboard.com/bvictimsagainstscams
Friends In Business (Scams 101)
http://friendsinbusiness.com/board/index.cgi?
iCop! Discussion Forum (International Council of Online
Professionals)
http://pluto.beseen.com/boardroom/h/50220/
The Home Business & Marketing Discussion Board
http://www.homebizlink.com/wwwboard
A couple of sites that you may want to also check are:
The Consumer Sentinel
http://www.consumer.gov/sentinel/
Internet ScamBusters
http://www.scambusters.org
The Federal Trade Commission
http://www.ftc.gov
One other resource is the good old online telephone books.
If you have an address or telephone number go to
www.yellowpages.com or www.whitepages.com and check them out.
You can use the telephone number and do a "reverse directory
check" which checks the telephone number and gives you a
name and address. You can also check out the address that
you have and sometimes may be able to tell if the address
is a valid business office or a mail drop by making a
couple of telephone calls.
If you are getting ready to spend some of your hard earned
money by joining a money making opportunity whether it is a
one time cost or a monthly cost, make sure that you check it
out. First you want to reassure yourself that it is legit
and secondly if you are going to promote it, you want to
make sure you have confidence in it since you are going to
risk your reputation by recommending it to others.
About the Author
Joe Reinbold, webmaster of The Entrepreneur's Home Business
Link publishes a free weekly email newsletter "Home Income
Quarterly E-dition" which is dedicated to assisting online
marketers. For a free subscription just
mailto:subscribe@homebizlink.com or visit his site at
http://www.homebizlink.com