Many of us would love the chance to work from our homes. Imagine– no more hellish commutes, ungrateful managers and stressful days and work. Setting your own hours and working when you are most productive are some of the many advantages of a work at home based business opportunity.

There are a few snags that emerge when exploring this option. Anyone who uses their computer regularly will likely see the many advertisements boasting huge salaries from simply working at home. More often than not these are fraudulent. However, a few con artists should not frighten you from pursing your goal of working from home. There are loads of good, legitimate opportunities out there ripe for the picking.

Society today has made work at home based opportunities very possible. Most families are far too busy to do many of the basic things themselves. All you need to do is find something you enjoy doing that is of use to the public. Once you do, then you are off and running. Before you know it, the cash will be rolling in.

There are loads of possibilities in this day and age. One of the most popular is running an in home day care center. If you love children then this could be the perfect opportunity. It is also very lucrative. Keep in mind that you will have to meet licensing requirements for your state. You will also be subjected to inspections. However, good quality day care is worth its weight in gold to working parents. Get this right and you could be very wealthy.

If you love animals, there are also several other good paying opportunities. Creating a pet sitting service has become another excellent work at home based opportunity. Many people do not want to place their pets in boarding kennels when they go on vacation. They would rather have them in a home situation where they have regular human contact. Offering your home for this can prove very lucrative. Again, you may have licensing requirements to meet for your area. You may also find you are extremely busy at the regular holiday times. However, a pet sitting service that is good is virtually guaranteed success.

Finally, if you love to cook or bake, this can be another great work at home based business opportunity. Home made baked goods are highly popular. They are not expensive to make and the general public love them. You may find that you are tied to your kitchen if the idea takes off. However, when the profits start rolling in you won’t likely mind so much.

Contrary to what many people find on the Internet, there are some great work at home based opportunities. To make it work, you need to be creative and hardworking. Once you find what you are able to offer, the sky is the limit. Find you idea and don’t give up.

Peter Collins webmaster for Affiliate Home Based Business Income and writes on a variety of subjects. To learn more about starting your own home based business earning 6 streams of income visit http://www.TodaysGood4U2.com

Whenever there is money to be made, criminals and con artist will find a way to turn it into a scam to make what they consider to be easy money. The only way to protect yourself is to know what the scams are and how to avoid them. Billions of dollars are lost each year to scams that are both online and off.

Affiliate Marketing Warning Signs

New affiliate marketers will almost always come across and fall for scams when they are new. Here are a few warning signs of a few common affiliate scams.

- An affiliate program that does not have a website to clearly explain their program and what it does should be ignored. Anyone can create a website, there’s no reason that a company who has something to sell should not have their own.

- A common them in affiliate scams is that they will ask you to pay for the instructions to find out what will need to be done before you can start making money. After a while you will notice that the only product is trying to sign up other people like yourself who would like to make money. If that is the only product they have for sale, it is more than likely a pyramid scheme.

- Unlike MLM and other programs, affiliate programs should offer free signup. You are doing marketing the products for the company with a chance to earn commissions. You are not buying the product to sell face to face usually, so there is no reason as to why you should have to pay to join.

- If you have searched the entire website for a way to contact your affiliate program only to find that the information is missing, you should bypass this website. Customer support should be available and if problems arise in the future, how will you be able to alert the company of a lost check or other issues. This could also be a company who will receive sales before they neglect to pay you your commissions.

Affiliate marketing scams like anything else will always start off by offering huge amounts of money for no experience and very little work. You have to remember that if these claims were true, its doubtful that most people would be sharing such a secret.

Many affiliate scams begin with the con artist making claims that he became rich and to find out how they did it, you will just need to buy their ebooks. Once the ebook is purchased, you will realize that it contains information that is free all over the internet. It is very rare that these scammers will even bother to write a book for themselves. Many will steal content from other websites to create their product.

Being asked for a fee to receive instructions on how to become rich yourself is typical of these scams. Once you have paid, you will receive a list of outdated companies or you will be asked to find new suckers like yourself, so that they can pay for the same useless information. These scams have been around for decades, long before the creation of the internet.

Jude Wright has been the owner of http://aboutaffiliatemarketing.com since 2002. Stop by and pick up her free report, Newbie’s Affiliate Guide.

Owing to the new Google rules on Adwords, you need a website if you are to become a successful affiliate marketer. In the past, you could get away without one, using the direct linking technique. Direct linking means that the surfer is taken directly from your advert to the Merchant’s page.

Generally, it was necessary to use a cloaked link, such as you can get at tinyurl, but it could be done. There were better ways of linking, but they required a website.

Overheads of less than $100 a year

But now you need to bite bullet and get a website. There is no need to spend more than $7 a month for web hosting, and the domain name, which is the name of your website, costs about $10 a year. Not much of an overhead for a business is it? Just under $100 a year, compared with over $10,000 as a minimum for a tiny offline business.

To he fair, you really need an autoresponder, which costs $180-$360 a year, and if you want your website to be designed for you, you could spend $300 a year for hosting instead of $84. That could be good value. Even so, you would spend less than $700 all in.

Keep the website simple

What sort of website do you need? For affiliate website marketing you need a simple website, with the minimum of graphics. The only graphic you need is a header graphic, about 600 x 100 pixels to 750 x 100 pixels. The rest can be done by text. You can get a header logo done for about $25 online, or you can get some graphics software are make your own. It is probably best to buy one.

Get a memorable domain name

First, though, you need to select your domain name. This will need to be unique, so the obvious terms are no longer available, and haven’t been for years. A good solution is to combine your name with affiliate or affiliate dump or affiliates treasure or something like that. Remember that you are building a brand, so whizzbangaffiliate or harrysmith-affiliatenews is better than toptips-affiliatemarketing, which is rather easily forgotten.

With the domain name registered at namecheap or another top-line registrar, you can get the graphics done. After that you just need to write some articles about the products you are marketing. Reviews of products do well. You also need a few articles about the topic itself. Even if you do not know much about the subject you can easily find out by reading three or four pages in Google.

Overall, ten pages is enough, but this needs to include an ‘about us’ page and a ‘privacy policy’ page. The privacy policy page just needs to say that you hate spam and that you will not divulge email addresses to anyone else. Don’t forget the privacy page. You don’t need an ‘about us’ page, but it helps build credibility.

What about layout? Avoid sidebars in bright colours, and make sure that the main text is black on a white background. The whole idea is to draw the surfer to the text and to keep him or her reading. Remember that, learn a bit of copywriting and you will be well away.

For FREE reports and the latest reviews of affiliate marketing products and services go to www.reallyusefulmarketing.com - which is run by John Hartley.