Is Working Online At Home The New Gold Rush?

2010 | By Dylan Miller - Staff Writer

Given the current global economic climate and outlook, an increasing number of people are seeking to supplement their income through work at home jobs opportunities. As the need to make additional income is growing amongst average families, people are actively seeking work at home jobs programs.

After being sent hundreds of work at home success stories we decided to check out a lot of these programs ourselves. We wanted more answers and here is our results:

More and more work at home jobs opportunities are becoming available and with each one the claims of income also increase. The legitimacy of many of these programs comes into doubt at just a first or second glance. However, there are many opportunities and programs that appear to be genuine on the surface.

Our aim was to find out if these were credible and trustworthy work at home jobs programs.

Therefore, we shortlisted a large number of such programs available online and subjected each of them to a rigorous test drive over the past few months, out of 112 programs we narrowed our search down to 47 programs to try and here are our results:

Brief Summary of Findings For Work At Home Jobs
Our results were quite interesting and we can make the following summary conclusions. Firstly, these work at home jobs programs will not make you rich in a short time. The majority of them failed to make any money at all. Secondly, the ease of use and the ease of the methods involved varied a great deal. A lot of the programs offered very little practical knowledge and were lacking in instruction. (which is why we failed to make any money from them). Thirdly, a fair share of these work at home jobs programs wanted us to pay them more money which they did not actually disclose at the beginning. These were the main things we found.

However, what did surprise us is that we managed to produce some results with 5 of all of the programs we tested. Not all produced a substantial income, but there were a couple that did stand out. If you are interested in pursuing any of these programs, you should be careful about which one you want to subscribe to. In what follows we will present our findings in more detail as well as information about each of the work at home jobs programs that made us a very reasonable income.

Detailed Information
Anyone who browses the web often will tend to come across a very large number of advertisements for work at home jobs programs displayed on websites and search engines. During our research we counted in excess of 540 unique advertisements all making promises of significant income levels if a person was to purchase their program. but are they to good to be true?

To answer this vital question, we conducted tests over the past few months on 47 programs in the work at home jobs markets. We arrived at this shortlist of 47 work at home jobs programs by monitoring the most prominently advertised programs on the Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask search networks. As these are most popular search engines and portal sites, these ads probably reach most online surfers. So we made sure that we chose programs that were reaching people and which people would be likely to buy due to this heavy exposure.

All of these programs are still currently running and are open to new members, and they are all based on one premise (upon which they make their promise): That they will help you to make lots of money online.

Why are such programs so abundant and popular? The Internet’s vast popularity and reach has made it extremely easy for the average person to earn anything from extra income to a complete living online. As the cost of entry is relatively low, these programs are becoming very popular. Generally speaking, large investment sums are not needed.

You don’t need to be a technical expert because lots of free resources are available that allow you to facilitate many of the tasks such as publishing online. Given these facts, if you were to receive good tuition from a legitimate work at home jobs program that gives you step by step instructions, you can be successful fairly quickly.

A word of caution must be mentioned here. A lot of the websites that offer work at home jobs programs offer credentials and testimonials that sound inflated. In some cases we found claims that people on their programs were immediately making $20,000 or more in a single month. However, from our testing of these programs over a few months our results proved that it was not possible for most people to earn such large amounts in such a short time. This calls into question some of these claims, given the fact that we as a review team have had considerable experience in trying out a wide range of the most popular programs.

Nevertheless, our research did isolate a couple of very high quality work at home jobs programs with which a steady full time income can be earned. These programs scored top points in different areas. They were great value for money. They offered the latest methods and techniques. They were regularly updated and support was exceptional. These elements made these few programs stand out and they did provide very good results when we tested them for a two week period.

Results
The 47 work at home jobs programs that we shortlisted after surveying the major online search engines and portals were tested from between 10 to 14 days. We read all the instructions and followed them as indicated. Whenever the need arose we tried to contact the support team for the program to receive help and further guidance. We also noted the ease of use, the quality, depth and breadth of the information and the general feasibility of the program for the average person’s use. In addition, we also opted in to the “free newsletters” and “email lists” that most of these programs offered. To do this we created a separate email address for each program so we could see what information they were presenting or what other offers they may be trying to sell.

Upon completion of our study, all of the shortlisted work at home jobs programs failed to generate any significant revenue with the exception of two programs. This means a striking 94.6% failure rate on the most popular and most heavily advertised work at home jobs programs.

Out of 47 programs we only made a profit (based on time spent compared to monies earned) on 2 showed actual sustainable and livable incomes.

Receiving Payment
Since almost 95% of the work at home jobs programs failed to generate any revenue we could not evaluate how quickly we received the money and in what form it was received. Of the ones that generated money for us, we received a check approximately 15 days after our testing period, which was a decent turnaround time.

Major Problems Identified
Around 95% of these work at home jobs programs failed our strict testing procedure, and thus were rated as very poor quality. Some of the characteristic features that led to poor quality gradings on all such programs include but are not limited to:

* Too little information provided: Whilst the concepts and methods were presented fairly well, there was no further information of practical or instructional value. This left us a little lost.
* Poor quality of information: In some cases the program merely consisted of an E-book in PDF format ranging from 50 to 80 pages with an inflated font-size to make the book appear more than what it actually is. The information was poor, confusing and the content had many spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. These were very unprofessional products. And we were surprised that such highly advertised programs could be of such low quality.
* Hidden fees and huge upsells: A number of these programs did not disclose that there were further fees for the use of certain resources they offered, and many others offered an “upsell” which is offering you a higher value item at the point of purchase.
* No clear privacy or refund policy: Many of the poor quality programs did not offer a clear privacy policy nor a refund policy. We attempted to get refunds for some of the extremely poor programs but were unsuccessful in most cases.
* Selling of mentoring programs: Our personal information was used (or passed on to other organizations) and we received a few emails and calls in some instances attempting to sell us expensive mentoring schemes.
* Poor customer support: The poor quality programs had support that was not very responsive and in some cases, non-existent.

Conclusion
Our tests over a period of 12 weeks proved very disappointing for the most part. The majority of these work at home jobs programs were a waste of time and money, and proved next to useless in the end. With a 95% failure rate in our study it is important that people ensure they join only the highest quality work at home jobs programs since it is very possible to make a reasonable income online. Our tests revealed only 5 decent programs which showed promising results.

The 5 companies that provide positive results only required a small registration fee and had a clear refund and privacy policies documented on their sites. The registration fees appear to be reasonable and legitimate costs due to the investment into the members area, the quality of information and the infrastructure needed to maintain the provided resources, as well as the provision of support. In particular, we found that the first program reviewed below was of exceptional value. The one time registration fee was negligible compared to the level of income that we were able to produce in only a two week period – and we got paid shortly thereafter.

Taking the Opportunity
InfoWorld reports that just the US online economy alone collected $102.1 billion in 2006. This was up 24% from the previous year. That’s the available data from three years ago and the current annual value is expected to be much more than that. With such an gigantic online economic machine it is no wonder that literally tens of thousands of people are self-employed and earning a respectable online income. The online economy is set to grow even further as more and more people come online with broadband, and this proves that this is a great opportunity and probably the best time for people to participate in and take their share of this online income.

Finally, we’ll leave you with the 2 programs which we used successfully to generate revenue:

#1 – SMC Big Profits
#2 – Secret Cash Loophole

Untested Sites
When looking for programs to test we ignored ones that offered information for free to focus on ones who charged fees for the information. However several of the programs that offered free information or means to make extra monies looked promising. So we have listed several of the free programs for 2 reasons, 1 the more information you have the better off you will be, 2 since they have zero cost you have nothing to lose.

Here is the list of programs (In no order) that we found which offered valuable information at no cost to the consumer:

#1 – Ipsos Surveys
#2 – Typing 4 Dollars
#3 – Make a Difference
#4 – Clip N Go
#5 – Work at home Moms
#6 – Panda Research
#7 – Fusion Cash
#8 – Inbox Dolars
#9 – Send Earnings
#10 – Teleprofits
#11 – Internet Riches