Starting up an online work-at-home business is the dream of many people all over the world. The benefits of working at home with the Internet are many, and it's no wonder people are coming online in droves looking for business opportunities to fulfill their dreams.

But the world of online work-at-home is filled with myths.

Dangerous myths.

Here are three of the most dangerous online work-at-home myths. Take these to heart and you'll avoid falling into some of the common traps that snare new online entrepreneurs.

Myth #1: You can make money online without doing very much work

There are so many get-rich-quick schemes floating around the Internet that by now you'd think we'd all be wise to them. My favorite is the one about the teenager who made over $70,000 on eBay in a couple of months just by sending out email. Ha! How many of us got hooked into that one? Or something similar? Quite a few, I'd dare say...

The fact of the matter is you need to be prepared to do some serious work if you want to make money online. That may not be what you want to hear, especially if you don't have much extra time because of your day job and taking care of your family.

But there are many ways to streamline a work at home business. Even if you have only a couple of hours a day or a few hours on the weekend you can still get the most out of the time you put in.

One of the easiest and cheapest ways to make your online work at home efforts more efficient is simply to educate yourself about direct marketing. The Internet is, after all, direct marketer's paradise. To join in with the others in paradise, you need to learn what they've learned.

There's a ton of good direct marketing advice available for f_ree out there, advice which will help you learn how to get the most out of your limited time and budget.

And if you have a little money to invest you're in even better shape! Buy one good book on direct marketing at least once a month.

And sign up for every small business marketing ezine you can get your hands on. Then set aside some time each day to read. You need to get good before you can get rich. So concentrate on getting good as quickly as you possibly can.

Myth #2: You can make money online without selling anything

Joining programs and then doing nothing will not bring in any money, I'm sorry to say, no matter what some of the MLM'ers may have led you to believe. You need to sell, sell, sell in order to get cash flowing.

This holds true even when it's the program itself that you're selling in order to recruit people for your MLM downline. You need to make a heckuva lot of calls and send a heckuva lot of emails and direct mail, because most people in your downline aren't going to take action without really being pushed. The only way you can light a fire under them is to use proven selling tactics.

So learn all you can about selling. Learn all you can about copywriting. Jump into selling with every fiber of your being! Find good products and sell, sell, sell.

The greatest advantage of the Internet is its potential for reaching out to a huge amount of customers. You **can** sell on the Internet without becoming an annoying and illegal email marketer! The Web offers many low-key, low-cost ways of getting quality customers to your website.

Myth #3: You can make money online without having your own Website

Having only an email account is not enough to make money online, especially with all the new spam filtering software that people or their service providers are loading into their email programs -- software that filters out up to 50% of legitimate marketing email messages. You need something more.

And while many affiliate programs offer you your "own" website (which is just one of their's with your name or affiliate number somewhere) in exchange for marketing their products for them, let's face it, it's just not the same as having your own!

Having your own website builds credibility with customers. It says, "Look at me. I'm ON the WEB. I know what I'm doing!"

Having your own website also allows you flexibility, since you can change its look and add or remove things when you need to. You can even change horses in the middle of the stream and switch to a whole different type of marketing or even to a different product.

Most importantly, having your own website keeps your profile out in front, rather than the merchant's. The center of your online work-at-home business is YOU and the purpose of your website is so that people will buy from YOU.

Doing affiliate marketing, which is one of the easiest ways to get started making money online from home, works much better if you drive prospective customers to a landing page on your own site rather than directly to the parent company's sales page. You keep control this way.

After all, you want YOUR name and business to still be remembered after your customers start going directly to the merchant (think of what happened with Amazon.com; how many people go to Amazon through affiliate links on Websites anymore?). Or what if the merchant goes belly-up?

You Have What It Takes To Make It!

In my 3 years online, I've seen many people fall for some version of one of these myths. And yes, these myths may seem obvious, but the fact of the matter is that it's easy to overlook them when all the stories about easy money are staring you in the face.

So don't fall for one of the 3 big myths, or you'll end up as yet another of the many disappointed and embittered ex-online businesspeople out there. Work hard, educate yourself about direct marketing, selling, and copywriting, and get your own working Website up right away. It will pay off big-time. I guarantee it!

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