Home Businesses - Satisfaction & Stunning Success or Disappointment & Dismal Disaster? Part 1 of 2

So you're thinking about starting a home business. Good for you! Starting your own business can be one of the best decisions you ever made - or one of the worst mistakes you ever made!

How can you know how it will work out for you? Even more important, how can you tell whether you're headed for success or disaster before you invest a lot of time, money, and energy in starting your new business?

Let's start by clarifying vocabulary here. Many people use the terms "home business" and "working for yourself" as meaning pretty much the same thing.

"Working for yourself" can include business plans such as opening a franchise store (think McDonalds, UPS Store, Baskin-Robbins, etc.) Those franchise businesses can become wildly successful for you - after you invest tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars in front money. They also often require at least a year's worth of constant hard work before you start to see profits coming in. These businesses also require substantial amounts of "overhead" money (store rent, buying merchandise to sell, possibly paying other people to work for you, etc). That's fine if you have a lot of money and time to invest - not so great if you don't have all that extra money and time. Sadly, many people who attempt to start a business such as these end up in the "Dismal Disaster" camp.

"Home business" can also mean many different things - doing independent consulting in your area of expertise, running a small daycare center, joining various "party" plans (cosmetics, candles, kitchen goods, etc.). Again, all of these ideas can earn good money for you - after you invest a fair amount of time and front money in them.

In this article, I'm going to focus on a completely different vision of how to start "working for yourself at home." Wouldn't it be great if you could start your own business, work at home with your own computer, work on the schedule you choose, spend practically no "front money," make as much money as you choose to, and see that money start coming in practically right away? (You also don't need any college degree or other technical knowledge.) Sound good? It is!

The business plan I'm talking about here is called "internet affiliate marketing." Never heard of it? Don't feel alone - probably 90% of the people in the world have never heard of the idea. It's just one more of those awesome possibilities that has been created by the practically unlimited power and the sheer enormity of today's internet universe.

However, unlike many aspects of working with a computer and the internet, this plan requires absolutely no technical knowledge of either one of them. Can't even guess how fast your computer modem is (or even what it is)? No problem! No clue what HTML is (or why anyone else cares)? Doesn't matter! If you can use email and do a few Google searches, you can make good money with internet affiliate marketing.

This is the basic idea

Internet affiliate marketing is just referral-based selling and then collecting commissions from your sales. Don't freak out - you don't have to knock on doors, make phone calls, have parties, buy start-up kits, pay for advertising, or any of the things that may have just popped into your head. Here, briefly, is how it works.

1) A lot of people would like information about a lot of different things.

2) There is a lot of very good information for sale on the internet.

3) You locate information that would be valuable to other people (easy).

4) You tell them where to find the information (also easy to do).

5) If they buy that information, you earn a nice commission.

6) Most product owners pay between 50% and 75% commission on their products (that can mean you earn as much as $50 - $75 for each sale).

6) The company that pays the commissions pays out every two weeks, just like clockwork.

That's it. It's that simple. Obviously, there are more details, but that's the overall idea.