Getting Started

How did I get the idea of trying to make money on the net?
A few months ago I ran into a friend of mine in the supermarket late at night. She is an "herb lady". She is a registered midwife who treats people with chinese herbs. I always thought that this is how she was making a living. Well, She told me that she is currently only working one day a week with the herbs. For the rest of the time she is making her living by building websites and advertising with google on the web. I was blown away as I had no idea you could do this stuff. Please don't laugh at my naievete. I really had no concept of what was going on on the internet. Neither do most of the thousands of people who work in the hi tech company where I was employed. Shocking but true. Anyway, my friend pulled a Google check out of her pocketbook and showed it to me. Wow. It wasn't high but the whole concept blew me away.

As a result of this conversation with her, I started to surf the web late at night, after the kids were in bed and before the next day's work. I encountered many websites with all kinds of offers. The first ones I encountered were survey sites and data entry sites. I suppose it's because they do heavy duty advertising. What I saw was that none of these sites were giving anything away for free. They usually wanted about $50 in order to send me their "program". This was after hyping it up and trying to get me to see that I would be getting stuff worth much more than $50. I didn't spend any money although I was tempted. Thank goodness for that. I subsequently found out that most of these sites were scams.
Then, I started to find sites run by various internet marketing "gurus". These are people who supposedly have made lots of money on the internet and have been doing this for years.
Almost all of these sites into which I surfed offered something for free in exchange for me giving them my first name and email address. So, I dutifully entered the information into alot of sites. I got all kinds of freebie downloads as a result (e-books, videos, short courses etc.). Now, I am also on the mailing lists of all these gurus and they all send me emails either every day or every few days.
Unfortunately, I found a link to Treasure Trouper someplace and went in there and looked around. It's a site where you get money from them in exchange for filling out your information on certain "offers". I put my email address in some of these offers. It basically got me nowhere, but now I am getting so much "spam" email because they gave my email away to other companies. Now my inbox is loaded with "free" lawnmower offers, digital cameras, insurance offers etc. AUGH!!!!! Don't make the mistake I made.
More of my experiences next time...
Dena
A Good Beginner's Guide