Daughter’s first steps on treacherous path

After two months, our daughter is still not online with any of her web businesses.

In February, after taking extended medical leave from work, she started looking for online opportunities to work from home. Initially, she fell for two inexpensive programs. The first cost about $30 and promoted what they called incentivized freebie websites. She was supposed to create come-ons for free items like cameras and laptops. Interested visitors would then be linked to a site to take a survey where huge amounts of information about the person’s shopping preferences were gathered. Throughout those pages of questions were also offers for services and merchandise that the survey-taker had to buy in order to qualify for the free end product. Recognizing that this was no service, our daughter next paid about $40 to process rebates for major companies like Home Depot from home.

However, these companies were not involved. Instead, it was making your own coupons for products you sell. She had no products to sell.

Frustrated, she cast her search net once again on the World Wide Web. This time she was reeled in by a company that promised to get her started in an affiliate or drop shipping business. In affiliate sales, customers are redirected from your website to another retailer’s website through hop links or tracking links. The affiliate earns commissions on any products the customer makes there. In drop shipping, your website actually handles the financial transaction, and then the wholesaler mails the product(s) to the customer. She incorporated to do that.

She paid $6100 to this company, lured by the promise that she would be paired with a mentor who had successfully operated his own website for three years. The company was to build her website as well as market it. She still has no website. Her personal mentor is a group of people who often cannot answer her questions. She speaks to a different person each time she calls. She is being forced to create her own website under the auspices of a different company.

One of her first tasks was to select her niche. Our daughter wanted to market green products from drop shippers. But the company told her they had no green drop shippers. They advised she pay another company to put her together with wholesalers of environmentally friendly products, or to use their company affiliate program. Many of their affiliates did offer green products.

The company that is helping her set up her website has few options regarding layout and appearance. To attain a more professional-looking site, she would have to pay one of their web designers another $400 to create it. Keep in mind, that she paid $6100 to the “umbrella” company for a professional to build her site. All they really did was to put her in contact with legitimate e-businesses at their lowest level of service.

Because this was taking so much time, for example her banners show up as script on her webpage because she is having to do it all herself, she made one more investment of $115 in an affiliate program that directs shoppers to Amazon. While the $6100-company provided an email contract, this program required a written contract that needed to be faxed or mailed. Because she has no fax machine, signing up has taken more time. However, company tech support has already started working with her. Unfortunately, she came down with the flu and she has done nothing more with that program. When she does get started again, you’ll find her experiences here.