One thing you will stumble upon sooner or later are membership sites run by self proclaimed marketing gurus that claim they will teach you the secrets to making money online. There are membership sites for blogging, affiliate marketing, pay per click, and just about any other twist you can put on the making money game. All you have to do is join any one of these sites and you will be a privileged member to a wealth of insider information that will set you on your way to fulfilling all your financial goals in life. Or so they say.

Some of these membership websites include:

Shoemoney System
Blog Mastermind
Third Tribe Marketing
The Keyword Academy
Wealthy Affiliate
 
There are many others out there but those are some of the bigger ones that you will hear about the most. Other marketers and bloggers will provide glowing reviews of each one of them in hopes you will sign up under their affiliate link so they will get a commission. These sites seem to range in price from around $30.00 per month to around a $100.

First of all, you should know that I have only joined one of them (for a month) but I have been around the block enough now to know what goes on in this type of site. There is usually a set of tutorial videos and a variety of other “training” aids the owner has put together. These might be webinars, eBooks, MP3’s, charts and other things that are designed to teach you all you need to know about how to start your own money making Internet marketing business. These are usually the biggest draws inside each membership site because it is through these vehicles that the “guru” explains his or her secrets and  system.

What You Really Get

Once you run out of the training materials, what are you usually left with? A forum. It is in the forum where you can then expand upon your knowledge by networking and talking to others. This is where you end up spending all the rest of your time, month after month unless there is new training material added. Now, what is wrong with this picture?

What is wrong is that all you have left is a forum that is full of other clueless beginners all trying to figure out and interpret the training material. The “gurus” might or might not participate in these forum discussions but I will bet you that 9 out of 10 times they leave the forums to the administrators they have hired. Forums can be vicious time wasters and especially so if you are conversing with other beginners like yourself. It becomes a free for all where everyone is trying to prove to the next guy that they know what they are talking about when in fact they don’t. You know they don’t because they are paying to be there just like you! 

What Is In It For Them?

One of the questions that any astute beginner who is trying to learn how to work from home and make money should ask themselves is: why is the guru giving away this information? If he or she is making such good money, why don’t they just keep doing it and keep to themselves? Why on earth teach it to others?  The answer is always the same: because they can make more money teaching their “system” or knowledge than they can by actually implementing it themselves. Plain and simple.

The brilliance of these guru run Internet marketing membership websites is that they will get your money month after month and in return give you some training material and a forum that the students are basically running more times than not. You are actually paying to belong to their forum and keep their business going!

Now, some of the training material these guys give out might be really useful and some of these membership sites might be better than others. I know for instance that with The Keyword Academy you get a guest posting system inside the membership site which might be very useful. However, my basic point of this post is to say that generally speaking, when you pay to belong to one of these “how to make money online and create a business” membership sites you are really getting a forum. And how much can you really learn from a forum of newbies all like yourself?

Know When To Quit!

The longer you stay with one of these sites, the less there is to learn as you will quickly run out of material and be left with nothing to do but converse on the forums and be part of the “community”. It is a brilliant plan really, for these guys to hawk their knowledge and receive a recurring monthly fee for putting out not much more than a glorified forum that they probably don’t even spend too much time in. They spend most of their time trying to enhance their “brand” and getting more people to sign up.

Always remember that marketing gurus are making more money by teaching than actually doing what they teach. If you do decide to join one of these paid membership sites, make sure you are willing to cut the strings after (or shortly after)  you have exhausted the training material. Don’t be one of those people who get suckered in to paying a hefty monthly fee just for a forum and remember, everything they teach inside can be found somewhere for free on the Internet.

When you set out to make money from home it might sound like an exciting proposition and I’m not saying it isn’t. Not having to commute, being able to get up whenever you want, and all the freedoms that go along with earning money at home are great. But if you are successful and are able to succeed long term, it will get lonely.

There are ways you can combat this and one would be to get out of the house with your laptop in tow and go to a coffee shop or library that has Wi-Fi Internet access. It is getting easier and easier to find places with the Internet and it is totally possible to work out of your home on your laptop. But even if you went to the library or some other place everyday to work just so you could be around people, it is unlikely you will be able to make friends.

One of the good things about a 9 to 5 job is the co-worker friends you might be able to make. Not everyone likes the people they work with and sometimes they can create a lot of frustration but most of the time it is good being around people you are familiar with and can befriend. Many time when a person gets fired, laid off, or quit a job they later realize how much they miss those contacts and friends they made at work.

Many people who want stay at home jobs are mothers who would like to earn a side income while looking after their children. This is about the best scenario you can have as those moms would be home anyway and being able to make some extra money without making any outside commitments is something that is very desirable. That segment of the population is responsible for the proliferation of the hundreds of “jobs for moms” websites that have popped up in the last 5 years.

But if you are single or will be in the house alone while you are working your home job, be very aware that you will feel isolated from society after a while. Perhaps not at first and not even everyday will you feel this way, but the longer you do it the more aware of that loneliness feeling you will get. It will then take a concerted effort from you to make plans and arrangements so that you can spend periods of time out in the real world and still have time at home to get your work done.

Many families now have both the husbands and wives working full time and they are still in debt. Our society has become one where people demand and expect things now, rather than wait until they can afford them. Credit card companies prey on this mentality and being in debt is now considered normal. Without any secondary income, people’s eggs are in one basket (their full time job) and if anything happens to that they are in big trouble. 

Because we are all so busy tying to make a living and trying to have some personal time too, people continue to search online for easy ways to make money. Online scammers know this and it is why they can successfully pitch all their programs that they say will bring in a full time wages with only several hours of work per week. People don’t have time to put in the required hard work online and therefore they are gullible to the dreams and fantasies put forth by many of the money making systems out there.

If you are young and single, now is the time to get started trying to learn how to make money at home and start an Internet business. If you wait until you are working 50 hours a week at a real job with a wife and two kids, it will be too late. Many people honestly wish they could learn how to get a second income from home but in the end, they just don’t have the time to devote to ever make it happen. They are trapped and will probably never find a way out.

If you have been laid off from a job, now is the time to start exploring ways to make money online. Admitedly, you will have to spend most of your time hunting for a real job but you should have enough extra time to start exploring your online options. Likewise, if  you are anyone with any amount of free time, rather than watch TV everynight, why don’t you start exploring what you need to do to set up another income source? Time is the most valuable thing we have and if you actually have some of it to spare, you might consider using it to invest in your future.