The idea of working at home, making money online, making a passive income has crossed my mind a few times. The people giving advice on how to do it call themselves internet marketers[1]. The problem with internet marketers is that most of what they’re selling seems to be how to become an internet marketer. Some of the suspicious ones will ask you to join their ‘affiliate’ network, presumably that’s how they’re making most of their income.

It all seems like a thinly disguised pyramid scheme where the people at the bottom make next to nothing. Do they actually create anything useful for others? My instinct tells me that at best, they’re creating false hope. Much like the lottery. At least with a lottery, you play once, you don’t win, that’s that. With internet marketing, you could waste a few months throwing your free time away at something that you won’t be proud enough to admit you tried. What I gather from some of these work at home programs is that it requires a significant amount of discipline and persistence to work. It almost replaces a full time job in some cases, with no guarantee that any success will come of it. If you succeed, you’re one of the lucky ones, if you fail, “you weren’t dedicated enough”.

A wise teacher once said to me,

“if someone really did have a system that could predict stock prices to consistently make a profit, then they would keep that technology a secret. Any body trying to sell you such a technology is scamming you because they’re obviously not making enough money from their own system.”

He was referring to the suggestion that [insert some high tech day trading company] is selling a neural network driven AI to predict stock prices claiming [insert outrageous returns]. I think it applies to many of these ‘work at home’ schemes out there.

Many people will have made this conclusion as soon as the idea crossed their mind, but I’m curious and maybe a bit stubborn, so I had to spend a some time researching it before ruling them out as something I could do. Admittedly, I haven’t tried any of these schemes, and would rather not post the ones I’ve read about here because that would be unintended promotions. There is just too much junk out there for me to continue researching. I’m sure there are people who are bitter about wasting their time trying a ‘work at home’ system, they’re just too embarrassed to share their story. Either that or no body is searching for them, search engine algorithms make things impossible to find if your search is unpopular. Nobody searches for the losers, just for the winners and the marketers selling the stories of winners.

I feel pretty stupid for even spending time researching this topic, but I’m not ashamed to share the fact that I did. At least it gave me a new blog post for the week.

[foot notes]

[1] I may be mislabeling a group of people here, ‘internet marketer’ is just a convenient term to call them because I’m not creative enough to think of another name.