Too many people today look at an opportunity online, fallfor the hyped claims and signup without thinking. Youreally need to take a step back and examine it beforejoining. Here are some things to consider.

One of the first things you should do is go throughthe site of the program you are interested in anddetermine who is running it, where they are locatedand what their contact information is. Know who you aredealing with. If you can’t find any of that, that shouldbring up a red flag!

If you were referred to the program by someone, email themor call them and find out what they know about the program,who runs it, how long they have been involved and are theymaking money. If they can’t give answers, ask them fortheir sponsor’s name and email. Maybe they have informationfrom being able to access the program’s member pages, from awelcome email they received upon joining or maybe fromchecks/statements that they might have received. If theydon’t have any information or are reluctant to tell you,they may be promoting it in the dark.

If they have some company information, i.e., telephonenumber, address or email addresses, contact the companyand ask questions about how many people they have in theprogram, how long they have been in operation, do theyhave any business references you could talk to andwhatever else you want to ask. If you email them and theydon’t get back to you timely or at all, pop up anotherred flag. This may be an indication of the type supportyou are going to get.

If you can’t find any information on them through the aboveavenues and you still want to do some research take theURL (web site address) i.e., www.theirname.com and go toone of the major search engines and enter the address(theirname.com) or the name of the company.

The other day I searched on a company that has been aroundfor a number of years. I entered the name of the company inquotes at Iwon.com and got a list of almost 25,000 sites.By doing this you can then check out some of the sites thatyou find for contact information or at least find othermembers who you could contact.

Another place you can go if you can’t find any contactinformation on the company is a domain registrationsite. Take the URL of the company you are checking andgo to:

Network Solutions Whois Sitehttp://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whoisand enter the URL. You should in most cases be able todetermine who registered the domain name, where they arelocated, a telephone number and/or email address. Thiswill be under the Administrative contact section. You canalso determine who hosts the site.

If the URL ends in one of the new domain types i.e., .tv,.ta, or .de for example I generally use the register.comsite since it has info on these type domains:Register.com http://www.register.com

There are a couple of discussion boards that may haveinformation that may help you. They are:

Victims Against Scamshttp://pub31.ezboard.com/bvictimsagainstscams

Friends In Business (Scams 101)http://friendsinbusiness.com/board/index.cgi?

iCop! Discussion Forum (International Council of OnlineProfessionals)http://pluto.beseen.com/boardroom/h/50220/

The Home Business & Marketing Discussion Boardhttp://www.homebizlink.com/wwwboard

A couple of sites that you may want to also check are:

The Consumer Sentinelhttp://www.consumer.gov/sentinel/

Internet ScamBustershttp://www.scambusters.org

The Federal Trade Commissionhttp://www.ftc.gov

One other resource is the good old online telephone books.If you have an address or telephone number go towww.yellowpages.com or www.whitepages.com and check them out.You can use the telephone number and do a “reverse directorycheck” which checks the telephone number and gives you aname and address. You can also check out the address thatyou have and sometimes may be able to tell if the addressis a valid business office or a mail drop by making acouple of telephone calls.

If you are getting ready to spend some of your hard earnedmoney by joining a money making opportunity whether it is aone time cost or a monthly cost, make sure that you check itout. First you want to reassure yourself that it is legitand secondly if you are going to promote it, you want tomake sure you have confidence in it since you are going torisk your reputation by recommending it to others.

Joe Reinbold, webmaster of The Entrepreneur’s Home BusinessLink publishes a free weekly email newsletter “Home IncomeQuarterly E-dition” which is dedicated to assisting onlinemarketers. For a free subscription justmailto:subscribe@homebizlink.com or visit his site athttp://www.homebizlink.com