It's quite challenging nowadays to be able to identify real opportunities from scams, especially when there are so many mlm scam reports available on the Internet reporting scams that pose as business for opportunity seekers, and as a business internet opportunity for webmasters online business. 

Both tend to operate similarly in terms of offering great revenue potential as a homebusiness on the internet, or as an internet business career opportunitity, leveraging on the power of network marketing, and so forth. So what are the differences? Real home businesses or opportunities generate income with your investments. Scams offering e-business enablement just take your money and encourage you to get more people to get their money by offering home based businesses with business opportunity leads online.

When you say you are thinking of starting a homebased business on the Internet? What do you really mean?

Do you have something of value ( product or service ) that you can offer via the Internet, and you want to start an internet business to offer your product or service? Or,

Are you looking for a network marketing or MLM opportunity where your main job is to promote the business and get others on your team to do the same using the Internet as one of the outreach channel? Or,

Are you looking for a reseller type of internet business, where you want promote the products and services of the principle for a commission via sales from your own website?

Whichever is your purpose for starting an Internet business, the general wisdom applies:

1. Not every one is suited for every type of opportunity. Some people are able to produce their own product and sell them. Some people are excellent network marketers. Some people make lousy network marketers (despite training) but are successful resellers or affiliate promoters. So firstly, know yourself well and know your preferences. Look for opportunites that blends well with you and your natural preferences. Take a free career test HERE if you are not sure.

2. Be wary of your own tendency to be attracted to promises of great wealth in extremely short time. Even the most experienced network marketing professional would have to put in sufficient hard work at the very beginning to reap the success that you see in the professional today.

3. Be wary of opportunities that encourage you to buy products or services that you wouldn't use yourself, or have to change your lifestyle in order to use them. Chances are you'll be paying lots of money for the products and services, while having a real difficult time convincing others that the product / service is good if they were to change their lifestyle.

4. To be successful as a competitor on the Internet, you need to have three Ps: Passion, Persistence, Patience.

5. The difference between an excellent worker and an average worker is the passion in the excellent worker. When you have real passion in your business or work, you will be putting more than 100% of yourself to bring the business to the level of success that you would want to achieve. This is why your choice of opportunity is important. Choose an opportunity that you are not really passionate in and chances are you will only do well if you have to put in lots of effort.

6. Like a life-time marriage relationship, passion needs to be sustained through persistence. Through rain or shine, in sickness and in health, you have to be persistent in nurturing your passion in your business. Complacency or slackness will be the first step to your downfall. However, this doesn't mean you have to work 24x7. This means having a balanced life so that you won't burn yourself out, nor fall into the trap of complacency or slackness.

7. Persistence also means that you need to keep in touch with your customers. You can do so through regular newsletters, forums, articles and so forth. Keep them always informed of your latest updates, and offer them tips and secrets in better using your products or service.

8. Like a mustard seed, success in a new internet business takes time to bear fruit. Patience is the key here. You need persistence to nurture your passion in the business, to use new creativity to bring in the sales and effectively increase the sales traffic. If you are just starting out, you need to learn patience. There will be times when you have the urge to spend more money in the hope of bringing in more sales. These are the times where you need to hold back and wait. It takes time for a new website to rank well and achieve high visibility in the search engines, assuming that you have done your part in optimizing your website for search engine indexing, as well as the other website promotional campaigns.

Finally, never lose hope if you ever realised you were involved in a scam instead of a real opportunity. Get out of the scam quickly and treat it as an expensive lesson to learn. If you have a good mentor to guide you, it would be the ideal situation. If not, remember the above principles and you should be able to achieve progress towards your goal.

Here are some real business opportunities which I have experienced success for myself. You may want to do your own research on these opportunities.
- Start Your Own Affiliate Marketing Business
- Work-at-Home with Cognigen

Here are some web biz tools which you may find useful for your internet business
- Instant website creation software
- Affordable keyword research and website positioning tool
- Affiliate marketer web hosting bundled with every resource that an affiliate marketer would ever need
- BuildGreatWebsites web hosting with instant online e-commerce website creation and management