By Des Scahill
Like everyone else I've lost money in a variety of work at home internet businesses. I still do lose money sometimes, as trying new things always involves a risk of failure.
This doesn't mean that you should put your mind in neutral and just 'try things' in the hope that one or more will work out though. The fact is, most don't. By the time you filter out: likely scams, possible scams, unsound business models and/or wrongly priced products, that cuts out a lot of whats on offer.
But there's something else I've found that works for me as a very good predictor of failure. I call it the Greed Index. It works like a charm for me in the real world, and has helped me avoid bad stock investments and dumb financial decisions. And it works just as well on the internet.
What I should do now of course is give you link to a splash page, offering to sell you my 'secret weapon that will save you thousands of dollars' for a miserly $197, along with my 'free gift' of 1,117 outdated viral e-books saturated with links to all the biz-ops I belong to as part of the deal. But lets not digress. If we are honest with ourselves, we all have a problem with 'greed'. Its natural (and at times quite rational) to want 'more' of something we perceive as a "good thing", rather than less.
Often though we don't discipline ourselves to observe limits. Thats our fatal weakness. It can lead us to a place where we are exploited by amoral marketers. Its very easy to be greedy about money. Why? Because its a medium of exchange. If you have enough of it, you can if you wish, exchange it to satisfy just about every 'greedy' desire for more that you can possibly think of.
Thats one of the reasons 'money' is such a powerful incentive.
Its also the reason a lot of the 'marketing' on the net uses 'more money for you' as the heart of their advertising pitch.
Combine a powerful motivator and target people with lack of discipline about setting limits. You're bound to get some takers.
Lots of them it seems. Anecdotal evidence suggests 95% of people 'fail to make money on the internet'. For some, maybe their reason for failure is that the ONLY thing they wanted to do was 'make money'. The more the better. No limits on how much. No limits concerning what you sell. Whatever it is, if people want it, let's sell it to them. So long as it makes money.
Ask the right questions and you'll quickly identify the biz-ops that appeal to the 'greed' factor. But first, just answer these questions with a YES, or NO.
1) Is a greedy person more likely to put their own interests ahead of yours?
2) Does the product (or products) a marketer sells provide any insight at all into their personal interests and motivations.
3) Is a marketer who sells products that rely heavily on the 'greed' factor in the advertising or product design more likely to be a greedy person themselves?
4) Go back to Question 1
My Greed Index assumes that the answers to Questions 1, 2 and 3 are always YES. Think of this as the underlying theory for the index. If you don't get the point, read Question 4 again and keep repeating the loop till the bulb lights up.
I'm not making any moral judgements here. Just pointing out that if you buy into biz-ops run by a particular personality type, it seems to me that you reduce your chances of business success.
Why give yourself a handicap before even starting the race?
The problem is - how do you identify where a business lies on the greed spectrum? Thats where my Greed Index kicks in.
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Copyright Des Scahill - he operates a number of web sites including
HomeBizTraffic - a leader in automated submission services.
The Greed Factor Index
