Another big concern is for the welfare of those who buy into the myth that all you need to do is jump on board with some program and all the work will be done for you. The internet does not do the work; it is a tool for assisting you to do the work or in some cases it’s the face of your business to the world. The real business building process still involves the business person. Otherwise, why would the system owner need entrepreneurs or participants? They would most certainly just implement it for themselves and never need you. This is especially true in network marketing or MLM, which in and of itself is a very viable business and product / service distribution model.

The internet does a fantastic job of helping us to find new customers and prospects. It can even help us stay in touch with them and continue to market our other products and services to them. However, as in any business, the real growth of the business occurs in developing a customer base, the product or service distribution channels, and those personal relationships that foster that growth. The internet can not do this for you. It can aid you in doing this and is a useful tool. A personal relationship takes real time, personal interaction, conversation, and communication. The internet can facilitate many forms of communication. However, it does not replace that personal phone call, that face to face meeting, or true personal and value focused interaction that solid business and personal relationships are founded on.

Using the internet as a way to provide additional income with affiliate programs, e-books, etc… is one thing. Many of these are one time sales and are heavily dependant on thousands upon thousands of folks seeing what you have to offer and a small percentage of them making a purchase. If you can do huge volume and drive massive traffic to your offerings online then you may be able to make a full time living with these types of programs alone. The problem here is that the vast majority of folks getting involved in an online business will not be able to drive the masses to their offerings or web site. They can not feasibly expect to make a full time living right out of the gate, nor in many cases even long term. That is because they will not, even with substantial resources, be able to drive internet users to their offerings in mass to generate the volume of one time sales required to make a full time living with affiliate programs of this nature. In addition, in an affiliate scenario this leaves you with a one time sale and someone else still has the customer. So where is the residual income for all your effort of customer acquisition? Why would a sensible business person have a customer acquisition cost of $5, a product cost of $25 and call a $39 sale a big profit unless they can do this at least 50 times per day. Remember, 50 sales of a $39 item per day may well require that you drive 3,000 or more visitors per day to your offering. If your site contains multiple products, services, or affiliate programs in fact this number even increases.

Further, in an affiliate scenario you have really not built a distribution channel or customer base but rather you have simply found a customer for someone else to continue to market to. Moreover, driving this type of traffic and visitor count to your site or offering means advertising, search engine positioning, and other online and technical related techniques to get the massive traffic required to build or sustain a business. You must do all this simply to eek out a living and then turn right around and have to do it again the very next month. This of course will drive up your customer acquisition cost and in addition much of this type of technical positioning is ever changing and quite challenging indeed for the novice marketer.