Favorite Surveys

They want you to pay for the information

Never pay to work for someone else. You do not need to send money to real employers to show that you are “serious” about the job or for the paperwork or software to do the job. If you work as an independent contractor you will frequently need to spend your own money on hardware — such a a second landline telephone, a headset or a transcription machine, but you will buy that stuff yourself at your local Radio Shack or someplace.  If you are doing work for someone else, they will always supply you with any software and paperwork required for free. You might have to spend money on ink to print it out. That’s it!

Question the Earnings Potential
The next way to recognize an online data entry job scam is an outrageous statement about earning potential. Being able to earn $500 a week doing data entry jobs is not unimaginable, depending on your job market and skills, but $500 a day for an entry-level job requiring few skills? It’s completely out of the question.

Offline data entry jobs where you actually have to show up at an office to do the work pays anywhere from minimum wage to $11 or $12 an hour. You might see data entry jobs for $14-20 an hour if you happen to be in a community with a very low unemployment rate and a high demand by employers to fill these sorts of jobs, but at those wages, you’ll need both experience and very good keyboarding skills, especially with a 10-key numeric keyboard. You’ll most definitely be given a typing test or an test on the 10-key to get a job like that.

Any telecommuting job opportunities naturally would pay in the same range as any other type of job in the same field. In fact, you’ll frequently find that they’ll pay lower wages because they can leverage the marketplace. Why hire workers from big cities like Los Angeles, New York or Chicago where the average pay scale needs to be higher to cover the higher cost of living when you can hire someone in other parts of the US or even overseas where wages are quite a bit lower?

The Alluring Evidence — Beware the Paypal Screenshot

The sales page for a data entry job scam almost always includes screenshots showing off how much the person running the scam has earned. The beauty of this for the scammers is that they don’t even need to go to the effort of using Photoshop to create fake documents. They simply use screenshots of what they’ve earned selling the scam itself because nothing about the stats indicates why money was paid. This is particularly true if they are showing off their Paypal account. Paypal is owned by Ebay is primarily used for buying and selling on Ebay. A Paypal screenshot is only going to show you how much money has been sent to that account and for all you know they just sold off a garage full of stuff on Ebay. The money could be from anywhere.

Other screenshot tricks are showing off Clickbank earnings or showing deposits into their bank account. Again, neither of these provide evidence of where the money actually comes from. There is a transaction screen on Clickbank that does show where the earnings come from, but you can bet they sure aren’t showing you that one.

You’ll likely see this instead:

This is a screenshot from my own Clickbank account. You’ll see much bigger sales numbers on a scam website because they devote a lot more time to selling stuff on Clickbank than I do. So ignore the dollar amounts for now and focus on the following:

Payperiod Sales Subtotals
Daily Sales Subtotals

Okay, so what’s been sold? It doesn’t even tell you that, does it? All it shows is how much money was made. That’s not even remotely useful information. The word Sales is also a trigger word here. It’s not payment for work done. It’s payment for sales made. Clickbank is an e-commerce mall, not a site that hires people to do data entry work. There are lots of other similar sites out there and Clickbank recently booted most of the “Work at Home” scammers out of their system, so you may see different screen shots than these, but if you keep an eye out for the word “sales” you should be able to work out that the screenshot has nothing to do with earnings made for data entry work.

Common Phrases to Trigger Your Scam Alarm
I mentioned in my previous post on data entry job scams that one of the standard scams is to sell you information about placing advertising on Google Adwords, usually for the same product that you just bought. This is a form of affiliate marketing where you take a cut of the sales price from the product that you sold.

It is a perfectly legitimate avenue for earning money online and there’s a variety of ways to go about it. One of the other common ways besides running pay per click advertising campaigns is article marketing. In a nutshell, article marketing is writing articles for websites for free, but making sure a link is placed back to your own website. There’s a lot more to it than that, but this will suffice for now while you try to figure out if something is a scam.

These are just some of the trigger phrases to look for:

Ad Typing (or Typist)
Marketing Typist (or Typing)
Article Typing
Response Typist

These are all shady euphemisms for writing ad copy that you will either 1.) place on Google Adwords, 2.) place in article directories (article marketing) or 3.) post in forums and message boards.

What’s wrong with it?

TYPING ISN’T WRITING.
WRITING ISN’T TYPING.

I’ll get into typing vs writing in a second, but I’d just like to talk about a few other things that are wrong with this first which all relate to “response typist” or forum spamming. Yep, forum spamming. Sure, you can call it posting, but most of the other people on the forum you are invading with marketing copy will consider it spamming — as will the other places that are commonly recommended for this tactic, Craigslist and MySpace. You will not make friends doing this. Don’t do it!

Now onto typing vs writing:  Data entry jobs — whether we are talking about 10-key or word processing — are about inputting information that has already been providing for you. Data entry jobs do not require that you come up with your own copy. That’s the job of a freelance writer or copywriter. Copywriting is a task that requires a completely different skillset - creative writing and marketing. Typing jobs only require that you TYPE FAST AND ACCURATELY.

In addition, you should also note that if you are doing affiliate marketing — which is what this boils down to — there is no guarantee that you will ever make any money. I write ads to put on Google Adwords myself. Some of them make money and some of them lose money. I also write articles. I frequently spend a couple of hours writing 500 words for one article because I need to do some research as well. Data entry work doesn’t require any research.  Some of these articles make me money, some of them don’t. The ones that do, it is often weeks before I start to see a return for them.

On the other hand, when I did data entry work myself, I got paid for every single thing I did. I wasn’t taking any risk and I certainly wasn’t writing copy for anyone. I was either transcribing audio tapes, word processing handwritten documents or recording accounting data on a 10-key. Easy, mind-numbing work that took effort, but not a lot of brain involvement, if you know what I mean. It took me more effort to write this article than it ever did to type someone else’s messy handwriting into Microsoft Word.

Stay tuned tomorrow for my post on real online job opportunities and where to find them. On Thursday, I’ll talk about Affiliate Marketing in case reading this has got you thinking that sounds a lot better than a data entry job anyway.