Everyday I deal with people looking for home based business opportunities online. And it gives me a good sense of how confusing it is for many people to find legitimate home based business opportunities.

I think the problem is that nowadays there are so many different home based business models that people are overwhelmed with choices. And often when they do make choices they get sucked into buying overpriced inferior products - often with monthly charges that they scramble to figure out how to cancel.

Needless to say, by the time I get a question from them they've been through the ringer and are skeptical about just about anything someone has to say in the area of home based business opportunities.

This is one of the reasons I recommend what is commonly known as a "self-funding home business"

One of the biggest problems I encounter is the fact that people looking for home based businesses are often searching out of desperation.

They need money NOW!

Aside from the obvious problems with this approach, there's a subtle problem that I'm growing convinced leads to so many people getting scammed. And it's not only that many sites promoting home based business opportunities make ridiculous claims of "instant overnight riches".

The problem is that someone who is completely new to the internet who finds several opportunities they are interested in are faced with the classic all-to-common decision-making dilemna of which path to choose - and the inherent risk of choosing a path.

In fact there's a specific inherent risk in choosing a path when making a decision that is particularly sneaky and tends to get people into trouble the most - and that's the risk of wasting time by making the wrong decision.

I think this is one of the reasons even highly-educated people with little internet experience fall for the "overnight riches" type home based business opportunities. Given a choose of risking "overnight" versus "working hard to build a business" I think they at some level decide at least if they pick the "overnight" opportunity they won't have wasted valuable time.

Based on the previous section you may be beginning to realize why even legitimate home based businesses often resort to hype.

You see, they know that people respond to hype. And while owners or creators of legitimate home based business opportunities truly want to of legitimate products truly want to help their customers, they can't focus their efforts on working on products and services that aren't selling.

Hence, they end up creating hype-based sales letters like every other home based business opportunity out there - which needless to say leads to an awful lot of confusion. It truly is extremely hard to determine which home businesses are legitimate.

At this point the Home-Based Business Opportunity Hunter often starts consulting consumer advocacy sites like the Better Business Bureau, RipoffReport, and ComplaintsBoard - there are tons of them - many of which are listed in the Search4Scams search engine I created to help people search through many of them from one central location.

This certainly can be one part of your due diligence. But there are a few things you should keep in mind:

The only problem with going by sites like the BBB and RipOffReport is that you still have to get some idea of the volume of business the company is doing, since 100 complaints against a company doing 1000 transactions per year is of course much different than 100 complaints against a company doing 100,000 transactions per year.

There are sites that measure the popularity of a site like Alexa.com, QuantCast.com, & Compete.com, but then you still have to look into the possiblity that the company manipulated their rankings and know which industries ranking-manipulation is more likely to happen in.

I will say thought that it appears that Quantcast and Compete are doing a great job of eliminating the type of ranking manipulations that still seems to affect Alexa's accuracy at times. There's also a site called Ranking.com which I suggest you not pay attention to for this purpose as it's based on the downloads of the 7Search Toolbar and is notoriously innacurate.

One thing I will say though is that if a company is NOT a member of the BBB and has a good report that's certainly a good indicator. If they ARE a member and have a clean report it's less meaningful.