*reasonable income expectations touted by top management of company offering opportunity.

*support systems and training resources available to help participants succeed.

One thing that really struck home with me was a statement made by founder of company that I eventually selected for my home based business. It went something like following:

"Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear from an affiliate questioning why he or she is not seeing a big check yet. More times than not, person asking hasn’t even been involved for more than 90 days and is only barely beginning to even understand how whole system works. And frankly, even if number was six months, it’s still much too early to be expecting a significant income stream to have developed.

I always say that if you’re not willing to give a business at least a year, don’t even bother getting involved. You need to understand that it takes time to get to know all nuances of compensation plan. It takes time to determine which products you want to lead with. It takes time to develop a game plan. It takes time to figure out what marketing activities deliver biggest bang for buck. Anything worthwhile takes sustained effort. If you’re not thinking long term, you’ve set yourself up for failure."

To sum it up, selection process should focus on reality (there is no "magic" in home based businesses) and reject any so-called "opportunities" that seem too good to be true.

There have been millions of words written about what makes good advertising copy, take a bit of time to read some of them. You'll find many great articles and ebooks you can get for free, study them!

Google has a set of standard guidelines as to what they deem acceptable when it comes to writing your ad. You need to read these and stick to them. The next job is to decide what people searching internet for your product might type in as a search, for example if you decide to sell mortgages you might use "cheap mortgages" or "best mortgage deals".

These phases are known as keywords, and you bid for keywords on Google. Your bid is amount of money you are prepared to pay for each click on your advert, and bidding starts at $0.05. So if you get a keyword for $0.05 and you get 100 clicks on your sales page, it costs you 100 x $0.05 ie $5.00.

Now let's have a look at your potential profits. A good sales page might get a return of 2% - 3%, ie out of every hundred clicks 2 - 3 will be converted into sales or sign-ups. So if you are promoting mortgages, out of hundred clicks for your $5.00 outlay you could expect two or three sales, ie a return of $100 - $150.

Realistically though you would be doing very well to pay as little as $0.05 per click for a market as crowded as mortgages, you would most likely have to bid up considerably higher. But even at $0.50 per click, you would only be paying $50 for your return of $100 - $150 in example above, still a very healthy profit margin.

Obviously more popular keyword or phrase higher your bid will need to be to secure it, so you will find that phrases like "cheap mortgages" or "best mortgage deals" will be very expensive but will attract a lot of traffic.