You have seen the promotions, usually online about how you can start a home business absolutely free. Simply register, click on the sign me up button and you can start making money within 10 minutes. Although some of these promotions are becoming more realistic, knowing that precious few will start making money in ten minutes. Now, they claim you can start making money by the end of the day. In most respects, they are not lies, they business can be put in your name almost immediately, but how soon you start making money will depend on many factors, and in most cases the answer is just short of never.

First of all, be realistic. Who would give a complete stranger the reigns of a successful business? That being said, the offers for a free online, home-based business are real and in some cases offer the very real possibility that you can make some money. However, as in all things, you get what you pay for and when you are given something free of charge, you can't really complain about how well it works. Before you get into an online business, consider what it will cost to get customers to your site.

No internet business on the planet can make money without customers and in order to have customers, you have to have traffic. There are a number of ways to entice traffic to your website, but once they are there, the site is going to have to convince them to spend their money. So, How do you get traffic to your site? Of course, you have to pay cash for it.

Email marketing will cost money for a list of current prospects and buying qualified leads is not going to be cheap. While some offer deep discounts on leads, the quality of the leads may be questionable. The return on your investment may be so low to make them worthless and with lead marketing, it is all a numbers game. The more emails you send out the better chance you have of making a sale. However, more leads will cost you more money.

You can work with search engine marketing to make your individual site attractive to search engines, so when a person enters certain criteria into a search engine your site rises to the top of the results list. Now to have a website search engine friendly is very costly, however now a days you can obtain alot of Web2.0 strategies that are very effective and mostly free. Article marketing is another popular method of driving traffic, but unless you are an experienced, and have the time to write your own articles, you will have to pay someone to write them for you.

Also, you can pay to have your site advertised by using things like pay-per-click or newspapers, ezines and many other ways as well just do a bit of research. Essentially, making money on the internet is possible, but a lot will depend on how much you can afford and are willing to pay to market and advertise in order to make money with your free home business.