Earning from home is too hard to believe

I was looking at my newsfeed on Facebook and came across multiple sponsored facebook business pages. How often do we see such sponsored pages on FB these days? Obviously you need to shell out some money to become a sponsored logo on someone’s Facebook feed whom you don’t even know. Unless the concept is great, marketing something heedlessly is not going to be a value for money type of proposition. If you are a business then you don’t want people to like you out of fluke because apparently they just saw the link and clicked ‘Like’. You want them to like you because you really appealed them. I have seen people marketing their blogs on facebook by putting up a sponsored ad. It doesn’t cost much. Probably $5 or $10 a day and you could be part of someone else’s newsfeed. If they see the worth in having your newsfeed then they might like you and you could start building the rapport. It’s not the real yesteryears genuineness that was attached to ‘word of mouth’ publicity. ‘Word of mouth’ used to be ‘product first and propaganda later on’. Today it’s propaganda first and product later on. Nothing right or wrong in the philosophy but it’s plainly the difference of the flows for generating audience that has worked so far in the 21st century. The day is not far when your book store owner will market his new books through facebook that are specifically targeted for you. Recently you might have visited a grocery stores to buy some grocery and a few days later you receive a sponsored ad from the same store for some discounted food items. It seems bizarre but this is a 100% sure candidate for facebook marketing. In fact I think there is nothing left that can’t be marketed through facebook other than honesty in today’s times. Now coming to this whole episode of who wants me to like them on Facebook and how can I evaluate these paid sponsored links. One of the sponsored links attached some of my curiousity and I decided to check it out. It was about making money from home, something that a lot of people aspire to do but are never able to accomplish in spite of spending considerable time on the web. Realistically speaking who doesn’t want to make money by working from home for 8 hours a day. Incidentally 2 of my friends had liked the business page and I curiously asked them if they had any good experience making money from home with this website. They told me that they had no experience but felt that the site could provide them with some major inroads in doing something that they had dreamt about. After hearing their views I felt that the 1000 plus people who liked that link would have done it for the same incentive. It’s funny why people ‘like’ something on FB without actually having any experience whatsoever. It’s a different topic altogether and needs to be researched separately. However coming back to the original thread, how sensational is it for someone having a fulltime job in a preferred industry to work from home and have a secondary stream of income? It’s not always possible. I can vouch on that as you don’t get as much time to do it. I prefer to do blogging as an aspiration more than anything else. I feel dedicating that one or 2 hours on a daily basis will really help me put out my thoughts well and influence someone somewhere. Yes, some friends have taunted me saying that it seems to be my childhood problem that I am trying to get rid off but then that’s just humorously laid out by them and I don’t really take them seriously. I try and stick to my goals of writing. It’s slow but certain and I feel good once I key in those few words that exemplify my mark on the web. Although I am vocal person but unless you are a media savvy one you can’t influence many people as much. Nothing is better than writing it out because you get the liberty to express yourself and reach out to a wider world. I have never done anything with the sole purpose of earning from the web. Although I must admit that I have earned quite some in my writing ventures on different websites but that’s primarily to unleash my love towards writing. I have never tried things like working from home to earn money. Almost all times it looks too hyped to be true. 99% of the times such work from home advertisements are sheer marketing scams and nothing else. I remember one of my friends who used to do it around 3-4 years ago. Initially he got paid and was gung-ho about the entire thing. A few months later I talked to him and he said they had fooled him and not paid him in last 3 months. He said it involved a lot of fuss and tension and he needed to fight a lot to get his dues cleared off. He gave it up for a fulltime job and has been happy ever since that day. I decided to check out on the consumerlivingwell.com website as it was so well marketed on FB. The sponsored advertisement looked tempting to resist. I decided to check out the site. It looked reasonably genuine on the first biew. The layout looked simple and there was nothing jazzy about the site to suggest that it was a scam. Generally most websites that deal with money making schemes from home are flashy with a lot of advertisements and pop-ups. Obviously it was my first look after all. I must say that these days even if a particular company doesn’t exist people can create such genuine looking websites with such ease that any person can get fooled. My experience in IT helps me tackle these problems with relative ease. You first need to check google with the company name followed by words like ‘scam’ and ‘fake’.You can easily make out if the company is good or not. You can find so many reviews about anything today that to a smart surfer it’s not that tough to make out what is fake and what is not. Now apparently the site begins with the headline: “EXPOSED: Mumbai Mom Makes over Rs. 400,000 Month And You Won't Believe How She Does It! “. The title says ‘Consumer Finance reports’ with a disclaimer saying that it doesn’t belong to any newspaper publication. Vow!! Now this is a sureshot marketing gimmick to look authentic. Isn’t it? The font and presentation seems to have been adapted from some reputed newspaper. When I saw the page first, even I thought that it was some authentic newspaper site. I scrolled below to find a lot of people saying good things about the website. It tells the story of some house wife who lost her job last year and today she is able to earn around 400,000 INR per month through this site. Now that is something which will really pop up your eyes. It looks like a highly improbable claim. This is where the site starts demonstrating fakeness. How is it possible that someone who entered into this work from home arena just last year is able to make such a humongous amount in less than a year. The claim looks too tall to be believed. Now here is the thing. If someone is telling you that by working from home you can earn twice or thrice what a VP in a Bank would earn with a fulltime job and status then there has to be something wrong or dangerously fishy in the job profile. On the right hand side of the web page there is a photo of a smiling family and it obviously looks like a marketing gimmick. I faintly remember that I had seen this photo in a Bank advertisement a few years ago. Although there is no way of confirming it now but believe me I do have a fairly good memory and vision. A lot of people (almost all Indian names) seem to have entered their comments. Not a single comment is negative which makes me believe that the feedback is cooked. At the bottom of the page it says ‘Comments have been closed due to spam.’ I don’t feel that there would have been any comment entry mechanism on this page. Now here is proof of the fakeness. I saw the site on 24th May and at that time the last comment was dated 23rd May from Omkar. Today when I see it , the same comment is dated 26th May. If the comment section is closed for last 4 days how is it possible that someone entered a comment yesterday even if I were to assume that the guy enters the same text. ‘Guys don’t treat us as fools. We are watching you!!’ The site lists out the steps to be followed for making money from home and it comes with a warning saying ‘Registration Deadline is Tuesday 28th May 2012’. Please note the typo ‘2012’. 28th May could not have been a Tuesday in 2012. Anyways, it really means 2013, just that the guys managing the site are still living in 2012 or find it tiringly difficult to fix this typo. Yesterday when I saw the site it said registration deadline was 27th May. There is no probability here, they have definitely set it to be Current date +1 so that they can capture the easy scapegoats and make them feel like they need to take immediate actions before the deadline. ‘You need to be watchful and see such traps coming your way.’ If you click on the link to register on the site it asks you for details like phone number, home address and all sorts of personal details. It says that currently they are offering 50% off. Yes, there is a discount of 50% on god knows what. Probably it’s registration fees for some work that you will do from home. The site says that it comes to around 3500 odd INR after the discount. If you click on ‘close’, the site displays a prompt and the amount reduces to around 2200 INR. It’s clearly a way of trapping you into buying something that is unwarranted. I don’t believe that the site would have real people enrolled. 95% profiles ought to be fake. The rest are probably scapegoats who in a haste of making fast money entered the trap and now have nowhere to go. People on the site are claiming that they earn 7000 INR per day. It’s simply not possible even if you were to sell any affiliate products with a chunk of networking links. I am yet to hear from a genuine person who has worked from home and earned that much of bounty. My verdict is that the site is 100% fake and is only misleading people. Even if 10 or 20 people can be trapped then it’s great for them because the investment cost is hardly anything. Even facebook can’t rule out the sponsored link because apparently someone pays for it. So there is no way of knowing that the site is fake. But as a consumer we need to keep our eyes open and not trust anything that looks amazing. Here is my outlook on this entire thing called ‘Work from home and earn money’. Work from home can have various ways of doing it through genuine means. 1st is when you work on research articles and do some market research, provide data, fill up surveys and questionnaires on specific products and brands that you are aware of. Such online projects will help you earn a maximum of 10,000 INR per month and nothing more. If you are selling affiliate products on prominent genuine sites and are a person who markets stuff on Facebook and twitter then on a few lucky days you can earn a good chunk but then the probability of this happening throughout is quite low. Just imagine how you feel about someone who keeps spamming friends on facebook and twitter on different types of products. 99% of the times you will want to defriend that person. That’s a common mentality and unless you have people in your list who could be easily tamed it’s not possible. Personally I feel it’s a shameful act to market in such a manner and really shows a bad class. Even if you do market then it should be based on other’s choice and their needs. For instance, by marketing a Cell phone product on your wall page you are really beginning to look like a spammer. The ideal thing to do is to register with a cell phone community or a business page and market the product there. That way you would have targeted people who are subscribed to the community because they want to know more about it. You would be targeting consumers based on their choice and not yours. As per me, that’s much more sensible and effective marketing style. Obviously that’s my perception and will depend from person to person. Blogging and publishing articles for prominent websites is other genuine way to make money by working from home. I would categorize the rest of things in the spam and scam category and certainly a waste of time, money and your talent. Easy lucrative money making from home is not possible else their won’t have been any outdoor jobs left by now. Believe me, earning from home is possible if it’s your business and not anyone else’s. http://consumerlivingwell.com/inbo/

The mathematical Wizard Shakuntala Devi

Legendary Mathematical genius Shakuntala devi is no more. Known for her exceptional mathematical abilities Shakuntala Devi died on 21st April 2013 in a hospital in Bengalaru at the age of 83. She was admitted to the hospital following respiratory problems. She developed some heart and kidney complications and died at around 8.15 am in the morning. Shakuntala Devi was a human robot and literally overpowered computer. She found a place in the Guiness Book of world records for her extraordinary ability to solve complex mathematical problems on a fly. You could ask her just about anything and she could get you the answer within seconds. She had an extraordinary ability to find the day of any past of future year by just doing some brain calculations. In 1977 she competed with a computer to find the cuberoot of a random 9-digit number and won easily. She again beat the computer when she found the cuberoot of a 201 digit random number in just around 50 seconds. She used her strong mathematical brain to solve the problem mentally. In spite of being programmed with multiple instructions it took the computer more time than shakuntala Devi. Shakuntala Devi was born in an orthodox brahim family. Her father used to work in circus as a trapeze and tightrope performer. At the age of 3, Shakuntala devi assisted her father to perform card tricks. Her mindblowing number crunching abilities helped her to contribute immensely in some number tricks presented by her father during road shows. Later Shakuntala devi gave a number of presentations in the University of Mysore and Annamalai university. In 1980, at the age of 51 Shakuntala devi again beat the computer when she computed the multiplication of two 13-digit number in just 28 seconds. Shakuntala Devi wrote a number of books like ‘Puzzles to puzzle you’, ‘Book of numbers’, ‘More puzzles to puzzle you’, ‘Figuring: The Joy of numbers’, ‘In the wonderland of numbers’, ‘Super Memory: It can be yours’, ‘ Mathability: Awaken the Mathn genius in your child’ and ‘Astrology for you’. Many companies have used Shakuntala Devi puzzles during their interviewing process. Infosys is one of the companies that I have been in and it has used a lot of puzzles from the books of Shakuntala Devi. You get people like Shakuntala devi only once in many lifetimes. Respect to this mathematical maestro!!!