Re: infor need: travel agent @ home and affiliate travel sites....

> This post is actually for a female friend. She wants to find out further
> info on "work-at-home" travel agents biz opps you see
> advertised.

First of all, she wouldn't be a "real" travel agent, because that requires licensing. What she gets is one of those innumerable clone websites that exist mostly to sell the bizop to others. Of late, these sites redirect you to Yahoo, etc, and let you do your own booking (with some sort of cookie that presumably gives you sales) but, let's face it, they do none of the services that my real, licensed travel agent does or did.

> Has anyone been involved or know anything about these? She has
> absolutely no training, but is looking an "at-home" biz as she
> is a stay-at-home mom. Any reputable companies? Training? What is
> realistic income potential? She has no inclination to get rich.

Well, that's good, because the realistic income potential (judging by the fact that there's well over 11,800,000 of these sites -- yes, 11 million) is Not Very Much.

> ALSO, she asked about "affiliate marketing" for travel, where
> you set and market a web-site and make comissions based on airline, hotel
> reservation, car rentals, etc?

Okay, let's be blunt here (you can dress up the info for her): if she doesn't know where to market this, it says right away that she's in deep dippety-doo if she tries this as a business. If you're starting into business the very first time, Start Something You Know About. If I went to her and said, "hey, I want to be a babysitter... where could I market my services?" don't you think she'd have a huge list of places and people to contact?

Someone who's experienced with starting businesses could, with motivation and all, start up just about any kind of business they wanted. You know about ad-testing from other businesses, you know about your marketing style, you know something about locating customers, etc, etc. But the newcomer with no business experience is the one who ends up prey to the wolves who like to sell them programs (as Lesley talks about) to set them up as spammers or programs to "motivate their poor sales" and so on and so forth.

The Wolf in Mentor's clothing basically sees them as a money machine to feed the Wolf.

I'm sure that she has a lot of skills she might not have thought about, and fairly traditional skills at that: childcare, cooking/baking (possibly for special occasions like cakes and parties), sewing, costume making, gardening (one of our occasional readers is such a good gardener that he has a business growing seedlings for sale (among other things)), upholstery, painting, etc, etc, etc. And I bet if pushed she'd know how to start any of those businesses on a shoestring and she'd know where to market the products and how to get customers, too (without relying on the web.)

One of THOSE is the business she should start. Those others are not worth the time and effort. And, although they tell you that you're giving up the boss and working for yourself, the sad truth is that you're working for a lot of upline and much of the profit that should go into YOUR pocket goes elsewhere.

See if you can point her to her own skills for a business. I know that people often dismiss the things they do as "too humble" but you'd be surprised how many people need those "humble skills."

Like lawnmowing. Or tree trimming. Or hedge trimming. Or special-order cooking. Or a meals service marketed to people who are having day surgery (nobody wants to go home from a day surgery and cook a meal). Or...