Let's look at a similar situation that arose a couple of years ago. Stephen Pierce (who was unknown at time in Internet marketing circles) released an eBook about his online success. One chapter of eBook covered something that he called 'Smart Pages'. There were, quite simply pages which had been designed in a certain way to rank well in search engines. They were completely different to directory pages I have mentioned above but concept was same - fast, free traffic to your site from main search engines.

Smart Pages were big business for, I guess, a year after Stephen's eBook was published - software was written to create them, more eBooks were written, I even tested them and wrote about them myself.

Gradually though their effectiveness started to reduce and nowadays, I doubt that any serious Internet marketer would even consider using Smart Page technology. I am sure however that for that period of a year, a lot of people made a lot of money from Smart Page concept.

Just to illustrate this point further, I did a search on Google today for term 'Smart Pages' and not one person is paying to advertise using Adwords for this search term - not one! How often does that happen?

As I say, directory sites that TE and other software products create are completely different to Smart Pages and do at least have some content but fact is that they are being mass-produced and in many cases people are not even bothering to change standard page templates that come with software. If Google (or any other large search engine) wanted to exclude results of such pages, in most cases it would be pretty easy for them to do and if your only traffic comes from these very search engines, any income could stop overnight.

So what is point of this article? Am I telling you not to use this technology?

Absolutely not - I have been testing various software products available myself to see how well they work so I am certainly not saying 'Don't do this'. What I am saying is that you should be aware of risks. You should be aware that you 'might' wake up one morning and find that as far as search engines are concerned, your automated pages no longer exist and therefore don't rely on methods such as these for your entire income. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket - make hay while sun shines but be prepared when it eventually goes in :-)

Plenty of people make a good living jumping from one fad or craze to next but it can be a risky business. Just make sure you are aware of risks.

4) Join everything. If it is free to join, why not? Affiliate marketers especially are always on lookout for next great business opportunity. What happens, however, is that unless business opportunity somehow compliments your primary home based business then you are going to end up spreading your efforts thin. Choose programs to join that provide you with marketing leverage or which will enhance what you are offering without providing unwanted competition. The other danger with free progams is that once you join there may very well be an "upgrade opportunity" that you will find difficult to pass up. Be sure that this is what you want before you click on payment button...all those free programs upgraded adds up soon!

5) Spend lots of money on advertising. This is a tough one. You would think that people who spend most money get most traffic to their websites and therefore earn most money. While this may be true, how much are you willing to spend to have kind of traffic volume to your business opportunity that is going to pay off? It is really hard to tell. The best advice I can give you is to take it slow. Track results of every advertising campaign so that you can assess how effective method or ad itself is. If you do not track your marketing then you might just be throwing money down drain. Spend too much too fast and you might soon find it difficult to keep your home based business running. You might even adversely affect your current lifestyle by piling up bills that you can't pay because website advertising you chose is not bringing you a good return on investment.

There are other things that can help your home business become successful or kill it. And these may not be "top 5" for you. Just listing these made me think of another 5 that have probably hurt my own home business. Time to make some adjustments!