The Internet is a great place to work. There’s no doubt about that. You can stay at home and get up when you want (although once you start rolling you rarely get to sleep in ) and you usually set your own pace. You can look for new clients and communicate with old ones online, and if you’ve got the right technology like a BlackBerry or iPhone you can stay linked to the ‘office’ no matter where you are.

Still, working on the Internet does present a few problems for the person that’s just starting out and doesn’t really know all the ropes yet, and there are a few traps that can be avoided if you know what to look for.

Blog Samples Have No Place Because Nothing’s For Free

One of the first things that I learned to avoid after being burned was the free sample blog that comes with a promise of a great hourly or per blog wage after the ‘test’ blog is accepted. Forget it. It doesn’t happen that way and you’ll never hear back from the people that asked for the sample again. If you think about that you’ll see why.

Imagine you’re one of those shifty types that sees the Internet as a way to take advantage of people in general and writers specifically. You need some content to fill your needs and once you put an ad out there, you get a massive response from the people who are looking to get a start in the business.

So, being that kind that still has webs between their toes, you decide to get all your requirements filled with the all the free samples that you get from these unsuspecting writers. It’s happened to me several times before I caught on to the scam. Hopefully, I can save you the trouble.

Your Name On The Web Doesn’t Pay The Bills Either

Then there’s the next classification of people who think they’re doing you a favor by letting you post a byline or some other kind of mention about your post. “We can’t afford to pay right now, but our compensation is great web exposure,” they offer in their ads. These people should be avoided as well.

They know as well as you do that mention of your name in relation to a few blog posts will get you the same exposure as an individual grain of sand on a beach. If you want to get started in the business you should get used to the fact that you’ll more than likely be a ghost writer—a hired hand to make the company that needs your writing talents look good, and if you want to get your name out there as a writer-for-hire, you’ll need to set up a web site but even then you’ll not be able to advertise all the work you’ve done.

The people that hire you need to pay for your services. That’s the bottom line. Even when they agree to, you’ll need to be careful. I had one client stall for months on end because he said that Toronto didn’t have any kind of International banking system. Maybe I should have told him how hard it was to keep my laptop warm enough to work in the Igloo where I lived.