Do you buy lottery tickets in any form? That’s a big gamble with a huge win/lose ratio. If you stick to a budget of a few dollars and have discipline, not too serious. However still a real small potential to win. If you get a thrill anyway, go for it – again as long as you have control over your gambling ‘instincts’. If not just don’t go there ever, at all, period.

A much better gamble would be to invest that money to start a home business. A million dollars will not flush themselves out of your computer magically. Not even doughnuts and coffee. However if you can create a plan you might have an intelligent gamble with little risk. You may make some money someday if you work at it.

The fear of losing a few dollars in this way somehow seems to trump the stupid gambles and therefore people usually don’t even try. If they realized how few dollars are necessary to get a business started online, maybe they would skip the lotto. Or maybe the problem is they don’t need any more work. If they realized that once your home business is set up it requires very little work. Not like a job.

Once your home business is set up and functioning so that it will eventually develop into an income, you can call it pretty much ‘passive income. ‘Passive’ doesn’t mean you never need to do any work. It means the business (website or affiliate page) is always running, 24/7 online. Whether you are present and accounted for or not, you have the capacity to earn income at anytime from anywhere in the world when you consider a 24-hour clock.

With for example affiliate marketing programs, you pay a very small fee monthly with no contracts beyond month-to-month. You get a working web page you can use to advertise your opportunity and/or product, an affiliate link that can be used anywhere to promote your business, as well as banners and ads that you can use to earn commissions.

Some of the best programs also provide some level of training in Internet marketing for their members and some go as far as to provide actual resources and tools that you can use. There is likely a communicating, living community that you can network with and maybe even learn something else from.

Your only gamble here would be that small monthly fee – even just once to check it out from the inside; and of course the fact that you will either like the environment and are willing to try to develop an online business or not.