My post yesterday brought an important issue to my mind. I talked about the bad idea of MoneyMagnet (MLMMagnet) and I felt I should elaborate a bit more. A lot of people starting business online thing that if they go out there and buy everything up the cash will start rolling in. These people go buy all the E-Books, submission services and everything else you can name it to make their site succeed.

While this may work for them it ends up being costly and less effective than if you buy smart. That’s the topic of this post, buying smart online.

A lot of people think that a problem can be solved by throwing enough money at it. If their website is broken they hire a coder rather than trying to solve it themselves. They don’t experiment or research properly before hiring a service and they end up throwing money down the drain. My golden rule is to try to do something myself if its reasonable rather than hiring someone to do it. In the end if I manage to do it I saved money and if not, at least I’m not wasting money.

Before you buy online you have to do research. Google search the product, look for testimonials, this should give you and idea of the product you’re buying as well as the customer response to it. For example, when you buy an E-book, your usually going to get information but how relevant is this information? Did you waste your money buying it to get that information that could be found online for free somewhere else? Don’t throw hundreds of dollars out for almost no viable return. Ask friends what worked for them and what they recommend, search the forums and you will find the answers to your questions for free most of the time.

So before you go out and buy up things for your website or to try and get rich online take a good look at them. Anyone can make something look appealing. Don’t get suckered into buying something that’s not worth it.

The prime example I would give is EntreCard. It’s a mini marketplace where you can buy ads on sites using credits. Many users can inflate their EntreCard price easily. So you see ads on a site like JohnChow going for 200 credits a day while other websites with say 20 readers have ads going for 400 a day.

This illustrates my point about buttering something up. Those sites may seem like a great buy to the new EntreCard user but if your careful you can see which sites are worth advertising on there. The same principal should be applied to buying products online. Be careful about what you buy and separate the real products that are worth it from the “fake” products that you’re just wasting your money buying.