The Upcoming series will require less work than Internet Marketing, but this doesn't mean that it works without work! Anyway, this will be the series for lazy people!

What is a HYIP? It stands for High Yield Investment Program. They became very popular in the last 2-3 years. What they offer is a much more higher return on investment (ROI) than banks or other well known opportunities do.

The first important thing for you to know about these programs is that most of them (popularly said 99%) are Ponzi schemes. This means that while they pay out to their investors they pay from the new investors money. This is like when a snake begins to eat himself from his tale. It works for a while but sooner or later when there will be no more fresh investors, or the program reaches it's desired profit it stoppes paying and the admin(s) suddenly disappear.

For example:

Joe invests $100 on monday to a program that offers 300% ROI in one week. Paul and Patricia invests $200-200 in the same program on Wednesday and Thursday. Now there is exactly $500 in this HYIP. From this amount our Joe will be paid on the next monday. He tells all of his friends and relatives to invest in this program because it will make them rich! Because of Joe's "work" lots of people invests on monday and on tuesday but somehow the program disappear on wednesday without any prior notice. Paul and Patricia will be...lets say unhappy.

So who made profit here?

1. Joe who got in early
2. The admin of the Ponzi

Of course this scheme is illegal but it is very hard to catch someone on the Internet, especially if the money which was lost, is not worth the investigation.

What I would like to say with this is that there is a big risk involved in all online investment programs! That risk cannot be made totally disappear. The only thing you can do with it is to accept that it is there and minimize it as much as possible. This will be done through proper investigation and risk management.

Luckily nowdays there are much more reliable programs, but they are still hard to find. These are mostly private programs where you can register only by invitation from another member. I will write about these programs in a whole article soon!