A former colleague of mine, I’ll call him Chris, responded to an advertisement titled “work at home: home business opportunity” and ventured into the world of home businesses with the hope that he will take advantage of the growing trend and make his dream lifestyle a reality.He soon became a statistic – he joined the 90% group of home business workers who failed in their endeavours and finally quit. So what could Chris have been done differently to alter his market place results? What could he have done to move him from the 90% group of failures to the coveted 10% category?In this article I will look critically at Chris’ work practices to pick out two of the many nuggets that the wisdom of hindsight provides.Lesson #1: Separating the Chaff From The WheatThe internet is filled with a lot of information which my friend Chris was not able to adequately sort through. He got bombarded left, right and centre such that he got overwhelmed by the sheer volume of what is available on the internet.Every opportunity looked like ‘the’ one and he found himself joining one program after another. He did not allow enough time for any of these ventures to produce results he desired before moving on to the next.Does that mean there is no legitimate and profitable’ work at home, home business opportunity’ that one can operate? Far from it, there are some really excellent opportunities out there.You only need to know what to look out for in order to separate the chaff from the wheat and concentrate on the good, business opportunities.This research phase is very critical to the success of your home business endeavours. You need a checklist for evaluating every work at home: home business opportunity before you make a commitment one way or the other.For example, I personally check the quality and the existing demand for a product before I even consider getting involved in the business. If both if these are not up to scratch then, frankly, I am not interested – I move on to the next opportunity.It is very important to offer high quality goods and services. You want to offer good value for money because your customers deserve it.There are at least 7 things that I look out for before deciding on whether to join a venture or not.Lesson #2: Don’t Believe the Hype Chris certainly got carried away by all the hype and the endless promises of getting rich quick that his ‘work at home: home business opportunity’ advertisement promised.Like so many others before him, he was led to believe that he could get away with putting in little or no effort into his online business and still have great results. He was also of the opinion that once he had a system in place he could relax and the system would do all the work and the money would roll in automatically. Sounds familiar?Far from it – succeeding in your online business venture, just like any other, requires a lot of work and dedication, especially at the start. It also requires a lot of testing and tweaking afterwards in order to produce optimal results and ultimately to achieve autopilot status.No online business becomes a success overnight.Choosing the product, I must say is the easy part; the challenge comes from getting others to know your business exists. Driving traffic to your website, for example is one of the key skills you need to learn and master in order to succeed.In other words, you business needs to be nurtured from inception to the point that it can stand on its own feet. This takes effort and sometimes a lot of it especially at the start when you are learning the ropes on how to make that work at home: home business opportunity a success.