Reality Check! Nothing in life if 100% guaranteed. That goes for investing in the stock market, risky business ventures, 401K plans, online investment opportunities, etc. You've heard this said time and time again, but diversification is the key to financial success and security. Diversification is defined as "To distribute (investments) among different companies or securities in order to limit losses in the event of a fall in a particular market or industry." That just means do not put all your eggs in one basket. No matter how attractive one investment looks, do not put all your money into just one investment opportunity. The best of companies and programs can fail and there can be many contributing factors, none of which you have control over. 

When it comes to putting money into programs like auto-surf and high yield investment programs (aka HYIPs), diversification and starting small is key to your success. If you decide to start investing in these programs, please follow my steps below and you will be sure to have more winners in your portfolio than losers and more gains than losses. Losses do happen, so if you balance out your investments, you can absolutely keep your losses to a minimum:

1. Don't just join any program because it promises huge gains. Many programs have great marketing behind them and promise you huge gains. Don't believe the hype.
2. Do research. This can be as simple as opening up a web browser, going to google.com and typing in the program name with the word scam. Then read through to see if the company or program you're looking at has lots of complaints against them. Also, most of these programs have forums. Visit the forums and see what the current members are saying. If there are more complaints from members about the company than praises, STAY AWAY!
3. Know the difference between real scams real programs. There are plenty of scams around, but there are also lots of people who report companies as being scams when in fact they're not. People have a right to their opinions, but read through all this and you will get a good feeling if the company you are researching seems reputable or if they are in fact a scam that is not paying their members or have never paid them.
4. Invest small and do not put more money into any one program than you can afford to lose. I recommend starting with the minimum, or less than $30 in any one program. Too many people get dollar signs in their eyes and think if I can make so much money on $30, then I could make 100 times the money with a $3000 investment. This is not a smart thing to do. I don't care how great you think this program is.
5. Get your initial investment back first. This should be your first priority. If a program has a minimum investment, for example $10 and you invest $30, then your first goal should be to get back your $30. Once you've done this, and you like the program you're in, you can now invest your earnings into the program without risk of losing any of your money. If you're unfortunate enough to lose your initial $30 because the program failed, then you're not out much money.
6. One Paycheck does not mean another paycheck. Just because you received one paycheck from a company or program, does not guarantee you will receive them forever. That's why step 5 above is so important. It's great getting pay checks from these programs but too many people think the money will never end, so they keep putting more and more of their own money in, and one day the program fails. They now lost all their profits and their initial investments.
7. Diversification. Everything comes down to this. If you are diversified across multiple programs, you reduce your chances of loss. If you put all your money in one program, and that program fails, you're out 100% of your money. If you invested in 5 different programs, and one failed, you're only out 20% of your investments which means 80% are still earning income. You can then focus on finding another program to take the place of the failed one, always keeping the above steps on this page in mind.

I wish I could say every program you will ever join will always make you money, but I can't. The reality is many more fail than succeed. Just see our SCAM LIST list to see how many programs have failed. We do our best here to try and pick the better programs to increase our odds of success. I am personally in all the programs I list on the auto-surf page. I will know first hand if a program is having trouble or not paying it's members. And if we ever suspect a company of not delivering on it's promises and not paying its members, you can be assured we will remove it from our site and warn people in our scam list so they stay away from the bogus programs.