Long before the Internet was around many people sought to find a home based business opportunity that could give them a new life and the freedom to work from home. They looked into all different areas from selling Tupperware at their monthly home gatherings to teaching piano in their front room. The type of home based business opportunity wasn’t important, the key was to do something from home that had the potential to make them financially free in a few years.The Reason Why They FailedThe problem with this logic was that the business model that they had was never going to accomplish their goals within the time frame. You would have to sell a lot of Tupperware or teach 24/7 to even get close so they started to look at other areas and one that became increasingly popular was something called MLM or multi level marketing. With this home based business opportunity they would not only make money on what they did themselves but also on the efforts of the people they sold to. This is called leveraging other peoples time or OPT and is one half of the magic key to success in any industry on the planet.Home Based Business Opportunity-Part 1: OPTThe first part to running a successful home based business opportunity is to leverage other peoples time. It’s just not practically possible to be successful by yourself, you need to build up a team of people that work with you to the mutual benefit of all. Now this differs from simply having employees because with employees you’re not really leveraging OPT at all, you’re just paying them for their time which is completely different. A better example of OPT in regular business would be a salesman on commission; you don’t pay them anything unless they sell something and then you simply take a percentage of what they make.Now the way this translates to a home based business opportunity is that the salesmen in this case are just ordinary people like you and I. The problem was that they just couldn’t make any consistent sales and the thing that ended up happening was that everyone started trying to convince their friends and family to buy their products and this lead to an overall bad reputation for anyone in the MLM business; they were seen as get rich quick mentality and avoided like the plague, so what’s changed?The Internet Gives New HopeThe Internet is the thing that’s changed everything and it’s now the best way to succeed with any home based business opportunity. Now I’m not saying that some people didn’t make a success of MLM but I would suggest that it was those with the sales backgrounds that did. The Internet however has brought with it the opportunity for everyday folk just like you and me to become financially free through OPT and OPM.Home Based Business Opportunity-Part 2: OPMWe’ve looked at how you can use OPT to help your business progress but the problem is that you need to also use OPM to be successful and this just wasn’t happening in the MLM industry because most people really didn’t know how to sell at all. But the Internet has allowed us to become an expert salesman through the power of online systems and online sales funnels. Now what I mean by this is that most things in life are some form of sales funnel; your local supermarket is a perfect example. Have you ever wondered why all the items you buy on a daily basis are right at the back, think about it. They want you to walk through their entire store every day to up-sell and cross-sell you other products.Now you can leverage the Internet yourself to be your very own sales funnel. In this scenario you will have many different web pages that are ultimately leading someone to what they came for but also cross-selling and up-selling as they go. The real power of the Internet though is that once you set up your sales funnel then it’s there for all time and doesn’t really cost you much money to upkeep; it just keeps funneling people through the system and popping them out at the other end ready to buy. So now the second key to the magic formula is complete; the Internet is providing you with OPM. The great thing about this model is that you can make sales and money and ultimately become financially free whilst you sleep.