Sunday, 11. July 2010
Wow, I can believe I haven’t posted in over two months. I have been super busy, and honestly, I haven’t had the gumption of writing anything. The good news is I am off on vacation to FL this week. So perhaps I will have a little more time and a lot more to write about. So until next time, have a memorable summer!
Sunday, 16. May 2010
Do you get an income tax return each year? Do you want more in your paycheck by paying less taxes each pay period? If you answered yes to both these questions there is a way to remedy this. It is called optimizing your income tax withholding. The best part is that there isn’t any guessing and it is %100 legal. In fact, the IRS will even help you estimate your income tax withholding for free.
Are you ready to make easy money? Here is what you’ll need on hand.
Once you have all this paperwork together, your need to visit the IRS 2010 withholding calculator. To figure out how to fill out your W-4 form simply answer the questions and follow along in the electronic form. If you fill out this form correctly, you should be in the tax withholding window of +/- $150. This means that you will either owe $150 or less or receive a tax refund of $150 or less. If you want to be sure not to have to pay the government any money at the end of the year simply add $13/mo to your withholding. I have been banking the extra money each month in an interest bearing savings account. Christmas is going to be good this year!
Friday, 14. May 2010
In today’s internet culture, getting the message out about what your site is offering can be a difficult challenge. Sure, what you have to offer could really help people, or save them money, or revolutionize politics. But if people aren’t finding your site, then what good is your message, product, or service? Isn’t search engine optimization ( SEO ) supposed to bring throngs of traffic to your site? I say not necessarily.
SEO is meant to accomplish a few different things. First and foremost, SEO optimizes your website for search engines to find, follow the links on your site, read and interpret what your site is about, index your site, and then show your site within a search engine results page. Ok, so let’s assume that you rank number one on Google for neoprene accessories. That in itself won’t bring you a great deal of traffic. So how do you bring in more traffic?
One of the easiest ways to boost traffic with internet marketing is to tap into pop culture. The company that sells neoprene accessories could tap into connecting their product to iPods and urban culture. And this can be as simple as featuring their product in a 30 second video on the website, blog posts featuring their product in different urban settings, and pictures of their product being used by young trend setting college students. After those are in place a simple short ran advertising spots on Facebook, Myspace, other popular high traffic sites will get the traffic jump started.
After traffic starts coming in, analyze your traffic sources to determine which internet marketing efforts are performing and which ones aren’t. Trim out the sites that aren’t performing. What you’re left with is your core advertising demographic. At this point your have to decide if your advertising budget can afford to bring in another site that has the same demographic as your core site(s). If not, you may want to consider cutting your core site(s) click-thru’s in half and spread the advertising money across the other sites in your demographics.
Once you get the core advertising site(s) down to a science, do you know when to get out? Some people say stick with an ad as long as it is working. Others say drop the ad after a certain point, and there is also a school of thought of rotating in new ads to keep the ad spot looking fresh. Certainly, if you are a non-profit entity your getting out position is fairly easy, when your funding stream dries up. As an internet marketer, this is my position, it is time to look at getting out of an advertisement spot when your organic traffic has increased %30 -%60 of the original amount. Now this percentage can be what ever amount you want, or you can have a conversion amount also.
The end goal is your site, message, video,e-book, etc to go viral. By this I mean it gets forwarded by people automatically without prompting or incentives. It’s at this point you know your site has made it to the big leagues. You’ll have more traffic than you’ll know what do do with, and chances are you’ll need your own dedicated server. Even if you don’t run paid ads, you can use link building to help bring in traffic and increase the popularity of your site. Whether you do it yourself, pay for someone else to do it, or prefer to run paid ads for you, internet marketing picks up the slack until your organic traffic gets to the level you want.
