Sunday, 16. May 2010
Bigger paychecks now by optimizing your W-4
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.
Income tax withholding calculator is Ez Internet Money
Are you ready to make easy money? Here is what you’ll need on hand.
- One month of pay stubs;
- Most recent tax return;
- Quarterly investment statements;
- Monthly dependent care receipts.
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!
Posted in How To... by -
Friday, 14. May 2010
Internet Marketing can “ad” a boost of traffic to your site
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?
Internet marketing to boost relevant 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.
Internet Marketing Goes Viral
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.
Posted in Promotion by -
Wednesday, 12. May 2010
Low Gas Prices For Summer 2010
As reported by the Associated Press in the article, As Summer Nears, Expect Gas Prices To Go… Down?, gas prices may have already peaked for the summer. This makes the idea of a road trip a vacation possibility. Before you hit the road on what could be an awesome family vacation, consider these easy low cost tips. They could very easily save you lots of money.
Money Saving Vehicle Maintenance Tips
The first thing you should consider before you hit the road on a road trip is vehicle maintenance. And the easiest items to check are your spark plugs, air filter, oil, and tires. In fact, these are the most common items included in a basic tune-up. A basic tune will run about $65 for a basic six cylinder car. This includes changing the oil, air and oil filters, spark plugs, rotating the tires, and chassis lube.
$65 may sound like more than you want to spend right before you hit the road, but consider these savings. If your car is lacking this basic maintenance, it could be getting 5 MPG or more less than the advertised highway rating. If your trip is 600 miles round trip and the average cost for a gallon of gas is $3.00, this 5 MPG loss is equal to. And don’t forget to kick the tires, improperly inflated tires add friction, which can lower highway fuel economy 2 MPG.
Save Money With Trip Planning
Proper trip planning can definitely help you save money on a road trip. Take for instance finding the best gas prices along your route. You could look for the best price at an exit near where you may run low on gas. Or you could use the Gas Buddy trip planner. This route planner tells you what the address is for your fill ups, what the current prices is, about how much gas you’ll need, and approximately how much your total will be.
Another good way to save money on your trip is to sign up for hotel award points. One of the main hotel points programs I use are the hotel rewards by Choice Hotels. Each time I stay I get points that can be redeemed for free nights. I also gain points by using a special code when I rent a vehicle or buy from certain online vendors. This works really good when I am on business travel. Before I hit the road I plan my hotel stays along my route and check Gas Buddy for the best fuel prices near my hotel.
Other ways how to save money on road trips:
- Set the cruise control for the maximum sped limit. This not only will save you the cost of a speeding ticket, it saves gas! Very few drivers can beat the cruise control when it comes to MPG.
- Visitor centers have a lot of coupons!
- If you are going to spend a lot of time on the road over the course of a year, buy a seasons pass to the National Park System. In three visits to a national park you have already saved money over regular price admission for a family.
- Pack a cooler with drinks and snacks, you’ll save over buying in the convenient stores.
- Save money at home while you are gone, set the thermostat to a temperature where it the ac/heater won’t run much, turn off all the lights, shut all the doors (makes it easier to control temp in thermostat zone), turn the water hear to the lowest setting or vacation mode, and unplug all the power strips in the house.
Best of luck on your road trip, have fun and be safe!
Posted in Save Money by -
