And that’s only in the U.S.

Talk about a great time to be in business online! If you’re not, start preparing for next years Christmas season today! There’s more and more money changing hands online every Christmas season; with no sign of a slow down anytime soon.

It’s the perfect inspiration for planning out your business goals next year. Speaking of goals, stay tuned for my next “project” for next year. It’s a biggie, I promise!

“A report from Goldman Sachs, Nielsen/NetRatings and Harris Interactive found that between Oct. 29 and Dec. 23 retail shoppers in the U.S. spent $30.1 billion online, up 30 percent from the same period a year ago.” Via News.com

Interesting post over at VOASI by Adam Maywald yesterday.

I’m all for experimentation, which is why I build a variety of sites in different formats.

Well, Adam’s been running a test building custom directory generator sites for the past 2 to 3 months with an uncommon software tool.

With 8 sites and a little over 2 months, his test sites are making $20 a day, considerably more than the average affiliate makes per day.

But as Adam says, “Still, the trick is to get links to these sites to get them crawled.” Many people throw up these types of sites and expect them to garner traffic on their own. Experienced marketers often have better luck with these projects as they have other reputable sites that they can use to link to their other, lower quality sites.

Interesting stuff.

When most people start any kind of business from home, be it online or not, generally it will be operated as a sole proprietorship.

And there’s good reason for that: it’s simple and convenient.

There are rarely any forms to fill out to start things and at tax time your additional paperwork load will generally be minimal.

But operating your online business as a sole proprietor doesn’t get you off that easily; there are some requirements you should be aware of, along with some potential pitfalls. (more…)

Sorry about the lack of posts the last few days, I’ve been wrapping up things (literally) for Christmas.

For those of you who celebrate Christmas - Merry Christmas - and to everyone else, Happy Holidays!

Enjoy some time with your family and friends. We’ll pick things up back here once we all realize that we ate and spent too much money this year!

For my third, and final post for the series “How to Manage Your Business Finances” (Part 1 - Part 2), I’ll discuss the current system that I use to manage my affiliate business finances.

I want to be upfront that what I use does cost a monthly fee (~$20 US) and is not for the faint at heart. If you’re just getting started in this business, I recommend that you wait a little while before jumping into this option.

To manage my income, expenses, taxes, and payroll I use a service from Intuit called QuickBooks Online. If you’re familiar with Intuit’s or QuickBooks’ other products, then you’ll already know that they are top-notch.

Why Do I Use QuickBooks Online? (more…)

This is the final part of the interview I had with Allan Gardyne of Associate Programs. If you haven’t yet, I recommend that you read Part 1 of the interview

Q: Without getting into specifics, it’s clear that you make a more than a decent amount of money from your online business. But I’d venture a guess to say you have more significant expenses than the typical beginner in affiliate marketing.

What tips, techniques, and tools do you utilize to keep track of your revenue and expenses? What types of expenses do you have now that you initially didn’t anticipate having? (more…)

If I was to credit a single individual for introducing me to the world of affiliate programs, it would undoubtedly be Allan Gardyne of AssociatePrograms.com. His practical, no fluff advice really hit it home with me; especially in a world of self proclaimed “gurus” peddling any product that gives them a good commission.

As you could imagine, I was excited (to say the least) when Allan offered to answer some questions about the starting and growing of his business, which generates the bulk of its income from affiliate programs and contextual networks.

Q: As your site AssociatePrograms.com states, you’ve been “earning a good living from affiliate programs since 1998.” At what point did you first realize that making money online wasn’t some passing fancy, but a real and sustainable business? (more…)

In Part 1 of How to Manage Your Business Finances, I discussed a simple notebook and envelope system for keeping track of income and expenses. I recommend that you read that article first (it will open in a new window), as I’ll touch on issues from that piece here.

For this article, Part 2, I’ll discuss a slightly more complicated, but much more powerful, method of keeping track of these items. This will involve the envelopes from before, but this time we’ll substitute a spreadsheet program for the paper notepads. My personal favorite is Microsoft Excel, and it’s what I used before upgrading to my current system (I’ll explain that in Part 3.) If you don’t use Excel, then some of my instructions below and sample spreadsheet may be different for each respective program.

Just a quick update for today. Tomorrow, Part 2 of my 3 part series on How to Manage Your Business Finances will be posted.

Included will be a free download to help with managing your business finances; you don’t want to miss it.

In the meantime, browse the rest of the site and read Part 1 of the series if you haven’t gotten around to it yet.

From now on, every week I’m going to attempt to bring you an inspiring story of ordinary people being sucessful with online businesses. Here you won’t find pitches for products to make thousands overnight, but stories of pure sweat equity.

The first story is about an individual named Justin D’Angelo, pictured to the upper-right, whom I read about at CNN Money. (more…)