Here’s a cool free service I recommend everyone check out. Phil Tanny has launched his site Bookkeeper For You.
It’s an online service similiar to QuickBooks Online that allows you to track your income and expenses for your business and access them anywhere. Don’t expect all the bells and whistles QuickBooks offers, however as a free service, this can’t be beat if you’re using paper or a basic spreadsheet to keep track of everything.
Go check it out: http://www.bookkeeper-for-you.com/
Well, it’s been a week since I first launched my aWeber pop-up test to get more newsletter subscribers.
I won’t share all the details again; those are at the link just above.
After adding the new sliding javascript pop-up to just my homepage, I had 89 people subscribe to my newsletter in a week. That’s more than triple the amount I was getting before (25 a week) with a traditional pop-up that all the browsers block today.
The next step is for me to add the pop-up code across all of my pages, since the vast majority of my visitors never see my homepage. I’ll be sure to update you after I’ve ran that test for a week. But don’t set on the edge of your seats for this, I probably won’t begin testing this until a week or two.
I can’t stress it enough; if you’re not collecting email addresses on your site you’re really missing out on a huge revenue stream. If you don’t currently use aWeber, I highly recommend that you sign up here.
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A little experiment I’ve been doing with aWeber inspired me to share this with you. If you’ve never heard of aWeber, it’s a service that allows you to generate forms to capture email addresses on your sites. You can store these email addresses in as many different lists as you want. Once someone joins one of your lists, you can automatically send them an autoresponder email series and then follow up with random messages whenever you want.
If you don’t have it yet, I highly recommend it. My business couldn’t function with out it.
On one of my sites that gets a good amount of traffic ( about 600 visitors a day ) I collect email addresses for a newsletter. It currently has about 4,200 subscribers, but I’ve been only adding about 25 new subscribers per week. That’s because the only way I’ve been collecting email addresses is via a traditional pop-up window that only displays on my homepage.
Well, since the latest version of Explorer and FireFox automatically block pop-ups, my list signup form hasn’t been showing to too many people.
I decided to get off my lazy ass and try something new. Here’s what I did yesterday. (more…)
About 2 weeks ago I submitted 3 articles to iSnare’s article distribution service. I was attempting to get a new site spidered, indexed, and some initial backlinks.
So, what happened? (more…)
If you’re not familiar with iSnare, it’s an article submission directory where you can submit your articles for other webmasters to pick up and post on their sites.
But what I learned over at the Associate Programs Forum is that they have an article distribution service as well, where they’ll submit your article to many other articles directories, instead of you manually doing it yourself.
There are currently services and software programs that do this for a steep fee.
But iSnare’s distribution service seems relatively cheap: $2 or less per article to be distributed. The more distribution “credits” you buy, the price per article drops.
Someone told me they had an article distributed hundreds of times in about a month using this service, so I figured it would be worth a shot.
So here’s what I did: about a week ago I finished up a new niche site with about 75 pages in size and no current inbound links. I had 3 1000 word articles written to distribute to article directories for this site. I used the iSnare service to do this for these 3 articles, for a total cost of $6.
And now I’m waiting….
I’m going to put together a report (not sure when) to highlight the distribution and inbound links I received for my $6. I may even throw in traffic and Adsense stats, but I won’t reveal my site’s name, topic, or address.
What I’m trying to determine is if iSnare should be a service I use for all of my sites to get inbound links. Now keep in mind, this isn’t an end all solution. It’s just ONE potential method of getting inbound links to a site. Here’s a couple other methods I reguarly use, besides article distribution:
So, stay tuned for that report. It will be a PDF document showing hard numbers on my results using iSnare. After a couple days, things are looking good, but only time will tell.
Oh, one more thing - it will only be available to my newsletter subscribers.
While some may consider them outdated, checklists are the hottest thing in my book right now.
Besides creating a daily todo list for miscellaneous tasks in my Palm, I’m also creating a checklist for each site that I’m working on.
Anyone who has ever built a new site from scratch knows there’s a bunch of components that go into the process: (more…)
When I’m filing my taxes (personal and company) the best tool I’ll have will be a software program. While there are plenty of free online versions that allow you to manually input the data and submit it, I find the best versions ask you questions step-by-step and automatically fill in the data in the correct fields for you.
Here are some of the top used tax applications, in no particular order:
While I don’t like doing my taxes like the next guy (or gal) I do make sure I do them right. Running my online business is important to me and keeping in good terms with the federal government is essential.
The main reason I’m advocating using software like this is simple: I don’t like wasting my time if it doesn’t involve building my sites. Tax software helps me get my taxes done quickly and lessens my chances of getting an audit or penalty which would take even more time to deal with.
My advice: do it right the first time and forget about it!
I thought this would be appropriate for everyone, as staying organized is half the battle in this business.
Yesterday, I sat down with a high school friend at a coffee shop, as we do every week, to talk business.
That’s when he whipped out a Palm Z22, which is a new handheld PDA. I’ve never owned or used one before, so I played around with his.
Let’s just say I liked it so much I bought one for myself today! It’s a great beginners model and at less than $100, it won’t break the bank.
The biggest benefit I’ll get from it is keeping track of my hectic schedule and creating a to-do list for my business, which I can “check off” as I complete tasks. It is going to definitely help me plan things out for my business much better than my previous pen and paper system.
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…)
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.
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