Browsing Category: "Blogging Tips"
As we continue with tax season, I figured we’d go over some tax deductions you didn’t know about. Well, maybe not necessarily you but me. 
I previously wrote a few posts on tax stuff so you can read them at List of Tax Deductions 2009, Tax Deductions for Self-Employed and Tax Deductible Expenses for Self-Employed Online Entrepreneur. But since there’s less than two months left to file your taxes and get your refund, I figured we’d cover a few more things here.
I’m constantly reading about tax stuff because it’s becoming more and more important to me as my revenue increases for my online entrepreneurship. As you guys know, we have to file for taxes on all the money that we make so deducting expenses become more and more important so we’re not actually losing out on money that should belong to us and not Uncle Sam.
Matter of fact, I don’t even have a Uncle Sam so why would we want to donate our money if we don’t have to. 
(By the way, that was my lame attempt to add an unnecessary joke somewhere randomly in this post)
Anyways, let’s get down to business. Let’s go over some detailed tax deductions we didn’t know about…
Write Off Travel Expenses – There are a few things about travel expenses and I’ve mentioned in the past but I would like to correct a couple of things I found as well. I mentioned that you could write off travel expenses if you’re moving outside of 50 miles to a new job. Well, apparently you need to have been hired prior to the move to qualify for writing off travel expenses.
How to Limit Bandwidth Usage – Since I recently upgraded to a dedicated server, one of my main objectives was to limit my bandwidth usage especially since it’s no longer a shared server and I don’t want any of my sites to load extra slow. There are quite a few ways in which you can limit your bandwidth and I’m still working on a few myself!
Don’t Host Images… Or At Least Minimize Or Outsource
A large portion of your bandwidth usage comes from hosting images on your server. The logical thing for people to do is to simply avoid hosting images on their own server but not all of us can do that. Or at least, I know I don’t want to.
There are quite a few places in which you can outsource your image hosting. A few places include Imageshack, Flickr, Photobucket, etc. Though, some of these sites give you a limit on the bandwidth usage you can use and some of these places charge a small fee.
In my experience, the larger (or the more images) you have hosted, the slower your site gets and the more bandwidth it uses. If it is completely necessary for you to use images and you don’t want to outsource, I would simply put small images, if you can.
HTTP Compression
I’m finding out more and more with this upgrade to a dedicated server and HTTP compression is something that will be extremely helpful. Basically, what it does it compress your content so your site can load faster. Just think about it like it’s a zip file for your website.
As internet entrepreneurs making money online or running a business, you’re going to need to budget and deal with taxes. Since I’m getting more into the business aspects with my online entrepreneurship, I figured I would get you guys a list of tax deductions for 2009 so you can deduct as many things as you can to save money.
I already mentioned on previous posts Tax Deductions for Self Employed and Tax Deductibles for Self Employed Online Entrepreneur a few of the big things you can deduct but below is a bigger list that I tried to get together for those of you guys that will be doing your taxes for your online businesses.
On this post, I will try to list as many things as I can that you should be able to deduct mainly regarding your online stuff. This is to help you guys out especially if this is the first time you’re doing taxes for your online business… or maybe you just want to find out more things you can deduct.
Okay, so here we go…
- Office Rent
- Utilities for your work space (electricity, internet, work phone)
- The interest on business loans
- Work supplies (for instance, you need a desk, chair and computer to work online)
Read the rest of this entry »
It’s getting close to that time to get all your receipts ready for your tax deductions for self employed especially if you are an online entrepreneur such as myself. And yes, any money that you make online (in United States) will be taxed. And yes, you are supposed to report all of it. But of course, you can potentially save a lot of money by writing some expenses off.
I know the year isn’t officially over and technically you have until April to get all your tax documents in but it’s always good to get an early start. Matter of fact, you should have probably been tracking all of your income, expenses and remembering to save all those receipts to begin with.
Before I go on, this post is directed towards people paying taxes in the United States who have made money online or by being self-employed in any way. I know there are other countries in which they don’t need to pay any taxes whatsoever. And for the ones that do, I don’t know the details for them.
Earlier this year, I wrote a post on tax deductible expenses for self-employed online entrepreneur in which I listed a few key things that you can write off. You can check it out especially if this is the first year you’re going to do taxes for your online income.
This discussion has been going on for quite sometime and it still goes on. But should you include the “www” in front of your domain name or not? We have different reasons for doing one or the other but which one should we really stick to?
Yes or No with the WWW?
Honestly, it doesn’t really matter which one you use but whichever one you decide to use, it should remain consistent throughout your site. For instance, if you don’t include the “www” in front of your domain then you shouldn’t all of a sudden include it on certain pages.
The reason is the fact that when search engines come to your website, they see those two as completely different URLs. So, “http://www.datmoney.com” and “http://datmoney.com” are technically two different URLs according to the crawlers that crawl your site.
So, in essence, if the search engine crawlers check out your site, see the two different URLs (although they are both the same), there is a risk of duplicate content and both of those pages not getting indexed. I know there is a whole debate on if duplicate content is just a myth or not but I read that if its duplicate within the same site, then there might be a penalty.
Personally, I wouldn’t want to risk it. Feel free to try it out and let me know though!
But luckily, most of us use Wordpress so there’s an option to edit both the “Wordpress address (URL)” and “Blog Address (URL)”. Both of these should be the same. To access this, go to your Wordpress panel, click “settings” and “general”. (see the screenshot below):
Don’t worry, for you Blogger users, its basically the same thing. They even have a redirect of “http://datmoney.com” to “http://www.datmoney.com”. To do this, simply go to your Blogger account panel in “advanced settings” is where this option is. (see the screenshot below):
