Bookkeeping and Accounting for your Web Design Business
QuickBooks will walk you through a setup and your Company File while organizing ‘Customers and Accounts Receivable’, ‘Vendors and Accounts Payable’, ‘Payroll and Employees’, ‘Banking and Credit Cards’, ‘Business Services’, ‘Reports’, and an important ‘Year-End Guide’ because when tax time rolls around as it does each year you will have a complete record of Income and Expenditures that you will be comfortable explaining to the IRS. A necessary part of every affordable web design company is an account system that doesn’t take a lot of time to maintain. An efficient system will help keep your web design prices competitive.
Using the “Memorizing Form” option will remind you when to send out reoccurring invoices and you will not missing annual renewals which are very easy to forget when you have several hundred web sites.
You will have the basics for ‘Year-End Closing’ with a complete guide to help you prepare for year-end closing in QuickBooks. You will be able to get answers to your FAQs and help with tasks such as reconciliation and tax data exports.
The time you save with the small business accounting software from QuickBooks on your every day accounting chores will translate to your reputation as an affordable web design company. Repetitive tasks become a thing of the past with this small business software and your web design prices will be comparatively cheap.
You will have excellent summary reports readily available. No more sorting through piles of paper or trying to think where you stashed that important file. This software organizes all your important small business information in one place, giving you easy access to an accurate picture of your business.
This will help you get it right the first time and every time. Forget about your arithmetic or the formulas on your spreadsheet. This system automates all of that for you and your data is always accurate and planning financial goals is easier. No wasted time double checking your work you will know it is correct.
The QuickBooks software although complex designed to be ‘User friendly’ and the are many self help books available. Entering your transactions is straightforward because the forms look like the well-known paper forms you use every day the result is the easiest accounting solution to learn and use. BlackGyr rates the program number one and recommended it for a Web Site Design Business.
- Millard Hiner
How to Set a Price for Web Design Work
Your prime objective here is to charge what your work is worth Not to you but to your client and that means that you need to give them a guarantee that they will be completely happy with the finished product you provide. The simple way to start is to set a fixed fee for the complete web site and to do this you will need some incremental prices. It is affordable web design and reasonable web design pricesthat an online cost estimate for web design will convince your web site visitors to choose your company.|Your prime objective here is to charge what your work is worth. The cost of your work must be acceptable to your customer and they must be happy to pay your fees. One way to insure their satisfaction is to offer a money back guarantee. The determination of fees is a subjective process but if you plan on providing the client a fixed fee for the complete web site you will need to break down your charges for each step in the design process.
Here are some categories to price for your Price Schedule:
Standard Page We suggest you start by taking your day job salary rate per hour and use it for your base rate per hour. Now determine the time you start on a ten page web site and then design that site. Do this with five different web sites and then take the total number of hours you have spent divided by five, times your hourly salary rate and you have a starting place for a price per page for a ‘Standard Page’ your design fees. Interactive Page For your interactive pages depending on the type of form you use you may charge 1.5 to 3 times what you charge for a Standard Page.
Forum The setup fee for a phpBB should be about three times what you are charging for your Standard Page. This is dependant on your client’s ability to administer the Forum and assumes they will be doing the complete administration of the board.
Shopping Cart (PayPal) Setup (with 30 items). We suggest you pick one shopping cart to become very familiar with and use it almost exclusively. If the client requires a specific cart then charge by the hour to setup their cart. A reliable and easy to use cart is available form PayPal.
Shopping Cart (PayPal) Items (rate per item above the first 30). If you are using a PayPal cart, $5.00 per item is a reasonable price for additional shopping cart items.
Web Site Maintenance fees. A very difficult rate to set for a beginning firm because of the possible time that may be required for the site. Most web sites require very little maintenance while certain types require many hours a week.
The next step after you have established you prices is to decide how to present them on your web site. You want a simple but clearly described price schedule and you may want to give three or four levels of web site prices. I like to see an example of the cost estimate a vender will provide for a Request for a Proposal (RFP).
- Millard Hiner
Why you should consider taking an accounting course online
Taking an accounting course online can be helpful to anyone that is managing money, whether at home or at work. Getting an online accounting degree can increase your chances for employment in many different market sectors. There are several different accounting schools that you can choose from to get your online accounting degree at your leisure and in your spare time. Many CPAs have used the Internet to start their careers while working at other jobs during the week. They employ the use of accredited universities that offer courses from entry-level programs all the way to doctorate level and also CPA courses. You can choose several courses of study. You can choose the path to become a CPA, an accountant that deals with forensics, working in the government , or opting to become a financial advisor.
When choosing an accounting course online you’ll want to make sure that the course you are taking will expose you to various Accounting software packages, especially if you are seeking to find work within a larger corporation. Most of these companies use major software accounting packages for which it is necessary to have at least some familiarity to be seriously considered for the position.
One of the biggest benefits of taking an accounting course online is your ability to work in the real world while you are taking the course. Even if, while you are working on your bachelors degree, you your job is just a staff accountant position in a small firm, this puts you far ahead of graduates from colleges and universities who don’t have your on the job experience.
Usually these graduates will perform unpaid or low pay internships before they can land the position that will be waiting for someone that has already been working in the field, someone who, while attending accounting school, has gained proven, practical knowledge. The individual with both a strong education plus work experience is much preferred by employers.
The accounting field is expected to have strong job growth for the next decade. There are so many openings and so many types of positions including, but not limited to titles such as Tax Manager, Fund Accounting Analyst, Financial Analyst, Internal Audit Manager, Tax Accountant, Accounting Manager, Project Accountant, Investment Accountant and Procurement Manager. The list is large and growing. If you are looking for the flexibility to seamlessly maintain your current job and your family life then getting your accounting degree online can open many doors.
- James Hunter
The Apple iPod
TheiPod is one of the most important inventions of this generation.The greatest achievement of the iPod is that it changed the way we listen to music.In the generation before the iPod, you could only take so much music with you at any one time.There aren’t too many places where you can’t enjoy songs and music now, because of the iPod.
A lot of work went into developing the iPod. Apple realized that if they could capitalize on the trend of people downloading music from their computers, they could create something special. As a result of this foresight, the iPod became an important part of pop culture.
No matter where you go on Earth, you can easily spot someone with an iPod.Every country in the world loves their music, and the iPod lets them take their music with them.Many people, when traveling, bring their iPods with them.The iPod presence is strong. Just take a look around you at any given time to see how many people are using an iPod.
Another reason why the iPod has changed the music world forever is how it has altered the way we are exposed to music. It is easy to share and discover new songs with an iPod and with other iPod users. There are stories and tales of strangers with nothing in common besides listening to an iPod becoming fast friends by listening to what is on each other’s device! It seems that if you have an iPod, you are part of a select group of individuals with unique stories to tell and unique and personal songs to share. The iPod has truly opened up the world to a variety of new music, because of its portability. If music is a universal language, like love, then the iPod is the diary in which that language is recorded, remembered and shared. The iPod has opened up music and people to each other, which may be its greatest accomplishment aside from its technical capabilities.
The iPod has altered our view of music.The iPod can hold a vast number of songs.The iPod lets people bring literally every song they own if they want.
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- Chris Lorensen
Using Niche Directories for Easy Traffic
In my opinion, the easy part of Internet Marketing is building a website. Build a site that looks good, contains useful content, and is attractively and logically laid out and you’re in the money, right? Well, not exactly. Now comes the hard part. How to get visitors to your site?
Visitors will flock to your site if you can prove that you are different from every other site. Try to determine what particular niche the site fits into. Then, niche directories can help give you an edge over the competition.
You can easily build theme-related links using Niche Directories A niche directory is made up of links that specialize in some particular area, or point to sites that offer a product for a non-general audience – an audience that usually has more money to spend, and more incentive to spend it.
Niche Directory Advantages: Search engines are now placing more emphasis on the relevant anchor text and the theme of the links coming into your site. That means links from sites that are related to yours may end up weighing in your favor when it comes to getting a higher placement in the SERPs.
What’s good for the search engines is also important for other visitors. People who actively look for niche directories are highly targeted visitors. When they come to your site, they’re likely to be eager to read your reviews, sign up for your newsletter, join your forum, and check out your products or advertisements. They may even be more targeted than a visitor who comes straight from a Google search, since they choose your site from all the sites in that niche directory.
Whether your ideal visitor is into classic car restoration who is looking for that hard-to-find 1932 Ford carburetor, or a physician looking for integrated medical software, they have one thing in common. They are both people who are searching for specialized goods and services, they’re motivated to spend, and they usually don’t mind paying top dollar.
Since niche directories are usually smaller and, by definition, more focused, they can help your site become much easier to find. Both potential customers and search engine spiders will find it easier to discover you.
Finding Niche Directories. As with other things, it takes an extra investment of time to locate a directory in your niche. The vast majority of web directories combine many niches under one general umbrella site.
One way to locate directories is to go to a large meta-search engine, such as Dogpile (www.dogpile.com), and type in “niche search engine.” You will have to wade through a lot of junk to find what you’re looking for. But the advantage of using Dogpile is that it allows you to compare results from several of the biggest search engines at once.
Another, but more tedious method, is to hunt for niche portals and blogs that contain links pages. Social bookmarking communities, such as Spurl or del.icio.us are even better places to hunt around for topical lists of websites. Finding niche portals is more work, but should pay off handsomely in the future.
Keep looking and linking, and soon you will see your traffic and profits increase to where you always knew they could be.
Evelyn Grazini is a writer for the Affiliate Classroom and has been in Internet Marketing for more than 5 years. Her specialty is finding Niche Markets for Affiliate Marketing. Get Your Free Copy of The Niche Code today!
- Evelyn Grazini
Accounting Course Online: Accounting as a career
Studying accounting can be a real challenge, whether in a traditional classroom or online. The field of accounting is constantly changing and very complex, especially in light of the recent updates to domestic and international generally accepted accounting principles in the world economy. To help cope with this rapid change, an accounting course online gives students many advantages which are not always available in a traditional classroom setting.
There are many students which may not be able to attend a brick-and-mortar accounting school, because their personal affairs and time schedules conflict. One may bypass this problem by getting an online accounting degree: your career will advance to a very notable degree.
If you start an accounting course online you are allowed to use a lot of accounting literature and pronuncements available on your personal computer, which are usually not accessible in a traditional classroom. Contacts with classmates can occur online as well, and every student will be able to share information and opinions both with other fellow students and with his/her professors, all through the use of the personal computer of course.
This setting allows the individual students to share their thoughts and questions with their instructor and classmates. Without the concern of a time constraint, the instructor is capable of responding in a more leisurely fashion, unconcerned about the next lecture. Enrolling in an accounting course online allows students the chance to advance their careers without ever leaving home.
It may seem difficult to start an online accounting degree. But the benefits and the easy frequentation of an accounting course online result in a special advantage compared to traditional classroom courses: by bringing the classroom to your personal computer, and allowing you to take the opportunity to get lots of accounting literature usually not available to traditional classroom students.
Taking an accounting course online can be helpful to those interested in pursuing a career in accounting, or towards those individuals looking to obtain a background in accounting in order to expand or open a business. accounting school need not be an unachievable goal. Registering for an online accounting course can help one to begin a path to obtain a greater understanding of financial accounting standards while conforming to your schedule and will provide you with a wealth of information at your fingertips.
- James Hunter
How to start an online Web Design Business
You have to be able to publish to the Internet To do this you have to use Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is a relative easy programming language. For the day to day design work you probably will buy and learn to use one of the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors. However, learning the basics of HTML is still a prerequisite to starting a successful web design shop even if you use one of the canned HTML editors. Buy yourself a HTML reference book and a good find one is at the Dummies web site.
There are several very good WYSIWYG HTML editors for sale such as Microsoft’s FrontPage 2003 or Macromedia’s – DreamWeaver 8. FrontPage is probably the best choice for a beginner while DreamWeaver is a bit more sophisticated it is also more difficult to learn. In addition to these two HTML editors there are many more available and a search for ‘HTML editors’ on Google returns over seven million web sites.
Next you will need a hosting company to display your web site and there are hundreds to choose from. You may want to start cheap and the domain name registrar GoDaddy.com has server space for rent that will host a small web site for a very reasonable price. Or looking ahead you may even choose one of the companies offering reseller hosting plans so that you will be able to host the web site that you design thereby creating a built in source of reoccurring income. After trying almost a dozen different hosting companies BlackGyr now uses midPhase and recommends their service without reservation for their support, reliability and price.
So now you need to practice. Start on your own web site and work to create a site that YOU are proud to send any prospective client to for an example of the work you do. When you have reached this level of competence you are ready for the next step, pricing the work that you offer and that will be my next article and I will address web design prices which is the basis for a competitive business. Now affordable web design is not rocket science but a cost estimate for web design that makes sense to your clients is a must.
- Millard Hiner
Online Marketing Articles
Articles and information for online home based businesses. Find articles about online marketing, designing websites, web hosting, ecommerce and how to create a blog as a website.
Real Estate Investing Can Give You the Financial Freedom You’ve Always Wanted
becoming a real estate investor is not easy; time, energy and capital are required. However, a successful investor can reap enormous rewards, among them virtually limitless income as well as financial independence, with all the benefits that entails. Therefore, real estate investing will always remain an option that attracts people who have ambition and drive. This article presents four easy steps toward making your own real estate investment business plan, so you can get on the path to a more secure financial future.
You must begin with a budget in mind. Having a predetermined budget will help you determine your investment options. Avoid paying too much for a property, and stay away from properties that will be expensive or time-consuming to repair.
Second, it’s important that you’re confident and secure in your investment decisions. Know your strengths and what areas you have experience in. If you’ve done projects such as land development, home renovations, or interior decorating, for example, then choose investments that put that experience to good use.
Third, choose the right market to invest in. You’ve probably heard of the phrase “location, location, location.” Well, the goal of real estate investing is to sell your property for more than you paid for it. The ideal place for that is in an expanding real estate market which regularly has more buyers than sellers and, as a result, rising prices. You should familiarize yourself with the current trends in your property’s market.
A different strategy to real estate investing is to spot a property at a discounted value, upgrade it, and sell it for a profit. This approach, often referred to as “flipping,” is for the investors with skills as it requires thoughtful planning and budgeting. It can provide much higher short-term reward but at the same time carries greater risk because of the possible complications and cost overruns.
The final step now is to do your homework. There is no better way than doing some hard work when your money is at stake. Like any type of investment, losses can be greater than your potential profit, thus carefully consider your goals when doing real estate investment. It is best to be prepared and plan ahead.
Before you make your first purchase, you should know what you are buying and what the risks are as well as the trend in the overall marketplace. Inspect the property or hire a professional to do a thorough inspection for you. Visit the city or county planning office and research local ordinances and anything that may apply to your prospective investment. Know why the owner is selling the property as much as you know why you’re interested in buying it.
- Scott Roemermann
Novice SEO Tricks That Produce Lots Of Free Traffic To Your Website
Be forwarned! There is no fast way for you to get fantastic rankings and lots of traffic to your site inside of ten seconds, like all of the other so called Search Engine Optimization Gurus who fill your email inbox claim. But then again, if you believe all of the hype that they regurgitate, you might still believe in the tooth fairy or that the earth is flat.
However, if you want honest information about how a sheer amateur built and marketed a very successful, profitable website in well under one year, then stick around. This article is really about what has worked exceptionately well at getting mountains of highly targeted traffic to an ecommerce website that I own.
A year ago I was a complete novice at this, and I didn’t even know what Search Engine Optimization, reciprocal links or article spooling and marketing was. Today I am the owner of a outrageously successful ecommerce website.
Now, I don’t claim to be an SEO expert. But I can honestly tell you that in well under one year, I’ve been very successful at driving huge amounts of traffic to my website without paying for it. And my ecommerce website also has a much higher conversion rate than many other sites on the web. In other words, my site is well in the “black” and making plenty of money.
Here is a little background on my experience: I’ve been an entrepreneur since 1969 and I’ve had more than my fair share of success at it. Since about 90% of all new businesses fail within 36 months, and many established businesses fail regularly, I believe that over the years I’ve learned how to rapidly adapt to a changing marketplace.
I decided to morph my profession into an Internet based business in Feb.. So I installed a copy of Microsoft FrontPage and I started building an ecommerce site. At the same time I started morphing my “product” for online consumption. In June, I was 59 and I retired from my business in order to focus full time on marketing my “product” via my ecommerce website.
You might be wondering what my “product” is. My “product” is information. But I’m not going to reveal to you exactly what kind of information it is that I sell, and I’m not going to send you to my website because I don’t want my competitors to know how I took a brand new homemade PR0 site, and advanced it to a PR4 site by Thanks Giving – a six month time span.
More importantly, I don’t want them to know what I did to get my homemade website to rank on the first page in the Google organic SERPS for lots of very important keyword phrases, and on the first three pages of Google, Yahoo, and MSN organic SERPS for literally hundreds of different keyword phrases. It has taken me well under a year, and lots of my competition has been struggling at it for up to ten years!
I’ll admit that I wasted a lot of money and time on a lot of Internet marketing software and lots of worthless information from the “Internet Get Rich Quick Gurus.” At the same time I’ve learned which software packages are productive and worth the investment.
HOW I FOUND SUCCESS ON THE INTERNET – ARTICLE WRITING AND MARKETING
Many people use link trading to promote ecommerce sites. I myself have traded links with others in my industry. However, it is my belief that writing articles and getting them published on thousands of competitor sites for free has had the most profound impact on my ecommerce site’s search engine ranking and my income. But beware: If you are not fully aware of the downside of article marketing, you can quickly drive yourself out of business.
WHAT MAKES ARTICLE MARKETING SO EFFECTIVE?
It’s simple: 1. The fastest way to good rankings on the major search engines is to have a lot of one-way links from other on-topic sites to your site.
2. When you write and publish a good article to another site, your “payment” for the use of that article is one or more links from that article back to your site. The more articles that you publish, the more free one-way links pointing back to your site. The more one-way links from other on-topic sites, the better your site will rank in the organic SERPS.
3. If you are capable of writing a good article, you can set yourself apart as an expert in your field. Well written articles will create a lot of validation for you in the eyes of the public. And a well-written article is one of the best ways to get qualified traffic to your site. That’s because people will read it, and if you’ve built their trust through your article, they will click your link to see what you have to offer them.
NOW FOR THE MONKEY WRENCH – AVOIDING THE GOOGLE DUPLICATE CONTENT FILTER
If you want to be successful then you must get your articles onto hundreds or even thousands of other websites. Google doesn’t like content that has been duplicated on other websites. So in the event that you have an article on hundreds or thousands of other websites, Google can find the identical articles and only give you credit for the links in one, or maybe a few of the published articles.
So in reality, in order to get the most benefit from your articles you will need to create a different well-written article for each website. But it is almost impossible to accomplish that, right?
Well . . . . Thanks to modern computer software, articles can be spun, spooled, or re-written automatically using software. And indeed, in 2006, article-spooling software began to emerge on the scene.
Unfortunately, most spooled articles are worthless because the articles that the software creates on full autopilot can be totally laughable. The grammar and syntax is very often all wrong. And people who read them usually think that they were published by a three year old. And because of latent symantic indexing, the Google algorithm can also pick out and ignore your articles as well.
However, if you create an article that has been well-written to begin with, and then use the spooling software correctly, the software can re-write your article into hundreds or even thousands of unique, high quality articles that anyone would feel proud of. And more importantly, the articles will be more than unique enough to avoid the duplicate content filters.
If you don’t like to write, if you do not have the time, or don’t have the expertise, you do not need to worry. You can purchase PLR (private label rights) articles and spin them! But you are always better off if you can write your own articles.
I’ve used desktop article spooling software that I paid about $200.00 for, to create these kinds of spun articles, and it works great. As I write this page, I still do use this software for creating articles that I submit to article directories. The upside of this is that each article directory gets a unique version of the article, and this version won’t get filtered out by the duplicate content filters. The down side is that as other webmasters take these articles from the article directories and publish them on their sites, most of these re-published articles will get filtered out. But they will still increase the traffic to your site as people read them and click your links.
Published articles will usually produce a lot more referrals if they are published on your competitor’s website! But it is usually somewhere between very difficult and impossible to recruit other competitor webmasters to publish your articles. So that relegates you to submitting directly to article directories.
HERE IS SOME GOOD NEWS!
There are some affordable Internet sites that allow you to use their article spooling software right on their websites, to create dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unique articles. Some of these sites will even let you try out their service for free. It is easy to learn and to use their software. And the benefits of these services are almost too good to be true. Let me tell you a little bit about these services.
To start with, the best part about these services is that they can take your article, and they can spin an unlimited number of unique versions of it. Then they publish a different unique version of your article on hundreds of on-topic websites. These articles are so unique that a duplicate content filter will not filter out these articles. So you will get the benefit of all of your back links for ranking purposes.
This is real efficiency. We are talking about the ability to get your well-written articles published on hundreds of your competitors and your peer’s websites practically overnight. To make the situation even more attractive, when your articles are published on another site, they won’t publish that Webmaster’s articles on your site. This will eliminate reciprocal linking and will net you hundreds, or even thousands of one-way links.
Unlike most article directories where the number of links you can place in your article are very limited, these services allow you to put up to 5 keyword rich links in each of your articles. It’s best to have each of those back links go to a different page on your site, not just to your home page.
You should make the links appropriate. So if your article is about baby furniture, and you are talking about cribs, you’ll want to link to a page about baby cribs on your site. If you are talking about playpens, you’ll want to link to a page that features playpens, etc.
The plans for the future on some of these article spinning sites are to spool your unique articles to thousands of on-topic blogs, and into hundreds of article directories automatically. And remember, every submission will be unique as far as the duplicate content filters are concerned.
Don’t get carried away, because this is not a 10 second fix for the huge job of publishing hundreds of unique articles and submitting them to hundreds of article directories and potentially thousands of your competitor’s websites. If you believe that something like that exists, then you probably still believe in the tooth fairy.
You still must be willing to put sufficient effort into creating well-written professional articles. And then you must be willing to put sufficient effort into creating the synonym words and phrases that the software requires to spool your unique article. But believe me, you could not do in a year by manual means what these services can do in a matter of mere hours.
Here is an example of what can be accomplished: I wrote 4 different articles on different kinds of information that I sell. And after only twelve days on one of these services, my articles were on 242 different competitor site on-topic web pages.
You can do the math! With 5 links in each article, one to my home page and 4 to different deep linked product pages on my site, that’s nine-hundred-sixty-eight links in only 12 days! And I began to see some of those links indexed by the major search engines within that same time period. A little mathmatical extrapolitation will tell you what will happen after a month, 3 months, a year, etc.!
JUST HOW HARD IS IT TO SPIN ARTICLES USING THESE SERVICES?
It is very easy to use the software and a 9-year old child could learn the process. You will learn to use it within a few minutes.
Many of these article spinning services will allow you to test out their service for free. They give you a 30-day money back guarantee. You will get to try it for a full month to find out how much it can help your site to improve its traffic before you are committed to having to pay for the use of the software. I highly recommend this type of service and you will want to give it a try!
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Albert Weiss is an amateur at SEO. He is NOT one of the thousands of self-proclaimed Search Engine Optimization Gurus that inhabit the Internet. However, as a novice, he has built a very successful and profitable ecommerce site in well under one year. His site is successfully competing with other top producing websites in his industry, many of which have been on the Internet for ten years or more!
Mr. Weiss has documented the steps that were taken to drive lots of free traffic to his site to make it successful by relying on article spinning, as well as how using several other aspects of Search Engine Optimization can make an ecommerce site a successful money maker. He developed a Free Search Engine Optimization Information Website just for you! So go to www.ArticleSpooling.com right now.
Mr. Weiss has documented the steps that were taken to drive lots of free traffic to his ecommerce site to make it successful by relying on article spinning and marketing, as well as how incorporating several other aspects of Search Engine Optimization can make an ecommerce site a success. He created a Free Search Engine Optimization Website just for you! So go to www.ArticleSpooling.com today.
- Albert Weiss