My accountant has been over the last few days do do my first quarterly tax returns. Man, this is one part of freelancing I don’t like. I don’t mind paying my taxes. Well, I don’t like it, but I want to pay what I owe and not any more than that. The taxes aren’t too bad so far, but I’m about to have to pay taxes on earnings. I’m showing a profit for the end of last year, which isn’t the case. My expenses for getting setup, among other things, there just wasn’t any profit. Because of some where some deposits fell and when the payments made after those deposits came it shows on paper that I made a profit.

In the long run I don’t think it’ll be too bad. We still haven’t finished recording all my expenses for last year and I’ve got a few months before we actually pay my yearly taxes.

But seriously, taxes are much simpler when you work for someone. And people will give you loans. I always thought there were plenty of breaks for a small business to get started yet every time I turn around a different department has their hand in my wallet draining my money.

Any of you freelancers or small business owners got any tax tips?

Technorati Tags: Freelancing, Small Business, Taxes

My friend Patrick, whom you probably know from phpBBHacks.com, just announced the launch of his latest project, ManagingCommunities.com.

The site targets anyone who runs an online community, though I think anyone who has to manage users would benefit from subscribing. But perhaps the most important part of Patrick’s announcement is the release of his book, Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. The book is due out in April but I can tell you know it’s well worth reading. I was happy when Patrick asked me to read some early chapters and then eventually a couple of early versions and final drafts. He also asked me to write the Foreword for the book, which I was honored to do.

So help Patrick out, go pre-order the book. It’s listed at $24.95, but amazon has it on sale for $16.32 plus another 5% of you pre-order. Grab it Managing Online Forums now.

I think some of my favorite blogs are reaching out to me today. I started working from home this past August and most of the time I love it. It’s got its share of ups and downs too, but for the most part, I love it. If you work from home, or want to know more about what it’s like, I highly recommend these articles:

• Working from home - Motivation and Accountability?
• Top 30 Tips for Staying Productive and Sane While Working From Home
• The “Work From Home” Generation

I found it odd that 3 stories from 3 different blogs I read would pop up on just about the same topic. I guess it’s just “in the air” lately, and it is a growing trend.

Technorati Tags: Work From Home

Ben over at the Blogging Experiment writes Learn from the Gold Rush: SHUT UP!. His article suggests that if you happen upon some successful idea, don’t go running to tell everyone about it, or you’ll find yourself with a bunch of prospectors trying to stake a claim to your find. It’s actually good advice and I’m about to disregard it and tell you how to make money like they did during the gold rush.

Ben left out a little bit of history when describing what happened during the gold rush. Most prospectors didn’t get rich from finding gold. These people often sold everything they had to move out to California to prospect. Nearly 300,000 people rushed into the area in search of riches promised by large veins of gold discovered there. But the smart money wasn’t on the gold at all, it was on the prospectors themselves. The people who cleaned up and made the real money are those forward thinking folks who sold the prospectors their gear. They sold them pans, picks and all the tackle they would need to go out and prospect. Most of which they’d have to buy more than once as they broke, lost or had theirs stolen. As more prospectors showed up, so did more merchants, ready to peddle their wares to the new settlers of California. Between the rising cost of living, equipment and goods offered, the people mining the gold were just handing it over to the people who saw the opportunity to market to a captive market. In short, the people mining gold did all the work while merchants simply sold their wares from the comfort of their shops. There were exceptions, of course. There are always a handful of savvy business people in any group, and the prospectors had their share as well. Eventually, though, only large groups with money and equipment would be able to get at the valuable ore.

In terms of blogging or doing business online, that gold rush is still happening. The people making the most money aren’t those building sites, but the people catering to them. Offering them advice, hosting, programs, ebooks, seo, consulting… the list goes on and on. Like with the gold rush, there are obviously people creating web sites and making money, but like so many other industries, it’s the feeders, as I like to call them, who are really raking in the cash. One great example is the ‘writing’ industry. There is no shortage of business that cater just to writers, everything from professional copy editors (a good thing) to people who will be happy to charge you to publish your book (a very bad thing). There are even scams, like poetry.com, who will publish every single poem submitted and sell you an author copy for a nice sum of money. They know that the writer is going to buy a handful to pass around to friends. They aren’t targeting readers, they are going directly after the writer!

My point, before I get too lost, is that if you can find a way to service a niche you may be able to make more money than if you were publishing in that niche. Something to think about when you’re cooking up ways to make more money online. Anyone out there with a site need a consultant? I’m kidding. Unless you do need someone.

Technorati Tags: Making Money, Consulting, Gold Rush, Marketing

After the recent fiasco with buying and selling text links, I wanted to make sure it was still allowed to sell banner ads. I was suprised to find out it’s not. You don’t have to worry about putting “nofollow” on your banner ads though, Google will do that automatically for you. Pretty cool, right?

I think anyone would agree that webmasters bring Google ungodly amounts of money, yet it seems like Google has grown to hate us. Google, the search engine, lives on links. They even say so and warn against a site that hordes there on traffic without linking out. They encourage you to link out. But they don’t want you to get links in!

Here is some of the shenanigans Google has pulled lately:

• Link exchanges are bad
• Directories that link directly to you are bad
• Buying links is bad
• Selling links is bad
• Selling ads that directly link to the buyer’s site is bad
• Giving away a program, plugin, theme or software that requires a “link” is bad

And the list goes on and on. I’m not the only one that feels this way. I work hard on my sites and I try to stay within the rules. The one on the list that probably bugs me the most is “linkware”. If I put my hard work into a software package (a forum, community site, whatever) or a theme, I should get some sort of reward. If I decide to release it as “linkware”, that’s my right. They are currently cracking down on sponsored themes, which I do get to an extent. But as a theme creator, that’s my design and in exchange for using it, I ask for a link. That’s a small token of support and helps me continue doing those kinds of things for free. I’m giving something of value and getting something of value back.

I don’t know how far they are going to take their vendetta against links, but I’m starting to lose faith in a company I used to have huge respect for, who’s motto is “don’t be evil”, who’s products I truly enjoy and tell everyone to use. I’m feeling burned and as more webmasters look for alternative sources of traffic we will influence our readers to use that source. Google is creating the tool of their own undoing. Sure, it’ll take a while, but their sewing the wrong kind of seeds. They won’t like the crop come harvest.

Technorati Tags: Google, Big Brother, Text Links, Banner Ads, Making Money, Webmasters

Since I’ve relaunched my blog I’ve been focusing on the things that pop up in my day as a freelancer and blogger. I’ve been posting a mixed back of items, everything from my thoughts on freelancing to actual programming tips. I’ve got another domain that would be perfect for tech tips and I’m thinking of leaving those off here and keeping the site purely focused on the business end of things. Observations, tips and other information and anything I learn as I do this full time but leaving all the “geek” technical stuff out. I think it would make more sense to keep the code and stories separate because I doubt the majority of the audience would be interested in both.

So in a few weeks I’ll launch a more technical blog, but in the mean time, this one shall continue on it’s new path.

I had to update a link for a client today and most of their content is database driven. This makes it easy to do quick searches and even search and replace. Most databases support this and the syntax is pretty close, but this tip is specifically for MySQL.

So, lets say you have an affiliate link that looks like this:

http://www.domain.com/aff.php?affid=1234

But you get an email from your affiliate manager telling you to update your links to a new format like this:

http://affiliates.domain.com/offer/1234

MySQL will make that easy.

First, lets check to see how many of our records have that url:

SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE field_name like ‘%http://www.domain.com/aff.php?affid=1234%’

In plain English, that means, select everything from the table named ‘table_name’ where the filed named ‘field_name’ is like the url. The % signs around the url are “wildcards”.

Lets say it returned 189 records. Now lets do our replace

UPDATE table_name SET field_name = REPLACE(field_name, “http://www.domain.com/aff.php?affid=”, “http://affiliates.domain.com/offer/”) WHERE field_name like ‘%http://www.domain.com/aff.php?affid=1234%’

This query is a little more complex, but still pretty straight forward. You should see 189 records updated. You don’t have to use the where clause in this query, but I do simply because it speeds things up and it’s a good habit to always use a where clause unless you really need for your query to look at or check every record. In that query, inside the replace, the first field is the OLD string that you want to replace and the second one is the NEW string you want to replace it with. Just like search and replace using your favorite text editor.

Technorati Tags: MySQL, Search, Replace

I do a lot of development in linux/unix. In fact, that’s where all my development is, but I spend a fair amount of time in the “CLI” or command line interface. I use putty and ssh in to edit files and look at logs and just generally do what I do.

Today I ran into a problem with a file and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I kept getting an error and the spacing was off so I started suspecting a hidden character. vi, the command line editor I use in linux can show you hidden characters. Just type:

set: list

And bingo, hidden characters are revealed.

Turning them back off is just as easy:

set: nolist

Write that down, it comes in handy.

I’m getting ready to kick start We Heart Pets. It already gets some decent amount of traffic from all the hard work Aeryn has put into it and with both of us writing and adding features I can see it being a very solid site for us. In it’s prime it was doing about 1000 unique visitors a day according to webalizer (which is a bit inflated, but just as a baseline) and it’s about half that now. I suspect in 3 months it’ll be double that. I need to get Google Analytics up on it as it’s much more accurate.

The template is based off the one I did for this site and for Twitter Hacks. And speaking of stats, Twitter Hacks is doing about 1000 page views a day on average and around 120 rss subscribers. It’s doing really well in terms of natural growth.

While I want to rush into getting as many sites going and profitable as possible I just want to take it slow and get each one going full steam before I decide if we can handle another project. My wife and I both love books, but the margin is so low on them that it’s hard to justify putting in a ton of work for such a small product. Still, we may build our book site just as a fun project once we get a little further along. We do have one unique product in mind for that niche that we haven’t seen anywhere yet and it’s hard enough to create that it’ll be useful to anyone who loves books, I think!

Last week and this week has been rough. My Windows PC got a major trojan/virus, which I haven’t had in years. It was stupidity induced trying to help out a family member, but that’s how it goes. I’ve been needing a format for years though and when antivirus and spyware tools couldn’t identify or clean the infection it was time to format. I also happen to have just bought a Macbook Pro, which I love. So it’s time to ask:

What do you use for web development on your Mac and/or PC?

On my PC, I use Photoshop, FileZilla and Putty. I usually use UltraEdit and Homesite, but the versions I had were from a previous job (I bought the pc when I left) so now I have to re-buy them myself. I’m 99% sure I’m going to buy UltraEdit for the search and replace alone. It’s fairly cheap and has a ton of great features. Homesite is a little pricey, but I haven’t found anything that feels as good. I’m toying with Alleycode, which is free. If I have to pay for it I’m going to buy Homesite. But if you guys have a great tool that’s free, I’d love to hear about it.

On my Mac I’m using Transmit, Coda, Terminal and Textmate. I’m not as proficient with the Mac a I am with the PC yet so I’m not sure I could just abandon the PC all together, but it’s very tempting at this point. The Macbook Pro is about as solid as you could hope for. You can pry it from my cold dead hands!

So, what are you using? I’d love to try out some new stuff. I have 30 day bets for Homesite and UltraEdit so I have some time before I have to buy. I’d rather spend money on advertising or PPC rather than buying more software.