Updated: Seminar on Using Blogging in Your Writing Career
Due to scheduling conflicts, we will not be the featured presentation at the May 8, 2010 meeting of the Louisville Christian Writers Group. We apologize for this inconvenience and we are working diligently to get this seminar rescheduled in the local area.
5 Small Business Blogs We Like
We wanted to share with you the 5 Small Business Blogs that we like. Every day, between all of us, we skim through hundreds of articles. The five blogs we’re listing always have value-added content! The links we’re listing go directly to the feed, so have your reader ready!
- The Small Business United Blog - by Intuit
- Small Business Brief / Current News
- Small Business Computing News
- Today’s Small Business News from Inc.
- MintLife Blog
Feel free to comment and add your own favorite small business blog to the list!
Small Business Taxes
Yesterday the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council published the Business Tax Index 2010. The Council looks at 16 different tax measures ranging from income, unemployment, property taxes, etc. and ranks all 50 states from best to worse. The best… South Dakota. The worst… New Jersey.
Depending on how you organized your business, there may be several tax strategies available for you and your accountant to consider. For example, some things to consider are how to reduce the amount of taxable income and/or reducing your tax rate. For those times you do have to pay taxes, controlling when those payments are made could avoid potential cash flow problems. Make sure you and your tax advisor understand what tax credits are available to you and how to properly claim those credit. Be diligent in watching for anything that might trigger the Alternative Minimum Tax rules.
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The Tax Man Cometh
April 15 will be here soon. Have you finished your taxes yet? Take our quick poll to see who the procrastinators are! In a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” How true that is!
With the clock ticking, you may be scouring the web for guidance. To save you from pulling more hair from your head, take a look at our quick links list:
- IRS Small Business Tax Center – when in doubt, call
- Tax Center at Entrepreneur’s website
- Small Business Tax Center at business.gov
If you are a do-it-yourself kind of person, both Intuit and H&R Block have software packages applicable to business owners. If you need a CPA, check out these references:
If you find that you’re running out of time, be sure to file an extension. You’ll still have to send in any taxes owed to avoid penalty, but you’ll gain extra time to file that paperwork.
Procrastinator Poll
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Fast Intro to Web Analytics
Overview
We’re not quite sure how to describe a portion of our business in “politically correct” terms. Often we’re called in to “clean up” the mess left by the previous web designer, web master, IT contractor, nephew, niece, or the kid next door. Following the parlance of some talk show hosts, we’ve coined the term WINO – Web-guru In Name Only. One particular area of irritation is the “web analytics” (and we use that term loosely) solution that was sold to the client. The worse case involved a custom application that had script on each page that wrote to a database and tracked… wait for it… page views only. Despite the fact that the developer had access to the server logs and could have used a free tool like Google Analytics, the client was charged for this custom add-on.
Page Views alone tell you absolutely nothing about the success (or failure) of your web site. Page views are just one metric out of many that you should be examining on a regular basis. This article will present an entry-level explanation to web analytics terminology. It’s our hope that this will prime you with questions to ask your web team. As always, if you need our input, we’d be glad to help. If you’re the DIY-type, check out our web analytics package.
The Basics
Monitoring is the only way to benchmark your web efforts. Whether your hosting your own site or having it hosted for you, you should have access to your raw server log files. If you don’t – ask your provider or IT staff. To make sense out of those logs, you’ll need to use a log file analyzer. There are several free log file analyzers available. We’ll discuss log file analysis in a separate article. Page tagging is another method to analyzer your web site’s effectiveness. Google Analytics, WebTrends, and other third party software applications utilize page tagging methodologies.
Any monitoring package should be able to tell you Duration, Hits, Page Views, Referrers, Unique Visitors and Visitors. Duration is the length of time a visitor is on your site. Accuracy depends on server session time out. This is a good reference to check for search terms but not a good metric for tracking. Hits are any call made by the browser back to the server. This could be for an image, a script, or a stylesheet. This is probably the most misunderstood term. Hits are not a reliable measurement of success. Page Views are the number of complete web pages requested from the server. This is a good measurement when viewed in the context of Number of Unique Visitors. Referrers are represented by the link that your visitor clicked on to get to your site. This is a good metric to watch if you’re running an advertising campaign or have your web site linked from other places. Unique Visitors are calculated by the number of visits to your site from a particular IP address. If you’re depending solely on server logs, this could be skewed by visitors behind a single firewall. Visitors represent the number of visits to your site. This could consiste of humans and/or robots.
Basic Web Metrics
At a minimum, you should be monitoring Page Views/Visit, Unique Visitors, and Referrers. There are many more metrics available – depending on the monitoring method you use – but we consider these core components to review daily.
Minimal Metrics
What’s Next ?
As a business owner, you’re comfortable with watching your P&L. You should be just as comfortable measuring the success of your web site with analytics. Whether your outsource this aspect of your business or manage it yourself with a tool similar to Veracity’s Site Analytics, it’s important that you monitor this aspect of your business.