Archive for February, 2008
Feb
22
Posted in Internet, Real World
Just under a month ago, there was a huge battle, of sorts, between me and Langley High School administrators on the legality of creating Internet-based proxies, outside of school time, on private servers. I was accused of being a criminal by assisting students in bypassing the school’s block lists and filters, and was punished on multiple levels for what I did: I had my computer access at school removed, threatened suspension if I didn’t bring down all my proxies, and defamed on a school-wide level.
But now, I have won it all back. With the help of masses of the Internet, through press on such websites as Digg.com and Fark.com, my school, Langley High School, has given me back everything they’ve taken away from me. My respect, my privileges in school, and most importantly, my right to create whatever I want on the Internet outside of school, without having to fear the government’s hammer cracking down on me.
As previously stated, I did nothing wrong. I, personally, did not use my proxies inside the school network, did not create them during school hours, created them on my own privately owned servers, and did not actively promote my service to others in my school. I was simply accused of doing wrong because other students discovered my proxy, and used it during school hours to access websites such as FaceBook.
With the help of some lawyers, who contacted me after the media caught wind of this abuse of power in FCPS, I managed to work up a case (not on a court level), and successfully settled (in my favor) with the school. I got my rights back. And I’m happy now. Thanks guys and gals, all the support was greatly appreciated (however overwhelming), and it’s thanks to each person that supported the case that brings me to where I am today: free.
Digg: http://digg.com/people/Student_Fights_Back_Against_High_School_s_Web_Restrictions/
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Feb
20
Posted in Real World, Stocks
This morning, I found myself stuck in some serious rush hour traffic, and being in a hurry to reach my destination, I was switching lanes constantly (not driving too aggressively, mind you), attempting to navigate my way into the fastest lane. However, I found the harder I tried to get past the traffic, the more I ended up in a mess, stuck in the lanes that were not moving at all. It just seemed like every time I tried to switch lanes, I was always a “day late, dollar short”. By the time I switched lanes, about ten other cars would have also switched into the lane, ultimately causing me to get stuck in a jammed lane, when the lane I was previously in would suddenly start moving, and the car that was once behind me ended up ten cars ahead of me.
It hit me that driving during the rush hour jam is a lot like trading in the stock market. If you’re trying to squeeze your way into the (at least what seems like) faster lane, you better act quick and decisively, otherwise you’ll be too late and you’ll just end up even more screwed then you were in the “long” lane. Same exact principle applies to day trading. In order to make money off high volume, ‘in the news’ stocks, you better get on the bandwagon before the stock reaches its high for the day, otherwise you’ll end up losing money you could have made had you held onto a less risky, solid growth stock.
It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and nobody cares if you’re late when your on the road, except yourself. Likewise, if you’re the emotional, indecisive trader in the stock market, nobody is going to try to help you when you start losing your hard-earned cash. Either take the risk boldly and cherish (or suffer) the rewards (or consequences), or don’t get yourself in the sticky web of chaos in the first place.
Well, there’s my rant for the day. Time to jump on some trades, so I don’t end up a dollar short like I was this morning. What does the stock market remind you of?
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Feb
19
Posted in Internet
Most webmasters nowadays are lazy. In fact, that’s usually the impetus behind why they want to become a webmaster in the first place. Nothing better than being your own boss, working at your own pace/time, and best of all, working from the comfort of your own home. But most web-”masters” are actually just web-”wannabes”. Everyday, I have to deal with a handful of people who ask me for help making money on the Internet. Most of them think the Internet is easy to master. Many of them think that writing a blog on WordPress, quite possibly the easiest CMS to manage in the world (as if CMSs weren’t easy enough in and of themselves), makes them an Internet entrepreneur. Almost all of them think short term and look for quick cash opportunities. Only a select few look long term, willing to invest a shit-ton of time and tons of resources into a project which may not reward a single cent till months down the road. In the end, the short term thinkers tend to call it quits in a matter of weeks; the long term thinkers end up with some serious money in the bank.
Nevertheless, there are still many ways to make cash online with minimal effort. Websites like online arcades, proxies, and file hosting services offer valuable services that millions of Internet users use daily. With such a large audience of users to cater to, there is generally a lot of room to take part in these niches. Though competition is fierce, and you’ll find yourself hard-pressed trying to game your SEO to the top of the search results, you can still make a good deal of money if you play your cards right.
Not to mention that these sites are largely autonomous: after the initial setup, you essentially don’t have to do a single thing to keep them running. No need to add content daily, no need to pay a staff to keep the site up to date, no need to even visit the site on a daily basis. They can run and grow on their own, just add water (ahem, just provide the hosting payments).
I, on the side, own a network of 30 or so online arcade websites. Among a few of the smaller ones are AllBestGames.com, ArcadeNoob.com, and BuffGamer.com. Altogether, the three of them rake in nearly $400 a month from Yahoo! Publisher Network and various CPM advertising networks. Do the math, and you’ll see that I earn mid-$X,XXX from the compilation of all the arcade sites that I own.
The best part? I haven’t touched a single one of the arcade sites since late 2006/early 2007, and they still are growing. Each arcade pulls in an average of 500 unique visits a day, with an average of nearly 2,000 pageviews a day. This is the definition of autonomous. Making money (if small in amount) without doing a single thing or spending a single cent on advertising. Word of mouth and viral marketing handled it all for me.
Of course, it took a few months for the sites to get going. Didn’t make a cent for the first six months I ran the network (didn’t have any ads at first so as to attract visitors). Most webmasters would give up at that point. But I held on tight to my portfolio of independent websites, and now, thanks to the likes of Google search referrals, they all receive traffic and make a pretty penny.
I also ran a network of over 50 proxy sites once upon a time. Names like DopeProxy.com, ProxySecks.com, and BRBProxy.com were among a few of the many proxy sites that I ran for a while. Theses extremely easy-to-setup websites made quite a lot of money (around low-$X,XXX a month for all of the proxies combined) for a few months, but as they expanded, server usage increased dramatically, and the proxies started to get blocked by the big name blockers (Websense, McAfee, etc), which decreased US traffic, making the ROI continuously worse as days went by (as advertisers don’t care for international traffic). Ended up shutting them all down, wasn’t worth the stress or the hassle (at least for me, I’m sure a lot of people would love an extra thousand dollars a month of spending money).
So, I conclude that autonomous websites CAN be worthwhile. I would not recommend making them the main focus of your “making money online” ventures, but sprinkled in between bigger projects, they can make be a nice monetary buffer and offer some good supplementary income for you to build off of.
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Feb
18
Posted in Business, Internet
Though I focus the majority of my efforts online in the intangible realm of advertising, there’s a huge market for online product sales, known as e-commerce industry, which exists. Companies that develop products or services and sell them/charge for them through the Internet. Rather than relying off advertisers to create revenue, their websites serve as portals for users to buy stuff: whether it’s a new computer or subscription to advanced feature’s that a website has to offer, the visitors pay the owner in order to make use of the site (or portion thereof).
Woot.com is one such example of an extremely successful e-commerce venture. The unique online store and community combination serves as a place where tech savvy bargain shoppers can browse for various goods. Each day, Woot.com offers one product for sale at a hugely discounted price (Woot.com negotiates with manufacturers for bulk pricing on overstocked goods in order to be able to offer the discounts) until the product sells out, or until the next day’s product becomes available, whichever comes first.
The structure of the website company entices users to visit daily (thus constantly pumping a continuous flow of traffic) to catch the latest deals. The message boards consist of thousands of bargain shoppers who love to interact, and various inside-jokes (or specials), such as the prized “Bandolier of Carrots” and the infamous “Bag o’ Crap” (a $1 “surprise” product that thousands of Woot! users order simply for the fun of it), make the community an incredibly lively, upbeat place to talk, even if the company’s only goal is to increase sales. How many times do you have users willing to give you money for random junk? Woot.com hit the jackpot.
Woot.com is only one example of e-commerce. There are many other ways to make money online without utilizing advertising. Some individuals specialize in selling their products on eBay to make money. Others resort to the shady gray-market of dealing legal drugs (think online pharmacies) to make their ends meet. And then others offer syndicated adult content for a monthly fee, which, not surprisingly, a handful of people on the Internet are willing to pay for. There are many other ways to make money online without relying on advertising; I may not be able to sum it all up in one post, but take some time to think if you can find a way to sell a product/service online. Maybe you, too, will be thinking “Woot!” when your e-commerce venture hits the limelight.
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Feb
13
Posted in Stocks
Day trading is a gamble, no doubt about it. But it’s also a test of character. It’s a combination of how fast you can react on breaking news, how confidently you can invest money, and how quickly you can execute the respective orders. People who waste time deciding whether or not to invest are the losers; people who jump on each and every opportunity for money are the short-term winners. In day trading, you’re not deciding who’s going to hold onto your money for months, or years. You’re deciding who gets the chance to hold onto your money for seconds. So you gotta make up your mind fast, or you’ll lose out on some real money making opportunities.
Today, however, I experienced something somewhat out of the norm of day trading. The ask price of a stock is almost always higher than the bid price, I mean, that’s basically the foundation of the stock market. Seller offers higher than what the stock is worth, and buyer offers lower than the stock is worth. Simple. There have been a few times during after-hours wherein the bid price has risen above the ask price, but usually it’s because of some kind of transaction error or stale market data, and whatever asking/bidding (selling/buying) that goes on does not reflect the stated price.
Ambac (ABK) stock is shown above. As you can see, between 15:31 and 15:33, the bid price suddenly spiked above the ask price. Keep in mind the stock was nearly stagnant for a good ten minutes before this happened.
MBIA (MBI) stock is shown above. Considering MBIA is also a bond insurer, and also suffering from the same CDO (Collateralized Debt Obligation) mumbo-jumbo that Ambac is going through, the two companies tend to have the same ups and downs.
Anyways, I immediately called my TD Ameritrade representative and asked for assistance. Being as this is quite the anomaly in regular hours trading, I had to get to the bottom it. Meanwhile, I also purchased 300 shares of MBIA at 15:31:30, priced at 11.82, even though the bid price was 11.91. Wow, what a deal! I bought stock for lower than what other bidders are offering. So yes, I happened to be one of the two purple circle trade markers on the green ask price line on the MBIA chart at 15:31:30.
The TD Ameritrade representative wasn’t of much help, but she did get her supervisor to confirm that there were no errors in my transaction. I’m led to believe by the broker that I got stock for a bargain price because a handful of news was just released to investors. Therefore, there was not enough time for the sellers to adjust their asking prices, even though the bidders were successfully purchasing stock at the higher, anticipated price, and raising the bid value of their own shares. Talk about some news, Ambac and MBIA continued to rise till the end of the day and even into after hours.
I recovered a good portion of my losses from yesterday. Thank God.
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Feb
13
Posted in Internet
Oh, I’ve heard the horror stories. Yahoo!’s been kicking out innocent publishers from their poorly organized BETA program for a long time now. For some, Yahoo! accuses the webmasters of click fraud, for others, vague terms such as “lack of conversion”. They never lay out exact reasons or rationale behind their banning; they simply use and abuse their publishers when they feel necessary. Disagree with Yahoo!? Too bad! They obviously don’t care if you care about their relationship with you…
Let me first give you some background on my relationship with Yahoo!. I’ve been a Yahoo! Publisher Network member for almost two solid years now. I am what you would call one of their relatively bigger partners: I’ve been cranking out mid-$XX,XXX annually since the program’s beginning. I was originally invited to the program when I went to the Ad:Tech conference, hosted in New York in 2005, and met up with/became friends with a few representatives from Yahoo!. They wrote my name and information down, and a month or two later, I was invited in one of the first few rounds of publisher invites they sent out.
Anyways, this brings me to the bad news. Recently, I’ve had my ad targeting disabled in the Yahoo! Publisher Network account manager. This is a sad move on Yahoo!’s part, as I have always been a hard-line YPN fanatic when it comes to the never ending Google Adsense vs. YPN debate. For most of my higher traffic sites, I’ve previously switched out Adsense ads in favor of YPN ads, and have produced solid click-through rates and eCPMs ever since my induction into the program in late 2005.
Anyways, Yahoo! claims my “conversion is not meeting with industry standards”, and therefore, they believe removing my ad targeting capabilities will resolve the problem. Rather than taking it on themselves that their horrendous contextual ad targeting FAILS at delivering even 1/4 of what Google has to offer, they take the liberty to blame it all on me, when I am clearly not the one at fault. I have never abused the ad targeting mechanism, never targeted insurance ads on a gaming website, never tried to pry more money than I deserve out of their publisher network.
I immediately, of course, emailed the Yahoo! representative that informed me of this non-sense. Ever since ad targeting has been disabled, my click-through rate has remained the same, yet my RPC has plummeted over 80%. Goes to show that I wasn’t abusing the system at all, because my users are equally interested in the stuff that I targeted towards them, as they are the junk that Yahoo! now shows them. After the click-through, it’s not my fault at all if there is no conversion. They can’t possibly run a legit CPC program if they are going to impact publisher’s earnings based on after-click conversion. Then it’s not a CPC program anymore. It’s CPA, and they’re false advertising it as CPC so as to attract a larger market. Go figure.
The Yahoo! representative replied back and failed to even attempt to make a deal to re-instate my targeting powers. She even took the time to let me know that “[they] are doing [me] a favor by disabling [my] Ad Targeting, as [they] only provide this option for [their] long-time partners. Most YPN abusers are banned on the spot, no questions asked.” Thank you ma’am, but I pay for your salary. Stop treating me like a piece of cow dung and realize that this is supposed to be a symbiotic relationship. 50/50. Not Yahoo! > Robert Afnani. Anyways, she didn’t really get that so I gave up. My other two friends at Yahoo! have long since ‘moved on’ in careers, so I really don’t have any top-secret connection anymore to keep me going strong (at least till next Ad:Tech, heh).
The Yahoo! Publisher Network program has really slipped since it began. Gone are the days when RPCs skyrocketed past $1.00 a click. Gone are the days of friendly publisher/customer/client support, when a live Yahoo! representative would help publishers improve their sites to make more money. Gone are the days that Yahoo! cared to build a strong bond between YPN and its respective publishers.
Yahoo! really is a falling knife. I’m going to revert most of my contextual advertising space to Google now.
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Feb
11
Posted in Stocks
Day trading is an extremely stressful gamble to take part in. It’s no wonder NYSE day traders have been known to have the highest suicide rates among all white-collar jobs. Probably one of the worst feelings in the entire world has to be losing money in real-time on a risky day trade. There is nothing worse than seeing your hard-earned cash evaporating on a computer screen, leaving you powerless as you lose it all. The worst part is as we hold onto the stock, in hopes that it will recover, we’re often just slammed with more losses. At the end of the day, you pretty much lose all sense of reality. Your brain’s dopamine is reduced to near nil, and you feel like you’ve wasted your life.
“Yesterday,
All my troubles seemed so far away,
Now it looks as though they’re here to stay,
Oh, I believe in yesterday.”
-The Beatles
Yesterday, by The Beatles, represents how I feel when I lose a few thousand in a day in the stock market. It stinks. You regret every part of it. You could spend a whole month day trading, make $10,000 on a $50,000 cash account, and lose it all in one day. One hour. Heck, a few minutes. If only there was a way to go back in time… to yesterday, when troubles just seemed so far away…
It’s been proven that losing money has a bigger emotional effect on the mind than does making it. I don’t remember the source (I believe I heard it on CNBC during Power Lunch), but losing money has a 2.5X bigger emotional response than making money. What does that mean? The effect that losing $1,000 has on your brain releases the same amount of dopamine as making $2,500. Crazy, huh? We really do hate losing our money.
However, there are ways to stomach your losses. There have been many times were I’ve wanted to call it quits, cash out, and go cry home about how much I’ve lost. But I don’t. I keep doing it, I keep riding the waves, and I never give up. Here’s how I keep going:
- Go crazy - get some stuff you don’t mind destroying and place them nearby your desk. Believe me, it’s better smashing a $5 RadioShack micro-RC car to pieces then punching your 21″ LCD and cracking the display, or tossing your iPod out the window. It can get pretty bad sometimes, so make sure you’ve got something to squeeze on.
- Get an aquarium - you’d be surprised how stress-relieving an aquarium can be for your work environment. When times are at their worst, just take a look at nature. The fish go round and round, nothing bothers them. You be the same. Try to control your emotions and learn from the fish: don’t give up on life (or stocks) and don’t let anything bother you or keep you from cherishing life, however pointless it all may seem at the time.
- Listen to loud music - depending on whether your workroom is a public office or your home room, you may or may not need headphones. Just jam out. I personally drive around town in my Audi A4. Nothing better than cranking up the two 12″ Alpines to max bass tuning out the buzz of the real world. Which brings me to…
- Go for a cruise around town - hop in the car, roll down the windows (if it’s nice, sunny, and warm outside), and drive around town. Though this may or may not be fun depending on what make and model of car you have and how comfortable you are driving, but however you feel, remember to drive safely, and you may just return home a little less stressed out.
- Grab a drink - this should be one of your last resorts, and should only be done amongst a group of friends. Sometimes it’s good to get smashed. With the stock market, getting drunk and forgetting about it may be one of the best ways to pull through a big loss. The second you sell your holdings of the stock, you lose your money. But forget about it with the aid of alcohol, let the stock recover the next day(s, weeks, months), and you may even make some money!
- Play a video game - it can be fun, even for adults. My personal favorite is GTA: San Andreas. Nothing better than runnin’ around town shootin’ up everything you see within a 100 foot radius. Just make sure you limit your anger to in-game. I don’t want to be held responsible for encouraging the next mass-murdering day trader tomorrow on CNBC.
- Have a love life - when the market closes and you’re done for the day, stop thinking about the markets. Call up your girlfriend and do something fun. Whether it’s watching a movie or having sex, you won’t be losing as much hair as you will sitting behind the computer mindlessly lamenting over your loss. Having someone there for you is probably one of the best feelings there is.
Good luck, and don’t forget to get some sleep. Sleeping trouble (only in the stock market, where making money is mostly a gamble) away is probably the safest way to reduce stress and improve your chances at having a better, energy-filled day tomorrow.
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Feb
9
Posted in Internet
I’ve bought out many websites in the past. Some purchases have proved to be worthwhile, while others turned out pretty raw. In the end, my results really came down to how much I was prepared for what the site had to offer, and what my expectations for the future were before I bought out the site. Knowing what you are getting yourself involved in ahead of time is half of the game; having the patience to improve upon the site and recover the cost you had to pay to buy it out is the other half. Here’s a brief list of things to look out for before you spend your hard-earned bones on something that could be your next nightmare:
1. Don’t catch the falling knife - obviously, I like to use this phrase. Take a look at graphs of the website’s statistics. Check out third-party statistics as well; never put your full confidence in what the seller has to say about his/her own website. Alexa.com offers good generalizations of traffic/reach over time. You want to buy the site that is on the up and up, not the site that’s heading towards the gutter.
Many webmasters tend to think they have the “magic skills” that will heal a failing website. Sure, it’s possible, but more likely than not, the site will continue to grow/fall apart in the direction it was going before you got your hands on it. Websites are not like stocks: what goes up will not necessarily come down, and what goes down will definitely not come back up unless you have some sort of plan that will bring it back to the limelight.
2. Expect downtime - when buying out an established site, a lot can go wrong. If you are transferring over a site that takes up 20+ GBs of webspace, and collects thousands of unique views a day, you’re going to find yourself depressed in the corner of an inner-city bar, drinking the night away, if you don’t prepare yourself for the worst. DNS/nameserver transfers take 24-72 hours to fully propagate all over the web. This means at least a day or two of downtime, which will definitely take a chunk out of your traffic once the changeover is complete. Let your visitors know that there’s going to be downtime. Surprising them makes them think you’ve either got hacked, taken down by the FBI, or fell off the face of the planet.
Visitors tend to lose interest fast. When you’re down, they find something else to do, and when they find something else to do, they forget to come back to your site. Furthermore, a day or two of downtime could affect your search rankings, and could also tick off some advertisers (esp. if it’s a larger website with direct ad sales). Make sure you have multiple backups of the databases and site stored locally as well. Sometimes, things can really go wrong and files become corrupted beyond all recognition. Better safe then sorry.
3. Know the topic at hand - do not buy a website that you don’t have expertise in. Don’t buy a site that has to do about taking care of cats if you’ve never owned a cat in your entire life. Likewise, don’t buy a site about advanced SEO techniques if you barely know how to edit the .htaccess file on your webserver. Buy a site that you’re interested in, because when it comes down to it, you’re the one who’s going to have to deal with it every single day till the end of time (or when you sell it).
4. Make friends with the visitors - dedicated visitors tend to dislike site takeovers. The reason why they usually visit a site is because they like how things are going. When you buy out a site, you’re changing things up. And society doesn’t like change. Unless you plan to hire the owner and his staff to continue the maintenance of the site, a lot of things are going to be different. And people will notice, so don’t try and hide it. If anything, make it clear that you’ve bought out the site. Don’t make it too corporate-feeling though, you don’t want to scare off habitual visitors. Make it something smooth, like “Johnny is going to college now, so I’m going to run the site for a bit, but he’s going to continue to give me advice on how to run it for you all”. Corny example, yes, but make up something along those lines.
5. Don’t pay too much - generally, my formula for a website’s value is 10 to 18 times the website’s monthly income. However, there are a lot of other factors which should affect your pitch to the owner. If the site is unique (in design, coding, topic), you should offer more. If the site is just a run-off-the-mill forum site, or anything else based off a publicly available CMS, offer less. Your pitch should reflect the amount of effort the owner put into developing the site. Also, adjust your offer to reflect the site’s growth potential. A site that is niched and hard to expand is worth considerably less than a site which has the potential to attract millions of users.
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Feb
7
Posted in Internet
The other day, I was talking to a webmaster friend about working on a new joint project together. While brainstorming for ideas, a few different routes were investigated. Should we make one, unique website, which dominates its respective niche and churns out money, or create hundreds of small, easy-to-setup throwaway sites which collectively make a good deal of cash? How about make a large network of arcade gaming sites, publicize them on a massive scale (by pouring thousands into Adsense and other advertising programs), monetize them, then kick back and reap the return? Sounds easy enough.
Personally, I find that a balance of large and small sites is the perfect portfolio. It’s much better to keep your eggs split into many different baskets, especially online. In a virtual world where your money-making machines are intangible, and consist only of thousands of lines of code stored in a server somewhere far away from your home, there’s no telling what can go wrong. Server outage, DDoS attack, site hacking, script corruption, crazy man with a gun raiding your datacenter: they all can ruin your day. With large, thoughtful sites set as your main “income generators” and your small, pre-scripted sites set up as “backup generators“, you’ll be sure to have a steady flow of money coming in everyday of the week.
Owning large websites can have its benefits. For one, they look much better on your portfolio. When company’s are interviewing you for a new job, they’d much someone who was the chief editor, lead designer, and founder of IGN.com then someone who uploaded a bunch of pre-made arcade templates to a server and pressed the magic “GO” button on the install script. These are two totally opposite extremes, but it gets the point across.
They’re also more brand-able. A large website consists of a site which has a vast following of users. You can easily leave an image in user’s heads when they visit; they’ll remember what your unique website’s domain name is called, but they won’t remember what ‘the arcade site’s name that their friend yelled to them from the other side of the computer classroom’ is. Not to mention that more brand-ability means more advertisers. Advertisers love associating their product/service with a web property that’s known to lead its respective niche; brand-ability means more money for you!
Everyday I see tons of new webmasters make this decision. Do they want to be ingenious and rock the Internet with the latest idea? Kevin Rose of Digg.com did that. Mark Zuckerberg of FaceBook.com did that. John Chow of JohnChow.com did that. Or do they want to be the “lame ducks” of the Internet generation: feed off the larger sites, attract users through black hat SEO techniques, and copy the money making techniques of thousands of other Internet developers?
Which path will you follow to your success?
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Feb
5
Posted in Business, Real World
Utilizing tax write-offs is a great way to essentially make ’something out of nothing’. For business owners and self-employed individuals, which includes owners of Internet-based companies/websites, tax write-offs are the bread and butter of making the most of your hard-earned money. With the US tax season right around the corner, it’s about time you start compiling a list of things to write-off . Whether you use TurboTax software or consult with an H&R Block representative in order to get your taxes done, there are many legitamite ways of pushing your tax dollars to their limits. Though write-off eligibility could vary from person to person, and sometimes depends on which tax bracket you’re a part of, there’s always a way to get some reduction on your taxes. After all, Uncle Sam doesn’t need all your money.
1. Write off a room in your house/apartment - if your place of residence has multiple rooms, dedicate one of the rooms to solely business activities. Doesn’t have to be the master bedroom, even something a little bigger than a walk-in closet will do. You can write off the value of the room (which, when appraised, may be much higher than you might think) as a business expense, and save a few hundred (or maybe even thousand) dollars.
2. Write off all electronic devices that you need - heck, buy yourself a new top-of-the-line computer every year. Want that new 22″ LCD monitor? Buy it! How about a new PDA or iPhone? Buy it! As long as you can prove to the IRS that at least a portion of it is used for business work, you can write off a respective portion of your taxes (although you may need to capitalize it and depreciate it over time, but essentially, it’s a write-off).
3. Write off a new car - depending on where you live, you could buy or lease a new car and save a chunk of money. Though this mainly applies to people who have more than $30K a year in taxes, you could, using a tax loophole, buy a new luxury SUV that weighs over 6,000 pounds and write-off $30K of its value in the first year (might want to check with your H&R Block adviser on this one). Thinking about leasing? Well you could lease a new 2008 Mercedes C-Class and write-off a major portion of the lease if the car is ‘mainly used as a business car’. Might want to keep the mileage low though, for auditing reasons (wink).
4. Write off gas - use your car to goto Kinkos and make copies of advertising contracts? How about driving to BestBuy to buy that new computer you’re planning on writing off? Well yes, you can write off all the gas that it takes you to get from your home to your destination and back, as long as the destination has something to do with your company’s interest.
5. Write off the food you eat - taking a trip to StarBucks to talk to a prospective client or business partner? Write-off the Grande White Chocolate Mocha as a business expense. Taking fellow staff to dinner at a up-scale restaurant? Write it off (all though you can only write off 50% max of business food expenses)!
6. Write off your server(s) - obviously if you are running an Internet-based company, you’re going to need to have some sort of hosting/servers. Make sure to mention that as a business expense, I mean, what else could you be using a dedicated server for?
7. Write off your donations - care about a particular cause? Want to look philanthropic without losing your shirt? When donating to various causes, whether it be the Ronald McDonald House foundation or the Salvation Army, feel free to write-off all the donation amount from your taxes. Kill two birds with one stone (or save two birds by donating to the PETA)!
And finally, a word for the wise: save ALL receipts and keep detailed logs of all purchases you made that relate to your business. IRS will screw you if you don’t have proof of purchase/usage. And this list is by no means complete; there are many, many more ways of making use of your tax dollars more efficiently if you own a company, just do some more research (or hire the tax guy, and make sure he knows you want to get the write-offs you deserve)!
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