Now that my wife is no longer working, she has started to spend more time working on her home business. She set up a business a couple years ago called Just Barrettes where she makes hair barrettes. I built a store site for her. Now that she has started working more on making her barrettes, I have once again started working on her website.
I added a statistics program to her website so we could more easily see where traffic was coming from. I was surprised to see she is not getting much. So I have been encouraging her to become more active in a couple forums that she has been a member of, and add a link to her webite in her signature line. This will give her website more exposure, and also the links will help in the search engine rankings. I have also worked on making a “light box” which will allow her to take better quality photographs of her barrettes. The pictures on her website are not very good, and don’t really show off her barrettes very well. If they look more appealing, they will hopefully sell better, and her home business will make more money.
If all goes well, she should start selling more of her barrettes. Time will tell how far she might take her small home business.
Paying taxes sucks. But paying more taxes is not neccesarily a bad thing. When you find yourself paying more taxes, it usually means you are making more money. Making more money is a good thing. But I hate preparing taxes! I hate it! I used to sit down once a year with my computer and some tax software like Tax Cut or Turbo Tax, and start pluging all the numbers in. It was very stressfull. I remember when the software came up and told me I owed $5000 in Federal taxes, and I hadn’t even gotten to the state stuff yet! Ouch! I went to an accountant, and he found some deductions I didn’t know about, such as deducting part of our rent as a business expense. He got our Federaal taxes down to a more managable $2000. We still have to compile a bunch of stuff, and fill out a questionaire that he sends us. And we have to update the various numbers such as mortgage payment, utility costs, etc. But my does that now. I just can’t stand to do it. But I do my part. I have a bunch of folders. One for each year. When I get a reciept, or a tax form, or whatever, I stick it in the folder for that year. Then when it is time for her to start gathering stuff for the accountant, she just pulls out the folder, and most everything is there. When she asks questions, I will scramble to find the answers for her. Then once she has everything put together, I deliver it to the accountant. Then he usually has questions, so I track down that information for him. Then generally in a month or two, our tax returns show up in the mail with a bill of how much we owe the governament, plus how much we owe the accountant.
In general I hate tax time. But it is something we have to do!
I want to get my wife involved in doing blogs, and making money. I suggested several blogs that she could do that would probably do very well. Some of the ideas were a blog about depression, or a blog about weight loss. But she didn’t like either of these. I am sure they were have both been successful money makers. She wanted to do a blog about our dog. A blog written by our dog. Okaaayy… I didn’t think it would be a big money maker, but I thought it might make a little bit. She said she could use her creative juices. She would have to do the posts though. She did some posts. I even did a few posts. But then she stopped making any posts. There are less than 20 posts on the blog. It made a little over 40 cents in January. That sucks considering the blog site cost over $7 a month in hosting fees! When the site comes up for renewal, I am going to just let it expire. Or maybe I will tear down the blog, and put up a store site of some sort. Maybe list dog books or something. But I am not going to keep it as is, as a money loser.
Running a blog doesn’t take much time. A few minutes a day can quickly build up a sizable blog that can make $500-$2000 a year. And if you have multiple blogs, you can be making a nice amount of money. And the cool thing about websites like these, is that you write a page, it might continue making you money for a long time! But some people I guess are happier sitting wasting time playing Solitaire or Gameboy.