Bookkeeping can be an awfully daunting task, and yet it is imperative to the success of your business because you will be held accountable for what your books reflect. It doesn’t matter if you are a part time blogger, a full time web entrepreneur, or a brick and mortar business owner you will need to track your revenues, expenses, clients, invoices, estimates, and basically everything that might matter to you or the IRS.

On that note I want to let you know about Quickbooks Simple Start 2008. You may have heard of Quickbooks before it is an extremely popular accounting software that allows for great flexibility and tracking of your revenues and expenses. But you may not have heard of Simple Start before. Simple start is a FREE version of Quickbooks that is available for download from their site. Go here to check it out.

I have recently downloaded this myself and have fallen in love with it. I can easily add clients and contacts, create services with a description and price, add vendors, create custom estimates, create custom invoices, track payments, make deposits, register a bank account, accept credit card payments, track expenses, and all sorts of other great features.

If you aren’t keeping your books up to date I would strongly suggest getting to it and Quickbooks Simple Start is a great software to do it with.

As you know from reading this site I am a member of Kontera. Kontera is a contextual based ad system in which keywords in your content are found and magically turned into advertisements. I am a huge believer in this style of advertising because it is not bulky and you don’t have random ads distributed throughout your content. By this I mean that the ads are relevant and generally unobtrusive unlike a big google ad block. However as I speak with more and more bloggers/readers I find that people have a general dislike for contextual ads because they feel it junks up your content even more so that I simple google ad block.

So with my blog in a still relatively small and new state I want your opinion because I am going to be looking into changing my advertising schema in order to generate a higher level of income. Are contextual ads good or bad? What are the pros and cons. Why do you like them and why do you hate them. Like I said I personally like them because I feel it allows for the greatest number of ads to be displayed on my site without interrupting to much of the readers progress. Generally speaking you would think the more ads you had the higher your income would be, but I am not experiencing this. My payouts are higher from Google Adsense each month with simply a small ad block in the sidebar than they are from Kontera.

With that I put my potential in your hands, would you prefer I kept the contextual ads, or would you prefer a Google ad block at the beginning of each post? I will take your comments in to deep consideration as I am planning on testing several different ad layouts within the coming months.

If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed.  If you like emails subscribe via email.  Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me achieve my goal of 100 subscribers by June.

As a designer you will meet many people that will ask you to do work for free, to do work for a fraction of what it should actually cost, and to do work at a fixed rate (per design).   When you are first starting out these will all be very tempting offers for you because you won’t have a strong portfolio or the work experience that is needed to charge the prices that you want, right? 

Wrong. Very Wrong. Just because you are a new designer doesn’t mean your work is worth less. 

I am writing this article because as of recent I am working on a website which I quoted at a flat rate. A mistake I made as a rookie designer. In my case I quoted a company a reasonable price, roughly 600.00, for a wordpress theme designed and developed.  But what I did not take into my estimation was many weeks worth of revisions and modifications.

When you are estimating a project for a client I recommend giving them exactly that. An Estimate. Make sure you leave some wiggle room for charging for modifications and revisions.  In my case I suggested that the revisions where included which is why months after the fact I am still working on the same project without any new income from it.

I am not upset with my client for making the revisions as the finished product is supposed to be exactly what they are looking for and it is my responsibility to deliver that.

Setting your pricing and being strong in your convictions about what you want to earn will benefit you as a designer.  But I do throw caution to the wind.  You will lose many business opportunities. 

For some reason many people believe that design and development is way overpriced therefore you will probably never ever here back from many people requesting quotes from you.  Don’t be discouraged.  The problem with design and development jobs is that most people looking for a design don’t have a business plan, don’t have a budget, and think that they are going to make a fortune online without spending anything. These are the people you are going to quote 7 / 10 times, these are the people that aren’t going to get back to you.  Expect that you are going to find 1 client that is going to pay your prices out of 10 and keep sending out  your estimates.  You will eventually generate a real strong client base and won’t have lost your ass by doing work for to cheap.

Some things to take into considerations when estimating a design:

• Your Value - Estimate your salary
• Your Expenses
  • Internet Connection
  • Drawing Supplies
  • Web Hosting
  • Learning Materials
  • Computer
  • Software
  • Work Space

There are plenty more expenses that will come into your design career and you will need to estimate their cost into your rates otherwise you will end up losing money in the long run.  Don’t be afraid to charge what you are worth even when you are starting out.  The better you establish yourself in the beginning the better off you will be in the future.

Stage two of Project IP was designing the site.   If you click on the image above you will be brought to the full layout of the site in png format.

With this web design I wanted to keep it simple. That is my style which you can probably infer from creadiv.com itself.  I am looking for a layout that doesn’t have a lot going on. I simply want to present my information in way that the user will be able to easily find what they where looking for.

I know I said this site wasn’t a blog, but you are saying… “It sure looks like a blog”.  That’s because in the traditional sense of the word it will be a blog, by which I mean it will be powered by wordrpess.  However I don’t have any intent on adding daily updates as I would with a blog.  The purpose of the site is to have a passive income which will be delivered through ad placements based around high quality content.  So why am I choosing to power it with Wordpress?  Simple, Wordpress is great.  I can easily add content.  I can easily build navigational menus, I can easily optimize my articles for search.  So although I may not be updating the site frequently Wordpress still puts together a nice package for your informational site needs.

So now we come to monetization.  The actual process of monetizing the site won’t come until much later in the development process, but it is something that needs to be thought about when you are designing your site.  You must take into consideration how you will be able to convert your users into buyers. For theiphouse.com I have chosen to have 3 types of ads.  The first you will see is a standard 468 x 60 banner ad built into the header of the site, a hugely succesfull ad style and placement in the affiliate sales arena.  The second the newest hippest trend of having 4 to 6 125×125px square ads in the sidebar, which has quickly become one of the most popular forms of advertising.  The 3rd good old fashion adsense ads. I will be placing a 250 x 250 px square adsense unit floating directly inside each post in order to get as many ads into the viewers minds as possible.

And just to be cute, Check out my subscribe icons.  I thought it would be unique way to help the brand of the site.  Let me know what you think.

 If you are building your own site along with me, post a link to your design.  If you are looking for help ask a question. If you are awesome subscribe to my rss feed.  If you like emails subscribe via email.  Remember only you can prevent forest fires help me acheive my goal of 100 subscribers by June.

Branding your site is an extremely important part of the development process.  Your logo will set the tone for who and what you are.  It will be the first thing your viewers see, and it will definetly give them their first impression of the information that you are presenting to them.

So what does this mean to you?  It means that you need to create a logo that will impress the audience that you are attracting.  You will need to identify how your logo is going to be used and what you want to portray with it.  The logo for theiphouse is not going to be used for marketing purposes, so I don’t intend to make the most memorable logo that you would see. The logo is going to be used as an agent for welcoming people to my site since I have determined that the major sources of traffic to the site are going to be from search engines, and referring sites, not from advertising.  I am giving away information and a simple tool, I am not going to be selling anything so advertising with the logo isn’t really necessary.

With the idea of how I was going to generate my readers, and the knowledge of what I wanted the logo to do I set out to create a logo that was bright and welcoming.  I want people to see my logo and think that it was professionally done and that the information on the site was valid and interesting.

So I started with my original logo for the site and started modifying and adjusting what I felt needed to be changed.  The logo was already solid, but it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.  It depicted a house with my name on it as seen below.

I felt that this logo was a good starting point, but i want to liven it up a bit and get my full name into the picture so I changed the font to a more friendly rounded type, added a gradient to my house to soften it up, and added the word the into the picture incase people did remember it, I didn’t want the going to iphouse.com and not theiphouse.com.

Finally I started of thinking of ways to make the logo depict the content of the site a bit more.  Yes, the house was good for the name, but this wasn’t a site about building homes, or your home address it is about a technology based topic.  I decided to use the quite familiar symbol of the feed icon to show that the house was high tech. 

So the final logo came out pretty easily.  I didn’t spend any money on designing this logo so my budget is still fully intact, and the logo is simple and welcoming just as I hoped it would be.  You can generate the theories behind your logo and develop it cheaply as well. If you need any help leave a comment and we can start brainstorming for the application purpose of your logo.

Don’t forget to sign up for my rss feed to keep track of this projects status.  Plus it would be a help to me in achieving my goal of 100 subscribers by June.  I look forward to seeing if you have any logo designs worked up, or helping you in creating your site.

I told you a couple days ago that I was going to start a case study in which I begin to create an informational site paired with a small web tool in order to create a revenue generating site.  My goal is to develop several small sites to bring in a semi-passive secondary form of income.

What I have come up with is Project IP. Project IP will not be me creating a new site, but turning an existing site of mine into something profitable.  I have mentioned before a little web tool that I created at www.theiphouse.com that helps me find the public ip address of the network that I am on so that creating vpn tunnels is easy at work.  Well now it is time to make this site worth something.

I am going to take 1 month and $100.00 dollars and turn theiphouse into an informational website that will generate $1.00 a day in income through text links and affiliate advertising.  This is going to be an excellent test for me and should make for an interesting guide to making money online. 

Here are some of the steps I will be touching on while I get this project of the ground

• Create My Brand
• Design My Site
• Research My Topic
• Develop My Content
• Perform SEO
• Upload The Site
• Monetize The Site
• Get The Site Indexed
• Market The Site
• Track The Performance

These are just some of the topics involved in creating a money making site, but as I work through them I encourage you to work with me on your own site maybe with some encouragement and help from each other we can create ourselves a network of sites that will help acheive our goals of making money online.

The how to make money online niche is full, almost saturated, with so called “experts”.  People who for the most part are not making a significant amount of money online.  They are however becoming experts and potentially establishing themselves to make some money which is something you are very interested in doing.  I am one of these “experts”.   I can’t say that I make a fortune from online business, but my site is growing and with it my wallet.  I am going to start on a journey into making money online and I am inviting you to come with me.

I am not going to be telling you that it is easy, passive, or that money is going to come fast and in bunches. But when I am through with this new series of posts you will have seen an idea become a website which has generated a new form of income.

My journey is going to proceed by creating a series of projects that I will explain and describe in detail so that you can build a site right along with me.  I am going to show you the critical steps involved in creating an online empire one site at a time. 

The first of many projects is going to be an informational site. A website that simply educates people about a topic and will provide them with a small web based tool.  I have my idea already planned, so it is time for you to get thinking and find a topic that you want to educate people about so that you can build your site as  I build mine.

So start thinking and be ready to dive into the building process with my next post.