As I write this email, I’m still awaiting my 1099-MISCs from 3 different ad companies. I’m not sure if the federal law states that we need to get them by January 31, or if they need to be post-marked by January 31. But it’s now February and I’m still waiting. It’s not like I’m dying to pay my taxes, but I just want all my tax papers so I can be organized and get it over with. Based on estimations, I’m looking to owe a couple thousand dollars in taxes because of what I made online. It’s not going to be fun paying that!

So far, I’ve received my 1099 from Google, Azoogle, and ValueClick Media. Google was the first to get it to me, and that was probably 10-14 days ago. Azoogle came a day or two later, followed by VCM on the 30th. I am still waiting for a 1099 from Yahoo and Adbrite. I’ve double checked my information with both companies, and my address is correct. Hopefully the mailman didn’t lose them!

I’m not sure if I’m going to file my taxes right away so I can get it over with, or if I should let my money sit in my high interest savings account for another 2 months and collect interest. Knowing me, I’ll do it right away just so it’s done and I can move on.

Anyone else still waiting for their tax forms?

A lot of webmasters use pictures on their websites. And a lot of the time they get copyrighted photos from Google Images or MSN Images. Most photos you find on the internet are not legally allowed to be copied and used on your website without the permission of the photographer. This is especially true for pictures of celebrities. Sure everyone uses pictures without permission, but that doesn’t mean it’s right.

There are places you can find legal pictures to use. Flickr is one of my favorites. They have millions of photos that a perfectly legal to use on a commercial website. Here’s how you find them:

• From the Flickr home page, enter your keyword into the search
• After you click ‘Search’ your results will come up
• From there click ‘Advanced Search’
• Next click ‘Only search Creative Commons-licensed photos’
• Then click ‘find content to use commercially’

Then all the results that come up after that search are able to be used on your website. The box you click that says ‘use commercially’ means that it can be used on a website with ads on it.

Another really cool website you can use to find Creative Commons photos is called Yotophoto.

So next time you’re looking for cool pictures for a website or wallpapers, check out the legal Creative Commons photos first. You may surprise yourself with all the high quality pics on Flickr that you can find.

You may have heard by now that Google has altered Adsense units to reduce the click area on your displayed ads. Instead of visitors being able to click anywhere in the ad unit (including the blank white space around around the link text), they can now only click the ad in the link title or description. What this means is that there will be fewer accidental clicks on your ad units. Good for advertisers, bad for publishers.

As an Adsense user, this will probably hurt my earnings. I’m not sure how much, but I can’t imagine it being much. Sure the area where people can click on your ad will be reduced by more then 50%, but seriously, who the hell clicks on white space anyways. Most people clicking your ads actually want to click on them. They won’t be clicking white space near the ad, they’ll click on the link title just like they click on everything else.

I think webmasters were over-reacting when they initially heard the news. Unless you’re tricking your visitors into clicking your ads (which is against Adsense TOS anyways), you shouldn’t be affected to the point where you’re earnings are ruined. If CTR drops to some ridiculous low on my websites, I always have YPN to fall back on. I haven’t run YPN on my websites in months. I have no idea if it’s gotten any better or worse since this summer when I dropped it.

While reading through the Forbes Richest Men in Sports, I came across Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks. Now I’ve flipped some websites, and I’m sure you have too. We make a few bucks here and there. Hicks makes our thousand dollar profit look like fractions of a penny.

Forbes says Hicks “made fortune in soda: bought Dr Pepper, Seven-Up for $45 million, flipped 2 years later for $700 million.”

That’s right. $700 million in 2 years.

Now if we brought those numbers down to our terms, you might say “hey I wouldn’t be happy at all if I bought a website for $45 and 2 years later sold for only $700″. Ya, you’re probably right. $700 after owning and developing a website for 2 years is not a lot of money. But you can’t simply use the same profit ratios. Would you be happy if you bought a site for $450 and then sold it for $7000 two years later? You probably would.

The higher in dollar amounts you get, the more impressive his flip looks. I’ve never heard of a business being flipped so fast for so much profit. There isn’t really a point to this post. I just wanted to share with everyone how badass Tom Hicks is. For more info about him, click here. He is currently #380 on Americas Richest List.

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Strong Listing and Lemon Directory. Submit your link for free to these awesome directories.

If only time machines were real…

It’s been just over 1 month since I jumped into the stock market. I have almost reached the even point (thanks to the $7 trading fees every time you buy a stock). I now own 7 different stocks. Some of them I only own 2 shares per stock, and some I own as many as 15 shares.

I’ve made some nice decisions along the way. As of closing yesterday, 4 of my stocks are up since purchase, and 3 of them are down since I purchased them. Lucky for me though, one of up gainers is up 12% since I bought it… giving me some nice double digit gains in only 1 month. If it weren’t for trading fee’s I would have a nice profit on my hands. The few stocks that have gone down since I purchased them have been very minimal losses. No huge droppers in my portfolio.
As you can see I’ve spent $50 in fees. Every time you buy a stock it costs $7 no matter how many shares you buy and every time you sell a stock it costs $7 no matter how many shares you sell. So the stocks need to go up a minimum $14 (total combined from all shares) before you can make a profit by selling.

But like I said before, I’m not day trading. I’m in this for the long haul. I plan on holding these for years. Trying to find the next Apple (AAPL), who has gone from about $16/share to $121/share in 3 years. I wish I had that time machine I mentioned earlier.

Also, I noticed something nice in my portfolio yesterday. My first dividend payout! Here’s a quick rundown of what a dividend is, courtesy of about.com

A stock dividend is a pro-rata distribution of additional shares of a company’s stock to owners of the common stock. A company may opt for stock dividends for a number of reasons including inadequate cash on hand or a desire to lower the price of the stock on a per-share basis to prompt more trading and increase liquidity (i.e., how fast an investor can turn his holdings into cash). Why does lowering the price of the stock increase liquidity? On the whole, people are more likely to buy and sell a $50 stock than a $5,000 stock; this usually results in a large number of shares trading hands each day.

The company I own payed out $0.08 per share. Since I own 15 shares, I made a cool $1.20. Pocket change for me, but for the big boys who own 100,000 shares, that’s $8,000. Dividends are usually distributed quarterly, bi-annually, or annually depending on the company.

Well that’s it for the update. I’ll post another one next month

This blog post is proudly sponsored by Browse Anonymously

Marketing a website using offline methods can be rather difficult and expensive. For the amount of money you spend offline you could buy some nice text links that pretty much guarantee traffic to your site. If you market offline, then you really have no idea how much traffic is coming to your site from your promotions.

So why spend $100s printing flyers?

The following method is best used for sports sites. Every city has sports radio. I listen to it every morning on my drive to work and every evening on my way home. Local sports radio guys are very cool. Often times half the show or more is just the hosts taking callers.

This simple and free way to promote your site is as easy as calling into the radio show and giving out your website before you hang up. Gator sports dominate the airways where I live, and lucky for me I own Gator Envy. I usually call into radio shows once a week and give my opinion on whats happening. But if you’re feeling pushy, you could do this everyday.

All you have to do is call in, talk about your topic for 30 seconds and then just ask the host if you can give a shout out. He’ll say yes. Then you just say: “I just wanted to shout out to all the fans at gator envy dot com”. Simple and fast. Radio shows are run on a 7 second delay so they can beep out curse words and stuff, but there is no way any host is going to go through that trouble to bleep out your shout out.

Free, targeted, offline promotion. What better way to drive hundreds, if not thousands, of listeners to your website. If you run a site about the Yankees, call into your Yankee radio show and do the same thing.

This method can be used to market non sports sites as well, but I doubt it will be as effective. Talk radio shows are either sports, news/politics, or Christian related. If your site doesn’t fall into one of those 3 categories this might not work for you.