Are you impulsive? If you are in business for the quick buck then maybe you need to take a step back. Starting and growing a new business requires time, care, and money. So here’s the million dollar question. If your new business takes off and you make $30,000 in short notice do you buy a new car, use the money towards your house payment, or put the money back into your business? The obvious choice for many people is to upgrade their status symbol, their car. Nice cars are certainly fun to have and they let others know that you are successful, but is it worth having a nice car if you don’t have any money left to put into your business?

Many people are quick to spend their hard earned cash on things that depreciate in value. In order to fit into society as a successful businessman it is assumed that you will own a Mercedes, have a big house, watch movies in your custom home theater room, and of course take expensive vacations a few times a year. These things can be signs of success, but they can also be signs of stupidity.

If you are like me then you don’t like figuring out your taxes each year. It’s probably too late for most everyone (unless you didn’t profit in 2006) but here are some of the things that I’ve started doing to help make my life easier at tax time.

First, depending on the type of business you run you should definitely invest $100 or so and pick up the latest version of Quicken. Even if you don’t plan on e-filing, it’s really a great program just for book keeping and transaction recording. If you are smart with how you set it up and track everything you can also use this to balance multiple bank accounts.

I’m a graphic and web designer by trade (among other things) and one of the main questions that my clients often ask me is whether they should use a lot of graphics on their website. My answer usually varies from person to person, but generally my theory is similar. If you want your website to look like it was made in the 90’s then feel free to use a lot of graphics.

There are some websites that look really nice with high end graphics, background images, flash banners, the works, etc, but, these websites generally do not benefit directly from their high end interfaces. For example, one of my favorite “Web 2.0″ designs is the Skype layout. It has some images in the middle, but really the layout does not rely in the overuse of images. If you browse from page to page you will notice images are used as supplements to the CSS. The site makes very good use of colors and fonts to create a soft and welcoming feel.

Starting a new website for profit can be a daunting task. How can you make money and how long should it take to get traffic? There are several ways to make money with a new website. One popular option is to charge people to join your site. I do not recommend this version personally and here’s why. When it comes to charging people money for online services, you’ll rarely find people willing to pay immediately. Everybody wants to try it first. But where do you draw the line between using ads and charging members? Personally I’ve found that charging members is almost never something that will go over well. I’m referring mostly to forums in this case, but I have seen other sites have similar problems when it comes to charging members.

When I’ve offered extra features to subscribers, this has generally not been a bad thing. But I’ve created websites for people who wanted to charge for EVERYTHING and this is NOT something that I recommend. People generally don’t mind paying extra for extra features and benefits once they are used to your website and community, but, you will be hard pressed to find somebody to pay without ever even being a normal or non-paid member of your service or website.

It’s funny that just yesterday I was writing about Google buying YouTube for $1.6 billion dollars. Late yesterday afternoon Google just announced their hefty purchase of DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

Google revolutionized the web advertising industry as well as the concept of creating successful ad supported free services such as gmail, Google earth, Google maps, google desktop search, and of course the Google.com search engine. One area Google has been targeting is display advertising such as banner ads and video ads. Adsense publishers have always had the option to allow image ads to be displayed on their websites, but, Google’s flagship advertising product has always been text based contextual ads.With

the addition of DoubleClick to the Google family, they will have access to the success that DoubleClick has had in the display ad market. Google’s stock price last traded at $466.29 on Friday. It will be interesting to see which direction it moves at the bell on Monday morning.

After Google boought YouTube in October of 2006, their stock saw a steady increase past the $500 mark. Take a look at this stock chart from late 2006. I’m not saying it will or will not happen again. I’m just saying that the initial public reaction seems good. Things could get interesting next week. I’ll definitely be keeping my TD Ameritrade ticker windows open.

What do Google, YouTube, MySpace, Digg, Flikr, and del.icio.us all have in common?

There are a few things. First and foremost though, they are each 100% branded names. None of them are names that you would naturally type into your web browser if you didn’t already know what each site was. Obviously these companies have all become phenomenally successful. Google was recently valued at $100+ billion dollars. YouTube was recently purchased by Google for $1.6 billion dollars. MySpace was sold to Fox News Corp for $800 million dollars. Yahoo acquired flikr and del.icio.us for around $30 million a piece. The only question remaining is when will the owners of Digg.com decide it’s time to sell, and to whom for how much?

The numbers seem to speak for themselves. In the online world branded names are king. Who wants to go to (for example) “SocialNetworking.com” when “MySpace.com” sounds so much cooler? Why would you go to search.com when you could just “Google” what you want to find? “Do you YouTube?” Do you want to “Digg” it? Do you find certain websites and news stories “Delicious?”

In the web world there are people who swear by online directories for link building and traffic generation. I am not one of those people. In fact if I was taking a “web personality” test and the question came up “Do you find online directories useful?” I would have to answer that with a resounding “Highly Disagree”.

Online directories are sites that list countless websites in different categories. Many people believe that by getting listed in many directories will help Page Rank and generally increase their search engine positions. While this CAN be true, it still does not justify the existence of directories. With search engines being so mainstream now you can find anything you need by a simple search. I have yet to meet a single person who goes to a web directory to look for websites. With the immensity of the internet, it’s hard to believe that a “phone book” approach will even begin to give you a good sampling. A simple search in Google or Yahoo will easily bring you what you are looking for.

You’ve probably heard that content is king? Well that’s 100% correct, but, there is one catch. Somebody needs to write the content. If you are looking to hire some writers and get some quick content, you shouldn’t have any problem finding quality writers for dirt cheap. However, if you are a writer and want to earn some extra cash on the side don’t expect to make your part time fortune writing articles for somebody else.

From what I’ve seen on several popular webmaster and business forums across the net the going rate for a 300-500 word article is about $5. Ladies and Gentlemen, that’s roughly $5 an hour. People who need quick content are almost never looking for quality content. They are willing to settle for cheap yet decent content because the truth is they don’t really care about the content. They simply want relevant high paying Google or Yahoo ads to be generated and displayed to their visitors and readers. So their article is junk? No problem, luckily Google found several related websites that will catch the interest of their viewers, at several dollars a click.

I’m sure if you’ve been around internet in the last 15 years you are probably aware of these things called “domain names”. They are the heart and soul of the internet as we know it today. Back in the early 1990’s there were several people who were considered eccentric at the time who began “mining” domain names. They were free when the internet first started, but soon were changed to $100 per year. This knocked a few people out of the gold rush, but, many people continued searching for available domain names hoping that someday they would be worth a lot of money.

They were right. With some domain names selling for millions of dollars, and a countless amount selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, the internet had created many millionaires in just a 5-10 year time.

Now you are probably thinking that all of the big money has been made already. Right? Wrong! I got into the game in 1999 and began purchasing a few domains. Soon after this I realized that my current names had increased dramatically in value. This prompted me to purchase several more.

I run several websites that cover a large range of subjects. Naturally I link all of my sites together in either my network bar or in the footer as text links. As you can imagine, with a network of several highly indexed websites I’ve managed to end up with several high PR pages. I often get emails from people who want to buy links on my PR5 and PR6 pages.

To somebody who is just starting out, selling some links and making some quick cash sounds pretty good. However, let’s take a step back and consider the bigger picture; a concept often times referred to as a “launching pad.” If you have several high PR high traffic websites and people are offering you money in exchange for your links, you are obviously onto something. Now whether or not you will realize what you have or not is up to you.