Getting receipts means that you'll have to think ahead. When you buy something online, print receipt page. When you subscribe to a service that may pull a fee from your checking account or credit card account on a monthly basis, make sure to opt in to any e-mail notification of transactions that you might be able to get.

Print everything out and put it in a folder for that years tax records. You won't regret it when tax season comes along.

You will also get a much better picture of how much money you're earning. I think a lot of affiliate marketers brag about their checks, but conveniently forget that out of $10,000.00 they earned last month, they spent $8,000.00 for PPC advertising, $27.00 for Wordtracker, $100.00 for their web host, ect, etc, reducing their actual profit to enough to buy some bubble gum.

There's great software that makes all of this easier of course. Quicken or MS Money Home and Business editions or PeachTree accounting would all make whole process of tracking these numbers much less painful.

Finally, there are real benefits (and some costs) to incorporating yourself. Incorporating changes tax rules and create scenarios that let you put more of your profit into your pocket. They also help to shield you from liability. I'm not a lawyer, so I'd recommend talking to an tax law lawyer. I incorporated in Florida and entire expense was about $495.00.

To get visitors to stay, you need to give them information that they want. This will not be information about you (at least not on home page). Your goal should be to educate your visitor. Give them information they will not get elsewhere on how to solve problem that caused them to search for you in first place. If you website is just sales hype, your visitors will be gone in a lot less than 68 seconds.

4. What do you want visitors to do once they are at your site? Many would say- “Buy lots of stuff from me.” Well, in your dreams! Most people will not buy from you, or call you on first visit to your site. They don’t know you (unless an offline relationship has been established). And unless you are selling a commodity, that is same on every site- eg CD’s, and you are competing on price, you need to be able to establish a relationship. To do this, you need to give visitors a reason to give you a way to stay in contact. This could be by way of a newsletter, or through a free download of information requiring their email details. When you do this, it is essential you provide an unsubscribe option, because otherwise you will be spamming. And there are no rich spammers (although I believe there are rich people selling spam technology).

5. How are you going to get people to come back to your site? On average, four out of five website visitors will never come to a website. And if they only stay 68 seconds, it’s going to take you several lifetimes to become an internet millionaire. To get people to come back you need to do several things: •Have sufficient quantity and quality of content, that visitor will bookmark your site to come back for more •Continually add to and change content to make visitors want to come back •Provide special offers to your subscribers that will encourage them to revisit your website

If your website never changes, why would anyone want to come back?

6. How are you monitoring going to monitor results of your website? No-one can guarantee what is going to work for you. Therefore you have to measure your statistics. A good webhost will provide you with a statistics package that will tell you how many visitors you have had, when they visited, how they found you and what they did at your site. When you make an offer, make a change to your site, or undertake some marketing campaign, whether online or offline, check response on your statistics, and conversions that you have achieved on your site. Do controlled experiments. Don’t change too many things at one time, because you will never know what caused change. Find out what works, and what doesn’t. And when you find a good thing, stick to it!

7. Are you really going to trust your 10 year old nephew to do all this? You may not be using your 10 year old nephew, you may be using a graphics design company instead. But don’t confuse determining your website business model and marketing strategy with colour and movement of your website graphics. As a general rule of thumb, flashier website, worse it is commercially. (Check out eBay and Amazon- how flashy are their sites? But is there a clear business strategy?) You will need someone to do html programming, but almost certainly, someone who is good at that will not be good at everything else. A website is just another marketing tool. Like a brochure. Would you get your printer to write your advertising copy?

I don’t suggest that you should not use a great website design company (or even your precocious nephew) to build your website, but don’t let them be in charge of your marketing!