Unemployment insurance tax -- You are required to pay federal and state unemployment taxes if you have more than one employee on books for at least 20 weeks in a calendar year, or if they have paid more than $1,500 in gross wages in a calendar quarter.

Again, check with your state's Department of Revenue for more information.

A home business qualifies for all of same tax deductions regular businesses do. In eyes of IRS, only difference between most home businesses and Fortune 500 Companies is their size, and fact that home businesses can also deduct many household and living expenses.

Owning a home business will entitle you to deduct thousands of dollars in every day expenses. After all, why pay more in taxes than you have to?

Listed below are just some of items you are allowed to deduct:

* Your car and car expenses.

* Your mileage.

* Your home computer, printer and other office equipment.

* Your home. If you're not a homeowner, you are allowed to deduct area where your home office is set-up.

* If you're a homeowner, you may deduct a portion of your property taxes and utilities.

* Your travel expenses.

* Your restaurant meals, entertainent, dinner parties.

* You may pay wages, tax free, to two of your children, if they are involved with business.

* You may deduct your families health insurance.

NOTE: To qualify for above tax deductions, you must be actively working your home business.

In closing, since tax laws are continually changing, I highly recommend you consult with your accountant or tax advisor to learn more about applying aforementioned deductions to your home business.

Dean Phillips is an Internet marketing expert, writer, publisher and entrepreneur. Questions? Comments? Dean can be reached at mailto: dean@lets-make-money.net

3.Set up E-commerce E-commerce involves setting up shopping cart software and a means of accepting credit card payments. There are three possible ways to set up e-commerce:

a. Set up shopping cart software and a secure order form on your Web site. Then process orders using your regular off-line bank processing service. This is good for people whose Web site is an extension of their off-line business. But setting this up from scratch for a Web only business may be too costly.

b. There are many companies on Web that will set you up with a merchant account. This service may or may not include a shopping cart. In either case, before user enters their credit card information, they are transferred to secure server of merchant account. Setup costs for a merchant account can run into hundreds of dollars. In addition, there are transaction fees and monthly fees.

c. Many small businesses use online payment services. Most online payment services can provide you with a shopping cart, but in many cases, all you need is to place some html code provided by online payment service on your Web site.

When your customer clicks on a "Buy" button on your Web site, they are transferred to web site of online payment service where they enter their credit card information. You receive an email notification when a transaction is completed.

Online payment services don't charge for setup or monthly fees, but transaction fees are similar to a merchant account. Fees run about $0.35 and 2.5% per transaction. After a delay to prevent charge backs losses, you can login to online payment services Web site and transfer payment into your bank account.

The oldest and largest online payment service is PayPal which processes over 600,000 transactions per day.

4.Promote Your Web site

Unless someone makes a lucky guess as to URL (Uniform Resource Locater) or address of your Web site, you will receive no visitors. Simply placing your Web site on Internet does not result in traffic. You need to promote your Web site. There are many ways to promote your Web site, some free and some pay, some very effective, some a total waste of time. Below are main methods of generating traffic.

a. Advertising. You can purchase advertising on Web sites that do have traffic. You can also purchase advertising in newsletters or e-zines. Don't assume that Web site with most traffic or newsletter with most subscribers is best value. The secret to successful advertising is testing. Test different advertisements in different locations.

b. Pay per click. Almost all search engines will let you purchase search words. When a search engine user enters a search for a word that you purchased, a link to your Web site will be returned at top of results. Sometimes you "bid" on a search term. In that case, when a user of search engine enters a word that you placed a bid for, a link to your Web site will be returned in results below all Web sits that bid more money.

c. Traffic Exchange. A traffic exchange is a Web site where you login and click to visit other people's Web sites. For each Web site that you visit, you receive a credit. You can exchange your credits for visits to your Web site. If you don't feel like making effort to visit other people's Web sites, you can purchase visits to your Web site. The quality of traffic from traffic exchanges varies between very poor to totally useless.

d. Search engines. You can submit your address of your Web site to most search engines for free. After you submit your Web site information, search engine will scan or "spider" your Web site with a program called a "robot". The robot will provide information that allows search engine to list your Web site in their database, and rank it for relevancy. When a user of search engine enters a search for a word related to content on your Web site, a link to your Web site will be returned in results at a position depending upon relevancy of your webpage.

e. Link popularity. Different search engines use different methods to rank relevancy of a webpage. One method uses number of links on Web that point to webpage. To take advantage of this, you need to get links to your Web site posted in as many places on Web as possible. One method to accomplish this is to write articles related to topic of your Web site and make them available for people to post on their Web site for free.

f. Web presence. To get traffic to your Web site, people have to know you are out there and what you have to offer. Getting involved and contributing useful information in online forums and message boards is one way to establish your presence on Web. People reading your messages may put information about you on their Web site. Another advantage of this method is that it keeps you in touch with what's going on in areas related to topic of your Web site.

Selling your product with your own Web site boils down to four steps explained in this article. This article is in no way comprehensive. Complete details about each one of these steps would to fill entire books. This article gives you a general overview and enough information to get you started.

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