G. Costs for Advertisements on Internet,

H. Billboards, and

I. Graphic design costs.

Goodwill Marketing For Your Business

Marketing that is intended to portray your business positively can be deducted. Such marketing creates a long-term potential for business and, thus, falls within ordinary and normal requirements of tax code. Examples of such marketing include:

A. Sponsoring local youth sports teams,

B. Distributing samples of your business product, and

C. Costs associated with prizes offered by your business in a contest.

As long as your marketing expenses can be reasonably related to promotion of your business, you should be deducting said expenses from your gross revenues. If you failed to claim any such expenses on your tax returns, your probably overpaid your taxes.

You’ll also find many further free tracking software solutions at http://www.hotscripts.com

But personally speaking, what I’ve found works very well and avoids putting any increased strain on my existing websites is using a third party tracking service.

The only things really to worry about when using a third party service are:

* How long will this service be around? (If they stop their service after a year, you wouldn’t be able to access your past data and will have to change all your tracking codes on your pages too.) * What is their privacy policy regarding my web stats? (Are they honest and trustworthy in other words. You don’t want service owners studying and then duplicating your successful business plan.)

Over past month I’ve been using ecommStats (http://www.ecommstats.com). Now, this service isn’t free, but at this time they give you 50,000 free page views per domain, and depending how busy your site is those page views can last you a very long time.

The service works great and is very easy to add to your pages—simply add three lines of code at bottom of each of your pages (you can easily do this with Server Side Includes if you’re comfortable with that) and all your visitors get tracked accurately and in great detail.

Alternatively - an entirely free (at this time) and very established service is StatCounter (http://statcounter.com). It even has a rave review from Tucows.com (one of largest download sites on internet) which speaks for itself and adds a lot of credibility to service.

And just in case you’re wondering how a free service like StatCounter makes money, well - since it’s such a popular service with many webmasters logging in every day (and many I’m sure even more than once a day just like me) that it’s made it very easy for them to sell a lot of advertising on their site. They also offer an upgrade to their advanced paid service.

But thinking beyond free services, as your business grows you may choose to upgrade to high end paid services that provide even more in depth information about your visitors...

Services like Urchin (Urchin.com - owned by Google) or Deep Metrix (DeepMetix.com). However, to help you grow your business to that point you need to keep a close eye on what your visitors are doing and where they’re coming from, and free tracking software and services is a great way for you to start to do this.