You have a thriving Internet business going. Your empire includes several websites that you created, with several different products. You also belong to several affiliate programs, a good network marketing program that is giving you monthly residual income, and a bunch of safe lists and traffic programs. You also have a personal and a business PayPal account, several ClickBank accounts, and a StormPay account, each with a different username and password. Then there are your various email accounts and auto responders. You also have some great software on your computer, such as tour ezine editor and safe list submitter. And you probably have a bunch of things that I didn’t mention.

All this stuff is so much fun to keep track of. However, you are keeping good track of it. Aren’t you?

But are you only one keeping track of it? Does your spouse have any idea of what you do on Internet every day? If those screeching tires took you out of commission for a while could your spouse step in for you and keep your Internet Empire running?

If you can answer yes to these questions then pat yourself on back, you are exception. You plan ahead for unexpected. You have set up a free insurance plan that will allow your Internet business to continue even if you can’t for a while. Congratulations. Good going.

How about rest of you? Is this important to you?

In off line business world there is “key man insurance”. This insurance is on an individual who is extremely important to success of business. It is fairly common in small to medium sized businesses where founder knows more about company then anyone else, and much of knowledge is in his head.

I’ve never heard of “key man insurance” for a home-based Internet business. And even if it did exist, it would probably be very expensive. So you need to take steps to make sure that someone else knows, or can find, information that you use on a daily basis.

There are additional ways that you can organize yourself so that your are more effective.

One major advantage of organizing your self is that you can save time. And as old adage says, “Time is money”. If your information is scattered all over place it is hard to find and you will waste time looking for it.

It is easy to join several programs, especially if you start joining traffic exchanges or safe lists. Keeping track of their information can be a real chore. Most of them will send you an email. You can print out emails and file them. You can also save all emails in a folder. While it is a good idea to do both of these, it will take time to look up information later.

Create a file where you can store all of information from email in one place. This file could be made with a word processor, a spreadsheet, or a database program such as Access. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

With a word processor you have everything in one file that is easy to scan. However, you should alphabetize entries as you enter them.

With a spreadsheet you can have one line per program and easily sort them by program name, program type, or date. Sometimes when you save a URL in a cell cell looks strange.

A data base program takes a little longer to set up, but once done you have nice fields with labels for each piece of information.

Use whatever is best for you or what you are most familiar with. The point is to organize them for easy and speedy access. Store file where you can get to it easy and fast.

For each program I suggest that you store at least name of program, login URL, referral URL, your user name, your password, date you joined program, type of program, and cost. You may also want to store your email address used for program, program contact email, how you found program (especially if u joined from a portal), and some notes on program.

As you join programs you will have costs and income. Generally these costs are tax deductible and income may have to be reported. Also, you will want to know if you are making or losing money. This is another thing to track.

Tracking expenses and income can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be. A spreadsheet is one of simplest ways. Set up columns for date, program name, cost amount, income amount, and source. The source would be PayPal, ClickBank, check, credit card, etc.