Ordinary Marketing Expenses

Marketing costs must be "ordinary and necessary" business expenses in order to be deductible. Put in layman's terms, you marketing must be reasonably related to promotion of your business and expense amount must be a reasonable amount.

Deductible Marketing Expenses

Common deductible marketing expenses include costs associated with following items:

A. Yellow Page Advertisements,

B. Business Cards,

C. Advertisements in print media such as newspapers,

D. Telemarketing,

E. Business Cards,

* Exactly how many people are visiting your website? * How long they’re staying on your site before they move on? * Exactly where those visitors are coming from, each day? * How much of your website traffic is repeat visitors? * The exact paths people take as they click their way through your website?

Here’s what I’m getting at:

If you don’t know your visitors, it makes it *very* difficult for you to improve performance of your website and turn more visitors into customers - AND - get more quality traffic. For simple reason that you’re effectively working blind.

Without knowing how people visit your site and what they do on your site, any attempts at growing your traffic and improving profitability of your website is working with one armed tied behind your back, at least.

And unfortunately - web stats that come with your web-hosting are generally not enough these days.

Depending on your web host, chances are you’ve either got Webalizer, Analog Stats, or AWStats installed on your server. Here’s how that software works:

It takes “raw” (unreadable to human eye) information your web server stores of everyone that visits and presents this in an easy to understand way.

Unfortunately, due to a number of technical reasons, this information is often presented in quite an inaccurate way.

And in my personal experience, these software packages don’t present this information in a particularly helpful way either for someone trying to improve conversion ratios and profitability of their website.

What I personally do, and what I would suggest you do is use a “Tracking Solution” that accurately tracks and reports all your visitors in an easy to read and understand way. These solutions come in two forms: Software & Services

Both these options have their pros and cons, but what they both do very well is present exactly what’s happening on your website right up to minute, and in a way that’s very helpful to you for making good (and profitable) decisions for your business.

To start with here’s a software solution you can install and use for free on your website:

Now before you go and install it, you should of course be familiar with installing software on your server. If you’re not comfortable installing software on your website, a tracking service (which I’ll come to in a moment) would probably be best for you.

And it’s also important to note that installing software on your website can often put more strain on server. This is particularly true if you’re on shared hosting.