Home Business Blog

Ok, we all know when our business is not going so well right? Be it a lack of visitors, lack of purchases, whatever, you will not need a littman stethoscope to figure it out, you need help! You can get the help from all sorts of places depending on your situation, try forums for instance, post your problems there and there are usually a good amount of people that will look at your site and tell you what you need to change, maybe it isn’t professional enough, maybe something is broken, you never know until you ask for help.

The great thing about the internet is even if your site is up for a year with NO success, it is not over, sometimes a revival is in order, simply a major redesign, investing some time and resources into marketing and things can turn around overnight. It is not like a brick and mortar store in a small town, that once people drive by and say no they never return, with the internet the options are unlimited, you can change in a heartbeat!

I just had to take a minute and rave about the new budgeting program I have been using. It is called MVelopes and is the only budgeting software I have found that works for me. It is ALOT different than other programs like Money or Quicken in that it does not specifically plan ahead. It just allocates. So far it has been super easy to use, and I think the fact that I do not have any actual ‘credit cards’ helped that, because tracking credit cards and payments can get confusing. What it does for me is lay out my checks, from all my accounts, say Joseph brings home a 400 dollar check, and I have 200 dollars in PayPal, then it puts 600 dollars in the ‘cash pool’ saying ok, you have 600 dollars to spend, what are you going to do with it?

Then you set up ‘virtual’ envelopes for bills and spending, things like insurance, grocries, eating out, etc, then you assign a amount to each envelope, until that 600 is ’spent’. Then through the week, you can see that you have say 40 dollars in grocery money and 20 in eating out, if you spend 15 on eating out, then you enter that in the envelope and now you only have 5 dollars left to eat out on. You can also put a protion of money into a ’savings’ envelope to grow everytime you add to it, and say if you go over on something, you can transfer money from another envelope to cover it.

No more missing money, every dime is accounted for before we spend it, and we no longer ‘accidently’ overspend… it is great! They also have a business edition that I have not tried, but I can only imagine it is perfect! LOL I recommend it to anyone that has a hard time budgeting money any other way. It is really close to the Dave Ramsey principals of teaching and making it very easy to save money now.

If you are running any pay per click campaigns on the major search engines to drive traffic to your site, you should check out this PPC Management Software, by acquisio. It helps to manage the campaigns in one place, be it Google, Yahoo, or MSN. To better analyze your results, track them, and make the changes needed to get better results. Don’t waste your money on any of those without really tracking the progress somehow be it with this program or another. Tracking is essential.