More money, more problems, right? If you made money last year from your blogging, congrats! You must be great at it, and you’re doing something you love.  If you’re a freelance blogger and get paid as an independent contractor, you probably didn’t get taxes taken out of your pay. It depends on how much money you made throughout the year, but you could owe some money from your taxes. Don’t worry, just prepare yourself.

We aren’t tax professionals, but there’s plenty of content out there to help prepare you for when you file this year. Here are some of the most helpful articles.

1. Tax Tips for Bloggers, Writers and Journalists - HR Block on Blog Talk Radio

First things first – if you’re making money from it, it counts as a business in the eyes of the IRS.

Listen to internet radio with HR Block on Blog Talk Radio

2. 7 Things That Every Blogger Should Know About Taxes - Problogger

“Telling the world about your blogging business is also deductible. Consider the cost of printing business cards and letterheads or advertising your blog when calculating your expenses.”

3. Tax Tips for Bloggers - Saving for Someday (Shareaholic publisher!)

It may surprise you that the IRS defines swag as compensation.

4. How to Avoid Income Tax Fines and Legal Penalties As A Blogger - Problogger

“A business online is a business nonetheless. And any business can be sued for anything.  At the very least, it’s a good idea to ensure your personal assets are protected and “separated” from your business assets. One way to do this by incorporating your business under a formal legalized structured such as a limited liability company (LLC).”

5. Tax Tips for Bloggers and Freelancers – TurboTax

“Whether you use Quicken, a spreadsheet in Excel, or an envelope containing check stubs and deposit receipts, make sure you know the source and amount of all income that you earn. This can be difficult when you are dealing with multiple modes of payment, including paper checks, electronic direct deposits, PayPal, and cash. Tracking your income and your important expenses and having the details ready when you sit down to complete your tax return will make your job so much easier.”

6. 101 Tax Deductions for Bloggers and Freelancers – Wisebread

#92: Clothing. Don’t mind if I do.

7. 2011 Tax Tips for Bloggers Who Make Money - Adventures in Blogging

An actual CPA on deducting your home office: “When you claim the home office, you base the deduction on the square footage of the home office divided by the total square footage of your home. You then multiply that percentage by the amount spent on rent, utilities, repairs and maintenance, and mortgage interest and real estate taxes if you are a homeowner. ”

8. Blogging As a Business: Tax Tips – Young and Thrifty

If deducting at-home internet, you have to calculate the % you use for the business.

9. Blogging Tax Tips for 2011 – Yakazie Personal Finance

Like the Problogger article said, spreading the word about your blog is deductible. This includes placing ads on other blogs and giveaway prizes you offer to promote your blog.

10. Self-Employed Individuals Tax Center - IRS

Just how much do you have to earn from blogging to be taxable? $400. From the horse’s mouth: “You have to file an income tax return if your net earnings from self-employment were $400 or more. If your net earnings from self-employment were less than $400, you still have to file an income tax return if you meet any other filing requirement listed in the Form 1040 instructions.”

We aren’t tax professionals so we can’t offer all the guidance you may need on this topic. Hiring a professional to help sort this out may be the right solution for you. If you earned money last year from blogging, be proud of being able to earn an income from something you love! Just take it seriously and consider how you should file your taxes accordingly so you can continue to blog happily and audit-free.

What other resources have you seen out there for tax tips for bloggers? Let us know if the comments.

Sometimes, the inspiration well simply runs dry. What will you blog about today? If you want your content to be shareable, you need to make sure that it’s as fresh and high quality as it can be. Offering something new is part of that. But how can you come up with new things to say on your blog day in and day out?

Here are five FREE Google tools mind stays inspired and your blog stays full of new content.

1. Google Reader

In order to create content, you need to consume it. You should monitor the content from competitors and other go-to industry blogs that will keep you up to speed about the trends in your industry. This will give you a sense of what’s already being covered and serve as inspiration for how you can offer a different or fresh take to your readers. You can use the Google Chrome RSS Subscription Extension to find the RSS feed for whatever blog you are reading without leaving the page. Firefox has a similar offering with the RSS Icon Add-On, which also shows a RSS icon in Firefox’s address bar.

Organization tip: Collect your RSS feeds into categories and put them into folders. Do this by clicking “Feed Settings” and selecting a current folder or creating a new one.

Next, let Google Reader guide you to finding new feeds. Discover similar content by clicking the arrow on the feed itself.

There’s a ton of news to keep up with. Setting up and organizing your RSS feeds in Google Reader will make that process much more manageable and enjoyable.

2. iGoogle

RSS feeds aren’t just for blogs. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of Twitter searches, LinkedIn Answers and even Quora threads. Again, keeping the feeds organized is key to staying motivated to actually read them though. Add your RSS feeds to a single iGoogle dashboard for a DIY social media monitoring dashboard. To do this click “Add Gadgets” at the top left hand corner of iGoogle, and then add the RSS feed of your choice on the next page.

You can drag and drop your gadgets around the dashboard to organize them in the most efficient way you can.

3. Shareaholic for Google Chrome

Chrome is Google’s own web browser, and Shareaholic offers several Chrome plugins that will make your life easier.

For your blog post idea generation needs, if you find a blog post that sparks inspiration for you, email it to yourself with the Shareaholic Chrome plugin. This is particularly helpful if you’re working with a team of writers. Find a great topic? Email it to the group.

Add Gmail to your services under Accounts/Services. When you find an article you want to email to yourself, click on your Shareaholic icon in the corner.

It will open your email in a new tab so you can send away. Bonus points: collect the articles you like in a Gmail folder to keep your content consumption manageable.

4. Google Analytics

What keywords are sending your blog traffic? Leverage that traffic with blog posts that target those keywords. Discover them in Google Analytics under Traffic Sources/Overview.

Find variations of these phrases using Google’s free keyword research tool.

5. Google docs

Now that you’ve identified some topics and keywords you want to target, collecting these thoughts into a plan of attack will lead you to blogging success. Creating a content publishing schedule is extra motivating for getting blog posts out. It’s almost like you’re creating a delicious menu of strategic ideas to pull from for your next blog post. The free spreadsheet you can create in Google Docs is a perfect platform for it.

SocialFresh has a fantastic post on how to create an editorial calendar, along with a free downloadable template for an editorial calendar of your own. Put your dates in the rows, and create columns for any one of the following categories:

• Blog post title
• A link to an example of what’s been written on the topic
• Keywords to target
• CTA (Good for content marketers – What will your call to action be on the blog post?)
• Status  (published, in review, scheduled)
• Assets  (video or photos needed)

For a backstage view, here’s how I keep things organized for the Shareaholic blog.

Another nice thing about Google docs is that you can share them easily with other writers. Ah, the beauty of the cloud.

One more Google docs tip: If you put in the work to establish an editorial calendar, you don’t want to lose your work. Use Backupify to back up your Google docs.

What tools do you use to generate blog post ideas? Let us know in the comments.

Need even more help getting blog post ideas? Here are 20 to get you started.

The Tweets are alive with the buzz of Pinterest! Social media’s pretty new girl at school is still drawing a ton of media interest, with a new post highlight content marketing how-to’s and even some not-to-do’s for the rising star. For a different take on the buzz itself, I personally found this perspective from Clever Girls Collective to be spot-on.

Among the buzz are requests from you folks, our community members, to add Pinterest as a sharing option in Sexy Bookmarks. We’ve got it there for ya, in addition to a Pinterest Chrome plugin so you can pin right from your browser.

Here’s a screencast with instructions on how to add Pinterest to your current Sexy Bookmarks social media button set.

Is Pinterest a fit for your blog? Will you add it to your Sexy Bookmarks button set? Let us know in the comments.

Want tips on how to leverage Pinterest for your blog? Read our free guide to Pinterest for content marketing.