Malaysian Blogger MUST Pay Income Tax
Now, for the million dollar question, do we (Malaysian Bloggers, ebay entrepreneurs) need to pay income tax? Unfortunately ‘yes’, we have to pay income tax.
Contrary to popular beliefs, income remitted from outside Malaysia is exempted from Malaysian Government Residential Tax. However, this rumor turned out to be not accurate. This has been countered by bloggers and online entrepreneurs based on Clause 12 under the ‘Tax Exemption For Individuals’ which stated clearly that:
12. Income Remitted from Outside Malaysia.
With effect from the year of assessment 2004, income derived from outside Malaysia and received in Malaysia by resident individual is exempted from tax.
I believe, the true meaning of the above paragraph has been misinterpreted, based on my own understanding, what the LHDN tried to articulate is a person is exempted from tax if the incomes remitted from outside Malaysia had been taxed by the foreign government.
Based on an accountant’s (Ice Lim) telephone conversation with an officer from LHDN, the officer clearly elaborate in details to what extend a source of income falls under the category ‘foreign income’ and are tax excempted:
- The specific service must be provided outside of the country (Malaysia).
- You have to be a PR holder of a specific country and contribute to the specific country’s income tax. In other words, one must have a studio or resides in a foreign country.
Having gone through the article, I am still unsatisfied with the answer and took the trouble to write an email to LHDN for a more solid information, and the officer replied:
If you are a resident in Malaysia and only your server is based in the USA, then your income is subject to Malaysian Income Tax.
Let us hope that with all the information provided by the people from the LHDN and an accountant (ice lim), this would put an end to the rumor on bloggers are exempted from paying income tax. Simply put it this way, a person has to pay tax where he or she resides, this is because the person is making full use of the public facilities such as roads, proper waste management, police protection, general hospitals and many more.
The image above is the rates for resident individuals, for instant, if you earn RM5000 per month, your monthly taxable income is RM25.
Please be warned that it is not worth taking the risk by avoiding paying income tax. Tax evasion is a serious crime in Malaysia and in almost every country tax evasion falls under criminal law; the penalty depends on the amount of tax evaded by you and a harsh jail sentence. Do read this article – Businessman gets six months jail for tax evasion.
Should you require further assistance or still doubt about paying tax to our beloved corrupt Malaysian government, kindly contact them at 03-42893535, 03-42893600 or customer service centre 1-300-88-3010.
How to increase your google adsense earnings?
Blogging for money is not my cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean I hate the idea of making money online, who does? Lately, I’ve noticed a large number of people decided to blog not because they enjoyed blogging but wanted to make a living out of it, and that really annoys me. Reminds me of a good friend of mine, when the blogging world was in its infant years, I proposed the idea of co-blogging, with no intention of making anything out of it, but he rejected my idea, reason is because it is a waste of time.
Fast forward 2 years, he came talking to me and wanted to know how blog works and told me he bought a book – ‘Google Adsense for dummies‘, and just like yesteryear, I politely rejected his proposal on the ‘idea’ of co-blogging with him. His sudden passion in blogging was due to the fact that he overheard I’m making a living out of it.
Anyway, GeckoandFly was meant to be a collaboration between my friends (non-tech savvy people) by it did not materialized, glad that it didn’t worked out, if it does than my earnings would be equally divided among them. Three years of blogging and numerous trial and errors, I conclude that the art of monetizing your blog comes in many forms, depending on the blogging platform, keywords, language and many more, I would like to take the opportunity to highlight some of the key issues or shall I say some really simple technique that all newbie should know.
1. Insert Ads into your post.
This is by far the easier way to increase your CTR, but be cautious that just like a sword, it cuts both ways because it can be potentially annoying to your readers knowing that you are bombarding them with advertisement. Some of my favorite formats are the 468 x 60px, 300 x 300px, and 125 x 125px. Read AdesBlog.
2. Filter unwanted or low paying ads
Rumors has it that the author of AdsBlacklist own numerous spammy websites and the only for his splog to appear in adsense is by blocking out the competitions, thus born AdsBlacklist, basically he provide a list of his competitor’s splog to be filtered by the publisher. Well, it does works to a certain extend.
3. Ping your blog, submit to all the search engines.
Based on my 3 years of experience, pinging you blog and submit it to every known search engine does not guarantee traffic, and in most cases you get spammed in returned.
Submit to Google
Submit to Yahoo
Submit to MSN
Submit to Baidu (China’s biggest search engine)
Ping Moreover – http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml
Ping MSN – http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com
Ping ASK – http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml
Ping Google – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://www.YOUR-NAME.com/sitemap.gz
Ping Yahoo – http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=Yahoo&url=http://www.YOUR-DOMAIN.com/sitemap.xml
4. Sitemaps and SEO
Submit your sitemap.xml manually to Google, MSN, and Yahoo, it is a great way to monitor the keywords and your ranking in Google and Yahoo, highly recommended. The following table lists the Sitemap submission URLs for several major search engines:
Google Webmaster Central
Yahoo Site Explorer
MSN Webmaster Tools
If you are using Wordpress, then you should install these plugins:
All in One SEO – It works, based on both my blogs’ traffic, I noticed a 10 – 15% increase in term of pageviews.
Google XML Sitemaps – Will generate a sitemap.xml automatically whenever you update your post and comments, it pings all the three major search engine as well. A highly recommended plugin.
I’m not a SEO expert, neither am I a rich millionaire with tons of money lying around on the carpet. Just an ordinary kid making some spare cash for my college education. Whatever I wrote here are pretty basic in term of monetizing your blog, Google for more.
5. Drop Comments
By dropping your comments with a link back to other blogs, you’re building a social presence in the blog sphere, make it a habit, I would say at least 3 comments for each for your write.
p.s. If your new to the world of blogging, do read ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income, it is very informative for beginners.
Tags: Adsense, Begineer, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, CTR, Earn, Google, How To and Online Tutorials, Increase, Learn, Make, Monetizing, Money, Newbie, Noob, Online, Wikipedia
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