It has been a whirlwind two weeks for my family. On December 5th, I attended my brothers wedding. 2 days later, my wife gave birth to our second child Kyle (6lbs 11 oz). The following day, escrow closed on our new house and the day after that contractors began working on the house. During these next few weeks, we will be packing our bags for the big move.

In any case, it has been a while since I last did a mailbag so here are the questions for the week. I’m a bit backlogged but am doing my best to go through my mail.

I love your introduction to corporate entities and I am linking to it in my own blog to recommend it a resource for my readers. One question, I’m surprised that you didn’t choose the S-Corp as a store owner. Often, the S-corporation structure …

Whenever I mention to anyone that I work a full time job, help my wife run our online store and maintain MyWifeQuitHerJob.com all while having two kids in the house, one of the first questions I always get is how I find the time to do all of these things.

Photo by Morbuto

Believe it or not, even with all of these items on my plate, I still feel I have time to take on even more. The secret is being more efficient with your time and managing your day a little bit better. I know. It’s easier said than done. But I’m going to describe in this article how my wife and I organize our time to run our online business and and how we manage to cram a ton of activities into a single day. The reality is that there’s plenty of free time …

Lately, I’ve been receiving a number of emails from readers asking for the easiest and fastest way to open up a cookie cutter online store. I’ve also been asked to critique several newly launched online store websites and unfortunately, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. People have this tendency to do the least amount of work possible while expecting the largest possible payoff. Lesson #1, doing little work for a large payout just doesn’t happen very often in this world.

Photo By Nevada Tumbleweed

First off, I hate it when people ask for a “cookie cutter” solution because it implies that the design is exactly the same as someone else’s and there is no originality involved. Some of the stores that I looked at didn’t even bother to change their look from the standard website template. So I wasn’t surprised at all when I heard that …

After reading my series of articles on how to save money on your taxes, a buddy of mine decided that he was going to start taking extra tax deductions by turning one of his hobbies into a business.

Hey Steve! You know how I love to paint right? And just the other day I sold a painting to someone on Ebay… Why don’t I just call this a business and declare business losses off my tax return? May as well right?

At first glance, my friend’s logic sounds reasonable. After all, he does create paintings that are sold for profit as a side business. So shouldn’t he be able to take business deductions and losses for all expenses incurred while painting?

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is a bit complicated. While my friend is technically allowed to deduct business related expenses for his painting business, the …

This is a guest post written by Joel Ohman. Joel is a Certified Financial Planner™ and the founder of 5 web startup companies. Among the 1000+ websites that he owns, his latest project is www.creditcardchaser.com where he helps people proactively search and compare different credit card offers.

One of the biggest challenges facing many small business owners is the issue of how to manage a company that is bursting at the seams because of rapid growth. Many entrepreneurs love what they do and work hard to turn their “baby” of a business idea into a money making business. However, if an entrepreneur does not prepare themselves properly then they may just find that their baby of a business has turned into a growth spurting teenager complete with hormonal issues and a desire to take your car out for a spin and party with their friends until the wee …

My wife and I went to the obstetrician yesterday and found out that she’s literally ready to deliver at any time now. So inevitably in the next day or so, we will be having another little boy in our household! The timing is also such that our new house closes escrow the day after we are due, my mom is flying in and my brother is getting married all around the same time too. It’s going to be a busy week.

It’s hard to tell how much of an impact this will have on our other activities, but I wanted to let you all know that I may be MIA for a couple weeks in terms of answering questions. But without further ado, here are a few questions for the week.

I’m creating a website to promote affiliate products. I wasn’t sure if I needed …

I was discussing the merits of using Adwords the other day with a few buddies of mine when I couldn’t help but notice the skeptical looks on their faces. In fact, both of my friends were quite shocked when I told them how much we were paying Google every month to use their Adwords service.

I must say that I was a bit surprised by their reaction. Even after explaining to them that our return on investment for Adwords was quite high, they still didn’t see the value. After all, they had both dabbled with Adwords in the past and felt as though it was a complete money pit.

So I dug a little deeper and asked to look at one of their accounts and soon everything became clear. There were several things that they were not doing correctly and they were optimizing for the wrong metrics.
A …