This past weekend, I was casually glancing at my Google Analytics numbers when I noticed a statistic that surprised me. Almost 3 percent of our revenues last month came from customers making purchases on their mobile devices. While 3 percent doesn’t sound like a huge percentage, this is pretty shocking to me on several fronts.

First of all, I never used to imagine anyone shopping or making purchases on such a tiny screen. Second, up until this point in time I hadn’t given mobile shopping a second thought because of my personal biases. Personally, I would never use my phone to buy anything online and I had assumed no one else would either given today’s technology.

Photo By Generation X-Ray

While mobile users only represent about 5% of the overall traffic to my store, this number is clearly trending higher. In fact at this exact same point …

This is a guest post from Laura Roeder. Laura is a social media marketing expert who teaches small businesses how to create their own fame and claim their brand online. She is the creator of the Creating Fame Classroom, Your Backstage Pass to Twitter as well as other courses she offers online. Laura’s free program, The Dash, provides weekly actionable tips on how to leverage social media. To become a member, go to GetTheDash.com.

Not this again.

I found myself on another looong Chicago bus ride, on my way to present a proposal (AKA spend an hour of my time without getting paid) to yet another hesitant prospect. By all measures my web design business was doing incredibly well – I was 23 years old and had hit just over $60,000/year.

But I was already getting drained, frustrated and burned out.

Every time I wrapped up a project I was back at zero …

My wife and I put it off for as long as we could. Our friends teased us about it. We had visions of the both of us crouched over on our hands and knees scrubbing the floors all day. Potty training was the one aspect of parenthood that my wife and I absolutely dreaded. Unfortunately, we had to bite the bullet sooner than we wanted to because our preschool forced us to take action. In order for our daughter to advance to the next class level, she had to be potty trained or be held back with the younger kids. And to make things worse, we recently had brand new carpets installed. (Bad timing. I know)

Photo By SpaceNinja

Yet in many ways, what instigated my wife and I to start our business and to potty train our daughter were very similar. Some …

As most of you know, exactly one week ago I launched my course on how to create a profitable online store. Since it was my first product launch on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, I thought that it would be interesting to talk about the chaos leading up to the launch and about what went right and what went wrong. While many people emailed to congratulate me on having such a nice, smooth launch telecast, let’s just say that from my perspective it was about as smooth as sandpaper.

Photo By DLR_de

Anyways, I first wanted to thank everyone who made it to the live telecast. Believe me, I was terrified that I was going to be broadcasting to no one. Actually, I can’t really say that. My mom was there and she wasn’t going to miss it so I was guaranteed at least one viewer.

But still, putting yourself out there …

The number one thing that prevents most would-be entrepreneurs from starting their own business is fear. Heck, my wife and I were absolutely terrified when we started our first online store. Not only did we not know what we were doing but we also had absolutely no idea where to begin. Seriously…

We had no idea how to launch a website
We didn’t know anything about PHP or HTML or CSS
We had no clue where to find products to sell online
We had no idea how to run a legit business
We didn’t know a lick about online marketing
We had no idea how to optimize our site for the search engines

Our greatest fear was spending all of this time and money on a business venture only to have it fail miserably.
How Did We Succeed?
After having gone through it all from scratch and creating a six figure business within the span of a …