A few months ago, I posted an article about Paypal Website Payments Pro Vs Authorize.Net where I provided a detailed comparison of two different credit card processing solutions. And almost immediately after posting it, I started receiving an abnormally large amount of email feedback from Paypal haters. In fact, I’ve never encountered such strong anti-feelings for any service before.
Having used both services in the past with no problems whatsoever, I was very surprised to hear the overwhelming negative feedback towards Paypal.
I will never use Paypal again. After being a loyal customer for over 3 years, one day they decided to place a 6 month hold on my money for no reason. I couldn’t access over 20k in my account which I needed to pay my bills!
The above quote was just one of many emails I received in the past few months since …
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First off, I just wanted to clarify that this article is NOT about how to detect and flag comments as spam. The WordPress plugin Akismet already does a pretty good job of screening out and filtering traditional comment spam. Instead, this post is about how to prevent comment spam and other rogue activity from crashing your server and taking down your blog.
Photo By BoxChain
As I mentioned in my article on best posts of 2011, the traffic to my blog has doubled in the past year.
And unfortunately during that time, the amount of spam comments has increased by an order of magnitude as well.
Just to give you an idea, there were several days in December where I was getting bombarded with over 20 spam comments every few seconds.
Yes, you heard that right. Whenever I refreshed my dashboard, I would see 20 or more spam comments in my Akismet …
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The new year has already begun which means that it’s time to report the annual numbers for our online store. Just yesterday, my wife closed the books on our financials and I’m proud to announce that we had yet another record year with double digit growth!
I know that I say this every single year, but my wife and I are continually amazed by how our little online shop continues to grow. Seriously folks, while our store does cater to the wedding industry, our niche is actually quite small. But apparently, we haven’t yet saturated the market for wedding hankies and we’re not done growing yet.
Here are some of the highlights for 2011
Year over year revenue grew 39%
Year over year profit grew 44%
Except for just 2 months out of the year, our store had higher revenues than the previous year’s highest month.
Our SG&A went down as a percentage of …
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It has been quite a year for MyWifeQuitHerJob.com and I just wanted to thank everyone for continuing to support my blog. Compared to last year, traffic has more than doubled and the number of subscribers to my newsletter has almost tripled! Honestly, I never thought that my blog would ever become that popular and I’m very thankful to have reached this point after 3 years of hard work.
In addition to the increases in subscribers and overall traffic, revenues for MyWifeQuitHerJob.com have also increased by over 5x largely thanks to my Create A Profitable Online Store course which launched in March of this year.
Looking back, I started this course which just a 400 page PDF document and nothing else. Today, the course has well over 30 hours of video and I’ve had a total blast teaching a very driven set of students.
In fact, I just wanted to take …
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It’s rare for my wife to hold a grudge against anyone or anything. So the conversation below took me completely by surprise the other day when she and I decided to do some Christmas shopping online together.
Photo By nffcnnr
Me: Let’s go pick up everyone’s gifts at “The Big Convenient SuperStore” (Not the real name).
Wife: I will never shop at that store again.
Me: Huh? Why not? It’s so convenient and cheap. We can get all of our shopping done at one place.
Wife: I ordered there a few years ago and had a bad experience. Can’t remember the full story but I didn’t get my order on time.
Me: Is that all? Was it their fault?
Wife: No, they shipped it out the same day, but it got lost in the mail.
Me: So what’s the big deal? That’s not the store’s fault. It’s the shipping carrier’s …
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This past week I read an article on TechCrunch about how retailers weren’t ready for iPad shoppers this past holiday weekend. Now I don’t know much about the author or her ecommerce background, but I strongly disagreed with the post.
The main premise was that most of the top online retailers missed out on a lot of sales because they neglected to have an iPad app or an iPad optimized site ready for holiday shopping.
Photo By Old Shoe Lady
First of all when I go shopping on my iPad, the last thing I want to do is to have to download an app in order to shop efficiently. The iPad screen is large enough such that browsing full blown sites is comfortable for most online stores.
The only thing that would be a detriment to online shopping on an iPad would be if the site used flash, which most sites already …
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If you’ve followed my blog for the past several years, you’re probably already aware that every Cyber Monday, I take part in a gigantic sale on business ebooks and ecourses that is only valid for 72 hours.
However unlike previous years, this year’s 72 hour business sale is going to be offered in two different tiers.
The Business “Launcher” Package will have $1,033 in courses and guides all for only $97 (90% off for the 72 hour sale period)
The Business “Amplifier” Package will have $4,344 in courses (including everything in the “Launcher” package) and will be only $497 starting tomorrow (89% off).
When it comes to building an online business, having the proper education will save you time, money and a whole lot of frustration. Seriously, if all of these business courses were around when I first started, I would’ve been successful much sooner and I wouldn’t have made half the mistakes …
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This is a guest post from Sunil. Sunil owns over a dozen profitable niche websites and is the author of “How to Go from $0 to $1,000 a month in Passive and Residual Income in Under 180 Days All in Your Spare Time”, a FREE report you can download instantly from his Extra Money Blog, where he discusses how to create multiple streams of passive and residual income, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, blogging and personal finance.
In 2007, he sold his ecommerce website for $250,000 to a top Ebay Power Seller and since then has sold several niche sites for five figures each. You can read more about him and his work on his blog.
Ebooks are a great source of “passive income”, at least they have been for me. I published my first ebook in 2008 which I have not had to update. The ebook still sells as strong …
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