Because my wife and I were at the Canton Fair last October in search of new vendors for our store, we didn’t get a chance to celebrate Halloween with our kids last year. So to make up for lost time, we took the kids out trick or treating for almost an entire hour past their normal bedtime.

And I have to say that it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time! My daughter is at this age right now where she just loves playing dress up and she’s incredibly outgoing and enthusiastic about everything.

In fact, we had such a good time dressing the kids up that I now completely regret missing Halloween last year and I don’t plan on missing it ever again.

Just seeing the look on my son and daughter’s face yelling out “Trick or Treat” in cute little costumes just made my night and …

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As part of my free mini course on how to start an online store, I recommend 2 different credit processing services, Paypal Website Payments Pro and Merchant Plus which is an Authorize.net provider.

But the problem with recommending more than one option is that you still have to make a choice. And making the right decision largely depends on the nature of your business and the volume of payments that your shop processes.

The reason I decided to recommend more than one option is because both services have their pros and cons which I’m going to talk about in this article today. I’ve used both credit card processing solutions before so I’ll give you my breakdown and let you make the call.
Which One Is Cheaper?
The first and foremost criteria that most people use to select a credit card processor is price. But when it comes to credit card processing, …

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When I was a kid, one of my favorite fables was “The Tortoise and The Hare”. But even though I loved this story growing up, I never had any respect for the tortoise because the way he won the race just wasn’t that sexy. So what if he beat the hare this one time? As far as I was concerned, the tortoise’s win was just a big fluke. What do you think would happen if they came out with the sequel “The Hare Strikes Back”? Who do you think would win the second time around?

The problem with the tortoise is that no one wants to be known as the slow and steady guy. Human nature dictates it’s infinitely more appealing to be quick and speedy rather than slow and steady which is why most people are impatient and expect fast results when they …

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This article is a followup to a previous post I wrote about how we use analytics tracking to improve our online store. Whereas the last article mainly dealt with the out of the box and default features of Google Analytics, I will now delve even deeper and discuss some of the more advanced metrics that we track.

Now when I say advanced, I’m referring to the features of Google Analytics that require a little bit of extra coding and are not implemented out of the box for most shopping carts.

Because every store is different, there’s always going to be certain aspects of your business that require custom tracking data that is completely unique to your situation.

For example, let’s say you want to track customer behavior after someone has signed up for your newsletter. This can’t be done out of the box with the standard analytics snippet …

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Recently, I was featured in an article published on AllAnalytics.com discussing how analytics has improved our online business. While the article was well received, I ended up getting a good amount of questions asking for more specifics on exactly how and what we track for our web store. So, the purpose of this blog post is to point out a few important metrics that we analyze and look at on a regular basis.

First off, I just want to emphasize that analytics is more than just looking at the number of visits or the number of pageviews that your website gets.

Don’t get me wrong, checking your traffic levels is both fun and rewarding but ultimately Analytics is about tracking specific metrics that will allow you to improve both the engagement and conversion rate of your website.
Make Sure You Set Up Ecommerce Tracking
Google Analytics has many ecommerce specific features which …

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I just wanted to start this review off by saying that I’m a big fan of Laura Roeder and everything she has accomplished with her online business these past several years. If you’ve never heard of her, you should check out her story by reading her guest post on my blog because she’s got a great story to tell.

And if you don’t feel like reading the entire article, here’s an executive summary. In a nutshell, Laura graduated from college and started out her entrepreneurial career by forming her own web design consulting business.

While this consulting gig was moderately profitable, the main problem with her business model was that she spent so much of her own time looking for new clients and catering to their needs that it became a chore to grow her revenues. After getting fed up with having to scramble for new business day …

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Every time I publish an article on entrepreneurship that encourages my readers to start their own business, I find myself tiptoeing across a very fine line. On one hand, starting an online business is simple, relatively risk free and doesn’t require a lot of start up capital. But on the other hand, running a successful business requires a ton of hard work, perseverance and a little bit of luck.

Photo By Mary Anne Thygesen

The problem is that when I emphasize the enormous amount of work that is required to launch a company, I tend to turn people away from starting a business.

However when I emphasize the simplicity, people tend to harbor unrealistic expectations and expect a quick path to riches.

It’s unfortunate, but many would be entrepreneurs choose what business model to pursue based on how “easy” it is to start as opposed to considering the actual probability of success. …

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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.

I first heard of Steve and his wife’s project through a webinar link that was relayed to me by a fellow blogger. I was immediately interested because this is a road that I have been on before. …

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