Probably the most frequently asked question I get asked on this blog is how to find wholesale vendors to source products for an online store. And I almost always make the same recommendation, sign up for Worldwide Brands because it will save you time and help you avoid scammers.

Especially if you want to drop ship your products or source your products domestically within the United States, signing up for Worldwide Brands is the best way to get access to a large database of pre-verified and legit wholesale vendors that sell products across a wide variety of categories.

However, the main problem is that the service costs $300 which stops most people dead in their tracks. Personally, I think $300 is a drop in the bucket when you think about how much time you can save by having direct access to a large data base of pre-verified vendors as …

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To be honest, I’m a little bit late to the Facebook and Twitter game when it comes to using social media with my online store. And the reason I’ve waited such a long time before applying these services to my business is because I was never fully convinced that it was a good use of my time.

After all, I have many tasks on my plate and very limited resources so I have to prioritize my time accordingly. But lately, I’ve been hearing way too many success stories with Twitter and Facebook to ignore them any longer.

For example according to Search Engine Land, many ecommerce companies have seen huge increases in sales and traffic after implementing Facebook Likes for their websites. Here are a few examples.

Levi’s jeans found that referral traffic increased 40X after implementing the Like button
Giantnerd.com’s revenues increased over 100% after implementing the Like button
American …

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As I often mention in my articles, entrepreneurship and personal development are intertwined. You need the proper motivation and mindset in order to succeed with your small business which is why I’m happy to tell you about something exciting today.

A bunch of my blogger friends and colleagues have put together a killer deal involving personal development ebooks and courses. In a nutshell, for only 72 hours starting on June 20, you can purchase 22 premium personal development guides written by top experts in their respective fields for only $97.

Keep in mind that these guides come straight from the experts. Famous bloggers and entrepreneurs such as Charlie Gilkey, Leo Babauta, Jonathan Mead, Henrik Edberg, Karol Gadja, Adam Baker, Ali Luke, Thursday Bram and more spill their guts on what it takes to live a fulfilling and balanced life.

While I haven’t read all of the guides in this promotion, I can …

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This is a guest post from Jeremy Day. Jeremy writes about local business news, and gives out free business listings for what he thinks are the best local businesses in the neighborhood.

So you have started an online store. You have all your products listed. Everything looks pretty and yet, not a lot is happening. I know this is the case for a lot of people starting out.

It does take awhile for a brand new site to get some traction, become trusted by search engines like Google, and just plain getting found.

And you are probably doing a lot of things like trying to get backlinks to your site for your keywords, and all the other fun things online business owners get to do.

But how much are you treating your online business like an offline business? In other words, how much are you treating your online business like a “real” business?

What …

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Even though we’ve been running our online store with the same basic layout for a few years now, I’m continually amazed by how often I find problems with our website and how often I have to make subtle tweaks to improve conversions. I’ve also come to the realization that I’m pretty lousy at predicting human behavior and anticipating how customers will interact with our user interface.

Photo By javYliz

In any case, the issues that I’m about to describe aren’t necessarily “bugs” per se but website usability issues that we discovered from talking to our customers directly.

9 times out of 10, a customer gets confused navigating through our online store because I’ve made certain assumptions about the way a user should interact with our site. I’ve made certain assumptions about how clear the instructions are written and how tech savvy the internet user is.

And you know what? I’ve found …

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Today, I’m happy to announce that our online store will be featured in the summer 2011 issue of Martha Stewart Weddings magazine! My wife and I are both ecstatic because we’ve been trying to get Martha Stewart’s attention for quite some time now.

As one of the top magazines in the wedding industry, I am truly humbled that they chose to include our wedding handkerchiefs in their latest issue.

A Mad Scramble
Several months back, an editor for Martha Stewart contacted us on a Friday afternoon asking if we could send some personalized hankies to their offices for a photo shoot the following Tuesday morning!

It was extremely short notice (the package had to arrive on Monday), but we managed to stitch out their request right then and there(something that would have been impossible to do if we didn’t do our own embroidery in house) and shipped out the hankies that afternoon via …

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I watched a very interesting video on Tech Crunch TV the other day where venture capitalists David Lee and Ron Conway discuss some of the key attributes of their most successful portfolio company investments. The video is definitely worth a watch if you have a spare 15 minutes or so. You can find the video here as well as my own take below.

Photo By SashaW

While the businesses that I encourage readers to start on MyWifeQuitHerJob.com are not crazy startups where you’re working 16 hour days, trying to hit a home run and earn millions and billions of dollars, there are many parallels between a lifestyle business and a venture backed startup.

In other words, many of the same traits that make a venture backed startup more likely to succeed apply to small businesses as well. Here’s my take on David and Ron’s findings.
Get A Partner
According to Ron …

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This past month, I’ve been asked to critique several online store websites (click here to read some of my past online store writeups). These days, I rarely have time to take a look at random reader’s websites simply because I’m swamped with other things and taking care of little people aged 3 and below. Also, since I run an ecommerce course, I reserve most of my non-family time for my students.

Photo By KateMonkey

But I felt compelled to respond to these review requests because all of them had the same or similar mistakes.

And when 4 consecutive websites have the same problem, I feel compelled to write about it. Here were the problems that I found with the stores I looked at this past month.
No Value Proposition
Whenever I land on an unknown store while surfing the web, especially a site where I might be spending some …

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