It’s still early on in the year, but our online store is poised for yet another 30%-40% increase in year over year profit.

And believe it or not, our little online wedding linens store has now shown 4 consecutive years of double digit growth.

At this point, the shop easily makes more than double my day job income and the business still seems to be growing every year despite my skepticism and disbelief.

My blog, MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, is also seeing similar growth, setting record traffic and income numbers that continue to grow exponentially. The affiliate and ad revenue for my blog has more than doubled from the previous year and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.

Furthermore, my Create A Profitable Online Store Course now has well over 125 students and continues to grow. Because I’ve been consistently adding new content every single week, the course now contains well over …

This article is part 4 of a multi-part series on how to design a mobile optimized website for ecommerce.

In case you missed them, here are the links to the previous 3 articles.

How We Doubled Our Mobile Sales By Designing A Mobile Version Of Our Website
How To Design A Killer Mobile Ecommerce Website That Will Boost Sales
3 Ways To Design A Mobile Optimized Ecommerce Website And The Tradeoffs You Must Make

In today’s article, I’m going to discuss the most important elements of mobile website design. One of the hardest parts of designing a mobile optimized website is that the screen is so darn tiny. In most cases, you have as little as one-tenth of the screen real estate compared to that of a desktop or a laptop, yet you still need to convey the same level of information to your potential customers.

Because the discrepancy in screen real estate is …

This article is part 3 of a multi-part series on how to design a mobile optimized website for ecommerce.

In part 1, I demonstrated how big of an impact a mobile optimized website can have on the conversion rate of your store. In this article, I used actual numbers from our online store Bumblebee Linens to show how optimizing for mobile can effectively double your conversion rate.

In part 2, I went over some basic design principles that are essential to optimizing your site for mobile. Specifically, I showed you what you need to do in order to design a killer mobile ecommerce website that will boost sales.

Today, I want to talk about tradeoffs. Knowing the best design practices for creating a mobile optimized site is all fine and good, but implementation is the hard part.

Often times as a webmaster, you need to make some hard choices about …

This is step 2 of a multi-step series on how to design a mobile optimized website for ecommerce. In my last article, I unveiled my mobile ecommerce site along with some real data that I collected from my online store. In case you missed it, you can check it out below.

How We Doubled Our Mobile Sales By Designing A Mobile Version Of Our Website

Today, I’m going to talk about some of my goals and criteria in designing the mobile version of my online store website.

As you are reading this article, keep in mind that making an ecommerce site mobile is a lot different than making a blog or article driven site mobile.

For one thing, optimizing a blog is all about framing the content whereas ecommerce stores must also focus on photos and intuitive navigation. To make a blog mobile, often times it is as simple as running …

A while back, I wrote an article on Why My Online Store Needs A Mobile Website And How To Tell If You Need One Too. If you haven’t read it already, I recommend that you take a quick skim through it because it outlines some of my motivations for creating a mobile version of my ecommerce store.

Click on the picture above to check out my mobile site!

Now my mobile ecommerce site has been up for a few months now and the reason I haven’t mentioned anything about it until this point was because I wanted to gather at least 2 months worth of data before reporting the results.

So while I’m going to show you some actual data taken from my mobile ecommerce site along with some of my observations, today’s article is actually just part 1 of a multi-part series about my experiences in the world of mobile …

Unless you’ve been living under a rock this past year, you are probably aware that Pinterest is a very hot topic among bloggers and small business owners. Not only has Pinterest’s user base been growing at an exponential rate but more and more businesses are starting to use Pinterest to market themselves online.

In fact, I’ve probably read over 80 Pinterest articles in the past 2 months alone. And of those 80, I’d say that a good 50 of those articles have been “free” tutorials and guides on how to use Pinterest to market your business.

One of the problems with reading and digesting all of this information is that after a while, every article starts to sound the same.

And what bugs me is that very few of these posts provide any real life case studies of how Pinterest has affected their businesses.

Is everyone just jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon …

As many of you are probably aware, I currently offer a free 6 day mini-course on how to start a niche online store in 5 easy steps. And while my guide is an excellent introduction to the world of ecommerce, by no means does it contain all of the necessary information to run a successful online shop.

Why am I telling you this? It’s because the other day, one of my readers emailed me to let me know that he had followed all of my directions on how to launch an online store from my free course but wasn’t making any sales. In fact, he even went as far as to blame me for wasting his time and money.

First off, I just want to say that there’s a big difference between “launching” your store versus running a successful one. My free 6 day mini-course is meant to …

Welcome to part 3 of a 3 part video series on how to create an online store and own your own website without any technical experience required.

Today, I’m going to teach you how to get a great looking website without having to hire a designer and without having to spend a lot of money. In an informal survey that I conducted among my readers a while back, the second biggest mental hurdle to starting an ecommerce website is the design aspect of the store.

Photo By Auswandem Malaysia

Let’s face it. Most of us aren’t web designers. Most of us aren’t very artistic and most of us are not well versed in the art of writing html or php.

The good news is that you don’t really have to be an expert in any of those things in order to put up a good looking online store.
The Beauty Of Open …

This post is part 2 of a 3 part series on how to create your own online store and own your own website without any technical experience required.

The main point of these articles and videos is to convince you that you don’t need to rely on the Ebays, the Etsys or the Amazons of the world to sell goods online. There’s no reason to pay hefty selling fees when you can own your own online shop and keep all of the profits for yourself.

In part 1, I showed you how to create your own fully featured online store website with just a few clicks of the mouse. Today, I’m going to show you how to make your website transactions secure with SSL and how to install credit card processing on your online shop.
No Technical Experience Necessary
In an informal poll that I conducted with my newsletter readers a …

Based on the emails that I’ve received during the past year, there are a lot of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com readers that sell on either Ebay, Etsy or Amazon and have a strong desire to open their own online store. In fact after conducting a short survey, I created a video tutorial a few months back on how to install an open source shopping cart from scratch for free.

Photo By SheeShoo

However, this video got mixed reviews from my audience because it was too technical. Several readers tried to follow the instructions but got stuck trying to figure out how to use some of the free tools I recommended.

Another set of readers were turned off by the amount of typing of “random” commands into their terminals.

The reason I created that video the way I did was to show you at a fundamental level what was needed behind the scenes to set up …

The other day a student in my Create A Profitable Online Store Class” asked me a pretty good question.
Right now while I’m developing my site it doesn’t really matter but how do I put my store under maintenance after I’ve launched without affecting my search engine rankings?
The great thing about this question is that it applies not only to ecommerce shop owners but to all webmasters in general.

If you improperly put your website under maintenance, you could potentially destroy your search engine rankings while driving away customers at the same time.

Especially if you plan on bringing down your website for an extended period, it’s essential that you do things the right way.
Common Mistakes
But before I discuss the proper way to put a website under maintenance and what I do with my online store, I thought that I would talk about some common mistakes that I’ve seen people make with their …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

These last few weeks haven’t exactly been the smoothest in small business land for my wife and I. For starters, our business computer died a horrible death which caused all sorts of mayhem. Ironically, I wasn’t that upset about the computer itself. After all, we bought it a good 4 years ago for a few hundred bucks off of Craigslist and it had served us well.

The big pain was in reinstalling all of the software that was on the old computer. Now with regular programs like Windows and Microsoft Office, reinstalling the software is not that big of a deal because I keep all of my original install CDs.

Most programs don’t require you to jump through hoops during installation. But our business relies on several “sewing” programs that are sold by companies who are terrified of piracy.

So I get it. These sewing programs …

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, …

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 …

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 …