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 …

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 …

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. …

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. …

Ever since I posted my article on Why Etsy Stores Are At A Disadvantage Compared To Online Stores That Own Their Domain, I’ve been meaning to show everyone how easy it is to install a free open source shopping cart.

These days, there are many open source shopping carts out there that are completely free and very feature rich.

You simply have to sign up for a web host, download and install the free shopping cart and you are almost ready to go.

So today, I thought that I’d give a mini tutorial on how to install Open Cart which is one of the open source shopping carts I recommend in my free 6 day mini course on how to create a niche online store.

Open Cart is an incredible shopping cart that is easy to use and has an elegant back end interface with which to manage your orders and products. Did …

When I first started my online store, I had a master search engine optimization plan that I believed was fundamentally sound. The plan was to buy my search engine traffic using Google Adwords for my main keyword terms while simultaneously improving my organic search rankings through link building.

Then, once I managed to organically rank on the front page of search, I would gradually cut back on my Adwords spend and eventually rely solely on organic search to bring customers in the door. Not a bad strategy right?

While my plan sounded great on paper, when I looked at my Google Analytics statistics coupled with my search results, I knew this strategy wasn’t going to cut it if I wanted to maximize the profits of my online store. Please allow me to explain.

The photo below is a search for a keyword term that my store currently ranks …

As part of my weekly regimen, I like to read and participate in various small business forums and one of my favorites is the Etsy forum. For all of you who have never heard of Etsy, Etsy is a marketplace for do it yourself and handmade goods. Similar to Ebay, Etsy provides an easy way for talented crafters and artists to sell the fruits of their labor.

The reason I like reading the Etsy forums is because most if not all Etsy users are casual shopowners who have a strong desire to make some extra money on the side.

Many Etsy users would eventually like to quit their day jobs. Many Etsy users have the desire to launch their own full blown online stores but are afraid of the technical and marketing challenges in doing so.

Anyways, I was reading the forums the other day and noticed more complaints …

This is a guest post by James McLaughlin. James is a New Jersey based ecommerce marketing expert that helps small businesses achieve big results online. James has worked at Fortune 500 companies developing ecommerce marketing strategies that drive well above average growth. You can contact James at James@SupremeROI.com or find him on Linkedin by clicking here.

One of the biggest challenges in starting your online store is advancing through the ever-evolving landscape of building a website that converts sales and attracts visitors to the site to purchase.

Knowledge is power in this sense, but testing your knowledge in the real world and learning from others who have done it are much more valuable. You need the mind-set to learn it, and follow through with blind enthusiasm.

Luckily we have resources like Steve at MyWifeQuitHerJob.com to share his experience and insight on how to create a profitable online store that supports a family …

Every year, my wife and I hire a professional photographer to take pictures of the kids and the family. While this is not cheap, it’s something we like to do because the kids are growing up so fast and we want to have photos for every stage of their development.

What’s funny is that hiring a photographer is only a small portion of the overall cost. Buying all new matching outfits for the kids and my wife is what tears a hole in my pocketbook and gives me heartburn.

For all of you who know me well, I’m pretty cheap and seeing the clothing costs for these photo shoots makes me want to faint. In fact, I don’t even bother checking the credit card bills during this time because I’m that terrified.

The other day, my wife was shopping online at a kids clothing “boutique” and probably spent a …

My wife just closed the books on our mid year numbers(January – June) and profits are up in the double digits again. I say this every year but my wife and I are constantly amazed by how our little business continues to grow and expand.

Seriously folks, there’s nothing particularly exciting about our online store on the surface. We sell wedding hankies and linen napkins primarily to the wedding and event planning industry. Nothing big! Our niche is very small but it happens to be a part of a very large and lucrative market that is insensitive to price.

Part of the reason why my wife and I are always surprised with our numbers is because these yearly increases are compounded annually.

If we have a great year like last year where we grew 44%, then it’s that much harder the following year to show similar growth.

At …

Last week, I received an email from Amazon.com informing me that they just cancelled their affiliate program in California effective immediately. They provided very little notice and in just one day, my Amazon affiliate account became worthless. Now I make a decent amount money with affiliate marketing for various business services, but what if I relied entirely on Amazon.com as my primary income source? I’d be screwed.

After running MyWifeQuitHerJob.com for several years now, I’ve fielded many questions about how to open an online store and how to put up niche affiliate sites. And whenever someone asks me for advice, I almost always advocate creating an online store as opposed to going down the path of making a pure affiliate website.

The problem is that most people are attracted to the prospect of creating a niche affiliate site due to the passive nature of the …

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 …