386: What Sucked In 2021 What Went Well With Our Businesses With Steve Chou

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You’re listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into the strategies they use to grow their businesses. Today, I’m doing a solo episode to wrap up 2021. I’m going to talk about what went well in 2021 and what didn’t work well for our businesses. I’m also going to talk about my family life, what’s been on my mind, and what is in store for 2022 for both Bumblebee Linens and MyWifeQuitHerJob.com. But before I begin, I want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode.

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Postscript is my SMS or text messaging provider that I use for e-commerce and my wife could have job actually, and it’s crushing it for me. I never thought that people would want marketing text messages, but it works. In fact, my tiny SMS list is performing on par with my email list, which is easily 10x bigger. Anyway, Postscript specializes in text message marketing for e-commerce and you can segment your audience just like email. It’s an inexpensive solution, converts like crazy, and you can try it for free over at postscript.io slash du.

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That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T.I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavier, who is also a sponsor of the show. Now, are you working around the clock to build the business you always imagined? And do you want to communicate with your fast growing list of customers in a personalized way, but in a way that gives you time to work on the rest of your business? And do ever wonder how the companies you admire, the ones that redefine their categories do it? Companies like Living Proof and Chubby as well. They do it by building relationships with their customers from the very beginning, while also evolving in real time as their customers needs change.

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These companies connect quickly with their customers, collect their info, and start creating personalized experiences and offers that inspire rapid purchase, often within minutes of uploading their customer data. Klaviyo empowers you to own the most important thing for any business, the relationship between you and your customers, and the experiences you deliver from the first email to the last promotion. To learn more about how Klaviyo can help you with your own growth, visit klaviyo.com slash mywife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash mywife.

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And then finally, I wanted to mention a podcast that I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the Profitable Audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience. No topic is off the table and we tell it like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the Profitable Audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now on to the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife, Quit or Job podcast. 2021 is over. So what I’m going to do today is I’m going to talk about what happened in 2021 with both of my businesses and my family life, both the good and the bad, and give you a sneak peek at what is in store for 2022 with mywifequitorjob.com as well as bumblebeelinens.com. So I want to start with my personal life.

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Many of you who follow me know that my wife and I strongly considered moving out of California for a number of reasons in 2021. California is probably the worst place to start a business anywhere in the US, like literally anywhere in the US. Our rent for our warehouse, just as an example, is ridiculous compared to any other part of the United States. What I pay for a 2,500 square foot warehouse

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literally cost the same as a 20,000 square foot office in North Carolina. I compared notes with a buddy of mine over there. The minimum wage is 17 bucks, which is 70 % higher than Vegas. And the tax rate here in California is ridiculous and is only going to get higher. Now actually don’t mind paying taxes if I believe that the money is actually going somewhere useful.

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but I personally don’t think that it’s being allocated very well by the California government. Now, fortunately for us, we actually bought a house at an opportune time. So we’re pretty much set on housing, but real estate here is now $1,200 per square foot, which again is ridiculous. I don’t really know how any young person here can possibly buy a house. It’s just too expensive. Now I actually want my mom to move out to where we live.

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but the cost of getting a house in our neighborhood is just super expensive compared to Maryland. Anyway, the list of candidates on where we were going to potentially move to were Vegas, Austin, and Maryland. Now, I actually personally really wanted to move to Austin because I think Austin has the best small business environment for, at least for what I do, out of anywhere in the US. Plus there are no taxes, but the problem is is that my wife and mom did not want to move there.

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Now, Maryland, if we moved to Maryland, my mom wouldn’t have to move, and this is where I grew up. I spent 18 years of my life there, and I actually really enjoyed growing up there. Great thing about Maryland is that the schools are amazing. I would say the schools there are much better than California overall, and I still have lots of friends there because I grew up there. But the problem with Maryland is that the housing just…

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doesn’t appreciate there. think my mom bought her house 10 years ago and it’s still the same price. It didn’t go up, it didn’t really go down. The summers are hot and muggy, if you’ve ever been to the East Coast, and it’s cold in the winter. Now my wife, who’s lived in California all of her life, would be in for a major shock if we moved out there. Now right now it’s funny, as I’m recording this episode, it’s actually been raining in California where I live for the past week. And it just made me think, I always seem to take for granted

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how great the weather is here for 10 months out of the year. And what ends up happening is when it rains, I tend to exercise much less. And whenever I exercise much less, it makes me less happy and I’m less productive overall. So I think weather is actually an important factor in terms of where you want to live. Being stuck in the house for the past week has just reminded me of this. so weather is going to be a strong component of where I decide to live. Anyway, that leaves Vegas, right? Vegas.

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is actually pretty ideal because number one, it’s close to LA, which is actually where my extended family lives and where my wife’s family lives as well. There are no taxes and you can get a lot for your money. Now the only problem with Vegas, and my wife did extensive research on this, is that the schools aren’t great except for a very small pocket or you basically have to go to private school. Anyway, ultimately the decision came down to the kids. They have a great friend network here. They have a really good routine.

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We know all their friends and parents. So basically it’s all good. And we don’t want to cause any disruption. Now I’m trying to pretend I’m a kid here, but I can only imagine how hard it is to pick up, switch to a brand new high school, make new friends, and then just kind of adjust on the fly. Anyway, the upshot here is that we’re staying here for probably the next six years, most likely. And speaking of the kids, I just want to say that I believe that I’ve crossed the hump into

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what I call peak parenthood. So what is peak parenthood for me? It’s basically when your kids are finally old enough to play sports with you. My son and daughter have been taking private volleyball lessons for the past year, and they are finally good enough to play doubles with me and actually have it be fun. And in fact, over Thanksgiving, we had an outdoor volleyball party and it was a lot of fun. I mean, we play on the same team, we play with each other and it was a blast. My son has been taking tennis lessons for the past year too.

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and we can finally rally without me running all over the place chasing down balls, which is really exciting for me. Anyway, everything is generally pretty good on the parenting front. And meanwhile, my wife and I are great. And I think COVID overall, ironically, was incredible for our family because we spent even more time together. In 2020, my kids were taking classes at home and literally we’d spend the whole entire day together. All right, on to the businesses. Let’s start with Bumblebee Linens.

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a number of bad things actually happened in 2021. So first off, we got hit by the Google update, which basically shaved off, I would say almost a third of our organic traffic. Now Google search is actually 25 to 30 % of our business. So we knew we had to do something. So the focus of 2021 was actually trying to get back our rankings. And I’m happy to report that not only did we recover our traffic, but we’re actually up 40 %

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since the drop overall. Now I’m gonna probably write up a complete blog post about everything that we did, but I just want to give Jeff Oxford a quick shout out for the help and guidance in the SEO department. Now here’s a short list of what we did. And first off, I want to say that SEO is like a black box and you really never have any idea what exactly caused something to work or what caused something for you to drop in rankings. Basically, you just throw the kitchen sink at the problem.

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and just hope that your rankings improve as a collective. All right, so with that intro, here’s what we did. So first, we did a complete site audit to make sure we were following best practices for our pages. So no website in general is stagnant, it’s constantly changing. And I’m probably at fault for this, but we’ve gotten a little bit careless over the years in terms of meta descriptions, redirects, broken links, and that sort of thing. So we just fixed all that stuff. And then we did an audit of our money pages

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to prioritize our optimization efforts. After all, you probably have hundreds, if not thousands of web pages on your site, and you can’t possibly optimize every page. So you basically look at every landing page and figure out what dollar value each page brings in. You can easily figure this out in Google Analytics. You simply go to landing pages and then look at e-commerce revenue per visitor for that page. Then you use a tool like Ahrefs or Uber Suggest, whatever you want to use as an SEO tool.

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You figure out which keywords you are ranking for to generate traffic to those pages and just basically see where you’re at in the rankings. And then you apply a weighting factor to decide which pages you want to prioritize the SEO optimization for. Now that sounds all complicated, so let’s break it down with an example here. So overall, the goal is to generate a score for every page on your site in terms of SEO opportunity. And this score is calculated

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by the potential traffic that your target keywords can possibly obtain for the page, minus the amount of traffic you’re already getting for those keywords, multiplied by the revenue per visitor for that page. So basically, I’m just factoring the potential gains from ranking a keyword for a page to make sure that I’m putting the most effort on pages that will generate me the most money. So for example, I get a lot of traffic to a page, it’s actually a blog post, on creating a sync skirt.

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and I could get a lot more traffic to that page by optimizing it further. But that page, since we don’t sell sync skirts, generates a very low dollar value per visitor, so I’m actually not going to spend that much time on it. Anyway, once I’ve identified these pages, I then use a tool called Surfer SEO to add content to every page. Now, what does this tool do? Basically, it analyzes the pages that are ranking on the front page and allows you to create a page

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that encapsulates all the content that Google expects to have in order to rank for it. Now, I just want to say this upfront that for e-commerce, it can be difficult to write content for a category page without affecting conversions or the usability of the site. basically what I do is I keep the content below the products. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go to any category page on bumblebillins.com right now and you’ll see what I mean. Now for these money pages, I also try to use internal linking to boost that page.

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So basically I’m taking other pages that have strong page authority and I’m just linking to those money pages on my shop. Now recently I also revamped my top level nav to make sure that only money categories are displayed as well. After all, you don’t want to be linking or sending people to like an about us page, for example, when you can just send them straight to the products that make you money. So bottom line, onsite optimization is all about adding content and focusing all of your link juice from your entire site

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towards your money pages with internal linking. Now some other more esoteric things that were done to the site were adjusting the robots.txt file to make sure that Google didn’t go down a rabbit hole when crawling the site. Here’s how Google works. Basically, Google allocates a set crawl budget for every website, so you have to make sure that Google can get to every money page on your site. And in terms of generating backlinks, we created a scholarship program to attract EDU links and specialized discount pages for certain professions.

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But all all, Google traffic is up big time for our shop. Now this year end report would not be complete without talking about the shipping crisis. Now in August of this year, our supplier informed us that he wouldn’t be able to send us our holiday shipment until January. Now these are products that we typically sell a ton of over the holidays, so we actually had to act really quickly. Now normally, I actually ignore most solicitation emails from my inbox, but I just happen to be checking my email one day.

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when I noticed one from Jing Sourcing, which is actually a sourcing company in China. Now I did a little bit of due diligence and I found that they seem legit. So I said, hey, what the heck? Let’s just give them a try. Worst case scenario, I could write a blog post about it. It would be free content regardless. So I hired Jing to find me a supplier for these products to be delivered within just two months. And that two months is actually a very short timeframe. Typically our orders have a lead time of four months.

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I followed all the best practices that I teach in my class, which includes creating a very stringent quality control checklist, getting an inspection done, and addressing all the possible contingencies and pitfalls, etc. And the upshot is that we got our products in mid-October just in time for the holidays. However, we did have to airship everything, which ate into our profit margins, obviously. But we did have product, which was very important. Now, I’m actually going to be doing a full write-up on my experiences with Jing Sourcing and

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Ultimately, they came through, but we did experience several minor hiccups, like nothing ever goes smooth when it comes to sourcing. And here’s just an example. I was careless and I focused all the specifications in my work on the product rather than the packaging, which actually caused a couple of misunderstandings. And in addition, the defect ratio from the factory was higher than we were expecting, but fortunately we negotiated a contingency plan in case there were defects for these products.

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So it ended up being okay, we didn’t lose any money, but we didn’t get actually as much product as we initially expected. In fact, you know what? I’m probably just gonna do a separate podcast on my experiences with this altogether, because I know that you guys who are listening are probably interested in this. If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens.

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Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself. Now, first and foremost, protecting your IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copywriting their designs,

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policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to emergecouncil.com and get a free consult. And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a $100 discount. That’s EMERGECOUNSCL.com. Now back to the show. Anyway, the year isn’t quite over yet at the time of this recording.

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but we should end the year up year over year for Bumblebee Lens. Now, I get asked a lot of questions regarding the shipping crisis. And the good news is that the shipping crisis has affected everyone, not just you. I mean, we’ve raised our prices across the board in 2021. I personally think that mass inflation is coming. So do not be afraid to raise prices. Everyone’s doing it. And you’re going to be eating into your margins if you do not raise your prices. I’ve also been asked about the Apple iOS changes.

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that have mainly affected Facebook ads. Now, only a minor percentage of Bumblebee Linden’s business is actually from Facebook ads, but I will say this, ad creative is everything, which is why I’ve focused a significant amount of effort in teaching how to create an effective ad in my Create a Profitable Online Store course. And starting in the new year, I’ve actually solicited several student volunteers, and what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna create ads together following these best practices, which should be a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that.

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All right, so that’s Bumblebee linens in a nutshell. For mywifequitterjob.com, I also got hit by Google and I ended up spending a lot of effort recovering my traffic. Now, my results for mywifequitterjob.com weren’t as effective as bumblebeelinens.com, but I did manage to recover a significant portion of my lost traffic. Now, the type of SEO work for mywifequitterjob.com is actually fundamentally different than bumblebee linens because I’m writing for a much more competitive niche. Not very many people write about linens and hankies, for example.

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Now I’ll probably do a complete write-up of my SEO changes from mywifequitterjob.com also in a separate episode, but here’s what I did in a nutshell. So first off, I revamped all the navigation on the site. There’s actually over 500 posts on mywifequitterjob, possibly more actually, and they were all largely unorganized. So I painstakingly categorized each of these posts in a hierarchical fashion in such a way that only relevant posts linked to each other. So basically, I organized the content in such a way

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to tell Google that I have topical authority in my space by focusing my internal link juice in specific content silos. I also actually changed up my writing style to be much more concise. Over the years, Google has focused on content that delivers the answer as quickly as possible. Now, you’ve probably seen this already when you do a quick Google search, you probably see rich snippets in the search results that basically summarize the answer to your question. So basically now, when I write,

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I try to be concise and answer questions in a single sentence and then expand upon the answer below after that initial answer. And in fact, I’ve actually used this strategy extensively to recover a lot of my traffic. Now, the only downside to this way of writing is that it’s boring. Google actually does not reward storytelling or experiences. They just want the facts. So going forward with my writing, I definitely don’t want to write this way. So it’s basically a balancing act.

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of giving the right answer and making your posts fun and entertaining to read, and most importantly, based on experience. So I also performed the same SEO analysis as with Bumblebee Linens, except using the metric of email subs as opposed to pure revenue. Now, overall, I’m very bullish that I’ll recover all my traffic and more in 2022. E-commerce and business content is just really competitive, but the main difference between my content, and I would say 90 % of what’s out there, is that I actually write about what I do

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instead of farming out content to just random writers who know nothing about e-commerce. And I’m actually hoping that Google improves its technology to be able to spot the people who are just regurgitating whatever’s out there. So we’ll see about that. Meanwhile, both of my courses over at profitableonlinestore.com and profitableaudience.com continue to do great. Profitable Online Store is my e-commerce course where I teach others how to sell physical products online. And Profitable Audience is my course where I teach others how to build an audience

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through blogging, podcasting, YouTube, to sell advertising, digital products, and courses. Now, overall, I would say the pandemic has been very good for both courses since more and more people don’t want to go back to work and would rather work from home on their own terms. Now, outside of my blog, my YouTube channel grew tremendously in 2021. In 2021, I gained about 45,000 subscribers, which brings my total to about 67,000 subs overall.

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And my goal with the channel is actually to get the much coveted YouTube plaque when you hit 100K subs. And I’m on track to do this at the end of 2022. Now YouTube generates me between two and $3,000 per month just on AdSense alone, which is enough to pay my mortgage, but it’s brought a tremendous amount of sales for both of my courses. Now I know that I could make a lot more with my YouTube channel alone, but I’ve pretty much rejected almost every sponsored

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pitch that’s far. Anyway, I launched my YouTube channel in the beginning of 2020 and I’m beyond happy with the results. 2021 was also the year of TikTok and I’m currently sitting at 54,000 subs. After years with the dance lessons and lip sync tutorials, I was finally ready to take the plunge. Just kidding, I don’t do any of stuff on my TikTok channel, but my TikTok strategy is a little different than most. Instead of trying to go viral by making funny videos,

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I’ve decided to focus on teaching e-commerce content. Now, my goal is not to attract as many people as possible, but to attract the right people who want to learn from what I teach. So, so far, I’ve been repurposing both my blog and YouTube content on TikTok, and it’s worked pretty well. Right now, I actually think TikTok is the best way to build an audience because you can go viral pretty easily. In fact, creating a TikTok video literally takes me 10 minutes or less.

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This content can then be posted on YouTube shorts and Instagram reels as well. Now, right now, TikTok is not making me any ad money. I think I’ve made maybe 30 bucks so far, but it has generated core sales. Now, finally, I wanted to talk about the profitable audience podcast. As you know, I’ve been working with my business partner, Tony, for many years now, and it made sense to launch a podcast about building an audience. Now, things started out slow as all podcasts do, but we are now generating thousands of downloads per month.

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and we routinely crack the top 150 in the marketing section of iTunes. Now, if you enjoy my solo episodes, then you should definitely check out this podcast. Basically, I talk about what’s on my mind since we don’t interview any guests on that show. Look up the Profitable Audience Podcast on your favorite podcast app. So let’s jump to some of the highlights of the year. I got interviewed on a CNN special in the middle of the year, I would say, which is due to come out in 2022 about selling on Amazon.

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And recently we were featured on CNBC’s hit show, Make It. And if you haven’t watched it yet, check it out now on YouTube. Just search for CNBC Make It and look for us. We actually filmed this episode for two straight days to produce just an eight minute video. And obviously a lot of details had to be cut. So I actually created a reaction video to fill in the details that were missed during that CNBC video. Now a popular YouTuber, Graham Stephan also did a reaction video, which I made a response video to as well.

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Now this is the first time that I’ve created these types of response videos. So just let me know what you think. I feel like a millennial actually making them. So what’s in store for 2022? Well, for Bumblebee Lennons, we actually held off on hiring for both 2020 and 2021, mainly due to COVID. But we are finally ready to hire in 2022. So if you live in the Bay Area and you want to work for us, email me your resume. Every year when it comes to my businesses, I basically have one objective for every business. So in 2022,

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we are actually going to start a TikTok channel for Bumblebee linens. Now I’m still trying to get my wife on board for this because it does heavily depend on her, but that’s the goal. And for mywifequitterjob.com, I actually have a super secret project that I’m working on, which I’ll probably reveal at the end of 2022, but I’m super excited about it. But overall, the goal for mywifequitterjob is to create more and more content and help my students become millionaires. That’s literally my primary objective with that site.

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And then finally, I’m so looking forward to Seller Summit this year in May. After two straight years of postponement due to COVID, super looking forward to seeing all of you in person again. I mean, seriously, I have not gone to a single event since the beginning of 2020, and this has just got to stop. As of right now, we only have a few mastermind passes left, but join me in Fort Lauderdale in May. I really want to see you guys. But overall, for 2022, I’m going to be a lot more selective on the projects that I’m working on, and here’s why.

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my daughter is entering high school, and I’m really not sure what to expect. Am I going to have to spend more time with my son and my daughter as they get older? Or will they want to have nothing to do with me? It remains to be seen. But I do know that they don’t drive, and the number of activities they have continues to grow exponentially. So for example, just sports for the both of them literally occupies almost every single day of the week. And I’m probably busier on weekends than I am on weekdays.

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which is kind of ironic here. High school is also when grades truly matter for college. And this is all new territory for me, so I’m playing it conservative, leaving a large block of my schedule open for them and just see what happens. Who knows? Maybe they want to have nothing to do with me and I won’t have to spend as much time. But I will say that family is always my priority. And my second priority is keeping up with the latest in e-commerce and keeping my mind active. So here’s to a successful 2022.

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Hope you enjoy that episode, and if you have any questions to start off the new year about ecommerce, feel free to send them my way. For more information about this episode, go to mywifecoupterjob.com slash episode 386. And once again, I want to thank Klaviyo, which is my email marketing platform of choice for ecommerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandonment card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoupterjob.com slash KLAVIO.

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Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash KLAVIO. I also want to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash div. That’s P-O-S-T-S-A-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash div. Now to talk about how I use these tools on my blog and if you are interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com.

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and sign up for my free 16 mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.