Thanks for sharing your insight!! Your story has inspired my husband and I. I am interested in starting my own online store, however neither my husband or I are from the business background, I am wondering if either you or your wife is from a business or marketing background before she quitted her full time job? For our situation, will you recommend us to take some business related classes? Thanks

My wife has a background in finance. She graduated with a bachelors in economics and worked as a financial analyst at various firms such as Agilent and Intuit. I have a masters degree in electrical engineering.

I wouldn’t say that my wife and I have ideal backgrounds for the business world. Both of us are definitely not marketers and outside of a few years spent studying entrepreneurship, I don’t possess any business experience prior to opening our online wedding linens business.

I personally don’t think you need to take any classes to succeed. All of the information that you need can be found online. Find your niche and go for it. No business class will teach you the necessary practical knowledge better than learning while doing.

Did you use Adwords exclusively to drive traffic in the beginning? I’ve read on how you tweaked your Adwords, but do you find generic keywords drive the most conversations or really longtail/product specific keywords that bring in more? If I were to focus on Adwords on a limited budget, which path should I go for?

Initially, my wife and I used a combination of adwords and forum marketing to drive traffic. We also focused on writing content to drive search engine traffic to our store as well.

In terms of Adwords, our ad keywords are very focused and we use very few generic terms because they are simply too expensive and don’t provide the return on investment that we would like. I have even gone as far as to make our advertisements so specific such that only a small subset of interested customers would click on it. Bottom line, I do whatever it takes to increase the cost per conversion and the ROI. It’s not about the traffic, it’s about attracting real customers.


Have you ever hired any SEO company to move your site up on the search engines? Do you find them very effective? I’ve been struggling in finding the best SEO company because I really don’t know which ones actually do a great job (I’m honestly not sure if the guy is doing a good job). I assume getting SEO worked out was a big part of your process – did the turnaround coincide with the success of getting placed on search engines? Or what kind of SEO strategy did you use that really made you much more successful in a short time frame?

I’m probably going to get flamed for this but I don’t really see what the big deal is and why people struggle with SEO. The concepts are very straightforward and there have been many articles written about SEO online. In fact, I wrote a little piece on SEO as well called 10 ways to optimize your online store for the search engines that outlines some of key concepts to look out for.

To answer your question, I have not and probably will not ever hire an SEO company. Most software packages out there these days already take care of the bulk of SEO for you. The rest you can figure out yourself. Getting into and ranking in the search engines takes time. There are ways to accelerate the process but requires writing content and doing work that you are more qualified to do than any SEO company because you know your business better than anyone else.

My advice to you is to do some research on SEO first. If you still think that doing the SEO yourself is beyond the scope of your abilities, then consider hiring an SEO company.