I grow more and more enamored of Facebook’s ad platform every day. I am now probably spending 50x more money with Facebook than I do with Google. See here for my first post on Facebook’s ad platform.

On one set of keywords, for instance, I can get a CTR of 0.3%, pretty good I think. I am paying 3 cents per click. 3 cents. On this same set of keywords Google has no ads shown on searches, no one else is bidding on it, but because of quality score or perceived popularity or something they have a minimum CPC of $4. Lets see, do I want to pay 3 cents to target people who ARE interested in my products (because I’m targetting based on what they LIKE in their Facebook profile), or $4 to target people who are merely searching related keywords (possibly for a myriad of reasons)?

This is not a hard issue for me to decide.

Also, I’ve made a page on Facebook for one of the businesses I advertise, so now, when someone clicks the Facebook “Like” button on my page after visiting it through an ad (something that happens, a lot) they sign up for my page automatically, basically becoming a subscriber for anything I wish to post. This is a great marketing tool, and I dare say Facebook posts probably are read more than emails. It is also better than email because people can comment and ask questions. All told a great tool.

International ads are even cheaper, if you have a product you wish to target to non-US customers, really cheap. That is the one I’m paying 3 cents for (the same US based ad I’m paying 20 cents for, but I’ve paid as low as 6 cents for similar, but not identical, US based ads). I tell you what, it is very easy to make a positive ROI at 3 cents a click.

I also think Facebook widgets, showing how many people like your business or product or website, can add a degree of respectability to your site. These few thousand real humans like you, you can’t be all bad.

Google is turning into a bit of a centrally planned system, it isn’t a market driven ad auction anymore. They’re setting price controls ($4 minimum on terms where there are no advertisers ROFL), and they’re losing business because of it. Facebook is still purely market driven, if your eCPM is higher than the next guy’s, you get shown.

The people are CRE Loaded have put their PRO and B2B shopping carts on sale for $1.11. That is today only. This is a ridiculously good deal. I have not written a review on CRE yet, but it is the cart I’ve used the longest, various versions since 2004. It is more or less a souped up OScommerce clone, so it has a lot of the OScommerce baggage, but very good, and for $1… buy a copy, you might want it one day. It is worth the investment.

Today only, so move fast.

Previous related posts on this topic here and here.

Demand Media recently went public, they’re now trading at an almost 2 billion marketcap (more than the New York Times, which owns quite a few web properties too). Meaning, the market says they are worth about 20x revenue. It has to be revenue because it is an unprofitable company.

People often try to buy sites for 2x yearly profit, and the market says Demand’s stable of content sites (And domain registrar business) is worth 20x revenue. Even though Google has recently broadcast that they don’t like content farms.

Some people are speculating that Demand Media is going to use all the cash they just generated in the IPO to make acquisitions. If they bid 20x revenue, they can certainly buy me out, and my business is profitable.

This is good for the industry as a whole in anycase. It shows content websites as a real business and may spur other consolidation and acquisitions. You might get a phone call, an email, or a letter one day from someone saying “Hey, I want to buy your website.” and this time they might not lowball an offer.

Retailers launch special, stampede inducing (people have died), sales on this day for people out buying Christmas gifts. It has gotten pretty crazy in some sort of retail arms race they’re opening earlier, and earlier. A few years ago it was 6 AM, then 4 AM, then midnight, now some places start the sales on Thanksgiving while football is still being played and turkey is still warm.

A while back someone noticed a pattern, people would shop at stores and the malls on Black Friday, and the Saturday and Sunday that followed, only to end up on the Internet when they go into work Monday morning and do their online shopping. The largest online shopping day of the year is ACTUALLY December 14th or 15th (or around there depending on where Christmas falls each year, the last reliable day for free/ground shipping to make it in time). However, Cyber Monday (the monday after Thanksgiving) as it is called, has become a marketing cliche with many online retailers holding special promotions.

These online retailers typically also offer special promotions on Black Friday, in their desire to take even more marketshare from brick and mortar types, but they get Cyber Monday too.

The people who really benefit from all this hoopla, I think, are us publishers. The ad dollars spent yesterday announcing Cyber Monday sales are off the charts. I personally had my best day ever with multiple ad networks, and for the first time passed $1000 in ad (CPC or CPM) revenue (net) with a single website. I’ve done $1000 a day with CPA/affiliate programs before. I’ve done it with ecommerce frequently. I’ve done it with regular ads overall as a total of all my sites, but yesterday was the first time a single site managed to break the $1000 mark all by itself with just CPC/CPM ads. It wasn’t a traffic spike, traffic was normal, even a little down, it was premium CPMs and eCPMs that suddenly showed up.

I don’t know if this was a one day Cyber Monday celebration, or simply the start of what is going to be a very good holiday shopping season, but it would seem to me that online ad spending has DEFINITELY recovered from the recession, and if we’ve still got room to grow, well, it is a good time to be a publisher.

If “Black Friday” is the day when brick and mortar retailers get in the black, then Cyber Monday would seem to be the day for website publishers to do the same.

Edit: Just in comScore reports Cyber Monday biggest online ad day in history with over 1 billion spent. Can you feel it? I sure did.

I did make a purchase of a website this Spring which has added to my daily totals, but even factoring that website out I would have hit the monthly records (if not the daily ones).

Has anyone else noticed better than normal performance?

What I surmise are the redesigns I did this summer on my literature site are paying off well (it took this long because the site’s traffic is tied to the start of the school year). Additionally the economy is recovering, but also I think Google’s redesign of the 728×90 ad unit is making a big difference, and maybe a little Bing powering Yahoo because my rankings on Bing were always better.

What I’m curious about is if others have noticed significant revenue increases thanks to Google’s 728×90 redesign, and if so, I wonder if it is enough to move Google’s quarterly results. They report this week, it could be a good time to buy Google stock. I know in the past, being someone who pays attention to these things, when Adsense has done well for me Google has always reported a blowout quarter, so maybe my sample size is enough to show overall trends. I don’t know, but things are definitely looking up.

Anyone got advice?

Update

So I think I got the attackers blocked. I don’t think it was malicious, in that I was the target, it was obviously a botnet of some sort, but why would they try to shut WSP down? It makes no sense, this is a tiny site.

I saw a lot of examples on the Internet on message forums to just do this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^WinHttp
RewriteRule ^.* – [F,L]

I didn’t know you could use mod_rewrite on user agents like that, but I guess it makes sense. Maybe I had learned it at one point and forgot, probably the likely scenario.

Anyways, the above will not work, despite the fact I saw that example, or ones like it, plastered everywhere. I think people were parroting other people and they didn’t really understand it.

I definitely do understand regular expressions though, so when trying that and finding it doesn’t work, and then swapping “WinHttp” for “Mozilla” and being blocked myself to verify the code works in theory, I took another look at it.

The ^ symbol denotes the beginning of a line in a regular expression. If your user agent begins with “Mozilla” and you try to block “^Mozilla” it will work. But if the keyword you’re after is further down the line, you need to accomodate it by telling the regular expression other characters can appear between the start (^) and the word you want.

In regular expressions a period matches any character and an asterisk matches the previous character any number of times. So .* matches anything to any length.

As such I changed my code to this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*WinHttp
RewriteRule ^.* – [F,L]

And it works, the bots are blocked. Happy days. I can go do other work now.

The install was simple an easy, there was one issue I had where I thought I had the Gold install and so was following the wrong directions. Partly because the customer control panel of their website is not very intuitive as far as downloading software and downloading directions, they’re often stored in different places. It would seem to me they allowed complexity to be the enemy of usability.

Support was excellent though, I just told them the issue and gave them FTP details and they fixed it for me, which is nice service.

During install it asks you for the layout you would like for your store from some default templates, but it gives you no thumbnails or anything, so you really have to guess, which is really annoying.

So right as I was getting ready to do this review the first time they announced another update, great I thought. I login to their member’s area and look for upgrade instructions, and again depending on where you look they are different. So I found instructions to get an upgrade pack, they tell me to go to the “My Licenses” page, click on get an upgrade pack, and select the versions and whatnot. The problem is, the best upgrade pack listed is fom 4.2.2 to 4.2.3, there was no upgrade pack for 4.2.3 to 4.3.0, the most recent update. So, basically, the official instructions for upgrading were incorrect.

Then I found another set of instructions telling me to upload a dozen or so .sql files then run them to change the database, then to upload all the files from a 4.3.0 distribution, then install it, but indicate a setting during install to let it know the database had already been done.

Well, I didn’t do that because last time I upgraded by just uploading files everything broke and I couldn’t login to the admin area on the site.

Since I hadn’t really started building the site yet, I decided to just delete everything, and do a fresh install. Because, quite frankly, I was afraid to do anything else.

I get the impression x-cart is put a lot of thought into upgrading, but I also get the impression they’re making it far more complicated than it needs to be.

I thought the software was to include the ability to print UPS etc labels directly from the cart, it does not. To set up UPS it makes me register for UPS instead of just configure, maybe I already have a UPS account? That seems short sighted. Then the options provided for the setup are less than I’ve seen in most other carts. It will not let me define a shipped from zip code to use with the UPS module, uses store contact zip code. Store office could be a different location than warehouse, this is a problem. Even further, in an ideal situation you could set a shipping-from zip code per product, as different products may ship from different locations.

Perhaps the biggest issue with the software is how they deal with customer reviews. Customer reviews are ridiculous. Can you believe all reviews are automatically approved? How crazy is that? Of course they get spammed all to hell and you have to buy a third party mod just to deal with it. Also, stupidly enough, by default ratings are setup so that search engine crawlers will rate products while visiting your site. Google rated all my products all possible ratings, nice of them. This just seems to be, amateurish, how could you, in 2009 or 2010, release software that had no consideration for comment spam?

Cannot find what version you’re currently using in the admin area. That is a really silly oversight. Interspire had that problem too but they fixed it like a week after I published my review.

The picture management is really poor. Really really poor. There is no multiple size images, no click to enlarge, no lightbox, and any additional pictures for a product just are tossed at the bottom in an unorganized and haphazard way that looks amateurish. No thumbnails, just tossed down there in their original size. There is a setting for thumbnails but it does not seem to work.

Their integration with Authorize.net works appropriately, the only issue is an improper use of the description field for the transaction, which they do what Interspire and CubeCart do and just repeat the invoice number, rather than listing the contents of the order as it is meant for. But that is a small annoyance only.

Product variations work fine. The checkout is good and user friendly. The SEO naturally in the software is less than stellar with inadequate use of page titles among other less egregious issues.

Skinning is passable, there is an attempt to do a “webmaster console” for easy design changes like Interspire has, but in execution it isn’t near as useful, it does not work as well and the code you’re editing is not organized or commented so well, or as accepting of simple changes. I found it enough of a challenge just to add my logo and change one color. Doing a complex skin would be significantly difficult using that system.

Other than the SEO issue, the image issue, and the comments issue. The frontend is user friendly enough, I do not dislike it.

However, the backend annoys me. It is not intuitive in the least, options are not intuitive, navigation is not intuitive, product and order management is not intuitive. You don’t get a list of products or orders, you have to search for them, sometimes the link to edit something is a tiny one letter link, it is just weird. Way different than any other cart I’ve used, and I can’t say that I like it.

I would have to say, my favorite cart of all carts I’ve used, in this regard, for order management, is probably Interspire, and for catalog management (viewing and editing products) is Oscommerce (or it’s clones). And my least favorite in both categories is probably X-Cart, though Interspire still annoys me with their product variation management, but with my custom fix for that it isn’t so bad.

All told, I don’t like X-Cart. It works, it is functional, in fact it is quite powerful and flexible, but I don’t like it, from the admin side of things, I hate the usability. Almost all the problems I’ve mentioned can be fixed with third party add ons. There are mods for images, for product reviews, for SEO. All these things can be bought, installed, and paid for. Just search on Google and you’ll find quite a few sites selling this software.

But, see, the thing is, I don’t know if I will even keep this site, the site I built to test out the software. I got this license for free, but that doesn’t mean I get free mods too. The cost of ownership thus being so high I think maybe I don’t want to spend money to outfit it and upkeep it when I’d rather have different software.

Interspire is an expensive cart for instance, but when you buy X-Cart and then add in the cost of the mods required to run it at a bare minimum… suddenly the cheaper initial price ends up not being so cheap.

The next review I am going to do is going to be on CRELoaded, which I use as the basis for two of my OScommerce sites already, but I’ve never installed it and supported it and skinned it myself. I am going to do so now. So I know, the older versions I use, do a lot of what I like already. I know the company is really good about staying on top of updates, and security, and things like PCI compliance. Assuming this review works on well, I am probably going to take the site I built on the free X-Cart and port it to CREloaded, even though I would need to buy the CREloaded license whereas I got the X-Cart for free (I am getting 1 CREloaded license free to do the review on, but that is spoken for on another site already). Plus, right now, CREloaded is only $125, which is what a mere two mods for X-Cart would cost me to fit out my X-Cart license.

My coupon site was once my highest earner, pulling in over $1000 a day. One month’s revenue was the down payment on my house. Then I lost my rankings due to Google algorithm changes which favored a breadth of incoming links instead of a few really strong ones. My competitors starting making spam sites and using other methods to create tons of really low value incoming links. I did not want to compete like that. Unfortunately for me during my heyday of popularity I didn’t do something which I now consider to be a rule for all of my sites: build a forum. Because if you can get to critical mass with a forum your search rankings become less important, people will still come.

Additionally, at almost the exact same time, the ecommerce side of my business took off, doing $4000 a day in gross revenue in December of 03. So I shifted gears really. I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had so much success, and not just at one thing, I’ve had multiple ideas or sites become successful independently.

In the intervening years the industry changed and while it is still probably the single most profitable niche for a an affiliate content site (IMO) it is more competitive and requires a larger software investment and time investment. New coupon sites with innovative Web 2.0 features were launched, mine stayed the same because was focused on other things.

Last year I paid someone to reprogram the site and incorporate some Web 2.0 features, they did the work, but I never did the finishing touches I intended to (like a better design, automatic importers, launching the forum, etc). Meanwhile, I feel pulled in too many directions. I have a baby now, I have a todo list that is quite long, on sites I’d rather work on than a coupon site, and my ecommerce businesses keep growing and growing.

I don’t actually like affiliate marketing that much, mostly because I don’t like affiliate programs. Merchants move offers, change offers, expire offers. Many do not adopt standard methods of automatic communication (more need to use RSS). Programs will get terminated without warning, or maybe just you will be. So to run a website that in the end is just an organization of affiliate offers is not what I prefer to do. I prefer to do ecommerce, or strict content sites. I like to write, I like to publish, I like content that I can publish once and let it earn for me forever. I do like some affiliate programs, but with a coupon site you need to manage hundreds, and that is not my favorite task.

I’ve actually had this site up on the market for awhile, but only passively, I decided to give Flippa a try though and see if I’d move it actively. I figured with my taxes likely going up soon it’d be better to move it now, than a year from now.

In less than a day I’ve already had some private interest, perhaps I should have put the minimum offer higher. It looks like it’ll probably sell, only question is to whom and for how much.

If you’re interested, the listing is here.