A Reminder on Link Buying

October 10th, 2007 by Chris

If you read Matt Cutts’ blog you’re no stranger to the knowledge that Google is cracking down on link buying & selling, and Danny Sullivan recently wrote a decent summary of the entire issue for those who haven’t been keeping up with things.

I thought this would then be a prime time to remind people the right way to buy links.

If you read this blog, or my articles, or the forum here, you probably already know what I’m going to say. That is that you cannot be lazy when buying links. The lazy thing is to go to a link broker and just buy random links on the basis of PageRank or Alexa rating and not care how or where your links get posted.

You do not want your link crammed in some spammy site’s footer between a link to a car insurance site and a viagra site, you don’t want that.

What you want to do is spend time finding link partners individually, not through a brokerage service. You want to personally contact them and work out a unique agreement with them. You want to ensure their content is related to your site and you want your link to be optimally placed within their content in such as way as it looks like they naturally added it.

I cover this topic in more depth here and also somewhat here.

I also have done this very thing most recently to help my one-product ecommerce site. I contacted bloggers individually, and asked them to write a review in exchange for a free product ($250 value, to them anyways, my cost is a little less). It worked. I got long, detailed, posts, and targeted links. I of course only chose the best blogs for this as it was an expensive product to give for free.

On the flip side, if you want to sell links, you also have to put more work into it. Don’t settle for a bunch of cheap links you can cram together, spend time finding that company that is willing to pay more for a more prominent content-embedded link. Do not cheapen your site by whoring out links for cheap. You’re in this for the long haul aren’t you? If you want your site to last you need to maintain it’s quality & integrity and that means saying no to cheap untargeted link offers.

A Review of CubeCart 4

October 5th, 2007 by Chris

This review has been updated, please read the updated CubeCart review before making any purchasing decisions.
I came to CubeCart via a circuitous route, it was never my first choice, however the path I took to get there is a useful lesson, and so I shall share it.

I’ve been planning a new site selling only chainmail armor for a while now. My sword ecommerce site sells chainmail but I thought I could get more sales with a site that focused on the armor itself. I wanted a premium domain and tried to buy chainmail.com figuring the small hobby business than owns it probably would be willing to sell out, but they spurned my offers. Instead I settled on chainmail.net, which I purchased for a reasonable four-figure sum. I could have easily just used a non-premium domain but I have very long-term plans for this site. It will be an extremely easy site to run, and it sells a product that is just about perfect for ecommerce with a good profit margin.

My previous ecommerce sites all used OSCommerce (OSC) or it’s derivatives such as CRELoaded or ZenCart but I wanted to get more experience in a wider variety of carts for writing purposes (so I could write about a wider variety of carts) and so I decided this chainmail site would use a different cart. Plus I was fairly frusturated with OSC.

Miva & Magento

I bounced around for awhile considering which cart I wanted to use, meanwhile I was having a logo drawn up. Finally the logo was going to be done and everything in place for launch. I heard some decent things recently about Miva so I decided to give their shopping cart a try. That was a big mistake. I figured Miva was a larger business but there was very, very, very little documentation on installation and what they had was poorly written, even inaccurate. Sure, for most carts you don’t need hefty installation documentation, but Miva uses a custom scripting language and requires all sorts of server tweaks to run, I couldn’t even get it set up properly. Then I had the most horrible time just canceling my order with them, it took many multiple emails. Support, by the way, was obviously outsourced.

I had long thought of Miva as slow and bloated because every Miva website I visited as a surfed seemed to load slow, but I thought I’d give them a shot. Turns out I should have trusted my initial instincts.

So, after the Miva failure I heard about this new cart coming out in August, Magento Commerce. The features they mentioned that they were aiming for were all really good, and the company making it was really interacting with their community. It seemed like an ideal situation, so I decided to wait until it launched… which it finally did the last day of August (seemingly rushed).

Alas it was a big let down. Many rudimentary features were not there. The installation was fairly straightforward, I did have to upgrade to PHP5 finally but I won’t hold that against them, but the admin side of things was horribly complex to manage, just from a pure usability standpoint. In their admin control panel something that should be accomplishable in 1 click, took 5. Pages all loaded slowly, the software was unbelievably bloated (the initial download zip was something like 75mb) and almost every script kept bumping into PHP’s memory limit until I increased it (indicative of the slow loading).

What is perhaps the most annoying is I posted a suggestion that they code support for shipping via dimensional weight in their forums, explaining how it is absolutely necessary for any shop that sells large products (really, anything over 30 inches), and a developer told me that it isn’t a big deal and I should just manually edit shipping costs for all orders after they are placed. This wasn’t a big request on my part, OSC has had such a feature available in a contribution for years, but the developer’s attitude sort of underlined all the other problems I saw with the software. I didn’t need that feature for this site, since chainmail is heavier than it is big, but I didn’t like the way they were going.

Maybe I was confused, I thought a beta product is supposed to be working better, this was more like an alpha release, even though supposed they had already done beta testing.

Anyways, quietly (at least to me) in the middle of September, CubeCart V4 was released.

On to CubeCart 4

Now, I’ve never used CubeCart Version 3, so none of this review will compare the new version to the old version. I will say though that CubeCart 3 was free, CubeCart 4.0 is commercial, which is alright with me. The price is only $129.95 and if you cannot afford that to open an ecommerce site, how will you afford your initial inventory or your merchant account?

Pros

CubeCart 4 is very easy to install, and is fast loading. The SEO based options are as good as I’ve ever seen in a shopping cart. Normally with OSC I’d have to install around 5 contributions, that don’t always want to play together nicely, to achieve good SEO. This includes things like keyword rich and friendly URLs, friendly links, killing session IDs for spiders, meta & title tag management, textual content on category pages, and some things I’m probably not remembering. CubeCart 4 does all these things easily, and by default.

Coming from OSCommerce I’m used to shopping carts that are a pain to skin and edit. OSCommerce is some of the most convoluted software on the planet and to change a single design element you may have to edit 20 files. Compared to that CubeCart 4 is a dream. I was going to have someone do the skinning for me, but I ended up doing it myself, it only took around 4 hours of work and that is with me starting at 0 experience in CubeCart skinning at the start of the process, and also with no documentation, and I’m also far from a CSS ninja. It is as easy to skin as WordPress.

CubeCart comes by default with a whole bevy of shipping and payment modules, many of which beat their OSCommerce counterparts handily. Somethings that required one or multiple contributions with OSCommerce, such as Authorize.net AIM integration with support for CVV numbers, is able to be done by default with CubeCart. They also integrate a printable mail order form, which I think is nice.

Finally, they have an easy utility for exporting to Google Base format your product catalogue, as well as some other similar formats.

All told, it is a great shopping cart, has great features, is easy to use, fast loading, accessible, and should be easy to rank well in the search engines with, and it is only 2 weeks old, I expect great future improvements.

Cons

No dimensional shipping support with their UPS module. This annoys me, I think they should add it, and if I wanted to use this cart with other sites I might not be able to, but for my chainmail site it wasn’t an issue.

They do something somewhat screwy with orders. They load an order into the database as pending once the person goes around halfway through checkout, they also send a confirmation email at this point, then after payment is received they change the order to processing and send another confirmation email. This is strange to me, and I cannot find a way to turn this off, but I’m sure with a hack it would be possible. You see, customers aren’t always intelligent, and I just know many people will have trouble checking out, but then check their email and see the first confirmation and think they’re okay and the order got placed then a month later I get a phone call asking where the order is.

Then, after checkout, they do not print out an order receipt or summary. They have code to do it, a customer can go into their order history and see a receipt, why do they not print out the same thing after checkout? They also do not include any such details in the email confirmations, making them probably the only shopping cart in existence that doesn’t do this. Instead they just give a URL to the customer’s order history, a link is decidedly less useful than just the information straight off.

There is currently one small bug with their authorize.net module, but I know they’re aware of it and I expect it to be fixed, it doesn’t hinder use, just ends up in having less information stored at authorize.net as is possible.

There is no way currently to set different shipping methods for different zones. For instance if you wanted to offer free shipping on domestic orders and USPS for international orders, you can’t. I think there might be a commercial mod a third party has put out that does this, but I’m not 100% sure.

I did have to buy, for $21.99, a commercial mod so that I could build a contact us form on the site. The way by default CubeCart sets things up they expect you, apparently, to just put in an email link, but I don’t much like spam so I decided to pay for the upgrade. Again however other carts include this functionality by default, and I think CubeCart should as well.

The last main feature I really wish they had is an automatic sitemap xml generator. All the major search engines say they’re using the sitemaps protocol now, this would be a really handy feature to add.

So that’s it, it isn’t a perfect cart, but it is as close to perfect as I’ve used, and it is cheap, fast, efficient, and oh so easy to use. I highly recommend it.
This review has been updated, please read the updated CubeCart review before making any purchasing decisions.

Finding Programmers

October 1st, 2007 by Chris

When I asked what I should blog about one person mentioned finding programmers, so I’ll talk about that a little in this post.

I’ve had a hard time finding reliable programmers to do work for me. Invariably they take longer than they say, sometimes much much longer, and 50% of the time they tend to just vanish on me without completing the work.

This is one of the biggest hurdles I deal with on a regular basis. I have the ideas for sites, but I just need to pay people to help me execute them, but I cannot find the people.

For instance, one of my ideas I’m pretty sure will easily result in 7 figures of income if it works. I thought this up in 2003 and still haven’t managed to get it done. I’ve had 5 or so programmers up and vanish on me and trying to get a new one acclimated takes time.

One of the problems I have I guess is that I think I’m hiring someone who does freelance full time, but turns out they have a day job and they’re only planning on working for me at night, on weekends, when they aren’t busy doing other things or getting other jobs. It is frustrating. Then you have what you run into with building contractors all the time, you hire them, and you think they’ll work on your project, but instead they get jobs all over town and only work on your project once a week.

I’ve even used people highly recommended, only to have it not work out.

I figure I either make the worst client, or the best client. I know what is possible, I know the technologies, most of the work I could do myself given time (time which I do not always have), I know exactly what I want and can often help the programmer out by pointing them in the right direction. I think those are good qualities, and yet maybe programmers who are used to less knowledgeable clients end up put-off by my exacting requirements.

For instance, I’m launching a new ecommerce site this week and I was going to hire a guy who runs a skins website for the shopping cart software to do the skinning for me. I already had the design made, I just needed it skinned, I had even presliced the images so all he needed to do was the markup and the integration with the cart. It ended up falling through. I didn’t have huge confidence in his abilities considering the skins on his website that he sells, were, in my opinion, subpar. The graphic quality and design feel was sketchy and left a lot to be desired. I had the design done though, I just needed an expert on the shopping cart. But he balked at using my presliced images and wanted an unflattened PSD instead. I had presliced the images and made a mockup showing exactly how I wanted the site to look, his slices couldn’t have been better, but they could very well have been worse. I’ve had designers before simply leave out graphical components because they couldn’t figure out how to slice & code them and then turn in the design as supposedly finished.

So, while I have a lot of experience in the hiring of others, I’m afraid I don’t have any proactive advice.
I have had some minor success using Odesk.com. I’ve hired one guy hourly there, that was a mistake. He told me he was having Internet problems and couldn’t upload his work, so I gave him a little leeway and then I missed the deadline for disputing his hours and got stuck with the bill. He is supposedly still supposed to be finishing for me so he can get new work for me, but it has been 2 months.

I’ve made a couple hires there on a per-project and not hourly basis though, those worked out great. They were both really small projects but the work was done well, quickly, and with a high degree of quality.

I used to be of the attitude that I’d rather use a first-world programmer as I would have to explain less to them and there would be less of a communication barrier, but these US and other first-world programmers keep letting me down, so I think I’m going to be programmers from developing nations in the future. Dealing with some communication snafus is a small price to pay for expedient and reliable work.

$0.20 CPM from Tribal Fusion

September 24th, 2007 by Chris

How a good company goes bad.

Tribal Fusion used to be a great ad company with high rates for niche sites and a dedication to high quality ads. They were the Macys of Internet advertising. But apparently Macys got a little jealous of Dollar General and Tribal Fusion got a little jealous of all the general audience/low rate/high volume/crap networks out there.

So Tribal Fusion launched TF Direct, the worst idea ever by any head of any ad network. This is a program of crappy little ads that pay crappy little rates that publishers are not allowed to opt out of. We can set a pricing floor, a minimum CPM we’re willing to accept, but it can be no higher than $0.60 CPM (pre commission). Also, that is for all ad units. It is impossible to specify a different pricing floor for popunders or other intrusives, banners, leaderboards, boxes, or skyscrapers. Apparently Tribal Fusion thinks all those ad unit types should have the same rate.

So of course I set my pricing floor to the minimum $.60 CPM, but what do I see when I login, for the last 7 days it has averages $0.36 CPM. The minimum it should be is $0.60, but instead it ends up being almost half that. What is worse is after commission that means I’m only taking home an averaging of $0.20 CPM, and again that is an average that includes large & intrusive banners stuck at the top of the page. For a bottom of the page ad I might accept $0.20 CPM, but for a top of the page ad from a first tier? No way.

Tribal Fusion lists of course the advertisers in Tribal Fusion Direct, but they do not tell you which advertisers pay what or how many times the ads get displayed, only in aggregate total statistics do they tell you what TFD does. The only way for a publisher to block such advertisers is to block them all by domain. One thing Tribal Fusion does though is have advertisers with both normal campaigns and TFD direct campaigns so if a publisher wants the higher rate they need to deal with the lower rate which could be as low as $.05 CPM on a popunder for all we know. It seems very much more and more to be a bait and switch type manuever and one I am quite tired of. The other option is to block by domain, the only real way to turn off TFD ads on your account, but then you block both the higher paying ad (bribe ad) and the lower paying ad (which again, you have no idea how much it pays individually or how many impressions it is getting). It is something I do though for TFD popunders, I will not serve a popunder for less than $1 CPM, let alone less than $0.60 CPM.

Another idiotic thing Tribal Fusion does is make default campaigns expire yearly, but they give you no notification when they expire, so you have to remember and if you forget, oops, lost revenue. I have never seen any other ad network that does something like that, their whole system would give a usability guru nightmares.

For years I’ve recommended Tribal Fusion as a 1st tier provider and have used them myself, but they just keep getting worse and worse and it seems like they’re driving down that path on purpose.

Find Suppliers for Ecommerce Sites

September 13th, 2007 by Chris

This question was asked what I solicited reader opinions on what to blog about, it has also been asked recently in PMs to me a couple times, so I decided to tackle it today.

When I first wanted to get into ecommerce I did what I’m sure many of you have done and worked the Internet searching for “dropshippers” or “distributors” or “wholesalers” etc. This was a completely worthless expenditure of time and effort. I did not get one solid lead by search from that end. Not one. Mostly I ended up finding crap directories or lists of nonexistant or no-longer in business or shady dropshippers. Yuck!

The method of finding a supplier that has worked, in contrast, nearly 100% of the time, has been to start from the product and work my way backwards. I buy (or examine in the store) the product I want to sell. I use the product packaging, warranty card, instructions, or other such documentation that comes with the product to figure out who the manufacturer is. I then find the manufacturer’s phone number and I call them. Sometimes they deal with retailers directly and I need to fax my sales tax license and sometimes a credit application or credit card authorization and that is all it takes. Other times they direct me to a distributor they recommend I use. But it almost always ends up working out.

There is a reason that when I explain to people how to pick a product for ecommerce I ask them to pick a product. You start your search at the product level, then work back to find out where you can buy it. The only exception I consider for this is if you can find a local manufacturer, in that case you’d be starting at the manufacturer and working down.

Now, what about getting your own products made overseas? It is a big headache. If you could pay with a credit card and have the products shipped to your door, it’d be easy, but that isn’t how it works. You need to pay with bank transfers, which are scary because if this little factory in China rips you off, you’re screwed, you can’t get your money back (of course you could fly to China to handle things, but that adds other expenses as well). Then you have to worry about shipping to the port, customs brokering, then trucking to your location. Headache Headache Headache.

I’ve done it once on my own and I hated it. I got real cheap products though with better margins than if I had bought from an importer, but it was such a headache.

For my newest venture I hired a consultant who handles all of that junk for me, including flying to China to make sure the products are being made appropriately. It isn’t cheap, at $750 a month, but this overall project is costing me over $125k so in the grand scheme of things the additional per-unit cost for having the consultant is only going to be about 50 cents, and that I can swallow.

I wouldn’t start out with that though, get your feet wet. Buy from US manufacturers and importers first, build up a customer base, learn your industry, and when your business is generating enough revenue to cover it, then look into producing your own products.

What to Blog About?

August 26th, 2007 by Chris

I’ve had a hard time recently thinking of things to blog about. I’ve never been a “diary-type” blogger where I simply summarize my daily activities or post little personal tidbits, rather I’ve always been a more educational type blogger, taking inspiration from my daily activities or business dealings to construct longer educational posts. What I tend to do is if I run into a problem, issue, or achievement in my business I think about whether it would do best presented informally or formally and so decide if I’ll write a blog post about it or instead use it as inspiration for an article. Even in my other blogs I do things the same way, always writing more educational and what I think is useful content than just personal random thoughts.

However, the problem is my business has been in a holding pattern for a few months. I’ve got 4 big projects being worked on by 4 different programmers (or groups of programmers) none of which are done yet. I’ve got two additional small projects being worked on by yet more programmers, but those should be done soon. Then I’ve got 2 manufacturing projects in the work, which are progressing but slowly as things normally do, and finally two ecommerce site ideas, one of which is merely in the planning stage, the other should hopefully be launched by October. But nothing is done, there is no news, no new developments, I’m just waiting for the work to be completed.

So, in short, my muse has dried up.

I’ve decided to reach out to you, my readers, what do you want me to blog about? Is there something you’ve always wondered about my business? Do you want my advice on a particular issue? Please, comment on this post with your questions and ideas, tell me about the types of posts (in general, or as specific as you like) that you want to see.

An Endorsement by Google of Cross-linking

August 8th, 2007 by Chris

In this recent Google blog post they mention that it is okay to cross link multiple sites you own so long as they are related in topic (the links appear organic), and that you merely want to avoid cross linking dozens or hundreds of unrelated sites in your footer.

This seems to be in agreement with what I’ve always said and what I laid down in my Hub & Spoke linking article.

So for those who in the past were fearful of penalties when you’re doing legitimately useful-to-users cross linking, sleep easy tonight. You’re okay.

Been Getting Hosting Company Forum Spam

August 4th, 2007 by Chris

Over the last couple months seemingly innocent posts have been appeared in the Website Publisher Forums that taken individually would look normal, but as a group they are very suspicious.

One new member would first post in the introduction folder, and then in the web hosting reviews area (the right forum, so they aren’t dumb spammers) asking for a review on a host they were considering. Then over a couple weeks other new members would come and reply, and start their own threads, and there would be actual conversations. It all seemed pretty normal.

Except, the members do not post anywhere except in these hosting review threads and sometimes in introductions. Except, the posting style of all these members is nearly identical. Except, the IP addresses of these members are often nearly identical (as if they were working next to each other at the same spamming sweatshop in India), and all of the IPs were from spam hotbed countries (you know, Russia, India, Malaysia, Indonesia). They also none use signatures or avatars, when almost every normal forum member does.

The thing that really gave them an edge though was an apparent no link policy. Only occasionally would they actually post links, and never in the first post in a thread, normally they’d just post the domain of the hosting company they were promoting.

If it had been just one thread and one member I don’t think anyone would have ever noticed, but with so many threads and so many members it started to become obvious, and the IP data cinched it.

They were promoting the following hosting companies and websites, and as such I would have to recommend you never use such companies. I cannot be sure that these hosting companies were paying for this forum spam, so I won’t say that they well. But just the risk of them being the type of business to do that would make me very nervous to host a website with them.

whreviews.com
ahosting.biz
webhostingbuzz.com
emedianow.com
247-host.com
onthespothosting.net
hqhost.net
reviewcentre.com
igotfree.com
igotspace.com

If you run a webmaster forum or are a moderator at one, try doing a search for these names in your forums, you might have the same thing going on.

Underscores are now word seperators at the big G

July 27th, 2007 by Chris

Matt Cutts apparently made a lot of interesting comments at a WordPress seminar, blogged about here.

He said a lot, but the big news is that Google will soon be treating underscores as word seperators in URLs.

This is long overdue, the underscore was always the traditional word seperator in formats where spaces were not allowed. The reason was it had no grammatical meaning. I liked to give the example of Catherine Zeta-Jones. If you expressed her name in a space-less format using hyphens you’d have Catherine-Zeta-Jones in which case you do not know if she hyphenates her last name or not. In contrast if you use underscores such as Catherine_Zeta-Jones it is obvious she uses a hypen.

However in many programming languages underscores have different functionality and way back when Google engineers decided it was more important to preserve them for those such queries than use them as word seperators. So for a long time people have recommended the use of hyphens as word seperators. Well, now you should be able to use either. Also, for all of those with really old pages made before Google with underscores, good news for us.

Why Build 1 Site, When you can Build 2?

July 27th, 2007 by Chris

Horizontal expansion in your niche is a very good thing. So good of a thing that you might as well do it from the get go. Have a neat idea for a site? Great, build it and a related site at the same time. Cross promote, cross link, and you’ll do better.

I’ve talked about this many times in regards to content sites and ecommerce sites. The idea being the content site gains the traffic and the links and while you will make money off it, the goal is just to break even and earn your profit with all the traffic you send to the ecommerce site.

However it also works with two content sites, if one is more profitable you can build a secondary site to help promote it and only aim to break even on the secondary site while the first one brings in the dough.

Once a long time ago there was an issue with the Google toolbar where pages on a popular domain would get a high PageRank based purely off the weight of the domain. This was very commonly seen on Geocities. The root cause of the issue was that the pages were not yet crawled and so Google had to guess at a PageRank to display in the toolbar. They don’t do that anymore but it caused many people unwarranted glee way back when. Still, being the scientific soul that I am I had to test it so I made a mini site directly related to one of my sites and stuck it on Geocities. In the end, once it was crawled, it got a really low PR. But I also got it some incoming links, decent ones, including one from DMOZ, and linked it to my site. It at it’s peak was actually ranked in the top 10 of Google, and is still in the top 20. This, for a site I put 2 hours into one weekend years and years ago. It is of course peppered with links to my main site on the topic and to this day provides great on-topic PageRank and traffic.

I’ve done other horizontal expansion things as well. I have my sword ecommerce site. I then bought The Fantasy Forum which at the time was an extremely popular place to discuss collectible swords. I also have a dinky little medieval costuming site that is meant to carry tutorials on making your own costumes. It only has around 6 tutorials, but that free information does attract good links and okay traffic, and of course it links to the sword site. I have a new manufacturing business too that is also going to be swords, another horizontal expansion, and my existing traffic & customers from these sites will help there. Finally I have a couple medieval fantasy based games in the works and if they’re ever finished that’ll provide a nice new source of traffic for my ecommerce sites. Oh, and a third ecommerce site related to the genre as well.

Then I’ve got my little growing gardening network, this one is newer. I started with a gardening blog, I’ve mentioned it before here how it gets a lot of respect despite not being too old or having a lot of posts. Namely for being #1 for “gardening blog” on Google so when companies are looking for blogs to advertise on, or bloggers are looking to fill out their blogroll, I’m easily found. This results in the site gaining a good amount of incoming links (I’ve had an easier time link building with it than any other site I’ve ever owned). I later expanded it until a relatively still unpopular article site and forum (not that different from Website Publisher in truth). This expansion though is very much a “for later” type of expansion. As I talk about in my longevity article I’m thinking very long term here.

Then I opened my first (and not my last) gardening related ecommerce site, and being able to promote it with my content sites makes the job of promoting it much easier.

Now, I’m making a third mini network. In addition to gardening I also like to cook, and I like to cook healthy food. Not like rabbit food, but burgers, steaks, man food, I just make it healthier. My main new site, which isn’t launched yet, is a nutrition site but it takes a unique angle rather than just another article site or calorie counting site. Then I decided, you know, I like to cook, I might as well make a cooking blog. This will help promote it, so I’m doing that now as well. Cooking & nutrition aren’t 100% related, but they’re close enough that I should be able to get some cross promotion mojo going on.

The more sites you have in one niche, the easier your promotion work will be, and I’m not really recommending you putting the same content on multiple sites, that’d be spam, technically. Rather I recommend making different sites with different content but within the same niche, or to pair up ecommerce sites and content sites. The rewards are great.

Top of page...