Woman's Day

BudgetSimple (and myself) were mentioned as one of the top websites for saving you money in this month's issue of Woman's Day magazine! On newsstands today :).

Facebook Advertising

Just on a lark I tried out creating a page for my business (BudgetSimple) on Facebook. The experience is very interesting. The concept is that instead of just providing a link you create a way to express their use of your product by "Becoming a fan" of your company. Facebook also offers a very simple "AdWords"-like way of advertising to the Facebook community, where they can not only visit your website, but also rate the quality of your ad or become a fan.

I have not had phenomenal success as yet with this form of advertising, but one thing that sets it apart from Google is the demographic data you receive. Unlike Google, Facebook knows every last detail about a person, including age, sex, etc... and provides you a rather nice breakdown of this. Of course it's probably skewed by the age generation that uses Facebook, but even my 60 year old father is on Facebook at this point so it's probably not that far off. Definitely worth a try if you are an mISV looking for new creative advertising routes.

Pretty much the worst way to start your day is to find out that AdSense, which makes up a large portion of your business is randomly not showing. As bloggers like Patrick know, getting in contact with Google when they mysteriously wave their god-like hand at you is almost impossible. Luckily I know people who physically work in the AdSense dept so hopefully I can get a real human being to tell me what's going on (I've received no mail from Google).

New AdWords Interface

I'm pretty unimpressed with the new interface, I don't really understand how to use it, and it's so AJAX to the max that when my connection was running slow everything started breaking. How do others feel about this new interface?

Changing Business Models

It's as usual been a long time since I've posted so I figured I was due for an update. I'm still around and working hard on two main projects. The first is BudgetSimple, which has continued to grow as one of the most popular free online budgets in the net. Since the big 2.0 upgrade that made the project "AJAX to the max!" I've been working on a 2.5 version that should monetize some of the interest in the project, while still keeping my goal of providing a useful free budget.

Besides that, Used Cars On-Line is undergoing a slight change in business models. Since it's inception as one of the first sites for used cars on the Internet in 1995, it's been exclusively for cars "for sale by owner". While I always thought this was a great little niche, Craigslist pretty much cannibalized what small market segment there existed for people who didn't want to buy from dealers. I know many people don't mind buying from dealer and in fact some people only buy from dealerships, so in the coming weeks I'll be offering dealer feeds in addition to FSBO ads in hopes of growing interest in the site. There is always considerably more dealer inventory out there then private owners, so this requires a pretty substantial update in terms of search on the site. I'll post again when it's live to get the software business community's feedback.