Introducing the best thing to happen to Voodoo Ventures since our new office: the Voodoo summer internship team. we’re really excited to welcome on board a very talented group of individuals who we working with us this summer. As we launch siteMighty, we have a ton to do, and an endless supply of marketing opportunities. Enter the new team. Already, we have a long list of projects that are under with them. They’re playing a big role in developing the customer support training and marketing materials they were launching July 15th of siteMighty.

In addition, we are relaunching Blake versus Chris is a friendly competition with each of them launching their own siteMighty powered website. They are live blogging on their sites every step of the way. And training guidance on getting sites set up, bugs they are finding that we need to fix, and of course step-by-step guidance on how they are marketing their sites including PPC, SEO, and blog outreach. We are so excited to see all the personalities emerge and see all the helpful content being created for our siteMighty users.

Meet the team and follow their progress:

• Will - starting at Tulane as a fellow in the MBA program in August - CreditCardOffersPlus.com
• Tannia - a Tulane Communications graduate - KazillionCreditCards.com
• Jeff - finishing his masters in Organizational Communications at Southeastern Louisiana State - TheCreditCardJunction.com
• Claire - entering her senior year at Loyola - CreditCrazyOnline.com
  

Welcome aboard gang. Stay tuned on their progress and keep up to date on their helpful tips and tricks at eah of their blogs.

Long time friend of Voodoo, Marc Nathan was profiled yesterday in the Houston Chronicle.   We met Marc just over a year ago at a BarCamp event in Houston.  He was one of the first Angel Investors / VC’s that I had ever actually met in person.  He’s been extremely helpful to us and always willing to listen and bounce ideas off.

He shares some great red flags that when he hears, he walks:

No. 1 is ‘I don’t have any competition.’ When I hear that, my shutters go up. I put the note on the door that says closed for business. When somebody says that, it means two things: They don’t know who the competition truly is, or they don’t have any competition because nobody wants what they’ve got.

No. 2 red flag is you tell me your numbers are conservative. I automatically cut them in half anyway, so we could go around in circles. At the end of the day, don’t tell me anything. Just show me what you’ve got.

No. 3 — and there are so many of them — but No. 3 is probably saying that you as a management team or CEO are going to be with the company for the life of the company. The opposite of that is telling me that your CEO is going to step aside when more talent comes on board

Glad he’s getting some props over in Houston. Click here for the full article.  Thanks to Blake Poutra for sending this our way.

Today, many internet webcasters are observing a day of silence to alert and remind listeners of the impact that the new copyright royalties will have on the webcasting industry if the proposed royalty rates go into effect July 15th.

I listen to internet radio all day long, at work and at home, and today is a reminder to me that what I take for granted now may not be there tomorrow. Internet radio is one of the few bright spots in the music industry currently, and that webcasters serve up eclectic and interesting tunes that you would never here on celestial or satellite radio. Internet radio serves a valuable role in promoting lesser known artists. The future of the music industry lies in discovery as people search further down the long tail to find the niche they want to listen too. Internet radio helps them find that niche.

But it could all be going away. Currently, webcasters pay royalties by sharing advertising revenue with the artists and labels. The proposed changes would require them to pay royalties on a per song per listener basis. There are many listener supported webcasters who simply couldn’t afford it.

Some of my favorite stations that I won’t be listening to today are: KCRW, Pandora, & Radio Paradise. Interestingly, since Last.fm has recently been purchased by CBS, they are choosing not to observe the day of silence. I was an early adopter and loved Last.fm but this new corporate stance ends my relationship with them. Last.fm, you’re off my playlist.

Hope everyone enjoys the quiet day in internet radioland. If you don’t want this to become the permanent situation and want to do something to save internet radio, go here.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been making some major decisions about siteMighty. We’re learning what our strengths are, and what we have to work on. It’s been an exciting and busy time around here, and were making some tweaks to our business model based on feedback they were getting from our users.

During the course of the last month our Director of Marketing, Blake, has become our Customer Support Guru. His phone rings all day long, he answers support tickets at 9pm at night and on weekends, and his instant messenger window pops up every 30 seconds. If this conjures up images of customer service hell, bear with me, just like Blake’s been doing.

We recognized that this was becoming unsustainable for him a few weeks ago, and we decided to do something about it. So, do we take our phone number off the website, let our support tickets linger, and leave our customers to fend for themselves? No way!

As much time as support is taking up, we love it. Our customers are reaching out to us, they’re using the siteMighty, they’re trying to learn affiliate marketing, they’re working hard to build their businesses. All of these touches with our customers are opportunities for us to show how much we love them. It’s a lot better than the alternative, no customers, no calls.

In March at the SXSW interactive conference, we went to a presentation that included Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com. The presentation was titled Customer Service is the New Marketing. It was about how to WOW customers with support that exceeds their wildest expectations. This is how you get customers to stay with you, this is how you get customers talking about you. This is our opportunity.

So here’s what we’re going to do:

We notified our users this week that as of July 15th, personal support will be available for free customers for 30 days, and then limited only to paid accounts. Self-serve support like the FAQ and Knowledge Base will always be free for all users. After all, it costs us a lot of money for Blake to be on the phone for hours. We can give the software away for free, but getting personal support with learning affiliate marketing and how to market your site will cost you $19 a month. This seems like a fair bargain, and and it will enable us to provide an even higher level of support to our paying customers.

On top of that we are embarking on a month-long company-wide project to enhance our support at all levels.

• We have a great team of interns who are learning siteMighty from scratch. they will be live blogging about their experience in setting up siteMighty sites throughout the summer. This will create great content for us that will serve as a step-by-step guide to setting up a siteMighty site and that we’ll include in training guides and FAQs.
• We are overhauling our siteMighty support system. We’re building a huge database of FAQs as well as a searchable Knowledge Base.
• We are writing a training e-book that will serve as a guide to getting started with marketing your SiteMighty site.
• We’ve already launched 24/7/365 live chat support powered by Clixconnect. This has already substantially increased our rate of sign up and customer satisfaction because people can get a hold of a real person at the very moment they have a question.
• We’re creating screen cast videos that will be embedded in siteMighty at various points users might have questions.

We’re really excited about all these upgrades. We are in the business of putting people in business, so if we can help our users succeed they’ll stick around.

We really believe that customer service is the new marketing And we’re excited to get ourselves in the position to provide better support than ever to our users. If you are user now, thank you, if you’re not why not sign up and give us a try.

We pushed at a major update to siteMighty today. Today’s update included several changes, but the primary improvements are to our siteMighty Analyze services.

Based on feedback we’re getting from users, we’ve substantially improved our built-in analytics. There’s more to come, but here’s where we are as of today.

• Improved conversion tracking - our new report aggregates conversion data over various time periods. We’ve added filtering mechanisms to remove faulty data that represented the search engine spiders and automated robots visiting your site.
• Removed server bandwidth graph - we previously had a report showing the server bandwidth to your site was using. This data was more confusing than valuable, and because we are not regulating accounts based on server usage we eliminated it.
• Added hits versus conversions graph - hits versus conversions is an important metric to tracking usage on your site. Hits to your site represent a daily count of total page views on your site. Conversions represent the number of people who clicked the apply button on a credit card offer.
• Added link to affiliate network stats - we want to be very clear with your user that your official stats that you are paid based on a maintained by your affiliate network. The stats and siteMighty are to assist you in marketing your site, but don’t have a bearing on how you earn. It is important to track your earnings through your affiliate network’s reports.

We’re going to continue to improve our analytics capabilities over the next weeks and months. This is one of the most difficult things for us to develop, because it takes real traffic data to test analytics are performing. We are watching the performance closely, but we ask you to please in mind that these capabilities are still in beta, and we will continue to work on them until we are providing you with the best data possible.

What is conversion tracking?

One of the questions we’ve been getting over the course of the last few weeks, is what is a conversion? A conversion on a siteMighty site is counted when a visitor to your site clicks the apply button on a credit card offer and visits the “conversion page”. The conversion page is the last page on siteMighty the visitor sees before being redirected to the credit card application, which is hosted securely by the credit card issuer.

Think of a breakdown of visitors to your site as a funnel, commonly called a conversion funnel. At the top of the funnel are all visitors to your site, the next level our visitors who siteMighty counts as a conversion, meaning they click the apply button for a credit card. The next level are visitors to actually make it to the application page for credit card company (if they click the back button or close the browser they don’t end up getting there). Once they get to the credit card application page, the next level happens if they fill out the form and actually apply for the credit card. The final level of the funnel is an approval. If a visitor gets approved for the credit card they apply for, you get paid.

We hope this helps you to succeed with your siteMighty site. If you have a questions please contact us. We’ll be continuing to roll out new features. Thanks for being a user.

A few weeks ago I posted a State of the Blog post, where I highlighted traffic stats about our most successful and least successful posts over the last six months. The goal in doing this was to evaluate our performance with the Idea Fuel blog, and ascertain what we are writing that is engaging our readers, and what is just fluff.

Blake and I have talked several times in the last few weeks about where we want our blog to go. When we consolidated all our blogs are different projects last fall to Voodooventures.com, the goal was to build one voice representing all that we do around one brand: Voodoo Ventures.

You may have noticed lighter posting during the last couple weeks. This is related to several things:

1. We have each become extremely busy with siteMighty. We’re working hard to keep up with the growth, and as exciting as it has been, it has simply cut into the time we have for blogging.
2. We decided not to try to compete with TechCrunch (haha). This may seem obvious, but acknowledging it has enabled us to let go of the need to blog about everything that’s getting a little buzz in the blogosphere. We’re entrepreneurs not journalists.
3. We are implementing skills were learning from Getting Things Done in a 4-Hour Work Week. I highly recommend both of these books. One thing that we’ve learned through these systems is to focus on the important, not the urgent. With this in mind we are starting to measure our success with this blog by the quality of our posts not the quantity.

We’ve are aligning the mission of this blog with the goals of our company. Voodooventures.com exists to inform our users, to market our projects, and as an outlet for our own personal expression. We feel that we add the most value on topics with which we are intimately familiar. So going forward you’ll read less here about the latest Web 2.0 flavor of the week, and a lot more about what it’s like to run a startup.

Without further ado, here’s what we’re shooting for going forward:

• Education and Training - Our users are asking for training guidance to help them succeed if they are siteMighty sites. you’ll be seeing a lot more educational resources about SEO, PPC, and affiliate marketing in general.
• Product Announcements - siteMighty is growing fast and changing every week. We’ll be communicating what’s going on inside and out with our projects.
• Industry Insight - You’ll still read our thoughts on cool startups, and useful Web 2.0 sites. However, we won’t just be regurgitating what we read on TechCrunch and Techmeme. We’ll be talking about our own experiences using these tools.
• Entrepreneurship - We live and breathe startup life. And a lot of people have shared with us that the most interesting things we write relate to how we are building our startup: the challenges we face, the tools we use, our strategies for success, and our management style. we want to share what we are doing and how we are doing it so that you can do it too.

Thanks for all the feedback on our blog. We always want the blog to be a conversation, every comment and every reader face we see on Mybloglog widget means a lot to us. Let us know your thoughts, we want to hear from you!

I checked out the alpha (tech preview) launch of Synthasite today. Vinny Lingham and his team have done really great job with it. It is a very powerful web publishing app that is simple, elegant and not overwhelming. You can already pull in widgets from Flickr and YouTube.

Synthasite hits the mark with an easy Ajax-powered interface that is natural to navigate. It’s much simpler than a desktop-based web site creation app, and you can build a site from their built in web building blocks.

Because the site is in alpha, it is not ready for full use yet and they are not guaranteeing that future upgrades may result in lost data, its intended just to get an idea of where they are headed right now. There is a very impressive screencast demonstrating the ease of setting up a new site. Watch it here.

Based on 30 minutes of usage, I am very impressed. Vinny, you guys are on the right track. Keep it up! Congratulations on getting to alpha launch.

There are about 1200 accounts left in the tech preview, go snap one up today.