“…In New Orleans, recovery has been spotty at best. The historic French Quarter and neighborhoods close to the Mississippi River did not flood and have bounced back fairly well. The city’s population has reached an estimated 277,000, about 60 percent its pre-storm level of 455,000. Sales tax revenues are approaching normal, and tourism and the port industry are recovering…” (from yahoo)

We’re with you guys, hope this city is all back into fully recovered state and running well!

Wow, someone is finally getting it right about New Orleans. Business Week published an article yesterday highlighting what I have been saying for years: New Orleans is a great place to start a business!

It’s exciting to hear our friends highlighted in this story:

Robert LeBlanc, an EO Accelerator member who founded the nightclub Republic after the storm:

“Everybody knows that there have been a lot of problems endemic to New Orleans, and a lot of that is because it has been such an insular city for such a long time,” LeBlanc says. “We wanted to do things to connect the people who are in New Orleans with the new people who were coming to New Orleans, to create those bonds and those communities.”

Neel Sus, fellow EO Accelerator member who launched SusCo Solutions last year:

“Everybody wants everybody to succeed, and I think if anything Katrina has motivated people to open it up more.”

And most of all, a big shout out to Blake, this is an exciting highlight to mark the launch of Killian Interactive:

Blake Killian, who left a small Internet startup to found his own online marketing firm, Killian Interactive, this summer, says Web-based companies have another advantage: Their businesses didn’t suffer the same damage during Katrina that traditional companies did. “We just grabbed our laptops and headed to higher ground,” Killian says.

Congrats to all, and most of all congratulations to New Orleans entrepreneurs, we are getting our story out and New Orleans is on the move.

We are working on a homepage redesign for next week’s v1.0 launch of siteMighty. We have been bantering around a more descriptive tagline for siteMighty. Our current lead on the homepage “We’re changing affiliate marketing forever” is problematic for a couple reasons… it doesn’t address what we actually do, or the benefit of siteMighty to our users.

So, we’ve got a tag line that we brainstormed about a month ago for our business cards, and we’re batting it around. Here’s what we’ve got:

• We build the site. You build the business. – This is on our business cards now. It helps define the role siteMighty plays, and the role the user plays. It also conveys that siteMighty puts you in business and that you have to do some work to build your business. This flows really well with the dual play on build.
• We build the site. You’re in business. – This is an adaptation of the above. My wife, a psychologist, recommended this tweak because it doesn’t scare the user with an unknown “I don’t know how to build a business…”. Also it conveys the immediacy of what happens when you signup, you instantly have a affiliate marketing site up and running, open for business. This may not flow as well as the first.

We need your input, help us decide on siteMighty’s new tagline. We look forward to hearing from you. Please post any additional ideas in the comments. Thanks!

We made it happen – First BarCamp in Russia!

The day of the conference was 4th of August, while Christopher Schultz was in Kazan, Russia at Flatsourcing-development department (that is located outside US for better cost/effective rate although it’s secure US-based entity with top quality standards).

Well, it was actually first BarCamp conference in Russia – we made it! Made people feel very comfortable, informal, we’ve broken all the walls and stereotypes of that Russians are very modest and shy to talk openly. It was even a surprise to me, how it looked similar to regular BarCamp that are happening in US, Europe and all over the world!

I definitely think we should do that one more time and meanwhile, please take a look at those materials that are available from the conference (copy-pasting from TatSoft web-site, blog that was covering the story in Russian):

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oleg_kurnosov/tags/barcampkazan/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/barcampkazan
Original conference official web-page: http://barcamp.org/BarCampKazan

It’s been a busy couple months, and I am excited to announce some big changes that are taking place with siteMighty. We’ve been working rolling out several new features that are now included in siteMighty. You’ll continue to see new features over the next two weeks as we prepare for … wait for it … the version 1.0 full release of siteMighty.

That’s right, we’re coming out of beta! We are thrilled about getting siteMighty to a released version with NCS & Icommissions integrated affiliate offers in the credit card vertical.

You’ll already see in your siteMighty accounts:

• Upgraded FAQ’s and a Knowledge Base for easier online support.
• Integrated live chat support and a new support phone number for paid users – (504) 717-4717
• New dedicated support team lead by Dilyara who many of you have already heard from answering your support tickets.
• Embedded training videos throughout siteMighty
• Premium templates for paid users (currently 2, with 7 more coming next week)
• New offers sorting in brands & issuers
• Default offer sorting by the affiliate networks so the best performing offers are at the top of your pages

Coming with our v1.0 release Sept 3rd:

• New siteMighty homepage showing newest siteMighty sites and Top 10 siteMighty sites – this will drive traffic to the our newest users and our top users
• New premium templates and new homepage design option for your siteMighty site
• Additional SEO features
• What do you want to see?
  

We want to know what else you want to see in siteMighty for our v1.0 release? We have allocated next week’s development to user requested features!

Please complete this survey here to tell us how you are using siteMighty, and what you want to see in siteMighty so you can continue to grow your own business.

Thanks to all of our users! We look forward to hearing from you.

I went to lunch today with Oleg and Alex here in Kazan, Russia. The whole experience reminded me of how flat this world has become. Oleg drove us to lunch in is Toyota, he said that Japanese cars are really considered to be much higher quality then the Russian Ladas. We went to a mall that is the first branded mall I have ever seen, called Mega Mall, a Russian company. It was right next to IKEA, a Swedish company. On the other side was the a do-it-youself megastore OBI, a German company.

Inside the mall, we went straight to the food court for lunch. Alex chose his favorite restaurant, McDonalds, and got his usual order of a Fresh Mac meal (a Big Mac modified with tomato’s and lettuce). Oleg got a chicken sandwich meal from KFC. I was the only one to actually have a meal from a Russian company, and it was a Greek gyro at that.

The world truly is flat.

Dobraye ootro from Kazan, Russia, home of Tatsoft.ru and Flatsourcing.com. It been a long trip over here, but I arrived Tuesday night after several flight delays and about 60 hrs of travel.

Its great to be over here with our entire development team and to be spending time with Oleg, Alex, & Timur, my partners in Flatsourcing.com. We all are getting a tremendous amount out of working together face-to-face. Even though we talk can daily via Skype, email, and phone, nothing supplants seeing each other in person.

We’ve laid out aggressive plans for ourselves for the next few days, and started today with hashing through the details of the siteMighty Advanced Analytics module. This is an incredibly sophisticated tool that will enable us to fully optimize PPC campaigns by pulling in cost & conversion data. It’s quite a task, but 6 hrs today enabled us to finalize the specs and really move forward on it.

We are all really looking forward to Russia’s inaugural BarCamp this weekend. We’ve got a lot of excited attendees, and many software development firms in the region will be in attendance. I’ll be blogging about the event and the rest of our adventures together, so stay tuned.