Back in the heyday of the NBA I used to love watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. No matter what kind of game MJ was having, Phil Jackson would rest him at the end of the third quarter and for the first few minutes in the fourth. He’d come off the bench rested and ready, and go on to do the most amazing things I’d never seen basketball court, more often than not leading the Bulls to victory.

And sometime during the fourth quarter, Marv Albert would remark “he lets the game come to him.”

Sometimes as an entrepreneur you have to let the game come to you. Things don’t always move as quickly as you want. Software doesn’t get developed overnight. Search engine rankings take time. And user adoption of your product doesn’t happen overnight.

About a month ago I felt myself pressing. I was pressing too hard to get siteMighty to the next level. I was pressing too hard on my team, our partners, and our business model. I realized this one night when I literally laid in bed all night with my mind racing and unable to sleep. I was pressing too hard.

So I made the decision to step back. I let the team step forward on siteMighty, and instead of trying to press so hard to grow fast, let things take their natural course for a while. We have a fully developed product, our users like it and are finding success with it, and we have a great team behind it at supporting it.

It was an incredibly freeing moment when I realized I could take a break from siteMighty and stop pressing so hard.

So that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’ve been focusing my energy on building the business infrastructure for Flatsourcing which has been going incredibly well, and is something thats been waiting for my attention for a long time.

And today I realized that the game was coming to me.

• A good friend of mine signed up for an account with siteMighty and gave me some great feedback on it.
• I looked in on our support tickets and stats that I’ve been purposely ignoring for the last couple weeks. They’ve been handled excellently by our support team.
• Today we received a revenue-share check from a partner it was literally 10x what it was last month. That means we’re growing but more importantly our users are growing. Wow, if that’s what stepping away will do, I’m heading to Panama.
• Most of all, I’ve been having fun again.

Letting the game come to you feels great. Pressing too hard feels stressful. It’s a lesson in entrepreneurship and I won’t take lightly.

Thanks for the life lesson MJ.

One of the staples of Web 2.0 is launching products using what 37 signals calls “The Hollywood Launch” or private beta invites. Hype and scarcity are well known promotional tactics, and hot web applications are creating buzz around their launches using these type of launch tactics:

• Prelaunch splash page with e-mail collection form
• Limited release invite-only private beta launch
• Leveraging social networks by releasing new invites to early adopters
• Building buzz by creating artificial scarcity – when demand outstrips supply you’ve got buzz

While this is not a new tactic in marketing, it’s now being employed by American Express with the launch of their new credit card, the Plum Card, a business management credit card. This card is being launched on November 5, 2007 with a limited release of 10,000 cards.

Makes you wonder if they’re trying to create the scarcity induced buzz that drives the mystique of the fabled American Express Black Card.

It will be interesting to see how this launch pans out. They could drive quite a bit of hype for the Plum Card, but my guess is he won’t be long until they’re offering it through credit card affiliate networks like siteMighty.

(shameless promo: If you don’t get the invite, search for other American Express business cards here.)

Dave Coustan wrote a post today about his idea for a “hipster domain holding page“. Basically, an easy-to-create placeholder page that you could point your domain name servers to for those 5-50 domain names that we all own that are just sitting there.

Marshall Kirkpatrick talks about the investment that several domainers are making in SharedReviews. It’s no secret that there’s big money and domain real estate. But how about a little money for all of us who own 25 odd domain names?
This is an interesting concept, and something that we could certainly execute through siteMighty.com. It’s already brain-dead easy to point the domain to siteMighty. Your site is automatically embedded with affiliate links that give you the opportunity to earn revenue when someone clicks from your site and performs the desired action. Right now you can market anything you want, as long as that thing as credit cards (We got our inspiration from Henry Ford’s Model T). But in the near future you’ll be able to market a whole lot more.

What if you could customize this page with content about you, and embed some affiliate links and maybe AdSense on it to earn a little revenue whenever somebody goes to this domain?

Through your siteMighty placeholder page you could:

• embed your Twitter feed
• embed your blog feed
• embed your Flickr feed
• include affiliate links for categories of your choosing
• include AdSense

Would this one-page site make sense for you? Let us know, we definitely could build it.

Just wanted to make a note, that siteMighty.com is planning to offer even more opportunities to professionals, and along with more premium templates that have been recently released now there is an additional Advanced account plan coming up in October!

In the beginning of October 2007 please now look forward to this new Advanced plan on siteMighty.com, with following new features:

• 10 sites – Now you will be able to manage up to 10 sites in one account!
• Landing pages – Landing pages are pages of your site, that can be accessed directly through an URL. Page content is being set by you and is made of offers of your choice and html area at the top with any information you want to be displayed.
• Even more support – As 10 sites that are able to create in Advanced new plan will require more effort support team will provide top quality assistance to make it more comfortable for marketer and help to manage all web-sites!

So in October, look for Advanced plan during signup for siteMighty.com services!

Congratulations! “Basic” and “Intermediate” accounts on siteMighty.com now have even more opportunities!

Paid users on siteMighty.com usually already know what kind of content to fill in their web-site, how to perform at least some basic SEO and attract visitors to web-site that means earning money.

siteMighty.com provides even more tools now for paid users to make it even more comfortable and fast to create new web-sites by rolling out new premium designs only available for paid users.

Click on the “Design” menu inside your control panel in siteMighty.com and you will see new designs that you can choose from to create new sites.

Please don’t forget that only Intermediate accounts can create up to 3 sites in one account. If you need more, please just create another Intermediate accounts.

P.S. They say there is going to be new advanced account plan soon available on siteMighty.com that will allow you to create up to 10 web-sites in one account, create landing pages for your PPC campaigns and much more!

I’m very pleased to announce that siteMighty has been honored by New Orleans CityBusiness magazine as one of New Orleans Innovators of the Year, 2007. This is a real honor, especially because it is the second year in a row that we’ve won this award; last year we were honored for Huckabuck.com which we sold in October, 2006.

CityBusiness honored siteMighty in its “On the Brink” category. This is very exciting for for me as I feel this is exactly where SiteMighty stands today, particularly in light of our version 1.0 release earlier this week. You can read the whole article here, and here’s a brief snippet:

When creating siteMighty, which took a little more than a year to design, Schultz had a particular goal in mind. “The goal was to make it so simple that my mother would be able to do it.”

Since it’s debut in March, siteMighty has had more than 1,700 users nationwide. “The most satisfying thing is that users are making money by using our product” Schultz said.

A big shout out to my mom for letting me continually use her as my design inspiration. While I tend to say things like this, the truth is she’s a very capable Internet user, but it’s nice to have her as a muse for website design.

Thanks to everybody who’s worked on this project: Our partners NCS and Icommissions. The wonderful Flatsourcing team: Oleg, Alex, Timur, Dilyara, Rustmem, Evgueny, Ravil, Rustem & TimurB. Blake Killian. Our great summer interns: Will, Jeff, Claire, Tannia. And Susan and Jeff who are helping us take this thing to a whole another level. Stay tuned.

We are very excited today to announce the release of siteMighty.com v1.0. In the short six months since our beta launch, we’ve been able to roll out some really exciting new features based on the feedback from our users. siteMighty stands today at the forefront of affiliate site builders, and in the category of credit card affiliate site builders, we think we’ve got a winner.

Thanks to all our users who helped us out with feedback and testing our product through the beta phase. Here’s what you’ll see at siteMighty.com today:

• A brand-new home page – it better reflects our current identity is a credit card affiliate site builder, and one exciting new feature is the showcase area where we highlight our newest users in our top 10 users.
• Full release of the upgraded support – our goal is to make you money with siteMighty. To that end, will be offering as much help as we can through online support (FAQ, Knowledge Base) for all users, and live support (24/7/365 live chat, phone support, support tickets) for all paid users.
• New premium templates – we’ve got new premium templates for paid users and more on the way.
• Presorting of offers – the affiliate networks know what cards make money, and now your sites will be sorted with the default settings chosen by the affiliate networks. You can change your ordering at any time, but your site will start from scratch with the best-performing offers at the top.
• Upgraded SEO capabilities – we’ve enhanced the SEO functionality at the intermediate level. This will help users get more traffic from natural search engine rankings.

Thanks to our users, we hope you’ll continue to grow alongside us. It’s exciting to see you many of our users now earning great commissions through their siteMighty sites. We’re in business for you, so let us know what we can do to help you grow.

If you haven’t checked out siteMighty yet, there’s never been a better time to check it out. Sign up today. Thanks for everybody support, and congratulations to the whole siteMighty team!

- Chris Schultz

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!

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.

Mashable posted a list of 50 Web design tools yesterday, and we’re thrilled that siteMighty landed near the top (#8). They said:

“[T]here are now scores of tools that turn ordinary folks into designers.”

We couldn’t agree more. Like we always say, we built siteMighty to enable anyone to build an affiliate marketing web site. And not just any site, but one that’s beautiful, powerful and that can be built in about 5 minutes.