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!

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.

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.

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.

One of the fundamental principles that we operate on with siteMighty is having data at our fingertips so that we know what is going on at all times. We do this by 1) setting metrics, 2) gathering data, and 3) presenting it in an actionable way.

I have staked the growth of siteMighty to analytics: we have to know how we are doing and act accordingly. One of my failings with Huckabuck is that we built a great web-app but never had any idea how or if people were using it. In the end, the most concrete data we had were the $2 checks that rolled in from our advertising rev-share.

I got serious about this at SXSW in March. siteMighty was ready for beta launch, and functionally it was ready, but we already knew that we didn’t have data tracking and analysis tools that would enable us to stay on top of siteMighty. And as I’ve said before, getting to launch is like pulling up to the starting line, the race hasn’t even started yet, so I knew we needed tools to understand siteMighty. Ryan Carson blogged about his meeting with Ryan Allis the 22 year old CEO of a multi million dollar company. Ryan wrote:

What really struck me though, was how he knew his numbers inside and out. He is absolutely hard-core about measuring everything. It was like a slap in the face - as CEO of Carson Systems, I just don’t know enough about what’s going on.

It is critical to know what is going on. So, here’s what we are doing about it:

I designed an analytics dashboard that is mocked up over the the right there. Here are the important things we wanted to track:

• Open support tickets
• The Visitors / Conversion / Paying Users funnel (more on that below)
• Server bandwidth usage and capacity(so we’re prepped for a TechCrunching)
• Aggregate stats on our users sites so we know if they are seeing success
• Revenue stats

Our conversion funnel was designed to really understand how many people we have to get to visit siteMighty in order to actually make a paying customer out of people. I got a lot of insight into doing this from Mike McDermont from Freshbooks. I basically built our funnel around the ideas he presented here on Vitamin. I lifted his conversion funnel for our mockup. (Thanks Mike!)

So, after three iterations of our analytics dashboard here we are. Our current version is over to the right.

This has be instrumental in helping us understand what is going on with siteMighty, react to the needs of users, and evaluate the success of our marketing efforts. We keep this screen up all day for a live look at what is going on.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on any successes with analytics or challenges with not having the data you need. I’d be happy to provide insight into what we are tracking and why, and please feel free to use anything you can learn from our analytics package on your web app.

• Related caveat: I just ordered the new book Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning which has been highly recommended. Check it out.
  

During the launch of siteMighty, we have found ourselves talking about the affiliate marketing industry as much as we are talking about what siteMighty does. Affiliate marketing has a stigma to it in need of debunking. So without further ado, it’s time to change the perception of affiliate marketing:

• MYTH #1 - Affiliate marketing is a zero-sum game. Just like every other web phenomenon there is a tremendous long-tail of opportunity with affiliate marketing. By definition there are only 10 sites on the first page of Google when you search for “credit cards”. And most of them are the behemoths of affiliate marketing. But there are people searching for credit cards using so many other search terms, and there are niche sites that appear for these niche terms. Affiliate marketing is fundamentally about monetizing traffic, and new ways of generating traffic are being created every day. Search marketing has been the big thing to this point, but many successful affiliate marketers are leveraging social media, blogging, online video, and more. There are literally tens of thousands of credit card affiliate sites out there. The sites on the top tier have a lot of traffic and make a lot of money, but there is definitely plenty of opportunity out there. New affiliate marketing sites are expanding the pie, not slicing it up.

• MYTH #2 - Affiliate marketing is spam. This is one of the biggest stigmas of affiliate marketing. People think that it is just someone trying to insert themselves into the clickstream of someone who is looking for something. This may be true in some cases, and there are people who play the PPC arbitrage game, but in my experience, the most successful affiliate marketers add value. SiteMighty-powered credit card sites add value by aggregating credit card offers, providing a platform for editor’s reviews and user reviews, show data about popular cards. We encourage people to blog and write articles as this is the best way to help your users make informed decisions. Here’s a great example of someone who is not using a siteMighty site, but has a credit card blog with great content and really helping inform people. This is our vision of how people will use siteMighty.

• MYTH #3 - Affiliate marketing is the second class citizen of advertising. Advertisers love affiliate marketing because it is so efficient. It’s a very simple equation for advertisers, you pay for performance. An advertiser only pays if the action they are hoping for transpires. It is a pure and efficient proposition for advertisers. That’s why Google is starting to experiment with it through their pay per action Adwords. So, for publishers looking to monetize their sites, there are a lot of advertisers willing to advertise on their site, but they won’t pay CPC or CPM, they will only pay when the publisher drives traffic and a desired action takes place. It’s win-win for both sides when it works.

We’re building siteMighty as a platform to launch great affiliate marketing sites based on the success that we’ve had as affiliate marketers. Basically in the eco-system of commerce on the internet affiliate marketing sites are nice small businesses run by individuals. Affiliate marketing provides a revenue model for small and medium size sites where people can make a living doing something they are interested in. That in essence is what siteMighty is. It’s a publishing platform with a built in revenue model.