If you’re running many sites it can be difficult to keep up with the stats for them all, logging in and out of so many different control panels to use things like Webalizer or AwStats.

Many people use Google Analytics to be able to have a single control center for their stats, but is this a good thing to do?  Sure, Google provides some great data and is much more user friendly than the control panel programs. The problem is that now Google can see all the sites you have in the account and they now know that these sites are from a single owner.

Many people believe that this is a big mistake, and you might be tipping your hand to them.

Move Over Google…

There is now a new, and also FREE, alternative to Google Analytics.  Blvd Status has launched their beta of Blvd Analytics at http://www.blvdstatus.com

I signed up a week ago and installed a small snip of code on one of my sites and its working great.

The stats it provides are thorough and the interface is very friendly.

You get the standard referrer information, the search keywords as well as the ranking of that keyword (awesome), the URLs visited on your site with the time on page and the bounce rate, “foot traffic” showing hits and unique visitors by day, week, month, etc as well as time of day.

One feature that looks promising is the conversion tracking. This is a page tracking conversion system. It will tell you where people came from and where they left. Basically it’s a click through rate tracker, but no actual sale conversions unless it’s your site and you can place the tracking script on a “thank you” page.

It can track matches by when a visitor hits a certain URL, a partial match on the URL, or even a certain parameter in a URL. These matches can be from the referring URL, the landing URL, or the outgoing URL. You can’t get this from your control panel stats program. Oh, and there is no additional code for this tracking. Just tell it what a conversion is for you. No, this won’t replace PPC tracking systems but it’s great for tracking natural search traffic.

Now you can quickly see your over all site stats and your “conversions” showing where they came from.

You can also see all your sites from within a single control panel all without the worry of a foot print or Google having your data. There’s no foot print as every site you install the stat tracking code to is assigned a different tracking ID. With the ID being per site, not per account, there should be no way that anyone can determine that any two sites using BLVD Stats are from the same owner.

I also heard that there will be a more feature filled version in the future, for a fee of course, but they say there will always be a free version available. And the current free version is pretty nice.

Give it a look: http://www.blvdstatus.com

Jonathan

You may have started hearing about the Aggressive Affiliates affiliate marketing training program (http://www.aggressiveaffiliates.com).  Well as it happens, I have a little inside knowledge about this product so I’m going to share what I can with you now and do a really quick aggressive affiliates review.

This is going to be a quick post however because I have to be on a plane tomorrow morning to head to San Diego for the Magic Bullet seminar event (which I am SUPER excited about!!) but I wanted to get something out real quick since you’ll probably get bombarded with emails about this very soon.

So here’s the deal… I don’t actually know the names of either of the two guys (Eric and Peter) that are behind this product.  I’m just that out of touch with the Internet Marketing “guru” world.  In fact it wasn’t either of them who even alerted me to this… it was a very good (and EXTREMELY trusted) friend of mine, whom I believe would prefer to remain anonymous (Hi Mr. Sniper! ) at this time because he’s largely responsible for the content of the course but he prefers to stay underground & behind the scenes, doing his thing and quietly making his living as an affiliate.  This is someone that in many ways I actually feel that I owe my entire current business to, so I take him seriously and trust him implicitly when he says this is a great product.

Still, I wanted to see it for myself… so I convinced him to give up some of the course material so I could really check it out first hand.  I’m only a little ways into it but I have to say thus far - KUDOS on a job well done!

I don’t really know what market they’re intending this for (newbie, intermediate, advanced, etc.) but my initial opinion is that it’s not quite for newbies.  You should probably have a basic familiarity with things like using keyword research tools, and obviously with concepts like “what is affiliate marketing” should be old hat to you.

The content is actually quite excellent (nice job on your first camtasia videos my friend!) and covers some really good, very nitty-gritty specifics on things like keyword research, buying traffic, market research, competition evaluation, video marketing, and much more.  I’d wager that probably even someone who is an existing “super affiliate” (whatever the heck that actually means…) would pick up a few useful tricks.

He actually talks about something I’ve meant to test for well over a year now and of course am kicking myself for not doing it sooner now (hint:  Animoto!)  His explanations are easy to follow, he speech is clear and not too fast.  Still if you’re a total newbie who hasn’t made their first buck online yet, I think you’ll be a bit lost and will have some ground you need to cover first in order to be ready for this course.

OK that’s it for now for my review of aggressive affiliates (once again http://www.aggressiveaffiliates.com if you’re interested) as I’ve gotta finish packing for tomorrow!

Jonathan

W0000000000000000000000000T!!!!!!!!!!!!

About freaking time… I’m so happy to see this I just had to blog about it.

You can FINALLY set a specific date/time for emails to go out.  This is especially huge for anyone who plans to implement “The Machine” as described by Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher at their Traffic & Conversion Summit event in Austin recently.

There’s also nice looking email templates finally - ala Aweber… including custom templates so you can make your own and save them for later use!

1ShoppingCart is finally starting to really grow up… I’m extremely happy to see this progress.  They’re gonna rival InfusionSoft soon (at least they will if I have anything to say about it!  LOL)

Jonathan

It’s 4:30PM, and I just witnessed an atom bomb being dropped.

A psychological atom bomb that is.

Here’s how it played out…

I was standing in line at the grocery store, when a man with a young boy and a girl in tow came walking past.  There was a display of candies, nuts, etc. and the boy (I’m guessing about 8 or 9 years old) took immediate notice of it and spotted opportunity.

“Dad, can we get pistachios like we always used to?”

An instant, knee-jerk answer almost escaped the man’s lips but was just as quickly held in check.

A seemingly eternal 3-second pause followed.  I could almost hear the anguished mental struggle.

“OK sure, go and grab them,” came the confident answer.

I don’t think the boy had any conscious idea of the weapon of mass persuasion he had just used, more effectively than any soldier could hope to wield a knife.

Do you see it?  Do you recognize what happened?  If you do you’re probably laughing in admiration as I was.  But if not, allow me to explain what I saw in the exchange…

First, let me preface this by saying that I’m in the middle of reading Robert Cialdini’s book, “Influence”, and it has - pardon the pun - definitely influenced me in terms of recognizing the psychological impact of certain words and phrases.

In this instance, the child deftly employed a brutally powerful principal known as consistency.  Cialdini cites many studies conducted that have established pretty conclusively, that human beings will go to great, even completely ludicrous, lengths to appear consistent in their words and deeds.  If someone has gone on record at any point in time as being a certain type of person, or doing certain types of things, then they are almost magically forced to hold true to that position pretty much forever.  If you can find a way to tap into someone’s established behavioral traits, you can pretty much force them to comply with you by leveraging their desire to remain consistent with those traits.

In this case, the boy used two phrases - just three words - that I found to completely destroy the father’s ability to resist, and ensure that the boy got what he wanted.

“Always” and “used to”.

By finishing up the request for pistachios with “… like we always used to”, the boy accomplished two things:

1)  the word “always” established that this was something that could not be avoided, could not be broken, and simply had always happened.  This means there can be no other outcome but for it to happen again.

2)  Finishing with “used to” does several things at once, all combined into a powerful cocktail.  First it hearkens back to times past… bringing back memories of good times with the kids.  Happy times where they all sat on the back porch eating pistachios and tossing the shells out to the pigeons… or whatever.  Next, it helps seal the consistency deal.  If the father “always used to” do this, then in order to remain consistent to his past behavior, he MUST DO IT NOW. There is no other escape.  He’s trapped by his desire to be seen as consistent in the eyes of his child, and now he’s also awash in memories of those happy days gone by.

I was completely blown away by this… I swear the father was about to say no to the request, but swallowed his words and visibly wrestled for a few seconds with himself, probably having no idea why he suddenly was unable to say no.  And sure enough, in the end the boy got his pistachios no problem.

So what can you, dear marketer, take from this?

Find ways to tap into consistency in your sales letters or other calls to action.  Talk in terms of “always”, such as:

“Have the white teeth you’ve always wanted…”

“… the body you’ve always dreamed of…”

“… the mate you’ve always been searching for…”

and so forth.  You can safely assume if someone is at your page for a teeth whitening, weight loss, or dating offer, that they’ve “always” wanted a certain something.  But what if you know much more about your visitor?

What if they’re your customers?

And what if you can see their purchase history, and make note of the products they have and have not purchased.

Don’t you think you could possibly craft an email to them, detailing what they’ve done in the past and how they’ve “always” been striving for some sort of result - preferably one that you have a product to address?

Obviously this won’t automatically work for every possible market everywhere, but I’d be willing to bet that a good writer who puts some time into understanding her/his customer base, could work wonders in terms of increasing sales by a combination of list segmentation and psychological tactics like the young boy displayed.

Now imagine applying this sort of thing when you speak, be it selling from the stage, conducting interviews/webinars, or even recording a message to play to visitors of your web page.

If you haven’t already read it, go get Cialdini’s “Influence” right away and devour it.  You’ll start seeing everything around you in a very different light, and realize that we both influence and allow ourselves to be influenced constantly, every day.  And most of the time I’d say that we, like the boy’s father, are utterly clueless about it.

Parting words… when you have a nuke in your arsenal, please use it responsibly! 

Jonathan

How’d you like to attend Amish Shah’s Magic Bullet Seminar for half price?

One of my LPGen customers contacted me and is going to be unable to attend the live seminar.  He plans to keep his Hexatrack software license, he just won’t be able to get to San Diego and would like someone else to take over that “half” of the event.

This means if you are someone who doesn’t care about the software, but would like to be able to be there live and in the flesh for half price, contact me ASAP or leave a message here on the blog, and I’ll put you in touch with the person splitting their ticket.

Amish has already been contacted about this and said it was no problem, so there’s nothing shady going on here.

The seminar dates are getting closer so if this interests you, speak up right away!

Jonathan

Well I’m finally back from Austin, the Traffic and Conversion Summit was absolutely mind blowing.  It’s going to take me a while to fully digest and implement everything but wow… those guys know their stuff!

Only real downside was my flight home on Sunday evening got canceled, and there were no others.  So I got to spend an extra unepected night in Austin.  I was so completely brain dead that all I wanted was to get home.  Alas, I got home today at long last.

So now that I’m home, I’m catching up on things like support tickets, LPGen2 bugs, emails, etc.  And then I realized that I have to have a presentation ready for this coming weekend!

In case you’re in the SF Bay Area (or want to come out here), come check out the Internet Income Summit (why is everything a summit lately?).  I’m speaking along with one of my main mentors, Gauher Chaudhry.  It’s not a real specific event, more of a “sampler plate” of things in my opinion, but I’m looking forward to getting to meet a number of people in person for the first time, and others once more.

Come check it out if you can, it’s extremely cheap as these things go:

www.tooltrainer.com/summit

If you come, make sure you grab me and say hello… I’m speaking on Saturday as of the last schedule I saw.

And now, back to support tickets!

Jonathan

WOW.

I’m in Austin at Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher’s Traffic and Conversion Summit and my head is set to explode with ideas and things I need to execute immediately (and some things I’m kicking myself for NOT having been executing for months or years…)

I had a weird notion that I needed to be here… wasn’t really sure why, and though I’m on Ryan and Perry’s lists I really haven’t bought anything from them or followed them  closely before.

I sure as heck will be now.

Today was day 1 and I could head home right now and be TOTALLY satisfied at having spent a grand to attend plus travel costs.

AMAZING stuff.  These guys are mind blowing.  Seriously.

Time to digest both today’s content, and a little food as well…

Jonathan

P.S.

I’ve taken a few videos with my Flip cam but can’t keep an internet connection up long enough to post them!  So my “video blogs” will probably get posted long after this text post.  SIGH… technology.