Blake’s back. siteMighty coming out of beta.

Whoa. Chris reminded me this morning of how long it’s been since I last posted to the Voodoo blog. It’s been an incredibly busy time for us here at siteMighty, but now, Blake’s back and ready to blog, blog, blog.

From now on, I want to primarily post about siteMighty happenings, specifically regarding marketing/growing siteMighty. We officially launched in March 2007, and as of 7/17 we have over 1700 users. Not bad, but we can do better.

We have an amazing team of interns that are bringing a lot of new energy and fresh ideas to siteMighty. They’ve helped us get siteMighty to a point where we can emerge from our beta phase, and move into hard-core marketing. Coming out of beta means we’re:

  • Polishing all the content on siteMighty
  • Releasing a comprehensive FAQs and Knowledge Base
  • Offering a training guide for help with marketing a siteMighty site
  • Integrating tutorial videos through the siteMighty account interface
  • Adding 24/7/365 Live Support

More about our amazing Summer Rockstars:

  1. Claire (The Artist): Claire’s bringing her talents in graphic design and experience in viral marketing to siteMighty. She is currently working on a viral marketing project involving videos where we will engage our users by connecting them to the siteMighty culture and team. We’re going for a YouTube hit with this one, but our primary goal is to connect with our users and get them excited about not only using siteMighty, but about being a part of our family.
  2. Will (The Godfather): I’m calling Will the Godfather because he has tons of experience on the software development side of things. He’s working with us to learn more about how to launch a start-up and how to market a new product. He’s an MBA Fellow at Tulane. Moving forward, Will will take an active role in developing search marketing strategies as well as our blog outreach campaign for siteMighty.
  3. Tannia (The Story Teller): Tannia has a very curious mind, and is always interested in how things work. She’s also great at putting things into plain English which is really great since we talk in “geek speak” a lot of the times here. Tannia is currently working on a series of press releases with Jeff as part of an awareness campaign for siteMighty.
  4. Jeff (The Great Communicator): Jeff is just wrapping-up his Master’s coursework at SLU, but he’s already added a great deal to siteMighty. He was the lead on an award entry project where siteMighty was ultimately named New Orleans’ CityBusiness Innovator of the Year 2007. This is a big deal for siteMighty. Jeff is going to be working with Tannia on the awareness campaign for siteMighty.

These are all the lead projects that they’re working on, but in addition to these, we’re also starting our blog outreach campaign. Blog outreach takes lots of finessing and time. We’ve not found much success in the past “cold calling” a blogger and asking them to write about us. In those cases, we got dismissed as just another sales pitch.

We’ve developed a more sophisticated approach:

  1. Identify Blogs: Use Technorati (or another blog search engine) to define a vertical, or a subject that a group of bloggers consistently write about.
  2. Comment and Trackback: This step involves adding value (in the form of content) to the blogs in your vertical. Don’t pitch at this stage, just ease into the conversation/community. Comment on their blogs, and link (trackback) from a related post on your blog to their blog.
  3. Request a mention: I’m not calling this a pitch, because if you do #2 well, you won’t have to ask for a mention.

Meet iCommissions (siteMighty’s first partner)

Scot & NatalieFor those of you who don’t know, our offices are located in New Orleans. Far from the fervor of Silicon Valley or the pace of NYC, being a technology/Internet company in the deep south has it’s own set of challenges and rewards. One of the perks is getting the chance to work with people like the team at iCommissions.com.

We’ve been active in the affiliate marketing space for years, and have worked with iCommissions for a while now. When we made up our minds to start building siteMighty, we introduced the idea to iCommissions and without pause they committed to step up and help us any way they could.

Inviting their users to try and test siteMighty has proved to be invaluable as we learned (and continue to learn) a great deal about siteMighty from the user’s perspective. They told us what was working and what wasn’t which is exactly what we needed – honest, genuine feedback. Many of the features you see on siteMighty today have been tweaked, polished or suggested by an iCommission’s user.

iCommissions is located in Mandeville which is on the Northshore just across Lake Pontchartrain from us. We try to get up there as often as we can to talk about siteMighty, have lunch and drink in the crisp, lake front breeze.

We thought we’d post some pics from our last visit so you can get to know our good friends at iCommissions.com.

(Pictured: Natalie Yarbrough and Scot Rumsey of iCommissions.com)

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