Brad Fallon of StomperNet fame has been working on a new project that bills itself as “The Marketplace for Ideas” called Free IQ. It’s like YouTube for the business community - but isn’t limited to video. It’s for all sorts of media including ebooks, audio and video.

Still in beta, Free IQ lets you search all sorts of media for cool freebies. Anyone can join - here’s my FreeIQ Author Page where I’m able to write a brief bio about myself, link to my Aweber mailing list, and upload content. At the moment, I’ve uploaded 2 podcasts. (Read the article)

Social Media

I attended the Atlanta StomperNet Live conference over the weekend, so I thought I’d write up some articles about what I considered the best content at the event.

What is StomperNet?
If you’re not familiar with StomperNet, it is a membership-based, distance learning portal started by Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins in Oct 2006. Members pay a monthly fee of about $800/month to access the content, forums, and live events. The benefits are that you interact with a number of other likeminded professionals who are trying to improve their website conversions and sales.

Members have access to all sorts of great videos by well respected internet marketing mavens. For instance, Dan Thies and Leslie Rohde teach about search engine optimization. Sherman Hu and Dave Taylor teach about blogging. Jerry West teaches about affiliate marketing, and so on. Most of these videos teach you step by step how to get started marketing your website with each of these different tactics. (Read the article)

Conferences

If you’ve heard of Stompernet or Butterfly Marketing or Rich Schefren’s coaching program, chances are that you’ve seen some of the effects of Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. Jeff has taken processes that big companies use to launch new products and translated that into a process that anyone on the internet can use to launch their own product - like an ebook, home study course, software package or coaching program. (Read the article)

Conferences, Web Analytics

Michael Stebbins is the VP of Marketing for the analytics firm, ClickTracks, which offers all sorts of hosted analytics solutions for businesses. If you’re new to analytics, I highly recommend you start with Google Analytics, as it’s free and easy to install, but for those looking for a more robust solution, ClickTracks is impressive.

Michael provided an extremely valuable template for asking the right questions and measuring results with analytics software. (Read the article)

Conferences, Optimization, Pay Per Click, Web Analytics

I admit that I’m not much of an affiliate marketer. My main source of affiliate revenue comes from Amazon.com’s affiliate program, and that’s less than $100/month - not very exciting. So I was curious to hear Jerry West’s presentation on affiliate marketing.

Jerry’s talk was more about how to protect your business than the nitty gritty of affiliate marketing, so I thought I’d share some of the points he made that are valuable to any business. (Read the article)

Conferences

Andy Edmonds is StomperNet’s usability expert, which means he’s concerned with the ease that visitors can accomplish specific tasks on a webpage - like navigating your site, joining a mailing list or buying a product through a shopping cart. In his talk, he discussed several elements that he’s found to matter when it comes to converting web visitors into buyers. Here were my takeaways. (Read the article)

Conferences

David Bullock is an incredible, confident speaker who never broke a sweat when his Powerpoint stopped working (several times!) throughout his talk. With a background as a process engineer at Dupont, it’s not surprising that David stressed the importance of setting up and following processes in your business, and on the importance of knowing where you are using that as a baseline for improving your business.

I know from my 12 years experience designing and developing websites and online marketing campaigns for clients that most small business owners are clueless about how to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. They tend to try something and if it doesn’t work, move on to something else. They don’t spend time testing different ads to figure out what works best and what doesn’t. (Read the article)

Conferences, Pay Per Click