I started driving from Philly to Los Angeles on Tuesday. It has been SO awesome!

I’m in St Louis now, and have stopped in Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

The drive has been going really well! My friend Dan Kelly gave me 7.5 gigs worth of products and audiobooks to listen to (over 100 hours worth of content), so I haven’t been bored at all. I ADORE HIM!

Actually… one of the things that he gave me was this awesome free teleconference
call between Rich Schefren, Stephen Pierce, and Alex Mandossian. It was unbelievable! You should have seen me… I was driving, with one leg curled under me, with a notebook on my lap, and taking notes as I was driving. I know it’s not the safest thing ever, but how could anyone listen to that call and not take notes!?!?

In other news, I have a newfound love with Wal-Mart. There’s about a trillion 24 hour supercenters within every square foot around here… it’s awesome for the weird hours I’ve been keeping!

For example.. the first night, I slept in my car at a park. I was ready to start driving again at 4:30 am, but had to go to the bathroom… so I was able to just drive to a Wal-Mart!!

(There aren’t any 24 hour supercenters in Philadelphia, so excuse me if I sound ridiculously ignorant.. hahaha)

SPEAKING OF IGNORANT!! I saw the coolest thing!!! My cigarette lighter blew up yesterday, so I had no cell phone charger. I pulled over somewhere in Illinois to ask them to charge my phone via electricity for a little bit… and in this big travel stop, there was a shoe-shining station!!

True story!

Someone actually had to climb up on a perch.. and there actually was someone sitting in one of the chairs… and another girl was shining his shoes!

I wanted to take a picture, but since they were charging my cell phone for me, I figured that I shouldn’t be rude.

Since my cell phone lighter died and I had no electricity for my laptop to charge or my camera, I decided to get a motel for the night.

Although the hotel is insanely vile, I’m still in love with it. I walked in and wanted to kiss the (dirty) walls. I’ve never appreciated a bed more in my life!!!

Hahaha… about the hotel: I’m really not complaining, I swear. It’s a huge upgrade next to sleeping at a park. But check out the shower!

It was AMAZING to have a bed, regardless, though

In other news… a few people have recently approached me to do some copywriting for them!!! SOOOO EXCITING$#@#!!@

And last but not least - my friend Brian and I launched a Warrior Special Offer that we’re going to convert into a regular membership site. It has been doing PHENOMENALLY so far!! You can check out the thread here. We have over 50 members already!

Okay.. I have to go see if I can get that cigarette lighter fixed… and maybe tour the Budweiser brewery around here. Budweiser originated in St Louis, so there are 5 million Budweiser signs all over the place! I’m not really a beer drinker, but it should be interesting anyway!

I’ll update as soon as possible as I make my next stop - I think I’m going to stop in Tulsa, next!

I always wanted to be on Frank Kern’s mailing list, but by the time I figured out how to get on it, he had shut it down to any newcomers.

Fortunately, I met an awesome guy at JV Alert who *is* on Franks list, and he forwards me all of the emails now.

Anyway… Frank sent out an awesome video the other day about how he’s been testing a product, and how it’s increased his conversions through the roof. I think he made something like $19,000 extra in just a few weeks because of this product.

I was fortunate enough to get in and beta test this product. The owners are awesome and have been giving me tips to maximize conversions. I’m really, really excited about it.

Go here to see what it’s all about.

I don’t want to explain too much, because you won’t appreciate it until you see it for yourself (you’ll know what I mean when you go!)

Because of Top Secret Riches, I’m subscribed to some alert feeds that constantly tell me about the latest free tools.

Anyway, the newest one that I found is called FoldSpy. This tool will show you what your website looks like, above the fold, in tons of different operating systems, browsers, user preferences, and resolution sizes.

I can see getting a LOT of use out of this one!

I had no idea!

I went to go add a forum to one of my websites today, and the list on Fantastico looked longer than it did the last time I was there.

I decided to try out the “Help Center Live” application, and found out that I could easily add a help desk to my site (where people can submit tickets) as well as get one of those cool “Live Help” buttons! It’s all free, too, as part of my hosting package.

This is exciting!

There’s a self improvement giveaway that Gina Gaudio Graves and Henry Gold are cohosting.

To sign up for it, go to 117 Self Improvement Gifts. All products have to be uploaded by the 20th.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I look at those mindmap/heat map things, I get blown away by how interesting they are.

Anyway, I found a site where you can record and watch your visitors in action! You watch every mouse movement, keystroke, and action. You can even watch them fill out forms!

It’s called Robot Replay, and you can find it right here.

BTW, if you want access to more awesome tools, go to TopSecretRiches.com - I’m the queen of finding free alternatives!

I know a few people that pay money for the “Ask Database” service by Alex Mandossian.

I’ve found free alternatives for two of the features:

1. The “Ask A Question” form (this is great to help bulk up sites and give a “more content” feel, as well as to get valuable customer input.

2. The obnoxious text popup when someone tries to leave.  I haven’t used this yet, but I figured I’d throw it out there.

For the “Ask A Question” form, you can get a free script right here. As I said, this is great to bulk up the content section of a website. I use both “Ask A Question” and “Submit A Topic” on one of my websites. It’s essentially the same thing, but it really bulks my site up well.

For the obnoxious text popup, use this code (I found it on The Warrior Forum from member “dabuzz”:

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>

var exit=true;
function unLoad()
{
if (exit && document.all) {
	var popPage;
	var popHeight=550;
	var popWidth=520;
	popPage = “http://www.yoursite.com/popup-page.htm“;
	showModalDialog(popPage,window,’status:no; help:no;
dialogHeight:’+popHeight+”px; dialogWidth:”+popWidth+”px;”); }
}
window.onunload=unLoad;
</script>

Add it RIGHT after the “<body>” tag, and don’t forget to upload your pop-up page..
and replace: “http://www.yoursite.com/why.htm” in the above code with your URL.

So I said I’d get back with my reviews…

Because of Ryan Deiss’s endorsement (and the fact that Dan Raine uses it for Immediate Edge), I decided to try aMember again. I had tried it a while ago and found it kind of confusing. It’s either become much easier, or I’ve become much more adept - either way, I definitely like it more than the other two.

(And they’ll install it for you if you don’t find it easy, anyway).

As you can see from my CMS Infusion review, I really wasn’t 100% thrilled with it anyway… and I mentioned that if someone could make a CMS Infusion + XSite Pro product together, I’d be all over it.

One thing that I’ve learned is that there’s always an “Option C”… and my “Option C” was using XSitePro + aMember.

This works out great because XSitePro is incredibly robust (maybe not as robust as Joomla as far as all the extensions, but you can easily add scripts to XSP…) and the learning curve is pretty much nonexistent. It’s the most user friendly piece of software EVER.

aMember integrates wonderfully with it, and like I said, they’ll install it wherever you need it, anyway.

I’ll write more on this later… running out to brunch with a few friends, haven’t seen them in weeks!

CMS Infusion was recently recommended to me by someone that I really trust.

I’m in the process of launching a membership site and CMSI seemed like it’d really make things go a lot quicker.

I still can’t decide how I feel about it.

I feel like Joomla is a lot more robust (and free!), but CMSI is a lot quicker and maybe slightly more user-friendly.

Although I wouldn’t call it “difficult”, I still wouldn’t say that CMSI is as easy as everyone makes it out to be. There are parts that can get kind of confusing. Even in the tutorial videos, the narrator got confused a few times. With that said, it’s probably still easier than Joomla. Joomla has been around for a while though, so there is a lot of support on the forums. When I submitted support tickets for CMSI, there was anywhere between a 6-24 hour lag… and then sometimes the responses weren’t sufficient, so I’d have to go through the process again.

Also, CMSI doesn’t have options for forums or blogs yet. I guess I could just make a forum, create a link within the CMSI navigation panel and redirect to the forum… but it would be nice to integrate everything.

That being said, from my research, it seems like CMSI is still the quickest and easiest membership tool out there. I think I’m going to keep using it…

Since there really aren’t very many tutorial videos within CMSI, I’ll make my own videos and upload them to this blog as I learn about new features.

What would REALLY be awesome is if someone made some kind of product that integrated CMS Infusion for the membership side and XSitePro for the design side.

(If you don’t have XSitePro, by the way, it’s the most incredible piece of web design software EVER. It’s very user friendly yet incredibly robust. I absolutely adore it and pray that Version 2 comes with membership functions. Also - if you purchase it anytime from now until when Version 2 comes out, you’ll automatically get a free upgrade.).

If anyone uses any membership scripts that you really like, I’d love to hear about them. I’ve experimented with CMSI, Joomla, and aMember and have talked to people who have used Drupal and JV Manager. It seems like CMSI is the best option out there right now, which is kind of sad.

One really cool person that I met at JV Alert was Simon Leung.

Simon was actually an ex-Google employee. Not only was he one of a few people on an “AdWords Optimization Team” with Google, but he was actually one of the senior employees there, and wrote almost all of the AdWords training himself!

Needless to say, he knows a lot about AdWords and the secrets to avoiding “Google Slaps”.

Some of the things that I’ve learned from him have blown my mind!

I never knew that:

* Google prefers short-copy to long-copy? That’s right… they’ll penalize a site with long copy much faster than one with short… just because they associate “long copy” with “scam”.

* Any image… even a stock photo… will make you look 10x more credible to the AdWords ad reviewers?

* An outbound link to Google.com from your squeeze page could increase your AdWords quality score?

* 2-5 outbound links on your squeeze page is the “magic number” of links to have on your squeeze page

* Your quality score suffers if you have ads of any kind of on your website… EVEN AdSense ads!

This is just some of the information that Simon teaches in AdWords List Building.

Another fabulous thing to note about this course is that Simon could easily charge $2000+ for it. He does AdWords consulting with businesses, and charges $1000 for just an hour of his expertise! However, this information-flooded report is only $97. I highly recommend it.

Here’s the URL again:

AdWords List Building