About three weeks ago, I learned about a way to increase sales through a website by 13% with relatively no effort.  Now, obviously, when I heard that I was like, “Gimme a break!”  I work my ass off to write good sales copy and you can throw a button on the page and increase sales?!

So now, three weeks later, I though I’d let you in on the secret too (plus give you a link to the freeware I’m using!)

The secret is live help or online customer service.  You’ve probably seen it if you go to VerizonWireless.com to pay your cell phone bill or some of the upper end sales pages online.

By simply putting the “Live Support” button on one of my niche websites, conversions went up a staggering 24%.

Now, just so we’re all on the same page, there have been a few people that clicked it.  6 to be exact.  4 of those have been, “Oh!  There is someone on the other end of this chat window” type conversations.  But for an increase of 24% overall, I’ll take it!

Here’s the link to the live help software I’m using…  There are open source, server side apps out there like HelpCenterLive, but I find this app to be pretty solid.

LiveZilla – Freeware Live Help

If you know of any other server side live help applications out there, let me know!  All the ones I tried seemed ugly and outdated, but who knows.  Maybe I’m missing the good ones…

There’s no limit to free media players for handheld devices.  My Nokia Internet Tablet has a player that I can stream media from network locations (aka Gandolf, my media server).

You can even do it with a Windows Media Extender like the XBox 360 or the Popcorn Hour (also highly recommended).

But what about your desktop?  Well, if you want to kill productivity, install a media player that lets you stream movies!!

Yesterday, I found a player that I particularly enjoy, Moovida.  It’s compatible with all the major operating systems and is truly a beautiful application.

Moovida is much more than a simple media player… it is a cutting edge media center bringing the best of the internet to your TV screen. Automatically creating your own digital library you can browse from your sofa with a remote control. The elegant and easy to use interface automatically displays artwork and fan art throughtout and gives you access to movie synopsis and artist info.

Granted, it’s got some bugs but that’s cool.  It’s a great app anyway!

Check out Moovida, the free media player

I can’t remember if I ever shared this with you, but it’s an awesome tutorial on how to build a server rack for your house or your office, without having to pay thousands of dollars!

Admittedly, it isn’t the prettiest thing I’ve ever put together, but it works and exemplifies the geek in me :0)

For about $150 and 3 hours of work, it’s entirely possible to put together a stand-alone unit to house all of your computers/servers.  I, for instance, have my email server, web server, media server and file server in this bad boy.  There’s also a rackmount network hub, modem and monitor hanging off the side so I can monitor vitals…

Anyway, here’s a link to the original how-to article:

Deadly Computer Blog » DIY ~20U server rack.

If you’ve ever thought about operating your own microblogging service, I’ve got an app for you.  Obviously, dethroning Twitter isn’t really a possbility, but you might do one for your office or your family!

I found this cool open source server script for you to play with.  It’s called Laconica, pronounced “luh-KAWN-ih-kuh,” and is a Free and Open Source microblogging platform. It helps people in a community, company or group to exchange short 140 character messages over the Web.

Users can choose which people to “follow” and receive only their friends’ or colleagues’ status messages. It provides a similar service to sites like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk.

Want to try Laconica without installing anything? Hop on over to identi.ca, the largest microblogging service based on Laconica.

via Laconica.

I’m cleaning out my Firefox bookmarks (all 2300 of them) and dumping them into Evernote.  It’s proving to be more of a pain than I thought it would, but Evernote gives me persistent search and a way to attach files!

Here’s an interesting WordPress hack that I thought you guys would be into…

WP-CRM is a WordPress system for creating a basic Contact Manager / CRM. The system requires a combination of plugins and a theme. It was inspired by the great work David Yeiser did with WP-Contact Manager, and by 37signals Highrise.

Features:

• Add contacts from the front end of WordPress – no need to go to the admin screen.
• Associate an image with each contact.
• Assign each contact to a company… or don’t.
• Create a note history for each contact.
• Clickable email and website links.
• Google map contacts address.
• Dial a phone number works on cell phones with internet browsers.
• Fully hcard / vcard compatible.

Check it out at WP-CRM: a basic CRM built with WordPress | SlipFire.

Check out TubeMogul and to get access to Jimmy and Travis’ online video creation video (I know.. that was weird to type..) just click here: Social Media Soap Opera

For a long time, I’ve believed that the future of operating systems lies in a browser – hence Web Browser OS.

If you think about it, the only thing you SHOULD need to get up and running is a basic OS that runs your computer and opens up a web browser (which Linux does nicely).

WindowsForAll does exactly that.  It allows you to use the Silverlight technology and open up a full, Windows operating system in your web browser.

This os browser operating system deploys quickly and you can run all the native components on it.  The downside is you can’t store data and files on the instance because it technically ‘lives in the cloud.’

As clustering technology and server disk drives increase in size though, we’ll be able to enjoy the full potential of browser based operating systems!

I am ecstatic about this…  Smashing Apps just had a writeup about this new piece of software that turns your Photoshop templates into WordPress themes quickly and easily.  And free!

That software is Divine.

How it works is you:

• Download and install divine
• Open Photoshop and launch Divine
• Assign all the WordPress elements like post title, post date, etc
• Specify your FTP parameters and upload your new theme to the web!

Truly, this is going to put a whole new spin on WordPress theme design – and it’ll probably put quite a few blog design companies out of business – which is unfortunate.  Looking forward to what happens with this app though!

Pay per click is one of those crazy advertising models that can either be a godsend or the bane of your existence.

About two months ago, I found this software that I was itching to use called Prosper202.  And since I’ve been doing a lot with information products and driving traffic, this PPC management app looked pretty cool.

Here’s some of the features:

• Increase your profits with real-time PPC analytics. Our unbeatable analytics give you real-time performance updates-so you have a clear picture on how well your campaigns are performing.
• PPC success is in the details. In order to succeed in PPC marketing you need the ability to track
  everything. Tracking202 gives you unprecedented details for every click-letting you weed out poor performing campaigns, keywords, and ads.
• Features you won’t find anywhere else Tracking202 is truly a revolutionary tracking system. Get real-time data, RSS feeds, keyword tracking, cloaking, spy view, text ad tracking, referrer tracking and much more-all in one place!

It’s very cool stuff.  If you try it out, let me know how you like it!

**If you’re looking for affiliate management software – check out Infusionsoft. I used them for all our in house affiliate programs and absolutely love them… Click here for a free demo**

I love open source software.  Truly I do.

About a month ago, in the quest of looking for good affiliate software to run campaigns for some of my sites from, I found an interesting little app called Affiliates For All.

Here’s a bit of a sneak peak:

If you are running an e-commerce site, you almost certainly have affiliates and need affiliate management software. Affiliates for All is the new affiliate management system that everyone is talking about.

It’ll do everything you expect from affiliate management software:

• Fixed commission rates or percentages
• affiliate cookie lifetime
• lifetime commission to the affiliate or just the first order
• emails to affiliates
• reporting

I like it a lot.  I have been using it and testing it for a little while now and it seems to hold up pretty well, even under some pretty serious affiliate linking stress.  Definitely, check it out here: Affiliates for All

Well we’re on this conversation, what do you use for affiliate tracking?  Clickbank? Or another paid affiliate manager package?

[img caption: I'm well aware that this picture has nothing to do with the post - but I liked it...]