I am sorry its been a few weeks since a viral marketing idea Friday post, but things have been super busy around here as you know! I personally have been on vacation for a couple of weeks, and just hitting the projects hard. I am hoping to be done with all the excitement for a while so I can get back into (every Friday) providing examples, and answering your questions about specific industries and how to go viral. Thanks for being patient! Also a reminder to make sure and send me any of your viral questions, or just comment in the post and I may feature your question!

I have done quite a bit of digging (no pun intended) around on sites like Digg, Yahoo Buzz and Propeller and have found some amazing stories that are related to the credit industry. I got asked the question if a site offering cash back credit cards (for example) would do well on one of these types of platforms. It is important to take a step back and realize the information you have on your site - vs - the information related to your site that could in fact, do well.

If you are trying to take the “specs” of a specific credit card you offer, and make it hit the front page of Digg it will never happen, but if you look at creative ways of finding credit related information you could probably do better. For example, some of the stories that have done well have been related to credit card security or theft. A pretty good credit card related article I read the other day gave the title of “I’ll have a Number One With Extra Cheese and a side order of credit card theft!” This title gives you more reason to click, and gives some good link bait in making you wonder what the article is about.

Some other titles (or ideas I researched out) that could do well for credit card related industries would be “People You Freely Give Your Credit Card Information, But Shouldn’t” or “Ten Ways For Parents To Protect Their Kids Credit” or “101 Ways A College Student Can Build A Healthy Credit Score” or my favorite - “10 Secrets The Credit Card Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know”

The point here is to remember the type information that you provide is the most important ingredient when it comes to social media marketing, and not everything on your site is “viral” or “buzz” worthy. If you take some time to create content that is good (think of the above examples), and that would appeal to the masses, you can’t go wrong!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

I have been working along with my brother Patrick (who is an insane web designer) and a kick butt programmer named Charles Berube for the past seven months on an analytics tool. I am happy to say that it is finally ready for anyone and everyone to test out. We have had it in private beta for about two months and it is stable enough now that we want you to give it a try.

It is called BLVD Status it is a killer tool with a lot of features that no other analytics tool offers, it is also extremely easy to set up and get running. To put it simply it is has the live stats like you are used to with products like Have a Mint, but with conversions and in depth info. There is a dashboard that has live instant stat info somewhat similar to Mint but with a conversion section that shows you the latest conversions. It also has a killer Keyword section showing the latest hits from keywords as well as what search engine and what your rank is for that term both live and on average.

Here is a Screen Shot of the the Top Row of the Dashboard:

Features
RSS Conversions:

You heard me right, we have it set up to track your referrals to subscribing to your RSS feed. Until now you had to set up complex Google outbound click reporting, or set up your own special java script or guess as to whether StumbleUpon, Digg or a blog link brought you the new subscribers.

Digg This Conversions:
If you love social media like I do you have to have live stats as you don’t want to wait til the next day to find out you are on digg with only an hour left of voting time. You want to know the second you are on Digg, so you can send that url around or watch your comments etc.This way you can best welcome and utilize that influx of traffic. But we took it a step further, in the dasboard you can set up Digg This buttons that have our analytics tied to it so you can treat it like a conversion and see which referrals bring you the most Diggs. If you are on Reddit, Stumble, Sphinn and Digg at once which one of the other communities brings you extra votes. If you see that Reddit will bring you more Diggs and help you reach the front page easier you should start tweaking your strategy accordingly. Right now this is only available for Digg but soon it will be most if not all Social Buttons. We have done a lot of studies in this area and will be releasing some sweet data on the BLVD Status blog talking about conversion rates to the Digg This button.

Live Keyword Tracking:

This is a favorite amongst most people that have tested it, there is a dashboard in side BLVD Status dedicated to Keyword referrals. It will show you the most recent referrals, all time referrals, what engine they came from and what your live or current rank is. It also has a filter so you can just view Google Referrals, Google Blogsearch, Live, Yahoo and pretty much all the main engines. It uses Googles API when getting the ranking so for now it will only let you go to number 32. So anything that ranks further back than 32 will show up as >32.

We will be adding a ranking reporting tool that will let you see what your rankings are, how many hits, conversions etc. you got for that term as well.

Traffic Allotments for Beta:
Right now we have now limits as to your levels we want to get as many people using it as possible and not limit your stats. As we grow if our servers start to take a beating at it could effect the reliability of the product we will announce a new traffic level structure.

Feedback:
We want your feedback we want to make this the analytics product that offers all the tricks and trinkets you could ever want. When we look at feedback and decide whether or not to do anything about it we will always lean towards the side of the feature helping someone better understand and ultimately improve their web site.

For now please send any and all feedback to - chris@blvdstatus.com or leave comments at the BLVD Status blog it will be live this week.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!