Utah blogs are buzzing about the chance we have to get the legendary Seth Godin to visit Utah as part of his new book tour. We just need 500 people to each pay $50 (and get 5 copies of his new book) so that he will stop here on his tour.

I took a trip to NYC two years ago to hear Seth speak, so I paid a lot more than $50. He was the keynote speaker at an advertising conference, and he slammed traditional advertising and explained in a powerful way how the internet changes everything. To hear him speak in Utah would be incredible.

Chris Loch of whatisyoursecret.com spoke at the Provo Labs Academy recently.

Chris's main point is that a very important part of internet marketing is capturing email addresses from customers so that you can follow up with them with useful information and offers. He kept saying, "the fortune is in the followup."

If you run an internet business with the potential for rapid growth, and you use a merchant account for processing credit card transactions, please check your merchant account monthly limit before you encounter the problem that we experienced over the weekend.

Wikipedia has a decent article on Merchant Accounts, but until I edited it today it said nothing about monthly transaction limits.

I switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail a long time ago, but I still get dozens of emails a day sent to my old Yahoo email address. I forward them to Gmail, but I'd like to make sure my 2,600 contacts in my Yahoo Address Book and many thousands of other people who have emailed me in the past know my new email address.

I've been using web analytics from Omniture this morning (Provo Labs uses it in our more mature portfolio companies) to discover some really interesting (and disturbing) customer usage patterns.

I continually get questions from students and startups such as: Which
email solution provider should I use? What is the best affiliate
program to launch? What about payment processing? What is the best
low-cost or free web analytics software?

These are tough questions for anyone to answer because most of us, even
internet veterans, have tried only a handful of solutions in each
category (email, affiliate, analytics, payment processing, etc.) and
often have deep experience with only one.

And today there are literally hundreds of available solutions, from