1. Of late, more and more ventures are getting spin-off from the university system. Which are some of the key universities in the world that have contributed to this new trend? What have been the reasons for their success?
2. ShoeMoney is the fifth highest trafficked Web marketing site according to Adage. The company has grown into a multi-million dollar business ever since it was launched in 2004. It was described by 35,000 daily readers as the Best Affiliate Marketing Blog and featured in Technorati’s top 50 blogs for three years continuously. The company is based in Lincoln, Nebraska, and is not from Silicon Valley or New York.
Jeremy Schoemaker was born on 31 March 1974 and spent his initial childhood in Moline, Illinois. He struggled a lot with poor health, most notably weight-related issues, during his childhood. He was more than 300 pounds at the age of 14 years. His solution to constant teasing and the hostility that comes with this was typical of Schoemaker/ShoeMoney: ‘work that much harder to be that much better than my competitors’. He started as a Web entrepreneur, founder of ShoeMoney Media and co-founder of the AuctionAds service. ShoeMoney’s blog was described as the Best Affiliate Marketing Blog of 2006 by Search Engine Journal. He claimed that his blog was generating $10,000 monthly with the sale of direct ads in 2007. While studying at Western Illinois University, Schoemaker founded his first business, making Macintosh gaming sites, and later created ShoeMoney Media Group (SMG).
His special talents leading to innovations in Internet marketing area led him from a stage of unemployment to earning eight-figure incomes within a period of few years. It is said that Jeremy ‘ShoeMoney’ Schoemaker is one of the most successful Internet marketers of the present era.1
Timeline ShoeMoney
Jeremy Schoemaker started ShoeMoney.com in 2003 and expanded his ring tone community company, called Next Pimp . The site was originally called googleninja.com , on which he shares information on his life, Web marketing and new projects, such as The ShoeMoney System. It has a very distinct design, especially the logo, which is featured on all ShoeMoney products, marketing and T-shirts. The site is 100 per cent free to read. The advertisement feature was added only in 2007 and before that, the revenue model had nothing to do with advertisement. In 2003, the company discovered Google AdSense, resulting in a single check for $130,000, one month earnings from Google AdSense, which is the most linked to pages on his blog. He became ‘famous’ in the Web world after this check showed his Google AdSense earnings. This established him as an authority on affiliate marketing and online subscriptions business models. Some detractors did question these earnings by him and highlighted that it was a manipulated income and not the real one. In 2006, ShoeMoney, with Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd and Dave Taylor, started a conference called the Elite Retreat. This was limited to 30 people and cost $5,000 per person . In five yearly events over four years (20 events), it sold out every event. That’s $100,000 for 20 days’ work . In March 2007, Schoemaker and his business partner David Dellanave launched AuctionAds, an eBay affiliate marketing service that serves eBay auction ads on contextually relevant sites. The service won an eBay Star Developer Award (it was named the ‘eBay Most Innovative Application—Buyer’) at the eBay Developers Conference. In July 2007, performance marketing company MediaWhiz purchased Schoemaker’s majority ownership in AuctionAds [1] . ShoeMoney won the SEOLogs.com -sponsored SEO contest that ran from 1 January 2006 to 1 March 2006 and carried the term ‘redscowl bluesingsky’. He donated the prize money to the number two winner.
The company won a series of awards and within four months, marketing company Media Whiz purchased a majority stake in it. When sold, it had 25,000 active publishers generating over $2,000,000 a month in revenue. That’s $24 million per year. In 2008, it launched ShoeMoney Tools—an advanced suite of PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEO tools. This resulted in having reputed companies such as Intel, Microsoft, MTV and Google becoming its clients. It launched ShoeMoneyx.com in 2008, which was a free 12-week course on Internet marketing. In the subsequent year, it launched The ShoeMoney System, which was a step-by-step guide on making money on the Internet using their site as a platform to run a real Web business. During 2009–10, ShoeMoney.com generated $1 million from multiple income streams.
The ShoeMoney System teaches different ways, means and techniques to make money online. It starts from the very basics of Internet marketing such as applying for and creating an account in various affiliate networks to creating advertising campaigns. It is interesting to note that two new video-training modules are released every three–four days. He responds to questions of trainees via webinar every other week. As a member, each participant to the programme gets $2,000 worth of free coupons to advertise his business. The coupons gradually become active when relevant video modules are released each week.
In the getting started section, there are a bunch of short videos where Jeremy explains fundamental topics and concepts related to Internet marketing. They are like a video glossary of Internet terms. Topics covered include—What Is Video Marketing? What Is the Link between Buying and Selling? What Is Pay per Click? What Is Crowd Sourcing? What Is Link Building? What Are Web site Analytics? What Is Media Buying? What Is Web Hosting? What Is Link Cloaking? What Is a Call to Action? and many more such topics that make participants conversant with the basics of Internet marketing in an interesting manner.
The first couple of weeks’ video trainings are just sailing members through how to apply and create accounts from different Web site services. Some of the accounts and services covered in SMS are creating a Google AdWords account; Google analytics account; Google Web site optimizer account; YouTube account; StumbleUpon account; Sponsored Tweets account and PayPal account.
Each one of these accounts helps in growing and expanding some aspect of online business whether it’s for advertising, sales processing, campaign tracking or outsource management. ShoeMoney System Core Training covered in the first month and half include—Introduction to Affiliate Marketing; ClickBank 101; Create AZN Network Account; Behind the Scenes at Epic Advertising/AZN Network; Completing an Affiliate Offer; Finding Your Audience; Forums; What is Arbitrage? Getting Started with PayPal; Getting Started with eBay; Introduction to Social Media; Getting Started with Facebook; The Art of the Deal and Setting Up the Client.
In summary, if one wants a well-rounded Internet marketing education where one can look over somebody’s shoulder and follow step by step to do things, then the ShoeMoney system is definitely a worthy investment if one’s budget is not too tight. It would shorten the learning curve a lot. The customer support is great and there is a 60-day money-back guarantee. One will reap the full benefits of advertising coupons as long as one takes action after becoming active. The SMS free coupons add a lot of value to the learning and online business and they are not available with other programmes.
Started Got Really ShoeMoney How
In 1987, Schoemaker’s mother bought him an Apple computer. The journey began from there. He started with his first IT job at a local Internet Service Provider in 1995. He made one dollar more than he had made in Sears. The pay was irrelevant. This was a chance to work—every day and all day—with all types of technologies. At the ISP, he was thrown in at the deep end and soon learnt how to use servers, program systems and build Web sites. Then, while returning to college, he started to get calls from companies wanting to advertise on his sites. The penny dropped! He could make money doing what he loved.
Like many successful IT entrepreneurs, Schoemaker knows how things work ‘under the hood’. Instead of getting other people to teach them, they make deep dives into the technology, figure out how it works and then get people to teach them how it works. Essentially, that is it.
It is important to find out the technical reasons for the success of ShoeMoney, which does not click with everybody in the Internet marketing. As such, Google Adwords trick was totally new on multiple fronts such as high-impact articles that generate incredible traffic, backlinks, live long on the Web and drive subscription rates through the roof
Therefore, the secret lies in not writing content that has been discussed 1,000 times elsewhere in one form or the other but create something that really makes the readers go WOW!
This will have a huge impact on the subscription rates and drive repeat traffic to the site, especially if the network is on StumbleUpon or Facebook. Follow Seth Godin’s suggestion: develop content that is remarkable–something that others can remark on.
The dotcom crash in 2002–03 hit his business very hard wiping out most of his savings. At 28, he was 420 lbs, $50k in debt and struggling for direction. Luckily, he met his future wife, who, in his own words, ‘showed me that you can get whatever you want if you are willing to work for it’.
ShoeMoney’s business model was based on Google Adwords and other types of advertising. While these business models can be lucrative in boom times, when the economy takes a hit, advertising budgets get cut almost immediately. Therefore, keeping other streams of revenue becomes a critical factor for success, which The ShoeMoney System wisely followed. ShoeMoney’s philosophy centres on three key areas:
Embrace New Trends and Exploit Opportunities— ShoeMoney’s ‘Coke Theory’ best sums up his approach. He gives this example: ‘SMG entered the ring tone market early, captured traffic and has monetized it. Finding angles and exploiting them for profit is a key aspect of SMG. Maximum and diverse revenue streams are built on fairly narrow marketing concepts that are then diversified.’ With the ‘The Coke Theory’, you take an existing product, give it a new twist and then find ways to leverage its position to generate parallel, non-competitive income streams. It is the same approach Coke uses with Diet Coke, Cherry Coke and Coke Zero—at the end of the day, it is just Coke. The beauty lies in positioning the product to create insatiable demand for its new features—this is what matters.
Focus on Core Strengths— ShoeMoney’s focus is on product development, marketing and site design in that order. Unlike others who have invested in expensive site designs (and re-designs) first, he ‘ built his sites on those natural marketing principles while running the backend. Web design was a secondary skill, so he focused on the marketing of the sites, which then built revenue’. Once these were running successfully, he invested in a professional-looking Web design. Since then, he has launched other sites, all of which ‘expand their income potential by building a network of sites centred on a central theme’.
Small Changes Create Big Revenue— ShoeMoney loves to experiment and this comes through in many articles. The purpose here is to look for ways to fine-tune small areas that, when optimized, generate higher returns. ‘Once the traffic is there, small changes in design and structure can make big changes in revenue. Ad placement, recurring subscriptions and affiliate marketing can add value to a site without disrupting the base of revenue.’ What he is doing here is classic process improvement. He (and his team) looks at areas of the site, makes adjustments, performs split tests and then compares the results. Most of us do not reach our goals as we do not do the comparisons, testing and analysis. So, for example, while your AdSense campaigns may be ‘successful’, the hard data are not there to refine the campaigns. If you are interested in this type of in-depth analysis, get his free newsletter. And, if that impresses you (and it will!), try out The ShoeMoney System.
Schoemaker talks about his business failures to enable people to see his progression over the years . He has been passionately pursuing his journey and is determined to stay in the business for the long haul. This gives a distinct confidence to the customers, in particular, and stakeholders, in general. This provides a comfort level to customers to continue with him. There are a number of other Web marketing sites such as the About Us page, which, as such, is not about anyone, just generic marketing guff.
As customers, most of us will empathize with a personality like Nebraska—overweight, with health issues and some other disadvantages. This is but natural from a psychological perspective. The majority of us would make a buying choice, given similar quality, with someone having come through a difficult path in his journey towards entrepreneurship, which may be because of personal disability, poor family background and one who has come up against all odds on their own strengths.
From a marketing perspective, ShoeMoney.com is an interesting mix. Scanning through the comments on his blog/forum, his followers are made up of newbies (asking, ‘how do I type questions?’) and experienced Web marketers looking for very detailed tactics, hacks and marketing strategies. While he caters to both, the long-term fans are the hard-core marketers and developers whom he offers the most value. These offer detailed information on Pay Per Click (PPC), Click Through Rates (CTR), advertising strategies and Split Testing.
If you have seen the T-shirt, you will recognize the brand. ShoeMoney has invested in developing a strong brand, great logo with nice clean artwork and some very sharp packaging. Look at the polished quality you see in his videos here and compare it with most other blog sites that come to mind. Do not be fooled by the ‘ Home Grown in Lincoln, NE ’ folksy feel. ShoeMoney and his team work hard to make this look easy.
New Product Launches— Brian Clark (CopyBlogger) released the very successful Thesis Theme last year. Part of the success was due to the select band of A List Blogger recommending this very slick WordPress Theme and pushing it in their marketing campaigns. Chris Brogan has had it on his home page since it started. Others have drip-fed the recommendations to readers since launch.
For ShoeMoney, linking up with fellow Web marketers in his space, for example, John Chow, may be on the cards. Both of these are high-trafficked sites with similar audience profiles and demographics. John Chow’s revenue streams are mostly based on advertising (which he is very successful at) so there may be tools that complement his books—I do not see why he will not publish a book as he has the traffic and following. Most of his peers, such as Chris Brogan, Brian Solis and Darren Rowse, have done so with great success. I would assume this is in the pipeline.
However, one reason why he may not do this (for now) is that it could cannibalize his ShoeMoney site and distract prospect customers from signing up.
ShoeMoney System 2.0 is a training programme that assists in each and every step when it comes to affiliate marketing, Pay Per Click (or PPC) campaigns, Web site creation and other Internet marketing strategies.
It is important in any business such as ShoeMoney to focus on product development as a core theme to business strategy. Remember that developing a set of tools insulates you from the everchanging fortunes (and budgets) that undermine advertising-based models. It is important from a long-term success perspective to build a brand by investing a particular percentage of revenue that works both online and offline. The T-shirts are a good example to be learnt from ShoeMoney that can cross the divide between off and online. ShoeMoney has developed a cult following of sorts; their site is slightly counter-culture, geeky (see their Theme Song competition) and not trying to please the mainstream while engaging personally with existing and prospective customers. The rewards would be obvious. It is important to make a distinction between a business and a blog –ShoeMoney runs a Web business; it is not a blog. This is a real business, with real employees, offices and a defined business strategy. The blog is the axis around which the business is built–but it is important to see the difference between the two.2,3
1. Why did he build these products?
2. What pricing strategy has he adopted?
3. What was the key strategy used for product development by ShoeMoney?
4. What are the key lessons from the case of ShoeMoney for a start-up venture in Web marketing? 5. Who helped him get to this place?