Shoemoney – Skills To Pay The Bills By Jeremy Schoemaker

I always have a good laugh at the “whitehat” SEO’s making headlines on Sphinn about best practices in Google to do X. Most are Matt Cutts kiss asses that have never built a successful website let alone business. They talk about patents and theories but very few have any real world experience.

Here is a real life example of how stuff really works in Google and you wont read about it from any “SEO” expert.

Many years ago John Chow started getting steam as a blogger and told Google to goto hell. John sold paid links, paid reviews, and did massive amounts of reciprocal link exchanges to gain tons of backlinks. All of which fall under the penalty of death under Magistrate Matt Cutts.

John was given the death penalty and completely removed from the Google Index. Many people wrote about this and how Google was owning John and he was done for.

See Jim Kukrals writeup about how John Chow’s free fall begins

Or Neil Patel – John Chow vs. Google – Guess Who’s Winning

Some places like this blogstorm blog even tried to gain trust with users placing Adwords Ads like this:

Mean while I was making videos about how not to make Google Look stupid (which was mocked at the time but has recently been cited as a great resource on how Google works). In the video I talked about how its not really about what you do but rather if it makes Google look stupid or not in regards to them taking action against you.

If you appear to be able to control the rankings in Google through whatever method and can rank any site then Google has lost its luster and that would be the start of the end for them.

So when public pressure mounts, Google takes action…. stay off their radar and your fine (in most cases).

But when John Chow got nuked a strange phenomenon happened. His popularity and brand grew. Now it was the success story of how you really don’t really need Google to succeed on the internet. RU-ROH!!! Can you imagine if people started adapting this model =P

Now Google was in a dilemma. Search traffic for john chow was growing but nobody could find him on Google. What people were finding was infringing sites like johncow or notjohnchow who were only getting traffic because they were ranking for John’s name.

This obviously made Google Search look very incompetent. While there was a significant amount of search volume for John Chow it wasn’t anything like when BMW or other big brands were de-listed from the Google Search engine when Google actively sought them out to help them get back in. Searching Google for BMW and not finding BMW is not a user experience Google wanted. Google worked hard with BMW to get them compliant and back in the search index.

Wordpress.org creators also experienced a similar thing when they embedded links to their websites in everyone’s blogs by default. After much scrutiny Google delisted them and dropped page rank for these developers websites. To which they stopped doing that and then all of their page rank and rankings came back. This is a huge example of how the ends justify the means.

But lets get back to Mr. Chow-

Always being creative and realizing that Google penalizes the domain, but not the link, John registered Johnchow.ca and redirected GoogleBot to that domain. Within days Johnchow.ca started ranking for all the phrases that johnchow.com used to. But as we talked about before…. when people publicly point out that you can beat Google they don’t like it and within a couple days Johnchow.ca was penalized as bad as JohnChow.com.

Today I noticed that Johnchow.com is not only back in the Google Search index:

Also seems to be ranking very well for his old reciprocal link exchanges where people linked to him with the target anchor text of make money online :

I talked with John today and asked him what happened and how he got back into Google. He said he worked with Matt Cutts, was told he had to be in full compliance with the webmaster guidelines and then submitted the site back to him and it was all fixed in a couple of days.

Now not many people are going to write about this and how its a great success story (especially in the SEO world).

I want to be clear on the lesson learned though. Its not about being a black hat and going against Google but building a good brand with a great site should be your number 1 priority. If that means you part ways with Google a long the way then so be it. If your site is good then it will continue to grow.

Besides its always easier to beg for forgiveness then ask for permission Just ask Mr Chow!

This is a guest post made by Jonathan Volk. Jonathan is a 20-something affiliate marketer that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars each month online. Feel free to check out his blog at www.jonathanvolk.com.

Time and time again I am asked by newbies and struggling affiliates this question: “Is the only thing worth promoting a rebill (also known as a free trial) offer?”

Rebill / free trial offers are offers that generally convert well and pay a very high amount (Upwards of $40 per free trial signup). This happens because they offer a free trial to the user (usually plus shipping costs) and then after 14 days the user is automatically enrolled into a subscription (monthly) program.

A couple examples are Work from home offers, Diet (Acai, Colon, etc) offers, Skin care offers, and just about anything that can be used up or sold as a membership.

These offers have been around for a while but recently have been picking up a huge amount of steam and attention; they have picked up so much steam, most people don’t recognize affiliate marketing without rebill offers now-a-days.

First, let me debunk this myth. You don’t need to promote a rebill offer to make good money. In fact, right now I’m not actively promoting ANY rebill offer and will have hit close to $200,000 in commissions just for HALF of the month of July, 2009 (Estimated 400k in commissions for July).

Next, are rebill offers ok to promote? A lot of people seem to think that there is some sort of ethical issue with promoting a rebill offer.

I’m doing a poll on twitter (”POLL: Are Rebill / Free Trial offers ethical? http://bit.ly/MBMwd – PLEASE RT with @JonathanVolk in it.”) to see what everyone thinks about them.

Personally, I have no issues with the idea of rebills. Free trial offers have been around for years and I think when done ethically, it can be a great way to promote offers.

Recently, there have been a bunch of offers that have come out that have grown too quick for their own good and thus have caused issues. Issues like not being able to cancel because the lines are always busy, etc. When these issues arise, the government starts to step in and it gives the entire idea of a rebill offer a black eye.

That being said, I have no issue with the free trial / rebill model as long as the company is ethical, allow for cancellation, etc. Ultimately, the choice is your own – whether you will or won’t promote the offers. (Take a minute to vote now! – http://bit.ly/MBMwd)

Lastly, How does Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, And other big advertising agencies feel about rebill offers?

Google

First, check out my most recent guest post on Zac Johnson’s blog entitled, “Help, My Adwords Account was Banned!” Google adwords recently had big ban on people promoting rebill offers. It was not as much the rebill model as it was the way that the rebill offers were being promoted, thankfully.

You actually can promote the rebill offers on Google but you have to be compliant with the way Google will allow you to promote them. This means, no bridge pages, no fake blogs, etc.

Yahoo

At the moment, Yahoo does not seem to mind the rebill offers as much as google. You still see them a lot more than you do in Google and they certainly won’t ban your account. At worst, Yahoo will simply delete the campaign from your account and send you a fairly mean letter asking you to not upload it again or face a ban. (Shouldn’t Google act in this way too? haha)

Others…

Most other ad networks have not seemed to mind with the exception of Microsoft Adcenter. Adcenter has also been known to ban accounts for promoting rebill offers in non-complaint ways but will allow you to promote them when they are complaint with their set of requirements.

Other Offers You Can Make Money With

So, if you don’t want to promote rebill / free trial offers in affiliate networks, what are some offers you CAN promote?!

Consistent performers have always been: offers that offer a solution to a common problem, offers that are free, offers that deal with dating / meeting others, education, refinancing, insurance, and mobile just to name a few.

Affiliate marketing has existed for many years without the rebill offers and will continue to go on with or without them.

For more information on affiliate marketing and making money online, visit my blog, JonathanVolk.com

Earlier this week Techcrunch ran a story about co-founder EV Williams ( From Lincoln Nebraska but never gives a shout out) got hax0red. His Gmail account (and Google docs) got owned and other stuff… turns out they also had server passwords with the password of….. password. Total alleged things the hacker gained access to:

* the complete list of employees
* their food preferences
* their credit card numbers
* some confidential contracts with Nokia, Samsung, Dell, AOL, Microsoft and others
* direct emails with web and showbizz personalities
* phone numbers
* meeting reports (very informatives)
* internal document templates
* time sheet
* applicant resumes
* salary grid (time for me to move..lol)

Yesterday (7-14-09) Mike Arrington posted that they had received over 300 confidential twitter internal documents and would be releasing them to the public on Techcrunch. Many other sites are also claiming to have received the same documents but will not post them for ethical reasons (which i think means they just want to seem important but didn’t really get them).

After the post Twitter users bombarded Techcrunch with pleads not to release the documents and it was a trending topic on twitter all day today. Mike then posted a response Today (7-15-09) about what they planned to do with the confidential Twitter docs and specifically on ethics. To quote:

We are always in the delicate position of balancing what’s right for the community with publishing insider news that helped build this site into what it is today. We don’t sit around and republish press releases, we break big stories.

This is one of the reasons I love TechCrunch and its aggressive journalism. They don’t fuck around.

Later today Techcrunch revealed the first of many to come of the Twitter internal documents. This one is the growth and financial sheet. While its a updated sheet its very interesting to see where the co-founders thought the site would be at in terms of growth and revenue. Mike also leaves us with a cliff hanger for tomorrow revealing twitters original idea to monetize the website.

I personally cant wait to see these docs as they keep coming on TechCrunch.

Public Registration is NOW open for the Elite Retreat NYC 2009!  This will be the 6th Elite Retreat Conference and it is being held for the first time in New York City at the Hotel Gansevoort.

The Venue

We have always done everything first class at the Elite Retreat and this year we are blowing it out of the water. The Hotel Gansevoort was recently named the “hippest hotel in the world” by Tripadvisor.

Nestled among warehouses and cobblestone streets, the Hotel Gansevoort features a sleek and striking exterior of glass and metal. Breathtaking views from the landscaped roof garden along with a pool that emits soothing underwater tunes, makes it a popular, one-of-a-kind venue.

We have taken over the entire top floor of this kick-ass hotel for the event. You can check out pictures of the hotel here.

The History and Experience

When you go to a conference to hear an “expert” speak, the experience rarely has that much value. You listen to 60 minutes of a canned speech and if you are lucky, you get maybe 2 minutes of the “expert’s” time after waiting in a long line. The real value in conferences is always found at the hotel bar where you can buy an “expert” a drink, talk about your problems and get a solid action plan, tailored to your business, from them.

A couple problems with this approach are:

1) There are lots of speaker who honestly have no interest in helping you or solving your problems.
2) There is no way to scale this at a conference with thousands of people.
3) Most of the experts at conferences are only there to promote themselves or their products.

The Elite Retreat was formed to really solve this problem. We assemble tried and true cast of speakers who have not only achieved enormous successes of their own but really enjoy helping others. We also limit the amount of attendees so that each speaker can truly connect with each attendee and help them formulate a plan to solve their problems as well as follow up with them.

The Hostess/M.C. – Rebecca Kelley

Rebecca Kelley is the Director of Social Media for 10e20, one of the industry’s leading social media marketing companies. She has over three and a half years of experience in the Internet marketing industry and specializes in client consulting, organic SEO, content creation, viral marketing, linkbait, and blogging. In addition to being one of the industry’s most recognizable bloggers, Rebecca also speaks at various industry events and provides guidance and strategy for multiple facets of Internet marketing.

The Keynote Speaker – Seth Godin

Seth Godin is often regarded as the worlds best marketing mind. He is author of ten books that have been bestsellers around the world. His most recent titles include Tribes, The Dip and Meatball Sundae. Free Prize Inside was published in early May, 2004 and All Marketers are Liars was published in 2005. Permission Marketing was an Amazon.com Top 100 bestseller for a year, a Fortune Best Business Book and it spent four months on the Business Week bestseller list. It also appeared on the New York Times business book bestseller list. Seth was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the industry’s leading interactive direct marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in late 1998.

The Speakers

Aaron Wall – Aaron wrote the book on SEO, literally! He has been a leader at the Elite Retreat since the first event in 2006. Aaron’s in-depth knowledge of SEO is astonishing. What makes Aaron such a good fit for the Elite Retreat is that he is not afraid to speak his mind and tell you how things really work. From each of the previous events we had comments from people saying they thought they knew some neat tricks with SEO until they heard Aaron speak and show them how it’s really done. Key Search Engine engineers like Matt Cutts are always keeping a close tab on what Aaron is saying and they are frequently mentioning Aaron in their public speaking and on their blogs.

Brian Norgard is a passionate entrepreneur, angel investor and waterman. Brian co-founded Newroo which was acquired in 2006 by FoxInteractive Media/NewsCorp. He currently is a VP at FOX Advertising Network and works on numerous internal projects including MySpaceMyAds. Previously, he founded Ferrosity, which developed vibration dampening technology.

Chris Winfield is President and Co-Founder of 10e20, a publicity company that specializes in social media and search marketing services. He is considered to be one of the leading authorities on social media marketing in the world today. Chris has been featured in multiple articles by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Investor’s Business Daily, The Boston Globe and over 100 other media outlets. Chris has been a featured speaker at SES, SMX, Pubcon, DPAC, DM Days and is a columnist for Search Engine Land.

Neil Patel – When it comes to social media, one name always stands out – Neil Patel. He has been a top 20 digger and stumbler for years. Neil is also an expert at other social media sites like Newsvine, Reddit, and Del.icio.us, and for years he has been charging clients hundreds of thousands of dollars for social media services. Neil is the Internet Rockstar’s SEO/SEM/SMO with huge name clients like GM, NBC, Samsung, AOL, Techcrunch, Mashable, and Guy Kawasaki just to name a few. I think everyone takes a lot away from talking to Neil about how to leverage Social Media for their business.

Jeremy Schoemaker (widely known by his nickname of ShoeMoney) is an important player in the search engine marketing world, and his knowledge and expertise make him one of the top go-to guys for PPC, arbitrage, SEM, branding, and online income optimization. His weekly Internet radio show Net Income allows listeners to hear Jeremy’s honest assessment about his failures and successes in the online marketing space.

The Value

The value of the Elite Retreat does not stop at the end of the 2 day event. All speakers continue to work with attendees helping them achieve their goals. There is also a weekly mastermind call organized by previous attendees where people talk about their challenges and accomplishments and also give presentations. The one thing we hear over and over is that we should charge more for the event. This event does one thing; it solves problems for business’s and makes them more profitable.

The Guarantee

We have always had a 100% money back guarantee if you do not think this is a good conference for you.

I honestly believe this is the last time we will hold the event. I know I always say that, but I always think its as big as it could possible get.  When I first wanted to run my own conference, my dream was to get Seth Godin as the keynote speaker, but at that time it was impossible.  I was still having to sell people on the idea of the Elite Retreat, let alone get a big name like Seth to come and talk.  Now, years later, the conference sells out within days, and Seth Godin will be keynoting this year.  I never plan to have another event unless we can out do the last one and this one is going to be VERY hard to beat!

Last year the event sold out in less than 10 days and I expect this years to sell out really quickly as well.  I don’t want anyone to go away from this even with anything less than a an off-the-chart experience.  But in order to assure that, I like to review each and every potential attendee and make sure they can benefit from this experience.

Go here to sign up now!

Its been an amazing year here at ShoeMoney Media so we thought we would give back through a awesome Twitter Contest sponsored by David and Myself.

We are giving away 10 ShoeMoney FlipHD cameras!!!!!!!!

to enter go here

At the Revenue Bootcamp conference on Friday our panel was asked how we would monetize Twitter. I took the lead on this one and talked about how I was already monetizing Twitter… but just for my own benefit.

I also went on and talked about how there is a HUGE market imbalance going on right now with Twitter traffic.

I started doing sponsored tweets about a year ago when I was offered $50 a tweet and recently as much as $400 a tweet.

But the opportunity really lies in arbitraging Twitter traffic. There are about a dozen Twitter advertising networks out there. Traffic can be purchased anywhere from .5 cents to .15 per tweet.

I will show you my first examples playing around with arbitraging Twitter traffic.

A couple months ago while browsing the Social Spark opportunities I noticed they had added CPC deals. This means you get paid per click that you send to them. They also have a special link you can use for social network traffic like Twitter and Facebook.

Social Spark is buying Twitter traffic for this offer at .24 cents per click.

I shot the owner of RevTwt an email asking what would be a good price per click to ensure that I got a lot of clicks to do a test with and he told me anything above .10 cents should be good, so I went with .14 per click to get some interest.

So I made my ad:

and did a $200, 5 day test to see what we were working with.

You can see all the sponsored tweets by searching for “blu frog #spon” on Twitter search.

Now keep in mind I honestly was not worried about making money but rather wanted to do a test to see what average CPC could be earned. I was more concerned about getting enough volume to do a proper test.

When the test was complete, the results were very encouraging.

The RevTwt showed over the 5 day period I received 1166 clicks costing me $174.90

Social Spark showed I had made $127.20 on 530 clicks:

As you can see there is a HUGE discrepancy in clicks… over 2x.

Social Spark massively (putting it lightly) scrubs the clicks using a 3rd party fraud detection software called Click Forensics and they are SUPER SUPER scrubalicious when it comes to validating clicks from fraudulent ones.

So while this campaign lost 50 bucks it really got my fire going because consider this… I choose a CPC way too high at .14 cents and I choose one of the lowest paying CPC offers, blu frog, at .24 cents and yet was still in the game.

Since that first experience I have been paying .05 to .09 cents per click from various Twitter ad networks and sending it to much higher paying offers like Blockbuster, Disney, and Seaworld which pay in the 70-80 cent range per click from Twitter PLUS you can negotiate a much higher rate once you show them you can create some volume. Now after dialing it in a bit we are seeing 4-6x on our ROI. Not bad.

So why am I sharing this gem with you and not soaking it all in?

The problem is there is just not enough advertisers to make this worth our time. We can make $300-$500 a day in profit on Twitter and I know that for a lot of you guys out there trying to make something happen that is all you need. For us we need to move the needle a little more to really devote resources to it.

I honestly believe NONE of these Twitter advertising networks are doing it correctly and the first one that does is going to crush it!

There are really 2 types of Twitter ad networks right now.

1 – Going after spammers/bottom feeders.

2 – Going after celebrities or ONLY high follow count accounts.

The first Twitter ad network that works will be the one that appeals to everyone and does not take more then 5% of the cut.

Its such an opportunity that if I was not tied up with a non compete from our Auction Ads I would start a Twitter Advertising network in a minute. C’est La Vie.

Had a blast at the Techcrunch organized August Capital party.

Awesome TC Ice sculpture. Booze provided by Grey Goose:

I helped out 2 at a time:

Photo By Brian Solis

Later on the V.I.P.’s went to the 4 seasons to party on and I met Los Angeles TV Star Shira Lazar, former girlfriend of Kevin Rose:

I asked her if K-Rose dugg her or buried her and she did not think it was funny… =(

Thanks to August Capital & TechCrunch for throwing another great event! Looking forward to the Techcrunch50 conference in September.

Great card tonight for UFC 100. I am pretty pumped.

I have not bet on MMA since I lost all my winnings I had built up ($1300) in the first Lesnar vs Mir fight.

I am going to lay the wood on this rematch for redemption! CMON LESNAR!!!!!

I like Alves in the big upset over George St Pierre.

I also think Michael Bisping will be exposed for the total can that he is fighting Dan Henderson. The only reason the UFC promotes him so much is because they want to keep the UK fans interested in the sport.

From a unit perspective I am betting:

10 units on Lesnar over Mir
3 units on Alves over St. Pierre (not likely but nice odds)
5 units on Henderson over Bisping.

For those not getting the fight MMA Junkie has live round by round coverage and they do a really good descriptive job of the action. I usually refresh often to get the under card results.

UPDATE: REDEMPTION BABY!!!!!!!!!!! +12 units!!! ended up a great night.

While its not quite the 3 wolf moon shirt the ShoeMoney shirt seems to have an undeniable mystic quality about it. Many start out entrepreneurs started out sporting one and soon achieved enormous success.

Congrats Dealoco!!

Today’s free shirt was sent to us from WordStream.  They have keyword management tools for PPC and SEO.  Their website is quite confusing, but it looks like they have a lot of products to offer.  Not really sure what any of it does, but check it out.

Thanks for the free shirt! vest!