I first met Technosailor aka Aaron Brazell at SXSW last year. I was introduced to him by Ted Murphy. He seemed kind of stand offish like he was better then everyone but I let it go because anyone can have a bad night.
Later Aaron pinged me about a new project that Darren Rowse, Brian Clark and he were working on (or thats what he made it sound like) called Lijit and in so many words asked me to promote it…. so I did here.
Then a couple days later he thanked me and asked if I could get john Chow to run it… which I pinged him about and he started using it.
Then a couple days later he emails me this asking for a intro with Joel Comm cause “Darren and Brian” want to keep the good vibe going….
So I hooked him up with a intro….
Then at Blogworld I talked to Darren and Brian and they told me they were not involved a at all with lijit and Aaron was just name dropping… hmm ok…
At Blogworld lijit had a bigass booth and I hit Aaron up to sponsor the elite retreat … basically just got the cold shoulder (not interested at all). Ahh well no worries we did pretty well with that.
But then out of the blue today he twitters that I spam him on facebook to join my fan page.
Wow wtf? Have I been inviting people to my facebook fan page? Yes… with 2000 friends I do about 300 at a time until my fingers go numb and usually wait days before attempting to pickup where I left off. Do I invite some people 2x… no doubt…. especially I see have not joined and I am like wtf… thats weird I know I did shit for him…
But Aaron could have emailed me if he had a problem with me… He certainly knew where to get my email when he needed something from me and I could help him.
I have met a lot of weasels like Aaron (technosailor) over the years. They use peoples names and do whatever it takes to get what they want. Then they piss on you first chance they get.
Are we starting our own affiliate network? Mostly just dabbling .
I got a email last week to check out has hasoffers to run your own affiliate company/network – saying they had all the features of direct track only it didn’t suck ass like direct track so I checked it out and it is pretty freaking awesome. I am very impressed. Its VERY easy to setup but also has some pretty advanced high end features (geotargeting, leadcaping, redirecting).
So while playing around with the free account I was like damn we have several offers now that we are paying out to affiliates…. $1000 per signup for the Elite Retreat…. ShoeMoney Tools and we have a lot of other things in the pipe so I thought I would test it out for real a bit.
If you are interested in promoting any of the shoemoney stuff you can sign up here.
I will do a more indepth post in hasoffers cause its seriously unreal. Go and signup for a free account right now so you have it because when I show you all the sweet features it has your going to wish you got it while it was free.
Here is the general blue print for a successful website:
You find a cool idea or service that you want to use.
You build the service and solve the problem.
You lose interest now that you have solved the problem and want to solve other problems or create new websites.
People are still wanting to use the site but you no longer no how to help them because you have lost interest.
This has happened to us many times. We are awesome at building and launching new things but maintaining them sucks.
You basically have 3 options
1) Let the site die
2) Sell the site (rarely can you sell a site that is on the decline).
3) Bring in someone to manage the site for a revshare.
We have been very fortunate to be able to sell companies/sites that we lost interest in when they were at their peak but lately I have been bringing in people to manage sites for a revshare above and beyond current revenue.
This Friday I’m sporting a shirt from GymJunkies.com. This site is dedicated to fitness information and packed full of how to videos, weight loss programs and strength training workouts. Want to look good for the summer? They just launched a free 30 day shred it program. Great stuff. Thanks, Vic! Stay up to date with Vic’s fitness tips on Twitter – @gymjunkies.
John Reese is one of the best marketers of our time. His accomplishments are legendary in this industry. I originally met John because one of the other admins at the Digital Point forums was talking about this guy who promoted his software product and he did hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in 24 hours. He said the guy just sent out a email recommending his product. I was like WTF I gotta meet this guy. I shot him a email and he asked if I was going to AdTech. I was and we agreed to meet up.
I originally met John at AdTech San Francisco in 2007. I was telling him about this advertising network I was doing called AuctionAds. He listened to me give my pitch then proceeded to gave me about 2 notebooks full of tips on how to market it. It was a HUGE tipping point for AuctionAds. I followed John’s advice and it made a dramatic impact right away.
In the years since I have learned from John more with what he does then directly interacting with him. From his monstrously successful Traffic Secrets programs to some that did not go so hot like Blog Rush.
John shares an enormous amount of knowledge through his successes and failures.
Today John launched opportunity.com . A training program to teach people affiliate marketing. Its free to sign up and get a peek what he is up to. I highly recommend it.
Watching John work might inspire you in coming up with your next big thing.
We have been getting a ton of applications from people who just graduated college and are looking for a job. When they apply they are super cocky and tell you everything you are doing wrong and how if you hire them they can fix everything… and they think they are worth an enourmous amount of money.
They tell you technically they can do anything and have won all these awards and letters of recommendations to prove it.
Course they have ZERO real world experience.
So just to save some of you some time I wrote a little something:
Dear Highly Technically Skilled College Graduate,
You probably have been worshiped all your life because you are super technically skilled and so young.
You are about to get a rude awakening.
One thing I have learned is that any idiot can do:
Server Administration
Write code
Graphics
SEO
Affiliate Marketing
But there are very few people on earth that have this skills and that:
Have a work ethic
Can finish what they start
Not flake out
Be trusted
Follow instructions
For years I was about as technically well rounded as they come but got no where in my own business or working for the man.
Technical ability only gets you so far.
Its kind of sad because I know some of the most technically skilled people on this planet and all they ever do is what is required to get by. Anyway I digress…
Obviously if you just graduated college you have a work ethic and can finish what you start.
Its been almost 1 year since the twitter name ShoeMoney was turned over to me and I started using it.
Its now the 2nd biggest source of referral traffic to my blog.
April Stats:
I know what most of you are thinking…. “Well if I had 30k followers I could get traffic too” You would probably be surprised to learn that less then 5% of the twitter traffic came from my tweets.
Just engaging in the twittosphere has been amazingly rewarding.
But if you still “don’t get it” its cool. Less competition
In the post I showed how I started using Max blog Press Ninja Affiliate and evidently someone there noticed because they contacted me and said they would be willing to make a super phat 33% off limited time offer to shoemoney readers.
I have been using this plugin for a lot more then just affiliate stuff. It comes in super handy when I want to link to stuff and cant remember the websites…
OR like if I want to retroactively link to all posts which mention “the dip” to link to seth godin’s book with my affiliate link I can do that…
Possibilities are endless. This has become one of my favorite plugins.
This is a guest post by my friend and elite retreat alum Chris Hedgecock. Chris started a website a while back called Cars For A Grand which he says was inspired by my below-a-buck site. The concept is it shows all cars currently on eBay for under 1k. Pretty simple huh? Anyone could have done that? Well Chris did! AND unlike my below a buck site Chris has stayed on it and is now earning a high six figure a year income from it!. He recently did a homegrown PR stunt which is an amazing case study for anyone looking to score free PR. I asked him to write about it for shoemoney.com
As you may or may not know I run a used car website called CarsForaGrand.com. I thought it would be a great idea to buy a car for under $1,000 from the site and drive it coast to coast in an attempt to get some news coverage and visitors to the site. We were successful in appearing on a dozen news broadcasts and driving almost half a million visitors to the site in three weeks – all for free.
Here is an example of the coverage we got, this one is from San Diego:
The basic hope was that we could drum up some news coverage and backlinks with the unique story, especially amid the current economic climate and automaker bailouts. The initial idea was to get on a few local TV stations, you know the classic filler on a slow news day ‘Two guys are driving across country in a $900 car…’ stuff like that. It also sounded like a bunch of fun, never having been across country before. I thought about hiring a PR firm, or getting a consultant, but then I remembered that stuff costs money. So I talked to a few friends in the industry like PR guru Chris Winfield, whipped up a press release, and got to work. Here is the first release:
COAST TO COAST IN AN $899 CAR
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
SAN DIEGO, CALIF (April 2009)- Who says you can’t afford a reliable, safe, working car in this recession– for under $1,000 bucks! Early this month, two young entrepreneurs will set out from San Diego, Calif. to show the country that they do not need a bailout to get a decent car. Chris Hedgecock and Jorge Gonzalez, founders of the website CarsForaGrand.com, have purchased a car from the website for $899 and will drive from San Diego to Miami to prove you can buy a reliable car without the hassle and burden of financing one.
These two young guys will be cruising through your town and would like to stop by your station as they make their way across the country. You will find their story to be inspiring, interesting and humorous as they honk through towns just like yours.
The car is a 1974 Pontiac LeMans, purchased for $899.89 on February 26, 2009. To make sure the the car was safe and road-worthy, $200 was invested in parts like belts, spark plugs, and a much needed oil change. The car was purchased from CarsForaGrand.com, a website that only features used cars under $1,000.
Chris and Jorge’s journey can be followed at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/) where daily updates will be posted including pictures and video. The entire trip is expected to last 14 days barring a major incident (fingers crossed!) The route and city list will be updated with dates daily as schedules might change, always find the newest information at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/the-route/).
AVAILABLE IN SAN DIEGO APRIL 2, 2009
To schedule an interview or a drive-by please contact
I had the good fortune of having my friend Drew Schulte to help out with the PR legwork. Drew is not a PR professional, actually he’s my real estate agent but in this market he has a lot of free time So I had Drew put together a spreadsheet with all the cities we were visiting, and all the TV news stations in each city. He then called all of them and got the email address of the ‘assignment editor’. We learned early on this term ‘assignment editor’ was really important as this person decided who did what on what days. The great thing about TV news stations is they are open 24/7 looking for newsworthy stuff to put on the air. So we would pull into a town as it was getting dark, and while we would be getting settled Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors, and emailing the release to their ‘breaking news’ address.
After a few cities we altered the release to include the specific city we were in, and links to the previous news coverage. This really helped because it showed them that other stations were covering us and the last thing a news station wants to do is miss covering a story other stations might be covering. So once we got the ball rolling it was pretty easy, pull into town, get a hotel, wake up early, do a news spot, and get back on the road.
After we hit New Orleans we noticed the coverage kind of snowballing. For example, the news story we shot in San Diego got picked up by their sister station in LA, the one we shot in El Paso aired in San Francisco, etc. By the time we were done in Miami, the story had gone national… on the largest day we did over 110,000 uniques – all for free.
Not to say it wasn’t a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. I got to see a lot of this great country and meet a bunch of cool people. I also learned a whole bunch, which is really my favorite thing. I really knew nothing about PR, and was usually pretty shy in front of the camera. Now my smiling mug and my ‘74 LeMans have been all over the national and local news across the country. I hadn’t touched a Mac since the Apple II GS, and now I am zipping all over iMovie on my new Macbook Pro.
The real driving force behind this trip was attitude. I had the idea for the site a few years ago, and had the idea for the road trip around December or January, but it really took going to Elite Retreat to motivate me to get off my ass and go. There are just so many smart capable people there and the attitude of “We Can Do It” was just so infectious, I started planning as soon as I got home.
So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process.
One of the most frequent questions I get is how to monetize websites that have mostly foreign traffic. Some networks will have some offers but there has never been a network that was focused on specifically international traffic…. until now.
Globalizer has the most complete selection of international offers that we have ever seen. Whether its:
Sweepstakes
Music
Ringtones
Personalized Video
Search Toolbars
Baby/Family Related Deals
There is a good chance Globalizer has something for you in a country you are targeting.
Globalizer is owned and operated by my good friend (and 2x elite retreat alum) Mark Colacioppo.
Why do I think Globalizer is a good choice, well besides the fact that this is a smaller network, that is actively involved with their publishers. And Mark and his team ALL have run affiliate networks, done media buying for well known properties (PCH.com, eMusic, RocketProfit, Traffix, FreeLotto and others) and have been Super Affiliates themselves. This is not your average affiliate network.
They use Hit Path technology for tracking which is known for being far more accurate than some of the other technologies being used by other networks.
They’re all about educating publishers on how to best monetize their inventory whether search, email, display, social or incentivized and share the tricks they’ve learned since running online media since 1996.
They offer a 2% referral program on the network.
They are open to affiliate feedback, taking your input and evolving their network based on your suggestions.
Want to check out the GlobalizerNetwork offers? Mark agreed to hook up the first 100 ShoeMoney readers who sign up (and are approved) by Globalizer network with 25 FREE songs from eMusic.
Last week on the ShoeMoney show my guest was Yaro Starak. The first half of the show we talked about how Yaro got to where he is now which I think many people will find pretty facinating.
One of the main reasons I wanted to have Yaro on was not just to talk about his products but the marketing behind them that made them so successful. Yaro has years of experience in conversions with both email, search, and blog traffic and we discuss various techniques in all to have a successful product launch.
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So I had Drew put together a spreadsheet with all the cities we were visiting, and all the TV news stations in each city. He then called all of them and got the email address of the ‘assignment editor’. We learned early on this term ‘assignment editor’ was really important as this person decided who did what on what days. The great thing about TV news stations is they are open 24/7 looking for newsworthy stuff to put on the air. So we would pull into a town as it was getting dark, and while we would be getting settled Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors, and emailing the release to their ‘breaking news’ address.
