Just got this package from Neverblue for Christmas!
They sent a shaving kit, chocolate fondue set, chocolate pizza, erotic blindfold sleeping mask
This reverend pimpdaddy robe:
Its so pimp I been wearing it around the office all day:
Also they sent the limited edition Neverblue 2010 calendar:
Thanks Neverblue!
UPDATE: The finalists have been announced and voting is now live here:
http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/12/27/affiliate-summit-contest-finalists/
Announcing the ShoeMoney ASW 2009 Contest.
1 lucky winner will win:
You get all the above no matter what.
Now for the gambler part of it you get your choice of:
$1,000.00 cash yours to keep and walk away with.
$2,000.00 cash with the stipulation you must bet it all on 1 hand of blackjack OR 1 spin of the roulette wheel betting either red or black.
The cash is being put up by AzoogleAds. Thanks to them for going along with my crazy gambler idea!!!!
How do you enter?
Write a blog post explaining why you should win this amazing opportunity and submit the url to your page in the comments below. Also make sure you tell us your decision to walk away with the cash or gamble… and if you gamble on what?
On December 23th we will stop taking entries.
On December 27st we will put up the list of finalists and allow users to vote.
On January 4th th a winner will be announced.
Our panel of Judges listed below will each nominate one of favorite entries and then users will be able to vote for the winner!
Your Judges are:
Me
David Dellanave
NickyCakes (almost reformed blackhat)
Erin Hughes (AzoogleAds AM)
George Avery (Get Ads)
Neil Patel
Barman (the one and only)
The winners from similar contests in the past have not only explained why they should win but also did some research on the judges and catered their answer to them a bit.
GOOD LUCK to all those who enter!
A couple days ago John Chow and I endorsed ZK to win the Invesp internet marketer of 2009.
ZK was crushing everyone in the contest…
But evidently Invesp wanted someone else to win and removed most of his votes.
If you can’t trust these guys to run a legit contest can you really trust them to run your PPC campaigns or optimize your conversions?
Seems like a shady organization.
Since I posted my worst ideas list a couple years ago I get requests all the time to talk about my worst business ideas or ideas that I just never pursued. I thought I would highlight some of the ideas I had in 2009 I did not do anything with.
Please do not email me telling me you want to do them but you need my help. I don’t need mean to be an asshole but if I wanted to do them I would have done them. I have ZERO interest in doing any of these ideas or investing in any of them so please save your breath 
Idea behind it:
Last year Amex came calling to invite us into the Centurion (American Express Black Card) program. As much as I wanted to be one of the cool kids with a black card I was not about to pay the $5k enrollment fee. After 2 more attempts to get us in they finally offered us the African American Express without the initial fee. So we took it and got cards for most of our employees. I mean we were already paying $600 per person per card for the plat + $450 per year per person with the priority and given you’re supposed to get all these massive travel perks it seemed like a no brainier.
So we got our bulletproof cards and booked some flights… then went up to the travel counter and was like can you upgrade me… uhh it does not work like that. Same with hotels, priority passes, rental cars….
There are SO MANY sites out there that are talking out of their asses about the Centurion card. There are many myths and a lot of misinformation. The FlyerTalk forums are about the best source of info out there and most of it is filled with haters saying the black card is not worth it… you seem to run into that a lot.
Over the last year and talking to good friends who I know actually have the black cards we have discovered a ton about how to get all the benefits and also lots of secrets that are not published like what top end restaurants cater to cent card holders. Also there are a lot of limited time offers (especially in vegas) exclusive to black card holders that you don’t know about unless you talk to your AmEx travel person.
But, yet, I am sure there is a TON of stuff I am missing.
Looking at the ShoeMoney Playbook the 3 things we look for are:
1) Is it a needed service?
2) Can it go viral?
3) Can it make money?
This idea is a very solid yes for all.
I have already shown and explained how it is a needed service. The viral part would be word of mouth. I know if I found a site like this I would tell 20 friends in a minute.
How can it make money? This has subscription written all over it. We are paying about $6k a year for all of our AmEx black cards do you not think we would pay $1k/yr for a subscription to a forum where we could interact with other black card users in private and get the real information on deals and offer availability?
In addition to the forum a monthly newsletter with all of this month’s or next month’s deals would be awesome too. This seems like a no brainer to me.
If someone did a really good job with this site I think it could make a couple million a year pretty easily.
So the obvious question – why we don’t do it? Well it’s not really our style. If there is one thing I learned from doing fighters.com is to stick with what I know. And I know jack shit about running something like this.
Car washes make TONS of money. There is a big up-front investment but over time they absolutely crush it. Mostly because on average you don’t need to upgrade any of the equipment for like 25 years. So I looked into buying a space….. equipment… and even talked to some car wash owners in Omaha about the car wash business in general.
They all said its a great business but the hardest part was getting people in the door. They all spend most of their money on advertising, and they kind of suck at it.
I thought between using AdWords/Facebook/Myspace advertising to get people there, I would come up with some marketing gimmick.
After a couple days I came up with the gimmick that all the cars would be hand dried by a staff of young ladies in bikinis.
Thus we could name the car wash “Hand Jobs”
Just the stupid gimick would help it spread super virally. I think anyway.
Why didn’t we do it ? – Well besides totally being out of my element and having zero experience in that business, in Nebraska Car washes only have about 5 months out of the year where they make all of their money. Yes it would work… and no doubt it would make money… But it’s a huge investment and a very long slow return on that investment. Just not for me.
I talked about this quite a bit in my post titled “When is a Scam a Good Business Idea?”
Depending on where you stand morally and ethically this could be perfect for you.
Why it would work:
As soon as people find out they are pregnant one of the first things they want to know is the sex of the child. This is a really trivial service that I could have together in a few hours. You would just make a website where people could fill out a questionnaire and guarantee 100% accuracy or your money back. Just from jump street you have a 50% chance of getting it right (and being profitable).
What if you want to get more scammy? If you wanted to be really scammy, your 100% money back offer could have crazy stipulations like the people have to fax you a copy of the birth certificate within 24 hours of birth or something.
How to do this in a super legit way and build a valuable service ?
1) Start the service off as a 100% free service.
2) Once people have the kid shoot them an email and ask if you were right. Make it really easy for them to say yes or no. Use tracking in the email so they don’t have to sign in or anything.
3) Use the data from people’s answers to actual build an algorithm and show predictability.
4) If someone completes the survey and you have over a 75% chance (from real data) of predicting the child’s sex from previous peoples data charge them for the service but be completely honest about your rate of success.
5) Once the baby is born send them a email and ask if you were correct and if not give them a easy link to get a refund. You can even offer them a free netflix subscription as an apology (and make $35 from the affiliate offer). (Sorry, it’s the affiliate marketer in me).
How to market it? Should be pretty easy on Facebook and Myspace with their targeting options to “pregnant woman” and “women who just had a baby”.
At the end of the day though to do this right is going to take time and dedication.
Really this one seems like a no-brainer to me for someone looking for an idea. However again like many other things it’s just out of our element and I don’t know if it would move the needle enough for me to devote resources to it.
Many times what was wildly successful with other things can work well in new things… Remember the Myspace Trains? The concept was simple. You put in your Myspace id and then you friended the 10 people listed. Now you were in line to get friends. I took that concept but applied to to twitter with adding some extra functions like geotargeting and category tagging (so you would only follow other people interested in the same things).
Lets say you were a real estate agent in California and you wanted to only follow people interested in real estate and also have them follow you. The twitter “Train” would deliver these followers.
The payment model would be free for the first 6 months… then would go to $5/per month. If users wanted to cancel thats fine… but they would lose all the followers they got. The pain of disconnect would be great.
So why didn’t we do it? Well we did do it.. The site is completely done, works awesome, purchased twittertrain.com from someone we were about ready to rock then some jackass started a website called twittertrain.info (or net) which was a total phishing site stealing peoples passwords and spamming the crap out of twitter so we never even got to launch it. The site never saw the light of day (even though its completely done). We got legal papers from Twitter’s lawyers to immediately cease and desist… and it also had some mumbo jumbo about a phishing site (they must have just sent legal letters to all the twittertrain tld’s ).
This one is kind of a bummer… I think it would have done really well. Now it sits in a “completed sites” directory with other sites totally done but never saw the light of day =(
I could go on and on all day about all the nutty ideas I get… but at the end of the day we have to apply the “prioritize the profitable projecs” – the ShoeMoney Mantra.
My wife is attending a medical conference here in Denver so I hitched a ride and decided to hang out all day at GetAds.
I love the GetAds guys and always learn so much hanging out with them.
Do you know this face?
Its ZK from webtrafficroi! ZK has been a regular commentor on ShoeMoney.com for a long time…. And not just on mysite on many sites around the web.
ZK is up for nomination against 99 other marketers for Best Internet Marketer of 2009. No seriously !
GO here and vote for zk now! He is the last one on the bottom.
High Beam Research is a comprehensive online library with over 80 million articles from 6500 publications. And it’s not just for students, professionals can use it to for Business trends, Financial news, and market research.
And they even offer a trial period, so check it out, and thanks for the shirt!
If you would like to see your website or company featured on Free Shirt Friday click here
POSTSCRIPT:
12/05/2009 – A well informed birdy just told me Dennis Yu has been asked to step down from the panel. No official word yet.
12/4/2009 – I had been told before that the Affiliate Summit board of advisors had voted that Dennis be allowed to speak at Affiliate Summit. This source was incorrect. I was told today from the Affiliate Summit people that the board is still reviewing whether or not to let Dennis speak. Sorry for the confusion.
Yesterday I wrote about how Facebook panel I was going to be doing at Affiliate Summit was going to be interesting because it contained the founder of Blitzlocal, Dennis Yu, and his chief investor, Markus Frind (Plentyoffish founder).
Yes Markus has repeatedly publicy denied ever being an investor in blitzlocal… but he is listed many places around the internet including the official affiliate summit website as being the funder for the porn/scam empire BlitzLocal
Dennis was no doubt going to give a epic presentation about all the amazing Facebook things he is doing for all these huge name clients…… Even if it was all bullshit (like the last panel I was on with him).
Instead of giving a presentation on Facebook I have been working on a PowerPoint presentation where I was going to be showing and reading out loud all the emails from former employees and clients of Blitzlocal about what really was going on there and some horror stories from people about what happen to them in their dealings with Dennis.
Well… From my post the powers that be at Affiliate Summit made it very clear this was not going to be allowed. The only thing to be discussed was Facebook on this panel. Everything needed to be civil and people would be muted if we did not stay on topic of Facebook advertising.
I can’t do that and if Jimmy Kukral muted me then we would have a massive beef…..
You can read the comments and my responses here from the thread from Affiliate Summit founder Shawn Collins as well as Moderator for the panel Jim Kukral.
See postscript at top for correctionI was also told the board of directors for Affiliate Summit recently took a vote on whether or not to let Dennis Yu speak and they overwhelming approved him to do so. (unlike Affiliate Convention who threw him off his panels).
While I do not feel giving this self proclaimed scam artist a stage is a good thing…. I do not hold it against Shawn Collins or the Affiliate Summit. I never want to put my friends in a position of choosing me or them… I hate that crap.
There is just no way in hell I could be on the same stage with this scumbag and be extremely clear with the audience on what a scumbag he is.
The bottom line for me was earlier today when I got a call from a nice young lady who told me about how Dennis took over her PPC campaign and now was basically extorting money from them to keep it going. She said she met him at SMX and was sure he was legit because he was speaking on the panel and stuff. She asked me how such a crook wormed his way into these speaking gigs to leverage them into conning clients. I told her to call Danny Sullivan and ask him.
So I apologize to anyone who was wanting to learn Facebook stuff from me. I will be around for the entire conference and happy to tell you anything you want to know from my experiences.
I just can’t be on the same stage as that weasel and listen to his BS. I hope you understand.
Trackbacks:
Convert2media – Affiliate Summit put shoemoney back on the facebook panel
I’ve been doing Internet marketing in some form or another for nearly four years, and while I’m nowhere near the seasoned veteran as some of the old dogs in this industry, I’ve worked with my fair share of clients, met lots of people, seen trends come and go, and heard plenty of eye-rolling buzz words that make me want to cobra punch someone right in the face. I polled some people on Twitter, and most of the respondents came to a consensus that these five words are annoying, aggravating and just plain douchey.
Okay readers, what about you? What ridiculous buzz word automatically causes you to start grinding your teeth and rolling your hands into meaty little fists of fury?
This is the 3rd time I am doing the Facebook advertising panel at the Affiliate Summit. This session is taking place Monday January 18th and I recommend you get in their early. The previous 2 times its been standing room only and with all the latest Dennis Yu drama I am sure people will be turned away from the packed session.
This year its going to be interesting…
On the panel is
So its the BlitzLocal founder (Dennis), One of the people who was listed as an advisor to the porn/scam empire but asked to be removed as soon as he found out he was listed (DK), The guy who is backing the whole BlitzLocal company (according to the affiliate summit profile) Marcus Frind, Alex Schultz (who probably can’t believe he got involved in this shitstorm), and me.
I know a lot of people are surprised I would participate on a panel with Dennis Yu… Well this panel was planned long before all of the drama and I am not one to back out of something I said I would do.
I also want to be able to answer any possible questions the audience might have about the situation in person. As I am sure Dennis does also…..
I was told that instead of doing q&a Dennis has prepared a presentation for everyone. I am sure it will be filled with huge names of companies and people he has conned.
I might prepare a presentation too… but its not going to be about me. Maybe emails from all the former blitzlocal employees about what a dirtbag dennis is and what was really going on there?
Anyway, See you there!
So often I get emails, facebook messages, and even tweets from people asking how to get started with affiliate marketing.
It comes with a good reason too; starting affiliate marketing can seem like such a daunting task! You have the landing pages, the advertisement creatives (banners and text ads), traffic sources, keywords, Ahh!
You know, the most common problem I hear is, “I am not a coder” and “I am not a designer” often followed by “I can’t afford to hire them!”
The funny thing is, while I “can” code and I can design, my coders and designers would agree that I suck at it. The other day I tried to modify a template my coder had done for me. He messages me shortly after… “Hey, do you mind if I… recode all of this…” Hahaha.
Anyway, I’m sure many of you know how it can feel when you don’t have this skillset. The honest truth however, is you really don’t need to have those skills to be able to make money online.
Sure, having those skills will help, there is no argument there.
Last year I made over $1,500,000 using a free template that I grabbed from one of the many free CSS templates. No joke. It didn’t matter that it was free or that I didn’t have to do anything except add my own filler text. All that matters is that that it converted and converted well.
So often we get into this mindset that if we don’t have the most beautiful page that we will not be able to succeed. Success really does not come from design. Success comes from your ability to optimize, test, retest, test some more, and focus on details. I truly believe that, and obviously have some proof.
Starting as a marketer is certainly no easy task. It took me 3 years to really start to become successful (2004-2007) but as you continue to press on, you will continue to learn and grow in your ability to generate sales.
Looking at our advertising page you can see all the national press we have been mentioned/interviewed in. But we have never gotten any local love .
That is until yesterday:
