We implemented Facebook Comments on ShoeMoney.com right before I left for the BlueGlass conference last Sunday.

On Wednesday I made a post about the event and also talked about how we had implemented the comments.

Today I thought I would log into Google Analytics and see what the traffic from Facebook was like:

As you can see before I implemented (and even after) I averaged somewhere around 150 referrals from Facebook per day.

But when I made one post with Facebook comments enabled I received over 4,000 visitors…

Here are some other really interesting statistical things:

• The average user coming from from Facebook stayed for over 2 minutes.
• My goal tracking went up dramatically meaning the $ value of the user was much higher (tons of more newsletter signups and other stuff).
• The average user viewed 6 pages.  This is 2x a normal user.

Here are the features I love most about it (besides the traffic):

• The comments are much cleaner!
• REAL PEOPLE REAL CONVERSATIONS!
• Good bye comment spam!
• You can promote top commentators so their comments always go to the bottom.
• You can ban users so their comments are never shown to anyone but their friends and themselves (nice feature!).

Now as you can see also when I did not make a post for the next 3 days the traffic died down to its normal rate.  

But this was a super slow week for me only making one post.  Normally I average 1 post a day at minimum.

But this brings up another thing.  At some point are people going to get pissy to see their friends commenting?  Will they still want to engage?   It can’t be as annoying as seeing your friends planting crops =P.

Its going to be interesting to see how it goes on.  Will keep you updated.

Just got back from the BlueGlass TPA conference. Really unique event. Its the first Conference I have been to (besides Elite Retreat) since Affiliate Summit West last January.

BlueGlass really does it up right. All the events, food, and atmosphere was awesome. I heard some people had a lot of fun out late enjoying the nightlife until the sun came up but I wouldn’t know anything about that..

There is a full recap of our TPA session here. Props to Amanda Milligan from BlueGlass for taking awesome notes and having it up… in like… no time.

Anyway there has been some significant changes to the blog. We dropped wordpress comments all together and implemented Facebook ones. Our wordpress comments were approaching 1,000 every day and moderating them was turning into a full time job for my assistant.

So I pulled the trigger and implemented the Facebook ones.

Now I know SEO monkeys are like… well you just lost tons of content and now your pages are not fresh anymore… blah blah….

We will see.

I predict my quality of traffic will only increase. Not even mentioning the value of having real people commenting.

Obama lately has been on this kick about the wealthy paying their fair share.

Being we are coming up on an election year you are going to hear all kinds of theories and numbers that you can’t really take to seriously… Promises are gonna be made… stats will be made up…

All I can do is talk from my own experience.

I felt like I have always paid my fair share.

The one thing I have learned is that the more money I have made in my life the more “opportunities” there are to pay less taxes.

Lets for a second forget about the 3 companies I have sold in the last 5 years. Total combined investment of probably 200k of post taxed income but millions and millions in return which I only had to pay 15% income tax on.

But I pay a very low amount of tax by deferring money. In my case a huge percentage of my income is tax sheltered for many years.

Thus bringing down the total amount of tax I pay by about 40% over all. Course the money is not available to me. But I don’t need it either.

Fact of the matter is a very small percentage of people pay the majority of taxes.

Fact of the matter is politicians will always promise the world to the lower class but in the back rooms are always making deals with the wealthy to ensure that the rich always win.

Here is what I propose. Call it the ShoeMoney FU tax act.

Get rid of every single deduction. EVERYTHING.
Everyone pays an equal percentage on all income earned. EVERYONE
When you die you give up all your money

Imagine how much money we would save with no IRS and no accountants trying to decipher and argue tax code. Just pay a flat percent on all tax earned.

Imagine how our economy would keep humming if people can’t pass on millions/billions to their children. I have 2 little girls right now and the last thing I want to do is cripple them by giving them millions of dollars when I die some day.

What I FOR SURE don’t want to do is give our government no more money. Since I have been old enough to notice they consistently waste money.

Watching the Mayweather fight on Saturday night and seeing all the Mayweather Promotion signs it made me think about those in the rat race working for the man vs people who have figured it out and banked.

Dave Mathews band took control of the reigns and allowed its concert goers to record and distribute those recordings however they wanted. This blew up the band in the 90’s. Dave Mathews is also one of the few bands who takes a percentage of concessions and all merchandise at all of his shows.

Marshal Mathers (Eminem) after making several successful hits under DR Dre’s After Math record started his own record label called Shady Records. He found many successful artists including 50cent… who would go on to create his own record label called G-Unit Records.

The list goes on and on.

So how does this relate to Affiliate Marketing.

Lets look at the pyramid:

Look at all the Affiliate Networks:

• Jason Akatiff was a top affiliate who started ads4dough
• Ryan Eagle was a top affiliate who started EWA
• Joe Speiser and Alex Zhardanovsky started AzoogleAds (Now Epic Direct).
• I have shoemoneyoffers (just for internal use for the most part).

Actually I can’t think of any top tier affiliate network that was not founded by a affiliate who saw the real money was in running a network.

And to continue that thought more once they owned the network they saw the REAL money is in owning the offer and being the AOR (Agency Of Record) they took it to the house.  I learned this with our ShoeMoney System offer.

But not many want the risk.

So they always will work for the man.

Recently mailchimp updated their TOS with a nice little line that prohibits Affiliate Marketing links in emails using their service.

From their page:

there are some industries that send certain types of content that result in higher than normal bounce rates and abuse complaints, which in turn jeopardize the deliverability of our entire system. No offense intended, but because we must ensure the highest delivery rates possible for all our customers, we do not allow businesses that offer these types of services, products, or content:

• Illegal goods or services
• Escort and dating services
• Pharmaceutical products
• Work from home, Internet Lead-gen, Make money on online opportunities, etc.
• Online trading, day trading tips, or stock market related content
• Gambling services, products or gambling education
• Multi-level marketing
• Affiliate marketers
• Credit repair, get-out-of-debt content
• Mortgages and/or Loans
• Nutritional Supplements, Herbal Supplements or Vitamin Supplements
• Pornography or nudity in content
• Adult novelty items or references in content
• List brokers or List rental services
• Marketing or sending commercial email without proper permission

That is interesting, considering they have their own affiliate program and also you can elect to auto include their “Badge” in your emails automatically which has your affiliate link built in (by the way this was default last I checked).

This would essentially ban any Mailchimp user. That makes sense….

I emailed Mailchimp support for comment (btw it annoys the SHIT out of me you can’t get ahold of a human at Mailchimp. EVERY other legit email service gives you a phone number where you can get a live person.)

I have heard nothing back.

I reached out to Aweber, the big player in the game, to see what their stance on it was.

Instantly I received a response:

At AWeber, we are happy to serve affiliate marketers who follow email marketing best practices when building and managing their email lists.

As is well-known both among our customers and within the email marketing industry, AWeber places the utmost importance on permission and relevance as foundations of responsible and effective email marketing.

If your business sends only relevant, valuable, wanted emails, and sends those emails only to subscribers who come directly to you and sign up to your email list, you are welcome to use AWeber to create and deliver your email marketing campaigns.

We count a number of affiliate marketers among the 100,000+ businesses who use our service, and are happy to serve more of them.

As is the case with anyone using AWeber, affiliate marketers must adhere to our service agreement. So if you are at all unsure whether AWeber is right for you, please refer to that agreement or contact us with questions.

Sidenote: I started with Aweber a long time ago but have moved on to lots of other services over the years… I have always come back to Aweber. There is no better service.

As you know FaceBook has a limitation of 5,000 friends. I have been hitting this limit for about 2 years now. Some people get really offended when I unfriend them. Like REALLY offended.

Its nothing personal… I just have a limited amount of people I can be friends with… so you probably fit one of the following criteria:

1. You were a tool in high school.
2. You scare me.
3. You troll my wall and disagree with everything I say.
4. You post nothing but negative bullshit on your own status updates about how the world fucked you.
5. You use a picture of your kid as your avatar. Don’t get me wrong I love to get friend requests from 7 year old girls… but seriously… Also like when we are comparing the best strip clubs in the world I dont want to talk to a image of your kid…  I feel like Chris Hanson is going to interrupt our conversation at any minute…
6. You dress super slutty in your profile picture and distract me from doing work.
7. You post “cryptic” messages to get attention from people, so you can play the victim.  Like “Well that really fucked me over” “I wish I had true friends”, etc etc  so all your friends comment, oh no, what happened?
8. You’re an attention whore.
9. You use your wall as your personal counseling service.  No one cares about your husband cheating on you…. again…
10. You beg me to “mentor you” or show you the “real secrets” to make 10k a day with no work involved… Hey look while writing this I just got this:

I know this probably makes me sound like a complete jerk. Probably worse then when I gave you all the reasons I delete your email without responding..

Whatever,  it’s true.