When I first put on this shirt I was thinking “Shit I need to start working out an XL doesn’t fit me anymore and then I noticed they sent me a freak’n baby tee (medium). Thanks guys!” When I went to workmonk.com I soon found out they do the work that I do not want to do… work with small businesses. All a small business has to do is post on their site what services they would like done and BOOM it’s done!
Every year I try to write a post where I try to narrow down the top 10 ideas that I had for this year. It seems I come up with something about every week and as I look in my Google Docs under the label “Ideas” there is currently over 120 for 2011.
People seem to find value in these so I am happy to share them. They are just things I came up with that I think would work very well but, following one of the main rules of Shoeintology (focusing on the profitable projects) they have been pushed into the “maybe some day” category of ideas.
Dream Helmet
This one I think would absolutely crush it and was at the top of my list. I did not pursue it cause I have no idea how to manufacture it. But I know how to sell it!
Basically you would create a very comfortable helmet or something that would go over your ears that would be able to sense when you have reached rem sleep.
Once you are at this stage it would use pre recorded, subtle audio that would make you dream about whatever you want. Travel to a place… have sex with a super hot red head… whatever your heart desired. You could also record the messages yourself and have things like for students where they could record themselves studying.
Behind the scenes methodology: Now that is a great story in theory and follows another Shoeintology rule (we buy products based on what we tell ourselves they will do for us, not for what they actually will do). In reality who the hell knows if it works. I think it would have a placebo effect. Also like most of the population we don’t remember 97% of their dreams so, who is to say it didn’t work.
I love business models like this… its like religion. You buy it for how it makes you feel and I am confident that the Dream Helmet will help people feel better in the morning regardless if it works (placebo effect).
Review Exchange
There are tons of “pay for review” websites out there like reviewme and sponsoredposts where you pay to have your blog or site reviewed.
I think the market is ripe for a free site where you can review someones website in the marketplace and you would earn points. Then once you have points from reviewing other peoples sites you can list your site in the marketplace and your points would be spent by others when they review your site.
There obviously would need to be some controls in place where you would need to prevent people gaming the site or giving crappy reviews.
Sites would also need to be weighted with a score to determine how much they are reviewing other peoples sites… maybe alexa, compete, google pr value to the site.
For instance, if I reviewed someones site it might give me 5 points where someone with no traffic or pr value would be worth maybe 1 point or so… dunno obviously this would need to be tweaked.
What it sells for
I think there is a need for a site that agregates ebay listings for what items are actually selling for. This would be really useful for knowing what you can price stuff for locally on craigslist.
ListXchange
Much like review exchange this would be a way people could build lists but, in this case very niche focused. This concept is actually pretty simple. For instance, when you opt into my list and confirm the “thank you” page you would point to our system which would fill the page with your thank you content. Then present other people’s lists you could get on that have relavent content.
It would be purely opt in, where you would see what people are offering and check to be opt into other lists.
The more people you refer to others then the more your list would be displayed as the suggested list.
Much like review exchange this would need a user driven feedback system to weight down people who’s list are not giving value but just trying to sell you shit.
I think it is a needed service especially for people just getting started building their email lists.
Learning experience (Failure) of the year – TwitterTrain
Every Thursday night here at ShoeMoney we have our hackathon where we stay until the wee hours until we accomplish something.
Sometimes it is building a site from scratch and sometimes it is just finishing a project or a portion of a project.
A few months ago we started a service called Twitter Train. I thought it was cool because it would connect like users on Twitter and you could follow people who specified similar interests.
Well the train ran for about 48 hours until it was banned by Twitter and derailed.
I still think a service like this is needed… but Twitter hates it.
Anyway those are my best ideas from 2011 that I did not do. I am confident they are all good ideas and would work well. They are all services I would actually use.
I was on another QAQN podcast earlier this week with Daniel Clark.
Daniel is the best podcaster in the affiliate marketing business and a great interviewer.
In the podcast we discuss
Its one of the better I have done. Go here to give it a listen:
=>> http://shmny.me/dcinterview
Thanks Daniel for having me on your show again!
Internet Marketers know the value of a squeeze page… after all many studies find that a email is worth between $50-$150 over the lifetime of that user.
It appears that Obama has one hell of a smart marketing team. They have been rotating squeeze pages on whitehouse.gov for the last month or so to get into the Obama newsletter.
If you don’t know, politicians are exempt to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.
Here are the 3 variations of the squeeze pages being implemented on whitehouse.gov that I have seen:
Hopefully the whitehouse will share the conversion percentages… but I am not holding my breath =P..
“I wear my sunglasses at night….” Thanks to HostDime I know own 30+ cheap sunglasses. However, while visiting HostDime.com I couldn’t help but notice there “not so cheap” looking website or service. They are a privately owned company that provides website hosting to over 1,000,000 domains. So, if you are looking for someone to host your site or manage other services check out HostDime.
Lots of times we get inquiries about the traffic to this site. Its neat to see live traffic come into your blog. Sometimes distracts me a bit.
I wanted to put this together for a while and finally got around to it yesterday. This is from our platform we built for our Elite Internet Solutions division which is a full service platform that integrates live traffic, social media, SEO performance and even mailing list management.
This is obviously just the live traffic portion.
Here is a low bandwidth YouTube version:
If you want to download the full res high quality version (also should work on iPads)
By far the question I get hit up about on here, email, Facebook is what is the fastest way to make money online.
I usually despise the question but ironically I was doing a talk last weds at a local school and got this exact question.
Keep in mind I had 2 hours and was about 1 hour in. I started to take live questions. Course the first one was:
“All of this long term talk is great but how can I make a quick buck online without spending any money”.
Ugh really… I figured screw it and was going to show them live… hopefully how to make $10 in ten minutes (and probably get banned but demonstrate how it works).
I brought up a volunteer who had NO CLUE what affiliate marketing is. I gave her control of my keyboard and mouse.
She went and logged into my CJ account and got my affiliate link for this insurance program that pays $5 on 3 page submit to see if you can get a better rate on car insurance.
I then told her to craigslist local forum and I had her post a question saying:
Hey guys I went to this site and it said I would save $100 every six months if I switched providers. Just curious if anyone has any experience with these and if there are any hidden fees or tricks??
Oh almost forgot here was the page:
http://www.tinyurl/someinsurancelink
Appreciate your feedback as I am skeptical.
It took only 6 minutes unit someone did the survey and we made $5. I told everyone to give her a round of applause on how she was on pace to make $50 a hour…
Then said I give it 5 minutes until its flagged for spam.
I continued to WARN people that this WAS a REAL LIFE example on how to make a quick buck. BUT there is a chance that
When the talk was over I refreshed the page and over 10 people had completed the survey making $50 total. The post had been removed for spam too.
I went on to talk about the dangers of this “quick buck” method and how stupid it was.
But it didn’t matter… the kids were enthralled by it and the next ten questions were all about what else they could do to “make a quick buck online” I gave them 10 other ideas that I am confident would make them quick money. And probably get them in trouble…. I gave the disclaimer a lot that while this worked I did not advise it.
I guess the thing is everyone starts somewhere and if thats what they need to do to understand how affiliate marketing works then so be it… I would be a COMPLETE liar if I said I have not had accounts banned for doing stupid stuff like that when I was getting started.
Anyway I focued the talk on another piece of the ShoeMoney Mantra (Shoeintology) on the question of ”What is a key factor on being successful in a long term affiliate marketing strategy and I said really its to understand… err better yet to be blunt exploit peoples passions for profit. Yes I said it..
It works best if you are also passionate or very understanding about the subject.
Lets look at the most profitable niches:
While there are endless affiliate programs for these niches, we have found the best way is to capture the users and monetize them for ever. The people interested in these subjects become your assets where you are building a real business. Some of these sites, in addition to affiliate revenue, I have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I pointed them to a webinar where I outline this cutting edge technique
I want to finish by saying the above method is completely not recommended. With that said… again… if you are just getting started and want to understand the process of how affiliate marketing works… and like me can take that and roll it into something that wont get you in trouble then… How can I discourage that.
Anyway please don’t take this as “ShoeMoney says affiliate marketing is all about spamming”.
But whatever. People know I cut to the chase and give real life examples from my experience. So there it is.
Flippa will soon be releasing their next “State of the Website Economy” report and they’re focusing this time on investment multiples – the number of years revenue that buyers are paying for a site.
There’s no surprise that the multiples tend vary depending on the sort of site you’re looking at.
Website niche and revenue model are two big influencers – not all audiences were created equal.
Sports, health and automotive websites score higher than other niches, with a price-to-earnings ratio of 1.5-2.5.
Compare this to the ratios for tech sites and even internet marketing sites – the latter typically go for less than the equivalent of 6 months of revenue. Even home and garden sites, which, on average, sell at 14 months revenue, tend to fare better.
The lowest-valued niche, however, tends to be shopping sites, with an average price-to-earnings ratio of just 0.4. This aligns with the findings that sales multiples are also highly variable across different monetization methods –especially for online shopping.
Online spending by consumers may be on the rise, but ecommerce sites typically sell for lower multiples than ad-based sites.
The lower price-to-earnings ratio of 0.5 on ecommerce sites, may be due to the costs and risks associated with holding inventory – ecommerce sites were classified separately to referral or drop-ship sites that sell for ratios of over 1. Ad-funded sites come out on top with an average price-to-earnings ratio of 1.4.
Finally, we’re reminded that as businesses grow, so do their valuation multiples.
“The price-to-earnings ratios on a typical revenue-generating website on Flippa is around 1.1, which means many buyers are earning their acquisition price back in just over a year,” said Flippa General Manager Dave Slutzkin. “Someone looking to buy out AOL at the current share price would be waiting over 20 years for the same outcome.”
So ya…
As I wrote about in July I tore all the meniscus in my left knee and could not put any weight on it until November. So I have been able to walk for 2 months but the fight with barman is not going to happen. Call me a pussy or whatever but my knee is not worth re-injuring and my doctor said it would be really stupid for me to get in a mma fight that could involve wrestling or other odd angles (or getting KTFO) that would shred my not healed knee.
It will happen in the future. I am disappointed its not going to happen at this years 2012 ASW event.
Props to Barman for accepting. I take full responsibility for this not happening.
Sorry to disappoint. It would have been a lot of fun (win or lose).
Now…. for the interesting part. Clickbooth is having a fight night… totally swacking our idea. I just want to be clear I have NOTHING to do with this. Barman nor I knew nothing about it.
As many of you probably know I have been working on a book for … what seems like an eternity now. A bout a month ago I figured I would just go through the chapters on video and get it out there.
You can access the videos, mp3, and transcribed PDF’s Here
This is the process that we go through here at ShoeMoney.
Here is the chapters:
PPC.org focuses on generating results through PPC, SEO and Social Media. They provide a start to finish walk through of all methods used for pay per click marketing.
Been getting several of the same question so thought I would quickly address them.
Jeremy do I have to be located in the United States to win?
No, in fact the last 2 winners were located outside of the United States (Canada, New Zealand )
Do I have to have a popular blog to win?
Not at all. Again if you look at the last 2 winners their sites had less than a dozen posts and almost no traffic. The goal is by putting up a post it lets you be more creative and take your time in writing.
I told you in a comment that I wanted to win does that count?
No you must have made a post somewhere on the internet and put the link to that post in the comments of this one.
The rules for this contest are very straight forward. Please make sure you read this post.
