Shoemoney – Skills To Pay The Bills By Jeremy Schoemaker

Ok I will contune this series a bit more…

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Most people try to leave there weaknesses in a closet. I think your weaknesses are as important as your strengths in that as long as you communicate them to the rest of your co-workers they can help you and likewise the reverse will happen.

My weaknesses would be the following:

Pride – I am very proud of the work that we do and I get overly upset at times when I see people unfairly cast a light on me projects we have worked our ass off on. I think this was probably my worst weakness years ago but being more public I have learned to let it go. You kind of start to pick and choose when you should care about someones opinion.

The biggest thing about not being able to get past your pride is you never learn from your mistakes. At one time I was so bad that when someone would critique my work my immediate repsonse would be to attack instead of actually look at what the person said and thank them for there feedback (which I try to do a lot more of now).

Temper - At times even by my closest friends I have been called a little volatile. It never gets to a physical level. I think this is a weakness I can almost write off. I have gotten much better at this then I was even 2 years ago. I think having a baby helps.

Self Discipline – Definitely my worst all time fault. I have a really hard time motivating myself to do things that I do not want to do. I guess this could also be selfish. I think I have come a long way on this one too from when I first got married and also brought other people into the company. When you are responsible for more then just yourself you learn self discipline if not for yourself for those who count on you. Even with that said I struggle with it. The best way I cope with it is I try to give myself a reward system. Like for instance I will be like ok after I finish this list of work then I will write cool code that will make me no money but will be fun as crap.

Patience - eek another tough one. I want stuff when I want it and I want it yesterday. Amazon prime is my weakness if they actually had a “send this yesterday” I would opt for that whatever it costs.

So ya I think its important to recognize your weaknesses and not be afraid of them. We are all who we are just try to make improvements one day at a time.

This has been your ShoeMoney TFS tip #6

Its been a bit since i did a Monday questions post. Sorry I got caught up. Keep them coming

James Writes:

Would be interesting to know how much you personally make from az referrals, since I read that you have more referrals under you than anyone else. Blog about it, fill us in!

First you have to keep in mind that I do not think I have ever used my affiliate ID when linking out to Azoogle and most of the time in the past I have posted there direct phone number (even my reps number) so I probably do not get near the people I have actually referred. Reason mainly being is that AzoogleAds has always been a sponsor of the shoemoney blog since we started doing advertising and I kind of feel like that would be double dipping and dirty…

However to answer your question I have about 45 refers and consistently make between 400-500$ per month from them alone.

Pat Writes:

I have a topic for your Mondays question that I have been thinking
about…. What is the effect of AdBlocks on the Net Advertising
Market?

Here is a blog post I did on it from my view (on my new blog):

Good question Pat-

Here is my thoughts on adblocking software and plugins… people savy enough to install them are not clicking on ads. I mean thats as easy as I can put it. When you have to worry is when browsers come default blocking ads. THEN THE WORLD COMES TO A END!.

I really do not think that would happen though…. Microsoft is just getting into the online advertising world and Firefox’s biggest contributors are advertising companies. Not smart to bite the hand that feeds you!

Tye Writes:

Hi Jeremy

How’s things?

What would you do with a 2003 ringtone domain name? Content Site, Aff marketing, PPC marketing, white label site?

hmmm I am guessing your using 2003 as the year the domain was registered and if that assumption is correct I am guessing your asking what do you do with a domain that does well in serps for ringtone phrases?

If that is the case then I would try to build a content site. You will burn a site out pretty bad in serps if it has only affilaite links on it (in my experience).

Tanya writes:

Shoe I saw that you are giving a presentation on SEO at eBay devcon in boston next month? What made you choose SEO?

I was asked by eBay to give a presentation on SEO and I said that if I did it would not be a classic by the book presentation but rather one based purely on my experiences. Basically not a “webmaster guidelines for seo” but more here is what I did that worked and here is what I did that did not work. They were cool with that and so its on

I can promise for those in attendence it will be kind of the alternative view to SEO (much like my contextual presentations).

Darcy Writes:

Hi Jeremy,

I have a sports card trading/community site that ranks well in google and I don’t want to screw that up.

For programming purposes, and the site’s current crappy navigation structure, I’m looking at possibly having to change from a .asp to a .aspx on the home page of my site.

Will this hurt my google page ranking?

My first question would be why do you need to change from asp to aspx. I am not a asp wizard but I am guessing you can tell the server to process asp pages like aspx ?

If you must switch over the url structure you need to be very delicate. Again I am not a asp ninja but in the unix world we use mod_rewrite to redirect old urls to point to the new ones. Maybe someone can point out a guide to the Microsoft IIS equiv to mod_rewrite.

Hope everyone is having a good memorial day!

Its pretty obvious people like full feeds better so full posts are in feeds again

I always had full RSS feeds then about hmm a month or so ago after getting a bunch of complaints i switched to partial feeds. Now getting complaints about that.

So tell me what you want.