Posts Tagged ‘Shoemoney’
If you’ve been following developments in affiliate marketing, you might’ve seen 16-year old affiliate Harrison Gevirtz (right) blog or met him at a conference. Posting at Shoemoney’s blog recently on “How I Optimize My PPC Campaigns“, it’s easy to see how marketers might be overly focused on his age or the fact that he earns about a 6-figure net profit each month from his PPC campaigns.
Just as celebrity fans check the magazines to find out who’s dating who, what they wore to the MTV awards, or who they’re currently feuding with, likewise in the internet marketing world, legions of marketers constantly scour the blogs and forums to find out what a successful marketer’s shopping trip cost, how much they paid (or overpaid) for a rare painting, or just pictures of their $1,000 dinner.
While reading this news can be a source of motivation for some, the risk in spending just about all your time on this pursuit can be detrimental to your business growing efforts.
I’ve been talking to my friend NickyCakes about issues of time management and prioritization, here are a couple of issues for consideration:
- Prioritization: Are you spending 90% of your time relaxing, spending your time checking out cool stuff to buy, planning your next vacation, researching your business (ie: reading blogs and forums, chatting over IRC), leaving 10% of your time to actually running your business? Or should it be the other way around?
- Focus: How much of what you are doing now will help you get what you want? Or could that time be better spending doing something more productive?
- “Secrets” of Internet Marketing: As mentioned by guests on the Friday Podcast, although you can learn strategies and techniques from blogs, forums, books, courses and networking at seminars and conferences, ultimately your success will rely on taking action, as well as testing and measuring your results. If you’re looking for a magic wand or magic dust to achieved your desired income level, you could be looking for a long time.
You can check out Harrison’s tips on setting up his PPC campaigns.
In addition to producing my own Friday Podcast series, a major source of information for me is listening to audio programs and podcasts.
I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.
Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.
My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.
If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.
Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and (more…)
I was talking to PPC Super Affiliate Amit Mehta about our Internet Marketing efforts yesterday and the topic of how much income my blogging generates came up.
On a conservative basis, I’d say that monetization from my blogging alone amounts to somewhere in the mid to higher 4 figure range per month.
Which is a pittance compared to some of the “Super Bloggers” out there.
There’s a lot of talk these days about how much the top bloggers make, especially in the light of Business Week’s “Bloggers Bring In The Big Bucks” story.
Although I know Darren Rowse and Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker and visit Mario Lavandeira’s PerezHilton and Pete Cashmore’s Mashable, the names on the list were alien to me.
It’s a testament that blogging is an open field and you pick your niche and can do well with it.
But if you’re clued in to the power of blogging, you’d realize that the payoff from blogging comes outside of blogging.
If you listened in to the episode of the Net Income radio show where Shoemoney had Matt Mullenweg, part of the team which developed the WordPress blogging platform, the real money comes as a result of having blogged, rather than because of blogging.
If you missed that episode of Net Income, you can check it out:
As an example, Darren Rowse is a founder of the B5Media blog network, which receive venture funding earlier this year and Shoemoney’s income also comes from promoting CPA offers and developing AuctionAds with partner-in-crime Dave Dellanave AKA Dillsmack. AuctionAds was recently acquired by Media Whiz for an undisclosed sum.
Personally, blogging is a platform to (more…)
There’s gold in Internet Marketing podcasts from the perspective of a listener, and if you listen closely enough, you might sometimes catch bits of invaluable information that drip off stream-of-consciousness style from the podcasts hosts or their guests.
Daron Babin’s (SE Guru) WebmasterRadio.fm is home to a ton of great content and I listen to many of the great shows there.
This week, Affiliate Thing, hosted by Revenue Editor-in-chief Lisa Picarille and Affliate Summit co-founder and affiliate marketing fixture Shawn Collins talked about the new podcast shows like:
and the new Shoemoney Show. (I guess Jeremy might have a little more time following the sale of AuctionAds to Media Whiz)
It was great to hear that Shawn listens to my Friday Podcast and mentioned it on the episode “The British Invasion: Affiliate Style” as well as on his blog entry “The Podcasts on my iPod“.
Besides checking out Affiliate Thing and the Shoemoney show, I also recommend new affiliate marketers to check out the “Affiliate Marketing Today” podcasts. Although the show is currently inactive, it’s worth checking out the archive for episodes hosted by Super Affiliate Jeremy Palmer. The 2004-2005 episodes hosted by ABestWeb founder Haiko de Poel are an excellent primer.
Although it might sound like I listen to many podcasts, I usually have a couple of gig on my hard disk and listen to it when I can.
I have a Nokia N73 Music Edition smart phone with about 2GB of memory on it, at the moment I’ve got John Carlton’s “Kickass Copywriting Secrets of a Marketing Rebel” and Mike Litman/Matt Bacak’s “Ultimate Lifestyle Workshop” on it. The rest of the memory is taken up by video footage of my daughter, Bianca Wee.
Carsten Cumbrowski has podcast resources listed at his resource site Cumbrowski.com.
I just bought about $400 worth of used teleconferencing equipment off eBay (and had to pay about $30 in taxes when it got to Singapore), so you might hear more interesting Friday Podcasts in the near future.
In the meantime, if I had a wishlist of podcast shows, I would be interested in tuning in to (more…)
Shawn Collins’ and Missy Ward’s Affiliate Summit East has wrapped up in Miami and it has provided some buzz, even from where I’m at halfway around the world.
If you didn’t make it down, Shawn has posted a listing of WebProNews’ video coverage of the event.
Jim Kukral seems to have been holed up in the Blogging Room the entire event and has posted quite a bit of content. Pity I wasn’t down there, else I’d have visited him once or twice (For real this time, Jim…)
He did post this marvel of a pic though:
Missy Ward and Internet Girl Geek Stephanie [Let me emphasize that’s it’s SIMULATED]
Shawn has also blogged about ASE:
5Star Affiliate Linda Buquet has linked to the Affiliate Summit East blog posts. [Incidentally I won 5Star’s “Blog Buzz” prize a week back. Thanks Linda!].
Shoemoney has posted his reflections on Affiliate Summit East and has a number of interesting photos in his photo gallery.
Super Affiliate Zac Johnson, who spoke at ASE, has posted (more…)
Most PPC Marketers would probably send traffic direct to the Affiliate Marketing/CPA (cost per acquistion/action) offers landing page. But here’s an idea, build a niche community, like the folks at newly launched Boomj.com are doing.
You might’ve received a notification about the site targeting Baby Boomers and “Generation Joneses” last week.
It appears to be a fairly “mass” campaign, rather than a targeted one because I’m clearly a “Gen Xer” (born between 1965-79).
Although guys like Shoemoney, PepperJam’s Kris Jones, Gauher Chaudhry and Amit Mehta do really well with PPC traffic to CPA offers, I’m thinking that building a dedicated niche community helps you get better leverage out of your lead generation efforts.
With Gauher’s background in information marketing, I’m sure he’s one of the frontrunners in putting this process into action.
This requires a paradigm shift, from going beyond just a product-based focus to (more…)
