Jeremy Schoemaker aka Shoemoney gave a great closing Keynote at Affiliate Summit West 2012 Las Vegas #ASW12. The main theme from his speech was “Be willing to do what others are not”.
Many of you guys who saw my speeches at A4uExpo, Affiliate Summit and Affili@Syd may remember I talked about Shoemoney’s Facebook Ad Board study, and his amazing story how he was 400lbs and massively overweight, $50,000 in debt, smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day, unemployed, lonely and played multiplayer games for 16 hours a day … Then he met the woman of his dreams, lost the weight, and got into internet marketing and just 3 years to the day after he made his first dollar online, he had $10 million in the bank.
Here it the video and below are all my notes from Shoemoney’s keynote:
Tells story about girl Melissa he liked in school, he would buy her jewellery, everything, but got denied. She wanted to go see a dog and he bought the dog for $250, then she traded the dog for pot!
Best Buy Refund Scheme
Shoemoney was working at Best Buy, for these speakers the employee cost was $75, sold for $379
He was going to buy at employee price, then give it to a friend and get him to take it back to Best Buy for a refund at full price, it worked 🙂
So after 50 times doing this he had a completely decked out home system at 19 years old. But Best Buy had this whole investigation going on as they were missing hundreds of thousands of revenue, it was actually these store managers doing something else. Shoemoney befriended a person investigating and told him what he was doing, Best Buy didn’t like it.
One day working at BestBuy Shoemoney is told to go out front, the Police are there waiting so Shoe got busted and had to go to court, had to borrow money and get an attorney.
Attorney says you never declared a value, you didn’t break any rules, Judge says:
– Best buy has no policy on refunds
– People who refunded the product never declared a value
– They didn’t break any rules
So you are not guilty, and Best Buy had to pay back for the 9 months wrongful dismissal
Because of Shoemoney, now Best Buy made a Nation Wide Policy Change – you have to show ID and they give you the lowest price it ever sold for
Recently, on phone with Melissa chick from High School again, she says tell me what exactly you do to make money, he says I make sites that add value to people. Melissa says, I want to get started, “I don’t even have Facebook installed yet”
Catholic Church – Shoemoney says religion is perfect business model, only one can be correct, and if you are wrong, no refunds
Obstacles at the moment – Affiliate Nexus Tax
Shoemoney started learning online using forums like DigitalPoint and WickedFire
“Be willing to do what others are not”
Bill Gates – Sold DOS to IBM before he had even written one line of code. Was willing to do what others were not
Steve Jobs – Says Steve Jobs started by ripping off Xerox, conned them into letting him borrow his computer, completely copied the code over and that was the first Mac OS
But how will Bill Gates and Steve Jobs go down in history? They don’t go down for that, they are remembered as some of the greatest technical people and successes of our time. Bill Gates will be remembered as this great philanthropist and incredibly brilliant guy. But they started because they were willing to do what others were not willing to do
John Chow – Shoe gave the example of John Chow, who makes $40,000 a month with his blog called “I Make Money Online by Telling People I Make Money Online” – he is willing to do things people are not.
John’s site says when you sign up through my affiliate link for Hostgator, I will install WordPress and install all the plugins I use (then John pays some monkey $5 to do it)
Google Adwords – Another example was Shoemoney used some tricks with his Google Adwords Ads like using foreign characters and putting tags in his Google Adwords Ads which made certain text bold. People say – you will get banned if you do that, but he never did.
Microsoft AdCenter – the way they used to determine quality score was they would just let you do as many keywords as you want and they just dropped non-performing ones. So Shoemoney had 30 accounts and uploaded all the keywords that had been used on CNET – which was 22 million keywords. People said – they will ban you and come after you – but Microsoft actually called Shoemoney in and made him a consultant.
Facebook Ads – Even with Facebook Ads, Shoemoney pushed the boundaries with sketchy Russian dating ads. Again, instead of getting in any trouble, Facebook actually called Shoemoney in to be a consultant.
Seems like there are new opportunities every day, like:
Retargeting – seeing 80x ROI on products
Back to the story about Melissa, she got in touch and said “I think I missed the boat, too much competition now”. But when Shoemoney launched AuctionAds in 2007, there were 8 other companies doing the same thing. Had to find creative ways to get users. (This is a good point, I think entering very competitive markets can be very lucrative if you can find new or creative ways to get new customers).
AuctionAds
Shoemoney’s company AuctionAds would pay out net zero payments, so they would effectively pay affiliates after 30 days, even though eBay didn’t pay for 90 days. Got the big boys like John Chow to push his campaigns.
When AuctionAds was sold, they had 25,000 active publishers, millions in revenue, and made 2 employees millionaires overnight.
Leaving Points:
– Recognise the opportunity
– Be willing to do what others are not. That is the difference between people that are successful and those that are not
