Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

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What you need to do to get started making money online

Posted: 25 Sep 2012 05:43 AM PDT

I was browsing Traffic Planet a little while back and saw a thread linking to one of my posts. I chimed in and got a question… one I get a lot. I wrote a lengthy answer that I thought I would share here:

Terry & Jeremy, as 2 people that have specialized, do you have any advice for someone at the start of the path such as myself?

Here is my response:

I am not a big fan of telling you what you need to do. All I can do is share what I have learned and how I got started.

What do you need tomorrow that would improve your life?

Doesn’t matter how small it is or if there is a service out there that kind of does it. My first big home run company started as a simple way I could upload an image and resize it to fit my phone. I had very very very basic programing skills and zero graphic ability.

I bought a book at barnes and noble and while I was working at a full time job and at night would work on the site.

Other people started using the service and within a month over 50k people were using it a day. When ringtones came out I made a similar service that allowed people to convert ringtones to the format their phone required.

Pretty basic stuff. With my programing ability now I could easily code these in a day. Back then it took me weeks while I was learning…. but I loved it.

2 years after I started the site was when Google called me and told me to put adsense on my website. That is when I got the check that became famous.

My biggest success has come from building tools I find useful and sharing it so others can use it.

In 2006 ,4 months after twitter launched, I made a service called twit this. It was the first retweet button. It’s currently on over 100 million web pages and used millions of times a day. Not a huge financial home run but, it caught fire nonetheless.

In 2007, I made ShoeMoney ads cause I was sick of Google’s restraints on what I could do with AdSense. I pretty much ripped all their code to display the ads but, instead put my own affiliate code (after all that’s all people were advertising on my site through AdSense). Cut out the middle man and made more money. I made this service available to other people. After a couple months eBay called me and said the majority of their lower end affiliates were doing well using ShoeMoney ads and we should strongly consider building an ad network around eBay. AuctionAds was born.

4 months after launch we had 25k active publishers doing over 2m a month in revenue.

In 2009, I launched ShoeMoney tools. Basically opening up all the tools that I have used to be successful over the years.

Since then I built link control and Offerpools, which didnt quite go the way I wanted them too. But the story on them is not over yet.

Since 2003, I have been sharing all of this in real time as I am learning it on shoemoney.com. Some might not consider this a service but, I never saw a site that actually shared what they were learning in building a company and what they were finding successful and not successful. Lots of people told me I was stupid for sharing the exact steps I was taking in my methods to rapidly grow these companies. Again, I offered a service I always wished was out there and people found that valuable.

I also, created a conference I always wanted to attend (a long with others) called the Elite Retreat. When we first launched it the entire industry thought we were were insane. We charged 5k a person and limited it to only 30 people. But, I had been going to big shows for years and got sick of weeding through people trying to sort out who is legit and I could learn from and possibly work together with. We are about to have our 10th show and they have been sell outs. The event is not profitable in terms of dollars but the experience sharing from others who attend is priceless.

There has been other stuff but that’s just off the top of my head.

Trying to increase your Google rank that is like no other?