I get asked all the time about who I follow or who I look at as a mentor.
My answer is that I listen to everyone but I do not follow anyone.
However, with that said, the guy who had by far the biggest impact on my internet career is Seth Godin.
If you don’t own The Dip & All Marketers are Liars (Now renamed All Marketers Tell Stories), get them.
Here is an email I sent Seth back in 2008. I don’t want to post his response in respect to his privacy but he is a VERY giving person and we have kept in touch from time to time since. He came on my
1. radio show for an interview
and even spoke at my Elite Retreat Conference.
He is an amazing role model for the internet marketing industry.
Here is the email I sent him in 2008. As you can see my writing was horrid back then… well its not THAT much better but he never even commented on that.:
From: Jeremy Schoemaker
Date: Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 4:10 PM
Subject: Your Impact On My Life
To: Seth Godin
Dear Seth-
I am sure you get emails like this all the time but I wanted to personally tell you how you books have effected me. Your books have changed my life. I have owned many companies in the last couple years and have gone from a negative networth to now over 10m personal and a very successful, stable business.
The Dip made me take a long hard look at all the companies I was trying to do. For a long time I was running 6 different corporations all doing pretty good revenues. The real message of the dip to me was to focus on items not only that I could be #1 at but that were related to other items.
For instance with the shoemoney brand I am #1 in my space.
I have the shoemoney.com blog, ShoeMoney Tools internet tools marketing suite, and the ShoeMoney Elite Retreat conference. All of which are #1 in their space and offer a great service. Also every time one of them do well they bring the whole company does well they all do well.
At the same time I was trying to maintain nextpimp.com and fighters.com as well as my offline business arbitraging computers.
The dip helped me see that nextpimp and fighters by themselves were monster projects that perhaps if I tackled them alone I could be #1 but doing all of these at the same time there was just no way with the resources I had. So I sold them.
In March of 2007 I launched a service called AuctionAds. It was a advertising network that showed auctions on eBay in a nice contextual format. Long story short 4 months later we had over 25,000 users and were doing over 2 million dollars per month in revenue. In July of 2007 I sold the company (only 4 months later). Many people have asked me how in the world we built the advertising network so fast. It was really the dip that helped a ton. I knew I had to do what others were not willing to do. I embraced te dip and did amazing extraordinary things. For instance I discovered pretty quick that people were so adverse to change that we needed to incentivize them to run the ad code on their site. So I gave every new user 5$ if they “tested” the code on their site for 1 month. I found less then 3% of these users ever took the code of their page and since our minimum payout was 10$ we did very well with that.
All marketers are liars really taught me why my blog at shoemoney.com is so successful. My story of going from 420lbs. smoking 2 packs a day, and being over 50k in credit card debt to where I am today is quite a magical story
Anyway not that you would ever need my testimonial or a guest speaker somewhere but anything I can ever do please let me know!
Truly yours,
Jeremy
Jeremy Schoemaker
President
ShoeMoney Capital LLC
twitter – @shoemoney
phone: (402)306-5750
0 comments:
Post a Comment