Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

The Unreal Ride Of Successes and Mistakes in 10 years of MMO

Posted: 05 Jan 2015 01:28 PM PST

Recently I got my monthly reminder to send the monthly recap as December came to a close. But it’s the 1st of January so then I thought, well maybe I should do a year review.

But it’s actually much bigger than that.

My Google Adsense check, otherwise known as THE Check, was issued September of 2005.

Yup. I started making my first dollar 10 years ago this year. My Adwords account was created January 15th 2005.

I remember the first time I made a dollar in a day. I was so excited to show my wife. It evolved slowly and didn’t do much for a bit. I actually took it off if my site cause I thought it was too distracting and misleading.

I focused instead on making my ringtone site awesome. Then I got fired from my day job and filed for unemployment. I wasn’t in the best shape financially at the time. My girlfriend was in medical school and we were planning a big giant wedding that we were funding ourselves with money we didn’t have.

So there I was. Lots of payments and a huge amount of credit card debt. No job. 420 lbs.

Well at-least I get my $350 a week unemployment check!!

My fiancé encouraged me to work on my website and start working for myself. I had zero confidence this would work.

With my site my priorities were 99% building a cool site and 1% making money. Even in the financial position I was in.

Ironically, at the same time, I got a call from a Google Adsense Rep who said she noticed I had a lot of mobile traffic (the site was now doing 100k uniques a day) and that I had a Google Adsense account but wasn’t using it. She asked if I had any questions or problems and how she can help me get it reimplemented. I told her I honestly didn’t like it cause I thought the ads were a bit misleading and made for a bad user experience.

She said they had a program for people with my concerns and it paid out significantly more. She also said it gave me much more flexibility with the way I wanted to present the ads.

She was a bit relentless and after analyzing my stats she said she would guarantee that I would be making a minimum $300 a day if what I told her was accurate.

I was like, ya right, but she was like gimme 10 mins and I’ll walk you through making the ad. She said all i needed was to have access to the server and a little bit of html knowledge or her developer would be available to help and the ad campaign would be up and going in no time.

Here is the funny thing, her remark asking me if I had basic html knowledge motivated me. I was gonna show this chick who she was dealing with and get it up and running on my site in no time.

After a couple of hours of implementing it I was blown away. In the first 12 hours I had made more money than I ever made in a month working my ass off for “the man”.

Less than 2 months after implementing, the big check for 132k was produced.

In those first couple months with Google Adsense I had made more than 2x what I had made my entire life combined.

How fucked up is that. Literally a side effect of my hobby, and passion project, in a couple months made me 2x more money than what I had made in my entire life.

Obviously, I was completely blown away by this. But I was confident it wasn’t going to last. I don’t remember the exact date or time but I put printed out a number in huge font on paper and pinned these around my house.

2740

This number was the exact dollar amount that I needed to make everyday in order to make a million dollars in a year.

Making money was my new hobby. I was fascinated by it. Screw Google Adsense, I was making much more doing direct advertising deals with Sprint and Nextel. I implemented a subscription paid forum, started selling phone accessories and even got money for donations.

By the end of first quarter in 2006, I had a new number pinned around my house.

33335

That’s what I needed to make everyday to hit a million a month (in profit before taxes).

Not counting selling a company or website I have never hit that number (a million in one month in profit). Till this day, I still have that number pinned.

In the last decade, I think my best month ever was about 750k in profit and that was produced in really about 20 days.

The past decade has been a crazy roller coaster. CRAZY.

Looking back though it seems to have always been the same recipe. Whether it was my ringtone site NextPimp, AuctionAds, ShoeMoney Tools, ShoeMoney System, Link Control, etc etc all of these were items I built because they were fun and I gave them away for free. In the case of my blog I turned down advertising for many years until almost 2008.

BUT the biggest thing is once I started monetizing each of these, they all changed. All of them in different ways of course.

With my ringtone site I totally stopped focusing on the user community and was squeezing out every dime. Over many years traffic kept falling off and eventually it went to nil until a company bought it because of its SEO rankings.

For AuctionAds, it didn’t affect it really because I sold the company before it was profitable. I was only 4 months into it and I had a lot of initial expenses and because of the model it wasn’t producing revenue. I didn’t really care though because I had so much income coming in from doing PPC, affiliate stuff, and from residual income from my ringtone site. I can’t disclose what it sold for but I can tell you each employee of the company received millions of dollars.

With ShoeMoney Tools as soon as I started charging to use the tools, stopped development and maintenance of them, and solely focused on getting more users subscriptions the tools itself started to fail. Revenue went from 300k/month to 30k/month in about a year and a half.

And the story goes on and on…

I have been writing month to month about the drastic transition this year has been for myself and my company. I turned 40 and started to figure out what I want to do.

Taking all this into account and analyzing my biggest strength and weakness I discovered I CAN do everything and often times I take over items when I shouldn’t. Which really leads to nothing being accomplished really well.

For the first time publicly I will reveal my partners in my newest company. Bryan Zimmerman, CEO of the largest affiliate network jvzoo.com, Chuck Mullaney who has an extensive amount of experience owning his own email marketing company as well as experience in internet marketing, and another person who still doesn’t want to be named (you wouldn’t know him anyway but he’s our CTO and he has built applications that are unparalleled to anything out there).

All of us have put away a lot of cash over the last decade and are ready to build our legacy. We also raised an initial seed fund from a private investor for $650,000.00.

We are all in agreement that our primary focus is to build the most innovative email marketing platform the world has ever seen. We already had a lot of the core components from the PAR Program but all are in agreement we will be relentless in innovation to truly create the next evolution of email marketing.

We call it Market Notify. We just opened up the beta application page here. You will notice it’s not just a “sign up to be notified when the beta launches” type of thing. We ask you for information about your list, how many people you have, and other information. We will be inviting people as we grow and are positive we can accept the volume of new users. Beta users must agree to give us feedback.

For this when you are accepted into the beta program we will give you a 50% discount for life. You will also have first access to our affiliate program. With our affiliate program we are planning to beat every other email platform’s commission by double (or more).

All of us, as owners, are all in agreement our primary focus is not to make money but rather to build our legacy with an amazing email marketing platform that will truly change email marketing as you know it. We are focused on having a great community of users and building the application to be extremely user friendly.

I believe this is what I was meant to build. It all circles back, as I am now back to being in my basement doing what I love… building cool & innovative shit.

I couldn’t be more excited. If you haven’t already, fill out the beta application and be part of it.

ProBlogger: Make Money Blogging: Start the New Year by Increasing Your Income Streams

Make Money Blogging: Start the New Year by Increasing Your Income Streams

Posted: 05 Jan 2015 06:55 AM PST

It’s the aim of the majority of the readers of this site – make an income via your blog. Today we revisit the post where Darren outlined all the ways he diversified his streams and how after 10 years he was still going strong. We also have a look at the Ways to Make Money Map – make sure you also see the Make Money Page, if you haven’t already. It’s a great place to begin, or to refresh your memory.

Today I was speaking with a blogger (I’ll call her Alice for the sake of this post) who was feeling a little overwhelmed with the idea of monetizing her blog. She expressed that as she looked at other blogs in her niche, everyone seemed to be doing such amazing things. She said she felt she’d never be able to compete.

Other blogs in Alice’s niche were running online courses, selling out hundred people live events around the country, selling ads to fortune 500 companies, authoring best selling eBook and more. The thought of even beginning to monetize her blog in these ways was completely paralysing Alice!

It is so easy to be overwhelmed to the point of paralysis when you look at what other bloggers are doing. I know this from personal experience!

My advice to Alice was to keep in mind that all those other amazing blogs started in the same place that she was – without any income streams at all.

Often it is easy to forget this and see a successful blog as always being what it is today.

By way of illustration, I shared my own story

When I started blogging, I did it as a hobby. I had no intention of it ever being more than that and there were no examples of people directly monetizing blogs.

Over the coming year and a half, my blog grew in popularity and the hobby became something of a passion and obsession. It also began to cost me money to run for hosting, domain, design etc.

Phase 1

Blogging Income 6

I began to dabble in monetizing with the hope of simply covering my costs. My first experiments were with Google AdSense and the Amazon Affiliate Program. The results weren’t spectacular but they were encouraging enough for me to keep trying. A few dollars began to trickily in but more importantly – I was learning a lot!

Phase 2

Over the coming months I continued to experiment with AdSense and Amazon. I vastly improved how I was implementing the programs (better ad positioning, writing reviews for affiliate products). I also began to think about how to drive more traffic to my blog. I even started a second blog (and then more followed)!

The results were that my income began to grow. I began to see my blogging as a part-time job and even began to wonder if it could one day be full-time.

Over the coming year I also began to also look at other forms of monetization.

Blogging Income 6

During this time I started promoting affiliate programs with other online stores. I also did something that terrified me but which became a great income stream, I picked up the phone and began to sign up advertisers directly. This was a period where I had to bite the bullet and start to treat blogging not just as a hobby – but as a business.

Again – these new income streams started small and were experiments. My first ad sale was for $20 for a month long ad. It didn’t bring me overnight riches but securing the ad taught me a lot and contributed to my overall income.

It was around this time I realised that while none of my income streams were enough to sustain me alone, a blog could actually sustain multiple sources of small income that could add up to something significant.

My goal was to go full time as a blogger. To do that I knew I needed to grow multiple streams of income and my blog’s traffic.

Phase 3

It was around this time that other Advertising Networks began to appear. I experimented with quite a few but the one I had most success with was Chitika. At the time, AdSense was my #1 source of income but putting Chitika on my site almost doubled that income overnight and allowed me to go full time as a blogger!

Blogging Income 6

Of course it wasn’t just that Chitika worked well. I’d also been growing my traffic, building reader engagement/community etc – but the extra income stream helped a lot.

Phase 4

It was around this time that I’d started ProBlogger as a blog along with a whole new range of income streams. I did monetize ProBlogger in the early days, using all of the above income streams but I found that ProBlogger was actually better to monetize indirectly.

By ‘indirect monetization’ I mean that ProBlogger began to grow my own personal profile and authority on the topic of blogging and I began to be approached to provide products and services that I could sell. The blog itself didn’t necessarily make money – but it enabled ME to make money as a result of the blog.

Blogging Income 6

For example, it was through ProBlogger that I landed my first paid speaking opportunity. I was asked to fly to Washington DC to speak at a conference – (all expenses covered plus a small fee paid).

Around the same time, I was approached to write the ProBlogger Book (the hard cover one that is now in it’s 3rd edition). This only came off the back of the ProBlogger blog.

Similarly, around this time I began to offer my services as a consultant to help people with their blogging strategy (a service I don’t offer any more).

Once again, these income streams started small (in fact writing a Book isn’t generally a big income stream for most authors) but they each contributed to the overall revenue from my blogging, which was now adding up to be a lot more than I’d ever earned from any other job (keeping in mind that I’d been blogging now for 4-5 years).

Phase 5

Most of the above income streams have continued to grow but other opportunities have presented themselves as new technologies emerge. While I’d previously been approached to create a hard copy book, we began to see the emergence of eBooks. While people previously had asked me to speak at their live events we began to see people delivering content via virtual/online courses and conferences.

Blogging Income 6

I began to experiment with creating eBooks and membership areas to my sites. eBooks have gone on to become my main income stream (both with ProBlogger eBooks and Photography eBooks). The main income from eBooks tends to come in fits and starts, when we either launch a new eBook or run a sale/promotion on one but even when we don’t have these events happening they still steadily sell each day in small numbers. Again, contributing to the overall revenue.

I also added the Job board here at ProBlogger.

The job board is an interesting example of what I’m talking about today. It has never been a spectacularly huge income stream but it has actually been a pretty steady source of income over the years. We generally see 1-2 new blogger jobs advertised every day and that $50-$100 per day in income adds up over time. I’ve not got the exact figures but I’d estimate that over the last 5 years it has brought in over $100,000! I’m glad I started it!

By this stage my income was growing to the point where I was able to bring on others into my team. This started with some very part time outsourcing of small jobs but in more recent times has enabled me to hire a number of team members to help run different components of my business.

Phase 6

The final income stream has become a growing focus of my team and I (although I have to say it’s not a massive income stream at this point) has been running events and conferences.

Our annual ProBlogger Training Event here in Australia has grown in number each year and this year we think it’ll probably turn a small profit. Having said that, my intent with these events is not to make a lot of money. Rather, it is about giving something back to the Aussie Blogosphere (it is also great for branding and gives me a lot of personal satisfaction and fun).

We’ve also started to run some smaller more focused workshops (our Email Marketing workshop in Melbourne still has a handful of spots left).

Blogging Income 6

My suspicion is that events will be something we’ll see expand a little in the coming years.

Final Thoughts

Let me sum up with a few thoughts, disclaimers and words of encouragement:

Keep in mind that all of the above has happened over 10 years. While today there are obviously 12 or so income streams (although I’m sure I’m forgetting something) they all started quite small and as experiments.

There have been moments where it did seem like I had rushes of income, those rushes were usually the result of several years work and investment of time and money.

I also would say that in each case, I started each experiment not really knowing what I was doing (on at least some level) but really seeing the experiments as a chance to learn. For example, my first eBooks were taking previously published blog posts and updating, completing and adding to them to offer readers a more convenient way to access my content.

At the time I had no idea if that would work and the design and delivery of the eBooks was fairly basic. In time I learned what did and didn’t work and was able to grow the sophistication of my delivery systems, design, authoring and marketing to the point that it’s become a fairly well-oiled machine.

The key is to pick something to try and to see whether it connects with your readership and to learn as much as you can while you’re doing it. Often you end up evolving what you do to the point that it is a better fit for you and your blog – but you’ll never get to that point without starting.

Update: I’ve since published a followup to this post that gives a split of the different income streams.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Make Money Blogging: Start the New Year by Increasing Your Income Streams