Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills |  |
| May Recap and behind the scenes at ShoeMoney Posted: 01 Jun 2015 07:13 AM PDT Yesterday was my 41’st birthday. Seems like just yesterday I was re-writing my recap a year ago talking about my epiphany I had on my 40th birthday about the past, present, and future of my business. Lot of stuff has changed. The ShoeMoney Network has been the most interesting thing that has happened to me in the last 30 days. A month ago I opened it somewhat in stealth mode with me doing all the programing, content creation, and customer support. That didn’t last long. 15 days ago (actually on the 12th of April) I asked John Chow to blog about it and that created a giant viral ball. As of today we are averaging 2,000 – 3,000 new users a day. Payout out to users $10,000 to $20,000 users per day. It’s been interesting. So now I find myself in an interesting position. I have always had a skill for building things and growing them rapidly but as soon as they become a real business – meaning it needs employees, customer service and all that, I lose interest, it becomes a grind… Right now I am excited about growing this new company and taking it to the moon. I want to work with affiliates, building landing pages, split testing, media buys, monetization, conversion. What I am good at. Reality is I already have a lot on my plate. The PAR Program has a solid customer base but I have decided to stop taking on clients unless they are very significant (10k+/month). Instead of having people scout prospects and set up sales calls I am having them transition to answer all the support requests we are getting on the ShoeMoney Network. Its averaging about 500 per day as it is. I am not abandoning PAR by any means. I know there are a lot of rumors out there about be selling it or merging that company with another company – and to be honest there has been talks about it – more on the side of a company acquiring the technology behind it than actually buying the company – very similar to when I sold AuctionAds. If the right company and offer comes along then something could happen but I am in no hurry. After all I am the biggest user of the platform. I have been in this situation with something new and hot many times. AuctionAds, FreeSeoReport, ShoeMoney Tools, ShoeMoney System, NextPimp, TwitThis, and many other companies that caught fire. But most have the same M.O.. Either I have sold them within 6-8 months after launch or they started to decline after they became a real business. But with each one came priceless experience and education that brought me to this point in my life. With the ShoeMoney Network, as much as it pains me, I have to be patient. Instead of employees in this company I am bringing in contractors or people on a rev share. For my employees I currently have I hope to move them soon into a contractor position where they get a percentage of profits instead of salary. They will make much more and I will not have the monkey on my back of salaried employees. Sounds weird but its a big thing for me. As I said above I have learned what I am good at and what I am not. In the past I was hesitant to delegate out what I am not good at cause I felt I was being lazy or because I didn’t like doing it I shouldn’t dish it off to an employee because they wouldn’t like doing it. Yes I actually felt that way in the past. But employees are there primarily just for that. Sounds so simple I know but I can’t tell you how many companies I have built to a million dollars in revenue in a very short amount of time start to go south because of those primary reasons. So what do I do different with this company to keep it rapidly growing, me interested in it, but not fuck it up. I think everyone has to have a management style and there is no clear cut “one size fits all” one. What I do now is at the beginning of every week put together a diagram of key tasks that need to be accomplished, which is easy, but then also include all the pre-requisite tasks that need to be done by employees in order for those key tasks to be possible. For instance – I am ten steps ahead already on growing the company with traffic. I have banners made for display networks, I have affiliates lined up to promote through my internal network at affiliates.shoemoney.com, JV people that I have promoted for in the past, and the offer is now going into external affiliate networks. But in order for this to happen the prerequisites are that I need to have proper tracking in place to measure the ROI. Sounds simple enough right? But its not as easy as just setting up google analytics. Because of all the dynamics within the ShoeMoney Network and because we pay out so much to users, let alone affiliates, the analytics need to be there on so many levels. This is so complex that I will save the details of that for another post. Another topic, one that is a big issue, is fraud. In the ShoeMoney Network there is a very large risk of fraud between the users and affiliates. Since we pay out money to users as they accomplish tasks to make money online in REAL TIME through PayPal, on the user end, it’s a huge opening for people to game the system and make tons of accounts. When I first started this I got hammered hundreds of dollars an hour in fraud. Ouch. But we have a really good system now for battling that and in some cases have just had to block a handfull of countries. Not ideal but just the way it is. On the affiiate fraud side I haven’t really run into it yet. Like I said I haven’t launched that side of it. But the best way to limit that of course is to only go with trusted affiliates and I will probably set the threshold very high… something like 1k minimum payout and have less than 10 affiliates. I am very fortunate that I have relationships with the “super affiliates” that I can do that. Most companies would have to open it up to the masses and would have thousands of affiliates that would do sketchy stuff. Again I am very fortunate to not be in that position. While I don’t classify this as a bizop – it falls into that category… and most of the old guys that were giant affiliates in that industry are scared of the FTC and regulations that come with it. While we have never had to worry about that too much anyway because we don’t make false claims and what not, this is quite a bit different in that at no time do we take money from the consumer. So needless to say we have had a lot of interest from affiliates. This project will be interesting and I look forward to sharing with you a lot of great information. Its been way to long since I did media buys, worked with affiliates, optimization and split testing, etc etc so I look forward to sharing that journey with you as well. Hope you have had a great may and here is to an awesome June!! BTW if you haven’t been listening to my radio show you are really missing out. We have had some amazing guests. You can download episodes at http://shoemoney.com/radio/ Talk to you soon!       |
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