Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

Affiliate marketing is, and will likely always remain, my favorite method for making money online. At the risk of repeating myself, here’s why every blogger should get into the affiliate marketing game -

1. You make a margin per product sale that is often as good or better than the person or company that produces the product
2. You don’t have to do any product fulfillment, handle cancellations or any customer service whatsoever
3. You have a huge range of products to choose from in most mainstream product categories
4. You can enter new niches any time you like with zero switching cost, simply by finding a new product to promote as an affiliate (this is for those of you who like variety)
5. If you have a product of your own, one of the best ways to get affiliates to promote your product is to make sales of their product as an affiliate first (this is a big one!)

I could go on, but let’s state the obvious and most important aspect: Affiliate marketing is great because you can make very good money for very little effort.

Don’t get me wrong, it requires effort to get to a situation where you can make money as an affiliate, but once you are there the actual process for making money is very, very simple. It’s as easy as writing a blog post or sending an email.

It’s Like Printing Money

I remember about four years ago reading all those hyped-up sales pages from Internet marketers, and I come across the phrase “it’s like printing money”.

I’ve never been a hater of sales copy, although obvious hype agitates me just like anyone else. I certainly believed that some people were enjoying a situation where they could just send emails and make big money, but I was personally very far away from that. Jealousy mixed with depression about my own results, were the dominant emotions I felt at the time when I read what other people were achieving apparently so easily.

My first attempt at “printing money” as an affiliate was with my blog when it was about six months old. I put in a couple of hours to write a blog post about Perry Marshall’s Definitive Guide To Google AdWords and managed to print about $20 in commissions – one sale.

I was disappointed given it had taken me six months of consistent work on my blog to make that $20, however I was also encouraged. I could see given enough time and energy, that $20 could be $200 and then $2,000 and even $20,000. Today I have the audacity to believe it could be $200,000 one day too.

Fast forward to the year 2009 and the first six month’s of affiliate promotions have gone like this…

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Download the MP3 [ 77 Minutes - 106 MB]

Jeremy Schoemaker, otherwise known as “Shoemoney” thanks to his famous blog, Shoemoney.com, is a serial Internet entrepreneur.

I looked forward to doing this interview for a couple of reasons. First I wanted to connect with Jeremy directly, as I had not personally ever spoken to him but obviously knew about his blog for a long time, and secondly to hear the crazy stories from Jeremy’s previous business experiences.

Whether by divine chance, or orchestrated intention, Jeremy has enjoyed some tremendous success online. He has followed his passions and turned them into money making web properties, including a site dedicated to cell phone image and ringtones, an online advertising network based on eBay which he sold within four months of starting, and of course, one of the most popular blogs in the make money online space.

This podcast is an interview, but it’s really a story. Jeremy takes us from day one of his Internet career, all the way up to the present. He includes the background story behind the projects that haven’t gone so well and all the inside details and emotions involved during the entire “ride” of every successful business.

It’s a great story, and I’m sure you will find it inspiring just as much as you enjoy the unique insights into why Jeremy has been able to make so much money online.

Show Notes

• Jeremy begins with a look at his early history where he managed to get through school with the help of his mom
• We discover how Jeremy started his first big successful website based on mobile phone backgrounds and ringtones
• How Jeremy’s ringtone site NextPimp.com became a serious AdSense earner including the story behind the $130,000 AdSense check
• We learn about the birth of the Shoemoney.com blog
• Jeremy talks about his experience starting and then selling AuctionAds, what he calls the wildest four months of his life
• After a successful exit from AuctionAds, flush with capital, Jeremy moves on to his next project, Shoemoney Tools
• We talk about Jeremy’s live event, the Elite Retreat
• Jeremy ends the interview with advice for people just starting out in the Internet business game

Click Here to Download the MP3 [ 77 Minutes - 106 MB]

Thursday was my 28th birthday (thanks for all the well-wishes everyone!) and this weekend I’m having a BBQ with friends to celebrate. In the meantime I have some recommended links I’ve been saving up. There’s some real gem resources in this list that I expect you will enjoy…

Recommended Links

• Alan at The Marketer’s Podcast has started up his podcast interviews again and has come back with a bank, interviewing Perry Marshall and Ari Galper in recent weeks.
• John Reese (income.com) interviewed Jeremy Shoemaker (Shoemoney) and you can get the MP3 directly from this post – Reese VS. Shoemoney (Round 1). It’s a great audio covering all kinds of topics related to make money online, blogging and affiliate marketing. The two guys carry on a conversation that we get to listen in on and given the calibre of success these two have had, you get what you would expect – some amazing insights into how they do what they do.
• My friend Will Swayne is looking for a full time web developer. If you can work in Brisbane you might be interested in this job.
• Bestseller Interviews (Jon Morrow) targets marketing genius Seth Godin with ten questions.
• Paula Mooney has updated her list of blogger salaries to include general webmasters, domainers, affiliate marketers and content scrapers – essentially a list of some of the highest earning web based entrepreneurs today.
• I was featured in a podcast interview about how blogging can help you sell books courtesy of Kim from AudioWorkshop.MarketAbility.com.
• Bobby Walker from the Niche Blog Affiliate Profits, one of my sponsors, has just released his product of the same name as his blog that you can check out here – www.nicheblogaffiliateprofits.com/. I haven’t read my copy of his product yet so I can’t tell you whether it is good or not (it’s only $9.95), but if you look at the page you get a special bonus – me!

That’s it for now everyone. Stay tuned as I’m starting my next pillar article series soon – all about how to launch a membership site.

It seems like I post one of these every week lately. This time I’m heading back home, with a brief stop in Hawaii. I’ll be back in Brisbane Friday evening and it sure will be good to be home – although, I need to find a place to live yet to truly feel home.

I’ve had a good time in Toronto the last six months and traveling around a bit in North America too. I’ve met quite a few new people, which is definitely the highlight for me. It’s great to know when I head back to this part of the world, which no doubt will be soon enough, that I have friends to look up.

For now it’s back home to work on finally launching Blog Traffic School. I’m building a team when I return home to support and help launch the first product. It’s pretty clear I can’t put out as high a quality product as I want to without the support of a team, which is my focus as soon as I return. If you want to be involved in an Internet product launch and you are in Brisbane, give me a buzz and maybe you can help out and learn a bunch about Internet marketing along the way.

I’ve got a few SEO related posts coming out this week that I think you might enjoy. I’ll attempt to get them published via hotel net access during the week.

See you soon Australia!

Recommended Links

In the meantime, here’s some links to keep everyone busy:

• You have probably already noticed the spike in RSS feed counts occurring across the blogosphere, which hit here at Entrepreneurs-Journey too, almost doubling my feedcount. I must say it’s nice to know I’m talking to 3000-4000 of you every day. The adjustment is as a result of Google finally publishing feed statistics. I first found out about it from Adnan and Trader Mike also has a good write up about it too.
• Dave from the MODE blog asked me to contribute to his group blog post – Career Success is Just a State of Mind. You should recognize a few of the other contributors as well. Take note Dave has implemented a nice traffic strategy here by asking for brief contributions from a variety of bloggers. He built a nice article by combining the work of many bloggers and while not everyone who contributed will link to him, some of them will, like I just did . Dave also has a good post for all you ‘The Secret’ fans in response to the recent Oprah coverage – 8 Secrets to Business and Career Success.
• I have to give a shout-out to my mate JR at the Seeds for Wealth blog. He’s blogging like a mad man, really putting in the hours and pumping out the content. He may have gone a bit too far with his post – John Chow and Yaro Starak Together On Valentines Day?
• Any of my fellow WordPress bloggers who use the Ultimate Tag Warrior and MyAvatars plug-ins should make sure they have the latest versions. After upgrading to WordPress 2.1 my tags started disappearing and you need the updated version of Ultimate Tag Warrior to fix it, although apparently it doesn’t fix the problem for everyone. The first version of MyAvatars, the plug-in I use here to include MyBlogLog avatar images with comments, had an issue where commenter’s email addresses may have been available in the HTML code, which the spam bots would eat up. Make sure you upgrade MyAvatars to fix the problem.
• I’ll end with a quick tip for some great podcasts. Many of you probably already listen to ShoeMoney’s podcast Net Income on Webmaster radio, but you may not realize how many other programs there are. Check out the full range of Webmaster Radio episodes and I’m sure you will find something of interest – Just avoid SEO Rockstars – I’ve never heard so much rambling in my life