Today started out with breakfast and a quick meet and greet with attendees.

Each speaker (Jeremy Schoemaker, Darren Rowse, Neil Patel, Aaron Wall, Lee Dodd, & myself) shared “how I got started” stories with attendees then attendees shares there stories. Aside from the amazing success stories from each speaker I was blown away by the story of each attendee – without disclosing names, there are people here who are incredibly successful – some founded and / or work for well known companies and others have moving stories of personal obstacles overcome with significant success through online marketing.

Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) was our first speaker covering branding, blogging, and arbitrage. Shoe told the story of his father who founded numerous successful businesses, including a fishing lure company that was sold to a major branded lure company.

BRANDING: Shoe talked about the need to differentiate your brand from competition.

ARBITRAGE: “Understanding arbitrage is like selling bananas.” It’s about market inbalance – the profit you make by selling a banana for higher than you bought it for (your profit) is arbitrage.

- Talks about how to perform basic arbitrage using Google Adwords, Yahoo Search, and MSN Ad Center.
- Discusses strategies for building out landing pages. One of the attendees asked –
can you show us some specific examples?” I guess this was short for “show me the money.” Of course, Jeremy showed several examples of his own websites and how to make money using arbitrage strategies. One example given was http://www.dadamobiletones.com – a arbitrage website Shoe made to arbitrage affiliate ringtone offers. Note that the website uses Google Adsense ads on the page, which is another form of revenue = nice!
- Shoe talks about his “nickle traffic” concept – buy thousands of keywords at a nickle (or the engines minimum CPC) and send them through targeted landing pages. Ultimately, he buys lots and lots of keywords at the lowest price possible and carefully watches his EPC using a portfolio approach – i.e. EPC on overall campaign.
- Shoe talks about keyword gen and how he once purchased an entire database of millions of keywords from CNET and bid on those keywords using his nickle traffic theory.
- Shoe and I talked with the attendees about the different approach that is needed on Google Adwords versus MSN Adcenter / Yahoo. For instance, on Adwords, because of Google’s Quality Score Algorithm you can’t use Shoe’s nickle approach as well – however, I share that you still can use Google using a different strategy, which I’ll talk about in more detail tomorrow. MSN and Yahoo allow an affiliate to purchase high volume keywords based on Shoe’s theory.

STREAMS OF REVENUE: contextual (Adsense / YPN), affiliate, subscription (i.e. Lee dodd’s earnersforumn.com, donation, direct ad sales, products (i.e., Aaron Wall’s SEO Book).
Shoe says his favorite form of income is subscription income – more specifically, reoccuring subscriptions.
- Shoe shows some of his more proftable subscription-based community forums and talks about to set them up and how to strategically approach subscription rates.
- Shoe talks about direct ad sales – gives example of his blog – HERE.
- Shoe talks about direct product sales. He gives an example of how he sells cell phone data cables on one of his high volume ringtone websites as an additional form of monetizing the website.
- Shoes talks about contextual ads. He has many websites and usually doesn’t try to monetize them until there is at least 1,000 unique visitors per day. He tells us how is made the contextual income from his popular Adsense photo.
- Shoe talks about affiliate and how you need to think outside-the-box to become an affiliate superstar. Talks abouttaking advantage of seasonality, trends, etc. i.e., tax season.

Shoemoney talks in detail about the idea of white hat, gray hat, and black hat. He says he spends most of his time making money in the gray area, where rules are ill defined so there is opportunity to define them (and test the ropes).

Shoe discusses using CrazyEgg.com (Neil Patel’s product) to build and analyze quality landing pages. Shoe says Crazy Egg has helped increase his revenue significantly, especially using Crazy egg heat maps, which allow him to analyze where people are clicking….and, in turn, optimize his pages.

Shoe tells the attendees “don’t sell out.” Keep your goals in min at all times, but test and then once you’re done, test again.

Shoe offers his tips for success (about 10 tips or so to take your business to the next level).

Shoemoney closes with some words of inspiration and offers to answer Q & A.

FYI: One of Elite Retreat attendees is also blogging this event at http://www.emomsathome.com/blog/.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Elite Retreat, Uncategorized, affiliate marketing, search-engine marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.