Shoshana

I have been bumping into references to Shoemoney often in my travels through SEO blogs but I do not know much about Jeremy Schoemaker really. I also know what people will say, “You don’t know Shoemoney”? That’s right, so why would a weenie internet marketing blogger have an interest in this guy? For me it’s pretty simple, I enjoy David Naylor’s sense of humor and he mentioned that Shoemoney was blogging naked? This morning I visited Rand Friskin’s blog and Michael Gray posted a few links to Jeremy’s computer room which looks like it is in some sort of futuristic bunker. This guy also throws around money like it is just paper! That’s it; I am hooked and need to get this guy in for an interview today! Jeremy kindly agreed so let’s learn more about this interesting fellah. Hello Jeremy, let’s get this straight, you don’t blog naked do you?
Blog in boxers but code in the nude!
If we look at your office pics we see a dark place without furniture but it does have an extremely cool looking computer console area. Where do you work, from a house or bunker? Do you have some sort of skin condition that requires you live in a light free environment?
After my wife and I found out we were pregnant (expecting june 28th) I decided to make a home office and not get a commercial property. I remodeled a 1500 square foot section of my basement. It is actually lit up pretty good but the web-cam doesn’t really show it well You can see good pics here.
I am not a webmaster world forum member and am just too damn busy now. Can you let us in on your internet history, you seem to have a lot of money, care to share a few words of wisdom with us internet marketing weenie bloggers? Where did you begin and what success have you had?
Ohhhh not sure how far back you want…
In 1997 I was selling washers and dryers at Sears in Moline Illinois. A nice lady named Kris Rylander (now Kris Harris) was shopping there and asked me if I wanted a job with a company she was starting called a ‘internet company’ called Net Express (netexpress.net) . I was down so I quit and started there the next day. I was immediately thrown into a world of the Unix operating system…. Specifically Linux and it was all dummy terminal style so I had to get good with the command line interface of Linux fast!.
About 2 years of that and I thought I needed to go back to college (plus i think I was a month away from getting fired at best). I went back to school. Not really for the educational aspect of it but more to party with my high school friends. So I went to Western IL. U for a few years where I found macgamer.com and macquake.com. As you can guess they were sites geared to the Macintosh gaming community. Soon I was contacted by advertisers and was making about $1200 a month in advertising. This was the most money I had ever made to this point and I thought I was really cutting a hog in the ass!
Then the .com crash happened…. advertisers not only did not re-up they did not pay there past bills… doh!
Fast forward a bit… I move back to my home town of Moline Illinois and start working for a nice family owned Internet Provider called Internet Revealed (revealed.net). I stayed on there for about 2.5 years doing tech support (but mostly playing games like Everquest) for 7$ a hour or so and was REALLY HAPPY to do so. Then one day I was given the option to quit or be fired. I quit.
Out of work again…. A few months went by and I landed a pretty solid job as the region system administrator for a company called First National bank in the Quad Cities, IL. This was a pretty solid gig and my first exposure to the corporate world. My job was basically to hire contractors and oversee all things IT wise for the midwest region of the company. I did a pretty bad job as I got bored really quick. I started working on my own company at this point and pretty much just would go to work and work on my own stuff on there dime (pretty crappy I know)… So guess what? ya fired….
Now I had got myself in a pretty bad predicament… I was about 25-30k in the hole and had ZERO outlooks for jobs. I had been fired or left on bad terms with just about ever internet provider or network related business.
I had a good friend volunteer to have me come stay with him in Des Moines IA until I got on my feet. I took him up on the offer and landed a job with Wells Fargo INC soon after moving to Des Moines. I started entry level at the help desk and quickly moved my way up. Within 3 years I was the lead Unix System Engineer and had increased my pay rate almost 4x over in those 3 years.
Alas… soon I was fired and for good reason. Unbeknown to Wells Fargo my job really only took about 20 minutes a day to do. The rest of the time I tunneled out and worked on my own stuff. Basically they paid me 6 figures a year to develop my own business… (I know bad huh) but they caught on after a while and I was out!
But by now I had a good hold in some of the websites I was working on and making more off of them then I was at that 9-5. But I still liked the stability of a 9-5 job so I moved to Omaha, Nebraska and got a job with a local back called Commercial Federal. I worked there for a few years (again mainly working on my own stuff the entire time) as the Senior Security Admin. I stayed on with them for about 2 years before getting canned again.
At this point my wife was just like “Why don’t you just run your own company? You keep getting fired for doing it anyway!”, Well she did make sense and so there was when I founded ShoeMoney Media Group.
My income from websites had been bashed a bit so I had to go on unemployment from 9/2004-1/2005 (yes I only started taking a salary in 2005).
To start my company I borrowed $5,000 from my mother in law and bought a Semi Truck load of recycled computers from a company called Redemtech (redemtech.com). I think I paid about $3500 for the whole load. I took all the pcs and striped them down and resold the parts on ebay for a total PROFIT of about $13,000. I quickly bought more computers and kept this up for a few months until I had enough capitol to put more into my Internet business.
I found a few profitable niches right away and started to buy traffic. I also built some VERY popular niche sites that have awesome word of mouth traffic. I started learning about SEO in early 2005 and since i had some great sites that had loyal users that linked to the site(s) they quickly rose to the top in SERPS.
I also dabbled with what is commonly referred to as Black Hat techniques. Mostly just to learn how search engines work. I never really made much money using black hat techniques so while interesting it is not very profitable (for me anyway).
My user driven sites now totaled about 3 million users and I was told by my premium adsense representative that my sites were the highest grossing Adsense sites for the “mobile niche”
So I think that is pretty impressive for a 1 year turn around… from unemployment to a 8 figure income.
Having a few blogs myself with Google Adsense on them I notice algorithmic changes as they happen. My blogs are low traffic environmental hobby sites so I do not make any real income from them but you appear to have dabbled in all kinds of money making strategies in the past correct? Is it as easy to earn a dollar today online as it was before Google’s dreaded Florida/Jagger/Big Daddy Datacenter updates?
Well I have never tried to market my blog… I was really never even into blogs until my friend Jason Golod talked me into making one last august after SES San Jose. I mostly just blog about my real life experiences in search engine marketing. I try to talk in REALLY broad terms and never specifically mention my urls. When I offered links for 1,000 apiece last October I was SUPER surprised when they sold out in 1 week. Now I started putting up adsense and already have had offers ranging 3-5k a month for sponsorship of my blog… I do not get it but whatever =)
Florida - Now other then my blog… and what you were referring to above.. I have dabbled in other areas. Florida totally killed my affiliate sites. I guess it was good that I never really made any good money in those niches I was affiliating for.
Jagger and the Big Daddy updates are the best thing that has ever happened to me. My search engine traffic is up about 30% since.
Speaking of change, I watched your DMCA video and learned a lot thanks. Tell us about your video setup, how it works, what software/hardware you use.
Thanks… I was mainly messing around with video… I hate to write and just wanted to do something different. I thought video blogcasts would be neat. That was done with a apple iSight but I have bought a HD digital video recorder and plan on doing some really neat stuff in the future.
Have you found value in the social aspects of blogging? You have a recognizable logo and brand will we refer to you as “Shoemoney” or “Jeremy Schoemaker” in the future? Do you put this much thought into things?
Yes definitely. It is pretty neat to go to a conference and have people come up to you and say HEY SHOEMONEY!!! I am always surprised. Its been really really fun doing the whole shoemoney, skills to pay the bills, blog. Of course giving away free shirts and dumping dollars that would have otherwise gone to the tax man to fans is always fun too! We just ordered 1,000 hats (500 white and 500 black) to give away so stay tuned for that . I honestly never really put much thought into it. Again the blog just happened. I am always out there a bit in left field and do some whacky stuff.
You have a new forum where you mention you are doing the $40k experiment, explain to us what this is. How can we be sure this is not just “link bait” to fool Quadzilla?
Actually the forum was a test bed for a plugin I was working on for wordpress 2.0 and VBulletin. I am still working on it and will probably never finish the plugin but people seem to like the forums.
First of all I really do not care if people think its link bait or not. I make crap off of my blog to be honest. If people choose not to go there it is A-OK with me. I have TONS of other stuff I should be working on. Actually if people stopped reading my blog it would be the best thing that ever happen to me =)
But since you asked I will tell you some things I have never revealed ever in public anywhere.
The 40k experiment.
This month (march) I am spending 10,000$ in Yahoo Search marketing, Google Adwords, Adbrite, and MSN AdCenter. I am using the same terms for the ringtone industry and sending people to landing pages which are optimized for ringtone affiliates.
The reason for the experiment was that I could not believe how much people are paying for my adbrite spots just to redirect to affiliate pages. I wanted to see if it really was worth the money… and believe me it is. Its only the 22nd of March and already we have done over $110,000 in affiliate sales. This also is a reason I am going to start my own ad network shoemoneyads. Basically its all the best features of Chitica, Adsense, YPN, Adbrite with none of the negatives… meaning click fraud and overhead. I am mainly making it for myself but will offer it as a beta to certain people if interested.
Now for the SEO contest. Again I am going to reveal to you stuff I have never ever said publicly before anywhere.
First of all its more like a SEM contest and its not going to start anytime soon. I already have advertisers committed to 25,000.00 but they all have made me wait until at least May before starting it. If you think any of this is bullshit feel free to call Azoogleads and ask them if they have not committed 10k to the contest.
What am I doing that is so different? Well I am not 100% sure yet. At first I wanted to have a apprentice like show where I would give each contestant(s) weekly tasks then fire the worst one each week and all the ones not fired would get great prizes like cash or free servers at theplanet.com (another sponsor) stuff like that.
These are going to be real world SEM tests. These people are going to have to actually MAKE MONEY not just spam search engines with keywords.
As for QuadZilla I like to razz him a bit but he is a decent enough guy and defiantly has his place in the internet world.
What is an ordinary morning like in the life of Shoemoney, walk us through your day and can we get a video of this sometime?
My wife wakes me up as she leaves for work, I get up around 6:30-7am. I make a 3 egg omelet with ham and swiss complete with diet pepsi for the drink. I check my email and stats on my laptop as I wait for my food to cook. Once its done I take it down stairs and eat while working… usually say good morning to my friends david naylor, Jen, rustybrick and others on instant messenger. Talk shop with them for a bit. Generally David Naylor will have discovered something incredible and we will talk about it for a bit.
Lunch time I always get into my cpc stuff. Where are my bids at… what’s my roi… etc. This takes up 2 hours or so between the 6 different services I use. 5pm my wife usually gets off work and I try to hang out with her and eat dinner then back to work until about midnight. I always work about 16 hours a day. I am a machine.
In between there I try to make as much money online as possible
I might video it some day… we will see if anyone cares =P

http://www.shoemoney.com