About a year ago I was going to write the post about Shoemoney. I discovered several of his sites, taked snapshots of some of them. And... did not post anything.
Now, after several more facts opened by Shoemoney about his AdSense money, I decided to write this post. So, let's investigate the Money of Shoemoney..
ShoeMoney is a nickname of Jeremy Schoemaker, a 35-year-old internet entrepreneur, "king of ringtones", co-founder of AuctionAds, owner of ShoeMoney Media Group.
Started from "Dial up tech supporter" and "Lead Unix Security Admin" [1], Schoemaker has grown into one of the most known Internet marketers.
If you are interested in making money on Internet, you should know this picture:
This is Shoemoney holding the AdSense check for $132,994.97 (August, 2005). This check picture is rather old, but not long ago Shoemoney has provided some facts about this check [2]:
- This is one month's revenue generated through Google AdSense ads on nextpimp.com site.
- His expenses were 1 server at 299$ per month for hosting.
- It could be named "web 2.0" because it's mostly user generated content (494.000 forum members).
- This is was not a PPC-generated but a natural traffic (about 70% of the traffic was direct, 15% from search engines and 15% from referrals).
- Visitor statistics: 75,000 unique visitors/day.
But AdSense earnings is only the tip of the iceberg. Shoemoney's main income source is not AdSense, he get much more from affiliate programs (AzoogleAds, Commission Junction).
This is what Business Week wrote in October 2005 about Shoemoney blog earnings:
The half hour he spends each day writing ShoeMoney attracts 20,000 unique visitors daily, brings in $12,000 a month, and gives him a platform from which to launch his own Web products... The blog accounts for only 3% of his company's revenue.. [3]
So, doing the simple math, we can calculate the full earnings per month: $12,000 / 3 X 100 = $400,000 per month. Not bad, ha? ;)
This is a picture of Commision Junction account of Schoemaker (he said this is earnings for March 2007):
Revenue sources
Ok, but where his main revenues come from? The answer is: from affiliate programs. Shoemoney is a guru of PPC (pay-per-click) arbitrage, which means he has many one-page "landing" sites, and drive traffic to them via PPC. Those landing pages are built on similar template: they have ads leading to the merchant's site and Google AdSense ads. Taking into account they have not much content, they should produce good CTR. The secret is to perform a reasonable PPC advertising campaign without loosing money (when cost per click higher than your revenue). Aaron Wall was involved in experiment when Shoemoney show him "how easy it was to make money from ringtones". Aaron spent $1,500 and at the end of the month he got a check for $4,721.60. This is how he describes this "secret technique":
Of course the value was not in the cheesy landing page, but in the ~ 200K keywords he uploaded to the account. It takes some serious resources to gather that much market data, but if you can create a way to gather relevant search queries and bid on them before the competition saturates your market you can make great profits. Having unique data sources is like having great link authority. It provides you a business advantage that is hard to replicate and highly profitable in high value verticals. [8]
I beleive Shoemoney owns thousands of domains. He even had trademark problems with domains free-alltel-ringtones.com and alltel-ringtones.com [4].
Year ago I've investigated several of Shoemoney "landing" sites. Here is the list of some of them:
allphonetones.com,
dadamobiletones.com,
gamertones.com,
icetones.com,
instant-ringtones.net,
rangtone.com,
rangtonez.com,
rockinringtones.org,
sprintpimp.com.
As I can see these sites are not "alive" today, but just to show you a basic principle I can share the screenshots I've made a year ago:
Several more facts about ShoeMoney
- He was a co-founder of AuctionAds and has sold his part of the ownership to MediaWhiz [5]. The price was not disclosed.
- There also was a fun story about photo of fake Azoogle ads check for $500,000. People discussed it and ShoeMoney answered: "This is not a real check it was for a Magazine Ad for AzoogleAds".
- He is an active member of DigitalPoint forums (3.63 posts per day). [6]
- He met Paris Hilton in Vegas and has a picture with her :) [7]
Jeremy Schoemaker and his business can be a good and inspiring example for beginner entrepreneurs. I hope you'll find something useful from his experience.
References:
- http://www.linkedin.com/in/shoemoney
- http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/11/04/the-adsense-check-for-13299497/
- http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/07/0714_bloggers/source/4.htm
- http://www.arb-forum.com/domains/decisions/572945.htm
- http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/27/mediawhiz-buys-another-ad-startup-auctionads/
- http://forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=1641
- http://www.shoemoney.com/2004/10/11/so-i-met-paris-hilton/
- http://www.seobook.com/archives/001793.shtml
