Shoemoney Interview

Posted by Miles Evans

I’ve seen Shoemoney around the usual forums and sort of picked up reading his blog earlier this year. The dude struck me as a real down to earth guy enjoying the take and working hard - like any of us. He runs a live web cam, has zany contests, and even got a photo taken with Paris Hilton.

So who is this guy? Shoemoney is a well known SEO pundit and is often quite candid about some of the greyer techniques we all do for research purposes. You can search around for some of his posts on the usual SEO forums, but by chance I bumped into him on Efnet yesterday and we spoke a bit about SEO, SMS systems, getting over a cold, and other fascinating subjects. Watch for the gold:

Miles: First it would be cool to know what you do in the main stream besides your blog. No need to drop the farm but if you’re working on something cool or have done well somewhere now is the time to drop the link.

Shoemoney: I own several large community/forum websites that I wish to not name. I just have never been much into self promotion =P. Combined subscriptions alone we have almost 95,000 members paying 19.95 every 6 months or roughly 4.5 million a year. That is the single biggest revenue stream that I have and it is reoccurring.

Miles: Yep anonymity is good. I heard you work hard in the ringtones niche?

Shoemoney: Yes. I have owned and sold many large ringtone websites. I think I have beat that horse enough though.

Miles: What is the deal with your own Ad network?

Shoemoney: Basically I wanted an easy way to have affiliate ads without running their low converting banners. The affiliate ecpm I find is about 5-10x what contextual is depending on the niche. I created shoemoneyads for myself but quickly realize many people wanted to use it so I made it multi-user. I am not quite sure where it’s headed.

Miles: Ok here is a zinger. As a publisher what percentage of your online income is based on contextual ads vs affiliate marketing vs paid placement? Sorta like Adsense vs CJ vs Paid Links.

Shoemoney: I would say as a whole its about ¼ subscription ¼ contextual ¼ affiliate and paid placement (adbrite and other) and the other ¼ in donations or random other stuff

Miles: It’s pretty obvious that the SEO industry is reaching a critical mass or tipping point. Everyone with a website wants information on this stuff and it’s a nice geeky subject that gets picked up easy so the information spreads. Where do you see the industry at the end of this year? How about the end of this decade?

Shoemoney: I honestly have never thought of myself as much of a SEO. I mean I do not think there is really that much to it. I try to build quality websites that people find useful or communities/forums that people WANT to use. I have said many times I think SEO is DEAD. Sure there are basics that everyone should know but now almost all blogs/bulletin boards come pretty seo optimized out of the box. This makes SEO the standard and not the exception in my opinion.

If you custom program your own websites then I am guessing that the seo side will take less then .01% of the total time spent developing the website.

Miles: Good points. How do events like SES and Pubcon help SEO’ers and webmasters. Do you think they are they worth the expense and travel?

Shoemoney: I do not think people can afford not to go. I have met so many people and made so many business relationships from these conferences. I think people that do not go might do so because these conferences might seem a bit closed minded. Even if I do not directly pick up SEO/SEM stuff many times I will pickup an idea and get super motivated to work on new projects.

These shows have always paid for themselves 10x over.

Miles: Ok here’s a funny one for the fanboys. Where do you see cloaking technology in 2006. So like a server side script like PHP detecting a known user-agents (a spider) and showing it juicy keyword dense content? There are some ethical ways to use cloaking for geo manipulation etc but on the black hat side where do you see this stuff? Bad, good, or both?

Shoemoney: You have to ask yourself what is the real cause of this ? Well it’s because there is SO MUCH money in it. Google, Yahoo, and now MSN are all cranking in cash from there contextual products. The dirty little secret is scraper/cloak/blackhat sites convert and the publisher/advertiser are happy. The day these companies start banning accounts for spamming or blackhat techniques is the day you will see less “made for adsense” websites.

Sure Matt Cutts will ban them out of Google but why should Google not make money off of MSN, Yahoo, or other search engines sending these blackhat sites traffic.

Miles: So true. The gravy train has truly rolled into town and the cows are lining up to be slaughtered. On that note I see sblogging getting more and more advanced and harder to detect. Some of the sbloggy scraper sites I see lately look pretty legit and will be insanely difficult to filter. What do you think?

Shoemoney: Sure, the search engines are fingerprinting new spamming techniques all the time. Splogs are a bit more difficult for them to catch because they look like real blogs of course…. But there is still a fingerprint.

Thanks to Shoemoney for taking the time to chat. I noticed Shoe has gotten over his cold and is hard at work on a $10,000 Adsense Experiement where he takes what he has learned from the Adsense Professional Program and applied it to a PPC ringtones campaign with Google. Very good info here for any aspiring ad publishers.

For more Shoemoney check out his podcast interview interview on WMR from a few days ago.

Digg this story!

Posted Apr 09, 2006 at 02:04 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!