Shoemoney Interview

Hello All

Here is the next instalment and it comes in the form of a few Q+A’s from the link bait king Shoemoney. So here it goes:

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The picture of that adsense cheque has probably encouraged a lot of people. So are they still that size or have you been hit by the changes?

I am not sure what you mean by changes? The check is from over 1 year ago much before I discovered PPC. It was 100% organic. The site that generated that income has since signed direct deals with advertisers. I was really really new to learning how to best monetize websites when I got that check. I thought that was a ton of money for 1 month but really anyone doing that kind of cash contextually with a white hat site with organic rankings can make a ton more signing direct deals. I just did not have the contacts back then that I do now.

Are you still learning PPC, if so what have you learned recently that you might be willing to pass on.

Wow that’s a whole interview in itself. The one thing I learn everyday about ppc is that I don’t know shit. I spent a few days with pepperjamsearch who has a full 20 person team that does nothing but manage PPC campaigns and you really realize you don’t know shit. Sure they are at the top of the bell curve but that’s pretty intimidating when you’re a 2 person shop.

Rank for Shoemoney competition, what was that all about, profile raising, laugh or something else? And do you fear the ‘gray wolf’ after all he seems to relish these sorts of challenges.

It was just for fun. My blog always ranked crappy in Google and still does. I did not think it would be that hard to knock me out of the top spot. Its pretty neat to see the creative ways that people came up with (white and black hat) to try to knock me out. I don’t really have anything to fear about my blog getting knocked out of the serps… its something I write for fun and I write for myself. I ended the contest early (due to circumstances out of my control) but paid out I think double what I said and I even emailed the front runners privately and told them I would pay out if they were able to rank over me in the time frame specified. Just publicly I had to say the contest was off.

Am I correct in saying that your background is security/hacking, if so how has that helped you in the SEO game.

Yes I was a security admin for about 6 years before starting my company. I fell into this whole ‘seo’ thing by accident. I build sites that people find useful and go from there. I don’t really think there is a big mystery to seo. I have yet to come across a site that offers a great, unique, service to users that doesn’t have sweet organic rankings.

When I tell people that in person they look at me like I am lying… like I really hold the key to some secret way to rank for huge terms… Well the key is just hard work over time. Anyone can bust ass for a few days but go a few years and you will not fail.

How do you protect your assets, by assets I mean sites, identity, disguising interlinking of sites. Got any tips?

Anon registers, I don’t cross link… period. I really don’t have any huge tidbits here just common sense stuff. Financial speaking when sites get to a certain point they should become there own legal entitiy. This makes it nice when you want/need to sell companies/sites off.

Are you a long tail person or a big term player and why do you do it that way?

Well again I don’t really build sites for search engines other then very basic seo. I build them more for functionality then whether or not search engines care about them. My blog for instance gets pretty good traffic yet less then 1% comes from a search engine.

How do you deal with getting large sites indexed these days?

If a site is setup properly then sitemaps with a good amount of internal linking seems to work very well. Again Seo is not really my cup of tea so this probably seems pretty basic to most people.

Do you ever see Google losing their strangle hold and what do you make of their $500 per share, madness yeah?

I don’t. Google GETS IT. They make such a huge profit off Adwords/adsense and they just keep land grabbing that space. They totally cockblocked yahoo and Microsoft when they bought uTube. They had done the testing on adsense video (which I beta tested) and they saw huge numbers then they looked at how they could expand and obviously uTube was it.

Is it madness? Well only the future will tell on how madness it is. Here in Omaha Nebraska we have a investor by the name of Warren Buffett. We bought stock in his company Berkshire Hathway when it was at 72,000.00 a share. As of right now its at $107,610.00 a share.

Google is kind of following the warren buffet model in that they just keep reinvesting in themselves. They don’t have a lot of idol money. I think right now GOOG is a VERY SHALLOW and will take about 10+ years to really solidify. Until then its going to be massive ups and downs. I have felt from the beginning that Google will be the next BRK.

What is your biggest achievement in terms of search, or if you cant be arsed with that, what about biggest achievement in life?

In Search – At PubCon 2005 I went up to the SEO INC booth and asked if I could take the SEO Challenge. They said sure what keyword do you want to rank for. I said “Ringtones”. Then they asked me what my site address was and I told them. I was #1 on Google, MSN, and Yahoo they told me to get lost.

In life – I met my wife and my life changed completely. I lost 240 lbs, quit smoking after 10 years, and started my own company.

What do you think of the current search scape and how and what one thing would have the biggest impact?

I think the more blacklists search engines maintain the more they prove that a algo based search engine is just not the way of the future. At the first ses Larry and Serge said that there was no such thing as search engine spam. Now they blacklist domains left and right and to me that is the same as them throwing up a white flag. So what’s the future? – Social voing. When I want to find news or good information on something technical I search Technorati or Digg . I almost always find what I am looking for with more relevant and up to date results.

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Cheers Jeremy, it has been my pleasure to ask you a few questions

Of course you can catch up with Jeremy in many places, but the best is probably the Shoemoney Blog

ukgimp out