Welcome to Week #25 of the Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series!

This week I interview super affiliate, entrepreneur, and Technorati Top 50 Blogger Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker.

Read on to learn more about Jeremy…

Here are the rules… 

The Pepperjam Network “Meet the Affiliates” Interview Series will feature an original up-close interview with an affiliate marketer every Friday.  Priority will be given to Pepperjam Network affiliates, but that is not a requirement to share your story.  If you’d be interested in being interviewed please submit your request here – please make sure to tell us why you think your story is especially entertaining or educational and worth sharing with our readers.

As the series progresses we will do our best to ask questions that both entertain and educate!  We encourage you to comment on each of the interviews, as well as ask follow-up questions of the interviewee.

Lastly, if you are a blogger or just someone with a network of likeminded affiliate marketing friends, we encourage you to share our interviews series with anyone who you think may benefit. Also, since you won’t want to miss an interview once it’s published I encourage you to join the Feedburner Pepperjam Network RSS Feed, which is located at the top of this page or by clicking here.

Well…let’s get on to the interview!

Meet the Affiliates: Interview #25

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker
President & CEO,
Shoemoney Media

Blogger,
Shoemoney.com
Question #1

KRIS: Where do you live?  Are you married?  Any children? Animals?

SHOEMONEY: Lincoln,  Nebrasksa. I am married with 2 girls ages 2.5 and .5.  I have a dog named Baxter.

Question #2

KRIS: How did you get started as an affiliate?  Share with us your story…

SHOEMONEY: Well I was doing really well with Google Adsense and decided to follow the money.  I quickly discovered why people were paying so much per click to be on my site.  The real money was in affiliate marketing.

Question #3

KRIS: Most people know you not only as a Technorati Top 100 Blogger, but also “that guy” in the picture holding a $120,000 Google AdSense check; however, most people probably do not know you are also the President of a major media company called Shoemoney Media.  Please tell us about Shoemoney Media?  What properties does Shoemoney Media include?  Tell us a little bit about each one…

SHOEMONEY: Basically at ShoeMoney Capital LLC (formally ShoeMoney Media Group INC)  we do a bunch of things.  First and foremost we try to create services that we feel are badly needed.  Services that we want and would use if they were available.  For instance I created a site called nextpimp.com in early 2000’s that allowed people to upload images to make into their own wallpapers for their cellphones.  This quickly grew into ringtones and other media for cellphones and it was a huge player in the space until I lost passion for it in about mid 2006.

In 2007 we created a company called AuctionAds which leveraged the highest tiered payout of the eBay affiliate program by pooling all affiliates together.   We made a nice display widget for publishers and within 4 months of launch we were doing over $2 million per month in revenue with over 25,000 users and I sold the company in July of 2007.    When we launched there were 8 companies doing this exact same thing including eBay themselves but we just did not feel it was being done properly.  We were right

In  mid 2008 we launched fighters.com which is based around Mixed Martial Arts fighting.  We are HUGE fans of the sport and feel there is no good “all in one” site that caters to fans.

Question #4

KRIS: Let’s chat a little bit more about Elite Retreat.  Why did you start Elite Retreat?  What makes Elite Retreat different than other conferences? When is the next Elite Retreat?  Who are your speakers? Where can our readers learn more and sign-up?

SHOEMONEY: The Elite Retreat came about because after 5 years of going to conferences me and a couple others came up with the concept what if you could capture the networking aspect of the conference and expand on that.  Also by bringing in several speakers from very diverse backgrounds we could analyze peoples business plans and help them get to where they want to go.

The Elite Retreat event this year takes place in San Francisco February 18th-20th at the The Hotel Vitale.

Our Speaker lineup:

1st day Keynote: Gary Vaynerchuk
2nd day Keynote: TBA
Leaders:
Stephan Spencer – SEO Expert
Chris Winfield – PR Ninja
Neil Patel – Marketing Consultant, SEO, Social Media whiz
Andy Liu – Startup Expert
Kris Jones – CEO of Pepperjam Network
Jeremy Schoemaker – this is me!

To learn more you can checkout http://www.eliteretreat.info

Question #5

KRIS: Can you share with us a success story or two from a past attendee of Elite Retreat? Has the conference really been able to change any one’s life?

SHOEMONEY: Sure – actually a guy made a whole website about it – http://eliteretreatreview.com/

There are TONS of stories out there.   I dont see how it does not greatly effect someone’s life.

Question #6

KRIS: If you weren’t a successful internet marketer what do you think you’d be doing and why?

SHOEMONEY: I would probably be a stay at home dad.  I never was very good at working for anyone but myself.

Question #7

KRIS: Please share with us the most challenging life event you’ve ever had to overcome and how you dealt with it…Would you have changed anything about how you handled with the situation?

SHOEMONEY: Personal life -  I think when I made the decision to have weight loss surgery.  I was 420lbs + smoked 2 packs of cigs a day was in horrible physical shape.  I thought the surgery was going to kill me and it was a real possibility being I was so overweight.  I would still do the same thing.

 

(To read more about Shoemoney’s inspiring battle with weight loss CLICK HERE.)

Business life -  When we sold AuctionAds I did not sleep very well for a month or so.  I always wondered what would have happened if we did not sell.   I think it was the right call though.  We did not have the staff to take the company to the next level.

Question #8

KRIS: If you could trade shoes with anyone for 6-months who would it be and why?

SHOEMONEY: I would have to say my wife.  She is a Anesthesiologist and does some interesting things with her job.  She gets to play God every day.  Also I would still get to see my kids for 6 months.

Question #9

KRIS: Can you give us your top five tips on how to become a more successful affiliate marketer?

SHOEMONEY:

1) Be Patient.
2) Test a ton.
3) Split test offers to make sure you are not getting screwed
4) Use heatmap and mouse tracking to see how your changes effect your users
5) use Google Website Optimizer RELIGIOUSLY!!!!!!!!!!

Question #10

KRIS: Can you share with us five tips on how to become a more successful blogger?

SHOEMONEY:

1)  Blog for people not search engines
2)  Blog from the heart.  Dont hold back
3)  Blog about topics you are passionate about
4)  Realize you will never make money from your blog as 99.9999999% of all others don’t
5)  Be active on other blogs – commment and guest post as much as possible.

Question #11

KRIS: Please tell us more about Shoemoney Tools… Where can our readers learn more?

SHOEMONEY: Your readers can learn more at http://tools.shoemoney.com

ShoeMoney tools is basically us opening up our internal tools for users.  There is no other internet marketing tool suite on the market that compares.

___________________________________

On Deck for Next “Meet the Affiliates”

Stay tuned.  Next Friday is Black Friday so we won’t be posting an interview since we’ll all be shopping – NOT – we will be managing the biggest day in the history of Pepperjam Network only to be surpassed by the following Monday, which if Cyber Monday.  Best of luck!

Read Previous “Meet the Affiliates” Interviews:

Week #1 – Sam Harrelson
Week #2 – Scott Hazard
Week #3 – Rosalind Gardner
Week #4 – Colin McDougal
Week #5 – Zac Johnson
Week #6 – Harrison Gevirtz
Week #7 – “Uber Affiliate” Paul Bourque
Week #8 – John Chow
Week #9 – Scott Jangro
Week #10 – Darren Rowse
Week #11 – Carsten Combrowski
Week #12 – Thor Schrock
Week #13 – Garry Conn
Week #14  – Ron Passfield
Week #15 – David Adams
Week #16 – Marcus Tandler
Week #17 – Bob Jones
Week #18 – Anik Singal
Week #19 – Collin De Ruyck
Week #20 – Tyler Cruz
Week #21 – Amit Mehta
Week #22 – Will Haimerl
Week #23 – Rae Hoffman
Week #24 – Jeremy Palmer

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Affiliate Interviews, Jeremy Schoemaker, Meet the Affiliates, Pepperjam Network, Shoemoney, affiliate marketing, affiliate network, pepperjam. 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.