The Mindset for Success from ShoeMoney’s Story

As it states at the bottom of the newsletter ShoeMoney sent to all subscribers today that I have his permission to repost, here you go. Needless to say, it’s a wonderful story that sure provides me a lot of juice to keep moving on.

I am hearing a lot of great stories from people who have gone through my free shoemoneyx.com course and doing some neat things generating revenue.   Please keep sending me your stories.  I love hearing them! That is why I made the program!

Now I don’t mean to pee in your cheerios but I want to talk to you and share something with you. Something I feel is really important.  Making money online is easy.  Profiting from it over the long haul IS NOT.

Eventually everyone’s ship comes in.  When your ship comes in what will you do?  Maybe your ship just came in?

This is my personal story and dealing with my first big success and how I was able to position myself for the best outcome.

I hit rock bottom about 8 years ago.  I was 420 lbs, smoked 2 packs of cigarettes a day, about 60k in credit card debt, and just had lost my job.  I also sleeping on my friends couch.

Its important to know what rock bottom feels like.  Its important to know what its like to really be hungry.  Its important to know what it feels like to drive a 1990 rusty van with no muffler.  Its important to know what having massive amounts of credit card debt and what appears to be no way out feels like.  Its important to have that feeling that you are a failure at life and maybe that’s all you will ever be.
Now I say that its important but to me it was ABSOLUTELY crucial in developing my mindset for success.

I am guessing you have seen the image of me and the Google AdSense check for 132,994.97 for one month. 

Its actually hard to search for anything related to making money on the internet and NOT see it…

The one thing I have never really talked about was the back story on WHY I took a picture of me and that AdSense Check for 133k before taking it to the bank to cashing it.

As I am sure you know Google AdSense is run on your website and you get money when visitors click on your AdSense ad.  Almost all of my traffic was coming from Google so I felt it was really a house of cards.  If Google felt my website was no longer relevant for the keywords they were sending me traffic then over night I was done!

At the time I was totally new to making money on the internet and I never thought it was going to last.

I took the picture because I always thought that if my websites disappeared tomorrow I could leverage that picture into a book or something… I didn’t really know…

I always had in the back of my mind what rock bottom felt like and I never wanted to experience that again.

In hind site it was even more brilliant then I ever thought it was going to be.  Especially that that month was the last month that Google ever sent out paper checks for over $10,000.00  so really nobody will ever have a check.

But I never took my success for granted and I diversified my website income into many other forms instead of just Google AdSense.

I learned how to make money from donations,  affiliate programs direct banner sales,  selling my own products, and subscription.  Within a few months my subscription revenue, Direct banner sales, and affiliate revenue each by themselves dwarfed my Google AdSense revenue.

So I have all this money coming in from the website im all diversified but I still did not really feel safe.

So I started the ShoeMoney blog (originally on googleninja.com before I obtained shoemoney.com) basically just talking about the ins and outs of making money.

Because I had the Google AdSense Check for 133k and some pretty other large screenshots of revenue that I could use to make points on what I was talking about the blog VERY quickly became an authority in the space of making money online.   So much so that in its first year that we implemented advertising on shoemoney.com we did over 2007 $100,000.00 in revenue.

In 2008 we boosted that to $490,000.00

in 2009 shoemoney.com will make over $750,000.00 probably closer to 1m in revenue.

But lets take a step back.  Because we had built this authority we were able to leverage our audience into starting our own conference called the elite retreat.  We started the event in 2006 and have sold out events every year since.  Even at a price tag of $5,000.00 per person.

In 2007 we leveraged the blog audience and our contacts and started our own advertising network called Auctionads.  Auctionads is truly an amazing success story and one of my proudest accomplishments.  We took a company from 0 to 25k active publishers doing over 3 million per month in revenue in less then 4 months and sold the company.  That is simply unheard of.  It would not have been possible without leveraging our previously accomplishments and taking them to the next level.

So what drives me to keep doing more things?

I can remember that feeling of hitting rock bottom like it was yesterday.

ONLY now the steaks are MUCH bigger.  I am now married and have 2 kids.  I also have 20 employees that I am responsible for.

So why am I telling you all this?

I want you to recognize what you have and not take it for granted.

I had to hit rock bottom to find myself and really develop a work ethic and drive for more.  Maybe you don’t? 

Always be leveraging your current position and looking for your next thing. 

I have no doubt that everyone reading this will come into money/success eventually.  If you love what you do and you keep trying then its just the law of averages.  Eventually its going to work.  But when it does what will you do?

eBay Canada bowed down to CRA

Bad news for eBayers in Canada, as eBay Canada announced that they received a court-authorized requirement from Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) that requires the account information and sales data of Canadian resident eBay members who meet the following criteria:

• Sales of more than $20,000 and at least 24 sales transactions in any of the calendar years 2006, 2007 or 2008, (irrespective of membership in eBay’s PowerSeller program); OR
• Sales of more than $100,000 in any of the calendar years 2006, 2007 or 2008, regardless of the number of sales transactions.

So if you have received a letter from eBay titled as “eBay to comply with Canada Revenue Agency request”, congratulation, you finally have made yourself to the CRA’s list.

Oh, what about privacy? Forget it! When it comes to Government and Money, who cares about privacy!!

You better check here if you are a serious eBayer or a serious eBayer wanna-be.

Does mass un-follow all your twitter friends make sense?

It looks like a trend that all of sudden a lot of big players on Twitter started unfollowing all their friends and rebuilt a list that is much smaller and meaningful. Does that make sense at all?

I first saw Scobleizer done that. He even blogged two posts that explained “how can anyone follow 10,000 or more?” and claimed “you are SO unfollowed”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t locate both posts on his blog anymore. But I can tell you that the tone in these two posts sounds so arrogant that I personally can’t take it at all. But that’s not the only reason why I don’t agree with him and his action that unfollowed everyone on his following list.

Then, my role model on Internet Marketing John Chow have done the same lately and explained number of reasons why he did that on his blog. While I agree most of the point he made in this blog, I still don’t see the strong needs that make him to take this extreme action.

I am not going to comment on those reasons one by one to against them but what I really want to say in this post is that don’t do it, especially when you are an ordinary user like me.

Those who did mass unfollow are the big guys who usually have more than half million followers. With that large user base, they basically can do and experiment whatever they want without worrying about too much losing the followers. They have the enough influence that can still make people to follow them no matter what. Besides, having the much smaller ratio of the number of following and the number of follower actually makes them look much better.

We, as the ordinary user in other hand, can’t really do that. If we did the same we would never be able to grow and gain larger followers. We still need to take the routine path and follow the make-sense steps to build our list. This mass unfollow thing just doesn’t make any sense and not belong to a regular user, like you and me.

By the time I am writing this post, I took the action in my twitter account and unfollowed all users who didn’t follow me. Hence, bye bye big guys, I am not following you anymore. What I want more is a two-way communication that not only makes me to hear what you say but also makes you to hear what I say.

9 First Step Goals for Blogging

Words from Darren Rowse on ProBlogger.net:

Many bloggers start blogs these days with the dream of millions of readers and making large amounts of money.

While it is possible to build blogs that are widely read and profitable and there’s nothing wrong with dreaming big – the reality is that it takes time and a lot of work to build these kinds of blogs.

And he went on and suggested a list of 9 first step goals to people who want to get into the blogging venture with a big dream of making money from it.

1. Publish 10 Posts
2. Getting your first comment from someone you don’t know
3. Get your first link from another blog
4. Build your readership up to more than 20 readers a day
5. Hit a level of 20 RSS subscribers
6. Getting your blog indexed in Google
7. Get your blog earning $1 a week (update: only if making money from your blog is one of your goals – it’s not for everyone
8. First guest post on another blog
9. Having someone (not you or your mum) tweet about your blog

I seemed to have accomplished most of them, except the guest post on another blog, but Darren is very right that it’s just a beginning to get my feet on the right track. There is a very long way to go.

Yes, blogging is my new venture on making more money, and I am doing it with a dream that would make me completely off the regular job one day, or at least gets me retire earlier. With that big dream in mind that is still in “day” stage, I am totally prepared doing that in a long term. A very long journey is laid out right ahead of me.

9 First Step Goals for New Bloggers [ProBlogger.net]

Tips to Save Money on Grocery Shopping

Time to think about saving money in any possible way, because

1) “every penny counts while we are still in recession”, and

2) considering there will be more members joining my family later this year.

The Simple Dollar shares a tip that I can simply do while doing the grocery shopping. It reveals a fact he discovered that

on some products, the higher volume version often has a higher cost per unit than the smaller version.

He then went ahead and did some research to find why, and listed 10 products we should study carefully before going ahead buying a bulk.

• Tuna fish
• Ketchup
• Canned beans
• Salad & cooking oil
• Dishwashing detergent
• Laundry detergent
• American cheese
• Canned vegetables
• Jams and jellies
• Syrups

Very interesting find. I will sure think twice when thinking of buying these items in bulk next time when I do the grocery shopping.

Grocery Shopping 101: Qty Surcharges and 10 products to Watch out [the simple dollar]

7 Mistakes You Can Simply Avoid When You Write

I came across this post on Copyblogger while going through his feed today. Reading through the post kind reminded me one of the reasons that made me to start a blog a few years ago, which was basically to improve my writing skill while making my own web logs for my daily working and learning experience. It’s proved be a good one that have helped me to archived these two initial goals at some point.

To be honest, these 7 mistakes are quite common mistakes I see on the various posts I follow everyday. It’s definitely worth a post here emphasizing an easy way to improve the quality of the post by simply avoiding these 7 mistakes.

Mistake #1: loose vs. lose

If your pants are too loose, you might lose your pants.

Mistake #2: Me, Myself, and I

Many consider Chris a punk, but I myself tolerate him. Which brings me to ask myself, why?

Mistake #3: Different than vs. Different from

This vase is different from the one I have, but I think mine is better than this one.

Mistake #4: Improper Use of the Apostrophe

Mistake #5: Parallelism

When writing a list of items in paragraph form, this is even more crucial, and failing to stay in parallel can result in confusion for readers and scorn from English majors.

Mistake #6: i.e. vs. e.g.

i.e. is a way of saying “in other words.” while e.g. is used before giving specific examples.

Mistake #7: Could of, Would of, Should of

Please don’t do this:

I should of gone to the baseball game, and I could of, if Billy would of done his job.

Instead,

I should have gone to the baseball game, and could have, if Billy had done his job.

For more tips on avoiding grammatical mistakes, check out Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb.

Do you make these 7 mistakes when you write? [copyblogger]

Go Rockets Go

Who would have thought this Rockets and Lakers series can go this far, especially when both Mutombo and You Ming were already out?? Hey, no problem, they have beaten down Lakers twice now since Yao Ming’s out. Why they can’t do it again on Game 7?

So, Go Rockets Go. This is the best changes going to the conference final, ever!!

Publish Blog to Amazon Kindle

Amazon has opened a door to all blogs over the world allowing them to publish their blogs over to their flagship product Kindle. Previously, it was a closed program that only opens to the large well established blogs.

Currently, the program is still in beta, which is a fast track self publishing tool to upload your blog for sale on Kindle store, and open to everyone. However, in order to get paid, you will have to either have a US residential address or a US bank account. Not bad to a Canadian since it’s pretty easy for a Canadian to open a US checking account.

All you need to do is to register an account and submit your blog RSS feed to the Kindle store. Amazon will format your content for the delivery on the Kindle. Be ready with images of your blog’s screenshot, and masthead/banner/logo during the submission.

I went ahead and got my geeks talk blog submitted and published within 30 minutes, and now it’s in the waiting list for be approved. Currently, it shows “not available yet” on the product page.

So what would it look like on Kindle? During the submission you can preview your blog to see how it will look like on Kindle. To be honest, pretty ugly, but that’s ok.

Will this new money making mode work? I don’t know but my gut feeling is who wants to pay to read the stuff that is already free on the Internet. Well, since it’s still at the very early stage, it’s too soon to nail the deal. And here is John’s opinion that seems to summarize it pretty well at the moment.

Subscription revenue will be divided 70/30, with 70% going to Amazon and 30% going to you. Subscription price is solely determined by Amazon. I don’t know how Amazon prices their blogs but the average rate seems to be $1.99 per month. Even if you doubt anyone would subscribe to your blog, it’s still a good idea to sign up and get listed on one of the biggest websites in the world. The free exposure can’t hurt!

And yes, “The free exposure can’t hurt” in any way, so go hurry to give it a try.

Kindle Publishing for Blogs

Auto-Twittering through Friendfeed

Friendfeed is very feed friendly because it can be a central place that integrates all the feeds you subscribe together. Not only that, it can also automate things like sending tweets to twitter whenever you have new feeds coming in, which is very nice for both time-saving and marketing.

Friendfeed offers 57 services you can subscribe so far, pretty much covers all popular social network websites, blogs, twitter, flickr, delicious, Google Reader, YouTube, etc. etc. you name it. However, wandering around there is usually quite time consuming. I won’t suggest you go there too often unless you are a social media expert or enthusiasm. It’s a nice place for marketing but only merely ok for learning. I currently have 5 services added in my friendfeed account, including my blogs, bookmarks, feed readers, and twitter. I also set it up so new posts posted on my blogs and items shared through my Google Reader will be tweeted automatically to twitter. So far, it works great!

Setting up auto-twitter is a little tricky though. There is no obvious option in user setting for that. You will have to go a little route to get friendfeed authorized in your twitter account first in order to get the option shown up in user settings page.

First, in your friendfeed main page, click Post button near at the top, which turns on the cc Twitter option next to it.

Then, click Twitter link, which opens Twitter authorize page in a new window. Put your twitter username and password in, and click the bit Allow button.

Once it’s done, you will find the Twitter publishing preferences becomes available in your friendfeed settings. Clicking the Settings link next to your avatar will get you the page similar to the one below.

And once you see that, it’s all set. You can now enjoy the time saved from this automated process.

Happy friendfeeding, and twittering!

Life would be better without being a Canucks fan

All Canucks fans probably would totally agree with what I said in the title after watching a painful game that ended another Canucks journey to the Stanley Cup. What an ugly game to watch! Where were the so-called super stars when we need them the most? Why this so-called defensive-minded team had so many turnovers in the 3rd period that gave up 4 goals in 10 shot attempts? Why a so-called more experienced team acted no better or worse than a rookie?

My wife kept and still keeps telling me stop being a fan of any kind sports, especially the home town team. She simply thinks there are just many other things in life that are better and worth than being a *stupid* sports fan. Well, you know what, I have to admit that she’s right. She’s been right since from the first day I met her. But well, sadly, I am hopeless.

So what hope will we have being a hopeless Canucks fan? There will always be next year but before we do that let’s look back. It’s just plain shame being a hockey town without even winning the cup once in their history. Shame to death. We need a better hockey team, a team that can win the cup, a team at least that

• has the winning heart. If you still think they have it, stop it. A team that has the winning heart with them wouldn’t have given that many turnovers after leading 3 times in a game.
• has the leadership. Relying on a goalie is not going to bring us the cup. We need Ovechkin, Crosby, Malkin type of super stars who can carry the team and win the game. We don’t even have any player that is at the same level as Patrick Kane. Look at the 3rd goal he scored, just beautiful.
• has more young skilled willing to fight guys than aged experienced but soft guys.  You know and get what I meant.

Let’s keep hoping and wish life will be better, a lot better the same time next year with being a Canucks fan.