Shoemoney System Review & Overview

Wednesday 24th February, 2010

Yesterday I gave a brief rundown of the topics included in the new “Getting Started” section of the Shoemoney System. Today I’ll talk about some of the topics in more depth. Keep in mind though that I won’t get too detailed about just what exactly is in the videos. It’s just an overview.

Fundamental Topics

Jeremy just gives a quick rundown on what to expect with these videos. I say “quick” because the entire video only runs for about 50 seconds so, needless to say, there are no revelations or “get rich” tips here — Just an intro stating that these videos are meant to be seen as a “video glossary” more than anything else.

What Is Video Marketing?

Now you have to keep in mind that this portion of the System is aimed squarely at the beginner, and there may be some people out there who have absolutely no idea what video marketing is — Hence the basic title. In this () video, Jeremy just lets you know that video is hot right now and that many, many products are sold through video marketing. Of course that wasn’t always so, but faster and faster broadband means that uploading and viewing videos is easier now than it ever was — coupled with the fact that good quality video cameras are so cheap nowadays! Even Amazon.com are getting into the act!

Now so far I’ve managed to avoid putting videos on most of my sites, but I can see that’s gotta change!

What Is Link Buying & Selling?

This video is a quick rundown on link buying and selling. Essentially if your website or blog is popular enough for various companies to come calling and offer you some money to link to their site or product (and you accept it), then that is link selling. Beware, however, that Google does not like this at all because it artificially inflates the perceived popularity of the site who’s bought the links so, if you do this, you should try to make the link a “nofollow” one if possible.

Likewise, link buying is when you buy a link to your own site from another site. Once again Google doesn’t like this practice, so be careful.

Personally speaking I don’t bother with selling OR buying links. It’s just not worth the hassle to me. I know of quite a few people who do this though.

What Is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click is basically what the name says, and it’s something that is bread and butter to most websites, whether it’s buying or selling. There are many forms of PPC, such as text link ads, PPC through media buys, or through social media such as Facebook and MySpace.

Just about everybody has heard of Google AdSense. They’re the little text link ads that you see on a lot of websites, and publishers (as in website owners) make money by having other people click on those ads (but NEVER click on them yourself or tell your friends or family to click on them or you might end up being banned). Likewise, you can “buy traffic” to your sites by setting up a PPC campaign through Google AdWords and other networks such as MSN and Yahoo.

As this video (along with others in this section) only lasts for about a minute or so, there’s not really a lot you can say about Pay Per Click at this stage, but it WILL be looked into in more depth in coming videos.

What Is Crowd Sourcing?

Crowd sourcing is a term that I hadn’t really heard about before, so it was interesting to hear a little bit about it. Basically it’s about “listing” a particular job, such as a graphic design or logo for your website for instance, at and then seeing what other people (the “crowd”) come up with. You continue to work with the crowd as they, independently of one another, design and redesign your graphic. When you see something you like you can pay that particular designer for that graphic. Not a bad system!

Apparently it costs something like $50 or so to list your job, and whatever you deem as an appropriate sum of money for the winning result.

Likewise this is a topic which will be looked into more thoroughly at a later stage.

CPC vs CPM Advertising

A quick rundown of CPC (Cost Per Click) and CPM (Cost Per 1000) advertising and how they work. For instance you might pay 1 cent for each time someone clicks on one of your text links campaigns (CPC) or pay 50 cents for each 1000 impressions, or views, of a particular campaign (CPM). This is the same principal if you’re earning money through either of these methods.

As far as buying is concerned you might want to start off with CPC advertising (through AdWords for instance) as you’ll only pay for each click. Down the track you might switch to CPM or even try a combination of the two.

For those interested, “M” is Latin for 1000.

What Is Link Building?

Link building is simply building links to your own website. Some of these links will happen naturally as your site becomes more well known but, initially, it’s something that you need to kick-start yourself and continue to work on whenever you can. The more links you have to your site, the higher you’ll get in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). The higher you get in the SERPs, the more traffic to your website. And the more traffic to your website, the more money you’ll make! Easy, right?

What Are Website Analytics?

The more information you can gather about who comes to you website, the better off you’ll be. With website analytics you can see where your potential customers are coming from, what they’re looking at, how long they spend on your site, what keywords they used to find your site, what links they’re clicking on when they get there, where they’re exiting and much much more. Not only that, it’s just cool to look at all the stats. Well, it’s fun for me anyhow!

What Is Media Buying?

I can’t say that I’m any the wiser on this topic, but media buying is buying media on very large sites, such as Facebook and MSN. Actually I take that back. I understand the concept, but not the reason why. Mmmm, that’s not true either. I understand why you would do so, but not HOW you would do so. Damnit! I could figure out how you would do so, because I would assume that it’s pretty straightforward, I just….. Nah. Stuff it! I understand it all, but I don’t understand any of it. I guess because it probably requires LARGE SUMS OF MONEY I feel that I don’t need to know about it just yet. Yup, I think that’s it. The money thing is the stumbling block for me. Maybe in a few months time I’ll comprehend it a little better.

As Jeremy says at the very end of this video “Media buying is just buying a huge bulk set of media packages on websites”. Enough said!

What Is Web Hosting?

A web host is a place on the internet which hosts your websites. Simple enough, yeah?

Shoemoney Quote Of The Day in regards to hosting your site on your own computer (using a “normal” internet service plan) — “You could service one or two people but then your complete uplink will be down”. Guess you have to see the video to appreciate it. Sorry…

Me personally? I use Hostgator. Cheap and effective!

What Is Link Cloaking?

I have to say I was initially a little concerned by this topic and it had me thinking “Now where is Jeremy leading us to, here?” I needn’t have worried though as it was just simple stuff that won’t get you into trouble. It’s simply a mixture of anchor text and URL shortening as far as I can see. A little bit like using tinyurl.com or bit.ly for example. Anyone using Twitter will understand what I mean.

You just turn an ugly long-ass affiliate link in to a much shorter and prettier one, that’s all. Apparently that’s called link cloaking.

OK, that’s enough for now. More tomorrow. Stay tuned!