If any Membercon readers will be there, let us know in the comments – let’s have a small meet-up – beers (or the beverage of your choice) are on us. We’ll pick a day/time as we get closer.

Blogworld Expo is the show we sold Podcast Expo to a couple years ago and it has really turned into a tremendous event. Honestly, Rick and team were able to turn the event into something I wasn’t able to – a huge industry-wide spectacle that everyone attends. (If I had to name my biggest business fault, it’s not letting things mature enough before selling it and moving on, but that’s a subject for an entire post I’ll write during the show.)

There are a few reasons we’ll be attending:

1) I’ve always approached any event, webinar or research project with one goal: if I can pick up just one tip, trick or nugget of information that helps us increase our revenue just 1%, the entire trip is an awesome investment.

2) Emile and I have been so focused on our niche membership and content sites that it is helpful to take a few days, step back, and get a broader view of what other successful site owners are doing to make more money.

3) Events like these are great for “recharging your batteries” and getting fresh motivation to do more. Making money online is terrific motivation, but sometimes you need more than that to confirm you’re on the right track and seeing the world with clarity. It is easy to get a skewed version of reality because you’re spending so much time on the “nitty gritty” details. Meeting other site owners face-to-face is a terrific way of making sure your business goggles are on straight.

Hope to see a few of you there. Feel free to call my cell phone on-site if you want to chat: 1-949-677-4905.

In my interview, I ask him a variety of questions about how he grows his membership base, what works in terms of free and discounted trials, his conversion rates from the $1 trial to a regular monthly membership, and how he sets pricing.

As usual, 4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here:

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hi, Tim Bourquin here from membercon.com and thanks for joining me for another interview today. Today, our guest is Perry Lawrence and you may have seen his website, it’s a very popular one called AskMrVideo.com that talks about using video for your website. We’re going to talk to him a little bit about that and how he uses video and suggests that membership site owners use video to promote their sites. He’s also got an eBook he’s written called Membership Site Bible, which I understand a new version is coming out shortly this year. So we’re going to talk to him about that too. So, Perry, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Perry Lawrence: Tim, thanks a lot for having me. It’s a pleasure.

MemberCon.com: Well, I always like start with a little bit of background to give our listeners some idea of the context to where you’re coming from. So, when did you first decide to get into the membership site business and create revenue that way?

Perry Lawrence: Well, I’ve been doing websites for other people for quite a while and really helping other folks make money online, but it never really occurred to me that I could use that for myself. So, a friend of mine, a good friend of mine, Rich Farina, dragged me to a membership site conference hosted by actually the developer of the platform I’m using. His name is Bill Myers and his associate, who now owns the company, Tim Kerber. So, it was I guess a three-day conference and really what they spelled out was really intriguing to me and it really made a lot of sense because they talked about it being a true business, a true sellable asset, the continuity model. They didn’t use the word continuity at that time, I think we called them subscription or membership sites but it all appealed to me but even more of the point that the type and caliber of people specifically Bill and Tim, but the people that they gathered to them was just outstanding. The people who had successes in other businesses who are now porting their knowledge to a membership or continuity website and I just for like, “Wow, I’ve found my calling, I found my people.” So, I went home. I really just studied the model, studied the systems, really got very familiar with the platform, started building membership sites for other people using that platform and others and just shortly, in a short matter of time, just really put my thoughts down to paper and came out with a book called “Membership Site Bible” that did extremely well and we pulled it off the market at the beginning of this year, while we’re rewriting it, and we’re coming out with Membership Site Bible to the New Testament and things have radically changed as you know even in the past two years. So, that’s kind of the story. After I wrote the book, I was still trying to figure out my niche. I thought, well there are other people such as your self and at that time Tim Kerber and Bill are both deeply involved in teaching folks the membership model. So, I knew that’s not exactly where I wanted to end up, but finally it dawned on me, “Well what have you been doing for the past 20 years, Perry?” And so I came up with a site called AskMrVideo.com. I’ve been here for so long, I’ve forgotten all the questions and so I figured, well let’s just have people ask me and I can tell them because I either know the answer or you find out the answers very fast and that’s kind of how the AskMrVideo.com site was born.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. So do you have a background then in TV production and then you just translated that to the web video?

Perry Lawrence: I did. I spent 20 years in commercial production, producing commercials for an ad agency, a little ad agency called Ogilvy & Mather. They hold the IBM account, 900 billion dollars or something like that, and a hundred million dollar account. And they got a great, great education there in branding and just really short form video which I really, really, really like and from there went on, about 10 years ago I work for a nonprofit in Philadelphia where I’m currently residing and that nonprofit has sent me all over the world doing short documentaries for their work, and so I was developing documentaries for them and developing their web properties and I helped them go from a five-million dollar organization to a 15-million dollar organization. So, that’s kind of my background. I’ve been in video forever, brief stint in audio and in my head, it’s a video very fast, and I have never looked back. I just really love video and know ins and outs of it and I really have been applying what I’ve known to the web for quite a while. It used to be just merely impossible if I get video on the web. And nowadays, it’s just incredibly easy so that’s what I really teach people is that, “Don’t be afraid, it’s easy and you can use it in marketing to great success.” So, yeah, my background is video production. I’ve been doing that since, man 20, 20 almost 25 years.

MemberCon.com: So, OK, so you took some knowledge that you had…a lot of knowledge you had from video production then translated that to the web. Your timing was great because, of course, web video has exploded over the past five years. But how did you initially promote your website to try and get members and how did you decide, “Well, let’s start with that. We’ll get to pricing in a minute.” How did you first promote your site?

Perry Lawrence: Well, like I said, I was trying to find what my niche was. Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. Like well, duh! You’ve been putting videos, you do that. And really, I think part of the issue there is you really have to be passionate about your topic and while I’ve done video for so long, I had to really tap into that passion again because some folks out there have been a dentist or a lawyer or groundskeeper, you name it and it becomes “a job” to them and then, and somehow the passion gets lost when it becomes a J-O-B. So I really had to tap back into that passion and once I did, then the light bulb just started going off. Like well, “I could talk about this, I could talk about this, I could talk about this.” So what I did is I was involved in a number of membership sites because of the Membership Site Bible and I just put up a squeeze page that it just had a caricature of me and an opt-in box. I knew at least I needed to do that and kind of a “coming soon” type of thing. And I just started adding my signature, my URL to my SIG file in the forms I was posting on. I didn’t know them but that’s called the expert posting, so I just was very helpful on the forms, just started talking to people about what I was thinking about doing, what I wanted to do and what I was going to do. And I just started really building a list, very slowly, very methodically, went to Yahoo Answers, I went to a bunch of places and wherever I want just kind of left little breadcrumbs and crumb trails to AskMrVideo.com and generated a few names, few hundred names, and then when got ready to launch really encourage those people to join as charter members and that’s a great strategy that I really think worked well. And I just promised them, as long as you’re charter member, you’re low, low charter membership price is guaranteed for life and I do have some life as long as askmrvideo.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, what was that price initially for those charter members on a monthly basis?

Perry Lawrence: I believe the lowest has been 9.95.

MemberCon.com: Well, that’s great incentive to stay subscribed obviously because if they cancelled then they’re going to be coming at a higher price, so that has probably helped–

Perry Lawrence: Exactly.

MemberCon.com: –some unretention. What do you currently charge for new members now?

Perry Lawrence: New members now are 19.95 and we’re getting ready to rollout in August our new, I don’t know if we have a name for it, but our new membership level has got a couple of other platforms that were rolling into AskMrVideo.com and I guess I can talk about him now. They’re going to have a full blown editing platform built right into AskMrVideo.com. So, we’ll get editing, hosting, plus a lot of marketing content that they can incorporate into their website, so we’re extremely excited about that and now probably I rollout of the 47 a dollar price point.

MemberCon.com: Did you use some testing with the 19.95 and try different levels or is this something you just kind of picked out of your head and went with it?

Perry Lawrence: I kind of picked it out in my head and went with it. I mean I’m talking to people subsequently. A lot of folks say, “Well you know 17 would be easier, we’d better, blah, blah, blah…” You know what I think the pricing is a pricing…Granted they’re, if people are in the buying frames and they had to buy the pricing they may have something to do with that 19 versus 19.95, I don’t really know, I don’t do a whole lot of testing. We’re getting addition to do a lot, but I have never done a lot of testing. And again, going back to my point, I don’t think the price is going to, a couple of bucks here and there are going to make or break it. However, I do believe that you have a lot of value and you do offer things that people want. They really don’t care what the price is. So that’s what I try to focus on is like, “What do my constituents want, what does the audience demand, what are they looking for, what’s going to get them to say, yes, to sign me up quicker?” And so we had a dollar trial for over six months and that’s been extremely well received. So they do a dollar trial, try to set up for 21 days and 19.95 after that.

MemberCon.com: What percentage or if you’re willing to share that with us are people converting over to the regular membership after that trial?

Perry Lawrence: Seventy-five percent.

MemberCon.com: Really? OK that’s fantastic.

Perry Lawrence: Yeah. We try to manage the consumption. I think consumption is a huge topic. It could be a whole another call, but I think consumption is really important when you’re talking about new members. And the best way to think about consumption is when you are at a restaurant. If they brought you four appetizers, five entrees, 16 desserts and 57 drinks all at one time, you’re not going eat any of it. You’re going to get up frustrated, unsatisfied and leave. But if you can start with an appetizer, let them finish that, start with the drink, maybe an entree.

MemberCon.com: Right.

Perry Lawrence: Dessert perhaps…People then can consume what you’re offering and be satisfied, be happy with the rate. So we’re really looking at ways to re-engineer AskMrVideo.com and make it a little more navigatable–

MemberCon.com: Right.

Perry Lawrence: –and a little more consumable especially for the beginners. You know, we’ve got so much stuff there, and some broad topics that we really want to now, take that, consolidate it a little bit better and make it available for people as they need it and when they need it so it’s easy to find and so they don’t get frustrated.

MemberCon.com: I’ve heard about that, that in fact if you do offer too much, in our minds, as the side owners, you think it’s a good thing because the more you offer, the better value it is but that being, that overwhelming feeling for the user sometimes can work against you.

Perry Lawrence: Yeah. I think there’s a real balance there because you obviously want to show them some goodies that are going to entice them. I think a folk like Jim Laube of restaurantowner.com does it extremely well. I think Tim Schmidt over at the usconcealedcarry.org does it extremely well. What are you going to get and make that such a value that you’d be stupid not to sign up and that’s kind of what we tried to do over at AskMrVideo.com and here’s what you get and if you went out and did this yourself, it would cost you arm and leg money and time wise, in that three to five typically great, great products or content pieces, assets we call those, after that you wanted then to be able to trickle it in. It’s like the blue plate special. Here’s the special to get you in the door and then be able to offer people up-sells, french fries, whatever it is that they happen to be hungry for once they get in. So, it really is a balance on some real key assets that they’re going to come for then deliver them some great other assets while they’re there that they can make use of. In a dual phrase, it’s always been, people come for, they come for the content and they stay because of the community, is typically true. I mean if you can migrate your folks from the content, get them involved in the community, your stick rates are going to be a whole lot higher.

MemberCon.com: Do you find that you get more conversions from your email list than you do from the website itself?

Perry Lawrence: Yes and no. I think up to recently, it’s been more from the website itself. I think recently what we started to do is, in our newsletter, have a members-only section. And I was hesitant to do that for a while but recently just added it and it’s just at the bottom, it’s just a little blurb that says, “Here’s some content that only members can get to and we’ve really made that valuable.” We have industry expert interviews, called us the video pros and that’s been received really well and we’ve also done some website strategy sessions that we’ve recorded and are delivering those every week. So every week, there’s a new interview. Every week there’s a new website strategy session that both of us are video-driven and it’s great, great content and that can only get accessed by members. So, now we’re starting to see more folks come from the list on, as members and as you grow your list, you can grow membership. It used to be that you could get 20% to 25% of your list on as members. I think that members dwindled down a little bit to below 20 for most folks just because of the industry landscape of membership sites. So it’s a lot harder, everybody’s finding it’s a lot harder to just, what we call lead with your membership site. You can’t just say, “Hey, you got a membership site, join here now, you get all these good stuff.” It’s really difficult to do that. I think there’s a lot of other ways to drive members and those ways are a whole lot more effective than just hanging up a membership shingle and expecting a lot of people to join.

MemberCon.com: I like the idea of a members-only section in the newsletter because it’s a constant reminder to everybody who gets it, that there is a member’s area and the more stuff and more kind of teasers you can put in that area, it’s a great sales to all I think for the members.

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely. Yeah I wish I’d done it a little longer but it’s working out really well now.

MemberCon.com: I’ve been hearing a lot about it and I’m kind of researching how long members stay members on certain sites and it seems for the internet marketers, the people that talk about making money online, 45 months is about the lifespan of their membership, I mean, they’re constantly having to get new people into their sales funnel. What has it been for you? Do you know kind of your average stick time for members who stay members?

Perry Lawrence: It’s about eight months but obviously some are shorter, obviously like I said to any other call, there’s some that have been on for two years, our charter members. So, I think a lot of it has to do, like I mentioned before, is getting them involved and getting them involved in the community and I learned a lot of great things from Jerry Minchey over at artisticthreadworks.com. He’s a genius when it comes to member retention and really community building, and so we’re doing a lot of things like that getting ready to do another contest. One of our first contests doubles our list so we’re getting ready to that again. Just had a member-only promotion this past July 25th and we called that “Christmas in July” and so we said, “If you’re a member, you’ll get a free DVD, if you’re member on that day, on Christmas Day, July 25th.” So, I’ve had a ton of people request that free DVD and I covered shipping and everything is totally a free gift if you’re a member, and so we even opened that up to people who are trial members. So we say, “For a buck, you can get this great DVD that’s got a lot of great content.” And so, there’s all kinds of ways to promote the site and to incentivize people to stay and that last promotion, I’m very happy about because I think it did both. It was a great way to say thank you to the members who had had stay and who were members and it’s a great way to drive new members to it. So, we’ll definitely be doing the stuff like that again.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. I’ve noticed that even if your content is the best stuff out there, the best online, the best you could find anywhere, without some sort of time-sensitive incentive or some kind of offer that’s going to be taken away at a deadline, it’s really a lot harder to get people to sign up just for the content alone. It’s almost like they need that push no matter how great the content is for them to get on board. Have you felt that to be true as well?

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely, absolutely. It wasn’t until two years ago was a little different, but nowadays that is 100% true. And so what a lot of us are doing is leading with launches instead of leading with the site. And leading with launches, what I mean with that, have a new class or new product, have a time, a time-sensitivity to that, a deadline and have also a class size limit and then we bonus in the continuity. So we’ve done that three times now that’s worked very successfully over the past six months, six to eight months, and extremely successful every time it has built my list substantially and increase membership substantially, plus sold a ton of products, and another way is to do a promotion like we just did with Christmas in July. That was a one-day only event and really did well for me. I did not push it at all. It wasn’t a hard sell whatsoever but a lot of people really dug in and we’ll have up-sells on as a free DVD, but we’ll up-sells on the back of that, added a bunch of new members, and so we’ll see. But there’s…I’ve talked to one membership site owner who closes his membership site for three months and has an event every quarter, so that’s really scarce. I mean you can only get in once a quarter and so it’s all about scarcity. I’m a big fan of Cialdini and his book Persuasion, and there are a lot of great tips that I try to follow from that and I try to implement in everything I do?

MemberCon.com: Now, you mention one site just before that that I meant to ask you again to repeat the site, it was artistic something.

Perry Lawrence: Artisticthreadworks.com.

MemberCon.com: Threadworks.com?

Perry Lawrence: Uh-huh.

MemberCon.com: OK. All right, I’ll have to check that out, we’ll link to that as well.

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely. Yeah, he’s a great interview to be there, crashing it in their niche it’s a woman and her husband who she designs little patterns for mechanized embroidery machine, sewing embroidery machines. And they’re absolutely crashing it.

MemberCon.com: It’s definitely a niche.

Perry Lawrence: Absolutely a niche. Not one of the most beautiful sites on the planet, but they’re absolutely crashing it. So a lot of these membership sites where mom and pop run. She does the content site and he does the management site if you will in the community building site, it’s been really good.

MemberCon.com: Do you offer a money back guarantee on your site as a sales tactic?

Perry Lawrence: Yeah, we do. That plus a dollar trial is no real…There’s no real incentive that’s for your money back, we feel it’s a great content, a lot of ton of downloads, so we’ve not had anybody take us up on that.

MemberCon.com: All right. We’ll I’m going to get a little selfish here and ask about the video side of things because I try to use that a lot in my site. What one of the things I do is I take the audio, make it a podcast, but then I also make some PowerPoint slides and make a video by putting just the audio over the slides. I noticed some people superimposed the people talking through Skype or what not, am I missing something by not having the faces of the people while they’re talking almost in kind of a TV sense or am I OK doing these slides with the audio?

Perry Lawrence: I definitely you’re OK doing the slides with the audio. The things that I try to teach everybody is just do it. Just whatever is what you’re doing continue to do, if you’re not doing start, and where you’ve start there you start. So you’re way ahead of the game. Most people will just throw up their audio. I think you’re way out of the game by throwing up, adding some slides to it because now that becomes even a more valuable asset. People learned different ways, they consumed content different ways. We try to make our content available three different ways, video, audio and text. Especially our classes, so yeah I think you’re way ahead of the game. Now what I will say though and what I do teach a lot is that people definitely need to be adding videos of themselves to their membership site. Membership sites typically are personality-driven and if you’re not hanging your personality out there through video, I think your competition is going to be where already are. And you’ll attract people, whether you do video or not, just by the way you write, by your personality and by what you talked about, you’re going to attract people who are similar to you and, you know, that’s exactly what you want and you can leverage that even times 10 when you do that with a video. So becoming an authentic authority what I call in your niche by doing a series of videos, doing an about me video, doing a live video, all those things are going to be very powerful on your membership site. Don’t stop what you’re doing because that seems to be working for you, but I will also get you to do videos of yourself, introducing about me, video doing a why video. Why you’re doing this? What’s your passionate about either that’s in business or in charity or, et cetera, because your kid needs a new pair of shoes and just doing video blogs about some things that you’re having fun with or passionate about. I carry my Flip with me every where because I’m always looking for a quick interview with an industry expert and it’s just so much fun and so easy to do.

MemberCon.com: That’s a good point that you brought that up about the Flip. Decent quality, it’s getting better but not the greatest. It used to be that you could put up a pretty crummy video with so-so audio and as long as the content was good, people got something out of it, they tolerated that. But I sense that that’s starting to change as well. People are expecting a little bit better production these days, am I right on that?

Perry Lawrence: It really depends on your niche. I’ll just agree with you on one point. The quality of the Flip…I used to lug around 20 pounds Betamax, Beta cam high end news camera with the lens cost more than the camera type of feel. When I was working in Manhattan and the quality of the Flip Mino HD far and above surpasses that. If you’d know a few tricks, the built-in microphone is the best built-in microphone on any camera period I think and so you can really…Now, you can’t have a lot of the flicks and volume adjustments that you can with one of these bigger more powerful cameras. But people ask me, “What’s the best camera?” And the best camera is the camera you’re going to use. So it’s brain dead simple, one button turns it on, one button hits record, one button plays back. It’s just dead simple and it just works. So for me, a lot of times, I get to leave my big cameras at home and just bring a Flip in my back pocket and just have some amazing content. And that’s what I teach people too. Now, if you’re worried about you look on film or how you’re coming across, you’re thinking too much about me instead of thinking about the content you’re delivering. People come to you for your content, for who you bring them, for the insight that you bring them so as long as you’re focused on giving, people will forget a ton of “quality issues”. I think you too, there’s a way to step up your game and now you can broadcast and widescreen HD, pretty incredible quality there. So the game is changing so yeah I think even with simple tools like the Flip and you too you can still have some good quality video if you pay attention to a few things. Don’t shot with light behind you and make sure you’re brighter than the background and get the camera close enough that the microphone doesn’t have to strain to hear you. So checks like that, making sure there’s catchlight in your eye to increase the trust factor that we teach all of that in the classes over at AskMrVideo.com and just I have struggled over that point you make because I’ve been in the video industry for the 25 plus years, and here I’m doing Flip videos and wanting people to think that I’m a pro is like, well pro is a relative term. You know, professional is a relative term. Now, we have done for our higher end clients, we have done high end productions. You can go check those out at barefootexecutive.tv and buzzprofits.tv and nicheology.tv. Those are web TV shows that we’ve put together for our high end clients, and they’re having some great success with that. And we have stepped up the quality there thus it is more of a “show” We just want to position it differently. So, yeah, I think there’s room for both. But if you’re just starting out or if somebody is just interested in leveraging what they do and incorporating video in their marketing bag of tricks. Don’t worry about quality, I mean there are some tips to pay attention to, but worry about delivering great content.

MemberCon.com: So, I’ll finish up with this, you said just put in the content up there as long as it was quality and great work to get membership than you see that decline, now it’s more of launch, you got to create some incentive to get in by a deadline, maybe even close to site, will that stop to work eventually or start to taper off and then what do you think is next? I mean what’s after that?

Perry Lawrence: I don’t think that the subscription or continuity model is going away any time soon. I think we’ve seen a dip a matter of fact because of the economy. I think as the economy bounces back people’s discretionary income and their “educational income” and their forgettable money is going to bounce back and as that do I believe the continuity of starting things will continue to grow. So, as far as how people go into market on internet in the next five years, it’s hard to tell. I think everything that has worked offline has since now working online, so I try to follow the rule of thumb that success leaves clues. Look at what some of the bigger companies are doing with their promotions. Look at companies like Sports Illustrated and what they do to incentivize you into their continuity program. Look at what your cable company does. I know Ryan Lee watches a few interesting sites and checking out what some other industries are doing online. So just, success leaves clues, follow what other successful people are doing, what their bundling, what their offering and look at the content that they’re delivering and how they’re delivering it. And I’m finding is people’s attention span gets shorter and shorter, smaller bunch work even better. So the future of the web, I think the future of the web is video. I happen to biased, but I think web free data will be an immersive video experience. You can find things like that over at who really are already doing stuff like that. I use a player called Veeple which is kind of an immersive interactive player that we’re having some fun with and so as video gets just that easy it’s rarely changing the phase of, it has changed the phase of internet plus companies like Live Stream, Justin.tv, Ustream, they’re all going to a live streaming model and offering that up to users so we’re going see people streaming their life 24/7. Kind of a scary spot, I’m not particularly interested in doing that but and as kids come up they want to be…Have what one pundit is called arm’s length intimacy and that the Justin.tv and the streaming media, streaming live video definitely does that.

MemberCon.com: You said Veeple, spell that for me so people are going to know what site to go through their.

Perry Lawrence: Veeple.com.

MemberCon.com: Got it. And, of course, anyone listening make sure you check out AskMrVideo.com for great tips on adding video to your own site and then what will be the site name for Membership Site Bible when that’s ready?

Perry Lawrence: They can just go to membershipsitebible.com.

MemberCon.com: All right, easy enough. We’ll link to that as well. Perry, thanks very much for your time today. I appreciate your sharing…

Yaro also does a site called MembershipMastermind.com, which offers a free eBook called Membership Site Masterplan. For the great price of your first name and email, it’s one of the best free resources online for membership site owners. Go there now and grab a copy!

When I saw that Yaro had interviewed Jeremy, I knew it would be great. Jeremy Schoemaker is my type of entrepreneur – scrappy, motivated and passionate about making money online. His frank and candid demeanor really shines in the interview. I listened to the whole thing on a long drive a few months ago and again a few days ago.

I wrote to Yaro and he was kind enough to give me permission to post the interview and the transcript on MemberCon. You can find his original post here.

By the way, Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com also did an interview with Shoemoney which is excellent.

Thanks Yaro for allowing me to re-post your interview!

Click the play button below to hear the interview:

Interview transcript:

Yaro Starak: Hi everyone. This is Yaro Starak here from the Entrepreneur’s Journey podcast. And today on the line with me, I have a very special guest which sort of I have been trying to get for a long time but I guess I haven’t been trying hard enough because we both know each other and it took Nate Whitehill from Unique Blog Designs.com who I believe has done both our blog designs now to connect us properly. And my guest name is Jeremy Schoemaker, who you may know as ShoeMoney from the Shoemoney.com blog. So, thank you for joining me Jeremy.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Hey, Yaro, thanks for having me.

Yaro Starak: So, there’s quite a bit of history behind what you do and obviously you’re a well known blogger but that’s really not I think what you do really. I mean that’s part of what you do but definitely not all of what you do. But before we get to today, can we go back to yesterday and a little bit further back in that and just get us to where you’re up. Like did you go to university or school or what’s your story?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I lived on campus at Western Illinois University and many other colleges over the course of about seven years but never really went to college that much. I just had a really good time partying with my friends and it was a real waste of my parents’ money and I feel really bad in saying that and was really happy when I was able to repay them a couple of years ago for all the money I’d wasted of theirs. But yeah, I really was never a college student. I was never…I was barely a high school student. I mean I barely graduated high school and to be honest, I mean my mom was a teacher there and if it wasn’t for her and her reputation, I don’t even know if I would have graduated high school. So, I just was never into school and I was always kind of doing my own thing.

Yaro Starak: Nice that you had an insider there to get you through school. That’s clever.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. It was kind of weird I mean I remember going up and getting like our test scores from our finals and seeing like 43% D minus and then a quote and it says like, “Your mom is a wonderful person.” So, I mean I’ve very, very fortunate that I made it.

Yaro Starak: It is pretty clear that the education system has very little to do with your success online and in business. Where did you get your skills like how did you study up in this area?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I’ve always just been a hands-on person. I mean I think one of the reason why I never did well in school is just I never had the attention span for it nor did I really care to listen to somebody talk for a long period of time about, you know. I mean if they had…I want like a lot of meat…I really like…I love debate and stuff like that. I mean I need hands on stuff. So, I was always into electronics like from a very, very young age and fire and all that cool stuff. My mom forbid me from ever using like household electricity. So, the deal was as long as I stuck to 12 volt automotive kind of electricity that I could kind of have free reign and do what I wanted. Well, she didn’t think that I could get a converter in our basement and basically transform our entire basement into 12-volt powered. So, I don’t know. I mean I’ve always just been a hands on person and that led me into computers where I learned how to program and which eventually we’ll get later in the story I’m sure. It’s marketing and just kind of just learned as I’ve gone, just all hands on. I tried to read as much as possible online but take it all kind of with a grain of salt, and just test everything and just get hands on, get down and dirty.

Yaro Starak: Let’s put this into chronological order. When did you get your first Internet account?

Jeremy Schoemaker: It would have been about 95ish. I was working at Sears selling washers and dryers and this lady walked in and said, “You know, I hear you’re good with the Macintosh computers here.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know about good. I mean I’m good with the games on them.” And she said, “Well I’m going to start this Internet company and we don’t have anyone who knows anything about Macintosh computers and we need someone to walk our customers through setting up their computers.” So, she said, “I don’t know what you make here but I’ll pay you a dollar more an hour and you start tomorrow.” So, I walked out of there and the next day, I was thrown right into it. I never had a clue what the Internet was. I mean it was so new and especially this was in pretty rural Illinois where I grew up. So, I was landed right into it and we didn’t really each have our own computer because it was a really, really low budget startup. And so, everybody had what’s called a terminal server which was connected to a Unix based server and that one server was not only like powered all of us but it also was like the dial in server for everyone and all the stuff. And everyone there had to do and I didn’t even know it at the time but I was developing all these like server administration skills with Unix and Linux which helped me a lot later in life. But that was basically my first exposure to the Internet. And I also didn’t know it at the time but she was running about a million emails a day through there which is now known as high volume email deployment or spam. So, it was kind of fascinating back then at the time. I mean it wasn’t like you thought it was a really bad thing. I mean AOL would sell you their entire users. I think back then, it was like eight million users for a couple hundred dollars.

Yaro Starak: No kidding.

Jeremy Schoemaker: And you could, yeah, and you could market to them. So, it was just so early in the game. And it was…it’s nice…it’s funny to look back and to see how I really had no clue about what I was doing but it’s kind of like the Karate Kid and all of a sudden you get thrown on your own and you realize, “Hey, I know how to do all this, and this, and this.” So, I left to go back to college. After doing that job for about a year and a half, I left to go back to college, wasted about two years there, worked for a small ISP there just doing support and some small programming stuff which was very, very basic. And then moved back home and then worked for another Internet provider but this time, I had a little bit more. I was doing web design which I was never very good at but didn’t really take much back then to be an expert web designer. So, it was pretty much just throwing together a bunch of tables in a web site with no real graphic ability which I didn’t have. So, and then I started making my own web site and just playing around with stuff and building a bunch of just silly sites and I kind of fell into one because I was always a gaming person about 90 probably late 90s, I owned a site called madgamer.com. I owned MacQuake. There was a game called Quake I was super into which I’m sure a lot of people out there are familiar with and there was a Mac version that came out which was kind of hack and it was unsupported by anyone and it actually got the developers who poured it over to use my site MacQuake.com as the official support site. So, in all the documentation, they actually used my site. Then I was approached by a company called Other World Computing, still around, and they wanted to advertise on the site and were going to pay me like $1800 a month that I just absolutely was blown away by that.

Yaro Starak: What year are, Jeremy?

Jeremy Schoemaker: This is back in the late 90s.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Like probably 97, 98. I’m sure it’s on the way back machine back there.

Yaro Starak: Yeah.

Jeremy Schoemaker: I mean the site, the site was all framed out. It was all crap. You know, all we did was we just had a forum and it barely worked I mean the site was…it was bombarded with traffic, you know. I had no clue just flying blind just…I just made something I was into and I knew other people wanted help with the game and needed files and what not and had questions. So I created that service and service them which kind of leads into other things. Very shortly after that, the dot com crash happened about 2000 or right around there and Other World Computing said, “We got to break our contract with you.” We’re broke.” They refused to pay anymore and I thought, “Man, that was good while it lasted.” And I didn’t make much money. I think maybe I made $10,000 or so and spend it as fast as possible. And I just thought while that was good while it lasted. Then a couple of years later, about 2000, well I kind of needed to focus on jobs because I was getting older, getting into my 20s, mid 20s actually and needed to really focus on a career. I never really made more than $25,000, $30,000 at that point.

Yaro Starak: Have you met your wife is that why you’re saying this?

Jeremy Schoemaker: No, not yet. A couple years down the road. So, then, I mean it was pretty bare for work around that time where I was from. It was a really run down area. It’s about 100 miles west of Chicago in an area called the Quad Cities Moline Illinois and stuff like that. Some people out there, I’m always amazed of how many people had heard of it. But, so, I had to move for work and I moved up and I was working for a bank at the time in that area and this was before I moved in. I moved into the security position and it was right when there was all this regulation coming out. So they sent me away to get all these training on data classification and basically it was a security position but it was kind of weird. So, I was like this regional guy for this chain of banks. Well, I never really did very good working for somebody else because I was kind of lazy and what not and they ended up firing me after a while and I had no…I didn’t have any way to pay my rent, blah, blah, mid 20s, not going anywhere with my life. So, a friend of mine in Des Moine said, “Why don’t you come stay with me.” So I stayed on his couch and I ended up landing this job like totally just couldn’t believe it. I landed this job for the lead security administrator for Wells Fargo Bank. And so, because I have this banking experience and also this experience with security and was already trained in all this stuff, they brought me right in and it basically doubled what I was making before. And so, I had that job for a couple of years and that is where I met my now wife. So, along that way, one day I was talking to her and I have this NextTel cellphone and I was telling her like how cool it be if I could put a picture of her on my phone and I wonder if there’s any way to do that. So, I started doing research online and I found that you could do it but it was really, really difficult. You had to basically have photoshop and be a whiz. You have to deinterlace the photo nontransparent GIF and there was a patent on GIF files then so there wasn’t a lot of programs that supported Gifs. Anyway, long story short, I figured out how to do it then I started like hanging around some mobile phone forums explaining to other people how to do it and I just started getting bombarded with people who wanted me to format it for them because they didn’t have photoshop or couldn’t figure it out. So, I thought maybe I could create server aside, a way that would automatically format pictures for people. So, that’s what I did and I created a site that basically you could submit any image and it would spit you back the correct format for your phone and it blew up. I mean it just completely blew up and it was called Nextpimp and it still is. It’s still really kicking butt and it was basically just a side work. People could upload any format of image and it would correctly format it for the phone. And then people would say, “Hey, I’ve got this phone. I need this format,” and I would alter it for their phone as well. Then somebody came along, now this is probably 2003-ish and there were like, “Why don’t you archive these?” So because maybe I want a picture of the same person if people want to share what they upload or something like that and there was no such thing as tags back then or sharing or You Tube.

Yaro Starak: But what about copyright on these images?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Well, that will come around a little bit later.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, we went ahead and I was just kind of learning as I went at the time. I mean I was concerned about that and we had Please do not upload copyrighted material with respect, blah blah blah. And so, I mean but there was no Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Well, I guess there was in the process at that time. But like you say, it was kind of just like people just kind of did what they wanted and waited to see what happens. So, I mean I was just in this position. So people just uploaded content and I just…I let them categorize and basically shared it. And I was processing about 5000 images a day after about six months of starting the site. And it was a pretty busy site and then it started…a lot of people started linking to it and all of a sudden, it’s like I started getting all these traffic from search engines and just…it’s kind of fascinating to me like how these search engines work and how to optimize your site so you can gain them better. So, I started playing around with search engine optimization a little bit. And then one day, at the office where I was working, a lady and I had actually lost my job at Wells Fargo and moved to Omaha Nebraska now. This is probably about a year and a half later and working for a company called Commercial Federal as their system administrator security guy. And this lady is asking me how Google makes money because being the computer guy, you know how everything computer related works. And so, I knew I heard about an AdWords product or Google AdSense since Adwords were…I didn’t understand the Adwords side of it but I knew that if you place these ads on your web site, Google would target them based on the content. And she said, “Well, why don’t you do that on your cellphone site?” And I said, “Well because I don’t think I’d make much money.” It’s all images and I don’t know how they would target or if they would even allow that. So, I said, “You know, I’m going to try it though.” So I launched it, first day, I made like I think like four bucks or something like that and I thought I was a big timer. I remember I told my wife I was like, “This is awesome! This is like the coolest thing ever. I can just throw up these ads and I’m getting paid.” So, that really lit a fire under me and it was just like just playing with it and playing with it more. Then, of course, ring tones came out and I had already had…I already had this traffic like huge, huge amounts of traffic. Well not huge amounts, maybe 10, 15,000 unique visitors a day. I mean it got to about $40 a day or so. And I think $30 a day was pretty high point I think right before ring tones came out. And that was it. And then people were like if you could just format ring tones for phones like you do these wallpapers, that would be cool!” So, I mean man, I got to tell you, it took me so many and so long to figure out because it’s a server site. Now, I got to figure out how to code to, I mean now, there is all these tools that are just ready to rock if you want to build this kind of thing. But man, back then, it was very hard and it took me a long time to figure it out. But I did and so now, I let people upload ring tones and do all these crazy stuff and within not too long after that you see what you see with the picture of men in the Adsense check which was 100 and something thousand in one month. That’s probably a year after…well it’s probably two and a half years after I started this site and about a year and a half after really getting down with the ring tone stuff. So, go ahead.

Yaro Starak: Did the addition of ring tones like make the traffic increase? Was that why it went from $30 a day up to about the big Adsense check or was there some other reason?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, absolutely because now, we were getting…because I had learned about SEO and knew how to rank for things. So, now instead of like dog wallpapers, I was ranking for all these ring tones like whatever people were uploading.

Yaro Starak: Right.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, I mean just huge amounts of traffic, let alone I was number for the word ring tones back then.

Yaro Starak: Right.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, when ring tones really came on, I mean at the very beginning, I was there and I had the traffic and it was, about a 150,000 unique visitors a day as its peak.

Yaro Starak: Nice. Very nice. So–

Jeremy Schoemaker: So–

Yaro Starak: Go ahead.

Jeremy Schoemaker: You go ahead.

Yaro Starak: I just want to clarify for people like obviously with the ring tone, I’m assuming they found a piece of music they liked from somewhere and they had in what, MP3 format or something and they went to your web site uploaded it and converted it into a ring tone they could then download to their phone. Is that how the process worked?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. We can send them to some phones directly and others we actually…they could actually download the audio file. Now I mean like you brought up copyrights before and it’s pretty important I think that we address that because obviously, when you allow users to upload stuff, it creates a huge liability for you and so, we had we basically just went to a really big law firm who handled a lot of copyright stuff and just asked them how to do it. And we make users agree that they created what they’re uploading. We also make it very, very easy for people to report copyrighted content to us and we comply very quickly when somebody makes a complaint that something has been uploaded.

Yaro Starak: So, it’s kind of like the You Tube model, sort of thing.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, I mean there’s a Digital Millennium Copyright Act and therefore, the whole DMCA thing is there for a reason and it’s great for all parties involved. I mean the artist can protect their stuff, you know. You just have to have a clear and concise record of complaints.

Yaro Starak: You keep saying we. When did you go from you and your wife to…is it more people or is it still just or was just you two?

Jeremy Schoemaker: It’s funny you say that because I’ve always said we even if it was me just because I thought it sounded and in my signature back in the day, in my signature in my email, it’s Midwest Regional manager for ShoeMoney Media Group. I mean it was just me but it sounded cooler when you’re with an entourage. So…

Yaro Starak: I wrote an article about “it’s not we it’s me” many years ago but yes, that a very common thing to do, isn’t it?

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, yeah, it was just me and right about the time I made the big Adsense check, a couple of things happened to me. One was I realized I couldn’t do it by myself anymore because when I made that check, I also went to my very first conference to learn more about search engine stuff and by that time, I was pretty well…I had a pretty good following in forums and what not but I didn’t really have a blog yet. Actually, I did have a blog but it was only about two months old. This was in 2004. And so, I actually have to verify that date. I’m kind of just guessing.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: I should actually…you know, sometime I need to write a correct bio because a lot of times when I give interviews and stuff, I just throw out dates as they come to my brain or whatever. But all right, so basically that time, I’m sitting at this conference and this kid comes along on the Internet and emails me and I’d known this kid since he was like 12 years old and I always thought he was a little bit cocky but he was like, “Hey I know you’re having trouble with your–” I mean I was getting 150,000 and upwards a day and there’s a lot of times my site, the server would actually reboot at least one time a day. And I mean I thought I was a pretty good Unix engineer. I’m much better now but I really didn’t know that much then. But this kid I think he was about 20 years at the time, was like, “You know, I’m pretty good. I’ll prove myself for like 10 bucks an hour. Just give a shot.” So, I was like, “How about it?” Now, this was when I was bringing in about 3 to 4000, 5000 a day on Goggle Adsense, right?

Yaro Starak: Yeah. Tight ass, huh?

Jeremy Schoemaker: But I was a tight ass and it was really because I had been fired from every job I’ve ever had in my life. It was torturous for me to ever work for anyone. I hated it and I was scared to death that this is it for me. And just because I I mean like, what’s this ring tone? Like what’s the long-term play on a ring tone site?” I just kept thinking like tomorrow this is all going to come crashing down just like what happened before.

Yaro Starak: Paranoia, huh?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, I was like, I was a tight ass and I mean that seems crazy but at the time, I mean I was going nuts because my wife was in medical school. We had like half a million dollars in debt and I was paying that off as fast as possible because I really thought that’s it for me. This is my big thing so let me do this for her and she’ll support me for the rest of my life because she’s going on to this great career and I was never supposed to do anything. So, all right. So, then continue with Nextpimp and I open up and I really kind of realized after I made that Adsense check that’s kind of famous, I found affiliate marketing.

Yaro Starak: You found it?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, I did because people will ask me and they were like, “You know, you’re making this kind of money but how are they making it and why are these people advertising on your site? Because obviously they’re paying for it then it must be worth it. So, why don’t you find out what they’re doing> So, the people that we’re advertising through Google Adsense on Nextpimp were advertising a couple different things. There were either advertising commercial ring tone offers, which was affiliate marketing or they were selling physical goods like cellphone accessories data cables. So, now I had David working for me as programming and keeping the servers go and we had expanded operations a little bit but I was still only paying him like 10 bucks an hour and he was only putting in like 20 hours a week. And but I was like I’m going to try to take this to the next level. And I have all this traffic. I was number two for like cellphone cables and I mean just like I had all these incredible SEO rankings. And I really…so I started and I was redirecting people to Ebay and collecting like 10 cents when they buy a data cable on Ebay. So, I basically did some inquiries and got hooked with a guy in HongKong who sold me data cables, USP data cables for Nextel phones and all these phones for like I mean literally like 20 cents a piece and I sold them all day for 20 bucks with $5 shipping. And that’s quite a margin. And we would sell 10 to 20 a day. So, I mean it was good little profitable thing and that’s just data cables. We sold all kinds of phone accessories. And so, but then also I also did the affiliate marketing stuff myself and instead of getting a couple of cents per click, I started to get great ROI per click like a couple bucks. And because you can…those affiliate offers were converting to like $16 a lead on the mobile stuff and then also I kind of played around with just every form of monetization because up until then I had only made money with Google Adsense. So, I played around with donations which I basically was just like, “Hey, want to give me some money?” Then I also played around with subscriptions which blew my mind because I was basically…we have free ring tones and so my lawyer was strongly an advocate of not charging for ring tones because then we’re profiting from if there was a copyright issue. So, what we did is we sold subscriptions to the forum. So, if you wanted a cool avatar or you wanted like unlimited messages or the standard stuff you see on forums that are kind of premium stuff then you could pay 20 bucks every…well I think I originally did the…it was $25 a year for a membership. And we had a lot of people signed up and basically all it said, “When you signed up was, this is a donation based membership. And you understand you’re getting nothing for it other than you can have a cool avatar,” and I was amazed at how many people signed up because we have like special forums where people would for support and all kinds of stuff like that. And then I started reading about instead of like playing with price points for subscriptions and stuff like that. And I came across something that said, “You know, to try a shorter time period and a cheaper amount.” So what we did is instead of $25 a year, we went with $19.95 by every six months. So actually, we made quite a bit more but it was a lower price point and then it really exploded. And in the height of it, we have about 75,000 paying users.

Yaro Starak: Whoa!

Jeremy Schoemaker: I know!

Yaro Starak: Incredible.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, so and we’re still doing phenomenal monthly revenue and I’m just like blown away.

Yaro Starak: Can I ask you?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Go ahead.

Yaro Starak: Have you bought the sports car and the mansion by now or you’re still being a tight ass?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I have a wife now so my–

Yaro Starak: Just going to shoes and hand bags and something?

Jeremy Schoemaker: You know, well, we bought a house, we bought a nice house and I’m thinking like my days are numbered, you know. I’m still not convinced that this is here to stay but along this process I had started my blog and I started to write about and I had really a free reign to go crazy because I did not give a crap what anyone thought. I had a cash cow and I’m talking from experience and like there’s all these guys out there talking about Adsense and all those stuff and I’m just like, “Yeah this is guy is…he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I got this site. I know what I’m talking about,” and it just kind of you see the light with a lot of it where these people talk but they don’t have any experience whatsoever. They just those people who make money because they tell people how to make money kind of thing. Not that I have a problem with any of those, but it’s tough to take advice from somebody on how to sell things when they don’t sell anything, you know.

Yaro Starak: Yeah.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, it’s just really interesting. So, I mean I was really cocky back then. I was really, I believe the word was unstable and I think there’s…volatile! Volatile was the word.

Yaro Starak: Someone implied that to you.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Microsoft actually implied that to me because they didn’t really invite me to because I was like Yahoo’s publisher of the month. I was Google’s thing of the month and I’m speaking at all these conferences and I got this big, fat check but I was like this cocky guy. I mean I really thought my days are numbered. I could go back to my life and the crazy thing is like the blog just started growing extremely rapidly because I would…I mean I could be completely transparent and show everyone exactly what I was doing and I was still good to go because I was ranked like number one and number two for ring tones like who’s going to compete with that? I mean I could actually show people exactly what I was doing to make money, exactly who I was marketing. You know, we raised…when Hurricane Katrina happened, on Nextpimp, we had this huge fundraiser that got us so many new users and I think we spent like I don’t remember how many thousand we gave for charity but it was like so worth the money and I wrote about all these things and then I said, one month I was like, “I’m going to get into this paper clicks stuff. I’m going to actually be an advertiser and see what happens.” And I’ve never done it before. So, I allocated $40,000 and I said, “This month, I’m going to spend $10,000 on Yahoo search marketing, on Microsoft dcCnter on Adbrite, on Google Adwords. So, I wrote this entire two-part guide of my adventures this month. And I started off losing money, kind of understood how things work and then started making money and then really got it out, amazingly got it out. Now, I totally, totally saturated the ring tone affiliate marketing industry with that but which probably cost me a lot of money but for that short amount of time but looking back on it, I mean it really boosted. My blog became like a really high authority for people looking to make money online. So–

Yaro Starak: Let me just clarify, Jeremy, it’s nextpimp.com for people listening if they want to check it out. I’m looking at it right now. Are you still the owner of that site or has that gone to someone else?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. And it’s really going downhill massively.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: And I think it was…it’s a valuable lesson out there because it was a hard lesson for me to learn. And I’ve talked about this on my blog before. I lost passion. I mean like I was into making ring tones. I mean I was into it. I was doing it myself. I was having so much fun doing it and when you have that, when you believe in what you’re doing and when you have that passion, it’s almost like angelic because nobody can mess with you. You win. Hands down. You win because you’re thinking about it all the time. You’re doing it all the time. Well, I lost that for the ring tone market. I was more into making money than anything else at that time. And so, I was killing the site. I mean it was growing so fast because of my organic stuff. but I mean like now, I really don’t care about the site at all. I mean it still makes a decent amount of money but I’m so past it. I mean it’s kind of crazy because it still does very well and I have no doubt I missed out on a huge opportunity with that site. It could have been so much more but I simply lost interest in it. I should have appointed someone in charge of that site to take it over and to really take it to the next level and I didn’t. And that was a really, really good learning experience for me and one that I will not repeat. So–

Yaro Starak: You can only say that you’re so paranoid about it being taken away from you that eventually, you let it go rather than have it taken away.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. You know, I don’t know. I mean as we talk about other things that I’ve done, I mean you kind of see a pattern with me where I’m super, super into something and I am like so obsessive compulsive. I mean it’s all I can think about. It’s all I can do and I mean ring tones were that for me. Like when I had to figure out how to format images for people’s phone, it’s all I’d talk about. My wife was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” you know, and I’d be like, “Oh, I just I got to go downstairs and work on this. I got to figure it out.” And then when it was the ring tone stuff, it was like, so…I was so into it. I had to figure it out because nobody else was doing it and then and then I just…there wasn’t nothing else, you know. Then it was all about the challenge really was how to make more money and it really kind of…I really was more intrigued by that in less about the actual product and the actual web site. So, but it was still a great service and I mean people still use it all the time, you know. I mean like the ability to upload ring tones I don’t even think has worked for like a year. Now, this site still does earn money but I mean I think it really could have been, really, really huge like I could have retired and never ever had t do anything again and bought a baseball team or something, you know. I really think that it could have done extremely well if I would have stayed passionate about the site. But you know what? You can’t control your passion, you know. I mean like so here’s what happened with that. So, I lost my passion for Nextpimp. I got Dave with me now and he’s making…he’s now a salaried employee. I’ve got my mother-in-law now doing my accounting. She’s now a full-time employee. So I’ve got some expenses, company revenues doing good. We’re killing it with affiliate marketing. But it’s like we don’t have anything stable. So, I really…I hate ring tones so much I mean because that’s all I have done for the last four or five years. And so, this is in 2007, 2006. I have to look back. So, in 2007, 2006 was an awesome year for us. Just incredible year. I mean we completely destroyed it in the ring tone industry and made a ton of money. And then the ring tone industry started having a reg…sorry regulation. I got it out. And they started attacking all these sites that had free ring tones. Well, they actually didn’t have free ring tones. They just said they did but they never did and then you get conned into paying this huge thing. When we showed up on the radar of course and so we were having to deal with all these compliance issues and it looks like making money off of ring tones was over. I mean the only reason that there was a lot of money in that was because there was all these affiliate programs. And when the went after all these affiliate programs, then the Adsense revenue dried up. All this revenue dried up. I mean I still had my subscriptions but they’re cancelling because nobody is there helping people. I mean like, it’s just really I let it go downhill. So, I said to Dave like, “We’ve got to come up with something. Let’s try to come up with something new,” and the blog I was not…I had a pretty good following on the blog but I had never implemented any sort of advertising whatsoever on the site.

Yaro Starak: What year are we at?

Jeremy Schoemaker: This is late 2006.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So, I’m in Las Vegas for I believe it was…no…yes. It was Webmaster World and I’m there with the guy who owns Digital Point, Shawn Hogan, and he introduces me to some reps from Ebay and they say to me, they’re like, “Hey, you created the thing you’re playing around with called ShoeMoney ads.” And I said, “Yeah, you know.” It was basically, the thought behind ShoeMoney ads was you put ads on your site that are Adsense and they have this great look and feel to them but if you could write your own ad copy and do it to your own offers and just kind of cut out Google. So, you know your site converts well for ring tones, why don’t you just make your own ad copy for ring tones, make it look like they’re Adsense and you cut out Google.” So, we basically created this whole ad system around that but we were taking none of the profit and it was kind of consuming resources and we kind of killed after a while. And so–

Yaro Starak: Clarify that. You have people promote affiliate offers. That was how they do that service, right?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. So, they could promote anything they wanted to because it was their site and that was my whole…I was starting to kind of have a beef with AdWords or I mean with Google ads since that time. And I was because, I’m now like the poster child for Google Adsense, and so even then when I speaking in public, I would give all these reasons why you shouldn’t use Google Adsense because from my experience and how there were so much more money in building a subscription model or direct advertising and all this stuff. I mean we had done deals with Sprint and Nextel and all these companies. And I was really kind of preaching about how Adsense was kind of the devil. I mean it’s so easy do but it’s really taken a lot of revenue on your pocket if you want to pursue that. So, now, we’re at like this event with these folks from eBay and they say, “You know, well a lot of people were making really good money through eBay using your ShoeMoney ad system. And we were talking internally and we think you should develop an ad system based around the eBay affiliate program. And we would be really, really open to helping you with that.” Now, I was like, “Oh, that sounds great,” you know, and I mean having people from eBay say that they think you should build an ad network and they’re going to help you I mean that’s pretty awesome. So, we looked into it and there was a couple of big problems which is one, I had never ever paid out to a bunch of people like if we were going to be anywhere successful and so the concept behind it was that eBay has this great affiliate program and it’s really a great program and it’s so great because it’s so diversified. And there’s eBay in 14 different countries. So, between the vast inventory on eBay and all the countries it’s in, I mean it’s basically the ultimate kind of display advertising because you could throw it on pretty much any site anywhere in the world and you can make money off of it. So, we basically and then you match that up with the affiliate system is basically based on volume. So, the more you make, the more you get paid. And so, as a whole network the thought behind…we came up with a company called AuctionAds after eBay kind of give us the pep talk which basically it was the thought behind it was, let’s pay out a 100% and just focus on growth and see what happens. And either we’ll become so valuable to eBay that they’ll give us a higher percentage than it’s even listed or what the hell. Maybe somebody will buy us. Or, we’ll just get so big that eventually we can take a percentage. So we had a lot of…capital was not a problem. I mean we were…we had the Nextpimp subscriptions millions a year coming in. We had great monthly revenue coming in but it’s going down. So, we want to build this new thing. So, we launched in March of 2007. Also in January of 2007, I decided to take advertising for my blog because things were going downhill, I want to see what I could get. So, I just said to the companies who had inquired before, what would you give me and I started throwing some ads out there just direct ad placement. So, and that was the first time I’d ever done any sort of advertising on the blog.

Yaro Starak: And how much did you get straight off the bat from that?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I think the…on the high end, it was like two grand a month and on the low end, a couple hundred for text links and stuff like that before text links were evil. I didn’t text…I don’t think I sold text links ever, actually no. I think I just sold like 125 banner ads and stuff like that.

Yaro Starak: When did you get total wise, like…?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Oh total? Maybe because we had one huge placement. Something to say like 3 to $4000 a month, max, like when we first started.

Yaro Starak: What were your unique visitors? We’ll talk about blogging in a moment. What was your unique visitor count at that time?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I want to say about 7 or 8000 a day, something like that.

Yaro Starak: OK.

Jeremy Schoemaker: So then we I didn’t nothing with RSS or, you know. I was like, “That’s for the birds.” I don’t know anything about that. I’m in the building businesses. So then so we’re making AuctionAds. We launched on March 7 and it was really the best thing and worst thing that I’ve ever done in my life. And like I said we had…so there were some things we had to figure out. One is that we’d never pay out to a ton of people before. I had no clue how to do that. And the second thing is, customer service like, now, we’ve got all these people that…you need to account for and you’re playing with their money. So, we had to figure that out and we partnered with my friend Patrick Gavin who owns a company called Text Link Ads. And he had just and he had just sold Text Link Ads to a company called Media Whiz. So, he basically pitched it to them and got them to back it and we’re in business and we’re partners. And, there were actually a pretty minority partner but decent partner. So, they were going to…their role was basically to handle all the finances, pay out affiliates every month and to handle all the customer service and we would handle all the text stuff. So, we go from March 7th,we launched and I don’t know how in depth you want me to go but it was the longest four months of my life until–

Yaro Starak: Why?

Jeremy Schoemaker: We fast forward to…well, between March 7th of 2007 and July 27, we sold the company and we were doing millions a month in revenue and we had 25,000 users. We had 20 SIM servers and this had become my life 24/7.

Yaro Starak: Who’s working with you like to help control of it?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Just the same amount of people, me and David. That was it. And actually, and I got to be honest, like David did everything. So, we went from like–

Yaro Starak: Well he’s getting paid better by then.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. So, here’s the cool thing like by then, he was like, “hey I think we had worked out a salary deal plus rev share and so he was coming more and more into it and he’d been with me three to four years by then. And a very loyal guy, a very awesome kind and but he was still…I think he was actually 21 when we sold AuctionAds.

Yaro Starak: That’s incredible.

Jeremy Schoemaker: He was 22. So when we sold it, I told him and we never anything on paper. But I told him because he was like, “What am I going to get like my small percentage of the profits of the sales,” you know. I mean this kid is like doing this 27/7. He lives in Minnesota. I live in Nebraska. So, but we got a data center in Minnesota where all the servers are. He has to basically live at this data center because he’s managing all these servers for one person. So I said to him, “You know, whatever it sells for if it does sell or whatever we do, I’ll give you half the money.” And he was like, “Oh, OK.” And along the way I sent him some bonuses because he didn’t see the end goal there for a little bit. He had a little problem because he was like, “You know, hey, we spent like 200,000 on this thing and it’s made zero amount of dollars and we’re making less money every month off of ring tones. And I’m like, “Listen, it’s fine. We’re growing at a phenomenal pace.” And he’s like, “And I’m working my ass off and we can’t barely keep these servers up and I’m just there going, “Yeah, and that’s an awesome problem to have because we’re growing.” So I was like, “What do you want?” He’s like “Well, I really want this Ducati motorcycle.” And I’m like, “OK.” So I bought it for him, whatever. Along the way, I had to give him stuff to keep him sane. So, we sell the company to Media Whiz on July 27 and it’s like, “Wow! Awesome!” It was so awesome to be done with that. We learned our lesson. We now had a bunch of capital to play with. I build a big edition on my house. I put the rest in the bank which sucks because we lost a lot of it recently with the stock market. But, it was really, really cool to…I had sold my first company. And had a pretty good exit. So, now I’m on like venture capital, people’s list and all this stuff and I’m getting into all these circles and go the TechCrunch conference and people all these companies who were now trying to launch their ad network, we were like the blueprint of like we launched an ad network and went from zero to millions a month in four months with 25,000 active users. So, I mean all these guys want to talk to us, what exactly do we do and I told them all, like “Read my blog.” I was so transparent about everything we did. I mean like just amazingly transparent to where I mean almost stupidly transparent because everything that we did is so copied like exactly my blueprint.

Yaro Starak: And is it fair to say that your blog was significantly irresponsible for such a rapid growth of AuctionAds?

Jeremy Schoemaker: No. I would say, OK, like from the start, yes but it was a good launching point. It was also, but it was also featured we also were advertising and yes. At Nextpimp, I used to kind of leverage the blog and I think that it’s important to have this whole kind of chronological thing. I used Nextpimp, I made a lot of money, I started writing a blog and then I leverage that into an audience on the blog by like, “Hey, look, I got this company. I’m making tons of cash. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about just listen to what I’m saying.” And then the blog, basically because that was doing so well, I could launch an advertising company and have a big advantage over others because I already had people coming to me, looking to me on how to make money. So, I mean with AuctionAds, we made a lot of people a lot of money. So, yes, having the blog absolutely gave me a huge advantage. Now, you also have to remember though that with AuctionAds, there was eight other companies doing exactly what we were doing with eBay including eBay who had like millions of dollars invested in their product and five years in development. So, it was kind of aggressive for us to come out like we did swinging and grow as fast as we did. Now, I mean I’d like to credit my marketing but, who knows. I mean I think I did some pretty amazing things marketing wise. And I wrote about it in the blog but it was pretty slick.

Yaro Starak: What do you think is the one thing that made the difference at why you can do better than eBay with a two-man team?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Well we had experience. These big ass companies, they have too many people and nobody can ever do anything. Like in order for eBay to actually do something that counts, they have to get it approved by somebody. It’s got to go the flagpole. It’s got to be reviewed. They got to go on their development servers. They’ve got to do this. They’ve got to do this. And then finally like maybe they get the OK to try it and they get a meeting about it, you know. We just outline the codes and it’s done. It’s implemented. So, I think that a lot of these other companies that were trying were just way too slow and we just…not only did we like look at what they’re doing and say like, “OK, there is 10 different things we do right here but we have the agility to move very, very fast because we were a two-man team. Do we have a little down time because we screwed up sometimes? Yes! But we were able to implement massive changes really fast. I think the key to our growth really was really just looking at our statistics. You know, we were advertising and spending a fortune on advertising on TechCrunch and Mashable.com and all these web sites and when we started looking at the numbers like 80 or 90% of our clients came from seeing the ad. So I’ll just kind of go over some of the techniques just real quick but I mean so it was like, “Wow why are we advertising all these stuff? What we need to do is to get more people to use the ad.” So, to use the actual product because at the bottom it said, “Ads by AuctionAds.” And the one thing that we found that was really, really awesome was that once you penetrated the market, like there was the mixed martial arts community, once you get one site to use it, all their competitors try it because they’re like, “Hey, what’s this guy doing over here?” So, all we had to do was basically get market penetration. And so instead of paying TechCrunch to run a banner that was animated, it was like, “Hey, you make money with it eBay with AuctionAds,” we had them actually use the product. And the cool thing was he was making money with it and we’re told just keep it all. It’s fine. But we were getting a ton more signups from him actually using the product than we were from the banner. So, then it was all about how can we get more real estate on the Internet because that was how we were getting more people. And then it occurred to me like, “Why don’t we just give everyone five bucks?” Like what would be wrong with that? Like, now, so an interesting thing is that it was cool…now along the way, I decided that we had to do a lot of crazy things, right, which were it’s kind of my best feature and my worst feature because I’m willing to like try really crazy things which, I said, “ You know what? Let’s have net zero payouts,” which means if it’s the first of the month, you get paid for last month’s earnings. No wait time. Now, we didn’t get paid until like 40 days later. So, if there was any problem on the network, it came out of my pocket. And keep in mind too, I’m also taking no percentage of this. So, it was cool when it was like 100,000 for the first month, a couple 100,000 but when it got over a million close to 2 million, 2.5, I was like, “Holy crap! Where am I going to come up with 2–” because I mean like I don’t want to cash in like all my stock and all the stuff every month, you know. It’s like that’s crazy. So, we had to get a credit line of multiple million dollars which we paid incredible amount. And all these things you don’t have to think about like currency exchange. I mean when you got 2 million bucks and you’re paying out on all these countries, currency changes from the time you made it. So, we had to do these currency hedging and, “Oh, my gosh, it’s like all kinds of problems. I mean it was like, it’s a great problem to have but craziness.

Yaro Starak: Yeah.

Jeremy Schoemaker: You just never think of stuff like that.

Yaro Starak: I can see why David was a bit worried about the end game there because he didn’t see the end game is a lot of holes.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I’m always the topline guy like I just focus on making so much money that it doesn’t matter and he’s more of the bottomline guy which is like, “Show me how this is going to work again?” you know. So, I’m the dreamer. I have the vision, whatever. So, we really balanced each other extremely well because I’ll come up with this great idea and he’ll come up with a hundred reasons why it will fail and the somewhere along the line, we’d agree to do something. So, right we do AuctionAds that goes well. So, basically I come up with this idea of paying everyone five bucks and so the people that we’re getting the credit line from there were like, “That doesn’t really make sense,” because if you get 20,000 people and you got to pay them off five bucks that’s a lot of money. And I’m like, “no, no. Trust me because our minimum payout is $10. So, if we give them five bucks to start, they got to make $5. By the time they made…because I was like, “Listen, people are so adversed to change that if people start running the product, they’re going to run it forever like how many sites do you put something on or even if you…no matter what happens, you’re so adversed just to change. So, you just need that incentive to do it and then once you do it, you’re less likely to change it unless somebody else gives you a better incentive. So, we just gave people five bucks to sign up. It was in their account when they made 10 bucks. They got paid. So, they actually had to make five bucks, did the math on it, and it was like, “you know, if we were to take X amount…and this was like basically the last month. I was like, “If we were to take X amount of percentage, this is going to work.” And that’s when we got bought out shortly after that, but it’s just little things like that and that’s something that we always do is look at our numbers. The numbers will always tell you what you need to do. It’s always funny to me when people come up to me and they’re like, “What should I do with my site?” I’m like, “What does your log say, like what are people doing? Like, “Where are your users coming from that give you value? What’s you goal?” you know. People just don’t know. Like bloggers, they’re like, “How do I make more money?” or, “How do I do this?” And I’m like, “OK, what’s your absolute goal for this site?” And they don’t know. they don’t know the answer. And I’m like, “OK, well, it’s hard to track value if you don’t know what your goal is.” So that really amazes me because you have all the data you need. You don’t need to talk to a guru or whoever to interpret what you have but you have everything you need. So, after AuctionAds and all that stuff, the one thing I knew for sure is I never ever want to run an advertising network ever again. It was just insane. I mean we were doing like thousand of hits a second, you know. I mean it was just nuts. So, but it was cool because like I said now, it opened us up to a whole new audience because if that wouldn’t have worked out, we sucked, but it worked out so it was awesome. So, then in 2007, I had capital and I was itching to start a new company and really if you see something that pattern involved whether it’s my blog Nextpimp or AuctionAds or this next…the next things I’m going to get into, they’re always service oriented sites and they’re kind of like we look at the market, we see a service that’s needed and we cater to that service and that’s really all we ever done, you know. I saw that with the ring tone industry, with wallpapers, you know. I mean I kind of discovered it by accident like and then just kind of discovered all these other stuff and there’s so many needed services out there but if you’re not passionate about it, you’re going to lose. So each one of these things we were super passionate about it. we were so confident in our product. Like I said, it’s like an angelic thing. It’s like you have no competition when you’re like that. And I mean I am hustler. I mean I’m a go-getter. And so, it’s really you’re immortal when you just…you know you have a great product, you believe in it, you put so much blood, sweat, and tears in it and you just…and even if you don’t have the best product, you’re willing to put in the time to make it the best. So, every time, that’s what we do. So, now, we’re getting to the end of 2007 and I purchased…I’m really in the mixed martial arts, huge, huge, huge. And I’ve always been a fan of it and I decide it’s time to jump in. I buy a domain called fighters.com. I hire 13 writers across the world to staff it and I just started burning money. And didn’t take too long really to realize like this was a bad mistake. But I thought I was like, man the recipe for success is here because it’s like, something we’re super passionate about. We love it but the thing we were missing was that it was so far away. Oh, and also, I started a conference called Elite Retreat like three years before that. Sorry I missed that one. But it was another thing where it was like a really needed service and basically oh man, I got it talking too fast. So somewhere I think 2006, we were like, I was talking with a kid named Lee Dodd and we were talking what the value of the conference is, is really like nothing to do with like listening to people speak but it’s like when you see somebody at a bar or something and you get some like one-on-one time with them, they’ll tell you things that they wouldn’t tell you onstage. And they’ll really help you and really think about what you’re saying. And so, I was like, “How do we capture that and cater to that community,” because that’s a badly needed service. So, we started Elite Retreat 2006 and then had it for the next four years. Long story short, it’s evolved into me running the whole thing because other people didn’t want to have…because we lost money the first two years basically. And so, I was…I just never give up on anything unless it’s the fighters who would give up. But basically we just…we created that and so I’m happy that the Elite Retreat now this year and 2009 when we had our event, it sold out in 10 days. I mean it was in San Francisco. It’s a two-day event. We took everyone to Facebook and now, it’s really grown into an amazing and I’m really, really proud of that. So, now back to fighters.com, in 2007, or end of 2007, we bought a domain. We hired all these writers. We have awesome content, incredible database of every fight that’s ever happened anywhere in the world and I’m struggling because this is so far away from everything I’ve ever done. I mean if the Elite Retreat does good or blog as well, everything else that we’re doing in that space as well. So, I pretty much decided at that point that fighter.com was not going to be for me. And so last–

Yaro Starak: What was the model you were trying to run with for fighter.com like a media site? A news site and make money from advertising or where were you going?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to have like a fantasy league based around ultimate fighting where you could choose your fighters and do all this stuff and make like fighter bout that would predict fights between what if this person fought this person and just build a whole social community around it, social network where people can make their own profiles and say what their style is and people can put up their amateur records and just really blow it out. But writers are expensive and especially, when you’re not making any money, and that just builds up and builds up and builds up and I had even investors on this project which was my first time too. And, so, they had gotten killed. Our investor had pretty gotten killed in the stock market and we’re basically like, “Hey, we’re not in for any more money.” And I was like, “We’re just getting started.” So, I had to make a tough decision at that time, which was do I buy them out and go at it myself which I tried to do and thankfully, they talked me out of it and instead we ended up selling the site to a third party which they haven’t really done much with the site since and I pretty much just broke even on that deal which I look at it like, I mean like I’m always a half full guy. So, I think that it was a big success in that I learned like so much while doing it and didn’t lose a lot or lose hardly anything other than my time which I think, again, that’s just…I rack that up to education. But I mean…so what I did do is but then I’m back in the situation in the early part of 2009 where it’s like, “Hey what do you want to do?” We don’t have anything really going, you know. We still have this Nextpimp revenue. We’re sitting on a pile of cash from selling AuctionAds but like I don’t want…like I mean I’m not done yet, you know. I want to do other things. So, David said to me, we have these tools that we use internally. And we should actually make a service where we actually let people… because people have always asked. I’ve talk about tools that we built in-house for the last six years. And what they do and how they work and people were always wanting access to them. And they’re not made for people. They’re made for us. So we never could do that. I said, “Dave let’s try that.” So, we called it ShoeMoney tools and it’s our newest things. We launched…it’s actually not 2009. It was actually late, late, late of last year of 2008. And basically, and then re-launched in like March 1st of 2009 and ShoeMoney tools, it’s tools.shoemoney.com and basically we opened up our suite of tools because we kept coming across all these tools that sucked and charged like hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month. And I was like, “You know, all of our in-house tools like are better than all these tools and we have them all. So, why don’t we just do that? So, I’m happy to say that, like as of I think yesterday, we had 1000 subscribers. We haven’t really made a big marketing push yet. And we’re just getting started and it’s working for us. So, it’s 100 bucks a month. It’s got a forum and all that, and again, it’s a service that I think is badly needed. So, that’s where we are right now. That was the long history of ShoeMoney.

Yaro Starak: I have to say, you’re an easy interview. I just have to just ask one question and we just go from there. So…

Jeremy Schoemaker: I told you.

Yaro Starak: That’s incredible. Whoo! I was going to ask right now, today, you’re obviously running ShoeMoney tools but the fact that you have your tools must mean you’re still doing a lot of paper click and affiliate marketing, is that true?

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. We play around a lot, you know. The thing with affiliate marketing is you never really find something that last very long. So, we experiment all the time and yeah, I mean we do it every day, you know. It’s like my hobby more than anything else. You know, during the day, especially lately, I’m been able to do a lot of bis dev stuff with ShoeMoney tools working with affiliate networks, and you know, just a lot of networking and promoting and stuff like that. And then like of kind when I go home and after I get my kids and wife to bed and stuff like that, then I play with paper click and build…I mean because that…again, I mean I am so passionate about that. I love doing it. It’s my hobby and it’s what I do for fun. I mean I love being able to throw up a site using like, Unique Blog Designs affiliate, have a site up and running and less than 15 minutes, and generating revenue like off a Facebook turning 36 clicks into dollar leaps, you know. I mean I love that. I just love it when it works and even when it fails, it’s such a challenge to me to get it working and just tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. And again, you have all the data you need, you know. You just test and tweak and test and tweak and it’s just a blast for me to do it. And so, these tools that we build I mean are tools I use. They’re tools that and it’s just something that again it’s like an immortal angelic thing and I’m just confident about them because I just know that they are the best and if they’re not the best and somebody tells me why, we fix it and if somebody says, “Hey you don’t have this tool that does this.” Well, three days after that, we do because everyone who works for me is a programmer. And that’s what we do. So, I don’t know. I just think it’s just a continuing thing with us over and over just like we’re super into this and I mean the lessons we’ve learned with Nextpimp, we should have sold that a long time ago and now, it’s to the point where there’s so much issues in that field that nobody wants to take it on. I couldn’t even sell that site for probably half a year’s revenue if I wanted to which is amazing. But it’s a declining industry but I’m really glad that the things that we are passionate and we still just kind of pursue those and even in this economy, I mean people were telling me like your business was going down and you decided to launch a new company. And in this economy where everything is going crap,” and I was like, “You know, it doesn’t matter what economy it is. Something that gives a positive return on investment will always succeed and that’s what we’ve always done is try to make needed services that people need and I mean it’s just an absolute recipe for success every time. And it’s not rocket science, you know. It’s just you’re passionate about it. You see an angle that you don’t think people are doing it right, then build the service yourself.

Yaro Starak: Are you still pretty much a two-man show then? You guys working from your homes or…?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I have two more employees now. So, I have…my mother-in-law is no longer with me but I do have a full-time…I kind of joke around and call him the CEO because I’m a horrible CEO. I’m an absolute horrible at running a company. You’re supposed to be good at focusing on the bottom line and all this stuff. I’m not. I just try to make as much money as possible and everything will fall into place. But that’s not how you run a company. So, I hired a guy to basically run day-to-day operations. His name is Ty. He does an incredible job. Then I also hired a young lady to do all of our copywriting and customer service and her name is Breana. So, that’s the team. Now David is actually part owner of the company. He invested…I gave him an opportunity to because he basically went from and that was an actual a pretty cool process as well. He went from working for $10 an hour to more to becoming a salaried employee and then a salaried employee with a percentage of profits and then actually being able to, when we sold AuctionAds, I said, “OK, I want you to stay with me for the long haul and if you’re in it then I want to you invest and buy a decent portion of this company. So, he did, and so now, he’s co-owner of the entire empire that we built because he’s been in it with me since the beginning pretty much.

Yaro Starak: So, it’s like the silent partner you never hear about.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah yeah he’s not the loudmouth that I am and he’s such a smart kid. He speaks like four languages fluently yeah. He’s into program like nobody have ever seen. But it’s not…programmers are a dime a dozen just being honest. I mean programmers, graphics peoples dime a dozen. Marketers, dime a dozen but it’s the one that…the ones that really see the angles and are in it for the long haul that there’s such a huge value to. Most people, as soon as they hit the dip, they’re done, you know. I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have passion or what but finding people for me has been a huge shore and I’ve got through probably 50 people to find the team I have.

Yaro Starak: All right, Jeremy let’s wrap it up. I do have one question that would probably be relevant for the listeners more than anything else. Thank you for telling your story. it’s really interesting. We haven’t even touched upon the other aspect of your life there which was the other interesting aspect was the weight surgery and so forth.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah.

Yaro Starak: There’s another story there that’s not really Internet marketing related. So, we’ll leave off and people can go find out about that on your blog.

Jeremy Schoemaker: If you want, I can just briefly touch on it.

Yaro Starak: Go for it. Why not? We’ve got time.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Basically, when I met my wife in Des Moine Iowa, and I was pretty much comfortable before I met her with the fact that I was going to be single for the rest of my life. I really…I was probably going to die before I was 30. I was 420 pounds, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and was like 50,000 in debt. So, I was a real catch for the ladies. But, for whatever reason, I met this young lady who was going through medical school, and doing all the stuff and going on to this great career and it really kind of showed me like, if I want something out of life, I need to get my crap together. So, I decided to have weight loss surgery and kick smoking, and get my finances in order. And it was really a life-pivoting altering moment and it’s really continued. My wife was really the pivoting moment for me.

Yaro Starak: Good motivation there. All right. For like a lot of your story hinges on past successes especially when it comes to capital. Most people don’t have the capital. If you went back to right at the beginning, you’re sort of first story there of success were almost falling into it having the passionate subject that you have developed a web site for which just happened to get a ton of traffic. Obviously, you put in some work in to make that traffic appear. But you really didn’t go into it expecting it to be what you are today obviously. So, I’m sure you’ve been asked this a lot of times but for those listeners who are at the beginning of this curve, who come into this with no capital and, so many times I meet people like this too. They start to get a feel for how the Internet works. They know kind of what paper click is. They kind of know what search engine optimization is. They get affiliate marketing. They get blogging. They understand they could sell their own product. But all of this is sort of overwhelming and they don’t know which direction to run with first.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Right.

Yaro Starak: And where the best way to get there, the cash flow starts so that they start building on that. What do you suggest to those people?

Jeremy Schoemaker: You know, the one thing you can’t teach a person is confidence in themselves. And so that’s really the bottom line is I mean I’m a very, very confident person and I think that kind of…every person I’ve met in this industry who’s been successfully kind of has the exact same traits. I mean they’re not going to quit. They’re extremely confident in what they do. And they’re extremely passionate and so, anyone out there, if I met them and they know what they’re talking about, my question for them is like, “Why don’t you have more confidence in yourself to do what you want to do?” I mean and maybe confidence comes over time. I mean for me, I just kind of always had it. I mean not so much when I used to be really overweight. That was kind of changed when I met my wife and I started to develop a lot of confidence and I got to say it was probably her that gave me confidence. So, I don’t want to act like it was all me and I have everything figured out. I mean because I didn’t. I thought my life was going to end before I was 30 before I’m in Illinois. So people out there, there’s something holding you back. For me, I lack the confidence to go for it. I had to work for somebody else because I needed that security. When I met my wife and she was going through medical school, even though we were racking up debt and I was…I had like 50 grand in credit card debt, she had confidence in me to start my own stuff or this was like, “You’re doing pretty good with that. Why don’t you continue with that?” you know, and blah, blah, blah. And so, for me, that’s what I needed to go forward. And a lot of people I think they need to find that inner confidence to really go for it because if you’re passionate about what you do and you know what you’re doing, you really have no excuse. I mean capital really isn’t in excuse. I mean massively in debt when I fell into these things. And I was it’s just because my passion and my ability not to quit, that I found it. I mean if you look at almost anyone successful, they’ve failed. They’ve been in debt I mean like that’s everyone’s story. And they don’t stop. They don’t quit. And that’s the thing that you find with everyone is true is they don’t give up. And right now, I mean there’s no excuses for anyone. I mean you can start…it’s much easier for somebody to do what I did now. I mean it’s…for me Jeremy Schoemaker to do anything, if I want to do anything affiliate related, it’s watched like a hawk. Every time I register a new domain, I get emails. “What are you doing with this domain?” People have all these alert set up to alert them. I mean it’s insane for me to do something. Everything goes off the radar. So, I can do these things and make money. I don’t understand why people can’t. I mean they might lack experience but there’s always ways to get free traffic, still that I do like there’s just so many things. I mean there’s never… I’ve never met anyone with a legitimate excuse and I’ve…at all these conferences, I get this question all the time and people were like, “Well, you say that now because you have a blog and you can launch whatever.” I’m like, “Really?” because here’s all the negatives that come with that. And then people are like, “Wow, I mean I get it now.” So for those out there that want to start and if you really get it and really, truly believe in something and you’re passionate about it especially now with venture capital out there, I mean if you’re really, truly passionate about it, pitch it to me email me with your idea. I mean we funded various things and we’re not…we don’t have a very good track record with that but I wouldn’t say it’s a total loss but I mean we’re always open to new ideas. And what’s the thing I love about the TechCrunch conference that I go to is that they have these 50, I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but they have 50 startups that pitch on stage but I don’t go to those. I go to the ones in the demo where they have hundreds of these ones who have these awesome sites who were bagging groceries by day. And these guys, I love then sometimes we’ve acquired technology or assets of those people. I mean you can just see these people…there is people everyday with awesome ideas and I mean you just reach out to somebody, just make a connection. Just don’t give up on it. If you really are passionate about what you’re doing, don’t quit.

Yaro Starak: Right on. Awesome. Well, that’s pretty much it, Jeremy. We didn’t talk much about your blog but I think that’s a subject we both covered significantly before. So, I think that was just the nice point to end on there. So, I’m not going to continue this. And we’ve been going for a good chunk of time. So, Jeremy, one shout out to what web address would you like to direct people to. I’m thinking ShoeMoney.com the best place to go if they, by any chance don’t know who you are.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah, sure. I mean like the one thing I’m not good at is like self-promotion as crazy as that sounds.

Yaro Starak: Try it.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Like, so I always sound weird but yeah, so if you wanted to do ShoeMOney tools, sign up. It’s tools.shoemoney.com. Elite Retreat is my conference that have once a year and then ShoeMoney the blog. You can just keep up on everything at ShoeMoney.com.

Yaro Starak: And I mentioned to Nate that you should bring Elite Retreat down to Australia. Is that going to happen anytime soon?

Jeremy Schoemaker: You know, we’ve had. It’s funny that you mentioned that. We actually have had a venture capital firm in Australia, an advertising company and another company asked us and we got four people who have been to the Elite Retreat, one of them who had been to every one we’ve ever had. He’s made the trip. So, everything is in place. We’ve had all these people like actually basically to say, “Hey, we’ll back it so you won’t lose money,” you know. That’s only the risky thing. So, I don’t know. I mean we could have it. We’ve talked about having more events and changing it and mixing it and we’ll just have to look into it then see if it makes sense. I mean I wouldn’t mind that.

Yaro Starak: Have you been down here?

Jeremy Schoemaker: I never have but I’ve always wanted to travel that way.

Yaro Starak: It’s a nice place, far away but it’s a nice place.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. How did you get down there?

Yaro Starak: Born here.

Jeremy Schoemaker: OK.

Yaro Starak: Born and raised but we can save my story for the other interviews. So.

Jeremy Schoemaker: Yeah. I would love to hear your stories so you got to come on my radio show.

Yaro Starak: Definitely. I’d love to. All right. That’s fantastic Jeremy. Thank you for joining me and I think everything got a lot that was really good stuff.

Jeremy Schoemaker: All right. Thanks for having me.

I’m new to the membership site ownership game myself so I thought the best way to find out what it takes to be successful would be to talk with folks already well on their way.  The questions I ask are truly ones that I want to know the answers to personally.

If you’d rather read the transcript, you’ll find it below the video on the individual post page (click on the title of this post).

If you’d like to download the mp3 of this interview:
download or listen to the mp3 file. (to download, right click and then “save link as”)

Please let me know in the comments what you think.

Transcript:

MemberCon.com: So, I’m talking today with Jeff White. He’s got a membership website called TheStockBandit.com where he does, obviously, a membership site for online traders about stock picks and what he’s trading. And I want to talk to Jeff about how he does his membership site ’cause he’s one of the first guys that I saw doing this, and when I first started getting interested in maybe starting a membership site of my own. So, Jeff, thanks for being on this first episode here, I guess, or whatever we’re going to call this. I appreciate you being on the phone with me.

Jeff White: Yeah, thanks for having me, Tim.

MemberCon.com: Well, let me get some background first on you. When did you decide to start the membership site and how did you know that this was a possibility? Just give me a brief background.

Jeff White: Sure, yeah, I was…I’m a full time day trader and so, I trade stocks all day, and I…few years back was subscribing to some other websites to get some ideas and I got to the point where I felt good enough in my own trading, and I felt like I knew what I was looking for and kind of overlapping with that, I was at that time trading in an office full of other traders and so, I have plenty of interaction with other traders. Well, around that time, I stopped commuting to that trading office and began trading from home. And around the same time, I felt more confident about my own trading and felt like one way from me to kind of produce that interaction with other people would be to start a website. And so, it kind of overlapped in that regard. But what I did was decide that I could put out a nightly newsletter of what I’m looking at for the market for the following day and just kind of test it out as a hobby, you see, if there is any demand for that out there.

MemberCon.com: Did you have a list or a following that you could kind of capitalize on or did you start from zero?

Jeff White: No, I actually started from zero which, you know, today I don’t know if I would do it that exact same way. I think there are ways to purchase lists from organizations or other companies or just sort of piggyback on to maybe create a partnership with another existing website. But at that time, I had no list, I had nowhere to start. I actually started with friends and family and began sending it out that way, and it just kind of evolved into something where a word of mouth travels pretty quickly in my industry if the trading world is kind of a small world. And so, it wasn’t long before I started to get other people mentioning me on whether it was online forums or in chat rooms on other websites, and so it sort of took off that way, but I really began with zero customers and not exactly knowing what to expect from it.

MemberCon.com: Did you give away your stock picks initially? Was it free?

Jeff White: Yes, I did give it away for about a month or so. I just…I felt like that would be an appropriate test period for me to kind of workout the kinks before I had something and had a good clear vision for what I thought my product would be. And then once I have that, I decided to go ahead and just launch in a membership style format, and it was very raw, I guess, at that point. That was quite a bit I learned over the next few years from where I started to where I am today, and I think I’m still learning a lot, I’m still trying to learn a lot, and I want to continue to evolve with the web in that way.

MemberCon.com: If you had to do that over again, would you start by maybe offering some teasers and then go right away. I mean, did you get any, you know, push back. I know a month is not a long time to start to develop and follow and get used to your free stuff, but was there any push back from that when you did start to charge for it?

Jeff White: There really was not much of a response initially. It took me about three weeks before I had my first subscriber. And so, what I did was I was offering a free trial period. So, I did have, you know, kind of a steady growth in sign ups or registrations but before I actually got paid by someone was about three weeks after I decided to begin that model. So we’re probably looking at about seven weeks from the time I started my very first newsletter with friends and family. So, it did take some time.

MemberCon.com: And did most people before those three weeks, did they just take the free trial and then they canceled or what did they do?

Jeff White: Yeah, you know, what I found was, you know, this is a little bit embarrassing, but one thing I was doing wrong initially was I wanted to take it and make it as simple as possible for people to sign up. And so, what I was doing was collecting email addresses and allowing them to register simply with an email address. And I quickly realized that, that’s just going to spark a lot of abuse by people who want something for free. They could sign up with one email account, take it and get something for free for that trial period, and then they could simply cancel that and start up with a new email address, and it could be the same person, and it may look like a dozen different people, but as long as they could generate a new email address then, they could sign back up. And so, yeah, that was part of my initial learning curve. I was just realizing that I needed to find a better way to qualify my registration so that I was getting real people and that I was actually limiting that to one per person as oppose to allowing a handful of people reuse the thing over and over.

MemberCon.com: So, what have you kind of settled on now as then your happy meeting. You probably tried different timeframes of free trials and can you guide us through how your evolution went to where you got to where you are right now?

Jeff White: Sure. Initially, like I said, I started with just email addresses then I realized that I could setup a recurring subscription through Paypal. So, I began doing that and I felt like that was a good way to do it because Paypal limits their accounts to one per person. So, I felt like I could sort of piggyback their way of limiting abuse and let that work in my favor. And so, I started off with a one-month trial and I did that for a little while, and I found that so many people were canceling after…in the latter portion of the trial. And so, I realized that they probably are going to know whether or not they want this product pretty early on in the cycle, and so, I cut my trial period in half and it went to two weeks, and for the next several months, I really started keeping pretty close ties on when did people register and then when did they cancel. Because the way that my trial period works is they begin the trial and that at the end of the trial, they’re going to get charged for their membership, and they know that on the front end. So, anytime during the trial period, they can cancel before they’re charged and which is a different model in some sites which charge upfront and then offer a refund period after that charge. So, what I was doing was giving them this free phase and then following that as soon as they’re going to get charged. And I started studying and tracking exactly when does the average quitter leave, and what I found was it’s really around day seven or eight. And so, at that point, I felt like I had enough metrics to kind of really hone in and really reduce my free trial period, and I actually cut it in half once again from two weeks down to seven days, and that’s where I’ve been for the past couple years with the seven-day trial because, again, I had the data to backup. I realized that most people who want my product will know it in the first week, and if they don’t want it, then I don’t want to continue providing that to them for free.

MemberCon.com: There are two schools of thought here now that I’ve looked at it in researching membership sites. One, and I don’t see a lot of this, is they sign up and you can sign up without a credit card, and then you would basically get charged after you give them the credit card. And I don’t see a lot of people doing that for the obvious reasons. I think you get a lot of people that just don’t sign up. But I wonder if it would convert just as well as getting the credit card upfront and then not having them canceled. Do you follow what I mean there?

Jeff White: Sure, yeah, I do, and I’ve wondered that, too. I simply haven’t tested it. The way I’ve kind of operated is to validate…and by the way, I since stopped using Paypal because I was on the recurring payment system. I did encounter some problems with Paypal in terms of recurring payments, and we can touch on that momentarily.

MemberCon.com: Sure.

Jeff White: But, for me, I did shift to a payment processor in a credit card processor who authorized that net gateway and so, that’s what I currently use. But what I do during the registration process is when someone enters all their information, we do ask for credit card info upfront. And what we do is simply preauthorize that card for the term of their membership. And it’s simply a way to validate that that billing is correct and valid. And so, I do get some questions from people who say that they’re a little bit concerned about in putting credit card information for something that they’re wanting free which is my trial, but the response to that is generally that it’s kind of like holding a reservation at a hotel. They’re going to ask that you to put a credit card on file with them so that they can validate that you are for real, and they’ll preauthorize that credit card. It’s not going to get charged until you go and stay at their hotel or until you’re beyond their cancellation policy. But, for us, what we do is preauthorize the card initially, and then if they do wish to go ahead and become a member after the trial period then it will charge them. But that way, we’re protecting ourselves from abuse and the user is, of course, simply proving that they are a new and unique user.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, and I totally get that whole being able to give the credit card upfront, I guess, for a lot of members what I found, too, is that you mentioned the hotel, example, Hyatt is a huge, you know, probably Fortune-500 company that I know ultimately. They’re probably not going to rip me off but on the line, I’m just an individual guy that nobody’s every heard of. What do you do to kind of help to build trust with the end users so they trust you the same way they would if they give a, you know, credit card to a hotel?

Jeff White: Well, you know, I think that that really goes hand in hand with how you build an audience to begin with which is once you are perceived as an expert or you become known in your field, I think people naturally will allow a little bit more trust to you. The other thing is if I encounter someone who’s really concerned about it and they email multiple times that they’re really interested in taking, you know, in signing up for my product but they’re not confident in putting their billing info, I just suggest that they contact their credit card company and ask about their rights as a consumer because generally, the credit card company is very much going to go to “go to bat” for their cardholder and there is a lot of protection offered from the credit card companies to their cardholders.

MemberCon.com: That’s definitely true. I’ve had even with other businesses experience of those charge backs which is basically saying they’re just speeding the charge.

Jeff White: Right.

MemberCon.com: The money immediately comes out of my bank account before I can even respond to it then I have a chance to respond and then they decide whether or not to honor the charge. Almost always, it goes in favor of the cardholder which as a card owner myself, I want, as business owner, it can get a little frustrating at times, but.

Jeff White: It certainly can and I’ve encountered that some in the past on. Fortunately, it’s been pretty limited here. We go to great links to try to make crystal clear what is expected and what the process will be from start to finish. And so, the people who do agree to that, we do collect that data and so, we know exactly what date and time they agreed to our terms; and in that way if we ever need to prove that, then we’ve got it on hand. But it can certainly be frustrating when you get hit with one of those charge backs because typically from a lack of communication with that customer in particularly from them to you as a business owner. If I’m a consumer and I feel wronged by a business, the first thing I’m going to do is go to that business and see if they’ll make it right. If they won’t, then I might consider contacting my credit card company. But in the case of charge backs, with us, it seems that it’s occurred when we’ve never heard anything from that customer who either misunderstood the process or simply just went over our heads and never even attempted to give us the chance to make it right which, of course, we’re happy to do. But it’s certainly frustrating to feel like that merchant account provider, I guess, the bank is allowing you, as a business, to process credit cards. You certainly want to remain an honest business in their eyes, especially, so that they continue to allow you to do that. That’s your lifeblood and if you don’t have that then it’s very frustrating to, I guess, have to go out and try to find another one to replace it.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, and it totally agree with you with the communication. One of the things we do on our sales pages, I’ve got my direct phone number right on there, right at the bottom of the page–

Jeff White: Right.

MemberCon.com: –as well as my email. It say “call me anytime”. I knew that for somebody who does a home business, that’s a little tough, I mean, I work at an office, and so, it’s easier for people…I can give them my office number, but I would really highly suggest anybody doing that. You’re going to get…the first thought is I’m going to get thousands of calls. Well, as much as I would love for that to be that case ’cause probably it means I’m getting thousands of members. It just isn’t the case. I don’t get called a lot unless they have something to say or, you know, they’re on the verge of buying and they have another question. In that case, I don’t want them to be able to call me.

Jeff White: Right.

MemberCon.com: So that I can put them over the top.

Jeff White: And I totally agree. Think that whether you’re operating from a home or an office, it’s very inexpensive to go get a post office box somewhere as it can operate as your business address. But even on any website that’s conducting business on the Internet, it’s very important, I think, to place contact information rather than just send them to an email address or to a contact forum. They can have at least place the address of your business on there and, of course, if you have a business phone number, then place that on their, too. It really adds a lot of confidence for prospective buyers to know that you are legitimate enough to actually put down a physical location even if you’re solely operating online.

MemberCon.com: Well, let’s get back to that free trial and then converting them to a paid membership. In percentages, what are you finding in terms of…well, first of all, tell us how much your membership cost, and then what percentage do you think are you converting right now between the free trial over to the regular full membership.

Jeff White: OK, yeah, my monthly membership is a hundred dollars that’s $99.95. And, you know, on free trial that we probably convert about 25% to 30% of them. Though, you know, there are more people who take the trial who cancel then who actually go on and pay for the service.

MemberCon.com: I think 25%, that’s incredible. I mean, I don’t know what the standard is, I guess, we’ll find out and kind of my journey to talk to other outsiders, but that seems tremendous.

Jeff White: Well, you know, for me, I don’t mind when people cancel on their trial. I think that that period is set up of both of us. It’s for them as a possible buyer to know whether or not this is something that they want to pay for. So, I think it’s certainly advantageous to them to go ahead and kick the tires and give it a test run and see if it’s something that you’re looking for. But for me, I do spend ample time trying to interact with my members, and I’m always available to them to answer questions or help them out when they need it. And so, for me, if I’m going to invest that time on the backend of a sale or of a conversion from free trial to paying member, I want it to be with someone who plans on being around long enough to utilize that help. It’s nice to make that one conversion from someone coming from free trial to paid member, but if they cancel on the first month or so, then obviously, they’re not happy with what was provided. And as a business, we’re not really helping them either. And so, you know, I want them to cancel if it’s not for them. I want them to stay onboard if it is for them, in that way we can continue to build that relationship and help explain the things to them that they’re here to look for.

MemberCon.com: That’s another good point talking about how long they stay a member. I’ve heard in my research online, three to four months is pretty common which when I first start looking at this, I thought, “Man, that is awfully short.” I mean, when you think of membership, you think of somebody becoming a member for a year. I guess, it’s just not realistic and that’s just maybe the short term. What has it been for you, have you found out…kind of your average?

Jeff White: Yeah, I think my average is just bitterly longer than that probably around five months. But, again, it’s not, you know, it’s not a lifetime type of thing, and that’s actually not what we’re trying to do here at TheStockBandit.com. The aim here is to try to teach people, you know, what I look for in a good trade. And so, if I’m doing a really good job then I think that these people are learning it pretty quickly, and they get some feel for what I’m looking for right now, and then the aim is for them to go out and do it on their own. I’m trying to equip them to be able to this for themselves.

MemberCon.com: That’s an outstanding sales point, too, and I’m going to steal that from you, Jeff. I think putting it on my sales page saying, “Look, I’m not trying to make you a member for your lifetime here and collect $99 a month from you. I’m here to teach you to do what you wish you would get on and then do your own trading.” I think that’s fantastic. I think that’s fantastic, so if that puts somebody over the edge and to try you, I think that’s a great idea.

Jeff White: Well, and there certainly are some people who are here simply so that we’ll do the work for them. Maybe they don’t want to invest the time to learn it themselves. They would rather, you know, pay for the fish instead of learn to fish, and that’s OK if that’s what they want to do. They can stay here as long as they like. But the ideal person is someone who’s coming here to learn a skill and work on that for a little while, and have some interactions, and back and forth learning, and then go on out and attempt to learn it on their own. And sometimes, they’ll come back for, you know, maybe call it a refresher course or something for a couple months after they’ve done it on their own for a little while or possibly when the behavior of the stock market changes a little bit, they may want to come back and learn something a little different. But, you know, there certainly are that follow into both categories of short term versus long-term members. So, I try not to read too much into the duration of their stay.

MemberCon.com: Do you email them when they do cancel and say, “Hey, is there somewhere we fell short for you or is there something I could do differently, can I get you back?” Do you offer them a lower pricing? It’s like four questions right there in wonder.

Jeff White: No, absolutely. I do contact them when they do leave. If they’re a trial user, then they’re automatically emailed from our database. It detects that they’re in a trial and that sends them, basically, a generic email that says, “Thank you for giving us a try,” and, you know, “you’re welcome back anytime.” But if it is someone who has paid me and they’ve been a paying member, I will send them a personal email and I will ask those questions. I do not offer them a lower price to come back, and I don’t try to incentivise them to return, but I do want to seek their feedback as a paying member because I feel like theirs is the most valuable. Their feedback is the most valuable. If they’re leaving because of something that changed in various situations, then I certainly don’t want to pry and learn too much about their personal situation. However, if it’s us then I definitely want to know if we promised something and didn’t deliver it, or if their expectation was different than what they found here and so, I think it’s very good for me to seek that feedback from people who leave. And sometimes it’s simply because there is not a fit, you know, maybe they found that it’s just not something that’s for them and that’s perfectly fine, too. But it helps me as a business owner to know what needs work and what is probably doing OK and it let’s me continue to know what may need adjustment and what may need to just continue as is.

MemberCon.com: You know, one of the things I saw when I was a Netflix member a couple years ago when I went to cancel, they’d offer me a lower rate for a shorter amount of time. And I was wondering, so, if I was paying $17 a month, they offered, you know, OK, how about if we drop up to $10 for the next three months. So, I think I stayed and it caught and they got me to stay and I always wondered if that might be an interesting strategy to try with a membership site as well.

Jeff White: Yeah, that is very interesting. I think that may just boil down to exactly what you’re providing and how much ongoing work is required from you as the owner of that membership site. If it’s something like I’m doing where I’m putting out fresh new content on a daily basis, I’m not willing to reduce my prices in order to gain them back. But if it’s the type of thing where I’ve produced the content for members and it’s simply now my job to maintain it, then that may be something I would consider.

MemberCon.com: When you first started, did you have a forum for your members? That seems like a big deal a lot of membership site owners talk about starting a forum and that’s a big way to keep people subscribe. What are your thoughts?

Jeff White: You know, I think it can be a very double-edged sword to be honest, and I actually have had a forum in the past and currently do not have one, so I can kind of just walk you down that road. I think that a forum is great when it has people engaged and when it’s lively and moving. And when you visit a forum that’s alive and it’s got a lot of activity, it’s very easy to engage and it’s easy to learn and notice that this is a thriving community. If the forum is very quiet and it’s not being bumped along by people who are visiting it frequently, then I think it can actually drive people away. For me, what I found when I implemented the forum was that the wrong people began to use it or I should say the right people began to use it for the wrong reason. It was never abused which, initially, was maybe one of my concerns implementing a forum. How closely will I need to monitor this and moderate this thing and make sure that language is appropriate and that the topics are appropriate. What I really found what that people were using it not so much to network with each other but to hit me with a lot of questions. And I found it very demanding on my time, and so if I were to implement another forum, I would do it in such a way that there are other moderators in place on a volunteer basis who are there to help out to where as a site owner, I don’t have to be the guy that answers so many different things. What I found for me personally was it detracted from my midday trading, and so, there were trades I was missing because I’m busy typing an answer on the forum, and that was causing me a lot of money and opportunity. And so, I found that it was just going to be best for me to close the forum for that reason so that my focus could be where I wanted it to be, where I knew it should be during the day.

MemberCon.com: Yeah, that’s a good point, and it’s a chicken of the egg thing, too, how do you get the forum started and look busy without a whole lot of members, too.

Jeff White: Right.

MemberCon.com: So, it’s definitely something to consider.

End of Part 1 of 2. Stay tuned for the second half of this interview.

The new model has also led to a ton of questions.  What is the right color for the sign-up button?  How much free content should we give away as a teaser? How much should we charge?  These are questions we discuss every day.  So we’ve set up this site as a way to help us get the answers we need and to help out other membership site owners in their quest to build a recurring revenue business.  We’ll learn together what it takes to make this a real business.

Since our membership site (TraderInterviews.com) does audio interviews, we’ll be doing quite a few of those with other membership site owners and experts.  The first one will be posted the middle of next week.

Thanks and welcome to MemberCon!