Here is my video from SMX Advanced. I had to back out because my wife is about to have our second child soon and really wanted to keep me close (very understandable and stupid of me to commit in the first place).

When Stephan Spencer asked if I would be willing to do a 10 minute video I was more then happy to do it. Working on the video though was pretty hard. I did it about 5 times and kept restarting after a minute… then just busted this out sent it to Stephan and he said he liked it so it went. I had not watched it at all since I recorded it.

I am happy to hear that nobody thought it sucked (yet). Its one thing to do a presentation in front of a ton of people and its another to pre-record one and have it played in front of all your peers where you can’t adjust for anything… eek…

Here it is!

Keep in mind I am not a professional SEO. All my opinions come from my real world, hands on, experiences.

Jen and I were getting ready to do the show and testing our cameras. We logged in to our Live Yahoo account and people started showing up in the chat. We twittered for peope to come to the Yahoo! Live chat… Evidently someone at Yahoo! still has a beef.

All of a sudden it said we had been banned. WTF Yahoo! ?????

I later got this email.

Dear shoemoneyshow

By creating and using your Yahoo! account, you agree to abide by
Yahoo!’s Terms of Service (TOS). Pursuant to the TOS, Yahoo! reserves
the right to terminate your account or otherwise prohibit use of your
account in the event that, among other things, Yahoo! believes that you
have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of the
TOS.

It has come to our attention that you may have violated the TOS
(http://www.yahoo.com/r/ts).
Please reread the TOS and cease any use of your account that may
violate the TOS.

If your use of your Yahoo! account is brought to our attention again,
and we believe that such use violates the TOS, then we may terminate
your account without further notice.

Please do not reply to this email. Any questions concerning Yahoo!’s
Services should be submitted through the on-line form in the help area
( http://help.yahoo.com ).

-Yahoo!

Which makes it sound like its a temporary thing…. but as you can see its not.

Actually getting booted from Yahoo! was the best thing that happened to us. Ustream has a much better service.

For those asking on twitter and in comments the beef with Yahoo goes back quite a while.

There was the whole myblog log thing (which turned into like 5 smaller things). Yahoo publicly apologized but there have been hard feelings since. I still cant access mybloglog.

Then the whole yahoo search marketing pr nightmare for them

Social media has brought about a great change on the web. It has never been easier for just about anyone to have a voice online, and have that voice heard by thousands. With so many people authoring blogs, participating in social communities, and utilizing the various social communication tools, how do you keep people from saying too much?

I mean it is social and all, but when is it time to “Shut the f**k up already”?

Marketers talk and they always have. In the past, when they shared tricks, accomplishments, and information, it was done on a face to face basis. Whether through an IM conversation, emails, or over a drink or two, the sharing was always controlled to a certain extent.

Sure even in those controlled environments, information can accidentally get out. For example, when Rand Fishkin, a well know search marketing expert, overheard Matt Cutts talking with some people at SES San Jose about the sandbox, he blogged immediately about
it and caused quite a stir for publically releasing information that was from a private conversation. Luckily, social media was not as evolved as it is now, so the information and visibility of the blunder was minimal, thus quickly forgiven and forgotten.

Revealing too much information is not is not a new issue that is related only to social media. Even as far back as many of you might remember, there was always some marketer giving away just a little too much information. One example was when Bob Massa, SearchKing, announced that he was selling PageRank through his PR Ad Network. This prompted a trend of buying links for PageRank and resulted in Google launching a war against paid links.

Had Bob only shut the f**k up, he could have made a lot of money, but instead he lost the PR on his sites and it took four years to get it back.

So why is that people feel the need to talk about their accomplishments and the tricks they have figured out? There are three main reasons why people just cannot shut the f**k up:

The Good Guys are really good hearted marketers. When they discover a trick that works, they want to share it with their peers and friends.

We all love the good guys. They already know when to shut up and when to speak, and they are more likely to spend an evening sharing their tips and tricks face to face. It is the braggers and the ambitious people that you have to watch out for.

The Braggers lack confidence or desire attention. These marketers feel the need to brag about their accomplishments to fit in and make them feel accepted.

Normally I would say that the braggers are harmless, since they tend to have small followings and less of a reputation. However, every so often a somewhat visible and reputable marketer brags about something that they probably shouldn’t have.

Take Matt Inman, former SEOmozzer, who used widgets and quizzes to get inbound links with the anchor text “Free Online Dating” and “Online Dating” to his site Mingle2. The accomplishment earned his site the number 1 spot in Google for the top dating keywords above top dating sites like eHarmony.

Matt, obviously proud of his accomplishment, went on to explain in great detail exactly how he did it during SES San Jose in 2007. Something he would probably later wish he had just shut the f**k up about.

Mingle2 was later sold to JustSayHi, a competing website, due to Matt’s success. Next Internet, the parent company of JustSayHi, later asked
Matt to swap out some of the quiz and widget links with keywords like “Cash Advance” and point to some of their lead-gen websites.

It was a swap that did not go unnoticed. As a result widget links became an issue that Google felt had to be addressed immediately.

The fallout cost Matt all of his properties’ rankings, which was the success of his technique to begin with, but that was not all. It also
caused many big companies to lose millions of dollars when Google put an eye on widgets and the links they contained.

The Ambitious marketers want to increase their reputation and respect within their industry, at any cost.

The Ambitious are the people who scare me the most. They will gladly give away any tricks or tips they can so that they are seen as a leader in the industry. They often do not care about the industry or the people who work around them.

The recent Lyndoman situation is a perfect example. Lyndoman is a social media marketer who was well respected among the top social media marketers. He created a social media linkbait for a client that went to the front page of Digg and was even
mentioned on a television news broadcast.

Needless to say, the linkbait was a huge success. Lyndoman probably would have gone on to continue to do more linkbaits for the client, if he had only learned to shut the f**k up.

Lyndoman decided to brag about the campaign and announced to everyone that the article was actually false. “Absolutely-completely-utterly a fabrication, a tissue of lies weaved in a fog of deceit. Or what most people would call satire.” In addition to admitting the content was false, he also put his client out in the open to be judged on his behalf. An action that later drew the attention of Matt Cutts from Google, who commented, “

This resulted in multiple problems for Lyndoman and the social media marketing industry.

Although we have seen a major change in the way corporations have begun to embrace social media, there are many who are still concerned about losing control of their image, message, and reputation. The control they are accustomed to with traditional media doesn’t exist online. As a result,
corporations are afraid that one of the extreme or edgy content pieces marketers convince them to do. They are concerned it will hurt their reputation and business.

Unfortunately, this incident could hurt the entire industry by making clients wary of participating in social media. It will also impact the way social communities perceive content submitted by marketers.

Lyndoman admitted later, after losing the client and gaining a lot of negative media exposure, that the short lived fame from exposing the success of his campaign was not worth it. He even decided to remove the original post from his site saying, “At the end of the day it did more harm than good discussing publicly such effective tactics.”

As social media and online marketing continues to grow, we will see an even stronger desire for marketers to expose tricks and techniques in exchange for potential fame and recognition. In an effort to eliminate the chance for this to occur, an increasing number of top internet marketers have stopped talking about their secrets completely. The days of buying someone a beer and having them share their tricks are being replaced by smaller behind the scenes groups. They are increasingly becoming very cautious with who they allow in their circle of trust.

Even the newly crowned “rockstars” can still make mistakes, especially when they don’t realize the power of their voice. A great example is Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker. Shortly after becoming widely known online for affiliate marketing, he published a picture of a very large adsense check sent to him by Google.

Through blog posts and his radio show Net Income, Jeremy explained how he was able to make large amounts of money from the ringtone industry. This caused a lot of people to get into the ringtone market and drove up the keyword costs in PPC engines. Something he admits probably cost him a lot of money.

I have a lot of respect for each of the people referenced in this article. They are all experienced internet marketers, who at one point or another made a mistake. I use their examples only because they had a large impact on the internet marketing industry as a whole.

Everyone brags and everyone shares secrets, but you need to pick and choose the right time and place to do so. If you really want to gain the respect and reputation in the industry and your peers, save the bragging and ambition for the face to face encounters.

When it comes to disclosing your techniques and tricks, just shut the f**k up already!

Brent Csutoras is an internet marketing consultant, who specializes in social media, viral and search engine marketing.

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One thing that always has bugged me with MacOSX is that in order to get sound with the Quicktime player for Avi, divix, and xvid formats was that frequently you would have no sound as it could not load the audio codecs. You could use Mplayer and as cool as it is that it can play anything its missing some features (like skipping ahead) with certain formats also. (Although pretty impressive for open source)

I found the fix today. Its called Perian. Its free. Download it and end your frustrations.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/perian.html

Fire Away.

post closed pending answers.

When I was asked last month to be apart of the “Buying Sites For SEO” panel on June 3rd at the SMX Advanced panel I instantly replied yes! This was a subject I really wanted to speak on and had a TON of first hand experience in purchasing thousands of expired domains (not parked, the ones that truly were in limbo) over the last 4 years. I also wanted to talk about how its changed … a lot… anyway…

Then as time has slipped by and my wife has gotten closer to her due date and made it very clear to me that she wants me closer to me as we expect our 2nd child I have had to come back to reality and cancel on the speaking engagement. I was pretty bummed. Its the first time I had canceled on a speaking engagement ever.

BUT then the panels moderator Stephan Spencer, who knew how excited I was to be apart of this, emailed me and said I could do a video portion of what I was going to present and that seemed like a plan! So I wont be there in person but I will have a short video in my stead!

The panel is stacked with other experts with tons of experience in the field.

Should be very educational for those looking to buy domains for there SEO value.

I have had blog networks approach me like Federated Media, etc etc to handle my advertising. They just do CPM advertising though and they take a HUGE CHUNK like 40%+.

I guess I should give you some background on how we do our advertising here.

Basically we price it monthly at a flat rate and we let the market set the prices. We are currently sold out but when a slot opens it will be more then what the previous person paid or less depending. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for us the prices have only increased since we started doing advertising over a year ago. Also we have a very low turnover rate. I think the renewal is something like 90% so I guess advertisers are getting a great ROI. Allowing the market to set the prices IMO is the way to do it. This month (May) shoemoney.com will hit a all time high taking in almost $40,000 in advertising for one month. If the rate of growth exceeds it should do a half of a million dollars in gross revenue (not profit) this year. That is pretty cool.

Ok back on point of why I do not like CPM advertising networks. CPM is cost per 1,000 impressions. Lets say you get 20$ CPM. That means if your site gets 100,000 page views (not visitors) per day you would make 2,000$ per day per adspot.

Techcrunch for instance charges 15$ CPM on the low end. But if you look at there site the ads 99% of the time from Federated Media are COMPLETELY unrelated to the content or niche. This means a bad user experience for users and also a bad ROI for advertisers. While its a quick payday for Techcrunch in the long run I feel it will hurt them. Now I know Techcrunch does do direct flat fee ads (yay!) and much like on shoemoney.com you see the same ones there over and over and over.

So even though I could make probably 20-30% more with CPM advertising networks (from what I have been offered) I just feel in the long run it will cost me more money.

On a CPM basis you are always trying to game the social networks. The average front page Digg brings in at least $3,000 (don’t forget there is more then 1 CPM running) to these sites. but I really think you have to shift the focus of your site if you want to do CPM. Also you see sites quickly turn into page viewing whores implementing all kinds of things to get you to view more pages (hot or not, voting scripts, CLICK HERE TO READ MORE, etc etc).

With direct placement flat fee advertising I will guarantee that I will continue to do the exact same thing I have always done. I have zero incentive to game social networks or to buy 3rd world crappy non converting .00001 per visit traffic.

I know people really want to get into Federated Media but I can tell you … no I promise you that they are not worth it.

EDIT: I originally in included Blog Ads in with Federated Media for CPM networks Got my blog advertising mixed up but the points still stick.

LinkConnector.com is an affiliate marketing network helping merchants and affiliates increase online sales and revenue.

I would have to say this shirt stood out to me, nice job guys.

And I would definitely get naked for a beer. Who wouldn’t?

BTW I know what your thinking. Shoemoney looks Good with a tan!

If you would like to see your website or company featured on Free Shirt Friday click here