In today’s installment of my IM product review of Shoemoney’s Shoe In Money System, we have some positives. We also have some potential negatives, depending on your point of view.
Last time, we finished up Module 6 and the Action Plan through Day 8.
Module 7 is about driving traffic to your site. I currently have notthing on my site to drive traffic to. I’m assuming I’m not ready to do Module 7 yet. So I’m going to tackle a few days on the Action Plan in this review.
A note about the Action Plan. It says it’s a 30 Day Action plan. You could do some days’ tasks in 30 minutes to an hour. Other days’ tasks would take anywhere from all day long to a couple of days depending on how quickly you work. Since I’m assuming most people would not have a straight 30 days’ worth of free days to devote to this plan, I can only look at the Action Plan as a guideline more than a rule.
Anyway, I’m going to review Days 9-13. They’re steps needed to get the site populated with content, so it makes sense to do them together. If you don’t want to read the in-depth review, you can skip ahead to the summary.
Shoe In Money: Action Plan Day 9![Search-Engine-Marketing]()
Day 9′s action is to research competitors He gives some things to look for as you’re researching. Look at the URL in that graphic to see how to search for some of the information. He doesn’t tell you how to do it, but he does demonstrate.
This was a really useful step for me. Just looking for what he said to look for on my competitors’ sites helped me get some ideas for mine. It would be good to make this an on-going activity, even once you get up and running for a while.
Action Plan Day 10
This day was less productive. Why? Well, it’s about creating an email list. He recommends AWeber and mentions the $1 the first month/ $19 after that price. He doesn’t go into how to set up the list from a technical standpoint, which … well, AWeber could be more intuitive than it is, let me tell you.
Still, I’m living proof that you can poke around AWeber enough to figure out how to set up a list, so while I would like to see more here, it’s not a huge deal.
He talks about the number of emails you’re going to send to your list. He obviously believes in automated emails, not live – he talks about pre-writing a large number of them. I’m not sure about that. Why would that be better than just creating emails as you go?
This part irritates me:
“You should also be thinking about how you will promote your list. Free eBook? Email course? Webinar?
Choose a good one and make it clear to your readers that you have more of the same on the way.”
Yep. That is all he says about that. Just … go do it. No guidelines, no examples, no anything.
Then he gives some steps to do in the coming week – at least that’s realistic.
The first one has to do with pre-writing emails to your list. Still not sure about that one.
The second one – makes sense. I’ll have to think about what I need here.
The third one – “If you didn’t do this a couple days ago, do it today.” Erm, when did you explain this one? How about some explanation now? No? Okay then.
The last one – excellent advice.
Action Plan Day 11![photo by David Castillo Dominici/FreeDigitalPhotos.net]()
Today is about content. He clearly has a lot of free time on his hands if he considers all of this a day’s work. That said …
He gives some general guidelines for the type of content you should be creating or outsourcing. Maybe a little too general, I’m honestly not sure. You know what would really help here? A sample website with some examples. It’s not that his guidelines are so bad, it’s just that they’re vague. Write this, write that, but no real description of what “this” and “that” are. Being able to see what he means would help.
Oh, and the one about recording a video – while not strictly necessary, some comments about how to do that (software, hardware, etc.) would be nice.
What I’m seeing here is a lot of assumptions that the reader already knows stuff that someone who had been in marketing for a long time probably would know. If you haven’t been in marketing a long time, you’re going to have to make it up as you go. While you’ll probably learn a lot that way, I see many people giving up in frustration before they actually get to the point of making money.
He finishes up with some guidelines on how to find good writers if you decide to outsource. It’s good advice, and at least he’s not saying “Go hire someone for $0.05/1,000 words”.
Obviously, writing the content for my site is going to take a bit of time, so I’m not implementing it “real time”. Trust me, the instructions for this day aren’t much help anyway, so I’ll just be working on that behind the scenes as the review goes on.
Action Plan Day 12
Today is about content for your email list. Again, I’m not sure about this “write out a year’s worth of messages ahead of time”. Why do that?
Okay, this gets a bit confusing. He says “you’ve already seen my 20 day list plan” which, um, no I haven’t. There’s an OTO called “A List Machine” that I have access to at the bottom of the page navigation menu. I didn’t pay for it – maybe it’s a freebie even though it’s called an OTO? It’s been so long since I bought the course that I don’t remember if they mentioned any freebies.
Anyway, that does have a 20 day list plan under “Creating an Email Sequence”. But I found that by poking around, not by him ever mentioning it.
Back to Day 12 – he summarizes the email sequence. Again, this seriously needs examples. This could be a whole course by itself, and he’s just blowing through it in a couple of paragraphs. Quite honestly, I have no more idea how to do this now than I did when I got up this morning.
He does suggest writing a few emails a day rather than trying to do this all in one day. That’s a little less daunting.
I really don’t know about this part. He makes way more money online than I’ve managed to make yet. There’s something to be said for following the advice of someone who knows what they’re doing. I’m just thinking that canned emails lacks the personal touch that he was so big on earlier in the course.
Action Plan Day 13
We’re going to finish off with Day 13 today, then I’m off to write a billion articles and a gazillion canned emails.
He gives a list of tasks to do on social media sites – daily tasks, weekly, and monthly. They’re good ideas. No argument there.
One thing he hasn’t mentioned. How do you get people on these sites to subscribe/follow/like/whatever to you so that you can be social?
This step, quite honestly, is useless without a step telling how to get connected to people. Where is that?
The TL;DR Version
Great information about researching competitors in Day 9. Days 10-1 were a little less useful. They covered adding creating your email list, pre-writing your emails, and getting content on your site. The list of things to do was useful, but they lacked detail or examples of how to do those things. Day 13 seemed pointless to me. Why do I need a plan for interacting on social media when I have no one to be social with? Train me in that, then come back and train me how to keep the interactions going.
One thing I want to say in the interest of fairness: My personality is kind of perfectionistic. I want to get things right the first time. That means I want clear, step-by-step directions. Once I learn how to do it, I’ll start experimenting and putting my own flair on it. Other people may not care as much about the step-by-step or may already know how to do these things.
In other words, the “what to do” is there in the Shoe In Money System; it’s the “how to do it” that’s occasionally lacking. How much this lack of detail bothers you will vary a lot from one person to the next.
Which are you – a step-by-step person or a go out and figure it out yourself person? Does it bother you if training doesn’t include the steps on how to do everything? Or do you just want the basic outline of what to do so you can get to work on it in your own way? Let me know in the comments.
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