Last week
I quoted Einstein when he talked about how any idiot can make things more complicated but it takes true genius to make the simple things work.
Then I proceeded to go on a rant about all these guru's out there who give advice based on theory and not any experience or numbers to back it up.
I think in my rant I lost focus of what I was trying to convey.
I made my first million dollars, actually, first 5 million dollars with a website called NextPimp that had:
- The worst graphics ever
- No flash animation
- No Ajax
- No analytics
- No website optimizer
- No call to action
The CMS I used was called Post Nuke and while I had ZERO knowledge of PHP I knew how to shell script. So I made the site work by forking everything to a bash command line script. This was about the most insecure and non scaleable way possible to do things. But it was an awesome service - One that was badly needed and the site was as simple as it gets to use... and bottom line more then anything else -
it just worked.
Everything I have built that has made money online started with a simple idea I got from seeing what someone else did.... and it spurred something in me.
Another example is when I discovered all the domains out there that were unregistered (for years) but had a shitton of back links. These domains instantly ranked for whatever we wanted and we absolutely crushed it in many verticals. Course they burn out after a month or so but they brought in EASILY a million dollars in free money because it was all organic traffic. Funny thing is we are STILL to this day finding domains that have been unregistered for years only now instead of building out content for them we sell them in ShoeMoney Tools and sell about 200 a month or so.
Were any of these things magical new never before thought of things? Nope...
Working with the
ShoeMoney System students and going over their websites with a fine tooth comb I can't tell you how many times
removing stuff drastically increased their conversion.
One example is a guy had a really awesome product with a really cool CSS website design and a lot of ajax thrown in but was not converting anyone to sales even though he had a very high percentage of users hitting the sales page. He was doing tons of testing of different pages with website optimizer but none were converting.
After I tested it in multiple browsers I figured out that his site was completely incompatible with Internet Explorer. He took out the ajax on the site and boom... quadrupled his sales.
There is a lot to the "keep it simple stupid" mantra. As things get more and more complicated on the web I think its important for people to really keep it in mind.
Everyone gets so lost in the cool crap (myself included) that we forget to make something that just works and is well tested.
