The internet is still the wild west. With gunslingers, sheriffs and whores. There are plenty of pioneers making their way over the prairies in rickety covered wagons, trying to find their patch of land, where they can set up and stake a claim.

The guy I want to ride with is not the new sheriff in town, but instead the half wild gun slinger whose seen it all, and done it all. See the new sheriff in town with his shiny badge, and chaps that are not quite broken in, is gonna miss the meaning when the smoke comes up on the horizon from the left, with a southerly breeze rising, just before the turn to autumn, the morning after the first frost.

On the other hand, the half wild gun slinger, whose been living out in these parts long before anyone else, knows the lay of the land. See he has seen it all, and he has done it all. He’s fought side by side with the Indians, killed a bear with his hands, and limped across the dessert for two weeks without a drop of water to drink, living off the juice he could squeeze out of a cactus. So maybe he shot a few people along the way to survive, maybe he still walks into a restaurant with his gun drawn, and maybe he’ll go a few weeks without shaving.

That’s the guy you want riding by your side. Now if you are relatively new on the trail you’re not going to know what a rattle snake looks like when it lays across the trail like a branch, and your not going to know which lizard you can eat in an emergency and which one will kill you. That’s what the hardened gun slinger is for.

So how do you be friends with Jeremy Schoemaker.

People love him.

People fear him.

In two minutes he can write a post that launches a career, or destroys one.

Whenever I go to conferences, even the elite ones like Azoogles Playboy Mansion party, many people come up to me and ask me about Shoemoney. It usually goes something like this, “The guy has been a total inspiration to me, but whenever I try to go up and talk to him, I don’t have the guts to speak, or I just blurt out something stupid.

Even a few of the people who went to thinktank last year, after spending three days with Jeremy literally 10 feet away from them, were disappointed that they never spoke to him.

I consider him a great friend, and I would like to help others be better friends with him too! My online career was literally created by Jeremy. I’d been doing great work, but until he pointed it out to others, I had never gotten the kind of respect I do now.

This is written not to be funny, but literally so you can be a better friend to Jeremy and help him, which will absolutely help you!

Here’s what I learned:

1. Don’t try to start the next war with him online to get traffic and look cool. At this point so many people have tried this role, that I predict he will ignore you, and other people will think what you are doing is dumb.

2. Don’t try to get the upper hand on him. I have heard enough stories now about people who tried to get an angle or an edge on him. He is powerful enough that this is not a good idea. Back to the gun slinger analogy, if there is another new gun slinger in town walking down the road toward him, don’t expect Jeremy to run into the saloon.

3. Listen to the guys stories. One day at the stratosphere, when we went to go meet with the Coutures the first time, I sat there for something like 4 hours in the coffee shop while Jeremy schooled me on the world of internet business. If I had gotten an MBA, and then worked in the internet world for another 20 years, I would not have learned as much as I did in that 4 hours. The secret, was that I paid attention to everything he said.

4. Help and protect the people around him. Tigh is Jeremy’s right hand on day to day business matters, Dave Dellanave is his main programmer, Jeremy with good reasons loves his wife and kids. If the possibility comes up where you can help any of them, this helps Jeremy and will give you credit in the Shoemoney book as someone who in the words of Shoe “contributes”.

5. Don’t expect help right when you want it. Shoemoney is working on huge things all of the time, and just becaue you want him to promote this thing or that thing right now, or you need help with something this week, it may not happen.

6. Forgive the guy for his failings. Yeh, I’ve noticed he is not perfect. Remember it was not too many years ago that he was over 300 pounds, living off of pizza, playing online games, not paying the bills, until his power got turned off. To have gone from where he was, to where he is now, in such a short time, is mind blowing. I know what that is like, as I have seen the bottom also, but that is a story for another blog.

Bottom line, when the dust on the horizon is heading down the trail toward town, the Sherrif has taken off on his horse high tailing it to the south, and the kids are under their beds trembling, Shoemoney is the guy you want standing in the middle of the road to town, a shotgun in each hand, piece of hay between his teeth, and grinning. But don’t be afraid of him, not unless you are the one kicking up the dust riding toward him.

Up to this point, I have danced relatively well above these ne’er do wells,  bouncing from cloud to cloud with a pretty angelic reputation online. It isn’t because I haven’t pissed anybody off. It’s just that I haven’t pissed anybody off “enough” to write too badly about me online so far.

I was recently speaking to a business guy who was pooh pooing the effects of google. Believe it or not, some very successful companies, like my favorite Mexican food and Friday night caterer for thinktank, Tacos El Gordo de Tijuana, don’t even have a fricken website! This place literally serves over 5,000 people a day in their combined locations, actually has the best Mexican food I’ve ever had (tied with Chipotle) and has zero online presence.

Unfortunately, no matter what someone may “think” about the effect of google, googles got us all by the butt, even if you are friends with Matt Cutts. Having your own site rank well for your name, or your key terms is great for getting customers, but what about the next 30 sites down blabbing about you?

In my opinion, there are a few different categories of searches that people do.

1. Entertainment – These are people just cruising around because they don’t have anything more important to do.You might grab someones interest with an article or add, and then gently steer them in some direction. They will rarely notice the bad stuff written about you online unless by chance they come across it.

2. Know What they want, but not Who to buy it from – These are the ones who have made a decision to buy, and now they are looking for the best place. This is the sweet spot in SEO, and why you want your site to rank high for your keywords.

3. Researching a particular topic before they close. – Again, this is where good SEO will lead them to your site, or another site to educate them on your product.

4. Researching your company before they buy.

We are going to take a good look at this last one.

They are at that last step before they send you that e-mail, spend the money, or sign the contract.

Researching about your company before they buy in my experience is still a relatively new way to use search.

For those of us who can type faster than we can speak this is probably second nature. I hear a brand name, a website, a T.V. commercial or even an individual, and before I say a word, I google it. I even do this while talking to someone on the phone. I could give a flying piece of toast as to what they say about themselves if we are not already friends. I do care what others say about them.

A prefect example was yesterday. My right heel had gotten so dry and cracked it barely looked human. I’ve never had a pedicure in my life, but realized that this had gotten to a point where I needed professional help.

I know if I google pedicure San Diego that the top site is most likely going to be the one where the owner of the salon has a friend who does SEO, or the site designer bought a few links, or something of that nature. Honestly, the whole system is way too easy to game for me to trust my delicate heel to it.

So I went to Yelp and entered in pedicure – San Diego. The place that popped up is called LuLu’s. There is a reason they popped up as the best place to get a pedicure in San Diego. They ranked well in yelp because they had a ton of reviews, and overall the reviews were very positive. To earn this they do an amazing job, and are less than dinner for 4 at Mc Donalds. For this I got Leslie, a beautiful estitician, spend half an hour soaking, buffing, scrubbing and filing my cracked calloused feet into submission. She won. The place is adorable, in a cute older neighborhood, easy parking, offered us tea when we arrived and were warm, friendly and safe. It was also super clean.

The next thing I did just to be safe was googled LuLu’s salon San Diego. As you scroll down you see nothing but “best place in San Diego”, “love this place”, “what an amazing experience”, on and on and on down the page. Not a single whinning compaint!

I’ve been working for years on reputation management, and John Andrews recently really got me thinking about exactly what I was doing, and how it all worked.

I would wager a bet that if you took the group of all Americans.

Then you removed everyone who makes less than $100,000 per year.

The group you would have left are the movers and shakers of our economy. They for the most part make the decisions that effect everyone else, what they do, what they buy, and even what will be available to them.

I’ll bet over 90 percent of that group, when making a buying decision of any significance, google their final choice before they actually purchase. If they don’t, they will be once they figure out the power in this.

As a business owner it is pain in the butt keeping track of what people are saying online about you, and correcting the damage when they do. It can also down right hurt ones feelings when the people writing are mean, and inaccurate. An unhappy customer obviously should come to you first, give you a chance to resolve it, then if you don’t resolve it, they can write about their unhappy car buying experience later.

As John Andrews suggested in his blog, the time to get positive reputation management is now, before the world gets the idea of the damage they can do you online. On the other hand, if you are aggressively getting your name in place properly before hand, it will take a pretty powerful internet marketer to knock you down online.

As consumers understand the internet and especially rating sites and blogs, I predict it will eventually be considered stupidity unless you google the name first to see what it is.