Hey there!

My name is Mike (like half of the financial bloggers!). I am 29, married with 2 young children (William; 5 and Amy; 3). I work in the financial industry (my day job) and I run an online company with my best friend. My wife doesn’t work while I work 4 days a week at my day job and about 20 hours a week on my online company. My overall income is over 135K and my company (from which I don’t take much income) has gross revenues of 125K in 2010.

I Started This Venture A Long Time Ago

I recently shared on the public Yakezie forum that I started my blogging business back in 2006. It all started with my main blog: The Financial Blogger. In 2008, my partner and I decided to start a corporation and build more websites. We also decided to include an interesting side of our online business; buying and selling blogs. Over time, we are building our “online empire” and we now operate several website properties (most of them in the personal finance niche).

I started to blog because I love writing and have always dreamed of making a living from my writing skills. But since it’s very tough to sell books, I soon decided to head towards my second passion; finance! I am now a financial planner during my “day job” and a financial blogger…well… the rest of the time ;-). My ultimate dream would be to live from my online income… which I could already do right now if I didn’t have a good day job!

In the meantime, I have decreased my weekly work hours to 30 (so 4 days a week) in order to spend a full day per week on my online business. I started this schedule back in September 2009 and since then we have seen some important progress. This gives me more time to spend with my family while not hurting my overall income.

Why Join The Yakezie Group?

I wanted to join the Yakezie group because I think it’s an amazing initiative. The principle behind blogging is to connect with people and help each other out. There is a lot of energy and a wind a new thoughts flowing around this young group of bloggers. This is why I want to be part of it.

In addition to this, I am not shy and will tell you upfront; I am currently working on building my personal brand with The Financial Blogger. I intend to do this by giving away my tricks and secrets to make money online. Therefore, I think it’s a win-win situation for all of us; I will share my success and my failures while building my brand. I’m willing to help you succeed with your blog in all kinds of ways (advice, tricks, link swaps, advertiser sharing, etc.).

Finally, I have discovered over time that when you give advice to someone else, when you teach him to do something right, you have the opportunity to learn as you teach.

What I Want To Do in The Yakezie

I’ve already started to connect with several of you. My goal with the Yakezie is to provide you with great insight and help you succeed. Every 2 weeks, I will post content from my newsletter on the forum (or maybe now as member posts ;-) ). If you have read a few of my threads already, you will see that I share everything about my sites (Analytics, income stats, etc.).

If you want to follow me, you can go look at my several websites:

The Financial Blogger

The Dividend Guy Blog

Intelligent Speculator

Green Panda Treehouse

Do Not Wait

I hope that we will have the chance to chat together soon!

Cheers,

Mike