If you follow Consumerism Commentary, and I hope you do, you might have seen that I recently left the company I’ve worked for during the day for the past eight years. Since 2003 but particularly in the past few years, Consumerism Commentary has been a side project — even though I often contributed more than forty hours a week to its development. For a side project, it’s done quite well for me. The revenue from Consumerism Commentary surpassed my day-job salary in 2007. The question I am asked most often about my revenue is, “Why didn’t you quit your day job a long time ago?”
I ended my Yakezie member post with the issues I needed to consider before leaving the corporation that offered me a steady salary and benefits: “… the two remaining questions are whether quitting the day job will allow me to further enhance my online projects while keeping my sanity and whether I would be able to quickly recover if the income were to disappear overnight.”
Unlike many of the thousands of personal finance blogs started in the past few years, Consumerism Commentary was not designed to earn any money. In 2003, it was very rare for a blog to generate revenue, and when I had begun writing on the web in early 1995, it was unheard of. I’ve been building online communities since 1990, and it never crossed my mind that there would be a market for this. Consumerism Commentary was designed to keep myself accountable publicly for my financial decisions, to learn more about personal finance, and to share interesting articles with a small number of readers. I didn’t even add advertising for another year — as an experiment.
When Consumerism Commentary started earning more than $1,000 a month, I realized that there was potential for earning a living solely through blogging. $1,000 might have been enough for some people to leave their day jobs, but I decided that if I could earn three times my salary — a low back-office salary from a cheap company — I would quit and consider myself solely self-employed while spending all of my working time developing Consumerism Commentary further. It didn’t take too long to get there, but there were some barriers along the way.
1. Lack of diversity. First of all, I wasn’t comfortable with the lack of diversity of income sources. This seems sort of silly, considering the alternative was my salary and benefits, coming from one company. But with a public company that has been around for over a hundred years, I wasn’t concerned. Earning money from primarily blogging was an untested medium, and most of my income was coming directly from Google through AdSense. I diversified, working with advertisers directly, to ensure AdSense wouldn’t be my only source of income. I began accepting affiliate advertising, text link ads, and traditional banner advertising.
2. Google’s omnipresence and control. Even with this diversity, there is no escaping Google. Many people talk about this privately, and if people write about it publicly, I haven’t seen it. Here is the logic that shows how Google controls your blog income, even revenue from independent sources:
- Google is the biggest search engine.
- Visitors who find your site through Google’s search results drive revenue-generating traffic.
- Without being listed — and listed well — in Google’s search results, revenue could easily dry up.
A few years ago, I had a scare. For no apparent reason, I stopped receiving traffic from Google. It didn’t take long for me to determine that Consumerism Commentary was no longer appearing on Google’s search results pages. This happened after Consumerism Commentary was earning more than my day job, and my revenue sank for a few weeks. I thought it was all over, and I had no idea why. Even without traffic from Google, I was still able to operate the site. Regular readers still visited without any knowledge that the website was receiving less traffic, and I continued publishing articles and participating in discussions as usual. The revenue-generating one-time visitors were no longer finding Consumerism Commentary, and I wanted to understand what happened.
The bad news didn’t stop there. Consumerism Commentary’s PageRank — an important measure of a site’s standing at the time — dropped to zero. This was the same experience that some other bloggers had reported around that time as a result of running various types of ads. In actuality, advertising had nothing to do with why my site lost its ranking. Consumerism Commentary had been hacked and some malicious JavaScript code was appearing on most of the pages on the domain.
I installed a fresh copy of WordPress with a new host, MediaTemple, and migrated all of my information from the old location on DreamHost. With a clean copy of the entire domain, I filed a re-inclusion request with Google, noting I removed the malicious code. Google was quick to act; Consumerism Commentary was back on the search results pages with a PageRank of 5 or 6.
This scare solidified the idea that I needed to diversify income sources before realistically earning a living from blogging. Many have suggested offering “information products” or “e-products” or “e-books” to supplement advertising income, and this may be something for someone to consider. I have yet to find any “information product” with more than dubious value, and these are usually sold with annoying marketing techniques such as unblockable pop-up windows, so I’m still determining how to create meaningful projects, earn money, and stay true to my values when it comes to marketing. While I’m reserving the right to offer something in the future, I’ll only do so if it has value and only if I can be successful doing it my way.
3. Fear. The experience with Google made me cautious. I had been planning to leave my day job to blog full-time from the moment Consumerism Commentary revenue surpassed my income, but this experience set me back at least a year. I needed to be completely confident that my revenue wouldn’t go up in smoke one day before I left my job. Today, I feel strongly that the possibility of this happening is low, and between the cash I’ve built up for emergency situations such as a loss of income and my demonstrated skills of various types, I could be back on my feet in a short time if disaster strikes.
It was the right time to leave. I traded my salary and benefits in for eight to nine hours a day during which I could write more, participate in communities, take care of administrative tasks, and handle marketing. Although I also planned to squeeze in more time for other things that make my life worthwhile, I’ll have to wait and see how my time develops over the next few months. Some of the barriers still exist, but I’ve found ways to convince myself that I’ll be better off without the need to fall back on a “stable” paycheck.
I still find it somewhat crazy that making a living by writing on Consumerism Commentary is possible, and that may be a psychological barrier, as well. As you can see, it can be done if you provide something of value to the world.
Great post! It would be so amazing if I could make enough online revenue to quit my day job! I’m still working hard at it and have a lot to learn, but as my Alexa score goes down and my subscribers go up, I feel like I am closer and closer to that reality.
Thanks for the real-life experience. It’s always appreciated! :)
Absolutely — if subscribers go up and traffic goes up, you’re moving in the right direction!
Hey Flexo, I think you’ve been really smart by being cautious and not just quitting your job at the drop of a hat. Having some diversification in your income sources is definitely the way to go. I’m following a similar path to you I guess but I’m a few years behind at least. But I’ll get there eventually, just gotta stay the course.
As long as you keep it up, you’ll be successful.
This is quite amusing that your gravatars are so similar!
Inspirational Flexo. We of course would love to achieve similar success but we are wary that the lack of PR and advertisers not understanding google has not updated PR in almost a year, means the advertisers may not come to those who aren’t lucky enough to have a PR.
That being said, we started our blog as we like to write and work on common projects together. We gain satisfaction from this alone so anything over and above in terms of income is simply gravy.
The more traffic you can get, the less PR matters, because you’ll be able to get advertising deals other than text link ads. Advertisers will want brand recognition and results (sales. sign-ups, etc.), and major brands don’t need any link juice from blogs.
Thanks for sharing your story. I agree with your conservative attitude. Having Google serve the majority of traffic makes a website vulnerable to a bunch of different factors. I have a few numbers in mind that I’ll need to hit before I quit my day job to work on website projects full time. Long way to go.
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What an informative post, I loved it! Being dropped by Google is my number one fear, even though they are driving me crazy by withholding page rank from me! You were so smart to diversify- I cannot imagine how scary that must have been to find yourself banned by Google. (Too bad they never told you first and you had to find out on your own.)
Congratulations for going out on your own. You have done a fantastic job and have helped a lot of people through the years I am sure.
Enjoy!
THanks for sharing your story, Flexo! That must have been really scary, but I am glad they were able to reverse it so quickly for you.
I suppose that with a blog, it’s like the same as with any other sort of income (e.g. passive income- have rental income and have dividend payers)- that people should diversify if possible ;)
Thank you for sharing your story. It is inspiring for those of us who also dream of being full-time bloggers. I guess it’s all of the unknowns that become mental roadblocks for taking that leap of faith and quitting a job to pursue a blog full time. So many things could go wrong, but then again, the extra time one has to further their blog can result in much more success in the end. I agree that one has to be cautious when moving forward to minimize the risks, and you seem to have achieved that balance. Best of luck to you.
The extra time has certainly been helpful — not only for improving Consumerism Commentary but for improving all things in my life. Now, if I could only get my cat to be quiet in the middle of the night so I could get some good sleep…..
What an inspiring story, thanks for sharing! I also thinks it a very courageous and smart move to finally transition to blogging for a living.
Now that you’ve experienced your site being hacked, what are you doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again? Is your current host better at catching hackers? I’m just curious, since I’m sure that was a very scary experience!
The hack that happened at the time was system-wide at DreamHost, and possibly beyond. Their machines were infected with a worm that added JavaScript to html and php pages. I don’t know if anything’s ever hack-proof, but at MediaTemple I don’t have a shared hosting environment, so there are no other sites on the same (virtual) machine. I control the root account, and I make daily back-ups.
Thank you so much for this great story … although I’m not quitting the day job to focus on my blog, I’m undertaking a big side project this year (a novel) and this kind of success story helps motivate me to just keep it up!!!
Flexo, Thanks for sharing! You are an inspiration to many bloggers including me. Can you share what communities are good for improving our blogs in general? I am active at Yakezie and would like to join even more communities.
You’ve done the right thing by joining Yakezie. Read the forums here for an excellent community. Make sure you’re listed on pfblogs.org for more promotion of your content. Join the Facebook and LinkedIn groups for personal finance blogging, get to know other bloggers, meet up in person when possible, and attend some of the more popular conventions. Comment a lot on other websites. All these are things that I’ve been doing more and will continue to do more with more time to devote to the website, beyond the time I spend writing.
Thank you for your reply. Your comment is very helpful.
excellent decision on your part, and evidently it is paying off. congratulations.
congratulations as well on a beautiful website at CC – i would guess you have a full staff of writers/contributors now?
because many would aspire to do the same, and knowing that it is not just one single factor that determines success, it will help readers if you can comment on what you would say was/is the single biggest action you take to reach where you are at today?
Thank you Sunil. I’m handling all of the writing responsibilities except for a few guest posts here and there. There’s no need for a full staff at the moment. The biggest action I took was starting early and being ahead of the curve.
Hey Flexo, glad to see anther Jersey man doing so well (we deserve it)!! ;-)
I love that you took your time in getting things together both online and offline before leaving your job. You have a great site that has been a model to many of us. Thanks for writing this and thanks for being so open here and on your blog!
I hope we have a chance to work together in the future.
I’d be happy to meet up and talk about blogging any time (it helps I’m much more available than I used to be, too). Remind me where in NJ you are (email if you like).
No fair, we need a meet-up in NYC!
Congrats on going full-time. Man, I had a hack problem once and it was scary. You feel so helpless. Glad the big G reinstated your PR.
Yours has always been one of the big personal finance sites to look up to.
Thanks for sharing your story. It’s exciting to see the possibilities.
Glad to see you did not have problems with Google to get re-instated.
As many have posted above, awesome story. Hope all is going well with Media Temple so far, and let us know if you have any questions or issues. We’re here to help 24/7.
It certainly sounds like we’ve been on a similar path. My first site hit the web in 1994.
For my current life 2.0 I gave up working for my larger company to pursue my site full time. It has been so liberating and freeing to not have a big staff and people to answer to and earn my living from my site.
But I’ve learned a number of lessons along the way.
If you want to share a virtual cup of coffee during the day, drop me an email. We’ll meet by the virtual water cooler. I bet we have a lot of stories in common.
For anyone looking to do the same thing, “patience grasshopper.” It is much smarter to develop the site in your spare time than it is to leap and hope that it works out. Putting up a site and writing regularly for a year is just the tip of what it takes to get going.
And if you are looking to make a decent living online it takes the same ingredient that making it offline takes, hard work.
The Google curse is a bit frightening. No matter what you do it does account for a large part of site income. On one hand it can be unnerving but on the other it is a process that works well and is easy to implement.
Experience has shown me that good content = traffic = revenue. There are more lessons to offer but that is the basic building block. If you are looking to follow us and do the same, the opportunity is there.
Steve
Everyone: Steve’s advice above is priceless. Good content is key, and that’s something I continually strive for.
Hey Steve, good to see you here on the site! Ignorance is bliss sometimes, and if we can just focus on writing for the long term, eventually things come. Hope to see you around!
Those are all major considerations when going into blogging full time. It’s good to hear from a blogger that was able to make the transition into full time blogging.
Congratulations on taking that amazing step Flexo! I can’t imagine earning 3x my normal income from blogging on one site alone … that is insane!!
You mentioned in the comments that you suggest for bloggers to attend conventions. Could you give a list of conventions that you have either attended or think would be good to attend?
The best conferences are the ones that the people you want to network with are going. South By Southwest is probably one of the best options, though I’ll probably never attend it because it always occurs on my birthday and I have other obligations at that time. BlogWorld is popular, and if you want to meet with some advertisers, Affiliate Summit is a good choice. Finovate could put you in touch with financial industry leaders.
The only “blogging” conference I’ve attended thus far was Twittercon, mostly a waste of time, though I did get to hang out with Kelly from Centsible Life. I attended a private event for financial bloggers a few years ago in San Francisco, and I met colleagues Jim from Bargaineering, SVB from Digerati Life, J.D. from Get Rich Slowly, and a few other machers in the space. The point is to meet people, not to attend useless sessions by so-called experts.
Next time there is a PF blogging conference in SF, let me know! Would be fun to get together with everyone. Cheers
Hi Flexo, I really liked how you mentioned acting in line with your values. In blogging as in life, it’s one of my priorities and something I think about a lot. I want to thank you publicly by accepting my guest article, I have truly enjoyed responding to your readers! I know you will continue on your success path with your new full time venture :)
congrats on blogging full time now! That’s also really neat you’ve been blogging for many years while working full time. That must have kept you so busy. Best of luck with your site.
I just hit my second year of blogging and I’m almost ashamed to say that I didn’t even think that a blog my size could possibly earn any revenue outside of the pennies that I made on Google until I’d almost hit the second year mark. I know that many of us dream of leaving day jobs, but I am not so sure that we write on the level that keeps readers and engaged nor do we have enough content on our sites to make the site “sticky” enough for casual web searchers. I think that part takes time and too many new bloggers rush in for the money without building some serious content that is targeted to the users. Do you have any thoughts on that? How did you work on your site’s sticky factor? BTW I happen to love it.
Thanks, Sandy! It’s hard to say what the secret of success is. You’re a reader who comes back — let me know what brings you back to read more. I tend to write about things I find interesting and whatever financial issues are on my mind. I always try to be authentic in doing so.
Flexo is correct. Ultimately a good blogger is aware of what either informs or educates the reader. If you are clever enough to write engaging content a build an audience that way, great. Or you spend time researching and writing stuff that provides new information or research on a topic.
Engaging content in the personal finance space is not about how to make a budget. That’s been done a thousand times. But if you want to write about your intimate journey with finances then that’s different.
But you need to ask yourself if you are going to be a storyteller or a journalist.
For those of us that earn our living from our sites by writing let me just share with you if you are are striving to do the same thing, there are risks.
Running a site these days is a liability minefield with risks that can really harm you. Between moderating comments and losing Section 230 protection and getting sued to defending yourself from linking or quoting content, you need to be aware of what you are doing or risk losing everything you have.
Take an issue I’m dealing with right now. I got sued over a comment posted by someone on an article I wrote. The facts of the article are not the issue, but the comment of some random reader on the article are.
So now as the site owner I have to deal with a range of issues and those issues cost a lot of money. Since I’m not going to just hand over the identity of a commenter on my site I now have to fight this to get me out of it. If I didn’t fight it how could my readers trust me. What would you do? Roll over and sacrifice your readers by handing over their identity?
None of these things are a big deal when you are small but as your blog grows and you develop more attention, they will be. More attention and rewards bring more issues.
The good news is there are good resources out there to help.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an excellent resource at https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve even had to defend my site from a Digital Millennium Copyright Act claim that could have shut off my server permanently because a company I wrote about claimed the use of their name in a story was a trademark violation. In fact my server did get turned off for three hours. See the bottom of http://getoutofdebt.org/17364/ for details.
And in closing, here is my advice of the day, never, ever, ever moderate your comments on your professional site. If you do you will lose liability protection from commenters. Learning that was the best $1,500 legal bill I ever paid.
Thanks for teaching us about the dangers. I’m going to beef up my privacy and disclosure policies.
WOW! That’s nuts! I don’t get it, what was the comment the reader said that got you in trouble? You didn’t write it, so what gives? Do you have a link to it?
Also, what do you mean exactly by “never, ever moderate your reader’s comments’? Are you saying we can’t delete them, or edit out swear words or spammy links? Love to hear more of your insight!
Cheers, Sam
I take the approach that gives my site the most liability protection and that is to “passively host comments.” You could moderate comments but then when a battle arrises you would get into a defense about why you moderated this one and not that one or by not moderating you get blanket immunity. Your choice.
When I was running a WP comment system I had problems with spam comments but switching my site to Disqus solved that issue instantly. They do an amazing job of blocking all the spam automatically and that protects me from moderation claims.
If you don’t want links in your comments then block all comments from links. If a commenter gets spamy you can mark them as spam and the system automatically blocks them. All are fine.
Bear in mind there are two types of full time professional sites; those that have been sued and those that will be sued. It’s up to you to decide ahead of time how you want to deal with it.
For more on Section 230 protections you can see http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/immunity-online-publishers-under-communications-decency-act
For more on battles my site has faced you can see http://getoutofdebt.org/legal-defense-fund
This is a great site to see the volumes of cease and desist letters site owners are getting. http://www.chillingeffects.org/index.cgi
Bottom line: If you want to get serious about your site you need to get serious about liability issues as well.
Man that is scary. It must be a real headache to deal with those concerns…
The scary part is that every blogger needs to think about those issues and do it before it is too late.
Funny how you mention MediaTemple. I just switched to another host from them.
I got hacked 3 times in 5 months. And their site response time was maddeningly slow. Sometimes it took 10+ seconds for my very simple home page to load.
Hopefully you’re getting better service. Their help response time was excellent though.
Flexo has a VPS. Their shared hosting from all public reports is awful. Regarding the hackings, I can’t say it was their fault unless knowing the details of the hacks.
What Investor Junkie said. My first stop with MT was their shared hosting service but http response was slower than DreamHost and it cost more money. I knew I needed a stronger solution and I’ve been happy with MT’s (dv) Extreme service.
I used to have MT and then it went down 5X too many. I think they are suffering from too much growth.. just like AT&T suffered too much due to the iphone growth.
You’re probably on the grid service i bet. The dedicated virtual servers are much better. Any shared hosting environment will tend to have issues I’ve found.
Yes the Google monopoly is concerning. In addition good luck trying to contact/work with them. I think in the next year Facebook will be our alternative for traffic/revenue generation. I don’t think it will be too long before Facebook offers their own version of AdSense.
Regarding selling eproducts.. why not sell someone else’s you believe in? Could be a good way to test the waters.
Your site was one of the reasons I started my own and as far back as I could remember you said you wanted to do it up full time! Congrats on accomplishment.
Have you used what you learned/relationships you created to expand your empire? Buying other blogs? other sites? etc.
I’ve tossed the idea around of buying other blogs, but up until now I haven’t had the resources to make it work… perhaps now… Are you looking to sell, Evan? :-)
Great post, Flexo. I enjoyed reading about your journey and how you dealt with the Big G’s traffic disappearing, and related issues. Congrats on your success.
One additional item that jumped out from comments above is the notion of attending blog conferences. If you had to recommend one to attend, which one would it be?
We’re all pretty excited for you on this latest path of your career! Exciting, and a bit intimidating all at once! The Google bit must have been a huge shock!!! If I’m ever in that scenario, I’ll have to come back and re-read what you did after you got your site migrated and fixed!
I enjoy your site, Congratulations again :)
Hi Flexo,
Thanks for sharing your post. I’d like to ask a different angle of questioning.
What if you really liked your job, got steady promotions, and earned multiples times more than your online income. Do you think you would have still quit your job now or sometime in the future?
Do you think you will ever return to the normal day job routine? Are there any metrics you are shooting for to make that determination after a certain period of time?
If I really liked the job — or if I liked the job more than I liked working on my own projects — I don’t think I’d see a reason for leaving that job. I may return to a normal day job routine if I ever get tired of what I’m doing now. I may opt to just start other projects of my own. As long as I can continue earning money for doing something that is personally fulfilling and interesting, whether a “day job” at a corporation or working for myself, that’s what I’ll be doing.
You’re definitely my inspiration Flexo. I’m hoping to earn salary-like money from blogging full time but we’ll just have to wait and see. Well not sit and wait, but see the outcome of my hard work.
Thanks for sharing this post, Flexo! It would have been nice had Google informed you why you had been dropped from the index instead of having to find out the hard way, but at least you were able to solve the problem fairly quickly.
I would love to have blogging as a decent side income, but I don’t think I would like to depend on it as a sole source of income. I’d rather have some capital saved up for that and have blogging income as a supplement.
Thanks for sharing your success story. Hopefully, many of us here can share that experience ourselves in the future and have an impact in the blogging community.
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Very cool. I have been involved in online communites and writing sporadically for 6 years now. I never knew I could make money working for myself doing what I love. Wow.
This article was great to read along with all the comments. I particularly found the story about Google traffic useful as we all proceed with our online businesses. I think networking is the second most important task in running a blog; the first is great content as Steve and you mentioned.
Excellent post Flexo. You are someone we all look up to and I amazed you kept your job for so long. However what did finally change to make you jump onto ft online?
A combination of having a big enough cushion to support myself in a bad economy if things turn sour and feeling confident that I’m quite employable as a last resort. Consistently earning a significant multiple of my former day job income helped.
A great post… always interested to see how other PF bloggers do, and what they can make of their blog!
I’m always happy to share from my experiences.
[…] to make a living for yourself, don’t wait as long as I did. On Yakezie, I wrote about why I waited so long before quitting while I had been earning enough income to live from my projects without my salaried job for several […]
Congrats Flexo!
You are one of the very few PF blogs that has a sustainable income to live off. I always decided what side of the fence I wanted to be on. I have a family; therefore having cheap health insurance is a big plus. Running the numbers was less expensive to stay put. However, I have a business that is slowly progressing. I will revisit my goals later this year
I love that despite the fact that you had a setback, you stuck with your ultimate goal of blogging full time. You make it seem so easy! I feel like your conservatism paid off and you were able to establish yourself in a marketplace before diving in full time. You are an inspiration and I’m glad I saw this post :)
Flexo, great post. I love how open you are with everything. It’s nice to hear a voice behind the words. :) What a crazy story about getting hacked though! Wow!
All of these comments about moderating comments and getting sued make me nervous!!! : /
Love reading your story Flexo – and about how you’ve struggled with the decision on whether to stick with the day job or not. It certainly is a hard decision, and it’s a whole new paradigm to become fully self employed when for so many of us it just seems foreign to not be going to a day job at an office somewhere. I’ll be interested to hear more about how it’s going, how you’re adjusting, and how you are able to keep things on track and growing now that you’re doing it full time.
Good luck, and keep inspiring us all! Hopefully I’ll be joining you in another year or two! I’ll consider quitting when my blog income is twice that of my day job i think – and it’s currently almost equal to my day job, so I’m on my way!
Hey Money Smarts,
I’ve been writing a series on Consumerism Commentary focusing specifically on my experiences without my former day-job — “Life After Salary.”
It’s always motivating to read about someone who made the leap into full-time blogging. I hope to be there one day. What sort of goals did you set to get to blogging full time?
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