The Yakezie has always been about organic growth through meritocracy. Anybody can choose to join the Yakezie Challenge and write 2-5 times a week on their own sites and build relationships within the community. If you succeed over the next six months in breaching 200,000 in Alexa and have developed 30 or so relationships with the community, you’re in. Everything you do is up to you. Freedom of choice is something we should never take for granted.

Success online doesn’t happen over night. The luckiest people are those who spend countless hours producing content, coming up with their own products, taking lots of risk, and tactfully marketing themselves until the cows come home. There were even some of us over the winter holidays who decided to write 5,000 words a week for seven weeks in a row. The idea was to push ourselves harder during a slow period to slingshot us higher into the new year. It’s crazy to see how much effort goes into creating luck don’t you think?

COMBINING ARTISTRY AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

As creative types, we bloggers look up to those who produce things with their own hands. We visit sites that have individuality. Perhaps the blogger has incredible photography skills, or is a great story teller. Whatever the skill, they are the reason why we visit. On the flip side, we shy away from factory sites with multiple writers who provide little opinion. If we want bland, we might as well read major newspapers who provide much higher quality bland. Don’t ever forget the difference between a blog and a major media organization.

As online entrepreneurs, we look up to those who are able to make money, perhaps regardless of how it’s being done. The more passive such income and the greater such income, the more we admire. This is why there is such a huge following in the niche site arena, whose main purpose is to slap up content, set it and forget it, and repeat. Unfortunately, the ability to arbitrage the longtails online is getting harder because search engines have become smarter.

In the creative category, I’ve done well. In the online entrepreneur category, I’ve done quite poorly because my other income was more than enough. I was scared and am still scared to let money affect the way I write because I hate writing if it feels forced e.g. writing some credit card review when I’ve never used the card.

This post will discuss how we can leverage the act of buying your way to success to help the creative types of the world become more financially stable. Being a starving artist is admirable, but you’re still starving. Remember, there are two different measuring sticks for success for creative types and entrepreneurs. If we can find some common ground, perhaps we’ll be able to achieve the best of both.

HOW TO BUY YOUR WAY ONLINE

Since the beginning, I’ve been fighting for equality on Financial Samurai. Not everybody can be born into a rich and powerful family and grow up with rich and powerful friends. When you’ve got money, you can donate money to schools to secure your kid’s spot at a prestigious private school. When you’ve got power, you can fast track friends to higher places. Do not underestimate the power of wealth.

Mathematically speaking, most of us are just average. Therefore, if we are lucky enough to have a huge head start in life, I argue it’s our duty to give back and help level the playing field. Perhaps this is why the United States spends so much money on foreign aid. Just being born in the US puts us in the top 1% of global income earners.

What if you believe it’s every man and woman for themselves? If you have money and power, why bother slaving away from the bottom in hopes of becoming successful on your own? It’s much easier to leverage your resources to buy your way to the top. And only once you are at the top, will you consider giving back to the community. Plenty of folks think this way and this is what they’ve taught me.

Shortcut To Online Success

1) Buy websites in your niche. The first step is to identify “low hanging fruit” in your niche. Sites that have good rankings, but are either rarely updated are good targets. If you know the owner is either burnt out or in need of money, then approaching them with an offer is easy. Some may even sell for as low as one year’s worth of revenue. Buying cash flow positive business in this low interest rate environment is a win.

2) Redirect links to your site. Now that you’ve acquired your site, it’s time to look at the archive of posts to see where you can redirect links to posts or pages on your prime site. You can also create new relevant anchor text within your new acquisition to point back to your prime site. Just make sure you mix up your anchor text. As you know, links are the currency online and the more links you have, the better you will rank.

3) Employ staff writers. The writer can either be a new staff writer, a ghost writer, or the seller most preferably. It’s important there is at least one post a week on the acquired site to keep the content fresh in Google’s eyes. The last thing you want to do is buy a site and have its rankings drop. As a business person, you don’t care if your readers don’t hear your story in your writings. What you care about is profits.

SO EASY ANYBODY WITH MONEY CAN DO IT

All you have to do is repeat the three step process over and over again and your main site will surely climb up the search rankings without you having to network or write any original content yourself. If there is a short cut to being successful online, this is it. The search engines can’t control which sites you buy and edit. It’s a free market and there are marketplaces like Flippa to help facilitate the buying and selling process.

Call me naive, but I had no idea this type of stuff was happening until about the middle of 2012. I always thought that in order to succeed online we had to write consistent, meaty content, guest post on other sites, and build our brands. In other words, grow organicly. I thought buyers of sites wanted to focus on optimizing the acquired site’s advertising potential and interact more with the installed community. Buying sites to redirect links to your main site and neutering the voice is no different from large corporations who grow through acquisition and kill the acquired company’s culture. Cisco for example, acquired around 200 companies and made their shareholders incredibly wealthy!

Once you make a lot of money, it becomes easier to make even more money online because you have more money to buy other sites. Pretty soon, you might even use your outsized profits to get into new niches and dominate as well. Now you can see why there is such an uprising against the truly wealthy in every single society. If the gap between the haves and the have-nots gets too wide, bad things happen.

For those of us who are fortunate to have solid web properties, let’s do our best to be appreciative of what we have by helping others succeed as well. Survive long enough and inevitably something bad will happen to us. When it does, we’ll have a community of supportive people to help us out.

RECOMMENDATION FOR BUILDING WEALTH

Manage Your Finances In One Place: The best way to become financially independent and protect yourself is to get a handle on your finances by signing up with Personal Capital. They are a free online platform which aggregates all your financial accounts in one place so you can see where you can optimize. Before Personal Capital, I had to log into eight different systems to track 25+ difference accounts (brokerage, multiple banks, 401K, etc) to manage my finances. Now, I can just log into Personal Capital to see how my stock accounts are doing and how my net worth is progressing. I can also see how much I’m spending every month.

The best tool is their Portfolio Fee Analyzer which runs your investment portfolio through its software to see what you are paying. I found out I was paying $1,700 a year in portfolio fees I had no idea I was paying! There is no better financial tool online that has helped me more to achieve financial freedom. It’s 2015 and the bull market continues. Make a decision to be wealthy by taking control of your finances!

Regards,

Sam

Photo: Sheraton Infinity Pool in Waikiki, SD.