When I first helped ignite the modern day FIRE movement in 2009 with my motto, “achieving financial independence sooner rather than later,” I had somewhat of a dilemma as it relates to blogging.

Should I focus most of my writing on helping readers achieve FIRE? Or should I write about a variety of topics beyond FIRE that interests me and perhaps other people too.

In the end, I decided not to brand myself as a FIRE blogger because I really loved writing about real estate, stock and bond investing, alternative investing, career strategies, and now family finances.

I could tell people how I’m living my life, or I could just get on with things and live my life.

What I found after leaving my day job in 2012 and living off my passive income is that there’s really no fanfare once you achieve FIRE. You just get on with living your life how you wish.

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If there wasn’t already enough on my plate as a father to a newborn who publishes 3X a week, I decided to finally start a podcast on iTunes. Each podcast episode takes me about 30 minutes to 1 hour to record on average, due to all the many different takes.

The funny thing is, for the past year, I thought I had already had an FS podcast channel on iTunes because my random audio versions were showing up on my Podcast feed on my phone. Alas, I realized only I could see my audio versions and nobody else.

So finally, after being brutally honest with myself and listening to constructive criticism by my readers, I figured out how to set up my iTunes channel officially and get to work. Read More

One of the things that helps keep me writing 3X a week for the past eight years is a simple visualization exercise. I imagine sitting at the edge of a cliff on a warm sunny day. I can see an island 80 miles in the distance because the air is crystal clear.

In my hand is a fishing pole. When I first began in 2009, the pole was only six feet long and it couldn’t even reach the water below. But now, the fishing pole is over one mile long with a cantilever surrounded by brackets of reinforced steel.

Every time I publish a post, I’m casting deeper and deeper into the ocean. Most times, I reel nothing back. Given I’m always hungry, the obvious move is to cast again until something is caught. I refuse to starve.

I know that somebody, somewhere will find something I write interesting. It’s an inevitability with over three billion people online. I just have to keep trying because once I catch one big fish, other big fish will follow. Read More

With the downturn in the stock market, interest in financial products as measured by click through rates have declined. Why would anybody want to sign up for a robo-advisor now when there’s a higher chance of losing money? We all know we should continue to dollar cost average in a downturn, but at the margin, more people are afraid to invest in bad times than good times.

If you want to make a full-time income online as a blogger, or if you want to defend your income during difficult times, then it makes sense to write more defensive themed articles and highlight more products can help people survive a downturn. One article example is, How To Protect Yourself From A Mass Layoff. Read More

After seven years of blogging, I’ve decided to finally focus some energy writing about how to make money blogging. My online income is now greater than my passive income, which took 15 years to build. Meanwhile, 94% of the over 500 voters say they want to learn how to make their own money-making website in my latest poll. Therefore, I’m going to give my community what they want.

I’ve been reticent to build this portion of my online revenue income because I never got into blogging to write about blogging. It just sounds a little circular doesn’t it? Further, in order to write about blogging with authority it’s a good idea to actually have a lot of traffic and income from other sources BEFORE writing about making money blogging.

What I failed to realize over the years was that people really don’t care whether you have credibility or not when it comes to writing about SEO, online marketing, blogging, etc. Instead, people tend to want to be sold the dream of online riches. People visiting want so hard to believe in the ability to make lots of money online that they’ve already made up their mind once they get to your site! Read More

The larger your site grows, the more inundated you will get with requests to highlight a product, company, or service. It makes sense given your sphere of influence has grown. And as your sphere of influence grows, so does your revenue.

But not everything has to be about making more money online. I write mostly because I enjoy writing and interacting with people. If I didn’t, there’s no way I would have gotten through the first several years earning minimal income. There’s also no way I’d keep going after six years on Financial Samurai if money was the main object because I’ve turned down multiple seven figure offers already.

Selling an income producing asset when rates are this low is a suboptimal financial move. Once you sell, you’ll scratch and claw to try and replicate your business success to no avail. Besides, valuations for online media properties are skyrocketing with the bull market. We’re talking 10X or greater annual revenue multiples now compared to 5X or lower before 2012.

Enough about the joys of blogging. If you’re a publicist or marketer, I’d like to provide some tips on how you can get influential bloggers to write about your product! This post is a way to help you, and also help us bloggers who get inundated with uninspiring requests every day.  Read More

One of the reasons why public writing is so addicting is because there’s a chance somebody important out there might read what you’re writing and highlight it to somebody else important.  Your traffic starts to surge and your site might even crash due to server overload.  If this happens, congratulations!  You have found your Whale Post!

The Whale Post is elusive.  You think you’re writing interesting stuff, but most of the time nobody really cares, as reflected by the lack of comments.  You can have a site with thousands of subscribers with only 10 people motivated enough to leave some thoughts.  How demoralizing is that?  It’s only demoralizing if you think you’ve written something good.

Whale Post definition: A post which contains over 100 comments or 5X your average number of comments and accounts for at least 25% of your monthly traffic.  This is a new term that I’d like to introduce to the online writing community.

Here’s a case study of how the post, “How Much Do The Top Income Earners Make By Percentage” became a Whale Post on Financial Samurai.  If you search the term “top income earners“, you’ll see this post come up at the top of all major search engines.  Because of this, the post has received over 60,000 page views a month for the past couple of months.  Meanwhile, there are more than 700 hundred comments, hundreds of which could be stand alone 800-word articles themselves!

THE BASICS OF CREATING THE WHALE POST Read More