What’s Been Your Biggest Motivation Not To Quit All Year?

by in Lifestyle on Jan 6th, 2014

I’ve got a problem that perhaps many of you share: the lack of motivation to give things my best day in and day out. This devil on my shoulder always likes to whisper, “Good enough is good enough!” “The world isn’t going to end if you don’t publish 3-4 post a week.”

At least three times this year I’ve been tempted by outsourcing my writing and making everything a little more generic on Financial Samurai. This way, I’ll get less comments to respond to. By “speaking from left to write” where I talk about the basics so that everybody can understand, I’ll have a larger mass market appeal. The temptation was strongest while I was traveling abroad in Europe this summer with only my iPhone.

But each time I felt like not editing a post to publish or skipping a week of writing I think back to one of my greatest blogging motivations of all.

RAISING YOUR MOTIVATION LEVEL Read More

New Year Blogging Check List

Preparing Your Site For A Better Year

by in Lifestyle on Dec 30th, 2013

With the stock market and real estate markets rebounding, employment levels rising, and more people turning to blogs for information and entertainment, I hope many of you had a fortuitous 2013!

I’m publishing my personal year in review this week and just finished curating the top posts on Financial Samurai for 2013. It’s pretty neat how much we can write over the course of a year if we stay consistent.

The following is a list of things I think many of us should consider doing to optimize our sites for the year. I’ll certainly be working on a number of these to ensure my site survives for a sixth year.

NEW YEAR BLOGGING CHECK LIST Read More

No More Excuses Why You Can’t Make Meaningful Affiliate Income Online

Proof You Don't Need A Lot Of Traffic

by in Personal Finance on Dec 16th, 2013

I hope by now everybody agrees affiliate income is the way to go to make money online. What’s better than helping a reader at the end of a post with a product that’s completely related to the answers they are looking for while allowing you to make money in the process? Once the post is published, you may very well earn passive income for years depending on the quality of your whale post.

Affiliate income is the most passive of active online income. Affiliate income is also the safest and most congruent of online income streams. We’ve seen a lot of changes over the past four years when it comes to search engine algorithms. They use to worry me like they use to worry many of you. But I stopped paying close attention to things such as pagerank and domain authority a couple years ago when I shifted the large majority of my focus to finding products that could be naturally incorporated into my writing.

Now the main work I’ve got to do is make sure my links still redirect since campaigns expire all the time. Make it a practice to audit your affiliate links at least once a month. Run the broken link checker plug-in every so often as well.

THE MAIN EXCUSE I HEAR Read More

Keep Things Short And Simple In Video Promotion – Sponsored Video

by in Lifestyle on Dec 13th, 2013

We’ve written a lot in the past about the importance of writing meaty content with a personal angle if we want to do well in search. Search traffic is 100% passive and the best type of traffic for monetization purposes.

Longer articles do better in search because length is generally correlated with quality. The idea is that a longer article is usually more thorough with much better data points to buttress an argument. There are more keywords and related keywords to help search robots as well, even though Google says keyword density doesn’t matter. Yes, you certainly shouldn’t be stuffing keywords into the article just to increase density. But you will naturally have more relevant keywords the long your article.

When I’m searching for an answer online, I want to land on the most comprehensive post possible that looks at various points of view. If an article can provide an argument and a counterargument, all the better for me to make an informed decision. The same thing goes with instructional videos about how to fix anything.

But what about for marketing purposes? Shorter is better in my opinion.

ZERO ATTENTION SPAN WORLD Read More

Understanding The World Of Binary Options Investing

by in Personal Finance on Dec 11th, 2013

During senior year of college, I was already highly immersed in the world of stock market investing. I used Ameritrade at the time and would purposefully schedule my classes until after the market closed in order to day trade online. I’m lucky I didn’t have a lot of money because I faired poorly in my trades, but I learned a tremendous amount that would later set me up for a career on Wall St. 

One of the desks I could have joined on the 50th floor of 1 New York Plaza was the derivatives desk. I’ve always thought of derivatives as only for hardcore math geeks, of which I was not. I disliked higher level math with a passion. But when I spoke to the team they seemed absolutely normal. I knew very little about options, so I was told to read, “Options As A Strategic Investment,” a 1,000+ page book by McMillan and fly back a month later for follow up interviews. They ended up asking me only one question from the entire book, “What is a butterfly spread?” I didn’t join the derivatives desk in the end, but ever since that experience I’ve always kept my eye on options as a way to hedge or juice my investments.

The following is a post that discusses the world of binary options, something I’m not too familiar with. I don’t recommend options investing for every day investors. Get the basics down first!

The idea of investing in stock and trying our hand at stock market trading is something that appeals to many of us, however, very few of us will make the jump from thinking about it, to actually doing it. There are many reasons for this – for some it is an issue of capital, for others its accessibility to the stock we want to invest in, and for others its fear, a fear of not having the savvy and the chops to navigate the financial markets and make a profit while doing so.

At the end of the day, investing and profiting from your investments is not an easy game. I suppose if it was everyone would be doing it! If you do find yourself been put off investing due to any of the reasons mentioned above but you would still like to get a piece of the stock market pie, there is an alternative investment vehicle one that allows you to invest and profit from the stock markets without having to overcome obstacles that hold many of us back.

This alternative investment vehicle is “Binary Option Trading” aka “all-or-nothing options.”

What is binary option trading? Read More

The Beauty Of Operational Leverage In Running A Business

by in Lifestyle on Dec 9th, 2013

I recently finished up my annual business offsite in Oahu and I wanted to highlight one thing everyone in the blogging business should do once a year.

Calculate your year over year top line revenue growth and compare that figure to your year over year operating profit figure. If you have been growing, hopefully you should see a much bigger operating profit growth rate than your revenue growth rate. This is what we call Operational Leverage in finance.

The internet business is my favorite business because the world is our potential demand curve and our costs are largely fixed. If we are able to grow revenue, more and more of our bottom line profits flows into our pockets as a result. It only costs ~$20 a year to own your domain, $20-$250 a month for web hosting, and $100 – $3,000 a year for maintenance and design work. After that, all other expenses are discretionary.

To give you a simple analogy let’s look at property. If your property is in an upcycle as we are now, every 1% increase in your property price is like a 5% increase in your overall equity if you put 20% down. Property is my absolute favorite asset class to build wealth in an upcycle. In a downcycle, property is a terrible investment and you shift your mindset from being an investor to being an inhabitant. Hopefully everybody has a decent portion of their net worth in risk-free investments to play defense when bad times return.

CONSERVATIVE BUSINESS GOALS CAN CREATE BIG MONEY Read More

The Decision To Attend Public University Over Private University

Providing your child with some sort of assistance is one way towards helping them build a brighter future. To be saddled with debt upon graduation severely restricts a student’s options and risk taking abilities. What a shame it would be to never pursue one’s dreams.

When I was in high school I had a choice between a couple expensive private universities or a couple of dirt cheap public universities. My parents were squarely in the middle class and my older sister already decided to go to not one but a second expensive private university for graduate school. I distinctly remember sitting around the kitchen table hearing my parents say, “We make enough to afford tuition, but we make a little too much to receive any type of need based assistance.

I already knew we weren’t rich because we lived in a modest town house and drove a seven year old Toyota Camry. But to hear these words over breakfast one morning cemented my decision to go to a public university where tuition was under $3,600 a year vs. $24,000 a year for private university back in 1995.

THE THOUGHT PROCESS BEHIND PUBLIC SCHOOL OVER PRIVATE SCHOOL Read More

Fine Tune Your Blog For Maximum Results

by in Lifestyle on Nov 29th, 2013

Fine tune your blog: missions and writing styles

Author’s bio: Maria Nedeva is the blogger behind The Money Principle: a personal finance blog that will ‘make your head hurt and your wallet sing’. There she writes about money management, wealth and the changing rules of money. 

There is no point beating around the bush: we bloggers want to be read.

In fact, it doesn’t matter whether we blog for fun, for love or for money – our writing is meaningful only when someone reads it.

Lately, people have little time to read and many sources to choose from. So every time we, bloggers, write and publish something we are in intense competition with each other, with journalists, with reality TV, with the movies and with a myriad other entertainments which temp our potential readers.

Recently I had a chat with a lady, a former journalist, who now works for a website in the UK. Our amicable chat became a friendly debate at the moment she shared her belief that within five to ten years all small personal finance bloggers will disappear – and let me tell you, compared to the site she works for we are all small – because they couldn’t compete on two counts: resources and professionalism.

She was saying that to dig up information is expensive and needs much work by many people; small players don’t have the resources to put behind this so people will stop finding them useful.

Her second point was about the quality of investigation and writing referring to the fact that top journalists are starting to work for major websites – how can ‘one man and his/her dog’ compete with that? How can hobbyist-bloggers reach the level of professionalism that trained and seasoned journalists have?

You have probably guessed I didn’t agree with that; I even insisted on splitting up the bill and paying my part (for a personal finance blogger this is sign of great upset, I think). But my argument was messy and my thinking fuzzy. I just found myself muttering lamely:  Read More

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