Yakezie.com

Imagine selling your site for $200,000. Wouldn’t that be incredible? It depends actually. What if the site took you four years to build? Each week you spent over 70 hours writing content and getting the word out. Furthermore, this was your only job during this time period.

You’re 29 now and flush with $150,000 in cash after taxes, that is, if your buyer pays up front and your company doesn’t have any debt obligations to pay before finalizing the deal. What now? Are you going to start all over and try and build a new website? Are you going to get a job? $150,000 is not going to last you very long if you don’t do anything given interest rates are at such pitiful levels.

What if you were a freelance writer who made $3,000-$5,000 a month. Naturally, you write a book about how to make money freelancing to generate an extra income. Now you’re rocking $3,500-$5,500, or $42,000 – $66,000 a year. Right on! This is your full-time job now and all is good. But, is $42,000-$66,000 really that impressive when college graduates several years out regularly make the same amount? Maybe not. Furthermore, it’s hard to scale freelancing. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid!

WHY DO WE SET DIFFERENT STANDARDS ONLINE vs. OFFLINE? Read More

For the first two and a half years of blogging, I don’t think I had a single affiliate post. Reading other blogger’s affiliate posts sometimes made me cringe because it was evident most did not use the products they were pitching. Over the years, I’ve seen plenty of blogger’s completely lose their audiences and quit because their blogs became all about making money online. When money is your primary focus, and you aren’t making enough of it, things get disheartening really quick!

I want to always write for fun. Anybody who visits Financial Samurai knows that I have a lot of opinions which sometimes doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy. The truth often hurts, but sometimes it’s a great way to break through. When I decided to retire from the corporate world in the first half of 2012, I finally got serious about the business of blogging in part because I no longer had any W2 income. The challenge was exhilarating!

Within three months after leaving my job, I finished writing my book, How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye. The experience of creating my own product and the time spent marketing the book has led me to positively change the way I look at affiliate income forever!

NOBODY KNOWS MORE ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT THAN YOU Read More

Blog building and website creation can be a time consuming and somewhat lonely task. There are so many things to handle, from site design to backup and recovery to obtaining or developing fresh content and more.

If you are suffering burnout – wondering how you can possibly attend to everything for daily operations and still build your business site or blog, you might consider systematizing your site.  One of my 2013 goals for Family Money Values is to systematize my blog.

Systematizing your site means building systems, including procedures and schedules to handle anything and everything you do for your site or blog.

At FinCon12, Will Chen, one of the Wisebread core team members, also stressed the importance of having systems in place. The Wisebread folks have built theirs, and they can and do use those systems when they build out additional sites.

What is a system? Read More

Given the huge Google Penguin update in the Spring of 2012 and the rolling Panda updates that occur once a month, guest blogging has become the #1 way for people to acquire backlinks to their sites. The SEO industry has gone into overdrive to ping all bloggers whether they can guest post their “free and unique” content in exchange for one or two links. I get 5-10 requests a day from spammers or complete strangers, and it’s getting old real fast!

I absolutely love great quality guest posts that provide a unique view point or something I have no expertise on. Given Financial Samurai doesn’t employ staff writers (can’t afford it!), I try and argue points from the other side to ensure I get as much balanced content as possible. Posts such as “Socialism Is A Means To A Brighter Future” is one such groupthink abolisher which has been quite a hit based on the number of views.

When your answer to all things illogical is “everything is rational,” it’s sometimes hard to understand why someone would complain about not being able to get ahead if they only work 40 hours a week or less. It’s hard to understand why someone would not enjoy being in debt after deciding to spend way more than they earn for a long period of time. Haven’t all the goodies provided more comfort than the discomfort of debt? If they didn’t, you’d stop spending!

HOW GUEST BLOGGING WILL RUIN YOUR SITE Read More

Aaah, Thanksgiving is in the air! This is such a happy and exciting time of year. Black Friday’s coming, the snow has started to fall in the mountains, ski lifts are opening, persimmons are all over the farmers markets (YUM), and people are headed home to spend time with their extended families.

It’s also the time for open enrollment, planning ahead, and also for giving back. Even though I have a lot I want to accomplish in the next month and a half, I am already getting giddy that a new year is right around the corner.

Thanksgiving The Easy Way Or The Hard Way Read More

Finally, a part of life where being thin isn’t better anymore!

I’ve been spending some time reading about the interesting world of niche and “authority” sites lately. I never would have delved so deep if Google had never laid the smackdown. Everybody kept talking about the latest carnage, so I just had to pay attention. The idea is to create a site that focuses on a target keyword to start earning some advertisement revenue while doing little to maintain after launch. There are probably millions of sites out there with just a couple of posts waiting to be found.

I actually love the idea of kicking back and doing nothing to make money. But darn it, it took me 13 years of saving, investing, and waking up at the crack of dawn to be able to do nothing! Our niche site friends were able to make some nice coin in just months, if not days. Genius! I respect anybody who puts in the effort to arbitrage inefficiencies in a market. They are much better than those who sit at home complaining why they aren’t rich while doing nothing about it!

I can barely keep up writing for two or three blogs a week so I was scratching my head when I met folks who have 20, 30, 75, and even 200 blogs! To start, isn’t that a crap load of annual domain registration fees to pay? What about the process of updating sites one by one? Brutal! As it turns out, almost all the content is outsourced, and there isn’t much new content once the initial posts are published. The hope of having an exact domain site, or even a partial domain site to attract Google’s attention with little content flew out the window.

LEARNING FROM THE CARNAGE Read More