Yakezie.com

As bloggers, we know how difficult it is to gain the trust of a community. Way too many sites start off with a lot of enthusiasm and just fade within a year. Life gets in the way, and that’s fine. There are certainly more important things to do with one’s time than write all day. But for those of you who are serious about blogging, commitment and longevity is a must.

I no longer watch any TV shows live because the networks tend to cancel them arbitrarily mid-season without even an apology or excuse. After spending hours getting into the characters and story, to have a show ripped out from under me pisses me off. I feel like I ended up wasting a lot of time that could be spent doing something else. Now I only watch shows on DVD or Netflix after they’ve survived a third season. Three seasons is enough time for me to invest in the program.

The same thing goes with blogging. A lot of readers don’t fully invest their time on new sites. They know the survival rate for surviving past the 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 3 years mark goes down at each step. Therefore, it is imperative for bloggers who want to make their sites more than just hobbies to survive for at least the first year. Otherwise, readers will tend to just stick with sites that have been around for years, despite having less interesting content. The Yakezie Challenge is six months long b/c it weeds out less serious contenders.

If you are a blogger looking to make connections with other bloggers, the same thing holds true about the importance of survival. Are you really going to bother spending a similar amount of time leaving comments and building a relationship if there’s a high chance the blog will fail? Of course not.

Giving up too soon is one of the top three reasons why sites fail. The other reason is simply unoriginal, unhelpful, uninteresting content. Write Whale Posts if you can instead. Let me discuss more about the third reason why so many sites fail. Read More

Like many of you, I’ve been on this passive/semi-passive income building journey for quite a while now. I love the blogosphere because most of us like to write, and we’re all looking to see if we can develop a fun side or main income stream to buttress our financial situation.

In my latest passive income report, I finally realized that I’ve been seriously neglecting one key financial asset: my Lake Tahoe vacation property! It’s weird, because for the previous two passive income reports, I thought I was doing everything possible to boost my passive income.

I occasionally advertised the vacation property on Craigslist to supplement the existing efforts of the hotel property management company. But I stopped after about several months because it became tedious.

Then I fired the hotel property management company after six years and went with a new property management company that charged half the commission. The risk was that since they are an outside property management company, volume would decrease. But they guaranteed me a minimal amount of income to switch, so I wasn’t too worried unless they welched on their promise. I decided not to help them market my property due to the guarantee and due to my desire to focus on my consulting and online business.

Now that the annual guarantee income period is over, it’s best to help them, help me beyond just advertising on Craigslist and e-mailing my friends. I could write an in-depth post full of pictures about The Resort At Squaw Creek to rank for the terms “lake tahoe vacation property rental, Squaw Valley, Lake Tahoe, Resort At Squaw Creek” and link back to my property management company! If that post could sit on the front page of a Google search for years, then voila! An extra $500 – $1,500 a month in income could very easily be generated

So that is exactly what I did. I finally wrote a 1,550 word post about the best vacation property rental in Lake Tahoe on November 7, 2014. But what I should have done was write that post five years earlier when I first started Financial Samurai! Doh.  Read More