This is where your finance takes place

- The Idea Behind M35 -

Yet another dot com company!

While our plan is definitely not to become a YouTube or a Facebook, we still added another dot com (we technically should say dot ca!) company to the register of companies. But our goal is different; we are not techy’s (especially me!) but we know that we can make a few bucks out of the net.

Create a steady flow of income

We don’t know where our adventure will end-up but the main purpose is to create a steady and growing flow of income. This is why we are looking in buying, building and maintaining web sites that are bringing monthly contribution in our pockets. This blog is a very good example as it has a very steady (and growing!) readership in a niche market. Guess what, this is exactly what advertisers are looking for!

When you want to advertise your products or services, the only limit of your marketing strategy is your budget. Since everybody is limited by money (the root of all evil… NOT!), when you place an ad, you want to make sure that you will reach potential customer. What is the point of advertising fat burgers in a nutritionist cabinet? This is exactly the same thing with the Web.

By maintaining good contents about a specific topic, you gather people with common interest in a single place. This is perfect segmentation for advertisers. So this is what we are trying to do with web sites included in M35.

Sky is the limit

While we are very aware that we will never become filthy rich with this project (or maybe we will, we never know!), we can use this steady flow of income to make us rich :-D. Once you created a money machine, you only have to keep it rolling and use its cash flow for a better use. Think of what could have done the farmer with the golden egg chicken! He could have probably buy most land in Manathan!

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- What To Do With Profit? -

You might be tempted to use this money to “reward” yourself for the hard work you did for so many months. This new pair of jeans would just suits you well. After all, this money was never budgeted, right?

While I truly believe that one should reward his efforts once in a while, you must keep in mind what was your goal before you created an alternative source of income. If this additional money was not meant to be “free money”, then you must not touch it otherwise!

The other tricky part is that most alternative sources of income are derived from a little “company” that you created. Therefore, a part of the money earned from it should be use to keep the project rolling.

You will also face the dilemma of not taking any profit out of your project in order to let it grow and make even more money later on. On the other side, we are never 100% that our project will keep growing or lasting for ever. Therefore, taking a few bucks away from your project seems reasonable.

On our side, we decided to split any income generated from our company by the following rule:

- 40% must be kept in the company in order to maintain web sites, design new one, pay for advertising and other maintenance cost.

- 30% of our monthly revenue will be withdrawn by each partner.

We decided to do it this way because the first reason we started this project was to create an additional flow of monthly income. At first, we should be able to make about $1,000 per month so it will leave us $300 each and $400 to be reinvested in the company.

We will surely wait a few months and redesign our biggest site, tennisrulz.com. The site is pretty big but definitely needs some clean up.

As for the $300 a month, this will allow me to get closer to my $1,500 project. With this additional income, I will probably break the $1,000 bar. According to my calculation, I would need an additional $900 before I reach the full $1,500. So I am basically 11K away from giving my wife the opportunity to stay home.

The main reason why we leave 40% in the company is that we strongly believe that we can improve its profitability and probably reach $2,000 per month next year. That would gives us $600 a month more in our pocket

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- TAMTA technique -

This is when I developed my own technique to improve the way I work. The ultimate goal was to become more productive as I didn’t have much time to spend on this project. Unfortunately, this is the problem of 99% of people who try to create an alternative source of income. The TAMTA (Try, Analyse, Modify, Try Again) technique is an easy process to continuously improve your way of working.

Try:

First things first, you must have an idea in mind before you start anything. As you never tried it, you can declare that this is the best method at the beginning. This is why you better off trying what is on your mind to see if it really works.

When you are in the trial mode, it is important to define what was happening before and what you are trying to accomplish with your new ideas. If you didn’t take the time to define your goals properly, I suggest you go back to read more about setting measurable goals.

Analyse:

The analysis of the previous and present situation is crucial to improvement. By looking at the result you are getting by changing your way of working, you will be in a better position to determine if your changes were beneficial or not. After a few months, I noticed that my French blog had much better stats in term of page viewed and time spent on the site but the numbers of visitors were not going up.

Modify:

Your idea might be good but it also may require a bit of tweaking. In the modify stage, you are allowed to make modification to your process in order to compensate for the lack of your previous method. In order to grow the number of visitors, I tried to participate to carnivals, I posted comments on several other blogs, I tried to link to them (link love is always a big winner in the blogosphere).

Try Again:

As long as you see potential in one of your ideas, I would suggest to try to modify it and try again as many time as possible. However, you must be able to put a stop to your madness when there are no results months after months. The analysis stage will help you out to determine if you are really wasting your time or not.

For example, while The Financial Blogger was growing at a steady rate, the French blog was going nowhere. In my third analysis stage, I noticed that no matter what I action I take, the number of visit was not increasing. When I dug deeper, I found out the market for French financial blog was simply too small to do something with it compared to the English market.

This is where I decided to give up on the French blog and put more effort into The Financial Blogger. By looking at what TFB has become, I certainly not regret my choice!

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