Last week, after coming back from the Financial Blogger Conference, I made another business changing decision: I’m going to give up $4,200 in annual income.

I’m not talking about any shady ads or inappropriate paid content on one of my sites here.

I’m talking about a fight I ran into with one of my advertisers or affiliates.

It’s not even a matter of principle or value.

So Why The Hell Am I Refusing Good Money Like This?

I guess I’m doing it because I want to grow . I wanted TFB’s “above the fold” section clean. I’m leaving a decent money maker to keep more readers on my site.

As of last week: I quit Adsense on The Financial Blogger

Everybody that has the guts to call himself a blogger knows that the best way to make money with Adsense is to use the “Who Sees Ads” Plugin, get a nice 336×280 large rectangle Adsense with blended colors and you will make some decent money. This is what I use for all my sites and as you can see in my blog income report, I’m raking in more than $50 per day with Adsense. Of this $50, I am making between $10 and $15 per day (so roughly $4,200 per year) from The Financial Blogger ads.

Since the beginning of the year, I have changed the direction of The Financial Blogger. While I still talk about my personal finances, I’m also adding several articles with regards to managing an online business and I opened the doors to my own company. I now show you what I am doing to make even more money online.

After being hit by the big fat Panda update, I’ve decided to let go Google traffic and concentrate on building a community. Today, I’m telling you about a step forward and getting rid of my TFB Adsense.

Why Drop So Much Money When It’s Easy and Legal?

I have only one reason to do so:

YOU!

I want to diminish the number of ads on TFB in order to make your experience on my site better. I don’t want you to be bothered by a pop-up asking you to subscribe to my newsletter (but feel free do to it anyway ), I don’t want you to be bothered by the “top 10 stocks” ads from Adsense either.

I think that by cutting down my ads, I increase the chances of people giving me credibility, sticking with my site longer (obviously if they don’t click on ads, they will read more stuff on my blog) and subscribe to my RSS and newsletter or follow me on twitter.

So now, when you hit my home page or any other page, you won’t see any ads in the first place. If you scroll down, you will see some ads on the right columns (as Adsense is used to back fill my 250×250 block there and other private advertisers). However, you won’t have anything in your way when you read any of my articles as this column has been completely cleaned up.

The point is to please you and get your friends on board

Some people may argue that my regular readers will accept ads as it sounds fair to get bombarded by ads while reading free content. However, between you and me, my regular readers don’t click on ads. In fact, my most loyal readers don’t generate money on TFB as they will read my stuff but never click on anything.

As for the new visitors, well if they click on any ads, I just lost them. And this is exactly the point, to keep these visitors on my site longer so they have time to bookmark my site or register to it so they will eventually come back.

I’ve noticed a terrible stat lately: The number of new Search Engine visitors each day vs the number of RSS subscribers. While my RSS is fairly stable and increasing very slowly. The number of new visits is growing every day. Therefore, this means that people are visiting my site but are not interested in getting more of it. They don’t want to come back.

And this is something that pisses me off! I can’t believe they don’t want to read more and hang around for a few more days. And I think that one of the reasons might be because I have too many ads on my site. This is why I’ll start the clean up by leaving an Adsense block to back fill ads that are lower down on my site and I left a few key earning pages with Adsense. I know that these pages are not representative of the blog as it is today and that is why I don’t mind making a few bucks out of them .
 

Do you think I’m crazy? Have you considered this for your own site?

I curious to know if this idea sounds weird to you of if you have ever consider dropping your current income in order to seek more commitment from your readers? What do you think?

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After publishing my blog income report yesterday, I got several questions with regards to my operating costs. Last year, I wrote a detailed post on how much I spend per year. After reading this post, you will realize that during the past 12 months, I was in line to spend about $67,000 to run my business. This obviously cut out the glamour surrounding my company income which is around $8,000 to $10,000 per month.

So what’s the point of working extra hours on a company that will bring about $30,000 in profit per year? It’s even worse when you calculate that I have a partner and that I have to split everything 50/50! I tried to explain my reasoning in a previous post but I don’t think that people realized how I separate my costs and why it’s not important to look at cost when you are building your side income.

#1 I don’t derive income from my side business

I do have a pretty decent day job and this is why I don’t need my online money. Instead of receiving dividends or a salary from my online business, it pays for some of my expenses. For example, my blackberry, internet and cable are supported by the company. Same for my partner.

So these expenses are essential for running my business but I would definitely spend money on a Blackberry and internet if I didn’t have a company. These are small rewards we are getting for our efforts.

Since I don’t count on my online income right now, I don’t really mind if one month I’m a little short. In fact, since we have massively increased our expenses, we only went negative during the month of July 2011. This is a great liberty as, in the end, if I make more money, I’ll just spend it on creating another project!

I think it’s a key factor in our success; we don’t really care about money at this point. That sounds a bit odd from people publishing their income report, right? In all honesty, I don’t really mind if I have a good month or a bad month. The fact that I report my income on a monthly basis increases the level of accountability I have towards my company and towards you. On top of that, it helps using an hour per month to see how things are going. To look at what went well and what requires improvement.

#2 I reinvest every single penny in my company

As I just mentioned, we have made the decision to reinvest each dollar within our company. My ultimate goal with my company is to see how big it can become. So am I going to stop buying or creating websites one day? I guess I will… but this won’t be tomorrow! We first spend money on our servers and security (I have a full article explaining everything about hosting services in a draft so send me all your questions regarding this topic and I’ll cover them!). Then, we hired some writers (for reasons described in #3). But when we decided to hire Virtual Assistants, we were going to play on a totally different level.

We now have the resources to go above and beyond our regular business. In the past 12 months, we were able to launch 2 books, several niche websites and are about to launch a few bigger sites in the upcoming months. Most of them will be related to investment topics because:

#1 this is what we like best

#2 people who are interested in investing are also interested in spending a few bucks to help them make money from their investments!

#3 Time is more valuable than anything

The main reason why I spend so much within my company is definitely because I don’t want to end-up working 25-30 hours per week on my online company while I work an additional 30 hours a week at my day job (+ transportation!). I value quality time with my wife, family and friends more than anything else. Therefore, if I can pay people to write on my sites instead of writing, I’ll do it. I want to keep my baby (TFB and The Dividend Guy Blog) but as for the rest, I’m trying to find interesting writers.

The key in finding a good writer is that you need to find someone with a specific tone. Someone that is original and that will be passionate about a specific topic. I’ve found some great writers among the blogosphere`

MD who blogs on Studenomics,

Laura who used to own Green Panda Treehouse and now authors Couple Money

Chris, previous owner of Broker Professionals

Kristina who’s a writer on Dinks Finance (Thx to J Money who sent me her contact info!)

As you can see, I’ve found my writers amongst previous or actual blog owners. They know what is required to write on a regular basis and are familiar with the blog industry. I liked them before and they bring personality to their posts and to me, this is the most important thing.

Technically, if I wanted to fire all of them, I could do it and write all the articles myself. That would be a big mistake for 3 reasons:

#1 They are amazing writers so why try to write great stuff when they do it already!

#2 I would have to take several hours away from my week to write these articles… I would still rather go play soccer with my son and watch my daughter dance ballet

#3 It would prevent me from managing my empire and looking at the big picture!

What’s the True Cost of my Operations?

If you are really curious about the real cost of operation (e.g. keeping my site as is and growing within these sites instead of diversifying my empire), I am showing them right now. I am taking this info from my original post about cost of running my business but cutting down what is being used for growth and what is really required to keep my business as is.

Accounting: $3,200

Regardless if I’m making 30K or 300K, my accounting costs will be similar. This includes book keeping (this is why I’m so bad at keeping track of my expenses!), tax reporting and producing financial statements.

Writing/Editing: $9,800

This is for writing articles on all my sites + correcting my articles so I don’t sound like a French guy

Banking & Interest Fees: $6,000

We still have a pretty decent business loan and this is why we are paying so much in interest. But that’s all right since we are making more money with the site we bought than the interest being charged 

Hosting and domain renewals: $1,500

Here again, nothing can be cut as keeping our domains is an absolute must for our  business!

Life Insurance: $1,200

This ensures that my wife will get what the company’s worth if I ever pass away. This is also the main reason why I put the value of my shares in my net worth statement; it’s because we have a potential buyer if I die : my partner will have enough cash to buy them!

Telecommunications: $7,000

This is the very basic of our company. Without cable, internet and cel, we don’t have a business!

So my true cost of operations is more like $28,700 per year and not 67K…

In fact, by dropping my cost to less than $2,400 per month, I could still run my company with 10 hours per week. The problem is that I would have to cut my 2 VAs, investment in software and promotions. My 2 VAs are a tremendous help in the creation of new websites and products. However, in order to keep my company as is I would not need them.

My main goal is to create enough “money making machines” that my VAs will take care of them while we will be making 15K… 20k… or even 25K per month! In the past 12 months, I have built the structure I need to grow my business to over 250K annually with the SAME COST. This is why I don’t care about how much it costs me to run my business today .

Do you have any questions? Do you find that I’m spending too much money for nothing?

If you are looking for more details, be sure to register to my newsletter!

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The idea of telling you how I network while I hate networking came after getting back from the Financial Blogger Conference in Chicago last weekend. So before I start with my anti-networking post, I wanted to say a few things about the awesome time I had in Chicago:

Phil from PT Money is the king of organization. He’s the man behind the FINCON11 and I can just say that it was PERFECT! If I ever have to plan my 2^nd wedding, I’m calling this guy!

J Money from Budgets Are Sexy has a very cool Mohawk! On top of that, he won so many Plutus Awards that it felt like watching Justin Bieber at the Much Music Awards (don’t worry, J is much cooler ).

SVB from The Digerati Life is the sweetest blogger in the world. She’s super kind and helpful.

Mike from Money Smarts Blog is not my Anglophone alter ego from Toronto! Regardless if he’s a financial blogger, has 2 kids, a wife and the same initials as I do, he actually has hair. So my baldness makes me unique ;-D

Pat from Smart Passive Income was never part of the ones to be picked first for basketball in college. But trust me, he has a hell of a shot!

Baker from Man Vs Debt is even more inspirational in person. I guess you must be very inspirational to get people to applaud at 8am after Saturday night’s party .

Tom from Canadian Finance is always laughing. A lot of fun hanging out with him!

Martin (MD) from Studenomics is a true machine! He drove to Chicago from Toronto and was up all night both days… though he mentioned that he wouldn’t be drinking on Monday morning

Dividend Ninja doesn’t have nun chucks but he is sharp as a blade.

Mike Piper from The Oblivious Investor is very generous to share all about his methods to write and publish books on Amazon. Thx for the tips!

All right, I originally had a much bigger list of bloggers I wanted to talk about but it’s getting too long already , let’s go on with why I hate networking and how I still do connect with people.

That’s kind of funny to say for a financial planner since I need to do a lot of what people call “networking” to be successful but I just hate it. Really, really, REALLY hate networking. I just don’t get how people jump from one person to another spending barely 15 minutes talking and ending-up the conversion just for the sake of “meeting” someone else. It looks more like pollination to me! To me, it sounds like the same script that you roll over and over again:

- Hey, how is it going

- Where do you come from

- How come you got into blogging

- yadi yada…

- okay, now it’s time for me to switch to someone else now that “I know you”.

I just can’t do that. When I want to talk to someone it’s not for small talk but rather to really know this person. Know him outside of his blogging strategies per se . Fortunately, I must say that most people at the conference were truly interested in connecting with people instead of doing basic networking.

How do I connect instead of networking with people

I think this is the most important message: connect with people don’t try to become friends in 15 minutes. I personally prefer meet less people but actually get to know them rather than doing pollination . That said, it is much harder to do than you think.

The first thing is that you need to know who will be there. You might have connected with some people already and a conference like this is the perfect way to solidify your relationship. Emails and skype calls are cool but there is nothing like a good face-to-face conversation.

So the first thing I did was to check out the list of attendees. Phil had this great idea of making that list to show who was coming. Then, I looked at people I really wanted to see… hum… that was a bad idea since I wanted to meet 80% of them… the other 20% were people I didn’t know lol!

After that, I made a list of people that I know a little bit more (based on email and skype calls). These were my “priorities”. While I didn’t have enough time to meet everybody that I wanted to, the time I spent with these people was genuinely cool!

Note that everybody is pretty busy during a cocktail. It’s important to know who you want to talk to before entering the room. If not, you won’t know with whom you can really connect and you might end-up going from one person to another until you find people with more common interests.

Speed Networking Formula

I don’t know where that Idea comes from but it was a great formula at the FINCON11. We were all sitting on a chair face to face and we had 1 minute to connect with people. This is great as you don’t get to spend too much time and you can see if you want to meet that person later on during the evening and talk more. I really enjoyed this formula and got to meet about 20 people in less than half an hour ;-D

About my trick to spend quality time with busy people

Oh yeah… I almost forgot! During conferences, there are always people that everybody wants to have a chat with. Therefore, you can either be lucky enough to speak with them for 10 minutes amongst the crowd or you just don’t get the opportunity to talk to them. But I had a trick that I used this time to see if it would work and guess what, I got to spend some great quality time with them.

Want to know what it is? I’m explaining my story along with all my notes from the conference in my newsletter on Friday. On Friday, I’ll be providing a 2,500 word document with everything I’ve learned from the conference to my newsletter subscribers and since it’s free, be sure to subscribe:

image credit

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I’m happy and excited at the same time as I’ll be part of the “ask the experts tables” at The Financial Blogger Conference! Next weekend, I’ll be in Chicago for the first Financial Blogger conference. This was already an exciting experience as I will finally meet most of my blogging idols and friends after 5 years of sending emails!

But the best part has been confirmed: I’ll be meeting with anybody who has questions about valuing/buying/managing/selling multiple blogs. My name is now beside big guys like Mike Piper from Obvlious Investor, Peter Anderson from Bible Money Matters and Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income! (you can see the list of all “experts” here).

The “ask the expert” table roundup will be take place on Saturday. This will be a 30 minutes spot where everybody will have the chance to chat with any of us regarding specific topics. I think it’s an amazing opportunity for me to share my knowledge and connect with other people. So if you are coming to Chicago, be sure to stop by my table to have a chat ;-D

3 nominations for the Plutus Awards

The Plutus Awards are the first personal finance awards for bloggers. This year, the winners will be announced at the conference. I was happy to be nominated in 3 categories:

 
Best Personal Finance Blog for Entrepreneur (for The Financial Blogger)
 
Best New Personal Finance eBook (for Dividend Investing)<
 
Best Personal Finance Blog for Teens or College Students (for Green Panda Treehouse)
 

 
It is a true honour to be nominated for these awards! Sometimes, I compare myself to the “big guys” and often feel that I’m not “that good”. So I was quite surprised to find myself recognized! If you think I should win any of these categories, you can vote here.
 

Let me know if you are coming to Chicago this weekend, we’ll have a beer together!

Cheers,

Mike.

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Last week, I read a very interesting post by Sunil at Money Extra Blog asking if you would rather spend an extra hour on your profession or on your side business. I found this debate quite interesting as there is a huge discrepancy between what people say and actually do. It’s easy to say that you would spend an extra hour on your day job to increase your chances of getting a promotion but what are you going to do with this hour? The same rationale applies if you decide to use this hour wisely to work on your side business. So tell me:

What would you do with an extra hour?

I really want to know what you would do and am even more curious about what you are doing right now? Have you taken any steps to free up some time in your schedule? What are you doing with this precious time that you have cleverly wrestled away from one of those time eaters we encounter during a typical day?

I’ll tell you what I did during the last 2 years with not one extra hour but one extra DAY working on my side business!

Back in July 2009, I announced that I was working 4 days a week at my day job so I could have more time to hustle for my business. Now, 2 years later, I can tell you that it was the best decision I have ever made in terms of my personal finances.

Where I went before working 1 day a week on my side business

2 years ago, our online empire wasn’t that big. In fact, it was limited to:

The Financial Blogger

Intelligent Speculator

Gather Little By Little (which is no longer part of our empire)

And that’s about it. We were making roughly $4,000 per month from these 3 sites but it wasn’t enough to justify that we should work more than 10 hours each on the company. It was slowly growing and was easily managed. This is when you need to be cautious.

Cautious of falling into your comfort bubble and never escaping it

But we weren’t like that. Since we had several projects in mind, we decided that I could start working 1 day per week (which is 6 hours more) to work on these projects. That was really the key; when I worked during these 6 hours, I:

- Don’t write posts

- Barely answer regular email

- Don’t work on our main sites (unless for special projects)

- Therefore, I don’t do regular stuff

The key, when you are about to use an extra hour on your side business, is to direct your work towards CREATING VALUE

If you use an extra hour to write an article or to answer email, you won’t see much improvement. However, if you use this extra hour to:

- Work on the outline of a new site

- Look for private advertisers

- Create a group project with other bloggers (that will eventually drive traffic and new readers)

- Work on a product

- Think about your long term strategy

This is how you will create value and see amazing results. You want proof? Here we go:

In the past 2 years, with only an additional 6 hours per week (and counting 5 weeks of vacation ), we went from an average of 4K/month to an average of $8,000 to $9,000 per month this year. On top of this, we have diversified our income through a dozen websites and now count 5 major sites in our company. We now have 2 ebooks (Dividend Investing & Escaping the Rat Race) and are presently working on developing 3 other niche websites (which will be bigger sites than our current niche websites) along with 4 book projects on the table (the sequels to Dividend Investing & Escaping the Rat Race).

Would I have tripled my day job income with 6 hours more at work?

What would have happened if I had taken these 6 hours and put them into my profession? Would I have been able to earn a sustainable income out of it? I think the answer is pretty obvious: working longer hours at work will at best give you small benefits (such as a bigger bonus or at best a promotion) but it will never scale over time.

The best case scenario would lead you to a better job, earning perhaps 10% more income… and probably requiring you to work more hours . In comparison, I don’t work more on my online company but my gross income has tripled. It is true that I had to hire 2 VAs and more writers, but it was also with the purpose of creating a team that will be able to handle the growth over time. With our current team, I know that we can handle double the work we have on our plate right now, without increasing our cost… and without having me or my partner working more than 10 hours per week (+ my 6 hours ).

In the end, it’s not how many extra hours you are able to find in your week to work on your side projects, it is what you do with them . Try to outsource all admin work and focus on value creating activities.

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