The other day, I was going through the Yakezie Forum and a new blogger was asking a very interesting question:

What would you do if you could go back in time and start your blog all over?

If you have been following me since the beginning, it means that you have read a total of 1,275 articles over almost 5 years (the blog started back in November 2006). You have probably noticed a lot of changes on this blog since the beginning. I went through different topics and orientations throughout the years. My most famous post back then was about The Smith Manoeuvre and my highly debated Primerica Reviews. Since then, I have evolved towards a “make more money while working less” approach with “open door articles” such as how I went from 18K to 125K online income per year and my monthly blog income report. But even if I was able to build a 6 figure online business, there are tons of things I would have done differently with my blog if I could start all over:

#1 Start a Mailing List

To be honest, I had been reluctant to create newsletters with my blogs. It is my silent partner who finally convinced me to do so after 3 years of operation! While I still don’t master the concept of having a newsletter along with daily posting, I certainly understand and appreciate its power. Here’s a quick example:

When I launched Dividend Investing (my first eBook), I got 47 downloads in 15 minutes only through The Dividend Guy Blog Mailing List. By the end of the day, out of 500 subscribers back then, 432 had opened it and most of them downloaded the eBook.

Since then, I’ve been using the TFB mailing list to communicate with my most loyal readers and ask them what they want to read about in my Rat Race eBook. In order to reward them, I will offer them a 50% pre-sale offer in September to buy the book (so there’s is still time to register in the spot on the right column ).

A mailing list is a privileged access to your most engaged readers. You can provide them with additional content and they can give you more feedback this way. I get several article ideas from my newsletter readers and I can now see its power. If I had started my newsletter 3 years ago, I would probably have thousands of subscribers! Fortunately, it’s never to late!

#2 Go Light on Advertising

Have you ever noticed that it’s easy to cut something you don’t really benefit from but it’s darn hard to cut out something you enjoy? Well I enjoy making money and I’m making a lot of it by selling private advertising on my blogs. However, I want to move TFB towards a site where I can communicate with my readers and where we can exchange ideas (such as Smart Passive Income, ManVsDebt or Think Traffic).

If you have ever gone on any of these sites, you have noticed that they don’t have Adsense and that they are very light on advertising that are not directly related to their products or services they use. This is why I am seriously considering cutting down adsense on TFB in order to keep more readership. I guess my loyal visitors don’t mind the advertising but I know that most new visitors can be turned off by so many ad spots. I’m having a problem making the switch since the money is really good. If I had never sold advertising on my site, I would have been able to build a stronger community and make even more money than I am right now! The 3 guys I have mentioned are making tons of money and they generate it through their own products or through affiliate programs. People buy from them because they trust them. And that is where I want to bring TFB.

#3 Connect with people

I had started to comment on other blogs and send emails to my fellow bloggers after almost a year of blogging. No wonder my traffic was about 10 visits a day for the first year! Then, I started to connect with people in my niche and comment on their blogs. This has had a huge impact on my blog.

If I have one piece of advice to give you regarding connecting with other bloggers is to do it honestly. Don’t connect with people in the hope that they will retweet your post or that they will offer you a guest post spot on their huge blog. Just email them explaining why you read their material and why you think you have points in common. Share a true friendship and help them to grow by asking questions or contributing with stellar comments on their blogs. This is how you will truly build online friends that will eventually help you out in the future. I’ve learned this from Baker by the way.

The guy needed financing at one point in his project. We had liquidity sitting in our bank account and we were amazed by how this guy was successful and showed a high level of motivation. This is why we have decided to lend him the money with no interest for a few months. This was a door opener to a great friendship. And today, he is helping me grow my business and has coached me for my eBook and TFB redirect.

#4 Buy another Blog

One of my most famous moves as a blogger was to be among the first guys to drop significant cash into a website. My first purchase was Intelligent Speculator, but what put me on the map was buying Gather Little By Little (which I sold back in 2010). When you buy a blog, you not only buy the traffic and the reputation, you are also buying a good part of the blogger’s knowledge.

Each time we purchased a blog, we looked at the special ingredient that lead them to their success story. This is how we have learned so much throughout the years and how we were able to apply many tricks we found on other blogs across our network. For example, a while back ago, we discovered a plugin that allowed us to put adsense code in each post. It seems pretty common today but it was quite a revolution a few years ago. With this simple piece of code, we cranked up our revenue by $1,000 per month! I will keep buying websites once in a while but am currently concentrating on building my own sites at the moment. It is cheaper than paying the big bucks every time we want to build another asset!

Do these 4 things today and become a successful blogger!

If I had to start again, I would start my business with these 4 steps. This will definitely help you to grow and build a true online empire!
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About 2 weeks ago, I produced my Monthly Blog Income Report. I mentioned that even if I had a month with over $5,700 in income, I was still cash flow negative in my business. How the hell was I able to throw $6K out the window of a business that doesn’t even have a proper office?

Several readers became less enthusiastic about my income report once they knew that I am spending about 6K per month on it. Therefore, even when I generate $8,000 in a month, they consider that I only clear 2K… which is split in 2 with my silent partner. But the reality is a little bit more complex than this and I think it’s important that I explain why I am not too worried about being cash flow negative with my business.

#1 I’m spending money that I have already earned

I guess this is one of the biggest points: it’s okay to be cash flow negative for a few months if you have already accumulated this money previously during the year. For example, I had months of $10,000 and $12,000 earlier this year. Since the cost of running my online business is pretty steady on a monthly basis, I have accumulated $10,000 in profits with only these 2 months. Last month, I was cash flow negative by about $500. So it’s not a big deal overall.

When you run any kind of business and even when you look at your personal balance sheet; it’s not the end of the world to be cash flow negative if you have already earned this money in another month. For example, if you review the month where you are going on a 2 week cruise; you will definitely be cash flow negative. But as long as you know why and that you have budgeted your vacation, there is nothing to worry about!

#2 I’m spending to grow

I have discussed this in the past but I think it is very important that I bring it back to the table this morning: we could be putting more money in our pockets but have decided to invest in several projects instead:

Niche websites

eBook writing

and bigger websites that will be discussed later on.

If you look at my company as you would look at a stock, you should look at it as a fast growing company that is cash flow negative because it prefers to invest in its growth instead of reaping the benefits already. I’m glad I can make 6K-7K or even 10K on good months but I want to make more. Once we reach over 10K as an average, we will probably start to pay out and reward ourselves for non-stop efforts since 2008.

#3 know what you are doing

The problem is not with being cash flow negative when you are down during a period of time. The problem is when you don’t know why or that you become stuck in a high cost structure. If you have a fixed and non-flexible cost structure, being cash flow negative is a real issue. However, if you are spending most of your extra money on specific projects that you can put on hold at anytime you want, you shouldn’t be worried.

I don’t see my current company spending as pure expenses but more like intangible investments. I know it will take time before I recover my investment and start making some money but I know it’s worth it. Once a website explodes and start making money, it can only grow!

For example, I could probably sell What is a Dividend for near $2,000 considering its traffic and monthly income (which is near $100/month). If I only sell this site, it would pay for all the costs involved in the niche website creation so far. However, if I keep it and let it grow, I’m sure I’ll be averaging $500/month with this site within the next 2 years. If I can have similar successes with 2-3 other projects, I will have succeeded in creating important sources of passive income.

Are you willing to go cash flow negative for a project?

Going cash flow negative is just a prudent way to use leverage. Instead of borrowing a lot of money in one shot and start building assets with more capital, you slowly use your earned money or borrow at a slow rate to bring your monthly balance sheet back to even. With this method, it allows you to shoulder less stress and easily manage your projects as they don’t grow too big in a single month.

I’m wondering how you grow your business or personal balance sheets? Are you using only the money in your bank account? Are you leveraging? Are you going to accept a cash flow negative statement once in a while for the sake of growth?
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At the beginning of the year, I was pretty ambitious with 5 blogging goals. They are all related to the growth of my online business. In fact, this year, I am spending a boat load of money on growth hoping that we will generate income to Crush it in 2012. So while my 2011 goals are oriented more towards growth, I’ll be talking numbers and cash in 2012 . But before getting there, I must succeed this year! So this is where I am stand:

#1 Get over 250,000 visits per month with my blog network (currently at 200K)

This goal will be harder to reach than expected! I was on great pace since the beginning of the year and I thought that my “normal” growth would bring me to 250,000 visitors easily. But The Panda Update arrived from nowhere to punch me in the face. Now I’m back to 205,000 visitors from last month’s blog income report. Now that summer has started, I’ll have to wait until September to see if I can move back up in the Search Engine. In the meantime, I am concentrating on the creation of great content!

#2 Write a free eBook and achieve 500 downloads

My first book was launched in early June 2011 and it’s called: Dividend Investing: How to Create a Never Ending Cash Distributor. I was expecting to reach a few hundred in the first week and eventually reach 500 downloads throughout the year. But the reality was totally different! I got more than 500 downloads the day of the launch! Today (so in 50 days), I’m over 8,000 downloads and preparing a post on how to get to 10,000 downloads for your first ebook!

The eBook had a great effect on my business overall. It has helped me push my visits to a higher level, boosted my affiliate program earning commissions (I made roughly $700-$800 from the book already) and helped increase significantly my newsletter subscribers. However, my wife is haunting me with a crazy thought: imagine how much I would have made if I was selling the book $1!… I would probably have reached at least 5,000 downloads out of the 8,000…. Arghhh!

#3 Create my first product (eBook) and sell 100 copies

I’m almost done with my second eBook which should sell around $17. I hope to launch it at the end of August and sell 100 copies. With the first eBook success, I believe I will reach my goal…. As long as I launch my book in time! In fact, my eBook project will be a 4 eBook series about financial independence. I’m taking a deeper look at the 9 to 5 Rat Race, how it sucks to be stuck in it and how to get out of it. Since I’m almost out of the Rat Race myself, I thought it makes sense that I share my experience. On top of that, you will know that I’m not getting out of the Rat Race by selling the book but rather by applying what will be found in these books.

#4 Create 10 niche websites and make a minimum of $100 per month with each of them

To be honest, I’ve put this project on the sidelines with regards to monetization. I’ve figured it was much smarter to create the sites and build as much content as possible. So far, we have the following sites up and running:

Home Security System Canada

Secondhand Saddles

What is a Dividend

Covered Call ETFs

Smart Financial Analyst

On top of these 5 sites, we have 2 big projects along with other niche websites that should be all launched by the end of the year. They won’t be making $1,000 altogether per month. However, they will be set for next year in order to grow much faster. Since content is King, I expect my next sites to grow much faster.

#5 Switch The Financial Blogger’s direction from Personal Finance Blog to a PF/Online income blog

I guess this one is pretty obvious! The Financial Blogger has successfully gone through its “transformation”. However, while I thought of doing a make money online blog with some personal finance topics, my idea has been crystal clear. I wanted to follow my tag line: Working 4 days a week, Making a 6 figure income. So it’s more than making money online or talking about a few personal finance topics. I want to share all my tricks with regards to my career, to my finance strategies along with my online venture to reach a 6 figure income without killing myself working like a mule. So I’ll keep my online updates, my net worth articles and my thoughts on how to successfully climb the corporate ladder. However, I will move my TSX Dividend and Ex-Dividend date monthly updates to The Dividend Guy Blog (makes sense, right?). In fact, I’ve already been doing all my investment commentaries on DGB, so it’s not a big surprise. TFB will definitely concentrate on making more money while enjoying life at the same time.

So far, so good! I’m pretty happy with what has been done this year but I know that the biggest chunk of work is yet to come. We have decided to write the FOUR books this year… so I better get working! Lol!

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Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income shot an interesting question to his readers the other week that I would like to answer in this post:

What’s better: having 1 site or 10 sites?

Which I would turn into:

Would you rather make 10K or 1K 10 times?

You probably know about my business model already. So you know that my answer is that I would rather make 1K 10 times. I think that the diversification argument has been explained over and over on several blogs and for different topics (just ask your financial advisor if he would let you have a single stock versus 10 stocks in your portfolio ). But I think that there is much more than the fact that you can count on multiple sources of income and that diversification is a synonym for income stability. So here’s my take on why I would rather make 1K 10 times:

Find the Magic Formula

If you have one site, you might be a bit reluctant to adjust your business model. You might think that if your readers don’t like your new direction, you could leave traffic or income on the table. What if the modification you make on your site is not the right one? The trial period will definitely make you lose money.

When I want to try something different, I use it on the site that has the most potential for success. If it works, I can apply the “magic formula” to my other sites and make even more money. If it doesn’t, well only 10% of my income will be affected by this modification.

Leverage

I love leveraging! But this time, I’m not talking about borrowing to invest, I’m talking about using some of my sites to drive traffic to the others. By creating a network, it makes it easy to launch a new site. Without any outside promotions or SEO, I was able to reach more than 3,000 visits per month on What is a Dividend, only by sending my existing readers from Intelligent Speculator and The Dividend Guy Blog towards this site. You can’t obviously send that many people if your sites are not related. But since I’m building most of my websites around financial topics, people who read about dividends will be interested in these 3 sites for sure!

High Speed Growth

Have you ever noticed that it is easier to grow by 10% every month when you have a small start-up sites? If you grow from 100 visits to 200 visits, you get 100% growth and you can achieve this within a couple of weeks. When you want to go from 1,000 visits to 2,000, it becomes a bit more difficult. And when you are going from 10,000 to 20,000… I’ll let you guess how much work is involved. This is why I found it easier to create more websites that will grow to the size of The Financial Blogger or The Dividend Guy Blog instead of trying to double the number of visitors for these 2 sites.

I often see that for certain periods of time, some of my websites attain a plateau. For a few months in a row, they can hover around the same number of visitors until something triggers a new jump. For example, TFB sat on the 20,000 visitors per month bar for almost a year before cranking up to 45K-50K (right before the Panda update ). But while my site was sitting on this plateau, I was working on other sites in order to  grow them. This is why I think it’s easier to grow 10 sites making 1K to 2K each rather than have one site making 10K trying to get to 20K per month. Not that it is impossible, after all Pat did more than that! But it’s still an exception. The rest of us mortals need to play on a “safer” ground.

The Ability to Sell

If I had only 1 site, I would be very reluctant to sell it. On the other hand, chances are that it would worth so much that there would not be any market for a quick sale. Who could possibly buy Million Dollar Journey today? The site is probably worth several hundred thousand dollars… (doh! I just wasted all my chances of bidding a low numbers on the site!) this is enough to restrain your market if you want to make a quick buck!

By having smaller sites, I’m able to sell one if I need cash flow as I did when I sold Gather Little By Little 18 months ago. Selling your blog might be one of the best way to put money in your pocket for all your effort. If you only have one site, it will be harder to sell and chances are that it will personally branded to you (like I did with TFB). So technically, TFB doesn’t have a big resale value as I am TFB. On the other hand, it is much easier to sell an investing related website like Intelligent Speculator or The Dividend Guy Blog since it is more related to stock commentary/analysis than an individual’s personality.

More focus, less confusion

This last point is very personal to my perception of things. I’m a passionate individual and I write with a lot of “fire”. But sometimes, I could switch from one topic to another because I just feel like it. This could make it hard for readers to follow. This is why I have built a structure where I can write about investing on a specific blog while keeping how to make more money with less work on this blog. And if I ever burst a bubble and want to discuss other personal finance topics, I always have other sites that will cover these topics for a more suitable audience.

So would you rather make 10K or 1K 10 times?

I’m returning the question to you, what’s your take?

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Since this blog’s direction has changed a bit and became more about our online business, we have been publishing details regarding both our revenues and the costs of our business (which we will be getting even more specific about) and one of the comments that is recurring both on these posts as well as in private conversations that we have is the fact that our business is risky because of the very high costs. It’s an interesting point of view and I think it’s certainly easy to see these expenses that way. However, in our opinion, it does not portray the reality of the situation. Mike explained why our model is safer than the stock market. Today, I decided to take a deeper look not into our specific expenses but rather to discuss why our costs are so high and why we hope to take them higher in the coming months and years.

Looking For Growth

Very early on after the creation of our company, we both agreed on a long term vision not only in terms revenues and profits but also in terms of lifestyle. I think it’s fair to say that we have very big ambitions for our project and while many of you consider our current numbers incredible, it’s still far from what we are aiming for. With that in mind, there are not a million different ways to increase our business growth. We could have kept one blog, and it would have been a great way to increase our business year over year. Chances are good however that it would not be enough. Both Mike and I have similar circumstances:

-Desire for the business to generate much higher revenues within 5 to 10 years
-A very good current job that pays well and that we enjoy doing
-Limited time available (we both have a family and a balanced life with friends, sports, etc)
-We can live with little to no income from our online company

As you can see, we are limited in the amount of time that we can dedicate to the business. Thus, the only way to generate higher growth was to get help. Does increasing our costs scare us? Not at all. Every year, at our annual shareholder meeting, we review all expenses, all outsourcing and employees in order to make sure that they still make sense.

Where Our Costs Go Towards

I think it’s critical to understand that the vast majority of our costs are not necessary for us to maintain our business. They are however critical for us to maintain the strong growth that we’ve had for a few years now. There is a major difference between the two. If Mike or I decided to go full time, we could more or less cut expenses by 80% and keep everything running smoothly. That is not our goal however. The best way for us to increase future profits of the company is to maximize our revenues and profits. So what do we invest in?

-Design: While our niche sites generally have more general designs, we have made sure to have all of our “main sites” run on original designs that help not only improve the user experience but build a stronger brand. Most of our costs are for new projects although we do have a few on our existing ones such as the last redesign of this blog.

-New Projects: It’s easy to overlook the fact that most of our expenses are not spent on our established projects but rather on those recently launched (such as DoNotWait, HomeSecuritySystems, WhatIsDividend, CoveredCallETF’s, etc) and also some soon to be launched ones. Even though these costs will only payoff in the coming months and years, we think these are no-brainers. Looking at our costs without considering the future would not make sense. Of course, many of you do not know about these other projects which is why I decided to write about them here.

-Quality Content: Running multiple blogs as well as niche sites and others is a challenge even for a creative brain like Mike. There are only so many hours in each day right? Having someone like MD who can write quality content that is interesting is certainly worth the investment for us.

-VA’s: As Mike has written about, we have 2 VAs (one full time!) and they are able to help us in so many different ways. Not only do they help us by managing things that we’d have to do for us to focus on specific projects but they are also able to do research for our projects, to manage specific tasks, etc. Running our growing business without them would be unthinkable without quitting our day jobs.

As you can see, it’s easy to draw conclusions from our costs and perhaps even question our profitability. I prefer to see it in another way. We are reinvesting, in the smartest way we can, pouring profits back into the company. If our revenues double in the coming months, you can expect costs to follow a similar pattern. That would translate into more and bigger projects of course. Why would we take in an extra few thousand now if those can translate into thousands more paid every year by reinvesting them into the business. Honestly, what stock or financial investment could possibly return more than our reinvestments into our online company? If you know of one, let us know.

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