About a year ago, I wrote my company long term plan. This post was divided in 4 sections according to a time horizon (1, 3, 5 and 10 years out). Since I’m a financial planner, I know a thing or two about effective planning. Plans do change in time and most plans are not realized as forecasted. But the power behind a plan is in revision and adjustments. If you don’t go back to your initial plan and look at where you have been, where you are at right now and realize the difference from the plan you have, then your plan has been worthless. It is darn important to follow-up. Not because you need to stick to your plan but to understand what went well or went wrong and what you can do to move forward.

I’m also a big fan of commitment. There is no point talking about something if it’s just to write it on a blog to be forgotten. This is why today I’m reviewing what was written a year ago.

1 Year From Now… It’s Today!

Last year, I wanted to accomplish several things in this company during the short span of 12 months:

-          10 niches sites up and running

-          2 sites (besides blogs) up and running

-          Make over 10K/month (I made $10,514 in May 2011)

-          Have 4 eBooks for sale

My goals were pretty ambitious and several things went sideways during the last year. We went “all-in” without a true direction. We didn’t have a huge plan. In fact, we just had goals… I must say that I’m somewhat disappointed with where we are at today when I look at my aspirations of a year ago. But, nothing is all gloom and doom.

We do have some serious niche sites running and generating over $350/month now. We do have our 10 niche sites but they are not as big as we thought they would be 12 months later. We were expecting these 10 sites to make $100/month each in orderto  generate $1000/month from this part of this business. I actually think that we will make it, but it’s harder than we thought. Our latest sites are well built and make a the bulk of our niche site income. Here are our 4 biggest niche sites (all generating over $40/month):

Canadian Dividend Stock

What is Dividend

EMT Classes

Home Security System

The “2” big sites are still under construction. This is probably our biggest “failure” as we didn’t make enough time to have them fly. On the other hand, it gave us the time to create a super nice structure around them. Both designs are done and the sites are live right now. However, we are still working on the content before officially launching them. The only advantage I see is that they are already getting search engine authority since they are live and updated regularly. We expect to launch both sites by the end of Q3.

When we wanted to make $10K/month on a regular basis, we were already “almost” there last year. But now, I can say that it’s great success. Even if we are currently decreasing our number of private ads, we have compensated those losses by bigger Adsense income and affiliate marketing. After 4 months of operation, I can say that I’m confident we’ll make over $120K in gross income for 2012.

eBooks… ish… do I really have to talk about this one? You know how my 2^nd eBook launch went (read here if you don’t!) but we are not discouraged. In fact, we learned a lot and tried something else recently with some good success (more details here). Our current project is a 2 version eBook on dividend investing (Canadian and US). Both books are completed and have been sent for editing/formatting and we will also have a complete site built for us for this launch. I expect to sell over 300 copies in 2012. It’s pretty ambitious but it will also be confirmation that I have (or haven’t!) learned from my past experience and that I can create, market and sell a great product! With an investing newsletter over 5,500 members strong, I’m confident that 5% of them will buy my book. The rest will come from an affiliate program and other referrals. So maybe I’ll be able to say “mission accomplished!” in 6 months .

What’s up with the 2014 plan?

I wrote that I was expecting the company to use leverage again to buy another site in the 3 years to come. Well, this happened faster that we thought! We actually made our big purchase about 3 months ago. While we are still integrating these sites into our network, I can say that the investment return is already showing. Our company currently owes around $82K in total. Yup, you read it right… 82K in debt! But this debt is dropping by 3K a month since February. We have put in place an aggressive debt reduction plan. In 27 months, we will be debt free and running a highly profitable business. OR…. we will be leveraged again and be making a lot more money .

Our second project for 2014 is to offer membership websites or other kinds of paid services. Well this will probably happen in 2013! The funny thing about our first 12 month plan is that it was tossed away by several other “opportunities”. This is why we started working on different projects instead on focusing on what we thought was important. So we already know what our membership product will be, how we will manage it and the platform / design has already been purchased. So all we need is manpower to generate content and setup the launch (this is already being put into place). To be honest, as soon as we can launch our eBooks and finish our 2 major websites, we are starting to work “full time” on this project: Canadian Aristocrats They Have it Too.

The main goal will be to make over 20K/month in 2014. As we are currently generating slightly over 10K/month, this is a 100% increase in 2 years. There is still a lot of work left but if everything that we launch works, I don’t see why we couldn’t achieve it. Worse comes to worst, we just have to buy 10 sites that make 1K/month over the next 2 years… lol!

2016 Plan

In 2016, I’ll be 35. I already wrote that my windows of opportunity will start to shrink after this countdown. This is why the current 5 years are crucial for me, my company and my pockets!! The big plan is to show a $1M net worth for my 35^th birthday. I’m now focusing on paying off my debts and both my investments and home will increase in value. However, we all know that if I show $1M in net worth at 35, the bulk of my assets will be my company. I’ve already mentioned that I would need my company to be worth 864K to become a millionaire by 35. This is roughly a 20% annualized revenue growth. It is still quite a challenge (now that we have to survive Google once again!) but I don’t think it’s impossible.

I mentioned on this blog that 2012 will be a “do or die” year for our company and this is really the case.

If our niche sites don’t grow and generate $1K/month by the end of the year,

If our 2 big sites are not generating money by the end of the year,

If I don’t sell 300 copies of my new eBooks,

If I can’t sell membership subscriptions to my new sites in 2013,

I won’t be able to bring this great sideline to the level of a great company.

What I like to see is I’m not too far away from my 12 month projections. While this is definitely not where I thought I would be on many points, I’ve also developed other projects and already bought 2 great websites (which wasn’t in the short term plan).

So I’m now ready to crush the rest of 2012 and boost my monthly income to $15,000 by the end of this year!

Readers, when is the last time you wrote a plan and looked back at it? How did it go?

image credit

If you liked this articles, you might want to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

Related Post

WARNING: this will be the longest post you will read today (maybe the only one!)

Yesterday, I was talking about bloggers who put their blog up for sale and shouldn’t.  They shouldn’t do it right now because it is a very bad market. If they would have sold 3 months ago, I guess they would have made 50% more than what they can make today. This is a huge difference. So instead of selling, there are a number of things you can do in order to build a better blog and create a true sustainable source of income. The following is my own ultimate list of everything I have tried successfully so far on my various blogs that had a real impact.

1. Rethink Your Design

I’ve had 3 different designs on TFB so far and this one is the one I like the most. It’s important to rethink your design to put strategic elements in place. I’m not talking about the color or the logo, that is a question of personal taste (mind you, I LOVE my logo J ). I’m talking about the first impression you want to leave with a new reader. You have about 5 seconds to make your first impression on the web before a visitor decides if he will stay on your page or not.

Real impact: The main goal with my new design was to get more readers to come back. This is why the first 2 things you see on the right are my RSS subscriber button and my newsletter sign-up. I also removed the Adsense block above the fold. In fact, I eliminated all advertising above the fold. The only thing people get when they land on TFB is content. This was my main objective.

2. Get a Newsletter Started

I won’t lie to you; a newsletter is a lot of work. It is a lot of work on top of your actual blogging routine. But by putting the best content in there, you are assured of keeping a very high and loyal readership. I don’t send the “best of my blog” or “most commented articles” in there because I think it would bore most of my readers. Instead, I focus on writing awesome and useful content for bloggers who wants to make more money with their blog. It’s up to you to find what you want to talk about in your newsletter. Find a topic that you like and narrow it down. It’s important that you clearly define what your newsletter is about. You don’t want to simply create an extension to your blog. You want to create a separate medium for people that will actually follow your advice and trust you.

Real impact: since I’ve added the focus on my newsletters, I’ve been growing the subscriber list steadily (here’s an example of how many subscribers I can get). I used several techniques to grow my readership such as offering a freebie (eBook), using contests, writing series on my blog and finishing with exclusive content available only through my newsletter, making my sign-up block obvious, etc. you need to plug your newsletter as often as you can. This is how you can get many sign-ups!

3. Wrap-up an eBook

I just told you that offering a free eBook is an awesome strategy to gain new readers, right? Well the next thing you must do is actually write one! But you don’t have to write that much. You can actually use your existing content and package it well. This is definitely far from being the idea of the year (many people have done it before me) but it works darn well! Just look at my 3 different results from my eBook experience and you’ll notice how well an eBook created from existing content can work. The thing is that nobody reads your archives… so nobody will notice that you are using your old stuff!

Real impact: To be truly honest, about half of what has been written in the Dividend Investing eBook was already written on either The Dividend Guy Blog or The Financial Blogger! I just repackaged everything, wrote an introduction, conclusion and added a little bit of meat in between. Once everything had been copied/pasted, I just had to rewrite some parts to make it more coherent. But the hard work was already done J. You can even sell your “new” eBook! It’s much easier for people to buy your book than going through your archives and reading everything you have written. You basically sell the packaging and not really the content!

4. Make a Short List of Bloggers in Your Industry

If you want to grow within your niche, you need allies. This is why it is important to make a short list of bloggers that evolve in your industry. Try to narrow it down to 5 blogs that share the same passion and write about the same topic. For example, I would not combine The Financial Blogger with a frugal blog. This is just too different! By forming a small group, you can interact with them, write guest posts, comments and eventually swap a part of your readership. This is a great way to make new friends and to grow your blog. Try to concentrate on a few relations instead of going at large and comment on 25 different blogs. It’s like in the real world; are you closer to 5 of your best friends or to 25 of your “best friends”?

Real Impact: I have my own list of buddies online where I chat with them once in a while. It’s important for me to stay connected to them as we can help each other while having a good laugh!

5. Make a Short List of Bloggers Out of Your Industry

While knowing bloggers in your industry is essential if you want to grow and establish yourself, knowing bloggers outside of your industry is an awesome asset that most people neglect. They think that because you don’t write about the same topics that you can’t help each other. But this is totally the opposite: you can get an outside perspective of your work. Most people that evolve in the same industry will share a similar background, operate a similar scheme and will think alike. If you talk to people from another industry, you will get more “outside of the box” ideas for your own stuff.

Real Impact: I’m currently working with people outside the PF blog industry to launch my next eBook. My goal was to get ideas other than what I have seen and talked about with PF bloggers. So far, I’m getting a lot of alternative options to problems I’ve encountered since my first eBook creation.

6. Create a Group Project

Once you have built a great relationship with several bloggers, you can then start a group project. Group projects are awesome because they provide back links (which is good for search engine traffic), it gives free promotions (which is good to gain more readership) and provides an awesome perspective on a specific topic. The purpose of a group project is to have several bloggers talking about the same topic and linking to each other. This is how you can send and receive a lot of traffic.

Real Impact: I could talk about my own projects but the most impressive project I’ve seen was the ROTH IRA Movement  by Good Financial Cents. This project created such a hype that Jeff shows all time record traffic stats since then!

7. Become an Active Part of a Forum

When you become an active participant in a forum, you automatically gain a lot of credibility and authority. This is where you can make a lot of good friends and find help quickly. If you have time, it definitely worth it to connect with other bloggers in a forum. However, be sure that you truly contribute to the discussion by adding a point of view, information or by helping others on the forum. Commenting for commenting is not very useful.

Real Impact: I must admit that forums are part of my flaws. I’m very limited in terms of time and often skip this part of my routine. However, each time I do a “blast” of comments, I see an immediate impact on my blog (visits, comments, personal emails, etc). This is always a fun way to connect with others!

8. Write 1 Epic Post Per Week

On TFB, I’m trying to write 1 epic post per week. I’m not always able to do it but I always keep this as a goal. You can think that writing a post like the one you are reading right now takes a lot of time. I can’t fit this in my regular “30 minutes/article” schedule. I need a good hour to write such content but it totally worth it! I just need to get into a great groove of inspiration!

Real Impact: I’ve noticed that I get a lot of traffic and links back to such articles. Other bloggers appreciate these long articles and make sure their readers are aware of them as well. I also notice more newsletter subscribers on days that I publish them.

9. Write Less But More

Several blogs operate on a 1 post per workday schedule. This is the “classic” model for most blogs. However, this is a burnout model in my opinion! I can write 5-6 articles per week because I write them on 3-4 different blogs talking about different topics each time. I would definitely not be able to write 6 articles a week on dividend investing for example! This is why it is important to slow down your number of posts (ideally to 2 or 3 a week) but write longer articles with more insight, more info and more punch. 500 words articles don’t make the cut on TFB anymore. I try to have them near 1,000 words all the time.

Real Impact: I’ve clearly increased the number of subscribers, pages viewed and average length on TFB since I’ve moved to this model. Since people read less articles from me in a week, they can digest longer articles.

10. Narrow Your Readership

Now that I cover several blogs at the same time, I’m able to write about everything I want but on different blogs. If you try to cover 15 topics, you might lose a lot of readers and the one you keep are not necessarily always appreciating what you write about. My largest audience is on TFB because it is still a combination of my passion for entrepreneurship through my online adventure along with the distraction of my personal finance and thoughts on many topics.

Real Impact: When I made the official switch towards my “online adventure” on TFB, I was expecting to lose readers at first. The fact is that I did lose a few readers but I gained more so I never felt the claw back of my decision.  People that now read TFB know that I’ll be talking a lot about how I run my business and will get a few articles about my own personal situation once in a while. However, all my thoughts on general personal finance or investing have been moved to other blogs I author.

11. Get a Tag Line

I first thought that having a tag line was a marketing trick at first. I didn’t think it would be that important. However, over time, I’ve realized that a simple tag line is a lot more than a marketing hook. It should reflect your blog, it should be your mission, your unique selling proposition. Mine is “Making 6 Figure Income, Working 4 days a Week”. This means that I focus on making more money while working less. This is exactly what this blog is about!

Real impact: since I have had a defined tag line, it became a lot easier for me to know what to write about. I simply write about what my tag line says! This helps retain readers and connect with them. I’ve completely thrown away the idea of gaining as many readers as possible. I’m now focusing on gaining readers that see the world as I see it so they can laugh when I think it’s funny and they can be upset when I’m frustrated J.

12. Attach Your Reader

When I wrote about sustainability yesterday, I mention how important it is to be more independent from Google. While you definitely need search engines to get traffic to your site, it’s important to find a way to retain these new readers and make them regular visitors. These folks won’t be clicking on your Adsense but they will surely be interested in your affiliate products! On top of that, these are your best ambassadors! They will talk about your blog to their friends and family and this is how you can get more readers outside of Google!

Real Impact: I get about 250 direct hits/day on some of my sites. These hits are from people who go directly to my blog to read what I’ve written on that day. I receive emails from people telling me that they talk about my blog each week and I send them over to my newsletter landing page to sign-up! Writing great content, offering a newsletter, eBooks and writing series on specific topics are all tricks that help to attach your reader to your blog. Stop writing about a review of this or that and hoping to make an affiliate sale. Write with your gut and tell the world what you truly think! Write about your passions and your motivations.

In the end, if you don’t write about your passion, I think you should just quit. But if you like something enough to write about it each week, I think that going through this list will definitely make your blog a better place and will ultimately help you to make more money!

image credit

image credit #2

If you liked this articles, you might want to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

Related Post

Not more than a month ago, Google struck again.

After the terrible Panda Update, they came back like heathens to finish their massacre after they already set fire everywhere around the web. I called it the PR Slap. Over a span of 12 months, we bloggers, had to face 2 major events with direct impacts on our traffic and revenues. Even though the last event happened about a month ago, I can tell you that since then, a lot of things have changed already.

I don’t publish my income report anymore.

Some sites have been delisted from search engines.

People have lost tons of money.

There is a witch hunt going on.

Let’s just say that I’ve seen better days in the blogosphere…

Blog for Sale

I guess this was inevitable… that at some point, one might think that he has enough to fight back all the time. That it was so hard to survive this second wave that the best solution was simply to sell while you still have traffic and income to show. For the past month and a half, there are tons of blogs for sale in the PF industry.

Oh… you were not thinking that I was selling TFB right? I’m here to stay and this business is my playground. I just have too much fun running this business to quit just yet J.

But I now receive at least two emails a week from bloggers who’s considering selling. While I’ve spent a good 9 months looking for a blog to buy, I could have bought 8 blogs in the last month! And I could have bought them at a fairly cheap price (so much for my blog valuation series!).

Why are all these blogs for sale all of a sudden? Because the easy money is gone. Over the past 2 years, I’ve been quite surprised to see how people were able to make tons of money from their personal finance blogs without investing much effort. In a few months, several people became “kingpins” of the web and thought they finally found the hen laying the golden eggs! Most people didn’t understand my urge for diversification and interests in other business models. They thought of keeping things simple and raking in the money while it lasts. Can you blame them? Hell no! They have been doing very well and were able to cash in while most people can’t figure how to get a 5% raise at work. But unfortunately, they were not business owners, they were just there at the right time doing the right things without thinking about tomorrow.

The Magic Word is Sustainability

I’ve discussed how I survived Google already so I won’t be rehashing the same thing here.  I really want to put the emphasis on one word: sustainability. This is the key for any business regardless of which field you work in. Is your model sustainable?

What is Sustainability Anyway?

The sustainability of a business model is hard to see for the one who operates it. Why? He wants to see sustainability everywhere. When a human being makes money, he surely doesn’t want to hear that he won’t continue in the future. In order to see if your model is sustainable, you need to take a step back, take a pause, and look at your business with a different eye. Here’s an example with my site:

Is my Traffic is Sustainable?

One of the most important things for a website… no… the most important thing for any website is its traffic. A Blog is not a Blog without readers and a business is not a business without customers.  The sustainability of our traffic was challenged last year during the Panda update. This is when we realized that we were greatly dependent on Google (who isn’t?). Like everybody else, we didn’t want to hear about it before being hit. We just thought that it was sustainable . But we got hit and we had to find other ways to grow our traffic. This is why we have built our newsletter and strong network relations among bloggers.

If Google would drop my search engine visits by 50% today, I would still have a website. I can drive quite a lot of traffic toward my sites with my 7,000+ newsletter subscribers across my network. I have several websites hosted on different servers aimed at different keywords and topics. This diversification makes my search engine traffic more sustainable as a whole too. So today, I can tell you that my traffic is sustainable.

Is my Income Sustainable?

I’ve discussed many times that private advertising might not be sustainable over the long run. We now have a clear example that it’s not. While I have temporarily stopped my income updates, I think I will continue to post my affiliate and Adsense income starting in May. This is actually 2 sustainable sources of income. Adsense is probably the most uncertain source of income after private advertising because you never know when Google is going to change the game with that. Since the system is working and Google makes a lot of money with it, we can assume that it will continue to work over the years to come. In the event that this doesn’t work anymore, I have other options that I haven’t explored yet (such as Media.net or Investing Channel). I guess that if I work hard enough, I could be able to replace Adsense.

The affiliate programs are probably the most reliable source of income. Since you only make money when you sell a product, the company pays you only when they make money too. This is a match made in heaven! The fact that I run a lot of affiliate programs at the same time will guarantee me a minimum income every month.

In order to improve the sustainability of my income, we are developing several other projects at the moment. By offering our own products, we won’t depend on anybody else in order to make money from our websites. And I think this is how you can truly become sustainable.

Is Buying Blogs Sustainable?

The core of our business model is based on buying blogs, optimize them and make twice what the previous owner used to make with them. We have been quite successful and our business has never stopped growing over the past 3 years. Is buying blogs still sustainable since the market is evolving so fast?

The answer is definitely yes.

The rules have changed and will change again. But when you are buying a good asset, there is no reason why you should not be able to make money from it. The key is when you buy and not when you operate or sell it! As long as you have great diversification across your network, adding a new site will always be a good move.

I told you that I’ve received several requests to buy bloggers’ sites. To be honest, I would have not probably bought more than one out of the whole group. Why? They were all based mostly on the very same model. A business model that is not sustainable and where there is a lot work required to switch it to a more appreciable model.

If you are one of these bloggers who wants to sell after the debacle, I suggest you keep your site and modify it. You definitely have something great within your grasp but most people, like me, won’t make an offer because there is a lot of work involved. This doesn’t mean that you can’t make it. Actually, since you are the owner of this blog, you are the best person to make it happen… again!

Tomorrow, I’ll come back with a list of To do’s to revamp your blog and make it more sustainable.

image credit

If you liked this articles, you might want to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

Related Post

Last week, I wrote a complete article on how to survive Google. This article was inspired by the huge PR slap that happened about 2 weeks ago. Last week, there was another Panda update (about 5 times smaller than those previous according to Matt Cutt). Call it luck, call it diversification or call it simply having a lot of sites with a lot of authority; I wasn’t affected at all by either updates by Google. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t have to react.

Don’t Wait, Take Action

I’ve been quite busy for the past 2 weeks with email from bloggers who have been hit and looking for answers. I’ve tried to help them to the best of my knowledge, but even then, there are a lot of mysteries that only the Googlers know. All these bloggers have one thing in common: they will all take action to improve their situation.

Some of them will fall, others will recover what they have recently lost and a handful of them will crank up their blog to a level they had never attained. Regardless of their results one year from now; they will all take actions and try to improve their blog.

For the rest of us that haven’t been affected, my guess is that most of us will stay relaxed and keep raking in the money we are used to making. We weren’t affected; we must be sheltered from bad luck. Not me. This time, I won’t wait to take action. These recent events should be a wake-up call for all of us; regardless if you were hit or not.

What’s up With the Wake-up Call?

Over the past 2 weeks, we just got a clear signal that the business is changing, once again. You have 2 options; you either ignore the change and still feel lucky or you go back to the drawing board and evolve your business model.

The recent events are clearly aimed at people who had a business model based on private advertising. We all know that; Google doesn’t like ads besides their own Adsense. Call it a greedy way to exercise their monopoly or simply a clever marketing technique, the facts won’t change. So if your business model relies on this premise, you should continue reading this post because if you don’t evolve, you will get hurt sooner or later.

Changing my Business Model

I can’t obviously remove all my private ads tomorrow morning and say good bye to half of my online income in a single day. I have contracts to must honor and am not ready to cut out such a huge part of my online income. However, it doesn’t mean that I’m going to continue the way I do. I have established a clear plan on how to reduce our private ads to the minimum while increasing our other sources of income. The key is to find ways to increase our revenues and each time we succeed, we will reduce a part of our private ads.

Looking at my Strengths

Improving your income from various sources is easier said than done! In order for me to achieve this immense task, I have to look at the strengths of my network and convert them into higher revenues.

My #1 strength is definitely my traffic

Across our network we are on our way to hitting 500,000 pages viewed per month. It is well diversified across several websites and is proven to be quite stable over time. What does page views mean when you think about revenue?

-          CPM ads opportunities

-          More chances to hook a new visitor via RSS or newsletter subscription

-          More chances to get Adsense clicks (or similar ad network)

-          More chances to sell products (via affiliates or our own products)

What can be done: I’ve never looked too much at CPM ads so far. They seem to pay a very small payout and didn’t want to bother registering for them to try them out. This is obviously changing upon the recent events! I’m actually going to look at some of the big ad industries such as:

BlogHer (I have some sites dedicated to women )

Ads-daq Ad Exchange

Value Click

Casale Media

Burst Media

Advertising.com

Right Media

Tribal Fusion

Then, I’m going to modify some site designs to increase the presence of my RSS subscription button along with creating freebies to increase my newsletter subscriptions (read my series on building a newsletter). The more loyal readers you get, the more traffic you can generate without Google. I’ve successfully done this with some of my sites after the first Panda update and am now more independent in terms of traffic.

My #2 strength is the number of subscribers.

I’m already good at getting new readers from my traffic. Over the years, I’ve built a solid readership through my RSS feed and newsletter. I’ve only started to monetize this aspect of my blog in 2011. This has been done through a lot of trial and error work but I can see that I’m gradually improving my skills to generate money with loyal readers without upsetting them with too many ads.

I guess the trick is simply to offer useful products/services that I use. Instead of writing boring reviews, I’ve decided to show readers how I benefit from using X & Y products. I have some consistent sales from my article on how to use Market Samurai where I show exactly how I do my own keyword research. I just need to do a lot more articles that do this. They are usually longer and harder articles to write because it requires more research and the time to structure the post. You can’t just go and write whatever crosses your mind!

What can be done: I’ll be looking at doing more post series or email funnels (you have to register for my newsletter to understand how I create email funnels) on what products I use across my sites. I also need to be as specific as possible. Most affiliate products are highly competitive and narrowing my topics will be a great way to get interest from both existing readers and search engines visitors. It’s not like I could rank for a “0%APR balance transfer credit card” within a few months! By being very specific, you also increase the likelihood of not bothering your loyal readers as you will talk about products that can really help them.

My #3 Strength is the size of my archives

I have an incredible amount of articles in my archives. Across my network, I probably have over 5,000 articles written (TFB alone has almost 1,500 articles!). This is a huge database that is sleeping for the most part. Over the past 6 years, I’ve covered a surprisingly wide range of topics and know that a lot of this stuff could be read again today by new readers. I guess that one of my strengths is to write timeless articles. I know there is a lot of money that can be made from my archives.

What can be done: This is probably where a lot of work can be done to earn a lot more money as I’ve never worked too much on my old posts. Here are a few things that I can do:

#1 SEO: This is obvious and cliché. However, if I really go back to older posts that already get some SE traction; I can see exactly how they rank for which keywords with Market Samurai and optimize them accordingly. I will change the title and subtitles to reflect this keyword along with rephrasing a few lines to include synonyms and make the article more keyword rich. This will help me to improve my Adsense stats.

#2 Affiliate Research: I haven’t done many affiliate links in my early days (I was too busy doing private advertising, lol!). By going back to my archive, I’m sure I can find a lot of articles that are talking about great products and include affiliate links in them. What I like about affiliate links is that I can make money in a passive way once the link is up!

#3 Use my archives to create products: I’ve seen this from other sites and it seems to work well. In fact, I first tried to package a part of my archives from one of my smaller sites to make an eBook out of it. Believe it or not but with less than 500 visitors a month, I’m making about $30/month with the eBook for the past 4 months. It’s not a huge amount of money, but it’s a very small niche site a well. I figure that if I can replicate this model on one of my sites that has over 25,000 visitors/month, I should make a lot more! I will also use my archives to create free products in order to increase the number of subscribers .

What are YOUR strengths?

I have given you a few examples of how I intend to move my business model towards my strengths and make as much or even more money that I am making right now. Have you thoughts of your strengths and how you can make money with them? With the current change in the business, I think it’s time for you to look at this aspect, don’t you think?

If you liked this articles, you might want to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

Related Post

It’s been a little bit more than a year since I started declaring my online income. The idea behind that successful series was to share how I’m able to make money online and to help you to do the same. As you can see, it’s been over a year that I have been disclosing a lot of interesting information about how you can improve your blog or websites and make a side business out of it. I’m pretty open about my sites and actually pretty open about my personal situation as well. Each month, I disclose my net worth and each year, I do a total income summary.

Why Money is Such a Taboo?

I have never understood why money is the biggest taboo ever. You could almost have a sex discussion at work during lunch time but it is strictly forbidden to share your salary with your co-workers. During parties with friends and family, people are almost shy to tell how much they paid for their new car or how much it cost renovated their house, etc. Why can’t we talk about money as we talk about anything else?

I’m a very open person. I’m sharing everything on my blog, but I’m also sharing everything in real life. When someone asks me how much I make per year or how much I paid for something. I tell them upfront. I don’t see the problem with it. It’s not like I’ve been stealing money! But then again, people are surprised to see how open I can be. To me, it’s just a matter of offering the right information to the right question. What’s the point of giving a vague answer? What does it matter to you if I make 20K, 200K or 2M$ a year? It doesn’t affect your life, so why would you care so much?

Because People are Evil and Jealous

I have faith in human beings. In fact, you can tell that I’m a bit naïve. I think that people can be good. In fact, I expect people to be good and hope the best for others around me. Unfortunately, I am regularly with regards to this premise. Over time, I’ve found that some people are evil and jealous. If you make money or are successful in something and you tell people, most people that truly like you will be happy. However, a handful of people will hate and envy you. These people, as little as the number can be, can hurt you big time. It seems that because they haven’t made it, they must drag everybody down to their level.

And This is Why I’ll Shut my Mouth from Now On

Yeah… I know, it’s pretty sad. While I’m trying to help people and give them hope, I’m under the impression that I could be attacked. I’ve seen a lot of weird things happening lately in the PF blogosphere (it is not a coincidence that I’ve wrote how to survive Google last week!).

I haven’t seen any backlash on my site but I will certainly not wait until it happens. This business is one of my true passions in life and I don’t want to see it destroyed by a few evil doers. I’ll keep reporting my net worth because there is nothing to attack on this one (I’m not rich anyways!) but I might stop the day that I become richer… it’s crazy isn’t?

I’ll do Things Differently

I’m still going to be pretty open about a lot of things that I do (so don’t cancel my blog yet ). However, I’ll become more cautious about getting specific on the sites I own and how much money I make. My monthly income report will be transformed into an “empire update” where I’ll do a round-up of what goes well and what doesn’t and about my upcoming projects. Unfortunately, there will be a few blank spaces here and there as I can’t take the risk to see my business going bust because of evilness in the world.

What do you think of all this? Have you regretted disclosing personal information with regards to your income or net worth?

I’m still shocked… now it’s time to go back to the drawing board… once again!

If you liked this articles, you might want to sign for my FULL RSS FEEDS. Then, you will get my daily post to your email and can read it at any time. To subscribe CLICK HERE

Related Post