“IF YOU’RE PUTTING IN 200% EFFORT AND SEEING A 10% RETURN, IT ISN’T A BUSINESS YOU’RE RUNNING. YOU’RE RUNNING THE TITANIC.” - Everett Bogue

Mike (TFB) Editorial not on this post:

“Before Martin wrote this 2 part articles, we had a great discussion. I didn’t change anything from his 2 articles but I don’t necessarily agree with him on everything he wrote. This is why I have decided to publish his 2 articles and reply later on this month with my own perception of the perspective of making money online. I’m looking forward to read your thoughts!”

Do you want to become a full-time Blogger? If you do then you NEED to read this article from top to bottom. It’s time to give everyone a reality check.I’ve never written a post upset before because I’m always in a good mood. I love to blog and to help others. Today I’m in an unusual mood. Let’s see how this goes.

Alright so if you’re a blogger you likely want to blog full-time. I know how it works. Pro Bloggers sell the dream. You can work from home and do whatever you want. You can work any hours that you want. [Correction: Working from home means you can work any 18 hours of the day that you choose.]

Did you go to FINCON11 this year? If you did, how motivated were you? How excited were you to be more EPIC? How much more PASSIONATE did you feel? Likely very. What have you done since then? It has been a month. You probably did a roundup of the event and bragged about how many people you met. Good for you. Do you think your readers care? Nope. Are you any closer to becoming a full-time blogger? I can tell you what you want to hear or I can be honest with you. The answer is NO.

Let’s get started with my story…

“I hate losing even more than I like winning.” – Moneyball, a great movie.

My first hardcore product launch.

I finally launched my first premium product over at Studenomics. I had a soft launch over at Passive Income Now with my real estate guide in the summer. I sold a few copies and it was a cool learning experience. From there I decided to consume every piece of literature on the internet on how to launch an eBook. I paid $97 for the, “How to Launch The **** Out of Your eBook” guide.

I worked on this product all summer. I spent all of my free time on research (because real guides need real research), and learning to improve my writing style.

How much did I invest in creating my own product? Let’s look at the costs.

• $97 in eBook.
• $400 in the design.
• Time to write the book (many months).
• Time to write the sales page (3,000 words took many hours).
• Time to write 8 guest posts.
• Ridiculous amount of time to promote the eBook via email, forums, and Twitter.

What did I earn? How much money did I generate from this super helpful guide?

I was conservative with my estimates. I couldn’t sleep the week before the launch. The night before I went to bed an hour before the launch. As I was settling in for the night I wrote on my planner a conservative figure of 20 book sales. I figured that between 8 guest posts on popular blogs, Twitter followers, and my 1,400 RSS subscribers, I would EASILY sell 20. I woke up and realized that I had like 15 emails in my inbox. I was excited because I thought this was e-junkie notifying me of all of my sales. Whooooo! Nope just the usual crap from guest posters offering me a 300 word post. Get a life!

How many sales did I get? ZERO. Well to be specific it’s in the negatives as you can tell from my start up costs.

You see the problem is that bloggers love to write a transparency report when they succeed at something. When we were in grade two this was known as BRAGGING. Nobody ever sees the other side. I’m here to give it to you.

My friend I do NOT like to lose. Nor do I like to fail. Do you know what I hate the most? I hate to let my supporters down. This project was the first time that I got my girlfriend, friends, and family involved. I had friends proof read the guide. I had my girlfriend read it over, help me out with the sales page, and give me support. To be more specific, I don’t know how she put up with me all month. I spent every single moment jotting down notes or busting out my laptop to get some work done. Let’s just say that sometimes great ideas hit me at the WORST time.

All week after the launch my friends have been excited calling me to ask me how many copies I sold. They wanted to know if it was 20 or 30? It was ZERO. Do you know how embarrassing that is? One friend asked if I was a millionaire yet because he knows how hard I worked on this project. I’m sort of avoiding him because I don’t like the disappointed look that’s followed by a “better luck next time” bullshit line. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m 23 and on top of the world.

Before you give me your expert advice…

I bough the $97 eBook on “How to Launch The **** Out of Your eBook” and I downloaded like 20 workshops that the author made available. I went over everything with such great detail.

I consumed every piece of information on the topic from CopyBlogger, I went through all of Ramit Sethi’s psychology links he has bookmarked, and my girlfriend gave me her psychology tips from years of studies.

My product was based on extensive research. I went through every reader email and comment to see what common questions were. I didn’t just launch some random project that I thought was cool.

Long story short, I did my research.

A little about myself…

I don’t play for second place. I don’t feel sorry for myself.

I’m not some person that got in debt $30,000 because I couldn’t resist buying stupid shit on my credit card. I finished college. I got my degree. I didn’t drop out to “follow my passions” or to “channel my creative energy.” I hustled. Worked full-time hours, blogged all of the time, and studied my ass off to get strong grades. I didn’t get poor grades and then turn around to blame the system.

I bought a condo when I was in college when it was still in pre-construction. It was in an up and coming area. I saw potential and more importantly, I saw dollar signs.

Well it has gone up over $100,000! Now I bought a second condo. I rent out my first unit for $1,400 a month. I get to travel and do cool shit.

I also worked full-time hours every year of college. I was able to earn over $40,000 while I studied and went down south a few times a year to party hard while other people complained about the economy and sat around on Facebook stalking girls that they had no chance with.

I don’t like to lose and I don’t want to be apart of something that sucks.

I consumed everything..

I swear to you I have consumed every piece of material on working for yourself and following your passions.

What books did I read on the topic of entrepreneurship?

• Never Eat Alone.
• Art of Non-Conformity.
• 4-Hour Workweek.
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
• Career Renegade.
• Escape From Cubicle Nation.
• Crush it!

I didn’t stop with books. I took all of these online courses. I paid for:

1. Earn1k with Ramit Sethi
2. The Hustle Project with Adam Baker and Corbett Barr.

I’ve read everything out there on working for yourself because I’m very excited with the idea of working on my own projects and helping people. I now realize that it’s more realistic to get a real fucking job.

Selling the dream..

Everybody wants to follow their passions and read the next guide on how you can follow your passions. We all want to be “our own boss” and work on our own terms.

There’s a reason that Pat Flynn makes more in one month than most of us will make in a year from blogging. He sells the dream. We sign up for his affiliate links and he continues to live the dream while we work full-time jobs and walk around like zombies because we were up all night blogging.

Why won’t anyone else give you this reality check? Because then they wouldn’t be able to sell their consulting services to you or to push affiliates on you.

Pat Flynn made $12,600 from Bluehost on readers in September. The dream is being sold and we are all buying it.

[FYI, this is not an attack. I love Smart Passive Income and continue to read it on a daily basis. Actually it's my favorite blog. Whenever Pat releases a premium product I will be the FIRST person to buy it. It can be ANYTHING. I would purchase sand on the beach from Pat because he deserves every penny. I'm just saying that we need to take action instead of chasing dreams that are unrealistic.]

 Making money online.

I tried every strategy for making money with blogging. In three years you can really test everything out. Three years is a lot of time to see what works and what doesn’t work.

Google Adsense.

It’s sort of tough to rank high for any decent keywords. Plus I want to help my real readers instead of worrying on some random keywords. I usually make the monthly payout for Adsense. My record month was close to $400, nothing compared to others.

Affiliates.

How many credit cards or bank accounts can you promote? I’ve had good results with affiliates and plan on pushing more credit card offers because it seems that my readers would rather sign up for credit cards than learn how to conquer their credit. More credit card offers it is!

Creating products.

Well you know how that went…

Funny story, one day a reader emailed me to tell me that he loves my blog. Then he asked me why I even bothered with it. We got on the phone and he told me how he makes thousands per month from promoting credit cards and creating niche sites. He said he loves the idea of writing for readers but doesn’t get it. I didn’t want to get blinded by the dollars since you know, “follow your passions and the money will follow.”

I told him that I love to help people. I guess people don’t love my help.

Stay tuned…

Thanks for reading this far. Please do NOT leave any motivational quotes or anything like that. I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me.

I’m nowhere close be to being done my friends. I got a lot left to say. I hope you join me next week. What can you expect next week?

• Tips on what you can do to make money online.
• Lessons learned.
• A few more lethal doses of reality.
• Another 2,000 words or so that you need to read.

In the mean time you can BUY A COPY of my premium guide on how you can Completely Conquer Credit. It doesn’t show you how to follow your passions or how to set epic goals. It WILL save you thousands of dollars in your 20s. This is money that you can spend on following your passions eCourses.

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I’ll be honest with you, the month of October has been life changing for me. It all started at the Fincon11 in Chicago at the beginning of the month. What’s weird about this, these kind of conferences usually create a great buzz and give you some motivation to keep going forward but it all fades pretty fast. So most people get back home with tons of great intentions that eventually become… nothing because you are too busy watching Dr House . But this time, it was different for me as I did something most people don’t do when they come back from a conference.

I took action

The first action I took was to improve my level of writing on TFB. I hope that you have noticed a difference as I take twice the time I used to when writing a post. They are longer, offer more insightful information and are meant to be more useful. Each time I write, I make sure that you can actually get something out of the post (such as my private advertiser management series). I don’t write just because it is Tuesday anymore .

The second action I did was to take adsense off the TFB posts. You will still see some adsense blocks in the side bar and on a few very old pages (that earn me the lion share of adsense revenue ). The reason why I wanted to lose money on purpose was to gain more readers. I want to have my top screen clean of ads as I want to make sure that new visitors want to hang around and read more than one post. So far, it is going great as my newsletter subscribers have increased ;-D.

The last action we took as a team is to establish quarterly priorities. We have tons of projects on our board right now but we were working on too many sites at the same time. Therefore, some of our time was lost and also had a decrease in motivation due to the fact that “nothing” is moving really forward quickly. Now, we have a maximum of 3 priorities (projects) per quarter.  This has made a huge increase in our productivity and the rate at which we are developing our projects .

How does this translate into my company’s income report? Here are the numbers!

What I like the most about an online company is that as soon as you take action, you see results within the first month. But the best part is yet to come as the actions you take now have an exponential impact on your results in the years to come!

Traffic: 241,196 visitors (+20%) and 323,056 pages viewed (+19.75%)

Traffic is on fire for October! There are 2 things that explain this:

a)      The stock markets have gone back up and most of my sites discuss investment topics

b)      I got hit by the Panda again… but this time, quality won the fight!

Yup! I’ll discuss that in another article but Google ran another Panda update in the middle of October and I got all my previous rankings back. This is why my traffic had gone up by so much in so little time . The good news about the first hit is that I have learned to keep my readers on my blog longer and have them sign-up for my newsletter. This is a big accomplishment as our company grew stronger in during rough times and is now ready to crush it while we get a boost of traffic ;-D.

Google Adsense: $1,628.55 (-3.05%)

This is my September payment. Since traffic was pretty similar from August to September, I’m not surprised to see about the same payment amount. However, I can tell you that with the panda update, my next adsense cheque will be higher. This should continue as my traffic is definitely picking up at the moment (my last 15 days is better than the first half of the month).

Private Ads: $8531.45 (+2.47%)

Using all the tricks mentioned in my newsletter about how to increase my private income, I have another month over $8,000 in private advertising. This is pretty good as one of my biggest advertisers lost one of his clients which resulted in canceling a healthy campaign on almost all of my sites! This is why it is so important to keep contact with many advertisers at the same time .

Brokerage deals & Affiliate: $927,59 (-49%)

Months come and go and they all look different for brokerage deals and affiliate programs. While Market Samurai and Questrade still do wonders for me, I have several ups and downs during the year. This is why I have decided to push on the brokering side of the business a little bit more. Keep reading further down and I’ll tell you more about it ;-D.

Niche Websites Revenue: $200.78 (-67%)

This is not a big surprise to come down to my $200 average right now as I didn’t close any big deals this month for my niche websites. I keep working on new sites (my latest on is almost finished!) and I didn’t work on promoting them at all. With the recent panda update, I’ve seen my traffic go up and I have now more than one site with over 1,000 visits per month without even trying! When I work on promotion (probably in Q2 of 2012), I’m convinced to bring these numbers into the thousands of monthly visits ;-D.

Cost of operating the biz: Roughly $4,000

I’m not good a bookkeeping (this is why I have an accountant right?) but I know that my expenses are roughly $4,000 for the month (this includes my pay for the day of blogging). In order to be fair, you need to factor your hours in there too. If not, you are not calculating real profits . I detail the cost of running my business in this post .

Total income: $11,087.59 (-6.33%) so roughly $7,000 in profit!

Since I have a partner, this makes $3,500 in profits for roughly 16 hours of work in a month (this is the time I spend writing as the rest of my time is calculated in the cost of operations). I’m now making $218.75/hour writing … how cool is that!

Opening up a new service for YOU!

Last week, I produced a 3 part series on how to manage private advertisers:

The first part was about knowing your site

The second part is about building your media kit

The third part is about making money without working your ass off!

There is also a 2,250 words complement to this series for my newsletter subscribers

I created this series as I knew that there were a lot of interest in private advertising and you wanted to know how I manage it. In the meantime, I tried brokering some ads for a fellow blogger. I used to this at large a while back ago. I had stopped during last year as I was too busy with other projects. But now that I have a full team working with me, I opened up the business.

In a single month, we were able to generate $650 worth of deals (this includes two 6 month agreements and 2 new Paypal subscription). We could have jumped this to $1,650 but we had technical difficulties while adding a specific widget. With this great success, I’m opening up my offer to other bloggers  in limited numbers (as I want to ensure a high quality service along with high quality advertisers ).

Here’s the deal:

I have a huge load of advertiser contacts and am well known in the industry (I’ve been blogging since 2006!). Therefore, it’s easy for me to generate more advertising opportunities and my sites are pretty full right now. So I am offering to manage and negotiate the ads for you for a very small price.

What I offer:

- I find, negotiate and manage advertising space for you.

- I also handle the renewals.

- It’s not exclusive so you can continue to find and close deals on your own.

- So less time spent on your blog, more money for you, how does this sound?

What I’m expecting from you:

- I want blogs that are PR3 and above (Sorry guys but Google sets the rule on this playground)

- I want 1 year of history (I want to deal with serious bloggers only and the threshold is usually 6 to 12 months before a blogger quits)

- I want bloggers that will put the ad in place within 24 hours

What’s the cost?

My process is pretty streamlined so I don’t want to charge you an arm and a leg for that. So here’s how it works: I take 1 month worth of advertising as a commission that is renewable on a yearly basis.

So for a monthly deal (through paypal subscriptions), I take the first payment in full and then, set a paypal subscription to pay you the following months.

For 6 month agreement, I take 1/6 of the deal and you keep the rest. If the advertiser renews in 6 month, you get the full payment (I will only take another commission if we can keep the advertiser on board the year after).

For 12 month deals, I obviously take 1/12 of the payment and you are good to go for 12 months .

Interested? Shoot me an email at thefinancialblogger at gmail dot com

I’ve already got 2 new clients for November, so I’m already at 3 and will take a maximum of 10 clients right now so hurry up!

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They are everywhere.

They are watching you.

They are closer than you think.

And they are waiting…

To destroy your precious…

They are the Dream Crashers

Nope, it’s not some late Halloween post I wanted to write or a lame parody of Lord of The Rings (hum… my precious….). I’m talking about a sad phenomenon; I’m talking about the guys stuck in the matrix (man… what’s going on with me and all these movie references today !?!).

But seriously folks, I’m talking about people that don’t do things like you do but differently. They will do everything they can so you stop your behavior and get you back in line. You might not get what I’m talking about right now so let me share with you a little story of mine. It’s called…

What the F&*/ do you care about what I’m doing with my life?

I don’t mean to use the F word on this blog but this is exactly how I felt last week after my lunch. I was invited to some “special” lunch with some “special guests” at a “special conference”. All of this because my company wants me to feel “special”… ugh! In the corporate world, it is seen as a gift of a great importance when you are invited to sit with the great rulers of the tribe. I was actually more interested in listening to the conference (as the speakers are usually very sharp) than sharing the peace pipe with the great rulers .

Anyways, we are sitting at the table and eating some green piece of… “something-fancy-I-guess” with 3 slices of tomatoes and 5 pieces of roquette (that’s French salad ) and the conversation begins… Everybody is obviously there to shine and show how great they are (I’m sure you have lived this at work too ).

In these conversations, I always step back and listen to people. I prefer to listen to them and watch how they act then produce my own show. But I’m always get into some discussions because I am fascinating… Nope, I’m not talking about my charisma… I’m talking about the fact that I’m one of those rare beasts who succeed in the corporate world while working 4 days a week…. Worse than that, I  don’t crush 40 hours into 4 days… I literally work 30 hours per week (and to be totally honest, I leave at 3pm on Friday ).

So each time someone brings that topic up and asks me in front of everybody:

“So Mike, how do you like working 4 days a week?”

That’s the signal.

I feel them.

They were closely watching their prey and now they will jump on it and shred it to pieces…

“You work 4 days a week? Really?”

This question is either posed with disgust (as I must be a dumb, lazy ass who doesn’t want to work) or with pity (as I’m not good enough to work 40 hours a week like a “normal, devoted” employee).

Then, they start with more remarks such as:

“Don’t say it out loud, you know that HR doesn’t like this”

“You’re very lucky, I would never let my employees do so”

“I don’t believe in family-work reconciliation”

And my 2 favorites that I heard last week:

“Now that we are opening on evenings and weekends, such arrangements will disappear”

“Imagine how much you could have brought in if you were working that 5^th day”

Both were coming from the same guy who I call the Grand Dream Crasher. In his opinion, there is nothing more important than working and succeeding. Where I see quality time with my family and flexibility, he sees laziness and a lack of motivation.

The dream crashers are pretty good to plant the seed of doubt in your mind. Since you are not doing what the crowd is doing, they will put the spotlight on you and make you doubt your decisions. They will question your actions and beliefs. Most people will stay polite and not say a word. Especially if you have recently started to implement changes in your life (such as eating healthier, working less, starting a side line or a business). It’s because you are doing something they don’t get.

I spend a whole section of my book, Escaping the Rat Race explaining things people don’t get and how to avoid to arguing with them. It’s very important to avoid arguing and explaining as you waste a lot of time and energy doing it and the dream crashers will never quit. Their beliefs in the corporate world are stronger than religious fanatics or Packers fans on Monday night football . Worse than that, they will argue so much with you that you will start thinking that you are doing something wrong instead of simply doing something they don’t get.

The dream crashers will work numerous hours for their employer and they expect the same thing from others. It’s normal as if you want to succeed in the corporate world, you need to work ridiculous hours, be a performer and know the right people. I’ve concentrated in the latter 2 but I’ll never work a lot of hours . Because it’s not worth it, not compared with time with my family and friends. Will you ever regret not staying late at work? I can tell you that you will regret missing your son scoring an important goal at soccer or playing hide & seek with your daughter or simply an intimate evening with your lover. This is what you will miss in the end.

And because you take measures to spend more time with people you like than people that pay you, you are brought down by these dream crashers. They can be co-workers but they can also be members of your family or friends. People usually like the denial stage and they certainly don’t want you to wake them up with your success. This is why bursting your bubble seems like the best option to keep their denial intact.

So what the F&*/ do you care about what I’m doing with my life?

Here’s the key: they should not care that you do things differently but they do. Don’t let people question your choices, especially when you know where you are going. Don’t let the dream crashers put you to sleep again and back in the matrix. You are better than that.

So it’s now your turn to not care and tell them to get lost!

 image credit

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During my last net worth statement, I was completely ashamed of myself. How can I make so much money and spend it all? It’s one thing to reward yourself (I’m a big believer in behavioral psychology!) but you ain’t doing anything good if you finance your rewards through your credit card! So this is how I went on an austerity plan (feels like a Greek guy!).

My austerity plan has 1 objective: cut on dinning out!

We are tired, we want to celebrate or we simply have this obsessive image of a BBQ chicken with fries and sauce (my favorite is the combo double chicken legs! Hum…. So tasty!). I love to eat and I know I spend a lot of restaurants and ordering food when it’s Friday and we don’t feel like doing supper. Well for the past 6 weeks, we haven’t ordered anything and we didn’t go to the restaurant either!

The second important source of expenses in my household is my cost of transportation for work. I live 85 km away from my job (that’s a 1 hour drive on the highway for US readers ). While I really enjoy driving (after all, I did Montreal – Virginia Beach in one shot, no stops ), it cost me a ridiculously high amount to make this distance. There is gas, parking (yup, I don’t even have free parking!) and a higher cost for car maintenance. With the price of gasoline rising, it is now a $10,000 expense per year in my budget. The most disgusting part is that since I’m at a marginal tax rate of 42%, my last $17,241 earned on my notice of assessment goes to transportation… Even if this year I’ll reach a total income of about $150,000 (more on that later on), it is 11.5% of my total income going to transportation!!!! I can’t do anything about this right now, but I will in February. I can’t tell you more right now, but let just say that regardless of what is happening until then, in February, I’ll be working in the same city I live. So I’ll go from 10k to $500 per year for gasoline to go to work ;-D.

My Halloween Horror Story

I’ve delayed my net worth statement on purpose to get it on Halloween’s day because I have a horror story regarding my personal finance. I feel like living the sequel of an old horror movie of a story that happened 11 years ago (I would have preferred the tragic number “13” but it’s only 11 years…). For the very first time in 11 years; I wasn’t able to pay my credit card in full! I have municipal taxes and school taxes coming in November and I needed to leave a few more hundreds in my account. This is how I was able to pay only a part of my credit card statement. I could have taken the missing amount from my company’s account but I wanted to act different this time.

For a while, I’ve been taken resources right left and center to pay off my lifestyle. This time, I’ve decided to stop counting on the fact that I’ll be making more money later on and take the hit. I guess that if you really want to change your behaviors, it needs to hurt. Pain is probably the biggest motivation factor I’ve ever experienced in my life. I felt the pain a few weeks ago when I paid partially my credit card.

The pain of paying interest.

The pain of feeling like a slumbag who’s not able to manage his budget properly.

The pain of publicly writing this article you are reading this morning.

But when it hurts, you do something about it. This is why I decided to take a deep breath and take out the stitch one shot!

But there is still a good news ;-D

My “austerity” plan actually worked though, my debts have decreased by $300 or so this month. This was the very first time since a while that I’ve actually decrease my debts instead of taking more money out of my line of credit. While $300 is not an incredibly high amount, it is definitely a good step in the right direction!

So my net worth has slightly declined (thx to the value of my 2 cars!) but my debts has slightly reduced as well. This is what the most important part is for me right now!

Assets:

Liabilities:

Total Net worth: $177,889 (-0.2%)

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What’s the epic article of the week?  Side Hustle Series: I’m a Phone Sex Operator @ Budgets Are Sexy.

What’s so epic about this article?

I love the Side Hustle Series that J Money has going on his blog. This one caught my attention because it’s a gig that’s often talked about, but we rarely know anything about it. This is an inside look at the life of a Phone Sex Operator. There’s lots of juicy details in here that I bet you didn’t know about.

We never think of the details involved in being a PSO likely because we never think of the job. This inside look will change the way you view this industry.

The gem of this article.

My favorite part of this article happens to be:

You need 4 main skills to be successful as a PSO: listening, organizational, imaginative, and improvisational. You have to listen very carefully to your clients in order to follow their lead. For example, if he says that he loves pulling your “black” hair, you have to remember not to mention your “red” hair if you are a redhead.

You need to pay attention, no matter what your business is. Give the article a read. You might be on to a new side hustle.

Did you write anything epic this week?

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