The Amateur Financier

Today, I’m going to step away from the subject of money for just a brief moment (as I sometimes do) to discuss another issue near to my heart: blogging.  Yes, as you might guess from the sheer volume of material I’ve written, I’ve learned a thing or two about being a blogger.  Now, I’m going to share a few pointers to those considering getting started in blogging, particularly those who want to use it as a source of alternate income.  I’m not trying to scare anyone off from blogging; I certainly find it a fun and enjoyable way to spend my time, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

But much of what you have read about the process of blogging seems rather upbeat and optimistic.  You might have the idea floating around in your mind that blogging can serve as a quick and easy way to generate income.  That, unfortunately, is not the case; instead, some of the realities you’ll face while blogging include:

1) You won’t make much money (at least, at first): Before you ask, yes, it is possible to generate a good income, even enough to replace (or exceed) your day-job income, while blogging.  I could point out any number of bloggers who have done just that (Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar is my go-to example).  BUT, that is far from saying you can simply start blogging and the money will pour in.  Not only do bloggers like Trent illustrate how much work you need to put into blogging to make money from it (writing for years, multiple times a day, before earning enough to quit his day job, and even then only earning half as much from blogging as his job was paying), but the very fact that there are successful bloggers in most major fields means you have competition already in place to keep you from dominating the market.

Picture a swimming competition, where the most famous swimmers have already lapped you several times

So, what’s a more realistic view on the income you can earn?  Well, Darwin of Darwin’s Money, who is a quite successful money blogger, currently earns over a thousand dollars a month, after years of blogging.  Hardly the level of income you need to earn if you want to tell your boss to ‘take this job and restaff it’; but for some perspective, I typically earn less than a dollar a day from my blog after two years of writing (and can go days without earning anything at all), and I still consider myself fairly successful.  If you want to start blogging to quit your job, whether next week or years down the road, be advised that it is unlikely to come to that.  Instead, you should consider blogging as more of a hobby, and…

2) You’ll need to blog about what you love (if you hope to keep at it): Now for a quick reminder about how much you need to blog to keep your blog fresh.  Most suggestions you will hear recommend posting at least once a day, or 365 posts each year.  That said, there are successful bloggers who don’t publish that often, getting by on three to four posts per week (about 150 to 200 posts per year), and there are also prolific bloggers who publish multiple times per day (like Trent again, who publishes twice a day and puts out about 730 posts per year).

All of this is just to say that if you hope to be successful, you will end up writing hundreds of posts per year at minimum.  If you are writing about something you enjoy and love to write about and discuss, it should be no problem; I personally enjoy talking about money, investing, and finance, and so The Amateur Financier keeps humming along.  If I was trying to write about something I didn’t really care for, say sports (what can I say; I’m a nerd at heart), I probably would have called it quits years ago.  Find a topic that you enjoy and you can blog about it forever.  (If you are hoping to make money at it, you probably want to make sure it has some wider popular appeal as well; if only you, and maybe your mom, are interested in reading your blog’s topic, you’ll have even more trouble than normal turning it into a profitable enterprise).

3) You’ll have to ensure that you enjoy writing (as you’ll be doing a LOT of it): Regardless of what topic you decide to write about, one thing you will need to enjoy doing is an incredible amount of writing.  Even if you don’t publish a post each day, you’ll still need to write regularly in order to keep the posts flowing.  To help put things in perspective, I’ve written over 500 blog posts, which clock in at about 1000 words per post (possibly more; I tend to be rather verbose), for a total of 500,000 words written. (And that’s just the posts themselves; it doesn’t count responses to comments or comments on other blogs, which I’ll get into in my next point.)  For comparison, that is a higher word count than the first four Harry Potter books combined.  And I’m nothing compared to the more prolific bloggers out there.  If you don’t like writing, and writing a lot, stay away from blogging.

That said, if you don’t like writing but still want to get in on the blogging band wagon, there are ways around the writing aspect of it.  With the availability and (relatively) low cost of audio visual equipment nowadays, you could fairly easily do a audio blog.  Or, if you are fairly photogenic and get a hold of a webcam, why not do a video blog?  (Or vlog, I guess they are also called, although that’s a bit too much abbreviation for my taste.)  Even if you want to stick with a traditional blog, there are options for you; I recently picked up some transcription software and a audio headset, and as soon as I get the hang of it, you might be reading a transcribed version of this web page.

4) You must be prepared to socialize (and socialize, and socialize): So, you started a blog, you’ve been publishing steadily, but you still aren’t getting much traffic.  Well, my friend, you’ve forgotten one of the most important steps in blogging success: socialization.  Yes, one of the best ways to get out the word about your new blog is to comment on other people’s blogs.  Find people who are blogging about the same sort of topics as you, and comment on their posts (and respond to comments on yours), share ideas with them, join any blogger organizations in your area of interest, even offer to guest write an article or two.  If you do all this, it will come back to you in the form of more traffic (and more profits) down the road.

The disadvantage is that doing all this will take time and effort.  You can easily spend much more time trying to get out word about your blog than you do, say, blogging.  Such social networking (to borrow a phrase) also tends to build on itself; you comment on someone’s blog, another blogger takes notice and comments on your blog, so you return the favor and comment on this second blog.  As you get more comments, you try to comment more yourself, the number of people in your network increases, and you soon find yourself with dozens of blogs on your ‘To Read’ list, with no hope of catching everything they have to say.  For a ‘passive’ income source, blogging requires quite a bit of work, even outside of the actual effort to put words into a post.

A Final Encouragement

I hope I didn’t just send dozens of would-be bloggers screaming into the night.  There are plenty of reasons to blog that I haven’t shared yet.  You get to share your views with the world, and actually have (at least some) people read and understand them.  You get a level of feedback and encouragement that is rare in most public forums.  You can, when you become successful, influence any number of readers and help to shift their opinions on issues that are close to your heart.  And yes, if you keep at it and are successful, you can end up earning sizable amount of profit, perhaps even getting up to a substantial portion of your income from your blog.

All this article was designed to do was to help remind you that it is not a short, easy, or guaranteed road you face to reach those points.  If you want to become a blogger (or some variation thereon), it will require quite a bit of effort on your part.  If you go through that effort, I wish you good luck; it’s always nice to see someone else try to join the blogger crew.  Have fun, and here’s hoping you have much success!

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The contest is over now; I’m choosing and contacting the winners.  Thanks to all who entered and tried to help me improve my blog!

Well, it’s 2011 now, and the new year brings new opportunities to improve. Let’s be honest, there’s quite a lot I could stand to improve, and my blog is at the top of my list. I’ve already set a number of resolutions involving this blog, which will hopefully enable me to improve my Alexa Ranking, bump up my number of Feedburner subscribers, increase the number of comments I get, and in general, get much more attention for all my writings here on The Amateur Financier.

That’s where all of you, my readers, come in.  I’m hoping to make some changes in 2011, and want to know your opinions on things like what subjects I should cover, how I should promote my blog, and in general, how I can make this blog more appealing to all of you out there in the blogosphere.  (And what better way to learn what my readers are thinking than to come right out and ask them?)

I trust my readers more than the average think tank.

Now, you might be wondering why you should be so generous; after all, marketers, consults, and think tanks can make thousands, even millions of dollars for sharing their expertise.  Why should you give away yours for free?  Why, for the chance to win valuable prizes of course!  I know that if you’re like me, you want to know what you might be able to win.  So, with no further ado…

What You Can Win

Since it is the new year, it seems appropriate to give you a gift that can help benefit you throughout the rest of  2011.  What am I thinking of, you ask?  Why, a personal finance magazine subscription, of course!  I’m actually a subscriber to numerous personal finance magazines myself, and they give me an different insights into the world of money, provide me with useful factoids to fill my mind, and have even inspired a blog post or two in the time I’ve been writing.

So, what sort of magazines are we talking about?  Any personal finance magazine that costs under $30 for a yearly subscription, including, but not limited to, these*:

-Money Magazine
- SmartMoney
- Inc. Magazine
- Fast Company
- Entrepreneur
- Fortune Magazine
- Forbes Magazine

Or any other magazine you might want to receive, so long as it is (a) related in some way to personal finance (that is the theme of my blog, after all) and (b) under thirty dollars for a subscription.  (I’m not made of money, you know; at least, not until you help me to become the King of All Bloggers!)

(What’s that, you say?  You already have more magazine subscriptions than you can really keep up with?  I sympathize; I subscribe to most of the magazines listed above myself, in addition to some magazines connected to my biochemistry background.  Here’s my solution: if you win, feel free to give away the subscription to a friend or significant other by giving me their name and address.  Or ask your local library what magazine they would like to receive; you’ll be able to help your neighborhood and still be able to read the magazines whenever you like.  Don’t let your own magazine subscriptions stop you from entering.)

The Questions

By now, you’re (hopefully) starting to pretty excited by this whole plan. If you want to enter this contest, it’s pretty simple.  All you need to do is leave a comment below where you answer the following three questions:

1) What money related topics would you like to see covered here on The Amateur Financier?  Do you want to read more about investing, saving, smart spending, or something else entirely?

2) What methods are needed to successfully pull the marketing of The Amateur Financier up to higher levels?  What systems or companies should I approach to bump up my blog’s influence?

3) Lastly, what is your favorite type of blog entry?  Do you like when I respond to other people’s blog entries, enjoy my round ups, or particularly like my discussions of my new worth?  Inquiring minds want to know!

There you go, three simple questions, all of which would help me greatly in transforming my blog for the better.  I thank everyone in advance who want to help me out in the process.

How to Win

There are three simple steps to enter yourself in this giveaway:

1) Answer these questions: Post a reply to this blog entry that answers these questions as best you can.  You don’t need to type for hours; a simple answer, as long as it provides me with useful information, can be more useful than a three page long rambling response.  Just do your best, answer all three questions, and try to help me out.  You MUST leave a response that gives some answer for all three questions to be entered in the contest.

2) Promote this contest: You can increase your number of chances to win by helping me to get the word out about this contest.  By including this contest in a round up or providing a link on Twitter, I’ll give you another chance to win (or two, for both of these) when choosing  some of my contest winners.

3) That’s It! That’s all there is to it; simple, no?

There will be a total of three winners to this contest, each getting a subscription to the personal finance magazine of their choice for themselves or others; one winner will be chosen as giving the most helpful answer, while two others will picked at random from the other entrants.

Other Notes and Details

-The deadline for entering this contest is January 14th (a week from this Friday); that should give you plenty of time to formulate a decent response to this blog.  The winners will be announced on January 17th (two weeks from today).

-Please do your best to answer the questions listed.  If you want to provide me with further advice, go right ahead, but at least answer the given questions (as they will be the most helpful to me).

*The links to the magazines that I included are my Amazon Affiliate links; if you opt to subscribe to any of the magazines via these links (and they are pretty interesting magazines), I will receive a portion of your subscription price.  Just a warning so you don’t think I’m trying to put anything past you.

Good luck once again, and I look forward to reading what everyone has to say!

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With the end of the year approaching, I am looking forward to this coming year with anticipation and hope for the future.  One of my major goals, of course, is to make more money.  I definitely enjoy making money (I’m hardly unique in that respect), and anything I can do to bump up my income will get my attention and due consideration.

And so I read The Financial Blogger’s guide to running multiple blogs (while maintaining his sanity and working less than twenty hours each week, no less) with a great deal of interest.  I’ll be honest, I hadn’t given much thought to adding another blog to my repertoire; it’s been quite a challenge just keeping up with one blog, although, perhaps if I follow the advice on hiring out some of the work, it would be more feasible.

Money, the goal which we all seek.

So, I though I should consider some of the pros and cons of running more than one blog.  It’s not something that should be undertaken lightly; after all, I’ve put hundreds of hours into my blog over the past two years, and no matter how much I outsource the work, another blog would mean many, many hours of more effort.  So, do the potential benefits of starting another blog (or two, or three, or…) outweigh the hassles and expenses?  Let’s start with some of pros, the reasons why more than a few bloggers run multiple blogs.

The Pros of Multi-Blogging

-You can create your own network of related blogs…: You can call it ‘synergy’ as The Financial Blogger does, but the idea is simple: you can expand your influence in a particular area by increasing the number of blogs you run.  It also gives you a chance to move beyond your particular niche and explore other aspects of your blogging field; I could started a blog that focused on ways to save money, or started to cover more on alternative investments, while I could continue to focus on investing and money management basics with The Amateur Financier, thus expanding the subjects I cover.

-…Or go in a completely different direction: On the other hand, you can also opt for an unrelated topic; I could start a blog that covers organic chemistry, for instance, or maybe one that looks at anime (both subjects that I enjoy that have nothing to do with personal finance).  While this option offers less opportunity for cross promotion, it does enable you to break into different fields, and exercise your creativity.  (It also might help you preserve your sanity, if you care about that type of thing.)

-It’s easier the second time around: There’s a lot of things I’ve learned while creating this blog that would enable me to make another blog much more efficiently the second time around.  It would still be a lot of effort, but the year or so I spent learning the ropes and getting my feet wet here would help me to get another blog up, running, and (hopefully) turning a profit in much less time.

-More blogs mean more opportunities for more money: Let’s get to the heart of the matter; if you want to maximize your money earning potential with blogging, one method to do so is to set up more than one blog.  Two blogs means twice as many opportunities for advertisements and other money making techniques, three blogs triples the possibilities, and so on.  It’s not a guarantee that you will multiply your earnings as you increase your number of blogs, but the opportunities will exist.

So, plenty of benefits are possible with multiple blogs.  But by now I’ve learned, there’s never benefits that come without some downsides.  So, some of the cons of having multiple blogs include:

The Cons of Multiple Blogs

-More blogs require more time…: Probably the biggest reason most bloggers limit themselves to just one blog is that increasing the number of blogs you run increases the time needed to run them.  While you won’t necessarily double  your work load by doubling the number of blogs you run (there are economies of scale to consider, and you can combine some of the tasks you do for your blogs), it is certain that writing out more articles will increase your time expenditure.  There are ways to avoid spending all your time on your blogs, but they usually require…

-…Or more money: You can solve the time issue, at least in part, by opting to outsource some of your blogging tasks, from technical support to marketing to even writing blog entries.  However, none of this comes free; if you want to outsource the work required for your blog, you’ll need to have money to pay the people who do that work.  This is fine if you have the money available, but if you don’t have much money and little ability to go into debt to get more, it is a stumbling block.

-Good help can be hard to find (and manage): Even if you have the money you need to hire others to help you keep multiple blogs running, you still need to find employees or partners with whom you can work on the blogs.  Even after that, you need to be able to motivate, work with, and generally manage your new blogging compatriots.  If you, like me, you’re not that good at socializing and aren’t really a natural leader, that’s almost a more daunting task than trying to do everything yourself.  It’s definitely a different skill set than blogging as an individual, which you may or may not possess.

-Your personal situation might make it impossible: Because of the aforementioned time and money constraints, it can be impossible for you to start another blog at a particular point in time.  Being a grad student, I’ve found myself short on time and money this past semester, which has cut into my blogging; starting another blog is almost out of the question right now.  And then there’s the fact that your family or significant other might resent you putting even more of your efforts into another blog.  (My fiancée has threatened to castrate me if I start another blog, for example.  I think she’s joking, but until I can start a blog without greatly increasing my work load, I don’t want to take that chance.)

My Plans for Further Blogs

In the short term, my lack of available money (and limited time when I’m not working on the Amateur Financier, doing housework, or studying) limits how much more I could do in starting new blogs.  If I get far enough ahead on my blogging here (far enough ahead that I can avoid that whole threatened castration thing),though, I might consider starting another blog.  (Probably not one closely related to personal finance; I like the idea of stretching my writing wings a bit).

In the longer term, I do like the idea of creating an online empire all my very own, and working to generate an income that I can manage fairly passively.  My first step will probably to look into hiring a virtual assistant when money is not as tight (and I’m creating more of an income through my own efforts), and seeing how that works out; it’d be nice to expand my ability to get things done online.  After that, I’ll slowly build my online kingdom from there.

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My friends, much as I had hoped to avoid doing anything this dramatic, my current situation compels me to do so: I’m taking a hiatus from The Amateur Financier.  For the rest of August, I’m taking a break from regularly updating my blog and posting new articles.

I’m not disappearing completely (at least, not yet).  I will continue to respond to comments made on the four hundred plus entries I’ve already posted, talk with any readers, and read and post on other blogs, as normal (perhaps more often than I have been doing lately, actually; I’ve been doing a lot less blog reading than I used to, one of the things I hope to change during this hiatus).

The ‘Why’

There’s several reasons I’m doing this, but most of them boil down to one thing: time.  I have been feeling short on time for a while now, having trouble keeping up with everything I need and want to do.  I’ve tried to cope by cutting down on what I’ve been doing; in the blogging realm, that’s meant reducing the number of blog entries I publish each week, reading fewer other blogs, and commenting much, much less than I would prefer.

Even with all of those measures, I’ve still been struggling to keep up with my blog in intact.  From moving in with my fiancee in January and taking on the role of official dishwasher/laundry washer/dog walker (along with having my computer occasionally kidnapped by said fiancee, while her own is in need of repairs) to getting a job in May, I’ve been increasingly having trouble keeping up with my blog on top of everything else going on in my life.  I’ve been trying my best to keep up, but as you might have noticed, there’s been more than a few times when I’ve had to back date posts or try to cram in an article during the wee hours of the morning.

August promises to make things even worse; in less than three weeks, I will be starting grad school, which means that I need to register for classes (yes, the way things have worked out, I’m not registered for classes yet), relearn organic chemistry, find a place to live, move in, visit with family members (both mine and my fiancee’s), AND finish my stint of work at Wal-Mart.  There is a good chance that I will not have enough time over the next few weeks to keep up with my blog and everything else I need to do; unfortunately, when it comes to choosing between school work, family, and my blog, my blog unfortunately will always lose.

At the end of the month, things get even more complicated; that’s when I start graduate school, and will likely have even less time to spend online.  (Although, I’ve had semesters during my undergraduate career where I had so much spare time it wasn’t even funny; if something similar happens, perhaps all my worries will be for naught.)  There is a good chance that I might not be able to continue this blog while going to classes at the same time; part of the reason for this hiatus is to give me a chance to build up a reserve of posts for when I’m at school, or at least, figure out a way to bow out of my blog gracefully.

What Happens Next

As mentioned, I’m not trying to disappear completely, simply get a little more breathing room to get things done in the real world.  I’ll still be around if you need me; if I manage to get things under control, I might even be back to posting regularly well before the end of the month.  As for what happens once grad school begins…That I honestly do not know, yet.  Again, if time allows, I might be able to resume blogging by the end of this month without any serious problems; on the other hand, I might not be able to continue with my blog at all, at least while I’m attending classes (a major portion of time for the next two years). In any event, this is not the last you’ll hear from me; I’ll be sure to keep everyone updated on my progress, and to provide a final answer about what will happen with The Amateur Financier soon.

Before I go, though, I’d like to say one final thank you to all my readers for spurring me on, asking thought provoking questions, and challenging my post; you’ve helped to make this blog all worthwhile.  Thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.

Your Amateur Financier,

Roger Raby

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