I originally bought the domain for this blog 2-3 years ago. At the time I had been sporadically writing finance article on SeekingAlpha.com during my first few years of post-college employment. I’ve always been interested in finance and making and saving money so I figured it was a logical step that could help me organize and share my ideas and maybe make a little bit of money.
Originally my motivator was to have a place to publish articles that I had written for SeekingAlpha that got turned down. Basically I had no real goal or vision for the website. Which is likely why it languished in cyber-space for a few years as I got more into my career and starting finding more friends and hobbies. The time I had for writing about finance became less and less and I was fairly content financially ($400 a month rent life helps with that!) so I didn’t have that extra motivator.
At the start of this year i left my job corporate job. It was a big decision but not a particularly hard one. I was being asked to relocate to Plano, TX and had just moved to Denver, CO with my girlfriend and was loving it. A robust tech job market in Denver also assuaged my fears. But I did end up having a month off before starting a new job. New city, unemployed – perfect circumstances for blogging!
I basically spent the first week of employment getting the website to look decent enough and writing 3 -4 posts about the foundations of my investment philosophy and the general concept of investing for income. Not having done the before I thought that was a good start and I was ready to start getting paid.
I understood the basic ways of making money through websites. You can go the subscriptions route, partner with affiliates, sell stuff, or make money from ads. I decided to go the ad route. It seemed like the path of least resistance for monetization. It’s a little comical now, but I was shocked when my AdSense application got turned down. It turns out they want you to have at least 15 decently lengthy posts and to pay attention to things like SEO (search-engine optimization), tagging, categorizing, and general site navigation.
Whoops! So I spent the next couple of weeks churning out around 3 posts a day and learning about all that monetization stuff. Once I felt like I had enough content I applied again for AdSense and this time got accepted. Time for the money to start rolling in! Or not. First day, around 50 or 60 views, earnings $0.00. Second day a few less views, same for the third day. End of the first week $0.00. And then I started a new job.
My original thought/goal for this blog was to eventually grow it into a side-hustle. Maybe that will still happen someday but I don’t want this to feel like work so that idea is going very far back on the back burner. Mainly, after an fairly long commute and an 8 – hour work day in the office (I’m used to working from home) , it’s hard to find the motivation to write when I know I can at best hope to make a couple pennies. At least it was when my goal for this was to make money.
After doing some re-evaluation, I remembered that I do actually like to write about this stuff and do find it interesting. So I re-thought my goal. I’m a very goal oriented person if you haven’t noticed – an entire childhood playing competitive sports will do that. Now there are two things I want to get out of this blog:
1. Explain, Develop, and Track my investment ideology
2. Help others to build wealth
I plan to incorporate stock analysis into both of those points. There’s something about sitting down with a company’s 10-K and trying to figure out the direction the company is heading that I find satisfying (I know that sounds weird).
The second part of my goal – helping others – is what really will determine the overall success of this website. I found that coming home and writing for a couple of pennies does not motivate me. At all. But people do. Nothing gets me energized like when someone asks me my thoughts on an investment, or about personal finance in general. Helping others is a sustainable source of motivation in a way that money (particularly small amounts of money) is not.
Really what I want to get out of this blog, and what I hope you will get out of it, is a passion for building passive income. I want us to be able to wake up in the morning and feel that much better about the day because we know that just by being alive, we are starting the day with more money that we had yesterday. That the foundations we laid that seemed small at first are throwing us more and more income every day that we don’t have to do any additional work for. That eventually our passive income stream will grow large enough that it can grant us more freedom to do what we want to do and at the same time give us more peace of mind.
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