I realize this series isn’t for everyone. I had the idea to create another blog, because of TINA – there is no alternative of COVID. It didn’t seem like there good investing opportunities with a high stock market and a fast rising real estate market. It seemed natural to me to invest in creating a business. Nowadays, the markets look a little different, but investing a business (in this case a blog) is a personal finance topic worth covering, right?
A few months ago, I started off this series with a blog post, Building a Million Dollar Blog: Introduction. I explained that I started Lazy Man and Money in 2006 and have made over $600,000. It will take some time, but I might get to a million dollars. However, rather than review the 16-year history of Lazy Man and Money, I decided to profile the start of my new blog, KidWealth.com.
I acknowledged that it would be an uphill climb for Kid Wealth to be a million-dollar blog. With that said, I have a few things in my favor to help make it successful. It’s a great brand (in my opinion), domain, and it has all the social media accounts. I know a lot of the bloggers in the personal finance space giving me a head start. I’m not working on a timeline – a million dollars could be over the next 20 years. I’m also willing to spend money. The big marketers often only preach about their revenue, not their costs.
Finally, I made the point that Kid Wealth isn’t about making money. It’s a lot of fun and hopefully, many families will benefit. I have a passion for personal finance and covering it from a kid’s perspective is fresh and exciting. Last week, I overheard my 9-year-old explaining to my 8-year-old what a loan was. A few days later, he offered to do a bunch of extra chores to earn money for a Pokemon card set that he saw at Wal-Mart.
Getting a Blog Started
The first thing I had to do was find my brand name. I had a few ideas such as KidMoney.com, but so many .com domains are gone. I found KidWealth.com was for sale on GoDaddy for $250. I decided to get a Gmail account with the name and then buy the domain. I purposely wanted to get the email first because then renewing the domain would always be with that business email rather than my personal email address.
Before buying, I also did a quick search on NameCheckr.com which tells you all the social media usernames that are available. Fortunately, almost everything was available. It took me about an hour to complete the purchase and sign up for all the accounts.
I already had some blogging infrastructure set up. For example, I use Cloudflare for Lazy Man and Money nameservers. I also had hosting with SiteGround. My software engineering days are far behind, but it gives me a headstart, especially combined with my experience at Lazy Man and Money.
SiteGround, like any decent host, makes it easy to install WordPress. I had a basic blog up and running.
That’s when I realized how much work I had left to do. I had some ideas of what articles I would write. After all, I had been writing a few articles on Lazy Man and Money. However, I didn’t have a design. I didn’t have a logo. I didn’t have any organization of how to categorize the articles I would write. I knew the people in the personal finance area, but kid financial literacy is almost an entirely different group of people. I had an idea of which WordPress plugins I would need, but the best plugins have changed since I last updated the Lazy Man and Money website. There were a lot of other sub-accounts that I needed to sign up for such as Google Analytics.
I started to organize by making a Kid Wealth directory on my hard drive. Inside that were some folders like Content, BizDev, and Design. I also included two more files at the root level – a text file called “ToDo” and a spreadsheet called “MasterPlan.” The MasterPlan spreadsheet is enormous and covers anything my ADHD brain could think of. I would create a spreadsheet for the Theme, Passwords, Marketing Ideas, Helpful Friends, Publishing Checklist, etc. I also had a page of content titles, keywords, and notes.
Unfortunately, the MasterPlan spreadsheet is disorganized. Part of my goal with this series is to refine some of the process and make it easier for others to duplicate. In future articles, I’ll drill down into specific areas, how I’ve implemented them, and what the costs have been.