Lazy Man and Money

Investing in… Websites?

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Every now and again, traffic growth on Lazy Man and Money hits a plateau. I’m not overly concerned about that for two reasons:

  • I rarely try to write for traffic. Okay, every now and again I try to write a sensational title for fun and amusement. However, in general I write whatever is on my mind with regard to money.
  • I think hitting plateaus is natural. I think of it a little bit like dieting. Some weeks you lose more weight and other weeks it just stops. If you stick with it over time, chances are you’ll see results.

Nonetheless, hitting plateaus does trigger the thought, “what could I do differently to bust out of this?” My thoughts often turn to ideas of finding effective advertising. My problem with that is measuring what’s “effective” is difficult and time consuming for me. I think about ways that I could create other products, perhaps an eBook, that might garner attention. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time for that. I have the money to outsource it, but when you read Lazy Man and Money, I’m going to assume you want to read my words, not something I outsourced. So to this day, I don’t have a solution.

If I get out the Lazy Man brand though, possibilities start to open up. I can outsource writing for other blogs or websites and effectively be an editor. However, can I duplicate the success of Lazy Man in those topics? I think it’s possible, but it would require building a lot of relationships. That’s where time becomes a factor again. Also, if my writer is writing about basket weaving am I, a non-basket weaver, going to be able to build those relationships? I don’t think so. I think you have to show that you know what you are talking about before others take you seriously.

That said, I see a lot of advantages to investing in websites. If you know what you are doing, they can deliver cash flow. My experience is that the cash flow is fairly erratic. However, like an volatile investment, it seems to become more predictable when looked at over the long term.

The big problems with investing in websites? The time and/or money to keep the cash flow can be a little bit like being a landlord. If you want it to be truly passive, you can hire more people, but it may end up costing you as much money as you making. What’s the point in that? The other big problem with websites is one of diversity. Search engines can often be the lifeblood of a website, and one search engine, that shall not be named, is at the point where it create and destroy entire incomes overnight. That’s a huge concern.

Peter Lynch says to invest in what you know… and I know websites and blogs. Now if I can come up with a couple of solutions to the above questions, I’ll have interesting diversification in my investment portfolio.

Improve Your Blog and Personal Finance Links

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For those of you who have a blog, Blogthority is offering a new blog review service to help you blog better. They’ll review your blog and give you their opinion on a number of areas such as: appearance, branding, readability, image usage, search engine optimization, monetization, and code validation. I’m really just touching the tip of the iceberg, for a better idea, I’d look at their sample report. The part that I like the best is the Improvement Checklist at the end. I’m at my Laziest when things aren’t organized. Even I can find the time to burn through a few items.

Unfortunately it’s a lot of time and effort to put together a report like this together – so it’s going to cost some money. The price is $49.99, but Lazy Man and Money readers can save $10 by using the coupon code of LM8571. For those of you writing about what your cat did this weekend, that’s probably more than you want to spend. However, if you make a few hundred dollars it’s well worth it.

Money Writers:

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Alternative Income Streams – December 2008

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For over two years now I’ve been freely posting how much I make in alternative income. That income largely comes from this website. I am starting to diversify with Lazy Man and Health, but it never seemed to take off as I hoped. That transitions us nicely to the theme of the rest of this article… failure.

I feel like a complete failure today. I’ve been chatting with some other bloggers and they made significantly more than the $2166.22 I did last month – on what seems to be less traffic. I know I shouldn’t compare myself to them, but it’s hard not to. Some of them even have full-time jobs or take care of kids.

Back in college I was in fraternity. We through some parties and probably had a little too much fun. Well it turns out that everyone was having so much fun they weren’t recruiting freshmen to keep it going. One day, one of the of the upperclassmen stood up and said, “Are we going to be a fraternity, or are we just going to play fraternity?” I never forgot that statement. Today, I feel like I’m not the owner of a blog, but just “playing blog.” And it feels like I’m not even that good at it.

For the past two weeks, I’ve had quite the case of writer’s block. I even wanted to break one of the cardinal rules of blogging… posting a post that says, “I’ve got nothing to say today…” If there’s a lower point in a blogger’s career than thinking that, I don’t know what it is.

Now that I’ve entirely depressed my entire readership, I want to end with some good news. While I have had trouble writing about personal finance and health, I have had good luck writing on another topic (that I’ll leave secret for now). I’m thinking it’s going to be an eBook. I’ve worked through two chapters in two days. Each chapter is broken down into three or four points that could serve as blog posts. So I’m thinking it’s going to be an eBook/blog. It might not be a blog though because I’m not sure I intend to write on the topic for a long time. Anyway, stay tuned…

A Look at 2008 Goal Progress

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One of the best ways to accomplish something is to break it down into small, manageable parts. Complete these small parts and soon you’ll have your goal accomplished. For 2008, I thought I’d back on what my goals were and how I’ve done at accomplishing them. Please put on your seat belt, this could get ugly.

At the beginning of the year, I actually set 2 sets of goals, one if I worked full-time and one if I focused on blogging and other online businesses. Since I’ve been focusing on the other online businesses, I’ll ignore the full-time goals here.

  • Net Worth – My goal was to have $250,000 in net worth by the end of the year. At least count, I was at $212,000 – about no gain for the year. There are 3 things that contributed to my lack of growth in this area. My investment property is worth a couple of thousand less than it was at the beginning of the year. I was hoping it would be worth a little more. My stocks and mutual funds have been flat. Lastly, with reduced income, I’ve been unable to grow this area. It doesn’t look like I’ll accomplish this goal unless we see some drastic changes.
  • Alternative Income – My goal was to make $5000 in this area. It seemed like a reasonable goal since I would put my full focus on it. For much of the year, I’ve been unable to significantly grow my alternative income. This month is looking very good, though – and it seems to be somewhat sustainable. I might finish in with a pre-tax of $3000.
  • Software Development Skills – I have not learned any significant skills in this area. Tuning my online projects has required me to dig into a little code, but I haven’t picked up Ruby on Rails or CakePHP.
  • Business Skills – I tried to get a personal MBA this year. I got through the first book, Elements of Style, and quickly remembered how much I really dislike reading books vs. web pages. Sadly, I’m no danger of actually completing this goal.
  • Health – I weigh about 3 pounds less than I did at the beginning of the year. My goal was to go from 20% body fat to 17%. I’m at around 19% now. I should probably be in better shape, but I’ve been very good about eating better and exercising.
  • Websites – I wanted to have 50,000 monthly visitors of this website and 20,000 of Lazy Man and Health. This month, despite the summer slowdown in Internet traffic, looks like it will be just shy of 50,000. If I can keep it up, I should be able to surpass this by a good distance. My health site is starting to gain a little traction, but it’s got a tougher road to get 20,000. I’m looking at only 13,000 for this months pace.

Look back, it seems like I’m on track in only two of the six areas. That sounds pretty bad. One of the factors that I didn’t put in place is the stealth business I’ve started with a friend. It’s brought in enough cash to cover the start-ups costs, but it hasn’t done much more than that. I am learning some business skills along the way. In that sense, real world experience is better than reading the books I intended.

I’ll continue to update you along the way, but why not take a few minutes today and review your own goals for the year. Let me know in the comments how you are doing.

Alternative Income Streams – April 2008

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I’m a little late with the report this month. My pseudo April Fools article about buying a tank had priority. I call it pseudo April Fools, because I honestly would like to own a tank someday. I have a pile of other frivolous purchases that I’d rather make first.

The second reason I’m a late posting this report is that I’ve taken a part time job. This blog, and it’s success, has directly led to a consulting gig. It’s 20 hours a week. I wish I could say that it’s alternative income, but it’s not. At least much of the work can be done whenever and wherever I want.

Since I’ve been busier with my conventional income, my focus on my alternative income waned. While I made $1837 last month, I found my alternative income drop to $1412. this month. I can attribute almost all of this to a drop in revenue from this website. I had been doing extremely well with various companies paying a premium to advertise on this site. Recently it seems that these companies have decided not to pay that premium.

I usually don’t link to blog about the business of blogging, but I’m going to break that rule. I’ve outgrown my current theme. I realize I can create a much better experience with a different theme – one that I’m creating almost completely from the ground up. It’s quite silly considering that my current theme is not very old. I would chalk it up to simply not applying all the knowledge I had acquired from years of web experience. I got Lazy in my testing. Some new opportunities have come along and this will allow me to take advantage of that. (I may be able to discuss these in the future, but the time isn’t right now.) Lastly, I expect to feature a professionally designed logo by a reader and frequent commenter.