Lazy Man and Money

Building a Million Dollar Blog: Getting Started (Part 1 of ?)

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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.

Building a Million Dollar Blog: Introduction (Part 0 of ?)

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“Who’s to say what’s impossible
Well, they forgot this world keeps spinning
And with each new day
I can feel a change in everything
And as the surface breaks, reflections fade
But in some ways, they remain the same
And as my mind begins to spread its wings
There’s no stopping curiosity
I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I’ll find the things they say just can’t be found
I’ll share this love I find with everyone.

Who’s to say I can’t do everything
Well, I can try”

– Jack Johnson, Upside Down

That feels like a blog title from 2009. I seem to remember everyone starting a blog with the idea of getting rich. I started Lazy Man and Money in 2006 and didn’t know you could make money with a blog.

It’s around 16 years later and I’ve made a little more than $600,000. I’ve had some offers to buy Lazy Man and Money, but never for $400,000. It’s at the point where the blog means more to me as a reflection of more than a third of my life than it does to someone else trying to make money from the traffic. It seems like in maybe 10 years it could get close to $1 million. That would be a cool 25th-anniversary milestone.

However, this article isn’t about Lazy Man and Money. It’s about the site I launched this year, KidWealth.com. If you are a regular reader, you’re probably a little sick of me giving it side mentions in every article. If that’s the case, you might want to click away now.

I thought it would be interesting to go through the process I’ve used to build Kid Wealth. Is Kid Wealth a million dollar blog? No, it is not. It isn’t even a 10 cent blog at this point. In fact, It’s about $1000 in debt. Ouch! That’s a bad ROI for my time so far. That’s okay, I’m trying to build an audience of parents interested in helping their kids become financially literate. I don’t plan on ever having ads or selling a product or service. Instead, I’d like to make money by providing great information and connecting people with valuable products and services.

Kids-Financial-Independence

Can Kid Wealth Become a Million Dollar Blog?

Well… a lot of things have a possibility of happening. Obviously, the odds are not good. It’s extraordinarily difficult to build a blog that popular. Instead of looking at all the reasons why Kid Wealth won’t be a million dollar blog, what if I went through a few reasons why it will be a million dollar blog.

  • Great Brand/Domain Name

    A lot of people tell me they like Lazy Man and Money as a brand, but it’s a mouthful. My fingers get tired just typing the name. Kid Wealth is short, easy, and doesn’t require an explanation. I was able to get almost all the social media accounts. It’s a brand that I can envision on national television.

  • I’ve Got (Some) Connections

    I start Kid Wealth, a personal finance website, with many connections to other personal finance writers. I had thought about creating a website around teaching kids programming, but I’m not active in the teaching, kids, or programming communities.

  • I’ve Got Time

    I’m on a 25-year pace to make Lazy Man and Money a million dollar brand. I hope to have another 25 years on Kid Wealth. That makes it easier to get to the million dollar mark. Also, I have inflation on my side. In 20 years, a million dollars would only be $550,000 in today’s money. Did I just cut that million dollar target almost in half?

  • I’ve Got a Budget

    I built Lazy Man and Money without using money to advertise it. I spent very little money to help grow it. I don’t mind spending on Kid Wealth. As I mentioned above, I’ve already spent around $1,000 (details to follow in a future post). It would be nice to say that Kid Wealth has made a million in profit, but I’ve found many of the hype bloggers stick to the revenue numbers and neglect the expenses. I’m hoping I don’t have to resort to that, but if I had to spend $50,000 to make Kid Wealth a million dollar blog, it’s a great, great, deal right?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter too much to me if Kid Wealth doesn’t make a ton of money. That’s not why I started it. As of now, I’m enjoying creating the best resource I can. There’s always something to work on. A few days this past week, I didn’t feel like writing new articles, so I spent time making the home page look good.