Every few months I like to do an assessment on where I am in terms of the strategy of this blog so as to keep my eye on what I hope to achieve. I encourage everyone to do this not just with their hobbies but in their lives and with their jobs. It will keep you centered on your broader goals for your career and your life and what you may find is that your current situation is in conflict with your long term goals for yourself. Making small adjustments daily sometimes can lead to drastically different outcomes long term. I wrote this in the hopes that for those reading it, they can relate to my own struggles yet see the value in pursuing something that they are interested in yet may not produce income right away.

The Power of Habit

The rebirth of this blog was born out of a rejection of short term-ism. When I started writing in 2016, I tried to follow another financial blog’s format and strategy but found I lost patience and the will to consistently write when my blog did not go viral after 3 months of writing. It was still a pretty intense period of writing, I churned out three 1,800 word posts a week. I like to measure my progress in terms of how many words written and compare that to the length of a book. A typical adult book has about 90,000 words. During that period in 2016, I wrote about 45,000 words, or half of a book of material.

At that time though, my aim was an end: going viral and making enough from my blog to quit my job. I wasn’t taking the time to enjoy what I write and immerse myself in the process. This is always a recipe for failure because what I have learned in the interim is that there is more consistent joy if you learn to love the process and enjoy your craft as opposed to the fruits that it’s success can bring, which are fleeting. Rather than trying to go viral by copying someone else’s style or subject matter, I have taken my time and explored topics that I was interested in, even if they were not popular topics.

The benefit of this is that it has improved my writing and developed a habit of writing on a semi daily basis. I have found that this is the real power behind changing your life. Focussing on my craft and developing a daily habit of pushing myself forward in writing has produced 3 times the content compared to when I was just keeping an end goal in mind. In fact, if I would have achieved that goal of going viral, my content would have likely suffered, as I would have been working to constantly try to reproduce whatever it was that helped me go viral rather than having the conviction to forge my own path.

This part of my strategy, more of a mental process for myself, has helped me produce more than that burst of production in 2016. This is my 100th post since I started blogging again and the writing has become much easier. I have written about 140,000 words since I restarted despite cutting the posts down to 2 per week instead of 3. This still has produced about one and a half books of material or about 466 pages. Looking back on this progress, despite not getting many readers, has helped build my confidence in addition to improving my writing. It has also provided benefits in other areas as well.

The Spillover Effects Are Still Relevant

The writing has also provided 2 spillover effects which are relevant immediately and towards my long term goals. In the near term, writing about personal finance topics like the cost of college and the cost of charging a moped, have helped my own personal financial decisions. I try to write some posts as a reference so that I don’t have to keep researching the same topic.

For example, we often get co flicking information on the cost of college. I decided to once and for all put a target number on the cost of college for my son based on informed projections to get an idea of how much I should be putting into his account monthly. This was the point of my post How Much Should You Save for College? The idea being that we often forget the research we do on a topic if we don’t record it. It serves me to have my post be my own reference for how much I am saving and what the long te em goals are.

The other longer term spillover effect is on my habits and work ethic. The more you push yourself to stick to deadlines and do something you don’t always want to, the easier it gets to push yourself at other times , be that in work or social situations. Consistency of effort also pushes you to keep trying despite the setbacks. I’ve found that mental fortitude can be inherited in some people but it can also be learned and cultivated. Many of us don’t complete things or fail at things but through building habits and pushing yourself to be disciplined, even if it’s in small things, can start to spread into other parts of your life.

In my constant search to improve, write better, motivate myself and get out of my comfort zone, I recently listened to a book on audio (one of the ways I do research during my commute now) called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. Manson, a fellow blogger, touched on many of the topics I have covered in this blog in terms of happiness, motivation and psychology and how they relate to our overall well being. As a writer, it is clear to me that Mark seems to have also struggled with motivation at times. He opens the book with an example of Charles Bukowski, a writer who was poor, drunk and angry most of his life but eventually an editor took a strange liking to him and he later achieved literary fame for his poems and novels. Manson stresses that this didn’t make him a better person and didn’t necessarily make him happy. Rather, it was being dedicated to his own style and craft which eventually made him famous. For this reason, the epitaph on his grave reads “Don’t Try.”

The other tidbit I grabbed from this book was about another novelist who, over the course of his life had written over 70 novels and pumped them out on a consistent basis. When asked how he was able to remain so consistent in terms of his output for such a long time, he responded with a simple yet insightful answer: “two hundred crappy words per day.”

Something about this clicked for me recently and the book I had been struggling with all of the sudden became easy as long as I was able to write that minimum of 200 words per day as that author described. I realized that changing my habit, and maintaining the same discipline I already had for my blog, could produce an entire book on whatever I wanted in less than a year. This has spurred me recently to start that 200 words a day, I have added a twist of sometimes also creating a blog post which will go into the book to not duplicate my work and save time. So far I am 10,000 words in and hope to have the draft completed within the next 9 months. This was described as the do something principal, meaning that not overthinking and just doing something is better than overthinking and ending up not doing anything at all.

The Setbacks

An evaluation wouldn’t be complete without naming some of the failures and setbacks I have experienced in the same timeframe and the areas where I can shift strategy or improve.

Marketing is key to getting traffic to the site and getting eyeballs to read it. Attention spans are quite short and with all the different social media and news platforms, it’s difficult to build your own brand and try to fight from scratch for some space.

My own marketing strategy for this blog has been primarily through WordPress’s own reader site and through Instagram. Readers on WordPress have produced the majority of my unique visitors, the best being 114 visitors in a month from the reader app while Instagram has only produced about 10 in a month.

The other idea was to interact and comment on other WordPress based blogs to start an interaction exchange which could hopefully lead to cross viewership via blogs with similar themes. In this sense I have underperformed in terms of consistent engagement as well as finding many similarly themed blogs on WordPress. There seem to be a number of blogs dedicated to arguing about politics or climate change denial, but very few dedicated to markets and building discussions based on facts. I know there is a market out there for people that want to read blogs like mine, it’s just a matter of finding the right strategy to reach readers.

Instagram has proven a disappointment. Despite posting every day and spending many hours researching relevant topics, I have topped out around 650 followers, few of whom actually click through to the website. On the plus side it has allowed me to connect with some regular readers and meet some influencers who are very active in topics and market segments that I wasn’t. Their insights and observations have helped me in other areas of my research as well as getting a feel for what some readers are looking for in the blogs they read.

While looking at a deck produced by entrepreneur Gary Vee, which I highly recommend for social media marketing, it became clear I should shift my strategy and can do much better. I can’t just copy the strategy he outlines because a key part of my strategy is to guard my identity due to the fact that I work in the financial industry and don’t want my analysis to be associated with my firm, remaining an independent voice despite my day job.

Although readership has been climbing, currently to about 250 unique visitors per month, I still have a way to go to get to the 1,000 visitor per month figure which I understand is important to start monetizing the blog.

Room for Improvement

The key going forward will be to upend my current strategy while remaining consistent with my posting and providing strong content that people want to read. Blogging as also pushed me in another direction I didn’t expect: a long term move towards wealth management with a particular strategy: psychology. I have touched on this topic in posts such as The Psychology of Being Broke but would like to cover it more in-depth in subsequent posts as I believe there is a significant untapped market for combining self motivation with financial expertise. This isn’t the end, the road is just beginning and expect some adjustments ahead.

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