Image by skelbar via Flickr

Assets:

Obi-Wan (Primary Checking Account): $1444.43
Mace-Windu (Primary Savings Account): $463.59
Tatooine (Down-Payment Fund Savings Account): $5000.49
C3PO (Personal Checking Account): $3.44
R2-D2 (Secondary Savings Account + Business Earnings): $51.55
Chase Pre-Paid Debit Card for CSL Plasma: $316.49
Roth IRA: $862.01
401(k):$4004.92
HSA: $27.29
Geo Prizm: $1041
Chryster Cirrus: $2755

TOTAL ASSETS: $15,970.21

Liabilities:

Cirrus Car Loan: $4513.22
Capital One credit card: $0
NCO Financial/Bank of America credit card: $4938
Student Loan 1: $26835.50
Student Loan 2: $5554.89
Outstanding Medical Bills: $4080.93

TOTAL LIABILITIES: $45,922.54

NET WORTH: -$29,952.33

Related articles

• What’s your net worth? (financeexpressonline.com)
• Keep Track of Your Progress (8/365) (thesimpledollar.com)
• January 2012 Cash Flow (retireby40.org)

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17 people signed up. Some had been at it for a few years, but hadn’t gone to the next level (like myself). Others were brand new and saw this as a way of starting right. Who are they? Well, meet the challengers below:

Nicole Mladic – The Budgeting Babe: http://www.budgetingbabe.com

Nicole Mladic, 32, of Oak Park, Ill., is an award-winning Communications professional. Her blog, created in November 2004, chronicles her journey from over-spender to power saver. Nicole has been quoted on the CBS Evening News, in Financial Times, The Wall Street Journalonline, US News & World Report, www.msnbc.com, www.cnn.com, Yahoo! Finance and Glamour magazine, among others. She is also quoted in “The Everything Blogging Book” and featured in “Generation Earn: The Young Professional’s Guide to Spending, Investing, and Giving Back.”  Read more about Nicole here: http://thebudgetingbabe.com/about/.

Aubrey Rose – Discovering Adulthood: http://discoveringadulthood.blogspot.com

I am 19 years old and I started blogging on Discovering Adulthood about a year ago, but I didn’t get serious until a few months back. I blog mainly about Personal Finance and growing up. All of the money I make off of my blog this year will be going towards my adoption Fund. My Fiance and I hope to begin the adoption process of either a deaf or blind child in just a little over a year. You can read more about how to help us out on my Adoption Page on my blog.

Crystal – Sophisticated Spender: http://wwwSophisticatedSpender.com

SophisticatedSpender.com is all about practicing good financial planning. I am currently an engineer who works for the government. I am also a landlord of a multi-unit property, a former day trader, a former real estate agent and a former property rehabber. I have learned a lot from all of my trades and have a lot to share with you guys. I love personal finance and the complex tax code. So come along for the journey!

Brent Pittman – OnTarget Coach: http://www.ontargetcoach.com

Personal finance and coaching website http://www.ontargetcoach.com.
I offer 1 on 1 coaching and book keeping

Kris – Simple Island Living: http://www.simpleislandliving.com

My name is Kris and I just began my blog http://www.simpleislandliving.com. My blog is about personal finance, life and love on an island in the middle of the sea (things are pricey here!).

Danielle – Odd Cents: http://www.oddcents.com

Hi there! My name is Dannielle and my blog is Odd Cents. I have blogging since September 2011, so I’m still fairly new to this. I post almost everyday, but I’m in the process of starting a travel blog, so that might decrease.

Katie – What Gnau?: http://www.whatgnau.blogspot.com

My blog What Gnau? is a place to document our family’s story. It’s largely a place for my musings about motherhood, but I’ve also begun to talk about our minimalist aspirations, our Dave Ramsey inspired budget, and some of the work I’m doing as a work at home mom (spoiler alert – I’m making more than I was working full time!?). I’d say my 2 big interests are personal finance and home improvement so those themes are likely to appear often.

Don – Money Smart Guides: http://moneysmartguides.com/blog

Hi, my name is Don and I have a personal finance blog,http://moneysmartguides.com/blog where I attempt to provide basic personal finance for everyone. After all, no one taught us this stuff in school!

Stephi – Glitter & Salt: http://www.glitterandsalt.blogspot.com

Hi! My name is Stephi and my website is http://www.glitterandsalt.blogspot.com. It is a crafting/DIY/food and recipes website that I just started up.

Mark – Primal Low Carb: http://www.primallowcarb.com

my name is Mark and I run the diet website Primallowcarb.com.  I will be posting my regular blog, podcasts and hopefully if I find time videos.

Lianna – Song of Mystery: http://www.songofmystery.com

Hey there, my name is Lianna and I just started up The Song of Mystery in December. Every day I post music videos from up and coming bands — it gives viewers the chance to be that one cool friend everyone goes to for new music ideas.

Andi – Bun in the Toaster: http://www.buninthetoaster.com

Hi! My name is Andi, and I started http://www.buninthetoaster.com in October 2008 to chronicle my first pregnancy for out of state family and friends. Little did I know that in three years time, I would STILL be blogging, but this time, about two kids, the chaos and, ahem, bodily functions that come with them.

Renee – Counting Our Pennies: http://www.countingourpennies.blogspot.com

My name is Renee and I am the blogger ofhttp://www.countingourpennies.blogspot.com which is mostly about personal finance & personal goals.

Matthew – Matt’s Respite: http://www.mattsrespite.com

Hi – my name is Matthew. I started my blog – http://www.mattsrespite.com – around Christmas. It’s a personal travel blog that I mainly started to get into the groove of it before I move to South America in June or July. Until then I plan to post a couple of times a week, either about past trips or books enjoy.

Rebecca – Bloody Mary Mom: http://www.bloodymarymom.com

I’m Rebecca (aka Riot718 and/or Bloody Mary Mom). I’ve helped my kids with their blog (http://www.chowderkids.com) since 2008 but I moved it from Blogspot to WordPress a year ago and it all kind of fell apart. I also recently started up my personal blog (http://www.bloodymarymom.com) and started a blog for my consulting company (http://410partners.wordpress.com/).

Beth Anne – The Catholic Couponer: http://www.thecatholiccouponer.com

Hi I blog at http://thecatholiccouponer.com. I blog about couponing tips, deals, pinterest, crafts/recipes (when I feel called to), and catholic things. I just started this blog in June 2011.

Lorilla – Your Money Mentor: http://www.yourmoneymentor.com

My site http://www.yourmoneymentor.com, I am a licensed financial professional, but my site does not offer any financial advice. My site is about personal finance and wealth building.

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I’ve had my Facebook Ad running for about two weeks, and I’m impressed with the results. For the first week, II didn’t set up a custom landing page (they made that harder from the last time I made one a year ago), just collected “likes” for my SEAM Publishing. In that five days, I collected over 50 likes for the SEAM page. Actually, I got 50 likes from only 23 clicks! And only $11.23 spent.

When starting a new venture, whether a full-fledged business or a simple blog, the hardest part is getting the world aware of it. There are several strategies for this, including guest posting, search engine optimization (SEO), commenting on other blogs, and social media. They all are good strategies and, done right, they all work.

Out of these, social media could be the most important. As Nick Armstrong of WTF! Marketing put it, “marketing can still happen even if your company isn’t the one doing it.” That’s the power of social media. Depending on the message, going viral could either be the best or worst thing that could possibly happen.

Being on Twitter and Facebook are a minimum. For Facebook, create a page for your business or online persona. Having a page means people can like it, instead of having to send a friend request. And you can add a widget to your site so people can like it without even leaving your site. You can do that for this site right here:

Use this page to communicate with your fans, and share your posts. There is one problem with a Facebook Page. Unless you already have a big community/brand to bump out a few hundred likes in the first week of the page’s existence, you are going to have a small number of likes for a while. It looks pathetic, and Facebook won’t even let you user their analtytics (called Insights) unless you’ve had 30+ likes for at least a week.

You are going to have to resort to some trickery. That’s right, it’s time to start advertising.

Setting Up Facebook Ads:

Facebook’s advertising system is called, originally, Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads lets you create a regular text ad or “sponsored story.” A sponsored story shows a person that one or more of their friends likes your page (or a post within that page). Note: sponsored stories are only shown to friends of people who already like your page, which isn’t going to be a whole lot of people at first.

With a normal ad, you can promote a specific post, or to the page, with a short custom message. Your best option will likely be  Facebook Ads -> Facebook Ads for Pages. With this selection, you can send people to a specific tab of your page (more on this later).

The targeting options are pretty amazing. You can set your ad to only be shown to certain ages, genders, education levels, languages, interests, location (down to zip code!), orientation, and relationship status.

Custom Landing Pages for Facebook Ads:

Creating a custom landing page is a bit more involved than it was a year ago. Back then, there was a little link right in the page saying something along the lines of “create new tab” Now, you need to install a custom Facebook app called Static HTML: iFrame Tabs. You can get that here.

Once it’s installed, you will see a new link on your Facebook page called “Welcome” If you click on that, you will find two boxes:

You can provide a different page based on whether a person has liked the page or not. The pages will take html, css, and javascript. A popular option is to create an image of your message, save it to your website, and link to it for your welcome page. Just be aware that you are limited to 520 pixels wide.

For best results, offer something free as a giveway in exchange for a like. This would be done by saying something like “Like us for a free guide/whitepaper/coupon” in the first box and providing a download link (or coupon code) in the second. For my cooking blog’s page, I will offfer as a free download the no-stove cookbook I’m working on.

What Facebook strategies have you been using to create conversation about your site?

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When my $3k Challenge post was tweeted by J. Money last week, I got over 100 visitors that day alone. How much money did I make? 1 penny. At that rate, I would need 30 million visitors over the course of the year to reach my goal. And if I can get that many visitors, there are a lot better options of monetizing that AdSense.

Why AdSense doesn’t work:

From what I’ve read about the program, it works best if you have a different readership demographic than I seem to have developed. AdSense works best for mature blogs with a returning readership. Apparently, returning visitors are more likely to click on ads than new visitors. And clicks make a lot more money than impressions (fancy word for viewing an ad).

According to Google Analytics, 85% of my readers last month were new visitors. For my cooking blog, the picture is even worse. Despite roughly four times as many visitors, 93% were new.

Now there a lot of reasons why my retention rate is so low, some are my fault, some an artifact of the topic. But that doesn’t change the fact that AdSense isn’t going to make me a whole lot of money, and probably isn’t going to make you much either.

A quick update: Apparently, AdSense requires a privacy policy and will penalize you with lower paying ads if you don’t have one. Check out the new privacy policy at the bottom of the page for a template you can use.

Chances are, nobody will click this ad.

So what are your options?

• Different advertising partners
• Cut out the middle-man
• Sell something
• Consult
• Sell your blog

Let’s take a closer look at these options.

Different advertising partners

AdSense is by far not the only game in town. There are several others who work in the same general arena as AdSense. There may be a program targeted towards your topic. For my food blog, Foodie Blogroll has an advertising program specifically for food bloggers. Because it is much more targeted than AdSense, it pays higher. I’ve made twice as much with the Foodie Blogroll Publisher Program than I have with AdSense.

Cut out the middle-man

Of course, there is nothing that says you have to use an advertising partner to advertise. Try reaching out to companies that sell things related to your topic. If I can grow If You Can Read, You Can Cook to at least 1000 monthly visitors, I am going to do exactly that. King Soopers seems to have a pretty big advertising budget; maybe I can convince them to give me a small chunk of it.

Sell something

Have you written a book or guide about your topic? If so, let me know! I can help you get that into ebook formats with my SEAM Publishing. But shameless plug aside, a popular and potentially quite profitable way of making money is by selling something, usually a book filled with your expertise.

Consulting

Similar to selling a physical/digital product, you can sell your expertise on your topic. Motivational speaking, a service like my SEAM Publishing, web design, graphic design, menu creation. The options are limited only by your expertise and the blog’s topic. (If you write about quilting, a post about career coaching is going to seem out of place and probably not going to generate many sales).

Sell your blog

If you’ve grown a decent base and are tired of your topic, there is a better option than simply letting your blog wither and die. You can shop around for a buyer. This will generate the largest one-time amount of income, but it’s a one-off. Theoretically, you could repeat the process. Building a series of new blogs and selling them, but that’s going to be a lot of work.

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Last week, Jeremy Vohwinkle of Gen X Finance departed from his usual writing on personal finance issues facing the Generation X. Instead, he gave some job searching tips to us young’uns.

The advice is pretty standard, in terms of networking, practice your interviewing, experience matters. But the real gem is where he talks about thinking about what’s really important to you about a job. Before you can know which job to even apply for, you need to know your answers to questions like:

• What is more important: pay, or a flexible schedule?
• Are good benefits more important than higher pay?
• Would you give up some perks in order to work in the city or are the suburbs more appealing even at a lower salary?

http://genxfinance.com/job-hunting-tips-for-the-new-college-graduate-or-anyone/

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Personally, I think that advice is horse-poop.

A guy in debt up to his eyeballs just called the biggest names in personal finance idiots. Riiiight. Actually, I didn’t call anyone an idiot. I’ll let Suze Orman do that.  I’m just saying that the standard advice ignores some very important aspects of psychology that Dave Ramsey utilizes in other chapters of his book.

The Standard Advice:

Everyone has heard of the debt snowball. It’s the idea that you pay off your smallest debt first, while paying minimums on other debts. Once that’s paid off, put that money towards the next smallest debt. From a financial standpoint, this is wrong; you should pay off the highest interest debt first. But from a psychological standpoint, it’s absolutely right. You get the “win” of paying off a debt sooner and are more likely to stick with it.

On the topic of savings and insurance, you aren’t supposed to mix the two. Term life is cheaper and the money you would have spent on whole life, but now aren’t, you invest. Investing in the stock market “historically” earns a higher rate of return than what a cash-value life insurance policy pays.

What’s Wrong with the Standard Advice:

Will you really invest it?

The idea of the debt snowball is that the psychological win that provides a greater likelihood of overall success is more important than saving a couple hundred dollars. The standard advice on life insurance assumes you don’t need any psychological boost to succeed and instead chases after the extra money. I think we all know the definition of ass-u-me. It seems rather backwards that a person is going to be more disciplined at saving for tomorrow than in paying off debts you see today.

Sure you can set up an automatic withdrawal, but when the new shiny whatever comes out, the temptation will be there to cancel the withdrawal and buy the shiny. If you’re investing through a vehicle like life insurance, then your investment becomes a bill that you have to pay.

Will you really earn more?

I’m a worrier. I try not to, but it comes naturally. As such, I have a pretty low risk tolerance. According to e*trade, my retirement account is more than 1/3 fixed income mutual funds. I like the idea of guaranteed return. I sleep better at night with it than I do thinking about the fact that a downgrade of US Treasuries caused $1.4 trillion to disappear from the stock market. A cash value life insurance policy won’t loose value in a recession.

I recently talked about this issue with an actual insurance agent, Patrick Soukup*. When I brought up this issue with him, he also brought up the issue of pre-tax gains vs. after-tax gains. I’m not going to pretend I’m remotely knowledgeable on tax issues aside from filing a simple 1040 every year. But apparently, your stock market investment would need to gain 7-8% to match the after-tax value of cash-value life insurance’s current 3-4% returns.

*He wasn’t sure of compliance issues with me providing contact info in this post, but if you are in the northern Colorado area and want to talk to him, contact me on twitter and I can get you in touch.

——-

Disclaimer: I am not a certified anything, except flagger (the guy who stops traffic in a construction zone). The information above is my opinion based on readings and conversation and should not be construed as advice.

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“Some 450,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians that live there. In times of drought, in contravention of international law, the settlers get priority for water.”

The report itself is a 20 page section on “The Jordan Basin: Water as an Integrated Hinge of the Territorial Conflict and Security Question,” is part of a larger 300+ page report titled “The Geopolitics of Water,” released on December 13.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/french-parliament-report-accuses-israel-of-water-apartheid-in-west-bank-1.407685

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But the place we saw yesterday, we really liked. The kitchen is a little smaller than I would have preferred (and has an electric stove, ugh)*, and the backyard doesn’t get much sun. But for our price range, we aren’t going to find better. It really is a nice starter home. And it has an HOA pool. Expect to find me there every nice day we have this summer.

I’m started to get excited about the whole prospect again.

*This part of the country really seems to love electric stoves. Browsing though hundreds of listings, I’ve so far only seen one with a gas stove.

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What I learned from Google – You Get Fifteen Years

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One of the first rules of blogging is this: Content is king. Meaning that by any possible metric, the key to being successful is having content that people want to read. But if you don’t already have a 1000+ followers, there aren’t going to be a whole lot of people seeing that content. That’s why the kingdom of content needs a strong queen. That queen is someone who can help you get the word out.

In The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell calls them connectors. Connectors are people who know lots of people. Connectors spread your message to those lots of people. Connectors are your queen.

Over the past two years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve developed relationships with a few bloggers who have been more successful than me for a variety of reasons. I try not to abuse these relationships. However, if I have a particularly important message that is aligned with their interests, I can ask them to share it.

When I decided to launch the challenge, I contacted J. Money of Budgets Are Sexy to help spread the word. Less than half an hour of his time has had amazing results for me. This blog got more visits on yesterday than it did in December. Plus 5 new feed subscribers. Thanks guys.

I do realize that I just called J. a queen, but I didn’t mean it that way. Especially not after the amazing boost he provided me here. Now that I’ve been propelled to possibly being interested, I need to install my king. Time to get back to content.

How have you utilized a connector to help your site?

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