I got an email from Blake last week (a fellow planner and loyal TFB reader). He’s a really good, honest planner and knows that he can add a lot of value for his clients. He is meticulous and is always looking to improve his clients’ situations. In other words, he’s part of us good guys . He told me that he was able to close almost everybody that he meets in a one-on-one conversation. The problem is that he would like to get more clients (who doesn’t want to make more money anyways, huh?). In our business, there are 2 ways to gain clients:

1-      Referrals (from existing and happy clients)

2-      Cold Calls

This is the same situation for most businesses in fact. You either get a reference from a buddy or client of yours or you pick up the phone and book a meeting by yourself. Life is easy when you get a referral since the potential client has been sold on you by someone he can trust. Therefore, he is willing to give you 2 super important things you need as an entrepreneur (advisor, salesmen, representative, etc):

1-      Time (he will allow you to meet him)

2-      An open mind (he will actually listen to what you have to say and might even ask questions to know more)

Ironically, this is exactly what you don’t have when you make a cold call. Most people don’t have enough time in a day to do what they enjoy doing the most (whatever it might be), so why the hell would they have time to listen to you? Chances are that you are distracting them from a very important task (according to them) when you call.

If you think you don’t have the time for someone who calls you, the first thing you think of is “how can I politely hang-up ASAP?”.  The word “politely” is probably your only chance of having more than 30 seconds with the prospect. Some people just don’t care and will hang-up on the spot. For this type of client, I don’t have many tricks… but when I have more than 30 seconds, I’ve developed a few techniques to make my way through. I’m not an expert in cold calling and still have a lot to learn about it. On the other hand, I’m able to get an appointment every 4 calls I make. In all honesty, you should expect 1 appointment per 20 calls at first, then it will rapidly drop to 1 appt /10 calls and then can become better at selecting your prospects to hit a 20-25% batting average after a few months. My techniques don’t apply to all types of cold calling as I’m in a profession that offers high value services. I guess that most of these techniques would not work if you are a telemarketer selling credit card insurance! Here’s how I do it:

Be Confident

If you are not convinced that you can truly and genuinely help the person you are calling, don’t even bother dialing the phone number. You need to know what you are doing and why you are doing it. What’s in it for the client? Don’t answer this crucial question by the characteristics of your products and services. Answer this question with benefits for the clients. Don’t think about you, think about the client. What would make YOU change your mind about someone calling you? The very first thing is the confidence of that person who thinks that he can truly make your life better.

If you are not confident in your services/products, I suggest you check with other colleagues, your boss, a mentor to enhance this part of your offer. Without confidence, you won’t get a single appointment.

Prepare a Script But Don’t Over Prepare

Anxiety starts when you are about to pick-up the phone. This is when you “don’t feel ready” and want to practice again. It’s important to have a short script with a few “pick-up lines”. But don’t over practice your script. It has to be natural to avoid going on for 4 minutes without breathing and without letting your prospect talk. He won’t listen anyways. Your script should be split in 3 parts:

a)      Who you are (Hello Mr. X, It Mike from XYZ situated at and I’m doing ABC)

This quick intro is just to tell your prospect that you are a real person working for a real company doing a real job. I personally ask my prospects how he is doing. This usually generates a small “fine” tainted by either a small interest but most of the time I know that the client is annoyed already. This is when I jump into the second part of my script:

b)      What you are doing / what you are offering

This part must be less than 1.5 minutes if you want to make sure the client doesn’t lose interest and that you can ask him a question that he will answer (because he is still listening). The point in that 90 second timeframe is to go directly to what you do best (what’s in it for the client). It doesn’t really matter which point you want to highlight as long as you sound very confident and that your 90 seconds ends with a question. This question should lead to interaction with the client so you become more “human” and less “that annoying telemarketer”. You want to engage in a conversation and “open doors” which is part 3:

c)       Asks questions to open doors

By asking questions of your prospect to know with whom he deals with, why he deals with them, if he has heard of “XYZ” strategy or products, if he knows how much it costs him, etc. The point is to get the prospect talking about his situation and note everything he says. With this information you should be able to open doors to an appointment. The door opening comes when the prospect gives a “weak” answer such as:

Why are you doing business with them?

-          Because I’ve always been (meaning he never considered another option)

Have you heard of XYZ strategy / product that can help you do ABC?

-          No, never heard of that (here’s your chance to explain what is it, make it sound interesting and to book an appointment to explain the whole strategy/product)

Do you know how much it costs you?

-          Not really / It’s been a long time I haven’t check that / Yeah, it’s $$$ (You can then offer something cheaper in most cases)

When is the last time you met with your advisor? Did he check everything, not just the investments?

-          I met him last week, 6 months ago, he just looked at my investments (now’s your chance to offer a global approach).

Are you convinced that your bank is offering you the most? Would you allow me to confirm that with you?

After you have opened at least one door, you can “close the call” by offering the following:

Here’s what I offer; you take 45 minutes to meet with me, I’ll even go to your office. Within 30 minutes, I’ll guarantee you 2 things:

-          I’ll offer you something you never heard of

-          You won’t be wasting your time with me

There is absolutely no obligation on your side. The worse that will happen is that you will have spent 45 minutes with a professional and will have a few questions for your own advisor to challenge him.

It won’t work all the time as many folks won’t answer your questions and you will be left with very little ammo to convince them to meet you. For those situations, I don’t have any tricks yet. But for those who give you a few more seconds to prove yourself, you will definitely hit a question that will open a door and will allow you to book your appointment. Then, the only thing that you need to do is to ask him a few more questions “in order to present the right thing for him and not waste his time”. You do that once the appointment is scheduled so the prospect will be willing to give you additional information.

All you need to do after that is to prepare a killer presentation!

How would you react if a professional (not a vacuum salesman) called you with that approach? Would you give him 90 seconds to prove his point?

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It’s a total coincidence, but it seems that I’m making a lot of confessions this week. After telling you how I feel at work (I’m already doing better now!), I want to share some failures I have had in the past with regards to my business ventures. Believe it or not, this is not at my first attempt to build a company and not my first partnership either.

When I was in University, I started a small computer business. We were building new computers and repairing old ones. I didn’t know much about computers (like I don’t know much about tech stuff today!). But I liked computers and already had that entrepreneur bug in me. One of my friends was really good at opening up computer boxes and playing with them. On the other hand, he wasn’t much into sales and didn’t know how to start a small business (account openings, accounting, etc). At first, we thought we could do something pretty good. In fact, we had about $20,000 in sales during our first year. Considering that it was our third job (I was going full time at University and working 35 hours per week on deliveries), I think it was pretty good!

Nonetheless, this great partnership ended about 18 months after we sold our first computer. I was going to study abroad for a session and my friend didn’t want to sell computers by himself for 6 months. The company was closed upon my return from Europe without much drama. In fact, it felt like we both have lost the will to continue and wanted to move on… the funny part is that we didn’t have any other side projects and we just stopped having a profitable sideline for no clear reason. Since the computer business is fairly aggressive and new players like Dell were entering the Canadian market, I doubt that we would have built a multimillion dollar company with this sideline. Although I still think that we could have made a lot more money! Ten years later, I can look back and see why we failed. It’s not a specific reason but a group of them.

Lack of Planning

Most people start their business or sideline without a plan. They think that a good idea, a profitable niche and some talent are enough to succeed. They are all wrong. If you plan to head across the United States by car, you will need a plan. If you only have the good idea (going from the East Coast to the West Coast), with a good car and great friends, this won’t be enough to build a memorable trip. However, if you check out the right roads to pick, the right places to make pit stops and the right cities to visit in between, you can have the trip of your life. This doesn’t mean that you won’t get to the West Coast without a plan, but you may lose your way at times! This is the same thing with a business; if you don’t have a direction, if you don’t know where you are going, you will eventually get lost. While getting lost in a car could lead to some great stories, when you get lost with your business, you usually lose money along the way. I doubt this is what you want!

We never took the time to write a plan and it showed. There was no replacement when I left and no way for us to grow rapidly. Fast growth is one of the things that will keep an entrepreneur busy and, therefore, motivated. If you just work your sideline when you have some free time, you will eventually be bored and quit. This is true with your business, your blog and this is also true for most hobbies. Who can say they like soccer and play once every three months? I don’t call it playing a sport!

Lack of Communication

When I go pee while working on my sites, I tell my partner. This is how transparent we are about communication… okay… maybe I’m exaggerating! Seriously, if you don’t say what you do, what you like and what you don’t like on a weekly basis (we are actually doing it on a daily basis but that’s because we are best friends), you won’t make it over time. It’s important to mention what you don’t like the very same minute it starts to annoy you. If not, it grows bigger, becomes a problem and are then stuck with a huge situation to deal with. Intense communication is always very cool to exchange ideas and brainstorm. Each time I have an idea, good or bad, I send a quick email to my partner. These emails are sent at 4 am when my friend wakes up early and can’t sleep, at 10 am right after I met a client and got a flash or at midnight because we are not both sleeping . We basically send emails every day for anything. Most of our ideas are poor to be honest and the other partner analyzes it in a heartbeat. But from time to time, we generate some awesome ideas and can develop them the very same day.

Sharing the Same Goals

One of the biggest reasons why you will succeed in your partnership is if you and your partner share the same goals. The problem is it’s usually the case at the beginning of the partnership. But life evolves, you meet someone, get married, move out of town, start an MBA, have kids, want to travel, need money, ready to invest a big chunk of money, etc. We actually went through all of the situations mentioned above and we are still doing business. Why? We share our goals and discuss the company’s situation as well as our personal situation. We then know what to expect from each other and understand that we go through special events once in a while that allow us to work more or less on our sites. I clearly didn’t have see anything similar the first time I started a business and this is why we ended-up miles away from each other and never realized it until the company closed.

Blind Trust

There is one person that I can trust with my life in this world and it’s my partner. But this naïve confidence doesn’t come from our partnership but from a 40 day trip across Europe when we were 20. We saw each other in all emotional states and supported each other. At no moment did we get annoyed by the other even though we went through some epic debates. And when I talk about epic debates, I talk about two to three hours of debate on a single topic in the middle of a park, a museum or simply in our hotel. I guess this is why I can trust him and he can trust me the way we do it!

This Doesn’t Mean That You Should Cover Yourself

While we trust ourselves more than brothers, we still setup our business “the right way”. We have a shareholder agreement where we determined how we value the company and how one can buy the other (shotgun clause). If we were ever to split, everything has been written down and agreed in this contract. If you are serious about going into business with someone, you should do everything with the same seriousness.

Don’t Think About Money

My final advice about having a partner is to avoid concentrating about money. If you do it, you will start counting your hours and watching your friend. Setup goals instead and split tasks. It’s a lot more effective and you won’t concentrate on who’s bringing the money to the table. That doesn’t matter. What matters is if you have fun or not and if you want to grow the business. There is no “star player” on our team, we are just TWO geniuses doing their job hahaha!

Readers, are you or have you been in a partnership? What have you learned from it?

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An eye-opener in this post is some thoughts on red bull and vodka:

“The alcohol tries to slow you down, the caffeine tries to speed you up – your body has no effing clue what to do.”

Every young person going to a party after a long day of school or work, has tried this concoction of red bull and vodka.

Some interesting thoughts on drinking in your diet:

“I believe drinking can be done occasionally, in moderation, and a desirable healthy lifestyle can still be achieved.”

The best advice on drinking altogether:

Volunteer to be the designated driver.  That way, your friends will love you and OWE you as they don’t need to pay for a cab, and you have a built in excuse why you’re not drinking.

Do you cut out drinking when trying to lose weight?

I understand that anyone with a family, kids, a mortgage, car payments, or any other real responsibilities is obviously going to want job security. You want to know how much money you’re going to have coming in so that you can cover your current expenses and plan for the future. I totally understand that aspect of job security. Nobody wants to work in an industry with a high turnover rate when they have a family because they want to be able to put food on the table.

There’s one problem though. I want to ask you a simple question:

Do you care about job security too much?

I’ve recently encountered buddies that are far too concerned with job security. These are talented young people that could reach their goals if they worked for it Allow me to share a quick story.

At my part-time job, a friend of mine took a full-time position. His new position doesn’t fulfill him at all and he gets paid enough just to not quit. He’s never happy at work nor does he feel stimulated for one minute, yet he chose to accept a permanent position. Why did he do this? Because he feels that his job his stable and he wants job security. I think that he’s far too talented to be concerned about job security.

Should 25 year olds care about job security?

I don’t think so. At this age you have all of the energy in the world and you’re ready to grab a hold of life. Sure it helps to have a steady gig so that you can budget your money. I get that part. However, your only concern shouldn’t be money in your 20s. You could be apart of something remarkable or work on stuff that actually interests you. You can get that steady job in a few years. You don’t have to settle for the first secure gig that comes your way in your 20s.

When is job security important?

• When you have bills to pay.
• When you don’t have a backup plan.
• When you don’t have an emergency fund.
• When you prefer stability.

Should you quit your job, following your passions, and travel the world?

“Transferring your passion to your job is far easier than finding a job that happens to match your passion.” — Seth Godin

Not at all. As much as I praise the idea of “working for yourself/following your passions” or whatever else you want to call, I do realize that it’s not for everyone. I have buddies that are huge risk takers in real life, but don’t care for risks with their income. Not everyone is meant to be self-employed and traveling the world like Tim Ferriss. It’s cool to work for a small startup or to accept work in a field that has a high turnover rate. You don’t have to ditch job security for self-employment.

I recently brought up a challenge to make an additional $5,000 in freelance income this summer because I do believe that we all have the potential to make more money in our 20s. We just get too distracted with dating, media, and other useless crap. If we can filter out the useless stuff once in a while, we can make find time to work on cool stuff.

A couple of months ago, I told you that I started a new job and that I was joining the big leagues. More recently, I compiled a few videos on how I motivate myself to get the ball rolling.  And it works: after 6 weeks at my new job, I’ve already achieved my annual objective and have an interesting pipeline for next year!

I received a few emails and comments on this blog asking how I make cold calls and how I start a new book. Readers are basically asking me what I do to be so successful at work. I guess the secret is to find what you are really good at and hustle. Passion and hustle are the only 2 words you need to remember to be successful in any field. This is what I’ve been doing for the past 4 years and it is paying off big time. On this team, I am, once again, the youngest guy sitting at the table. This is great proof of my fast climb due to consistent high performance at work.

Everything seems perfect and rolling for me.

Seems

But the truth is slightly different.

Today I want to bring you with me for a tour behind the scenes. The truth I never told anybody  about my job is the following:

It’s a Darn Hard Job to Do

There is nothing cooler than succeeding at something that is very tough. What is even cooler is when other people look at you and you make it appear like it’s super easy to do. Well NOT! This is not cool! It’s not cool because it is so f&%/”g hard to achieve, you have no idea. Each day is a roller coaster of emotions. Regardless if I exceed the expectations or not, I feel like sh!t at least once a week. And I’m writing this post to explain exactly why I feel like that. At the moment of writing this very line, I’m not even sure myself. But I need to dig into my mind to find out what is wrong.

I like my job.

I’m good at it.

People around me are awesome.

So what is wrong?

Anxiety is My Dark Passenger

Each time I have to pick up the phone, I feel anxious. It’s kind of weird as I have a pretty good batting average to booking appointments on a cold calls. So far, I have a 26% rate of success when I call a client to get an appointment. In this industry, this rate is sick. Every 4 phone calls, I have a chance to meet with a new client and show what I can do best: take care of people.

Nonetheless, the pressure of performing is freezing my brain and slowing down my actions. I fear the moment when I schedule time to make cold calls. I find all kind of excuses to “shuffle paperwork” instead of growing my business. This results in hours of non-productivity, boringness and an awful feeling of being useless. But some days, I just can’t pick up the phone and make a stupid call. The confident, borderline cocky, Mike is unable to pick up the phone and dial 10 numbers in a row! Come on, dude, it’s like ordering pizza! Is it that difficult?

Why is it so hard to do something that I’m good at? I mean; I love to meet new people and find out about their lives, businesses, backgrounds. I love connecting with people and move forward with them.

But the seed of anxiety was planted in my brain when I started. I told you that people had great expectations of me when I first started at this office. Well, the seed of anxiety was planted the moment I realized that I didn’t have a small book of client to start with. I was supposed to get roughly 40-50 clients. I thought this would be enough to get me busy for a few months, get the ball rolling, meet with clients, develop relationships and develop referrals. But I started with 18 clients regrouped into 5 families. Seriously, 5 families to start a business… it’s more like having 5-6 real clients (can we count the 3 minor kids I have in the 18 clients as “real clients”?) Do you really think I can live with that?

This is where a little bit of panic started to run into my mind. When I have a busy day, when I have appointments with clients or when I have files to work on, the anxiety disappears in a heartbeat. In fact, these days, I feel like a million buck and truly love my job. Every time I have to meet with a new client, I’m super excited and motivated. And each time I leave their offices I smile and feel satisfied.

But most of my days are not like that… there is not much you can do to keep you busy with 18 clients, right? So there are other days where all I have to do is to sit at my desk, pick up the phone and make calls. This is exactly when anxiety jumps onto the dance floor and drains all my energy. So what scares me, really?

I hate when people tell me they are not interested.

I hate when they make me feel unwanted, unsolicited.

I hate when I have the feeling that I won’t bring in any money this week.

I hate when I can’t prove that I have real value to offer, that I can truly help them.

I hate to been seen as a vacuum peddler – I’m a professional damn it!

Phew!… seriously, thank you for reading me this morning. I’ve been thinking seriously prior to writing this post and I dug inside myself to find what is wrong with me, when I go into a rut like this. The fact that I feel like you, my friends, are listening to me this morning makes me feel a lot better. It’s kind of weird but the best way to get rid of anxiety, is climb up to the rooftop and scream it to the world.

I’M ANXIOUS AND I HATE IT!!!!

Aahhhh… now I feel better! It’s currently8:44 amas I finish this post and I’m going to hit the phone like I never have since I started this job!

When you think about it, what is worse: staring at the phone during an hour and doing nothing or getting ten “no, thanks” and 3 appointments for next week?

Rock on!

Thx for reading, you are awesome!

Mike.

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About a year ago, I wrote my company long term plan. This post was divided in 4 sections according to a time horizon (1, 3, 5 and 10 years out). Since I’m a financial planner, I know a thing or two about effective planning. Plans do change in time and most plans are not realized as forecasted. But the power behind a plan is in revision and adjustments. If you don’t go back to your initial plan and look at where you have been, where you are at right now and realize the difference from the plan you have, then your plan has been worthless. It is darn important to follow-up. Not because you need to stick to your plan but to understand what went well or went wrong and what you can do to move forward.

I’m also a big fan of commitment. There is no point talking about something if it’s just to write it on a blog to be forgotten. This is why today I’m reviewing what was written a year ago.

1 Year From Now… It’s Today!

Last year, I wanted to accomplish several things in this company during the short span of 12 months:

-          10 niches sites up and running

-          2 sites (besides blogs) up and running

-          Make over 10K/month (I made $10,514 in May 2011)

-          Have 4 eBooks for sale

My goals were pretty ambitious and several things went sideways during the last year. We went “all-in” without a true direction. We didn’t have a huge plan. In fact, we just had goals… I must say that I’m somewhat disappointed with where we are at today when I look at my aspirations of a year ago. But, nothing is all gloom and doom.

We do have some serious niche sites running and generating over $350/month now. We do have our 10 niche sites but they are not as big as we thought they would be 12 months later. We were expecting these 10 sites to make $100/month each in orderto  generate $1000/month from this part of this business. I actually think that we will make it, but it’s harder than we thought. Our latest sites are well built and make a the bulk of our niche site income. Here are our 4 biggest niche sites (all generating over $40/month):

Canadian Dividend Stock

What is Dividend

EMT Classes

Home Security System

The “2” big sites are still under construction. This is probably our biggest “failure” as we didn’t make enough time to have them fly. On the other hand, it gave us the time to create a super nice structure around them. Both designs are done and the sites are live right now. However, we are still working on the content before officially launching them. The only advantage I see is that they are already getting search engine authority since they are live and updated regularly. We expect to launch both sites by the end of Q3.

When we wanted to make $10K/month on a regular basis, we were already “almost” there last year. But now, I can say that it’s great success. Even if we are currently decreasing our number of private ads, we have compensated those losses by bigger Adsense income and affiliate marketing. After 4 months of operation, I can say that I’m confident we’ll make over $120K in gross income for 2012.

eBooks… ish… do I really have to talk about this one? You know how my 2^nd eBook launch went (read here if you don’t!) but we are not discouraged. In fact, we learned a lot and tried something else recently with some good success (more details here). Our current project is a 2 version eBook on dividend investing (Canadian and US). Both books are completed and have been sent for editing/formatting and we will also have a complete site built for us for this launch. I expect to sell over 300 copies in 2012. It’s pretty ambitious but it will also be confirmation that I have (or haven’t!) learned from my past experience and that I can create, market and sell a great product! With an investing newsletter over 5,500 members strong, I’m confident that 5% of them will buy my book. The rest will come from an affiliate program and other referrals. So maybe I’ll be able to say “mission accomplished!” in 6 months .

What’s up with the 2014 plan?

I wrote that I was expecting the company to use leverage again to buy another site in the 3 years to come. Well, this happened faster that we thought! We actually made our big purchase about 3 months ago. While we are still integrating these sites into our network, I can say that the investment return is already showing. Our company currently owes around $82K in total. Yup, you read it right… 82K in debt! But this debt is dropping by 3K a month since February. We have put in place an aggressive debt reduction plan. In 27 months, we will be debt free and running a highly profitable business. OR…. we will be leveraged again and be making a lot more money .

Our second project for 2014 is to offer membership websites or other kinds of paid services. Well this will probably happen in 2013! The funny thing about our first 12 month plan is that it was tossed away by several other “opportunities”. This is why we started working on different projects instead on focusing on what we thought was important. So we already know what our membership product will be, how we will manage it and the platform / design has already been purchased. So all we need is manpower to generate content and setup the launch (this is already being put into place). To be honest, as soon as we can launch our eBooks and finish our 2 major websites, we are starting to work “full time” on this project: Canadian Aristocrats They Have it Too.

The main goal will be to make over 20K/month in 2014. As we are currently generating slightly over 10K/month, this is a 100% increase in 2 years. There is still a lot of work left but if everything that we launch works, I don’t see why we couldn’t achieve it. Worse comes to worst, we just have to buy 10 sites that make 1K/month over the next 2 years… lol!

2016 Plan

In 2016, I’ll be 35. I already wrote that my windows of opportunity will start to shrink after this countdown. This is why the current 5 years are crucial for me, my company and my pockets!! The big plan is to show a $1M net worth for my 35^th birthday. I’m now focusing on paying off my debts and both my investments and home will increase in value. However, we all know that if I show $1M in net worth at 35, the bulk of my assets will be my company. I’ve already mentioned that I would need my company to be worth 864K to become a millionaire by 35. This is roughly a 20% annualized revenue growth. It is still quite a challenge (now that we have to survive Google once again!) but I don’t think it’s impossible.

I mentioned on this blog that 2012 will be a “do or die” year for our company and this is really the case.

If our niche sites don’t grow and generate $1K/month by the end of the year,

If our 2 big sites are not generating money by the end of the year,

If I don’t sell 300 copies of my new eBooks,

If I can’t sell membership subscriptions to my new sites in 2013,

I won’t be able to bring this great sideline to the level of a great company.

What I like to see is I’m not too far away from my 12 month projections. While this is definitely not where I thought I would be on many points, I’ve also developed other projects and already bought 2 great websites (which wasn’t in the short term plan).

So I’m now ready to crush the rest of 2012 and boost my monthly income to $15,000 by the end of this year!

Readers, when is the last time you wrote a plan and looked back at it? How did it go?

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What’s so epic about this piece?

We all know someone that’s guilty of bragging about how little sleep they get. The idea of not getting a lot of sleep is often glorified and we give credit to those that are sleep deprived. I’ve been guilty of this myself until I realized the negative implications of not getting enough sleep. This article looks at what can happen to you when you don’t get a good rest.

What’s the best part of this article?

“Lack of sleep seems to be a badge to show how hard we are working.  Yet, while we may feel tired when we sleep less, most of us rarely think about the significant health and financial implications.”

If you want to read more on the topic of sleeping, you can check out an older post that I did where I wrote about difficulty sleeping problems and how they relate to hustling in your 20s.

“If you’re five years old and say you want to be an astronaut, your parents tell you that you can be anything you want to be. It’s harmless, like telling a child that Santa Claus exists. If you pass 25 and announce you want to float in space or sail around the world, the response is different: be realistic, become a lawyer or an accountant or a doctor, have babies, and raise them to repeat the cycle. Put all of your disposable income in a 401(k) and do your best to enjoy your “too-weak” vacation.” –  Tim Ferriss

I keep on getting bothered by friends that don’t understand what I’m doing. They ask me about why I don’t have a real job or why I don’t get into the real world.

I wanted to look at why I’m not technically in the real world right now…

I wanted to travel.

When you start your first job after college you might have to wait a long time before you get to travel or take any time off. I wanted to try to travel the world as much as possible in my 20s. Since I graduated from college I’ve been on six trips and I finally got to backpack through Europe by myself. I believe that I still have a few good long distance trips left in my tank.

I love working on my own projects.

I’m not motivated to work on stuff that I don’t care about. I can’t put all my energy into something unless I’m totally into it (ask any of my ex-girlfriends). The beauty of not finding a full-time job yet is that I’m able to focus on my own projects (freelance work, building up my site, and other random activities). Most of my friends that found steady gigs complain to me about how they have no motivation after a boring day of mundane work and that they don’t feel creatively fulfilled. I’m proud to have the luxury to work on my own projects for now.

I don’t have any debt.

I worked full-time hours during college so that I didn’t graduate with any debt. I didn’t want to be desperate for work after college. I didn’t want to be chasing after any random job. I wanted to be able to pick-and-choose and do what I want. I’m grateful every single day for the fact that my parents let me stay at home for free while I hustled through college. Being able to pick up my degree without the stress of student loans is one of the best feelings in my opinion.

I also didn’t max out my credit card or anything like that either. I made some foolish moves with my money, but I was able to recover by working even harder. My only debt right now is my home mortgage, but I don’t mind that because it’s a rental property and at this point I’m not losing any money.

Those three factors are why I still haven’t entered the real world. I don’t know what’s next, but I’m pretty pumped about life right now.

Are you in the real world?

Yeah…last month I told you that I would stop publishing my blog income report. This month, I’m telling you that I’ll be sharing a part of it . If there is one thing that is constant in my business model, it’s definitely the fact that I keep changing my mind. I think it’s important to rethink the way you do things constantly even if it means to go back to your project and making even more modifications. This is why I will be telling you about my adsense income at the end of this article. Since I want to boost my adsense up to 40% of my total monthly income, this would give you a pretty good idea of how much I make on a monthly basis.

Traffic Improvement

The end of April was a bit challenging for us because one of our sites was hacked for 3 solid days. It was showing a malware alert before you enter the site. Do I have to tell you that I missed several thousand visitors during those 3 days? It was quite challenging to solve the issue as it wasn’t clear what the problem was. Here’s what we did:

-          Run free malware detection tools… without any real indication (you get what you pay for, right?).

-          Check Google Webmaster Tool to see what was going wrong… Google was telling us that we had 24 (!) pages affected by malware. We couldn’t tell which pages were delinquent.

-          We then contacted our host (Liquid Web) to ask them to run tests on their end. They were very helpful and first found that it was probably created by a plugin or a code added to the WordPress theme. Since WordPress is used a lot by bloggers, it is a platform targeted by hackers.

-          It took them 2 days to clean all pages and make sure that the malware won’t come back.

With spring coming, we always see a small drop in traffic. When I combine the malware event to the natural slowdown, I can say that my traffic has been quite steady. We didn’t make any major changes on our side to improve our traffic either.

Affiliate Program Strategies

I haven’t worked much on affiliate programs this month as I was finishing my eBooks (more on that below). This is how I collected a few checks from Market Samurai, 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, INO and Questrade. My experience with displaying 1 single link toward ProBlogger’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog really proved that you should think of adding excellent resources to your epic posts. About a month ago, I wrote a huge post on how to Survive Google. In this article, I explained various strategies used to create a sustainable business that is not fully dependent on search engine traffic. A simple mention of my most favourite book to learn how to build a strong blog was enough to “pay me” for having written this post. If I do this more often, I would not only become richer but I would also help a lot more individuals. There is a huge difference between plugging an affiliate every time you can and telling people about a product you like and use. The latter is truly helpful for everybody and this is how affiliate links should be managed.

Newsletter Projects

Last month, I mentioned that I was working on a newsletter funnel project of 12 emails. I’d say that half of these emails include at least 1 affiliate link. They are all pointing to legitimate products that can truly help readers. Since I’m now done creating the email funnel, the test is now running to make sure everything goes smoothly. Testing is crucial when you want to sell products through your newsletter. You want to make sure that your message hits home and that people see the benefit of registering for products instead of seeing them as annoying ads.

Now that this project is almost over, I’ll be able to concentrate in May on my other newsletters (such as TFB!). I have several topics in my “to do” list

Niche Site Central

My EMT Training site continues to impress with a total income of $36.87 for its second month. I’m surprised since I have absolutely no network in the medical or job/career field to use to boost the traffic. I’m still not getting many visitors (slightly over 300 for the past month), but the Adsense stats are awesome. I was also able to generate an affiliate sale of $20.99. I think the combination of Adsense and affiliate programs is awesome. The EMT exams are not easy and people are definitely looking for help. Mock exams and audio resumes are a great help if you want to pass that exam. I guess the key point in designing this niche site was to aim at a need people had (pass that exam in order to get a job). Since this need is quite important, people are willing to invest a few bucks to make sure they pass the first time.

Now, the real challenge will be to generate traffic as I’m convinced that if I can multiply my traffic by 10 (getting 3,000 visitors/month), I can also multiply my income by 10 (and make almost $400/month with this site!). Link building will be a hard path to travel but I have a few ideas in mind.

eBook Development

I’m “officially” done! I’ve written 2 eBooks on the same topic: 1 Canadian and 1 US version. This was quite a challenge, especially writing the second version. I had to revisit the entire book and erase several chapters and rewrite others. What I found the most difficult about it was that I needed to find the additional motivation to revisit something that I already completed. The book is now off for final editing and formatting. I’ll share more thoughts on strategy (and how the sales went) later. For now, let’s just say that I am very happy to have completed this very important step in our business plan. This will enable me to work a lot more on other projects!

Current Project in Progress

Next month, early in June, is our annual meeting. We will have to discuss how the company is doing so far this year and what will be done throughout 2012-2013. We usually start our discussion a month in advance through email to bounce various ideas and topics we want to discuss during that meeting. We have limited time to think about our business during that weekend and need to be as efficient as possible. By doing a 1 month brainstorming session, we have the opportunity to build a huge list of topics to cover and not forget anything. This is definitely the biggest project I’ll be working on this month: preparing the next 12 months for my business. We usually cover topics such as:

-          Operating costs (potential savings, optimization)

-          Security (server, backup, password management)

-          Revenues (trend, strengths and weaknesses)

-          Projects (new sites, products, newsletters)

-          Overview of our current sites (we look at each site to determine what should be done to make it better)

This is definitely one of the most exciting moments of the year for our company!

Adsense Income: $3,126.40!

For a second month in a row (sorry, I couldn’t show you March’s income stats!), I reached an average of over $100/day with Adsense! In fact, during April, I only had 6 days below the $100 bar. These usually happen over the weekend! When I look at my stats, I only wish I could understand why I go from aRPM(revenue per mile impressions) as low as $0.46 to as high as $29.64. Part of the answer probably lies in the site topics and type of visitors. The rest of the answer is probably in the ad placement. I’m actually working on a big piece of how I manage Adsense throughout my network and I’ll provide more details next time out. In the months to come, I’ll also create additional channels to narrow down my stats. I currently have 1 channel per site, regardless of the size or the ad placement. In a perfect world, I’d need a different channel for each ad placement to know exactly where I make money and where I’m just bugging readers.

If you have any specific questions, send them to me!

And if you want to learn more about my online business, you simply have to register for my newsletter:

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A few months ago, I started a quick series on the importance of having a newsletter. I do believe that a mailing list should be part of any business model, regardless if you want to make money online or not. To be honest, my financial newsletter at work always brings me new business. A newsletter is a privileged means of communication with someone you know. It’s a way to:

-          Gain credibility

-          Stay in your client’s mind

-          Become the #1 resource for any topic

-          Offer a quick way for your client to connect with you

-          Be proactive

I recently told you that having a newsletter is one of the things you need to do if you want your blog to make money. There is a lot of potential to make money if you publish the right kind of newsletter. From time to time, I subscribe to newsletters myself in order to gather more information and see what others are doing (learning from others is definitely a great way to improve your business as I’ve mentioned in my newsletter). About 2 weeks ago, I received the following email:

I received this mailing as I registered to My University Money newsletter in order to download his awesome ETF eBook. To be honest, I didn’t have to register for his newsletter as Teacher Man sent the eBook via email. But I was somewhat curious to know what he would do with his newsletter and how he will manage his so precious connection with his readers. I also asked him if he minded having me analyze his “welcome note”.

Do you think it’s good? Do you like it? Let’s take a look with a different eye:

The Newsletter Analysis

There some great features from Aweber that have been used in this newsletter. The first one is the use of my own name (Mike). This makes the newsletter more personal and people are more likely to read ahead. In an effort to optimize , I would also plug the subscriber’s name in the title: “So Mike, What do you think?” would have made an awesome email title. Since the email is coming from a blogger I like and he uses my name along with a question, I would definitely jump on this email to read it.

Another great feature is the not-too-aggressive ad on the left side. The Mint ad is well placed and doesn’t distract the reader from the main content. It clearly says that it’s a sponsor and that he uses the product. Another great thing is that Mint is free; it’s easier to promote a product that won’t cost your readers anything. This is perceived as a less aggressive marketing strategy. On the other hand, since the email is not about personal financial management and we don’t really talk about Mint, I doubt this ad will generate much conversion. The idea is good, the ad placement is optimal, the product review is a good idea and the product is great. But, there is no incentive to register for Mint (besides the fact that it’s free). While the product is great, it’s not directly related to ETF investing. Since you get this email after downloading a free eBook on ETF investing, you would expect to get investment related ads.

Teacher Man and J.B. ask for feedback on their book. I think this is a great idea as it leads to another way to connect with your readers. Each time I ask for feedback from my readers, I receive hundreds of emails. This is simply AWESOME for a blogger! I would have preferred that they define their newsletter first (in order to remind me why I am subscribing) and highlight the fact that they ask for my feedback (put this line at the end of your email and put some words in bold).

The newsletter layout is clean and simple. I like them fairly plain as most people don’t display images when they receive email.   A simple layout makes it less spammy and helps focus on content. The University Money logo is a good addition as it reminds you who send the email right away. I personally receive so many emails in a day that I like to know who sends me the email (as I have this internal voice urging me to delete the email before I open it ).

If I would add something to this “welcome note”, I would create a special section on University Money for my readers. A section that is “secret”. It could be complimentary to the eBook (such as portfolio models for example or ETFs lists). I think it could be a great idea. But to be honest, I haven’t done on mine yet, so I can’t really criticize them!

The other interesting thing to add would be a “best of” or “must read” articles they wrote on University Money. I did that with the TFB newsletter to show my new readers what they should expect and what they should read if they are looking for the best of TFB. It drives additional traffic to your site that is completely independent from Google. If your content is great, it will bind your new readers to your site.

In the end, I think it was well executed and that they did a great job sending this first email to subscribers. I can’t wait to see if they have built a newsletter funnel as I suggest in my newsletter email as this could be very promising.

Readers, what do you think of this welcome email? Would you delete it? Unsubscribe? Or be happy to join the discussion newsletter?

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