The major changes to the blog have been made. We will have minor iterations here and there over the next month or so, however the vast majority of the changes have been made. For those that are wondering, we chose a blue theme because of the typical banker blue font color used for Wall Street (holler @ those analysts working on Christmas/New Years… It gets much better!)
2014 Review
Traffic: Overall, traffic continues to grow at a rapid rate on the blog. We’ve seen a 500% increase from 2013 (off a small number of course). With that said, the user growth and readership is enough to continue blogging at this time. On a more positive note, our friend Mike over at Danger and Play killed it like Ebola with web traffic this year. Our vote for largest blog improvement of the year goes in his direction.
Content: We have messed around with different formats/post types and will continue to do so in the near future. Since readership continues to grow and we are bombarded with questions/emails at this point, we believe the changes were a step in the right direction. In fact… Some of our old posts were so bad and short we’ve deleted them forever. We will eventually rehash some of the posts we kept in a more detailed format since… well.. they sucked.
· Personal Finance Content: This has seen the most growth this year. Probably because most information about penny pinching and frugality is pure non-sense. We are going to think of more creative ways to explain why saving never gets you rich. You gotta spend to earn.
· Wall Street Content: The good news is that we’re going to continue with some of the industry primers. If you want proof that the information is legit, we have several posts in the top 20 for 2014 over on WSO. Given the market dynamics this year, you can guess which sector we will do next… Oil and Gas of course. As a reminder, 2014 primers/overviews are here: 1) Consumer, 2) TMT (Part 1) and TMT (Part 2), 3) FIG, 4) Healthcare (Part 1)
· Life: We’ll continue to mix it up on this front. For those that are wondering why we have moved away from a lot of game posts… the answer is simple.. Game is a waste of time for a person in their early 20s (our primary reader base). Everyone thinks they need to “learn game first” but in reality they need to have *decent* social skills and focus on the more important aspects of life which are: 1) high quality friends, 2) getting their money tight and 3) developing an unbreakable level of self confidence.
Broken record here. If everyone else is focusing on “getting laid” in their 20s… You know what to do. Do the opposite. Big ticket items come first. Game is secondary to a fantastic lifestyle. Finally, we will do some game posts in the future. But. Recognize we will focus on more important items going forward.
Design: The web design was terrible at best. We have put some effort into the redesign and got some people in the good old USA (#SayNo2India) to help us fix all the bugs/choose new themes etc. We will see how this plays out in the future but below are some highlights:
· Hiring: We tried hiring some Indian workers to help, it was ugly. We won’t do that ever again.
· Colors: Choosing a color scheme is usually difficult. Positively, we knew the color scheme because… everyone knows the color scheme on Wall Street (at least those with front office roles)
· B&D: Bold and Determined offered to help with the redesign. We exchanged two emails and the two pointers were: 1) add an email subscription and 2) take off the ads. We agreed. Since we have not finished we’re going to hold off on the advice offer for now
· Nitty Gritty: Logos and banners will be replaced. Eventually the ugly cursive banner will be taken off but take one last look at it for nostalgia purposes! For those that don’t understand the twitter moniker it is a Bull and a Playboy bunny. Our readers are smart enough to realize that… Others not so much
· Scripting Language: CSS is annoying. You end up spending a lot of time messing with margins, gap width and other such non-sense. Yet another reason to #SayNo2India
Blog Functionality: With the updated functionality it is now much easier to manage the pages and content that comes in. We are maintaining our hard stance on asking repetitive and redundant questions. Bad comments/commenters will be banned.
In fact, we are cleaning out some of the old posts that contained terrible questions. It only takes 10 minutes to search and see if the question has been answered, if not then ask away and we’ll happily answer.
Wall Street Bonus Season: Of course many of you are curious about this. In short bonuses were flat to up. If you’re good (you should be) your bonuses are still pegged at roughly 100% of base. For a good analyst you’re generally making ~$160-210K and an Associate is going to make $240-350K. As more proof that we “know the numbers”, *generally* if you made Vice President you’re making ~$350-400K this year (More than 100% of base is bonus. ~$30-50K deferred. Base salary in the ~$175-200K range for Vice Presidents).
Congratulations! You know who you are (both contributors here and those on the Street reading this blog). Second week of February 2015 is going to be a great time period.
Stock Market: For the fourth year in a row… the market was up. On the other side of the spectrum, the “enjoy the decline” people continue to fail at life. Nothing new here. Yes numbers are getting frothy but of course it doesn’t matter if you’re reading this blog. You didn’t freak out in October when things went south and you made even more money buying the dip. You know how to manage your cash and manage your emotions as well.
We don’t make any stock market predictions. If you’re a novice investor we’re going to continue giving you the same advice. Invest in You Inc. If you have extra money just buy index funds or start a company. We recommend starting a company.
Finally, we continue to get peppered with additional investing questions so we will get our feet wet with a couple of high level posts. But. We are not going to turn this into a “what to buy” blog. If we are going to invest in something… our mouths are sealed. You should do the same.
Concluding Remarks on 2014: It was an okay year. For the standards here, probably a C- at best. We are still not putting much effort into the blog, maybe 2-3 hours a week while racking up those United miles. With that said, we are going to increase the effort for a bit and see what happens. The real winner in 2014, as we’ve said earlier, is Mike over at D&P and he deserves every single bit of it. We’re just happy we knew he was going to be famous and quickly asked the questions we needed before everything hit the fan. Finally, if you believe all of the positive momentum is a “coincidence”… you shouldn’t. More on that in 2015.
2015 Outlook
Effort = Traffic, Friends and Growth: If you simply put in the effort to grow your blog, things will improve. Do not try to rehash the content of other people. If you steal content, no one will read it (it will be watered down). In addition? You won’t find your own set of skills. You’re cheating yourself.
What are we saying… point blank? We will put more effort into this blog. Are we going to put in 20+ hours per week? Absolutely not. It is not worth it at this time (maybe closer to 5-10 hours). We’ll take small steps and increase effort as we see traffic rise. Making 5 figures off of a product is not of interest on this side of the web.
Product Launches: As you can infer from the statement above, we will *unlikely* launch any product in 2015. We simply do not expect traffic to reach that point in 2015. We have several product ideas and none of them are going to compete with WSO or other Wall Street type companies (no resume reviews or wall street prep packages since everything you need is clearly on this blog). We have a few great ideas, but again, the readership simply isn’t there yet.
Future product launches? Absolutely. This is why we are going to collect emails going forward. We will not bombard the list. We’ll collect and wait. When the time comes, we’ll reward our subscribers with access to the product first and offer a discounted rate. In addition, we may offer *free* specialized private content from time to time. Until then? Hang tight since we’re not interested in making $50K.
One Major Content Change: As noted in the 2014 review, we will continue to vary the content style going forward. The main focus of the blog is unchanged 1) Life, 2) Personal Finance and 3) Wall Street.
One quick change.
We have historically done short motivational type posts. Those are dead going forward. No, this is not a “passive aggressive comment”. If you want motivation you can simply go to B&D which we have now linked to twice on this post.
Why are we ending motivational posts? We no longer believe in them.
If you need someone to motivate you to do something, you simply don’t want it in the first place. Again, this is not a “passive aggressive comment” and is a direct comment stating a belief. We don’t know a single successful person who needs to be motivated. Not one. You don’t need to tell Michael Jordan, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or even anyone on this blog to “go do work”. That fire is already there or it is not.
Need an example? A coach is not a motivator. A great coach is someone who finds your talents and improves on your weaknesses. Getting “hyped” is a meaningless part of the process. This is exactly why players are consistently traded for bad attitudes. In an ideal world this blog will be more of a “coaching platform” not a motivational one (a streeeeeetch we know) .
Lets emphasize the point. Ask yourself the following question. Does a motivational speaker need to be motivated (Tony Robbins, Jordan Belfort, etc.)? Of course not.
We want people who are already motivated. Not people who are happy to be part of the middle class. If this loses us readers? So be it. We don’t want them anyway.
Nail in the coffin. Here is a motivational video.
After you watch this video, you should feel nothing. If you are hyped or “turned up” after watching this video it means you associate motivation/inspiration with “how you feel”. This is a trap. This is a problem you need to fix inside of you. Internally. You *must* rewire yourself immediately. You should see yourself as the person giving the speeches and quotes. Not the person receiving them.
As a third and final disclaimer, there is nothing wrong with anyone making money off of motivation, it is an enormous market. In fact… we agree with Mike Cernovich who once said “eventually we will all make a lot of money”. This is not a contradiction. Just another “coincidence” that we agree with.
Concluding Comments on 2015: It will be business as usual going forward. We are going to increase the amount of effort we put into the blog (up from a paltry 2-3 hours a week) and see where it goes. The great news is that we are not going to pander to non-sense topics like frugality, the extra $500 increase to your 401K or otherwise. We have already covered those basic items and you’re not going to get rich clipping coupons or saving $50K a year.
With that said we’ll end 2014 with the long-term theme of this blog. Do the opposite.
Everyone else is going to be out dropping $1,000+ on New Years Eve celebrations. What should you do? Stay inside and plan your year. If you do this intelligently, you’ll find ways to make $1,000+.
You have 24 full hours to sit down with no distractions. Apply/flip your credit cards, make sure all your business tax items are taken care of, adjust your personal tax filings and re-evaluate your friends/relationships.
Make smart moves. Make them decisively. You have a full year to see how they pan out… They will work.
Happy New Year!
