2015 is coming to an end. It has been the best year in history to make money. The best year in history to be single. And. The best year in history to start another company. 2016 is looking better than ever but instead of putting the cart in front of the horse we’ll review the year (both positives and negatives) and move onto 2016 expectations.
2015 Positives
Writing Style Established: We’ve finally established a consistent *writing style* although we continue to mix up the format. Overall, happy with the progress here as the blog was abysmal back three years ago with chaotic content that could have been summarized in a solid tweet. Importantly, with the new and established writing style all of the terrible posts have been turned into solid tweets causing our twitter account to grow.
Twitter Use Solidified: We’ve also established the point of the blog and the point of the twitter account in 2015. It will continue to be a micro blog about topical items and will *not* be used as a “connect” feature unless we get bored. Running a micro-blog is more helpful and we won’t waste our time dealing with trolls. We’ll continue to build our own audience separate from any sort of “movement”.
User Base is Up: We’re on the line here with creating our first product. Yes it will likely be an information based product but we’re not going to sell anything until our metrics are hit. Will it make us a lot of money? No. The blog continues to grow and we make a lot more money elsewhere (Wall Street is not our primary source of income). In short, user base continues to grow at a nice clip despite materially lower post count.
2015 Negatives
Decline in Posting Rate: To no surprise to our readers, an actual company (or companies in this case) and a career is significantly more important than a hobby blog. This blog took a massive hit in posting rate and we’ve tried to ramp it up now that things have cooled off. Disappointing.
Still Arguing With Failures and Losers: We wasted time arguing with people on the internet and even more-so in real-life. While the rate was down a solid 50% we’re going to try and decrease this again by another 50%. If a person is too slow to figure out what is legitimate and what is not, we’re simply going to click ignore and move on (we’ve already met multiple people in real life including some of our excellent commenters!). Mediocre people *practically* never turn it around. It is much more efficient to find someone who is above average but younger… than find a fool in his early 40s and $200K to his name… Sad and pathetic.
They had 40 years to figure it out, while there is still a “chance”, the probability is so low it is not worth your time. Hat-tip to Felix Dennis for that one.
User Base Not High Enough: While we’ve mentioned this as a positive, it didn’t actually hit our metrics. Both a success and a failure. If we were able to keep the posting cadence up we would have been ready for a product launch already! However. The user base increased more than expected given that were only posting 1x per month! In short this was both a win and a loss for 2015.
2015 Articles We Didn’t Write
Since we failed to post as many times as we wanted we’re going to highlight interesting articles from 2015 that we didn’t write! Here are some interesting posts we read while in transit.
The Paradox of Rest – Mikael Syding: “If you want something done, give the task to a busy man. Ask somebody with all the time in the world, and it will take exactly that long”. This is probably one of the best quotes we’ve read and it is entirely true. Resting is not limited to sitting in front of a TV screen or taking cat naps. Resting is really a form of changing tasks in your brain. Using this blog is a great example, it’s fun, we don’t take it seriously and it activates the creative part of our brains.
How Much Do Independent Authors Make? – Mike Cernovich: “Every author keeps their sales data secret because of an “embarrassing” reason.” In short, Mike outlines the e-book industry and gives you an idea for how much money you’ll make by being an author. It isn’t great. People write to us asking if we’re “hating” on the sales and the answer is always no. We actually *agree* that writing online is definitely not the best way to make a living if you want to make money and get rich. In fact, his sales numbers are incredibly impressive. Generating $100K as a one man shop selling e-books to a market for *men* is no joke. We wouldn’t even sell a fraction of that based on his data! Read the article before you believe you’ll get rich selling books and stop complaining that he has monetized 10+ years of effort.
5-MeO-DMT, The Spirit Molecule, Pineal Gland, Consciousness, and Atheism – Mike Cernovich: We actually feel uncomfortable posting that link here, which is exactly why it belongs here. There is no reason to add an explanation, when you read or listen to the post you will believe what you believe and we will all move on. Yes we realize it was written in 2014 but we found it this year.
How To Write A Sales Letter For Your Blog – Robert (30 days to x): “It will take you between three to five years before you figure out how to actually make any money. Most niche sites will cap out around $15,000 a year. If a website is earning more than $30,000 per year it’s almost always operating off of paid traffic. The owner is buying advertising space somewhere. Sites that get organic traffic and less than 10,000 visitors a day aren’t going to earn a more than a $10,000 to $20,000 per year.” Simply well said and true. This is why we aggressively hammer the point down of needing *paid advertising* to make money.
Machiavellian Maxims – Illimitable Men “When people don’t like you, their questions are attacks. Sometimes these attacks are disguised as concerns, other times they are blatant. Whenever you’re asked a question, judge the legitimacy of the question. Insincere questions must be met with insincere answers, if any answer at all.” This post is almost a darker refresher of the book 48 laws of power. We usually do not like list posts but this is a solid summary of the dark side of human nature. We found this blog this month and will check it sporadically.
2016 Expectations
No Q&As for the Masses: We made this change in 2015 (for comments) and it was probably one of the best decisions we have ever made. Going forward we will only provide Q&A’s to **email subscribers** and they will be held on Twitter on a Monthly/Quarterly basis depending on schedule. We are shutting down the free-for-all Q&A’s on Twitter as too many of the questions are terrible so we never respond. Importantly, for every single subscriber you will have significantly less people to compete against.
– Facebook will be the first place to receive post updates
– Twitter will be a micro blog and also provide post updates
– Subscribers will receive access to Q&A’s and we will respond with @ instead of .@ to minimize interactions with regular people
Continued Page Growth: We have three triggers in place before we start a product to sell. Page views, users and email subscribers. If the three triggers are hit we’ll get started. Until then we’ll keep steady with the stream of information/content.
Three Action Steps for New Years
In our opinion there are only two things to do. First do not waste your New Year’s going out to party, do the opposite and you’ll succeed. Stay in.
Second, if your questions are personal finance related we strongly recommend signing up for Personal Capital as we are unwilling to do personal finance consulting (would be a time for money exchange)
Third, we continue to get questions about doing an Internet Marketing post. No chance. We make more money online than we do on Wall Street (all writers in revenue generating roles) so there is no way we are ever going to give that information out. People on the internet copy and steal things that generate $20K a year so there is a better chance of us blowing our brains out. Positively. Here is a book that every single person must read if they want to learn how to sell online: Ca$hvertising. It is basic but gets you started.
Final Comments
On a personal note, reading took an enormous hit this year so we were unable to 1) read as many books as we wanted and 2) were unable to read as many blog posts as we wanted as well. With that said we’re happy to hear about interesting posts/books that people found in 2015.
