We continue to receive questions on how we run this blog, twitter account, facebook and find time to write these posts. With that said we’ll provide a detailed and *actionable* <– as usual… post on this topic. This will be more informative in nature than entertaining. Outline below:
- How Do You Operate the Blog?
- How Do You Operate on Social Media?
- What Do Email Subscribers Receive?
- How Do You Find Time to Write Posts?
We’re keeping this one a bit shorter than our previous posts (lots of work last week) but it will be jammed full of actionable advice for anyone who wants to run a website.
1) How Do You Operate the Blog?
We get a lot of questions here since the blog has been around for a while now (since 2012). Instead of adding more of a backdrop, we’ll jump right in with the primary questions.
How Do You Stay Private? This is the primary question we receive, how do we maintain privacy on the Internet? Many of you have already figured out how we do this (smart readers!). We simply purchased accounts for Facebook, Google, Twitter and one IP address. Anyone with a speck of knowledge with regards to affiliate marketing is going to know that it doesn’t cost much money to set this up (about $5K, or less than 3 days work).
How do you make posts? Okay, so you purchased the accounts… now how do you operate as a group? Simple, one word: *Teamviewer*. All you have to do is download the program and you can now login to a single IP from anywhere in the world. You can use other applications such as LogMeIn and that will give you the same benefits as Teamviewer. Notably, you don’t need an expensive computer or anything like that. You just need a single IP hooked up to a direct line that does not go down. Set your computer so that it never hibernates, shut the laptop and slip it into a drawer. Done deal. You can now post remotely but work off of the exact same IP address.
How Do You Determine the Post You’ll Write? This is primarily driven by “whatever we feel like”. But. We do look at analytics once a month and see what people are clicking on (approved products) to see what people are most interested in. That said, we try to keep the following balance in mind… 15% Game specific posts, 45% life related posts, 20% Wall Street related posts and 20% personal finance related posts. We are certain the mix of posts will change over time. Overall, the readership is primarily men in their 20s (our target market) so wasting time posting 50%+ on “game” would ruin the lives of all of our readers. We have no interest in that.
How Do You Create New Content? This is easy. We’re sandbagging everyone. We have many post ideas that are sitting in the queue waiting to be published. But. We simply won’t hit submit until the audience is ready. We have 10+ posts in the draft folder that are already complete (each about 4000+ words!) but we sit on them until the time is right. If you want to create good content you need to be *proactive*. This means you’re creating content consistently and are not *reacting* to random news. You can have some reactive content but the only way to really gain readership and create differentiated information is to be *proactive*. This is extremely important. Write it down. Proactive > Reactive.
Are You Worried People Will Not Read an Anonymous Blog? Nope. We have a huge advantage in this case. Wall Street information is impossible to fake. People are nit-picky and will try to poke tiny holes into any Wall Street related post. If we were “fake” this blog wouldn’t be growing. It is growing rapidly.
This is a front office only blog. No useless posts on wealth management or operations.
This is also why we avoid stock picking information like the PLAGUE. It would create too much drama and we prefer high level sector overviews. High level overviews can give out actionable information without being forced to make stock calls. The last thing we want is a blog full of retarded retail commenters.
Why Do You Mark People as Spam? Simple. Having a “tolerance” policy implies that there are no standards. The only people who are tolerant of *everybody* are those with ridiculously low standards or low senses of self-worth (insecure). We have no interest in regular or mediocre people. Never have, never will. Marking idiots as spam is a good long-term move and a bad short-term move. Luckily we don’t have any interest in short-term gains .
Conclusion: The blog outline is quite simple: 1) buy accounts, this will cost about $5K, 2) make posts that are a good mix of what you think is important and what readers want, 3) create blog posts *proactively*, you do not need to submit them all at once, 4) anonymous blogging only works if you walk the talk and you have information that is *impossible* to fake and 5) keep the idiots out. On the internet, the only way to prove you’re not living in your mom’s basement is to deliver *actionable* value and provide legitimate *information* that can be used immediately.
2) How Do You Operate on Social Media?
Not even sure why we get this question. Our social media profile is muted at best. We have a simple Facebook page but operate relatively frequently on Twitter. That is about it. In fact… Most of our traffic comes from Reddit and SumbleUpon which are two things we don’t even use! But we’ll answer the question anyway.
How Do You Use Facebook? This is the easiest one. We operate our Facebook account solely to show new posts. In addition? We post to Facebook as our *first* media outlet. So, if you like us on Facebook you will be alerted by a new post immediately. All of our new content is added to Facebook and we respond to comments on our page once a week (when the post goes up). As usual, make sure your logo and banner are consistent and you load up photos with each new blog post.
How Do You Use Twitter? This is a much more complicated one so we’ll break down our logic into bits and pieces. We are much more active on twitter so we will explain how we use each function.
Following: In *our opinion* anyone you follow should be a reflection of you. This means you should not follow many people. Everyone has their own strategy, none is right, but this is ours. We follow a total of seven people. That is it.
1) Mike Cernovich – a personal friend of one of our writers who runs a great blog that covers mindset, fitness and TRT
2) Wall Street Playgirl – an account that is in transition and will likely be up by year end
3) Financial Samurai – the only other personal finance blog worth reading since it doesn’t focus on bogus things like “frugality”
4) Good Looking Loser – a blog that has improved the skin care of our writers
5) Kevin Gates – Best rapper on the planet today
6) James Altucher – one of the leading voices in pushing people away from college and towards entrepreneurship
7) Mikael Syding – retired hedge fund manager
We do not see “eye to eye” on every single topic with all of these people but it creates a good mosaic of what our blog is about. The people we follow may change but the themes will not (IE: you won’t see us following idiotic frugality blogs any time soon!). Finally, if you don’t follow a lot of people, then all of your followers are going to be *real*. Meaning? They are not following you because you are following them.
Favorites: We use the favorite feature to promote our blog. Anyone who mentions a post of ours will receive a favorite. We think it is poor form to retweet every single mention of your blog since it looks too promotional. We believe twitter should be run as a micro-blog so the main takeaway should be *content*. It should give viewers a sneak peek into what the blog is about. If you automate the process of favoriting every tweet, you’re going to end up favoriting a lot of negative tweets as well. This will come off as “passive aggressive”. Who cares. These people lose their cool and call even *more attention* to your blog! Let them flip out since passive aggressive behavior is for two year olds and women. We strongly suggest automating your “favoriting” process because it helps you grow your platform at zero cost.
Retweets: You should always be on the lookout for good information. If you find a really good tweet or blog post then go ahead and retweet it even if you’re not following them. Not a big deal. It will add to your high quality *content*. Since Twitter is meant for short-term signaling, you should “undo” all of your retweets after about 3-6 days. It will clog up your twitter feed. So retweet the content, and then undo the retweet once all of your followers have seen it.
Connect: The connect function is primarily filled with idiots and retards. You should only respond to two people on the connect feature: 1) your followers and 2) people who dislike you but have more followers than you. The rest should be ignored.
You will certainly miss a lot of @mentions but the two guidelines above are going to serve you well. If some idiot with 200 followers tries to argue with you… Don’t favorite any of it and just ignore it. He’ll go away and fight some other useless “internet battle”. Move along.
Finally, if you respond to one of your followers, once they have seen the tweet again… delete it. Why? We treat our twitter profile like a *blog* and you don’t want it clogged up with one conversation with one follower that no one cares about. If one guy is asking you about a resume review… Then it unlikely applies to everyone… Also? Most of your followers won’t care either.
Mix of Content: Overall we think a good guideline is to have ~10% posts, 90% content. This means you’re promoting your blog or linking to new posts 10% of the time but the remaining 90% is content. This means your twitter profile is really just another blog which explains why you delete all of the useless @ conversations and undo stale retweets. This keeps a *clean* twitter profile. New people find your handle and can quickly decide if they want to follow since it is primarily content instead of marketing mumbo jumbo.
Conclusion: We use Facebook to give the latest updates and use twitter to micro blog. Everyone has their own strategy. Specifically for Twitter we 1) maintain a clean content based blog, 2) avoid clutter in the twitter stream and 3) only follow people who have added value to our lives in some way.
3) What Do Email Subscribers Receive?
We have not finished our product. But. The main value add for our email subscribers is simple… We offer sporadic *free* Q&A’s. As you can imagine, we do not have the time to answer every single question on this blog. We try… But. It is not numerically possible if you’re committed to using the power of 1% for your blogging endeavors.
Since this section is short and sweet we’ll give some freebies away for our current and future subscribers.
- We will continue to offer *free* and random ask us anything events. Some of them may be on the blog. Some may be on social media. You will be alerted.
- All of our subscribers will receive a discount upon product launch. This is not going to be the case for followers on Twitter, Facebook etc.
- We *may* create Infographics that help “map out” decision trees for specific situations. If we do this… It will only go to our email subscriber list.
4) How Do You Find Time to Write Posts?
Ahh yes! The most common question from *primarily* retards. The argument goes like this.
“If you work 80 hours a week on Wall Street and remain in shape it is impossible to write 3000+ word posts every single week. You’re full of it!”
Sigh.
Pretty simple really. None of our writers work 80 hours a week doing *solely* Wall Street work. In fact, anyone who works 80+ hours a week after the age of 25 on Wall Street really needs to get a new career because he isn’t any good at it.
Here is how it works.
As you go up the chain on Wall Street and as you operate an Internet Business… You are going to travel *a lot*. You will not have WiFi access all the time and you’re not going to spend 3 hours a day reading (1 hour is more than enough) so what do we do instead? We write on a tablet or mobile phone.
Literally 90% of our posts are written on a tablet and smartphone. This is also why we developed the *star* labeling system since we couldn’t figure out how to bold some content on the older form mobile devices. We have since stuck with it. It has also caught on as others now use the *star* format on social media and in our comments!
So there you have it. This is pure utilization of the power of 1%. Only blog when you’re in transit. Blogging should be a hobby. Not a serious form of income since it would only generate ~$150K a year on ~15 hours of weekly work (not worth it at all).
10 Summary Bullets: Here are the actionable items from this “short” blog post of “only” 2500+ words.
1) Buy IP addresses to maintain privacy and download Teamviewer for *free* remote access
2) Make posts that are relevant to both what you know and what readers want
3) Proactively create content to backfill your posts
4) People only read anonymous blogs that can be *proven* as valid
5) Actively keep the idiots out – hint most idiots are the late commenters
6) Have multiple social media accounts with a purpose for each one
7) Have a clear strategy for each social media account – we gave you ours (micro-blog)
8) Give email subscribers a reason to add themselves to the list – do not spam them
9) Blogging in transit is a great way to slowly improve over time
10) Spend the rest of your time (not blogging) on *serious* business/career activities. Anything that will generate *at least* $400-600K+ (now or in the future) otherwise it is a huge waste of your time.
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Special News: We are going to disclose our next blog post. The Topic?… The bloody real estate post everyone has asked for. We definitely own real estate but not in the way “most people do”. Why? If most people are doing it you know what to do… Do the opposite.
