Blogging is great. Anyone who has succeeded in the life should start a blog as a simple way of paying information back (to those that will listen of course!), yet blogging does have its downsides. Lets take a look at them.
1) Repeat Questions: This has to be the most annoying one. For anyone with Wall Street experience, you know that asking the same question twice is the fastest way to guarantee you will be at the bottom of the ranking pool. You will be bottom bucket, 4th quartile, faster than Usain Bolt can run a 100 meter dash. Yet. It still occurs.
The most common ones we get are listed here, and they generally revolve around the same topics:
How to *beat the market*. If you’re not a multi-millionaire the chances of you being smart enough to outdo professionals is pretty much zero percent. If you’re a multi-millionaire, you likely started a business, therefore you know the actual products and industry inside out and *may* have an extremely slight edge. Everyone else trading for money is going to get emotional about meaningless 10% declines in the market.
Dollar cost, work you a** off and create multiple passive income streams. You will be significantly better off having 3-5 streams of income, than you will spending any time generating 5% extra returns on a meaningless 6 figure portfolio.
Blueprint to Getting Girls: There is no blueprint and people who sell you on line for line, rhyme for rhyme words that will get you laid… are wasting your time. The people who request these types of posts have not even tried to get laid.
This is not mean at all. It is simply the truth.
If they were to go out and approach 100 women (less than a month of effort if someone cares to do so) then they would find their own specific sticking points. If you do your best to look sharp, be in a positive mood and approach… You’ll likely get laid. In rare instances, people with severe social skill issues, you may go zero for 100.
But even then? You will have specific issues, see sticking points, where the pick up falls apart.
If a person asks you for a blueprint tell him to go approach women. If he comes back with specific parts in the interaction where he falls flat on his face… He actually tried and you can now help him. Until then, don’t bother.
2) People Don’t Like the Truth: Once the rubber meets the road and your friends from college who wasted 4 years of their life chasing girls start to fall off the radar, you’ll learn that they don’t like to hear the truth. They would rather read feel good information about how they can “make it too” than recognize they made terrible decisions that will take at least a decade to overcome. Instead of learning harsh truths they would rather be entertained. Unfortunately this will continue to get worse as you age, maybe 1/10 of your buddies will turn it around, the rest will become jealous of you and expect you to give them a handout because you are their “friend”.
What does this have to do with blogging? In short, if you tell people the truth via a blog, they will get angry at you because they see their own mistakes in the writing. If what you’re writing was truthful, you should anticipate some serious venom.
3) Emails: As your blog grows you’re going to receive a lot more email. First it starts with 1-5 emails a week and you’re excited to see you have some fan mail. Then… It grows to 10-15 per week. Still manageable but you’re getting lower quality emails from people demanding you help them… as if your time is free and grows on trees. Finally, you start to get into the 10 per day range and begin ignoring large amounts of emails – 1) you don’t want to use your time to respond to them and 2) most of them offer no compelling reason to read them.
The worst part of this email trend is you likely miss out on some good ones, but that’s the name of the game if you have no serious intention of becoming a full time blogger.
We have a solution for this but it’s not going to be put into action until 2015.
4) Traffic Flows: Traffic flow is practically impossible to control. One day you can be at your regular X thousand views per day, then out of nowhere, it jumps 5-10 fold or more. This creates a problem since a casual blogger does not have time to respond to questions/comments/emails and again many of the items get dropped to the wayside.
On the flip side, if you’re a serious blogger, you should plan for ways to monetize a spike in traffic outside of simple ads that help you track page views. Think of how each post would help sell a specific product. This way, you avoid the hassle of missing lost revenue.
5) You Can’t Help Everyone: Even if you’re having a good time helping people improve their lives, you have no way of helping everyone. You’re going to get busy, you’re not going to prioritize them and a potential success story will slip through the cracks. It’s simply how it works.
The best way to combat this is to have an allocated number of people you will allow yourself to exchange emails with and work with privately. Our number is a maximum of ten people. It is a low number because 1) we would rather help someone to the fullest than give 50% effort and 2) the number of people that are significantly underperforming relative to their abilities is low.
6) It’s a 7 Day Per Week Process: As soon as you start gaining traction, you’re going to get emails/requests on the weekend. While you can avoid tweeting and posting on Facebook during the weekend, you certainly cannot do anything about people searching the internet for the truth.
In addition, if you blog is new and *different* then people are more likely going to read it at home versus at work. They are afraid of being caught reading obscure websites at work because… you know… Human Resources.
7) 80/20 Rule: At the end of the day, you’re going to primarily speak to 20% of your readers. Just like everything else in life, where all good things flow to a small subsection of people, your writing will only reach about 20% of the readerbase.
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With the bad out of the way, there are a lot of reasons we’re continuing to blog.
1) Friends: We’ve made a few friends through blogging and have also helped connect people who would have a mutually beneficial relationship by meeting. Win win.
2) Improved Writing: To say that the writing in the past was poor is an understatement. Writing for a blog is nothing like writing professionally or at the collegiate level. Completely different skill sets.
3) 100% Investment Banking Placement Rate: We thought we were going to have our first miss but the candidate eventually came through. We have helped a select few people with Wall street advice and a total of zero people have failed. The number of success stories is getting close to 100. Not bad. More impressed by the 100% success ratio. (no we still won’t do any sort of resume review service since we do not trade our time for money).
4) A New Hobby: This blog is still a hobby. If we wanted to increase the traffic it would likely take 2-3 months of actual effort instead of the 3 hours per week we put into the blog at this point. Oddly enough it’s still growing!
5) Learning to Sell is Harder than Learning to Buy: As you know, everything is sales. If you can learn to teach/inform via a blog it’s going to improve your salesmanship. Not in a material way, but it will certainly help.
6) Improved Quick form Typing: The grammar police will always be watching! In addition to the spelling police! Continue to free form write and you’ll find that your spelling errors will naturally decrease. This will help your more important emails that are unrelated to your blogging hobby.
With that out of the way… Expect some Wall Street effort shortly…
