The photo is a HUGE lie, the title a small lie. It should say the power of 2% but the headline title is better as is. Three things 1) how you can utilize the power of 1%, 2) why you don’t blog for money and 3) takeaways after ~3 years of blogging . They seem a bit unrelated but they are not. The power of 1%, or 2% in our case, refers to the total time commitment here. 3 hours per week maximum or 2% of a week (3hrs/168hrs in a week). In addition, the related point is why we don’t blog for money (will likely launch a product later at a terrible ROI) and why you shouldn’t either.
How to Utilize the Power of 1%
You can become competent at practically anything if you commit 1.6 hours a week to the task. This is the truth. If you decide to take up drawing. Take up a new sport. Or even take up a new language… 30 minutes a day three days a week will result in massive change. You will not become an expert (not even close) but you’ll have a baseline competency that exceeds the first standard deviation of the bell curve. Now you’re probably wondering… How can I possibly utilize the power of 1%?! You haven’t given me anything actionable!! Well…You know that is not our style… Lets go ahead and get started.
Step 1 – Choose a Topic: Our goal is for you to live a balanced life, so lets brain storm some quick ideas (we mentioned a couple above). 1) Learn a language, 2) learn a dance, 3) learn an art, 4) learn how to sing, 5) learn how to give a speech, 6) learn how to play a sport, 7) learn how to make a good first impression, 8) learn how to ride a motorcycle, so on and so forth.
Step 2 – Inside or Outside: Once you have determined which item you’re going to learn you need to categorize the item. We strongly suggest you have two hobbies brewing at the same time (at all times). One that is inside and one that is outside. What is the difference? Simple…
Outside (extrovert): This is something that requires you to be at a specific place to improve. You have to literally block out time in your schedule to do this because you cannot practice at home. This includes: team sports, learning how to ride a motorcycle, learning how to meet new women during the day/night, learning how to dance etc.
Inside (introvert): This is something that you can do at work, at the airport or at home. You don’t need to be out and about to improve on your hobby. Simple examples include: this blog, drawing, learning a language, improving your tone of voice – recordings.
While some will argue that many of the outside activities can be brought inside… That misses the point. You want at least one hobby where you are forced to go outside and interact. Remember the world is a stage. You need to learn how to perform even if you’re an introvert. So, you should maintain both one introvert activity and one extrovert activity
Step 3: Set an alert on the weekend. You need to set a specific time where you will improve. Hold yourself accountable. Generally 45 minutes of time is ideal (2x per week, this usually means at least 1 day will be a weekend as noted in the first sentence). If possible make it in the morning. If you are able to do this, you will no longer be allowed to do any other activity until the extrovert activity is complete. Again hold yourself accountable.
Step 4: PDF and install. This means you need copies of the introvert activity in your hand at all times. If it is a language you are learning, you have lessons/recordings on your phone 24⁄7. Unlike other places, we love the introduction of smartphones because it allows you to be significantly more productive.
Now what do you do? Force yourself to take action. Every day when you’re done working (spend a minimum of ~60 hours a week on real work, IE: a career or a real business) you then turn to your introvert hobby first.
Side Note: As a fun fact, literally 90% of the posts here and even edits to the blog were made on a smartphone or tablet. That is not an exaggeration. We write and send to our main guy who hits publish (TeamViewer is an amazing and free resource)
Step 5: Focus. Lets repeat. *FOCUS*. When you are working on your hobby you do not do anything else. You do not watch TV in the background (throw it out if you have one). You do not listen to music. You do not connect to the internet to browse. You do not allow yourself to have access to anything. This step is excruciatingly important. You must focus 100% on the activity otherwise you will gain nothing. It is only 1.6 hours a week so it is not hard to do.
Step 6: Do this for a full year. That will result in ~83 hours of attention. Lets go ahead and round up to 100 hours to be safe. 100 hours is only 60% of one week! That is nothing! Now go ahead and take your activity and use it. Go to Brasil if you taught yourself basic Portuguese. If you learned how to dance? Go take a girl out dancing (please do not take her to an actual dance lesson though, you’ll get slaughtered by the real pros).
In short, after the year is up, you’re going to be a much more interesting person. In just five years you’re going to have ten different skills where you will be above average! That is a huge accomplishment and we have no doubt that it will work for you as well. Why? Unlike regular people you’re reading a blog for the elite. That means you don’t need a push and you’ll be thrilled at the results by 2016.
Concluding Remarks: The power of 1% is underrated. If you follow our step by step process: 1) choose a topic, 2) have an introvert and extrovert item, 3) set alerts, 4) send yourself the training materials, 5) focus intensely <– most important piece and 6) do this for a full year <– second most important piece. You will be significantly more interesting. You’ll add at least one friend (we practically guarantee it) and your confidence will soar as you learn a new skill you never thought you would be any good at.
Moving on…
We’re going to give you an example of the power of 1% (or 2%) since you’re staring right at it.
2) Why You Should Never Blog for Money
As usual… What is everyone else doing? Do the opposite. Everyone and their mom is apparently ready to become a professional blogger and leave the “declining west” (whatever that means).
The problem is really two fold 1) are you trying to make money? and 2) are you ~25 or younger?
If you answered yes to either of those… Stop. Don’t even bother getting started. We will explain exactly why it won’t work and what you should do instead. Finally, to avoid appearing pessimistic (that is not the intention) we will also give solid reasons for blogging and how we completely f***** up a lot of the basics.
Why You Don’t Start a Blog for Money: This one is the easiest since we have experience in making some money.
Here is how a blog works: You are old enough to give advice (or successful enough). You then decide to start a blog.
Here is how the business model operates: 1) start posting, 2) gain audience, 3) continue to add large amounts of value for free, 4) gain more and more followers, 5) deal with haters and idiots who try to scam you for money or raid your comments with dumb questions, 6) repeat steps 3, 4 and 5… over and over and over again! 7) after adding tremendous value and gaining trust from your audience over a period of years… You sell a product that is even better than your free and valuable content. “Profit”. (profit in quotes…)
Based on our research, a solid blog makes about $5-15K a month. Nothing to laugh at but definitely not a good use of time if you’re trying to make money.
Here is how a business works: You spend many months/years studying a multitude of industries. You find a product hole/gap. It is small but enough for you to make a nice profit… Here is how the business model operates: 1) check to make sure there is demand, 2) create a product that is of high value and has a decent margin profile, 3) create the full and professional look for the site, 4) buy tons of traffic from that specific niche, 5) make money for as long as you can, 6) wait for competitors to come in and start invading your space and 7) compete aggressively with them. Once step 7 in the process is in full force, you will either become the market leader, sell your company or get priced out of the market (someone did it better than you) and simply let it die.
What is the real takeaway here? A blog is a reverse business model. A blog builds an audience first then sells a product. A solid business niche, one that solves a legitimate pain point, just needs to be marketed. That is an enormous difference. That needs to be repeated. That is an enormous difference.
If you are trying to make money, building an audience is going to take a lot more time than buying the audience correct? Correct. So if you want to make money then your risk reward is heavily skewed towards solving a market/demand issue. You just buy the audience if you know where the demand for your product is. There is a reason why major companies have huge sales teams correct? Again… Correct.
Do You Have Enough Experience? No matter how many times you try to replicate the work of someone else… It will NEVER work. It is sad. We have even found blogs that are trying to replicate our content and we don’t even make money (insert laughter)
Why does it matter? The audience can tell if you are legitimate.
Our blog is only growing because the content here is impossible to fake. Only two people, at this point in time, will believe that the information here is “BS”.
Those two people are…. 1) an idiot – too dumb to connect dots and 2) a lazy person – new to the industry and unwilling to do 15 minutes of research.
Why? It is impossible to reflect the realities of Wall Street without working on Wall Street! Not to mention, there are two public figures who have Wall Street experience (Sam from Financial Samurai and Mikael Syding from SpreZZaturian) that could have called “BS” on the information here well over 2 years ago.
In addition? Notice how our views align quite a bit and as we have stated in the past… Most wealthy people don’t invest in bonds. Now ask yourself… how in the world did we “know” this before he even posted the article?
That is enough of that.
While the above looks like a diatribe, that is not the intent. The point is this. If you do not have relevant and valuable experience to share no one will read your blog.
That is our point and it should be repeated.
If you do not have any interesting views or opinions and you are just out there trying to make a few thousand bucks a month, you’re going to miss by a country mile.
Reality check. If you start a blog without enough life experience you are doing immense harm to you and your future. You are going to waste a lot of time writing and writing and no one is going to come back to your blog because they will know that you have nothing interesting to say. You can rip, regurgitate and repeat consensus information… No one is going to come back. That is the reality.
We do not care if you ignore this advice.
Why? Time is the most valuable resource in the world and you are wasting your own time by blogging without anything interesting to say.
Concluding Remarks: If you want to make money, your risk reward is significantly better if you start an actual business. A blog is essentially a reverse business where you build an audience then sell. A business sells a product and then buys the audience through advertising/marketing/sales team. If you do not have a unique voice, opinion or viewpoint, you’re not going to build a meaningful audience and worst of all you will hurt yourself by losing valuable time.
With the ugly part of the post done with, we’ll end on a positive note. As our readers know, being positive and happy is a necessity to success (section two appears quite dreary!) so lets explain why you should start a blog if you want to…
The Main Things We have Learned After ~3 Years of Blogging
Lets say you pass part two of the test. You don’t want to make money, you simply want to spread the truth and you have a unique opinion. You are likely a good candidate for a blog. As cheesy as it sounds, your “heart needs to be in the right place”. Your audience can tell if you care about them or not within your first 5-10 posts.
Branding: This is one of the things we did well from the get go. You buy a legitimate domain with a website name that is 1) catchy, 2) conveys the point of the blog and 3) hints at fun/excitement and solving a problem (Most Wall Street Guys are type A nerds who don’t have enough fun, we’re trying to fix that!).
Steps to Take: Once you have the website name… Go buy the domain, not “wordpress”. It should just be [insert name] .com. We actually do not know what provider we have since it is all outsourced under one guy who doesn’t contribute to the blog… Which brings us to point 2.
If You Want to Be Anonymous: That is one of the differentiating features here. We’ll unlikely ever go public (fame is awful – opinion). Going public or becoming famous is simply not worth it. Harassment from regular people at a sticker price of $200K a year or whatever… Hellz to the no.
Steps to Take: If you’re serious about anonymous blogging, do it right. This is the second thing we did correctly. 1) Buy the persons accounts – facebook, google, Paypal, etc, 2) have him/her set up a server and just reimburse the costs of hosting – meaningless $100 a year, 3) go download TeamViewer and set it up in one location so you can maintain the same IP address at all times – set team viewer so the code never changes. If you don’t have anyone who is willing to sell or give you their accounts… You’re not connected enough to blog so you’ve already failed the second section of the process.
Website Design: Complete whiff here. Our previous design was terrible at best so now we’re on to the good stuff… where we f***** it all up! Our previous structure was a free piece of junk that didn’t have the minimum requirements. What are the minimum requirements?…
Steps to Take: You need the following 1) pictures for each post, there is a reason why Instagram is so popular (SnapChat on mobile), 2) responsive website, it needs to auto adjust to mobile phones, tablets, desktops etc, 3) Matching colors – we went with the banker blue for those hard coded cells!, 4) clearly differentiated forms for mobile and desktop views and 5) new colors when the admin leaves a comment. This is the bare minimum. The most popular form is called “Genesis”, there are many genesis themes and they cost about $100 a pop. Just pick out the one that is best fit for your blog.
Comments: This is a disaster. When we first started blogging no one believed the information was legitimate. Then… more Wall Street people came and word spread. Then… The retards show up! The retards will try to promote their blog in every single comment (the comment is never useful). Then… they try to give you “advice”. Even though you don’t even know who they are… about how your blog “used to be good”… (just another hater). If there was an auto spam alert for idiots and retards we would pay $5K for that <– (business idea, sort of).
Steps to Take: In our opinion, you need a harsh auto filter. Once every week you should check your spam filter to make sure that no good comments got chucked into spam (many do for one reason or another). If you lose out on a few good comments … oh well. Charge it to the game. Better to lose out on 1⁄100 good comments in order to prevent regular people from commenting. On the internet… there are a LOT of regular people. Finally, do your best to contact the good commenters to let them know it was a harmless error. If they are upset about the delay then they don’t have control of their emotions anyway. Finally, try your best to respond to everyone you can (it is not possible). We had to completely shut down email communication.
Banner and Logos: Another miss here. Our previous logo and banner was terrible as it did not match the content/colors or anything else on the blog. It was just text and a simple icon. We suggest you create a solid logo and banner. Who made our banner? A guy over at unlucky devil. He did a great job and we watched his work over the past year. We also promised he would eventually redesign our logo and banner. Of course both happened.
“Stop being a broke ass and get your 1% on” – Unlucky Devil (got a good laugh from us)
Steps to Take: With your theme picked out, colors and all of that good jazz, go ahead and grab a logo and banner. Make sure the logo and banner can be used on all of your social media. We use Twitter, Facebook and… that’s about it at this time. Make sure that you can create a banner and logo that is consistent across all of your social media platforms. We don’t have the time to expand to other platforms (again 3 hour maximum for this hobby) and would recommend you think in advance as well.
Finally? Given how the logo looks and how efficient everything was… we suggest you have Unlucky Devil do the design for you. If you can do it all yourself? Go for it, but that is not our expertise.
Create Content that Solves a Problem: The real beauty of this blog is that most of it is “ever green” (note any product you make should be ever green). Some of our original posts written by much younger gentlemen… Need to be redone… But… A lot of it can be redone and made into an “ever green” post. A great example is our interview guide (will add more) and information on careers (doesn’t need to change). Wall Street has a structured recruiting process and a lot of our overviews will stand for decades as well (multiples of course will change as we go through recessions and bull markets)
Steps to Take: Try and create posts that will last a long time (we know, this is obvious!). This will not work all of the time. You may suffer from writers block but it definitely helps if someone can read one post, get something and everyone who tries to copy it will simply do a worse job of it. Not all of our posts are like this, but in an ideal world every post will be “ever green”. As you can imagine… Our actual product will be ever green. We just won’t bother releasing it until the numbers/page views/users are there. Maybe in 2 more years, who knows and we don’t care either.
Concluding Remarks: We are no where near experts in this field and likely never will be (no one gets good off of 3 hours a week). But we do know that the items listed above are true: 1) address a problem 2) brand, 3) TeamViewer, 4) responsive website 5) colors, logos, banners and 6) long-term content.
We have no doubt that anyone with a serious blog will laugh at this advice but we got a lot of questions and there is our minimal contribution. In addition, if you have items to add, let us know and we’ll put it on the “to do” list.
Finally… Notice that point 6 highlights that a blog is significantly less effective than a product. The main rule of starting a business is that you want to create an “ever green” product. With a “real” blog… Every single item should be “ever green”. Much more headache than it is worth (opinion).
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More positivity.
Assuming that you still want to start a blog, but don’t have the required experience, we suggest you leverage a blog as a learning experience (from pain). Do not spend your life on the blog. We have already debunked this myth since the upside is severely limited unless you sell to “regular people” (in which case you may as well create a business that sells to regular people)
Every time you come across a harsh reality… then you write. The pain will come through in your writing and people will realize that you are living a real life (in real life you will suffer a lot and recover if you are a man).
A great example is 30DaystoX.
Why? He’s a young guy who is simply learning how life/business/money making actually operates. He is honest and the best writing from him comes when he is reminded of pain (ie: the latest when he got swindled out of $1,500)
While we do not read all of his posts (he won’t be offended by that) we are most interested to see if he starts a company. IE: builds a product and pays for the audience.
We hope he does and we hope he hits his first $1M before 30.
Then he can change his blog to “30YearstoaMilly”… and start doing that money dance…