The other day at Starbucks, I watched the person in front of me get smoothly upsold from a cup of coffee to a $20 tea sampler set.

I’m not saying that the guy was pressured into buying it; he wasn’t. I’m not saying that he got ripped off; he didn’t. On the whole, he looked pretty happy about his purchase as he left.

But he came in for a cup of coffee, and the chances of him seeing and then buying that sampler set were almost nil. Until he was asked.

You have to ask for what you want. And a surprisingly high percentage of the time, you’ll get it. Maybe not high in the sense of 80% or 90% (though you might, depending on the circumstances), but getting what you want 10% of the time is better than getting it 0% of the time, especially when all it took was you asking.

This is similar to the maxim that if you want to date supermodels you need to be where they are. That’s necessary but not sufficient. You also need to ask them out. Talk to any practitioner of “the game” and they’ll tell you it’s a numbers game and if you have zero going into the top of the funnel because you’re not asking, you’ll get zero in return.

Yes, this is kind of a ridiculously simple observation.

And yet we don’t do it. We don’t.

Most people don’t really negotiate for their salary. Do you know how much simply asking for more is worth in this situation? (BTW, here’s a fantastic post on how to do it right).

I did it too; my first job offer out of college was at a large tech company, and I took the salary they offered without pushing back. That was incredibly stupid of me. I could have easily landed 10% more by pushing back a little. As it was, it took me almost a year to wrangle the 10% raise I should have had from the beginning. That’s thousands of dollars of income that is lost, forever. If I had simply asked for more, I would have gotten it. Let’s say I then put that raise into my retirement account (which I was severely underinvesting in at that time). By retirement, that would be worth a quarter of a million dollars.

$250,000.

For not saying the words: “Based on my research, this position is worth closer to $X”.

Decide what you want. And then start asking for it.

Related posts:

1. What the $1.5 trillion Federal budget deficit taught me about time management
2. How to retire at 30 on $1 million
3. You don’t really want a million dollars

That’s pure crap. The laws of the universe don’t care about your heart. The bills have to be paid, the kids have to go to school, and life isn’t magically roses just because you’re in love.

If you marry some moron who is lazy and un-disciplined and selfish and stupid, life is going to be a living hell for you. I can trot out statistics all day long to prove to you that almost nothing you choose in your life has as much impact as the person you marry, but it won’t make any difference for the people that it really needs to make a difference for. To those people, all I can say is: 1) Ask the advice of a few people older than 40 who know you both and who have strong marriages, and 2) think about whether you’d advise a sibling or a close friend to marry this person.

I think often we fall into this trap of thinking that since we’ve found the One True Love (TM) and there could NEVER be anyone else for us, we have to just take the good with the bad. Well, that’s true, but only once you’re married. Until you get married, you don’t have to take everything. Some things are just deal breakers. Anyone a little older who has seen some life and has half a brain will tell you that nothing will hold you back like a bad spouse. And nothing will push you forward like a good one.

I got a good one. One of the best, actually. Alexis is the most long-suffering and good-natured person I know. She’s been putting up with my various shenanigans for more than seven years, and she’s still incredibly supportive and encouraging. She challenges me (which I need), and she’s just as driven and ambitious as I am. I admire the hell out of her, and I can’t help but feel that I somehow got the better end of the bargain in all of this.

And that’s the kind of spouse you want. You want to crawl into bed next to them every night and think about how you’re the luckier one in the relationship. You want someone who makes you want to work harder and do more and be more because they deserve that (and more). You want someone that you know will have your back in a tight spot, and someone that will encourage you and challenge you to reach new heights.

You want someone that helps you win, and helps you want to win. So don’t marry a loser. Chances are you’ll end up one as well.

Related posts:

1. October 2010 Blog Income Update
2. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
3. How a Barista and Losing a Quarter of a Million Bucks Taught Me to Ask for What I Want

Related posts:

1. January 2011 Blog Income Report
2. November 2010 Blog Income Report
3. December 2010 Blog Income Report

When you work 40 hrs a week for a salary, the value of your time is roughly your annual salary divided by 2000 (40 hrs per week for 50 weeks). So if you make $60,000 per year, then the value of your time is $30 / hr. When you include benefits and such, that number might go up to $35 or $40.

However, people don’t really seem to think like this. If the value of your time is $40 / hr, then it makes sense to pay $20 to save an hour of time, for example. If you can hire a cleaning person for $20 / hr who can work as fast as you can, you should. Period.

I think one reason that people don’t see the world this way is that their time is worth $40 / hr, but only for the first 40 hrs per week. They effectively have a limited market for their hours. And you can’t really bank hours to be used later (or can you? topic for another post) so it doesn’t really matter how you use those hours, because a) no one will pay for them, and b) they’re going to be gone either way.

Contrast this with freelance, where people have a lot more control over how much of their time they convert to income. There have been weeks where I wanted to work on a project of my own or where I was traveling when I did no work, or only worked a couple hours on paying work. On the other hand, there have been times when I needed extra income and I was willing to put in 14 hours per day, seven days per week.

Not only are the first 40 hrs usually more valuable for a freelancer, but they go up from there. When I’m pretty booked, I’m still open to taking on additional work, but my rates go up by 50-100%. If I’m working at night or on the weekends, I’m charging extra for that.

It’s a really good feeling to know that if something comes up, you can adjust your schedule to optimize for free time or for extra income. Of course, there’s still lag time, which can be a problem. I haven’t quite figured out how to setup an arrangement where I can work from 0 to 16 hours on any given day at normal quoted rate, and get paid immediately at the end of the day for hours worked. That would be the ideal scenario in terms of being able to adjust my work to meet any financial needs. However, it’s not too bad right now; I generally can adjust the amount that I’m working with a couple weeks notice.

This level of flexibility has a downside, though. I remember when I first started doing freelance, I was very aware of the fact that every minute I stepped away from my computer was a minute that was costing me in time I could have been billing. An hour-long lunch with friends went from costing me $10 to costing me $60 (my hourly rate was $50 at the time). So for a long time, I wrestled with trying to bill as many hours as humanly possible, because I felt guilty otherwise.

Today, I tend to set income goals for the month and then base my hours on that. I look at my entire month as monetizable, and I have to decide how much of my time I want to “buy” back with income that I’ll forgo. And because I’m focusing more on disconnecting my time from my income (which I’ll talk about in a future post), all I’m expecting from my freelance at this point is to hit those minimum income goals.

Still, it’s nice to know that if I want to earn 2x as much in March and then take April off to travel, I can.

Related posts:

1. My money quote of the week
2. Can money buy happiness?
3. Reader question: what to charge as a freelancer?

But I opened 2011 by screwing that up. January 2011 was the first month that I didn’t meet my goal of 20% growth in income. In fact, I made less than in December. A lot less. It was a bloodbath, actually.

I made just $219.38 in January 2011, down about 73% over December 2010, when I made $809.54.

So why did I lose so much income? Two primary reasons:

1. My post quality just wasn’t as high. I’ve been busy with some other projects and I’ve not had as much time to dedicate to researching and writing posts. This is something I’m making a big focus in February and March.
2. Traffic is way down. A good portion of my traffic growth over the last four months of 2010 was the fact that I was getting lots of posts to hit the homepage on Hacker News, which brought a lot of traffic. But in January, not a single post of mine hit the homepage, despite several garnering enough votes to do so. I dug deeper and apparently my domain is being penalized at HN for some reason. I don’t know why, but that’s the reason my traffic is down so much from that source.

So how am I feeling? I’m disappointed, obviously, but I’m neither surprised nor upset. Of the two reasons above, #1 is completely my fault and completely fixable, and #2 is something I’ve been expecting and preparing for. I realized a couple months ago that in order to grow this to something that could replace my income, I’d need to do two things:

1. I need to expand my audience. What the readers of sites like Hacker News want is not really what most people want. And while I’m sure many will accuse me of being shallow for commercial appeal’s sake, I really do blog about things because I enjoy helping people and exploring new ideas. And I’d like to try doing that for a wider audience, that’s all. As a result, I’ve been expecting to move away from traffic sources like HN; this was just earlier than I was hoping for.
2. I need to focus on subscribers. Being subject to the whims of social media sites is nerve-wracking and frustrating. It encourages cookie-cutter content with overhyped headlines, just to get attention. I’d much rather build relationships with a base of subscribers who are interested in the same things that I am and who are willing to take the time to get to know me and to learn to trust me. I would love it if most of my growth came from subscribers forwarding posts to their friends. That kind of relationship-based growth is harder in many ways, but much, much more valuable. And bonus: you’re not dependent on a 3rd party for your traffic.

So while I wanted to see January do better (and Feb isn’t looking amazing either), I’m still very excited for the rest of this year. I’m going to dedicate more time to content in the coming weeks, and I’m still working on several plans to grow the subscriber base. I’ll be sharing more about that in the coming weeks, but feel free to drop me a comment if that kind of thing interests you.

Related posts:

1. Feb 2011 Blog Income Report
2. December 2010 Blog Income Report
3. November 2010 Blog Income Report

December 2010 Blog Income Report

Here’s November and December:

The news here is mixed: I hit my goal of 20% growth over last month, which is the target that I’ve set for myself. If I can hit this target every month for a year, I’ll be making more than enough by the end of 2011 to live off the income from RyanWaggoner.com alone. So that’s good, but I’m also slightly concerned because I just barely hit the goal, while I completely blew it away last month (264%).

Upon reflection, I think my post quality went down slightly this month. I know that part of this was just the holidays, but it was also partly worrying too much about the big things to move the income needle in the long run, and neglecting some of the basics, like writing great content every single day.

So for January, my goal is to buckle down a little and get some of the bigger ideas for posts that I have out the door, as well as land 1-2 guest posts on top blogs that I admire. I also want to focus more attention on the advertising side of things, and I have some ideas on how to make that happen and get my CPM rates up so that I can bring the advertising and affiliate income more in line with each other.

2010 Annual Blog Income Report

Overall, I had a blast this year. I started blogging every day in August and I truly didn’t have much in the way of income expectations for it. A friend actually suggested I throw some Adsense on the site because it couldn’t hurt, and the last few months have been amazing. It’s really exciting to see something grow organically from nothing into a project that could actually replace my income within a year or two.

Goals for 2011

As mentioned, I pretty much just have one goal: be able to make a full-time income from this site by the end of 2011. To be more specific, I’d need to make about $5 – 6k / month from the site before I’d be able to stop doing all contract and freelance work. Starting from a baseline of $800 / month (which is what the site earned in Dec 2010), I’ll need growth of about 18% per month to reach my income goal by the end of 2011. I think this is an achievable goal, and I’ll be working very hard over the next 3-4 months to see if I can achieve it early.

Once again, thank you so much for being a reader; it means the world to me.

Related posts:

1. November 2010 Blog Income Report
2. January 2011 Blog Income Report
3. October 2010 Blog Income Update

As a result, my goals for my blog have shifted a little. I originally started blogging every day without a clear purpose, but as my income has grown and I’ve received more emails from users who have enjoyed my posts, I’ve decided to make blogging more of a priority. I’m not in any hurry to do it full-time or anything, but I now think that’s a probable outcome in the next few years, and I’m going to focus my blogging efforts in 2011 on that goal.

Now, if you’re reading this and you’re thinking that I’m “selling out” or that I should really just be blogging for fun, not to make money, you’re not alone with your concerns. I’ve wrestled a lot with this question, because I really don’t want to just be adding to the noise and writing purely for the sake of making money. All I can really promise you is that I’ll do my best to add value with every post. I’ll leave it up to you to gauge whether I’m successful, and unsubscribe if not.

Speaking of unsubscribing, one of the big things I’ve learned is that I need to focus on building my subscriber base. My initial traffic came almost exclusively from Hacker News, which is awesome, and I’m really grateful for that push. But I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of being dependent on the Hacker News audience for all of my traffic and income. The community seems to be deteriorating in some ways, likely as a result of growth, and it’s becoming a lot more noisy. Building a relationship with a subscriber base means that I don’t have to worry about winning my audience all over again every single day. It also means that I can have a better conversation with the people who enjoy what I write, and ensure that I’m adding value for them.

I’ll talk in a later post about the specific methods I’m using to grow my subscriber base, but I’m really excited to see how things turn out. If you haven’t subscribed already, please do so now; I’ll be posting tons of great content in the coming weeks and months and you don’t want to miss out. Subscribe right now.

Related posts:

1. Blogging frequency
2. Feb 2011 Blog Income Report
3. January 2011 Blog Income Report

In 1869, the GDP / person was $2310. In 2005, it was $37,600 [1]. I know what you’re thinking: inflation! Nope, both of those numbers are adjusted for year 2000 dollars. That means that the US produces 1500% more per person every year than it did 140 years ago. That would mean that the average person [2] is 1500% wealthier than they would have been 140 years ago. That’s pretty amazing. Where is this wealth coming from? We’re creating it out of thin air.

There’s a scene in the movie “Lord of War” where a cargo plane is emergency-landed on a dirt road in a poor country in Africa. In 24 hours, the plane has been completely stripped down to the carcass, as locals literally dismantle it and cart off the pieces. It reminds me of those old movies where an army of ants devour a dead bird or something.

Anyway, I was watching and I was thinking about how that scene is a good example of wealth destruction in practice. That plane had tremendous value as a cargo plane, worth millions. But by breaking the pieces apart, it was reduced to being used for makeshift shelters and other purposes that plywood and scrap metal would do for.

The same process is true in reverse: what’s the value of the raw materials that go into an Airbus A-380? I have no idea, but I know it’s a hell of a lot less than the $350 million that each one costs. By combining the materials in an innovative way, we’re creating true wealth.

The growth in wealth is because we’re creating wealth itself. Human creativity and ingenuity has incredible power and promise. Think of what life was like 140 years ago, and what it’s like today. Is it any wonder that we’re 1500% wealthier? And this process is actually accelerating; we’re building wealth faster now than at any point in history (the recession notwithstanding).

And it’s not like we’re getting close to the end; I firmly believe that by the end of the 21st century, we can build the global GDP per person to be more than $1 million. And that’s inflation-adjusted 2000 dollars. But it might not happen, and if it doesn’t, it will likely be for one or more of these reasons:

• We don’t invest in education like we should, and human innovation declines
• Wars or other mass casualty events destroy wealth faster than we can create it

After decades of gloom, it looks like poverty in Africa might finally be falling. If they have the chance, if wars and plagues and famines don’t wipe them out, if Africa stands up, can you imagine how much wealth the people of Africa will be able to create over the next century? I can’t, but I hope we get to find out.

And seriously, watch Lord of War if you haven’t seen it.

1. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic448946.files/lecture_facts_growth.pdf
2. Note I said that the “average person” is 1500% wealthier. Not everyone is.

Related posts:

1. Book Review: “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuk
2. How to Become a Billionaire
3. Useful hard problems have easy elevator pitches

You can read the October 2010 income update here.

So here are the numbers for November:

More good news: my blog income is up about 265% over last month. Very surprising, actually, because three weeks into the month, I had made a total of about $10. However, I had a couple of posts that popped and brought a bunch of Amazon affiliate revenue. The relatively low number of popular posts resulted in less traffic, and thus less advertising revenue, something I plan to focus on more in December. Overall, though, I’m pretty excited; I think it’s realistic to be able to make a living off my blog in another 18-24 months. I still haven’t done hardly anything other than post content every day and post the occasional post to Hacker News. I have to think that when I start really working on marketing and promoting the blog elsewhere, I’ll be able to continue the growth. I only need about 20% growth per month to get to the point where I could live off my blog in a year. Judging by the last few months, I don’t think that’s completely unrealistic, but we’ll see.

If you have suggestions on how I can make this blog even more valuable for you, please let me know in the comments!

Related posts:

1. December 2010 Blog Income Report
2. October 2010 Blog Income Update
3. January 2011 Blog Income Report

I originally started blogging just for the sake of improving my writing and building a personal brand, but after I started getting some decent traffic, I decided to try some monetization. Thirty minutes of setting up Adsense and I was done. I had already been messing around with Amazon, but I started getting more serious about it.

Since then, my income has been steadily climbing each month. It’s not enough to pay my rent or anything, but it’s getting to be enough for a few nice dinners out. October was my biggest month yet:

So not too bad. No, I can’t live off of it yet, but it’s healthy growth and I’m excited to see where I can go from here.

Unfortunately, the outlook for November isn’t looking so rosy. Because of our launch of 21times on Nov 1st, I haven’t had the time or energy to really devote to the site like I have for the last few months. However, I’m streamlining a few other things in my life so that I can continue to work on this site and see where it’ll go. Lots of folks make a living on their blog; why not me? I’m in no rush, either…I don’t mind growing slowly for five years.

But growly slowly for the long-term isn’t really actionable, so I’ve got a three-pronged approach for the next couple months to see how I can improve upon these numbers:

1. Go through the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog ebook from Problogger (loads of good stuff in here)
2. Seek out some guest post opportunities (I was on Lifehacker a couple months ago and it brought some good traffic)
3. Experiment with other monetization strategies, including affiliate programs and direct sponsorship sales.

If you have any suggestions on how I can improve the value of my blog to you, please post in the comments!

Related posts:

1. November 2010 Blog Income Report
2. December 2010 Blog Income Report
3. January 2011 Blog Income Report