Darren Rowse coined the term "six figure blogging" to refer to those bloggers who make six-figure annual income from blogging. I am not there yet, but I achieved an important milestone of blogging this week by claiming the 100,000th dollar from blogging income. I have to admit it is very surreal -- when I started PFBlog back in January 2003, our family net worth was barely over $80,000. For many years, I only treated the blog as a personal record of wealth accumulation, and I never imagined one day the blog itself will become a meaningful source of wealth accumulation.
Aside from the boringly thorough documentary of our family finance over the years and the invaluable interaction I have with all the readers who consistently hold me accountable for better content, the money generation process itself is a huge source of satisfaction for me. Especially, I have been able to practice many skills I learned from running business in a big company to my small boutique site:
- Marketing: Many good initiatives of how to expand the audience and how to reach for potential advertisers.
- Pricing: All pricing tactics taught in the pricing class have been used: tiered pricing model, price discrimination, pricing psychology, effective price hike, etc.
- Negotiation: Some good experience of how to create a better proposal and cut a win-win deal.
- Merchandising: Many good tries to maximize shelf space and optimize value.
- CRM: Believe it or not, I rely on a home-made CRM solution on top of Microsoft Access to analyze my results and support the billing, renewal and upselling of my advertising inventory.
I am also able to refresh my best memories as a Computer Science college student and enterprise network administrator early in my career by putting my computer skills to good use. I have never been more knowledgeable on LINUX operation, HTML authoring and SEO.
All in all, blogging is the dream second job that I can never beg for more. I fully enjoy the marriage of my never-ending curiosity of personal finance knowledge with my business skills and computer know-how. Will I retire early? Maybe. But will I stop blogging once I hit my net worth goal? Most probably not. More and more, I can envision how blogging will play a very important part of my life in the next decade.
Readers and fellow bloggers: thank you for your patronage over the years! I'm committed to keeping making progress in this personal finance journey, and delivering more quality content. Please keep coming back!
