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Breaking News: Caught in the Crossfire Stocks retreated on all fronts as intensifying Mideast fighting sent oil prices to a record. The Nasdaq hit a nine-month low. Downgrades painted Wal-Mart and Disney red. SAP's warning cast a long shadow over the new earnings season. Bonds and gold came out ahead.
Smart Money Daily Turns One! 
Smart Money Daily went live 1 year ago today. That was a fast year! I figured it would be fun to think back to last January and to remember what I was thinking and feeling as I launched this site...
Change of Direction I was, of course, full of Rich Dad revelations and this site was the first action that I took in pursuit of that mythical beast: passive income. My initial intention was to build an application, a blogging platform to be specific, and then to sell it or leverage that into some form of business.
This site was intended to document that process and also allow me to perfect my product as I went. It is fairly typical of my style to want to learn by doing, rather than by researching in advance. Sometimes this is a good approach and sometimes, well, not so much.
Even though I loved building this site and it is satisfying to have coded it myself, I soon realized that the there was a lot more potential value in creating content than in writing a new blogging platform. After battling through code bugs, lack of styling options, lost work, hackers and comment spam attacks, I really wish that I had done a bit more up front research and started out with Wordpress. I have had the thought of shutting this site down or taking the time to migrate it to Wordpress...which is a lot of effort, but probably doable, but would result in a temporary loss of most of my search engine traffic.
Finally a Writer? Another interesting aspect of the past year for me to reflect on is writing. Many years ago, I actually spent a lot of energy trying to be a
Writer. Even though I did have one short journal style piece published in a literary journal [for you young-ins, this was back in the pre-internet days when writers spent countless hours submitting stories to magazines and journals following the near impossible dream of getting published] mostly I just filled notebooks with angst-ridden scribbles.
Fast forward 20 years and now thanks to the web and blogs, everyone is making their angst-ridden scribbles public, and a lot of people are really enjoying reading them. As I started out I remember how liberating it was to write into a public notebook, but after a couple weeks I remember checking my stats [I'm a self-confessed stats-o-holic] and being shaken by the realization that there were a few people reading my site on a regular basis. I actually remember experiencing performance anxiety when sitting down to write for a couple weeks after that; worried that what I was saying was not going to be worthwhile. I think one of the things that I had to learn as a blogger was that it's okay to write stuff that your readers might not get, or like, or agree with.
Blogging isn't Passive Income Another important realization came when I saw that what makes a blog successful is the blogger. As I educated myself in business and financial principles I began to understand that a blog is about the writer, and this by definition, is not a good business model. It is not scalable and, blogging on its own, is somewhat tied to an exchange of hours for
money. Given this realization, despite that I found blogging a surprisingly addictive and fulfilling activity, I knew that I needed to look elsewhere to reach my goal of getting rich.
It is a systematic approach that has the best chance of making you serious
money and a system can not be tied to an individual. In a system the parts, including the human ones, are replaceable, so I felt that blogging, at least my personal approach to it at that time, was not going to be the holy grail for me.
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