2017 my rockiest year of retirement yet. But without some struggle, one becomes too soft. I don't ask for fewer burdens, but a stronger back.
My laziness finally caught up to me as my income started dropping at a worrying pace. I hired a writer from the Netherlands, paying him out of pocket to write an article every day, hoping to reverse the trajectory of ad revenue. Long story short, it didn't work and the experiment left me with less in the bank than I had planned for.
Now, most millennials would be thrilled to have no debt and 10 grand in the bank, but for me it was a crisis situation. In my panic, I even started applying for jobs *guffaw* I had a few offers but ended up turning them all down because nothing was quite worth giving up my freedom.
Complicating matters was our new baby boy who we call Baby G. My wife really preferred I didn't work, even though for about a month I felt like I had to.
This was the sort of situation JacobERE warned me about in 2012 when I proposed building income-generating websites for a living. Specifically he warned that a website has a discount rate of 50%, and that website revenue cannot be relied on long-term.
Finally, in a fit of desperation, I chose to work on my own sites using my own time. I'm rather burned out on my own sites, which is why I hired that guy from the Netherlands in the first place. After a bit of research, I discovered one of my problems, and how to fix it.
You see, it used to be that you could put a whole mess of content online, and as long as your overall website was high authority, even the mundane content could rank in search engines. Not true anymore. Now, if you want every piece of content to rank well, every piece of content has to be stellar.
Many content marketers online now utilize a "cornerstone content" method, whereby you continually hone your best content instead of trying to pump out daily content. Fortunately, that fits my own websites very well already. And that's exactly what I did. And I am happy to report it worked. My blog income grew by 70% over a few months of building up my pre-existing cornerstone content, and I was out of the woods.
And that's when the client work started coming in. You see, I am technically running three businesses. A web design business, blogging business, and that weird compost business in my username. This year the website business came through, just when I needed the work. Hallelujah. I had to cancel a vacation to Europe in 2017, but with another 10 grand in the bank it may only be a delay to 2018.
I'm still applying to jobs, because you never know. I may hit on the perfect part time writing job that would allow me to do some work from home and still raise my kids without paying my right eye and 8 fingers for daycare.
I'm stable, and my estimates are that I will remain stable for at least 2-3 more years before another crisis. After that, who knows? Better to start working out my back now.
. There's a lot more to the country than London, as I'm sure you'll appreciate if you've travelled outside it, that said, October isn't the greatest time to explore our countryside, it's cold, wet and windy!
not my idea of fun anyway! 