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Who wants to see ads? It’s something one tolerates. Funny TV commercials are entertaining — but just once or twice. After that, even great commercials get old. So adding ads to a blog can be distracting. When I see a blog with tons of ads, I tend to think that the ‘author’ is more interested in revenue than in writing, and usually that means the ‘content’ is just copy-n-pasted from somewhere else. I’m not going back to that blog.

The best ads address your audience. You know those TV commercials that you never want to watch? I’m a guy, so feminine hygiene products just aren’t of any interest at all to me. I don’t want to see those commercials on TV. Don’t tell me about denture cream. I don’t have ED. Bleh. If I’m gonna see ads, show me something I might buy.

In addition to pissing off your customers less, relevant ads also bring revenue to the host. Some of the blogs I read on a regular basis are monetized, but often just through generic ads. Google AdSense provides contextualized ads, but although they might be relevant to the context, they’re not approved by the author. There’s no editorializing in those ads; you might not get a denture cream ad, but the book itself might be completely contrary to the author’s opinions. Imagine if I advertized Ornish or Dr Oz here!

So: what I wanted for my blog was a list of my favorite books; books that were relevant to the blog itself. I like those books. I think my readers would benefit from reading them – not just in a generic way, but really, if you’re reading that blog, you should read those books, too. I feel the same way about blogs; if you’re reading this blog regularly, then I think you’d get a lot out of reading Richard and Peter and Kurt regularly.

I finally found a way to do that, and it’s fairly straightforward. The key is to start at Amazon.com, assuming you have an associates account (which is free to set up and run). The process:

1) Sign in to the Amazon associates page, and make sure you’re signed in to Blogger as well.

2) click on the Widgets tab

3) find the “My Favorites” widget

4) add a bunch of books (or whatever!), then click ‘Next Step’

5) Give it a title and customize the appearance. Save the widget, just to be safe. When you’re done, click ‘add to my web page.’

7) In the popup, select “Add to Blogger”

This will take you to a page at Blogger.com. Select the blog that you want to add the widget to, and click “Add Widget”.

9) Modify the layout if you want, then click “Save” to finish.

Then sit back, and wait for someone to click a link and actually buy a book.

I’ve got two muses almost ready to go. One needs maybe a solid 10-20 hours of work and it can be sold. The second, maybe the same, but part of that time is waiting for reviews (from beta-testers) to come back in, so the timeline isn’t completely under my control. My goal is to get the first one up and for sale by end of day Monday, and to get copies of the second one out to testers at the same time.

I’ve got another five or so on deck. In two weeks, I’ll get teaser pages created and published for all five, to assess which one is most likely to bring in the most revenue.

That’s my challenge. I’ve got to meet all three goals in order to pass. I’ve been updating lately M-F, but I’ll be updating daily for the duration of the challenge.

1) SM up for sale by end of Monday

2) SG out to testers by end of Monday

3) Five teaser pages built & published by Friday March 5th.

See ya tomorrow.

The 4-Hour Workweek

Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week is about many things. Finding more time to do what you want is probably the core. One element of that is having what he calls a muse — a mostly-automated business that brings in enough money to let you do what you want with the rest of the week.

Finding a muse is hard, of course. If it was easy, everyone would be rich. But also most people aren’t entrepreneurs. I was an employee for most of my life. Starting a business is a risk; there’s a psychological hurdle to overcome before you start something up. Entrepreneurs and inventors the world over are trying to get rich. Generally, the recommended approach is to work your ass off. Ferriss suggests searching not for a way to get rich, to strike it big, but rather to find something that pays for your dreams but doesn’t take time. It’s a combination of finding ways to get your dream cheaply and ways to make money with few hours of work.

Work can broadly be divided into three types: products, services, and reselling. The customer only sees products and services, though; when you resell, you resell either a product or a service. Yet, as the business owner, you have to choose between the three. A product is not necessarily a physical thing; it can be software, a book, or a DVD program. Services don’t make good muses, because what you’re selling is your time. I guess one could explore the sorts of services where one could make a good amount of money for only a short amount of time, but those are niche, technical, or professional things. But I think it’s hard to think of and market something like that. So that leaves us with products or reselling.

Let’s start with manufacturing your own products. What can you make and sell in only four hours a week? Stay-at-home crafts like gift baskets, woodworking, toys and/or stuffed animals, stuff like that… generally, the simpler the skill set it takes to produce the item, the more likely it is that someone out there is already producing it, and cheaply, too. (This is why reselling is a better option for these types of products.) Products themselves are hard. Probably the most bang-for-the-buck is content: books, movies, TV shows, DVDs, video training, porn, blogs, websites, etc. These are all things where reward can outstrip cost. Not all content; small-market nonfiction books tend to pay equal to an average wage. Blockbuster books and movies can work out to a huge hourly wage.

But it’s hard to write blockbuster books, right? Ferriss counters that with the idea of a lucrative niche market; his example is yoga for rock climbers. If you already know yoga and mountain-climbing, you could put together a one- or two-hour DVD in just a few hours of your time, and for a small startup cost. Then, sell it at a steep price ($50-100) to that niche market. Ferriss emphasizes going after easy, lucrative customers. If you sell something at $10, you’ll deal with indecisive buyers, dilettantes, scams, and cheap people that will abuse your return policy. Sell at a higher price, and overhead costs come down.

Reselling can also be a good market, but requires its own set of skills. Maybe I should look into it, but I thought (for me) that content was a much better route. I can spell, type fast, use proper grammar, write code, research easily — it seemed much more appealing to me. Content is my muse. Well, it’s the muse I’ve chosen.

Not this blog, though. My god, this blog is worthless. Mostly someplace for me to type while thinking. But thanks for reading!

Burton Cattleman's Rail Jam

There’s a rail jam here in town on Saturday. I’m not competing, but one of my roommates is. Until you get to the big pro competitions, they’re really structured for entrants, not spectators. I think the rail jams are a bit different; footage and photos I’ve seen of other rail jams look like parties with some snowboarding going on nearby. There was a Gatorade Free Flow Tour event here a couple weeks ago, which is an amateur event for the 21-and-under crowd. Spectators? Feh! Spectators can go f themselves!

When I played “pro” chess, it was the same way. There wasn’t really room for families and friends, and of course no effort made to draw the public in. But chess isn’t much of a spectator sport. But is that because they don’t try? I played in some video-game competitions and they were the same way, even though there was a much larger group of spectators — usually friends and clan-mates of the competitors.

Online coverage of tournaments is mostly the same. Some info for competition entrants, tables of results, but no flavor, no reporting, no hype, no info for spectators or people that just want to follow the sport.

Magazines like to push personalities. This was one of the keys to the success of poker on television: drama. They turned the players into characters (or characatures), then pit them against each other and exaggerated past conflicts, as if there was something personal going on behind the scenes. It worked for the Travel Channel; they were able to make money from it.

Money would be the obvious reason why it’s difficult to be a sport enthusiast. No-one’s figured out how to make money from it. No-one wants to offer me coverage of upcoming snowboarding competitions, competitor profiles, behind-the-scenes looks at training and tournaments, and info for spectators that want to go watch a competition live. As with poker coverage, I think that it’s a Field of Dreams thing: if you build it, they will come.

The “obvious” answer would be to go offer that stuff myself. Sadly, I don’t have the time. Could I outsource it, 4HWW style? Hmm.

I think the term “ski bum” somehow implies sleeping in your car (or van, down by the river), but there’s tons of people here in town that have a roof. Paying for a room requires a job, and obviously a nights-and-weekend job is ideal for leaving your days free to hit the slopes. Some bums might travel from mountain to mountain, hiking up the hills and ducking through lift lines instead of buying tickets, but that’s outside my experience. I’m going to stick to the semi-legit ski bums, those with jobs (or savings) enough to stick around at one mountain for a season.

My monthly expenses are easy enough to list: rent & utilities, food, car payment, insurance, and cell phone.

Room: the cheapest room is one you don’t have to pay for; couch surfing is cheap. A case of beer might buy you a week, and if you don’t care who you piss off maybe three or four weeks. Mountain employees here (at Mammoth) can stay in employee housing, which can be as cheap as $270 a month. Crowding a bunch of people into a room can also reduce expenses; a $30 or $40 hotel split six ways is pretty cheap. But for a bit more, you can get a real room. There were dozens of ads available here for $500 rooms, although utilities were extra. And those utilities can add a lot, especially if you don’t have a fireplace or wood-burning stove. Electricity might run about $60/mo during the winter, less if you’ve got wood burning or gas heating. So plan for about $50-100 for heating expenses, depending on how tolerant you (and your roommates) are to the cold. An internet connection, telephone, and TV add a bit, too. If you’re willing to sit at a coffee shop without buying anything, you might get your inet fix for free; otherwise, it’s $2 for a cup of joe and several hours of surfing. (Or blog posting.)

Food: Eating paleo can be expensive. Grass-fed meat is not cheap, and raw-milk cheeses typically run around $14 per pound. Factory-farmed meat is very cheap; one of the great things about Mammoth is the free bus that runs throughout town, for about 20 hours of the day. Getting to the grocery store is cake, and it’s only a two-mile walk elsewise. So I can check the specials each week. Last week, factory ground beef was $1/lb; this week, chicken is $1.97/lb. I’ve found cheap steak, pork, ham, bacon, and cheese. Eating on the hill can be grossly expensive, so don’t do that. My weekly food budget is $30, but that doesn’t include any extra drinks, snacks, coffee, etc. I cook at home a lot more now, which is both cheap and paleo-friendly. Mostly. I wish there was a Whole Foods in town, although then my food budget would double. I do fast at least 4 meals a week, eating about 10 meals a week total. I’ve got over 200,000 calories of fat to burn off here so that helps too!

Car: The ideal path is to own your car outright. I bought a new car shortly before heading out, so I’ve actually got a car payment that’s kinda hefty relative to my new mountain lifestyle. I’m recommending against car payments, for the record.

Insurance: Car insurance is kinda critical whether you own or are making payments, though, and that’s another $80-200 a month, depending on your state, car, driving history, blah blah. Health insurance also varies a lot from state to state. If you’re young and healthy, health insurance might seem like a needless expense, but if you’re skiing — you might want it! An accident won’t just end your season, it’ll bankrupt you.

Cell phone: Plans are the same whether you live in the city or in the mountains. Chances are you already know how much this costs. Having a cell phone is, I think, critical for keeping in touch with friends and family.

My monthly budget is just under $1200, but it could have been much cheaper if I didn’t have a new car. If you’re willing to go into debt, your out-of-pocket expenses could be much lower — just over 500 or 600. With a part-time job or two, you have that made.

For those with “real jobs” that want to take six months off, the key is savings and debt. No debt payments is critical.  At $1000 a month, a season-long vacation costs about as much as two weeks’ vacation to someplace fancy. That’s what brought be here!

There’s one major key to living your dream. Before I get to it, however, there’s one major roadblock to living a go-anywhere, do-anything sort of lifestyle.

A mortgage is probably the worst investments a dreamer can make. There are better and worse mortgages, of course; I don’t mean to be categorical in calling mortgages evil. If you put a lot down (say 50%), choose a short term (say 10 years), and the payments are easy to make, then it won’t be a drain on your income. It might still be hard to get out of, and those payments might keep you locked down when there’s so much in the world to see.

This is where I am. Where are you?

A house is not a place to live; it’s an *expensive* place to live. If your mortgage is a giant chunk of your salary, such that you bring a sack lunch to work every day because you can’t afford a $7 lunch out, then you’re paying way too much for your house. $2000 a month for a place to live and $120 a month for food is crazy. I think those priorities are backwards. Food is nutrition; it’s health; it’s life. Shelter is cheap.

Buying a house is an investment. If you don’t know where the real estate market is, you could be where many people are today: upside-down on your mortgage. Even if you own your home outright, it’s not a liquid asset. In a bad market, it could take a year to sell the house — if you’re willing to wait that long. And every year you still have to pay taxes, insurance, and maintenance fees.

I’m surprised at the amount of money people will dump into redoing their kitchen or bathrooms. For that kind of money, I could live easy for a couple years. Throw that money into investments and it’s a good chunk of living expenses on its own. The money you pay in interest is pure bank profit; it’s a huge amount of money that YOU pay so that you can live in a nice place for a few years. In decades past, the interest was about 2/3rds of the monthly payment, but with modern low-down-payment and long-term loans, that percentage is creeping up.

Debt is the #1 roadblock to chasing your dream.

I used to feel guilty about having never bought a house, but I moved so much, I thought — soon as I find a job that I want to keep for five years, I’ll buy a house. Layoffs, bad bosses, crappy jobs, and better opportunities kept me moving; luckily, I moved up the responsibility and salary ladders too. Everyone else had a house, going over to visit them was cool, but… it was never for me. Never looked seriously.

With the tankage of the market in 2008, I suddenly felt very good about renting an apartment. I’m mobile, my living expenses are tiny, and I never bought a house full of furniture. Say your monthly mortgage payment was $2000. $1300 of that is interest, and $700 is principal — ie investment. Instead of paying  $1300 in interest to the bank every month, I put around $800 that “disappeared,” ie didn’t turn into an asset. How is paying interest better than paying rent? And what if the rent is lower? A family of four could live in a nice apartment for $1300 a month, skip expensive insurance and
maintenance fees, and instead of putting $700 of principal payment into a slowly-appreciating asset (that might not even be appreciating!) you could put that $700 into much better investments.

Yes, the stock market cratered in 2008. If you’re going to invest, invest smart.  There’s a lot of crossover in the paleo community with other non-mainstream groups, including the crowd that follows sites like Mish (and others) that saw housing headed for a bust back in 2005. But that’s a topic for another day.

So, where was I? Oh yeah.

I was able to move to the mountains! My monthly expenses are now about 14% of my old salary, and even that’s a bit inflated due to a new car and the insurance costs that go along with it. If I had traded my old car 1:1 for a used buggy that would do well in the snow, and… I’d be looking at 11% of my old salary. At this point that kind of comparison gets silly.

The first thing that let me go live my dream was low expenses. That’s the one major key.

If your dream is to travel the world and stay in first-class hotels and eat at 5-star restaurants every night, the only way to get there is with lots of cash. But is that really your dream? I’d like to do that, but I don’t think it would make me happy. I’m much happier going out and snowboarding five days a week. I could be doing that by staying in a mountain-side room at $150/night, etc etc, but again that luxury wasn’t essential to my dreams. It’d be nice, of course.

Being rich is a dream that requires more than a full-time investment. It’s an 80-hour a week thing, and it requires talent or smarts or luck, too. And what it gets you is money. What do you do then? Live in luxury? I’ve had jobs where I could just sit there and twiddle my thumbs and still get paid. Those jobs sucked. It was boring. I felt like I was wasting my time, learning nothing, getting better at nothing, not furthering my career or my life. I can’t understand those that say they’d like to sit at home and watch TV all day. That sounds like a fucking bore to me.

To me, happiness is a specific thing. It’s chasing my goals. Right now, snowboarding every day is hella fun. And in six months, maybe I do something else, but for the next six months? I’m in heaven.

I’m also using my spare time to build software products that I can sell. This is a 4HWW sort of thing; build or buy a product and sell it. This goes hand-in-hand with having low expenses. It won’t take much for a few software products to pay my living and travel expenses. I’d love to talk more about that part of my life, but I’m waiting for a few more products to get out there in the market.

In the meanwhile, I’m living it up, cheaply, here at 8000 feet elevation.

I leave tomorrow. I’m driving up to Austin to stay with some friends, then it’s off to Colorado and the mountains. I haven’t secured a place to live, but I’m talking to a few people about available rooms which fit right into my budget, are close to the slopes, and will be available through the season. I’ve got nearly all the gear I need, except for goggles and a helmet. I’m losing weight again (yay no more cheating!) and feeding my body right. I’ve got six months of expenses saved up, and leads on other revenue (more on that when it’s real income and not just beer money).

I’ve been trying to push myself to run more lately, to get as much improvement in fitness as possible. I’m planning to run tonight, even though it’s near freezing here in Houston.

I’ve tagged this post “4HWW” because Tim Ferriss’ book The Four Hour WorkWeek serves as an anchor for much of what I’m doing here: doing something I want, as cheaply as it can be done, while actively searching out entrepreneurial activities that can pay the bills.

I get into town on Tuesday, I’ve got a season pass on the way, my gear is packed… I’m bound for the snow!