Entries Tagged 'The Dream' ↓

I came across this quote at Corante - Future Tense and I absolutely love it.

There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm…Second, there are the hard- working, intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered. Third, there are the hard- working, stupid ones. These people are a menace and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody. Finally, there are the intelligent, lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.

General Erich Von Manstein (1887-1973) on the German Officer Corps

Now let me start off by saying, I have nothing against smart, hardworking people. In fact, that is the type of person I like to hire. They make great operations / middle management. You want someone who is detail-oriented and smart so when you assign them a large project they can actually execute it at a high level. I also think they make decent entrepreneur-CEOs (but not great CEOs).

The great entrepreneur-CEO is, at his/her core, smart and lazy. Now, that’s a bit of a paradox. If you’re starting an ambitious Web site or company get ready to work 60 hours a week for the next 3 years, doing all kinds of menial tasks you hate and even giving up Friday nights to catch up on what I lovingly call “monkey work”. But and this is a big But a great entrepeneur is working towards, and then achieving, above-average profits passively. You might continue to work the 60 hours after that, but then it’s about passion, not because profits aren’t above-average. Think Larry and Sergei, thousands of paid clicks every minute from now until forever, and they only had to write the algorithm once (now they pay people to maintain it).

Let’s make this personal. For instance, if you quit working as an account manager at a large SEO firm, and then work for clients on your own, you’re only siezing some of the benefits of the entrepeneur (the ability to set your own hours, choose your projects, etc.) But in many ways you’re still a chump. (I mean that in a nice way.) There’s a cap on how many hours you can work in a week, so in effect you’re still earning an hourly wage. And for every successful SEO campaign you manage, you receive about 5% of the profit benefit, and the client receives the other 95% of the profit benefit. Finally, don’t forget that once you stop working, you stop getting paid. That’s no way to live!

If you’re continuing to move up the value chain, there should be less “work”, and more thought and strategy, at each step along the way. Of course you still need to understand the nitty gritty details of link building and usability and social media. (Otherwise your strategies will be lacking, and you won’t know if an underling is bullsh*tting you.) But a lazy entrepreneur-CEO’s time is mostly spent attracting and retaining middle manager talent, brainstorming and reviewing new ideas (picking winners from losers), and architecting strategic plans. Plus golfing or playing video games.

Hopefully this doesn’t sound too arrogant. (Meh.) In truth I’m not “there” yet, it’s something I’m working towards all the time. But I do know I have made a lot of these changes which I originally discussed in The Lazy SEO Manifesto, and I can say the profit’s better, the lifestyle’s better, the days are more fun. Change can be painful, especially if you’re a control freak, so it’s something you have to commit to. Commit to being lazy!

I like to integrate this idea into my personal life, as well. For instance, I am somewhat messy, however I like to live in a place that’s clean. So I have a maid. You would be surprised how cost-effective it is to pay someone to clean your place an hour or two a week. Also, the maid cleans much better and faster than I would. Now, I could try and justify this by saying, I use the extra hour or two a week to work, and my effective hourly wage is higher than what I pay the maid, so the ROI is positive. In reality, this may simply be another hour or two of Desktop Tower Defense. It’s a win either way. My goal next year is a personal assistant slash secretary (maybe just part time… maybe not). Other parts of the Manifesto are still on my to-do list. I haven’t moved to a tropical island yet, but I’m moving to Texas next month (Houston–near the Gulf Coast and Mexico, at least), so that’s a start. I also do not have a mistress yet. That sounds like a lot of work.

This quote got me thinking:

Every entrepreneur feels vaguely disreputable. Maybe you drive a crappy car. Maybe you never went to prom. There are enough stuffed suits in this world to fill fifteen Wall Street Journals a day. As anyone who watches American Idol will tell you, what this spun-out, over-hyped world is absolutely famished for is a little genuine personality. And, outside of your technology, it’s probably the only thing you have. So stop trying to be like IBM and just be yourself.

Those words really rang true. When you are first starting out as a designer, webmaster, entrepreneur, blogger, or SEO, the “industry” can seem daunting. Why would anyone take you seriously when there are hundreds of better designers, better entrepreneurs, or better SEOs out there whose names have been around for five years and who have shiny websites, portfolios and published articles to back them up?

Let me put it this way, for those of you who do client work under their own name or brand, you know that it can be humbling very quickly doing business with a Fortune 500 company. They send you a 20 page contract and a non-disclosure agreement, and demand to pay you under net-60 terms. You’re just Andy Hagans the Link Builder (or Lady Lou the Logo Designer), and they are Gigantic Prestigious Public Corporation, Inc.; who are you to argue?

My younger brother is trying to learn SEO. He sometimes seems daunted by how much there is to learn, and how much work goes into it all. He admits that he has a hard time committing because he is afraid of failure. I try to explain: this is a marathon, not a race. You’re going to be here a while, and you won’t be rich right away, but you will get there eventually. Settle in, get to work and try to have some fun on the way!

I think as an SEO or webmaster, the largest hurdle you’ll ever face is getting from $0 to $100 in profit every month. That represents doing something entrepreneurial and taking initiative, which is further than 95% of your “normal” friends will ever get. It seems to me that the initial $100 / month is harder to attain than it is to get from $100 to a few thousand per month, which is enough to live off of (though this is probably the second biggest hurdle you’ll ever face). If you can reach that point relatively early in your career and have the smarts/stubbornness/stupidity to stick with it, chances are, you’re going to be rich. The only question is, how rich?

As entrepreneurs, a lot of things are out to screw us. We don’t get a tax deduction for our health insurance, like our “normally employed” brethren do in a roundabout way. We work longer hours. We have to deal with lawyers and stupid tax forms. We have more stress. It only takes a single bout of bad luck (illness, injury, family problem, lawsuit, search engine penalty, changing external environment), and the whole thing goes bye-bye, Return to go and do not collect $200. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have self-selected yourself as having more guts or greed than the average human. Either one can get you through.

Back to that Fortune 500 company which sent me a 20 page contract, a non-disclosure agreement, and demanded to pay on net-60 terms. At that point, my business had gotten slightly off the ground, and I wasn’t exactly starving (well, if you’ve seen me, you know that I’m never starving, but I mean starving for cash ), so I asked myself, do I really want to deal with this horsesh*t? The answer was no. I replied to them: I don’t sign contracts (I know, that’s ghetto, but I didn’t want to pay for a lawyer to review it considering it was a smaller project), and I required payment upfront. I figured they would blow me off, but their response was, OK, where do we send the payment? It amazed me, but it shouldn’t have. I performed a niche service that they couldn’t do themselves, and thus I had something that they wanted. I had leverage.

So what is the lesson here? If you look at the Web as a sort of ecosystem, I think many of the nodes (and people) in the system hold a lot more value in their position than they know. As the environment evolves in the future, many of them will learn how to better unlock and monetize that value. The winners are those who decide to be players in the first place.

If you take yourself seriously, other people will. You are a CEO, and you are better than you think.

Well it feels pretty weird, but as of last Friday, I am no longer doing link building / link baiting / social media consulting for anyone else. I’m not sure what I’ll do with my client services site, I will keep it up and indexed for now and maybe make it a personal homepage in the future.

Now, for the record, let me say I don’t regret working for my clients for the past four years one single bit. I made a lot of friends, learned a ton, helped many sites rank in Google, paid the rent, and built up a bankroll to finance other projects. So I am definitely thankful to all my past clients for those reasons, and for putting up with me of course

But at the end of the day, economics won out–doing SEO for clients simply isn’t a business model (as others have said before). And honestly with the link baiting service, I began to hate the lifestyle (I think every bury at Digg moved my heart attack up a year, at this rate I’m due for my first at age 26.)

So in fulfillment of my manifesto I’m now 100% affiliate marketer slash competitive webmaster, and a little bit closer to living the dream… still no sign of cutting back on hours though!

It takes strategy, tactics, balls, elbow grease, money, and smart planning. Mostly, though, it’s a matter of putting in a lot of time every day to “block and tackle” (a.k.a. “the boring details” or “content and links” or “the grind”).

Most people do not have the proper attitude, personality, or personal situation (kids to feed?) to grind it out for 3 or 4 years. You have to wake up, work the 8 to 5 job, come home, lift a few weights, eat dinner, then work 7 to midnight on the side project (which, if it yields any profits, are most likely reinvested).

So, if you can’t/are scared to/aren’t able to grind it out for a few years, this guide isn’t going to help you. Now, even if you are grinding it out, you still are unlikely to build a site you can later sell for $1M: most SEOs are applying their valuable tactics, sweat and money to bad business models.

And that is what this article addresses: making sure that you apply your grind to a site that can sell for $1 million USD in a few years (rather than $20 or $200k).

The Multiple: Why Some Sites Sell for 10x Yearly Profit, and Others Sell for 6x Monthly

To many readers, $1,000,000 sounds like a ridiculous sum to sell a website for (it would seem that way, if you’ve check DP for sites lately). Now, this is partly because “bigtime” websites are usually sold privately, so you’re not going to see the high value ones listed at DigitalPoint or SitePoint.

But we’re also used to seeing low multiple sites for sale on these public forums. What do I mean by low multiple sites? These are sites that sell for somewhere in the neighborhood of 1x their annual profits. If these sites were stocks listed on the S&P, their P/E (price to earnings) ratio would be 1. (Hint: that is an absurdly low multiple for a stock.) Nevertheless, that is the multiple that the marketplace is willing to bear for these types of sites.

What sort of factors would discount these investments so much? (From an investor’s standpoint, that’s what a site is–an investment.) Why, when the investor is willing to pay 15x annual profits to own a share of stock, is he only willing to pay 1x annual profits for a site being sold at DP?

The main reason these sites are so discounted is that they are extremely risky. They generally don’t hold any strategic value for the acquirer (for instance, why Youtube commanded a premium valuation), so their value is solely a function of return vs. risk. The typical site sold at DP:

• Yields revenue from only a single source (Adsense).
• Receives traffic from only a single source (usually a site does well in Google or MSN).
• Has search rankings which are likely not-defensible (based on low quality links, DP co-op weight, links from the webmaster’s own network, etc.)
• Does not have any other valuable assets to speak of besides the revenue stream itself (e.g., there is no newsletter list, no brand name recognition, etc.)
• Overstates profits because the webmaster’s salary (opportunity cost) is not taken into account.

That last bit gets me all the time. First of all, I think it’s pretty hilarious when someone tries to sell a site based on its revenues. If your site brings in $20,000 a year, and you spend $19,000 on cost-per-click, the revenues aren’t really the relevant piece of information, are they? But even in the case above, it is misleading to state that the sites makes a profit of $1,000 a year.

We have to assume that the average webmaster’s time is worth something–let’s say, $30 an hour. If it takes you 2 hours a week to manage the CPC campaign in the example above, your opportunity cost for running the site is $30 x 104 (hours per year) = $3,120. So in fact, this site isn’t making $20,000 or even $1,000 a year… when the salary for the webmaster is factored into account, it is losing $2,120. Small wonder it is selling for such a low multiple! When you combine the overinflation of profit numbers due to ignoring the opportunity costs of running the site with all the high risk factors (single revenue source, single traffic source, etc.) it isn’t surprising that the generally accepted fair valuation multiple at public site-for-sale forums is 1x yearly “profit”.

How to Build a High Multiple Site

The thing you need to realize is that there are plenty of websites out there that are actually selling for 5x, 7x or even 10x their annual profit (and I’m not just talking Youtube or Facebook–I’m talking real, everyday websites that a guy like you or me could actually build if we put in a lot of time and elbow grease).

When you take that sort of sale multiple–7x annual profit–building a $1M website is much more realistic and attainable. If you can clear $12,000 a month (in profit, after subtracting your own salary), that’s $144,000 a year; multiple by 7, minus a few thousand for the accountants and lawyers who do the deal–that’s how you sell a site for $1,000,000.

The trick is, it has to be the right $12,000 in profit per month. It has to be $12,000 a month that is defensible, sustainable, diversified, and strategically valuable to larger companies.

So what kind of site is defensible? The long version is here, but the short version is: good domain name, good brand, diversified traffic sources, diversified revenue sources, and measurable assets like RSS and newsletter subscribers.

What kind of site is sustainable? A niche where consumer interest is growing not shrinking, a site with low legal risk (e.g. you don’t host a bunch of copyrighted files or infringe on trademarks). I also personally believe that profit margins based on CPC campaigns are rarely sustainable over the long term.

What kind of site is diversified? Revenue: You don’t make most of your money from Adsense, and you are selling leads or acting as an affiliate to multiple merchants. Traffic: You rank well on all 3 search engines (or at least 2), plus get a majority of your traffic from non-search sources like direct links, RSS subscribers, bookmarks and typeins.

What kind of site is strategically valuable? One that doesn’t reflect negatively on the entity who owns it, and one that exists in a niche with a mature lead marketplace.

Now, that latter statement needs a bit more explanation. Some people like to go after microniches (low profits, low competition). I take the exact opposite approach, for two reasons: Firstly, as I explained in Warren Buffet’s Advice to SEOs, it is highly profitable to be an average player in a highly profitable niche. (Not always the case when you’re the top player in a low-profit niche.)

More importantly (when discussing multiples), to extract full value when you’re selling a website you need to be in a market with an abundance of website-buyers. To use a specific examples (because boy do I hate generic advice!), if your website generates mortgage leads there are about seven hundred zillion (roughly) mortgage affiliates, brokers, lead resellers and argitrageurs who would just love to own your monthly stream of leads. This is going to create an efficient marketplace for when you try to sell your site, and is going to extract the maximum multiple (price). Potential buyers know there are many other potential buyers out there, so they are less likely to lowball you. It would not be a stretch at all for a defensible mortgage site to sell for 7x its annual profit.

Conversely, when there are fewer buyers of leads in your niche, it is going to be very hard to receive an attractive multiple when selling your site. Let’s say there is only one large niche-widget-merchant in your little niche, and you are one of a few affiliates that generate leads for him. When it comes time to sell your site, who is going to buy it? Super-affiliates are going to heavily discount the value because selling leads to a single niche-widget-merchant is risky and not very defensible. If he cuts his payout-per-lead in half, you don’t really have any option but to continue to sell your leads to him (now for half the payout!). Likewise, if you try to sell the site to the actual niche-widget-merchant, he knows he probably isn’t bidding against many (or any) other buyers, so he is likely to only offer a low multiple to purchase your site.

Here’s a little test to see whether your niche has a mature lead marketplace: Login to CJ, and search for your product/service name. Are there at least 5 merchants coming up for your product or service? If so, the lead buying marketplace in your niche is mature.

To summarize: If you want to build a site you can sell for $1,000,000, build a site that makes $12,000 or more in monthly profit, passes my 10 point defensibility quiz, and operates in a mature (large) lead-buying marketplace.

Back to the Grind: Getting to 12k/month

So we’ve covered how to make a site defensible, and how to pick a mature niche. Now we need to figure out how we can get to $12,000 a month in profit (realistically this is something like $17,000 a month in profit before your “salary”, since whoever buys your site will probably have to spend ~60k a year to get a webmaster to maintain the site).

The rub is, I don’t have a step-by-step plan to help you do that. Even if I did, it would be pretty useless–we all have different talents and resources, so the easiest way for me to get there is going to be very different than the easiest way for you to get there. Rest assured there are hundreds of different tactics, marketing channels, monetization strategies and options to get a site to 12k in monthly profit.

I actually recommend you start with what you know. Tactics: Do you know link baiting, how to program AJAX tools, or low-cost offline marketing? Niches: Where have you operated in the past? Do any of your past niches fit the definition of being a mature lead marketplace? Resources: We all have special connections that make things easier; is your dad an insurance agent? Is your college roomate good at manipulating large data sets? Or maybe your husband has a law degree.

No matter what your personal situation is, your strategy has to play to your own personal strengths. For me, these strengths have included:

• Having a partner who is a lawyer
• Being willing to work 12 hours a day
• Being good at link baiting and social media optimization
• Having a team of low-cost, talented writers in India

In the vein of Warren Buffet’s Advice to SEOs, I’ll admit that the following strategems have also served me well:

• Structuring sites so that the ads are the content
• Building traffic of visitors who are in the buying cycle
• Finding affiliate merchants who don’t operate at CJ
• Partnering with reliable, honest people whose talents complement (not overlap with) my own

And Now: The Catch!

Let’s say that 3 years later, you have the site–it’s defensibly earning 17k in monthly profit (12k after your “salary”). A few things might happen. #1, some big company decides they just have to have your domain name or position in the SERPs or whatever tools/assets you’ve developed, and they offer you a 12x or 20x annual profit multiple to buy your site. That’s pretty much a no-brainer SELL, but let’s not count on that, it’s a (relatively) rare occurance. #2, let’s say God forbid you get sick or have some sort of misfortune, and you need to sell your site quickly–in this case you might get a much lower multiple than you otherwise would, but it can’t be helped.

More commonly, you are in a position where you can choose whether or not you want to hold or sell. And here’s the ironic part: you may very well find that the type of site you could sell for $1,000,000 (at a 5 or 6 or 8x multiple) is worth keeping! Personally I feel like if I can get a site to 12k/profit a month in two years, I can probably get it to double or triple that given another year or two. Why be in a hurry to sell? If you’ve developed truly premium virtual real estate, it’s only going to increase in value; meanwhile, despite your Aunt Gladys who thinks money earned online is “silly money”, if the site is truly defensible, it may represent an option that carries less risk than alternative investments (*ahem* Enron stock *cough* Las Vegas real estate).

If you take the proceeds of the sale of a 144k annual profit site–let’s call our sale price $1,000,000–first you’ll get hit with a long term capital gains tax (at least, us yanks will), and your after-tax pile of cash is now $850,000. If you put that into real estate, the (long term) average rate of return is 3%–you’ll yield $25,500 this year. If you put it in an S&P index fund, you’d average maybe 12%–$102,000. So the alternative uses for our money aren’t even coming close to beating the $144,000 annual yield we got from the website. Meanwhile most of us don’t have the talents to substantially increase the yield we get out of real estate or stock investing (like we would if we were maintaining/expanding a website we founded).

Of course, if most of your net worth is tied up in a single website, there is serious pressure to cash out and diversify that worth (and rightfully so). And most of us with the fortitude and personality to be an affiliate marketer/competitive webmaster in the first place realize that change is good for the soul (and often good for one’s lifestyle)–wouldn’t it be lovely to cash out, put most of the proceeds in an investment account, travel the world for a few months, and start all over again (with a brand new premium domain name)?

It’s a good problem to have. Whether you decide to sell, or hold, or hold then sell then start again, you’re still in a good place. I’m chasing the dream and I hope all Tropical SEO readers are, too!

Guys, you know I pretend to not like to toot my own horn, but every once in a while, you just can’t hold it inside. I found this article in my referrers and I can’t even begin to express how happy it made me, on several levels.

SEOs: the New Pornographers of the Web

If that’s not pure gaming of the system, I don’t know what is. There are entire guides on how to properly linkbait, such as Andy Hagans’ Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and Social Media Marketing. Read it. I did, and now I feel like I just walked through a sewer.

You know who else walks through sewers? TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES… BAM!!!!

Although SEOs pay lip service to the quality of the content, it’s clear that the focus is on one thing, and one thing only: naked, raw greed.

So Mr. Atwood also has a deep understanding of the underlying principles behind the Lazy SEO Manifesto.

When you focus on SEO, you’re focusing on money and connections. If that’s your goal, then have at it. But don’t be surprised when people see through you for what you really are.

Money and connections?? Codswallop! I’m in this business for the fame! I’m in it for the honor! Really I just do it to make the children smile, that makes it all worthwhile! Fluffy Pink Unicorn Rose Blossom Rainbows, let’s all hold hands!

Two years ago…

• I was attending a class (no, seriously) called “Women & Islam”.
• Aaron Wall was selling 2 ebooks a day and making ends meet.
• Rand Fishkin was notable for his SOCEngine directory.
• Rich McIver was studying for the LSAT.
• Brian Clark was an assistant manager at Burger King (well, something like that )
• Neil Patel was going through puberty.
• Chris Pearson was selling cell phones.

I love the Internet.

P.S. I am aware that there were many more in the Class of ‘06 but I didn’t know everyone’s former job so I couldn’t list you… please fill us in in the comments!

I usually consider “What I’ve been doing” posts to be boring and egotistical, sorry you’re getting one anyway!

Conferences

• Last week my company had our annual board meeting–on a Hunter 305 sailboat. The corporate strategy for ‘07 was nailed down, and we also got certified for coastal cruising by the ASA. Score.
• March 31st 2007 is the Delhi SEO Meet. I’ll be in attendance with my partners-in-crime Brian Thibault of Convert Up and Rich McIver of Biz Niche Ltd. We’re going to stay the week and see the Taj Mahal (thanks to Pankaj for playing host and tour guide!) If anyone lives near that part of the world or just wants to see India I highly recommend attending, it is going to be a fantastic opportunity to network with Indian web service providers and many familiar faces from DigitalPoint.
• 2nd week of April is Search Engine Strategies in NYC. I’ll be speaking with several cool folks on the social media panel, stop by after and say hi!

Domaining

• As you may or may not know, many smart and aggressive folks from the SEO side of things are seeing the huge potential of domaining (and its synergy with SEO and branding). I myself am beginning to dabble a bit, and I found How to: Get Started As a Domainer @ Aviva Directory to be a good resource for SEOs/n00bs/intermediates. It goes in-depth into several buying, financing and monetization strategies and also has a helpful toolset of links at the end.
• I also just got my first issue of Domainer’s Magazine in the mail (for free!), and was pleasantly surprised with the quality. In my opinion domainers are the rock stars of Internet marketing, and again let me reiterate I think SEOs should be looking into domaining if they want to maximize their ROI on future projects… a premium domain + SEO/linkbaiting skills is a case where 1 + 1 = 3.

Special Surprise

• I lied, there is no special surprise, this is just a lesson to remind you that it is an accessibility and marketing imperative that your blog post deliver what is promised by the title (otherwise the reader gets disappointed and your brand is adversely affected). So don’t call something ‘The ultimate guide’ unless it really is ultimate, and don’t call something the cold war if it’s just a friendly bet, not Russia vs. the USA in an arms race.

I pledge to strive wholeheartedly to make the most amount of money while doing the least amount of work possible.

I pledge to develop passive revenue streams that maintain themselves using automated systems.

I pledge to outsource anything that possibly can be outsourced. My core competencies are thinking, planning and strategizing, and my time spent on those activities will yield the highest ROI.

I pledge to have a secretary/personal assistant and/or mistress to take care of pesky details.

I pledge to only give my phone number to very close associates. Everyone else will have to email me. I will compulsively check my email throughout the day, but it may take me up to a week to answer one, especially if the reply requires effort on my part.

I pledge to use Digg, Reddit, Delicious and the like as a shortcut to link building. The Digg community is a bunch of annoying little wankers but I will play the game until my sites all have TrustRank out the wazoo from dozens of successful link baits.

I pledge to get dressed only after the noon hour. Getting dressed implies putting on pajama pants or sweats instead of boxers only. It does not necessarily imply the presence of a shirt.

I pledge to extend myself outside of the SEO realm only into even lazier and more defensible areas. Namely, domaining.

I pledge to waste at least two hours a day on Threadwatch, WebmasterWorld and Bloglines. Not because I’m learning anything new, but because I’m bored.

I pledge to be a Lazy SEO.

The worker makes money from his labor. This revenue is non-recurring. Work once, get paid once.

The capitalist makes money from his money. This revenue is recurring. Save (”invest”) once, get paid forever.

If you work for clients, you’re making money from your labor, not your money. Working with clients is not a bad thing. It’s fun to talk to people. Working on new types of Web sites expands your knowledge and sharpens your skillset. Working with new people allows you to hear new perspectives and opinions. And clients pay you NOW — rather than a year or two from now.

The problem is, they pay you once.

Want to know something about me? I’m really, really, really lazy. I’ve told this to people before, and they’ve replied something to the effect of, “Yeah right! You work fulltime and run several businesses on the side! Hardly lazy.”

Well, in a way they’re right. I rarely, if ever, work a 40 hour week (60 might be par).

However — know this — I love being lazy. I love the feeling of not lifting a finger, and getting a check in the mail (Adsense, dividend, CJ, whatever).

What is it with the Protestant work ethic in this country? Why do we have to work all the time? Yes, some people have to work hard, and all the time, just to make ends meet (talking basic needs here: food and shelter) — I’m not referring to them. OK, aside from them, yes, you can get pleasure from hard work. There is honor in providing for your family. There is satisfaction in challenging work. Maybe all your friends are from work (but then, maybe that isn’t very balanced, eh?)

But what’s the best kind of work?

It’s the kind you do because you love doing it. You don’t have to do it. You like doing it. You can take a break whenever you want. I don’t mean an hour. I mean a month or a year. It isn’t a financial necessity that you work; it’s a financial bonus.

The freedom to work like that is a privelege. Most people in the world do not enjoy this privelege. That doesn’t mean you should feel guilty if the idea sounds good to you — or that you shouldn’t try to achieve this lifestyle.

So I guess I’m not truly-uly lazy at this moment. But one of my primary professional goals is the ability to be lazy if and when I want. Where I want.

I want to be a capitalist!

I’m not the biggest Steve Pavlina fan — far from it — but his article 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job is an awesome read, and really changed the way I think about work.

Getting a job and trading your time for money may seem like a good idea. There’s only one problem with it. It’s stupid! It’s the stupidest way you can possibly generate income! This is truly income for dummies.

Why is getting a job so dumb? Because you only get paid when you’re working. Don’t you see a problem with that, or have you been so thoroughly brainwashed into thinking it’s reasonable and intelligent to only earn income when you’re working? Have you never considered that it might be better to be paid even when you’re not working?

Everyone has a dream, right? Different people have different dreams.

SEOs have different dreams, too. Some dream about speaking at SES. Some dream of reaching $100/month (I think we all dream that dream in our first year!)

There’s another dream which a lot of us seem to share. It’s not written in stone, and there a dozen different permutations of it, but I think it generally contains the following elements:

• Gettin’ that passive income nice and high
• Workin’ for yourself
• Movin’ to the tropical island

For some people, “nice and high” income is 3k/month. (I can attest that this allows a lavish lifestyle in some parts of the world!) For others, it’s 30k/month. (Does six figures mean anything anymore in New York City?) And of course, the “tropical island” might be the mountain lodge in Colorado, the house (paid cash) in Seattle, or even the flat in Dubai.

But you know this dream when you see it, or when you read about it. I think there’s something about the personality of your normal “affiliate” that tends to daydream… or maybe he just looks at the monkeys in the cubicles next to him, and thinks, I know there’s something better out there.