Live Your Wage Blog

For years I had the idea of sharing the financial knowledge I’ve learned over the last 20 years somewhere on the internet for others to read and learn from. I didn’t know if I needed my own blog or if it could just be a social media thing, and I debated that for far longer than I should have.

In 2017 I finally realized sharing my own personal story and knowledge about my own family’s financial journey should absolutely live on my very own blog.

And that’s how LiveYourWage.com was born.

Helping people kick normal to the curb, one reader at a time.

I started with a bunch of ideas about the kinds of stories I wanted to share, and the kind of information I wanted to pass along to people.

Some of it was very personal to my own life, such as only paying cash for cars, or paying off our house in 7 years.

But some of it was more general financial knowledge, like how to do a budget, and how to understand that true wealth is invisible.

So before I ever wrote one lick of code in Wordpress, I created the beginnings of my information architecture to figure out how I was going to structure my content.

Of course, knowing the type of content I wanted to create, and actually creating said content are two very different things.

I was still extremely employed at the time, so I knew the blog was going to have a slow start.

The first step, of course, was simply setting up the site on Wordpress.

I had never used Wordpress before, but I had done quite a bit of research in my years of dithering about whether I should even build my own website. That research all pointed me to Wordpress as the most ideal platform for by blog.

So I did what I pretty much always do when I need to learn some new technology related skill. YouTube videos. Lots and lots of YouTube videos.

That worked pretty well, but I wasn’t making progress as quickly as I desired, so I then jumped into the insane world of pay-for-instruction tutorials. This world is not for the faint of heart as scams and garbage tutorials are the vast majority of the content.

Another healthy round of research led me to what looked like a reputable entrepreneur who was specializing in making Wordpress tutorials. I plunked down the money and hoped for the best.

It was better than I could have ever hoped for.

I spent the next week getting all the behind the scenes stuff set up on my site such as the web hosting, security, the core SEO infrastructure, the design and layout of my chosen template, as well as the overall structure of the site – pages, blog posts, contact forms, email capturing forms, etc.

Beyond the constant pace of simply writing and getting blog posts onto the site, I also set up my email marketing campaigns using Mail Chimp.

Again, I did a fair bit of research before settling on Mail Chimp as my provider. Other services offered a lot more functionality at the time, but for a much steeper price than I was willing to pay. I knew the cost in man-hours of converting all my campaigns to a different platform later on would be steep, but I wasn’t looking to dump a ton of money into the site until I had more clear vision on how it would become profitable.

Setting up email campaigns in Mail Chimp was surprisingly easy. Beyond just my ad hoc emails that would go out whenever I posted a new blog post, I was able to set up several automated email flows that would initiate an entire campaign once a reader provided their email address and signed up to receive one of my free resources.

And integrating those email campaigns into the custom modules I built in Wordpress to automatically show up on all my blog posts was also rather straight forward.

Once I had enough content and got beyond the family and friends pool of readers (who were my amazing beta testers, by the way) the email campaigns ran without a hitch, delivering the 1st-time-reader content, plus the freebie content emails automatically.

Of course, running a blog is almost pointless without taking full advantage of all the social media marketing opportunities to connect with readers and share your content.

I did the majority of my social media marketing on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn might seem like an odd social channel to use, but I found that much of the financial information I was sharing was directly related to work, such as how 401k’s work, what to do when you leave your job, and how to survive losing a job.

I setup the social media profiles and started out doing all my posting manually. That was fine in the beginning when I was struggling to crank out one blog post every two weeks, but as I was able to increase the pace of new content, it was time to find a quality social media scheduling tool.

And that meant…more research.

I finally settled on a powerful tool called Smarter Queue.

Honestly, Smarter Queue wasn’t the budget choice. There were much cheaper services out there, but the functionality offered was just too good to pass up.

For example, you could set your social media posting schedule by social media site, content type (blog post, tip, inspiration, seasonal, etc.), and day and time of the week.

Once I was proficient enough to have new blog posts to share as well as inspirational messages and shorter tips and tricks posts, it because incredibly valuable to be able to spread out my posts by channel, type, and day and time.

Smarter Queue also allowed me to easily see it all on a calendar interface so I could see exactly what types of posts were getting sent where and how often.

This was a game-changer as I was able to schedule new posts 2 and 3 weeks out, and create evergreen content that got shared and recycled automatically throughout the year.

As complex as all that sounds, it was so easy to see exactly what was happening on all my social channels. As a one-person shop doing all the Wordpress development, blog writing, graphic design, and social media management, Smarter Queue made my life significantly more manageable.

Sadly, as much momentum as I had built up through 2019 on the blog, it wasn’t enough to power through the Covid pandemic. I went from spending 6 to 8 hours a day working on the blog to spending 7 hours a day monitoring 4 kids who were suddenly home-schooled (a.k.a distance learning).

I did my best to power through in 2020, but then my mom started having health issues and was eventually diagnosed with cancer and passed away suddenly in 2021.

I didn’t write a single blog post in 2021, and the lifeblood of any blog is new and highly searchable content.

As my wife and I discussed our goals for 2022, we realized that the blog wasn’t as big a part of our lives as it was back in 2017-2019, so we shifted our priorities to allow us to tackle some new goals.

Luckily, the LiveYourWage blog hasn’t disappeared. I still find myself doing financial coaching from time to time, giving talks at local businesses or schools, and will still send links to specific blog posts to help answer people’s financial questions on a fairly regular basis.

It’s not the growing site it once was, but I’m extremely grateful I was able to get so many of my financial thoughts written out and stored in a permanent place on the web.

Well, as permanent as anything is on the web.

If you’re curious how my wife and I were both able to both be full-time stay-at-home parents for the last 5 years, my blog will tell you exactly how.