Episide 22 - How a Work-From-Home Dad Creates and Sells His Websites for One Million Dollars

Creating Content

Wendy and I are new to this world of content creation.  Actually, we both have some experience leisurely writing blogs in the past, but we have never created public content that produced substantial income for us.  Well, all that is about to change, because today we spoke with Marc of the Vital Dollar Blog, and what we learned was so insightful. We will take some time to implement some of the processes he talked about, and hopefully, we can find a way to receive a bit of compensation for all the time we are putting into the show. 

Who is Marc

Marc is a professional blogger and content creator.  

So far he has sold over $1,000,000 in profitable blogs.

He currently owns and operates the blog the Vital Dollar. He has an interesting plan for reaching Financial independence while having the flexibility to work at home with his family.  He builds and sells websites. This has been so lucrative for him, that he plans to replicate the process a number of times over.

In the podcast, we spoke in depth about how Marc and his wife balance full-time self-employment while raising his children. We talk about how he generates money thus far through his blogs, and what he plans to do in the future in order to reach his FI number.  

Marc on Money

Marc was born to low-income parents, and he learned to have respect for money early in life.  Later he became a Process Auditor (not a financial auditor). He was thankful to have a job but eventually began to grow a side hustle - a web design company.  

He saw some early success with this, but he eventually found out that he enjoyed blogging more than website development.  After a year and a half into blogging and building site, he reached a point where he replaced his income and was able to leave his full-time job.

Marc is trying to get to what we refer to as FAT FIRE.  Fat FIRE is when you save up more than the 25x your annual expenses (Marc is going for 50x his expenses). He only found the FIRE movement about a year ago, and through learning about the movement, he set his target savings amount according to his comfort level.

Blogging as a Business

Marc dedicates full-time hours to his blogging.  His routine has him devoting 50+ hours to blogging every week from home.  As he builds his blog, he makes sure to keep track of his hours. As his blog grows, his goal is to significantly reduce his hours of input.  The beginning inertia of starting a blog seems to be the hardest part. Traffic is difficult to capture and hard to sustain.

How did Marc learn to build websites and to blog?  He took one course in college which taught him the basics.

 

Marc's Blogging Tips

Stick with it - you need a long-term focus Network with other bloggers No money for the first 6 months - accept it! Make the content unique, interesting and useful Wordpress is pretty simple Put in the effort - you need to put in the effort to get traffic, Pinterest, facebook groups, blogging groups, forums etc.

Marc on the final questions

Money Lesson - Learned from his parents - respect money, manage it well, don’t spend what you don’t have.  Low-income parents, that made their money count.

Favorite Life Hacks - Credit card rewards have brought joy to their family.  Cashback rewards towards Christmas. Family vacation towards Disney World.

Book - Marc reads a lot of blogs and keeps them organized using a feed reader.  For a book, he is reading The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns - It looks at how we can impact people less fortunate. The impact we could have on poverty in other countries if we cared enough to make it a priority.

Contact - VitalDollar.com contact page to email  [email protected] @vital_dollar on twitter.