It is hard to believe, but I started blogging in March of 2013. At the time I had not written anything except simple business letters since college. My friend suggested I started a blog, and I really did not know what a blog was. I researched blogs, decided to go for, and I started writing. My articles were horrible and full of errors when I started, but people liked them. They learned to overlook my horrible grammar and use the information I was providing. Thanks to a little encouragement I kept writing more and more articles. Over the years I have written close to 500 posts. I have also recorded 145 podcast episodes and recorded hundreds of videos. It has been a lot of fun, been super rewarding, and a little frustrating as well.
How did I come up with the name InvestFourMore?
I wanted to write a blog about rental properties. In 2013 I was still working with my dad as a real estate agent, flipping houses, and I bought rentals as well. I loved rentals and thought I could provide the most valuable information on them. One of the biggest hurdles I overcame with rentals was getting more than four mortgages. Most banks will not let a person have more than four mortgages in their name. Some banks will flat out tell you it is impossible to get more than four mortgages. However, there are local banks, and other options who will lend many more than four mortgages to a single person. I own 19 rentals and have loans on 15 of them with one bank. I also have a number of loans on my house flips with that same bank as well. The name InvestFourMore came to me as a play on getting more than four mortgages on houses.
What have been some of the highs and lows of blogging over five years?
I loved writing in the beginning of my blog. I had so many things to write about, and it was so easy to write and write and write. I was rewarded with more and more traffic as I kept writing. Eventually I was getting over 100,000 unique visitors a month and I knew I should capitalize on the traffic I was getting. I had some ads going, but was only making a few thousand dollars a month from the blog. I focussed on monetizing the blog with:
-affililliates
-books
-coaching programs
I was able to increase my revenue 5 to 10 times what I was making. However, I was not writing as much and I stopped seeing the huge traffic increases I was seeing earlier in the blogs life. I was also competing with huge blogs that had staff writers, marketing departments, and much bigger operations than me. I was doing the blog as a side gig.
I started a podcast because everyone said they wanted me too. I have done a podcast for almost three years. It has done well, but does not do nearly as well as the blog itself. I get about 1 to 2 thousand downloads an episode. I like the podcast, but it takes a lot of time finding guests, recording, and writing the show notes.
I also started a YouTube channel that chronicles my properties. That channel did okay with 1,000 views a day for what seemed like years. I liked YouTube because it was easy to create videos and people loved to see my flips and rentals. Late last year my views jumped to about 5,000 a day and this year they are up to 15,000 a day! I now have many more people on my YouTube channel than I ever have on the blog.
What are my future plans for the blog?
I am at a crossroads with what I want to do right now. I love the videos and they are much easier to create than an article. However, I want to keep writing as well. I think I will keep writing at least one article a week, but I may phase out my podcast. I am going to spend a lot more time on my YouTube videos and try to make some house flipping shows that show the entire process. Right now most of my videos are simple before and afters of the houses once we fix them up.
Of course I have to keep finding houses to flip and that has been tough lately!