I Have Published a Directory of the Past 15 Years of My Work on Investing for Beginners at About.com

Now thats what im talkin about! this is great news. thank you.

Perfect! Funny that you've been working on this, as I've been going back to all of your lessons and compiling a word document of each topic. If you've seen a spike in traffic across this website and your about.com website all from one ISP, it was probably me over the past few weeks!

Excellent stuff. Thank you.

Thank you.

Does About have a policy against showing the publication date for articles? Most of the info is timeless, but a lot of it would benefit at least a little from some time context. It would also be helpful to be able to distinguish new content versus articles that the site is recycling back to the top.

I am contractually forbidden to talk about non-public information so this will have to be general and deal only with things that are already known and/or visible to an outside third-party.

You're preaching to the choir. The current situation is a result of legacy inheritances from past platforms. Specifically, the original system from 15 years ago involved writing html files and uploading them via ftp. It was a very different time; the tail-end of the dot-com boom with a bunch of twenty-somethings running around a very expensive office in New York and the work force telecommuting, communicating almost entirely by email and AOL Instant Messenger, manually building pages by hand with either Notebook or Microsoft FrontPage. There was no real model for what we were doing and we had near total autonomy over how the site, including our html pages, looked so we could craft user experiences that best fit our content, developing our own link structures, tables, images, and visual navigation tools. We could even write javascript to create quizzes, calculators, etc.

One of the only standards that was applied: The files were coded with a dating system in the URL (most of which have been destroyed but some of which, miraculously, still survive). My site was originally populated by the people at headquarters duplicating the television site from one directory to another, which led to some odd things that became engrained as they couldn't change them once the dot-com boom ended. For example, check out an article called The Bottom Line: The Anatomy of Profit. If you look at the URL, you notice /21jumpstreet/a/051401a.htm in the path. The television show 21 Jump Street from the 1980's was the original template directory they instructed me to use, thinking they could change it later, which never happened. The /a/ subdirectory meant "articles", and the number combination was the date in U.S. standard (May 14th, 2001, article). The investing lessons couldn't fit within an existing template so they were coded as "bl" files, which stood for "blank". For a long time, dating wasn't necessary (at least from an administrative perspective) because the URL was the date and the site was so new that the idea people would still be reading it (now going on) twenty years later wasn't really on the radar.

After awhile, the early years' content was migrated to an online content management platform, which was converted and moved to another, etc. etc., merger after merger (there was a point when we were a subsidiary of The New York Times and quite literally covering the bills of some of the parent company as the old-line newspaper declined; they required us to write "About.com, a division of The New York Times on any and all mentions of the site) some of which were finally rebuilt from the ground up and given a new name with redirects on the old content pages. (Others were able to survive the transition for reasons that are clear only to the lords of technology.) Later, there was a point at which each new piece had an accompanying blog which was dated so you navigated the blog and new the date going into the content, though this became even messier because you now had duplicated content (click on the blog, only to be redirected to the "real" page if you clicked on the internal link to the article). Those blogs were removed in recent years, leaving just the content. All of this conspired to mean even the backend administrative dates aren't accurate because many of them refer to the date of transition rather than original publication (e.g., articles from 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004 almost all look like they were published later with the names now gone so there's no way to tell when they originally hit the system).

Additionally, over the years, multiple editors and owners have given me different mandate parameters within which to work (e.g. the investing lessons and intermediate/advanced content stopped because the then-owners and then-editors didn't want me writing cumulative knowledge that helped the audience grow with me, but rather, focus exclusively on beginners; focus on timeless ever green content vs. up-to-date coverage of what was happening in the investing world; there was even a point where they had me writing office equipment reviews for HP printers/scanners/copiers, which I found a few years ago and might still exist out there somewhere).

This has sometimes led to humorous situations; at least on my end. I had an inexplicably angry man write me once after he came across and old real estate article in which I wrote about the the (then) unattractiveness of real estate relative to equities, using the (then) interest rates to calculate the relative attractiveness. He talked about his girlfriend being in real estate, how I was a moron, and, incredulously - and clearly rhetorically - demanding something like, "What?! Was this written ten years ago!?". I wanted to write back and say: "Yes. It was written ten years ago. It should have been evident from the mortgage rates employed, which provides a fairly substantial context clue that you were viewing the archives, as well as the equity assumptions." I didn't, however, because the reality is that it was a failure of the platform. He shouldn't have had to try and sort out the context clues.

Following the most recent merger/acquisition and the updates that resulted from the new management, that platform is now almost completely out of my control; a near polar opposite of the one I started with, a blank html page. I've had people reach out to me, beyond apoplectic, explaining how upset they are about things like auto-play non-muted advertisements in the middle of articles, pop-ups, the introduction of endless scrolling, and my content now cross-linking with other writers so they can't say within the universe I created but there is literally almost nothing I can do about it unlike the old days when my fiefdom was mine to shape as I saw fit based on my audience's needs and interest. That template has no date functionality so if I wanted to add the date, I would have to manually type it into each piece when it went live and pray that it wasn't later added or else I'd have to go back and delete it from everything to avoid duplication.

My hope is that the directory, which I can use as an organization tool for myself as I bring everything up to date over the next few years, can also make it easier to find exactly what someone is looking for on the Investing for Beginners site. If that turns out to be true, the reader benefits, I benefit, and the network benefits. In another 15 years, it seems fairly evident that this site, which really isn't an investing site per se as it doesn't compete with my About site in any way but rather enhances it and drives page views to it, will largely be much larger by at least an order of magnitude. Here, I can write about anything I want, no matter how advanced or complicated, using any formatting I desire, while exercising complete control over advertising placement and the schedule. I can write about recipes, personal improvement, business strategy, and a host of other things that catch my interest at the time. The fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) thing is that, the nature of this community is some of the best investing-related conversations happen in unexpected places, like the recent discussion of Hershey's intrinsic valuation in the comment section of the Lindt White Chocolate Ice Cream Recipe post. If someone wants to stick solely to the financial stuff on this blog, they're going to miss a lot of it because it's organically built into the very fabric of even the personal posts, not neatly segregated as it would be on a news site.

Oh man, that takes me back. I started doing web development in 1998, and did professional work in 2003/2004 during a college co-op job. Those were the wild west days, for sure. Thanks for the amusing background.

Thank you so much for this. As an aside, and seeing how much content you've produced, do you have a daily or weekly output target that you must hit or some other productivity strategy?

Technically, I have contractually agreed to produce a minimum amount of output (I can't talk about the specific terms of the contract as there is a confidentiality clause. Broadly speaking, the output requirements vary on a year-to-year basis and, especially in the early years, were very liberal, giving me virtual carte blanche to do whatever I wanted at whatever frequency I desired). Ultimately, that contractual minimum has proven almost meaningless in my case because over the past 15 years, on average, my output has greatly exceeded what was required.

What happens: I get in the mood to write about something so I do. There were periods where I would publish 10,000+ words of new content in a matter of 1-2 days at the end of a month, and other periods where I'd write shorter, 600 word pieces throughout the month. I've learned my efficiency is greatest when I don't try and make myself write, I wait until I'm ready and it comes out as if I were talking to someone in person. It's terrible productivity advise, I know. I'm sure somewhere a self-help guru is shaking his or her head at my lack of system.

The closet I've ever come to a system - and even it is more of a big-picture strategy plan - is every few years, I would do a deep-analysis of Google's keyword data and develop a long-term content plan around certain concepts. If I noticed a hole in my output, or thought I could monetize something intelligently without a lot of work, I'd go down the Excel sheets until I found a line that made my heart flutter. I'd write the piece, mark it off, and monitor it's performance. That way, I could write about what people wanted.

Even that makes me wary these days. Stepping back from the discussion of About and looking at the broader Internet, especially in the context of this personal blog, the downside of this is that Google has come to dominate search rankings to the point that much of the web is nothing but junk. I mean, look at
a post like the one I wrote on the oil majors and oil stocks back in August. It doesn't optimize at all. Almost nobody is going to find it through a search engine, which means for a lot of people, it doesn't exist. I wrote it with the goal of distilling years' worth of information in a single essay so people could benefit from my knowledge. Since it was published roughly 3 months ago, it's produced a mere $12.45 in advertising revenue for 6,249 words. That is a complete and utter waste of my time.

If this weren't a side-hobby, but rather, a career, I could have gamed the system, written ten 625 word articles that were optimized around a single term or keyword phrase but offered a mere fraction of the insight, and turned it into 30x or 50x the amount of cash flow, which would produce thousands of dollars in the coming years. Between this sort of incentive and the online filter bubble that it has created so people don't see news or blogs that conflict with their worldview unless they modify their settings, Google is severely damaging the civilization. That's one of the reasons this blog is the way it is. I decided awhile ago that, for the most part, I wasn't going to care about search rankings, anymore. I was going to try to help people and write things that I wanted to write, optimizing the content insofar as it was intelligent but not going out of my way to do it, focusing almost entirely on the human reading it. It's created some interesting by-products in the data. There are pages on this blog that you would never think could monetize for anything, and that are terrible in search results, but that have produced thousands of dollars in cash flow since they were written; single posts that are a few hundred words and have been forgotten for years.

(Related: I once did something as a bit of a side-bet with someone, which illustrates how bad the current incentive system is. I setup a WordPress site, spent a couple of days writing around 100 pages of short, targeted content with Aaron (entirely non-related to finance to prove a point), used a pen name, threw up some advertising code, and left it alone, out there in the ether, unattended and horribly out of date. I haven't put any meaningful work into it since other than security patches and in the past 36 months, it's pumped around $2,300 in cash into my personal account; a small annuity stream that was really more of an intellectual exercise to demonstrate how information is a commodity these days and if you knew how to manipulate the levers, you could quickly build a six-figure income even if it wasn't particularly valuable or insightful.)

The downside of this write-from-the-heart methodology is that, between my two major outlets, I'm generally producing 10,000 to 30,000 of words in new content a month. That means things like my books - many people know one of them has been done for nearly five years sitting on a shelf - never get wrapped up because I don't want to spend my time chained to a desk any longer than I already am. I tend to ride my passions rather than force myself to work so the idea of making myself sit down and write more when I'm all written out isn't appealing to me (one of the reasons for the drop in content production on this blog - I'm spending a lot of time immersed in writing the documents that will serve as the foundation for the global asset management business we're launching).

TL;DR: If you were doing this as a business, I think you'd probably benefit substantially from a structured weekly output system, treating it like you were pumping out widgets or something. My heart isn't in that sort of approach.

Joshua,

I love this directory! I have a huge concern of it disappearing when you change the content of the site in coming months... please tell us this will survive!

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I am always looking for articles on long term investing. Much of the articles you find in the popular press is more along the lines of speculation than investing.
I am so glad to have stumbled upon your essays, they are informative as well as entertaining. I look forward to a compilation of all your writing in a published format. The only other writer I have found who is an advocate of blue chip investing and a buy low and hold approach published a book and has a newsletter. I probably can't mention his name here because it could be construed as advertising but it has helped me in my investing. Just tonight I was going over my statements and the cumulative gain on my portfolio has been 285% since 3/08 until 12/17. This has been since I switched my investing style to blue chip dividend stocks that have a history of increasing dividends. It is something I wish I had started earlier but am happy that I did it when I did. It is in a tax sheltered account so all dividends can be put to work without having to pay taxes....until RMD time arrives. I am 100% in stocks and could never understand why I should have bonds to cushion the corrections and the bear markets because they also limit my gains during the bull markets as we have been having since 2008. If my dividends do not decrease, my yield is increased during those periods and I purchase more shares at a sale price.
Again, thanks for the essays, they are well appreciated.