How I Started A Personal Finance Blog That Gets Millions Of Traffic Per Year
Hello! My name is Jim Wang and I run a personal finance blog. I started the blog in late 2015 and we aim to help young professionals and new families better manage their money and, as a result, their lives.
Before WalletHacks.com, I started a personal finance blog in 2005 called Bargaineering with a similar mission. It started as a personal journal, which is what most blogs were back then, and grew into a site that many people relied on for financial news and information. I sold that blog in 2010 and missed it so much that I created WalletHacks.com as soon as I could!
We don’t sell any products of our own, we just provide free personal finance information to our readers and monetize through advertising and affiliate partnerships. It’s a model that has served us well over the years and we’re set to make high six figures in 2021 with a full-time staff of just one - me.
What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?
I grew up on Long Island and was always a decent student in school but was never near the top of the class. I enjoyed school and was a relatively quick learner, but it wasn’t something that captured my interest. As a kid, I would make stationary with the letterhead of Jim Wang Enterprises half as a joke. I liked the idea of “business,” even though I didn’t know what it meant.
After high school, I went to Carnegie Mellon to study computer science. While there, with a bit of free time, I started finding little side hustles to make some extra beer money. I would scour websites like Fatwallet (RIP!) for “hot deals” and flip them on eBay. I went as far as to write a small program that would scrape eBay’s site for completed sales pricing information, which helped me decide whether I would buy something to flip.
I always had a little bit of that entrepreneurship streak in me, even if I didn’t know the word because I liked the idea of finding little ways to make money. It was a game to me and one where the winner got to make a little extra money.
Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?
After I graduated from college in 2003, I started working as a software engineer in the defense industry for a large company. It was the first time I was introduced to a 401(k), planning for retirement, and other “adult” financial concepts I’d never thought about. It was also my first time working for a company with thousands of employees and I felt like a tiny cog in a machine that probably wouldn’t miss me much (they didn’t).
On the side, I started a personal finance blog to help me better understand things like a Roth IRA and a 401(k). In 2005, blogs were thought of as journals and not businesses so I didn’t think I was starting a business. If you were reading blogs then, you remember Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com being fired because of her blog. It wasn’t a year or so into the project that it started to make advertising income and I realized that it could be a business. It could be something that I worked on full-time.
About three years into starting the blog as a fun side hobby, I quit my full-time job. I was making more from the business than my day job and the leap made sense. It was still a scary decision because I saw my job as “stable” and my blog as “risky.” I told myself that the income from the blog was buying me a runway to pursue it full-time. If things went south, I could always go back to work.
I remember a conversation I had with my dad about how I was going to quit and wondering what he thought of it. The only thing he asked was “Are you sure?” I said “yes,” but in reality, I wasn’t sure. I don’t think anyone is ever sure but I thought it was a smart bet and one I was willing to take.
The blog continued to grow, perhaps even faster than it would’ve had I stayed working full-time, and I used my extra time to network with others. This meant going to conferences, joining masterminds, and hopping on phone calls just to chat with people in similar situations. The solopreneur life can be quite solitary so building a network of friends is important.
In 2010, I was able to sell the first blog for an amount that changed my life. I pursued a few other businesses in the interim but, once my non-compete expired, I had an itch to go back to blogging about money. That’s when I launched Best Wallet Hacks in 2015.
With WalletHacks.com, I followed the same game plan as before - writing about subjects I cared about and promoting them to people I thought would be interested. This meant working with other bloggers, becoming more active on social media (which didn’t exist in the early days of the first blog), and building a team to support the work.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
The last few years have been challenging, given the pressures of the pandemic, because uncertainty is always both an enemy and an opportunity for entrepreneurs. It closed some doors while opening others. Some companies paused their marketing spending, which meant lower advertising revenues, while others ramped them up. It was a volatile time that taught me a lot about business and being nimble.
One of the highlights of the pandemic was that a lot of readers emailed me to thank me for helping them understand different money concepts during an especially emotional and turbulent time. In more normal times, I don’t get emails like that because I think people are probably too busy and just want an answer to their questions. It highlighted the importance of what we do on a personal level, which can get lost when you think about how thousands of people visit the site each day.
Entrepreneurship is also about survival. If you do something long enough, the chances of success go up.
Today the business is doing well and remains profitable. We are positioned well to take advantage of new opportunities and feel like the pandemic years have strengthened our resilience.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Your network is quite possibly the most important asset you have. Whether it’s social friends who can help you through emotional challenges or business associates and acquaintances who can help you through business challenges, having someone you can talk to is critical. Sometimes it’s for advice because they’ve gone through what you’re going through right now. Sometimes it’s just someone you can share something, good or bad, with and celebrate or commiserate.
Try things that scare you because that’s how you get out of your comfort zone and if you still hate it after you do it, you don’t have to do it again. It sounds cookie-cutter but one of the best decisions I made early on was to spend a few thousand dollars, which was a huge sum back then, to go to a small conference of internet marketers. I thought that I was “just a blogger” and felt like I was jumping into a swimming pool of sharks - but it was nothing like that at all. It was one of the best events I’ve been to and I still keep in touch with several attendees to this day.
Finally, you can take risks professionally when you have your house in order. This means everything from your family life to your finances. With a stable base, you can take a few risks and swing for the fences. If you don’t have stability, those risks can potentially ruin you. You want to be making decisions from a position of strength so make sure your foundation is solid.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
The blog is built on Wordpress with a custom theme designed for speed and search engine optimization. It wasn’t always like that though. When I first started, I only used free software and tools. When the business started making money, I reinvested some of that into better premium tools to make my life easier and more efficient.
As for third-party tools, I use Drip for my email newsletter and Ahrefs for SEO research and analysis. For content analysis and optimization, I use MarketMuse.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham is a book that will help you understand what it means to think outside of the box. It is full of stories of the various opportunities he’s created through his partnerships and while it may not be directly applicable, it should open your mind up to a new way of thinking that I found very useful.
I’m a fan of Noah Kagan because all of his content is concise, packed with information, witty, and delivered quickly. You don’t need to listen to his Youtube videos or podcasts at 1.25 or 1.50x speed because he talks 1.50x faster than anyone else I know. It’s fascinating to get to listen to how he thinks because he shares a ton of insight about how he’s built up several massive companies.
I also really enjoy listening to Tim Ferriss’s and Joe Rogan’s podcasts because they have some of the most interesting people on them. For example, the latest podcast I’m listening to is the Adam Huberman podcast Huberman Lab because it’s all about the brain. I discovered it because he was a guest on both Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan’s podcasts - they’re great discovery engines.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting?
It’s important to start something and learn along the way. There is a tendency for people to try to learn as much as they can before starting out but there is no substitute for experience and struggle. Some businesses move so quickly that if you don’t get started today, the opportunity may pass you by.
Entrepreneurship is also about survival. If you do something long enough, the chances of success go up. This doesn't mean that you shouldn’t pivot when it makes sense but I want to emphasize that what many see as success can be attributed to survivorship.
And be prepared for it to be very difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it and there would be no value in it. To be truly great, you have to go through the hard parts and make it to the other side.
Where can we go to learn more?
The best place is the blog but you can also find me on Twitter. You can also email me at [email protected] - I’d love to hear from you!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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