I hope everyone had a blessed time giving thanks for any family you may have left. For us older folks, we wonder who will be missing the next year. Count your blessings while you still have them. Say what you've been meaning to, you may never get a chance again.

Thanksgiving is done, the leftovers are probably gone, and the internet has shouted itself hoarse about Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So, rather than talking about what our audiences are spending, I want to talk about how we are earning. Most personal finance creators do not have “a business” in the singular. We have a stack. A slightly wobbly pile of income streams that might include: - 1 to 1 services or coaching - Digital products and courses - Memberships or communities - Ads and brand deals - Platform revenue share (YouTube, TikTok, podcasts) - Affiliate deals Some parts of that stack are under our control. Some belong to the algorithm gods. Some are there because they made sense two years ago and we have never quite had the heart to kill them. I have my own version of this. Certain pieces are overweight, others I have been “meaning to build out properly” for far too long. December is my annual excuse to stare at it and ask a very simple question: If I could redesign this from scratch for 2026, what would I actually want it to look like? I would love to turn that into a group exercise. ***YOUR 2026 REVENUE STACK CHECKUP** Copy paste this into the comments and fill it in: - Niche and main platforms: - Current revenue stack: - One stream you want to grow in 2026 and why: - One stream you would happily shrink or kill and why: - One action you will take in December to move toward that 2026 stack: You do not need to share exact numbers if that feels uncomfortable. Percentages or rough ranges are completely fine. The point is to see: - Where you are overweight on fragile, platform dependent income - Where you are underweight on owned, compounding assets like products, email and memberships If you are earlier in your journey and only have one stream right now, that is perfect. Just write: - What you have today - What the “dream stack” looks like 12 to 18 months from now I will go first in the comments. What do you want your revenue stack to look like by the end of 2026, if it is doing its job properly for you and your audience?

Now, just because I call it "Book of the week" doesn't mean I'll recommend one every week. I'd love to get through a book a week, but sadly, it hasn't happened yet. And even if I did, they wouldn't all be finance and economics. I've been quiet this week as I got away for a few days with my wife to spectacular Istanbul. On the flight, I added this book to my Kindle on a newspaper recommendation (Yes! I still read those). Here's the review from Martin Wolf in the Financial Times: Link to article, so I'm not in breach of T&Cs https://on.ft.com/4iA5yhB "Fixed: Why Personal Finance Is Broken and How to Make It Work for Everyone by John Y Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai (Princeton) "This book would be the ideal present for anybody who needs lessons in finance. The authors, professors at Harvard and Imperial College respectively, are informed critics of a system that fools its users. “The problems of today’s financial system can be summarized as complexity and cost,” they explain. These two defects are related since “complexity increases costs to consumers”. A better financial system would, they argue, adhere to four principles: simple, cheap, safe and easy. With modern information technology, they add, these requirements could be met relatively easily. They recommend, in particular, creation of a “starter kit” for beginners." Has anyone read this? When I've finished it, I'll come back with a review. Also on the flight, I finished Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It" Very entertaining and informative. Now, I'm far from agreeing with him on everything, but the main thrust of the book hits the nail on the head. Our governments (right, left, US, Europe, WTO) have dropped the ball on antitrust and straightforward rules that protect consumers like interoperability. Moreover, we've written into law protections for tech companies that seriously prejudice consumers and leave them open to exploitative pricing.

I've been kicking the tires of various marketing automation programs. A lot of them do similar stuff. I think of Kajabi as a course platform with strong marketing capabilities. I think of Kit as an email platform. I think of HubSpot as a landing page platform. I think of Clickfunnels as a sales funnel builder. I think of HighLevel as the whole marketing automation shebang, but divorced from any product. I'm already paying for Kajabi and Kit, but recently I'm finding a need for 1. More of a CRM, 2. A bookings calendar like Calendly, 3. An SMS service, 4. Better funnels with upsells and downsells. I ran a little comparison in ChatGPT. I was surprised to discover that HighLevel also offers a course platform very similar to Kajabi. Clickfunnels also has a course builder, but I haven't reviewed its capabilities. I've just renewed my annual plan with Kajabi, so I won't be making the jump soon. But for not much more $$, I get a ton of useful services. Which of these do you use most? How do you use them? What do you like and what are you lacking?

A lot of the focus at Chiang Mai SEO was on what gets called AI SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or LLM SEO. I'll try to communicate a few ideas without getting too much into the weeds. If you're trying to get traffic for your blogs or articles on your websites, maybe you need to change you're approach. Google is answering most long-tail queries with AI Overviews. Therefore, the only way to get any volume of visits in search engines is to be cited as a source. To get visits from ChatGPT or Perplexity, you need to be cited as a source. To be cited as a source, you need to be considered an authority. To be considered an authority: Start with the basics of SEO. You need to make sure your content is indexed: 1. Perform a site search in Google. Type in the search box: "site:yourdomain.com" . Do you get a list of all the pages on your website? 2. Find out if you're indexed on Common Crawl - this the index other LLMs are using other than Google's Gemini. Go to https://index.commoncrawl.org/ . Where it says "URL Pattern", type "yourdomain.com/*". That asterisk will pull in all pages. You can paste the output into ChatGPT and ask for a list of URLs. If you're not in Common Crawl, you are not in the LLMs! Be a *topical* authority 1. In your niche, are you covering the subject matter fully? (Page per keyword) 2. In your pages, are you responding and covering the keyword idea completely? Technical break: there was a lot of talk last week about "Query Fan-Out". When an LLM processes a page, it doesn’t only ask one question, but rather generates a network of related sub-queries based on the main topic. In one study found that most pages will only answer about 30% of those queries. That's an opportunity for content creators. Links still matter, but so do mentions 1. Google still uses its link graph to evaluate pages. 2. More (better) links will 1) get your pages ranking higher in Google, and 2) increase how often and how deeply your content is indexed. LLMs tend not to go very deep. 3. ChatGPT makes NO evaluation of links, but uses mentions to assess authority. 4. Get links and mentions on pages that are relevant to your topic.