Category: Blog

Words and stuff.

Is Your Personal Finance Blog Setup for Failure Instead of Success?

A friend of mine, Gary Foreman from The Dollar Stretcher, pointed out a set of facts to me recently that made it painfully clear why new personal finance blogs are finding it difficult to find their audience. And also why it looks like it will get increasingly tough to do so if blogs don’t work together. Collaboration is the logical and obvious answer. But keep reading and see if you agree.

According to the Statistic Brain Research Institute the number of searches conducted on Google is dropping after a long upward climb.

The numbers say there were about 66,430,000,000 fewer Google searches in 2014 than 2013. Yet the total number of page indexed by Google in the same time increased by 9,000,000,000. This is a function of more sites adding more pages and just new sites coming online.

Online competition with the addition of pages and sites is becoming tougher and small sites will continue to get lost in the deeper ocean of content.

When I first got online in 1994 it was easy to get noticed. I was even named the Microsoft site of the month back then. Today the new blogger would find that accolade tough to accomplish. Life is a much harder for new sites and that limits the opportunities for success.

Search traffic statistics show an ever more alarming decline and one reason may be people are getting more results from apps, Siri, or other options other than typing a question into a Google search box.

With such tough core changes between sites, searches, and visitors it leaves you wondering how trying to compete using traditional methods like SEO alone is going to be a good strategy. You don’t have to be a personal finance genius to see those numbers are not going to add up favorably.

My idea is the more that personal finance bloggers work together to share great content with readers from the Personal Finance Syndication Network then the more we can keep readers in our friendly arms than letting them go elsewhere.

By working together we can all do better. Alternatively, you can say I’m full of crap and you can try to radically alter the way the internet is fundamentally changing. Good luck with that approach.

To learn how the Personal Finance Syndication Network works and to participate, click here.

Steve

So Then This Happened

What started out as an idea, led to this.

The Personal Finance Syndication Network seemed to me to be a logical way personal finance bloggers could work cooperatively to share content and help each other out.

The idea behind the Personal Finance Syndication Network is cooperative simplicity. The process to automagically or manually include the content you select in your site is simple. And the ability to submit your articles is stupid easy as well.

And best of all, it’s simply free.

We’ve all had those dry days where we don’t feel like writing yet another blog post. Yet someone else out there has written the most brilliant article that our readers would love to read. So why not share it?

Sharing a relevant article with your readers helps your site because it gives your loyal readers fresh content they are interested in. It also helps the author or site who put the article up for distribution by getting in front of other like minded readers.

Face it, none of us active bloggers are ever going to write that one post that will change the world. So let’s respect the loyal readers and followers of our sites and given them content you know they want to read to keep them coming back to your site on a regular basis.