$aving to Invest

The Journey towards Financial Freedom by Saving Effectively and Investing Wisely
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts

Is my stimulus payment taxable?  

The answer is No. According to the IRS website - "You will not owe tax on your payment when you file your 2008 federal income tax return. But you should keep a copy of the IRS letter you receive later this year listing the amount of your payment." That's a relief. I am still waiting for my check, but over the last few weeks the stimulus check has been a very hot topic with some stuff being said way off the mark. For accurate and verified information, go to the source - The IRS Economic Stimulus Payments Information Center - where you can get all the information and frequently asked questions on the stimulus you could ever need.

With that, and to find what else is the buzz, here are some of the recent blog carnivals and festivals my articles were featured in over the week. Great job by all the hosts.

Money under thirty hosted the
Carnival of Personal Finance #152, which featued my article on starting to budget for $5 gas

Festival of Frugality #125 was hosted at the Quest For Four Pillars, and featured my article on frugal ways to keep your home safe. This was an editiors pick!

The 88th Festival of Stocks was hosted at the Stock Market Prognosticator, which included my article on Macau Play : Melco PBL (MPEL) - on the up and worth a gamble

The Money Hacks Carnival was hosted at Can I Get Rich on a Salary which had a greek gods theme and had my article on understanding Taxes and my Paycheck.

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Which Personal Finance Blogging Platform is best (plus 3 tips)  

Having run this personal finance blog for a few months now on Google's blogger platform one question I ask myself as I become more serious about blogging, as a possible full time pursuit, is what is the best and most effective blogging platform to be on for the long term. To answer this I looked at a cross section of the top personal finance and investing blogs (based on various sources) out there. The table below presents a summary of my findings which I think represents a good cross section of the data I looked at.

You can see that from the list that Wordpress is clearly the blogging platform of choice for the biggest and best personal finance bloggers out there. There were a few instances of blogger, but not as many as I would have thought. Most people, like me, start on Blogger thanks to already having a Gmail account (both applications are owned by Google). It is also relatively easier to get started and run advertising on Blogger. Though long term it is clear that as blogs grow and bloggers go for their own hosting options, Wordpress is the preferred choice. From what I have seen, Wordpress seems to have much better templates, "widget" options and even better performance when compared to blogger hosted blogs. I have some serious thinking to do as to if and when I want to port this blog over to Wordpress.

Glblguy at Gather Little by Little had the following comment on this topic when I asked him about it a while ago "Well, I've never been on blogger, but Wordpress provides pretty much unlimited options. You can customize however you want, and there are literally thousands of plugins to do just about anything you want. If you notice around the blogosphere most if not all the big blogs are on Wordpress with their hosting. I think that in and of itself tells you something. If you are planning to move, the sooner the better. It makes the transition easier and you won't loose any Page Rank you've earned.
Also, here are three quick tips from what I observed at the more established blogs while doing the research for this article. Hopefully these will help you along the way if you are starting your own finance related blog.

Tip #1 : Get your own domain name

What ever platform you choose or site design you go with, the main thing to do is get your own domain name. When you set up a free blog with Wordpress or Blogger, you get a domain name with "blogspot" or "wordpress" in it. This is because you are a sub domain under their main one. This can limit the growth (in terms of ranking) of your site and advertisers (assuming you want to build a commercial blog) are reluctant to use these sub domain type blogs. The sooner you get your own domain the better. I used the well established GoDaddy to get my own domain name (comes with a free custom email) for less than ten dollars. You can still use the wordpress or blogging platforms to host the blog (like I do here), its just that people will now see your custom domain name.


Tip #2 - Avoid temptation to have too many ads and flashing banners

Most personal finance blogs have some form of advertising (which equals passive income and is a fundamental rule of good investing). The thing that sets the pros apart from the rest of us is how they use and layout advertising on their blogs. This is a post in itself, but suffice to say their advertising is well placed, relatively low key and/or nicely blended into articles they write. Also, they tend to have a lot more direct banner advertising (125x125 sidebar ads were the most common) as opposed to relying only on Google Adsense and they almost always keep the focus on their content and not the ads.

Tip #3 -
Submit to related personal finance & investing blog carnivals

Just this week I submitted and was published at the following well known finance blog carnivals:

Carnival of Personal Finance, which was hosted this week by Lazy Man and Money and had my article about shopping effectively and save $29 in minutes.

Festival of Stocks which was hosted this week by Investing adventures and had my article on How to buy shares - Two simple steps

Carnival of Debt Reduction hosted by Broke Grad Student and included my post on the Rental Squeeze

Sound Money Matters hosted the Festival of Frugality which contained my article on the rise in food costs.

I noticed a significant jump in visitors (some who became subscribers) thanks to the referral from the sites where these carnivals were hosted. Getting published at these carnivals definitely increases the exposure of your blog and something you should look to do as you grow your blog.

Finally, on top all the above, the number one thing that the best personal finance and investing bloggers had was relevant and well written content. I guess this is the key for success for any blogging endeavour. Feel free to share your comments and thoughts on the above.

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Appearances this week  

I started this blog in Decemeber as I dipped my toe into the personal finance blog pond. However over the last month or so I have started committing more time and effot to the blog and have increased the frequency of posts to almost 1 a day. Over this time I have also contributed some of my articles to related blog carnivals/festivals and it was nice to see some of them referenced at host sites during the week. What's more I discovered a number of great articles (and blogs) along the way. Here are the highlights:


149th Carnival of Personal Finance - Chasing Dreams Edition

My post on I am NOT going to cut back on my cup of coffee was mentioned at arguably the most popular personal finance carnival hosted at The Happy Rock. Frank (aka the Rock) runs a great blog over (on my blogroll!) and here are some other notable articles from the carnival:

> Frugal Babe and her article The Choices We Make - Very interesting and some choices I would find very hard to make. But kudos for sticking with her convictions.

> MomAdvice presents This American’s Dream -A motivational post for those trying to get out of financial harship.

> The Digerati Life writes Get Hired, Get a Raise and Get Paid More By Improving Your Appearance - an unofficial fact to get ahead in the corporate world.

> Think Your Way To Wealth writes about Two of the Most Important Work Habits for Increasing Your Income. Great post on why you should take the initiative in work and life

>Thicken My Wallet examines the relative pro's and cons of Share Buyback or Dividend Increase.

> Mrs. Micah presents a post on Spousal IRAs Make Sense for Stay at Home Moms (SAHMS). A concept you should consider for one-income familes.

> FiveCentNickel presents Ten [useful] Things to Do With Your Tax Refund

> Trees Full of Money presents a comprehensive article on The Complete Guide To Protecting Your Identity and Credit

> MoneyNing talks about Being in Las Vegas and not Gamble. I could not do this.

> Can I Get Rich On A Salary presents The 9 Or So Paths To Getting Rich—And My Purported Analysis Of Them(Part 2 of 2). You should read both parts of this interesting analysis.

Through this carnival I was also noticed by US news and my article was linked to in a Kimberly Palmer's Alpha Consumer blog.


Festival of Stocks #85—Man on the Moon

This festival hosted at CAN I GET RICH ON A SALARY (yes, if you look at authors net worth!), had a novel story line around the moon landing, which was fun to read and had some great articles. Gblogger was kind enough to include mine on Reacting to Market Volatility up there. Other ones I enjoyed there were:

- FIRE Finance present a good summary of Investment Risks at a Glance

- Caution - Analyst Predicting Bull! by Smart Investing & Money Management, is a good article about not getting caught up in the hype

- The Dividend Guy Blog write on Dividend Stock Wednesday: Yum Brands Inc. (YUM:NYSE). I like his perspective and philosophy.

- Where to Find Good Stocks from Financialzip.com, provides some good resources to find the next winning investment.

Thanks to the carnivals, I have had a lot of new readers and subscribers to this site. I hope to be part of future carnivals, both as a submitter and as a host one day. If you are new to the blog pond, I definitely recommend you check out blog carnivals/festivals in your niche.

Have a good weekend!

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Beware Paid Links and use the "no follow" attribute  

I have started receiving the following type of emails recently, which offer to pay me between $10 and $50 to embed a link to specified external websites.

Hi Andy,

I was looking at your page on credit scores -
10 things to know about your credit - , and I'm interested in paying you $30 to place a text ad on with the possibility of a multi-ad deal for more money upon further review of your website and your interest. The ad will link to a site offering credit repair services.

I can pay you immediately via paypal or check once the ad has been posted. Please let me know if you are interested and I will send you the ad. Thanks!! :)

Best,
Judy

Generally the emails are for paid links to credit repair, loans or debt management type websites. When I first started blogging (on my other site), I used to jump at these opportunities for the easy money and they actually paid on time. However, I soon learnt the hard way what the real cost of these paid links were – a drop in your page rank and potentially in Google referrals to your site. This means less visitors and in the long term less revenue from my other sources. This far outweighed the few dollars I could get from the paid links.

I did some research on this topic and found that Google frowns on these “embedded” paid links, especially to blacklisted sites that use this method to inflate their page ranks. Page rank is mostly based on the number of unique links you have coming into your site. You can see more background and technical details for this in Wikipedia (link below). To keep Google happy (which generates the majority of most websites organic traffic) they suggest adding the “no follow” attribute to all outbound paid/ad links. All the search engines (Yahoo, MSN) also encourage use of this attribute. Here's how you easily implement this attribute in a standard HTML link : (I have changed the <> to [] brackets to prevent the example link becoming a real link when I publish the post)

[a href = "dummy_url.com" rel = "nofollow"] Dummy text [/a]

So, when I responded to these ad solicitation emails with the comment that I would be willing to put the text link into a relevant post, but with the “no follow” attribute – they were suddenly were no longer interested. No surprise there. Obviously they were not looking to leverage my site for real advertising, just looking to build their page rank. Also as this blog is still relatively new, I don’t expect to be in a position to attract “real” advertisers yet. On the flip side, I have used this situation to add to my blog goals (I do have them – but that is the topic of another post) an item that I will get an advertiser on my site, by year end, who wants to advertise due to the number of visitors I get and not just to build their page rank. Direct advertising is the most lucrative source of revenue, but you need to go about getting it in the right way.

Note : You don't need to use the "no-follow" attribute for links in valid comments, which if made by another blogger includes a link to their site. The blogging community should in fact encourage use of the "follow" attribute of links so that everyone benefits.

See more about this topic in Wikipedia

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Carnivals and Festivals  

The Money Hacks Carnival #7 was hosted at Mommy Gets Paid, which featured my article on Easy Ways to Save Money. Check out the other great articles there.


Carnival of Personal Finance #147 is up at MoneyNing. Many great articles are presented there and thanks to David for including my article on "Excessive Taxes and Fees on my Cable/Phone Bill". As this is a relatively new blog it is great to get this exposure and I look forward to participating in future carnivals.

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