Have you already decided or thinking about starting a financial blog of your own? Or are you just playing with the idea of doing so? Amazing! Because it is going to be a lot of hard work and fun.
While financial blogs are growing popularity, but you have to learn some basics to make your upcoming financial blog a success both in the credibility of content and popularity. Therefore, what you read here will give you a sound foundation or a platform to take off in the world of financial blogging.
Financial Blog –Unique Challenges
Like any other niche, blogging comes with its own set of challenges, and the early you familiarize yourself with these challenges, the better. The way we handle our money and budgets has its short term and long term effects on our lives. For some, it can also be an emotionally charged area, especially in a social setup where discussing topics such as your salaries is considers a bad-mannered taboo.
Many cultures around the work also place major emphasis on what you for work, where you are employed, and your salaries are the measuring gauge of your self-worth. Therefore, I will have to keep in mind while writing about budgeting, bankruptcy, credit scores, debts, and other personal financing topics, because some people find it shameful or embarrassing to talk about such issues with anyone.
Empathy and understanding people’s perspectives coming from various socio-economic backgrounds will help you write on such sensitive issues relevant in a respectful way. For example, if you receive a lot of requests from the readers to write blog posts related to budgeting. They will mostly be working-class people, college students, or small business start-ups.
The suggestions, opinions you represent along with the resources you use for writing your blog posts will vary drastically depending on your targeted audience or readers, where they come from, and what social-economic and cultural background they belong to.
A small business reader might want you to write a straight forward, quick, and blunt blog post, whereas a college student will require an introduction to various concepts of personal financing that they may be taking for granted.
On a more logistical level, an excellent financial blog such as Neuer capital finance blog requires taking technical and confusing concepts and translating them into digestible content that can be easily absorbed and understood by laymen reader.
If you are not sure about what my targeted audience or readers already know about finances, you can head to other financial blogs. These blogs will help you find out who the leaders are and see what topics are trending to give you an idea of what audience from different market segments and demographics are looking for.
Social media can also be a reliable source to find out what type of financial information is searched most by the people. Some of the details that you may note during this process include:
- The most common financial concepts that people want o to ask about.
- The colloquial phrases that are used frequently by the financial blogs’ audiences
- You can also learn what tone of voice is used for formal and casual financial blogging pieces
- Which websites are considered the most reliable for resources and researches by the readers and the financial bloggers?
- You can also get to know your targeted audience as to which income range, job niche, demographic settings they belong to. You also get to find out if this demographic information is available freely or volunteered by a source.
- You will find out the biggest and most common financial challenges the audience face and what are the pain-points your readers usually run into.
Balancing Audience and Leadership Thoughts
Various content marketing techniques, including financial blogging, mainly focus on positioning a brand or an individual as a thought expert in their respective financial niche. The trick is to find a balance between what an industry knows to what the audience is looking for. You do not want to bombard the new reader in the financial sector get scared with all the technical jargon and heavy concepts.
You need to find a sweet spot that works for both readers and the financial experts’ views. It is your job to make the content relatable for the audience. Analogies are the most effective way to help someone grasp the difficult financial concepts in small chunks. It may sound impossible to you right now; you may think, “How can someone understand a concept with a basic definition?” – But trust us, it really does work.
You can represent complicated topics by showing more relatable, friendly graphic charts depicting funny characters. Everyone loves some entertainment while they learn. Such as show population growth depicted by cats because the internet is obsessed with anything that is cats – or you can demonstrate debt management plans with a scenario of selling products at a departmental store. Etc. It all depends on how creative you can get.
You will not be able to pull this one off unless you are a part of a targeted audience yourself. Another way is that you conduct extensive research about the topics with the method that we mentioned earlier in this blog. One of our most favorite and recommended approaches is to cover a lot of foundation or 101 levels of financial topics. You can create a glossary or Wiki that readers can easily link via their articles.
Know Your Recommended Reading List for Financial Blog Writing
You will have to read a lot in order to produce financial blogs that are rich in quality and content. And some of the permanent financial resourceful links on your RSS feed reader may include the following.
Get Rich Slowly
This is a financial blog that covers a variety of finance-related topics from a broad spectrum of financial domains. These topics are perfectly relevant for a reader or someone who is just starting in the financial niche and maybe a complete novice in this area. Get Rich Slowly has quality content from over a decade of financial blogs, features, and they are all great pieces of financial write-ups.
The Balance
This is my most favorite financial blog hub, as this one is home to more advanced topics. This blog covers a lot of ground when it comes to personal finance niche and other topics related to small businesses. Therefore, if you want to conduct research on your articles, Balance is the perfect place to begin.
AMEX Open
The Open Forum by American Express is a general community and resource for small businesses. However, because it is operated by a credit card issuing organization, it is focused on more specialized topics that are good for small companies and start-ups. You can use it for business and start-up related financial writings.
SBA – Small Business Administration
This personal financial blog site covers almost every and any topic that you can think of in the world of finance. Whether it is the policies or new tax rules, you can stay updated on all the latest developments happening in the financial landscape globally.
Fortune
Fortune is useful if you are looking for a finance-related source to keep up financial behavior and moves within medium-sized enterprises and businesses. You must head over to Fortune, as it is a long-running financial publication that is available for general purposes and is an excellent research source.
The Economist
This financial publication is not just about the financial industry; it also focuses on other sectors. Therefore it serves as an impeccable source for you to read about trends and events that may end up influencing business finances directly or indirectly.
Investopedia
To be honest, none of us have that much amount of time and amount of space our brains to remember each and every finance acronym and terms. Therefore, when your memory fails you, you know you can turn to the very best source, we know, as Investopedia. It will help you recall the exact word that was stuck on the tip of your tongue.
If you are someone with even the slightest bit of interest in the finance sector, we would highly recommend that you start writing a financial blog straight away. It is a rewarding and satisfying way of presenting difficult financial concepts to the global audience. It will also spark their interest in learning about the latest news, updates, and technological advances in the financial sector.
Some of the personal-finance niche areas you can start covering as you begin to write a finance blog are as follows:
- Debt
- Budgeting
- Lifestyle/family
- Retirement
- Early retirement
- General finance
- Investing
- Minimalism/frugality
- Real estate
- Making money etc.
Once you have chosen your niche, you must then select your blog type. Its now time for a naming ceremony, therefore you must find a good hosting domain and name your financial blog post. Always try and come up with a name that defines your niche and financial blog’s purpose – or you can try to be close. Pick up a good hosting package and see if you would like to also get a dedicated email address from your domain hosting provider so that you can communicate officially with your readers, audience, and business partners.