Personal Finance Advice

I took notice that over the last couple of months a lot of personal finance writers have had the blogoversaries. As I sometimes do, after reading about one of these (I can’t remember exactly which one which is a shame because I would really like to thank that person) I went in and did a [...]

I’ve had several people ask me how Nate and I have built our blog community. For those who are not familiar, we also run the SavingAdvice.com website where we have an area where we have a personal finance blog community we call Real People, Real Finances. We recently passed the 100 blog mark for those [...]

I finally purchased a video camera which I hope to use quite a bit in the months to come. I went against my normal shopping habits on this one and I hope that will ultimately be for the better in the long run. Usually when I shop for something, I do a lot of research, [...]

This is another post that only has a minor connection to actual personal finance, but might explain why there may be a bit less posting than normal this week. This is going to be one of the busiest and most exciting weeks this summer for me.
First and foremost, this Friday Nate and I will [...]

I mentioned that we had picked up a few new blogs that we added to our growing family last week. We found a writer for one of them. I’d like to extend a big welcome to Khyron who will be writing the Alpha Guy from now on:
…As for my background, I studied electrical engineering in [...]

A quick step away from personal finance…
I’m not sure whether I should be happy or disappointed that one of the most popular posts on this site has little to do with personal finances. The fact is that my post about my wife’s entrepreneurial spirit and how it has made living in our house a cute [...]

I mentioned earlier that Yahoo Publisher Network ads were performing so poorly on our grocery coupon guide site that it only took a week to realize we needed to switch back to Google Adsense. That was definitely a smart move because earnings immediately shot up.
The other site we decided to experiment with, frugal gardening, ended [...]

One of the decisions that Nate and I have decided to take is to invest in domain names. We believe these are great investments because they cost little (under $6 per year) and have the potential to earn a lot both in advertising income and sale value. The key, as with all investments, is picking [...]

We had a good July (knock on wood) and have seen some improvements on performance on a few of the satellite sites that hadn’t been performing as well as we had hoped in the past. In fact, we have reached the stage where the decision has been made that come next January, Nate will also [...]

I wrote a bit yesterday about the day at the Blogher conference. One of the little tidbits I collected from the conference was a tool that you have if people are stealing your content. This is always a problem I have had where I find my articles on the Internet without any acknowledgement that I [...]

5:45 The workshops are over and I was finally able to meet another pfblogger out here (believe me, there are not very many at this conference) who was Nina from Queer Cents / Sitting Pretty who was actually leading one of the discussions (transforming your life with blogging). It was nice to actually meet one [...]

One of the most difficult and frustrating aspects of beginning a blog is finding an audience. Unless you actively seek others to trade links with, comment on ones that are popular and put a lot of effort into promoting what you’re writing, you just aren’t going to get a lot of readers and it’s always [...]

I mentioned a few days ago that we were trying out Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) on a couple of our satellite sites to see how they compared to Google’s Adsense. While we had planned to do the experiment for the entire month, it took less than a week for us to come to some conclusions. [...]

Nate and I have decided to experiment a bit with Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) this month on two of our satellite sites and see how they compare to the results we’ve been getting with Google AdSense. While Google has been kind to us on most of the sites, we have been wanting to compare [...]

I missed going through my goals last month as I was busy with the move, so I definitely want to get through them this month - especially since we’ve reached the half year mark. We’ve made progress in a lot of areas, but still need work in others:
Increase unique visitors to the main site to [...]

It was a pretty quick start to the week and had a few surprises for me. The blog went down for about an hour because two of my posts made it to the front page of Digg.com (Creative Job - Commute Helper and 50% Off Cable TV Bill which sent an avalanche of visitors to [...]

Now I’m not usually into the celebrity gossip scene, but I thought it was interesting that one of the first things that Angela Jolie and Brad Pitt did upon deciding a name for their new child was to go out and register a bunch of name domain names including shilohjolie, shilohjoliepitt, shilohpitt, shilohnouvelpitt, shilohnouveljolie, and [...]

Concept: Use the Internet to find the cheapest gas stations by having a loyal base of users enter in the prices that they see. By knowing where the lowest price gas is available, you can save money. You can use services such as Gas Buddy or MSN Auto Gas Prices
Will You Save Money?: Yes**
Comments: [...]

I was recently reading an article about domain names and the prices that some of them are fetching and it occurred to me that this is an area where we should start investing. That’s not to say that I believe that I will pick five figure domain names to sell, but it seems to me [...]

Overall it was a good month for Nate and I. The satellite sites had both some quite positive numbers as well as some numbers that were a bit disappointing. It was our first full month with site managers and it worked out fairly well although all the sites lost money compared to March when the [...]