50 Resources Every Financial Blogger Must Know

February 17, 2011

Are You Running a Personal Finance Blog?

Blogs about investment, personal finance and saving money are hot today.

If you are one of the bloggers who write about these topics you must know these 50 most important and most useful resources that will enhance your blog and help it being one of the leaders in the niche.

Enjoy!

Social Networks & Promotion

Social networks and social news sites are great way to promote your personal finance blog. But don’t go to general sites like Digg, there is little effect of posting there. Instead, check these niche social networks where you can interact with other people interested in personal finance, submit your articles etc. And don’t forget that great content is what matters – don’t expect success from mediocre articles.

1. Personal Finance Buzz is a great niche social news site where you can submit your posts and read other posts about finance and investment
2. Tip’d is a similar site, even more popular.
3. Money Hackers Network is a network of personal finance bloggers, joining can bring a big benefit
4. Value Investing News – another Digg-like site focused strongly on investing
5. FeedTheBull – contains socially submitted articles, news, questions and answers and videos
6. Personal Finance Blog Aggregator – submit your RSS feed and get targeted traffic and SEO benefit
7. Investorville – and here is another social news site with investment focus

Finance and Investment Forums

You can benefit from forums in many ways. You can participate and establish credibility. In some of them you can advertise your blog through a forum signature. All of them are excellent sources of ideas for new blog posts, content and information.

8. SavingAdvice is one of the busy personal finance forums with focus on frugality
9. Money Talk – although old and archaic this forum has a log of quality discussions and users
10. Motley Fool Discussion Board – maybe the busiest forum about money, finance and more
11. MOneySavingExperts.com Forum – if your accent is on saving you must participate here
12. MBN Forums – and every personal finance blogger is here, you should be too
13. Small Business Forum – if your blog is mostly about entrepreneurship, in this forum you will find a lot of ideas and potential readers.

Blogs & SItes For Inspiration

I love good personal finance blogs. They allow you meet bloggers, communicate with them and sometimes even send them a guest post. Besides that quality blogs are great source of ideas and inspiration for your own blog. I am listing here several of the best personal finance blogs and my personal favorites.

14. The Simple Dollar – Trent’s blog is maybe the most popular personal finance blog with human face and ran mostly by a single person. Great one!
15. Moolanomy – few years ago this was just a small blog and now is a big info-site. Great work!
16. Bargaineering is another very popular blog. But this shouldn’t scare you, as Jim is very nice and friendly guy
17. Free Money Finance – the most active personal finance blog I have seen – short and sweet posts!
18. Generation X Finance – very well structured and useful blog.
19. Clever Dude Personal Finance Blog is a blog of well, a clever dude.
20. Cash Money Life is managed by a couple of people now and is very active and useful too.
21. Get Rich Slowly is focused on slow and steady investing.
22. Punny Money is always funny. Be creative like him and your blog will be successful!
23. Money Crashers has 2-3 posts every day, worth reading.

Software Tools & Plugins

Some software tools can directly enhance your blog by adding extra features to your visitors. Others are useful for you as a financial blogger and can help you create interesting and useful content. I have picked mostly free tools and WordPress plugins as most bloggers use WordPress anyway.

24. Investment Calculator – this calculator shows the power of compounding interest. Excellet for investment-related blogs. Available as PHP script, WordPress plugin and Firefox extension, all free.
25. Debt Reduction Calculator – bloggers who write more about debts, savings and loans may prefer to show the effect of early debt payments. Free calculator available as standalone PHP script and WordPress plugin
26. Stock Market Ticker – this is a PHP and Javascript tool that displays stock market quotes
27. Financial Freedom Graph is a WordPress plugin allowing you to chart personal finance goals.
28. ChartGo is an easy to use online chart generator. Financial blogs often need to display various data and concepts as charts so this software can help you do it.
29. Mint is the most popular free personal finance software. While it’s not somethign you can put on your blog, you can use it to track your finances and investments and then write useful posts about that.

Statistical Data & APIs

Infographics and mashups are within the hottest things today. But to create them you need reliable statistical data (and some programming skills). Here are several good resources where you can obtain financial related stats (some are free, some not)

30. US Economic Statistics and Economic Indicators – this is a web service that you can use to provide all kind of informative articles and graphics. XiGnite offer a lot of other similar APIs as well.
31. FoXRate is a simple service which can be used to provide currency exchange rates for free.
32. WorldStat.org – a lot of worldwide statistical data!
33. Free Business and Financial Statistics – unfortunately there is no API but you can collect some useful data manually
34. Statistical data sets from Wikipedia on various topics, including money/finance
35. The World Bank Data Catalog contains a lot of data on economics, finance, development and demographics in various formats. Be creative and use it!
36. Economic Data freeli available – this is a collection of resources
37. Statistics Worldwide is a portal site that organizes a lot of data in many categories.

Financial Graphics and Templates

Graphics, images, vectors and finance-related blog theme can make your blog and content stand out from the crowd. Here are places where you can get them free or cheap:

38. Google Image Search. See how to find creative commons images with it.
39. Clipart Guide has some free clipart images on finance and money
40. Financial Concept Vectors – vector images can be scaled in any size which makes them great for any purpose. These are not free however.
41. Free Finance Vectors – here are several vector sets that are free
42. Finance Vector illustrations – and a lot more paid ones.
43. Business and Finance WordPress Themes. Running WordPress? Here are some free themes for your personal finance blog.
44. And some more
45. Finance & Business Stock Photos . And if the creative commons licensed images aren’t good enough for your blog, why don’t you buy some royalty free stock photos?
46. And more cheap ones with various formats and licenses.

Monetization for Financial Blogs

Most probably you are expecting to make some money with your blog. Personal finance blogs can use standard monetization strategies like Adsense and BuySellAds, but here are also a few specific ones for the industry.

47. ClickBank Finance. Clickbank has a lot of products in finance and investing niches which can be promoted. The payouts usually are very nice. Just be careful what you are recommending to your users, as a lot of the e-books on Clickbank are low quality ones. You will have to find the link yourself as Squidoo is not allowing a link to Clickbank(!)
48. Traders Media is advertising network specific for trading and financial ads
49. At Amazon you can find a lot of books, DVDs and other financial products to promote
50. Finance Affiliate Programs – probably the bes directory of affiliate programs for your topic

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Being able to Invest & Trade on your own is the most amazing road to financial independence & optional retirement. I was very fortunate to have amazing mentors and read many amazing authors, I hope you enjoy my articles & books suggestions which are made with the intent to share my experiences as simple as possible.

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By Jose L. Aguilar

Being able to Invest & Trade on your own is the most amazing road to financial independence & optional retirement. I was very fortunate to have amazing mentors and read many amazing authors, I hope you enjoy my articles & books suggestions which are made with the intent to share my experiences as simple as possible.

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