TheFinanceBuff.com Review

Raghu — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:20:33 +0000

Last time I reviewed the site Get Rich Slowly and in today’s edition I will discuss The Finance Buff. One of content rich Personal Finance Blog. I have been following TFB for over an year now.

The Finance Buff – Design

As soon as I go to the blog, I noticed few things that can be added to improve the user experience.

The Finance Buff - Screenshot

Things that needs improvement are

Missing Header – Header provides a navigation mechanism. By default everyone is used to look at header navigation while trying to find contents. Since there is no Header Navigation, only way to Home Page is via the Logo.

Navigation Structure - Websites in general requires a structured navigation. It can dramatically improve the Average time spent on the website. In TFB I saw only 3 Navigation options ( Categories, Related Posts, Previous and Next article above each post). Since Categories is located below the fold and if visitors don’t find that, they will go away from the site.

Writing Format – In the screen shot above shows a lengthy article. Most of the articles at TFB are detailed and very informative. But, it has to be made more readable. For example if you look at CNN, most of the paragraph will not be over 4 lines in length.

Google Adsense – Adsense in Sidebar is good placement, but to improve the revenue, more ads can be placed in the blog. Testing various ad placements can drastically improve the revenue from Ads.

Subscribers – Right now TBF has about 1135 subscribers. In blogging world, MORE Subscribers = MORE Money. Visitors are not going to subscribe to the RSS fee by default. They have tp be explicitly said many times in the blog to subscribe to the RSS Feed. One other way is to provide free content like ebook and ask them to sign up for News Letter. But, Email Marketing requires at least $15 per month to start with.

Google Custom Search – Search bar can be moved to top right corner ( above About). Visitors eye move towards that corner find the search option. Custom search results are displayed as separate page. It might be good idea to display the search results within blog page.

Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing for Finance related products pay out lot of commission. I don’t see many affiliate product links.

Header – Right side of Logo has lot of empty space. You have added Twitter and Fee Subscribe there. Instead, try placing 468×60 Banner ad in that space. Move Twitter and Fee icons to sidebar.

Hope this review is helpful to you. If anyone reading this review, requrie a free review, just leave a comment to this article.

Review – GetRichSlowly.org

Raghu — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:34:51 +0000

Starting new series of posts to keep adding more contents to this blog. There are so many Personal Finance Blogs out there, but there is not many sites that review all those Personal Finance blogs. So, this new idea came up and I decided to give it a try.

Get Rich Slowly – Review

Get Rich Slowly is a popular Personal Finance blog and recently it got new interface/design. So, I decided to start my review series with Get Rich Slowly by J.D

Negatives

Search Form text size can be increased to fit the remaining space
Email Text Input Area can be increased, since there is still space left in the rectangular box
Navigation to next and previous posts looks lengthy, it can be removed or moved to below the post
With over 80,000 subscribers, I’m not sure Private ads are sold in this site. There are lots of opportunity to sell Private Ads when so many people are following this blog.
Just above 468×60 ads below the post, has a graphic, which highlights the following ad. That might lower the CTR of that Ad
Navigation on sidebar ( Popular Posts, Archives, ..) can use some bullets ( Circle, Square), it will look much better than plain layout
Usually all the posts are lengthy, but font size and line height make it difficult to read the article in the blog post. Sample lengthy blog posts with good layout that makes reading the blog article easy to read include Yaro’s Blog. Just by increasing the line-height to 13o% will make blogs post much easier to read
Simple ( or bland) Blog design
No Follow links is not enabled for some outgoing links and to pages like Privacy posts, ..

Positives

Number of subscribers
Quality of the articles and impact to readers
Ability to generate lots of comments on each blog posts
Forum to share ideas
Timely articles ( example, if Mortgage Rates are low, article will be posted related to Refinance)