Believe it or not, today’s post is my 100th on this blog! Considering I just started the blog in April 2017, that’s pretty crazy. It’s been a whirlwind. I wanted to take a moment to talk about it.
For my readers who aren’t bloggers and don’t care about that part, the first half of the post is for you. It’s a summary of what I’ve learned about myself, blogging, and personal finance over the last few months. For the bloggers and those who do want to hear about the business side of things, I’ve written the obligatory blog report at the end!
I apologize in advance if you think this post is too long, but understand I’m summarizing literally hundreds of hours of experiences into one blog post. Since I don’t intend to turn into a blogger who blogs about blogging, this is my opportunity to get everything out at once. It’s all here: what I’ve learned about blogging, stats, goals, and the future of this blog. Buckle in.
Here’s (a partial list of) what I’ve learned
About blogging
Blogging is hard work. At least, the kind of blogging I do is hard work. One of the purposes of this blog is to turn complicated concepts into easy to understand and implement realities. That’s why I dig deep into the tax code and distill 30 page documents into 1200 word posts. The goal is to make it easy for all of you. But boy oh boy, doing that is hard! Y’all should see my computer tabs sometime. It’s like a tribute to the IRS.
On top of actually writing the posts, there’s promoting the posts, and learning how to work the software, and creating images, and social media and yada yada yada. No wonder so many bloggers aim to make this a full time gig!
Blogging is also addictive. At least, it is for me. I already have several other blog ideas that I’d be interested in starting, which is really stupid for reasons that will become apparent later in this post.
About being a blog reader
Before I became a blogger, I had never commented on a single blog. Not one, despite having been a blog fan for many years. I’ve given a lot of thought as to why, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
Military people don’t comment on blogs. I have received very few comments from military members. It’s picked up somewhat this month, but it’s still a tiny, tiny fraction of the military visitors. But then they will go and send me a 500 word, four-part message about how much they appreciate a post or the blog overall.
It’s funny. I met up with a group of bloggers known as the DC Money Nerds in early September, and the topic of comments came up. I mentioned to another blogger that I rarely get comments from military members and why I thought that was so. Literally two days later, a reader emailed me and started with “I know you don’t get a lot of comments but…”
I get it, military brothers and sisters. We tend to be private, security minded people. For goodness’ sake, we have to take really long, boring training every year to show us how to be safe on the internet.
But on behalf of my blogger friends I’m going to say: please, comment on blogs you like. It’s helpful to the bloggers to know how you feel about their posts, even if it isn’t all glowy praise. Engage. Let them know what you didn’t like and what you want to see more of. If you are concerned with security and privacy issues, trust me – you are far more anonymous on a blog than you are on Facebook. There are rules bloggers have to follow regarding how they use your information. Anybody on Facebook can just share or screencapture your posts and share it willy nilly.
If you are worried about being subscribed to a mailing list, just pay attention when you comment. Some comment areas will have a button that says something like “Subscribe me to this blog.” If you see that and you don’t want to be subscribed to the blog, just make sure the box isn’t checked. Easy peasy.
About personal finance
I’ve learned more about personal finance in the last six months than in the previous 15 years.
If you’d told me that would happen six months ago, I would have laughed in your face. After all, I’ve been reading finance books since the summer after my freshman year of college. I’ve been reading finance blogs since I knew what a blog was. I’m part of forums. I go to seminars about changing the tax code that affects our retirement accounts for fun. I am a giant personal finance nerd.
But sure enough, entering this world has increased my knowledge by leaps and bounds. Partly that’s because of the research I do for my own posts. And some of it is because of the extensive reading I do every week to find good posts from other bloggers for my Summary Sunday series. But part of it is just because I may be a wee bit obsessed with optimizing my own finances, and the more I learn the more I want to learn.
About the PF community
This community is so supportive! Seriously! Especially the personal finance part of Twitter. Regular Twitter is dark and full of angry people. PF Twitter is full of people encouraging each other and talking about avocado toast.
I’ve also been able to meet a few PF bloggers in person, and we have a great time when we get together. Nobody should have this much fun meeting a bunch of strangers to talk about money. It’s stupid, but it works.
You guys are awesome!
About myself
I try really, really, really hard to distill information into easily digestible bits. That may not seem true when you are reading a 1500 word post on what a mutual fund is, but understand those 1500 words are culled from usually 6-15 different articles and books. And goodness, if I’m writing about tax code I probably spent 2-6 hours looking into the bowels of the IRS website to figure out the true answer.
This is pretty true to who I am. I’m not great at answering complex questions in one sentence, because I think the number of times you can responsibly do that are rare. Thirty second elevator pitches are not my forte. Three minute discussions to explain something concisely is my sweet spot. (you should hear me talk about Syria)
And that’s what I’m trying to do on the blog. If you want me to answer whether you should buy long term care insurance and you are looking for a yes or no answer in ten seconds, you are probably going to be disappointed with this blog. But if you want to understand in 10 minutes or less what long term care insurance is, what you need to consider when buying it, and who it benefits the most, I’m here for you.
The future of the blog
Now for the hard part. I’m going to have to pull back – just slightly – from my posting schedule.
Apparently, most bloggers start out with one, maybe two posts per week. Some aren’t even that regular. I knew I wanted a set schedule from the beginning to make it easy for my readers to know when I’d be posting, but I didn’t realize how much work goes into a blog.
I’ve been posting four posts per week since the beginning. That’s why I was able to reach 100 posts so quickly. But I need to skinny that down a bit.
It’s not a lack of post ideas. A few readers have contacted me with ideas for posts and they always start out with “I have an idea for you in case you are running out of things to write about!” I promise, I have plenty of post ideas. In fact, if I don’t come up with one more idea ever again, I already have a schedule that would get me through June 2018 at my current publishing schedule. And that’s just based on how many ideas I have for the category I have the least amount of ideas in (Military Monday). If you counted up all of the ideas and divided by four, I’m good for a full year. Without thinking of a single new idea.
So, nope, I’m definitely not running out of ideas. What I am short of is time. I still have a full time job, remember, and amongst my unit my particular office probably works the longest hours. Plus, I like having free time. I haven’t had a lot of free time lately.
So you are going to see some changes to the schedule. I haven’t decided what it will look like quite yet. I might only do one or two Summary Sundays each month. Or maybe I’ll alternate doing a Military Monday post one week, and a Finance Friday post the next week. I don’t know yet, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
In exchange, I’m hoping to use the extra time to make the posts better. I hate publishing a post and finding out 12 hours later that I forgot to include something important. Plus….I’m going to give myself a little more free time!
BTW, keep the ideas coming. Every single one of those post ideas you guys send me goes into the list. My goal is to eventually write about everything that gets requested. I just can’t do it all at once 😁
Money Stuff
I’m not going to go deep into this because the money isn’t the goal. Literally all I want money-wise is to earn back my original investment. Once I do that, I’ll be happy.
Spent: about $650. Half of this is from signing up for five years worth of hosting, because I’m the kind of person that needs some skin in the game to stick with it. The rest can basically be summed up as “things I bought to make this blog more professional.” That includes things like my theme (the site design), a PO Box so I can send out newsletters without giving you my home address, etc.
Earned: roughly the equivalent of $200. It depends on how much you value the bonus points I’ve received from somebody who used my link to sign up for a credit card.
Blog Goals
I don’t have any hard and fast goals about how I want to improve my traffic or increase income or anything like that. It would probably help if I set goals that way, but this blog isn’t about me.
My blog goals are focused on the audience. Depending on which report you are reading, there are 2 to 2.4 million people in the US military (active duty, Reserves, and Guard). Let’s call it 2.2 million. My outreach to military members has about a 2% success rate so far (meaning for every 50 people who have access to information about the blog, I’m gaining one reader). That may sound low, but these are loyal readers that come back again and again. I’m pretty happy with that number.
I’m not delusional – I don’t think I can get the entire military to become interested in this site. That would be awesome because I would love to have a part in ensuring all military members and veterans live a lifetime of financial security, but I know it’s not going to happen. But if I could get 2% of the military to read – even just occasionally – I would consider that a resounding success. Hell, even .5% would be incredible.
Yes bloggers, I know I’m supposed to set actionable short term goals to steadily build my audience. But it’s my goal so I can dream wildly if I want to.
So, readers, if you have gained anything from this blog, please spread the word. Tell people about the other military money blogs as well. My favorites are The Military Guide and Her Money Moves but there are more out there. Let’s help each other help ourselves. I can’t imagine any of us want our battle buddies to not be good with their money.
If not for altruistic reasons, then do it because nobody wants to be the supervisor or leader who has to counsel their troop for financial issues. That’s no fun for anybody.
The Blog Report
Everything is as of midday on September 27th and will have changed by the time I post this. Oh well.
My Stats
Facebook Likes / Follows: 212 / 245 (mostly military)
Twitter Followers: 737 (mostly personal finance bloggers)
Pinterest Followers: 27 (I really need to put some effort into this…or not…whatever)
Total Views: about 27,700. About 70% of that has been in September.
Visitors: a little over 18,000
Comments: 175 (about half are mine)
Most Frequent Commenter: Darren from Learn To Be Great
Most Popular Day For Readers To Visit The Blog: Sunday, thanks to a Facebook forum I post to every Sunday
How I Get Traffic: Mostly Facebook, but also a decent amount from direct traffic and Rockstar Finance (thanks J. Money!)
Country With The Most Views: The United States. This should come as a surprise to literally nobody.
Country With The Most Views That Isn’t The US: Germany, narrowly edging out Japan. Rounding out the top five are the UK, Canada, and South Korea.
Weirdest Country With Views: I’m going with Bulgaria, because I’m pretty sure I had a hacker there who was trying very hard to get into my account. The malicious login attempts stopped completely after I read and followed David’s advice in this post (thanks again, David!)
Total Number Of Countries I’ve Had Visitors From: 118. That’s more than half!!
Posts
Favorite Post: This one was hard to choose, but I’m going with Why I Want To FIRE. I like it because writing that forced me to put into words a lot of things I’ve been thinking about over the years. Plus, it’s good to go back to occasionally to refocus.
Most Shared Post: Hands down, my post about Retiring on an Enlisted Military Pension is the most shared. It’s not even close. As of September 27th, this post has been shared over 750 times that I know of. Since some people probably didn’t use the social share buttons, and Twitter shares don’t get counted, it’s actually even more than that. That’s crazy!
Most Viewed Post: Same. The Retiring on an Enlisted Military Pension post struck a chord. It’s been viewed over 9,000 times since September 18th. Considering my previous total monthly viewing average was about 2,000, that’s pretty insane.
Most Important Post: Toss up between two series. My four-part series on the Blended Retirement System is the most important right this moment, because the decision of whether to switch to BRS or stay with the legacy system is one of if not the most important financial decisions many military members with between 1 day and 12 years of service as of January 1st 2018 will make in 2018.
My ongoing Retiring on a Military Pension series might end up being the most important for servicemembers’ financial security in the long run, though. It’d be great to hear that people are using the lessons in those to figure out how they can become financially independent.
Longest Post: Retiring On An Officer’s Pension: Jane’s Family Of Four, which is 3,053 words long. Overall I’ve published 129,083 words *before* my 100th post goes live. That’s about two books worth since April 😲
Favorite Types Of Post To Write: Without a doubt it’s my Wednesday posts. Every single thing I write about on Mondays, Fridays, and Sundays can be found somewhere else on the internet if you take the time to look. My Wednesday posts are where I get to put in my own personal spin and tell you how money has worked in my life. It’s all well and good (and important!) to understand the technical details, but I think there is a lot of value in seeing how this stuff works in the real world.
Miscellaneous
My Biggest Blogging Mistake: One day I was annoyed having to sort through all of the uploaded media on WordPress to find the image I wanted, so I deleted almost all of them. I figured it was stored on a server. Like, if I upload a picture to Facebook and then delete it from my phone, it’s still on Facebook. I figured it was the same thing. Nay. NAY.
Every image I deleted from WordPress was gone from my site. Major facepalm. Lesson learned: never delete an image from WordPress unless you also want it off your site. And in that case, delete it directly from the post or you are going to be left with a line of text where the image should be. It mocks you and your mistake. I had to manually go into each post and reload the images. This was not a fun use of a weekend. I’m not even sure I’ve caught all of them yet.
Most Frequent Search Term: anything having to do with the Blended Retirement System
Favorite Search Term That Led Someone To My Blog: “travel hacking churning.” Why? Because I’m nowhere near the top of the search results for those words, which means they must have been looking deep, deep into the search results to find me! I hope it was worth it!
Woo hoo, congratulations on your 100th post and on the blog traffic! Also I totally agree on the “nobody should have this much fun meeting a bunch of strangers to talk about money” part, but I’m glad it is so fun!
Um as an international relations nerd, I do want to hear you talk about Syria. Let’s go hiking and discuss geopolitical events some time 😉
Wait, you’re an international relations nerd? I’m an international relations nerd! Did we just become best friends?
We were possibly already there but if not, we are now!
Good stuff and congrats!!!!
Thank you!!
Congratulations, it’s always great to see another fellow blogger reach a milestone. I’m new to your blog but I appreciate being able to learn from someone else’s journey. Congratulations again and keep it up!
Thanks Juan! I love your blog name!!
Ahhhh. My inner blog voyeur is very satisfied. Coffee in one hand, full Military Dollar confessional in the other. I could have read more!!! Thank you, Hot Stuff for doing what you do. Without sounding patronizing or old lady-ish, I hope you are proud of yourself as I am of you.
Hahaha, not patronizing or old ladyish sounding at all! Thanks, Lady.
Congrats on your 100th blog post! I didn’t realize you’ve only been blogging for a year, you make it look simple! Thanks for all the great info!
Thanks Dan!