Simple Debt-Free Finance

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Giveaways, Carnivals and Personal Finance Blogging.

Posted on | May 17, 2008 |

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I don’t know about you, but I’ve been reading personal finance blogs for a couple of years now, and it has really improved my life. Seriously. Personal finance blogs are a gateway to free information from average people and industry insiders alike.

I got hooked early on by reading people who were writing about their experiences with things that I was also experiencing, things like digging out from credit card debt and car payments to making the most of my 401k.

Then came the great blog explosion. It seemed like 100 new blogs were born every day, and personal finance blogs were no different. I was in heaven for a time with so much to read and learn. Call this my golden age of pf blogs.

Then things changed.

Little by little, I started seeing an overall decline in the length and quality of the posts. Many posts began to be little more than 250 word quotes from other sites, often loaded with links. Then I started noticing things like “Carnivals of Personal Finance” seemingly everywhere I turned. At first, I mistook these as general laziness on the part of the blogger. But then things started to click. Remember that exponential growth I mentioned earlier that led to the golden age?

All of this growth meant increased competition for readers and attention. Then these carnivals began making sense. Giveaways too. Especially when I learned that search engines favor sites with numerous inbound (and outbound) links. What better way to get a large number if links then to offer a free book giveaway, and all you have to do to enter is leave a comment? Other bloggers leave comments so they can link your site to theirs, and it become a mutual link exchange.

I don’t begrudge bloggers who take part in carnivals, or roundups as their close cousins are sometimes called. It’s smart, effective marketing. I just think far too many treat them as simple link gathering exercises and don’t use them to offer any real value. I think giveaways are great and linking to other material on other sites is what makes the Internet the rich medium of information that it is. But this power is not always used for good. Some sites seem to be little more than thinly veiled link farms. Those sites disgust me enough to make me unsubscribe from their blog as they are providing no real content or insight.

Now that I have all of that off my chest, there are still some really good blogs out there that offer meaningful, insightful and interesting thoughts, critiques and opinion. One such blog is MoneyNing.

In the interest of full disclosure, MoneyNing is having a giveaway in which one can enter by mentioning his giveaway post in a post of their own. This is, of course, what I am doing here, but I don’t feel it’s compromising my beliefs as laid out above because MoneyNing is not like those other blogs.

MoneyNing is an insightful, motivational and engaging personal finance blog. And he has some pretty good giveaways too! ;-)
Photo by: Andrzej Gdula

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