Address to Personal Finance Bloggers

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this announcement from Free Money Finance:

This is a note to all of the personal finance bloggers out there. If you're not a personal finance blogger, it likely won't interest you. Never fear, more great personal finance content is just around the corner. But for now, I want to address personal finance bloggers.

Late Friday afternoon, I received a comment on Free Money Finance that criticized this blog and four other personal finance sites. Basically, the anonymous author was upset that a group of us bloggers had been working together while excluding the rest of the personal finance blogging community (that's the nice way of saying it -- the author wasn't nearly as generous).

I responded that the author should be brave enough to leave her name if she was going to leave a comment like that. She must have been remorseful, because soon thereafter she responded and said it was ok to take the first comment down and that she should have contacted me privately. (Even later, I did receive an email and corresponded with her.)

I did not take the comment down, but I did respond. Here's what I said:

I have had some people contact me privately and I've explained as best I could why I'm moving things around. It would have been better if you'd approached me in that fashion as well.

The public version is that things are not done moving yet, so don't fret if you're currently not on the main page. Once it's clear to all what's going on, I'll be doing round two of changes which will see some blogs return to my front page.

That said, I won't be linking to everyone. First, I owe it to readers to offer them a choice, but not an unreasonable set of choices. No one can decide what to select if 60 blogs are on a list.

Second, I'll use criteria. Someone who posts infrequently, has sloppy quality, etc. is not going to get a link. I want to promote high-quality, worthwhile blogs that people are putting time into.

Finally, it's likely that I'll have a list of "new blogs" -- people that have been around less than three months. This will give them a chance to get started, but allow me to keep an eye on them as there seems to be a 50/50 chance that a blog started today won't last for 3 months.

I'm sure many of you have been wondering what's up as well, so I wanted to bring this issue and my response to the forefront with a main post on it. In addition to this, I would like to say the following:

• I currently have 171 personal finance blogs on my RSS feeder. Over the next few weeks, I'll be reviewing those blogs and deciding how, when, and where to link to them. (FYI -- I just reviewed 10 this morning and am in the process of making changes. BTW, it doesn't automatically disqualify someone, but if they're not linking to me, it's likely I won't link to them.) Update: Just finished looking at 62 sites -- done through the F's -- and have added several.
• In the meantime, if you'd like to get some promotion for your blog from Free Money Finance, there's a standing offer on the table. Being part of this effort would net you far more visitors over the next couple of weeks than a link with 60 other blogs would on the left side of FMF. Yet, I have had no one volunteer yet. That's very interesting to me -- especially for those of you who may feel slighted at being moved off the front page for the time being.
• There are other ways you can promote your blog too. Jim has an on-going interview series with bloggers you can volunteer for and JLP has a site of the week. These are both good opportunities to promote your blog -- much better than a listing with a ga-zillion other blogs (at least in the short term).
• If you would like to discuss this with me privately, simply email me.

Much of the issue will come to light soon and it will be apparent what I am doing. Until then, know that I will continue to work with and partner with all serious personal finance bloggers for as long as you all want to work and partner with me.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Comments

[Cap]

I'm surprise someone got upset over that. Personally I think its your own individual sites/blog, and you can develope it however as you see fit.

Wow, 171 blogs.. I have 31 fees and I think that's a bit too much for me already.

[Financial Fruition]

Ha, that's pretty funny as I just noticed the "conglomerate" pf blogs banding together (Jim, Flexo, JLP, Nickel, and FMF) with special highlighted link sections to each other and weekly best lists that included each other posts and was wondering what's up. Thanks for the update, look forward to what you folks have in store with your ever expanding readerships.