Personal Finance Blogging Takes Off

Written by Nickel - 4 Comments

While perusing ProBlogger.net this morning, I ran across an interesting service offered by BlogPulse — a blogging trend tracker (direct link). After entering search terms and selecting a timeframe (from one to six months), you’ll get a graph depicting the percentage of all blog posts that mention the term(s) of interest. Beyond giving you an overall plot, you can also click on individual dates to drill down into a listing of the actual posts that mentioned the term of interest on that day. So what does this tell us about personal finance blogging?

Here’s what the results for ‘personal finance’ look like:

BlogPulse Plot of Personal Finance

After flatlining early on, it appears that things started to heat up in early April, and have really taken off since the beginning of May. Note that this graph is expressed in percentages. Thus, the increase isn’t simply a byproduct of increased blogging in general. Rather, personal finance blog entries seem to be proliferating at an accelerated rate.

Just to see how real these sorts of trends are, I punched in ‘baseball’ and looked at the plot over the past six months. Sure enough, there’s a major flurry of activity starting in early April, which corresponds to the beginning of the season. Similarly, check out the plots for ’spring break’ or ‘graduation.’ Pretty cool stuff.

Published on May 24th, 2005 - 4 Comments
Filed under: Online
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About the author: Nickel is the founder and editor-in-chief of this site. He's a thirty-something family man who has been writing about personal finance since 2005, and guess what? He's on Twitter!

Comments (scroll down to add your own):

I’m new myself, so I guess I’m part of that big spike at the end.
Comment by FMF — May 25th 2005 @ 7:39 am
It’s been interesting to see this happen… Only a few years ago there were no blogs centered around personal finance, even though there already were millions of blogs. I wonder why it took such a long time to catch on.
Comment by Flexo — May 25th 2005 @ 8:53 pm
I always thought I was late to the personal finance blogging scene. I guess I was early. I know when I started back in October, 2004, there were really just a handful of personal finance blogs. Now there are lots of them.

I’m sure a lot of them will burn out and quit blogging. Time will tell.

JLP

AllThingsFinancial
Comment by JLP — Jun 6th 2005 @ 3:09 pm
There are a lot of personal finance blooger now. But, the Stock Market/Mutual fund related bloggers are hard to find.
Comment by The Real Returns — Jun 17th 2005 @ 11:01 pm