Blogger Confessions #18: Money Saved is Money Earned
Happy Saturday and welcome to the 18th episode of the 'Blogger Confessions' interview series on the blog. Today, I'm bringing in Sebastian and Tawnya from Money Saved is Money Earned to talk about blogging and how they've managed to keep everything straight as a personal finance blogger.
Sebastian and Tawnya, take it away.
Blogger Confessions with Money Saved is Money Earned
1: In at least 100 words, describe the target audience of your blog.
Our goal is to provide financial education to ordinary people so they can better conduct their everyday financial lives.
We want to try and get ahead of financial issues with proactive education as well as help those who may have already gotten themselves into financial hot water. With this in mind, our primary target audience is young people in high school, college, and any others who may not be financially savvy.
Understanding finances at a young age, or any age, will help people better plan their financial lives and avoid financial hardships.
However, we want to provide financial education to anyone who desires and needs it, so we also want to help those who may be older and have already made some mistakes turn their financial lives around. Ultimately, we want to help our readers manage their hard-earned money, and to avoid being victimized by financial institutions and businesses.
2: What makes your blog different from other blogs in the PF blogosphere?
Our blog is different in that there are two of us writing and managing the blog. Not only are we co-blogging, but we are very different in age and background.
These differences allow us to tackle a much wider range of topics and bring very different and credible perspectives to many issues. When you read one of our articles, know that it has been read with two sets of eyes that have experienced the world very differently.
Our blog contains a wealth of research as well as lived experience, and we emphasize changing behavior in order to address financial issues.
3: What’s the thing that you’ve struggled with the most since starting your blog?
The main thing we’ve struggled with is getting our content in front of the people that need it most. The blogger community is extremely supportive, but what we’ve found is that the majority of people reading our content are other bloggers, and usually other personal finance bloggers.
While there are some great discussions that come about, the people who really need our content are not yet being reached. Without a large advertising budget, we’re not sure how to better get content in front of our target audience.
4: Do you publish your net worth on your blog? Why or why not?
We don't publish our net worth at this time.
Our primary goal is to provide financial education, and we don’t feel that publishing our net worth falls in line with that. When we do write about ourselves, we prefer to do it in a way that illustrates a point we’re trying to make, or to make people aware of something they may not have known about before.
While some may find reading our net worth interesting, we would prefer to focus on writing content that will help other people understand financial institutions and systems, as well as how related systems impact our financial lives.
5: Have you monetized your blog (ads, affiliate marketing, etc)? Why or why not?
We have been trying to monetize our blog, although we are not great at it yet. We currently have ads and affiliates and are hoping to begin collaborating with some other brands following FinCon18.
However, we want to make sure that our revenue is not coming directly from our readers, as these people cannot probably afford to spend money on financial advice. Instead, we hope to monetize through collaborations with brands that can afford to foot the bill.
6: Would you rather be loved, hated or controversial? Explain, please!
It’s a toss-up between loved and controversial, but we definitely don’t want to be hated. We would probably rather be controversial because not everyone will love us, but that’s okay as long as we’re providing good content that is helping people.
We also know not everyone will agree when it comes to financial topics, but we welcome discussion and different perspectives as long as they are presented respectfully.
7: Who would you be horrified to know read your blog?
We wouldn’t be horrified, but we’d be anxious if we knew Damian Lillard or any other Portland Trail Blazer was reading our blog because we’d badly want them to like the content!
8: What’s your most favorite, least favorite and most embarrassing post on your blog?
Our favorite post is How to Shift Your Mindset from Consumerism to Frugalism because it lays out our core philosophy and our approach to personal finance. Our least favorite would have to be the intro post to the Taking an Interest in Interest series because it’s kind of boring. We’re aren’t embarrassed by any of our posts (yet!).
9: Explain your writing process
First, we both have developed a habit of writing ideas down as they come to us so we don’t lose them. Sometimes we choose a topic to write about because something has inspired us, sometimes it’s because of the time of year or related to a recent event, and sometimes we just look at our list of ideas and pick one.
As for the writing, it typically takes us 2-3 hours to write the post (they are all around 1200 words or more), and we both tend to edit as we’re writing.
Then, whoever wrote the post sends it to the other for another round of edits before it’s sent back to the original writer for their thoughts. Sebastian is more focused on content edits. Tawnya is also an excellent content editor but she is the stronger writer of the duo so she does the final cut.
10: What is your favorite blog in the PF blogosphere (other than your own!)?
It’s so difficult to choose because there are so many great blogs and almost every blog we’ve come across has written good posts. We think it’s really important to have multiple voices and perspectives when it comes to finance, especially because each person has some areas of expertise that others don’t.
With those ideas in mind, we'd probably have to pick Rockstar Finance as our favorite blog because their goal is to curate and feature content from across the personal finance blogger community. If you follow Rockstar Finance you’re getting the best of the PF blogosphere every day, and although they don’t feature every great post, you can find almost any PF-related post written every day in their feed.
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