Blogging about personal finance is turning into a full time effort for me. I want to use needmoneytips.com to help people spend wisely, pay off debt and earn supplemental income. To accomplish that goal I want to make this blog the best that it can be. Wisebread has a list of the top 100 personal finance blogs. The blogs are ranked by Alexa ranking which means the list is not perfect. Alexa ranks websites by the amount of traffic they receive by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. Not everyone has that toolbar installed (I don’t) so it’s not a perfect list.

Regardless of the flaws of the Alexa ranking, I wanted to see what the top 25 PF blogs do well compared to everyone else. This is the kind of research that everyone needs to do when they start a Niche Blog. You can avoid mistakes by watching what others do well and comparing it to the “other guys.” Most of what I found in my research is not going to change the way we blog but it was still a fun exercise that I hope will pay off for me and my readers.

Below are the 12 categories I rated each blog on and what I learned about each topic:

1. Multiple Contributors

11 of the top 25 blogs have multiple contributors to the blog. Guest posts or very rarely recurring contributors do not count in the 11. Most, but not all of the multiple contributor blogs post more than once a day which allows them to generate a ton of content. It also brings different perspectives to the blog that one author cannot bring by himself.

2. Encourage Guest Posts

Only 13 out of the top 25 blogs encouraged or invited people to guest post. Somewhere on their site in their sidebar, footer, header, about or contact page there is a mention of how to guest post on that blog. Guest posts are a powerful way to get more traffic to your blog and expose your content to new readers.

3. Publish Full Length Posts

This is a personal no no for me. Publishing in full length means each blog post you write is posted in it’s entirety on the home page, category page and tag page. Plus, it reduces page views and keeps people from interacting with your blog. It also gives the reader the entire post without showing them a comment box (unless they clicked on the link to go to the actual post page). Despite all the negatives I just presented, someone knows something I don’t because 13 of the top 25 do post full length posts on their home page.

4. Professional Logo

You either have a professional looking Logo or you don’t. I don’t believe you need to have one but it helps if you do. 13 blogs had what I consider to be professional looking logos.

5. Forums

Forums are a great way to interact with your readers, get post ideas and provide a content based community. They can be very time consuming to maintain. Only 3 of the top 25 Personal Finance Blogs have forums.

6. Modern & Clean Design

17 blogs had a clean easy to read modern looking theme. At least 3 of the top blogs looked like someone created them in 1997 and hadn’t been updated since. If they look so bad, how can they be successful? The answer is they do everything else right. At the end of the day people are there to read your content. A modern design is a big plus, but if you’ve been blogging every day, multiple times a day for more than five years and your write quality content your blog is going to be a success.

7. Weekly Posts

That leads me into my next criteria, the number of times the blog publishes blog posts per week. The average was 10 per week. The highest I saw was The Consumerist which looks like they post around 45 times per week. Wisebread and Free Money Finance are also way up there. 14 posted 7 times and week and only one blog posted less than 7 times per week.

8. Uses Pictures

Most of the top 25 blogs use pictures in their post, but only 14 use them more than 25% of the time. Pictures have been proven to boost SEO and improve user experience. Still for some bloggers they aren’t worth the hassle.

9. Free e-book if you subscribe

Only three of the blogs give away a free e-book if people subscribe to their blog. Everyone else uses a small RSS or Feedburner subscription box.

10. Uses a Related Post Plugin

Many top bloggers use a WordPress Plugin to display related posts at the end of each blog post. The related posts are generated automatically from the tags used in each post. 17 of the top PF blogs use a related post plugin.

11. Author Picture at the end of the Post

Only 9 of the top 25 have a picture of the author at the end of each blog post. 14 of the blogs have a picture of the blog owner somewhere on the blog.

12. Adsense looks like the focus

Most of the blogs use Adsense somewhere in the blog. 8 of the top 25 blogs have Adsense ads on their homepage in a way that stands out and draws your attention away from the content. I use Adsense on my blog, just like most bloggers do. Embedding Adsense into your content can be an effective form of advertising. I hope I don’t ever have a home page where an Adsense ad dominates the look at feel of my blog.

Other Items

I also looked at other items like the post layout, number of links in the sidebar and what the content focus was. The quality of the content is high on almost all the top 25 PF Blogs. Most of their posts exceed 500 words.

Gaps in the lower rated blogs

I spent some time examining blogs that ranked from 100-200. There are some poorly designed blogs that update often but post short posts and sub par content. The biggest flaw I see in the new clean looking blogs is the frequency with which they post. To have a successful Personal finance blog you should post 7 days a week, write quality content and do it consistently over time. This research has given me a lot to work on!