At the start of the year, I asked people to share the blogs they owned in the comments of this post with a vow to add every blog listed into my RSS feed. It’s now more thna half way through the year, so I thought I’d give a bit of encouragement and links to the blogs I’ve been enjoying.
Best New Blogs For 2016
This is a bit of a cheat, because they actually started blogging in 2015. I like that they usually don’t rehash what the rest of the blogosphere are saying/talking about and that their posts are actually well researched. They’ve been posting more often recently as well which is nice to see.
Doesn’t post a lot, but does uncover little changes when it comes to manufactured spending.
The Chinese version of this site has been around for awhile, but the English language version is a bit newer. They break a lot of deals on the site and also only share the best offers.
Advice For New Bloggers
- If you don’t already have a blog, decide if you really want to start one. Blogging eats up a lot of my spare time and it’s not just writing and research content. You have to do other things, like answering readers questions via e-mail and comments, promoting the site, trying to make sure the site runs smoothly. I hate to think how much time I’ve actually invested into this blog. If you’re not sure if blogging is for you, or if people will enjoy what you write then consider writing a guest post instead. We pay our contributors (first guest post is $50 and if you want to be an ongoing contributor like Chuck we can discuss more of a profit sharing situation). I’m sure other sites would also accept guest contributors.
- Create a unique voice. When this blog was first started, it was mostly about credit scores because I wasn’t happy with the information out there. I thought I could do a better job of it. Then credit cards starting offering free FICO scores and now I blog mostly about points & miles with a bit of bank bonus and general credit card information thrown in. We cover a lot of different stuff on this blog, if you’re just starting out I wouldn’t recommend covering absolutely every deal out there. It’s very time consuming and most people are reading multiple sites anyway. Instead try to focus on things others aren’t covering, haven’t yet covered or haven’t covered in the same depth you can. A lot of new blogs will write an insane amount of posts the first month and then taper out and die, that’s called burning out and you can prevent it by focusing on things you can add value to.
- Promote your site. I try to link to new content/blogs whenever I can because I found when people like Frequent Miler & View From The Wing first started doing that when I was starting out it dramatically helped and also gave me a lot of encouragement to keep going. That being said I probably get 10+ e-mails a week from people wanting me to share their content on the site. Usually it’s really apparent they haven’t ever read the site or understand what we actually post about. That being said, some people regular comment on the site (and interact on Twitter) and if they have the website in the URL field of the comments I’ll usually check their site out. I also don’t mind if people tag me on Twitter, as long as it’s not all the time and it’s something you actually think readers of this site would be interested in.
- Don’t get discouraged. When I first started we were getting about 3 pageviews a day and most of them were just me. Two months later it was 10x that and it continues to grow to this day. It would have been very easy for me to just give up when I was started out but I thought the content that I had written was better than the competition and deserve more traffic so I kept going.
Our Verdict
Sorry if I didn’t include you, I wanted to keep the list short to try and encourage readers to click over to the site. A lot of bloggers are now posting less often or not at all due to credit card relationships disappearing or for other reasons. There is still a lot of competition in this space, but if you have the drive then I definitely think new blogs can thrive as a side hobby/income stream.
As always, I’m more than happy to add new blogs to my Feedly. Just send me a tweet on Twitter and remember we’re always looking for new guest contributors.
