Things I learned from analyzing top financial blogs

By Joseph

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Ever since I read "Rich Dad Poor Dad," I've been fascinated by the tax strategies that enable the super-wealthy to accumulate even more wealth. Business owners can leverage tax rates and borrow against their assets to minimize their tax liabilities!

While school teaches us to become laborers, true entrepreneurship is learned through hands-on experience.

I've attempted to start a blog three times in my career. The first attempt was before my first job, where I simply used Medium to jot down some project ideas. The second attempt was during Covid, and the third attempt is happening now, inspired by posts from Financial Samurai about blogging as one of many potential income streams.

Good artists copy, Great artists steal

Unlike Sam or Mr. Mustache, who have been in the field for a long time, I realized I should analyze how their audiences respond to their articles.

Most personal finance bloggers use Wordpress, and their sitemap can typically be found at https://your-website/sitemap.xml.

So, I wrote a Python program to iterate through the sitemap and parse the comments on each article.

Although some articles weren't included in the sitemap, the overall results look promising.

Top tier bloggers write a lot!

According to Sam, he started his blog in 2009. However, the scraped data I collected only goes back to 2017.

I'm not sure if Wordpress limits the number of linked articles, but I'm confident Sam has written more than 1000 articles.

Even with rough estimation, publishing 1000 articles over 6 years would mean around 166 articles per year—that's an incredible amount of content (nearly one every other day)!

Consistent output often outweighs perfection; the key is to keep writing. Once you hit a critical point, momentum will carry you forward.

Don't worry about the quality of your first few articles. Just keep writing, and you'll improve over time.