I’m Speaking at FinCon13!!

As a blogger, I love getting in contact with others who also blog – especially if it is about money and finances! The owner of PT Money Phil Taylor has for the past several years organized a financial bloggers conference. It has become hugely popular. This years conference is called FinCon13. Believe it or not, that stands for Financial Conference 2013.

I went last year and learned a lot. I also met many bloggers with whom I had networked online and had a wonderful mini vacation in Denver. Last year I was lucky to participate in one of the work sessions as a panel member.

This year, I am proud and a bit scared to say that I will be the main speaker in a work session, The session is for advanced bloggers and is called “How to Build Systems for Your blog”.

So, bloggers and readers, if you have anything special you would like to hear about building systems to make your blog or business easier to run, more organized or better documented, please shoot me an email. I’m currently actively working on the materials to use in the session and would just LOVE to get some input.

During the conference I will share input I have already received from others. Ahead of the conference I hope to highlight some of that information and share it with all of you.

First, we hear from Andrew Schrage at MoneyCrashers.

Money Crashers’ mission is to develop a community of readers who make good financial decisions. The Money Crashers’ team, including Andrew, has been around for at least 4 years. They have been featured by multiple national media venues such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS news and MSNBC.

Thanks for your input Andrew!

In bold are the questions I posed to him, followed by his answers – sometimes with links to additional information on the subject.

• What blogging tasks do you think are most important to spend time on? How do you stay focused on those?
  One of the most important tasks to stay focused on is quality of content. Once your blog starts to grow, you’ll have many other items to tackle, such as advertising, social media marketing and tracking analytics. But none of that should get in the way of committing to top quality, factual blog posts. Most quality control is handled by our managing editor, although both myself and fellow co-owner Gyutae Park review all articles before they are published.
• What tasks are your blog’s main time suckers?
  Dealing with glitches. It’s hard to get more specific than that, but there are times when things go wrong with our website itself, and our writers have to deal with WordPress glitches. Straightening those out usually takes a good bit of time. Another time sucker (although it’s time well spent) is our social media campaign. We’ve really improved our efforts on social media, and it has produced some great results.
• How have you worked towards getting those areas under control and organized?
  The glitches are dealt with on an as-needed basis. Gyutae is adept at solving them without much outside help. We also hired a social media expert.
• At what point in your blog’s life did you find it necessary or desirable to define processes or systems?
  Early on, our blog consisted of myself, my business partner, and one writer, and we didn’t have any systems in place. We posted content on a rather erratic basis. Once we began to see some growth we decided that taking a more organized approach was necessary.
• What trouble spots have you overcome by defining steps to handle the issue or by automating things and how did you do it, what did you use?
  Our subscribers and readers are happier it seems because our content is now posted on a regular basis. Gyutae and I also divided responsibilities. Among others, I am mainly in charge of marketing, and he’s responsible for the nuts and bolts of the blog and day-to-day operations. We share social media responsibilities, although bringing in a specialist certainly helped lessen that load. We’ve organized our social sharing strategy as well. Our tweets and Facebook posts are scheduled and organized, and we conduct a weekly TweetChat every Friday at 4pm. We have a large team of freelance contributors, and we’ve defined topic areas that each writes about.
• Do you run your blog by yourself or do you enlist others? If others, what roles do they play and how did you define the roles to them?
  Our blog is run mainly by myself and Gyutae. However, we never would have been able to achieve the level of success that we have without the help of a large number of writers, editors, and our social media specialist.
• If you were to sell your blog, how would you communicate to the buyer how to run it the same way you do?
  If I ever were to sell my blog, I believe that I would ask to still play an active role. If that were to happen, I’d outline for the buyer all of the systems we’ve implemented over the years and encourage them to keep those things in place.

More to come, but please comment or shoot me an email with your thoughts!