My experiences with the blog

One week they say is a long time in politics but, not being a politician, my knowledge of that will only be second hand in nature. As a blogger though, I do have a rich experience of 2 full months now to the day. June 17th was the day when I started the blog and today is the day the blog has completed it’s second month.

Though several people had encouraged and urged me to start a blog on personal finance aspects, I was always reluctant to do so. My main reason for the hesitation was that, I would not want to do something which would be read by very few people. Having been readers of some blogs myself, I know it is hard to get readership and the initial enthusiasm very often peters out and you are left with only a handful of loyal readers. However, the reception I had to some posts I wrote in the Facebook Groups AIFW and Market Musings ( my own group ) assured me that there would be a decent response to my blog.

The trigger point of starting the blog were mainly three. Firstly, I was finding it difficult to handle all queries from readers in the Facebook groups I was in. I thought it would be a good idea to write posts and direct readers to those, instead of explaining the same stuff multiple times. Secondly, my daughter being present at home during her summer vacation meant that she could help greatly in setting up the blog. Not that it was very complex to do, but I doubt whether I would have done it completely on my own.Thirdly, being on my own with the Consultancy practice gave me a fair amount of time to do this. If I was in a CEO role, as I was till last year, it would not have been possible.

The start of the blog was rather auspicious as I had a good deal of viewership almost immediately. I thought it was mainly because of the curiosity value of something new, but I am happy to note that the readership has sustained. The challenge is to keep writing posts that I have conviction about and making sure they are relevant to the readers at the same time. Not knowing, details of statistics on similar blogs at start-up, I am unable to comment on how successful the blog has been, but I can present some basic statistics to give an idea to the readers.

• Number of posts published in the blog including this = 100
• Views till today = 26,756
• Visitors till today = 11102
• Highest number of views in a day = 970
• Highest number of visitors in a day = 532

But more than the numbers, I have been really glad that there has been some difference made in the following:-

• Several people have been encouraged to take up investment in direct equity.
• Many of my posts tackling controversial topics such as SIP effectiveness have been read widely.
• Many readers have reached out to me for advice and through these interactions I have learnt a lot too.
• A lot of the feedback has been quite complimentary, but more importantly, usefulness of the blog has been agreed upon by most readers.

The following posts have been the most popular in the blog in terms of viewership, so here are the links:-

1. Why you must invest in PPF
2. My current SIP in Mutual Funds
3. Why you must be in direct equity
4. Should you buy your first home now
5. SIP – A modified version

What of the future? I do plan to continue the blog and hope that it is already in a place where many new investors can come and find useful resources to help them in their own financial planning process.

The century of posts was scored rather easily, but it is now time to take fresh guard.

Interested readers may pls follow my blog on email by clicking on the relevant button on the right hand panel. I will shortly be stopping the practice of posting the links in different Facebook groups. Following the blog will ensure you get intimated whenever there is a new post.