I got involved with a new financial markets blog, Monkeys & Elephants, last year to help them get setup and drive some traffic to it.
The first part was easy: I purchased the domain and set up an instance of WordPress on my existing hosting space. Then I sat down with Anthony and John to pick out an existing theme and worked on some changes that they wanted. I even built a custom page (I’m pretty proud of this) that pulls in stock portfolios that we created on Google Finance for our own little portfolio challenge.
The guys have managed 51 posts since November 27, 2011 and they’re pretty diligent about posting at least once every 2 days. So content isn’t a problem.
What I’ve been kind of stuck on now is trying to drive traffic to the site. We’ve told our families and friends about the blog, and they’ve told people who they think would be interested in it, but we’re still only averaging about 7 unique views a day. Posting the odd article on Digg and Reddit hasn’t helped much. So I’m left with only a couple strategies:
2) Search out some other like-minded blogs to cross link with.
The second option here has been kind of tough since I haven’t been able to find any like-minded blogs. There don’t seem to be any satirical financial markets blogs. My guess is that people want serious advice about their stocks. My other thought is that people are not interested in a random person’s stock advice, no matter how informed or correct it is.
In either case, the above reasons would suggest that people are not reading the blog because they’ve seen it and fall into one of those 2 categories. But the fact remains that very few people have actually seen the blog. So once we’ve cracked the ‘get eyeballs on the site’ problem we’ll probably run into one of those 2 other problems. But I’m confident that at least a small percentage of those people will stick around because they enjoy the tone of the site.
Lets just hope that they know more people who would equally enjoy it.
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