Financial Jungle

It’s that time of year! My wife and I are taking the next 3 weeks off travelling…. this time we are visiting Bejing, Shanghai, X’ian and Guilin. I’ll try to write a few posts here and there, but most likely they will have a lot to do with China. It’ll be tough being out of the loop with the stock market, as I’m so addicted to reading every piece of financial articles within my sight. The only “fix” I’m bringing with us is today’s Globe and Mail.

In addition to keeping my mind off work, I’m also bringing my new Canon Rebel XTi for a serious test-drive on this trip. You’ll notice the new Flickr plug-in on the left sidebar. If you’re into photography, please visit my Flickr account periodically and leave a few comments and suggestions.

Take care!

I just met another apex of my blogging career. Larry MacDonald gave thumbs up to Financial Jungle when he introduced a few new personal financial bloggers today. Larry highlighted Financial Jungle along with Ellen Roseman and Four Pillars. In his exact words, Larry said:

Financial Jungle Guy
A nicely written blog with intelligent and amusing posts (e.g. Can Money Really Buy You Happiness?) from a Vancouver software programmer.

This is quite overwhelming that Larry MacDonald would praise Financial Jungle with uplifting words like intelligent and amusing. I’m not only feeling humble; I’m downright embarrassed.

After all, Larry is one of the most well-known and respected investment writers in Canada. He’s the icon of sexy journalism. Women want to be with him. PF bloggers want to be him. I tell you. He can turn those prominent eye-wears into a hot commodity.

I just want to say thank you.

Please check out these links to follow Larry’s exceptional writings:
Canadian Business
Investor’s Digests

Larry didn’t get the opportunity to review all the new blogs, but he made notable mentions to:
The Financial Blogger
A Canadian and Her Money
Re: money
Riscario Insider Blog
Thicken My Wallet
Financial Security Quest
Savings Journey
Moneygardener

Contratulations to everyone!

This morning, I was estatic to learn that Ellen Roseman from Toronto Star crafted a mavelous piece on Blogs offer new views on finance, which included Financial Jungle, Canadian Capitalist, Middle Class Millionaire and The Money Diva.

Ellen Roseman is a blogger herself, and I’m an RSS subscriber to her site to draw new inspirations. Thank you, Ellen, for making us famous!

It’s been a notoriously busy week for me so far, so I don’t have a financial article prepared. Instead of going two weekdays without a post, I’ll chat about the blog instead.

Financial Jungle is an editor’s pick

I was thrilled to learn that Money Smart Life selected my article, The Dirty Secret Behind Closet Index Funds, as an editor’s pick for the Carnival of Personal Finance #102. You might want to check out the other 68 articles. Some of which are quite interesting, and I may expand on a few in later posts.

Canadian Capitalist votes for Financial Jungle

Canadian Capitalist, one of my most admired Canadian financial blogs, generously mentioned Financial Jungle yesterday, and included my blog to his blogroll. Canadian Capitalist is a passive-investing advocate, whom I enjoyed a healthy debate with on passive versus dividend investing just a few days ago. If you’re looking for unbiased opinions on personal finance from a source with integrity, www.CanadianCapitalist.com, is it.

So, what does it mean when Canadian Capitalist mentions a blog? The blog scores a lot of high-quality hits. Yesterday, Financial Jungle received a whopping 44 hits (36%) from a single source, which easily shattered the previous and distant record.

A writing tip

Being a software developer, my typical day involves writing and commenting computer code. I don’t get too many opportunities to practice writing articles, and this is why I believe blogging will help to improve that aspect of my communication.

I’m a keen believer of the Pareto principle, where 20% of the effort is responsible for 80% of the result. Life is too short to be a perfectionist. Naturally I went on a quest to discover the one writing gem that can turn a fair writer into a good writer with as little effort as possible. I turned to bloggers who have always captivated me with their bottomless supply of charismas. Bloggers, like Darren Rowse from ProBlogger and Vince Chan from Investorial, have clear and attention-getting writing styles that any new blogger would love to emulate.

After deciphering their blogs, I believe their secret is to pick concise and interesting rather than general and boring words. General words like talk, get, give, go, make, look and take force reader to work harder to understand your story, thus should be used sparsely. Good bloggers rarely write sentences like “he talked to her”. Instead, they replace “talked” with something more descriptive that conveys how he talked to her. Did he whisper, shout, congratulate, praise, criticize or persuade her? Descriptive words like these offer readers a head start on your story, and make reading effortless and enjoyable.

My previous blog enhancements are paying off. Last week, Financial Jungle’s traffic improved from 47 hits/day to 52 hits/day. Not quite ground shaking, but respectable considering the lack of blogging tour participations. I hope the modest success is also feeding off to blogs on my Favorite Blog widget as well. As no blog is an island, the only way to thrive in the blogosphereis to connect and be connected. If you’re a financial blogger and believe Financial Jungle is worthy of a mention, please consider linking it through your blogroll. Conversely, I’m happy to reference financial blogs that bring in engaging and fresh ideas, so don’t be shy to ask.

For this week, I’ve installed several promising WordPress plugins to elicit reader interactions and retentions:

1. The Similar Posts plugin quickly finds and suggests related articles based on MYSQL’s fulltext search capability. This plugin saves readers’ time by leveraging the more sophistical search algorithm, instead of the rudimentary search box functionality. It also helps me because the plugin uncovers some of the older (brilliant?) articles buried too deep in the archives.
2. Readers participating in discussions are immediately recognized by having their names displayed on the Recent Comments widget. Moreover, new visitors can glance through the widget to find the most talked-about posts. (For the life of me, I can’t figure out where I got this widget from.)
3. Thanks to the NoFollow plugin, bloggers leaving comments at Financial Jungle are rewarded with link-backs to their own blogs. A link-back helps to advance your Google PageRank score, thus making your site more visible in Google searches. The plugin expires the link-backs after 2 weeks to encourage return visits.

I forgot to mention this earlier. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the ClustrMaps icon. Clicking at the icon brings you to a world map showing off where the loyal Financial Jungle readers are coming from.

For the past couple of weeks, FinancialJungle.com has been stuck at around 40+hits and 30 RSS feed readers. To increase traffics to the blog, I’ve implemented the following enhancements:

1. Migrated permalinks to display the post titles instead of the post ids. According to some experts, search engines incorporate the URLs into their indexing.
2. Made the RSS Feed icon larger, and placed it within the blob near the upper right corner of this blog.
3. Installed the autometa Wordpress plug-in to insert meta and Technorati tags, so surfers can find this blog easier.

Hopefully I will see a difference within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to drop me a comment if you have any other suggestions.

Please remember to visit on Monday for the second Canadian Tour of Personal Fianncial Blogs. You can find the list of participants at the Money Diva financial blog. Did you notice that Ellen Roseman from the Toronto Star is on the list too? There are a number of other top guns, such as The Canadian Capitalist, Million Dollar Journey, Investoid, and Canadian Finance DIY just to name a few. I’m really looking forward to read their articles. It’ll be a blast.

• The Money Diva will feature Financial Jungle along with 14 other blogs on the second Canadian Tour of Personal Finance Blogs. I missed the deadline for the original tour, but I’m glad to be in the lineup this time. I have a few possible topics in mind, but I’m leaning toward something on the lighter side.

  

• The first calendar month for Financial Jungle is nearly over. Here are the latest stats for April, and thank you for your support:
  • Unique Visitors - 396
  • Pages - 8,432
  • Hits - 39,867

This morning I was estatic to receive an invitation to join the Canadian Tour of Personal Finance blogs. Canadian Money Advisor initiated this tour event to ‘get to know other bloggers who write about personal finance, and to show case these bloggers articles and expertise to their readers.’

It’s so cool for the Canadian Money Advisor to invite a start-up blog like mine. I will definitely take on his offer to showcase a Financial Jungle article. Go check out the other participants on the tour as well. Some are already on my blogroll.