Financial blogs can be extremely lucrative. A cursory website valuation of Bankrate.com shows that the site is worth an estimated $64.7 million. Even smaller financial blogs, such as Get Rich Slowly and Money Crashers are worth seven figures.
If you have a background in finance, you could make a bundle managing your own personal finance blog. The downside is that this niche is obviously very competitive, especially if you are going into a high-paying vertical such as cryptocurrency and Forex.
This shouldn’t discourage you from trying to create the next Bankrate blog. Just recognize that you are going to need to really step up your game. The finance niche is becoming more competitive than ever. At the same time, Google is rolling out new algorithm changes almost monthly, so you will need to work harder than ever to keep your blog on the front page of the SERPs.
Here are five things that could make a huge difference in your financial blog.
Stock Ticker Symbols and Charts
Take a look at some of the smaller financial news blogs. You will notice that over 90% of them have purely static content. The authors typically publish an article and never touch it again. What is worse Is that many of them don’t have very appealing visuals.
Adding stock ticker symbols and charts is a good way to boost engagement. You can find a number of widgets that will automatically update with the most recent stock prices.
These visuals will make your financial blog much more engaging. They will lower your bounce rate and keep users on your site longer, which should improve your search engine rankings. You can see an example of this in action through the compass share price ticker below. Many financial websites and blogs will also offer the ability to grab one of their stock ticker widgets, which can be customized to display any of your preferred quotes.
Resource Videos for Training Purposes
I can’t begin to emphasize the importance of video marketing in 2018. It is even more important for financial blogs than most other niches.
Below you will see a few examples from Free Online Trading Education, where they not only provide users with the guidance and information they need to learn how to trade online, they also have useful and daily videos provided through their YouTube channels as well.
Here are some reasons that resource videos are so useful.
Improving trust
Publishing videos is a good way to establish rapport and build trust with your visitors. This warms up leads and makes them easier to convert. This is important in the financial niche, because you are usually selling more expensive services that require greater levels of trust than bloggers in other niches.
Search engine rankings
Video plays a very important role in search engine rankings these days. There are a couple of reasons for this. Highly engaging videos are great for linkbait. If you have valuable insights and a charismatic brand ambassador, other blogs and even reputable new sites won’t hesitate to link to your videos as resources.
Video is also great for improving onsite engagement statistics and showing Google that you have rich content on your site. Over 51% of global marketers rate video as the medium with the highest ROI.
Testimonials from Previous Clients
If you are selling a product, adding testimonials from satisfied clients is a great way to improve your business. In fact, studies have shown that they are the most effective form of content. A report by Spectoos shows that they have an 89% effectiveness rating. Another study by Big Commerce shows that using customer testimonials can increase revenue by 62%.
In reference to stock recommendations or just providing a paid service for financial information, user testimonials can go a long way. Testimonials and reviews can be shown in a number of ways, such as with profile pictures, in video, or even in basic text like the ones shown below from TopStockPicks.com.
You don’t necessarily need to sell a product to get testimonials either. Even if you only use a blog that is purely monetized with advertising revenue or affiliate links, you can ask appreciative readers to share testimonials about your content. If you have a background in the field, you could also ask former colleagues to discuss your expertise.
In addition to helping convert users better, testimonials can help improve engagement. Visitors will spend time reading your testimonials, which will improve your site’s onsite engagement statistics. If your visitors are impressed by the testimonials, they will be more likely to read other content as well. This helps increase your onsite SEO profile.
Recent news throughout the World
If you want to create a really engaging financial blog, you are going to need to provide some topical content. Publishing some evergreen content can be helpful, but it is going to be tough to engage your visitors with it. The reality is that most have evergreen topics are pretty dry.
Bloomberg is a great example of a site that is covering a wide range of active topics at all times. Not only do they have a scrolling news bar at the top of their page, and day charts and pricing for different markets, they also have the trending news making headlines around the world. While it would be quite a mission to compete against a site like Bloomberg in terms of creating content for your blog, you could definitely use many of their widgets, tools, and news sources as reliable references.
Writing blog posts about current events will help your blog in a number of ways. First of all, fewer of your competitors are going to optimize their content for keywords related to specific events. You can generate a lot of traffic by targeting longtail keywords around them.
Publishing articles about new developments in the financial sector are also going to be a lot more interesting to most of your readers. They are going to spend more time pouring over your articles about these events that they would a try technical topic that you cover.
Crypto and Digital Currency Trends
I can’t begin to enumerate the ways that crypto has changed the global economy. It is influencing the financial sector more than any other.
It doesn’t matter what type of financial content you want to focus on. Cryptocurrency will have an effect on it. If you are talking about the investing side of personal finance, many people want to consider investing in crypto to improve the margins of their portfolio. If you are focusing on helping people get out of debt, they may want to understand the direction of the market decide whether it is worth putting their money in.
Not a day goes by that digital and cryptocurrencies aren’t making the headlines. Everyone wants to keep an eye on the latest coin, it’s price and where it’s headed. Through the use of widgets and tools like the ones at Coin Market Cap, anyone can easily view such information in seconds. You can also take a look at their Crypto Widgets page to start adding these same elements to your own site.
It is a good idea to have a section of your blog that Focus is purely on crypto. You can talk about a number of aspects. You can cover recent news related to the crypto industry. You can also provide detailed guides for people that want to consider investing in it.
How to Create the Best Financial or Stock Resource Possible
As you can see, there are plenty of moving parts and fancy widgets involved in creating a killer online resource for anything relating to stocks, finances, and cryptocurrencies. The most important thing for you to remember, is to provide the most detailed and accurate information possible… while also niching down as much in the process.
You will notice that each of the examples in this article are best at what they do, and many of them are extremely simple in design — yet accessed by millions of site visitors daily. Try to follow these same practices when building a blog of your own.