A group of women bloggers I recently fell in with subscribes to the idea that a blogger’s glass ceiling holds women writers back from the big time in the PF blogging world. How big the PF “big time” is remains to be seen. We know several male bloggers—Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar and J.D. Roth at Get Rich Slowly, among others—have built sites that earn enough to free them from their day jobs to write full-time.
On the other hand, we know successful women PF bloggers are holding forth, too: Silicon Valley Blogger’s The Digerati Life is going well enough to excuse her from the day job treadmill.
I don’t know whether Squawkfox earns proprietor Kerry Taylor enough to quit the ratrace, but this very day she posted an announcement that the Globe and Mail has her in the running for its Best of Money Blogs poll. Quite a few of the sites on my blogroll are written by women—most of them, come to think of it—but I’m pretty sure none of us is making a living at this business. MSN Smart Spending supports a couple of long-time women journalists, but they’re freelance contractors with no health insurance and, one might fairly guess, frugal wages. On the other hand, plenty of male bloggers aren’t making a nickel and a dime to rub together, either.
Is there some sort of good ole boys’ club out there for bloggers, a virtual country club where men go to play computer golf games together, every day but Ladies’ Day? It’s one of several issues that have been floating around in my coffee cup as I mull over ways to improve on Funny about Money and build its readership. Having reflected on this for a while, I really don’t think so.
Clive Thompson published a fairly nuanced article in a 2006 issue of New York Magazine, reflecting on the permutations of blogger success. He reports on research showing that one key indicator of a blog’s success is the number of links pointing to it, particularly links on large sites. The “A-list,” as he calls the most successful of the monetized blogs, is extremely small; “most bloggers toil in total obscurity.” This isn’t surprising, and by extension it’s unsurprising that lots of women bloggers are among the totally obscure, along with lots of men bloggers.
If you look at the blogs that men write—the ones that seem to be successfully monetized—and the blogs that women write, you see some fundamental differences. Successful blogs tend to be tightly focused; that is not often true of women’s blogs, which characteristically are rather gestalt. I believe that difference stems from men’s and women’s responses to fundamentally different life experiences. Women’s daily lives are gestalt, scattered among a score of conflicting responsibilities, whereas men’s daily lives are often spent on a job where they focus for long periods on the work at hand.
Consider, for example, Peter Rojas, who in 2006 was supposedly “the best-compensated blogger in history.” When Thompson visited him, we learn,
he’s sitting at an Ikea desk bedecked with three flat-panel screens and looking relatively fresh, considering he’s just come off another eleven-hour blogging jag. Like most A-list bloggers, he hit his keyboard before dawn and posted straight through until dinner. “Anyone can start a blog, and anyone can make it grow,” he says, sipping a glass of water. “But to keep it there? It’s fucking hard work, man. I’ve never worked so hard in my life. Eighty-hour weeks since I started.”
How many of us, whether we’re women or not, have 11 hours a day to spend on a single task? Writing at Work It, Mom, Lylah Alphonse, proprietor of Write. Edit. Repeat, puts it in a nutshell:
It’s about the daily juggle—my career, my commute, freelance work, homework, housework, married life, social life, and parenting—and finding the time to get it all done.
The issue for women is that few of us have 11 uninterrupted hours, or even eight, or even six, in which to develop, write, and market a blog. Observing my own work habits, I can say they reflect a lifetime of adaptation to demands on my time that come from every direction: work, friends, parenthood, wifehood, school, housekeeping, yard care, pool care, shopping, money management, pet care, healthcare, bureaucrats, editors, clients, advertisers, neighbors, cops…you name it, and somebody thinks they have a claim on my time that’s more important than anything I imagine I should be doing with my time.
The natural response to a cacophony of demands like this is to learn to do several things at once. And that is a very inefficient way of working. Yesterday, for example, around trying trying to get my blogging act together I had to…
• Walk with a friend at dawn, dragging the dog along by way of getting two things done at once;
• Call WellPoint to find out where the bill for Medicare Part D is, necessitating another time-wasting turn through a punch-a-button phone maze;
• Check and adjust pool chemicals;
• Wash two weeks’ worth of laundry;
• Read 80 pages of technical copy for a client;
• Rough out a calendar for one of my fall courses;
• Dredge up some old university-level course materials, rewrite and reformat 21 single-spaced pages newly targeted for lower-division community college students, and key them to the proposed new course syllabus;
• Create another single-spaced page of boilerplate copy-&-pastable comments keyed to this material;
• Feed the dog;
• Feed myself;
• Read page proofs;
• Water the plants…
I was in front of my computer more on than off from about 5:30 in the morning to about 11:00 at night. But as you can see, that time was interrupted repeatedly, and relatively little of it was spent focusing on what I thought of as the day’s primary task: learning more about driving traffic to FaM and putting some of those strategies into gear.
You know…if you have a wife who’s doing those household tasks and doing battle with the outside world, you have a lot more space in which to focus on your enterprise. And an enterprise—a business enterprise—is what a blog ultimately is. My guess is that men are socialized in many ways to focus more directly on the job at hand and are better at resisting interruption.
As I write this, I’m also dinking with trying to figure out how to get Alexa‘s code into FaM’s header. And really I do need to get up and drive to the oculist’s shop and find out why those glasses that were supposed to have been done last Wednesday haven’t surfaced. And brush my teeth and take a shower and wash my hair and fertilize the citrus trees and…oh, yeah: I forgot to eat, too.
Compare a few women’s PF sites with a few men’s, and by and large you see the difference I mentioned above. Check out the topics of the last few blogs at these Male-run and Female-run sites:
The Simple Dollar (M)
• Walking from your mortgage
• Employees’ attitudes
• Financial advice to readers
• Book review
• Frugal tips
Budgeting in the Fun Stuff (F)
• Monthly household budget
• Splurge on bedroom furniture
• Yakezie Alexa ranking
• Weekly favorites link-love roundup
• Gardening
Bargaineering (M)
• Federal legislation re extending tax cuts and unemployment compensation
• Increase on FDIC insurance to become permanent
• Moving a CD ladder to another bank
• Ally Bank’s .25% CD renewal bonus
• “Legal ripoffs”
Out of Debt Again (F)
• Top referrers
• Paperless bank withdrawals?
• Plan to pay off Discovery card
• Gardening
• Review of 2010 Quicken Deluxe
Darwin’s Finance (M)
• Analysis of energy tax credit toward central AC
• Gold bubble?
• Debt & major financial crises
• Saving for college
• Greek debt crisis & the markets
A Gai Shan Life (F)
• Summer travel costs
• Took out a store credit card
• Relaxing; blog challenge
• Weddings & cost of travel
• Freelancing as lifestyle
Five-Cent Nickel (M)
• Mortgage strategies
• America’s worst banks
• Credit card offers
• Traditional vs. Roth IRAs
• Sallie Mae raises online savings rate
Frugal Scholar (F)
• Children’s books
• Pantry remodel leads to domestic squabble, food ruminations
• Cookbook collection
• Pantry project (with literary references)
• Gardening & frugality
Get Rich Slowly (M)
• Home safety precautions
• Personal data collection
• The $20 challenge
• Learning from Baby Boomer experience
• Finishing what you started
(These are all guest posts, since JD has been on vacation)
The Digerati Life (F)
• Nintendo Wii games to cut down her gym costs
• Credit card review
• Carnival of Financial Planning
• How to lower homowner’s insurance costs
• Rant at annoying “Wall Street trader letter” circulating on Web
Notice how tightly focused the men’s most recent posts are? While the women are not exactly off-topic, they tend to write more personally and they often wander from the topic of personal finance in its strictest sense. Counting a discussion of a financial matter framed in terms of the current events in one’s own life as “personal” posts, I come up with this quantitative comparison of subject matter:
Men
• Personal Finance, Economy: 21
• Personal commentary: 2
• Blogging: 0
• Other: 2
Women
• Personal finance, Economy: 5
• Personal commentary: 13
• Blogging: 5
• Other: 2
Sooo… Does this have meaning? Should all us girls who just wanna have fun making a living off blogging start copying the boys?
Not IMHO. But I do think we need to recognize that women have a different blogging style from men’s. Possibly we have different things to say to the world. Moi, I like reading personal takes on personal finance (isn’t that why we call it “personal,” after all?)—but I have to recognize that may restrict my readership to other women.
The other lesson I take from this observation is some of the men’s blogs show how much focused energy is devoted to those sites. Making one of these things fly pretty clearly requires stretches of uninterrupted concentration. You don’t get the sense of gestalt from, say, The Simple Dollar, where Trent is posting at least two articles a day, often lengthy ones, that you do where authors appear to be writing on the fly, while they’re braiding the threads of their lives and can’t let go of even one.
Well, I finally got sick of The Simple Dollar, with its myriad typos, occasional provincial outbursts, and the repetitious, contradictory, and occasionally confusing posts. The inconsistent moderation was also really annoying. It is off my blog-roll and has been replaced by this great new blog I found called Funny About Money. The writer is a professional editor so the posts are always impeccable and never grating. FAM also brings a fresh voice. I expect there will be repeats once it gets established but so long as they’re not too close after each other I probably won’t mind.
Still love me some GRS though. JD and his staff writers are still awesome.
@ Nicole: “Never grating”? Careful, now…you haven’t heard me hold forth on “the crash of the Bush economy” yet. 😉
GRS is good. JD is still my fave, though. He’s a wonderful writer.
So are…oh, yes…some of the women bloggers. Have you read Simple in France?
Out of curiosity, where would you place professional public finance columnists? My two favorites are Liz Pulliam Weston (F) and Walter Updegrave (M). (I also, of course, enjoy Donna Freedman who is both a columnist and a blogger… Liz Pulliam Weston also has an Ask Liz blog now.)
Off topic: I hadn’t read Simple in France yet… Why? Because there was a “on the compact” blog I had really been enjoying from a woman living a simple life in France a couple of years ago… until she posted that women undergoing difficult pregnancies should take Cohosh and some other herbs that are traditionally used as abortifacents and are known to cause birth defects… and man she chewed me out after I gently tried to suggest that that might possibly not be a good idea. So I have bad mental associations with Simple + France. I should get over that and take the plunge. 🙂 Btw, kids, herbal supplements can be just as dangerous as conventional medicine… just because something is natural doesn’t make it safe. And don’t do drugs. M’kay?
@ Nicole: I love Donna Freedman’s writing. I’ve occasionally looked at Liz Pulliam… Some of those big sites, of course have big backing and so crank the money. There’s a point at where commercialism begins to turn me off, which, I suppose, is why I enjoy reading blogs.
I think the current Simple in France has only been blogging for a short time; the site’s archive only goes back to 2009.
Agreed about the herbal stuff. In addition to the fact that some of the products have side effects every bit as baleful as Big Pharma’s products, there’s little regulation and no way to be certain that what you get is what you paid for. Proceed with extreme caution.
Not all people who live simple lifestyles in France are crazy, eh?
@ Nicole– Non, je ne croix pas.
If I had known you were going to tabulate, I would have stayed more on topic! Also, I think the difference has to do with when people start blogging. All those guys were in place when I started–I too know all about the difs between a Roth and regular IRA, but I felt that ground was covered. I do teach my kids the basics though.
Like Nicole, I was thrilled to find your blog, Funny. I get annoyed when people who’ve been investing for two years declare that dollar cost averaging works, etc etc. You’ve been through it all and your experience resonates more than people simply pulling stats out of various personal finance books.
Well I liked your post and it brought to light a few things I have been wondering. There is such a wide variety out there, I much prefer the smaller voices as the more well-known on can get predictable for me.
@ frugalscholar: LOL! If we adjusted our styles every time we thought someone was looking hard at us, we’d never be ourselves.
@ dawn: Predictability is what you get when a subject has been done to death. How many ways can you say “live below your means, stay out of debt, save what you don’t spend, invest”?
I’m back with some more thoughts. There is overlap between frugality and personal finance–but they are not the same things. Frugality has to do with life choices big and small that enable you to be a good steward of resources–time, money, stuff, and so on. Looked at in that light, my OT posts are not really OT because they are about frugality.
To tell you the truth, I prefer getting my personal finance info from books (like Andrew Tobias–an oldie, but goodie). Frugality is all about personal choices–see The Tightwad Gazette as an example, which was all about life with kids.
Frugality is what enabled me to save enough so that my children COULD have gone to private colleges (though they chose not to). I learned a lot about financial aid and wrote about that. Frugality is what enabled me to pay off my house. And to have money to invest in all those index funds…
interestingly, the women bloggers–Revanche comes to mind–accomplished incredible financial feats with regular jobs and savvy and–yes–frugality, not through the windfall of an incredibly lucrative blog. So some of these women are, in fact, better role models–they continue to walk the walk.
ERGHHH. This is so long. Maybe I’ll copy and paste and post it on my blog.
@ frugalscholar: Yes…to my mind, frugality is a facet of personal finance–the “live within your means” part. But it’s also a facet of being a responsible human being: living with moderation, living light on the land. Frugality isn’t living like an anchorite. It’s simply using and enjoying what you need and only what you need.
Another interesting post. I haven’t been blogging all that long and I originally thought I might keep my gender a secret. That didn’t last long at all since I found it too annoying to refer to my husband as my spouse and all of the other hoops I would need to jump through to keep it hidden. I’m no girlie girl, but being female really is part of who I am and my voice as a writer.
I still get people who aren’t familiar with me who refer to 2 Cents (my pseudonym) as “he”. I kind of like that, since it means my gender isn’t overpowering my writing. I tend to write about more hard core investing and economics topics than a lot of other PF bloggers, so those posts probably sound more masculine. Still, I can’t write about that stuff all the time. Since my blog is about balance, I pretty much use that as a license to write about a lot of other stuff too.
I am so honored to be included! Just out of curiosity, I don’t understand what you are trying to do with Alexa and FAM’s header. Elaborate? Do you mean the Alexa toolbar in your browser? You’re at 259,176 on Alexa as of today. I keep the Alexa toolbar in my Firefox browser at all times.
I know I’ve lightly touched on the same topic on my blog before, as I’ve noticed the differences between the women’s PF blogs vs. men’s PF blogs. We do tend to write about our lives, and are less prone to giving advice. I suppose we’re more storytelling than saying “do this.” Then again, most of the women I know lead very busy lives and don’t have the time to blog 11 hours a day, as you’ve pointed out.
I have a fairly ‘dry’ writing style, but my posts are not focused. And that’s the way I like it. Perhaps it will hold me back from jumping to blogging full time, but then again, that’s not one of my goals.
Wow, I was surprised to see my name amongst such true A-list bloggers. You bring up an interesting point I hadn’t considered before. I have to admit, I tend to follow and correspond with male bloggers primarily, but I also tend to have a keen interest in investing and finance (with a love of PF of course). For whatever reason, it seems to be a male-dominated industry (I don’t work on Wall St, but everyone I know that does is male).
Good post, interested to hear what others think.
Phenomenally insightful post! It’s always interesting to understand actually WHY someone would go about writing on this topic. Care to share your thoughts? 🙂
I agree guys are a little more focused in the PF world, but not necessarily as you see from The Digerati Life.
Perhaps you should stop by my site one day and give me your analysis based off the following last titles!
* 200th Post – Thank You All Readers (With Song I Record For The Female Readers)
* The Emergency Fund Fallacy
* The Happy Loser Archetype
* An Extra Seven Hours A Week
* Hire A Financial Adviser Or Lose Money All By Yourself (Guest Post)
* The List Of Jobs I’d Do For Free Baby!
* Germany’s Missed Opportunity To Save Greece & Themselves
* The White Cloud of Happiness
* Pretend You Have Arrived So You Can Become
* Where Did All The Time Go
* The Dark Side Of Early Retirement
Awesome effort in this post!
Best,
Sam
I, too, find male personal finance blogs to be dry and repetitive. As you pointed out there is only so much financial advice to be given, so the art is in the telling. Women bloggers tell it better.
I really enjoy the personal aspect of FAM, however, I would enjoy it more (she said with her arms crosssed over her head for protection) if there was less political ranting. I assume you want readers across the political spectrum.
(Gentle smile here.)
Extremely interesting look at blogging from a gender viewpoint – and seeing if one is more suited towards monetization and realizing a full time income than another.
Honestly I don’t think gender really matters as there are plenty of successful female bloggers. What I think matters is subject matter, how you write, and what types of topics monetize better for certain types of monetization models.
In the numbers you showed above, it does seem that the full time bloggers were more focused on personal finance and economy topics – which in my experience are the topics that tend to be easier to monetize – at least in a traditional sense – through adsense ads, affiliates, etc.
If you’re writing more in a personal way, with more personal commentary, personal stories and relating through your blog to your readers – and creating more of a community, those types of posts can be harder to monetize I think.
I’ve found the topics that monetize the best are straight up news, how to posts, posts that answer questions that lots of people have, and posts that speak towards people’s own self interests.
When you look at the successful bloggers and their topics, I don’t think it’s an accident that they’re focusing on similar types of things.
This was very well written and interesting!
I prefer reading and writing more towards the personal side — but I know that comes at a cost, as my personal musings are much less valuable to the average person than… real facts and information.
I’m more of a reader than a writer, but I really like that there is a difference in men’s and women’s blogs. I’d lose half my enjoyment of reading blogs if everyone wrote the same way!
(I’m a girl, just for reference.)
Wow I never thought about the difference between men & women bloggers. But part of it may reside in how men generally want facts and hard data while women like to elaborate on matters at hand. Although I am neither woman or PF blogger, I do find this discussion very intriging!
Pretty interesting post. Rather surprise that there may be an outlook of a glass ceiling from some female bloggers, because from my experience, this is one niche in the web where gender may not be a factor, and at times can be a core strength (e.g., would you rather read about parenting from a near middle age mom or a 21 year old dude fresh out of college?)
The PF blog niche has grown massively over the past 5+ years, and though I haven’t kept as good of a track of it as I use to — I’m still firmly in the camp that touts: “You can write whatever the hell you want to write about and still make job-replacing income… ”
BUT, there will be times where you have to focus. Where you have to leverage, plan, strategize, consider monetizing angle, work hard, and yes, commit time to make it happen.
Very interesting post. I read it last night and decided to digest it overnight before commenting. Obviously you hit a chord with so many comments already.
I agree the women PF bloggers tend to write in a more personal style and the topics are not always traditional finance ones. As a woman, I relate to the “stories” more than “just the facts”.
I think we can monetize by taking advantage of the community we’ve built. I plan to get more into that this summer as I start my second year.
One thing I have noticed is that it seems that the males don’t always include women bloggers in their network.
I teased one blogger a few bout not having any female staff writers (out of several). He got a new writer recently and it was another male. I think he could widen his appeal to women by including a woman’s perspective.
@ Balance Junkie: For the longest time after FaM started appearing in blog carnivals, people thought it was written by a guy. Apparently at the outset I wrote boyishly. 😉 There’s a little tool called “GenderAnalyzer” that tries to guess whether a site is written by a man or a woman. Go to genderanalyzer.com to find it.
@ Mrs. Accountability: I’m amazingly unsophisticated about code. The problem was figuring out where to go to find the code for the header in FaM’s template. Mrs. Micah finally showed me how to get there. Now all I’ve got to do is go back to Alexa, install the toolbar, and figure out how to use it. In the middle of all that, BlueHost went down for about an hour, when half the city where its servers reside lost power and phone service.
One of the problems for me is that the techie stuff takes me a LOT of time to ponder through, whereas a younger or more technically savvy person would breeze right through it.
@ Rainy Day Saver: IMHO you’re best advised to write about what you want to write about, not what you think some niche should be reading about. Obviously you can’t ignore your readers, but when you let a topic drive your content, your writing sounds wooden and eventually you run out of content.
@ Financial Samurai: I’ll try to find time to look at some of those! Today I have to prepare course materials and tomorrow work with an IT person on getting the stuff into the new version of BlackBoard.
@ Bagel Girl: There are quite a few male-written blogs that have a lot of panache and interest. I like the one by the guy who’s teaching in Japan — Foreigner’s Financest. Get Rich Slowly can be very entertaining — it was a hoot when J.D. wrote about his gardening adventures and then tried to quantify his savings (if any) on produce. Heeee! Anyone who’s tried to grow tomatoes and discovered the plant for which you paid $8 disgorged a grand total of two ripe tomatoes, one of which was eaten by birds, has got to watch in awe.
@ Peter: Interesting point, that less journalistic posts are harder to monetize. Certainly it’s more difficult to target a higher placement on a carnival page, ecause they mostly fall into the “Other” category, which is invariably relegated to the bottom of the page. That’s why once I started a carnival with an “Other” category — half the time that’s where the really interesting posts congregate.
@ SP: I wouldn’t say that personal experience narrative is less valuable than “real facts and information.” Story is the basic way that humans pass values and history to each other. That’s why a good journalist or popular science writer will write a lead that connects dry facts to the experience of real people and then try to connect it to the reader’s likely real-life experience.
@ Kerry and Torrey: Variety is what makes the world go round, eh? I think that men and women, being at base human, want the same things; they just come at it with different styles.
@ Cap: Yes, clearly if you’re going to make enough blogging pay enough to call it a “living,” you’ll have to devote enough time to it to make it fly. Comes under the heading of “no free lunch.”
Thanks for the info on genderanalyzer.com.
My site was analyzed as being very gender-neutral, but they guessed a 59% chance it was written by a woman. That’s why like some of the others I’ve been referred to as a “he” in carnivals.
What a fun site genderanalyzer.com is! My site came up 51% written by a woman but quite gender neutral. I have a different blog where I write in a totally different context and it came up 90% written by a woman. Cool. My son’s personal blog came up 63% written by a woman, heeehee!! Very fun! Thanks for sharing it with us!
Sounds good, no worries. I get a sense you are frustrated with progress, which is why you would write this post. And if so, my only advice is to check back in one year after a continued amount of consistency and I’m sure you’ll do just fine!
@ Financial Samurai: Actually, the post came out of a face-to-face conversation with a group of women PF bloggers who live in the Phoenix area. The younger women brought up the question of whether there’s a PF blogger’s glass ceiling, an idea that arose at a BlogHer conference. The subject has been percolating at the back of my mind since that discussion.
I’m not at all frustrated with Funny. Truth to tell, FaM is doing amazingly well. It has earned enough now to cover the shortfall if the two classes I’m supposed to teach this next semester fail to make. When a spike in traffic jacked up earnings so high that AdSense returned more in two days than FaM normally makes in three months, I decided to spend this summer learning how to build readership.
The number-one thing I’ve discovered in that department is that it’s going to take working at it 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. At least.
Ooh– almost 30 comments… Popular!
Good attitude Funny! It’s important not to play victim. Please convey to your friend you spoke to that you don’t believe there is a glass ceiling. It’s human nature to blame other things instead of look inwards.
There is in no way a glass ceiling, especially when 50% of the world is made up of women!
Sam, as a man you can’t really say there’s isn’t a glass ceiling for women PF bloggers. You don’t experience it but it’s there. The power in our society is not derived from plain numbers or women would have been running the whole show a long time ago.
Having said that I do think this particular glass ceiling can easily be broken.
Hmmm…. Well, I do have to admit, F. Sam, that I don’t pretend not to be a “victim.” I just don’t use that term for the simple facts of life.
In the past, I certainly have been the target of plenty of discrimination; the first time I went to apply for a decent job, bearing a cum laude diploma and a Phi Beta Kappa key, I was told I wasn’t eligible because the bank didn’t hire women into those positions, but, the interviewer added, I’d be great in their secretarial pool. I can recall, among many other adventures, being advised against pursuing the doctorate because, said my committee chair, all the women he knew who had taken a Ph.D. had ended up divorced. And by golly, that reminds me of the very bright and highly qualified friend who was rejected for the doctoral program at the Great Desert University, because, she was told, “we don’t accept women over 40 into the Ph.D. program.”
Discrimination is subtler today (well, unless you’re of the Latin persuasion and you live in Arizona), but it’s still there.
That grouse groused, I kinda doubt that there’s a deliberate “glass ceiling” in blogging. C’mon. The blogosphere a corporation does not make! People seek out other people with whom they feel they have something in common. Most of the early PF bloggers were men, and so it’s only natural they would find each other and build networks that are largely male. On the other hand, every single one of the bloggers who have contacted me with an interest in forming a network has been female. Soooo… If we build a network among ourselves, are we discriminating against men?
As a general rule (of course there are exceptions, especially in the Twilight Zone that is the Internet), blogs make money because their proprietors have time and energy to dedicate to building and marketing them. As a general rule, most women’s energy is diverted to child-rearing, housekeeping, and the care and feeding of a man. If a woman also holds down a job, as most now have to do, she doesn’t have a heckuva lot of time or strength to build an enterprise that is every bit as much a business as, say, owning and operating a McDonald’s franchise. I suspect that explains a lot of the difference, to the extent that there is a difference.
About the difference in content and style between men and women: half the world is female. I figure if half the people on the Internet want to read FaM, I can live with that. 😉
Bingo Funny! There’s nothing stopping ANYBODY from starting their own website and becoming a successful blogger, whatever that definition is to you.
There is no person telling a woman she cannot start a site, name a site, write whatever she wants, build networks, make friends, comment on this site or that, and have a lot of fun.
I’m certain there is plenty of discrimination in the work place and in life against women. I empathize. But in the PF blogosphere, or the blogosphere in general, nobody is going to stop you from writing your best!
50% of 6 billion people reading your site will be a huge success! 🙂
Very interesting stuff! And am honored to make it in your article. There’s a lot of food for thought here, certainly. As for the glass ceiling, not sure I believe that necessarily — I think that there are a lot of contributors to blogging success. I think it all boils down to what your goals are for your site and how you go about deciding how to run it.
To be honest, if you want to blog for money, you’ll have to make some tradeoffs on how you run your blog/site. It could mean putting more time and effort in running your site, taking more risks with the content you present, taking more risks in running it as a business, making some harder choices about your site’s direction. I know that in the close to 4 years I’ve been pf blogging, that my own site has evolved quite a bit in order to accommodate these goals. Now I face the challenge of making sure I maintain a good balancing act — run the site as a business yet make sure to continue giving it my own voice as best as possible. With so many pf blogs today, it’s much harder to get your voice heard in the din. I can also say that a lot of the bigger blogs you mention were also some of the older ones in the space, and that gave them “first blog” advantage.
Do I think anyone can make money off their blog as a full time endeavor? I think anyone can do it, but it does take a lot of work as well as luck. And I am less optimistic about it than I used to be. The landscape changes quite a bit too, so that’s something to be aware of. It’s going to be interesting to see what the future holds for us in this space!
@ Digerati Life: Yeah, it’s clear that a bunch of changes and new strategies need to go into place this summer, while I have the time to think about them and learn how to implement them.
As for the future of the PF niche… Frankly, I don’t know. It’s true the biggest sites tend to rank among the oldest. The question is whether that’s because they got here first or because they’ve been in business the longest. It remains to be seen whether longevity serves you well on the Web. Given the volatile, yeasty nature of the Internet, one inclines to think what’s needed is fresh ideas and new, original sites, rather than hanging in there for a lifetime. You can see that others thinks so, too, when you observe how many probloggers are maintaining more than one site.
My site is 72% Man. Wow.
Notwithstanding my overbearing manliness, I really believe that you have to determine what success means to you. Is it money? Is it clicks in adsense? Is it page views? Is it a network of people? Is it conventional press?
Most of the GREAT bloggers you mention don’t talk about how much money they make on their blog (flexo does every month), so how can you compare? If The Simple Dollar is able to make $110,000/yr that might be enough for him to quit work wherever he might live, but it won’t work in NYC. You were able to replace two teaching classes, but I have NO idea what that means are you making $300/week? $1,000/week? I have no idea.
I think the internet is the great equalizer…until you admit it I would have NO idea if you were black, white, latin, green, woman, man, transgender, etc.
@ Evan: Holy Mackerel! Que macho! 😀 I don’t suppose you’re single…???
I have an idea what these guys are making because I’ve spoken to and corresponded with them in person. They’re earning enough that, in their family and community contexts, they can afford to knock off the day job. One of them is (or was, when I interviewed him) earning a highly acceptable income from his site. On the other hand, he works very hard at it.
I make $2,400 per course — that’s for a course that stretches over 16 weeks. The maximum number of courses I’m allowed to teach for the District is three per semester, or six a year. Thus the most I can earn teaching is $14,400. Amazingly, in the retirement context this turns out to be more than enough when added to the munificent $15,000 I get from Social Security.
In a year, I can turn about $8,000 to $10,000 freelancing, depending on the way the wind blows.
Thus I estimate that if FaM could earn about $10,000 a year, it would free me altogether from having to teach to keep food on the table. I would continue to teach anyway, because I like teaching and believe it’s healthy for us old buzzards to be around young people. But a steady, modest income from FaM would allow me to drop to one or two sections, which is a pretty light workload. Three sections can give one a few onerous moments.
I don’t mean to be a pain or nitpick, but like anything else in life what are YOU doing to promote FaM? I have never seen a guest post from you. Do you properly utilize all the wordpress plugins? Do you do keyword research? You don’t seem to do a lot of affiliate marketing? I am horrible at most of those things.
I think what annoys me more about blogging and especially PF blogging is what gets people going:
http://www.myjourneytomillions.com/articles/pf-blogging/
All that being said, I am sorry to inform you that I am in fact Married to a great woman, and I am not really all that manly (although I Love Football and Beer).
@ Evan: Drat! All the best men are married or gay!
Actually, I do write an occasional guest post and am laying plans for more. FaM is picked up now and again by publishers such as MSN Smart Spending and the Wall Street Journal. The site has a ton of plugins, including an SEO pack that’s said to be as good as any. And I recently got Funny up on FaceBook and Twitter (for reasons that I have yet to fully grasp…). Keyword research has so far flummoxed me a bit…what I’m seeing are words that have little or nothing to do with anything I want to write about. Probably I don’t understand how to use this tool and need to do some more learning.
Augh! Trent got 79 comments on how he wraps presents???? The weirdness of it.
That’s part of the story here: the weirdest posts are the ones that go viral. What drove Funny’s traffic out of low orbit in April? The ridiculous “No Laundry Detergent Experiment”! Say you don’t use soap in your laundry, and everybody on the planet wants to read it. Hand out some solid information, and they all fall asleep on their desks.
Just posted a how-to on boiling a scorched pan clean. Not weird enough, but maybe it’s pragmatic enough to pick up some readership.
If it makes you feel better, unless this present wrapping post was a recent (and inevitable) repeat, many of the comments were trashing Trent for what a crappy job he does wrapping presents, if I recall correctly. (I don’t think I thought it was that bad, but it has been a while.)
Maybe that’s what you need… more ridiculously stupid posts that everybody disagrees with. Then, you can either ignore them or go into the comments and say something that just makes things worse. I think TDS’s most popular posts in terms of comments are the ones where he’s talking about the superiority of the Nordic race.
Of course, JD on GRS does exactly the opposite– thoughtfully replies to dissension. He also corrects typos when they’re pointed out, which is nice.
It is true that sensible posts often don’t get a lot of comments even if they’re useful compared to ones that stir up controversy. (Is that why you’re hitting the gender issue in this one? Sneaky!) But I think the sensible and helpful posts do help a site for the long term. They give the blog cred. If someone is just spouting ridiculousness, eventually people get tired of it and move on. Of course, there’s new people discovering blogs every day so maybe it’s still a good business model.
Cough. A carpet is neither a car nor a pet. Discuss.
All the blogs I read are pretty much female blogs, barring Punch Debt!. I don’t exclude male blogs consciously; I just don’t find them relevant to me and I don’t enjoy them. I’m not after ‘how tos’ or economic analysis. I enjoy reading about people’s lives – real people – and I suppose it’s the way I blog as well.
Very interesting analysis. I wonder if there are other topics besides PF where Female bloggers do make a living with a blog.
Quite a few. Most notably, The Huffington Post was cofounded by Arianna Huffington; before she helped originate that valuable property, Huffington ran at least two blogs, Resignation.com and Ariannaonline.com.
You are definitely on the money about men having mono time and women running around like a chicken with their head cut off. So, maybe women, such as myself, should write about organization and being a superwoman. There is definitely an audience for that! 🙂
If men, monotize the PF blog topics, its also because their affiliates on those subjects bring in a higher rate than other affiliates (credit cards versus coupons). I know this from experience, but still can’t put myself to writing about credit cards, retirements, and savings accounts 24/7. I’m a woman… I want to write about more. My life is full of more.
Now, I am not saying there isn’t money available to make in those not-as-prominent affiliates, but you need to be smarter about planning your campaign.
Each time I get frustrated with reaching an obstacle or a short stacked ceiling, I have found a way to boost it up. And one awesome key, Networking.
So start a women’s PF blogger network and we can kick some ass! 😀
@ Money Funk: Well, there’s a women’s blog network out there, in the form of Blogher. Not restricted to PF, though…
Wow. This is a fantastic piece. Seriously fantastic. And I thank you for including me in the mix. I started blogging because I strongly believe that the notion of “personal finance” should include A LOT more than just stock picking, retirement planning, and investing. I take a more holistic view of money matters, and I suppose this is why my blog contains a myriad of topics unlike traditional PF newspaper columns. Heck, I just wrote a post on how to turn over-ripe fruit into ice cream. Go figure.
As you’ve noted, I’m not alone in my love of varied topics, and women’s blogs can reflect a “gestalt” life. I don’t think a blog boasting varied content can harm a blogger’s income though — through my blog I’ve landed a book deal AND I was voted the top money blog in Canada by the Globe and Mail. I beat all the boys. I guess you could say they got “chicked” by a frugal gal posting about ice cream. Kudos on a great article.