8 Keys To Build A Personal Finance Website
Stylish. Thrifty. Sophisticated. Those are three qualities that everyone running a personal finance website or blog should aspire to have. The problem lies with providing the proper design and the insights. You need to have a good idea of the audience that your financial advisory website will cater to and design your site in a way that’s both appealing and attractive to that audience before they even know it themselves.
Luckily, with the vast repository of information on the Internet, you spend hours digging up ideas and then trying them out. Here are some proven key points that will allow you to create the best design and content for your personal finance site.
Having a Mathematical Background
Did you know that many physics majors end up working in finance? Surveys from The Guardian show that for employment one year after graduation for physicists are most concentrated in the fields of education and finance. The point here is that a mathematical background is essential to producing insight in financial matters; physicists so often participate in finance because they are so familiar with the applicability of complex mathematical formulas and statistics.
Design Balance Between Artistic and Objective
An IronPaper report notes that: “Websites are an education, inspiration, and trust-building tool that directly impacts sales.” So, a tasteful design for most personal finance sites should involve a fusion between the creative and the technical. Your reader base wants to see numbers, conclusions, and insights, but they also will receive those same things with greater enthusiasm if the visual medium draws them in.
Make Use of a Knockout Main Page to Draw in Visitors
Take a look at Tesla’s main page which offers a stunning visual background to put you in the shoes of the driver before also presenting those who are interested with very particular specifications about the practical and aesthetic features of the vehicles. If you’re able to achieve this sort of aesthetic and balance in your web designs, it represents a great asset for any company seeking to differentiate itself online.
Create An Easy, Non-intrusive Sign-Up or Subscription Flow
Sometimes the content of your site doesn’t even matter in the sense that you can arouse a lot of interest in a user through the quality of your site’s content only to have time slip away because they absolutely abhor your sign-up or subscription flow. It’s a common problem with companies trying to get visitors to buy products and McKinsey even reveals that: “70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.” Seemingly minor details like the length of a form, the number of fields that a visitor has to fill in to proceed to the next step, or the number of questions asked correlate strongly to whether users choose to stay or leave.
Teach Utilization of Budgeting Programs
The premier budgeting programs used by most individuals are Mint and You Need a Budget, both of which are software that offers their users powerful visualization tools when it comes to characterizing their expenditures and spending habits. Visuals are incredibly compelling, so they are incredibly essential to the presentation of financial information on your site and the immediacy of the impact it has on visitors: “90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.”
Talk About The Importance of Building Credit
Credit exists as one of the cornerstones to financial health. With high credit comes a slew of perks like lower interest rates on your loans and car insurance, waived utility deposits, various credit card rewards bonuses in the form of redeemable points from spending, and a much higher lending ceiling. For more knowledge on fixing your credit, check out Creditrepair.com.
Experian reports a range of around $500 for those with the lowest credit scores (300-409) to $9,543 for those with the highest credit scores (781-850). Providing information on how credit scores are calculated, how people see good or bad credit, and the benefits of credit, in general, are easy topics that net you a lot of traffic.
Explain How to Systematically Alleviate Debt
Debt is the cousin to credit and both debt and credit are some of the most apparent and popular topics. After all, Americans hold significant amounts of debt as a population with over $764 billion in credit card debt and $8.63 trillion in mortgages – don’t even get me started on student loans and wedding costs. Discussing your own personal take on popular debt elimination methods like the snowball method or the avalanche method is a surefire topic that will generate interest for your personal finance blog.
Reference Existing Financial Information Websites and Current Events
People like someone who stays on top of things when doing their research. Customer engagement research performed by IDG Enterprise reveals that: “89% say that when a sales rep is highly knowledgeable and able to answer questions promptly it positively impacts the likelihood that they will purchase the solution for which they have downloaded content.” Knowledge pays off.
As an added bonus, doing research into current economic trends and connecting that to your financial analyses gives you more content to work with – it’s a win-win situation all the way around and it drives organic traffic. For instance, you may want to invest in a subscription with outlets like the Wall Street Journal orThe Economist for contextual financial information or Morningstar for more analytical details.
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