NetworthIQ Blog

In the spirit of the financial blogging field from which we originated, we released two new features this week to help NetworthIQ become a financial blog for anyone. You can now post an entry with your monthly net worth update, and comment on public profiles. In addition we changed the comparison chart to use the median net worth’s as the averages have become too skewed.

You can treat the entry just like a blog posting, commenting on what impacted your net worth for that month, sharing thoughts on what strategies have helped increase (or decrease) your net worth. You can start a discussion in the comments about these topics as well. Beginning with these features, we hope to evolve NetworthIQ to a vibrant personal finance community where ideas can be freely shared.

bjlee979 appears to be the first one to take advantage of the new entry feature. There a few comments popping up as well.

Look for the rounding out of the blogging features soon, with ability to navigate all monthly entries (archives/permalinks), and RSS feeds for public profiles.

Free Money Finance is hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance. Check it out to get the best of this past week’s postings from across the personal finance blogs.

As of about 2:30pm Pacific today we hit 1,000 users … a milestone we’ve been looking forward to for some time, and never expected to hit while still in beta. And even more amazing is the willingness to share profiles … over 39% of our users have made their profile public. That’s a rate of participation which is very significant … most numbers we’ve seen have maxed out at about 25%. Way to go NetworthIQ users!

Thanks to all of you who’ve joined us in making this a rapidly growing and lively community site!

In another way we’re marking another milestone … more public team communication. This is the first post from a member of the team other than our brainy idea guy, Mr. Williams. With all those bright ideas whizzing around in his brain (along with his new found stardom from the NYTimes article), we thought it was time we gave him a break and stole a little limelight for ourselves. (Just kidding, Ryan, we’re happy to have you be the “voice of NetworthIQ” anyday!)

Here’s to all the exciting new stuff we have coming your way!

The hits keep on coming… Hot on the heels of The New York Times article, we got another huge link from Robert Scoble, one of the top bloggers on the web.

Thanks Scoble!

Wanted to highlight a couple more users who are using the NetworthIQ badge:

Karnic3881 (net worth)
washu (net worth)

Those that have followed this blog know that it was big goal of ours to get to 500 users. We had hoped to get there in the first month, but ended up at 200. I then extended the goal to two months. Well, it wasn’t far off, as we just hit 500 at two months and two and a half days. Getting over 200 users today sure helped that though ;-). Another goal I had was to get to 50,000 page views (cumulative) and we shot right past that today as well.

Woo-hoo! Time to check off those milestones in Basecamp.

Welcome New York Times readers (article by Elizabeth Harris)! We hope you find NetworthIQ interesting and we’d love to hear any ideas you have to make it better. We have a long list of features on our todo list, but the more we hear something, the higher up the list it moves. As you can imagine, traffic is surging today and we’ve already nearly doubled our user base in a few hours since the article came online last night.

Congratulations as well to Jim. There are many excellent personal finance bloggers and it’s very cool to see this segment of the blogosphere is getting noticed.

I never thought I’d say this, but today, I love MSN (Scoble, you listening?). After only two months, NetworthIQ is now #1 on MSN for both the keywords, net worth and the phrase “net worth”. MSN has consistently been our biggest traffic driver. I’d also like to rank highly for personal finance, but that’s a much more crowded space. So, for now net worth is the primary target.

Where’s google and yahoo? Don’t ask. They’re definitely behind the times ;-). I believe we’re too new at this point to rank highly there. I’m anxious to get a PageRank and see what happens then. Is there a sandbox effect happening? Tough to tell because we’re definitely indexed in both and come up fine in direct networthiq searches.

We maintain a simple (but effective, IMO) SEO strategy for NetworthIQ:

• Create lots of content that is updated frequently. Well, we don’t directly create it. Our users take care of that part. Every time a public profile is created we have a new indexable page and the home page and listing pages change/expand. All of this requires no additional effort on our part.
• Produce clean, standards based pages, that are easy to index. Minimize markup, and place all script and style blocks in external sources.
• Make clean URLs that are easy to navigate. (We use ISAPI Rewrite, but why does Microsoft not put this into IIS? I could give my opinion on that, but since I’m liking MSN today I won’t knock Microsoft.)
• Focused titles and headings
• Encourage backlinks by both being a fun new app, and by opening up public profiles so that users link directly to their profiles. We’re working hard to take advangtage of Blog Power when it comes to SEO.

If you received the newsletter you’ll know that we’re working on entries/comments and for a user’s profile, which if utilized, has the possibility of exponentially increasing the indexable content.

One area for improvement is to update titles to move NetworthIQ to end of the title tag, thus highlighting the keywords earlier. Also we should encourage backlinks to use “net worth” in the anchor text (i.e. NetworthIQ - Track, Share and Compare your net worth or Track, Share and Compare your net worth with NetworthIQ, or something like that), but you can’t always control that, and it gets to be a little wordy. Plus, we’re grateful for any link regardless of anchor text.

Have any other SEO suggestions? I’d love to hear them.

Wanted to give a shout out to MMB (net worth) for being the first to use the NetworthIQ badge. Leave it to a fellow Northwesterner (is that a word?) to get the ball rolling. Let’s help her get more than 2.35 loyal readers, and help with the condo decision.

Hazzard (net worth), you’re next buddy. I know you had the idea in your head, so why not put it in place? It’ll give you something to do while you’re listening to your new iPod Nano.

Back to school shopping put a dent in your net worth? This being the beginning of the month (is it September already?), now’s a great time to update your net worth for August.

A quick reminder for you bloggers that have to update your net worth on your blog. Be sure to check out our badge so that you can save yourself some work.

Look for our first newsletter in the next couple of days and have a great holiday weekend.