Weekend reading: A quick guide to Monevator

I have to get up ridiculously early on Saturday morning (I am writing this post in advance) so I won’t be able to do my usual run through the press.

Since apologies! I’ve only missed half a dozen Weekend Readings over the past few years, so I think my batting average is pretty good. 🙂

Instead I thought I’d give a quick recap of what’s going on here with Monevator, since we’re getting a lot of new readers recently and I’ve not updated the regulars on Monevator for a while.

Monevator now has two writers

This has been the biggest change in the past 12 months, and the most potentially confusing. It’s also been a change wholeheartedly to the good.

Monevator is now written by two bloggers, whose pseudonyms you can see at the top of the articles, just under the article heading. We are:

• The Investor – Yours truly. I am the founder of Monevator, and have been writing here for four years now. I am a semi-active investor (despite thinking most investors should be entirely passive) and many of my posts reflect this. I now tend to post every Thursday, and also write the Weekend Reading every Saturday.

• The Accumulator – An old friend of mine who kindly agreed to start writing on Monevator back in Autumn 2010. He is a passive investing fanatic, and unlike me he doesn’t stray from the path. You can find most of his articles under a passive investing sub-category, which I will soon be making into a separate tab in the menu above. After that, the passive faithful can simply read him and ignore me altogether! (Sniff). He has also written a bit about saving and budgeting, and I hope to see more of it from him. His articles go up on Tuesdays, and feature his trademark blackboard graphics.

My hope is that between the two of us we offer something for everyone – sensible passive investing wisdom for the majority who badly need it, crossover articles on ISAs, pensions and the like, and some more esoteric stuff from myself (I’m tending to leave the passive stuff to The Accumulator now).

I don’t foresee us getting a third writer any time soon. I’d love to find a weekly illustrator/comic writer, but have yet to find a single one who knows anything about money and investing. Quite the opposite – those I know are experts in being semi-destitute, wearing £50 t-shirts, and buying grande skinny Frappucinos for a fiver.

A few other site features

There’s been a few things added over the past year that experience suggests many of you haven’t noticed:

• A discussion tab – It’s not pretty, but the Discuss link (top right of every page) enables you to see all the latest comments Monevator, across all the posts. This is a great way of dropping into active conversations on posts that may be quite old. I’ve considered adding a forum to Monevator, but this should work as a halfway house.

• Three fancy tools – A good friend of mine kindly produced three excellent personal finance tools, including a mortgage calculator, a millionaire calculator, and a compound interest calculator. They were state of the art when he did them, and the graphs are still pretty cool compared to the opposition. The link is in the top right – check them out!

• Search facility – There is a Search button hidden down the right hand column. It’s powered by Google, and it’s pretty accurate. I’m going to move it up the page eventually.

• Notify comment follow-ups – At the bottom of a post comment box you’ll see a tick box, which enables you to ‘subscribe’ to a comment thread on an individual post. Any easy way to keep following the discussion.

I’m sure there’s some other stuff, but it’s very late at night.

How to get updates from Monevator

You know how you sometimes come across a cool website then never find it again? Well it doesn’t have to be that way. You can follow Monevator via:

• Email or RSS subscription – See this page to discover how to sign-up. I never spam anyone; your email is only used for receiving posts. Some 1,600 people have signed up this way.

• Facebook – You can follow Monevator via following its Facebook page. I don’t really do as much as I could with this at the moment (no time) but all the posts are linked to on there, and so should get lost on appear on your Facebook wall.

• Twitter – We’ve just surpassed the 1,000 follower mark on the Monevator Twitter profile. Again, time constraints mean I can’t currently chat on there much; I hope to again someday. But all our blog posts are auto-tweeted, so it’s another option for all you Twits out there.

Spreading the word

Sometimes people contact me to say thanks for something they’ve read, which always makes my day.

Now and then they ask if they can do anything in return. Invariably I ask them just to share the word about Monevator. You can do this by simply emailing links to your friends and family, or by using the ‘social’ buttons that you’ll find at the bottom of each post to spread articles you like on Facebook or Twitter.

I’m going to streamline those buttons soon, to reduce the options down to Facebook, Twitter, Email and Print. Hopefully that will increase the propagation of our articles; I think there’s plenty more who would like to read them.

Where we’re at in terms of readers

I don’t like to speak in terms of specific numbers or goals. This is a site about investing and making money, not a blog fest. That said, I can confirm Team Monevator continues to swell in numbers, although not as fast as I (or any other writer!) would like.

Here’s a graph showing how monthly traffic has grown over the past three years:

Hopefully this gives an insight into how Monevator has kept growing (and why if you email me I can take a while to get back, particularly if you’re one of the daily dozens trying to sell dodgy adverts or write guest posts about cheap loans).

If you’ve been here since the early days, you’re one of a select band of veterans.

Final thoughts

Writing a blog devours time like a teenage boy furtively devours tissues – and it similarly also tends to happen in gloomy bedrooms at 1am – but I’m very glad I’ve stuck at it.

Financially, the site is still not even washing its face in terms of how much I’d charge a client for my time. Another three years like the above and I may finally be getting there. Don’t blog to get rich, that’s for sure.

I’m not the best blogger for interacting with readers, for various reasons. But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate every comment you leave. I especially love to see readers talking to each other, and providing solutions – there’s been a lot of that on The Accumulator’s passive posts, and it’s great to see we’re hosting such helpfulness. I look forward to more of it.

Finally, in the next few weeks I hope to give the site a bit of a Spring Clean, so look out for some more little tweaks to come.

Thanks for reading and spreading the word – or at least for sticking around. 🙂