It has been two years since I set up my Finance aggregator blog. It started with my interest in reading local finance blogs because I am able to relate to them as compared to those written by the professionals. As the number of blogs that I read grew, I experimented on different RSS feeds readers to better consolidate and organize them. It wasn’t long before I realize that there is an untap market for local finance blogs.
It is almost impossible to find the finance blogs that I read through the conventional search engine and is usually through links or recommendation. Hence, these blogs get very little attention. It is a waste as some of them have really good advice and information. If I could create a site to consolidate all these blogs together, I can then focus on generating traffic to that one site which will in turn generate traffic to the aggregated blogs. Hence, TheFinance.sg was born.
It wasn’t smooth sailing and I am faced with challenges unlike a conventional blog because the articles are not owned by me and I have to seek the author’s approval first. Other challenges include getting a high rank by the search engine, generating interest, layout, automating the feeds etc. However, I’m pretty confident that with enough time, I will be able to address them.
The biggest challenge I face is competition especially from big established organizations. What if a site like Yahoo Fiance or MSN Money decide to create a blog aggregator too?
In fact, there are already a few microsites locally that is doing something similar. While I only published an excerpt of the authors article and linking it to their site, the microsites published the full article and credit the author for it. The authors are more willing to have their articles published in full at the microsites because they are more established, reputable and most importantly generate huge amount of traffic.
How then can I stop them from taking away what I have painstakingly built up?
Has any of your sites wind down because of this or have you successfully reinvented yourself? I would love to hear your thoughts and experience.
