About debt reduction blogs
January 1st, 2006 | by mbhunter |Debt reduction blogs are a noticeable subset of personal finance blogs. People put up debt reduction blogs or websites for a number of reasons. Here are a few that I’ve seen:
- To give advice. Here, the best ones are by people who have been in debt and know how to get out. Experience wins out over theory here. Suze Orman and Dave Ramsey are good examples.
- To stick with it and solicit advice. They may have their progress toward debt reduction on their website, explain what they do along the way, and take and respond to reader comments. Regular posting on their blog keeps them on task. No Credit Needed has kept true to this kind of debt reduction blog, and he’s well on his way to being finished with his debt.
- To spam the search engines to get ad revenue. You get blogs with very little content and a lot of keyword stuffing and affiliate links.
- To talk about their debt to anyone who will listen. Now, bloggers by definition write for anyone who will listen, but for some, it seems that this is all they have going for them.
The first two groups are great sources of information. Anyone who reads gets to see how it’s done, and they also get to see the great support that visitors give to these people, whether it’s good advice or just words of encouragement. There needs to be more exposure of these kinds of blogs, because there is lots of good fruit waiting to be picked.
Eventually the third group will be deleted or otherwised de-ranked by the search engines into oblivion, so I really don’t care about them except that it makes finding the real debt reduction blogs more difficult.
The last group I still haven’t figured out. They’re up and posting, but they’re either not really interested in reducing their debt or they are just shouting to the world about their debt and don’t really want to hear any advice about it. It’s as if they’ve resigned themselves to living in credit bondage.
So why do they blog? Do they just want attention? It’s probably not that simple, but it would be a bit sad if it were. It would indicate that no one else is listening to them. A blog, especially a highly topical one, can’t show everything a person is going through. But I still wonder why they post their dirty laundry to the world with little or no effort to fix it.
I pray that bloggers that might fall in the “woe-is-me” group would make efforts to reduce their debt. Really!
