So you want to write a market blog
Blogging has grown wildly in popularity over the
past several years, with over 50 million blogs registered. According to
media research, 20% of all adults
have read a blog in the past week. Trading-related blogs have kept pace. Sites
such as Stock Blogs and
Seeking Alpha reveal hundreds of blogs
that cover topics ranging from technical analysis to economic commentary. The
TradingMarkets site has itself begun
a blog feature that
covers trading and investing from a variety of perspectives.
Amazon’s Alexa
site provides a rough, if imperfect, view of the relative popularity of
websites by ranking them in terms of traffic. A site with little traffic will
receive a rating of one million or higher; a site in the top 100,000 is
attracting a steady and sizable daily stream of surfers. It doesn’t take long,
playing with Alexa, to discover that most blogs are not generating much
traffic. If you’re an aspiring market blogger, what can you do to attract
readers to your site?
I’ve had some practical experience with this
topic, having begun a blog called
TraderFeed in December, 2005. It’s taken quite a few months to get the site
to the point where it consistently attracts thousands of readers a week and
quite a few hundred unique users daily, with an Alexa ranking around 250,000.
That’s certainly not enough traffic to worry the likes of Google and Yahoo!, but
it has succeeded in bringing me into contact with a variety of creative market
professionals that I would never have met had I not joined the blogging
community.
What makes for a good market blog? Here are a
few observations from my blogging sojourn:
1) Consistency of output: Take a
look at sites such as The Kirk Report,
The Big Picture,
Trader Mike, and
Abnormal Returns. These
bloggers provide unique content on a very regular basis, encouraging ongoing
viewing. Their sites encourage readers to
subscribe via syndication and thus build a loyal following. This is not
easy. Maintaining an active blog is a bit like hosting a daily talk show: you
are constantly challenged to provide unique content.
2) Unique perspectives: The worst
blogs are those that emote without informing; that provide generic material
(“this chart looks good”); and especially that tout products and services for
sale. The best market blogs hit you with perspectives you wouldn’t thought of
yourself. Check out the entries on the
CXO Advisory site and
Ticker Sense, which admirably
synthesize research for traders. Good blogs also organize existing material in
fresh ways, as can be seen in John
Mauldin’s popular site.
3) Links: Blogging is about being
part of a knowledge community. It is important to get that. Links do not
substitute for fresh material, but they do provide depth and background to your
topic, as in this article. Mutual linking is also an important element to
building Web visibility and traffic. A good blogger thinks like a good team
player in sports: your job is not only to excel, but to make others around you
better as well. If you’re successful as a blogger, you will help traders find
resources they would have never otherwise encountered. For this reason, I
devote an entire section of
my daily personal blog to links.
4) Tracking readers: There are a
number of services that help bloggers track how many readers they have, where
they’re from, how long they stay on the site, etc. This is extremely important,
as it provides you with meaningful feedback about the features that readers find
most valuable. It also helps you quantify the growth of your site more
precisely than is possible with Alexa. I use
a service called Sitemeter, which provides useful graphics and summaries on
number of visitors, page views, etc.
5) Engaging style: Blogs are most
popular when they provide short posts on interesting topics and include an
element of human interest. Highly technical blogs with lengthy entries may be
valuable, but generally will not attract a large audience. Many top-rated blog
sites incorporate humor, personal perspective, and other engaging features.
Here’s
an entry that brought many visitors to my blog; it has many of the elements
of a successful post. Do pay attention to the blog title: it is a major factor
in attracting links and placement within search engines.
My best advice is to clearly identify *why* you
want to do a blog. The best reason is to join a community of bright,
inquisitive, creative professionals and benefit from the mutual association.
The worst reason is to create a form of advertising or a platform for selling
ads. To be sure, there are blogs written by vendors of trading products that
are quite good. Invariably, these support users of the products by providing
education as to new and creative applications; see the blog from
Trade-Ideas for example.
Ultimately, when you’re a blogger, you’re an author and your success hinges on
the value of your material. If you have a lot to share in a community context,
you’ll find yourself richly rewarded when others return the favor.
Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D. is Associate Clinical
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical
University in Syracuse, NY and author of
The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003). As Director of Trader
Development for Kingstree Trading, LLC in Chicago, he has mentored numerous
professional traders and coordinated a training program for traders. An active
trader of the stock indexes, Brett utilizes statistically-based pattern
recognition for intraday trading. Brett does not offer commercial services to
traders, but maintains an archive of articles and a trading blog at
www.brettsteenbarger.com and a
blog of market analytics at
www.traderfeed.blogspot.com. His book, Enhancing Trader Performance,
is due for publication this fall (Wiley).