Back Nine Finance

Archive for the ‘Yakezie Challenge’ Category

Yakezie Challenge Update

It’s been another busy week here at Back Nine Finance. To start with this fine Friday, let’s take a look at an update of my Alexa ranking that I’ve been tracking since launching this site and deciding to join the Yakezie Challenge. The last update was on March 4th.

Beginning Alexa Ranking: 8,426,935

Last Update’s Ranking (update #5): 1,039,663

This Update’s Ranking (update #6): 673,429

The site has continued to make solid progress over the past 3 weeks, although most of the progress you see above came in the first week after the last update. The ranking has pretty much stalled out over the past 2 weeks, but I guess that was bound to happen sooner or later.

The goal is to get the ranking below 200,000 by July 27, 2011…about 4 months to go!

Week in Review

On Monday, we continued to work through the Bank Nine Finance Rules of Finance with Rule #3: Do the Big Things Right. I firmly believe that making good financial decisions on the large purchases in your life will help you achieve about 95% of the financial goals you would like to – the other 5% is achieved by saving money on day to day expenses.

Tuesday, I proposed some New Ratios for House Buying. Many commenters thought that perhaps these new ratios could be a bit restrictive, especially in areas of the country where housing is very expensive. I was under the belief that people in these areas of the country earned way more income, which made up for higher housing costs, but not everyone agreed. Regardless, along the lines of Monday’s post – keep your housing costs in check, and most other things won’t matter so much.

As I discussed in Wednesday’s post, I will be giving a financial presentation in a couple of weeks to a group of people who are part of a subsidized housing program (low income). I asked you all for tips to share with these folks who are in a much different financial situation than many of us. I sincerely appreciate your feedback and suggestions!

Finally, on Thursday, we began the series “Ask the Banker” with 3 questions that were submitted by readers last week when I introduced the series. Thank you to those who submitted questions, and to those who have questions you would like to see answered, email your questions to me using this link.

Link Roundup

Robert Brokamp had a post this week over at Get Rich Slowly about how living below your means is like saving for retirement twice. I think that was just a really long and confusing way to say that if you learn to live on less, you won’t need as much saved for retirement. I’m not sure I agree with cutting back in every single area, just to “save for retirement”. Saving a ton of resources for later assumes you will have better options available to use your resources on later. I tend to lean toward using more resources today, because I know what today looks like, what my health is like, etc. Not to say I am not saving for retirement – I most definitely am. But saving for retirement is just not the focus of my life as it seems to be for some people (at least in the financial blogosphere).

I’m going to cut the link round up (extremely) short, because to be honest, I just haven’t read many blogs this week. I’ve taken off work yesterday and today to work on a very large landscaping project at our house (we built the house, and the landscaping that was included was very minimal). I plan to write a post about it in the near future, so be looking out for that.

Sneak Preview of Next Week

On Monday of next week, we’ll continue the BNF Rules of Finance Series. This series is getting pretty close to being wrapped up, just a couple more rules to go.

Also, sometime next week, I am going to write a post about “A Day in the Life of a Commercial Banker” to give my readers an idea of what it is I do all day. This will go hand in hand with the “Ask a Banker” series, which we will continue next Thursday.

Other than that, who knows what we’ll end up talking about…come back and see! Have a great weekend everyone, and see you next week.

- Bogey

It’s time for weekly update #5 detailing my progress thus far in the Yakezie blogging challenge. Remember that my goal is to get my Alexa ranking below 200,000 within 6 months of beginning the challenge. Here are the stats for this week:

Beginning Alexa Ranking: 8,426,935

Last Week’s Ranking (week #4): 1,204,502

This Week’s Ranking (week #5): 1,039,663

I continued to make positive progress this week. I still haven’t seen the massive jumps in ranking that some other bloggers have experienced (except for the first week or to when I dropped about 6 million spots), but I have continued to improve the ranking by over 100,000 each week. I know at some point that rate of progress will slow down, but it’s fun while it lasts!

Blog Traffic Stats

I have to admit, I have absolutely no idea what type of traffic other blogs receive. I also have no idea what a respectable amount of traffic is for a blog that is only a couple of months old. Here are couple of key traffic stats from February for Back Nine Finance:

Unique Visits: 1,051 (compared to 333 total for January)

Average Visits Per Day: 95 (not necessarily unique)

I really have no idea if this is good or perhaps terrible. Any thoughts?

Link Roundup

Here are some links to some of my favorite blog posts from around the web this week:

• Sam over at Financial Samurai posted about how Diverse Interests Create Diverse Income Streams. I am currently working very hard on diversifying my income outside of my day job. I’ve talked before about my rental property endeavors. I have a couple other ideas brewing that I’ll discuss in the near future.
• JD Roth from Get Rich Slowly just got back from a long trip to Africa. He wrote a post about the experience called From the Rich to the Poor. It is a very eye opening read.
• JT at Money Mamba wrote a post entitled Solving the Retirement Crisis: A Tax Proposal. It’s an interesting proposal, but as with any major change involving taxes, it’s probably a long shot. That’s why I wrote a post earlier this week which discussed 4 Questions to Consider When Deciding Where to Put Retirement Savings. Taxes likely aren’t going anywhere (but up) – might as well learn to plan for them.

See you all next week.

P.S. – I should have an update on my real estate investing adventures next week!

First of all, Back Nine Finance was privileged to be included in 2 carnivals this week.

My post titled Things to Consider When Forming a Partnership was included in the Totally Money Blog Carnival hosted over at Fat Guy – Skinny Wallet.

Also, my post about Choosing My Next Real Estate Investment was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance #297 hosted by Ben over at moneysmartlife.

Now, onto my weekly update regarding my progress in the Yakezie Challenge…

It has now been about 4 weeks since joining the challenge, and my progress looks like this:

Beginning Alexa Ranking: 8,426,935

Last Week’s Ranking (week #3): 1,313,234

This Week’s Ranking (week #4): 1,204,502

I am super happy with the continued progress made this week toward my goal of getting my Alexa ranking under 200,000. Still a long ways to go, but I have made positive progress each week, and I am thankful for that.

But even more exciting, I got some great reader feedback this week from you all, and I am very appreciative of that. What I was most looking forward to when I started this blog was the interactions I would (hopefully) have with readers of the blog. I truly love to talk about money topics, and the discussions with you all are what make this worth the time and effort. I hope you’re getting as much out of it as I am.

I am interested to hear about topics of interest to my readers. I’d would also love to begin posting reader questions, perhaps once a week, and use the blog as a resource for people to get feedback from both myself and others readers for financially related questions they might have. If you have a topic you would like to read more about, or a question you would like to see answered on Back Nine Finance, you can let me know by using the “contact me” link at the top of the page, or alternatively, you can just comment on this post, as I read each and every comment on this blog.

Looking forward to continued progress in week #5.

- Bogey

Today marks approximately 3 weeks since I joined the Yakezie Challenge. Time to provide my weekly update on my Alexa ranking, which is the basis for the Yakezie Challenge.

Beginning Alexa Ranking: 8,426,935

Last Week’s Ranking: 1,456,971

This Week’s Ranking: 1,313,234

Certainly, my meteoric rise through the ranks of the financial blogging world has slowed a bit (I was joking), but I am certainly satisfied with the progress this week. My traffic over the past several days has increased substantially, most likely due to 3 guest posts I had published over at Free Money Finance. These posts made up a 3 part series titled: Launching the Career of Your Dreams. You should check it out! A huge thanks to FMF for allowing me to guest post.

Post #1

Post #2

Post #3

Sometime toward the end of the month, I plan to post some site stats from my first 2 months. It is super interesting to me to see how the traffic to my site has gown in its short existence.

Thanks to everyone that has been reading and commenting so far – I look forward to even better discussions very soon.

It has been about 2 weeks now since jumping into the Yakezie Challenge. I have been reviewing my progress every Friday, so let’s check the stats for this week.

Beginning Alexa Ranking: 8,426,935

Week 1 Updated Ranking: 2,141,547

This Week’s Ranking Update: 1,456,971

That’s not bad progress at at for week #2 in my opinion. I actually figured my progress would slow down quite a bit this week after such a large jump in the rankings last week. Perhaps my progress this week was due to some pretty decent articles that I posted (in my opinion) this week. Let’s review…

Monday I talked about Choosing My Next Real Estate Investment.

On Wednesday, I talked about Things to Consider When Forming a Partnership.

Then yesterday I decided to poke some fun by telling you: Don’t Underestimate “Central Coasters”.

These articles all generated decent traffic to the site, but I would still prefer more discussion and feedback from readers. So if you’re here, and you like what you are reading, or perhaps even disagree with me, please, leave a comment! I really look forward to discussions with readers of this site.

By the way, next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I will have 3 guest posts featured over at Free Money Finance. FMF is a great personal finance blog that I have been reading for several years now. Make sure to stop by there next week to check out my guest articles!

Pushing on to week #3 of the Yakezie Challenge…

Approximately 1 week ago, I took the plunge and decided to join the Yakezie Challenge. The first week or so has gone pretty well, and I have seen my Alexa ranking take quite a nice jump. The details of my ranking are as follows:

Alexa ranking at beginning of Yakezie Challenge: 8,426,935

Alexa ranking as of today: 2,141,547

Not bad progress at all, considering this has been pretty much a wasted week for me. Although I was off work for 3 1/2 of the 5 work days this week (due to a freaking blizzard), I didn’t do near as much writing as I wanted to. But, my wife and I did spend a fair amount of time (a lot of time) with some good friends of ours this week, so all was not lost. We also came up with a few fairly solid business ideas, one of which will probably get off the ground very soon. I’m probably only a few blizzards away from becoming a billionaire!

Stay tuned in the next couple of days for further discussion on these business ideas, as well as a discussion on how we booked a super cheap vacation (we were bored and cold, and are headed somewhere tropical – details soon).

I am looking forward to making further progress in the Alexa rankings over the next week. Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read and/or comment on my blog.

After announcing on the Yakezie forums this morning that I had plans to join the Yakezie Challenge soon, many kind folks suggested that I go ahead and jump into the challenge immediately.

Good suggestion.

Here we go!

My goal in order to be successful in the Yakezie Challenge is to get my Alexa ranking below 200,000 by July 27th, 2011 (6 months from today).

Current Alexa Ranking: 8,426,935

When I first installed the Alexa toolbar about a week ago, I had a ranking of about 10 million, so I have already came a long way.

You can learn more about the Yakezie Challenge here.

Learn more about Yakezie here.