How to Improve Your Knowledge of US Finance

Because the US economy is in such as an uncertain state, it is crucial to stay informed of our financial situation. But if you have a liberal arts background (like I do) or you didn’t grow up talking about the Dow Jones, Futures, or the NASDAQ, then you might be a bit in the dark when trying to understand some of the financial situations that we are facing. So here are some ways that helped me learn more about finance.

1. Read the Wall Street Journal – The WSJ goes into detail about financial situations, such as the sub-prime mortgage, better than other magazines such as the NYTimes. You’d be surprised at how well the WSJ explains certain situations for those of us who don’t have MBA’s from Wharton – at least not yet.

2. Reference WikiInvest – When you start reading the WSJ, you’ll probably come upon jargon that you’ve heard of, such as the Dow Jones, but don’t fully understand. Take the time to look up what these expressions mean, how they got started, and what they show. If the reference is not available in WikiInvest (because it’s a relatively new website), see Wikipedia.

3. Read Finance Books – One book that I just finished called Boone is an autobiography about T. Boone Pickens that gives a glimpse into how finance, take over, and wall street can be very exciting stuff; it also talks a lot about entrepreneurship. Another book, which I haven’t read yet but plan on soon, is Greenspan’s book “The Age of Turbulance”. Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006 – so basically he was running the Federal Reserve from Reagan to Bush, which is pretty unbelievable. I hear it’s a great book and I’m looking forward to reading it.

Personal Finance

Since I just finished my consulting gig with Mindsite, a website specializing in personal mental health diagnosis, I am taking a couple of days to reorganize my life (it’s also obviously a New Year’s resolution). One of my first stops was personal finance – not because I’m bad at but because it’s obviously so important. I’ve tried expensr.com, an online site to catalog your spending, but I found it to be rather redundant from my credit card sheet. So instead of relying on an online database, I’ve decided to build my own Excel spread sheet (one things I’ve noticed is that it’s better to build your own system, even if it resembles one of the online databases, so that you know exactly how it works – and you improve on your Excel skills).

If you’re looking for more tips on life management, a great blog (and one of the most popular) is Lifehacker - it’s a great site if you want to improve upon your email, time management, goals, life management, etc.

Dyslexia and Entrepreneurs

Reported in the New York Times article, and according to several studies, there is a high incidence of dyslexia in entrepreneurs. The NYTimes explains that people with learning disabilities at an early age develop high verbal skills and how to delegate work to others. They also find older confidants to aid them through their learning disabilities. Some famous entrepreneurs with learning disabilities include Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways and Charles R. Schwab, founder of Charles Schwab.

FaceMash

An article referenced by the New York Times in a story about Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg talks about the somewhat controversial founding of Facebook. It talks about how three Harvard students thought of the idea and apparently hired Mark to do some coding for it. What I’d like to point out, however, is that on the second page it talks about Facemash.com, an online bracket-like competition- think NCAA baseball tournament but the teams are senior guys and the competition is based on looks, and the score is based on votes by registered users- to find out who is the most attractive senior at Harvard. Well, I can proudly say that I was seeded in this competition- because I was a senior at the time- and I even made it to the semifinals. No big deal. Was that my fifteen minutes? Let’s hope not.

Bo Knows Bow Hunting

Bo Jackson used to be one of my idols growing up as a professional athlete in both Baseball and Football, but who would have thought he would become my idol again when I got older, this time in another sport of bow hunting. I remember seeing Bo in a hunting show a couple of years back but I didn’t know he was as serious as they say he is in this great article in ESPN online. As a fellow bow shooter I can’t help but admire his bow room and his passion for the sport. I just bought my first compound bow and I practice everyday in my bow room, which is in my basement. It is 15 yards long so I get to practice several times a day- and I already practiced once this morning. It’s a relaxing and fun way to blow off some steam before and after work.

Sean Taylor’s Death

An Fox News article written about Sean Taylor’s death, and several other black athlete’s death, by an African American journalist to African-American men. Regardless of your race I think you should read it if you haven’t already.

SEO

In my search about the best SEO tactics I found a great article written by Pole Position Marketing on keyword research. The article explains how to find certain keywords and phrases to optimize your search engine results- an important initial step towards your sites best SEO. My only complaint was the section devoted to disclaimers- meaning the part that says, “I’m not saying that this article is better than others, there is a lot of information about there…”, etc. Just leave the disclaimers out please. But other than that the rest of the article has some great insight into the first steps towards keyword, meta tag, and other SEO research.

Twitter

After reading a blog post I decided to join Twitter, an online community that allows immediate updates on all your happenings. At first I couldn’t help but think, who cares about what I am doing? And then I tried it for a couple of days and I no longer thought who cares, I was now convinced- who really cares about what I am doing? I did, however, get one follower but I think that this person was being polite and reciprocated to follow me- because I decided to follow them.

Long or Short Text

I recently posted a question in the Q&A on Gooruze, an online marketing community, and I got some unreal advice so I thought one way I could reciprocate is by summarizing all the threads here and on Gooruze. First, thank you to the responses from Fre-Entity, Al-Scillitani, danlondon, Marc-Loveridge, BrianChappell, TheNugFarmer, and WarrenDuff.

Question:

The site that I am working for has 300+ pages of professional content. Do you think it is better to keep the very long pages on just one page or break them up into smaller, individual pages? What would be more profitable or better for SEO?

The longer pages could probably be broken into 5/6/7 pages.

Thanks for your help. This site is pretty awesome so far. I’m trying to get more involved.

Answer (summary)

THINGS TO INITIALLY CONSIDER

- Think User Experience

- is it easier to use broken up or one long text?

- Search Related Terms

- Search the terms your are looking for and look at the top 10 to 15 results. Base the answer on what is found on those pages. If the majority have 1000 words on the page, then follow that, if they have 100, then have 100, etc…

- If it’s quality content, people will click through or scroll down

- Check Page size:

- Serge Bondar last year ran a test “Serach Engine Indexing Limits: Where Do they Stop? Based on his data Slurp stopped at 210kb.

LONG TEXT

Benefits:

- Increase time spent on site

- the visitor knows exactly how long the article is.

- the visitor knows exactly how long every section is (if only one section is in his interest)

- better for social bookmarking, One Digg, Sphinn, … button, at the bottom/top of your article (different pages = last page of the article ? every page …)

- if the visitor browses with the internal navigation, he knows directly what is before & after the section

- more keywords on one page, more links to one page (instead of 15 links to page1, 12 to page 2 …)

- if there is a comment section, then the possibility is higher people will read them.

If You Do

- Provide decent internal navigation

o on top of the page a good introduction with internal links to the sections

o on the bottom of every section a top link (where you would see the internal links of the sections directly in the viewport).

- Enhance the Readablity/make your content easy to scan

o Put some time in marking up the text, put strong tags around keywords

o Keep your typography tight, whitespace & line height to enhance readability.

o add illustrations or pictures if they can add extra value to the content (make it easier for the visitor to know where the text is about)

SHORT TEXT :

Benefits

- Increase Page views

- Readers like breaks

- “No one reads long text”

- People like breaks

- Ask yourself

o Why are newspaper stories printed in columns?

o Why is copy broken into paragraphs?

o Why do we use bullet points

If You Do

- For SEO, you’ll want to differentiate the Page Title Elements of all URLs involved with a record that has multiple pages, and be sure to link to the sub-pages with keyword-rich anchor text.

- Always give a reason to click and a clear explanation as to what they are clicking to, and change the Page Title Elements for each new record (though it may be a subset of a larger record).

New MVM Revenue Model

Momentum Video, or MVM, is a rock climbing video site that I’ve had on my blog roll for some time now. Over the past few years they have produced high quality videos on their site for free. High quality is the key words here. They weren’t Youtube type videos with shaky camera movements, low budget lighting, and poor editing- they are well done video entertainment. And now they are trying to make money.

Over the past few years they have provided the service free, while promoting their DVD sales, but in doing so have created a loyal following. My brother and I certainly check out their site every week, and I’ve spread the site to numerous other climbers. But just recently they have changed their revenue model- or perhaps created one. Now they charge $6/month for access to the videos.

It’s interesting to look at how they might succeed. They are going up again a behemoth, Youtube, that provides billions of videos for free. But one thing Youtube sometimes lacks is quality, especially in difficult mediums such as climbing and fly fishing (two areas that I am likely to watch). If it isn’t done right, or professionally, climbing and fishing videos are the worst. And therefore there is, or might be, a market for buying higher quality videos. Momentum seems to think so and I hope their right. I know that I’ll be buying their subscription- what’s $6 for some sick entertaining videos during my work week? I just spent that on my hot chocolate and croissant and I don’t get to eat those again like I get to watch these videos again.