Beyond the Rhetoric

Well, duh!

Kenneth Dickson from InvestorBlogger was the first person to take advantage of my 90% off review sale, so he obviously recognizes an incredible investment deal when he sees one. On his blog, he talks about every kind of investing imaginable, like looking into different income streams, managing your expenses, and other useful stuff to aid you in your quest to make money. Oh, and if you’re a blogger, Kenneth yaks it up about WordPress too. That’s a lot of content!

Investing for Noobies

I’ll be honest with you: I know next to nothing about the world of investing. Although I realize it’s probably not the smartest thing to do, I have most of my money holed up in a high interest savings account rather than dabbling those dollars in the stock market, mutual funds, and all those other tickers that investment gurus like to watch. Thankfully, while Kenneth Dickson’s blog is all about investing, the way he describes the information is ingestible by even noobies like me.

Take one of his most recent posts, for example. In Loans and Rates: Four ways to save money on your mortgage or personal loan, he provides enough background information on interest rates so that even beginning investors (and borrowers) can understand what’s going on. The first tip that he provides sounds obvious enough, but not everyone would be aware of it:

First, if your mortgage rates are rising, your savings rates should be, too.

Well, that makes sense. And that’s how many of the posts on this investment blog go. Kenneth lays out the scenario and then goes into enough detail that you have something to gain from reading it, while keeping them short enough that you don’t get lost (or bored) in the process. Kudos in that respect.

Here are a few more posts that caught my noobie eye:

• Chinese Domain Names: They’re available!
• Payperpost Click Thru Rates: Much HIGHER than you’d expect…
• LCD TV vs. Credit Card Debt – Is it really worth 12 years?
• Interest Rates: Taking Aim at Compounding
• 10 ways to send traffic AWAY from your blog

Someone Needs a New Blog Design

I realize that Kenneth is more of an investment expert than a web designer, just as I am more of a freelance writer than an Internet marketer. That’s still no excuse for having such a bland and generic blog design.

InvestorBlogger features the tried and true MistyLook theme, first popularized by its use on a certain panda killer‘s blog and later implemented by nearly anyone looking to make money online. While Kenneth did go through the trouble of using a different header image, it’s still rather generic at best. He didn’t even change the color scheme at all.

As a result, despite the useful information you may find within, InvestorBlogger (great name, by the way) very much looks like an amateur effort. Content is important, but it’s the presentation that will draw visitors further into your site.

More Design Stuff

I have a few other suggestions in terms of the look and feel of Kenneth’s investment blog. In the interest of brevity, here they are in bullet form.

• Lose the Related Posts on the index page.
• Too many categories: why have WordPress and WordPress Classes?
• Category names aren’t very descriptive. More Reading vs. Good Reading?
• The sidebar feels too busy for me. Drop some of the fluff.
• Lack of graphics. I realize that it’s an investment blog, but a few images here and there would really break up that huge body of text.
• Change the byline to read Kenneth Dickson rather than kennethdickson.
• Hard to tell where one post ends and another begins.

Make Money Investing with InvestorBlogger

Follow Kenneth Dickson as he embarks on his “random walk to wealth.” His writing style is fluid and ingestible, while sponsored posts blend in seamlessly with the rest of his content. With a current pace of more than one post a day, there will never be a shortage of things to read at InvestorBlogger. Subscribe to the RSS Feed to stay on top of the latest happs.

Filed under Money, Sponsors.