PF Blogger Interview: Lazy Man and Money

I can’t believe it has been a month since I have posted one of these great interviews. For today’s interview I had the pleasure of speaking with one of the most popular personal finance bloggers- Lazy Man of Lazy Man and Money. In fact Lazy Man was a full time blogger until he went back into the work force recently. Enjoy the interview:

Me: What was your first major break as a blogger?

Lazy Man: That’s a tough one. I remember being excited about things that were silly early on. One time I got a Best Choice Blog on Brainwash Cafe – a blog that isn’t exactly lighting it up in the traffic department. It was huge to me. Another time I had an article make PF Blogs most popular list and I thought I was the coolest cat on the block. However, I think that getting nominated for Reader’s Choice as one of the Best Money Blogs of 2007 by Performancing. I finished third, which was pretty cool considering I don’t have a 10th of the readership of some of those people nominated. All that said, I’m still waiting for a huge site like the Consumerist or Lifehacker to realize I exist.

Me: What have been some of your major roadblocks on the journey to success?

Lazy Man: Every three weeks or so, I run out of ideas.  I have nothing.  When that happens, I try to read other people’s blogs and comment on them.  Sometimes I get new ideas and often I find that I get traffic from my link in the comments.  Other times, I’ve simply got too much going on to keep up with.  Setting up advertising deals, dealing with public relations people sending you books all the time, writing back to commenters, it can get to be pretty time consuming.

Me: Being one of the most popular personal finance blogs out there, how would you do it all over again if you were to start today?

Lazy Man: Learning how to blog is a process.  When I started, I simply got a Blogspot blog and started writing.  For 6 months no one came to my site.  Then I learned that there was a community of other bloggers, blogging on the same topic I did – personal finance.  So if I had to do it all over again, I’d probably pick up a book about blogging.  I would also follow websites about blogging.

Me: If there was one thing you could change about Lazy Man and Money what would it be?

Lazy Man: This is another tough one.  I have the power to change just about everything on Lazy Man and Money.  So in a lot of cases, I’ve made some of the changes that I already see fit.  I realize that I simply don’t know what I have to do to take Lazy Man and Money to the next level.  This is why I’m working on a reader survey.  I can never get enough good feedback.

Me: Now it’s time for you to have some fun and tear my blog apart. How would you improve Studenomics?

Lazy Man:  I can be extremely harsh sometimes, so I hope you can take this… I’d switch to showing 5 or more posts on your home page.  I’ve never found a lot of value highlighting the comments in the sidebar either.  You should also allow a way for people to sign up to get your content delivered in their email inbox (Feedburner provides this service).  Honestly, that’s about all that I can see.  I look at the design and it’s professional, much better than the theme I hacked together myself.  The content is great and you make it very “scannable”.  I would say include more pictures, but that’s something that I’m often too Lazy to do.  The other thing I would suggest is just doing what you are doing, getting your name out there by commenting, getting in carnivals, doing guest posts, things like that.