Although you’ll see me commenting around the personal finance blogosphere, I actually comment even more across the lifestyle and more recently, the SEO space due to all the changes with Google. The reasons are several fold:

1) Variety is entertaining

2) It’s always good to learn something from those who spend most of their time on a subject you don’t

3) Everything is intertwined

If you are a lifestyle blogger, it’s probably best to figure out basic personal finance fundamentals because it’s unlikely anybody will take care of you when you’re old. If you’re a personal finance blogger, it’s a good idea to figure out what alternative lifestyles you can lead during your wealth accumulation phase and after you’ve reached financial independence.

The Yakezie Network is a personal finance and lifestyle blog network. Unfortunately, we don’t have many lifestyle bloggers as part of our crew, but that’s slowly changing as more and more of us are leaving our jobs due to the successes of our online endeavors.

I’ve come to realize that not many lifestyle or SEO bloggers ever come visit Financial Samurai despite my frequent visits. I’m curious to know if any of you personal finance bloggers experience the same phenomena and why do you think that is?

Let’s see if we can figure out what’s going on.

WHY THE ONE WAY STREET?

1) A limited amount of time. When you’re juggling work, family, and your blog, reading and commenting on other blogs take a back seat. How many big bloggers in even your own genre do you ever see comment on your site? The answer is hardly any. They’ve got their own community to interact with. My soft definition of a big blogger is anybody with more than 100,000 unique visitors a month.

2) Laziness. We might have the time, but like so many things that take effort, laziness is a culprit for not doing. It takes effort to learn what’s out there. It takes effort to type in a comment and fill out an annoying CAPTCHA code that’s impossible to decipher. It takes tremendous effort to build hopefully long lasting relationships.

3) We think the world evolves around us. There’s a good chance that many of us think we know what’s best for everybody. It’s our way, or the highway. This is why I encourage everybody to write with differing points of view. I hope everybody can travel around the world and experience different cultures for example. Even better if you can master another language. Americans are spoiled by wealth, power, and geography. Everything comes to us, thereby weakening our minds.

PERHAPS PERSONAL FINANCE IS JUST TOO IMPORTANT TO BOTHER?

So many people don’t bother to learn personal finance fundamentals because they are either intimidated, or find the idea of retiring early with millions of dollars in the bank extremely boring! Weird huh?!

Some people naturally get excited about certain things. I can spend hours in a Range Rover dealership inhaling the leather while fiddling with the gadgets. I feel the same way about travel, electronics, and entrepreneurship. On the other hand, I’m completely not interested in reality shows like Jersey Shore. I’m just not, I don’t know why.

Folks need to cross-pollinate their minds to keep things active. If you are a lifestyle blogger, you should definitely visit personal finance sites that discuss passive income generation opportunites that are not online related. If you are an “SEO expert,” you should definitely visit personal finance blogs that receive hundreds of thousands of visitors a month that do no manual linkbuilding to figure out what they are doing right.

Everybody online needs to read personal finance blogs! Personal finance is a part of everything we do, whether we know it or not!

Readers, how can we encourage more people to visit personal finance sites? Why don’t more lifestyle and other genre of bloggers visit personal finance sites? Are personal finance bloggers actually much more interesting since we can talk about everything under the sun?

Best,

Sam