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Welcome to the challenge!  Make sure you're signed up with alexa and that you have the toolbar downloaded.

Congrats on the new site MB. I hope it is a success. Best of luck.

Hey everybody!  I just joined the challenge yesterday Dec. 1, 2011.  My blog is called Celebrating Financial Freedom and I've been blogging for exactly four months now ( Alexa rank: 3,133,416).  Quite an experience so far.  CFF is a Christian personal finance blog and all my posts are written from the perspective of being debt free or becoming debt free using Christian and common sense principles. 

I've also developed a self study course that I have for sale on my site and will eventually offer as an ebook.  I also teach the CFF program live at churches. 

I am SO ready to grow this blog and get it on the map so I can help as many people as possible become debt free and succeed with their money.  I want to change lives. 

So let's git 'er done in the Yakezie spirit of selflessly helping each other.

http://www.CFinancialFreedom.com

Twitter: @DrCabler

Email: jasoncabler@gmail.com

Welcome Jason! Or do you prefer Dr Cabler?? I always said I would make people call me Dr. if I ever got my PHD lol!

This message has three purposes:
A) to announce I have crossed 200k in Alexa,
B) to encourage regular submissions to the Carnival of Financial Planning, and
C) to solicit Carnival of Financial Planning hosts for the coming year.

A) Crossing 200K

I started the challenge in early August with an Alexa score of 271,959. It is early December and I just broke the 200k barrier.

B) Encouraging regular submissions to the Carnival of Financial Planning

One way to boost your Alexa scores and your Google traffic is to submit your post permalinks with a brief text snippet to financial blogs at blogcarnival.com. For the past 4+ years, I have edited the weekly Carnival of Financial Planning (CofFP). That is how Yakezie got on my radar screen, because I kept seeing Yakezie badges on the sites I was reviewing that had submitted to the CofFP. Several dozen Yakezie members and challengers are now submitting regularly, and since I joined the challenge, I am keeping a look-out for any flavor of Yakezie badge.

So here is the deal, if you want to submit your posts to the CofFP, realize that the editor is also now a Yakezie challenger. As long as your post submission is of reasonable quality, and I can easily see your Yakezie badge, you will get in. (Note that the submission cutoff is Thursdays at 10AM, and I am not sure what time zone BlogCarnival uses.)

C) Soliciting host for the Carnival of Financial Planning for the coming year

If you want to host the CofFP in the coming year, please send me a message. If there are months that you prefer or want to avoid, just let me know.

Hosting the CofFP on your blog is a relatively low stress obligation. This is because I provide every host with a pre-edited and publication-ready html file. While a few hosts will dress it up, most just publish it "as is." The CofFP is a free post for little work. All a host needs to do is publish and send me the permalink, so I can set up the next edition.

A few years ago, I gave up on the usual carnival editing process where the weekly host did the editing. There were too many coordination snafus, and I found that I could edit the file and screen out the spam in under an hour each week. By doing the editing, I got to keep up on what was being published on many personal finance blogs.

Note that I will give hosting preference to blogs that already have lower Alexa scores. (If you are a challenger with a high Alexa score, please do not get excited about this low Alexa score hosting preference, because this actually works to your advantage. If you participate in the CofFP regularly, it is to your benefit to have the CofFP (or any carnival for that matter) published on a higher ranked and higher trafficked site. This also means that you are getting inbound links from higher authority sites with related subject matter, which means that Google will increasingly smile upon your site, as well. The reality is that when a blog hosts a Carnival, they are doing a service for the community. And, everybody benefits when hosting is rotated among established personal finance blogs.)

Welcome to all the new challengers! 

Larry – thanks for the info on CofFP – headed to check it out now!

Welcome. Good luck.

Welcome to the challenge Alex :D