This is an unpaid review of the social networking personal finance site PFBuzz.com. I wanted to do this review because I think this site has the potential to be a great resource for the personal finance blog community.
What is it?
PF Buzz stands for Personal Finance Buzz – it is a website that has social networking for personal finance articles. What the heck is “soshal netwerkin” you ask? Basically the deal is that the site has a whole bunch of personal finance posts in its database, readers can vote for the article or against the article – the more positive votes an article gets then it will be displayed more prominently on the home page. It’s the same basic model as Digg or Reddit but for personal finance posts only. One of the key ideas is that new and “hot” posts should be at the top of the page so anytime you go to the site you can see the latest, greatest personal finance posts.
Why do I want to use this?
- Quick and easy way to find some good, new personal finance posts.
- Good way to find new personal finance sites.
- Easy promotion for your blog or favorite posts.
I use Digg/Stumble/etc – why do I need this site?
More focus! One thing I can’t stand about Stumble is all the extra crap like advertising sites that I have to sift through. PF Buzz is only personal finance and any crap that gets added is quickly weeded out.
Is it a lot of work?
Nope – the easiest thing you can do is go to the site and start reading! If you want to vote on posts then you can sign up with a very quick login. If you feel really ambitious you can also add posts to the site as well (feel free to add any from this site!).
Please note that you can look at the most popular posts for different time periods ie day/week etc.
What needs improvement
This site would be more useful with more readers/voters and article submitters. At the moment it doesn’t take a lot of votes to get a post to the top of the pile so it’s not all that certain if the best posts are indeed getting voted up or not. Over time however, this will improve and it should become required reading in the personal finance community.
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As someone who loyally reads a lot of moneyblogs, I’m increasingly annoyed by bloggers linking to the same blogs over and over or any old stuff submitted via requests on twitter or whatever rather than saying if I’m going to bother with a links roundup I’ll spend time actually looking for good posts my readers might enjoy, (not directed at 4P). I know it’s hard because a lot of the good ground has been covered already, but I just got back from a quick break and there’s tons of posts in my google reader which are just groups of links to genuinely subpar subject-beaten-to-death posts – just because the bloggers have to round up material from “their network” once a week. I’m finding myself unsubscribing like crazy recently (again, not from 4P!). Which is a long roundabout way of saying I suppose the only way to get around that is to weigh in to pfbuzz myself as in theory it’s free of the buddy-buddy stuff that wastes my time, but being honest I probably can’t justify the time.
Great comment Guinness – yes, I tend to skip over most link posts for the very reasons you mentioned.
We’ve just joined a network so you will see extra links to those blogs but I can guarantee they won’t be links to crappy posts!
I think one of the benefits of a reader (ie Google reader) is that you can easily skip posts that you are not interested in which is what I do.
I think once it gets going then PFBuzz can be a good complement to a reader since it might be a way to find new blogs or just to see some good material from a blog that you otherwise might not be interested in reading on a regular basis.
Mike
Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve gotten just less than 4% of my traffic from PFBuzz. I think it really has the potential to drive a lot of traffic as the site grows. I’ve noticed PFBuzz visitors tends to spend more time on my site than do digg or stumble users, as well. So that’s a plus.
@4P, thank you for weighing in on PF Buzz. I appreciate the positive review. As for making it’s tougher to get to the front page, that’s in the plan. As we gain more users and there are more votes to go around, it will become tougher to get to the front page. Looking at the oldest post of the front page being 2 days old, I can say we are not quite there yet.
@guinness — I can understand your position and I completely agree that it’s hard to find link round ups or carnivals that point to really good collection of articles.
But social networking is a part of blogging, so it’s natural for bloggers to vouch for each other. Hopefully, PF Buzz will help rectify some of the problems you mentioned and surface really good stuff.
Again, we need more readers, voters, and submitters. The current level is not bad, but more participants means a better chance of discovering real gems.
Mike, Pinyo – I just reread my comment and am amazed you could understand what I was getting at, it was so poorly written. Can you tell I’m still on vacation?! I do skip the stuff that’s irrelevant to me (most posts on cars, kids, debt, US-centric programs and bible thumping) but I like link posts a lot, and am a bit sad that a year ago we could find lots of good link posts, that have now been replaced by the network ones. So if pfbuzz is the new way to achieve that, I’m all for it, and will sign up.
Kyle, you make a good point that from a blogger perspective, traffic from PF Buzz should be a lot more targeted towards our type of sites.
Getting a big Stumble rush is fun but it does absolutely nothing for the growth of the blog.
Mike
Guinness – I thought your comment was fine.
Yes, the quality of link posts has definitely gone down. Usually I try to skip the ‘network’ links especially for blogs that only link to the same N blogs each week.
The reality is that money is a motivator for most bloggers and link posts are part of that. You are better off thinking of (some of )them as advertising and just skipping.
I find carnivals can be a good source as well ie the ‘editors picks’ are usually half decent.
Mike
I prophesy that PFbuzz will be the equivalent Digg version of personal finance freaks*laughs*.
Sam
Fix My Personal Finance
http://fixmypersonalfinance.com/
Pfbuzz is still a growing community so it woudl be interesting to see if it attracts a wider audience over time. But having a user generated content website is a very good idea Pinyo. Very close to having a passive income from websites site