I want to thank Araminta from Financially Mint who graciously nominated A Journey to FI for a Blogger Recognition Award. Initially, I was a little bit skeptical about the whole thing but once I started reading I realized it was the real deal!. A Journey to FI has only been out there for a few months so all I can say is that It’s great to be recognized for this award especially in this incredible Personal Finance community.

As Take Charge of your Money mentions, The Blogger Recognition Award is an award given to bloggers by fellow bloggers. It resembles those email chain messages (or chain letters) from long ago. When you are nominated, you find other blogs that you enjoy and simply pass it on.

Unlike the traditional chain email though, this award serves a purpose: it promotes blogs and helps readers discover them. It’s an excellent way of showcasing the blogs we follow and acknowledges the hard work and dedication of the people who create such blogs. It’s also a great way to make new friends!

Why I Started Blogging

Starting a blog came out of nowhere. I discovered the Personal Finance community a couple of years ago and immediately became captivated by the amount of information, tools, and tips to become financially independent.

I was so excited by the things I was learning that I immediately decided to engage others in an attempt to share and provide guidance where appropriate. If you read my post about Emotional Intelligence in Financial Independence you’ll get more details about my experiences but the bottom line is that providing unsolicited advice did not work out well for me.

At that point, my wife suggested the idea of writing and posting information somewhere. I gave it some thought and decided to start a Facebook group. Initially, the Facebook group seemed like a good platform to share information; however, I immediately realized it was not efficient and/or engaging as I had envisioned.

I was about ready to give up and then my wife mentioned … why don’t you start a blog? and my response was … yeah right!.

I wasn’t computer savvy so no way I was gonna be in a position to start a blog and do all the cool stuff my favorite bloggers do. On top of that, how in the world was I supposed to compete with all the awesome bloggers out there.

If you’re reading this, you can see how the story ended. I quickly realized you don’t need to be a computer guru to start a blog and that the word “competition” has no place in the Personal Finance community. Everybody has been phenomenal in terms of support and encouragement, and networking continues to amaze me every single day.

In summary, the reason I started a blog was my desire in finding a vehicle to:

Share and help others achieve Financial Independence!

Advice For New Bloggers

Tip #1: Quality over Quantity

Aside from some of the tips Financially Mint and Take Charge of Your Money mentioned on their posts, my number one advice is to think about quality instead of quantity.

I’m a goal-oriented individual so my original plan was to write a post per week. Things went well at the beginning but then slowed down once I realized blogging took time and a lot of dedication.

Increasing traffic on your site certainly matters; however, this will be driven by the quality of the information you’re putting out there for your readers and not necessarily by the number of posts you advertise in a week.

I know I need to push myself hard to avoid complacency but I refuse to let metrics (numbers of posts per week) influence the quality of my content. It’s always better to have a great story to tell than to share a lot of crappy stuff no one cares about.

Tip #2: Find Balance

When I started blogging, I was super excited about writing and being active in social media. This excitement got the best of me and led to crucial conversations with my wife around time management. I was so obsessed with the blog and social media that it affected our quality time as a family.

My wife recently performed my mid-year performance review and her feedback was extremely helpful for making adjustments that will be beneficial going forward. There’s more to life than Personal Finance so don’t forget about finding the right balance!

My Nominees (In No Particular Order)

1. The Happy Philosopher
2. Adventure Rich
3. The Luxe Strategist
4. Listen Money Matters
5. My Strategic Dollar
6. Zero Day Finance
7. Fifty Week Vacation
8. Married with Money
9. Chronicles of a Father with Cents
10. Coach Carson
11. Mustard Seed Money
12. The Code to Riches
13. The Financial Journeyman
14. Freedom is Groovy
15. Your Average Dough

Some Rules For The Nominees To Pay It Forward:

• Thank the blogger who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
• Write a post to show your award.
• Give a brief story of how/why you started blogging.
• Give two pieces of advice to new bloggers.
• Select 10 – 15 other bloggers you want to give this award to.
• Comment on each blog and let them know you have nominated them, providing the link to the post you created.