I Built This Site Myself!

Now that's not a political headline. Just a fun (I trust) parody of one. However, it is intended to draw attention to one fact: what you read on this site is written by me, growing out of my own education, experience, and real research.

That is one reason why, in my opinion of course, I believe you can trust what you read on Success With Money to be the truly valuable information you need to help you reach your goal of financial success.

This post is a little different than most. It is not about money as such; it is about my philosophy of work when it comes to writing the content you find here. It is intended to give a little insight into my approach and purpose for the site.

Much Online Content is Weak

Because I publish online, every day (and especially lately that is a literal fact) I get promotional emails offering one kind or another of short cuts for building web site content. With all these methods of creating content being used it is no surprise that so much of what we find online is worth so little.

  • One common offer is for one of the programs that you just plug in keywords for and it scrapes together information from existing online pages and then the software writes the article for you. Of course you get a jumble of rehashed content and if you are the publisher you have to clean up all the grammar and misspellings.

  • Another, probably somewhat better method, is to hire someone to write articles or posts for you. The rates are cheap, most often, but what do you expect for $5.00 per article in the way of research and ability to relate to your site’s purpose and goals.

  • Then there are offers from financial sites asking if they can offer a post or article which they will write for me if I allow them to include links to their sites. These could be OK, depending on who they are, but most often they are from businesses I could not recommend or hold views I find unacceptable.

    Yesterday, for example, I received such an offer from a pay day loan site. They may or may not have been willing and able to write a decent article on a subject I need, but I am not going to appear to endorse such a business—out of curiosity I looked at the site and saw that their required disclosure statement showed that the average APR for their loans was 2957.3% or just over 8% per day!

  • Finally, lately I have been receiving all sorts of new ideas for various templates and tools to help with writing. These are essentially fill in the blank forms or something similar to help you, they claim, write your article or post in five minutes or so.

It is no wonder that there is so much junk online.

Why I Write My Own Content

When I began thinking about why I have been so committed to writing all my own content (not that there might not be some exceptions for specific reasons in the future) I was a bit surprised. It is really not for just one reason but several.

  1. First, this project I have named Success With Money has grown out of my own commitment to helping others with the knowledge I have gained over the years about money. A lot of research still goes into each article, but my basic purpose is personal. I want to share what I personally know has been helpful to others over the years so that even more people can benefit from that knowledge.

  2. Second, I do not trust most of what others say and write about money. I don't want to sound arrogant about this, but the fact is that most of you hear about money (outside of personal blogs) is wrong in one way or another. I won't say I am smarter than everyone else, but I am ready and willing to tell the truth about what I know without commercial intent.

    I can't go into detail here, but most of what people hear or read is misleading due to some sort of advertising goal, whether to sell insurance, get you to buy on credit, or buy into an investment of some kind.

  3. Third (not the last but the last I will mention), I like to write and teach. This is totally personal so perhaps irrelevant to your life, but I taught literally hundreds of classes over the years (not all on money but all designed to help people in one way or another) until personal life commitments restricted my options for getting out and doing so.

    Now with the internet I have discovered a new way of work that allows me to express myself with writing. For me it is rewarding as long as I know I am offering good stuff.

So, for these reasons and others I currently write all my content myself. And while I do use WordPress for this part of the site (the blog) I have even learned to hand write my own code (with a text editor—no Dreamweaver!) and put up the pages of the site. I am still that little kid saying, “Just leave me alone. I want to do it myself!”

Obviously I don't have the same standard or talent for doing the layout of the site as I do for writing the content. But I enjoy it, I work cheap, and so far everyone else puts up with it.

Will I Ever Use Guest Writers?

From reading all this you might think I would never use a guest writer on my site. But that is not necessarily so.

Perhaps I would, in some special areas. But I can say that I will never use software generated information or other shortcut methods that would produce inferior or less personal work.

At this time I am reading a book that discusses various ways people are making money online. In it the author asked a friend to write a chapter that dealt with earning on eBay because that individual was better informed in that area.

While I have no plans to do so at this time, it is entirely possible that at some time in some specific area that I feel people would like to know more than I could treat well (perhaps a legal topic), I would have a guest writer. If I do, that article will be clearly identified as such.

Yes, I Wrote It Myself!

Yes, I know. I didn't make the computer I am typing this on and I thank Mr. Dell for his great machine. But still, every word of this post I wrote myself. For what it is worth.

I intend that the end result of my work is that anyone who takes time to read on this site will get the best financial help I can offer. I hope that for you it will bring greater success with your money—and your life.