I just spent an amazing weekend in Toronto attending the Canadian Personal Finance Conference, and after hearing from some amazing thought leaders in the Canadian PF industry, I’m excited to begin focusing on Jillian Adriana Design as a business, and on this blog! My goal for this blog is to provide financial bloggers with useful resources to enhance their blogs and overall brands.

There are countless blogs that give advice on how to be a successful blogger and how to build your brand, but I’ve found that many financial bloggers struggle to figure out how to apply “generic” blogging tips and techniques to their specific blogs. That’s where I come in. I’m here to help translate all that creative mumble-jumble into a practical and personal-finance-blog-focused guide.

I’ve also decided to do something else with this blog: I’m going to begin merging my Debt Detective blog with this one. It’s a big decision for me to make, and it’s one I’ve been struggling with over the last month (especially since I already bought the Debt Detective domain), but I’ve finally settled on merging the two (thanks for the advice, Paul Jarvis) and I’m excited to do so. Let me explain my decision:

1. I do personal branding and it doesn’t make sense for me to have two different personal brands.
2. Both brands focus on personal finance.
3. Both brands reflect my mission to make the industry much more appealing and engaging for its audience.
4. It’s easier to have one website/blog than two.
5. I’m more passionate about design than I am about finance.

I’m still on a debt-repayment journey, so I’ll continue to be transparent about it and provide monthly budget updates and helpful tips. I mostly write about personal finance and debt based on my own experience, and since I’ve found that paying off debt as a young single woman is pretty simple (for me, at least), I just don’t have as much to say about it as many other great personal finance bloggers.

However, I’m still passionate about personal finance and the role it plays in the lives of people everywhere. This stuff doesn’t have to be difficult to understand and boring to learn and read about! It can be appealing and engaging, especially to people like myself who don’t have a natural knack for finances (and most things math/number-related).

After I started Debt Detective and began following other financial blogs, I quickly noticed that there are so many great personal finance bloggers who, like me, want to make a difference in the lives of people who think personal finance is too hard. They write great content and offer incredibly useful tips, but most seem to be missing such an important piece of the blogging puzzle: a consistent brand.

It’s not exactly a surprise to me that this is the case, since finance hasn’t exactly been painted as the tall glass of water it could be. Finance tends to be seen as plain, boring, and most of the time it puts the “f u” in confusing. There just aren’t a lot of people who can’t wait to open an Excel spreadsheet for the shear experience of punching in numbers. If you are one of those people, that’s fine–you are a rare breed of champion–but if you are writing a personal finance blog, you’re likely doing so with the goal of helping people better understand one of the most important aspects of everyday life.

The two most important blogging rules

All personal finance bloggers need to keep the following two rules in mind:

1. Consistently maintain your brand
2. Effectively cater to your audience

Why are these things so important? Maintaining a consistent brand establishes trust with your audience and strengthens your credibility as a personal finance influencer and thought leader. Effectively catering to your audience is absolutely crucial for personal finance bloggers because you have to constantly keep in mind that what makes sense for you might not make sense for your readers.

Throughout the life of this blog, I’m going to be building on both of these topics, as well as a host of others. If there’s something specific you’d like me to write about, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll be sure to address it.

I hope you find this blog incredibly useful. Whether your visual aesthetic is minimal like Cait’s, clean like Bridget’s, or bold like mine, we all have one common goal: to help others master personal finance and live with less stress and more freedom.