Seventh year of blogging – Summary

The Poor Swiss in numbers

We can start our usual retrospective of my seventh year of blogging with some numbers about the blog. As usual, here are the page views for each week of this seventh year:

This is the first year I have been running entirely using Plausible. Since Google Analytics deprecated the Google Analytics 3, I had to move to something else. I tried Google Analytics 4 last year, but it was not good for my needs, so opted for Plausible itself. Plausible is not perfect, but it meets my basic requirements. Plausible is also much better at collecting as little information as possible about my readers, which is a good thing. And I very rarely look at the stats these days.

Overall, it seems like the stats have been going up, but it is difficult to compare with Google Analytics results from last year since they are quite different. And I only have a few weeks of data for last year on Plausible since I lost 2 months. If you wonder about the dip in September, this is because I broke the stats (again).

I had been considering dropping entirely the stats instead of migrating. But some of my partners sometimes ask for my statistics, so it makes sense to keep the minimum running. Since more and more people block tracking scripts (including me), stats are becoming less and less relevant, I think.

Overall, I would say I am happy with these statistics, even though they mean little.

It is also the first year with the forum running. So, I can share a few numbers about the activity:

Unfortunately, the statistics of Xenforo are quite limited, which is a shame for a tool that is so expensive. I have no idea of how many page views are generated. But I can see the number of posts in the forum. Overall, the forum is not very active, but it is not dormant either and there are some new members coming. In August, there was a new peak of activity for some reason, but it went down again in September. We will see how it fares in the coming months.

The growth in the comments is continuing. There are now more than 16’000 comments. In this last year, there were about 4000 more comments. It takes me a lot of time to answer each comment, but I think it has substantial value for the blog. I wish some of these comments could then move to the forum where they are more visible.

As for the articles, there are now 510 articles in English, 381 in French and 372 in German. Except for a single day late, I was able to keep my routine of one article a week. New articles are written in all three languages.

For some comparison, you can read the summary of the previous year.

What went well?

We should first talk about what went well with The Poor Swiss.

The goal of the blog is to help Swiss people with their finances. And I think the blog has succeeded in this regard. Given all the contacts I have with readers, on the comments, on the forum and by email, I feel like the blog is doing some good.

And I should also mention that one thing that did go well is that the blog is still standing after seven years. During the previous year, my motivation was getting low, and I had very little time for the blog, making it sometimes a hassle. This year, it went better, and I had more time to do with the blog and actually do some real improvements for the blog.

As well see in the next sections, I managed to do many more projects than I would have expected. I am pleased about that.

The transition to the LLC went well overall. It took longer than I expected to get all the bills and invoices transferred to the new structure. And we did not manage everything well. The way we manage the company is also not perfect, but it is improving. But overall, it is a good learning experience.

What did not go well?

I am still sometimes having a hard time balancing this blog and my other priorities. I am doing a good job prioritizing my family (my wife and son) over the blog. But occasionally, I should prioritize myself over the blog and allow myself more time for other things than simply the blog (on top of my full-time employment). I am very close to the limit in terms of the time I can allot to the blog, with all my other priorities.

While I have always made a point of updating old articles for factual correctness, I have not always been able to improve old articles to enhance them. I am a better writer than I was several years ago, and I wish I could rewrite some older articles. But I have not found the time (and motivation) to do that.

One other thing I did not do well is try to get some more exposure within the press and other blogs. Until now, this is something I have not done and that happened passively, but it is probably something I should do more actively if I want the blog to grow.

A very minor thing is that I am currently running out of ideas for the next articles. I usually have a long list of articles to write. But this year, I removed more articles (wrote them) than added them. Currently, I have a few more articles lined up, but I do not know how long this will last. So, if you have suggestions for articles that are missing from the blog, please let me know in the comments below.

I also wanted to organize a meetup to meet some of my readers. And in the end, I procrastinated on this project. I had the chance to meet a few of them, but that was independently.

Overall, the main thing I need to improve is the balance of this project with other personal hobbies.

What changed during this seventh year?

Last year, I changed many small things under the hood, but not much very visible. This year, was quite different, and I managed to do multiple projects for the blog. I am quite surprised at how many projects I was able to undertake. I will cover all these projects here, but they are not in the order I implemented them.

Last year, I was already contemplating writing an e-book and this year, I finally did it! My Invest Your Money in the Stock Market e-book is now available for sale. This is the first product I am selling on the blog. This book is not a copy of my articles, but a full rewrite as a guide on how to start investing, from scratch with Interactive Brokers. I am pleased at having been able to write this. Along the way, I learned many things, and it was interesting to learn how to sell a digital product myself. I hope the e-book will be useful to many. So far, the feedback has been good.

Another major change is the introduction of The Poor Swiss Forum. This is something I was thinking of doing for a long time and I finally got to it. The traction is quite slow, but there are new members popping up and some active members as well. I hope this will develop into something useful for the community.

I also developed a slight change of design for some of my articles. All review articles and all comparison articles are now using the new design. This makes the design look slightly better. And it allows me to add metadata to each section as a note or as a winner for the comparison articles.

To avoid maintaining both styles, I am actually considering using the same design everywhere (as well for standard articles) and would like your opinion (I did not get much feedback yet). Here are the two different versions:

• Article with current style (the current version)
• Article with another style (the reviews style applied to an article)

I would appreciate it if you could either vote in the forum survey or comment below to let me know which you prefer.

I also developed three calculators during this seventh year:

• The advanced FIRE calculator
  • It packs all the options from my SWR tool.
  • This is something people have been asking for for a very long time.
• The broker comparison tool
  • This allows you to compare the fees of all brokers I know for a given scenario.
• The robo-advisor comparison tool
  • Same thing but for robo-advisors

It was a lot of fun developing these calculators. They do not get used much, but it can be really helpful for people.

And talking about calculators, I should mention I got a designer on Fiverr to remake the design of all calculators. It is not a major change, but it looks more appealing and less boring. Overall, it makes the calculators look more professional.

I also finally created an advanced budget spreadsheet. This was also something that many people had asked for, and it was quite fund to complete. This spreadsheet is much more capable than the previous one (still available) but is slightly more complicated to use.

Finally, the last change I did (or can remember doing) is rewriting of my free e-book: Swiss Financial Services Cheat Sheet. I have rewritten it entirely and added new sections to make it more useful.

Rereading this list again, I think it is quite incredible that I was able to achieve all these changes on top of the other day-to-day tasks of the blog (themselves on top of family and full-time work).

Most popular articles

We can see which were the most popular articles on the blog during this seventh year. I say popularity by number of page views. Some articles are probably more popular based on comments or value, but this is more difficult to estimate.

So, here are the five most viewed articles of the year:

1. Updated Trinity Study for 2024
2. Should you use IB Fixed or Tiered pricing in 2024?
3. Interactive Brokers Review 2024
4. The best broker for Swiss investors in 2024
5. What is The Best Credit card in Switzerland for 2024?

It looks like brokers are very popular on the blog, with the three middle posts about brokers (mostly about Interactive Brokers). I am glad to see the Trinity Study article at the top, since this is one article that took a very long time to write and has a lot of value. And it appears credit cards are also very popular.

What about you? What is your favorite article?

The next year of blogging?

I do not have big plans for the next year of blogging. At this point, I envision the eighth year to be a consolidation of this year. I have done more for the blog during this seventh year than I expected, and it is probably time to build upon these changes but not change many things.

As usual, I plan to stick to my routine of an article a week. And I want to keep updating older articles as new information comes about them.

One thing I hope to try is the new WPML AI translation system. In theory, it should be of higher quality than DeepL and supposedly can translate with a larger context. They introduced this system recently and when I tried it first, there were issues in the generated output (bad enough that it could not be used), but the translations were good. If this improves the translation for my readers, it is worth paying a little more.

I would also like to consolidate the expenses on the blog. There are many monthly and yearly subscriptions that are necessary to run this blog. And hopefully, I can try to save a little. One major example is that I will likely switch to self-hosting the forum. Currently, the forum costs as much as the blog to host, which is dumb because the forum has less than 1% of the traffic of the blog.

Next year, I may finally do some videos for the blog. My wife is going to help me with some scripts and filming and editing. I am not entirely we will have the time to do that consistently, but it would be great to increase the reach of the blog and to help more people.

I still want to try to do a meetup with some of my readers at least. This meetup will be organized in the coming months, through the forum.

Of course, this will all depend on the time and energy I have to spend for this blog.

Your perspective?

This blog is for you! I would like to get your standpoint on this blog!

What do you think I should focus on next year?

What do you think went well or did not go well during the seventh year?

Do you have anything you would like to have on this blog? Any suggestions for articles?

Conclusion

Overall, the seventh year of blogging was significantly more active than I expected. I managed to do many new projects for this blog! After doing some foundational work in the sixth year, it is good to have been able to do something more visible in the seventh year.

The eighth year should be more quiet, I expect. I want to continue building on top of the improvements of the seventh and polish everything properly. I hope to continue with the current schedule of one article a week and will continue to answer comments and emails as long as possible.

If you would like to learn about what happened next, you can read the summary of the eighth year of blogging.

What do you think of my blog? Do you like the direction it is going in?