As I approached the five year mark, I began to contemplate how to write my blog anniversary post. Do I vent out in what has become a habitual crib of not feeling like I am doing this space justice? But that would be so 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th blogiversary.

Instead, I thought I would try to see it as a reason to pat my back instead as I look back at the five years of blogging at Elementum Money. Did I think I would go on for this long? Considering it’s my third blogging attempt and the longest has lasted half this much time, not really.

The story so far…

When I started out, I started out with three posts a week along with preparing for CFP and a fairly consuming marketing job at a bank! So, the first year saw me churning out 130 posts. Those were the heady days…

I was also pretty active on social media, enthralled by the connections I was making with bloggers in other countries. It had its pitfalls as well because there were enough and more bloggers working so much harder at their visibility. But, now when I see a lot of them having disappeared without a blip from the digital landscape, I realise that going long might be more important than initial intensity.

The great bit is that in these five years, this digital corner of mine has now garnered more than 100,000 views cumulatively. As for the most popular posts, those mostly remain consistent through time. SEO is more like a whirlpool where once a post gets established it often is the traffic attractor. Surprisingly enough, it is more of the Personal Growth posts that are doing better than the initial sole focus area of Personal Finance.

Year 5 report card

Last year, I added two sections to the blog with extremely mixed results. Although I haven’t done much about the Top Reads of the Week section, I am pretty chuffed about having established the Mutual Funds portfolio corner. It is possibly relevant only to people investing in India. However, for me mutual funds remain one of the best, evergreen ways of creating wealth. For any aware investor, the monthly updates in this section are bound to be valuable. So far, it has been 11 months of unfailing publishing and here’s to keeping it going.

Top 5 posts through the years

You could check out the all-time five most popular posts by clicking on any of the post titles mentioned below.

7 Benefits of a Daily To-Do list

This post was integrated in their posts by some far more popular bloggers. Hence, this tailwind has kept it going strong. Not to say that it’s also yet another well-written post from yours truly (you gotta brag when you get a chance, right?)

11 reasons why retirement planning is important

For me, this post provided that moment of excitement when I saw it on page 1 of Google Search results for “retirement planning india”. SEO is often still a black box for me and mostly I tend to write about what I believe is important and that I will be able to do justice to.

The role of courtesy in our lives

Looks like this post still has takers in a world, where people are largely happy to choose bring curt over courteous.

32 movie dialogues for 32 years

The performance for this post has always befuddled me and confused me further about SEO. I doubt there are too many SEO algorithms that would recommend a post on these lines. Yet, I had so much fun writing it and what would you know. Despite being live for just short of three years, it is now one of the consistently high attraction posts.

The perils of social media addiction

This post told me the magic just one mention on the personal finance blog aggregator Rockstar Finance can create (Don’t go by the current bland look of the page for it was quite a rage when J. Money was handling it). On one such day with a mention of this post, Elementum Money hosted it’s heaviest traffic and some years on the post still manages to keep a spot in the top 5.

What does Year 6 look like?

This is the year that my dream transition of a blog to advisory business will finally fructify. I am now a licenced Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) in India. I will be operating individually in an attempt to help young people make and follow simple plans to organise their financial lives.

So, the website is soon going to undergo a revamp to reflect this changed dynamics. The blog will remain as is but the home page will have more details on how you could engage my services for financial planning and advice.

I am also looking to collate some of the most useful posts as downloadable e-books to be able to access that content better.

Have you been reading Elementum Money for some time? Is there anything you would like to see different here? Let me know in the comments below.