Review: Debt Consolidation News
Today I got my first paid ReviewMe offer from a site I have not personally visited until this afternoon:
Debt Consolidation News. DCN is another personal finance writer. I was hesitant to review this site for a few reasons:
- I couldn’t find an About or Contact page on the site. Why does the author want to be anonymous?
- The site has a very basic template and no ads, but a PR of 5. Why aren’t they capitalizing on this?
- I get funny feelings about the words “Debt Consolidation”. Plus, their site has little to do with debt consolidation.
However, I decided to review the site because of one reason:
CONTENT
Oh, and I was assured by the fact they had hosted a Carnival of Debt Management.
Debt Consolidation News has an immense amount of useful information for individuals and businesses. For example:
- 101 ways to cut your daily costs
- 17 hidden lender tricks and how to avoid them
- 100 most famous finance quotes – at least useful for reference if not to practice
- 100 ways to cut small business overhead
Again, I’m just amazed at the time the author has taken to create the shear amount of content. It can help explain why they only post a few times a week at most. I applaud their effort!
Now, because I tend to focus on the negatives of almost everything, I’d like to give some constructive criticism of the site’s design:
- I’d like see About and Contact Us pages
- Add navigation on their homepage to older posts. The only way to get to posts that have moved off the front page is through the Archives or Categories. Many people like to just page through the screens
- Jazz up the design a bit. Make it look less like an out-of-the-box template and more like your own creation!
- Monetize the site! If you’ve got a PR of 5, you can at least that to pay any hosting fees with a small sponsor link. However, I understand if it’s against your intentions for the site.
- Think about breaking up some of the articles into parts of a series. Often, a list of more than 15-20 items just gets to be too much for the reader. Break up future lists into something more manageable. For example, the list of famous quotes is already categorized, so you can get 5 daily posts out of it rather than 1 weekly post.
Overall, I like Debt Consolidation News. The content is definitely a big draw for me, and at least the design is on the minimalist end of the spectrum, rather than distracting and ugly. Why don’t you go over and check it out. Heck, comment with your own suggestions for the site!
This was a paid ReviewMe article. However, just because it’s paid doesn’t mean I don’t get to criticize.
They’re essentially buying traffic from your site. (I got the same exact offer.)
But hey free money buddy!
I agree, I don’t like sites that don’t have an about and contact page. It really defeats the main intention of the blogosphere, networking.
People listen, because we are unique individuals with stories, not because we are true experts.
It is funny that a rich financial person with 10 degrees could be writing DCN, but without a about page it seems shady and impersonal.
I would like to add that it is also not always about interest rates. An interest rate assigned to a mortgage (think amortization table) requires a different monthly payment than the same balance in a credit card.
I found this out when researching a sum I had at 1.9% for life on a credit card. While the total amount I would pay for interest, even paying the minimum amount was not much at all, the dollars were tied up and not usable to knock off the higher payments and interest of my home mortgage.
Better to pay off the credit card with an equity loan, (with a higher interest, but lower monthly minimum) and then pay off the equity loan quickly, thereby freeing up the money to knock off the home mortgage.
Of course this all took more discipline than I have so I got some help.