I’ve often wondered about the profile of readers and visitors to Experiments in Finance. I’ve noticed that my traffic has grown steadily over time (currently hovering around 1K visits a day on weekdays) and that over 90% come from search engines, which isn’t surprising given what I write about. Unlike most personal finance bloggers, I tend to write a lot less often and focus mainly on tutorials and long how-to posts, mostly about using Excel.

Earlier last year, I signed up for Vizu Polls as an income source for this blog. Income from Vizu has been very small, but paying publishers to display polls from interested parties seemed like a decent and interesting business idea. When there isn’t a paying poll to display, Vizu displays basic demographic polls for visitors to answer, and I’ve collected the findings here. I’m sure the data isn’t completely clean or scientific — I don’t know that they have a mechanism in place to prevent double answers, and of course, it’s garbage in, garbage out — but I find the results fun to look at anyway.

Do the results below describe you?

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Before my site went down last week, I received an email from Jae Jun at Old School Value (a fellow value investing blogger) who took it upon himself to make an automated version of my portfolio tracker spreadsheet that I created when this site first launched (the original version’s here).

Using the SMF add-in from Randy at Yahoo! groups, the spreadsheet now automatically looks up SPY’s performance on a particular date rather than requiring you to manually enter in SPY prices, a real time saver.

Thanks for doing this Jae! You can go to the link above to find the spreadsheet as well as his instructions, and while you’re at it, check out his blog and “about” page.

Seems my site was hacked into a couple of days ago. Thanks to the fine fellow personal finance bloggers at the MoneyBlogNetwork Forum, I was able to restore my site with a few hours of work and a database backup from my host. Yay!

Sorry to everyone for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience. I’ve since upgraded WordPress so that, hopefully, security is a bit better, though it never goes away entirely…..