How I talked Arianna into giving me a shot as Huffington Post's wealth management blogger and how it changed my life

Brooke’s Note: Most people I know who take up bicycling as a means of transportation are satisfied that their point A to point B needs are being met. But then they discover that all that pedaling also improves their life — starting with their lung power and spreading to their spirit. I see a parallel with people I know who take up blogging in the utilitarian spirit of building an online presence — whatever that is. If the bloggers succeed in the basic marketing mission, next thing they know, the citizen journalism transforms their business and their life. The one drawback in each case: self-propulsion. You abdicate precious time and energy to suffer bad hair days (helmet head) and time spent re-working crude pieces of writing — your own junky first drafts. But in the end, done with persistence and in a devil-may-care spirit, all that work pays off and April Rudin drives it home here.

In 2010, I asked Arianna Huffington point blank how I could become a Huffington Post blogger and she signed me up.

That year, I was launching my new financial services marketing business out of my living room, and I happened to attend an event at which Arianna was talking, ironically, about her new book, “Third World America.”

I felt as if she were talking to me directly when she discussed the endangered middle class and the free-falling of opportunity in America. How could I grasp that narrowing window of opportunity as I tried to make a name for myself and my new business? It immediately occurred to me that a slot as a contributor on Huffington Post might be a great place to start.

So I marched up to Arianna with my card, and asked her what it would take.

“How can I become a contributor to HuffPost?”

She smiled, looked at me intently, took my card and handed it to her assistant. “Sign her on,” she told him. And that was that. I was the high-net-worth marketing blogger for a world renowned publication. My path was quite different from those of most contributors, who get “credentialed” first, but it worked. I went straight to the head of the line.

Pay by play

In the spring of 2010, Huffington Post was already an enormous success in terms of the traffic it generated, but it was still testing out a variety of different content types from hard news to opinion, celebrity blogging, campaign trail dispatches, slide shows, lists and virally disseminated aggregated content. A year later, the sale of Huffington Post to AOL was seen as a watershed moment as AOL put an end to paid subscriptions to provide all content free.

While initially there were some skirmishes over the “pay” or shall I say “no pay” of the contributors, that argument was finally put to rest in 2012 when the US District Court in New York ruled that the bloggers were compensated; their compensation was in publication and distribution. Today, Huffington Post has over 50,000 bloggers, including politicians, students, academics, parents and policy experts, who seem to agree. The site boasts 78 million monthly global unique visitors, over 8 million monthly comments, and has won a Pulitzer for national reporting.

Winging it

As a first-time blogger, I found there was a bit of a learning curve. I knew that the blog could be a helpful calling card, a way to broadcast my knowledge of financial services trends and marketing, and even to help me define my positions on certain topics. But I wasn’t exactly sure how I would achieve this or where it would lead. See: The RIABiz top 10 industry blogs — and which bloggers they recommend.

I decided to let inspiration guide me. Rather than create a calendar of topics and stick to them in a disciplined way, I used the platform as a soap box of sorts, calling out those notions or topics that I encountered in my everyday professional life in wealth management, next-gen issues or advances in technology. This approach seemed to work.

Arriana Huffington used a gut feel
to take a chance on April
Rudin.

Certainly, there was a lot happening in each of these realms so I had plenty to write about. I eventually established a rhythm of about two blog posts a month, though the timing has been flexible. I tend to wait until I notice a topic or bit of news that seems urgent, do a little research and then write it out. I generally spend about 5 or 6 hours on each blog post, give or take. I post the columns myself, and Huffington Post does not edit them, with the exception of verifying sources for any major data points I include.

Developing a 'voice’

Early on, I learned to pepper the blog with “scenes” from my own life, to inject it with some personality, and try to connect more directly with my audiences. It’s an approach that’s consistent with my firm’s take on digital/social marketing strategies for financial services generally: Be authentic, and stay narrowly focused on topics most relevant to the audience you seek to attract to create the most engagement. See: How a 33 year-old advisor ditched the Midwest for California and used mad blogging and SEO skills to hijack annuity-bound web traffic to propel giant growth.

One essential feature of the blog that everyone who has read it remarks on is the “voice.” I aim to be disruptive and contrarian, offering an original take on events and developments in the market. This seems to come through. In fact, when people meet me, they often remark that I sound just like I write. A high compliment for a blogger.

Four years and some 60 blog posts after I began, the payoff has exceeded my expectations by opening doors and creating relationships globally that might never even have occurred to me. I have 500 or so regular followers on Huffington Post, and my content is streamed to Forbes.com and the Wall Street Journal online and many other publications with broad readerships.

My readers include financial services executives around the globe. Some of my posts have gone “viral,” as they say. LinkedIn—The Gateway Drug to Social Media, was re-tweeted over 1,000 times, for example. And I have used the column as a starting point for conversations with prospects who then became clients. See: Advisor Tested: How LinkedIn can truly build your business and not just feed your ego.

Priceless payoff

It has also attracted the attention of financial services conference organizers around the world, and I have become a regular speaker on this conference circuit. See: One-on-one with Ian MacKenzie: How IMCA makes hay by letting the RIA and wirehouse channels fall where they may.

It has also been a point of reference in conversations with editors at major trade publications such as Rep. magazine/wealthmanagement.com, Investment News and now RIABiz.com, where I have penned columns. (Why RIABiz? I consider it a kindred spirit as a contrarian in financial services thinking) In other words, I believe the payoff of writing a blog for the Huffington Post has been priceless.

I have noticed that if I want to begin doing business in a particular area, penning a blog on that topic can lay the foundation. To offer one example, in late 2011, I began to do research into and write about next generation wealth in Asia, and not long after that I was contacted by the organizer of a training event in high-net-worth marketing in Hong Kong. That set off a chain of events, and I have since spoken twice a year at conferences and training workshops around Asia, including in Kuala Lumpur, and Dubai.

Last night I dreamed…

Attendees have included representatives from banks in Bahrain, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore and many other countries. Not only has this work brought me clients and exposure, it has deeply enriched my own personal experience and knowledge as well. In January of this year, I attended the Asian Financial Forum—the largest financial services conference in Asia as a guest of the Hong Kong Trade and Development Council. You can read my blogs about that experience here: Innovation In Financial Services-Oxymoron? and here Lessons From the Asian Financial Forum and Hong Kong 101— An American’s Guide To The Asian Financial Forum.

Another blog, Last Night, I Dreamed I Was The Goldman Sachs Social Manager, allowed me to start a conversation with some of the most influential and talented people who run social, marketing and brand for Goldman Sachs.

Twitter alert

It has been terrific to get to know some of the smartest minds on Wall Street in this subject. I kept that conversation going with a few subsequent blogs, You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby—The Boring Annual Report Goes Social and A New Lighthouse Beckons The Social Media Weary.

The Huffington Post blog has also allowed me to build relationships and network in an organic and instantaneous way. One day, I was on Twitter and watched as David Heinemeir Hansson, founder of software company 37 Signals, answer hundreds of tweets alerting him that his software had gone down. As a PR professional, I was amazed to see how authentic David was in his responses and Twitter “crisis communication.” See: What to make of Sallie Krawcheck’s emergence as a Twitter-sphere celebrity.

Conversation starter

I had the opportunity to interview Hansson, who is also co-author of “Rework,” a contrarian’s guide to business success (co-written with Jason Fried), and blog about our conversation in What To Do When Business Breaks Down – One Guy’s Tale.

Many of the blogs are simply great conversation starters. The blog, Wealth Gets A Facelife: Attracting And Engaging With Next Gen Wealth, has been referenced back to me many times by a variety of people in the financial services industry as being the piece that “finally made it all make sense” with regard to why embracing a digital strategy was increasingly urgent.

Alive and online

And I was producing a piece with the Wall Street Journal on hedge fund marketing when the outside writer working on the project quoted a line from my own blog, Mad Men Meet Wall Street back to me.

I am certain that Huffington Post and my blogger’s chair will carry me even further in the future. I’d like to continue to use the platform to give visibility to those issues that are important in my field, to shape the direction my own business takes and to uncover opportunities I didn’t even know were there.

After all, everything is still alive on the Internet. And I believe it’s essential to be a part of the conversation happening there.

April J. Rudin is the founder of The Rudin Group, a wealth marketing solutions firm specializing in UHNW/HNW client acquisition. strategies. It is the mash-up of wealth marketing, digital/social media and next gen. The Rudin Group represents the sum effort of April’s experience, relationships and know-how in creating effective, visible campaigns.