Our blogger this week is Wade Pfau.

Wade Pfau is the Professor of Retirement Income at The American College, the Director of Retirement Research for McLean Asset Management and inStream, and publisher of Retirement Researcher. Wade focuses on helping guide readers of Retirement Researcher "along the path to a successful and sustainable retirement by providing modern, sound academic research."

Wade has been named one of the Innovators in the 2016 InvestmentNews' Icons and has been featured in publications like The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and AARP.

How long have you worked in the financial services industry?

I've been in the financial services industry for 5 years.

When did you first start blogging?

I first started blogging in 2010.

Why did you start blogging?

I was working as an economics professor in Japan, and starting a blog was part of the process I used to prepare to return to the United States.

How has blogging impacted your professional career?

I think blogging was instrumental in helping me to build a reputation within the financial services industry, which then helped to open many the door to many other opportunities.

How often do you post a blog?

It has varied a lot over time, sometimes more frequently than others. But for the past year I have been pretty consistent about creating two new posts per week.

What is the best way for coming up with blog topics?

My blog topics mainly relate to research topics in the area of retirement income planning. This includes writing about research I’ve conducted as well as writing about the research of others.

How do you find the time to be a Financial Advisor and a blogger?

Blogging is an essential part to building my reputation as a source of unbiased information about retirement income planning, which in turn helps with financial advising.

Did you make any mistakes when you first started blogging?

I never had a real organized approach. For the first few years, I used a free blogspot blog. It probably would have helped to be more organized from the start.

What is the best way to promote your blog?

That’s a good question. I wish I knew the answer. I think it does help when media publications include a link to my blog when they write stories for their publications.

If you could only give one tip to an Advisor out there thinking of starting a blog, what would it be?

To find a niche and a unique voice that will help to rise above the mass, and to also be a consistent and regular blogger.

If you could give your younger blogger-self one piece of advice, what would it be?

Determine your audience and determine the point of the blog. I experimented with things like advertising on it, but in the end I found that the blog is much more effective as a way open the door to other opportunities rather than to be a direct source of generating revenues.

What KPI do you look at to measure success?

I’m not sure what this means, but I’ve always tended to focus on pageviews per month as the metric I am most familiar with.

How long did it take you to start seeing positive results (whatever the result was) from blogging?

I had very few readers for the first five months, but then readership grew rapidly after releasing my Safe Savings Rates research article in February 2011.

Read past interviews:

Michael Kitces: advisorwebsites.com/blog/michael-kitces

David Merkel: advisorwebsites.com/blog/david-merkel

Roger Wohlner: advisorwebsites.com/blog/roger-wohlner

Tadas Viskanta: advisorwebsites.com/blog/tadas-viskanta