Archive | affiliate marketing

Ways to Increase your Search Engine Rankings

By Randy Roedl on November 13, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

Ways to Increase your Search Engine Rankings

As a website owner you’ll know how important it is to raise your search engine rankings and that it’s the most valuable traffic around. If you want to make money online with a website then it’s almost apparent that you’ll need to get some search engine rankings in your niche. There are plenty of ways out there to increase your search engine rankings and you should try to use as many of them as you can. You can guarantee yourself that thousands of other webmasters are out there doing the same so if you want to compete with the big boys then you’ll need to know the tricks.

The reason search engine traffic is so important and vital to your success is because it’s the most targeted traffic around. If people are finding your website for terms they search in the engines then you’re doing something right and should benefit from your hard work. It takes time for the search engines to rank you well though and you can reflect the degree of difficulty by how much competition there is in the search engines. If there is low competition then you’ll be able to easily get high rankings, but as the competition increase in the search engines then you’ll have to work hard to earn the rankings. We’ll now take a look at some of the methods you can use to increase your search engine rankings.

Build Backlinks

The first thing you need to work on is your backlinks and this is an ongoing process that never really ends. The search engines love seeing websites consistently building backlinks as then it seems important to the search engines so you should work on building backlinks every week. You also don’t want to build a bunch of backlinks at once and then stop because it could hurt your website rather then help it out. Build naturally and you’ll notice a great influx of your search engine rankings as time progresses.

Optimize Your Website

You can work on all the link building and promotion in the world, but if your website isn’t optimized for the search engines then you could be in trouble. You should always have an updated sitemap on your website so that the search engines can easily index your website without any problems finding pages. You also need to make sure you optimize the keywords you’re targeting throughout your website. Places to add keywords on your website are in the meta tags and in the content. If you’re website is properly optimized and you build links around the keywords optimized on your website then you’ll be well on your way to some great keyword rankings in the search engines.

Both of these two methods are the main methods you need to worry about when building your search engine rankings up from the ground. Of course having great unique content is also a must, but apart from content and search engine rankings there isn’t much else to do except collect your checks. You’ll need to maintain your search engine ranking campaign over the long-term though if you want the revenue to stick, so owning a profitable website is basically a full-time job.

How to Find the Best WordPress Themes Using Search Engines and a Little Bit of Intuition

By Randy R on November 12, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Find the Best WordPress Themes Using Search Engines and a Little Bit of Intuition

Finding a good WordPress template can often be a bit of a task and a process that can last countless hours as you manoeuvre through all of the less that suitable options. The standard option for most people looking for WordPress themes is to use a search engine or a popular WordPress templates directory such as Woo Theme, Theme Forest or Elegant Themes. However, there are countless other ways to find WordPress themes and there are even a few under-utilised ways you can utilise to find premium WordPress themes for free.

The easiest way to find WordPress themes is to use a major search engines such as Google and perform a relevant query like “”best WordPress themes””. However, this will typically bring back endless lists of themes from blogger’s whose sole intention it is to profit from the referral commission they generate. A better option is to perform a quick query around your main target term and look at the returned results by opening them up in your browser. Once you have opened them up try appending the term “”wp-admin”” to the end of the root URL (this will allow you to identify whether or not the site is using WordPress).

Then, if the site does use WordPress, look in the source code of the site by going to the view menu and selecting source. Scroll down to the stylesheet tag and look at the filename – this will usually include the name of the particular theme the website is using. Perform a search around the name of the theme and there you have it, an attractive WordPress theme that is suitable to your particular niche or sector.

Another useful way to find potential WordPress template is to be more specific with your web queries – for example, if you are looking to build a technology magazine website then try searching for something like “”Technology Magazine WordPress Theme””. This will bring back more relevant results and results that are likely to be more suitable in terms of how you want your site to look.

A Brief Explanation of WordPress Themes

By Randy R on November 10, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

A Brief Explanation of WordPress Themes

WordPress is an excellent tool that many small businesses and individuals are using to reach their target audiences. So, what exactly is WordPress and what can you do with it? WordPress is a blogging platform which allows users to either create their own theme or use one of the many free themes available. Let’s take a look.

Dashboard

Once you sign up for WordPress you will be able to log into what is called your dashboard. This is where all the magic happens. The first time you sign into your dashboard you might feel a little overwhelmed. Don’t fret. The dashboard is the grand central station of your blog. From here you will have access to your blog posts, the different pages of your blog, links to and from your blog, different media you are using, comments to your blog, and of course your WordPress design. WordPress design falls under the “”Appearance”” section on your dashboard and there is much you can do with it.

Free WordPress Themes

To begin with WordPress you need a theme. This is what people see when they look at your blog, but it’s also so much more. It determines the control you have over your blog in terms of look and feel. There are many free WordPress themes that you can choose to use. To gain access to these simply click on “”Appearance”” on the sidebar of your dashboard and then select “”Themes””. This will take you to a section of WordPress where all the free themes are available. Each theme will have a brief description, and allow you to be able to preview it via the “”Preview”” button. If you find one you like you can click the “”Activate”” button to have the theme active on your blog. The good news about free WordPress themes is that you can switch them anytime you like. On the downside, you are not likely to find a theme with every design element you want on it and while you can add your own design elements like your company logo, in the free WordPress themes, this ability is somewhat limited.

Custom WordPress Themes

To get a custom WordPress theme you can go about it in two different ways. In the first option you can choose a free one and tweak it to your liking. One way to tweak it is to utilize the various widgets that are available with that particular theme. To do this, select the “”Widget”” selection on the sidebar of your dashboard under appearance. On free WordPress themes you can also edit the stylesheet. This is the code behind the design of your chosen theme. To do this, select the “”Edit”” option on the sidebar of your dashboard under appearance. It is important to note that stylesheets are set up in CSS which means that in order to edit the theme you will need to possess knowledge of at least basic CSS code.

Your other option is to create your own WordPress theme. This is also done using CSS. WordPress itself gives an excellent tutorial called Theme Development ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development ) that is very helpful if you want to develop your own theme. It is important to note that if you want to get a clean looking, professional, custom WordPress theme that no one else will have you are going to need to know coding and have access to a design program. If you have neither of these, a simple solution is to work with a design service that will be able to create a custom WordPress theme for you.

New To Online Shopping Carts

By Randy Roedl on November 9, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

New To Online Shopping Carts?

If you are unaware that shopping carts exist online than you will learn a lot from this article. Website owners who sell more than just a few items on their site will usually have a shopping cart so that customers will have a more pleasant and efficient shopping experience while on their Website. Unlike a physical shopping cart that is made of metal or plastic a online shopping cart is a piece of software, or a script, that allows customers to put items they wish to purchase into a virtual (online) shopping cart so that they can save them to purchase when they are done browsing.

An online shopping cart will usually allow the customer to have a running dollar total of the merchandise they have placed in the online cart. Sometimes the running total will even include the shipping fee.

If a customer frequents the same Website multiple times some shopping carts will save the shipping information so that the customer does not have to keep entering it each time they shop on the site.

Online shopping carts can even keep track of inventory levels that can save the customer a lot of frustration and time. Some shopping carts are even smart enough to make suggestions based on the customers past preferences while shopping on the site.

Online shopping carts can make your shopping experience faster, easier and hassle-free. Shopping carts have also been known to send out an email thanking the customer for shopping and confirm the order – can physical metal or plastic shopping carts do that?

Online shopping carts allow customers to add to the cart, delete items, change the quantity of items already in the cart, and also input the size or color of an item.

The online shopping cart can help the Website owner to appear more professional, and can help to create a secure and friendly atmosphere in which to shop. The shopping cart should match the theme of the Website and look like it is a part of the site and not a separate entity. Website owners should choose a shopping cart software that is easy for customers to navigate and have the features that are helpful for both the owner and the customers.

Shopping cart solutions for Website owners can be simple or complex depending on the number of items and the number of transactions that the Website usually handles each month. Shopping cart solutions can be free or they can be very expensive depending on the services provided and the number of features provided with the shopping cart. Some shopping carts are complete storefront solutions and others are basic shopping carts.

A Website that is offering goods or services that does not have a shopping cart may turn customers away if they are already used to the convenience of using online shopping carts.

How to Design a WordPress Theme

By Randy R on November 8, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Design a WordPress Theme

If you’ve every built a website on your own or are fluent in many different programming languages, then you might be able to benefit from designing your own WordPress themes. There are a few things you need to consider though if you’re thinking about trying to make a little money from this type of activity.

Having a web development background will certainly give you a starting point as far as being able to develop WordPress themes goes, but there are some specifics that you have to be concerned about. One of prerequisites that often times applies is that you must have an in-depth knowledge of the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) programming languages to be able to make your themes work in WordPress.

Since some many of the themes you see out there today incorporate images, color, graphical objects, and more, you’ll also want to consider how fluent you are in the filed of graphics design. If you have a background in graphics design, you’ll have a better chance at creating themes that are more attractive and desirable to those searching for them. This certainly isn’t a requirement, however, because you can always outsource the graphics work to those that specialize in this sort of activity.

If you want to be successful at designing and selling WordPress themes, then you have to do your homework in order to find out what the most popular themes are. Some of the more popular themes include business, blogging, and e-commerce themes. If you can focus your efforts on these types of categories, then you’ll have a better chance at being successful because people are searching for them on a consistent basis.

When you design your themes, try to keep them as professional, creative, and as functional as possible. Customers are more likely to purchase themes with these characteristics, especially if they’re trying to present their business to customers in a manner that will gain praise and admiration. Keeping the customers coming back is the key to success with any business, and the same applies to your business of designing WordPress themes.

Testing is the key to a successful product so make sure that when you think you’re finished with your theme and it is ready to be sold, go back and test all of the different components again. You want to make sure that your theme is completely error free and that all of the components are functioning properly. Trying to sell a product with holes in it is not going to do your business any good.

Finally, the price you charge for your product is going to determine how successful you are in the business you’re in. Be sure to research the average market price and then set your pricing based on that. Try to be as realistic as possible and make sure your prices are reasonable. You want to make a profit, but you don’t want to be so overpriced that nobody is ever going to purchase your product. Don’t sell yourself short either because you’ve worked hard and deserve to be rewarded for the wonderful WordPress themes that you’ve created.

The Thesis WordPress Theme – Perfect For Beginners and Experts Alike

By Randy R on November 6, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

The Thesis WordPress Theme – Perfect For Beginners and Experts Alike

Almost anyone who has ever set up a blog or tried to design a website will probably have used WordPress at some time or other. It’s one of the most powerful, and popular, pieces of software to be found on the internet today.

Most people think that it’s just useful for blogs and they do little more than install a copy and add some content. However, if you search around the internet you will soon discover that WordPress can do much more than just act as a blogging platform. Its great popularity comes from its customizability thanks to the huge number of plug-ins and widgets that you can download for free. These add-ons enable you to configure WordPress for almost any kind of website from simple sales pages to complete e-commerce stores complete with payment gateways and so on.

Its other great feature is the ability to change the look of your website at the touch of a button using templates, or as they are referred to in WordPress circles, themes. Some themes offer little more than a change of colour or some extra graphics, but the better ones enable complete customisation of your website, right down to individual page level. Using such a template can really make your website seem individual and make it stick out from the crowd.

One of the best themes in terms of the level of customisation it offers is the Thesis WordPress Theme by DIYThemes.com. This amazing template enables people with little or no web coding skills to completely customise the look and feel of their WordPress installation. Non-techies can adjust a whole range of parameters from right inside the WordPress control panel itself without ever changing a line of code.

There are 3 different ways to alter the look and feel of the Thesis them. These are listed under 3 menu options named Thesis Options, Design options and Custom File Editor from inside the control panel. The Thesis Options menu allow you to change things such as the layout of your navigation menus, add analytics and stats tracking code and gives you a fine degree of control over the display by tuning the headers, the posts, comments, sidebars and even tags that are used. The next menu option covers the design aspects of the Thesis theme. Here you have a bewildering range of choices that allow you to change the colours and fonts of every part of the site individually. You can have a feature box, a multimedia box for displaying video and even drop in a custom stylesheet if you have one.

Finally, you have the custom file editor. This utility allows even the most hardcore technical wizard full control over every aspect of the themes design. There is literally nothing that you cannot customise as long as you are familiar with WordPress and PHP.

The Thesis Theme is amazingly versatile, as can be seen by some of the showcase blogs that are demonstrated on its homepage. If you are en expert you can play about with it to your hearts desire but if, like most of us, you never want to see a line of code, then you can still change almost every aspect of the design. You can really allow your creative juices to flow without your getting your hands dirty, making the Thesis WordPress Theme one of the best available on the market.

For more advanced WordPress users

By Randy Roedl on November 5, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

For more advanced WordPress users who are looking for plugins to upgrade to, here are some nifty suggestions. Imagine a blog reader finding a useful link on your blog. Then imagine the reader clicking on the link only to find out that the link is broken. To avoid such frustrations, have this broken link checker installed on your blog. It helps you keep on top of things by checking your posts in the background while your WordPress administration page is open. It will then send you a notification on the Dashboard should a problem be found. It also checks outgoing and incoming links and you can time the intervals these checks are carried out.
If you have been blogging for a long time, nothing matters more than knowing that your posts are secure and accessible in the event of a fault. Backup your database on WordPress by using this plugin. It is compatible especially for Windows users.

Hard to deal with your codes on the blog? There are plugins that easily colorizes your codes making it standout and easy to read. The plugins are usually free of server dependency and supports multiple languages such as ; C & C++, C#, Delphi, CSS, JAVA, JS (Java Script) and more. For example, the Hex Hub HTML Color Codes and the Code Markup.
You have a RSS feed on your blog, now add to it! The Feedfooter is a handy plugin that puts an extra footer part on your RSS feed. You could place a greeting, an advertisement link or a personalized note to readers. It supports HTML enabling the embedding of banners right on the RSS feed. With 10 spots, you could place 10 different footers which rotate throughout your blog.
This cool plugin is a must have for your blog. The clicks made on your blog by readers are color coded with the most clicked on part turning red. It helps you easily track the most strategic locations for banners and ads and to know which links and advertisements are working and which are not. Having cool looking aesthetics does not hurt as well.
If you are a regular poster, the TinyMCE plugin is a nice WordPress plugin that allows you to change between a multitude of design choices to your blog post. This plugin is a timesaver with many shortcuts as well as a drag and drop option. In addition, linking, imagine and embedding videos are fast and easy.

This plugin brings your blog to new levels. It shows relevant posts and blogs when reader click on it. With high profile websites such as the CNN using this plugin, your blog could be linked to this international site should their news article be related to your blog post.

Just when you think you have seen it all, there are more plugins out there which can make your blog faster, cleaner and just more user friendly – increasing your traffic – which is the whole point of your blog in the beginning.

How to Create a WordPress Theme1

By Randy R on November 4, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Create a WordPress Theme

As most bloggers know, WordPress is an amazing platform for blogs, personal sites, businesses and portfolios to publish content, news, pictures and anything it comes to your mind. It’s very powerful and nowadays, it’s not just for blogs, most people are using it as a CMS (Content Management System). WordPress is for free & incredibly secure! It’s open source and one of the best thing about it, is that you can integrate plugins very easily from your WordPress admin panel. You can search for plugins all over the web, in the WordPress official website (WordPress.org) or anywhere else.

Designing a theme can be a hard task, specially because you can get a bit lost if you know nothing about html or php, but it’s definitely not impossible. With patience and perseverance anything is possible.

Looking around the web you can find several interesting tutorials, very useful and easy to understand, they guide you step by step on how to use the codes and tags, but very few of them are precise about what it takes to build a WordPress theme from scratch and what you need to know beforehand. They usually assume you already know about html and CSS.

First of all, you need to understand how HTML works. HTML is essential to learn how to create a WordPress theme. You need to find a way to learn and get familiar with the basic html tags and commands. Use Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage to play around a bit and get used to the html structure. Without HTML, you are completely lost, because you are going to deal with a lot of coding! Simply Google and key something like this “”learn html from scratch””, “”html for begginers””, “”html for newbies””, “”html step by step””.

After learning the basic html tags and functions, you need to learn how to style a webpage, that is to say, in other words, you need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets ). Learning how to Style an html page will allow you to style a WordPress theme, with pics, colors, font sizes, etc.

Why is this so important? HTML + CSS = CSS TEMPLATE. In order to build a WordPress theme, we need to create an HTML CSS layout first. It is the easiest way to build a WordPress Theme. That would be an html page styled using CSS. As we already mentioned before, with CSS you can control the different font sizes, font styles, colors, layer positions, margins, etc.

Once you’ve created a CSS template, THEN you will be able to easily convert it to a WordPress Theme.

So, to sum up the first phase:

1- Learn html. 2- Learn CSS. 3- Create a CSS Layout. 4- Convert the CSS Layout to a fully functional WordPress Theme.

Remember it’s a process that takes time but it’s definitely worth it if you aim to work freelance to make some extra money! don’t be afraid, use Google and search for tutorials, play around with Dreamweaver, and you’ll be able to create a WordPress theme!

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