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Monetizing your Blog

By on November 1, 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

Monetizing your Blog

After you have set-up your wordpress blog and begun getting some traffic to your blog from your link building and from the search engines you can begin monetizing your blog. You shouldn’t start monetizing your blog too early because it will turn some people off from your blog. Also make sure that you don’t make each post a big advertisement for some product or advertisement because your readers won’t enjoy that too much. You need to figure out the perfect combination of ads to make money off of your blog while keeping your readers happy.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

Google Adsense is the biggest ad network for bloggers and you’ll be best off using them for your pay per click ads. You simply make some pay per click ads to the size you need them in the Adsense admin section and implement them into your blog. The size of the ads will make a big difference so make sure you don’t try adding too big of ads into your blog. You should try to implement the ads into your blog so that they fit right into the content as it will draw in more clicks.

Affiliate Leads

Many of the affiliate networks offer leads that you can add to your blog and what this means is simply that you send your readers to a lead page where they sign-up for something free. Leads don’t pay that much when there free, but some of the leads which cost money will pay a lot of money. You’ll also find that you have better luck trying to get people to join leads then buy products.

Affiliate Products

All affiliate networks have products that you can promote and you can either add links or banners to your blog to promote these products. It’s best to generally write a review as a blog post to promote the product this way it won’t interfere with your blog. You will be paid on a commission basis for the products you sell ranging anywhere from 5-75%.

Link & Banner Sales

There are lots of webmasters and businesses that will buy links and banners from blogs with traffic and you can make lots of money with ads. You can choose to find the people privately on webmaster forums or you could advertise your blog in some of the networks out there that allow you to advertise your blog in hopes of selling links and banners. Many of the networks work great and will find you advertisers quickly, it’s best if your blog is niched based though when looking for private ad sales.

There are lots of ways you can monetize your blog as you can see, and I haven’t touched all of the methods either. I’ve gone through the most popular methods, but there are some other things that can make you money depending on your website niche. I’d recommend starting out with these monetization methods first so that you can make some money before moving onto other areas. Also remember that you should stay with the same networks until you reach minimum payouts so that you don’t have money sitting in a bunch of networks that you can’t withdraw. It’s a rookie mistake that many webmasters make and I don’t want to see you waiting months for your first check.

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How to Choose an Effective WordPress Theme

By on October 31, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Choose an Effective WordPress Theme

If you’re blogging on the WordPress platform,the first thing you’ll probably do is to install a new WordPress theme. Even if you’ve been blogging for years you may still be a theme “”addict””, wasting a lot of time doing minor modifications that when summed up merely distracts you from blogging itself.

It’s actually easy to see why this single aspect of running a blog demands so much attention. With the correct theme, you can accommodate all the nifty little widgets and codes, and may also mean better search engine rankings and tons of fresh traffic every day.

So what are the factors you need to consider to make theme-hunting easier? Here are five important ingredients:

1) Theme Width and Columns

Typically, WordPress themes come in 2-column or 3-column formats, with widths ranging from 500 pixels to 960 pixels wide. If you’re blogging for non-profit purposes, a 2-column theme can look more compact and reader-friendly. Since you have less images of products or links to other sites to display, you can focus exclusively on the content without leading readers away from your site.

On the other hand, if you’re blogging for profit, you may want to consider a 3-column WordPress theme that will be able to accommodate your Google Adsense, Chitika and Text Link Ads codes comfortably without squeezing everything in the content area. 3-column themes allow room for expansion, but in the event that you’ve filled up all available space with ads, then it’s time you removed the non-performers and use only the advertising services that work for that particular blog.

2) Use of Images and Icons

A theme with images and icons can look good, but it rarely increases your web traffic or subscriber base. In fact, most “”A-list”” bloggers have plain vanilla themes with a simple logo on top. Reducing the amount of images also means faster loading time and less stress on your servers. This vital aspect of server load become apparent only if you have tens of thousands of visitors a day, but it’s worth designing for the future.

A image-laden theme also distracts readers from the content itself. This is the reason why blogs like Engadget and Tech Crunch use images intensively in the content areas to add value to a post, but the theme itself is simple and rather minimalist.

Ideally, a theme should allow you to use your own header image for stronger branding purposes, yet replace images and icons with links and text, or just not use them at all unless absolutely necessary.

3) Compatibility with Plugins

Another time-sucking activity is installing plugins that improve the functionality of your site. There’s a plugin out there for almost everything you want to do with your blog, but while most of them are free and easily obtainable, it’s not always easy to install the plugins and insert the codes into your WordPress theme.

If your theme is too complicated, it may be a headache to even insert that one line of code you need to make a plugin work. This is often the case with advanced AJAX-based WordPress themes that have too many files and heavy coding. I’ve always preferred a simpler themes that stick to the default WordPress theme as much as possible, so I can cut back on the learning curve and just get on with my life.

Remember that the purpose of your blog is to deliver timely, relevant content to your readers, Any theme that preserves or improves the reader experience is good, any theme that subtracts from the experience is bad.

4) Search Engine Optimization

A lot can be said about search engine optimization, but at the end of the day if you have content worth reading eventually you’ll get the rankings you deserve. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need SEO; all it means is that what you really need to do is to make sure:

(a) Your

(b) All your blog content titles use the H1 tag, with the main keywords used instead of non-descriptive text for better SEO relevance

(b) Your theme has clean source codes, and if possible all formatting is linked to an external CSS file which you can edit independently

5) Plug-And-Play Ease of Use

Can the theme be installed easily on an existing blog without having to move things around? Can the same theme be used and customized easily on your other blogs? These are some additional things you may want to consider when theme-shopping, especially if every minute of downtime on your blog may mean lost revenue.

While it’s hard to make comparisons due to the sheer amount of free and paid themes out there, it’s still a good idea to have a test blog site. Test any theme you plan on using, and make sure your test blog is also fitted with all the plugins and miscellaneous widgets used on your real blog. The last thing you want is for your readers start seeing weird error messages on your blog.

At the end of the day, a theme is just a theme. Instead of spending your time installing them, it may be wiser to outsource the task and focus more on your readers. Alternatively, you may also want to consider buying “”plug-and-play”” themes for a reasonable price. Dennis De’ Bernardy of ProWordPress.com has probably one of the best themes around, but if you’re short on cash there are certainly cheaper alternatives.

Copyright (c) 2007 Gobala Krishnan

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StudioPress WordPress Themes Review And StudioPress Discount Code

By on October 29, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

StudioPress WordPress Themes Review And StudioPress Discount Code

More and more people use WordPress these days, because WordPress is free and there are a lot free and premium themes and plugins. Some of us love free WordPress themes, but most of time we can not find quality themes. So I suggest you use premium WordPress themes and you can get full support from the designers.

StudioPress is a leading WordPress theme provider; the designer Brain is famous in this area. If you are looking for high quality professional premium tempaltes, you can find your favorite WordPress themes on StudioPress. With Brian Gardner as the founder, StudioPress is being managed by a group of six professional designers, graphic artists, and WordPress experts.

There are more than 25 professional premium WordPress skins out there, including news themes, magazine themes, gallery skins, company templates, real estate themes and more. You can find your favorite theme here.

The price of these quality WordPress themes is affordable. Similarly important is the pricing of the themes offered by StudioPress; generally they are affordable at $59.95 per theme. On top of that, they also offer a Pro-Plus All-Theme package for $249.95 which you can gain access to all themes offered by StudioPress including the newly launched skins. With the Pro Plus All-Theme package, you are entitled to receive support and updates for all current and future StudioPress themes! You can use StudioPress coupon code to save.

StudioPress offers theme aid by means of their assist forum where you may ask any questions and they shall be answered by helpful members and supportive staff. On the negative side, no email assist is available and your issues will have to be posted within the forum in which others can address it. Hence, there may be no privacy on your component when it comes to asking for help. Nonetheless, this is not a massive issue due to the fact the critical thing is that you will get the assistance that you will need either from other members or the staff. When it comes to the use of the selected layouts for your web page, there is assistance and detailed concept tutorial provided for the members so that you can make integration of the concept towards the web site smooth and less difficult.

StudioPress WordPress themes are easy to use. Their layouts are fully Search engine optimized by 1 of the top SEO experts, Joost de Valk. StudioPress Themes can assist your blog rank much much better inside the Google by following StudioPress Tutorials and recommendations you’re able to obtain even higher search engine placement outcomes.

Good for SEO. StudioPress WordPress Themes are fully Search engine optimized by 1 of the top SEO professionals, Joost de Valk. StudioPress Themes can assist your blog rank much better inside the Google by following StudioPress Tutorials and recommendations you are able to achieve even higher search engine placement results.

To conclude the StudioPress review, the overall assessment of this premium WordPress subject provider is superb and highly recommended, having wide range of expertly developed SEO themes to offer to its prospects and consumers.

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Twitter Try it

By on October 28, 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

Twitter: Try it

Twitter, a new way that you can talk to millions plus people. A sleek looking alternative to the other social networking sites out there. You may not have as many theme choices as some other sites, but you can change up the background colors that will fit your wishes better.

As a Twitterer you can do just about anything. Have fun looking up different subjects from Wicca to Shoes. Meet people from all over the world. Write a blog to vent those daily issues you can’t stand. Others will follow you, which means they are interested in what you do, and want to be a friend. You of course can choose who you follow, and believe it or not, there are a lot of famous people here too. Shaq is on Twitter and to a big basketball fan they can click and follow what he posts and talks about. It’s just a really neat thing for people to be able to learn things about others.

Maybe you have a project that you need to write about another country. Go and see if you can find some Twitter people who live there. What a way to make that report even better than normal. You will wow your teacher or professor and have information that others will not find in books. Why not take advantage of something that will only help you score a higher grade.

You are able to add widgets or design your own. Some people can come up with some really excellent ideas for widgets; it’s always nice to check out the new ones that have been made. Add them to your page and have something that will make your page a bit different.

Perhaps you have a product or a website that you would like to promote put that up on Twitter and your followers will see it and check it out. Plus those people who are doing a search and hit on a keyword you may have. Well you can see the possibility of having a bunch of people come and check out what you have on your site.

There are many reasons to use Twitter, a fun way to connect with others in the world. Your own unique look on your profile by changes the colors if you want too. Plus just meeting some nice people, or a mate, you never know where you might meet your Mr. or Mrs. Right! Twitter could be the place that it may happen at.

Be sure to check out the Twitter page and see what all the hype is about. Don’t worry if you don’t post a lot, looking at what others has posted is fun too. There are so many advantages to meeting people online. Heck it’s a great way for a person who hates going out to have friends too. You may even meet one day or just talk through years and become really close with someone. All this can happen by just going to Twitter and getting signed up. Check it out now and make some new social connections.

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How To Build A WordPress Theme – 5 of the Most Popular WordPress Blogging Themes

By on October 27, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How To Build A WordPress Theme – 5 of the Most Popular WordPress Blogging Themes

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms in the internet today. Over 25 million site owners have chosen WordPress as their blog software of choice.  WordPress is easy to install, maintain and modify. It has a huge list of powerful features that can make your website very functional. Best of all, WordPress is free. Site owners can easily change the visual look and layout of their WordPress site simply by changing the themes.  There are a lot of themes available for free online. One of the best sites to get your WordPress blogging themes is the official WordPress site of WordPress.org. WordPress.org maintains a theme database where people can download WordPress themes for free. Themes are ranked based on popularity, date of first upload, as well as the date of the latest update. Currently WordPress.org ranks Twenty Ten, Mystique, Atahualpa, Constructor and LightWord as the five most popular themes based on the amount of downloads.

LightWord is the fifth most poplar theme in WordPress.org. It is a basic, intelligent black text on white theme that can have two or three columns. The theme is set to display at fixed width regardless of the browser size and screen resolution of a site visitor. It supports widgets as well as Google AdSense and covers all the basic WordPress functionalities.

Contsructor is the fourth most popular theme. A lot of people like this theme because it can have multiple layout settings. The theme can display six different sidebar positions and three layouts right out of the box and creating a new layout on this theme is fairly easy. This is a great theme to work with if you want to easily come up with a distinct original theme.

The third most popular WordPress theme is Atahualpa. They are highly customizable WordPress blogging themes. It boasts of 268 options for site owners to use to come up with their own original themes with the resulting design compatible with most web browsers. Designs can be up to 4 sidebars, fixed or flexible width as well as other customizable functionalities. The theme also has an active support forum where users can find help in fixing any theme related issues.

Mystique is the second-most popular them in WordPress.org. It currently has over 340,000 downloads since October 2009. It is a feature rich theme built over solid and stable design. There are a lot of useful widgets built-in to the theme as well. The best part with Mystique is that the theme settings interface is intuitively designed so users can easily make changes to the theme even while having only a little knowledge in PHP and CSS.

Currently, the most popular WordPress blogging theme is Twenty Ten. Designed to be stylish, simple and readable while still highly customizable, site owners can easily make a distinctive theme by just changing the header image, the background and designing a custom menu. This them is great to use when you need to come up with a theme that you can easily set up, modify to be distinctive and efficiently present your information without making any modifications to the actual theme files. This theme is great for website owners with minimal knowledge in PHP, HTML and CSS and just wants to have a theme that they can easily modify to look different and original.

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10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

By on October 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

As a general rule of thumb most errors you’ll encounter with your WordPress blog are the result of excessive or incompatible plugins. While many find the selection of essential plugins a conundrum I believe in testing each plugin one-by-one with the latest version of WordPress so I can isolate the problem to determine the cause of the slow load times, call function errors or php memory limit warnings. The most valuable tool I can tell you when it comes to plugins is that when possible look for existing code that can accomplish the same result.

Of course there are certain plugins that even I use in my WordPress Blogs. I’ve compiled a list below of the top 10 plugins that I use on a daily basis that I believe will help any tech blog:

* AdSense Now – There are many ad insertion plugins for WordPress, but if your tech blog is using AdSense – this is the plugin I recommend. It allows you to insert your ad blocks aligned left, center or middle in 3 sections of a post. It also gives you the option to suppress ads on pages, category pages, tag pages, archives and more.

* Audio Player – Being able to insert mp3 clips or podcasts into your blog can be a problem. Audio Player is a plugin that makes this process simple – simply create a music folder on your site via FTP and then upload mp3 tracks to the directory. You can insert the built-in audio player into any of your posts or pages with a simple line of code – painless, simple and easy.

* Facebook Sharecount – It’s no secret that social networking sites like Facebook are effective ways to create a fanbase, but being able to harness that power relies on an easy way to share your great content. Facebook Sharecount will make it easy for visitors share your posts and monitor your content.

* Foliopress Descriptions – Once your tech blog has hundreds or even thousands of posts you will need a way to mass edit your descriptions. While the importance of meta descriptions is debated, I still believe that a hand written summary should be written for each post. Foliopress Descriptions supports post excerpt, These and All In One Seo meta description fields.

* Google XML Sitemaps – If you’ve read my previous post on how to get indexed by Google and Yahoo you know that having a sitemap is essential. This plugin auto generates your sitemap in a nice and neat XML file and let’s search engines understand the content on your tech blog. After installing and activating the plugin Google XML Sitemaps will take care of the rest.

* NextGEN Gallery – Managing your images and photo galleries can be a pain, but NextGen Gallery makes this simple. With features like auto resizing, watermarks, thumbnail creation as well as gallery effects – NextGEN Gallery is a must have plugin.

* Star Rating for Reviews – When you run a tech blog sooner or later you will start receiving products for review. Creating a solid review is as much about content as it is about presentation. Star Rating for Reviews allows you to create ratings for the products you review or even rate different aspects of the product and averages the ratings to determine a final score. The possibilities are limitless with the plugin – a must have for anyone looking to review tech.

* TweetMeme Retween Button – If you look at the posts on TechBlogStartup you’ll notice a yellow Retweet button aligned to the right. The power of Twitter is growing by the day so making it easy for your reader to ReTweet great content can prove very valuable. If you’ve installed Google Analytics like I explained in my previous post here, then you will be able to monitor just how many visitors enter your post through Twitter. If you are wondering why I haven’t included ShareThis it’s because I manually insert the code instead of using a WordPress Plugin.

* WP Super Cache – If you’ve heard of Digg then odds are you’ve heard of the Digg Effect where an article on a website becomes so popular so quickly that the flood of traffic to the website causes the server to crash. Since WordPress blogs are built on SQL Databases they are highly susceptible to this condition, but installing WP Super Cache can almost eliminate this threat. The plugin builds a cache of your posts and creates a static html page so that the server load is reduced and your site can handle more visitors. If your tech blog is brand spanking new I would install the plugin but not activate it until I started to see spikes in traffic or one of my articles was picked up by a major tech blog like Engadget or Gizmodo.

* All in One SEO – Search Engine Optimization is a key ingredient to driving organic traffic to your tech blog. Writting great content is key, but after you have created that content you need to make sure that it targets keywords and includes some basic optimization to ensure it is search engine friendly. All in One SEO does this job very well. If you are using the WordPress theme I use (Thesis) then you will not need this plugin, but for pretty much every other WordPressTheme I recommend installing it right away so that you can start writing your custom meta descriptions

All of the plugins I’ve mentioned above can be downloaded manually and then uploaded via FTP to your blog or you can add them from within your WordPress Dashboard – personally I prefer the latter. If you are wondering why certain plugins are not listed on my top 10 list – I just don’t find them essential to a tech blog. You will notice that I do somethings with TechBlogStartup that many people use Plugins or Widgets to do – eg. the top 6 articles aligned horizontally at the top of the site or the Recent Posts section in the side bar. For tech blogs that receive a large volume of traffic, limiting the plugins helps reduce the SQL memory load and if you’ve ever had a website crash you know just how important this is. Do you have some WordPress plugins on your tech blog that you think we should know about? Go ahead and drop your own list or links to the plugins in the comments section below so we can check them out.

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How to Add WordPress Plugins

By on October 23, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Add WordPress Plugins

When it comes to utilizing the power of WordPress, the one thing that sets is apart from other platforms is the plugin system. Plugins allow you to easily add advanced functionality to WordPress and can help you perform a wide variety of tasks. However, you need to learn how to add WordPress Plugin before you can start using them on your own blog or website.

There are two different ways to add plugins to WordPress. The first one is to go out and find the plugin you are looking for on the internet. You can then download the file that they give you. From there, all you have to do is log in to your WordPress blog and select the add new plugin link. WordPress will then have you point to the file you downloaded and it will automatically upload it into the correct directory.

The second way to learn how to add WordPress plugin is to use the built in search feature. You can type in a certain keyword or phrase and WordPress will automatically show you the plugins that it finds based on your search. Best of all, you can also see ratings for each plugin and see which one is the best option for you.

Once you find a plugin you like, just click the install button and WordPress will take care of uploading the plugin for you. If you do this method, you do not even have to upload the files yourself. It is really that easy!

As you can see, there are a few different ways to learn how to add plugins to the WordPress platform. Regardless of the way you choose, you can quickly start adding a lot more functionality to your blog or website.

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Quality WordPress Themes1

By on October 21, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Quality WordPress Themes

A innovative software makes it possible for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, and Blogger individuals to easily build templates within a short period of time. Instead, I use a WordPress theme that I installed in less than a half hour. After that I just added loads of great content such as images, articles, videos. As soon as they notice that another site have a similar theme they will immediately look for to find another one to ensure that their website boast a unique look.

The ePanel is the mechanism in their themes where you customize and set your website layout. You can dictate the navigation, home page, color scheme (if more than one color scheme is offered by a particular theme), search engine optimization, blog settings, and more. Photo WordPress theme is extremely important in the world wide web as to catch client and users to check out and use their web site wherever you’ll be able to include up your blogs and of course generating your own articles or blog posts and posting it to a certain web page.

Once you find a theme you like, you will need to download it to your own PC. It will likely be in either RAR or ZIP format, so you will need a unzipping tool. WinRar is free to download if the file has a.rar extension. Once unpackaged, you will need to FTP/Upload the files to your own webhost. WordPress application can also be used as a Content Management System (CMS). CMS is a document centric application which is used to manage documents.

By the time you get the Gallery WordPress Themes, the first thing that you should know is on how to install it. You should always remember that this is a child theme and because it is a child theme then the first and the most important thing that you should do first is to upload both the parent theme and the child theme, to do this you have to download Thematic theme and extract the folder and then after upload it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. There has been a huge increase in the number of developers releasing free premium WordPress themes over the years. This has boosted the competition in the field, which has in fact benefited the end user.

Language of local or international origin can be used to create the weblog using WordPress theme development process. You can make test site and check the functionality of your WordPress template. StudioPress is a leading WordPress theme provider; the designer Brain is famous in this area. If you are looking for high quality professional premium tempaltes, you can find your favorite WordPress themes on StudioPress. While selecting from online sites, you have to ensure that the site offers its themes rich with high quality and great appearance.

A genuine magazine WordPress theme with pure articles or blog posts, minimalistic illustrations or photos and usable layout, structured to focus between visitors interest around the content and ads, instead of designer graphics. If you have a bit of knowledge in PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript then you can make your own themes for WordPress that can be sold over the net for a nice profit. But there’s one important part that reflects the image of you and your niche as a blogger, and it is what we call design. Although design is just secondary to the content, it is still very potential for the blogger to make it look very attractive.

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