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10 Classic WordPress Themes For Your Blog

By on October 9, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 Classic WordPress Themes For Your Blog

If you do a search for WordPress themes it will display thousands of results. Some of the themes will be dull and some are really inspiring. There are so many but these are 10 that I liked –

GridFocus Public

This is a three column WordPress theme. The navigation bars can be found at the top and bottom of pages in order to provide which provides the visitors with ample opportunity to continue exploring. It’s very clear in structure and hierarchy.

Copyblogger

This is one really cool WordPress theme. You can visit Brian’s copyblogger website for the demo.

With the Copyblogger Theme for WordPress, you’ll be able to modify colors, fonts, and even the tiniest details by utilizing the custom stylesheet solution that is included with the theme download. Also, thanks to the wonders of open source development, you can take advantage of add-on styles that others release for use with the Copyblogger Theme.

Jello Wala Mello

Jello-Wala-Mello is a news and magazine-styled WordPress theme created for multi-media sites. Some of the positives of this theme are 1) Beautiful colour scheme 2) Subtle design touches 3) Not difficult to start using.

K2

K2 is an advanced template for the blogging engine WordPress.

K2 also has the following AJAX-powered features:

1. Live Commenting lets readers leave a comment without having to reload the page.

2. Livesearch lets you type your search query and instantly have the results at hand. Better yet, it integrates directly with…

3. Rolling Archives is a navigation system designed specifically for K2, which allows you to navigate through archives and search results without having to reload the page.

Whyte

Who says monochromatic themes have to be boring? Theme features include: AdSense-Ready; Widget-Ready; Recent Entries; Comments, trackbacks, and pings separated on post pages; Option to include your own logo; Active navigation states for posts that appear in Recent Entries. Download the theme from the link below :

Vertigo

Vertigo is a modern, 2 or 3-column Widget-ready theme created for WordPress.

GridLock

Gridlock is cool because it doesn’t look like a blog, also because an HTML help page is included with Gridlock’s download file, which is very rare because most WordPress theme don’t have such a guide

Longhorn

Longhorn is a minimalist two column WordPress theme. Its design is simple and I have used it in this blog. Longhorn WordPress theme is compatible with the following browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 6 and 7

2. Opera Browser

3. Mozilla Firefox

4. Apple’s Safari.

LightBreaker

Here’s another great make money online WordPress theme. It’s really cool with a good design for placing advertisements.

BlueBird

If you are looking for a classy little design for your personal blog then 3-column BlueBird fits well.

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Top Ten Social Bookmarking Websites

By on October 8, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Top Ten Social Bookmarking Websites

Social bookmarking websites have become huge over the past couple years and there are now thousands of different websites out there that allows you to submit your blog posts too. Many of them aren’t worth submitting too due to them not being well ranked by the search engines as well as not having much traffic. If you’re going to spend time submitting your blog posts everyday to social bookmarking websites then you’ll want to make sure you submit to the websites that will offer you traffic. I’ve come up with a list of the top ten social bookmarking websites out there and I would recommend that you try to submit to at least these websites and if you have time then I would suggest finding more and submitting to more.

Whether you submit your blog posts to the social bookmarking websites yourself or with software is up to you and once you start making money you should definitely look at software out there. The best program is social bookmarking demon and you’ll be able to submit to hundreds of social bookmarking websites automatically within roughly ten minutes. It doesn’t take long to submit your blog posts using the software, but it does cost money so you’ll need some initial money to invest. If you want to wait until you make money then that’s fine as well and I personally waited until I was making money as well before I bought social bookmarking demon.

Certain social bookmarking websites receive millions of unique visitors each and every month so there is a huge potential for gaining traffic on some of these websites. The traffic isn’t always targeted, but it’s free traffic to your blog which helps increase your search engine rankings as your page becomes more popular. Some of the social bookmarking websites also give you do-follow links which count in the search engines so you should try submitting to these ones often.

Building links to your blog is one of the biggest tasks you’ll have as a blog owner and it isn’t always fun. Submitting to the same websites day in and day out can quickly become boring, but if you’re motivated to make money then you need to be ready to work. Social bookmarking submitting is one of the easiest things you’ll do and although it’s repetitive you need to do it, especially in the early stages. It’s a good way to get your blog out there in the social media spotlight, as you’ll be giving it the potential to become a hot item. If people like what they see on your blog then you could become the next social media icon which will result in a lot of traffic coming your way. Without further discussion I would now like to share the top ten social bookmarking website with you.

• Digg – www.digg.com

• StumbleUpon – www.stumbleupon.com

• Propeller – www.propeller.com

• Del.icio.us – www.del.icio.us

• Reddit – www.reddit.com

• Fark – www.fark.com

• NewsVine – www.newsvine.com

• Yahoo Buzz – www.buzz.yahoo.com

• Technorati – www.technorati.com

• MyBlogLog – www.mybloglog.com

There are plenty of other social bookmarking websites out there that are worth submitting too so if you have time then make sure you research some of the other social bookmarking websites out there. You can never submit your blog posts to too many social bookmarking websites so don’t ever worry about that and make sure you submit to as many as possible. You need to be consistent when you submit your posts though, so make sure you do it everyday.

Once you sign-up for accounts on the social bookmarking websites and get used to submitting your posts each day it will become a lot faster. You’ll get into a routine and it won’t take you long at all, you also should try keeping your accounts logged-in so that you don’t need to sign-in each day. It will save a lot of time for yourself and every second saved is valuable when you’re a blogger. Remember that once you have some money to invest you should get social bookmarking demon so that you can submit your posts to hundreds of different social bookmarking websites at once within ten minutes. It will save you countless hours and the small investment is worth it once you consider how many hours you’ll spend submitting to social bookmarking websites.

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Learn How to Select the Best WordPress Theme For Your Blog

By on October 7, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Learn How to Select the Best WordPress Theme For Your Blog

Lets face it, there are an over abundance of WordPress themes available on the internet, and with so many out there, fitting magazine style, CMS style, and personal style blogs, how can you tell which one is suitable for your needs? Choosing the right themes can be tough at the best of times, however by making sure that you follow the following guidelines, you should be able to easily shortlist to your ideal theme in no time.

Is The Theme Search Engine Optimized?

For most webmasters, this is going to be a priority, and for those who don’t know what they are looking for, it can be a hard task in itself. First and foremost, the theme will need to load in a reasonable time. As Google has made it public that they will include a measure in their algorithm that incorporates load time into their ranking system, a theme that is so jam packed full of features will most definitely slow down your load times, and may impact your rankings.

For example, the Boardwalk WordPress Theme from WPnow is one of my favorite themes, it’s bursting with color and life, which suits my needs perfect, however, the theme is painfully slow to load. In cases such as these, you can simply use the Super Cache plugin, which will create a static set of HTML files, to allow for fast loading, every time, thus keeping you safe when Google incorporates page speed into their algorithm.

Of course, you are also going to want to be completely certain that keywords are emphasized in headings using the correct tags. The standard use involves H1 and H2 tags in both the header, and in the blog post title. Some other themes, such as the Vigilance Theme from the Theme Foundry use a special piece of code which renders an image from text, and whilst this may come across as a bad thing, the script itself renders clear HTML coding which the search engine spiders can read easily. Bells and whistles are fine, only if the result is a clean and clear coding structure that can be read by the search engine crawlers.

Does The Theme Support My Version Of WordPress?

WordPress is booming at the moment, and as such, the demand for improvements is higher than ever. It only seems like yesterday when version 2.9 was launched, and we are already on the verge of seeing version 3.0 arriving. As such, if you are looking to shortlist your theme selections, making sure that your theme is by a reputable designer that regularly updates their themes is going to be of huge importance.

One of the most renowned theme designers, WooThemes, are currently working with WordPress on their version 3.0, and as such, they work consistently to ensure that all of their themes are compatible with all versions of WordPress.

What I suggest in all cases is to install WordPress on a test domain, just to ensure that themes are compatible, and most importantly, that they work and are customizable for your blog.

Is The Theme Easy To Customize?

If everyone downloaded or purchased the same theme, the blogosphere would be a very repetitive place indeed, and would most certainly lack the excitement that it currently has. Although I do recommend all webmasters to find a good theme to purchase (more people download free themes than purchasing, instantly making your blog more unique!), it is always advisable to look into making some customizations to your theme.

Some themes make customisation very easy, in the case of the Theme Foundry, their coding structure is very clearly labeled, which is most certainly something that I believe a lot of designers should be taking note of. Knowing where the search box is in the header can save a lot of trouble locating it, especially if you only know basic HTML, as such, a clearly labeled theme is always going to be something that deserves a second look.

Where Can I Get A Good Theme?

There are many places online that will offer themes for free, and various others that will charge a fee for their high quality premium themes. Whilst I do recommend investing in a good unique theme, this is a personal choice, some free themes can be very easy to customize just so long as you know HTML and PHP. The choice is entirely yours!

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WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers1

By on October 5, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers

WordPress is an open source web publishing platform used by millions of people around the world. It’s known to be relatively easy for a beginner to learn and start creating content for their blogs or websites.

However, there are few features that if not setup correctly, can do your site more harm than good. All the steps below assume that you are logged into your WordPress Dashboard (administration area).

The WordPress Tagline

The default WordPress tagline is “”Just another WordPress blog””. This acts as a subtitle for your blog or website and is meant to be descriptive of your content. Leaving this default text in the tagline text box means that your visitors and search engines will see this. It sure isn’t descriptive of what your site is really about is it?

You can easily replace this tagline with your own by going to:

Settings–>General–>Tagline

(make sure to save your changes)

Membership and User Role Rules

You have the ability to add additional users to your blog or website for the purpose of adding content or submitting articles for review. There two settings here:

Settings–>General–>Membership

Settings–>General–>New User Default Role

Be careful if you decide to let anyone register for your site. Spammers love it when this option is ticked without having hardened security measures in place first.

You will also want to choose the default role for new users wisely. WordPress allows five user roles:

Administrator
Editor
Contributor
Author
Subscriber

Each user role is allowed to access different administration areas of your WordPress installation. This can be a powerful way to organize your users but can also be potentially disasterous if one of those users accidentally deactivates a plugin or theme that your site depends on.

You can always add additional users manually without the need to open registration to the public by going to:

Users–>Add New

Set the Correct Timezone

99% of WordPress websites I’m brought in to help with do not have the timezone correctly set to match the location of the owner. The time is detected automatically, and you would think this would be OK, but it can cause a usability issue with your users.

Why? Imagine I live in California and my site offers news and updates about the Stock Market or Wall Street. Further imagine that I schedule an article to post at a specific time in order to target either my night owl readers or the early risers about a specific stock tip.

Well, if I’m in California and I schedule my article to post at 5:00am what happens if I didn’t set my timezone to match my location? You guessed it, that article would be published based on whatever timezone is set by default. This would not position my site as having “”breaking news”” for my target market.

What timezone is set by default? The timezone that gets chosen is directly based upon the timezone that is set on the server computer at your hosting company. I host some of my websites with West Coast based hosting companies but I live on the East Coast…therefore I need to make sure to set my timezone to Eastern Standard Time instead Pacific Standard Time.

(scheduling your article post times is a built-in feature of WordPress by the way)

Set Update Services

When you publish a new content WordPress provides a way for you to let other people now you’ve updated your site. Go here:

Writing–>Update Services

You’ll see that there is an text input box with one web address inside it. That address connects your website with the Ping-O-Matic search engine update service. Every time you add something new, your site tells Ping-O-Matic and Ping-O-Matic tells various search services.

You can add more update services to this list so you can be assured that any new content you create is automatically being distributed and indexed by a variety of update services. You can view a long list here.

Creating Human Readable URLs

When you create a page or blog post in WordPress, it is given a unique ID for use in the programming code and database. Because of this, when you view a page or post url in your browser address bar, you see something similar to this on the end of your web address:?p=123

The code at the end of that url address above is referencing the page/post ID of 123. That’s not very readable or descriptive to a person is it? Additionally that address contains absolutely no keywords that could be utilized by search engines to help them return relevant results to your content. Luckily, you can change how these look and make them much better.

Go to: Settings–>Permalinks

You will see that you have four choices of different url structures to choose from:

Default
Day and name
Month and name
Numeric
Custom Structure

I use different Custom Structures based on the needs of particular websites and I would recommend doing the same. You can learn more about Custom Permalink Structures here.

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Top Social Bookmarking Sites

By on October 5, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Top Social Bookmarking Sites

In the webmaster social bookmarking has been the recent phenomenon over the past year or so and they look to be continually growing still. There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites now on the internet and there are even programs available for purchase to help with the process of social bookmarking. Now if you’re like most people you won’t want to spend money when you first start using social bookmarking sites, and I don’t blame you because I didn’t either. The simple fact of the matter is though that you can only bookmark your sites pages to so many different sites manually before becoming bored. So if you’re just starting out with social bookmarking and are looking to do it the free way which is manually then you should focus your efforts on four social bookmarking sites. There are many more but if time doesn’t allow you to manually submit your posts to more then four that’s fine because most of the traffic comes from these three anyways. The four social bookmarking sites you should use are as followed.

– StumbleUpon

– Digg

– Propeller

– Reddit

Once you make accounts on the four websites listed above then you’ll be ready to submit your first page to each of the sites. It takes roughly two minutes to submit a page to all four of these sites and less once you get the hang of it. Social bookmarking can bring in daily traffic and earn you money on top of your other traffic which is why everyone is beginning to use the sites. The sites rank well in search engines and they also have a huge amount of type-in traffic. This means that your link could be visible to millions of people everyday and chances are at least a hundred of them will click the link. Social bookmarking is about persistence as well and you need to be persistent when you use the sites because if not the traffic will die down quickly. If you can manage to submit your new pages every time you add a new page then you’ll allow for a more continual flow of traffic.

If you’re a blogger then you should definitely use social bookmarking for exposure because everyday you make your post you can then submit it to these social bookmarking sites. If you post daily and submit to the bookmarking sites daily then you’ll never need to be worried about not having traffic, because by submitting everyday to the social bookmarking sites you’ll allow for constant flow of traffic. Make sure if you spend the time writing content that you gain the most exposure possible and you can do this by submitting to social bookmarking sites. There is a lot more that you need to do but you should make sure you fit in the few minutes each day to submit to social bookmarking sites.

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Interested In ElegantThemes Premium WordPress Themes-Discover ElegantThemes Here

By on October 3, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Interested In ElegantThemes Premium WordPress Themes? Discover ElegantThemes Here

Overview of ElegantThemes

When you start learning about ElegantThemes, a premium WordPress theme developer, there are two things that really grab your attention.

This is one of the most affordable premium theme developers out there today, yet their quality and attention to detail remains very high.
Their customer service and dedication to pleasing clients is exceptional. You won’t find that combination in many theme developing services today.

You have a sense that you are in good hands when you take up your ElegantThemes membership. All themes are guaranteed to function properly in the dominant browsers and have been tested to ensure that. It is also noteworthy that all sidebars on these themes are ready for widgets and some are ready for AdSense ads right out of the box.

Easy Theme Customization with ElegantThemes WordPress Themes

One of the nicest features of a WordPress theme from ElegantThemes is the easy customization using the famed ElegantThemes ePanel.

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. The best part is you can do all this customization in the ePanel without knowing any coding at all.

Pricing & License Model

This is one of the most interesting points about ElegantThemes. As a premium WordPress theme developer, the service is definitely one of the more affordable options. Everything operates off a membership system and there are two licensing options.

The basic license after joining gives unlimited access to all themes for a full year and you are allowed to make any changes to customize the theme to your personal needs without giving credit or stating anything about ElegantThemes on the site. The only restriction is that you can only use the themes on sites that you personally own. No redistribution is allowed.

The cost for a personal membership with the basic license is $39 a year (as of the time this article was published). This is definitely one of the best membership pricing models on the market today for an all-theme access premium WordPress themes developer. Yes, for $39 you get access to ALL the themes created – including future themes for the duration of your membership.

If you want to use one of these themes as a part of a professional web design or development service, you need to pay the one time distributor fee of $89 when you sign up (at the time this article was published). This gives a more advanced license to use all themes on as many domains as you like, with any modifications that you like, and this includes putting them on sites that will be sold to others.

The distributor license does not include selling the actual theme itself. It must be packaged with a domain name that is sold as a complete project to your clients.

PSD Files Included

Every theme offered from ElegantThemes comes with the PSD files that makes editing the graphics fast and easy within Photoshop. Also, each theme comes with blank logo images so you can do some customizations even if you don’t have access to Photoshop. Often PSD file inclusion is a premium cost with other theme developers.

Technical Support

Technical support is one area where other theme developers could learn something from ElegantThemes. They stand behind their themes and openly offer to fix any problems with installation or functioning. There is an active support forum open to members and an FAQ file that answers practically any question you could have, including defining basic terminology and concepts for beginners.

The catch here is that they are willing to keep their themes compatible with future WordPress releases as long as you are a member of the service. Once you cancel your membership and a new version is released, they may not be as willing to get it up to date without a restored membership.

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Tips to Make Money with your PPC Ads

By on October 2, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Tips to Make Money with your PPC Ads

If you’ve begun implementing PPC ads into your arsenal of marketing, but are having trouble making money off of your ads then follow these tips. I will be sharing will you some tips that will help you turn your PPC ads into profit pulling machines. When you first jump into PPC ads it’s difficult to get a high quality score and it’s even harder to make a profit. If you try implementing the below tips into your PPC ad campaigns I can assure you that you’ll be happy with the results.

#1 – Always go for Long-Tail Keywords

Whenever you set-up a new campaign you should only target long-tail keywords in your campaigns. You need to think about what the person will search for when looking for the information on your blog. For instance if you sell doctor notes then instead of targeting doctor notes you could target phrases such as Fake Doctor Notes, Buy Doctor Notes among many others. The best way to find long-tail keywords to target in your campaigns is to utilize a keyword tool.

#2 – Target Buying Keywords

What I mean when I say you should target buying keywords is simple, you should think about what someone would search for when ready to buy a product. Bid on keywords with the product name, review keywords and comparing keywords. These keywords will turn in the highest conversion ratio and this is what you want to be aiming for in PPC campaigns.

#3 – Create Targeted Ads & Creatives

You want your ads and creatives to be targeted around a small set of keywords which are all highly targeted towards what you’re selling or promoting. The more targeted your ads are the higher quality score you’ll have and the better luck you’ll have with PPC.

Turning PPC campaigns into profits isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t simple either. When you first start out expect to have a small budget that you can waste for testing purposes. Take a few products from different niches and begin doing small tests on the niches. See which one converts the highest and which one is bringing in the most profit. Once you have a good niche that is converting well then start spending more on your campaigns in that niche.

When you run a PPC ad campaign you need to check the results each and everyday. If you don’t then you risk losing too much wasted money especially in the early stages. A lot of PPC ads is testing and once you find out what converts then you just need to ride that wave until it ends. Once it ends then you need to have other campaigns running to create your revenue. Never just rely on one product because you never know when the money from that product could stop rolling in.

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10 Best WordPress Theme Editor Plugins

By on October 1, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 Best WordPress Theme Editor Plugins

WordPress does a very good job, especially for moderately-sized websites. This is because of the WordPress theme editor plugins, making it easy and simple to maintain a site and update its content. Here are the ten best WordPress theme editor plugins that you can use in your WordPress site.

1. Cforms II

This is the best in terms of configurability. It allows you to build literally anything in the site.

2. WP e-Commerce

This doesn’t have any competition. It provides an easy and simple to manage shopping cart and storefront as an integral part of the WordPress installation. It also includes the feature of selling digital downloads.

3. Search Everything

This is ideal for websites with static content since it allows users to search the entre site without relying on Google or leaving the site.

4. Google Sitemap Generator

The biggest benefit of using this is that it allows you to save from manual labor because the software already can locate your content. This editor plugin submits a complete index of your WordPress site to Yahoo, Google, Ask.com, and MSN Live every time the site is updated.

5. CKeditor

This is an open source WordPress text editor that brings the power of different desktop editors to the Web. It is compatible with different Internet browsers such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Netscape.

6. Event Calendar 3

This is one of the best and most integrated WordPress theme editor plugin. It provides you with an iCal feed aside from the standard RSS feed.

7. Page Links To

This is by far the simplest in the list since it allows you to create Web pages that link to another site. It is the easiest way to add different links to the main menu without the need for codes.

8. TinyMCE Advanced

This WordPress theme editor plugin allows you to easily add classes to tables, images, and block quotes.

9. XSPF Player

This allows you to play music on your WordPress site. This MP3 player allows you to manage cover art, playlists, and artist links.

10. pageMash

This theme editor plugin makes it very simple to put pages on the site in order without the need to edit every Web page individually.

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