Tag Archives | Readership

WordPress Themes and Styles

By Randy R on December 22, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress themes are styles and files that work together to form layouts that you see on WordPress blogs. Kubrick theme is used the Default Theme in WordPress for its innovative design and use of tags for people to customize their websites. Soon after that, custom themes come into the scene. Custom themes offer plenty of choices for users to take advantage instead of using Kubrick theme all the time.
Users are able to create their own unique WordPress websites without having to resort to Default Theme. The possibilities to more beautiful designs are endless if more time is spent in creating high quality blog layout designs. Instead of tweaking Kubrick theme, it is advisable to make your own design through available tutorials in the Internet.
Although Kubrick theme can be tweaked too, it is horrendous to read through long list of tutorial pages. Beginners are easily confused with the alien IT languages used in changing Kubrick theme that it is almost not possible for beginners to tweak Kubrick theme without giving up half way. Custom themes are so much easier to use and are available in readily downloaded form.
Another reason to choose custom theme is custom theme provides alternative template for specific site features such as category pages and search result pages without cramping everything into one column. Sometimes people would love to have things to click on their websites. This means that personalization is a better choice if people want to increase readership.
Using only Kubrick theme means that you are going to stuck with it whole year. It makes your website looks so boring and not well- updated. You can solve the problem by switching to custom theme. It is also easier to switch between two site layouts to allow users to change site layout according to occasion or season. Some people purposely switch to festive theme when festive seasons like Christmas and New Year are approaching.
You can also design WordPress themes as a service so that others can enjoy your design through public release. This is especially true for graphic designers who created many different themes as charity to others through their free websites. Users can take advantage to further customize the themes if no copyright is stated. If it does, all users need to do is creating design that has the some elements of the copyrighted design to make it truly a new design. It is that easy to make your own custom theme.
Building your custom theme rather than just using Kubrick theme helps you expand your knowledge in web building. It is an opportunity to learn more about CSS, HTML and PHP. To those who are already good in the mentioned IT knowledge, it gives you the opportunity to put your expertise to work. You will be surprised at your level of creativity once you lay your hands on customizing your site theme.
Kubrick theme is not a bad theme. Nevertheless, we need to create something new to make our sites less likely to resemble each other. Therefore, it is time for Kubrick to retire to give way to more exciting and interesting themes.

WordPress Company Sites

By Randy R on December 4, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

A decade ago, it is not surprising and embarrassing if large corporation did not have their own websites. Now, a company without its own website loses its credibility and respect due to vast demand in online business. WordPress websites are made for companies and individuals to compete in this competitive cyber world. Whether it is for commercial or personal purpose, websites are staples in the Internet as a form of communication approach. The success of a website depends on how appealing it is to search engines. To make websites easily accessible, WordPress are created to be SEO friendly.
WordPress can be customized easily to optimize search. The term ‘SEO’ which stands for search engine optimization, is used as a tool to gauge traffic and volume of a website. It is not difficult to change WordPress URL into a more SEO friendly one with a few simple steps. Users just need to change and update their permalink structures. The reason behind this is to create a new SEO keyword-friendly URL structure. Bloggers need not worry about their old URL because all incoming links which are associated with the old URL will be directed to the latest optimized URL.
Being a platform of blogs and commercial websites, WordPress is user- friendly in terms of site administration and configuration. Users do not have to be highly- skilled in IT knowledge but to learn a few advanced technical optimization to prevent duplicate contents and make their blogs SEO friendly. Some useless archives in the blog need to be disabled to avoid duplicates which will adversely affect blog ranking in search result. It is also wise to exclude unnecessary links and pagination.
Using suitable WordPress themes can shoot your blog to stardom with better SEO. Users can download SEO friendly templates to revamp their blogs to increase popularity and readership. The secret to choose the best template that fits your blog is the matching the theme with blog contents and blog name. Search engines will easily recognize the keywords and WordPress theme used when the blog fulfills certain SEO metrics such as highlighting its contents, onsite optimization and appropriate look and feel.
On top of that, WordPress is blog- publishing software that is compatible to many useful and SEO friendly plug- ins. Killer plug –ins like Comment Luv, Feed Footer and Who Sees Ads give your blog more functionality. WordPress is already great software by itself. With enhanced features by plug –ins, your blog will be more manageable and SEO friendly. Plug – in like Google XML Sitemaps helps to make your blog more visible for search spiders. Marking the online presence of your blog through sitemaps makes you a more successful blogger.
Also, WordPress blog is made to host a more well- structured layout. It is a design stage for corporation and individuals that need no fancy design features. Moreover, design features such as Flash and Javascript might hamper search effort as they are not SEO friendly. Search engines prefer simple but loud layouts that clearly reflect the identity of the website. WordPress websites are not heavily designed so that the websites can appear easily and quickly in the search result.
You can also optimize your WordPress front page with texts. Texts, preferably permanent ones, are personalized to make blogs more visible in search engines. More tags on the front page also optimize search especially the unique ones. You can even replace the “Read More” link with something more meaningful to your every post. This little thing makes a huge difference in your WordPress SEO.
To conclude, many people underestimated the power of SEO in elevating their WordPress websites to greater height. Through intelligent comprehension and understanding of SEO, blogging is not a mere entertainment anymore, but a sign of success in blogosphere.

Ways to Monetize Your Blog

By Randy R on October 23, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Ways to Monetize Your Blog

In the early stages you shouldn’t really be thinking about monetizing your blog and instead you should be more focused on providing good content so that you can build a readership. Once the foundation is laid and you have a steady stream of traffic then you can begin to play with the many different monetization options. I feel some bloggers will put ads on their blogs way to early and most readers get turned off from this. If you’re planning on having a long-term successful blog then you shouldn’t even consider using ads on your blog until you’re well into being established in your niche. Once you have a certain trust factor secured with your readers then adding monetization methods can pay off greatly.

The first type of ad many people start with is cost per click ads and the most popular network for this is of course Google Adsense which I highly recommend joining. If you haven’t already registered with Google Adsense then this should be the first thing that you do before anything else. Adsense is very slow in the beginning but if you have traffic then eventually your earnings will go up. You’ll need to play with ad placement on your blog to ensure that you’re optimizing your ad space to the best of your abilities, but you shouldn’t be posed with much hassle doing this. Adsense pays millions of people every month and have a very good reputation which is why so many people use them to make money from their blogs.

Another method commonly used to monetize your blog is through affiliate offers and sales. You can either get leads and receive a set fee or a commission for products you sell. Selling products is far more profitable then getting leads but in the beginning we all need to start somewhere and often time’s leads are easier then selling products. There are countless numbers of affiliates for you to choose from and you should try sticking with only one or two until you reach minimum payment.

Finally you could choose to sell your own advertisements on the blog, usually you’d post on a webmaster forum in a Link Sales section and try selling links or banners. This can be really profitable if you can manage to keep a high page rank and decent alexa rating. Many people buy links on blogs so you can ensure residual income through link sales by maintaining a blog.

There are still other ways for bloggers to monetize their efforts but that’s the main three ways you should use to monetize, although selling links you need to be careful and make sure they don’t appear as paid links. Google frowns upon paid links and for this reason you should be really careful when thinking about selling links on your blogs. Selling links in the content is a lot risky and safer for you to do then offering sitewide blogroll links so you need to make the decision on how you’ll sell links if in fact you even choose to. Monetizing your blog gives you the chance to earn a nice income off of your hard work and you should make sure to capitalize on the chances. Once the readership is high then you should implement ads and affiliate offers that pertain to the topic of your blog.

How to Make Money Off Of Affiliates

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

How to Make Money Off Of Affiliates

Most bloggers who are blogging to make money already have some experience with affiliates most likely but for those of you who don’t an affiliate is simply someone who sells a product for someone and receives a commission. You can also get leads that pay money too and this can actually be easier in the beginning and I would recommend that if you’re new you work with getting leads rather then sales. People are more inclined to join something free then to buy something, especially off of a new blog which doesn’t have too much reputation so for the first while stick with leads. I actually wouldn’t even introduce affiliate sales or leads into your blog until at least one month after you begin it. Also it’s only one month if you post everyday if you post less frequently then give it a couple months before introducing affiliates. The last thing you want to do is bombard all your new readers with affiliate ads, instead you want to first build up a readership and then move forward with affiliate ads.

Once you’ve decided to start working with affiliates you need to decide how you’ll go about the task. Some people will make a separate page for affiliates and list them all on one page so that it’s somewhat tucked away and then only people interested in the offers will have to look through them. Other people will add banners or links into their sidebar pointing to the affiliate and then others will make a new blog post with the affiliate lead or product. I find that creating a new post for the product or lead is the best way to go about getting sales, because this way you can write a review of the product and let people know a bit about what there buying. You’ll notice you get more sales from the products and leads that you offer some guidance or knowledge on rather then just posting a banner or link.

When you’re placing links on your blog that point to affiliate URL’s you should use a cloaking plug-in so that you can make friendlier URL’s. A lot of people won’t click links if they know it’s an affiliate link and it’s easy to tell because most affiliate networks use there URL to forward you to the affiliate product. There are plug-ins for WordPress which make this simple though and a quick Google search will do the trick for finding the right plug-in. I’ve noticed on blogs where I cloak my affiliate links up to 30% more action on the links then when I simply use the affiliate link normally and when you’re dealing with money 30% is a fairly large percentage.

That’s about all you need to do in order to display your affiliate links properly so that you can maximize your profits and apart from that all you should be concerned about is making sure the affiliate banners and links you use on your blog fit in the blog. Meanings don’t promote a shoe affiliate on a hat blog, only choose affiliate leads or products that are directly involved with your niche. Also ensure you don’t overdo any affiliate ads because people will quickly become turned off from your blog if everything is an affiliate ad. You should use them sparsely throughout the blog posts to make sure you don’t come off as someone just trying to make a quick buck. People are far more inclined to buy something off of someone who has taught them stuff through the content on the blog, so make sure you continue writing solid content and mix in the affiliate ads as you go.

Having a blog is something very common in cyber world

By Randy R on April 29, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Having a blog is something very common in cyber world. What makes a blog more superior than other millions of blogs is its friendliness with SEO. The acronym “SEO’’ refers to “search engine optimization” which means the process of improving and elevating volume of traffic to a website from search engines via normal search results. Blogs with better SEO gets heavier traffic and readership compared to the ones with poor SEO. In this case, WordPress websites are able to create SEO friendly sites.
Nothing beats WordPress when it comes to content management systems. WordPress works with themes that are CSS- based. Therefore, it is wise to pick SEO- compliant designs for WordPress which will propel your blog to success. Search engines prefer designs that are CSS- based whether you have a static site or content management systems. It is advisable to exclude Flash or large amount of Javascript because search engines do not read these well. Design features that take ages to load despite fast connection also makes your site less popular in search engines. WordPress countered the problem with its structured configuration that disallows too many design features.
WordPress is also very versatile when it comes to choosing themes. Choosing appropriate theme for you blog is very important to narrow down search. Themes or designs that are associated with certain keywords or keyword phrases are equally important. This is because when your site is indexed by search engines, they will actually review the blog contents and themes. WordPress makes this possible with its easy customization of blog themes. Whether it is Kubrick theme or custom theme, WordPress setup is so user- friendly that switching themes is not difficult to match your website. Your theme is a fundamental approach to appeal to search engines.
WordPress is SEO friendly with its easier customization of URL structure. Users can easily modify and edit their permalinks through WordPress dashboard. All they need to do is to go to ‘Customize Permalink Structure’ page and select ‘Custom Structure’ Option. The main purpose of doing this is to list the Post Name and Post ID number in URL to customize it as /%postname%/%post_id%/. After installing and activating Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin, you are able to change your .htaccess file before updating your new permalink structure. Simple steps like these will ensure that only one URL is associated with one blog entry. This makes your WordPress URL very SEO friendly.
Furthermore, permanent texts on your WordPress front page make your website more SEO friendly. This can be achieved with WordPress template which can be easily modified to include a text box right under blog header. Bloggers just need to write texts that show up on permanent basis. Texts that are associated only with your blog makes your blog pop out in search results. From this way, your blog will stand out among crowds of other findings because of your significant permanent texts.
It is advisable to sign up for RSS feed for to optimize search for your WordPress blog. “Really Simple Syndication” of simply RSS is a feed format used for blog entries, news and headlines in a standardized format. Each update of your blog entry will be featured in mailbox of people who subscribe to your feed. Also, with RSS feed, it is easier for people to track down your blog titles. WordPress makes RSS customization a simple job with its clear instructions that even beginners can follow. Resolving your RSS customization would mean that the chance of your blog entries being found in search engines is rather high.
To make your WordPress more SEO friendly, there are many plug- ins that you can install. There are as much as 24 plug –ins that WordPress bloggers are recommended to install. Although having a matched theme for your website is sufficient, you can always make your website outstanding since your downloaded theme might be used by other bloggers too. WordPress bloggers can install Akismet, All in one SEO Pack, Feed Copyrighter Plugin and Homepage Excerpts. These plug- ins make your website popular to readers as well as appealing to search engines.
In conclusion, the presence of your blog among a sea of other blogs does not mean that yours will be engulfed quite easily. Making your blog SEO friendly solves the problem easily as well as creating a path to your blog success in long- term.

Become an Active Member in the Blogosphere

By Randy R on February 19, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Become an Active Member in the Blogosphere

You’d actually probably be surprised but if you’re an active member in the blogosphere then it will bring you countless amounts of free traffic, and can make your blog more mainstream. There are tons of blogs created and many more created on a daily basis and you need to make sure that if you plan on blogging that you make yourself stand out from the crowd. There are tons of social networking sites for bloggers that can help create a name for yourself and your blog, and the more time you spend on working on networking the better results you’ll see.

Don’t expect to get thousands of visitors overnight from a couple conversations, but over time if you consistently use the social networking sites for bloggers then you can gain a following of people, especially if your blog is half-decent. Twitter is probably the most popular network for bloggers right now and it allows bloggers to follow the daily internet lives of other bloggers. Anyone can use the site though and you don’t need to be a blogger which means that many blog readers also use the site to follow the popular bloggers. If you make yourself noticeable on Twitter then chances are more and more people will begin to follow you which simply means they can see whenever you post something new to Twitter.

This means you can post a new blog post and then notify everyone on your Twitter about it within seconds which will help gain you a readership. If your knowledge is useful and not just regurgitated nonsense then you will stand a much better shot at retaining the readers that come from the social networking sites.

Another way to become active in the blogosphere to benefit your blog is by commenting regularly on different blogs. I always make sure I comment on certain blogs, as then you begin to gain a friendship with the other blogger which can be great for your blog. This can lead into link exchanges, blog post exchanges and even traffic exchanges through numerous methods. The possibilities are endless and the fact is most bloggers like networking with other bloggers to help each other out. All you need to do is make yourself noticeable by commenting on blogs, and obviously you might not be noticed on a blog with hundreds of comments a day but if you comment on semi popular blogs you can become noticed quickly.

You can also link to other blogs in your blog posts and they will then notice that they’ve been linked to from your blog. This could end up getting you a link in return and depending on which blog links you back it could bring in huge amounts of traffic.

Your best friends are other bloggers when you’re a blogger yourself so make sure you remember that and always be network with other bloggers. Also if you’re asked for help from a fellow blogger you should help them out because you never know what it could lead too. You may end up getting a link from them or even a review from them and it could lead to more traffic. If it’s a service you offer on your blog then you may even get more business from it. Sometimes doing free work leads to higher paying jobs which mean you should always consider doing freebies for some people. If it gets you advertising out of the deal then it’s not working for free anyways, so you need to think of it like this.

There is nothing more important I find then becoming friends with other bloggers in your niche, because although there sort of your competition you can still benefit from helping them out. Blog commenting also builds your backlinks so this is the most important thing to do, because even if it leads nowhere you’ll at least be getting some backlinks. The do-follow backlinks help your search engine placements as well, but most bloggers don’t use do-follow. If you find a do-follow blog then you should bookmark it and comment there at least once a day because then you’re guaranteed to be increasing your backlinks everyday which is something that Google and the other search engines love to see.

Blogging For Earning With A Long Term Strategy

By on August 9, 2010 in

Many men and women dream of blogging for revenue, and this goal is not far beyond the reach of someone with average intelligence, a willingness to work difficult, and a fundamental grasp of blogging technology. Even so, extremely few people manage to reap the profits they want from their blog page. Most folks who attempt to produce dollars with their blogs do not succeed for two reasons. Usually, bloggers have unrealistic expectations of how fast their readership will grow and how a lot dollars they’ll make, and when these expectations aren’t met the disappointment can crush the desire to continue blogging. The other trap that many bloggers fall into has to do with lack of planning. If you want to turn a income as a blogger, the key to accomplishment would be to make a realistic plan and stick with it.

Original post by Val Alex