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The Importance of choosing the right WordPress Theme

By on April 5, 2012 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

The Importance of choosing the right WordPress Theme

Once you have set-up your WordPress blog one of the first things everyone does is chooses the theme for their blog. You don’t need to keep the same theme and can change it anytime you would like. In the beginning when your blog is new I would just use a free wordpress theme that is related to your niche. There are hundreds of different free wordpress themes out there that you can use and many of them are very well done with great graphics.

As your blog starts to get older you’ll need to determine whether or not you want to keep using the free wordpress themes or if you want to adapt a custom wordpress theme to your blog. Normally what will determine this is whether or not your blog has any traffic or revenue. If you have traffic and are making some money off of your blog then I would recommend getting a custom wordpress made for your blog. Once you have a custom wordpress theme it’s like jumping up the ladder in blogging and makes you almost like royalty. Most readers will stay on custom theme blogs longer than other blogs as well because when you use a free wordpress theme people see those everywhere, but when you adapt a custom theme your readers will have never seen any blog like yours before.

WordPress themes have come down in price over the past couple years and you can get a great custom wordpress theme for under $200. This isn’t a small investment for a blog that isn’t making money and isn’t a very wise investment either. If you have traffic on your blog though, and making some money off your blog then spending $200 won’t seem nearly as bad. It should also help increase your traffic and revenue so it’s a wise investment in some situations. Make sure you have established traffic and revenue before spending money on any theme though, this is because a lot of blogs will never make any money. The last thing you want to do is spend a couple hundred on your blog and it never make any money.

If you look around the blogosphere you’ll notice that most of the established and authority blogs all have custom themes that look amazing and unique. It helps to retain traffic and also assists in increasing your return visitor traffic. If you’re a designer and coder then you can most likely make your own wordpress theme and if you can do this then you should definitely do it for all of your blogs. You don’t need to wait for traffic and revenue if you can do the work on your own time because it isn’t costing you any money.

When you decide to implement your own custom wordpress theme to your blog make sure that it stands out and is unique. You don’t want to spend money on a theme that looks similar to another theme because that defeats the purpose. The purpose of a custom theme is to stand out to your readers and to retain the traffic you build to your blog. Try to add some new features to your theme that you can’t find on other blogs or try changing the layout of the conventional style and making your own style. Always make sure that you use a custom logo or mascot for your theme as well because this will help brand your blog, especially a mascot.

As you can see the importance of your wordpress theme is very important and there are many reasons you should be considering when choosing a theme. If you’re choosing your theme for looks only then you aren’t doing enough. You need to think about how many people are doing that as well, because many do and end up with the same free wordpress themes. If your blog can afford to invest some money into it then I would first spend it on a custom wordpress theme.

A custom wordpress theme will also help you sell your blog if you ever decide to sell it in the future, and you’ll be able to fetch top dollar for your blog. So your themes is more of an investment then anything else, but if money is tight then wait until your blog is making money before spending money on a custom theme. If you’re using free wordpress themes then you should consider switching your theme every month or so, this is so that your readers don’t get bored of the same theme. You should try switching your theme with a newly released free theme each month as then your visitors will be less likely to have already seen the theme.

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WordPress Plugins, Themes & Hosting Consideration Recommendations from Search Commander Inc., CEO

By on August 1, 2011 in Randy Roedl

PubCon video content producer Vanessa Zamora sat down with Scott Hendison, president at Search Commander Inc., to discuss content management systems, specifically WordPress, the blogging platform that is one of his specialties. Hendison shared a number of his top plugin picks for WordPress development in this PubCon Las Vegas 2010 interview, including SEO Automatic’s own Core Tweaks WordPress Setup plugin that minimizes the initial content management system set up time, All in One SEO Pack and HeadSpace2 SEO for search engine optimization needs, as well as Yoast, which includes a plugin for SEO, an XML Sitemaps plugin, and an RSS footer plugin. Hendison also shared his preferred WordPress themes, pointing out that although the most popular theme to his knowledge is Thesis, a premium theme, he prefers a free theme called Atahualpa, and recommends others browse through free themes before spending money on a premium theme that ultimately might not have all of the desired capabilities. Hendison continued by sharing his recommendations with regards to selecting a Web hosting server, suggesting against shared servers that stifle page load time, now a factor in Google’s ranking system. In addition, shared servers do not provide as much security as dedicated environments, Hendison added. If looking for shared hosting, Hendison suggested Search Commanders PDXTC shared hosting service, as well as Bluehost. For dedicated options Hendison suggested Rackspace or Dreamhost.

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Importance of Directories for Bloggers

By on July 7, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Importance of Directories for Bloggers

A lot of people in the online business say that directory submissions are played out and not worth there weight and gold anymore. I disagree with this completely though and I feel that directory submissions are basically mandatory for bloggers. Directory submissions won’t help bring in direct traffic to your blog, but they do build your backlinks up fairly quickly and therefore boost your SERP rankings. You’re much better off taking your time with directory submissions and not doing them all at once. You’ll notice a brief increase in SE traffic from submitting to directories quickly, but if you take your time and only do a few everyday then you’ll notice a more steady flow of SE traffic. There are both free and paid directories that you can submit to and I personally don’t use any of the paid directories. Either I feel there not worth the value or in some cases just too costly for a blogger to spend on directory submissions.

Instead of spending money on directory submissions I simply submit to five directories everyday that I haven’t used before and this way I’m getting a guaranteed five backlinks each day for my blog. Google will notice that backlinks are being built everyday on a consistent basis and most importantly the links will seem naturally built to Google which is vital. When you submit to too many directories at once you run the chance of Google thinking that your submissions were done through automation which would hurt your SERP rankings. Being completely natural is the only way for you to go when building links to your blog and that’s why submitting to only 3-10 directories daily is ideal.

Since you’ll be submitting to so many directories there isn’t really a need to list any here because you’ll end up finding them anyways. There are regular directories, blog directories and niche directories, now you’ll want to submit to all three types of directories on a regular basis. Regular directories allow any type of site from almost any category you could imagine, blog directories only accept blogs and niche directories will only accept sites/blogs from the niche that the directory is about. I find that blog directories and niche directories hold good value so you should seek these types of directories out first and then move on to regular directories. There are hundreds of directory lists with thousands of directories on them which you can find easily on the internet. One of the best resources that I use for finding directories is DirectoryCritic.com which always has an updated list of directories. They also have niche directories so it’s a site worth checking out.

You’ll notice that some directories take awhile before accepting your submission but that is fine and don’t expect them to do it in one day every time. Directory owners are usually busy approving and rejecting hundreds of submissions each day so sometimes they won’t get to yours for awhile. One last thing that you need to know about directories is that some will require a reciprocal link and some won’t. I personally only submit to directories that don’t need a reciprocal link unless it’s a good blog directory or niche directory. There isn’t any reason a regular directory should ask for a reciprocal though and generally when I come across ones that do I skip them.

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Never Buy or Trade Traffic for Your Blog

By on July 4, 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

Never Buy or Trade Traffic for Your Blog

No matter what niche of blog you have there always seems to be a traffic exchange system where you can either trade or buy traffic. Now for the most part you never want to trade or buy traffic for your blog simply because it’s a waste of money. You only want to change trade traffic if the other traffic is coming from another website or blog that is similar to yours and offers good traffic. If it doesn’t offer good targeted traffic then there is no reason why you would want to trade traffic with the website and you should stay away from it because it won’t help you out.

If you trade all your hard earned traffic then your blog visitors will be leaving your blog and you’ll be receiving visitors from the website you’re trading traffic with. Now if the website you trade with is a toplist or something then the traffic isn’t going to be worth exchanging traffic to get. You need to determine which trades will offer you equal or more traffic for your traffic, and the traffic needs to be targeted. There is no reason sending away your targeted traffic to get junk traffic in return that won’t amount to anything.

Now for those of you who have been thinking about spending money on buying traffic I would advise against doing so. You don’t want to buy traffic for your blog because the only reason traffic is for sale is because it isn’t good targeted traffic. If it was targeted traffic then you would never see people selling traffic by the thousands for dollars. The reason they sell their traffic though is because there traffic is garbage and they make more money by selling it then trying to convert it into sales. Now you could try and hope to convert the bought traffic into sales, but for the most part you won’t even see one sale from any traffic you buy. Unless you find someone who is selling some private traffic that is targeted and converts then you shouldn’t buy traffic.

Some people buy traffic to try and boost there website stats before selling it, but the problem with this is that it won’t help you. People will want to see the referrer stats and once they see that the traffic has been bought then they won’t want to buy your blog or if they do they won’t pay much. Buying traffic seems dodgy because the only reason people really do it is to boost their stats and other webmasters don’t like buying blogs with bought traffic.

Buying traffic from bad areas can also cause your blog problems in the future with the search engines. The more unnatural stuff you do the more likely the search engines are to find something wrong with what you’re doing and penalize you. The last thing you want to do is get penalized by the search engines so make sure you follow the rules. Stick to building links and getting organic traffic and the revenue will begin to build up. Buying traffic is just a waste of your money and you shouldn’t spend time even considering spending your hard earned money on useless junk traffic.

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