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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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WordPress Plugins! How to Optimize

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

WordPress Plugins! How to Optimize

WordPress plugins can make or break your blogging experience. Being fairly new to blogging has been a real learning experience, not so much writing articles and sending them out to all my social sites, but in trying to optimize the WordPress site so that it’s hitting on all eight cylinders, so to speak. As I read other bloggers articles I pick up bits and pieces of what they have experienced so far, and I’ve decided that having the right WordPress plugins working for you can make life a lot easier. I’ve got a list of 11 plugins, that I’m going to recommend and hopefully shorten your learning curve, and make your blogging a more enjoyable experience.

No 1. Do Follow…This removes the evil nofollow attribute that WordPress adds in comments. You need this to keep visitors coming back for more.

No 2. AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget…Help your visitors promote your site! The widget allows any visitor to bookmark your site easily with many popular services.

No 3. All in One SEO Pack-Pro Version…It’s setup and ready to go right out of the box. It will optimize your site for search engine rankings, plus shorten your url’s by adding a number at the end, versus having a url that winds up being a mile long.

No 4. CommentLuv….Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. It’s rewards your readers and encourages them to return and make more comments.

No 5. Commissions Automator…..This plugin is really needed but if you’re interested in making money on line, it’s helpful. It automatically post instant commission promotions to your blog, with your affiliate ID included, so when someone buys the product, you get the commission. Sweet!

No 6. FD Feedburner Plugin….Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed which then sends your blog post out across the entire internet.

No. 7. Onlywire… This is a social bookmarker that will send your blog post out to millions of sites, with only one push of the button.

No 8. PostSwapper.com Plugin…..You can swap links with other bloggers to posts that are related to yours. Build link popularity automatically and easily. Backlinks are one item that is considered when webcrawlers and search engines are looking at ranking your site.

No. 9…Scribe….This plugin quickly checks your new blog post content against SEO best practices, utilizing the Scribe Content Optimizer. You get a readability score, plus see what your keyword density is so you can add more or remove some. This tool makes a huge difference when it comes to SEO Optimization.

No. 10….Tweetmeme….This plugin simply adds a button to your blog which allows your guest to retweet your blog post out to their list of tweeter followers. Nice way to take advantage of someone Else’s list.

No 11….What Would Seth Godin Do….This plugin allows you to display a custom welcome message to a new visitor and a different custom message to a returning visitor. Pretty neat. People like to be treated special so what better way to do that.

To find more information about the plugins just do a Google search, download the plugin into a temp directory and then go to plugins in your WordPress blog, click new and upload the zip file and then install. Pretty simple process and now you have an optimized blog that should bring you hundreds of visitors thanks to your new WordPress plugins.

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Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half

By on September 11, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half

WordPress themes are also known as layouts or templates. These are files that create the look and feel of your blog content. WordPress themes can be very simple, like the one that comes standard with every install, to the complex. Bloggers can choose from free and paid versions of templates. When choosing a template, you should choose one that will give you a lot of ability to easily customize the template to fit your branding needs. This article discusses 2 templates (or themes) that have a lot of customization features which are relatively easy to a create unique brand.

All WordPress templates allow you to customize them by going into the Edit page of the Appearance tab. If you are not comfortable with PHP and HTML code, then you may have some trouble in customizing your appearance. One benefit of the themes mentioned in this article is they are customizable through a special theme options page, which means you can get your WordPress site up and running much more quickly.

1) Atahualpa Theme

This theme is a free theme that was created by ‘Bytes for All’ and can be found on their web site where you can ask questions and get community support for this theme. Once this theme is installed, you can customize the theme in the Appearance >> Atahualpa Theme Options page. Once here, you will find a host of options to highly customize your theme. Webmasters can configure special CSS styles for things such as the header, the layout, and page features such as headings, links and menu bars. Users can easily upload header graphics that can rotate through the header graphic.

Other options that can be customized include the number of columns you want on your blog (technically you can have from 1 to 5 columns), which side you want you sidebars to be on, or what you want your widget boxes to look like. The look and feel is highly customizable and is a great start to quickly getting a professional look to your blog.

2) News Magazine Theme

The free News Magazine theme was created by Anti Social Media LLC. This theme gives you several easily customizable options that can be set in the Appearance >> News Magazine Theme 640 Options page. The News Magazine theme doesn’t have quite as many options to set up as the Atahualpa theme, but you can add code for site tracking (can be done through the use of plugins), ad rotating and just adding text or java script code to parts of your template.

One nice feature of this template is that you can easily take featured categories and spotlight them on your blog through simple dropdown selections. One very nice feature is that you can control the excerpt length of your blog postings on the index page. On 99.9% of the WordPress blogs out there, the home (or index) page prints the entire text of the blog post. A better format for visitors is to have a post excerpt and they can click a link to read the entire blog. Currently there is no function in WordPress that allows you to display excerpts of your blog postings. This blog theme allows you to display excerpts with their ‘Blog Mode Excerpt Length’ setting.

These two WordPress themes are varied enough to get you started and well on your way with your first (or second) WordPress blog. The ease of these customizable settings should greatly reduce your setup time while creating a fairly well customized blog. To make the most advantage of setting up your blog for more traffic and more automation, taking a WordPress training class will speed up creating a decent blog following.

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How to Edit WordPress Widgets

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

How to Edit WordPress Widgets

One of the things most people like about WordPress is the built in widget system. Widgets make it really easy to manage the sidebar elements of your blog or website. Depending on your theme, you may also be able to use widgets to control other sections of your WordPress blog or website.

However, in order to take advantage of the widget system you need to learn how to edit WordPress widgets to suit your needs. The good news is doing this is really, really easy.

To get started with widgets, just navigate to the widgets section within the WordPress administration panel. If you are unfamiliar with this, you can find the link to the widgets section along the left hand side of the screen.

Once you are in the widgets section, you will see a variety of different options available to you. WordPress comes with a handful of built in widgets, such as recent posts, recent comments, tags, categories, and search.

To activate any of these widgets, just click and drag it to the sidebar section which can be found on the right side of the screen. Then let go of your mouse button to automatically place the widget in the sidebar you choose.

Another cool thing about widgets is that you can drag and drop them to determine the order they show up on your sidebar. They will appear exactly the way you place them within the widget screen. If you place recent comments above recent posts, then they will show up just like that on your blog or website.

As far as editing widgets go, each widget has different options which can be configured. If you see an arrow next to the name of the widget, you can click on it to expand it. This will then give you a variety of options that can be customized for that specific widget. A good example of this is setting the number of recent posts to show.

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Top WordPress Plugins Overview Part 1

By on August 9, 2011 in Randy Roedl

gregguide.com Let’s talk about some of the top WordPress plugins. Addthis social bookmarking widget is a great social networking tool that allows your users to share your WebPages on sites like facebook and twitter. For you blogs advertising I would recommend that you go with Ad Injection, this advertising manager will allow you to post any type of ads on your site. It could be Google ads, click bank ads, commission junction ads or you own email forms from acajoom, phplist, aweber, icontact, or get response. Ad Injector also allows you to place these ads anywhere on your site. pcfix411.com

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lynda.com Tutorial | WordPress: Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins—Exploring WordPress plugins

By on July 25, 2011 in Randy Roedl

Watch the entire course at www.lynda.com In WordPress: Creating Custom Widgets and Plugins, Drew Falkman teaches PHP developers how to create custom functionality for WordPress 2.0 through 3.0 using widgets and plugins. This course starts by installing and setting up WordPress 3.0 on both Mac and Windows, then provides an in-depth look at tasks related to these WordPress add-ons: installing and administering, building and customizing, creating editable options and database tables, working with posts and pages, and utilizing jQuery and AJAX. There are also tutorials dedicated to promoting a widget or plugin, adding security, and localizing the interface.

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5 Popular Must Have WordPress Plugins

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

5 Popular “Must Have” WordPress Plugins

If you have a WordPress blog, there are certain plugins you will need to install to make blogging easier. A lot of blog posts lately recommend various, “”must-have”” WordPress plugins. Most of the commonly recommended plugins include:

1. All-in-One SEO Pack: Easy fill-in-the-blanks features to optimize your blog post for first-page search engine ranking. Add a Title, Meta Description, and Meta Tags (keywords) to every post you create.

2. WP Greet Box: Shows a different greeting message to your visitors depending on which referrer url they’re coming from (ex., Google, Facebook, Digg, etc.).

3. Aweber Web Form Plugin: “”This widget allows you to quickly and easily…Drag and drop web forms that you have created in your AWeber email marketing account into your blog, without having to log into your AWeber account or copy and paste anything!””

4. Thank Me Later: Automatically sends a “”thank you”” email to anyone who comments on your blog and reminds them to engage further with your blog.

5. Askimet: This plugin comes preloaded on your blog, but you will need to activate it with a WordPress.com API. Just follow the instructions and this plugin will take care of all your blog spam.

Another popular WordPress plugin that you have to purchase and download to your WordPress blog is Popup Domination. This plugin undoubtedly helps increase your email opt-in rates and makes your blog look professional. Most importantly, it helps build your email list. It is widely used and comes highly recommended by professional bloggers. A more affordable alternative is another plugin called OptinPop.

You can find and install most of them from within your WordPress backoffice. Popup Domination can be found by doing a Google search for the product. Installation is usually quick easy with all of the plugins, but OptinPop requires additional technical know-how in order to make it work correctly. You can learn more about OptinPop on their website.

Of course there are more great plugins you can choose from and install on your WordPress blog, but these will definitely make your blogging experience much easier and smoother. This list of popular plugins was compiled from recommendations from professional bloggers and are most certainly recommended for a reason, but having the right plugins will not make you more profitable as a blogger. You have to learn the basics of blogging for success, then you must learn how to market professionally to monetize your blogging efforts.

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