If you’re looking to get some really awesome Premium WordPress themes for your blog, take a look at Elegant Themes right now.
More than 24 themes available in their gallery (plus all future themes) for just $19.95 / year. All the themes are gorgeous in their own right. Plus, these are not like the basic free themes – they come with their own options page and some advanced features depending on the purpose of the theme.
At less that $1 per theme, this is perhaps the best value for money you’ll get if you’re looking for affordable premium WordPress themes. Take a look at their entire collection here: Elegant Themes
One of the better changes I noticed in WordPress 2.9.2 is the mass upgrade feature for plugins. You’ll find that right under the Tools > Upgrade link. Also, in WP2.9.2 you can now “Un-Delete” your deleted comments, post and pages. If you haven’t upgraded, I strongly recommend that you do so right now.
A contact form is one of the most basic and most important things you’ll want to have on your new blog. But do you need a contact form badly enough to pay $39 for it – that’s the question!
Gravity Forms is a well-coded, sleek contact forms plugin for WordPress. By looking at the demo site you can clearly see that Gravity Forms will help you create almost any type of form you want. In fact, if you’re in an industry where you need to create lots and lots of forms, this could be a great investment.
But re-examine the fundamental question here – how often do you need to create new forms?
If all you need is a simple contact form on your blog, there are several free WordPress plugins like WP Contact Form and Contact Form 7 that will do the job just fine. And from my experience, once your basic contact form is up and running there is no real need for you to mess around with other solutions.
Here’s how much Gravity Forms will cost you:
- $39 for single site license
- $99 for multi-site license
- $199 for developer license
So, do you really need it? It would be interesting to hear what you have to say..
If you’re planning to create your own products, coaching program or membership site about WordPress and blogging, then our PLR WordPress Videos offer is probably the best on the Internet. Researching, testing and creating videos for WordPress plugins and themes can be a major headache, and using PLR or Private Label videos can be a perfect alternative.
Here’s what David Cavanagh has to say about our offer:
You have full control over all videos. Sell them and keep 100% of profits. Package them into membership sites, DVDs or live coaching material. We provide full promotional materials, sales pages, website set-up and even assistance in uploading your videos.
More info: PLR WP Videos
Not all space on your blog is created equal. How much you understand about your blog’s real estate will ultimately influence the results you get.
That being said, which parts of your blog are more valuable? Where should you put your main money-making ad, link or Aweber optin form?
I’ve broken down a typical 3-column blog layout (like the one we use here) into a few profitable areas:
- Content Area – No matter which type of layout you use, the content area is by far the more valuable spot. People visit your blog to read content, not to look at your ads or design. Sure, a jaw-dropping design is cool the first time, but it will not get people to stick. Ads, links and optin forms within your content is the most valuable, as it is guaranteed to reach the eyeball of your visitor. It’s even more effective if your ads are tightly related to the content itself.
- Left Navigation – If your blog has a left-column navigation (like ours), then this is the second most valuable spot. People in most countries read from left to right, and on the way to your content their eyeballs have to pay at least some attention to the navigation area.
- Right Navigation – Unlike the left navigation, your visitors don’t have to pay attention to the anything after the actual content area. Since they don’t have to, they rarely will. People are quite accustomed to grid-based website layouts and they know (almost instinctively) where to look for content, and what to ignore.
- Header Area – Although the header area comes before everything else, it’s too detached from the actual content, which makes it the second least valuable spot on your blog. I will almost never pay an advertiser for placing banner ads in the header area. The more frequent someone visits your blog, the most invisible the header area gets.
- Footer Area – It’s almost worthless to even consider the footer area as a possible most maker. Detached from content and navigation, and too far from eyeballs, the footer is best left for things than don’t really require attention.
Yeah i know; your results may be different. However, in most cases this simple grid-based logic works well. The real question though, is what should you do with this information?
If you want to squeeze more money from your blog, you need to reorganize certain elements to work for you, instead of against you. Here are a few ideas:
- In-Content Ads – If you’re selling banner ads on your blog, create a spot in the content area itself. Savvy advertisers are willing to pay much more for an in-content ad, and you can easily increase your advertising dollars overnight.
- Affiliate Links vs Affiliate Banners – If you’re promoting an affiliate product, forget banner ads. It’s much better to use affiliate links weaved into the content. Plus, having less ads frees up important real estate for other purposes.
- Reorganize Your Navigation – Are your navigation links eating up valuable advertising space? Move them away to non-profitable areas like the right sidebar, header of footer so you can make more money from the profitable ones.
- Footer Dump – Anything else that your readers don’t really need, but which is essential for your blog (privacy policy, disclaimers etc), has to be moved to the footer. The footer area is the universal dumping ground for all non-profitable stuff.
The next time you decided to get a new theme for your blog, ask yourself an important question- “What do I want to achieve with my blog?”
Always put function above form. Understand the main objective of your blog.
Is it to communicate your ideas? Then move your content to the left, followed by navigation, and use minimal ads. Is your objective to build a mailing list or get more subscribers? Then put your optin form in the profitable areas instead of hiding it beneath meaningless ads.
No matter how popular your blog is, or how much traffic you get, there is always room for optimization. I hope this guide will help you improve yours, and I’d like to hear your comments.
Anand Srinivasan is the founder of KnewThis.com – the World’s FIRST Ask&Answer site where affiliate webmasters can build back links and get targeted traffic. Learn more about KnewThis by clicking here
First and foremost, before I begin this article, I would like to clarify that I am not an SEO expert. I am simply yet another webmaster who recently launched his own website and who has learnt a bit of SEO along the way. Also, this article is not a definitive piece in itself, but is just to instigate a bit of discussion from our individual experiences.
A lot many times, we have been told by Google as well as SEO experts that duplicate content hurts our website. And we have indeed taken efforts to minimize the incidence of duplicated content by writing rehashed articles so that Google does not detect it as something copied from elsewhere.
So, the question is does duplicate content actually affect our website rankings? Though I would personally still believe that duplicate content is good neither for our own website nor for the Internet as a whole, I would like to discuss here about two instances where I have observed that duplicate content does not affect rankings to a great extent. Firstly, from my own blog. When I first started blogging, like most of you, I had it hosted on Blogspot. This blogspot blog was my primary site for more than a year before I thought I should move to a .com domain. At this point, I had no idea about duplicate content affecting SERPS. I had no idea how to use 301 redirect to effect a seamless transfer. All that I did was use the Import tool on Wordpress to import the whole content from the blogspot site to my new .com blog. It has been over two years since then. Till date, my blogspot website continues to exist and that has not affected my .com site’s ranking one bit. My site is still growing at 25% month on month (on a lower base though).
The second example is drawing from the success of article directories. Article directories like EzineArticles and GoArticles are among the most heavily trafficked websites in the world. A lot of their content is duplicated elsewhere. And they still they remain the primary source of traffic for a lot of affiliate webmasters amongst us.
So, does that mean duplicate content does not matter at all? Of course, it does. But from what I presume, while duplicate content is accounted for in the search engine rankings, websites are not explicitly penalized. If I copy content from a popular website, I shall not be penalized. Rather, when someone searches Google for a related topic, Google realizes that the site I copied from holds better authority than my own copied content and so decides to display their link.
Do you agree? What has been your experience with duplicate content? Please let us know in the comments.
The “ad” above, which looks like a part of your blog content, was generated using Nikola Jankovic’s WP Affiliate plugin for WordPress.
I found this plugin extremely easy to use, and you’ll never need a manual. Just enter a few keywords and your ClickBank ID, and your “related products” ad is added to every single blog post. All the links are encoded with your ClickBank affiliate ID, which is really convenient.
My only complaint is that the actual content is probably taken from ClickBank’s product feed, which contains product titles and descriptions entered by the merchant. As with most merchants, the description is usually targeted to recruiting affiliates from the Clickbank marketplace instead of attracting potential buyers.
In the ad above, if you look at the ad for “Want great SEO tips” you’ll notice the mention about “75% affiliate payout” instead of useful information about the product itself. This is perhaps the most obvious shortcoming of the plugin, and the only way to overcome it is to have the ads manually reviewed and edited by a human being.
However, to that is a huge undertaking considering that ClickBank list over 10,000 products. So I can’t really see a solution to it, unless of course you just go ahead and create an ad manually.
That being said, it’s certainly a useful tool to include in your marketing chest.
More Info: WP Affiliate Plugin for WordPress
Although you can download tons of WordPress plugins for free, sometimes free just isn’t enough.
The BIG problem I have with free plugins is that most of them have a short shelf life. The hard working developers who create WordPress plugins sometimes get too many complaints and curses (and no donations), that they eventually abandon their plugins.
That’s not to say that some paid plugins suffer the same too. But overall, if a plugin is complex in nature, a commercial version of it tends to be better and longer lasting.
So here’s my list of the best 7 commercial WordPress plugins ever:
- Max Banner Ads Plugin – Allows you to display banner ads easily on your blog. You can also get complete stats to see how well each ad is performing, and it support Adsense or other Javascript based ads as well. A free version is available, with credits back to the plugin page.
- Ninja Affiliate Plugin – Allows you to automatically convert keywords on your blog to affiliate links. Extremely useful to automate affiliate marketing on your blogs, and even more useful if you have multiple blogs to manage.
- LightPop Plugin – Allows you to create a “lightbox” popup on your blog, which can be used to get new subscribers, display an ad, announce important information, or anything you want.
- Auto Social Poster – Allows you to automatically submit blog posts to a number of social bookmarking services. Te time-delay and random submission feature helps you
- WP Review Site – Allows you to create a product review blog using WordPress, complete with themes and additional stuff. You can automatically rank products on your main page, and you can choose to apply the plugin to certain categories only.
- WP Blaster – Create one post or content, and “blast” it to many different WordPress blogs that you own. Suitable for blog farm builders
- Synonymizer Plugin – Probably better known among niche blogging marketers, who use a lot of Private Label articles. Synonymizer automatically creates unique articles by replacing words with synonyms, and youo have complete control over how words are replaced.
I’m sure there are many other plugins that I’m missing out, some newer ones that I have never used, etc. Please feel free to mention them.
WPVideoTube is a commercial WordPress plugin that grabs video content from YouTube and posts it automatically to your WordPress blog. From my initial testing, this plugin is easy to use and does exactly what it’s supposed to do without much fuss.
Once you’ve installed the plugin, you can configure it based on keywords, categories or a particular YouTube profile. Then, you can select to publish content every X days / X hours, and also to “humanize” it.
You can assign videos to a particular category, and you can choose to also grab the comments if you want to. This is how ac actual page generated from WPVideoTube will look like:
You can see the actual title and video from YouTube. The keywords used for that video will be imported as “tags” in your WordPress blog. Below is how the syndicated comments will look like:
Should you get this plugin?
Well, that really depends on what type of blogger you are and what you want to achieve. If you’re into niche blogging or autopilot blogging then this plugin will definitely help you either add content to an existing blog, or create a new one from scratch.
You can get WPVideoTube for as little $29.95 for the Lite version, or the developer version for $299. Get more info here.
Recently I submitted this site to Best of The Web directory, and after making a payment my site was soon listed. Unfortunately though, I did not get listed for the keywords I wanted, which is “work at home”. Instead, I got listed as “Gobala Krishnan” because that’s the actual domain name.
This is a clear example of why you need to have your main keywords as part of your domain name. A lot of the major web directories are still human edited (or at least human approved) and they will not allow words or promotional text that is not a part of your domain name.
If you already have a blog using your own name or a non-keyword name, there’s nothing much you can do about it. However if you’re starting a new blog, it’s really worth the money to get a proper domain name. Read my post about getting premium domain names as a guide to snap up great domains at cheap prices.
