If you are setting up a WordPress blog and are looking for free wordpress themes, there are many.  But there are also some advantages to purchasing a premium wordpress theme.  And the cost is usually very reasonable.

WordPress Hack has a good article about WordPress Themes and choosing the right wordpress theme for your project.

They cover issues around support and customization of the theme.

One interesting thing I learned about WordPress Themes from the article is that there is a problem with people selling bad themes as premium themes.  Since I am very careful with my shopping, I have never experienced that.  But I can see how someone new to WordPress could easily be fooled.]

The good thing is that you can find and install WordPress themes in a few minutes, and if you do not like them you can change the theme in seconds.  It is very nice.  Go try a few free wordpress themes first, and if the basics are not enough for you, then go shopping for a premium WordPress Theme.

Having a blog with little or no visitors at all? Seriously, it is not surprise to see that there are many blogs are read only by the owner’s friends and families. The Blogsphere, after all, is a crowded place that’s full with competition. In fact, there are more than 130 million blogs indexed by Technorati since year 2002 and the figure is still growing.

Apparently, it takes a lot more hard work to own a successful blog that stand out from the crowd. Besides creating valuable blog content, bloggers nowadays are required to learn more in Internet marketing as well as search engine optimization (SEO) as these are the basic methods to expand readership.

Nevertheless, not every blog needs an SEO expert. Most mom and pop blogs, in fact, can achieve huge improvement with some simple SEO efforts. For instance, here are 9 simple ways you can improve your blog SEO scores.

1. Be a big fish in a small pond

The first thing to do in SEO is always keyword research. Get to know what the users are searching in your niche, learn your competition, and come up with a list of targeted keywords.

Smart bloggers avoid direct search engine competition with big players. Instead, they go for long tail keywords with moderate search volume and low competition.

2. Pick a keyword-rich domain name

A domain name is where blog readers start to know you. It should memorable and contains your primary keyword.

There are lots of examples proving that a keyword-rich domain name helps a lot in term of SEO. Blog ranks high for certain keywords just because the words are in their domain.

3. Focus on one to two keywords on each page

It is almost impossible for a webpage to rank high for 15 – 20 different keywords. Hence, it’s wiser to create several posts/pages and optimize each of them for a small number of different keywords.

Say that you are running a financial blog and wish to rank high on a series of technical terms like MACD, EMA, and RSI chart. The best way to do so is to create a different page for each of these terms and build different incoming links to these pages.

4. Customize your title tags

Title tags are the most important on-page SEO factor but yet most blog platforms emphasize so little on the issue. Most blog platforms use post title as the title tag and that is certainly not good enough. Title tags should be handcrafted independently and it should be more than just your blogpost title.
I am not sure with other blog platform but in case you are using WordPress, there are a few plugins that allow you to customize your title tags. Stephan’s SEO Title Tag Plugin (http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/) for example, is a good one to go with.

5. Use heading tags wisely

Heading tags (<h1></h1>) is another tags that are misused by most bloggers. I am not sure why but most blog theme designers like to use heading tags for sidebar titles. These heading tags are used on irrelevant words like Categories, About, Archive which offer zero SEO value.

To make sure your blog do well in term of SEO, such heading tags must be alternated. You can modify your CSS and quit using heading tags at your sidebar; or you can insert targeted keywords into your sidebar.

6. Make your blog reachable

Don’t do silly mistakes on robots.txt, don’t fool around with your site navigation; always have a link to your achieved posts; make sure your blog has a XML sitemap. All in all, make sure your blog can be easily crawled by search engines.

We want the bots to index deep and wide on your blog content. So make sure you provide enough roadways for the spiders.

7. Proper optimized internal links

Interlinking your own blogposts is not enough. As you already know, search engines (Google especially!) pay a lot of attention to links and both of your internal and external links count.

You only have control over internal link thus that’s the least you can do with linking. Make sure your internal links are filled with descriptive keywords and avoid using anchor texts like “click here” and “read more” that are meaningless to search engines.

8. Be consistent

Posting consistently improve your blog creditability and expand readerships. More over, it increases the number of pages indexed in search engine’s database and in turn, increases the probability your blog to be found by searchers.

9. Build links

You need incoming links as much as possible. Trade, beg, buy, or even steal links from websites or blogs related to your blog. There are various ways how you can build links – writing guest post, directory submission, blogroll exchange, link trades, forum signatures, and text link ads are some of the common known methods – some of these methods contain risk of being filtered by search engines while some do not.

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This guest post is brought to your by Jerry of Web Hosting Secret Revealed. Jerry inspects and reviews web hosting companies based on his own usage experience. Readers looking for honest hosting advice are recommended to read further at his blog.

An affiliate program creates an arrangement wherein a merchant pays a site owner (an affiliate) a fee to send them traffic which turns into new business. The affiliate sites place links within their site to the merchant’s site. The affiliate site then gets paid for each click, or for each sale depending on the arrangement as a result of that link. Affiliate marketing thus allows site owners to monetize their traffic without the need to hold inventory, fulfill or deliver services to the end consumer.

In practice, there`s only so much money you can make with the odd affiliate link here and there. To truly capitalize on affiliate marketing, your need to ensure that you can drive high quality traffic to you site at a sensible economic rate and that the programmers you are promoting are those that will attract the greatest click-through ratios and achieve optimal conversion rates.

From a merchant perspective, it is essential that you understand what attracts and motivates affiliates in designing or managing an effective affiliate programme. Getting the right affiliates on board is not only a great way of selling products on the Internet but it`s also an excellent way of boosting your reputation.

In general terms, the most effective means by which to promote your programme generally lie in networking, the affiliate networks themselves and in making direct contact with some of the high traffic “super affiliates”.

Most affiliates are ultimately motivated by earnings per 1000 clicks or EPM as it is commonly called. The factors determining this will include your sector, products, consumer brand awareness, the level of competition and the quality of your own site, together with your pricing strategy. All of these factors need to be correctly aligned in attracting and perhaps more importantly retaining the right affiliates. Major brands may offer lower headline commission rates but will engender greater consumer confidence and thus higher click-through rates and conversion rates and potentially better earnings. 10 sales at £20 commission from a major brand will be more attractive the one potential sale at £300 from an unknown market entrant.

That isn’t to say that new market entrants are unwelcome. Quite the contrary. New innovative offerings in a competitive space can server to help to differentiate one affiliate from another and most experienced affiliates will spread their risk accordingly.

Headline commission rates aside, affiliates are looking for merchants with attractive, FAST, easy to use sites (still sadly a minority). It takes a great deal of effort, time and money to attract traffic to an affiliate site in 2009. Few affiliates will be prepared to see their hard-earned visitors click the back button in frustration at a poorly designed or badly constructed merchant site.

If yours is a commoditised product or you have a large range of products, make sure you provide the networks and your affiliates with a data feed. This is particularly vital for price comparison sites and a decent Google Base feed may also help drive free traffic from Google product search and from the new `One Box`, part of Google`s universal search strategy.

Make sure programme terms are fair and that any commission reversals can be fully explained and justified. Keep you affiliates` attention with well constructed offers and voucher codes and be sure that the validity period and conditions surrounding these are made abundantly clear so that your affiliates can stay within the latest IAB guidelines concerning the use of voucher codes.

Communication is essential: whether you are working directly with your affiliates or via the networks and their account management teams, make sure that communications are clear, timely and positive. So many merchants rattle their affiliates with micro complaints, negative communications and poorly designed promotions. No-one wants to promote a £0.0002p saving on a bottle of shampoo between 3pm and 5pm this afternoon “sorry we forgot to tell you earlier”. No-one wants to be told that “we are currently reviewing the validity of the affiliate channel in the context of our upcoming marketing plans”. Positive. Timely. Accurate. Those are they keys.

Ultimately, any UK affiliate marketing program will only succeed so far without the backing of the major affiliate publishers. Getting them on side is only the first part of the equation. Handle the programme well and it will mushroom.

ABOUT Guest

Lammo.net is one of the most popular Affiliate Marketing Blogs in the UK. With a reputation for “telling it like it is”, it has attracted a very loyal following amongst the Internet Marketing community as a whole. Lammo is updated several times a week with news, comment and opinion on the very latest topics to affect the Affiliate Marketing Industry.

WordPress MU 2.7 was just recently released.

I have really wanted to start using WordPress MU because I keep getting more and more WordPress Blogs, both for me and for my clients.  However, I did not want to start out learning WordPress MU in the older version because I knew the upgrade was coming.

Would you like to know how geeky Marketer/IT Guys spend their evenings after their kids go to sleep?

I will be digging into WordPress MU 2.7 and seeing how I can bend it to my goals.  So fun!

If you are one of the many authors, speakers, consultants or specialists that read this blog, you will like this post.  I have been experimenting for about 9 months with different membership website software and finally I found the winner.  Wishlist Member

I went through a progression of different membership website software packages.  I tried Moodle, but it was too complex for what I was trying to do (and was hard to make look good.)  Then I tried a paid vesion on Ning, but that is more social networking and not great for leading learning.  I also tried Joomla, Drupal and DotNetNuke.

Finally I came to realize that a membership site is about publishing highly valuable content in a clean, private environment.  I decided upon WordPress and it was a great decision.

The only down side was the wordpress membership plugin made it necessary for me to set up people’s accounts.  That was just not acceptable.

Then I found WordPress Wishlist Member.  I already had ecommerce, affiliates and more.  I just needed an easy way to integrate membership and manage them.

The Wishlist development team does a great job with online training videos and their support is very good as well.  They have also just updated the membership website software to include paypal integration that looks fantastic.  I am looking forward to trying that option.

If you have ever thought about starting a membership website but did not know what is the best membership website software and the best membership site platform, I strongly recommend keeping it simple and powerful with the combination of wordpress and Wishlist Membership.

Want more infomation about membership site creation?  Visit How to create a membership site.

WordPress is an Open Source Blog Package.  I write about it occasionally, but really should more often.  I spend a lot of time playing with WordPress, customizing it, setting it up, etc.

One challenge is always to find good Free WordPress Themes.

WordPress Themes are a package of templates, images and style sheets that you upload to a specific folder and unzip.  Then you can activate it and customize it via the admin interface of WordPress.

So via Twitter I found this Free WordPress Theme called Apollo today – please note that I have not installed it yet, but is looks very clean and nice.  I am looking forward to giving it a try.  Go look at all the great layouts and they even provide a bunch of generic logos.

I have paid for good themes in the past.  I do not mind doing that, but with more and more quality free themes coming out, the days of paying for a theme seem numbered.

Last night my daughter had a friend over which means pizza for dinner.  (Don’t all of you try to be my daughter’s friend at once now.)

I have a routine.  I usually go online to compare several pizza places we like and buy the deal that fits best.  I start with Hungry Howies Pizza.

They used to have coupons that were very easy to find.  However, this time they wasted my time and I bought a pizza from a competitor after getting frustrated with their website.  This is why you need to really look at how people use your website.  I can imagine that their online marketer is pleased.  The site looks nice enough and now it has the feature all the franchisees probably were asking for.  Different coupons by store.

Here is the problem – and it is costing them money – and you may be doing a similar mistakes.

1. They’d taught me where to go in the past for online coupons.  After I have done it once or twice, I have no need to read the text on the page, I just click and find them.  It is very unpleasant to need to figure things out after you already learned it once.
2. They falsely promise coupons many times – leading me through a maze that never did produce a coupon.  I was told to “Click the coupon below” and it was blank.  They are time thieves!  I just want to save a dollar on a pizza and precious minutes of my life were slipping away.
3. They present pretend coupons – things that look like they will lead to coupons but do not produce any.

I did some quick screen shots below so you can see what I mean.  I do not want to bash Hungry Howies Pizza, but I think writing something like this illustrates what you might be doing wrong on your website as well.  And maybe Hungry Howies Marketing Team will visit and get some free consulting as well.

Twice now I have gone to their site and not been able to find coupons.  The first time I gave up really fast and ordered somewhere else, the second time I hunted more, gave up and ordered from somewhere else.

I know that we can argue that if I loved their pizza I would not worry about it.  But pizza is a commodity and I do not order it frequently and I do not have a favorite.  If they have lost 2 orders from me in the last 3 months, how many are they loosing all together?  They may be blaming a bad economy for something that has more to do with a bad website.

It is popular to talk about social media, influentials and Web 2.0. But does that mean the old school marketing has stopped working?

No, it means that there are more ways to reach people and depending on your target market, you have more options that all may be less effective than in the past when there were fewer options (and more people condensed into fewer communication channels.)

Here are some old school marketing techniques that still work.

1. Press Releases – When it used to be really read by the press, it was appropriate to call it a press release.  Now I would call it a news broadcast.  I do not believe a press release will usually find any major writers but I do think that you are going to get some good exposure and good back links to your website.  Also, if you focus on a niche or use the more expensive services you may still hit some great media outlets.
2. Email – Way more attention seems to be given to social media than email marketing.  However, email marketing will still generate a lot more money for you.  It is an essential part of your marketing and if you bought the whole Email is Dead crap, you jumped on the wrong bandwagon.  I make most of my money from email and SEO.
3. SEO – Search Engine Optimization is not the new hot thing, but if there is one area that is actually using social media well, it is the people that get how SEO and Social Media tie in together.  The key with SEO is that if you are in a tight target niche with little competition, you can probably pay for a one time project and reap the rewards for a long time.  If you are in an even slightly competitive market, you need someone that goes to war on your behalf every month to increase ranking and get more pages indexed.
4. Old Websites – Do you have one of those old websites sitting around that looks like late 90′s and does date back to then?  Don’t touch it without talking to a professional!  The age of your website is very valuable and the pages should not be changed unless you have someone that can look at your ranking first.  I updated one of these old sites after some research and got fantastic results within 3 days – I am talking #1 rankings where a lot of other people were fighting for it.  These old sites have great credibility in the eyes of search engines and can be ignited by a good search engine specialist.
5. Directories – Things like directories seem out of date, but getting listed in a good directory still gives you a valuable back-link and can generate a steady (if not huge) stream of traffic.  Some of my favorite are technorati and blogcatalog – but the older (less shiny) ones are still effective if you get into them too.
6. Link Exchanges – These things have a bad name, and anything that automates the process I would stay away from.  However, doing an occasional link exchange with someone else in your industry will help – not hurt – your website.  If link exchanges actually hurt websites, most blogs with blog rolls would be thrown out of Google long ago since they often link to each other.  This is one of those things that still works, you just have to be smart about it.
7. Word of Mouth – The oldest of the old school marketing is the new cool.  Finding ways to get people to talk about you are the holy grail of cutting through the clutter.  But it may just not work for you – you really have to be differentiated.

Dead Marketing – Some things are really gone

Yes, there are some marketing techniques that are really gone.  Do not do the following -

• Pass out your audio book on 8 track tape.
• SPAM – Does anyone fall for that now?
• Dressing up as a gorilla and selling encyclopedias door to door – OK, this still works but don’t do it.

Most things will still work with good execution and message.  Just be realistic about how people’s attention has scattered.  You need to scatter your message where your niche market is to make sure they can find you.  But that does not mean you throw the old school marketing in the garbage.

I want you to be more successful with your business via the web.  For that reason, lets forget about traffic for a little while.

WHAT!?! Website Traffic is EVERYTHING

Website Traffic is everything after you create a solid business system.  Do not mistake a website for a business system.

While many of you may think of me as an Internet Guru, the truth is that for 10 years I have been learning things the hard way, trial and error.  One thing that I have found is that myself, and many people I know, have focused on entirely the wrong things for too long.

(This is assuming you are not just trying to build advertising revenue, where traffic would be your main focus.)

The fact is, you need a system that catches leads and automates the system for your business outcome.  I spent years going through the various stages of investing in the web.

1. Build a nice website and hope people find it.
2. Realize people do not just find it, you have to promote it.
3. Start doing search engine optimization
4. Realize you need to build an email list
5. Become a publisher and start writing regularly
6. Start doing audio and video
7. Start selling things people want to by instead of things I want to sell
8. Automate the system to get results.

I am sure I have a ways to go.  While I have never invested in those guru packages, it probably would have been a good idea, considering how long it took me to learn the importance of building business systems, not traffic of fancy designs.  Many years ago we were correct about building expert sites with lots of content, but the monitization thing (kind of critical) took a long time to figure out.

So here is a suggestion.  If you have a great site that is not really producing sales, find something else that you can sell from the web.  It could be an affiliate product from clickbank or a mlm product, like iLearningGlobal.  Make sure it is not something that you need to actually do much to deliver.  Then start learning how to sell it profitably online.

When you start from scratch, it is much easier to focus on the outcome you want and not get lost in all the fluff of your existing business.  This is a great way to learn about Internet Marketing.

I just got an eNewsletter from someone.  Probably a subscriber to mine or someone I have met – I am not accusing her of SPAM.

However, if you really want to make someone unhappy, just sign them up for your Volume 1 Issue 1 eNewsletter and blast it off to them.

Look, this is just common sense.  I am not going to be happy to be automatically subscribed to something.  Nor are most people.  However, I would welcome a personal email inviting me to join the eNewsletter list and giving me the choice.  I know it is more work, but guess what, I just had to do work unsubscribing from the unwelcome subscription.

Do invite people to subscribe to your new newsletter with an email you write – DO NOT just add them to the subscription.