Best Wordpress Themes for your blog

I recently purchased some themes from Revolution Themes and Premium News themes. Both are worth buying. The looks are professional and performance is acceptable. When you have a blog and want to have a professional look, you need to have something professional. I don’t mean to say that the free themes are bad and they are not professional, but its very common. Your blog should have some difference, but again these are not unique themes. You can make your blog look unique by buying custom theme which is exclusively designed for you.

Revolution Themes

Revolution themes have about 7 themes for sale with some difference in every theme. I purchased two themes which is single licence and you can use it only for one website

Premium News Themes

Premium News themes are also excellent ones. They have different designs which you can select. Just go through the demo site and select the one which you need and suits your blog.

Try the demo and select the right theme

How to monetize your blog

I presume that you have a blog that has sufficient content, valuable readers, and decent traffic. If you do not have all these, then first you need to create this. Creating Traffic to your blog is explained in my previous posts so I am not going to talk about that in this post.

1. Pay per click programs - This is the first option that you should start off with and I would recommend Google Adsense for this as this is the only work which worked good for me. I used Bidvertiser (Gave me good income earlier), Ads For Indians, Tyroo

2. Selling Private Ads - Selling private ads are the best income generator. We can see the blogs with high traffic, go for private ads than pay per click programs as they get paid for impressions or monthly tenancy. You can get customers for this only if you have good traffic and loyal visitors

3. Job Postings - I have seen this in Darren’s Blog, Problogger, he has a blogging job board. This is a good revenue generator

4. Donations - This something which can be done and there is nothing wrong in this. You do provide good content and if the visitor has got some help out of your website, then he can in return help you by making a donation. There are many WordPress plugins available for this like the “Buy me a beer”

Don’ts

1. Paid links - Don’t go for any link trading as popular search engines like Google and against this and it can result in losing your pagerank and ultimately lose in traffic. This has happened to many top bloggers like JohnChow who was penalised by google for paid links.

2. Paid Reviews - Again this is bad for your search engine ranking. Google is penalizing blogs which offer this service. If you are doing this, you should use the rel=nofollow tag.

If you are blogging for money then you should find the right product that you can sell using your blog and your blog visitors. Some blog for fun, some for money and some for both.

List of Adsense revenue sharing sites

Some websites with user contribution do revenue sharing and Google Adsense revenue sharing is becoming popular these days. In the Revenue sharing model, the users are paid a share from the revenue generated. This gives an encouragement for the users to spend more time on your site. Usually the revenue sharing is 50% by most of the sites. The best advertising program used for this is Google Adsense as there is no worry of making and receiving payments for both the members and the site owner. Google do allow this and we can find many popular sites doing this for long time.

Digital Point Forum - You get 50% of the ad revenue at digital point forum, but you need to post at least 50 threads to qualify to join this program.

Indian Citizens - Portal for Indian Citizens, Your ads will be displayed 50/100 times when the page is loaded. There is no qualifying limits. If you are able to write a page everyday, then you can earn considerably. Get started with Adsense revenue sharing at Indian Citizens

Eref - Refer a Webpage - Again its 50% revenue sharing from Adsense Ads

Poll-O - Revenue sharing and reward program. This is a great earning portal, join for free

IndianPad - A site, mostly dominated by Indians with Adpad

There are lots of sites which are sharing their revenue with the members who work for the portal. This is an incentive to the members as many sites are users driven

UPDATE

Free Articles Directory - is an articles directory which allows 50% revenue sharing (50% times your Adsense ID will be shown up)

Is revenue sharing allowed with Google Adsense Program

Few months back, I wanted to introduced a revenue sharing model for one of my bookmarking sites. I did some googling on this and confirmed that Google do allow this, even though they have not made it clear that its not allowed. The webmaster do not have the risk of click fraud if any member tries to do it. If any member tries to work against the guidelines, then the account of the member is terminated and not the site owner’s.

There are many popular plugins and extensions available for popular content management systems like Wordpress , Drupal , Joomla which manages the revenue sharing task taking care of the Google Adsense Terms of service. The most important point to be noted is that one page should not show ads from two different account. For example in the header part if you display an ad which belongs to the site and the sidebar ad belongs to a member, then its violation of Google Terms and conditions and you have good chance to get your account banned. I have listed some popular sites where you can sign-up as a member and earn from Google Adsense.

There are lots of sites which work on the Google Adsense Revenue sharing model. You can earn from Google Adsense without even having a website.

How to manage organize your affiliate programs

I have signed up for many affiliate programs and I often get confused with the login information, login URL etc. When you have a blog, one of the biggest income generator other than private sales of ads is affiliate program. For example, I am an affiliate of Shaadi.Com and I did a post to promote few days back. I am an affiliate of different affiliate programs and to keep track of the earnings, promotion, banners are difficult if things are not organized well.

Ok let me explain to you, how I manage all these things. I am bit choosy while signing up for affiliate programs so I am not having much to manage, but I do it in an organized way. I will be in a stage when I will be promoting many affiliate programs using my blog and the traffic to my blog.

Tools I use for managing the affiliate programs and private sales of advertisements

Advertisements - I do sell advertisement space other than using Google Adsense. I have good number of websites with enough traffic. I am happy to say  that my traffic is growing everyday and I am working hard on that. 85% of my traffic are from search engines and some from referring sites. I have a very small budget for advertisements  and I usually use Google Adwords.

Let me come to the point now, to manage my Advertisers, I use OpenAds, hosted on my dedicated server and its working fine. I sell space on CPM basis and the advertiser need to buy minimum 10,000 impressions and the ads run till the purchased impressions are over. In fact I have already applied for an invitation for Google Ad Manager, if I get an account, the I could try that. The advantage of using Google Ad Manager will the the efficiency in delivering ads.

Affiliate Programs - To manage my affiliate programs, I again use openads. The ads are rotated along with other paid ads and I get to make some income from my the affiliate programs which I promote. I also have my in house ads running along with these paid ads.

I create a campaign for each affiliate program I promote and add up all the information about the program to the campaign details. I may have different login details for different affiliate programs, so to avoid any confusions, I keep these information updated in the comments column of the campaign.

In this way, by using OpenAds, now known as openX, is good and efficient. There are lots of reporting tools available which can help you in monitoring the performance of your ads and affiliate programs.

OpenX is a opensource program, which can be downloaded for free.

Social networking / bookmarking sites, free source of traffic

Social networking sites are one of the best sources of traffic. There are many popular social networking sites where you need to register as a member and participate in the site activities. The results will be good only if you create a good profile page and also be active. You need to post pages and comments to get noticed. Sites like digg can provide you with un-expected traffic if you have your page on the top, but will the traffic be useful to sell your product, that’s a question that you need to ask. You get lot of traffic but if you do not get any conversion, then the traffic is of no use.

Some of the best social networking and bookmarking sites

StumbleUpon - This is the latest social site that I have joined. Lots of things to learn, I know I am very late, but better late than never.

Myspace - This is again an online community website where you can meet your friends, make new friends, share photo, journals and lot of things. This is very popular and many make good use of this.

LinkedIn - This is another one, which I have joined. Here you meet high end professionals, can do business, connect to your friends, connect to your friends, friends, recommend others and lots. This portal is good for meeting great people. Recently Bill Gates joined this and he is linkedin.

Digg - One of the most popular and high traffic generating site. Its worth, just try it. I have been using this for long time

Pollo - A site, where you can get the revenue share. You get paid through Google Adsense program. The revenue sharing percentage is 50.

Reddit

Fark

Slashdot

IndianPad - This site is mainly dominated by Indians. The advantage of this site is it shares Google Adsense Revenue.

Linkinn - This is somewhat similar to the Digg, but the difference is that you do not need to be member to vote

Sphinn - This is another site, similar to digg. I have never used it. You can try this

Yahoo Buzz - As the name shows, its from Yahoo. A Buzz can be from a top site which could be interesting. Instead of having editors, the members decides the popular stories. The top stories are displayed on the Yahoo home page.

These are just few sites, which can help you in getting some traffic and help you in branding yourself. I will be shortly posting a page on Branding yourself.

Are you looking to get married?

In India, the marriage is still mostly arranged and to get a right person its very difficult. There are many portals which are offering the service of Matrimonial and the biggest Matrimonial website is Shaadi.com.

How to start off?

Just register for free and create your profile with all the information requested and search for your life partner. You will find tons of information in the database. You can search by religion and regions. The site is well planned and very user friendly. There are about 10 million users already registered. You can read about the success stories of thousand of couples who met through this portal.

If you are not married and planning to marry but still looking for a life partner, just go head and register for this service for free. You will be getting lots of queries and the system works very well. This portal is more than 10 years old and growing day by day

Analysing your blog growth

I presume that you have a new blog or a blog that you are really working hard and using some campaigns in Increasing your blog traffic, but how do you know that its working well? For this purpose you need a tool to check your website stats and I do use Google Analytics which is 100% free and I feel the best for managing multiple websites and domains

So how do you start off?

Go to Google Analytics and create an account. If you are already a Gmail user, just sign-in using the same login credentials and start configuring.

Click on the Add Profile Link as shown on the image above and enter the website details

You need to enter your website URL and the Time Zone and click on the continue button as you see in the image above

You need to select the code, I prefer to use the New code, Just copy that and paste it on the footer.php of your selected wordpress template file before the tag

Once you complete it, just click on the finish button, you will get the page shown above. Once you add the tracking code to your template and click on the Check Status link, you will get the message shown as on other websites (Please refer to the image above)

Now you are done, just go to the view report link and explore the different reporting system

I will be posting a page on using the reporting system soon

You should first Creating content for your blog, and do the necessary for Traffic for your blog, before you start analysing your traffic.

Use the best to be the best

The title seems bit confusing, but what I want to explain in this post is to get the best out of yourself, you need to use the best tools.

I always try to keep myself updated with the latest products and take the advantages of the new technology.

My Laptop
I change my laptop every year, this is not because I have money, but to get the best out of me. I was using a Compaq with 512mb ram for about an year, but towards the end, I felt that its not enough for me. Now I have upgraded my laptop to a Lenova, with 2mb ram and Vista as the operating system. Whats the advantage of this? Yes I can feel the advantage, I can work more efficiently and save a lot of time. Instead of spending long time in editing the images that I need to upload to my blogs or even when it comes to my project works and developments.

I use a HTC TyTN as my phone and pocket pc. I use Push Email from Microsoft, through which I get my emails as soon as it arrives at my server. I do not miss any email or there is no delay in replying to the emails sent to me. I was using a Gmail account for my mails, but now I forward all the emails to my Exchange Account and I get it instantly. I can reply these mails from my HTC TyTn or if its not urgent, I can handle that later. My contacts, calender always synchronized. Suppose I add a contact in my pocket pc, its immediately updated on the server and when I open my laptop I find it there also.
Last time when I changed my phone from O2 Zinc to the recent one, I just needed to configure the server information of my Exchange account and within minutes I got my contact, emails, calender, task updated on my pocket pc. I cannot imaging entering all the contacts (I have more than 1000) manually. I do not have time for that. I work almost 16-18 hours a day and I still feel its not enough.

What I mean to say in this post is that you can manage with tools which are old or less efficient, but to get the best, you need to use the best. You should try this, you will see the difference in your output

How to market your blog with email signatures

I have been explaining different methods to market your blog and get some traffic for free. Just check how many emails do you send every day? Why don’t you use these emails that you sent to your clients to do some selling other than the content of the emails. Yes we can do that by adding an email signature to each mail that you send out. Every time when the recipient of your email gets your email, there will be a small text with a link to your blog web page. There are some chances that the recipient of that email may visit your blog. Its good to try it as you do not have anything to lose or you do not need to pay anybody

How to create an email signature?

You should not create big email signatures. A perfect email signature can be of 5-6 lines. I suggest to do as mentioned below

1. Your name
2. Your company name or blog name
3. URL of your blog
4. Your email ID
5. A short message or an advertisement text
6. Your phone number

Every email client has the feature to create email signature. You can create either as a plain text one or an html email signature with colours and images. You can mention some interesting features or your blog or if you have an offer, just mention it in the advertisement text. Suppose you give off some free e-books, you can mention that. You can also use email signatures in your profile for any forum or discussions. You can imagine how many visitors will visit such kind of forums and if your post is something different there are chances that the reader click on your blog URL and visit your blog. This is a sort of free traffic for your blog. Such visitor can even turn as your regular reader or even a customer if you are selling something.

How to create an email signature with outlook client?

I use MS outlook to read and send my emails.

Its very simple, go to Tools->Option and in that mail format, you will find the signature button. Create a signature and save it. You can find more information about creating an email .So to conclude, you should use email signatures with each and every email that you send out as its free advertisement and you do not have to do anything extra other than creating one. I would also suggest to keep changing your signatures periodically so that your email signature looks fresh and do some marketing for you.

Suggested Reading

• Creating an email signature

Do you have a question? I will be pleased to answer it or if you feel the above post has something lacking, you should comment on it.