BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

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by Kathleen Gresham

When you say WordPress, people automatically think of blogging. WordPress is the blog engine supreme. It is free, easy to install and easy to customize.

Thinking of WordPress as just a blog engine, though, seriously limits your options. That would be a shame, because WordPress offers so many options.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS). It can keep track of multiple authors and their privileges, provide a place to store documents and allow users to download them, keep track of document revisions and allow you to compare them and reinstate earlier versions—and so much more.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with WordPress. And most options are freely downloadable somewhere on line at no charge.

1. Web Sites

WordPress allows you to build a static web site much faster than any website builder software. Especially if you are not a wizard with that particular sitebuilder. That is, unless you are a super whiz with, say, DreamWeaver, you probably cannot match the speed—and certainly not the ease—with which you can set up a web site with WordPress.

Nowadays there are some great themes with dropdown menus that look like high-quality web site templates and can be easily customized.

Not only that, the search engine optimization benefits of a WordPress site versus a conventional HTML web site are tremendous. There are so many blog networks and SEO plugins and other tools that you can use to promote a WordPress site that are simply not available for HTML web sites.

2. Forums

There are several free plugins that allow you to easily set up a discussion forum, using WordPress. You can use that forum to make money from advertising, offer support for the products or services sold by your company (on line or off line), meet like-minded people, and so much more.

3. Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make residual income. You can charge a fee for joining, for example for a niche membership site, and/or charge a monthly membership fee. Internet marketers often use a membership site to post their products for purchasers to download, to offer affiliate marketing tools and status reports to their affiliates, and to offer support for their products.

Others simply charge a membership fee for members to get access to a host of free downloadable ebooks, software, or other original content in a particular niche.

4. Article Directories and Link Directories

Article marketing is a staple of online marketing, and articles sites have many purposes. If your article site becomes popular, you can make good advertising revenue. If not, you still have a good place to post original or PLR articles with links to your main blog or web site.

You can download free themes and plugins to build an article directory with WordPress. Or  you can build yourself a link directory with other free WordPress themes and/or plugins. You could, for example, add a links page from your main blog to all your other sites.

5. Blogs

Yes, of course, WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible blog engine for self-hosted blogs. The very popularity of WordPress means there are thousands of theme designers and plugin makers constantly providing excellent new free or paid products to add value to WordPress blogs.

6. Combination Sites

Lately I have been making combination website-blogs for offline and online businesses. That is easy to do with WordPress.

For example, see the site designed for Temples Gate, a charming metaphysical gift shop in Houston, Texas. The old site was unfindable on Google for any related keyword or phrase.

The new WordPress-based site rose to Google PR2 in just a few months. It gets traffic via Google searches from all over world.

The site continues to grow as we add more pages, posts, and photos. Google loves sites that steadily grow. And site visitors like to see new and different photos and text whenever they visit the site.

The embedded blog fits seamlessly into the web site, and the site is linked to a Google Calendar so that the store owner can easily add and update the classes, workshops, and other events held at the store.

We will soon add a shopping cart to encourage online purchases. WordPress makes it easy to do that, and several of shopping cart plugins are free. We are still comparing features and usability on a separate test site.

Flexibility and Free Tutorials

Some of the same features can be found on Joomla and Drupal, but nothing beats WordPress for design flexibility and the huge array of plugins, widgets and other accessories available to easily customize it. Also, there is so much free training available for WordPress. WordPress video courses abound, and many of them are free.

So think outside the box when deciding how to build your next site, whether for personal use, to enhance your offline business or for ecommerce. Consider using WordPress even if you are not building a blog. Your imagination is just about the only limit to what you can do with it.

Adding Extra Value to Your Blog

And consider all the options that the WordPress community offers for adding value to your blog. Even if a blog is your main goal, WordPress allows you to add a forum for your reader community or a paid membership area.

If you want to do business on line, WordPress is a great tool for that, too. The sky is just about the limit when it comes to WordPress.

Select Your Hosting Service Carefully

If you intend to build a business in online retail sales, however, make sure you have a good ecommerce web hosting service. Make sure  you use a service that fully supports whatever it is that you are trying to do.

My first hosting was horrible. We could not even get a simple WordPress blog to work properly on their service, and it was a nightmare. So look for quality, not just price, in selecting a hosting service, even if you are not currently planning to get into ecommerce.

What cool things do you do with WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Kathleen Gresham designs, writes, and promotes blogs and websites and consults on search engine optimization (SEO) and directory listings for online and off line businesses in Houston, TX. For more information, see Houston Blog Web and Web Fresh Leads.

Today I received an Email from LINKWORTH which said that one of their advertisers is requesting to p lace a LinkPost on my Blog. This is the first invitation from LinkWorth. It is a site which we can make money blogging.

It supplies so many ways we can make money with our blogs.  The ways include: LinkPost , LinkAds, LinkWords, LinkInTxt, LinkBB, LinkSura , LinkMura, LinkPack , and Affiliate Program. If your blog is great enough, make money blogging with LinkWorth is a good choice.

Linkads – are simple text links that are normally places in a website/blog sidebar. Publishers make 70 percent of CPC (cost per click) of all links.

Linkpost – linkpost is a way where the advertisers set some outlines for their website or service and ask the bloggers of their choice to their review or words on it. Bloggers normally make 70 percent of total earning in this kind of scheme. Read the rest of this entry →

If you are blogging for fun, then you can think of blogging about anything you want. But if you are serious about making money with your blog, them you should choose your blog niche very carefully.

When we chose a wrong niche for our blog, that will lead to a unsuccessful blog. Here is the list of mistakes we generally make when choosing a niche for our blog: Read the rest of this entry →

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Ever wondered where travel bloggers get their money to sustain their travels?

They get the money from writing about and taking pictures of their travels. Basically, they get rich from traveling the world and enjoying their lives. They just document it so that others can read about and enjoy the adventure.

Travel bloggers have taken advantage of some of the most lucrative and easiest business models today, getting rich via Internet blogging.

You have to have at least basic Internet skills, decent writing skills, and a bit of marketing flair. Although, let me stress that all of these can be learned as you go along with your blogging. And the further you blog, the better you become and the more traffic your site will get. Read the rest of this entry →

My favorite new widget for 2009 is the PayDotCom product widget. I’ve been busy today putting it on all my blogs.

The PayDotCom product widget displays links to the top-selling products in up to three categories you choose. It comes on a variety of colors to match your blog. To view the one on this blog, look in the far right column. You may have to scroll down a bit. It has a dark blue frame.

And if anyone clicks on a product in the PayDotCom widget, and ends up buying it, even months later, you get paid a commission. 

You select the categories and the widget color. PayDotCom provides a snippet of code to paste into your site. It is just that easy.

You do need to join PayDotCom first. If you have a ClickBank ID, you can elect to have the top-selling products from ClickBank in your chosen categories also be displayed.

To use that feature, you will need to join ClickBank if you don’t already have an account. (PayDotCom and ClickBank accounts are free.)

Here are a couple of quick tips:

If you decide to change the widget color, you must double-click on the new widget for it to be selected. Otherwise, you will get the old one.

Instead of copying and pasting new code to change the widget color, you can simply change the number of the “theme” in the widget code. The colors are numbered starting at one in the upper left corner and moving from left to right. If you are not changing categories, it is easier and quicker to just change the code.

I just signed up at a new site for blog advertising, social networking and getting paid to post: SocialSpark. Register your blogs there and let advertisers find you.

Meanwhile you can make friends, who can vote your blog up or down in the rankings. You can also add applications to your profile page, just as you can on Facebook. (There are already hundreds.)

You also get a set of tools for tracking traffic and other stats on your blog. To install the tools, so you can view the stats on your SocialSpark dashboard, you paste a code snippet into the theme code of your blog (not into a widget). But you have to add code anyway to claim your blog.

The service is still in beta testing, according to the site. But registration is open now, and there are already over 1000 blogs listed.

To get ads from SocialSpark, your blog must be over 90 days old and have at least 20 posts. So what are you waiting for?

.

Marakesh Art Print
Buy at AllPosters.com

Hah! Made you look!

Great images are attention grabbers. They not only add visual interest, but they can also help enhance—or stress—the point of your post. As the old saying goes, “One picture is worth a thousand words.”

But great photos and illustrations to use on line are not always easy to find.

Buy this photo at AllPosters.com

Images can also be expensive. If you use a stock photography, you may find a few sites with some photos that you can use for free, but the quality of free stock photos tends to be low and the selection is quite limited.

Also, the good photos are usually mixed in with a lot of really boring ones. It can take a lot of time to sort through them to find a photo that you want to use.

Good, free contemporary illustrations are even harder to find. Clip art can be bland, and usually it takes too much time to sort through and find free or cheap art you like.

Swifter, Art Print
Nieto, John
Buy at AllPosters.com

How about a collection of free images that are guaranteed attention grabbers for your blog? And what if you could actually get paid to use them, because if people click on them and buy them, you get 20 to 30 percent of the price as an affiliate?

What if you could recruit other bloggers and webmasters? And for each one you sign up, you get $5.00 for their first sale, $3.00 for their second sale, and 5 percent thereafter? Not bad payment for using free top-quality art and photography.

Your readers will love the look of your blog. You can choose from hundreds of categories, from comics to religion, from music and movies to wildlife, from sports to fine arts, and many more.

You can select either a thumbnail-size image like the one Marilyn Monroe below or a full-size image like the ones above. You control whether or not to display the title of the image, the artist or photographer’s name, and/or the dimensions. 

Warhol, Andy 

Buy at AllPosters.com

Now you can enhance the look of your blog and grab the attention of visitors. And you will enjoy making some affiliate cash when they buy pictures or sign up to be affiliates, too. 

To sign up for free, click the following button:

Webmasters Make $$$