Should I buy a Premium Wordpress Theme?    Do I need a Premium Wordpress Theme?

Good questions! The main reasons to purchase a Premium Theme are:
1) Superior design to free themes (not always the case!)
2)  Support (forum and email support in most cases)
3) More flexibility than free themes
4) Constant upgrades to keep up with new releases of Wordpress

But, before I go any further below is a quick summary of my recommendations – based on my personal use of some of these themes.

Recommended Themes
1. Woo Themes: cheap, extremely high quality, good support, easy to use
2. DIY Themes: aesthetically not as pleasing out of the box but extremely flexible theme. Great for people with design skills.
3. Solostream:  Nice designs (some look a bit too similar though…), good support, great theme features built into the admin panel

Based on my experience to date I would have to say Woo Themes are the best in terms of value for money and they have a vast selection of themes to choose from.

Before you decide on a Premium Theme you should do a number of things  - see below for some suggestions! Then decide based on your own findings

1) Go to demo sites and take a tour of the demo template you are interested in.
2)  Go to any of the forums/comments section on the site. If they don’t have one then you should re-think.
3) Contact those who comment directly to ask them questions/feedback on the theme
4) List up your own requirements and see how well they match up to the theme you are considering buying

When deciding on whether or not to purchase a Premium Wordpress Theme, you really need to look at what you want to do with your site. If you just want a pretty looking site which only needs minimal changes to the design (or use as is), then you need to select a design which more or less matches up to the type of site you are looking for, or at least comes close.

If you are a complete Newbie, you have to make sure that the support is there to guide you through how to use the theme. If there are no instructions or help when you first start out it can be very frustrating, so make sure the theme you choose has support. If a theme has good support it is probable that the developers of that theme will also make constant upgrades. If the theme is not very popular and the comments on the forums are scant, you can bet that the theme is probably not being constantly upgraded. So beware of this before you purchase. A mistake I made when I first started blogging was I always used free themes which had no support, which also meant they weren’t upgraded to the most recent version of Wordpress. So I kept looking for new free themes until I got tired of running around in circles.

What Wordpress theme to choose?

There are a number of professionally produced Premium Themes with great support from a select number of companies. In terms of superior design and value for money my best experience so far is with Woo Themes. They have an offer which allows you to buy 3 themes for $70 and the themes are really slick and have an easy to use admin panel. I use their ProductM theme on this site and I had the site looking beautiful in about 10 minutes. Another company worth mentioning is DIY Themes, who produce the Thesis Theme. This design is extremely flexible and allows you to change a number of things without any coding or html knowledge. The only drawback is that the ‘out of the box theme’ is a little plain and you have to tweak it a bit before you get it looking pretty. I have also tried the Solostream Themes which has nice designs and good support.

The main providers of Premium Themes are Woo Themes, DIY Themes (Thesis), Solostream, Rich WP Themes, Press75, Elegant Themes, Studiopress and WP Zoom. From personal experience I recommend the Woo Themes, and depending on your needs the Thesis and Solostream themes are also very good.

Below is a list of Premium Themes that I recommend but you should check out the sites yourself, go to the forums and choose one! if you aren’t ready to splurge on cash there are also a lot of good free Wordpress Themes, but the main issue will be support. Remember, the main reason to buy a Premium Theme is because of the superior design, flexibility and most importantly the support.

If you want to change your design a fair bit but have zero experience then I recommend using a developer. Depending on the theme you choose there are usually developers who are experienced at creating sites based on particular themes and it can save you a lot of headaches if you fork over some cash and get them to do the hard work. But, be careful that you are very specific with you instructions. I have been burnt in the past by being too vague and having to go back to the drawing board when it hasn’t been done correctly. You can usually look for these developers on the theme sites.

Well, Happy Blogging and any comments are welcome!

1. WOO THEMES

Visit Woo Themes Site

WooThemes was started by three designers – Addi, Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester. Some positives:

• Easily change your logo
• Add Feed Burner URL
• Add Google Analytics
• Add Flickr photos
• Add Twitter updates
• Great value for money (3 themes for $70)
• You can use the theme on unlimited domains without extra costs

The last point is quite important when you compare the pricing models to other companies. Most sites have a single-use license and multiple-use license. The multiple-use license is obviously more expensive. Woo Themes allows you to use their themes on an unlimited number of domains for the one price.

Woo Themes has a variety of different designs which include Magazine/News, Personal Blog, Portfolio, CMS, Business, Free and Multimedia. Among these designs there are about 56 themes to choose from. They have a great deal where you pay $70 and get 3 themes. As I said, I’m using the ProductM Woo theme for this site. I also started experimenting with one of their photo templates and I have to say I was really impressed. Very easy to use and a lot of layout flexibility from the admin panel, so to get something like that for around $25 is a real bargain. It is still a work in progress but this is the site I am in the process of setting up which uses the Object theme.

They also have a deal where you pay $125/month to get access to all of their themes, but I wouldn’t do that unless you are a serious developer.

2. THESIS THEME

Visit Thesis Site

Probably the best site for SEO (search engine optimization) theme because of its great coding. If you want to change the colour, columns etc., not being a coder is a non-issue because the thesis option panel allows you to change aspects of the site which normally would have to be done by time consuming coding.

One of the fortes of the Thesis theme is the ability to produce unique designs easily from the admin panel. A great feature is the layout generator which allows you to choose a 1, 2 or 3 column layout within seconds.

What is different about Thesis is they have one design which can easily be tweaked. Other themes have multiple designs, but you have to pay for each different design. The main drawback to Thesis is that it doesn’t look slick out of the box. You really need to work a bit on adding the various components and playing around in the admin panel until you get it looking the way you want it to – but that is also one of the advantages…

3. SOLOSTREAM THEMES

Visit Solostream site

Previously run by an individual by the name of Michael Pollock, Solostream was bought by the Jigsaw Group in 2008.

Very professional looking out of the box with over 20 different designs. The templates can be customized to almost any color palette and personalized with logos and photos. They have put a lot of thought into the ad placement to allow webmasters to monetize their site easily and the tutorials are useful and easy to follow.

I bought this theme when it was called WP-Vybe. As mentioned above, the company has since been sold to the Jigsaw group but still maintains a high level of support. The themes have moved on and the new designs look really slick. What impressed me about this theme was the really good tutorials and the ease of use. It didn’t take me long to get my site pretty much looking the way I wanted.

4. RICH WP THEMES

Visit RICH WP site

Rich WP offers about 9 different themes listed below:

BigNews (Magazine)
Personal Agency
Superblogger Theme
Daily News (Magazine)
Showcase (Photo)
Rich Magazine Theme
RichBIZ Theme
Blogbeast (Magazine)
Photo Theme
All Themes Package

I don’t know too much about these themes, but from what I hear the Showcase (Photo) theme is good if you want to make a Recipe site!

5. STUDIOPRESS WORDPRESS THEMES

Visit Studiopress Site

Nice looking colour schemes (about 13 of them), widget-ready, integrated Adsense units and optimized for search engines. The Studiopress sites certainly look nice although I haven’t purchased one yet. To tweak the themes you require a working knowledge of HTML/CSS and an understanding of how Wordpress Themes work.

]]> http://www.settingupablog.net/premium-wordpress-themes/review-of-wordpress-premium-themes/feed/ 16 http://www.settingupablog.net/driving-traffic-to-your-blog/link-building-strategies/ http://www.settingupablog.net/driving-traffic-to-your-blog/link-building-strategies/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 07:39:30 +0000 admin http://www.settingupablog.net/?p=123 How to increase traffic through link building

After you have set up a blog, gaining traffic through link building is one of the most important things you can do to drive traffic to your site. No one knows exactly how google calculates the popularity of a site but link popularity is certainly one of the most important things.

Essentially, link popularity refers to the number and quality of the incoming links that are pointing to your site. In the old days you can easily build links by using link farms or link exchange programs, but google has got smarter and if you try this your site is likely to get punished or banned. What you really need to do is get links from other sites which have a similar focus to your own or from authoritative sites.

Below is a list of linking methods you can use:

1) Write emails to sites similar to your own which are not directly competing with you. Before you do so make sure they have a Links Page.
- do a search in google  and list up sites which are similar to your own. They should have links to sites which are similar to your own. Type in search terms which are relevant and important to your own site when you do this.
- write to the webmaster or main contact on their page outlining the benefits of linking to you . Make sure you have content which will genuinely be of interest to them
- find out who is linking to your competitors and send a request to them as well
- if possible, put a link up on your site first if possible and tell them you will leave it there if provide a link
-  suggest the location on their site where you think the link should go
- send them the exact link text to use. You should also provide the HTML if you can so they can simply cut and paste it into the appropriate place
- send a Thank you note if they provide a link

2) Create a links or resources page on your site
- in order to create a link to other sites you need a specific page on your site to set this up. This is usually done by creating a ‘Links’ or ‘Resources’ page.

3) Cross link other sites which you create
- Another great way to increase links to your site is to make mini-sites which focus on one related area to your core site and then link back to your site from those mini-sites.  You don’t necessarily need to stick with Wordpress and can even use Blogger if you like.

When setting up a blog, understanding whether or not a keyword is worthwhile or not is crucial if you are serious about driving traffic to your site and making a profit. I used to think I could blog about anything of interest and the site would eventually get a lot of users by virtue of the fact  I thought my blog was interesting. I never thought about keyword research and believed it was too much hard work and hassle to find out more about it. But after reading a lot of sites on the topic and experimenting myself I realized how important it was to understand how many people search for certain keywords and also how much advertisers pay for those keywords.

Fortunately, google keyword tool allows you to easily check how many people are searching for specific keywords by region and also understand the amount advertisers pay for those keywords. But, to make money from any given keyword it should satisfy the following conditions.

1) Sufficient number of people searching for it
- you need a decent number of people looking for your keyword, otherwise there is no point writing about it – unless you are just doing it because you like to write about it.

2) Not too much competition for the keyword
- if there is a large number of really good sites which already cover that keyword, then it will be difficult for you to rank sufficiently and get on the first page of google. If you aren’t on the first page of google for any given keyword then you won’t get many visitors.

3) High value with advertisers
- If advertisers aren’t paying much money for the keyword, even if you have a high ranking site you won’t make much money from it because every time someone clicks on an adsense unit on your site you will only earn a few cents every click. But, if you have a site which focuses on keywords which are worth a lot of money you can earn a decent amount every time someone clicks on an adsense unit. But, if you are looking at creating an e-book and driving traffic by using adwords then you would want to do the opposite – i.e. find low paying keywords so you can easily pay for adwords ads and drive traffic. This is a topic I will go into later.

You may or may not have heard of niche websites. These are websites which focus on specific keywords by using the information above. If your blog or website focuses on a specific subject then you can utilize your knowledge of keywords to easily drive more traffic to your website. It just takes a little patience and persistence.

Choosing a topic to write about
Choosing a topic to write about can be one of the hardest things to do. If you already have a website or topic you are interested in then that is good. But, if you are serious about making some money, you should check whether or not the topics and keywords for that site are profitable or not and whether or not there is strong competition.

Choosing the right keywords

If you choose the right keyword you can create an entire site around that keyword and other keywords associated with the key keyword you choose. For example, you may write about ‘Bass Fishing’, but in addition you have other categories and posts on your site using associated keywords such as ‘Bass Fishing Competitions’, ‘Bass Fishing Lakes’, ‘How to fish for bass’ etc…

There are a lot of ways to brainstorm different ideas. Below is a list of different ways to go about it.

1. Amazon/E-bay
- by searching for various goods on this site will give you a lot of good ideas.

2. Magazines
- there are obviously thousands of magazines out there and browsing through these can give you some great, unique ideas

3. Your hobbies/interests/problems
- If you intend to write your own e-book, then listing up your own hobbies and interests is a great way to brainstorm. A piece of software I use which I find really good is Freemind mindmapping software which is free and allows you to easily view all your ideas on one page.
- Looking at your own problems can also reveal some subject matter which hasn’t been addressed in a comprehensive or easy to understand way. 

4. Clickbank
- by looking at which topics sell well you can get an idea of the type of products people are looking for. Go to clickbank and browse subjects. You can filter your search results to search by popularity as well.

5. Googles Keyword Tool

This website is very cool and gives you the number of Google searches per month that have been made on any given word or phrase. You can type in a keyword or phrase and it will give you the number of corresponding searches. Try typing in generic terms like ‘how to’ or ‘learn’ or other terms likes this before your keyword. Before you start the search you should change the location to ‘all countries and territories’. You should also change the ‘Match type’ to exact and under ‘Choose columns to display’ you should choose ‘Show Estimated Avg. CPC’. This means the average cost per click that advertisers pay google.

6. Sitepoint Marketplace
- On this site people are constantly selling and buying sites to eachother so it is a good place to see which niches people are making money from.

Before you start analyzing keywords, you should download the SEO for Firefox Plugin which allows you to check the ranking of sites in google. For example, when you do a search in google, by using this tool you can check a number of things including the page rank of a site. If the page rank is 3 or below you have a fairly good chance of beating it. If it is 4 or above the site will most likely be hard to beat.

Keyword value and search volume
- Checking the CPC (cost per click) of any given keyword allows you to tell how much advertisers are willing to pay google for that keyword. For example, if they pay $1 for a keyword, then you will get about 25 cents every time someone clicks on that google ad. You can see below that advertisers pay $1 for the search term ‘bass fishing boats’ and that about 3,600 people per month search for that search term.

Finding the right combination of cost per click ($1 or more), monthly volume (2-3K/month) and low level of competing sites (sites with less than or equal to 3PR) is important. You should make a list in excel with keywords which have this combination.

Once you find the right combination you can then start creating a site around the keyword of your choice. I highly recommend using Wordpress to create your blog. This page shows a few of the blogging options available. As well as the advantage of being able to use your own domain name which means you can re-sell your site in the future if you want to, there is a lot more flexibility with Wordpress over other options such as Blogger.

When you set up your site you need to consider what your goals are for the site. Are you writing for your family and friends or do you want to make a profit? Is it a niche site or are you just blogging about anything that comes into your head?

When blogging, the most important thing is that the blog is interesting to read and you keep the blog updated regularly. I have set up a number of sites which were going great in the first few months when I was updating regularly and I thought these users would keep coming back, but when I stopped posting on a regular basis my users dried up and I went from a few hundred a day to about 20 a day. Your content must also be well written (or at least not so bad that users are turned off).

1. Be useful
Writing something which is of use for others is extremely important. This is why ‘How to’ posts and ‘How to’ E-books are so popular.  If you are good at something which you take for granted, try writing about it in a step by step way to explain how to do it. You’ll be surprised how many people don’t know how to do certain things and how difficult it can be to find easy to understand explanations.

2. Write for humans
What I mean by this is that many people write about what they think people will read and end up writing in an unnatural way in order to try and drive traffic to their site. You are better off writing in a natural way for your human audience.

3.  Be passionate and unique
Being passionate means you are saying what you really want to say without holding back. Users appreciate honesty and passion so don’t be scared to write what is on your mind and in your own way. If you copy what others are saying without saying anything unique, users wont come back. Google also recognizes uniqueness which can really help your site ranking in the long run.

4. Be controversial
Being controversial is a great way to grab attention. By being controversial, people will often link to your site because they have something to say in response to what you are saying. People are also more likely to comment on your site which also helps drive more traffic.

5. Be Funny
Being funny is a great way to bring back readers on a regular basis and also helps your readers put a more human face to your blogs. Funny posts are probably more often linked to bland, boring posts.

6. Give credit where credit is due
If you use information from another site (e.g. photo or text), you should give credit and a link to that site. Giving credit like this will not damage your site ranking if you are linking to sites which are relevant to the topic you are writing about. In fact, I have heard that google actually rewards you if you are responsible and link to sources which are relevant to what you are writing about.

1. Adding a new post

Click on ‘Add New’ posts on the left hand side of your dashboard as shown below.

2. Enter a title for your post

This should accurately reflect the content you are writing about in your post. For example, this post is called ‘Your First Post’ which is apt.

3. Write content

This is done in the body of the post (the big white space below the title). You can write what you want but I recommend that you BOLD any titles as this helps identify the content as important and apparently can help your SEO (search engine optimization).

4.  Adding an image

To add an image is easy and simply involves clicking on the image icon and then choosing a file to upload. Usually a JPEG or a GIF is the best way to go.

5.  Adding video to your blog

Fortunately with Wordpress always evolving, this has become very easy to do. All you have to do is press the ‘Insert/Edit Embedded Media’ and then select your video type and your file. The disadvantage to adding your own video is that it puts a load on your server and can be slower to load, so the user experience may not be so good.

A good alternative is to simply embed a YouTube video. To do this you click on the HTML button (on the right hand side of the Visual tab) and then insert the code.

After you click on Insert/Edit Embedded Media icon above, you will see the window below. Click on General and then insert the code into the File/Url box as shown below. Then your video will appear! To grab this video code from YouTube you simply copy the text which says ‘Embed’ and paste it as below.

Another way to add a video is to click on the icon below

The next screen will look like this (see below). First, Click on the ‘From URL’ link and then go to YouTube and select the ‘Embed Code’ option. Copy this code by doing Ctrl + C or going to edit and copy and then past that code  as shown below. Then simply click on ‘Insert into Post’.

6. The ‘More’ button

When you write a post and you don’t want the entire post to display (i.e. an excerpt), you can simply click on the ‘Insert more tag‘ as shown below. Just select the spot you want to insert it and press it. This is very useful and I use it for many of my posts.

Basically, all text above this will display and all text below it will only display when users click on the full post.

7. Saving your post as a draft or publishing it

When you save a post, if you aren’t quite ready to announce it to the world you can save it as a draft. This means you can access it anytime and keep editing it until you are happy with it. If you Publish a post you can also save it as a draft if you change your mind, but try not to do this if possible because once it is published and it is indexed by google then users may get an error when they look for that page. If your site isn’t well known and google doesn’t index it very often then you are probably okay. When you Publish a post, it means it will display on your site and it also means ‘hopefully’ google will index your site and this will be one of the pages it indexes.

8. Deleting your post

If you want to delete your post it’s easy to do from the admin panel. When you click on POSTS in your sidebar there are 4 options – edit/quick edit/delete/view. Click in the checkbox and select which one you want.

The big advantage of Thesis of other Wordpress themes is the flexibility you have right from the outset and the fact that Thesis has been created with SEO in mind. Being able to change the number of columns, their width, colour etc. from the admin panel is a godsend, as you usually are required to know html to do that type of customization. This flexibility in design means you can use the template over and over again and have each site look different just by selecting different options in the admin area.

Below are some tutorials you should check out

- Thesis Video Tour
- Thesis Demo site
- Thesis Testimonials
- Thesis gallery showcase

]]> http://www.settingupablog.net/reviews/the-thesis-theme/feed/ 2 http://www.settingupablog.net/hosting-services/bluehost/ http://www.settingupablog.net/hosting-services/bluehost/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:38:12 +0000 admin http://www.settingupablog.net/?p=58 Bluehost has been around since 1996 and is a reliable web host which offers 24 hour support. It is extremely easy to add Wordpress to your domain and the admin panel is easy to use.

Bluehost offers unlimited domains, so if you are looking at purchasing a lot of add-on domains I highly recommend them.You get an unlimited numbers of add-on domains as well as subdomains.

They support most scripts and are good if you want to start a company blog as well as personal blogs. They have several useful tools for eCommerce as well and a drag and drop site builder if you need it. The stats functionality and keyword analysis is also very useful.

The plan supports most scripts, and is a good choice if you’re planning to start a company blog, as several blog tools are included. They also throw in several eCommerce features in the deal, such as carts and different forms of encryption, and if you’re setting the site up yourself, there’s a drag and drop site builder, which is very convenient.

Their support is 24 hours and they have a toll-free number you can use or they can be reached via email. I have never had to wait more than about 5-7 mins to speak to an operator.

I have used a few FTP Clients, but I highly recommend Filezilla FTP Client. It is free, easy to use and have never had any issues with it. You can download it from here.

Before you start blogging, you need to to ask yourself the following before you decide on what software you use.

1) What are your objectives?

Are you:
- blogging for fun or for $?
- will you need much space to store photos/video content etc?
- do you want a simple blog or do you want to grow it into something which may require additional functionality? e.g. forums, photo album etc

2) Choosing the right blogging software

The best blogging software I know of is:
- wordpress.com (free version-no domain name required) and wordpress.org (domain name required but this offers you more flexiblility)
- blogger.com
- weebly

Depending on your needs, the blogging software you choose will differ. If you need something really simple – e.g. a personal blog or a simple site which doesn’t need much tweaking, then Blogger or Weebly are probably better. But, if you want to do more with your site than just blog, Wordpress offers the most flexibility and there are a bunch of resources available for free which make it easy to add more functionality to your site.

The free version of Wordpress is very good and has a huge number of free themes and you can literally get a blog up and running in a matter of minutes. Google also likes it and your blogs are pinged to others in the Wordpress community which means you get traffic to your site fairly quickly. Wordpress also has a pretty cool stats program which gives you a good breakdown of your users. The downside is you do not have your own domain name which means you are limited in terms of functionality.

For the purpose of this site I will focus on Wordpress because it is my blogging software of choice.

1. Go to Permalinks and Custom Structure and change it to: /%category%/%postname%/
- this will change the way the URL looks when you create a page or a post. i.e. you will have a google friendly post instead of an ugly URL which is the default in Wordpress.

2. Activate Akismet
- This is an spam filter and will save you from having to delete loads of messages from people trying to sell you viagra or sex toys. When you go to activate Akismet they will ask for your API Key. Check your email as you should have been sent this the first time you set up a Wordpress blog. Enter this API key in and you are away.

3. Install Plugins
- Plugins give you additional functionality in Wordpress. There are loads of different plugins, but there are some that you really should use which will make a big difference to your site. I have made a list of what I believe to be the most useful/important plugins. There are a bunch of blogs out there which can expand on this list, but for now these are my recommendations.
- To install a plugin, download the plugin folder to your desktop and then drag and drop it to the Plugins folder on your FTP Client.

4. Change password to something more memorable
- When you log in to your Wordpress admin for the first time you will see a message at the top of the screen asking if you want to change your password. Unless you want to keep the default password, I suggest you change it to something more memorable. You can also change your login name.

5. Set up a Contact Us page
- make sure you activate the Contact 7 plugin
- Go to the ‘Contact’ link on the left hand side in your admin panel
-  Scroll down the page where it says <p>Your Email (required)<br /> [email* your-email] </p>. Insert your email into the part where it says Your email (required).
- Copy the text at the top – [contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"]
- Create a new page called Contact Us or whatever your prefer.
- Insert the code – [contact-form 1 "Contact form 1"] into the body of the page.
- Save it and you are done.
Note: If you are using Thesis, go to Thesis Options, Navigation Menu and click on the + sign where it says Select pages to include in the nav menu. Select the Contact Us page and save.

5. If you are using the Thesis theme,do the following:

- Change name of the ‘custom sample folder’ to ‘custom’ in your FTP client
- Write in some ‘Home Page Meta Data’ in appropriate spot in admin area