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If you are aiming to earn from AdSense, then use Prosense theme from DoshDosh.Com.

I was just browsing WP themes last night and I did see some nice Real Estate ones, as well as a ton of other really nice themes at http://www.wpthemesarchive.com/brow…ry/business/

Themes offered from http://www.blogohblog.com .. I use one of his free themes on www.GurusLab.com he also offers a couple of paid themes that cost a lot less than some of those *cough*, premium designs out there.

Most themes can be adjusted to whatever you like using the css style sheets and a few graphics.

Contents and Video Titles

1. Changing a header graphic
2. Playing with CSS Style Sheets
3. Inserting code and scripts
4. Content Management CMS
5. Advanced Plugins
6. Graphics and logins
7. Desktop Blogging
8. RSS uses and stats
9. 404 pages Customize your error pages
10. Widgets
11. Resources and summary

Visit http://www.advancedwordpress to get your copy.

If you look at lists of popular blogs, you’ll realize that very different types of content can attract a crowd of readers. The difference between a good and a not-so-good post is all in the execution.

There are many reasons why posts are interesting. Sometimes it’s the writing and the personality behind the writing. Sometimes it’s the ability to find and put together links to content that is interesting, or weird, or unusual. Sometimes it’s the ability to create community around your blog. It takes some experimenting to understand what type of blogger you are and what style matches your personality, motivation, and interest. So try different things and see how it feels.

You will find disparate opinions on what constitute a good blog post. It’s OK. There are so many different reasons for blogging, and each reason requires a different type of posts. Do you blog just for your own enjoyment? Because writing makes you think more clearly? Do blog for a cause? Or to communicate with your friends? To make yourself known? To market your product or yourself? To make money? Depending on your reason, you’ll need a different focus.

If you just want to express yourself, a good post is a post you love writing and represents you unique voice. If the purpose is communication, social networking, and community, you need to write posts that create debate, connect people, are interesting to discuss, and speak to the community. If you want to get known, you need to express interesting opinions on interesting topics that can catch the attention of enough of the right people. If you want to market your product(s) or yourself you need to focus on communicating value to your prospective customers or clients. And so on.

In the end, a good post is a post that has value for you and/or your readers. We read posts to have fun, perhaps to learn something, discover something interesting, hear a different point of view.

Short and crisp posts are popular, because they require less effort to read (but not necessarily to write). It’s easier to grab the attention of your readers with a short post that to maintain it through a long post (read more on this topic) and it’s fun to jump from one short post to the next linked post again and again. On the other hand, long posts can be valuable and satisfying because they allow you to develop a topic, to create connections, and to present a different point of view.

Different styles of posts appeal to different people. You need to choose a style that matches yourself and your audience, and then get better at it with practice.

Whatever you do, try to be respectful of your readers. Provide value, don’t waste their time, put some care and attention in your writing, no matter how long/short, personal/objective, opinionated/balanced your posts are. Put some love in your blogging, and you’ll get some love back.

I’ve read many bloggers suggest “Post frequently, post every day.” It’s true that posting frequently can help increase traffic to your site. But in the end, it’s not the quantity but the quality of the posts that creates loyal readers. I read many blogs that are not updated very frequently but are just a really good and stimulating reading. Blogs that post frequently but have few valuable posts are the most frustrating to me.

My suggestions is rather “Blog frequently, blog everyday.” Some posts require more than one day to become good. Sometimes I start to write a post and only a few days later I can tell what parts are good and what parts are bad, where there are holes, and what needs to be improved.

The great thing about of “customer-created content” is that we can create our own rules. Some blogs are immediate and spontaneous, and this is great. Other blog content takes time to create. Don’t get trapped in a predefined idea of how a blog post should look like. Take your time, put some practice into it, find your way, and most of all have fun.

You could simply cut and paste the text of the post into Word or Notepad and print that, or you could clean up the page using a handy extension for the Firefox browser called Aardvark.

Aardvark allows you to selectively remove elements of a page for printing. Aardvark alters the web page as it exists in your browser (in memory). It doesn’t alter the page on the web server from where it is delivered. It just alters what you are looking at it, and is temporary.

Perhaps you’d like to print the blog’s banner and the post with nothing else? It’s easily done with Aardvark. Here’s how to get started with Aardvark:

1. You must have the Firefox browser installed on your computer. Using Firefox, download the Aardvark extension here. You’ll need to restart your browser before the extension is fully installed.

2. You can start Aardvark by simply right-clicking on the web page and selecting “Start Aardvark” from the context menu.

3. Now move around the page. Do you see how Aardvark puts a red outline around all the elements on the page? With Aardvark you can clean up a page for printing by removing an element from view, or isolating an element so that only that single element is displayed on a page.

4. Using Aardvark highlight any undesirable element and type ‘r’ to remove it. To isolate an element type ‘i’. Remove unwanted elements until you’ve got a clean page for printing.

5. If you screw things up just reload the page and start over. You can also type ‘h’ to see Aardvark’s help menu.

Great article provided by David Airey

I know that many of you reading are web designers / developers in some shape or form. I also know that more and more clients are integrating WordPress blogs into their web projects (although it’s something I’ve yet to do for a client).

One aspect of the design that I probably would’ve overlooked, had it not been for Ayush Saran, is the actual WordPress login screen.

If you have a WordPress blog, then take a look inside your wp-admin / images folder. You’ll notice two .gif files titled:

login-bkg-tile.gif
login-bkg.bottom.gif

These two images make up the look and feel of your WP admin screen (where you login), and if you click on the two files above you’ll see how I’ve branded mine with my logo (I had to use transparency for the bottom section so the graduation shows correctly).

It’s the little things that make all the difference when you’re dealing with customers. If you’re launching a WordPress blog for a client I’d highly recommend making this small, yet important, inclusion. This comes into even greater focus when more than one person is accessing the admin screen, whereas I’m the only one who updates my own blog so it’s less important for me.

Do you have any examples of your own modifications?

Drop the link in the web address field in the comments below as I’d love to see. Here’s my login screen in all its WordPress glory.

Great article David

The second way I get traffic to my blog is using “article marketing” In addition to having http://www.need-an-article.com write some blog content, I also have them write me a set of 10 articles that I can publish to http://www.ezinearticles.com
I normally use 2% keyword density in my articles and my keywords are always  long tail keyword phrases. Since my blogs also target longtail keyword phrases, I just use that same phrase to writemy articles with. If my blog is promoting “used top flite golf bals” then my targeted keyword is “used top flite  golf balls”.

This phrase won’t get a ton of traffic, but the visitors it does bring in are focused on one thing, which is buying used top flite golf balls. I cover this more in the “longtail nichekeywords” module. For those of you who haven’t used article marketing, I have included a short video in the course that tells you more about it.

The third way I drive free traffic to my blogs is by making posts to multiple forums. Each time you make a post to a forum, there is a place you can include a signature file. In this space you always include your web address, so when the search engines spider the site, they see yourpost that has your web address in it and that creates backlinks to your site,which in turn helps your blog rank higher.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

http://www.blogmastermind.com/?home=733