Do I use a free theme or pay for a premium theme?

What I’ve learned over the years is that, depending on the niche that your blog is targeting, it’s often very cost-effective just to purchase a premium theme and get your content online as quickly as possible.

For personal blogs, sure, use a free theme. But if you’re launching a blog targeting a professional or corporate audience, buy the premium theme and you’ll be happier in the long-run. It’ll be easier to gain the trust of your blog audience, plus you’ll be pleased with the raw power that many of these premium themes have under the covers.

New Corporate Themes for WordPress

Here are a few corporate themes that caught my eye at ThemeForest, arguably the top premium WordPress theme site on the web.

Debonair Corporate WordPress Theme [View Demo]

I think Debonair looks fantastic. The green and grey color scheme is totally trendy for corporate websites these days. I was this close to buying it today, but instead, decided on Glide which is shown just below.

Glide Premium WordPress Theme [View Demo]

I actually purchased Glide today, which is what prompted me to write this blog post. I love that there are multiple sliders you can choose from to highlight your feature content. And the theme comes with this really neat skinning ability, where you can change the colors of the background, the nav bar, etc. all from the WordPress dashboard.

 Thunder Business WordPress Theme [View Demo]

See More Corporate Themes

You can browse more Corporate and Business WordPress themes here.

Happy blogging!

But did you know that they also offer free custom printed t-shirts?! This was news to me when I found out just a few days ago.

To me, this seems like a great deal for new start-ups and tech companies looking for some basic, free / cheap t-shirts to wear around town and to local meetups and events.

Here’s how it works:

1. Choose the text to appear on the front of the t-shirt, such as your company name, slogan, and web site address.
2. Choose a t-shirt design. (They’ve got a few hundred designs to choose from.)
3. Choose the t-shirt color. (White, grey, and black.)

Pretty simple process if you ask me. And as far as I can tell, you only pay extra for additional customization and for shipping.

Here’s the link to the free custom printed t-shirt page on the Vistaprint website.

Anyway, let me know your thoughts.

Note: Each of these 125 x 125 banners are owned by their respective owners; none of them are my own work.

Click into the article to browse through the gallery of “Your Ad Here” images.

I present to you the 5 Minute Long Tail SEO Drill. You’ll learn how to quickly and easily implement some simple on-page SEO techniques to improve your Google search ranking positions (SERPs) and, ultimately, boost your blog’s traffic.

No doubt, many of you will already know about this particular method. And for those that don’t, it’s such a simple and obvious method that you’ll question why you haven’t started doing this already.

I recently spent 5 minutes doing long tail SEO on my blog and within a couple of weeks, was seeing search engine traffic to key pages on my blog increase by over 20%, resulting in overall site traffic increasing by over 12%. Again, this is just with 5 minutes of effort.

Repeat the 5 Minute Long Tail SEO Drill every month or two, and you’ll see continuous step improvements in your site SERPs.

The 5 Minute Long Tail SEO Drill concept:

Fact: Ranking on the first page (SERPs 1 – 10) of any Google search query is far better than ranking on the 2nd (SERPs 11-20) or third. While being on the first page may result in an abundance of traffic,  click-thrus dramatically drop off as you fall onto the 2nd and third pages of Google search results.

Goal: You want to be on the first page of Google search results (and, actually, as high on the first page as possible). And, chances are, your blog already has a lot of “low-hanging fruit” that you can quickly affect change to, and easily get onto the first page.

Strategy: Using Google Webmaster Tools, identify high impression Google search queries where you’re ranking low on the first page (8-10) or high on the second page (11-13). Perform on-page SEO to optimize your content to those search queries, and move up the SERPs.

The 5 Minute Long Tail SEO Drill method:

Step 1: Identify high impression search queries where you’re ranking low on the first page (8-10) or high on the 2nd (11-13)

(We’ll be using Google Webmaster Tools for this. If you don’t already have your blog set up to use Google Webmaster Tools, do that first, then come back.)

In Google Webmaster Tools, open up the Your site on the web > Search queries view.

The Search queries screen lists all of the Google search queries which resulted in an impression for your blog. By default, the list is ordered by impressions, which is great, because that tells us which search queries have the power to affect change most dramatically.

Further to the right, you’ll notice your average position for each of the search queries.

Remember, the goal here is to find high impression search queries for which you’re ranking low on the first page or high on the 2nd page.

Glance down the listed search queries, looking for search queries with positions in our target range. When you find a couple such search queries, note them down mentally and move onto Step 2.

Step 2: Make a list of which blog entries are associated with the target search queries

In Google Webmaster Tools, when you click on any of the search queries, you are given additional details about the search query, including the URLs to the blog entries that were actually listed in the search results for that query.

Normally only one blog entry will be listed, but in cases when multiple blog entries are listed, identify which one appears most often. That’s the blog entry we’ll be optimizing.

For each of the search queries you identified in Step 1, write down which blog entries you’ll be optimizing. Once you’ve done this, move onto Step 3.

Step 3: Perform on-site SEO optimization on those blog entries

When optimizing your blog entries, there are three key areas you want to focus on.

1. Blog post title - Does your current blog post title contain the search query you’re optimizing for? If not, rewrite the title so it does. In some cases, you may be using a slight variation of the search query in the title. For example, you might be using the individual words from the search query in your title, but not as a single phrase. For these cases, consider revising, but before doing so, see my consideration notes below.
2. The first sentence – Search engines prefer to use the first sentence of your blog post in their search results. So, remember to use the search query term early on in the first sentence.
3. Keyword density – In your blog post itself, you want to mention the search query term multiple times. The exact frequency depends on the overall length of your blog post, and this is referred to as “keyword density“. Aim for a keyword density between 1% and 5%. For example, a 1% keyword density means that for every 100 words in your blog post, mention the keywords from your search query once. Longer blog posts will inevitably have more words, so you’ll have the opportunity to repeat your keywords more often.

Some considerations:

• Most blog posts will have multiple search queries resulting in search engine traffic. When doing any of the optimizations suggested above, don’t forget to consider what other search queries you may be affecting.
• Usually, I’d optimize for the top 2 or 3 search queries for a given blog post, and anything below that, leave alone.

Anyway, so there you have it– the 5 Minute Long Tail SEO Drill.

Over the next few weeks, monitor your SERPs using Google Webmaster Tools, and watch them improve. As well, as the whole point of this is to direct more traffic to your blog, don’t forget to monitor your traffic in your favourite analytics package, and measure the improvement.

Let me know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

The idea is to choose one of Market Leverage’s CPA offers and share how you’d market the idea. From the submitted blog posts, a few winners will be chosen: 1 winner by Zac, and the rest by Market Leverage.

How to Enter This Contest

1. If you aren’t already an affiliate with Market Leverage, sign up for an account.
2. Browse the various campaigns on the Market Leverage website and choose one that you’d like to “promote”.
3. Write a blog post or create a YouTube video, detailing your promotion ideas for the chosen campaign. (Quality and Originality will be two factors that determine the contest winners, so make your posts stand out!)
4. Head over to Zac’s blog and leave a comment on the contest post with a URL to your entry.
5. (Optional) Follow through and actually make some money executing your campaign promotion strategy!

On January 5th, the winners will be chosen. Who knows, maybe it’ll be you!

Below is my entry to the contest. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, but who knows, it could actually work!

My “Share Your Secret” Contest Entry

The campaign that I would promote is the “Are You Psychic – Mobile Fun Test” campaign, which pays out a decent $8 per lead.

I’d choose this product because of the growing media buzz around fringe sciences, the paranormal, and conspiracies. Just look at some of the new TV shows to hit the airwaves recently: Fringe, The Mentalist, Monk, Psych, and probably a bunch more I’m not aware of.

I’d target the audiences of these TV shows, because I figure that people that enjoy these shows are also open to the idea of ESP, and possibly have dreamed about having ESP or being a psychic.

Two methods:

1) Advertise on Social Media sites like Facebook. Zero in on the favourite TV shows that users list on their profiles, and target users who list the ones I mentioned earlier. Create ads targeting those TV shows and asking the question, “Are you Psychic?” Or, ”Are you a Mentalist?” etc.

2) Advertise on Search Engines using AdWords. This time, target keywords like “fringe tv show”, “fringe tv series”, “the mentalist tv show”, “psych tv series”.

Direct users to your landing pages, with each TV show getting it’s own, customized landing page. Sell the campaign. Rake in the dough.

The Goal
To attain a Page Rank of PR1 within 1 week.

The Reasoning
Although from a search engine perspective, Page Rank may be losing relevance, from a marketing perspective, Page Rank is still a useful and necessary indicator of website authority. For folks offering paid links or posts from their blog, the Page Rank value is not only important, but often necessary even to get the conversation started.

Keith’s goal was to begin using the KickJoey.com domain as a platform for paid reviews, so, attaining a Page Rank was deemed a necessity.

The Result
Unfortunately, after one week, even with some promotion across the blogosphere, his domain remained at PR0. But that never really surprised anyone, considering how infrequently Page Rank gets updated. To be honest, I didn’t think Keith had a chance. I figured he’d have to wait til the next big Google index PR update occurred, if Google ever does one of those again.

Happily, there is a positive ending to this story. After 4 more weeks of waiting, Keith did notice his domain was finally awarded a Page Rank of PR2.

While you might say to yourself, “But it’s just a PR2. Why the fuss?” Why the fuss? Because I can honestly tell you I know many other bloggers who are still waiting for their PR to update after many months of waiting. Is it just bad luck on their part? Probably not.

When asked about the PR2 Page Rank, Keith mentioned to me that he probably owes it to the 4 PR4 backlinks he received while promoting the experiment (and less so to the PR2 backlink that he got from this site, LOL).

Well, there ya have it. A happy ending to the 1-Week PR Experiment.

And if there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that if you’re a new blogger anxious to be awarded a Page Rank, you better make some friends in high places… I mean, with high Page Rank…

I attempted to remedy that by driving targetted search engine traffic to the site via PPC advertising with Findology, only to discover that the Findology traffic was difficult/impossible to convert.

In the end, I fell well short of the earnings mark I set last month when I earned a profit of $718.21.

Gross Earnings
AdSense: $65.53
Affiliate Sales: $230.05
Text-Link-Ads: $85.93
Sedo: $21.45 (My first Sedo earnings payment ever!)
Paid Reviews: $11.45
Total earnings: $414.41

Costs
Findology PPC Advertising: $25.00 (What a waste of money!)
Total costs: $25.00

November Net Earnings: $389.41

October Earnings: $718.21
September Earnings: $335.79

Earnings Analysis
Compared to my October earnings, my November earnings reflect a decrease in earnings of 46% month-over-month. While that decrease is quite sharp, my net earnings are still up by 16% from September 2008 when I began my renewed efforts in Internet marketing. Considering the search engine traffic issues this month, I’m satisfied with this month’s result, although not happy.

Mortgage Goal
As you may recall, my goal is to earn enough each month through AdSense and affiliate marketing to cover the cost of my monthly mortgage payment. For the sake of the experiment, we’re saying it’s $1500/month.

This month I earned $389.41 profit, which is 26% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 7 more months to make up the remaining 74%.

Plans Going Forward
As the New Year is approaching, I’m in the process of developing a 5-step plan on how to further increase my earnings next year. I’ll be detailing the plan here once it’s complete, but in a nutshell, it has to do with setting goals, creating objectives, and measuring success.

If you haven’t heard yet, you can use coupon code 99DOMAIN over at GoDaddy.com to purchase .com/.net/.org domain names for 99 cents!

Update: The $0.99 domain name deal is dead, but you can find current GoDaddy.com coupon codes here. Before purchasing domain names, you should always find a working GoDaddy coupon code first, as it’ll save you an easy 30% off your domain purchase.

This is a smoking deal for anyone looking to start the New Year fresh with a new blog/website. Even if all you do is buy a domain for $0.99 and flip it for a few dollars on SitePoint or DigitalPoint, that few dollars is nearly pure profit!

To make the deal even more smoking, as always, if you purchase 5 or more domains from GoDaddy, they’ll throw in free Privacy Registration (a $11 savings on each domain!).

Keep in mind, this is just for 1-year domain name registrations. I’ve got a handful I’ll be registering tonight. Lemme know which domains you end up picking up!

Introduction to Affiliate Link Cloaking

To improve the effectiveness of affiliate links, Internet marketers often “cloak” their links. For example, on my blog, I’ve cloaked my affiliate link to Market Leverage.

Cloaking changes the URL from

http://trendsbiz.com/a.php?a=CD11894&b=25367&d=470782&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4110&s1=&s2=&s3=&s4=&s5=

to

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php

Benefits of Cloaking your Affiliate Links

This has a number of benefits, including but not limited to:

• Prevention of affiliate link hijacking
• Increased professionalism through attractive affiliate link presentation
• Increased click-thru rate
• Improved search engine optimization, because Google doesn’t like affiliate links

How to Cloak your Affiliate Links

There are a number of high-quality products out there to help manage affiliate links, probably the most notable being the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in for WordPress.  These products can cost nearly $100 to purchase, and while that might be pennies in the jar for many Internet marketers, for those just starting out on the making money online scene, $100 can be a rather large investment. For that reason, this blog post isn’t about those expensive products.

The purpose of this blog post is to show you how you can cloak your affiliate URLs yourself, for free, and in just a few seconds.

To do this, we’ll be using PHP, and in a nut shell, creating a PHP file on your web site that will redirect the user to your affiliate link.

Note: This is a very simplistic example, that does not contain any click logging and should probably not be used to manage more than 10 – 15 affiliate links. If you require a heavy-duty solution, you should consider the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in, or some similar product.

Note 2: To make an even more attractive affiliate link structure, it’s possible to use more advanced techniques, like creating a .htaccess file and specifying your URL format. But, that topic is out of scope for this post, too.

Anyway, let’s get started.

Step 1: Determine how you want your links to look

If you scroll up, you’ll notice that in the example, I decided that I wanted my affiliate links to take the form:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/productname.php

I’ve used the word “recommends” in the link to further “sell” the link. Many other famous IM’s use this same naming convention. Others have used similar naming conventions, such as:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/go/productname.php

http://www.roryhansen.ca/goto/productname.php

It’s really a personal choice, but you’ll need to decide that now before you proceed.

Step 2: Create a new subdirectory on your website

Using your favourite FTP program, connect to your website’s FTP server. In your base web site directory, you’ll need to create a new directory to store all of your cloaked affiliate link files.

In my example, the new directory I created was called “recommends”. This is what enables the cloaked affiliate link format I decided upon.

Step 3: Create your cloaked affiliate link file

In a text editor like Notepad, cut-and-paste the following code:

<?php
header(‘Location: YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE’);
?>

Replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE with the actual affiliate link for your product.

Save the file using a friendly filename, to represent the product you’re advertising. In reference to my earlier example, I saved my file as marketleverage.php.

Step 4: Upload your cloaked affiliate link file

Again using your FTP program, upload your new cloaked affiliate link file into the new folder you just created.

And you’re done!

So, how does this work?

In your blog posts, you’re now going to link to the new cloaked affiliate link file you just created. For example, you might write:

Click here to sign-up for <a href=”http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php”>Market Leverage</a>.

The code in the file tells the browser to redirect the user to the URL you included into the file.

User clicks on link –> Browser goes to marketleverage.php –> Code tells browser to redirect user to the real affiliate link.

And there you have it, your first cloaked affiliate link.

Happy affiliate marketing!

This month, I’ll be lucky to break $100 with Clickbank with the same site and same niche and same product, largely because traffic is wa-ay down. The keywords which were driving much of my traffic from Google are no longer ranking my site well.

So, since natural search traffic is killing me, I’ve been experimenting with PPC traffic. (You’ll remember that I wrote an earlier post about signing up for Findology, one of the many 2nd-tier PPC networks out there. I signed up after finding a $50 coupon code with an initial deposit of at least $25.)

Well, so far, my opinion of Findology is this:

The Good:

• I have only good things to say about their staff. Carey, my account manager, has been polite and helpful from the get-go. But, since our initial email conversations, I’ve yet to use her services again.
• PPC costs are LOW. We’re talking $0.03/click.

The Bad:

• I’m having trouble converting the traffic.

In the last week, my ads have generated 630 click-thrus. Result: No conversions. And, actually, I don’t even think I got any AdSense clicks. I got nothing. In comparison, with natural search traffic for the same site and same product, my conversion rate was 0.7%.

Also, Google Analytics is showing a very high bounce rate. And my gut feeling just tells me that the traffic was not engaged.

Granted, I’m still new to PPC and so, my ads are weak, my landing pages are weak and/or canned, and my sales pitch is untrained. Maybe it’s just a lack of skill on my part.

So, I queried Google to find others that WERE having success converting Findology traffic. What I found was the exact opposite. Link 1. Link 2. Seems that others have come to the same conclusion as me. Findology traffic has low conversion rates.

So, What Now?

I’ve now eaten through my initial $25 deposit with them, and still have $50 remaining. It’s essentially free money.

Not sure how to use it though. I figure I’ll still run the campaigns, and continue to tweak them to see if I can generate a sale. I just need 1 or 2 to recoup my initial $25 deposit.

After that, I don’t think I’ll deposit anymore money with Findology.