RORY HANSEN

When launching a new WordPress blog, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is:

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.

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You’ve probably heard of Vistaprint before; they’ve been one of the largest sites offering custom printing services online for a while now. You’ve probably even heard that they offer free business cards.

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.

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I’ve collected over 80 “Your Ad Here” 125 x 125 banners from Google as examples of what you can use on your website to fill those blank ad spots. Use them on your blog or website to entice potential advertisers to learn more about your site and ad rates.

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.

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Market Leverage is running a brand new contest with Zac Johnson and a few more bloggers, giving away prizes such as a Flip Mino HD, an iPod Nano, an Amazon Kindle and gift certificates. It’s easy to enter; just write a blog post or create a YouTube video.

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.
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November Recap
Early on in November, I realized that this was going to be a challenging month for my Internet marketing efforts. Natural search engine traffic for my most profitable niche site was way down, which has affected both AdSense earnings as well as affiliate earnings from Clickbank.

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.
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Happy Cyber Monday everyone!

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!

As Internet marketers, we all use affiliate links in some way or another. For some, they might be embedded into blog posts, while for others in landing pages or forum signatures. Regardless, affiliate links serve a necessary evil when making money online and we depend on them.

Introduction to Affiliate Link Cloaking
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Last month I had a breakout month with Clickbank, with affiliate earnings exceeding $400.

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.

I had a good laugh when I saw this in my inbox over the weekend:

The valuation of clicks received for the time period July 2005 – October 2008 has generated a parking revenue of:

$21.45.

Yes, I earned a huge $21.45 over the course of over 3 years with Sedo, which averages out to about $0.55 per month.

After a maintenance haitus that lasted a few weeks longer than their posted notice stated, DealDotCom is back in action.

For those that are unfamiliar with DealDotCom, their concept is similar to that of Woot! in that they have a different product on sale each day. But, each product/tool/ebook is focused on blogging, affiliate marketing, generating traffic… topics that webmasters (especially those wanting to make money online) are interested in.

What sets them apart is that they have a 2-level affiliate marketing program, where you can earn 35% of the sales you send their way.

Anyway, in their first day back, they’re advertising the AutoMarker Social Bookmarking Software, which allows you access to a community of users that will propel your blog posts up the social media site ladders through votes. Sounds sorta scheme-ish, but, hey, traffic is traffic.