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How and Why I Customized the Performancing Modernpaper Theme

I have a blog called The Big Chorizo which runs on WordPress and is all about Spain. I customized Brian’s Modernpaper theme and someone from the performancing community saw it and liked it:

Hiya, great blog and I love the template. I saw your post in the performancing forum and just wanted to let you know that I think the customization you have done are exceptionally good. I was curious if you ran into any trouble setting the colours of the nav-bar text (the pages: comment, about, etc.) with the template? I can’t seem to get it right. Also, as a newbie, I wanted to ask about some of your most succesful monitization plans on your blog (you hav several really nice ones, like the Amazon store, the RateMe button, etc.). Anyhow, sorry about all the questions but I think that your blog’s a benchmark for me, so I just wanted to find out a bit more. Cheers,

Suitably flattered and with apologies for taking so long to finish this write-up, I thought it was time to give something back to the performancing community and any other interested bloggers by explaining what I did to Brian’s great Modernpaper theme and why.

Colours

Spain is not black and blue. Spain is red and yellow. Actually, Spain is lots of colours and there is an abundance of greens, yellows and browns in the buildings and surroundings but red and yellow are the colours of the Spanish flag and once I’d finished the re-design I took a look at a fellow Spain blogger’s site and realised he’d come to the same conclusion.

Typography & Layout

Understating wildly, I’m not any kind of design expert but I don’t do so badly at looking at bits of other websites and working out how to fit them into what I want to do. This happened with the typography and layout of the text bits of the posts. Go and check out a page on Spanish business newspaper eleconomista.es an you’ll see where I got the inspiration. I found the CSS for the site by looking in the source code of an article page for the URI and tweaked it to fit my blog.

WordPress Plugins

  • Add Meta Tags
  • AdSense Deluxe
  • Aksimet
  • Category tagging
  • Fancy excerpt
  • Flickr Photo Gallery
  • Get Recent Comments
  • Google Sitemaps
  • Subscribe to comments
  • Viper’s Video Quicktags
  • WordPress Database back-up
  • WP Contact Form
  • WP Cron
  • Yes WWW

Discarded Plugins / Ideas

  • another photo gallery thing – very complicated and sometimes it didn’t work properly
  • amazon aStore – easy to set up, but nearly no-one followed the ‘shop’ link and total referrals after 2 months or so were a big fat 0.
  • postalicious – still not really sure about the whole aggregated del.icio.us links as a relevant post affair. I’m coming round to the thinking that it’s much better to hand craft this type of post and add comments that readers will appreciate;
  • random image – it worked for while but then I decided to streamline the individual post pages;

Monetisation

Making money from a blog is intriguing, of course, but neither this blog nor any other of mine (for the moment) has ever been a big earner. It doesn’t do badly for now and I think with more traffic it will do well especially with adsense as the CTR is reasonably good I think. 

  • Google Adsense: reasonable CTR as far as I can work out from others commenting on forums and it reaches the adsense minimum payment of 100$ every 3 months or so, almost without trying or posting, so I’m hopeful that with some more posting, networking and traffic build up that this could be developed
  • Amazon contextual links: nice idea and easy enough to set up, the referral rate exists which is a start, but hasn’t yet produced any income. One of the things that I’ve always thought that bugs me about amazon referral programmes (please correct this if it’s wrong) is that it’s normally only possible to send them to .com or .co.uk which confuses people both at the decision stage and the buying stage. Clicking things and being paid is much simpler for everybody;
  • Review me: an e-mail glitch meant that the only review that’s been asked for so-far this year was spotted after the 48 hour expiry period. I still think it could be a good idea though once traffic picks up.
  • Google Referrals 2.0: I’ve only just spotted this but it looks very interesting, Maybe for another blog I’ve just started. Using it on The Big Chorizo will depend on whether or not they have any Spain or Spanish related products;
  • Affiliate programme: I have a great (I think) affiliate programme in mind for The Big Chorizo – it’s called Don Quijote and is all about learning Spanish. The school behind the programme seems to have a good real-world organisation and the support people were quick off the mark when I contacted them a while back. It’s also being used by a fellow Spain blogger who I respect so that’s a good indication.

A Short Background

I started The Big Chorizo in April 2006 after wondering whether or not it was worth the effort for a couple of months. I have lived in Spain for the last 10 years ago and had often thought Spain in English would make a good blog topic.

I thought at the time (after having a good look around) that there were not many people doing Spain in English as a blog topic. It turns out that there are around 20 of us spread all over the country who put in some type of regular effort. ‘Meeting’ them and reading their blogs has been one of the nicest parts of the adventure. I am still looking forward to meeting several of them in person one day.

The Big C has gone through a couple of designs in the last year, including one great one whose biggest problem was that it was based around the whole images next to Adsense thing that was squashed by the Adsense team at the end of last year.

Then it went to a really skinny design with almost no click options on the page other than the Adsense ads which wasn’t very aesthetically pleasing and nor did it include many of the multimedia elements I was keen to introduce.

Then came a 3 month blog silence as I concentrated on getting a real-world company off the ground.

Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought as I waded through invoices and tax forms, to one-day redesign The Big Chorizo and make it look more like one of those modern news sites and emphasise videos and photos and comments.

…then I opened my feedreader and saw Brian’s Modernpaper theme on performancing and decided to kick start The Big Chorizo out of its apathy.

What I wanted to emphasize

I had been happy from time to time with one or another of the following things but had never managed to come up with the answer to all of them at the same time:

  • Information Architecture: categories or not, categories displayed or not, what about reference articles/pages. Standard WordPress navigation is not particularly optimal from a search engine or user point of view;
  • Adsense & Income: the no images next to the ads sentence killed the best design I’d come up with so far on this front;
  • User Comments & Participation: conversations with readers are one of the things I most enjoy about blogging;
  • Multimedia: there are hundreds of people all around the world who read The Big Chorizo and it’s so easy to do photos and videos these days so that readers can experience and/or remember Spain that bit more;
  • Subscriptions: to the RSS feed.

The Future

4 months or so after finishing the main parts of The Big Chorizo redesign and after tweaking a couple more things, I’m happy with the results. The way I know I’m satisfied is that I no longer have urges to change its design again to try something else.

My blogging challenge for the future is not one of style or design but one of regularity of posting: I’m currently the Managing Director of a brand new (6 months) small business that I’ve discovered takes a lot of effort. It’s a lot of fun and very rewarding but it has meant that The Big Chorizo has had to take a back seat twice this year for more than a month each time. Going from being self-employed to having a new limited company and employees to take care of is a responsibility I will never take lightly.

As from this month though, I slowly start to manage the company more than work in it and that will give me more time to blog at The Big Chorizo, on our company’s blog, which will be all about languages and communications and another more general catch-all blog I’ve started to get other things off my mind.

I would also like to start doing interviews, reference articles and maybe some podcasts about Spain.

The Business of Blogging: What do you do with your earnings?

Over at College Startup I wrote an article this morning entitled Five Effective Ways To Re-Invest Your Profits. The basic point of that post is that the best way to become rich off the Internet is to slowly exchange roles with your money: put your money to do the work that you used to do.

Writing that article got me wondering what the average blogger does with his or her earnings. Do you keep 100% and use it for spending money? Do you reinvest 30% and keep 70% as salary? Or vice versa?

So let’s use the comment section to share our personal strategies for handling the money we get as (pro)bloggers. I think it will be helpful to all of us to get a picture of how other bloggers use their earnings and maybe “borrow” a few tips;-)

The Only Way to Beat Bloggers’ Block

For some people, blogging is as easy (and fast) as talking. These people are rare – good conversationalists AND good bloggers (or maybe they just appear that way?).

For the rest of us though, blogging is NOT as simple as saying our ideas out loud, simply because our ideas are NOT clear enough.

Blogging, especially good blogging, can be excruciatingly painful when you just cannot transform the thoughts in your head into a post in your blog editor.

There are many reasons why this could happen – stress, whether from being over-worked or just poor health and distractions can jumble up our thoughts and leave us grasping for the thread that can unravel the mixed up thoughts and turn them into a post so we can get it over with and move on to something else.

It doesn’t work that way always, and we get even more stressed out.

The way to beat it is a ‘Duh’ method – one that you’d say is so obvious that I shouldn’t even put it in words (but if it were that obvious, why are we still struggling over what to write?).

The only way to beat Bloggers’ Block is to:

Just Start Blogging.

Don’t fret about the 40 other post ideas you have written down that you want to put up (are you nuts?), or the affiliate code that you have to add to your older posts (is it worth your time?), or that OTHER blog that you haven’t been writing on for the last two weeks and you’ve fallen way behind on your work quota… etc etc.

As a society, we think way too much. There’s a time and place for everything – but when you’re working, you should be working, not thinking about it. At the end of the day, you might take out 3-5 minutes to review and perhaps another 5 minutes to plan for the next day, but apart from that, does it really help you if you go over the same pros and cons 300,506 times?

So the next time you’re stuck and don’t know what to say, open up a notepad file or something and start writing. Take action – put yourself under a deadline and force yourself to get things done before that deadline comes.

We all need to kick ourselves in the backside now and then – it’s good practice, I assure you.

PR10 Sites – They Do Exist

All indications are that the Google PageRank rollout is going on right now. Evidence is that a few sites formerly without a PR ranking now have one. But wait until Monday before you start worrying, as some PR indicators will fluctuate.

Now this isn’t something most of us will ever experience for our sites, but Jack Humphrey posted an article last weekend about a list of PR10 sites at Search Engine Genie. It’s a very short list, but proof that they do exist – in case you doubted anyone site other than Google.com has a PR10.

However, this list, as far as I can tell, is from Jan 25, 2007, and some of the sites listed – including apple.com – are showing as PR9, according to my SearchStatus for Firefox extension. Apparently Google lost a lot of PR10 pages as well, so we’re not the only people who suffer the decline. Except Google never has to worry about how much money their pages will earn from running someone else’s ads.

If you’re interested in a bit of PR10 history, check out the links at the bottom of the list, which show PR10 sites as far back as early 2004.

Generally speaking, don’t get too obsessed about the PR of your sites except for ad networks that use it to measure what you’ll get paid for ads. I’m a firm believer in organic growth of backlinks, but I use the term “organic” very broadly.

Performancing more important website than Drudge Report, Google confirms

The DrudgeReport has been assigned a PageRank of 6 in the latest PR toolbar rollout. Performancing has a PageRank of 7. According to an official at Google (we’ll call him Tim “the toolbar” Thomas for the sake of confidentiality), “PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of [a website].”

According to Google, Performancing.com is more important than DrudgeReport.com.

Congratulations Performancing staff. Job well done;-) The most powerful company in the world has spoken, and you’ve come out on top!

pMetrics Debuts With PageRank 6, Advertising Rates Go Up ;-)

pMetrics looks like it has been assigned a strong PR 6 in the August 2007 toolbar rollout. That means that the early-bird advertising rates have now expired.

But don’t fret. You can still get great deals on both text links and graphic ads on a subdomain that has over 885,060 backlinks. Leverage our 4,000+ pMetrics users and massive backlink strength to jumpstart your business quickly and efficiently.

Pro and Blogger pMetrics members can pick up a link for $45/month. Non-paying pMetrics users get a link for $59/month. Everyone else can get a link for $79/month.

Just get in touch with me at [email protected] to get your ad campaign started today.

The 5 Step Guide To Being An Effective Mobile Webmaster

Whether you’re flying half way around the world to close a new big development contract or just driving a few hours to your local tropical resort, most of us in the blogging / webmastering / SEO world are increasingly mobile. As my frequent flyer miles have climbed over the past couple of years I’ve found that there are a few steps you can take to minimize the inconveniences of traveling and the costs it imposes on your business. Rather than write about the latest and greatest technologies and gadgets, the following tips are all things that I actually do and find beneficial on a daily basis, so I can feel confident in saying that they’d help you remain both connected and mobile as well.

1. Buy A Crackberry.

Yeah, I know its annoying to watch the a-hole in the car next to you trying to read his emails while driving, but a Blackberry (or Treo) really will revolutionize the way you’re able to do business. Rather than having to drop everything and open up the laptop to see if that important email has come in, you can just quickly check it on the blackberry. Its especially helpful if part of your team is on the other side of the world, because it gives you the freedom to go out and enjoy your evenings without worrying about holding your team up as they wait for your response.

2. Stick With One Airline

I’m usually skeptical of brand loyalty, after all Shell and Exxon both provide the same product so why pick one over the other? But in the case of airlines, if you repeatedly fly with the same airline your leverage increases dramatically. By no means to I fly every week, but just because I always fly the same airline, I never have to wait in security lines, get my baggage before other customers, and when something goes wrong I get shifted over to another flight while others get delayed. Regular customers often don’t realize that it only takes a few flights a year before these benefits start accruing, so when you can, pick an airline and stick with it.

3. Shift To Online Apps

Let’s face it, webware is still years away from being a full replacement to your laptop. But there are a lot of things that webware can do just as well as traditional software, while providing you the mobility to access the information from wherever. Try to move as much of your day to day operations to online webware, and you will be surprised how often you need to access something quickly and don’t have access to your laptop.

4. Get A Garmin

Webmasters can navigate the internet superhighway with ease, but when it comes to a regular highway we’re often lost. I used to think that Garmin’s were useless and unnecessary gadgets. Now that I have one, I can’t believe the amount of time it has saved me when running errands for our business or making appointments.

5. Get eFax

The fax is perhaps the worst technology ever invented. They never work right and are slow as hell. Unfortunately, not everyone has jumped on the scanning trend, so if you want to do business today you need a fax number. The best way to be able to send and receive faxes for your customers but retain your mobility is with a company like eFax. There are a number of these companies, eFax is just the one I’ve used before. But its remarkable how much better it is to be able to send and receive faxes through email rather than being tethered to your phone line.

Blogging Trailblazers And Copyists

Deborah wrote a thought-provoking piece a couple of weeks ago about whether traffic (visitors/readers) or money should come first when blogging. She also talked a little bit about a radio interview she’d participated in where they drilled for information about making money online.

Deborah’s post struck a chord with me on two levels:

  1. about the focus on money by the media, and
  2. the resultant copycat bloggers who think it’s a fast way to get rich

In this post, I’m going to talk about my personal experiences of both these points.

Passion Versus Profit?

Our story follows the blogging dream: we started a blog about something we loved, and after a while, visitors flocked to the site to comment and read our latest posts. The industry became familiar with our blog and started to cooperate with us, improving the information we were able to provide to our readers. We got interviews, exclusives, etc.

To promote the blog, we circulated some press releases to the media and secured a number of radio and newspaper slots on local and national programmes.

The single biggest question from all these journalists wasn’t “how’d you manage your stellar success and build such an amazing website?” It was “You couldn’t be running this website for free – how do you make money?”

Now, I can tell you in five minutes how we make money online. AdSense, TLA, FeedBurner, IntelliTXT, etc. But ask a sweeping question like that and you’ll miss the vagaries of fluctuating CPC, the frightening dips in revenue during the summer months. These wild generalizations about blogging miss out on some pretty important stuff in their rush for AdSense cheques.

Some of these journalists would do well to study the success rates of most bloggers and how much an average blogger can expect to make, rather than hyping it up as easy cash.

Hard Work And Enthusiasm Comes First

Although we had adverts on our site at the beginning, the earnings were poor. That’s because the traffic was poor. That’s because we had very little content and no backlinks other than the odd directory submission. The WordPress theme needed to be optimized and myriad other little things had to be done to improve the site.

The bottom line? We worked our asses off. My wife wrote the content and I managed backlinks, SEO and a bit of offline promotion. I tracked other sites writing about our topic on Technorati and made comments where I could. We experimented with MySpace and promoting ourselves through new social networks to different levels of success.

Other bloggers will recognize the hard times too. There were times for us when we almost threw in the towel. Traffic growth was incredibly slow, and often we felt we were wasting our time. But our fanbase was growing and we blogged on.

Copycats And The Get-Rich-Quick Bloggers

These are the folks who think a five-minute WordPress install is their key to massive riches. They see a condensed blog post about how someone made money online and assume that it’s easy.

The most personal example for me was after we’d done a newspaper interview. A friend of ours suddenly joined our forum and started posting. While we were initially pleased, we discovered he’d done it to drop links to a blog he’d created. Worse still, the blog was on a very similar topic to ours and absolutely plastered in AdSense!

Anyway, I deleted his spammy posts and he disappeared from the forum for a few months. We kept an eye on his blog, but it seemed to die a death. A few months later, he came back with another blog, on a different subject. Again, his posting rate was poor and the site was covered in AdSense. I’m sure he’s sitting in front of his computer, checking AdSense incessantly, wondering where his millions are!

Finally…

And that’s my point people. It is no accident when a website (blog or otherwise) succeeds. Generally the people behind those websites carry a passion and determination that shows in their work. They tweak their blog themes, promote their sites, write great articles and people are attracted to those sites. They tell their friends about those sites. They link to those sites from their blogs.

This post was written by Gerard McGarry. Gerard is a music blogger for Unreality Music and designs websites at Scribble Designs.