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Why invest in a premium theme for your blog?

There are a whole host of very good free themes for most blogging platforms, which can often be used “as is” or customized just a little to create something a bit different, but is it time you invested some money in a premium theme to really push your site forward?

It’s true that content is very important, but the way that it’s presented is not to be ignored, particularly when you consider that first impressions count a lot, people will initially judge your site on what it looks like, and it takes just a second or two to click on the “back” button.

If you have the time, knowledge and dedication to work out a theme from scratch, or rip out the guts and replace swathes of code on a free theme, then good for you. I know there’s satisfaction in creating your own design that’s completely yours. I also know, now, that I’d rather spend that time creating content than designing from scratch.

How to get a premium theme

There are two routes to getting a premium theme.

The first is to find a designer that sells premium themes. Generally you’ll want to look for designs that are highly and easily customizable, have a degree of support (whether that be direct with the designer or via a forum), offer upgrades/updates to fix bugs or add new features, and offer more than “run of the mill” features you could easily find in a free theme.

The second is to hire a designer to create a unique blog template to your exact specifications. You’ll want to take a look at their portfolio to ensure that they’re creating bespoke sites, and maybe talk to some of their previous clients to see how the process went.

The first option is cheaper and quicker but you still may not own a completely unique theme.

The second option is more expensive and takes longer to implement, but you’ll hopefully get a design that’s truly your own.

Advantages

Look and Feel

Whether you’ve had your blog template designed for you, or you’ve customized a premium theme, the way it looks and operates will be unique and tailored to your blog.

Ease of use

If you’ve picked a good theme or designer, it should be really easy to add new elements without breaking the template or having to get bogged down in the code. This means you have more time for creating content and building community than wrestling with how things work.

Pride

I found that after I’d invested some money in a premium theme, I took more pride in my blog. Though I didn’t spend much on the theme, it was enough to change my mindset and take my site more seriously. Not only did the theme present content much more attractively but it looked more professional and encouraged me to work harder at building it.

This might not work for everyone, but I find that if I’ve invested money (beyond basic hosting and domain name costs that everyone incurs) I’m more likely to stick with a project.

Long term view

Linked to the pride factor, I’ve taken a much longer term view of my blog design, and am more likely to let it evolve over time rather than completely redesign it.

When I was running free themes, I found myself tweaking or even replacing the design more often. After I invested in a premium theme, I left the foundations alone and added things that created more worth.

That’s not to say that I’ll never revamp the design in the future, but I’m far less likely to do so on a whim.

Conclusions

It’s possible to run a successful blog off the back of a free theme, but moving to a premium theme definitely has its advantages.

If you’ve not considered it before, why not take a look at some of the options available. You don’t have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get something a bit different that could set your blog apart from the crowd.

What do you think? Do you use premium themes and how has it changed your view of your blog? Or do you think free themes are fine?

Blogging Tricks Will Only Bring You Part of the Way

Recently, I was working with someone that considers themselves an expert in social media marketing, SEO, and other popular terms these days for promoting a site and getting it some traffic. The person ran their ideas past me, and there were two things I quickly noticed.

The first was that they had probably read some blogs that told them to do various things to increase their SEO, things like bolding keywords, stuffing meta tags with keywords, and changing out H2 tags for H1 tags all in the hopes of beating their competitors.

The second was that they were focused on various tricks relating to creating landing pages, buying links, and other marketing methods.

All of the information this person passed by me was older information, most of which was nearly useless today as well as short sighted, with possible results that would end in disaster.

Imagine if you will, owning a blog for years, slowly building it up, trying to get to the next level in traffic, revenue and whatnot, hiring an “SEO expert” and having that person create, via tricks, some serious traffic.

You pay the person, thinking they’ve done a great job, and three months down the road, your site starts dropping in rankings, traffic dries up, and various other things happen that puts your site lower than it was before the “SEO expert” came along.

This is a far too common occurrence in blogging. Even the bloggers managing their sites make mistakes in SEO, marketing and social media in hopes of creating a hugely successful, viral, high positioned page that they can leverage in terms of making huge amounts of money or popularity that they can leverage in other ways.

People have to stop and realize that blogging tricks will only get you part of the way to your goals, and if done incorrectly they can actually cause huge setbacks.

Too much optimization, too overt in your self-promotion, and you’ll end up wishing you could undo your hard work.

The best advice I can give someone looking to do better with their blog would be to research as much as you can before you act in any way to effect your blog in any important way.

Don’t just leap into action after reading one person’s experience, and always check the age of the information because all the search engines are working hard at providing the best natural, gaming free search results.

The Two Core Principles to Building Quality Links

I like to keep things simple when it comes to building quality links. If you make link building too complicated, you can often over analyze and overthink things that you don’t get much done.

Most of my quality links have come from applying these two simple principles.

Connecting

I like what Aaron Wall at SEO Book said about link building. He said you should think of links in terms of social connections. The better connected you are to influential webmasters, the more quality links you’ll build.

Therefore, you should be connecting regularly with the webmasters of the quality sites in your niche.

Too many bloggers have the mindset of “build it and they will come”. In most cases though, it doesn’t matter how awesome your blog, you need to let others know about it because there are so many websites on the net. How will anyone find out about your blog unless you tell others about it? But if you get the attention of other webmasters, they will often promote your blog if you have content that adds a lot of value to the industry.

Moreover, many webmasters with quality sites are busy and don’t have time to keep up with all content in the niche. Therefore, you’ll need to contact them directly to get their attention.

Especially in the beginning of your blog, you’ll need to make yourself known by connecting with other bloggers. Here are some ideas to consider:

Introduce yourself to other bloggers and tell them about your blog. If you have good content, many of them will add you to their RSS reader and they may link to you in the future.
Send them a guest post.
Create something really good. Content that is unique and comprehensive is the best. Then, contact bloggers and ask them to link to it if they like it. Don’t be shy. Most bloggers don’t mind a little bit of self promotion as long as you have quality content and don’t overdo the promotion.

Content

It’s not enough to have the right connections, you also need to provide something to attract the link. This is usually content.

There are many ways to do this – from in-depth resources on your sites to interesting guest posts on other blogs – but the main thing to keep in mind is to keep the quality very high.

Consider guest posts. Many of my guest posts used to get ignored until I started putting more into each guest post. My motto now is that every guest post should be better than the posts on my blog. Leo Babauta of Zen Habits has excellent content on his blog of over 100,000 RSS subscribers, but I think his guest posts are actually higher quality.

Quality sites have quality content so you will need the same kind of content for them to link to you or for them to publish your guest post.

By connecting with other webmasters and producing high quality content, you should be able to build quality links. Now while these two principles are simple to understand, they do take hard work to apply in real life. But just stay consistent and focused with your link building efforts. In time, you’ll enjoy top rankings and huge increases in traffic.

If you don’t have time to apply either of these principles, consider our link building service.

Blogging and the Underground Economy

Recently, I’ve written a couple of articles relating to blogging and finance. Here on Performancing, I thought about how bloggers prove their income or revenue streams when banks and other entities require these. On the Blog Herald, I tried to compute for the monthly cost of my blogging activities, which supposedly accounts for electricity expenses, software, hardware, and other related costs.

I write about these as a blogger and also as an economist. With the popularity of blogging, writing, blog design, and other online-based freelance work and businesses, I sometimes wonder what percentage of the online workforce and industry are part of the informal sector. In other words, I wonder how many online professionals actually pay taxes. Being part of the informal sector essentially means you’re working underground, and under the taxman’s radar.

I tried to bring up the question of blogging and taxation in an earlier post here on Performancing, and it seems most take care of their tax payments in some way or another. Most of us probably pay taxes as professionals, self-employed individuals or small business proprietors. In some places, the informal sector is actually seen as a big part of the economy’s workforce, which actually bolsters economic activity in the light of the global financial crunch (although these studies focus more on micro-businesses and less on the technology worker aspect of the underground economy). Perhaps with better figures about how much bloggers, designers, and freelance writers are earning, we can figure out how much we are contributing to the economy, and how much we are supporting our respective governments in terms of internal revenue collection.

In the end, I would agree with the adage that only two things are sure in life: death and taxes. Whether you pay direct taxes or not, you still pay duties in the form of indirect taxes, such as sales taxes, value added taxes, and the like. So if you earn from your online activities, but don’t declare these as part of your income, you still pay part of your online expenditures as taxes.

Do you pay direct taxes as an online professional? I’m interested to know. If so, what percentage of your blogging (or other) income do you pay? And how do you declare your income source and your status as a taxpayer?

And if you don’t pay your taxes directly, what would convince you to do so? Better benefits and protection from your government? Recognition as a professional in your field?

Don’t worry, if you’d rather not disclose your identity, you can always comment anonymously.

5 Tips to Help Bloggers Maximize HARO

Peter Shankman founded the HARO mailer network many months ago. Since then, the Help a Reporter Out network has grown into perhaps the most powerful community of networkers, journalists and product marketers on the Internet. Not only is the network free to use, it is also very effective. Here are some tips to maximize the use of HARO.

Don’t confuse the “source” and “media” request pages

This is the most fundamental rule, and is something that Shankman highlights at least twice on the main HARO page, which is reserved for companies who are the source of information. If you’re a journalist or blogger looking for leads, use the other page.

Be brief and get to the point

When looking for sources, note that the HARO mailer comes in the form of a digest. If you’re smart you’ll probably use the search function to go through a ton of requests. If you had all the time in the world to look through a dozen of these queries then fine, but put yourself in the position of the person looking through your query: avoid run on sentences and long introductions (i.e. avoid lines that start with “may I request the permission of your good office…”) and simply, get to the point. If you need a sponsor for a prize, give the benefits of the sponsorship. If you need leads, ask for it.

Be concise in credentials and duration of requests

By credentials, I mean filling up the form with an email that looks authentic. Use your business email if possible. When asking for leads it is beyond a doubt reasonable to give ample time for a response. Don’t ask for a lead with a deadline the very next day. Not only will it cause attrition on your part, but it will also most probably not be sent due to the way the mailing list is compiled. Remember, mailings are not sent immediately, but are collated first, then sent. It also goes without saying that you should not spam the HARO network.

Note the Gift Bag page

There’s a special page within HARO that caters specifically for “goodie bag” sponsorships. This is by all means not a paid list and should be used with a lot of discretion and respect. If you make products and want them to appear in loot bags, this list is for you.

Build relationships

More often than not, PR contacts will often save your email addresses in queries after a successful engagement. Don’t be a stranger an do keep in touch. Provide updates to build your very own network of contacts to sponsor prizes and receive wires.

The Pros and Cons of Auto Tweeting Blog Posts

Back when I first started using Twitter in 2007, I had become fond of tweeting updates whenever I had a new post on my personal blog. I also tweeted everytime I made a post on several network blogs I edited and contributed to. After a while, it became tedious, and I decided to use one of those WordPress plugins that automatically updates your Twitter status when you had a new blog post.

The concept is pretty simple–the updates could actually go both ways. The plugin will automatically tweet the blog post title as soon as you hit the publish button. You also have the option of consolidating your tweets for a day, and publishing these as a blog post (which I personally find tacky).

For a while, I thought having these updates on auto-pilot seemed good. But when I realized I, myself, ignored automatic update notifications from my Twitter friends most of the time. Unless you run a Twitter account solely to provide updates to your readers about new posts, you most likely run your Twitter account to communicate and connect. And I think it’s best to use this to really talk engage with your readers, rather than blindly update them when you have posts elsewhere.

I guess it’s similar to how I’m not so cool with the idea of cross-posting between Twitter and other microblogging services, such as Plurk. It gives the perception that you’re not actively engaging with your Twitter friends and contacts. It makes it seem they’re not important enough to spend a minute copying and pasting (and shortening) URLs, and typing a few words to introduce your text. It makes them wonder whether you’re actually logged into your Twitter account to read replies and messages, if anyone wants to respond.

Manually posting Twitter updates when you have a new blog post is better, in that you can personalize the message that comes with the link. Sometimes, a blog post’s title is not self-explanatory enough, unless you’re an expert at writing headlines. You can get readers more interested in your blog post if you include a catchy tagline or blurb using your own words, or as an excerpt from the blog post.

Furthermore, when you write about the new post in your own words, it makes it more conversational, and it helps you connect better. For instance, rather than just tweet:

The Pros and Cons of Auto Tweeting Blog Posts – http://shortenedurlhere

I can perhaps say:

What do you think of automatic tweeting blog post updates? – http://shortenedurlhere

By asking a question, my friends and followers can pitch in. Or perhaps I can write something more retweet-worthy, so both my tweet and blog post get better traction.

People easily get tired of automatic tweets. But if you make your Twitter followers feel important by personalizing your tweet, then that helps in winning them over. Instead of getting a lot of zombies to read your posts, you get real people liking and loving what you write, reacting to these, and possibly helping spread the word.

When you’re in a network environment, with dozens and dozens of blogs and contributors, it can get unwieldy. In these cases, it might be easier to do automatic updates, but only if you intend the Twitter account as an update mechanism to alert readers of new updates to the network or to that particular blog. Otherwise, you can perhaps ask each contributor to be active in linking to their posts on their own Twitter accounts.

Have you tried auto-tweeting plugins? What has your experience been, so far?

Blog Comments: Do they still bear the same weight?

I don’t know about your experience, but the real-time updates of Facebook and the massive Twitter community seem to have lessened the value of blog comments. Wait, scratch that. I’d be more inclined to say that Twitter and Facebook have made it easier for marketers to call for comments.

I say this under the premise that numerous PR agencies have “decided” that comments have been the most obvious sign of a strong following. Can’t blame them — as many blogs do not publish their feed count nor share stats publicly. Above the surface, it’s really just about the comments. But you’ve also noticed that ever since the social media echosphere was created, we’re seeing more engagement on these networks more than the blogs.

As a blogger, do you give a hierarchy to value depending on where you receive comments?

Of course, another way to look at it is that your social network demographic is different from your blog readership.

Do comments still bear the same weight as they did before? Or have they been saturated by the social echo chamber.

Or, is this writer approaching the question the wrong way?

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