In years past, creating a professional blog design required internet marketers to hire a professional. This was often a costly and laborious endeavor – most good blog designers charge $1000 or more for a unique design. Then, there’s the problem of going through several “drafts” to obtain the look and feel you need to attract readers and keep them coming back.

Today, the process is much easier (and less expensive). There are several premium Wordpress themes you can use to create your blog’s look and feel. These themes are fully customizable, so it takes just a few minutes to build a blog that is different from the thousands of other sites out there.

For the beginning blogger, FlexxThemeis a good choice. The setup is pretty straightforward. Plus, Flexxtheme offers 2056 unique configurations, so you can create a unique design on the fly, even if you have no programming knowledge. It’s easy to add featured posts, affiliate banners, and direct advertising to monetize your site – the theme’s widget-based platform does most of the work for you.   

If you’re primarily interested in affiliate marketing, Affiliate Themeis a good investment. This theme is designed with affiliate marketers in mind, so you can showcase affiliate products without the headaches of coding. These sites aren’t quite as extensive as traditional content blogs, but they’re great for jumpstarting your affiliate marketing efforts.

If you’re willing to put a little more time into your site, Thesis offers the greatest level of customization. You can build a static website with a blog, or put your blog posts front and center. Because Thesis offers so many options, it comes with a bit steeper learning curve… but if you want a truly unique site that fits your vision, this theme will give you all the tools you need.

Each of these themes cost less than $100. In my years of experience, I’ve found that they are more than adequate for creating professional, unique sites that will impress first-time visitors and subscribers alike. And they’ll save you from countless late nights that you would otherwise spend hunkering over a keyboard, trying to figure out how to get your design “just right.”

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

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For many internet marketers, there comes a point when they must consider outsourcing some of their tasks. Usually, this involves hiring freelancers to handle website creation and design, content, and administrative functions.

Hiring a freelancer involves an element of uncertainty and anxiety – you’ve never met the freelancer before, and he or she knows very little about your business. So it can be difficult to trust a freelancer with your marketing functions. What if it doesn’t work out? What if the freelancer performs below your expectations?

Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to ensure that your outsourcing dollars are well spent. It’s easy to assume that your freelancer should automatically know how to produce exactly what you want – after all, they are professionals. But you wouldn’t just tell a contractor, “Build a deck for my house”, without taking steps to make sure that the end result is consistent with your vision. The same applies to freelancing work.

Freelancers deal with myriad clients, each with their own visions and expectations. While they are professionals, they are also businesspeople, and require the same type of co-creation as a home improvement contractor, landscaper, or any other service professional. 

Here are some tips for getting the most out out of your outsourcing:

• Write clear, detailed explanations. Tell your freelancer how you envision the end product, how it will be used as part of your business building efforts, and how you arrived at your vision. If you can provide examples – flagship content that appears on competing sites, examples of blog or site designs, etc., it will give your freelancer a clearer picture of what you want. The more information you provide, the fewer revisons you will need to ask for.
• Decide what you want before you start contacting freelancers. For a freelancer, few things are more frustrating than taking on a client that only has a vague sense of what he or he wants. If you know you want “great content” to build your online business, but you’re not sure about the structure, style, tone, or keywords you want to see, log out of your email and put pen to paper.  The half-hour you spend refining your objectives will save you countless hours of frustration down the road.
• Don’t just hire the cheapest outsourcing help you can find. Like any other service niche, freelancing has its share of shining stars and scoundrels. It’s worth paying more for proven talent – in the end, it can increase your profits a thousandfold.
• Respect your freelancer’s other commitments. Successful freelancers juggle numerous projects at once… and every one of your freelancer’s other clients want their projects to be completed right away too. Pressing your freelancer to put your project first will result in lackluster performance. Freelancers worth their salt aren’t waiting around for projects – they’re busy carrying a full time workload (or more), so if you want to get the most out of your investment, it’s a good idea to let your freelancer provide a realistic timeframe for the completion of your project.
• Listen to your freelancer’s feedback. Your freelancer has probably done similar past projects, and may well be able to offer valuable insights that will help your business. A good freelancer has to make a living, or course, but he or she is also keenly interested in your success. If your freelancer offers suggestions or other feedback, you’re getting far more value than you’re paying for.
• Stick to your requirements.If a freelancer disregards directions, misses deadlines, or delivers shoddy work, don’t be afraid to look elsewhere. It’s a headache to “train” a new freelancer, but sometimes it is necessary to keep your project rolling along on schedule.

These tips will help ensure that your outsourcing endeavors go smoothly. They will also help you find and retain top freelancing talent that you can use again and again to help you build your business.

Potential advertisers will look at, in part, the number of daily page views your blog receives. This will determine whether they want to advertise on your blog, and how much they are willing to pay. More page views makes your blog more valuable to advertisers. And the best way to increase page views is to keep visitors engaged, compelling them to read more of your posts and pages.

Here are 5 WordPress plugins that will help you increase your daily page views:

1) Similar Posts

The Similar Posts plugin displays a customized list of related posts at the end of each entry. The plugin automatically chooses posts with similar content; however, you can configure the plugin to factor in tags and titles as well. Before you can use this plugin, you’ll need to install the Post Plugin Library (this plugin doesn’t do anything on its own, but it facilitates the use of several other plugins).

Why it helps: The Similar Posts plugin offers recommendations based on the post a visitor has just read. Readers don’t need to search for related information – this plugin tells them where to go next.

2) Popular Posts

Like the Similar Posts plugin, Popular Posts is designed to help visitors navigate your blog. This plugin calculates which posts have received the most page views, and displays a list of the most frequently visited posts. This plugin also requires the Post Plugin Library plugin.

Why it helps: Visitors want to know why other people like your blog. The Popular Post plugin shows the posts that others find the most interesting… these are the posts that define your blog. This strategy is based on the concept that readers like to be led, rather than spending hours searching for the most valuable content on their own.

3) Most Commented

Like the Popular Posts plugin, the Most Commented plugin automatically uses site statistics to create a module for your sidebar. This module shows the posts that have received the most comments.

Why it helps: Again, new visitors to your blog want to go straight to the information other readers have found the most valuable. This plugin gives visitors a way to quickly access the posts which have generated the most discussion. Because the posts shown in the Most Commented module have raised the interest of your current readers and subscribers, new visitors will want to read them, too. 

4) What Would Seth Godin Do?

This plugin uses cookies to differentiate first-time visitors from repeat visitors. It allows you to create separate welcome messages for new and repeat visitors – these messages can be shown before or after the first post on the front page of your blog.

Why it helps: The new visitor welcome message can be used to point readers to the most important posts on your blog, or to encourage them to subscribe to your RSS feed and/or email newsletter. Getting visitors to subscribe right away increases the chance that they’ll be back to read more of your posts.

Not everyone uses the “return visitor” message feature, but even a simple “Welcome back! Glad to see you again” sort of message can help returning visitors feel special – like they’re part of an “insider’s circle”.

5) Post Teaser

The Post Teaser plugin lets you show only a paragraph or two of each post on the front page, and provides links to the full posts. The teasers can be any length you choose - after a bit of experimenting, I found that 100 word teasers work best for me.

Why it works: This plugin doesn’t need a great deal of explanation - the visitor has to click on the “Read Full Post” link below the teaser to read the full post, so you get at least an extra page view per visitor (assuming the visitor lands on your home page first).

I certainly don’t mean to put off those of you who are using another blogging platform, but since many of my readers have been asking questions about WordPress over on one of my other blogs, Blogger’s Workshop, I thought it was time to provide some nuts-and-bolts info about blogging on this platform.

Lee

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

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