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.

But does your content really speak to your audience?

Let’s forget about SEO for a minute. Your visitors don’t really care how well you’ve optimized your content for search engine spiders. What they care about is getting what they came for – useful content they can use to improve some aspect of their lives.

But your site content also has to be engaging. That means that you have to speak on your audience’s level. You should take into account certain factors, including:

• Age
• Gender
• Geographic region
• Education level
• Financial level
• Life experience
• Interests

If your content misses the mark on any of these factors, your website or blog is not going to perform as well as it could.

To some degree, it is possible to reverse engineer your sales process to determine who your target audience is. Let’s say you’re running a site that offers blogging templates through an affiliate program. Who is most likely to want a blogging template?

• Age: This product could appeal to anyone from about 20 to 55, but the target audience for this skews a bit young, probably in the 25 to 35 range.
• Gender: Both, although males are more likely to want a good blogging template for the purpose of making money online.
• Geographic region: Since bloggers come from all over the world, it would be a good idea not to post content specific to a particular geographic region.
• Education level: Most bloggers who would bother buying a template are college educated.
• Financial level: Moderate income, say $30,000 – $60,000. Above that, quite a few people would rather pay a programmer to create a custom blog design.
• Life experience: The target audience is web savvy, and has at least a vague idea of how to use blogging to communicate about their interests. 
• Interests: Online business weighs in heavily here. Not too many personal bloggers (the online diary type) are going to bother purchasing a premium template. Quite a few members of your target audience will either be interested in making money from blogging, or using their blogs to promote another website.

Great. So if you’re promoting a blogging template, your content should be written to target young, educated people who are web savvy and interested in using a blog for business or financial gain.

If you hire a copywriter to produce content for your site, it’s critical to make sure that he or she knows who your target audience is. If you haven’t taken the time to figure this out, or don’t communicate this to your copywriter, you’re effectively wasting your money.

We’ve been writing online content for nearly a decade, and we’re looking forward to sharing our knowledge and experience with you. Of course, we’d also love to provide content for your online venture – we provide masterful articles, blog posts, sales pages, ebooks, and more for dozens of U.S. and international clients every month.

Whether you’re just starting out with internet marketing, or you’re a seasoned professional who needs a dedicated writing team to provide your marketing content, we look forward to making your online venture a success!

Lee and Carla Rowley

Java Joint Media

Twitter: @JJMbuzz

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