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Anyways, so I needed to find a solution for making custom Wordpress themes that suit my needs and look awesome to visitors of my sites.  Hand coding Wordpress themes is a pain in the butt and I quickly wrote that off as an inefficient use of my time.  After discounting hand coding themes myself, I considered looking at premium themes offered by sites like WooThemes as an option to deliver what I needed.  I quickly decided that these premium themes weren’t for me and they were way too expensive for what I required.  After that I came upon Thesis.  I’ve heard Thesis tossed around for months by people on forums that I frequent  so I was fairly familiar with the theme and have considered buying it in the past (but didn’t feel like it was a necessary investment at the time).  However now, especially since I’ve been deploying large sites built to draw a social audience and gain authority, I felt it was a necessary investment.  Plus, I knew I could make some money by building custom themes for other Wordpress site owners.

Because I own many sites and plan on developing for other people, I ended up buying the developer license of the theme for $164.  To be honest, I don’t think there are very many who would benefit from the single site license.

Using Thesis will be very easy to people who have some experience programming or who have made plugins for Wordpress in the past.  Thesis uses a hook and action system where you designate where you want custom code or applications to display.  Hooks are basically areas of the site template that can be modified.  This is pretty much every place you’d ever want to put custom code.  An action is simply a PHP function that you use to display HTML or do whatever else you need.  Using this system is fairly easy and it only required about 30 minutes to get familiar with it and efficiently do what I wanted to do.

Customizing the  CSS of your Wordpress is also very easy with Thesis.  If you want to change the background of the site, you simply need to add the rule to the custom.css file.  Their naming system for the <div> tags of their template is very simple and its easy to keep track of what you’re modifying.  If you’ve every tried to edit the CSS of free Wordpress template, you’ve probably found out how FRUSTRATINGLY DIFFICULT some people’s structure and naming system is.  I was able to make CSS changes in minutes with Thesis that would’ve been ten times more difficult if I was working with someone else’s theme.

One thing I found annoying with Thesis is modifying some of their existing hook/actions.  Adding actions is easy, removing existing ones can be a bit more frustrating.  The problem is they don’t have convenient documentation on the removal of existing hook/actions.  For example, to remove the attribution link at the bottom, I had to Google search it and find a supplemental resource that listed the exact function creating it so I can do a remove_action() to it.  I would REALLY LOVE to see the documentation list the default actions Thesis uses for each hook so that I can quickly kill the ones I want without having to search.

Another thing that I found a tad annoying was the “Big Ass Save Button”.  Apparently the developers found that pretty humorous but I found it a bit tasteless for its context.  Fortunately there is an option where you can change the save button text and I changed it something I that I found more entertaining.

My conclusion for Thesis is that is well worth it for the aspiring Wordpress blogger or developer (assuming you own more than one site or have a very large Wordpress site already that you want to customize).  But even then, if you only owned one site, I would recommend paying someone else to make your theme than spending the $80 for a single site license.  Thesis is a great investment, it’s fairly easy to use, and has a lot of third party support available as well as support on their forums.    I’m glad I paid the $164 and I would definitely would buy it again if I was doing the purchase over again.  I hope you found this Thesis review helpful.

Click the banner if you’re interested in learning more about Thesis.

There is a right method to make money online and there is a wrong method to make money online.   This is not to say that “wrong” won’t make you money, it’s just to say that “wrong” can be immoral or unethical.  We should not be making the internet worse with the work we do as internet marketers.  Instead, we should be working to make good information to find on the search engines.

For the people who are crying “the sky is falling” for making money with AdSense, they need to reevaluation everything rationally.  Google is a business that wants to make money just as much, or more, than you do.  But in order for them to make money, they need to produce good results for their clients IE the AdSense/Adwords advertisers.  If those ads are placed on websites with poor quality content, that can jeopardize those advertiser’s conversions.  When that happens, they either complain to Google or find an alternative to Adwords.   This result, of course, will greatly tick off Google’s accounting department and the dominoes will fall from there.

You need to focus on content that are useful to readers, useful to advertisers, and make money for ourselves.  If your content sacrifices either of those entities, you’re putting yourself at risk for the long-term potential of your site.  Ask yourself candidly if you’re doing everything the “right” way.  If you can’t give yourself a honest answer, you should change what you’re doing wrong immediately.

So what can you do to do things right?

First off, work on content that is worthwhile for the readers.  Don’t fluff around from subject to subject and instead put down some solid information.  When someone comes to your site, are they going to learn something new?  Is your article going to solve a problem?  Is your article going to help someone find what they’re looking for?  If the answer is no, you’re risking the future of the income of your sites.

Next, what about the advertisers?  Are you doing anything against Google’s terms of service?  Are you artificially increasing your CTR% through shady or tricksy tactics?   If you have to think about the answer to that question, you need to quickly fix those potential issues.

Finally, are you doing everything you need to to optimize your income?  Do you have the optimum, Google-friendly layout?  Have you tested the placement and the color scheme of your ads?  If your answer is no to any of these questions, you’re shooting yourself in the foot and leaving hundreds to thousands of dollars on the table every year.  Consider learning about optimum layouts and colors or consider paying a consultant to help you out.

Always remember that Google is your boss and you want to deliver work to your boss that is of good quality.  If you’re doing things the “wrong” way, think about who you’re hurting in the long run:  yourself.

People have a lot of preferences when it comes to domain registrars.  Some people prefer Go Daddy, others prefer Namecheap, and further, others prefer Netfirms.  I’m one of those who like to buy domains from Netfirms.  So far, I’ve registered about 30 domains through their company and I have been pleased overall with their service and speed.

First off, I’ll tell you why I don’t like Go Daddy.  Go Daddy at the end of the day is a rip-off.  It’s the greedy man of the domain registering world.   Go Daddy is insistent on up-selling you to other services and generally giving you grief about buying their web hosting packages, buying their privacy packages, or pushing more domains on you.  Overall, their entire selling process is a heart-attack.  I can’t tell you how much I don’t like having to click ‘no’ and ‘not interested’ on their various products and go through a ten minute process to buy one or two domains.  Second, Go Daddy can be a bit slow at times changing nameservers of your new domain.  Compared to other domain registration services I’ve used (like Netfirms) they’re like molasses.  When I register new domains I like to get started right away getting content on the site–I don’t like having to wait five hours for the domain to propagate.

Netfirms has by far given me everything I’ve wanted from a domain registrar.  They’re fast, cheap, and non-obtrusive.  Once I’ve done the research and decided on a domain, I can go to Netfirms and have the domain bought and paid for within two or three minutes.  There isn’t any upselling, just simple, straight-forward domain buying.  Once I have the domain purchased, changing nameservers is a cinch.  Unlike Go Daddy where you have to click-through deep into the site to change those details, you can do it all on one page with Netfirms (they use a nifty AJAX-ified interface).  I kid you not, changing nameservers is almost instant.  My web host (Bluehost) picks up the nameserver change almost instantly and I’m ready to go, on the web, within an hour.

If you haven’t tried out Netfirms I strongly suggest that you give them a try.  Their domain registration costs are among the lowest in the industry (especially when you couple them with a coupon).  I use ‘104DOMSPECIAL’ coupon to get $1.04 off the domains I buy.  If you want to try them out, click the banner on my site (yes I get paid if you buy through it) and try them out (use a Netfirms coupon).   I’m pretty darn sure you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

Draanor offers consultation services to people needing to boost their AdSense income.  Most people don’t realize that the wrong ad setup, color scheme, or positioning and drastically impact their performance.  If ads aren’t tweaked “just right”, potential revenue could be thrown away each and every day.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you increase AdSense Revenue.  Our rates are very competitive and we promise we can make a positive difference to your AdSense revenue or our services are free!

What exactly is keyword research?

Whether you own an existing site or starting a new one, keyword research is a key to every website’s online success.  Without proper planning and choice, you can have a website that is “dead in the water” for search engines.  Some keywords are simply too difficult to rank on the first page.  The competition is too stiff and have way too much authority to compete with in a reasonable amount of time.

How does keyword research work with you?

We build keyword lists from the ground up for our customers.  With the keyword list we make, we research the competition and find out FOR YOU how difficult it can be to rank on the Google.  We also can determine the value of keywords and let you know if a keyword is even worth fighting for.

How much do you cost to keyword research for me?

Keyword research for niche sites can be time consuming and arduous process.  Fortunately, we have the tools and methods available to make it cost less to you.  For our service, it costs $0.035 for every keyword researched.  If you want a list of 1000 keywords that have been researched, it would cost you $35.  Our lists are unfiltered and we cannot guarantee the number of low competition–easy to rank keywords–given to you.  It entirely depends on the niche or category chosen for the results you may receive.

We cost $0.05 per researched keyword.

What can I expect from you?

If you choose our service, you can expect to receive an Excel spreadsheet of the number of keywords you choose to buy.  As stated before, the number of low competition keywords can vary.  From our experience, ~1% of requested niche keywords are considered “low competition”.

Contact us for more information, sample spreadsheets of keywords, or to place an order.

There are two major reasons why you would want to start posting on InfoBarrel:  build residual income; or create links to existing sites.  InfoBarrel has the best of both worlds when it comes to Web 2.0 directories.  Done correctly, you can generate hundreds of dollars per month with just posting articles on InfoBarrel and backlinking them.  InfoBarrel can also give you a lot of referral traffic and added authority if you choose to use them for links.

Residual Income with InfoBarrel:

If you’re someone who is just starting out with making money on the internet, you may want to start with InfoBarrel before you start investing in websites.  Because InfoBarrel has a lot of domain authority with Google, many of the articles you post on their site will begin ranking and getting traffic immediately.  With backlinking, you can your posts ranked in the top 5 of Google search pretty easily.

InfoBarrel is one of the many sites that participate in what is called “revenue sharing”.  How it works is a portion of the visitors that see your articles will see advertisements that pay InfoBarrel when they’re clicked.  The other portion of visitors will see advertisements that pay you when they’re clicked.  The ad services that InfoBarrel currently employ are Google AdSense and Chitika Premium Ads.  The current revenue share is 75%.  This means that 75% of the time, your ads will be showing.  Go to InfoBarrel now and start earning residual income.

Backlinking with InfoBarrel

InfoBarrel is one of the best sites for obtaining links for your own sites.  With their domain authority and great policies concerning links, you can start building your site’s SERP rankings easily.  There are only a few simple rules that need to be adhered to when writing for InfoBarrel.

-Two self-serving links per article
-No self-serving links in the first paragraph
-No call-to-action links to affiliate products at the end of the article

Beyond those rules, everything is fair game.  If you’re looking for fast links that don’t require miles of red tape, you’ll love writing for InfoBarrel.  Go to InfoBarrel now and start building links to your websites.

If you need help with website development, PHP development, or graphic design, contact us to learn more and get pricing for our services.

Are you wondering why your AdSense earnings completely bites?  Is your click-through rate for your AdSense beyond abysmal?  If there was something I could claim to be good at, it would be AdSense placement and optimization.

In the image above, the optimum ad placement of a site is pictured.  This ad placement works with nearly every type of site out there (not just information related sites).  If you’re trying to make money with affiliate products, AdSense, Amazon, etc., this is the layout you’re going to want to have.

When someone comes to your site, for whatever reason, there is a certain area of your web page that they’re likely to click which is depicted as the green triangle.  This triangle is prime real estate on your site and you will get the highest paying ads in that area of your site.  Placing ads outside of this triangle (with exceptions) is like shooting your site’s foot off with a shotgun.  Sure it can stumble around getting some clicks, but it’s no where as good as a site with two working feet.

There are three types of clicks that visitors will do on your site:  bored clicks, lazy clicks, and call-to-action clicks.

Bored clickers are people surfing at home or at work with no real purpose.  They’re impulsive and fairly random.  They’ll click on anything with a blue hyperlink that seems interesting.  Bored clickers aren’t worth nearly as much as lazy clickers and call-to-action clickers.

With lazy clickers, they’ll click out of your website to avoid a block of informational text.  Pretend you have a website about caring for dogs.  A lazy clicker types into Google “caring for dogs” and finds your site in the number one spot.  They’re interested by the snippet of text Google provided and click into your site.  Once they arrive at your site, they see it properly designed and very inviting.  However, they see 400+ words of text which is your article.   Since they’re lazy, they decide on to read the article at all, instead, they see the perfectly placed ad about caring for dogs at their eye level.  They click that ad and make you some money.  These clickers are worth more than bored clickers.

Finally, you have call-to-action clickers.  These are the best types of visitors on your site and are worth a pretty-penny.  These visitors are on your site because they have something to solve or do.  They usually have  a full wallet and will open it and give you money if you play them a pretty enough song.  These people will usually read your articles and then click out using a call-to-action ad.  Call-to-action ads need to placed at the end of your articles.

After the types of clickers and ad placement, the next thing that will impact ad performance is size and color.  Certain sized ads are completely, and I mean, completely ignored by people.  Banner ads… they suck.  Skyscraper ads… they suck too.  They’re great for catching the occasional visitor but they’re going to have a dreadfully lower CTR% compared to rectangle and square ads.  If and when possible, use rectangle ads, your AdSense account will love you.

Color is the final thing that impacts your AdSense clicks.  The rules are simple for coloring your AdSense ads:

• NEVER have borders (color should match background).
• ALWAYS have the background match your website’s background.
• Title text color should match the color of the links on your website or be blue (#0000FF).
• Body text color should always match the text color of your site.
• URL text should be gray, silver, or black.  Sometimes doing blue or red works in your favor.

And that’s pretty much it.  If you follow image and the guidelines laid out here, I can almost guarantee your site’s AdSense click percentage will increase by at least several points.

Beginner Adsense Snipers

Are you new to SEO and making money online?  Do you want to avoid the extra work and time that keyword research requires?  If you’re someone that answered “yes” to any of those questions you’ll want to buy our Beginner Adsense Sniper product.  With these Adsense snipers, we’ll do all the work necessary to get your new site up and running.  We’ll do all the necessary keyword research and will get you a site up and running as fast as possible.  Once we’ve done the necessary keyword research and found a keyword that has a chance to be profitable with low competition we will contact you to have you set up a domain and host.  Once the domain is registered and set up, we will require access to your FTP account and MySQL database.

With the Beginner Adsense Snipers we will:

-Install the latest version of WordPress, install a stock theme, and include installing and setting up popular plug-ins used for SEO.

-Set up of a basic “about me” page, contact form, and privacy policy as required by Google.

-Create five 400+ word posts of content.  These posts will feature the keywords that we researched for you and will be optimized for on-site SEO ranking.

-Set up Adsense on your site using strategies (colors, placement, and size) proven to have high CTR rates (3 ad units per page).

-Include one back link from a Web 2.0 directory like HubPages, InfoBarrel, or Ezine Articles to get your website indexed fast.

-Every Adsense Sniper we create will conform to Google’s webmaster quality standards.

-Provide technical support via instant message or telephone (United States only) as required for web domain registration, name server set up, and other necessary functions required to do the Adsense Snipers.

Price: $80

Bulk pricing is available for people ordering 3 or more Beginner Adsense Snipers.  Please contact us for more information!

Basic Adsense Snipers

If you’re experienced with keyword research and are able to do the preliminary research for your Adsense Sniper sites and want to save money and time building sites you’ll be interested in our Basic Adsense Sniper product.  With the basic level snipers, you’ll provide us with the keywords that you want to target with your new site.  You’ll also need to register a domain name, have a web host, and be willing to give us access to your FTP account and MySQL database.

With the Basic Adsense Snipers we will:

-Install the latest version of WordPress and include installing, installation of a stock theme, and setting up popular plug-ins used for SEO.

-Set up of a basic “about me” page, contact form, and privacy policy as required by Google.

-Create five 400+ word posts of content.  These posts will feature the keywords that you gave us and will be optimized to give you the best results with search engines.

-Set up Adsense on your site using strategies (colors, placement, and size) proven to have high CTR rates (3 ad units per page).

-Include one back link from a Web 2.0 directory like HubPages, InfoBarrel, or Ezine Articles to get your website indexed fast.

-Every Adsense Sniper we create will conform to Google’s webmaster quality standards.

Price: $60

Bulk pricing is available for people ordering 3 or more Basic Adsense Snipers.  Please contact us for more information!

Advanced Adsense Snipers

Do you require more than what our Basic Adsense Snipers give you?  Do you want your snipers to feature custom logos and images?  If so, you’ll be interested in our affordable Advanced Snipers.  As with basic snipers, we’ll require you to do the necessary keyword research for your site before we can begin setup of your sniper site.  You’ll also need to register a domain name, have a web host, and be willing to give us access to your FTP account and MySQL database.

With the Advanced Adsense Snipers we will:

-Install the latest version of WordPress and include installing and setting up popular plug-ins used for SEO.

-Create 1 custom header image for you site.

-Set up of a basic “about me” page, contact form, and privacy policy as required by Google.

-Create five 400+ word posts of content.  These posts will feature the keywords that you gave us and will be optimized to give you the best results with search engines.  We will also find and put 1 related image into each post.

-Set up Adsense on your site using strategies (colors, placement, and size) proven to have high CTR rates (3 ad units per page).

-Include one back link from a Web 2.0 directory like HubPages, InfoBarrel, or Ezine Articles to get your website indexed fast.

-Every Adsense Sniper we create will conform to Google’s webmaster quality standards.

Price: $75

Bulk pricing is available for people ordering 3 or more Advanced Adsense Snipers.  Please contact us for more information!