Flame Scorpion

Your personality should always shine through on your blog. In fact, personality is what sets you apart from everyone else. If you don’t have it, you’re just another faceless blogger out there vying for the hopelessly short attention span of visitors who are really looking for authoritative and accurate information so that they can solve their own personal problems and challenges and get on with their life.

Your Design

The design of your site is one way to let your personality shine through. Site design is often something that most bloggers just hand over to a designer. Don’t do this. Don’t “hope for the best.” Designers are technically proficient, but they don’t always understand marketing. They also aren’t you, and they don’t understand your market, so the types of things they would do on their own site aren’t necessarily what you want for your site.

• MinimalistMost sites could benefit from being more minimalist. Contrary to what you might think, this allows you to inject more personality into your site. Instead of having a million different banners, a confusing navigation menu, and an incomprehensible layout, you should strive for a simplistic layout that allows your readers to focus on your design. The fewer elements you distract them with, the better.

• Make Use of White SpaceWhite space is underrated. Most sites need more of it. The biggest design feature on your site should be your logo and your navigation menu. Why? Because that’s going to tell people who you are, and how to get around while they’re visiting your place. Again, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that “more is better.” More is not better – in fact, most of the time, it’s just distracting.

• Add An “Accent”If you have a value proposition, and you should, this is the other design feature you should incorporate into your site. For example, if your blog is about auto racing, you might have a schedule of events incorporated right into your sidebar. The schedule might detail where the next racing event is, and you might even want to tell your readers where you’ll be just in case they want to meet up with you in person.

Content

You’ve heard the old saying, “content is king,” a million times. It’s true. What you don’t often hear people talk about is the importance of personality. Without a voice, your content is going to be pretty boring. The good news is that this isn’t all that difficult to fix. When you write, write in the same manner as you speak.

Will it come off as being very casual? You bet it will – and that’s what will draw readers in. Most users are pretty savvy these days. They tend not to trust things that are or appear to be advertising. Even research studies put people to sleep or on edge (depending on who funded the study). A personal account is very different, however. If you have expertise in your niche, and you speak as though you and your reader are just hanging out at a bar shooting the breeze, it’s going to be a lot more genuine and inviting than writing in the third-person or even a “stiff” second-person narrative.

Bobby Campbell has recently self-taught herself WordPress and is becoming an active blogger. Her articles mainly appear on writing blogs. For faster internet in your area, visit the CLEAR-internet.com link.

If you are using Gmail then you must have noticed the changes in Google Mail Inbox. Now, you can add different tabs to your inbox. By default, there will be 3 tabs: Primary, where you get all the direct mail and important stuff, Social where you get all the emails from social networks and Promotions where you usually get all the broadcast messages sent by online stores or email marketers. In fact, is not that much different because I used labels and filters before, but after the update, the process is automated. If you are interested in this, there is a chance that you have already disabled tabs, angry because some email newsletters that you wanted are going into the promotion tab and you miss it, or because you are a email marketer and you are angry that your messages are getting there. You may consider it a stupid feature but the truth is that most people won’t disable it.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

Marketing is not easy. You have to test and test to see what works for your business. If you do not invest enough time in testing, you may leave out a lot of valuable marketing opportunities just because you heard that it is hard or that it does not work. There is no universal advertising strategy, for some websites, adwords is a great fit, while for others can be a pain.

Big companies are spending a lot of money ( because they have enough ) on marketing campaigns with a bad ROI. But in most cases, they can’t know this because they have a good branding and other marketing strategies that works great. If you are a small company, you can’t afford having bad ROI campaigns and you have to test and accurate track the results until you find those strategies that work.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

On 27 May 2013, WordPress will celebrate 10 years of existence. WordPress became popular as a blogging platform very fast. In 2005 I created my first wordpress template for a client. Despite wordpress was used only as a blog, starting with 2007 it was also used as a content management system. In 2006, I coded something for wordpress multi-user for the first time.

For me, the move to wordpress from simple html/php sites or from Joomla was a very good move. I was able to to bigger things with much less time. Joomla is another content management system, they have some built-in features but if you want to get out of their box, it is very hard. I like to think outside the box and WordPress fit just right with my mentality. Today, I can’t imagine my work without wordpress.

There will be many anniversary meetups dedicated to wordpress, if you wish to join. Also, there are anniversary clothes for this special moment. You can check more on this official post.

In the first quarter of 2013, tablets and smartphones sold more units than desktop and laptops. 20 years ago, we played all the social games in real life: chess, cards, poker, blackjack, etc. 10 years ago, all the social games moved to our computers. Starting with zone ( microsoft owned game rooms ), continuing with yahoo games provided us great support to play any social game with our friends or with anyone in the world.

Today, we are moving from computers and laptops to smartphones. We can play games when we wait for the bus, or when we wait to meet with a friend, or in any other moments when we are unable to to something else. This will definitely led us to play more and more.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Options for backing up data have greatly increased in the last few years. As storage demands become greater, some business owners have begun to turn to online services rather than trying to do it all themselves. This form of data storage can be advantageous to business owners, although it may not be the best option for everyone. [Read the rest of this entry…]

One of the things that every parent worries about is “am I really doing everything I can to ensure that I am properly planning for my child’s college education?” College is incredibly expensive. Even the state/publicly funded schools that used to be an affordable route for nearly everyone now cost upwards of $20K a year for tuition, fees and living expenses. Not everybody (in fact, hardly anybody) is able to afford that outright. So what can you do?

Getting Creative

These days one of the best ways to bring in extra money is to set up a website. The great thing about starting a website and using it to earn money is that this is something that you can do in your spare time while spending time with your family.

The easiest type of website to set up is a blog. There are lots of free blogging platforms out there to choose from (we, obviously, like WordPress the best). You simply choose a name, password, input some basic information and viola! Your very own website.

Blogs are great because they have so many different avenues for monetization:

• You can sell sidebar ads
• You can sell advertising in the headers and footers of individual posts
• You can get people to sponsor individual posts
• You can sell ad space in your blog’s header and footer space.
• You can put paid links in the text of your regular posts.
• You can create products that relate to your blog and sell them.

The best thing about blogging as a platform is that it is so versatile. Thanks to free content management systems like WordPress you can set your blog up to be pretty much whatever you want. You could even set your blog up to function as the landing spot for a web based business.

For now, though, let’s focus on the blog.

You can focus your blog on a single topic (make sure it’s something you care about so you’ll be motivated to write) or you can generalize and make the blog more of a lifestyle oriented site.

What matters is that you choose something about which you are already enthusiastic. This way you will want to work on your site. You’ll want to do the research. You’ll want to do the link building and networking. Readers can sense enthusiasm and they are more likely to respond to it than to something someone is obviously creating with the sole purpose of making money in mind.

So: what do you love? When you do have a moment of free time, what do you choose to do with it? What subjects do you gravitate toward? The answers to these questions are where you should start when you’re trying to figure out what to blog about.

As long as you are passionate about it and work hard, you should be able to start making money via your blog within a few months.

There are other things you can do, of course—other affiliate marketing and internet marketing methods you can use to earn extra money. The blog, though—the blog is the best place to start.

Since I started working with wordpress more than 7 years ago, for most of the blogs and website I created I needed an option to show related posts at the end of every article. The default is a list of 4 or 5 posts related to the current post, shown at the end of the page. The engine that tries to match the related posts is important, but it is not a visible feature.

Recently I have tested some plugins that will achieve this and I found Related Posts from Zemanta to be the best so far.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

Genesis from StudioPress is one of the best WordPress theme framework developed so far. There are already over 86,000 blogs who use genesis framework, despite that it is not free. People chose Genesis because it provides a lot of custom features that can be changed from admin panel, extra security, built-in SEO optimization, etc. Genesis framework can work standalone, but it also supports child themes. If you want to build your design from scratch, you can easily do it on genesis, but Studiopress also provide quality child themes for their framework.

I have selected 3 best Genesis child theme designs for you. [Read the rest of this entry…]

If you maintain a blog about web development or programming, or another type of blog where you have to show some code to your readers, you already faced problems trying to paste code into wordpress text editor. If the piece of code is not deleted by the editor filters, it will be screwed up by changing the tags.  [Read the rest of this entry…]