Archive for January, 2009

Decided On A Theme, Found Some Nice Theme Sites Too

Posted by Kaz on January 30th, 2009

Finally decided on a theme, going with Flexibility Theme version 2. It was given a big thumbs up at the Warrior Forum so I decided to check it out. Must say, it’s the most customizable free theme I’ve ever come across. I’m not done with the final design but it’s a work in progress.

During my theme hunting I found a few sites I really liked. There are tons of free Wordpress themes available online but a lot of them are mediocre to say the least. If you’re ever on the lookout for some fresh themes check these sites out:

FreeThemeLayouts.com

They only showcase about 50 themes or so, but there are some beauties in there. A couple of my favorites are BoldLines and KikiBerry. I also love how they display their themes – you can easily hover over the thumbnails to get a larger image. That means no clicking back and stuff, saves a lot of time. You can also demo each one of the themes as a full site.

WPThemeDesigner.com

If you’re looking for a news theme look no further. Some gorgeous ones available here, worth checking out. They also have a beautiful site design with large images of the blogs to make it dead simple for previewing.

Theme-Time.com

I like the themes on this site, and use one over at my Free RSS Tips blog. I think it only cost something around $10 to get the theme without their backlinks on the bottom, otherwise they are free. There’s a lot more themes to choose from on this site, and some rather unique ones.

I’m always on the hunt for fresh and unique blog themes!

Karen (Kaz)

Posted in News, Useful Sites Tags: , 2 Comments »

It’s Time For A Change

Posted by Kaz on January 13th, 2009

I’ll be trying out some new themes so you might end up seeing some strange activity going on here! I love seeking out new and interesting themes, feel free to comment on what you like or dislike. Right now (at the time of writing this) I’m trying out the “gridblog” theme. I like the layout but might need to tweak the font and play around with some settings.

Posted in General Tags: 2 Comments »

Niche Hunting Here We Go! (Part 1)

Posted by Kaz on January 10th, 2009

I’m really itching to jump into a new niche, and what better way to get started than making a detailed post about how I’m going to go about it. In the past I’ve always targeted niches that appealed to people’s desperation and didn’t pay much attention to whether or not the actual niche held a lot of interest for me.

Well, not this time. I’m dead set serious about getting into a niche that I can actually leverage my own true passion about. But I must be honest and up front here. I’m not actually looking to start into a new niche for the purpose of making money – not initially anyways. I want to get into something enjoyable and entertaining for ME. Of course I want to be successful in what I do so I will eventually look to monetize it.

You hear time and time again from many sources that the best place to start niche hunting is to look at your own hobbies and likes. Like I said before, I’ve always glossed over that and went the other direction (and certainly both can be successful). So now I’m faced with this looming over my head… what are my hobbies? It saddens me because I’ve long given up my most beloved hobby which is quilting.

Forget about that for a minute though because I want to ramble. (more…)

Posted in General Tags: , 4 Comments »

Social Bookmarking Sites With NoFollow? No Problem!

Posted by Kaz on January 4th, 2009

If you aren’t familiar with marketing using RSS feeds yet, it’s never too late to learn. Hop on over to FreeRSSTips.com to receive a free guide about RSS. So what does RSS have to do with this post?

Well as many of you already know, social bookmarking sites can generate traffic to your sites as well as help you with backlinks in the search engines. Yet many of them nowadays are employing the dreaded “nofollow” tag which isn’t going to give you any love for backlinks.

But by leveraging these sites’ RSS feeds, you can totally bypass the nofollow tag. Many social bookmarking sites offer RSS feeds for your account, which displays the links you’ve bookmarked right within the RSS feed. And guess what? There is NO nofollow tags inside the RSS feed.

When you submit your RSS feeds to the major aggregators (think FeedAge.com, FeedAgg.com, RSS2.com etc.), the contents of your feed are displayed on the aggregator’s site and the links contain NO nofollow tags. You’ll not only gain backlinks from the aggregator sites but also your urls at many of the aggregator sites tend to rank very well in Google.

So if you aren’t marketing with RSS yet, it’s very simple to get started and the benefits are numerous. For a full list of the top RSS aggregators, check out the free RSS guide over at FreeRSSTips.com.

Kaz

Posted in RSS Tags: , , , , 4 Comments »