I am much more interested in people than pixels. If you’re here reading my blog, than that’s awesome and all that counts in my mind. Unfortunately it is sometimes difficult to bring in sponsorship and review cool products without the little green pixels up there. *Curse you green pixels!*

Since the popularity for Wordpress is so large, one might wonder how you can get a one of a kind design for their blog?  Here are your three choices-

1: Hire it out. Many web designers now design Wordpress templates instead of hand coding each page, since many more people are using CMS (Content Management System) than your good ol’ fashion HTML content pages that once the common form of web pages and sites. They can cost anywhere from little to a lot of money to get a designer to design a custom theme. Plus each designers skills vary, one designer might be good at coding-but not good creating the layout graphics. You should do your research before you hire one carefully, and make sure you are getting exactly what you want from them!

2: Use a Wordpress theme generator. This free and web based browsers keep things much more simple. True that they aren’t exact customized, but they do allow you to get your basic theme without paying someone. It’s also good for getting an idea on how to edit the themes to suit your needs better for your site.

3: Do it yourself. This maybe the hardest of them all. Getting a good paint program (GIMP is a good free one) and learning how to code it exactly could take some time. If you do not want to risk it or take the time out to fix your kinks, then this wouldn’t be a option for you. But if you know your way around CSS/HTML and graphics programs, it shouldn’t be a too big of a deal.

Of course you can stick to premade themes, if you like. Though a blog with a unique theme is far better off than a blog with a common theme. Keep these options in mind, maybe even do a pro and cons list for each choice. Then figure out which one you prefer and feel at peace with.

The 30-minute Flip Ultra is the perfect companion for bloggers to use to add videos to their daily blogging. You can catch your pets or your kids acting silly, or you might just catch someone doing something weird at the grocery store, or better yet you can start a vlog and record your daily posts on the fly. You’ll love the portability and the easy to use functions.

How to Tweak Your WordPress Theme

There are literally millions of different themes available on the Internet. You can choose one from sites that sell them or give them away free. You could also have someone custom-make your theme, which could cost you a good amount of money. If you choose to select one already made, there are things you can do to make it customized to suit your taste.

• Header. Create a header with your business or blog name on it. If someone stops by your page and sees a header they have already seen somewhere else, they may be inclined to move on.

• Background color or pattern. There are simple ways to change the background color to your theme so it matches your header and provides readers an easier to read web page. A basic pattern can make a nice background as well, diagonals and stripes seem to be pretty popular these days, but don’t be afraid to be creative.

• Text color and font. Choose a text color that will be visible on the background color or pattern you have chosen. You also want to pick a font that is clear and large enough for people to see. You don’t want people to have to strain to see the information you have provided for your customers or readers, because they will give up and leave your site. Avoid colors like pale grey and yellow for fonts.

• Incorporate pictures. Images are a great way to capture someone’s attention and give them a reason to read what you have on your website. You can grab stock images, create your own graphics, or browse free photo sharing websites.

• Do not clutter. Some themes have many frames so you can fit a lot of information on the page. Take out some of these frames so your page looks organized and clean. You don’t want people to have to search for things for too long or again, they will leave your site.

The Importance of Tweaking Your WordPress Theme

Many of the reasons why you should tweak your theme are listed above, but there are additional benefits to doing this.

• Make it your own. You have your own personal style for your blog or business site; don’t settle for someone else’s taste when it comes to what you want to present on the Internet.

• Tailor it to your readers and customers. You know your audience best, so make the page that will be pleasing to them. The more people like your site, the longer they will stay.

• It’s easy. Making a few changes to your WordPress script is not difficult. Sometimes all you have to do is change a few codes and you are all set. There is a lot of information on the Internet that will guide you.

Finally, you want to tweak your WordPress theme because it will give you the success you are looking for in a blog or business website.

Some corporations try to discourage deep linking, as it allows users to visit a specific page, while bypassing advertising on the front page of the site. For most people deep linking is very helpful and actually sought after. The following are a few reasons why deep linking can help a business.

Deep linking greatly increases a user’s ability to find exactly what they are looking for on the web. If you were on a website researching chicken recipes and saw a link for chicken pot pie, when you clicked on it, you would expect to be on a page that had a recipe for chicken pot pie.

You would be disappointed if you ended up at a main page of another recipe website and had to search through all their recipes in order to find the recipe you thought you were linked to. When a website owner deep links to a specific page that contains the specific content their readers are looking for then the reader is much more satisfied.

Not only does deep linking help the website visitor but it also helps the website owner with keeping tabs on their tracking. They are able to see exactly which pages of their website are getting the most links. This can help them decide what the most popular content on their site is and what their visitors are looking for.

This can also help in the search engine rankings. If there was a site about tropical birds that had links coming in to various pages on different types of birds, when someone searched for “parrot” then the parrot page would come up. The person would be able to visit the page that allowed them to learn exactly what they wanted.

If you participate in any pay per click advertising, use deep linking to point to exactly what your ad is talking about, which will help your conversion rates. For example, if you have a site about gardening and place an ad for shovels, using deep linking in the ad to point directly to the shovel page rather than pointing to the home page.

If the ad pointed to the home page, there may be some visitors who would navigate towards the shovels they were originally looking for but some would leave the site altogether. If the ad points directly to the shovel page more people would buy the shovels and that would increase the conversion rates.

Start creating deep links in a blog and link to specific content on the site. Include deep links in articles submitted to reprint directories. Experiment with this idea and see if traffic increases.

CSS is designed in a manner that makes it easier to define how text should look. If you are familiar with HTML, you will know that it was designed as a structural language. When the web was in it’s early development stages, websites were not “pretty”. In fact, HTML didn’t contain bold or italics tags until the mid 1990’s.

When someone uses CSS to build their website, they do not have to include a bunch of opening and closing tags, as would be needed with HTML. With CSS, not only can the website designer have the ability to set the colors, text and the background of any element, they can also create borders around images and define how much space these borders contain.

Another advantage of using CSS is that it centralizes all the commands for a specified visual effect. If a web designer wanted all of the headers on a website to be blue, they can simply create one rule in CSS that defines what each of the headers will look like.

If that same web designer were using HTML, they would have to add font tags around each header. If the website contained 40 pages, the designer would need to add 40 font tags around each header. As you can see in that example, creating one simple rule in CSS was a lot simpler and less time consuming. If the web designer wants to change the heading color from blue to red all they would need to do is change that one CSS rule, versus changing each font tag again.

The “cascading” part of CSS comes into pay when a web designer wants to add a specific style to a web page. To maintain a common theme throughout a site, the designer could save the style sheet to it’s own document and import it on any page they want to carry the theme to. If the web designer wants one page to stand out against the others, they can create another style sheet on that page. The two style sheets would cascade, and the web browser will display the style sheet that is specific for that page.

Some browsers allow the reader of the website to change the CSS of a page. This is called Reader Style Sheets. The reader could set all links to a special, pre-defined color. This is a great tool for color-blind web surfers.

Another bonus to CSS is that, when implemented, it creates smaller file sizes. Your pages won’t take as long to load as those written in HTML.

A good way to practice working with CSS is through a blog. It doesn’t matter if you use Blogger, WordPress or TypePad because they are all written with CSS. These sites also have CSS tutorials to help along the way.

technorati.com – This site allows users to share their blogs, photos, videos and more and boasts almost a million and a half visitors each month.

del.icio.us – This site is a very popular and was one of the first social bookmarking sites to really take off.

digg.com – This site receives 8.7 million visitors each month. Visitors can look up any topic and receive instant information and statistics.

stumbleupon.com – This is a relatively new site and it combines myspace with social bookmarking. Users can make up 5 of their own pages on any topic they want.

reddit.com -This site allows users to view what’s new, what’s hot at the moment and what the weekly stats are.

fark.com – This site’s main page has categories displayed that allows the user to go directly to topics such as sports, business, politics, music and more.

mybloglog.com – This site combines social bookmarking, blogging and social networking.

blinklist.com – This website is still in beta testing and it’s mission statement is more about how people can use the service for keeping track of their own research.

ma.gnolia.com – This site isn’t quite as big as some of the others but it is very easy to use and has a lot of information to make the process of social bookmarking understandable. This is a great site to get started with.

tailrank.com – This site keeps track of the conversations between blogs to help find what is hot on the web. The user can search on any topic they like or view randomly through categories such as politics, video, technology and entertainment.

These sites are all varied and, while they share in social bookmarking, they are all geared towards different audiences. To get the most out of these sites you may want to combine the use of several of them. For instance, you can list your blogs on technorati.com and ping the site when you update your blogs.
Then join a site such as stumbleupon.com and set up five web pages about various topics found on your own website. For instance, if your website featured information on guinea pigs, one of your stumbleupon.com sites could feature information on feeding guinea pigs and another page could feature information on the type of environment they should be kept in and so forth.

Meanwhile, keep your bookmarks in del.icio.us to share with other users and visit a site such as tailrank.com to keep track of what other people are blogging about. This can inspire new blog posts for your own blog, which would then mean you’d have more pings for technorati.com and the cycle would just start over.

All of these elements would work together to create more buzz for your website and introduce you to people with similar interests. This could lead to more web traffic and even some future joint venture partners, which, in turn would lead to even more traffic (but that is a whole new topic for another article).

Step 1. If you don’t already have a domain name, like www.myblog.com, you’ll need to get one and register it. It can be a .com, .net, .org or any legitimate address. Note: you do not need to pay for hosting services, only purchase a domain name.

Step 2. Now you need to create a CNAME record for your domain with the DNS, Domain Name Server, associating your domain with ghs.google.com. Each domain registration service has their own instructions on how to do this. Blogger.com lists directions for changing your CNAME for several domain registrars like GoDaddy and 1&1. If your domain registration service isn’t listed at Blogger, contact your registrar to find out how to do it. It’s normally a fairly straightforward process.

Step 3. Change your blog settings. Now you will need to get into your blog’s settings and change them so that the correct blog shows up when people visit your site. Get into your blog’s dashboard and click on “Settings”. On the toolbar across the top you’ll see several tabs. One of them is labeled “Publishing” Go ahead and click on that. Now you’ll see it says “You’re publishing on blogspot.com” and below that it says “Switch to custom domain” Go ahead and click on that. Enter the domain you registered and you’re good to go. Sometimes it takes a little while for the redirect to kick in so give it a day or two. If it still isn’t working, make sure you entered your DNS changes correctly.

Your blog should now be shown as having its own domain. Congratulations!

Step 1. Visit www.mybloglog.com and register for an account. If you already have a Yahoo ID then you can log in using your Yahoo account information.

Step 2. Logon and you will be taken to a Create Your Profile page where you will be asked to create your profile URL. If you’re tying this to a business, you can use something related to your business name. Here is what MyBlogLog suggests you use to create your profile URL

“You can add any word or word combination (no spaces) that is relevant to your blog. If you blog about celebrities, you might add celebritynews or celebphotos to this box. If an error that the url is taken occurs, that means another MyBlogLog member already has his MyBlogLog community at that url. Try another keyword phrase here.”

This is my profile ~ http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/terrapin719/

Step 3. Now you can add edit and add to your profile including adding your website, blog, tags, pictures, an about me page, you can also add Twitter to your profile to update members with messages, changes etc…

Step 4. Add your website or blog to your profile. Once you’ve successfully added your site they will generate a script for you to get started. You will add the code to your blog template in between the OPEN body () tag and the CLOSE body () tag and republish. Tracking will begin immediately after the code has been added to your blog. The code will look like this:

script type=’text/JavaScript’ src=’http://track3.mybloglog.com/js/jsserv.php?mblID=2007122617322967′ /script

Step 5. MyBlogLog does more than track who visits your blog or website and what they like and what they read, it enables you to build a community. You can link up with other members, share recommendations and network.

That’s it. Once your profile is up and your website or blog is linked, then you’re ready to get started using MyBlogLog and tracking the valuable information to build your business.

But thankfully for such people, there are many alternatives to AdSense which attempt to alleviate some of its shortcomings. Here is a list of the most noteworthy ones from the lot with a description concerning each one. All of the links in this post are straight links, there are no affiliate or referral links.

AllFeeds (http://www.allfeeds.com/?action=publishers)
AllFeeds has a great pool of online advertisers to choose from. It also features many display formats that you can choose from. These include banners, buttons, XML feeds, DHTML pop-ups and so on. It also features real time reporting of your ad status. The site will mail a check every month, provided that you earn more then $25.00, while rolling over earnings for the next month if you don’t. Another interesting thing about AllFeeds is that it integrates with Google AdSense, maximizing your earnings with AdSense.

MarketBanker (http://www.marketbanker.com/mb/sell.php)
MarketBanker allows you the unique possiblity to set the pricing for your site. It also allows you to allow or reject any link that appears on your site (although AdSense itself does a very good job of this as well, with URL filters) There’s also a statistics section which will allow you to see how well your site is doing. The ads are small just like AdSense’s and they’re just as easy to set up. Also, registration for MarketBanker is free.

BidClix (http://www.bidclix.com/PubTop.html BidClix is different because it has advertisers compete for clicks on your site, which in turn is meant to generate the highest possible profits for your page. It also has a very large pool of advertisers which ensure there are plenty of people to choose your site. However, it does require more polish on site contents then AdSense. As most sites, real time statistics are available and its very easy to get started with this service, but it's also very flexible.

Chitika (http://www.realcontext.com/index.php?option=RealContext:+Contextual+Targeting+Engine)
RealContext uses Artificial intelligence to retrieve the most relevant ads for your page. And there’s an extra feature which makes RealContext unique as well. Keywords are selected based upon which previous selections payed off and which didn’t. That means there’s a constant feedback process that ensures you gain better revenue from your ads. It also supports blocking certain adds and child-safe filtering and many more options.

AdHearus (http://adhearus.com/webmaster.php)
AdHearus is a very feature-packed contextual ad provider. As with AdSense, advertisements are targeted but it doesn’t stop here at all. The ads are very flexible, you can select from text-ads, banners, rectangles, pop-ups, pop-unders or skyscrapers. You can also display your own ads, through rotation, both on your site and on other affiliate sites, which makes AdHearus a hybrid with conventional advertising technologies. There’s a very comprehensive on-line real time reporting feature and, as usual with such services, starting out is free and it’s a breeze.

AffiliateSensor (http://www.affiliatesensor.com/)
AffiliateSensor has highly customizable ad blocks, which you can make for yourself with an easy to use on-line interface. You also get realtime reporting with clicks-by-domain, page and refferer. There’s integration with Google AdSense as well, through the google_alternate_ad_url so AffiliateSensor can be used as a substitute for Google PSA’s (Public Service Ads).

Kanoodle Bright Ads (http://www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool)
Kanoodle’s offering allows publishers to get ads related to topics or segments, and not the traditional keyword oriented ads. The site also groups publisher sites with advertisers by hand to ensure high-revenue generating ads. And speaking of revenue, the amount of money you receive is a clear 50% share of the amount of money Kanoodle recieves for an advertiser.

TargetPoint (http://publisher.targetpoint.com)
TargetPoint is oriented more towards content publishers. It offers full control over the look the ads, statistics over your site’s overall performance and better revenue. It’s free to register and you earn a guaranteed 60% of the total revenue. You can get payed with Paypal of Bank checks and (most times) wire transfers as well.

Clicksor (http://www.clicksor.com)
Clicksor will earn you as much as 60% from the amount of money your website produces. What you get is about the same as AdSense, there are targeted text ads, you can view the revenues from your website in real time. You can receive money via PayPal or through a check every two weeks, provided that you have earned more then $50. If you haven’t made that much, your earning roll over to the next period

Bidvertiser (http://www.bidvertiser.com/)
Like AdSense, Bidvertiser displays text ads in your page. But the difference lies in the fact that advertisers bid over your advertising space, ensuring you earn as much revenue as you possibly can. This also means that bids will increase over time, earning you even more cash. You also get a great way to customize your ads with a very easy to use tool and detailed reports on your site’s status.

Quigo AdSonar (http://www.quigo.com/adsonarpublishers.htm)
Quigo AdSonar achieves relevancy by placing a filter according to your site’s categories. It also offers you on-line reports of your site’s status and the possibility to add your own custom ads replacing ads that don’t gain you any revenue. The setup is very simple, in a similar fashion to AdSense’s and quite customizable as well.

Vibrant Media IntelliTXT (http://www.vibrantmedia.com/vibrantvideo/index.asp?referrer=Intellitxt.com)
Vibrant Media IntelliTXT offers user-activated ads, highlighting certain words within the content of the page and presenting relevant ads when a user hovers his mouse over them. It uses a pay-for-performance pricing scheme and can easily be used along with other advertising methods, because it is unobtrusive. It places you in full control, allowing you to easily integrate it within your site with some simple JavaScript.

Nixie (http://www.nixxie.com/display.php?section=Partners)
Nixie claims to hold a technology that can read and understand your site, enabling it to display the most relevant content to your site. Besides text ads, Nixie also features price comparison listings as well as live auction advertising. It’s very easy to implement and has a good payment policy as well.

MIVA AdRevenue Xpress (http://www.miva.com/us/content/partners/arx.asp)
MIVA AdRevenue Xpress is targeted towards small and mid-sized publishers. It implements Search Box functionality and also features things like a Category Directory as well as the handling of 404 error pages. It can be integrated with your page using a simple on-line wizard.

Value Click Media (formerly FastClick) (http://www.valueclickmedia.com/)
Valueclick offers you an impressive 65 percent of what it makes from a click on your website. Payments are done monthly, via PayPal or through checks. The ads can be formatted as you wish, and Valueclick even offers a free support serice for its members and no fees are required to register with the service.

contextWeb ContextAd (http://www.contextweb.com/Corporate/publisher/publisher.shtml)
ContextAd offers the possibility of contextual ads for dynamic pages, meaning ads will change as soon as your page does. It’s very easy to use and free to sing up for and offers a transparent payment policy. The ads are fully customizable and real-time reports are available 24/7.

AdBrite (http://www.adbrite.com/)
AdBrite offers publishers the possibility of integrating text ads in their pages. These are done on your own rates, with the websites you approve by hand so it bares some similarities with a classic advertising scheme. You also have the option of adding a “Your Add Here” button that buyers can immediately click to ad space on your page. It can also be used in conjunction with Google AdSense, maximizing your CTR and offering advertisers the possibility of showing their links in your Google AdSense space. You have full control over the look and feel of your adds and finally, you get an incredible 75% of what the advertiser pays for on every click.

So, as you can see there are many offers for this kind of advertising, and many hybrids based on AdSense like advertising. Also, a lot of services can work together with AdSense to earn you an even greater amount of revenue for your ad space.