The Internet Marketing Challenge Blog

Archive for June, 2009

One of the most common questions I get asked is how to build custom wordpress themes? A lot of people with some HTMl skills can throw together a half decent website quite easily but when it comes to constructing a wordpress theme it leaves them scratching their head in bewilderment.

At first site the whole wordpress blogging platform can seem like a black art and the knowing where to start to build a custom wordpress theme can seem quite impossible. Artisteer is a piece of software I recommend to people who want the freedom to build a theme but have little or no coding abilities and it does a mighty fine job. What about the HTML tinkerers out there though? What about the person who would like total control over building a new custom wordpress theme from scratch? Thankfully the answer lies with the most excellent but oddly titled – How To Be A Rockstar WordPress Designer..

This guide and series of tutorials can take you from absolute HTML newbie through to building your own custom wordpress themes by following simple step by step instructions.

It takes you through from learning some PHP and wordpress codex through theme design and into areas like creating basic WP plugins and advanced theme design. It is recommended that you already have dreamweaver and photoshop but it isn’t essential. If you use other coding and image manipulation software then the ideas can be quite easily ported to those software products.

From the first page of the guide through to the end and following the easy to follow tutorials you could have your own custom themes built very quickly and just the way you want them. No more scratching your head wondering how to increase the width of a sidebar or add an optin box, you will know how to do anything to your theme.

The best bit is that the How To Be A Rockstar WordPress Designer package is available for just $29 and trust me, it is worth 10 times that amount.

Okay, just a quick update after the previous update this morning.. My European cruise blog has now managed to get back onto the first page of Google in the UK at least for the keyword “European cruises”. It seems Google has finished it’s current little dance with my blog. I am quite pleased because I was missing the traffic from that phrase plus all the advantages you get from Adsense placement targeting from rich advertisers bidding on that keyword which sent my CPC through the roof on some days.

I hope that all the other Google centres follow suit soon and it ranks in the Google top 10 everywhere again.

Sorry it has been a while since I updated my progress with the 100 bucks challenge but just so you know I had a day last week which hit $76 from this 1 blog which was pretty awesome. Since then unfortunately, I have been at the mercy of the Google dance and have seen the blog drop from the top 5 in Google for the pahrase European cruises down into the deepest darkest recesses of the index. I don’t know why Google do this but I am hopeful it will bounce right back up again.

The upshot of this is that both traffic and Adsense income have dropped back down to between $30 to $40 a day from this blog. During the dance I noticed I am getting a lot more traffic from keywords that it previously didn’t rank for and a lot more long tails as well. This has kind of balanced up the blow of losing all the traffic from the “european cruises” keyword a bit.

Thankfully I am still seeing some great CPC on the blog. I had one click last week of over $4 which was pretty amazing really and my average CPC is around $1 but it does change from day to day.

This is a twist on my previous tactic about link exchanges but it is very powerful in getting backlinks from authority sites..

You will need:

• SeoQuake firefox plugin
• firefox (obviously)
• 10 keyword optimised articles with 2 backlinks to 1 page on your site.

The process I am about to outline is about persuading sites that are already indexed on Google that are indexed already for keywords you are targeting to post an article on their site written by you. It is a very powerful technique but does involve a small amount of effort on your behalf in both the power of persuasion and also article writing skill. The objective is to get the SEO benefit of backlinks from authority sites plus some good direct targeted traffic to your site. Okay here goes..

1. Choose just 1 page on your site that you would like to get traffic to and determine 1 keyword phrase that you would like that page to rank in Google’s top 10 for.
2. Write 10 articles optimised for the keyword in step 1 and with two backlinks to the page on your site you chose in step 1. Also, enure your anchor text is the keyword phrase you chose.
3. Open up firefox with SeoQuake enabled and showing you the toolbar with PR enabled also.
4. Go to Google and set preferences on google to show 100 positions rather than 10.
5. Type in your target keyword phrase into Google and click search.
6. On the SeoQuake toolbar click on the down arrow for PR which will sort the top 100 pages on Google in order of page rank from highest to lowest.
7. On the Google results page go from the top down and look for around 30 sites that look like they might be interested in articles. (See notes below)
8. Open each of those 30 sites in it’s own tab.
9. Look at each of those 30 sites and try to locate their contact details either from the site itself or through whois.
10. Contact each site’s webmaster in turn and offer them either..

• Preferably one of the articles that you wrote earlier to be posted on the page you found from the search or failing that a new page on their site.
• Change some text on an article on their page to include anchor text back to your page.
• A link exchange.

Now the hard part you are probably thinking is trying to persuade a webmaster to do this for you.. What is in it for them? Well, they will probably be more open to a link exchange but when you start offering money under their noses then it becomes a lot more attractive for them. You can expect to pay around $100 if you are persuasive enough to get your article on their site. Also, some webmasters are hungry for new content so before you offer the money they might be open to any new original content. Use money as your last resort… The important part is to try and build a rappore with the webmaster, they probably get hundreds of spammy link requests and your email needs to be personal, friendly and above all emphasize what is in it for them.. fresh content, keyword optimised content, money?? You can even offer them regular fresh content obviously with a link back to your sites.

So what are the type of sites that would be open to this? It might be easier to describe the sites that wouldn’t. Shopping type sites like Amazon, ebay, target would not be open to this and neither would big established names. The type of sites are the ones that have a lot of content, obviously run by enthusiasts and probably just 1 person outfits.

The secret sauce as to why this technique is powerful is because you are getting backlinks from sites that Google already hold in high esteem (page rank) using your target keyword phrase as anchor text back to a page on your site that is optimised for that keyword phrase already. Aim to get 10 of these per page that you want to rank for and it will shoot your page up the rankings..