This is a tough question and the answer is not the same for everyone. See it depends on what you blog’s purpose is. Now if you are creating a blog and your sole purpose is content and your looking for a monetization then Adsense can be a great source of income.
If you are in a niche and writing product reviews that you are linking to actual affiliate products then you may want to rethink using Adsense. One of the things Google is good about is targetting the ads to your post. You don’t want to lose a reader to an Adsense ad that results in a sale for the exact product you were reviewing. This does and will happen if anyone is using Adwords to promote the product you are reviewing.
That is why i have some that are set up primarily for Adsense and others that I wouldn’t even think of using Adsense on. This blog is a perfect example. It primarily helps promote some of my blog products but a bit of extra income from Adsense doesn’t hurt. Here if someone is promoting my blog products I am still happy as I wish I had to pay more commissions each month.
Generally though if you are looking for an easy monetization to add it is an easy way to do it. Just don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.
There are a few things to think about when looking to choose a theme.
The first is the actual layout of your blog. How many columns do you want? Are you using this for a specific purpose such as an Adsense site?
The second thing you need to consider is what the theme supports. Specifically for me the first thing I look for is widget support. Now that has gotten to be a lesser item for me as I have gotten more familiar with the structure of the underlying code I will add the widget feature to a theme. Between you and me I have to really love the design of a theme to go though that trouble.
The third thing is the actual visual look and the ease of customizing it. You ususally have a preconceived idea of what you like. That makes it tough to recommend specific themes to someone else as their vision is not necessarily the same.
The links section allows you to link to other sites. The standard Word Press installation comes with quite a few links already added in the blogroll section. This sectio is usually used to link to other blogs you like.
Personally, the first thing that I do when installing Word Press is remove all of these links. I understand why they put them there and would love to have my link in every Word Press new installation too. However, I don’t know them or have a business relationship with them so they leave my blogs immediately.
I do always add a new category – My Sites – and do link to MY blogs and websites. If you look to the right you will see that section in the sidebar.
I will link in posts to others if I am quoting them or recommending a specific article but as I run a business with my blogs I really want to keep people on my stuff not yours. If you are going to leave through a link I prefer it be something where I have an interest in it.
For example if you click out through one of the Adsense ads I get paid. If you click through to a recommendation I have the chance of getting paid if you purchase something.
So be careful of your links when creating your blog.
Pages unlike posts are static. If you use a theme like this one (Regulus) they may create tabs across the header. The most popular page is usually an about page.
If you click the about page on this blog you can find out about me – the author. You can also use them in a variety of ways. It all depends on what you want your blog to do.
Here is an example. I use a blog for selling custom Word Press installation services. If you go to this page you will see that I have used a blog in lieu of creating a stand alone site for this service.
On this site I have 3 pages – home – about – order. The order page is a static page to allow people to fill out a form to order their blog. It has a form mailer added but comments are turned off so it works just like a normal web page.
I used a blog rather than a static site for a couple of reasons. First it is quick and easy for me to set up. Much easier for me because I use Word Press all the time then it would be to create a static site. Second, I am selling blogs so isn’t it better to use what you are selling?
You can create any number of static pages using the page function to meet your needs.
I know widgets sounds like something you would hear from somebody talking about sales. After all they always use that term as a generic item.
For Word Press widgets are one of my favorite items. They allow you to rearrange the sidebar on your blog by simply dragging and dropping the items within your dashboard to reorder your sidebar.
Now part of the sidebar on this blog is hard coded. For example my lovely picture , the banner ad for my report are all added into the side bar HTML.
However, everything below that can be changed in less than a minute because of widgets. If I wanted to add a calendar I would just go into the dashboard and drag it over where I wanted it and it would be added as soon as I clicked the update button.
If I wanted to move the subscribe me buttons up to just below the report banner – drag it up to the top and drop it. Click update and the sidebar is changed.
Widgets are sure a great way to add, remove or reorder your sidebar in less than a minute. Try it if you get bored like me.
Themes create the look of your blog. The standard Word Press package comes with 2 themes but there are literally hundreds if not thousands of themes that have been developed for Word Press.
Adding a new theme allows you to change the look of your blog by just clicking a link in your dashboard. That basically changes all the html and css files for the look and presentation of your blog.
You do need to take care of picking themes. Not all themes are made to support all other add ons.
For example I like to use widgets (which will be the topic of another post) but the default theme that comes with Word Press (Kubrick) does not allow you to use widgets with it.
So despite the clean look of the default theme and the easy way to change the background and text colors of the header I almost never use it. The plugins I prefer for customizing my blogs use widgets. I prefer having flexibility in my sidebar but then I am old, bald and easily bored .
If you use Word Press for your blogging platform a plugin is a script you can add to increase the functionality of your blog. One of the things I really like about Word Press is the number of plugins that are available.
You can find plugins to create your site map, add Technorati tags, input audio or video, control comment spam and literally hundreds of other things.
Because Word Press is open source anyone can add things to supplement the base platform. The vast majority of plugins are open source and won’t cost you anything. I do recommend that if you find a plugin you really like please donate to the author. Most have a donate button on their site. The vast majority also support their work quite well.
You can spend lots of time searching out and finding plugins to do almost anything you want. The best place to start your search is at the Word Press Pugin Data Base. After that a quick search of Google will show you hundreds more.
Not exactly the most search engine friendly way to do that but easy for programmers. Just keep numbering the posts from 1 to infinity.
You can change and set the permalinks to other options within your dashboard for your blog. My personal preferrence is to use a custom permalink but this does require a bit of technical skill. You need to have a .htaccess file that is writable.
This allows me to make my posts more like a web page title. For example the last post I wrote about categories. The URL for that post looks like this.
This allows anyone seeing the URL in the search engines to have a definite idea of what the post is about. For more information on using permalinks and other optimization tips check out “7 Tips To Make Your Word Press Blog Search Engine Friendly“.
Categories allow you to create groups or topics for your posts. For example at this time I have 3 categories on this blog. One is all of the posts about blog questions called – questions.
Two are test posts – I use this category for trying out new things so people can see how a particular plugin works or looks on an actual blog.
This makes it easy for the reader to be able to sort all of the posts and see everything about a single topic easily. If you are interested in seeing all the questions that have been answered so far you can just choose the category link for questions.
Likewise if you are a member of Word Press Made Easy and are only interested in the updates that are listed here just click the update link.
You can create as many categories as you need. Right now I only have 3 but I can easily foresee adding new ones. Just on a guess one for theme reviews, one for plugin reviews probably aren’t far away. May even add an optimization category. See it is simple to add and makes your blog more user friendly and easily searchable by topic.
This is another in a series answering blogging questions. Feel free to leave comments with the question you would like to see addressed here.
I am going to start a series of posts on various blogging questions. Please feel free to add your questions to the comments here.
The first topics will start with some definitions. Today I will be easy on myself and start with what is a blog? I’ll start with a definition from Wikipedia the online encyclopedia.
A blog is a user generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.
Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.
The term “blog” is derived from “Web log.” “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.
Now that is a decent definition of what a blog is. Tomorrows question will depend on any comments I receive.
, the banner ad for my report are all added into the side bar HTML.
