6 Reasons Why You Should Use a Premium WordPress Theme For You Small Business Website

WordPress is one of the most popular open source blogging platforms available on the web, giving you complete creative freedom and the ability to design the perfect website with minimum effort.

The WordPress directory contains thousands of great plugins whilst the web is abundant with thousands of free themes, all to give your blog project that unique personal touch.

Whilst there are many great free WordPress themes available on the web, only a very few of them have the security and custom ability of a professionally designed premium WordPress theme. And this is the subject matter of this article, where I'd like to share with you 6 valid reasons as to why you should use a premium WordPress theme for your web project, as apposed to one of the readily available free themes on the market.

Design Quality

The design quality often found in free WordPress themes cannot be merely matched to those found in premium themes, and this is down to several reasons; for example, the attention to detail is often reflected on how well the theme's code was originally written.

A good example of this would suggest; a quality premium theme will rarely ever load with any concerning glitches, the layout of the theme itself will always load cleanly and smoothly with all the qualities found in a premium theme, whilst these qualities can sometimes be of poor forthcoming in the vastly freely available themes.

Features

Many free themes also lack of the essential features whilst premium themes often offer you many useful features such as featured posts plugin, dynamic content gallery, Twitter and RSS integration and a contact us form just name a few.

Customization

When it comes to customization free themes offer almost nothing in return, as many of these free themes are designed for one thing only, and that's for gaining a free backlink to an external site used by the theme designer normally. However, many if not all premium themes available offer full custom ability with easy customisation of CSS, headers and footers amongst many others.

Security

One of the biggest reasons why many serious bloggers or webmasters tend to use a reputable premium theme is for its impeccable security features.

The guys over at WordPress work their hardest to keep us updated with the latest security releases for their platform, and many of the premium themes are designed to cater and reinforce these security updates to make your blog project as secure as possible. No body likes the thought of waking up to find out their blog or website has been hacked into or sabotaged.

Updates

With a premium WordPress theme you also receive the latest updates that are available for your theme; if a new version of your theme is available you'll be offered the chance to upgrade with normally no extra cost.

Even with the safe knowledge of being able to get the latest version of your theme as and when available should be enough to make you want to invest in a premium theme.

Technical Support & Documentation

Finally many if not all premium theme services now come with full online technical support as well as documentation with clear instructions on how to use your theme, giving you even greater peace of mind.

If you're as passionate about your blog or web project as you think you are and are currently using a free WordPress theme for your blog, consider upgrading to a premium theme. For the sake of a few dollars it could mean the difference between your blog or website being safe and secure or being hacked into even without your knowledge.

How To Sell Clothes Online

The Internet has made it much easier and affordable for ordinary people to sell clothes online. While a traditional retail store costs thousands of dollars a month to maintain, a website costs next to nothing to maintain. In fact, you don't even need your own product to sell online. You can work as an affiliate marketer selling clothes made by other companies or people. Every time you make a sale you are paid a commission. Whether you sell your own clothes or clothes made by others there are a few important things you need to do to successfully sell clothes online.

Get A Website for Selling Clothes Online

A website is your own virtual piece of real estate. You have complete control of the content and you can promote whatever products you want. A website has three basic components: a domain, a hosting service and a site building platform. You purchase the domain from a domain registration services, usually for around $15.00 a year. You can purchase hosting for less than $5.00 a month from a hosting service, and you use a platform like WordPress, Site Rubix, Drupal or Joomla to build your website. A website does require a small financial investment, but it is a necessity to sell stuff online.

Add useful and engaging content to your clothes website

In the early days of the Internet, you could do quite well by filling your site with banner ads and promotional copy and wait for people to click through and buy. Those days are gone. People get on the Internet primarily to find information and they will not stay on a site if they're not getting what they want. Your content should be relevant to the product you are selling but should be perceived as useful to the reader even if no sale is made. For example, if you are selling sweaters online, you could have content on your site about sweater materials, how to select a sweater this winter, best sweaters for kids, and sweaters to wear to a first date. 

 

Join Affiliate Programs Specializing in Clothes.

If you decide to sell clothes made by other people you will be an affiliate marketer. The easiest way to get started finding affiliate products to sell is to type in your product + affiliate into Google and sift through the results.

Most of the big brands have out sourced the work of finding affiliates to third party websites that run Affiliate products. These websites handle the management and payment.

Popular Affiliate Programs include Commission Junction and Google Affiliate program. You will need to register with them to promote their products. Registration is free of charge. Once you join you can choose clothes to sell from a thousands of manufacturers. Once you have chosen a product you are given a link that you place on your website. Every time a visitor on your website clicks the link he is directed to the manufacturers website. If he/she makes a purchase, you are paid a commission that is anywhere from 5% to 75% of the price of the product.

A common misconception with affiliate marketing is that you first choose a product and then you plan your marketing campaign. You really should plan your marketing campaign first, then choose your product. The reason is that a full blown Internet marketing campaign involves a lot of dedication and writing on your part. You want to choose a topic that you feel passionate enough about to consistently work on for a long period of time. It also helps to know about your topic, but it's easy to quickly learn more about a topic that holds your interest. Once you know your topic, then you can easily choose relevant products from the many possibilities.

Drive traffic to your clothes website
There are a number of strategies for driving traffic to your website and they loosely divide into two categories: free traffic generation and paid traffic generation. In one sense, neither one is free because if you are not paying for advertising, you will be spending time writing articles. If you are going to sell clothes online for the first time, I recommend starting with article writing, as you can lose a lot of money on pay per click advertising if you are not doing it just right.
Article writing is writing articles for your website and waiting for Google search engine to add them to their index.  The goal is to try and make sure your articles appear on google results every time someone searches for the type of clothes you are selling. If you are selling sweaters.Write articles about red sweater, female sweaters, kid sweater etc, so that your articles are found every time someone types those words on Google.

Article writing starts with keyword research. Target each article to a long tail (meaning more than three words) keyword potential buyers are likely to search under. Your goal is to have your articles show up on the top page for those keywords.

Your traffic will come from people finding your articles in Google, Bing and Yahoo. Write and publish articles regularly--once a day if you can, but at least two or three times a week. You can have several articles targeting the same keyword, but you should aim to have articles targeting as many keywords as possible to drive a steady stream of traffic to your site.

It is neither difficult nor complicated to sell clothes online. But it does take a bit of an investment of time and resources to get started on the right foot. You will need your own website that's filled with useful and engaging content. Then you will need to write articles targeting relevant keywords that bring visitors to your site. Finally you will need well chosen clothes that your visitors will be receptive to buying.

How To Make $30Million A Year Selling Wine Online Via An E-mail List

Jon Rimmerman, a.k.a the Garagiste, is an internet marketer extra- ordinary. He rakes in $30Million A Year Selling Wine online Via An E-mail List. The email list has just 136,000 subcribers. 

From Bloomberg Magazine

In 1996, he took a $500 advance on his VISA card to start a wine business that generates $25 to $30 million a year from his 23,000-square-foot (2,136 square meter) temperature- and humidity-controlled Seattle warehouse. He doesn’t advertise, has no partners and says he’s never had a business loan. 

I first came across his story in a New York Times article and I have looked around to learn how Jon Rimmerman built a successful business of selling wine online via email.

I share my discoveries.

Tips for Selling Wine Online 

Trust
His 136,000 email subscribers are faithful fans around the world who include old friends, and plenty of people in the wine industry.

Best business is referral
He has never advertised and he never had a website. He set up  http://www.garagistewine.com/ in 2009. The only way to subscribe to his email list was someone recommending you.

Even today, the Garagiste Web site — through which you can now sign up for the e-mail list — has no e-commerce function nor even a blog post of Rimmerman’s daily offers. You get the memo or you don’t, and Rimmerman rarely offers the same wine twice.

Avoid anything that might turn off a reader
Such as not including photographs in his daily emails. This might sound bizarre but this is how explains it “Psychologically, it’s very important,” he says. “If I told you that story but you didn’t like the look of the label” — Animale’s cat, say — you might doubt the pitch.

I think his thinking is "my taste my not be their taste."

Keep Reinventing
He takes notice of emerging competition from such sites like gilt taste. His response, "I have to stay ahead; I have to offer things no one else has,” says Rimmerman.

Offer a Mix of Cheap and Expensive
To break even he he sells plenty of wine for under $10 a bottle and pricey ones, like his recent offer of 2009 Romanée Conti at $25,821 per 12-bottle case.

Be passionate
Rimmerman says he has spent about half of the last 15 years on the road, hunting wine and story in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America, Turkey, Israel, three Canadian provinces, northern Mexico and 13 American states.

Be Fearless Stay Fearless
His father was a serial entrepreneur and he laernt from him. “He made millions and he lost millions and he was never afraid to go for it,” Rimmerman said. “That’s definitely my personality and the impetus for Garagiste — no fear, believing in yourself.”

The last one was my favorite. It is the fear of failure and ridicule that stops us from trying.

To your success!

Easy Guide On How To Redirect Your Domain To Bluehost Servers

You will need to do domain redirection if you have purchased Bluehost hosting and your domain name was purchased from another domain registrar, e.g, Go Daddy, namecheap, network solutions, ipage, tucows, dreamhost, enom, fastdomain, register.com, moniker etc.

Bluehost have a number of options available for hosting, transferring, redirecting or even transferring the registration of your existing domain name to point to bluehost servers.

If you have registered your domain name through another domain registration company and it is not currently on bluehost Domain Name Servers (DNS), you can contact your domain name registrar and request they change the Name Servers to point to bluehost hosting service.

Bluehost Domain Nameservers
Request your domain registrar to replace DNS settings with the following DNS;

ns1.bluehost.com
ns2.bluehost.com

In many cases, you can even do this on your own through your domain name registrar's Control Panel. Log in to your domain control panel and look for DNS setting. You will see names of you regisrar. Delete those and replace them with;-

ns1.bluehost.com
ns2.bluehost.com

Example of Redirecting Domain From Go Daddy To Bluehost 

To modify, add, or delete name servers (DNS) for your domain(s):

Step 1:
Log in to the GoDaddy.com Account Manager.

Step 2:
Select Manage Domains from the Domain Names dropdown menu or the Manage Your Account list.

Step 3:
Select the domain name you wish to modify using the checkboxes and then click Set Name Servers .

Step 4:
Enter your updated name server information in the spaces provided under the blue Name Servers heading on the right side of your page and click Save Changes at the bottom. Your entries should looke like this:
NS1.BLUEHOST.COM
NS2.BLUEHOST.COM

This will allow you to maintain your domain name registration with your existing registrar, but still host your domain name on bluehost servers. Standard Propagation time is 24 to 48 hours. This means after 24 hours the domain name should be correctly pointing to your Bluehost account.

This can be completed along with the transfer of your website files so that the transition from your old hosting provider to bluehost.com appears seamless, without any downtime in between.

To avoid the above hassle I always recommend you transfer your domain name registration from your current registrar to bluehost.com. Bluehost will then manage your domain name and yearly renewal, as well as host your website. You can transfer your domain name registration at any time, as long as your domain name has not expired.

40 Profitable Niches To Make Money Online

The reality of making money online is some niches are more profitable than others. You might have a passion for exotic sand but the truth is you will never make money while blogging about it.

The best tool to find out profitable niches to make money online is Google Keyword tool. The tool allows you to see and know how much advertisers are paying.

The most expensive keywords on AdWords can also be assumed as the most profitable niches online. Here they are: Next to it is average CPC

Caveat - The more expensive the Keywords the more competitive the niche. And if a niche is very competitive it will be hard to get your blog/website to rank on page one.

Tips For Niche Marketing
1.  Choose Keywords with atleast 50-100 unique searches every day that have relatively low competition that could be easy to rank for.
2. Avoid the most expensive keywords, they are expensive and dominated by big brands.
3. After you have identified the keywords buy a domain. Don't put all your target keywords in the domain because Google is punishing blogs that have been doing that. Useone word plus other generic terms.
4. Writes articles on your chosen keywords.
5. Inside those articles make sure to include the keywords in the title, subtitle and body. Don't over do it because Google is against keyword stuffing. Make sure your articles make sense.
6.  Keep writing relevant content and after about 1-2 months you may begin to see some movement to the top 2-5 pages of Google depending upon the quantity of your post, back links and competition.

20 Free Tips On How To Increase Website Traffic

When it comes to online business they say you live and die by traffic. The following free tips will teach you how to increase traffic to your website or blog. 

1. Announce Your Blog on Facebook and Twitter

Start with people nearest to you. Reach out to your friends on Facebook / twitter and ask them to share your website with friends.

2. Read and Comment on related blogs. 

Look for blogs where your target visitors hang out. Leave thoughtful comments on them. The readers will click on your link and in the process increase traffic to your website.

3. Join Forums In Your Niche

Join forums related to your niche. To find a forum in your niche go to Google and search, "forum:your niche." Forums allow you to have a link pointing to your website. The best way to increase traffic to your website from a forum is by presenting yourself as an expert. If other members see you as a good pro they will be inclined to visit your website.

4. Offer Value

Nothing increases website traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work.

5. Inform Search Engines when you post fresh content

Inform search engines and aggregators using the ping functionality when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources. See pingomatic.

6. Write More Content

Increase your website traffic by writing more often. Keep a writing schedule of at least one article per day. 

7.  Join You Tube

Youtube.com is the number two search engine after Google. Do video versions of your articles and make sure you add a link to your website at the end. Use the video to tease the viewer by promising him/her he will get more information when he visits your website/blog. 

8. Start an Email list

Nothing creates long-term website/blog traffic more than email. If you can have 100 people sign up to receive email updates when you make a blog post, it means 100 people will read your article. Imagine what it means to your website if your can have 1000 or 10,000 people on your email list?

9. Be controversial

I don't like being controversial but I have seen evidence that websites and blogs that write about controversial issues get massive traffic. Think of drudge report and huffington post.

10. Keep things simple

Attention span of most web users is low. Internet users don't like reading 5,000 words article. Look for long and complex articles and write shortened versions. 

11. Boost Pageviews

A simple trick that will boost your pageviews is installing related post plugins. This plugins pull articles related to an article and list them at the bottom of a post. 

12. Blog Carnivals

Submit articles to blog carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com) that are related to your niche. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, at least.

13. Be first to post breaking news

You will be listed on page one of Google news every time you are the first to post breaking news. Stay in the loop in your niche and try to be the first to cover any new/fresh content. 

14. Link exchange with related blogs.  

Link exchanging with other blogs can offer you a big help to increase your search engine ranking plus getting referral traffic. Just make sure you don't over do it because google has a habit of punishing those who over do it. 

15. Don't forget offline

A great tip on how to increase website traffic is leveraging your off-line marketing effort. Include your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets and adverts. 

16. Never Neglect your Blog/website

Search engines love website that remain active. Don't stay still, keep your website updated with new and fresh content and you will continously see an increase in website traffic.

17. Encourage others to Tweet your articles.  

Twitter is a site that lets people share articles, on whether people like them or not. Your readers will most likely tweet your work for you if you politely ask, or even better, add a Twitter button at the bottom of all your posts. Make sure your best articles get tweeted and started in the right direction, and if the post is good enough, it can generate thousands of visitors a day.

18. Share your articles on facebook

Start a facebook page for your website / blog. Add facebook buttons at the bottom of all your posts and ask readers to share. 

19. Write list posts. 

We all love list posts. This post is a list post. Examples are “Top 10 web hosting companies”, “7 tips I use to get repeat visitors”, and “6 e-commerce wordpress templates”. List posts are usually linked to a lot more and get a lot more traffic than normal posts.

20. Write a pillar post.  

A pillar post is a long, authoritative, instructional post. Pillar posts are time consuming but they are worth the time and effort. Pillar posts will get linked to and receive decent amounts of traffic.

Here is to abundant website traffic!

Quick Guide To Bluehost Shared Hosting

Bluehost is a shared hosting company. This simply means multiple web sites share the same server, thus reducing the cost for everyone.

As of 2012, BlueHost has over 2M domain names hosted on their servers. Sharing a server with other those millions customers may seem like a lot That  but it usually works out extremely well because most sites don't generate enough traffic or use enough resources for it to become a problem.

Why It Works Like Clock Work
All those domains are not hosted on one server but spread out over a number of servers. Something like 100 domains in one server. 

Bluehost offers substantially more disk space, data transfer, and email accounts than most people or businesses need. If every site used their quota, shared hosting would not work. But since few do, it actually works out quite nicely.

Bluehost shared hosting is perfect for personal blogs and small businesses websites. If a small business requires a static website that gives them a web presence and ability to just get contacts from customers then shared hosting is okay. If a small business needs to a website to do e-commerce they may need to pay for their own dedicated servers.

Bluehost Servers For shared hosting
For those asking how many servers do they have or do they have enough servers to much my need? Just know BlueHosts owns and maintains an astonishing number of servers, several hundred, in order to support the growing demand for it's services. With that large number of servers in multiple locations around the world they are able to guarantee optimum performance.

Bluehost name servers are

ns1.bluehost.com
ns2.bluehost.com

To be able to host your website with Bluehost you will need to point your domain name to bluehost server. Log in your domain registration page and look for DNS name servers and copy paste the above name servers.

Server Features
High quality quad core processors.
DDOS protection to guard against viruses and hackers.
Back up generators and UPS backup systems.
24/7 monitoring with daily backups

BlueHost offers a single all-in-one shared hosting package with all the features required by almost all the shared hosting users.

• Free Domain Name & Instant Setup 
• Free Website Builder with Templates 
• Free 1-Click Script Installs (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal etc.) 
• Unlimited Hosting Space, File Transfer & E-mail Accounts 
• Host Unlimited Domains on 1 Account 
• 24/7 Responsive Support 

All those for a cheap price of $6.95 per month.