My Favorite Wordpress Themes

I have a lot of sites in my portfolio these days, and on the majority of them I use Wordpress. I like Wordpress because its so simple to use and easy to customize with different themes and plugins. In the past, for each new blog I set up, I would go to google and search for some free theme to use. It always took quite awhile to find a theme I liked, and even more time to customize the look of it to how I wanted.

After I started making some money online, I decided to invest in a few premium Wordpress Themes. There are a lot of fantastic looking themes out there and many are worth much more than you pay for theme. Here are three of my favorite themes I bought in the past year.

Thesis Theme - This is hands down my favorite Wordpress theme, and I've made it my default Wordpress theme for any review sites I create. Out of the box, it looks great, plus its extremely customizable. The settings panels allow me to tweak everything I want initially, but if I want to do some major work to the site, I make use of the extensive Thesis hooks. Using hooks takes a little time to get used to, but once you master the concept, you'll start loving how flexible it makes things.

Affiliate Theme - This is another Wordpress theme which is great for making affiliate landing pages. When I need a landing page for my PPC campaigns, Affiliate Theme is my Wordpress Theme of choice for this. It's a very flexible theme, and I can create many different types of affiliate landing pages with it very quickly.

Squeeze Theme - This is a new Wordpress theme that I just bought. It's purpose is to make it very easy to create squeeze pages for capturing emails. I've been really getting into email marketing these days, and Squeeze Theme is the perfect theme for this. This is definitely a theme I will be using much more in the future.

While it's hard to make the case for purchasing a premium wordpress theme sometimes, I think the themes I described above are well worth the money. Check them out for yourselves, and see if you want to invest in one.

Make More Money Online With Automation Tools

Making money online is not always fun. If you want to be a master of seo, then you have to perform mundane tasks like creating accounts, posting links, and other boring tasks. Sure you could outsource some of this stuff, but that requires money and time to train the other person. That's why I am always looking to automate the tasks that I do online.

One useful tool that I've found is a Firefox Addon called iMacros. iMacros lets you record any actions you make inside of Firefox. You can then save these actions as scripts and play them back later. With it, I've created scripts to check my PPC Coach affiliate earnings, post the articles I've spun with Magic Article Rewriter, and a whole lot more. It's a huge timesaver and you can do quite a lot with it. It's a free download so I recommend that you check it out.

However, I've recently been introduced to a new program called UBot. UBot is essentially a development environment for creating web bots. It utilizes what it calls a Visual Scripting language, which allows you to create scripts in a visual way. It's quite a bit more powerful than iMacros as it allows you to use branches, loops, and other constructs that you'd find in any standard programming language. For my first bot, I was able to create a Google scraping tool that saved the results to a file which I could then import into Keyword Elite 2.0 for further processing. I'm still learning how to use the tool more effectively, but there's really a ton of potential here.

Make Quick Cash With CPA Polls

One of my most profitable methods for making money online is with CPA polls. Basically I come up with some poll questions related to current popular news topics and I tell my visitors they have a chance to win some sort of prize for voting. The prizes are usually CPA email submits, and I get paid from $1.10 to $1.70 for each visitor that fills in their email address. With these CPA polls, I can usually generate 80-200% ROI and by running several of these polls a day, I can make a nice chunk of change.

I've found that polls usually work quite well on the Google and Yahoo content networks. You can get very cheap clicks that way, and if you have a big enough keyword list (2000+), you can generate quite a bit of traffic to your poll pages. Currently, my favorite tool to generate keywords is to use Keyword Elite. KE2, the recently released version of the tool has some really great features that makes it easy to come up with a big list of keywords.

One thing Keyword Elite can do is add a word or phrase to the beginning or end of a keyword list. If I am doing a sports poll for example, I first like to create an initial keyword list and then add words like ESPN, Yahoo Sports, NYTimes, etc to each word in my list. With KE2, this is super easy, and I can multiply my list of keywords in no time flat.

The second feature I like to use is the Google ABC function. When invoked, Keyword Elite goes out and searches for my root keyword + each letter of the alphabet to come up with new unique keywords. These are keywords that aren't picked up by any other keyword tool and they really work well on the content network.

CPA polls are a really easy way for newbies to get into pay per click marketing. It teaches you about bidding strategies, keyword research, campaign creation and much more. Plus, it is a relatively inexpensive way to get into the game. Try it out, if you want to make money fast.

Problems with double meta refresh

There are several ways to hide your referrer (the source of where a visitor is coming from), but one of the most popular ways is to use what's called a double meta refesh (DMR). Instead of linking directly to a site, you redirect through two different php files which has the effect of blanking your referrer. Thus, when your affiliate manager looks to see where a visitor is coming from, he won't see anything your traffic source will be protected.

Unfortunately, there a few issues when using this technique. First, using a DMR will not work for certain browsers, namely Safari, Chrome, and Opera. Worst case, you don't check for these users and their referrers show up, defeating the whole purpose of using the double meta refresh. The best you can do in this situation is to check for users of these browsers and redirect them to some other page. Whether you can stomach the lost traffic is up to you.

The second issue with blanking your referrer using a double meta refresh is that some affiliate networks are very strict about it. I know from personal experience that CJ.com will question you immediately once they find you are blanking the referrers. Don't fight it. Just play by the rules, or send your traffic somewhere else.

Using a double meta refresh is one of the easier ways to hide your traffic sources. However it does have its drawbacks which you need to be aware of, so make sure you are appropriately informed.

Linkwheeling With Web 2.0 Sites

This is one of my favorite strategies for increasing the rankings of my sites. The idea behind this tactic is to pick some highly ranked Web 2.0 sites, create an account on them, and post a related article on the site. These sites allow you to include the anchor text of your own choosing which make them excellent for creating keyword targeted backlinks. Once you've posted your article, you can then submit the RSS feeds from the sites to RSS aggregators and use social bookmarking tools like Bookmarking Demon for example to increase the link juice they provide. All this strategy requires is some time and effort, but it really does work quite well. This is also known as the link wheel strategy, because if you link your web 2.0 submissions together, it forms a wheel with your money site in the middle.

Here are some of my favorite Web 2.0 sites to use.

Squidoo
Blogger
Wordpress
Jimdo
Blog.com
Wetpaint
Tumblr

I would also include Hubpages.com on the list, but it is a little more strict in terms of the content it allows. Plus, you don't get dofollow links from it unless you have a hub score greater than 75. This means you have to spend a little more time making sure you have a reputable account. Still, it's quite worth it as many of my hubs rank very well and they get a decent amount of quality traffic.

There are a ton of other web 2.0 sites you can apply this strategy too. I don't normally go overboard with this as I feel the sites I've listed above do quite well on their own. Try it out on your own sites and let me know if you see any results.

Making The Most Out Of Your Spun Articles

I utilize article marketing a lot to build backlinks back to my sites. Creating content though is a lot of work, and one way I maximize my effort is to use an article rewriter and spinner. The article rewriter portion lets me create one piece of content and then add a special spinning syntax to my articles. Then using an article spinner, I can take this single article and generate hundreds or thousands of unique articles. Currently my software of choice to do this is called Magic Article Rewriter. It has some excellent features that makes article spinning easier so I suggest you check it out.

So what are some uses of your spun articles? Well here are a few ideas.

- Post them on your blog
- Submit them to Web 2.0 sites like Hubpages, Squidoo, Blogger, etc
- Submit them to Article Directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, etc
- Submit them to Article Submission Service like Unique Article Wizard, AMAutomation, etc
- Package it as part of a special report or ebook to generate an opt-in list

These are just some of the ways to use spun articles. It's an awesome way to generate backlinks, so be sure to check it out.

Welcome To My Make Money Online Life

On this blog, I am going to be writing about my adventures with making money online as an internet marketer. Sure, this has been done by thousands of sites before, but I promise to have my own unique take on everything. We'll go into pay per click marketing using Adwords and Facebook. And I'll show you some of my favorite SEO techniques to increase the rankings on your sites. Hope you will enjoy my Make Money Online Life.