Customizing Your Blog Theme To Make More Money Online

One of the methods I employ for both SEO and Adsense optimization is keeping things simple. Simple text based sites that make the Adsense and Google bots jobs easy to navigate and index my sites for the Keywords I am targeting. Fancy complex sites are wonderful if your goal is to attract readers. Thanks to the likes of Darren Rowse (of Problogger fame) many bloggers assume that having readers and making money go hand in hand. If you are selling ads then having a lot of readers will help. If you are trying to sell product or use CPC programs like Adsense then you will find that readers are not going to buy anything from you or click your ads. You need search engine traffic for that to happen as they are the type of visitor that is actively looking for something - info or a product - and if you present them with what they seek they will buy or click. Moreover they aren't going to search around on a fancy complex site hoping to find what they want. If the answer is right in front of their face they click. If not they leave and look elsewhere.

This is why keeping things simple pays off when using adsense. A simple plain and boring site may turn off readers but it allows search visitors to see your money links or ads the moment they hit your page. Buyers don't want to sift through posts or a page full of beautiful photos and widgets looking for the item they seek. If the item is right in front of them when the hit your site they will click or buy it and never remember your site at all. You don't care - the site has done it's job. It made you money.

Over the past year I have seen dozens of themes developed that are based on my truly ugly theme that you are looking at right now. The nice thing about Blogger is that it is pretty ugly right out of the box and is easy to modify without any technical skills. WP or WordPress blogs are a different matter as you need some technical knowledge in order to use and modify WP themes. I don't have that knowledge as all my WP friends can attest to. I use Blogger because I am a Techno Challenged dinosaur and my brain is full - I have no room to learn anything else and don't own a cell phone because my eyes glassed over the last time someone tried to explain how to add a phone number into the memory. (True - I may be the only person left in the developed world without a cell phone!) The good news is that you can still do really well online if you are a techno dunce like me. You just need a few friends to help out when things cross over the line between slapping out content (I call it Typing - if you are under 30 you probably call it Data Entry) and setting up a WP blog.

Unfortunately many of my readers don't fully comprehend the limits of my technical inabilities and constantly email me asking questions regarding their themes - specifically how to modify their wordpress themes to duplicate my simple is better Blogger approach. To this end I asked an old friend of mine to intervene and lend a hand as he modifies WP themes for a living. I asked Costa to write up a simple post so that I could refer my readers to his site and of course he didn't do that because he knows me too well. Instead he wrote the following Griz length post just to tell you all to head over to his site if you need help modifying your themes...   (I have trained you folks too well!) Lol

Here is Costa's post - his link is at the bottom and he has been a great friend to our community over the years and will go out of his way to help you. Take him up on it!  

When you start a blog for the sole purpose of making money online or anything else for that matter, the first thing that faces you is your blog’s theme. Though MMO gurus don’t specifically tell you that the looks of your blog plays a part in your earnings, many Internet Marketers have discovered that a blog or a site’s layout, the color and the fonts does play an important part in increasing click-through and conversion rates. If your theme is right, and by that does not mean beautiful, you can and will make more money online.

Lots of bloggers have the misconception that if they make up their blog to be fancy, unique and beautiful, they will attract readers to come in droves and in turn make lots of money. Purist, like my friend Grizz here, has other ideas. They want a simple, boring and a blog theme that is on the brink of being plain ugly. They will tell you that an ugly looking theme makes the most money and they have good reasons to believe so.

A beautiful and pleasant looking theme keeps your readers at your site for a longer time, something that all bloggers yearn for. They want their readers reading everything they wrote and then maybe stay on to make a comment or two. After that, they reluctantly leave, waiting anxiously for your next update so they can come back to enjoy the pleasant surroundings. Some do not wait, they come back twice a day just to drool over that beautiful theme that you are using. Well and good. You have garnered yourself a bunch of loyal followers. Sick and bad. They will not be clicking on anything. Be it an affiliate link or an Adsense Ad. Their eyes are all over the beautiful Theme to take note of anything else.

A secret not much openly mentioned by pure Adsense masters like Grizz is they hate blog stragglers. People who comes to their blog and refuse to leave. Especially so if it is their money making sites. So they devise ways chase them away as quick as possible. One of the many ways is to make their blogs look as ugly and as boring as they possibly can. If there is a way to make their Adsense blogs smells bad, I definitely think they will do it.

Imagine yourself accidentally dropping into a sewerage pit. Your natural and instinctive reaction will be to stretch out your arms to hold on to something so you can get out as fast as possible. In the same sense and with the same reaction, anyone who stumbles into a boring blog or smelly one if there is a possibility, the first thing that comes to mind is to look for the fastest and the nearest exit point. Where is the fastest and nearest exit? Your ads, of course. It only takes one click. Any thing else will take at least two. Think about it.

There are of course many other creative ways make visitors to your money sites want to leave as soon as possible. Some sets their theme’s background to a very dark color and set their fonts just slightly brighter so it is on the verge of being illegible. Then their Ads are shown in bright neon colors shining the way out for their visitors. Just like the “EXIT” sign inside the cinema. Let your imagination run wild and you will come up with a dozen ways to make your visitors want to leave by clicking your Ads.

All this theme manipulations will however come to naught if you cannot attract any visitors to come drop by. We all know that organic traffic is the best paying traffic. To attract organic traffic, other than all the tips that Grizz has taught us here, we will also need what some call a SEO Theme. Basically, most WordPress Themes are already very well optimized for Search Engines but there is still room for improvements. Proper use of tags, Meta descriptions and so on can improve the Themes visibility and provide better nourishment for Google bots. There are tons of free tutorials out there that reach you just how to do that.

By having to do all this to improve your blog’s income, don’t you think it is a nessicity to know how to customize your Theme? You can’t possibly employ someone to do it for you each time you start money making site and using the same theme on all your sites leaves a footprint as big as Bigfoot’s for people to exploit, not to mention our friendly neighborhood giant, Big Daddy G. Once he finds out you are running an empire of Adsense blogs with the same look and design to chase away visitors, he will fry you. So do yourself a small favor. Visit my site and learn some basic Theme Modification Tips so you can use a different Theme for each of your money making sites.

Thanks Costa.

In my attempt to build up our community please let me know if you have something useful to help us all make money online. I will be more than happy to lend a hand getting your message out. If it benefits you - no problem but make sure it benefits us all. (A new forex robot will not cut the mustard.)

Cheers

Griz