Nowadays, I just settled on a few ‘trusted’ sites to get free quality wordpress themes instead of wasting countless hours looking through the mass of sites offering free wordpress blogs. If you are using wordpress as a blogging platform and are in constant need of new and fresh themes for your wordpress blogs, these few sites below will be able to satisfy your insatiable thirst for free and quality wordpress theme.

Blog Oh! Blog
Besides offering premium wordpress thmese, Blog Oh! Blog also have a number of quality free wordpress themes for download. Their free wordpress themes are as good as the premium themes that they have for sale.

Skin Press
There are a number of high quality free wordpress themes over here. Besides wordpress themes, you can also find PHP Link Directory templates over here. They are coming up with templates for Zen Cart, websites and flash websites.

Smashing Magazine
This is the site to go to for all web developers and web designers. Besides lots of information and tips on WordPress themes, Smashing Magazine also gives away free themes of their own. The free themes available for download are very high quality and popular with wordpress bloggers.

Woo Themes
Although this is premium wordpress theme site, Woo Themes do offer free and high quality themes for download. If you find their premium themes out of reach for you at present, their free wordpress themes are more than good enough for your blog for the time being.

WordPress.org
This is the place to go to for if you are looking for no fluff wordpress themes. There are thousands of wordpress themes available for download. If you have the time, this is a good place to browse through and have a look at all the different types of themes available for the wordpress community.

WP Theme Designer
This is a relatively new site that I discovered recently. Lots of promising and high quality free wordpress themes for download.

I hope the few sites above will save you lots of time and trouble looking for your dream wordpress themes. If you know of other sites to go for free quality wordpress themes for download, feel free to share it with us.

Generally, people do not like sales pitches and that is why article marketing is such an effective way to promote products and services. With article marketing you are just providing people with relevant and useful content that are beneficial to them.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the benefits associated with article marketing that is simply too important for any online marketers to ignore:

Credibility
If your articles are well written, informative and highly beneficial to your readers, you are setting yourself up as an authority in your niche. In time to come, you will gain enough creditability to become one of your niche’s leaders. When such a time arrives, you will begin to have a lot of referrals due to your reputation as one of the industry leaders.

Profits
When you set yourself up as an authority and one of the industry leaders, you start to gain trust from people who are looking for solutions to their problems. In return, your opinions and recommendations are more highly valued and thought of as compared to your competitors. As a result, your readers are more likely to buy from you and thus more profits for you.

Trust
Once you start to get recognize as one of the industry leaders, people will tend to trust you more. With that, people will start coming to you instead of you having to go out and market yourself to potential customers. You will also start to have a loyal group of readers who will keep on going back to you for solutions to their problems.

As you can see, the benefits of article marketing are all pointing to a healthy relationship with your readers which are win-win in nature. This is highly desirable because if you tend to take advantage of you relationship with your readers, there will come a time when your readers will start to desert you for one of your competitors.

A classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the very first companies to offer free web-based email services to internet users. Basically, people are attracted to the ideal of having free email services and they signed up for it. Whenever any Hotmail users sent out any email, at the bottom of each email is a short message that entice people to sign up for their very own free Hotmail email account.

As more and more people started using Hotmail to send emails to their personal networks of friends and acquaintances, more and more people are exposed to the short viral marketing message attached to the bottom of each email. In turn, a high percentage of these friends and associates will sign up for the free Hotmail email accounts, spreading the viral message even further with every email they sent out. This is viral marketing at its best.

A successful viral marketing strategy should consist of the following components:

• Free products or services that are useful or beneficial to others
• Understand the underlying nature and motivations of your targeted audience and what drives them to spread the message
• Channels for people to spread the message easily and readily
• Ability to handle the campaign’s requirements when it gain traction and become too successful

The few components above will go a long way into making your viral marketing campaigns a success. While viral marketing remains one of the best marketing strategies to use, it is not easy to implement a successful viral marketing campaign. Most marketers failed at viral marketing because they do not understand the nature of viral marketing. From the product or service itself and right up to the marketing message, everything need to be construct with “viral” in mind. Most importantly, your product or service needs to be highly beneficial and useful to people in order for them to spread your marketing message.

Not every affiliate program is the same. While one affiliate program may be a good fit for a site, the same affiliate program may not work as well for another site. Depending on the nature of your site and the niche it is from, results and the money you can make off each affiliate program can vary from site to site.

I have list down some basic tips below to guide those of you who are interested in selecting the right affiliate program for your site.

Commission Structure
My rule of thumb is for digital products, the commission needs to be at least 50% of the price. For physical products, anything from 10% to 30% will be good. Also take note of affiliate programs that has a 2 tier commission structure or even offer recurring commissions.

Customer Support
Test out the customer service before promoting the program, otherwise you will run the risk of alienating your loyal customers. Always go for affiliate program that offers at least a decent level of customer support.

Payment
Choose affiliate programs that pay out commission at least once a month. Also take note of the minimum payout amount, ideally minimum should be as low as possible, probably less than $100 will be good. Another important point to take note is the payment mode (such as paypal); make sure you are able to receive your commission.

Pricing of Products & Services
When promoting an affiliate program, please take note of the affiliate program pricing. If your site primary audience is made up of visitors with low buying power, it makes no sense to promote affiliate program with high price products and services that are out of reach for your targeted traffic.

Reputable Merchants
There are many affiliate programs that have merchants with shoddy products and services. That is why if you are able to afford it, try out the products and services first before recommending to your site’s visitors. If not you can always do some research on forums and blogs before deciding whether to promote a particular affiliate program or not.

Tracking
If an affiliate program does not offer you decent tracking tools, you can forget about it. Without decent tracking tools, there is no way you can tweak and test your results to maximize your affiliate commission.

I hope these tips on choosing an affiliate program will get you started on the right track to making healthy commissions off affiliate marketing. As you become more experience in promoting affiliate programs, finding the right affiliate programs to promote is going to be a breeze to you.

In order to attract more visitors, you can employ some of the tips below to drive more traffic to your blog. You may choose to employ some of these tips or all of them but for best results, you have to test and track which tip or tips work best for your blog.

Article marketing
Articles are very useful in driving targeted traffic to your blog. It is also a good way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche if you can provide articles that are well written and well research.

Comment on other blogs in your niche
Take stock of all the major blogs in your niche and follow them closely. Whenever possible, try to post intelligent and helpful comments whenever a post is publish. In this way, you can leverage on these high traffic blogs to attract more readers to your blog.

Guest blogging
Guest blogging is another good way to establish authority and drive traffic to your blog. Many bloggers especially those who have well established blogs are always on the lookout for more content to add on to their blogs. Contact them and offer to guest blog for them, most of them will not reject you if you are able to provide well written and informative content.

Join forums in your niche and participate
Forums are another great channel to get more visitors to your blog. Join and participate actively in well established forums in your niche. You can add a link back to your blog in your signature and profile and if you are well regard in these forums, you will find a lot of targeted traffic coming your way through your postings.

Offline promotion
Besides promoting your blog online, you can also take your blog promotion offline. For example, you can add in your blog URL to your business cards and whenever you distribute them, it is another channel to get more visitors to your blog.

Optimize your blog for the search engines
Learn how to optimize your blog properly for the search engines. You need to understand and learn about on page and off factors which can directly affect your rankings in the search engines. It pays to master some basic SEO skills.

Proactive in networking with fellow bloggers
Build rapport and long term relationships with fellow bloggers in your niche.

Quality Content
Nothing beats quality content when it comes to getting more traffic. Provide more useful and quality content to your visitors and you will find them coming back for more.

Reply to comments
Whenever you receive any comments that are not consider spam, make sure you reply back. Nothing hurts a blog more than having a unresponsive blog owner who do not reply to their readers’ comments.

Submit your blog to blog directories, site directories, RSS feed directories and search engines
Submitting your blogs to these directories and search engines will get the search engines to crawl, index and list your blog quicker and at the same time give you some decent traffic and build some backlinks back to your blog.

Tag your posts
Tags are very useful in getting your blog notice by the search engines. It is also a good way for your site visitors to find your blog easily especially in blog search engines such as Technorati where readers perform searches on blogs based on tags.

While there are many ways to attract visitors and boost your blog’s traffic levels, getting them to return is an entirely different matter. This is something you have to work on if you have trouble getting repeated visitors back to your blog. Other than that, the tips listed above are good ways to drive more traffic to your blog.

Personally for me, I have a list of core or essential wordpress plugins that I always use for any wordpress blogs that I set up. This core list consists of wordpress plugins which I have tested and find them extremely useful for my wordpress blogs. In a nutshell, this is a list of wordpress plugins that no blogger should be without.

While I may be basied in my choices and should you prefer, you can always set up your own list of preferred or core wordpress plugins. This makes it easier for those of you who tend to create a lot of wordpress blogs continuously. I hope this list is a good start to help you build up your own list of core wordpress plugins.

Akismet
Akismet is a very effective plugin that helps to filter out spam comments and save you much time in combating spams. To activate your copy of Askimet which is build into the current version of wordpress, you need a wordpress API key from WordPress.com.

All In One SEO Pack
The All In One SEO Pack plugin allows you to optimize your Wordpres s blog for SEO purposes. This is highly recommended for those bloggers that want to optimize their blogs for the search engines.

Google Analytics
If you are using Google Analytics to track your wordpress blogs, this is a plugin that you cannot ignore. This plugin allows you to input your Google Analytics code into your blog’s header or footer to track your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate sitemap of your blog that are supported by the major search engines such as ASK, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.

Simple Tags
This plugin is very useful and effective plugin for creating tags. With it, you can choose to mass edit tags or one by one or even get it to auto tagging for your posts. In a nutshell, this is the most complete tagging plugin for wordpress that I have seen.

Subscribe To Comments
A plugin to solicit return visits from your readers. Basically, you readers can subscribe to comments make on a certain post and get updates and follow ups on subsequent comments through email their email. This is useful for blogs that encourage readers to comment and voice out their feelings.

WordPress SEO Pager
For those bloggers who are looking to optimize their blogs for the search engines, this is another great plugin to have. Bascially, this plugin is an enhanced pagination control for wordpress blogs.

WP Super Cache
The WP Super Cache plugin will help to improve your wordpress blog’s performance and loading speed though caching of your blog’s pages.

If you are looking for more wordpress plugins to add on to your list, try visiting WordPress.org to search for plugins that can help to improve and enhance the performance of your wordpress blog. Alternatively, if you have some good wordpress plugins to share, feel free to do so.

I have include in this list what I feel to be the best 10 free high quality premium wordpress themes I have come across. There are probably many themes that are better than what I have listed here and I would appreciate if you can share them with us. I hope you will find these themes useful!

Arthemia

Black Magic

Color Paper

Curious Demo

Freemium

Irresistible

Magazeen

Snapshot

Typebased

Vintage

Firstly, as internet access is cheap and readily available, more and more people have access to the internet. As a result, individuals and businesses have access to a large and global base of customers. Local businesses in the past will be hard pressed to market their products and services pass their locality, however the appearance of the internet change all those factors that make it hard for business to bypass their local customer base.

Also, setting up a web presence online is relatively easy and inexpensive. In the past, when the internet is still in its infancy, it can be quite costly to set up a web presence online. Nowadays, it cost less than a meal for two at a fine dining restaurant to get started on marketing your products and services online. As compare to a conventional offline business, the capital need to start off an online business is very much lower.

If you own an offline business, it is virtually inescapable that you should have a website to promote your products and services. A website is essentially a 24/7 office or shop (depending on your business) to market your products and services to prospective customers. That is why if you own an offline business and do not have a website currently, it is time for you to look into the possibility of creating a website to give a boost for your business.

Internet marketing can also refers to a way that people can make money online from home, like some sort of home based business. People who are involved in internet marketing are known as internet marketers. Internet marketers make use of the internet to make money through a variety of business models such as but not limited to affiliate marketing, ecommerce and email marketing.

In a nutshell, internet marketing refers to the marketing of products and services over the internet medium.
For businesses, it is a new medium to reach out to global audiences. For individuals, it is a means to make money online. No matter how you see it, internet marketing is only going to gain in popularity and stature as the internet matures.

There are many benefits to link building such as:

• Helps the website to get indexed by the search engines
• Raised the profile of your website
• Targeted traffic from relevant websites
• Wider search engine exposure
• Higher link popularity and page rank

When building links, it is important to take note of the anchor text or keyword to use. This can have a beneficial effect to your overall link building campaign if you use the correct anchor text and keywords. If you want to rank high for a particular keyword or keyword phrase, you need to spend more time and effort to build links using that particular keyword or keyword phrase as anchor text.

Another point take note of is to build your links naturally and organically over a period of time. Although it is hard to suppress the urge to start building links likes there is no tomorrow, search engines and especially Google do penalize websites that build links too fast too soon.

Also, remember spread out your link building efforts across all mediums and websites rather than concentrating on a few sources. One good example is the use of social bookmarking sites to bookmark or build links to your content. Although social bookmarking sites are a good source of to build links and drive traffic, you should never rely fully on a single source. Spread out your link building efforts to article submission blogs, forums and other social media sites such like Squidoo.

Although link building is a task that many webmasters dreaded, it is an essential part of any webmasters activities. If you have the dough, you can outsource your link building campaigns; otherwise another option is to invest in software such as Article Post Robot, Directory Submitter or Backlink Submitter to hasten up your link building efforts.

In a nutshell, if you do a proper link building campaign, it can literally translate to more money for you. Whether you are trying to drive more targeted traffic to your offers or selling text links to other webmasters, it pays to devote time and energy on your link building efforts. I hope this post will give you a good overview of what link building is all about. Also check out my the other post on “Link Building For Beginners” to learn more about link building.

Although there are many paid social bookmarking software and tools available for those who can afford it, it is better for a beginner to make use of free social bookmarking services initially before upgrading to paid services. There are in fact some good and free social bookmarking services around for you to utilize. I have compiled a list of free social bookmarking service which you can utilize to bookmark your websites’ content.

Only Wire

Socializer

Social Marker

Social Marking

The list is by no means comprehensive but it is a good enough list for those of you who cannot afford paid services, software and tools right now. If you know of other free social bookmarking services to recommend, feel free to let us know.