The most important thing to do to monetize your site is to have a simple theme that will not distract the surfer from the content, one that offers only one way out – I.E., the link you put there to monetize your site, whether it be Adsense  or Affiliate Marketing, or the link to your own Sales Page.

• Simple (Ugly) WP Themes

My concept here is that by using the (ugly?) default Word Press theme and modifying only three things, you can create totally individual, functional and aesthetically pleasing blogs very fast. This idea (using ugly blogs) is heavily promoted by monetizing Guru “Grizzly” Brears in his authoritative Make Money for Beginners blog, and widely accepted by those in the know. I have been doing this for some time with my new blogs, and have developed a ‘noob’ proof system to do so.

• Fast Upgrades

A blog page consists of three basic elements, the Header, the Body, and the Footer, and in  the default WP theme each of these elements are built on backgrounds; kubrickheader.jpg, kubrickfooter.jpg, and kubrickbgwide.jpg. By editing these 3 pics in your favourite photo program, then saving them to the proper folder [wp-content/themes/default/images] you can change the entire look of your blog without fussing with any tricky CSS or HTML code. A really magical bonus for this is that whenever you update your WP version, you need only re-upload these 3 pics to restore your personalised upgrade.  How about that? – a 30 second upgrade!

• Plugin-Proof  Modifications

By using the default WP theme you are guaranteeing that there will be no complications with plugins whenever WP brings out a new security upgrade, and this seems to need to be done more frequently to baffle those evil ‘exploiters’. Your plugins will always work perfectly with the default theme.

• ‘Check Out’ here!

The other really important thing to do with your WordPress theme is set up your widgets so that only content and your key [monetizing] link(s) are visible ‘above the fold’; that is when the page is first viewed and BEFORE any scrolling takes place – that way, the non-serious, social traffic surfers can exit the page with one click, and hopefully it will be your “pay-off” link! Viola, Payola! Visit Costa and get another slant on  this idea of simple modifications for your Word Press Theme.

• Example
  

  Adelaide Gift Company (Modded Default WP Theme!)

Here is one of my blogs that use the method I have been outlining here.  It looks dramatically different from the WP default theme, but is really just that theme, with some basic ‘PhotoShopping” applied to the backgrounds.

• Update -

The  maker of this theme I have used for a couple of years has disappeared and the theme would not update to the latest [2.8.4] version, so I have adapted the standard WP default theme to look just like my original Blog.  This again illustrates what can easily be done to the basic WP Kubrick theme. If you have problem updating WP, check out WordPress Permalink 404 Error. I used the simple methods outlined above, but had to do quite a bit of tweaking to the style sheet to get the font colors to look like my original favourite ‘BinaryBonsai’ Business Theme.

Everybody is always looking for ways to “Monetize Your Site” and one of the most popular methods today is focusing on ‘niche‘ markets with web sites set up to specifically  target a carefully selected keyword (How to find Long Tailed Keywords).

• Server Hogs

Monetize Your Site

Building niche sites is a great marketing ploy and can work very well, but the downside for me is that because I prefer to use blogs to set up these niche sites, I am creating greedy space munching server hogs. Each blog requires a MySql database and uses lots of disc space for the WordPress blog files. Every blog is slow loading because of the nature of the beast, and the large number of files needed to display the first page. Do not despair, there is an alternative to these SERVER HOGS -

• Brilliant Solution – ‘My Starter Blog’.

Steve McGrath over at McGrath Info Solutions has invented a ‘flat-file’ blog that requires no database, and is very fast to load with very small files.  This resolves my reservations about band-width and server hogs very nicely. The program files on the server disc are 116kb and the Theme files 132kb – a total of 248kb – compared with the multi-mebabytes (4 MB + Plugins + Content) of WordPress files required for every installation.

• Alternative to WordPress, Joomla, Whatever

Have a read of the authors site here to find out more about this great alternative to WordPress, or read the My Starter Blog post on my other blog or Google for My Starter Blog Review to discover more opinion about this clever little program.

• Great Method

Start setting up some of these mini-blogs and cashing in on niche markets, and you will be well on the way to Monetize Your Site!

We assume you already have your Adsense account with Google organized and a ‘Skyscraper’ Google or Amazon (whatever) ad already to paste in.

Open your WPress admin dashboard and navigate to Display(Presentation)/Widgets. You are looking for a widget called Text 1 ( or 2 or whatever is the next free widget.)

If no Text widgets are available in the “Available Widget’ dialog box, scroll down and selct 1 or 2 from the ‘Text Widget’ dialog and when you “save” there will be one or more in the “Available Widget’ dialog. Drag one of these up to the appropriate sidebar box. Click on the little Page Icon, and a dialog will open where you can edit the widget Title and paste in your Google Ad code.