I usually don’t explicitly throw my endorsements at products. Usually I’m terribly sceptical about everything overpriced and IM related, but this really is cool.

If you use WordPress to power your blogs, but don’t know a whole lot about coding or css, you’ve probably got a pretty standard template for your blog. And, the more standard your blog looks, the more likely it gets mistaken for a splog by your visitors, and by splog hunters.

But customizing a WP theme isn’t exactly a job for an html/css newbie.

But now it actually might be. As long as you can customize a header graphic that’s 800X200, you can create your own theme, with your choice of left or right hand menu layouts, in no time at all.

John Delavera’s WP Themerator is an application for Windows that makes the process of creating a theme as easy as clicking a few buttons and choosing an image. It really is spectacular. In about an hour, including image creating, I created a new theme for Ian for father’s day.

Seeing that I’ve seen generic WordPress templates for sale for over $50, you could even use this software to start your own custom blog template creation service. Or just make all your blogs look niche-tastic. Ug. I can’t believe I used that word.
And again, I’ll try to avoid the hype, but there is a limited time special this weekend if you can use Paypal to purchase.

So… here is what you need to do:

1. Click here to visit the intro video page to see how easy it is to create your own blog theme for WordPress.

2. Click the link: “Download Themerator today!”

3. Fill in your email address.

4. Insert the following coupon in the next page where it is asking for the coupon:

weekend

…then click the “Update form” button. Verify the change in the price.

5. Select “Paypal” from the list and proceed with.

That’s it!

It’s amazing how quickly the internet marketing crowd jumps from one fad to another based solely on who’s got the latest ebook out.

Blog and Ping is dead…. even though it still works if you use it right.

Remember the brief flare of press releases? They still work incredibly well even though they’re sooo 2005.

It won’t be long before tag and ping is forgotten as well.

And RSS. Wasn’t that supposed to be revolutionary? Now all IM folk are using RSS for is to put newsfeeds from Yahoo and Google on junk adsense pages.

But creating your own feed and allowing others to use it seems to work quite well to get incoming PR as well as driving traffic.

I recently started creating sets of 52 weekly “tips” articles, published only by RSS feed, with links to my related sites. After a few weeks of publishing so people could see the quality, I posted the availability of the feeds for publication as content in forums and email lists related to the subjects, and today I found my RSS-fed articles on one subject placed on the front page of a PR 7 website, and on sub-pages of several other sites with PR values ranging from 3 to 5.

These are fairly active websites and the traffic coming in from these sites is significant.

I’ve also noticed traffic coming in from personalized homepages at Yahoo and Google, as well as online feed aggregators. I’m sure others are receiving the feeds in their desktop clients as well.

RSS publishing has, thus far, been far more effective for me than article marketing which takes four weeks (in my experience) before you start seeing high quality backlink results in Google, and rarely results in long-term placement of your link on a high PR page.

RSS publishing is like article marketing without the article directory submissions, with the added benefit of the possibility of a personal subscriber base thrown into the mix.

Why was it abandoned? Maybe just too geeky. Maybe the requirement that you actually publish something of value was too great once people discovered that feeds full of spam get few results. But I’m not complaining. I have no competition trying to edge in on my new great placements on other people’s sites.
Are there other marketing methods that IM has left abandoned in its wake that you could revive with a Web 2.0 twist?

You’ll have less competition for eyeballs with those old methods, and possibly great results as well.

While social bookmarking sites are still dealing with the onslaught of spam following the release of Sean Wu’s Tag and Ping book, this blog has steadily gained traffic and search engine rank, not by spamming, but by using the techniques I explained in my “Tag and Ping for Affiliate Marketers” post.

Before I began blogging again last week, I had taken a multi-month hiatus from this blog, and traffic to it had suffered. When I returned to blogging my alexa rank was over 500,000. This is a screenshot of my traffic rank as it currently stands. A week and a day after my first serious return post.

While my 3 month stats are still in the high range, my rank for the day and week are much improved.

A lot of my traffic has come from social bookmarking sites, Technorati and blog searches, and my search engine results have started showing up quite well too. Check out this results for the term “tag and ping” in Google:

Think about it. All the gurus with SEO experience were plugging the Tag and Ping release, yet my little old blog got the #1 natural search result for the term. And I’m not even pitching the product.

I did exactly four things that brought me the extra traffic:

1) Used technorati tags and Flickr tags as I outlined in previous posts.

2) I commented and tracked back a few other blogs that were discussing the tag and ping release

3) Bookmarked my blog posts in about 10 different social bookmarking sites, using one account. That’s it.

4) Used my blog address in my signature when posting a few posts to related forums. I would estimate less than a dozen posts in total.

I didn’t misuse any site’s resources. I didn’t spam anyone. But my traffic has increased, according to Alexa, by 225% in a little over a week.

Just imagine if you do this for a product you’re actually trying to sell!

My last 100 visitors came from:

Tag and Ping Fallout
It didn’t take long for the first tag and ping spammers to hit the ground running after the release of Tag and Ping. In fact, the very next morning Charles Heflin in his SEO20/20 blog caught screenshots of an overloaded Jots page.

Just this morning, I went to Jots.com and noticed that one user has taken up the entire 1st page of results…..The user “Richiz” has hit Jots so hard that (at the time of this writing) Jots had to shut down temporarily.

And Splork from Lost Ball in High Weeds noticed the spam affecting Technorati too:

Now granted I haven’t been paying much attention to tag and ping until recently, but a couple of tags that are currently popular in the last hour are nothing more than spam. They can’t even spell correctly. “Loose Weight” or “Lose Weight”. You decide. The Adsense tag is also popular this particular hour and interesting in that if you go to one of the weblogs it is simply an ad for a clickbank product on Adsense. Actually if you go to the top 5 they are all ads for something.

Technorati seemed to be working on the problem by Sunday afternoon, and as I write this the hot tags seem to have returned to normal. Jots is currently “down for maintenance”, which can be loosely interpreted as “we’re shutting off the spam till we get a fix in place”

I didn’t track closely, but I didn’t even notice a blip in the results of del.icio.us and blinklist. Presumably they already had some pretty good systems in place to keep the junk from hitting the front page.

It’s sad to see marketers taking the low road with tag and ping, but it seems as though most of the bookmarking sites have gotten the problem under control already.

RSS Revenues
This weekend I was introduced to a new feed aggregator called FeedShow. Feedshow is a web-based aggregator that lets feed publishers participate in revenue generation through the display of AdSense ads running in the feeds. The adsense ads only appear in the feeds of participating publishers, and they’ll rotate between FeedShow’s and the feed publisher’s accounts.

The method to sign up as a blog publisher is particularly easy. Simply post an entry to your blog that looks like this:

--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]
provider=[Google]
uid=[pub-8870932556899172]
option=[8411175611]
--[Subscribe FEEDSHOW Revenue sharing program]

where uid is your Google Publisher Id and Option is your channel code.

The feedreader is pretty slick, with the added advantage of being available to you wherever you are, as long as you can find some access to the Web.

It doesn’t seem to have a lot of users yet, and much of the navigation of the main site is in french, but it’s worth taking a look at in any case. It costs nothing to sign up, and if you’re already using AdSense, it’s an easy matter to plug in your codes and give it a whirl.

This particular site may not be the future of RSS, but it might spawn some ideas for the “next big thing.”

Web 2.0 Idea Management

Another site I stumbled across this weekend is Wridea.com. Wridea is an Idea Management application based on Getting Things Done that’s pretty slick. It’s got a nice interface, and a lot of flexibility.

There are five core principles in GTD. Collect, create ideas in wridea, Process, move them to another categories and pages or delete them, Organize, create pages or categories for next actions, projects, waiting for and someday/maybe, Review, browse your ideas easily and finally Do, this is your thing.

It’s free, and worth giving it a run-through to see if it’ll work for you.

Ebay has started offering blogs to its sellers to help them sell their products, wikis to collect informative articles about products, and a tagging option for the blogs, reviews and guides.

Ebay isn’t the first retailer to dip a toe into the waters of social commerce. Amazon has introduced plogs and tags into their store to tap into the power of social networks to drive sales.

And Yahoo has the Shoposphere which attempts the same thing, with personalized shopping pages and funky tag clouds to encourage further exploration.

What’s next in the world of social commerce? I’m not sure, but with the increasing popularity of blogs and social networks, this is definitely one of the “Next Big Things” that will soon expand out of the elite and trickle down to smaller ecommerce sites as well.