Edited June19/06 to remove Wordpress Themepark and change it to the Wordpress Theme Browser, which the former owner of Themepark is now administrating.
I recently created my very first Wordpress theme that I wanted to offer for free to the world. After uploading it to my blog, and tagging it with Technorati, and adding a screenshot with tags to Flickr, and adding some social bookmarks. I thought I had better do some research to find out where else I could submit my themes for the widest distribution.

1) The Wordpress Codex is the best place to start. All you need to do is register for an account, then edit the appropriate category in the wiki format to add your theme. The result is an instant PR7 link to your site.

2) Wordpress-Themes.org has a flashed-based file upload utility that is kind of cool. It’s a small list right now, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. Theme page currently a PR2

3) Leave a comment on How to Blog’s list of 875+ free themes for Wordpress and you’ll get some traffic from the comment section right away. And hopefully you’ll get added to the next update of the list. The list is PR5, and the comment section doesn’t appear to use the nofollow tag.

4) BloxFlux Theme Directory requires registration and a screenshot that’s 640×480, but if you jump through the hoops, your theme is added instantly. The theme page is a PR7, but your link will be on a unique page for your theme. Based on the directory structure, that page is likely to get a PR4 or 5 when Google updates again.

5) Wordpress Theme Browser (PR7)takes an uploaded zip file of your theme from your hard drive as a submission, automatically creates a screenshot and grabs the theme info from the style.css file. Very slick, and instant. Be sure to link to your site from the style.css for best effect. Now that this site is up and running, the Wordpress Themepark is offline… I think that leaves an opening for another site to come in and start with some new innovations.
6) The Open Directory Project seems to be listing only those sites that have multiple themes, but if you can make one, you can make two… and the ODP gets replicated at Google as well as other high-traffic sites.

7) Smaller link directories like the one found here

WordpressTheme dot com (PR5) seems to be down for the count, but it might be worthwhile submitting your theme via the contact form

9) Not yet fully functional, it seems, is wp-themes.org (PR6), where you can host your theme, and have it displayed wiki-style, like wp-plugins but for themes. Keep your eye on this site.

Anything I missed? Add a comment.

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.

My advice… don’t buy into the tagging for Page Rank idea.

Seriously, as soon as serveral hundred people simultaneously start to spam the social bookmarking sites with multiple accounts and trashy results, they’ll start with a rel=nofollow tag. Then they’ll add a Captcha to every bookmark entry form to make the automated software useless. And your $150 will be down the drain without much to show for it.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t use tag and ping. But rather than using tools to abuse the services, find new techniques to use them to build traffic.

In the end, tagging for traffic will outlast tagging for pagerank by a long shot.