A blog is a great way to express yourself and stay in touch with your peers. Not all blogs are meant to focus on written content. You can be a photographer looking to showcase his talent and publish photos accompanied by a short description. You can be a businessman or salesperson promoting certain products. You can be a writer or a journalist. You can turn your blog into a private online journal. You can publish your short stories or poetry, if you trust that no one will steal them!

However, no matter the nature of its content, every blog should have an appealing design. We all know visitors always come back if they like what they see and read. This is why it is very important for you to choose a stylish blog theme that will emphasize your message and attract more readers.

WordPress is one of the most popular open source blogging tools. Unfortunately, as we all know, WordPress is most likely the best blogging platform available with tons of available themes giving you the ability to monetize your site.

Studio Press offers Genesis-powered themes and templates for WordPress blogs. Used by more than 65000 online publishers, their templates use top-notch, search engine friendly code and Genesis turn-key designs that offer you full control of the framework. For a unique, affordable fee, Studio Press offers unlimited support, updates and domains. This means you won’t have to pay more if you wish to use their themes for multiple blogs.

Don’t worry if you’re not into coding: the Studio Press website provides free tutorials to guide you through the designing process, step by step. You will be offered all the support you need, from the very basics to advanced notions such as admin management, breadcrumbs and column classes. If these don’t mean anything to you right now, just wait and see…

Developers at Studio Press have also come up with several plugins to meet your social, SEO, data and design needs. Some of these plugins (such as Simple URLs) even allow you to monitor daily traffic from outbound links that you get to create and manage. Menus, tabs, sidebars, sliders… blogging has never been more fun!

The Studio Press blog and newsletter will keep you updated and help you discover more interesting facts about the company. And of course you won’t have to pay to have access to these! Overall, Studio Press is a great tool to make the most out of your Word Press blog, and if you’re into real blogging business, then you should definitely consider their services.

Here at Diy we are constantly on the move for finding and implementing new techniques.  Our latest drive is to find some really great SEO techniques and make them work for us.  We have a number of sites and a number of products that we are trying to rank for all the time.  Right now our big focus is on blogging and anchor text linking.  Soon we will have a section that will show you some great video and some easy to follow directions on how to create, control and publish your own anchor text links.  This is essential to help you start ranking for keywords that you have in mind.

The first article on this series

Link Building

The other day I had an interesting discussion with a friend about putting up a website to sell a product line that he was starting.  To make a long story short, he offered to supply me with product if I built the site and started promoting it.  Sounds good right?  It could be if the keywords had some potential, but the conversation revealed some interesting insights.

Build it

First you have to build the site, which means you have to decide on which platform you want to build it with.  Considering the fact that I already own and operate stores, I thought it might be a good idea to use the same platform that I already use.  This makes life easier, since you don’t have to learn something new (software)  Learning takes time and stops my progress.  I don’t like to be slowed down since there is more things to do in a day then there is time.  So you could build the site yourself, switch to something new, pay someone to build it for you or just throw something up as an experiment.  Either way to make a summary out of the conversation, you are going to spend about $2000 on the site, whether you hire a basic design out or you do it yourself. (Your time is worth money remember?)

What’s behind door number two?

So let’s say you spent the two grand and now you have a site, now what?  Well this is where most people get excited since their site is finished and it’s online.  However they are not making a dime because they are not promoting it.  In fact, they had no idea that they need to promote it because most website designers don’t know a thing about promotion.  They are two different specialties.  You really need a budget to make sure your website is found by your customers.  By the way, this is not easy, and anyone that tells you that it is, is a big fat liar.    So in order to do it right, since I spent $2000 of my hard earned money, I need a blog.

Blog Please

I wont get into the specifics of why, but I will say that if you are smart you will use a blog to promote your site.  So here we go again.  Do you use a free blogging platform? (Very limited)  Do you hire it out?  Do you build it yourself?  If you have someone who knows what they are doing, you can plan to spend between $300 and $500 for decent blog and design.  This is if you know who to ask and where to go.  But don’t forget the blog needs promotion too, just like the site.  The blog works for the site, but it still needs to be promoted as well.

Door Number Three

So if your math is right you have about $2300 into this project and know one including Google knows you exist.  And if you do not exist in Google, you don’t exist period.  So you need a budget, if you’re serious.  So how much do you spend?  That my friend is the golden question that begs to be answered.  Most people would say, “Pay what you can afford”.  This to me is a mistake.  The correct answer is in the form of a question.  How much do you want to dominate in the search engines for organic search results?  If you want to make it to the first page of Google or Yahoo, then this is going to take some money and a good plan.  I am not saying you have to spend a fortune, but I am trying to get you to understand that you cannot spend $100 a month and make it happen.  You would be better off taking the $2300 you invested and taking your special someone on an all inclusive cruise.  The point of this conversation is this, if you want to be a player you have to be aggressive, have a plan and make a budget.  I know people that spend 50K a month on their plan and I know some that spend $500.  Budget is a function of keywords as well.  If you are trying to rank for the word “mortgage’, get out your checkbook or buy a lot of lotto tickets, that my friend is a long row to hoe.  However if your keywords are less competitive you can spend less.  This of course leads you to the keywords conversation which is another article (sorry)