Almost every day (occasionally I’ll take a break), I will spend a good solid hour or so at my RSS reader looking at posts from fellow bloggers. A post by David Kam at the MarketingDeviant caught my eye, and got me thinking about the importance of storytelling in marketing. Here is a bit of that post.

“Marketing is like storytelling where you are the storyteller. The story you tell gradually builds up throughout the years. The story becomes stronger as people talk about it as many people will grow fond of it. The better the storyline, the better it will be remembered by the people. If the people remember your story they will remember your business.” -David Kam

  Some of the best advice I received early on in music was make sure the song you write tells a story. It really didn’t matter what the story is, but people have to be able to relate to it.

After reading David’s post, I started thinking about how important that is in blogging. How important your storytelling is to building your brand and establishing your voice in an overcrowded marketplace.

Maki at Dosh Dosh is my favorite example of excellent storytelling in a niche blog. Early on, he set himself apart with excellent writing, a creative thought process, and a little bit of flair. People remember him and his business, because his posts and advice have a little something extra that you do not find in many blogs. It is easy to forget he has only been at this a little over a year! Amazing. Another writer I truly love is Ben Cook, the former author of the Blogging Experiment. Once again, he is another author in the make money online genre of websites. It would be easy for him to get lost in the crowd. He built a loyal readership with intelligent and a sometimes unorthodox writing style that kept the reader well informed and entertained. Unless you are John Chow or you come up with some clever gimmick, the only way to succeed in blogging is to make sure your storytelling is on point, no matter what your genre is.

The blogging world has exploded in the past couple of years, and so have the amount of people trying to capitalize financially from their blog. One of the best things about Wordpress is that you can make it artistic, but still flexible enough for proper advertisement placement if that is what you are into. I run a few ad friendly websites and before I got a firm grasp on how to use Wordpress, it was essential that I found an already setup ad friendly theme.

Before reaching that point you should make sure if monetizing is right for you.

Below are some of my favorites. These are all free unless otherwise noted.

Prosense by Dosh Dosh and The Wrong Advices:

Prosense is a theme with decent ad blending while allowing the maximum amount of space to be dedicated to the ads. Judging by the name, you could guess that it is specifically geared toward Google AdSense ads, which as you know, may or may not be your preferable choice of monetizing. It has nice steamlined look, and a slick RSS feed icon in the top right to encourage subscribtion. It comes in simple gray and blue color schemes, but if you have a little knowledge of coding, you could easy change the scheme to your personal preference. Prosense is free, and can be downloaded directly from Dosh Dosh or the Wrong Advices.

Acosmin Monetized Theme:

Right out of the box, this three column theme has in place the code for advertisements. They do a good job within the code of explaining which box is set up for which type of ad. Along the left sidebar column there is placement for up to four 125 x 125px ads. This is excellent for selling those spaces because it is very high profile. On the right side bar is a perfectly placed 300 x 250px space for Google Adsense. It is excellent for CTR and, if you content is crawled correctly, will display excellent ads for your site. In the header, there is a spot dedicated for a 468×60 ad banner. If your website is generating decent traffic, this will be a highly lucrative spot.

The color scheme is very professional, it is a smooth grey and very earth tones. The layout features a lot of nice icons and rounded corners. The blog is highly monetized but it really doesn’t feel like it. When you click on individual blog posts, it keeps the same format without adding any additional Adsense ads. This is a good feel for those who want to have a nice website without looking too Adsense dependent.

Green Money Theme:

The Green Money theme was created by the folks over at EzMoneyOn.Net. I do like this layout a lot, it has a nice Pro Blogger feel without trying too hard to be overly monetized. It is easily customizable and a new blogger could configure this quickly and efficiently.

Blix Krieg Monetized Theme:

Although the Blix theme (a popular theme a few year back) was abandoned, it has been brought back as a monetized theme. The author even lists the reasons why you should use the theme. He makes several great points about not trying to make millions using AdSense but using a theme that can at least cover costs. The layout is nice, familiar and not overly complicated. This is an excellent choice for a monetized theme.

Monetizing the Web theme:

This theme is offered from the website, Monetizing The Web. Pretty simple and straight forward. It is a little more advanced for those who will be selling 125 box style ads as well. One of the great things about this theme is they offer it in 17 different color schemes. This might not seem like a big deal to you, but it is definitely nice to be able to change colors without having to know much HTML, especially if you are new to the web and blog world.

Bluesense AdSense Ready Theme:

Maki at Dosh Dosh, who helped bring the world ProSense, also has another theme called BlueSense. I do not like this one as much as ProSense, but it will definitely get you excellent click through rates. Decent color scheme and great ad blending.

AdSense Ready Theme:

Jason Golod created his own AdSense ready theme. It is simple and straight forward, with one 250 pixel tower slot built in. With additional customization, you could make this even more AdSense ready.

Slick Blue Theme:

This theme comes from the folks over at HackWordPress. It is a very slick theme, no pun intended. The authors have placed a nice arrangement of 125 x 125 banners, it is SEO friendly, and it is Adsense (BidVertiser ect) ready. Another great function is it already has the social networking buttons in place so you do not need to fuss with any code.

Connections With Adsense Theme:

Connections with AdSense is a theme created by the folks at MoreEarnings.Com. A nice layout which maximizes your blog with 3 AdSense blocks on the main page, and 3 blocks on the single post page. This layout is also very SEO friendly.

Simple AdSense Theme from Themey:

The dull gray color scheme is designed so that eyes are automatically drawn towards the adverts (in this case Google’s AdSense, although it is pretty straightforward to change them for Yahoo! ads or others as they are industry standard sizes). 3 ad units and 1 link unit are shown on each page, which is Google’s maximum allowable. In addition, AdSense for search has been used to replace Wordpress’ inbuilt search function. The theme is intentionally basic with no images used. This makes it quick and easy to apply to any blog or site that is using Wordpress as a CMS.

CSS Gallery Theme:

This is a popular theme, as you can tell by the amount of times it was commented and complimented. A CSS Gallery Wordpress theme for webmasters who want to build CSS showcase or web gallery. Packed with built in Tagging, Google ads and a sidebar block with 125 x 125 banner ads. Theme is valid XHTML 1.0 transitional and valid CSS! This is sort of a niche theme but it works well and has great ad placements.

WP Premium Theme:

This is an elegant theme, not to heavy on monetization. Works great and looks ever better!

In this post, I used suggestions and links from other prominent blogs and posts. I will link those here as well, so you can see their posts. Some of them are extremely comprehensive.

http://hackwordpress.com/125×125-button-ready-wordpress-themes-gallery/ - Excellent post showcasing graphical based Ad ready themes.

http://www.doshdosh.com/16-adsense-optimized-wordpress-themes-to-maximize-your-contextual-ad-earnings - Maki over at Dosh Dosh always has great posts. This one is no exception. In fact, it was the first one I stumbled upon when I was searching for monetized themes last year.

http://mashable.com/2008/04/29/monetizing-wordpress-11-sources-for-ad-ready-wordpress-themes/ - Mashable is a great resource for a lot of blog related information. This post is excellent as well.