http://www.ezmoneyon.net/green-money-free-wordpress-theme/

I was at the Blogging Authority forum and one of their contributors posted a link to their first monetized theme, which they call Green Money.

This is a FREE Monetized theme, which most are, but usually they are poor at best.

When I saw the first screen shot, I really liked the way it was laid out so I decided to download it and apply it to one of my smaller blogs, just to see how it looked and reacted.

It is slick, with great advertisement placements that remind of so many of the ‘problogger’ websites out there. It is easily customized and widgets can be added with no problem.

The thing I LOVE about this theme, is unlike most monetized themes where they try to cram as many ads as possible into a theme, this one makes you feel like your looking at a smooth, regular theme that just happens to be monetized.

It is SEO ready, and I will report back in a few days how the site responds in comparison to the old theme it was running.

I remember when I was galavanting around in my first rock and roll band. We were all a bit green in the business world, but we were ambitious and thought we definitely would be the next big thing. In hindsight, we really had no idea what it takes to be the next big thing, nor did we have a plan. Then a few months passed, and nothing. We were playing shows, but where were the fans? Where were the record companies handing out the big checks?

Sound familar? If you replaced band with blog, you would have roughly 97.3 percent of all bloggers current plan. I will get back to the blogging aspect in a minute.

In need of a jump start, the band got one great break. We had an opportunity to do a radio station show in Chicago for one of the most listened stations, Q101.  We worked the break, and next thing you know, the radio station put a small amount of muscle behind the band. And the buzz it generated helped us get our feet off the ground. In fact, that one moment probably transformed my entire understading of industry and big business.

For bloggers, finding that break is almost impossible. Takes a lot of hard work and a lot of luck. But there is something to be said for buzz and its money making potential.

Personal experience tells me that if you are in the money-making genre of blogging, or you are just looking to create a website that will generate enough traffic to earn a living, here is some food for thought.

I created a website for a gentleman named Richard Mims. He has been one of the more outspoken people in regards to the Drew Peterson / Stacy Peterson missing persons case. Richard had been on a lot of news shows, speaking about the case and his relationship with the people involved. I created the website to be VERY minimal on monetization, because the intent of the site was so he could speak his mind. The only monetization I put on the website was Google AdSense with the intent to cover hosting costs. The site only ran for one week before I decided to remove myself from it because of the hoopla surrounding the case in general. But the facts are pretty astounding. It shows what a little bit of buzz can do.

I am going to compare two websites. One I created for Richard Mims and one I have been running for about 7 months now.

For the length of this discussion, I will be referring to Richard’s website as Website A. The website was created on Jan 26th. I shut it down on February 1st. The content was pretty weak in general, just someone speaking their mind. It was sometimes hard to read, as this person was not a professional writer to say the least. There was no real SEO configuration because it really wasn’t a niche website, but he had a lot of ability to promote it including several large national news outlets. In the short week it was up, the website did over 32,000 unique visits with over 240,000 page impressions. AdSense registered just over 30,000 impressions as well, so the statistics come pretty close to matching up.

It is against Adsense terms of service to dicuss exact figures, but I will throw out some ballpark figures. Over 200 clicks generated over $50 dollars in revenue in that week alone. The site was configured with one ad block, 250×250 showcasing 4 ads per impression. It basically had the exact same setup as this blog, minus the 125 ads and the banner ad. Pretty minimal in terms of ads, in my opinion.

Website B, which does a lot less traffic, has a lot more monetization in place. It’s specific niche is graphical humor. I have banner advertisment, a couple of 125×125 ads, and a wide range of select placement for AdSense advertisements. There isn’t a whole lot of writing but what is there is a pretty easy read. That website averages less than 10,000 site visits per month, but it generates roughly 100 dollars a month in revenue after hosting costs are factored in. The AdSense click though rate and amount of clicks is right about on par with Website A.

Logic tells me that a website that generates as much traffic as Website A but had the same configuation as Website B would make roughly 300 dollars a week; possibly more if the niche and ad configuation is optimized.

Every website is different, and finding your proper advertisement setup will make a world of difference. But this is proof, once again, that traffic is the main factor in determining how much revenue you will make. As great as your content may be, if generating revnue is your main goal, traffic must be generated.

Hope you catch the buzz!

Theme review: Acosmin Monetized Theme

Every week or so, I review a monetized theme I have set up on a blog I either manage or personally contribute to. Today I am review the theme Acosmin. The theme was created initially for the website Acosmin.Com. The author did an excellent job making smooth clean layout that is excellent for monetization purposes. This is a free blog, and you must keep his link in the footer. It is a small link though, and shouldn’t concern many. I have switched to this theme for my personal website. I will be modifying it as I go however.

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.

There are a several things that bothered me about this layout. I added it to a blog that was receiving a ton of traffic and the users of that blog pointed out several bugs. The first and most glaring one is that when you try to comment a post, you are limited with how long you can make your email. I had to modify this in the PHP code AND the style.css and it took me a few shots. Once I fixed it, I was happy. But if you are creating a blog straight out of the box, this could be a real downside.

Another thing that always bothers me about layouts like this is they leave their logo and make you edit it. In the style.css file, they block the title from displaying in the header. This is fine if you are good with graphics, but if you aren’t, as soon as you switch themes in the Presentation section of Wordpress you’ll notice their logo. You have to remove the JPG and create your own. This is a pain to me.

Overall, this theme is a great solution for those who want to monetize their blog. You do need to have a good feel for editing PHP and using Wordpress, but if you do, you will love this layout.

Theme Review: Blue Columns Monetized Theme

When a new client came to me this week and asked me to configure a blog, I was presented with an interesting dilemma. He is an active participant in a missing person case, who has been on many talk shows and news programs. I was to be creating and maintaining the blog and hosting it on my servers. I would also own the domain name. The first thought that came to mind was HEAVY monetization because this website will be generating up to ten thousand hits a day. The second thought was this is a missing person case, and I don’t want to be seen as capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune. So I compromised and decided I would put enough ads on the blog to cover my overhead and I needed a theme initially that would let me place Adsense ads (I was avoiding any other affiliate ads for this blog) in the spots I felt would generate at least enough money per day to cover the fairly high hosting costs.

The theme I settled on (and changed quickly from) was Blue Columns monetized theme. Initially this seemed like a good fit. Two spots already came pre-configured for AdSense in decent placements. I liked the overall color scheme as well, blue and white. It was very simple and two the point. It also offered nice looking RSS buttons and a newsletter signup.

This theme was highly buggy from the start. I had to do multiple PHP edits just to get individual posts to display properly. The footer had an encrypted code set-up, which usually is ok by me, but this time it pointed to some highly suspect websites. I didn’t want my client to feel I was leading him down a sketchy road by making it look like these people were advertisers for the website. The code to make the newsletter work was a nightmare, it took me about 2 hours and STILL wasn’t working. I just gave up at that point. In addition, every title screen had its own JPG that had to be edited. After two days and countless hours, I gave up on this theme and went to a heavily modified version of the Acosim theme.

Every free theme you find online has its quirks. This one was full of more bugs than any I had used. The first initial feeling I had was it was a slick looking, monetized layout. That is still the case. But it takes more work to get it running correctly than any serious content blogger would like.

This week I will be reviewing Prosense. Prosense was designed jointly by Maki from Dosh Dosh and Dan over at the Wrong Advices. This blog was originally on this theme until I decided I wanted something a little more professional. I still run Prosense on one of my other blogs. Prosense accomplishes what its designers intended. It is a straight forward 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.

Personally, The theme didn’t really cut it for me on THIS blog. That is not to say it doesn’t work for certain content sites and blogs. Everytime I see a blog using Prosense now, I immediately think that the only purpose of the blog is to make money online, and nothing else. This is partially due to how popular the theme became with the ‘blog-in-a-can’ bloggers who set up 300 content blogs hoping to luck out when people accidentally click on an AdSense ad. The coding is clean enough, and if you take time to modify it to you liking, you can customize this theme to look less like a generic blog site.

I still use Prosense on one of my picture oriented blogs, mainly because it does a nice job of ad blending and providing maximum amount of surface space.

Prosense has become a product of its own success. Every half-wit and wannabe blogger can now easily set up a blog with the soul purpose of making a dollar. Prosense helped make this happen. These blogs now clutter the internet, but that really isn’t really the fault of the designers. I am sure there are many fine blogs that use modified versions of this theme, I just haven’t seen them yet.