10 cool WordPress themes

Readers will judge your blog creditability the moment they see the design of your blog. It is important to select a good theme that fits your blog. I have listed 10 cool WordPress themes that looks nice and useful.

Themes

Revolution
The design looks really professional. Nobody would imagine that it is run by a single blogger. As you can see, this design is for the blog that offers tremendous amount of contents. Although you can custumize it to smaller sizes, you probably need to add contents daily to stay look like who you are supposed to be.

WP Magazine
Clearly the deign is formatted for magazine blogs. However, you can also use it for news websites or even for ‘tips’ websites. I see some famous bloggers using this kind of layouts for blog tips.

FreshPress
If you run WordPress 2.5.1, you probably have noticed that design immitates the admin page of WordPress. This design keeps things simple yet functional. Don’t worry, most readers do not know what the admin page of WordPress would look like.

The Morning After
Looks really professional. It gives strong impressions for readers. This theme suits for daily blog posters who provides original contents rather than those who introduce daily news or funny videos.

Cutline 3 Column Split
This theme is the standard format for daily news. Very useful and easily custumizable compared to the ones above.

Networker
This is a simple three column layout. While it looks boring without custumizing, it gives more chance for your to edit the theme.

Pop Blue
This theme is very simple and easily customizable. I chose this for the simplicity and a logo placed in a right place.

LOSEMYMIND
This is another simple theme with corner edge. If you want to make your website look softer and simpler, this is the way to go.

Silver Light
This sharp theme offers both simplicity and stylishness. Easy for beginners to move things around.

Andreas
If you like the large picture logo and page menu on left, this is the best theme to go with.

Do you know who your audiences are?

Fabulous Mag has done a survey which asked both men and women what they think are the ‘perfect’ female body shape. It turned out that women tend to think ‘perfect’ body size to be much thinner than what men think.

This tells you two important lesson:

a) The definition of ‘thin’ differs in men and women
b) It’s only a myth that all men like really ‘thin’ body

Adjectives is subjective

When you describe your products, how are you choosing the adjectives? Fast, Easy, Attractive? What those words mean different for different people. However, we have ‘tendency’ to think things in similar way if we belong to some group. As you can see, gender plays a big role when it comes to describing the shape of body. So when you know (and you are supposed to know) you are targeting specific audiences, choose adjectives to describe your product carefully. You can find other services targeting similar niche and study how they attract their custumers. Or, you can even ask your friend who is in your targeting area to see how he or she thinks about the description.

Assumptions are devil

If you automatically assumed that men are only interested in really thin girls like what most girls think, then you will not succeed attracting men with your product. For example, if you open up a ‘find your date’ kind of service targeting men audiences, it will not give them good impression if you use really thin models. Rather, you should use the model’s picture with average body size of men’s ideal, which is 12 according to Fabulous.

Don’t be evil

A study done by Fabulous also shows how marketers can use these findings to ‘attract’ female audiences. You may sell a diet product claiming ‘men likes really thin body like this! and you can be the one!” Whether they like the product or not, they will sure to say, “Yeah I already know guys like thin body like that!” Some girls would really believe this ‘fake’ fact and get in her trouble with several diseases. So as a marketer, I encourage you to not use study in this way. Rather, use this study in a way that benefits you and your audiences.

TV or Web TV? New marketing strategy.

Broadcast companies have been crazy over catching up to new technologies to reach out young people in America. Now a days people gets more fun out of ‘funny’ movies on YouTube, Veoh, and so forth. Recently, some broadcasters have began to broadcast their official contents on webs. If you haven’t seen it, you should watch TV episodes on Hulu. I enjoy watching official TV shows on this website for several reasons. First, I can watch it whenever I want. Second, I can watch previous episodes. And the last and not least, I don’t have TV in my room!

TV statistics

Believe or not, there are selected households with special device installed on TV to monitor what they are watching. The system works in following ways: you enter your assigned password and turn on TV, once you are done, you turn it on and you are logged out. Your personal information like income and education will be registered beforehand to find out the niche. Once in awhile, TV will ask you if you are still watching TV, and if you are, you have to respond YES. Now you know this is not an effective way to collect data. It is just so ‘unnatural’ for viewers to do all these stuff. They may even try to avoid watching TV because it causes them too much trouble just to watch TV.

The data collected from selected households are generalized to represent the whole population of U.S. It becomes the indicator of the popularity of the TV show and therefore becomes the factor in deciding the ‘advertising’ fee broadcast companies charge for advertisers. Is this really accurate?

TiVo comes in

No, once TiVo comes in, which allows you to record TV shows and skip 30-sec ads, they have no idea whether they are watching TV shows or not. And most importantly, it is impossible to track whether viewers have seen the advertisements ‘on time.’ Some advertisements are really time sensitive and TiVo killed the purpose of that.

Web TV

So whats good about Web TV? Well, viewers cannot really ’skip’ the advertisement. And it is always time sensitive because you cannot save the content (or at least it is designed to be so). Well, then how do you know which shows are popular? Well obviously, you can easily track how many people are watching the web contents by the number of view counts. You can also receive average user feed backs on ‘ratings’ and ‘comments’. Then, how do you know what kind of people are watching the shows? Well, it depends on the honesty of viewers, but many online viewers register themselves online with their personal information like age and address.

Which is better?

Well, maybe this is not a questions of ‘which’. You just broadcast the same content on web as you did on TV. So one content approaches to both TV viewers and Web TV viewers at each convenience. But the important lesson is to not stick out with ‘old’ strategy. You need to constantly seek to adopt to new technologies and figureout how you might approach to people in new niche.

How to create professional email address

You should probably know that people judge you from your email address when dealing with you in business. For your private email, you probably have Yahoo, MSN, or Gmail accounts. While those are ‘ok’, they are not ‘professional’. So let’s learn how to make you look professional by simply creating an effective email address.

Email address formats

Business/Website Admin
Just put info/support/admin before @yourdomain.com
I personally like info@yourdomain.com style, as I use info@marketingnavi.com for this website.

Business/Website Member
Put your first name initial + last name before domain name, like eterada@marketingnavi.com for my name Elisha Terada.

Permanent Private Address
Buy the domain name of your name, like eterada.com for my name. Put your first name, like elisha@eterada.com. Do not use info/admin because it is your personal address. It still make you look professional that way.

Email forwarding

I know some of you use Yahoo, MSN, or Gmail email accounts for several benefits. You might be using MSN to receive email notice on MSN messenger, or Gmail for the easy interface. I would also not use the email software that comes with the hosting service. If you want to use familiar interface, you can simply transfer email from @yourdomain.com to your private address. If you are using Gmail, you can also ’send as’ @yourdomain.com so you can virtually send and receive emails from Gmail account.

How to reply blog comments

While nice comments on your blogs are always welcomed, some comments are not. Some readers attacks the content of your blog, or even the author’s personality. Because blog comments are open to public, replies to comments should not be taken lightly.

Do not criticize readers

Many of you probably know why this is important already. But let me emphasize this again because it is very important. Some readers would not come back to you again if they see you criticizing other readers. This can happen if you lose temper on some of reader’s comments. It is true that not everyone talks politely to you. They are eager to criticize your mistake, misunderstanding, or even something you are actually right about. Do not take it too seriously, and if the comment is too rude, you should delete it. While it is not polite to delete the comment of others, it is also not polite for that person to comment something unfavorable for other readers to see. Ignore, delete, or at least politely reply back to such comments. If you do not know how to politely reply, check other big blogs comments. You can see blog author’s reply and see how they manage it.

Take time

For Blogs with few comments

If you receive only few comments on your blog, make sure to take time and reply to each comments. Even if the comments are short like ‘thanks for tips’, be sure to reply something short like ‘I’m glad that you liked it’. Or even better, ask them for the feed back. Such as “Hi, thank you for reading my blog. What part of the content you liked the most?” This will make readers feel that they are part of your blog, and feel like coming back just to ‘check up’ on your progress. In another words, it gives another reason for them to come back.

For Blogs with lots of comments

If you receive a lot of comments, you can start to ignor short three-four words comments. Readers don’t even expect a reply to such a short comment among 10s of other comments. But be sure to answer their questions and requests. To you, you are replying to one comment, but to all otehr readers, they are getting answers for the question they wanted.

Show diligence

One time I was commenting something short on other’s blog, asking for extra tips. I was surprised when I received 3 paragraph reply from that author. I was not expecting such a long reply, and I became fan of that blog just because of that. Sometimes it is not about your contents that draws the readers come back to you. Be sure to take time when you can to reply the best you can to the comments of eager readers.

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