I just added a new offer to the end of this article that I wrote about a year and a half ago: How Much Does WordPress Really Cost?

Before I describe the offer, where I set up WordPress for you for free if you use my affiliate link and buy the web hosting from the web hosting company that I use and recommend, oh… wait… that was the offer.

OK. You can click on that link and go read the details now if you’re so impatient, Mr. Smarty Pants.

Tip: Take advantage of deals when you find them.

Random Chance

As I was saying, I want to tell you a story about that page.

I first wrote that article as one of many rants about the wonders of WordPress.

People read it and there was some interest and that was nice, but whatever.

It didn’t burn the house down.

Then some guy linked to it from his blog roll.

A “blog roll” is the list of links to blogs in your sidebar.

It’s used to link to people and things that you find impressive that you want to share with your readers.

“Look how cool I am! Check out all these other cool blogs to go read!”

So this guy puts a link to my page in his side bar.

Well, his site has over 3,000 pages on it, with the sidebar on every page.

That page now has over 3,000 links to it from this guy’s sidebar.

Tip: Write content that people find useful.

Google Notices

Next thing I know, I’m getting traffic from Google for people who are searching for how much WordPress costs.

There are variations on the search “WordPress cost” and “How much does WordPress cost” are the two biggest.

Apparently people are reading the article and it’s working for them.

It answers questions that they have.

It’s useful.

People read it and link to it.

Tip: Check your Google Analytics regularly for trends.

Still Top Ranked

Then I see that guy’s web site disappears. I think he was a politician and was using it for a campaign.

When the campaign was over, the site was gone, along with my wonderful, beautiful inbound links.

It doesn’t matter. It’s still ranked well.

Both “how much is wordpress” and “how much does wordpress cost” get a #1 ranking.

“WordPress Cost” gets it at #4 and #6.

I am, apparently, the world’s number ranking expert on How Much WordPress Costs.

Tip: Write with authority. Be an authority.

Surprise SEO Trick

You can steal this trick, I think.

The politician doesn’t link to me any more, but I still rank well, so I checked Yahoo’s Site Explorer to see if anyone else was still linking to the page.

I was surprised to see that there are 15 links from iStockPhoto.

Someone linked to it in response to a question in the forum.

iStockPhoto then translated that link into 15 different languages, one for each of their forums.

It appears that you can leave one link in the English forum and it will be multiplied into 15 links by iStockPhoto.

Tip: Write comments in forums, especially iStockPhoto.

Take Advantage!

I am currently getting 36% of the “page views” on my entire site on this one page.

The home page only gets 5%. Whatever the current newsletter points to gets about 6-8%. All the other posts get 1-3% or whatever.

I decided to take advantage of the traffic and put a special offer on that one page.

If you want me to install, set up, and configure WordPress for you, I will do all of that for FREE!

(It’s a marketing rule that you always have to capitalize the word “free” and use an exclamation point after it.)

I can do that if you use the special link to get your web hosting from the company I recommend.

If you want to take advantage of that offer CLICK HERE. Read through to the bottom of the page and follow the directions.

Tip: Take advantage of trends to create specific offers based on traffic.

You Can Make Money As An Affiliate

Every time someone uses that link, which contains my affiliate code, PowWeb records that click and writes a cookie to their browser.

If a sale is completed, they send me a referral fee at the end of the month.

If you want to make money as an affiliate, you need to go sign up with “them”, then use the special links they provide to pass your customers off to them.

Every time your users make a sale with them, using your link, with your code, you make money.

“Them” in this case is PowWeb, but there are a ton of other people that do this too.

If you want to check out other possible affiliates that might be more closely related to your niche, check out Click Bank or Market Bay.

Tip: Make money referring your readers to other sites.

Content Marketing

Did you get any good info from this post?

If you make a post valuable, people link to it and you end up with traffic, then money.

See how that works?

Can you write something of value that people will want to share with their friends and readers?

I thought you could.

Go make me proud.

Tip: Don’t just sit there! Put these tips into practice.

Wordpress 3.0

Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies. (Twenty Ten theme shows all of that off.)

Developers and network admins will appreciate the long-awaited merge of MU and WordPress, creating the new multi-site functionality which makes it possible to run one blog or ten million from the same installation.

As a user, you will love the new lighter interface, the contextual help on every screen, the 1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements, bulk updates so you can upgrade 15 plugins at once with a single click, and blah blah blah just watch the video.

Read the entire article at:
WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”

So what did I do first? I waited. I have a bunch of clients relying on their installations of WordPress. I can’t break anything for them, for you.

When a new piece of software is released, the very first day the “early adopters” try it out and find what breaks in the real world. That’s good, as long as it’s not someone who’s paying me money to keep their site up and running.

I guess that there will be an update, with bug fixes, in 3-7 days, if not sooner. I’ll wait until we get a couple weeks into it. I will put it on my development server, where it can break all it wants. I’ll do my own research on it.

The guys who built the system do an incredible job and I expect it to be pretty close to flawless. As soon as it IS flawless, then I’ll start your upgrades.

Until then, we’ll sit and watch the Lakers beat the Celtics for the Championship! Yeah, they did! Woo hoo!

Reporter: Kobe, what does it mean, to you personally, to win this championship?

Kobe: It means I got one more than Shaq! (laughter)

In this one, I talk about taking control with WordPress. People who are not able to update their own web site, should be using WordPress. I’m a control freak, so it’s all about taking control. You should be too.

Again, let me know if there are any issues with the video. Still playing with formats and sizes, etc.

You can watch it here on YouTube.

10 Reasons Why You Should NOT Have a Web Site

In the past, I’ve advocated using WordPress to manage your own web site. I’ve said that having your own web site is critical to the success of your business. I’ve said you should blog, that is, write posts regularly.

I’ve had people question that advice. People don’t want to follow it. They want a web site, but there’s a leap there, that they are not ready for yet.

I understand the hesitation and the confusion. In order to support those people who do not have web sites yet, here is a list of good, valid reasons why they should not get one.

This is list is for them.

10 Reasons Why You Should Not Have a Web Site

1. They are expensive.

When I worked for a video game company, our budgets for a new game web site were usually between $20,000 and $30,000. Most of that money was spent on going to meetings and arguing with the Marketing Department about the graphics. As a guy who loves learning about new technology, I was shocked to learn that the bulk of the cost was in the politics of building the site, not the technology of building the site. Building a web site is easy and cheap. Figuring out what it should look like and what to put in it, that’s the hard part.

Of course, if you already know what you want it to look like and what you want it to say, then maybe the only expense is your time.

2. They are technical.

Web sites live on web servers, or web hosts. They are built with HTML, a coding language that uses tags and variables and attributes. Domain names need to be configured so that the whole system of moving parts works together. Cars are technical too. They have engines and transmissions and differentials. You need training to learn how to work on them, just like you need training to configure web servers.

Of course, if you just drive a car without knowing everything under the hood, you could update your own web site using WordPress. Let the mechanic take care of fixing the car. Let me take care of configuring your web site.

3. They take too much time.

Updating your own web site takes time. You have to learn a few things about how to update it first, then you have to set aside time each day to write something new. You have to log into WordPress, then click on the “Add New” button. Writing out a title, then putting something into the body of the post takes, well, maybe 15 minutes.

Of course, maybe, 15 minutes every couple of days isn’t that much time.

4. You use other sites.

It’s possible to sell products on sites like Etsy. It’s possible to connect with your clients on sites like Facebook. It’s possible to communicate with people on Twitter. If all these other sites do the same thing, there’s no reason to have your own web site.

Of course, if you want a central place that will coordinate all of your efforts on FaceBook, Etsy, and Twitter, then maybe your own web site might work better.

5. You can’t write no good.

It takes some skill to organize your thoughts and write them out in logical paragraphs that make sense to people. You didn’t go to school to learn how to write. You’d be embarrassed to have people read your stuff. You’re just not a good writer.

Of course, if you talk to people on the phone, you can communicate. If you can talk to people in every day conversation, then you know how to get your point across. Besides, practice would only make you better, then you wouldn’t have this excuse any more.

6. You advertise other ways.

You use some other means of advertising, like print for instance. You pay the newspaper for ads that are seen by, well, they could be seen by, thousands of people already. Maybe you spend money on cold calling your customers. Maybe you sponsor a softball team in your city. Maybe you hand out flyers on the street corners, or dress up in a costume and spin those big arrow signs around. You’re doing just fine, thank you very much!

Of course, maybe a web site is actually cheaper and more effective than those other methods.

7. It’s just a hobby, not a business.

You don’t really want to make any money. You just want to make pretty things. You don’t want to mess with accounting or marketing or sales. Do what you love and the money will follow. The reason that they call it “hard work” is because it’s hard. You didn’t start your business to do things that are hard. You just want to make money.

Of course, you might want to make money with your business, then you might want to treat it like a business and not a hobby. Doing some hard work might pay off.

8. You don’t really like people

People can be such a pain sometimes. They complain. They insult. They are stupid. They do things that you don’t want them to do. You don’t need the grief. There’s no reason to put anything out there yourself, if all they are going to do is complain. They aren’t worth it. They don’t need your product anyway. They wouldn’t appreciate the hard work you put into it.

Of course, if someone actually might like your products or your service or what you wrote. They might compliment you. They might say nice things. You might actually make a new friend. Your life might actually be better because you write something and made a connection.

9. You already have enough money.

You’re good the way you are. You have a nice car and live in a nice house. You go out to eat whenever you want (Chinese food every night!). You can buy whatever you want, whenever you want. Life is good. You don’t need to put out any effort to make it any better.

Of course, if you happened to want more money, then maybe a web site would promote your business, develop some client relationships, and make some concrete sales.

10. You don’t have a computer.

OK. You got me there. This is a good reason to not have a web site.

Of course, you could go to the public library and use theirs.

They had no idea that WordPress would allow them to update their own site themselves. They thought that a web site is just a web site. Only web developers could make changes to them. They had no control of their own site.

The old school way of building a web site, the way I did it since 1994, is to manually write out static HTML files and put them on a web server. Each page lived on it’s own, like having a bunch of pieces of paper laid out on the living room floor. You have to change each one individually.

Smart people got the idea to develop a “Content Management System”, CMS, to take care of the hard, repetitive stuff. There are now many of them. Drupal and Joomla are the primary competitors to WordPress these days.

The idea of a CMS is that some of the elements on a web page are the same from page to page. Generally there’s a header, a sidebar, and a footer, with the content in the middle somewhere. The content changes, but the template stays the same.

If you had an automated system that would just add the same header to every page, then you only have to update the header in one place, one time. If you can have a system that manages the static stuff and lets you play with the changing stuff, life would be easier.

Using WordPress allows me to build that template, all the hard stuff, the common stuff, as a web developer, then allows my clients to manage all the stuff in the middle, the content.

I haven’t built a web site without using WordPress in years.

Why WordPress? Control.

In any CMS, there are “admin” pages, a section of the site that is password protected. Those pages control the images, the posts, the pages, the content of the site to be updated easily.

Want a new page? Log into the admin and add a new page. Want to write a blog post? Log in and write a new post. Find a typo that someone else did? Log in and fix it. Add an image and put it in your blog post.

WordPress puts the control of the content back in your hands. You don’t need a web developer to write HTML every time you want to change something. You don’t need to know how an internal combustion engine works to drive a car. You just drive.

WordPress takes all of the technical, hard stuff and handles it for you. You just create the web site. Type some stuff. Click a button. It’s a piece of pie.

You do need to know how to move the shift lever and turn on the engine. You need to know how to turn the steering wheel. The level of technical knowledge required is like driving a car.

If you are still paying someone else to update your web site, or if you don’t have a web site yet, now is the time to use WordPress. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s available.

Take control. The road is waiting.

If you use WordPress, what do you think about it? If you don’t, why not? Leave a comment.

The best places to look first.

1. Official WordPress Site

2. Smashing Magazine

3. Inspired Mag

Premium, i.e., paid, themes that offer huge customizations you can do yourself.

4. Thesis Premium Theme Personal Option ($87)

5. Headway Premium Theme Personal Option ($87)

Other, kind of cheezy, but not too bad, sites that have a good selection.

6. WP Theme Spot

7. WP Snap

8. Themes Base

Specific “Best Of 2010″ blog posts.

9. bloggingexperiment.com Best of 2010

10. wparcade.com Best of 2010

All of them are valid.

The biggest cost of WordPress is the time it takes you to create a site and make it what you want it to be. The biggest downside to using a free service is lack of control.

I suggest that you try out a free site, (after all, it’s free), and learn the ropes.

When you are ready for a “real” web site, then get your own web host and install WordPress. You can point everything on the free site at the new site.

With your very own web site, you have complete control of everything! Sell stuff! Publish what you want. Make it professional and compete with other businesses. Rock the world.

Final thoughts.

13 reasons why you should NOT have a free wordpress.com web site.

So basically what I’m saying is that it’s not a good idea to have a free website as your main home online. Whether you’re an individual or a business, get your own domain and pay for your own hosting.

If you already have a free WordPress site, and it is your only blog/website, I suggest one of two things. 1) Buy a domain, install wordpress and start fresh. You can always direct people to your new blog from your old blog, or 2) Export all your content from your free site into a paid site, then you’ll have everything in one place. The sooner you do this the better in my opinion.

That said, blogging communities are great and should not be ignored. Having a free blog within a blogging community however, is very different than having a website all your own. Of all the free blogging communities around, I like Tumblr the best. Here is a list of some of the most popular blogging communities.

WordPress is a blog application found at WordPress.org
Wordpress is free to use. It’s called open source.
Wordpress is awesome. Smart people use it.
Wordpress.com is a place to be part of a blogging community.
A free WordPress blog doesn’t make sense as your only blog.
A free WordPress blog is a great way to learn the ropes.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.socialmediatherapy.com/2009/07/03/a-free-wordpress-blog-can-really-cost-you/

Headway 1.5 Premium WordPress Theme

Andrew wanted to know what it could “do”. That’s a reasonable question, so I thought I’d try to answer it.

I think the list of features, or the actual tasks it can do, is probably similar to other premium themes. The big “woah” moment for me was the visual editor.

I had an event happen a week ago that caused me to need to get a site up quickly, like from nothing, no idea or content, to functioning site in like 4 hours.

I could have copied an existing site, using my old handcoded theme and thrown it up, changed the colors and been done with it, but I used Headway.

It was easy to create the pages in WordPress, then play with the visual editor to decide colors and layout.

I could add a wigetized sidbar, or 3, and put them where I wanted them.

I could control the width by click and drag to the width I wanted. Changing the width of the sidebay is usually going into the CSS file and guessing, then reloading the page, then guessing again. With this, I clicked and dragged until I was happy.

Of course the color pickers were easy and wonderful. You clicked on the element you wanted to color, and clicked on the color picker. That element was now that color.

I want to be sure I’m communicating this clearly. I like this theme, not because it “does stuff”, but that it does stuff in a visual editor. It’s value is not in what it does, but in how it does it.

You can select elements in a drop down menu and style them from there, but you can also just click on the area that you want to style to select it.

The visual editor is a bunch of “floating palettes” over the top of your page. You have to move the palettes around sometimes, to see what’s behind them on the page.

I also used Headway premium WordPress theme to build my coming business site, You Can Sell Crafts. I spent less than two hours on that site. I’m not promoting that much yet and the products aren’t in place, so I just needed a quick and dirty site for now.

I like it though.

The SEO stuff is great. The transition stuff is great. I haven’t tried the image stuff yet, but I’m sure that’s all great too. Whatever, dude. All the other premium themes out there are great too.

What's totally awesome (I do live near the beach and have long hair, so I can say that without irony) is the visual editor.

It’s like building a site in Photoshop instead of BBEdit, where I usually work. You don’t even have to go to a settings page, save the settings, then check the page. None of that.

You are seeing the page as you design the page, on the page, without leaving the page.

I’ll even complain about the lack of control on absolutely everything. If something needs to be styled or added, but it’s not in the drop down to be selected, I can do it through the editor, by changing the style sheet manually, which is what I’m used to. No loss. No gain.

But, I’m telling you, this visual editor changed the rules.

Woah, dude.

How much control do you want?

It’s a balance of simple and no control against difficult and total control.

Being the control freak that I am, I always choose control. I want you, as my client, to have as much control as you can. I can make the total control of your own web site a little bit simpler, and be there when you have questions.

Which do you choose?

Hosting: Self or Other

The biggest major difference between the two WordPresses is that the dot com version is hosted for you for free on Automattic’s servers, while the dot org version is software you install on your own web server. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress. Hosting with WordPress.com means you save a lot of money, because it’s free, and you never have to worry about your server crashing. You never have to worry about upgrades, because they’re automatic. Everything just works.

To receive those benefits requires you to give up something very important to a business: sovereignty. You don’t control the software or the server. There are incredible extras and freedoms unavailable to you if you go with the dot com version of WordPress. If you install WordPress on your own web server, we call that self-hosted WordPress to quickly tell which flavor of WordPress we’re talking about.

Self-hosted is a double-edged sword. With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have access to scads of themes and plugins that will let you do amazing things with WordPress that you can’t do on the dot com version—it’s like getting the keys to the kingdom. But you’re responsible for managing everything and keeping it updated. Plugins, themes, and WordPress itself require constant upgrading and backing up. Sometimes there are glitches that can only be solved by people who really know what they’re doing. If that’s not you, then you must have access to a qualified person.

Read the entire article at:
http://remarkablogger.com/2009/11/19/wordpress-com-vs-wordpress-org-the-definitive-overview-for-business

Headway 1.5 Premium WordPress Theme

I’ve always built my own custom theme for any site I built. I’ve looked at Thesis and other “premium” themes and none of them could really do any better than I can by writing my own code.

…until now.

Today Headway released the latest version of their premium theme. It’s got the usual list of updated features and that’s all nice and good, but they also released a visual editor.

I’ve hated visual editors since I first used Dreamweaver 1.0. I don’t even use the one that’s built into WordPress.

This one is different.

This one has built is color pickers. You can resize any element on the page. You can add elements to the page. They call them “leafs”, but they are really just “divs” in CSS, which I used to code by hand. Now, I click, drag, drop, pick a color, pick a font. Save. I’m done. It has never been easier.

I think this is the first visual editor that actually works.

I think this is the first visual editor that actually works and my clients can understand how to use it.

My first concern is if it can do everything that I can do by hand. There are a couple tricky things with the layout that I can do, but this does 95% of anything I would ever want it to do. It will do 100% of everything that you will ever want it to do.

My other concern is if it will be easy enough to use. The most obvious stuff is amazingly simple to accomplish. There are some things that you have to learn a little code to do. It’s got the hooks so that if you know the code and want to go hard core on it, it will allow you to. If you have the knowledge, you can do anything. If you don’t know the code, you don’t know the things that you can’t do. It’s that powerful.

If the biggest cost to building a WordPress site is time, then this will cut your design time in half and save you money.

I can finally recommend a premium theme for WordPress and I’m the most cynical guy you’ll meet when it comes to new stuff like this. If you are looking for a more powerful, easy to use way to customize your own WordPress blog, you need to check out Headway.

Do it now.