Randy Roedl

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affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is the revenue sharing between
online advertisers (and merchants) and online
salespeople. Compensation and pay is based on
performance measures, normally in the form of clicks,
sales, and registrations.

The advertisers and merchants are normally referred
to as affiliate merchants, and publishers or sales
people are known as affiliates.

The many benefits of affiliate marketing include
the potential for making lots of money. You can
automate a lot of the advertising process and
receive payment only for desired results, which
includes sales, registrations, and clicks.

Even though most merchants will assume some level
of risk with fraud, there is still a level of risk
involved. Once you know what you’re doing with
affiliate marketing, you’ll be on top well before
you know it.

Affiliate marketing has been a contributor to the
rise of many companies online, including Amazon.com.
Amazon.com was one of the first adopters of affiliate
marketing, and now has thousands of affiliate
relationships.

When it comes to making money, affiliate marketing
is in a league of it’s own. You don’t have to
worry about bosses breathing down your neck, and
you are in control of everything you do with
your company and your website.

Affiliate marketing also gives you the chance to
stand behind products you know and love, be
offering links and banners to them on your personal
website. You’ll receive money for each product
purchased that you represent, which is reason
enough to participate.

If you’ve been looking for extra money, affiliate
marketing is the way to go. You can stick with
one merchant or go with as many as you need for
your business. Affilate marketing on the internet
is truly becoming more and more popular - making
now the time for you to get your foot in the
door.

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affiliate Marketing 101

Affiliate marketing programs are a great way to get
income for your website, and a great introduction
to e-commerce. The more people that drop by your
website, the great your chance will be at creating
an excellent income.

Affiliate marketing programs are where a company
offers to pay you a set amount for either a click
through from your website, or a set amount for
visitors signing up, or even a percentage of a
purchase made by visitors as a result of being
referred from your website.

Even if visitors don’t make a purchase immediately,
almost all programs offer cookie duration, normally
consisting of 30 - 90 days. What this means, is
that as long as the visitors have the cookie in
their cache, you’ll still recieve a profit from
the sale.

The biggest amount of time in maintaining your
site will be searching and implementing affiliations
with various companies. Even though there’s a lot
of money in affiliate marketing, you have to take
the time to search for the best programs.

One thing that you may not be happy with, is the
idea of other companies banners littering your
website. If you use too many banners or links on
any web page, it can confuse and help to irritate
your visitors. More than one animated element on
a web page can be very distracting as well.

Affiliate tracking can also be a problem. Once
you have applied to become an affiliate for a
company, they’ll usually supply you with a
personalized link or code. It’s very important
that you implement this code into your page
correctly, or you may be sending visitors to the
company without recieving any profit.

A majority of snippets in the code will contain
a unique user ID, which the company uses to
distinguish which site sent traffic.

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Ad Tracking Success

It’s no secret that there’s a lot of money involved
with affiliate marketing. This is only true however,
for those who are serious and hard working on their
affiliate program. The biggest part of succeeding
depends on your perseverance and determination.

Even the best of affiliate programs won’t prosper
if you don’t build the business on a solid foundation.
Nothing happens if the banners and links you place
on a website just decorates the pages. The affiliate
must convince visitors to click on the banner or link
then proceed to the program to buy products.

Affiliate marketing can be easy if you have planned
your campaign well and have taken the right steps
towards success. Choosing the right product and
designing your website with banners and the right
material are keys to making things happen.

An ad tracker is a software program that will allow
you to trace and monitor every click that is made
by visitors through your referral link. To make
things even better, you know exactly where you
placed the link. You can either use a service
provider or purchase ad tracking software.

With ad trackers, you can monitor the progress
of your campaigns, even advertising offline. If
you have several affiliate accounts, this tool
can be very good to have.

Each and every decision you make should be well
grounded in facts. By using an ad tracker, you’ll
be able to generate traffic reports for your
personal sales page. Armed with the proper
knowledge and an ad tracking software program,
you’ll have no problems succeeding in the
affiliate marketing world. It can be tough to
get started - although once you start making money
you’ll be glad you took the chance!

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Adsense - Pros and Cons

You have that site on-line for quite a while, its generating a good number of hits every day and you’re thinking whether or not to use AdSense advertising on it to make it generate some form of income.

Well this is a description of the pros and cons of this approach to internet advertising. AdSense has definitely hit the Internet like something from another planet and people are very excited about it everywhere. There are negative aspects to Adsense and alternatives to consider.

AdSense is generally a great tool for webmasters. Whereas, they would use to worry about how to raise enough money to keep their sites profitable, or at least keep them on-line those worries are gone.

AdSense allows webmasters to forget about those worries and concentrate on creating good content for their sites. In fact, the emphasis is now on creating quality content (often associated with the top-paying words) which will bring you many visitors.

AdSense can also very well integrated with your website, it’s easily customizable in terms of colors, size and position which means you can experiment with it in any way you like to maximize your income.

AdSense is a very good means of generating a constant revenue on your site. All you need to do is create some quality content and keep it updated constantly and you can literally live off your website. A lot of people are doing just that nowadays with AdSense, so it’s become sort of a business in itself.

It’s also a great program because you can have the same account advertising on all your pages. This is great for webmasters wit a lot of content because it means they don’t have to create many accounts unnecessarily.

But as stated, above, there are some negative aspects to advertising with AdSense and here’s a small list of such cons.

Clearly the largest negative impact the AdSense program can have on you is through Google closing your accounts. Most of the time this happens because of so called ‘click fraud’, which means somebody would be producing artificial clicks on your page.

There’s one really nasty side to that. It doesn’t have to be you making those artificial clicks. It could very well be your competition doing this in order to shut you down, or the competitor of whoever is advertising on your page, looking to drive their marketing costs up.

The earning AdSense brings you are by no means constant. In fact, they’re not even close to that. Anything you do to your site could end up being a big mistake costing you a great deal of money. It’s that kind of pressure that has a negative impact on you.

First of all, you constantly need to make sure your site is in the spotlight of search engines when people are searching for whatever it is your site is about.

If you fail to do that you won’t have any visitors, and that of course means you won’t have any AdSense revenue. In a way this is nothing new, as any form of generating revenue on the Internet with advertising has such a drawback.

And finally, another major problem is that you constantly have to feed your site with better and better content. Now, of course, certain sites are very well geared towards doing this but with some types of content this is rather hard to achieve. This is often why the services of a copywriter are employed to generate more and more content.

When writing original content, the best thing a website owner can do is research a topic thoroughly and then return to writing with lots of information they can out in their own words, and show their own opinion on.

So there are the pros and cons of using the AdSense network for generating profits through advertising. Now the choice of whether or not these work for you is yours.

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates at www.AdsenseTemplates.com (www.adsensetemplates.com). They are offering 100 fresh new templates every month.

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Adsense is for Everyone

When Google’s AdSense appeared, there were a lot of people who doubted Google’s idea would be marketable and actually generate any profits. Yet as we stand here today it’s probably the most well known pay per click venture in the world.

Yes, all those nay sayers ended up eating their own words in the end. And that is because the folks at Google never go and do something without assessing whether or not it will be profitable, or exactly how profitable it is.

But of course, as you might very well know, AdSense isn’t just profitable for Google. It’s also profitable for the people who advertise via AdWords and very profitable for publishers who use it to make earnings which are sometimes just enormous.

So one must ask himself why this is such a good deal for everybody. And the question in itself is very justified because you hardly ever come across something that’s profitable for everyone in the chain. So why would AdSense be any different.

Well, AdSense is where it stands today, giving benefits for everybody in the game because it exploits a gap in the internet’s advertising model.

You see, the Internet is a very interactive environment, and its interactions come from the people who are browsing. They choose whether or not to follow a certain link and the term “navigating” is probably the most precise one at describing this situation.

So AdSense is great because it links together buyers and sellers. Yes, you have to hand it out to Google for a brilliant idea. They know there are people out there that want to buy stuff and people who want to sell them what they’re interested in. And Google AdSense helps members of the two categories find each other.

It works for the visitors, because the model is very transparent. You don’t see a huge graphic banner which tries to lure you into buying something. You just see a few words. And if you like what you see you can just click it. It works because visitors don’t have that feeling of someone trying to lure them into spending money. Ironically, however, they’re wrong.

It works for the AdWords advertisers because their ads go everywhere. Not only will they find themselves listed in Google’s search which gets gazillions of hits per day, up front without working as much for SEO and waiting so much.

Their ads can reach any website that deals with anything similar to what they’re trying to sell. Now you must realize they could never pull of such great advertising by themselves. And that brings us to the thing that makes Google’s AdSense a publisher’s best friend.

It comes from the fact that the ads are contextual, that they somehow related to the keywords you deal with on your page. Because people or on your site, which deals with a certain topic, you already know they’re interested in that topic.

But, hey, wait a minute, Google knows some companies which want to sell your visitors something related to their topic. Google wants your visitors, you want Google’s advertisers and the visitors just want to buy stuff. And that is the essence of what makes AdSense a great deal for everybody.

This is by far the most profitable hook-up deal you’re ever going to see anywhere on the Internet.

So you have to appreciate Google for realizing a killer deal. You have to appreciate how well thought out, yet simple this scheme really is. Sure, in practice it has a few quirks but those are minor and, up to this point everyone seems to be enjoying Google’s AdSense.

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates at www.AdsenseTemplates.com (www.adsensetemplates.com). They are offering 100 fresh new templates every month.

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There are countless methods and techniques that one can utilize to

earn either a part-time or full-time income, and there are more

people everyday striking riches on the internet. Like any other

method of making money it definitely doesn’t come easy and you

need to work hard in the first initial couple years to ensure

you’re set-up for the future. Some of the ways you earn online are

short-term quick means of cash and although these are great you

should focus on the long-term sustainable income if you plan on

working online full-time. Below are some of the methods you can

use to earn an online income.

- Paid Surveys
- Selling Products/Services
- affiliate Sales
- Advertising Sales

Generally these are the most common sought after methods of

earning money online and cover basically any topic you could

imagine. Paid surveys can be great for new webmasters looking to

begin earning online, with surveys the money is slow but you’ll be

able to get some income going and you’ll learn more about how the

internet runs and how you can make money. I suggest you join a few

survey networks as with only joining one you might not make

sufficient funds. The more surveys you place yourself in front of

the more chance you have of earning income. All surveys will pay

you money, but there is definitely the need for doing a nice

number of them to earn any substantial money.

For longer term income you can sell your own product or service,

this can be done through your own website or through forums and

social networking sites. There are countless amounts of people

hiring freelancers from forums and social networking sites. If you

want to earn an income through selling services and products then

you’ll need to ensure you allow proper time to do so. It wouldn’t

be honest to tell you that you can expect to earn hundreds of

dollars a day from the get-go and generally this will never

happen. With a product you need to set-up a website and then work

on advertising it to your target audience and then hope you start

triggering sales, which usually will happen in time but there are

some products that never sell. If you’re offering a webmaster

service then money can begin right away through forums, because

there are always people looking for freelance webmasters to

complete jobs.

If you don’t have your own product and you don’t think you could

offer a service then you can do affiliate sales which is basically

you selling someone else’s product for a commission. If you think

you have sales talent and just are missing the product to sell

then affiliate sales might work for you. You can also earn money

through leads which is where you send people from your website to

another website to sign-up for something free. Leads don’t pay

nearly as well as sales but you can get your foot in the door with

your affiliate network by setting up a few good lead offers on

your site. You need to make sure that your product or lead that

you offer on your site is targeted towards your audience or else

don’t expect many sales.

The last method to earn money that we’ll be discussing in this

article is advertising sales. There are different ways to earn

through advertising sales which consist of either joining an ad

network like Adsense and using their ads to earn money, or you can

find people to advertise your site by yourself. You’ll obviously

make more money by selling your own ads on your site but this can

be time consuming and often you’ll end up making less due to open

spots. I find a good medium is too use Adsense and then sell the

odd link or banner on the site for some extra income. This is the

best way to utilize advertising income, you just need to make sure

that you don’t place too many sold links on your site because your

site can be harmed by this, which isn’t what you’re trying to do.

All of these great methods that I’ve walked through with you above

are wonderful ways to earn money and you should try them all out.

Once you begin to get comfortable you’ll be able to utilize more

then one of the methods above on everyone of your sites that you

make. You’ll want to focus on one site in the beginning but once

you feel you have conquered some of the techniques you need to

know then you can begin branching out and making new sites.

Millions of people earn money online everyday and it can be done

by anyone at any age from any country. If you’re serious about

making money online there are tons of resources on the internet

that you can use to become more knowledgeable in the area. You

should remember to start slow and not expect to even earn a dollar

in the first few months. You need to establish your sites and

methods of earning before the real money starts coming in, those

with the patience will notice success before those who throw away

all their projects.

Adsense and the Surfer

AdSense is an easy program to grasp: it’s a great form of an advertising bringing a lot of benefits to every person in the chain. And of course, seeing the results it can have on a business (and a publisher) people encourage this form of publicity.

For the browsing audience this is probably the most straightforward model available, because they can be directed to a lot of new sites they wouldn’t have otherwise found. Needless to say, if you have an AdSense banner on your site, and a large number of visitors you’ll know it offers a great financial benefit.

But why does it work for the people clicking the links, as opposed to a standard approach?

It is aided by today’s society. With bloggers and information based articles on the internet, people may be encouraged to complete purchases, which adsense can provide links to relevant suppliers whilst also benefiting the publisher.

And the good thing about this is that it works for site visitors as well. In fact Google realized that by pleasing the people who are looking for something, and directing them to what they need faster, everybody wins.

It is because of this that a lot of websites promote through AdSense in both content and search. They do it because they ultimately learned that it works for everyone.

If we look in the past, we can realize that this kind of publicity has a great impact over the people, especially in the last few years. When we enter on a web site and we see a graphical banner, our first idea is to cancel it out of our mind, because it’s of no concern to us.

That’s why traditional banner advertising is wrong. It’s precisely because people are becoming savvy that they don?t look at a flashy banner because they think they’ll be losing their time with it.

We’ve gotten accustomed to banners that don’t interest us. And we’re accustomed to them having nice graphics. So we naturally associate the two things and think that a banner with nice graphics has nothing to tell us.

But we might look at a text-ad because we’ve grown accustomed to them being targeted at what we’re looking for. Basically these advertisements have marketed themselves into being looked at by any visitor.

This is a typical “no fluff, just stuff” situation. And in the end it means the visitors will see what they’re interested in, not some random cool graphics you throw at them.

As stated above, site visitors adopt this advertising mechanism, because it is efficient in leading them to pages of interest and can offer ton of things they really want to see. Someone coming across an article on adsense was probably looking for shoes or doing research on shoes when they came across the article.

And most importantly for everyone, including visitors, this scheme can only improve as the process gets further refined to make ads more relevant to what you’re looking for, not just a couple of keywords on a site.

Nowadays, it is because of AdSense that Internet surfers are looking after more interesting related things from banners, and the companies behind the site (Google and the advertiser) need to have better ideas to display, as expectations have increased a great deal.

So could “Do no evil” actually work in today’s cut throat competitive marketplace? Well, as you can see it can and it does. And you, as a visitor are the one who gets to enjoy this the most. Advertising becomes less of a burden and more of a benefit, and is still a benefit you can choose to ignore.

Less obtrusive banners; banners that you’re actually likely to be interested in and click means you’ll be less annoyed by surfing the web and feel like you as a visitor being offered a relevant service.

Although some may feel reluctant to read articles that are there purely to compel consumers, undoubtedly without this consideration they are useful. Ultimately the adverts mean that you don?t have to go back to your homepage every time you are compelled to complete a purchase.

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates at www.AdsenseTemplates.com (www.adsensetemplates.com). They are offering 100 fresh new templates every month.

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Adsense Alternatives 2

Bidvertiser (www.bidvertiser.com/)
Like AdSense, Bidvertiser displays text ads in your page. But the difference lies in the fact that advertisers bid over your advertising space, ensuring you earn as much revenue as you possibly can. This also means that bids will increase over time, earning you even more cash. You also get a great way to customize your ads with a very easy to use tool and detailed reports on your site’s status.

Quigo AdSonar (www.quigo.com/adsonarpublishers.htm)
Quigo AdSonar achieves relevancy by placing a filter according to your site’s categories. It also offers you on-line reports of your site’s status and the possibility to add your own custom ads replacing ads that don’t gain you any revenue. The setup is very simple, in a similar fashion to AdSense’s and quite customizable as well.

Vibrant Media IntelliTXT (www.intellitxt.com/site/web_01a.html)
Vibrant Media IntelliTXT offers user-activated ads, highlighting certain words within the content of the page and presenting relevant ads when a user hovers his mouse over them. It uses a pay-for-performance pricing scheme and can easily be used along with other advertising methods, because it is unobtrusive. It places you in full control, allowing you to easily integrate it within your site with some simple JavaScript.

Nixie (www.nixxie.com/display.php?section=Partners)
Nixie claims to hold a technology that can read and understand your site, enabling it to display the most relevant content to your site. Besides text ads, Nixie also features price comparison listings as well as live auction advertising. It’s very easy to implement and has a good payment policy as well.

MIVA AdRevenue Xpress (www.miva.com/us/content/partners/arx.asp)
MIVA AdRevenue Xpress is targeted towards small and mid-sized publishers. It implements Search Box functionality and also features things like a Category Directory as well as the handling of 404 error pages. It can be integrated with your page using a simple on-line wizard.

Fastclick (www.fastclick.com/publish.html)
Fastclick offers you an impressive 65 percent of what it makes from a click on your website. Payments are done monthly, via PayPal or through checks. The ads can be formatted as you wish, and Fastclick even offers a free support serice for its members and no fees are required to register with the service.

contextWeb ContextAd (www.contextweb.com/Corporate/publisher/publisher.shtml)
ContextAd offers the possibility of contextual ads for dynamic pages, meaning ads will change as soon as your page does. It’s very easy to use and free to sing up for and offers a transparent payment policy. The ads are fully customizable and real-time reports are available 24/7.

AdBrite (www.adbrite.com/)
AdBrite offers publishers the possibility of integrating text ads in their pages. These are done on your own rates, with the websites you approve by hand so it bares some similarities with a classic advertising scheme. You also have the option of adding a “Your Add Here” button that buyers can immediately click to ad space on your page. It can also be used in conjunction with Google AdSense, maximizing your CTR and offering advertisers the possibility of showing their links in your Google AdSense space. You have full control over the look and feel of your adds and finally, you get an incredible 75% of what the advertiser pays for on every click.

So, as you can see there are many offers for this kind of advertising, and many hybrids based on AdSense like advertising. Also, a lot of services can work together with AdSense to earn you an even greater amount of revenue for your ad space.

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates at www.AdsenseTemplates.com (www.adsensetemplates.com). They are offering 100 fresh new templates every month.

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Adsense Alternatives

Many people have started using Google’s AdSense program, but there are some who find it a bit too uncertain or simply not suiting their own requirements from an ad program.

But thankfully for such people, there are many alternatives to AdSense which attempt to alleviate some of its shortcomings. Here is a list of the most noteworthy ones from the lot with a description concerning each one.

Allfeeds (www.allfeeds.com/?action=publishers)
AllFeeds has a great pool of online advertisers to choose from. It also features many display formats that you can choose from. These include banners, buttons, XML feeds, DHTML pop-ups and so on. It also features real time reporting of your ad status. The site will mail a check every month, provided that you earn more then $25.00, while rolling over earnings for the next month if you don’t. Another interesting thing about AllFeeds is that it integrates with Google AdSense, maximizing your earnings with AdSense.

MarketBanker (www.marketbanker.com/mb/sell.php)
MarketBanker allows you the unique possiblity to set the pricing for your site. It also allows you to allow or reject any link that appears on your site (although AdSense itself does a very good job of this as well, with URL filters) There’s also a statistics section which will allow you to see how well your site is doing. The ads are small just like AdSense’s and they’re just as easy to set up. Also, registration for MarketBanker is free.

BidClix ( www.bidclix.com/PubTop.html)
BidClix is different because it has advertisers compete for clicks on your site, which in turn is meant to generate the highest possible profits for your page. It also has a very large pool of advertisers which ensure there are plenty of people to choose your site. However, it does require more polish on site contents then AdSense. As most sites, real time statistics are available and its very easy to get started with this service, but it’s also very flexible.

Chitika (www.realcontext.com/index.php?option=RealContext:+Contextual+Targeting+Engine)
RealContext uses Artificial intelligence to retrieve the most relevant ads for your page. And there’s an extra feature which makes RealContext unique as well. Keywords are selected based upon which previous selections payed off and which didn’t. That means there’s a constant feedback process that ensures you gain better revenue from your ads. It also supports blocking certain adds and child-safe filtering and many more options.

AdHearus (adhearus.com/webmaster.php)
AdHearus is a very feature-packed contextual ad provider. As with AdSense, advertisements are targeted but it doesn’t stop here at all. The ads are very flexible, you can select from text-ads, banners, rectangles, pop-ups, pop-unders or skyscrapers. You can also display your own ads, through rotation, both on your site and on other affiliate sites, which makes AdHearus a hybrid with conventional advertising technologies. There’s a very comprehensive on-line real time reporting feature and, as usual with such services, starting out is free and it’s a breeze.

AffiliateSensor (www.affiliatesensor.com/)
AffiliateSensor has highly customizable ad blocks, which you can make for yourself with an easy to use on-line interface. You also get realtime reporting with clicks-by-domain, page and refferer. There’s integration with Google AdSense as well, through the google_alternate_ad_url so AffiliateSensor can be used as a substitute for Google PSA’s (Public Service Ads).

Kanoodle Bright Ads (www.kanoodle.com/about/brightads.cool)
Kanoodle’s offering allows publishers to get ads related to topics or segments, and not the traditional keyword oriented ads. The site also groups publisher sites with advertisers by hand to ensure high-revenue generating ads. And speaking of revenue, the amount of money you receive is a clear 50% share of the amount of money Kanoodle recieves for an advertiser.

TargetPoint (publisher.targetpoint.com)
TargetPoint is oriented more towards content publishers. It offers full control over the look the ads, statistics over your site’s overall performance and better revenue. It’s free to register and you earn a guaranteed 60% of the total revenue. You can get payed with Paypal of Bank checks and (most times) wire transfers as well.

Clicksor (www.clicksor.com)
Clicksor will earn you as much as 60% from the amount of money your website produces. What you get is about the same as AdSense, there are targeted text ads, you can view the revenues from your website in real time. You can receive money via PayPal or through a check every two weeks, provided that you have earned more then $50. If you haven’t made that much, your earning roll over to the next period

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results. You may find the best adsense templates and blog templates at www.AdsenseTemplates.com (www.adsensetemplates.com). They are offering 100 fresh new templates every month.

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With thousands of wordpress themes now on the market for free and for money you can bet it’s hard to decide on the top Wordpress themes, but I believe I have come up with a great answer to this burning question. Now there are many free Wordpress themes that are very nice and I use many of them but they can’t justify being number one on the list.

To be number one the theme needs to have some exclusiveness, but at the same time still be available to the general public. I’ve seen some very incredible Wordpress themes that are unique to just one person’s blog but in this case we won’t be choosing from that.

I have looked through the top Wordpress themes on the internet that cost anywhere between $20-$200 and I have come up with the top Wordpress themes. It was a fairly difficult decision to come up with a winner for the top Wordpress themes but after viewing themes for a long time I decided on choosing the Revolution Wordpress themes.

There are currently eight Revolution Wordpress themes for sale and each one of them are very well designed and thought out. Each one of theme are designed for a specific niche blog and I feel that the designs were kept simple enough to use and didn’t go overboard on the options. The two themes I like the most from the Revolution series is the news theme and the sports theme which are somewhat similar but both very nice magazine style blog themes.

Magazine style Wordpress themes have been very popular and I have seen them on lots of blogs recently, but most of the free magazine themes aren’t very well designed.

Now I don’t have much coding knowledge so this is why spending a few bucks on a well designed Wordpress theme is worth it. With a revolution Wordpress theme you will stand out and look like one of the top dogs of blogging.

Now this exposure is excellent when starting out a blog and this is why I give the Revolution Wordpress themes the number one Wordpress theme.