Good Free WordPress Premium themes

admin    free, Productivity, websites, wordpress     free, themes, websites, wordpress

If you are looking for free wordpress themes you will fun in a big issue, you will either come upon many pages where they try to get you to buy the theme, affiliate link sites, poor quality themes, or even worse themes with bad links in them. Or the worse scenario, themes with virus or malware.

Even if you find the right theme unless it’s well supported you will come across issues sooner or later. The best option is to get free themes from premium sellers who offer the free themes as marketing and provide good updates and support. Here are some that I found:

Woothemes free themes:

Makes one of the best engines for wordpress themes. You can expect good integration and quality. The style is professional as well as it has some that are more playful.

Site5 free themes:

Themes are professionally design and good layout but it adds playful graphics to it. Good for web 2.0 websites that are casual but serious business sites. They provide great hosting service. They offer these themes to promote their company so you can expect good support and updates.

WP Shower:

Minimalist themes. Great for arts and fashion businesses that need simple elegant themes. They also recently started have premium paid themes. With their minimalist design there is not many options in the back to customize the themes.

How to get expired domains

admin    domain     domains, SEO

The best domain names are taken but there are many people who forget to renew. This is the perfect opportunity to grab it up. This is the life of an expired domain and how you can get it.

1. 0-45 days Renewal Period – Registrant can renew it at renewal rate
2. 30 day redemption period – The domain is no longer active, registrar owns it but let’s registrant renew it at higher fee. Some registrar may decrease this period to get the domain faster.
3. 5-10 day auction – Auction off
4. 5 day pending delete – registrant cannot renew it and registrar puts it on “Soon-to-be-available” list
5. Release to Public – Then it is released to public between 11am and 2pm PST.

You can no longer try to catch valuable dropped domains because the registrar will auction it off or keep it if they are valuable. The way to get expiring domains is to bid for them with Snapnames, Pool.com, GoDaddy’s TDNAM or similar services. Or you can hope to pick it up when with drops with Snapnames.com, Enom.com, Pool.com, and GoDaddy. If the domain is half decent there is no point in trying to catch it when it drops because the other companies have a lot more resources.

Snapnames.com

They charge $60 to get your name unless there are many other bidders. Affiliated with Network Solutions. They have an exclusive contract so they get first pick for expiring names on network solutions.

Enom.com

They charge a $30 fee. But now NameJet handles all of their backorder domains.

Pool.com

They will get the name for you for $60. Once they get it they will offer you a option to increase your bid but does not tell you if there are other bidders and how much they are bidding. If there are 2 bid or your bid is within 30% of the top bid there will be a one day auction.

NameJet.com

Exclusive domain management for Network Solutions and Enom. If your domain is with those providers you will have an opportunity to get it.

GoDaddy.com

You can buy expiring or auction domains from Godaddy. Starting bid is $10 but they charge an additional amount for the renewal. I recommend checking DomainYank.com Search to find the ranking and traffic for the domains.

Power tip: To get leverage over the other bidders it is good to get the .net, .org, and .info.

Tools to find the perfect domain name

admin    Online Tools, SEO    

Part of the starting a business is finding a good domain name. Here are some really cool tools that makes it very easy. You can also use this tool to build additional SEO sites with the keywords you want.

Domain Hole – A tool that help you mine expired domains. Then check on hosterstat to see the age of the domain. You can find some good ones.Here’s a list of what you can do:

1. Expired search – Find expired domains based on keywords
2. Name Spinner – Enter a keyword then select options to generate available names with the keyword
3. Instant Check – checks the domain as you type it but what’s really great is that all the names stay on the page
4. Complete Check – Checks all the different TLD extenstions
5. Name generator – This helps you come up with web 2.0 names where the domain is available

Panabee – Enter 2 words and it will generate a list of possible domains. Comes up with a lot of creative names.

Bust A Name – combines keywords in different combinations to get available domains

namestation – use this tool to generate random words or hold a contest for names. Tools that generate random domains, combine and blend words, and find short web2.0 domains.

Valuedrops.com – This shows the dropped domains for today and pending drops for tomorrow. It uses it’s logarithm to filter by value.

wordoid.com – Enter a word and this generates names with that word. e.g. enter “deal” and you get dealized, dealizing,, idealth, etc…

Domai.nr – enter a word and it will help you find short domains

Branding and Copywriting Ad Strategy Worksheet

God    Marketing    

Since I learn copywriting and branding I have used this simple copy worksheet to organize my thoughts. It’s very useful.

Creative Strategy Worksheet

The following sheet helps to understand and guide the process of developing an ad. This was taken from Fundamentals of Copy & Layout (1984) Alber C. Book and C. Dennis Schick

Product (or Service):
Primary Selling Points: (Product Points: built-in characteristics or product itself, including any U.S.P.)

1. .
2. .
3. .

Primary Benefits: (Prospect Points: what buyer gets from using the product or service)

Pain Points: (The pain the prospect feels in which this product/service will solve)

Consumer Profile of Target Prospect:

1. Demographics: (Age, sex, education, income, occupation)
2. Psychographics: (Lifestyle, attitude, personality traits)

Belief you want this ad to establish:

Reasons why prospect should believe it:

1. .
2. .
3. .

“Big Ides” to dramatize this belief:

1. .
2. .
3. .

Visualization of Big Idea:

1. Product alone:
2. Product in setting:
3. Product in use:

Action you want reader to take:

Interview Questions for Outsourcing Candidates

God    Outsourcing     interview, odesk, Outsourcing, questions

In Odesk there is an explicit “interview” process where you ask the candidates questions. With other sites there are similar processes. Most likely when you get to this process you are pretty confident in the every candidate and have done the proper research.

The goal of this process is to discover the following:

1. Do they know and understand the importance of the project
2. Their knowledge and experience on the topic and style of writing
3. If their communication style matches yours

Either if you do not need to find those information, it is better to do it before hiring them just to make the candidate do more work. They will appreciate and value the job more.

Questions:

1. Why do you think this project is important?
2. What kind of related work have you done before?
3. What’s your knowledge and experience with the topic?
4. Describe the target audience?
5. How do you typically communicate with your clients? How often?
6. How long do you think it would take to complete the task?
7. What would be your process for completing this task?
8. Do you have experience doing this work and how does it relate?
9. Do you have any suggestions for the project?
10. Do you have any questions for me?

Those should be enough to get their response and their dedication to the project.

Tips on finding the right odesk worker

God    Outsourcing    

Odesk provides great tools to find the right outsourcing staff. I personally find it much easier to use and filter than the other sites I use, vworker and scriptlance. However I still go to those sites for programmers. As I have been spending a lot of time using it, I have discovered some tips that would help you. Love to get your feedback on them to see if they worked for you or not.

1. Look at the hours they work on their projects – If a contractor is good they are usually hired for a long period of time.
2. Look for comment feedbacks – Look at how their employers rate them. Usually if they outstanding they will get consistent enthusiastic comments. If you see lack luster comments such as “They did as required.” It’s an indication that the employer did not like their work and only wrote that to be polite.
3. Review the type of work they’ve done -make sure it’s similar to yours
4. Make sure they have a lot of hours worked (about at least 50 or 60). – This will ensure that they follow the system. You do not want to waste your time trying to manage a newbie.
5. Plan to select more than one worker. – If the task can be divided select 2 or more workers at the same time doing different part of the tasks. Depending on your task and your style, one worker will be better than another.
6. Invite contractors to get more applicants. - Whenever I outsource the odds of the perfect candidate applying is very slim. So I am always proactive and look for them. In the case of odesk this extra effort saves me a lot of time and make the process quicker. After setting my filters I invite those contractors to the job. Since I invited them I just review those I invited instead of everyone that applied which many do not match my filter. As well since I invited them they respond within 24 hours so I do not need to wait for applicants.
7. For article writing, hire from culturally relevant countries – It is important to hire writers that have same cultural perspective as your country. I’m from Canada and I find that the Copywriters I was looking at, only people from the US, Canada, and Philippines seem to write in a style that is ‘normal’ and relatable here.

Better Usability Testing for Lower Price

God    Uncategorized    

There are many user testing sites out there but they are expensive. In additions the users on that does those service does not represent the actual user of your site because those using the service is an experience (they do it all day) and paid user.

A better technique would be to get people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. And get them to install Screencast-o-matic and to send you the video of them using it. Be general in what instructions you give them. For example, use this site to find your favourite laptop to purchase. This will cost 1/20th the cost of those user testing sites.

If you are launching a new service you could find millions of bugs in your app but instead of fixing them all which might take you forever, just fix the ones where the users are having issues with. Many bugs will never bother the user.

Million Dollar Revenue for your Startup

God    Money, Uncategorized     million dollars, money, Monthly users, Recurring, SASS, startup

Getting to a million dollar revenue is not as difficult as many startup thinks if you follow Signal37 thinking. Charging a monthly recurring fee can add up quickly. See the chart below to see how many recurring customers you need. For example if you were to charge $40 monthly you need just over 2000 paid users monthly.

Embed this on your blog or site:

<a href=”http://businesstoolreviews.com/million-dollar-revenue-startup/”><img src=”http://businesstoolreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/million-dollar-revenue-info-chart-01-1024×431.png” alt=”Million Dollar Revenue Startup Info Chart></a>

How to make a Web 2.0 Logo

God    Uncategorized     design, logos, web 2.0

If you are looking for ideas on designing web 2.0 logos check out this collage of web 2.0 logos. This will for sure give you a lot of great ideas.

Here are some characteristics of Web 2.0 logos:

1. Simple Shapes – Drawings of the icons are very simple, it is filtered down to it’s simplest elements
2. Sans Serif Fonts – Most of the text are sans serif, and in the rare case it is a serif font, it is the most
3. Bright Colours – Check out the colour palette of the sample logos. They are all bright happy colours
4. 2 tone – Text are divided to 2 colours. This is because for URL it is a combination of 2 text and it is not possible to have spaces between them or else the URL would be confusing. As well many names are made up of 2 concepts like Dis Us.
5. 2 fonts – Similar to 2 tone, some logos use 2 types of fonts to communicate the effect of the previous point (2 tone)
6. One idea – If you look at all the logos there is one concept or idea, one thing that draws your attention to. This is general of logo design.
7. Gradients – This is web 2.0 signature.
8. Lose the “.com” – Very few logos actually have “.com” in it. It’s so obvious that it’s a web 2.0 company, .com is not needed. But make sure you have a version with .com as well.

How to make a great company video

God    Uncategorized     Grumo Media, Made to Stick, mixergy, video

This is a real cool and ingenious concept on making company videos. Miguel Hernandez of Grumo Media on Mixergy talks about his approach to video.

Your video should answer 3 questions:

1. What is the problem that your product or service is solving?
2. How does it solve it?
3. What do they do next?

And he follows the methodogy of Made to Stick S.U.C.C.E.S: Simple Unexpected Concrete  Core Emotional Story

Check out one of his video that applies his philosphy: