I’m always looking for designing resources to make my wordpress themes better and stand out more then others out there and i have infact tried and incorporated a different view of a weblog in every one of my themes.

The only way to make the content stand out more is to have it on a plain white background with a detailed pattern as the page background, alot of weblogs have done this and most of the time the pattern goes un-noticed even though the readers don’t always realize why it is that they are drawn to the content more.

Here are 3 great resources for bg patterns.

ShutterStock Patterns

Rawsterne

Patternhead

Besides from ready made backgrounds here are 2 of my favourite sites, the generators.

Stripe Generator

Tartan Maker

All the resources posted above is not just for webdesigners but for bloggers as well the patterns here aren’t just for themes,templates and wallpapers but for ordinary pictures as well, such as banners for posts, titles within pictures to spice the post up.

Such as this banner

This month was slightly better then the last one, the growth is obvious although there were alot of obstacles this month i still managed to top my last months earnings. This month i was more focused on increasing my feed reader count (rss readers not email subscribers) then monetizing the site more effectively. My first priority is to get more traffic to the blog so that the current advertisers would stay, i think that should be every money blogger’s first priority, traffic/readers.

So lets get down to the figures of this month!

Private Ad Sales - $160

Sponsored Reviews - $250

Product Sales - $60

Ad networks - $50

Total: $520

Expenses can not be noted down at the moment because i have alot of mixed expenses that include other sites + personal expenses, i will however make an expense report for the next month.

May the next month be more profitable for everyone of you out there as well!

A few weeks ago i covered a visual search engine by google and i knew there would be more who would follow in those footsteps in order to make an “even better” search engine and here we are, ManagedQ has released their visual search which is said to be the visual search engine experiment that actually works.

I ran a few queries at MQ and it seems to have a really great sorting system where it sorts the results of your query by Person, Place and Thing. I think that is what i am looking for mostly at google to find a certain person with a certain thing in a certain place..

Although MQ has its flaws such as query result page titles and various text problems on the main windows of results and the keywords on the place/person/thing area where the keywords are really irrelevant to what’s being talked about.

TNX is a new link buying and selling system that came out a few months ago it was first intro’d at digitalpoint i think and since then it has boomed to a great height and right now its being used alot, the stats on their stats are really impressive, according to the stats there are 27 million pages of several Pageranks that you can buy links on.

Buying Links

Buying links is the hardest task for a webmaster these days with all the google penalties and all, if you are infact caught buying links your site can lose rankings that is why its better to buy links through either a professional link builder or link broking sites such as TNX, the reason TNX has got all the attention it has today is because of its comprehensive relevance system that gets you only the strongest links available in their page index!

They have an easy 3 step process to buy links which i will demonstrate here:

Step1:

• Choose the type of sites you want links on (this is the feature i liked the most because of the relevancy)
• Choose the geo targeting of the website’s traffic.
• Choose the language
• Choose the PR of the website, each pr has its own rates so this lets you choose your links in every way.
• At the very end it will tell you how many sites you have to choose from and what it would cost you to advertise per month.

Step 2 Making links.

This step lets you add as many links to the rotation as you want to avoid dup content on the minor end, and it can be modified in every way as well, the keyword has the main focus and the text around it is what gives it the most value thats why its crucial that you do this step properly.

If you are ordering around 100 links/month then you will need to have at least 50 links in the rotation (per site) and it may seem like alot but its the most effective way to get the most out of TNX!

Step 3 Look through your options..

On step 3 you will be given a list of sites available (no url, just stats) to choose from for links, here you can order as many links per site as you want, the results on this page are made by the options you chose on step 1, all the pr diversity chosen is now on this page.

You can either get 1 really powerful pr7 link or SEVERAL pr0/1 links!
In this case i went with the PR0s

Selling Links - Making Money with TNX

TNX has a very comprehensive page indexing feature which lets you sell links per page and not the same links site wide, after installing their code to your site , tnx will then start indexing every page you placed the code on, if you are curious about how much you could earn then try out their income calculator , here.

The potential of my blog’s income via tnx is around $140/month!

Making money with tnx is probably the easiest of all features as all the links go through your approval before they show up on your site and your site earns more as you get more backlinks and pr.

TNX also offrers an Affiliate Program in case you are not in to selling or buying links you can help promote tnx and get paid for every buyer/seller you refer to them (active buyer/seller ofcourse).

Example: When you refer a webmaster to TNX and advertiser pays 100 TNX-Points for a link on your referral’s website, your referral (webmaster) gets 75 points and you get 10 points which is 13.3% of his income.

They are infact expanding their link buying/selling features, one of the interesting upcoming features is their Article Placing . this involves a whole article to be placed on a page/site instead of a single sentence on an easy to see spot of course.

The last but not the least reviewed feature in this review is the Link Exchange “Linakor” where you can exchange links easily without having the fear of being dumped by search engines, tnx carefully explains the whole matter here.

Learn more about TNX on their website!

This is a guest post by Shannon Lily from Infected by Bugs.
First off I wanted to thank Ahson once again for allowing me to guest post on his great BlueVerse blog! I love BlueVerse and I read it as if it was my second home. Today I am going to uncover one of the many SEO Myths that have been around the search engine optimization forums and blogs out their.

Does The Cache Date Actually Matter?

I have seen people of all shapes and sizes tell newer seos that one key factor they can use to up their serp rankings is to get indexed by the search engines more often. These seos either don’t know the truth themselves (not a big surprise) or they are purposely misleading the newer seos to put them on a wild goose chase and never achieve seo success. Whatever the reason is the seos that endorse that method really bug me to say the least.

In my opinion seo is an art form that should be shared with the world, if you’re a better artists then me then you deserve the fame you get from your art and vice versa. You may be asking yourself how little old me knows this little tidbit of information that seems to allude most seos.

It’s really quite simple, I have done testing on the subject and after a few months time have seen the negative and positives of getting my site indexed more often. I am sure Gnet has covered how to get indexed more by the search engines, but just incase he has not all it takes is a few social bookmarks and you will be set!

So anyways, about my testing! I have sites that are anywhere from 3 to 10 years old that I have owned the whole time and used for various things. I have seen the ins and outs of seo at work and all my sites rank for decent terms throughout the search engines. This info has given me the ability to dissect each test and see what works and what does not. After all this testing I can gladly and proudly say that being indexed in the search engines is not necessary for better rankings.

Instead of focusing in on that logic, take your new found wisdom and do the other steps to seo that really do matter like link building and connecting with our bloggers of your niche.

I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this subject, I will reply to all that I can so comment away below!

While blogging, several times there comes a need to spice things up or try something new to make the readers happy and even more interested and hooked, to do that you need to make different types of posts with different types of content, they way i see it there are the following types of contents that i noticed as a reader and a blogger.

This post also serves as my blog content guide, types of content you could and should have on your blog to promote it further and/or build interactivity.

Tutorials & How-to Posts, Teaching people how to do a certain task is one of the best type of posts you can ever have on your blog, people are constantly searching google, yahoo, msn and all the other search engines about how t0 do things, other then that if your blog has relevant enough posts on a certain topic then you can keep all the visitors you get via SERPs as rss readers.

News & Updates on a niche, blogging about news on the high rollers in a certain niche is also a plus that way you can pull in all the webmasters and fans of that particular niche, think of this as techcrunch, they blog about the latest happenings and updates on the tech scene and webware as well. Not only tech fans go there but webmasters subscribe to it too because of the up to date relevant enough.

Rewrites and Your Opinions, if you have a feed reader I’m sure you want to write a few stories in your own words, stealing content is indeed wrong but offering your own opinion on the matter isn’t so go ahead pick a topic from your feed reader send a trackback (which is good for traffic too) and start blogging on it.  Thats what we usually do, right? - Search - Read - Blog, why should this be any different?

Reviews and Sponsored reviews, where as people love to listen you teach them stuff they don’t know about they love it even more if you review stuff that they don’t know about, this is why the webhosting review niche sky rocketed so fast.. Anyway, writing up reviews of new sites and/or new products, specially the ones relevant to your own niche can give you alot of authority at google and a boost in your reader’s responsiveness, if you take a closer look at tech/mmo blogs you’ll see that readers comment more on reviews then general news,tutorials..etc

Guest Posts by other bloggers can give your blog a fresh opinionated post that attracts a wider array of readers and better relations with other bloggers for you as well!

Personal Life posts do fairly well if you can present it well enough if you have a responsive readerbase then you’ll get a fair amount of sympathy but all in all its not as profitable as the rest of the types of content..But you might get a long tail serp though. These personal life posts can also include videos and audio that you might have made to further discuss your situation.

Video Blogging is really catching on among webmasters, shoe and carlocab is already adding videos to their blogs actively and it’s a really good tactic to get more personal with your readers on a professional level, there are things you can explain better on video then you can writing on a  post.

Podcasts, who doesn’t wanna be a radio DJ?.
The coolest thing about blogging in my opinion is the Podcasts! Its good to read interesting, new, fresh content that has alot of useful information and great tips to make my life easier and more profitable, but its even better when i can not read all of that and just listen to the whole post. - And that’s how podcast listeners usually think when they are reading posts, if you have an option of a podcast along with each post like an audio version of each post, you’ll definitely increase your reader (listener) base

In my last post i talked about sponsored reviews being used to promote products so this was kinda interesting, this could be the next “free” reviews site, of course sooner or later someone is going to monetize it so much that the amount of natural/original reviews is going to be really small.

Blippr is one of the few 2.0 sites that i really like even though they are loosely based around twitter it still is quite interesting to me, i would assume that they will have alot more features soon, and product reviews on almost everything including ebooks,movies,songs,celebs..etc

Kinda like an all-in-one site for everything that costs money.. maybe?

The screenshots that i took below show that most of the things that blippr has are infact based on twitter, but still it doesn’t feel like they are copying anyone..odd..

So far so good, I’m still liking blippr!

One of the most used blog promotion techniques that i know of are either Guest Blogging or Buying up Sponsored Reviews on other blogs.

Sponsored Reviews

Reviews give the whole site (including inner pages) alot of exposure, and these reviews have a huge chance for a potential buyer/customer, mostly blogs/sites that are promoting their sites in order to sell something buy reviews, on the other hand most bloggers get reviews from John Chow to get more RSS readers. The main purpose of a “review” is to let a blog’s readers know what you think of the site and/or describe what the site you are reviewing is and what it does with intentions of sending them potential/targeted traffic.

Guest Blogging

I’ve done this quite alot and to be honest, Guest blogging is a great way to earn authority over a niche specially if the articles you are blogging about are highly relevant to your own niche, so not only you get their traffic but also the link juice that goes along with it, think of this as article submission to article directories but here the sites you submit your article to are not spammy and have really responsive visitors/readers.

All in all i would say better blogging constitutes a little of both, if you do too much of each it can get you into some deep waters where you might find yourself way to much into one direction either you would have high traffic and low responses from readers or alot of PR and no traffic.

Blogged dot com is being praised among the rest of the authority blog directories by techcrunch so it made me wanna see what the fuss was all about, well for a “new” blog directory it sure is filled up way too much I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the first bit of real traffic the site ever got (techcrunch effect). There are alot of blogs already in its database, i guess that’s what happens when you have no captcha or email verification on blog submission

I did submit my blog there however it didn’t ask me for my email for confirmation just a simple adding page where you add a little info about the blog but nothing about the person who owns the blog so that if the blog is approved and added to the directory the owner would be notified.

Although there is no “blogger” profile there is however the reviewer profile if you signup with blogged it will give you a profile of a reviewer with all the options you might need to review blogs that are there.

Overall, i seriously doubt the ability of blogged and its reviewers to rate blogs because of their homepage feature, the site was not that good or anything special the topic of the site was vague and over used and in my opinion it de-values the site, I was surely turned off by it.

I realized something i already knew while reading the teaching sells, Somewhere along the line my business model was completely based on Google, traffic and revenue wise, i depend on Google for traffic via searches and revenue via AdSense not just on this blog but on my other sites as well and every site i plan in the future has Google within my plan and holds over 60% of value of my sites, this is annoying because I don’t really ever depend on something that much that if it goes away or ends I would be in deep trouble.

The reason for this post was to show just why I am not going to depend on Google but as other webmasters take this topic is to “boycott Google” I am not doing that either I don’t depend on Google doesn’t mean i would boycott it, having it as well along with other tactics i will now take up is an addition to my traffic and that’s always a plus.

Working with Google is like working with a bot that works on pure statistics, people on the other hand are 100 times more interactive and much more responsive, Google can only send you traffic and give your page some strength, figuring how to make money online lies within your ability to engage with your readers.

Think about it like this, there are tons more ways to get traffic rather then depending on Google, John-chow was de-indexed by Google then re-indexed and de-ranked on his own main keyword and his serps on most keywords are way down low but he still continues to get traffic, why?
AdWords,Feed-readers, Email Marketing,Natural/Organic links on blogs and alot more ways! His revenue stays stable because his growth is stable as well, the blog is growing on an even faster pace then before without any help from Google.

This post is not all about Google, its about opportunities that you have and might be ignoring in your pursuit of happiness via Google.

Lets look at some opportunities that i came up with by listening to the free audio tape by Teaching Sells

• Selling Content
• Offering Content Based Services (still i won’t offer seo services)
• Design Services
• Engaging in more user based marketing tactics rather then SEO
• A more on-hand approach to my blog readers.
• Sell your passion
• Marketing products to actual people rather then the search engines.
• Focusing more on trends

I’ll be launching something regarding this soon, subscribe to my updates for it!