There are a few ways in which you can advertise your business on Twitter & similarly, if you have a Twitter account, you can help these businesses advertise on your Twitter profile & make some money (actually it could be a handsome amount of money for publishers – read Twitter Monetization).

Setting up a Mutually Beneficial Relationship between Advertisers & Publishers for Twitter Advertising.

1. Advertise on Twitter through advertising networks

Very recently there have been a spurt of Twitter advertising networks. Their algorithm evaluates the right sort of Twitter account holders who can influence their followers for your advertising needs.

The advertising price varies from about US$ 2.00 & above. The tweets are monitored for clicks & publishers get paid when any of their followers make a valid click on your advertised tweet.

We have advertised & published with only a handful of Twitter advertisers that you can read here – recommended Twitter ad networks for Advertisers & Publishers.

Several of these ad networks would ask publishers to Tweet more than once if there are not enough valid clicks to make it profitable for the advertisers. From our advertising experience we have had returns over 600% at times, depending on how best the network selects the publishers.

2. Approach individual Twitter users for advertising

Like it happened with bloggers where advertisers have approached them to review their products & websites, many advertisers approach influential Twitter users with an advertising proposal.

This method could yield more ROI because you are profiling the Twitter users based on your exact needs (instead of leaving it to an algorithm that can be easily fooled).

3. Approach bloggers for advertising on Twitter

This is one of the best approaches, where the advertiser gets a blog post that keeps getting visitors to the advertised campaigns, gets you valuable back links & at the same time, Tweet out your links (most bloggers use automated blog feeds to update Twitter).

There are no standard rates for these sort of advertising yet. The more influential bloggers & Twitter users could demand well over a couple of hundred dollars for a blog post & a tweet (high profile bloggers often get US$ 500+ dollars for a single blog post).

We specialize in creating highly effective but simple WordPress marketing themes that are used by bloggers, freelancers, online marketers, affiliate marketers & MLM business owners for their small businesses.

Our focus has always been on making a functional website rather than one that looks stunning with images & graphics but fails to deliver results to our customers!

1. Design for the Website Visitors (or Website Customers or Blog Readers)

Too often we see that website or business owners design & redesign their websites for themselves. Websites are for the customers (blogs are for readers) & needs to be designed for them.

2. Create a Priority list of Pages / Posts that are Most Valuable

Websites & blogs can only display so much in one page (or post). Likewise, majority of the readers (or customers) will only read as much as the top 5 – 10 lines of your blog or business site.

Creating a list of priority items & effectively displaying them on either the home page or all the pages helps in engaging the readers better.

3. Choose a combination of drop-down menu & in-line menu

Designing menus could be difficult & creative theme makers often get carried away while designing a very graphically impressive menu. Step back & think if it helps the customer who would be using these menus to find what they need easily & quickly.

We have found that majority of the customers still prefer a horizontal top menu with a secondary left side menu. They hardly prefer drop down menus & those often get passed unnoticed.

4. Design for the least number of Clicks

Palm is the best known designer to make phones that require users the least number of clicks to get to the application they want. They design their phones & software so that with at the most 3 clicks, any Palm phone user can access anything they want on their phones!

The lesser number of clicks the customer (or blog reader) has to perform to get to what they want, or to find new posts on your website, the more they stick to you.

5. Use Images only if they serve a purpose to the customer

Images could serve a few purposes:

1. they draw attention
2. they allow designers to be creative
3. they beautify the design
4. helps display products effectively
5. they help in SEO etc

Use images on your website designs depending on what the purpose of the image is. If its a Buy Now button, sure go ahead & use an image with an ALT tag. Or if you are want to show how a product looks like, you should use as many images as necessary.

But you could certainly cut down on using background images, that serve the only purpose of beautifying the design.

6. Use Custom Fields for functionality

Custom fields help you extend a CMS software like WordPress many folds by helping you to implement specific functionality for the business. Custom fields have to be created by the website owner & are stored in the database.

As designers you have to leave it to the theme owner to create the custom fields correctly. As designers you have to optimize on your database queries so that these custom fields do not slow down rendering of the website in real life.

7. Use plugins as re-usable components to extend the capability of your creative WordPress themes

The WordPress community has created one of the largest repository of plugins that can extend the usability & effectiveness of a website. However, each additional plugin comes with its own risk:

• you have no control over how the plugin will work unless you edit them for yourself
• you cannot offer technical support to the plugin in case it goes wrong somewhere
• you may have to overcome any limitations of the plugin with additional programming

It is a matter of choice whether to build creative WordPress themes that must use plugins. Our premium business themes work well without them, but we also leave it to the theme owner to implement any extra plugin that they want (like YPN & Adsense plugins, Site Counter plugins, video embed plugins etc).

Subscribe to our Newsletter & we will email you whenever we update our website with new Creative Themes or Creative Themes Design tips.

They are not to blame – a website design is a lot of creative work & customers often are not sure what they really want. Over time, we have adopted a few ways that help us choose our clients intelligently, understand their business needs & why they want a website designed & thus deliver a superb quality website!

10 Tips to Make the Best Sites for Your Clients

1. Choose Website Design Projects Carefully

1. 1. This is especially true if you are bidding on projects on various freelancing forums. Many times clients would not be able to provide you with suitable data & enough information to quote a price & you may struggle with cost & schedule as their requirements would keep evolving.

Choose projects where your clients show sufficient clarity on what they need & what they expect from you.

1. 2. Requirements change, needs evolve. We have not seen a single project in the last 10+ years where the clients have not deviated from the requirements they started off with. Longer the project schedule higher are the chances of changing or evolving requirements.

Plan your project so that customers can evaluate what you are building from time to time & confirm whether they are on board with your design.

1.3. Program in modules. Especially your style guides. Nothing impacts your cost & delivery time like a change in the overall design that changes your style sheets.

For large projects we found that creating mock-up HTML files often help clients understand how their design would finally look like on a website.

Develop mock ups where possible.

2. Help Clients Understand Business Functionality

2.1 Clients often verbally express what all they want on their pages but it is often hard for them to understand complicated workflow. We bring in our expertize to the table to help them better understand the user’s experience, using white boards, paper drawings, flow charts & similar tools to help them visualize a real life situation when their web site would be live.

Use multiple tools to design work flows, use cases & test scenarios.

2.2. Understand system limitations in implementing a design. Especially if you are using a out-of-the-box CMS tool like WordPress, you may not be able to build all the features that your clients want. Or, it could just be easier to add-on functionality with available plugins rather than building them from scratch.

Know system limitations, available stable re-usable codes like plugins for out-of-the-box systems.

3. Test, Test & Test your product before you deliver the codes to your client

3.1. Visual Tests – Test in all the browsers IE7, IE8, Firefox 3 – 4, Safari 4 – 5 or whatever are the latest versions of these. Though few, there are still a lot of people using Flock & Google Chrome.

3.2. Functional Tests – create your functional test scenarios well in advance. It is a great idea to have your client understand what you are testing for & that they approve of the completeness of the tests.

4. Post Live Support

4.1. May clients come up with new requirements during the first couple of weeks of the website going live. These are usually new or modifications of some of the requirements you began with & are often not accounted in your prices. The right thing to do in a post-live support period is to only fix defects or bugs at your cost.

4.2. Create a User Document, or a FAQ that could help your client use your product. In case you have used GPL plugins & codes, it is a good idea to mention them to your clients upfront & also document the sources for their future references.

4.3. This is something we always do with our clients. At the end of a large website development, we provide our recommendations on how to manage, enhance & maintain the website at a minimal expense. We also make ourselves available to help them get over minor issues with their websites (our products). We also notify them of any “known issues” that we may have found with the website while building or testing.

Transparency with clients helps you deliver a better product. Cost & schedules will always be the point of contention but like us, if you look at the first project with any client as the beginning of a business relationship, you may be able to work out a cost that is mutually beneficial to both the parties.

Pro marketers depend on a few of the top email marketing services to build their lists from their websites. These could be through sign-up forms on their websites, lightbox sign up forms that intercept a reader & draws attention to signing up or sign up links through emails.

We have always depended on 2 of the top professional email marketing services. We recommend them to any marketer & blogger who wish to make it big & successful in the competitive business of affiliate marketing.

AWeber (Click Here to Sign Up) – This is one of the most popular Professional Email Marketing & Email List Building services. It is easy to sign up (you can get a free trial for just $1).

You can build as many lists as you want, in as many ways you want to build your lists. This feature helps you to cross market opportunities among your subscribers.

You get free professional email templates & numerous professional sign up forms too that you can customize easily to match your website or blogs appearance & add any additional texts you want.

Email Marketing and Online Surveys by Constant Contact (Click Here to Sign Up) – Create and send eye-catching HTML email campaigns in minutes & make it easy to connect with your customers. Now you can try it FREE for 60-Days.

Collect email addresses of your site visitors with a “join my list” signup on your website. Then, easily create and send compelling email newsletters, promotions and announcements to keep them coming back.

KEY FEATURES

• Add a visitor signup to your website
• Import in-house permission-based names
• Includes Free Professional Newsletter Templates
• Includes Free Email Sign Up Templates
• Use templates as is or easily customize to match your brand
• Add a “forward to friend” to every email
• Manages and hosts your subscriber list

Constant Contact is easy and affordable TRY IT FREE and see for yourself.
Click Here & Sign Up for your Free Trial

These are 2 of the best email marketing services & quite affordable even when you are just beginning your online marketing business. If you are running several blogs, you can also send your blog updates automatically in emails to your subscribers.

These professional marketing tools offer numerous ways to configure your autoresponders, follow-up emails, newsletter broadcasts & allow you to email of specific segments of your subscribers as needed.

The convenience & flexibility these autoresponder systems & email marketing systems offer add huge value to your business & you can build an effective, no-spam email list very quickly.

The Max Banner Ads Plugin is available for free download (provided you write a review for them on your website as a courtesy). Click Here to read more on this free advertisement plugin.

There are numerous ways to display banner ads. The easiest is to find a WordPress Theme with widgets & you can add as many banners as you wish from the Widget Admin panel.

However, several Creative WordPress Themes for Business may require banners of non-standard shapes to be placed in critical locations on the website. In such cases, these Themes would have to provide you with alternative ways to add these banners.

We do not use Max Banner Ads plugins on any of our websites or in any of the Creative WordPress Themes for Small Businesses, but there are definite advantages to those bloggers who do not wish to edit template files or wish to conceal affiliate links (cloak links) to save them from being penalized by search engines.

An effective design would help any visitor find content easily & would be able to hand-hold them into doing something specific – like enroll in a campaign, buy something from the website, download a PDF document or even refer the website to another person.

Here are a few creative design tips to help do just that.

Keep a Clean Effective Navigation

• website visitors should be able to move between posts & pages easily, preferably in 2 – 3 clicks of the mouse. It is also an effective design to limit main navigation to only the pages or posts that help you achieve your goals directly (like enrollment)
• always have a customized 404 page with the main navigation so that when a visitor lands on a page that is no longer there, they have a few options to choose from rather than closing the browser window
• have some key links in the footer, links to your “About” page or “Sitemap” could take up prime space on the main navigation. Instead such pages could be listed lower in the page

Use the Prime Real Estate for Calls to Action

• use heat-maps for your designs to place calls to action on the prime real estate of your web page
• use the most-frequented regions of your website to place links to your key content. Its a good idea to limit the number of links limited to about 3 – 5

Use Simple Technology to Guide Visitors to Links of Interest

• “Related Content” is a great way to help visitors find similar content. There are numerous WordPress plugins available to do that. You can also use simple cookies to recall the pages the visitor had been to in their last visit. This creates a nice “personalization” on the website
• create custom links to pages that help you meet the website’s purpose & display them in effective places on your pages

Make it Easy for Visitors to Share your Content

• provide visitors with the ability to share content on their Facebook pages, Twitter etc. There are WordPress plugins that will create nice “Email this Page” & “Print this Page” icons on all your pages
• create a custom contact form & keep it visible. You would be surprised how effective these forms are. Most of the inquiries you will get in email can be converted, unlike Comments that spammers use to get back-links
• display your social network icons so that visitors can follow you or add you to their favorite lists

It is also a good idea to look into past data – website analytics information to understand if you should customize any specific page, or create custom visitor paths for certain keywords.

If you are designing the website for the first time, you may need to wait for about 3 – 6 months to get you sufficient data to tweak the design further to tune it to your general visitors usage patterns.

• Click Here for a Complete List of Creative Marketing Themes.

Key Features of our WordPress Marketing Themes:

• absolutely easy to set up, update & maintain
• complete marketing functionality built into these creative themes
• most of these business marketing themes can be customized from the Theme Option panel without having to edit files
• creative designs & innovative uses of ad spaces that increases effectiveness of advertisements
• widgetized sidebars & footers helps show additional content or advertisements
• no dependency on external plugins
• effectively integrated with social media

This is a snap shot of where all our WordPress Marketing Themes are purchased. The map shows the downloads in the first week of June.

One of the biggest attractions of our Creative Marketing themes is the price. It is priced the lowest compared to any designer’s with similar functionality & creativity. And the Themes Packs offer even more economy – less than US$ 4 a theme!

We have a few suggestions of some of the Best Blog Advertisers here.

They have worked great for us from the we began & even now when we have grown almost 10 folds. We still recommend these few blog advertisers & sponsors.

If you are a new freelance blogger it could be a daunting task to get to sign up with the top advertisers. There are too many advertising networks around & it could be difficult to make up your mind which ones to sign up with.

Our tips here may help you make the best choice for your blog.

• Research on the Internet before you Sign Up – look for reviews, publisher feedback on the quality of ads, the FAQs for how they pay you & when, how easy it is to contact them for help etc
• Evaluate your Synergies – look ahead into your freelancing blog & evaluate how your blog will be beneficial to the advertisers. Will you offer high unique page views, will you have readers from only specific countries, will your blog have the content that the advertisers would be interested in etc

• Understand the Flexibility & Uniqueness of the Advertising Network – most advertisers provide with standard IAB formats (728px x 90px large leader board, 468px x 60px small leader board, 120px x 600px & 160px x 600px sky scrapers, 300px x 250px & 338px 300px box ad formats). Several (like Bid vertiser & Ad Brite) provide custom formats, interstitial ads, photo ad etc that are a huge advantage to bloggers
• Reporting Tools to Measure & Optimize your Inventory – to maximize your income from these top blog advertisers, you should be able to measure how the ads are performing on your website. Many of the top advertising networks provide you with very detailed reports to understand ad performance
• Ability to Maximize Bids for your Ad Spots – one of the reason many people quit Adsense is because Google does not allow publishers to have advertisers bid for your inventory. Google like being exclusive, so if there are no ads to show, or ads with very low costs, your income goes down drastically. Investigate ad networks for any such exclusivity rules or whether they allow you to offer your ad spots to the highest bidding advertisers

One of the basic mistakes that new bloggers are prone to is to quickly sign up with a large number of advertisers & then unable to make the most of their ad spaces. It is always a good idea to pick a few advertiser & stick with them!

There are several advertising network that specialize on traffic from specific countries. If your freelancing content is going to be dedicated to a country or a specific location, it might be good to look up advertisers who are ready to monetize that kind of traffic.

The relation between advertisers & publishers are symbiotic. The better content you serve up to your readers, the more your advertisers benefit.

There are several pros & cons to these 2 options. But a mock-up HTML page gives the clients a better feel of the new design, navigation, button clicks etc. However, it takes longer to create these mock ups, longer than creating static PSD Photoshop files.

You may also decide to present full screen shots to your clients, either from the Photoshop PSD files or from the mock up HTML web pages. There are several full screen capture software available to you.

We have used, and we recommend either of these 2 Screen Capturing Software. They are very affordable, easy to use & have numerous screen capturing features built into them, to save entire screens, even full web pages from browsers, into numerous image formats.

1. Snag It Full Scroll Screen Capture Software from TechSmith

SnagIt lets you take a picture of anything you see on your PC screen, edit and combine your captures, then share them anywhere. You get both PC & Mac versions of this software.

Tech Smith is also well known for their popular Screen Recording Software Camtasia.

Click here to visit SnagIt.

2. FS Capture Full Screen Capture Software from FastStone

FS Capture is another extremely light Full Screen Capture Software with Scroll function so that you can capture web pages that extend below the 600px mark. This feature is very helpful if you have long web pages that do not completely fit on the screen in a normal view.

FS Capture does not have all the bells & whistles of SnagIt, but it basically performs the same essential function – capture the entire screen, or complete web page & save it in an image format.

Click here to visit FS Capture.

Both SnagIt & FS Capture are available for free trial downloads to use extensively before you decide which one to buy. The full license of FS Capture is available at a very nominal price, where as SnagIt comes in various price options starting from around $50.

You may be able to restore your website again, and there is a possibility that you may not have lost much (or any) data either. Many hackers break into websites & hosts for fun & rarely do much damage to the data. If your is one of these cases, you are lucky!

Case Study: Pro Media Blog‘s business website was hacked by a group of Iranian hackers & the Purgatory Virus team at http://p-vx.co.cc/ & http://persiangig.com at around 2:00 AM EST on the 4th of July.

Nature of the attack: Shared Hosting from MM Hosting services were all infected with the hack files & there were no access to the CPanel either. We could not reach MM Hosting’s Helpdesk & we were told that in a similar situation earlier, the MM Hosting Help Desk had told the customers not to call them!

The Lucky Part: Though CPanel & Wodpress Login were hacked (and unavailable to us), the FTP ports still worked!

When we set up Pro Media Blog we had taken some measures so that we could switch hosts in a moment’s notice & we felt this is the right time. Along with the recovery from the attack, we decided to migrate the site onto a better host.

This is not the exact steps we did to restore ProMediaBlog. We were requested to put up a short step-by-step guide to help anyone whose WordPress Blog or Website may have been hacked & needs to be recovered.

Steps to Recover WordPress CMS Blog After Hack or Attack

1. Accessing your files on the server – try accessing your WordPress files, first through the normal WordPress Admin Login screen (/wp-admin/ or /wp-login.php) pages.

If the hackers have blocked this page, try your host’s CPanel. If the hackers have only attacked your website, you may still be able to access the CPanel. On the other hand, if your host is attacked, your CPanel access may be compromised too.

Try accessing the FTP folder. You could be using FileZilla or any other free FTP client. If the hackers have not changed the passwords, you may be able to access the FTP mount with the client.

2. Try to Isolate the Intrusion & the Hack Files

Depending on the extent & nature of the hack, you may be able to isolate the corrupt files & any modifications the hackers have made to your website’s essential files. In this case, the hackers penetrated all directories (& all subdirectories) & modified the index file with their own.

The most likely places are the main WordPress folders of admin, includes, plugins etc. Look in these folders for files that have changed very recently (sorting on the ‘Last Modified’ column on FileZilla could help). View these files on your local machine for any new lines of codes added.

What to Look For?

1. javascripts that look unfamiliar

2. php codes that are compiled or uses the eval function

3. inclusion of external files using the ‘include’ statement

4. completely unknown files in the directories

These are some of the ways to find out the extent of the damage. If your CPanel is hacked, you may not be able to access the database at all.

Since WordPress stores all the information (posts, pages, categories, tags, comments etc etc) in the database, you would not know if your data is still available!

3. Re-Install WordPress

If you are not an expert in handling hacks & intrusions, the best thing for you to do is to re-install WordPress files, completely. Be sure to save the data from the wp-config.php files about the database, so that when you can finished installing the files, you can use the same wp-config.php file to connect to your original database.

Once done, run the upgrade.php file. If your WordPress database requires upgrade, this will do it. If not, nothing will happen & your database will be kept as it was.

4. Log into the WordPress Admin Panel

Unless your website hosting provider is badly hacked, you should now be able to access your own WordPress dashboard. A few things to do immediately:

1. change your admin / log in password
2. take a complete dump of your WordPress with the Export tool
3. take a count of the number of posts, pages, comments & media files
4. verify if any data is missing (like lost posts or pages)
5. verify that you can still open & edit your posts & pages

Unless your hosting service provider is completely cured of the hack, database connections may not be available externally. So even though you may be able to edit your posts, you may not be able to view them on your browser like any other user would do. You have to wait for your hosting provider to clean up & restore the Apache systems before you can do that.

In our case with ProMediaBlog, the service provider MM Hosting was completely thrown off. And since they closed their communications with the customers & those affected, we had no idea as to how badly they were impacted or how long it would take them to restore services.

We used that time to migrate the content onto the new provider. Though this sort of attacks are rare & could potentially happen to any provider, we were told that it repeated very frequently with MM Hosting. And the fact that their support teams were not willing to help any customer, were good reasons to move away from them.