When I’ve launched the3dtechnologies.com for the first time, just after three days, I started using the three columns WordPress theme called “Grid Focus Public”, with the hope to improving my brand, the users trust, and of course, my montly income stream.
The point is that as my traffic grown, and my daily work as well, I throught that my blog would have done way better if I had got the theme right that could help me to simplify my job.
Sure, nothing to say about my old theme layout, but onestly, I really was unsatisfied by the lack of the widget.
Now, for an expert is no new this term, but a newbie blogger may not know what are widgets and what is a widgets ready theme.
What Is A Custom Widgets Ready WordPress Themes
A Custom Widgets Ready WordPress Themes is a theme that lets you to customize your layout and design in a few click directly from the dashboard without any effort.
Most of free template ignore this great technology. Of course, if you want convert a custom WordPress theme to be Widgets Ready you can do it as well, however it take a lot of time and you need to have php knowledge.
In general, custom Widgets Ready WordPress themes have a post column(or body) and one sidebar. However are common WordPress themes with three columns and sometimes four columns.
For this site I’m using a custom Widgets Ready WordPress themes called “frugal“. Below, I’ve just put a sample of how robust the Frugal theme option really are.
As you can see on the image above, Frugal theme lets you change anything of your theme, without having to get your hands on css or php files. You can set any type of color, font, weight of your column.
My Blog Section After I Moved To Frugal Theme
For those are new at The3dtechnologies, yesterday finally I decided to move from Grid Focus Public WordPress theme to Frugal Theme. As you can see in the detailed image above, the sidebar now contain these four sections:
- Email subscription forms – It’s very useful to grow my subscribers number and send my latest weekly email to them, plus I’ve put three cool button for feed, Twitter, and Facebook for who want to be updated with the latest post.
- Recent post – Include the latest 5 post I wrote.
- News - Is the work we do to aggregate and manually select the most relevant news for our readers from a group of about 50 selected news sources.
- Ad post – In the middle between subscription forms and recent post I’ve added an ad spot to monetize my blog.
As you can see in the Email Subscription Forms basically there is an input form where the user needs to type its email address and click on “Subscribe.” He will then see the following popup window (for the sake of simplicity we will carry the analysis using the Feedburner service only).
In my view this method has some drawbacks. First off, of all it uses a lot of space. Precious space if we consider the monetization aspect. You have only a simple box where put your email instead of a full registration form.
On this pop-up windows the user will just need to put his email address and to pass the CAPTCHA filter by copying some letters. Once done, an email will be sent to the mail box containing a link that will be used for the activation of the subscription.
In a nutshell, the steps required for subscription:
- Click on the link
- Type email address
- Type CAPTCHA letters
- Click on “Complete Subscription Request” button
- Go on your email box
- Click on activation link
In the home page, in particular on the right sidebar I give a preview of latest news about the topic related to my site. I’m thinking to put the section “news” only in the home page while let the same section of every single page blank.
Every day I try to optimizing every post I write in order to ranking well in the Google search engine. When I’m selling affiliate products I make each single pages like landing pages. This is the reason I’m thinking to let each single pages as simple as possible.
Make Your Single Page Like A Landing Page
Compared to my old theme I’ve let each single page as clear as possible. I’ve only put a subscribers form and two adsense ads(one within the content and another in the right sidebar). I didn’t begin doing this until just a few month ago.
The reason I’ve choosed this strategy is because I consider these page like landing pages. As I said before, when I started with affiliate marketing each single page were full of stuff.
It means that they could distract the visitors from what they are really searching for, then from the content of my page, which could make me lose sales.
Sure, I do not tend to selling affiliate products every day, but when I promote something on my site I prefer leave those page simple as possible by anything doesn’t concerns the main topic of the page.
Make Money WIth The Header
Compared to my old header, I’ve left only the logo on the left header. I took this decision because on the right header I can use the blank space to add some affiliate banner or the next book I’m writing.
