Build Your Real Estate Website with Agent

As someone who has grown up around 2 real estate agents, I am quite familiar with the challenges of running a real estate business. Sure, you have to worry about passing your license exam and actually selling houses to cover the cost of being associated with companies such as REMAX. But you shouldn’t rely only on phone leads to make sales. You should also use the power of the Internet to generate leads for your business and take your game to the next level. A lot of real estate professionals struggle to figure out a way to put up their real estate website fast. In reality, you’ve got three options. You can either hire someone to design a site for you (which will be expensive), create your own website, or use a WordPress theme to set up an online presence fast.

Agent is a premium real estate WordPress theme that is designed for real estate professionals who are looking for an attractive solution to go online fast. With Agent, you don’t have to write a single line of code to go online. All you have to do is get a web host and install Agent on your WordPress website. Agent is not only user friendly, but it’s very well-designed. If you are technical, you can easily change the look and feel and save a lot of money in the process. But what I love about Agent is the fact that it is organic search friendly. Paying for leads online can be a bit expensive, but thanks to Agent, you are going to get free leads from Google and other search engines and save money in the process.

Agent Theme comes with dynamic drop-down menus to allow you to easily host multiple property categories on your website. You also get an attractive featured gallery section to promote your top properties to your visitors. The theme is also RSS ready, making it easy for your readers to sign up to your property feed through their browser or via e-mail.

What I like about this theme is the fact that you get all the PSD files as well. So if you know Photoshop and illustrator, you can get to work and make further changes to your theme without too much trouble. You also get a comprehensive tutorial for this theme to help you learn how to get the best out of this theme. If you are an aspiring real estate agent looking to take your game online and gain new leads, you should give Agent a try. It’s easy to install and use and won’t cost you a fortune.

Verdict: A-

10 Useful iPhone Apps for WordPress Bloggers

Almost everybody I know owns an iPhone or iPod Touch these days. Whether you are a business owner or college students, chances are you are going to spend some time on the go for your projects. Just because you are traveling, doesn’t mean you should let your WordPress site go without an update for a while. Thanks to the community behind the iPhone platform, you can download applications that enable you to blog and promote your site while you are on the go.

Here are 10 useful apps that you should consider using to write posts and promote your blog while you are on the go:

1. WordPress: if you own a WordPress blog, this is a no brainer. A free app that allows you to write your blog right from your iPhone.

2. iBlogger: a complete solution for anyone into blogging. Allows you to interact with WordPress, Typepad, Expression Engine , Drupal, and …

3. BlogPress Pro: another great app if you want to blog and share pics with your readers while you are on the go.

4. FC Tasks – Franklin Covey: FCTacks is a great app to use to keep track of your to do’s. Don’t ever forget your important tasks or events with FCTasks.

5. Photobucket: upload and share your photos online while you are on the go. It’s free. All you need is a free account. You can also use Flick It for Flickr.

6. Twitterrific: these days most bloggers are tweeting as well. It’s the best way to get the c0nversation going and learn new things. Twitterrific is one of the best Twitter apps on iPhone.

7. Jaadu Remote Desktop: a very useful app if you need to access your PC from a remote location. Lets you stream audio from your PC to your iPhone as well.

8. BuddyFeed: FriendFeed is one of my favorite Web 2.0 services next to Twitter. BuddyFeed makes it so easy to manage my Friendfeed account on my iPhone.

9. BeeJiveIM: BeeJiveIM is a cool instant messaging app for iPhone that lets you connect with other authors on your blog or communicate better with your colleagues.

10. Ziibii: Ziibii is another cool free app that lets you keep in touch with the latest developments on sites such as YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.

There you have it. You can get a lot of blogging done with the above apps. Best of all, most of these apps are  cheaper than a cup of coffee. Who says you can’t blog properly on an iPhone?

Your turn: what is your favorite blogging app for iPhone?

Start Your Video Blog with Tubular

Video is the present and future of blogging, and if you are not using video to promote your blog and provide value to your visitors, you are not maximizing your blog’s potential. WordPress is a very flexible platform, which means you won’t have to spend a few thousand dollars to get one of those fancy content management systems to start your blog. All you need is a good hosting service and a decent theme to get started.

Tubular is a cool vlogging theme by StudioPress that helps you start your very own vlog fast. The theme is very well-designed and comes with everything you need to produce your very own web show on your WordPress blog. Your latest video is highlighted on the top of your blog. You can either add your own videos or use YouTube, Vimeo, and other video services to add video to your vlog. If you don’t afford a video hosting service, you can always take advantage of YouTube to host your videos. Or you can create your own branded player with Viddler.

The theme comes in two colors: dark, light. You are essentially getting two themes in one shot. The theme is easy to change as well. Not only can you add videos to your Tubular site easily, you can also host a blog on the side (perfect for web shows).

Overall, Tubular is a very well-designed vlogging theme that makes it very easy for you to get started with your own web show. Whether you want to post others’ video or create your own videos, you can easily add them all to Tubular.

Download your copy here.

Create Your WordPress Portfolio with deGusto

Whether you are a web designer or an artist, you are going to have to create a portfolio to display your work. Creating a portfolio on the Internet can help you land new gigs and gain more exposure for your work. You can even find new customers. A lot of artists that I have talked to are in general afraid of touching anything technical. They just assume that you need to spend thousands of dollars to have a portfolio design made for you. But in reality, you can use premium portfolio themes to get the job done fast and in a more affordable way.

deGusto is a cool premium portfolio theme that lets you get started with your website fast. Whether you want to display your photos or put your artwork online, you can do it easily with deGusto. deGusto is a dark theme that is very easy to set up and customize. It also allows you to add a blog to your WordPress website to discuss your latest work and updates.

The content slider at the top of the theme is a great way to share your new work with your readers. It’s very attractive and overall fits into the theme real well. You also get a cool ribbon overlay for your featured content, which is a nice addition. The sidebar boxes are dynamic and can be opened up or minimized with a click. Your readers can also choose to get rid of the sidebar and view your artwork in full width mode.

deGusto makes it easy for you to display multiple artworks on your homepage without ease. Your readers get a chance to visit individual pages from your homepage as well. If that’s not enough, here are a few other things you get with deGusto:

• Custom 404 template
• Automatic image resizing
• Customizable about section in the footer
• CSS styles for WP-PageNavi plugin
• logo.psd, ribbon.psd, 404.psd files to help you customize your theme easily

Overall, deGusto is a wonderful black portfolio theme that can make life a whole lot easier for artists and photographers. If you have a lot of artwork you want to share with the world and looking to set up your website fast, you should give deGusto a consideration.

Don’t forget to check these top portfolio WordPress themes for other attractive options.

Create Your Business Blog with Suit

Suit for WordPress is a premium theme designed by NattyWP for those who are interested in starting their own business blog. Suit is a very flexible theme that lets you change the color, font, and even background image all by yourself without having write a single line of code. The theme is very lightweight and SEO-friendly, enabling you to maximize your search engine traffic for your business.

Like many other NattyWP themes, Suit comes with additional widgets (6). You also get 3 page templates to help you manage your site-map, archives, and post pages more effectively. And you can change a whole lot of things in the back-end without writing code or adding plug-ins.

What I like about Suit is the fact that it comes integrated with Flickr, Twitter, and Feedburner. That means you can easily add content from these networks to your business blog.

All in all, Suit is a light weight business theme for anyone interested in starting a business blog. If you are looking for a theme that can be easily customized without you having to write any code, you should consider Suit.

10 Best SEO Plugins To Optimize Your WordPress Blog – Part I

WordPress is a wonderful platform that not only lets you build up your website fast, but it also comes with many enhancements that let you optimize every aspect of your website and get more out of your efforts. That includes increasing your traffic as well. If you own a blog and you write posts on it on a consistent basis, you want to make sure you drive lots of traffic to it to get the best value out of your work. You can always advertise or leave comments on other blogs, but you shouldn’t ignore the organic search channel. Getting free traffic from Google, Yahoo!, and even Live.com is a must if you want to make it on the Internet. In order to do that, you need to optimize your website for search engines. WordPress may be search engine friendly but it’s not optimized for organic search. Your permalinks, title tags, slugs, and … all play a big part in you gaining the best ranking possible on search engines such as Google. So you want to make sure you have the best settings on your website to get the most free traffic.

There are lots of plugins that you can install on your WordPress blog to optimize it for organic search, but you want to make sure you don’t go overboard and damage your blog’s performance in the process. With that in mind, here are 10 cool plugins that help you get more free traffic to your blog:

1. All In One SEO:  All In One SEO is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It not only allows you to optimize your title tags, but it makes it so easy to no-index pages that could be deemed harmful towards your search engine rankings. It automatically generations your title and descriptions, which means you save time.

2. Virtual Silo: Virtual Silo is a cool plugin that makes it easy to no-follow those spam comments and any other factor that can hurt your search engine rankings. You can also create a silo structure on your blog to maximize your search engine rankings.

3. Broken Link Checker: what you don’t want to do is leave broken links on your blog. Search engines certainly won’t like it. Use Broken Link Checker to find out broken links or image links.

4. Google XML Sitemaps Generator: creating a sitemap by hand can be a hassle. Some people are more scared of XML than spiders. Either way, Google XML Sitemaps Generator makes it so easy to generate and keep your sitemaps up to date.

5. SEO Smart Links: a very cool plugin that automatically links to your related posts and makes it so easy for your visitors to navigate through your pages easily.

6. SEO Friendly Images: a lot of people forget about their alt and description tags for their images. It’s true that alt tags are not as important as they used to be but you can still get traffic from Google Images, and besides it’s a best practice to have them. SEO Friendly Images makes it easy to get around this issue.

7. Advanced Permalinks: Advanced Permalinks is truly a life saver. Let’s say you didn’t know how to set up your permalinks properly when you started your blog. You can always change your permalink structure but that could affect your rankings immensely if you don’t go about it the right way. This plugin makes sure your old pages are redirected to their new location via 301 redirect.

8. Permalinks Redirect: Permalinks Redirect another simple plugin that lets you optimize your URLs and get rid of all those weird characters in some of your URLs. It 301 redirects them to a more search engine friendly URL.

9. Nofollow Links In Posts: Nofollow Links in Posts is a great tool for anyone who want to control what they link to and whether they want to dofollow or nofollow their links.

10. Robots Meta: Robots Meta is another cool plugin that lets you nofollow your comments and other pages on your blog. You can also control what pages are indexed on your WordPress blog. You can also easily add your Google Webmaster Tools account information and track your results properly.

There you have it: 10 wonderful SEO plugins for WordPress. But there is a second part with more cool search engine optimization plugins. So stay tuned! In the meantime, don’t forget to share your favorite SEO plugin for WP below.

Create a Church Website with Church Theme

Every organization, whether for profit, non-profit, or religious organization needs an online presence these days. People are spending a whole lot of time online, and if they have heard about you, you can be sure that they are going to come look for your website. No longer can you tell people that you don’t have a website. Not in 2009. Many churches have realized that they need to be online to reach out to others in the community and get more people involved with church activities. While the temptation is always there to spend a lot of money on a custom design, you can always go with a premium church theme to get the job done.

Church Theme by StudioPress is a premium theme designed specifically for anyone who’s looking to start a church website. Whether you work for a church or have been hired by a church to upgrade its online presence, Church Theme has everything you need to set up an attractive christian website.

Church Theme makes it easy to add images and feature them on your home page. It also comes integrated with YouTube, allowing you to push your church videos right on your side. You also get drop down menus allowing you to add as many categories as you wish to your website. You can also change your ads around easily or just use the ad spots to promote religious events in your local community.

What I like about Church Theme is the fact that you can easily feature your top categories on your home page. Adding new featured images is like a piece of cake. Best of all, the theme is optimized for search engines. That means you are going to get a lot of free traffic to your website if you play your cards right and use the right keywords. It does help that you don’t have to spend a fortune to get your hands on this theme. All in all, if you are looking to create a church website and customize it fast, you should consider reviewing Chruch Theme.