Give Your Site a Makeover with Office Space

WordPress may be a killer content management system, but that doesn’t mean you should forget about choosing a decent theme that lets you manage your content more effectively. As someone who’s seen so many WordPress themes in the past few years, I can tell you that there are many atrocious WordPress themes out there. It’s true that your content is more important than how your website looks but having an attractive, user friendly theme pays in the long run.

Office Space is one of those themes. The latest theme by Press 75 is designed to help you give your site a killer makeover. What I like about this theme is that it’s not specific to a website type. Whether you own a magazine website, a news portal, or a startup mini-site, you can easily give it a makeover with Office Space. You can easily add your logo, change your background, and give your site a unique look and feel too.

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Build Your Review Site with Black Aperture

Building a review site is one of the best ways to start a business online. In fact, a whole lot of professional bloggers are making a fortune out of managing comprehensive review portals. Thanks to the power of WordPress platform, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get a review site up and running. Black Aperture is a cool review theme for WordPress that makes it so easy to go live with your review site and start building your business fast.

Black Aperture is a dynamic theme that lets you create a highly attractive review portal easily. You can add and manage your images easily with this theme. The theme comes with 3 columns and provides you with plenty of space to promote your sponsors and direct ads. The options in the back-end allow you to change the look and feel of Black Aperture without too much work. You can turn your theme into a 2 column theme right from the back-end. You can also change your logo easily or turn it into a text logo.

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6 Cool eBay WordPress Plugins You Should Try

Many bloggers use eBay to monetize their blog and pay for their hosting fees and even make a living online (if they are lucky). eBay affiliate program is one of the most innovative ones out there. It comes with a lot of widgets, banners, and link building tools to give you the opportunity to promote eBay products without having to do too much. You can always grab the code from eBay and slap it on your website. But you can’t do everything with what eBay offers you. There are certainly things that eBay could’ve done better. That’s where the following eBay plugins come in. Whether you want to integrate auctions into your blog or build an eBay store on your blog, you can easily do it with these 6 WordPress eBay plugins:

• eBay Auto Poster: if you are looking for a quick way to post eBay listings to your blog without doing a whole lot of work, eBay Auto Poster is the one to try. It automates the process. I wouldn’t recommend it to regular bloggers. It’s really made for affiliate marketers. It’s also compatible with WP Robot.
• eBay Store: a cool plugin that imports your products from your ebay store and allows you to sell products through your WordPress website/blog.
• Auction Affiliate: another plugin made for affiliate marketers that is designed to let you add eBay auctions to your blog. You can easily define what products you want to add to your blog. You can customize the look and feel as well.
• WordBay: WordBay is a simple but effective way to create a WordPress-powered site featuring eBay listings based on any keywords you choose. It’s really made for folks who want to focus solely on building eBay-based WordPress websites.
• eBay Sales Lister: a very simple plugin that makes it easy to add eBay listings to your sidebar or inside your blog. Now, this is nothing too complicated, but the fact that you don’t have to do much work to get this to work makes this attractive to WordPress bloggers.
• Free eBay Store:  an easy to use and free eBay WordPress plugin that makes it so easy to add an eBay store to your blog. If you are a fan of eBay affiliate program, you are going to love Free eBay Store. All you have to do is enter your account information, provide a keyword, and tell it how many rows and columns your store’s going to have.

There you have it. 6 cool WordPress plugins to integrate eBay into your blog easily without having to write a line of code. If you are looking for a new channel to monetize your blog, the above plugins can come in handy. Don’t forget to check eBay Affiliate Program for more information.

Your turn: did I miss anything?

Social Maximizer Review

Taking time to start a WordPress blog is only a small part of the process. You are going to have to spend time to create killer content, get links to your blog, and make your readers feel at home on your blog. One of the best ways to get links to your blog is by taking advantage of the power of the social media. Social bookmarking sites have the potential to drive you lots of traffic, and if you go after the do-follow ones, you are going to see benefits on the SERPs as well. You can always submit your site to top social bookmarking sites by hand, but that could take a while, and to be honest that’s not something I would focus my time on as a blogger. That’s where Social Maximizer comes in. It’s a cool, affordable social bookmarking service that lets you submit your web pages to close to a hundred bookmarking services without you having to worry about creating accounts and adding your pages one by one to all of those.

Social Maximizer makes it so easy to submit multiple pages to social bookmarking sites fast. All you have to do is enter your title and description variations, choose the sites you want your blog to show up on, set it and forget it. I use five variations for my own sites, and that’s really the best way to go. You don’t want all your listing to look the same, and since the system does all the job behind the scenes, you are not going to do too much extra work to have fairly unique listings on social bookmarking services.

All in all, if you are looking to build more links for your WordPress blog but don’t want to spend too much time creating your social bookmarking accounts and submit your pages by hand, Social Maximizer is a decent service to try. It’s cheap and saves you time too.

Clone Twitter on Your WordPress Blog with Fresh Tweet

Twitter is one of the top social networking sites on the web. Anybody who’s been involved with blogging for a while has heard and tried Twitter before. It’s truly a great place to meet new people, find new ideas, and develop new connections and businesses. And now thanks to Fresh Tweet, you can duplicate the look and feel of Twitter on your WordPress blog. Fresh Tweet is a Twitter clone WordPress theme that is easy to install and helps you show your love for Twitter and what it stands for.

Fresh Tweet is not only lightweight but easily customizable. Once you install Fresh Tweet, you are going to see the similarities that it has to Twitter. But of course you’ll have your blog posts instead of tweets. Just like Twitter, you get one sidebar, on the right side of your screen. You can use it to push your ads on and monetize your blog. You can also change the look and feel of the theme so easily as the code is not particularly complicated.

Your posts pages are not too complicated either. You can easily add your images and social media icons to the end of each post without too much trouble. You can also customize your logo and other aspects of your theme fast. What I like about this theme is that it gives you the ability to create a socialize page that lets you readers get involved and leave you their thoughts and questions (just like Twitter).

All in all, Fresh Tweet is the unofficial Twitter WordPress Theme. It’s well-designed and lightweight and gets the job done. If you are a Twitter junkie, you are going to love Fresh Tweet (it’s free too).

Start a Video Blog With Groovy

Meet Groovy for WordPress. A colorful video blogging theme that lets you start your own video portal fast without having to spend too much money or time on development. Starting a video blog can be a challenge, and you’ve got to get a lot of things right for your video site to grow smoothly. The last thing you want to do worry about your website design or focusing too much on coding when you should spend it on developing good content.

Groovy is one of the best looking vlogging themes for WordPress. Not only it’s flexible and well-designed, it comes with 17 color schemes, enabling you to customize the look and feel of your vlog fast. Adding videos to Groovy is very easy to use. Your videos are automatically re-sized and embed code is provided for your readers as well. User ratings is also integrated into Groovy, making it easy for your readers to engage with your vlog and give you feedback on your videos.

Groovy is easy to customize, and you don’t need to be a coding genius to do it. The back-end comes with all the options you need to make changes without writing a piece of code. The theme is ad ready as well, so you can use it to make money from your sponsors or direct ads. Overall, Groovy is a vlogging theme designed for those interested in adopting a highly colorful theme for their video blogs. It’s easy to customize, and it comes integrated with everything you need to engage your readers and help them spread the word about your vlog. If you love vlogging and use WordPress to manage your vlog, you are going to love Groovy.

3 Cool Web Hosts For WordPress Bloggers

As someone who’s been around WordPress for years, I can tell you choosing the right web host can be the difference between succeeding and failing online. Whether you own a hobby blog or WordPress business website, you are going to need a host that is not only reliable but also comes with features that fit your business needs. A lot of WordPress bloggers tend to go with low priced web hosting service just to save money, thinking that there is no big difference between a $3 a month host and a $20 a month host. In some cases that may be true, but the majority of time you end up get what you pay for.

So what can go wrong with a cheap web host? You may have trouble keeping your site responsive if you have a lot of traffic. Worse, you may end up going over your bandwidth, storage, or resources limits, leading to more costs and your website possibly going down for long periods of time. As someone who’s experienced all the above headaches, I can tell you wouldn’t want any part of it. That’s why you should be careful which web hosting service you use to host WordPress.

There are many web hosting services around but not all are created equal. You want to make sure you pay attention to reliability and the restrictions that come with each hosting package. Unlimited bandwidth doesn’t mean anything if there is a limit put on your processing load. Besides, it would help if your web host is WordPress-friendly.

If you are looking for a cool web host for your WordPress website, here are 3 WordPress-friendly hosts you should try:

DreamHost is the hosting service that I have used for years to keep my sites up and running. The regular service is good for starters, but DreamHost PS is even more powerful and definitely worth trying for anyone hoping to build a popular WordPress website. It’s an on demand service that allows you to increase your resources as you need them. If you are getting more traffic for your server to handle, you can always increase your account’s limits to avoid your site from going down.

Justhost Hosting is another reliable hosting service that can help you provide keep your business website up at all times. You do want to go with a bit more expensive plans to give your website the chance to succeed. And you do get 99.9% reliability as promised.

WP Web Hosting is designed specifically for anyone who’s running a WordPress blog or plans to build a community with WordPress MU. While I don’t use this service for my regular blog, it’s a great way to get started with your MU communities. A lot of regular web hosts have trouble hosting WordPress MU, so it’s refreshing to see a service dedicated to doing just that.

There are many other good hosts out there, but since I have not tried them, I can’t vouch for their reliability. Everyone’s going to claim 99.9% up-time reliability and promise you a whole lot of good things. But you never know until you try them out. So don’t hesitate to use the money-back guarantees provided by some of these web hosts to get your funds back if the service is not up to the promised standards. Choosing a web host for WordPress is an important decision. Don’t take it lightly.