Foreign Perspectives

Archive for February, 2008

I thought that it was time I spruced up the look of the blogs that I run so I’ve been looking for a new theme off and on over the last few weeks. Today though was a bit of a marathon session when I picked up over 20 potential themes and am in the process of trying them out on the blogs.

It’s a very easy way to find yourself at the end of the day with nothing of any consequence done as there are dozens of sites listing untold thousands of WordPress themes, the vast majority of which are free.

I’ve barely scratched the surface but to give you some idea of where you can look, here’s very much a partial list of places:

http://www.wordpresstheme.in/
http://www.devhunters.com/
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
http://www.wpskins.org
http://www.bobek.co.uk/blog/
http://www.themesbase.com
http://themes.blogflux.com
http://www.themebot.com
http://www.fresheezy.com
http://www.freewordpressthemes.com
http://www.ithemes.org
http://www.themes.rock-kitty.net
http://www.WPThemesFree.com
http://www.web2feel.com
http://www.wordpresswow.com
http://www.themes.iwebnet.org
http://www.themevibes.com
http://www.wptheme.net
http://www.bloggingthemes.com
http://www.wpsnap.com
http://www.freewpthemes.info
http://www.webpuffs.net
http://www.freelayouts.com
http://www.templatenavigator.com
http://www.osskins.com/
http://www.unmatchedthemes.com
http://www.thatsprofound.com
http://themeboss.com/
http://themes.mygreencorner.com/
http://wptemplates.org/
http://www.wpthemesarchive.com/
http://www.themehq.com

Which doesn’t even include the (dire) WordPress theme viewer itself!

One of the problems with paid posting sites is that the majority of them expect you to know how much your blog is worth which, for most bloggers, is the one thing that they know next to nothing about.

That being the case, you often find “high value” bloggers writing substantial posts for $5 when they could just as easily be writing shorter ones for $50. They’re not crazy, they just don’t know what their blog is worth.

So, it’s nice to see that SnapBomb have taken away all that guesswork. Signup with them and within a few minutes their system produces a price range for your blog. Why the range? Well, as they explain on their blog most blogs will have a certain base value but that value can be enhanced if the blog is particularly attractive to an advertiser’s campaign. Thus, you can have a range from, say, $25 to $100. A generic post might get the $25 end of that range but if you’re in the right market segment for a campaign you’d get closer to the $100.

Also good is that signup is pretty much instant and there’s no delay before you can start writing posts for them. Payment is 60 days after taking the post and you’ve 12 hours to do the writing.

One confusing aspect of an e-mail marketing campaign is that whilst there’s almost always a big hit in takeup just after you send out the e-mails, it can be months before you see the full effect.

You might think that you can assume that the majority of your sales will come in that initial hit or within a few days of your e-mail but that depends a lot on the business that you’re in.

For example, we’re primarily e-mailing private owners of holiday accommodation and, in most cases, this isn’t their primary occupation. Therefore, if we send our marketing e-mails out Monday to Thursday we normally expect to get a lower immediate response than if we send them out Friday evening through to Sunday. However, that’s not always the case as our highest response ever was from an e-mail sent out on a Tuesday evening.

The season is also a factor so in our case if we send out the signup e-mails from June to August, we get get lower responses than if we send them out September through to February simply because the owners are just too busy to do much in the way of marketing whilst they’re in the peak season for guests.

Even the time of day can make a difference. This one is harder to call but generally your best bet is probably around 10am or 7pm on the principle that a workd-based target audience will have cleared up their overnight e-mails by 10am therefore yours will be on the top of the pile and likewise for a homebased audience at 7pm.

Whenever you do it though, don’t forget that many people file their e-mail for action later. In our own case, we often get a response from e-mail sent months earlier and, usually, would expect to get around 50% of the total response after quite a significant delay.

The English course that I’m doing started off nice and gradually with a history of the English language all the way back to its origins as a dialect of Frisian and motoring at a fair pace up to the establishment of the colonies and arrival of Colonial English.

Now we’re moving into a section which you’d think would be easy enough to follow as I’ve obviously been using it all my life: English grammar. Except, of course, that schools haven’t taught English grammar for a very long time indeed and therefore large chunks of it are only any way familiar to me as I’d learnt a number of the terms in French and Spanish earlier. That actually doesn’t make it a whole lot easier though as English is a completely different type of language and therefore many of the terms I’ve had to start going over are quite different from any that I’ve seen before.

Still, at least there’s only one more section of this part of the course and then it’s onto something completely different.

The weather has taken a distinct lurch for the better over the last week or so and we’re having to go back to just the t-shirts as it’s just too hot outside at the moment for anything else.

Somehow I just can’t see that heat wave holding up but we’re trying to make the most of it while it lasts (well, will be once we all get over the flu that’s felled most of us over the last week).

It is pretty peculiar to be needing the airconditioning in February though!