Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

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.

Whilst I include most of my sites in an annual site-promotion programme I’m really bad at omitting the blogs from that. Why? Well, because it’s not so easy to promote a blog as most directories aren’t geared up to listing them in a sensible way.

So, now and again, I look around for new places to list the blogs and just came across rssHugger this afternoon.

As in most blog directories, this one considers blogs separately from normal sites and, of course, in this particular instance targets the RSS feeds which is always useful as you can get a whole bunch of new readers if you’re on the “right” RSS aggregators. Now, the question is whether rssHugger is one of those “right” aggregators but, at the moment, it’s just impossible to say as 1) this is a relatively new site and 2) I don’t know the demographics of those that use it and therefore whether or not they’d be generally interested in the stuff that I write.

Initially the sign-up was $20 for 10 years but they dropped that requirement recently for those blogs that write a review of them. Personally, I think that it’s good to have that notional $20 value as it gives a broad indication as to where they themselves feel the value of a listing on rssHugger would be.

What’s the site like though? It has a very clean look which in some senses is good but it’s a little too clean as it’s not immediately clear from the opening screen that there’s a directory living here. I think it would be better to move that directory onto the front page. It’s also quite a long directory and could do with being stuctured eg you get “Investing” and “Save Money” as two categories yet since the directory is purely alphabetical these related categories are nowhere near each other.

Is it worth listing with? In that it’s free at the moment there’s no downside and it has the feel of a site that could have a lot of upside so, yes, it’s worth listing with. How valuable the listing will be only time will tell.

We’ve been looking around for a new template for this blog but haven’t really seen anything that really catches our eye and is broadly in tune with the themes that we talk about here.

However, there’s loads of people out there who run up custom templates and we’re toying with the idea of getting one done for the site. Well, depending on the charge for it that is as I can certainly live with the free ones if the charge is over the top and if really pushed could run up one ourselves I suppose.

I think we’ll have a look round some more but that custom template is getting to be quite tempting.

Wendy’s been looking through a whole lot of blogs this afternoon and, frankly, the quality of writing that she’s seen has been pretty dismal.

Now, I can accept that many bloggers are just scribbling down their thoughts and, yes, there will be spelling mistakes and no doubt gramatical errors that creep in now and again. Fair enough, but she’s been looking, by and large, at blogs that take sponsored posts and it’s a very poor level of writing from what are professional writers.

Yes, you count as a professional writer if you’re writing sponsored posts. You’re getting paid to write, aren’t you?

I’ll not single out any in particular but some of the writing is so bad that it amazes me that the advertisers actually pay for it. There’s people out there saying things like “i done this” when it should be “I did that” and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Frankly, I’d expect better work from a 12 year old. In fact, one of the better written blogs is written by a 14 year old so it’s not impossible to write decent stuff.

Now, I’m not saying that you have to write on high brow topics every post. It’s nothing at all to do with the content. What needs improving in a major way is the spelling and grammar used.

Some of the pay per post outlets are already hinting that quality checks are coming: it’s going to be better to improve your quality of writing before they arrive because many of the bloggers out there are going to find that their blog is totally shunned by advertisers if it’s tagged as being one that consistently falls down on the spelling and grammar.

If you find that your current efforts are the best you can do at the moment and you know they’re not good enough, then do something about it. Take a course to improve your English. If you’re taking sponsored posts it would probably even be a tax deductible expense and, in some countries, you can get free or subsidised courses if your English isn’t good enough.

But make no mistake about it: quality standards will come at some point and it’s better to be prepared for that in advance.