One thing that we don’t need these days is another mainstream media news site that doesn’t cover the news items that do matter. That’s probably why more and more people are starting their own news services to provide their take on what’s going on all around us. A few years ago, you would have to spend a fortune to get that done. But thanks to the power of Wordpress and all the cool news themes available on the market, you can get your news blog up and running in a flash.

News Wordpress Theme is another clean cut theme by StudioPress that is designed for that very purpose. You can easily get your own news website up and running in a matter of minutes. The theme has a very light look and feel to it. At the same time, it’s dynamic enough to allow your visitors to go through your content more effectively.

The theme is SEO friendly and comes with a clean code to give you the best chance to maximize profits from search engines. You get 3 columns that you can use to present your information as you see fit. The theme is also ad ready as well. So you can add your AdSense code or banners to the theme easily.

What I like about this theme is the fact that it’s translation ready. So it’s perfectly suitable for a foreign language portal. You also have like the fact that you can easily upload your images to this theme easily. The back-end does provide you with a few features to help you avoid writing code to customize your theme.

Overall, News Theme is a clean cut, SEO friendly Wordpress theme that lets you start your own news portal fast. It’s very easy to use and customize and gets the job done.

I happen to own a website that has over 10,000 pages and posts combined. That’s not much in comparison to some of the bigger portals out there. But at the same time, the sheer size of the site makes it too difficult to make the smallest changes to the structure of the site. When I purchased the website from the previous owner, I had every intention of changing the internal structure of the site to maximize the link juice flow and improve my site’s PR. One big problem with the site was the permalink structure that was used on the site. The URLs were just too long and not search engine friendly. If you change your permalinks structure without doing the ground work beforehand, you leave yourself open to search engine penalties and loss in traffic. Don’t forget that people who have bookmarked your pages won’t be able to find your pages once you make the switch. So how do you approach such a problem?

One easy way to do it is by writing a script that 301 redirect every one of your old link to their new location. That way you don’t lose your traffic and won’t get penalized by Google and other search engines. Of course, if you don’t know any coding, you can always use Permalinks Migration (even if you do, this could save you a lot of time). Permalinks Migration lets you 301 redirect your old links to your new links without doing too much work. All you have to do is define your old permalink structure:

Here is how the developers explain the concept behind this plugin:

There is a way to tell the search engines (and browsers) that the page has permanently moved, and that the old address should be replaced by the new one . It’s called a “301 Redirect”, also known as a Permanent Redirect.When you do this, Search engines will update their indexes quickly and you won’t lose your pagerank.you will continue to receive traffic as though nothing had changed. This works for search engines, bookmarks, and links from other sites…. This plugin will generates a “301 Redirect” when user or spider visit your site through old permalinks,and redirect them to the new permalinks of the same post.

All in all, if you have a huge portal and want to change your permalinks structure, fear no more. With Permalinks Migration, you can easily 301 redirect your old links to their new location and won’t have to write a single line of code. How cool is that?

A lot of people ask me about ways they can monetize their blogs. It really all depends on the niche that you are involved in. At the end of the day, there is no one size fits all when it comes to monetizing a blog. But most blogs should be able to make money from Amazon. Amazon.com has so many products that unless you are blogging about a very narrow niche. You can always use Amazon links inside your blogs posts, and there is really nothing wrong with that. But what if you want to create your own shop based on Amazon.com products? It’s true that you get paid through Amazon Associate Program, but if you put time to create a targeted store based on Amazon products, most of your users will appreciate your efforts.

Associate-O-Matic is an innovative script solution that you can use to create an e-shop for your Wordpress blog fast. You can easily choose what you want to show in your store and even monetize your store with Google Adsense. Installing the service is very easy, and the back-end is web-based and easy to get around. You can customize the look and feel of your store’s front-page, and you got control over the categories and sub-categories that show up in your store.

What I like about this service is the fact that it’s SEO friendly. You can always use the free version, but that is pretty limited. The premium version lets you optimize your store for SEO. The integrated shopping cart is a big plus as well. So your readers won’t have to deal with Amazon until they are ready to purchase an item. The solution supports RSS feeds and also works well with Wordpress as well. It’s very easy to add items from your store to your blog using Associate-O-Matic.

All in all, if you are looking to create a shop to support your blog or make some money on the side without having to take on any inventory risk, Associate-O-Matic is the way to go. You won’t have to ship the products or do anything in particular with your shop. Amazon takes care of everything. Yet another way to fund your blog.

You don’t have to be a genius to realize that the fashion business is pretty lucrative whether you are an insider or a blogger. Starting a fashion blog has never been any easier. There was a time that you had to pay someone thousands of dollars to start your fashion blog. But you can get one up and running fast thanks to the power of Wordpress. You won’t even have to pay for a custom design at the start. You can just buy a premium theme, customize it, and test the market before getting a custom blog design. Seduction Magazine is one of those well designed premium themes that lets you start your fashion blog fast in an affordable fashion.

Seducti0n Magazine has a celebrity magazine look written all over it. It comes with 16 different colors, so you can easily change the look and feel on your blog fast. It is also social media ready, giving your visitors an easy way to connect with you on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and more.

The theme can handle images as well. The image gallery is very easy to customize, and you can add your images to your theme without too much hassle. The banner management system allows you to monetize your blog in a more convenient fashion.

All in all, Seduction Magazine is a wonderful celebrity/fashion theme for Wordpress that lets you start your blog/portal fast. It’s very easy to set up and customize. Very dynamic too. A great way to start your fashion blog fast.

If you happen to own a Wordpress blog or portal, you wouldn’t mind getting as much traffic as possible. The social media is a great channel to go after traffic for your Wordpress website. In order to truly make it big through the social media, you will need to work on your content as well. The more valuable your content, the better chance you have of going viral on Digg, Twitter, and other similar services.

Let’s say you have worked on your content and have written a bunch of very useful posts. You can always hope for your readers to take the time to log on to sites such as Digg and submit your post by hand. But the better way to approach this is by giving your visitors an easy way to submit your blog to the top social media sites. I am sure you have seen how top sites such as Mashable go about the process.

Wouldn’t be nice if you could do the same on your blog on every post? There is a plugin for that. Digg Digg is a cool little plugin that lets you add Reddit, Digg, Twitter, Facebook, and more to your website. That way you can give your readers a much easier way to tweet your content.

I personally prefer using the compact button design on my sites, but you can stick with the normal design which is a slightly larger. You can also choose which pages you want your social media buttons to show up on. I recommend not overdoing it, but that’s really up to you.

What I like about Digg Digg is the fact that it makes it so easy to change the location of these buttons without having to write a line of code. You can even customize the look and feel of your digg button from the back-end.

All in all, if you are looking to give your readers an easy way to make your content go viral, using Digg Digg is a smart way to save time and effort and get the job done fast.

Getting a premium theme for your Wordpress blog is not an easy decision. You want to make sure you take time to get familiar with what each offers and try to find one that applies to your situation the best. You also don’t want to pay more than you have to get your hands on these themes. That’s where Wordpress coupons can come in handy. Many theme developers give discounts on multiple purchases, and if you own more than one website, you are leaving money on the table if you don’t take advantage of these coupons.

The Wordpress coupon market changes on a daily basis, but the below coupons should be valid for a while:

• WP Zoom
  • 10 themes for $199 (save $500)
• Studiopress:
  • 25% off  (PERF25)
• Gorilla Themes:
  • 20% off Seduction Theme (my20)
  • $50 Off Developer Theme packages (my50) [more coupons via @gorillathemes]
• WooThemes:
  • Standard package (2 for 1)
  • Developer package (3 for 1).
• Press 75:
  • 2 Themes for $100 (use “SEC25″)
  • 3 Themes for $150 (use “1FREE”)
  • 4 Themes for $225 (use “2FREE”)
• Natty WP:
  • 2 for the price of 1
• Elegant Themes:
  • All themes for $19.95

Watch this space for more Wordpress coupons and discounts.

One of the most popular topics to talk about these days is travel and its sub-topics. There are a lot of people who refer to travel sites to find out where to go for their next vacation and how to find the best vacation deals, so as long as you position your site the right way, there is no reason you can’t build a killer travel related website. Whether you want to be more active and travel around the world and blog about it or just talk about travel deals from the comfort of your home, a well planned travel site can help you make a living online.

Thanks to Wordpress travel themes, you won’t have to do too much work to get your feet wet in this niche. Building a sophisticated travel site from scratch could cost you thousands of dollars, but if you have Wordpress and a good travel theme at hand, you can go for.

Traveler is a well designed Wordpress theme that lets you take your travel site online fast. The theme is very colorful and great at handling your images, which you will need to use to build up your travel portal. The theme comes with a cool image slider that you can use to display images of those tropical vacation spots on your portal.

Traveler comes with 5 color scheme that help you customize the look and feel of your website and build a website that better targets your audience:

• Caribbean Blue
• Tropical Storm
• Purple Sky
• Red Sunset
• Forest Green

The theme is ad ready as well, so you can partner up with sites such as Experida and Travelocity to monetize your portal easily. It really comes down to the type of content you want to display on your portal.

All in all, if you are looking for a fast way to start your travel portal fast, Traveler is a colorful, dynamic travel theme to get started with. You can always customize it to your liking and add your content easily. It’s affordable and gets the job done.

In case you haven’t noticed, no topic is hotter than the celebrity business. I don’t know what it is about celebrities that is so worth talking about, but there are a lot of people who are obsessed with celebrities. That means if you are a smart business individual, you can set up a celebrity website with your own angle to take advantage of all that potential traffic. Thanks to the power of Wordpress you won’t have to put too much money upfront to get started.

There are plenty of themes that you can use to get your celebrity portal started. But if you are looking for themes created specifically for celebrity portals, here are 5 themes you should consider picking up:

Vanity: Vanity is an attractive, social media ready celebrity Wordpress theme that lets you start your own portal fast. It’s very dynamic and gives you a leg up over people who decide to use a general Wordpress theme. Comes with many color schemes as well.

Celebrity Gossip: a very simple but highly customizable theme for celebrity portals that lets you go online with your portal fast. If you want a simpler celebrity theme to build your celebrity portal around, Celebrity Gossip is a good option to consider.

Celebrity Press: a dark theme for celebrity portals that is not only colorful but comes with multi-media features that help you build a killer celebrity website. It’s pretty dynamic as well.

bSocial: bSocial is a colorful magazine theme for Wordpress that helps you set up your website without spending too much effort. Works great with images, and it’s easy to customize as well.

Seduction: yet another dynamic theme that is suitable for celebrity and fashion blogs. The theme is social media ready, great with multimedia, and comes in 16 colors.

Your turn: What’s your favorite celebrity Wordpress theme?

Optimizing a Wordpress blog for the search engines is more than just tweaking your title and description tags and hoping for the best. While paying attention to on-page SEO tactics can help you climb the search engine rankings, getting incoming links to your blog is the best way to make sure you drive enough traffic to your blog to get the exposure and credit you deserve in the blogging world. One of the best ways to get juicy links to your blog is by getting links from online directories. While directories are not as effective as they used to be, they can still help you take your business to the next level.

If you have submitted your blog to directories by hand before, you know how much effort it takes to submit to multiple directories manually. You have to create accounts per each directory, fill out forms, manage emails from these directories, and more when submitting your sites to directories. But thanks to Directory Maximizer, you can submit your website to over thousand of directories without you having to do much.

Directory Maximizer allows you to submit your blog to thousands of directories without you having to open new accounts by hand. You can also define the titles that you want your listings to use. You have the option to define multiple titles for your listings. So you can essentially define what anchor texts you want directories to use to list your blog. These directories comes with different PageRanks, and you can define which ones you want your site to show up.

You can choose to submit your site to over 1000s of directories all in one shot. You can also define your budget and have the system offer you a plan accordingly. Of course, you can combine all these options to come up with the best solution for your blog , and you are in control of the speed of your submissions as well. Each submission will cost you $0.14, which is not much.

Ultimately, you can either submit your blog to these directories by hand or let services such as Directory Maximizer to get the job done. Directories are not the only way you can get incoming links to your blog, but they do help you gain more traffic and improve your search engine positions. And with Directory Maximizer you won’t have to spend time on it all, so you can focus on more important chores.

Many startups and small businesses hesitate when it comes to going online. Many are worried that they can’t afford to put up a site while others don’t know where to start. One good place to start is by taking a look at some of the top corporate themes that are available for Wordpress. These themes are not that expensive, yet they allow you to start a good looking corporate website fast. Executive is one of those themes that allow you to take your business online fast. It comes with everything that you will need to take your site online right off the bat.

The theme has a professional look and feel to it. It’s well designed and highly customizable which is what you would look for in a premium theme. Executive Theme is image friendly as well, allowing you to showcase your corporate headquarters, your top employees, and your products easily. The back-end comes with additional features to help you customize every aspect of your website. For instance, you can figure out how to replace images with videos and so on.You can also add your Google Analytics code in the back-end without having to deal with a single line of code.

If you are fluent in SEO, you are going to love Executive theme. You can not only customize your title tags per each post, you can also take care of your meta keywords and description tags per page as well.

All in all, Executive Theme is another cool theme that lets you take your business website online fast. Your investment won’t be too costly, and you have plenty of ways to customize the look and feel of your website. If you don’t know any coding or just can’t afford a top developer, Executive Theme is a budget friendly way of taking your business online.