WordPress and Custom Blogs in 2012

If you read this you are certainly amongst those already using WordPress CMS in your business or  otherwise, maybe even have your own custom blog. There is no deny that WordPress is now the standard CMS for marketers and pasted the testing time with flying colors. With the new year started there is a flood of plugins, themes and other bits and pieces around WP that makes WP the most versatile and useful system for individuals and businesses alike, even more so for all types of custom blogs.

Do you need a Custom Blog?

First of all, some will wander what’s all this talk around custom blogs? What are custom blogs and how custom blogs are different from a “regular blog”?

Well, if you are a internet marketer or you have an online business, if you are already using WordPress, most likely your blog is a custom blog. A “regular blog” is most of the time set up to allow owners share their interests and communicate in an easy way. Internet marketers and businesses have many different needs – promote their own or affiliate products, sell those products, collect email addresses, crate membership sites, affiliate sites and the list can go on. WordPress can cover all these needs by means of various plugins and themes so that makes these sites/blogs custom blogs.

So the question that remains is – do you need a custom blog?

I strongly believe that you do need  custom blogs if you plan to earn in any way from your words, work and time invested in your blog. This is the way to go about this year in order to make a profit. And I do believe most of our readers do plan to get a little(or big) benefit from their investment.

The only issue that remains is that with the explosive development around WordPress is very hard to keep yourself informed and even more to actually test even a small fraction of various plugins and tools released daily. Just think about the pop-up plugins category – there were more than 10 big new releases in the past 2 months only ! These are full-fledged commercial plugins catering custom blogs, I can’t count or comment on free ones.

So, while a custom blog is in order for almost any business or internet marketer, it might be a wise move to seek professionals as our own Xtreme Freelance team that could save you huge amounts of time and money in the end. While our Xtreme Blogs System is on hold for now we are always happy to develop custom designs for blogs and custom blogs for any purpose.

best blog hosting

Best Blog Hosting -

every blogger and blog owner knows how important is to have a reliable hosting for the object of their business – the blog. WordPress blogging has raised steadily in the past years, partly because of the simple and effective approach that got many non-technically inclined the chance to establish a solid web presence.

Another reason would be the constant improvement and dedicated support and finally the huge plugin database. So these are the factors that define the recent blogging explosion and also the advent of business blogging. Many online marketers and online business owners had recently made the transition towards blogs because of the reasons I mentioned. That lead to an explosion of dedicated plugins that responded to the business needs. And this is all great, but…

Many online entrepreneurs start their business with a bare minimum, many times with no dedicated funding. Maybe they get a free domain from the hosting provider they found upon reading countless web hosting reviews. The problem is many times the hosting provider simply lies about the bandwidth, disk space, setup prices and other little things that makes their offer. And not to mention a huge number of them either pay or post themselves favorable reviews to get new customers… -  haw many “Best blog hosting” reviews you seen lately?

Then, how do you find the best blog hosting?

This is not a simple or easy question – I was myself in the position of changing web hosts because the quality wasn’t reflected in the price or simply gone south after a while. Not to mention the biggest disaster – a hosting provider that sunk and took 3 months worth of work…

So, after several years I found out that the best way to approach a new hosting company is to directly talk  with the ones in charge. This is how we found our current hosting provider. Of course first you should go through offers and choose the ones that suit your needs.  Get a money back guarantee and find out all the costs involved before committing to an expensive plan. Then you can think at yours as the best blog hosting

So, the quest fro the best blog hosting is never ending as many things are quickly changing. For example cloud hosting seems to be more and more an attractive solution, though it’s not there yet… In the end, I have to ask you:

Is yours the  best blog hosting ?

Leave some comments about this and we can share ideas

The last year was a very good year for us and we expanded our business way beyond we expected. We had more orders for our services and Xtreme Blogs System that we could handle so a few were left dry – I apologise for that….
Therefore we need now to adapt and adjust our team and business to the new situation. We are now in the process to re-launch Xtreme Blogs System on his own new domain, redesign all our business sites and streamline our services.

A few new members have joined our team and are now in full training to be ready for the tasks ahead. As a matter of fact, the new Xtreme Blogs System will have a crew only for itself so it could handle all the jobs ahead.

Right now we have several big projects on the role beside our re-launches and re-design. One of them is Renew America Project, give it a try as this is a great idea and a huge chance for everyone from US to start profiting in a great membership site.

To all that questioned about the Xtreme Blogs Ssytem – we are not actively promote it but we still get orders from time to time, so if you’re interested and want to take advantage of the great price, you can Order Now. Make sure you Contact us before to confirm we have an opening.

A few shots from our ongoing projects and future design proposals from our designers to please  your eyes :

Of course we can only do so much and some of our customers are not between the successful ones yet. that’s OK as we are at peace that we did our part with each and everyone. Success in the cruel online business is not a given and even more it comes only to those willing to sacrifice, work hard and don’t take NO as an answer. It is not an easy task and some are not prepared for this challenge. those that are however, are enjoying now the fruits of their work and in many cases the fuits are really sweet

As about our plans, we have many surprises for you next year, along with a few projects that dragged their feet on the ground for a long time. Those we plan to finally make them fly and you will see the results really soon.  Not everyone was happy about our business model and we plan to solve this also next year. We hope that soon we will be able to satisfy more and help even more with our services. You can see from the testimonials that after one year our record is spotless and everyone was more than happy with our work. We plan to offer even more services and make them even more affordable so that we could help many more customers next year.

For now, if you are still on the fence, we offer you a deal that you can’t say no to!

1 single spot is available for this year and the one that will take it will enjoy a 10% off along with a free run of our trademark Xtreme promo service. Those that used it have witnessed a boom in their ranks and a great deal of SEO traffic. Below is a picture with the actual stats for a brand new site (no content!-all first page is made from images!), after just 3 runs of Xtreme Promo!

You can see that even if we could only target 3 primary keywords, even more were updated in ranks!

So, if you ORDER NOW, you will get a free run of Xtreme Promo($67+value), 10% off the price and all the other services listed in our offer!

P.S – Some had already emailed us telling they are not quite ready but they want the bonuses. If so, you can still order (2 spots) and you will retain the bonuses and a low price once you decide to start – we can begin the work in January.

CityTravelGuides.Info as the spot today so let’s talk a bit about the blog. It is intended as a very-low maintenance blog and it will generate revenue from ads and affiliate marketing. In about 3 weeks we will add it to clicksor and maybe infolinks along adsense as per owners request. The blog was already accepted to display affiliate ads from a major network and other links can be added courtesy to Ninja affiliate.

As for design, as I stated, we tried to maintain a clean look but with an individual feel. We used only a few colors, mainly green as per client request, but we accented the whole look by adding a subtle but distinct background. That was a challenge as it had to match the rest of the site’s background perfectly and I think we did a good job at that. You can judge below – the main page (click for a larger view):

Features:

Custom  slider,  custom logo, custom favicon

Autoresponder integrated in pop-up window, under each post and in the comment field

Twitter integration with sidebar widget and auto poster,  social bookmarking buttons integrated

Content based on keywords researched Unique article wizard as extra content source Onlywire plugin with associated accounts-bookmarks automatically every post.  Gold offer have access to automatic submission on 5 onlywire accounts

We have provided 10 keyworded unique articles, written by our writers, as well as other articles for support blogs and web 2.0 pages, more than 17 unique articles in total. All blog posts were submitted to another set of more than 80 social bookmarking sites/accounts as we promised in our offer. The blog has now over 1300 articles ready to be posted.

Custom theme features with options in admin area, a few widgets to provide additional features- daily gas prices for USA, travel info plugin and rotating sidebar video – custom made. Here is an image of the blog page:

Squidoo, Hubpages and additional blogs on WordPress.com blogs, loaded with unique articles on the same niche – city travel guides. The support blogs will add “Google juice” over time and will provide traffic.

Over 200 royalty-free images are loaded in the media library, ready to be used. This is in fact the only action that is needed to prepare the posts for publishing and is only for looks

You can check the  Xtreme Blogs System Offer page to see all the extra services we did as we really don’t have the space to cover all our work. Of course we have our report done with all the vitals and various details describing the job performed.

We also used the best selection of plugins to date for his requirements. Affiliate links are added on some keywords and more can be added with a few clicks, blog wide through Ninja Affiliate.  This allows for easy changing of the programs promoted.  No more manual linking, and above that, the links are cloaked, meaning that search engines will perceive the links as regular links. We added WP incentive also – a paid plugin that will reward your readers that post comments, easy way to lure them to your list. Highly configurable also, can be used in many ways – host a comments contest anyone?

Subscription is managed by Popup domination plugin for the pop-up part and Subscribers Magnet for post and comments opt-ins. We have also using Apture as usual for media needs(also providing the top bar). Check the image of a post with media galore : )

Monetization – For now we have active only a few Payspree ads, affiliate links and banner ads under each post. AmaNiche plugin is installed and ready to use but as always our avice is to build traffic and activate/add monetization features gradually over time. As I mentioned, we will add Clicksor and other ads over the next weeks.

It was a long job but we feel we did our best this time too. If oyu like our work, maybe it’s time to take a look at our OFFER

A few more pics :

We must differentiate between “‘spammy” autoblogs that grab content from allover the net, tarnslate it and make use of other means to make the content “unique” and legitimate blogs with real content that  use automation. We make use of it for us and our clients every day and I found it great. Without automation we could never do all the advertising and backlinking or posting while we’re away:)
Also having all the automation in the world cannot make you succesful. The piece that is missing is traffic. No matter how well your blogs  are constructed and how much content you add you will need to get traffic. You will need to build links and get the search engine spiders coming.

Automation is a good thing. I use it all the time. WordPress is set up to automatically ping to the directories you have set up. You can automate your blog to tweet your posts. You can automate your blog to send an email when you add new content to your subscribers using your RSS feed and an autoresponder like Aweber. Plugins like WP Syndicator can create backlinks for you automatically when you post new items if you have set it up once.

All of these things though work to get traffic and if you just put up a bunch of content and do nothing to create traffic you are not very likely to get the easy results you are looking for. So automation is a good thing but make sure that you understand all of the things that need to happen and don’t think that if you build it they will come.

There is always an effort needed at some point. A big red easy button would be great and we all are looking for it. Understand the whole process before spending your time and money to create a bunch of content on the web.

With business blogs there’s a lot of hard work to be a part of, including writing the most persuasive articles, having good quality videos, and creating good back links. All which builds up your business to the company you want in the future.

With some businesses you only need one blog to make a impact with presumed customers but with others the more blogs you have about the specific business the better! It seems as if business blogs are like billboards for some and can create a lot of positive feedback.

In some of the business blogs there’s always a video to assist with promoting ones business. Video has a great way to illustrate what words can’t. In a article full of words people can be bored with the amount of information given to them. Therefore Video is a great way to shake things up in a business blog.

All this to conclude that talking about ones business on a blog is a essential way to promote the company you want to see flourish!

We have acquired even better skills in many areas, we have outrun many problems adn difficult situations and in the end we are most proud that we were able to help many people with our work. Some of our clients are doing very well -search for John Carroll, David Beard or Royce Mills-, others not so great, but that’s life…We are always doing our best to help each and everyone of our clients but in the end nobody can do more than the person themselves. You can watch and read their testimonials on our blog, just go in the header menu, sidebar or select the tags

We have installed 87 custom wordpress blogs in this year and we have done many services beside those. Our SEO Xtreme promo service proved to be one of the best ways to quickly push new and old websites up in the ranks. Here are  a few shots from one of our last runs – It is a brand new site with no content at all to help the SEO, and we run our Xtreme promo 3 times to achieve those results. A few of other services were also made but the xtreme promo is the biggest part. See for yourself the results after just 3 runs :

Keep in mind that is a brand new site with no written content at all!(entire page is made of images), against a medium-to-tough competition of old sites with fairly high PR. even so, we managed to get every keyword we promoted into top 10, up to spots in top 5(several #2, #4 and so on).  Another shot from google search:

We have even bigger plans for our second year, so if you are interested at all in blogging business or getting yourself into an online venture, keep our site bookmarked

I have added also never released screen shots of our various projects, Xtreme blogs and others. I am a bit upset because many of our clients choose not to help us with a testimonial of any kind, hence their blog was never promoted on our blog. it’s a pity for them in the first place as those who know will appreciate a free PR 4 link…

To close this in a nice way, we are offering a BIG BONUS to our next customer as a token of our gratitude to all of our clients So, as we have only 1 spot left, the next person who will order gets a free Xtreme Promo Service (value $67+) included with the order!

Check our Xtreme Blogs Offer Now!

Various pics :

[showtime]

John approached us first with several questions. he knew exactly what he wanted and his requirements posed a challenge that I decided to take. He asked me if we can comply to all his requirements and while many things he mentioned were not in our offer or in our Xtra services page, I was confident my team can handle all the challenges.

This being said, i must add the JohnJPCarroll.com is not a regular Xtreme Blog and we will only take orders for this type of blogs on a very special basis. Email us if interested.

The most demanding  job we had so far. We spent countless hours to meet John’s demands not because of the money but to prove our team can handle a big difficult job. And I hope John’s testimonials are a proof  about that.

Probably the biggest challenge we faced was to understand what John’s wishes were. He had a good idea of what he wanted but maybe not always we had the best explanation of his image. That proofs how important is the communication part in any business. You  can check in the end gallery samples of our work in various stages.

Here is the full page view of his blog.  You can click on it for a full view.

The theme we used it’s a professional theme designed with functionality and customization in mind. It’s called Indomagz if you like it. It has tons of features and it’s easy to customize as it provides 2 distinct layouts in the theme options, with every element being also customizable.

We always try to do the best to please our clients, so here it is a short overview of John’s new custom blog:

Features:

Custom footer

Custom header – custom made header on John’s specs

Autoresponder integrated in sidebar widget, video squeeze and pop-up, single page footer, comments, blog footer toolbar via Subscriber Magnet plugin

Twitter integration with sidebar widget and auto poster,  and Twitter suite plugin, social bookmarking buttons integrated

Content based on keywords researched Unique article wizard as extra content source Onlywire plugin with associated accounts-bookmarks automatically every post.  Automatic submission on 5 onlywire accounts

We have provided 10 keyworded unique articles, written by our writers, as well as other articles for support blogs and web 2.0 pages, more than 18 unique articles in total. All blog posts were submitted to another set of more than 80 social bookmarking sites/accounts as we promised in our offer. All of them were submitted on 3 different accounts – 240 total submissions

Extended custom theme features with options in admin area

Squidoo, Hubpages and additional blogs on web2 sites, loaded with unique articles on the same niche – personal development coach.

John provided a short Video teaser to help ew subscribers, we added it to the sidebar.

We made a few custom social networking and bookmarking widget . We have selected over 100 royalty photos that John can use in his posts and articles.

The theme makes use of all new feature in WordPress 3.0. It is very easy to add a new posts with images, even easier since we provided the Apture plugin. Also adding a featured image and the slider image is just a 2 clicks job.

You can check the  Xtreme Blogs System Offer page to see all the extra services we did as we really don’t have the space to cover all our work. Of course we have our report done with all the vitals and various details describing the job performed.

On top of that we have doubled or tripled all submissions. The biggest job was to customize the major social account designs. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube have all been revamped with custom designs, backgrounds and dedicated images. View them in the gallery at a larger size.

We also used the best selection of plugins to date for his requirements. Affiliate links are added on some keywords and more can be added with a few clicks, blog wide.  This allows for easy changing of the programs promoted.  No more manual linking, and above that, the links are cloaked, meaning that search engines will perceive the links as regular links. We added WP incentive also – a paid plugin that will reward your readers that post comments, easy way to lure them to your list. Highly configurable also, can be used in many ways – host a comments contest anyone?

For advertising we have  several options- built in theme advertising and  banner ads plugins with several advertising areas.

As I mentioned we did this job mostly as a Xtreme Blogs complete service show-off. We do not provide these as a regular service yet due to the costs. Email us if interested.

A few more pics :