The point is that as my traffic grown, and my daily work as well, I throught that my blog would have done way better if I had got the theme right that could help me to simplify my job.

Sure, nothing to say about my old theme layout, but onestly, I really was unsatisfied by the lack of the widget.

Now, for an expert is no new this term, but a newbie blogger may not know what are widgets and what is a widgets ready theme.

What Is A Custom Widgets Ready Wordpress Themes

A Custom Widgets Ready Wordpress Themes is a theme that lets you to customize your layout and design in a few click directly from the dashboard without any effort.

Most of free template ignore this great technology. Of course, if you want convert a custom Wordpress theme to be Widgets Ready you can do it as well, however it take a lot of time and you need to have php knowledge.

In general, custom Widgets Ready Wordpress themes have a post column(or body) and one sidebar. However are common Wordpress themes with three columns and sometimes four columns.

For this site I’m using a custom Widgets Ready Wordpress themes called “frugal“. Below, I’ve just put a sample of how robust the Frugal theme option really are.

As you can see on the image above, Frugal theme lets you change anything of your theme, without having to get your hands on css or php files. You can set any type of color, font, weight of your column.

My Blog Section After I Moved To Frugal Theme

For those are new at The3dtechnologies, yesterday finally I decided to move from Grid Focus Public Wordpress theme to Frugal Theme. As you can see in the detailed image above, the sidebar now contain these four sections:

• Email subscription forms - It’s very useful to grow my subscribers number and send my latest weekly email to them, plus I’ve put three cool button for feed, Twitter, and Facebook for who want to be updated with the latest post.
• Recent post - Include the latest 5 post I wrote.
• News - Is the work we do to aggregate and manually select the most relevant news for our readers from a group of about 50 selected news sources.
• Ad post - In the middle between subscription forms and recent post I’ve added an ad spot to monetize my blog.

As you can see in the Email Subscription Forms basically there is an input form where the user needs to type its email address and click on “Subscribe.” He will then see the following popup window (for the sake of simplicity we will carry the analysis using the Feedburner service only).

In my view this method has some drawbacks. First off, of all it uses a lot of space. Precious space if we consider the monetization aspect. You have only a simple box where put your email instead of a full registration form.

On this pop-up windows the user will just need to put his email address and to pass the CAPTCHA filter by copying some letters. Once done, an email will be sent to the mail box containing a link that will be used for the activation of the subscription.

In a nutshell, the steps required for subscription:

1. Click on the link
2. Type email address
3. Type CAPTCHA letters
4. Click on “Complete Subscription Request” button
5. Go on your email box
6. Click on activation link

In the home page, in particular on the right sidebar I give a preview of latest news about the topic related to my site. I’m thinking to put the section “news” only in the home page while let the same section of every single page blank.

Every day I try to optimizing every post I write in order to ranking well in the Google search engine. When I’m selling affiliate products I make each single pages like landing pages. This is the reason I’m thinking to let each single pages as simple as possible.

Make Your Single Page Like A Landing Page

Compared to my old theme I’ve let each single page as clear as possible. I’ve only put a subscribers form and two adsense ads(one within the content and another in the right sidebar). I didn’t begin doing this until just a few month ago.

The reason I’ve choosed this strategy is because I consider these page like landing pages. As I said before, when I started with affiliate marketing each single page were full of stuff.

It means that they could distract the visitors from what they are really searching for, then from the content of my page, which could make me lose sales.

Sure, I do not tend to selling affiliate products every day, but when I promote something on my site I prefer leave those page simple as possible by anything doesn’t concerns the main topic of the page.

Make Money WIth The Header

Compared to my old header, I’ve left only the logo on the left header. I took this decision because on the right header I can use the blank space to add some affiliate banner or the next book I’m writing.

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Social media usage has soared not just among the general population but also among at-work Internet users, who are heading to the sites for both personal and professional reasons in greater numbers.

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Source: www.emarketer.com

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The amount of insurance you need for your purpose depend by different financial situation. For instance, if you have a family who depend on your income to survive, you need life insurance.

In this little guide about life insurance I will give you a little introduction to Life Insurance, as how much coverage do you need, as the type of life insurance as well.

Inside the content:

• An Introduction To Life Insurance
• Why purchase life insurance?
• How Much Coverage Do I Need?
• Type Of Life Insurance

An Introduction To Life Insurance

Image credit: Keylovesvintage

First off, we have to know what is a life insurance policy. According to Wikipedia:

Life insurance or life assurance is a contract between the policy owner and the insurer, where the insurer agrees to pay a designated beneficiary a sum of money upon the occurrence of the insured individual’s or individuals’ death or other event, such as terminal illness or critical illness.

For instance, consider auto insurance. If your car was stolen, your insurance company should give you a compensation based on terms outlined in your insurance policy.

Also, purchasing a life insurance policy ensures that your loved ones will continue to living if you die unexpectedly.

If you have a spouse’s and your children’s you need to take into consideration both their annual expenses, as well as funeral costs. If you and spouse both work, you should each fill out a separate worksheet. You may also want to consider what sort of coverage.

In general, life insurance can be used to:

• Pay estate taxes and fees
• Provide an inheritance
• Fund your children’s college education
• Pay off a home mortgage
• Cover funeral expenses
• Settle medical bills and other debts
• Cover your family’s living expenses

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Running an e-commerce website is a never-ending task, from trying to squeeze that extra bit of conversion rate out of the check-out page to figuring out which referrers give you the best traffic. There’s also a plethora of tools out there to help you achieve your goals. But which ones do what, and why should you use some of them? This article introduces some of these tools and offers a tip or two on how to use them.

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Source: www.smashingmagazine.com

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Inside this Media Literacy Education:

• Web 3.0 & Libraries
• Socializing: Circles And Networks
• Your Personal Memory Device
• Conclusively proven: Video Games Make Aggressive Kids
• Who needs A prof?
• Chatroulette
• Game Design Open Online Course
• Call for Papers: Impact of Social Networks on Teaching and Learning

Image Credit: D’Arcy Norman

Web 3.0 & Libraries

Web 2.0 hype has subsided, largely replaced with terms like “social media”. Adding a “2.0″ to anything dates it – immediately. Because it’s just a matter of time before someone comes along and says “3.0″. Defining software by version number i.e. x.0 makes sense because software is bounded. Windows 98 shares some features with Vista, but overall, it’s a distinct piece of software. Real life – like learning – can’t be reduced to a bounded entity like software, making “2.0″ versions largely useless as a means of communicating unique elements. Which is why articles like this – Web 3.0 promises changes for libraries – are disappointing.

On the one hand, the concepts being discussed are important: blending virtual/physical worlds, 3D technologies, semantic web, and real-time web. But, the language used to describe these trends (web 3.0) is not helpful as it casts an air of hype. Naming things is difficult; a fine line exists between capturing the essence of change…and between becoming buzzword-based hype.

Socializing: Circles And Networks

Patti Anklam takes a quick look at the various ways in which the word “social” is used to define everything from technology to media to architecture to businesses. I appreciate the attempt to provide clarifying review of popular uses of social terms. Something critical is being overlooked in this: nothing is in itself social. Media is not social. It becomes social as we use it to form and create connections.

As Bruno Latour notes, researchers and theorists have long held the view that social is like ether – it exists and is something that we basically just “plug into”. This isn’t an accurate view – you can’t describe an object of study by the element that you are choosing to study it with (i.e. “social” – as Latour puts it, sociologists have mistaken the answer for the question – they assume what ought to be the object of study).

The social realm is not pre-existing. Social is not a thing that we add to a tool or an organization. The social realm is one that is created – grown and pruned – through connections and interactions. It is a fluid continually shifting concept. As a result, we literally cannot have social media or social businesses. The ether doesn’t exist. Only the connections do.

Your Personal Memory Device

Sounds similar to what I suggested with TEKL – Your personal memory device : “It will happen some day. It is inevitable. In the near future, someone will decide to record every moment of a human life from birth to death in digital storage…Data captured by the PMD [personal memory device] would be linked over the internet into distributed software services like GPS, Google Maps, facial recognition, speech/text recognition, brainwave analysis and so on. It would create an ongoing record of the people, terrain, and objects in your vicinity.”

Technology is fun when it thrills us, gives us choice, entertains us, or even distracts us. But when technology starts to replace us (not physical work, but what we think is our unique domain: the mental life), we start to get a little concerned. What does it mean to be human? Is conscious memory our unique province? Can the experience of being human – qualia – possibly exist in a technological device or memory card?

Conclusively proven: Video Games Make Aggressive Kids

A researcher has announced that, after “analyzing 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide”, he is able to prove “conclusively that exposure to violent video games makes more aggressive, less caring kids”.

I’m not sure about “conclusively proven” and many on slashdot have issues with the research. But there’s no point in being naive about it: experiences and activities influence our views, thoughts, and beliefs (duh). Even the US Army recognizes the value of games in developing skills (mindsets?) of future soldiers.

Who needs A prof?

I’ve talked in the past about trailing ideologies – namely that we design systems to serve an era, but when the era changes, the systems often don’t. Education is a great example. In higher education and corporate training, we labour under many assumptions and ideologies that have been negated by the web, social media, and mobile technologies. Courses, classrooms, and teacher-centric learning can (should) be rethought to capitalize on what technology enables and renders obsolete from the previous model.

Who needs a prof?:

So what role is left for the teacher? To be effective, Wieman says, they must be “cognitive coaches” rather than conduits of information. Rankin believes that the change in pedagogy will happen soon. “It’s comparable to the introduction of a light switch,” he adds. “It’s just going to take a while for people to figure out what this looks like and how it works.”

Chatroulette

Chatroulette is drawing attention from many groups – parents, students, teachers, and – as commonly focused on – the fringe of society. Basically it’s you and someone else chatting via video. If you don’t like your partner, you click and advance to another random person. Whenever a tool like this arises and causes a combination of panic and intrigue, it’s important to look beyond the tool and see the behaviours and interests of individuals.

Why are people interested in meeting random people (while wearing costumes, masks, or nothing…singing songs, rapping, arguing, etc.)? What is it about chatroulette that causes many early social media adopters – as I’ve heard many state – to express disdain for the tool and a reluctance to use it? The easy answer is that we are social people who like to meet new people. Or that we are voyeuristic.

The real appeal, I think, is that we are drawn to randomness, to newness. In spite of structured content and teaching that defines formal education, we like random connections: “despite its weirdness, Chatroulette brings back an element of fun and surprise to vastness of the Internet, where social networks of friend lists and avatars has remained the norm for years on end.”

Chatroulette takes the structured, secure, controllable social networking sites we participate in…and adds bit of interestingness to it. Randomness is a great motivator for participation.

Game Design Open Online Course

Planet Kodu is offering an open online course in Game Design with Kodu. From the overview of the course: “It will run for five weeks and the outline of the curriculum is on the overview page. Each week will consist of delivered content through text, readings, videos and required tasks posted on Monday morning each week but the delivered content is only part of the picture and we expect all participants will contribute knowledge and ideas.” [The course starts today]

The lab supporting Planet Kodu is supported by Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, DEECD, University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, and Hume City Council. Why is this relevant? The course is building on the model Stephen Downes and I have used in our connectivism course over the last few years. I appreciate seeing others experiment with the model and advance discussion on alternative design and pedagogical models.

Call for Papers: Impact of Social Networks on Teaching and Learning

Martin Weller and I are editing a special issue of RUSC on theImpact of Social Networks on Teaching and Learning. From the call:

Social media and emerging technologies have transformed how news is captured and shared, how politicians connect with the populace, and how businesses interact with customers. Is education the next discipline to be impacted? This special issue of RUSC will analyse the growing influence of social learning in higher education, including design, teaching and learning, scholarship and research, as well as next-generation technologies that are blending physical and virtual spaces.

The original call is here (select language preference from the drop down option on the right-hand side)

Article written by George Siemens for elearnspace

Source: March 6th, 2010 George Siemens newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About The Author

George Siemens is a theorist on learning in a digitally-based society. He is the author of the article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book Knowing Knowledge - an exploration of the impact of the changed context and characteristics of knowledge.

Source: en.wikipedia.org.

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Source: www.searchengineland.com

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WordPress.com‘ 10.5 million blogs are about to get a whole lot more real-time, thanks to a new behind-the-scenes development.

The WordPress team has announced in a blog post that the company has turned on support for PubSubHubbub (try saying that fast five times), a move that will get blog content to RSS services (such as Google Reader and Bloglines) much more quickly.

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Source: www.mashable.com

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Often, when people think about making money online, they tend to think about things like Adsense and affiliate link. Sure, they are all great ways, but you’ve need to put lots of sites together to make the financial picture work.

Make Money Online With Your Own phone Apps

Image Credit: Jeep Oostinjam

I’ve noticed from reading other blogs, a few people seem to move learning how to creating Iphone web applications and selling them to make money online as well.

According to source, there still many opportunity to make good money with iPhone applications, especially for games.

Today I thought to put together some instructions to show you how to start your own Iphone application from scratch, promote it, and make money too.

Inside the content:

• What Is An Iphone App?
• How does To Get An Idea For An Apple Iphone Apps.
• How Start Creating Your Iphone Apps.
• Pat Case Study.
• Step By Step Process To Start An Iphone App And Make Money Online.

What Is An Iphone App?

An iPhone app, is a third-party software programs developed specifically for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Of course, you need to using an iPhone because the apps do not work with other types of smartphone hardware.

How Does To Get An Idea For An Apple Iphone Apps

The first thing you can do is to go on Apple website and check the Appstore to take a glance at what kinds of app are most popular or could benefit iPhone users. Also, you could ask to your friends that have an Iphone what applications they would like to have. These two ways will help you to figure what is the right way to take.

How Start Creating Your Iphone Apps

As I said before,  there’s no complicated process to create your first Iphone Apps. You no need to be a developer or do have c-object knowledges. Once you’ve choosed as should be your first iPhone application, go to www.Elance.com and find an iPhone SDK specialist that make the job done for you.

Registering to Elance is very easy and free. Once done you can start creating your iPhone apps project. If you can invest some money, often you can get your work done with $300 or less. When you get your application the only thing you need to do is to promote it and making you money online on the Appstore.

Before to make money from selling Iphone applications take into consideration those factors:

• Quality - Popular Iphone app cost between $0.99 to $9.99 so if you think to charge more, make sure to create a great application.
• Time - Deciding what to charge your Iphone Apps for you to make money depend by the time you take.
• Commission - You get 70% of application you sell in the Iphone Appstore.
• Great market - The Iphone has sold over 10 milion units by the end of 2009, and it seem that will sale 45 million of units by the end of 2010

Pat Flynn Case Study.

Pat Flynn is a 27 year old dude from Southern California who makes a living as full time blogger. Pat is master of smartpassiveincome.com, a popular blog that show you exactly how  he done $10000 per month by blogging.

Pat Flynn and Quoc Bui are friends and have put together a website that sell iPhone application and where they documenting their progress, their marketing campaigns, and their income.

For each application they have spent between $2,500 to $5,000. In a nutshell, is an investment, one that may take a month or two to see any type of return on, but like anything else, it takes  money to make money, right?

Step By Step Process To Start An Iphone App And Make Money Online

For those who do not have any experience or knowledge about how does to starting a little business with Iphone applications, In this paragraph, I will show you the exact process to start creating your own Iphone application, market it and make money.

1. First and foremost, go to www.Elance.com. Elance is a site that helps companies hire and manage professionals online to get work done and grow their businesses. You need to register first(it’s free). The best thing is that you get responses in hours and sometimes in minutes

2. Check up what are the most popular Iphone applications people that people would like. Just go to the Appstore. Also, I reccomend to take a glance at the most popular free iphone apps and posts of 2009 or other similar review.

3. Find an Iphone SDK specialist to develop the application for you. Elance let you using a number of different search criteria to find the right developer.

• Category
• Provider name
• Keyword(s) listed in the Provider’s profile
• Tested Skills
• Skills
• Number of Reviews received in the last 6 months
• Feedback Ratings
• and much more…

Once you have your search done, you can sort the list by Location, Name, Feedback (6 mos), Minimum Rate, and Earnings (6 mos). Prices and payments plans will vary between developers.

4. Once got the job done, you need to submit application to Apple Store.  Once you’ve paid to join the developer program, there is no additional charge for actually submitting your application. I reccomend you to be carefull before submitting, because some things cannot be changed once you’ve submitted your iPhone application - for example: the name of your app, and whether it will also run on the iPod Touch etc.

5. There are many ways to promote your application, ppc campaign, social bookmarking, social media like Facebook and Twitter are welcome. Also If you have a blog you can promote your applications too.

I hope you found this article helpful and maybe a bit of inspiration for make money online.

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Source: www.mashable.com

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One of the easiest way to get people to join your Facebook Fan page is to invite all your current Facebook friends to join. However, the process can be quite time consuming if you have a lot of friends. I have over 4,000 friends on Facebook. To invite everyone of them to join my Fan page means I have to manually select everyone, which I estimate would take over two hours. Here’s a little trick that was shown to me by Michael Yurechko that will allow you to select all your Facebook friends automatically.

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Source: www.johnchow.com

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