Theme spring clean

(or where I tell you how not to make money online by developing your own wordpress theme)

So, I’ve been developing a wordpress theme for fun and profit. Well, fun mostly. Because I’m not going to try and sell it or anything. Just give it away. I mean why not – there’s so much free stuff on the net these days that I have taken advantage of, that it seems only fair.

But anyway, in honour of my development work, I thought I would change up the wordpress theme here at the old underdogblog. Gone is the gloom. You are now witness to a new white minimal theme. Not one I developed mind….you can’t upload your own theme on a wordpress.com hosted site. Well, you probably can if you pay them, but then you might as well become self hosted….and since this is my exploration of how to make money online for free, I’m not quite ready for that yet. See in this respect, blogger completely owns wordpress. On the free blogger platform, you can do anything you want. Change up the theme completely if you feel like it. Mess with the colours and stylesheet. Everything. For free. But that’s google for you. They get your data, you get free shit

So anyway, here’s an image pre-makeover….

Chaos theme on the underdog blog

using the Chaos theme……and one after the makeover

Journalist 1.9 theme on underdog blog

using the Journalist theme.

Thing I’ve learned while messing about with creating my own theme is that wordpress is a great time sink. At the end of the day, you spend a lot of time tweaking your design to get it pleasing to the eye. Time you could have spent getting more content up or creating more niche blogs or getting yourself some backlinks……I mean it’s not like there aren’t tons and tons of free themes out there already. You could probably earn money taking online surveys in the time it takes you to create a wordpress theme…even if I’m not a big fan of the get paid to initiatives (perhaps and understatement since I have previously proclaimed them to be the worst way to make money online). Of course, giving away a theme is a great way to get backlinks, as long as people start downloading and using your theme. And there’s the rub. Kind of a catch 22 – you need traffic to get people to download your theme to get traffic to your website . Aaaah there’s that trademark cynicism. Yesss, you thought I had lost it didn’t you?

Anyhoo….just so you know, spring cleaning and all that – the best way to spend your time when you should be making money online.

Woke up this morning

(or where I tell you why I like Monday)

Monday morning is idea generation time for me. I like to ease into my week with a few cups of coffee and a bit of internet browsing. Heck, I like to ease into every day like this, but on Mondays, I really don’t like to push myself too hard. Probably because I’m a lazy internet marketer……Let’s talk about the coffee first. I make mine on a very very old Saeco Family Superautomatica – it’s a bean to cup machine – meaning you throw fresh coffee beans in the top, it grinds them for you and then extracts an espresso. Though really I like cafe latte so I add some milk hmmmm I’m drinking Algerian Coffee Shop’s Formula Rossa at the moment, which isn’t bad. What else? well my coffee machine is starting to play up….which sucks.  Must make more money on the internet to buy new coffee machine.

Writing blogs/content for websites is a bit of a creative exercise so it’s kind of handy to have some tools to help you out – this morning, swimming in the flotsam and jetsam of the easiest way to make money on the internet, I found this – a blogging ideas generator. It’s pretty cool – I played around with it and found it useful not really because it generates ideas, but because what it asks you to fill in makes you think about what your blog or website is really about – you have to fill in 5 things your blog is about and 5 things your readers want to read about. As a sort of mini-mission statement for your blog, this is awesome because it forces you to really rationalise what you are trying to achieve with your blog…..and it’s so simple! Go play with it, you won’t be sorry.

It’s always good when you laugh on a Monday so head on over to The at home couple and read Elijah’s post about 9 Things You Need To Be Successful At Bum Marketing. I like Elijah’s writing – it’s humerous, but he weaves some great tips into the humour, which makes for a far better tutorial than a bland old style “First write another article…..”

Then for inspiration, Ashley at Upstart Blogger is designing ten blogs in five days. That’s over and above his work as a musician and his regular posting schedule. Damn – that’s hard work right there! Good luck Ashley!

On a side note, I had occasion to exchange a few emails with both Elijah and Ashley last week and I have to say, they are both super-nice guys. Why the heck would I mention that? I don’t know – just a sort of reminder that often, bloggers are just great friendly people which always puts a smile on my face….