A while back Jason talked about some of the often overlooked advantages to a custom built blogging theme.

But you don’t need to have a blog to get many of the advantages. In fact we use custom WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla themes as a starting point for many of the new sites we launch, despite what CMS platform they are built on.

There are many highly respected, high PageRank, and high TrustRank sites dedicated to sharing these free CMS themes. Beyond that, every site that uses your theme automatically provides you with at least 1 backlink, most likely an entire site-wide grouping of backlinks (the beauty is, you can control this – when you build the template just customize if you want homepage or sitewide, and even the target destination page)

This is the only active method we’ve used to promote the Jetpacked.com blog. In the few months since we launched we’ve received over 5,000 backlinks and a PR5 ranking in Google (with PR 4 on almost all inner pages).

AND better then that, we rank in Google for virtually anything we blog about within a few days.

Other hidden ways to profit:

• Writing ReviewMe.com reviews (after distributing 1 theme you will most likely be able to charge $40-60 per review blog post that you make)
• Your Technorati ranking will skyrocket, every blog that uses your theme is now a blog that links to you. Your blogs value with sites like ReviewMe will increase and your visibility on blog search engines will greatly increase.
• Anything you blog or add pages about will almost overnight start ranking, you can easily post affiliate reviews of products and rank right on par with the product its self (people love jumping over and reading a review before they buy a product). And you can of course promote your own products and rank for competitive keywords in a couple days that you only dreamed about before.
• Your PR5+ ranking will almost instantly be worth $100-200/month by selling text link ads through TLA or by selling direct on your site.

Jason and I are thinking about putting together a package to help a few people take advantage of the huge benefit of distributing themes without needing to lift a finger on their own behalf. I know we moved away from doing client webdesign work (which theme building and distribution is pretty close to), but we’re thinking of doing this on a very small scale with a select group of maybe 10-20 people who are serious about getting the benefit of theme distributing with their website (if there is enough interest).

- Todd Dickerson

Bottom-line value:

www.strictlymensbusiness.com.au
Online retailers of Men’s Skin Care and Grooming Products.

Most WordPress blogs like using the default permalink structure with an archive format of something like year/month/day/postname – I understand some sites like to provide an easy structure for navigating their posts by date. But unless your site has hundreds of posts per month it’s not the best idea for a few reasons.

1. From a user stand point: If you blog isn’t updated often, its obvious at a glance. This sends readers away faster then anything else. Remove your post dates completely. Don’t show them in the URL and don’t show them in the post header.
2. From a SE stand point: It’s been rumored and shown that search engines discount the SE rankings for archives. This makes perfect sense. If Google wants the most recent up to date content showing at the top of their SERP’s why would they be ranking archives higher? It isn’t helping you for sure.

When we redesigned Jetpacked.com we did it with this in mind. But our previous structure had been using the standard archive format. So this creates a new issue. How do you convert over to a standard /%postname%/ permalink structure without killing all your currently indexed pages.

Simple, thanks to the permalink redirect plugin. If you’re going from archive format to post name format using the simple plugin will be enough. If you’re doing more complex redirection the creator has a good guide to help you out.

- Todd Dickerson

Bottom-line value:

If you haven’t heard about the recent activity on digg, just check out the digg home page right now, the HD-DVD decryption key is being spammed all over it. When the key was initially on the front page, digg removed the story and banned the user who submitted it. When the majority of the users are tech enthusiasts and pirates, this could have been a bad move for digg. What would I have done? Kept the story, and linked to the site that has the key. As a legitimate news site, you shouldn’t have ILLEGAL content, regardless of the ridiculousness of the legality, on the front page of the site. We’re all about freedom of speech here, but leave the illegal content for sites like piratebay that wont face criminal prosecution here in the US for illegal content. There is absolutely no excuse for the out-roar on digg right now, it screams of immaturity and reflects terribly on the users who are doing it. This key will be available in dozens if not hundreds of other locations. From a business standpoint, there is absolutely no reason for digg to risk legal issues displaying it. So diggers, spread the number by your own means, put it up on your own sites, don’t expect a company to support illegal content on their front page, and grow up.

CoverHunt is Ross Hill‘s free cd album cover artwork search engine.