WordPress Themes

Oct

2010

Brand New WP Theme And Plugin Bundle

Update: The $10 offer is now closed, the theme can be purchased for $17 for a few days before we set the final price.

At last the third in the Multiple Streams Themes trilogy is complete, together with two plugins – Ads Manager and Redirection.

As usual I’ve decided to release a few copies on pre-order at $10 because it’s always a good idea to “seed the market”.

And in my constant pursuit of getting you the best deal, you’ll be getting a brand new premium theme, and also TWO plugins for just $10 in total.

Yep, to make it a sweeter deal, we’ve included our brand new unreleased Redirection plugin, as well as the Ads Manager plugin which we included with the two previous themes.

The Redirection plugin allows you to enter a URL against a post or page in your admin panel that redirects your visitors to that other location.

It’s very useful for creating links that look like they’re to a page on your blog, but that actually redirect your visitor somewhere else…

Get it? Do you? Good isn’t it? 😉

For this brand new theme we listened and we added in the features you asked for and then included a couple more we knew you’d love.

(Like WP 3 Custom Header support and multiple Page Templates…)

It has all the regular features from the previous two themes, packaged in a very attractive new design.

For 48 hours, I’m releasing just 50 copies at $10.

By including the new Redirection plugin (and also Ads Manager) I think you’ll agree this is a VERY appealing bundle. 😉

All of the Multiple Streams Themes are designed and built to do two things for you.

Enable you to earn you more money from your blog more easily.
Give you more control over your blog appearance.

This newest theme was originally designed for my own personal use across several sites and wasn’t ever intended to go public, but it’s so nice I decided to share it instead.

Let’s go through some of the new features.

Multiple Sidebars

In order to give you as much control as possible and make it as flexible as possible, we built FOURTEEN sidebars into the theme. Because everybody’s different and because we know you like to do things your way, we’ve given you the choice of lots of sidebars to use to make your site look the way you want it to.

Three feature boxes which in order, firstly help you to get more subscribers, secondly make it easy for visitors to see what you’ve been writing about recently, and thirdly, get more subscribers (again).

Followed by a full width horizontal ad area, then FOUR sidebars to give you plenty of choice of which ad you want to show and where, followed by a full width horizontal footer ad, and finally FOUR very classily presented footer sidebars with the very last sidebar at the bottom for a footer menu.

I don’t know of any other commercial themes that give you so much choice.

Custom Headers

By popular request we’ve built this theme to support the new “Custom Header” feature which was added in WordPress 3.0. Apart from the default blue shaded header, in the admin panel under the “Appearance >> Header” menu you’ll see six alternative shaded headers you can choose from.

You can also upload your own photo, or design your own custom header and then upload it into the admin area using the built in browser/uploader.

The header by default is overlaid with the blog name and tagline, but if you want to place your own text on your header, you can just go to “Settings >> General” in the admin panel and delete them there and they’ll disappear.

Custom Menus

This theme supports the latest WP 3.x and we’ve enabled the new WP feature “Custom Menus” for the top menu. Custom Menus only work with v3.0 of WordPress and above, so please don’t try this theme on a WP 2.9 blog as it won’t work.

We’ve also enabled custom menus at the bottom of the blog by creating a sidebar for that area called the “Menu Footer Widget Area”. To use it, just create another custom menu called “Footer Menu” or something like that and then drag and drop the built in Custom Menu widget into it. Then select the Footer Menu from the drop down and save.

Hey presto, one footer menu.

Multiple Page Templates

We came up with this idea when building a custom site for a client, and decided to build it into the latest theme.

WordPress will allow you to use different layouts for PAGES ONLY (not posts) by the use of Page Templates. However most themes only supply a single page layout that’s used for all pages.

In this theme, we’ve supplied a variety of different page layouts as templates.

You have the following templates available:-

#1 – Default Template.

This template is the default for all your pages and will present all the normal elements of your blog including the right hand sidebars and the three feature boxes at the top.

#2 – One Column (no boxes).

This template will remove both the sidebar and the three feature boxes from the page. This is useful if you have extra wide content you wish to display or just want to keep the page clean and clear.

#3 – One Column (no boxes).

This will remove the sidebar, but not the three feature boxes.

#4 – Page (no boxes).

This is the same as the default template, but without the three feature boxes.

#5 – Home Page.

This is a special format that has been designed for when you want to stick a page to the front of your site rather than use the default blog layout.

Instead of listing the first few posts on the home page, it will instead display the contents of the page you’ve just created, and also an extract of the three most recent blog posts underneath it, in a news style format.

You don’t have to use this template, but you may have a reason for wanting the front of your blog to look a little different.

To use these special page templates, all you need to do is create or edit a page in the admin panel, and over on the right you’ll see a box called “Page Attributes”.

One of those attributes is a drop down called “Template”. Simply select the template you wish to apply to the page and click the “Publish” or “Update” button.

Alternative Blog Layout

Although WordPress doesn’t support the idea of different layouts for posts (only pages via the page templates listed above), we thought you might want to choose that your posts don’t display the three feature boxes.

So we created an alternative to the default layout called single-alt.php which doesn’t display the three feature boxes on single blog pages.

If you want to use this layout, then connect to your site via FTP, go to:-

/wp-content/themes/multiplestream3-wp3.0/

…and rename the file called single.php to single-orig.php, and then also single-alt.php to single.php.

You’ve now effectively swapped out the default layout for the alternative which doesn’t show the three feature boxes.

We know it’s a bit of a kludge, but we just thought you’d find it useful to be able to do it. 😉

Maybe one day the WordPress developers will include post templates as well as page templates and we won’t have to do this any more.

Ads Manager Plugin

The Ads Manager plugin supplied with this theme is a just a little bit clever (ahem) and enables you to structure the ads on your blog so that if you like, you can disable some or all of the ads for your regular visitors.

We think it’s not a good idea to bug your regulars with ads the whole time, so we built Ads Manager to give you a chance to do that if you wish.

To that end, there are a number of rules that you can apply to an ad just by ticking boxes in most cases, and you’ll find these rules in the Ads Manager widget, waiting for you to set them:-

Display this ad unit only when the following conditions are met:

The visitor comes from a search engine
The post (not page) is more than 2 weeks old
The visitor is not a regular reader (at most three visits in the past two weeks)
The following php condition (WordPress conditional tags) is met:

In this last one you can add one of the WordPress conditional tags from this page:-

http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

So for example, you could add is_front_page() to the box and your vistors would only see the ad on the front page of your blog.

Or you could add is_single() and your visitors would only see the ad on a post and not on your front page, or you could use is_page() and the ad would only appear on pages, and so on.

Study the URL above for a deeper understanding of how conditional tags work. You’ll find it’s extremely powerful.

Redirection Plugin

The redirection plugin is extremely useful and allows you to redirect a page to anywhere you like.

We know that sounds like it might only be useful on very rare occasions, but consider this. You can use it for your affiliate links…

What you can do is create a dummy page on your blog that then redirects off to the site you want your visitor to go to, using your affiliate link. The link itself looks like a regular link to a page on your site, but when it’s clicked, your visitor is redirected.

Very cool for getting your visitor cookied without it looking like an affiliate link. 😉

When you create your page as you usually would, you’ll see there’s a new admin block underneath the editing area called PG-Redirection. If you leave it blank, then nothing happens, but if you fill in your URL, the redirection becomes active. You don’t even need to put anything in the main page editor, you can just leave it blank.

Tres cool huh?

Now I know you’ll want to take a look at the theme before you buy it! So we’ve set it up on the URL below together with some example pages and notes for you to read.

The header on this site isn’t the default, instead it’s one I uploaded using the built in browser / uploader. It’s a photograph I took a couple of years ago on a beautiful day in June, on the beach near the Black Rock Cafe at Widemouth Bay (pronounced widmuth) near Bude in Cornwall.

(I have such good memories of that day it’s actually my desktop photo…)

Use the menus when you get there to see an explanation of each of the main features.

http://broadexample.com/ (opens in a new window)

As I said above, I’m fairly certain I’ve missed some detail out, but it just won’t come to me right now. I’ll add a couple of videos when I get a few quiet moments. Your positive feedback and encouragement is always welcome.

This early bird sale for the third of the premium Multiple Streams Themes and TWO plugins is now on at just $10 for 48 hours or the first 50 people that buy the theme and plugins bundle. After this sale is closed, it will be $27.

You can get it now at the lowest price it will ever be by using the button below, and it’s strictly first come first served.

Update: The $10 offer is now closed, the theme can be purchased for $17 for a few days before we set the final price.

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2010

Your Custom WP Theme Is Now Available

Until we sell the two available slots, you can now order a unique custom WordPress theme for which you completely own the copyright.

We’ll supply you with all the Photoshop PSDs, plus the completed WP theme, all to your specifications.

The complete process to design and code your theme takes 2-3 weeks in ideal circumstances, but may take a little longer due to the nature of the task. This is why there are only TWO slots available.

I REALLY don’t want you to purchase this on a whim.

I would like it if you have a definite game plan and know exactly what you’re going to do with your theme.

As I’ve said in previous emails, it may be you have a mailing list and you’re going to sell your new theme to your subscribers, or maybe you have a client you want the theme creating for.

(I’ve a few minutes ago received a very nice cheque from a local client who wanted his site re-doing and some SEO work done. We created a WP theme and then used the All-In-One SEO plugin to do all the on page SEO, with an ongoing backlinking campaign to commence tomorrow.)

Or a third alternative is you may intend to give the theme away in return for sign-ups to your mailing list. If you’re going to do this I would actually recommend you use the 7 Dollar Script and sell it with 100% commission to build a mailing list of buyers.

Whatever you’re going to use it for, PLEASE make sure you have a game plan.

Okay?

I’ll just say it again, there are only TWO slots.

The price is $500 per slot. When they sell I’ll remove the buy button.

I’m really sorry if you miss it, but if it’s very popular I’ll do it again in a few weeks time when the current buyers have their new themes.

-Frank Haywood

Sep

2010

A WordPress Theme Designed And Coded

A couple of weeks ago, and just before I came down with a slight fever, I started talking about having your own unique premium WordPress theme created. Here’s the gist of it.

The same designer who created the two very successful Multiple Streams Themes for me will create a WordPress theme for you to your specifications. No-one else in the world will have a theme like yours.

You will own it outright and you can do anything you like with it. Give it away, sell it, have it designed for a client, whatever you want to do with it.

It’s yours and yours alone and we’ll have no control at all over what you do with it. It will be completely copyrighted to you:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/your-very-own-premium-wordpress-theme/

And I also then spoke about the importance of having a game plan.

If you decide that having your own unique theme created is the thing for you, then you also need to make sure you know exactly what your game plan is and how you expect to make your money back on the expenditure. I like every project to pay for itself within at least 2 weeks of launch:-

http://www.frankhaywood.com/the-importance-of-having-a-game-plan/

Let me put it like this. If you sold your new theme directly to your mailing list of say a few hundred people and without any other promotion, then I would expect you to easily make at least a thousand dollars if you sold it at $10 a copy.

If you have a larger mailing list, then you’d make a whole lot more money.

This is only true as long as you know what you’re doing.

Now I’ve taken care to say all this because I don’t want you to buy this design service if you’re not going to at least double your money on the deal and do it quickly.

You may not care about this, but I do.

The only exceptions I can think of with this is if you’re going to give it away to promote a site and build your mailing list in preparation to making money, or it’s for some other long term promotional plan you have running, or it’s for a site you have that you want to look a little bit special.

I also want to point out that right now at this point in time, I have no idea if there’s any demand at all for what I’m offering.

I know people like to buy WordPress themes if they’ll help them make money, and I also know that clients like well designed and functional WordPress themes.

But what I don’t know is if anyone will want to dig in their pockets and have a custom theme designed and coded for them and then cash in like I have. This is certainly not for everybody.

Okay?

I’ve spoken to the designer, and he’s told me he can take on TWO jobs. The graphic design and conversion process to a WordPress theme from beginning to end will take 2-3 weeks depending on the complexity and the number of design changes you ask for.

It will go much faster if you already have an idea of what you want from a theme and can show us a site you already like the look of.

Right…

In a couple of days time, I’ll put up a buy link on this blog to purchase a theme creation and the first two buyers get the job done for them and I’ll then take the buy link down.

If you want both slots, buy one and then do it again. 😉

One of two things will happen. Either both slots go immediately, in which case the link will disappear almost as soon as I put it up, or I’ve done such a good job of asking you not to buy if you’re unsure, that no-one will buy.

I’ll say it again, this is NOT for everybody.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2010

The Importance of Having a Game Plan

I want to talk today about how important it is to have a game plan.

What do I mean? Well having a game plan for one aspect of your business might run something like this:-

#1 – You create a new product.
#2 – You release it with 100% instant commissions using the 7 Dollar Script.
#3 – You send an email out to your subscribers letting them know it’s on sale.
#4 – You tell your buyers that you’re offering instant 100% commissions directly into their PayPal account and that here are some tools they can use to promote it – banners and the like – with their aff link built in. All they have to do is copy and paste the code.
#5 – You contact a few people who are likely Joint Venture partners and tell them it’s 100% commission. Some promote and get all the cash, and you get another pile of buyers join your mailing list.
#6 – You tell these new buyers about your affiliate scheme etc. and they start promoting for you too. Some of these people will be succesful marketers and will have their own mailing lists.
#7 – Go to #1.

Okay? I’ll testify that you can run a very successful business that way, that naturally grows over time.

Having a game plan allows you to make and take low-risk decisions. Low risk because you pretty much know what the outcome will be – long term you’ll make a profit on your efforts and increase the size of your business.

I believe this is where most people fall over.

Most people try a little bit of this and a little bit of that – which is fine – I like to try different things out too – but they don’t concentrate on their core business. The stuff that really works.

And that might be because they’ve never really found anything that works.

Or not given it enough of a chance to make it work.

I’ve found that you need to set yourself a few rules that you work with. I call them my #1 Rules, and I have plenty of them for all sorts of different situations.

I’ve found that as long as you concentrate on the #1 rules, any other lesser rules you might set yourself don’t really matter that much or don’t have a big enough impact on your business.

(This is a rule in itself, called the 80-20 rule. I do almost everything by the 80-20 rule and I think most successful business owners do too without realising it. I ask myself – “Do I need to do something about this, or just let it go?” – 80 times out of 100 it can just be let go.)

My #1 rule related to having a game plan is:-

“Every project must pay for itself as soon as possible.”

So if I take new staff on, I want to see results in 2 weeks that at least pay for their keep for the month. There are no free rides, and nobody in my business is an expense.

You could probably adopt this yourself. Think about it.

You may believe that you can’t afford to take anyone on full time. But if what they do for you brings in enough income to pay for their keep, and you end up with new products and a new long term income stream, then it was well worth hiring them wasn’t it?

But let’s say that you’re not ready to make that commitment yet and you want to see how things go.

You still need a unique new product. The emphasis here is new and unique. I’m not saying you can’t do what someone else has already done, I’m saying that PLR probably isn’t going to cut it if you’re looking for JV partners. (There’s at least one exception to this and I’ll talk about it another time.)

I’ve had many people approach me to promote products that I’ve quickly realised were PLR, and I take that as an insult because I’m quite capable of using PLR to create products myself thank you. I don’t like being suckered into promoting products that may be quite widespread as it does my reputation no good whatsoever – that’s my logic and I’m certain most other marketers feel exactly the same.

PLR is great. But it’s of no use when dealing with JV partners unless you’ve taken the time to make extensive changes to it and it really is your product. (Most people can’t be bothered and that’s where they get it wrong.)

You need something that you know no-one else has.

And you need to be able to make genuine claims like “I created this myself” or “I paid $xxx to have this created for me.”

(Believe me when I say this will make you feel a whole lot better when you come to promoting it.)

Tomorrow is your chance to have a totally unique WordPress theme created for you from scratch and to your specifications by one of my designers. They are all extremely talented, and I want to point out that it does take a (relatively) long time to put together a theme because there’s a lot of work involved in doing it.

First there’s the design itself (2-3 days), then converting to a WP theme (4-5 days), and finally the coding tweaks such as extra sidebars and additional page templates (2-3 days).

It’s a big job. If you were able to do it for someone else, ask yourself how much would be a fair price for you to charge for the service.

If like most people you wanted someone else to do it and could then find the right person with the right level of design and PHP coding skills (it’s very hard), then the designer would probably charge you a couple of thousand dollars at least, apply restrictions on what you can do with the finished product, and likely not supply the PSDs for you to edit.

My designers are brilliant graphically and their level of PHP coding ability is high (you’ve probably already seen their work), but charge a lot less than you might expect.

With a fair bit of legwork (it’s not easy finding good people), I have an opportunity to take on a couple more designers, but as I said above, one of my rules is I need to make sure I have work for them and that they pay for their keep.

As long as I can pay their fees and get your job done as well as my own, then I consider myself to have made a profit from it.

From your perspective, as long as you have a game plan and can immediately make your money back on the work, it’s well worth doing.

If you don’t have a game plan or you don’t have a clue on what to do then this isn’t for you. Wait until you’re truly ready.

Here’s two game plans that I know work well from personal experience.

#1 – Get a theme made. Sell it to your mailing list. Immediately make 3 or 4 times your investment followed by ongoing sales through your affiliate scheme.
#2 – Get a theme made for a client. Charge your client 3 or 4 times your investment.

And if you don’t have a mailing list or a client, then here’s your chance to get a product made for you and get your business off the ground, just like I talked about above:-

#3 – Get a theme made that will appeal to pro-bloggers and the IM niche. Sell it for $10 with 100% commission using the 7 Dollar Script, find a few JV partners to kick start it and build a mailing list of buyers. Promote some other related product to your new list and make your money that way.

And that’s how business is done. 🙂

You make an investment, you follow your game plan and you make back your money and then some.

Watch out for more news tomorrow.

If you want to know more right now about having a game plan and how to approach your business, go watch the presentation on 30 Day Projects.

Update: A slight temperature and an overwhelming need to sleep scuppered my plans to launch this week. I’ll get back to you with this shortly.

-Frank Haywood

Aug

2010

Your Very Own Premium WordPress Theme

A couple of weeks ago, I sent out an email explaining that it would shortly be possible to have your own premium WordPress theme designed and coded from scratch.

That time is nearly here.

Early next week we should be in the position of being able to completely create a WP theme for you.

You’ll get everything that I would get from my designers. All the WP code and graphics, the Photoshop PSDs, and the whole thing completely designed to your specifications.

If you want us to, we’ll also include the same multiple sidebars you’ve already seen in the two Multiple Streams Themes I’ve released myself, with plenty of opportunities for placing ads.

The entire process for designing and conversion to a theme takes about 2-3 weeks.

Once completed, the entire theme is YOURS and YOU totally own the copyright.

You can then sell individual copies of it, or give it away as a freebie in return for backlinks, or use it for blog flipping, or maybe if you have a client of your own who needs a site building, you can get us to do all the design work for you.

On that last one, I’ve just picked up a local web design and SEO client, and convinced him that a site built around a custom built WordPress theme is the way to go for his steel centreless grinding business. His theme is now built, and when he gets back from vacation on Monday we’ll install WordPress, activate the theme and load up his content.

After that we’ll do all the on page SEO and then start a backlinking campaign. In a few weeks he’ll dominate most of the steel grinding terms in the search engines.

(I’ll ask him if I can share the name of his business with you and give you a talk through what we’ve done.)

Most of the income from that project will be from the SEO. Relatively speaking, the design and conversion to a theme was a small (but VITAL) part of the work involved. And if you’re into this, any of these design costs can just be passed directly onto your client.

Now I’ve only told you about that to give you an example of what you can do with your own theme. You don’t have to do that, but it might be something you want to do, or something you’re already into.

Like I said, as you’ll own the copyright you can do anything you like with YOUR theme.

So if you are into blog flipping, you could have a unique but generic theme built that you can use to tweak into a series of sites you can flip – especially as you have all the PSDs.

Cool huh?

Although I’d just like to make it clear that this offer will be for a theme only, ie the design and coding to make the theme work to WP 3.x standards. We won’t be doing huge amounts of coding to make a product that is a theme and then something more on top of that.

So you will get multiple sidebar regions if you want them, and you will get Custom Menu support. But we won’t code in an autoresponder or do any special scripting that would otherwise be a separate plugin.

Okay? 😉

Now for the bad news.

We can only realistically do one of these per month (maybe two) unless I can get more WordPress designers on board. And I won’t hire any more designers unless I know I’ve got work for them.

So when I formally announce this service is open, I’ll take one or two customers only and then close while we work on those projects. If you’ve paid and you’re number three or four, then we’ll just refund you until we have another open slot.

I can wholeheartedly testify that having your own WordPress theme can put a nice wedge of cash in your pocket as long as you have a game plan.

So if you know exactly how you’re going to monetise it, then you’ll make a lot more money than it costs you to have it created. If you have even a small fresh mailing list of a few hundred subscribers, a couple of thousand dollars at least is easily achievable just by selling the theme at a low cost.

If you don’t have a mailing list, then it might be a little harder to monetise, but not impossible – that’s what JV partners are for. You could even use it to build a mailing list in the first place if you don’t already have one by offering 100% instant commissions through PayPal. Affiliates LOVE that, and YOU get a mailing list of buyers.

***

I’d like to end by saying that because this is something new and we’re still finding our feet, then the first few clients to take up this offer will be getting it at a discount.

When we have a system in place we’ll put the price up to something more realistic, but to begin with we’ll hold the price low.

Watch out for an email with more info early next week.

-Frank Haywood