When you’re trying to figure out How To Earn Cash Online one thing that you’ll realize is that often it isn’t the most pretty site or the site with the most engaging and entertaining content that wins the race for the dough. Often it’s a plain old ugly site. With that in mind, I created the Boring Memo theme back in June and released it on my other blog, OpTempo. Now, I’ve made a few updates, simplified the template more and now I’m ready to release Boring Memo Too. In this post, I’ll go over the basics of setting it up and some of the reasoning behind it.

Why Ugly?

I wrote about this a while back in this article: Earn Online Cash with Ugly Websites. Of course, Griz is my main inspiration behind this idea with his ugly old Blogger blog. He wrote about why ugly sites make money just recently in this article: Why Noobs Don’t Make Money Online.

Are there cases where having a nice looking blog is important? Yes, there are some, especially for things like self-promotion, product promotion, list building in certain niches and so forth. It’s also a good idea to have a personal flagship blog that looks nice in order to have a good public face. This kind of blog isn’t what Boring Memo is intended for. What it’s intended for is a niche blog that is targeted at search traffic.

Anyway, if you want more on the concept of it, read my post and read Griz’s whole blog. You’ll learn a lot.

How To Setup the Boring Memo WordPress Theme

Here’s how I recommend setting up the Boring Memo theme. I’m assuming that you already know a little bit about WordPress and how to install a WordPress installation on your hosting account and how to upload themes and plugins and maybe do a little minor theme editing.

We’ll start with the settings.

In the General Settings section make sure that your blog title and blog description use your keywords. The blog title is the <h1> header tag for the page. The description is just a <p> paragraph tag although it will be the first bit of non-header text the search engine bots encounter so make it good.

Now we move on to the Reading Settings. We will want to set the “Blog pages show at most” to 1 post. This causes one full post to show up on all pages, the index page, the tag page, search pages and so forth. I’ve found that Google will often index tag pages as being the most relevant keywords for a post’s content and this can help give you a leg up on traffic for certain long tail terms.

For Discussion Settings, I usually moderate all comments on my niche blogs before they appear. I allow them if they’re on topic and non-spammy but I don’t want to let anything troublesome through.

For Permalink Settings, I use the standard /%postname%/ setup but you might also try /%category%/%postname%/ if you want.

I highly recommend that you install the All-in-One SEO or Platinum SEO plugins with this theme. You may also want to consider the Who Sees Ads plugin to help you control when ads appear.

For setting up the advertising block, you’ll want to edit the theme. Don’t worry, it’s easy to do as long as you know how to cut and paste. Just go to the theme editor section and select the adblock.php module from the list. From there, all you need to do is paste in your ad code, save it and you’re done.

The ad block is setup for 350×350 pixels which is a good size for a number of advertising scripts including Adsense and eBay Partner Network. You can modify the size if you want by editing the stylesheet. Just go to the very end of the file and change the height and width of the block. If you have any questions about how to do this, let me know and I’ll be glad to help.

For widgets, I recommend the Pages and Tag Cloud widgets. You can add others if you want but those are the ones I generally use.

Niche Blog Advertising Strategy

The whole idea behind this theme is to make the single ad you use the star of the show, the only thing that doesn’t look dull and boring on the page. That’s why there’s only a single ad block that’s presented inline on the left side. Too many ads will make the blog look ‘Made for Adsense’/'Made for Affiliate’ (MFA). A single ad block is more likely to focus attention and pull the search visitor toward it subliminally.

For compliance with Adsense rules I recommend that you leave the small print ‘Advertisements’ text above the ads. They’ve complained about themes like Boring Memo where the article title was directly over the ads. I haven’t had a problem and, to my knowledge, no one who used the original Boring Memo had a problem with this but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Also remember to add a page for your site’s privacy policies or incorporate that into your about page.

What kind of content should you use? I recommend using good content which is to say content that is focused on the keywords you’re targeting while being moderately informative to a visitor who’s bored enough to actually read it. I would make the articles long, probably at least about 500-700 words, and start and end with sentences using your primary target keywords.

The Boring Memo Too Download Links

OK, I’ve bored you enough. Here are the download links for the Boring Memo Too WordPress Theme:

Download Boring Memo Too WordPress Theme

Boring Memo Too WordPress Theme Demo

If you have any additions or questions about this theme, please feel free to ask. I hope you’re able to use this theme in your quest to earn cash online.

Frank Carr February 9th, 2009 Blogging, Features

Blogging, Features
theme, ugly websites, wordpress