1. 1st Prize Winner: £500 Cash (via PayPal) + The Unlimited Video Theme Pack from Press75.com worth £295 + 6 Months WooThemes Club Single User Subscription for from WooThemes worth £250 + WP Freedom Plan Life Time Hosting Sponsorship worth £100/year.
2. 2nd Prize Winner: £250 Cash (via PayPal) + Developer License for Content Press WordPress Premium Template from WTM worth £249 + Personal License for Themes of Your Choice from Zidalgo worth £75 + WP Freedom Plan Life Time Hosting Sponsorship worth £100/year.
3. 3rd and 4th Prize Winners: £125 Cash (via PayPal) + 1 Year WP Freedom Plan worth £100

Total prizes worth £2000+!

To join the competition

Here’s how to enter:

1. Write a blog post participating this competition in your blog.
2. Get at least 5 comments. (excluding you and the spammers)
3. Submit your URL in the comment form here. (trackback could work too)
4. Done! (are you expecting more?)

The deadline is 15th November 2008.

Enter the WordPress Coolest Blog Competition

1.) It is a fast, effective way to drive traffic to your site.

Like I mentioned above, once the word starts to spread, it can spread very quickly, and there is really no limit to how many people can hear your message. Because your message often comes to someone from a person they already know, it has more credibility than if the message showed up uninvited in an email from someone they do not know.

Once the message starts to spread it picks up size and speed as it goes, like a snowball rolling down a hill. You may start out thinking that your efforts were not very effective, then one morning you open your email to find it full of new orders. When it works, it can work very fast.

2.) It can be very inexpensive.

Once the word starts to spread, there is not much additional cost. The biggest cost you will face is paying for all the additional traffic to your site. All of the cost and effort of spreading the word about what you have to offer is taken care of by the people spreading the word. More than likely, the biggest expense will be the upfront set up or production costs. Depending on which technique you decide to use. After that initial expense, the cost remaining costs are nominal.

3.) It can help shield you from negative comments

One thing to remember is that a negative message can go viral, too. Unfortunately, you are not going to be able to please everyone. If you do enough business, eventually you are going to have someone who is unhappy with you and your business. It only takes one customer that is dissatisfied to put a shadow of doubt in your customer’s minds about whether they should do business with you or not. Once that doubt is there, it is hard to remove it. If people are not happy with the service they received, they are more likely to tell people about it than if they are happy customers.

As unhappy customers start spreading negative messages about you, the word will start to spread, and there is not much you can do to stop it. The more it spreads, the more untrustworthy your business appears. All you can do is have enough of a buffer in place that the negative messages do not overpower the positive messages.

If your message goes viral, not only will is send a flood of traffic to your site, but other sites will link to you, and your site will rank higher in the search engines. Your name will also appear on other high ranking sites. If a negative message does start to go around, it will have a much harder time getting out, because your positive message is already so highly ranked that the negative messages can not find their way to the top of the search engine listings.

4.) It can find hidden customers.

Despite the time and money you spend trying to narrowly define your customers, figuring out who they are, and more importantly, where they are, there will always be people that you have missed. Once your message goes viral, there is no telling where it will end up, or who will see it. Because of the widespread coverage that can occur, people that you had not even considered to be your customers will get a chance to see your message. They will decide whether they are potential customers or not.

As word continues to spread about what you are offering, you do not have to worry about finding all the possible niches your customers might be hiding. You do not have to go find them, they will find you.

The initial place to begin your marketing with Facebook is on your profile page. Here you are able to place links to your site, content you’ve written and other world wide web pages that assist to advertise your business. This is the fastest and simplest method to get cracking, but not the only method.

Make a Facebook Page for Your site

A different method you are able to advertise your site using Facebook is by making a Page for it. Your Facebook Page is alike to your profile page therein you are able to share links, info, collect fans, etc.

Social Ads

Social advertisements are another way of advertising your business and are alike to Google Adwords, supported by a CPC basis. You’ll be able in addition to target these very specifically based on info that people have inserted into their profiles.

Social Groups

A lot of people who apply social networking sites slew to social groups. You are able to also capitalize on this reality by either joining groups associated your site and sharing your link there, if they let you; or by making your own group for people to get together which will give you bigger flexibleness of how you commercialise your site using these social groups.

Applications

Have you ever observed how many Facebook web applications that are accessible? The grounds for this abundance of applications is that they’re actually a great merchandising tool for these sites. If you are able to programme applications yourself or if you are able to hire somebody to do this for you then this can be a cracking viral merchandising mechanism and assist to pull in more traffic for your site.

Heres the link to an application that we made for facebook called Give Us a Drink.

Facebook is a fashionable social networking site, not merely for people desiring to meet other people and share their lives online but in addition to for intellectual net marketers who are recognising the grandness of this marketing technique.

1 Subscribe to comments – This lets readers obtain updates any comments made on a web design post, so that they can keep in touch with current discussions. You require to get readers active with your posts and so this is plugin is a requirement.

2 All in one Adsens and YPN - This makes it simpler to handle your Adsense and YPN advertisements in your blog. If you make up your mind that it adds up for you to have Google Ads on your blog, this plugin will make your life less complicated.

3 Chicklet Creator – an easy way to add RSS feed buttons to your web design to make it effortless for readers to subscribe to your blog.

4 Related posts – A list of 5 posts which are connected each post appears below each post, enabling blog visitors to read more about a subject of concern.

5 Sociable – Members of social networking websites such as as Digg and Stumbleupon to can easily tag your post. You want to promote readers to submit posts to these websites and it can give your post broader exposure.

6 Google Sitemap – The site map makes it more effortless for your blog to be indexed by the major SEs.

7 Simple Tags – an easy way of adding Technorati tags to your posts so that the main blog search engine, Technorati, can catergorise your posts.

8 Feedburner Smith – discovers all the ways to access your blogs RSS feed permitting Feedburner to track your subscribers. You want to have as much info as imaginable about subscribers and which posts are most fashionable.

• Attention-getting titles: Your blog ought to apply titles effectively. An attention-getting and SE friendly title goes a lengthy way in establishing your blog. It in addition to assists readers glance over your post promptly. If your title captivates their fancy, they’ll even scan what you’ve composed in your post.
• Use bullet points and bold typefaces to spotlight subjects: Most people read info on the internet instead of reading the full thing. And so, it’s crucial to use methods to acquire their attention rapidly. Using bullet poinys, bold typefaces and highlighters can be utilised in moderation to attract attention to the crucial facets of your blog post.
• Unique articles: People enjoy reading articles that resounds their beliefs and ideas, is unequalled in its approach and has a originative and fresh feel. Composing the same thing that everybody else is composing in the same way as other people will all but assure most of your articles being mostly dismissed. So, try to convey your unequalled approach to oft-repeated facts and try to compose about something new and fashionable.
• Use of images: Images are a potent medium that can transmit in ways that words can’t. Try to include a few visual factors in your blog that will render a different point of interest to your readers. It’s not essential to use images in all posts but if you’ve the opportunity of applying one, do it but assure that the images are in tune with what your article wants to communicate.

Note: WordPress blogs can be applied effectively to Magento web design

There are a lot of search steps you’ll be able to take to guarantee that your endeavours in IM don’t go to waste. Here are a some search steps to adopt to find a fruitful niche.

1.) Find the most recent tendencies via assorted internet sources. Merely by visiting eBay and ClickBank and doing a fast search, you are able to easily find what the hottest items are. This info is costless and is in all probability the most crucial info that we can use to find thte kind of niche to enter.

2.You’ll be able to also use a keyword search tool to find fruitful niches. The keyword tool will give us an estimation of how many people are seeking a definite keyword on an day-to-day basis. If you find a keyword that’s acquiring a ton of searches per day, you might have found yourself a fruitful niche.

3.) You are able to also check out best-selling magazines to see just what advertisements are running. If you see continual advertisements in the larger newspapers or mags, you can be certain that those products are selling.

4.) Finally but unquestionably not least, any niche that can alleviate pain at once will be fruitful. Toy with this for a minute. These type of purchasers will in all probability be willing and able to spend any sum of money to alleviate their pain dependent on their uncomfortableness. This could be an info product telling the customer how to deal with it, or it could be an real pain alleviating medicine or supplement.

So naturally, companies would gravitate towards placing their links and sites in an attempt to garner more visits to their web design.

In order to maximize ranking and placement, companies have used tools such as search engine optimization or SEO. Search engine optimization is the method or process of improving a web site’s ranking in a search engine listing.

Legitimate search engine optimization practices focus on the improvement of a page’s ranking in the search engine list by improving site content, usability and using legitimate methods of promotion through web phenomena such as viral marketing.

Search engines all use complex algorithms in keeping their relevancy in the web and to keep illegal and abusive search engine optimization methods from prospering. However, black hat SEO users will always be around so it is expected that search engine giant such as Google and Yahoo will continue to make more complex algorithms to filter the garbage out.

Search engines display different kinds of listings on a result page. The more common ones are pay-per-click (PPC), adverts, paid inclusion, and organic listings. Of all these listings, SEO concerns itself foremost with organic listings for a variety of keywords. This can increase the quality and quantity or visitors to a desired web site.

Organic searches are searches conducted by web users in a search engine that is free from solicitations. A study from Jupiter Media stated that 5 out of 6 commercial online purchases came from organic searches versus paid online ads.

This has made SEO much more in demand in creating revenue for companies as SEO is not a paid ad but a method of intrinsically improving content.

Here are a few tips on improving content for a much more improved result in organic searches:

1.    Expertise. Follow your strengths. Sites you set up must be on subject you consider yourself an expert on. People can smell an amateur a mile away.

2.    Plan the site. A good layout for the site can improve usability. This in turn will not unnecessarily aggravate the browser.

3.    Research. Check out the competition and see what they have set up. See what works and what does not. If possible try to communicate with users in forums and get feedback on what should or can be improved further.

4.    Decide on important keywords. Decide on the most important keywords to use for your sight. Include these keywords in the metatags, copy page, page title, and file names.

5.    The Search Engine is your friend. Make friends with your search engine and don’t give it a hard time. Being nice and friendly to it will make its job easier to serve your site up to your target audience.

6.    Focus. Focus on the topic at hand and nothing else. The rule is one topic per page.

7.    Join the directories. Directories are repositories of knowledge done by human hands while search engine are huge databases collected by mostly machine methods. The relevancy of your page when joining the right directory may shoot through the roof. Of course, make sure you know what you are talking about.

8.    Start a linking campaign. A most effective SEO method. This is a must to do. Ask your allies, strategic partners, friends and acquaintances to place your site’s URL link on their sites. With a short description this can draw traffic from other sites and increase exposure. Google especially ranks the importance of its sites by the number of sites linked to it.

9.    Repetition is the key to victory. Keep repeating the above tips, supporting and increasing what works and killing what does not as fast as possible until the desired result is achieved.

In the world of search engine optimization, content matters a lot. If a site has amateur or worse falsified information, fewer and fewer browsers will want to visit it. They will even spread bad news faster than good news so expect a garbage site to be ignored even in a week’s time.