Niche WordPress Themes November 2013

Searching for a WordPress theme that fits you or your client’s specific needs can often be satisfied by multi purpose WordPress themes. The seed design can often be tweaked and twiddled with to create the whatever the desired website outcome intended. However, if you find a theme that already matches the type of website you need then a lot of design time can be saved and spent on optimizing other features of the website. Here are some of the latest niche WordPress themes that you might find useful for your website needs.

Organic Market Friendly eCommerce WordPress Theme

Organic Market Premium WordPress Theme is a fun and fresh eCommerce theme ideal for online stores and shops. The delightful and eye-catching colorful design has been tailored to an organic food store, but is highly customizable and can be used for anything else. This simple and no nonsense theme features the basic website necessities but is also equipped with WooCommerce integration and includes support for all WooCommerce product management, widgets, and shortcodes so you can add all your products and set up your storefront. It also includes Royal Slider and Layer Slider Support and support for custom shortcodes for product sliders, featured product sections.

Campus Premium Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Campus Premium Multipurpose WordPress Theme is one of the newest WordPress themes for education and business. Based on the new Super Skeleton 2 Framework with the leanest and yet the most highly functional features maximizing all that WordPress has to offer. Significant features include: a brand new streamlined and simple to use theme options panel with simple visual cues, nested inline documentation, with the option to preload built in or user uploaded (Skin Builder) skins, the entire Google Fonts library, Drag & Drop Layout Builder, rock solid, compliant SEO friendly code, and the new WordPress 3.6 Post Formats UI, a ThemeForest first.

Medico – Medical and Health WordPress Theme

Medico Premium WordPress Theme is a feature-packed medical and health styled theme that is both stylish and functional. It features several important elements such as: a working appointment form, responsive HTML5 and CSS3 design, foundation grid using predefined HTML classes, Magellan – a style agnostic plugin, Clearing – a plugin that makes it easy to create responsive lightboxes with any size image, Joyride – an extremely flexible plugin that gives users a tour of your site or app when they visit, Visual Shortcode Generator, Styles manager – 1 click style change for many major elements, Portfolio with 2/3/4 columns support, pagination support with non-animated filtering, drag&drop item sorting, and so many other great features to get create a one of a kind medical/health website.

Metric Music Band Responsive WordPress Theme

Metric Premium WordPress Theme is a retro modern theme for all who love music, such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals. This bold and dynamic theme features a great way to present all the necessary information relevant to those in the music business such as Events, Albums, Galleries and Videos and even a Blog. This responsive and fluid theme can be displayed on all devices from mobile phones to desktop computers (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops). The theme is also SEO optimized because of its highly semantic and well structured source code.

Agriculture – All in One WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Agriculture Premium WordPress Theme makes going organic look easy. This WooCommerce ready theme boasts of a simple to use custom user interface that can turn website management into a task even a child can handle. You can easily add products, arrange them into categories, schedule automatic sales periods, manage delivery and other options with ease. This premium theme is based on an extended WordPress admin panel, with many custom shortcodes and widgets that are so easy in use and customize that even WordPress beginners can handle. It includes: Layer Slider and Revolution Slider plugins, Woocommerce, Super Extended Shortcodes pack for easy content formatting and improved presentation, a powerful Form Builder Tool, customly developed by CMSMasters, lets you create an unlimited amount of forms of different types and complexity, from simple contact forms to complex questionnaires with numerous fields, radio-buttons, checkboxes and dropdowns, text areas, as well as set validation for these fields.

Booklet Personal Blogging Theme

Booklet Premium WordPress Theme is a fresh take on the way blog themes have always been done. The portfolio like homepage is fully responsive and images and layout will automatically fit the screen no matter which device you are using. Inspired by popular e-readers, Booklet is a sleek version of your online diary. Some of the best features into this personal WordPress theme include the ability to change the background color and font color from black to white, change the size of the font and even read in fullscreen mode. Overall, a great way to add that personal touch to stories you want to share to the digital world.

The Wedding Day Responsive Theme

The Wedding Day Premium WordPress Theme is an elegant and lovely responsive wedding theme couples are sure to fall in love with. It is suitable for users with zero programming skills as well as advanced developers. The theme is the perfect match for your wedding with predefined styles and features its very own VamTam drag & drop builder. This drag and drop tool will save you lots of time on building your pages or posts with the use of a simple interface with simple drag & drop actions. The VamTam drag & drop page builder is tightly integrated with tinymce editor and you can switch to visual or text editor at any time without losing any changes. Buyers will also receive a bonus print invitation template for free.

Atlas Directory and Listings Premium WordPress Theme

Atlas Directory & Listings WordPress Theme is a front-end online directory portal where you allow members to register, login, edit profile, submit and manage (delete/update) listings, change membership settings, and so much more from the front-end without having to log into the WordPress dashboard.
Set up an online directory portal of any type – companies, shops, restaurants, real estate, websites and so on. One of the core features of Atlas is its email notifications where every action taken on your website is notified to the site admin allowing you to have full control over what goes on in your website. This feature can be easily disabled through the theme options panel.

Google Hummingbird – The Latest Algorithm Update

In case it slipped by you, Google announced its latest algorithm update last September – the Hummingbird – in celebration of its 15th anniversary. The announcement, held in the garage where Google was born, includes several major improvements on its answering system technology since its last Caffeine update in 2010.

One of the many new types of search activities in Hummingbird is what Google calls “Conversational Search“. This update is more than just typing in keywords to search for results. It encourages you to “have a conversation with Google” where you can post questions as if you were having a normal conversation.
Here are some of the latest changes included in this update:

Knowledge Graph

  • Use the Knowledge Graph to answer questions you never thought to ask and will help you discover more.

  • Knowledge Graph Carousel at the top of the results page gives you a more complete picture of what you’re curious about. Explore collections from the Knowledge Graph and browse lists of items, that help you research a topic faster and more in depth than before.

  • The Knowledge Graph can understand language differences, helping you more precisely express what you mean as you enter your search.

  • Information from the Knowledge Graph is available on desktop, tablet, and your smartphone.

Voice Search

  • Ask your questions out loud and get answers spoken back whether you are out and about or sitting at your desk. Just tap the mic on the Google search bar and speak up. This works on the Google Search App for iOS, Android and Chrome browsers for laptops and desktops.

  • Search without typing. You can ask anything, anywhere. Use it in the kitchen, on the couch or anytime your hands might be full. Plus, searching with your voice makes searching words you’re not sure how to spell quicker and easier.

Google Now

  • Gives you the right information at just the right time using helpful cards with information you need like: boarding passes, appointments, weather, flights, hotels, restaurant reservations, events, reminders, traffic, etc.

According to Amit Singhal, SVP, Google Search

“We’ll keep improving Google Search so it does a little bit more of the hard work for you. This means giving you the best possible answers, making it easy to have a conversation and helping out before you even have to ask. Hopefully, we’ll save you a few minutes of hassle each day. So keep asking Google tougher questions—it keeps us on our toes! After all, we’re just getting started.”

Mastering The Perfect Elevator Pitch to Help Build Your Authority Site

Elevator Pitch Defined

An elevator pitch, elevator speech, or elevator statement is a short summary used to quickly and simply define a person, profession, product, service, organization or event and its value proposition.

The name “elevator pitch” reflects the idea that it should be possible to deliver the summary in the time span of an elevator ride, or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes. The term itself comes from a scenario of an accidental meeting with someone important in the elevator. If the conversation inside the elevator in those few seconds is interesting and value adding, the conversation will continue after the elevator ride or end in exchange of business card or a scheduled meeting. (source: Wikipedia)

Part of establishing the identity of your authority site is creating a catchy and easy to remember description about everything you are all about. Many businesses fail to recognize the value of the elevator pitch for their companies and miss out on opportunities to connect with their target market. Some think that this technique borders on cheesy especially when done wrong. However, not recognizing its power and potential translates to many lost opportunities to market and “sell” yourself. If you can’t give a concise and succinct reason for the existence of your business, you confuse your target market as well.

The Internet is overloaded with virtual billboards vying for visitors attention non-stop. You need to be able to deliver your pitch and make it unforgettable – make it spark your website visitors’ curiosity.

What You Need to Craft Your Elevator Pitch:

Structure

  • Be specific. Use simple and easy to understand words
  • Offer a solution to an existing problem. Make it short and sweet.
  • Provide them with a specific call to action – visit your website, subscribe, register, etc.

Target Market

  • Address the appropriate target market in your pitch. You can later on expand to a qualified market and the general available market eventually. Tailor your pitch to match different segments of your target market but keep the core message consistent.

Delivery

  • Your website, social network, and all your other channels should be consistent as far as delivering your key message is concerned.
  • Believe in your own message and delivery will be natural. Try not to be too verbose when explaining yourself. People are turned off by the typical “car” or “insurance” salesman types. They easily see through all the hype but on the other hand, will appreciate genuine customer care and concern.

WordPress eCommerce Opportunities for WordPress Professionals for 2014

The Internet has significantly changed and reshaped the workforce profile in the last few years. It has opened up opportunities for work outside of the traditional 9 to 5 setup and the lure of “work from home” or “work anywhere” is irresistible. Because of this, more and more people are opting to liberate themselves from the office cubicle and pursue non traditional work opportunities because of the flexible work hours and the income potential it presents – most of which can be found online.

The global economic landscape is flat in the sense that anyone in the world, regardless of location or educational attainment, can become the next big business online. The challenge for most businesses is how to take their bricks and mortar mentality into the world of bricks and clicks.These people need experts who can help them build their dream business – online. For WordPress professionals, the opportunities to service this sector cannot be ignored.

According to comScore,

The comScore report found that retail e-commerce sales produced over $50 billion dollars last quarter. The study found that e-commerce sales have seen double-digit growth for 10 consecutive quarters. While growth this quarter was strong, comScore found that it was slightly down from the previous two quarters.

“The first quarter of 2013 was fairly strong for online retailers, with total e-commerce sales surpassing $50 billion for only the second time on record,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.
“While the year-over-year growth rate of 13 percent remained healthy, it was a point or two below that of the preceding quarters.”

According to the report, sales growth was down one percentage point on a quarter-over-quarter basis. E-commerce sales growth was also reported to be down two percentage points since Q3 2012. Fulgoni surmised that the slowdown was caused by payroll tax increases, which took effect in 2013.

ComScore’s report found that digital content and subscriptions, apparel, sport/fitness, consumer electronics, and consumer-packaged goods saw the greatest amount of e-commerce sales growth this quarter. The report shows that all categories saw over 20 percent growth year-over-year.

Here are a few key strategies WordPress professionals can use on how to take advantage of the booming WordPress eCommerce business opportunities:

Think Local, Sell Global. – think of businesses and services in your local area that have the potential to go global

  • local retail stores in your community that can sell globally – eg. books, accessories, jewelry, hobby stores, food, specialty shops
  • personal and professional services – consultants, freelancers, financial advisers, coaching services, tutorials, accountants, DIY-ers
  • NGOs, events, charitable institutions, fundraisers, non profit organizations
  • niche businesses – realtors, travel agents, auto dealers
  • small to medium scale businesses

Master the eCommerce process and understand how each step functions. WordPress professionals need to be well-versed on how the standard eCommerce process works:

  • shopping cart – should be simple enough for the customer (eg. WooCommerce, easy digital downloads, gravity forms, etc.)
  • payment gateway
  • merchant account
  • merchant’s bank account

Study your client’s needs and specifications and how you can integrate, merge, or streamline their current business practices and processes to their website. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and provide suggestions on how to modify or improve how transactions are processed.

Price yourself right. – Building an eCommerce site is more than just choosing an eCommerce supported WordPress theme, adding a plugin, and hitting the publish button. Consider the scope and the size of the whole project, the after installation support, and any additional web admin and system maintenance support you might be asked to provide before giving a price quote.

One of the highlights of the comScore Q1 2013 report says that,

E-commerce accounted for 10.6 percent of discretionary dollars spent, the highest share on record.

There is no turning back to business as usual. eCommerce is here to stay and it’s momentum is on the rise and WordPress professionals have every opportunity to take advantage of it.

WordPress 3.7 Beta is out!

WordPress fans will be pleased to know that the latest iteration of WordPress – WordPress 3.7 has been released. If you are a developer or simply a certified WordPress geek you might be interested to test the beta version. The scheduled release for the final version is October as they have decided to shorten the development cycle and focus on a few key improvements.

Here are some of the features that have been updated in this latest beta version that you can test out:

  • Automatic, background updates. 3.7 Beta 1 will keep itself updated. That’s right — you’ll be updated each night to the newest development build, and eventually to Beta 2. We’re working to provide as many installs as possible with fast updates to security releases of WordPress — and you can help us test by just installing Beta 1 on your server and seeing how it works! When you go to Dashboard ? Updates, you’ll see a note letting you know whether your install is working for automatic updates. There are a few situations where WordPress can’t reliably and securely update itself. But if it can, you’ll get an email (sent to the ‘Admin Email’ on the General Settings page) after each update letting you know what worked and what didn’t. If it worked, great! If something failed, the email will suggest you make a post in the support forums or create a bug report.

  • If you’re running WordPress in another language, we’ll automatically download any available translations for official WordPress importers and the default themes.

  • Our password meter got a whole lot better, thanks to Dropbox’s zxcvbn library. Again, subtle but effective. Strong passwords are very important!

  • Search results are now ordered by relevance, rather than just by date. When your keywords match post titles and not just content, they’ll be pushed to the top.

  • Developers should check out the new advanced date queries in WP_Query. (#18694)

(source: WordPress News)

If you’d like to be more involved in the development and help test WordPress 3.7 beta, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Just make sure you don’t do it on a live site.

Tips To Maximize Marketing To Your Local Mass Traffic

A panel of experienced resource speakers including Mike Cooch, Kevin Wilke, Jack Mize, Martin Maybruck among others shared valuable insights and wisdom (T&C Summit 2013) on how to handle local traffic.

Here’s a summary of some of the key points these experts shared and see how it applies to your own local marketing targets.

The top 3 strategies for getting clients are:

  • networking at local events
  • speaking at local events
  • direct mail

The top 3 online strategies for clients are:

  • videos (get ranked quickly) Tip: put your business phone number in the title
  • directories
  • social media

Effective Facebook Page contests include the ff. elements that can contribute to your list building efforts, free referrals, viral reach, etc.:

  • name – for brand positioning
  • video – builds trust
  • prizes – aligns with market and doubles attendance
  • fan gate – increases “likes”
  • webinar – adds value

Follow up with people over the phone and offer your services

Build your business eventually to be sold

  • build assets instead of just a source of income
  • keep your financials clean
  • document systems and processes
  • target margins to be at par or better than industry standards
  • think of transferable contracts
  • recurring revenue
  • proven sales model

Your number 1 job is to sell

  • Small businesses are not actively looking for someone to market for them. You have to sell to small businesses.
  • Focus on one vertical to start. It is the biggest secret to growing fast
  • Leverage channels (conventions, webinars, newsletters, trade shows)

Use tools and resources to help you find leads

  • Smartwebinar – automated prospecting webinar for local marketers
  • Localizer lead tool – find local prospects fast
  • Lead kahuna – find leads with bad online reputation and turn them into prospecting material to target them

Fast local lead copy works for landing pages, video scripts, online classifieds, biz listings, social media properties.

Small businesses want mainly is fast sales. Mobile consumers are among the highest percentage of searchers for local businesses but not all local businesses have websites.

If you are running a small business your local business must be listed in apps such as:

  • Google maps
  • Yahoo
  • Mapquest
  • Yelp

Local businesses owners need to build a custom mobile landing page catered to their target audience.

Your friendly neighborhood shop could be the next big thing to happen. Check out opportunities to connect and network.

WordPress News You Can Use: September 2013

The WordPress community is a great resource for anything and everything to help you get your feet wet. Get to know the movers and shakers in the industry or simply develop your WordPress skills whether as a beginner or a seasoned developer with these useful articles and news updates we’ve culled in and around the web community you can read, glean, and learn from:

Creative WordPress Themes September 2013

The latest crop of new WordPress themes that are coming out are all inspiring and filled with features and functions all wrapped in pretty packages. Here are the latest WordPress themes to whet your creative juices:

Gridstack Responsive Agency Theme

GridStack Premium WordPress Theme is a unique and beautiful easy to use portfolio theme for agencies, artists, graphic designers, and freelancers. The theme’s extra wide and parallax-style media complemented by the clean and modern title rotator make it a perfect solution for showcasing photos, illustrations, videos and audio. It is responsive and automatically resizes to accommodate a variety of devices – computers, tablets and mobile phones.
It is also Ajax-enabled, allows you to display your brand logo on screen, and is SEO optimized, ensuring a consistent user experience while maintaining best practice SEO standards.

Big Gallery Photography/Portfolio WP Theme

BIG Gallery Premium WordPress Fullscreen Photography Portfolio Theme is an impressive way to showcase your photos on a grand scale made possible with the creative use of CSS3 and Javascript. Fullscreen WordPress themes are tricky especially when showcasing photographs that highlight the photographer’s composition intent. Some themes make photos look cut or stretched and lose their original intent. You have 4 full screen slideshows to choose from where you can fill the screen with the whole image, or automatically adjust images to prevent them from being cut. You have the option to change the slideshow type for every page and even play music or turn it off if you prefer.

Jarvis One Page Parallax WP Theme

Jarvis Premium WordPress Theme is a one page parallax WordPress theme for corporate, agency, nonprofit, freelancer or general business that includes features such as: MailChimp subscription support, 12 homepage variations, stunning parallax effect sections, Premium Revolution slider, background video support, ultra-responsive (including sliders), 6 navigation styles, advanced styling customization features with tons of customizable backgrounds for each section (unlimited colors, images, built-in patterns), ajax contact forms, Font Awesome icons, unlimited skins, awesome extensive theme documentation and help support, and other functions and features.

Craft Responsive and Retina-ready WP Theme

Craft Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and modern theme designed for creative agencies, design professionals, graphic designers, and freelancers dabbling into creative design. This retina-ready flat designed theme built with HTML5 and CSS3 includes many modern features such as graphically intuitive shortcodes, ultra high resolution graphics, advanced theme options panel, mobile ready sliders (FlexSlider 2), classic and masonry blog styles, paginated/ajax portfolio pages, and several page templates applicable to other business or web applications.

Storyline Board WP Theme

Discover Storyline Board Premium WordPress Theme – a different, creative, innovative and user friendly theme to present your portfolio, blog, online magazine, personal site or anything you may think of in a not so typical fashion. From innovative post styles (circle, square, image, text, sidebars,etc.) to unique design elements that will make your website truly stand out. This trendy and progressive product is a perfect vehicle to display your creative work/portfolio/photography gallery and amaze your visitors with an unusual new generation blog. This premium theme comes in three styles: colorful, glass, and facebook tabbed version.

Frame Photography WP Theme

Frame Premium WordPress Theme is a photographer’s virtual playground chock-full of features and options for portfolio and image gallery presentations. This premium theme HTML5 & CSS3 valid, responsive, retina-ready, comes in dark and light skin versions, has a powerful admin panel, includes a full screen, grid, and masonry style gallery/portfolio page, a working Ajax contact form, easy color management options, tons of options, and extended documentation to get your photography site up in no time.

Building an Online Following through Publishing – NYTimes Best-Selling Author Tucker Max

You either love him or hate him – a common reaction when you hear the name Tucker Max. But there’s more to this foul-mouthed #1 New York Times Bestselling author of I Hope They Sell Beer in Hell than meets the eye. Tucker Max was one of the guest speakers in the Traffic and Conversion Summit 2013 held early this year and he shared some practical and valuable insight as to how he became a successful author despite the odds against him. Here are some of the nuggets he shared during the event:

Publishing a book is just a “Trojan horse” to establish your reputation and do bigger stuff. Published authors have a lot of more perceived prestige and respect vs. marketers.

Book is the best way to become an authority of your field. Use books to build media and brands

Ryan’s model for launching a new brand: Find a thought leader, publish a hardback book, use as a self-liquid offer, use that to build a brand and media

At the very least, publish a Kindle book

Tucker’s Tips:

On Getting Opt ins from books:

  • In the first 10% of book, Amazon shows a “look inside” feature, include a link to your opt-in page. It’s even clickable on Amazon. Ex. “For readers only, get the bonus chapter/audio version over here.”

On Publishing Model

  • Competing goals of publishing a book: NYTimes best-seller, make a lot of money, spreading your message. If you’re not in Barnes and Nobles, it’s hard to become NYTimes Bestseller. Making money – selling stuff off the backend. If you’ve been self-published, it’s hard to get a big 6 publisher to pick you up later on. Easier to get mainstream media if you’ve been published with big 6 publisher.

On Manipulating Mainstream Media

  • Tucker bought sponsored tweets from big celebrities. You only have to pay if celeb accepts. He got Kardashians, Snookie to tweet about his book.

On Dealing with Competitors

  • Don’t compete with them and try to be entertaining. Be a different category completely and known as the “serious guy”

According to him,

“As marketers, we’re often seen in a bad light. Society views us scammers. It doesn’t matter how much money you’re making, you’re always going to be associated with scams, frauds and a lot of other slimey stuff.

But if you’re a published author, then everything changes. Suddenly, everyone respects you. Because you wrote a book. You almost have the same social status and prestige as movie stars and musicians now.The coolest part is, you don’t need to seek a publisher. You can self-publish on Kindle nowadays.

Also, keep in mind, you don’t want to publish books to make money (because chances are most people won’t make much, no matter how many little kindle eBooks they pump out). The real purpose is to use your book as to establish your authority and expertise in your niche.

Don’t go out and look for attention. Just focus on creating the best thing you can create. Worry about what you’re creating 80% and the marketing/selling 20%.

Tucker Max generated a huge following on his website prior to publishing his first and highly successful bestselling book. He has published several books since then. He had an epiphany that started after his first book was published and has announced that we was leaving behind the lifestyle that made him famous. He has turned into a health buff and he is also a mixed martial arts practitioner.