I have been working on a customisation for the Wordpress Thesis theme by DiyThemes for a client of mine over the last few weeks.

Although Thesis offers a great deal of power in its backend, and is very well setup for SEO, it does behave very differently from your standard wordpress blog template. It uses hooks, which are chunks of code that with a single command you can insert before or after another element of code.  Once you understand the power of hooks and what they can do, it makes performing drastic alteration to the look and feel of the site easy to do on a large scale level. That is, it’s easy to move sidebars, change fonts for headers and text etc,

This reliance on hooks however makes some of the simpler customisations, like changing the look of the menu, or making custom page templates a little bit harder. To do this, you need to edit the file called custom_functions.php, and add a function that is called by a hook at a certain time when the page loads.

For instance, the script below

function custom_archives_template() {
?>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=10′); // exclude the third category ?>
<?php if(have_posts()) : ?><?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php
} ?>
<?php

remove_action(’thesis_hook_archives_template’, ‘thesis_archives_template’);
add_action(’thesis_hook_archives_template’, ‘custom_archives_template’); ?>

The function contains all of the PHP, and it is then called by the hooks functions remove_action
(which gets rid of the old page elements) and add_action (which calls your new piece of code)

The problem that I was facing today is that I was leaving whitespace at the end of the custom_functions.php and getting a “Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/web49060/public_html/wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/custom_functions.php:87) in /home/web49060/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 850″  error message.

A hard one to problem solve if you haven’t encountered it before.

The Thesis theme can be found at http://diythemes.com/thesis/

Just a quick post today to make sure that everyone knows that I am still around and kicking. I have had a busy last month, consolidating a couple of exciting new opportunities that have presented themselves, and getting my teeth into some challenging new internet marketing campaigns.

I just wanted to put the idea out there today to all of the bloggers out there that are wondering how to make money online with their blogs. The short answer is that you have a very small chance of making a decent income with just your blog alone. A blog that just has posts, a few adsense ads and some affiliate programs (like this one is at the moment) may turn some dollars, but not enough to get the bank manager excited every time you walk in.

You should not be considering yourself just a blogger, but taking the next step, treating this area seriously and start thinking about starting an online BUSINESS. Sure, a blog may be an integral part to it, but at the end of the day you need to know how to attract peoples attention and move some kind of product. The internet is full of bad information about “How To Make Money Online”, in fact there seems to be more of this around today then ever before. But in-between all of this there are some sound strategies of people that have gone before and made Sustainable Online Enterprises.

Like the byline of this site says, I am all about helping people become Sustainable Personal (as in personally branded) Online Connected Entrepreneurs. Its a simple phrase, a small acronym that can be easily remembered and applied to everything you do online. It is a system that outlines how to gain traffic, and then monetize that traffic so that your audience becomes your customers, and yes, even your fans in the year to come.

By utilizing the wide variety of ways to promote your business, develop content and target customers the SPOKE system deals with social media, google adwords, SEO strategy, blog optimization, marketing and advertising theory, personal branding and sound business knowledge to provide a comprehensive system to at the very least give a good online business idea a head start.

One of the most important parts to your SEO campaign for your websites should be the building of backlinks. Finding quality backlinks has always been a tedious task, sifting through search results, finding blogs and forums and social media sites with relative content to your niche.

Recently though I have been automating the process and using the power of google to send me backlink opportunities to my inbox everyday for free. I have set up a program using Google Alerts to keep track of all of my topics on the web, and tell me when new content is available that I can backlink.

I have so far found it an excellent way to keep up to date with what people are saying about my own domain, as well as keeping track of the different market niches that I have sites in.

AN EXAMPLE
An example is that if you have a site on “yoga advice” then you would create a Google Alert for these keywords. Google will then send you an email when a new link or content related to this is published on the internet.

It’s a fantastic way to be informed about your area, BUT it is also a great way to find potential linking partners to set up backlinks with.  With Google Alerts you will easily get 10 – 30 links per day, depending on how popular your niche is.

BLOG LINKING STRATEGY

I have found that an even better way to find blogs that allow you to leave a comment is to setup a google alert specifically for blogs and set the alert to search for “yoga” “leave a comment”. This will send a list of all blogs in your niche that you can leave a comment straight to your inbox. You can set the alerts to be sent to you daily, weekly or as they happen (as google indexes the page).

There are a few considerations to take into account when commenting on blogs as a back linking strategy. The first is the search relevance of the site that you are linking to. I recommend installing the SEOQuake plug-in as it provides information on Alexa Ranking, Google Pagerank and Number of Backlinks to a site, plus heaps of other relevant information for you to decide if it is in your best interest to backlink to a site. This great SEO plug-in can be attached to your browser and will give you helpful SEO information on the link or links you’re viewing.

Use the SEOQuake plug-in in conjunction with Google to sort through the results and find the ones with the highest PR, traffic and backlinks. The more knowledge you have the easier and more effective your link building will become.

Keep in mind that finding quality backlinks is one of the most tedious jobs in being a webmaster. It can take a long time, and a good deal of patience. By using this google alerts system you are taking a lot of the legwork out the equation, which will allow you to focus on backlink creation more consistently. Persistence pays off in this area, and soon your site will get noticed and start to rank higher.