WordPress as I have said before is a great CMS system, but without the proper theme, it can looking drab and emotionless. But, if you find the right combination of design, usability, and content, you can create a compelling offering for both your visitors and yourself.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when WordPress themes don’t fit the theme or content of the website. So many times I have stumbled onto blogs with completely contradictory layouts and content. You can’t have a professional website with cartoon characters as the heading (depending on what kind of site, obviously an artists website it would be appropriate). So being able to match a theme to what you like, without much modification is the goal.

Step in premium themes. Premium themes are WordPress themes that cost actual money, but come with a ton more features than free or open source themes. The price you pay is well worth it, for professional looking designs, different color and layout options, and a well crafted user interface that makes it easy to customize and modify the themes on the back end. With that, I want to introduce you to a few theme companies and websites that feature great looking themes for an affordable price.

Elegant Themes http://www.elegantthemes.com

Elegant themes is easily my favorite of all of the premium theme websites. With a unique subscription model in which you pay a yearly fee and have access to over 40 themes for any of your websites, it is a great idea for a niche site builder or someone with a large blog network. The price is very reasonable and you can customize the themes to your hearts content. Definitely worth checking out.

Thesis http://www.diythemes.com

Thesis has been the longstanding king of premium WordPress themes, with their extremely customizable hook framework, making it virtually customizable in every regard, Thesis supports many different layouts and allows the user to have a very SEO optimized theme that is lightweight and fast. Thesis is one of the most popular premium addons for WordPress ever and for good reason.

Woo Themes http://www.woothemes.com

Despite their name, Woo Themes features some really great and customizable professional themes for WordPress. Woo themes does a great job with a very customizable backend that allows users to access almost every element of their theme through a easy to use interface.

Theme Forest http://themeforest.net/

Theme Forest is unique in that they offer many different themes from different designers and coders who are allowed to set their own prices and features. This limits the user experience of consistent interfaces like Elegant Themes or Woo Themes, but does offer a very big variety of themes at various price points.

When running an online business, there are a lot of great resources you can look to for inspiration about improvements you can make to your site. The biggest source of inspiration is often overlooked.  You can actually learn a lot about how to improve your site by looking at what your competitors are doing.

Start by making a list of five to ten competitors in your niche that you feel are doing things the right way. Try to pick sites with better Alexa ranks and Google page ranks than your own. Then sit down and take a good long look at each site. Read some of their articles, browse through their archives, check out their store if they have one, and take notes on the experience. Be sure to jot down both your likes, and dislikes about their sites. Then, take some time, and think about how each like or dislike can be applied to your site. If, for example, you really like the image gallery set up they have, see if you can find a similar script to implement on your site. If they’re implementing an interesting feature that you don’t have in place, think about putting that feature on your site. The ultimate goal here is to make your site stronger by implementing strengths found on other sites. If a particular feature you find on another site won’t work on yours, don’t force it. It’s better to skip a feature rather than to try to implement it poorly, and hurt your site’s usability.

This practice doesn’t just apply to your website either. If your competitors have email lists, sign up for them. See what they’re doing with their list that you aren’t doing. Find out what sort of information they’re sharing with their subscribers, and see if you can find any useful ideas to help you adjust your own strategy.

If they have a membership site, consider signing up for their free trial, if they offer one. That way you can get a look at exactly what they’re charging for, and how it stacks up against your offerings.

There’s no shame in learning what you can from your competition. If they’re implementing interesting features, your users will expect your site to start implementing those features. By paying attention to the competition, you can get a feel for how things are changing in your niche, and what you need to be doing to keep up.

Keywords are the words and phrases people use when searching for information on any given topic. For example, if you’re looking for information about weight loss, you might search for something along the lines of “lose weight fast”. In that scenario, “lose weight fast” is a set of keywords relevant to weight loss. By understanding keywords, and doing the right things with them, you can make your site more SEO friendly in no time.

When building your website, you want to try to capitalize on the most popular keywords relevant to your niche. Make sure the title tags, and meta tags in your code include keywords relevant to your site. it’s also extremely important to have keyword rich text on your site.l You don’t want to make your content seem poorly written, but you do want to work in as many keywords as possible. Don’t let it get in the way of the quality of your content, but try to replace pronouns with proper nouns related to your niche whenever you can.

Search engines weight the first 250 words found on a page more heavily than the rest of that page, so it’s extremely important to make your first few paragraphs as focused as possible. Stay on topic, and include as many keywords as you can.Again, don’t make the content hard to read for your visitors, but make it as keyword rich as you can without hurting your site’s usability.

Keywords that consist of one word, or a short phrase tend to be very competitive. While it’s a good idea to take advantage of those keywords, don’t ignore longer terms completely. The longer the keyword, the less likely it is to be over saturated. If you can find a longer search term relevant to your niche that isn’t flooded with search results, take advantage of it as best you can. It’s better to show up in the top five search results for a longer search term that gets 500 searches a day than it is to show up six pages deep in the search results for a short term that gets 5,000 searches a day.

Keep keywords in mind as you develop your website, and your marketing strategy, and you’ll see some significant results over time. As your search rank goes up, so will your traffic. At the end of the day, that’s what makes the internet go ’round.

Pay per click, or PPC advertising can be a great way to bring in some ad revenue with your website. In fact, PPC ads can help you make money in more ways than you probably realize.

A lot of people shy away from PPC ads due to the low payout per click they bring in. While that is a valid concern, there are things you can do to counter the low payout by snagging a high volume of clicks. A lot of people try to hid their ads so that they won’t offend their visitors. While that’s a nice idea in principal, in practice, it doesn’t work out well Most frequent internet users are familiar with ads, and they have come to accept that advertising is a part of visiting any successful website. As long as the ads don’t directly intrude on your website‘s usability, visitors won’t be offended. Also, the whole point of running ads is to have them seen by your visitors. If you tuck them off to the side, or near the bottom of your site, fewer people will see them, and as such, fewer people will click them.

It’s important that your users see your ads, but don’t overdo it . If your ads cover up your content and make your site unusable, new visitors will be put off by your site. Not only will they ignore your ads, but they’ll be way less likely to come back to your site in the future, and you definitely want them to come back.

Traffic is the most important factor in how successful your PPC ads will be. By writing high quality content, and working to bring more traffic to your site, you’re ensuring that more people will see your ads. If more people see them, more people will click them.

It’s also important to keep your ads relevant to your content. Services like Google Adsense automatically generate your ads based on your content, but there are many other PPC programs you can join that don’t. If you’re picking ads to display on your site, make sure to choose ads that will appeal to your users. If you have a website about movies, putting an ad for a Blu-Ray player on it is a great idea. Putting up an ad for a lawn mower is probably not such a good idea. While the lawn mower ad might have a higher payout, fewer people will click on it, and you’ll make less money over time.

By choosing your ads carefully, and placing them in prominent places on your site, you can ensure that your users will see, and click your ads. The more traffic you pull in, the more ad revenue you’ll see.