Entrepreneurs-Journey.com Down-To-Earth Advice For Bloggers and Internet Marketers

I just finished reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography titled Open.

I LOVE tennis bios, they are possibly my favorite book genre because I love tennis, but more than playing it, I love following the professional tour and especially the people in the game. For me, it’s the personalities and the human stories that really inspire, hence I love it when the top players release books about their life playing the game.

Agassi’s bio was different to others I have read (I have Sampras, McEnroe, Newcombe and Scott Draper in my collection so far). Why it was different was because how much the book focused on Agassi and a few key people in his life and less specifically about the game of tennis, the matches he played and the people he played against.

Tennis tournaments and players certainly play a role in the book, but the focus is more on Agassi’s personal journey to discover himself. Reading the book felt a lot like reading what an angsty teenager goes through growing up. Lots of uncontrolled emotions from a person locked into doing things he doesn’t want to do.

Surprisingly, Agassi actually hates tennis and states so many times in the book, further demonstrating how bizarre a life can be for someone who is brought up to do one thing and one thing only, when he doesn’t actually want to. As Agassi grows up he gains control over his life, yet his hatred for the game he keeps playing remains, which makes the contrast even more bizarre, since he is choosing to continue to do something he doesn’t want to do.

Then of course, if you really think about it, Agassi is doing the same thing most people do today.

How many people continue working jobs they don’t want to every day because they feel they have to for whatever reason? Lots. Probably more people do this than people who actually enjoy and have passion for the job they do. This unique form of insanity is shared by many people on this planet, but the fact that Agassi excelled as he did, makes his story even more compelling.

Hard Work Pays Off

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This is a review of the Headway WordPress theme, written by Joel Williams from BlogTechGuy.com.

Note this post contains affiliate links, so when you buy the Headway theme after clicking a link in this article, you are passing a commission on to us, so thank you. Joel of course remained as unbiased as possible while writing this review despite the potential to retire young thanks to massive affiliate payouts . Over to Joel…

What Is Headway?

Headway is the new kid on the block in the world of premium (aka paid-for) WordPress themes.

It’s different to a lot of other premium themes in that it attempts to do away with themes only being customizable by designers or coders, and provide a theme that can be altered quickly and easily by just about anyone.

Customizing Headway: The Visual Editor Makes It Easy

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Squeeze Theme is the latest blog theme from the guys at Unique Blog Designs, who are the designers of some of the top blogs in the world, including the one you are reading right now.

Squeeze Theme is a premium theme for the WordPress blogging platform. Its purpose is to add significant additional functionality and scope beyond what the basic WordPress install includes. Here’s a video that explains the key features –

In Squeeze Theme’s case, its purpose is to augment WordPress so you can use it as a tool to create “squeeze pages” (or namesqueeze pages), which are pages that focus on capturing an email address of the visitor so you can build your email list. You can also use Squeeze Theme to create sales pages, and standard blog and blog magazine layouts.

Bear in mind Squeeze Theme is not a custom theme in the sense that you buy a certain blog layout style which you can then change or use as is. In this case you’re getting a tool to create lots of different types of websites more easily using the tools that Squeeze Theme provides.

The idea is if you are not a coder or designer you can buy a premium theme like Squeeze Theme and it makes it easier for you to create all the different pages your online business needs. Instead of having to play with the code, you get an easier to use back-end interface to control all the different elements like style, color, layout and design.

How Much Easier To Use Is It?

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A couple of weeks ago I introduced and reviewed the Affiliate Theme, which I called the perfect WordPress blog theme for marketing.

In the comments to that review, some people mentioned they were using the Thesis Theme, which is also a very powerful theme for WordPress created by Chris Pearson and Brian Clark, two very respected bloggers.

Custom themes for WordPress like Thesis and Affiliate Theme make it MUCH easier to maintain a professional blog, especially if you don’t know how to manipulate code like HTML and CSS. You can use these themes to easily change the design and look of your blog, they are very well optimized for search engines and give you a lot more power of your blog than the default WordPress set-up.

Which Theme is Better? Thesis or Affiliate Theme?

In response to feedback on my Affiliate Theme review, it was clear people wanted to compare it to the Thesis theme.

Joel Williams (BlogTechGuy.com), who is the technology mentor in my private forum for paying students, is a regular user of Thesis, so I invited him to write a review of it and then do a cross comparison between Thesis and Affiliate Theme.

If you’re looking for a robust and powerful theme for your WordPress blog, have a read of what Joel has to say below, read my review of the Affiliate Theme and then decide which one to go with.

Thesis Blog Theme Review

A lot of blog owners are looking for a middle ground between a free, but generic blog theme and a unique, but expensive custom theme. This gap has been filled with the “premium” theme, a paid for theme that is not unique, but comes with admin options and customer support. There are a wide variety of premium themes out there, but Thesis is perhaps one of the most well-known and used.

What is Thesis?

Simply, it’s a Wordpress theme, but it is much more than that. It is often described as a “theme framework” due to the fact that many different styles and types of theme can be created from Thesis.

Created by Chris Pearson, and expertly supported by Rick Beckman, the theme has been through a major series of regular updates, continually adding new and user requested features from the 3,000+ users.

It allows the user a huge amount of control through two control panel menus. One is based on configuration options that I won’t go into detail but include options such as what pages to include in navigation, what information you want to show about each post, some display options, Feedburner feed URL and any header or footer scripts that you wish to include.

The other menu, Thesis Design Options (pictured) really give the theme massive flexibility. In the current version (1.5) some of the options include:

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I’ve been in communication with Nate Whitehill from Unique Blog Designs for many months now and today his team have released something that all affiliate marketers should be excited about.

Back in August of 08 Nate and his team decided to begin work on a special WordPress theme that would make life easier for affiliate marketers to create websites.

Many online marketers today use WordPress blogs as their default website content management system to set up landing pages, mini-sites and review sites – stock staples for affiliate marketers. This new premium theme makes the process of creating affiliate marketing sites a select-and-click process, much easier and more efficient than hacking standard WordPress themes or building sites from scratch using Frontpage or Dreamweaver for example.

The theme has been given the very obvious name – Affiliate Theme – and you can read more about it here –

• Affiliate Theme for WordPress

What Is Affiliate Theme?

Affiliate Theme is a premium WordPress theme with a customized back-end administration system that allows you to easily control and test the elements of your website.

I’ve had access to the theme for a few days now and had a play with the interface. If you’ve ever wanted to control the most crucial elements of your WordPress blog without needing to go in and hack the code, this is the theme you need, especially if you set up blog websites to sell affiliate offers.

Here’s a list of some of the customization options -

• With a single click you can change the entire layout from 1-column, 2-column, 3-column, 4-column, left-column sidebar or right-column sidebar. That effectively means you can test six different website layouts without needing multiple themes.
• You can control the background colors or images, font typography, homepage title and header graphics.
• You can easily insert tracking code without needing to hack your theme.
• Your blog’s navigation system can easily be changed, as well as the footer elements.
• There are settings for a featured offer on your homepage (like a highlight box) and also individual page offers.
• and a WHOLE lot more…

Frankly it’s hard to explain this using text, so the best introduction you can have is this video that Nate put together to introduce you to the Affiliate Theme –

How To Profit With Affiliate Theme

Affiliate Theme is designed for affiliate marketers, in particular marketers who use affiliate networks to find offers in many different niches they then promote with websites.

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