By now, most of you should know that WordPress can do more than just a blog platform. With WordPress, plus some plugins, you can build almost any type of websites.

WebDesignerWall has written an article: 30 Untypical WordPress Sites, which shows 30 websites that use WordPress for different purposes — from general websites to portfolios, ecommerce and corporate sites. I am sure this post will open up more ideas for you to use WordPress.

Source: 30 Untypical WordPress Sites

Neil Patel has published a really interesting article on TechCrunch. He taught us How To Grow Your Blog Through Customer Development. When you think about growing your blog, whether it is a personal, professional or company blog, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

Chances are it is something related to traffic or subscribers. Getting more traffic or subscribers is never a bad thing, but if you really want more sustainable traffic you first have to understand the people coming to your blog. If you can’t make them happy, how can you expect your traffic to grow?

You have a vision of how you see your blog and where you want it to go. The reality is that your vision may not match up with what your readers are expecting. So instead of assuming things about your readers, start getting feedback from them.

Without understanding your audience you won’t know what they like and dislike. Take the next few hours and start analyzing your blog and create a game plan on how you can grow your blog.

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/02/how-to-grow-your-blog…

The Wall Street Journal has published an interesting article “America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire “. We can see some interesting numbers/stats for blogging. There are over 20 million bloggers in America, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.

Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates. Most are white males reporting above-average incomes. One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall.

Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products. Pros who work for companies are typically paid $45,000 to $90,000 a year for their blogging. One percent make over $200,000. And they report long hours — 50 to 60 hours a week.

the Technorati report says that of those bloggers who had 100,000 or more unique visitors, the average income is $75,000. True, it’s not the median, but it is the average. We can quibble about how easy it is to make this kind of money — but the point is, the huge potential is there.

Source: America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire

One of the reasons people love WordPress so much is its great flexibility. You can change the software’s appearance with themes. You can enhance its functionality with plug-ins. And, last but not least, you can totally unleash WordPress’ power with hacks. Some time ago, we published a post showing Most Useful WordPress Hacks.

Recently, SmashingMagazine has do it again with 10 new and totally killer WordPress hacks to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As usual, they won’t just list the hacks alone. In each entry, you’ll find an explanation of the code as well as the kinds of problems that the hack solves. It includes:

1. Create TinyURLs On The Fly
2. List Upcoming Posts
3. Create A “Send To Facebook” Button
4. Create A Maintenance Page For Your WordPress Blog
5. Display Related Posts Without A Plug-In
6. Automatically Retrieve The First Image From Posts On Your Home Page
7. Resize Images On The Fly
8. Get Your Most Popular Posts Without A Plug-In
9. Highlight Searched Text In Search Results
10. Disable Widgetized Areas Without Editing Theme Files

Source: 10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks

279 Days to Overnight Success tells the story of The Art of Nonconformity, but more importantly, it offers 11,000 words of free advice on how to create your own success with your own project. He offer this information freely.

You will learn How to become a Full-Time writer in 279 days from 279 Days to Overnight Success. It tells you exactly how the world domination strategy for establishing your brand. And it teaches you how to avoid the vampires who want you to fail and why Adsense (and most other Web Advertising) sucks. Moreover, you can learn how to stay off the Digg home page and still get all the traffic you need.

Bloggers, writers, online artists, and anyone otherwise interested in creating a new career or expanding their influence using social media. If you want your online presence to grow far beyond what it is now, you should download 279 Days to Overnight Success and read it now.

Download for Free: http://chrisguillebeau.com/3×5/files/2009/04/279days.pdf

Many new Internet marketers obsess over Google pagerank believing it to be the route to rising in the search results, where in fact pagerank is just one of many factors involved in your search engine ranking and, most misleading, what you see in the Google Toolbar is very inaccurate anyway.

Authority in a search context takes into account all the elements of a site then determines a grading on the spectrum from completely authoritative through to no authority at all. The more authoritative and trusted your site, the better you will rank.

How to Grow Your Google Authority? There are many factors that directly influence your Google authority including the domain, quantity and quality of links, plus traffic elements.

Source: How to Grow Your Google Authority

ForTheLose has shared with us 7 Wordpress Theme Trends and How To Implement Them Yourself. It includes Tabbing System, “Featured” Post Display, Post Thumbnails, Cross-Browser Transparency, Animated Dropdown Menus, Modal Boxes and Theme Options Pages. Most of them are very useful and very easy to implement it on your own WordPress blog with the detailed installation documents.

Source: 7 Wordpress Theme Trends & How To Implement Them Yourself

A personal brand is in many ways synonymous with your reputation. It refers to the way other people see you. What do you stand for? What ideas and notions pop up as soon as someone hears your name?

If you’ve been around for a while you’ve probably already developed a personal brand. People recognize your name, what you’re working on, what you offer and what you’re about. That being said, your personal brand might be a little weak and disjointed. If you’d like to make it stronger, Skelliewag is going to help give you the tools by outlining what he believes to be the components of a strong personal brand.

Source: How to Start (or Start-over) Building Your Personal Brand

Shoutem has shared us 10 Ways to Build Your Blog Community with Twitter. Every blogger, no matter how ambitious or dedicated to his or her blog – wants a community around it. There are 3 Reasons Why Twitter Rocks for Your Community.

1. It’s less tedious than forums. As any other type of website, forums have a specific organization scheme that users need to learn. What if you have both article comments and a forum – what will the user choose to do? With too many choice, he may just end up staying quiet.

2. It’s more effective than e-mail because you’re communicating to the community. While e-mail is personal, what happens when you get to much e-mail? What happens when you stop responding to people?

3. Accessible everywhere – browser, desktop, mobile,… With all the tools and ways to access both Twitter or your own microblogging network, you choose the way you want to engage your readers.

We all know that Twitter is good for our community. So how do we empower our community with Twitter?

Source: 10 Ways to Build Your Blog Community with Twitter

Speeding up the time it takes you to develop new Wordpress themes can become a very critical habit that will help you as you continue on in this business. When most freelancers start out, they usually are sure to take on one client at a time.

As you get more comfortable and know your limits, you may become a little daring and take on two, maybe three clients at the same time. If you respect yourself enough to deliver quality work in a timely fashion to these clients that put their faith into you, you better hope you have sharp time-management skills.

The production of a well-developed Wordpress theme can take 20-25 hours. 11 Tips for Speeding Up Wordpress Theme Development will help you speed up the production of your theme projects. Try to implement these next time you work on a theme and notice the increase in motivation and how much time you’ll save.

Source: 11 Tips for Speeding Up Wordpress Theme Development