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Free Wordpress themes: good or bad?

by asg
14 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
Hello guys.

I've been working on a niche site for a few months now and it's my greatest achievement in terms of traffic I get (from 40-60 visits a day) but I get very few Adsense or affiliate clicks, though. I think it has to do with the design of my website. I've had this problem with previous niche sites as well: usually I'll start with a free Wordpress theme cause I don't want to invest any money until I'm not sure about the site. And I'll think "oh, the theme is alright" when maybe most people wouldn't trust anything from a page with that look? I have a bounce rate of 49%.

My site is accordersaguitare[dot]com. What do you think of its layout? Why does Pat Flynn (in his Niche Site Duel) make a hell lot more than I do with less traffic than me?

Thanks for any help!
#bad #free #good #themes #wordpress
  • Profile picture of the author mgreener
    Hi,

    Yes, the design absolutely influences trust and credibility. What is the average visit time? What is your CTR? With 40-60 visitors per day, you shouldn't expect a ton of clicks unless your traffic is extremely targeted and ad placement is spot on optimized. Try split testing a bit.

    There is nothing wrong with using a free theme if it's good.
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  • Profile picture of the author asg
    Thank you for your answer. Average visit time is 3:30 and Adsense CTR is 0.30%. I have tried different ad placements but I get so few clicks it's hard for me to tell if my modifications provok the clicks or not.
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  • Profile picture of the author thethefly
    Your site looks quite nice. I had a look at it and I think that you should not rush to change the design.
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  • Profile picture of the author Karen Barr
    You only have the one set of ads, right? I would try different styles of ads - I find I get best click throughs on image banners rather than text ads. Leave the new styles in place for at least a week so you can get a good sample of data.

    I think the theme itself is fine.
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  • Profile picture of the author seomagic
    Its good to have free wordpres theme for simple site or just content site but if you want to make your site popular and unique then you should use customized theme for the wordpress
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  • Profile picture of the author thomasburke
    Looks good but you should ad two more sets of adsense ads if that is what you are mainly using to monetize it. Also some of the visitors may be comming to some of your other pages and they have no adsense on them at all. On one of your links I also got a 404 error.
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  • Profile picture of the author sumonrahman
    Today on web we got already a good numbers of free themes. Honestly all they are nice. But on Free theme no one can grab all the latest services while a premium theme can! Especially there also some themes can't be changed for footer or header. But anything you can edit or change on premium themes.
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  • Profile picture of the author WPBounce
    You should try promoting affiliate products. Like doing a few product reviews from amazon or smth.
    You can buy wordpress themes on theme forest pretty cheap.
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  • Profile picture of the author asg
    Thanks for the suggestions. I switched back to a bigger Adsense format and I got a click yesterday. I'm going to stick with this new format for a while and see how it goes. I'm still pessimistic about the future of my niche site because at a rate of $0.20 per click, I don't see this site bringing me what I had hoped from it. But so far I'm only #4 on Google, so we'll see.
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  • Profile picture of the author OBaz
    What's bad with Free Wordpress themes is that some of them (good looking ones especially) require you keep the links intact in the footer. If you take them down whole design of the site goes down. Nothing wrong with giving back to theme designer a backlink or two. But putting on your site irrelevant links in the footer on every page is a bit drastic trade off.

    Say, if you've got a site about dog training and in the footer with your new free theme you get links back to sail boats site is not good in the eyes of the search engines. And you can't tell the bots that it was the only way to make the theme work properly on your site.
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  • Profile picture of the author snowcloud
    In my opinion you could easily work with that theme. I think the best piece of advice I could give you would be to match the colors of your Google Adsense code to your theme. Choose better placement for your ads as well.

    Put a tower text add in your sidebar and use image banners in your posts.

    Don't ever go over 3 ads per page though. Google's rules..
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    • Profile picture of the author asg
      Originally Posted by snowcloud View Post

      I think the best piece of advice I could give you would be to match the colors of your Google Adsense code to your theme.
      This is some great advice, it is already paying off as a matter of fact (+4 clicks)! As for the ads placements and image ads, I got your advice and I'm going to try at some point, but right now I'm trying to emulate Pat Flynn's style.
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  • Profile picture of the author linkmonster
    Site is very simple you must redesign and improve lot It must be attracted while looking the website.
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  • Profile picture of the author zapunited
    I also don't believe that your theme is the problem. As the previous writer said I would
    also use image banners in your posts and try different positions.

    Another reason could be the content of your website. Is it interesting enough for your readers? I mean no matter how cool and attractive the design is, if the content isn't interesting, the people will leave your website very fast (remember content is king).

    But this is no kind of criticism on your website posts- just a point to think about...
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