Tag Archives for " iThemes "

14 New Duct Tape Theme

As a few alert readers have pointed out this blog has a new theme. (Those of you enjoying the full feeds in RSS readers, please come in from the cold and drop by and say hi!)

Suffice it to say the refresh was long overdue but pretty challenging for a site that has so many moving parts (albeit many of them my own spinning plates.)

The new theme is part of a complete overhaul here at Duct Tape Marketing to create a better reading environment as well as a more structured explanation of what the heck goes on around the Duct Tape Marketing System and Consulting Network.

I am also moving the entire site onto WordPress, not just the blog. Even though I’ve got hundreds of static pages built up over ten years of creating content, it’s still the best way to go in the long run.

The redesign process was started with a design contest on Crowdspring. I offered a very fair prize (as in fair to designers) and received significant interest to draw from.

The theme is Builder from iThemes and tricked out by the iThemes team to help show how much flexibility this bad boy has. I can’t thank Cory and Chris at iThemes enough for taking this project on. I love Builder and think it is absolutely designed for the user that wants total freedom to create many templates for many uses.

I still have a lot of work to do on the page conversions, speed work, and tweaking to do as well as a fair amount of redirect work to keep the Google happy, but I would love to hear your initial thoughts.

8 Multi-author blogging as a referral tool

Creating a blog and then recruiting a group of authors who have strong strategic referral partner potential is a killer local marketing idea. Every time I mention this tip in small business workshops the light bulb goes on for one or two marketing thinking owners. Just going out and recruiting potential strategic referral partners with this approach will get you much farther than the typical “hey, send me some business pitch.”

Blog networks are all over, but few local businesses are taking advantage of this play. If the right referral partners got together and contributed the occasional post to a blog focused on a local target market, they would own the search terms for their town and generate lots of leads for each other. Think about the power of a plumber, electrician, lawn service and heating and air company creating a local blogsite aimed at providing tips for local homeowners. That group would dominate the local home repair searches that have become the norm for homeowners frustrated with trying to find good help. There really isn’t any reason an insurance, legal, accounting, marketing and management team couldn’t come together and blog about local business.

The power of this as a formal referral group is enormous. This group could eventually start putting together all day workshops and seminars based on the multi-author blog format, much like a magazine.

Here a some tools to look into getting this type of venture going.

• WordPress – it’s a simple blog as entire website
• Themes – Revolution – iThemes – WPRemix – very multi-user blogsite type themes
• Author Exposes Plug-in – Great way to allow different authors to create blog posts and have bio info with their post
• Adding Author pages – tutorial on adding individual author pages to your WordPress blog to allow each author to promote their specific businesses.

WordPress does have a multi-user version called WordPressMU, but I’m not sure you really need it and there’s a lot more info and resources out there for the regular flavor.