Author: admin

7 New WordPress Themes From Thrive

admin 10,068 Comments

These 7 new themes from Thrive have some great features including being built for speed, mobile responsive (they will look great on any size screen) plus a lot of other features.

Focus

 1 FocusBlog

A multi purpose theme.

 

ignition

2 Ignition,

Good for a marketing website.

 

luxe

3 Luxe

For building a beautiful site.

 

minus

 

4  Minus

A Minimalist design

 

performag

5 Performag

A true magazine theme.

 

squared

6 Squared

An attention grabbing theme.

 

voice

7 Voice

This theme is for content and authors.

 

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

I recommend Thrive Themes they make blog page building a breeze.

2 Awesome Sites For Free High Resolution Images

admin 8,694 Comments

Rasberries

 

#1 Free creative commons photos on Unsplash

Unsplash provides a great site where they release 10 new photos in high resolution every 10 days. The photos are released under creative commons zero so that means anyone can use them on any blog or website they want. It can be for private or commercial reasons. The owners of the images have waived all rights to the images.

Click Here to visit Unsplash

#2 Pixabay

This is another site where they have over 250k photos, vectors and art illustrations that are available to use for free. While they do have a limited amount of advertising on this site you can remove this by adding 10 images of your own to the site.

The photos are set out in various categories and I have found them to be of high quality.

Below is an example of a photo I have cropped from their site.

cave

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click Here to visit Pixabay

If you would like a free tool to make it easy to snap images or crop images to any size then download MWsnap just do a Google search for it. Its available as freeware and is only a small program. I use it all the time and find it very useful for working on my blog.


About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

I recommend Thrive Themes they make blog page building a breeze.

Learn To Code The Easy Way

admin 1,080 Comments

codify

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learn to code interactively for free.

Codecademy is a brilliant site that teaches you how to code in several computer languages including HTML & CSS, Javascript, jQuery, Python, Ruby and PHP.

The beauty of the site is that you can learn at your own pace, saving your progress each day or
whenever you decide to return to the program. It sets out in a step by step process how to perform
each task. You can teach yourself how to build websites from scratch. These can be from very
simple sites to quite difficult programming.

You will see your site being built in real time and updating as you add more code to your project.

Click this link to visit the site now and start your project. One great aspect of the site is that its
completely free to work on.

Codecademy have had a number of success stories including a non technical guy who went on to build one of Time Magazines top 50 sites for 2013.


About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

I recommend Thrive Themes they make blog page building a breeze.

23 Brilliant HTML5 Templates – All Free To Download

admin 6,490 Comments

aerial template


Free HTML5 Templates

You can now download some great HTML5 templates completely free of charge compliments
of HTML5 UP! This website provides the templates under creative commons so you are free to
do what you like with them.

The templates are built on intelligent HTML5 and CSS3 they are super customizable and adjust
automatically depending on whether you are using a desktop, tablet or mobile.

Follow this link to check out all the styles available.

Further Assistance

Contact me via the popup on this page should you require further assistance to setup one of the
templates for yourself. I am using one of the templates for my main page at philrickwood.com
feel free to check it out.

Below is another of the styles available on the site.

big picture template

 

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

I recommend Thrive Themes they make blog page building a breeze.

3 Ways To Engage Your Followers On Twitter

admin 558 Comments

Engage followers

 

Image released on Creative Commons at Flickr.

Engaging your Twitter followers
Engaging with your followers on Twitter is one of the most beneficial and cheapest ways to market your brand. Its something you should get into the habit of doing each day. Below I have listed 3 ways you can easily engage with your followers.

#1 Make your posts informative.

Post interesting and informative posts. If a subject is not interesting to you chances are pretty high it won’t interest many of your followers either. Mix your posts up with news from your industry or the category from which most of your followers are interested in.

Its important that you do not make every post about your product or service. Followers will soon get tired and bored with your site if you post repetitive or pushy ads for your business at every opportunity.

If your stuck for what to post try a few inspirational sayings or quotes in image format. They always seem popular on my site.

#2 Engage with followers everyday.

Be sure to engage with your followers at every opportunity. Reply to all comments that people direct to you everyday. You can do this by thanking people for their comments, for following you or for a re-tweet. Engage them by asking questions and building relationships. This will effectively assist in building your brand as a company or business that is responsive to others.

Although the direct message section can be associated with spam you will get some genuine inquiries there so its worth checking out and replying to those messages as well.

#3 Make reference to your followers site.

When others follow you check out their Twitter page and the links to their website. That way you can tweet them a welcome or thank you tweet and refer to something they are interested in. You will be much more likely to get a response when you refer specifically to one of their interests.

Make your tweet an open statement or question i.e ‘What a great site you have how long did it take to build?’  or ‘I see your from Australia, what time is it over there now?’ etc. These types of response will open the conversation up and make it more likely you will be able to build an online friendship and network with fellow Twitter users.

 

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

I recommend Thrive Themes they make blog page building a breeze.

Top 10,000 Domain Names by Domain Count

admin 304 Comments 
Domain names

 

Image released on Creative Commons at Flickr.

Below is a list of the top 20 domain names by domain count on the internet. It can be difficult to find a top level domain name like .com if you want one of the top names like web or net. You can always pay a premium to obtain these domains but they can be expensive.

Even words such as ‘social’ can be difficult to find if you want to use it as the first word in your domain name.

Top 20 Domain Names

1.    web
2.    net
3.    art
4.    tech
5.    cloud
6.    shop
7.    home
8.    media
9.    world
10.    pro
11.    design
12.    mobile
13.    life
14.    city
15.    tv
16.    blog
17.    travel
18.    online
19.    it
20.    star

For a full list of names go to leandomainsearch who do a great job in compiling this list.

Personally I like to buy my domain names and hosting from Hawkhost who I have always
found to be very reliable. Their support is also 1st rate.

 

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

I recommend Thrive Themes they make blog page building a breeze.

Now Everyone can View their Twitter Activity Stats

admin 81 Comments

Ian ChanNew Statistics Available

Twitter announced on the 28th of August that they were opening up their analytics to everyone. Previously only Advertisers and verified uses could view the their stats.

Below is an example of the stats provided by my site.

Follow this link to view your stats.

Tweet Stats

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

I recommend Thrive Themes they make blog page building a breeze.

6 Ways to Create a Great Twitter Profile

admin 28 Comments

Twitter HeaderCreating a great Twitter profile
This should be your number one consideration when starting your Twitter account. It will
have a huge impact on the number of followers you get and your interaction with other people on Twitter. (Image above from Mashable.com’s Twitter site.)

6 Ways to create your Twitter profile.

#1 Find a great header image to display at the top of your page. Something that relates to you, your business or your location. There are lots of free image sites out there just do a search on Google or get one done professionally its your choice. Its the first thing people will see when they arrive at your site so make it impressive. I’d recommend not making it too sales oriented or you may turn people off if they think your only there to sell to them.

#2 Get a quality image for your profile picture of yourself if you have a personal Twitter account. If your have a company account then use your company logo. Ensure that the photo used is of high quality to again create a good first impression.

#3 Use the recommended image sizes for both your header picture and the profile picture. Twitter recommends “Recommended dimensions for profile photos are 400×400 pixels. Recommended dimensions for header photos are 1500×500 pixels.”

#4 Complete all sections of the bio section including your location and a link to your blog or business. The bio does not give you a lot of room so think carefully before completing that section. Take a look at people with similar interests to yourself and check out their bio’s for ideas on how to word it. I would not recommend using too many hash tags in this section. They  lead to search queries and take potential viewers of your site to the Twitter search screen.

#5 Make new tweets interesting. Its nothing worse than going to a site and finding it full of advertising. Many sites just repeat the same advertisement on a regular basis. This is not interesting for your followers and its against Twitters spam policies so it may get you banned. Re-tweet stories from other people from within your sector or interest group. The recommended tweet ratio is 3:1 tweet or re-tweet other people’s tweets 3 times to one of your own. This will avoid your site becoming boring and predictable.

#6 Use images with your posts.
Solar post
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By using images in your posts you will attract a larger audience than text only posts which can get overlooked. Above is a recent post which received a number of clicks, re-tweets and made a favorite. The image lets viewers immediately visualize what you are trying to portray in your tweet.

————————–

If you use just these 6 tips you will be well on the way to providing a top rate Twitter site and attract
a large following to your page.

 

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

Get More Twitter Shares With this New Content Builder

admin 22 Comments

Thrive Themes

Thrive Themes has introduced a nice feature to their WordPress blog building tools.

The feature lets your visitors click a box to tweet any quote from your post with one click.
Another nice feature of this element is that it will automatically add your URL from the  blog page to the tweet.

I really like some of the other features they have used in Thrive Themes. This theme lets
you build WordPress pages without the usual problems of moving around text and images
on your page and have no idea how it will look on the finished page.

In Thrive themes you get an immediate image of how the final page will look no more
preview post, return fix problem repeat etc. This video gives a better idea of how the theme
works.

 

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 100k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com

5 Ways Note Taking will Improve Productivity

admin 4,343 Comments

Notepad

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take notes as you think of ideas

Unless I take notes when I think of an idea I’ll probably forget all about it. By taking just
a short note I can always refer back to it later and work on the idea if it has any merit.

5 Ways Note Taking will Improve Productivity

1 Have a notepad on your desk if you work in an office or are a home based worker. That
way whenever you think of an idea you can just jot it down and won’t forget. I usually just
have a small notepad with the date scribbled on top under that I write any new idea or
concept that comes to me.

2 Use a mind mapping software like Freemind this is public domain free software that
you can transfer ideas to easily and always come back to later. I find mind maps great
for linking related ideas together. Once you have achieved the task or completed it simply
delete it from your list on Freemind.

3 Use the bookmarking service on your browser. Whenever you see a page or site that
could be useful in future bookmark it for future reference. I find it best to place it in an
appropriate folder such as ‘Social Media’. Immediately saving it to a folder it will be much
easier to manage your bookmarks long term. It can become difficult to locate specific sites
otherwise.

4 When your out for a walk or not at the office carry a small notepad and pen with you.
That way whenever an idea creeps into your mind you can make a quick note of it and then
add it to Freemind or a more comprehensive list later.

5 Most mobile phones these days have provision to save notes or ideas. If you don’t like
the idea of carrying a note pad with you then place it on your phone. Later copy the idea
to another list.

About the Author
Philip Rickwood is a Social Media Enthusiast
from Devonport in Tasmania with over 90k
Twitter followers at @afhitcom
philrickwood.com