If you have been blogging for awhile, you probably have heard the popular blogging saying that “Content is king.”   This is definitely true, but there are a lot of other things you can do beyond writing great content to help contribute to your blog’s success.

One example happened a couple of months ago when the evil John Chow felt his earnings had hit a wall.  He was making good money, but he felt that he could do better, so he decided that he needed to make a change to continue to improve his blog’s earnings.   That was when he decided to get a custom theme that allowed for better ad placement.   In addition to allowing for better advertising placement and the inclusion of 125 x 125 ads, this also served as a way for John to create a unique brand or look for him to be associated with.

John was not the only blogger to make significant changes to his theme lately.  Domtan has recently compiled a list of full time bloggers that have made major theme changes and includes both before and after screen shots.  I’ve been reading many of these blogs for a long period of time, so it was kind of fun to revisit some of their old themes.  While reading through that post, it was very clear that giving your blog a unique look can go a long way towards improving traffic, as well as improving your site’s income.

Unfortunately, at this time I am not a full time blogger and in my current situation I don’t really have the time to do a new theme from scratch, so this blog’s theme tends to be a constant work in progress.   My goal is to keep it unique, yet still work to improve it to keep up with modern blogging trends.  I get a few requests each week asking where they can download my theme, so I feel like I’m doing a good job of keeping up with the trends.

Are you using a commonly used WordPress theme?  If you find that you are using a WordPress theme that you downloaded from somewhere on the net, you may want to take that next step and invest the time into creating a custom WordPress theme (or consider purchasing one).   This will help you to both create an identity and continue to evolve your blog.   Investing the time or money may not seem worth it at first, but in the long run it will help you increase your readership and improve your monthly earnings.