Beyond the Free Stuff: Three Premium Services to Supercharge Your Blog

When I started my blog back in 2010, I had very small goals for it. All I wanted to do was get my ideas and college tips out to other students, and possibly have a writing portfolio to show to employers when I graduated and started looking for jobs. With these small goals came small expectations for my blog’s quality; I grabbed the first free theme I could find, used nothing but CC-licensed images from Flickr, and made do with free plugins or code I wrote myself for extended functionality. This worked well for a while, as my traffic was very small and didn’t warrant any big upgrades.

Everything changed when I got popular, though. All of the sudden, I was getting traffic I never dreamed of, and I decided that I was going to try my hand at the whole “pro-blogging” deal while still being a student. This meant, for starters, blogging more frequently. I went from posting about five times per month to a schedule of three posts per week, and I’ve steadily bumped that up to five. Along with my more frequent output of content, I decided that the actual blog needed to be better. The first iteration of this improvement process involved getting a premium theme. Recently, I went through the second iteration of this process, and decided to go over-the-top and try to optimize every aspect of my site.

What I found by doing this is that there are some premium services out there that really are worth the money when you’re running a well-trafficked blog. In this post, I’m going to detail three of the ones I use and tell you why I think they’re worth your money. Before I start, I need to clear up a couple things:

I’m not an affiliate for any of these services, nor do I benefit in any way by recommending them. They’re simply things I love using and want to spread the word about.
Look at the traffic – and thus, the profit potential – of your blog before investing money. If you’re only getting 30 views a day, then the cost associated may not be worth it. At this point, my blog isn’t super-profitable, but it has the traffic to become so. Make sure you’re at that point before investing unless you’ve just got cash to burn.

With those two odd bits out of way, here are my recommendations.

Envato Marketplaces

The Envato marketplaces are some of the best places to get all sorts of premium content for your blog. By creating a single account, you’ll have access to the offerings at all of them. I’ll list the best ones and what they offer below, but first I’ll let you in on a few tips to get the most out of Envato.

First, I’d recommend depositing money rather than paying outright for items. This is because you’ll pay an extra $2 if you’re not using pre-paid funds. Yes, depositing funds beforehand means you may have money left in your account after you buy what you want, but in my experience, there’s always something else I want, so that money comes in handy. When I first started using Envato, I deposited $40 for a $35 dollar theme. Initially, I thought I wouldn’t ever use that last $5. Quite the opposite has come true, though; to date, I’ve spent over $400 on stuff at Envato. However, this investment has paid off!

Here are my favorite Envato marketplaces and what you can get at each one:

ThemeForest – here you can get themes for any popular CMS, WordPress being the most popular option. In my experience, most good blog themes are around $35. Sure, you can get free themes all over the place, but usually the themes here are made better and come with good support. If you’re not an experienced developer, I’d recommend picking themes with good ratings. Picking a theme with few purchases and no ratings is a risk unless you’re confident that you can make any manual changes yourself.
GraphicRiver – lots of textures, backgrounds, vector art, and other things of the visual nature are here. I wouldn’t recommend buying images for every post you write, but it’s worth your money to grab a few background and texture packs. By learning some simple Photoshop skills, like how to adjust hues and layer modes, create clipping masks, and toy with layer effects, I’ve been able to create dozens of unique designs by using my backgrounds and textures along with free fonts.
CodeCanyon – if you want premium functionality on your blog, but don’t have heavy programming chops (I sure don’t), the premium plugins at CodeCanyon can be really useful. The cool AJAX contact form at my site is one of my favorites.

Envato has other marketplaces for things like Flash scripts, stock photography and video, and 3D resources, but the three marketplaces I mentioned above have been the most useful to me as a blogger.

MaxCDN

MaxCDN is a Content Distribution Network that can make your blog much, much faster. If you’re not sure what a content distribution network is, don’t feel alone; they’re not really well known in blogger circles. Essentially, a CDN is a service that caches your blog’s content and stores it on multiple servers around the world. When a visitor comes to your site, they’ll be served your site’s files from the server nearest to them, resulting in much faster load times.

To use MaxCDN, you have to pay $40 for the first terabyte of bandwidth. I initially scoffed at paying that much just to speed up my site, but then I thought about it – if I’m trying to eventually make money with my blog, shouldn’t I work to make the visitor’s experience as awesome as it can be? The answer is yes, and having a blazing fast site is a really important part of that.

MaxCDN (or any CDN – MaxCDN is just the one that was recommended to me) gets really useful is when you pair it with the WP Total Cache plugin and the Cloudflare service. Using these three things in tandem can decrease your blog’s load times by a substantial amount. Check out this case study to see how powerful this combination can be.

A Blog Critique!

Yeah, this final item probably isn’t something you were expecting. It’s not something concrete like a caching service or a premium plugin, but it can be incredibly helpful all the same. Getting a blog critique from someone who knows what the heck they’re doing can save you a lot of time and mistakes. You may think you know everything there is to know about WordPress, blogging, or any other related topic, but trust me – you don’t. I’ve been blogging for 18 months with some good results, and I still don’t know the half of it. If you want to get a head start (and learn a lot!), get a professional critique. I’m not talking about a $5 critique from some guy on Fiverr – I’m talking about one from an established blogger. I know Chris Garrett offers critiques – however, I won’t recommend just one person, so be sure to look around. There are a lot of successful bloggers out there who will take the time to help you out.

Again, these premium services are for bloggers who have had some success and are looking to make money blogging. Since there are so many great free resources out there (which I try to use whenever possible), I don’t take using these lightly. If you’re wanting to create a truly incredible blog, however, these can really help you out!

Thomas Frank is a junior at Iowa State University studying business. He’s a writer of college tips and is as serious headphone afficionado. You can connect with him on Facebook or Twitter.

[Photo courtesy of Flickr user mtshaw. (CC BY 2.0)]