The worst thing you can do as a visionary and a blogger is limit yourself. The biggest rewards come from the biggest ideas, and the biggest ideas aren’t always easy to implement. I’ll give you a rule of thumb: if it’s easy to do, it’s not a big enough idea to take you to the place that you want to go: internet stardom.
Since I’ve become jaded with the mediocre levels of success on my current blogs (I’m at a plateau of about 50,000 visits per month, and I can’t seem to move it up significantly, despite my best efforts.) The reason I’ve hit this plateau? Bad ideas. I didn’t know much about blogging when I started the site, and I picked the “geekery” niche, which is incredibly crowded and difficult to stand out in. Also, I’ve found that the established blogs are extremely stingy with their link juice – it’s almost as if there’s an inner circle of friends that doesn’t want to let anyone else in on the treasure chest that they found. But that’s a post for a different day.
So, I’m pondering what my new venture should be, and I come up with (what I think is) an awesome idea. The only issue – I need specific things from a WordPress theme, and I worry that these will be difficult to find. I’m looking for social sharing buttons on the home page, the ability to put two posts next to each other on the homepage, the ability to link posts to a specific page as opposed to the post itself, and more. (The point is that the idea takes a basic blog to the next level, and that there’s a lot of custom aspects that I need – it’s not super easy to explain, but check out the basic description if you want more details.)
I search on several theme sites for something that would meet my needs, but come up empty. ThemeForest, Elegant Themes, and Woo Themes lacked a theme which met all of my needs.
At this point, you can do two things: change your needs, or change your theme.
Never change your needs. Don’t limit your imagination just because you can’t find a theme that can support your ideas! WikiAnswers wouldn’t have been able to find a theme to fit their needs, and look how popular they are now! Same with TED, The Awesomer, Uncrate, and many many other popular sites and blogs!
Change your theme. I’m currently working on this right now, but equipped with little coding knowledge, I’m facing a few issues. Here’s something you might find surprising: very few theme creators accept customization jobs. Because of this, I’ve decided to use oDesk to find a freelancer who can help me build the site that exists in my mind. Big firms that do this work are nice, but in my experience they’re very expensive and will charge you for every little extra thing that you ask them to do or fix, which is a pain.
I know that dealing with technology can be difficult, but remember to always come up with your ideas before you look at the tech available to put these ideas into action, otherwise you will be limited by the options that are convenient. Convenience never built great blogs, but hard work built a whole heck of a lot of them.
