As a WordPress designer naturally you want to be able to make money online selling your WordPress theme. This article offers helpful tips on where to sell your WordPress theme and how to create some of the best WordPress Themes.
There are three main things you need to do in order to sell a WordPress theme:
- Create a theme that’s attractive and useful.
- Create a viable theme that works with a variety of browsers.
- Market your theme properly.
Not everybody has the skillsets to do all three of these things, which means that some designers may team up with a tester and a marketing expert, while others may develop the skills to carry out all parts of the process. Here are a few tips on the selling part of the process, assuming that you’ve got a theme that is attractive, useful, and thoroughly tested.
Where to Sell Your WordPress Theme
You can set up your own website to sell your WordPress theme. Depending on your goals, you might do this from:
- an ecommerce site that only sells that theme or a selection of themes that you have designed
- an ecommerce site that promotes your WordPress theme along with your other design-related activities, such as custom design
- a blog that discusses various aspects of WordPress and also promotes your theme
On your own site, you have to do all the marketing, but you can set your own prices and interact directly with your customers.
There are also sites that promote WordPress themes by multiple designers, and you might wish to present your theme on one or more of these. Of course, on a WordPress theme ecommerce site run by someone else, you will only be earning a percentage of the selling price, but you need to balance this against the wider audience that your theme will reach.
Some of the websites on which you can sell a site include:
- Headway
- StudioPress
- Templatic
- ThemeForest
- WooThemes
- WP Theme Market
Note that, unlike with your own site, your work will have to undergo an approval process to get listed on a site run by somebody else, and they may be the ones setting the price as well.
Crowd sourcing sites allow you to compete to meet a client’s spec for a WordPress theme. This is done on 99 Designs, for example. You might find the variety of specs exciting or motivating, but you can also end up wasting time on a proposition that is a much better deal for the client than the designers.
Approaches That Can Help Sell Your WordPress Theme
If your theme works well with different browsers and resolutions and is well-designed in other regards, users are apt to be more satisfied and give you better reviews. This is pretty obvious. But the following elements may not be such obvious sales boosters:
- Provide good, clear, thorough documentation. If a customer has a choice between figuring it out for him- or herself and getting some help, it could be the deciding point in a sale.
- Provide a live preview. WYSIWYG is another point of good salesmanship. If you have too many options to show easily in one preview, include two . . . or more. Better yet, use satisfied customers’ sites as previews for your theme.
- Provide images of different aspects of the site. Pay particular attention to features that don’t appear in any of the live previews and dialogs that allow customers to easily control their site.
- Write a compelling description of your theme and its features. Choosing an attractive name is part of this process.
- Provide tech support and upgrades as WordPress issues new versions.
- List the “problems” that your WordPress theme solves.
- Use Twitter, Facebook, and other social network to promote your WordPress theme.