Money is abundant in the internet. The problem is to find a right way to get it. The demand of themes for WordPress is increasing day by day along with the popularity of WordPress in the online communities. So we see that selling premium WordPress theme can be a good trend for business in the future. No matter what is your position in the premium WordPress theme marketplace – a beginner or a professional, a create-to-sale or just give away free theme – this post can give you a comprehensive view about this potential business. Why we should choose to sell WordPress themes? Nobody can deny the famous as well as the popularity of WordPress theme. But why it is a better choice to sell theme for WordPress than for other open-source like Joomla? Let take a look through the advantages and disadvantages below, it will help you make up your mind. Advantages: WordPress is a flexible, powerful and open-source CMS The demand of WordPress theme is really high because of WordPress’s popularity The total costs of creating a theme are low, since WordPress is free, many of its resources are free and many premium frameworks and resources are in low-cost. Premium themes can be sold repeatedly. Or they can be sold in high cost for an original license. Disavantages: Because of the popularity and high-demand of WordPress theme, there are already a lot of competitors. It is a hard thing to get a new theme noticed. Not only the technical part but also the design has to be excellent or at least a good one. It takes time to create a premium WordPress theme and there is no guarantee that this theme will be sold repeatedly. You have to promote a lot for your themes and giving away some free themes are necessary to let people know about you. In conclusion, the two things that you will need on the way of selling premium WordPress themes are time and dedication. If you are willing to devote your time and effort in studying how to make a truly premium theme as well as spend time on marketing them, then money are waiting for you to pick them up. How to make a premium wordpress theme? Before you decide to make and sell premium themes, you should identify the differences between WordPress theme and Premium WordPress theme. It is the price that makes the themes different, but we are not going to discuss about this part. The word “premium†means superior quality or value. This means Premium WordPress themes must have high standard than just WordPress theme. So, what are the features that a premium theme need? Let check out the followings: Ease-of-use for the builders and user-friendly for visitors. High quality and standard design Have customizable Option panel and widget ready Ad-free. If customers pay for it, it is theirs. No Adsence linking back to your own account or “Designed by…†in the footer. Of course, you don’t have to meet all the features above to call your themes “premiumâ€, but they will help you build up a good reputation in the marketplace. This means you can sale more themes and get a higher rate from users. Remember, nobody forbid you to call your themes “premiumâ€, but you need to create themes with truly quality, since this is the stable way to stand in this cutthroat competition market. High quality design: What is the first and main thing that a potential customer sees in their first sight, when they are searching for a premium theme? It is the design. A good design will catch customers’ attention right away. If they find the design suitable with their style, they will continue to see other things. A good designer must fully understand their customers’ need and design exactly what they desire. On the way creating a theme, designers will find that create a premium theme is different from design for a certain client. It is a guessing game, since they don’t know who their clients are, what they actually need and what their style are. Designers must have to use their experiences to figure out. There are some small tips for you, let take a look through the best-selling WordPress theme on the marketplace and see how it works. Did you recognize that the designs are not so artsy-craftsy? They all focus on the general functions that will cater for their customer the best. That way, buyers will easily see how their own customization can be put into place. In short, the themes must be beautiful and versatile. And the important thing is that it has to be used easily by many kind of business. This will help you sell more times for one theme. Adapt Theme Review / Demo & Download Modernize Theme Review / Demo & Download Blanco Theme Review / Demo & Download Widget ready: Just take a walk through some WordPress themes; you can see that almost every theme designed with widget-ready. Widget is important for any theme, no matter it is premium or not. Luckily, widget-ready is one of the easiest features to build up in term of back-end development. You can find out some useful tutorial video that teach you about widgetizing WordPress theme. One more thing, the most ideal position to place widgets is in the sidebar and footer of a theme. Custom post types: You can consider the “post†word in this context as content. It is a generic term and don’t be confused it with blog post. Actually, we cannot define exactly what Custom post types are, they can represent any type of content you want. The same as blog post, Custom post types can create, edit and store information but with much more creative control. This feature is really important for your customers when it comes to business. They will want their products have as much detail as possible and the property of those products must be easily to sort out. There are a lot of video on the internet that show you how to create it. Translation: Marketing your themes globally but create it locally! Never let visitors leave your site just because of they cannot understand the language and your site have no ability of translation. The theme-buyers will consider this function carefully if they are going built an international website. So that, it is strongly recommend to add the translation tools/plugins in your themes. Those themes will have more chances of being chosen. Options panel: This feature has proved its important role in WordPress community recently. Custom option panels provide easier and guided customization for buyers. Designers can also improve their marketing opportunities via the creation of this feature, since this is one of the most desire things for both free and premium WordPress themes. However, we have to say that it is quite difficult to implement. If you are going to design it, the following tutorials may give you some help: Create Custom WordPress Panels with WordPress Making a Custom Theme Panel – WordPress Options Page Tutorial: Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress Create an Awesome WordPress Theme Options Page The State of WordPress “Theme Options†Pages Also, you should take a look carefully at some popular free and premium themes to check out how their option pages are set up. By this way, you can know what necessary and useful when design this feature. For more : Tips to start selling Premium WordPress Theme
Posting mostly so I remember to come back and post. Let me gather some thoughts and find some time and get back to this. Trying to find a way to offer themes (and hosting, not sure about offering) is mostly what I am tackling currently.