Hey, i've just finished building a fairly feature rich theme, i do plan on adding more, but in the mean time, other than selling it as a product, are there any other cool methods that you can recommend? I have seen people on here before selling links in the footers of themes, which i am quite interested in, as it's a quick way to make cash, but are there any other methods? For instance has anyone seen any good results from releasing a free version of a theme, with a link in the footer back to their site where the premium theme exists? I could do with some cash right now so any tips i would appreciate a lot right now. I've got to admit i've been focusing so much on design and coding side of things that i have yet to developer a successful business strategy. Thanks in advance Lee.
The best option for selling theme is themeforest... You can get lots of clients there.. Best of luck!!
Haha, thanks, i tried that, it's not easy getting a theme accepted !! Truth be told, if i had done a theme that was corporate looking i would try to improve and get it accepted but the site i have coded was a kinda grime type design for a Mixed Martial Arts and Muay-Thai promotion type site. Has an event countdown , cutsom post type for the events with custom meta boxes, also have a custom post type for fighters where you can also input their stats via custom meta boxes. Has a lot of coded features but my designs just aren't capable to get accepted, my coding is awsome, design is lacking...
Linking back a theme in the footer to your portfolio is a great way to get recognized if you are just starting out. Especially if a few prominent websites start using your theme. If you decide to do this, I would recommend making it available through wordpress.org, which is the first place people look. The real money in web design is doing custom jobs for high paying clients.
Thanks for the suggestions, i do have a site and am planning to do more themes to sell, but i am just starting out and have no traffic yet. Considering releasing it through wordpress.org as you suggested, maybe i could give away a free version with footer link, and if they want to remove it they can pay a license fee or something along those lines. Randomizer, if you can get clients, i'd be up for doing the coding
Just a random idea. Why not team up with product creators in your niche (MMA), who have an affiliate program to sell this as part of the affiliate package?
Ah oki, cool i didn't know you was a coder but it's always nice to meet fellow coders, cheers for taking the time to reply to my thread. I'm probably going to go with your suggestion for the time being as currently i am a nobody in the web dev world, maybe people will trust me more if i can get something on there and interact with the community on there. Interesting, good idea, i did see someone suggest in another thread ( it may have been you in fact lol ) to offer a high commission rate to affiliates, which i am highly interested in doing to get started, but this is deffo another possibility, suppose i had better do some googling.
Your theme sounds way too custom made for a specific type of sites and it's hard to find an audience for that. That's why themeforest do not accept it, and you will probably have a hard time selling it, or even distributing it for free. Try to make more general themes, niche is good, but that niche, so people can use it on multiple projects. It's not good to pigeonhole yourself in a hole when you build a theme for wide distribution. Those type of themes are ideal if they are commissioned as custom themes by specific sites, so maybe that's something you may want to look into. "site i have coded was a kinda grime type design for a Mixed Martial Arts and Muay-Thai promotion type site. Has an event countdown , cutsom post type for the events with custom meta boxes, also have a custom post type for fighters where you can also input their stats via custom meta boxes."
Cool, i have thought about making this theme multipurpose, i'm going to try to make it useable as a blog aswell, and add in quite a lot of custom page templates (several homepage layouts etc), probably add in an option to change the countdown at the top of the site to adverts if you don't have a current event post selected as active. Cool, hadn't thought of that because i'm not a typographer, however for others that are i'm sure this is going to make them money