Just wondered if anyone had ever sponsored any wordpress themes and if so did they have any success? Never really used it as a link building tool and wanted to gain an understanding of its effectiveness
Yes and yes. I regularly sponsor themes on here and they are an effective way of gaining backlinks. I've particular benefited in terms of Technorati ranking when I've linked to one of my blogs. I'm careful which themes I sponsor - I want those with only 2 or 3 discreet links in the footer. Any theme that has a footer akin to an American General's medal ribbons is likely to have the links edited out, which obviously isn't good.
i did not become sponsor for a wp theme but i wil be in future. it's good way to build one way link building and as countryboy said it will also help your technorati ranking
From what I've saw and heard it's a great way to build backlinks, however, it can be costly and you should look into who you're buying from what what sort of response the theme will get. If no one downloads it you've wasted your money
I think you have to be careful about those with three long anchor text in the footers because many users will delete them. Two short ones should be a good investment.
I have sponsored a few, the results are not as great as expect as like already mentioned quite a few of those links will be removed. There are better was to spend that money, but if you can get a nice theme for cheap, its still a Ok investment.
Basically designers try and make some cash to compensate them for their time and effort. They do this by selling links embedded in the footer of their theme. These links, unless edited out, will appear in every blog that uses the downloaded theme. Popular themes get thousands of downloads, so you could end up with thousands of backlinks. It's also common for bloggers with established WordPress blogs to change their theme every so often, just for a bit of variety. If they change it to a theme you have sponsored you could instantly get a new backlink from a popular, high PR blog. Head over to the Link Sales forum and you'll see lots of themes looking for sponsors.