Archive for January 20th, 2008
20
I’ve recently met a web designer who is making $3500 per week on average selling wordpress themes he designs. I’ve tried my hand at designing wordpress themes for sale but my talent is mediocre at best and my themes sell for $20 - $100 when they sell. The gentleman making $3500 per week gets from $250 - $500 for his themes and his themes usually sell.
If you have talent for web design and know how to code wordpress themes, you could be making some extra income selling your designs. Even you don’t have the talent to create $500 themes, if you’re able to design, code and sell multiple themes in a day you could still make a fairly decent income from your designs, even if they sell for $20. You won’t be able to rely on designing wordpress themes as your sole source of income; but you could design and sell themes as an additional source of income and pull from $200 - $1000 extra per month. For $200 per month you just need to sell 10 themes per month at $20 or 5 themes per month at $40.
Of course your themes can’t be poorly designed as no one will buy them even if you’re only selling them for a dollar. Check out wordpress theme galleries and make note of the styles that get rave reviews or that get downloaded most frequently. Try to design similarly styled themes; or you can try to be innovative and go for something new and artistic. The higher the quality of your work the more you can expect to get for the theme as long as you’re selling the theme outright, meaning you’re transferring full rights to the theme to the buyer and will not sell multiple copies. It’s possible to sell multiple copies under the “premium themes” umbrella; but this post is specifically focussed on designing themes and selling full rights to the theme to a single buyer.
As an alternative to selling your theme you can also sell sponsored links in the footer. People buy these types of links to help increase their number of backlinks. It’s a controversial subject but there is still a market for selling sponsored links in your wordpress themes. You can find buyers on sites like Digital Point in their buy sell trade forum.
Selling sponsored links obligates you to make your themes available for free download from as many wordpress themes databases as possible. You can sell up to 4 links at $25 each so that you make $100 per theme you create. If you can create 5 themes per week and sell $100 in links you could generate around $2000 per month extra income from designing wordpress themes. Of course if your themes aren’t likely to get downloaded no one will be interested in buying a sponsored link; so you need to have some talent for creating themes people will want to download.