Selling Sponsored Links in Wordpress Themes is Dead
I entered the Wordpress Business at the beginning of march and I was one of the first sponsored link sellers on Digitalpoint. At the beginning I made so much money, that I was designing nearly one Wordpress theme a day because I knew that many better designers than me were going to enter this business […]
I entered the Wordpress Business at the beginning of march and I was one of the first sponsored link sellers on Digitalpoint. At the beginning I made so much money, that I was designing nearly one Wordpress theme a day because I knew that many better designers than me were going to enter this business soon. In fact, only 3 weeks after I started to sell sponsored links, the Link sale section of Digitalpoint became overcrowded with designers and webmasters selling sponsored links. The number of sponsored links in the footer went up from 2 to 4 (and some people were selling even the designer link) and the price started to fall down. This was the point where I decided to leave this business, not only because many of the offered themes were better than mine but also because many webmasters started to copy my promotion techniques (which was the best at the time I was selling those links).
To help other webmasters and designers and to give them the opportunity to make some quick many before the end of this business, I wrote two Wordpress theme related articles:
- One about how to make money with Wordpress themes
- Another about Wordpress theme promotion. I was used to send a list of all the websites I submitted the theme to, to each link buyer. Many webmasters bought a sponsored link only to get this list of websites and to start creating themes on their own. That’s why I decided to write an article about Wordpress theme promotion and let all my readers know how to promote them properly.
Digitalpoint is a forum that I read every day and the link sale section is one of my favourite ones. Already a few weeks ago, the threads about Wordpress sponsor links started to become less. After a quick look today I noticed that there are only a few sponsored link sellers left. All of them make great designs but they don’t succeed in selling those sponsor links for more than 20-30$ each. At the beginning of April, it was possible to earn more than 400$ with each Wordpress theme by selling 3 sponsored links in the footer.
Now this business is dead.
Two are the major reasons for this:
- It is not profitable anymore to design a Wordpress theme. A quality theme needs many hours of work and selling 3 sponsor links in the footer for 20$ each link is surely not worth the afford.
- The major websites that host free Wordpress themes and make them available for download to the internet community, does not accept sponsored Wordpress themes anymore (in some cases, they will accept the theme but it will be marked as “Sponsored Theme”). If a theme can’t be pubblished on those websites, it will surely not receive a lot of downloads.
I think you have noticed that I’m still designing Wordpress themes. In fact, it is a very good backlink generator, especially if it gets thousands of downloads like it happened recently to @rctic business. If you are planning to design Wordpress themes in the future, don’t make it for money, but for backlinks and the satisfaction you get everytime a blog is using one of your creations 
