A few of my regular readers will know that the other half and I regularly put together
HTML templates that we give away for free and promote on Open Designs amongst other places.
This works really well for us, it gives us massive backlinks and improves our Technorati rank, in addition to giving us constant traffic from people who click our designer link to see more themes. We all know building solid backlinks in a fickle blogging world is difficult, this is why I consistently recommend giving something away to get more exposure.
Recently we've had a couple of not so pleasant experiences with clients who wanted custom themes for Wordpress, except they couldn't work out what they wanted and ended up costing us a lot of money. So, we're throwing around the idea of producing attractive looking templates based on 2 or 3 column layouts, and then selling a link in the footer to your site, or if you're an SEO, then to one of your client's sites. Alternatively, we could sell the entire theme with resell rights.
We've seen widget capable WP theme links being sold for $75 a time, and it would be great to get that much, but I was thinking if we got $100 per template or more we'd be happy. So for example if we sold three links in an HTML template each one would be priced at $33, however If we produced widget capable Wordpress themes with an options page that these would be worth a little bit more. For us that is much less than we get for webdesign but it would let us focus our energies on putting together attractive designs without having to deal with meetings, phone calls, client research etc. It would also mean we could produce more designs. :)
The way it would work is this, the left side of the footer would have the copyright symbol and the website name of the person who downloads the theme, and on the right side would be 2 or 3 links to theme sponsors, although if a single sponsor wanted to buy the entire footer that would be possible as well.
The themes would be released under a Creative Commons license meaning if they get ported to WP or another CMS your link would need to remain, so you get extra exposure. Of course some people would remove them, but we know from past experience with themes that most don't and if the design is popular you'll get a lot of backlinks.
The other option of producing themes and then simply sell them to the highest bidder is also appealing, the buyer (you?) would then have exclusive rights to use or resell the theme including the ability to remove our designer link and replace it with their own. This effectively becomes a white label theme then allowing you to either place your own sponsor links in the footer, or just those of your own websites and use the theme to gain traffic and backlinks to your own network of sites.
So, knowing that many of the people who visit my blog are in business and need to increase backlinks without paying a fortune for listings in directories, I'd love to hear your thoughts. The image you see here is a mockup of one of the designs we haven't released but would like to. So if you like this design and want to talk about putting your own link in the footer of it, or even buy it outright, then
shoot me an email with your thoughts.
