The power of giving away free stuff – Part 1 Wordpress themes

As you all know I am giving away wordpress themes for free and today I want to show you the power of this method. Well a month ago, I managed to finish the wordpress theme acosmin v2 that was specially created for one of my blogs TMZ.ro (I know the domain name is lame, but …) and the main reason I released this theme was to increase my SERPs for the keyword tmz. Now because this theme is used by a lot of bloggers, about 250 blogs in which I have links in the footer for both my blogs, I am ranked second for the keyword TMZ on google.com with about six million results, first on .ro and of course second-third on other google extensions. You’ll say what’s the point?

Well if you look in google trends and compare the keyword tmz with one keyword whose traffic you know, you’ll see that this keyword brings a lot of traffic and now, to give you an example, here is a print screen from my google analytics panel (I should remember you that my last activity on that blog was 20 December 2007):

As you can see yesterday I had about 1000 unique visitors from google only for this keyword and the traffic is growing day by day. This is a good way to make money online as well, because you can drive targeted traffic to your websites for certain keywords. Here are a few tips before starting to use this system with wordpress themes:

1. The making off
Well many of you don’t have a clue how to design or code wordpress themes. The only solution for you guys is to hire someone to do the job for you. Let’s say you have 200$ to pay the guy, well for that amount of money you’ll get a nice wp theme. This theme will bring 300-400 backlinks in a month or two and in time it will bring you more. This means a higher pagerank at the next update, more traffic and better SERPs. As we all know higher and targeted traffic results in making more money from your blog/website so you can recover the initial amount of money (200$) in the first month. The only thing is you should research well for keywords before adding the links in the footer/siderbar. For this you can use the free tool from wordtraker and for hiring a designer/coder, the only website I know is rentacoder.com.

2. Promoting your wordpress theme
Let’s say you have the wp theme. Now it’s time to promote it and for this you have unlimited options. My favorite method is submitting it to wordpress themes directories, this brings the best results. Here is a little list of directories:

• Wpthemesfree is one of the best ones. This dir sends you traffic and a lot “clients” in the same time. All my submitted wp themes, have here around 2000 views and 500 downloads, this means about 200-300 backlinks from each theme.
• Freewordpressthemes.com another great directory the only thing is they only accept quality wordpress themes.
• The official themes directory from wordpress. Well here you need an account to upload them and it takes a lot of time to get accepted.
• For a larger list just search on google

You can promote it on forums, on digitalpoint.com you can ask for a review in the html and website design section or on sitepoint.com; they have a dedicated section for this: Reviews and Critiques.

Another way is to contact other bloggers to post an article or include your wp theme in a post. An example is to contact smashingmagazine or performancing, because they often post articles about top 100, top 10 wordpress themes and this is a good way to get to be known.

3. Make money with the backlinks you gain
Once you gain a lot of backlinks your serps will grow and your traffic as well. In the footer of the wordpress theme you should add your links to your products or blog, a single tip I have here: don’t add more than two links because you risk getting them deleted. As well you should optimize your website depending on the keywords you added in the links and work with PPC campaigns for better results and monetization. That is all!

I hope this article was useful and of course I hope you succeed in what you’re doing!