WordPress is the favorite platform of millions of bloggers. Every day, people are buying premium WordPress themes and sites owners like me are making money with affiliate marketing.
Promoting WordPress themes is a profitable niche right now, but as the competition is becoming harder every day there’s a few things to know in order to be successful. Here are 5 expert tips taken from my experience as a successful WordPress affiliate marketer.
Launch a WordPress focused blog
[tweet]In order to get clicks on your affiliate links, you have to get traffic. There’s billions of way to attract traffic, but in my opinion the best way is to get authority in your niche and then use your authority to promote the best products and make money. The quality of the traffic you get is also very important: people who like cars will certainely not be interested in WordPress themes, but if you attract bloggers, there’s way more chances that they’ll purchase something throught your affiliate links.
If you own a blog related to WordPress, you’ll attract visitors who are potentially interested by the themes you promote, because they’re already running WordPress.
There’s a bunch of really cool blogs focused to WordPress so standing out of the crowd may be a bit harder than some years ago, but if you have interesting posts I’m pretty sure you can create a popular WordPress related blog.
Use a theme gallery
Classical ads are often seen as annoying by readers. Lots of people won’t click on it just because they think adverts == evil. But if you display a gallery of your favorite premium themes, you’re not advertising, you’re showcasing. People will be more likely to click on your affiliate links if they provide a real value to them.
A good example of a premium theme gallery can be seen on my blog WPRecipes. Althought I haven’t updated the themes for at least one year, the gallery is still profitable and get good feedback by my readers.
Promote the programs that works
Due to the popularity of WordPress themes, lots of people decided to create their own WordPress theme shop. Of course, most of them failed, because their themes wasn’t that great, because they didn’t managed to promote them correctly, or both.
This is why you shouldn’t waste your time promoting themes that won’t sell and focus primarily on the established sites. In my opinion, you should promote:
Those five are serious companies, and those programs work the best for me. Though, feel free to try other programs and see how they perform on your blog.
Lists of themes works great
On my blogs, I have wrote some lists of themes, grouped by subject. For example, you can have a look to my 10 professional WordPress themes to start your online business or to the 8 awesome WordPress themes to sell your products online.
Those posts can be a very effective way to sell WordPress themes if the subject is interesting. Just stay reasonable and don’t publish 3 lists like this per week, otherwise you’ll bore your readers.
Another interesting option to consider is to mix free and premium themes in a list.
Manage your affiliate links properly
Making money with affiliate marketing is one thing, but if you’re looking to the long term, you’ll have to manage your affiliate links properly.
Affiliate links can be changed by the product owner, products can be updated, or even deleted. The products which sell today will probably not sell that much in three years. For those reasons, you should always use your own site to redirect to your affiliate links.
There’s a lot of ways to cloak and manage your affiliate links. You could for example create a “affiliate” directory on your server and use the php function header() to redirect to your affiliate links.
There’s also a lot of free WordPress plugin that can be useful for affiliate marketers:
- Redirection
- SEO Smart Links
- GoCodes
- Affiliate Links Cloaker
- Ninja Affiliate (The one I use, not free unfortunely)
Anyways, nevermind which tool help you to manage your affiliate links, the more important is to be able to manage it quickly and efficiently.