Wordpress is one of the best blogging platforms out there, and we all know that. We also know how big a user base the wordpress community possesses. But… Have you ever tried to leverage the power of this? No is the answer I’m expecting from most of people I know.

Why?

It’s such a super simple idea that can make you thousands of dollars with a very relatively low investment. An initial investment is required though, maybe a grand or so. $500 is also good enough to get you started. Alright, so we need a couple of professionals at coding & designing. My recommendations are James McDonalds and Matthew Rochow.

Both of ‘em are very good at what they do, and quite affordable. The total cost until here is $475. You may want to add some more bells and whistles to your theme; make it stand out of the league, and thus spend a little more overall. However, the investment should be worth it. If you’re looking for some other professionals, here are some “general” tips (often forgotten):

- Do take a look at their previous work; if your hiring a rookie, ask him to a sample work first.

- Never pay 100% upfront. General terms are 50% upfront.

- Get a contract signed. Save yourself from being scammed.

The last pointer is very important. A few minutes of extra work can ensure your money ain’t gonna go waste. Once you have a designer and a coder on board, and your plans chalked out, their work starts. In the time they do their work, you can chalk out some marketing plans. Ask yourself some questions:

- What are you going to price it at?

- What payment plans your offering?

- What percentage to the affiliates?

- Where to promote?

- A USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

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For an example, I’d price the theme at $59.95, pay 75% per sale to the affiliates (which comes out to be $44.9625). Okay, that’s my pricing plan on the front end. Considering a vast percentage of the sales would be coming from affiliates, and we’ll have to spend some money to recruit them and keep them on board, this is essentially a self-liquidating offer.

To make decent profits – enough to justify all the work that goes into this – we need to funnel the buyers into some kind of OTO’s (One time offers), maybe some upsell. For an example, we might just do an upsell of $19.95 to get hands over 6 more themes. Assuming 20% people take the upsell, we’re now in decent profits, and scaling this up, we can make a huge chunk of cash.

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Good enough, Now we’ve sorted our pricing plans. Let’s put some time into chalking out our marketing plans.

Where to Promote? Clickbank. Actually, this is an idea. Never saw a Wordpress theme launched on Clickbank, so I’m actually thinking on doing one and checking what the results are. The number of affiliates you find there can give your theme a big boost, thus making you a LOT of money.

Other than that, I can advertise on some high traffic blogs. Now that will cost a lot of money. I’d avoid that in the initial stages.

Recruiting affiliates – I can start a thread on some affiliate forums, such as Digitalpoint, Warrior forum, maybe a listing on Sitepoint, JVNotifyPro etc. With some kind of affiliate management system on the backend, it won’t be very hard to maintain once you get going.

Now, at just 100 or so sales (100 x $15 approx profit from sales + 20 x $19.95 from the upsell) we’re at around $1900 profits. And we’re talking of just 100 sales. It’s up to you then, continue with the site, or flip it for say — $15,000?

This was a real short post, kinda step-by-step to making money with wordpress themes. I did not go into too much details. By the way, I’ve a 50 or so pages Flipping established websites eBook on the verge of being released for free for my subscribers. If you want to get hold of it, please subscribe from the box on the right.