With all of the excitement nowadays, concerning boosting search engine rankings, Technorati visibility and creating a steady slew of backlinks to a website, it’s hard to know which methods work in the never-ending battle against the powers and which tactics tend not to yield such flash results. One method of advertising a website and receiving a slew of backlinks that is becoming increasingly popular, is the sponsorship of WordPress themes. Some people claim it’s down-right outrageous to have ‘sponsored links’ in themes, others see it as their right. The way I see it, if a designer has worked hard, creating a theme for general use, the least that a user of the layout could do would be to have the courtesey to give something back to the Theme designer, in the form of a single, small backlink. Is it really all that much to ask?
Of course, ethics aren’t the only matter being discussed. The monetary gain included, poses questions too. What should theme designers be charging for a link in a theme? Just recently – Performancing launched it’s own “Sponsor A Theme” forum, in which users are being given a chance to openly bid for theme sponsorship, and from what I’ve seen, it’s going pretty well. This, at least, solves the problem of setting a reasonable price-per-theme. In context though, whether you’re paying $100 or $1,000 – you’re going to be getting yourself a pretty good deal.
At Text-Link-Ads, you can expect to pay $50+ for a PR5 backlink. 1,000 people download a theme which you bid $1,000 to have a sponsored link placed within. 50 of these backlinks are PR5 or higher. Equalling only $1 per link, you’re getting yourself a pretty good deal! Considering the fact that the one-way link you’ve got embedded in so many people’s blogs is placed on every single page on the website, in reality, you could be getting tens of thousands of backlinks. The way I see it, opportunity like this is priceless.
Will you be bidding on a sponsored theme any time soon?
This post has been written by David Wilkinson – 13-Year Old ProBlogger.
3 thoughts on “Theme Sponsorship”
From a pure marketing perspective if you own a webhosting company or sell/develop blog plug ins theme sponsorship should be part of any marketing program.
Your theme sponsorship creates a sense of authority for your product. Most casual users would assume that your link in part of a theme (therefore used by a site) is a de-facto product endorsement from the site. Plus you can get thousands of SERP friendly backlinks.
Even themes like this (no disrespect to the creator) are averaging nearly 6,000 downloads!
http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/1-column/5/ambiru-10/
Or if you’re looking for a top-downloader, this one’s got 58,000 downloads.
http://themes.wordpress.net/columns/2-columns/701/vistered-little-1/
Convinced? 😉
Can you prove any of those figures? I downloaded A P-Theme, messed around with it, decided it wasn’t appropriate for my needs and that was that. I could’ve, but didn’t, remove the credits in the footer.
It’s a fantastic deal if the scenario you present is actually true. If not, it’s a crap deal for the bidder and lovely deal for the theme designer.
In real terms context, $100 is a significantly better deal than $1000 😉 (if you don’t believe me I can prove it on an etcha-sketch!)
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