An alternative to Themeforest for those who want to sell WordPress themes

I’ve been creating and creating WordPress themes for a long time: somewhere more than 4 years ago. And, when, two years after the start, I made more than 100 sites on WordPress, then of course the thought came up about how to make passive income for myself by creating plugins and themes for Envato and ThemeForest. At first, Avada's best-selling theme was impressive and, of course, the Revolution Slider and Visual Composer plugins. Immediately you start to multiply sales by the price and it turns out decently. At first, I didn’t even notice WordPress themes that had a very good design, but they had almost no sales. You can even see one example: here both the design is cool and the functionality is not bad, but there are only 20 sales in 4 months.

I had two action plans at once.

First: find the theme, then a designer who could create it and make it up in HTML with CSS. After that, try publishing PSD and HTML / CSS. Usually, if all this is approved by the moderators, then there is a big chance that they will approve the WordPress theme.

The second plan: to offer one of the designers with ThemeForest to compose in HTML / CSS and then create a WordPress theme. At the same time, a distant acquaintance approached me and said that he also wanted to make a WordPress theme for sale on ThemeForest. Without thinking twice, I said that I could help with HTML and CSS, since it already had a design. Here, the gain was double: I got freelance and in addition to this, the opportunity to improve my ThemeForest skills. The friend’s design turned out to be very good, and I suggested he put the PSD up for sale on Envato and tried to explain to him that this is the first step on the road to sales on ThemeForest. He refused, because he wanted to put up for sale immediately HTML / CSS template.

I began to typeset on Bootstrap, having read on the forums information about posting templates on Envato. All this took about two weeks. Then the client tried to put all this on Envato and immediately received a refusal with a request for improvement. It seemed that everything was not so scary and I quickly fixed it. A week later, we again received the same refusal, demanding revision. After reading a lot of articles about posting on Envato and various reviews, as well as seeing another HTML / CSS template, I tried to spend more time this time on finalizing and doing everything perfectly.

My client was very pleased until the moment when we again sent the template to Envato and after a couple of days received a final refusal. We were upset and I immediately lost my appetite for Themeforest themes. Of course, that was all over this time.

After a couple of weeks, I told about my experience at Themeforest to one of my customers who had a similar case in the past. Moreover, he spent about $ 2,000 dollars and only one topic was approved for him. For himself, he discovered an alternative, more profitable and without high costs. His team has a good designer who made him designs for WordPress clients. After losing a lot of money to create themes, he decided to do something about it. First, he simplified them a bit and put them on wordpress.org as free. The following is an example:

There were not many downloads, but if, for example, he has 5 such topics, then the effect is already better. And the most interesting thing is that after downloading and installing the theme, the client will want to purchase the full version, since the simplified version is no different from almost Twelve Eleven. Thus, it seems like a temptation for the client. Even if you have 10 downloads per day, then one client will want the full version of the template.

The site of my client themestune.com. He has about 20 topics there. The approximate price of one topic is $ 50. After the commission, PayPal net is about $ 45. One of the pluses is that you can go to the advanced version purchase page directly from the template admin panel that you downloaded from wordpress.org.

Thus, my friend finds customers through wordpress.org and so makes ads for his site, where he has more templates. In addition to this, on his site you can buy various subscriptions of it on topics. About a day, he sells for about 4 topics, and this is about $ 160. Since he has not been doing templates for a long time, he has any good earnings.

Let's look at the situation in which you make themes for Themeforest. For a good design you will have to pay about $ 400. A Front-End and Wordpress programmer for one topic will cost about $ 500. That is, you spent, for example, $ 900 and at the same time you have no guarantee that they will approve this topic at Envato. Suppose Envato fails with a request for refinement. In this case, you need to pay the programmer again, for example, $ 200, and in this case, if the topic is approved, then it will cost $ 1100. If after all this you have sales, it’s good, but in my practice this does not always end with approval from Envato.

So here is an alternative. You find a simpler designer who will take $ 250 per design. If you yourself are a WordPress and Front End programmer and you have free time, then in this case you only lose time. Plus, you can still find a specific action plan on how to create a theme for sale on wordpress.org, which Themeforest does not have. Of course, you should have your own website where you will trade these topics, but it will not be difficult to do it.

As a result, in this case you will spend $ 250 and your topic will be 100% approved if you follow the instructions on wordpress.org. In addition to this, you advertise your site and then you can have a minimum of 10 sales per month that will pay back both your time and money for a designer in one month. Then you need to do more and more topics and in this case the result will be even better than on Envato.

So is it worth it to suffer with Themeforest?