Make money with elegant wordpress themes - I just did!

I have been buying websites to make money faster and have actually lots to share. That is for other posts but for today, I just want to make a quick note about something I am quite happy with. A new site I bought last month has lots of potential to make different revenue streams. The upside is obvious but the downside is that each new source of online income is a learning curve. One such income stream is actually affiliate sales from selling wordpress themes.

I have never earn any online income from selling wordpress themes so all this is rather new. Today marks the first sale I have with this source of income and I am rather pleased with it. The screenshot below shows my income dashboard.

Click on image to enlarge

One of the exciting things is that amount of revenue you can earn which is USD19.95. That is quite a large comission! A few of these will be enough for a nice passive income stream. However, it wasn't easy. Firstly, the conversation rate is low. About 1.5%. Secondly, there are some really steep learning curves here. Below are some of the learning points for me:

• Sending visitors to individual theme, rather to the homepage has a much higher conversation ratio. Although it takes more work to create the individual links, the payoff is worth it!

• Ranking for wordpress theme keywords is a challenge. Maybe because the payoff is good, there is a lot of competition in the search engines, even with long tail keywords. Currently, I am using Fraser keyword strategy tool to see if it can help me to fish out low competition long tail keywords for this wordpress theme niche. By the way, it is a great tool and I recommend it for only USD26 per month. 

• Avoid targeting 'free' in your wordpress niche, unless you have a clever way to monetise it like what Michael did with his freewp.com site.  Check out his post on it. By the way, Michael is the real deal in making money online. He is way above me in terms of business development and growing his company. I highly recommend his blog. 

I am only starting to make money in this niche so my learning points are quite limited. Once I get my earnings to a few hundred bucks, things should be more interesting. Here is my plan to grow my online income using wordpress theme affiliate:

• Create a list of long tail keywords that my site can ranked for using Fraser's keyword strategy tool 

• Look through my list of analytics to identify potential low hanging fruits. This is more complex than it sounds becuase this site I bought generate about 1000+ keywords each DAY! Shifting through the data is an art by itself and is part my daily SEO activity. This is what I mean in my post about how to develop your SEO strategy.  It is never only about links. For this site, how you manage keywords and keywords growth is already a huge SEO effort. More on this when I talk about how to do SEO for large sites. 

• Signing up for more wordpress theme affiliate. Currently, I used elegant themes. It might not be the best in terms of conversion. You always need to test your monetisation once you have the traffic. I am going to sign up woo themes and themeforest to see if they can perform better.

Will keep you posted on this project.