Themeforest Alternative for Those Who Want to Sell WordPress Themes

I have long been making up and doing themes for WordPress: somewhere for more than 4 years. And, when two years after the start, I made more than 100 sites on WordPress, then of course I got the idea of ​​how to make passive income for myself on creating plugins and themes for Envato and ThemeForest. Initially, Avada’s best-selling theme impressed and, of course, the Revolution Slider and Visual Composer plugins. Immediately you begin to multiply sales by price and it turns out decently. At first, I didn’t even notice the WordPress themes, which had a very good design, but they had almost no sales. You can even see one example: here the design is cool and the functionality is not bad, but sales are only 20 for 4 months.

I had two plans at once.

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

The second plan: to suggest one of the designers with ThemeForest to put together in HTML / CSS and then create a WordPress theme. At the same time, a distant friend of mine approached me and said that he also wanted to make a WordPress theme for sale on ThemeForest. Without a second thought, I said that I could help with HTML and CSS, since it already had a design. Here the win was doubly: I got a freelance and in addition to this the opportunity to improve skills on ThemeForest. The design of a friend turned out to be very good, and I offered him to put a PSD for sale on Envato and tried to explain to him that this is the first step towards sales at ThemeForest. He refused, as he wanted to sell the HTML / CSS template immediately.

I started to typesetting on Bootstrap by reading the information on the placement of templates on Envato on the forums. All this took about two weeks. Then the client tried to put all this on Envato and immediately received a refusal with the requirement of completion. It seemed that everything was not so scary and I quickly corrected. A week later, we again received the same refusal with the requirement of completion. After reading a lot of articles about posting on Envato and various reviews, as well as looking at another HTML / CSS template, I tried this time to spend more time refining and do everything perfectly.

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

A couple of weeks later I talked about my experience at Themeforest to one of my customers, who had a similar experience in the past. Moreover, he spent about $ 2000 dollars and he was approved of only one topic. For himself, he discovered an alternative, more profitable and without large costs. His team has a nice designer who made him designs for WordPress clients. After losing a lot of money to create those, he decided to do something about it. First, he simplified them a bit and put them on wordpress.org as free. Further one of examples:

There were not many downloads, but if, for example, he has such topics 5, then the effect is 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 turns out it seems as a lure for the client. Even if you have 10 downloads per day, then one client will want the full version of the template.

My client site is themestune.com. He has about 20 topics there. The approximate price of one topic is $ 50. After the commission PayPal net comes out about $ 45. One of the advantages is that you can go straight to the purchase page of the extended version directly from the admin template you downloaded from wordpress.org.

Thus, my friend finds clients through wordpress.org and so does advertising for his site, where he has more templates. In addition to this, on his website you can buy different subscriptions for his topics. About a day he has about 4 themes for sale, and that is about $ 160. Since he no longer makes templates, he has a good salary for anyone.

Let's take a look at the situation in which you make themes for Themeforest. For a good design will have to pay about $ 400. 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 on Envato. Suppose that Envato refuses with the requirement of completion. In this case, you need to pay the programmer again, for example, $ 200, and in this case, if the topic is approved, it will cost $ 1100. If after all this you have sales, then fine, 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 for the 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 for 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 make.

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 are advertising your site and then you can have at least 10 sales per month, which will pay back your time and money to the designer in one month. Then you need to do more and more, and in this case the result will be even better than on Envato.

So is it worth tormenting with Themeforest?