Sometimes I chuckle when I see clumsy WordPress plugins have a huge number of installs whereas their neat counterparts are still awaiting success. It is unlikely that they will see that happen anytime soon. This feat can only be achieved through some drastic measures.
Sadly, most developers focus exclusively on learning development skills instead of marketing tricks. As a result, they are losing sales when they have a ready-built product but are not able to market it.
Adding insult to injury, they hire low-cost agencies or freelancers who make matters worse.
10 Steps to Sell WordPress Plugins
In this article, we are going to share ten proven steps to bring you lots of WP plugin sales with measurable actions.
1. Leverage the Marketplaces
It is best to start your developer journey on a marketplace. The CodeCanyon marketplace is the go-to marketplace for everyone. Thousands of developers sell their plugins there. Several of them are making staggering sums of money from their products each month.
Tip: Don’t limit your plugin to CodeCanyon; Mojo and Codester are other great places to distribute plugins.
Tip 2: Don’t just upload your plugin and sit idle. Your plugin will receive comments and reviews, and you must respond as soon as possible.
2. Build Your Own Website
Creating your own website is the number one step for those who can afford it or can do it.
The benefits of uploading your plugin to marketplaces are great, but the advantages of branding your plugin are even greater.
Granted, the marketplaces do have a lot of traffic, but they also cut a steep commission on each sale. Even so, if those sales occur on your website, you will enjoy the entire amount.
3. Start Blogging
Owning a website isn’t just for showcasing products. You should create a blog section and write some contents that may be of interest to your potential customers.
In order to do this, you first need to do some keyword research. You can do that with SEMRush. Performing extensive keyword research could unlock a huge market for your products.
You could then highlight the benefits of your products’ features. This is a great way to sell WordPress plugins for free.
4. Submit on WordPreview
Brand value is key to the success of any product. Directories play an important role in building brand visibility for online products. In terms of WordPress directories, WordPreview is the best alternative.
Taking this action will benefit you in a variety of ways. When clients see your ratings and reviews on this portal, your brand reputation will increase.
Secondly, it will increase sales of your WordPress plugins due to the number of daily users it generates.
Finally, you can find out the loopholes in your product with different types of reviews and fix them on the next update to make it unbeatable.
Tip: You can ask your existing clients to rate your products on this platform. You can then use the ratings as a branding tool on your website.
5. PR Building
PR is a great way to accelerate your plugin sale in a short period of time. You need to find relevant blogs where your product can be a good fit to be featured. It also comes with multiple benefits.
For instance, you can leverage the audience of those blogs to increase sales.
Also, you will get a crucial backlink that will work like magic if properly done. If you need professional assistance, check out dLinko.com. Their services are highly specialized in WordPress PR campaigns.
Read more: 5 Proven Ways to Make Money with WordPress Plugins
6. Community Platforms
Community platforms like Reddit, Quora, Medium, Stack Overflow are huge sources of referral traffic. And they convert like crazy, as those are truly authentic traffic.
Tip: If you do keyword research well, you will get tons of questions related to your products. Then you can create new questions or topics regarding those queries on those community platforms and answer by yourself.
It will bring loads of potential buyers and help to sell WordPress plugins.
7. Paid Ads
Paid ads might be an option if you want sales from day one. It might be costly but if optimized correctly your ROI (Return on Investment) should be lucrative.
Paid ads can be done in several ways to sell WordPress plugins. For instances,
- Google Search Ads
- Google Display Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Banner Ads
There are many more ways, but these are just to name a few.
Pro-tip: The key point of running paid ads is all about a healthy ROI. You need to do A/B testing to find out the best campaign method to sell your WordPress plugins.
8. Affiliate Model
Affiliate marketing could bring your business massive success. Hundreds, if not thousands, of bloggers would love to review your products in exchange for commissions.
In addition, you won’t mind sharing your revenue with them after all those extra sales that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.
Therefore, affiliate models are a win-win for everyone. Why not apply this to your business?
9. YouTube Channel
Having a YouTube channel has multiple benefits. As your main objective is to increase sales, you can focus on how your products can solve specific problems that have yet to be solved.
- Product demonstration tutorial
- Feature benefits
- How-to guides
- FAQ sessions
Several videos per week should be enough to start a channel. Once you’ve built up a good subscriber list, you can heavily promote your WordPress plugins.
Also Read: 10 WordPress Developer Skills to Earn $4,241 Per Month
10. WordPress Plugin Repository
You should upload a free version of your plugin to the official WordPress plugin repository.
One downside is that you have to make it absolutely free, although you can limit the features it offers. That repository, however, will provide you with immense benefits.
Firstly, you will get tons of eyeballs and downloads to the free version with a large amount of traffic. Your customer list will grow significantly as a result.
Secondly, as a freemium product, many customers will eventually upgrade to the paid version.
Third, you will be able to harness the product quality through reviews and ratings.
Fourth, your brand will gain recognition as a great number of users will discover your products through this method.
Tip: Make sure your product page contains every detail, including screenshots. Additionally, update the page every time your product is updated.
Final Words
Getting the first hundreds of downloads is the key. When your products are of good quality, there is no need to get some 5 stars with positive reviews. This will push for further progress in your sales target.
Selling WordPress plugins shouldn’t be difficult if you follow the ten steps above.
We are almost at the ending of this article. Thank you for taking the time to read this and I hope it has been informative and will help you increase your WordPress plugin sales greatly.
Fingers crossed.
