How to sell your WordPress plugins and make money?
By Faruque Ahamed Mollick
At this time WordPress is the most popular CMS application on this planet that is written in PHP and powers 30% of all websites.
WordPress is not just for the blog, but with the help of plugins, it can be extended your site to the ultimate level or just simply you can build almost any kind of website either it is an eCommerce, question and answer community, forum or social media and much much more.
There are 55,482 plugins already available in the official WordPress plugin directory just right now. All these are available in free of cost on official WordPress site.
But there are lots of plugins available that are premium. If someone wants a premium plugin then he/she has to pay. The money goes to the owner of the plugin.
Lots of WordPress plugin developers exist and you will be just amazed after you know how much the top WordPress plugin developers earn.
Yes, selling WordPress plugin can help you making a huge profit if you go through proper planning and guidance.
Day by day, the WordPress plugins economy is increasing and there is more bright future of WordPress plugin business. WordPress plugin developer has a bright opportunity.
Why do you need to market your WordPress plugin?
Are you also a WordPress plugin developer? Do you have the skill of developing a premium quality of plugin? If yes, then don’t let the chances go. Let’s start thinking today without wasting any time. Don’t let the opportunity go.
If you are reading this post, then most probably, you want to make money by selling your premium WordPress plugin.
But how to make money with your WordPress plugin? How to sell WordPress plugin?
Here in this article, I am going to tell you how you can earn money from your WordPress plugin. Here basically I am going to explore some great idea of making the profit with the WordPress plugin that you have developed.
Steps to make money by selling your WordPress plugin
To start making money don’t think after you develop the plugin. You should always think and plan before you start developing. Maybe another plugin is already available for free of cost with the same features as your plugin. In this situation, it will prevent your plugin from being sold.
Now here I am going to share the tips of making money with your WordPress plugin.
Below is the step by step guide and tips:
At very first think the needs of a WordPress site
This is the step you should take first. It is always better to think before do than think after do. So this step is the step where you use your mind and you have to think.
When one buys a plugin, it means the user need the plugin for some purpose and it may be useful for that user. I can say, It must able to fulfill one or more WP sites requirement.
Your plugin should fulfill one or more important requirement that really may be useful for WP users.
So sit back, take a while in thinking and planning what may be the requirement for a website that is really required for the website and which plugin you should develop so that it can fulfill the requirement. Do this before you start developing the plugin.
The best way is to check the most selling WordPress plugins to find which features inside the premium plugins attract buyers more.
Develop a quality unique WP plugin
You can’t make money just with any types of plugins. There are a huge number of free WordPress plugins are already available on official WP plugin directory.
No one is going to buy your plugin if your plugin has the same feature that you can see on a free plugin or lots of free plugins has the feature that your plugin also giving.
So the first thing is that, create a plugin that is great in quality, has some unique features and very useful. This is very important to attract peoples and make the profit from your plugin.
Market your WordPress plugin – SEO and digital marketing
There are lots of WordPress plugin developers are there. But very few of them can make a good amount of money by selling their plugins.
The reason behind this is not the lake of their development skills, but they have the lack of marketing knowledge or more properly it called digital marketing.
So it is better to market a WordPress plugin to make the sale. Learn about SEO to attract more visitors to your website where you want to sell your plugin.
For example, if you want to sell WordPress plugins through your website, then to attract visitors from the search engines you need to learn the SEO tricks. Understand social media marketing and learn how to create your brand.
Here is one of my blog post which describes this in details – Why do you need to market your WordPress plugin?
How to make money by submitting a free version of your WordPress plugin?
Submit your plugins on CodeCanyon
CodeCanyone is a marketplace where sellers can sell their source code and buyers can buy it. The company takes a commission on each sale and the rest of the money goes to the seller.
On CodeCanyon, you can submit your WordPress plugin for sale. After you submit your product, CodeCanyon has to review and then approve your product.
Though the commission deducted by CodeCanyon is much higher, still it is always good to sell WordPress plugin on there.
The main advantage of selling on CodeCanyon is that your plugin can reach to a huge amount of audience and you can make lots of sales.
Start a website with SEO focus and blog content
This is a common fact that you can sell your WP plugin on your own website. Your website should properly configure with SEO. Also if you are selling your plugin on CodeCanyon, still it is better to start your website, tell about your product and link it to your product on CodeCanyin page.
Try to write blog content regularly which is related to your plugin. Regularly posting article will improve your search ranking. If you are going to sell multiple plugins, then it will be easier for you to write the blog post more often as you have the number of topics to write.
For example Tips and Tricks HQ is selling some of their WP plugins on their website they have blog content too which help them to improve their search ranking and make more sale.
Create video screenshot and publish on YouTube
YouTube can be a great marketing tool. You can create the screenshot of video which will demonstrate your plugin and then you can publish this video on YouTube.
Take care of the video description, tags and title because these are so important and can increase the views of your videos.
To learn more about getting more views I recommend you read these post:
- Grow Your YouTube Channel and videos With TubeBuddy Chrome Extension
- 10 Tricky Ways To Get More Views On Your YouTube Videos
I already make some sale of one of my WordPress plugin by publishing the screenshot video of my plugin. Here is that video on YouTube.
Let others earn affiliate income
Just like other WordPress plugin and theme selling website, you can also offer the partner program where bloggers and site owners can promote your WordPress plugin and for every sale make via them, you will give them a commission.
Affiliate system is a proven way of increasing the sales. Almost all the popular WordPress plugin selling website has their own affiliate system. Even I am also making money from the affiliate program on several websites.
With this tactics, you can promote your plugin by others and all this is in free of cost. or you can think it like this – Pay after they make the sale which is known as the commission. If you are making money, then there is no problem to pay money to them who help to make the sale of your plugins.
Distribute free version of your premium WordPress plugin
Distributing the free version of your WordPress plugin can grow the interest to the premium version of the plugin and thus you can make more sale.
Boosting the sale with the free version of your WordPress plugin is an amazing marketing strategy that is used by lots of WP plugin developers and even by some plugin development company.
Here is one of my blog post where I have discussed more this – How to make money by submitting a free version of your WordPress plugin?
Sell add-ons of your free plugin
There are lots of plugins you can see like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads etc that are free and everyone can use it free forever.
But how they are making money? Actually, these plugins have already developed so many add-ons or plugins that work with their free plugins.
Just like that, you can also develop WP plugin and let peoples use it for free of cost. After that develop some add-ons for the plugin and sell it. But the features of the add-ons really should be appealing and helpful.
To use this strategy, you must have to think and plan before you start developing the plugin.
So how was that? What are you thinking now?
I hope you have got some ideas for making money from WordPress plugin. Now start thinking and plan well to be a successful plugin seller.
I hope you like the above tactics of selling WordPress plugins. Comment below to ask anything. If you already have any other strategies to sell WordPress plugin then you can also share it with me.
hello Dear Sir,
thank you for sharing this amazing & informative blog post.
ones again thank you.
You are most wellcome.