Releasing a Wordpress Theme is a really good way to gain a linkback to your blog, i have released 7 themes so far and they are all doing well especially the 3cWPTP & Mezzo theme.
Take for instance the Mezzo theme that i released just 9 days ago, according to my stats the theme has been downloaded 456 times and a futher 689 downloads at Themes.wordpress.net.
That’s 1145 (and counting) downloads but the good thing for me is that at the footer of each theme is a linkback to this blog, now i do understand that out of the 1145 people that downloaded maybe a handfull will actually continue to use the theme and that’s where Technorati plays it part as it helps me understand and track blogs that are using my theme(s), this blog is about 4 months old and is now ranked Rank: 8,080 on Technorati, pretty decently impressive considering that some 1-year-old blogs haven’t even breached the 10,000 mark yet.
Besides getting a linkback to my site releasing themes also helps me in my “keyword” quest, for most linkbacks in the footer i use the keyword “Wordpress Themes” and believe it or not it is one of the biggest traffic source for my blog when people type in ‘Wordpress Themes” in Google, i’m hoping to be in the frontpage on Google search soon as it updates regularly.
Another case
Today i stumbled upon a post by Gary King whos posted on how iLEMONed achieved a ranking of 12th (21 now) most popular blog on Technorati.
I checked the blog’s FeedBurner stats, and it only has 681 subscribers. This alerted my sensors immediately, and so I look around for a minute and found out that the blog released its theme for public consumption a few weeks ago. Since they included a link leading back to their own site, they garnered thousands of links in only a few weeks. You can see those links here.
One of the main reasons why the blog is at 21 is because of this theme.
Sponsorship Bandwagon
As you can see this method works and that’s why there is a rise is themes being sponsored, the reason people sponsor a theme is mainly because they can’t design and code a wordpress theme themselves, they could technically get a designer and coder to get the job done but it would be extremly more expensive than sponsoring and piggyback on someone else design.
That’s why my themes are sponsored, i make some $$ out it while the sponsors enjoys a linckback to their site too and the Wordpress community has a better array of themes to choose from, personally i’ve always opted for a single sponsor only so that the footer of the theme doesn’t end up looking clunky and messy.
Now, i’m on the verge of releasing another theme soon and this time it will be a 4 column theme, let’s see how it goes in terms of climbing Technorati and Google, bythe way i’m always on the lookout for a sponsor. 
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May 29th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
LOL, and I am always on a lookout for a theme to sponsor. Just email me if you want a sponsor.
- MENJ
May 29th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Ok menj, definitely will.
June 2nd, 2007 at 8:36 pm
but the problem is, some of the user remove our link from the footer. they make like they own the theme, they design the theme. so how?
June 3rd, 2007 at 3:32 am
I think that’s something that happens some time, but the reason people still go on sponsoring is because the majority of wordpress users rarely edit know much about editing a theme, let a lone editing the footer.