How to Start WordPress Plugin Business: A Complete Blueprint

WordPress is a golden platform for software developers to make a business of web themes and applications. As this platform occupies the largest market share as a website builder, you will find countless users in the market, whose number is increasing every day.

You can earn a lot of money by selling your plugins and themes to them. Just search online. You will find many such software developer agencies. But if you are new to this platform, you might ask how to step in. No worries! This article will satisfy all your queries.

We’ll cover in detail how to sell WordPress plugin and step into the WordPress plugin business, from development to marketing. Get started!

Why WordPress Is Great for Plugin and Theme Entrepreneurs

As you know, WordPress dominates the CMS market share in a big margin. From the reports of many authoritative sites, the current market value of WordPress is $590+ billion. W3techs publishes that WordPress has 61.8% of the CMS market share, which is more than all other systems (e.g., Drupal, Joomla) combined.

In addition, WordPress holds 43% of the market share of the entire website-building industry (published in w3techs). Considering that the total number of active websites is estimated at over 1.7 billion, around 731,000,000 websites are currently using WordPress.

Surprisingly, these numbers are going crazy day by day. You will be amazed to know that last year,

• 250+ Wordcamps took place in 41+ hosting countries.
• 550+ Meetup events took place.
• WordPress.tv videos published increased by 26.7%.

So, we can say that there is no looking back in the WordPress industry. If you are ready with your WordPress plugin business blueprint, it is still beneficial for newbies.

WordPress Plugin Business Blueprint: Everything You Need to Know

Selling WordPress plugin isn’t something that you can just start and rule. It needs your dedication, hard work, passion, and more importantly proper plan. So, here is our plan to start a WordPress plugin business.

1. Choose a Niche
2. Research the Competition
3. Build WordPress Plugin
4. Launch the Plugin
5. Start Selling the Plugin
6. Afterwork

The whole process is the sum of these four points. Now, we will take a further look at each of the topics.

Apart from this article, watch this tutorial to clarify the topic.

1. Choose a Niche

With WordPress, you can build almost any website you can think of. Apart from creating websites, various offices and organizations today use WordPress for internal communication with their employees and members and for various content management needs.

So, you have to decide beforehand which particular functionality or niche your plugin or theme will target. Of course, you can’t do unlimited work with one plugin. But once the niche is determined, the niche-related multiples can be worked out.

Some of the most popular plugin niches at this moment are:

• E-commerce Solutions
• SEO Optimization
• Membership and Subscription Services
• Social Media Integration
• Security and Backup
• Performance Optimization
• Event Management
• Learning Management Systems (LMS)
• Portfolio and Gallery
• Blogging and Content Creation
• Real Estate
• Health and Wellness
• Travel and Booking
• Nonprofit and Charity

2. Research the Competition

Popular niches are always competitive. Again, with popular niches, your skill sets and passion may have very little relevance. So you have to select a niche that has financial prospects, you can make that type of plugin, there is less competition in the market, and even if there is competition, you have the ability to establish your position in it.

And for that there is no alternative to comprehensive research. You must consider the following things when researching the competition.

• Identify your direct competitors by analyzing their existing plugins and themes
• Study their features, marketing tactics, user reviews, and pricing
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the competitors
• Understand what customers like and dislike of them
• Define your target audiences
• Find out the effective channels for marketing
• Keep your eye on the ongoing and upcoming market trends

3. Build a WordPress Plugin 

Once your market research and niche selection are complete, you can start developing the plugin or theme you want. But there are several cautions to consider before you jump into this phase. They are:

Follow the Latest WordPress Coding Standard

Coding standards help avoid common coding errors, improve the readability of code, and simplify modification. They ensure that files within the project appear as if they were created by a single person.

Following the standards means anyone will be able to understand a section of code and modify it, if needed, without regard to when it was written or by whom. It saves time while implementing WordPress products and makes your product comparatively faster.

Ensure Software Licensing 

Once a user gets their hands on your Pro version, if you don’t have any licensing mechanism in place there’s nothing you can do to prevent them from using it on multiple sites, sending it to friends, share it on Facebook, or even uploading it as a torrent to the internet.

If you want to protect your paid offering and not base your licensing only on trust, you need to have a licensing management layer in place, making sure only paid customers will have access to your paid software.

Make Sure a Hassle-free Payment Procedure

If you want to start a theme or a plugin business, you’ll have to charge money. There are so many different aspects and moving parts to accept payments that it’s hard to know where to begin.

The simplest solution would be to sign-up with a payments gateway that offers a standalone checkout solution

Set Pricing Plans

Adding pricing plans for the pro version is the final phase before jumping into the second stage. Pricing plans can be,

• Monthly
• Annual
• Lifetime

You can categorize each of the pricing plans into different ways like,

• Free
• Starter
• Professional
• Business
• Enterprise

You are not done yet. Now decide what facilities you want to provide under each of the plans.

• Conduct research on similar plugin pricing in the market
• Find out the proper value of your plugin
• Analyze your investment (cost, overhead, etc.)
• Understand the pricing psychology

Thus you can set pricing plans for your WordPress products.

4. Launch Your Plugin 

After building your WordPress products, let’s focus on how gorgeously you can launch that product. If your launching can create a bang, it will outreach more people easily. After testing and launching your product, do the following.

List the Free Version to WordPress.org and other Repositories 

Listing your plugin to WordPress repository leads your tools to get free downloads and reviews. As most of the freemium plugin do so, it enhances the chance for generating premium user. When people getting used to your plugin, it makes them believe that the pro-version may help them achieve more.

The best way to sell the free version of your plugin is by listing it to the WordPress official repository- WordPress.org and other repositories like WPHive. WordPress.org is the most sought-after place where every WordPress user visits frequently. It has more than 1.5 billion plugin downloads.

Add Your Plugin to a Reputed Marketplace

When you want to sell the pro version of your products, make sure you are familiar with the popular WordPress product selling marketplace.

You may already know the top marketplaces like Codester, Creative Market, ThemeSnap, CodeCanyon, TemplateMonster Marketplace, and ThemeForest. Choose any of the marketplaces to sell your WordPress plugins or themes.

Host It on Your Site 

After listing your plugin to a marketplace and WordPress repository, you can even host it to your website too. Create a sales page and landing page with sales text to let people know about your products.

Write regular blogs based on your product to attract traffic towards your site. Thus you can get potential customers on your site and sell your product from your site too.

5. Start Selling Your Plugins

After launching the products, it’s time to start selling them. For selling the product, you must follow a marketing guide to reach out to as many people as possible.

Leverage the Content Marketing Strategy 

We know the term “content is king,” and it’s true. The upward demand for the content proves the term.

The recent January 2020 core update acknowledges the utmost necessity of quality content. 91% of B2B marketers are relying on content marketing. While 86% of B2C marketers consider content marketing as their prime strategy.

You can get this job done in several ways like,

• Writing niche-specific blog posts
• Providing video tutorials
• Accepting guest blogs
• Using social media

Feel the Power of Email Marketing 

“Is email marketing dead?” Hell, no!

Research shows that more than 5.5 billion email accounts are being used globally. And it seems to be unstoppable as many people rely on email for business communication.

Another research on email marketing revealed that more than 92% of adults use email which is 72% of the entire internet users. Now you can really feel the urge of email marketing.

So, you should feel the power of Email marketing and leverage it to increase your sales.

Provide Sale Off Discount

Discount attracts customers. It’s a psychological action. Provide discounts based on the festivals with a limited time boundary. Black Friday, Christmas Day, Eid, and New Year are good reasons to offer the sale-off discount.

You can also run a giveaway program if you want to surprise your customers. Believe me, as much as you give your customers, in return, you will get more than you think.

5. Afterwork 

Once you are done with your product building and launching, that doesn’t mean you have ticked all the checkboxes of your WordPress plugin business blueprint steps. Even after starting selling the product, still you have something to ensure for getting better output.

Provide Essential Documentation and Tutorials

A well-elaborative document helps your users to understand your product deeply. After developing your product you need to create a clear documentation describing how to set up and configure your product easily. It’s really frustrating to buy a premium plugin but having no clear idea of how to edit that plugin.

You need to show the technical functionality and aspects of your plugin. For example, you must include a product installation doc, detailed documentation of different features, etc.

Ensure Top-notch Support

Support is a serious issue. You can take your business to a whole new level providing strong support to your users and thus getting high reviews and ratings.

When starting a WordPress plugin business, people normally expect support from you. Even if you highlight in capital letters that there’s “NO SUPPORT,” customers will expect you to help them out and solve the issues they are experiencing.

Remember, “No Support” costs you fewer customers. So, after launching your product, make sure you always have a support team to take care of your customers’ feedback, complaints, and issues.

Bonus: Don’t You Get Expected Sales? This Point Is for You

After doing everything that you were told, if you don’t get the expected sales, then it’s time to analyze your plugin deactivation data. So you can get a clear idea of what is going on with your WordPress products.

How will you get your plugin deactivation data?

Well, there is Appsero to help you out of this situation. Apart from deactivation data, it will also help you to get,

• Useful user insight: Plugin or theme deactivation reasons.
• License management: Whether you use EDD/WooCommerce/Envato, you can manage all the licenses from one place.
• Push auto-deployment: You place any upgrade directly from your Git account Github/Bitbucket to WordPress.org.
• Upgrade all the update to your verified users just in one click
• Deactivation reasons analyzer: You’ll get an email notification immediately if any user deactivates your plugin.
• Integration with different solutions

So, try Appsero now to find out why you aren’t getting your expected sales as well as manage & deploy your WordPress plugin easily.

Over to You

Following and completing the WordPress plugin business blueprint is the beginning of your journey. Because only by following all these points won’t make you profitable, instead, you should always keep your consistency, hard work, motivation, and passion up. Thus, you will be able to head to a profitable business.

If you ever followed a WordPress plugin business blueprint for your business, do share your experience with us. Don’t forget to provide your feedback on our blueprint through the comment box below.