How to Promote WordPress Plugins

How to Promote Your WordPress Plugins and Themes Effectively

WordPress has triggered the development of many new forms of business. It is an ideal platform to make a living for designers, developers, and programmers.

Today, a growing number of developers and designers are opting for ways to sell a wide variety of WordPress products – themes, plugins, modules, and extensions. A salient reason behind this is that it’s a scalable business.

Remember, building a new product is just the beginning. Sending it to the hands of your target users requires a whole new set of efforts.

You can’t just live with the philosophy ‘a great product sells itself’ while competitors are striving with all their maneuvers to suppress you.

Now, if you are a WordPress business owner and looking for ways how to promote WordPress plugins and themes, this article will meet your quest. Let’s get a cup of coffee and keep reading.

Types of Promotional Plans That You Can Try for Your Business

How to Promote WordPress Plugins

Without a plan, you might end up somewhere that you never expected. So, always there should be a viable plan if ever you wish to achieve something. Once you create a marketable WordPress product, the very next step should be outlining a detailed promotional plan.

A good promotional plan must have definite objectives, flexibility, practicability, a task list and along with a timeline.

But before outlining how to promote WordPress plugins and themes, you must know about promotional methods. There are basically two major types of promotional methods:

  1. On-site promotional methods
  2. Off-site promotional methods

While the first one will drive traffics and build brand authority, the second one will boost sales and revenue. Rightful coordination between them can widen your products’ reach and set a solid foundation for your online presence.

However, this article will focus mostly on off-site promotional methods, as it deals with quick sales and revenue.

9 Proven Ways to Promote Your WordPress Plugins/Themes

Promote WordPress Plugins and themes

Here, we’ll talk about the promotional approaches already tested by successful industry leaders. Because those are undeniably most effective than the other. Let’s jump into it.

5 On-Site Promotional Methods

On-site promotion refers to the marketing approaches that are carried out from that particular website. Let’s explain, how you can harness the methods to promote WordPress plugins and themes.

  1. Create a Dedicated Website: Though there are many premium marketplaces to sell themes and plugins, you must have a dedicated website to host your WordPress products. Alongside, it will increase the brand value and credibility of your products.
  2. Create Blogs and Video Contents: Visual graphics and blogs are some wonderful ways to bring visitors to your website organically. Whenever you make such content, try to focus on how they can solve your customers’ problems. Avoid making them much salesy.
  3. Launch an Affiliate Program: Affiliation is somewhat relatable to word-of-mouth marketing. Just by offering an affiliate bonus, you can entice your customers to refer the product links to others. Obviously, to do that, you need a minimal customer base.
  4. Harness the Social Media Platforms: Today, a vast majority of people spend most of their off-time on social media. Therefore, it has turned out as a great platform to reach out more target audiences. By sharing relatable and on-point content relentlessly, you can gradually reach them.
  5. Create Email List, Send Follow-up Emails and Newsletters: Whenever someone visits your products, try to get them subscribed through opt-in forms, popups, and other ways. It will give you quick access to communicate with them directly through follow-up emails. Honestly, email marketing has an amazing ROI of 4200% ($42 for every $1 spent).

Only after you get a solid foundation on the web, off-site promotions can uphold your sales and revenue. So, you must ensure the above approaches in your checklist.

4 Off-Site Promotional Methods

Off site promotional plans

The more your sale, the more your business grows. Off-site promotions have the power to do that. Following are the four most powerful off-site promotional methods.

  1. Outreach to Other Web Owners and Influencers
  2. Take Advantages of Plugins Directories
  3. Write Guest Blogs
  4. Get Reviews on Your Products From Industry Experts

Now, we’ll talk about how you can scale up the true potential of your business by the above approaches. Also, you will get some extremely effective tips and tactics to improve your efficiencies. Stay afloat!

1. Outreach to Other Web owner and Influencers

Reaching out to other web owners and influencers can bring you many prospective opportunities. The two most important of them are:

But how do they do it? We’ll walk you through the processes.

Outreach to Relevant Website Owners

Outreaching the relevant web owners of the same industry can bring quality backlinks to your site. Backlink signals the search engines (like Google, Yahoo, Bing) that particular websites have found your content so valuable that they are linking it with their own content.

Thus, a good number of backlinks can refer a good image of your website to the search engines. Side-wise, it increases your ranking possibility on search engine result pages (SERP). 

The top websites appearing on Google’s first SERP have 3.8 times more backlinks than those below them.

ImpactPlus

But whilst you look for backlinks, you must consider the following factors:

Domain Authority: It refers to the ranking score that predicts the likelihood of a website to be ranked on search engine result pages. Try to get backlinks from those websites that have high domain authority.

Get Quality Backlink to Improve Domain Authority of Your Website

Spam Score: Spam score describes how many times a website has received warnings and penalties from search engines. Google blacklists around 10,000 websites every day for spamming. Just a single backlink from a spammy website can cause you lots of suffering. So, avoid them cautiously.

Relevancy Status: Look for backlinks from the websites that are covering similar topics and contents. Only then Google can send relevant audiences to your website who are much likely to purchase your products.

Warning: We hope, already you’ve got the importance of backlinks for a website. But remember if the links are from less relevant, spammy, and low authority sites, it will radically hurt the progress of your website.

Outreach the Industry Influencers

Outreach the industry influencers

Influencers are the individuals who can affect the purchase decision of a large population with authority. Usually, they have a good number of fans and followers. So, outreaching the industry influencers is a great credible way to promote WordPress products overnight.

Around 49% of consumers rely on the influencer recommendations than the brand recommendation.

Cure Media

Besides, according to Digital Media Hub, $5.78 is earned for each dollar spent in the influencer marketing campaign. But before planning to reach out to an influencer, have an eye on the following considerations.

Define Your Goal First: Without planning, your downfall is just a matter of time. So, define the objectives you want to achieve from influencer marketing.

Identify the Right Influencers: Next, you must find out the influencers who can help you achieve those goals and objectives.

Have an Agreement with Them: Obviously, they won’t let you use their popularity without any benefit. So, after you find someone like that, your very next step should be offering them some exciting proposals.

Get the Influencers Ready for Your Campaign: Once they agree with your proposal, you need to prepare them for the campaign. Make them speak your sales copy in a certain way that sounds like an honest opinion of your products.

Evaluate the Process: Finally, set some KPI metrics to constantly assess the outcome of your campaign.

You might wonder why it’s necessary to bear too much hassle while you can run paid advert quite easily. Obviously, there are some staggering reasons.

Weekly, 41% of consumers discover new products through influencers.

Rakuten Advertising

Besides, according to ClickZ, 22% of large purchase decisions by 18-34-year-olds are influenced by influencer endorsements. That is why; influencer marketing is so powerful in the digital world.

2. Take Advantage of the Plugin Directories

There are many popular plugin directories that host both free and premium WordPress plugins. You can enlist your products on those directories. But obviously, most of them will keep a commission whenever your products are sold through the platforms.

Why should you care about plugin directories? Because the popular plugin directories have a strong follower base. By enlisting your products there, you can reach out to many potential buyers overnight.

WP Hive is a trusted plugin directory where you can list your products. It will help you harness their follower base to promote your WordPress plugins and themes.

List Your Plugin on WP Hive Plugin Directories

3. Write Guest Blogs

Write guest posts and publish it to the relevant websites

Guest blogging means writing and publishing content on someone else’s website. You can publish content on your website anytime. But for newcomers, it takes a long time to build domain authority and rank their sales content. Guest blogging is a handy solution to the problems.

Followings are the major benefits of guest blogging.

  1. Get backlinks
  2. Improve domain authority
  3. Increase traffic
  4. Promote poducts
  5. Develop credibility
  6. Boost brand value

Here’s a real-life example of how guest blogging turned the fortune of a new startup HelpScout in less than two years.

HelpScout is an email-based customer support platform, founded in 2011, in the United States. It provides email support software for small enterprises. Gregory Ciotti is a marketing strategies for the organization.

HelpScout was in debt since the beginning of the venture and struggling to reach out more potential customers. After several months of the startup, Gregory Ciotti started guest blogging on others’ websites.

Surprisingly, HelpScout gained more than 36k subscribers within the next 14 months. Today, they are a prominent software company offering global remote support.

Anyway, if you wish to get a similar result as them, first you need to find out the safest websites. Why safest? Just remember the issues we covered in the backlink section. Guest blogging in spammy, less relevant, and low-authority sites will never bring you benefits. Rather it will cause you troubles.

Publish Guest Blog on WordPress Site

4. Get Reviews on Your Products from Professionals

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) on the web. More than 40% of all active websites are running on it. In the beginning, it was popular only for blogging. But now it can support all sorts of activities, from subscription to eCommerce.

Therefore, people are constantly looking for creative WordPress tools to ease their online presence. That’s why top WordPress resource sites get thousands to millions of visitors each month.

Get reviews for your products

So, collaboration with a top WordPress site to write reviews on your products can create trust among your customers. But none in the commercial world will give you this advantage without any interest. Some might charge you money, a free product, counter reviews, or else.

Nine out of ten customers love to read reviews before going to purchase a product.

62% of consumers avoid purchasing from the brands that censore online review.

Trustpilot

Professionals’ review works like social proof. That’s why, according to BrightLocal, around 79% of customers take online reviews so trustworthy as personal recommendations. So, if you want to boost brand value and sales together, getting experts’ reviews can prove to be another best alternative.

Get Your Product Reviewed

Promote Your WordPress Products to the Right Audiences

Use WP Hive to Promote Your WordPress Products to the Right Audiences

WP Hive is a free WordPress repository that will host your WordPress plugins with dedicated pages. It will show an in-depth analysis of the plugins including their rating, page speed, PHP errors, memory consumption, and others.

So, visitors can have a quick overview of the plugins within the shortest possible time. On top of that, users can make a comparison among multiple plugins to choose the best.

In addition to that, WP Hive publishes blogs and tutorial-based web contacts regularly for users’ convenience. Already, they’ve helped countless plugin developers to promote their WordPress products. If you’re looking for affordable ways to get reviews on your products from professional experts, you may contact the WP Hive team.

WP Hive offers some affordable plans to publish honest reviews to let you reach your prospective customers. Click here to check out the pricing plans of WP Hive.

Are You Ready to Take Your WordPress Themes and Plugins to the Next Level

Hope you agree, when it comes to sale a product, things get tough to tougher. It’s because marketplaces are saturated with so many competitors. Things aren’t different in the case of WordPress themes and plugins.

But as long as your products can solve real-life problems, you’ve ways to take them into the hands of your customers. All you’ve to do is discover the ways. We hope this article has successfully met your quest in many aspects. If you still have confusion and want us to add some points here, feel free to comment anytime.

Plus, if your find this write-up helpful, subscribe to our website for more interesting articles like this one.

About

Fuad Al Azad is a creative writer who loves to blog on everything in between tech, marketing, and eCommerce. Alongside, he is an admirer of fact, fiction, and philosophy.