Gain Backlinks to Your Website by Sponsoring Free Wordpress Themes
Recently I have seen some bloggers who are offering “free Wordpress templates” and I always wondered why they were doing this. I never understood the benefits of offering a free theme or sponsoring someone else’s Wordpress design. After all, if you were not making any money off of them – what good is it? The answer lies in the links!
I have done some research and I have discovered that many bloggers are now sponsoring Wordpress themes in order to slowly build valuable backlinks to their blog or website. You see, when you sponsor a Wordpress them you can have the designer set up backlinks at the bottom of every page of the template that cannot be removed by the person who is downloading the theme. This means that if 100 people download this free theme and you have sponsored it, you will be getting 100 backlinks to your website. In fact, each time they add a new post or blog page with the same template – you are getting even more backlinks!
While this process takes time and is not an immediate way to climb the search engines, it is a great idea for long term link building. I just sponsored my first Wordpress theme which included four backlinks and anchor text of my choice and a full sponsorship for only $15. In fact, I will even get a submission report from the theme designer showing that he submitted my theme to 100 free Wordpress theme websites and my theme will be available for download on all of these websites.
If you too would like to sponsor a Wordpress theme, you can find plenty of options on the Digital Point Forums. I used a designer named Bill and you can see the theme that I purchased here: Night City Swirl Theme. Bill has plenty of other Wordpress themes available for purchase and he was prompt in answering any question that I had about the process of sponsoring a theme.
If you have had success building backlinks by sponsoring Wordpress themes, please let us know by commenting below. If you have any pointers for those who might be interested in sponsoring a theme – we would love to hear about it!
You can view available themes for sponsorship here: Digital Point Forums
Best regards,
Michael-John Wolfe
7 Comments to “Gain Backlinks to Your Website by Sponsoring Free Wordpress Themes”
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You know, I had always considered this strategy but I though you either had to build the theme yourself or pay a lot of money. I think I could afford fifteen dollars. Seriously, you could sponsor a theme every month for that kind of money.
Yea, even if you gained 50 backlinks – it would be worth $50. I just got my submission report from Bill, he submitted my sponsored theme to a ton of free Wordpress theme databases. So now I just sit back and hope that people download it!
MJ
I never thought about this before but it does sound like a sound strategy. I will have to check into this. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve kept this in mind for quite some time after I first learned about it, it’s certainly a great way to build backlinks.
Double points if you can land a wordpress theme that fits in your niche, then every post will be related to your anchor link giving you more relevance.
Keep us updated how the backlinking pans out.
I spent some time a year or so ago sponsoring a load of free Wordpress themes on Digital Point. And whilst they have built a few links back to my sites, there are far fewer than you might imagine.
I think one of the problems is that there are so many themes out there to choose from which can make it difficult for you to stand out. Generally the better the theme, the more people will use it, but the more it will cost you to sponsor. Sometimes in my experience paying a little more to get your link on a top theme is worthwhile.
Obviously many more experienced Wordpress users will also know enough to remove your link from the theme if they choose to use it and so you can lose links this way too.
The upside of sponsoring a theme is that you will not only get a link on every page of any blog that uses your theme, but you will also get a homepage link, which can be the most powerful links of all for your site.
So my experience is good and bad. Would I do it again? Possibly. I’m not convinced that the results are really worthwhile but if you’re on page one of Google and just want to push up your ranking by a couple of places it might be worth a try.
Incidentally, Matt Cutts has stated that sponsoring free themes in this way is not cool so be aware that Google knows about the process and may penalize you if they catch you using it. Best to only use for minisites then rather than great big authority sites you’ve spent months building.
Thanks for the info Richard! I used one of my links for this blog! I hope Google doesn’t penalize me! I am not sure I will be doing a lot of theme sponsoring – this is something that I wanted to try. I may just stick with the one theme and see how it goes. I am guessing that you would have to buy a lot of themes to really get a large amount of backlinks out there.
MJ
the safest way to do this is look for designer who offer wp customization for a cheap price – like we do now!
we offer custom wordpress theme with huge discount for bulk orders, you may contact me via email should you need a quote, but it can be as low as $25 each custom theme.
your satisfaction is our guarantee. we will change/modify the theme until you’re fully satisfied with your order. so you’ll be the one to decide what kind of theme do you like – what EXACTLY do you like
we are also member of DP
MJ, I hope it’s okay if I linked this post to our site under the Sponsor Themes section – just so more people will have idea about it
thanks!