How to make money selling wordpress plugins

how to make money selling wordpress plugins

You need to think about how you are going to reach key influencers and early adopters before you even get to a working beta, so once you do, you can share it with them. Save Save. That would depend on your audience, your site content, and how you implement the ads. Putting your first plugins out for free allows you to get better as a developer the only way possible — by inviting others to break and criticize your code. Source: CashCats. Thank u so much I love this site fr the way they explain things.

A lot of people have written about how competitive WordPress has become and how difficult it is to make money with WordPress from products such as themes and plugins. This is the story of how I make money selling premium WooCommerce plugins. Andy and I founded Barn2 Media back in late It started out as a service business, designing WordPress sites and developing custom plugins for individuals and companies locally and around the world. Focusing most of our time on our plugin business made a huge difference, as it gave us the capacity to get the plugins to market much more quickly. The client business was successful and we built up a good income within 2 years. But like many developers who build websites for clients, we dreamed of selling WordPress products instead of providing services for other people.

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how to make money selling wordpress plugins
Learn how to make money with WordPress by selling your own plugins or themes. In this video, I will talk about earning money by selling your own WordPress products. Those products would be themes and plugins. There are also other services which you can offer as part of your WordPress business, but that is not intended for this video. The best part here is the fact that these marketplaces are well established and they do already have a high number of visitors. That way, you may get sales without doing marketing.

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A lot of people have written about sordpress competitive WordPress has become and how difficult it is to make money with WordPress from products such as themes and plugins. This is the story of how I make money selling premium WooCommerce plugins. Andy and I founded Barn2 Media back in late It started out as a wordpresss business, designing WordPress sites and developing custom plugins for individuals and companies locally and around the world.

Focusing most of our time on our plugin business made a olugins difference, as it gave us the capacity to get the plugins to market much more quickly. The client business was successful and we built up a good income within 2 years. But like many developers who build websites for clients, we dreamed woddpress selling WordPress products instead of providing services for other people.

This was always part of the business plan, and we experimented with a few minor side projects without success. In earlywe decided to focus most of our time on selling WordPress and WooCommerce plugins.

Prioritizing the plugins made a huge difference, as it gave us the capacity to get plugins to market much more quickly. Both of these were based on plugins we had developed for clients, and we figured that other people might want the same thing. The aim of the free plugins was to gain experience and start building our name as a plugin company. I marketed our first plugin by publishing a couple of blog posts, without any further promotion or wordoress.

We were delighted when the sales started coming in after just a few days! We only had 8 sales in the first month, but it felt like we had passed the first hurdle. We just needed to build on this with more plugins and more marketing.

Over the next few months, we continued to market our plugins and launched a couple more, all based on requests from our customers. By the end ofhow to make money selling wordpress plugins had 5 premium plugins. The bestsellers were all WooCommerce plugins. The sales grew slowly but steadily. Within 6 months, we could afford to stop taking on new client projects.

Fast forward toand we sell over plugins hwo month, with sales continuing to increase. The plugin makd is still run entirely by Andy and. Andy is sole developer for all makw plugins, while I focus on support and marketing.

When we first started selling plugins, we encountered lots of challenges and made many mistakes. We had to solve all these problems in order to make money from WooCommerce plugins. One of the first major decisions to make was where to sell our plugins: should we build our own e-commerce site, or should we sell on a third party marketplace such as CodeCanyon?

We were selling niche plugins more on this laterso it was easy to get the exposure pluginns needed without having to pay mqke commissions to a marketplace.

We already had quite good SEO because we moneu been designing WordPress sites for 7 years and had built up good traffic and rankings, which would benefit the plugin sales. I think this is a fantastic opportunity for giving your plugins the best possible start. Plufins the first few months, it felt that the plugin wordpess was doomed to failure because each sale came with at least one support request.

When we calculated our hourly rate based on the cost of each plugin and the time spent responding to support requests, the plugins were llugins profitable than designing websites for clients! Some worddpress companies have a very negative, defensive joney to support.

Improving support was essential to making our plugin business sustainable. This has allowed Andy and wordperss to continue providing all the support in-house, which probably takes hours per day between us.

We have dramatically increased sales, while seeing only a small increase in the number of support requests. Another challenge was how much to charge for each plugin. We experimented with lowering and increasing prices, each time monitoring the impact on sales. We settled on a happy medium that achieved the most overall profit. Sales were higher when we sold the plugins more cheaply, but a higher price is more profitable overall.

I think that says it all. For example, you might charge an annual fee for continued access to plugin updates and support. Sure, some of your customers will pluhins this and cancel their subscription. Inseveral prominent plugin companies stopped offering a renewal discount. This means that to keep your license key up to date, you must pay the full purchase price each year.

These companies have since reported that wordprrss the renewal discount had little or no impact on sales. We are now making several thousands of dollars per month from renewal payments alone, and this figure will keep growing.

If you sell your plugins for a one-off fee, then you could be leaving a lot of money on the table. Like any new plugin company, we had to decide whether to develop niche plugins that might have a limited market, or generic plugins that had a big market but more competition. A niche within a niche is a very small market. WordPress controls These are HUGE numbers and mean that a mzke within a niche can be a very big market.

It started getting sales within a few days because it was the only plugin solving this problem. I was initially concerned that the market for such a niche plugin would be too small to make any real money. However, my fears were unfounded. There was so much demand that worcpress a few months, we launched a companion plugin for people wanting to hide their entire moneyy — WooCommerce Private Store.

We managed this by finding a niche that we could dominate and succeed in. By targeting niches within the WooCommerce market, we wordpreess gained a strong foothold for ourselves selling plugins.

The cake is big enough for us to cut ourselves a large enough piece without going head-to-head with bigger companies. The cake is big enough for plugine. My advice to anyone wanting to make money from WooCommerce plugins: Find your own niche. Google is your friend. You might be surprised at just how many people are searching for a solution to such a specific problem!

In my experience, people seem to lap up any plugin that adds extra functionality to WooCommerce, however specific it wordpfess be. For example, WooCommerce Password Protected Categories has sold more than 10 times more than our generic category protection pluginPassword Protected Categories. That brings us to the next question: Where to find ideas for niche WooCommerce plugins that will sell? A lot of developers contact me for feedback about their plugin ideas.

They often involve building complex systems on top of WooCommerce, such as a complete events booking plugin or learning management. A relatively small WooCommerce plugin can often bring you greater success than something more challenging. They add a specific feature to WooCommerce, and they do it. This is a much better way to make money than trying to develop the next WooCommerce membership or events solution. Our success proves that even very niche plugins can find a sizeable market and make significant money.

You mak need to be able to evolve, listen to your customers, sordpress commit to making it work. WooCommerce provides a fantastic opportunity to make money from selling plugins. WooCommerce has an enormous user-base, yet there are plenty of gaps that are crying out for new plugins to be developed. Do your research, work hard, and you too can make money from worepress WooCommerce plugins. Hopefully this mix of how-to and success story can provide the inspiration you need.

And as you say, start with simpler ideas. I love your customer support tactics. Something we should follow. Do you have any suggestions how to market to food bloggers?

I do plan to attend a bloggers conference here in California. Try Googling your target keyword and finding out who else plugihs written about. Sponsored reviews also work well, particularly on high profile sites. Thanks for the uow Katie. Some plugins lend themselves naturally to selling different components individually, whereas others are best sold as a single plugin. Highly recommend checking out their plugins themselves. Wow, great experience. I consider to build a plugins business, I already sell one plugin on a niche, and it works well but there are many advices here who are precious I guess.

This is such a great post. But then I worry about selling the plugins so that people can get an actual license — where should I do it? I looked into selling in the WooCommerce marketplace but they only allow select developers. Has anyone tried that? One quick question. Is it better to sell a plugin with different premium options or sell these premium options as separate a module?

Search for:. Lee says:. March 8, at am. Katie Keith says:.

Feels like I found the end of the rainbow. I am about to start a blog related to my job, and I hope I can apply one of. Whatever kind of content you restrict, make it personal. Another challenge was how much to charge for each plugin. Founded by Devesh Sharma, the main goal of this site is to provide useful information omney anything and everything WordPress.

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