Earn Money with Free WordPress Themes & Plugins

 WordPress has been around since 2003, and for all that time it’s been open-source for all the public to indulge in. 13 years later here we are, the WordPress ecosystem is flourishing beyond anything we could have imagined.

Most people know how to install WP, find a free theme on the official directory or via 3rd party theme market sites, and almost as many people know how to find free plugins to enhance their website experience, but do you know how to earn money with the only cost being your domain name and hosting service?

Easy Difficulty: Curate a list of themes and plugins

While this is nothing new, there’s money to be made by creating posts such as “Top 20 Restaurant WordPress Themes” and linking to affiliate sites such as Themeforest or other marketplaces. All it takes is your time and effort - no costs at all associated with this endeavour.

Bear in mind that there are hundreds of other WP related blogs out there, already doing this, and the top sites are earning most of the money since they rank first in the search results on “Startup Themes for WordPress,” but do not let that dishearten you. After all, search rankings take time to achieve, and if you just started your blog there are faster ways to get traffic than to build links and optimize your webpages day in and day out.

Once you have a good, high quality blog post complete with affiliate links, good descriptions of each theme and preferably screenshots of all the themes, you can start to syndicate your post on various social media and sharing sites.

Find niche groups on Facebook designed for entrepreneurs, freelancers and other startups, post your link in these groups and watch the traffic come almost immediately. Do the same on Twitter, use hashtags with good volume, and you are well on your way to drive good, converting traffic to your site.

Only your time will limit you, and in my experience it is better to promote one single blog post on 20 sites, than 20 blog posts on 1 site, so keep finding new groups or sites where you can share your list. Go to Google Plus groups and instead of sharing your link in WordPress related groups, share them in groups designed for the people starting new businesses and other places like that.

Do this correctly and you can drive 1000’s of visitors with each blog post you make, and when you have done this 5-10 times, you will know what social platforms give the most visitors, what time of day is best for sharing your content on the various media, and hopefully you will also have earned your first money by now!

Medium Difficulty: Develop your own WordPress theme

Whether you’re an experienced programmer, or just starting out, developing your own WordPress theme is easy these days. Using established frameworks (basic starter themes,) you can get a headstart on all the difficult coding, and focus more on designing beautiful websites.

For newcomers we recommend using _underscores, a simple framework providing the necessary starting code for a WordPress theme. You can head over to their website, and generate a theme by filling out your new theme’s name, and other information relating to the theme, and then download a compiled zip file of everything you need to get started.

Once you have your theme, we advise you to install a development version of WordPress, either on your local computer, or in a subdirectory on your website, so you can make changes to the design, layout colors and fonts, all without breaking anything important.

Now that you have set up your development environment, it’s time to get coding!First and foremost, if you used _underscores as your framework, you will notice a boring website layout when you visit your frontpage. To begin with we recommend that you use the following CSS rules to make your site structured and mobile friendly (responsive):


ul,ol {margin: 0px;}
.entry-footer span {margin-right: 10px;}
.main-navigation {display: block;background-color: #003D5C;}
.main-navigation a {line-height: 40px;text-transform: none;color: #fff;margin-left: 10px;}
aside#secondary {margin: 10px;}
h2.widget-title {font-size: 100%;background: #e0e0e0;padding-left: 10px;}
#primary-menu {background: #00557F;min-height: 40px;height: auto;overflow: hidden;}/*  Screen wider than: 768px. */@media only screen and (min-width: 768px) {.hfeed{}.site-header{width:100%;padding:0 10%;}.site-content{padding:0 10%;}.site-main{width:100%;padding:0;overflow:auto;}.content-area{width:63%;padding:0;float:left;display:inline;}.widget-area{width:35%;padding:0;float:right;display:inline;}.site-footer{width:100%;padding:0 10%;}}
/*  Screen max width: 768px. */@media only screen and (max-width: 767px) {.hfeed{width:100%;padding:0 10%;}.site-header{width:100%;padding:0;}.site-main{width:100%;padding:0;}.content-area{width:100%;padding:0;}.widget-area{width:100%;padding:0;}.site-footer{width:100%;padding:0;}}

This code can be placed in “style.css” which is located in the root folder of your theme directory. Once you have added these lines, save the “style.css” file, and upload and overwrite the existing file, then you can refresh your webpage and see the theme starting to look better.

From here on out you are on your own, anything you want to create, you can create!
When developing your theme, it is advised to focus on a specific topic, such as for an example a Restaurant theme, something specific, but still broadly used and sought after. 

No use developing a theme designed to be used only for albino snake petting zoo’s, you want many people to use your themes, don’t you?

Currently there are 800+ themes waiting to get approved in the official WordPress theme directory, and only 15-20 themes are going live every week. So while it might take half a year to get your theme into the official repository, you can share your theme on many other websites and outlets, marketplaces and social media platforms.