• While working he was interested in building a magazine like website and installed wordpress to his own host.
• Started to tweak wordpress design. Then he wanted to provide free theme and get his name out and see what happens. There was inspiration from other guys who were providing free themes and reaching big audiences.
• Initial idea was create online presence and then people will ask for extra features, Brain would make note of them and charge 25$ per hour to make them after work hours at home.
• Then there was one client who asked for real estate website, Brain made big theme with lots of features but client declined it settling with custom blog design. Then he asked his blog audience if anybody will pay for this custom theme? Using their response he created RevolutionTheme.com and started selling it on there.
• It took 6 month from starting this freelance job for real estate client to when he started to make more money from theme sale than his day job. That is when he decided to quit his job.
• His blog had 2000-3000 subscribers most coming from links on free themes.  Daily blog had 2000 regular visitors.
• First month when he announced this premium theme sales were 10,000$, and then it doubled every month.
• Then he started to look for forum to support all customers. Initially installed phpBB3 then switched to vBulletin when he had couple hundred thousand posts.
• Initially he started to sell using PayLoadz, and then switched to e-junke. Theme was selling for 79.95$
• Now they offer all themes and future releases for 350$
• Initial theme was more like a website rather than a blog with lots of areas on homepage pouring content from different categories. Initial version can be viewed on Leoville.com site.
• Name Revolution was just initial name that is signified movement, then after year and half company from UK with same name trademarked send letter to him, at which point he renamed his company to StudioPress.
• Then people started to ask for magazine like theme, newspaper like theme. Ironman.com is using “Revolution Magazine” theme.
• Revolution Magazine and proMedia theme were most successful themes.
• In last 2 years competition is very high, it was much easier to earn before.
• More than 50% sales come from affiliates. They didn’t promote affiliate sales just put a page about t and that was it.  Affiliate share on sale is 40-35%.
• Super affiliate can make 5,000-10,000$ per month.
• They started in August 2007 then switched to studio press in February 2009.
• They also developer AgentPress, theme for property agencies. Then they merged it with StudioPress converting to a child theme for genesis framework.
• Genesis framework came as a need to update all 27 themes if new feature added or some code changes done. So instead of making that change to every theme they wanted to change make that change in framework and every child theme will be updated. Also Thesis came out just before that time.
• Child themes just change visual appearance of theme by overriding main theme code. Genesis is main theme framework and all designs are all child themes of Genesis.
• StudioPress later merged with Copyblogger Media, company providing SEO services. For StudioPress it was opportunity to offload marketing and accounting tasks to them and promote theme to their customer base. Copyblogger previously was promoting DIY themes.
• Copyblogger added their marketing knowledge for promoting StudioPress. One thing they added relevant content to themes, so instead of dummy “lorem ispum” now themes have real content which is more appealing to customers.

This are notes from interview that is published on mixergy, you can view full interview here. Also check other theme related business stories: RocketTheme, WooThemes, Envato

Related terms:

• how to sell wordpress themes
• build wordpress custom theme and sale
• how to design and sell wordpress themes
• how to sell more themes
• how to sell theme sales on wordpress

Here are notes from Envato success story.

• Marketplace business: They started as a website for selling flash compopnents called FlashDen in 2006. Then renamed website to ActiveDen due to getting warning from Adobe regarding using name Flash in domain.
  • They created mini portfolios and used their flash components, fonts, videos and then shared that portfolio to show how easily you can create such portfolio.
  • Items were selling for couple dollars, and created by others. Developer would get 25% then as sell more they will get 40% revenue share from the market. Nowadays those numbers are 50% at beginning then 70% as they sell more.
  • Most content is exclusive to Envato network.
  • They promoted content on flash and design forums.
  • Changing point was when they offered 10$ for every registered new member. Member then can use it during 2 week time. Total 10,000$ were scheduled to give away out of these 8000$ were registered, 6000$ used.  This will actually cost Envato 2,500$ because of revenue breakdown of 25%. And that money will boost authors to create more content.
  • Before this giveaway 3 month in they were earning 100$ per month, after they started earning 1000$ per week.
  • They promoted this offer on flash gallery showcase with a banner saying register and get 10$ credit.
  • They repeated this promotion 3 times after realized that existing members started registering again, this happens when you grow big in members.
  • Initially they were 3 founders, husband, wife and friend, invested their savings 40,000$. After couple month in they forth member to company.  Collis Ta’eed and his wife were freelance designers.
  • Then they added more marketplaces for themes, audio / video files, images etc.
• They hired Rubi developer, were looking for php developer but one friend suggested a rubi developer, which they agreed to develop system in rubi.
• They had problem with accountant, everything was not reported and documented properly. What almost lead to financial crisis in future.
• They started planning in February, projected to finish in April, finished in august, October saw some income and December started earning 1000$ per week.
• Job board, content and eBook business:In 2007 started freelanceswitch.com as a blog about freelancing. Then added job board to it. Site became popular because of freelancing articles. Blog was getting more traffic than ActiveDen.
  • Freelanceswitch is monetized by 8 ad blocks 1000$ each. Income was not steady because one month 4 advertisers could disable their ads. It was expensive ad option.
  • To make revenue more stable they used 7$ / month subscription for freelancers to contact advertisers.
  • Because it is freelance site and project may be with 100$ budget charging advertiser 300$ model would not work.
  • Freelance site generates 8000 – 10000 $ per month
• They build different sites because they didn’t want to jam everything into one site. Because then sites code will be very complicated.
• Then bought Photoshop site psdtypes on flippa.com for 1000$. Site was using adsense for monetisation and should repay for itself in 6 month. But it didn’t work that way because adsense income stats were a bit inflated.  Then started to use it as blog and write psd tutorials.
• For pricing they prefer starting with low cost like 7$ and then grow that slowly. With themes they started as 8$ and now some themes are 35-40$. Same method is used by iStockphoto site.
• Tutorials and premium subscription business:Then they launched psdtuts. It was getting lots of traffic from dig back then. Site is monetised by adsense and earning well. They wanted to balance advertising with paid options.
  • They started to sell PSD files from tutorial for 1-2$ on using E-junkie. It didn’t go that well, was generating 100$ per month or couple month.
  • They started a premium subscription model with bonus tutorials. Subscription model brings 2/3 of revenue, advertising is 1/3.
  • Premium subscription has a trial, visitor views beginning of tutorial and then to view complete tutorial have to pay 9$ a month subscription.  Most of revenue comes from this type of tutorials.
  • They paid for content 200-300$ one-time payment to author.
  • Subscription was 7$ then they changed it to 9$ differentiate from other payments. Price goes down to 3$ if you pay ahead for couple month.
  • Initially there was 1 premium tutorial and 40 PSD source files from free tutorials.
  • Then they expanded this idea of tutorials to web design, programming, wordpress and other fields.
  • Initially it was different subscriptions for different tutorial sites. Then they merged all subscriptions into one 9$ per month and massive spike in customers happened. No they can use any files from any resource and view all premium tutorials.
  • Now they have 500 bonus tutorials, 1000 source files.
  • Also user can subscribe and download everything and ask for refund. But it is not common because customers appreciate content and effort spent for creating these tutorials.
  • 80% of content is free then 10-20 % is payed content.
  • Subscribers keep subscription to get new content.
• They also have eBook sales on FreelanceSwitch which is profitable but compared to other areas very small portion of revenue comes from this. It is alwas good to have variety of revenue sources.
• Every project is planned ahead on a paper, how to bring initial traffic, how to monetize, how to grow.
• After a while they had so many projects that some of them started to loose attention and interest by staff. They started to sell those small projects and focus more to main projects.
• Envato has 50 staff, half in office in Melbourne and other half is remote employees.
• On themeforest, activeden and other digital goods sites they have 2$ price difference. Which is in early days when item was sold for 2-8 $ paypal would take commission 40 cents or so minmizing income for company. So they added 2$ for direct sales without registration. And some people prefer registering with 30$ and buy many items instead. There was time limit 1-2 years before customer have to spend their money in their account before it expires. But it is not actual for current prices because they are 30-35 $ per theme on themeforest.
• Company name Envato is made up name to make it easy to trademark, Name costed 1000$.

These are notes from mixergy interview, full interview can be viewed here.

Related terms:

• envato psd templates
• envato revenue 2012
• envato tutorial font

Other big bug fix is UTF-8 category names and URL. Especially for Russian characters it was generating wrong category links which were resulting as 404 pages. 

Also fixed category editing bug where instead of renaming category it was adding new one.

For full list of change log and download latest version visit wallpaper script page. If you spotted any other bug or questions then post them in wallpaper script forum.

For those who are interested in Classifieds Script, I am working on one right now, it is flexible and responsive script easy to install and manage. It will be paid script but discounted price will be offered to beta testers. If you are interested in script or just want to help beta test it then visit classifieds script website and subscribe for updates. 

Related terms:

• wallpaper script
• business ideas software engineers
• wallpaper s script
• wallpaper free script
• veppa wallpaper script

Patrick followed 3 simple steps to achieve this success.

1. Setup wordpress site by buying domain and hosting.
2. Write content every day. 90% of workload.
3. Write guest post every month. 10% of work load.

Let’s break down steps of this business idea:

Setup wordpress site

• Buy suitable domain name for your topic of interest.
• Buy .com domain with no dashes in it. Prefer short domain name with 2, 3 or 4 phrases. You can use tool serpiq.com (has free trial subscription that allows to discover 1 keyword and analyze competition for 2 keywords. Update: has 7 day trial, a bit expensive and payment is recurring. I suggest using free Adwords Keyword Tool instead) for finding suitable keyword with search volume of 1000-5000  per month and domaintyper to check domain name availability.
• Your topic needs to be helpful for people that would have constant search traffic and interest.
• You can buy domain from godaddy or any other domain registrar. Registration is usually 10$ per year.
• Buy hosting from bluehost or hostgator. It is 50-60$ per year. Buy package with support for many domains because you can build other sites as well and you wouldn’t need to spend more money to host all your sites.
• Install and setup wordpress blog.
• Install google analytics to analyze traffic sources and keywords.
• Add adsense on later stage when you have at least 10 articles.  This is not important at the beginning you can add it 3-4 month later as well it is up to you.
• Setup related articles plugin for wordpress.

Write content every day

• Every article on website generates traffic. More articles you have more traffic you will get.
• Write articles yourself and do not copy from somewhere else.
• Do not outsource your writing because it will be low quality or spinned from other resources.
• Focus on providing value to reader.
• After having some traffic analyze your site statistics and get list of keywords send traffic to your site. Check each keyword by searching on google and if you are not on first page for that keyword then write an article using that keyword.
• Generate your keywords ahead, for example 100 keywords to write about. Patrick generated 5000 keywords and wrote 25 articles on holiday as an experiment. Also can be done for short time.
• Write every day so you will get more professional at writing. It will be much easier and faster as you write more content.
• Articles should be at least 500 words. His articles were on average 1000 words.
• After reaching 100 articles you can focus on creating a pdf bookon your niche. Define at least 10 chapters in your book and publish each chapter in your site if it is not published already. Then create a book and distribute it. This can an additional income stream for your business idea:
  • For free to gain more readers and natural links suggesting your book from other websites.
  • For a subscription to your newsletter. To grow your audience and get returning visitors that will keep coming to your blog every time you post new content. You can also suggest related products that you experienced to your subscribers via email marketing.
  • For a little fee like 20$. Also you can publish it for kindle or as paper book using amazon or other publishing tools.

Write guest post every month

• This is used for getting quality backlinks.
• Do not automate your backlinks for quick results. Do not use any software for automatically linking, commenting, spinning and distributing content.
• Use natural backlinks. Comment yourself on related blogs.
• Leave meaningful and long comments, 300-500 word comments on blogs that you want to write a guest post.
• Communicate with blog authors in those blogs by comments first. Then after 3-4 long comments and healthy conversation discuss writing guest post on their blog.
• This will help to build relations and backlinks to your website.
• After a year you will have approximately 10 quality links to your site and many links from blog comments.

Other important steps taken to accomplish this success

• First 6 month or year do not expect much income from your blog
• It takes 2-3 years to reach 1000$ goal. This may vary by niche that you selected.
• It takes less to reach 2000$. In his experience it took 90 days after 1000$. You still need to continue writing articles and guest posts.
• Your main metric is your income. Publishing articles helps to increase income the most.
• Find advertisers that advertise on your site through adsense and offer advertising directly on your site.
• If your advertiser happy with results after directly advertising on your site offer to sell your website.
• Your advertiser can be a buyer of your website that you can sell for 100 times your monthly income.
• Price your site by the value that it provides to your buyer. If it is a company that specifies in your niche then value will be much higher as 100 times the monthly profit. This is dues the website age and constant targeted traffic that converts really well.
• For comparison average site sells 18 times the monthly profit. For established and focused niche sites it can be as high as 100 time of monthly profit.

Patrick Meninga has his personal site makemoneywithnowork.com where he explains in depth all steps he took and also has many free ebooks related to building profitable niche sites that generates passive income. His project that he sold is spiritualriver.com.

You can also download mp3 interview that Yaro published on his site from here.

Related terms:

• increasing income in spare time
• creating passive income websites
• exemple website generating 1000$ month
• four project that create passive income
• passive income from websites

Writing software is one step.Biggest and hardest step is marketing the product to sell it to many customers that will use it. That is what Rob Willing learned during his journey from day job working as developer and consultant to business owner having several profitable software and services.

Here are the notes from an interview made on mixergy.

• Had many failures before being successful.
• Build an ISP service and put challenge before acquiring a new customer. Thought that it will bring more customers. Didn’t have any difference than main competitors. Failed with this project.
• Learned that it is very hard to compete with big names in big market. Instead small markets can bring couple thousand per month and much easy to target customers.
• Worked after day job at home for 8 hours 6 weeks to build next project that submits blog posts to search engines. Was successful at targeting niche market and earned 200$ per month from it.
• Knowing how to market products today he would market product before starting to code it. Getting 100-200 emails and notify them when program is ready to buy. Also research market using google keyword tool before starting to build project.
• Decided to buy a forum software sold for 150$ on ebay. Had difficult time to acquire customers. Advertised on adwords for 1500$ but had only one customer who bought for 99$.
• Sold forum script for couple thousand while it was bringing 300$ per month.
• Was buying software instead of writing himself because he was billing for consulting 100$ per hour, 200,000$ per year. That is why it was cheaper to buy rather than code himself.
• Bought invoicing software for 11,000$. Beleaved that it was generating 900$ per month but learned that it was generating 300$ and had many bugs and unhappy cutomers. It was selling for 99$ per license.
• Fixed bugs and priced it at 300$, got advice from market about that software was undervalued. Did some SEO for the site.
• Next month sold 3 copied again and earned 900$. After it was constantly steadily earning 2000$ each month. Also spend 1500$ on adwords for it.
• Applied for Y-combinator for funding but didn’t get it. Forgot to mention how he success at small projects selling software.
• Goal was to earn 7000$ per month in order to quit his day job.
• Bought justbeachtowels.com drop-ship business. It was on google 2^nd page, after some SEO work ranked #5 in google for main keyword. Started earning couple thousand per month. Hider virtual assistant to take care of orders.
• Bought CMSthemer.com PSD slicing and converting to theme business. Outsources slicing to offshore assistant and focused on SEO and management. Was making 3000$ per month.
• Advertised on buysellads and it was converting really well for design related businesses.
• Sold in 2008 Beachtowels.com for $7000, and cmsthemer.com for $12,000.
• Started writing a book startupbook.net, which has video and visual content to learn advertising and other staff required to success as a small entrepreneur.
• In 2009 built micropreneur.com course for micropreneurs. Targeted at people like himself who worked at day job and were not happy and didn’t have much free time to enjoy life.
• In 2009 acquired ApprenticeLinemanJobs.com, in 2010 acquired WeddingToolBox.com, and then in 2011 put together MicroConf conference.
• Acquire a product improve it and assign an employee to manage it. Work on 1-2 project himself.
• Bought hittail.com traffic source analyzer and suggesting tool for targeting new keywords in order to grow organic search engine traffic for a website.

I recommend reading his detailed ebook to learn how he built his success in past years and transitioned from working for someone to owning multiple successful businesses. Ebook can be obtained from his blog www.softwarebyrob.com

Related terms:

• business ideas for software engineers
• how to make money from software development
• how to make money in software development
• make money from software development
• software development business ideas

Features:

• bbPress sidebar
• default wrapper for forum pages
• bbPress login links widget

bbPress sidebar – you can use different sidebar on bbpress forum pages. It will replace your default wordpress sidebar with bbpress specific sidebar. Supports most widgets enabled templates that use main sidebar.

default wrapper for forum pages – bbPRess uses wrapper file in your theme in this order: ‘bbpress.php’, ‘forum.php’, ‘page.php’, ‘single.php’, ‘index.php’. You can choose which template to check first. Most templates don’t have sidebar in ‘page.php’, ‘single.php’ files. ‘index.php’ always has sidebar. If you cannot see forum sidebar then change this value to index.php in plugin settings (settings -> bbPress WP Tweaks ) page.

bbPress login links widget – if you want to display login and register links instead of login form in your sidebar then use this widget. By default bbPress will not show login links to visitors if they want to post in forum. Use this widget instead of login form in your bbPress sidebar.

Back story of bbPress WP Tweaks plugin

I was using bbPress, version 1.0  and smaller versions, which was great as forum but separate from wordpress. Then they released version 2.0 of bbPress as a wordpress plugin which is great but it is missing some integration features to my wordpress theme. I redesigned my wordpress theme to match rest of my site using Teventy Eleven theme provided by worpdress. With some tweaks forum integrated correctly to it. Main disadvantage was sidebar which is shared with blog. You do not want to have exact same sidebar in forum and blog. You can if you want but in forum you need more forum centric sidebar with necessary widgets to login. I was running my forum without login not even knowing it. It was displaying ‘You must be logged in to reply to this topic.‘ message without login or register links. Which is must have links in every forum. So instead of adding them to my theme files I decided to create a plugin that will add those features in any wordpress theme.

I hope that this plugin will save lots of your time. bbPress WP Tweaks took me 3 days to understand wordpress, bbpress and plugin building process. I am open to suggestions and bug fixes. Feel free to put them in my blog or forum.

Demo of bbPress WP Tweaks plugin

Check out my forum that uses bbPress plugin.

Download plugin

bbPress WP Tweaks – latest version from wordpress.org repository.

FAQ:

Q: Sidebar  is not showing in forum pages, how to fix it? [via]

A: Your theme may be is not compatible with bbpress wp tweaks plugin. I suggest using “Content Aware Sidebars” http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/content-aware-sidebars/ with which you can set different sidebar for your posts, pages, archives, forum pages even different sidebar for each forum.

Q: Can I display different sidebar for each forum, topic or reply in my forums?

A: “bbPress wp Tweaks” plugin will display same sidebar for all your forum pages. If you want different sidebar to be displayed on each forum, topic or reply then you can use “Content Aware Sidebars” plugin.

Suggested bbPress plugins

• bbPress New Topic Notifications – get notified when new topic posted, instead of checking your forum periodically for new posts and questions get notification directly to your email address. Good for admins and moderators to know when new post added and respond timely on forum.

Related terms:

• bbpress missing login
• adding a sidebar to bbpress forums
• bbprees plugin for wordpress
• bbpress php get
• bbpress wp

Everyone in this newsletter business is happy using it.

• Subscribers get great opportunity to be featured on newspapers, magazines, digital media, TV, radio. Newsletter is completely free to receive and opens opportunity to free publicity for businesses of any size.
• Reporters reach to great resources to write about. Businesses, communities, celebrities, politicians and other important personnel subscribe to newsletter.
• Owner earns money from advertisement in newsletter
• Advertisers reach to huge audience of professionals who read newsletter daily.

As you see it is win-win situation for everybody. It is still not easy to create such a service in terms of reaching to required amount of interest and users.

Here are notes from interview that explain how email newsletter business works and generates money:

• Business grew out of facebook group , built in 2007, that was used by many people.  Moved to web in March of 2008.
• 100,000 subscribers receive 3 newsletters daily with 60 requests.
• This newsletter is time sensitive and needs to be delivered in 1-2 hour to everybody. Reporter may need article to be delivered by 17:00 today.
• Used AWeber at the beginning to send newsletter once per day. Aweber is not time sensitive it spreads delivery through time to reduce load on mail servers. It is not suitable for time sensitive newsletters. It is more useful for tracking usage and create sale funnels.
• Advertisement is 4 line text at the beginning of newsletter.
• Advertisement costs 1500$ – 2500$ per newsletter and booked 5-6 month ahead. Which means it has huge demand for it.
• Owner is negative about selling products in newsletter through recommendation. Thinks that advertisement is best fit and works well.
• Helped many business that was shrinking getting publicity and boost with business requests again.
• Owner speaks at conferences about using social media. This way gets trust and introduces his newsletter business as a useful tool. Reporters use this service because they trust that report request is not public but delivered directly to subscribers.
• Report requests cannot be published on a website revealing contact details of reporter.
• Subscribing to newsletter is very easy, it is simple online registration.
• In future subscribers can receive filtered requests by category that they subscribed.
• Competitors who bought email list is not succeeding because they have very few reporters that trust and request. Also many reporters are happy with speed and quality that HARO delivers to them and don’t need any other alternative to post a report request.
• 4 people working on this newsletter business.
• Advertisers have a great success by selling 200 books in 10 minutes and other measurable successes.

These are some key notes that I highlighted reading interview which can give some idea for your future business. It has many lessons to learn that can be applied to similar businesses and I know that by learning all successful businesses you can use them in your business in future. It will all be clear regarding how to use this information when you most need it. You can read full interview at mixergy.

Related terms:

• email newsletter business income
• daily newsletters business model
• newsletter business
• newsletter business millions
• newsletterbusiness com

• 140 million page views per month, 9 million unique visitors, more than 1 million $ revenue per year. Has 15 websites.
• Started in 1999 when he was 12 years old.
• Started with simple html website hosted on free providers like Homestead, GeoCities.
• First banner advertisement brought 5000$ in 2001-2002.
• Emailed to all fan sites to promote his site and exchange links on one dedicated links page.
• Properties MuggleNet.com, OMGfacts.com, Sixbillionsecrets.com and more. Try to launch new website every month. Collect users of one specific topic in one site.
• Had 8 paid staff and 12 volunteers. Doing weekly meetings with paid staff, then they do meeting with their group. Discuss new ideas, how progress goes on each community.
• Community is very passionate, everyone wants to participate and show their own work on website.
• Used facebook to create funny groups like “I will walk slightly out of my way to step on an extra crunchy looking leaf.” and after reaching to some great number of followers post some content from their website and direct followers to their websites.
• Then Facebook changed their pages, but they adapted and looked like a legit company for each fan group created a website. Then same method used on twitter.
• Communicate with users through social networks like Facebook  twitter, YouTube  Don’t get email address from users but publish news on Facebook and twitter, grow their fan base there. Have 6 million Facebook fans and 10,000 adding daily.
• Tried Digg to attract more users, they voted for their own content and encouraged their fans to vote. When they got on first page of Digg then their website flooded with used content that came from Digg. Which in return generated more traffic.
• Look on other industries and port /adapt features to your site.  Features that work on other sites have greater probability to work on yours if implemented correctly.
• Promote new sites on exiting sites and promote using social media.
• Wrote book about Harry Potter assumptions for 7th book before 7 series published, sold 350,000 copies, was bestselling author for 6 month. Book is collection of ideas published on MuggleNet
• Every site should have mobile version.
• Third post in every website in network is from other site on network, to draw attention and traffic.
• Test everything, A-B tests, test it again and again, 35 different things. Constantly test and measure difference. You can tweet 2 titles for video and ask which one make you click.

Interesting method for remembering useful information that you read is reviewing it next day, next month and every 6 month after that regularly.

You can read full story on mixergy.

Here are notes from interview with Andy Miller, founder of RocketThme:

• Making more than 2 million $ yearly
• 45,000 registered users/customers. Had total 80,000 users at all time.
• Forum is key part that attracts people. 600,000 posts in forum, 12 moderators free and paid ones.
• At the beginning was working 14 hours / day. Was active joomla template developer and community member. Was working after work hours for as freelance theme developer. Then noticed that it requires too many time to develop for one client. Decided to develop customizable themes that will sell many times.
• Pricing is 50$ for 3 month, 90$ per year.
• With subscription themes can be used on 2-3 live sites.
• Offers themes for Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, phpBB3 forum, Magento shopping cart CMS
• Publishing 1 theme every month. Each theme is developed in 3 weeks by 4 developers. At beginning themes were developed in 3-4 days by one person.
• Had first employee who modified and offered different colors for existing themes.
• Total 9 employees all work online from home. Located globally.
• Has GPL licensed Gantry theme framework . All themes built on this framework. It provides 960 pixel grid system, easy to position widgets in different size.
• Used name rockettheme to not stick with one platform. But has difficulty from SEO because didn’t have joomla in domain name. (I think you cannot use joomla in domain anyway, same with wordpress as well )
• Used adwords for attracting new customers, affiliate system as well.
• Generating tutorials and other related content to attract search clients from search engines.
• In theme business 5 years, then probably started in 2006.

Plus side of this business is it does not have technical scaling problems like in software as a service model. You do not have to handle file storage or database for your clients. It is mainly forum that takes a lot of time to track issues and help customers to solve their problems.

You can grow your theme development to other e commerce and content management platforms but that will require to expand your support and forum moderator team as well. For this reason some theme developers expand to different plugins within same platform. For example they add ecommerce, classifieds, job list, real estate, forum, question answer plugins and themes for them. Classipressis one of this type of business.

Update: While searching for Rockettheme related articles I came across a website mentioning Rockettheme but no visible content about it. Then in HTML I noticed hidden link to Rockettheme on top of every page on that website. It is black hat SEO tactic which is used to gain some link juice for google. Using hidden links is not advised by google and using hidden link will punish you sooner or later. This is also discussed in Joomla forums. This also may be fault of site owner for not configuring theme settings properly.

...
<!-- begin top section -->
<div id="top">
<a href="http://www.rockettheme.com/" title="RocketTheme Joomla Template Club" class="nounder">
<img src="/templates/rt_hivemind_j15/images/blank.gif" border="0" alt="RocketTheme Joomla Templates" id="rocket" />
</a> 
<div id="mod-search"> 
<div class="moduletable">
...

To read full interview visit mixergy site. Read more success stories here.

Related terms:

• can you sell rocket theme templates to your clients
• images blank rocketheme
• rocketthemes business model
• RocketTheme’s business model and business strategy

Pros to this business model is you can start small and move to more powerful servers as you grow and earn money to cover costs. Feels like no downside at all. But once you gain some user base and page views then your scaling issues start being problem for you. But earning will not grow as you expect to expand properly.  Other problem is legal issues of user generated content. Even if you state that users are responsible for content you have to keep an eye on abuse reports. It also takes lot of time to track this reports and cleaning server content. Not mentioning database and application server crashes. To keep growing you need to control all this issues and stay profitable with your business.

This type of projects come to mind first because you use them and you feel that you can do better service. Also you expect that ad revenue will be huge to meet your expenses and efforts. I know that most people wanted to clone facebook , while one or two succeed like in Russia and Germany others in thousands who tried failed.

My point is big popular projects seem to be easy to build and bring great revenue is not true at all. Instead it takes a lot of effort and in most cases low revenue and fail at the end. Instead new entrepreneurs that want to succeed on internet business need to focus on niche ideas and solve problem for smaller more focused group of people. Even if that niche has some successful products your solution can also be successful regardless of other options. It is like pizza shops in city. There are many of them and all of them profitable. Huge unfocused traffic is no value for advertiser and product marketing instead small focused traffic to specific niche is profitable and easy to maintain.

Here are notes from Darek Halpern who tried to earn with huge traffic from celebrity gossip blog but then realized that it is possible to earn more with less but more business focused traffic.

• Earned 7000$ in single day with one million hits in 2007 with gossip blog.
  • Traffic can be built with having controversial opinion to the actual celebrity topic. Gaining more attention because you bring controversy to story and news blogs will mention your post in their story.
  • Used twitter to find different user opinion to create article and promoted twitters. They promote his post as a result because they are happy to be published on gossip blog.
  • His friend was earning 100,000$ with 30,000 people.
    • Build you mailing list loyal to your niche
    • Offer a free webinar and send invitations. Sent to 10,000 people, 1500 of them registered, 500 showed up on live webinar. Webinar is 45 minutes teaches to how to get more traffic and last 15 minutes explains product that they sell. This webinar got 10,000$ as a result.  Later webinar video is sent to all recipients in mailing list.
    • Used GoTo Webinar for their webinar. It is more user friendly and preferred for online webinars by marketers.
    • Add extra value to people who attended live webinar. It can be extra features, templates, tutorials. Price reduction is not good because other customers who bought before will feel uncomfortable.
    • Content videos are also good to sell, at the end of video explain your product and how to achieve same result using that featured product.
    • Send follow up emails to people who watched your video or read your article and say you can do your test using this product or you can subscribe to this master class to learn step by step building this business.
    • In marketing and user interface leave visual as simple as possible. It will keep visitors focused. If you have menu with 12 items then group them and show 3 groups, then expend to 4 submenus. It will make decision making easy and increase conversion rate. Best example for simple navigation is zappos.com site. There has been study that used 24 jam and 6 jam displays to promote jams. 6 jam banner sold 1000 times more than 24 jam banner because people has difficulty to make decision if there are too many choices. Learn more about increasing conversion on socialtriggers.com site.

You can read, view and listen to full interview at mixergy.