I actually stumbled across this method completely by accident, not that what I did was accidental, but I had no idea that i would reap the benefits that I did. For the longest time I have been a designer at heart, graphic, print, apparel, interfaces, I just love to design. I also love to blog, so it was a no brainer that I would be modifying, and redesigning the look of my website, over.. and over again. First I started with a simple theme someone else created, just changing the colors and images. Then I moved on to totally restructuring other theme designers’ themes and layouts. Finally I got around to creating my own. Now I’m no expert coder so I had to pay someone to code the layout I came up with, but it was still all worth it. My first theme completely created from scratch was called “Shooter Red”. I initially was just going to use it as my site layout, and not let anyone else use it, but then I thought about how I feel when I go to a great looking site and hope they offer the theme for download, but they don’t. If someone loved the look of my site, I wanted them to be able to use the theme as well. But before I could prepare the theme for distribution, I lost time to keep blogging on my personal site and Todd Dickerson and I started on the development of our relaunched company “Jetpacked”. While we were busy developing the first two tools of the JetTools suite, I found some time to prepare the theme and created a section on our site for “Wordpress Development”. I posted the theme for download there, and also did a “Shooter Blue” version as well. To let the community know about the theme release, I sent a few bloggers messages and wrote a little bit about the themes. That’s where it started, word of the “Shooter” themes spread like wildfire through the blogosphere and theme directory sites. Our site saw traffic go up steadily by the hundreds. But not only that, we started to see that we were gaining back links by the THOUSANDS. Feeling pretty good about this method, I decided to have a go at a second wordpress theme. In no time I whipped up a theme I called Infonightly, it was a simple 2 column “web 2.0″-ish theme. But I did something a little different this time as a test. I didn’t tell anyone about it, didn’t submit it anywhere, to this day it’s not even on our site! What I did was partnered with a site owner that offers wordpress themes for a fee. And we created a “Sponsored Theme” section on his site. In this section was a free download to my newly created infonightly theme. To this day the theme has been downloaded more than 4000 times. Resulting again, in thousands of back links.

Creating or modifying themes is relatively easy if you have any experience with HTML and CSS. Keep in mind you don’t have to create a theme from scratch to distribute it, you can simply modify someone else’s (but do something effective and noticeable, don’t be a sap and change the header color and redistribute it, I’ve seen a lot of these and it makes me angry every time). If you don’t have any experience doing this, and you’re not willing to learn how, there are plenty of individuals and companies that will be happy to design and create a theme for you to distribute. (for a fee of course).

If you would like to gain thousands of backlinks from releasing your own wordpress themes, contact me.