Make Money Selling WordPress Themes & Plugins: A Free Cheat Sheet

This is not your average, generic business guide.

The insights we’re sharing are backed by data, experiments, and accumulated first-hand experience from the makers of hundreds of WordPress plugin and theme businesses, including products many of us love and use: WPML, MailPoet, WPMU DEV, IconicWP, OceanWP, FooPlugins, StyleMix, and Blocksy.

Tips from 160+ articles in a single, digestible eBook!

This e-book offers an extremely helpful step-by-step guide to publishing a WordPress theme or plugin, placing it on the market and ultimately becoming profitable. A must-have for anyone who wants to start or scale a WordPress product business.

— Florian, flowdee.dev

Here’s a little sneak peek from the guide:

Who Is This Cheat Sheet for?

Are you a busy developer overwhelmed by tasks like replying to user queries several times a day, promoting your software, managing sales tax, and looking for new team members to join your business?

You’re exactly who we had in mind when we decided to create this cheat sheet.

Standing out from (free) alternatives in a saturated, mature market like WordPress is a tough job. You’ll need to convince potential customers that your premium offering provides significant value they can’t get for free — or from your competitors.

And if you want to grow your WordPress plugin or theme business, but you’re not sure how to simultaneously deal with developing the product and:

• Building a marketing strategy
• Providing exceptional customer support
• Growing your team
• Designing product assets
• Getting necessary business licenses
• Managing different kinds of taxes

And more of similar non-developer stuff that unavoidably comes with growth, this cheat sheet is for you.

We’ve consolidated years of “wisdom” into a concise guide to help ease your business growth pains with actionable DOs and DON’Ts that you can apply throughout your WordPress product business journey.

To dive into a treasure trove of information that’s (quite literally) been years in the making, grab your FREE copy of our WordPress Business Cheat Sheet for Selling Themes and Plugins here:

Check out this free Cheat Sheet eBook by @freemius that covers everything to know about selling #WordPress #plugins and #themes!

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What’s Inside the Cheat Sheet?

This eBook takes you from start to growth, exploring key areas in every step of the journey to guide you through different dilemmas and questions about building a WordPress product business and help you make smarter decisions:

1. Brainstorming a WordPress Product Business Idea: The first chapter helps you find inspiration and come up with new product ideas in the WordPress industry.
2. Analyzing & Understanding WordPress Markets: To make sure your product is viable and feasible, you need to do a little analysis and research of your own. This chapter covers those aspects.
3. Tips on WordPress Product Development: Development is the core of any WordPress product — this chapter guides you through developing a plugin or theme that holds real market value.
4. WordPress Product Business Models: This chapter explores popular WordPress business models to help you choose the best one for your business.
5. Pricing Model Tips for Theme/Plugin Businesses: There are many factors to consider when setting a price for your product. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to analyze the value and price of your product for maximum returns.
6. Subscriptions for WordPress Products: Subscriptions are the go-to solution for creating a viable business. This chapter talks about subscriptions over one-time payments.
7. Taxes and Legal Compliances for Selling WordPress Products: Since you’ll be running a business, it’s important to make sure you’ve got all of your ducks in a row. This chapter covers everything you need to know about EU VAT, sales tax, and legal compliances for running a WordPress plugin or theme business.
8. Preparing and Launching the Product: A well-orchestrated product launch sets the stage for success. This chapter outlines what you need to do to lay the groundwork to launch from.
9. Marketing for WordPress Products: No matter how good your product is, it needs to be promoted. In this chapter, you’ll learn the proven marketing strategies for WordPress products and how to implement them.
10. Managing Customer Support: Good customer support is the backbone of any WordPress product business. This chapter discusses the various aspects of customer support and how to become more effective at it.
11. Growth Opportunities and How to Make the Most of Them: Apart from launching and marketing, there are many other tactics that you can deploy to grow your business and take it to the next level. In this chapter, you’ll learn about various growth strategies that you can implement to boost your sales.

The Backstory: How This Business Cheat Sheet Was Born

Over the years, we published a tremendous amount of in-depth content about running and scaling WordPress product businesses, from inspiring interviews to data-backed analyses on how to increase conversion rates and reduce churn.

As time went by, some older articles needed updating to sync with today’s best business and WordPress practices, which are constantly evolving.

While we were updating our content repository, an idea hit me. We should condense our learnings and experiences into a tangible, valuable asset for our team and the WordPress product makers’ community to help them simplify daily operations, speed up growth, and avoid an error or two that we made along the way.

The idea was brought to life thanks to our amazing content team members who managed to turn my insights and thoughts into a digestible, actionable, and helpful guide.

And we mean helpful!

I have been recommending Freemius’ WordPress Business Cheat Sheet eBook for years and am excited to see that it has been newly updated for 2024. I read it when I first started selling plugins and found it indispensable for making sure I had optimized every part of my business for success. It’s a complete handbook for selling themes or plugins and covers absolutely everything you need to know.

— Katie Keith, Barn2 Plugins

This guide is the ultimate list for anyone wanting to enter the WordPress market. It covers everything from market research to marketing strategies with clear, actionable steps. It has insider tips and expert advice that can make your path to success much smoother. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, this cheat sheet is an invaluable resource that will save you time and help you avoid common mistakes.

— Xaver Birsak, Mailster

The cheat sheet offers a great overview of all relevant aspects of building a company around a digital product, from turning an idea into code to market research and pricing. The valuable advice around marketing and handling support definitely gave me a head start for launching my plugin business!

— Tobias Bäthge, TablePress

Join hundreds of software makers who have already implemented our advice and made a difference for their businesses — get your free copy of our business cheat sheet today!