Happy Friday! I thought I would start off this week by giving an update about how some of my WPLift-related side projects have been going since they launched…
WPLift Themes
My first addition to the site was the WPLift Free themes section, this was added as I wanted to focus on creating more themes this year to giveaway for free to help build traffic to the main WPLift site. So far I have added 8 free themes to it, 7 by me and 1 by a partner. 2 Weeks ago I spent 2 full days in Photoshop creating new theme designs which I will release exclusively to WPLift readers in that section, I also spent some time coding up a new CSS framework to use for these themes which should allow me to build them faster.
In the last month, the site received over 3000 visits and 15,000 page views. So far the themes have been downloaded 5400 times, with the top theme being MediaPhase which generated 1600 of those downloads.
I’m pretty pleased with the stats so far, obviously most of the traffic is coming from the main WPLift site but I’m starting to see traffic coming in from other blogs who have started including the themes in roundups etc. This is good for the overall health of the site and should eventually help boost the main site. I think there will be a larger increase in traffic and links once there are unique themes listed there.
Kooc Market
7 days ago I launched a brand new site, Kooc Market, a marketplace for creative downloads like photos, themes, icons and so on. The idea was to build something like Creative Market or Envato with the difference being: everything is free!
We started off with 100 items for download last week and I have added another 50 since then, in the first week we signed up 132 members who have downloaded 632 items.
Traffic-wise, the site received over a 1100 visits in 7 days with 5300 page views. I think that’s a pretty good start for a brand new domain, due to the nature of the site offering freebies, it should be pretty easy to pick up some links and start to get some search engine traffic over the next month.
To help send some traffic to the site, I added an area to the footer of posts here on WPLift which lists the latest 4 items added to the site. This was built by adding a plugin to the site which adds in featured images for RSS feeds on Kooc Market, then I used this free plugin to build a shortcode into the theme here for pulling in the feed.
The plan for growth here is to add some more unique free items which can’t be downloaded elsewhere and to open up the site for user uploaded files – I will have final approval over items going live though as I want to keep the standard of items on offer to a high standard.
Early days for both sites, but feels good to be launching new websites and seeing some small early success with them.
Have a great weekend everyone, here’s the news from the last 7 days…
WordPress News and Articles
- 43 Expert Bloggers Weigh In: What’s the Most Powerful Social Media Marketing Strategy for 2016 – Some interesting tips in this article.
- What Highly Successful WordPress Business Owners Were Doing at Age 25 – What were you doing at 25 ? I was working with open source software running a forum hosting company
- Transparency Report #12 – We’re Launching a New Blog + Why – Transparency report from CodeinWP.
- TGM Plugin Activation Team Releases Custom Generator – Generator to help using TGIM on themes in the official directory.
- Rescue Themes is For Sale – Theme shop up for sale – anyone?
- It All Begins With a Thought – Cool read from the creator of the SportsPress plugin.
- Pressware Plugins For A Better Blogging Experience – Tom’s planning to release some premium plugins for Bloggers.
- Selling themes yourself and on ThemeForest but with inconsistent licensing – Make sure your licenses are in order and consistent across platforms.
Tutorials and How-Tos
- Basics Of AngularJS With The WordPress REST API – Intro to WordPress and AngularJS.
- Using Gulp to Speed Up WordPress Development – Intro to using Gulp.
- Selective Refresh in the Customizer – See live changes in the Customizer without having to refresh the whole page.
Resources Freebies
- WP Pro Real Estate Theme 7 Review – A Powerful Solution for Creating Complete Real Estate Websites.
- WordPress Pop-up Plugin Review – Build Your Mailing List Faster With ConvertPlug.
- Plugin Developer WordPress Plugin – A plugin for plugin creators to display their plugins!
- 40+ App, SAAS Startup WordPress Themes – Landing Page Themes for you Product – WordPress themes for showcasing your software product.
- 60+ Best WordPress Job Board Themes 2016 – Themes for building a job board website.
- 60 Best WordPress Video Themes 2016 – Themes for building a video website.
- Google+
- Website
Weekly WordPress News: Side Project Transparency Updates & Stats
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