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January 05, 2010

5 Niches to Make Money Selling Your Designs on Theme Forest

Posted in: Design Ideas

Most designer’s will have encountered it at some stage, but few of you will have seized the opportunity. Theme Forest has a strong advertising campaign and as such, they have a vast audience of keen buyers just waiting to buy your templates. Their percentage cut, starting from 60% (you make 40% per sale), seems like extortion, but once you start making sales in these niches and boosting your cut, you will be a top seller in no time.

As a relatively new site there is an amazing number of untapped pockets of demand. Most popular CMS and web software is completely uncatered for, and here I will highlight 5 particular areas where I think there is money to be made.

Blogging Themes

It’s no surprise to see that there are an excess of Wordpress themes available - they market themselves as a source of Wordpress themes. There is a complete lack of almost every other system though. Next time you design a blog theme, make it for Expression Engine or Text Pattern - if you don’t want to make it exclusively for these blogging systems, at least port your theme.

Forum Themes

The free software phpBB is mildly catered for but themes for vBulletin and lesser known softwares like MyBB and punBB are nowhere to be seen. There is an internet wide demand for vBulletin templates so this is bound to carry across to Theme Forest.

Shopping Cart Themes

Every man and his dog is looking to take their business online these days and often the first place they look is to open source cart software. Magento and osCommerce have a few available themes, but there is certainly room for additions.

Control Panel Themes

One of the main shocks when I was researching this article was what a large demand there was for control panel themes. Most designs are not even integrated to the popular softwares such as cPanel and Direct Admin, but still some (see example) have made in excess of 800 sales per design! At a cost of $15 each sale, and an approximate cut of 50%, you could make $6000 from just one design!

Low Demand, Low Supply Themes

This was actually the inspiration for this article. I was searching for a theme for a relatively unknown software, phpList. I simply searched it in Google and it took me to a Theme Forest template (see template). The template was merely some simple color modifications to the default template and had made the designer an estimated $200. If you can find more niches like this one and put out a theme of good quality, the profit possibility is endless.

To Conclude

Ultimately the key is to research your niche before setting out on the designs. You need to have a more business oriented look at theme design. The real value in doing this is the sustainability of it. If you put out a few successful designs you can be making a stable and consistent monthly income, something which is often hard to come by as a freelance designer.

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