HOW TO START A WORDPRESS PLUGIN BUSINESS?

WordPress is one of the most amazing and widely used CMS, which empowers nearly 28 percent of the web. It is equipped with almost 150,000 themes and plugins having 1.3 billion downloads already made. In fact, such a powerful platform can open new opportunities for a lucrative WP plug-in business.

Let’s understand how being a WordPress Plugin developer you can explore the market of the plugins and what precautions should you consider during your journey as a WordPress plugin development company or developer.

Market Research

You definitely would like to build something that sells, so before you take your first step in building a plug-in, browse the available plug-ins in the market; understand the needs, demand, trend, service offerings of plug-in authors.

To give a start you can use free plug-ins available on WP directory to study and understand how you can make them better by adding premium features. Although it is illegal to simply use the code of free any plug-in and publish it with additional features as a premium plug-in, but you can still enhance the product for your personal use.

Build a Strong Product (Plug-in)

Leaders say that you should start a business that would pay you even when you are sleeping. On the other hand, WordPress market is enormously huge with millions of people from various countries. Let’s say your plug-in gets some exposure and goes viral among the WP Users around the globe, you’ll earn while you’re asleep!

And for that you need to come up with a unique and strong plug-in that is easy to setup, has easy and clean UI for any non-technical user to understand the flow, compatible with most versions of WordPress, loaded with multiple premium and useful features.?

Challenges in WordPress Plugin Monetization

• Software Licensing

Once when you have created a unique plugin with Pro version and have introduced it in the market, you cannot avoid its sharing and usage unless you have a licensing mechanism in place. Without any license, the pro version of the plugin can also be used on multiple sites, shared it with thousands of other individuals, shared on Facebook, or it can also be uploaded as a torrent to the internet.

These all activities will result in loss of revenue that you deserve being the producer of the plugin. The second reason is support. You may not be able to detect if the customer approaching you has bought your plug-in or just downloaded your code as a torrent?

The cores are, if you want to protect your paid offering you must have a licensing management layer in place, which will ensure that only paid customers will have access to your paid plugin and support.

• Getting Paid

This is obvious if you plan to start a business of developing and selling plugins, you need to charge money for it. The best way to receive payment for your product is to sign-up with a payment gateway having a standalone checkout process like PayPal. Once you have signed up with such gateway, you will be able to create a checkout link and promote the link as an upsell on your preferred space you’ve listed free plugin version to convert it better.

Though this could be a great start to get your initial bucks, it is far from being professional and robust. All the prominent gateway solutions cannot host your Pro code and cannot do your license management. To automate that process, you must create and integrate the APIs of those services to your product which can expose the pro version download link, or you can also automatically email the zip after a buy.

To offer fool-proof security to this system, run this system on your backend, and it should be synced with your licensing layer logic.

Secure Code Hosting

As the concept of WordPress.org repository is “everything should be free” being open source, hosting premium themes and plugins is mostly restricted.

For this, you can either sign-up with one of the Git services like GitHub or BitBucket, or host it on a cloud without any versioning solution i.e. Amazon S3. Whatever you opt for, you must have a permissions layer to restrict the access to the repository/cloud-files only to the customers with a valid license.

Promote Your Plug-ins

This needs strong marketing skills. The best way to leverage your existing websites is to introduce marketing collateral in the plugin settings on the admin dashboard.

You can also start your own website, create some content for SEO, lure potential customers through search, try some inbound social media marketing, etc.

If you do not have any experience in marketing and do not want to get into it, an alternative option is hiring someone else to do it for you, if you have the budget.

The best way is to select an e-commerce platform that already exists especially for plugin developers, rather than recreating a full e-commerce platform.

Provide Proactive Support (Important)

It is a great thing to run a free side project. You are your own boss, no obligation to anyone, you can ditch the project whenever you like, and in most cases, users do not have high expectations for support either. It can ideally be a “Use it at your own risk” type of software/effort.

When money switches hands on starting a WordPress plugin business, it becomes an entirely another story. Even you do not offer support by mentioning “NO SUPPORT,” customers still would expect you to help them out.

If you start supporting your customers, nearly 50 percent of your time is dedicated to supporting. In case of not getting the right support, customers will stop using your product and will start talking smack about your service in public forums.

Building a WordPress plugin that people love to use and willing to pay for, is not easy. Of course, you may start getting a residual income just by creating a “Pro” version of your Free Plugin. If you wish to create a career out of it – you need to develop multiple skills — which most likely means developing a team of partners.

Software Updates

All software’s keep updating its new version and WordPress is no exception. However, unfortunately, it works only with the official WordPress.org API, and therefore it will not work on your pro code.

As you save the pro code on an external repository, you need an added logic layer to?juggle with the default software updates system?to align with your API endpoint. To secure your API you need to set up an SSL and include an authentication and authorization system. This is the best way to safely monetize your products.

Study Analytics & Usage Tracking

In WordPress.org tracking usage of your plugins is prohibited. But as a WordPress Plugin Developer, you need to understand the number of downloads and an estimated count of active installs and also several other analytics that can help you define your future strategy of plugin development and promotion similar to what Google analytics offers for the businesses.

But in WordPress, you are not even allowed to “phone home” without the user’s permission. If you want to, you can track any usage of your plugin or theme only after opting consent from the site owner. This is why, most of the plugin & theme authors are “flying blind”, just resorting to their gut feeling and users’ feedback.

The fact is nearly 28% of the web is powered by developers who are just working on imagination, shooting in the dark, as they do not have any access to the usage data of their software’s.

Synopsis

Apart from facing the technical challenges, you also need to become a marketer, content writer, designer, SEO expert, security specialist, and support executive as well. It may take you to some serious backend work also.

You need to do loads of groundwork to understand the market, preference, and offer back support. Starting from analyzing the market’s size, selecting a great niche and perspective for your WordPress plugin, what exactly you should do before and after you release it online are all your baby and you need to decide. In addition, you may also hire a WordPress development company or WordPress developer like me for all your above needs, sit back and watch the results!

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Thanks!