With millions of WordPress users and a constantly evolving ecosystem, there’s a significant market for innovative plugins that can enhance website functionality and streamline tasks.
Plugins are the easiest way to ensure that a WordPress store or website has the desired capabilities with the least possible hassles. However, it’s not easy for any plugin to shine out and catch the attention of the targeted audience.
Why do you Need a Strategy?
Right. You’ve developed a great plugin, thought a lot over its utility, and the output is a robust product. Why do you need to put effort into selling your plugin now?
Well, unfortunately, a great product needs visibility in front of its prospects.
As the world of WordPress plugins is chaotic and overcrowded, plugin developers and agencies have to come up with a well-thought-out strategy to sell the designed plugin. They have to look beyond designing user-friendly plugins or building custom plugins from scratch. This is a tactical task, and we decided to sort this out for you today.
We’re going to share some of the most viable strategies that you need to make your WordPress plugin a bestseller. Whether you’re a seasoned developer who creates custom plugins often or just getting started, these strategies will help you maximize the potential of your plugin and generate revenue while delivering real value to the WordPress community. So, let’s get started.
Where To Sell Your WordPress Plugins?
There is one more aspect of selling WordPress plugins that should be sorted out before you start selling: know the ideal place to sell your plugins where they will get adequate exposure and appropriate attention.
You have two ways to sell your plugin.
The first and sure shot way is to upload your plugin on a leading online marketplace.
If you want to make money using your plugin without spending on commissions, you have to take the help of another option which is selling the plugin over your website. As a developer or WordPress agency of repute, you can sell a paid plugin using your website.
Let’s talk about both methods in a minute.
Though WordPress.org Plugin Directory is the most common place where targeted customers download desired plugins, it’s for free plugins. However, as the platform can help you reach high-traffic web pages and can provide the maximum possible exposure to your plugin, you can’t afford to ignore it.
1. Sell your Plugin in a Marketplace
Besides placing a free version of your plugin there for visibility, you might want to add it to various other marketplaces too. Wondering where to sell a WordPress plugin? Your top options are:
2. Sell it through your own website.
This route is daunting. You need to work on optimizing your website so much so that it ranks high in Google Search, and your plugin shows up in every relevant search.
While selling it on your own, you will need resources such as:
- A way to accept payments (Freemius is a good option for this)
- A way to let your prospects try your plugin without installing it on their website (Create a product demo using InstaWP)
Both routes have their specific pros and cons. Hence, you need to pick a method that suits you the most.
The Pre-Selling Workout
We know how exciting it sounds to have a fully functional and viable plugin that is all set to become the talk of the town. But we will tell you to hold back your excitement for a while and pay attention to what every developer/agency must do:
No matter how astutely and attentively you’ve developed the plugin, you need to conduct extensive testing of the plugin before you launch it or start selling.
The very first expectation of potential plugin users is that it works seamlessly with their website. And, if it fails to meet this expectation, your plugin will be like thousands of other run-of-the-mill plugins that are available in the market. Plugins that are not compatible with key website components are not going to earn name and fame in the WordPress community.
This is when extensive plugin testing is here to help developers and WordPress agencies.
Yup, test Your WordPress Plugin Well!
Carefully conducted testing ensures that the plugin is working correctly with other website components. With the help of testing, it’s easy for developers to avoid plugin crashes, conflicts, and operational errors.
In addition, testing is a great way to ensure the all-inclusive compatibility of a plugin. You can also avoid tons of security concerns and spot vulnerabilities that are not visible otherwise. All in all, a developer or a WordPress agency should never think of launching a WordPress plugin without testing it thoroughly.
This is an essential aspect of developing a WordPress plugin from scratch. However, overlooking it is also a common practice. Due to the extensiveness of the process, many developers try to take a shortcut and launch a plugin without exhaustive testing. However, there is no shortcut to success. Instead of sidelining testing, try to learn how to make it less strenuous. Using WordPress sandboxing is the ideal option here.
For beginners, a WordPress sandbox is a testing environment that you can set up without much hassles if you use InstaWP. It is a ready-to-use resource using which you can have a fully customized testing ecosystem without tedious coding. You have to use pre-built staging site templates, DB editor, code editor, and many other tools and features as and when you text plugins.
With this by your side, testing is no longer going to keep you engaged for hours to come. You can save crucial work hours and invest them somewhere productive.
5 Tips for Successful Selling a WordPress Plugin
Once you’re done with WordPress plugin development, have done all the preparatory work, and are all set to sell a WordPress plugin, you need the backing of certain viable plugin-selling tips. So, here we are, helping you with tried and tested WordPress plugin selling tips.
#1 – Identify Your Target Audiences
You can break sales records only if you’re targeting the right audience with the right approach. We will talk about the right approach later. First, let’s understand the importance of targeting the right audience.
Imagine you go to a supermarket to get vegetables, and you find a salesman pitching you an investment plan over there. Will you be interested? Certainly not. The salesman was simply at the wrong place with the right product.
Just because a supermarket gets a great number of footfalls, it doesn’t mean that a bank will find its targeted audience there. Instead of the supermarket, the salesman should be somewhere related to banking and financing to target the right audience. By being at a supermarket, he simply wasted resources, time, and effort.
Every product has a specific audience, and products that are reaching the right audience will be able to mark success. When you target the right audience, you can get the ROI of invested efforts, have a quick turnaround time, and experience better conversion rates.
So, when you’re out in the market to sell WordPress plugins, don’t forget to target only the appropriate audiences. Wondering how to do that?
Here’s how:
Well, you can conduct extensive market research to have a deeper understanding of the broader industry or market in which your WordPress plugins are going to operate. You must have tabs on market trends, competitors, and potential opportunities during the process.
Creating detailed customer personas with demographic, psychographic, and behavior-related details is a great move to understand your targeted customers. If this is not the first time you’re selling a WordPress plugin and already have a customer base, you can go through the existing customer database and find some customers who might be interested in the new plugin.
To know about the customers’ interests, you can conduct surveys and questionnaires. This is an easy way to know about your customers’ needs, pain points, expectations, and preferences.
You can also use tools like Google Analytics to learn more about the website traffic. You can find out which kinds of users are visiting your site and which plugins they are browsing the most. There are too many, and all of them are useful for identifying your targeted customers. Pick options that suit most to your organizational needs.
#2 – Offer a Live Demo of Your Plugin
If you want to sell a WordPress plugin with high sales numbers and want to experience more plugin installs, one strategic approach is to offer a live demo of your plugin.
Learn how to set up a plugin demo in 5 minutes →
Offering a live demo is the easiest way to increase the users’ understanding of the concerned plugin. It allows potential users to see your plugin in action. They can check how the features operate and behave in real-time. It helps your customers to build trust in your WordPress plugin.
See this ClickWhale Live demo to understand things better:
When targeted users have a chance to interact with the plugin before making a purchase, they are more likely to trust that it will meet their needs and expectations. One more potential benefit of offering a live demo of the plugin is that it leads to quick decision-making. A demo will bring clarity on whether or not it’s going to meet the immediate needs of your audience. Based on the demo, they can make a decision then and there.
However, the process itself is not a cakewalk. Developers or agencies have to make sure that the live demo you’re offering is as functional as the actual plugin.
Things to Remember while Offering a Live Plugin Demo
1. If you’re not able to use appropriate security measures, your live demo can have serious security concerns and can even introduce major vulnerabilities to your customers.
2. Hosting and maintaining a live demo environment can be resource-intensive at times. If you have a complex plugin to sell, the resource burden can be very heavy for you.
3. The worst nightmare with offering a live demo is to have serious data privacy concerns. If your plugin interacts with user data, you need to ensure that it adheres to data privacy policies and is compliant with regulations like GDPR so that your user and their data is never at risk.
All these challenges are hard to overcome but not impossible. You can combat all of them and many more with the help of a live demo feature of InstaWP.
Here’s How:
This leading WordPress Sandboxing and staging site is now offering you a chance to offer a live demo with the least possible hassles and great functionalities. The process is explained in detail here.
You can create a new InstaWP site and use it to host your plugins over there.
Next, convert it into a shared template in the blink of an eye.
As InstaWP offers great features like SSL encryption, DB editor, code editor, free domain, multi-stack and PHP configurations, logs views, and many more, getting started with a live demo is no longer a tiresome job.
In no time, you’ll have a place to host your live demo. It allows you to install the plugin that you’re planning to sell and its dependencies for your targeted audience. You can customize the content of this demo site, which is a great thing.
There is very little work for you to do while you offer a live demo for your plugin. So, don’t hesitate.
Get InstaWP today and launch the live demo today to see the magic happening.
#3 – Provide a Crisp Description of the Plugin
Customers these days are super busy, and they don’t have time to go through page by page to know what your customer is offering. They want a short and informative way to learn more about the plugin.
So, if you want to catch the attention of your users, you need to provide a crisp description of your plugin that can highlight the USPs of your plugin, talk about its benefits, and provide every other relevant information quickly.
These busy days people don’t want to read page after page. Rather they want to read very shortly. So for quick navigation, using easy and simple language is important.
Overall, try to keep the description informative and short. Demonstrate that your plugin can help people. Don’t prolong your words here. Because you’ll have other places where you can write more and more.
#4 – Add Videos About Your Plugins
It will be a great move if you manage to provide videos about each of your plugin’s features. Never underestimate the power of engaging videos because 99% of people prefer watching videos to learn about any product.
Video marketing is an ideal tactic and can help you increase the conversation rate, win the hearts of the audience, convey your message with a voice, and build customer trust.
#5 – Offer Professional Technical and Customer Support
You have faith in your perfected WordPress plugin development process and consider it best-of-the-breed. We get it. But don’t ever overlook the importance of offering dedicated technical and customer support to fix any unforeseen troubles that your users can experience with your plugin.
Customers tend to trust products with customer support more because they know that someone is out there to help them as and when troubles bother them. You can start by providing documentation, FAQs, email, and live chat support, and offer a dedicated technical team for troubleshooting.
This is also a revenue generation opportunity as you can have tiered and subscription-based customer support.
Are You Ready To Sell Your WordPress Plugin?
All your WordPress plugin development efforts will only pay you well if you’re able to sell it to the right audience. This requires a lot of hard work and a smart strategy that is based on plugin testing, setting up live demos, identifying your targeted audience, creating crisp descriptions, and many factors that we just shared with you.
If you manage to apply all of them in the right manner, no one can stop you and your plugin from ruling over the market. So, start your WordPress plugin selling efforts today, and don’t forget to take InstaWP on board during the process. It’ll surely help you do 10x better. ?
