12 WordPress Themes – Month 1. Week 2. Report

It’s the end of week 2. It’s creeping up to the point where the first theme will be almost ready to be released. A lot of time this week has been spent setting the scene. Reaching out to Outreach partners and spending time being interviewed and getting content prepared for various sites.

The first post about the project is up. My interview with Ben from WPin.me. You can read it here.

Outreach List

Getting the word out about the project is important. I could develop 12 WordPress Themes in 12 Months and not tell anyone about it. I wanted to get the word out. Getting links to the project homepage is important. Especially as the project picks up pace and themes are released. The update on the Outreach list is:-

I added 13 new websites last week. I’ve just added another 18 Outreach Sites. This takes the total up to 51 websites in the database (with 33 published and 18 scheduled for the coming week)

This will continue to grow. The new sites are scheduled to be posted a couple every day. You can visit the Outreach List WP here.

Contacting the sites

I spent a good chunk of time in Week 2 reaching out to some of the sites on the list. The process of compiling the Outreach List really helped here. Through having the information on the websites to hand I was able to assess responses from the sites based on the cost vs the value that the article would give. Keeping this anonymous as to not name any names but my outreach had:-

• A website with 10x the traffic being cheaper to promote on than a site with 10x less traffic
• A ‘trio’ offer which doubled the price. The doubling in price only added 1k extra visits per month

All in all it’s turning into a really nice easy way to see which sites to focus time on if time is short.

Theme Development

Not much happened with the 12-in-12 WordPress Theme development this week. What I did do was go through my code base from plugins and the themes I already have and get code which can be used in the first theme. This will save me a lot of time. More on the development in the next week.

So that’s it for this update. A lot of focus on Outreach which has been really useful and I’ve found some great contacts who will hopefully become long term acquaintances.  As always, don’t forget to sign up to the newsletter to hear more about the project as it progresses.