I bought a premium Wordpress theme to give away for free (SEO hacks)

I got a bit manic a few weeks ago and spent $5000 for a Wordpress theme, so let me break it down in this post. Firstly, I was already looking for some kind of theme or Wordpress solution I could sell or give to my audience. The one I was looking at was a paid solution, they wanted $85K for it, and it had huge potential... but I would have had to handle customer service and support and everything (yuck).

But I started exploring in that direction, which led me to this one. It's a pretty decent theme, and the website already had a pretty strong domain authority. In my research, I discovered that a lot of the big wordpress themes actually have crazy high DA, like 80 or 90+ - and weirdly, despite that they aren't getting traffic.

It's because, everybody uses their themes so they get a lot of backlinks; but they don't actually have a lot of good content on their blogs so no traffic. Solution one, the easy SEO hack, would be to just focus on getting backlinks from THESE sites - despite their high DA they probably don't get pitched often and I could make a real strong custom offer, like curated creative content or customized blog posts for them only. 

But that's actually not great either: ideally I'd have a paid product so they can earn affiliate income, which is a lot more attractive for them. With a paid product, I could get a lot of backlinks from strong sites who want to earn money. That's a great hack for a different day. Like I said, I'm not a coder or developer, I barely know how these themes function, and I do not want to be handling customer service requests.

So instead, I decided to take this pretty great premium theme - as good as the others that are in the $67 dollar range - and make it 100% free. The IDEA is to get everybody using it and getting a ton (like millions) of backlinks, and eventually drive the domain up to 80DA+. 

The potential is there, if I can get everything working. Now, true, those backlinks from footers or menus ("theme design by xxx") don't count as much in SEO anymore. I think that's why some of these sites have vastly different rankings if I'm checking Ahref vs. Moz or other DA/PA checker site tools. And I mean from 70 down to almost nothing.

It's inconclusive, for sure. But it's still a reasonable bet. Also, everybody is almost looking for the best, fastest, free wordpress themes. Like everybody. Which means, all the content creators on all the blogs are always making lists and roundups of the best themes. So just by *having* a great free Wordpress theme - that's on par or better than a lot of other suggestions - I have the opportunity to get featured on a bunch of big blogs that wouldn't usually link to me. 

It's pretty simple; they screenshot the theme and link back to the source (me). And those would be real, content links. So first, I just have to get the word out. How do I do that?

Well...

A sneaky tricky for getting influencers to share your content