As you may notice the sales are getting worse day by day. The new items are underpriced and have close to 0 sales. Complaining does not help, so let’s focus on how we can improve the situation.
Whether you want to stay on the market or move on to sell independently you need to know marketing.
The idea of this topic is to share ideas, what worked, and what didn’t. Share your experience so everyone can learn.
Here are a few examples.
E-mail marketing. Build a lead magnet, and offer your free product in exchange for the user’s name/email. This can be achieved with free tools like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc. The purpose of this method is not to try to sell immediately but rather to nurture and build trust with your users. After you capture the lead don’t try to upsell them your premium product, instead try to deliver value first, offer free guides, video tutorials, etc. After that start offering them the solution to their problem with your premium product. Try to keep communication open, let them reply to your emails. this will keep your domain out of spam filters. Books about this topic: 1-Page Marketing Plan, Sell like Crazy, $100M Leads: How to Get Strangers to Want to Buy Your Stuff.
Google / Meta ads. Requires some knowledge on how to set up the ad properly and configure your audience. Requires a lot of experimentation. A few points to mention: Users very seldom buy directly from ads, so don’t try to sell them right away, instead build a landing page with a lead magnet to capture their name/email. Then use an email automation sequence to nurture your audience and offer free value with the follow-up about your premium offer. Paid course - The guide to advertise your SaaS & Software on Facebook, haven’t personally tried that, but heard some good results about it.
SEO and Content Marketing. Research keywords, and write good content. Sounds easy right? Unfortunately, it’s much harder than that. If your domain is new and your DR/DA (Domain Rating and Domain Authority) are low it’s going to take some time until you see any results. To increase these metrics you need to build quality backlinks. If you offer your product for free you can include a “build with your-product-here” link somewhere in the footer. For keyword research use Ubersuggest, they have a lifetime offer, or if you have more budget Ahrefs is one of the best. Once you find low-competition, high-traffic keywords your next step is to write good-quality content. Don’t use AI tools for writing content as it’s mostly not going to rank well. Another option to build backlinks and traffic is to build free tools like generators, calculators, etc. If it’s useful people will share it and get free backlinks easily.
If you have anything to add feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and I’ll try to keep this topic updated.
That’s a good question. You can apply these methods even outside of Envato. Assuming you have your own website, you’re not going to make any sales without marketing.
I agree about Elements banner nonsense. It can be a waste of money.
I don’t think everyone knows these tricks. Just recently I saw a comment from Elite author who tried to sell on his own and he got 1 sale after 4 months and was asking how he can market it.
I just post his comment here, hope it’s not against the rules I can’t find the exact comment, but here are some:
How much money should a startup spend on marketing?
Difficult question, I personally don’t have that experience. But there is experience of sales with Envato, and there the conversion rate is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1% of the targeted traffic. So we need to generate this targeted traffic by SEO and ads.
My plan is simple: a website with articles and documentation, YuoTube, maybe paid advertising, as I said above I’m newbie in this area except development. If that doesn’t work, I’ll go look for a real job, where I haven’t been in 10 years ))))
I have an experiment like this. I created a brand new plugin, published it on wordpress.org under the freemium model. And yes, last month I sold one license directly from my site, and it was an annual subscription, a real subscription, not like in Elements where the user downloads your product for 1 cent and that’s it). The conversion rate is about 1-2%. The only problem right now is traffic, so far I only have about 100 sessions a month on my site.
Your question is on point, that’s why I’m always keeping an eye on what’s out there. You might want to expand a bit beyond Envato and experiment with different strategies, for example at the moment I’m testing a ChatGPT gmail plugin. I am also testing a couple of email campaigns (no investments, I use a free tool) and it’s not going bad at all. I mean, I’m still learning about email marketing, and doing it on a small scale. If it keeps going well, I will get more serious about it. I don’t do paid advertising, not there yet.
Since you shared your experience I’ll share mine. We launched a freemium theme on wordpress.org 3 years ago, and since then it’s generated $7,691.25 and currently has 52 active subscriptions. It got featured multiple times on some reputable websites so it helped a lot with exposure. I agree with you that traffic is very important, but what’s more important is to create something that can get the attention of reputable websites and listicles like “Best WordPress plugins for …”.
We’re in the same boat mate, I know very little about marketing and it’s still a very big challenge.
I think I just got lucky to notice an upcoming trend and released a product early enough to get some traction.
Right now I’m learning and getting more experience with email marketing and SEO. It’s a very slow and hard process, but I’m trying to stay positive and experiment. I’m also trying to post more often on X and just today I received a very first DM from an interested buyer. It’s not a big win, but a small victory
The market is dead, especially since June when Envato focused on Elements and put its advertisement banner everywhere in the header and footer!
Also you can’t earn money from the Elements while users pay $16 to access anythings and create a lot of project with it!
Perhaps this will be of interest to someone. Here’s a graph of the page views for my new WP product on CodeCanyon after its release. Currently, it’s only 10-20 views per day, which is disappointing. You can draw your own conclusions.
For us, it started to decline somewhere in April. I’m not sure it’s about Elements since the banners were always present. I think Envato started to cut its budget for marketing and show fewer ads. That resulted in a decline in traffic. Meanwhile, Elements traffic is on the rise.
I have a cheap plan on Ahrefs and can see some data for recent months like paid search for example. Some interesting metrics:
Elements paid traffic is 24,220, while TF is only 7,408
Are you seriously talking about advertisement on the Market??!! Just is a waste of money!
While the Envato Elements banner is everywhere, how do you expect to sell on the market?! Now, all traffic goes to the Elements.
As a user, what do you prefer? Pay $16 to access a million WordPress themes, plugins, codes, templates, videos, images, add-ons, etc., or pay $59 for a single WordPress theme! It’s funny! We do not have any way except to join the Elements and earn a few dollars just for a hobby!
Actually, Envato Elements was terrible news, especially for web developers and designers! Most of us have to leave the market soon. I promise.
Just look at the advertising banners on the market! You just see Elements!
You can apply these methods even outside of Envato. Assuming you have your own website, you’re not going to make any sales without marketing.
