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Thanks to the great participation of you (my readers), the “Questions and Answers” category of Linkrain is going to be filled with some useful information within the next days. Today Aninaruto asked me: ” Is it worth sponsoring Wordpress themes and PHP scripts? ”

I will immediately tell you that this is the first time that I hear about “sponsoring PHP scripts”. I checked the link sale section of Digitalpoint forums and there is actually nobody selling sponsor links in PHP scripts. Even after Googling some related keywords, I was not able to find any kind of information about this.

I don’t think there is any advantage you can get for your website by sponsoring a script. Sponsoring a PHP script could only increase your backlink number if the owner promotes the script by submitting it to some “PHP script directories” and by naming you as the author or sponsor of it.

Recently i’ve got an offer to sponsor a php script where my link will be put on the footer, the script cost around $180 to download and another $500 for webmaster to remove the sponsored links on the footer. In my knowledge this is a great way to build thousands of backlinks but after doing some research, the down side is that if the webmaster develops a site using the script and the site gets banned by Search Engines, my website could get some kind of negative impact from it.

Sponsoring a Wordpress theme will surely bring you much more backlinks than sponsoring a PHP script. First of all because sponsored Wordpress themes are usually free to download and secondly because Wordpress themes spread much faster than a PHP script. You could maybe get the some good results if the PHP script would be free to download after you have paid a lot of money for sponsoring it, but if the programmer is asking for an additional fee of 180$ (!!) to download it, it will certanly not get the same number of downloads than a Wordpress theme does.

If someone has more information about sponsoring PHP scripts, please leave a comment.

Now let’s talk a bit about Wordpress themes.

What do I have to look at before going to sponsor a Wordpress theme?

• If the theme is unique and not just a customized one
• If the price for a link is reasonable
• If not more than 3 sponsor links are sold in the footer
• If the designer knows how to promote a Wordpress theme
• If the designer is offering support for the users that are going to install the theme

Other things you should check before you are going to spend some money for a sponsor link in the footer of a Wordpress theme are:

• Did the designer release some previous themes or is it his first theme?
• How many times did Wordpress users download his theme ( usually Wordpress themes will get most downloads from the Theme viewer )
• How many of the people that downloaded this theme, are still using it ( you can find an indicative number of people using a certain theme by searching in Google for the exact text included in the footer )

Now, let’s assume that you find a really good designer that released some themes that got thousands of downloads and you buy a sponsor link for 100$. After one month, the theme got 1.000 downloads ( a quality Wordpress theme will get these downloads easily within a month ) and after searching in Google for the anchor text you placed in the footer of the theme you find out that 100 people that downloaded it, are still using it. In this case you got 100 backlinks with your chosen anchor text from 100 different websites. Each website will probably have a PageRank (there will be also some PR0 blogs). In money this would mean that you have paid 0.50$ for a backlink on a website with PageRank. And that’s not all!

Wordpress themes can be seen as some kind of “link generators”. Once a Wordpress theme has been released, it will continue to be downloaded after some months and even after some years.

Wordpress themes are not the only “link generators”. You could also try to sponsor a Joomla template or a phpLD (PHP Link Directory Script) theme, which is widely used by most Web Directories.

Finally, if you don’t want to spend a lot of money by sponsoring Wordpress themes youw could learn ho to design them by yourself ( it’s not very difficult) and you could release some of them with your link as the “author” of the theme. The ability to create Wordpress theme can also be turned into a big money maker. Read about ” how you can make 9.000$/month by designing Wordpress themes” for further information.

Sponsoring any kind of “link generator” can bring your website a lot of quality backlinks depending on the ability of the designer to promote a certain theme and the quality of his work.