Can web2feel.com Themes Make it Big?
Posted on 02. Jun, 2009 by admin in Free Themes
web2feel.com is the producer of a number of premium quality free themes. The themes include many of the features that the best premium theme creators include in their own themes like ad management and theme settings. The themes also benefit from being highly usable as niche and content/affiliate site templates.
Why isn’t web2feel as big and popular as WooThemes or StudioPress, especially given their themes are free? Well it’s pretty simple really.
web2feel has chosen to support themselves by selling sponsored links in their theme releases. There are a number of problems with this, SEO being one of the most important, also most webmasters will want to remove them but the links are encoded. With a little Googling you can find how to remove them you will probably also discover you can officially and legally have them removed for a $10 donation. This effectively means the theme is no longer free but $10 is very cheap for themes of this quality, so many would not begrudge paying it. web2feel don’t openly offer this option unless you go looking for it.
When it comes to SEO Google can’t penalize web2feel for selling these links because they are not on their site, they may end up penalizing the sites that are linked from the themes however as their back links will likely not appear natural or relevant, plus there are a whole bunch of reasons why buying these type of links doesn’t provide good value.
The links also pose another major hurdle to web2feel being a success. Their inclusion means they cannot sell the themes and therefore there is not real reason to advertise. While other major players in the premium theme niche have excellent affiliate programs that effectively buy them free advertising and increases their profile web2feel can go no where near as big.
Great Themes but a really bad business model. web2feel find a way to get rid of the links, sell the themes directly and back it up with a good affiliate program to get your brand out there.
You can view web2feel’s themes here.
