I've been a bit quiet again recently. Besides doing the whole house hunting thing again (more on that another time!), I've been working with Kevin from BloggingTips on a new site for WordPress Themes called Blog Themes Club.

Club Membership

The site is primarily a themes club (in case you hadn't already guessed that!), selling 3, 6 and 12 month membership plans which will allow users to sign in, download and use any of our themes available, get updates of the themes as soon as they're available, get quality support via our private support forum and also via a support desk.

The membership prices are below however we've also reduced these until 1st August as we appreciate that starting with 4 themes isn't a large amount, however our prices are based more on support and continued upgrades:

• 3 months membership – $49 $29
• 6 months membership – $79 $49
• 12 months membership – $99 $69

Single Purchases

Going from experience I know a club membership isn't for everyone, and not everyone will need support or want more than one theme, so we've also got the option to purchase themes individually for a single use. This option doesn't come with any support, but the themes themselves go from $19 which we think is a fairly reasonable price.

Also until July 31st 2009 you can get 25% off the purchase of any Single Use purchase by entering the discount code LAUNCH25 during the checkout process.

Theme Designs

Of course we're aiming to cover all the subject areas that a design can be used for with WordPress including Blogging, CMS, Photoblogs, eCommerce and more. We've already got another theme almost ready to go plus a 6th is being planned ready for design soon. We're hoping to add at least one new theme per 2 months and of course keep our current ones up to date.

Win membership for a month!

To celebrate the launch of Blog Themes Club we are giving away 10 membership accounts for free to readers. These accounts are valid for one month. During that time you will be able to download all of our themes and get daily support.

To enter the competition all you have to do is help us spread the word of our site via Twitter. All you need to do is:

• Follow us on Twitter @BlogThemesClub
• Tweet or ReTweet the folling message via Twitter :
  

  @BlogThemesClub have just launched their new wordpress themes club http://tinyurl.com/n7rhnh – 10 memberships up for grabs in a competition

• Leave a comment linking to the status link of your tweet on our launch post

The deadline for this competition is Sunday 21st June 2009. Therefore, no tweets after midnight Eastern Time (New York Timezone) on Sunday (about 5am GMT) will be counted. We will select the winners randomly and do our best to announce the winners the following day.

» Read our launch post – Blog Themes Club Opens

I'll be back to normal soon!nnOh and another $450 month last month

It's been quiet round here of late. Actually most of the AIS/Money Making sites I subscribe to have been quiet of late. Could be the weather, the football (European Cup), Wimbledon, or just one of those periods where everyone stops blogging and actually starts concentrating on their sites!

For me it's been a mix of a few things. Work has continued to be mad and whilst it's relaxed this week I can see it escalating further in the next few weeks. In between work I've been trying to get our CMS Plugins site finished off. I'm mainly left with the content and checking over the first plugins ready to go up for sale. It's just sitting down and doing it. I'm hoping to set the site live ASAP, maybe on or after the weekend, although Wimbledon is also taking up my spare time!

Anyway, to the nitty gritty, last month was another successful month and we've finally cracked the $400 mark! This has been the highest monthly income ever, which I'm pretty pleased about. The final figure has come in at $445. We're just $55 off cracking the $500 mark which I'd love to do before the end of the year.

Other good news is that real cash in the bank has topped £900 (I've not got all the payments in/cleared yet so I can't give the exact figure) which gives us a monthly average of over £150 a month, about £25 a month more than last year, again something I'm pleased with but would love to get this up to £200 a month before the end of the year.

Considering it's the summer, where earnings tend to drop slightly (adsense definitely has), I'm quite pleased with these figures. I hope you've all set another milestone in your earnings

Update: Cash in the bank for the month is now at £950 after the various payments were in. Plus I suddenly got $10 in from Chitika, somewhere I rarely every check, so that was a nice surprise! So that's almost an average of £160 a month, which is a good improvement over last year

May earnings were pretty good, mainly due to the first sales of my commercial plugins. The total income for the month was $374 which almost works out evenly between advertising (link sales), AdSense and product sales. Not a bad turn around from last year where about 75% of our income was from AdSense, which is never desirable.

This is a step in the right direction of increasing our monthly income, now all we need is the exchange rate to sort itself out and our dollars earned will be worth more! There's always hope!

I've yet to finalise the current cash balance, however we've cleared over £127 at least, so we've hit the monthly target yet again.

It's been a bit quiet around here as I've been working on our new commercial plugin site. We've now got a design for it which is being coded up into a WordPress theme, as we're going to use WordPress to power the site (obviously!). We're using Secure Delivery to deal with the delivery of the products after purchase, makes my life easier!

We've got 4 plugins ready to sell, plus a few to give away for free. I'll also be writing at least one other for use on the site which I'll also put up for sale. I've got plenty more to do, it's just finding the time! I mentioned last time about pricing products and the different structures available. For selling the standard products this is just a one off payment, but for the yearly upgrade and support license there's more involved. My plan is to sell this as a product and then manually create a user account in WordPress for the buyer. We'll then have a different page set up for each plugin and the member's account will be given access to each plugin they've subscribed to. This should be possible with a couple of plugins, although it is the trickiest part. For the payment I'll most likely set it so that if someone subscribes I'll set up the subscription via PayPal for their account and then if payment isn't received the following year their account will just be suspended for up to X weeks and then terminated.

I'm also intending to set up a demo WordPress install with the plugins available to try out so that people know what they're paying for. Obviously with a CRON job to refresh the database back to its original state every so often.nnSo things are getting there slowly. I've upgraded a couple of the plugins to WordPress 2.5 now, so I just have the others to check over. Then I'll make a start on the content and getting our subscription area sorted out. Unfortunately we've both been swamped with work for the past couple of weeks, and it doesn't look to be slowing right now, so it's a case of getting little bits done here and there when there's a spare moment. Still, should be good when it's live

The good news is we've already made a sale on 2 of the plugins for 2 multi site licenses and the yearly upgrade/support.