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

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

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.

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.

We've worked out our pricing structure for this as we want to try and offer something for everyone. As the plugins are not anything major we're not looking at charging a lot for them, but charging enough to make it worth while. Obviously each plugin is charged according to the complexity and time taken to create it, however with a few other sites selling plugins too, we also need to keep it competitive.

Our pricing options for these plugins are going to be

• Single site license
• Multi site license
• Yearly upgrade license

The 3rd option can only be purchased if one of the first two options have been purchased in the past. This way someone who just wants a cheapy plugin can grab the single site license, but as WordPress upgrades or if we happen to add more features in, then the yearly upgrade license will have to be paid for to get an upgraded version. Of course if a major amount of new features are added then I'll probably release it as a new product as a Pro version.

To deal with the pricing we're going for simple maths ie. a Single site license costs X, the multi will cost 2.5*X and the yearly upgrade will cost 0.5*X. I think this works out reasonable. Of course the single vs multi site usage goes on trust, but hopefully most of the businesses that buy from us will be honest, as the plugins are not going to be exceptionally expensive in the first place.

We'll also be offering a couple of freebie plugins, mainly because one has been available on my own site for quite a while (and is pretty basic) and the other uses partly modified code from another plugin, and naturally I wouldn't want to be selling someone else's GPL code! Plus I think offering a couple of products for free will attract the buyers in and we'll be offering all the plugins for free to registered charity sites too.

So hopefully the site will be virtually ready to go live soon. I've just got the hard part to do now, write the content!

The past month I've been a bit quiet and a lot of my spare time has been taken up with tinkering with WP eCommerce for one of our sites that has over 100 products for sale on it. I've uploaded about 20, it's a bit time consuming! However once those are up and I've finished customising the code for the cart then that will be done for the time being. My other site is the plugin site which we're still working on getting some content on it, however we already know of one sale that'll be made (once I've written the plugin!) plus a yearly license for upgrades. This site, although not finished, is also eagerly awaiting the shopping cart system that Secure Delivery is about to unveil, so it'll be great to put that to the test too.

However, it's a bank holiday weekend here and I'm taking the weekend off (besides writing my article for BloggingTips) so hope you have a good one

WP e-Commerce is just like any other plugin for the installation. Just unzip the files and upload the directory to your plugins directory, and activate it in the WordPress admin. You then get an extra menu for it, where you can set your shop settings, other preferences, and start adding categories, brands and product information. It can deal with physical products or digital products, the latter was what I was interested in. You can also easily select which fields to have in the form on the front end, and which of these fields to send PayPal so that they're prefilled. As I'm only looking to sell digital products I took the address details out as these are not needed.

The lite version of this plugin allows you to sell products via PayPal only. Whilst it's called 'lite' it's not that simple as such. You can have your products in categories, there's a shopping basket and it uses the PayPal IPN for instant notification. I've not gone through the whole process but I would assume that if you're selling a digital product it will also then provide a download link to the buyer to download the product, as I've had the option to set how many times the product can be downloaded by the buyer.

There are optional extras that cost a little extra (very little to be honest!) which I may look at in the future if the site gets busy enough to need them. Whilst I could have coded this all myself I figured that it was worth looking at the plugin and to be honest it's a good plugin to use. I may also convert one of our other product selling sites over to it as that's been needing a shopping basket for months but I've just not had the time to sit down and really finish the coding myself. With this plugin I could probably get everything added over a couple of days (100+ products) and convert the site to WordPress and hopefully, if my thinking is right, see the sales rocket

So if you're after a free, light, product selling script then this is a good option to look at.