First let me congratulate some of you out there. Today, it seemed that Google did a huge round of PR updates, and those of you that gained, for what it’s worth, congrats! For those that lost PR, such as a favorite site of mine which you can find at OneMansGoal.Com – I feel for ya. It’s not a huge deal (unless you’re a link seller pimp), so no worries.

Anyway, the main reason for this post is to document a small investment I made yesterday. The opportunity involved sponsoring a new WordPress Theme, and the way you do that is first, you find a designer who’s selling sponsored links in their new theme that they just designed (you can find these usually on the Digital Point Forums pretty easily), and you obviously agree on a price for a link. I’ve seen them go anywhere from $5 – $100, depending on the designer, the design, and some other factors.

I’ve always wanted to try this out, because if you pick a decent theme to sponsor, and it gets downloaded several hundred or thousand times over the course of the next year, you could end up with a lot of backlinks coming into your site. The cool thing is that they’ll all have good anchor text (because the sponsor allows you to pick the anchor text for the link).

Details Of My Deal

Other factors that were important included where the designer was going to promote the new theme, and here is the list:

* http://www.wpthemesfree.com
* http://themes.blogflux.com
* http://www.wpsnap.com
* http://www.webpuffs.net
* http://www.freelayouts.com
* http://www.templatenavigator.com
* http://forums.digitalpoint.com
* http://www.themebin.com
* http://www.fresheezy.com
* http://www.wpskins.org
* http://www.freewordpressthemes.com
* http://www.wptheme.net
* http://www.bloggingthemes.com

It’s a decent amount of sites, and he should get some good exposure there pretty quickly, because bloggers tend to try out new themes if they look good, and I really think this one does.

The designer also said that he would send me download reports with links, so that way I can track the amount of downloads and hopefully (crosses fingers) it turns out to be a lot!

Bottom line, for $15, if I’m able to get even 50 links out of it (which I’m sure I will), it will be worth it. Chances are, over time, it will probably be a couple hundred, and just imagine if you did this on a regular basis. Imagine getting a sponsored link on a theme with the success of “Cutline” or the “Andreas” series…I bet those people are happy these days!

I’ll keep you posted over the course of the next few weeks, and let you know of any immediate progress. I may pick up a few more sponsored links if I find any more good deals, and if you’re interested in doing the same but are confused…just drop me an email and I’ll help you out