WooThemes

Reporting for Duty

15. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News

So we’re finally back at the office after our week-long “mobile officing extreme” trip to the slopes, which was indeed an amazing time for the WooTeam. If you had been following us, you’d know that there was much fun & good times to be had…

This means that we’re all refreshed and ready to rock again. We gathered some amazing ideas via all of the discussions on the trip, fueled by much Jagermeister, and we’re looking forward to roll those out in the coming months.

But first up, you can expect the release of CityGuide, which should be going out later this week. The theme is basically ready to go, and has been thoroughly beta-tested, so it’s just a matter of wrapping up the little bits & pieces and then releasing what we expect to be another hit. Thereafter we have a few more surprises (these will definitely include these two designs which we teased last week), but I’ll leave it at that…

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A Designed Startup

11. Mar, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

Ever since we started WooThemes, we’ve been absolutely fascinated with top notch design and we’d like to believe that this focus has been evident throughout all of our activities (from our themes, to the user experience on our site, our content and also our marketing campaigns). This should also be fairly obvious when you consider the amount of amazing web designers we’ve collaborated with, plus we’re always harping on about how awesome our designs are anyway…

Whilst design is ultimately subjective, one thing that can’t be disputed is the fact that our designer focus has probably contributed significantly to our success. This seems to be confirmed by startup guru, Dave McClure, in a recent BusinessWeek article about the value of design to startups:

“Design and marketing aren’t just as important as engineering: They are way more important.”

So in a very techy industry (the interwebs), there seems to be a lot of room for the more design-orientated folk among us. In the past, you could probably get by if you had a superior & groundbreaking product, but these days your competition is much tougher and you need to fight for every person that gives you their attention (superb design tends to be successful in this regard).

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WooBranding

25. Jan, 2010 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

We really love and nurture our WooThemes brand.  It would be ignorant for us to ignore how proper branding & marketing have helped us to create the WooThemes that we are today. Maybe it’s because we’re a creatively-focused bunch, which when mixed with some (hopefully) shrewd business decision-making, you get a proper, longer term strategy that can prove to be sustainable for the brand.

So it’s great when we get to see, that we’ve influenced people’s perception of “Woo”; but not just the way we use it – but the word as a whole. Last night on TechCrunch, they covered a new startup called WooRank, in the comments on that post some people believed that we were behind this new startup. Pretty neat, hey?

Now this post isn’t intended to gloat, but I’d like to point out two reasons why I think we’ve had this success in “owning” the “Woo” enterprise online (if not completely, we have a massive share of the “woo” market…).

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Marketing: Success in Persistence

14. Oct, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

A while back I published a post entitled “8 Ways to Guarantee Steady, Incoming Traffic” and a little over two months later, we still find ourselves implementing the exact same strategies in attracting traffic to our website. The great thing about this strategy is the fact it has resulted in a constant 10%+ month-to-month traffic increase for WooThemes. So it actually works.

What we’ve found though is that irrespective of implementing specific strategies; it has been our persistence that has paid the biggest dividends in our growth over the last 12 – 18 months.

So what is this persistence that I’m referring to? Well, basically it’s just deciding on a plan / strategy and then sticking to your guns in executing those decisions – even if you can’t necessarily immediately see the effects of those plans. Here’s a few reasons why persistence pays off…

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The Science of a Freebie

09. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

Over at WooThemes we’ve released our fair share of free WordPress themes in the last couple of months and we’ve even dabbled in the odd free web icon set as well. And the reasons behind these freebies are simple: 1) we like to give back to the community; and 2) it is a great marketing tool.

The one thing that we’ve always been pretty adamant about though (with regards to the freebies we release), is that the quality of those freebies needs to be right up there. so the free themes that we have released are all top-notch themes and they include all of the functionality that our paid themes would.

Why? We want to impress you guys enough to consider signing up / purchasing the real deal, instead of just using the freebies.

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8 ways to guarantee steady, incoming traffic

03. Aug, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooCamp

In the past few months, we’ve been trying a few different marketing strategies to increase the incoming traffic to WooThemes (including WooCamp & The Showcase of course) and we found that by far the hardest part of that is to ensure that the traffic comes in constantly and consistently i.e. not peaking every 2 weeks and then just flattening out.

And we believe we’ve been relatively successful, considering that our unique visitors are up 16% and pageviews, 25% from June to July. Also, if you look at the following two traffic graphs, you’ll see that the incoming traffic line is a lot flatter in July compared to June. Weekends will obviously be more quiet, but the aim is to even get visitors to your site then…

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