What’s Hot and Not in the WordPress Economy
The WordPress economy is a big buzzing hive of talent and ideas. Users are always thinking up new ways to extend it, make some side income or turn it into their full-time profession.
Finding a niche within that ecosystem is a task of its own, because there’s so many directions you can take. Let’s take a look at what’s hot and what’s not.
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What’s Hot?
Niche Themes
Generic themes are good, but niche themes are better. Using a theme specifically built for a restaurant is easier to customize and launch than building/modifying a generic theme. Some examples of niche themes include –
- Wedding themes
- Resume themes
- Landing page themes
- Video themes
Managed Hosting
Not just hosting, but “Managed Hosting”. What’s the difference? Well, a lot. From automatic updating, private VPS, CDN data delivery, hassle free backups and much more, this is the crème de la crème of hosting. Getting into managed hosting is not for the faint of heart though, your business depends on exceeding 99.9999% of the time.
Support Services
As the products and services around anything grows so does the requirement to support it. Supporting themes, plugins and other services around WordPress is a very lucrative and profitable option today. With more users creating amazing products everyday there is sure to be a need for supporting them sooner or later.
Consulting
Even though millions of people use WordPress, there are millions more that do not. Providing direction, benefits and showing how a robust platform, such as this, can help an individual or a business do more is a growing section of the market.
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Consulting can include SEO, design, custom development, site management among other services.
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What’s Not?
Blogging
Not blogging by itself, but blogging about WordPress. Unless you can bring something really, really exceptional to the table starting another blog on the topic will only make you a download statistic for Matt’s “State of the Word” address.
You’re better off writing for an established blog where your content is seen by more people. If you’re really good at what you do, then you’ll make more money developing products than writing how someone else can do it anyway. You can write a memoir later.
AdSense Sites
I think I’ve said enough about that. I mean, ugh!
Plugin/Theme Number X
If you’re creating similar plugins and themes like the popular ones out there, then you’re just wasting your time. There are dozens to dozens of themes/plugins that offer similar functionality, try to be different! There’s a reason GPL exists, instead of making a new product why not take an available one, improve it and release it again? Provided you do so under the same license.
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I’d like to hear what you think is hot and what is not? It could be a certain niche, a sub ecosystem around a particular theme framework or plugin, or even what you think may get big in the coming months and years! Leave a comment below and let us know.