250 Beta Invites to ThemeForest to Give Away

As you know we here at NETTUTS are also responsible for a family of creative marketplaces. Almost exactly 2 years ago, we released the first of these – a little site called FlashDen – an open marketplace where anyone can sell their Flash wares. Since its launch the site’s been getting bigger and bigger, and today there are authors making as much as $10,000 a month on the site. A couple of months ago we expanded FlashDen out to an audio marketplace called AudioJungle that is slowly but steadily building up steam. But today I’m happy to announce that we’re opening up a limited beta invite to our most exciting marketplace site yet – ThemeForest.

Site Templates + Themes for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and more …

So what is ThemeForest? Think FlashDen for Site Templates. It’s going to be a site where you can sell HTML/CSS Layouts as well as themes for just about every CMS you can think of, heck you can even sell MySpace themes (I know, I know, they’re the devil!)

Items will sell for between $5 and $75 depending on the complexity and awesomeness of the files. The site will run in exactly the same way as FlashDen, so authors take a commission ranging from 25-50% depending on whether they are selling the same files elsewhere and how long they’ve been selling for. Actually if you’re already a FlashDen member, you can use the same account, as it’s all hooked up.

How Much Can 1 Template Make?

Obviously it’ll take a while for the site to ramp up, but to look at the highest selling Flash template on FlashDen, that one file has $52,000 worth in the last 5 months. The author takes 50% of that which translates to … well a lot of money :-)

There’s definitely money to be made in templates and themes, especially with the explosion in blogs and small businesses needing websites but not being able to afford designers yet. Additionally there are plenty of small agencies who use and customize templates to onsell to their clients at a profit. And we’ll be chasing all these markets!

Why Wouldn’t I Sell On My Own?

Good question. If you can make site templates and themes, you can most likely make a site to sell your own products. What we offer, and the reason we take a large cut of every sale are two crucial benefits:

1. Ease
   When you sell with ThemeForest you won’t have to worry about anything other than making files. From fraud to refunds to site infrastructure to payment systems, delivery, licensing and all the other things an online shop needs to worry about, it’s all taken care of for you. In fact you can upload a few files and just totally forget about it except to receive cash.
2. Marketing
   It’s very easy to underestimate how difficult it is to get the word out about a product. At ThemeForest (and FlashDen and AudioJungle) we offer traffic and lots of it. We’ll foot the bill for advertising, marketing and promotions, while authors just concentrate on making good products.

Naturally for some authors, it might make better sense to go out on your own, but for many, it’s just simpler to list on a site like ThemeForest!

Get Your Invite Here

We’re opening the site up first to 750 Beta authors to upload files and give the site a run through before we kick open our doors in two weeks time and start a massive marketing campaign. To get into ThemeForest in our limited Beta program, all you need is a FlashDen username (because it’s the same account system) and then just:

Fill Out This Form, the Password is “nettuts”

There are also 250 invites being given away at these two other sites:

• CSS-Tricks
• Down the Foxhole

So I’ll be back to announce the site when it goes live. In the meantime back to your regularly scheduled program of TUTS! :-)