Yesterday I bought 1000 visitors from TrafficZap … mostly because it was cheap, and I thought I’d experiment with a few more traffic exchanges than I did last year.

With most of the traffic delivered, I was surprised to check my stats to find that I actually converted some of that traffic. 1.4% of it, in fact.

While that doesn’t seem like a spectacular number, it is the best I’ve gotten so far from any non-targeted traffic purchase.

I’ve got a few more results left to come in from text links and AdBrite, but when I start over again with the best of the cheap traffic, I have a feeling TrafficZap is going to be included in the mix.

Gosh, I love being surprised.

I’ve been promoting a new site for the last week, and because it’s in a very broad area, I thought I’d once again experiment with traffic exchanges and purchased traffic.

And again, I’ve found that traffic from sites like TrafficSwarm convert poorly, traffic from purchased packages that come from expired domains and popups convert dismally (which is two steps downhill from poorly), and traffic from InstantBuzz, while harder to get, converts a little better than both put together.

And once again, traffic from signature files in forums has all those other methods beat by a mile, or ten, or more.

Forums are great. As long as what you post is helpful, and as long as your sig link looks interesting, you’ve gone half the distance to getting a lead or a customer as soon as they click.

And as a result, the new site is off to a great start.

Now, if someone wanted to start a service, offering a forum posting service where they researched answers to particular questions and responded intelligently to posts with their customer’s link in the sig line would be a neat thing to try.

Another free ebook is available from Surf the Mind. WP Theme Traffic details the steps I’ve taken making and promoting WordPress themes, which result in instant high PR links, as well as hundreds of links from new blogs from just a few hours of fiddling.

To download this ebook, and get notification when other similar books become available, click the link below:

WP Theme Traffic

I wrote before about the benefits of high PR links from WordPress Theme directories, but there’s another benefit I’ve been seeing as well.

For the last several weeks, I’ve been noticing that a lot, and I mean A LOT of new incoming links are coming from blogs that have installed my themes.

Now, I wouldn’t call these links targeted. For example, my WordPress dashboard shows the latest, and two are video game blogs, one’s about jewelery, one’s about job hunting, and one’s an erotica fetish blog. But the are incoming links, and they are bringing traffic.

As a caveat, I imagine that if I had linked the credits to an online pharmacy, more of the blogs using the theme would have deleted the reference, for fear of harming their own rank in Google, so if you do pursue theme creation, I’d suggest using sites in a ‘Good Neighborhood’ as defined by Google in the credits line.

How this will eventually effect my Google PageRank, or even SERPs, I have yet to discover. But it does confirm that creating WordPress themes is a very viable way to create one-way links to your website.

Edited June19/06 to remove WordPress Themepark and change it to the WordPress Theme Browser, which the former owner of Themepark is now administrating.
I recently created my very first WordPress theme that I wanted to offer for free to the world. After uploading it to my blog, and tagging it with Technorati, and adding a screenshot with tags to Flickr, and adding some social bookmarks. I thought I had better do some research to find out where else I could submit my themes for the widest distribution.

1) The WordPress Codex is the best place to start. All you need to do is register for an account, then edit the appropriate category in the wiki format to add your theme. The result is an instant PR7 link to your site.

2) WordPress-Themes.org has a flashed-based file upload utility that is kind of cool. It’s a small list right now, but it looks like it has a lot of potential. Theme page currently a PR2

3) Leave a comment on How to Blog’s list of 875+ free themes for WordPress and you’ll get some traffic from the comment section right away. And hopefully you’ll get added to the next update of the list. The list is PR5, and the comment section doesn’t appear to use the nofollow tag.

4) BloxFlux Theme Directory requires registration and a screenshot that’s 640×480, but if you jump through the hoops, your theme is added instantly. The theme page is a PR7, but your link will be on a unique page for your theme. Based on the directory structure, that page is likely to get a PR4 or 5 when Google updates again.

5) WordPress Theme Browser (PR7)takes an uploaded zip file of your theme from your hard drive as a submission, automatically creates a screenshot and grabs the theme info from the style.css file. Very slick, and instant. Be sure to link to your site from the style.css for best effect. Now that this site is up and running, the WordPress Themepark is offline… I think that leaves an opening for another site to come in and start with some new innovations.
6) The Open Directory Project seems to be listing only those sites that have multiple themes, but if you can make one, you can make two… and the ODP gets replicated at Google as well as other high-traffic sites.

7) Smaller link directories like the one found here

WordPressTheme dot com (PR5) seems to be down for the count, but it might be worthwhile submitting your theme via the contact form

9) Not yet fully functional, it seems, is wp-themes.org (PR6), where you can host your theme, and have it displayed wiki-style, like wp-plugins but for themes. Keep your eye on this site.

Anything I missed? Add a comment.