Become a Young Successful Entrepreneur

Photo by laurenlemon

I absolutely love Wordpress because of the number of plugins that are available.  I dare you to try and find something that no plugin out there can do!

Actually, you should seriously try and think of something a plugin can’t do right now and leave me a comment about it.  I’ll either find the plugin for you and comment it back to you or I’ll tell my plugin-author friends to develop it themselves.

What amazes me is that all plugins are available for free!  I was talking to my good friends @TamiReiss and @Yams about this and we decided to do some research to find out how plugin authors currently make money and how much money they’re making.

I interviewed the following people:

• Michael Torbert - Author of All in One SEO Pack
• Oliver Seidel - Author of cforms II
• Joost de Valk - Author of Sociable
• Viper007Bond - Author of Video Quicktags
• Lester Chan - Author of WP-Polls
• Alex Rabe - Athor of NextGen Gallery

Here are some interesting facts I found out:

• The majority of the WP Plugin authors are freelancers who are making plugins as a hobby because they enjoy it
• Plugin authors are open to suggestions about what kind of plugins are needed in the community.  Feel free to send them an email introducing yourself and your idea because they’ll most likely build your plugin just for the fun of it
• Top authors make money with plugins through advertisement on their site and through donations
• The most money made through donations is a couple hundred dollars a week

Question: What 1 piece of advice would you give a person who wants to make a living developing WP Plugins?

Michael: “The best piece of advice I can give to someone wanting to make a living developing WordPress plugins would be to pay your dues.  Before I was involved in WordPress commercially, I was already very active in the support forums and developing free plugins for the community.  I didn’t treat it as something that would make me immediate money, not even as something that would eventually make me money.  I just wanted to do my part in the community.  You should always strive to provide a top notch product and/or service, and the rest will come.

Understand that you’re not going to be an overnight success, and it may not happen at all.  If you’re involved in Open Source development just for the money, you’re going to be disappointed.  Look at Matt Mullenweg, he didn’t start WordPress to gain fame or fortune, he just wanted a great blogging tool.

Find your niche, and become personally involved.  If you don’t care about what you’re doing, then you’re in the wrong profession.  This applies to WordPress as well.  When I work with WordPress every day, I feel like I’m getting paid to enjoy my hobby for a living, it doesn’t feel like work.  That’s how everyone should feel about what they do.

You may not want to just dive right in to trying to make a living on your own developing for WordPress.  There are plenty of companies hiring people with WordPress experience, and most started part-time or as a hobby before fully committing.”

Oliver: “Think of a proper business model, like Akismet has and ensure your business model is ‘approved’ by Matt Mullenweg. Clearly state as many times as possible that your work is GPL compliant.”

Joost: “It’s neigh to impossible if you don’t charge for your plugins. I give them away for free and love doing so, but the donations I’m getting amount to a maximum of a couple of hundred dollars a week. So you should be doing plugin development to make a name for yourself so you can get work for your WordPress business, or for other reasons.”

Viper007Bond: “In short: pick a different career. You can’t make a living off writing WP Plugins, at least from what I’ve seen, but you can make a living off being the IT guy / support for a WordPress site. That’s actually where most of my income come from — managing WordPress sites for clients (upgrades, theme changes, adding their content as posts, etc.).”

Lester: “Give back to the community by creating free plugins as well. Maintain a portfolio of both free and commercial plugins.”

Alex: “If you would like to be part of the WP community and start plugin coding then study, study, study other plugins. There a tons of good plugins out there, with the help of the WP Codex and other plugin code, you should be able to write a plugin within 1 day.

Make money like Akismet

From my research, I found that Akismet has the most solid way of making money.  They currently have two business models:

1. Pro-blogger API Key - Any blog that is making over $500/month should pay Akismeth $5/month for their SPAM blocking services

2. Enterprise API Key - Commercial or company blogs pay $50/month for SPAM protection

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So there you have it.  The most you’ll get out of donations is $200/week (and this is with an extremely well downloaded plugin AND on a very generous week).  If you want to make a living developing wordpress plugins, you’ll need to develop a business model outside of selling your plugin or asking for donations.  Advertisement is always an option, but perhaps you can target enterprises and corporations like how Akismet is doing.

Before I leave you, here are the Top 10 WP Plugin Authors and the Top 10 WP Plugins.  Enjoy!

The Top 10 Wordpress Plugin Authors

1.Michael Torbert - 961,306 downloads. Co-author of All In One SEO Pack (originally created by Uberdose)
2.Matt Mullenweg - 921,827 downloads. Author of Akismet
3. Lester Chan - 775,220 downloads. Author of WP-Polls
4. Arne Brachhold - 628,350 downloads. Author of Google XML Sitemaps
5. Andy Skelton - 449,345 downloads. Author of WordPress.com Stats
6. Alex Rabe - 429,705 downloads. Author of NextGEN Gallery
7. Oliver Seidel - 361,918 downloads. Author of cforms II
8. Joost de Valk - 328,036 downloads. Author of Sociable, Google Analytics for WP
9. Donncha O Caoimh - 246,752 downloads. Author of WP Super Cache
10. Vladimir Prelovac - 244,963 downloads. Author of Smart YouTube, various SEO plugins

Top 10 Plugins to use right now for your blog

1. CForms 2 www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
2. WP Post Ratings http://lesterchan.net
3. Twitter Tools http://alexking.org
4. Social Bookmark Creator http://www.twistermc.com
5. Plug ‘n’ Play Google Map http://archive.yongfook.com/plug-n-play-google-map/
6. Google XML Sitemaps http://www.arnebrachhold.de
7. All in One SEO Pack http://wp.uberdose.com
8. FeedBurner FeedSmith http://www.feedburner.com
9. WASABI Related Post http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries
10. Spam Karma 2.3 http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/