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Link building fads come and go, just like practically everything else in search marketing. That doesn’t necessarily render them useless unless overdone but it’s always a good idea to review strategies further down the road after the initial buzz has calmed down.

Over at foliovision you’ll find an interesting, refreshingly un-excited piece on how to go about sponsoring Wordpress themes (if at all) for linklove: How to Sponsor a WordPress Theme Successfully | How to audit a theme sponsorship.

Seems that the market has matured now: Designers have obviously caught up with the prevailing link craze, upping the ante by charging anything between $80 to $150 and more a pop even on three sponsored links themes. While they will obviously hype the purported benefits no end, this piece takes a long hard look at what to actually consider and expect when gauging theme sponsorship options rather than sink your money into some perfectly futile venture.

After analyzing the ranking and linkage effects some sponsored themes have cornered, the author’s conclusion doesn’t come as a particular surprise:

A single amazing theme could be worth thousands of dollars of incoming links.

On the other hand, no one can predict if a theme will get 1500 downloads and two hundred results or 15000 downloads and 500,000 results. There is a bit of a roll of the dice.

Now that the WordPress theme market is so saturated, it is even harder to gain traction for anything but a top notch theme.

So, like in all walks of life, it’s really a question of thorough research, a hardnosed estimation of ROI and a feel of what quality standards will succeed in terms of enticing users to actually make use of your sponsored themes to flood your web sites with incoming links.

In any case, SEO focused link building, whether applied to Wordpress themes or elsewhere, is arguably one of the most widely misunderstood fields of search marketing these days.

For a quick but unbeatably hands on primer, we suggest this excellent post by Michael Martinez: High Quality Links: How to make high quality links.

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