One of the most cost effective ways to market your website is link building through free template downloads. Many computer users want a website but don’t have the technical know-how to build a site from scratch. These thousands of users turn to the popular world of free templates.

How many links can my template get?

I’ve seen many designers of templates with over 10,000 downloads each. Can you imagine getting 10,000 backlinks from a couple hours of work? Not all templates will perform well, but if you create a worthwhile template, it will be heavily downloaded. I created a template 2 days ago that already has almost 30 downloads. Sure it’s not 10,000 backlinks yet but at a rate of 30 every 2 days, I’ll have almost 1000 free backlinks in 2 months from that template alone.

I’m not a designer, I can’t make one. Can I?

Even if you do not have the technical skills to create a template from scratch, it may be worth your time to pay a designer to make you templates. A template is not as complex as a complete website and requires no copy-writing or content. You can hire a designer to make you a template for less than $100. Sure, it’s not free, but over the long term it’s much cheaper then directory submission or other means of creating large quantities of backlinks.

Where should I list my template?

Many sites allow anyone to submit templates for download. One of my favorites is FreeWebTemplates.com, but there are many many others to choose some. Submit to them all for more downloads overall. Here’s a list sorted by pagerank of some sites that allow submissions:

PR7 – http://www.freewebtemplates.com/

PR6 – http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html

PR6 – http://www.free-css.com/

PR5 – http://css4free.com/

PR4 – http://www.csstemplates.net/

Search google as well to find your own sites. If you think you’ve developed a really killer template, there are also sites that offer templates of sale. If it performs well there, you not only receive the backlinks but a cut of the profit. Two ways to win!

Here’s a shameless plug to my latest template, but also a valid example of what a well designed template can look like:

Clean and simple, valid XHTML and CSS

Questions? Leave a comment.

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