The website templates business has been in a cash cow position from its beginnings in the early 2000’s. Over the past ten years, hundreds of thousands of eager entrepreneurs have uploaded websites, or even entire networks of websites, in order to stake their claim in the website templates gold rush.

Now, ten years later, the marketing landscape has changed drastically. The boom town activity of website template sales has given way to market saturation and intense competition, with one hundred thousand template websites disappearing everyday and two hundred thousand start-ups rising to take their place.

I raise this issue because of the increasing number of novice, would-be web designers who contact me for advice about how to be successful in the web design and website templates industry.

As mentioned, the primary hurdle to overcome is the intense competition in the web design and website templates industry today. I just typed in “website templates” on Google and it returned 23,000,000 results. If you put up a new template website today, why would anyone buy from your page instead of from one of the other 22,999,999 other pages?

Frankly, I cannot understand how anyone could break into this market today unless they are brilliant at SEO or have very deep pockets.

That being said, if you are brilliant at SEO and/or you are extremely committed and determined, your only real hope would be targeted traffic, and particularly a niche market. In the early days (going back ten years), it was easy to sell to a broad market because there were only a handful of template sites offering a quality product. But now you are up against hundreds of thousands of template sellers, with many of them offering the exact same product or a product with competitive quality.

So again, you have to ask yourself, why would anyone buy from my website? The answer, in my opinion, is that you must market yourself to a specific type of customer. Unless you have a well-established brand, novices in this industry must tailor their marketing endeavors to attract a narrower range of customer than was previously possible.

For example, Perfectory Web Design Services has always (since 2000) marketed to the artsy web design professional, as opposed to, say, the small business entrepreneur or high-tech aficionado. This wasn’t a conscious decision, but was born of my personal interests and inclinations. It was from hindsight that I recognized this pattern and attributed it as a factor in my success. Looking back, all of Perfectory’s various facades have been “artsy”, and my marketing strategies followed in kind. No surprise then to reveal that many of my long-time customers are creative web design professionals.

So, in closing, I might offer as advice to neophyte web designers and website template sellers to think carefully about your own personal interests and proclivities and how you can use them to focus your website appeal and marketing strategies. Trying to sell to anyone and everyone will not work. You must develop some kind of “hook” to attract some of the people and hone your approach accordingly.