Zillah - Our Most Exciting Free Blogging Theme Is Here

TL;DR: We have a new theme. Its our best free theme to date. And it will stay free for life. No paid add-ons, no upsells. Just quality features, updates everything that youd normally expect from a paid theme, delivered for free. Zillah.One of our goals at ThemeIsle for this year is to create amazing free products for WordPress and give back to the WordPress community as much as we can. Ionut already  explained how we can afford to do so in this prequel  post.One of the ways in which we want to make that the reality is by releasing completely free themes that are of the same quality as our premium themes.But in order to make this happen, we needed to change our mindset slightly. Since the only goal was to build a great final product without holding back anything, this has helped us regain our passion for building themes in general. Everything that we thought should find its place in the final release did.And since we owe everything to WordPress which originally started off as a blogging platform weve decided to make this newest theme all about blogging and the blogger in you.Introducing Zillah, our newest free, no-features-locked theme for bloggers and writers.This theme will remain free for life,no upsells,no locked features,no paid add-ons.Also, prepare yourself for free updates because we intend to keep this theme as up-to-date as it can be.Heres the story behind Zillah + what you can expect of it:Click the image for theme demoA dashing WordPress theme  for  the blogger in youFirst off, weve worked hard on this product, and we owe the stunning result to the people that got involved:the man with  the plan Ionut who has unlocked the resources needed to achieve thisthe lovely Ashley  who kept true to herself and designed such an elegant theme, just like her own styleour developers who worked around the clock to implement everything: Claudiu and Rodica (who also came up with  the brilliant Zillah name for the theme)each member of the  ThemeIsl e crew from graphic design, to marketing and  (spoiler alert) supportWeve promised to keep this theme free, which means that our work doesnt stop here. Were going to continue building it and updating it constantly. You can take our word for it because we actually use Zillah on our main channels (on this very blog and IonutN.com). We also have a promise to keep to our friends who have beta tested it and ultimately ended up switching to Zillah for good:  Madalin Milea  and  Catalin Zorzini.If you value style and simplicity, the Zillah WordPress blogging theme will appeal to you. -Joe FylanLooking into the future, two of the features that are next on the plate for Zillah are:WooCommerce integration for everyone who wants to sell their products directly through their main WordPress site.New fonts for more customization and better branding possibilities.(By the way, if you have any cool features in mind that youd like to see in Zillah, please submit your ideas on GitHub  and well take a look.)Feel free to go ahead and download Zillah, theres no signup needed: Download here for free Need help setting up the theme? Write to us via the customer support channel. Our amazing support team will be with you in max 24h. Yes, support is also free of charge with Zillah.How we introduced Zillah to the worldWe are proud that ThemeIsle is now a growing business even though we did start off bootstrapped. This means that we can invest in various ideas that we value, and come up with products like Zillah (the last time we did something similar  was with Parallax One). And its not just development cost were talking about here. Once the whole theme is built, then come the marketing efforts.Heres our go-to-market strategy (just keep in mind that some of the actions described below did require a lot of work and some skin in the game):Firstly, in order to bulletproof Zillah, we reached out to ThemeReview  for a technical check. But we  also wanted to see how it behave s in the hands of an actual user, so we asked some WordPress bloggers to test the theme and see how it works for them. Their reviews appeared this week on WPKube and WPDailyThemes. From an online marketing point of view, those reviews  represent authority links pointing to Zillah and bringing it into the light. This is how we approached these partner sites:Were also using some of our own media to reference back to Zillah, which has an impact if you already have some fairly popular sites to back you up. For us, the  CodeinWP blog and JustFreeThemes  are valuable places  for reaching WordPress users looking for WordPress theme-related topics. Moreover, for  our CodeinWP readers, were preparing a newsletter that will include a mention to this very article. So the more sites you have, the more subscribers on board!Talking about email marketing, we reached out to our friends at CreativeTim who kindly agreed to announce Zillah en premià ¨re in their own weekly newsletter. This is what the piece looks in the email they sent out to their designer audience:We also added a paid newsletter in the bucket and got featured in WebCodeGeeks (the listing cost us a bit over $500). We reached a different niche this time, mostly web developers and freelancers who can now recommend Zillah to their clients. The listing:Some of our growth-hacking tactics also include placing links in the most popular networks dealing with design/development resources. Keep in mind, though, that in order to get some traction there, you must be an active member, have a good karma, and not just ask  for votes out of the blue. Those networks have  complex algorithms that will keep you from popping out from nowhere and abusing the system. But if you  behave  properly, in time, you will start seeing some results. Heres where we like to hang out: Product Hunt, ManageWP,  Reddit, Hacker News, Designer News. Last but not least, we crafted a retargeting campaign (were using  Perfect Aud ience) for people who already have a connection with ThemeIsle have visited our site, or have liked our Facebook page. Ad  campaigns  can really pay off, if youre doing it the smart way and segmenting your target audience thoroughly.One week  worth of resultsAll these actions took place over the course of a week, from  Thursday to Monday, overlapping the weekend, and not just any weekend, the #EURO2016 opening, so maybe this was  not  the best timing. An important thing to remember: research what could steal your audiences attention before planning up a campaign.We have the traffic results, as well as the themes downloads in. There were 3865 views on the themes landing page, and 2585 downloads.This doesnt mean that the CTR was 65%, though. In many places, we used a  direct link for  downloading the ZIP, so some of the users havent seen the themes page or the demo before getting it. What made a difference, though, was that we didnt ask for emails in exchange. You cou ld and can just get the theme right away. A great number of  these views come  from the  Facebook  campaign. Facebook Ads worked for us because we used them to communicate with our past visitors, not to target new people. In general, however, Facebook Ads arent that perfect of a marketing method anymore.The display campaign on PerfectAudience hasnt been such a great success. Weve made  30,000  impressions though and for around $40, which counts for brand awareness. In time, such actions increase the ThemeIsle brand recognition:On the demo page,  the traffic was about the same as on the landing page, 3600 views. But our efforts  have paid off, as you can see below. The first referrals are DesignerNews (including aggregators like UsePanda and Sidebar.io), Reddit, Facebook and Hacker News. Again, these results rely  on a constant activity on these networks.In conclusion,  Zillah is one good example of what the love for open source can result in. Theres a lot more we could have done, but we believe  this is just the beginning for Zilah, and that its popularity will grow organically from now on.Hope youve enjoyed this transparency-like written post, and that it helped you understand how were doing things at ThemeIsle.One last important thing, wed love to hear from you how do you  like Zillah, and what are *you* doing to promote your products?