If you’re like me and have been trying to come up with effective and original ways of promoting and distributing your Wordpress themes, then you know it can be a daunting task. The traditional way of promoting a Wordpress theme is to upload it to a popular theme directory site. The downside I have found to this is the lack of exposure, as your theme gets buried and almost never sees the light of day.

I had a spur of the moment thought last week about using torrents to promote my theme. I figured, I have looked up Wordpress themes on torrent sites, maybe somebody else has too. First, I set off to do some searches on some popular torrent sites such as mininova.org and btjunkie.org. What I found was only a small handful of torrents related to Wordpress themes. This was a good thing in my mind, not too much competition :).

My Results So Far

Since I created my tracker and torrent file last week I have had over 50 80 downloads requesting my Theme Pack. I must say I was blown away with the results. I think this goes to show that torrents can be a effective distribution tool for any free software.

According to mininova.org my torrent has been download 134 times in the last 6 days just from their site. I am not sure whether to trust my tracker or mininova, but either way my themes are getting download at high volumes and that was my only intent to start with.

How to set up a tracker… and what is a tracker?

A tracker is a centralized computer that acts as a portal between Seeds (people with the file) and Peers (people wanting the file). When you download a .torrent file it connects to the tracker in that torrent file and says, “is there anybody out there?”. A tracker doesn’t actually share the file, it simply tells Peers where they can find the file.

1. First you will want to download BNBT EasyTracker. BNBT is not a new program, but does everything you would need it too do. Plus its open source.
2. After you install BNBT, but before you start it, you will want to make sure your router accepts incoming and outgoing connections on port 6969. If you don’t know how to do that go to Portforward.com/routers.html to find out how.
3. Also you will need to open the ports on your computer. The first half of this tutorial will tell you how to open ports on your computer.
4. Now you can start your tracker by opening BNBT EasyTracker. This will launch a console window that says something like this “[Sat Oct 18 14:18:00 2008] server - start”. You will need to keep this window open in order for your tracker to run. You can of course minimize it.
5. Next login in to your tracker by opening your favorite browser and going to this address http://localhost:6969/. Enter admin for the username and password for the password. It is recommended to change your default password for security reasons to start off.
   
6. I recommend you make your tracker a private tracker to avoid tracker abuse. In your BNBT install directory, there is a file called Bnbt.cfg. You can edit this file with notepad or another text editor with these settings

How to create a torrent

1. Download and install MakeTorrent. MakeTorrent is a easy to use and free program for creating .torrent files.
2. Open MakeTorrent and switch to classic mode as it seems more simple then the simple mode to me. Click [dir] or [file] and select what you want to share. What I did was create a folder called “Great Wordpress Themes” and put all of my theme directories into it. There is no need to compress your files, but you may do so if you please.
3. Enter your tacker address. If your ip address was 245.254.245.254, your address would be http://245.254.245.254:6969/announce. Make sure you use the address assigned by your ISP and not the address assigned by your router.
4. Click make .torrent file and save the file in your BNBT EasyTrackertorrents directory.

Seed your Torrent

1. Seeding your torrents is important so that Peers will have a Seed to connect to. Remember you tracker simply connects Peers to Seeds so there has to be at least one seed. Open your torrent client of your choice, such as uTorrent or Bitcomet. Click file, then add torrent.
2. Navigate to where you saved your torrent file and open it.
3. When prompted, save the files to where you have them on your hard drive. You won’t actually be downloading the files because your client will see you have 100% of the download. You will want to keep your client open now to remain as a seed.

Finally Upload your Torrent file

Now that you have a running tracker, and one seed(you) you can upload your file to the larger torrent sites. When you upload your torrent to a site such as mininova.org you will appear in the search engine for Wordpress Themes. This will be the way people find your themes. With some sites you will need to register, while others you can upload as a guest. To start I recommend these two sites.

1. Mininova.org
2. Btjunkie.org

Your Done!

If you need more help setting up your tracker and torrent you can visit the Official BNBT Documentation Page for a more detailed walk-through. Torrents get a bad rap for being simply a pirate tool and not a useful file distribution format. I think this proves that torrents can serve a legal purpose as well. If you find this distribution method works well for you, drop a comment about you experiences below!

Technorati Tags: torrents, wordpress, wordpress themes, downloads, theme downloads, utorrent, bnbt easytracker, theme distribution, theme promotion, worpress theme promotion, promote themes, mininova.org, btjunkie.org, tracker, seed, peer