In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Matt Medeiros’ conversation. They talk about how running a family-owned agency honed his entrepreneurial and sales skills, constantly giving value to potential customers, and learning effective sales talk.
Matt is a content creator and the Director of Podcaster Success at Castos. He hosts the podcast, Matt Report, where he talks to a wide range of digital business owners and web consultants. People in the product, marketing, and the agency space are the primary guests.
Joe Howard: Yo WordPress people. Welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe,
Matt Medeiros: and I’m the witch king of ag
Joe Howard: mark. And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast, the witch king of ag Mar this week. Love this character selection. I always, I always love when people. More unique characters. Cause I really get to dive in and remember all of my favorite movies and books, et cetera.
So wish king of ag Mar welcome. What’s going on this week for you?
Matt Medeiros: Just a typical slang folks in different dimensions, moving in and out of time without anyone seeing mates, it’s an amazing.
Joe Howard: Yeah, this is a great characterize. As we’re here on this podcast, I’m looking at, I know I’m just doing some searches so I can get the field as character and man scary, scary character badass.
Yeah, totally. Yeah. That is a very good way of putting it.
Matt Medeiros: They always get like the best like superpowers, the coolest weapons, you know, and it’s just, that’s why.
Joe Howard: Yeah, for sure. We have the witch king of ag Mar uh, also known as Matt Madeiros on this week. Thanks for hopping on man. Uh, I’m a big fan of.
Everything we’re pressing, you do online. Big fan of the podcast, know about a lot of the stuff you do at Pagely, but why don’t you give people kind of the rundown of all the WordPress things that you do?
Matt Medeiros: Yeah. Super quick is a, the maryport.com is the podcast also YouTube channel. And you can find me during [email protected] as a one of their sales reps, just sort of helping folks pick a right pick the right solution on Pagely and get them set up on managed WordPress hosting.
But during this time, Few years now. So a lot of stuff out there, but that’s my primary work.
Joe Howard: I have a question about the podcast. Actually. You mentioned that you do the podcast, obviously that comes in audio format, but also you do YouTube stuff. When you started off doing the podcast and kind of doing YouTube stuff, were you, was your plan to do them both.
Did you start audio and then move to video? What did that look like? It was actually, I
Matt Medeiros: started with both audio and video and. It just became like way too much work. Uh, and this is like six, six years ago. So like even like editing videos and chopping off the beginning and the end was just too much time to even do that.
So I, I stepped away from it, but on the YouTube channel now it’s more just quick little talking head things. If I’m doing stuff on the Maryport channel or from on the plugin Tut channel, it’s much more like tutorial driven content stuff that like teaching people how to do things with WordPress.
Joe Howard: Yeah, cool.
That that’s my ultimate fear is, is bringing on something that is going to take up way too much of my time and not even just taking my time, but it will take up my time because I’m not fast at it. I’m not efficient or good at it. And like video editing is not my thing or, and audio editing. So if I were to do that, that was.
My fear, like maybe it’ll just take, it’ll suck up my time. Then four hours later, it’d be like, okay, edit one video suite. And then, well, where’d the rest of my,
Matt Medeiros: yeah. I mean, that’s the thing with content creation at any level, either whether it’s a blog or, you know, whatever content channel you’re committed to, it can definitely be a time suck and you can quickly get lost in it.
So doing things that you’re comfortable with that you can do pretty efficiently is.
Joe Howard: Agreed a hundred percent. So we got the Matt report podcast and we got Pagely stuff going on as well. So this is interesting timing, actually talking to you this morning, so this is actually kind of a perfect time to maybe jump off from that and talk even more about it. We had some really good conversations about what that looks like in general, how a lot of people, they think that like they work a job, maybe they don’t like it.
Maybe it’s just not for them. And then they move into entrepreneurial. And they find something they like, and they get it to work. And then like, that’s the end of the road? Like, that’s it. I did it like, I’m an entrepreneur now. And that’s like, clearly just like usually not the case. Like there are different chapters of life that happened.
So you kind of went from doing some of your own stuff in WordPress to now working at Pagely. Maybe let’s talk about that transition a little bit. What did that, what did that look like?
Matt Medeiros: Yeah, so, I mean, it’s definitely chapters, you hit the right word right there and that’s the way that I think.
Collectively people, you know, should look at this entrepreneurship is a difficult road, right? So a lot of people who are that have a job, they hate their job. And they’re like, Hey, I want to be this entrepreneur. Right. I want to be this person who starts a business and make some money while they sleep kind of thing.
Totally cool. And it’s totally how, like a lot of us sort of got inspired to get into this game, but it’s, it’s a long journey. And for most of us, we’re just doing it heads down by ourselves. It’s it’s lonely and it can become quite difficult. Now, in my case, I started a digital agency with my father, uh, about a decade ago.
Uh, and the agency is still running. Um, it was just. Different time in WordPress a couple of years ago. Uh, you think you can just go around the horn of many agencies and even boutique agencies a couple of years ago, right around the presidential election, where I think many people at the higher level were just tightening their belts a little bit.
Cause they were unsure of where the economy was going. Um, and the agency gained became pretty difficult. Um, and I was like, I’m the one that can step away from this and have the agency still continue to run and get a job at a, at a place like Pagely and the stars sort of aligned because they still allow me of course, to do my podcast and do my content creation stuff.
Um, so that’s a benefit, but, uh, it’s, it’s a great team too. It’s just a great fit all around and it doesn’t feel, I hope Josh isn’t listening, but it doesn’t feel like a job, you know? Um, Great people. Uh, you know, we have a great system down in and really enjoy working with them and, and the stuff
Joe Howard: that I do.
Yeah, cool man team is everything. You know, if you have the right people around you and you’re spending time with the people that bring you positivity and bring you the drive and passion, then you know, there may be times when it feels like a job, but it feels like a positive driven as opposed to like, you know, driving because you feel like you have to or something.
I don’t want to get back
Matt Medeiros: another piece. That’s just sort of underappreciated in a lot of this is. It’s if you’re able to level up. Right. And in my case, I mean, I was running an agency for years. You know, maybe the biggest projects that we were securing at the time was maybe around like, I don’t know, 30 grand, 40 grand at most in terms of project size, but now I’m able to do.
I’m just learning so much being at the Paigey level with the types of customers that they work with, um, that I’m seeing, you know, the multiple hundred thousand dollar projects. Right. And like just seeing and learning and seeing how everything is done at a higher level. It’s just like, it’s a huge boom to your career.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Pagely is, uh, is now maybe moving into is wrong, but has moved in the past towards more of an enterprise level customers that, right.
Matt Medeiros: Yeah. I mean, you know, not today. Talking about their solution to everything is sort of just dedicated hosting, right? There’s no shared fabric. There’s no shared hosting that the model is not, that it is, is about having dedicated servers and about having a dedicated dev ops team that somebody would work with much closely.
So your development team would work with our dev ops team, you know, way closer than your typical, like. Help desk.
Joe Howard: Yeah, very cool. I’m a big fan of people who have found models, where support is really a core piece of it. We’re obviously big fans of awesome support here at WP bus cassettes. A lot of our jobs, significant portion of our job is just providing great support to people.
I want to, I want to come back to page Lee’s stuff in a second, but you’ve said something that I feel like I have to dig into even a little more because I don’t hear very often. You started an agency with your father? That’s something I don’t hear super often. Dig in there a little bit more selfish that it’s kind of want to learn what that experience was like.
Matt Medeiros: Yeah. So it’s a, so I’ve been working with my father for, for many years. So he and his and my grandfather had started a car dealership. You know, I don’t even know what 60, 70 years ago at this point, uh, we, one of the first Mazda dealerships in the country. So my father and his brothers and his father, they ran a car dealership for about 40 or 50 years in the local community.
And I was always working there that sort of. Learned everything from sales to customer service to everything. So I’ve been working with them for literally all my life. And, uh, when we were getting out, uh, when he was getting out of the car industry, I was getting out of an ISP that I worked at, where I managed a team of developers and it was actually a Drupal shop that I had managed.
And uh, if somebody wanted to build a website, you know, the quick story is somebody wanting to build a website. He was a pro photographer at the same time. It’s something that he did. So then somebody said, Hey, can you build a website with these products that these product photos you took? And he said, yeah, I can try that.
And he turned to me. Uh, these guys want a website, do you know how to build it? And I said, shirtless would give it a shot. Right. And that was sorta like the Genesis of building, uh, the agency.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I’ve heard that agency. Genesis story multiple times. Hey, I need a website with this. Can you help?
Yeah, sure. I can. And thus, an agency. It was your father kind of into some of the cause obviously to, to maybe, you know, Cove bound or to run an agency with your dad, you have maybe kind of different perspectives on technology as technology changes a lot. Did you find that like one of you was carrying the torch more technology, one more on sales and or marketing?
Or what did that look like? Well, just
Matt Medeiros: two different game plans in terms of. You know, he’s very versed in technology. I mean, giving, giving him credit, he learned a whole heck of a lot and he was always into sort of tech. I mean, we always had a computer in the house from way, way back from ever. I can remember, um, is how I got into computers, but his, you know, his knowledge level just sort of stopped at a certain point.
Right. If we started talking bigger enterprise solutions. Yeah. That’s, that’s where I, you know, came in, but we both shared the torch on sales market. It was just a different segment of customers that he was able to.
Joe Howard: Yeah. I’m trying to think about running a digital agency with my dad and it’s like, Nope, I don’t think that’s going to work.
Sorry, dad, you’re listening, but I don’t think you don’t think you’re quite technical enough to help handle the, uh, the running of a digital agency. Maybe you could do some sales and marketing, but
Matt Medeiros: yeah. I mean, family owned businesses. It’s tough. I mean, it’s, it’s no different, I mean, every. Every context has its own diff his own challenges.
Right? So if you’re solo you’re you’re by yourself. If you have a co-founder, you know, I, I used to start, uh, I’d started Dropbox before Dropbox was Dropbox. Right? Years and years ago, I built, uh, uh, started to build a company with a friend of mine. He was a co-founder and I remember we got some seed investments and I remember talking to the seed investor and who is the advisor who was also the father of my business partners, girlfriend.
And I remember him telling me. You know, we were pitching him the business and, you know, back then we were talking about like sinking files to the cloud and it, you know, the cloud wasn’t even like a thing. And we were like, what do you think about this? And he was like, look, I don’t care about any of this.
He’s like, what you guys have to do is work together and build a business. That’s the challenge that you guys are gonna face. And we looked at each other. I remember, I remember it vividly being at dinner at this guy’s house. Sitting with my business partner at the time, his name was also Matt and hearing that and being like, what is mark talking about?
That was the guy’s name. I was like, what is Marco? Of course, we’re going to build a business. What do we think we’re doing here? What else? Right. And that was ultimately the challenge because then my business partner broke up with his daughter and then, and then he just lost all it all interest in building the business.
And he stopped like coding stuff. And I’m like, oh, this is what this guy was talking about. This is the challenge. It’s not the product and the customer. It’s cohesively working together with any partner, be it family, or just somebody you’re paired up with.
Joe Howard: Wow. That’s cool. I did not know that about you.
Yeah, I think you’re right about that. It’s a, like a lot of businesses co-founded businesses fail because something happens with the, with the partnership between the two. I mean, even you see this, this was successful companies, you know, the, you, and you’re married to that person in building a business and it doesn’t always work out in a lot of cases.
It doesn’t. And then that causes, obviously, if there’s a riff between founders, there are going to be some issues building the business, moving forward. It’s hard enough when you’re a hundred percent cohesive and on the same team and working together every day and doing it well, it, even in that situation, it’s hard to run a successful business, you know, to do it when, if that’s not the case, definitely a challenge.
I would love to talk about a little bit more sales stuff. We have had a few people talk about sales in the podcast before, but this is, I think this is a big area. Of interest for a lot of people, a lot of people, you know, in terms of WordPress, they’re technical enough to put a WordPress site together, especially listeners of this podcast, mostly WordPress professionals, people who kind of know their way around, around WordPress, but a lot of the kind of business development and sales stuff.
I mean, that’s a really big aspect of running a business that people need to focus on that. Not everybody has an expertise on. It sounds like you have a background in sales from car dealerships. And now have kind of applied that at Pagely would love to hear a little bit more about, about that. Yeah. I mean,
Matt Medeiros: that, that is one thing that is, you know, sorely lacking in a lot of like, uh, uh, either plugin authors or people who have premium plugins or even themes.
And I think a lot of people can admit this too, right. Because I think the overall feeling in at least this space is. They say they don’t know how to sell. And at the same time, they’re also saying like, I don’t like to sell, I think it’s like this, this evil thing. Right? So when you combine that in that person’s head, they will just never do it because one, they they’re afraid because they certainly they’re uncertain of their abilities.
And they’re also afraid because they feel like they’re projecting on somebody, something negative. And it’s, it’s truly not. I mean, I can safely say that in the year 2019, um, that selling is vastly different than it was. 10 years ago, 20 years ago. I remember I remember being in the car dealership at the Dawn of consumer internet when people could actually first look up car prices, which is, you know, Very common now, right.
People would come to us or come to me with, you know, a pile of papers that they printed out from all these websites that they found and all these other reports that they would buy. And they was just like, ready to come to war with you. Right. There’s this, like, we want, you know, this, we want another, a hundred dollars off and this is why.
And you know, and it’s just like, well, look, we’re not, we’re not going to war with this stuff. And even back then, You know, selling on value, being a family owned dealership was huge. Selling on value is absolutely huge today. And in fact, you know, it’s, it’s the differentiator for, it can be the differentiator for a lot of these plugin, uh, in theme folks in service, people in the WordPress space, right.
Just selling on that value, telling your story building trust is really not that hard. And at the same time, you know, and it allows you to filter down on finding the right customer. So if you’re telling your story and you’re out there. You know, either doing content or podcasts, YouTube blog, whatever, or out meeting people at networking and things like that.
You’re finding customers that want to connect with you and the customer is savvy enough today to do research and understand that they want to give their dollar to somebody that’s going to be there to support them and answer their questions. Sure. There’s like that 20% of bad customers that come along and they just demand everything.
You were all in a position these days to resign from those types of customers and only focus in on, on, um, the customers that we want to serve. So yeah, selling isn’t really as difficult or as challenging, and certainly not as sleazy as some
Joe Howard: people can try it to be. Yeah. Most people think about sales and they’re like, they think about, you know, the slick salesman and I think in a lot of senses, Tack it doesn’t work anymore with, with people being able to do as much research as they want to across different mediums.
I mean, people can really choose you for a bunch of different reasons besides just the 15 minutes or conversation you have on the phone with people, you are doing sales, maybe in a slightly different area than some of our listeners. I think just based on kind of statistically, there are probably a few larger people working with a lot of enterprise people, but a lot of people in the WordPress space.
Doing, you know, required to do sales with, with smaller customers, maybe up to the point, you know, that you used to with your agency, maybe, you know, the smaller deals are 5,000, but maybe the bigger ones are 40 or 50,000, but you’re working in the enterprise space. Can you maybe tell listeners what, what you think has worked with.
For you and kind of what you’ve learned in your time doing sales at Pagely really looking at these like pretty mammoth deals, at least according to the people who come to us for, you know, a couple hundred bucks a month, you know, a hundred thousand dollars project, it’s a big, big deal. What’s uh, what does sales look like on that level?
It’s the same.
Matt Medeiros: With just added zeros. It’s the
Joe Howard: same thing
Matt Medeiros: with added zeros. Right. And, um, you know, whether you’re selling a $500 site or, you know, there’s a, a $50,000 site coming on board with, uh, you know, $4,000 a month hosting account with Pagely effectively, people are, people are looking for the same exact questions, the same exact service.
Um, but you know, in the enterprise, yeah, there’s, there’s some more legwork, this or more paperwork, there’s legal stuff, you know? And, and, and that’s one of the things that. Uh, quickly discovered being in this space, but it’s, it’s all the same challenges is, is folks want to know that plausible deniability, right?
They’ve picked Pagely because, you know, they know that if something goes wrong in the middle of the night, that the Pagely team is gonna, is going to be there to fix it. And they just want to know that they’re making the best. For a, for number one, their job security, but number two, uh, with the budget that they have, have to spend.
And I would say that on the positive side, on these larger scale deals that I see now is people are a lot less price sensitive where they might be at, you know, the, the 500 to $5,000 range of a typical, you know, mom and pop customer where, you know, they’re not just looking at every single thing and asking you a million questions about, you know, it was, you know, what about, should I just use.
This instead of this, like why, why can’t I get this and why doesn’t it take, you know, why isn’t it faster to get this stuff done? People at the higher end, they already are well past that. And they’re just, they just want to make sure that they’re giving their dollars to the right
Joe Howard: place. Yeah. I think that it would be an interesting conversation.
I mean, I’m, I’m on, Pagely the pages of the website right now. Just kind of looking at some of the. Your client said, I think it would be very strange if like someone like Disney or like booking.com or visa came to you and were like working to put together some Wix websites. That conversation doesn’t really make much sense.
Right. They’re coming to you saying as a company that has pretty good amount of revenue coming in, we need a solution that does X, Y. Can you provide that you guys say, you know, come together and say, is this a WordPress solution then? And with our team and our, uh, our specializations, yes, we can help you.
Here’s how much it’s going to cost. Obviously, there are more steps in that, but in general, the grand scheme of things, you know, people need a solution. If you can provide that solution. And like you said, in that sales process, Really conveying the value that you’re adding to them for like really honing in on the pain point that they are really having.
And, uh, and really saying this solution is going to not only solve that pain point, but maybe even here’s how it’s going to solve it financially. Right. You’re spending this much money on this now, you know, with this solution, you pay this much, but for the ongoing support and for how much I know how much better this is going to work for you moving.
Over the next six months or the next year, like you’re actually going to see a positive ROI. So that kind of conversation. Yeah.
Matt Medeiros: Another side to the coin too, is, uh, for the hopefuls that want to get into the sort of the higher level, I’ve seen some crazy things with people that have plenty of money, plenty of budget and plenty of resources I’ve seen.
Funny things happen
Joe Howard: with what’s one of those one or a couple of those funny things with WordPress that people have been kept coming
Matt Medeiros: out of this. Yeah. I mean, from, from the, you know, the regular WordPress side, you know, we’ve seen people that haven’t updated WordPress and literally years, and it’s like a corporate site.
It’s like, wait a minute. Why what’s going on with all of that? You know, why haven’t you done this, right. This is a pretty big
Joe Howard: set for you as your main company website, because they have nobody been maintaining it.
Matt Medeiros: The typical, the typical. Sales processes. Hey, we, you know, you do the sort of, uh, the presentation and then it’s like, okay, we’re going to go with Pagely and then, okay.
We have all of this, like InfoSec security stuff. We need you to, uh, review and make sure that you are compliant with how we do InfoSec security. Like, yeah. Okay. No problem. And then you get to see their website and it’s like, version three of WordPress and you’re like, wait a minute, this just doesn’t line up.
Like, you want all this stuff, but you’re on version three. Like, what are we missing here? Um, all the way down to like some of the things that. You know, being a, starting off the agency, if you’re somebody who’s just starting off like a service or consultancy pricing is always that difficult thing where you’re like, am I charging too, too much, too little of my worth it?
Not at, um, um, you know, again, some of the things I’ve seen with, with other developers and, and what they charge. At the higher end too, when I start meeting these, these larger brands or these organizations, and it really it’s really, eye-opening like, wow, you might want to follow the money a little bit better, a little bit higher, right.
Because I’m seeing what they’re doing and what they’re charging. I’m like, wow. I mean, I, you know, I was charging a fraction of that at my agency. I could have charged, you know, four times the amount for this type of process. So I opening it all ends both the, the end user customer and some of the developers that, uh, I’ve come on.
Joe Howard: Yeah. I think one of the things I’ve learned as a business owner, or maybe two of the things is that hindsight’s 20, 20, it’s really easy to go back and see where you made the mistakes. And the second thing is just like, you kind of, you don’t know what you don’t know. Like there are certain things that until you kind of like, fuck up a little bit and see someone else like charging twice as much and like selling to just as many clients.
And you’re doing pretty much the same thing. Their prices are just double it’s like, oh, like, okay, cool. Like I get that. Uh, you know, when you’re, when you don’t know it, you don’t know it.
Matt Medeiros: So I think it’s all goes, it’s a good lesson for what we said, what we talked about earlier, like chapters in people’s lives and being an entrepreneur and, you know, in the world of Instagram and Twitter and everything, everything is always like, Hey, you know, check out the Ferrari I bought or check out the numbers.
Here’s my transparency report. We’re doing like 50 grand a month. That kind of thing. And everybody who’s like, we’re listening
Joe Howard: and don’t know there’s actually a Ferrari right in the background with my video with Matt. So I’m trying to press him as much as I can,
Matt Medeiros: you know, in this, in this kind of, you know, uh, vanity metrics world, a lot of people who start a business and if it’s not working yet, It’s a very difficult thing for people to say, Hey, I’m wrapping this up.
It didn’t, it didn’t do what I, what I wanted it to do, but I’m gonna take all these lessons. I’m going to get a job. And this job with the right team and the right company is going to just level up all of that knowledge. So that if I do go back out again as an entrepreneur, I start my own business. I have a whole range of new info data research, um, to level up.
It’s not a bad thing. To have to step away from, you know, your entrepreneurship days in this new chapter of your life. And then maybe just, maybe you might start something else later on.
Joe Howard: Yeah, dude, I think you totally nailed it. I a hundred percent agree, Christie and I had a very similar conversation on our episode, which, you know, relates around there’s, you know, there’s so much media around successful entrepreneurs and people.
Making it, and like, you’re talking about all this transparency report for in, in the background of my video stuff that when something doesn’t work out, we feel bad. Like we feel like we should have made it. And like we’re letting people down when in fact this is just part of the journey, right? You don’t always see all the failures of successful entrepreneurs.
If someone was a successful entrepreneur, their first time out trying that’s the exception, the extreme exception, and for most successful entrepreneurs use. 10 different projects they tried before that didn’t work out also what you said about man, like working somewhere to be able to level up your skills.
I mean, I’m sure you’re learning a ton about sales and enterprise sales and all this stuff at Pagely that working at your agency, you may not have had that you may not have had that ability to, you know, if your highest point project was $40,000, you’re not really working in enterprise. The ability to not only have some comfort in.
Having a, a regular paycheck and all that, but the ability to actually have professional development as part of like your day to day execution, like as a business owner, I feel like I lack a little bit of the professional development in the sense that like, I don’t get to work as much on like marketing and like the SEO and, and S and, and sales, like the stuff in the business development stuff.
Enjoy doing, but I don’t feel like I’m super leveling up in those areas because I I’m like managing a team. I’m somewhat jealous of some people working at companies like you, because of the fact that you get to, like, you get to like, be Excel in sales or you get to like pastor of this trade, I feel like I’m kind of a, like, what is it like a, like a master of none sort of thing.
I’m okay. A lot of stuff. I don’t really feel like I’m super good at one thing I, that does, it’s a cool thing to be able to have for sure. And
Matt Medeiros: definitely like. You know, w w if you do, if you are somebody sort of transitioning into a new, a new role. Yeah. It can be scary. I mean, being in sales, all my life for selling so much stuff, I used to, if you remember, there was a company called circuit city.
I used to sell computers way, way back in the day when I was sitting, when I was in college. And then, uh, you know, going into this role, I was like, man, I, you know, uh, I had my own self doubts. I have my own imposter syndrome. Like, how am I going to get on the phone? At and T and Comcast, Verizon Experian, all these people and be like, I feel like the biggest idiot in the room.
Right. And in the beginning, yeah, it was, it was pretty challenging mentally, right. To step up to that. But now after two years, you’ve learned so much, you understand it and you understand that it’s still just people to people, right. It doesn’t, it doesn’t change. You know, you’re not shifting gears just because.
Uh, an executive position at edit and another company.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Very true. It that’s one thing you learn along the way is there’s a lot of advice you can give to people to help them build a business. I mean like unlimited advice or best practices, or, you know, telling your own story to help other people. The one thing that probably covers, you know, everything, you know, if you want to be successful, surround yourself with other people who are trying to do what you’re doing and other people who have, you know, maybe even been successful doing.
If you can find the right people and surround yourself with them, then you’ll at least like not, if you go off the rails, when you go off the rails and things go wrong, you will have those people to lie on. Right. It’s like, you know, you’re bowling, you know, with a, with no, you know, those, uh, gutter, blockers, you know, you still use this.
That I probably used for way too long growing up because I was not never very good, but if you have those, it doesn’t matter which direction you go in. The people will help you to move in the right direction. If you want to go there, we’re going to wrap up somewhat soon. But last thing I would love to touch on here.
A little bit of content marketing stuff. One thing I saw that you did at Pagely that I was super impressed with. I thought it was really cool was you put together these little sales videos and they kind of strung together in a way where you could kind of have a sales associate of Pagely talking about the different things to do a page.
You can actually click on that video and say like, uh, you know, first was you just introducing yourself. Hey, and what do you want to talk about? The video stopped. It had a little button said, oh, I’m a individual owner or whatever. I’m a, an agency owner. I’m like a big agency owner. Then it moved to the next video.
And depending on what people clicked, it would push them into a different video that would talk specifically to them. I thought that was super dope. I never seen that before. Is that something you’ve put together before, or was that your first time trying it?
Matt Medeiros: So we always are launching different project names and that, uh, internal project names.
And that was the internal project name was called bottled beer. Beard was sort of like a genius bottle, but my beard kind of thing. Um, and, uh, Sean Tierney, my, uh, the, the VP of sales, it was his idea. We had chatted about like building some kind of like, choose your own adventure. Um, and he found a service that, uh, would.
But you have that overlay that you were talking about, it was like, you know, your piece, the, uh, the, the, you, it was actually one giant YouTube clip. And then it just had like this menu overlay, and there’s, there’s lots of services out there that can do that kind of thing. But that was a particularly, that was a lot of work.
It was a lot of work because the software is self. Like you have to map all the questions and answers and all that stuff in the checkbox check boxes, but it was also a lot of work to, to feel. Uh, filling in my office here and then do it without having to say like all the ums and AHS. I mean, I still do it in there.
I mean, I’m not a professional, but, um, that was a lot of, uh, of recording time, uh, as well. But a lot of people is great. I mean, our tactic in a lot of this stuff, Look, if you, if you don’t want to get on the phone. Cause a lot of people don’t want to do a online presentation through zoom, which is what we use.
If you don’t want to do that, you know, here’s all like we have handouts, we have obviously the website and here’s just another thing that you can use. And at least they get to see who I am and that they actually talk to me when we do get on the phone. And it was actually really well received by, by customers as well.
So yeah, it was a, it’s definitely helpful to put as much content as you can, uh, out there. A lot of people forget. That content marketing is a great pre-sales or sales tool that can alleviate a lot of, you know, the general frequently asked questions. I mean, I’m sure I can tell that you’re probably a big proponent for like automation and getting things lined up correctly.
So you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting every sale that this is like a perfect case of that. If you’re putting out. These frequently asked questions and sort of like a choose your own adventure fashion. It’s really going to help customers warm up to you. And you don’t have to ask all the same old questions when you get on the phone.
And you can just say, are you ready to sign? You know, are we ready to do the deal that you’ve seen everything else? You have a couple of questions leftover. Um, if not, let’s, let’s just, let’s move on.
Joe Howard: The perfect sales tactic. You jump on the phone and you get the document sign that that’s a sales 1 0 1.
Right? Cool, man, this has been a ton of fun. We’re going to cut it a little short, uh, because I know you are heading out, uh, I’m checking out this, uh, live Q and a you’re going to be on. So you’re doing this Gutenberg times. Q1. With Joe Casabona and carry deals to other people who have also been on the WP MRR podcasts.
So I got all three of the Gutenberg, but that looks fun. Go and enjoy. We’ll wrap this up now, but the last few things we’ll go through, I just want to make sure people can find all your stuff online so they can go listen, people listening to a podcast right now. So they’re maybe on their phone. Where can they go to find.
Find your podcast, maybe also where you are online, Twitter or website,
Matt Medeiros: stuff like that. Yeah. So maryport.com is the WordPress podcast. If you looking for everything I do, it’s crafted by matt.com has every link for every possible thing. I’ve either launched and failed at or still do today. So crafted by Matt has everything that I do.
Joe Howard: Uh, and I will give a quick shout out to Pagely pagely.com for anybody looking for. Uh, hosting partner, uh, on the right on your homepage here, we help big brand scale word press. So if that sounds like something you’re interested in doing or something that you have clients interested in doing Paisley is an excellent partner for that as well.
Uh, Matt, last thing I always ask guests to do is to ask our audience for some iTunes reviews. Would you mind. Asking our listeners here, if they can leave a review for
Matt Medeiros: us. Yeah. If you want to leave a review for the Matt report, just kidding.
Joe Howard: This is what I always do afterwards. So I always say also go leave him a Firestone.
So I’ll give you, I’ll hit you up WMR podcasts, and then we’ll get you out.
Matt Medeiros: Listen, I, I. I’ve been on a, I’ve been talking to a lot of folks lately about, about podcasting with other podcasts and such apple needs to do something about reviews. They need to make it as easy as hitting the like button on YouTube or like a Facebook or something like that.
That should the particular challenges is even if somebody is listening with their mobile device, that is the easier way to do it than doing it through iTunes, but they just need to make it so much easier. Cause it’s still like five clicks you have to do. And then you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and hit the stars at the end, leave a review.
They need to make that easier. But having said that, take a moment and go and give Joe’s podcast. Five star. Because it helps people like him get found. It really does. And it encourages Joe to wake up every day to keep doing this because podcasting is not an easy feat. I think a lot of people forget that or don’t realize that there’s a lot of effort that goes into this.
So leave them a five star review. I’m sure he would really appreciate.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Hey, I appreciate that, man. We tried to make it a little easier for people. If you go to WP mrr.com forward slash iTunes, it forwards you to the iTunes link. So it makes it a little easier. So it’s four clicks, I guess, instead of five, but yeah, people want to leave a review.
Make sure you leave a comment with Matt’s name in it and just mats. How, uh, you know, talk about how Matt, how awesome Matt is. Cause this was a pretty cool episode,
Matt Medeiros: terrible map. I will take all
Joe Howard: sorts of criticism. First episode was now. Yeah. If you want to leave a one-star review, you can just email us that want to start with you.
You don’t have to put it online. New listeners. If you’re in here for the first, maybe second time, we have a ton of awesome episodes recorded. Already. Feel free to go and binge you already binge on Netflix. Why not binge WPM or our podcast and why don’t while you’re at it. Go ahead and binge Matt report podcast as well.
They’ve got some brilliant guests on there too. If you have questions for the show, you can email. At [email protected]. Uh, we’re always getting new ideas for episodes. So if you could help us, we will give you a nice shout out on the show and go ahead and answer questions. That’s always fun. Uh, WP mrr.com is the site.
If you are interested in doing a video course all around increasing your MRR by selling care plans for. Clients then check that out as well, and feel free to grab that 30% discount on the site too. Other than that, we will see you and be in your ears. And next Tuesday, Matt, thanks again for coming on.
It’s just Joe. Thanks for having .
]]>In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Shane Barker’s conversation. They talk about why real-time engagement matters more than fake following, how influencers shouldn’t rely on just one platform, and staying visible online through relevant and relatable content.
Shane is a top digital marketing consultant, keynote speaker, and influencer. He has helped businesses accelerate their growth with customized digital marketing consultation and services. Having won many accolades, he has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
Joe Howard: Hey, WordPress people. Welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe
Shane Barker: and I’m
Joe Howard: overing. And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. We’ve got Wolverine on the podcast this week. One of the most popular X-Men, uh, around what’s going on.
Shane Barker: Nothing man. Just hanging out, looking forward to, hopefully we’ll be filming a movie here soon.
Also, you guys can’t see this on the podcast, but I have an, like an aggressively red beard that I’ve grown out for the new movie. Yeah.
Joe Howard: Nice, nice. Everyone knows that. Wolverine is a, is a red head.
Shane Barker: Yeah, secretly, I mean, who doesn’t want to be a redheaded C? I mean, especially in elementary school, I was so popular.
Joe Howard: Uh, cool. Wolverine, uh, the red headed Wolverine on the podcast this week also known as Shane Barker. Shane. Welcome to the podcast, man.
Shane Barker: Hey man. Thanks for having me. I’m excited. Yeah, for
Joe Howard: sure. Cool. Uh, why don’t you tell people a little bit, uh, about yourself, about what you do, uh, maybe like, as it relates to the WordPress space, it’s kind of a WordPress podcast and most listeners WordPress professionals, but you know, you do some stuff with WordPress and some stuff in the marketing world as well.
So yeah. Give us a little, a little play by play here.
Shane Barker: Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve actually been like in the digital space for about 25 years. I actually teach at UCLA. I teach personal branding and how to be an influencer course. And I’ve used WordPress forever. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s been the platform that I use for all my clients when we used to develop websites quite a bit in my earlier days.
I mean, I say my earlier days, probably 10 years ago, maybe eight years ago, seven years ago, but we use WordPress for my own website, obviously index as well. I mean, there’s nothing, you know, everything’s phenomenal about it. You know, keywords and getting index and all the fun stuff. So I’ve been, I do that.
I have a consulting company called Shane barker.com. Um, I also have, uh, a few, I have a few different companies that I have. I mean, they’re all, like I said, in the digital space that all come into driving traffic and converting traffic. And so that’s kind of, that’s kind of my expertise, but also the influencer side of things, because I’ve been writing about it for about seven or eight years, and I teach a course at you.
Cool man.
Joe Howard: Uh, if the tissue in the course of UCLA is actually, I didn’t know that about you. I did a little research about you. I was like, what’s up with shame. You do it online, but I didn’t, I didn’t catch that UCLA part as someone who’s been in the digital space for a little while. I don’t hear about a lot of like teaching of this kind of stuff, especially in universities.
So that sounds like that’s kind of new to me. What w how did you, how did that come about.
Shane Barker: So it’s crazy, man. It’s actually kind of a funny story. So I, this was, uh, probably about two years ago. I had a local junior college cause I’m here in Sacramento, California, and our local junior college. One of the instructors that I’ve known for awhile while reached out to me, said, Hey, we want to, we really liked for you to teach a course.
Um, you know, I mean, you know, in a roundabout way, she furnished with the instructors that we have are old and they don’t, they’re not in the current space. Right. They’re not an Instagram. They’re not on Tik TOK. They’re not on wherever. I don’t think tick-tock was around two years ago, but anyways, you get my point.
They would, they’re not on these platforms. And so really looking for a practitioner. So they, and I said, well, it sounds awesome. Let’s see, let me look into this. And they said, well, but you have to have your master’s degree. And I said, okay, well then let me go back and get my masters. So I was looking into my master’s degree.
Two weeks later, I might have UCLA reached out to me and said, Hey, we’re, you know, hiring for this position is personal branding, how to be an influencer. And so I sent him an email back and I was like, well, Hey, just so you guys know, I don’t have my master’s, you know, and they said, that’s it. The problem is what do you mean really?
So I said, okay. So I flew down there and they’re like, yeah, we’re really looking for a practitioner. We’re looking for somebody that’s in this space. It’s such a new space. We just know a lot of the instructors. Aren’t going to know how to teach it. And we want somebody that’s, that’s actually been in the space.
And so it was interesting to me because. Usually it’s not that way. Right? I mean, unfortunately academia or the university systems. They’re like, you have to go through certain things, right. You have to do this and you have to do your masters. You have to do this. And in a lot of the times you’re not grandfathered in.
If you have, you know, 20 years of, um, background in marketing, right? Like that should be better than any degree that you received 20 years ago. Right. As soon as they reached out to me and it was because of the content that I was writing. And because of the, my website, obviously it was, you know, were pressed and that was indexing well, and they read my articles and said, Hey, we think you’d be a good fit.
And that’s how I got the job. Like, I didn’t even apply for it. Like they came after me. So it was kind of a crazy little deal. Um, and I’ll be honest. The first time they emailed me, I thought I got hacked. I thought somebody was hacking me in. You know, Hey, UCLA wants to hire you. And I was like, oh, sounds good.
Okay. Whatever buddy. You know? Okay. Let me give you my account number, you know, so yeah, so, but anyways, but yeah, it was a, it was a real deal. And then all of a sudden I had a job at UCLA. Nice.
Joe Howard: That’s funny that a lot of opportunities that people have, uh, you know, you put yourself in good opportunities to, or you put yourself in a good position to be lucky to get opportunities, but a lot of times opportunities kind of find you, you know, it goes both ways.
It’s a
Shane Barker: crazy deal, man. It’s a crazy world.
Joe Howard: Cool. Okay. So teaching this stuff at UCLA, so you must know a thing or two about influencers, personal branding, that kind of stuff. Uh, I mean, my first question is like, what makes someone an influencer? Like how would, how would you define an influencer as someone who knows tons about the topic?
Shane Barker: Yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, influencers like is like a, it’s like a dirty word these days, you know, if you were like, oh, you’re an influencer. Like what, what warrants an influencer? Like at what point do you go, Hey, you know what, now I have influence over my community or whatever that is. Right. So the thing is, is it used to be follower camp?
You were like, oh, if you get X amount of followers and you’re in theory and influencer for me, it really comes down to it. It’s not necessarily a follower account. It’s if you’ve built. And your community listens to you, right? So you, Joe has an example. You are an influencer. You might not look at yourself that way, but you have a podcast.
You have a, a heavy amount of people that use WordPress, right? Your very, your niche down in your space. And so if you go and you have a sponsor on your podcast and whatever it is, it’s SCM rush or whatever that is. There’s people that are going to say, well, if Joe uses it, then maybe I should use it. Right.
And there’s, there’s going to be some validity to that because you actually use those programs or software. So an influencer once again does not have to be people. Think Instagram is kinda like the first thing. Oh, that must be an influencer. An influencer can be a reporter. It can be a blogger. It can be a blogger.
It can be anybody that posts content on Instagram. It can be tick-tock, it can be Twitter. It’s, it’s just somebody that is built out. Some kind of a social media platform have built out a website and they have people that follow them. And that. Like what they put out there and are willing to potentially purchase something and practice service that somebody either reviews or talks about.
So, you know, we have like YouTube COVID unboxings. I mean, there’s just, there’s literally hundreds of different ways that you can, you can use it or work with an influencer and an influencer what’s going can, does not have to be somebody that has a million followers on Instagram. That doesn’t mean that instantly they’re an influencer.
You can have high numbers, but that doesn’t mean you’re influencing people. So I think that’s always a, a misnomer about it must be. So the follower count and that’s not always.
Joe Howard: Yeah. I, I hear that. Um, I feel like when I think about influencer, like I follow a few people who I guess I would consider influencers, right?
Like, like I’m, I’m a YouTube person. So I’m on YouTube, you know, watching different videos. Like Casey Neistat is someone who like, I watched a lot of his videos because I’m very interested in his life and the things that he does. And so, you know, this influencer. I agree with you. Some people are like, kind of like, ah, influencer.
That’s like a dirty word, like, ah, like get that vocabulary out of here. But it’s, I like to think about it more as just like the concept behind it, I think is what’s more important than the, than the actual word or terminology of it. Um, but can you talk a little bit more about like follower count versus actually being an influencer or like size of your email list?
Sort of things I’ve always felt that these can definitely be vanity metrics, but. What’s like kind of the difference between just having a big email list or a big audience and having people actually like, you know, follow what you do and trust and have trust in you.
Shane Barker: Yeah. I mean, I think the, the issue is, is that brands will, for years, they’ve always looked at follower count.
Right. And, and that actually has started the, you know, I’m not going to call it an epidemic because people think it’s like rampant and people are dying because of it. But because of like fake. Right. And, and adding fake followers to your account. So the issue is if you’re a brand and you’re going to an influencer and you say, Hey, listen, you have 20,000 or 25,000 people following you.
So we’ll give you a thousand dollars. But if you get to 50,000, we’ll give you 2,500. But if you get up to 100,000, we usually pay those influencers 10 grand, and then guess what? As an influencer, I go, okay. How do I get to a hundred thousand faster? Right. It took me five years to get 25,000, but how do I get to a hundred thousand?
Like, I don’t have another 15 years to do it. Right. And then people start doing fake followers and not everybody’s doing it. Right. I mean, a high percentage of people have fake followers. Right. And it really comes down to like how many fake followers you have. But the thing is this, you know, as much as you read about it, like, oh, fake followers, Oh, my God, it’s an epidemic and kids are dying because they have fake followers.
I’m being facetious obviously, but no kids are dying because of fake followers, but it really comes down to if you’re a brand, you just look at somebody’s engagement. You look at like, you know, they save a hundred thousand followers and they get a thousand likes on a picture and they get two comments.
Whether that number is true or not true. Two comments is not real engagement, right. If you have those type of numbers, right. Okay. And if I was speaking to a hundred thousand people and I only had two questions at the end, you know, it just seems, it feels like there would be, if you, if you’re producing good content and people like your content, they’re going to be more engaged with what you have to say, right.
With the content you’re putting out there. So, you know, it’s, it’s a, the fake follower thing. And the fact that you have influence just means the way I look at it is back in the day it was, Hey, we post a picture with an influencer right on, on Instagram. And we see how well it does. It’s not that way anymore.
And what I mean by that, It really comes down to a strategy. You have to figure it out, put a plan together, right? So you go to an influencer and say, Hey, where do you have? What do you think you have influenced? And, well, I have a good followership on Instagram. I’ve got a buy blog, puts brings in a hundred thousand a month and I’ve got a 15,000 email list.
And so really now what should happen is a brand should say, Hey, that’s interesting. Um, what we’d be interested in doing is we have a budget of, let’s say $5,000. And what would you do for that $5,000? And the influencer goes. I would post two pictures on Instagram. I would do three stories. I’d write a blog post about it, and I do a blog about it.
That would be keyword driven. That would go after the keywords that you want us to go after. And then you as a brand have to go, okay, for $5,000, do I think that’s worth it? Right? Cause that’s the other big question is like, what do I pay? Influencers? How much do I pay an influencer? Well, First of all, we have to quit putting all influencers in one bucket, right.
Because everybody has different packages, right? That’s like, it’s not, everybody’s the same. So they say, what should I pay an influencer with this, this, this, and this. And it really comes down to, what do you think is fair? Like right. If J tell you this is the package I’m putting together for $5,000 and you look at it and say, okay, I sell $5,000 widgets.
All I have to do is sell two widgets to break even on this. And do I think this influencer can at least sell two widgets for us, right. To break even enough, obviously the goal isn’t to break even, but the goal is to at least get your money back. Right? And so you just have to figure that out. If you’re putting together a campaign and you sell, you know, $1 forks and you have to sell 10,000 forks, you have to go, okay.
That campaign that they’re putting together, do I think that they’re going to be able to push, push the needle? So they sell 10,000 forks. W the lower price point it’s sometimes becomes a little more difficult once again, depending on the influencer and their audience and stuff like that. But it comes down to a frequency deal.
You can’t just do one picture, don’t hire an influencer to put up one picture and then expect to move to The Bahamas and drink Coronas and my ties the rest of your life. Right? I mean, you can do that, but that isn’t going to equal the money that you’d be able to do to go retire. Right. So the idea is you put a strategy behind it.
You have to put a campaign behind it. So every influencer is different. So I usually, when I pursue an influencer. I tell them, Hey, this is what my budget is. And what would you be willing to do for that budget? And some influencers. This is the other side of it. So the other side of it is a lot of influencers don’t know how to put packages together.
Right. And that’s what I teach at UCLA because they go, okay, well, I’ve got this, these things going on. And I have a brand that brand wants me to put a package together. Like, what do I do? Like, I don’t really know what is, what’s a package like. And you say, okay, well, you have to figure out where do you think they’re going to get the most traction and what kind of content you’re going to have to produce and what that’s going to cost you to produce that content.
And if that content is going to be a one-time Instagram post, that’s going to go down in the feed and people aren’t going to see it. It’s only going to have some traction mainly in the beginning for the most part, or is it going to be a blog post? That’s going to be evergreen that could potentially be number one on Google and can continue to bear fruit.
Right. So, I mean, there’s just a lot of different ways to look at it. And I think, you know, my big thing these days is I do heavy education. So I actually teach a word. I do a workshop with brands to say, Hey, listen, this is how you find influencers. This is how you work with them. This is how you put your brief together.
This is what you want to put in your contract. And then I also talked to influencers and say, you know, because a lot of influencers aren’t marked. Right. That’s the thing is like your Helen, the yoga instructor. She’s not a marketer. She just has people that really like her and like she’s authentic and she’s genuine.
And you know, she does all this great stuff and gives out great content. Well, she gets a lot of the time, doesn’t know how to put a package together. So I have a course and I’m coming out with it. We’ve already talked about the, how to be an influencer.com is the course, but how you can go there. And then what they can do is take a.
And personal branding, like how did, like, how do you put these packages together? And first of all, before the packages, how do you like get your website up? Right. And how do you get your, you know, your custom email address? Like these basic things that you want to have, right? You don’t want to have like hot girls, 69 at Gmail, emailing Nike and saying, Hey, I want to be, you know, I want to be your number one influencer, and they’re gonna be like, well, first of all, you, you have a Gmail account, right?
Like you gotta kind of like show that you’ve right. I mean, it’s cool that you’re hot and 69 is awesome, but what, you know, we got to kind of figure this thing out here a little bit. Right. So that’s really what it comes down to. And so I’m the education side of it, because I think any of the, the, the, some of the news about influencers can be negative because once again, it’s a new thing and they it’s, you know, it’s like two, it’s like two high school kids getting together to dance.
It’s kinda like, I’m not really sure where to put my hands or what to do. I’m like, you know, it’s kind of this awkward little situation and I’m here to be. You know, I guess I, I guess I’m the awkward teacher at the dance that shows you how to dance with each other. That sounds super weird when you say it out loud, but the idea is just to help facilitate it, right?
I mean, that sounds super awkward, but I’m not really going to be at a dance with your kids and making sure that they’re holding each other. It’s
Joe Howard: disclaimer.
Shane Barker: Don’t worry. Yeah. Stranger danger, stranger danger. No, I, you know, really it comes down to just getting it so that brands and influencers can work better together.
I mean, that’s really my goal.
Joe Howard: Cool, man. Okay. So a lot of information there as someone who’s in the WordPress space, uh, I mean, I guess I hesitate to call myself like an influence. I understand the concept of like, I have some certain characteristics of what an influencer would be to like, you know, cause I do this WMR course.
I run this company. I have a little clout in the space, uh, after being here for 5, 6, 7 years doing this stuff, I find that in the WordPress community, um, being a core part of the community, uh, is really important to really loving open source softwares. It’s pretty vital, uh, wanting to help others and to kind of help smaller businesses come up after you’ve come up and give your advice to other people.
Like those are things that, that help you be someone who people look up to in the WordPress space. Um, but there are definitely some other strategies involved. I would love to hear a little bit, and this, this may be some, some of the stuff that you’re including your course on how to be an influencer.com, but, uh, maybe we could go through just like, if someone’s kind of starting from.
Zero. They’re just kind of like, okay, like this sounds like something that I may be able to do. Uh, maybe particularly in like the WordPress space, like someone wants to say, you know, I’m a pretty good developer, but I don’t really have, uh, like any visibility online or like I’m a solid designer or I’m a solid marketer even, but I don’t have a lot of, uh, you know, blog posts out or I don’t have an Instagram profile.
What are like the first, I don’t know. I want to say first three, but like. Well, the first steps that you would, you would advise someone to take just like, as someone starting out.
Shane Barker: Well, first of all, if you, your audience is WordPress people there for they’re starting off, that’s where you need to start off as building a website.
Right? Because what happens is, is what, what we’ve seen we’ve seen consistently is that whether it’s Instagram, it’s YouTube, it’s, whatever everybody complains about that. Right. So it’s this it’s like, oh, I used to make more, so much more money. Two years ago, I made tons of money and now the algorithm change and there’s this, there’s that right?
So at the end of the day, it really comes down to using WordPress building your own website, right? Because the idea of all the social platforms that you want to be on, and we’ll go over that here in a second, the idea is you want to drive the traffic from those social platforms to your website, right? Or to your course, or to whatever you have going.
Because that’s where your money’s at. Right? And you control that, right? Not necessarily controlled all the way when it comes to Google and trying to index, that’s kind of another conversation, but you can, you, you, you pay your hosting for $10. You pay your 10, $15 a year, whatever it is and how in, in domain registration fees.
And there we go, you own that, right. As long as you’re paying those fees, you have that. So that’s what I’m teaching people to do is like you’re, if you’re just on Instagram, you’re literally waiting to get shut down or have something happen because the only guarantee is that Facebook is going to. They did it with Facebook, right.
They, all of a sudden you’re getting tons of engagement. Everything was awesome. And then all of a sudden overnight you’re like, God, nobody’s responding to my stuff. Or what did they say, Hey, do you want to boost this post for seven bucks? Okay, that sounds good. And then they’re getting $7 a post and they’re buying, you know, times a hundred million people.
I mean, you do the math, right? It’s not that everybody did it, but my point is is you get engagement, you get dish, you’re getting all this, this great traction. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to pull back on that and then you’re going to have to pay for that, right. They’re going to have to, there’s going to be a pay to play, and that’s not a problem.
That’s their model. And they own the site. You don’t own Instagram Ford slash. You don’t. I don’t know that I absolutely do not. They can shut me down for my political views for anything. Right. I’m not trying to be negative, but really at the end of the day, they can shut you down in a hot second. But if you have, if you diversify view of other platforms like Instagram and Facebook or whatever, this is wherever you want to produce content.
And that’s another thing too, is that you have to produce content where you want to produce content, right? Like if I go. Hey, Joe, you really need to jump into video. And you’re like, ah, but I hate the way I look on video and we were going to fight for three months, six months. You’re never going to a video.
It’s going to, you’re going to kick and scream all the way. Right. And I can understand the first one is always weird. Cause people always hate the way I read the first blog wrote log article I wrote was terrible. In fact, I showed it to my students and they’re like, dad, that’s terrible. And I’m like, exactly.
Now I’m teaching you. So you do the math on that one. Right? So, but it’s thing with video, like you feel like I was just terrible and I’m stuttering and I looked terrible and the lighting’s not good. If that’s, if you’re only worried about that small thing, you can get past that. You just keep doing it. But if you say, listen, I like, I stayed up all last night with anxiety and I was throwing up this morning thinking about doing the video.
Probably you’re not going to do that many videos. Right. So you have to figure out where do you want to produce that content? And let’s get all that conscious reproduce with the goal of driving it back to your WordPress site, right? That’s where the money’s at. That’s where your all we’re consistently going to have control over that.
There’s a lot of ways to do it through social. And there’s obviously SEO and there’s, you know, PPC that you can do. There’s a lot of different ways that you can drive that traffic to your website and be able to convert them. And influencer marketing is no different. Like the idea of influencer marketing is to get people, to buy things or get people to, you know, if you’re looking for more eyeballs or, or exposure, it just, you have to figure out what your KPIs are, right?
Your key performance indicators or what your goals are. And then you build a campaign around that. And then you have to have some. Things, you know that obviously you talked about KPIs, like, well, how am I going to know that somebody closed a deal, right? How do I know that Shane, when he posted this video, that he was the one that brought all the boys to the yard.
And you know, once again, I know all kinds of sales happen. Well that’s coupon codes and some other stuff we’ll talk about, but really it comes down to, like I said, if you’re, if you’re in WordPress, you should build a website. You have to have that. That’s going to be very, very key to this whole thing and use everything else is just a tool to drive the track.
Joe Howard: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. We’ve Christie and I have done some episodes on open source versus closed source and talked a lot about this exact thing. You know, if you have a Instagram account with a hundred thousand followers, it could get shut down tomorrow because you post something about your political views, like you say, and you know, the instant, the 10 top people on Instagram came together and said, actually, we don’t really like this person.
We’re going to shut it down. WordPress source. So when you buy your hosting, when you install WordPress, the GPL language tells you that that is your content. You own that content, uh, and you can publish what you want there. So, yeah, I’m a big, uh, we’re big believers in owning your content and democratizing publishing here in the WordPress space.
For sure.
Shane Barker: Yeah, you have to man. Cause if, once again, it’s, your, your stuff can get shut down for no reason. And they don’t have to tell you why I’ve had big clients that, you know, on Instagram or wherever they’ve gotten shut down. And we go back and really at the end of the day, Facebook and Instagram, nothing against them, but they don’t really care unless you’re an advertiser for the most part.
Right? I mean, if you’re spending big bucks, then you get the private phone number and you get, you know, Helen that will answer the call because, you know, you’re spending a hundred grand a month, but if you’re Joe blow the political. Loves or hates trumps and wrote something crazy on there and they shut your account down.
Yeah. You’re going to get crickets, my friend, you don’t get the private phone number to, you know, we’re, Helen’s gonna answer. Harold is going to be like, you know, being real weird where she’s not going to answer that call. Right. Cause you’re not, you’re not spending money and that’s just, that’s the reality of it.
And so you have to go fight to get your account back. And, you know, we have been able to get some of our clients stuff back and it doesn’t happen all the time where it gets banned, but when it does. Let’s say you wake up and your number one source of revenue, and then all of a sudden it’s shut down. And you’re you talk about helpless that sucks, but your website will always be solid, you know, as long as you have the hosting up and you’re not getting, you know, span with links and all the other fun stuff that we have to fight, but it’s, it’s yours and you will always have that.
So. Yeah,
Joe Howard: I hear that for sure. Okay. We talked a little bit about social stuff as well. So using social media to drive traffic to your website, uh, as a fellow marketer, I’m a big in the inbound marketing and content marketing stuff. So we read a lot of content to try and drive traffic that way, but we don’t have as much like.
Driving as much traffic from social media. Like if you look at our Google analytics, you’ll see like referral traffic. And like 90% of our traffic comes from organic search and then like 5% comes from referral and then 3% comes direct. And then there’s like this little, you know, little one to 2% coming from email and social media.
Um, so as someone whose organization is, I wouldn’t necessarily say we’re bad at social media, but I would say we’re bad at driving. Traffic, especially meaningful traffic traffic that will subscribe to our email list traffic that will sign up for one of our care plans or this WP MRR, WordPress course traffic.
Pay us money for something or become ritually, become part of our audience. Uh, in terms of people we can reach directly like via an email list. Um, social we’re not as good at driving the traffic from social. Um, so maybe we could talk a little bit about, we could do like a mini coaching session here and help me think about some of the strategies we could use.
Not only. Drive more traffic via social, but like what, yeah. What, what aspects can we do to make social more meaningful for us?
Shane Barker: Yeah. I mean, social is, is kind of a bear just in the sense of, cause you’re, you’re talking about you guys are having the WordPress space, right? So you’re not going to see too many people that are on Instagram and go, I’m going to go follow Joe.
Cause all he talks about is WordPress. It is so hot. Like I wake up on a Saturday morning. Right. And then you’re like, God, I just, Joe talks about code and it just gets me revved up. Right. It’s just not as sexy. Right. Instagram as an example is more like lifestyle and this happened, the other I’m drinking my tea and my private jet with my pink poodle on I’m eating caviar.
That was gonna be all that’s fake. I was
Joe Howard: yesterday, right?
Shane Barker: No, I hear you. That’s me. I’m like, that’s, I, I actually just came down to my private jet. I was actually a dream, but that was the closest I’ve gotten to my jet. But that’s the thing is like, it really depends on where you think your audience is going to be in social is becoming more difficult.
Right. Because I think. People are because there’s just so much, right. There’s so many different places to get content. And that’s where I think, you know, it’s important for, for companies. Like, let’s say yours as an example, to figure out where you think your audience is at. Right. And if you say, Hey, I think it’s Instagram.
I might disagree. Right? I’m not saying they’re not people there that use WordPress. Obviously there is, but there’s there. You’re probably not going to go to Instagram for WordPress information, right? The reason why 90% of your traffic is from, is from Google. Organic is because. If I’m one questions about WordPress, I’m like, okay, where do I go?
Is it Twitter maybe? Right. Facebook. Nah, not really. It’s going to be Google. Right? You’re going to go. I’m going to go and Google search. I’m going to go to core. I’m going to find out where people are asking certain questions and then, so that’s why you’ve optimized for that. Like. Your breakdown of your traffic is like almost the same as mine.
Like I get almost all of my stuff is organic because I write about, you know, marketing. So if somebody wants to know that SEO, they’re not going to go look at, you know, cool, hot Shane on Instagram to find out what he’s talking about, SEO. Right? Like, so yeah, she should, it’s pretty popular cause I’m going to create it right when we get off this podcast.
No. And that’s the thing is you’re not really going to get that. It’s like, where’s my word. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have one, maybe it’s for your own personal stuff or thing you’re doing, or, you know, you can use Instagram for like your course, or you can talk about people that have had successes in your course.
Right. And testimonials, and Hey, this is John and Nick is a 15 thing. John’s talking about how he went from zero to $10,000 a month, whatever that is. Like, people are like that. Keeping the dream alive. And people are like, oh, that’s exciting that somebody took Joe’s course and he’s crushing it because of that.
And it’s only a $97 investment, but yet this guy made 10 grand. So that’s where things can get interesting. Right. In regards to the type of content that you think. Right. So for that, it’s not necessarily going after the WordPress professional, you’re going after the person that wants to be a, you know, get into WordPress.
Cause they, they feel like there’s riches. There there’s money to be made if you take my course, that will make it. So. You know, I’m going to give you the 10 years of knowledge here in this 17 hour course or whatever 10 hour course. And you’re going to be able to be, you know, once again, you’re going to be able to go in and be able to make, do things faster and not have to spend the 10 years that I spent, uh, understanding like how we do things, right?
So I’m going to streamline that. It’s like a mentor. And so there we go. So now the person who says, Hey, I want to do a website and I’m not a big WordPress person, but I can take your course. And at least, you know, be 80% closer to where I need to be than where I’m at. Yeah.
Joe Howard: Gotcha. So I think we try to do a little bit of social strategy in terms of, we find that different channels are good for certain aspects of sharing who we are.
So like our Twitter account is kind of about sharing our content and sharing content maybe we’ve been featured in, or it’s. It allows us to build relationships with people by like tagging people who we’ve included in articles and saying like, Hey, like we included you. Plugin. Thanks for being awesome.
You’re part of our list and then maybe they’ll retweet us. And so we can kind of get in front of other audiences that way and kind of share that like hashtag WordPress community on Twitter, Instagram, is we your rights? Like, no, we don’t find that anybody’s going to Instagram, like retweet like a specific WordPress thing, unless it’s around or re gram or whatever it is.
To like really do it, that high gate and stuff, unless it’s around word camps, there’s some word camp X activity on Instagram, but we try to use it really more for like a window into WP buffs to make us just like two people can get to know us. So it’s really more about like a remote team and people can come and see, like, what are they doing?
Oh, there’s a couple in front of a huge in Japan. And like, there’s Diego just ran like a hundred mile race, like in the middle of the desert and it’s like, whoa, okay. So I know this team does this stuff, but like I wanted to learn more about them as, uh, as people. And so we tried to use NCA. Exactly. So we try to use Instagram more for that.
Does that sound. Decent
Shane Barker: manifestation. Yeah, because cool. Yeah, because you, you’re probably, I mean, the idea of it is, is that you want to show that there’s real people behind this and people kind of like that. Right. Because I want to know, like, I can go take Joe’s course, but when I see that you’re doing this and you’re traveling and doing this and I’m like, God, it seems like he’s out there.
A great life. And obviously it’s because of his course and the knowledge that he has. And he’s obviously doing some things that are right, right. It’s not like he’s, if you had on your Instagram, you’re like homeless and you know, eating out of garbage cans or like, I don’t know if I’m going to take Joe’s chorus because he’s, he’s eating garbage cans.
Not that you can’t eat out of garbage cans. I’m just saying they might think that you’re not doing good. Right? There’s that they’re judging you obviously. So totally judging
Joe Howard: this new millennial trend of going in and grabbing fresh food from the garbage. Not bad yet. So people may think I’m cool for doing that.
I don’t know.
Shane Barker: You know, what’s crazy about that and this, and this is I’m going, I’m going right. And we were just talking left. There was just, I was, I was watching the, uh, Charlie Manson, Charlie man’s like his little group of people that he had, the way that they would get food, the way that they didn’t have to do, they would go into trash cans.
So would go to like bakeries the day after. So when you said that, I was like, oh, I guess that probably could be pretty fresh. Food is in plastic bags. And so when you said that, I, I instantly thought. Charlie Manson. I mean, who doesn’t think about
Joe Howard: before? And I want people to associate it with that. So great.
Shane Barker: Millennials and Charlie Manson. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s like hand in hand. There we go. Just kidding, by the way. Yeah.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I will also want to talk about, because we talked, touched about this a little bit, like the word influencer people. Sometimes it can be like a trigger word for certain people who are just like, don’t want any of that language.
I like if people have followed me on. Vale and seen like my cover photo of my background. This is the thing that I feel like has I’ve done. That’s been the most, like, I don’t know. Sometimes I feel uncomfortable in this. Like, is this kind of influencer sort of thing that I’ve done? Because my cover photo on Twitter is me like sitting in a hammock on my laptop, like in front of this icy mountain, in the background.
Okay, cool. I’m not going to lie. Okay. It’s a super dope picture. That was awesome trip. It was really cool. But even putting it up there, I almost felt like it was a real moment. Like I was doing work in like in the hammock and someone took a picture of me, but it’s, it’s kinda, it almost feels like show off a little bit to me.
How do you meld that? Like, I want to get more followers and I want people to think I’m impressive because. You know, some of the stuff I do is impressive. Like of course, like, um, I want to be humbled, but like some of the stuff I do is kind of cool. So like, I do want to share that. How do you find the balance between, you know, sharing or may potentially oversharing and trying to be humble and real?
Uh, I feel like there’s a middle ground there, but I’m not exactly sure how to find it.
Shane Barker: See the way I look at that is like, I did see your picture and I did instantly think God, what a dude. No, I’m totally kidding. No, no, no. For me, I looked at that and I was like, that’s where I would want to be. Right.
Because I have a whole remote team too. So for me, I travel a lot and I, the, the hammock in the mountains behind it and you and your lab, Literally could have been me. Like if I sent that picture to my wife and cut out the head, she’d be like, when did you go there? Like, it looks right. Obviously we’re like twins.
Right? We look identical. But yeah. So, no, I mean, for it’s, I don’t think there’s a problem with that, right. Because you’re just saying, Hey, this is a great picture. And this is kind of the lifestyle that I live because I’m a remote worker. Right. And I, I travel and I do, I’m going to look kind of a digital nomad.
There’s not a problem with them. There’s people that want that type of lifestyle. And guess what, if you’re going to go do WordPress stuff. The cool part about WordPress, all you really need is an internet connection. Right? So to be able to get onto that. So I think it keeps the dream alive of like WordPress is the avenue for making money and for traveling, if that’s what you want to do.
Right. So your picture to me, screams freedom free it screams like, Hey, I can get some stuff done, but look at this view, right. And people can look at that as bragging or like, oh, you’re just bragging. I’m like, well, but at the end of the day, you would like to be here. I mean you would, right? I mean, let’s, let’s just be honest.
It’s not. And so to me, I mean, that’s like me, so I, I do speak in events and on my profiles, I have pictures of me at a speaking event now, my bragging or my maybe a teeny bit, but I’m also telling people I’m a speaker. I want them to know that. Right. And for you, you want to say, listen, I work hard, but also, and I’ve got some great views around me and I’m enjoying it.
I’m enjoying, I have this work-life balance. I’m sitting back and drinking a beer and I’m on my laptop and getting a few things done. Like there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, I guess you have to figure out what, what you think your audience likes. Right? If it, if I think the audience wants a lifestyle like fat, I would think I going say, most people I do.
Let’s say, well, I’ll just speak for myself. I enjoy that. I look at that and go, man, that would be awesome. I would love to go to that mountain. I’d love to be in that hammock and I’d love to be hanging out like that. So for me, I think that’s awesome that you’re doing that. You know what I mean? That’s, for me, that’s more of a lifestyle thing, but I’m a traveler.
I like doing that. So I like those pictures. I go, God, where was that at? And then I’m going to engage with that. Cause I want to know, like, how do I get to that spot? How do I get to your hammock that you were just in right to me. I don’t look at it as like bragging, you know? I mean, I guess if, if you were like saying, oh man, another million dollars today and crushing it and you know, it’s like, you’re like slapping kids on the way out.
Look at me, I’m a big deal then. Oh, okay. I get it. Josie, big deal. Like, you know, but I don’t even have to go tell everybody and just slap kids on the way out of the door, you know, it was kind of weird, but the idea of it is, is like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I really, really don’t. I think if people have a problem with that, then that’s their own.
Things like, why would you do put a picture of that? Like, to me, it’s like, what’s the problem with it? Like you weren’t, there’s nothing wrong with it in my opinion. And I just think you’re just showing that you’re living a good life and there’s nothing, you know, what do you think social media is for guys?
That’s why everybody’s happy on Facebook. And I put my air quotes up. Everybody’s happy, you know, that’s we want to show like, Hey, what we’re out there doing and having fun and, you know, taking part and, you know, enjoy. Yeah,
Joe Howard: probably important as you’re. I think anybody who grows their own business or as an entrepreneur, as they start to see success in their business, like you’re almost by default going to have more visibility in the space.
And it’s important to remember, like, not everyone is going to love you and hopefully not everyone is going to hate you, but you’re never going to make everyone happy. So it’s important to like, you know, What you think your audience likes and not try and appease every single person out there.
Shane Barker: You’ll never make everybody happy.
This is the thing too, is you have to realize if people start to hate you, then that means you’re on the radar. I mean, really though it really is. And people don’t, it’s hard for people to understand that, but really at the end of the day, if people are starting to hate you, for whatever reason, there’ll be a small amount of.
Let them hate you just let, just let it roll right off yet. Cause at the end of the day, that means you’re on their radar and that’s okay. That’s not a bad thing.
Joe Howard: Yeah. I actually love that. I kind of want to even highlight what you just said a little bit more. Like we’ve had people duplicate our entire website over at WP buffs, trying to just duplicate what we, what we’ve done and.
Not like we teach a course on it. So we want people to get into the maintenance space, but like we’ve had people like literally duplicate like word for word, the exact website on like three different occasions. And the first time it happened, I got pissed. I was like, what the fuck? Like this is BS. Like, I can’t believe they did this.
And by the third time I was just like, Oh, so like we’ve gotten somewhere like, like it’s almost flattering that you want to like duplicate my business. Like thank you. But like, don’t do that, but like, it’s cool. Like it, we’ve gotten to a point where we’ve made a lot of people happy, but there are some people who are going to take those, this, I guess wasn’t a hater example, but it’s a taking it in the negative direction example and that’s going to happen as you gain more visibility places.
So I totally hear that.
Shane Barker: I mean, trust me, I it’s, you know, somebody when copied something word for me, I’m not going to be happy either. But the cool part is, is that people are copying you, right? Which that means that you’re a leader. That means somebody is looking up to you and, and even, you know, and you have to realize, I’ve realized this over the years, I used to be really protective of whatever I was doing to this.
I can’t tell people this can’t do this. And now I’m just an open book. I’ll share anything. I’ve done open this are they? This is what works. This is what doesn’t work because for me. It’s just easier that way. Right. And that way I pull in clients cause they go, man, it seems like you’ve done this. And you said you had issues here.
And this is just very transparent about things. You know, I was always worried back 10 years ago that like one of my other businesses that somebody would, you know, they’re going to take this and they’re gonna be able to open a business like. The thing is they don’t have the experience that I have. They don’t have the 25 years of what I’ve went through the right turns and left turns and this, and being slapped in the face, being kicked here and doing this, like that is built my business today.
And there’s nobody that can do that the way that I did it. Right. I mean, they can learn some stuff from it, but there’s nobody that’s going to take over, you know, my, my thing that I’ve built. Right. And so when they go and they take it, it does suck because at the end of the. A little bastards, you know, cheating and you’re like, you know, I’m gonna find you, you know, and I’m going to shut your stuff down, but you know, it’s a flattering still.
Joe Howard: Yeah. I totally agree with that too, because you can take my entire website, put it somewhere else. Rebrand it. Good luck. Like the reason my business is successful, it’s not just because of the website. Like there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of painstaking, painful challenges, successes, and, and a lot of experience that got us where we are today and like good luck.
You know,
Shane Barker: it can’t happen overnight and you have a network, right? I mean, somebody to have to go to the podcast to do this, like they’re not going to. Th they’re going to try, they’re going to chip away at your business and they’ll take your two, 3%, whatever it is. But really at the end of the day, they’re not going to have the traction that you have it, it takes time to do that.
And it’s just not an overnight type thing.
Joe Howard: Yeah, totally. I would love to finish off a little bit here. Kind of wrap things up by. Opposite side of things we started and kind of talk to people about, like, if you’re starting off, like what can you do to like, you know, push more in this direction and push your social media out there and, you know, get more visibility and all this, I would love to talk a little bit about what the other side looks like.
Like once you’ve gained traction and have. You know, I guess I’ll say a large audience because it, it does differ depending on the context, right? For some industries, like a hundred thousand people is going to be a lot for some like five million’s a lot. But, uh, I want to talk a little bit about the pressure of having a lot of visibility online.
And how that can affect the kind of content you’re putting out there. Like, I feel like I don’t know anybody with like 5 million Instagram followers, but I would feel like they feel a little bit of pressure every time they push the publish button, because there are so many people looking at all their stuff.
I, but I think about people like Joe Rogan, who has this podcast that’s listened to by, you know, millions of people, but he just like keeps saying. Pretty real. And it’s just like, talks about whatever he wants to. So it’s kind of, it’s, it’s a there’s examples of each, but, um, have you found that like, people feel pressure to.
Keep what they’ve done to get those followers and keep putting out the same content, even as like they evolve as a person and change. Maybe they want to post new content, but they can’t because they have, you know, they got 200,000 followers who want X kind of content, even though they want to do Y content.
Shane Barker: So, well, first of all, so the reason why nobody talks shit about Joe Rogan is cause he can kick their ass. Right. And so that’s the first of all, that’s. Yeah, exactly. I mean, not to mention his contents. Good, but he can also, I mean, he actually, he actually had a heckler that I don’t know, there was like a video.
I have to look it up. I can’t remember the name of it, but like Joe Rogan got into it with a guy that was talking shit about him. And he went and met the guy and they like wrestled. And of course, Joe puts him in a hold and, you know, anyway, so I think it’s kind of funny, but the, when it comes down to conduct.
Here’s the issue and this is what people, some people don’t see. Like, what I teach at UCLA is I ask people, Hey, what are your, you know, what do you expect from the course? And what do you want to do? Right. So that’s like a, oh, I want to be in The Bahamas. And I want to be in a bikini and I want to do yoga and I wanna drink my child latte.
And that’s all great. If that’s the lifestyle you want to live, that’s perfect. You know, but what happens is, is. Well, people don’t understand about influencers is that when you’re an influencer, you’re you always, you have to be on stage. Right? And so what I tell people is, Hey, the minute you quit performing, like the minute you quit doing your podcast, you quit writing content.
Guess what’s going to happen. They’re going to go over to John. Your competitor. Right. And they’re going to start looking at his stuff and going well, you know, he’s given a lot of information out and Joe kind of, I don’t know what happened to Joe. Like I think he’s, you know, he’s over at that, he’s in that hammock and he lost his laptop and we don’t know what happened to him.
Right. It’s been two, three months. So it’s the same thing with Instagram and same thing of all this stuff. If you’re not producing content, And you start, you know, used to people, used to seeing you once a day, and then you’re doing it once a week and then it’s once a month and it’s once every two months they’re going to find somebody else.
And that’s just how it goes. And people don’t understand what that does to people. Like if you’re an influencer, some people go, oh, poor influencer. Like, you know, there’s people that are using the, what is it at? And they’re like these, you know, ninja and all these other guys that are making, you know, a million dollars a day or whatever the number is.
And he goes, yeah, but I have to work 18 hours a day and they go, oh yeah, but you’re making a hundred thousand dollars a day. Like, what are you complaining about? But like, literally if he doesn’t work 18 hours, if he took a day off. It could affect his income by a hundred thousand dollars, $200,000, $300,000.
Now I get it, you know, Hey, just take a day off. But the thing is, this is you. Once you’re in that limelight, you’re performing and you’re putting out content. And either everybody loves you and they’re clapping their hands or you put something out or you take a day off for God’s sake. Things can switch.
Things can change on you and it becomes an, it can happen overnight. I mean, I had one of my clients that was always in the limelight, always talking about this and doing this and had a great following. And you know, it was very heavily engaged. They all loved her. And, but one of the issues with her, she had like five bucks boyfriend’s a year, but she’s, she posts about all of them.
Oh, here goes John other things. Great. Oh, I’m here with Howard. I’m here with Michelle. We were like, God, you’re, you know, you’re out there just doing your thing. Like you’re having sex with like, and so people started kind of going off a little bit and she’s like, oh, I’m, can’t believe this. And we’re kind of talking about it.
And I’m like, Hey, I, I, it’s important to be honest. But the problem was that she’s always on stage. She was talking about everything in her life. Right. No different than a celebrity. Like seventies. Don’t always say that, but yet pop Razzi that’s running around. So when you’re sharing these intimate things in your life, You have to realize that there’s, you’re giving up something, right?
The Kardashians have billions of dollars. That’s awesome. But they can’t go anywhere. Right. That you know everything about their life, whether it’s true or not true, who knows. Right. But can you imagine jumping if you’re Kanye west or anybody and you jump into that family and you’re like, I don’t want a little privacy now, wrong family, not picking it, because guess what?
If you’re not on stage moving your hands and giving everybody a performance. I mean, that’s part of the whole thing is like, it’s one of the things being an influencer is like, you get to a point. I mean, you look at YouTube, like if you’re a prank. What’s the next level. Right. There’s always has to be something that’s the next level.
Right? So we have, you know, somebody that like, I mean, they used to have, what was it back in the day? How was the name of them? The guys who do all the stunts on MTV. And I might be dating myself on this. Like, I’m like all these guys that used to do crazy, crazy stunts and
Joe Howard: oh, is it like the jazz guys? Or
Shane Barker: like the jackass that was them?
I didn’t watch a lot of TV, so I was a little sheltered, but I mean, but that’s the thing is like, you know, next, you know, you’re, you know, hammering a nail into your privates or something. What like that wouldn’t happen three quarters ago or whatever three seasons ago, but now you’re so it’s like, what do you have to do?
And that’s what influencers are people that are influential. Like you always producing content, but they’re very emotional to the ups and downs of what happens. So when you get an algorithm, It’s hard for them, you know, and I know people go, oh, poor influencer. Now they’re not going to be able to get there, like, you know, gold Corvette or something.
It’s, it’s something it’s more than that. Right? Really. It comes down to it’s like, you have to be out there. You have to be putting on the show. And if you don’t put on the show, somebody else is going to do that. So, you know, you have to figure out is that the life that you want to live, do you want to put a magnifying glass on your.
Uh, assuming that’s what you’re, you know, that’s what you’re going to be doing to some kind of, you know, you can be a writer, a blogger, like I could walk on the street and not have anybody notice me. Right. I’m not that big of a deal by any means. Right. But if I was on Instagram and I was doing pranks and Dino’s big and Sacramento, who knows, I might not be able to do that.
Or, you know, it’s just, you got to figure out what you’re going to be giving up in regards to your life, what you’re willing to expose in your life for the world to see for, you know, potentially money.
Joe Howard: Yeah, good thing for people to think about. Now, if they’re starting off or starting to get a little bit of visibility in whatever space you’re in, uh, do you want to keep rolling, you know, go in going in that direction?
Um, or do you want to, you know, grow your business or do your thing without as much visibility? Um, I guess people have the choice, but, uh, cool. I think that’s a good place to, to wrap up today. Um, Shane, thanks for coming on. Let’s give people the new course that you have started, how to be an influencer dot.
Shane Barker: Um, yeah, you guys can go over there. We actually have an email templates that you guys can use. You can download them for free and you can actually send them out to brands. So the idea of it is you can use these as templates to pitch brands that you want to work with, um, and then if anybody needs to get in contact with me, you either obviously the how to be an influencer.com is the site for influencers. Um, if you’re a brand or an agency and you’re looking to learn more about influencer market, you want to jump in the space.
I do personal workshops as well, but you can reach me. This is my personal email at just Shane and that’s S H a N [email protected]. I’m going take a look at the website, sign up for the newsletter and the. Cool man. You
Joe Howard: beat me to the second question, which was, you know, where can people find you? If you’re starting off and you don’t have as much social clout or whatever, or you just kind of want to learn more about this stuff, uh, had been influenced or.com is a great place to get started.
, and go check out. Yeah. Shane has some free templates. I’m on the site right now and I was just checking out some of those free templates that look pretty, pretty cool. Social profiles. Can people find you on like Twitter or Instagram or. Yeah,
Shane Barker: you can go on Twitter. So Twitter, just Shane underscore a Barker I’m on Instagram.
It’s just Shane Barker. And then also LinkedIn at Shane Barker as well. I was able to grab all of them except Twitter. Um, I’ve threatened the guy, I’ve done everything. I’ve sent people over to his house and he just won’t give up it. And so, you know, what are
Joe Howard: you doing? We’ve got the same problem. Some, someone who has never tweeted and never like no activity on the profile has WP buffs.
So we are the WP buffs, but I’ve tried. Patent or the trademark on WP buffs and still fits. They’re technically not violating Twitter’s term up. Tell me about a closed system. Doesn’t care about me because I’m not paying them advertising dollars.
Shane Barker: That’s exactly it. People can squat on stuff unless you’re will Smith or something.
Nobody’s going to listen to you when it comes to the squatting. There
Joe Howard: you go. I’ll get well a DM and see if he can help me. Um, cool, man. Okay. Last but not least, I always ask our guests to ask our audience to give this podcast a little five star iTunes review. So if you wouldn’t mind giving our audience a little ask, I’d appreciate it.
Shane Barker: Hey guys, what’s going on? This is Shane Barker, also known as Wolverine. Once you guys to go do as a huge favor and give us a five-star rating for this podcast, man, I really.
Joe Howard: Thank you, man. Appreciate that. Uh, yeah. When you leave our view, make sure you leave Shane’s name in the comments, something maybe you learned about the episode or something.
Cool. You’re going to try with influencer stuff. Uh, yeah, we’ll shoot a screenshot and shoot it over to him and thank him for getting us a little iTunes review there. Uh, WP mrr.com forward slash iTunes, Gavin, redirect going on right there to make it nice and easy for you. Uh, if you’re a new listener to the show, you already been Shaw.
TV shows, why not binge something that’ll help you grow your WordPress business. Go check out some old episodes, WP mrr.com forward slash podcast. We’ve got tons of episodes on there. So no matter what challenge or thing you’re facing right now, it probably did an episode about it. So it goes through the old logs and see if you can find something that you can listen to maybe later today or this weekend that will, uh, will shed some light there.
Uh, if you have questions for us on the show, Christie, I’d love to do Q and a episodes. So we’d love to answer some more of your questions. Anything? Well, I don’t care. It could be. WordPress could not be. WordPress could be totally random. I don’t care. We’ll answer them on the show. Uh, [email protected], I man, that inbox personally.
So I will get back to you and we’ll get your question answered on the pod WP, mrr.com. If you are reporting. Agency in the WordPress space, or maybe you’re a freelancer you want to do more monthly recurring revenue stuff. Uh, so we’ve opened source the stuff we do at WP buffs, 24 7 care plans, open sourced.
It created a video course around it. Shane and I are big course people. So we have the video course here as well. And. How course there you go. Cool. If you’re interested in that, go check it out. It’s cool. Course. Shane’s cool guy. He’ll teach you some stuff for sure. Uh, this college professor can do. Uh, help you move forward in that area.
Cool. We will be back next Tuesday for another episode, because like Shane said, don’t want to stop producing content. We want to keep putting new, new, great content in front of you. So we’re going to keep going. So Shane, thanks a lot for being on man. It’s been real. Hey, thanks for having
me,
Shane Barker: Joe.
]]>Travis Pastrana crashes in on his motorbike and does a triple backflip into our foam pit! He’s here today to talk on mobile apps for WordPress and more.
In this episode, we talk about AppPresser, the advantages and technical skills needed to work with headless WordPress, and the next generation of web hosting.
Tune in to know the best stunts for your WordPress!
The legendary Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi stops in today to share his ideas on directing and guiding his mentees.
Today on WPMRR, we discuss the reputation of the endeavor of sales, being a supportive and successful manager, and how Kinsta is diversifying their marketing and sales strategies.
Tune in for tips on having your sales and marketing work in tandem.
Hermione comes through the Floo Network and enlightens us on the path of the empowering female-led project Women in WP.
We speak on the history of Sumy Designs, the conception on the Women in WP podcast that follows, plus WordCamp experiences and hype!
Don’t miss out and get hit with a Stupefy!
In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Shane’s chat about image optimization. They cover the technical side of image optimization, how the app is designed to compress images across multiple platforms and websites, and the projects currently in development.
Shane Bishop is a WordPress plugin developer and website performance nut. He’s the lead and only developer of the EWWW Image Optimizer, a plugin that was launched on WordPress.org back in 2012.
Joe Howard: Hey, Hey, WordPress people welcome back to DWP MRR, WordPress podcast. I’m Joe and I’m Aragorn. And you’re listening to V WordPress business podcast. We’ve got the savior of a middle earth here on the podcast with us. What’s up, what’s going on this week or going
Shane Bishop: not too much has been a busy guiding some Harvard’s around and helping them avoid all that.
Big bed monsters out there in middle earth.
Joe Howard: Very very diligent of you. We appreciate, we appreciate everything you do to to save middle earth and all that cool air going on the podcast this week. Also known as Shane, Bishop Shane, have we met before? I don’t know if we’ve met at a word camp before, or if we’ve just kinda been digital friends, maybe, maybe the, the latter, I don’t know.
Shane Bishop: Most of the ladder. I haven’t yet made it to a word camp, so that’s on my to-do list.
Joe Howard: Sure. Gotcha. Yeah, maybe in the future, we’ll we’ll get to hang out in real life.
I know we’ve emailed back and forth and I’m a big fan of the plugin that you’ve you’ve built and also interested in, in some of the new stuff you have coming out too. So, yeah. No who you are, the plugins you’re you’re up to once you get people kind of a little background there.
Shane Bishop: All right.
So I’m the developer and founder for the E www optimizer started at about, oh, it’s 20, 19 7 years ago, eight years ago, somewhere in there. Yeah, I think this is seven. Anyway, was looking at a few clients sites and wanting to optimize their images. And I had seen the classic Amazon study back in the day where they talked about how every hundred milliseconds would lose.
Billions of dollars, all that crazy. So I’m like, well, yeah, I gotta have these guys optimized. So I went looking for image optimization, plugins, and there wasn’t much out there smush back then relied on the Yahoo Smosh API, which was, I think in the process of being deprecated or. Maybe it was run by hamster.
I’m not sure it was, it was a pretty frail and often overloaded and not anything like this much plugin we know today. And so I started a new one the www image, optimizer that. Compress images without sending them to a third party API so that you didn’t have to depend on anyone else’s servers to compress your images.
Joe Howard: Interesting. So it’s like seven or eight years is that timeframe is cool. I remember when I first came into the WordPress space and I first started learning about performance and optimization, like image optimization stuff. Okay. I gotta have my image images loading fast. I’m on your plugin page right now.
And I can remember the kind of cover photo artwork as one of the first plugins I saw. Like, and it’s one of those ones that stuck in my head. So if, for people who don’t know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a race car kind of cartoon on the background. And for me, that’s something I see. And I totally like brings back memories of kind of starting off like learning about this stuff.
Yeah. A lot of great ratings on the plugin. It’s like a four and a half stars, almost 300, almost 300, five-star ratings and yeah. You’re like kind of closing in on a million downloads or excuse me, a million active installation. Yeah. There you go. So is that kind of the next, are you kind of looking at that as a milestone?
Shane Bishop: Oh, I, I try not to pay too much attention to that. Cause it makes me nervous may have been responsible for software that’s running on 700,000 sites. Wow. It’s, it’s kind of humbling, you know, just the. This is that many people have trusted their image optimization. There’s a software that I built while I was on paternity leave seven years ago, you know, so yeah.
It’s kind of crazy.
Joe Howard: Wow, cool. So is he www something you started while, or you kind of, I, you know, maybe it was one of those things that kind of started off, maybe not as a business, but just as like a plugin you saw a need for, and you just built and you built it while you were on parental leave. Is that right?
Shane Bishop: Yeah, originally it was just, I was, I had started a little bit of a consulting business, was trying to get some local clients and stuff doing. Just running websites for them, basically building websites and the company name and the one I still use for business purposes is exactly www. And so the eww is just an abbreviation for that.
And also a little bit of a joke. Like you, your images are really gross and bloated, so you need to optimize them. Yeah. So I was on maternity leave for about four weeks and I was like, Hey, I got some time, you know, I’m not getting much sleep, but I got time. So I took one of the existing plugins out there that was the CW image optimizer.
And so it was originally just a fork of that, that one. Was built so that you had to have root access on, on the server. And for anyone that knows what that actually is almost no one has read access to their server. So it’s like, oh, that’s a large market. So yeah, I rebuilt it so that it could use use.
Binary’s built originally on a blue host. Okay, cool. They had surprisingly all the tools you needed to build, build an executable or a binary right on the server already. I was like, wow, that’s kind of incredible. Even now looking back, it’s like, wow, they have all that on their servers and they let me use it
Joe Howard: crazy.
It’s it’s cool to hear that this started on, on parental leave. You know, I think a lot of people think of, okay, I’m taking time off. You know, I’m not going to have much time for anything. But it’s actually like super refreshing to hear that something that was started during that time kind of grew in, became.
Something that powers almost a million websites, man. I mean, that’s, that’s pretty cool. And so is eww EWP, E www, is this your main thing right now? Is this the kind of only thing you focus
Shane Bishop: on? Yeah, right now it’s the only thing I’m doing. And so, you know, seven years ago I was working for our local community college.
And so I was just working on the plugin. Part-time just evening hours, weekends. As I had time and then a couple years in there were enough people. We’re asking for an API sort of usage kind of going back to the way Smosh originally. Well, it still operates. And most of the others operate with, with sending your images to third party server because not all sites were compatible with the free mode of the plugin and.
I started it out latter part of 2013 and thought, well, I’ll start this out. And I’ve got a, I had a free HP virtual server for a couple months that I could use. And well, let’s see where this goes and it took off pretty quickly.
Joe Howard: Yeah, very cool, man. I am a, as someone who runs a business that cares a lot about performance and speed optimization has our customers do and expect us to do it for them.
A lot of people, I hear a lot of people asking questions, like what’s the fastest team to use, or like, you know, what are the what’s, how can I get a good foundation for speed? And a lot of times our answers. You know, there’s, you know, there’s, there are probably good and less good choices to, for performance in terms of a theme, but a lot of it comes when you build a website and especially how the website performs over the long-term.
When you’ve added a lot of images or video files to it, we see that slowing down websites far more than. Purely kind of, you know, bloated code does. And, and yeah, I’m in a lot of kind of Facebook groups around WordPress and kind of slack channels. And every once in a while, people are talking about image optimization and performance and people kind of posting the plugins.
They think are the best. And very, very often I see a www come up as like, it’s, it seems like almost like a cult following, like people who use eww likes really seem to dig it and think it’s like, it’s it’s prime time. I’d love to talk a little bit more about like the technical side of image optimization and, and kind of what makes E www unique.
I think you kind of mentioned a little bit that the way that the optimization works, but maybe we could touch on that even before.
Shane Bishop: Okay. So, the basics of image optimization or, or what most people call in, we dumped my visitation, I guess. Simply image compression. You know, we’re, we’re repacking the bits that make up an image and we’re trying to make it more efficient.
I think you guys posted the other day on Twitter, a link to one of my old articles about how, what did I call it? Packing your bags, packing your bags. That’s what it was and using the, the idea of a suitcase to illustrate image compression. And, you know, if you’re packing for a trip and you just take a whole drawer and dump it into your suitcase, that’s not very efficient, but that’s what cameras do.
They, they see and they just dump it into the image and. They don’t attempt to, you know, make it real small. They use the JPEG format at least. So, you know, that’s good for, for at least the start on compression, but they’re trying to do things fast and they’re not interested in minimizing the file size necessarily.
So, I mean, I’ll my iPhone six, which is not, you know, very modern, but it’s got a 12 megapixel camera and that’s a lot of data. Most screens can’t display that same iPhone six has a one megapixel screen basically compared to a 12 megapixel image. So it can only even display a 12th of that image. So compression is then take your suitcase and you go, okay.
If I want to be efficient about this, I’m only gonna pack the stuff I need. Right. And so if you’re going to the beach, I’m going to take hiking boots and. Probably not going to take a winter parka, so you’ll leave that stuff at home. Right? So it’s the same idea with image compression. When you’ve got a large swath of sky, you don’t need a lot of bits to represent that sky.
You can smooth that out a little bit and, and ditch the quality there. Somewhat. And without even the user noticing it. And a lot of times I look at the images I’m like, that’s a 10th of the size. I can’t even tell the difference. It’s incredible. The, the newer compression that we use on the API, we’ll say newer, it’s been 40 years now, but it’s designed by the folks over at tiny, tiny, ping, and tiny JPEG.
It’s incredible software. I mean the amount of space that they’re able to save without even being able to see the difference. It’s just, it’s kind of mind blowing. Originally when I started the plug and I was like, oh, everything has gotta be lost. This. We can’t be losing any quality, you know? And I, and I was adamant about that.
People started suggesting why don’t you try JPEG mini or why don’t you. Tiny ping. I’m like, oh, but it’s lossy. It can’t possibly be any good. You know? And when I tried it out, I was, I was amazed. It really was, was solid compression. So that’s what we use our API. I didn’t design that part of it cause I’m not quite clever enough for that.
Joe Howard: Gotcha. So it sounds like you have maybe it’s you and maybe a small team of people, right.
Shane Bishop: Me and one other guy I just hired about a month.
Joe Howard: Gotcha. Nice. So you’re starting your foray into a, you went from company of one to company of two. Has how has that transition?
Shane Bishop: It’s going really well. It’s going really well hired a guy that I knew a little bit from he’s living in Missouri right now and I’m in Montana.
So we do everything just like we’re doing, you know, online web chat and stuff. And. Yeah, but it’s been working really good. He’s really been catching on quick with the image optimization stuff and yeah, we’re getting good, good feedback from customers and everything on that. So, yeah, I’m really happy with that.
Joe Howard: Cool. Awesome, man. The. I’d love to talk a little bit also about pricing for image optimization and how you kind of came to the pricing structure you’re at now. I see with a few optimization plugins, it’s it looks like you kind of have a flat rate piece of it and then kind of a per image piece of it is that the pricing model you’ve always had for www or did it start somewhere else?
And you kind of had to say, ah, this isn’t quite working. Let me try adjusting and trying something else.
Shane Bishop: Yeah, back in the day. Well, it was a lot cheaper for starters cause we weren’t using quite as sophisticated of compression and so we have to pay for that. And so some of that’s just handy now on the cost, but originally it was kind of similar to some of the others.
It’s more, it was more of a use it or lose it style. Like he pay five, 10 bucks a month and you get this many images and if you pay 20 bucks, then you get even more images and it’s even a better deal. And that kind of thing. And then when we started off with the tiny pink folks, one of the things that they did that I really liked was they didn’t have user to lose it.
It was, you pay only for what you use no more. And that’s it. And I really liked that model. And so that’s what we switched to back in 2015 and. At that point, we still had kind of the idea of, you know, if you compress a thousand images, you get one price. If you compress 10,000 images, you get a better price, but had a conversation with a marketing professor.
I don’t remember where he was a teacher at, but he, he lit into me about our pricing being too complicated at that point, I think. It’s like four different pricing tiers. And I was just like, well, I could see the pain because I had that same conversation with other people. They were just confused. They didn’t get the math was difficult to work out and there’s just so many questions and he’s like trial, postage stamp price.
And I was like, what? And so he explained it and basically the idea of every image costs the same, no matter what, because it costs the same to compress, you know, the 10,000 image didn’t cost less to process. So. Charge less for it. So that’s when we switched to just flat across the board three tenths of a cent per image.
And we’ve been doing that for. Two three years now and it’s worked out really nice. It’s really eliminated a lot of the confusion around pricing. So I think that’s been a big win.
Joe Howard: Yeah, half the battle around pricing is just getting people to easily understand the pricing. Obviously there is some science behind, you know, too high pricing or too low pricing.
You wanna experiment and get a good pricing at a good point. That’s optimal, but a lot of it is also. Like having people understand exactly what they’re buying and had doing that pretty easily. We have kind of these care plans and we have, you know, different levels, you know, and then we have even other separate levels of kind of like custom websites and it is a little bit confusing.
And I honestly, I don’t even like our pricing table that much like today. So we’re always still trying to figure out how to make it simpler. So I totally get that. Talk a little more about the and this is just for honestly, for me, because I want to learn a little bit more and don’t completely understand the, like what I’m loading on your server versus loading.
Or I guess like, if I were to use something that loads on my server, as opposed to you guys using your server to compress the images, what’s the difference there. And like how can that affect what’s happening?
Shane Bishop: Right. So just to make sure, I, I think you’re talking about like the difference between like on our pricing page, the exact DN or the compression API style.
And so that’s the other side of our pricing where our exact DNS. Goes one step further, basically where the API is offloading the compression. So, you know, your server sends the image to our server, our server compresses. It sends it back to your server, exact DM, instead of sending it back to your server, it’s done on demand on our server and delivered via a CDN, a content delivery network.
So your images are then served from the location nearest to your visitors. Free and more of a speed boost and that side of things, because we’re paying basically bandwidth there in addition to the per image type of deal. We just do a flat rate on that. So everyone pays nine bucks a month unless your site uses ludicrous amounts of bandwidth.
Yeah. So we tried to keep that simple. Instead of people being like, oh, I got 20,000 images. How much is that going to cost? And they’re with the API, even though it’s same out parameters, it’s still, I think causes some issues for people. So, you know, with exact DN, whether it’s a small site or a pretty good size site, I bucks.
And so the technical difference on that, I think I kind of explained it a little bit, but just to go a little bit further with. The API, your images are still then delivered from your server, or, you know, if you want to use a different CDN like CloudFront or stack path, or, you know, any of those out there, go for it.
You know, we’ve compressed your images locally and now. Fast, no matter how they’re delivered then on the exact inside all the images on your server stay the same way they are and all the compression is done on our system. Nothing’s ever sent back to your server on that sorta set up. There’s some benefits to that.
Namely the. The web peak conversion. And that’s something I was thinking we get into a little later and we can go into more detail later if you want. But the web P format has some pretty impressive gains over the traditional JPEG and ping her PNG formats. With, with using a CDN with sending all of your images through our server, essentially we’re able to auto compress or auto convert to web P and deliver the right image based on the browser supports.
So, you know, like safari if you’re familiar with the web P format so far, doesn’t support that yet. Apple’s kind of dragging their feet and say, no, we don’t want to. But at this point, everyone else has pretty much gotten on board. You know, there’s going to be people with older browsers and stuff. I just looked at it this morning and estimated browser support is at 80% for web P.
So 80% of people that can use what P automatically get even smaller, faster images. And they’re getting them from a CDN, which is super cool. Whereas on the, if you’re doing it locally, there’s some, you can do server rewriting. It gets complicated with web P cause because you have to do it conditionally based on, you know, those 20% of people that can’t use what PA.
Joe Howard: Yeah, cool. I mean, I’m just Googling this for the first time web P I mean, I, I had not not heard of this. Maybe I have to talk to my team a little bit about what web peak can do for us. But yeah, I mean, it’s a, I’m kind of looking at this kind of Google developer’s page looks like what P lossless images are about 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs?
I don’t know about that exact number, but it seems like there’s a significant saving. The file size when you’re using a web P and it seems like there’s also a little bit of flexibility in terms of, if you’re delivering to a different browser, you can just kind of like the, you can have the browser choose, like what kind of image it wants to use to load.
If it’s on Safaria may not, it may not play nicely.
Shane Bishop: Possibly, I’m trying to
Joe Howard: think. Maybe I said that wrong. I’m just, I’m trying to get my own grips on it. Right.
Shane Bishop: Right. For the most part, it’s basically just going to convert, you know, the image directly over to that format. And I mean, I don’t know all the details of how they do it either, but.
The main thing is that it’s smaller. In most cases it’s similar to our normal loss of year premium compression that we have right within the, the regular plugin, but it’s able to pack the data differently somehow and get the file size down even better than, than the JPEG format can and to the pink format, usually to.
Yeah, my brain just stopped
Joe Howard: all the time, man. It’s always, this is a usual occurrence on the podcast. Cool. Let’s dive into some of the new stuff you’re doing too. So you have www image compression kind of add scale for if you run your own website, you can get in on it. If you’re kind of an agency or a freelancer, I believe you can use it across multiple sites with a single subscription.
Shane Bishop: Right. Both of our products are designed to be used across multiple sites. The difference being with the compression API, you’re paying perimeter. So, you know, uses on a thousand sites and you’re still just paying per image with exact DM. You pay. Charge per site that you activate on it, but it’s still just one subscription.
You just there’s an account page that you go to that you add all your sites that you want to have active on there. And then you get a discounted rate for each additional site that you had add onto the account there.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Cool man. Okay. So we have www what’s the new thing.
Shane Bishop: It’s a little bit of a rebranding of our exact DNS system.
There’s four things that Google talks about often with image optimization. And that’s why I said earlier, most of us, when we say image optimization, we’re talking about image compression, but. More to it than just image compression for most sites, or at least there’s more that they can do. The second biggest one usually is properly scaling your images.
And that’s where I was talking about the whole, you know, my camera’s 12 megapixel, but my screen is only one megapixel. It’s that kind of idea where you’re trying to scale down the dimensions of an image. You’re displaying the correct size for the page and the device size.
Joe Howard: Yeah. My developers tell me this all the time.
I have, you know, I’ll, I’ll put an energy that’s too big or I’ll upload an image that’s too big for like, it’s something that’s taking up like 300 megapixels or yeah, three, 300 pixels wide. And they’re like, why did you upload. Oh, yeah, she probably shouldn’t do that, so.
Shane Bishop: Okay. Right. Right. Exactly. So that’s kind of the second pillar, if you will, of image optimization is, is making sure those dimensions are accurate and, and responsive for the, the device.
That your visitors using? The third one that Google will talk about is what we, we just mentioned with the web P format. They’ll tell you use next gen image formats. Of course they’re promoting web P cause that’s the one they developed. There’s also the JPEG XR format from a Microsoft. And I believe apple has their own HEIF.
I don’t know how they pronounce that, but I think that’s, that’s the one that they’ve been working on it. Possibly part of why they’ve been a little hesitant to jump on the web P bandwagon, but so there’s a few different ones. Really we do web P just because it’s the most widely supported. It seems to be the one that everyone’s getting behind pretty well.
So that’s, that’s a, we’re throwing our hat in and then the fourth area of image optimization is lazy loading or as Google will usually tell you, if you’re running your site on their page speed insights, it’ll tell you to defer off screen images, which is just what it sounds like. Don’t load images that aren’t on the screen, right?
So. 50 images on your page and the visitor comes and they can only see two of them. Well, don’t load the other 48 yet. Wait until they scroll to them and then load them in of course, you know, there’s some extra consideration in there, you know, how, how soon do you load them in when they get to the view port or, you know, do you load them when they’re within 300 pixels of the viewport, you know, stuff like that.
So, because you don’t necessarily want someone to scroll and miss your image because all they saw was a blank space. So. So those are the four main areas and that’s really what exact in was built to salt. Well, exact Dan was built to solve the image optimization and image scaling or sizing issues along the way.
It gained the ability to do the web piece stuff. And then earlier this spring, we introduced a lazy loader, a. It takes care of the fourth. And it also allowed us to do more with the image scaling issues. And so our new plugin is built to do all four of those things. In the smallest package possible and is easily and painlessly as possible.
And so we called it the easy image optimizer, and so it takes everything we’ve learned with developing exact DM and makes it super simple. You literally buy a subscription, add your, your site URL to your account. Go to the plugin, click activate. That’s it there’s, there’s no more to do. Your site is instantly optimized.
So that’s, I don’t know. It’s, it’s pretty exciting that we’re even able to do something like that work traditionally, you know, you install that you image optimizer, you run a bulk optimizing. It might, you know, if you’ve got 10,000 images, it’s going to take a day and you know, you got all that wait time and it can be kind of a tedious process.
And that’s only the compression side of things. To even try to address the resizing or the web P or any of that yet. So yeah.
Joe Howard: Let let me Hey, would like an example site? What if I have a site? Yeah. With like 20,000 images on it, does the easy image optimizer and kind of all these image optimization plugins.
Is there a kind of a separate piece to going back through all my previous photos and images and optimizing and compressing all those and then kind of doing the same thing moving forward. So whenever like I upload an image to the media library, it automatically gets optimized and compressed or those two different pieces or does it do both.
Shane Bishop: Those are kind of two different pieces and you can use styles. So, so there’s the type of image optimization, like easy image optimizer, where your images are just going through a CDN and it’s the CDN that optimizes them on the fly as soon as your visitors request them. So as soon as someone visits your page, all those images are.
For loaded through the CDN and automatically optimize. So you don’t really have to think about, or these new images or these old images. They’re just images, images on your. And we’re going to optimize them. As soon as the visitor sees them. And then the other style of course, is on the local server, especially if, you know, with some of the managed hosts like WP engine, you know, you only have 10 gigs of space or some of them are even less than that.
And so you might be trying to save on storage spaces. It can be important to go through and use something like our compression API, or one of the other plugins, like image of fire or short pixel to go through and make sure all your local images are properly compressed too. Cause that can be a huge deal.
You know, you might have five gigs of images and slim it down to one or two using one of those plugins. So there still is, is a use case for those alongside of the easy image optimizer for sure.
Joe Howard: Yeah. All right. Yeah. Okay. I’m learning a ton right now. So I’m like geeking out over this. If people want to check out w w w just to plug in, if you’re looking for like premium stuff and you really want all the bells and whistles, it’s just E www.io.
The new, easy image, optimizers, eww dot I O four slash easy. So it’s all in one place. You can go check it out here. Cool, man. What’s what’s what’s next for the For the E www family. Are you guys I guess, you know, you’re kind of closing in on the million million downloads, a million active installs is that, is do you have anything kind of planned for the next year or something like that?
And you just kind of like rolling with what comes.
Shane Bishop: Right now, you know, we just literally released the easy image optimizer so it’s kinda, you know, see how that goes and see how things roll with that. There’s always going to be, you know, compatibility things with different themes and page builders and different things.
And so we’re, we’re always working with. Plugin off and theme authors to try and make sure we’re, we’re integrating with them properly and giving their users every opportunity to have the fastest site possible. And I guess, you know, some of the things on the radar probably aren’t as exciting as it was all that, but the stuff that I’ve got on the roadmap is more of, you know, kind of clean up and kind of tools, I guess, to do various things around that, that idea of, of cleaning up or one of the things I was going to mention earlier.
With image conversion. You know, we talked about web P, but there’s also a lot of times people will save their images as in the PNG format cause they want it to be lossless and they don’t realize that it’s going to be, you know, it could be 10 times too large compared to the JPEG format. So we have some conversion stuff in the image, optimizers that, that auto converts.
But for all their existing stuff, they might convert them and be a little nervous. And so they don’t delete the originals. And so then I want to, one of the things I want to do is create a tool that will go back through, you know, after they’ve checked things out, they made sure it’s all working, then they can go clean up the originals or with the web piece stuff.
If they’ve generated all the web PM, which is on their website, and then they decide, oh, I want to use something like. Easy IO or exact DM that generates them all the CDN. And I don’t need it all of them locally, and I can save storage space that way. How can I clean those up? And we’ve had people ask about that.
It’s like, well, you can just go on the command line. Right. Everyone loves that. But no, we want to create a tool that will we’ll go through and clean up all those web PM just for them when they don’t need them anymore. And some different things related to that. So those don’t get me super excited, like the easy image optimizer, but, but I think there’ll be useful.
And they’re things that we’ve definitely seen in need for the past.
Joe Howard: Yeah, very nice, man. Cool. Well, we’ll we’ll include some links in the show notes when the episode goes live. So people can go check out all this whether people are again running their own website or whether they’re working on multiple websites managing multiple websites all this stuff sounds like a really positive move for people who are interested in Focusing on performance making sure sites are running smoothly.
A lot of times it’s related to images and how well the images are loading. So cool, man. Let’s let’s start wrapping up. Why don’t you tell people where they can find you online websites? Social media, all that jazz. Sure.
Shane Bishop: So of course the website, eww w.io on Twitter, it’s just easy www IO and. Also have a Facebook page and I believe that’s the same.
I was going to try and pull it up real quick here.
Joe Howard: E www something.
Shane Bishop: Yes. If you search for eww, w your you’re more. The us company out there using eww www and they don’t look like us either. Www IO on, on both Twitter and Facebook. So.
Joe Howard: Yeah. All right. Cool, man. Last thing I always ask guests to do is to ask our listeners for a little five star iTunes review for the show.
So if you wouldn’t mind giving our audience a little ask, I’d appreciate
Shane Bishop: it. Hey yeah, sure. Yeah. Make sure to check out this podcast on the iTunes store and give it, give it. That’s five stars for sure. And make sure you subscribe and all that good stuff.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Right on. And if you happen to leave a review after listening to this episode, make sure you leave Shane’s name in the comments, something you call you learned in the episode so we can forward it to them and give them a thanks for the, for the review we got online and all of that.
Cool. See if yeah, if you’re going to leave a review WP, mrr.com forward slash iTunes forwards right there, make it nice and easy for you. A new listeners, if you’re new to the show, and this is your first episode or your second episode or your third episode. Dozens of hours of content. Go back through small episodes.
Don’t hesitate to binge on some older content, still just as good and may help you in another topic that you are stuck on or having challenges with. We’ve talked about a ton of stuff on the show, so I’m sure there’s a few episodes that Unstuck,
cool. WPA. Dot com WordPress monthly recurring revenue. If you’re interested in selling ongoing support plans maintenance plans supporting websites and using a subscription model, feel free to check out the course. It’s a WP buffs, open sources so don’t hesitate to go grab it for yourself.
Cool. That is all for this week. We will catch you all again next week, Shane. Thanks again for being on man. It’s been real.
Shane Bishop: Thank you.
]]>In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Sam’s conversation about joining WordPress. They discuss Sam’s stories during his firefighter days, how he stumbled upon WordPress and coding, and his approach on how he successfully managed his time to build his own business.
Sam Smith is a retired Firefighter/Paramedic, an Orlando WordCamp Organizer, and a Web Developer.
Joe Howard: Hey, Hey, WordPress people. Welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe and
Sam Smith: I am Boba
Joe Howard: Fett and you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast, Boba Fett awesome character from the star wars franchise. One of my favorites kind of funny that I actually offer recording. This is our second time recording.
And the first time I screwed up. May actually went off the whole wrong character. We know about what that is crazy. Anyway, Boba Fett, one of the best, most bad-ass characters in the star wars franchise, what’s going on Bubba
Sam Smith: much, uh, refraining from disintegrating, anybody because a Darth Vader has banded that for the foreseeable future.
But once I give him Han solo, I will go back to disintegrating
Joe Howard: to my, well, yeah, there you go. You’ve got hon frozen, hopefully. So hopefully he won’t put up too much. Too much of a fight. He’s got that carbonate around him, but cool. Boba Fett. Great. And again, one of the most bad ass characters, you’re, you’re pretty bad ass too.
So I think, I think there’s an equivalent. They’re not actually bubbled FET or actually, you know, maybe you could be Boba with, I don’t know, got that helmet on. Never know we’ve got, we’ve got Sam Smith on the podcast this week. One of my favorite WordPress people. Sam, why don’t you tell people a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your history with WordPress.
Sam Smith: Um, so I am kind of a newcomer to WordPress only been doing this about two and a half years. I will say two and a half years ago, I typed into a Google search bar. What is WordPress?
Joe Howard: And we’ve all been in
Sam Smith: it since then. I’ve just been a hook line and singer I, uh, changed careers and, you know, doing this full-time.
And then, I launched my own freelance WordPress company. I’m doing custom development stuff and building sites and all that good stuff.
Joe Howard: Yeah, for sure. I’m actually glad that you, uh, you said at some point you looked up what is WordPress? We actually just published an article on WP buffs blog that focuses on that keyword in search results.
What is WordPress? So I’m glad we have some real data on at least one person act, you know, it’s not just, oh, this many people we saw doing some keyword research. This many people search this, we actually have. Now I’m talking to someone who actually searched that. So very cool. Yeah, man. And so you’re two and a half years or so into WordPress.
We’ve hung out a bunch of word camps and stuff. So we’re buds at this point. Yeah. Yeah. Heck yeah. Let’s why don’t you tell people also like previous, like what have your two and a half years, what have you been doing and WordPress for the, for the past two and a half years, you just kind of now going off doing some more freelance work.
Um, so if anybody has any projects we’re working on, they need a bad-ass developer to come in and help. We got Sam right here, but uh, what else have you been doing the.
Sam Smith: Just kind of go into word camps. Um, oh, and let me clarify the question, what am I doing in WordPress now? Or how did I kind of do that sort of transition into
Joe Howard: it?
Yeah, let’s talk about that. That, that, this is super interesting to me because the first time we met at a word camp, I think it was probably the first time I kind of heard about what you were doing before you jumped into WordPress. And it was like, whoa, I don’t really hear that kind of, uh, that kind of history from most people, but yeah, you just had a story come out and hero press about this but why don’t you tell people who may not have read that hero?
Press.
Sam Smith: Heck. Yeah. And the thing is with those here, press articles. It was like, I was trying to condense it all into like 2000 words. And I was like, man, if, if I just like, didn’t pay attention to the words, I could’ve gone for like 6,000 and go into rabbit holes and all this other stuff. But I won’t do that here.
The,
Joe Howard: um, we’ve got all day, man. We’ve got all day. So don’t worry.
Sam Smith: This records for how long you said. Um, yeah, so two and a half years ago, I was a firefighter paramedic for a city down here in Florida. Um, was doing that for, at that point, probably six years. I ended my career at eight years. There was just some stuff I spoke briefly about it.
Yeah. And the hero press article, but, um, I was just kind of losing passion for, for that career. Also, I sustained a few injuries, back problems, dominant problems. And, uh, I was like 27 at the time. And I was like, man, I’m falling apart. Like, how am I going to do this for another 13 years? Because the typical career for firefighters 20 years, a lot of people go, um, further.
Um, but then I actually. Kind of stumbled upon HTML on a YouTube tutorial video. I didn’t even own a computer at this point. I was borrowing my wife’s back over here. This is great. And because it was like, ah, it’s a Saturday, I’m going to be bored at the station. Can I please borrow your computer? So I’m not just like sitting at the recliner doing nothing.
And so I was like, surely, surely it cannot be as easy as what I’m saying. To create a webpage. And then, so it was like H one, hello, world. Closing H one tag,
Joe Howard: I’m a coder. I did it. I was
Sam Smith: like, oh my God. So this is everything. I was like, this is everything like everything I’ve been seeing on the web until this point.
It’s just these
Joe Howard: characters. Yeah. You just type that over and over again. And then you have a beautiful website. That’s how it works.
Sam Smith: Yeah, exactly. At that. That’s when it started hitting me to where I was like, oh my God, these are. I’m seeing all these other beautiful websites and I’m like, how are people doing this?
And then I kept seeing WordPress, you know, in the, the YouTube search bar. Then finally it was like, what the heck is this thing? Nice.
Joe Howard: Nice. And so you’re like a self-taught WordPress person. I think most people are pretty self-taught and you kind of came in with the, and the transition from kind of long time as a firefighter and kind of self-taught into moving into this new area.
Yeah, pretty cool. I would love to rewind a little bit. I think a lot of. And myself included and I’m sure a lot of listeners have had injuries before. I have had lower back issues before and still a little bit here and there. But is that something that you’d still kind of deal with a little bit today?
Did you, did you use anything to help out with that? What do you think? Like, what are the things, the things that you think were most helpful for, for that kind of stuff, especially now that you’re sitting behind a desk most of the day, instead of fighting. Yeah.
Sam Smith: So I hate to say this. When I say I was lucky enough to be injured at my job, but all things considered, I was fortunate to have the times threw my back out.
It was while lifting a patient, the, uh, you know, you, you go to lift up the patient and you’re about face level with them and you just go. Oh, and you know, you have that look on their face and they’re like, what? And I was like, nothing. Don’t worry about it. Just set them back down to someone else. You just walk, bent over to the truck after.
And then another one, it was at a fire and I was taken a ladder off the truck. And, you know, I had done this hundreds of times up until this point. And then just this one time, I wasn’t paying attention to snatch the ladder off. And these things are like, I’d say 60 pounds or so the ex the full extension ladders.
And I felt a pop that was like pop. And that was when the abdominal muscle month, it was one of those things where it’s like, you know, there, there’s not much we can do for you. Kind of just take it easy, relax. And this actually happened right before my keynote talk. So I was actually out for probably a month or so before my keynote talk, gave me some time to, uh, to practice.
You know, actually, unfortunately I still deal with it today, you know, like I still get that pop every time I sneeze or cough or something like that. I just kinda brace myself
Joe Howard: a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Back and back prompts, circus. It’s really, I know a lot of people who have them and it’s not an easy thing to recover from.
It’s almost like it’s almost like there is no. Real like certain way to go about it. Maybe everyone’s issues are a little different. I’m sure they are. I’ve got like a lumbar, like L four L five kind of lumbar spine, like somewhat slipped discom, which is very common. I mean, that’s very common in terms of people who have lower back problems.
I’ve tried a bunch of different stuff. Going to see your chiropractor has, has honestly helped. If I’m being honest in a lot of senses, I don’t chiropractor going to see a chiropractor is not something I would go for. If it wasn’t something that was like somewhat spinal, if it was like, oh, sure. Something random hurts.
Like, oh, let me align your spine. Like, that’ll help that. I’m like, yeah, maybe I don’t know. But this has actually very much helped me. So I really have good things to say about it, but. You know, strengthening my abdominals a little bit, actually like using my, but I found out like recently how to actually activate my butt muscles, like my glutes, like, oh, like these are actual muscles I should use when I’m like, you know, lifting things like, oh, you know, knowing that, learning these things from hip flexibility stuff, all this stuff really helps.
So I don’t know. I’m sure there’s some people listening out there who have dealt with this stuff. You know, maybe that stuff could be a little bit helpful. So you moved from being a firefighter. You’ve done some work in WordPress previously, and now you’re going and really doing the full time freelance thing.
We’ve actually had a few people leave reviews for WP MRR podcast and emailed in the show and asked about freelance. Stuff. I’m just kind of wanting to know a little bit more about what it’s like to go and try to be a successful freelancer. So you are a great guest for that, even though you’re at the beginning of your journey, actually, maybe even more so, because you’re the beginning of your journey.
Sometimes people like to hear people who have been doing it for 10 years and they have all this experience, but I actually think it’s really interesting to hear like what people are doing right now as kind of a beginner in the freelance space. So how have the first, I don’t know, month you’ve been, it’s been like a month or so now maybe, maybe a little bit shorter, a little longer, somewhere around there.
How has it been starting out for you?
Sam Smith: I think the most helpful thing would probably be honest because, you know, I, I would really like to be able to come on here and be able to say something that could help somebody else that’s going through the same kind of things that I went through too. You know, there’s, it feels like periods.
Like you have a period where you’re just like, there’s, there’s nothing else that I would rather do than start my own business. And then you wake up one morning and it’s like six 30 and you’re sitting there. Yeah. Did I really just tell my job that who, who is really happy with paying me money? Like they, they are totally fine with keeping me on and paying me a salary.
And I just told these people. I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to do my own thing. You get flooded with those, what ifs, you know, some anxieties where you’re just like, man, you know, I really don’t know where that next paycheck is kind of coming from. And so it really feels like that. It feels like you just come and in and out of phases and then slowly just started executing things.
So one of the big things for me was I had this huge task and list of things that I needed to get done, to be able to launch my business and. Do it properly. And so I just started taking little bits per day and I’m like, I’m going to accomplish this tiny bit a day. And I, I know I’m not the first one to try that.
I, I learned from other people that
Joe Howard: whoa, what a novel idea.
Sam Smith: And so it just, it was one of those things where I just kept adding. Maybe, I didn’t know where this was going, but you know what I’m going to act. And I kept doing it in those periods of what am I doing? Kept getting smaller. And those periods of, I couldn’t see myself doing anything, but this kept growing.
I wouldn’t say that I’m out of the woods. There’s still definitely mornings when I wake up and I’m like, eh, you’re not a business owner, buddy. You are, you are a worker bee, but just keep getting up, keep up. Yeah.
Joe Howard: Oh man. I think that’s, I think that’s really important. I mean, I have a bunch of what you just said really resonated with me as someone who, who kind of runs a semi-successful businesses at this point.
I think a lot of people say, okay, you know, whatever, whatever, but you know, people say, I think if some people see me and our business and say, You know, Joe must be really happy doing that every day because it’s so successful. Like I, if I’m being honest, like yesterday I was a little bit down on stuff for the business, because I was just like having one of those days and it doesn’t go away just because some things end up going right.
And, you know, you build something, you know, you always have those thoughts with you. And then today we actually, our first WP buffs webinars today. And again, Kaylin ran our. It was actually fantastic. And I was super, super like happy today. So these things go in waves, it always happens. And the thought of like, what am I doing?
I think that at WordCamp Miami, we were hanging out at work at Miami actually. And Chris limo was on a panel there. And one of the things he said, I forget what the exact question was. And I actually forget what his exact answer was, but the gist of the. Life’s chaos, like building a businesses, thus building a businesses, chaos.
Like this is not something that is just going to be easy. That is what it is. And the, at the end of the day, if you can control some of that chaos, you can be successful. So whether you’re just starting out and where you are right now, you know, when, when you’re five years in and you’re hyper successful freelancer, like you’ll still have a lot of these thoughts.
And so I think a lot of people can find solace in that. Yeah, for sure. So starting off, you talked about kind of doing a little bit, kind of had this list of things you had to get ready to do to like, you know, really jump into freelancing. I like to think of that as kind of like, if you can like get 1% better every day, like that’s huge.
That’s everything. One step forward every day, you know, two steps forward one day, one step backward the next day. That’s okay. You’re moving forward. Or are there some of the things like the biggest things or the biggest hurdles you’ve edited, you’ve had to handle like jumping into really try and push freelancing for, especially at this beginning, like startup grind, like part of the freelancing where those big task items you were trying to.
Sam Smith: So it’s, it’s very interesting. There was a lot of things that I realized were, um, perceived large items, you know, I’m going down the list, I’ve got a list of like a hundred things and I’m like, this is a big one. Like forming my LLC. I was like, this is going to be huge. Like I got a file with the state, like all of this other stuff.
And then the closer you get to these huge perceived tasks that you’ve got to do you realize how tiny they are or how easy it is to just push right through. You know, and it, it may be different for me. Cause I had a lot of mental blocks that I was, you know, pushing through, like I said, like, oh my gosh, LLC.
Oh my goodness. It took all of about 30 minutes to, to knock that
Joe Howard: out. Yeah. A lot of times that mental state of starting something as the hardest part, it’s like, man, this is going to take hours. Like I just don’t even want to start it. So you push it off another day and then another day. But if you actually got around to just like, just go like do it, just like, just do it it, oh, that was fast.
And that’s a lot of cases that happen.
Sam Smith: Well, and it’s interesting you say that because that’s kind of how I brought down the little pieces, because when I looked at that huge thing, I would be like, man, look at all this stuff I got to do. I should play video games. I would take
Joe Howard: off. Woo.
Sam Smith: Yup. I was like, oh yeah, that looks like a lot of work.
I’m going to go play fallout for a couple of hours. And then, um, but when I did those little pieces, I was like, no, I’ll just knock this out in 20 minutes and then go play fallout. And then. Look at that, I spent two hours on it and got a whole bunch of complish nice. But yeah, no, some of the big stuff was, uh, getting, getting a personal site launched and not being super upset with it.
I am not proud of my website at this point. Um, but you know, you need something functional. You need to be able to take in leads and, you know, get your stuff out there. Um, so I I’ve had to change that. That’s a work in progress. That’s not an. Place that you, you get to so sight, um, coming up with like booking software that was.
And see I’m a systems person coming from my year as a support tech. It was like, no, we have, you know, workflows and you do the workflow every time. And then you slowly tweak workflows and then it gets better. So when I came into like things like bringing on leads through CRM or generating invoices or something like that, I immediately started systematizing everything.
So then, you know, I have this. Follow through that. I do. Um, so that was a big one for me. And then kind of just, uh, facing the unknown where it’s like, I really don’t have any leads right now. And I don’t know where, where those are gonna come from, but. You know, I’ll just work at it until they start
Joe Howard: pouring in.
Yeah. That’s the right attitude, man. Uh, and, and we’ve talked about this, we talked about this a little bit at, in Miami, um, and a kind of a previous word camps and such, but the, uh, the fact that you’ve been doing WordPress here for a little while, and you’re starting to have a good network in the WordPress space is just like going to be super helpful for you starting as a freelancer.
Um, like if you just came into WordPress, like as a total WordPress noob and wanting to start freelancing, that’d be. Like there’ll be enormously difficult, but the fact that you can kind of lean on some of the relationships, you already have to say like, Hey, like I’m starting to freelance. Hey, you guys have like 10 hours a week of contract work that you need done.
Like, oh yeah, I can do that. How about over here? Like it helps with both financial support and as you continue to build your skillset working on different stuff. So I think that. Going to word camps, going to local meetups. Um, like building that network. I, I struggled talking about this a little bit because I don’t like traditional networking.
Like I don’t, I’m not, I don’t like go to like panned out business cards and like do speed dating to like meet a hundred people in like a hundred minutes, you know, like that kind of stuff. I don’t think it’s very effective, but there are definitely. In which like networking quote unquote is, is just kind of hanging out and talk with people.
Like that’s how we met. Right. It was like networking, quote unquote, but we just like met and was like, what’s up? What’s up? Okay, cool. We’re friends now. Like it was, it wasn’t a, like a business arrangement. It was just like, you know, you meet people. Close and friends with people. And then, Hey, like maybe some stuff there’s some synergy there to, you know, do some work together.
So yeah. WordPress community. Yeah.
Sam Smith: Funny you say that. Um, because when I was, um, growing up, my stepfather was in the local chamber of commerce and. You know, this was like, turn them away, like two thousands, like early two thousands type era. And it was heavy that where it’s like, oh yes, here’s my business card.
Let me judge your business card. And you know, if we have any prospects, we’ll, we’ll get back to you. And it was one of those where it was like, I didn’t dislike that. Please don’t take that as a knock to a chamber of
Joe Howard: commerce or, Hey everyone here, who’s who part of a chamber of commerce is like, wow, Sam, that asshole turn
Sam Smith: him off.
We’ll
Joe Howard: try again next week.
Sam Smith: But no, it was one of those things where it’s like, I did personally want something different. I wanted to be able to build relationships and have friends. And you know, what, if stuff came out of it, that’s totally fine too. But the friendships were the number one, you know, the push for all of this work camp stuff.
Joe Howard: Yeah, totally. I think it’s, it can be funny too, when you do prioritize that, it’s funny how some business opportunities just can happen to fall from that. Like, you kind of realize like you actually should be like going to like make friends and be friendly with people just to like make, you know, to make new acquaintances and to do that because that’s where most of the business happenings happen to fall through.
Most people wanna work with people. They want to work with. Did I say that right? Most people want to work with people who they want to work with. Yeah. That makes sense. Right? You want to work with people who you, who you engage with are just on a personal level. I think most people would agree with that.
So if that comes first, then the rest can, can kind of drip down from that. Dude. You mentioned fallout. Are you a, are you a gamer of sorts?
Sam Smith: So I wouldn’t say that I’m a heavy gamer. Especially now that I started probably in October, November, I really started hitting the dev stuff hard. And so all of my free time was kind of getting sapped up with all that.
But I do like a lot of RPGs. I’ve really liked fallout series. I know people are losing their minds over 76, but I rather
Joe Howard: enjoy. I dunno what that is.
Sam Smith: So it was a I’ll touch on this briefly, but the fallout of the fallout series a was a beautiful role playing game with, you know, so many dynamic storylines and everything with this last release, they kind of, they kind of kept that, but they made it an entirely multiplayer.
Um, experience where, you know, everybody jumps on a server and they all interact with each other. And that was such a deviation from the normal release that, you know, the game comes out with. And man, the diehards we’re losing it, but. Yeah. Funny, really funny how he went there, but
Joe Howard: I just ask, I used to, I don’t, I don’t do as much gaming anymore, but I was like a big time in high school.
Like I was like in the like land party crew, like, you know, we got like threw on like halo, like original halo and there was no online. So you got two Xboxes and you’re like hook them in through the land. Uh, and you just played on two TVs. One team of four over here, one team of four over there, man. Those are the days
Sam Smith: the best weekends.
Joe Howard: Yeah, dude. Yeah. You order some pizzas. My dad had ordered like Stromboli, every, all my high school friends are like, strombolis like every time I see them, like strombolis pizzas. Cause my dad would always order strombolis pizza and you know, you know, just be playing here again.
Sam Smith: Yeah, then it’s 4:00 AM. And you’re like, where, what, I guess we’ll we’ll sleep for a couple
Joe Howard: of hours.
I don’t know. Totally man. Cool. Well, that was, I enjoyed that tangent very much. What were we talking about? Freelance freelance ish thing.
Sam Smith: Oh yeah. And like word camps and relationships and stuff. I was surprised, you know, when we, when we were talking about friendships, as opposed to, you know, Leeds or, you know, acquaintances or whatever, it’s different when you, when you transfer into, um, you know, doing something on your own it’s D.
To think that you have people in your corner as opposed to people that are just like, oh yeah, I know Sammy is starting up a business. And the overwhelming support that I got afterward at Miami, you know, telling everybody about this launch and everything was awesome. It really did feel like, you know, like.
50 people behind me pushing me forward and helping me out and, you know, showing me where to go and where not to go. So
Joe Howard: yeah. Yeah, man, the, uh, I remember that too. It was like magical almost like we were hanging out a lot that weekend. Everyone was like stamped for this, like Stanford, that like, how do we help Sam?
Like then it was like, really, it was like, so cool, like to see that happening and that, you know, it doesn’t happen if you don’t, if you don’t, you know, aren’t there and part of the community and give to others and help others. And you know, it does help you back. It may not be immediate, but, uh, but yeah, man, that was super cool.
So like as a business owner, for me, it can be, sometimes it can be difficult to separate these things. I’m always very much trying to, to do what we talk about and really like value relationships and to value the friendships I make. And I know I do that, but as our business has grown, there have been times where I’ve had to start, like having more serious business conversations and like really like, kind of get to the point more and like, like, what are we like, what kind of partnership we’re really talking about here?
Like now we’re having these. Uh, in depth and detailed conversations. And honestly, I feel like sometimes I have more to lose now than, uh, than I did when, uh, you know, we were, you know, a small business of like three or four people right now. It’s like, I have bigger, I feel like consequences are bigger for mistakes.
So sometimes I feel like I can lose that a little bit sometimes because I feel a little bit more pressure to like sustain and grow we already have. And so sometimes I feel like I can lose a little bit of that. Like, Friendship stuff. Sometimes I feel like I’m more like, very focused on like, what’s the, like, what’s the deal here?
Or like, what’s the relation? How does this relationship benefit me? I don’t always want to, but sometimes it just, it just kind of happens. So.
Sam Smith: And do, you know, people that if you’re surrounded by with the right people, they understand that as well. You know, they’re just like, oh, Hey, yeah, there is time to cut up.
You know, uh, you know, the guy I work with Ben Meredith, I mean, it is really hard to get us focused sometimes in these meetings. Um,
Joe Howard: I can’t imagine working with Ben and it must be, oh,
Sam Smith: Yeah, it’s nothing but poking and prodding, but then there’s times where, you know, mats corralling us in and you just got to flip the switch and it’s like, yeah, we’re talking business now.
We’re not talking about the fact that it’s Ben’s birthday.
Joe Howard: Yeah, for sure. I feel like that’s a lot of, a lot of my job now is really just like putting people on the right path and like letting them go down the path. But like, I help people to find that path, so, yeah. Yeah. And spends birthday today. Do you know that it’s been.
Shoot.
Sam Smith: I’ve. Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s Ben’s birthday today. You know, I think it, it was Ben’s birthday yesterday,
Joe Howard: too. I think I, you know what I think when this episode comes out the day it comes out well, actually any day that anybody listens to this episode, it’s actually going to be Ben’s birthday. So Ben is at Ben UNC.
On Twitter at B E N U N C. So like, feel free to wish him a happy birthday because it’s definitely his birthday today, whatever day you’re listening to this. Oh yeah.
Sam Smith: Did you see that? It was his actual birthday the other day.
Joe Howard: Oh no, it’s this other site and it’s not my birthday today. And it’s got,
Sam Smith: um, oh, who’s the actor that plays doc.
Um, he’s standing in the rain crying,
Joe Howard: cause it says it’s not as birthday. Oh my God. Pretty epic for people who, for people who are very confused right now, you got to go to work camps. You got to get some of these inside jokes. Very funny. It’s the better. I don’t know if I’ve talked to anybody on the show about WordCamp organizing before what let’s, let’s dive into that a little bit.
What’s a, you’re not lead organizer, but that’s cool. What’s a, what like, what’s your role? And what’s the planning process look like and what stage.
Sam Smith: Oh, gosh, I don’t even really know what my role is right now. Um, it was kinda like, Hey,
Joe Howard: this is not new.
Sam Smith: Yeah. Well, it’s kind of be like, uh, last year was like, um, organized Wrangler and it wasn’t, it was just, you know, like just helping out the.
Sponsor Wrangler, which is fine, you know, it was cool. I got to see, uh, the ins and outs of that. And then, um, I think they’re going to be switching it up on me. I’m kind of the gopher right now. Gotcha. So, you know, if, if an, if an email comes through or something, they can assign it to me or make a call or do it, I’m just trying to be available.
You know, if they need anything, just I’ll take it.
Joe Howard: Yeah, this seems like a lot of word camp or camp organizing. It’s like just making sure you’re being flexible enough to like a few different things. Like things gotta be handled and there’s all sorts of stuff that needs to happen. So yeah, I did a little bit of Edward campy west.
I went to contributor day and was at the, I forget what the actual, what the, what the area was. I don’t think it was like word camps. It was like community, I guess, but. I was trying to put some documentation together with a few people about like for first-time organizers actually. So I’ve actually done a little bit of that, but it actually kind of, it like got me motivated to like, maybe I want to like, do more like, cause DC has, has a lot of challenges during, in DC.
And I was like, maybe I should just like go and like be the head lead organizer of DC. And I thought less about half an hour. And that was like, Ooh. After going through all that degradation was like, oh shit, there’s a lot enormous responsibility. Like, so yeah. It’s.
Sam Smith: Yeah. You look at David Bissette every year and you’re like, man, that guy is, he’s running a million miles an hour everywhere that whole weekend.
You really try not to speak to him. Cause you know, he’s
Joe Howard: probably doing something stupid. That is true. I know. It’s like, I talked to him for 10 seconds. I’m like a cat doctor when you’re wanting, you know, do much of his time. But I actually, well, I look at David now and I’m like, maybe I should organize a word camp.
Like I’d be super fit. If I organize the word camp
Sam Smith: that you see that. That thing going around the community right now, you see a Nathan and how much weight he’s lost?
Joe Howard: No, I haven’t seen that. Nathan.
Sam Smith: Nathan Ingram. Yeah, he, um, he just posted the other day that he was, um, I think he broke the 180 mark and, um, I think, I think he was around the two 50 to 60 or something like that.
He mentions it on his Twitter. I think he was able to do it with like mostly diet. I was so freaking proud of him, man.
Joe Howard: I did see him recently. I did see him there and he looks, so you mean. I forgot that I was Nathan though. Yeah, man. I love that the community rallies around rallies around these people, because you see it on Twitter and like so many likes and retweets, and then like you see people WordCamps like amazing.
Like, you know, it’s, uh, I feel like the WordPress community is so supportive of that. Yeah.
Sam Smith: When I, um, released the, uh, the hero press article, like I lost my mind when I saw the, uh, the analytics behind, you know, like everything that took place with that. Cause I’m like a mild data nerd. I’m sitting in bed, you know, scrolling on my phone, I’m telling my wife, I’m like, look, look another a hundred impressions or whatever I was, I was stoked.
Joe Howard: Yeah. Yeah. It’s fun to see when things start taking off a little bit like, Ooh, like I’m big on.
Sam Smith: Oh, it’s funny on that real quick. So, uh, Tofor hits me up and this was like a couple of hours right after it had been released. And he didn’t tell me this when we first started, he’s like, Hey, are you in the backend of a WordPress site right now?
And I was like, yeah, I’m in the back of a client site. Why he was, he was doing this over slack. And he was like, do you see anything there? And I was like, uh, Hey, my, my stories in the new. Like this store is this on every WordPress site. And he’s like, yeah, about a third of the internet is looking at you right now.
And I was like, uh, I could like pay attention for like
Joe Howard: 20 minutes. Wait, wait, go back. What do you mean? So R is that it’s like hero, press stuff, like pushed out through WordPress dashboards everywhere.
Sam Smith: Heck. Yeah, dude, I wasn’t putting them away. Yeah. It’s um, it’s just in the news article. Like it has the feed and then underneath it, there’s, um, different articles to things and hero, press releases are.
Joe Howard: Wow. That’s dope. I didn’t know that that’s cool.
Sam Smith: Like my face melted. I was like, I’m in the back of the, how many millions of sites right now.
Joe Howard: Even if you get like 0.01% click through rates, like, oh, that’s like hundreds of doubts. A hundred thousand visitors, like, oh shit. That’s cool. Yeah. Well that man. Ah, cool.
All right. Well, we talk, we talked about some freelance stuff. We talked about, uh, community stuff. I like digging into things that people feel like they’re nerds about. I feel whenever I talk about my nerdom about, I know I can do all sorts of stuff and I’m a big, like Saifai fan. Like I love anything science and like space and all that stuff.
But you mentioned you’re a little bit of a data nerd or a analytics nerd. I think. Like kind of am, but not to the extent that I would call myself access because I don’t feel like I’m super knowledgeable in that area. Cause like Google analytics is like, I’m cool with that. Like, I don’t need anything like super fancy, but, uh, what is your nerdom look like when it comes to comes to analytics things or things?
Analytics,
Sam Smith: th the depth of that knowledge is probably the shallow end of the pool. The a C. The stuff, you know, like I’ve got heart, you know, the Hotjar stuff, running some data analytics stuff. And I actually, um, I subcontract for a agency in town called, uh, data-driven labs and they
Joe Howard: were actually people off.
So a webinar, uh, here, a couple. What’s
Sam Smith: that is awesome. So yeah, you know, I’ve got this wealth of knowledge at my fingertips when it comes to data stuff, you know, I got a little bit into like the data studio, you know, where you can pull in the information, the pie charts and stuff like that. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world once he showed me that.
But no, Chris and Sandy. Run data-driven labs. They actually were the ones that I think I even mentioned that in the article that they gave me my start, I was just a dude coming to meetups and they were like, Hey, uh, you want to kind of get paid for some of this, you know, on the inside. You’re kind of like, you know, I’m having a, like a freak out.
I’m sorry. I just whacked the crap out of the mic. I do that all the time. Boom. Hey, you wake. Yeah. But no, like, and on the outside you’re like completely stoic and you’re like, yeah, I think that would be a good, a good fit. You know,
Joe Howard: relationship, stay calm. I need
Sam Smith: to go to the bathroom. Actually. I just need to leave this room for just a minute.
Joe Howard: Yeah. It’s like the, in the Martian it’s, there’s that scene where the head of NASA is like, they’ve realized, you know, he’s alive on Mars and he’s tells us random engineer, like we need satellite coverage, you know, for every like rolling every three minutes and in the movie, she just says like, yeah, sure, no problem.
But in the book is she’s like, I had no idea at all how to do this, but all I could say was sure, I’ll get it done. So something I really enjoyed that. Yeah, that was a, it was really good. It was really good. Surprisingly good. Uh, and the, you know, I find a very interesting story behind actually the book that was written because it was very much crowdsourced.
It was very much. W who was the guy who wrote it, I’ll look it up. But the book itself, I mean, it has so much science and craziness in it. And it’s actually like pretty, you know, there may be places where it stretches a little bit, but overall it’s a pretty realistic telling of it. Yeah. Andy Weir is the guy who wrote it, but very much crowdsourced.
I mean, he didn’t know a lot of this stuff and he had, I believe, talked to a bunch of different people and get opinions from all these different scientists and stuff about how this would work, how that would work. It’s chemistry work. And eventually just like the guy in the movie, you know, solve one problem, solve another problem with eventually.
Shoot. And
Sam Smith: so you would definitely recommend the book then?
Joe Howard: Yeah. Oh yeah. The book’s really good. Highly recommended, even if you’ve seen the movie already, the book. Uh it’s uh, it’s one of those like vacation reads. I think I like to think of it as it’s like, I would love to have it like sitting on the beach or, uh, you know, hanging out in the wood cabin or something.
So yeah.
Sam Smith: Yeah, and I am also a fan of the, uh, the young Matthew Daymond, so,
Joe Howard: oh yeah. Very nice. Oh, cool, man. This has been real. We’re going to go in for a little while here, so maybe time to start wrapping up, but I appreciate you hopping on, man. This has been a lot of fun, always good to chat. It was funny.
Right. You know, we’re recording this podcast sometimes. I’m like, okay, I got get. Podcast mode, like I’m going to go like do podcasts. Like, I don’t know what that means, but I like got my podcast mindset or whatever, but for this one, I was like, oh, I’m just getting on and talk with Sam. Like, it feels like just a casual conversation.
So let’s finish off. Why don’t you tell people where they can find you online? I don’t know a website or Twitter, or I don’t know where you do your online.
Sam Smith: Must-have so I like to hang out on Twitter quite a bit at G Sam Smith. I can be found [email protected] and I’m on slack. Some or you can find me, I’ll make that word.
Joe Howard: Yup. There you go with the, uh, I know you try just to get, you know, Sam smith.com or just at Sam Smith, but for some reason that, that, uh, that was a handle on that, that say were all taken
Sam Smith: up, man. I don’t
Joe Howard: understand it. Ooh. Who is a Sam Smith? I don’t know. Yeah, if you listen to any music you probably probably know already, but yeah, one of the same, I’m going to get a cease
Sam Smith: and desist letter in the mail
Joe Howard: someday.
Right? I got. Yeah, right. Cool, man. Uh, yep. G Sam smith.com. If you’re looking for some freelance help, uh, if you’re looking for some WordPress support, G Sam Smith is the place to go. He’s on Twitter. Go check him out. The last thing I always ask guests to do on the show or request of them is to ask our audience.
If they would please leave a five star review on iTunes. So you want to, like, you want to give them a little.
Sam Smith: Yeah. So, uh, I understand that you can only do five stars. If I, when you’re thinking in your mind, like I could do 20, I could do one spot, you know, just hit that five. It’ll let people know. And you don’t, I’m sure there’s a comment section you can put like, Hey.
Twenty-five or 30, but yeah, definitely leave a review. That’s how we, uh, we know you
Joe Howard: like this stuff. Yes. The good old 25 star review. I’m going to hack into iTunes and give us a 25 star review. Uh, that would be excellent. Yeah, you can, uh, give us that review. Anytime we actually have a redirect. If you just go to WP buffs.com/itunes, it brings everything up for you.
So it makes it a little bit easier. If you want to leave us a review. If you have any questions for the show, you can shoot them into us. And to me personally, just [email protected], I answer that inbox pretty frequently. So you can always feel free to reach me there. WP M R R video course around selling care plans.
If you’re an agency or a freelancer, like Sam, feel free to check out the video course. We have a 30% discount on there right now. So you can go ahead and check it out. Other wise, we will catch. Next week, Sam. Thanks again for hopping on. Thanks Joe.
]]>In today’s episode, we get to listen again to Joe and Mario’s conversation on the enterprise space. They discuss how a paid service should always focus on delivering prime and premium experience per user visit, pros and cons of different invoicing methods, different channels to hunt for potential clients, and the power of inbound sales.
Mario Peshev is a global SME Business Advisor who’s been named “The next Tony Robbins” and “The best tactical strategist out there aside from Neil Patel.” His technical consultancy DevriX grew past 50 people and ranked as a top 20 WordPress agency worldwide.