In today’s episode, Joe talks to Maddy Osman, Founder and SEO Content Strategist at The Blogsmith. She creates content optimized for onsite SEO, handles keyword research, and picks feature blog images, among other SEO content writing strategies her agency offers. 

They discuss SEO and content optimization, old school SEO strategies, competitor analysis, and winning clicks in search results.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:36 Let’s welcome back, Maddy Osman!
• 03:06 How to start dominating content and SEO
• 09:19 Keywords and content optimization
• 13:28 Identifying the reading level of your target audience
• 17:51 The importance of word counts in SEO
• 21:30 SEO ranking and relevant search
• 27:22 The first experience someone has on your site
• 28:40 Video embedding is an engagement metric
• 31:03 Tips to content exposure and audience reach 
• 33:30 How to win clicks in the search engine results
• 38:12 Target keywords still work when added in the meta description
• 41:00 Find Maddy online!

Episode Resources:

• Tweet Maddy
• Visit The Blogsmith
• Check out Clearscope
• Leave an iTunes review or binge-watch past episodes
• Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Oh, do you folks, Joe Howard here. This week on the podcast, we have the one and only Maddie Osman, Maddie and I have been friends for a while now. So it’s always a pleasure having her on the podcast. I think this is her second time being on anyway. As folks listening know I’m pretty big into the content and SEO and marketing world.

And sometimes you just get two people together on a podcast who really vibe. And this is just one of those episodes. I was pleasantly surprised with the amount we were able to fit into this episode. It’s super. Tactile, super tactical, tons of strategies, tons of actionable content for you really you’ll be able to, if you pull out your pen and paper or whatever, your note taking app of choice from how to create the right title tags, to how to do some competitor analysis, what tools to use.

All that’s included in today’s episode. So before Moe gets a little more mad, go ahead and enjoy today’s episode.

All right. We are live on the pod. We’ve got Maddie Ozmen on this week, Maddie. What’s up? Uh, tell folks a little bit about you. I already know a little bit about you because we’ve been friends for a little while, and I know all this stuff you do with WordPress, but I, and we were talking about before you’ve been on the podcast before, so people haven’t gone back and heard that.

First episode, lot of great stuff. And I should go back and listen or not. You can listen to this episode because you’re on with Maddie right now. So yeah, without further ado, Maddie, just tell folks who maybe haven’t heard the last episode that you were on a little bit of your background and stuff you do with WordPress.

Yeah. So

Maddy Osman: [00:01:42] I run this company called the blog Smith and we create SEO content for B2B tech brands, which mostly live in the WordPress space. So. You might recognize my byline on websites like WP buffs. Hints does another favorite client of mine that, and just like a lot of web hosts that kind of tends to be my main clientele in the WordPress space.

If you’re ever looking for an answer to a WordPress problem, I probably we’ve written about it.

Joe Howard: [00:02:11] Totally. I’m on your, uh, Website right now, it’s just the dash blog smith.com. And I

Maddy Osman: [00:02:17] also own the non-data.

Joe Howard: [00:02:19] Okay. Okay. So just the blog smith.com. Okay. So either one of those works, people are going to check out your stuff, Maddie.

I was just going to say, I’m on the website now, and I know that you practice what you preach because. It has on the landing page here. It’s like SEO content written and strategy for B2B technology brands. I can tell you do SEO content because your website, I can see the little, you can see what the title tag is in the tab of your website and it’s, it starts with SEO content.

So clearly you want to be found for SEO content because that’s you do so you’re doing it. You preach when you you’re, you, you do what you preach, which is, uh, is always refreshing. So cool. I mean, I’m, I’m always super stoked to talk about. Content and content marketing and all of that. Maybe we could start just around like content basics for people.

If people want to get found online, if they want to write content, that is, you know, obviously the quality of the content is kind of a little bit up to the writer or people they hired to help with the writing. But in terms of getting that content found, using SEO, maybe using some other tactics, what’s like the lowest hanging fruit for people, where should they start?

I

Maddy Osman: [00:03:27] think that a lot of people build up SEO content in their head is something that’s difficult and technical, and there’s so many steps and there are a lot of steps that you want to. Be conscious of that. You want to, you know, sort of plan for, you can kind of create some guidelines for yourself in terms of like a checklist that you could follow, you know, using a primary keyword in the URL using it and the method title and things like that.

A more technical nature, but I think a good place to start, especially if this is something that’s new to you is to go into Google search and take whatever your primary. Keyword is that you think it should be, or that you’ve done keyword research to validate. And that’s kind of getting more to the intermediate advanced level of the stuff, but let’s just run with whatever your idea is, type it into search and see what comes up.

First of all, you know, before you even hit enter, you get some suggestions from Google, Google. Autocomplete is what it’s called. And it’s basically using whatever that term is and adding extra words onto it. And these are this data’s based on what actual searchers are searching for. So, you know, in that light it’s based on the things that they actually want to know, they want answers for.

So then you can hit, enter and get into those search results. And you’re going to have two other places you can look for really great ideas in terms of how to flush out your content, you know, different sections to add or different questions to answer. So in about the top or the middle of the search results, you’ll see a section called people also ask, and these tend to be phrased as questions.

And that’s interesting that they’re phrased as questions because another way that you could potentially rank in search is by answering questions and getting what’s called the featured snippet, which is like that top box that you see on some search results that highlights. Like a certain answer

Joe Howard: [00:05:21] before it’s like position zero is what some people would call it.

Right? Correct. Yeah. So

Maddy Osman: [00:05:25] some people call it position zero because it ranks at the top of organic search. Sometimes it’s under ads, so it’s not position. Zero is the first thing that you would see, but it’s the first organic result you would see and that’s, that’s invaluable. And so people also asked is a good place to look for those questions that you could answer to potentially rank in that spot.

And just to make sure that your content. Is answering the questions that people, you know, actually have about the topic. Um, the last thing that I would say in terms of low hanging fruit is on that same page. If you go to the very bottom, there’s a section called searches related to whatever that keyword term is that you input.

And these are things that may not use the same words. Like you would see an auto-complete, but they use related words and related terms. And so those are. Good ideas for either related topics that you could write about separately or that you could write about again, within that same piece of content. So you don’t need $100 a month SEO tool to be able to create great content.

I mean, I would still say you need some sort of tool for keyword research and that’s another topic, but. In order to validate your ideas and create great content, you can definitely use what’s available to you even within Google search.

Joe Howard: [00:06:37] Yeah. I love that. So you and Lindsay Halsey, who does a lot of SEO and are in and around the WordPress space, YouTube of people I’ve like worked directly with.

Around content and SEO. And I love both of your approaches because if they’re actually like both of your approaches seem to be, go and get the data from Google’s first, there’s all sorts of tools out there that can help you do X, Y, and Z. But like what kind of data is that really? Like, even if they tell you what kind of like is the data is coming back from Google, like, Oh, I don’t, I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from, but.

Right. Google clearly, like is showing you something directly from what their algorithm is giving you in search results. So I like the idea, like, like Lindsay uses a lot of Google search console, just like literally data from Google, which I’m always like, great. It’s like, I just want to know what Google thinks so I can make Google think better of me and continue to, you know, rank for different stuff and all that.

So I love the idea of the checking out the autocomplete for searches. Once you do a search, just scroll to the bottom and you’ll see a bunch of related searches. And also in the middle there mean it may not show up on all searches, but in a lot of searches, it’ll say it’ll have that auto or not the auto, but the what other questions people ask around this topic.

And that’s a really good idea for like, if you’re doing a general topic, well, what should your, like your H one tag you may want to have is like, You know, the general topic of the keyword you’re going after, but what other H two questions could you answer? What, like FAQ’s, could you answer in that content?

Those are maybe some good ones to, to add to your keyword research for a content to write. Yeah. Also interesting to hear about the like positions, zero stuff you were talking about. Cause I think a lot of trying to rank and position zero seems to be like, I’ve seen a lot of search results where the positions zero.

Result that Google auto gives you. It’s not the first organic search in a lot of cases. Not in some cases I’ve seen content. That’s not even on the first page ranking on the first page auto completed, which I think is like totally crazy. It’s like you rank number 30 for keyword, but still you’re technically ranking one because you get pulled into this first result.

Yeah. A lot of that seems to be from the organization of your content. Like, how did you have the right OnPage tags? Like schema markup and or each one, like nested content. So like H2O is all go under.  like having all that really easy for Google to read and understand makes Google think it’s well organized and I think helps get an auto answers like that.

I don’t know if you’ve been involved in more pure SEO, stuff like that, or if you’ve run across anything like that. But. That’s a topic I’m always like, it’s a pretty easy way to rank. First is just rank in position zero, but it’s not always easy. You got to figure out how do you get Google to answer that question for you?

So I don’t know if you have any other thoughts on that.

Maddy Osman: [00:09:19] There’s definitely a lot to think about in terms of how to format your page in a way that’s going to be helpful to Google. And that’s going to get your content index, especially in terms of these different features. And you brought up one thing which was schema, and then another thing, which is FAQ’s.

And so that’s been an interesting, like sort of newer way to rank in search and to like Mark up your content accordingly in a way that it’s sort of helpful in signaling to Google that you have the answers to people’s questions and you can. Implement FAQ schema using tools. Like I think Yost has a feature on their plugin where you can set like questions and answers and Mark them up as FAQ schema.

And so that’s just one thing to keep in mind as sort of extra. Thing that you can do to make your content better and make your content more indexable to Google. Another thing you brought up are things about, you know, what should you put in headings in order to come up full for your snippets and just for others, Google search features.

And so kind of getting more into like the tools side of things. Now I’ve been using this tool called clear scope, which I love have you heard of it, Joe?

Joe Howard: [00:10:30] No, I have not heard of this, but I love hearing the new tool. So tell me about it.

Maddy Osman: [00:10:34] The sign. So clear scope basically works. If you’ve heard of surfer, SEO or market muse, it’s very similar to the types of things that those tools do, but it focuses specifically on content optimization.

And so what you do is you take a primary keyword, ideally, something that you validated because clear scope is not a cheap tool. It’s something like. $8 and 50 cents to run a report for any new content that you would create. And they have plans that start at like $170 a month for their lowest plan. And so unless you’re creating a lot of content, I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re like me and you’re creating a ton of content for clients, Or if you’re like Joe, and you know, you have a blog that you’re trying to maintain with a lot of new topics.

This is a really great tool because what happens is clear scope goes through. I want to say it’s like the top 20 to 30 results for that primary keyword. And it basically reverse engineers. What was rankable about those things in terms of this specific entities? Like the nouns, you know, the people, places, things like the wording, basically within these articles.

And then it makes suggestions to you. So basically you have this content editor and you can use a Google docs add on if you prefer to work in Google docs versus their editor. And it basically tells you like yours, a bunch of terms you should make sure to include because that’s what these top ranking articles included.

And furthermore, it gives you direction in terms of where those terms should be used. So should they be just like body content? Should they be in a heading what’s the order of importance for all of these terms listed clear scope can give you all that information. It also tells you what’s the ideal word count of the top ranking articles based on that.

And what’s the ideal reading level, which is also super important in terms of just like. Matching intent and, you know, reaching your audience the right way. So that’s been a tool again, it’s not necessarily for somebody who’s like a hobbyist or who’s just not creating enough content to justify using it.

But for me, for someone who’s a high content volume producer, it has really revolutionized my workflow.

Joe Howard: [00:12:48] Yeah, that’s a cool tool. Clear scope.io. Anybody from that? Team’s listening. You’ve got to reach out to Maddie and get her. Oh, we’ve yeah. Nice. Nice. Yeah, that’s a cool tool. I, you know what I really like about the couple of things you said, one was what you said around reading level for like what your content is reading levels should be about.

I bet if you use that. Software for like four or five, six pieces of content. You’d see a pretty uniform reading level across, not just like what that topic was for, but like the entire. Focus of your blog. So for like us, it’s like WordPress stuff. I would love to know like what reading level I should be writing for to write to WordPress people in general, maybe it wouldn’t be the same for like a new WordPress users or would be a developer or, you know, I’m sure there are differences, but I need to know that so that I can, we can write good content for people.

If people, I haven’t looked into this, but I think I’ve like read some stuff that like the reading level you should be writing to is always. Probably lower than you think it should be. Like if you’re writing to like a college level audience. I mean, that’s more advanced than a lot of people potentially to like, to be able to easily digest.

And so you may be missing some people who may not have gone to college or may not have that level of sophistication. I’m not trying to like, say anybody’s better than anybody else. I’m just saying you want to write content. That’s really accessible to everybody. Okay. I’ll include myself in this. Like I went to college, but I’d probably rather read on like a sixth grade level than a college level.

I just want to like, read something and understand it. Like, I don’t need like. Some crazy advanced topic, like I’m from Googling something to fix something. I don’t need it written at that level. And nor probably do I want it, I just tell me how to fix the thing I need. Like that’s all I need. And then maybe, Hey, I’ll join your email newsletter or I’ll, maybe I’ll become a customer in the future.

Who knows? Because you gave me the answer I needed. So I think that level of. I like the reading level is a super important thing that we’ve actually like not focused on. I just actually hit up Alec and Slack to ask him, Hey, should we like, think about using this tool and maybe like, think about reading level more in our content.

That’s a definitely an interesting

Maddy Osman: [00:14:54] idea. Yeah. I want to expand on that for just a second, the reading level, and I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of whenever you are looking for an answer to a question, how most of us use search, we’re looking for a quick answer. We’re looking at least for a guide for how to find it.

We’re not interested in reading a novel. We’re not interested in reading a textbook. We want to be able to skim and that’s going to be impossible if the reading level of our content is so complicated and verbose, I mean, I love to write, I love to read and I love to use colorful language, but there is a time and a place and reading level, the way that the metric is composed, like the way that clear scope measures it.

It’s like the average number of words per sentence, but it’s also the average number of syllables within the words. So obviously that’s like a very like bare bones way to judge reading level, but it is a pretty effective one when you consider, you know, multi-syllabic words and, and the fact that you could probably use simpler language if your reading level gauges getting pretty

Joe Howard: [00:15:59] high.

Yeah. I’d agree with that. I think. When I think about things like a short tail SEO keyword versus a long-term SEO keyword, really all I’m thinking about is like how many words are in that keyword phrase. So if you’re looking for like Nike shoes, that’s two. So that’s pretty short tail. Like it’s going to be hard to rank for that.

I think because Nike is probably gonna rank for that. But if you do a search, you know, if you’re trying to rank for Nike high top is high top one word, I think it’s one word, Nike high, top yellow and black. Basketball shoes. In DC, that’s like nine words long. So that’s a much longer tail, obviously there’s probably less volume, but it’s more targeted keywords.

Someone who’s looking for that, like probably looking like, Hey, I want to buy like that specific shoe. And if they land on your e-commerce store selling something like that. Hey. Well, who knows Nike may not be happy if you’re selling knockoffs. Nike’s this is just an example. If the longer tail keyword has better intent as well.

So I’m with that. Another thing I wanted to touch on what you mentioned that that tool provides is like an optimal word count for a certain piece of content. And you were just talking about, like, people are looking for an answer. They don’t want to novel, they just want their answer, but there’s also this balance you have to find of, Hey, if the top piece of content is like a thousand words, but how do you do better than that piece of content?

Obviously, if you write piece that’s half as long, but twice. Good. That’s great. But there’s also like Google does just like, see how many words on a page. You can probably dictate at least to some degree, maybe it’s yeah. Correlation, but there’s causation that a longer piece of content is going to be, I don’t know, better informed is going to be more in depth.

So if someone’s writing a thousand word article, maybe you want to write a 1500 word article, but I’ve also had people give me feedback on that. Like. That’s bullshit, Joe. Like you don’t need to do that. Just write a good piece of content and it’ll outrank. So I don’t know exactly the right answer to that.

Like I look up recipes all the time when I’m cooking something. And the thing that bugs me so much about when I look up a recipe, I’ll Google something it’ll come up like great. I just, I just need to know. I just looked up the recipe and there’s like, 2000 words before the content is like, here’s some other recipes you might like, like here’s the history of like this soup.

And I’m like, I just want to, like, I just need to know like what ingredients I need to mix in this thing. And then I have to scroll on my mobile phone, like all the way down anyway, I’m sure other people have encountered this as well. So I want to know your thoughts as someone who writes a lot of content.

That’s SEO specific. You’re trying to outrank other content. How do you guys deal with board count and like, how do you dictate how important it is in certain contexts? Well,

Maddy Osman: [00:18:36] first of all, I want to give you a hack for the recipe situation, which is I just go to the recipe button and just get rid of everything else.

And then I just keep that.

Joe Howard: [00:18:48] Number one tip we’ve ever had on the podcast in a hundred plus episodes just hit the print recipe button. You get the recipe right there. I’m actually going to use that. So thank you.

Maddy Osman: [00:18:58] I’ve been using that a lot lately, so it’s very top of mind for me. And I do feel for the people who run recipe sites, who.

Or trying to follow whatever they think the best practice is. And much respect to the people who offer, give us the jump to recipe button, because that’s also quite invaluable.

Joe Howard: [00:19:18] Yes. You can write all the content. Just give me a little button, just go to the thing you need.

Maddy Osman: [00:19:22] That’s great. Yeah. You can still have your content and maybe I’ll read it, but right.

So you got to think about the user no matter what, and that’s what content is. It’s finding the balance between. How do I make sure I provide the best user experience, but how do I hit my minimums kind of with like, whatever I need to do for SEO. So my thought in terms of how to correlate the SEO best practices with content length is.

If a piece goes longer, that extra word count can be used to address like those extra semantic keywords that I want to make sure to include. So, so that’s the correlation. It’s not that longer. Content is better. It’s just more opportunities to fit in your keyword, your related keywords, answer those questions for people.

Also ask. Maybe cover some topics from searches related to stuff like that. So that’s, that’s the only correlation there’s, there’s no other correlation between, you know, content length and content

Joe Howard: [00:20:23] quality. Okay. So if I’m writing a piece of content, I just want to make sure I understand exactly what you said.

If I can write a longer piece of content, as opposed to a shorter piece of content. I should do that. Given the fact that the longer piece of content is still fully focused and adding value throughout the length of that content. And that link to the content is not just long quote unquote, because I added some fluff to the end and it is 2000 words.

Instead of 1000 words, that’s all, as long as it’s like adding value and it’s valuable content and good content, then it’s good to be longer. Is that right? Pretty right.

Maddy Osman: [00:21:00] Absolutely. Yeah. I’m a huge believer that you don’t have to add stuff just for stuff’s sake. And again, going back to even like word choice and being concise and not using, you know, overly verbose words that plays into it too, you have to say it, you have to add to content in a way that still gets to the point.

That still leads people to the answer quickly. So yeah,

Joe Howard: [00:21:24] exactly. Yeah. I agree with that first one to answer people’s questions and add value to them, but there’s also this, like, I want my content to rank well, and I want to, like, I’m sure you’ve heard of like skyscraper approach, right? It’s like that, like Backlinko like strategy of.

Okay. You want to rank for this keyword? Pretty much all you have to do is, I mean, obviously it’s more complex than this and takes more time than this, but if you just do a search and you find it and you’re like, like, look at the first page of all the results and you gather all that content together and you spend half an hour, like picking out all the good things about all those pieces of content and then put those all in an article.

That’s obviously not like plagiarized. It’s obviously like you wrote it all, but it just takes the best from all the other content. And like, now you have the best piece of content. Obviously it takes more than that to rank number one or rank high for a keyword phrase. But in general, if you can follow that strategy and execute it well, you can have.

Theoretically all the best content out there. And so I feel like the back of my brain is telling me, like, this is a strategy that you heard about like seven or eight years ago. And maybe it’s just, it’s not exactly the same anymore. So maybe I need to get updated on my SEO stuff, but just around like, Competitor analysis and writing content that is the best content out there.

Is that something that you and your team focus on? Are you just starting from a fresh palette? Like, Hey, we want to just do what we want to do and write the best content, or are you looking at all the other content already ranking and saying like, Oh, this is good. We should include that. Oh, this was like not good.

Like if we don’t include that, it’ll probably actually make our content better. I don’t know if you use competitor analysis around content. It’s like a way to be able to write. Great content.

Maddy Osman: [00:22:57] I think if your goal is SEO and ranking and relevant search, then you have to compare your content to competitor content and make sure that, you know, you’re covering all the things that people sort of expect to see in that piece, you know, trying of course, to be bothered than it and to add more value.

And I think that something that you made me think about while you’re talking is just the idea that a lot of stuff has been done to death. You know, like there’s, there’s just so many different variations of content on the web. And so you want to be thinking about what can I do to add sort of like an original opinion or to add original content to the way that you’re going to cover that topic.

And so just to give a couple ideas, it’s things like, you know, considering. Doing like an expert Roundup where you’re asking questions to like a targeted group of people who could submit their answers. And there’s definitely like an art and a science to doing it well, but you know, not just regurgitating what those experts say, but formatting your article in a way that weaves in those perspectives to whatever, like the other points you were trying to make are.

And so complimenting. W whatever research that you can get done on your own with original, extra stuff that you could get from other people who are experts. Another thing you could do is like, if you’re working with a client or, you know, if you’re a content marketer on a team, In-house or something like that is to hold interviews with subject matter experts on your team, on the client’s team.

And, you know, I think it’s useful to just say, like, I’m limited in the knowledge that I have in my head. And you know, like me personally, it’s like, I focus a lot on content writing and SEO best practices and stuff like that. But then when it gets like deeper into other topics, you know, I just don’t really have the mental capacity to.

So to commit that to memory. And so it’s stuff like, you know, realizing that you’re not the only one who has knowledge and that you might be surrounded by some people who have really cool things to say and share, and maybe they’re not even used to being asked their opinion, you know, but if you do that, then you can create some really awesome original content with the right questions.

Joe Howard: [00:25:13] I think that is. Totally right. I like the idea of really trying to be unique around the content you’re writing. It continues to be more important to be able to stand out because there’s so much content online to be able to like write content that stands out is becoming harder and harder. Like I’m going to be honest, like some of the content on the WP bus blog is like not really super original.

Written just to kind of rank for a search term. Like there’s some listicles on our website. Okay. Honestly, I think a lot of the writing on our site is very good. Like it’s good writing and it’s good content, but is it’s really unique. I don’t know. I don’t know. Like if you go to the second article in some of those, is it like about the same article?

Maybe that’s the case. We’re actually, we just hired a head of content. So one of their projects, one of her projects when she gets started is. To come up with some really good ideas about how to continue to differentiate us and like, how do we evolve the listicle, you know, because I don’t think we’ve done anything bad.

We’re adding value to people. We’re giving them all the options out there, but like, how can we evolve it? How can make it better? And so I like that. Idea of coming up with content and maybe some different content formats that people haven’t seen before. And I think another reason why that’s valuable is if you’re competing in SEO to try and rank well in Google, like you’re just, you’re not always going to be the first search result.

Right. Especially as you scale, right? It’s like you have a hundred pieces of content that not all a hundred, it’s going to be like ranking number one. So it’s important. If someone comes to your blog and read your blog, If they think like Schmidt or whatever, that was fine. If they do another Google search in a month and they see your website ranked number one and someone else ranked number two for us at different search term, maybe they’ll just go to click the second one because they remember, Oh, that’s I gave me an okay.

Blog post, but it wasn’t that great that like affects your click through rate and your other rankings. And so. If you make your content really good people click through, Oh man, WP, boss.com. That article had a video in it. It answered my question exactly how I needed to boom. You could maybe be ranking number four for another search term and they see you below three other articles.

They’re like, I remember WP bus. I’m going to go back and read that article. That’s like part of like, I think the. I don’t know if I’d call it the forgotten piece, but like honestly, the piece, I think a lot of people don’t pay attention to in searches like that user experience part. Because if you give people a good user experience, they’re going to come back to you.

They’re going to remember your name, you know, companies like HubSpot, you know, it’s like you see HubSpot in search results. You’re like guests I’ll read the HubSpot article. Cause it’s probably good. Like they’re content machines. Like they literally invented inbound marketing and like, this is what they do.

So that’s super powerful. So I’m totally with you in terms of creating. Good user experiences that also you may not do initially because you want to get into it. Not everything’s going to be amazing all the time, but eventually you want to keep improving, improving, and try to get to a place where you can really write unique content and be one of the best in your area.

Cause that’s the only way you’re going to stand up. I was

Maddy Osman: [00:28:05] just agreeing with you in that, like, it’s an aspect of branding that first experience someone has on your site and maybe the second and third until you start to become a familiar name to them. And yeah, I mean, it totally. Influences a searcher and the choices in front of them and who they’re going to pick.

And I agree. I think WP bus does a great job of incorporating multiple visuals. Like I remember that about working with you that that was something that was really important to you. And even just like the gifts, you know, like it’s just like fun to have engaging visuals, multiple different mediums from which to consume that content.

So like you mentioned video and I think. That’s something that’s going to be more and more important and it’s like video, you can turn that into audio. Like you can meet people wherever they are in terms of how they like to best consume content while also, you know, satisfying the things that you need to do for SEO.

And I think that video only adds to that, especially because YouTube is owned by Google and it’s like the second biggest search engine in the world.

Joe Howard: [00:29:08] Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that’s one of the biggest reasons we started the YouTube channel so we can compliment. All of our written content with video content, you know, Allie’s like literally going through analytics, Google analytics is just like going through the list of like blog posts, got the most traffic over the past three months and like creating video content for it.

So that people who come on to the blog post, maybe they want to read it. Maybe they just want to watch the video. That’s cool too. And if they watch the video embedded in the website, man, their time on page skyrockets. So that’s great for us.

Maddy Osman: [00:29:34] Right. And that’s engagement. It’s, it’s an amazing engagement metric to embed your video.

It could be someone else’s video too. I think that’s what people don’t realize is like, even if you don’t have the capacity on your team, like. You know, like something that’ll do for clients is just like explaining a concept. Somebody else did it. Or, you know, here’s a tool in this like, list to call and here’s a video about how to use that tool.

It doesn’t have to be your video. It’s great.

Joe Howard: [00:30:03] That’s a super good point. I think probably a lot of people don’t think about that. I think that’s a great opportunity once, like increase your time on page two, it’s like make a cool connection with someone like, Hey, I just included your video and this just so you know, like, Hey, good video.

It’s in my blog post to people read it. They’ll watch a video, more exposure, free exposure for you. Maybe now we’ve become friends. Maybe now you do a video and like include us in the next one. You know? So there’s a lot there. I think recently I did a guest post on, I think it was like torque. Blog. I can’t remember, but I included embedded video of, I can’t remember.

I don’t even know who it was, but it was a friend of mine in the WordPress space. I found his video and I was just like embedded it in my, in my guest posts. That was just like, maybe I could have embedded our own video by embedded his, and I pinged that person afterwards. I was like, Hey, include your video in here.

Just so you know, it was a good video. Nothing else. That’s all. Thanks for shooting the video. And that person got back to me. I was like, thank you so much. Like, that’s so cool. Like. Hey, and that, you know, that’s good for like relationship building as well. So yeah, I’m done with it. Yeah.

Maddy Osman: [00:31:05] I want to expand on that too, because I think that’s a really good leaping off point for any links that you include in your content.

To just go through and what I like to do with content, I’m creating for myself and definitely with content I’m creating for clients is at the very top of the article before getting into the content itself is just a link of any links, referenced, any links included as external links, and then also internal.

And since I want to show them, you know, that we’re kind of covering our bases in terms of all the different SEO. Pieces that are important, but, um, to take that a step further, not only doing links, but also taking the time to grab like Twitter handles of any brands that you’ve mentioned. So say like you have just examples, you know, in your article or sources that you’ve referenced for statistics, quotes, you know, whatever.

I think it’s, it’s a really good idea to take that extra time. Write down their Twitter handles. And then when your article is live, just tweet at them. Hey, so-and-so, so-and-so so-and-so, you know, just included you in this article, check it out.

Joe Howard: [00:32:10] Yeah, I love that strategy. That’s something we do. We’ll include 10 outbound links to different companies.

I have. Let’s just say it’s like listicle thing. Or if not, just to say it’s like 10 outbound links, we’ll go through grab Twitter handles and do like 10 tweets scheduled over the next month. Each one, tweaks that article. But it just tags the single person with like maybe a quote about them from the article, or just saying like, Hey, we learned about this person, like this new article and sometimes six out of 10 times.

So, you know, whatever, no likes, no retweets just kind of disappears. That’s fine. But four out of 10 we’ll get maybe a, like maybe a retweet, maybe a reply. And then like that creates more like, okay, that person liked it. Whatever. Thanks for liking, I guess there’s not that much more. Oh, that person retweeted, Hey, maybe we should send them a DM and Twitter or email them and say like, Hey cool.

This little thing could lead to maybe more working together, maybe in the future. You’ll link to us, more willing to do more. And now we’re talking about like a bigger opportunity and more of a network and opportunity to do more offsite. SEL in addition to the onsite SEO. So yeah, I think that adds to that strategy nicely.

I’m totally sending this episode when it goes live to our new head of content. So she can just listen in and just like take all these strategies and literally implement them because, uh, this is like a super tactile, like, just like all this stuff you should do around SEO, which leads me into the next thing.

I want to talk about, which wasn’t on my list of stuff, but now I’m thinking about it, which is just like, Title tags stuff. And maybe not just title tag stuff, but like meta description stuff that shows up in search results that would affect the conversion or click through of someone who’s coming to your, Oh, who’s doing a Google search and maybe your website appears next to two or three other websites.

So, um, the reason I’m thinking about this is because. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to win clicks, even if you’re not ranked in like the first or second position, maybe you’re in the third or fourth position, but people see something that says, Oh, That’s kind of a unique thing that’s in that, that title tag, but it’s not in those other title tags or, Ooh, maybe that little thing in the meta description caught my eye.

That that’s something I wanted to read about, but I didn’t see that in the first two articles. So I’m just going to go right down to your blog and let’s click on the third article, even though it wasn’t technically ranked higher. Um, like I tried to put like numbers in my titles, cause that usually is good for click-through it like draws people’s eye, maybe a little parentheses, like how to do this in parenthesis.

Three simple steps. You know, there’s a lot of like parenthesis. There’s a lot of, uh, data showing that like adding little, like hints at the end, a little parentheses or something helps improve click through, or like parentheses video included something like that to draw peoples towards wanting to click your article more than other people.

So like as content folks, how do you make titles? And honestly, like maybe do a little bit of experimentation with titles to see like what. What works and what doesn’t work. Obviously there’s some best practices out there. People can go look out 30 best practices for how to create a good title tag. But I’d love to hear straight from you as someone who like writes so much content, what title stuff seems to work for you under your clothes?

The

Maddy Osman: [00:35:14] brackets thing is a good idea. The parentheses and I think the WP buffs blog is definitely a good resource to look at. That’s a tactic that you’re considering, but haven’t done yet. I think. Where I first learned about that technique was Backlinko. So another great resource to look for ideas for like what you would put in those brackets or parenthesis, but like, just that, it’s kind of like, what’s kind of like the extra included with this article.

Like here’s the title. And then just so you know, like there’s an original interview or special video, or, you know, there’s some, it’s a new study. There’s some original reporting, like whatever. Whatever is kind of unique. Like we’ve talked a little bit throughout this podcast about like, how can you make your content unique?

So whatever it is that makes your content unique, that would be a great thing to put in that title tag or in the meta-description too. I think it’s a good idea to use heading analyzer tools. Like CoSchedule has a really good one and you can embed it as a Chrome extension. So it’s just like really easy to access if you’re creating content all the time in it.

It sort of analyzes like every word and the combination of the words and like, you know, a bunch of different ways. And so it makes you really think about the composition of how you’re putting things together. So that’s, that’s a good practice to not just put something out there without testing it. And maybe I think Buffer’s trick is they test out all the different possible titles that they’re considering by like tweeting them out and seeing which tweets get the highest engagement based on whatever title that they used as the copy for the tweet.

That’s a good pro tip and to sort of proceed that or proceed that. Is to just sit down and write a bunch of different ideas down because some of it is just kind of like getting it, like out of you, you know, and just kind of like, like the creative writing process. It’s just like, even if it sounds dumb, like just write it, get it out, you know, give yourself maybe 10 options.

If you have time, give yourself, you know, 20 options and then yeah. Maybe test them out by tweeting out the article with those different ones. And then, you know, going back after the fact and saying, okay, this one looks like it’s the winner. It’s worth noting, you know, that you can have a different page title, what the human sees when they go to your blog versus the meta title.

You know, w when again, a human is reading it, and that’s the person that you should be creating it for, but you’re also kind of creating it for Google so that they can understand the context of the content. But, you know, take advantage of that because maybe your SEO title is just like a little bit off, like what you really want it to be on your blog.

And that can make a big difference for the people who are coming in from other, uh, you know, like from social or from email or from referrals

Joe Howard: [00:37:57] or stuff like that. Yeah, totally. I, I like to make my Mehta title or my SEO title, the same as my H one title. Because I like to slightly lean in the direction of user experience.

And I liked the experience of people clicked on a title in Google and they see the same title on the website. But I think there are, I think there are situations where like with the meta title or the SEO title, the best practice remains, even though it’s kind of old school, it’s like, you want to have a lot of the main keywords you’re going after, towards the front of your title.

Maybe there’s some cases where it’s like how to do X, Y, or Z, but you want the focus to be on. Those keywords, you know, fast WordPress themes. Like if I’m writing about that, like I’m not going to be like the 13 best ways and methods and situations in which you want to potentially have fast WordPress themes.

No, like you probably want to have like fast WordPress themes. In your first, like five words of the article, you know, because that, the first word of the SEO title, because Google still is going to see, like, that’s, you know, you want Google to know, like, that’s what I want this to show up for. So in some cases you may slightly change the title to have maybe your keywords a little closer to the front, but I don’t know, part of me thinks that that’s kind of like old school and.

Maybe not going to be super helpful for like ranking in 2020. I don’t know. What do you think? Or 2021? I don’t even know what year it is. 2022 is 21. Yeah.

Maddy Osman: [00:39:21] I, I don’t, I can’t keep track anymore. They’re all the same, but yeah. I mean, Google is, currency is speed, right? Cause they’re trying to quickly show you the best search results.

And so as a result of that, you want your page to load quickly and get to. You know, with these new core web vitals metrics, they want your page to be like quickly interactive and, you know, showing, you know, whatever it is that the person went there for. And I think the same can be said with the way that you compose your meta titles.

You want to quickly, you know, tell Google what is. Again, the context of your content. And so yes, by using your keywords early on, I think it is old school SEO, but in that it doesn’t really change. Right? I mean, people have said, SEOs have said maybe even Google has said it’s not as important to put. The keywords in the Metta title and the meta-description anymore.

But like, I don’t believe that I still do it.

Joe Howard: [00:40:15] Yeah. I like from a click-through perspective, because if you have the keywords pretty much focused keyword in the meta description, I believe Google is still like bolds. It it’s a very slight little thing, but I think it still like shows up as bold. Yeah. In the meta description that shows in Google.

So, you know, it’s a tiny thing, but it is a little advantage. It could catch someone’s eye and maybe one in 20 times it’ll catch someone’s eye. But Hey, if those one in 20 times gives you another click, then that’s that’s excellent. So cool, Maddie, this has been like a super. Excellent episode, one of the best we’ve done.

I think no mean anything further. Other people who’ve been on the show, but this was like a super tactile and super like strategy driven. Like people could come in and like have like a list of like all the most important stuff they should do around content and SEO. Um, so let’s wrap up ish. Now, why don’t you tell folks where they can like find.

You online website, social media, all that stuff. Totally.

Maddy Osman: [00:41:09] So you can check out my website, the blogs with.com. And like Joe was saying earlier in this episode have been trying to practice what I preach. I haven’t blogged on my website and like a year, but the last three weeks I have blogged consistently and I’m trying to keep that up.

So I get out to the latest posts and you can always hit me up on Twitter. I’m just at Madea, Yasmin my name. And I, you know, I love to talk about this stuff. So if you have any questions that you’re struggling with, please hit me up.

Joe Howard: [00:41:40] Excellent. Love it. Last few articles on the blog. I’m checking out how to conduct a kick ass content interview for SEO content clients.

That sounds like a good one. How I quit my nine to five, started a freelance business and turned it into a marketing agency. People can. Learn more about your story. We kind of just went straight into the tactile SEO stuff and people didn’t get to hear too much your background, but Hey, people should go to the blogs, smith.com and check out the blog post about it.

They want to learn more about you personally. Maddie. Cool. Last thing I always ask our guests to do on the show is ask our listeners for a little iTunes reviews. If you wouldn’t mind asking listeners, I’d appreciate that.

Maddy Osman: [00:42:14] Please leave an iTunes review. That means the world to content

Joe Howard: [00:42:18] creators. Absolutely.

I couldn’t agree. More. WP, M R r.com forward slash iTunes Fords you right there. If you are on an Apple or a Mac, I read every review. So I will check it out if you leave it. If you are a new listener to the show, man got a hundred plus 120 plus episodes would go and listen and binge some old WP MRR WordPress podcast episodes.

Use the search bar on WP mrr.com forward slash podcast search for any topic you’re interested in. I’m sure we have talked about it before on the podcast. If you have questions for us on the show, hit me up. Yo, Y o@wpmrr.com or you can hit me up on Twitter at Joseph H powered. I’m probably more likely to see it on Twitter, even though I’m not on super frequently, but I like when people tweet at me and I’ll get a little endorphin boost and Hey, hit me up and I may quote your tweet and talk about some.

Answers or just about it here on the show that is all for this week on the pod, it will be in your podcast players again next Tuesday, Maddie. Thanks again for being on. It’s been real.

Maddy Osman: [00:43:22] Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me. See you have a buddy.

In today’s episode, Joe talks to Alex Harling of Dynamite Jobs. Alex handles Account Management and Operations, focused primarily on remote jobs hiring. Launched in October 2017, Dynamite Jobs is an efficient way to connect companies in the Dynamite Circle with remote job seekers to thousands of remote jobs posted each week.  

The discussion is focused on remote hiring, the right way to post successful job listings, top hiring tips in a remote setting, ways to announce a job opening, and the latest updates at Dynamite Jobs.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:49 Welcome to the pod, Alex Harling!
• 03:38 How Alex started at Dynamite Jobs
• 04:52 Common ways to announce job openings
• 08:01 Top tips and changes in the hiring process 
• 13:15 What makes a job posting successful?
• 21:54 Hard skills and culture fit lead to better hires
• 25:56 Typical clients at Dynamite Jobs
• 30:10 What is Dynamite Jobs Hiring Pro?
• 34:36 What will be the team’s focus this year?
• 42:12 Get discount to use Hiring Pro, use code: WPBUFFS

Episode Resources:

• Visit Dynamite Jobs 
• Email Alex at alex@dynamitejobs.com
• Dynamite Jobs Hiring Pro discount code: WPBUFFS
• Leave an iTunes review or binge-watch past episodes
• Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Kind of Woody folks, Joe Howard here this week, I got to sit down and chat with Alex Hartley. Now Alex comes to us from a job board called dynamite jobs, where they focus on helping people, uh, hire and recruit, uh, remote workers for their companies. And that’s actually how I met Alex. Um, I was, uh, posting a bunch of different job boards.

They posted the done at my jobs and then Alex personally reached out and was like, Hey, what’s up? Uh, how can I help? Can I reach out to my network to try and fill some of these positions? Hey, can I like posts? Some of these other jobs too, like really not just nice and friendly, but really wanted to help and put the extra time.

And they’re just like reach directly out to me. I thought that was really cool. Not a lot of other job boards did that. Um, and so I thought it was a cool differentiator. And so eczema over the last, I don’t know, month or two of has been emailing a lot now it’s just like, yeah, Alex, you’ve got to jump on the pod.

I got a lot of questions about hiring and how to onboard someone, how to go through the hiring process. What do I need to do to like recruit people better? Uh, you can enter some of my questions. I’m sure, sure. Those answers will be really helpful for our listeners as well. So. Uh, having Alex on the pod this week was a ton of fun.

We got along really well, super easy guy to, to get to know and talk to, uh, and yeah, and answered a lot of my questions. And we talked about some stuff I wasn’t even planning to, but all of it was super valuable. I took a bunch of notes during this episode so that we can level up some of the stuff we do with hiring.

Here at WP bus. All right. That’s it for the intro of without further ado, please. Welcome Alex Hartley.

Hey, what is up folks? We are here on the pond this week. Uh, with the one and only Alex Harling, uh, Alex, tell folks a little bit about yourself. We know each other a little bit jokey before you have gone today. Like we emailed a lot and this is actually the first time I’ve like met each other in like a video call.

So, um, yeah, I know what you do, but tell folks a little bit about what you do online.

Alex Harling: [00:02:08] Thanks for having me. Yeah. So I’m Alex Harling from that on my jobs. And I handle account management and operations over at that time of my jobs. And what I do is I help people hire all day, hire remote workers all day.

Yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:02:22] Nice. Oh, you got your elevator pitch like down. Cause I feel like I’m still working on mine, like WP blocks. Okay. We do website management for folks and we do white label. It’s like, it’s a little bit too long, but you got your it’s down to like a few words, which is nice. So helping people hire remotely, which is totally.

That’s how we met. We do a lot of hiring remotely and dynamite. My is like one of the, we we’d probably post to like 10 different job boards for dynamite jobs is a one where I can I come to where I feel like we’ve gotten really good results. Then my job posting. And to every time I post a job, you always emailed.

And you’re like, Hey, like, thanks for posting. Like, Hey bro, that’s at the shop. We can post that. We’ll just throw that one up there too. Like I’m like, Oh, Alex is awesome. I know my job is awesome. So you guys do a really good job just to. Making customers happy, but yeah. So dynamite jobs, where, where is that dynamite jobs.com?

Alex Harling: [00:03:13] Yeah, we became a.com uh, this past year, actually, you know, we were.co for a while now we’re on.com level. Um, so after two, two, half years, three years with the Dakota Maine, uh, we went all in on.com. So dynamite jobs.com is where you can, you can find us and you can see the latest, uh, WP bus jobs on there.

Yeah, you can. Yeah,

Joe Howard: [00:03:31] you can. Sweet. Um, alright. So, um, for my. Personal selfish, wanting to know what, tell, tell me a little bit about like how you came to dynamite jobs and kind of how you became that kind of an account manager. The operations guy there in

Alex Harling: [00:03:47] 2017. I was, I was working for a digital marketing agency, uh, during the, uh, the cryptocurrency ICO.

Boom. Um, so I was helping with some marketing plans, mostly doing cold outreach to different companies. Um, and the job was fine. Um, but I was looking for new opportunities and I found, uh, uh, the tropical MBA podcast, which, uh, started dynamite jobs.com. And so that was during 2017 when they launched the site.

So I followed all of the site from prom since day one, and I was actually using the site to apply to jobs on there. And I didn’t get any jobs. I was applying to jobs on there. And then, um, the, the owners of dynamite jobs.com wanted to hire. Different there was the first hire. And so, um, it was an apprentice ship style role.

It was, uh, yeah, gentle operations, uh, trying to figure out, uh, where to take the company and working directly with the founder. So I applied to that and, uh, yeah, I started working with them in 2018. So this is my, uh, my, my third year, third year there now.

Joe Howard: [00:04:44] Nice, nice. Okay. So the dynamite jobs have a dynamite jobs, job listing on dynamite jobs, or what did you kind of like just, did you do it to the emailing with the founder and then you found out like, Oh, they’re hiring.

Maybe I should talk to him more about that.

Alex Harling: [00:05:00] They, they, I believe the way it worked was first, they announced it on the podcast as a way to get the most, uh, the people who were following their audience first, which I think is smart. If you have time to hire, I’ll try not to get too much into hiring strategies in this, maybe the subject matter.

But, um, uh, that’s how I first heard about it. Yeah. I found the job listing through the podcast episode, um, applied that way. And then after, um, they listed it on the site, I was fine. A while back, we were looking through old listings and we found those, we were doing some SEO work on the pages and, um, we were looking at listings and someone said, isn’t this, the job that you applied to?

Oh my gosh. Yeah. That’s the job three years ago that I applied to.

Joe Howard: [00:05:36] Very cool. Yeah, I’ve done some job announcements here on the podcast too. Um, we do like a little intro for every. Episode now. And sometimes the intro, if we have something, you know, we’ve done like, Hey, we have this like little survey about around community, you know, I’ll take it.

Or, and then we’ve also done job stuff there. Hey, you know, Christie and I had done jobs, went forward, both talked about like, Hey, we’re hiring for this kind of position at our companies. Uh, and if. Do you have any interest can talk to us? Cause I think you’re right, like that, like a podcast is like, it’s like in a lot of ways, your most intimate audience.

And so, you know, those are the people who like, maybe they’re not just reading your content or videos or like demos some of your podcasts, like they’re like seriously, like in your circle. So that’s a good place to reach out to folks. I think, I think you’re right

Alex Harling: [00:06:21] about that. Yeah, I see the podcast announcement, a Twitter announcement, and then an email list announcement as common ways before going to the public.

Um, because it’s kind of like a referral. People are most comfortable with referrals before a cold applicant.

Joe Howard: [00:06:33] Yeah, totally. And now we’re getting into like more of the, kind of like hiring strategies or maybe recruitment strategies. This is a lot, this is honestly why I wanted to have you on the pod today because.

I have a lot of questions about this stuff, and I’m sure a lot of our listeners will be able to like, get, hear these answers and it’ll help them as well. So I’ve found as our company has grown, the WordPress base is very, um, it’s a, it’s like there’s a community around it because WordPress is open source.

And so the community in essence kind of builds WordPress, uh, and the code bar code based behind it. So I found a lot of our best people that I have found hire, like really. Core parts or their core members of the WordPress community, because they care about open source software. They cared about, you know, democratizing, publishing, they care about WordPress.

And so those, I find a lot of are my most dedicated people I can find in order to bring on to my team. So like I’ve started to do, it’s kind of a combo. Like I sometimes I’ll post on. You know, on job boards, if you want to get a good number of candidates in, but also like as the CEO of a company, part of what I feel like my job is, is to talk to people and use my network a little bit to find people who are good fits for certain positions here.

Somebody we don’t have to go through the whole, like get 500 applicants and sort through them all, but I can just like find it. The best people and kind of plug them into what we’re doing. So, yeah. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Maybe how you see people doing hiring, I guess in both those senses, you know, both job boards and also kind of like the recruiting aspect of it.

Alex Harling: [00:08:02] Yeah. I mean, hiring has changed. So at least in our little remote work world, um, which is now a big remote work world, um, hiring has changed so much. And every time someone asks for hiring advice, you know, it’s, they ask for advice. I felt a lot of questions to figure out what is what’s, what’s the best situation because everybody hires differently.

And, but one thing that’s pretty common to start is that, um, looking to your referrals or looking to your network first, because I mean, opening up your, your job is it’s like a to, to the world is not like opening up your home in the way, but you’re opening up your company to. Who, who knows who and you’re, and you’re signing yourself up for a lot of work.

Um, looking at applications, talking with candidates, distributing the job. It’s a lot to do it. So I do recommend that people start with their initial network, um, when they, and that’s open was coming CLCs. Someone will post a Twitter status and say, Hey, I’m looking for a marketer who you recommend it, but that the issue with that is it can also lead to so many referrals and without much context.

So I always recommend if you’re going to go to your, your network, would that with whatever platform, have that job ready first. Because if, if it’s just a project, if you need someone to, uh, we’re going to do random examples. Okay. For WordPress, for example, um, you’re having an issue with a. You need a theme update and you’re worried about updating your theme.

And so you want to have a developer in there to check everything when they update the theme, that’s could be a small term project. So have that mapped out and know exactly what you want. And then ask around. I need a WordPress developer. Who’s very comfortable with this theme type, instead of saying, I need a WordPress developer, because that will narrow it down.

And the responses you get will be more, um, targeted, uh, to, to you though. People will not just say I’m WordPress developer, they’ll say WordPress developer. And all I do all day is theme updates.

Joe Howard: [00:09:39] Yeah. I think that’s really. Smart. I think whenever I’ve tried to do some recruiting, kind of outside of posting a job description and it’s, it’s worked okay to have conversations with people who I think are good candidates, but it’s missing a little bit of that.

I’m not quite bridging the gap between like, Are you good in the general area that I know you’re in now that I talked to you and are you a really good fit for this specific position? Because for every job position we post, like my big thing is wanting to have outcomes. For the job description, like, what do you need to do in your first year, in this position?

Like that needs to be really clear on the job description to me. So it’s like, yes, like right now we’re hiring an operations person. It’s like an operations manager and operations assistant. Um, yeah. So shout out people who are listening, if you’re looking for an operations position, come and talk to me.

Um, but in that position, like there’s people who are generally have been in operations, but like, what do you need specifically to do at WP boss? Okay. You need to handle this and like, Some people ops work, we need to handle like, even like more specifically, like need us to create like really rigid and systemized, like onboarding and like hiring documentation and like best practices we can use.

And then there’s like, there’s more actual like systems implementation in terms of like the software. We use a WVU bus, um, which off the top of my head. Can’t think of exactly what that stuff is. Nick is our head of operations. He’s the stuff that I am, but in suffice to say, I want to know like exactly what people want to get, like needed, what outcomes they need to accomplish.

If they’re thinking of joining this job so that when they see that, you know, either say, Ooh, that’s not really my skillset. Maybe I’m not the best fit for this position, which is fine. Obviously you want people applying who are like going to be effective. And then the people who apply, they say, Oh, like, this is my bread and butter.

Or I at least feel confident I’ve done similar projects in the past that I can accomplish that outcome. I’m with you on the job, on having at least like a basic job description to together before kind of throwing it out there, or else you’re going to get a whole bunch of people in who are like, totally, I can help with that.

Uh, probably. Well, you’re not really sure.

Alex Harling: [00:11:53] Great. And you have those plans. She’s ready to make sure they’re a right fit. You know, if you had to jump on the phone with them right after seeing their resume, you could ask them, what’s your familiarity with SLPs similar roles you’ve been in. You can ask them about the day to day of that job and then, you know, faster that’s the right fit.

Um, I see a lot of people get in the trap of they start hiring and then they realized they don’t. No exactly what they want. So having that ideal, uh, like a customer persona, like a candidate persona in your mind that will really help.

Joe Howard: [00:12:20] Yeah. We’ve never hired people that we didn’t know exactly what we wanted for the position.

Of course not. I’m totally joking. Like we’ve definitely, definitely done that in the past and it has more depth and we’ve we’ve, I know I’ve hired people on who I’ve made that mistake before and I kind of hired based on gut feeling. And it didn’t really work out, not necessarily because I thought my gut feeling was wrong.

Like they were good, maybe in certain aspects of like digital marketing, for example, but they weren’t very good at exactly what we needed for our position. They were more of a generalist and less of, they didn’t have the exact expertise needed. To do what we needed them to do here at our company. So that was, I think, where the, where the gap was.

Um, but I, I’m always interested to hear, especially from. Someone who runs a job board. What, what do you usually see from like the most successful job postings there? Cause you see a bond. Yeah. You probably see hundreds of job postings, you know, probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands of job postings over your career there.

Right. So. What are like some, this is kind of a hard question because it’s like, every company is different and every remote company, especially a lot of things are contextual, but I’m sure you’ve seen some things. One needed at that work that worked pretty well in your job description in order to effectively hire someone from, from Denmark jobs.

And that person is a really good long-term employee and does really well for you. So maybe some things that have worked and maybe some things that like, Oh, you definitely don’t want to have that in the job posting. I don’t know if you can say positive or negative, it’s kind of, I’ll leave you the choice to you.

But anything that pops out to you is just top of mind, I’m going to be really helpful for people. I. Oh, a lot of listeners trying to hire great people and maybe like me, they’ve struggled a bit in the past. So what can they do in terms of job descriptions when they’re posting to, to improve that conversion?

Alex Harling: [00:14:22] Yeah, I think, uh, it’s I always try to think of some universals, I guess, universal job rules, um, when helping people hire and a lot of clients will ask, they’ll say, I’m interested in hiring a marketer. Um, what kind of job posts, uh, perform the best. And I’m happy to share some that have performed the best, but there’s different.

Performance metrics that we can measure. And I mean, some of them will get a lot of, Oh, I look at John, I’m trying to think of a thinking out loud, what we were looking at in terms of what performance. Well, because some, we could get some job posts, a ton of clicks and tons of use. And then, um, You spent time on pages longer.

Um, and then, uh, just like you would for a, like a normal marketing campaign, but then we always look for the, the application conversion. And then after that, the quality of the applicant, I’m trying to equate it to like marketing charts, maybe like the lifetime value of that application, you know, who is actually a good fit.

And so I think some of the universals we started is one is, is, is getting that. Uh, candidate persona down is, um, when you say you need to hire like, uh, you need hire for a certain category, but who are you looking for? Uh, what, what do you want them to do day to day? What is some of their a month long, three month projects?

Where do you see them a year from now? Is this budgeted are all the stakeholders involved when all those initial pieces are in place, we have a good foundation to hire, and that’s when I get, I’ve posted a lot of jobs where it’s missing something, maybe the partner, uh, wasn’t quite ready to hire, but the other partner said, no, no, we’re going to do this.

And. Drop fell apart, um, because the foundation wasn’t set or even the day to day where you ha we had a lot of good candidates, but as the candidates came in, we realized the company realized they needed a different skillset. Projects were changing. And that’s okay, because we can, we can adjust when, when, when the job is live and perhaps some of the candidates have already received, um, they, they might be a good fit.

So the first thing I would say is getting the foundation after that, it’s the, um, the job post itself. I mean, it’s got to look good. We hit, uh, I hope I don’t insult anyone. When I say we get a lot of jobs, scriptures that are really short and it looked like project, project jobs, descriptions. That’s fine.

If you’re hiring for a project, you do that on our site. But if you want someone to be around for the longterm, I think you really want to, um, You know, excite them, you know, if they’re about to spend time submitting application, um, tell them why. And I think that’s going to give you guys a shout out, you know, WP buffs.

They have, um, you guys have an amazing, um, page that shares all the, uh, why you should be on the team. Not only do you, do you define the job and what the job is, but the, uh, people can, kids can imagine themselves working on the team. They can get excited about it. The work that you do day to day. I mean, that’s like, yeah, it’s exciting, but that’s not everything.

It’s also the people you’re around. It’s, it’s what you’re representing. That’s what the company is. All those little things out to the job as a whole. So when we always, we share resources when we’re creating job descriptions, because that’s what I really encourage. So that’s the other piece is having a well-defined job, a good job description after that would be the application itself.

And this is where things have changed the pre COVID now and how we can say that pre COVID world when there were more candidates than there were remote jobs, people were very hungry to give it their all and applications. And maybe you can tell what you’re seeing Joe on your end, but were we, we were seeing a little at the end of last year, less applications, whereas in 2019, 2018, we were seeing.

Ton of applications, people would bend over backwards and do whatever you wanted to, um, to apply to a job. So I’m not sure if you’re seeing something like that and all this applications or,

Joe Howard: [00:17:36] yeah, I haven’t talked with Nick about that because I don’t know he’s reviewing the applications cause it’s an ADAPs operation session right now, but, um, do you think that’s related, do you think that’s like COVID related, do you think that’s like a, some like.

People. I see, this is interesting to see some of these trends. Cause sometimes they’re the opposite of what I think they were like, I would think if there were like a significant amount of people out of work right now that people would be putting more time in. So do you think like the work, the remote work industry is like just grown so much over the past, like 18 months that it’s, or maybe not 18 months, but 12 months, the last 12 months, that application that applicants are not.

Or people are not as, quite as like. Needing to find a job because maybe they already have one or

Alex Harling: [00:18:25] something. Yeah. I think, well, dynamite jobs and the other people that are in our remote work world, we work remotely remote. Okay. All of us are doing really well. Um, because we were ranking for some of the top agents for different remote work categories.

Joe Howard: [00:18:39] That’s what I was going to ask. Have you seen a lot more applicants or a lot more job postings over the past year or so? A lot

Alex Harling: [00:18:46] more. Yeah. Everything and everything’s become so much more saturated. So we were doing when March, April hit, we were doing really well in terms of getting traffic and then indeed LinkedIn monster.

It didn’t take long for them to switch over, add in remote, remote work from home. Um, and so they were, they start getting a lot more traffic as well, um, for that search. And so. I think what I, what I was saying about the application side is it was great. It wasn’t, it wasn’t great for people with, uh, for, for, for everyone.

And it was a very difficult time. Um, April may, and it’s still a difficult time, but for someone who was hiring, you really did have your pick of the litter. Um, there were so many applications coming through, but then it’s summer the, um, the applications that the amount of candidates looking and the amount of, um, Job.

They seem to have a been about even because we’re seeing less applications, still the same amount of traffic, but less applications. There were people were becoming more picky. And so our site had a lot more longer applications with, uh, video intros, cover letters, multiple, uh, questions, um, uh, and, uh, it’s longer applications.

But if you’re a candidate who can just apply to 20 jobs in indeed with one click over and over again, you’re going to go for that. And I don’t blame candidates for that. So that is what people are now competing against when they’re hiring is you want to make it easy enough for Qantas to apply? I mean, well, I guess I go different different directions here.

I mean, you can make your job easier to apply, um, by having very few fields and we can just get the resume. What have you, and, and apply, um, or. You can give your job extra, extra promotion, wait longer to increase that top of funnel with the most amount of applicants, have a few more application questions.

So you get like, I guess, like less candidates and presumably you’ll have more targeted, interested people.

Joe Howard: [00:20:22] Yeah. That’s so I think about conversion optimization, I think about like, how can I. Get the most bang for your buck, really? Like how can I make this specific funnel, the most effective and to me, and it’s not always just like getting the most like lead generation, like I don’t want to get the most leads necessarily more leads is good as long as they’re high quality leads, but like I want to get more high quality leads.

So in the job posting, I might say. I would actually personally, please tell me if I’m wrong. I want to like learn from you. I might add more job, feel more fields, more questions. Uh, and because I’d much rather personally have like a hundred people apply to a job. We’re all really pretty well qualified. And I’ll clearly like put the effort in to put a good application and then like 500 applicants who maybe a lot of them are not as high quality.

So I might actually like. Anti conversion optimization. Like I might like make it a little bit harder to apply. And I might ask for like a loom video that goes through some answers to some questions specifically for a role that’s maybe you’d have to like hop on calls for that role. Like, it’d be, I might not ask for a video.

So like, And like engineer role, maybe that kind of role doesn’t need to like be on video all the time. And maybe that’s not specifically their skill set for someone like that, but for like a marketer, who’s doing webinars, like clearly you have to do video. So like, okay, shoot me a little video with like X, Y, and Z.

And for people don’t do that, maybe they’re not a good set that’s for people that do do that. They went through the extra effort to say like, I want to work here enough to like, Jumped through a few hoops. Um, so yeah, I don’t know if you, what do you think about that? Or if you’ve seen people successfully hire based on like maybe adding more fields, making it actually a little bit more difficult to hire?

I don’t know. Yeah.

Alex Harling: [00:22:01] Yeah. I think that people who have more fields, um, and sometimes I’m for that, uh, this is very, again, it’s hard to have universal rules for hiring, so these are all. Like, these are kind of general General’s things and I’m oftentimes we post roles, we try different, um, test different things out to see what works well.

But yeah, if you’re hiring for a specific skillset, uh, I guess we call them hard skills internally. If it, the hard skills are the most important thing. What I do is I, I encourage the company to make it easy, to apply and ask about that specific skill, because that’s what’s most important. But if, if attitude, uh, there, the person’s, um, uh, how long they’ll be around like the culture fit.

Yes. Yes. And I, I think we should have more fields and we should ask a few more things that I think that’s totally cool. And that, that leads to hiring honestly, necessarily faster, but maybe a little more straightforward because you know, who’s the most interesting, whereas I think the bolts will take ’em up, uh, both ways we’ll take the same amount of time.

The other option that we’re seeing lately is instead of having one long form to start or, or. Part, one of them, one long application to begin with, uh, companies are trying out, uh, two parts of the application. So just the very basic, a few, few, few questions just to bring, just make sure the person has the, the main skill necessary for the job.

And then an automatic email. After applying with automatic email, after they, the initial applicant applies saying thank you for applying you pass part one, you are invited to part two. Sometimes the CEO, the CEO, or the founder will be CC’d on there and it will look. It’ll look good or it’ll be signed by them.

And that gets a lot more conversions because again, like maybe do not want more conversions, but in terms of if, if the skillset is really important, the best candidates are getting picked up very fast. Um, okay. Another example is actually pretty crazy that the beginning of the summer or mid summer, there was a few Google spreadsheets going around.

And they, they had the list of all these of developers and people from really talented, uh, candidates. Um, and from, from companies that were shutting down, for example, it was, that could be, uh, could be that video app that just failed. They had amazing people on the team, so many amazing people, anyways, that spreadsheet was going around.

I’m not sure how many people saw it, but I would go on and try to invite developers to certain roles and try to share with the different opportunities they were getting picked up so fast. I’ve never seen so many head hunters, so many recruiters moving around. So the other part of, of the, of the application part is whether you want it long or short is to think about that is people are getting picked up pretty quickly.

And even now for, um, other roles, I mean, here we are almost a year later, um, Are six, eight months later, what have you on, uh, at least, um, like one or two jobs a week that I work with, one of the top candidates get, gets picked up somewhere else. And, uh, so you could have only applications, but I guess there’s also the sense of urgency, you know, keep people engaged.

Uh, yeah. I’m, I’m going all over the place. There’s so many, it’s so situational, but it’s, it’s interesting.

Joe Howard: [00:24:47] Yeah, totally. You mentioned kind of the world of like head hunters and recruiters. That’s not something we’ve ever engaged now. I don’t know. It’s because we just didn’t necessarily need it. Honestly. I just never even really thought to do that.

Have you seen that? That is, you know, it’s kind of a weird time with COVID because hopefully we’ll be like turning the corner in 2021. I’m doing better this year than we did last year fingers. Cross. Yeah. Yeah. You can’t get very much worse, but that’s whole another conversation. What I want to talk about is, I mean, just the world of head hunters in general, is that something you’ve seen companies engage in and it’d be effective for them?

This is maybe we can talk about this in the context of like smaller businesses too. Probably more than people you work with. More people I’m connected to. I don’t know, you know, CEOs of a lot of fortune 500 companies, but I do know a good number of people who are, uh, you know, and maybe the fortune 50,000 or something, you know?

So I noticed some people who are maybe running some smaller businesses, maybe doing, you know, half a million dollars a year, or, you know, maybe up to like $3 million a year, which is like a bigger for small business, but still small in the grand scheme of things is that the kind of size business that you’ve seen.

Use recruiters to really find talent or is that really, maybe more with like, I don’t know, a VC funded company, as opposed to someone bootstrapped

Alex Harling: [00:26:09] in our space, in our space, um, with our work we have, we offer technical recruitment, um, as a service and yeah, they’re mostly, uh, VC backed, um, at the, at the minimum or the, um, there’s a few C-suite.

Executives, um, usually a CTO and there or a COO. Um, I’m trying to think of two people that we usually work with. They’re most likely to want to work with us because, um, yeah, they, they want to save time, um, and recruitment, head hunting. It’s expensive. It takes time and. But, um, I think a lot of people are opting towards that as a it’s talent.

It’s still very competitive. I mean, there’s a lot of talent on the market, but it’s so easy to connect with. W w with candidates, um, job boards, Twitter podcasts, LinkedIn, that, that person that you might find, uh, they might be contacted on. Some other way. So things are very competitive still. And, um, we’re seeing a lot more interest in that.

Um, but yes, mostly, um, VC back, you know, the larger companies, maybe they’re 20 to 30 employees. Um, but generally there’s an exec team and they’re trying to grow out their, their, their team. Um, but they’re pretty involved in recruitment process. We’re not placing well, we do there. There’s very many types of recruitment when we’re doing it.

We’re not just saying here’s the best person on the scale. Here’s the best person with the skill you need, you know, Put them in your company. It’s this is this, these are the people based on your parameters. And then the company will take it from there and speak with them some more after we’ve spoken with them and assess them.

Um, so there’s still very much involved, um, as they’re technically early hires in a company. Yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:27:37] It’s interesting to hear that most of that is done by VC backed companies. Um, you know, I’m a big, uh, like member of the indie hackers, um, Very much for, you know, revenue funded company, like run a revenue, funnel the company, if you can drive your company, if you can.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with raising VC funding. I think it’s necessary in some areas for some businesses, but this would be like, actually what I might think of as an advantage for running a VC funded company. Like as a Reverend fund a company, we really have to like be cognizant of like the revenue we’re bringing in.

And like, there’s not a lot of waste. Which probably is how every company should run, but if you’re VC backed and you raise $30 million, like you can spend a little money, like recruiting a good people and you can actually, it’s actually probably beneficial to maybe waste a little money or to like, I guess over pay like recruiter like you to help, help you put good people in those positions, because like, you have to grow fast as a VC backed company.

So like, you better have like really good people who are ready to like do that. Whereas for me, it’s like a little bit more laxed, which is good for me. That’s how I want to run the company. But. It would also be nice to be able to like, Hey, in a month to have like five awesome, perfect candidates for a high-level position hiring for.

So maybe I’m stuck between two thoughts there, but, um, yeah, I wanted to also just talk a little bit about dynamite jobs pro, which I believe correct me if I’m wrong, but this is something that I signed up for now at dynamite jobs. Um, and I’ll give a little backstory because I mentioned the beginning of this episode, I’ve hired a bunch of jobs sites.

Most of them, you post a job, you have to format it differently for each job posts, just like totally tedious. You go through, okay, blah, blah, blah. Posted. You get an email with your invoice. Maybe you get a thank you email. And that’s kind of, that’s kind of all your jobs there and they’ve been maybe linked to your website so they can apply there.

But like, that’s, that’s all you get. But when I hire dynamite circle, you personally reached out to me and you were like, Hey, like, how else can I help? What else can we do to like, get you more candidates? Oh, I have a pool of candidates, Joe. Like, I can, like, I am dynamite jobs. I can actually go and talk to people and see, I’ll give you some of our best folks to like, come potentially apply for this position.

And that was like super refreshing, like way. Better services. And most job boards I talked to or, or posted jobs did so kudos for that. But that’s a reason I signed up for dynamite jobs pro, which maybe you can tell folks better about everything you get in that. But to me, it was like a no brainer, like, Oh, okay.

Like I get to work with Alex and he gets to help me in like, Do a better job hiring, like, all right, let’s do it. But maybe you could tell people a little bit more about what dynamite Johns

Alex Harling: [00:30:13] pro is. Thanks. Thanks Joe, for mentioning that. Um, yeah, we, when we first started working together, it was, we were doing, um, that job moose still do job listings.

Um, but job, job posts and, you know, as you pay on and we sent your candidates and hopefully it works out. But we were trying to figure out, uh, for the past two years, you know, what’s a more personal touch and also more useful. Um, it’s one thing. Anyone can send emails and follow up, but we wanted to do something that was useful.

We found is following up and asking, how’s the job performing, we’ve got so much feedback and we’re able to, you know, adjust listings, you know, send candidates and w. We are not just working with the clients. We’re working very closely with candidates too. As we have a database of candidates, we handle interviews for certain roles.

So I I’ve got lists and lists of, of, of runners up, um, candidates for, um, that that we’ve personally spoken with. And so. Having, uh, having a WP boss as, as a hiring pro member, you’re able to post as many jobs as you want, which is, it was just, it was just cool. Um, and, uh, you can also browse a database of candidates.

And so what, um, my favorite thing about the job have about this about hiring pro is we’re able to go. You signed up, I think two or three weeks ago. And, um, the initial emails between us was, uh, Oh, these are the, these are the roles you’re hiring for. They’re live on the site where we’re sending candidates, this application form.

But, um, we were discussing the cans. We had the database, you know, you got in there and the database messaging people, it’s still very much in beta mode. It’s. Yeah, hence it’s affordability and flexibility with everything we’re testing everything. Uh, but we were able to share a cancer with each other to discuss them.

And then when I’m discussing with, uh, we’re, we’re hiring for other WordPress developer roles right now, I’m able to share your role with those candidates and vice versa. Um, and also the, the operations assistant role. Um, so it’s, it’s kind of an ecosystem. And that’s what we’re trying to do is allow our hiring pro companies, Postmate jobs, as they’d like Rouse candidates messaged them, but then also work with us, um, cause even like, I mean, as you said, it’s not good for, to give a WP off right now to bring on a big recruiter or an agency to do all this hiring hiring is still very much personal part of the company.

And I think that’s, I think that’s excellent. Well, we can help give a little extra support, whereas your team members are busy running the company. You now have a dynamite jobs in your side to help with these things. Um, and that’s uh, yeah. That’s, I guess that’s hiring pro in a nutshell or a few nutshells.

Joe Howard: [00:32:25] Yeah, there you go. Uh, cool. I thought it was, uh, I think it’s a great idea. I think about like, honestly like a fortune 500 company, or like a VC backed company, like. People with a lot of money to spend to do it this, but I think there are a lot of people out there. A lot of remote companies, a lot of smaller companies who need like a level of that down version or that maybe they don’t need all the bells and whistles, but they would love like something that’s like, Hey, I run the BP was a productized service company.

Like, Hey, something multiple subscription too, which is good for you because someone pays you on a month monthly basis and they can hook into someone who can maybe on a slightly lower level, like help them to do something like to find good candidates and like fill positions. As a company companies with good people, which actually I think works for everyone because I think about like playing by like the best possible candidate for every job I could have, like past those people, I probably can’t afford.

Anyway, if I’m being honest, it’s like, again, we’re running that company. Like we’re not DC that we don’t have. We’re not paying like huge salaries to people. Like our salaries are probably average for, you know, our industry or whatever. So we’re maybe not like, so we have to. Be a little bit more flexible around a 10 out of 10 person for a salary way out of our range.

Or maybe I want like a nine out of 10 person who fits our salary range. And sometimes we have to make those a better fit anyway, and maybe a better fit for like the kind of like price range of what then my jobs pro cost is one thing about recruiter, I think about expensive. So. So my job is pretty, somewhat affordable for us, you know?

So, you know, to me it was no brainer. I was like, yes, let’s do it.

Alex Harling: [00:34:02] That’s good. No, it’s really great to have, uh, have you as a hiring pro client. And, um, I worry that I’m annoying that my emails sometimes, cause I’m, I used to check it a lot. I check it a little less, but I want to make sure people are getting the best out of it because the company’s return and they keep hiring with us.

So I really encourage you and other pro clients is let me know what’s working. What’s not working. You know, if the candidates aren’t turning out well, we’ll make adjustments. It’s. Um, more often than not we have who, who, who you need. Um, you just gotta get their attention and, and send them your way.

Joe Howard: [00:34:32] Yeah, totally.

So, is that, what, uh, is that what you think your, your biggest focus is for the rest of 2021 or for like the foreseeable future? Are you going to keep, like, is, is the pro the pro thing, something that you just want to keep growing on and getting more people in there? Or like what’s the, yeah. What does the future look like for dynamite jobs for up or down the jobs, Joe?

Alex Harling: [00:34:54] Oh man. That’s the funny thing about having a company with a two-sided marketplace. We’ve got the companies, we’ve got the candidates, so we’re trying to, we’re trying to help them both. And there’s limited resources to grow up both sides of it. So our team has expanded, um, A lot this past year and I’m actually hiring right now.

I’m gonna bring another person on to help me enter this week. They’ll be brought on. And the whole purpose of that is we’re trying to expand both sides. One person is, is our CTO. Um, and he he’s building out that, the platform that you’re on right now. So our main site is based on WordPress, which has been amazing for our flexibility as.

For the past three years, but the, the back it’s like called the backend, the cult of the database or the platform that’s been custom built, um, by the CTO right now. And that’s for companies and candidates right now, because candidates are in there that you, you can message them and, and companies are in there.

They making message candidates, but. There’s not much connecting the two parts. And so we were trying to build out more where you still have to submit your jobs through a form and then we’ll get them live, but you’re not able to, you have to do everything through email, uh, with me, if you’re a company, um, you know, just send me messages and say, Hey, can you pause listing or, or let’s change this.

You cannot. If we don’t have a dashboard set up like that or a really, really good, um, system set up. So I want, I would like that to be built, uh, sooner rather than later. But on the candidate side, we’re getting almost a, I would say just around between 1000, 1,200 new people signing up for the platform. Um, on the candidate side, we have a decent audience for our email list and our, our social media, but.

People joining the platform, giving us their information that is growing a lot. So we’re also building out options for them. So candidates can now sign up for candidate pro there’s, hiring pro and then there’s candidate pro and with candidate pro. You are, you show up on the top of the search results in our database.

When companies search for your skills, you can also list offers or services. So if you’re, if you’re a designer, you can, you can list your design services. If you’re a developer, you can list your hourly rate, some things on there right now, as you have sales people listing their rates. We have, um, I was just looking through them yesterday.

They were showing them around, uh, social media audits, um, different kinds of, uh, SEO work. So that has been built out. It just needs some improvements. Um, but. Candidates are really liking that as they can, they can share their offers. We share those with companies. Companies can find them when they search for candidates.

So. What’s so, yeah, to answer your question, what are we going to focus on this this year? I would like to build out more things for my hiring for our clients, but then I also, I love helping the candidates as the user platform more, um, they’re getting hired on there. They’re starting more conversations. I mean, the emails we get from candidates who say like, I’ve, I’ve gotten more messages, more valuable messages on here than on LinkedIn, and it means a lot.

Um, and that’s, you know, something’s working. Um, so rest of the year is we’re building out that platform. And we may connect the WordPress site with our database sooner or continue to build out the database and the key functions within, within there. But no matter what, there’s a lot happening. So if you’re following down on my jobs, if you’re a client of ours, you’re going to see a lot of changes and a lot of updates, which is exciting.

Um, I, nothing should, should hurt our clients or candidates. I think everything is going to. Help everyone. And most of the people like that, they feel really happy to be a part of a beta project and to give feedback, um, you know, it’s still a little, um, uh, duct tape and bubblegum, but it works. That’s what’s going on there.

Joe Howard: [00:38:13] Yeah, cool, man. I, I know I could like potentially find candidates to hire on LinkedIn, but honestly there’s never once crossed my mind to do that. And I think the reason is like, LinkedIn is not cool for me to me. I don’t know if it’s like that for everyone, but I’m not like got a recruiter on LinkedIn.

Like that doesn’t sound. Like fun for me. Like I’m much rather go to like, like a indie site, almost like a, like a, a remote specific, like, honestly, like run by you kind of site to like hire or promote higher end. Like LinkedIn does not sound like something I’d want to do for that. I think that you’re going about building things out the right way.

Cause I think the most important thing. Is to see if people will pay for something and see if you can give good value. People, get feedback from people to keep building things out, but to launch something, this is a great example for anybody listening. You’re not have to have everything fully automated and fully built out when you start.

Like I have no problem, Alex, like emailing with you. Like when something. There’s there’s a little thing in the dashboard. Like I can’t do. That’s fine. I literally don’t care. It’s nice, actually. Cool. I get to email to Alex. If it was automated, maybe that would be nice, but like, it doesn’t, I don’t personally care that much.

If I need to email you, I think you took the right step. So like, okay. Joe paid for it. As did 50 other people. Okay. Now we’ve got a little revenue coming in the door. Now we can pay some, a developer to come and build some of this stuff out to make it better for people, but the proof of concept and the company grow into something bigger.

It’s more important to answer that question than to actually build it. And. Let me say, I’ll cross my fingers to see if this is something people want, because you’ve done it. Probably the hard part. Now everything’s hard, right? Every, every step you’re like, this is the hard part, you know, but you’ve passed a hard part and now you can do the part where a little bit more automation, a little bit more dashboard control.

Um, the things people want to see, but honestly, the thing is your early adopters, like me will be like excited to give you feedback on like, Oh, that dashboard is cool. Like you should totally be sending me emails when you’re working on stuff. Like, Hey Joe, I just built this. Like thinking sketch, how does this dashboard look like?

Oh, it looks cool. I’m glad you’re making that. So I think you’re on the right track for that kind of stuff.

Alex Harling: [00:40:25] That’s great to hear. Yeah. I love hearing the feedback on that. Um, but be careful and I’ll be sending you emails every, all the time now know, and I’m going to expect you to reply, like what should we do?

Joe Howard: [00:40:38] Uh, Oh, here we go. And here we go. Yeah. I’ve asked, I’ve asked for too much. Now you can hit me up. I’ll I like giving, I like giving feedback on that stuff. I like seeing what people are doing. Honestly, it gives me ideas. I’m not running a job board or anything, but it’s funny when people come to me with challenges, whether they’re like WordPress website support 24 seven specific, or they’re like, totally like they’re making chairs.

I had around deck chairs out of their garage. Like. There’s always something I learned from those when they ask, Oh, what is this I think about? How does that affect us? Like, there’s like an operation sort of thing. Okay. Now, I mean, that’s interesting because that kind of applies to this part of our operations here.

And it gets me thinking. So selfishly, you can email me when you want to, and I’ll try and give you feedback because it’ll help me as well. It helps everybody. All right. Cool man. Well, we have about 45 minutes now, so we’re going to start wrapping up, but this has been awesome. I learned a ton just from hearing about like some of the best practices around posting job board on job boards.

How I can use my network a little bit too in like the correct way, like find candidates, good potential candidates for my network. Maybe I should have a job description up. I should have a real focus on my job. Descriptions about maybe the outcomes, like I mentioned also, when you mentioned just like have a really good persona for what that job is.

And that seems like a big differentiator between places that have maybe more successful recruiting pipelines in one and one center, still working on improving them. So let’s wrap up now, but let’s, uh, tell folks about where they can. One finds you online. And two, if you’ve got a little discount code, so people could post jobs or sign up for stuff at dynamite jobs.

Why don’t you tell folks about that too? Great.

Alex Harling: [00:42:24] Yeah. Please head on over to dynamite jobs.com or just search down dynamite. My jobs. We should be the first result. There have questions specific to hiring. I’m happy to happy to help email me at, uh, alex@dynamitejobs.com. Um, we’re always, we love discussing hiring just like we are now.

Um, and then for the discount code, uh, w if you sign up to be a hiring pro a member on the site, and you can find that through our sales page, on the site, you get $10 off your first, first month with a WP buffs code. That’s capital letters, WP buffs.

Joe Howard: [00:42:56] Nice, nice. I watched the, uh, social dilemma recently, so I.

Pushed off my Google search engine and doctor go, but I had you come up first and talk that go search engine as well. If you didn’t know. So yeah. Dynamite jobs. Yeah. Then my jobs.com for folks who want to everything from, so it’s both sides. So the candidate and looking for a remote position, go check it out there and apply to some WP, loves jobs as well.

And if you’re hiring as well, if you’re a WordPress company, great place to go hire, you can post a job or you can like actually get some. Recruiting efforts to help you run your business and scrap one of Alex’s subscriptions there. So totally cool. Alex, the last thing I ask our guests on the show to do is to ask our listeners for a little iTunes.

So, if you wouldn’t mind asking listeners right now to give us a little review on iTunes, I appreciate it.

Alex Harling: [00:43:43] All right, listeners, it’s time to, uh, to give Joe’s iTunes review. You know, we know how helpful they are and how easy they are to give. So let’s give a little five stars. Yes,

Joe Howard: [00:43:52] appreciate it. People can go to WP mrr.com.

Forward slash iTunes. If you’re on a Mac or an Apple device forwards you right there, it can leave a little review. Uh, you can just leave a star review, but we like when you leave comments, tell us a little something you’ve learned from this episode. Then we can send a screenshot over to Alex and say, thanks for the review.

Here’s what people learned. And also gives us a lot of good feedback into what people really liked about the show. But if you left a review, it means like you liked this episode a lot, so we’ll know, Oh, we’ll do more episodes around hiring. We’ll do more episodes around how to hire, how to be a good candidate and all that kind of stuff.

How to build out your team, remote team, all that stuff. So, uh, leave a comment and it also kind of gives us motivation to continue going. So the more, every time I see a review, I’m always like, Aw, Thank you so much. Like it was a personal thing. I appreciate some of it took even two minutes out to go do that.

So go leave a review, WP, mrr.com/itunes. If you are a new listener to the show, I don’t know exactly what episode this is going to be 120 something I believe, but we’ve got 120 something odd episodes on the sorts of topics around WordPress about growing your business about running the business or around hiring.

Team building and that kind of stuff. So go through and use a search bar on WP MRR Ford slash podcast, and go find an episode you want to listen to, especially now you don’t have to go and be in that new Netflix show. Queen’s gambit I heard is pretty good, but other than that, you should feed bingeing WPM or podcast episode.

So don’t hesitate to go and do that. Uh, if you have questions for us at the show, feel free to shoot us an email at yo. Y o@wpmrr.com. So we can do some Q and a episodes. Do you like to do those occasionally here? So shoot those in, or you can just hit me up on Twitter at Joseph H. Howard on Twitter.

That’s it. For this week’s episode, we will be on your podcast players again next Tuesday, Alex. Thanks again for being all, man. It’s been real. Thanks, John.

In today’s episode, Joe and Christie pick out the top episodes they hosted together for the past two years, why these episodes made it to their favorite list and the stories behind the guests. They also talk about their individual growth in podcasting and the benefits of being a host. 

Sadly, this is also Christie’s last episode as co-host in the WPMRR podcast. Listen in to learn what will change and what to expect in the coming weeks! 

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:49 What’s up, Joe?
• 04:09 Sad news: This is Christie’s last episode
• 07:53 The truth about why Christie is leaving
• 11:50 Don’t do a podcast if you aren’t passionate about it
• 14:03 Some of the best moments happened off-record
• 17:10 What’s it like recording a podcast for the past two years?
• 19:57 Podcast is just a conversation between 2 to 3 people
• 22:20 The benefits of being a podcast host
• 26:30 Pod episodes on our favorite list
• 37:15 Parting words from Christie Chirinos!

Episode Resources:

• Visit Christie’s website
• Tweet Christie
• Christie is on LinkedIn
• Leave an iTunes review or binge-watch past episodes
• Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

Favorite Podcast Episodes:

• Should Your Business Take Political Stances or Stay Silent?
• What an Automattic IPO in 2021 means for WordPress Professionals (Brian Krogsgard, Post Status)
• What it’s really like to be people of color in the WordPress community
• The future of funding in WordPress

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] How would he folks Joe Howard here? So today’s episode is unfortunately a little bit of a sad one, as you probably already know from the title of the episode that you clicked to hear me say this, uh, we have. Some news today from Christie, uh, that we’re gonna really get into in today’s episode. And Chrissy doesn’t know that I’m recording this as a little intro, but I just wanted to send a quick message to her.

That man, it’s been a fantastic couple of years getting to record with you, Christie. You’re one of my best friends in the WordPress space, but really just one of my best friends period. And I’m really happy that. This podcast got to bring us closer together. And yeah, it’s something that is really, I think, made my life better to, uh, to get to do this podcast with you.

And also just to chat off-air about all sorts of stuff, WordPress or non WordPress. So thank you, Christie for everything also, just so listeners. Now we say this in the episode, but the podcast is not ending. Christie’s time has come to an end, but podcasts will continue to going out. We’ll be continuing to host.

We’ve got actually some really exciting guests coming up in the near future. So stay tuned in, and maybe if we’re lucky Christie we’ll hop in to a few episodes in the future, I’ll be sure to pull her into a few episodes. Cause we all know how great she is. Anyway, without further ado. Enjoy today’s episode.

Christie Chirinos: [00:01:38] Oh, WordPress people. Welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Christie. And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. What is going on in your life this week, Joe?

Joe Howard: [00:01:51] Let’s see, uh, I am in Mexico. That’s kind of like, I guess the big thing, uh, listeners probably know, um, uh, my wife and my son and I are taking a little time in Mexico for the winter.

It’s a little warmer here than it is in Washington, DC, as people can, could probably see if you’re watching on YouTube, you can see I’ve got some nice sunshine coming in and got some nice. This is, but that’s like in my house, that’s not outside of my house. Like that’s inside my house. And then like the front door is.

Past that. So half of my houses nature. So it’s, it’s great. Everyone here is super we’re in Marietta, Mexico. Everyone here is super friendly. The weather is great. Food’s awesome. We’re not doing a whole much different honestly, than we were back in DC. We’re being pretty safe. Um, everyone here is super safe around COVID like everywhere you go is like Tran sanitizer.

Taking temperatures, like stepping on mats with sanitizer to sanitize your shoe. Everyone’s like masked up. Yeah. Yeah. It’s really, uh, people are intense down here in a good way. So yeah, staying pretty safe, enjoying the warm weather. So that’s, what’s going on with me right now and we’ll be here through March, March ish.

So yeah, nothing much has changed besides just location, but that’s a big change. So it’s

Christie Chirinos: [00:03:07] been good. That’s so nice. I mean, DC. It’s not the coldest plates. But it’s cold and frigid and uncomfortable during the winter. And

Joe Howard: [00:03:18] it’s hilarious. I talk to people who were in like way colder places and, um, I have to be like, I have to admit like, yeah, I’m a weenie.

I know, I know it doesn’t get that calls, but like, I really just like warm weather more than I like cold weather. So even though it’s like gets into the thirties and DC, Oh my God. I’m so cold. I would still rather it be in the eighties.

Christie Chirinos: [00:03:37] I think that’s cold. I think that’s cool. And I, and I lived in colder places and getting into the thirties and getting into the upper twenties.

Fahrenheit is cold. If it’s cold enough for me to pull out my parka and wear it over my clothes, that’s cold because you don’t have to do that in Meredith, Mexico.

Joe Howard: [00:04:01] No, you do not. And I am thankful for that for sure. So that’s, what’s up with me right now. Now we shift to what’s new with you, which is something definitely now

Christie Chirinos: [00:04:14] big pausing for dramatic effect.

Drum

Joe Howard: [00:04:17] roll, please. We

Christie Chirinos: [00:04:19] have some sad news drum roll, please. We have some sad news and it is that my time on WP MRR. It’s coming to an end.

Joe Howard: [00:04:32] Oh man. Oh man. Obviously I’ve known for a little while. Since we were like doing this, she got everyone. She just surprised me on the podcast, but I didn’t even know that I had, obviously I’ve known about it for a while, but it’s uh, yeah, sad for me.

And also. Full transparency to the podcast will continue. I’m going to keep doing the podcast. We’ll keep having guests on twp. MRR podcast will continue. So this is not the end of the WP MRR WordPress podcast in its entirety, but it is the end Christy of your time here, which does like, it changes a lot.

You know, we’ve been doing this for a long time, so I’ll let you go ahead. I mean, interrupt your announcement.

Christie Chirinos: [00:05:11] No, that’s extremely important and yeah. I have had so much fun doing this podcast and moving on is so bittersweet. I’m so glad that it’s going to continue and that guests will continue to come on because.

We’ve had some amazing guests so far, and there are so many people still left to have on. And part of that is that the community more sun changes and gets new people and lets go of other people and other people move on. And same thing with podcasts companies, teams, it’s all the same, right. People come in and people come out and I think what’s really cool is just making sure that.

We all stay in touch. Uh, Joe and I were talking before we started the recording about the way that in a work in 2016, we heard this idea that I honestly had never even considered up until that point that every single podcast either gets passed on to a new group of people or it eventually ends. And then you grieve and its own way.

Those are the only two ways that. A podcast can finish. And I had never considered that about the shows that I love and that I listened to when I’m walking and cooking and doing all the different things where I consume podcasts. But it’s true. We heard that at work camp 2016, right? From, yeah, from the folks over at apply filters, which then.

Published that’s last podcast in 2017. From what I see on the website,

Joe Howard: [00:06:47] I remember that I remember thinking like, cool, like almost like it hadn’t occurred to me. Like you would, and like you would just end the podcast. I think probably cause back then, like we, they, weren’t doing this podcast so podcasting, like this big cool thing.

And it was like, why would you end it? You could you have a podcast? Did you not want to do it anymore? But I think we’ve learned obviously over two years that. You know, running a podcast is awesome. We’ve had a lot of fun doing this together. We’ve gotten to know each other really well. Like we’ve become good friends because of the podcast, which may be like the best benefit.

Oh man, I’m going to tear up because Mike we’ve gotten from the podcast. It’s just like becoming really good close friends, but at the same time, not everything has to continue on. Forever. Right. I think about like professional athletes that like played for like two or three years too long. And it’s like, you should have stopped when you were doing, you would like stop on top, you know, and not go into those sad last two or three years of your career.

You know, we’re stopping on top and at least for the two of us on this podcast, and I think that’s special in its own way.

Christie Chirinos: [00:07:52] Yeah. And you know, for the listeners, I want to tell you the truth about why I’m moving on and how I had this conversation with Joe. And the reality is that over the last two years, my life has changed a lot.

And my perspective on what I need to focus on has changed so much. Three years ago, work was my entire life to a point where I never want to live in a God and I have found more balance. And right now at this moment in time, I’m putting a lot of attention into other parts of my life. That are still work because I have a very demanding job within the company, but I’m trying to look for more balance.

I’m trying to look for what’s going on in those eight hours that I’m not working in sleeping every Monday through Friday and think about how that time is also filling my values and other ways. And, um, that just means. Paying attention to other stuff. And it feels really bittersweet because I have loved doing this.

And it’s interesting to see the ways that things more from change. And, um, okay. I know I’m going to cry

Joe Howard: [00:09:11] this wasn’t the point.

I always like to think of. Uh, you know, listeners know I’m a big scifi fan and, you know, I love the matrix. And I always think about this quote, when I think about things ending, you know, everything that has a beginning has an end, Mr. Anderson, and it’s a little bit more intense in the matrix movies because it’s like the end of humanity, but like that’s quote itself always stuck with me because it is true, you know?

And it also, like when I think about that core, I think about, you know, an ending isn’t necessarily. A bad thing. Like it’s a change and change is always going to happen and it’s okay to embrace change and to embrace things in the end. Because again, you know, like I already said here, like we’ve had a great run, we’ve done a hundred plus episodes here on the podcast.

Like we should be proud of what we did and we are proud of what we did. And yeah, just because your time on the podcast is coming to a close doesn’t mean our friendship is coming to a close. I told Christie before. Well, you know, while she was telling me this, I was like, okay, yeah, full transparency. I was like, totally fine, Christie.

Like, I support you in whatever you’re doing, but we got to hop on like a monthly call or like try to, because like, we have to like, keep in touch and keep like the friendship going. Cause that’s been the most important part for us. So, you know, that will continue. I have no doubt of that. And, um, yeah, we’ll be able to look back, I think on all the episodes you’ve done together, I already do.

And I’m like, wow, like what a collection of content we have, you know, not to toot our own horn, but like, wow. Like, it’s great. Like. Enormous value. It provides, you know, probably, Oh yeah. Hundreds of hours worth of content for people who are new to WordPress, we flew, want to learn about a certain type of thing can come in to snore show.

And that is a huge accomplishment and definitely something I’m not a, you know, don’t have to necessarily just be sad just because, you know, your time has come to an end. So we

Christie Chirinos: [00:10:56] want all the listeners to know that while our co-hosting of the podcast may be wrapping up our BFF friendship, but. Is strong and continuing.

So that’s extremely important for everyone to know, but. Yeah, I don’t know. I think that that’s actually one of the biggest things from the last two years that I got out of this podcast was just getting to stay in touch with you, Joe, and also with everyone else. The guests that we’ve had on the episodes that we both had, the conversations that have come from the podcast, right.

People messaging me being like, Hey, this was really great or good job on this episode. Or this episode taught me something. I didn’t know. It’s just an incredible way to. Stay connected. Right? A podcast is such an incredible example of just enjoying the journey, because let me tell ya for those of you who may be listening, thinking, should I start my podcast?

You’re not going to get rid of doing a podcast. You got to do it because you like it. And it’s fun. I’m sorry to break it to you. And especially their independence, just having this outlet to. Stay connected and talk to people and just make sure that people are doing okay. And then record that people are doing okay.

Has been really important.

Joe Howard: [00:12:22] Yeah. I totally agree with you. I think, you know, looking back and it’s like, what is WP M R R like, we could have done this podcast, like under WP bus as a brand, we could have done it. Like under liquid web is a brand like there’s, there were other like, kind of more, probably like business related ways that we could have.

Probably, I dunno, push more business towards our podcast or towards our businesses, or just made it like monetize the podcast better. Like we definitely could have done that. But the thing I enjoy about seeing like on my Google calendar, like doing a WP MRR recording episode, whether it’s with you Christie or whether it’s with the guest or whether it’s with you and a guest is that it’s.

Time in my calendar, like I’m pretty busy. I like to stay involved and WP buffs. I like to find new people to hire and I like to bring in new folks and I like to. Do work. Like I like working at Ws, but it is nice to have a thing on my calendar that is kind of independent of that. And that is much more, it’s more focused on, like, I get to have a cool conversation with someone and I get to kind of like relax for a little bit, even though it’s recorded and people are listening to this, it’s a relaxed thing.

That’s why this podcast is so informal. And that I think has been great for me because to have your calendar so filled up with all business stuff all the time, like. Again, I like all that stuff, but you got to change the pace sometimes. And so it’s refreshing when, you know, Thursdays would come along and I’d be like, Oh, cool.

So like part of my day is like, woo, I got an hour Kristy and I get to hang and hang out or any other day of the week, I get to just sit down with the guests for a week and just kind of like shoot the shit a little bit. So I think that’s been nice to have that as like a built in. Breather, you know, into the day-to-day is hectic life of, you know, business stuff.

Christie Chirinos: [00:14:00] Right. And there were so many times that we got onto that scheduled recurring event and we didn’t even record. We just talked to process 2020 was insane. And how many times did we just sit back and say, let’s not record, are we surviving right

Joe Howard: [00:14:18] now? And listeners should probably know. This is honestly, this has been one of the hardest parts about doing this podcast is that so many, like, I very much enjoy recording this podcast and all podcasts episodes with you, Christie.

But some of the best conversations we had were the times where we said, we’re not recording today. Like something is going on, or maybe we just have, we just wanted to like sit down and chat. And like, sometimes those are the best moments, but those moments wouldn’t have happened. Had we not had a podcast spot where we said, we’re going to come in.

And then we just happened to decide, Oh, we’re not gonna record a day. Cause there’s something else you want to talk about that honestly, we didn’t. Sometimes we just didn’t want to talk about it on air. Like it’s not something you wanted to record or it’s something as much as we want to be honest and transparent about everything in our lives.

Like there’s some things it’s like a better conversation. That’s probably not recorded and uploaded online. So, but those are some of the best times, and we wouldn’t have had those opportunities. Had we not been doing a podcast and then skipping out on same, ask her the podcast this week. Let’s just, uh, let’s just chat, you know?

So I’m thankful

Christie Chirinos: [00:15:20] we stayed up to date on big life changes. We had so many big life changes. You became a dad.

Joe Howard: [00:15:29] Can we start recording before? Like Sterling was even pregnant? Like, I don’t even remember. Like we must have, it was like two, two years ago now. Right. So man. What happens? I don’t even remember what episode that was.

I think it was called Joe’s big news or something. Big something. Yeah. I’ll try to look it up here, but man so much has happened. Uh, you know, you’ve moved from one WordPress company to another, so like new professional things happening

Christie Chirinos: [00:15:59] too. Yeah, the job change was big. You know, some of our listeners know some more, none, or one of the details of a serious health situation that I went through while we were recording this podcast.

And so, so much has happened.

Joe Howard: [00:16:16] Lots of changes. And this is just another, another one of those changes. Right? And like, no one goes through a year of their lives, especially 2020 everyone’s goddamn wife changed, but nobody goes through a year of life regardless. And like, has nothing changed in it. Right. And so, yeah, I mean, we’ve been through, you’ve been through a lot in somehow.

We’ve remained the consistency over two years of doing a podcast together and releasing episodes every week. And I know that there are podcasts out there who have done five years or 10 years and never missed an episode and like good for them. I’m happy for those people. I’m proud of those people.

That’s great. But I’m proud of two years also. You know, I think that two years is a huge accomplishment with so many life changes. Like it’s hard to stay completely consistent through that time. And like, we did that. So kudos for us, I think, round robos, Pat ourselves on the back for that one. That’s right.

Yeah. Cool. I I’d honestly like to dig into maybe some of the, I don’t know if you had anything else you wanted to say about like things that you enjoyed about recording a podcast, so you can think back to, or like, Things that you benefited from about recording a podcast. We may have, I’m not looking at our show notes right now.

I apologize. Maybe you went through them all already, but that part is really interesting to me. Like just reflecting and thinking, like transition time. What am I taking away from this? No, I have a whole list.

Christie Chirinos: [00:17:35] The ability to say in touch with you and was everybody was big. And I think that’s the biggest reason to start a podcast, right?

If anybody here is listening and you’ve been thinking about starting a podcast, starting a podcast about work, about some other interests about whatever you might be thinking of as such a good way. To stay connected and that’s been a big one, but also having this podcast forced me to learn how to talk on podcasts, to learn how to talk on video, to up my camera and microphone skills and set up an understanding of how to.

No, those things right at those sort of hard audio skills, weren’t something I had when we started doing this podcast. And the other part is just how to present on a podcast. This week. I also recorded an episode for Bob WP, who is also a podcast host for very popular. I will commerce podcasts. And yeah.

Whew, exactly. And so that episode will be coming out on to stay after this. So it’s going to be next Tuesday, whatever date that is. And we recorded this podcast with a guest, the owner of recaptured Dave, and after the podcast ended, all three of us were like, That was the perfect podcast

Joe Howard: [00:19:09] often. You’re like, Whoa, that was an insanely good episode. And you just kind of know it like innately, you know, I totally get it.

Christie Chirinos: [00:19:17] Perfect. That’s an overstatement. It wasn’t perfect, but it definitely was a piece of content. It was about an hour long that all three of us innately knew we were proud of. And then Dave says, That’s because we have three podcasts, so that are experienced on this podcast.

And I was just like, wait, hold on. There’s two podcast hosts that are experienced on the podcast. Who’s the third one. And then I was like, Oh,

Joe Howard: [00:19:45] still faking it to a naked. Yeah, I am. I feel that way too.

Christie Chirinos: [00:19:48] Totally making it, you know, and that’s a skill. That I think is going to come in handy for the rest of my life.

Joe Howard: [00:19:55] Totally with you. I think it may not be exact same skill as public speaking, because there’s something about like getting in front of people and having their literal eyeballs on you that can make you nervous. That can make you forget what you’re saying, that kind of thing. And it’s a little bit different with like an online webinar.

Like a live webinar, you know, people are watching you, but it’s to their computer. So there’s another level of separation there. This podcast is even like another step back. I think it’s like, yes, we have an audience. People are listening to this right now, but not live. And we can kind of treat this as just a conversation between two or three people.

And then the audience just kind of gets into the guest to listen to them afterwards. And I felt like doing, you know, a hundred plus episodes on this podcast that I learned to. I think about it as like my brain usually moves pretty fast. And so trying to get my brain and my mouth to sync up in terms of like speed people who are on YouTube or watching the, like, do this weird thing on my face with my mouth and my brain.

But I think that kind of makes it makes sense. Like my brainwaves, my mouth have to be able to move at the same tempo in order to like actually say meaningful things in those podcasts that make sense and add value to people who are listening to help them do what we try to do, you know, grow their MRR, grow their small businesses, run a comfortable business, you know, that kind of thing.

So I think that. When we started the podcast, you know, we go back and listen to the first 10 episodes. We were probably okay. At talking, I’m sure we were a little janky and we were kind of like, you know, the here and there and yeah. Thoughts were floating around a little bit. Now. I think we do one. I think we probably do a better job now of just speaking more, a little bit more eloquently and thoughtfully, but also.

I think just like we’ve developed a good rapport together to where we kind of, I don’t know when you’re saying something, I kind of like can predict where you’re going. Sometimes that feels like this magical thing, but it’s because we’ve done so many episodes together, you know, it’s not just not just a random thing.

So I think we’ve also like develop the sense of how to do that as well. And that’s a really valuable skill because listening is so important, you know? Instead of trying to think about the next thing I want to say on this podcast, because I have to say it, I’m trying to focus more on what you’re saying and then go off what you’re saying and not come back.

Just so the thing I was thinking of, just because I like have to say that thing and sound smarter, something it’s like, no, like, listen, and then move forward. We don’t have to say things just for the hell of saying them. Let’s. You know, keep a good template going. So I don’t know. That’s some of those are some of the things I feel like I’ve learned them.

It’s right there with you in terms of what you were

Christie Chirinos: [00:22:17] saying. That’s been huge for me too. I think that I’ve learned a little bit more about how to hook into a conversation. That’s not something that I felt very comfortable doing two years ago. And I think I just learned how to fix a move my bad habits in speech.

Now, obviously, honestly, when you talk to me in person and it’s not even something I have an outline for in, and I’m just talking about stuff, especially if you’re asking me for my opinion or my ideas, I’m really going to struggle to finish my sentences. I’m going to be like, but what about this? You know, I’ll go in like three different sentence fragments.

I do this when I write too, if I ever write just sort of stream of consciousness to get all the ideas that I want to do in there. My writing has parentheses around all these weird ideas. It’s just how my brain works. But in podcasts, especially listening to myself, look, I just did it. It’s frustrating. So I had to learn over time to stop myself from doing that.

And that’s going to help me for the rest of my life because it’s a really annoying

Joe Howard: [00:23:23] habit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t know that about you look at this, our last episode together. I’m still learning new things about how you write and how you think so. Um, yeah, I liked also what you said about the gear situation.

I never like would have had an excuse to get like a nice nicer microphone. Not too expensive, a hundred buck microphone, but like sounds so much better. And some, when I’m not mobile here, like my home setup, I had stuff pretty laid out pretty nicely, but just to get a good tech setup at home, it was kind of just an excuse to do that.

You know, we started off, we were just like, whatever, equipment’s fine. Whatever equipment you have is probably fine. And then like, you know, over the course of time, we kind of upgraded things a little bit and now we kind of have a, it’s like a little bit more built into our day-to-day digital life, regardless of podcasting stuff, you know, we kinda know, Oh, maybe need a nice camera or, and that can be talking on this crappy MacBook camera, sorry.

Uh, but you know, usually we want to try and get a good camera and we’re not as mobile and, you know, a nicer microphone for good audio. And that’s just really important, especially if you’re working. All the time digitally. So I think that helped like cement in that piece of like, you know, if you’re going to work digitally, if you’re going to work remotely, like.

Do it, you know, invest a little bit in it when you can and when you’re, when you’re able to. So

Christie Chirinos: [00:24:37] if you have the money, it’s totally worth it. You know, gear hadn’t even been on my list that I made, but it’s actually huge. And it has also helped me in other parts of my life. One of the things that I am making room for in this effort to find more balance in my life and to allocate more time to things that aren’t work and living is music and I’ve written.

So much in 2020, because we had nothing else better to do. Everybody else is doing something everybody’s life has changed in some way due to this completely unprecedented event. And the way that my life changed, one of the ways in which my life changed was I started writing a ton and I have so many interesting things coming out this year that you’re going to see as you follow me on social media about.

Art and creativity, but one of the people who has been helping me grow in that area asked me what I have at home to record vocals and record demonstrations of the things I’ve written. And I told him, and he was like, what?

And I was like, I mean, I did this podcast. Yeah. So I have this microphone and he’s just like, Okay, so you’re ready to go. You don’t need to buy anything. And I was like, yeah,

Joe Howard: [00:26:00] it feels good. Already leveled up. So yeah, I’m with you. We wanted to get through on this episode is just some of our favorite episodes from the podcast.

We have a nice little list here of some of our favorite ones. So maybe we can do a little lightning round of some of our favorite episodes of the podcast we’ve done together. So Christie, you want to start us off or maybe you can just present them and I’ll just, you know,

Christie Chirinos: [00:26:21] Yeah. Oh my gosh, absolutely. I’ll present them, especially because I had strong stances on the selection of this list.

Um, but the first one that I put on here was episode 94, which was the future of funding and WordPress. I, I love this episode because it’s the thing that I’m passionate about. I think that we’re going to watch this industry mature and expand in ways that nobody could have imagined when WordPress started.

And I’m a huge advocate for getting excited about it and thinking that more entrance and more attention is good. And it’s an opportunity to get the really great parts of the WordPress open source project, more embedded into how the web works. So I’m really excited about it. And I just thought it was such a fun episode to talk about.

And. Play around with the ideas about how to make sure that that development is good and that we push it in the right direction. So I don’t know. I love that one. What did you think?

Joe Howard: [00:27:25] Yeah. I’m with you. Those are always fun conversations to have too. Think about not only like the businesses we work in or the sectors we work in, but how does the whole industry we work in affect our business and how does our business affect the industry as a whole?

How does the industry fit into tech as a bigger ecosystem? And how does that fit into the world as a bigger ecosystem? Those are like bigger 30,000 foot conversations. Like really get my brain like. Woo. Like I’m in my happy zone when I’m talking about that stuff. And especially when I’m talking to somebody who’s like super knowledgeable in this area, like you, like, you give me all sorts of like the light bulb moments.

And so that was a great episode is actually interesting time to talk about it. I think a little bit about like acquisition stuff in that episode, as we’re recording this, it is not announced yet, but when this episode goes live, we WP buffs will have made an announcement, Christie that. You know, we launched our acquisition unit last year.

We’ll be announcing our first acquisition soon, next Tuesday. So keep an eye out for that. Well, I guess it will have already gone live once the podcast comes out. So WPZ is now part of the WP buffs family. It’s another care plan company and yeah, more details about that. Will you, people can find it anywhere.

So I’m not going to talk about it here on the podcast, but. That is exciting. And so WF is kind of becoming part of the, like this word for sequences. And we talked about, so like, man, like a lot of moving pieces, but I anyway, I enjoyed that episode a lot and I thought that was, that was really fun. So cool.

Episode 94, the future of funding in WordPress, any other. What are their favorite episodes that you

Christie Chirinos: [00:28:55] have? Wait, I have final thoughts on the future of funding and word WordPress. You know, one of the things that I, I just love that episode so much. And one of the things that I know will be true for my life and probably for everybody’s life.

People just have varying degrees of comfort with this idea is that chances are, you’re not going to be doing the same thing from the time you start working to the time you retire. You’re probably going to do all kinds of different jobs that you couldn’t possibly imagine. Many people change careers, many people change levels of income up and down and up and down, up and down.

And for me, I know that I just want to be able to pursue the things that I’m passionate about and I want to not be afraid of change and embrace it. And something that I have thought about in the past is I want to document. Things like episode 94. I want us to really have an understanding on this fundamental and academic basis as to what happened and how WordPress was born and how it evolved into an industry and how an open source project like that.

Evolved into this ecosystem of plugins and automatic and web hosting companies. And I think there’s something so fascinating about that because it has broken down the traditional model of commerce, right. Buy something, sell it for more. That’s not quite what’s happening here. And I think it’s so interesting to think about it that way and think about the fact that we’ve participated in something that is pretty revolutionary, even if right now that revolution feels largely undefined.

Joe Howard: [00:30:47] Well, you’re not allowed to say big, awesome stuff like that. And then make me want to record like 10 more episodes about that. So often not to the pockets anymore. So yeah, you’ll have to, you’ll have to come back and do some guest appearances so we can, yeah, we’ll

Christie Chirinos: [00:30:58] start a new podcast. I will do guest appearances.

So. Because honestly, we’re going to have this monthly catch-up and you know, there’s going to be new. So I’m going to be like, I really want to talk about this and then we’ll start a new podcast. Yeah. So I don’t know. I just think that that episode was so cool because I’m so interested in that particular topic.

So I loved

Joe Howard: [00:31:22] that. Of our favorites episode one 19 that we did with, uh, Brian Krogsgard, who runs post status and who, uh, uh, does the post status podcast, although I’m not sure if he does the, all the podcasts still, but you know, one of the premier podcasts in the WordPress space as well. So people should go tune into that one as well.

But we didn’t episode with Brian, uh, that was what an automatic IPO in 2021 means for WordPress professionals. And that was really good. Brian, super smart dude, watching YouTube, like. Just boom. Talk about financial stuff. It was like super eye to me. Who’s like fly on the wall. Like I’m cool. I pretty much know what you’re saying.

I know, I know what Bitcoin is and I understand, you know, that stuff, but that was a great episode and really cool to hear about again, bigger picture WordPress based stuff. Yeah. That

Christie Chirinos: [00:32:09] one was fun because I like dreaming about the future and I think that’s what a lot of that episode was about. Right. It was what could happen.

What if this happened? What would. This look like if this event preceded it and that was kind of a blast. I think that Brian is someone that likes to do that kind of thing, and successfully built a community around. Thinking about the future and believing in the future. And so it was closely related to episode 94, and

Joe Howard: [00:32:41] I liked that.

Agreed. I don’t mean to rush us through the end of this podcast, but I have to watch Mo in seven minutes. So we’re going to run through these last couple of episodes, quickly episode 122, a sugar business take political stances. That was super interesting. Really good question. You know, there’s, I don’t know if there’s a right answer.

But it was really interesting to have the conversation and think about all the different aspects of it. Yeah. You liked that episode

Christie Chirinos: [00:33:04] too. I love that episode because so much of my work so far has related political stances and activism to technology. Right. I think WordPress is an inherently political thing.

I say that in episode one, 22, and I also explicitly used WordPress in political non-profits. Settings before caldera forms and then liquid web. And so I love talking about that episode. I think that it’s worth thinking about it. Um, definitely. I think my views on this have evolved and morphed since we recorded that episode.

And that is part of what is interesting and fun about this podcast. And I think evolved and morphed often sounds like change. I don’t think it’s really changed, but it’s definitely evolved and become more nuanced.

Joe Howard: [00:33:55] Yes. Agreed. And then we go back to listen to episode 50 episodes ago. We’ll probably look back and hear ourselves and be like, I don’t necessarily a hundred percent with what I said before, or maybe I totally disagree.

Maybe we have totally changed her mind, but definitely you will evolve. And you’re thinking in terms of what you used to think and what you think now. So cool. Last favorite that you had down, and that’s definitely a favorite of mine too, was what it’s really like to be people of color in the WordPress community and that’s episode 99.

Very important episode for, you know, 2021. Why’d you have that one down, just one of your favorites that you did or that we did, honestly,

Christie Chirinos: [00:34:32] I think that for me, episode 99 was a turning point in the kind of thing that I felt I could say, because one of the things that we discuss in that episode is that a lot of the time you, as a person of color, do not protest what you see around you because you have a mission to accomplish.

So you figure out. Which fights to fight and which fights are going to get delayed for later. And for me, it was a very powerful experience to know that I’m in a position in life where I can get on the recorded podcast that I co-host and say, this are the things that I don’t think are right. And that was a really powerful moment.

Uh, and I think that a lot of our listeners felt that because I, I don’t know about you, Joe, but I probably got the most feedback on that episode of all the ones that we’ve.

Joe Howard: [00:35:25] Yeah, it was a lot. I also got a lot of people saying I’m really glad you to do this podcast. Um, because I’m not trying to talk down on white males who also run WordPress podcasts, but most of the people who run WordPress podcasts.

Look pretty similar. And again, I’m not trying to talk down on anybody. I absolutely know what I’m doing, but we do stand out, I think a little bit from the crowd in terms of like what we look like compared to what other WordPress podcasts do and our perspective, it makes our unique perspective, importance on a host of issues, whether they’re business or whether it’s race or whether, you know, anything like that.

It’s important to hear unique viewpoints from the perspective of people who may not look like you, or may not act like you were, or just. Different than you in a lot of ways. And so that’s important. So I’m with you. Very good episode there.

Christie Chirinos: [00:36:13] Yeah. And the last bit on that, for me, that is so important to mention is that for the last two years, I was so proud of this.

We have been a podcast hosted by minorities that isn’t about being a minority. We’re talking about hustling, about business, about running our teams about the future of the technology. And this was the only episode that we ever did. That was about being minorities. And we did it because this summer we saw a significant.

Protests about these long and systemic injustices in the United States. And it’s just been so amazing for me to be a part of this. I’m not going to cry for

Joe Howard: [00:36:53] real stop. My gosh, I was going to do our usual ending here, but people know, people keep listening, you know, how we end the show. So I was going to hand it off to you, Chrissy.

I wanted to just, I wanted to see if there was anything. That you wanted to kind of say in partying, this is not goodbye forever. Again, you’ll be back on the podcast. Don’t worry. We’ll will come back on. But like for now taking a breather, anything you’d like to say listeners over the past hundred plus episodes that have been here for us and anything.

Yeah. Anything you want to say? It’s honestly

Christie Chirinos: [00:37:22] been an honor. I feel like we just spent an hour saying everything I wanted to say about why is this happening? Where my life is going and just. How grateful I am to have been a part of this experience and extremely clarifying that Joe and I are staying in touch and keeping the awesome going.

So actually, I’m going to end the episode the way we normally do, which is I’m going to tell you where to find money for the rest of the time being. I won’t be on the podcast, but seriously. Find me, you can reach out to me on Twitter. I’m at  that’s X, T I E C H I R I N O S. My DMS are open and I just want to know what you liked about WP MRR and what you’re thinking for the future.

You can also find me on my website, Chrissy cherry.com, C H R I S. T I E C H I R I N O s.com and send me a message. There’s a contact form over there. There’s several things out there that just, uh, let you know a little bit about me, what I’m doing, where I’m going. Uh, I’m on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn is blessed.

Joe Howard: [00:38:38] That’s still a thing.

Christie Chirinos: [00:38:43] I don’t remember. I would have to look. Yeah, well, you know what. I, I probably still own it. So you can probably also go to business.business. Honestly, I’m just going to replay it through my personal website and yeah, send me an email. Um, my email is on my weapon. It’s on Twitter and, um, yeah, it has

Joe Howard: [00:39:06] been an honor.

Yes. Well, we will be in your podcast players again. Next Tuesday, WP MRR, WordPress podcasts. We’ll be Christy will be in your podcast players in the future of this. Maybe not every week, we’ve been forward, but as always, thanks for listening. And we’ll catch you next Tuesday.

In today’s episode, we have fascinating news! WP Buffs successfully acquired WP EZI – a team of highly trained world-class WordPress developers that provides unlimited 24/7 WordPress support, help, maintenance, and fixes. 

Joe talks to Paul Kidis – founder and former owner of WPEZI.com and a brilliant Website Specialist at Kidis Creative – about the closed-door details before and after the acquisition, the reason behind it, and a sneak peek at the preparations made for a smooth take over.   

Tune in and listen to a one of a kind acquisition story!

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:48 Welcome, Paul Kidis!
• 04:44 What is Kidis Creative?
• 07:28 The transition to focus more on Kidis Creative
• 10:40 It’s time to move on and let WP EZI go
• 12:52 What made the acquisition push through
• 16:40 Partnering up with the right people
• 19:50 How does it feel about selling a business?
• 23:04 Preparing and getting through the transition
• 26:20 Mixed emotions, fantastic journey, and refocusing priorities
• 31:12 It was about finding a better home for WP EZI clients
• 31:57 What’s keeping Paul busy at Kidis Creative  
• 33:22 Where to find Paul online

Episode Resources:

• Kidis Creative – Websites that Make Sale and Rank High
• WP EZI –  Unlimited 24/7 WordPress Support
• Check out Paul on Instagram and Facebook
• Leave an iTunes review or binge-watch past episodes
• Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Hey folks, Joe Howard here. So all right. A little bit of house cleaning before today’s episode. So obviously, you know, at this point that there’s an announcement happening on the pod this week and from WP buffs this week. So I have a few resources for folks. If they want to read more, learn more in other mediums.

So if you go to WP buffs.com, we have a blog post up that Allie rotor community manager about this news. If you want to hear more about Paul’s opinion or his blog post about this whole thing, going down, you can go over to WP E Z i.com WPZ and you can read that blog post there. We also have an official official press release out.

If folks want to read the official press release, it’s a little bit more formal, but it has all the appropriate details in there. And I don’t know the link to that right now, but it’ll be in a bunch of places. It’ll be in the show notes here in podcast. It’ll be in the w buffs blog posts and WP easy blog posts.

So you can find it pretty easily. And of course you have this podcast episode, so feel free to continue listening for. The real, tell all that we’re going to kind of go through here or at least as tell all it as we can, based on things that were signed. So yeah, today I have on the episode, Paul telecos, Paul is the former owner and CEO of WP easy.

Which is now joining the WP buffs family as are a couple of team members and a good amount of current and former clients and customers of WPZ. So this episode is really cool. I really appreciated the chance to touch base with Paul. And we’d been through a lot of this in the actual acquisition talks and the sales talk.

Some of the formal conversations and during this transitionary time, but we really kind of went to another level and hearing about the positive impact this has had on Paul’s life. And honestly, hearing from his perspective about what a positive experience it was to go through all of this with WP buffs.

And with me, I was really trying to make this a positive experience and unforgettable experience for him, a positive impact for him and his clients. That really was my. Prerogative here in our prerogative, in this acquisition. And it felt really good and I’m knocking lie. It felt good personally to me to hear him speak positively on it.

And so, yeah, hopefully more news to come in the future. But for today, let’s focus on WP, easy with Paul telecos. Enjoy today’s episode.

All right. We are live on the pod. We have it. And a special episode this week, a little announcement for everybody. So I’d like to introduce Paul, Paul. Okay. Two things. One. Can you tell people had to pronounce your last name correctly? Cause I don’t want to butcher it. And two, can you give us the full name of your.

Previous now company that you worked on. Yeah. Cool.

Paul Kidis: [00:03:03] So it’s  and happy to be on the podcast and it’s Kate is creative. So the last bit of my last name, creative.

Joe Howard: [00:03:14] Yeah. There you go. Kiedis, and part of, uh, a longer name and you’re from Australia and now living in Greece.

Paul Kidis: [00:03:24] Yeah. I relocated to Greece recently.

Absolutely. Love it. Yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:03:29] Yeah, I just wanted to touch on the name also of your previous company that is now kind of under WP buffs care. Now, how did you say WPZ or WP ECI? I had someone asked me that and I was like, Oh, I want to make sure Paul touches

Paul Kidis: [00:03:43] on that. Have you for easy. So the whole goal was to make WordPress support easy.

That’d be pretty easy,

Joe Howard: [00:03:49] solid. Okay. That’s okay. That is the exact response I gave to that person. So I’m glad I got it. Nailed it. So cool. All right. So point to this episode this week is obviously people know at this point, WPZ has joined the WP buffs family, and you know, a lot of people will see announcements in the WordPress space, but in the tech space in general, and I guess all spaces about acquisitions and it’s kind of this like.

Kind of formal blog posts, blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. But I kind of wanted to go and take it to another level of just like a little bit more transparency into the actual inner workings of like everything that happened. We may not be able to go into every single piece of detail here, but just in terms of like transparency about how the process went, both from your perspective, Paul, as a seller and me, from our perspective at WP buses, the buyer about.

What it was like to WPC to join the WP buffs family. So before we even dive into that, why don’t you tell folks a little bit more about the work you do at kit creative and maybe a little bit about your, your history with WPZ before we start talking? Yeah.

Paul Kidis: [00:04:55] Cool. I’ve been doing WordPress websites since like 2011.

When I started my first business, Kate is creative and we were. Just your normal web design agency, specializing in WordPress and the years we built many websites with that. People were coming back to us saying, can you make changes? Can you fix things? We need to change menus. We need to do this things broke, et cetera, et cetera.

So over the course of years, we set up care plans and it wasn’t till two, 2017. When I had this bright spark moment to think to myself, Oh, it’s actually a little bit of a business in this separate from building websites. I did some research on Google. I found some other companies that were doing it, some were successful and I thought, well, if they can do it, I can do it.

And we set up. So I started WP easy. I basically tried to create. A business that made WordPress support really, really easy in my own mind and for my own customers and in my own reference point. So I was really good at Trello. So I hijacked the Trello boards and created a system using that, that clients seemed to really, really enjoy.

And in fact, we had a lot of clients come to us because we use Trello and they were familiar with it. So that was really good. Basically, we grew that business. Uh, I built a really good team. I’m super proud of the team I built. They’re amazing. There has not been one problem in all these years that my team has not been able to fix, which is amazing.

Joe Howard: [00:06:32] Nice. I love that feeling. Yes. Yes. We have similar perspectives. Cause I feel the same way about our team and you really grow to love the work that you do and enjoy it. But at the end of the day, it’s like, Man, what would I have been able to do without a great team around me? I think a lot of people, even whether they have a smaller team or a bigger team, they feel like man, the team is, is core to everything.

So cool. So I hear this story a lot actually from folks who, um, who do web work and they realize people need ongoing support. Like people ask them for little things here and there. So it makes sense to offer something like this. It sounds like you kind of maybe even went in a somewhat separate direction from some people because some people will build it into their.

There one business kind of started a new business WPZ, you know, aside from kitties doing care plan work. Um, and so, yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit about there. Must have been a point where, you know, we’ve kind of discussed this in previous calls, obviously, but I’d love listeners to hear a little bit more about the, kind of the point at which you decided I’d like to focus a little bit more on Kitsis and little less on WPZ.

Maybe it may make sense to. Move on entirely from it. There must have been like a moment or at least like a period of time where you started thinking more seriously about that. And I’d like to dig into kind of like the why’s of the reasons for, for transitioning away from it and having someone else look after it.

Yeah, definitely.

Paul Kidis: [00:07:56] So I don’t know if there’s something, a trait of a common entrepreneur or maybe it’s somebody different with me, but I always tend to have a few things running on the go completely separate businesses. It’s been the story of my life and with that, it’s good, but it also has challenges.

And basically, so I had my web design agency running, servicing those clients. I’ve got WP, easy running, doing that, that thing with the care plans. And then. Also, I’ve got my e-com running. It’s good. But it also, you can’t go deep too deep on one thing when you’ve got so many things running, which is something I’m going to try and fix in the future.

I want to go deeper with one thing, but as it turns out, you can’t do everything well, WPZ has been like, yeah, I’ve put a lot of time into it, systemizing it, making sure the team are running it as much as they can without me, but it just got to that point in. Like, basically for me where I was just getting tired, like, I don’t have the energy, I had to do everything.

I did a bit of a self analysis and I worked out that between everything that I was doing, profit-wise what I want to do, where I see myself as a person and what interests me and what I want to pursue next. I decided that. I might want to start looking for a new home for WPZ.

Joe Howard: [00:09:22] The interesting part of that story is kind of that it’s one, it’s like the self realization that maybe like.

You wanted to, you know, you were waking up every day, maybe wanting to reconfigure your focuses on things. It’s funny, like seeing the parallels between different entrepreneurs, people who have started businesses, like I’m the same way, like you CWP buffs, like, well, this is the WP MRR WordPress podcast. We do like a virtual summit at WP MRR, like w um, very similar to Paul.

Like we like to try and experiment with different things. And so you go through these different phases of life, of like expansion and like maybe wanting to do more. But a lot of times you’ll go through phases where you want to do you either want to do less, or you find that you just maybe will be happier doing less or more fulfilled doing.

More of a fewer things. And I like the part that stood out to me also was like you said, you liked did a self-assessment. I think that’s so important because I feel like so many people in your shoes may have just continued to do it. You know, this is what I’m supposed to do. I was supposed to grow this business.

I’m supposed to build this business, but sitting down and actually doing the self-assessment. Yeah. Like triggered this, like maybe it’s time to do that. And I think that self-awareness, and that like action step really led to a big positive in your life. And they were able to really like focus on the things that you’re super excited to work on every day.

And that yeah, you wake up like jazz to do that thing. So that those things stood out to me as positives.

Paul Kidis: [00:10:41] For sure. Yeah, definitely. It’s, it’s so important in life too, you know, especially after a few years, uh, when you’re on the grind and you’re just going off to your different goals and trying to hit certain milestones and whatnot.

You forget, what makes you happy? You forget what life is like without being busy. And I had a crazy 2020 business school. Like we had exponential growth in some of the businesses I’m involved in and to take a step back after all the craziness and think to myself, like I’m at a certain level with WPZ. I love the business.

I built it from scratch, but it’s time to move on. Like it’s my time. And I don’t want to do a disservice by my clients. So you. You know, you start thinking of ways to do it. And that’s sort of how we met.

Joe Howard: [00:11:27] Yeah. Yeah. This is what the listeners have been, have been waiting for. They were teased for this episode and then we had to go through the background first of course, but let’s start chatting a little bit about like what it was like for you as a potential seller, going into a relationship like this.

So you kind of submitted WPZ. To the WP buffs acquisition unit, you filled out some answers to some questions in a form. I emailed you back saying like, Hey, and maybe I’ll even give a little bit more background. You gave your website, WP eci.com. I went to the website. I was like, Oh, Cause we get some like garbage come through that form.

It’s like businesses that we would never, like, it’s not, it’s not a good fit or it’s just not, or looking for, even though we explicitly say like what we’re looking for on the page. Right. But yours came through and I was like, Oh, one, like I’ve, I’ve either been to this website before, or I’ve heard about this.

Until this, this is like a really good fit. Like you do very similar work to what we do. This is a very similar business to WP buff. So I think there’s something that could work here. So after you submitted some of those Q and a, I took a look. I invited you to do a call just via Calendly as like, Hey, grab a time.

We chatted. I’d love to hear what you thought. What kinda, what was going through your mind after that first call, which was kind of like a discovery call. It was like getting to meet each other, getting to know each other a little bit. Me hearing a little bit about WPZ you getting to learn about WP buffs, making sure you’re comfortable moving forward.

That, that, yeah. And me to both parties, making sure, Hey, we want to move forward. How are you feeling after that first call? And like, what was your initial thoughts? Yeah. So

Paul Kidis: [00:12:58] before we jumped on the call, I did a lot of research. Obviously I already knew I wanted to dive in deeper because. When you think of selling your business?

I wanted to reach out to competitors first and then out of everyone that I researched, I, I, you know, I, I only contacted you really. I was going to post it up on other places and whatnot, but, um, I managed to just contact you guys. Oh

Joe Howard: [00:13:23] yeah. I remember. Yeah. You mentioned, I think when you submitted, like, forgive me if I’m wrong.

Cause we’ve had a few submissions come through, but I believe you said, like, I think I’m maybe some place like a flip ball or like a, or like another kind of marketplace where you sell businesses, but I’m going to start with you because this seems to make the most sense. And maybe I’ll try one of those others if, if this doesn’t happen to work out.

So I think that was that correct? That

Paul Kidis: [00:13:46] is correct. And uh, I loved what you guys were doing. Yeah. You seem like the leader in the market, the community’s down, people really enjoy what you’re doing. Your reviews are great. Like it was, it felt like a really good fit initially. Anyway. And then after the call, what really became clear was that we share a lot of the common goals.

So it was really, yeah, I really enjoyed that Cole. It was very positive.

Joe Howard: [00:14:11] Yeah, good man. I’m glad to hear that. And I like hearing little nuggets. I didn’t know about before, like the research you did before, you know, you came and checked us out. So we’ve put a lot of work into like, not one, making sure we look good online and people are like, Oh, WF is awesome.

But to, to make sure we’re actually fulfilling that promise. So that, that is not just like a marketing thing that is like truly w what WQS offers, uh, and that our marketing is. True to exactly what we do as the buyer. I guess, coming from my perspective, I was pretty excited after a call. I remember I shot a Slack message to Ben and Nick, like, Hey, we were actually in the middle of another potential acquisition that didn’t work out.

Yeah. And it was kind of at the end of like, maybe we wanted it to work out, but it just, it clearly wasn’t the best fit for a few different reasons. And we’ve realized we were trying to force it. I remember having the call with you and being like, okay guys like that other one now I really know what a good example of a good fit is.

We’re going to wrap up, you know, those negotiations didn’t quite work out. This is what we should focus our time on. And I remember talking with you. I, the one thing that stood out to me was I remember you were being, so you were so focused on making sure that you, that making sure that we knew, like how much you still want it to support the transition, which is something that we’re obviously looking for in a partner, because we know the whole, the whole success to this happens is like, we don’t just want to like take over a business to like, Just like reap the benefits and like look through customers, right?

Like the point of this is to. We, we care so much about managing people’s websites and, and keeping them up and running that you obviously want to make that transition as seamless as possible. And just the fact, so you were like, repeatedly, like, Hey, I’m not handing everything over. Like I want to be part of this only an act, a part of this, how can I help?

And you’ve like written emails to customers. You’re like jumping on this podcast. Like you did like everything that was asked of you during this transition, which is what you promised and like that to me, honestly, like. That was probably the best part of this whole transition was like, remember how well it’s worked out so far.

Like, and it’s just the two of us have loved working together. Like it’s been really as easy as possible. It was always something that’s going to go. Right. And something that doesn’t click. Right. But it’s been really pretty easy and the communication has been simple. So that’s something that after our first call, I was like, I think this is a good fit because honestly, I think based on what you were saying, I feel like we have similar.

Like value structures. And I think that sounds like a wishy washy. Oh, like you have good values. You should work together. But like, if you want to do folks, like if this is something you, I really have to focus on big time, I think that is what’s driven so far, the success of this, obviously like this is an announcement, so we’ll have to see how it goes over the coming months.

But like so far, and I don’t foresee any issues with it. It has been a big success so far. So I think, I, I think you agree with that. Does that sound good? It seems that same values. Yeah,

Paul Kidis: [00:17:01] definitely. Definitely agree with that. It’s been smooth. Uh, I went into it with good intentions and I think you guys, well, you did, you, you referenced yeah.

Reciprocated perfectly. So it’s been, yeah, it’s been really easy and it’s refreshing, like it’s refreshing to just do it with somebody that yeah. Has the same values and not like, yeah. Uh, we’re going to try and screw this person over, or we’re going to do this, or we want to do low ball offers here or do this, or do that.

If there’s none of that, it was just like, this is where we’re at, what we want to do. Where are you use at? And we found that common ground and it’s been, it’s been

Joe Howard: [00:17:40] really good. Yeah, dude. Awesome. I’m really glad to hear that. We obviously like went through all this, but doing this podcast episode really like brings out like real feelings of things.

I’m really happy to hear you say that. Like the word refreshing is like, that’s refreshing for me because that was our entire goal in this. Because when you do an acquisition, like when we sent you like the contract, it was like, It’s such an official thing. It’s like, what if I snuck something in there to like, like you never know what could happen.

And it’s like, it’s, uh, you know, this is a significant financial deal for both of us. Right. You know, for us as a company to be, you know, paying, you know, a multiplier on like an annual profit margin. And for you, it’s a, it’s a significant windfall for you to be able to take home. And like, there’s always a risk of something happening, but I think.

I felt like the foundation we laid in that first call and just like throughout our communication of like mutual respect and just like strong communication, honestly going a little bit, I always felt like your emails and my emails. We always try to do a little bit extra. I tried to always include that extra point of detail and make sure that communication was clear so that you knew, Hey.

Like we’re in this with you. Like we’re on the same team here. We’re w this is, this is us. This is not us as separate. And I think that was really helpful in, in moving things forward. Um, I, I also want to talk about like the, that next part. So like, after we, um, you know, jumped off the discovery call, I went to.

To Nick and Ben, I was like, let’s move this forward. Ben sent over, you know, a nondisclosure agreement that you signed so that we could do our due diligence. You know, Ben and Nick, from Nick from an operation standpoint, just going in and checking out everything, seeing making sure operations were strong and like.

Honestly, like what you said they were, which they were all good then from a financial standpoint, just going and making sure, Hey, this is the profit margin and this is the revenue that’s being generated. Here’s some money X customers, you know, all that stuff from a financial standpoint. NDA is like, Oh, I sound so like official and formal, but it’s really like, it’s a protect you from us being able to like, share your financial details around.

It’s like, that’s a nice closure is we can talk about, you know, your financials and it like protects us as well in the same. Uh, it’s like a two-way street there. How was the like, experience for you going from. Like the, the NDA, Sinai, and going through due diligence to like that, that final contract signing, like, again, like there’s a, I feel like there’s a little bit of like, not even a little bit like, but some significant pressure.

It’s like, it’s a big moment and you want to make sure you get it right. And that it’s. Mutually beneficial for everybody, but I just wanted to know kind of from a personal standpoint, like how you felt selling your business and going through like DocuSign in that final contract and what that process was like up to that point.

Yeah. A hundred

Paul Kidis: [00:20:22] percent. Um, okay, so you sent the NDA. I was like, okay, let’s get an official now, but it’s on there. And you know, the, the sending all the stuff was no problem, because I was just as open and honest with you from the beginning. So I, I think I told you on the first call, like. This is what we’re doing.

This is where we’re at. This is how many customers, et cetera, et cetera. So sharing all that with you was no problem. But, uh, yeah, like it was just a natural progression for me. I knew that you were going to see it one day. So there was no point in the beginning trying to do some fluffy business, like to see it all anyway.

So here’s where it’s at. Uh, for me it was fine.

Joe Howard: [00:21:03] I, I think that’s a really important. Thing to say though, is like a lot of, a lot of what we’ve talked about so far. And the reason we feel like this was a success is because of the trust we built with each other and the relationship we built with each other, just honestly, between like you and me even, and to build that trust.

Like if you were to have said something that like, wasn’t right to the point of like, maybe he was trying to hide something, that’s like a red flag for us. And that like it’s, so it’s hard to build trust. It takes time to build, trust, takes energy. It takes attention, but it only takes like one thing to break trust, right?

Like it takes one wrong move to break all that trust you’ve built. And so I always felt North team always felt like we never found anything that was like, Whoa, what’s this. Like, everything was like, What you said from the beginning, maybe like plus, or minus some small deviation. That’s like, well, now we’re having our second conversation, like a month after the first conversation.

So you brought on some new customers which changed this number a little bit. So like that those are the only changes, but those naturally happen. So yeah, I think that’s super important. And honestly, a lesson I’d give to anybody who’s potentially trying to sell a business or potentially try to buy as like, but especially from the seller’s perspective.

Okay. What a seller should do from my perspective as a buyer, you for sure should be honest and straightforward about everything because most people have good intentions. We have good, we have good intentions. We had good intentions in this deal, and we want to make it mutually beneficial, win for everybody.

We don’t want to have any bad surprises happen that that hurts it for everybody. And you know, yourself potentially included. So I thought you took the right. Approach and all that stuff and said, here’s lay, lay everything bare. And here’s where everything lands.

Paul Kidis: [00:22:46] I feel like we went to, we went into it, both thinking like open honestly, and fair.

Like that’s a big point to bring up, like, as we’re talking about it, we will fail with each other with what we can do, where we’re at, what we’re going to agree on and disagree on. Like we’ll just fair. And that goes a long way, especially

Joe Howard: [00:23:05] in marble. Tell me what the transition has been like from your point of view, because it’s been about three weeks since, since, you know, things were signed and we’ve been working together on operations transitions and that kind of stuff, but also some announcement stuff.

This podcast episode, we wrote some blog posts. You wrote a blog post WPZ, you wrote some emails to your customers, that kind of thing. How’s the transition been from your point of view? Is it lived up to the kind of expectations that were set when we kind of closed on everything? Yeah.

Paul Kidis: [00:23:30] Uh, the day after we signed the deal.

I said to my wife, I turned around, said, all right, we’ve got some work to do. So we basically sat down in front of the laptop and, uh, you know, got everything organized with all the different, uh, logins, all the different things that we had to do. And, you know, again, it was just all normal things. And, uh, it went, it went very smooth, Joe, like I sent you everything that we had a few hiccups with logging in with, you know, passwords or whatever, but.

To be expected when

Joe Howard: [00:24:00] you’re sharing 30 log-ins yeah. I don’t know how am I going to be, right. Yeah.

Paul Kidis: [00:24:04] But in terms of you guys getting access, you know, getting in there, checking everything out. I don’t think there’s been any issues with that. Everything’s been running as per normal. If we didn’t make an announcement, none of the clients would have even known what’s been happening.

Everything’s been running smoothly. The team’s really excited as well to get to know you guys. Yeah. So very good.

Joe Howard: [00:24:27] Yeah, I, I agree. I don’t know if I have much to add, I think has been, it’s been pretty smooth. The only hiccups we’ve had a few log in details, things, a few, like there’s going to be stuff that requires a few back and forth emails anyway.

Like it’s just, you’re not going to be able to package every single thing about the business and just send it off to us and then we’ll just take it all out. Like it’s going to require some back and forth. We need to learn about the business, whereas there’s, maybe we didn’t go over every single detail during the acquisition.

And we knew there, there were things where, like, we know the basics of this. We know, maybe we’ll add a note to like ask Paul about exactly how X, Y, and Z works, you know, once it has gone through, because we just, we want to know it so that we’re good with customers so that we give them the exact same experience and maybe even a better experience, but not change things for them, keep them with, you know, having some consistency and stuff.

So, yeah, I think from our point of view, I think something that we’ve learned honestly, is like, we could do a better job. Of formalizing some of this handover stuff. Like we could, we could put structures in place and systems in place from our point of view, that that really at the end of the day probably are our responsibilities.

Like the handover of logging information. Like we probably should have a better procedure than like sending like a password, like locked PDF files and all this stuff. And it was just a safe, secure way to do it. But like, we should probably have a process for that. Like, you know, this is the first acquisition data we’ve closed, so we don’t have every single thing in place, but this is.

Honestly like great reason to hop on this podcast too, cause we want to improve. And so that’s an area where yeah, maybe a few things weren’t exact right. But we should have, and we will have, but we also should have a better procedure for some things to make things a little smoother, both for you and for us, because you know, the more efficiently we can do some of this handover stuff and like have a core list of all the stuff we need to get through, you know, the faster and more efficient it’s going to be for everybody.

So learning moments for us too. Yeah. I want to know kind of personally how you’re feeling once now that this announcement’s kind of going live. Are you feeling like how has your what’s going on in your brain? Are you, are you happy? This has all happened. Are you feeling like a little bit like, Oh, I kind of like what a journey that was like, I don’t know.

Paul Kidis: [00:26:36] I got mixed feelings, you know, like. All right. So end goal is I can’t wait to have this wrapped up and you guys running the show so I can take a step back and regain that time and start putting it back into myself where it needs to be. I can’t wait for that. And I’m really looking forward to it because, uh, I need it.

But, um, part of me is like, wow, what a amazing journey I’ve been on with this business and gotten to know so many cool people. Our clients have been amazing. Our team is amazing. Like it’s just been really, really good. And, um, letting that go is, yeah, it’s hard, you know? Um, I think I’m going to miss the interaction with everybody more than anything.

Cause you know, you go back, you go from having that team and that communication and that, you know, we’re all doing this together as a mission and we’re gonna fix that. These things to now, I’m going to be back to by myself. I’m probably going to miss that the most, but yeah, it’s been a bit, yeah, different emotions, um, positive and negative, but not negative.

I should say positive. And like all I’m gonna miss that, but yeah, it’s good. Overall.

Joe Howard: [00:27:50] Yeah. Yeah, no, I think negative is a fine way to put out. I have positives and negatives like this yin and yang, right? When you have all these positive feelings that will bring some negative feelings because it’ll ha it’s just, just, this is kind of like how the human brain works.

So I get what you’re saying. Um, I I’m super glad you said that, man. I think one of the biggest things I remember when he got her first call, like one of the biggest things I was thinking was like, and through this whole process, really, I was, I was thinking. This story is so important. Like Paul’s like put his, like blood, sweat, and tears into this business for years.

And like, to transition in a way is a big deal. Like that’s something we have to respect as a company potentially like acquiring these clients in this company. And like, that story is so important. And like one of my biggest drivers in this was like, I wanted us to be here. I wanted you to be here and for you to have mostly positive cathartic feelings about the great journey you’ve been on and feeling good about it being in WP boss hands, obviously there are going to be some mixed emotion.

I’m not saying I don’t want you to feel that I want you to feel that’s what it is to be human, but. That was like, in terms of like this acquisition unit that we’ve launched, like this needs to always be the story we tell this needs to always be the ending of the story for the seller. I wanted you to feel like, yes, great.

You’re going to focus on other things you want to, but like, wow. Like. That part I’m like, I want you to look back at that part of your life with fondness and positivity and yeah. Mate, you’re allowed of course, to miss it, but I wanted you to feel overall positive. So it sounds like we’ve done that, which makes me happy, but yeah.

Is that set mostly true?

Paul Kidis: [00:29:23] Yeah. No, definitely. Definitely. You can take that one off the books.

Joe Howard: [00:29:28] Yes. Excellent. Very important. I’ve I’ve talked with like Allie, who’s our community manager kind of, she did like a mini interview of me of like some of this, maybe some quotes who wanted to put into some of the content we’re putting out.

And I kind of had a little bit of a hard time describing it because there’s like acquisition sounds so like. Monopoly like acquiring to become a model. Like when I think about an acquisition of like a fortune 500 companies, like acquiring competition. Yeah. It’s like so corporate and like launching this unit, like, this is really not what I was going for at all, like what we were going for at all, but that can be the story.

If we don’t tell the story, that can be the story people tell of us. And so I just wanna make it clear to people that like, We want mutually beneficial wins out of this. We want to, like when we, when we were going through the final steps of this, we really thought like, You know, all of your active clients like these are there now are responsible that we can continue to manage your websites.

They can continue to grow their businesses like that is good for them. It is good for you to be able to you yourself, Paul, to be able to focus on the other things you want to focus on. And we can grow our business at the same time at WP buffs, like all three of those things can be wins, but I always found myself like, Kind of caught in the middle of like acquisition unit.

Like, it sounds like you said it sounds so corporate. I don’t want it to, I don’t want it to feel like that or to seem like that to people. So people are like interested in checking out the acquisition and like the details there. WP bluffs.com forward slash acquisitions, go and read about it. It’s not, it’s not corporate or we’d really don’t want to make it feel like that.

We want to. Purchase businesses, but we want to do it in the best. We want to have the best positive impact. That is our new mission at WP buffs to great unforgettable experiences to have positive impacts for people. And that positive impact is going to be what leads us. So hopefully that came across in that whole process too.

Well, it

Paul Kidis: [00:31:15] definitely did come across and yeah, I don’t, I don’t see it as, um, like them, you know, the acquisition corporate style. It hasn’t been like that at all. Um, I went into this wanting to find a better home for my customers. Uh, Oh, clients I should say. And you guys fit that mold, plus, you know, I can’t believe you have a happiness buff and his only job is to make sure that everybody’s happy.

Every client is happy and successful. That’s awesome. So, yeah, we, we couldn’t be happier to do this with you,

Joe Howard: [00:31:50] you know? Cool man. Yeah. Happiness engineers. We’ve got client success folks. Yeah. That’s the name of the game for us. So I want to hear a little bit more about kitties and some of the other stuff you’re working on.

I’d love to hear some more about like the e-commerce stuff to work on, because that seems to be like a big focus for you moving forward.

Yeah.

Paul Kidis: [00:32:08] So it’s always been a focus for me. It’s always been a side hustle, but over the last few years, it’s really just taken off. I don’t know if that’s a combination of.

Uh, myself and the team getting better and, uh, doing better products and better things, or a combination of that. Plus, you know, generally the tide of things moving is towards e-commerce. But the last few years we’ve managed to build, uh, acquire and also manage, I think, up to 60 e-commerce shops now under the umbrella, which are owls.

So yeah, as you can imagine the team and I it’s, it’s very busy. We’re doing very well. And I can’t wait to dive on, like, one of my personal goals is to get over a hundred. It’s going to be on my journey and with all this extra time.

Joe Howard: [00:32:56] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s just time is the only, that’s what they say right?

Time is the only commodity you can’t really make more of, you know, you can always scale a business and make more money and make more, uh, you know, more growth and more stuff about time. That’s you only have a finite amount of that. Uh, not very much of it. So I think using it as wisely as possible is definitely.

The right move. So, Paul, thank you for hopping off the man. I think this is honestly just like selfishly. I thought this is great to touch base with you and hear that you really had a positive experience with this, but tell people as we’re wrapping up, how they can find you online. Now that you’re now with wpc.com, where can they find your domain?

Are you still on social? That kind of stuff.

Paul Kidis: [00:33:33] Yep. Poll caters on Instagram, Facebook. Also Kate is creative. You can just shoot me a message through the website there if you want. That’s

Joe Howard: [00:33:40] it. Cool, man. All right. Last thing I always ask our guests on this podcast to do is to ask our listeners for a little five star iTunes review.

So if you wouldn’t mind just asking folks to give us, leave us a little review. I’d appreciate it. Come on.

Paul Kidis: [00:33:52] Everybody give us a five-star review for five star WordPress support and we’re going to make it easy.

Joe Howard: [00:33:58] Yeah. Yeah. We are going to make it easy. WP mrr.com forward slash iTunes forwards you right there.

So if you’re on a macro, an Apple device, Uh, just type in that extension. You’ll get a nice little redirect. You don’t have to leave a comment, but if you want to, I mean, we love comments. I want to hear about something you learned from this episode. We can send Paul A. Little screenshot and say, thanks for helping us get a review.

It helps us to know what episode types we should do. So we get a few reviews for this. This particular episode, Hey, maybe we’ll have pollen again and talk more about it or we’ll have, you know, maybe the next person who joins WQS family had jump on or talk with more other folks who have sold businesses themselves or by well by businesses.

We’ll do more episodes around at least some comments interview would be excellent. If you have any questions for us at the show, yo@wpmrr.com. If you have questions, maybe a few Q and a episodes coming up that we would like to do. If you’re a new listener to the show, we’ve got a hundred. 2,530 episodes, something like that.

Uh, go ahead to WP mrr.com forward slash podcast. Use the search bar search for some keywords, we’ve got episodes and all sorts of things. So if you have questions or want to learn about something specific, we have an episode about it. Uh, that is all for this week. We will be in your podcast players again next week.

Paul, thanks again for me now, man. It’s been real.

Paul Kidis: [00:35:17] It’s been great. Thank

Joe Howard: [00:35:18] you. .

It’s another refresher of a past episode with Gregory Karelitz, Global Manager of HubSpot for Startups. HubSpot is a growth platform that lets your entire company to work together — from marketing, to sales, to customer service. 

Joe and Gregory explore how HubSpot provides quality integrations towards keeping a solid customer base, solutions the new plugin solves for end-user experience, and the importance of web page functionality.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:49 Welcome to the pod, Gregory Karelitz!
• 04:35 Working at HubSpot for six years
• 06:10 How global partnerships work
• 08:23 A look into the HubSpot’s integration build-out
• 12:57 The complexity of disconnected tools
• 15:28 Sponsorship of global WordCamps
• 18:06 Gregory’s early days in the WordPress space
• 21:18 Did you have a marketing strategy?
• 23:48 The transition into the HubSpot community
• 28:25 Optimizing your business growth with the right features and functions
• 34:36 Innovation towards pushing for mobile-friendly websites
• 37:55 The relationship between sales, marketing, and customer service

Episode Resources:

• Hubspot Website
• Hubspot Twitter
• Greg Karelitz is on Twitter
• HubSpot WordPress Plugin
• Leave an iTunes review or binge-watch past episodes
• Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Yeah, these folks, Joe Howard here. So first off question for you. We are in the middle of a. Project right now, it’s community-based project. Allie is working diligently on it, and we want to create a space for some of our listeners here for some of our 10 days of the WP MRR virtual conference. Some of our folks who work with WP bus just in general, as many WordPress community people as possible.

So the question is where should we launch our new community? So there the couple of obvious answers, which are. No a Slack community or a Facebook group, we’re leaning away from Facebook, but Slack is possible. Definitely what we’ve also seen a couple of other options out there. Circle dot S Oh, tribe dot S O both areas where we can create kind of new social network for us.

I know now Slack or Facebook, but using. Different more community-based software. So I wanted to hear what you think about that. I trust the thoughts of folks listening to this. So if you go right now, twp, mrr.com forward slash survey that’s WP MRR forward slash survey intent. You can literally go there right now.

If you want to, are you on your computer? You can go there. If you don’t respond to them, type it into the mobile browser. Take a quick survey, Allie, put it together. We want to know where to build our community. What you’ll get the most value out of. Cool. Really appreciate that. Today’s episode, we are putting back out there into the world.

This week’s episode, this was a really good one. I always really enjoy chatting with people from HubSpot. It’s crazy. Everybody. I talked to some, there is like a killer marketer surprise, but a Gregory Carolyn’s is definitely no different. We really talked a lot in this episode about his specialty is really in the sales arena, but really this episode books, a lot of them.

Making sales and marketing, more straightforward, more streamlined using WordPress. I think that’ll be helpful for a lot of agencies, freelancers, WordPress professionals out there who want to do a little bit better around sales, one who better at marketing. I’ll tell you that when we. Once we got our like sales and marketing funnels down at WP bus and really started to hit the accelerator, I hired an Alex who’s now our head of growth, man.

He just took it and run with it. And now super predictable customer numbers coming in every month through sales marketing channel. So this is a great episode for people who want to try and push that way as well. All right. That’s all for this little intro for you. Enjoy today’s episode. Yo good people. Welcome back to the UWP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:02:51] And I’m superman.

Joe Howard: [00:02:52] And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. We’ve got the one and only Superman, a hundred podcasts this week. What’s gone up, man.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:03:00] All is good. Just taking a quick break from flying around and trying to save some lives, just to talk about WordPress and I grow some businesses now.

Joe Howard: [00:03:09] Maybe those two things are the same thing flying around and saving people by helping them out with WordPress, the superhero of the WordPress, Superman of the WordPress space.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:03:17] Right when we throw our Clark Kent glasses on that’s when we’re sitting by the computer, otherwise we’ve got the cake flying around, trying to to see some new things and save some people.

Joe Howard: [00:03:27] Nice. That’s a good parallel. Actually. I really liked that. All right. Yeah. Superman on the podcast this week also known as Gregory Karelitz. And I’m saying that last name today. Almost.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:03:44] Perfect. It’s perfect.

Joe Howard: [00:03:45] Nailed it. I practice beforehand. People are listening. We practice the last line. I just wanna make sure I got it right. Cool. And you go by is Gregory or Greg?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:03:52] Usually, if people are mad at me, they call me Gregory. But what’s funny is I also have a tough time pronouncing. My own name is Greg. People are like Ray or gray, like no, Greg but so Greg or Gregory, whichever one, Ron today, Joe, it works for me.

Joe Howard: [00:04:06] Cool. I have the same thing. I say, Joe, what people think? I said, Jim, and then, yeah, only usually when my parents get mad at me, it’s like Joseph Hirshhorn Howard, but mostly Joe is a cup of Joe is a little easier. So I think most people go with that, but yeah. Cool, Greg thanks for hopping on the podcast this week. Why don’t you shoot a little intro? Tell people a little bit about what you’re up to in the WordPress space.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:04:26] Sure. I’ve actually been a WordPress fanatic for a little over 10 years now. I remember building my first website in high school and actually starting businesses then in selling some products using WooCommerce way back when but today I work at HubSpot and I’ve been here for a little over six years.

And most recently I joined the HubSpot WordPress team. Leading our global partnership effort. So aligning with plugins themes, hosting companies with the sole mission of trying to help more businesses grow better, especially the ones using WordPress. Clearly since I’m focusing on the WordPress partnership, but to enable them to do more with their websites and their businesses to help more customers and engage with people in  a really streamlined fashion.

Joe Howard: [00:05:10] Nice. Very cool. Cool. So I just did a a presentation at the HubSpot user group in DC, which I didn’t really even know about that you guys have user groups. And then one of my friends invited me to come talk. And I was. Putting up like the hashtags I want people to use before.

And in my presentation I saw grow better as the HubSpot hashtag which I didn’t even know about. But, and I like that you use that just now in your intro shows, you guys are all on the same page. Even a huge team can all be on the same page and know know what you’re going after.

Cool. Okay. Part of global. Partnerships at HubSpot, obviously WP bus, very good friends of a y’all over at HubSpot where not only of the new WordPress plugin, but just the CRM sales CRM, which we use to part of our sales process. All excellent stuff. Cool. Global partnerships. How has that been diving into that?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:05:56] So it’s been great. I’ve been working on it for a few months now. One of my teammates Kim, who I think you might’ve had on the podcast in the past, he is now completely owning our WordPress plugin. We’re revamping it and relaunching it to the world, which we are slowly doing. But we’re going to have some big news coming out later this year.

And on the partnership side, our whole mission is to align with other businesses that sing very similar narratives to us. So ideally we want to help businesses grow better in the way that we do that is by giving businesses more intelligence around their contacts. So knowing what people are doing across their website from page views to.

Last time that they were by to forms that they were filling out and live chats that they’re engaging with all aggregated onto one timeline. So David’s working night and day with the rest of our engineering team to give a big shout out to them on producing a pretty killer plugin. And then our goal with the partnership realm is to align with other businesses that can continue to enhance the contact experience.

So page builders and e-commerce informs tools in calendar tools, all aggregating to basically give businesses more intelligence around what the heck people are doing on their site and give them more opportunities to attract, engage and delight them wherever they may be in their life cycle.

Joe Howard: [00:07:14] Yeah. I liked the idea a lot because I think WordPress, WordPress is an interesting industry to try and do that in because of the open source madness of it. The pros of open source are great. Like you can use this plugin from over here. You can use this theme from over here and throw it all together on a WordPress site.

And the most of the time it magically works. But then how does the data over here talk to that data over there. People who are visiting your website to buy from you. Don’t. Care about the disjointedness of a theme and the plugin. Like they just want that process to work. And as a business owner, you also have this come from this perspective of okay, I’m using like these 10 different tools in my sales process.

How do I get them all to talk to each other, which is probably easier in like a closed system, but in an open source, it makes it a little bit more difficult. So are you guys, is the plan just build integrations with all of these tools so that you can port that data all in HubSpot so that. You can say, okay, you want to look at all of your calendar stuff from this booking plugin, you can just check it out and HubSpot and the same with other tools. Is that kind of the plan? Just kind of integration buildup.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:08:14] Yeah. That’s exactly it. So I think speaking from like a customer perspective, and this is why I’m so passionate about it, having used WordPress for over 10 years.

When I think back to my experiences, either in starting a website or building websites for other businesses that are pretty thriving businesses, the beauty of open source is I can go pick anything I want and put it right into my environment. The challenge with that is, is with every additional plugin or tool that you incorporate into your tool belt.

It doesn’t just add one more level of sophistication. It actually adds, I think, like maybe a factor and factorial level of complications, because now you have one more tool that has to connect with the seven other tools you already have. And so starting a business and starting a website is actually really easy today with easy hosting and themes.

And then you can pick the plugins, but when you start to begin your growth endeavors is where that tech debt, that system begins to really fall apart and break. And that’s what we’re trying to solve here is we’re not necessarily the. Best form tool. We may not be, the best live chat tool, but we’re working hard to try to make our pieces of the puzzle.

Really good, but we’re going out and building world-class integrations with the best in class companies where gravity forms just released about a month ago, their HubSpot ad-on that makes gravity forms and HubSpot works seamlessly together. And now we’re doing that across every other vertical that sings that narrative of contact management businesses can use any tool they want. But HubSpot becomes the centerpiece of all that contact information that allows you as the business owner to just know everything about everybody, but not having to worry about connecting too many dots.

Joe Howard: [00:09:54] Yeah. That’s a cool idea. Even just with that one example, you said the way we use HubSpot and connected to our contact form right now is we just have our contact form, sends an email to this email address.

So that email is hooked into HubSpot. That’s fine, that sends the contact into HubSpot. We can start the sales process there, but it would be nice if we could have different forms that automatically fill into HubSpot so that when they come in, they’re automatically marked as a lead. They’re automatically marked as whatever the HubSpot kind of The areas we have in HubSpot. That would be nice.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:10:24] To that note too, I think like with that challenge, that’s what our plugin solves today is we have this feature that David’s built and the teams built called collected forms. That actually when you install that spot plugin, It adds a script on top of every form that already exists on your website almost as a listener.

So when somebody fills out that form and they fill out at, Joe at WP buffs.com, that information automatically sinks into HubSpot, but no longer do you have to get that email notification and be like, Hey team, can you add this to the CRM? And then lose track of everything? Now cooking also establish on that person, just from the plugin so that now you can see all the pages Joe’s actually already viewed the form that he filled out and then use that intelligently to potentially even serve it up, to do an email marketing campaign, or to have your team reach out to say, Hey, Joe, we actually noticed you looked at our pricing page and our services page, and we’re also looking at other assets, how can we help you? So the whole goal is to give you context. To your contacts to make sure that you can healthily and in a really easy way, build great relationships.

Joe Howard: [00:11:35] Yeah. I feel like the personalization of the, of that contact and that communication is really huge in our sales process. And so the more information we can have about what people are doing across all of across everything we do, whether it’s the website, whether it’s in HubSpot, whether it’s like in the meeting, people booked the more information we can have, the more.

The more informed we can be when we’re going through the sales process, because in our mind, sales is just education. We treated us like we just want to give you we want to show the value of our tool as it is going to be most valuable to you or the value of our services.

What’s most valuable to you. And some people are like, they just looked at the security page, obviously interested in security. So we want to talk more about security when we’re, either on a call with them or anything. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man, it sounded, it sounds like the plugin is going pretty well.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:12:20] So far, I think there’s 80,000 plus active users. I think there’s a four and a half star rating which we feel good about it. We want to get that higher. But I also think with just our whole mission is we’re going and doing customer research and talking to our partners and our customers and the agencies.

And just saying what is it that you need? And I think a lot of times everything that you mentioned from disconnected tools, it’s not the disconnected tools. That’s the problem. It’s. W why does that matter? It’s then I’m doing my work in MailChimp, and then I have WP forms and then I have my ads tool with HootSweet and then I also have my social media over here. And then you have, you hire a person on your team and it’s all complicated. And they can’t grow. So we’re on that mission to help businesses grow better and figure out a way to do it in a really easy fashion that works nicely with tools that they may already be using today.

Joe Howard: [00:13:10] Yeah, you actually just described exactly what we did and it was like, we’ve got a lot of marketing and stuff to take care of.

That’s all slightly complicated and we always try to make it more automated and make it simpler. But yeah, my solution to that was okay, I’m hiring a marketer. So now Caitlin doesn’t have to, Mark is our head of marketing and she handles all the marketing, but we didn’t really solve that many problems in that higher of making things truly simpler and all.

Core in one place. It’s a continual journey that we’re always trying to do better at, but yeah. I mean I tell people all the time, the way to scale correctly is to figure out the things that you’re doing over and over again, and to automate them and to figure out what those hard pieces are and try and make them a little easier. And if you can do that, like you’ll be in a pretty good place. So that even when you do hire someone, they’re efficient with what they do.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:13:56] A hundred percent and then it’s fun to then it’s fun to, it’s The systems I think is one of the biggest challenges for people today. And I don’t know if that will ever go away. I actually feel like it’s just getting worse and worse with the more tools that get created. But I think in order to do it correctly is you will always have to hire great people, but ideally the systems take care of all the stuff like you mentioned that needs to be automated. And then the people can do their job in a system that works in a way that is repeatable. And that’s what we’re hoping to. To do with you guys as partners and as all these other companies that we’re trying to help with. And it’s a really fun mission to rally around.

Joe Howard: [00:14:35] Yeah, for sure, man. That’s cool. Now are you guys correct me if I’m wrong here, but are you guys now a global sponsor for word camps or maybe just a major sponsor of a lot of word camps?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:14:46] Yeah. So I believe we’re a global sponsor at this point. We’re going to, we were just at WordCamp Europe a few months back, which was super fun. And then we have us coming up and we’re also trying to jump into a few other word camps. I think Dublin being one of them. Nice. And it’s just an awesome way to get connected with folks and get to meet people in person. And I think this is where I get the fan boy is like, Oh my God, I’ve used your tools for and it’s just a, it’s a really cool way to immerse in the community.

Joe Howard: [00:15:12] Yeah. Love meeting people who make, create that amazing plugin. And a lot of times on these big, pretty successful businesses financially. And you’re like, Oh, that person is basically, you go talk to them. It’s Oh, they’re just a person. It’s just a guy who girl who created a plugin. And yeah, there’s just like the rest of us. So I liked that about word camps. It humanizes everybody. Yeah. Have you made it to a few words, camps around?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:15:32] So I had my first one at work camp Europe. Yeah, good start. I’m walking up to the these companies, whether they be plugging in theme or even at the hosting companies. And I was just like, I was actually, I was like, I had a fan boy moment with all of them and I was like, tapping my teammates on the shoulder Oh my God.

Look and tell the mentor, Oh my God, look, it’s her ex. And I like to think of the luckiest person in the world because now I get to go work hand in hand with these businesses to figure out more ways to do it. So word camps, killer. And it’s just cool to get, to meet the people behind the madness.

Joe Howard: [00:16:05] Yeah, I hear you. And now you’re officially like a WordPress nerd. Now that you’ve nerded out over these these companies you’ve worked with over the last little while and you can meet them at word gaps, right? Yeah, man. You also mentioned that you’ve been in WordPress for a long time, so it’s it’s interesting kind of that transition from being in the WordPress space, maybe, selling your own stuff with WooCommerce, all that, and eventually moving into HubSpot and now helping HubSpot to know what it’s like to come into the WordPress community because a lot of.

Businesses have tried and failed to do so because they don’t really get the WordPress space. They treated it as like a pure business opportunity, which it can be it right. There’s a there’s essences of that in everywhere, but the community piece is really important. And so the kind of global sponsorships you’re doing as well as the kind of, having you as part of the team and maybe other people on the team as well, who are like. WordPress people who’ve been around WordPress for a long time and understand the ecosystem. But I love to start with the stuff you did with WordPress before. What kind of stuff were you selling on WooCommerce and how did that go for you?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:17:07] So my first business ever on on WordPress was in high school and after doing woodworking all four years of high school, one of my buddies and I created a handmade wooden pen company. And so we were making like these beautiful exotic woods and turn them like physically on our lave into pens. And we started selling them both in stores and online. And that was like my first dipping of the toe into website building. And we were actually making a good amount of money. It was super cool.

It’s two little inexperienced high school kids figuring out how to sell a product was super cool. And actually my friend that I was doing that with has gone on to build a company called loci, which is a bracelet company that has helped raise. Tens of millions of dollars for different charitable causes.

And you see these bracelets now everywhere. So like that was our first step into WordPress and it’s a website building. Then I did another one in college that was a boat shoe business. And in a matter of months we were doing over, I think it was a few hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Which was pretty cool all through commerce, all for free, adding a few extensions into it. And then from there it was just like helping my friends and a couple other people that wanted business help and building websites. And it was all on WordPress. And now it’s a see like how the ecosystem’s grown is so fun to be on the other side of trying to add value back to the people trying to create.

Businesses and and beautiful website experiences trying to leverage HubSpot. So it’s been like a full circle journey and I get, I love putting myself, I am the customer. I still build on WordPress every single night. I’m like, I’m that geek, but that’s kinda been my journey throughout it all. And I probably dabbled in over a hundred websites and just. Do it for fun to continue to learn. And it actually is like my escape and don’t think about anything. So it’s so fun to be on the other side, getting to try to orchestrate a plugin and a, in a business endeavor to help more people.

Joe Howard: [00:19:07] Cool. I like what you said about that. You’re still a customer. I think that’s just like something I want to pick out for cause that’s, I think that’s so important for everybody to always be doing. You lose touch with the customer. It’s easy to lose touch with customer. It’s easy. It’s really easy to go and build a tool. Do you want to, all of these cool features, we have to have these five features.

Of course you have to have them. They’re awesome. But if you don’t talk to users, you don’t, and especially if you’re not a user, then it’s hard. It becomes harder to really build what people are going to want. What’s going to add value to people. So I liked that. When you were building these WooCommerce sites, you are selling, hundreds of thousands worth of like boat shoes and all sorts of stuff.

Maybe this was even if this was from high school on this may have been even like pre HubSpot pre SEO was around, but inbound marketing hadn’t made me not have been like named by HubSpot. So did you have a strategy behind like growing these small sites into making pretty significant revenue? Like what was your marketing strategy back then?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:20:01] Oh, man, I wish I had a strategy that was cool with the boat shoe endeavor is we had built a cool product. And then from there we put together a pretty good looking website. That just looked really nice where we had super high quality photos and not a ton of text and big images that, I think were enticing.

But the channel that we had tapped into then was college fraternity and sororities. And so I thought what was really cool was and I wish I had a contact management tool then was, we were just using spreadsheets. And literally going down the line and connecting with different fraternity and sorority and schools.

Cause we could do custom and Bostons on these shoes of any different logo. And basically say Hey we turned them all into ambassadors. Where if they sold a pair of shoes, we could give them a kickback of five to $10. And what was really cool is we then had an an army of these ambassadors that were looking to make money, spread a cool product and be more aligned with their own communities and have a unique product to bring to it.

And it worked really well. So that was like our initial go to market there. Had I done it all over again? I probably would have gone a lot heavier into search. I had no idea what I was doing back then. I still don’t know that much, but I’m now inside the walls of HubSpot I, in order to get to see really the machine behind the why, the how and the, what. Which is also what we’re trying to teach the world today, too.

Joe Howard: [00:21:26] Yeah, for sure. I love hearing about, marketing strategies. People tried 10, 15 years ago. It’s always, looking back, we’ll probably say the same thing in 15 years today. We’ll be like, Oh, are we doing back then? And that was crazy. We were just focusing on content marketing. There’s so much more now, but Yeah. It’s, when I started WP buffs, like before we were focused on any content marketing of any sort, I was like posting on Quora, like answering questions, like driving almost no traffic, like spending like hours answering questions and seeing like no traffic come up.

So we’ve all definitely had our like marketing. I dunno what I’m doing. That’s at times they’re not in a lot of marketing Oh. Classes for digital marketing at like universities. Like a lot of us are self-taught and a lot of the self-taught this is Figuring it out and try and stuff and seeing what works.

So yeah. Cool. Okay. So you had those sites, let’s talk about the transition to HubSpot. Did you have some other stuff in between, and then were you doing some marketing stuff and you were like maybe I should just go to the gold standard of marketing people and go work at HubSpot. Like how did that, how did you find your position there originally?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:22:27] Yeah. So while I was in school, I was doing the boat shoe business and then ended up deciding I need to learn a lot more before continuing down this path because we had. Probably a thousand different skews, our business model wasn’t super tight.

And I was like, you know what? Instead of grinding out on something that I’m not like I wasn’t ever super passionate about boat shoes. But I loved building websites and I loved doing marketing and I loved trying to figure out and talk to people to help them with their own stuff. I actually was going to go one of two paths after school, either be a teacher.

Or go work at HubSpot and I was super lucky to get an entry-level sales job at HubSpot, and I did that for about 18 months and then was a sales rep for another 18 months and then had an awesome experience getting to help. Start and build what’s now called HubSpot for startups after that Kim, who was the global head of it all, I came in to help her build the programming behind it and the partnerships.

And I did that for about three years and now And the last few months got to join the WordPress efforts to really meet my passion of WordPress and websites with HubSpot and try to help align partnerships and work alongside product and alongside content to try to build something really special in a new category inside of WordPress. So that’s been my journey and I just feel lucky to be able to learn at every single step. And this one feels the exact same way.

Joe Howard: [00:23:53] Yeah. Got you, man. Yeah. Six years is a long time at one company. From my perspective, I think WP boss is like the first thing I’ve spent. We just celebrated our four year anniversary. But the first year was thanks, man. Thank you. The first year was definitely like doing stuff on the side. Like I had a nine to five and I was doing five to nine. So like full-time I really been only been doing this for three years or so, but before that. I worked a few jobs for a year, maybe two years, max one was a high school math teacher. I was a high school math teacher for a couple of years. So it was your other route. Yeah. But yeah, it seems like your HubSpot is a kind of place that you started and stuck there. To me that says a lot about the company.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:24:34] Yeah. I, so when I started, I think it was around 500 employees now. I think there’s 3,500 employees. Yeah. It’s grown a lot since 500. That’s crazy. Oh my goodness. I just feel like everyday I get to be a student of the business. And I think what’s also really cool. And to this point that we’re also trying to bring into WordPress is like the culture of our business is.

Try as hard as you can. And if you fail, learn from it and then try something slightly different to see if you can continue to make it work. And so like the executive team and the leadership team and everybody supporting that there’s no wrong answer. There’s certainly a better answer. And it’s and we know that there’s a path to getting that better answer.

Which is why we go and do a ton of research and speak with partners and customers and say what is it you want? And then we come back and try to figure out the best ways to build it. And then how do we distribute it? And so all along the way everything that’s happened inside of HubSpot in some way, shape or form feels like it started as a little experiment.

And our plugin was actually an experiment started. Probably five years ago by these two guys, Andy and Nelson, and it’s just had its many iterations and it feels like now we’ve figured out what it is we want to do. And now we have the energy behind it to try to make it something special and make a difference in the WordPress space. That the journey is evolving and who knows what another year look like of it, but we’re keeping our eyes open and our ears open to make sure we’re listening to what people are saying and try to take that, to see what we can do to build.

Joe Howard: [00:26:07] Yeah. Yeah. What do you think at the same time, 2020 looks like from your experience so far doing a WordPress HubSpot stuff?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:26:15] My honest opinion.

Joe Howard: [00:26:16] Yeah.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:26:17] Let me, I’ll try to break it down for you. And this was just solely from a customer’s perspective. I think like our strategy is trying to play from that, but I’m going to put my shoes in the, myself, in the shoes of the listeners and the better the customers. And perhaps even the agencies out there building on WordPress is hard.

It’s gotten easier. If you are brand new to the ecosystem or have been done doing it before you sign up for a host, you probably have your domain and live somewhere else. You connect the two together. You end up WordPress inside that host you install a theme and a few plugins, and then you make your site look awesome.

And then what today we are. So people say I’m looking to redesign my website. I’m looking to redesign my website and we go and look at it and it’s not bad. So what’s the problem, right? I think the nature of WordPress and all these a hundred million plus websites in it, people care more about the look of their website than the way it actually helps perform their business.

I think that’s about to fundamentally change that’s our guests what’s happening now is if you look at the world’s best, plug-ins, there’s a select few that are monsters in the space. And everybody’s using them, which is awesome. It’s the way it should be. I think what happens in the long tail is it’s very hard to be a new business in the plugin space today and actually do great.

The service providers out there. Like you guys are adding a ton of value by connecting the dots between these super premium plugins, but how are you growing your business? It still comes down to my site. Looks good and has good features. That’s not enough today. The next phase of what I believe will happen inside of WordPress is this business growth phase.

Meaning how do we take our beautiful website and how do we attract the right people, engage with them the way that they want to be engaged and then delight them throughout the process that’s business model. That’s also operations and systems. And I think what we’re starting to see, and I’ll give an example of it.

Is you have to now tailor everything you do, not to your desire, but to the desire of the customer. The example I’ll use is I have a, I have friends that own and operate a big function hall just South of Boston. They are like, if not the best, one of the best in Boston for weddings, corporate events, social events, you name it.

Their website, they just went through a redesign that cost them a good amount of Chuck, a good amount of chunk of change. And the company that they used actually killed a bunch of pages that were ranking really? Oh man. Researching and Googling Boston Indian weddings. They used to rank number one and that page, because it didn’t fit the mold of the look and feel was killed.

So we had to then go back and say, what the heck do we want to do right now? You look better, but you don’t function better. And that traffic that you were once getting isn’t coming anymore, and this is happening, I’m going to put a guesstimate to it. Probably 30% of the time when I hear people do redesigns, we’re going to, we’re going to slim down our site.

We’re going to make it look better. But yes, that can be great for usability, but it can also absolutely kill everything that you’ve worked hard to gain. So we looked at it and we said, okay, what are your top performing pages? They have a weddings page. They have a homepage, they have a corporate events page.

They have a couple of other ones, but these were the ones from Google analytics with the WPM U dev plugin. We said, these are the top pages that people are coming on today. Great. Let’s start there. We put HubSpot live chat on their site, all through the plugin. And within a two month period, they generated 100 leads.

And the experience that was going through on that live chat is people don’t want to fill out long registration forms or say I’m having an a 150 person wedding on this date with this amount of it’s too much information. Stop it. Let’s now make it feel like texting. Let’s make it feel like customers can come to you and ask the questions without being scared to fill out a long form without giving too much information.

And so this live chat and the bot that you can turn on for free using HubSpot. The first thing that would prompt to do is say, Hey, where are your Lombardo’s concierge service bot, please chat with us and let us know where you’re looking for help with. And the first prompt is what are you looking for?

Wedding corporate event, menus, catering, whatever, when they click wedding, it says, Oh, great, congrats. When are you looking to have your wedding? They then ask a date. All of this feels human to human, but really there’s a bot behind the scene. They were generated a hundred leads in two months. So feature functionality and user experience.

That user experience is the last bullet that I think is going to start coming into WordPress. And it’s going to come in a big way. You now have to deliver great experiences wherever people are and do it in a way that’s unified to their interests. That also helps you engage with them where you said it best you have a sales team, but you just like to think of them as helping and supporting. That’s all you can do today. You just have to make sure that you’re converting people and talking to people in the right way. And then now they know everything about them and can tailor the right audience or the right information to the right audience.

Joe Howard: [00:31:30] Yeah, for sure, man, we used the live chat on our website, generates a ton of leads for us.

We’ve experimented with a bot as well. And it’s all pretty interesting to see how people are interacting with kind of such a, whether it’s a bot or truly chatting with us, it’s a much easier experience. It’s more like one-on-one experience in filling out a form or something. And a lot of people. Dig it and a lot of people.

Yeah, definitely generates a lot of leads for us. Yeah. I’d love to hear a little bit also about the. Like the direction we’re going in terms of mobile versus desktop. You’re talking a lot about like giving people great experiences. How are you guys and how is HubSpot helping people to do this?

Maybe not even just in the WordPress space, but in the WordPress space too, but with the move to mobile, everyone’s using their mobile phones. You mentioned like texting and such or Interacting with people like it’s texting, but yeah. What’s HubSpot about doing in terms of pushing, helping marketers to push into the mobile space.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:32:27] Yeah. Yeah. So when it comes to website development on specifically on WordPress, we’re partnering with the leaders in page building and we have our own CMS as well. That’s fully mobile responsive. That is pretty killer and is more tailored towards a. For businesses really trying to grow and not having to have the headache of infrastruct.

Sure. But if people are on WordPress, we’re partnering with if the world’s leaders in page building space. So that people can build beautiful mobile, responsive websites, and then have that live chat or engagement points or responsive email, all powered through the mobile. So if you were to actually even go, if you were to install HubSpot plugin and turn, live chat on your website somebody could live chat you and you could be using your Android or iPhone.

And even when you’re on the, go at dinner with your spouse or friends and you get a live chat on your site, you can respond to them from your mobile device now through the app. So it’s like your business doesn’t ever sleep, and you have to make sure that you can tailor your content and your follow-up and the responses that will suit.

The customer and like for Lombardo’s when people are doing wedding research, they’re not working during the day, they’re doing it at nine o’clock at night. So the bot responding to them to tee up the right information was all that was missing in their ingredient. So it’s just helping the people where they are when they are with the right sort of information that only you as the business owner can really figure out by going to survey your customers.

Joe Howard: [00:34:01] Yeah. It’s so funny how I have this Picture of my head of two guys digging holes in the door. And one guy’s turning around cause he’s tired and he’s ah, this is worthless. And he, there’s a big chunk of gold. And he was just about to hit the gold, but he just turned around because he was tired or the other guy is still going and he’s going to, he’s going to be the one to get that gold.

But anyway, that is just a parallel for, there’s usually not, I’m sure that there are a hundred things. A lot of business owners are doing wrong, but in terms of the high impact stuff, there’s probably not a hundred high-impact things are probably like two or three small changes you can make to the business that will have 80% of the impact you’re looking to have.

I’m a big like Pareto principle guys. So I’m always thinking what’s the minimum I could put in to have the most impact, not just because I’m lazy, but that’s how you should think, like you should think about how can I have that biggest impact in terms of my efficiency. I think HubSpot has has.

Has been one of those small changes that we’ve made to like have a big impact on the business? We were doing like all of our sales, like in our help desk software before. And it was like, Shitty, like not the way you should do things, especially when you have a small sales team. And it was always switching to HubSpot was like, Oh this is how professionals do sales. And now we’re getting into the marketing side of things too. Yeah. Cool man. And it sounds like for pushing the mobile and helping people, just the marketing in general. So I’ll go on as well.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:35:17] And I think Th the thought that I have, and I think this is what our executive team and a lot of us think about it keeps us up at night inside of HubSpot too, is today.

I think the functionality and division between sales, marketing, and services business is very fragmented. But what we’ve learned is that marketing can actually be your best sales. And sales can be your best marketing and customer service. Now, if you make customers happy and satisfied, it’s your best marketing and your best sales.

So I think we’re pushing businesses to try to do is become a little bit more modern and customer centric. And what that means is when you put them at the center of everything you’re doing, it gives marketing sales and services or a hybrid of all the above a unified mission. And like our services team is absolutely stellar and their goal is to make customers happy.

And guess what? When they’re happy, they’re the ones who, or the loudest microphone turning around to social media, turning around to the real engines, turning around and being the first ones to say it, Oh, we love HubSpot. We love this. We love that. Which just leads to more people finding that delight and like it, it’s not rocket science.

Every business can go out there and do it today, just know which are your best customers and which customers need your help. And we believe that a contact management tool is the right way to do that and just make sure you’re helpful. I couldn’t have said it better myself. I think that’s a great place to wrap up, but before we like officially wrap up, let’s do a little wind down.

Where can people find you online? Are you on social? Where can people like cook into the HubSpot? Whether it’s like the new plugin or just if they’re interested in like checking out, oh, the shit HubSpot, but we only talked about a fraction of the stuff HubSpot does, but yeah, if you want to check all that out, where’s all that at.

So if you’re looking for more information on like HubSpot’s WordPress plugin, just search HubSpot in the WordPress repository and it’ll be the first thing that comes up. If I can try to engage with anybody, I don’t know if anybody even would care to engage with me, but on, on Twitter G Corel it’s.

I happy to engage with people there or chat with them or LinkedIn, whatever, maybe. And then I think like the best learning opportunity is probably not anywhere other than going to talk to your customers. So that if I have one unsolicited piece of advice to the listening crew here is stop what you’re doing, or tonight, take a pen and paper and go through your process as a customer.

Do an incognito window start Googling things that would lead you to your business or to your industry, hit your website and say, okay, what next? Okay. So I click that then what then? Okay. Then I click that then what, and you will find so many damn doors that are closed, and if you can start opening up a door with a live chat, with a form, with a good piece of content. You are going to incrementally change your business and that’s how businesses actually achieve growth. It’s not a silver bullet.

Joe Howard: [00:38:21] Yeah, not a silver bullet is great advice. Everyone’s always what’s the one thing I can do to Scott. It’s not, it doesn’t always work that way. In fact, most time. It usually doesn’t. Yeah. HubSpot’s also on our recommended tools, WordPress tools page at WP buffs. You can just scroll to the footer. It’s just recommended tools. HubSpot’s one of our recommended ones there not only because we love the plugin, but we’re. Power users. So yeah, you can find a link there as well. Makes you follow Gregory on Twitter. What’s that handle again?

Gregory Karelitz: [00:38:51] Gregory gee corral. It’s not anything exciting there. 

Joe Howard: [00:38:57] Yeah, we’ll see if people can spell it. We’ll have we’ll link out to that in the show notes and stuff. So people are listening. Just check out the podcast episode there. And you can find it. Last thing I always ask. Guests to do on the podcast. Greg is just to ask our audience for a little five star iTunes review for the podcast. If you wouldn’t mind giving them a little ask.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:39:17] Why would they not give you a five star?

Joe Howard: [00:39:19] Yeah, exactly.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:39:20] I think won’t be end of the day. Like Joe, you’re doing super cool things. I think if it takes 30 seconds tops for somebody to go click on iTunes or click on anything to give you a review. If they’re listening to this show, they better do it. And then. Hit us up on Twitter to say you gave the five star review so we can give you some love back and in that way make the community keep going round and round. So go give your five star review. Go hit up, Joe on Twitter, hit me up on Twitter. We’re going to retweet that out and give you guys some love right back and try to publicize your own businesses through our channels too. I can’t guarantee that for Joe, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna hold.

Joe Howard: [00:39:54] Ah, yeah, I won’t do that. I hate everybody now. Okay. Yeah. Thanks man. Appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. And if you’re leaving an iTunes review, make sure you mentioned Greg in the comments. Hey, something you learned about the episode and we’ll shoot that to Greg so he can say, Oh, I’m glad someone got something solid out of the episode. You can go to WP mrr.com/itunes. We direct you right to the iTunes page. Pretty easy to leave a review. There, if you wouldn’t like a new listeners, if you are, this is your first time listening or one of your first few episodes, we’ve got a ton of content. We’ve got dozens of episodes, Greg. I think you’re going to be episode 60.

So we’ve got a ton of content in the backlog. Yeah, if you are having certain challenges with WordPress, we’ve probably talked about it. Want to grow and scale your business. Go check out some old content and go listen to what is going to help you today. If you’re a new listener or an oldest, and then you have questions for us for one of do smart Q and a episode.

So shoot any questions you have to yo@wpmrr.com I man that. Inbox personally. So I will get back to you and we’ll answer some questions live here on the podcast. Christina wpmrr.com. If you are an agency or freelancer or WordPress professional, and you want to focus more on monthly recurring revenue, check out the video.

Of course we have open sources, everything we do at WP Buffs, so that you can sell care plans, ongoing support, do 24 seven stuff and make your clients. Delighted like Greg and I were talking about today. One delight to your clients. You can do that at 75% off the care plan, core video course. Grab it while it’s there. I don’t know what that expression. I don’t know why he’s Xpression but it’s there. Cool. That is it for this week. We’ll catch you all again next week, Greg. Thanks again for hopping on. It’s been real.

Gregory Karelitz: [00:41:35] Thank you guys.

In today’s episode, we look back to a previous episode with Bhanu Ahluwalia of Rank Math – a Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress that makes it easy for anyone to optimize their content with built-in suggestions based on widely-accepted best practices.

Joe and Bhanu talk about Rank Math as a plugin, the company’s growth over the years and the team’s future plans, the launch in Product Hunt, and how to optimize your mailing list.

Listen in to learn more about WordPress plugins!

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 02:11 Welcome to the pod, Bhanu Ahluwalia!
• 04:45 How Rank Math started
• 07:21 What it felt to reach out to Yoast
• 08:42 What’s growth like for Rank Math?
• 12:49 How long did it take to build?
• 16:22 What people can expect from Rank Math
• 22:20 What to focus on to grow
• 25:13 Future plans for Rank Math
• 28:17 The Product Hunt launch
• 31:52 Optimizing your mailing list

Episode Resources

• Check out the Rank Math Website
• Join the Rank Math Facebook Group
• Check out Bhanu’s other project My Theme Shop
• Contact Bhanu by Email
• Leave an iTunes review or binge watch past episodes
• Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod
• Visit the WPMRR website

Podcast Transcript:

Joe Howard: [00:00:00] Hey folks, Joe Howard here. Hope you liked last week’s episode of the podcast. We tried something a little new. We have our Newman’s on our team who does a WP AMA series on YouTube. And so we thought we’d do a little kind of cross promotion. Uh, see if some of the podcasts listeners maybe didn’t know about the WP AMA show.

So we, uh, release the audio here on the podcast last week. She did a great episode with Tracy Lavesque from yak, starting, starting an adverse agency. Really cool. Listen, I love tuning into alleys, WPA AMA series. So feel free to check those out in the future. This week? Well, we’ve got kind of a repeat episode this week, a happy 20, 21 to everybody out there.

I am now in Mexico, my wife and a little son, we all moved down here for the winter. So we’re kinda hanging in our place and joined the warm weather. And yeah, I haven’t had as much time to record as many episodes as I’d like to. So unfortunately, no new episode this week, but I’m going to, re-release one of the most popular episodes we’ve ever had on the podcast.

This episode is about a WordPress plugin that hit 300,000 active installs. Actually, I’ll try to make sure I’m correct there in about a year and a half. Uh, this is Banu Ali, Malia. All while. Yes. Or Bhanu if I’m butchering your last name. Uh, but Bonnie will runs rank meth, relaunched WP bus.com about eight months ago now.

Uh, and we actually switched from, uh, using our old SEO plugin to using rank math. And it’s been really fantastic change for us. So we’re ranking as users here at WP bus we’ve purchasers of the pro plugin that they’ve recently released and yeah, it’s been. Pretty cool to see the growth of a bond news plugin and his team’s plugin over the years. So enjoy the listen and we’ll be in the podcast players again next Tuesday. All right. Enjoy it. Yo, good word, press people. Welcome back to the WP MRR WordPress podcast. I’m Joe.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:02:22] Hey, I’m obiwan.

Joe Howard: [00:02:23] And you’re listening to the WordPress business podcast. We’ve got  on the pod this week. Any background behind why you chose obiwan big star Wars fan.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:02:34] I just finished training  to become an SU Jedi.

Joe Howard: [00:02:39] Nice. We one’s always an excellent character selection. So we’ve got  on the pod with this week also known as Bhanu Ahluwalia yeah.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:02:49] Or that’s perfect. Yes, that’s  yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:02:52] The H in there threw me for a second, but uh, welcome to the podcast. This is actually kind of a long time coming. I remember that we met at PressNomics this year. Right? You were there and we chatted there for a few minute.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:03:04] Yeah. Thank you for having me. Yes, we did chat at personal mix and. We were in contact with each other, I guess since August, 2019.

Joe Howard: [00:03:14] Yeah. And it’s been a little while and we’ve been kind of going back and forth, like trying to get you on the podcast and timing, just like hasn’t worked out. And then I went on parental leave for three months and I came back and the, one of the, actually I’m not even joking about this.

One of the first things I did when I came back was like, I got to get Bhanu on the podcast because we went through this whole thing and it’s just like, we got to get them on. This is crazy. So I’m glad you were finally able to make it and actually very good timing for you to be on the podcast, which we’ll talk more about in this episode, but tell folks a little bit more about, you know, what you do in the WordPress space.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:03:44] Okay. So I have a couple of companies, one of them is called My Theme Shop and the other one. Which is, uh, gaining quite attraction lately is called Rank Math SEO. So Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress and within a span of like 1.5 years, we have gained over 300,000 active installations and over 1000 positive reviews on wordpress.org.

Joe Howard: [00:04:06] Yeah. Whoa. Okay. This is really fun for me when I learn new things on the podcast too. I didn’t know that you were also behind my theme shop cause I know My Theme Shop and so I didn’t know. Okay. Do My Theme Shop and you do Rank Math. So you’ve got like kind of a two-edged sword there. It’s cool.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:04:19] I personally prefer to keep myself like an underdog. I do not prefer going public way too many times. That is like me, but the Rank Math required me to be a public face. So that’s why people have now started relating me with Rank Math. Yeah. Well.

Joe Howard: [00:04:36] I definitely did after we met in, uh, at PressNomics, I kind of knew you as the guy behind, uh, rank math. And I remember like six months ago I had heard of Rank Math, but it maybe it was still kind of gaining a little traction, you know? And then I went on parental leave and I come back and I’m like, Whoa, like every, everyone seems to be talking about rank math. Tell me a little bit about kind of the background too. Even wanting to get started with a plugin that helps folks with SEO on their site when there’s obviously most people in the WordPress space know about Yoast. SEO is like one of the major plugins. What caused you to say, like, I know there’s this big player out there in that, but like, I think I can compete. Like how did that whole thanks dart.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:05:14] Yeah, it feels like back in 2015. We also run several niche websites because a background of ours, the founders is like we have been, and we still are kind of professional bloggers. And we hold premium medicines publish account. So oftentimes we ran into issues with the SEO plugins that we had to install tens of different SEO plugins, because as he was evolving via too much, and we realized that all the other rescue plugs in this space, they were kind of restraining us and they had their own vision.

So we developed something for ourselves. Internally. And we used that plugin for almost 3.5 years, and then we realized that, okay, we have built something good and it is performing really well for us. Let’s try and put it out. And when we released the plugin for everyone, we were surprised because we were not expecting to be very honest, to be competing against everyone.

But yes, it comes naturally. So I initially emailed, used. And I respect him for that, that I emailed him. And I mentioned this to him that I know that we are entering into, uh, your area of expertise. And we do not want to do any sort of bad molting about you. And we haven’t done that. And we would never do that because we still respect how used to have, has taken before process you, because that was, I remember my first SEO plugin. And we use that ourselves and we relied on that very much and then we lost it and then people kind of liked it because for the simplicity and the kind of tasks, which it does, and it reflects, uh, with the numbers which we have right now that people were in actual need of an SEO plugin.

Joe Howard: [00:06:52] Yeah, it’s so cool. I’m also not surprised that building the plugin was kind of, it came from your own needs and some of your clients need some of the folks you worked with, you built this thing that just pushed, uh, you know, it did everything you needed it to do. And then you said, well, maybe other people could use this too.

I know you hear a lot of starter stories that are like, I was scratching my own itch and then it turned out other people needed there. Itches scratched too. Um, so we released it out. I did not know that about you reaching out to Yoast as well, just as kind of like, Hey, virtual handshake or press space is pretty big. We can all be friends without necessarily like always competing against each other. Was that like nervous? Were you nervous at all reaching out? Like, did you, what kind of response did you expect? Was it like a little nerve wracking for you? And w yeah. Tell me a little more about that. So that’s interesting.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:07:40] I was kind of nervous. And I remember the email that I remember the title or something like longtime fan, but first time mailing you. So it was like that. And I was like, I’m an OC, okay. This is an, I would love to have your feedback, but I can understand he must be busy with something. So I did not get a chance to reply back, but yeah, I wasn’t as scared. And to be very honest, I never, in my wildest dreams thought that we would be getting compared with fuse to be very honest.

Joe Howard: [00:08:07] Yeah, I get that the WordPress kind of care plan and support and maintenance spaces is kind of similar. And there’s like, I’m pretty friendly with most of the other like owners and people who do the stuff we do. And like, we all understand WordPress is thirty-five percent of the web. Like we don’t have to be competing over each other to like, be like, we can all be successful and that’s fine, but there’s always a little bit of like, it’s almost like a friendly competition between everybody and like, That’s good.

Like that kind of sharpens everybody’s sword and everybody gets better, but yeah, launched. And like you threw some numbers out there which were a lot there it’s pretty high for a somewhat new, I wouldn’t guess I would call it a new plugin now, but I mean, 300,000 active downloads within a year and a half. And like a thousand reviews. That’s pretty solid. What was there, um, when that number was growing, has it been like linear growth and just kind of like regular growth month over month or has it started to like accelerate and become exponential as time goes on?

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:09:01] It turned out to be a snowball effect. When I met you in person comics, we were sitting at somewhere around 60,000. If I, if I can recall that for a while. And then like in just few months span, we shot 200 K 200 K and then 300 K. And it has been exploding ever since. So it’s like a snowball effect. It started really slow and we were happy about it that okay. People are efficient in that. And all of a sudden I’m in, it started growing too big for us. And we are happy about it.

Joe Howard: [00:09:29] Totally. So that’s a good problem to have it. It is a problem to have, you want to keep up and keep moving on things and sometimes fast moving can be tough, but it’s a better problem than probably moving too slowly. What do you think was the big draw ever behind a lot of those downloads rank math is a free plugin.

I know that Yoast has a good number of users as well. I mean, it’s one of the most popular plugins in the WordPress repository and they have a free version. I think most people probably use a free version of , but what do you think. Caused like driving of those new users. Um, besides just it being a free plugin.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:10:02] One of the key reasons I see there are like two perspectives, which I always recommend is like an Apple product until it’s like a Mac book until someone does not use it. They do not realize what they have been missing in their life. And if someone is not able to relate to that. So we are those people who do not want to install tens of different.

Plug-ins just to get over with the on-page SEO stuff of WordPress and want to handle everything via one plugin, which is something and the very basic problem due to which we developed TrackMan. So that is something people are able to relate. And for the growth we have seen that people love us. So tremendously that.

They keep on doing the word of mouth marketing for us. We do not mean to be very honest. We have not run single paid advertising. We haven’t paid anyone just to publish about ourselves, or we haven’t run any paid ads. Yet people are doing mouth marketing for us and they always email us back. Hey, look, I promoted you here. I promoted you there just because I like you and your plugin and things. And we really appreciate that and we feel really grateful about it.

Joe Howard: [00:11:10] Yeah. I totally get that one area and full transparency. So, you know, folks listening know that we just launched a new website for WP buffs and we SEO. Ah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We’ve worked really hard on it. SEO is a big part of what we do. A lot of our. Most of our website, visitors, our leads, our new customers a lot come via referral and via kind of the WordPress community in space talking about us, but a lot come through organic search. And so when launching a new site, we had a lot of considerations to make for like how, you know, what improvements we want to make, how are we going to manage that whole move and maintain everything?

And we used Yoast on the old site. And when we migrated to the new site, we did everything and moved everything to the new site. We switched over to rank math. So you’re actually doing a podcast with a rank math user right now. And, uh, the one thing that drew me to rank math that I was actually like super, super impressed was. The, the amount of features in this free plugin, like I was kind of blown away. Were these things that you kind of knew you wanted to build all at the beginning? Or did they come from like people asking you for certain things and then you were like, Oh, let’s just build it.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:12:23] No, uh, first of all, thank you for, I mean, migrating to rank math, I’m really happy to hear that all these features we launched the plugin with all these features, nothing has been, I mean, like. Edit to the plugins, since we launched apart from a couple of Gutenberg blocks. So all these things actually did things which we needed for our projects. That’s why they were all integrated into this plugin.

Joe Howard: [00:12:45] That’s pretty amazing because I’m looking down this list and like, I keep scrolling on the list and I’m like, it’s got to end soon. Like I’m still scrolling. How am I still scrolling? How am I still scrolling? And then there’s a ton of stuff in this plugin. How, how long was it? How long were you building it for yourself and your clients before you released it to the world? It must’ve been the least like a couple of years or something.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:13:04] 3.5 years.

Joe Howard: [00:13:05] 3.5 years, man. So you’ve been working on it for a long time for clients, and then it had time to kind of get everything in it. It needed. The one thing I thought was one of the best parts about the plugin is the schema support, rich snippet stuff, because Google is moving in this way, in this direction of.

Like you need to not just be ranking, number one for your keyword, you need to be manipulating. I shouldn’t say manipulating that’s sounds like it has a negative connotation. You need to be making sure that your, when you show up in search results, that your listing is formatted, how you want to. So maybe you want to have some like frequently asked questions as part of your thing.

Maybe if you’re like a recipe blog or something, you have a picture of your recipe that shows up schema. Markup is part of doing a lot of that. And your schema. Feature is just like click a button. And the schema is activated, which is like, totally, like, I remember used to having to like ask one of my developers to put some code into the website to like, make sure the schema Mark was right, but now it’s just like, boom it’s on. So that was that’s pretty dope.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:14:07] Yeah. Yeah. As he goes through trying to make a CEO easy because it is difficult. We understand there being developers and being in so long. We know that things change very swiftly and it become really overwhelming to do all the tasks. So we try and automate as much as we can, but at the same point of time, we ensure that we are not automating the tasks, which we should not be so that it might hurt the website and barely, yeah.

Joe Howard: [00:14:31] Yeah, for sure. I’m on the website now. And. Cool look, insight looks really good. And aside from just all those features that are pretty awesome. I mean, it has a pretty easy to follow setup wizard, and also kind of like a Yoast to rank math, like migration tool. Is that something you thought of pretty early on to make sure that you made it pretty easy for people to like make that transition because that’s kind of a scary thing to do. Yeah, because

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:14:58] I mean, we ourselves, uh, moved from rank ma from yours to rachmat when we initially built. And this plugin. So it was a need at that time. So we ensured that we were doing the one-to-one migration, even for the pro version. So even if someone has like use premium on their website, we import all the data and ensure that everything is folded over to rank math correctly. And we offer the important for other plugins as well for all the top SEO plugins.

Joe Howard: [00:15:25] That’s pretty cool. I remember I didn’t do the migration myself. Like Nick who’s, our COO handles handle all that. And he handled the migration from Yoast to rank math. And I didn’t do any of it myself, but I do remember Nick coming to me because I told him like, okay, we’re going to have to like migrate the blog over to the new site.

We gotta migrate the, you know, all the. Yost information over ranked mass since we’re moving over. And I remember him just coming to me the next day, being like, well, that was easy. I just did it. And it worked. And like, you know, sometimes with that kinda stuff, you have to try two or three times, but I think we tried once and it just worked.

So that’s cool. One thing I wanted to touch on pretty specifically was, and before I say this, you’ve been super respectful about. Talking about Yoast this whole time, you know, great plugin, great company. You know, a lot of people have a lot of respect for them, which they should. It’s a great company. This is not at all meant to be a dig or anything like that.

But if I’ve heard a common complaint about the Yoast plugin among people in the WordPress community, it’s that the plugin is a little bit heavy. It’s not quite. It doesn’t quite have the effect on speed of a website and performance that some people might want on the homepage of your site. It says code optimized for speed. I’d love to hear a little bit more about kind of how you built it with speed in mind and what those who have really, really high performance expectations can expect when using something like rank math.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:16:41] Yeah. So the thing was, and it was kind of a benefit and an edge for us that we had a base, which we were able to compare. So we were like, Okay, this is how all these other duplicates perform. So we have to build something which is faster than these plugins. So we started digging into the code and to be very honest, I’m not a developer, but I trust my developers with my life. They were like, okay, what is it that you require? I was like, all these functions should work, but at the same point of time, this should not be slowing down the backend of the website because that is something really irks me ever, Y levels within using the other SEO plugin.

So I don’t want that to happen with rank manager. Because I remember myself that I used to, I still have like the Curry monitor installed on the live websites where we use it and every now and then I log into the website and check, Oh, okay. If care is optimized or not, if not, I get back to the developers and ask them.

So that was the reason that we built for the performance and that reflects directly in the plugin because every time when someone comes over to us, Appreciating the plugin. They do mentioned that the kind of use CPU usage is very low when using rachmat compared to other SEO plugins. And yeah, because that was a problem for assessment.

Joe Howard: [00:17:58] Yeah. I remember when I was checking out plugin, deciding if I wanted to use it. I remember seeing like some performance comparisons looking at rank math and being like, wow, like, you know, 8.5 megabytes. And it’s just like, it’s a, it’s a compact and well-made plugin. It seemed. And so I was like more focused on performance and I think this was going to be pretty good for us.

I had a question about like, how. Your like funding, the running of rank math because it’s 300,000 installs. I mean, it’s a lot of support, a lot of probably development behind the scenes, a lot of supporting of customers, but it’s all free at least for right now. And we’ll talk a little bit about, you know, the pro version that will be coming out soon here in a second, but like financially, because I know you run my theme shop, are you kind of using my theme shop to like fund some of the. Progress of rank math.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:18:47] Yeah. That’s how it works because I’m in rank is like a rank math and my team shopper. They do companies which are known in the WordPress fair. We have other companies as well, so we have good amount of capital with us. So this is getting, we have all this bootstrap. All of our businesses.

We do not believe in funding because that, that is kind of restricting. And that does not let you fly as you want to does not let you make the changes and let you move with the pace with which you want. So we have the funding from other businesses, which is getting into it and right now, and to be very honest, We have always tried to keep our team as slim as possible.

We do not tend to hire 10 of 10 different people to doing a task, which we know a couple of people can handle effectively. We always tend to. Hire people and, uh, so that they can work with us for, for a longer period of time. I remember that there are a few people in our team who joined back in 2012 and are still with us and they, the lovers, like it is actually their company. So this is how we are getting funded. And we have a team of 22 professionals working together and we are a hundred percent remote team, right. From the very beginning.

Joe Howard: [00:20:01] Yeah. Cool. I love hearing more on that side of things too. You kind of sound like you’re at a similar place as WP boss. I think we’re like around 20 as well, fully remote. And just your mentality on, on, you know, this is not your company is whatever the founder or CEO, this is everyone’s company. And everybody’s kind of has a, you know, a part ownership in that, you know, everybody has responsibility and accountability over everything you do. And that’s, that’s a cool idea. And I’m a big believer in kind of the bootstrap mentality as well.

You know, maybe for some companies, funding is a better option. Totally right. And everybody is allowed to make their own decisions, but I always liked not having someone tell me what to do or myself to make my own mistakes, even if they are mistakes right. And be responsible for my own successes is always important. Yeah, that

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:20:42] is exactly the reason because we do not want someone else to drive and steer where we want to take our companies. We let our customers tell us, okay, this is something big because there are things which got over-delivered for instance, the integration in Gutenberg. We plan to launch that back in March, 2019, but we ended up launching that in December, 2019.

The reason being, because we were getting several other requests from our users, okay. I want this in the plugin. I want that in the plugin. And we were like, all right, these are the pressing needs rather than. Uh, but we thought that they could benefit from something so actually helps. But I believe since I’m just guessing that maybe when you’re funded, you got to plan a strict guide, stripped roadmap, which is definitely not the case with us. We tend to move with the fluent integrated things, which are the need of another, because. As you as an evergreen ever-changing space and it evolves via too quickly.

Joe Howard: [00:21:37] Yeah, that is interesting. I think probably when you’re a funded company, you probably still have some options, but I would probably agree with you. I would guess like nine out of 10 times, the decision you make is the one that’s best financially for the business. In the short to medium term. And when you’re your own business owner, you can make decisions that are say, you know, I don’t know if this is going to be profitable for the next year, but it’s the best decision for the longterm.

And a lot of times, those are the most important decisions to make for the longterm sustainability of a business. And so I totally am with you. And we’re kind of talking a little bit about funding, which is also an interesting time to talk a little bit about another plugin in the SEO space, which is all in one SEO plugin, which is another plugin that has.

Think, you know, at least in the millions of users at this point and was recently acquired by the awesome motive team. And I’m sure you’ve been kind of following that and seeing what’s going on there. I’d love to hear your thoughts as someone who’s in the SEO plugin space, uh, about like the recent acquisition of all in one.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:22:36] To be very honest. I mean, if we did follow all the ESY news around WordPress up until like, June, 2019 till we were like going very slowly, but ever since we have been growing quickly, we started focusing all on ourselves rather than focusing what someone else is doing because we have a roadmap prepare for the coming two years.

So we are to get all those things coming out as soon as possible. So rather than focusing on someone else, if we are focusing on ourselves. So yes, I did hear the news that site and his team has acquired the plugin. And I’m really happy about, I met him personally and he’s, he’s an awesome guy as well. I love the energy, which he carries around with himself. Every themselves. So, I mean, yeah, I wish them luck to be very honest. We are not falling any of the plugins right now and really focusing on ourselves because we have a very tight schedule, which we have to follow and we have to get things moving really fast at this point of time.

Joe Howard: [00:23:32] Yeah, I love that answer. Actually. I think a lot of people focus on competitive research and competitor analysis and trying to be better than their competition. And in some situations, maybe, you know, it’s a good idea to know what the landscape of where you are, but the highest impact thing any business owner can probably do is focus on your customers.

What are your customer needs? What are the needs of the. People and you’re focused more, you know, market in the space and like build something and focus on what you’re doing. That’s going to benefit those people almost regardless of what other folks are doing. Because if you focus on what other people are doing, they could be right there wrong.

Like, you know, you don’t really know, but yeah, no is the feedback you’re getting from your plugin, the growth you’ve seen from your plugin. You have everything you need at this point to not have to focus on others in order for you to be successful. And I think that’s an important lesson for a lot of folks, depending on that.

You know, stage of the business where you’re at, maybe when you’re smaller or just starting out, you want to see what the landscape’s like more, because that helps to educate you about the space and know what’s going on and what other people have been successful in with, and maybe not successful with, but once you get rolling, I mean, you use the resources. You have mostly, probably internally to drive yourself forward. And it sounds like you’re pretty focused on.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:24:41] Yeah, I cannot say that better. I mean, that is what we are doing, right. Initially. All the competitive analysis. But after that, we, we were like, I’m an audit. We are getting a feedback from our customers and that is where we should be heading towards to.

Joe Howard: [00:24:54] Yeah, absolutely. Anything else that we wanted to talk about? I think one other piece that we can kind of start wrapping up a little bit here, but I definitely want to talk about the pro version. And the kind of roadmap to what that looks like right now, the plugin is completely free. So people can go to rank math.com right now and go download the plugin, try it out on the news on your new site, you know, migration tool.

If you have Yoast stuff going on or other plugin stuff, people can go try it out for free right now. But in the future, I know you’re kind of moving towards, you know, I guess it would be called freemium model having the free version, but also a pro version with more stuff. I’d love to hear a rundown, I guess what you’re allowed to talk about right now or what you feel comfortable document.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:25:34] Yeah, we, we do have a plan to launch a pro version and that will be coming in the third quarter this year. And with the launch of that, we will make sure that nothing from the free version will ever get, I mean is ever removed from the free plugin niggas. That is something not ethical. And. Initially the idea of, of this SEO plugin wasn’t to build a business out of it.

It just happened because we were using it internally anyway. So we had to develop, keep on developing it for ourselves. So now people are needing more things and we are seeing that the spaces are changing V2 faster. Not, I mean, I’m just guessing that I guess that not everyone is tapping on the opportunities, which are out there, uh, with the SEO plugins.

So we will be introducing some really advanced features in the pro version, which the tools which we have built for ourselves, I wish I could really share over those are, but even sharing this sneak peak would be like veer too much information at this point of time.

Joe Howard: [00:26:30] Gotcha. But it sounds like I won’t. Pry too much into the actual details of it, but it sounds like, and people can go on the website right now and see all the free features that you have. It sounds like the pro version is going to have some things that go even above and beyond that is that. And I know, again, you can’t say exactly what the features are or these features that you may be able to find in other SEO plugins, or are these kind of new ones that people may not have seen before.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:26:58] Personally, haven’t seen any SEO plugin providing those features and those options. So I’m pretty much sure that no other SEO plugin, at least in the fortress spaces doing that. And top of it, again, all these tools, which we built for us as the internal tools they were born out of need. So we know what.

People might require when they reach certain, a certain level with their website. So these tools will come in handy. These are the things, these are the advanced, advanced things, which people might require. And I have like few agency friends. They are very helpful and we, Oh, I always end up discussing things with them and they tell us, okay, we have a, we built this, we built that.

And this was something because. Declined needed something like that. We gather all the ideas and now we have been. All the tools along with the bulls, which we’ve built for ourselves. So yes, the plugin will provide tremendous value for anyone who is growing with their business, for the starters or even the newcomers, the free version does everything. One can dream of, they do not need to pay for any premium plugin, but if someone wants to dive in deeper and wants to really extract the technical issue and the analytical SEO part of their website, Well, we will be targeting those people with our provision.

Joe Howard: [00:28:18] Yeah, very cool. I know I said the last thing was kind of what I wanted to wrap up on, but I actually found, I was, I’ve been looking through the site and I want to, I want to chat about your product hunt launch because product hunt is kind of, it’s like a, you know, what. Tech hub, digital tech hub, but I don’t see a lot of WordPress folks doing launches on product hunt or using product hunt. I’ve had someone before on the podcast, he did a product hunt. I can’t for the life of me. Remember who it was, but I’m checked out your product hunt launch page. I mean, I hear, I see you.

You know, with the initial post here as the maker, but I’m seeing like a great video here, like a really cool gift that’s featured, which a lot of people do feature gifts in product had lunches. I see it like the number five product of the month for March, 2019, almost 2000. Upvotes you have to have some sort of like marketing chops to be able to pull something like this off. Can you talk a little bit more about like the process of going through a product launch? Because I actually don’t know a ton about it as a marketer, and I’d love to learn a little bit more about to pull this off.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:29:17] So we realized that someone submitted a Baroque on production. And then immediately prepared an email because if we have, uh, we already have in meaningless from rachmat. So that, that was kind of an edge for us. We emailed them that, Hey, we, we got listed on product hunt. So if you really like us, please consider affording on our hunt and see if you can leave a comment. And then we did the same with our Facebook group users, and I believe that was. The moment when it started getting traction on product, and then soon it was featured as the number one product of the day.

Also it lasted for like a few hours here. And then we got like few benches. If someone is planning to launch a product on product hunt, at least from our experience, we noticed that we did not get as much traffic as Veeva expecting, but we got a lot of eyeballs and then people, people inquired. If, if you want to be acquired. If the plugin is to be sold and we started getting offers from there. So I believe that those kinds of people sit on product hunt, which are looking to acquire different businesses. So if someone is looking into that product hunt is the way.

Joe Howard: [00:30:32] Yeah. Cool. I think the piece of information I pick out of that is, I guess, two pieces. One is someone posted. Rank math on product hunt. And you kind of took advantage of that to me is a very, like you’re having a community around you. That’s engaged and creating a product that creates excitement and engagement is important. And like, without that someone may not have posted it on product hunt.

The second thing is your email list. As soon as it got posted, you put it out to your email list, you put it out to your Facebook page, our Facebook community asking for, you know, maybe an upload of people love the plugin to have an audience. When something happens is a huge advantage because if you have a list of 10,015,000, 20,000, even a smaller list, a small list of a thousand folks, too. If you can get, you know, a hundred up votes like that puts you somewhere and it puts you way farther ahead than what people don’t have an audience at all. So I think that’s a really important thing, like takeaway that I think listeners should take away is just that the best time to start building an email list and building an audience of people who love your stuff is right now.

And then in a year, maybe when things start rolling, you’ll be ready to take advantage of. Things that that’s almost like a make your own luck sort of situations like someone posted and you took it and ran with it because you had the resources at your disposal that you’d built over the last, you know, six months, a year, three and a half years. Apparently.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:31:46] Yeah. Well, so I mean, meaningless is something people say emails are dead. I do not agree on that. I definitely do not agree on that. We have an open rate of somewhere around 40% for all of our emails. So we have a very high engaging meeting list. One of the things which we do to optimize our mailing list is that we take out all the people who.

Haven’t any email in the past six months, we do not send emails to them. We call them that built and we try and pitch to them so that our open rate keeps on increasing and email clients like Google sees that. Okay. If they’re mailing to their customers, their mails are getting open, so they should not be sent into the promotions dab or the spam folder.

Joe Howard: [00:32:30] Yeah. I mean another great tip. I think a lot of people having a big email list is kind of like a vanity metric, right? It’s like, I have a list of like 50,000 and it’s like, wow, that’s amazing is what most people starting off think. But once you’ve built a list that big, you realize it’s all about engagement and the list of your size, whether it’s 15,000 or 50,000, like the difference is the engagement, because.

Point of a list is to have an engaged audience then to generate revenue for your business at some point. And if you’re not doing that, then who cares how big your list is, but what really moves your list forward is the things like high open rate and high engagement, because those are good indicators for everything else that you’re doing.

And to think I want to send this email out to more email addresses. It’s counter-intuitive because it seems like the right thing to do, but you get to this point where you do realize I’d much rather send it out to a hundred people and have 50 of them open it, then send it out to 500 people and have 10 of them open it. So I think that’s a smart idea. Do you kind of go through manually and clean out lists? Sir, do you kind of have like a automation in whatever email software you’re using that kind of says, if this person hasn’t opened an email in six months, just unsubscribed.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:33:36] It is all automated. We are using campaign monitor for sending our emails. They are definitely not cheap, but their deliverability and the kind of segmentation which they provide is really good. Again from our previous businesses, we ensure that whatever we learn, whatever failures we’ve made. Avatar mistakes. We did there. We did not repeat them. We obviously we’ve made, um, a new mistakes, new, uh, problems came in, uh, with Dragnet, but we were very much sure that whatever we learned from our previous businesses. So we do not repeat that. And at the end of the day, we provide like high-value to users. So once in awhile, if we ask them for a favor, they are more than happy to give back to us.

Joe Howard: [00:34:17] Yeah, that is a, that’s a great point to end on. Probably you’re allowed to ask your email subscribers and your list, your audience, you’re allowed to ask them for things. They have subscribed you for a reason, but make sure that, you know, one out of 10 times you’re asking them for something the other nine out of 10 times, you’re giving them free stuff. You’re giving them, you’re adding value to them. You’re helping them improve their business. So when it comes time to ask him for something, they’re like, Oh, this guy helped me the last nine times.

Like. Yeah, easy decision to, to help them out on this one. Uh, tell you get 2000 net votes on product hunt. I think so. Cool, Bonnie. Thanks for being on this has been awesome convo. I’m really excited about rank math and the direction it’s going. We got to talk about other cool stuff, too, more marketing side of things. It’s just more my area of expertise. So it’s cool to hear about product launches and strategies you’re using to grow your email list and to trim it back when needed things like that. Do we want to, yeah. Yeah, go ahead.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:35:07] Yeah. I was like, I I’m really thankful for having this. It finally happened. I’m really happy as a person.

When I met you at personal mix, you have like one of the most positive vibes coming out from a person. And I really like being around you and whenever seeing talking to other people, never for a second, I felt it that I was meeting you for the first thing. And that is like one of the sweetest things that you have.

Joe Howard: [00:35:29] Yeah, you’re gonna make me blush, man. I appreciate it. It’s uh, the WordPress community is so open and welcoming. It feels like most people I meet are like pretty friendly. I felt the same thing about you, man. So we’ll have to, we’re going to have to keep in touch and stay friends. Definitely tell folks as we finish up today, what can they find you online? Some people are like more on social. Some people are not as much. If someone wanted to check out rank math, are you, where should they go?

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:35:52] For Rank Math, they can visit our website rank match.com. And we also have a Facebook group, but if someone wants to connect with me personally, I’m not much of a social person on any social media platform other than Facebook. So you can definitely email me at  and dad a at  dot com and I’ll be more than happy to reply back to you personally.

Joe Howard: [00:36:16] Yeah, very cool. Last thing. I always ask our guests to ask our audience for our little five star review on iTunes for the show. So if you wouldn’t mind asking the folks listening yet.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:36:27] Definitely. I mean, if anyone’s listening and they have enjoyed what I mean, the kind of conversation which we had today, please go ahead and. Click on the five star review on iTunes. It takes like a couple of minutes to you, but it helps tremendously for all the efforts and the guys like Joe Putin. So also I’ll be sharing this with my, uh, with other audience as well, because they would love to hear this and this whole, a whole conversation.

Joe Howard: [00:36:53] Yeah, appreciate that, man. Very cool. WP mrr.com forward slash iTunes. We direct you right there. If you leave a review after the show, tell us something you learned in the review, something that you thought was awesome in this show. That way we can forward it to Banu and thank him for the little review. If you’re a new listener to the show.

Now is the time where everyone’s bingeing all sorts of TV and shows and movies. Why not binge something that’ll help you grow your business. Check out some older episodes of the WP MRR podcast. We’ve got almost like a hundred episodes now. So whatever topic you’re having a challenge with right now, do a search on the podcast page.

And you’ll be able to find something that is relevant to you. If you have questions for us on the show, Christie, and I like to do QA episodes and we need to do more of them. We’ve been slacking a little bit. I’m not gonna lie. We’ve been slacking a little bit on Q and a episodes, but we want to do some more.

So if you have questions for us, shoot them to yo@wpmrr.com. We’ll get them answered here, live on the show. Other than that, I think we are good to go. We’ll be in your podcast player again next Tuesday. Bhanu thanks again. I mean, our man’s been real.

Bhanu Ahluwalia: [00:37:55] Thanks to you for inviting me. It was great talking to you, man.