Mastermind.fm

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

Today Jean is joined by Adrian Tobey in a chat recorded at the Collision conference in Toronto.

We touch upon various topics like building a WordPress plugin business from scratch and what that entails, pitching to investors at big conferences, why WordPress people should attend conferences outside of the WP space, working with family members, and more.

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

This week Jean is visiting his friends Dejan and Tina in Toronto, Canada. They are all attending the Collision conference that is happening in the city, so they take the opportunity to record an episode and talk about social network automation and management. Tina and Dejan are the cofounders of Social Web Suite, a WP-specific tool for social network management.

We also delve into lessons learned within the WordPress, community, SAAS vs traditional plugins, working with your life partner, and the value of smiling and hugging people 🙂

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

Acquisitions have almost become the norm in the WordPress space in the past couple of years or so. Beyond WordPress, they’re also a common occurrence. Big companies often acquire smaller companies (often start-ups), while some business owners find that it’s time for them to move on to something new.

In this episode, Mark had the opportunity of speaking with Anthony Presley and Craig Williams. They’ve gone through a few acquisitions over time and have recently acquired Templatic, a WordPress themes and plugins shop originally founded by Bhavesh.

The discussion revolves around what an acquisition is, how it comes about, what factors are important to keep in mind throughout the process, and how Anthony and Craig went about their own acquisition of Templatic. The two of them bring up some invaluable insights on key elements to look out for and how to go about something like this, whether you’re the buyer or the seller.

Links:

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

In today’s episode, we welcome Lucas Radke from Plesk to give us a tour of Plesk and all the services they provide. Plesk can be used by many different target audiences, starting from single end users of WordPress right up to big cloud services like DigitalOcean.

We discuss many interesting aspects of managing WordPress servers, including security, caching, managing multiple WordPress installations and their updates, backups, staging as well as Plesk tools for SEO.

Plesk has been making a big effort in the WordPress space in recent years and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the various services they offer and the situations which would warrant using them.

While many people default to hosted management solutions, they sometimes ignore the fact that having a DigitalOcean or Vultr VPS with a panel like Plesk can be more than enough for their WordPress hosting needs and save a ton of money in the long run. As we discuss with Lucas, one needs to carefully analyze their needs before selecting a hosting solution.

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

In this episode, James Laws is back and he has some catch-up time with Jean as they discuss what they’ve both been up to in recent months both on the personal side as well as the business side of things.

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

I have been following Matt Medeiros’ work for a few years through Twitter, Youtube, podcasts and so on. Recently I got in touch with Matt and purchased one of his services, User Feedback Videos, for our WP RSS Aggregator plugin.

I loved his take on things and we got talking from there. Matt accepted my invite to the Mastermind.FM podcast without any hesitation and we were on Skype just a few days later. To me this was a bit surreal as I was used to watching videos of Matt for so long. In fact, at one point in the recording you may notice I seem a bit lost… that’s just because I thought I was watching a video while Matt was explaining something. It then clicked that this was a call and I had to speak, so on we went.

This episode focuses around the topic of managing multiple projects at different stages.

Matt has been involved in many areas of the WordPress space, even having a background as a car salesman, so he has been juggling multiple jobs and projects throughout the years. At the moment he works as an Account Executive with Pagely while doing a number of other stuff, including User Feedback Videos and hosting the Matt Report podcast.

I’ve taken on a more managerial role in the past couple of years, even more so now as the CEO of the team behind WP Mayor, WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings. Recently we also made some changes to our team, so figuring out what to focus on at what time (and why) remains a major task.

In our call, Matt and I discuss some of the pain points one could face in such a situation, how to approach them, and how to overcome them. Listen to the full episode to learn more and understand why even the most experienced minds and the best teams sometimes struggle in these areas.

Enjoy the show!

Mark

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

In this episode, Jean joins Asif on the show to have an informal chat between friends.

We touch on some important topics such as:

Asif is one of my favorite people in the WordPress community; I really respect what he’s managed to achieve so far and best of all the fact that he has remained very humble and open to sharing his knowledge with anyone who approaches him for help and mentorship. I wholeheartedly support the drive to have Bangladesh host their first WordCamp ever, and hope to have the chance to visit this country in the near future.

Enjoy the show!

Jean

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

SEO research may sound daunting to some, but there are some basic methods and tools that everyone should be using.

The Ahrefs team recently got in touch with me when I published this article on WP Mayor discussing WordPress’ performance in comparison to other CMS options. That led to discussions around Ahrefs, and eventually, this episode.

I’m joined by Joshua Hardwick, the Head of Content at Ahrefs, to discuss SEO research techniques using tools from Google, Ahrefs, and others. We delve into a number of areas that every site owner should be aware of and a few technical ones for those who already know the basics.

Among the topics we discussed are:

We went a little deeper in certain areas so it’s certainly worth listening to the entire episode. Whether you’re just getting started with SEO research or you’re looking for some new ideas, Joshua’s got you covered.

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

This week I welcomed back Jean Galea to the podcast as we found some time to discuss the plugins we’re using at the moment, and why we chose them.

Although Jean and I work together, we rarely find the time to have discussions such as these since we tend to focus on different projects, so this was an opportunity to see what each of us was doing. At the same time, we’re hoping to give you a better idea of how we run our websites and perhaps point out some plugins you weren’t aware of before.

Throughout our discussion we focus on plugins and a few SAAS tools that have integrations with WordPress.

Since the WordPress sites that we run are focused around either content (WP Mayor) or e-commerce (WP RSS Aggregator, EDD Bookings), our choice of plugins is also centred around these markets. Even if your sites are not focused around heavy content or e-commerce specifically, there are some great little nuggets in there for you.

I won’t list down all the plugins we use here, but here is a quick overview of the main ones we have used on all or most of our sites over the years.

We mention a few more plugins throughout the show that meet certain other needs, so be sure to listen in and learn more.

Are there any other plugins which you use religiously on your WordPress sites? Let us know in the comments to give them the exposure they deserve.

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

In episode 103 I am joined by Markus Schwingenschlögl, CTO of ThemeFusion, the company behind the Avada WordPress theme. Markus had recently answered a Q&A for us over on WP Mayor, hosted by David Scott, Envato’s PR and Communications manager. This episode is a follow-up to that Q&A, so I recommend reading the Q&A before starting to listen to our conversation here.

Marcus is an integral part of the Avada theme’s incredible growth on ThemeForest, the WordPress theme marketplace from Envato. They recently hit the $25 million mark in sales with an average rating of 4.77 out of 5 stars from over 21,000 reviews. Those numbers do not lie – the ThemeFusion team is doing a lot of things right.

In our discussion we go over a number of the areas that ThemeFusion has focused on in order to achieve this feat. These included:

I would like to thank Markus for sharing his thoughts and insights with us. Remember, if you haven’t read the Q&A we did on WP Mayor, I recommend starting with that here.