Mastermind.fm

This episode is sponsored by Plesk and EDD Bookings.

In this episode, Jean and Mark were joined by Michiel Heijmans, the COO of Yoast and an all-around great guy, to discuss conversion optimization and a lot more.

Michiel is much more than just a COO of one of the most well-known WordPress plugins around. He has been a part of the Yoast team from its infancy. In the years that have passed, he has contributed in many ways to its massive growth, especially through a focus on conversion optimization.

In our discussion with Michiel, we found out a bit more about Yoast as a company, their love for Lego, his experience in growing with Yoast, as well as what he and the Yoast team do to keep expanding and improving on their offerings.

One of the topics we covered was content writing and optimizing your blog. We looked into how to make sure your blog performs well, both for search engines and your readers’ experience. For instance, Yoast.com’s blog is categorized into a number of topics. Their team gave a lot of importance to the organization and presentation of these categories. Michiel tells us about how and why they did this, and what else they do.

We also cover a number of other subjects, including speed optimization tools, analysis tools, multilingual content, and more. Listen on to hear about the best methods and tools to use to optimize your site’s conversion rate.

On a side note, Yoast is well-known for their illustrations throughout all their products and services. Not to be outdone, Michiel does a little sketching of his own. Check out his impressive works on Instagram.

In this third episode with the man of many talents Kevin Muldoon, we discuss his experience with running YouTube channels and constantly creating content across several topics. We discuss what are the most common failures of prospective YouTubers as well as practical things like which hardware and software to use, as well as ways to earn money from YouTube. We also dwell on the effectiveness of the medium versus other channels such as blogging.

In our second episode with Kevin Muldoon, we discuss how he got into cryptocurrencies and his experience with mining them. He also speaks of his involvement with the SafeCoin project. We draw a lot of parallels with the WordPress world too. Definitely a great listen for anyone entrepreneurial who is also interested in cryptocurrencies.

In this episode Jean makes a return to Mastermind.fm to chat with one of his longtime friends in the WordPress space; Kevin Muldoon. Kevin built one of the earliest big blogs about WordPress (WPmods.com) which he later sold off on Flippa for $80k, at that time the largest sale of a blog in the WordPress niche. He then continued blogging on his site KevinMuldoon.com, before venturing into YouTube video production. His latest project is cryptocurrency mining.

We talk about many different facets of the WordPress space and what it means to be successful in business, as well as how to deal with pursuing different passions while still making a good living. This was a great and candid episode with one of the most honest content creators I know, and we’ll have Kevin back on the show soon to delve deeper into his experience in crypto.

A few weeks ago I was excited to receive a message from David Kelly, the General Manager at KingSumo, a sister-company of Sumo and AppSumo, all of which I encourage any business owners out there to look into.

After a few discussions we set up a date and recorded this episode. David provides a ton of value to the discussion of guerrilla marketing given his experience in growing seven-figure companies. If you’re not aware of what guerrilla marketing is, here’s how David himself describes it:

One of my biggest frustrations as an entrepreneur and small business owner is marketing can be expensive. Facebook Ads can cost a lot of money, hiring a SEO firm is costly, getting good writers to write content adds up… the list goes on and one. When you’re starting a business, you need to keep costs down: this is where guerrilla marketing helps. Using free or much less expensive guerrilla marketing tactics, you can grow your business faster without breaking the bank.

In this episode, David explains those inexpensive, effective guerrilla marketing strategies that you can use, too. Be it through the use of social media, giveaways or other methods, there’s something in this discussion that will certainly work for you. Sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error to find the one that generates the most revenue for your product or service.

We also get into when and why you should market a product using certain techniques, and when you should even bother about the marketing aspect of your business at all. Even larger companies can sometimes delay the marketing of a new product until they gather some user feedback. David also kindly shares an example of this from his own experience.

David’s insights will certainly get your creative marketing juices flowing, so get to listening!

Selling digital products online, including WordPress plugins and themes, can be easy if you’ve got a small shop, but once your business starts to grow, it becomes harder to maintain. Spending time working on your self-hosted e-commerce setup rather than building and marketing your product starts to work against you.

That is where Freemius comes in. It’s an e-commerce solution that takes care of all the nitty-gritty parts of running your e-commerce business while providing built-in marketing tools, some of which are new and exciting for the WordPress e-commerce space, to grow your business. The cost of having bugs and other issues fixed for you, and having access to a vast toolset that allows you to grow your business with relatively minimal effort, is a percentage of your revenue.

When running a small business, this percentage could be seen as worthwhile as you can focus on developing the product rather than handling VAT setups, payment gateway issues, and so on. When your business grows, however, the commission could be seen as quite a barrier.

In this episode, Vova Feldman, the co-founder and CEO of Freemius, joins me to explain why it could be the right solution for WordPress businesses despite being the new kid on the block. We also discuss how Freemius works in comparison to other e-commerce solutions such as Easy Digital Downloads and WooCommerce.

Vova Feldman

Freemius

This week I was excited to speak with Christie Chirinos from CalderaWP. I had followed her WordCamp EU presentation on the topic of financial forecasting back in June of 2018 and it intrigued me.

Christie has an M.B.A. in Management Information Systems from Florida State University and has been involved in the WordPress space for a few years now, currently being a partner in the CalderaWP team that is well-known for the Caldera Forms plugin. She enjoys sharing the knowledge she has gathered over the years with others in the WordPress community through talks at WordCamps and shows like this one.

In the episode, Christie took some time out of her busy schedule to continue discussing financial forecasting, business strategies and business administration. We discuss everything from what financial forecasting is to what business strategies are and how you should plan out your future targets.

We also delve into possible ways of learning more about how to run your business without having to necessarily get a degree or go to business school, plus a few other interesting tips and discussions that you won’t want to miss!

This week we’ve taken a look at the other side of running a WordPress business – the development.

We were joined by Alain Schlesser and Anton Ukhanev, two great developers who believe that developing your plugins and themes (and WordPress core itself) to as high a standard as you can will only help your business and the WordPress community grow further.

WordPress is growing in popularity, exceeding the 30% mark for the number of websites running WordPress worldwide. However, it’s also facing some controversy within the community over the approach being taken to Gutenberg, especially from developers.

I won’t give too much away, so listen in to hear about the pain-points within WordPress from a developer’s perspective, how this affects those running businesses around WordPress, and where the WordPress community went wrong and what it’s doing right with Gutenberg and more.

Alain Schlesser

Anton Ukhanev

Other Resources

This week I’m joined by Donnacha MacGloinn, a long-time member of the WordPress community and guest host on a few past episodes, to discuss WordPress hosting with Thomas Audunhus from Servebolt.

Servebolt is taking on the WordPress hosting space by claiming that they can beat any other host in terms of speed, and they don’t rely on caching for it. In fact, they believe in caching being used only for scaling, as it was originally intended.

Together we discuss what it is that Servebolt does, where it started, and how they believe they can make such claims as being faster than other top WordPress hosting companies such as Kinsta and WP Engine,

Thomas is challenged all the way, from the company’s decision on its name and why they own serverbolt.com but have not set it to redirect to servebolt.com, to how and why their stack is that much better than those with deeper pockets.