Open Channels FM

I remember when WooCommerce was released in 2011. And since I had already been using several products from WooThemes, it was only natural for me to dive into it. And yes, Woo baby, you’ve come a long way. In fact, it has been with me through thick and thin.

For me, Jetpack follows the same pattern—in a way. A little research showed me that the first version was released in 2011, same year as WooCommerce. I did not know that. Although I have not used Jetpack on my own site from the very beginning, it’s been more on than off. And, of course, I remember all those client sites where I either added it or recommended it.

It, too, has come a long way. Fast forward to now. If you are using Jetpack, or have one of their premium licenses, you know what I mean. And if you also use WooCommerce, you have seen the integration between the two. To explore that more, and see what is coming down the road, I invited Nicole Kohler, who works on the Jetpack team at Automattic, to join me. Listen in as we not only talk about what is going on, but what you might be seeing in the future.

Note: The new features Nicole describes in this recording may not be available to you just yet, but if you’re a Jetpack user, you’ll see a notice in your dashboard prompting you to give them a try sometime in the next few weeks.

To kick off our chat, I asked Nicole to bring us to speed on three features recently added to help with the WooCommerce onboarding process.

That led into one of my favorite types of questions. What would she say if someone asked her, Why should I use Jetpack?

We talked about the store owner and their decision to use or not use Jetpack for their WooCommerce-powered store.  How should they approach the decision knowing that a lot of what Jetpack offers may already be provided 1) through other plugins they are using or 2) their hosting company’s plan that includes a higher level of security and backups? Or does the user even understands this?

Next, I shared my own experiences with Jetpack and how I have used it. This led me to ask Nicole if most users are deploying Jetpack as a full

In this Do the Woo episode, Cody Landefeld joins me as my co-host for some talk around Woo.

We kicked off the show by talking about content and eCommerce sites in a general sense. We all know that larger eCommerce sites may have the resources, but does the smaller store struggle with adding content to the mix?

Then we transitioned to Gutenberg and Cody shared how, as an agency that works primarily in eCommerce, he is preparing for new move to the new WordPress editor. I was glad to hear that his priority was educating clients when it comes to Gutenberg.

We touched on the latest release of WooCommerce, a minor one, and what, if anything, caught our attention.

And next, a hop over to an article I read about Google’s Ad Mute option. We all know how often we buy a product online, only to find an ad for it that continues to pop up after our purchase. thereafter. We wondered if people would make the effort to remove these ads with Google’s new feature, as it does take just that, extra effort.

Lastly, I asked We Cody if he has any predictions for 2018 and if there was anything happening in his world that he wanted to share. Interestingly enough, he talks about user experience in the overall space of online stores and also some exciting stuff he has going on at ModeEffect.

Won’t you join us?

Mode Effect

On Twitter @codyL

In episode 22, BobWP and Brad Williams are joined by Eric Busch from Datafeedr.

In this show, we chat with Eric about Datafeedr, an automated solution for affiliate marketing with WooCommerce. We also touch on Constant Contact and Woo, GraphQL for WooCommerce, WooCommerce visual hooks and yes, affiliate link rot.

Eric and his company have been around since 2009 and have seen a lot of changes in the affiliate marketing space. He talks about creating Datafeedr to help simplify and automate affiliate link feeds into WooCommerce stores.

Eric shares how customers can succeed by building their content and site around the store vs. just throwing up an affiliate marketing shop. This critical piece has

In episode 18, BobWP and Brad Williams are joined by Cody Landefeld of Mode Effect.

In this show, we are talking about agency approaches to growing WooCommerce stores, the Storefront theme latest update and WooCommerce meetups.

Our guest Cody Landefeld from Mode Effect shares how he took the approach of finding the right vertical for his agency and what he discovered to be the sweet spot for client work.

He also gives us some insights on how he built up his credibility and client list by producing consistent and useful content on their website. It’s something some agencies and store owners don’t understand: what strong content can do for the growth of their businesses.

He then talks about how themes and plugins that are used to start your WooCommerce site are often outgrown yet stay in place to only cause performance issues down the road.

I share the most recent Storefront theme update and how the cover block brings more design to the homepage. And Cody share his thoughts on Storefront and how he would like to see more WooCommerce store owners making the choice of the standard for WooCommerce themes.

We swap stories on the successes and struggles of our own WooCommerce meetups. This segment clearly points out that all meetups are not equal.

Make sure to check out Cody on Twitter and his successful efforts in creating content at Mode Effect.

And don’t miss WordSesh coming soon to the interwebs!

In show 17, we go for a different take on things. Brad interviews BobWP on the latest changes on his site.

Co-host BobWP turns guest as Brad chats with him about his newest project. BobWP.com has officially become All Things WooCommerce, which pretty much sums it up.

This huge project is dissected through the questions from Brad. In a nutshell, BobWP.com is now entirely devoted to WooCommerce. All of the other content has been moved to a new site, WPContentMarketing.com, which focuses on just that, content marketing. Specifically, blogging, monetization, podcasting and writing. This site is currently changing again… you can see what’s going on here.

We talk about what this kind of endeavor entails. For a teaser, this took analyzing 1,322 pieces of content. Listen in to hear the nitty gritty.

We wrap up the show chatting a bit about an article Brad shared: Hertz hits Accenture with $32 million lawsuit over failed website redesign . If you design sites, whether they are WooCommerce or not, Brad recommends checking out this post to put your life’s work into perspective.

In episode 16 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP invite special guest Mario Peshev to talk about his robust endeavors into the world of content creation, and we take a look at some Woo news.

Mario Peshev, when not running his agency Devrix, spends time pushing out tons of content across the web. He has been published on Huffington Post and Entrepreneur, to name just a couple. And he is very active on LinkedIn, Quora and numerous other platforms.

We start out the conversation learning more about Mario’s passion for sharing his content and what drives him to do it. He shares some very interesting insights around digital content and, specifically, how it plays in the eCommerce space.

We take a few minutes to look at the new Woocommerce Admin which includes tracking performance with statistics, analytics and reports with 14 unique data points. There are 12 new improved reports and a new activity panel.

Next we chat about the decision that WooCommerce made to pull the suggested plugin feature from the forthcoming update. This article over on WPTavern inspired our conversation.

With the newest release o

In episode 15 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP fly solo and dig into some eCommerce news.

As you can see, this episode is coming out during my 48-Hour WooCommerce content marathon. In a nutshell, 48 posts on Woo, every hour for two days. If you want to see all that was pushed out during that time, you can find the links here.

There wasn’t a lot of news to share in the WooCommerce space this episode. So we dug into some recent news around the general eCommerce space, chatted about a couple of articles and shared our thoughts and perspectives.

If you use Instagram for your store, or have been considering it, you might want to check this post out. It has some interesting ideas of where Instagram is going. Brad shared some of his thoughts as between the two of us, he uses it more, although for personal use.

The one interesting fact that I brought up on the show was that Instagram now has 25 million active users. But half of them don’t list a website so that means their efforts are native to Instagram. Mmm. Food for thought, huh?

This one hit me a bit more as someone who is very active in the affiliate marketing space, at least in my own efforts.

And even though there are more businesses than you can imagine that have affiliate programs, I have been seeing this rise to the surface lately. Especially around the subject of influencers.

Brad and I chat more about this and more about affiliates in general. In fact, the article headline is a bit misleading, so you’ll need to listen in to learn more about that. Or read the article and decide for yourself.

Brad shared about the announcement of this year’s WordSesh, happening May 22, 2019. If you are a WordPress professional, you need to check out this

In episode 14 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP invite special guest Daniel Espinoza to talk about his work and experience with WooCommerce and subscriptions.

Daniel Espinoza as been in the WooCommerce space since its release. Having working at WooCommerce and then going out on his own, he has discovered his niche is providing clients support for their WooCommerce subscription sites through his agency Grow Development.

Daniel also has a solid background in products as he runs the site Shop Plugins, which has some awesome WooCommerce plugins. I should know. I’ve written posts on every one of them here.

Brad and I were able to dive in with Daniel on his choice to focus on subscriptions with WooCommerce, as well as his experience in the product space.

He also shared some words of wisdom as Brad asked him if the WordPress plugin space has reached the saturation point. From his own experience, Daniel talks about what he would do if he was considering this as a plugin developer.

As we continued talking about subscriptions, Daniel gave us some great examples of what is working and why subscription sites have exponentially grown over the last few years.

The release of 2.5.0 of the Subscriptions extension went out in early February, and we had the chance to ask Daniel his favorite new feature. We also talked about a couple of the other added options that came with this update. You can read more about it over on the Prospress blog.

Not a major update, but a mention of the product blocks will now be in WooCommerce core vs. the blog plugin.

Post Mentioned:

In episode 13 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad and BobWP invite special guest Patrick Rauland to talk about his new product, the board game, Fry Thief.

We also chat a bit about my other podcast with Matt Mullenweg and Todd Wilkens on WordPress and WooCommerce, plus some other news of stuff going on in the eCommerce world.

Patrick Rauland has been in the WooCommerce space for several years, and was WooCommerce Product manager in the past. He currently is a WooCommerce consultant, but also is creating his first product, a board game called Fry Thief.

He recently just completed a Kickstarter funding round for the game that was very successful, and he touches on some of what he has learned through the product development stage so far.

If you are thinking of creating and selling your first product, you will want to tune in.

We also touch a bit on my other podcast and the show I had with Matt Mullenweg and Todd Wilkens. Brad was particularly interested in the comment Matt made:

Something very fundamental happened when Automattic acquired WooCommerce. Previously we had mirrored our mission as Automattic to the same one as Core WordPress, which is to democratize publishing. When WooCommerce joined the family, we added two important words: to democratize publishing and commerce. So, it was a fundamental shift in the mission of the company.

Brad also shared the community on reddit for WooCommerce if anyone is interested in that, as well as the upcoming Pressnomics conference, number 6. As far as the latter goes, if you are running a WordPress business, this is one conference you won’t want to miss. Also, a good chunk of the Woo community is represent

In episode 12 of the Do the Woo Podcast, Brad, BobWP and special guest Chris Badgett have a conversation about:

• LifterLMS and WooCommerce.
• WooCommerce opens the door to bitcoin SV.
• WooCommerce dev chats starts up again.
• Winners and losers in 2018 eCommerce

Chris talks about Learn Management Systems, his journey in creating LifterLMS and the newest integration with WooCommerce. We also go deeper into the space of LMS and look at its significant growth over the years.

Brad touches more on Bitcoin and an article that announces a plugin that allows WooCommerce store owners to sell only using Bitcoin SV. We also reflect on how much we have seen ourselves with online stores offering this as a payment option and discuss the question: is it a good idea to only accept Bitcoin?

Just a bit of news: the dev chat for WooCommerce returned Jan. 31st and you can catch future chats over on the WooCommerce Community Slack.

This article talks about the winners in the space, and you can probably guess who they are. Also those who are fading away. We talk about a few of the numbers the article shares and what we found surprising, or not.

Bob – Upcoming Podcast

Tune into our BobWP eCommerce Show on Febru