The WP Crowd

This topic comes to us from ARC CTRL, and their article on the “Top 5 Business Website Myths, Debunked”. We talk about how WordPress service businesses can better handle the objections they face when trying to sell an assortment of business services.

Whether you are trying to sell marketing, WordPress maintenance & support, or even a new WordPress website. Businesses will always have their objections (i.e excuses) to not see it worth their money to invest in, and we talk about how to combat or respond to those criticisms.

A little bit about our guests:

WP Buffs

WP Buffs provides WordPress maintenance plans for serious website owners & white-label agency partners. They handle unlimited edits, performance enhancements, daily health maintenance and regular security troubleshooting so you don’t have to. This allows you to make bold decisions when it comes to your website without hesitating due to technical restraints.

With 24/7 support, a mission driven by their customers and an affinity to sponsor WordCamps, WP Buffs wants to be the very best technical support partner for any individual, business or organization with a WordPress website.

Since we talked about needing to be visible on social media in this episode, you can also find them on Twitter or Facebook. Bufftastic!

Data Driven Labs

Chris is co-owner of Data Driven Labs, a WordPress Maintenance and Marketing agency. He is a 17-year Internet marketing veteran with experience in web design & development, search engine optimization, online marketing, social media marketing and mobile development. He specializes in WordPress custom development utilizing either Genesis Framework or underscores and is very active in the WordPress Orlando community. Chris has held development and Internet marketing positions in some of Orlando’s top technology companies.

Our previous episode talking about marijuana and the cannabis industry was really good, but we focused on “Why”, and wanted to talk about “How”. If you live in a state with legalized (in any form) of cannabis, you will know that the tech and small business growth around this newly legalized industry is booming. In California it is no joke, with not just dispensaries but apps, startups, and other ventures being formed and businesses started all around the cannabis industry. It is proving to be a very profitable and very good business to be in now, so people are taking notice and investing.

Cannabis Dispensaries Are Small Business

Most of businesses you will be selling your WordPress website consulting services to are dispensaries. Dispensaries are the legal in way in which cannabis is sold to the public, whether it be for recreational or medical use. Think of a dispensary like a pharmacy, but they only sell 1 kind of medication in several different forms that can help many ailments in several different ways.

Most of these dispensaries are just small businesses like any other. They are just starting, or maybe have been around a while, but really they are not big companies (yet). Some of them are private collectives, meaning they only take on so many applicants or patients, while others are more open to anyone walking into purchase cannabis legally. A lot of what ARC CTRL wrote about business myths can also be applied here, as many of these small business owners don’t know the power or the benefits of having a website.

Technology for Cannabis Dispensaries

For the most part, there isn’t anything different you need to know if you want to sell WordPress website consulting to dispensary. If you know how to set up a basic brochureware website for any other small business, then you can do it for a dispensary. Once they start asking for more in depth functionality, you should treat it like you would anything else. Figure out if you can install a plugin to meet business requirements, or develop a new plugin.

There are already some great plugins out there including Robert DeVore’s WP Dispensary which handles a lot of the menu functionality, and now includes a lot of add-ons for the dispensary to grow into.

Marketing to Cannabis Dispensaries

Marketing to cannabis dispensaries can be the hardest part of the whole process. Even just marketing a simple dispensary landing page can be tricky as many marketing outlets aren’t allowing cannabis related websites yet. Also, it becomes an issue with taking payments. We mentioned a lot during the podcast about credit card processing, which most big names (PayPal) won’t allow you to accept if you are related in any way to the cannabis industry.

The best way to market is to get familiar with those who are in the industry around you. Go to a local dispensary and meet with the owner, offer some type of trade or see what they have going on with their web presence. Robert brought up a good option, which will take time and some money, but having . seminar or webinar related to web presence for dispensaries could be a good way to get in the door to meeting people. Let them know what a website can do for them and their dispensaries and once you are in the door, you can get referrals.

Luckily its still relatively new market, so SEO is going to be a big factor. Write as much as you can about it. If you don’t want to mix your current business with cannabis business, try using a new domain and a new branding so your existing clients won’t make the connection. As “shady” as this sounds, cannabis can still be divisive, and you don’t want to lose a good client because you are trying to break into a new industry.

It isn’t for everyone

Just like any other business, you should believe what they are doing is ethical before offering or starting to consult. Unless you can be completely unbiased (which is hard), cannabis isn’t f

Advertising is just 1 part of website marketing, however it is a huge part.

During this conversation we discuss advertising strategies and how it is done today vs. just a few short years ago.

Gutenberg is the new WordPress edit tool, replacing what we currently know as the “edit screen” in the WordPress dashboard. It is about time, after almost 15 years of being around, WordPress has been in need of a real refresh to the edit screen to bring it up to date.

Try Gutenberg Today

If you haven’t figured out how Gutenberg will affect your business website, try it out. Using a dev or staging environment copy all of your data and activate the feature plugin from the repo. In a few minutes you’ll see what Gutenberg is like and how it will affect your website. Click around both the admin dashboard as well as the front end of your site, notice any changes?

Selling Gutenberg

Another great thing about Gutenberg for WordPress consultants is that it offers a new revenue stream from your existing clients. If you have a client base that uses WordPress heavily, specifically for news, blog, etc. Make sure they know about Gutenberg. Do your own research first, but let them know it is coming, and most likely will require some work to get it working perfectly for their use case, and their theme.

We’ve talked about this before, profiting from Gutenberg and it is going to be a sub-niche within WordPress that explodes over the next year or so.

Do Not Fear the Guteneberg

Unliked the symbolism of the reaper, Gutenberg is not the end of WordPress, but rather a new beginning. Before you start to worry about what it will do to your business website, install the plugin and play around with it. It may offer something that the current WordPress edit screen does not.

If you have tested Gutenberg and are not ready for it, you can always download the current editor screen as a plugin at GutenFree.com

It is 2018 already! Can you believe it? Are you using WordPress to consult in your business? Are you you an avid WordPress fan and go to meetups, WordCamps, etc?

In todays’ podcast we discuss ARC CTRL’s article How to make money with WordPress in 2018, and discuss how WE are making money and planning on shifting our own focuses in 2018 to make more, or change the way we make money.

Sponsored WordPress Content

Bob Dunn of BobWP.com mentioned he is going into the sponsored WordPress content route, allowing people to sponsor him at different levels for the content he creates. This isn’t something I’ve seen too much of in WordPress, but I find the business model interesting as many WordPress focused businesses (like plugins) will want to market to the WordPress community and having someone like Bob speak about their product is a great way to get noticed.

Products vs. Services

We didn’t talk too much about the different between offering products vs. services during the podcast, but we did bring up a few points. If you want to get into the WordPress product realm, it won’t be easy, however its not impossible. Sometimes you just need to build something better than what is already out there, or have it appeal to a new niche. Another option is to try and find something that is new and up and coming, for example Gutenberg is coming out shortly, and there are already companies putting together plugins and add-ons for it.

Service offerings won’t shift too much in 2018, over the past year or two we saw the big shift into hosting + maintaining websites as part of most people’s service offering, and that wont’ change this year, although the competition is going to get more intense as more companies offer these types of services.

WordPress is still growing! It is not too late to figure out how to make money with WordPress, and that is a good thing. You just have to figure out what you want to do and attack it. If you are going after something that already exists, you will have an uphill battle to climb, however it is not impossible.

If you watched our previous episode on why WordPress developers get paid less, we talked a lot about how WordPress missing out on enterprise work, which is where a lot of money in software / web development is. This week we continue that topic by talking about why WordPress isn’t getting that kind of work, and the conversation led to some hard truth conclusions.

Enterprise & Open Source

While most of the top tier developers you might know and love today are very fond of open source, big businesses (Fortune level) have been much slower to adopt whole open source platforms. While this isn’t a fact across all businesses, it is fact that they are more readily to accept a library to use to build something vs. a whole platform. Take for example something we talk a lot about, JavaScript frameworks. React, Angular, and Vue have been adopted by enterprise companies for a while now, and that has helped them to flourish rapidly, however you don’t see whole platforms built off of them being used.

WordPress suffers from this greatly. It still has a stigma with more senior or removed tech executives as a blog (only) platform and with that a slew of other stereotypes like security issues. These are mostly just false stereotypes nowadays, plus as I said during the podcast, most enterprise level teams have separate teams for things like security, tech ops, etc. If you are a smaller bootstrapped team, then maybe not, but finding a good stack for performance and security is not hard to find, plus there are many hosts that specialize in enterprise.

Ultimately the battle of open source vs. closed source still rages on. As tech companies have taken over the more “old school” industries open source has definitely seen a large uptick in usage, but a lot of the VERY large conglomerates are still hesitant.

Politics & Bureaucracy

Some of the most frustrating things to deal with when it comes to enterprise, is the politics and bureaucracy that comes with it. WordPress will ultimately get lost in the shuffle because as a software, it doesn’t have representatives that wine and dine enterprise clients, or go to enterprise trade shows. Yes an agency who builds with WordPress might show up, but when you look at the CMS landscape, there are many companies you’ve never heard of that just live off of a crappy CMS they sold to 1-2 enterprise clients and charge more monthly per user than you make annually.

There are many other reasons why one software or even a custom internal project may get chosen over WordPress even when WordPress is a great choice, and while frustrating, not much we can do about it.

WordPress Developers Aren’t Good Enough?

I’m not saying all WordPress developers, but Carl brought up a good point. The average WordPress developer may not be skilled enough in what enterprise wants, therefore, why would they choose WordPress? I know this sounds like some weird logic, but it is plausible in the enterprise realm.

Mistakes are a great way to level up as a WordPress developer. Debugging for a example, is almost an art form of fixing mistakes. We’ve all been there, sometimes its a code mistake, sometimes its something we realize we DEFINITELY should not be doing till after the fact. Today we discuss some of those

Do NOT Code in the WordPress “Editor”

If you have been around WordPress long enough you may have noticed in the menu under “Appearance” or “Plugins” you see (sometimes) something called “Editor”. This is a dangerous thing, and should not be used. For those of you who haven’t seen it or don’t know what it is, its basically a textarea (text box) code editor. There is no syntax highlighting or default spacing like you get in a IDE or text editor app, just plain code.

DO NOT code here. No matter how tempting it may look ’cause you can access that coveted “functions.php” file that you see the instructions on StackOverflow talk about, do not code here. Using a IDE or text editor will greatly help you since again you get syntax highlighting as well as automatic spacing, and autocomplete. Another reason to stay away is because as soon as you make a mistake, you could lock yourself out with white screen, then you’ll be forced to fix it the right way anyway.

The right way

If you have a GIT workflow, this will bypass all of that since you are coding directly to the server, via WordPress (bad idea!). If you don’t, but still use FTP, then next time you push up your local, it won’t match, overriding what you’ve done. From a workflow perspective, really not a good idea. Stick to your workflow, whatever it may be. Git, FTP, etc. don’t use the editor, so many bad things can happen.

Use WordPress Templates

One of the biggest mistakes that we may make when first starting out, especially when coming from vanilla PHP or maybe HTML, is we put a lot of content into the templates instead of using the WordPress admin to power a template.

If you have content on the page, it should be powered by the WordPress WYSIWYG text edit whenever possible.

Exceptions to the rule

When you are a developer working on a site that you manage, sometimes its just easier to do things like hard code content, especially on the front page or home page. I think this is a valid exception since sometimes you don’t need this to be powered by an admin since you won’t change it often, or you don’t mind changing it in the code to maybe even avoid 1 more DB call.

Also if your navigation is not going to change, while I would always recommend using WordPress menus, there may be a good use case for not using them since the navigation won’t change allowing you to skip that extra code and DB call.

Enqueue Your Scripts!

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. If you need to inject a script tag (

Today we discuss payment, or salaries. There are many job openings out there for developers, and the average web developer can make close to six figures pretty easily, but how do WordPress developers fit into that average?

WordPress Salaries Are Consistently Less

No matter how you spin it, unless you are working for an enterprise fortune 500 company, it is not going to be easy to make great money with WordPress. When I look at jobs offered anytime the title has “WordPress” in it, the offered salary range is usually less, sometimes significantly.

I’m not saying this is the case for ALL WordPress developers and opportunities, but just looking at a few different types of jobs and comparing them to similar jobs (similar requirements) that don’t have the “WordPress” in the title.

Remove “WordPress” Get Paid More

I’ve talked about this a few times in the past, either in podcasts or in talks of mine I give at WordCamps. Removing the “WordPress” from your desired job title can easily put you in the position to make more money.

I’ll take myself an example. I was working at a up and coming agency in Hollywood, loved it, the people and the perks were awesome. However there was as shift away from WordPress as new leadership took over and I being paid so well (80k) compared to the other developers, I’d have to shift with it. I immediately started to look for new positions and realized that “WordPress” was keeping me from hitting my goal at the time, 100K. I searched and applied for a month, then realized that I need to start applying for jobs without WordPress at all. I quickly found a job doing PHP in CakePHP at a small company, and while it wasn’t my goal salary, it was far closer than the 60-70K WordPress jobs I had seen and interviewed for.

WordPress in Enterprise

There is one exception to this rule, and that is enterprise. A lot of money for websites and web work comes from enterprise. Enterprise companies usually keep a few contractors (if not a contract development company) around because priorities and resources are harder to spin up when you are in enterprise. For example if a new project comes in and it doesn’t have top priority, enterprise would choose to outsource it to a team they have a working relationship with. The same goes for projects that are high priority and there aren’t enough resources, its easier to hire or pay for a couple extra hands temporarily than hire and train new developers.

The great thing about enterprise, is they are consistent and usually have larger budgets to work with, so agencies can afford to pay their employees more for the work. I have spoken to a few people who either directly contract or contract through agency, and they are making industry standard wages (if not higher) for WordPress work that outside of the enterprise wouldn’t see that high of a rate.

The Race to the Bottom

The last thing that is really affecting the price of WordPress projects is the sheer flooded market of WordPress developers who consult. WordPress is a great platform that can do so many things between building a simple brochure website to feeding custom phone applications. It is great because it can do so much, but because it starts out in the “very basic” and the barrier to entry is low for someone to learn how to use and build with WordPress, sites are getting cheaper.

When I first started building website and WordPress was just coming out as really this great thing, it was easy to find high paying website projects. Around the time Custom Post Types became a thing I remember easily charging $15k for SIMPLE websites that really only needed some minor code work to get going. The community was small still, and WordPress hadn’t taken over the Internet yet. Back then WordPress wasn’t something you said you were going to use either, clients weren’t savvy enough to know so you just ke

As freelancers or consultants we face many obstacles when it comes to being a business, and none more so the problem than larger businesses wanting to treat you like you aren’t one at all. There are times when we have to wonder “would you really be treating me this way if I was a large enterprise corporation?”

David v. Goliath Business

One of the most frustrating parts of dealing with businesses that are more ruthless and hard, is that they know when you are a smaller company and won’t be able to defend yourself against them. They may have a legal team that you cannot complete with, or they may know that the money is more important to you than it is to them, so they can quickly hold you hostage in a way for payment.

There are many ways we discuss during the episode how to discuss this, and each way may work best for you

Make demands

Don’t be afraid to make demands. If you are being held up by a client who is treating you poorly because they don’t think much of you, make a demand for what you need. If they are holding up a payment and also want something else done to complete that payment, make a demand for for payment first, and if you feel nice, include the task as part of post-payment.

No handouts

Don’t give out handouts. When you have a good working relationship with a business client, it is easy to tell that the last 5-10 min. ask isn’t going to impede anything. However the businesses that treat you poorly, well once you give them 5 minutes, they’ll ask for 10, then 20, then next thing you know you are working on a whole new project practically and all because you really want that payment that they may be holding hostage.

Scope Creep

We have whole episodes dedicated to scope creep, but it has to be said that a good scope of work agreed upon prior to working can help mitigate so many of these issues. Still, even I had a locked down scope with my project and was constantly bombarded with new requests outside of that scope just to get my final payment.

Act Like Large Business

Meagan and I had mixed thoughts on this, but I can’t deny that it may help. Acting like you are part of a larger “agency” or business may help you. Start a new business or go sign up for a Business D.B.A which will allow you to even take checks and payments under that business name. While I currently have a business just for taxes and financial reasons, I still sell myself as “Roy Sivan” not my corporation name, which confuses some.

Meagan had another tip if you are going that route, and that is to email from other people within your fake organization. Instead of being “Meagan” she could turn herself into anyone else, as long as the email address had the same domain, it looked like a new person. I realize that this is a tricky situation, and honestly seems like a great slap-stick comedy movie in the making, but it may work for you.

Walking Away

I know it is hard to walk away from money. Something we talked about which I never thought about was writing it off (if you have a business) as a loss on time. Your business is paying you to do the work, if the work is completed and the business was not paid, its a loss. I’m not sure about how this works, so don’t assume that is right, however it makes sense.

Sometimes no matter how hard it is to walk away from the money, no matter the amount, it may be the right move. I know not everyone has a full time job or even a steady consultant income, so walking away form even a few hundred dollars is a big deal. However in the long run you will be happier with yourself. Every situation is different and there is no easy answer to encompasses all scenarios.

It happens

I think no matter how hard you try to vet, and scope, and contract, you are still going to potentially run into those bad clients who just want to take advantage for their own gain. Even if you do have a legal bounding contract, they may know the legal

Marijuana is a topic I’ve been wanting to cover on The WP Crowd for a while, we even tried recording the episode a few times, but had issues. So finally, a conversation about a relatively new (newly legalized) industry and how we as WordPress consultants will be affected by it.

Its not legal everywhere, yet

The first thing I’d like to mention is that while a lot of what we are talking about applies to US States (and Canadian provinces) where it is now legal to smoke marijuana recreationally or even through medical programs, it is not legal everywhere. Keep that in mind when you are getting a request for a dispensary, or someone selling, because you may be helping someone build their illegal business.

Even if its, there is lots of gray area

For the areas where it is legal to smoke and grow marijuana, there is still a lot of gray market and “iffy” things going on. We see it a lot in California, because even though it has been legal for medical use here for a very long time, it is still very easy to get marijuana through illegal ways.

Moral of the story, which should apply to any business but more so here, be careful with who you work with.

Medical Marijuana & Compliance

One of the more interesting things we speculated on was that moving forward since Marijuana is becoming legal in “medical use” for some states, will the storage of patient information from dispensaries on a website for customers fall under the same guidelines as any other doctor? HIPAA for example is something that every medical website needs to follow if they are in any way storing medical patient information online. Think of this like PCI Compliance for credit card processing, but for medical information, and its a lot harder (with much higher fines).

If this does become a thing that we need to worry about, will WordPress be a good fit for dispensary websites? If so, what kind of ecosystem may be built around it? Plugins for dispensary patients? Curious to see how this may change or add a new ecosystem within WordPress.

Is it Taboo?

Another interesting topic  of conversation during the podcast was the “taboo” factor of marijuana. Marijuana is one of the United State’s polarizing topics, many people aren’t fond of how its becoming more and more legal, while the other side is happy to see a medicinal plant become mainstream. No matter your opinion, there may be something of a taboo involved, and usually that leads to getting stuck in like-minded businesses only.

I compare this to the adult entertainment industry. I have known a few people who have worked for adult content websites, and while the pay is great typically, you get stuck basically only applying and working for other adult entertainment companies. It is hard to go from that industry into something more wholesome, as there is a stigma or taboo that may revolve around you.

I’m not sure how true this is nowadays, especially with developers, I would overlook where a developer is coming from professionally if the tech that they were using was on par with what we needed for a new hire. However, this isn’t always going to be the case, and you may be in a non-engineering role. So this taboo niche exists, and I’m curious to see if marijuana gets the same stigma, or if it becomes main stream enough to remove itself.

This may also be on a state by state basis.

Marijuana, A New Industry

Overall, since legalization of marijuana is slowly rolling out across the United States & Canada, it is proving that a new industry is forming, as well as all the businesses that support that industry. From those who grow and manufacture, to those who sell, every business along the chain will need a website. I think consulting with WordPress and WordPress itself will play a huge role in this. As small companies turn to .com for their small business website needs and medium to larger companies come to consultants for their expertise in building so