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Are you running your own development-focused freelance or small agency business? Have you mastered the skills to sell your services and close the right kind of clients to keep you growing? Selling your services can often be an uncomfortable or even often overlooked area when managing a development focused freelance or small agency businesses. Of course, these are some of the very skills you'll need to keep your billable hours full and money adding to your bottom line!

In this episode of PressThis we interview popular WP community contributor John Housholder as he talks about his trasition from a developer centric role to one focusing on helping to drive growth. John explores the challenges of shifting contexts, getting around the fear of talking to people, and coming to terms with the important role of sales in helping a business move forward.

As a former freelance developer, John has been in the trenches and his insights into how to approach sales conversations in efficient and effective ways are a must hear for any freelance developer wondering.. "How am I going to do this sales thing?!".

If you're struggling with how to up your sales skills to support your growing freelance or agency business, don't miss this episode of PressThis!

Interesting Google local pack functionality, a new setup for service area businesses, and the benefits of Google Posts kick off this episode. The hosts then delve into some fascinating Mueller files as of late and answer three great SEO questions from listeners.

Google's John Mueller was asked on Twitter if there is a way in the new Google Search Console to remove old Sitemaps files. He said you can 404 them to remove them. Maybe Google will add a button to delete old Sitemap files there but for now, 404ing them will eventually get them to be removed. A new mic icon. Below are screens from Android on the left and the iPhone on the right, showing Google.com search results. The iPhone doesn’t show the mic, although the keyboard allows voice input. The search phrase is “what percentage of mobile queries are voice searches?” Beyond the microphone icon inside the search box, the major difference — a significant one — is that users will hear a spoken response now with Android mobile web searches rather than simply get a set of “silent” results. This voice response may encourage people to undertake more searches while their eyes are occupied, such as when they are cooking or driving.

David Szetela talks with Akvile DeFazio about getting your feet wet with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest direct response advertising. 

Learn what considerations should be made before diving in (e.g. Facebook can create a catalog from a Google Merchant Center feed)? What kind of results can they expect(in standard KPIs) compared to search engine results?Any tips or hidden landmines and more.

Don’t just read the reams of 2019 trends reports that call out in-app header bidding as the next “Big Thing” in mobile app monetization. “Get involved now, or risk leaving money on the table” is the top advice we get fromMichael Brooks, SVP Revenue at Weatherbug, where he manages direct sales, programmatic partnerships, business development, growth, and more. Mike debunks industry myths and shares best practices, providing straight answers to tough questions based on his first-hand experiences with in-app header bidding at Weatherbug, the media property that connects 14 million consumers each month to accurate and innovative weather data.

Ecommerce platform provider BigCommerce recently released an ecommerce plugin for WordPress with a really unique approach. The plugin leverages the BigCommerce platform to offload many of the workloads required for ecommerce sites in order to let WordPress focus on delivering great content with awesome performance.

This was big news in the WordPress community and was even featured during the State of the Word talk at WCUS. For this episode of PressThis, we've invited Topher DeRosia of BigCommerce to share how their solution works and how they think about the opportunity of offloaded ecommerce to help WordPress ecommerce sites.

We're super excited for the chance to chat about this exciting development in the world of WordPress ecommerce. If you're looking for new ways to use WordPress to generate revenue from direct sales or on how you can help customers of your freelancer or agency business win with WordPress and ecommerce, listen to this episode of PressThis now!

Rhonda Moret, founder of Elevate For Her , a professional development organization with tactical programming designed to help women claim their value and step forward from inferiority, with drive, passion, and action to achieve their goals-- stemming from learning and education. From humble beginnings, growing up as a Latina woman in South Central Los Angeles, Rhonda was the first woman in her family to graduate from college and has forged a path of empowerment for women after her. As a branding and marketing expert, Rhonda directed campaigns for Google, Nike Golf, the PGA of America, Universal Studios, and Subway as well as working with high profile personalities including Tiger Woods, Billie Jean King, best selling author Robert Kiyosaki, and even Donald Trump. Over the course of her professional career, Moret's work and viewpoints have garnered media attention as she has been interviewed by The Washington Post, Adobe’ s CMO. com, The Business Journal, PBS, USA Today, and several other media outlets. Moret's most recent venture, Elevate for Her, has her focused on helping women elevate the critical business skills needed to reach the upper levels of leadership and management. With offerings including negotiations, leadership, personal branding and communications, Moret views this work as her passion project and an effort to ultimately create greater gender and pay parity in the workplace.

Jack McGuinness is co-founder and managing partner of Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on helping great leaders build great leadership teams. They discuss some of the most common mistakes made by CEOs, being open to leadership coaching, tips on building a leadership team and measuring effectiveness.

Jack has 25+ years experience working with leadership teams at organizations big and small across multiple industries. After serving as an airborne ranger with the U.S. Army’s prestigious 10th Mountain Division, he helped build a successful boutique management-consulting firm where he served as COO for 13 years. Jack also served as CEO of a contract packaging company, where he developed a passion for unleashing the leadership capacity of teams throughout an organization. In 2009 Jack joined forces with a West Point classmate to form Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on working with CEOs to unlock the potential of their leadership teams.

We saw this coming and now Google officially released a new sign up process for service area businesses, businesses that don't operate out of a specific location(s). Google now lets them specify the locations they service, instead of being stuck without any options. Google is testing a video overlay or lightbox feature to play videos in the mobile search results. In the search results captured by Valentin Pletzer on Twitter he showed how instead of being taken to the video landing page, Google shows the video itself in an overlay. Google has asked the National Labor Relations Board to reconsider rules allowing employees to organize over workplace email without fear of punishment, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday. The Obama-era precedent restricts companies from disciplining employees who used internal email communication for actions such as circulating petitions, organizing walkouts, or trying to form a union, according to the report.

Jon MacDonald is founder and President of The Good (https://thegood.com), a conversion rate optimization firm that helps brands convert more of their existing website traffic into buyers. The Good has unlocked results for some of the largest online brands including Adobe, Nike, Xerox, The Economist,  and more. Jon regularly contributes content on conversion optimization to publications like Entrepreneur and Inc. He knows how to get visitors to take action. As President, Jon has helped lead The Good to become one of Oregon's top 20 fastest growing private companies. The team at The Good have made a practice of advising brands on how to see e-commerce sales double or more. In recent years, brands that have worked with The Good have seen an average revenue increase in revenue of over 100%.