2023 Review… And Looking Ahead To 2024.

It feels crazy to say…

This will be the final issue of The Morning WP for this year.

Not saying I won’t email you anything before the year is out, but the Monday issues of the newsletter will continue in the new year. The next two Mondays are Christmas and then New Years Day. And frankly, friends and family are more important than reading a newsletter. 😇

But, seeing as this is the final issue of the year, I thought I would review the outgoing year and look ahead at the next one.

So, in this issue, I look back at some of the things I’ve done in 2023 and how it has worked out (including a major pivot in the business). I also look ahead to 2024. And yes, I even give a few predictions.

So, let’s dive in…

2023 Review

Well, this issue is very likely to be the final newsletter of 2023. And so, I figure I’d do a little annual review.

I gotta say, on one hand it feels like the year has blown by and not a lot has changed. But, on the other hand, when I step back and look at it… I realize I’ve basically pivoted the entire business.

But, first let’s get the easy stuff of the way…

Re-Engineering the Site on Kadence Theme

The Blog Marketing Academy was essentially re-built this year. The impetus of that was performance concerns running BuddyBoss and Elementor Pro.

I had been putting off a switch to a block-based theme. I thought the block builder (or Gutenberg) wasn’t very good and I was just being stubborn about it. But, I finally relented and decided to finally get good at using the native block builder of WordPress.

It was a big job to re-build the site, but everything got easier. And everything got faster. Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks is really a great platform to build a site with.

Since I re-built the BMA, I’ve moved a LOT of my clients to Kadence and I’ve built quite a lot of sites with the platform.

So, 2023 was the year I stopped using page builders. And now, I build with Kadence Theme for almost every project I’m involved with.

Branding Changes

I made some branding changes in 2023. You can read my full thoughts at the time in this post, but here’s the basic moves made:

• The newsletter was re-branded from The Edge to The Morning WP.
• WP Concierge became it’s own brand, was separated into it’s own site and then brought back again.
• DavidRisley.com was put back online again.
• The membership was re-branded to ONEPass.

As part of that re-branding of the newsletter, I also took a new path into using BeeHiiv for my newsletter rather than FluentCRM. The idea was to turn two of my newsletters into their own separate entities and grow them separately. The move to BeeHiiv took place in August and…

… I reversed the decision at the end of November. 🤪

So, what happened there? Certainly I’m no stranger to trying things out and changing my mind if I find it wasn’t the best idea. And you guys get to have all the fun of watching me do it in public. 🤓

Basically, it became a hassle having my email list in two different places. Secondly, I much prefer FluentCRM because it can do everything I want. I also came to realize that the real selling proposition of BeeHiiv is the paid boosts and the ads. It is like the old days of monetization through advertising, but brought to newsletters. And that wasn’t the path I intended to go with my newsletter.

So, a lot of the changes I made at the time didn’t end up sticking. You llve… you learn. 🤷‍♂️

But, I have kept a lot of those name changes. Just not the platform changes.

Lesson here: Less moving parts, the better. Simpler is better.

And now for the biggest change…

Pivoting Into Client Services (And All That Comes With That)

Perhaps the biggest change in my business I’ve made in quite some time is the pivot into client services.

This pivot started before 2023, however this year I fully embraced it. Whereas the membership site and training used to be my main focus, I began to really shift when Covid began. And here in 2023, client services now represents the majority of the income to the Blog Marketing Academy. A big majority, in fact.

This is not a move I thought I would ever make. In fact, I spent years avoiding it because it was “time for money” and client services can most definitely be a higher-maintenance business.

A few big things led to this big pivot:

• The massive content inflation in the world of online courses (over-supply leading to a drop in perceived value) was not something I wanted to continue to fight in the same way.
• I was, frankly, getting tired of creating training content. I’ve been doing it for so long.
• I love the concrete nature of building sites. I can get real results for people, apply my diverse knowledge of business, strategy AND technical to building sites for clients. And when we’re done, the client and I can both point at it and we KNOW we got a result. Contrast that with how most people who buy online courses never even complete them (much less execute them) and it’s just a different level of delivery.
• With client services, the average order value is higher. And it means I can work with less people, but just deliver better outcomes.

So, Blog Marketing Academy (despite the name) is more of a client service business than a training business now.

More work? Yes. More moving parts? Yes since that’s the nature of working with clients. But, more fun? Yes it is.

So, was 2023 one of my top-earning years? No. It was fine, but I’ve made more money before. But, what I will say is that I think the business being built now (after this pivot) is going to have a much stronger foundation and better staying power.

Overall, it has been a good year in terms of business.

Looking Ahead At 2024

So, what am I looking at for the upcoming year? Well…

My focus is going to be on expanding the client side of the business. A couple of areas of focus here will be:

• Bringing on more Concierge clients. Concierge has become a chief focus for me.
• Launching a few productized services set up for fast, systematized delivery.

This kind of business is more time-demanding, so there’s a good chance that things will need to expand in terms of the team. You may see some new faces. Systems will need to mature to allow for the personalized service I want to deliver for Concierge clients, but without me having to do every little thing on my own.

The Blog Marketing Academy site is also going to simplify further. Right now, I’m spending some spare time re-organizing the training library. Some of the old courses are going to be retired and removed. Others will be moved out of Learndash and re-posted into the main training library. Learndash is likely to be removed.

Blog Marketing Academy is going to be mostly giving away things for free. Because the money is mostly made with client services. ONEPass remains in place, but we’ll see what the future holds in that regard as things move forward. In the end, Blog Marketing Academy is basically a content marketing machine for services now.

And in some ways, that’s just a simpler model. And it solves a common pain point.

A Few Predictions For 2024

Everybody loves predictions. So, here’s a few of my thoughts on what I expect next year. Some business. Some not. Here we go…

• WordPress continues to lead the pack in terms of popularity, especially as more and more people come to appreciate the importance of digital sovereignty.
• There will be much more artificial intelligence (AI) brought into WordPress.
• WordPress moves more into full-site editing natively.
• WordPress gets a newly designed admin panel (finally). And it will garner some polarizing reactions.

And then, outside of WordPress and websites, here’s a few things I’m looking at…

• The crypto market is going to go nuts as we’re entering another bull run. Bitcoin ETF approved. Interest rates begin to lower as the money printer turns on. All drives crypto.
• The US election is going to be highly chaotic. The propaganda will be flying in all directions.
• Possible polarization between big tech censorship (in conjunction with government) and the growing groundswell of free speech and decentralization. This is the battle of this decade, and it will become even more apparent in 2024. Possibility that shutdowns and outages become more common across the internet.

I think there’s going to be a lot of noise this coming year. But, look for opportunities because there will be many for the people who don’t get distracted.

WordPress Quick Bits…

Fathom Analytics increases prices. Fathom Analytics is my preferred alternative to Google Analytics. Starting in January, they will have slightly higher prices. The increase is pretty minimal, tho. My bill is only going up by a buck a month. And if you’re a Concierge client, you don’t have to worry about it because Fathom is included with your service (if you choose to use it).

BuddyBoss Theme Security Patch. A critical vulnerability was found in the BuddyBoss Theme by Patchstack. A fix was quickly released, so make sure you’re running 2.4.61 or later.

BuddyBoss Now Has TutorLMS Integration. Speaking of BuddyBoss, they’ve now built-in an official integration with TutorLMS. Now, TutorLMS is a full alternative to Learndash for BuddyBoss sites. Read more about it here.

FluentBooking gets redirect URLs. FluentBooking is evolving quickly. They just released version 1.2.4 and one of the cool additions for this version is redirect URLs. After a person books an appointment, you can automatically redirect them to any URL of your choice. This gives much more control over the scheduling experience. Read more about this release here.

Thrive Suite updates. Thrive Apprentice users can now force students to actually watch a video before marking a lesson as complete. They’ve also built multi-select into Architect. Good to see them continuing to improve the products… especially with that new ridiculous pricing and the lock-in. Yay Awesome Motive! See their update here.

Matt Mullenweg gives State Of The Word. The co-founder of WordPress delivered his annual “State Of The Word” address. You can watch it on Youtube here. He also answered user questions in a Q&A, which you can watch here.