2024 Year In Review

Crazy that Christmas is this week. This week will be a lot of time spent with family…. exactly as it should be.

I want to wish all of my clients and subscribers a Merry Christmas. 🎄 I hope you enjoy the day… and perhaps even get a little bit of down time.

For clients, obviously this week (and next week) is going to be lighter on the schedule. Ongoing projects will be a little slower as I will be taking time to be with family. I will be working, of course. Just not full time. 😇 Once we get into January, we’ll be back up to speed again.

On that note, below I’m going to do a quick year in review and look back at how things have gone in 2024.

So, let’s get into it….

2024 Year In Review

Well, Christmas is in 2 days (which is crazy). And that also means we’re about to wrap up another year. Another trip around the sun.

Each year I like to do a little look back on how things have gone and simply take stock.

2021 was the year I made a fairly hard pivot into technical services. That was the year I just decided that my superpower was a little different than just teaching online business…. and instead was more about how to build and use web technology to actually make this stuff work. It felt right and I felt like I was in my zone doing that.

Shortly after that pivot was when I began offering what would become the Concierge program. It wasn’t called “Concierge” right away. And not only that, the service was a little janky in the beginning. 😇 I was feelin’ out how to do it, the best way to manage communications, and the mix of things that would become part of it.

For this year of 2024, I do feel like things have gotten pretty grooved in when it comes to Concierge. And, of course, Concierge is now really the core offer of the Blog Marketing Academy. A few years back, that’s just not something I even had in mind. Funny how things change. 😁

A few quick stats for 2024:

• Revenue growth for the business was 37% over last year.
• I currently work with 60 active clients enrolled in Concierge.
• I am currently actively managing 82 websites as part of Concierge.
• I only published 14 blog posts in 2024 and 25 new videos to Youtube. There was some overlap there, too, so video was definitely my main content medium this year.
• I didn’t skip a beat on this newsletter this year, having written and sent 51 issues so far.
• There has been an overall drop in web traffic to the BMA website of around 27%. Almost that entire drop occurred in the month of May, which is interesting. I’d need to go back and see what exactly led to that. No doubt some change with Google. But, you can probably also tell…. I’m not concerned about it. 😎
• I did 53 Roadmap calls in 2024. Many of them turned into business, but many don’t. Which is fine with me since I also look at these calls as one of my main ways to keep my ear to the ground on the needs/wants of my market. I find these calls quite insightful either way.

Overall, 2024 has been a year focused on service delivery to my clients more than anything. The newsletter and videos have been my main focus when it comes to content. I’m definitely not blogging my face off…. yet the business grew by 37%.

A few quick observations about all of this:

• When I pivoted to services, I leaned in quickly on the monthly recurring revenue through a productized service. I’m glad I did.
• A productized service such as Concierge has incredibly high retention rate – higher than I ever had with an information-based membership site.
• Clearly, when set up correctly, your web traffic doesn’t have a heck of a lot to do with how much money you make. My income grew 37% while my site traffic dropped 27%.
• The Youtube videos are my primary generator of business for new people, while this newsletter has proven to be fantastic for long-term relations for clients who end up working with me weeks or months after they originally found me. Interestingly, the blog itself is a minor player and the website ends up being mostly a centralized repository for my content.
• Overall, I like the relative simplicity of this business model over things I have done in the past. I feel I’m providing much more value, but to fewer people. That’s a heck of a lot easier than constantly feeling like I have to produce another course… or do an office hours call. 🤪

Overall, I’m happy with how 2024 has gone when it comes to business. For 2025, I am mostly eyeing growth and fine-tuning for the way things are already progressing. A few things on my mind for the new year are:

• A higher level of intention behind actual growth of this newsletter (in terms of subscribers) as well as subscribers to the Youtube channel. Since those two mediums have proven to be the biggest drivers of business, that’s where focus will remain mostly.
• I will likely be producing more video for Youtube.
• I will be creating more systems for management of Concierge as well as client resources.

And that is a quick summary of 2024 when it comes to my own business. 😇

This Week In Concierge

For all of my Concierge clients, you may find interesting my announcement video (and post) about upcoming changes for the new year. Some highlights:

• No price changes to the main plans, however the Growth plan will disappear (and already has).
• Multi-site discounts will disappear moving forward.
• Core clients will have a 20% discount on credits moving forward.
• Platinum clients will not get support for marketing emails, dynamic legal documents via Termageddon, priority support, and a quarterly sit audit.

A few notes for existing clients:

• There will be no price changes on anybody’s monthly plans, including those with multiple sites currently getting the discount.
• There will now be set limits on outgoing emails through my agency account with Postmark. Core clients will be subject to additional charges for outgoing marketing emails and I will be in touch with a few of you about that. Platinum clients can send marketing emails through Concierge with high deliverability, with much higher limits.
• Soon, all Core clients will be hearing from me with regard to legal documents for your site (privacy policy, terms of service, etc.). There will be the option of compliant documents through Termageddon, with a monthly add-on. If you choose not to use that, it’s fine. But, I will ask that you digitally sign a form acknowledging such.

Now, as for those credits….

Core clients will be getting a 20% discount on those moving forward instead of the 30% discount. That will go in effect after the new year. So, any Anytime Credits you secure now will still get the full discount. And this will lock in the current rate for any work you will want done on your site in 2025. As you know, Anytime Credits do not expire.

So, you may want to consider adding some credits to your account here as 2024 draws to a close. 😇

WordPress Quick Bits

You Must Like Pineapple On Your Pizza. After Matt Mullenweg was ordered by the courts to put things back to normal, he removed the login checkbox on WordPress.org saying you don’t work for WPEngine. And…. he replaced it with one where you have to check off that you like pineapple on your pizza. 🤣 I mean… I choose to take it as a joke. Still, a little childish. And, call me weird, but I don’t really mind pineapple on my pizza anyway. 😝 There I said it.

Elementor Broke Things (Again). Last week’s 3.26 version update of Elementor apparently broke some things. I experienced it myself with 3 different Concierge clients, but then began seeing rumblings of it around the WordPress community on social media. The answer was to roll back to the previous version and instantly the problems went away. Problems ranged from the editor freezing up…. to outright causing critical code errors that brought down the entire site. The issue could have been related to the Elementor cache, as indicated by some quick fixes in the changelog. Also an issue with enqueing styles, seen in the Pro changelog. We’ll see when we run fresh updates.

Cloudflare’s Year In Review.. Cloudflare is in a pretty unique position to see global trends of the internet due to being one of the core backbone services. And they just posted their 2024 year in review with some interesting stats. There’s been a 17.2% increase in internet traffic worldwide. Also, of the top 5000 websites on the internet, WordPress is powering 53.1% of them. Sadly, Google still absolutely dominates search. Come on, people! 😜 Seriously, there are other options. I use Brave Search most of the time, personally.

Aweber Increase Prices. Aweber recently emailed it’s customers with news of price increases for 2025. And unfortunately, these were biggie. Some people could see double… or even tripling of their monthly rate. Judging by their current pricing page, they’re not only increasing their prices, but overly complicating everything by placing quotas on how much you can send. Frankly, Aweber is in decline and they’re only coasting on the inertia of their earlier years. I would HIGHLY recommend any Aweber customers switch to FluentCRM and use a quality email sender instead. So much better.

2025: The Year Matt Needs To Be Bypassed

In the tech world, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a faster implosion of reputation than that of the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg.

There’s likely no need to reiterate all that has happened this year, beginning with his public attack of WPEngine and legal war against them that began with WordCamp US. You’ve probably heard about his public shaming of WPEngine for what was considered normal up to Matt’s sudden change of mind. How he stole the Advanced Custom Fields plugin. Blocked all WPEngine people from logging into WordPress.org to make updates.

I’m not sure if Matt expected a different reaction when he began all this, but what he got was an almost universal (it seems) condemnation from the WordPress community. And he didn’t take it well, publicly chastising people, blocking major WordPress community members on X, and more.

So, where do things stand now?

I must admit, my first reaction was to consider this whole thing a spectacle for nerds. That it didn’t matter much in the real world of regular WordPress users. But, with the recent shutdown of WordPress.org for the holidays and all of the uncertainty among the community, I think the effects of all this just might be bigger than I thought it might be.

What we have is a case of a benevolent dictator (Matt Mullenweg) who has suddenly lost his mind. In this Inc piece about him, he said he prefers the term “enlightened leader”. 😂 And in what appears to be a case of narcissism, he seems to be unwilling to even look at the fact that he went about this all wrong.

And the result might just be that the community is going to be working to BYPASS Matt Mullenweg is 2025.

Joost De Valk, original founder of Yoast, is now calling for breaking the status quo. He’s basically calling for a path forward that does not include Matt Mullenweg being the head of the machine.

Joost is calling for federated and independent repositories – or FAIR. Cool acronym, but he basically means independent plugin/theme repositories (like “app stores”) that are independent of WordPress.org.

This is smart and exactly what needs to happen.

What’s cool is that I think this is going to pick up steam. Joost is a major name in the WordPress space. If he puts his effort behind this, I think it will happen.

Whether this happens within the confines of the WordPress trademark and the WordPress Foundation remains to be seen. Plus, let’s be clear…. the current WordPress Foundation is basically a shell. It is supposed to be independent, but Matt made an empty virtue signaling move of transferring the trademarks to it. For all practical purposes, Matt has absolute control over the Foundation. The other two members are nobodies with no influence at all. The whole thing appears to be a mirage.

So, either the WordPress Foundation needs to become an actual independent entity without Matt leading it… or a new Foundation needs to be created.

One thing is for sure…. this whole thing will blow over at some point. However, in the end, I think the world of WordPress is going to look a little more…. decentralized. And perhaps Matt’s grip on things will become a little looser. Whether he likes it or not.