Gurus

Down here in Florida, we can get some crazy thunderstorms during the summers. One of them happened a couple nights ago when we were all woken up at 12AM by massive thunder and, apparently, lightning strikes right here in the neighborhood.

And, it managed to take out my main internet router and our internet service along with it. Which is great when you run a 100% online business, let me tell you. 🤪

I’m getting a new router sent to me which hopefully fixes the issue, but in the meantime, I was prepared.

I busted out my Starlink Mini and unpaused the service and…. I’m working using satellites, baby. 😎

With what I do, I need to be connected. And tethering to my cell phone can be spotty sometimes. So, I bought a Starlink Mini for times like this, including alternative power solutions to power things.

So, even when sh*t here in Florida gets crazy, you’ll hear from me. 🤣

Alright, let’s dive straight in….

Featured This Week

Internet Marketing With David Risley From Blog Marketing Academy

Something different this week. Instead of featuring something on my own site, I thought I would show you episode 504 of the LMSCast, where I was a guest talking with Chris Badgett from LifterLMS. We covered all kinds of stuff in this one, including my pivot into services after concentrating on teaching exclusively for so long. Thought you might find it interesting. 😇

Too Many Cooks In The Kitchen

This last week, I helped one of my clients debug a marketing campaign.

Well, maybe. And don’t get me wrong, I am definitely no expert at paid advertising. Not even close. But, I am pretty good at seeing “the big picture” in a sea of noise. That is one of my “superpowers”, seemingly. And when I looked at her sea of numbers in her tracking spreadsheet, I saw a problem.

In her case, she had been working with somebody consulting her with her ad campaigns. And they changed something which was working… and managed to crash her stats. And apparently nobody saw that until I, the “web guy”, took a look at it. 😇

Now, I don’t mention this to toot my own horn here. What I actually thought of here is that there were just too many cooks in the kitchen here.

Too many “gurus”. Too many people people listened to.

And there’s a couple things you really need to know about a lot of “gurus”.

• They can be a little arrogant in that the “best” thing to do is the thing they know how to do. If they’re not familiar with something, they’ll just recommend against it. And they treat their way as “one size fits all”.
• Often, they’re not quite as good at what they say as they purport to be.

They’re not bad people (most of them). They’re good at what they do, but perhaps ONLY what they do. They’ve got tunnel vision. And boy will they be confident about what they’re telling you! Confidence sells. A lot of clients are confused and not exactly sure what they need to do, so they find true confidence to be a lifeline.

See: Instant Authority: 5 Simple Strategies To Becoming A Leader In Your Niche (Without Depending On Others)

But, when you are paying attention to a lot of these people, you can end up with too many cooks in the kitchen. You can end up with conflicting advice. And some of that advice is given in a somewhat flippant manner because that consultant didn’t really understand “the big picture” and they were just going through their usual process without thinking it through.

Or you can end up with, in this case, a very confident “guru” making changes to ad campaigns without respect for what was working before he showed up… and manage to drop the stats.

And, IMO, the advice given to resurrect those statistics was just leading my client astray into a bunch of other crap that was causing things to get overly complex. I mean, I’m not the one in those conversations, but it seems like bad advice to me. Stats speak for themselves.

This is one of the reasons I pivoted into services instead of just teaching. I didn’t want to be yet another echo with my advice. Another cocky “guru” saying what you “need” to do. I got tired of it. Plus, I felt I was not truly helping people that way. I’d rather just help them “hands on” and do things in a direct, concrete way.

There’s a lot of noise out there. A lot of people acting like gurus. But, you’ve got to have a BS detector to work with them. Not because they’re lying, but because what they tell you to do might not resonate with YOU and YOUR business.

It is like going to a doctor that doesn’t even listen to the patient but just prescribes a drug.

Some “gurus” don’t listen. They preach. And there’s a difference.

And if you listen to too many sources of information and too many gurus when you don’t have your own certainty on some things, you will end up feeling overwhelmed and confused. You’ll end up throwing money at people hoping they will be a savior, but they’re not.

It would be like trying to cook in a kitchen with too many cooks…. and each cook is cooking a different meal. Each cook might be a good cook, too! But, they’re good at what they specifically like to cook. And there’s no coordination between the cooks. In this situation, the output from that kitchen isn’t going to be all too great.

My recommendation is not to listen to or hire too many “cooks”.

This Week In Concierge

Not sure if you’ve noticed, but the “Support” from some plugin companies is rather pathetic. 🤪

Most recently, I’ve seen subpar support from CartFlows and BuddyBoss. Both have perfectly fine products, but if the need arises that you need help, it feels frustrating.

This last week, one of my Concierge clients was having a big problem with his forums in BuddyBoss. Lots of errors. I went in and ruled out a plugin conflict and the issues were clearly coming from Buddyboss itself. Since it is his account with them, I had him contact support.

Unfortunately, all they did was waste a bunch of his time. The problem remained and my client was about to go out of town. I had him bring me in on the support discussion with BuddyBoss with the intention that I could see it through for my client while he’s gone.

But, I also decided to go in and see if I could find the issue on my own. And, after about 30 minutes of digging… I did find the issue. And fixed it.

My client is still out of town, I assume, because I haven’t yet heard back. However, his site is purring along just fine.

All this to say…

This is what a “Concierge” does. And why people choose to have me on their team for these things rather than being stuck dealing with these techie things on their own or… experiencing the frustration of dealing with support people via email that just run you in circles.

Those support people often go through little flow charts and processes on things. They don’t think holistically. And they don’t understand YOUR site. Often, the support people don’t even have a ton of experience. Combining all that with having to wait multiple hours between emails is just…. annoying.

One of my goals with Concierge is that my clients never have to deal with that. In most cases, I can handle problems WAAAYYYY faster than those support teams. And if needed, I’ll even deal with the support team on the client’s behalf.

WordPress Quick Bits

WooCommerce 9.9 Released. WooCommerce 9.9 was finally released last week, along with a string of rapid release fixes. As of this writing, the current version is 9.9.3. For some reason, this 9.9 release has been a little bumpy, but I am running it (as are almost all my clients) and it seems to be working fine. It comes with some email receipt emails that look a lot nicer than before.

WooCommerce Blueprints. Also in beta for Woo 9.9 is the new Blueprints functionality. This will prove to be a major time saver to quickly be able to configure the same settings over and over again for new Woo setups. I will test this, but intend to use it as I am often spending 10-15 minutes configuring new WooCommerce sites exactly the same way every time… manually.

Malware Disguised As A Plugin. WordFence has the scoop on a new threat vector. It is malware disguised as a legitimate plugin which then provides remote code execution capabilities to the attacker. These are little single-file plugins that put false headers into WordPress to look like something legit, such as “WooCommerce Product Addons”. For these plugin to do any harm, they need to be uploaded and activated and that requires an Admin account. So, a reminder to keep a secure password for your own Admin account in WordPress as well as to ensure all Administrators on your site are legit and active. If you opened up an Admin profile for some support team, always delete that profile when they’re done.

Robert Devore Steps Away. Devore began to be known as a guy who seemingly mass produced WordPress plugins. Well, no more, as he is stepping away from WordPress. Seems like he’s frustrated with how things have evolved with the community. Very gifted developer, but I can’t say he has very good people skills.

WordPress Leadership Declines Sustainability Team. WordPress used to have a Sustainability team, but it was disbanded by WordPress leadership over a lack of measurable output. And more recently, it again declined to bring it back. I agree with this decision. Why would WordPress need a “sustainability” team? Just so people can get a warm fuzzy about it? It would achieve exactly nothing, which is exactly why it was pruned. WordPress is about development, not virtue signaling.

Big Downtime Last Week. Thursday last week, Google Cloud went down for a bit and it caused a chain reaction of downtime around the internet, including some of Cloudflare’s services, all Kinsta clients, Spotify, Discord, etc. I bet Siteground clients went offline, too, since I’m fairly sure they use Google Cloud.

GravityBoard Launches. GravityKit is a team which produces add-ons for Gravity Forms. They’ve just launched GravityBoard which allows you to manage your form entries via a Trello-like interface and have a workflow for things. Looks a lot like what you can already do with Fluent Forms and FluentBoards.

FluentAuth 2.0. A lot of people don’t really know about FluentAuth since it is more of a side project for them, bit it is a handy little plugin for controlling and securing the login process for your site. Totally free, too. And version 2.0 just also gave it the ability to customize your login/signup pages.

How To Rollback A Plugin/Theme Upgrade Gone Wrong

It happens.

You update a plugin or a theme and… things break.

Most of the time, updates are easy and nothing bad happens. But, every now and then, the experience is different. In some cases, it is just a bug or a weird plugin conflict. In worse cases, it can take the whole site down.

When this happens, what do you do?

As you can imagine, I deal with this kind of thing from time to time as part of maintaining client sites in Concierge. So, here’s a few things that I know can definitely help when/if it happens to you.

First and foremost, ALWAYS make sure you have reliable site backups. If things go really badly, you can always revert to a backup. For Concierge, I back up every day with BlogVault. And we even have the ability to do incremental restores if needed, so I can restore just one single plugin if necessary without reverting the entire site. You absolutely need to be backing up your site every single day.

But, aside from that, a few tid-bits to help out…

• I would recommend you disable auto-updates on your site.. While it seems convenient, it could also mean your site auto-updates and…. breaks itself. It isn’t very smart. 😜 By being directly involved in updates, you’ll know when/if something goes weird.
• Some plugins have a ways to get previous versions, either via a direct rollback feature in the plugin or via their website. Even in the WordPress plugin directory, you can click on the “Advanced View” on any plugin page and scroll down to the bottom and you’ll be able to download previous versions of that plugin. Once you have the ZIP file for the plugin, you can just upload it right over top of the active plugin and it will downgrade.
• You can also use a plugin like WP Rollback as a convenience, but all it is really doing is accessing the previous versions found in the “Advanced View” of the repository.
• When things break and you don’t know which plugin is the problem, check your error logs. Often that gives the clue. In some cases, you may need to take the site into staging and debug as a plugin conflict.
• If you get a “white screen of death” where the whole site is just blank, you can deactivate all plugins. A good WordPress-focused host will enable you to do that right within their interface, so it won’t matter that you can’t access WordPress. Then, once you’re back in again, start activating one by one until you find the problem.

Most of the time, plugin updates work flawlessly. Especially if you’re using plugins from reputable companies. But, even with the “big guys” sometimes things go badly or there’s an odd interaction within your particular set of plugins.

Sometimes, a rollback is your best option.

When you do need to do a rollback, look at it as a temporary solution. Either a plugin conflict needs to be investigated and alleviated, or you should ride the support team for that plugin to fix their issue.