How To Make More Per Hour

Yup. The name of the newsletter changed. This one’s better than “The Morning WP”.

It will now be known as “The WP Edge”. Or just “WP Edge”. Doesn’t matter. I like it. It is shorter. And I want to send a “thank you” to Marie for the suggestion. I had a lot of good suggestions, actually. Appreciate it, guys! 🙏

In the end, it is the same newsletter. The name doesn’t matter a whole heck of a lot. Even had a few people tell me so. 😜 But, I do think this name suits it better. So, decision made and now let’s move on…

Below…

• How to increase your effective hourly rate
• A look at what’s going on with Concierge (the new guy, and a new service)
• How to spam-proof your forms

So, let’s dive in…

Featured This Week

9 Tactics For Autopilot Social Proof: How To Get Testimonials On Automatic

Not enough testimonials? Here’s several strategies to get testimonials automatically using systems. So you’ll have a constant flow of new reviews coming in for social proof.

Also modified this last week:

• How To Get Social Proof When You Don’t Have Any Testimonials
• BuddyBoss Theme Review: Could It Be The Perfect Membership Site Theme?
• Google Analytics For WordPress: Best Plugin Recommendations And The Hype Of Paid Pro Versions
• Thrive Leads Vs OptinMonster: A Non-Biased Comparison Based On Real World Use
• Thrive Suite Review: Real Talk About Thrive Themes And How It Compares To Competitors

Making your TIME More Valuable

In last week’s issue (which you can view here if you missed it), I talked about the effective hourly rate, or EHR.

The EHR isn’t the hourly rate you earn or that you bill clients for. The EHR is your real hourly rate. Take your actual profit and then divide by the actual numbers of hours you work.

Now, this EHR is a great metric. It is a metric of your efficiency. It is also a metric for lifestyle design. After all, if the goal is to have a business which fuels the life you want to live, then you want that EHR to be pretty high. Work less… make more.

So, the question, then, is how can you intentionally increase your EHR?

Well obviously, the basic simplicity of it is just:

• Work less.
• Make more money.

I know… this is some rocket science stuff here. 😜 But, how?

Well, anything that we can do to increase efficiency and lead to less working time will increase your EHR. Likewise, anything you can do to make more money will also increase your EHR. Doing both would be the goldmine.

So, on the “Work Less” side of things, some things you can do are:

• Build automations with software to automate certain tasks so you no longer need to do it manually
• Hire somebody to offload time-consuming affairs or even just free up “brain space”
• Systematize things and document things you do so that you can hire somebody at some point. Focus on repeatable systems.
• Just… cut your work schedule. Unless you work for “the man”, you have far more control over your time than you might think. You can just change your hours.
• Set deadlines and start managing your time. Parkinson’s Law says that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. So, give less time to complete tasks. Set deadlines.

OK, now let’s look at how you can make more money…

• Raise your prices
• Work on conversion rate optimization so you can increase revenue from existing traffic
• Reduce your expenses, thereby increasing your profit (and hence your EHR)
• Create a new offer and then make make the offer.
• Work on things that make you money, instead of stuff that doesn’t. Concentrate on higher ROI activities.

You get the idea?

In fact, if you calculate your EHR, then you can track it as a metric. Then, perhaps each week or each month, calculate it again. Then, track it’s changes. If you track it, you can then take actions to intentionally increase your EHR.

Too many people don’t manage their time. They aren’t strategic about any of it and they just react to what hits their plate in real-time. Or, worse, they don’t act like their time has any value so they will just grind all day, spend time on low ROI stuff, or act like the secret to more income is more time in the chair grinding.

But, more time in the chair working isn’t always the answer. If it is, do what you need to do to make it temporary. Sometimes you just have to cope with a high workload and do what you gotta do. But, while you’re at it, spend time time looking forward. Organize things so that you can reduce your work time.

EHR is a nice metric you can use to quantify all this. And your goal is to make the number go up. ⬆️

This Week In Concierge

Last week, I definitely began to feel the effects of having hired on a new part-time developer. While I’m still very much involved in client projects, we were able to handle some backlogged stuff and we’re getting things rolling again on some things that remain backlogged. Not only that, but I had time to work on content. 🥰 I mean, I’ve got things I need to do for my own business, too, and it has been rather tough lately to have the time. Feels nice to be able to spend some time on that, too.

So far so good!

Some of what we’ve been working on last week is:

• Fixed a hacked client site. This one is a lesson in why not to use unsupported plugins. The client is very well aware of the situation and I hope we can finally modernize his site as soon as possible to keep it from happening again.
• Re-build a bunch of FAQ pages for a client, moving from Elementor to Kadence
• Fixing the display of tutorials on mobile devices
• Re-building an online quiz used as a lead magnet, moving her from Thrive Quiz Builder into Fluent Forms
• Built a new membership component into an artist’s website, integrated into ActiveCampaign
• Solving email deliverability issues, connecting to PostMark

This coming week, going to continue to move forward on projects on behalf of clients. Heads up that next week, I will be out of town for our last family trip of the summer. As always, I will be connected, managing things and answering emails. But, not working full-time. And it will be interesting to have William continue to move on projects while I am gone. That’ll be an interesting feeling, too. 😇

WordPress Quick Bits

BuddyBoss Acquired By Awesome Motive. Yup, Awesome Motive has acquired yet another platform… this time BuddyBoss. Looks like the founders of BuddyBoss wanted an exit, and Syed was happy to oblige. I guess this means WP Beginner is going to start pimping BuddyBoss in their blog posts now… and you’re going to see cross-promotions, marketing gimmicks and other things come to BuddyBoss. In the end, though, BuddyBoss was already rather bloated, so perhaps not much will change there. If you want to hear my full thoughts on this acquisition, I recorded a video: My Thoughts On Awesome Motive Acquiring BuddyBoss

Why Awesome Motive Bothers Me. I’ve talked about the marketing practices before. But, what bothers me is that they’re centralizing too much of the WordPress ecosystem under one brand. And due to the marketing machine they’ve got, you end up seeing users installing these plugins when they don’t know any better. You’ve even got web hosts sometimes promoting Awesome Motive plugins. It is ridiculous. The WordPress ecosystem benefits from the decentralization. That’s what we want. And Awesome Motive is going against that, IMO.

Be Careful When Installing Awesome Motive Plugins. Yes, just one more. Because, one of my client sites had numerous Awesome Motive plugins auto-installed when we installed AffiliateWP to their site. So, I went in and showed you exactly how it works in this video.

FluentCommunity Is Coming. BuddyBoss needs competition anyway. And, the next plugin likely to come out from WP Manage Ninja is FluentCommunity. They’ve been using it in-house, but the plan is to turn it into their next release. It will be decidedly different than BuddyBoss in how it works, but will be much faster. And the inherent integration into FluentCRM is going to be very powerful. One thing you’ll like is that it is inherently more Facebook-ish in how it looks and works, meaning your members will feel instantly at home. I’ll keep tabs on it and keep you in the loop.

Cwickly Now Available For Free. Cwickly has returned after the developer had a hissy fit and quit. And it is now free. The homepage has been updated accordingly.

WordPress 6.6 Due Out This Week. WP 6.6 is supposed to launch tomorrow (the 16th). Kinsta has a writeup on their blog about what’s coming in this release.

Thoughts On Cost of WordPress. Eric Karkovack has a piece on The WP Minute that discusses the rising cost of using WordPress, what with all of the subscription fees.

Ollie Pro Released. The Ollie theme has been getting a lot of positive reviews, and now they have a Pro version that looks really cool. I have not yet tried out Ollie, but will. While I like and use Kadence all the time, I love that WordPress has so many great options. I’m also privately testing and learning the Bricks Builder in my spare time, too.

Spam Proofing Your Forms

Last week, one of my clients had a form which was getting pounded 2-3 times per minute. It had been going on for a little while and neither he nor I had noticed. How I discovered it was because I looked at my PostMark account. I use PostMark for outgoing transactional emails for many of my Concierge clients. And, well, his site managed to send out about 40,000 emails in the month.

Crazy pants.

These were not legitimate signups. It was obvious spam. But, it does open up to issues because this form was triggering out an email automatically. Whatever email address was entered into the form (valid or not), the system was sending one email to that account. If the email address bounces, then it can affect email deliverability. Not to mention the increased cost of sending those emails (which I will just eat on behalf of the client because this wasn’t his fault at all).

So, how can we avoid this kind of thing?

The absolute baseline thing to do is to enable the “Honeypot” on your forms plugin. It is a little invisible thing that happens and presents a barrier to bots to submit your form. Many bots can get through it, but some cannot. Enabling the honeypot is just baseline.

But, what really can cut the problem off at the knees is to enable some kind of Recaptcha.

Recaptcha was originally created by Google, but there are alternatives. There’s also hcaptcha as well as Cloudflare Turnstile. These technologies all work to tell the difference between a real human and a bot pretending to be a human.

Personally, I use Cloudflare Turnstile when the need arises. I just use Cloudflare a lot already. Plus, Turnstile doesn’t try to be annoying. The LAST thing I want is to be clicking on fire hydrant photos and clicking squares.

I swear, whoever invented that needs to be bashed upside the head with said fire hydrant. But, I digress. 🤪

So, for this client above, all I did was enabled Cloudflare Turnstile for his site. It doesn’t cost a thing. And since Fluent Forms works with Turnstile, I just set it up.

Inside the Cloudflare account, you click on “Turnstile” in the left menu. Then, click “Add Site”. Enter your domain. Leave the rest at default… then save.

You’ll get a couple of cryptographic keys. One is a site key and the other is a private key.

Then, I go into Fluent Forms > Global Settings > Security and I enter the keys I was give into Fluent. Once saved, all that is left is to go to the specific form you need to protect and drag in a “Turnstile” field.

It took just a few minutes for me to set this up for my client. And get this…

It stopped the bots dead in their tracks instantly. Problem solved.

I’ve got another solution for you, too. One that doesn’t involve integrating with any external services. Check out the WP Armour plugin.

WP Armour is a free plugin and goes back to the concept of the honeypot instead of a Recaptcha setup. But, different from the honeypot in most form plugins, WP Armour will change the honeypot field to something unique, making your site less predictable for bots. Not only that, the honeypot is loaded up client-side rather than server-side.

Geek-talk aside, WP Armour can often have a very positive effect on form spam. I myself using it here at Blog Marketing Academy.

Need help with this? We can take care of it for you via technical services. And, if you’re a Concierge client already, just hit me up in Basecamp and we can set it up if needed.