Productizing A Service?

Ready to get rockin’ with a new week?

I am. Got another week of flinging pixels around the interwebz coming up. 😇 Lots of people in the queue for projects on their sites, so I’ve got a lot to do.

You know, going back into the service arena with my business has been quite interesting. And it is going pretty well. But, I’m also doing it with a different mindset this time.

It is the mindset of a productized service.

You know, back in the earlier days, I talked a lot about “blog monetization”. That word “monetization” was always a funny one. Like it was something you did on a blog… not an actual business. And services weren’t something discussed all that often. It was all about affiliate links, courses, ads and other stuff like that.

But I tell ya…

Building the systems to offer a productized service… and doing it with content marketing from a blog? That’s some true monetization.

Anyway, let’s talk about that below, shall we?

Let’s dive in…

Offering A Productized Service

In this newsletter, I like to mix it up. Sometimes we geek out and talk tech… and sometimes we shift gears and talk business strategy. For this one, let’s get strategic.

A couple of issues ago, I talked about “infobesity“. I talked about the sheer overabundance of online courses and why going into the training business isn’t always the best move.

Sometimes, courses and training-based memberships work great. In other cases, there are headwinds because people are so overwhelmed and there’s so much competing for their attention already.

So, then there’s the option of offering a service.

A “done for you” kind of thing.

Take whatever your target market is trying to do and offer to do it for them. Or get them a lot closer to the goal.

But, let’s discuss a hybrid.

It is often called a productized service.

It is a service you offer which:

• Is systematized to the point where it can be delivered predictably.
• Is systematized and automated to a point where it can be scaled
• Can be purchased with an up-front fee because it is not fully custom.

Basically, it is a service which you can bundle and sell as a product.

If it is a done-for-you which is different for every person, then it isn’t a productized service. If you need to give an upfront estimate, it isn’t productized. If it is hourly work and you just do whatever for them, it isn’t productized.

I’ve seen a lot of people offer coaching services, for instance. But, they just charge by the hour. It is super vague. And I betcha they barely make any money at all.

But, take that same coach and productize the service and it becomes a little easier to sell. Create real deliverables. Build specific systems to give the client an outcome they want. Brand that offer. Turn it into a product. And BAM… what used to be a plain-vanilla boring hourly coaching offer now turned into something people understand.

And heck, it is easier for you, too. 😎

A product is a something you can deliver without any work.

A service is work without any process.

A productized service is work with a process.

You can think of it like a continuum. Or a graduated scale. With product on one end of the spectrum and service on the other.

On one end, people just buy the thing and there’s nothing else to do. On the other end, you’re doing all the work manually.

A productized services sits in the middle. And you can move that needle either direction. You could have a service which is 20% manual and 80% automated… so that needle would be much further toward product. Or you could have a service which is more hands-on but but parts of it are automated. You get the idea.

To give you an idea, WP Concierge is a productized service. Parts of it are predictable and the same repeatable process for every client. Plus, you can sign up for the service right there on the page. For the custom work component, we use Anytime Credits for that. And I don’t really do official estimates. I try to automate what I can. And even a lot of the hands-on stuff I do for clients is done using tried-and-true methods, plugins and software so that I don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time.

If you’re a coach, how can you turn parts of what you do into a repeatable system? How can you automate parts of it? How can you productize it?

Offering services can be a great money-maker. It can be a great way to generate revenue without having to constantly try to sell more products.

But, see if you can offer work with a process. A productized service. With an upfront price and repeatable processes that make things way more predictable for both you and your customer.

That there is a good business model. 😎

WordPress Quick Bits…

xCloud Hosting Introduces 7G Firewall. xCloud is the new hosting control panel that was recently launched. And as a new company, they are iterating pretty quickly and adding functionality. They just introduced 7G Firewall support to help sites on your servers be better defended against bots and malicious attacks. Now, 7G Firewall would be an improvement over something like WordFence (which, because it is a plugin, is making WordPress defend itself). But, 7G Firewall is still on the server. It isn’t as good as having a firewall at the DNS layer (such as with Cloudflare). But, still an interesting new feature.

BTW, xCloud Is Pretty Good. I’m going to put a full review together of xCloud, but I want you to know it is pretty solid. In fact, last week I migrated 11 sites from Cloudways over to xCloud. The interesting thing is, too, that I was using a Vultr VPS server in both locations. Same data center, in fact. Yet, the sites were MUCH faster once I moved them to xCloud. xCloud definitely outperforms Cloudways. Why? The tech stack. xCloud sets up the VPS in a much more performant way than Cloudways. Anyway, more to come.

FluentCRM Updated to 2.8.45. FluentCRM was updated with some new improvements. One is some improvements to how MySQL queries are handled for the sending queue. This one is a fix that I helped them debug using one of my client’s sites (thanks Jessica!). This version also now has an automation trigger tied to subscription expiration for Woo Subscriptions. You can read the full changelog here.

Conversion Bridge Updated to 1.1. It got support for the ad platforms at Google, Meta, TikTok and Pinterest. It also got integration with the button block for tracking events off your buttons. I haven’t yet tested this plugin, but certainly looks interesting for people to easily track conversion rates across their WordPress sites. Check it out.

Take Control Of Your WordPress Outdated Options. Joost deValk (originally behind Yoast SEO) released an interesting little plugin called AAA Options Optimizer. Read about it here. This little plugin will show you the options in the wp_options table which are autoloaded. Auto loaded options take up memory and the more you have, the slower your site can get. And plugins often do a poor job of removing that stuff when you uninstall them. If your site has seen a long history of plugins you’ve tried, you probably load up a bunch of old garbage you don’t need anymore.

PerfMatters Updated to 2.2.5. One of the potentially more interesting improvements for me are some quick javascript delay exclusions specific to Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks. Good since I use that theme all the time. And in fact, I dealt with an issue just this last week on behalf of a client that may have been handled by this upgrade. We shall see. Check out the changelog for PerfMatters here.

WP Options 101

So, let’s talk about your WP options. Since I mentioned it above in reference to Joost’s new little plugin.

There is a database table on your WordPress site called wp_options. And in that table is stored all of the settings and options for your WordPress site. And when you install plugins, they all use this table, too.

Why does this matter?

Well, SOME of those options are set to be “autoloaded”. This means the data for those options load up automatically every time WordPress is loaded up.

The more autoloaded options you have, the more memory your site requires. And hence, it can slow down the site.

It is like the old days of Windows PCs when the registry would get bloated and slow down Windows. And there were a bunch utilities with the sole purpose of optimizing the registrary and removing garbage.

Some plugins put a lot of stuff in the options table. And sometimes, they’re clumsy about autoloading it. They just do it out of convenience.

But, it gets even more interesting.

Because most of the time, when you deactivate a plugin and stop using it, the options are still there. They’re not deleted. And if they were autoloaded before, they probably still are. Even if the plugin is long gone.

So, how do you know what’s going on in there?

Well, Joost’s plugin might be a good way to see what’s in there. But, you can also run a little query on your WordPress database to see how much is being autoloaded. Here’s that query:

SELECT SUM(LENGTH(option_value)) as autoload_size FROM wp_options WHERE autoload='yes'

What you’ll get back is in bytes. 1 million bytes is a megabyte. And, if your autoloaded options come in under 1 megabyte, I wouldn’t even worry about it.

But, if it comes in much bigger than that, it may be time to trim the fat.

Now, as you can tell, we’re getting into database stuff here. And that gets nerdy. 🙂 And you’ll need to run that query in PHPMyAdmin, too.

If you go cross-eyed on all that, I can look into it for you. And do some other optimizations to increase the performance of your WordPress site.