Giving It All Away?

Hey there! Coming to you this morning from sunnier and much warmer Florida. 😍

Maine is beautiful. But, I’m a Florida dude. So, happy to be back where if it gets into the 40’s, we consider that cold. 🤣 LOL.

So, in this week’s issue, I’m first going to share some comments about this xCloud hosting lifetime offer that’s been going around.

Then, I’m going to talk a little “inside baseball” and some changes I’m making with my business… and why.

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Featured This Week

This week, I’m going to feature a couple of Youtube videos from my channel about the xCloud Hosting offer. Many of my readers have gotten the email from WP Manage Ninja with the lifetime offer. Here’s my thoughts.

Giving It All Away – For A Reason

While I was up in Maine recently for a few days, I spent a little bit of my downtime just brainstorming business stuff. Just… thinking.

In fact, within the next week or two, I may take our RV to a campground close by – just for the change of environment – and just do a strategy day. It’s been too long. Anyway…

When I look at my business now, I have done on almost complete pivot into client services.

Whereas I used to concentrate primarily on selling online courses and the membership site (called “The LAB” and now “ONEPass”), today the business generates almost all of it’s revenue via client services and Concierge.

I was toying with this idea for a little while. I initially resisted it, in fact. I was concerned about the whole “time for money” thing. Concerned about going backwards, in some ways. And to be honest, I think I even had some private considerations about the outward perception of doing that after doing the online course business for so long.

But, I was growing bored with creating online courses.

I was tired of the rat race.

I was tired of battling the massive amount of content inflation out there, with more and more people creating tons of content and lowering the overall value. I was tired of yelling into the noise of a crowded marketplace.

Frankly, I was also tired of battling people’s short attention spans. Knowing I could create the best courses or the best video and most people wouldn’t even watch it because they can’t get through the first minute or two.

On the hand, I really do enjoy building WordPress sites. I’m good at it. And people kept asking me, too. It was clear that my long-time readers trusted my advice and they were basically asking me over and over again who could build this stuff for them.

So, I pivoted. And I’m basically building a new business. Same domain. Lot of the same content. But, Blog Marketing Academy is basically evolving into a WordPress agency.

So, what does that do for all the content? All the courses? The blog posts? The YouTube videos?

Well, you know what most WordPress agencies don’t do?

You got it.

They don’t have the kind of content assets I do.

So, all of that becomes content marketing.

So, below, I have an announcement for you in this regard. But, I also wanted to share the mindset as well.

I know a lot of us get tunnel vision on the idea of selling coaching or online courses. It is what all the “gurus” talk about. And I get it.

But, don’t discount orienting your business around a tangible service. A real “done for you” service where you solve the pain points of your market by outright doing it for them.

Build a business around solving their problems in the most direct way that you can. Create the systems and the solutions where you can just hammer home the solution quickly by doing it for them and removing every speed bump. It is way simpler, actually, than trying to show them how to do it themselves in a lot of cases.

And as for your blog? Just give it all away. Make awesome stuff and use it for content marketing. Yep, you can even even create online courses and just give it away or for a super cheap price. Because you no longer need the content to make money. You make your money on the backend.

In most areas, you can outright show them how to do everything on their own…. and some of them will still prefer to just have you do it.

When you do this, you no longer even have to think about where to draw that line between free and paid content. Because you’re not selling content anymore. You’re selling the solution itself.

This isn’t some mind-blowing realization, I know. Not even close.

More of a reminder. That you don’t have to “monetize” a blog by selling courses or ebooks or membership site content. You can do it much more directly.

It is actually easier, in a lot of ways. Plus, you can make money by working with far less people, but getting to help them much more hands-on. It is kinda awesome, really.

Why My Membership Site Is Going Back To A Lifetime Plan (And Much Cheaper)

Alright, so let’s talk about ONEPass. Formerly “The LAB”.

Since the business has pivoted, it is now client services at the forefront of what I do. A large majority of my time is now spent serving my clients, answering their questions, and solving site issues for them.

This is quite a different game than what I used to do with “The LAB”. I used to create more training courses. I used to do office hours. I used to have a member forum and answer questions in there. I don’t do that stuff anymore.

And frankly, the business hasn’t been generating much revenue with ONEPass. It is a very small minority of my revenue that comes from ONEPass. I haven’t even been trying to increase it because it is not my focus.

So, I toyed around with just making the whole thing free.

But, that’s not what I’m going to do. Frankly, it’d be pretty stupid. My thoughts are this:

• All it would do is devalue everything and add to the “noise”.
• It wouldn’t be very fair to the people who paid for it in the past.
• I know from years of experience that people who haven’t paid for content are the least likely to do anything with it. I’m literally doing people a disservice by giving it to them for free, in some cases.

But, truth is that I’m not creating new stuff for ONEPass super often. When I do so, I want it to be for a reason. But not based on a schedule because I have people paying for ONEPass every month.

So, I have decided to get rid of both the monthly and annual plans for OnePass.

Instead, I am now making it available as a one-time purchase. A lifetime plan. And I’m pricing it so it isn’t even remotely expensive.

I’m doing this on purpose. I want it to be accessible to as many people as possible, but I don’t want to clutter up my database with a bunch of freebie seekers who will never do anything anyway. I want to charge just enough to know people actually want it and have some degree of intention.

Click here to check out ONEPass and the new pricing.

WordPress Quick Bits…

WPFusion 2023 Review. Jack, from WP Fusion, has posted his annual review. It is more like a “transparency report” where he shares all kind of inside stats. Stuff like:

• WP Fusion is now used on 28,472 sites.
• The 3 top CRMs WP Fusion users are using are ActiveCampaign, FluentCRM and Keap.
• WooCommerce is, by far, the most popular ecommerce platform for WP Fusion users.

The whole thing is an interesting read. Check it out here.

Free Kadence Course. Kadence Theme has been my go-to theme for awhile now. Any site I build uses Kadence unless the client has a specific reason to use something else. Well, I came across this new free course from Style Cloud designed for beginners to show them how to begin to use Kadence. Looks super useful.

New plugin to track conversions. There’s a new plugin available for pre-order, but will be released some time in Q1. This plugin is Conversion Bridge and it will enable you to easily track conversions across numerous analytics platforms. This one is going to be for you stat-junkies who really want to track conversion events, but without all the geeky codes. Plus, really cool how easy this will make it for people who don’t want to use Google Analytics anymore. I’m definitely going to be keeping an eye on this one.