Are you ready?

Are you ready to be barraged with Black Friday emails? Like this dude…

We’re all gonna get plastered with them. But…

Not from me. I won’t be blasting you with emails. I decided I’m skipping it. More on that below.

So, let’s dive into an actual newsletter with actual content… before your inbox starts getting littered with promotions…

😇

Here’s what’s in this issue….

He was dreaming of the same business idea… for years.

Why I’m not really bothering with Black Friday

Enhancements in Concierge

Updates to my favorite tools

Featured This Week

He was dreaming of the same idea – FOR YEARS

So, there’s this guy I’m connected to and he has a business idea. Recently, I was watching him talk about this idea on Facebook and I just could not help myself from chiming in.

See, I’ve been connected to this guy for years. And he’s been talking about this same idea – for YEARS. But, all this time later, pretty much nothing has happened on it.

Every time he talks about it, he is floating these grandiose ideas of how HUGE it is. Big dreams of millions of paying customers. He thought he would have the thing up to a six-figure monthly income within 6 months.

Yet…. nothing.

But, THIS TIME… it would be different! He said. 🤷‍♂️

Also every time I saw it mentioned, he was always waiting for something. He needed a business partner. Specifically a woman (he felt that his particular idea required that). Almost as if nothing could happen until he had this other person.

Between you and me, he was clearly looking for somebody else to make this idea happen. Because, all he was doing was dreaming. He was figure-figuring and convincing himself how awesome the whole idea was, but he was doing nothing at all to make anything happen and, in his mind, he needed this other person to basically be the missing link and make it all happen.

Honestly, I wish him the best. I gave him some advice to try to correct his line of thinking in terms of defining his market, etc. I gave him a few pieces of advice about defining his market, identifying his transformation, etc. Cuz he clearly was too busy dreaming to think about any of it and it showed.

But, between you and me, I don’t think he’s going to change. He’s never going to succeed at this.

He’s a dreamer. Not a doer.

You ever met people like this?

See, there are 3 components that go into most things in life. They are…

BE

DO

HAVE

To get what you want, you have to have a certain beingness, do certain things, in order to have certain things.

All 3 are important. But, some people get imbalanced on them.

Some people get too focused on the BE, at the expense of DO and HAVE. These are the people who dress the part, spend time messing with their logo or their letterhead, or worrying about registering an LLC before they’ve ever done anything real. They want to be seen by others as a certain beingness, but that’s where it often stops.

Some people get too focused on the HAVE, at the expense of BE and DO. They’ll dream of all the stuff they’ll be able to do with all that they’ll have, but it usually remains dreams. These are the guys who usually talk about how much they’ll have in a very short amount of time, without much thought to what is required to actually make that happen. These people, if not careful, can get into huge debt because they act as if the big money is right around the corner.

Some people get unbalanced on the DO and they’re so busy frantically working their asses off… but with little to no direction. Lots of movement, but not a lot of actual productivity. Things aren’t in alignment.

If you want to have, you have to be a certain person, which means doing certain things.

This guy wasn’t being an entrepreneur. He was being a dreamer with grandiose visions of what he wanted to be and have. He only paid lip service to the DO, or he was looking for a partner to do it all. He was waiting for things external to him to align… so that anything could be done.

Remember, being an executive means you EXECUTE. An executive is one who makes things happen.

If you want to succeed with any business idea, your blog… hell, pretty much anything in life, then….

What do you want to HAVE? Then…

What do you need to DO to produce it? And then…

Who do you have to BE?

It all goes together.

– David

Upcoming Workshop

For my ONEPass members, things are going to be heating up again. It has been a little quiet, I admit. My pivot into client services has taken a lot of time. But, I’m going to be doing a brand new mini-course (or, call it a workshop, if you want 😉 ). The topic…

Claim Your Digital Sovereignty

This is where we’ll talk about the tools and strategies to build your business and manage your data such that you’re not completely reliant on third-parties and can be simply shut down.

Learn more by clicking the link….

Big Changes To Concierge

The Concierge service has evolved. And if you want to save yourself a lot of hassle with your WordPress site, the new features of the Concierge plan may be of interest.

The core plan now includes…

Full weekly maintenance (get your themes and plugins updated weekly, along with full testing and quality control to make sure nothing breaks. I actually check the sites manually each time)

Daily off-site backups (so we always have safe restore points)

Unlimited “First Name Basis” Support. It’s me. I’m the guy. You know who to ask when you have a question or any issue with your site.

Access to Agency Plugin Licenses. Save yourself a lot of money, in a lot of cases. See the current Concierge bundle.

Site Analytics with Fathom Analytics (say goodbye to the overly complicated Google spyware)

Enterprise-level malware protection and web firewall (get the security you need without the overhead and slow performance of WordFence)

Rocket-Powered Hosting. Yes, I can host your site with Rocket.Net which is one of the best hosts I’ve ever worked with. Read more about this.

ONEPass Included. Concierge clients will have automatic access to all courses and everything in the ONEPass library.

Discounted Anytime Credits. Concierge clients save 30% on all project work.

Outgoing Email Service. Not only can you use FluentCRM (with my agency license), but we can handle your outgoing email with high deliverability

Concierge is turning into a full-service, simple, one-stop solution for business owners on WordPress.

Why I’m Not Really Bothering With Black Friday

Is it just me, or have some people been running their “Black Friday” sales basically all month? 🤡 Seems like it just gets longer and longer every year.

For multiple years, I always participated in Black Friday as a business owner. Heck, there’s a good chance some of you reading this right now bought something from me with a Black Friday discount.

I remember the first time I ever offered a lifetime membership in my membership site (called THE LAB at the time), it was during Black Friday week. That offer killed it. I made a ton of money that week. I used to do it with my tech site as well and did pretty well.

So, I admit it feels a little weird for this week to be…. normal.

I’m not in a mad rush to send out tons of pre-written promotional emails. I’m not running a bunch of ads. I haven’t spent the last few weeks in some big ramp-up to be in “launch mode” all week.

Why? Why did I decide to skip it?

Well, two reasons…

First, I am finding the whole Black Friday idea to be rather shallow right now. It used to be a weekend. Now, it is basically the whole damn month. It is ridiculous. And part of me feels as if participating in that is just me being a big herd follower, following the ass in front of me.

But secondly… to be frank with you, I’m not going to discount my stuff like that.

Especially now that Blog Marketing Academy has pivoted to the point where it is turning into more of a service agency with a membership site on the side.

Concierge is becoming one of my core focuses. I am confident in the offer I am making. In fact, I’ve done a lot lately to make it even better (see above ☝️). I’m already giving a great deal to people who sign on as Concierge.

I will not discount that. I will never offer a lifetime membership. I won’t even do an annual.

What I offer for sale is priced well now. And I have literally no reason to offer a discount on it. It would be stupid of me to do so, in fact. The service is too valuable and too worth it already for me to go off and discount it. Nope.

And so, I watch from the sidelines.

I won’t be peppering you with annoying promo emails and deadlines and discounts this week. I’ll be here doing what I always do. Taking care of my Concierge clients. Working on expanding my business the right way… not on the back of shallow discounts just to follow the ass in front of me.

I hope you don’t mind. 😉 

WordPress Quick Bits…

For FluentBooking, their lifetime offer is still online. And they’ve been busy making that tool even better (as I knew they would). This last week, it was updated to offer Outlook integration as well as team scheduling functionality (See the video). And word is, they’ve now gotten their app approved with Google which means one-click integration with Google Calendar instead of having to jump through those nerdy hoops like before. Coming soon…. Apple Calendar integration, Round Robbin booking, CalDav integration, etc. Love to see it!

FluentCRM also got a minor update to make it fully work with WordPress 6.4. They’ve also integrated some code to make migrations out of ActiveCampaign even easier. Now you can migrate your list over in one click rather than having to do it in smaller batches like before This is great…. because ActiveCampaign has been raising prices and FluentCRM is basically just as capable as AC is.

And, heck, I might as well tell you about their Black Friday offers. Because, I just love the tools from this company. Here they are:

Fluent Forms – up to 40% off. Awesome, awesome forms plugin.

FluentCRM – up to 40% off. This is, perhaps, the most effective purchase you could make if you are still using a hosted email marketing tool which you pay monthly for.

Fluent Support – Quite capable support desk software

Ninja Tables – Makes nice tables, what can I say. 😉 

WP Social Ninja – This should be called FluentSocial. I should tell them that.

Paymattic – Kinda like Fluent Forms, except purpose-built toward payment forms.

Looks like Astra is about to pick up a full site builder in version 4.5. Learn about that here.

Oh, back on the FluentCRM front…. so Jack from WP Fusion has been using ActiveCampaign for awhile. He’s now switching to FluentCRM. Which means he’s been a bit busy doing his part to help FluentCRM fill in some gaps in features. One of them was the event tracker. Well, he has created a new module that makes FluentCRM compatible with WP Fusion’s Event Tracking add-on. You can check it out on GitHub here. It is a little nerdy at the moment (although I could help you implement it if needed) . But, basically, this would mean that you’d be able to see what your contacts are doing on your site and log it right into their CRM profile. Then, using WP Fusion, you could trigger automations.

Kadence Blocks (which I use all the time now to build sites) has just crossed the threshold of 400,000 installs. Pretty cool! Oh, and BTW, they’re also having a nice Black Friday offer.