Sometimes I feel like I need to make a “changelog” just for the tools that I use in my business. LOL. 😂

I know I have a lot of people who follow the tools I use. And I do sometimes get people thinking I still use tools that I long since moved on from.

I hope I don’t drive anybody too crazy. 😜 Trying out tools is part of my job, after all. And when I like something and start using it, I tend to tell people about it.

So, while there’s NO decisions made here yet, I am thinking about changing my mind on using BeeHiiv for my newsletter. This very newsletter, in fact.

Below, I’ll talk about why. But, I’ll also share what I think the strongest use case for BeeHiiv is. And, I’m going to give it a solid “go” at that one use case. And if it doesn’t work the way I would like, I may pull the list off of here.

Here’s what’s in this issue….

Should I stop using BeeHiiv for the newsletter?

I was on a podcast (see the interview)

A cool tool for WordPress nerds. 😉 

Updates that break things… and some that make things better.

Featured This Week

Continue Using BeeHiiv: Yes Or No?

The last few weeks, I have been pondering moving this newsletter back out of BeeHiiv. And switching back exclusively to FluentCRM.

Nothing is decided, but let me spell out my thoughts here…

I use FluentCRM as my email list system. I’ve been a fan of it for awhile now. It is all within WordPress and does everything I want (and more). I highly recommend it.

But, then a few months ago, I decided to move the newsletter itself out and into BeeHiiv. If you go back to Issue #435, I spell out my reasons for looking at BeeHiiv. It had a lot to do with my RV newsletter at the time, but I had a sneaky hunch I’d move this newsletter into it, too. And, I did.

The whole time, I still keep FluentCRM there. It is still what powers the Blog Marketing Academy. It still sends emails every day. Just… not this newsletter.

And truth is… I miss the simplicity of FluentCRM.

I miss having everything in one spot. The extra geeky bullcrap that goes with having a list in two locations is a bit annoying…. and I refuse to depend on BeeHiiv for reasons of digital sovereignty.

Not only that, FluentCRM is just way more powerful than BeeHiiv. There’s quite a lot of features that BeeHiiv is still missing.

For instance, I really want to begin to offer a more frequent newsletter again. Something more daily, but a lot shorter. I surveyed you guys a month or so about it and the feedback was great… as long as I can offer the choice. And truth is, right now BeeHiiv makes it impossible to offer such a choice. It is the reason I haven’t done it yet. Whereas if I were still all on FluentCRM, it would be child’s play to do such a thing.

So, what do I do?

My inclination is to simplify. Remove pieces. And, go back into FluentCRM exclusively. If I do that, this newsletter will look a bit different but will continue on without skipping a beat. In fact, a HUGE chunk of you guys were getting the newsletter that way for a long time before I took this little side road into BeeHiiv. 🙂 

BeeHiiv is a great platform. And some of the missing things I need are coming. Probably pretty soon. But, let’s also face it… this tool costs $99/month and FluentCRM doesn’t. 🙂 

So, here’s where I stand at this moment…

The only real reasons for using BeeHiiv are twofold:

Simplicity specifically for a newsletter. The tool is purpose-built for newsletters and it is great for that. For real marketing automation and stuff for a real email marketing engine behind your site, it doesn’t work that well.

The growth tools. Specifically, the built-in monetization, boosts, ad network, etc. Again, all meant for newsletters.

So, I think what I’m going to do before I make any rash decisions is that I’m going to go “all in” on using the growth tools of BeeHiiv.

I’m going to throw some money into the growth of this newsletter. Use BeeHiiv to grow the list. It is the only thing that makes it make sense.

Then, for any subscribers that come onto the list here in BeeHiiv, they’ll be simultaneously subscribed to my in-house list over on FluentCRM.

If BeeHiiv become a major growth arm for the list, I’ll keep it. If it doesn’t, I will ditch it and go back into the friendly arms of FluentCRM and not look back.

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.

I Was Interviewed About Marketing Automation On WordPress

It had been awhile since I had been a guest on anybody’s podcast. But, Jonathan Denwood from WP Tonic invited me to be a guest on his show called The Membership Machine Show.

It was a fun interview, complete with some interesting jokes about a certain “awesome” company. 😉 

In this discussion, we made the rounds talking about a lot of themes, plugins and more.

Interesting Tool For Custom Code For WordPress

I recently came across a tool which could prove seriously handy for anybody developing WordPress sites.

It is called WPTurbo.

This site has a series of code generators for various purposes…. where you enter what it is that you need and it will output the PHP code for you.

Then, you plop that code into a Snippets plugin and you’ve got yourself what you need. Used correctly, you can actually alleviate the need for some extra plugins. Pretty cool!

They do have a paid version of more robust stuff. And, to be clear, this is a tool that you need to have some technical knowledge to use. But, if you do any of your own WordPress customization, this looks super handy.

WordPress Quick Bits…

WordPress made some waves last week with their seemingly rushed release of WordPress 6.4. The short story is that the new version broke updates on servers using an older version of cURL. The result? WordPress couldn’t update anything. No plugin updates for you! 😉 

Good news is… 6.4.1 was rapidly released that fixed the problem. But, it does make you wonder how they were able to get 6.4 through their quality control with such a blatant problem. Hmm… 🤔

On a similar note, last week we watched a new version of WooPayments that got rushed out and conflicted badly with CartFlows. The result was big PHP errors that would bring the site down. I had to repair TWO client sites last week due to this single problem. CartFlows fixed it, but the real issue is that WooPayments (and the Woo team) end up can sometimes throw out updates unpredictably that affect external plugins.

This is why it’s important to keep backups of your site. Updates can and do sometimes break the site. If you don’t have a recent quality backup, that can cause you a lot of problems. You can also check out a plugin like WP Rollback which provides a way to downgrade a plugin to a previous version if an upgrades breaks it.

On the CartFlows front, they just launched their big update to version 2.0. Version 2 has an entirely new backend interface which is a huge improvement over when we’ve been use to with CartFlows 1.x.

Fluent Support 1.7.6 was released which supports file uploads into Google Drive and Dropbox.