Podcasts about backupbuddy

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews David Johnson, product owner at Solid WP, to discuss the launch of  Backups Next Gen a rebranded version of Backup Buddy. David shares his background and the evolution of WordPress backup solutions, emphasizing the need for modern, cloud-based infrastructure to enhance performance and security. They delve into the features of Backups Next Gen including its user-friendly interface and incremental backup capabilities. The episode also highlights the importance of reliable backups and the supportive WordPress community. Michelle concludes by encouraging listeners to explore Solid WP's offerings.Top Takeaways:Backup Solutions and Features: David Johnson gives an in-depth overview of Backups Next Gen, highlighting its ability to perform incremental backups by only saving changed files daily, while backing up the entire database. Users can restore backups with a single click, and they can generate downloadable zip archives for specific moments in time. This makes it easier to choose the right backup and manage storage effectively.Integrated Cloud Storage in Pricing: Backups Next Gen now includes cloud storage in its pricing. Previously, storage was sold separately, but the new pricing structure offers more storage per site as users increase their licenses. This simplified pricing model is designed to offer generous and cost-effective cloud storage.Solid Suite and Black Friday Deals: SolidWP is offering a Black Friday sale for both Backups Next Gen and the Solid Suite, a bundle that includes Solid Security Pro, Solid Central, and the Solid Academy. The Solid Suite offers significant value for WordPress users by bundling multiple tools to enhance security, backups, and site performance.Solid Academy: The Solid Academy, run by Nathan Ingram, offers extensive training resources with live streams and a decade's worth of courses on topics such as AI email, WordPress plugins, and how to run a successful freelance or agency business. It's designed for developers and agencies looking to grow and increase their revenue.Mentioned Links:Solid WPSolid BackupsElegant ThemesWoothemesDiviKadence WPSolid CentralDropboxGoogle DriveStashNexcessWP-CLIJohn HooksSolid SuitePatchstackSolid Security ProSolid AcademyNathan IngramGive WPBen MeredithTopher DeRosaHero Press

After a time formatting bug caused a 24-hour delay, WordPress 6.2, code-named “Dolphy”, was released on March 29th. According to core contributor Jean-Baptiste Audras, 607 people from at least 50 countries were part of the release squad.Perhaps the biggest development in 6.2 is that the “beta” label has been removed from the Site Editor. The feature was first added in WordPress 5.9 and has undergone steady improvements. A new interface has been implemented this time around.Other enhancements include a revamped UI for both the Block Inserter and individual block controls. Direct access to Openverse media has also been added, allowing users to search, download, and insert openly-licensed content into their sites.For a rundown of key features, check out a handy guide from GoDaddy's Courtney Robertson. Links You Shouldn't MissWordPress.com alerted users that its access to the Twitter API was suspended on April 4. No specific reason was provided by Twitter. As Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports, the API powers Jetpack's Social Sharing feature. The situation was in limbo for a few hours, but service was eventually restored. During the outage, users couldn't automatically tweet out new content from their websites. Ironically (or not), Twitter recently announced a “new era of transparency” at the company.WordPress core contributor Mario Santos recently posted a proposal outlining the Interactivity API. This would enable developers to build blocks that are interactive on the front end. Santos notes examples including the ability to “heart” a post and performing an instant search. The project is currently experimental. A plugin is available for testing.The makers of Beaver Builder have announced the launch of Assistant Pro. It's a cloud storage and community template platform. Free page builder templates available for download. In addition, a marketplace allows users to both buy and sell. Templates can also be stored in the cloud and shared with team members.A couple of popular commercial plugins have released critical security fixes. Elementor Pro patched a vulnerability that impacted sites running the page builder in conjunction with WooCommerce. Meanwhile, Advanced Custom Fields PRO patched a PHP object injection vulnerability. If you use either plugin, be sure to update to the latest version.The name iThemes has long been recognizable in the WordPress ecosystem. The maker of popular plugins like BackupBuddy and iThemes Security Pro has undergone a name change. In order to better reflect their products, the company has announced a rebrand to SolidWP. iThemes customers shouldn't notice any pricing changes or support disruption during the transition.Links You Shouldn't MissWordPress.com alerted users that its access to the Twitter API was suspended on April 4. No specific reason was provided by Twitter. As Sarah Gooding of WP Tavern reports, the API powers Jetpack's Social Sharing feature. The situation was in limbo for a few hours, but service was eventually restored. During the outage, users couldn't automatically tweet out new content from their websites. Ironically (or not), Twitter recently announced a “new era of transparency” at the company.WordPress core contributor Mario Santos recently posted a proposal outlining the Interactivity API. This would enable developers to build blocks that are interactive on the front end. Santos notes examples including the ability to “heart” a post and performing an instant search. The project is currently experimental. A plugin is available for testing.The makers of Beaver Builder have announced the launch of Assistant Pro. It's a cloud storage and community template platform. Free page builder templates available for download. In addition, a marketplace allows users to both buy and sell. Templates can also be stored in the cloud and shared with team members.A couple of popular commercial plugins have released critical security fixes. Elementor Pro patched a vulnerability that impacted sites running the page builder in conjunction with WooCommerce. Meanwhile, Advanced Custom Fields PRO patched a PHP object injection vulnerability. If you use either plugin, be sure to update to the latest version.The name iThemes has long been recognizable in the WordPress ecosystem. The maker of popular plugins like BackupBuddy and iThemes Security Pro has undergone a name change. In order to better reflect their products, the company has announced a rebrand to SolidWP. iThemes customers shouldn't notice any pricing changes or support disruption during the transition. ★ Support this podcast ★

#726 WP-Ton”c "This Week In WordPress & Tech" 9th of September, 2022 at 8:30 am PST Every Friday at 8:30 am PST; we host the WP-Tonic This Week in WordPress & Tech round-table show, where we discuss the latest WordPress and the general web news of the week. You can also watch the show LIVE on our WP-Tonic’s Facebook Group Page & YouTube channel. This Weeks Spe’ial Guest Panelists This Week's Articles That We Discuss During The Show #1 - WordCampU’A 2022 #2 - Reacting to Apple's event, new watch, AirPods, and iPhone 14 htt's://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-09-04/apple-s-far-out-event-ip'one-14-pro-airpods-pro-2-and-apple-watch-series-8-l7ndyucj #3 - The ‘self-employment penalty’ emerging in WordPress https://masterwp.com/the-self-employment-penalty-emerging-in-wordpress/ #4 - Just a Few People Crowned Some of YouTube’s Earliest Hits https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/youtube-homepage-editor-google-algorithm-book-excerpt/671339/ #5 - iThemes Patches Vulnerability in BackupBuddy, Wordfence Tracks 5 Million Exploit Attempts https://wptavern.com/ithemes-patches-vulnerability-in-backupbuddy-wordfence-tracks-5-million-exploit-attempts

This episode reports on another WordPress plugin bug, a new Linux malware discovered, US sanctions against Iran's intelligence ministry for cyber attacks and more

Americans lost nearly $7B to cybercrime in 2021, ports at risk of breach, FBI alert about Vice Society, Wordpress plugin BackupBuddy zero-day vuln, HP notebook high severity flaws remain wihtout a patch, and a few thoughts about 9/11 21 years later. https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/fbi-americans-lost-nearly-7-billion-to-cybercrime-last-year/ https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/why-ports-are-at-risk-of-cyberattacks https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/fbi-issues-serious-cyber-threat-alert-about-vice-society/ https://www.cysecurity.news/2022/09/new-zero-day-flaw-in-backupbuddy-plugin.html https://thehackernews.com/2022/09/high-severity-firmware-security-flaws.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/11/politics/biden-september-11-remembrance-ceremony-pentagon/index.html --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/virtual-ciso-moment/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/virtual-ciso-moment/support

Editor's note: How I imagine the background music to WordCamp US 2022 News The new default theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, will be a stripped-down base theme with many style variations built by the WordPress design community. This theme is being released to make theme development exciting again. Jump over to the Gutenberg times to read about variations and see the latest on the “good and bad”. WordPress.com has announced that they can build and design a website for new business owners, in four business days or less. If you are on a budget, the cost is $499, plus an additional purchase of the WordPress.com premium plan. It will be interesting to see how this will grow and if it has any impact on the WordPress professional freelance community. Security Wordfence PSA: on September 6, 2022, the Wordfence Threat Intelligence team was alerted to the presence of a vulnerability being exploited in BackupBuddy, a WordPress plugin that has around 140,000 active installations. This vulnerability makes it possible for unauthenticated users to download arbitrary files from the affected site which can include sensitive information. There is minimal sharing about the details of this vulnerability as it is still an active threat. If you are interested in reading more jump over to the Wordfence website. Sarah Gooding over at WPTavern wrote an article that WordPress' Security Team announced it will be dropping support for versions 3.7 through 4.0 on December 1, 2022. Events WordCamp US has started! Michelle Frechette writes about how to make the most of your Wordcamp US experience with fewer participants and dealing with COVID restrictions. Use the official #WCUS hashtag to follow the online WCUS conversation. If you are there, say hi to Raquel Landefeld who is our community lead at the WP Minute. If you are a new camper, go listen to the Matt Report and Gina Marie Innocent to get more ideas on how to make the most of your WordCamp experience. From Our Contributors and Producers Phil Crumm has a thread on Twitter that the WordPress community is uneasy about the growing pace of acquisitions. His hot take may be correct as the news that GridPane has completed a seed round of funding, including a significant strategic investment from Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, WooCommerce, WordPress VIP, and Jetpack. Another acquisition Rocketgenius, the company behind Gravity Forms, has acquired Gravity Flow and Gravity Experts. The acquisition will help the Gravity Forms community by strengthening the portfolio of WordPress product offerings.

In episode 89 of Resourceful Designer, I discussed checklists and your design business. As a bonus to that episode, I offered my WordPress Website Setup Checklist. That was five years ago, and things have changed. In that time, I've grown and expanded as a web designer. The tools I use to create websites have also grown and expanded. Here is an up-to-date list of the tools I regularly use to design and build WordPress websites. Don't build in WordPress? Don't worry. I share a few things that may help you regardless of the platform where you design websites. Conceptualizing the website. Before I get down to designing and building a website, I want to know what I'm building. These are the tools that help me in the conceptual stage. Dynalist: Dynalist is a great outlining app that helps you get work done. I use Dynalist to outline the structure of every website I build. I like to know what pages a site will have and where they sit in the hierarchy. Dynalist helps me do this. Coolors.co Coolors.co is a super fast colour palette generator. I use it to choose colours for a website before the build starts. It's also convenient for finding great colours to go along with a client's existing brand colours. Setting up the website. SiteGround SiteGround I host all my and my client's websites at SiteGround. They're inexpensive, reliable, easy to work with and score well in web host comparisons. What more could a web designer ask for in a web host? Siteground has a very convenient one-click WordPress install feature that gets me up and designing quickly. Their installation registers me as the site admin using my email address instead of the default "Admin," usually generated by WordPress. If your web host doesn't have this feature, then I suggest the first thing you do upon installing WordPress is create a new Admin user and delete the default one named "Admin." During installations, Siteground installs two of its own plugins, SiteGround Optimizer and SiteGround Security. These are great plugins; however, I disable them until I finish building the site. Assets and tools I use on just about every website. Envato Elements Envato Elements is the first place I look for any stock images, icons or graphics I may need during a website build. Their low monthly subscription allows unlimited downloads, which comes in handy while experimenting. Depositphotos Depositphotos is another excellent resource for stock images and vector graphics. They're inexpensive, and their quality matches higher price stock image sites. Grammarly Grammarly ensures my website copy is error-free and written most effectively. I've been using it for years and won't compose anything without running it through Grammarly. Squoosh Squoosh.app is a handy website that does one thing very well, it optimizes images. Every image I upload to a website passes through Squoosh first. Screenflow Screenflow is only available on Mac (sorry, windows users). It's a screen recorder that makes it very easy to create tutorial videos explaining to clients how to use their new website. Screenflow is also a powerful video editor which I use any time I need to do minor edits to a video before uploading it to a website. Handbrake Handbrake is a free video conversion tool. It allows you to change the format of a video which is very useful in reducing a video's file size. Building the website. Divi Theme Divi by Elegant Themes is the world's most popular WordPress page builder and is trusted by hundreds of thousands of website creators. Divi takes WordPress to a new level by allowing you to build a website visually. With Divi, there's practically nothing you cannot create. Divi Marketplace The Divi Marketplace: is a one-stop shop for everything Divi, including layouts, child themes and extensions. If you need a website to do something special, chances are the solution can be found in the Divi Marketplace. Divi Booster Divi Booster allows you to customize Divi without adding extra code. This plugin adds 100s of new configuration options to Divi. Divi Express Divi Express is a vast library of Divi layouts, sections, headers & footers, sub-pages and more that you can import into your Divi website. Using Divi Express has drastically reduced my website design time. Divi Supreme Divi Supreme Is an All-in-One Divi Plugin that adds over 50 new Modules and eight extensions to Divi. Divi Supreme eliminates the need to customize things with a ton of CSS, saving you time. Divi Extended Divi Extended offers over 50 Divi Child Themes and 11 unique plugins. Their Divi Plus plugin adds over 50 new Modules to Divi. I love their Divi Blog Extra and Divi Blurb Extra plugins. Divi Life Divi Life also offers Layouts, Child Themes and Plugins. My favourite plugins from Divi Life are the Divi Overlays and Divi Bars plugins that I've used on several client websites. Divi Engine Divi Engine also offers plugins and extensions for Divi. However, it's their one plugin Divi Machine that excites me. With Divi Machine, you can create dynamic content with Div and Advanced Custom Fields. Learning about Divi Machine has changed the way I imagine websites. Plugins I use during the build. Gravity Forms Gravity Forms is the ultimate forms plugin as far as I'm concerned. Even though Divi has forms built in, the ease and versatility of Gravity Forms make it a must-install on every website I build. PrettyLinks PrettyLinks makes it easy to create prettier and easily sharable URL links for your pages directly from within WordPress. SEO Plugins Yoast and Rank Math are the two SEO Plugins I'm most familiar with. Yoast has been an industry leader in website SEO for years, but I've recently seen great results with Rank Math. Both are highly recommended, so research to see which one is best for you. Once the website is built. These are the plugins I install once I've completed a website build. These add functionality to protect and make the site more efficient. iThemes iThemes Security Pro: iThemes Security Pro is arguably the best WordPress Security Plugin available. I don't take chances with website security, and that's why I rely on the best. iThemes BackupBuddy makes it easy to create and store backups of a WordPress website. Over 1 million WordPress sites trust BackupBuddy, and so do I. iThemes Sync: I install this plugin on every website. iThemes Sync allows you to update and manage multiple websites from one location, making it very easy to perform weekly maintenance. SiteGround Optimizer and SiteGround Security: I deactivate these two plugins while building websites and reactivate them once the site is complete. SiteGround has created two great plugins that I've come to rely on. Google Analytics for WordPress by Monster Insights: This plugin makes it very easy to monitor your website traffic.

Síguenos en: Fundado en 2008 por Cory Miller. Periodista con familia de emprendedores. Resume que gran parte de su éxito con i Themes fue «To be at the right place in the right moment» Tiene un perfil no técnico desde el inicio colocó al cliente como centro de sus productos → "make people live awesome". También cree que es vital alinear la vida y el trabajo.  2008 Cory funda la empresa iThemes.Empezó con la idea de crear temas, optimizado para buscadores, para distintos sectores.Contratar a diseñadores para convertir webs de +2.000$ en temas 2009 Se incorpora Matt Danner.Objetivo de reclutar a más diseñadores y desarrolladores.Tienen un fallo de discos duros que les da la idea de crear BackupBuddy. 2010 Lanzan iThemes Builder y BackupBuddy (equipo de 3 personas) 2011 Su porfolio de producto ya comprende WordPress Plugins  WordPress Themes >  iThemes Builder + 150 temas, 80 temas hijos para iThemes Builder. WordPress Training iThemes Sync   2012 Ya forman un equipo de 17 personas.El tramo más duro para Cory fue pasar de 10 a más de 20 trabajadores.La mitad de la plantilla iba a la oficina física (Oklahoma) y otra mitad trabajan en remoto.BackupBuddy alcanza las 100.000 licencias vendidasRenuevan la web 2013 Contratan a 2 personasActualizaciones mayores de sus principales plugins (BackupBuddy, Builder...). Exchange e-commerce Adquieren el plugin Sync y lo renombran a iThemes SyncAño record de ingresos22 personas en el equipo  2014 BackupBuddy alcanza las 300.000 licencias vendidasSupone casi el 50% de ingresos Churn alto (todos los productos licencias anuales)Tickets de soporte complicados (calidad del hosting)Adquieren el plugin Better WP Security y lo renombrado como iThemes Security.Contratan a su creador Chris Wiegman para mantenerlo y mejorarlo.Lanzan iThemes Security Pro.iThemes Security supera los 2 millones de descargas.Formación sobre crear webs, gestionar clientes (Bill Erickson) iThemes Exchange el plugin de e-commerce 7-8 meses sin ingresos (250.000€ de inversión) luego addons de pagoIntentaron ofrecer servicios pero no funcionó  2016 Liquid Web se alía con iThemes para ofrecer el bundle iThemes Sync Pro. 2017 AJ Morris Product Manager de Liquid Web compra iTheme Exchange. Lanzan iThemes Sales Accelerator una herramienta para mejorar la experiencia de reportes, clientes etc en WooCommerce. 2018 Liquid Web adquiere iThemes y sus 23 empleados.  Además del conocer el equipo ejecutivo (por el acuerdo de colaboración previo), Cris Lema VP de Liquid Web es amigo de Cory. Cory se queda con el puesto de business manager. 2019 Cory deja Liquid Web y Matt Danner le releva en su puesto. De los 500 empleados de Liquid Web, 27 están en iThemes Discontinúan iThemes Sales Accelerator por la falta de tracción del proyecto. 2020 Cory Miller se incorpora como socio al projecto de Post Status (Bryan Krogsgard) iThemes adquiere Restrict Content Pro y WP Complete. 2021 Cory Miller compró Post Status a Bryan Krogsgard. Liquid Web cuenta con más de 600 empleados. El equipo de iThemes tiene 22 personas: 1 manager general7 developers12 soporte2 marketing1 training Liquid web adquiere the The Events Calendar y Kadence. Liquid Web adquiere GiveWP  (+ WP Business Review de Impress.org) y aprovechan  para lanzar Stellar WP , una marca y web donde juntan todos los plugins de la marca: iThemesThe Events CalendarRestrict Content ProKadence WPGiveWPWP Business Review. Gracias a: Este episodio está patrocinado por StudioPress, los creadores de Genesis Framework, el entorno de trabajo de temas más popular de WordPress. Ya está disponible Genesis Pro para todo el mundo, 360$ anuales que dan acceso a: Genesis FrameworkChild themes de Genesis de StudioPress1 año de hosting en WP EnginePlugin Genesis Pro (Diseños y secciones, restricción de bloques por usuarios…) y Genesis Custom Blocks Pro.

I'm sure that we've all had experiences with our WordPress websites where things went wrong; the site was hacked, something got deleted. In most cases we can recover, but if the worst comes to the worst we need a backup to save us. As with all things in the WordPress space, we're spoiled in the number of backup options available to us. There's plugins backups, our hosting backups, 3rd party SaaS backups and more. So which should we use? In this episode of the WP Builds Podcast we explore the pros and cons of the different backup types and why you might want to pick one over another. Have a listen to our thoughts on the podcast...

Does your WordPress membership site have sufficient security measures in place? Many membership site owners live in fear of their website being attacked, and for good reason... If someone manages to hack into your Wordpress website, install something nasty or delete or steal your data, it could cripple your membership business. That's why it's so important to be extra vigilant and make sure you take adequate steps to keep your site secure... In this episode, I'm sharing my top tips for keeping your membership site secure and advising which plugins and services you can use to help. Essential Learning Points: Whether or not WordPress is an insecure platform to build your site on Why it's crucial that your membership site has security measures in place The eight top tips to proactively safeguard your membership site What you can do if the worst happens and your site is hacked Important Links & Mentions: https://managewp.com/ (ManageWP) https://sucuri.net/ (Sucuri) https://www.wordfence.com/ (Wordfence) https://wpengine.com/ (WP Engine) https://www.liquidweb.com/ (Liquid Web) https://ithemes.com/backupbuddy/ (BackupBuddy) https://www.wpfixit.com/ (WP Fix It) https://www.fixrunner.com/ (FixRunner) Key Quotes: “The fact that WordPress powers 455 million sites definitely makes it more of a target. The counterbalance to that is that there's also a lot of people involved in keeping it secure and responding extremely quickly to any issues.” “If you need to give admin access temporarily to your web designer, or maybe someone from tech support at your plugin company, make sure you remove their account after they no longer need it. It's not about not trusting those people, it's about there being an additional potential account that someone could get into.” 

We are all looking for ways to make our lives a bit easier, right? As a web developer, one of the best ways to keep your mental sanity throughout the life of a project is with backups. Constant backups stored both locally and server-side keep you less worried about malware attacks and PHP conflicts and more focused on the task at hand. The best tool to keep your site backed up? We recommended BackupBuddy. BackupBuddy is one of the most prominent backup services for WordPress development, and there's no secret why. You can't go wrong with this reputable plugin with an easy to use interface and exceptional services.

Síguenos en: ¡Buenas! Después de una semana con la mitad de Freelandev de baja, volvemos ya en plena forma (o casi) con muchas ganas de pasar un buen rato compartiendo con vosotros, en este caso nuestra opinión sobre la Ley de Parkinson y cómo ser resolutivos en nuestro trabajo. ¿Qué tal la semana? Semana esther Mucho trabajo de soporte y mantenimiento de clientes después de vacaciones. Abriendo algunos módulos de la Zona DPW: https://www.zonadpw.com/registro-curso-gratis/ Contenido esther Y en el blog: Un vistazo a Genesis Blocks y Genesis Pro Semana Nahuai Mi cuerpo hizo huelga. Contenido Nahuai Tema de la semana: Ley de Parkinson: "el trabajo se expande hasta llenar el tiempo disponible para que se termine" Cuantas más tareas tenemos y menos tiempo para realizarlas, mejor nos organizamos para llegar a todo. Aumentar la productividad está muy bien, pero tiene un límite. Llega un momento que no podemos producir más, o que no es necesario hacerlo (no somos máquinas!)Ser resolutivo: resolver problemas, encontrar soluciones, avanzar y escoger aquello en lo que queremos centrarnos y en lo que podemos “perder el tiempo” sin remordimientos.Escuchar a nuestro cuerpo y respetar nuestro “momento emocional”Dar plazos muy amplios pero no asignarle más tiempo del necesario a la tarea.Ser creativo: que algo “siempre” se haya hecho de una forma no quiere decir que sea la mejor forma de hacerlo. Novedades iThemes adquiere Restrict Content Pro Promoción en septiembre de iThemes: toda la suite de plugins por sólo 249$, incluye BackupBuddy, iThemes Security y Restrict Content Pro para sitios ilimitados Lanzamiento de Genesis Custom Blocks Welcome to Genesis Custom Blocks Tip de la semana A partir de la versión 14.0 de Yoast puedes elegir el Schema para las páginas de contacto o sobre mí. Solo tienes que ir a la barra lateral del editor de bloques y elegir en el desplegable de la sección Schema. Menciones Pablo Moratinos nos agradece que en Freelandev expliquemos y pongamos un poco de orden en el rebranding y nuevos productos de StudioPress. Jesús, David y Mario también dicen la suya. Gracias a: Este episodio está patrocinado por StudioPress, los creadores de Genesis Framework, el entorno de trabajo de temas más popular de WordPress. Ya está disponible Genesis Pro para todo el mundo, 360$ anuales que dan acceso a: Genesis FrameworkChild themes de Genesis de StudioPress1 año de hosting en WP EnginePlugin Genesis Pro (Diseños y secciones, restricción de bloques por usuarios…) y Genesis Custom Blocks Pro.

Do you offer Website Maintenance to your web clients? [sc name="pod_ad"]Offering Website maintenance is a great way to make extra money while putting in minimal effort. It’s right up there with print brokering as a way to supplement your design income. Way back in episode 9 of the podcast, I shared 12 ways designers can earn extra income. On that episode, I mentioned making extra income by offering to host your client’s websites. Since then, I’ve made a few changes to the way I operate. I no longer provide web hosting on its own. Instead, I offer website maintenance, and I make a lot more money doing so. And so can you. The typical lifecycle of a web design project. A client approaches you to design and build their new website. You agree on a price, get the contracts signed and receive your deposit. You get to work on their site. When it’s ready, you present your client with their new website. You make any requested adjustments until they’re thrilled with what you did for them. They pay the balance owing to the project, and you launch their site. The client is happy with their new website. You’re pleased with the money you earned—end of the story. Once this process is over, you may or may not hear from that client again until they need a new website in a few years. That’s providing they don’t meet another web designer between now and then. If they do, then all bets are off. But it doesn’t have to be that way. By offering a website maintenance plan as part of your web design services, you retain that client on the books, and chances are when they need new web work in the future, they’ll turn to you because of your ongoing relationship. Plus, wouldn’t it be nice to earn a recurring monthly income that gives your clients piece of mind while costing you very little in return? If you are not offering a website maintenance plan as part of your services, you’re leaving easy money on the table. Offering a website maintenance plan doesn’t require much tech knowledge. The best part of a website maintenance plan is if done right, you don’t need much tech knowledge. I didn’t know much when I started. And to be honest, there’s still a lot I don’t know. But I don’t have to know much for my plan to work. What a website maintenance plan looks like. Website maintenance plans differ from designer to designer. However, let me break down what my website maintenance plan looks like. When I started offering website hosting in 2005, I charged my clients $12/month. When I switched from hosting static HTML sites to hosting WordPress websites, I raised my hosting fee to $35/month. Then I attended WordCamp Ottawa and met a fellow designer whose business was very similar to my own. However, instead of just hosting his client’s websites, he was offering a website maintenance plan. After hearing about his success, I immediately implemented it in my business. I raised my price to $69/month and expanded my offering from simple hosting to a full-fledged website maintenance service. Some web designers may find $69 per month expensive. But it’s not. I know designers who charge much more than I do for their website maintenance plans. Look at it this way, if you’re building $500 or $800 websites for clients. Then yes, they’ll find $69/month expensive. However, a client who pays several thousand dollars for a website, won’t hesitate to pay $69 or more each month to keep their investment safe. That’s what a web maintenance plan offers, safety and peace of mind. My website maintenance plan consists of: Managed WordPress hosting (I have a shared hosting plan that I divide and resell to my clients.) Premium licence fees for themes and plugins. Unlimited email accounts for the client’s domain name. An SSL Certificate for their site. Malware Scans. Weekly WordPress Core, Theme and Plugin updates. Daily website backups to an offsite storage location. Enhanced Website Security. Uptime Monitoring. In return for these monthly services, my clients get a stress-free website. They don’t have to worry about their website getting hacked. They don’t have to about keeping their site updated. They don’t have to worry about evolving security measures. They don’t have to learn how to manage their own website. Instead, my clients can concentrate on growing their business, knowing that I’m taking care of their website for them. Over 90% of my website clients see the value in my maintenance plan and sign up without hesitation. Variations on website maintenance plans. Some web designers offer a certain number of non-carryover hours as part of their monthly plan that allows a client to request small updates to their site. I don’t provide this. If a client wants changes to their website, I bill them extra. Some web designers offer to maintain their client’s website regardless of where the site is hosted. I don’t provide this either. If one of my clients wants me to manage their site, I insist they host it with me. This way, I’m familiar with the web host, which makes it easier to fix any problems that may arise. A website maintenance plan is not a lot of work. Maintaining a WordPress website doesn’t require a whole lot of effort. Other than keeping WordPress, the theme and the plugins updated, there’s rarely anything to do. Most of the work is done before launching the site and continues working month after month without any input required. I use SiteGround to host my clients’ websites. They help me set things up, and their 24/7 support means I can count on them should I need help with anything. Here’s what I install on every client website I maintain. SSL certificate (Your web host may be able to help you with this). A backup plugin (I use BackupBuddy from iThemes) A security plugin (I use iThemes Security Pro) Malware scanning (I use both iThemes Security Pro and SiteGround for this). Uptime monitoring. (I let SiteGround monitor the site uptime for me.) Should anything go wrong with a website, If it crashes during a plugin update, or gets hacked, I can quickly restore it by reverting to a previous backup and have it up and running again in less than 30 minutes. That’s it. There’s nothing else for me to do. Except collect $69/month from the client. It’s that easy. How to start offering a website maintenance plan. The first thing you need to offer website maintenance is a web host. There are many great web hosts you can choose from, but as stated previously, I recommend SiteGround. A good web host can help you with most of the hard work. When taking over an existing website, a good web host can help you migrate it to their platform. A good web host can help you install SSL Certificates. A good web host can help you update and add DNS Zone records as required. A good web host can help you troubleshoot site issues that may arise. Basically, a good web host will help you do the things you’re not comfortable doing. Once you've chosen a web host, the next thing you need are plugins to manage your security and backups. I prefer iThemes plugins for this, but there are many other good ones you can choose. Finally, if you want to get serious and maintain a growing number of websites, you'll want a way to minimize your time. iThemes Sync is the platform I use to maintain all my client websites. From one dashboard, you can monitor, update, backup and restore all the sites you manage, saving you precious time every month. Website maintenance doesn’t require a lot of time. On average, I spend less than 5 minutes per month, maintaining each client’s website. Of course, not all of the $69 I collect goes into my pocket. I have to pay for the hosting fees, the SSL certificates (if they require something other than a free one.) Theme and premium plugin licenses, etc. So maintaining ten client websites takes less than one hour per month at $69 each, which turns into a great hourly rate. But what if something goes wrong? I suggest you put a small percentage of your monthly fee aside in case of an emergency. In the rare case that something goes wrong with a client’s site that is beyond your abilities to fix, you can easily hire an expert to handle it for you. What to look for in a web host. Here are some things to look for when searching for a web host for your clients’ websites. Dedicated WordPress server: Shows they understand WordPress. Reputation: Look at reviews. Cost: Get the best bang for your buck, but be careful of dirt-cheap hosting services. Performance: What servers and OS are they using? Scalability: Can you upgrade or grow should the need arise? Uptime: Look for 99% uptime or higher. 99.9% is best. Nobody can guarantee 100% uptime. 24/7 Customer Support via phone, chat or email. Help/Training Resources: Document library to help you learn or get out of a jam. Security: Good to have, but doesn’t replace a premium security plugin. Bandwidth: Make sure they don’t limit you based on site traffic. Storage: Unlimited websites doesn’t mean as many as you want. Read the fine print. Domain Names: Good if you don’t already have a service for managing domains. Email: If you offer email as part of your website maintenance plan. Site Migration: It makes it easy to move a site from another host. Ease of Use: An easy to use backend. CDN: Servers web files from various locations around the globe. File Access: FTP or File Manager for when you need to poke around. Exit Strategy: Easy to leave should you want to migrate to a different web host. Additional Services: Backups, Malware scanning, Updates etc. As I’ve already mentioned several times, I recommend SiteGround as a great web host with all of these features. Website maintenance is the best form of passive income for web designers. Offering a website maintenance plan is a great way to supplement your design income. I estimate between 30%-40% of my annual income is from monthly website maintenance payments. This recurring income allows me to continue earning money while on vacation or at a conference. You can do the same. You’re already designing the websites for your clients. Why not go the extra step and offer them the peace of mind of a worry-free website by providing a website maintenance plan? Both you and your clients will benefit from it. You can thank me later.

Leveling up your relationship with WordPress with Terri Tutich is the topic of this LMScast hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. Terri helps people with WordPress websites on a little of everything, from teaching people how to get set up to building full sites from scratch, as well as fixing and maintaining sites. She shares a wealth of knowledge in this episode with some best practices and tips for running a healthy WordPress site.  Making backups of websites is a strong point of emphasis for Terri. Plugins such as BackupBuddy or UpdraftPlus can be great solutions for backing up your … Leveling Up Your Relationship with WordPress with Terri Tutich Read More » The post Leveling Up Your Relationship with WordPress with Terri Tutich appeared first on LMScast - LifterLMS Podcast.

Do you have enough of these? When it comes to running a home-based design business, there are some things you can never have enough of. Here's a list of twelve you should consider. 1) Printer supplies You should always make sure you have spare ink cartridges and extra paper on hand. It's never fun when you need to print something, and you can't because one of your ink cartridges is empty of you ran out of paper. 2) Input devices It's always a good idea to have a spare input device for your computer. Perhaps an extra mouse, trackpad, trackball or pen and tablet to operate your computer. Should something happen to your primary instrument, you'll be glad you had a spare. 3) Digital storage space When it comes to graphic/web design, you can never have enough storage space for your digital files. The price of hard drives keeps dropping, so there's no reason not to have extras on hand. As for cloud storage. You are always better off purchasing more storage space than you believe you need. Chances are, you'll end up glad you did. 4) RAM Whenever you purchase a new computer, you should try to maximize the amount of RAM you get. The more RAM you have, the longer your machine will last as software and operating systems become more demanding on memory. The extra cost upfront will be worth it if you can get an additional year or two out of your computer. 5) Backups It's better to be safe than sorry. And that means having backups of your backups. When disaster strikes, you'll be glad for the redundancy. Services such as Backblaze make it extremely easy to backup your computer and physical hard drives. BackupBuddy by iThemes is my plugin of choice when it comes to backing up WordPress websites. 6) Business cards I don't understand people who don't have business cards for their design business. They make a great marketing tool. And at such a small cost to produce, the return on investment is well worth it. 7) Cables You can never have enough cables. Power cables, charging cables, connection cables are just some of the various wires you should have on hand. You never know when you'll be required to connect a new device and not having the proper cable can cause unnecessary delays. 8) Connection ports Most computers come with a limited number of connection ports. I'm talking about USB, Thunderbold, Video, Audio, etc. Devices that add extra ports are convenient in avoiding having to juggle your connections. 9) Internet Bandwidth When it comes to graphic and web design businesses, the faster your internet, the better. Don't skimp on your internet plan. You'll be glad for the faster speeds. Plus, you get to write it off on your taxes as a business expense. 10) physical storage space Your home office should have sufficient storage space to keep all your "stuff." Drawers, shelves, cabinets and closets are a must to keep your work area organized. 11) Suppliers contractors Try to keep a list of people who could help you with your endeavour. Web and graphic designers should keep lists of copywriters, photographers, developers, illustrators, translators, printers and anyone else you may need to call upon for future projects. Even if you have your go-to people. It's good to know others just in case. 12) Peer support Working from home can get very lonely. To battle the isolation, you need to build a community of peers you can connect with regularly. Join clubs, organizations and networks that keep you connected to what is happening in your local area, your niche and your industry. What can you never have enough of for your design business? Let me know by leaving a comment for this episode. Resource of the week Udemy As graphic designers, we need to keep our skills and knowledge in peak form. Udemy is one of the best places to learn new skills or brush up on rusty ones. Udemy offers a wide variety of courses for all stages of your career. I've personally bought courses on SEO, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads and more. Have a look today and see what you're going to learn next.

This weeks WordPress news - Covering The Week Commencing 23rd March 2020

Kelly talks to Deputy Chief Jeff Hill about the Backup Buddy.

Så blev det langt om længe juleaften. Måske har du glædet dig mindst lige så meget til juleafsnittet af WordPress Podcasten, som børnene har til deres gaver. Vi har taget gløgg og klejner med i studiet her på juleaftensdag for at optage en gave fra os til jer. Gaverne vi har med, kommer i form af små pakker med vores yndlingsplugins, pakket nydeligt ind i god stemning. Og så bliver vi nørdet. Virkelig, virkelig nørdet. Og fortæller historier fra WordPress-land, samt vi afslører nogle af de spændende emner vi vil tage op i sæson 2 af WordPress Podcasten. Glædelig jul fra os til jer! Vi høres i 2020! Show Noter Administrative Plugins Admin Post Navigation (https://wordpress.org/plugins/admin-post-navigation/)Toolbar Publish Button (https://wordpress.org/plugins/toolbar-publish-button/)Toolbar Publish Button blogindlæg (https://www.yanco.dk/et-plugin-der-sparer-dig-timevis-af-arbejde/)Admin Columns (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/codepress-admin-columns/)Admin Columns PRO (https://www.admincolumns.com/)Advanced Custom Fields (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/)Advanced Custom Fields PRO (https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/pro/)Simply Show IDs (https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-show-ids/)Nested Pages (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/wp-nested-pages/)Nav Menu Collapse (https://wordpress.org/plugins/nav-menu-collapse/)Post Expirator (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/post-expirator/)Taxonomy Terms Order (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/taxonomy-terms-order/)User Switching (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/user-switching/) SEO Yoast SEO (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/) Backup og flytning af WordPress sites UpdraftPlus (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/)BackupBuddy (https://ithemes.com/backupbuddy/)Migrate Guru (https://wordpress.org/plugins/migrate-guru/)Duplicator (https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/)Duplicator PRO (https://snapcreek.com/) WooCommerce Smart Coupons (https://woocommerce.com/products/smart-coupons/)Product Customer List for WooCommerce (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wc-product-customer-list/)Advanced Bulk Edit (https://codecanyon.net/item/woocommerce-advanced-bulk-edit/8011417)WooCommerce PDF Invoices and Packaging Slips(https://da.wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce-pdf-invoices-packing-slips/)Checkout Field Editor (https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-checkout-field-editor/)IEX (https://iex.dk/webshop/woocommerce/)StoreBuddy (https://storebuddy.dk/)WooCommerce Store Exporter Deluxe(https://www.visser.com.au/solutions/woocommerce-export/)WP All Export (

How much thought do you devote to protecting your WordPress website? [sc name="pod_ad"]I want to share something that happened to me this week. I came home from a nice lunch with friends to both an email and urgent voicemail message from a client saying someone had hacked their website and their URL redirected to a porn site. This is a relatively large client of mine that gets a decent number of visitors to their website each day, so there was a good reason for the panic. When I heard the message and the panic in my client’s voice, my only thought was to get this problem fixed ASAP. But I wasn’t worried because I know I have measures in place for exactly this sort of thing. But more on that later. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. That popularity also makes it the most popular choice for hackers. Fortunately, WordPress is on the ball and releases regular updates to patch any new and existing security holes. But, security as a whole is a reactive process. Patches are only issued once a security vulnerability is known. At its core, WordPress is incredibly secure, but the massive ecosystem of plugins and WordPress themes makes it more vulnerable to security holes. That’s why you should have measures in place for protecting your WordPress Website and those of your client. It’s not good enough to rely on what your web host provides as part of your hosting package. You need to have your own measures in place. Those measures need to include both a security plugin and a backup plugin. Step 1: A WordPress security plugin By installing a WordPress security plugin, you’ll get access to additional features that WordPress doesn’t have right out of the box, including things such as: Site, file, and malware scanning Protection from brute force attacks Regular security scans, monitoring, notifications Site firewalls Overall security hardening Sadly, a lot of site owners don’t think about security for their WordPress website until it’s too late. And once a WordPress site is compromised, there’s not a lot they can do besides notify visitors and try to clean up the mess if possible. If only there were something they could’ve done to prevent the site from being hacked in the first place. Oh, there is. Installing a top-ranked WordPress security plugin is the first step in securing your WordPress website. Top-ranked WordPress security plugins All In One WP Security & Firewall Wordfence Sucuri Security SecuPress Free iThemes Security Pro (This is the plugin I use on all my sites) Google Authenticator - Two Factor Authentication Although not a security plugin, the Google Authenticator plugin is a great addition for protecting your WordPress website. It's something that should be installed on every website. Google Authenticator adds an extra level of security by adding Two Factor Authentication every time someone logs into the WordPress website. iTheme Security Pro, my security plugin of choice comes with Google Authenticator as part of the package. I'm unsure if the other security plugins mentioned above also include Google Authenticator. Step 2: A WordPress backup plugin Every WordPress installation should also have a backup solution. Not one provided by your web host, but one you implement and control yourself. There are too many instances where web host provided backup solutions either take days to provide you with the backup of your website, the backup is outdated, or in some cases, it's corrupted. Don't take any chances with your WordPress backups and install a top-ranked WordPress backup plugin such as one of these. Top-ranked WordPress backup plugins Duplicator BackWPup BlogVault VaultPress(part of Jetpack) BackupBuddy (This is the plugin I use on all my sites) So how did my story end? First off, let me tell you that I wasn’t surprised that my client's site got hacked. I had seen increased login attempts on it lately numbering in the 10,000s. If a determined hacker wants into a website, there's only so much you can do to stop them. So I wasn’t surprised when it got hacked, but I also wasn’t worried. The first thing I did was wipe the site. I logged into my cPannel, went to File Manager, found the directory for my client's website and deleted everything in the folder. That immediately solved the first issue of the site being redirected to the porn site since there wasn't a site anymore to do the redirection. Then it was a simple matter of downloading the most recent backup from the cloud drive I send all my client site backups to and using BackupBuddy, reinstalled the entire site from the backup. In all, it took me less than 10 minutes to get the site back up and running. After reinstalling the site, I changed the password for the database as well as all User passwords and made sure WordPress, the installed theme and all plugins were updated. Only then did I call my client. When he answered and immediately started asking what can we do about the problem, it felt so good being able to tell him that everything was already taken care of and his site was back up and running. Please, don’t delay, and don’t rely on your web host's security and backups to handle this for you. If you are not already protecting your WordPress website with security and backup plugins get to it ASAP. Don’t wait until it’s too late. Are you protecting your WordPress website the way you should be? Let me know by leaving a comment for this episode. Questions of the Week I didn't answer a question of the week in this episode, but I would love to answer one of yours. Submit your question to be featured in a future episode of the podcast by visiting the feedback page. Listen to the podcast on the go. Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify Listen on Android Listen on Stitcher Listen on iHeartRadio Contact me I would love to hear from you. You can send me questions and feedback using my feedback form. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram I want to help you. Running a graphic design or web design business all by yourself isn't easy. If there are any struggles you face running your design business, please reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you by addressing your issues in a future blog post or podcast episode here at Resourceful Designer. You can reach me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com

In this episode, we're talking with Zane DeVault, lead developer at co-founder of Tiny Blue Sky about updating WordPress plugins. Zane explains why plugins need to be updated regularly on WordPress websites, what to do if something goes wrong during the update, the importance of backing up your website and some overall website maintenance best practices. What is a WordPress plugin? If you currently have a WordPress site, you might know that some of its functionality is made possible by plugins. A plugin is a bit of software that can be added to your site to do a thing that your site couldn't do before. For instance, let's say you want to have an online store but your current site doesn't include ecommerce. A plugin can be added to your site, and voila, you're in business. How to choose a plugin? There are currently 54,737 plugins available to extend your website experience. And that number is growing all the time. So how do you know which one to chose? Zane recommends starting within your current site. On your WordPress Dashboard, hover over Plugins and select Add New. The plugins here have been vetted by WordPress. From there, look for Plugins that have been installed on lots of other sites and check for high ratings. Updating plugins: when, why and how Like most software, plugins require updates from time-to-time to keep them secure and working as they were intended. You should update your plugins—it's a good thing. Before you update, back up your site and your database. Not sure how? Check with your host (Zane recommends WPEngine and Flywheel. At Tiny Blue Sky, we use WPEngine and love that it automatically backs up our site daily). If your host doesn't make backing up easy for you, there are plugins that can help. Zane references Backup Buddy, Updraft, VaultPress and Duplicator. Once your site is backed up, update the plugins and then give your site a quick once over to ensure everything is in working order. If for some reason something isn't working properly, pat yourself on the back for having a back up. Contact your host or developer and ask them to help you restore your site. Zane recommends updating your plugins every week. This ensures you won't miss a security update, unintentionally making your site vulnerable to an attack.  What happens if you don’t update your plugins? There's a chance that nothing will happen. That said, you're also leaving your site open to the possibility of an attack. If you're hacked you're site could go down or become associated spam activity, which will negatively impact your Google search results. Have something to ask Zane? If you have a question for Zane. let us know. We may use it in a future episode of the Tech Savvy Nonprofit Podcast. Send your question to zane@tinybluesky.com.

Das Update eines Plugins ist schnell durchgeführt- der Schaden der dadurch auf deiner Website entstehen kann ist jedoch nicht so leicht behoben. Vorsicht ist hier definitiv besser als Nachsicht. Eigentlich liegt es nah: Wenn deine Website von bestimmten Plugins abhängig ist, dann bist du ebenso von der Lauffähigkeit dieser Plugins abhängig. Das kann ein ziemliches Risiko beherbergen, wenn das Update Fehler beherbergt. Erst kürzlich gab es eine vorweihnachtliche Bescherung mit der Veröffentlichung des WordPress 5.0 Core-Updates. Viele WordPress-Benutzer installierten das Update jedoch, ohne einen Testdurchlauf zu starten und zu überprüfen ob jenes Update auf ihrer Website überhaupt funktioniert. Das Ergebnis war bei einigen Websites fatal: Oftmals funktionierte nichts auf der Website mehr richtig. Dieses Problem lässt sich jedoch umgehen, wie du in dieser Episode lernen wirst. Die einfachste Möglichkeit ist das Einrichten einer Test- oder Staging-Umgebung. Im Idealfall sind hier alle aktuellen Inhalte deiner Website eins zu eins vorhanden. Hier ist es dir nun möglich in einer risikofreien Zone jegliche Updates zu testen. Ein konkurrenzfreies Plugin das dir hierbei behilflich sein kann, ist Migrate DB Pro. Es erlaubt dir deinen bestehenden Live-Inhalt in eine Testumgebung zu kopieren. Wie genau du mit diesem Plugin Zeit und Nerven sparst erklärt dir André in dieser Episode. Der WordPress Hoster Raidboxes bietet dir ebenfalls eine Staging-Umgebung, also quasi eine zweite WordPress-Installation in der du bequem Updates überprüfen kannst, bevor du sie veröffentlichst. Neben dem Testing ist es enorm wichtig Prävention zu betreiben. Lerne in dieser Episode, warum du niemals auf Backups verzichten solltest und wie du so die generelle Sicherheit deiner Website erhöhst. Plugins wie BackupBuddy oder iThemes Security Pro helfen dir haarsträubende Szenarien, wie beim oben beschrieben WordPress-Update, zu umgehen. Als letztes Plugin stellt dir André WP Security Audit Log vor. Dieses Plugin unterstützt dich darin die „behind the scenes“ deiner WordPress im Auge zu behalten. Das ermöglicht dir zum einen immer auf dem Laufenden zu bleiben was deine WordPress-Benutzer für Änderungen treffen und lässt dich zum anderen sicher sein, dass du nichts durchgehen lässt, was nicht vorhergesehen war. Mache deine Website sicher und drücke gleich Play!

When clients view design as an investment, you win. Whether or not a potential client decides to work with you relies heavily on your pitch to them. If they like the presentation but view the cost of hiring you as an expense, they may choose to look for more affordable options. However, if they consider the cost of hiring you as an investment, there's a good chance they'll decide to work with you. Not promoting the investment opportunity is a critical factor that holds so many designers back from charging what they are truly worth. One of the most significant concerns over raising design rates is that clients can get design work done cheaper elsewhere. Yes, it's true, but only for clients who view design as an expense. Something to shop around for the best deal. For clients who see design as an investment, the price isn’t usually an issue. Nurturing an investment mentality in your clients. How can you get clients to view design as an investment? Change how you make your pitch to them, and it will make a difference in your proposal success rate. It all comes down to semantics. When you tell a client their new website will cost them $8000, they hear the price and imagine it as an expense they need to justify. They may feel reluctant to move forward and may want to shop around for a better deal. However, if you explain to a client that by working with you they receive much more than just a website, they receive a strategic partner that focuses on their business success, the same $8000 suddenly becomes an investment in the future of their business. If you can get a client to think about the return they will receive after paying your fee; they will be much more inclined to work with you. The trick is to expand beyond the receivables you are providing the client and explaining what they can accomplish with those receivables. A well-designed logo can bring them better exposure and brand recognition and make them stand out amongst their competition. A well-designed website can generate more traffic, get them a better market share, help them monitor trends and visitors through analytics and increase their conversions. When you explain what the client gets beyond the designs, they are much more inclined to appreciate what you offer them and invest in you. You can even change the wording on your proposals from Total Cost or Total Price to read Total Investment. It’s such a subtle shift, but if it clicks with a potential client, then that client becomes loyal to you. An investment is something people want to do, whereas an expense is something people try to avoid but know it's sometimes inevitable. If you can convince clients you are offering the first one, there’s a good chance they hire you. I've talked in past episodes of Resourceful Designer about building client relationships and how you want them to see you as their strategic partner and not just a design supplier. Clients are much more willing to invest in a partner because they feel like they will get something out of it. What if the client still questions the price? If you present your proposal as an investment and the client still questions your price, you should try explaining it to them in business terms more familiar to them. If a client has a storefront, look at its location. Is it in a busy downtown area? Is it in a shopping centre?  Ask them why did they choose that location instead of opening in a cheaper location on the outskirts of town. If the client runs a service based business and relies on their vehicle for work, ask them why they didn't choose an older model vehicle that would have cost them less money? The reason clients choose premium locations or newer vehicles is that they are thinking of them as investments and not merely an expense. Yes, you could argue that mortgages, leases and loans are expenses according to accounting practices. But they are investments when it comes to the success of the business. Store owners will pay more for a better location because of the exposure it gives them. Service businesses are willing to pay more for their vehicles because of the perception it instils in people who see them. The same should apply to design. Clients can get websites, logos, and marketing material designed cheaper than what you are offering. But if they genuinely want what is best for their business, they should be willing to invest more to get something that will impact their business beyond just the design, and that’s where you come in. To paraphrase author and business leader Michael Hyatt. If a design seem cheap, dated or confusing, potential clients will think the business is cheap, dated or confusing. No business can afford to be percieved this way. The best way to avoid being viewed as cheap, dated or confusing is to hire a professional designer who will work closely with the business to ensure their success. That's where you come in. So if you are not already doing it. Change the way you pitch yourself to clients. Stop telling them how much things will cost them and start telling them how much of an investment hiring you will be. Do your clients know they are investing in their business by hiring you? Let me know your thoughts on this topic by leaving a comment for this episode. Questions of the Week Submit your question to be featured in a future episode of the podcast by visiting the feedback page. This week’s question comes from Ursula How do you approach Project Proposals? I feel like I spend a lot of time and energy on proposals, and I always wonder how much of them I could have prepared ahead of time to make the processes faster for my (potential) clients, and cost effective for me in terms of my time. But I feel like I should be approaching each project with a clean slate so that my proposal is individualized for them. There must be a better way. Can you share your process or other best practices in this area? To find out what I told Ursula you’ll have to listen to the podcast. Resource of the week BackupBuddy BackupBuddyby iThemes is the easiest way to backup, restore, migrate and relocate a WordPress website. With BackupBuddy you always have peace of mind knowing that your website is safe and if ever the need arises, can be restored with just a few simple clicks. Do you design client websites locally or in a designated sandbox? BackupBuddy makes it easy to move and deploy the site to its permanent domain once it's complete. BackupBuddy is the first plugin I install on every WordPress site I build. Listen to the podcast on the go. Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on Spotify Listen on StitcherListen on AndroidListen on Google Play MusicListen on iHeartRadio Contact me I would love to hear from you. You can send me questions and feedback using my feedback form. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram I want to help you. Running a graphic design or web design business all by yourself isn't easy. If there are any struggles you face running your design business, please reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you by addressing your issues in a future blog post or podcast episode here at Resourceful Designer. You can reach me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com.

Using Google AdWords to Attract Design Clients Any time designers get together in person or online on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or Reddit, you’re sure to hear someone ask how to attract more clients. It’s one of, if not the most significant problem faced by designers. Without clients, your business fails. It doesn’t matter how good a designer you are if you don’t have people paying for your services your business will not survive. There are many ways you can attract new clients. Last week I shared 12 inexpensive ways for you to promote your design business. A couple of years ago I wrote a blog post where I shared 10 proven ways to attract design clients. All methods I’ve used myself to gain clients. Today I want to talk about a great way to attract clients that for some reason, not many graphic designers or web designers are taking advantage of. Google AdWords. How do clients find you? Ask most designers, and they will tell you the number one way they gain new clients is through word of mouth referrals. Referrals are great. But what if you don’t have a large catalogue of clients advocating for your business? Let's look at it from a client's perspective. Let's say you need a plumber. Who will you call? Your first choice would be to call a plumber you know, or at least one you've heard of before. Your Second choice would be to ask family, friends, co-workers and associates who they would recommend. That’s the referral part. If it doesn’t work, you would probably turn to a search engine and look for plumbers in your area. Design clients do the same thing. They contact a designer they know or have heard of before. That’s where brand awareness comes in. Second, they ask family, friends, colleagues, associates etc. That’s where referrals come in. But when that fails, clients will turn to the internet and search for a designer online. And chances are they will formulate their search to look for someone in their local area. That last part is a huge benefit for you, especially if you are using Google AdWords to get in front of them. If you’re already familiar with how AdWords works, you’re probably nodding your head right now in agreement with me, but I’m going to continue with the assumption that you are not familiar with Google AdWords. Forgive me if I'm wrong. For the record, Yahoo and Bing also have similar advertising platforms, but since the majority of people use Google, I’m going to concentrate on it. So how does Google AdWords work for attracting design clients? Let me break it down into the simplest terms using only three steps, You figure out what keywords people are searching. You create an ad that Google puts in front of people actively searching for those keywords. You pay Google for the people that click on your ads. That’s all there is to it. The best part about Google AdWords is you only pay when your ads are working, and people engage with them. If they don't click, you don't pay. Now of course, “when your ads are working” is a relative term. In this case, it means when people click on your ad. Whether or not they become a client after clicking on your ad is not Google’s concern. A deeper dive into AdWords. I won't go into the technical nitty gritty of setting up a successful AdWords campaign. There are plenty of other resources where you can learn the ins and outs of fine-tuning your ad campaign to get the most bang for your buck. I will, however, elaborate on the three steps I mentioned above. Create an AdWords Account The first step is creating a free AdWords account and telling Google how to charge you for your ads. They have to make their money after all. Once your account set up, you can create your first ad campaign by choosing the type of ads you want to run. There are several options, but in my opinion Search Ads are the best ones for attracting new design clients. Next, you select the campaign type. I suggest you choose website traffic and don’t include Google Search Partners or the Ad Display Network. Both are good for driving traffic to a product or resource, but your goal is to attract clients. Set up the delivery What makes Google AdWords such a valuable marketing tool is the ability to pick the geographic location where your ads will appear. If you live in Cleaveland Ohio, you can set up your campaign so that only people in Cleaveland will see it. There are several reasons to limit your search to particular geographic regions. Top among them is the amount of competition you face the broader your target area. If you set your campaign to all of the USA you are competing with every other designer across the whole country. It is possible to win in that scenario, but since a kind of bidding/auction system is used to determine ad placement, it could get costly. Of course, there's a lot more to the whole thing that I'm not getting into which is why I suggest you take an AdWords course before starting. But basically, targetting an entire country is just too difficult for someone just starting out. By narrowing down your geographic area, you are narrowing down who you are competing with and the effort required to get your ads in front of potential clients. Set your budget You need to set a budget for your ad campaign. It can be as high or as low as you want. There are several options for choosing how to invest your money in your campaign. What I suggest is using the standard delivery method since it gives you better analytical data on your ads. For the bidding method. I suggest Clicks over Views. With Clicks, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad whereas with Views you get charged every time your ad is displayed regardless of whether or not someone interacts with it. The final part of setting your budget is choosing a start and end dates of your campaign. I suggest starting out with short campaigns until you get the hang of it. Choose your keywords. Choosing keywords is the fun part. You get to decide what keywords you want to target with your ads. These are the words you think people will type into the search engine to find you. Start off with common sense terms like; web design website design web designer logo design logo designer etc. You can narrow down your keywords even further by adding a location such as "web designer Cleveland." Choosing keywords is easy, choosing the right keywords is a bit more tricky. Targetting "website designer" may bring you a lot more traffic than "web designer" or vice versa. There are tools to research what keywords are more popular than others, or how often specific keywords are searched. Google’s Keyword Planner is a popular free one. I use software called Long Tail Pro for my keyword research. Create your ads Finally, you need to create your ads. There is an option to create banner style ads, but for finding design clients, all you need is standard search results ads. These show up as the first few listings when you do a Google search. They have a small [Ad] next to them. Then it's just a matter of choosing the right title and wording to attract clients to your site, launching your campaign and waiting for clients to come calling. How to get the most out of Google AdWords. Google AdWords is very easy to learn. However, there is a learning curve if you want to get good at it and not end up wasting money. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your AdWords campaign. 1) Build landing pages. AdWords campaigns work best when linked to a dedicated landing page and not your home page. Google give each ad a rank that helps determine it's placement (along with other factors) vs the competition. The page your ad is linked to plays a significant factor in your ad rank score. If your ad is for logo design. Make sure it’s linked to a landing page that is just about logo design. 2) Study what your competitors are doing Figure out what keywords your competitors are targeting and what ads they are displaying and try and outdo them. Keyword tools like the one by Google can help you figure out the best keywords to target, but they also allow you to enter a competitor’s URL and see what keywords they are targetting. 3) Split test Google AdWords is not a set it and forget it system. You should study the performance of your ads and adjust things on the go. If you are getting a lot of traction with the keyword “web design” but not much with “website design” then you should adjust your campaign to push more of your budget towards the keyword that is performing better. Split testing ads for a single keyword also works well in figuring out which ad copy is earning more clicks. 4) Link your Google AdWords and Google Analytics Accounts. AdWords has some excellent tracking info, but it only tells you what happened with your ad up until the point it is clicked. By linking your Google Analytics account to your AdWords account, you can follow along and see what happens after your ad is clicked. 5) Start small and grow as you get more comfortable creating ad campaigns. Although AdWords is easy to learn, there are a lot of things that influence the success or failure of an ad campaign. Until you are comfortable, I suggest setting short campaigns and starting with a low budget until you learn the nuances of the platform. "Hacking" Google AdWords I mentioned above that one of the best things about Google AdWords is the ability to target geographic areas because it narrows down the competition. But what if you live in a large metropolitan area with lots of competition? In my example, I used Cleveland Ohio. Let's say there's a lot of competition for web designers in Cleveland and the cost of running your AdWords campaign is getting high. Nothing is stopping you from targeting other areas instead. There are plenty of smaller areas around Cleveland that you could target. Places like Bedford Heights, Euclid, Olmstead Falls, and others. Nothing is stopping you from choosing keywords targetting those smaller communities. Chances are the competition will be much lower so your budget will go much farther and clients there shouldn't be opposed to working with a web designer in Cleveland. And the best part is if it doesn’t work out and nobody clicks on your ads, it doesn’t cost you a cent. Give Google AdWords at try So many designers are struggling to find design clients, and yet this inexpensive way to target exactly the people you want to work with is at your disposal. It doesn't matter where in the world you are; Google AdWords can help you attract design clients because it's putting your ads directly in front of the people actively looking for your services. If you are not already taking advantage of search engine advertising, I highly suggest you look into it soon. What is your experience with online advertising to attract design clients? Let me know by leaving a comment for this episode. Questions of the Week Submit your question to be featured in a future episode of the podcast by visiting the feedback page. This week’s question comes from Shaun Hi Mark. Only started listening to your podcast recently, I really enjoy listening. You give us some really good advice and it sounds like you really enjoy your job and lifestyle. keep up the good work! I am from South Africa and I am currently working for the government as a Graphic Designer, work is very repetitive and boring. I am stagnating at the moment and would like to make a move...I am thinking about freelancing on the side. I am currently busy learning app development. I heard you mention 99 designs and am currently doing some designs...I feel like I am lacking in creativity and skill. But this wont get me down... What would you suggest for someone that is in a creative rut? any exercises that one can do? to get back on the horse? Just wanted to say Thank you for your advice and what you are doing. Keep it up! To find out what I told Shaun you’ll have to listen to the podcast. Resource of the week BackupBuddy Deployment With BackupBuddy’s Deployment feature, you can push or pull a WordPress site’s database, media files, plugins and active theme back and forth between a Staging Site (or Test/Development Site) and a Live Site. BackupBuddy allows you to develop on one site and then push changes to another, so you never have to develop on a live site again. Deployment now supports setting the deployed site’s Search Engine Visibility option to either visible, not visible, or no change. A default for this setting can be set in the Deployment settings. Listen to the podcast on the go. Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on Spotify Listen on StitcherListen on AndroidListen on Google Play MusicListen on iHeartRadio Contact me I would love to hear from you. You can send me questions and feedback using my feedback form. Follow me on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram I want to help you. Running a graphic design or web design business all by yourself isn't easy. If there are any struggles you face running your design business, please reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you by addressing your issues in a future blog post or podcast episode here at Resourceful Designer. You can reach me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com

In this episode, Matt Medeiros interviews  Cory Miller from iThemes and jokes with him as being his most interviewed guest on the Matt Report. The big news for 2018 is that Cory's business (IThemes) was recently purchased by Liquidweb. Matt and Cory talk about the climate around WordPress, how they are working for different hosting companies, and what the future holds for Cory and his team with Liquidweb. Cory remains the general manager for iThemes, a business that he created over ten years ago with  WordPress themes, Backup Buddy, iThemes security and iTheme sync.   Listen to this episode: Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners What does it feel like to sell your decade-old business? Cory Miller explains. Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 00:44:28 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:44:28 What you will learn from this Episode: Profitable Plugin Businesses: Cory talks about how plugin businesses are viewed as good investments for hosting companies. (4:13) It makes sense for hosting companies to look at the plugin and backup businesses for expansion beyond hosting. (4:51) Hosting companies have the power and money for current WordPress onboarding. (6:23) iThemes built a passionate customer community centered around the brand which Liquidweb can benefit from. (7:37) Cory built a compelling company that customers would miss if the company was not around anymore. (8:15) WordPress and Hosting: The trend right now with hosting companies competing in this environment is they are purchasing plugin businesses. (9:29) Many developers became WordPress entrepreneurs and quickly built a business. (10:34) Merging with Liquidweb allowed the team to have a home. (20:05) Selling a business can impact your identity.  The sale of a business can allow it continue to grow and be valuable for everyone. (22:43) WordPress is changing and the plugin space may be challenging in the future. (24:54) The WordPress story continues to be written. You need to be adapting, adjusting and growing personally. (36:08) It is great to learn with a new team and can be eye-opening to serve a new customer. (38:00) If the technology changes the WordPress community will not. There are special people all over the WordPress world. (40:48) Advice on Self-Promotion: Cory built his business by being transparent, vulnerable and honest with who he is. (11:32) Use everything at your disposal to be who you are. (12:38) Listen to other people and your customers. It can lead you to purposeful profit where you can help other people with making their dreams come true. (13:20) The slow road to success builds great relationships with people. (14:54) Bitterness, jealousy or envy can consume you early and distract you from your business. Take time to build your quality business. (15:37) There is value in knowing who you are.  (17:04) Owning your own business is woven into the fabric of your life.  (17:47) Fear and uncertainty can impact business decisions but you need to recognize the bigger vision and future. (18:30) A failure is an investment in learning and growth. (the product Exchange)(27:49) Episode Resources: LiquidWeb iThemes Pagely Cory Miller's blog To Stay in Touch with Cory: Cory Miller's blog Cory on Twitter To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. Be sure to check out Matt's new offering at UserFeedbackVideos.com. It is like having a co-founder for $59.00.   ★ Support this podcast ★

In this episode, Matt Medeiros interviews  Cory Miller from iThemes and jokes with him as being his most interviewed guest on the Matt Report. The big news for 2018 is that Cory’s business (IThemes) was recently purchased by Liquidweb. Matt and Cory talk about the climate around WordPress, how they are working for different hosting companies, and what the future holds for Cory and his team with Liquidweb. Cory remains the general manager for iThemes, a business that he created over ten years ago with  WordPress themes, Backup Buddy, iThemes security and iTheme sync. (more…)

Do you have the 3Cs required to run a successful design business? There’s a lot more to running a successful design business than just being a good designer. In fact, being a good designer may be the least important thing for your design business. Don't get me wrong. If you're a bad designer chances are your business won't succeed. However, I know many great designers who don’t have what it takes to run a successful design business either. There’s nothing wrong with working for an employer throughout your design career. Just like are some chefs are destined to run their own restaurants while other chefs are content working in someone else's kitchen. But if you are a designer who wants to run your own design business, it will take skill, determination and perseverance. Plus a little thing I like to call the 3 Cs. Be sure to listen to the podcast where I go into more detail on each of the following. Curiosity. As a designer, you need to be curious. Curiosity is what will keep you growing as designers. Curiosity is what helps you to keep up with trends or learn from the past. Curiosity is what keeps you in the know on new software, apps and gadgets to help you in your work. It’s your curiosity that ensures you don’t get left behind. Competence. You have to have a level of competence if you want to succeed as a designer and as a business person. It's not necessary that you be a great designer to run a successful design business, but it sure helps. Competence is what helps you grow and master your craft. You may be good at what you do, but imagine how much better you can be if you continue to pursue it and get better at it. That takes competence. Confidence. If you have unwavering confidence in yourself, chances are you are going to succeed. Having confidence means that even when you fail you succeed because you have the confidence to learn from your failure and become better for it. Look at Thomas Edison, the man who said he failed himself to success. In his quest to invent the light bulb he had many failures before succeeding. In fact, there’s a famous quote by Edison that goes. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work." Seeing failure as an opportunity to learn takes confidence. The same goes if you want to run a successful design business. When a client doesn’t like a design or a direction you are taking. Don’t see it as a failure. See it as a learning opportunity and grow from it. Even the greatest designers in the world get it wrong more often than they get it right. But when they do get it right, it’s great. It’s all part of the process. Having confidence in yourself and your abilities will go a long way in ensuring your business’s success. The 3Cs There you have it. The 3 Cs to a successful design business. Curiosity Competence Confidence When you have all three, your road to success will be almost guaranteed. How are you with the 3Cs? Let me know by leaving a comment for this episode. Questions of the Week Submit your question to be featured in a future episode of the podcast by visiting the feedback page. This week’s question comes from Rich I am starting a website design and media company and I want to offer reseller hosting. It seems like I have heard you say that you offer hosting to your clients but I haven't heard any specifics. Do you have any specific/detailed advice for getting started with reseller hosting? To find out what I told Rich you’ll have to listen to the podcast. Resource of the week BackupBuddy I've shared BackupBuddy as a resource before. The reason I'm doing so again is that iThemes just released an update to this great WordPress plugin that makes it even easier for web designers to work between staging sites and live sites. The new and improved Push & Pull features means never having to make changes on a live site again, potentially breaking it. With BackupBuddy you simply pull the most recent live site to your testing server. Make and test the changes, and then push them out to the live site. It's that easy. Episode Sponsors Thank you to this week's sponsors. Save on Millions of stock photos, vectors and more with an exclusive deal for Resourceful Designer listeners by visiting http://storyblocks.com/resourcefuldesigner. Take control of your band with Brandfolder, the solution for digital brand assets. Get a 90-day free trial by visiting http://brandfolder.com/resourcefuldesigner Subscribe to the podcast Subscribe on iTunes Subscribe on Stitcher Subscribe on Android Subscribe on Google Play Music Contact me Send me feedback Follow me on Twitter and Facebook I want to help you. Running a graphic design or web design business all by yourself isn't easy. If there are any struggles you face running your design business, please reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you by addressing your issues in a future blog post or podcast episode here at Resourceful Designer. You can reach me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com  

Episode 53 (already?) brings you real life, unscripted, genuinely balanced discussion regarding what works and what doesn't when migrating your WordPress site. Is there a best way? Maybe not! It can be scary for sure. ? It might depend on what you are already familiar with... It might depend on the details of the site you're migrating. Regardless, you're sure to get some valuable insight on Divi site migration tips and best practices. We discuss experience with migration options ranging from simple (hosting and plugins) to the manual migrations that help you garner a deeper understanding of your development platform. Plus "do's and dont's" and what to prepare for and expect to happen before, during and after your Divi site migration.   Hosts Present: David Blackmon - Aspen Grove Studios / FB / @aspengrovellc Cory Jenkins - Aspen Grove Studios / FB / @aspengrovellc Josh Hall - JoshHall.co / FB Leslie Bernal - A Girl and Her Mac / FB / @agirlandhermac Terry Hale - Mizagorn, Ink / BeSuperfly / FB / @mizagorn Resources Mentioned: How to MANUALLY Migrate Your WordPress Site - courtesy of JoshHall.co All-in-One WP Migration - highest rated, but not for everyone. BackupBuddy - no freebie, but from iThemes.. a severely reputable WordPress company. UpdraftPlus - the migration tool is an inexpensive add-on to a free, awesome plugin that most already have in their repo. JetPack - you already either love it or hate it. No matter what, this is a powerful tool with lots of punch in many arenas. Limit Post Revisions - a sweet but simple way to Jenny Craig your database. RIOT (Radical Image Optimization Tool) - a true developer favorite. Site hosts that provide free site migrations - InMotion, GoDaddy, SiteGround (add yours in the comments!)   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYYL1pKxgNY

This week I discuss what cPanel can do. – Part 1 Upcoming Events WordCamp Kent Ohio – June 24-25 WordCamp Kyoto – June 24-25 WordCamp Nagpur, India  – June 24-25 Segment 1: In the News iThemes released BackUpBuddy 8.0. Jeff King now on the board of Liquid Web. WordCamp Europe 2018 be be held in…

This week I discuss what cPanel can do. – Part 1 Upcoming Events WordCamp Kent Ohio – June 24-25 WordCamp Kyoto – June 24-25 WordCamp Nagpur, India  – June 24-25 Segment 1: In the News iThemes released BackUpBuddy 8.0. Jeff King now on the board of Liquid Web. WordCamp Europe 2018 be be held in…

Watch the video of this podcast here. Cory Miller started iThemes back in 2008 as a premium theme company for WordPress. Today he and his company are best known for their Backup Buddy plugin and iThemes security. He’s also the co-author of WordPress All-in-One for Dummies and the current Communications chair of the Oklahoma chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization. Today he joins WP Elevation to talk about mental health topics like depression and emotional resilience for entrepreneurs. You probably recognize Cory Miller because of his company iThemes and their plugin and software offerings for WordPress. However he’s here on the WP Elevation podcast for another reason. As part of our mental health awareness campaign, Cory Miller is here to share a few of the topics he boldly shared in a WordCamp talk he gave in Denver recently. If you want to hear that talk in full you can find it in the links below. Although we can’t cover everything he talked about in that presentation, we are digging into a few areas. The first thing I asked him about was the concept of not being responsible for other people's happiness. Even if you don't have a boss or co-workers and you work at home solo, this still applies to you and the work you do for your clients. Cory says this belief and perspective came out of personal experience as he's been a people pleaser for most of his life and still has those tendencies. But in a team meeting about six years ago he said this same thing to his people: no one is responsible for their happiness but themselves. And when he said this he realized he's also responsible for his own happiness. That realization freed him in areas of his life where he had previously been held captive. We also talked about his struggles with depression and the tools he now uses to help himself. Because entrepreneurship itself is one of the toughest, loneliest jobs a person can take on, Cory has a few things he does to ensure his happiness. The main thing is the people who surround him, he calls them sidekicks. For a long time he didn't have someone to bounce ideas off of and vent to, but he has found a few key people to do that with now. And his wife is at the top of that list. His second “sidekick” is his COO Matt. With Matt in his role Cory knows he can step away from the business for a few days and everything will run smoothly, he doesn't have to worry. Matt has been in the job for a few years now and it’s made a big difference in Cory’s overall mental health and state of mind. Next is Cory’s local entrepreneur group. For the last five years Cory has met with this group for three hours a month. These are all entrepreneurs and business owners who have reached the $1 million sales revenue mark in their businesses. They all come together to talk about business, life and do so in a confidential way. Cory says these folks have been lifesavers for him. And the remaining people are Cory’s mentors, including his coach Michael Smith and Cory’s counselor Kyle. Cory says these are all the type of people who rush into his life when other people would rush out. If there’s a crisis of any sort they are there for him and for Cory’s family. Speaking of family, I also asked Cory how his wife holds him accountable to his blind spots. He describes the importance of open communication with his wife as well as their planned day dates and road trips together. And when they have difficult conversations he knows she is coming from a place of love and not a place of criticism. And we wrap up our conversation by talking about how having kids has changed his mental health landscape, and his insights on emotional resilience and why it's so important in the life of an entrepreneur. Find out about all of that on today’s edition of WP Elevation!

Moving WordPress from one domain to another or just one server to another can be a complete nightmare. Here is how we do it whilst laughing with glee. Duplicator (Free): The free version - https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/ Duplicator Pro: The paid version - https://snapcreek.com/duplicator/pricing/ Honorable mentions: Backup Buddy - https://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/ UpdraftPlus - https://updraftplus.com/   --- OUR EVENT: Do you want to make real change in your business? Join us at our in-person event Agency Transformation Live Meet Troy Dean; Lee Jackson, Chris Ducker, Kelly Baader, Amy Woods, Paul Lacey, Dave Foy and other legends in this fantastic conference focused on actionable steps that you can use to transform your agency. --- See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rachel Smets is the author of Awaken Your Confidence and stops by to share some insights into building your confidence. You can find her at Racehsmets.com as well as @rachelsmets and Facebook. and YouTube We talk about overcoming imposter syndrome, and how telling someone "just start" doesn't work. Here are three things you can do to help boost your confidence: Don't compare yourself to others. Start Small Failure is Feedback On this Week's taping of the Ask the Podcast Coach show Carlos asked, "how do i become a popular podcaster when i was the most unpopular kid in high school?" to this point to the following people who were not popular in school: Steven Spielberg says, " “I was a nerd in those days. Outsider, like the kid that played the clarinet in the band and in orchestra, which I did.”" Taylor Switft says, " I remember when I was in school, the whole reason I started writing songs was because I was alone a lot of the time. I’d sit there in school and I’d be hearing people like, ‘Oh my god, this party that we’re going to is gonna be so awesome on Friday. Everyone’s invited except for Taylor Charlize Theron - “I didn’t have any boyfriends in high school. I had a massive, massive crush on this one guy. He was a couple of years older than me and I did not exist in his world. Selena Gomez " “I was bullied every second of every day in elementary and middle school.” Lady Gaga " “Being teased for being ugly, having a big nose, being annoying. ‘Your laugh is funny, you’re weird, why do you always sing, why are you so into theater, why do you do your make-up like that?’" Jessica Alba " “I’d eat my lunch in the nurses’ office so I didn’t have to sit with the other girls. Apart from my being mixed race, my parents didn’t have money so I never had the cute clothes or the cool back pack.”" Cameron Diaz " “I’m a dork! When I was high school, I was a total goon! All the kids used to make fun of me. I was like all skinny and gangly and guys were like no thank you.” Jennifer Garner - I was a real nerd. I wasn’t the popular one, I was one of those girls on the edge of the group. I never wore the right clothes and I had a kind of natural geekiness. I was in the school band and I think that has a bit of a stigma at the age of 13. If you’d asked me what I wanted to be, I would have said something like a librarian. Kate Winslet - Winslet was bullied and teased for being chubby. Her nickname at school was Blubber, and she was once even locked in the art cupboard Miley Cyrus - At school, there was an “Anti-Miley Club” full of “big, tough girls” who were “fully capable of doing [her] bodily harm” and went above and beyond in their bullying pursuit. Cyrus was once locked in a bathroom during class: “They shoved me in. I was trapped. I banged on the door until my fists hurt. Nobody came.” Other incidents included challenging Cyrus to a fight, which only ended when the principal stepped in. And when Cyrus wasn’t being physically abused, she was being teased, with classmates telling her, “Your dad’s a one-hit wonder. You’ll never amount to anything — just like him President Bill Clinton - As a junior high schooler, he was picked on relentlessly for being a “fat band boy” with bad taste in clothes. He was also known as a band geek. Michael Phelps - He was taunted for his “sticky-out ears” and lisp, as well as his long arms, which ultimately took him to greatness. Tom Cruise - His Dad had the family moving a lot to find work. Tom says, " I was always the new kid with the wrong shoes, the wrong accent. I didn’t have the friend to share things with and confide in.” And at each school, he faced the fresh experience over and over again. He was small for his age and easily pushed around." Walt Disney He was fired by a newspaper editor because, "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas." After that, Disney started a number of businesses that didn't last too long and ended with bankruptcy and failure. He kept plugging along, however, and eventually found a recipe for success that worked. COMMENTS: 888-563-3228   A Podcast Can Be A New Start When you start a podcast all of the stupid people who didn't know the "true" you are gone, and you can start from scratch. Don't let your past dictate you future. Podcasting has boosted the confidence of many leaders in their field who say the practice of talking into a microphone. It has helped people be better speakers as they are familiar with coming up with presentations. So jump into the podcasting pool. The water is warm and friendly. File For Download Only and Other Mistakes Others are Making If you are using Libsyn.com (if you're not use the coupon code sopfree to get a free month) there is an optoin called "File For Download Only." This is useful for people who have membership sites, or VIP groups and they don't want the general public to have access to the file. The only want certain people to have access. The problem is two very popular consultants are telling their clients to use this all the time, and that is just bad advice. While this works for them (where they have multiple shows, and other outside circumstances) its not a good idea for most. Here is why: If you want to use any of the automation at libsyn, you've somewhat shot your self in the foot If you go back later and want to add this feature it's not easy. So as you Mom use to say "If Johnny Johnson jumps off a bridge are you?" I ask, "Just because Cliff Ravenscraft uses file for downloads only, doesn't mean you should as well).  Keep Your Wordpress Website and Plugins Updated I had a handful of people contact me this week when the name of their podcast changed to "No Title" in iTunes. The reason? They were running an older version of the PowerPress plugin. Now the PowerPress plugin is not bad, but you HAVE TO keep it up to date alone with your Wordpress install. If you don't you are asking, no, BEGGING people to hack you and give you headaches. Then always have a backup of your website. I use Backup creator. I've used Backup Buddy.  I'm looking into ManageWP which just joined Godaddy. Why I'm Changing the School of Podcasting I recently changed the School of Podcasting to try a "Scarcity" strategy. To make a long story short, it didn't work for me. I apprecaite all those who wanted to help my business, but as a teacher the one thing I want is eager students. Now when I get them I have to tell them to wait 9in some cases months) until the site reopens. For more details, read this post on my blog International Podcast Day is September 30th Check out the Gratitude Award we you can get an award for having a wide variety of Review (Via My Podcast Reviews - free). For more information check out https://internationalpodcastday.com Ready to Start Podcasting? Visit www.theschoolofpodcasting.com

Welcome to the Post Status Draft podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, and via RSS for your favorite podcatcher. Post Status Draft is hosted by Joe Hoyle -- the CTO of Human Made -- and Brian Krogsgard. In this episode, Joe and Brian talk scaling WordPress, and what to do when you think you might’ve reached WordPress’s limits. From meta data, to users, to traffic management, they break down some of the most common scaling issues. Topics Posts Meta Search Database Users Traffic (types of caching) Links Elasticsearch ElasticPress More Like This Query Elasticsearch WP_Query Memcached Redis Rarst Fragment Cache Plugin Human Made Fragment Cache drop-in Sponsor: iThemes iThemes has a full suite of excellent products to help you level up your WordPress website. From iThemes Security, to BackupBuddy’s new live backups, to Exchange for your next membership site, iThemes has you covered. Thanks to the team at iThemes being a Post Status partner!

The Client Isn't Always Right. The idea for this episode's topic about selling your idea to your client came about because of a Facebook group I'm part of. Recently a graphic designer posted a logo she was working on for critique. The logo was an acronym, a single common word with each letter separated by a period. General consensus in the group was that she should loose the periods and the designer agreed. The hard part was convincing her client. After several days she posted a new refined logo saying she was able to convince her client that the periods were not working. Everybody loved the new logo. A week or so later, the graphic designer let us know that the project was finished and the client had once again changed her mind and ignoring the designer's suggestion, decided to go with the period version as the final logo. This is not an isolated case. Every graphic designer that has been around for a while has dealt with clients who wouldn't heed their advice. Unfortunately it's part of our profession. We may have the skills, the knowledge, the expertise and experience but convincing a client to go against their own vision is sometimes a loosing battle. In this episode of my graphic design podcast Resourceful Designer, I share some past experiences of both failing and succeeding in selling my idea to my own clients. Make sure you listen to the podcast for the full story. So what is the best way of selling your idea to your client? It all comes down to confidence. The best way of selling your idea to your client is to show them how confident you are in those ideas. You need to remember that your client hired you because you are an expert at design. You may not consider yourself and expert, but in their eyes you are, and  you need to live up to that mantle. When selling your idea to your client you should present it in an affirming and non dismissive way. And word your proposal in a manner that makes the client think they're part of the idea. Use phrases like "why don't we do this?" or "We should do this instead". Instead of phrases like "What do you think of this?" or "Maybe we should try this." Don't make your idea proposal a question. If you say "Maybe we should try this" you are instilling some doubt about your idea and giving the client the opportunity to shoot it down. By saying "We should do this" not only are you including your client in the process by saying "We" which makes them feel like they're part of the decision, you are also minimizing the chance of a negative response because it's not a question. You are the expert after all. If your client feels your confidence in the idea they may second guess any doubts they have with it and proceed with your vision. Show your graphic design client why they hired you. As a graphic designer you have a vast knowledge stored in your head of design principles, colour theory, font usage, layout techniques and so much more. Use that knowledge to affirm your client's belief that you are the expert they see you as. When a client comes to you with what they think is a great idea. but you know otherwise, use your knowledge to explain to them why their idea isn't as good as they think. Explain design principles to them. Explain why ten different fonts on a flyer isn't a good idea, explain why bevels, gradients, and drop shadows on a logo limit it's ability to be reproduced. Reming them that you are the expert and you know what you're talking about. Clients get ideas from things they see around them and want you to incorporate them into their designs. I had a website client many years ago that insisted that every line of type on his site either flash, blink, scroll, flip, rotate, you name it. He had seen all these things on various websites and thought that including them all on his site would create more "action" and make it more memorable to visitors. It took a lot of convincing on my part, to the point of threatening to tear up the contract before I convinced him that just because it can be done, doesn't mean it should be done. Sometimes a little shovelling is needed when selling your idea. Clients often question decisions you make. It's not to second guess your work, it's to affirm their decision in hiring you. They know you are the expert and they want to know why you chose to do what you did. Unfortunately some of your decisions they question may not have a good answer. Sometimes the decisions you make are done on a whim. You chose the colour blue for no other reason than it's what you felt at the time. You chose a san-serif font because you just finished a logo for another client that used a serif font and you wanted to try something different. These are good enough reasons for you, but not good enough for your client. You need to be able to explain your decisions in a way that will convince your client of them. And if this requires a little BS on your part, so be it. Now I'm not telling you to lie to your clients, I wouldn't condone that. But you should have enough design background and experience to explain your decision in a logical way that makes sense. Even if that's not why you did it in the first place. Why did you choose a san-serif font? Because of it's modern look. Because of it's uniform line width. Because you liked the shape of the letter "e". All of these reason could be true and your client will understand them better than telling them you were tired of working with serif fonts. Remember, selling your idea means convincing your client, not yourself. In the end, it's the client who pays the bill. No matter how experienced you are, or how much design knowledge you've accumulated, sometimes there's just no way of selling your idea to your client. You shouldn't view this as a failure. Some clients have an idea in their head and there's nothing you can do to change it. All they want from you is someone with the skills to transfer their idea to paper or pixels. In cases like this you need to bite your tongue and do what the client wants. It may not end up in your portfolio but it will help pay the bills. What do you think? Do you have any stories of clients who's minds you've changed. Or stories of clients you just couldn't convince to go along with your ideas? I would love to hear them. Please leave your story in the comments section for this episode. Resource of the week is BackupBuddy BackupBuddy lets you move a WordPress site to another domain or host easily. This is a very popular feature for WordPress developers who build a custom site for a client on a temporary domain or locally (like a sandbox or playground site) and then want to move (or migrate the entire site with themes, plugins, content, styles and widgets over to a live client domain. With Deployment, you can set up a staging site and connect it with your existing site using BackupBuddy so you can push or pull changes in as few as two clicks. The restore function in BackupBuddy is quick and simple. Upload the ImportBuddy file and your backup zip, and it walks you through the steps to restore your site: your themes, plugins, widgets and everything else. In your WordPress dashboard, you can also restore individual files from a backup instead of having to replace everything together. This is great for replacing an old stylesheet or a couple templates that you want to revert back to. To learn more about BackupBuddy visit http://resourcefuldesigner.com/backupbuddy Subscribe to the podcast Subscribe on iTunesSubscribe on Stitcher Subscribe on Android Contact me Send me feedback Follow me on Twitter and Facebook I want to help you. Running a graphic design or web design business all by yourself isn't easy. If there are any struggles you face running your design business please reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you by addressing your issues in a future blog post or podcast episode here at Resourceful Designer. You can reach me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com

The Amazing Task of File Management! A little to enthusiastic? Oh well, can't blame a guy for trying. The fact is file management is probably one of the most boring tasks we do as graphic designers. Boring, but necessary if we want to run an efficient and streamlined business. After all, the less time we have to spend searching for some file we haven't touched in several years the better. A good file management system will make your life as a designer so much easier. So although file management isn't the most glamorous topic to cover in a graphic design podcast, it is what I choose to cover In this week's Resourceful Designer. Different areas of file management In order to try and make this week's podcast episode a little more interesting I decided to break it into seven different sections of file management Resources Client Files Logos Fonts Training/Education Material Bookkeeping Backups Resources Resources cover everything you may use that helps you be the wonderful graphic designer that you are. I'm talking, image libraries, application plugins, Photoshop actions and styles, website themes, Wordpress plugins etc. Anything that you can use in the design process. If you're like me you've probably purchased a few design bundles at some point (or many, don't judge). Design bundles are a great way of acquiring resources for your work. The thing with design bundles is they often come with way more than what you're actually interested in at the time. However, some of those pieces are worth saving for that "someday" you may need them. Having a Resources folder makes it easy to find all those often used or seldom used pieces to help you in your designing. My Resources folder contains many different folders for all of the above. For example; we all know that sometimes a good background can complete a design project. In my Resources folder I have a Backgrounds folder that contains every image file I own that can be used as a background. The folder is divided into sub-categories to make it easier to find what I want. Metal, stone, leather, paper, wood are a few of those sub-categories. If I'm ever working on a project and I think a nice wood background is needed I know exactly where to look for one. That's good file management. Also in my Resources folder is a Stock Images folder. In it I have the original copy of ever single stock photo and image I've ever purchased. I have this folder subdivided as well into Photos, Vectors, and Illustrations and each of these is also subdivided. For example, my Photos folder is divided into People, Landscapes, Vehicles, Interiors, etc. and each of those is subdivided further. People is divided into Women, Men, Couples, Seniors, Families etc. Every time I purchase a new stock image I make sure to put it in the right category. If it could go into multiple categories I make aliases of the file (Shortcuts in Windows) and put them in each category they fit into. This makes it extremely easy for me to search through specific categories and quickly find what I'm looking for. There are other ideas for the Resources folder I talk about on the podcast. Client Files File management of client files is a must. Otherwise you could spend hours searching for things when an old client contacts you down the road. On my computer I have my client files organized like this. I have one main folder that I call "Jobs In Progress". The title is a bit misleading since not everything in the folder is "in progress" but that's the name I gave the folder over 10 years ago and I just never bothered changing it. Inside my Jobs in Progress folder I have a separate folder for each client I have. There are two special folders in there as well called "Old Clients" and "Inactive Clients". Old Clients is for any client I know will never come back. Businesses that have closed or have been bought out. That sort of thing. From time to time when I need to clear up HD space I will move these clients to an external device but for the most part I leave them there. Why? I've learnt over the past 25 years that just because a client doesn’t exist anymore doesn't mean you wont need their files anymore. It's happened more than once that someone came looking for something and I was glad I has saved them. My Inactive Clients folder is for any client that I haven't heard from in over 2 years. They're still around but either they've found someone else to design for them or they haven't had need of me. That leaves the rest of my Jobs In Progress folder that contains a folder for every client I've worked with over the past two years. Opening any one of the client folders shows folders for each project I've done for them. Stationary, Flyers, Billboards, Website etc. Now what's found in each of these changes depending on the client. Clients that I do a lot of work for I may divide their folders by year, month and date if need be, others just by year. Regardless of that hierarchy, once I get down to it, every single client project folder I have is built the same way. Inside the project folder is the actual layout file (QuarkXpress or InDesign), or the website files. There are also four folders in every project folder. Working; for all the .psd and .ai files pertaining to the project. Images; for all the completed images that are actually used on the project. Supplied; for all file that the client has supplied me. Final; The final approved file to be sent to the client, printer, etc. If there are common elements such as graphics or photos that are used across all marketing material I store these in a special "Images" folder at the root level of the client folder. Logos Now you may be wondering why logos don't fall under the images folder for the individual clients? I discovered many years ago that it's much easier to save each and every logo I have on my computer in one centralized location. In my case I have a Logos folder in my Resources folder. In it I have all my clients logos as well as every single logos I've accumulated over the years. The reason i do this is for those time when you need to include "sponsor" logos on some poster or website for a client. Trying to remember if, or on what project you may have used some obscure logo a few years ago isn't fun. Since I started keeping all my logos in one place I've never had this issue. Listen to the podcast for a fun story about my logo storing method. Two Tricks For Acquiring Logos Sometimes it's a real pain to get good, usable logos from a client. Especially if they don't understand what it is you need. I have two tried and true methods of acquiring good quality logos quickly and easily. But you'll have to listen to the podcast to hear them (hint, it's at the 27 minute mark) Font Management Fonts are another thing we graphic designer tend to amass over time and it can be a real pain to sort through them to find just the right one. That's why I think everyone should have some kind of font management software to help organize the chaos. I can't speak for all the various options but I can tell you about Suitcase Fusion by Extensis. I've been using Suitcase Fusion since before they added the Fusion to it. This font management software integrates with all the design software we use to turn fonts on and off as we need them. This way you don't bog down your system with unnecessary fonts. Suitcase Fusion is a great way to organize your fonts and make it easier to find that perfect one for the project you're working on. In the application you can create sets to organize your fonts. I have mine set up alphabetically as A, B, C, D etc with each font in it's appropriate folder. I also have special folders for Celtic Fonts, Script Fonts, Hand Drawn Fonts etc. The best thing about Suitcase Fusion is the ability to assign styles and/or keywords to fonts. This makes it so easy to narrow down your choices. Looking for a slab serif font? Eliminate all fonts that don't fit that category and your search just became that much easier. Training/Education Perhaps not file management in the technical sense, but I've found that keeping all your training material in one place is a big help. Any eBook, video, guide, manual, web clip etc. should be in easy access for when you do need it. I have my Training folder divided into Web, Photoshop, Illustrator, (plus other applications) etc. Any time I download a guide or manual I store it in the appropriate place. Any time I stumble upon a good tutorial page or video I I grab the URL, label it as what it is, and put it in my Training folder for later access. Having this resource has saved me many hours searching online for something that I remember seeing some time in the past. Bookkeping This is a simple one that I use. The numbers on every invoice I send out begin with the current year. This January I opened my invoicing program, I use Billings Pro by Marketcircle, and I changed the numbering to start with 16-xxxxx. This makes it easer down the road to know exactly when a certain job was done. Backups Now backing up really has nothing to do with file management. But, what's the point of implementing a great file management strategy if you end up loosing all your files due to some unforeseen circumstance? There are things in this world beyond our control. Fire, flood, tornadoes, theft are just a few. On-site backup via Apple Time Machine or some other external device is a must for all graphic designers. But off-site backup is something we should all be using as well. For this I use a company called Backblaze. Backblaze is a set it and forget it solution. It works in the background backing up your files so you never have to worry should a natural disaster ever happen. There are other solutions available but Backblaze is the one I'm familiar with. Another form of backup you should look into is website backup. Most hosting providers offer site backup but they don't say how often. Some are every 30 days, 60 days, even 90 days. That's fine for a static website. But for any site that is updated on a regular basis it wont do. My preference for website backup is BackupBuddy by iThemes. BackupBuddy offers real time backups of your site. As soon as something is changed on the site it gets backed up. I have all my and my clients' sites backed up this way. So there you have it. File Management in a nutshell. I hope that wasn’t too hard to get through. I would love to hear your comments. Share your strategies by leaving me a comment. In next week's episode of Resourceful Designer I'm going to talk about the dangers of working from home. Questions of the Week I have another Question Of The Week to answer. If you would like me to answer your question in a future episode please visit my feedback page. This week’s question comes from Teri, Hi Mark, I have just started listening to your podcast in the past month and am really enjoying it! Thanks for all the fantastic advice! I have been working in the industry for about 7 years now here in Atlanta, Georgia. After the birth of my daughter a year and half ago I have started working from home part-time (which I love) and it has been keeping my quite busy! I was wondering if you had any advice on passing off work to other designers? Is there a good network you use or how do you build that network? I also feel that part of my value as a designer is that I know the clients and what they are looking for, thus it is difficult to explain that to another designer, especially with a super fast turn around. To find out what I told Teri you’ll have to listen to the podcast. Resource of the week is BackBlaze One of the scariest things you can think of as a designer is what would happen if disaster strikes and you loose all your computer files. What would it mean for your business? Backblaze offers a simple unlimited online backup solution for your design business for less than $5/month. And it’s so easy. You just set it up and forget about it. Backblaze works in the background automatically backing up your files. And if you ever loose your data for whatever reason, you wont have to worry because you’ll know everything can be restored from Backblaze. If you’re interested in finding out more about Backblaze’s online backup solution and trying a 15 day free trial, visit resourcefuldesigner.com/backup Subscribe to the podcast Subscribe on iTunesSubscribe on Stitcher Subscribe on Android Contact me Send me feedback Follow me on Twitter and Facebook I want to help you. Running a graphic design or web design business all by yourself isn't easy. If there are any struggles you face running your design business please reach out to me. I'll do my best to help you by addressing your issues in a future blog post or podcast episode here at Resourceful Designer. You can reach me at feedback@resourcefuldesigner.com  

This week I review the new Staging Server/Deployment function within BackupBuddy 6 Upcoming Events WordCamp Europe  – June 26-28 — live stream is FREE Segment 1: In the News O2 theme was released — replaces P2 WordPress.TV making tutorial videos. If you want to help there is a blog post on and info HERE Segment 2:…

In this episode I discuss how I completely failed and wasted my time working on a blog post. I highly recommend BackupBuddy: http://bit.ly/1IV024NHowever, before you buy a Backup program, find out if your WordPress hosting company already does backups for you.I would like to close this post by asking you a question: When is the last time that you backed up your site? Do you use a backup plugin? I ask this question because no matter how well a blog or website is built, things will just sometimes go wrong.https://www.amazon.com/shop/iteachblogging

In this episode I discuss how I completely failed and wasted my time working on a blog post. I highly recommend BackupBuddy: http://bit.ly/1IV024NHowever, before you buy a Backup program, find out if your WordPress hosting company already does backups for you.I would like to close this post by asking you a question: When is the last time that you backed up your site? Do you use a backup plugin? I ask this question because no matter how well a blog or website is built, things will just sometimes go wrong.https://www.amazon.com/shop/iteachblogging

This week I talk about what I learned from not launching a membership site?! Upcoming Events WordCamp Maine – May 15-17 WordCamp Lisboa – May 15-17 — Portugal Segment 1: In the News WordPress Version 4.2.2 ithemes – Backup Buddy 6 CampPress Segment 2:  Share how I what I learned when I thought I was…

Backup Creator I purchased Backup Creator and I love it and it costs half the price of Backup Buddy and I can put it on any number of sites I own. I mentioned htis plugin a while back, and when I went to update backup buddy I thought I would check it out, and I'm glad I did.  Canva Design School is a free list of tutorials to help you make better graphics. Elegant Themes Divi Theme Forever? Elegant Themes Divi Theme is super powerful, but it uses a TON of short codes. It appears that if you use this to create your website and later decide to switch themes, you may end up with a page of just short code (I need to contact their support to see if this is true). On the other side of the fence, the theme is so powerful, why would you leave?  See a video at www.weeklywebtools.com/272 Cool Plugin Driectory that Uses Rankings Managewp.org has a cool tool that allows you to see Wordpress Plugins are popular. It does this by downloads, rankings, etc. It's pretty cool and you can look at different categories.  Check it out at https://managewp.org/plugins/best Zoom.us Goto Webinar replacement If you have small meetings, and don't need people to register this is a great service for $9.99 a month. It allows people to join on PC, Mac, or tablet. it even lets tablet/phone user share their screen. It's pretty cool. Check it out at zoom.us

During a pre-sale call for my consulting service, a client asked me if I did content marketing “campaigns.” Now there are PPC campaigns, impression campaigns, and even some podcasting could be looked at as a campaign — but not your overall content marketing. Here's why: If you're looking at content creation as as this thing you “do” and not an expression of yourself or the company, the passion isn't there and you're just flipping switches. Content has to be compelling, informative and most of all authentic. You can't just bust out a stencil and trace the lines to create your blog post — if you did everyone would be pumping out the same thing. Content Marketing for Entrepreneurs Listen to the audio version Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners 4 Content marketing tips for startups Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window Subscribe on iTunes The best time to create content is right when you start that next big idea. I'm not just talking about the blogging daily, I'm talking about publishing content on various channels — start your a media empire.  “But I'm not ready for marketing!” you shout. That's, ok, in fact it's perfect! So, many of you have heard of the lean startup methodology, start with something that solves this small problem and get it into the hands of others as quickly as possible. This production line validates the business and the product with a niche market or case study. You can validate your idea with content marketing before you even begin to put sweat equity into coding. Validate your idea with a blog post Recently, I posted about the benefits of becoming a mentor. If you haven't thought about sharing your experiences with a young padawan, head on over to that post and consider it — mentoring will change your life. That little blog post, or seed as I refer to it, had some great feedback. Folks were leaving comments and connecting with each other to help out. I received a bunch of e-mails from around the world looking to see if they could get help. Ok, this idea is validated. I launched an MVP of the mentor program over at WP Mentor and as of this writing there are 17 listings for mentors and mentees. More validation, now with actual results and practice. Gauging design feedback on Instagram https://cloudup.com/cxdzDJr9rrz I see Brian Gardner do this a lot. Now, I'm not saying he does this on purpose, but it's something you can certainly leverage. Use Instagram to post design concepts or mockups. Look for comments there and grow an audience. It's a great channel to add to your media empire. Lastly, cool design photos are perfect for that medium and it's not out of place. Look at each channel you create content as if it were TV. Would you put the same advertisement out for your company during an episode of Walking Dead as you would The Today Show? More channels + diverse audience = quality feedback. Screencasts for beta plugins Got a plugin or SaaS business that's still not ready for the public consumption? A screencast is a perfect piece of media  to shed some early light on your product. The above example is a 3 minute walk through of BackupBuddy, not an actual product demo, but you get the idea.It doesn't have to be long and detailed — remember your plugin is still in it's early days. What you want to do is give someone a fly by, or series of casts, to gauge the feedback. YouTube provides some deep metrics of engagement, so you can really have fun in the data to see what the audience is liking — or what they don't like. Don't forget, build up your audience on YouTube. On launch day, instead of having no one to market to, you will have thousands of eager subscribers to pitch the product to. And when you have NO product… “Hey Matt, this is great but I don't even have a product yet!” Not a problem. Do you have a cofounder or another screen you can record? Produce some live Google Hangouts to demonstrate your idea with some basic slide shows and give us insight to your concept. As the stages mature, you can record your weekly or monthly meetings with your team and really give the audience some insight to how you're growing the business. Think about it, this early stage audience is going to make for great early adopters when you come to market. Better yet, you might be able to scoop up some beta testers which you will inevitably need. If they are spending the time to follow your new idea, chances are they want it at launch day or at the very least, they will refer you to someone who does. Building your media empire So here's my point: Build your audience while you build your product. Ultimately our products are going to change. You're going to find a new use case or someone isn't going to like XYZ feature and things change. The hard part will be selling these changes all over again. It's also going to be harder to discover a new audience later than from the beginning stages. Today it's super easy to start a podcast or blog daily. Don't get overwhelmed with all of the channels available to you. Take a step back and look at where you're succeeding already. Is it Twitter? Let's grow there. Is it a Facebook group? Nurture it. You can do a lot or a little, but don't be afraid to hit publish and start today! Where are you growing your media? Tell us in the comments. Like what I'm saying here? Subscribe to my Newsletter.   ★ Support this podcast ★

  In Episode #14 I hung out with my good friend Cory Miller from iThemes. We had a lot of technical issues getting started and eventually hooked up on FaceTime and used Screenflow to record it. Cory is big on people and building a great culture to allow people to flourish. He treats his team as his family and the company he has built is testament to the fact that the people he surrounds himself with admire him and are all on the same page. Cory mentioned he first started publishing thoughts and content on his own website way back in 1998 and I found a snapshot on the wayback machine from Oct 1999 – I know Cory won’t mind. Here’s the blogger account he setup in 2004 courtesy of the wayback machine again. It looks like Cory discovered WordPress around February 2007 and started posting themes up in 2007 too. His own website started looking very nice around the middle of 2007 and it looks like iThemes started to take hold around early 2007. I applaud Cory for having the courage to talk about how he and his wife Lindsey frequently see a counsellor to help them navigate their way through life. They are both advocates for mental health and this is something I think should be talked about more openly. Cory also tells the great story of how BackupBuddy came about. These guys lost their server (with lots of client sites) twice without backups! So they built an all in one backup solution for WordPress. There’s also some great nuggets about the future of WordPress business models, freemium, support, services vs products and an honest discourse of building the biggest thing they’ve ever done and giving it away for free (the eCommerce plugin Exchange). There’s boatloads of great advice for WordPress consultants and freelancers in this interview – don’t miss a word! You can reach out and thank Cory on Twitter and by email. Cory suggested I interview Lisa Sabin-Wilson, the author if WordPress for Dummies. Lisa, I’m coming to get you. Hint: to enter the competition, tell us the one feature you’d like to see in Exchange, the iThemes eCommerce plugin. The post Episode #14 – Cory Miller appeared first on WP Elevation.

Today’s episode features an interview with iThemes founder Cory Miller. We talk all about backups, especially with BackupBuddy.

What Plugins Do I Use And Recommend Today? I typically receive between 40 to 100+ emails each day. There are a number of questions that I get over and over again and one of the more popular questions is “What plugins are your currently using for WordPress?” I've answered this question on previous episodes of […] The post 271 PlugInPalooza – Backup Buddy – Lead Player Plugin – Pretty Link – And 13 Other Plugins That I Use & Highly Recommend appeared first on The Cliff Ravenscraft Show.