I’m Deleting My Content

Hope you had a great weekend! I can’t complain about mine. I’m trying to move several home projects along, so I was busy getting my hands dirty much of the weekend. Frankly, it is a nice balance from spending so much time at the computer.

But, let’s dive in here…

This week’s issue is more strategy than WordPress. First off, I’ll talk about the 3 core ways to grow any business…. and how it can (and should) guide the things you’re working on building. And then secondly…. yeah…. I’m deleting a BUNCH of my content. And I’ll tell you why.

So, let’s light this candle, shall we?

3 Ways to Grow ANY Business

I like to mix it up in this newsletter. Sometimes, I talk tech and stick to WordPress, but sometimes I think it helps to switch into strategy and just talk big picture stuff. I hope you don’t mind.

After all, I think that’s my “sweet spot”. Where tech and business intersect. After all, all the talk of tech means nothing if we’re not building something according to some strategic plan. Right? OK….

Last week, I talked here about what I call “money levers”. They are the things you have direct control over to make your business make more money. Things that you can do without waiting on anybody or hoping people do what you want them to do. You can go back and read last week’s issue on that so I don’t have to repeat myself.

Now, building out these “levers” starts with having a roadmap. A strategy. Otherwise, the things you do feel random. And nothing about “money levers” is random or luck. There’s definitely method to it.

To start off, there are 3 core ways to grow any business. They are:

1. Get more customers.
2. Increase the average transaction size.
3. Increase the frequency of transactions for each customer.

Each of these 3 things needs to have a system for making it happen. These are things you intentionally build and then work to improve over time. Let’s touch on each…

#1 – Get More Customers

To make more money, you have to get more customers. Pretty straightforward stuff.

Keep in mind, too, that a customer is just a person who has bought something. Doesn’t matter the price. It is about changing the relationship from random person on your list or random visitor… to a customer who has purchased something. Even if it just cost a few dollars.

In order to do that, you have to attract people in. And then you need to make offers. Once again, pretty straightforward stuff. So, from that perspective….

• Create more lead magnets in order to attract people onto your list on a more regular basis.
• Create more front-end offers
• Make more offers, in general

These are all things you can do anytime you want. They ARE “money levers”. But, it starts with simply being intentional about doing it. You can create lead magnets and offers at any time. You just need to do it. And it is ALL about just having as many opportunities as you can to turn random people into customers.

#2 – Increase Average Transaction Size

It is hard to grow a business on the back of tiny little offers with tiny prices. So, the second core way to grow the business is to make offers with higher price tags.

Now, there are some clear ways to do that. All of which you have full control over at all times.

• Raise prices on existing products/services. Many people (including me at many times in my career) make the mistake of pricing our offers too low. Lots of psychology can go into all of that, but clearly price increases are sometimes necessary and smart to do.
• Creating sales pathways (or funnels). Create upsell offers so when people buy one thing, you offer them more as an optional upsell. Don’t get overly aggressive or annoying about it, of course. But, the idea is to increase the average transaction size.
• Create higher-priced offers. This isn’t about doing a larger “money grab”. This is about making better promises and getting better outcomes for your most important customers. You can’t properly serve people on the back of cheap little offers.

And then, onto the last core way to grow your business….

#3 – Increase Transaction Frequency

In other words, get people to buy more often. And even get existing customers to buy more often.

I’ve seen a lot of people (especially old-school internet marketers) make the mistake of trying to do this by just blasting their list with stuff to buy all the time. But, that’s annoying. We all hate it. It really burns up an email list unless you do it right (and most people don’t).

I think the best way to do this is with recurring memberships. I think ANY business needs to have at least ONE recurring offer. And that recurring offer should be your core.

For me, it is Concierge. Concierge is a productized, packaged service billed monthly. Many others launch membership communities with training at the core and that works, too.

You see it in the physical world all the time, too. For instance, around my area, car washes have gotten more popular. Most car washes used to be one-time, on-demand services. But, a lot of car washes have gotten smart on the need for recurring revenue. So, they launched monthly plans where you can drive through the wash at any time. My wife has one for her car and I think she pays $20/mo or so for it. They offer higher priced plans, too.

….

These 3 core things are your framework. And you should have a strategic plan to build and then continually improve the systems of your business around these 3 things.

This is the core framework around building out your “money levers”.

Now, I would recommend you set aside a little time and just evaluate your business up against these 3 things. Are you paying enough attention to each? Are there things you should be building to help your business better execute on these 3 things? Some brainstorming could be in order.

More to come. Stay tuned to this newsletter.

This Week In Concierge

I was working on a content audit this last week on my own site (more on that below), but one article was discussing the idea of effective hourly rate. As in…. what is your time worth?

Take how much money you make in a month and subtract your expenses. Then, divide that number by how many hours you work in a month.

Pretty simple concept, but it got me thinking about the value provided in Concierge. And yes, I’m going to toot my own horn for a second here.

The Core Plan is just $99/mo. Included in Concierge is hosting with Rocket Hosting (usually $30/mo), off-site backups and malware protection with BlogVault ($12.41/mo), Fathom Analytics ($14/mo), automatic image optimization with ShortPixel… and all of the premium plugins I license through my agency. And you can imagine what all of those plugins would cost if you were to license them on your own.

…. AND…. I’m in there updating everything for you every week. Debugging things when they come up. And answering client questions. And helping build out their ideas on their site by helping with all the tech stuff.

How much time have YOU spent trying to build out something on your own website when you don’t know what you’re doing? Or time sunk trying to figure out how to make one small change on your site? Or researching plugins to see which will suit your needs the best, or debug some oddball plugin conflict?

People who run businesses or are trying to grow one don’t have TIME for that stuff! Time is much better spent on growing assets and growing the business. And in fact, time spent playing “webmaster” is time you’re NOT spending on much higher-value activities that will actually grow your business.

And THAT is why Concierge exists.

And why, frankly, $99/mo is probably too cheap.

WordPress Quick Bits

xCloud Does Custom Apps. Aside from Rocket, xCloud Hosting is the other host that I use. And they’ve just released version 1.7 of their core management software. This version isn’t tied to just WordPress, but can now support custom PHP applications. Their changelog can be found here. And more on launching custom apps here.

FluentCommunity Update. FluentCommunity was updated to 1.2.15, adding custom CSS and javascript options. Also, custom signup URL, improvements to the BuddyBoss migration for images, etc. Their lifetime offers are about to go away, so lock it in here.

FluentCRM Update. FluentCRM was also updated last week to 2.9.48. This version enabled a much easier way to re-start people in an automation, updates to the latest content block, as well as new shortcodes for WooCommerce Subscriptions (allowing you to easily put in people’s renewal dates, trial ends, etc. into your emails). Read the full changelog here.

Fluent Forms Update. All kinds of “fluent” updates today. Fluent Forms got a rather big one. Version 6.0 came out, sporting a new AI Form Builder. Also, conditionl groups to have entire groups of fields with conditional logic. The free version also now supports Stripe payments with recurring payment support, so now you don’t need the Pro version anymore to make payment forms. Read the full changelog here.

Automattic/WP Engine Is Super Slow. A 10-day jury trial has been set for February, 22, 2027. That’s two years away. Fact discovery runs until November of this year. Court LIstener has the details… and also shows how our court system runs at the speed of smell.

Alt-Crtl-Org Event. In June, WordCamp Europe will be taking place. But, as you likely know, Wordcamps are tightly controlled by Automattic and Matt. With all that that entails. So, given all the Matt-esque drama, an alternative event will be taking place right next to Wordcamp Europe. It is called AltCtrl.org. Speakers include some notable developers that Matt banned from WordPress.org, including Joost de Valk. Sponsors include WP Fusion. Very cool to see.

Page Builder Tests. Kyle from The Admin Bar did a great post where he compared real-world performance numbers on the major page builders over 150+ real websites. Check out his post here. He found that GenerateBlocks and Oxygen were the most consistently near the top. Bricks and Kadence swung around a lot depending on what was built. While Divi and Elementor most consistently came in as the slowest. No surprise there.
High-Severity Security Issue With All In One WP Migration. The All-In-One WP Migration and Backup plugin was found to have a high-severity flaw called an “Unauthenticated PHP Object Injection”. This plugin is installed on over 5 million sites. Make sure you’re upgraded to at least 7.9 if you’re running this plugin.

I’m Deleting My Content

This last week, I managed to spend some more time on my long-standing and ongoing content audit on the Blog Marketing Academy blog.

And I’m deleting content. Actually, quite a bit.

After all, my site has existed in one way, shape or form since 2008. That’s 17 years. For a WordPress site, that’s pretty freakin’ old. And I had posts in there written way back then. I still do. I still have quite a few old posts in there from 2010 and 2011 which I’m working on right now.

The process is simple:

• I pull up the old post and take a look to see if it is even relevant anymore.
• I check it’s traffic for the last full year to see if it is getting any traffic worth worrying about.
• If the post is useless and/or is getting barely any traffic, I trash it.
• If the post is getting enough traffic to warrant it and/or I think the material is worth updating and fits the overall strategy of the site, then I will sit down and update the post.

It is a time-consuming thing to do, so this is more of a long-term project.

If you have a lot of old posts on your site, this is something worth doing. The idea is to present a maintained, high-quality footprint to Google and other search engines. Having their little bots indexing low-quality trash doesn’t help the reputation of the site. So, I would expect my traffic to trend upward as this content audit proceeds.

In the past, I called this The Redwood Strategy. It is the idea of spending a fair amount of your time not creating NEW content, but circling back and updating older content. This ongoing update loop adds proverbial “rings to the tree”, just as a tree acquires size and quality over the years as new rings show up in the trunk.

I don’t treat my blog nearly the same as I used to. It is more like an article library now. A knowledgebase of guides. And as this content audit moves forward, I will be re-organizing the main blog page so that is no longer is based on dates, but on topics.

Articles will be optimized. Calls to action included. Internal and external linking. All the right formatting. And across the site, the goal is that ALL articles in the system are optimized the same way.

Oh, and by having LESS articles in the system like that, it will be a lot easier to maintain.

Even with our blog articles, the days of quantity being an important factor are well over. Less can be more. Less IS more. Quality over quantity.

Leave the short-form, more frequent stuff to other platforms like social. Focus more on formats that convert better, like video and podcasting.

The written blog posts? So much has changed now. So, blogging has changed. So, for most of us, I think treating the blog like a library that you’re strategically building makes way more sense than just pumping out articles because the calendar said so.

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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.