Is Selling Content Dead?

Good morning from the West Yellowstone area. Technically we’re in the state of Idaho at the moment. Beautiful area. A little hazy right now, but still very nice.

Anyway, I’m obviously out of the office this week. Will be attending to the basics and trying to answer emails, but we’re out on a family vacation. Last one of the summer for us.

But, it hasn’t stopped me from getting the newsletter out. So, let’s dive in…

Be Careful When Installing Awesome Motive WordPress Plugins. Here’s Why…

Got new plugins that mysteriously installed to your WordPress site? Did MonsterInsights or WP Mail SMTP suddenly show up on your WordPress admin panel? My client recently purchased AffiliateWP. We installed it for her. My new developer wasn’t clued in on the tactics of Awesome Motive. So, this is what happened….

Is Selling Content Dead?

Recently, I was having a quick email convo with an old client of mine. Her business took off a few years ago and now things are going…. “well enough”.

She’s pondering a pivot. Because things have changed.

Content consumption habits have changed big-time.

She asked whether this was the big reason I pivoted into offering client services and Concierge. And the answer is… yes.

Why did I pivot into services? In short…

• People had been asking me for it for years. Clearly indicating a demand.
• I’m good at this kind of thing. Been doing it awhile and I enjoy it.
• Yes, content consumption has changed radically. Short attention spans. Lots of market noise. Lower perceived value of content. And tools like ChatGPT aren’t helping because now everybody is just going for the TLDR (there’s a lesson there).
• I had gotten tired of trying to sell training products. I saw the writing on the wall.
• I had gotten tired of people not actually applying what I said in my training. On the flip side, service work is way more tangible.
• Much higher retention rates and higher ticket sizes for services.

To be clear, if I had not pivoted into services, there’s a possibility I wouldn’t be talking to you today. The headwinds were getting stiff on relying solely on training products and content.

And for my former client, she says she is seeing warning signs, too.

And I happen to know she’s not alone.

We live in a world of Youtube shorts, Instagram Reels, TikTok… and ChatGPT. All this has radically changed people’s perceptions of the value of content.

So, simply creating online courses and chucking them out there isn’t going to work nearly as well as it used to.

People want shortcuts. People want to save time. People want ease. People want things done for them.

More and more, the people who will sit and consume your online courses are not the ones who are most likely to actually do anything with it. They just like to consume. But, even those types are dwindling. They’re too distracted.

So, I think it is important to find the most effective ways to deliver value.

Content sells when backed by solid branding and a personal relationship. Content sells when it promises to be short and sweet and give quick results.

Don’t try to “over deliver” when it comes to content. You want to, instead, deliver more with less.

Or maybe just pivot like I did. Create awesome content, but without any need to sell it. Because you sell the solutions themselves for the folks who don’t want to do it themselves.

This Week In Concierge

This week, I’ll be out on my last family trip of the summer. One more… then I’m staying put for awhile. We’ll be in the Yellowstone area in Idaho and Wyoming.

So, for clients, I am available and answering emails. Just not as fast as normal. I’ll be checking Basecamp and William will be continuing progress on some projects.

Some of what we’ve been working on last week is:

• Putting together a site re-design for a client.
• Designing another’s blog. Actually, this one was a little tough even though the site is so simple because we had a hard time understanding what the client was asking for. But, hey, those things happen. Think we got it to a point where she can take it from there.
• Went live with a client’s site changes from staging. This was a site we converted to Kadence. A membership site and it is working much better than it was.
• Continuing on a massive project to re-build and simplify a client’s membership site and convert him off of a two-site, Digital Access Pass setup.
• Set up an affiliate portal for another client who just launched her membership
• Imported email leads into FluentCRM and set up for outgoing email marketing

I also want to welcome Phil to Concierge. A new client who brought on 3 sites and we’re going to be helping him streamline them as well as build his new personal blog from scratch.

WordPress Quick Bits

WordPress 6.6 Released. Good chance that your site auto-updated last week to WordPress 6.6. Overall, seems to have been a smooth update. I have seen a few minor plugin conflicts. For instance, the FluentCRM email editor got messed up due to a small change. They quickly released a fix. I also noticed a small issue with Presto Player, and that seems to have been fixed as well. So, if you’re having any weirdisms since the upgrade, just be sure to upgrade plugins and it may very well fix itself.

WP Engine Buys NitroPack. It looks like WP Engine has acquired NitroPack, a SaaS -powered solution for speeding up your WordPress site. An interesting one for them, so I expect more integration of services.

FluentBooking 1.5 Released. FluentBooking continues to evolve. Version 1.5 provides a new front-end panel so you can manage appointments without having to enter WP-Admin. It also now supports one-off events. Read the full changelog here.

WooBase Launched. A new tool called WooBase has been launched which provides a nice clean panel for accessing and managing your WooCommerce store. The idea is to make it easier and cleaner to manage. Looks interesting.

Reminder Why WordPress. Over on X, somebody who uses WebFlow had the shocker experience of being given one week to accept a $15,000 bill or else their site shuts down. This is the danger of not owning your own site and data. WebFlow and similar services are proprietary services. On the other hand, WordPress means data ownership and you’re in control of your own website. The difference is everything.

Creating Customized Post Grids With WP Grid Builder

So, this past week, I spent some time learning and using a plugin which is new to me: WP Grid Builder.

WordPress is quite flexible and you can make it so all kinds of things. I often use Advanced Custom Fields to create custom post types, custom taxonomies (or category structures), custom fields, etc. Basically, I can turn WordPress into anything I with that.

But, then it comes to how best to display stuff on the front-end.

Any listing of posts or content is called a “grid”. Could just be latest blog posts, or courses, or any custom post type. And if you set up filters for various ways to sort and filter your posts, those are called facets.

Well, there are multiple ways you can build these things. Your page builder (like Elementor) can often do it. Your theme (like Kadence) can usually do it. But, those tools usually have limits because they weren’t purpose-built for that goal.

For instance, what if you wanted to show custom field data in the grid rather than just the usual stuff like post title, excerpt and a feature image?

What if you wanted grid cards to appear differently in a conditional way? For instance, giving members-only content a different background color than publicly available posts so people can tell the difference?

WP Grid Builder is insanely flexible and can enable you to do almost anything.

In the past, I’ve used FacetWP some. It works and is a very “lean and mean” plugin. Very lightweight. Almost too lightweight.

WP Grid Builder is way more powerful. You can actually design your grids and facets visually in a block builder. While the tool definitely takes some getting used to, it is quite a bit more powerful than FacetWP. In fact, it isn’t even really close.

Now, for simpler sites, you probably won’t have too much need for WP Grid Builder. This plugin is meant for people who are using WordPress as a platform for more involved things. Memberships with custom content, directories, things like that.

To that end, there is a learning curve. While it does use a block builder, I definitely wouldn’t say it is as easy to use as the regular content editor. It does take some getting used to. I spent almost a good, solid day getting used to the tool. It started with a client’s site, but then I moved into my own and I’m in the process of building some stuff at Blog Marketing Academy using WP Grid Builder.

Anyway, worth checking out for you… perhaps.

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