Episode 450: The Business of WordPress With Nathan Ingram

---

---

Show Summary

Rob Cairns talks to Nathan Ingram about the business of WordPress.

Show Highlights:

1. Your new venture with Kathy Zant. 2. Blocks vs Page Builders. 3. All the work you do with Solid WP. 4. Your agency. 5. Time management.

• Your new venture with Kathy Zant
• Blocks vs Page Builders.
• All the work you do with Solid WP.
• Your agency.
• Time management.

Show Notes

Hey There Rob here and today I’m here with my guest, Mr. Nathan Ingram. How are you, Nathan?

Great. Rob, how are you?

Great to have you. You know, I was saying to you, I’ve been. A long time. Follower of your work and I’ve been saying I need to get you on. And then last week you were on this week in WordPress with our. Our mutual amazing host and you were on with two other good friends of mine and I was saying, geez, the only one that hasn’t been on and those three people are Nathan Wrigley. Of course, Tim Nash and Kathy. That was you. And I said it’s time to fix that problem. So here we go.

Indeed, I’m not sure how we haven’t done.

This before. Ohh and and The thing is, it’s not that we don’t DM, it’s not that we don’t follow each other on social and it’s not that we don’t.

Have conversations. It’s just. Yeah. Happened. So hasn’t happened here, right?

So.

You got your hats in a million one places, which we’ll get to, by the way, love the background. That’s kind of cool.

Thank you very much. Old word camp badges, yeah.

And but I want to jump in and ask you how did you get involved in WordPress and so.

Oh gosh. OK, yeah, this is a great story. So I actually started doing web development back in 1995. That’s when I built and sold my first project and I’ve had very over those years, I. Mean it’s been it’s. Coming up to 30 years, Rob, can you? I. Mean it just blows my. Mine, but you know, through all those years I’ve had various evolutions of software platform that I’ve built with. And you know it was right around the 2008 time period where I had a lot of clients that were asking for, you know, we want to be able to edit our own sites and they’re and I was resistant to that. Because my business model at that point was a few clients, very large monthly retainers because, you know, I was the guy that edited the website, you know, it was you had to have dreamweaver or something like that to to edit the website. And so I actually resisted WordPress. I remember saying one time to a friend of mine. I hate WordPress. It’s going to destroy my business. I did. I promise. I actually did a keynote at Word Camp, Jacksonville, FL. I think 2017 or 2018, and that’s that was my my intro.

No.

Slide it was like I hate WordPress. That was me, you know 2000. Right. But I realized pretty quickly that through a set of circumstances, I pivoted my business model and realized, OK, it’s actually better if I have many clients on a smaller monthly retainer that’s based on website management and WordPress falls into that. It works really well. So I started learning WordPress. Ironically, through what at that time was called web design.com, which later became I themes training, which is now solid Academy, where I’m the host. So I actually learned WordPress through the very learning format that I I worked with today and that’s kind of been history. From there.

And you and I are both great friends with the original founder of I think Corey Miller. Right. Of course, Corey.

Indeed, yeah, I got. I got to spend some good time with Cory at work Camp Canada few weeks back.

I was supposed to be there and I’ve gone through some health reasons. And I took a bit of a set back and it didn’t get there. And and it’s a shame because I would have loved to have seen people like you and Corey. And it was a whole list of people Nick Diego was. There, there. Was a whole catch up with.

It was a great camp and Corey is he’s been. He’s one of the one of the few people that I point to and saying they’ve been, they’ve had such a great influence over my WordPress career.

I was involved buying items when they still had the bundle of plugins. If you remember.

Oh yeah, the toolkit, absolutely.

Never got into the builder, but I did get into those and. And then I somewhere I picked up a I think a lifetime deal for what was in I team security and I teams and backup buddy they had a. Life.

Right.

Been kind of married to those which are now solid backup and solid security for a long, long time. And for those who don’t know, solid security is actually based on patch. Backs back end right now, so that kind of helps I think from the security, I think over sitting his team do a a crack shot job. I won’t mention a certain other security company just to be nice today because I’m in that kind of mood. That the listeners of this podcast know which one I’m talking about and why, so we won’t even go down that road. And yeah, I think you’re doing a lot of great job up, but at solid Academy with the paid webinars and the the free ones you do every month. And you’ve done a few with our mutual good friend Miss Kathy sent lately.

Absolutely.

She brings a lot to the table, doesn’t she?

Kathy is just wonderful.

It’s she is like, as I will say, an amazing person. And she’s been through a lot in her life with her husband in the last couple of years, I mean. And. I just. I love her so much that I can’t say enough good things. About her. So that’s.

Indeed.

Since you’ve been around this space well, it’s worth jumping in where you sit in the. Page builder versus. Debate fiasco and I’m not looking across controversy because my friend Sam Brockway over at WP engine has a phrase saying do word press your way and I believe in that strongly. So where do you sit in this mess?

Oh my. You know, so one of the things I do is I produce a weekly agency news for post status. And actually one of the it’s the the first worth of look item that in the the column that just dropped about an hour ago. So there’s a great article from WP Shout where they pulled several 100 people just about where they are with block editor, Gutenberg and so forth. And it’s interesting, it’s about 5050 people who like no way, never other people are like all in. So I I have, I have mixed feelings. I think ultimately the direction is good. As a practitioner of WordPress who you know, I I run an agency, we’re supporting lots of sites for clients from an agency perspective, it is critical not to change your tool stack unless you really need to and not follow every win because. You know the the key. I tell people all the time. If if you want to stay in business as an agency for, you know, for any length of time. The key to this is recurring. Revenue and that’s based on WordPress management plans and in order to have a good WordPress management plan, it just makes sense to have a streamlined theme and plug in stack without a lot of variations that you can support. And so that’s a long way around the tree to say this, it’s going to take a lot for me to change. From Beaver builder into the block editor, we’ve been using Beaver Builder for many years. I thoroughly appreciate their work. It just works. You don’t have the kinds of errors that you do in other page building plugins which shall. And nameless, it just works really well. And you know, with the the sort of work we do which involves a lot of custom post types and custom. Custom content the block editor. It will do a lot of those things, but good grief, you’ve got to really turn it on its head to do that. And lots of custom code. Whereas the platform we’ve been using for years with Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer, it just works. So it it we don’t. We have a few sites. That because of the client request we did build with the block editor cadence cadence blocks.

Yeah.

And but the the vast majority of our sites and every new build is is based on Beaver.

Builder. Now what I’ll tell you is, and you probably don’t know the story regular listeners will. I took my agency site. And here’s this is a do not do folks please. I did to move a live site away from elementary to cadence a live site. And it’s. Oh, no, it was not. I did it over a three month span and I did it where I did the blog post first, then the pages, then flipped the theme and did the theme customization. So I did it on the live site. Do not do this. And then I sat down after it was done and did a podcast.

Ohh, that sounds like fun.

With Burger Poly Hack and Mattis Ventura, Matthias is the Gutenberg lead on the project and we dissected what I liked. What I didn’t like, and how we did. And. Ah, I will never do that. Again, that’s all I can. Say, but I like cadence, but I also get why an agency doesn’t want to change a stack. Honestly, like that’s not a good idea. It’s not a good idea from a resourcing perspective. It’s not a good idea from a technical perspective. It’s not a good idea from a management perspective.

Yeah, 100% and it’s, you know, we we’ve tinkered with it and I I do, I do like, so let me say this also we for the editing of blog post content we absolutely use the block editor. I think the block editor is wonderful for controlling page. You know the post content area when you get. Outside of that is when things start to get really complicated and we’re nowhere near looking at moving toward the site editor. Well, Cadence doesn’t support it, and all all our builds are based on Cadence and currently Cadence doesn’t support the site editor, but it’s everything we are doing now. I I don’t. See a business reason to stop that. And to move to a.

Different stack, so I accept that what I don’t accept is all the fighting that keeps going on on. Ohh, it’s like folks. If you don’t like the block header, don’t use it. If you don’t like Beaver Builder, don’t use it. Move on, right? Ticked off at WordPress go find another platform like we need as a community to stop all this and we need people like you and the cafes of the world and me. Me and you know people at my mutual front. Courtney over at GoDaddy in multiple people and we need to just keep helping people and stay out of all this drama cause it’s not even worth it.

No, it’s really not. And you know, I think it some, this sort of drama that we see in WordPress that you’re strongly held opinions about what, how you ought to do things, you know what, plug and stack you ought to use. That’s just sort of. It comes with the territory when you’re dealing with people like myself, self identified geeks, you know, we we enjoy the details. We have opinions about. Things the problem becomes when I evaluate your intelligence or whatever based on whether we agree about this issue or not. It’s like, come on it. Life is too short for that stuff.

No, I agree. And The thing is, we’re all adults and what we have to remember is the people on the X or Twitter, which is where the vocal people are not LinkedIn, it’s acts and Twitter, they account for the devs and the designers who all in the know when you think about it. Word press power is about 46 percent, 47% depending on what number we’re looking on on what day. And the people on X are a minor subset of the people powering and causing all the drama. Isn’t that interesting when you look at it that way?

It is and I got to tell you. I. My stress level and blood pressure have been so much better since I just really stopped looking at X. A while ago.

Look at X, but I enjoy. I ignore all the drama and let me tell you, you caused the drama. You end up in a list somewhere that I don’t look at or something else because.

Ah.

Yeah.

The old people I don’t get along with very, very close. That’s that’s a good idea. But you know, it’s much. It’s much. Are you playing with Mastodon at all in that mess or no?

No, no, I have it.

So you’re basic.

Yeah, we we were. We were talking in the at the pre show. We were just chatting just about you asked me how I was able to do all the things that I’m doing right now and some of. It is. I just don’t spend time on social media a lot. There’s there’s. Better things to do.

I actually have clients that I manage social for, so I have no choice. Ah yes. And I’m not a big Facebook fan per se. Like I I have private conversations, but I’m not posting a lot. If you look at my Facebook feed in the last six months, a lot of this podcast and my family’s always ******** at me saying, where are those pictures from your vacation? I said, oh, my personal website, go find them, won’t you post? Want to know and I am. I upload them to Google Photos and then I use a plug in that embeds Google Photos albums into a website, so I’m like no, they’re here. Go away if you don’t like it. Well, we don’t wanna go there. Well, that’s nice. You know, I’m just and I pulled out. Whereas 15 years ago. I did the same thing and then I started posting everything on Facebook and you you know where that goes, right, so.

Right, exactly.

And.

That’s part of the problem. I mean, people don’t comment on websites anymore because of social media. Frankly, all the comments are going on social, aren’t they?

Yeah, they really are. And I again I. Just. There are certain things that I’ve just decided not to spend time on.

Yep, Yep, I get that. That’s how you keep listening. Your hats are multiple places. Do you kind of run it all on your calendar and just time block? Is that how you succeed? Yeah, so.

If you ask me three weeks from now what I’m going to be doing on a particular chunk of the week, I can probably pretty well tell you it’s in order to do. You know, I I. Run a an agency. I do a solid Academy. I do coaching for WordPress Solopreneurs and micro agency owners. I’ve got the monster contracts product. This a new product called Monster Secure. Just a lot of different things that go on. In addition to that, there’s a weekly post status column. All those places. It it it, it functions very well and I rarely I can’t remember the last time I worked more than 40 hours in a week. I usually take Friday afternoons off, but everything lives in a certain place on the calendar. I’ve got great help with my team and we’re able to keep all the all the plates spinning.

I get that I I run stuff out of my calendar. My clients know I very rarely will take an ad hoc phone call. They all have calendar links that they can go book time unless it’s a dire emergency. I do not run my business off my cell phone, which a lot of entrepreneurs do. I.

Exactly.

Actually went out and purchased VoIP number of voice over IP number which runs on an app off my cell phone but it keeps the personalized separate 25 bucks a month Canadian for sanity that’s well worth it.

Right.

It’s absolutely worth it.

And if they call after 5:00, my attendant says the office is now closed. Please leave them as.

You got. Love. It. Yeah, it’s, you know something now and I don’t know if you want to go into this. Rabbit hole I’m. A productivity geek. I do. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve. I’ve done a lot of work. Just personally on how do I, you know, ring every bit of juice out of the time that I have every week. And one of the best things that I’ve learned it, it actually started in a book. By Daniel Pink called when. And it’s this concept of chronotype and you know, like how your daily rhythm goes. Everyone is similar, but there’s very important differences. And so anyway, Long story short, what I learned was there are certain things that I was doing at certain points of the day that if I would move those to a different point of the day. It just makes more sense for energy level and creativity and so forth, and the sum of that is I can now spend less time doing things because I scheduled them at a particular point of the day and get often better results. And if I were to spend twice that much time at a different point of the day. So anyway, that’s it it. Time blocking, but then being very, very intentional about when I’m doing certain things and I’m I’m I’m mapping all out with, you know sleep apps and all that stuff that kind of keeps me on track. But that’s that’s just critical for my day-to-day flow.

Oh, I I agree with you. And and yeah, it’s a good rabbit hole to go down because.

It’s a lot.

Of fun, but I’m a productivity junkie myself. I’ve got probably 30 productivity books in my library, so you know I. I’ve played. Excuse me, I’ve played with a number of tools over the years, kind of where I sit on tools. I’m not a tool jumper. I will say this and I will say this again. So I’m for e-mail. I don’t even use Gmail or workspaces anymore. I use a company. In Australia, called fast Mail, which I absolutely love, they’re they’re privacy based e-mail service to reasonable and price. They’re reasonable and support. The and they support the open calendar and open contact standards. So that means if you’re running something like Thunderbird, which I like to do, you can interface right to the contacts and calendar phone. I use a pixel just because that’s the world I live in PC wise. Depending on which machine I’m on, I’m either on Windows 10 or Linux. Windows. Linux doesn’t like zoom calls. It’s interesting. Yeah. So zoom app. The minute you start recording it says.

Yes.

I hate you. Productivity wise. I think clients who use notion have for a long time. I like it. Yeah, it’s journal note taking. I use in open source app called Joplin. It’s like one note on steroids and you can basically put your back end database wherever you want. So you can throw it on like Dropbox or OneDrive or Google Drive. It doesn’t care. You just put it there. And then for to Do’s I I’m stuck using an app called To Do List right now which is.

I would love to do this.

Well, that’s kind of those are kind of some apps that I use to manage my agency life. What do you use since we’re there?

So very similar to your tool set. Actually we love notion actually and talking about not moving tool sets, I was an Evernote user forever and probably stayed a year too long just because I’m a curmudgeon about moving tools.

OK.

Yep.

It just got to be so. Awful that we finally moved all the way over to notion at the strong arm twisting encouragement of. Of Chris from my team. We love notion. We do a lot of things in it. It’s how we track news items and so forth with news content. We produce plugins for our plug-in Roundup, lots of stuff in there. So just. Absolutely love notion I’ve. Got it. It’s separated from the different hats that I wear, yeah. For e-mail, I’ve been for years now using an app. I’m a Mac guy, so I use an app called Poly Mail, which is just the best e-mail app I’ve ever seen, and nothing’s even come close. The little pricey, but it’s worth it. Yeah. So that’s of course the most important productivity app of them all is chat. PPT.

And in my case, because I’m on the pixel is Gemini. But same idea, right? Yeah.

There you go. Yep, Yep, Yep.

And it’s funny. You mentioned Evernote, so when I worked in healthcare and I was sharing this with you before and I’ve been out of healthcare for 15 years, I was an Evernote user as a page user and my boss used to hate me because I stored all my notes in the cloud and we were on my. Everybody knows OneNote is the Microsoft note taking package and I avoided OneNote. I avoided one note, I avoided one note and one day he came to me and said yeah, get your notes. So they’re called the CTO’s gonna kill you. So I. One OneNote has an Evernote importer, so I just imported everything and said OK I’m done, but one note has gotten so awful and and it doesn’t run on a Linux box, so that’s another problem. So I switched to the open source drop on app, which is basically OneNote with rich text. And steroids so. But I don’t use the thing for me is I use notion for different. I use notion for client nodes and managing projects not for keeping all the archival stuff like this bill received and that you get where I’m coming from like. Ever, yeah. You can find Lily.

Because.

And have you taken any productivity courses, Nathan? Yes.

No, I well it, but it’s mostly from books, but not any courses directly.

Hmm.

I’m in the same same method and I just find that being more productive and I find for me when I got up in the morning. Most people jump on their phone right away, right?

Yeah, which is a huge. Mistake. I don’t do it, no. No. So there’s a talk that. I’ve I’ve given for years now called taming the whirlwind. How? To grow your business. You’re busy, and the idea the idea is, you know, we have this thing that we deal with called the whirlwind, which is the energy and attention that’s needed to run our business. And a lot of times folks just let that consume their whole world and they can’t move forward and grow. And one of the main you know, there’s a lot of takeaways in that tall, but one of the main things. Is the whirlwind lives in your inbox, so just don’t open it until 10:30 or 11:00 in the morning. And I I. Resisted that for a long time. But when I started adopting that principle years ago, I suddenly realize that the world doesn’t stop spinning. If I don’t look at my e-mail until 10 or 10:30 in the morning, and that gives me two, three full.

By.

Good product, productive hours where I can get things done and not think about the client world when that’s out.

There and the other thing to do with your inbox is don’t keep.

It open only. Ohh no absolutely check e-mail twice a day. That’s what I do.

I usually check it twice a day and then if I’m in line at a doctor’s I have like a because I’ve gone through some health issues. I have a a wound that I have treated and I have to wait, so I might look at it in. A. Oh, sure, right, Jim. This is twice a day. And I teach my clients if it’s important, put 911 colon it to start your e-mail. If it’s that important, don’t abuse it. But do that for me. And then. I. End my subjects and say oh, that’s a 911. What’s going on here?

Yeah. And so, you know, I I try to move all those client requests into our ticket system and then I have a team member that watches the ticket system. So it it that clears my space just a little bit, but even even if you’re so low it having a ticket system I think is still critically important because it gets that stuff out of your inbox to begin with. And it puts it in a trackable, completable format. That so it just makes sense to to do. That even if you’re a. Solo opener, yeah.

It’s so true, and it makes life easy. And then you and I aren’t working past 40 hours a week and I gotta tell you, if I’m working and I’m out with my other half, she will take my laptop away from me and my phone.

I have got one of those. Yep.

We’re going away this. Take it with me. Two reasons. One for emergencies, but two so I can watch like Netflix. And Amazon TV in the hotel room at night, I just HDMI to the TV. Right? And absolutely, yeah. But but we have. A rule and and it. And she’s really good at reminding me and said, Rob, you don’t need to be looking at that. And I said, no, I I hear. You. So you know, we we gotta we gotta manage our life cause working to live is better than living to work, my friend. Indeed.

It’s been kind of funny with my wife and I early in our marriage, we we actually just celebrated 30 years back two months ago. But early in our marriage, I was the one that was always on, you know, if a client e-mail came in, I come right on it cause. I had this. This false notion in my head that I had to respond to everything and. Immediately, and I’ve since changed my my perspective on that, but now it’s so funny because she’s she’s back in the classroom. She’s just second grade now. And she, I, I’ve I’ve. I see the same things. Like she’s got to respond to emails from parents right away. Not you know what? Not necessarily. That’s funny how like the. The coin has flipped and now it’s me doing having those conversations.

It is, so that’s great. I put solid. You love teaching. And love teaching. Or and I’m I’m a teacher by heart. So much so that. Early in my career, I went back to school to get accredited for some tech stuff that. I needed the paper for that. I knew how to do kind of deal, so I booked through a course and I had to sit in the course and I ended up being one of the the computer tech labs assistants for three months because he couldn’t excuse me from the course. And even before that when I was in college as a. Man, I had multiple instructors used to kick me out of class on a regular basis and say by the way, you’re miles ahead. Take the student and make them learn something. Isn’t teaching really fulfilling?

I I absolutely love it, and particularly when it, you know, technical things are a lot of fun to teach. And I I love how I love to take, you know, two plugins and let’s put them together and make something that’s, you know, bigger than the sum of the parts. And I love to do that sort of thing. But what I really enjoy is the coaching work that I do, which is helping. Micro agency owners solopreneurs. Kind of. Basically don’t make the same mistakes I did early on and begin to grow their businesses because you start to see, you know, technical stuff is fun and I love to figure that out and see lights come on. But what’s more fun for me is helping people start to connect the dots and business because that not only can help raise revenue that. That ultimately impacts quality of life for them and their families.

OK. And what these business owners need to realize is having a fancy website. It’s just the start, not the end. I always say what good is the website if it doesn’t generate leads which go to conversions like which?

Yeah, exactly.

And it’s one of the things I used to have a a phrase in my business that says I don’t just do websites, I I do sites that generate your leads, which lead to revenue. So there’s like. I think what you probably see with small business owners is most of them are wearing too many hats and haven’t figured out that outsourcing some stuff would be easier on them because then they’d have time to do the stuff that they’re good at.

Yeah, for sure. So that there’s always a conversation I have along the the coaching pathway that that most folks end up on, you know in the early days and if you don’t have revenue, it’s. It’s understandable if you’re trying to do everything yourself, but that’s ultimately that keeps you in this circle. It’s a self fulfilling thing. If I don’t have time because I don’t have money, but I don’t have money because I have time to do more and so forth. And at some point you have to step out of that loop. For me, it’s something for everybody, but in my story, for me, that came with hiring my first.

Yeah.

Regular contractor who handled customer support and so bringing in Carrie and letting her run the ticket system and trusting her to speak with my clients and handle the small requests. That was the first thing I did that really opened up some bandwidth that started to create. Changed and I thought, oh, OK, that’s how this is supposed to work. Before that I, I had this mindset of, well, I have to do everything. Nobody can do it as well as I can. And and and that actually may be true, but if somebody can do 70% of what I can, that’s good enough to hand that over to them.

I agree with you. Mine was I went and hired the VA and that was like. And and my VA is actually a family member. It’s my son’s girlfriend. And the advantage of doing that is, and I don’t have to worry about things like credit cards and stuff like that. And I just. Like do it and if you have like.

To be.

And I’m at that point and it’s free. Clients call with questions about bills. Clients call about questions about this and she fronts all that stuff. And I never see it unless I have to. It’s it’s a wonderful thing when you start to realize that in your own business, not own somebody else.

Indeed.

Yeah. So you’re doing all that and then you’ve got this new project and you started it with one of my dearest friends in the world, Miss Kathy scent. And Kathy is we both agree is like bar for none excellente you want to tell us about the bird?

Sure. Yeah. So the project is called Monster Secure and it’s kind of Co branded with my monster contracts project that’s been out for several years, but Monster Secure basically is. Security training for clients. So and, and here’s why that’s important. And this is the genesis of this whole idea we had on solid icat where we have regularly at least quarterly we have Tom Ray from we watch your website. Tom is just a wonderful human being brilliant. And he and his team are currently monitoring over 18,000,000 WordPress installs. That’s crazy. So he has all this data of actual you know, how are these vulnerabilities happening? Cause he’s tracking everything. And what he discovered in a report that he released earlier this year was that essentially, you know, minus about, you know, a 10th of a percent here and there. It’s basically two out of three WordPress vulnerabilities don’t come from themes and plugins, which is not what we have normally heard. You know, not that Demon plug-in vulnerabilities aren’t important. We need to deal. We need to deal with those and have security level measures in place. But that’s 1/3 of the actual vulnerabilities. 2/3 actually come from vulnerabilities related to the user, primarily stolen session cookies and also compromised login credentials. And So what that says to me as an agency owner, and I remember in this conversation with Thomas saying like Thomas, this is terrifying because I I’ve done all this work and we’ve got a great protocol, multi layer security and all the things and you know server security, WordPress security, all the things. And I’ve spent all this time doing that. And then one untrained user could mess it all up, and that’s 100%. True. So you know what? What we’ve come to understand is that WordPress security has to include user training. It’s it’s one vulnerable user can bring down the site because they’ve clicked the phishing e-mail or they’ve done something else. And so I was thinking about this and then we had Kathy on on solid Academy doing some security training for us several months this year. And I just had a a chat with her pre show and I’m like Kathy, I’m thinking about this. She says, wow, I’m thinking about that too. Maybe we should think about this together. And so she was all in, and it was just a great. It was a a great idea from the beginning and so we built this training course and the goal is like none of my clients are gonna sit through a 5 hour WordPress security course. They’re just not gonna. To do it, and so the goal is we want to create an essentials course to give a client a client who’s going to log in and edit their website, have some sort of privileged login. We want to give them the essentials of what they need to know in about 30 minutes. And so that’s what we’ve done, monster.

Yeah.

Secure is our site talking to agencies. The course itself actually lives over. It goes safely online. It’s positioned as $100.99. Course and what the agency owner gets to do is say, all right, Mr. client. Mrs. Client, we’re going to give you this, this $100 security course free. But we need you to complete it before we give you access to the site. You can do it in about 30 minutes. And the agency owner goes in. Agency owners can get free access to the course. Preview it from a link there on monsterssecure.com, but once you upgrade you have a client dashboard where you can add your clients in. You’ll get an e-mail to set up their account. You’ll be able to watch your clients progress through the course, see the percentage of completion, how long they spend on each. And what their grade was on the final quiz to pass the course so you can track all of that. And then when they’re finished, you get an e-mail and you can set them up with access to the site. So. I hope we’re we’re. We’ve got a good solution to a problem that is a real issue for most web agencies, whether they realize it. Or not.

I would say it is. I mean I I manage. About 375 websites for security risk. So those websites all I. Do is do. Off site backups. And maintain the plugins, the security and that. Side of it.

Right.

This took on one website. You’re gonna offer to lose 39 administrators.

Ohh yeah.

So what did I? Do I went in, didn’t tell anybody and I turned them all off except one. The one I knew. Right. Two weeks later, how many complaints have I had? None.

Probably. Right, yeah.

Yeah.

But again, it’s the same thing and you know, when it comes to this, it’s funny where I got interested in security was, you know, who Kevin Mitnick was, the legendary hacker that and he just passed away last year, actually due to pain. Periodic cancer, unfortunately. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. Oh really?

Same thing my dad had end.

Hmm.

Look, the art of deception which came out years ago, he’s written several was kind of one of my interests that got me into the security space and reading. So I and I had met him at a conference years ago. So. I owe a. Lot of my interest in security to him, but also a lot to people like you. The people like Kathy, the people like Tom Thomas Reef is a good friend as well. The people like Tim Nash. I mean. Some of us have different views on different things, but generally it’s pretty well uniformed across the board. What we have to do and what we don’t have to do.

Yeah, absolutely. And just thrilled to have Kathy working on this project. She she’s done all the videos for us and she she’s just so, Oh my goodness. You know, she’s got a great YouTube channel, by the way. But she you know, if you’ve seen her on any podcast, she just comes across so friendly and helpful and any client is going to resonate with her. And but she covers the, the the critical topics like, you know, how do you keep your own computer safe? How do you set up two factor authentication? How do you use a password manager? You know what does a phishing e-mail look like and how do you protect yourself from those with all these? Things. That like how where does an agency even begin to create? Content you know to help your clients stay safe on these really important issues and so, gosh, there’s Kathy talking about all of them, right?

Yeah. They ice making phishing emails harder and harder to detect. As far as I’m.

Ohh yes it it used to be. Ohh you can tell that’s they’ve they’ve misspelled this word or they’ve, you know it’s the the verb tense doesn’t agree or there’s something, you know. But now with AI, these emails are written so well that it’s really hard to differentiate.

I saw one the other day where somebody in Canada. Yeah, impersonated the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, even with their logo, claiming this was a court summons and they better go here and pay this fine now. And it worked. Usually you look at them and say the logo’s wrong the spelling’s wrong. Something’s wrong. Everything looked right. Yep, and.

Yeah.

But they don’t send court summons through.

E-mail. e-mail, right? Yeah, but I mean you somebody looks at that and they get, you know, they’re they’re praying on fear. And so like, gosh, I better do something about this. So it’s understandable. But that’s where we the world that we live in. People understand now well. You park your car on a street downtown. You better lock your doors. I mean, these are just part of our regular. Thinking and there has to be some education now to help people realize that there’s we live in a digital world and there’s danger out there. And so we have to change the way we think about our online security.

No question great that you and Kathy are doing that project. I mean, as I say, couldn’t be two better people to do it. So well done and I hope it goes well. Have you had a large number of sign UPS or?

We’ve. Yes. So it’s we’ve been cautious. Cautious we’ve been slowly getting the word out about this because we want to get some feedback from folks on using the course and how things are going and we have quite a few people in the course now and quite a few actually have taken advantage of our lifetime deal that’s going on. But yeah, it’s it’s it’s gotten good response. We’ve set up a few surveys and have had good response. So yeah, we’re we’re very happy with where it.

Is right now which that you are. And I can.

The agency facing language is at monstersecure.com.

Thanks for sharing. I’d appreciate that they should jump on it, because if Nathan and Kathy are involved, you’re going to learn something and that’s the key I.

Yeah, absolutely.

Mean, I think. You got a. You got to keep educating yourself. Which leads me to another question and I was going to come to it earlier and I forgot about it. The one thing we have with agencies. And you’re in the agency game too. Is we all chase the next client, the next client, the next client? Do you and your agency book off some time to be able to do? That agency promotional stuff, the stuff you.

Ah. Yeah, this is such a good conversation, rob. Man, we should a podcast just about this. So I I I advocate for, for people who are a solo preneur or micro agency who don’t have a person that’s dedicated to account services and finding business and. Following up, I recommend for those types of agencies to just double down on referral marketing referrals. I I’ve never spent a. Dollar. On advertising for my business in almost 30 years, every bit of business has come through referral and you know you can read about and there’s certain certain agencies that will poo poo this idea. And I’ll tell you for us who operate on a small, you know, solo or micro. Level referral marketing is where it’s at now. There’s positives and negatives. To it. But the positives in my view far outweigh the negative. But the trick is this. You referral marketing is, you know, hoping that people are gonna refer me business. What I do is what I’ve called intentional referral marketing, which is really twofold. First, I’m actively asking people to refer business to me. Reminding people that you know this is what we do and these are the people we serve and looking for people who aren’t necessarily my end. Client. But people who know a lot of people who would fit as our ideal client and developing relationships with them and and the second part of that is incentivizing the referral. So there’s, you know, a a gift that comes if you send U.S. business that signs. And so creating that sort of referral network. That’s how I’ve built my business over the years and you get better clients that way, generally higher paying clients that. Way you know, there are so many web design groups out there that if you’re just trying to, you know, go on one of these marketplaces or and, you know, try to bid on websites, whatever you’re you’re always going to be at the bottom of the barrel. But when you have someone that’s referred to you and you’ve inherited the credibility from that referral source, it is. That, that’s just the way to do it. Now, if you’re larger and you have a team, you know content marketing, all those things, you know that that’s super helpful and that’s that’s probably where I would pivot if I wanted an agency that. Large but for, you know, a smaller agency. Referral marketing is where it’s at now the the the downside of referral marketing in my view is the workflow is often very difficult to control because you may have one month where there’s no referrals come in and the next month there’s six and that’s just that’s the downside. But I am much more comfortable with that. Downside because of the upside that it brings.

Oh my, I will tell you though, the spot that I picked up a Fortune 500. I can’t name who they are because of an NDA. But I’ll tell you the story. They were doing stuff on social wrong and they are a major, major franchise owner in the US and internationally. And they were doing stuff wrong and I tried to do something with them, and then I went to social to complain and realized what a mess. I wrote them a 25 page report of all the things they were doing wrong. And they hired. Me and that was five years ago.

How about that?

I still they are like they are like the most wonderful client. They pay their bills. I’m in the states four days a month because of it traveling and that’s the other approach is fill a need and say here it is. But but I agree referral marketer.

Absolutely.

The other thing with referral marketing is the trust levels already there because they they trust you.

Yes. Yeah. And that you know, there there’s the natural cycle in marketing of no, like, trust buy and you know what, what I’m looking for, OK how can I short circuit that process from no to buy and referrals do that.

The other thing that works really well is video testimonials. More than audio, and not just for you, but for clients too. Like I’ve got a client who’s got a jewelry store and I said to him, you’ve got great reviews, Facebook reviews, Google reviews. I said to him, do me a favor. Every client that walks out of here. 70% of work is custom. Work. Get the client to show the peace and shoot a 32nd video on an iPhone. That’s all. And that alone cause their business to go up by 30%, that would.

How about that?

And that’s basically. Testimonials are almost like referrals. Think about it, right?

Yeah. Yes, it is. If you have multiple of those that can, yeah, how do I know who these people are and that sort of thing might be going on in the the potential clients mind, but with a lot of folks that are talking about you with glowing reviews. Yeah, I can see how that would definitely be helpful.

In your agency, what’s the biggest trend right now going on?

Say that again, I’m.

Sorry, biggest trend in your agency with clients. What are? They asking for.

Ah, it’s interesting. We, we’ve. I’m not sure why this is, but in the last year we’ve tended to get more and more pros. Projects independently that are all more related to complicated content.

Oh.

And we love that you know how how do we assemble these things? Well, on the back end of WordPress and and expose them well on the front end of the website. Yeah. So we we’ve started for whatever reason, I wish I was smart enough to figure out why this was, but we’ve gotten a lot of clients. That are focused on that sort of work. So and it’s fun. It’s stuff that we enjoy.

It’s interesting and I was kind of looking at mine before we got on this podcast. And for me, lately it’s been big Woo projects, Big Woo projects and woo.

Interesting.

With lots of variable products, not just five or ten. My jewelry store front end client. We’re working on a shop on a launch date in November 1st. It’s going to have 2500 products.

My goodness, and they’re all variable. My goodness, yeah.

I know you should because you know.

Yeah, we do. We do a good bit of WooCommerce. I don’t think we have a site that’s that big.

I think this is the biggest one. No, it’s not. Second biggest one. I’ve done. The biggest one was a custom car parts. Same thing, all variables and it’s like ohh really? And by the time you’re done importing products, you’re you’re done. Like you’re seeing product specs in your sleep. You know, you go. Screaming them.

Yeah, that’s I have a person on my team that just loves the spreadsheets and so he would love a project like that for me. I’m like, ah, just let me know when it’s done.

What’s the worst thing that site owners are asking for right now?

The worst thing? Oh goodness.

Scarce.

I don’t know I this is sort of a. Well, I guess my my the answer off top of my head. To that question is. You still get this. The clients that absolutely have to have a slider on their homepage? Yeah. And yeah. And we do a pretty good job convincing them of why that’s not a good idea study after study. But some folks just don’t.

Why?

They they can’t be convinced.

What I would say to you is take slider down, put the CTA up there. You’d be better off to be.

Oh.

Absolutely. And I think what they’re really after is the movement. And we saw that in a couple of ways with a a background image that has like a Ken Burns effect on it moving in and out. We also like, I don’t mind a slider where images are moving as long as the call to action stays the same. So we’ve we’ve satisfied that slider longing with. A A. A stationary you know a bit of impact text and a call to action and let the images behind it cycle.

I think the worst one I’ve seen lately is I’m in the battle with the client right now. Who wants landing pages, but he wants menus on the landing pages. It’s like no. Oh, you don’t want.

Yeah, that totally defeats the.

Purpose click on that button that says buy my product at the bottom of the page.

You want them to land, not take back off again. That’s why it’s a landing page, right?

It’s it’s one of. The reasons, by the way, I’m not a big fan of putting social icons on websites in prominent positions. I like to bury them in the footer somewhere because, yeah, used to be we all buried them in the top right hand corner, go to our social as well. That screams. So leave me now, right?

Exactly. It’s. Yeah, it’s a. It’s a huge exit. Door right there.

What a great conversation, Nathan. Thanks for spending.

This has been fun.

Time with me today. Let’s go through a few things. Your agency website and your project with Kathy. Again, could you please?

Sure, project with Kathy is monster secure.com. And also of course, Monster contracts.com.

And your agency website, some of the work.

Agency website isbrilliantly.net.

What’s the best way to find you directly since you’re not much of an ex fan these days?

I’m. I’m on X, you know. I’ll. I’ll it’ll it’ll notify me if I get a direct message, but I am at Nathan Ingram there on X and I’m on Facebook as well.

Thank you very much, Nathan. You have an amazing weekend, my friend.

Thanks, rob. This is great you too.