So, youāve decided to switch affiliate marketing platforms ā now, itās time to actually make the switch. In this post, weāve put together a brief guide to migrating from one affiliate marketing platform to another to give you an idea of what to expect, what to prioritize, and how to structure the process so that your transition is as smooth as possible!
How to Save Time & Automate Client Onboarding with Forms
Thereās a lot more to onboarding new clients than meets the eye. Sure, there are the major necessary evils, like invoicing, support and contracts, but have you ever thought about all the time you spend organizing emails, files, requests, logins, tasks and notes? The more clients and team members you add, the more confusing the whole thing gets. Luckily there are so many tools and approaches you can take to make onboarding new clients a breeze, while keeping yourself sane and your clients happy. Here\’s how forms can help you out.
7 Additional Income Streams for Freelancers to Diversify Earnings & Grow RevenueĀ
Drumming up web design business can be a challenge. Itās often irregular; meaning you may get a lot of work requests all at once and go long periods with few or no new clients. For this reason alone establishing multiple streams of income is a great idea. Especially passive income steams that earn even when youāre not actively working on them. Ensuring that even when new clients are scarce, youāre not worried about cash flow. In this article, weāll talk a bit more about why itās smart to use multiple streams of income as a web designer. Weāll also walk you through seven project ideas you can put into action to increase your earning potential.
How to Sell WordPress Plugins [Guide]
In addition to being some of the most popular digital products you can sell online, WordPress plugins often provide much-needed solutions and specialized functionalities for WordPress websites, sometimes enabling and benefiting entire communities of people. But when it comes to selling plugins, a lot of the standard considerations apply: Where can you sell them? What prices should you charge? How do you market them? What about licenses, updates, and support? In this post, we aim to shed some light on some of the best practices!
5 Program Types WordPress Web Professionals Should Join to Earn More
Partner programs help you through revenue, resources, credentials, promotions, leads, and discounts. While the value of these benefits varies, depending on your business and the specific program, theyāre all worth serious consideration. Adding multiple revenue streams to your business mitigates risk. More income sources makes you less dependent on any one source. That gives you more negotiation power in dealing with clients, and it can help alleviate the āfeast and famineā cycle of chasing the next big client or project.
How to Scale WordPress Website Maintenance Services [Guide]
Youāve probably seen a lot of WordPress support and maintenance companies pop up over the past 5 years. Thatās because taking a pure service like ongoing support and bundling it into plans and packages is one of the most efficient ways to grow and scale a services business. Now, maintenance and ongoing support are actually pretty easy when youāre getting started. Itās once you start to grow your client list that things get more complex. So letās talk about how you can scale maintenance to hundreds or thousands of websites and give your agency what it needs to grow a predictable revenue stream!
The Ultimate WordPress Website Launch Checklist [List]
No matter how experienced we are at doing something, thereās always a chance that weāll make a mistake. So, in this article, weāve pulled together a checklist of tasks that web designers and developers should consider when launching a new site. By following this checklist ā or, even better, by using these recommendations to create your own checklist ā youāll have a documented process to follow for every site that you launch.
7 Ways to Start Making Money with a WordPress Blog
One of the biggest searches on the web is how to make money. And when you search the more specific phrase how to make money with WordPress youāll still find an impressive 11 million+ results. Based on those numbers you can infer that people really are making money off their blogs (especially those ranking at the top of the search results!). By the end of this post youāll find that it can be surprisingly easy to generate an income using your blog as a starting point.
Plugin Developer Stories: Gravity Flow by Steven Henty
Steven Henty is the man behind Gravity Flow and also the lead developer at Rocketgenius, the company that makes Gravity Forms. Steven came through big time with very thorough and interesting answers to my questions about what itās like to build, market and sell such a massive plugin with such an enormous number of practical uses.
The Ultimate Guide to SEO for Selling Digital Products Online [Guide]
Since the rise of eCommerce, search engine optimization (SEO) has been a seemingly mysterious code to crack. Itās a core marketing tactic that every website should implement if they want to be found through search engines; but plenty of digital product business owners are often left frustrated and unsure of how to maximize their exposure through SEO. Fortunately, there are some effective tricks you can learn to master SEO and push your digital product store to the top of the heap. In this post, weāve put together a rough guide of the basics you need to get started!
A Step-by-Step Guide for Pitching Website Redesigns to Clients [Guide]
Pitching a website redesign is a tricky process. It can be hard to show why a redesign is needed without sounding as if youāre putting down the siteās current look. Plus, sometimes your potential client is the original designer, and insulting their skills or vision could ruin your relationship. In this article, weāll discuss some reasons why working on redesigns can be beneficial to your career. Then weāll share four tips on how to approach website redesign pitches to help you land the job.
Should WordPress Web Professionals Sell Services on Fiverr?
Fiverr is often associated with low-quality services and people working for peanuts. Thatās partly true, but things have changed significantly since the siteās early years. Did you know that some basic SEO gigs currently start at $595? Other gigs start at $500, $400, or $300, so forget about the idea of getting everything for $5. Fiverr has allowed users to sell gigs above the $5 standard price since November 2015, and it created a large variety of services and prices. Are you interested in selling WordPress services on Fiverr? This post is the perfect start for you! Here are the pros and cons of this activity.
8 Key Tips for Freelancers on How to Follow Up with Clients
First youāre mildly annoyed. Then youāre frustrated. Then youāre worried. Then you panic. This is not playing out as you had envisioned. Did they not like you? Did they change their mind? Did they find a faster or cheaper solution? Possibly none of the above. Possibly all of the above. For whatever reason, when people donāt respond, you begin to have doubts about yourself, what you said, what you did. But donāt let those doubts or concerns take over. Itās time to follow up, determine what caused the lapse in communication, and get the conversation back on track. Here\’s how to do it right.
How to Write Email Newsletters that Will Grow Your WordPress Affiliate Program
You already know that regularly communicating with your affiliates is one of the best ways to keep them engaged, but how do you craft that perfect newsletter that stands out in their inbox and inspires action? In this post weāve collected some of the key ingredients to help you rock your affiliate newsletters, and get your affiliates moving!
Plugin Developer Stories: Shop Plugins by Daniel Espinoza
WordPress developer Daniel Espinoza took time out of his busy holiday schedule to answer some of my questions about Shop Plugins, his WooCommerce plugin business. In addition to questions about Shop Plugins, Daniel talked a bit about his #BUILDSZN project where he is focusing on building a SaaS company in a limited timeframe.
How to Pick an Affiliate Marketing Platform to Grow Your Business
Before you can launch your new affiliate program, you need to decide on the right affiliate marketing platform to use ā but what exactly should you be looking for anyway? In this post, weāve created a brief guide to some of the most essential features to aide you in the process.
4 Ways to Leverage Your Connections to Get New Clients for Your WordPress Business
Sometimes, getting new clients is as simple as being a little creative. I know how it feels sometimes. You are stuck. You need clients to pay the rent next month. You think that if you donāt get anything soon, you are going to be turning out the lights in a couple of months. You are stressed out. It is at this point that you have a hard time focusing and thinking of anything to do to round up some paying clients. Relax. Breathe. Take a deep breath. You are going to get through this, I promise. You just need to take a step back and come up with a gameplan. Today we are going to look at four things you can do to find clients for your freelance WordPress business. Letās get started, shall we?
How to Start Making Money Podcasting [Guide]
You might be thinking about starting a podcast yourself or maybe you are currently running one and the time has come to consider monetizing your podcast. There are a lot of variables in what advertisers are looking for, and the competition for those dollars is getting even more fierce. So letās take a look at some of the options you have.
How Much is a Lead Worth? Ā Here’s How to Find Out.
Have you ever wondered how much a new lead is actually worth to your business? And, more specifically, whether you have a particular funnel or channel that brings in more valuable leads over others? It can be frustrating trying to glean these kinds of insights from a tool like Google Analytics (because you canāt), which is why Troyās discussion with Keith Perhac is a must-listen.
How to Take on Clients with Existing WordPress Sites for Management in 8 Steps [Guide]
On the surface, an existing site in need of maintenance is a gift. No development or build needed; just check the dials on schedule, be ready if anything goes awry, and bill the client. Well, of course, this is WordPress, and although we love it, it is never quite that easy. A site you didnāt build is an unknown entity, and most clients have very little knowledge of their site āunder the hood,ā as long it appears to be working. Go through the following intake checklist when accepting management of WordPress sites you didnāt build. These steps are designed to help you evaluate the site quickly, so you donāt spend too much time getting up and running.
Plugin Developer Stories: Mailster by Jon Goldberg
Mailster, from developer EverPress, gives customers a tool for writing and sending email newsletters while at the same time maintaining their subscriber lists all within their own WordPress installation. Jon Goldberg was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about what goes into supporting a huge plugin such as Mailster and how their decision to sell through CodeCanyon has helped them.
How to Grow Your WordPress Affiliate Program with Social Media
Social media platforms have become some of the best places to find quality affiliates, but how exactly do you leverage them to expand your affiliate program? If you already have a functioning affiliate program, you might have more to work with than you think. In this post, we break it all down to help you grow your affiliate program using social media.
How to Make Money Online Working from Home (the RIGHT way!) [List]
Everybody wants to make money online working from home because it provides a great quality of life and you can work from anywhere. Here’s how to do it right!
How to Make Money with WordPress: The Ultimate Guide [Guide]
This is the ultimate free guide for learning how to make money with WordPress, which powers 1/3 of websites worldwide. WordPress is the best way to make money online. Start now!
How to Get High-Profile Affiliates to Sell Your Products & Services
You want the very best people promoting your products ā and just a few high-profile affiliates could drastically improve your affiliate marketing results. But, how do you motivate them to actually want to join your program? In this post, we discuss some tactics you can use to recruit high-profile affiliates ā and potentially boost to your affiliate program in a big way!
Plugin Developer Stories: Prevent Direct Access by Tim Alan
File security is an issue for a lot of digital product developers and online marketers. With Prevent Direct Access, WordPress site owners can restrict access to their files from prying eyes with a wide host of customization options through a simple interface. David Hg, from BWPS, took some time to answer my questions about their plugin. We discuss his background in WordPress, how development of Prevent Direct Access began and the ups and downs that happened with trying to successfully sell and market the plugin.
6 Ways for WordPress Web Designers & Developers to Make More Money
When projects slow down and the need for extra cash comes up, web pros have various options to make some additional income on the side using their skillset. Iām not just talking about going out and doing food deliveries. The skills of a web pro are invaluable and can have multiple profitable uses that you might not be aware of.
8 Ways to Get Better Clients & Start Charging More
In this article we discuss the eight changes you can make in your freelance business to stop being just another choice and become the only choice for your ideal clients (and start chargming more too!).
Want to Become a Freelancer? Ā Here’s How! [Guide]
Getting started in the world of freelance web development is not an easy task. In addition to solid technical knowledge, youāre on the hook to constantly keep up with the latest tools and methods, as well as to persuade prospective clients that you have the necessary skills and abilities to deliver the results they demand. Fortunately, a part-time side hustle as a freelance web developer can provide an excellent opportunity to gradually get some experience before making a full-time commitment.
How to Run a Sale with Your Online Store
Discounting your products or offering a promotion for a short period of time can help you boost sales, increase profit, and grow your websiteās exposure. But donāt be blinded by dollar signs and zeroes on the bottom line ā organizing a sale is a big task. Join us as we look at how to successfully run a sale on your website–here\’s how to do it right.
How to Sell Documents Online
Of all the different types of digital products, documents continue to be one of the cheapest, easiest, and one of the most potentially lucrative to sell ā and they last forever! If youāre ready to get started with selling your documents, read on for some tips and considerations that can help you put it all together.
How to Raise Funding via Sponsorships & Donations with a Great Sponsorship Page
If you are looking for how to get sponsored, you likely rely on donations or sponsorships for funding. And making sure that you are asking the right way is integral to your success. You must make sure that you lead your sponsors to the decision to hand you their money in the best way possible. Because this is so important, we want to walk you through some best practices for making the most out of your sponsorship page.
How to Get the Right Clients
Chris Lema is no stranger to the WP Elevation crowd or the WordPress community at large. This is his second time joining Troy on the podcast; the first was to discuss the secrets to growing a business. He also recently stopped by WP Elevation Live to explain why storytelling is essential when it comes to marketing your business. If you missed the opportunity to see Chris in Santa Monica or you simply want more juicy tips on how to use storytelling to get the right clients, give this episode a listen.
How to Use Leads to Grow Your Online Course
If youāre like many online educators, you probably feel pretty confident in the content and quality of your course. After all, this is what inspired you to begin your elearning adventure in the first place. However, many online educators are less confident when it comes to selling their course. And it doesnāt help that many of us use industry terminology that may or may not be familiar to those trying to learn the basics of sales and marketing. So, for this post, weāre going to take a step back and look at one of the basics: lead acquisition and nurturing. Here\’s how to do it right.
Plugin Developer Stories: Holler Box by Scott Bolinger
Holler Box lets you create custom notification boxes that can contain any content you can fit in a standard WordPress post. It also offers options to present a fake chat client or an email signup form that integrates with popular providers like ConvertKit and MailChimp. Each Holler Box you create comes with basic statistics that track views and conversions. Here\’s the story of Holler Box from developer Scott Bolinger.
How to Handle Refunds for your Membership Business
It can be frustrating to get refund requests after all of the hard work youāve done to get your membership site up and running (not to mention creating the content itself), but unfortunately, they are a reality! Letās be honest: it hurts when your members cancel. When it comes to the value you provide, youāre confident in your product, and the last thing you want is to lose a customer while having to return the money youāve earned. So, how should you handle refunds? Whatās the fairest policy for you and your customers?
5 Tips for Taxes as a Freelancer
Most people that receive a salaried paycheck are probably less interested in taxes than the average freelancer. If youāre self-employed, taxes can get really interesting because paying Uncle Sam is something that you must plan for, not something that happens automatically. If you donāt, you run the risk of being hit in the face at tax time with a big debt. Like I was. While Iām not an accountant, Iād like to share some of the things Iāve learned about the U.S. tax system and the real price of existing within the gig economy.
Plugin Developer Stories: Charitable by Eric Daams
Charitable is a popular WordPress plugin developed for creating fundraising campaigns. It has a robust feature set that lets you get started quickly and then expand its capabilities through extensions to further meet your fundraising needs. Eric Daams, the co-creator of Charitable, answered my questions about his background in WordPress, the beginnings of the plugin, sponsored development (a new topic here at The Plugin Economy) and his various attempts at finding the right pricing structure to fit Charitableās customers.
How to Make Money Online with Your Skills
2015 was the first year that my business ā owned 50/50 with my business partner āDiggyā ā generated more than $1 million in revenue. $1.4M to be specific. It felt weird to look at our bank account that year, and it still feels weird writing about it today. To understand how we got to that stage from our many failed online ventures, we need to go back around a decade to 2006.
Plugin Developer Stories: WP RSS Aggregator by Mark Zahra
Mark Zahra, from developer RebelCode, answered my questions about the origins of the company and WP RSS Aggregator. We also talk about its development challenges (with a guest appearance from Markās co-worker), the pluginās revenue model and the companyās approach to marketing. This clocks in as one of the longer interviews on the site so I want to thank Mark for taking the time to answer these questions so thoroughly.
How to Avoid Destroying Your WordPress Freelancing Business
Thereās a simple enough strategy for driving up the value of your WordPress business and keeping finances in the black. If followed, your business could be quite prosperous in just a short amount of time after launch. But what happens if you lose sight of the value of your WordPress business? Itās easy enough to do. And with the perceived and actual value of your services driving how much money your business makes, anything that throws it off kilter could effectively wipe away all that hard work you did to make it profitable in the first place.
The Ultimate Guide on How to Bill Your Clients [Guide]
Today Iād like to, once and for all, answer a question that Iāve been asked hundreds of times. āBrennan, how should I bill my clients?ā Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, per feature, per project. There seem to be a limitless number of ways to charge your clients. In this post, Iāll overview the pros and cons of each, and end with my recommendations.
Plugin Developer Stories: JetSloth by Blaz Robar
Weāre talking to Blaz Robar, from JetSloth, who makes Gravity Forms plugins for WordPress designed to help improve the end-user experience and make the mundane tasks of maintaining and editing forms faster and easier. Blaz talks to me about how JetSloth got started (and how they chose that name), how the ideas for all of their plugins came about, building a Gravity Forms-focused business, the ups and downs of their marketing and more. This clocks in as one of the longest interviews here on The Plugin Economy so I want to thank Blaz for taking all of this time to answer my questions so thoroughly.
The Ultimate Guide to Selling WordPress Plugins & Themes
Gone are the days in which you could wrap a few PHP functions into a WordPress plugin or even quickly convert a PSD file into a generic WordPress theme and successfully sell them as an end product to thousands of site owners. Even though the WordPressā market share only keeps growing ā in todayās market, this does not fly. Thereās just too much competition out there for selling WordPress plugins and themes, and the average customer now knows exactly what theyāre looking for and is less likely to buy a pig in a poke. Here\’s how to do it right!
How the TranslatePress WordPress Plugin Makes $10,000/mo. with a Ā Freemium Business Model
Our journey building multilingual websites started in the days when we were doing custom WordPress development. Our projects varied from simple presentation sites with a few pages to complex multilingual setups that needed ongoing development and maintenance. While there were quite a few WordPress multilingual solutions out there, we weren\’t happy with their added complexity and translation workflow (non-visual, out of context, found in multiple places).
How to Get Better WordPress Clients [Guide]
In this post, Iām going to share everything I know about attracting and winning better WordPress website clients with decent budgets into your business. You need to read the whole post. If you\’re going to do this, commit to it and I promise you it can be done. This post is part mindset and part tactical. I don\’t believe the tactics are valuable without the right mindset, so if some of this feels a bit āWoo Wooā, try and sit with that feeling and do it anyway. What have you got to lose?
3 Top Ways to Make Money with Podcasts
Podcasts can be a great way to get your voice out there, whether it be to teach, inform, or just make your opinion heard. But they can also be a great way to make an income, even a living, if monetized properly. The article below offers three different ways you can monetize a podcast: affiliates, […]
How to Sell Software Online
When it comes to selling digital products, software is an entirely unique beast. Over the last 6 years weāve seen many of our users succeed with selling software products, and learned a few things ourselves. In this posy, weāre diving even deeper into each of those different product types.
How to Make $3,000,000 a Year Helping People
A large portion of the training was focused on an SEO blogger named Aaron Wall, who had turned his blog readers into raving fans paying him $50 to $100 per month for access to his private forum on the same topic.Ā To this day Aaron still makes an estimated $50,000/m from the forum. Though I never got full access to the Teaching Sells course, the premise was clear: Earn the trust of your audience by giving away most of your knowledge for free, and then charge for it all to be packaged nicely in one place, often with additional insights. Itās a formula that worked very well 10 years ago, and still works incredibly well today.
Should Freelancers Invest in Building an Audience?
However, the exact same higher-touch lead generation and nurturing strategies enterprise companies use can be used by you, even if youāre solo. Thereās a lot about effective audience building that we can learn from enterprise leaders who have lead generation and nurturing down to a science. Ready to start playing the long game? Iāve got 3 core truths to start with (that many of us learned the hard way).