Thank you. Thank you very much everyone. Thanks for being here today. Thanks for spending the time to get here in beautiful Singapore and today we're talking SEO for business. All right. So before I start I like to get an idea of who I'm talking to. So would you be able to raise your hands if you know what SEO is? If you know what it is. All right. And why don't we keep them up? Keep them up. Keep them up. Keep them up. I don't say put them down yet. All right. Keep those hands up. Why don't we and I want you to keep your hand up if you've done SEO and keep them up if you've been paid to do SEO. All right. Cool. Excellent. Thank you very much. That gives me a real good understanding of who we're talking to today because when you're paid to do SEO and you know a lot of us hear about it but it doesn't give me a bit more of an understanding of who I'm talking to. So you've heard my introduction today. My name is Matt Knight and my beautiful wife is down the front here with me. We run MRKWP. We were called Divi Framework not long ago. We niche down into Divi and unfortunately Divi has a trademark on it and I faced a bit of a disaster with the fact that we had to change our name because I realised my name was trademarked by somebody else. Not a good day when I realised I had to change that. I wrote about that on the blog at MRKWP.com. Now while we've got that in our minds MRKWP.com you can go there and access all my slides straight away. It's already there. All my notes are there as well as well as links to different things for every single slide. Okay. So as we go through this you're going to be able to get all the information that you need. Go to MRKWP.com forward slash blog. It's all there completely for free. You don't have to do anything. No affiliate links just enjoy. All right. But let's get into it today. So I've got heaps of years experience in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I actually started coding when I was about six years old. My dad taught me to code on a VIC-20 with basic on the Commodore VIC-20 as before the Commodore 64. And he taught me how to make timetables, applications and a few different things. And then I learnt DOS and so my comfort was the green screen, black screen kind of thing with the green text. That's my happy place. And it's still my happy place. All right. But I know all this HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So why did I get into SEO? And it simply comes down to this. It's the best way to get business results. You see we're building websites, good code, nice designs and no traffic. And why? Because we didn't I didn't understand SEO. You know, without this key part, we're doing a discredit to the rest of our work. All right. We're doing a discredit to it. So today we're going to go through a basic understanding of getting business results with SEO. What do you need to know? And what do you have to do? Okay. So first of all, we're going to say, what is SEO? I'm going to bring in some new terms for you. All right.   No, when I'm not that kind of guy, I love sharing, which is why I'm here today. Right. So we're going to go, what is SEO? What makes the best page for SEO? You know, why does Google pick the top page? We're going to go into that. What is good content? What makes a fast page? How do I measure my results? How can social media help my SEO? And where do I start? Alright, where do I get started? So let's get into it. First of all, what is SEO? Because it's not some kind of magic. I don't have to get a wand or go to, you know, for those people that are Harry Potter fans, I didn't have to go to Hogwarts to learn this. Alright, it's not magic. It's simply some simple logic. And what helps us understand what is SEO is why do we have SEO in the first place? Let's think about this. Why do we have SEO? Because it really comes down to this search engines want to deliver a great experience. So in Australia, we have a term. Do we have any Aussies here? I know we do have a few. Alright, so for the Aussies in the audience, you will know this phrase when we're at a barbecue, and nobody knows the answer. What do we say? Google it. That's correct. In Google, we trust. Alright, there's no longer in God, we trust in Google, we trust and we all assume Google gives us the correct result, don't we? Anybody assume when they do a Google search that's wrong? No, we all assume it's right. And what we have to remember is Google, when they send someone to your web page, they're referring someone of their trust to your website. It's a referral, isn't it? They refer somebody over. It's a business relationship of a referral. So at the end of the day, Google senses their customers for free when we do SEO correctly. So how can we refer somebody? I have to trust them, don't I? You don't refer people to things you don't trust. So if I've got a spammy looking website, Google doesn't trust me, because my website's crap, right? So they're not going to refer.  And they tell us in some cases what we need to do. Alright, that's what SEO is, is earning trust with a search engine, so you can get that traffic. And how do search engines understand if they can trust you? What do they do? They use these things called algorithms. So for those of you who don't know, Google has these things called robots, spiders or crawlers, take your pick, right? But basically Google goes around the internet, looking at all the different pages, it grabs your page, and sends it back to their data center. And in that data center, they run algorithms over this index of data. And to understand that data, they use algorithms. The first one was that famous one where they looked at links. The founders of Google were in a library one day, looking at white papers, and they said, how do we know which one's worth reading? They said, well, surely it's the one that's been cited by other leading thinkers the most. Hey, what happens if we did the same sort of thing with web pages? And they started to count links and say, hey, the number of links you have to a web page, if a lot of people are linking to a page, that must be an indicator that this page is good. And that's really the birth of the first algorithm that was called the page rank.  Panda, that was a doozy of a update. That one, the detected duplicate content. A lot of people in WordPress got hit by this one up here. Because we end up with duplicate content in WordPress. How will your category pages, tag pages, things like that, everyone gets tag happy. Anyone got any tag happy customers that use their yep, you know what I mean, right? They put hashtag this hashtag that they think they're on Twitter. And you have to say no, you're on your website. You don't need five variations of the same tag. You just created five pages with links to this stuff. That's duplicate content, right? Penguin. Well, that detected fake or duplicate links or links worth nothing. There's no point linking to your butcher's website from plumbers are us. It doesn't cat up, does it? Think about it. Why would a plumber be linking to a butcher? That doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess maybe you did the plumbing at the butchers. But you see what I mean, like there's not a lot of sense there. So that's what this one does. Hummingbird was another one that helped people understand intent. A great example of intent. Yesterday, me and my wife were walking around the wonderful baby went up to see those gardens. I don't know if anyone's seen the gardens up here. They're beautiful. I'd encourage you to go take a look if you haven't seen it yet. And on the way back, we said, Hey, let's get a Starbucks coffee. So I said Starbucks. Now, because of the intent of the search, Google gave me directions to Starbucks. It didn't give me 2000 word essay on Starbucks on the founders. Didn't tell me about where they source their beans from or anything like that. They it knows from intent. That was hummingbird. And pigeon was another one that helped with local search as well. Okay. And then we had mobile get in. That was a while ago. But that basically means if your website doesn't work on mobile, we don't like you anymore. That's what Google said. And Fred, just so you know, every algorithm update recently is called Fred. We got sick of giving them names. They're all called Fred now. All right. So if you ever go to an agency and they say, Oh, it was a Fred update, it could be any update that happened this year. Because algorithms are now updating around 18 to 20 times a day. The algorithms change that often with Google. Now, they're machine learning algorithms. So that's why it's important that we understand this. Why? Because let's go back to our original premise. What's important, the best result for the search engine, right? Search engines want to send people to the best possible page for whatever they search for. That's what Google's trying to do. And we need to work with Google. If we're going to get SEO results for our business, we need to work with Google to prove that we have the best result. We have to prove it. And how do we do that? By creating awesome web pages. I want to go through that today. What does it actually take? Okay, to make that great page. But that's what we're doing here. So less and less are we thinking about manipulating some sort of algorithm. And we're actually thinking, What's the best page? How do I make sure that I'm giving my potential clients the best possible experience? That's what SEO is really all about. So what does an SEO tech do? What would you say you do here? All right. So what we do is we check your website against the algorithms and guides. There's all sorts of guides out there. If you go onto my website, there'll be links to some various things as we go through. But we basically look at your website and we say what's broken? What doesn't go with the algorithms? What's Google telling us that we need to fix? They can be things like you've got no alt text on any of your images. You've got long sentences that are boring. You've got broken links. You've got duplicate pages. You've got images that are broken. You've got missing titles and descriptions on your page. All this kind of stuff that needs to be fixed. And the higher quality we get, the better quality Google will pick up on your site. Pretty simple. If you think about it, isn't it? So we fix those errors and recommendations that are coming from search engines. And there's great tools that help us do that. So what is SEO? It's making the best web page for a given search term to maximize referral traffic. That's what it is. It's nothing else. Forget all the other stuff. It's making the best web page for a given search term. And one thing I want to say really clearly is do not manipulate the algorithms. Don't try to manipulate it. What do you hope to gain? You're only going to get traffic from Google where people don't look at your page and leave anyway. If you don't have the right to be the first page, don't expect it. You've got to earn that referral. Okay? Earn the referral. Make sure your page is actually worth linking to. And you'll find that people will actually link to it. Okay? Pretty simple. So what makes the best page for SEO? What makes the best page? What do actually have to have? You know, 60% of your effort we found should go into your content. You can have everything else done great.  All right? They have everything else done great. I know because we managed it. We have the top level scores on SEMrush and top scores on all the different tools that crawl the pages. Fast loading times of less than three seconds on first load under a second and a half per second load. We're talking a really great site. Good mobile experience. But they content stinks. It stinks. And they can't really get over 10,000 unique users a month. They're struggling to get over 25,000, 30,000 page views a month. Because people and they don't get repeat visitors because their content stinks. Okay? So you've got to make sure you get the content done first. It should be mobile friendly. It should be fast. The other stuff is technical off-site things like links. You know? You need people linking to your content. So let's keep going. You know? Because you've got to think about it. You just can't get top spot without that content. It's not going to happen. All right? It ain't going to happen. So let's think about this. You need to have great content. So great content is always your starting point. Every other element of SEO can't match it. Okay? It cannot match it. You need that great starting point of great content. So what is good content then? You know? So we know why we have SEO. We know the parts of SEO. But what is this good content? What does that look like? What makes a great page? And what tools can I use to get started with making this content? What can I actually use? So I've made this very simple checklist here. These are the four key things that I always look at. First of all, your page has to answer what potential clients are searching for. You could optimize for something that no one's searching for. It won't get you a result. Okay? So branded terms. You should optimize for them, of course. But there's no point. What's one of your latest products, Ricky? From WP Engine. A name of a product. Smart plug-in manager. Smart plug-in manager. Right. So Ricky works with WP Engine, a classy WordPress hosting outfit out of Austin, Texas. And they come up with smart plug-in manager. But let's think about that. Is someone going to be searching for smart plug-in manager? Or they might be probably going to be searching for something else, aren't they? So you could optimize for smart plug-in manager. But the problem you're solving, that's not actually displayed in the name of the product. So you could rank number one for smart plug-in manager. But what your users are searching for won't be there. So your page needs to be comprehensive and easy to read. Does anybody ever get a page and go, these sentences are just too short and easy to understand? Nobody? Didn't think so. All right. You should have images and video to help communicate. And a great title and introduction. So let's think about that page. So Ricky's there with smart plug-in manager. And he can go to Google and start to type in something and you get an auto suggest. And if everyone knows what I'm talking about there, auto suggest. Right? You type something out. Auto suggest starts to fill out. And these are what we call key phrases. Now it only gets there if someone searched for it. If nobody searched for it, it doesn't come in the list. Okay? That's the only way it gets there. And this is what we call keyword research. Anybody heard the term keyword research? This is what it is. All right? Yeah, a few of you heard of it. This is what it is. And you know what? It's a deep hole of stuff you can go into for a long time. I always start with this. And then from these ones, I look at the suggestions in Google and then I go to the other types of tools when I need to refine that further. Now for those playing at home who went to mrkwp.com onto my blog, there's a link to 10 free research tools with Ahrefs and I've got another great one from Semrush as well there for you guys to click on to check out all sorts of free tools you can use to further enhance your search keyword research stuff. Okay? So if you want to do keyword research, I encourage you to check that one out. So let's go on now. So I've got my keyword research. Now I need to actually make a great page, right? And wonderful thing is there's tools to do that. And in WordPress, they're free tools. Who would have thought that WordPress had a plugin for that? That's right. It's got a plugin for pretty much everything, doesn't it? One of the ones that I really love right now is the SEMrush writing tool. Man, I'm hooked on this thing. It's great. You put your research into it and it tells you everything you need to do to write your content out. It even tells you other words to put in your content, tells you how easy it is to read, all that kind of stuff. And of course for those playing at home on mrkwp.com, you'll be able to get some links to some great tools about what you need to do here. But let's just think about this. Make sure that you put headings in, all right? Nobody likes to see a big block of text with no paragraphs and subheadings. Make sure you do it. No more than 250 words between subheadings, please. All right? Nobody likes them longer than that. Keep your sentences as short as you can. Use active voice and make sure that you write to a lower grade level, okay? You can still have some sophisticated sentences but try and keep it simple. Everyone likes reading simple things. That's why people bought the Harry Potter book, the original Harry Potter book. They actually printed adult covers on it so adults could read it even though it was made for primary school age kids. Because everyone enjoyed the story, okay? It was a really good thing to do. We've lost the lights. We're in the dark. All right? We better talk about structured data now, all right? That's a bit of a dark space on the web, okay? But look, once you've got that content it's important to put some images and video in. And if you can do structured data, this is one of these little goldmines I'm finding lately. And this here is what you see with structured data. So see here how we've got like this FAQ under the content here? That's done with structured data. One of my plugins is for the dibby theme and it makes this structured data go into your FAQ. People have frequently asked questions. If you think about everything that somebody asks on Google is a question, it's also a good idea to have an FAQ on your important landing pages. And when you put it in structured data, you get this nice little card here on your information. Now obviously if you can put a video on your page as well, hey, that's awesome. But relevant content please guys, there's no point putting cats playing pianos on your Plumber's website. The GIF might look real cool, right? With that cat with its arms out playing piano. But it doesn't relate to the content, okay? And don't go stealing other people's images, all right? Get original content where you can get your smartphone out and take a photo and put it in your webpage. It's not rocket science but you know what? It makes a difference. Relevant photos, relevant images to your content help a lot, okay? So we've got all that stuff in there and of course we have to think about our title and introduction. Now let me ask you a question here. Who would say this is a correct statement? Your membership journey starts when they land on your webpage. Who reckons that's true? Anybody? Nobody. It's a bit of a trick question. Because the journey doesn't start there. If you think about it, the journey starts in Google. When they read the title and description of the text on your search link and that's called a meta-title and description, okay? Now Yoast has a great free tool. This is the example that used been used on Gutenberg and you can see here that we've got the meta description being filled out. This is the words there. That's your ad. That's your free advert on Google where they're going to refer people through. Don't skimp on your titles and descriptions because that's your advert, all right? And you think about it just by changing this. I did a test on one of our posts and I went from 800 unique views a month to two and a half thousand just by updating the title and description to better describe what my page was about. That's all I did. Nothing else. That's a lot of... that's not page views, that's users. All right? That's really cool. Two and a half thousand a month on one page. Think about what that would cost you with AdWords. At a dollar a click you're already at two and a half grand for fixing one title and meta description. And for those playing at home on the MRKWP on the blog you can actually click through to some information about that. So what have we got here? You're going to craft this great content. Let's remember this. Your page has to answer what potential clients are searching for. Your page needs to be comprehensive and easy to read and people need to understand it. It should have images and video and it needs to have a great title and information with that meta description so that people can actually click it. Remember that's your ad. That's your free ad in the search results in Google. Get it nailed. So I've got this great page but everyone needs speed right? You need to be fast. Nobody ever said hey this page loads too fast. I don't know if I trust it.  I'm not downloaded anything. Nobody ever said that right because everyone loves fast pages so let's give them what they want. Fast. Fast fast fast and that means I see a lot of people using GT metrics. You guys familiar with GT metrics? People know that tool. I love it. It's a fantastic tool but one of the big issues is people focus on these two things. My website's got an A plus. I've got a why slow score of you know what that's that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because you know what does your client you know for Stephanie up the back there for the trade is none of her trade is going to go on to Steph's website and say oh it's only an A rated page speed score. Are they? It's not going to happen. They care about these other scores here. How long did it take to load? Total time. That's what matters. How big's the page? You know if I give people a 22 megabyte background video just to fill my header up with some nice moving clouds that's not a good idea to get this page speed down is it? Right? Total times what really matters. That's what people really care about. So don't get caught up with these scores it's a vanity metric. What matters is the time and I found this out when I was testing one of our websites. I got my score to increase but my time went longer because I was using SSL with HTTP2. That meant that I can download lots of little small files instead of one big file all at the same time and it made my page go faster instead of combining it together and getting my page speed score up and that's when I realized I was chasing the wrong thing. I don't have to chase the score I need to chase a good time so for those people that really want to get good results aim for less than three seconds for your first page load less than three. Okay? So of course there's a whole bunch of tools that can help you do this. GT Metrics and Lighthouse. Lighthouse is a new tool from Google it installs in Chrome. Use it. Follow the recommendations. It's becoming a bigger and bigger thing. I use WP Rocket as a plugin just to generally give me a lot of real kick on my side to get me a long way forward to my page speed. It is premium but I think it's worth it. Next WP Smush. There is a free and a premium version of this. This optimizes your images. All right? So you don't end up loading like a 500 kilobyte image when 50 will do. Okay? Strip them down. Keep them small. Next up we've got one of the most important ones of all and let's use a high quality host. I love Kinster. Sorry Ricky. WP Engine is cool too but I've been with Kinster for a while. I've found them to be great. I can solely recommend them. I think they're fantastic but the thing is there's no point being on a bad host and getting slow times off that host or irregular downtime and stuff and expecting you to get good results. So spend the extra 10 or 20 dollars on a premium WordPress host and at the end of the day they're the ones who support events like this. So you look at the sponsors here. They're good examples of good hosts.  Go with those sorts of guys because they know WordPress. That's the point. They'll make it fast. So we've got it all going fast. I've put my awesome content in there. Now I need to make sure I measure for the results. What you don't measure you don't really know, right? We always have analytics over assumptions. Assumptions is what gets us in trouble. Oh my customers don't really want simple text to read. I've actually heard that from a lot of my customers. They don't really want that. How do they know? Have you asked them? Do they even read your meaningless drivel? I don't actually say that to the client so don't repeat that bit. Look, make sure it's easy to read, okay? So we want to make sure we've got these ways of measuring things and you probably already know them. Use Google Analytics. And when I say use, I don't mean put that snippet of code on your page and forget about it. I mean use it. Put the app on your phone. Read the stats people, right? It's got artificial intelligence there. It will even tell you what you need to know but use it, all right? Google Tag Manager. Google didn't invent this just for the sake of it. It's actually got a real purpose. Use it. Use it. I read a recent blog post on my website about do you need a plugin for this? Do you need a plugin for Google Analytics? Do you need a plugin for your Facebook Pixel Tracker? The answer is no. I personally don't recommend you use plugins for this stuff really because you should know how this works because tracking is important, okay? Use Google Webmaster Console. Yep, that means don't just submit your sitemap. Actually use it. Open it up. Look at the information it's giving you, okay? And finally, I use the Rank Tracker with SEMrush. So once you've done one, two and three. If you haven't done one, two and three, don't look for a Rank Tracker, okay? Do one, two and three first, then look for the Rank Tracker, all right? Rank Tracker is basically, you can put some details in them and it tells you where you're ranking against your competition for certain keywords. So you can track it. Again, what you don't track, you don't know. You don't understand what you're really going with. So I'm tracking everything. This is all going good, but what about social media? What can I do with social media to help my SEO? And what I found is there's one particular social media platform that loves links. All the tweeters out there, looking at you. Twitter loves links. What do I mean by that? Twitter will actually share, let you share traffic in links. You can put your link on Twitter and actually show it to people. Half the time you put a link on Facebook to your YouTube video and all of a sudden that kind of just disappears. Where'd that go? Well, hey, who would have thought that Facebook doesn't want people to leave Facebook? True, isn't it? You think about it. Facebook's model is showing people adverts. They do not want businesses to be sharing links without paying because people leave Facebook and that stops them making money off them. Because the more adverts Facebook shows, the more money they make. So when you don't just ignore sharing your links, but just know, Twitter loves links. And that means you can share this great content you've crafted multiple times. Some of my pages, I put them in an auto-share. I use Zoho social or deliver it. Other people use Hootsuite and that kind of stuff, right? And you put your link in there and you say, share this every month. And I just kept sharing it because how long is content lifetime on social media? How long does it live there for? A couple of days, a week, maybe? You see, I see a lot of people putting all this effort into making Facebook posts and Twitter posts and Instagram images. But after a week, no one looks at them anymore. Has anybody ever here had a link to somebody like an image older than like a week or two on Instagram? It happens sometimes, right? Yeah, Facebook. But how often does it happen? Like maybe one in a hundred? Not without boosting? You're not paying for ads or anything? Like somebody actually finds content you posted a year ago and just randomly likes it? If they did that, you'd think, man, I've got a store card. What's going on here? You know? Why is someone liking something I posted two years ago? But the thing is, you can have a blog post. And update it. Once every two years, just give it a little bit of improvement, you know, on something really important for your industry. And it'll get you traffic every single day of the week from Google over and over and over. And it will still be relevant for those people searching for it. It's not going to change. That's the power of your content lifetime. So use automation tools to share that piece of great content. You spend all the effort building and make sure that people get it shared to them on Twitter. Because, you know, if I show you something today, like structured data, somebody might not have used structured data before, it's new to them today. I've been using it for two years. But it's new for someone today, right? And that same information I learned before is still relevant today. So why should we not do that? So use those automation tools. You create that great content, share it again and again and again. Use Google My Business for it as well. If anyone is aware of Google My Business, you have the posts in there, they get a heap of traffic for nothing. Make sure you use it. It works really, really well. All right. So WordPress and SEO, where do we actually start? You've seen all this today. What are you going to do to get started?  And these are some simple steps. First of all, start with WordPress. Up here, start with WordPress. WordPress actually, out of all the tests I've seen, gives you more of a result than anything else out of the box. It's really quite a great CMS. It's such a wonderful piece of software. Second up, let's make sure we get a fast host. If you don't have these two things sorted, then the rest of my advice is probably a little bit mute. Next up, use a mobile optimized theme. Now, I've been a fan of Divvy for a long time, but I've been starting to use Astra a lot, particularly since Gutenberg's come out. And the reason is simply this, the pages are lighter. All right. Each page has less code. So let's think about why this is important. Google has a set amount of resources, don't they? They've got data centers and they're sucking all these pages in. Now, if they've got a budget of how much processing power they're going to give my website and all my pages are half the size, they're going to get through twice as much content on the same amount of processing power. You get what I mean? Because the pages are smaller. They're lighter. They're leaner. And not only is that better for my own customer because the page loads faster, but at the same time, Google likes it too. So look for something that's lean. I like Astra. It's a good place to start. If you can get something that's AMP compatible, I think AMP is worth exploring. Take a look at that. Accelerated mobile pages we're talking about. Install Yoast. That's free. Great SEO tool. I would encourage you to use SCM Rush. That's free as well. And of course, once you've got these tools set up, fill your website with great content using the tips I've got today, and you'll be well on your way to getting great traffic. And look, that's it. That's how you do it. All right. So remember, focus on content and ask me some questions. The only bad question is the one that's never asked. Okay, questions. Here you are. Hi, I'm Frank. Hi, Frank. I have a website and it says technical products. Yep. And they are sort of this region. Yes. So from an SEO perspective, would it be better to have a website a domain which is open or don't I need to care about that if I have a good account that will still rain better for people searching in this region? Yeah. The domain name extensions have no impact on where you're ranking. What matters is your citation and making sure your address details are correct. So that means there's a listing management tool that you can use in SCM Rush, but you look at where your domain name is and where that business is mapped to. All right. And within that, you'll be able to see, hey, Google knows that I'm in this area. Google knows I'm servicing this region. So that's what matters. Your content again and doing the right structured data, that's what will determine that Google knows you're in the right local area. You're welcome. Down the front. Just to be clear, if it's after ranking to rename the picture or tag the picture, you know it's not only when you... Yes. Yes, it will. Anything you do to improve your content can improve ranking. When it comes to images specifically, not having something like DSC001.jpg, it's better to have Matt and Kate at the zoo.jpg and then have the alt tag saying Matt and Kate at Singapore Zoo. You get what I mean? Yeah. So describing as best you can. If you think about it, if you can look at something and not know what it is from any form in a machine, then you're better off relabeling that to make it so it's comprehensible. So names with hyphens for your image names is best. Okay? Okay. Yeah, we've got a couple up the back there, Ricky. Hi Matt. Hey. That was good insight that Facebook, I mean, it's obvious now, but it was a good reminder that Facebook does not like links out of Facebook. But why did you say that Twitter likes links? Well, Twitter's becoming one of the big search engines. So let's think about what Twitter is the number one in right now. The number one in news that's now. So nobody ever says we're trending on Facebook, right? Nobody ever says we're trending on YouTube. They say we're trending on Twitter because Twitter is about now information. And Twitter is used to share links by news sites. That's their bread and butter. So sharing links in Twitter, what I found if I share the same link in Facebook and Twitter with the same audience, I get more views in Twitter instantly for the same content when everything else is considered the same. Because Twitter actually wants you to use them as a kind of search engine for what's happening right now. That's what they want. That's what their speciality is. So for them, you find in content and using it as a search engine and going to the link is the same benefit that Google has. They're helping you answer a question about right now. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Hi, Matt. Hey. So I wanted to ask a question without making it sound so complicated because working with users, one of the difficult questions they ask is something that you mentioned when their content isn't good. Yes. Isn't that subjective a lot of times? I understand that you have the bullet points of what qualifies as good content. But if you spoke into anyone who has built their own website, they all imagine that they have the best content that's out there. Sure. Well, all I can tell you is the stats prove it. That's when you say, let's look at the analytics. Because Google didn't come up with this because it's going to hurt their users, did they? Let's think about this for a second. Does Google want to send people to anything that's not proven? No. They keep the analytics. They've got some of the best AI learning tools. They built TensorFlow. They're using Markov AI algorithms and all these different wonderful technology things with one purpose, help us as Google understand how to deliver the absolute best result to search.  You know what I mean? I'd like to take it to that level. Now, it doesn't necessarily mean that Google always knows better with every audience. You can have things that are more formal or less formal in the way that you communicate things. And there's also things like trust. For example, Google will look at things like, hey, this guy's Matt Nighton, he's writing about a torn calf muscle and what he did to recover it. Why not send anybody there? Because he's not even a doctor. He talks about SEO for goodness sakes. Right? Because there's a level of trust there. So there is that factor to consider. And Google does factor that stuff in.  And anything that's in your money or your life, things like legal advice, stuff on divorce, things about medical journals, all that kind of stuff, have a slightly different algorithm applied to them about the way those businesses communicate because it's different. Right? Reading a medical journal is a heck of a lot different than reading something about my steps to do a kickflip on a skateboard. Right? And the audience is different. So do your guidelines or those discussions that you have with your clients, do they generally fall then industry-specific? They do. As a matter of fact, the SEMrush tool does apply those industry-specific things in the writing tool. So if you put those types of keywords in there, it will automatically say, we encourage you to be more formal or more casual. We suggest you to write slightly longer sentences for this and your content should be 2,000 words, not 1,000, because of the type of thing that you're targeting. Yeah. So it does take that into account. Yes, sir? Okay. We're just going to finish up the questions now so we have our tea break time. Okay. Let me show you the quick announcements. So with the announcement, we can head out and have some refreshments. And grab me if you want to ask anything as well afterwards. I'm big, but I'm approachable. All right? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


So I definitely recommend getting the slides. LauraRebel.com forward slash slides. I am Laura Rebel. Thank you so much for letting me chat with y'all today. That is pronounced Rebel like ring a bell. You are Spanish, you can pronounce it Ravel, my business family is from Cuba. So we're gonna talk about running your agency efficiently. Also known as how running a WordPress design agency allowed me to follow my dreams of being a musician. So I'll just get kind of a fun story part out of the way first. I have always loved music as long as I can remember. When I was a little kid, I was the nerdy child that would rewind the Disney movies over and over again. So I could pause it and write down the song lyrics and then sing the songs over and over. So I've always loved music and singing and when my family got our first computer, it was this really old school Tandy laptop. If you guys remember those and it was gigantic, even though it was a laptop. And all I wanted to do is type song lyrics on it. So my love of music and computers has always gotten all together. I was really fun that songwriting is poetry and code is poetry. So I think the world's implied it and it's really fun. And I'm gonna talk to you about how WordPress and the open source community kind of helped make it all possible. Right now, my husband and I live in Nashville, Tennessee where I'm kind of chasing the dream and going after a music career all at the same time that we're running an agency. So it's crazy, but it sounds cheesy, but I'm absolutely living my dream and we're having a blast. So quick two cents about our company. We were called Rebel Creative. We do WordPress web design and digital marketing for mostly small businesses and nonprofit organizations. So that's just saying where I'm coming from, and where our experience lies. We have been, I've been doing this full time for about six years and started freelancing as many as nine or 10 years ago back when I had just a regular old day job in the marketing department of a small business. This is a picture of us back when other people were paying our bills and we had day jobs. That was a fun time. But the story all started when we went on a tropical vacation about eight years ago. I made the mistake of reading the four hour work week. This was the first vacation we had taken in years where we didn't use our vacation dates to just visit family. We actually were on a tropical beach and reading this book all about how no problem, you can just quit your day job and have this internet business thing and then you can retire to a tropical island and life is gonna be incredible. I hope that'd be fun. And if that part of the book sounds like it would be really cheesy and salesy and kind of a turn off, it is a little bit. The first part of the book can come across as a little silly and overkill, but if you keep reading, what you'll discover is that his thesis really is all about proceduralizing and making your work life efficient and fully remote so that you have the time and the location independence to live anywhere and chase any dream that you have been thinking about. So if you guys, maybe your hobby is not music, maybe it's something else, but the whole idea here is just to give those bills paid in efficient ways so you have time to live your dream. So hopefully you guys will find something to relate to in that story. So I wanna talk a little bit about just laying the foundation for starving an agency and a little bit about our journey. First I wanna go back to the tropical beach and it looks really glamorous. It might be later, but at first it's really not. The thing that allowed us to do this and make sure that our bills were paid was being really frugal. So for example, when I started working from home, we shared a car because we weren't driving to two different offices every day. We didn't need two cars. We cut the cord and hadn't had a TV in six or seven years as long as I can remember. So we do our best to keep our living expenses low, which allows us to afford this lifestyle. So really all we need is the internet and the laptop to run our business. So it's not necessarily very glamorous and it took us a total of four years to make the transition from a married couple having two different day jobs to the same two people now completely self-employed. So our entire muscle income relies on our business. So that took four years. I went down to part-time in my day job while I started building websites for clients at first. Then when we started to feel good about that, I went full-time. It was full-time working the business while he still had his day job. And then about after two years of that, he was able to go down to part-time and then the next year we were both the full-time. So the whole transition took about four years and really thoughtful and deliberate planning. So just be thinking about that and what works right for your situation depending on whatever situation you're in if you're looking at starting an agency or growing your agency. When we laid the foundation, like I said, we try to be pretty frugal. We try not to buy a lot of things that are not essential and the same thing goes for our business. So I just wanted to list out for you guys a couple of things here that make it all possible. The main one I want to point out because I think not enough people know about this is Wave Accounting Software. It's a free accounting software, very similar to QuickBooks, but it has all kinds of amazing features that they don't charge you extra for, recurring revenue, invoicing, automatic monthly invoicing. It has mobile apps and things that connect to your credit cards and your bank accounts automatically to make the account reconciliation pretty quick and painless. So Wave Along has been saving us $30 or $50 for as long as we've been running our business. So that's a pretty great little free tool to know about. I could not live without last pass to manage all the password of the lungs. I hope you guys are using that or something similar. And another great thing I want to point out is HubSpot's free CRM tool. We have helped clients implement huge CRM softwares and waste thousands and thousands of dollars and waste tons and tons of time. And so many of these CRM platforms are absolutely the key elements that can take one employee almost a full-time job just to manage all the data entry and all the moving parts. However, HubSpot has a free CRM tool that is so intuitive and so painless and you can manage your sales pipeline and manage the status of all your leads and even your client projects if you build out the sales pipeline and customize it to your project workflow. So that's been an extremely helpful tool as well. If you're just starting out as an agency and you don't know what to do to get more clients, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about what works for us. I don't know anything about you guys and your skills and your strengths and your weaknesses. So it might be different for everyone, but I'm gonna just tell you what works for us. We are a referral-based business. It sounds a little bit critical, but we don't really do a lot of outbound marketing. We just kind of network amongst our natural network of friends and family and clients and existing clients and past clients and have found that kind of once the ball got rolling, people have referred business to us. So really just doing a good job, doing what you say you're gonna do, keeping in communication with your clients and letting your clients know that we're committed to a long-term partnership with you and this has led to some of that referral business for us. When we first started out, social media was really important. I made one LinkedIn post about building websites and my own cousin in South Florida said, hey, I know you did that. Actually, I need a website. Great, so never underestimate how your own friends and family might be thrilled to know that you have a work-rest business. They might not even know. And you definitely always wanna under-promise and deliver and I think, you know, fortunately we've had a lot of clients come to us in a bad spot where maybe a former developer abandoned them or had stopped replying to their emails and things like that. So having that follow-through and being someone that they can really trust and rely on can be really important as well and I feel like the word amount spreads in this industry when you do that. And, you know, another thing I recommend to people who are getting started is if you really don't have a portfolio yet of websites that you can design or that you have designed in the past, you can always offer to design a free website for someone to add it to your portfolio. And my thought on that is just be really thoughtful about who you're offering to design that website for. So for example, if you know of an attorney or a CPA who has a lot of clients that are the same type of small business or organization that you wanna be working with in a perfect world, then that might be a good choice because those clients might see your website, they would be in a position to refer those clients to you. So don't just design a free website for anyone to build your portfolio, but be really deliberate about who might be a center of influence that would be really influential in recommending future business to you. So that's a strategy that has been really helpful for us as well. And a lot of our friends and family ask, are you worried about slurs days and all these other kind of do-it-yourself website platforms?  And to be honest, no, we don't really worry about that. It's always good to stay up to date on the competition and what your competition is doing no matter what business you're in. But if a client comes to me and says, hey, I was thinking about doing this project myself, shouldn't do it myself, should I have you do it? You know what? I tell people like that, right? You can do it yourself. I'm self-taught learning WordPress. Come on down to work camp, hang out, learn everything you can.  So if that person has the time to spend and the time to tink around and the time to learn this software, that's great, they should absolutely do that. That type of person will most likely not be the ideal client that pays your bills as someone who's running a business. You're looking for the type of person that knows their time is better spent running their business than trying to do everything for themselves, right? So I always encourage those kinds of people to do it themselves if they have the time and refer them to work camp and some other great resources and even help them get started. That's the great thing about this community. We really don't do any cold or outbound marketing. In my experience, I have found that it's so hard to differentiate yourself from all of the spammers that are constantly doing cold outbound marketing in this industry in particular. So we really haven't done a lot of that. We've really just focused on centers of influence, adding value to people with no expectations of anything in return, just trying to be a good person and add value and just cultivating a solid reputation. I do wanna talk a little bit about the sales process when we get a new client. Actually, I just attended Chris Lima's talk about scoping a new commerce project and for those of you who are not in that talk, I would definitely recommend making a note to catch it on WordPress TV later and or checking out his slides because the questions that he walked through are actually with very few exceptions, all those questions would be really great for any web design project. So I absolutely wanna go home and make a list of all those questions to start asking clients on those new phone calls. That was a really great presentation. The main thing I wanna point out about our sales process is we definitely wanna ask a lot of questions to make sure we have a full understanding of the scope of the project. We want to first let them tell us what they need, let them tell us about their organization, but then you also wanna be sure and just take a minute and tell them your story so that they understand you're a real human with thoughts and feelings and you're running a business and tell them your story and what's unique about you and how you're different and just start to establish that human connection at the same time you're establishing that business relationship. And the biggest area for us that we've had to start to define boundaries and the biggest sticking point for most of our web design projects has always been about the content. It's a lot of clients don't necessarily understand that the content is going to ultimately fall on them unless they handle a copywriter. One of my favorite podcasters named Shawn Woods has a saying where he says, designers, designers design content. Designers don't create the content. You know, you're hiring me to design it but I don't know about your business. I can't write your about us page. The clients really need to be the one to do that and so I'd like to start to make that clear to them in this very first sales call and ask them what's the status of your website content? Are we moving over the content from your old site verbatim or are you gonna be refreshing it or rewriting it or is your old website a mess? Do we need to go through a little bit of a consulting process? For me it helped you reorganize that content first. All those things are definitely gonna affect the price and you also want the client to start to understand how much work is gonna be required on there and as we work together to establish a timeline and a price and all those kinds of things. And we always follow up with a formal proposal in PDF format. We make sure to outline everything in that proposal as clearly as we can. We get as granular as this is how many pages are included and if you need to go over x numbers for additional page make sure to have a footnote about this doesn't include any third-party software we might need to add into your website. We really have tried to think of everything and just map it all out in that template so that there's no stone unturned so that they don't feel like they're gonna be taken advantage of and we're trying to raise the price for something later. We just try to get all that out to be completely transparent in the beginning of the process. So when it comes time to actually build your website I put the emphasis here on the word process. The biggest thing that has changed our agency life and made our process more efficient has been coming up with one process for building a WordPress website and sticking to it. I cannot recommend that enough. And I don't know if any of you guys are in the position that I used to be in or if you ever were where when I first started out doing WordPress I was so excited about all the themes that were out there. Yes, I would go on theme forest now look at all the themes and get really excited. Oh, this one's pretty long to grab that you can find the coolest, snazziest nonprofit theme that's out there right now. And that was kind of fun to shop around but at the end of the day that left me learning a whole new theme developers process, a whole new theme options panel. There's a huge learning curve for every website that we designed and it was just a nightmare as far as the amount of time in the learning curve to build every website. So the best thing that we have done for ourselves is to pick a theme platform and stick to it and process it out and do that for every website every time. So for us, we chose the studio press pro plus theme package and that gives us unlimited access to those themes that we use on all of our client sites. They have a diverse variety of themes and that really works for us. I've also heard great things about Divi. I also had a great experience with the X theme which is highly customizable. So it doesn't even matter which theme platform it's best for you. I would definitely just recommend getting a process and sticking to it. And again, when you site ground hosting there's a lot of great other web hosting companies here as well but it's just whatever posts you pick once you learn how their platform works we definitely recommend you definitely suggest that our clients let us post their site for them. It's much more efficient. It's much quicker and easier for us to have hands on that site when something goes wrong. Again, it just makes everyone's life much more efficient. And the only thing about studio press, the only thing those themes leave lacking for me and this is probably more reflective of my skill set as a designer developer. I'm not one of these hardcore customized everything developers.  So I've found sometimes that I need to layer in something like vapor builder or some other page builder to make some of those interior pages a little more exciting. And of course we're all waiting on pins and needles to find out what Gutenberg can do and how that's gonna work and integrate with studio press as well. So that might actually end up negating my need for beaver builder for how I use it in conjunction with studio press. So definitely find a process that works for you and stick to it. A couple other really fun time savers that we like to do that I'll tell you about and some of these we've had to learn the hard way. Everybody knows to make a backup. Yes. Does everybody know to backup your backup? Yes, okay. So one other thing that I've never heard anyone suggest that I had to learn the hard way was, okay, great. You manually save the backup in the cloud somewhere and then that's over here and then your web hosting company makes a nightly backup. So I'm pretty reliant on that nightly backup for day to day tasks.  I'm usually pretty out of guard because, you know, I know I have that nightly backup. But what you don't always think about is if you just sat at your desk and did four hours worth of work for a client and you're still working and then you get that pop-up, you better not prospeed or you better pause and pull down a backup because if something goes wrong, you'll actually lose the four hours worth of work that you just did before last night's backup was made. So just being thoughtful of that as you proceed can definitely save you a lot of time and hard day as well. One other thing that's been really helpful for us to understand and just save time, especially when you're moving sites around and you have to move a site from your old host to your host, it's been a real time saver to understand the difference between the WordPress one-click auto installers and to understand the components of the core WordPress installation and how to kind of manually manipulate those when needed. So if you always use the one-click installs, I would definitely recommend going back and learning about your MySQL database, learning about that database username, password, table prefix, learning about all those moving parts and the WP options panel and things like that. Just so you have a good grasp on how that site fits together and how it works, that way if you need to move a site or troubleshoot a site, you know how to do that. And I learned all that kind of stuff at the hardware, spending long hours on the phone with whatever web hosting company I was using at the time asking why, but why, okay, but where's that, where's that? And I finally just kind of figured it out. But if you guys have any questions about that, just find me in the happiness bar and we can chat about it. Another, this is the smallest little thing but another thing that saves us a ton of time is as soon as I install a brand new WordPress website, I immediately go to WP content and plugins and delete the whole plugins folder. And y'all might think that that's weird because anyone else do that already? Yeah, I have my own plugins folder on my computer saved and I'm already pre-filled it with my 25 favorite plugins or however many that I use on almost all my sites. So then I just upload my zipped plugins folder, runs it, it takes 30 seconds and it saves me 20 minutes of install, not today, install, not today. So that's just a really quick thing that can save you a lot of time. So just always be thinking, as you're doing this process, how can you save yourself time? Never do anything manually twice, right? If there's a way to automate it, let's do it. Another thing, especially when you're working on something like studio press games, a lot of times that homepage is configured with content in the widgets. So you can import theme demo data to save yourself time but that's not gonna fill out all those little 25 different widgets for you. So if you take an hour and you're building a brand new website and you customize all those widget areas just to get it to look like the demo theme before you really get going and customizing it for your client, go ahead and use the widget importer and exporter tool to export and save a copy of all those widgets. So now next time you use that theme to save yourself an hour configuring the widgets. The same thing goes if you have top 10 favorite widget configurations that you use all the time for clients. I like to configure the content best widgets in a certain way with a bunch of different icons and a link for the map and directions and stuff. So I'll save that just so I know I can import it next time to save myself time. So just always be aware of little processing through things you can make to make your life easier because at the end of the day, if you're doing project-based pricing, that's extra time you get to live your life and do fun things. So I'm gonna quickly go over a few favorite plugins that I'm not gonna go through all of them. You got the slides here. You can download the slides at www.LawrRevelle.com or slash slides. So I do use the SiteGround Optimizer. Obviously that's just because of on SiteGround hosting. If you're on a different hosting platform, definitely optimize your site speed with some kind of cache and speed plugin. There's a ton of reputable ones out there. And I will point out the pods custom content types plugin. If you are like me, I was a designer developer who really got started just taking a template theme and customizing it for a client. So I was very intimidated by custom post types and all the customization and things that had to be built from scratch with those. But with this pods custom content types and fields plugin, it is very easy to create a new custom post type on your site. And it's very easy to then call that custom post type on the front end with something like Beaver Builder where you can just display it like any other posts. So that plugin has made custom content a breeze which just adds a lot of customization capabilities for you and your clients. So just one example is we recently had a client that needed the blog post for an actual blog but they also wanted to list activities on their website. So we used custom content type for listing their activities. And I do want to point out the AMR short code in a widget plugin. Once we get to a good known future, maybe we don't need this plugin anymore. But for now, I like to use it to add any, sometimes there's certain bits of HTML code that don't play nice in the classic page editor. So I will use this plugin to put those bits of code in a widget and then pull that widget content over to a page with the short code. So that could be a really handy workaround for like a missed one. I also like to mention, oh, use any font. If you have a client that has a very specific branding style guide and wants to match their font exactly, then use any font plugin can also be a life saver. Because not Google font doesn't have every font, unfortunately. So I want to talk a little bit about first client meeting and getting started. We have some friends that had their first child recently and jokingly, their tagline was, he's coming into our world.  We don't have to change our life or evolve around him. We're gonna, it's gonna be the same, but he's just, we're just adding him into it. And that's kind of how I feel about bringing new clients into your process. They hired you to be that expert. They are coming into your process. So whenever there's a meeting, we try to be really prepared, come to that meeting with an agenda. We're absolutely in charge of leading the meeting. I find that clients come into a new web design project a lot of times with some anxiety and insecurities they don't know how it's gonna go. They've never built a website before them. They don't know what to expect. So before you can tell them what to expect, have an agenda template, be prepared. That's gonna help them at ease and everything will go incredibly smoothly, hopefully after that. I do have some information later in the slides for you for some of the checklist items that you need from them. And always ask lots of questions, always get the client's input on the timeline. The meeting schedule. And we like to create the first draft of the site content outlining with clients. Like I mentioned, the content is one of the biggest places we've had to draw boundaries with clients in the past. So in order to feel like we're still helping them through that, what we like to do is help the client through creating the first draft outline of the site. So we'll take a look at the old site, what works, what doesn't, what does your new site need? And we'll help them over the phone come up with that first draft outline. And hopefully it looks like something we're all familiar with, right? About us, meet our team, testimonials, our services, any of that kind of stuff. We'll work with them on that outline. And once the outline's done, we basically hand that off to them and say, great, now this is your checklist. This is your checklist for all the content that you have to create or refresh or rewrite. And they can then go use that as a checklist and they'll know when they're done as they now have that outline to use and work off of. So that has made things incredibly smooth for us as well and gives the client kind of a clear understanding of what they need to do for their homework before we can go any further in the design. We definitely always try to under promise and over deliver. I like to tell my clients we have a 24-hour response time in business days. That is, if it's a small task, we can usually just knock it out for them 24 hours and not regret about or try to be great about recline and say, hey, got your email and I'll probably have that done for you by Thursday. So just always responding quickly and people really appreciate that and it leads to referrals and continued business. And if you ever make a mistake, I find that sometimes you can be worried that a mistake might ruin your relationship with that client or make it really rocky. But in my experience, actually if you make a mistake and you just apologize and then think you're right, I find that actually builds the relationship and builds that trust with the client. So don't be afraid if you do make a mistake, just apologize, fix it, make it right. Usually we don't build for that kind of thing. If it's, oh, sorry, that was my fault, I'll fix it, we're not gonna build you for that solution. Those kind of things, I find can build stronger trust in those relationships. If your client's feeling like you're gonna do the right thing. So we've talked a little bit about this already, but this is definitely a big takeaway thing for me of something that I want you guys to take away, especially if you're new at building websites for clients. The content really is the biggest sticking point and that's a boundary we really have to be clear with clients about. In fact, we base all of our timelines around it. So we tell our clients, this website is gonna take four to six weeks after you deliver us all the content. So they know from the very beginning that they can't just give us, we say, okay, great, you're so good done in January, they can't give us the website content December 15th. We say it's gonna take three months, it's gonna take three months from the day that you give us all the content. Because we can't really start designing that content until you give it to us. In reality, there are some design things that can be doing behind the scenes. We can start working on their template and getting their logo in there, making sure the main menu looks nice, but there is very little we can do until we get the rest of that content. So we're very clear about that with them. Another boundary we like to set is three rounds of changes.  You know, it just encourages everyone to get all their feedback out on the table immediately and then we just say, oh, if you need more changes, we of course want you to be happy, but we just might need a charge for that if we go past three rounds of changes. And we've never had to do that, but it's just a boundary that we set that encourages people to kind of be efficient in their review and gathering feedback from their team as it relates to reviewing early drafts of your website. And I definitely recommend getting comfortable with the phrase, no problem, we can just track our time of bill hourly for that. It seems like throughout a website project, there's all these things that come up that weren't included in the project scope or the client has questions about it. Can you help with this? Can you help with that? No problem, I'd love to help you with that. I'll just have to track my time of bill hourly since it wasn't included in the project scope. Just always being really clear and deliberate about that. And we track our time of 15 minutes minimum. You know, if a client wants you to change one thing that only takes you two minutes on their website, by the time you stop what you're going to read the email, log into their website, do the things, email them back, create an invoice, fill out that invoice and email to them, and then catch the check.  That's definitely more than a 15 minute interruption in your life, even if it's just a quick change that they need on their site. So we definitely go with 15 minute increments. Some time management tips that keep us efficient. I couldn't live without to do. It's just the to do list software we use to run our lives. I always eat the frog, which is just doing the most important thing first. I'm so ADD, I will get stuff just replying to the latest email that came in all day unless I really block out time to just knock out that most important project. So I'll check email first thing, make sure there's no emergencies, and then go into the zone on the most important project for the day, and after that I'll look up and check the email again and kind of triage and see what's important. But you definitely have to protect that time to make progress on your important projects. We do have a website wrap up checklist that we use with our clients. This helps keep us on track because I can't keep everything in my brain. I go through a very standardized process for every client, and there's also kind of some fun value added things you can do for them. So we always double check global friendliness, make sure the site speed is good, as well as the other plugin. And so we go through this whole process with them. And another thing we do that our clients really like is make video screen share tutorials for them that will record and then upload to our YouTube channel as unlisted videos and share the links with them. So if they have staff turnover, if they forget, cause six months goes by before they need to log in and make a change on their website, those videos just kind of leave it all there for them to learn and use whenever they need it. So we'll give them those links along with all their passwords and all the access to their website. Unfortunately, we've dealt with a lot of clients that have previous web designers that weren't as transparent and didn't give them website logins and that left them in a really bad spot. So we try to be really good about leaving clients with everything that they need to manage the website.  Now you have all the logins. And, you know, one thing that's really important for your business is to consider recurring revenue opportunities. Some other people have talked about that this weekend and definitely think through what's right for you, what's right for your business, what's right for your service. We do hourly searches and optimization for our clients. Our clients keep us entertained and do that for a certain number of hours for a month for them. I'm Google AdWords certified, so we can help our clients with that on a monthly basis, which are for clients for web hosting. We have some clients on proactive website maintenance agreements. To be honest, that's a missed opportunity for us that we have not done a good job with over the years and we're starting to get more into that. And in the past, we've tried managing social media for clients. Now we've kind of settled into doing more of a consulting role with that and giving them advice but letting them run with it. But really the key thing here is what's unique about you? What's your skill set? What's the technology that you're excited about learning? And how can you use that to give yourself recurring revenue so that you're not trying to go out and get new clients every single month, every time you wanna pay your bills? It's great to be diversified and it's also great to, you know, as industries change and things happen, it's great to have different skill sets that you can rely on. So at this point in the slide show, I just have some of those checklist items that I wanted to share with you guys that definitely download the slides if you wanna take advantage of these checklists. And I have some really fun additional resources here for you. I definitely recommend the Shawn West podcast. This podcast, 10 Mistakes You're Making with Clients That Cost You. This is where I got really clear on my boundaries as a designer who doesn't create content. When we first started building websites, I would just, the clients would not know how they were gonna write the content and I would just offer to do a forum to speed the project along. And once I listened to this podcast, I'm very much inclined that we had wanted to help with their content and it's definitely something I would have done pretty in the past. I was feeling good about my boundary-setting skills and said, okay, I can help you write that content but we're gonna have to charge an extra $1,500 for it. And they said, great, all righty. So that podcast might put $1,500 in your pocket and I definitely recommend listening to that. And there's some other books in here that have been really important to me over the years. I'm kind of a self-help junkie. So Big Leap, New Year, New Life is a YouTube video by Tony Robbins. It's really great for goal setting. I'm also a fan of Jeff Bezos's regret minimization framework, right? So the point of all this being efficient is so that you have time to live your dreams and do things that you're gonna regret. If you're on your deathbed, you don't wanna look back and regret not living your life and chasing your dreams and doing things that you're passionate about. So all this efficiency and running your business efficiently for me is about having time to live my dream and move to Nashville and be a musician. And we work with all of our clients remotely so we can travel and play gigs and do music while at the same time. Husbands driving down the road and I'm on my laptop filling hours for clients. So we're really there for the WordPress for making it all that possible. We're grateful to y'all for being here. I also want to go out. Shawn West is a great book about the overlap technique starting a business while you're working a full-time job. I would recommend that. And if you did not go to Tara Johnson's talk the other day, definitely keep an eye out for it on WordPress TV. Shout out to Tara. If you liked this talk and if you liked hearing about boundaries and efficient processes, she took it to the next level and has some other really great ideas for you guys. Dormant fee, which I've never heard of, but it was a fantastic idea if your client goes dormant on you to have them pay a fee to reinstate the project. She had a lot of really cool thoughts in that talk so definitely check it out. And the last piece of advice I'll leave you with is something that I believe, especially in my music career, the same thing applies to WordPress and running any business. You have to get really comfortable being uncomfortable. And I relate that to the music industry where if I go play gig as a musician in my very first coffee shop gig I ever played, I was terrified. I thought, what am I about to do to these people? I'm walking in with my guitar and how this is gonna go. Oh gosh, it's gonna be so awkward. As much as I love to sing, oh, I don't know. Is it too late to cancel it and go home? I mean, it's just so uncomfortable. And now I love it, it's what I've lived for. But the further I go along with my career, I'm always gonna be in a position of, oh no, this is the biggest theater I've ever played at. Oh, I'm terrified, how am I gonna do this? Oh no, the broadcast has to get on the radio what's gonna happen. There's always gonna be something as you learn and grow that's gonna make you uncomfortable. And so I really try to commit to being comfortable, being uncomfortable. So none of that makes sense. And it sounds really pessimistic, but I don't mean it to be pessimistic. Just, you know, I was excited about life, was learning and growing and doing new things. So I would like to keep in touch with you guys. If I have a sales fit, it is to join my email list and follow along on the musical adventure or write a monthly email newsletter about what it's like to move to Nashville and chase your dreams and be a musician. You know, we also do house concerts and we travel with Plagueis, so maybe you'll catch my band on the road sometime. So I want to stop the questions. We are definitely out of time and then I'm gonna play a song for you guys if you wanna hang around. Okay, we're out of time for questions, I guess. Sorry, too much talking. But I'll maybe grab that microphone over there and just play a song for anybody who wants to hang out during the break. Let's go to the next session.


I'm going to come back. I'll try to shake it all right. I'll do that. I'll do that. I'll do it. I'll do it. Good job. Good job. Good job. Three sets, chest and back, so you wait for the best of your time.


Hello and welcome to another edition of Dank Memes from Site-19. Let's get right into the memes with this one, the Foundation dealing with a mass containment breach, an attack from the chaos insurgency. Yeah, I've often found like SCP containment breach of the game, but not just that. The stories on the site sometimes have like a mass serious containment breach that threatens to release all sorts of really dangerous things into the world, and the chaos insurgency just thinks, now's a good time to attack. Yes, let's just end up causing the destruction of the world, because the chaos insurgency is so thinly defined on the SCP wiki. Everyone always talks about like, wouldn't it be interesting if this or that and the other thing on the chaos insurgency? And I'm always like, you know, literally you could do any story with the chaos insurgency because there's barely any canonical representation of them. I know there's some people that have been working on alternative views of them that actually make them interesting, but they really are so thinly defined. They're just basically, hey, what if it was the SCP Foundation, but evil or moving on to this is a dank memes from site 19 specific me memes about memes toaster pic exists dank memes from site 19 comedy obtained. Yep. Metamine humor. This one bothers me. Dr. Bright, Dr. Cleft, killing Hitler a few days before his death, high fives. You know what bothers me the most about this is this is a reference to a tale I wrote called Dr. Bright is no longer allowed to utilize temporal anomalies in order to travel back in time to kill Hitler. I think I got that in one. It's a long title for me to try to remember, but it also has Dr. Sumerian in it. They skipped the doctors. It should have been better. Dr. Bright doesn't succeed in that. Dr. Bright and Dr. Sumerian end up having an argument and while they're doing that Cleft has also traveled back in time some other way and ends up killing Hitler before they get a chance. And also it's not a few days before his death. It's when he dies. It's a self fulfilling bootstrap paradox sort of thing where like Hitler dies in the bunker because Cleft kills him. I'm on the road to story. I know what's going on. Grim dark characters, lol foundation characters, the scp foundation. I guess that means there's room enough for both. It really is. Trying to explain 2521 in first person, small brain. 343 meeting the gate guardian, big brain. Checking if 096 tries to become a toaster, mega brain. Checking if 682 recognizes the bodies in the water, galaxy brain. Do you though? You know, recognize the bodies in the water? I wonder since I'm a toaster do I recognize the bodies in the water? This is supposed to be Bush v Gore, but it uses Trump. They couldn't have found a picture of Donald, they couldn't have found a picture of Al Gore and Governor Bush from back. I mean there's plenty of them available. Plus there's plenty of them with the Al Gore looking really angry. Never ask a woman her age. Never ask a man his salary. Why not? See this is so silly. Never ask a woman her age. You know what? Actually it's never ask a woman her age. Never ask a woman her weight. Never ask a man his height. Never ask the scp foundation about scp 055. I don't care about my salary or my age. I don't think most women actually care about telling what their age is. The only reason they don't is because society has conditioned us all to be like those are bad things we shouldn't talk about. Same thing with the salary, to be honest with you. That way if people don't talk about how much money they make then the companies you work for can exploit you better because they'll pay certain people less without anyone knowing that they're getting paid less. Yay for societal constructs that have no real meaning that keep you... I don't know how this became a sociopolitical thing. I guess it's just be just who I am. Foundation. scp 049. What is the pestilence? scp 049. Good question. Has no idea either. That's always been my view on it. I think the reason why he doesn't answer is because he really doesn't know. Old scps? New scps. I mean I guess the idea... the idea is that old scps are simple but functional and new scps are complex and hard to understand maybe? Is that what we're coming from here? I mean I believe the title of the page was something along the lines. If I'm not saying either is better or worse I'm just saying this is what they are. I don't know that that's necessarily true either. There's old scps that are overly complex and there are new scps that are simple. I don't even think it's a trend. I think it's just we have these weird like we have ideas in our head of what the scp wiki is without actually it being true.  I don't know what this is from but it does look pretty hilarious. Carl mining his own business. Seal's tough guy finger snapping. Coming for you Carl. I wonder if that's going to be my... I wonder if on the scp wiki uh f u carl is going to be my like magnum opus. I wouldn't mind it doesn't bother me it's just I'm wondering if out of everything I've written so far is that going to be the one that stays the highest rated? Only time will tell. Welcome back sir. Will you be making a statement? Can we have an interview Mr. Tintin? Er... well I... I think articles not starting the foundation are better. I don't know if they're better but some of them are pretty good during the broken mass grade canon. UN. So yeah you got some pretty lit anomalies foundation. LMAO. Wait until you see the unkillable lizard. UN though. What? I don't know where this is from. This is in pretty good artwork. Is this original to this McCain IRL fella or did he take it from somewhere else? Either way Perry this... casual. Fair enough. Reality. The Scarlet King. Let me in. Let me in. I really like this one. This is pretty good. The idea for the reality being just a metal fence and Scarlet King outside just screaming let me in. Me talking about SCPs I really like. Dr. Samarian let me stop you right there. Yeah I do that a lot. I have this this uh it's not weird but uh I have this thing where I every time somebody says something that I find even slightly objectionable I'll be like well let me tell you what's really going on and then I get one of this long overly complex explanation of what my opinion is as though my opinion is complete and total fact uh because it is. Waiter give me a neck sandwich and make it snappy. I laughed so hard when I saw this the first time. I mean my god it's so good make it snappy. I read the first half of it was like I don't know and then I read the second I was like oh that's great I went you had me in I'm not gonna lie you had me in the first half then the second half man ha ha D-class get killed every month stop just stop they get amnesty sized and relocated everyone understands that except the ones uh which would benefit which the foundation would benefit more from keeping them exactly where they are and doing what they're doing I can't help but think this should have been SCP instead of SPC 1609 exists the GOC now this is an Avengers level threat I'm pretty sure that's the chair that they mulched yes this is uh that's about right wait for real you know I've never actually read hold on survival education destruction protection and concealment I am so so sorry but there is no no fucking way no matter what the GOC whatever their mission statement is there's no way the GOC would have the word destruction on their logo I've only never looked at this up close before I always saw this and just thought that it was you know whatever that is there's no way no what organization would do that are we the bad guys I think we are look at our logo it says destruction right there on it yeah but it says education right above it and survival and concealment and protection yeah but it says destruction that's a that's a good point huh are we the baddies I think you might be you're wrong I didn't say anything it doesn't matter you're wrong yeah handsome devil though some creating a facility in the late 1890s holding people against their these uh using people to test on extremely dangerous entities having corrupt and powerful people to run the most dangerous facility creating your own enemies and going to war with them the scp foundation built on blood that's about as accurate as it can be I think whoever created this might not be uh might not have English as a first language but it's still incredibly accurate anyway it's okay to ask for help you're not a burden murder is okay I feel like this would have been better the murder is okay would have been better if it'd been put at the end because it would have been it's okay to add because you know English readers read left to right and then uh the top to bottom so it would have been it's okay to ask for help you're not a burden your feelings matter murder is okay instead of this murder is okay in the middle which feels like it kind of spoiled I mean I get what they're doing maybe this is and maybe this is a reference to something that already exists and that's the reason why it's this way I just really think they should have flipped those two it's okay to ask you because you would have been it's okay to ask for help you're not a burden your feelings matter murder is okay either way it's still pretty funny UIU I demand to be taken seriously other GOIs no I you know the ethics committee used to not be taken seriously in in universe or out of universe until there was some stuff written about how they secretly were a lot more competent than there I feel like UIU could use something along those lines because even in the ones where they're you know they're competent or they do their jobs they're still subservient to all the other GOIs that are like more serious like the foundation foundation we finally contained scp 1425 celebrities will act normal now celebrities yeah I'm putting something on YouTube where I'm building the planet Saturn without I have no idea what the context for that is but yeah I'd be yeah crazy is crazy thank you very much for watching if you like this video scroll down and hit the subscribe button and then hit the notification bell next to that so you're reminded when I upload new videos and if you like this content and you want to see more like it or you want to see more of the you're wrong about series or you want to see more of the verses and tales series or you want to see more writing advice head on over to patreon.com forward slash D samarian there will be a link at the end of the video there'll be a link in the description and there'll be a link in the first comment because I have nothing if not thirsty when it comes to getting patreon backers shut up join the people on your screen right now in supporting this content long-term and letting me know that I'm not alone out here I'll see you all again on Thursday


My highest potential right now is telling me that I have to de-prioritize YouTube because I have a 20-page final due this week. If you're new here and you don't know me, I'm also a full-time graduate student at Columbia studying psychology and a yoga instructor. I just finished my research and, you know, I still gotta eat, so we're gonna run some errands. I need to make a return to Whole Foods, also get some produce and, like, poultry. Well, I don't eat chicken.  This is so uncomfortable because the sleeves of my sweater are so puffy and then these sleeves are so tidy, so it's all just, like, bunched up right here. Help me. So I'm just going to bring this and then a face mask. Honestly, because it keeps my face really warm, I kind of like it, especially when it's cold outside like this and my skin gets really dry.  I actually just got the new iPhone and I kind of want to see how the clips are in real life, so I'm probably going to leave my camera here and then the next clips you'll see of me running errands will just be all taken to my iPhone. All right, I'll see you guys in a bit. One of the Indian food at Trader Joe's is Shops Kiss. Like, literally, my Indian friend told me to start getting my Indian food there, so, like, you know it's good. Some green juice, two things of salmon. This is both salmon. Some veggie fried rice. Some turkey slices so I can make quick lunches for this week. Some sleepy time tea and then this tea, too, because it looks pretty good. Some yogurt, peanut butter cups, and then some broccoli. So this is probably, like, half of what I usually get, because I'm not really going to be in town for too much longer, so I figured why I could be shitting myself that's just going to rot in my fridge. So I mainly just got drinks and, like, frozen stuff. Ooh, I have a package, let's go get it. Yay! I think I know where it is. Let's open this bad boy up. Pretty hydrated lately, so I thought, why not just get a giant water bottle to help me drink water? So I have absolutely zero intention of bringing this around with me. This is probably just going to stay at home for me to drink from. And my goal, because so my goal would to be to drink two of these a day, and that would be the amount of water that someone should drink on a daily basis. So, yay! This is, like, my New Year's resolutions, but starting in December, because why not? I forgot to mention I also got a really good deal on this on Amazon. I paid 40 for it, and regularly I paid 65. So I'm going to put it in my Amazon store below. If it's on sale, I hope it's still is. I'll let you know in the comments or on the screen while I'm editing this video, but if it's not, I'm sorry. Studying definitely, and I probably will just show, like, maybe 10 seconds of me working on my paper, because, like, who wants to watch me work on a paper? So I'm going to get ready for that, and that's probably when I will see you guys again. So I'm pretty proud of myself. I was going to start dinner, because my neighbor has a party that I thought started at 7 o'clock, but now that I am reading the invite, just finished filming that, and now, I go to the party. YouTube is so weird.  But I'm going to go to my neighbor's Christmas party. I'm an hour and 40 minutes late.  I'm going to bring my discreet iPhone, and maybe I'll get some clips. Maybe I won't. Also, I don't know if I should use my whole outfit. So this is it, just the sweater, black sweat pants, and then the top, but, alright, now I'm going to go for real. I just opened the door and realized, oh, maybe I should pee, and it was banging over there, so... I'll see you guys in a bit. I'm going to get some clips definitely. It seems like a really huge, really huge party over there. I had a really fun time. I did it at last night, which means I'm probably going to be late for vlogmas, but it's fine. I'm sure you guys will forgive me. I hope you guys had fun. I had a lot of fun, and I met so many neighbors, which was really nice. But yeah, I will talk to you guys later. Bye!