Welcome to another episode of Silence is Golden where we share invaluable tips for your WordPress business.
Look who's back! Simon’s back! He has been in Canada with the polar bears. If you want to hear the story about someone he met that actually got mauled by a polar bear and some fun polar bear facts, then tune around the 2-minute mark!
Today we'll be talking about how to increase profit in your business by turning your services into products. We’ll also be talking about customising the all backs shop in WooCommerce, how not to GDPR, we look behind the scenes at the FlyWheel July Sale and Yoast is going to teach us how to optimise our optimisations.
Watch the Video
Stuff That Happened
Building The Official All Blacks Shop on WooCommerce
Simon picked out an interesting article for us on customising the All Blacks shop. There’s been a lot of content out there about Shopify vs WooCommerce so this is a good look at why WooCommerce is a good solution. It goes into the tech side of creating the site including the plugins, reporting and planning.
British Airways Shows Everyone How Not to GDPR
Troy thinks this is hilarious! British Airway's social media staff have been caught unintentionally encouraging customers to post personal data (such as their address and passport number) into a public forum. Woops!
How to Optimize Without Spending All Day Optimizing
The process of rising to the first page or even the top three result is a long one. This article from Yoast explains how to be more efficient with your optimizing with repeatable processes.
Behind the Scenes of the Marketing Campaign for Flywheel’s Fly July Sale
For the past four years, Flywheel has launched a summer sale called Fly July featuring three months free on any new annual hosting plan. So they shared a little behind-the-scenes glimpse into their campaign process. There are some great takeaways from this and some interesting advice on looking at the results of a campaign and writing up a debrief.
This Pisses Me Off
At the 10.30 minute mark, we find out what pisses Simon off – perfectionism.
Simon gets a little philosophical here…. and says that perfectionism isn’t real. What in life is perfect? (apart from Simon’s hair!) Nothing! To be perfect is to be without flaw and what is without flaw? Nothing! It's subjective anyway so what is the point in trying to be perfect?
Public speaking can be scary because we’re afraid of being judged. However, Simons says that around 10% probably won’t like you anyway! So if you can accept that nothing will be without flaw then that will help release you from perfectionism.
We live in a society where praise and high achievement is something that we want to strive for and when you hold onto that too much and become afraid that you’re not going to get praise, then you will hold back on not getting anything done!
Tune in at the 12.15 minute mark to hear a pretty inspiring story from Troy about this topic. Trust me, it's a good one!
Let’s Get Unstuck
Guess what? Over the coming weeks, we are going to take some live callers on the show via Skype for our “Let's Get Unstuck” segment. So if you want to call in and be featured on the show, then give us a call and leave a message with your Skype details and we will get back to you. Our phone number if you’re in the US is toll-free: 1844 241 5000
Around the 18 minute mark, we dive into the Facebook questions.
One of our members, Mitch, asked:
If you were going to productize custom website builds… would you do it with base packages, and then offer add-ons to let the client customize their package?
Simon's take on this is that when it comes to building products you can’t offer everything to fit everyone. It’s about delivering a consistent result and maintaining a consistent profit. If you have too many options it makes it more confusing and harder to sell. Start with the one product or package, build it, get feedback and then it will naturally progress from there.
The Golden Nugget
At the 24.40 minute mark, we dig into the Gold Nugget. Today we’re talking about increasing profit in your business by turning your services into products.
The Benefits of Productising
One of our members, Corey, writes in to say “I watched your yarn with John Jantsch and it really struck a cord about packages helping to avoid the time wasting of pitch after pitch etc, and making it easier to find the right clients, and get on with the work!”
The reason that Troy likes products over services is because with services there’s a lot of back and forth, rounds of revisions and micromanaging because clients don’t know what they’re doing. (Which is not their fault). He loves products because they’re easy to sell, easy to manage expectations and easy to make a profit.
Productising doesn’t mean that there's no room for creativity. It's about delivering the value in a shorter amount of time. It even allows you to teach and delegate tasks to other team members.
If you have a product, then the client believes that you have a solution to their problem. However, if you are creating a bespoke service then you're kind of making stuff up on the fly. So packaging it up into a product that has inclusions and exclusions, has a name, deliverables and a price point is much easier for clients to understand what they’re buying.
Troy always says that an hourly rate is an arbitrary figure that two people agree on when they can't agree on the value that is being transacted. Whereas a product clearly communicates the value that they’re receiving.
Good Revenue vs Bad Revenue
Simon was chatting with one of our members Charlie the other day about good revenue vs bad revenue. It’s better to bring in $100 that takes up none of your time, rather than $1,000 which takes up all of your time. If you’re bringing in the revenue that takes up your time, you get stuck and you can’t grow or scale the business.
Let's Brainstorm Product Ideas
A product is something that you can repeatedly produce to create a predictable result. So if you're doing something more than once, how can you automate it?
Some ways you can productise things:
1. Re-sell a Product or Service
You don’t always have to create a new product or service. Instead, you can resell someone else’s product or service. Many companies offer solutions such as white labelling that will allow you to resell their product or service with your branding.
You can do this for SEO and social media campaigns with white label companies such as Growth Geeks. You can charge for hosting, and even maintenance plans using a company such as WP Buffs.
2. Leverage your Content
If you are being asked the same question frequently, then write a blog post about it, publish it and email it to your clients. You position yourself as the expert by doing this and attract more customers at the same time. Or create a manual, video tutorials or a course.
Other examples of productised services:
- Write an E-book (which is great from a marketing perspective)
- Build a Plugin
- Build a Theme
- Website care plans
- Google my business set up
- Review funnel
- Digital strategy
- Website audit
Tool of the Week
MyWebAudit was created as a product by one of our members Clifford Almeida. It helps us start the conversion process where we look at the client’s competitors and conduct a website audit. It has a check list which you can leverage and use with your clients.
Wrap Up
So that's it for this week. If you haven't already, make sure you are signed up to the WP Wednesday to stay up to date with all the latest news and tech in the WordPress space.
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