Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin. Today, we are going to talk about the different ways that we can make money with WordPress, and this was all spawned on the fact that I just got back from The Podcast Movement, and there were so many different people and services and things that were, people were making money not necessarily using WordPress per say, but they had some really neat ideas, and I just want to kind of dive in and just give you some insight from some of the things that I picked up this past weekend. I want to let you know that this episode is the final episode that is sponsored by the all new Dream Press 2. I’m so thankful to them for reaching out and sponsoring the last four episodes. It’s a WordPress managed hosting provider that is much more powerful than the shared hosting account that you may get over at Blue Host or Go Daddy, and I’ll share more details at the end of the show about Dream Press 2. Three announcements I want to share today as we get started at this show.

The first one is about the WordPress webinar that’s coming up in just a couple of days. That is going to be on August 7th at 12:00 p.m. Eastern. Note the time change has changed a little bit, mainly because that time works best for me and it’s working best mainly because my daughter is asleep at that time and so I can guarantee that it’s going to be quiet in the house and it’ll make a very good recording environment. So we’re going to do that. We’re going to talk about the must have plugins for your WordPress site, how you can find those perfect plugins, and whether or not premium plugins are worth it. This is the presentation that I did this weekend at Podcast Movement, and there’s more than 28 plugins that we’ll talk about over the course of the hour, or 45 minutes or so. And if you show up to this webinar and you have heard of every single plugin that we talk about, I will make sure that I send you a free WordPress t-shirt, so that’s something to think about as well. So go on over to yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar and you can register today and even if you can’t attend live, you can go ahead and register and then you’ll get an email later that day when the video has been uploaded and you can get all the information right there. So the two pieces of announcement that I want to share is WordPress 4.3 release candidate came out, which release candidate means it’s basically almost done.

It’s one of the final last checks to make sure that everything’s ready for the next revision of WordPress. It is slated to go out Tuesday, August 18th, so that is two weeks from the day that I’m recording this, and there’s been more than 100 changes since the last beta, that was beta four of 4.3. So it basically means that release candidate thinks that everything is done, but we still need some more users to check it out to make sure everything is going okay. So go ahead and check that out. You can update that as long as you’re using the beta updater plugin inside the WordPress repository to run the latest version and make sure that you’re not doing that on your live site. In the meantime while we’re waiting those two more weeks for WordPress 4.3 to come out, WordPress 4.2.4 is a security and maintenance release and it basically just secures our WordPress installations. It addresses six different issues, including three cross-scripting vulnerabilities and potential SQL injection that could be used to compromise the site. And so you want to make sure that you are updated and using the latest and greatest version of WordPress. So go ahead and update your site today. Be sure to do a backup before you go ahead and do that, before you do that update, just in case anything may go wrong.

Now as always we’ll move right on in to the section Is There A Plugin for That? And today’s plugin that I found is called Custom Content Shortcode, and it’s a plugin that will allow you to create a custom display of content on your website, from single fields to entire pages, Custom Content Shortcode is a set of commands to display the content where you want. Basically this is adding shortcodes that you can add to your posts or pages or even your widgets or sidebars or menus so you can display custom content, instead of having to go in and create a custom template or things like that. You can basically use the shortcodes, which are little words inside of brackets like pages or posts or things along those lines, and you can also do loops. And so if you wanted to have, like, double amounts of information on a page, like normally what happens when you build a page in WordPress it has the loop and it will pull in all types of data whether it lists all of your categories or it lists all of your tags or it lists all your post pages or whatever it is, then usually that’s done. Like, you can’t re-use the loop, if you will. Well with this plugin you can actually do that. You can actually create multiple loops, so if you wanted to say, like, if you wanted to just create one page that’s like everything on my site page type of a thing, you could say, “Loop,” and then you could say, “Display all of my page titles for all of my posts.”

And then you could say, “Another loop,” and I want to say, “All of my page titles for all of my pages.” And then, “Another loop,” and, “All of my categories.” And you can just do this. And it’s kind of a neat plugin. It’s got more than 7,000 downloads. It’s just recently been upgraded. It’s got 74 five star reviews, and so there looks to be a lot of people who are interested in this plugin and are using it. So if you have any use for something like that I’d be sure to check out a plugin called Custom Content Shortcode and there’ll be a link to that in the show notes for episode number 244. All right today I want to talk a little bit about some of the things that I kind of observed this past weekend at Podcast Movement, because I was there and there was so many exhibitors talking about and helping people with their podcast, and so there were a couple takeaways that I got while just kind of thinking about this on my way home and today as I was trying to plan for what I was going to talk about on this episode, and the big thing was I realized that there were over 1,000 people at the Podcast Movement and I met a lot of you that were there and was able to share some stories about your WordPress experience and what not, and it was really interesting that we were all there, 1,000 people had flown from all over the US, mostly US, there were some from other parts of the world, and we were all there because we had one passion, and the passion was podcasting.

So this was a technology that wasn’t even around 10 years ago, and now everyone was there to celebrate that and to learn from each other about podcasting. Now the really interesting thing as a lot of the exhibitors that were there had something to do with WordPress. So there were people that had a plugin to display a podcast player on their website or they were a service for podcasters whether it be like some sort of hosting platform for WordPress or it was a hosting platform for their media content, something along those lines. And I just got to think, “Look at this, it’s free technology. WordPress is free and podcasting essentially is free.” It’s a free technology. You have to pay to host it. Kind of like WordPress, you have to pay to host it. But all of these companies and businesses are there based on free software. So I thought that was really interesting and unique in the fact that we can make a lot of money, we can run entire businesses, we can have entire companies, we can put services together, all based around this free technology of WordPress. So today I have four different ways that we can actually take what we’re doing with WordPress and we can create a service or a product and we can make money with WordPress, which is on a completely free piece of software that’s run by the community. And so that’s what I want to share today, so let’s go ahead and just dive right in. The first piece is, you can make money with WordPress by creating a WordPress consultancy business, or you can consult with people and charge them for tips and tricks and updates or whatever that you’d like.

Now, most of the time during this episode we’ll talk about a very small targeted market or targeted niche, which is podcasting. So for example, you can go out there and you can create a landing page that will target podcasters who need help customizing their website. So you can target completely on that. Whether you want to do podcasters or you want to do real estate agents or you want to do heating and cooling, people, that is, those services and industries, if you would target down to one specific little market and one little piece of the market, I think you could really do a lot when it comes to making money in the community. Because, think about it. If you are only beating heating and cooling air websites, those are the ones that they’re always going to kind of have the same thing. If you’re only creating podcast episodes, they’re always going to be kind of the same thing. So it really will help you focus in on looking for the right type of customer. You could also focus on going to these events, so if I was still in business for myself, I would go to The Podcast Movement to look for clients, because I have a shared passion with podcasting and I have a shared passion with WordPress, and most of the people that were there were using WordPress. And so I think that would make a perfect fit for me. So the first piece was I could become a WordPress consultant and I could help podcasters build out their websites.

I could help them create them from scratch or I could do customizations that they might need for their websites. So that’s one piece of the puzzle. That’s one way that I could make money with WordPress would be consulting with people in my target area. Another thing you could do is you could be like some of the people that were there that have WordPress plugins. There was probably about four, I think, four or five different stations that had premium WordPress plugins that helped to bring their podcast episodes onto their website. So they are all different in little ways. Some of them had different features, some of them had the visuals were obviously different, some of them had different features that were cooler than others, but the whole thing is, there’s a huge market, and there was 1,000 people there, and if each of these companies, say there was five companies there, if each of them have 20 percent of the market, that’s 200 customers that each of these people could have as part of their business. And so creating a WordPress plugin would be a great way to go after a target market or area. Now, building plugins is not the easiest thing in the world. I’m just going to lay that out there. There’s a lot of things that you have to do to make sure that your plugin is compatible with every single theme and every single WordPress site with all the other plugins running out there, so it is a challenge, but it is a great way to target an area so you could only focus on those specific people. I believe too, the people that I met there that have their own WordPress plugins that were there, they were asking questions. They’re like, “What are you looking for? What pieces of my plugin are they missing?” You could go to a conference and you could just learn about the pain points that podcasters are having and then build those into your premium plugin as well.

So that’s the second way, creating WordPress plugins. The third way is you could create WordPress themes. So every industry has their own type of themes. If you are a podcaster and what do you need on your website? You need the ability for people to listen to episodes; you need the ability to have your player on your site. You probably want to be able to link to outside links like affiliate links and things like that. You want to be able to have maybe a nice featured image so that you can highlight the guest that’s on your show or something like that, so you could do that. You could build several themes, kind of have your own mini theme marketplace that only sells WordPress podcasting themes, and I know for a fact that that would go over really well because I’ve searched for podcasting themes before and only found a small handful of those. So that’s something that you could do. You could build themes for real estate agents. Maybe you have, you build a theme that’s got everything that a real estate agent needs built right into the theme. Maybe it’s you’ve got it integrated with the MLS listings and you have a place where they can upload all their images for each listing that they have on their website, so their website is like a holding place for all of the active listings that they have.

And maybe they want a section that shows all of the recently sold websites, so that people can see, “Oh, these are the websites that this real estate agent has sold in the last 60 days.” If you’re going to go out and hire them, that would be great information to have. So all of these target areas would have a very specific set of needs that they’d want on their website, and then you could build three, four, five of these websites and then have them ready for people in that market. So that’s another thing you can do is you can build WordPress themes targeted toward a specific niche or marketplace. And the last one that I thought about is you could create a WordPress service, and you could create a service that could do pretty much anything that that target audience, that target market would need for their website. So in this case I actually met a team that was creating a platform, a hosting platform, it was running on WordPress, and it was going to be everything that a podcaster needed to get their site up and running from scratch. So it was very similar to, you know, it wasn’t similar but it was in the fact like Rain Maker was there. Rain Maker is a big platform that we discussed a few episodes ago when I was doing a comparison between different platforms that were out there. So Rain Maker does a really good job of coming to the market and it builds in a marketplace, it builds in SEO, it builds in the podcasting functionality, it has all of these pieces that you don’t have to worry about.

You don’t have to add your membership site or you don’t have to add a shopping cart. All that stuff is built into Rain Maker. Well there’s a company that thought, “There’s this target need that we can do for the podcasting community,” so they’re going to add the premium plugins that are necessary, they’re actually going to be a media host as well, and so it’s going to be everything all in one box solution and then people will sign up and they’ll pay, I believe they said it was going to be $97.00. The website is called podcastwebsites.com, and you can check them out. But that Podcast Websites, like, it was going to be $97.00 and they were going to charge people for it and then people could get everything that they needed and then they had the ability to put in all the documentation that they needed for people to get going instead of like, right now if somebody wants to have a podcast, they have to upload their files over at site A and then they have to do something over at site B and then site C is their actual WordPress site, and then you’ve got to integrate all these pieces together. These folks are trying to make everything under one roof within their WordPress environment, so I thought that was a really neat and unique way to build a WordPress service. You can also build a WordPress service on the fact that maybe you want to help your WordPress clients and, again, we’re going to continue with the idea of a podcasting platform, but maybe what you do is you help them to optimize their website, maybe you keep everything updated for them, maybe you put all of the themes and plugins and stuff that they need.

Not necessarily a service like the Podcast Websites, but maybe you run a package that’s perfect for podcasters. You can help them with their SEO for their podcast or do transcriptions for their audio, or whatever that service is, you can charge them X amount of dollars per month. As I think about that, that might actually be kind of cool. You say that, “I’ll build you your website and then I’ll do an ongoing service that will allow me to, like, every time that you publish a new podcast episode, I’ll take the audio file, I’ll transcribe it or have a service transcribe it and then we’ll automatically add that to your website,” and then people don’t have to do that extra step. So that would be a cool thing that you could do as well. Or maybe with the heating and cooling example from earlier, maybe what you would do is you could create a service that would go in and automatically update their catalogue for whatever heating and cooling system that they’re using. There’s all kinds of things that you can think about, and you just get into a target area, a target market will help you really kind of focus in on what you’re doing. You could create a WordPress service for creating membership sites, and maybe you help them set up a membership site and then you help them run and maintain their membership site so there’s a lot less for them to do on their plate.

So there are tons of different ways to make money. I mean, I was just thinking about it too, like, look at all these people in these companies. Of the 25 exhibitors, maybe there were 10 that had specific ties to WordPress, and they are, they have several employees and they’re paying their salaries and they’re giving them the opportunity to meet with other like-minded entrepreneurs, and it’s all based on this free software we call WordPress that we love using for our own websites, but I’m sure that each and every one of you listening today would have the opportunity and the knowledge to teach somebody else how to use WordPress or charge them to fix something on their website or consult with them and give them advice on what plugins to use and install or even just run a backup service and then install backup plugins and make sure they’re backing up regularly. You could charge X amount of dollars per month to make sure that their site is always backed up.

There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of ways that you can take WordPress and you can start making money with it today, whether, just, I don’t know. I’m just so excited that we were all there talking about podcasting but it was so cool to see so many people making money using WordPress or using some sort of technology that wasn’t even created 10 years ago or even some of it wasn’t even created five years ago, and it’s just so amazing what we can do with the technology that we have these days. So before I wrap up I want to just say thank you to Dream Host and Dream Press 2 for sponsoring this episode, and if you listened to the last couple of episodes I have shared that Dream Host was my very first website hosting company. It was the one that I created to set up a website for me and my wife as we were getting ready to get married, and I wanted to be non-tacky in a way of, “Here’s where we’re registered and here’s all the information, how to get to the wedding site,” and what not, and I didn’t want to go to theknot.com or whatever these premade wedding ones were, so I created my own website, and it was super easy and super slick to set up, and that was well before I even had any knowledge of WordPress. Now they’ve got a really cool thing called Dream Press 2 and you can find out more by going to yourwebsiteengineer.com/dreampress, and it is a steal of a deal. $14.95 per month for your website, so it’s about double the cost of a shared hosting account, but you get SSD storage, you have the ability to have up to 2.1 million monthly visitors. I know that is more than enough that would handle yourwebsiteengineer.com.

It has automatic installations of WordPress, and so this week when 4.2.4 came out, there wasn’t anything that needed to be done, it just automatically updated on its own. And so that’s really cool. It comes with unlimited email addresses, which is rare for these premium VPS hosting companies. And there’s just so many awesome things about using Dream Press. I even recommended it to somebody that came to Podcast Movement because they were on a very slow Go Daddy site and they needed to get going and get their site up to speed. And so I said, “Hey, let’s go ahead and check out Dream Press and see if that is going to be something that’s going to be perfect for you to work on your website.” So they’ve got two different options, or I guess once you’re signed up you actually get two separate VPSes. One runs your site and one runs your database, and so that makes things work even snappier, and it just works. One of these days I’m actually going to do a speed test of the three different platforms that I use, a shared hosting account, Dream Press, and Fly Wheel, and then I’m going to see, “Okay, which one is the fastest,” just kind of look at all those results and see the differences between them. Haven’t had a chance to do that, but I know that with my experience that I have with Dream Press and Dream Host, they are an amazing company and they do some really cool things.

And they’re really getting to the WordPress community. This is another way that you can get into the WordPress service business. They are building hosting specifically for WordPress, and so that just kind of fits with the whole theme of the episode as well. All right, well, that is a wrap. Don’t forget to sign up at yourwebsiteengineer.com/webinar for the next webinar that’s going to be highlighting the most essential plugins for your WordPress site. Also want to let you know that because of going to The Podcast Movement, I got some ideas floating around on how I can make this show better, and so be on the lookout for those. Didn’t have time to update or make any changes this week, but probably next week or the week after you’ll see some new things coming to the Your Website Engineer podcast show. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care. Bye bye.