On today’s episode, we are going to talk about how you can use your existing clients to make more money for your WordPress business. Right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 361. Hello, everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler, and today we are going to be talking about different ways to generate a little bit more income, a little bit more cash to round out the year of 2017. We’ve only got about nine weeks left in the calendar year, and time is just going really, really quick, and I wanted to share some ideas and some topics, and just some different ways that you could make a little additional money to round out this calendar year. But, before we do that I have a bunch of announcement to talk about, and plugin to share with you, and then we’ll dive right in.

So, the first one is – and I put this in my notes last week just a couple days after I recorded the last podcast – and it was going to be the countdown to 400 billionth spam comments that have bene removed by Akismet. And since that has taken place, that number, 400 billion, has been surpassed. It’s at 4 billion, 346 million, 210,000 comments, and the number keeps going up as I record the show. I’ve got a link in the podcast notes for this one in case you want to check it out, but it’s just a counter that goes up by like, 150 or 400 it looks like, at a time to show how many spam comments are being blocked by Akismet. Of course, Akismet is part of the Jetpack suite now, and so, if you’re interested you can go to Akismet.com or you can install it and turn it on from your Jetpack settings inside your WordPress dashboard.

There’s another great article that I linked to in the show notes, and this was by Mel Choyce, and she is one of the co-leads of WordPress 4.9, and it is giving you kind of a breakdown of everything that’s coming in 4.9, includes some animated gifs that you can see some of the customizations. It looks like you’re able to customize some, or make some drafts to customizations before publishing them, so you can do quite a few things. Like, you can go into the customizer and you can make all of these changes and update a few things, and then you can set when you want those to be published and when they go live. Lots of different things, I’d recommend checking it out. We’ve got just a couple of weeks until WordPress 4.9 comes out. Speaking out of 4.9, WordPress 4.9 release candidate has now been left out to the wild.

It is the release candidate means that the code is done, but they’re just looking to make sure there’s any bugs that need to be squashed or fixed that they need to work on. It looks like they’re targeting Tuesday November 14th, and they need still a little bit help to go in, check it out to make sure themes and plugins to make sure everything that you’re doing on your website works well with the new version. And so, if you have a development version of your site, I recommend testing out the new version of WordPress 4.9, and you can do that with the WordPress Beta tester plugin that you can install right from the WordPress repository, and then you can get the latest and greatest version, or within the blog post for the release candidate status, you can download the zip file that contains all of the WordPress information.

So, there are more than 30 changes since the beta of last week. They had four betas, and now they’re on the release candidate stage. Also, from WordPress.org, the news this week is the WordPress 4.8.3 security release has been released, and it has a few security releases and there’s releases for all previous versions of WordPress. So, if you’re web post hasn’t automatically updated you to this version, I highly recommend doing that as well. Let’s see, what else do we have this week? I want to talk about the WordPress Survey. There is the survey that happens every single year, it is a five to eight-minute survey in total, and the results well be presented at Word Camp US in December. The survey basically just gets some information about how you use WordPress, it usually asks some questions about if you make money from WordPress, and all of those good things.

So, go ahead and take the survey, it just takes a couple of minutes and you can go ahead and check that out, there’s a link in the show notes for that. Or, if you just go to WordPress.org, there’s a little banner at the top of every page and you can just click on that and take the survey. Two more announcements I have for you, and these come from the Woo Commerce Division, the first one is the WooConf Videos are now available, or at least some of the big, main videos. It looks like right now there is six videos that are available, and the top one is a 48-minute video by Todd Wilkins, and he is the lead of the Woo Commerce Division. So, you can find out these at WooConf.com/videos, and as always there’s a link in the show notes. And lastly, we’ve got an article written on WooCommerce.com, this is a big one.

This is news that we have been holding on to for quite a while, it’s such a difficult decision, but as of October 24th, Woo Commerce will no longer be selling Canvas, the theme that has been around for probably longest part of Woo Commerce tenure. It just can’t hold up to the new standards in WordPress. It’s not a good option especially with the site builders that are coming out, it doesn’t work well with the customizer, and there are just a few small things. It needed a complete rewrite, there was a lot of things that were changing. The theme, Canvas, came out in February 2010, so this was even before this podcast started, and it was one of the most popular themes that are out there. The recommendation is to go into and use the free storefront theme, had all the things that Canvas can, but it just cannot do things in the customizer in some of these.

The Gutenberg wouldn’t work very well, the new Gutenberg editor, that wasn’t going to work very well in canvas, so the team over there made a tough decision and said that it is going to be retired. It will still continue to provide support for the next calendar year, so until October 24th, 2018, so that’s the news when it comes to Woo Commerce. Alright. Now, let’s go into “Is There a Plugin for That?” this week. This one is one that I found last week, and I was going to tell you all about it but, there was really nothing to report on. But, this one is called Dark Mode, and it is a feature plugin with the hope that it will eventually make it into core, and it is a plugin that is again, not recommended for use on a main website, just because there’s not much development that’s been done yet, but it is called Dark Mode.

And this the ability to turn your dashboard, your WordPress site into a dark theme. And so, on the right-hand side, the panel that’s normally kind of grey, or that light-ish color, it can go ahead and just toggle that with the switch that’s in there, you can toggle Dark Mode and then it makes it much more computer friendly for Dark Screens or working at night. And last week when I talked to you about it – or, I was going to tell you about it, you could turn it on and you could check the box, and then it did nothing. Well, over the last week or so, they’ve gotten a lot of CSS added to the plugin, and it’s starting to look really, really nice. If you are somebody that wants to get involved with a plugin that could go into core someday, I recommend getting in on the ground floor of this. It’s got 40 active installs, so it’s not very many active installs, but it is a plugin that’s working, there is a GitHub repository where you can go in and see some of the issues and change some of the styles.

It’s one that I’m getting involved with just because it’s super easy to. It’s basically just modifying colors, and that’s pretty simple, all done with CSS. So, that is Dark Mode, it’s created by Daniel James, and you can find that on the WordPress repository after you’re done with the 2017 survey, of course. Alright, moving right along here to the main topic of the show, and we’re going to talk about how we can finish strong in 2017, make some more money for our WordPress business if that’s what you’re in. If you’re just getting started, these are some great opportunities as well, and let’s go ahead and dive into some of these ideas that I came up with. They’re not really in a lot of order, but let’s just go ahead and dive in and talk about some of them. It’s really hard to kind of predict how a WordPress business is going to work, and I had this struggle a few years ago when I was running my own business.

Like, some months were really, really fruitful, and other months it was just like, “Oh, there’s no work,” or I was working on other things, and I just didn’t make a lot of money. But, there are a couple of reasons why web design projects stop, or get stuck and they don’t actually get finished. And mainly it comes down to these two premises One is, clients have higher priorities, and so as a business owner that you’re working with, they may have higher priorities, you know? They may have to, you know, get ready for a Black Friday sale, or they may have to get their website inventory updated, or they may have to go to China to outsource something, you know? There’s tons of things that business owners can be doing. So, that could be one reason that they don’t finish the project.

And that is, they have higher priorities, or another reason that projects get stalled sometimes is because you’re waiting on assets from a client whether that some sort of copy, or maybe you’re waiting for some images, or whatever, you’re just waiting on the client to deliver the necessary information so you can finish your part of the website. So, sometimes these projects get stuck. Sometimes it’s your fault, sometimes it’s their fault, but let’s talk about some ways that we can get our projects un-stuck, or maybe pick up some additional projects to round out the calendar year. You could do something to incentivize the completion of a stalled project. So, what you could do is if you offer web maintenance, maybe you could offer one or two months’ free web maintenance if we can get this wrapped up by the end of this month.

That’s something easy that you can throw out there. Maybe you could do a free upgrade to a secure website at a HTTPS if they don’t have that valid certificate, you can get them all set up because it takes some energy and it’s something that you could charge for to get the client’s project by the end of the month. Or, you can come up with other creative offers. What could you do that you could offer, of a service that you’re already doing, or maybe you could – you know, you don’t want to give them a discount by finishing by the end of the month, but what other value can you add by you know, “Let’s complete this by the end of the year.” If a client is stuck on content, maybe you could create a content guide, and it would simply walk through different portions of website with examples.

Maybe you can include content like, what do you provide? What would your clients choose? What separates you from your competitors? And these questions should be designed to extract information right from the clients, and then let them guide you on the direction. The other way that you could do it is you could offer a few hours consultation, or you could make it a paid thing, or you can do it for free, call it a “Content Sprint.” You could set up some time to work through your content one on one, during the meeting you can just jot down the way that they’re answering your questions and what they’re talking about, using their native language, and then you could write all of the content. Or, you could hire somebody out that’s a copywriter to write all of the content. Ultimately, getting on content is one of the biggest issues; it’s one of the biggest sticking points.

And sometimes what you could do to eliminate this is you could say, “No code before content.” It’s a great motto for anyone building a website for a client. You want to tell them how important the content is for the development of the website, and say, “I’m not going to start any code, I’m not going to build on anything until we get all of the content that we need.” That’s a great way to keep that website going. Another thing you can do is you can add project delay penalties into your contracts before you even get started. So, you can cover delays. So, if there’s a penalty built in, you now, it could be an extra $100 for every day late that they are with their content delivery. Or, it can be, “The price is going to be this much, maybe $1,000.00 if you get all of the content to me by this day, but if it goes another week, then it’s going to be $1,200.00.”

You know, kind of build that into the contract. And if you don’t have that now, I recommend updating your contracts now. Adding that language concerning stalled projects can just significantly reduce that likelihood of a delay, especially if there’s a penalty involved. Maybe if you have a project that’s delayed more than 30 days from missing content, then maybe you put their project all the way at the bottom of your project list, and then it gets worked on when you have the available time. Or, you could say, “Oh, I’ll start working on it again once everything from the project is in hand, once I have all the content, and then the running balance is paid in full.” You can set something like that up so you can make sure that these are penalties to give the urgency to the business owner like, “Hey, this is important. I need this information so I can continue to finish my website, or finish their website.”

The last quarter of the year is often the time when many businesses are looking to spend money that they have by the end of year, most small businesses kind of hoard their money, and they’re seeing how frugal they can be throughout the year to make sure they can make all of their ends meet and what not, and they may come up towards the end of the year and have some money left over. You know, maybe their business did a lot better than they thought, or what not. And so, the few other ways that you can do to maybe pull some of this money, or extract some of this money is you can do some cold calling if you want. That’s not really my favorite one, it’s terrifying, it’s scary, and it’s usually not too effective if you just start cold calling people. But what you could do is you could start with your current clients, and if you’ve been freelancing for a while, just have your existing client base as a potential gold mine for opportunity.

What you can do is you can offer some of your existing clients some other things. Like I said earlier, you can do HTTPS, you can update them for a secure website, maybe you can ask them if they need a site audit, or speed improvements, things that may be slowing down on their website, what can you do to boost those search engine rankings or speed up their WordPress site. Maybe if they don’t have a mobile site yet, or the last time you worked on their site was a few years ago and mobile wasn’t a thing, you could offer that you could update their website for a mobile version of their website. And of course, you don’t want to say, “I’m going to do this for free!” You know, you want to be able to say, “Hey, this is something that I’m willing to do, and it’s going to be ‘x’ amount, and you can make money that way.”

You can also do a security audit in a service; just having an online security strategy is non-negotiable these days. Everybody should be having some sort of strategy, and you can actually build this in to a recurring revenue thing. You know, you do a security audit once a month, or once a quarter, or whatever. And general WordPress maintenance, that’s another thing. Are their websites updated? Are they running plugins that are updated? You could make a duplicate version of your site; you can update all their plugins, make sure everything works well, and then update them on the live site. That’s another service that you could provide. And one thing that I thought of when I was coming up with this list, like sure, you can ask current clients for all of these things, but you can also ask for a referral.

And with these referrals, you can say, “Hey, for every referral that you send to me,” and you can come up with the idea of whether it’s the referral has to actually turn into paid work, or if it’s just any referral that they give you, you could incentivize it. So, you could say maybe you get one free month of website maintenance for every email address that you provide to me. Or, you could get a gift card, you can send them gift cards for whatever, you could send them a nice gift, like depending on the size of the project. If you get a $5,000.00 project, you could send them a $200 Kindle, or an Apple Watch, or you know, you can come up with whatever you want. But, you could do those things. Or, you could offer them, like, “If I get a paid client off of somebody that you do, I’ll give you the service of updating your site to HTTPS or do a site speed audit, or change your website to mobile.”

You know, you could come up with the incentives, and you can list out your clients and send them emails and say, “Hey, this is what I’m looking for, I’m looking for people to complete projects.” Another thing that I’ve noticed when I was in this space, is whenever I would do some sort of email follow up, just send that email blast out to all of my past customers and clients, and inevitably somebody would email me and say, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about getting this, and this, and this, can you help me?” So, just sometimes being in communication with the clients that you already have is a great way to start that conversation with another project that they may have. Another thing that you could do since we’re getting close to the end of the year is you could raise your rates.

And you can send an email out, you can send it out here in November, and say, “My rates are going up by 10 percent, or $100,” or whatever the rate is, and say, “They’re going up on January 1st.” And you can set a block time at your current rate. If you wanted to, maybe you could say, “Oh, you can purchase a block of time, a five-hour block for $100, or $100 per hour now, an it’s going up to $150 in January.” Like, you can have them purchase in advance to kind of save some money, or you could say, “Oh, if you get your project started by the end of the year, then you’re grandfathered into my current rates.” So, that’s another option, another way that you could potentially get a little bit more business to close out this calendar year. Coming up with these ideas made me excited and a little bit sad, because it’s like, “Wow, I could do these, but I don’t have my own WordPress business anymore.”

But, some of them sound like it’s kind of a cool idea, and how can you gain the system, or how can you play your cards so that other people can help you find the work in the business that can help grow your company. And so, those are some things that I wanted to talk about today. It is getting close to the end of the year, we’ve got five episodes this month, and I’m going to be sharing a lot of different random WordPress stuff as we kind of close out this year. The theme of the month is “Random WordPress Things.” And so, today that’s what we talked about. We talked about how to finish strong in 2017, how to get some additional income, wrap up some of those projects, and get your revenue going on the upswing as we move on into 2018. So, that is the content and that’s the information I wanted to share with you this week, and we’ll talk again next week. Take care, buh-bye.