Mastermind.fm

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. Today Jean is joined by Adrian Tobey in a chat recorded at the Collision conference in Toronto. We touch upon various topics like building a WordPress plugin business from scratch and what that entails, pitching to investors at big conferences, why WordPress people should attend conferences outside of the WP space, working with family members, and more. Links Groundhogg Collision

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. This week Jean is visiting his friends Dejan and Tina in Toronto, Canada. They are all attending the Collision conference that is happening in the city, so they take the opportunity to record an episode and talk about social network automation and management. Tina and Dejan are the cofounders of Social Web Suite, a WP-specific tool for social network management. We also delve into lessons learned within the WordPress, community, SAAS vs traditional plugins, working with your life partner, and the value of smiling and hugging people :) Links Social Web Suite

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. Acquisitions have almost become the norm in the WordPress space in the past couple of years or so. Beyond WordPress, they're also a common occurrence. Big companies often acquire smaller companies (often start-ups), while some business owners find that it's time for them to move on to something new. In this episode, Mark had the opportunity of speaking with Anthony Presley and Craig Williams. They've gone through a few acquisitions over time and have recently acquired Templatic, a WordPress themes and plugins shop originally founded by Bhavesh. The discussion revolves around what an acquisition is, how it comes about, what factors are important to keep in mind throughout the process, and how Anthony and Craig went about their own acquisition of Templatic. The two of them bring up some invaluable insights on key elements to look out for and how to go about something like this, whether you're the buyer or the seller. Links: Templatic.com  

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In today's episode, we welcome Lucas Radke from Plesk to give us a tour of Plesk and all the services they provide. Plesk can be used by many different target audiences, starting from single end users of WordPress right up to big cloud services like DigitalOcean. We discuss many interesting aspects of managing WordPress servers, including security, caching, managing multiple WordPress installations and their updates, backups, staging as well as Plesk tools for SEO. Plesk has been making a big effort in the WordPress space in recent years and I thoroughly enjoyed learning about the various services they offer and the situations which would warrant using them. While many people default to hosted management solutions, they sometimes ignore the fact that having a DigitalOcean or Vultr VPS with a panel like Plesk can be more than enough for their WordPress hosting needs and save a ton of money in the long run. As we discuss with Lucas, one needs to carefully anal

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In this episode, James Laws is back and he has some catch-up time with Jean as they discuss what they've both been up to in recent months both on the personal side as well as the business side of things.

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. I have been following Matt Medeiros' work for a few years through Twitter, Youtube, podcasts and so on. Recently I got in touch with Matt and purchased one of his services, User Feedback Videos, for our WP RSS Aggregator plugin. I loved his take on things and we got talking from there. Matt accepted my invite to the Mastermind.FM podcast without any hesitation and we were on Skype just a few days later. To me this was a bit surreal as I was used to watching videos of Matt for so long. In fact, at one point in the recording you may notice I seem a bit lost... that's just because I thought I was watching a video while Matt was explaining something. It then clicked that this was a call and I had to speak, so on we went. This episode focuses around the topic of managing multiple projects at different stages. Matt has been involved in many areas of the WordPress space, even having a background as a car salesman, so he has been juggling multiple jobs and projects

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In this episode, Jean joins Asif on the show to have an informal chat between friends. We touch on some important topics such as: the current state of WordPress and thoughts about its future, what it means to retire in your mid-thirties, the impact of travel and living abroad on our lives, how our parents' lifestyles shaped our choices and motivations life in Bangladesh Asif is one of my favorite people in the WordPress community; I really respect what he's managed to achieve so far and best of all the fact that he has remained very humble and open to sharing his knowledge with anyone who approaches him for help and mentorship. I wholeheartedly support the drive to have Bangladesh host their first WordCamp ever, and hope to have the chance to visit this country in the near future. Enjoy the show! Jean Links Asif's blog WeDevs WP Developer

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. SEO research may sound daunting to some, but there are some basic methods and tools that everyone should be using. The Ahrefs team recently got in touch with me when I published this article on WP Mayor discussing WordPress' performance in comparison to other CMS options. That led to discussions around Ahrefs, and eventually, this episode. I'm joined by Joshua Hardwick, the Head of Content at Ahrefs, to discuss SEO research techniques using tools from Google, Ahrefs, and others. We delve into a number of areas that every site owner should be aware of and a few technical ones for those who already know the basics. Among the topics we discussed are: What is SEO? What is keyword research and what tools can we use for it? What are backlinks and how can we build more? How to understand what type of content you should focus on to bring in more visitors? Analyzing your competition through tools such as Ahrefs. Finding competing domains that you weren't

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. This week I welcomed back Jean Galea to the podcast as we found some time to discuss the plugins we're using at the moment, and why we chose them. Although Jean and I work together, we rarely find the time to have discussions such as these since we tend to focus on different projects, so this was an opportunity to see what each of us was doing. At the same time, we're hoping to give you a better idea of how we run our websites and perhaps point out some plugins you weren't aware of before. Throughout our discussion we focus on plugins and a few SAAS tools that have integrations with WordPress. Since the WordPress sites that we run are focused around either content (WP Mayor) or e-commerce (WP RSS Aggregator, EDD Bookings), our choice of plugins is also centred around these markets. Even if your sites are not focused around heavy content or e-commerce specifically, there are some great little nuggets in there for you. I won't list down all the plugins we use

The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius. In episode 103 I am joined by Markus Schwingenschlögl, CTO of ThemeFusion, the company behind the Avada WordPress theme. Markus had recently answered a Q&A for us over on WP Mayor, hosted by David Scott, Envato's PR and Communications manager. This episode is a follow-up to that Q&A, so I recommend reading the Q&A before starting to listen to our conversation here. Marcus is an integral part of the Avada theme's incredible growth on ThemeForest, the WordPress theme marketplace from Envato. They recently hit the $25 million mark in sales with an average rating of 4.77 out of 5 stars from over 21,000 reviews. Those numbers do not lie - the ThemeFusion team is doing a lot of things right. In our discussion we go over a number of the areas that ThemeFusion has focused on in order to achieve this feat. These included: The idea of focusing on the development of a single theme with the introduction of one-click install demos for various use-cases. Methods of g

This episode is sponsored by Plesk and EDD Bookings. In this episode, Jean and Mark were joined by Michiel Heijmans, the COO of Yoast and an all-around great guy, to discuss conversion optimization and a lot more. Michiel is much more than just a COO of one of the most well-known WordPress plugins around. He has been a part of the Yoast team from its infancy. In the years that have passed, he has contributed in many ways to its massive growth, especially through a focus on conversion optimization. In our discussion with Michiel, we found out a bit more about Yoast as a company, their love for Lego, his experience in growing with Yoast, as well as what he and the Yoast team do to keep expanding and improving on their offerings. One of the topics we covered was content writing and optimizing your blog. We looked into how to make sure your blog performs well, both for search engines and your readers' experience. For instance, Yoast.com's blog is categorized into a number of topics. Their team gave a lot of i

In this third episode with the man of many talents Kevin Muldoon, we discuss his experience with running YouTube channels and constantly creating content across several topics. We discuss what are the most common failures of prospective YouTubers as well as practical things like which hardware and software to use, as well as ways to earn money from YouTube. We also dwell on the effectiveness of the medium versus other channels such as blogging. Links YTtalk Streamlabs OBS OBS Project Screencast-o-Matic Kev's Crypto Channel

In our second episode with Kevin Muldoon, we discuss how he got into cryptocurrencies and his experience with mining them. He also speaks of his involvement with the SafeCoin project. We draw a lot of parallels with the WordPress world too. Definitely a great listen for anyone entrepreneurial who is also interested in cryptocurrencies. Links Kev's Crypto Channel How to Build a Crypto mining rig Awesome Miner Discord SafeCoin Coinbase MiningRentals NiceHash

In this episode Jean makes a return to Mastermind.fm to chat with one of his longtime friends in the WordPress space; Kevin Muldoon. Kevin built one of the earliest big blogs about WordPress (WPmods.com) which he later sold off on Flippa for $80k, at that time the largest sale of a blog in the WordPress niche. He then continued blogging on his site KevinMuldoon.com, before venturing into YouTube video production. His latest project is cryptocurrency mining. We talk about many different facets of the WordPress space and what it means to be successful in business, as well as how to deal with pursuing different passions while still making a good living. This was a great and candid episode with one of the most honest content creators I know, and we'll have Kevin back on the show soon to delve deeper into his experience in crypto. KevinMuldoon.com Kev's Crypto Channel Kevin on YouTube Kevin's Twitter account

A few weeks ago I was excited to receive a message from David Kelly, the General Manager at KingSumo, a sister-company of Sumo and AppSumo, all of which I encourage any business owners out there to look into. After a few discussions we set up a date and recorded this episode. David provides a ton of value to the discussion of guerrilla marketing given his experience in growing seven-figure companies. If you're not aware of what guerrilla marketing is, here's how David himself describes it: One of my biggest frustrations as an entrepreneur and small business owner is marketing can be expensive. Facebook Ads can cost a lot of money, hiring a SEO firm is costly, getting good writers to write content adds up... the list goes on and one. When you're starting a business, you need to keep costs down: this is where guerrilla marketing helps. Using free or much less expensive guerrilla marketing tactics, you can grow your business faster without breaking the bank. In this episode, David explains those inexpensive, ef

Selling digital products online, including WordPress plugins and themes, can be easy if you've got a small shop, but once your business starts to grow, it becomes harder to maintain. Spending time working on your self-hosted e-commerce setup rather than building and marketing your product starts to work against you. That is where Freemius comes in. It's an e-commerce solution that takes care of all the nitty-gritty parts of running your e-commerce business while providing built-in marketing tools, some of which are new and exciting for the WordPress e-commerce space, to grow your business. The cost of having bugs and other issues fixed for you, and having access to a vast toolset that allows you to grow your business with relatively minimal effort, is a percentage of your revenue. When running a small business, this percentage could be seen as worthwhile as you can focus on developing the product rather than handling VAT setups, payment gateway issues, and so on. When your business grows, however, the commi

This week I was excited to speak with Christie Chirinos from CalderaWP. I had followed her WordCamp EU presentation on the topic of financial forecasting back in June of 2018 and it intrigued me. Christie has an M.B.A. in Management Information Systems from Florida State University and has been involved in the WordPress space for a few years now, currently being a partner in the CalderaWP team that is well-known for the Caldera Forms plugin. She enjoys sharing the knowledge she has gathered over the years with others in the WordPress community through talks at WordCamps and shows like this one. In the episode, Christie took some time out of her busy schedule to continue discussing financial forecasting, business strategies and business administration. We discuss everything from what financial forecasting is to what business strategies are and how you should plan out your future targets. We also delve into possible ways of learning more about how to run your business without having to necessarily get a degr

This week we've taken a look at the other side of running a WordPress business - the development. We were joined by Alain Schlesser and Anton Ukhanev, two great developers who believe that developing your plugins and themes (and WordPress core itself) to as high a standard as you can will only help your business and the WordPress community grow further. WordPress is growing in popularity, exceeding the 30% mark for the number of websites running WordPress worldwide. However, it's also facing some controversy within the community over the approach being taken to Gutenberg, especially from developers. I won't give too much away, so listen in to hear about the pain-points within WordPress from a developer's perspective, how this affects those running businesses around WordPress, and where the WordPress community went wrong and what it's doing right with Gutenberg and more.   Links: Alain Schlesser alainschlesser.com Twitter: @schlessera Github: schlessera Dependency Injection and Design Patterns in

This week I'm joined by Donnacha MacGloinn, a long-time member of the WordPress community and guest host on a few past episodes, to discuss WordPress hosting with Thomas Audunhus from Servebolt. Servebolt is taking on the WordPress hosting space by claiming that they can beat any other host in terms of speed, and they don't rely on caching for it. In fact, they believe in caching being used only for scaling, as it was originally intended. Together we discuss what it is that Servebolt does, where it started, and how they believe they can make such claims as being faster than other top WordPress hosting companies such as Kinsta and WP Engine, Thomas is challenged all the way, from the company's decision on its name and why they own serverbolt.com but have not set it to redirect to servebolt.com, to how and why their stack is that much better than those with deeper pockets. Links: Website: servebolt.com Twitter: @servebolt Test your WordPress host's performance How does caching work in WordPress?

Brian Link started "The Plugin Economy" as an owner of a small WordPress plugin in order to get more feedback from other developers of small to medium-sized plugins. He wanted to share what he was learning from them with the community, so the interviews began. In this episode, I took the opportunity to ask Brian about what he has learned from the more than 30 interviews he has done so far. We discuss a variety of topics, from choosing a niche to marketing the plugin, and the lessons learned from our mistakes so far. If you're thinking of starting a small plugin or theme business, or you're already running one, then this episode is for you. If you agree or disagree with anything we said during the discussion, let me know in the comments below. Let's share our experiences and help each other out. Links Twitter: @bjplink Link Software The Plugin Economy Twitter: @plugineconomy WP RSS Aggregator Interview CryptoWP Interview Brant Calder Interview Word Count Plugin WP RSS Aggregator EDD B