Freelancer Opportunities in WordPress

And so I was like, this ain't going to work. And so what were the things that. you know, interested in me, I would build websites as a hobby, like with Dreamweaver and stuff. And I experimented with Drupal and Joomla and a couple of other things. And I helped some nonprofits out with some stuff like hobbies, like most of, most of us agencies do, but then eventually I found WordPress in 2004. And I was like, this is different. I kind of like this.

And then by 2008, the economy had taken a real hard dip. That 13 hours of standing on your feet at the car dealership made you about 35. And I told my wife, I said, this is not financially feasible. I'm not going to do this anymore. And so I literally just hung my tile and said, Hey, I'm a, I'm a web guy. I'll help you make a website. And I took on a ton of startups and super cheap projects and, christened myself through fire. And, Manana Nomas was born.

So I quickly became the, the internet sales person when that first came onto the scene. there's a lot of, I've always said like there's a lot that you learn. In that business, right? So, so long as you're like, you know, really trying to deliver a great experience for a customer and do right by the customer, there's a lot of great lessons there. especially in service writing as a service writer.

Yeah. I noticed you said you're spending a lot of time, maybe arguing with folks on the lot because you're trying to explain to them how this thing is getting forward. Fixed what goes into it. There's literal man hours that you're tracking. There's parts. So there's logistics. Sometimes you don't have the part, you gotta go get the part of the parts, the laid part does not the right part.

Now you're scrambling and you're getting all this in and you're trying to do this all under budget, or to the budget you presented the customer. It sounds very much like web design. there's a great similarity there.

And when I did, I just self published it and put it up and thought, well, that's it, it's done, Matt, people bought the dang book. And, and, and then I panicked because it was poorly written. I had to go and do a second version of it. but one of the customers was Ducati North America, the motorcycle company. And I'd worked at a ton of dealerships and my hobby was racing motorcycles.

And, you know, your dream is always like, Oh, if I could work for one of the big, you know, one of the big OEMs, that'd be awesome. And out of the blue, they called up one day and said, can you write us a course for service writers? and that led to a decade of working with Ducati, both as a contractor and as a full time employee. And then I graduated from Ducati to Suzuki.

Branding wise, it seems like a big step backwards to go from Ducati to Suzuki, but what people don't recognize is Suzuki is so much bigger of a company. So then I was working with automotive, marine, motorcycle. I was in charge of publications and training and that e learning that you're hearing me talk about now, that became the foundation for the stuff that I do with WP Tonic, Lifter LMS, and of course, Manana

Well, the guy down the street says it's 2, 500 Yeah, okay great, but the guy down the street is not us and it's not our process. It's not our portfolio mine is 5, That was something that I learned, literally selling parts at, for, for General Motors because it was when you presented the problem to the customer, hey, you need a new, whatever, carburetor for your motor.

you go, do you want the General Motors part or do you want Whatever the, I don't remember the name of the parts, AC Delco parts or whatever the, those parts were and you were selling on, do you want the brand recognition that's five times more expensive or do you want the cheaper one? And it just gets you into this, this mode of presenting the problem and massaging the brand and upset upselling.

And I know it sounds tough, but these are, these are things that you go through in the automotive world, at least back then. Where that's what was profitable selling these parts selling this experience selling the service and ultimately if the customer trusted you They invested their dollars with you and as long as you're fixing the problem In the right way and delivering it back. And it's a nice clean car. It smells fresh.

You don't hand it back to them filthy from the technician or, you know, or like oil stains. Like these are things that you just, people might just go over their heads, but from a brand and customer experience, these are, these are great stories.

And then finally, I said, you know, I should probably put it in Amazon and see if it does anything there. And what's really weird is sometimes I'll see used versions of it for sale. And I'm like, someone actually bought that paperback. And then wanted to sell it used. I'm kind of flattered, but I'm kind of mortified.

put up a sister course and put out a couple of posts about action leadership from the edge and copy started to sell. In that case, I made it, also a digital book that you could download off of, Amazon. And it's, I just let it do its own thing. I didn't do any of that, you know, any of the scams to become a number one rated book or bestseller or any of that stuff. I just, I just let the book naturally organically do its thing. And I just focus on my day to day running my agency and my business

What's missing here in your opinion? Like I had lengthy conversations. Is it marketing? Is it education? Like. What's missing, if anything, in your eyes of like, where WordPress sits for the end user? What is it? Who should be using it? What's the missing link for this stuff?

And, and I see that and I get that. I do. I, I, I've been in the platform since 2004 and I do understand a lot of the, you know, armchair quarterbacking that we can do on the product as it's built. But I've also introduced WordPress to literally hundreds of clients. As a new product. And to me, it is like handing and it's like hand handing a toddler an iPad, you know, within 5 or 10 minutes, they figure out what they're going to touch, click on or get to to make a cartoon go across the screen.

And I find that almost. The dumber someone is, the more fresh they are to the platform, almost the easier the adoption is someone that has come up with classic editor and then been through the block editor and the growth pains of that. And then to get into full site editing, it's almost like there's so many facets of things that have worked. In their past that create mental blocks to go forward. If I'm making any sense, I, it's for me to articulate that.

And then you add to that, you know, you got the bricks conversation, the Elementor conversation, the Divi conversation, the beaver builder. It's, and, and sometimes I think, Oh, I definitely need a page builder to knock this out. And other times I go, you know what? I'm just going to try cadence and see what I can do in cadence and magically. Cadence seems to work pretty dang good.

Techie developer like you weren't you know for the first five years was there the magic five minute install I'm not really sure I forget the first five years But you really had to be like super techie to get this thing off the ground From, you know, years five through 10, then there were folks like, I think me, we're not, when I came into it, who I was not a developer, but I was able to use a lamp stack, Linux, Apache, my SQL and PHP, and like put this thing up there because remember there

wasn't a managed WordPress hosting. Like we all enjoy today, there was a C panel one click installer, but not every web host was using that back then. so you had to be like a power user. Ultimately you were curious and willing to learn. And then the. Back half of the second decade is when we really saw, the user who came in through, let's say the Elementors and the page builders of the world that really exposed WordPress to building websites through their particular lens.

Again, whatever it was, Beaver Builder, Elementor, Divi, Bricks.

And what I, my theory is, Why folks are so vocal in year 20 is that it's been 20 years Which is an infinite amount of time in tech land, but it's this new core user of WordPress who came in from a product perspective who had all these issues that we all learned in the past smoothed over by UI and And UX albeit still challenging but much more easier to use than our first 10 years of WordPress Who are now like, Hey, I've been using this for five years. When is it getting better?

And these folks, it's a largely attached to their livelihood, their web business, their marketing firm, their SEO practice. And they're like, we need to make this thing better. And they're a lot more vocal. Maybe not in the best ways, but they're a lot more vocal and they're doing it in pockets across the community. Facebook groups, YouTube live streams, like it's a whole new set of user. That's my feeling. That's why it's so pronounced these days. What are your thoughts?

or these dang near entitlements, right? Where people are like, this should be this way out of the box. And there's a really major part of me. That's like, no, that's not what this was built for decades ago. Like even through its development, the idea that. Every single site can be a do it yourselfer, out of the box success, plug and play kind of thing. To me, it's kind of crazy. I mean, that's why there's experts and agencies around that do builds.

A lot of times I find that I find myself telling potential clients how to do something. And this is a big mistake for me. I'll say, Oh, well, in this case, we're going to plug in the CRM and then we're going to take that CRM and hook it to an automation. We're going to use this recipe to automate this with this. And then people that sign into this form are going to get this tag and this tag is going to, and so, you know, the rest of the story, right?

I'm, I'm telling us all out audience that I'm talking to doesn't care about any of that. They have a pain point. They want a web professional to fix it. And I think when we get into those level of. Conversations. We have to remember that we are the web professionals and we are the people that can answer those questions, solve those pain points and turn a profit doing it.

I think we make the mistake like I've done multiple times myself of trying to explain all of this stuff to people from a do it yourself or perspective when that's not, if I was building SAS platforms, I wouldn't be explaining to everybody that bought the SAS platform, how I put it

And when you give people That level of information that they didn't really ask for, you imply to them that they're responsible for their own website or that they must assume a do it yourself perspective. And sometimes we drive them away, we drive them to another source. I mean, not for nothing, I'm in the e learning space. So, I thought, you know what, everyone keeps asking for the Udemy experience, I should probably put a course on Udemy. What a nightmare.

Like from a user perspective, you know, I had to add the course. I had to tick all their boxes. I had to verify who I was. I had all these things to do, and I'm not lying. I put that course up six months ago. And to this day, I'm still getting spam from putting a course on that website. Everybody wants to help me sell my Udemy course. I had a friend jump into Kajabi. I jumped into the back end of Kajabi to try and help them with something.

And I thought, how in the world does what I'm seeing on the back end of this website? Resemble anything from the front end of the website. You know, it's just a huge disconnect compared to our experience in WordPress. But we've all made this assumption that SAS makes it easier. And that's not necessarily the case.

I think it's very use case driven and we have to examine who our audience is for each instance, and in a lot of cases, the audience that we're talking to isn't even concerned with the stuff you and I were just talking about with the development of WordPress and the UX and the UI and the this and the that. They just want something that works.

Do they see, you know, choosing, you know, lifter and then hiring you at your agency, like from the user's perspective, where do they come in from?

And everyone goes, Oh, I want to do that. And they do the research and they come up with learn dash, Lifter, LMS, tutor, LMS, you know, being your top three searches. And then they, they start, you know, going down and then they start the, you know, feature benefit, right. Feature benefit versus dollar spent. What are they going to pick? And so in a lot of cases, I see people come to Lifter LMS from that type of search. And a lot of times, they really don't even know what they really want.

They just heard somewhere that they can make a side hustle out of producing an online course. The other audience is completely the opposite of what you think. It's someone that doesn't want WordPress at all. Right. It is. So the first group is, they're the ones that may have sampled Kajabi or Udemy, but realize they need their own platform, which leads to WordPress. The second group are people that don't want WordPress. They explicitly do not want WordPress.

And that's the group I am specifically targeting right now. Those are enterprise level, Corporations that have very, I'll say technical, but I don't believe it's technical, SCORM content that they make their learning content in. So there's a very specific, course authoring software. And typically these enterprise corporations would have a, special built learning management system SCORM content. Typically those are very expensive. And newsflash, they usually kind of suck.

So, they don't look good. They don't function good. They, they, they play the content and they do the reporting, but everything else is horrible and it's super expensive. So when I learned that I could take that SCORM content and I could effectively run it through a Lifter LMS website, for instance, and I'll just give you real numbers. I have a corporate client that spent 500, 000 developing their LMS, 400, 000 a year for maintenance and hosting.

The website barely worked and they only had 2, 500 users enrolled in the

The inspiration moment for me to go, I need to make this more public. I need to let more corporations understand that there's agencies like ours, that you don't have to be a do it yourself. Right. We can give you the service and the maintenance and the hosting, and we can do all that for you, but it ain't 400, 000 a year. It's like 50 grand a year. We update your plugins. You, you give us the content. We'll load it up for you. It's good to go.

of, WordPress world is, is one that isn't explored enough. Um, I mean, as a decade long agency owner and then somebody who worked in at Pagely for enterprise hosting, I kind of know why, like technically, I know why. I also look, there's a lot of agencies that, that, that push into marketing for enterprise. This is a deeper conversation, but I, at the end of the day, I think it sort of boils down to maybe a lot of people are just afraid.

Afraid to give away the secret sauce and give away maybe that blueprint, because they're also trying to approach that like they don't want to tell other people that there's a lot of opportunity in the upper markets of WordPress. You also have to deliver and be able to, to. to, to, package and present yourself where, an enterprise is going to say yes to you. Like in that example, where they might be spending half a million bucks, maybe somebody comes in and goes, I can do it for free.

And they go, no, please, there's no, there's no time for that here. Right. And bigger business. I was just having this conversation with Mark Szymanski on, one of the recent episodes is what once a, a, a big corp, enterprise client says yes to WordPress, that's an investment for many years. Right. So it doesn't always. It's always, I think. The service provider in the WordPress space who's just learning these new levels of, of, client. You know, don't undercut yourself.

Don't undersell yourself because there's a lot here. You might be thinking, Oh, the software is free, but managing and working with these clients is going to be a whole different ball game. Just to get through them to say yes and sign your contract is going to be an experience that you said, Oh, I should have added another zero to the end of this thing.

You know, especially with COVID, a lot of these corporations were locked into these building deals and sent people to work from home and then they had these other expenses and, you know, in a lot of cases, Well, I worked at Suzuki and Suzuki right at the beginning of COVID had large layoffs, just huge layoffs. They closed the entire training division.

You know, when you look at what some companies are having to make decisions with, when you can come in and say, Hey, for about 14 percent of what you're currently paying for your training tech, I can not only maintain it, but I can actually make it better, I can make it a better experience for your users. And if they give you any, you know, If they say, what's it on? And that conversation rarely comes up to be honest with you at the corporate level. They just want to know that the website works.

But if they say on what platform and I say WordPress, if there's any backlash from that, it's gotten a lot easier when you say what was good enough for the White House, it was good enough for NASA. I'm pretty sure we can make, you know, your website work. And the thing to remember when I'm talking about enterprise e learning projects on SCORM, I'm not talking about millions of users and high bandwidth requirements and stuff like that. They typically have between one and 5, 000.

Users and active users in a month might be four or 500 people. So I'm not dealing with huge, huge numbers. It's not like I'm running Facebook on WordPress.

What if we could take all that, make it digital, and you could do all that stuff through zoom and digital signatures and offer it through a course and lesson structure better yet. What if I could put those zoom calls and embed those zoom calls into your course and lesson structure so that you keep everything organized and recorded properly and they're like, you can do that. And I go, yeah.

And then when you say that's 15 grand or 18 grand or 50 grand, it's still a bargain compared to what their it department was paying before they met you. And that's the other thing to remember is that the numbers, the number, never be afraid of sharing the number, whatever the number is, you throw it out there because it is what it is. And, and amazingly, it's been pretty successful. The, the higher the number, the less aggravation I seem to have with the client as well.

I would imagine building out these structural applications for people is a lot less painful on that side of things or maybe not.

I want to make sure that what we create for you meets your style and branding guides and that your marketing department is going to be happy with what we develop for you. And then they're like, Oh, and then when they learn, cause remember most companies have A training site or an HR site and a sales site and a CRM site and a, and a, and a, and when you start to develop your LMS product, and then you start to say, Hey, this is an LMS, but it's also a CMS.

And if you want to surround your learning, your learning channel with some of your marketing messaging or some of your sales pages or some of your landing pages, well, then you can start to see some of those windows in their brains open up and they go, wait a minute, we could do everything on this. Well, yeah, we're a full service agency. We can fill all the, we can fill all the blanks. My main focus was on getting your learning stuff up.

And then we found that, this is Chris Badgett's line, by the way. I'm stealing from Chris. He says, Oh dude, I just love the way you land and expand.

Like the agency structure you've built, the model you've built, because it's, it takes away or it can. I mean, it obviously depends on who you are and what you want to do, but when you're excited about solving problems with WordPress, it doesn't always have to be, let me make you a brochure site. It can be a Lifter LMS site. It can be e learning. And I talk about this all the time with my work at Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms allows you to do that too.

You start selling, the ability to connect to different add ons that we have. And it just ranks you up. Like you, one day you're selling a website to somebody because you have a great MailChimp add on. And then the next day you're like, Oh, there's a HubSpot add on.

And now I'm in this whole other echelon of, Of customers that I'm servicing because of gravity forms of this add on, et cetera, et cetera, solution based selling fantastic for the WordPress freelancer who's like, I'm not happy with where I'm at and I can build up this other solution. So kudos to you for, for finding

I was a really good project manager. I was a really good, I was really good at, at identifying people's skill sets and putting them to work on what they did best. And that's when I realized, Hey, just cause I'm working out of my home. Doesn't mean I can't leverage the skills and talents of other team members. And then I started adding to the team and I started networking with other people in the WordPress space in the community. Right.

So me and Michelle Frechette, so like she actually referred me for a talk that I got. I mean, it's like, there's so many people, positive people in the space that you can connect to. And it everyone assumes it has to be for money. It's not for money. It's about making that connection. Who's good at what? Who's best at this thing or that thing?

And there's been a lot of work that's come in through money on the no mosque that I've been able to farm out to other people through, you know, through post status and through the networking that we do. And, It's positive. It's positive net for everybody. Everybody gets the work. Everybody works in their strength zone. And in some cases, some of the profit sharing comes through money on an almost as an agency.

And in other cases, it's just a referral, but I know that's going to come back to me tenfold for being the right guy. Anyway.

And we, you know, we need you to come up with the logo and the, and the hero image. And I'm like, no, no. What you need is

I'm more of a plug and play kind of guy, so I've got a guy that I leverage for code work and customizations outside of my little home office here.

so there was always this natural, friction between he and I about like, you know, the things I wanted to like go after, which was what, you know, like a lot of us young foolish people at the time were thinking about like, I want to sell products too, man. I want to sell themes and plugins. I want to start a SAS business cause look at all these people starting a SAS business. Isn't it great? And he was just like, service work.

There's, you know, the, the, the folks that can change the oils and then there's the, you know, the head technician and the head technician builds the custom site and priced at one point. And then there's the oil change type people who just put the sites together and keep them moving.

And it was, it wasn't something that, I was truly interested in and of course agency life, you know, you're always like one paycheck away or one customer check away from bankruptcy When you're running like a custom agency So there was that like challenge of it plus having kids and like really, you know saying hey I just need to lower the stress level at home with kids But it's certainly like the no code tools where WordPress is headed.

You don't need Custom coding for every, every solution and you don't need to have somebody on the, you know, I don't mean this in a bad way, but you don't always need to have like an expert engineer on the team for something that comes up 10 percent of the time. Maybe in customer engagements.

10 percent of the time. There's so much out there that we can leverage. The hard part is staying educated on all of the different tools. What's a good tool? What's a tool to stay away from? What tools work good together? You know, I kind of have a dedicated tech stack that I'm familiar with that I'm happy with. and I think that that is a big key to what we what we do.

The other thing is, When I'm talking to a client, for some reason, a lot of clients just come to the game, assuming that they need some kind of customization or they need this. They need that. And one of the best words I've learned, and that, that might be from Emily Middleton is just asking why. You just ask the client, why do you think you need that?

And they'll come up with something, but it's like, maybe we should just launch a minimal viable product first, you know, do, do a proof of concept, make sure that your idea has traction, and then we can invest in your customizations and your dreams down the road. But, you know, for a lot of folks, what they're saying is a need at the beginning of a project is far from being a need. It's a distant

Honestly, I don't care if people take the free course or they come and buy the course from Manana Nomas, because I'm the author and the deliverer of the content. So that drives people to me anyway. You know, in a lot of cases, they'll see the content at Lifter LMS and they'll go, who's this Kurt guy. And if you Google Manana Nomas, you're going to see 68 pages of Google stuff on there. Come up for money on a little mass. There's just a ton of content.

So I really don't worry about how the net works. I just worry that the net does work and funnels people to me. Right. the other thing is I just get as much exposure as I possibly can. You know, I, I'm talking to you today. I'll be talking to Jonathan on Thursday. work with Lifter LMS every Thursday. and people are starting to get to know me and it's Matt. I've only been connected in the community for four or five years. I mean, my first WordCamp was the one in San Diego.

You actually regret that you didn't do it earlier. to the point that I actually run, Pippin Williamson lives in my town. I just moved to Kansas. And so Pippin has a brewery here in town and I told him I wanted to do the WordPress meetup for Hutchinson, Hutchinson, Kansas. And he goes, Oh dude, if they give it to you, you could just use my brewery for that. So second Tuesday of every month, I'm at Pippin's brewery down at Sandhills drinking IPA and talking WordPress.

And as an agency, I mean, I don't know what other people are trying to do. I mean, I see all kinds of weird things on post status health. People talk about their successes. in reality, I only need five or six clients a month. You know, I'm not looking to do hundreds of people a month.

Don't do it. Like AI will tell you and you don't really like, do you really know this content that you really passionate about this stuff? And I'm worried that, there are people who are like, Screw it. Like AI will print this whole course for me and I will just put it out there and people will come. that's the way that I kind of like see the impact of how AI is working right now. What are your thoughts on AI? How it impacts e learning? Do you have, you know, worries like I do on this stuff?

So, I can remember when open AI first came out, chat GPT, I immediately jumped in, I was so excited. I'm an early adopter of a lot of things. And so I jumped in and I was like, Oh, let's ask it about this topic. And it said, I can't answer that question that way. And then I would ask it from another perspective and it's, Oh, here's an encyclopedia worth of stuff. And I was like, so it won't answer. Questions from one angle, but I'll answer all the questions from a separate angle.

I said, that's definitely a piece of bias. And then when people started saying that AI was going to train on stuff that's available on the net, and then we were publishing content now at an exponential rate, that's AI generated and it keeps generating content eventually based on its own content, when, how much further until none of that content is really true.

Like, I really worry because it's, there's a lot of hallucinations and all these things that they talk about with AI and I go, so when I use AI, I only use AI on things that I consider myself to be knowledgeable, almost a quasi expert in, I use it to like, maybe make the outline. Maybe expand the outline and then I proof it, adjust it and edit it from there. often there are mistakes or there's verbiage or there's words I would not have selected.

and it also writes at a grade level that's usually outside my scope of influence. So

a lot of times I have to adjust the wording so that it meets. My projected audience at their grade level for