Category: Update

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Win: I’m Not Bogged Down by Excessive Client Work Anymore

It’s weird, but I feel like I so infrequently mention (or notice?) many of the small successes I’ve had. But the small successes lead to the big ones, and I think that highlighting them might be just as important as highlighting areas that need improvement.

So what’s the success? Basically it’s that I’m not spending large amounts of time on actual client work.

For many years when I started my business, I did everything. From sales and marketing to designing and writing every line of code.

I learned a ton. And my business grew.

But eventually it grew to the point where I couldn’t grow any more without some help. I started working with contractors and even had an employee for a while.

I found myself constantly drowning in client work, where I was personally going in and making designs, writing new code, and fixing other issues. And it was preventing me from scaling.

I’m sure there’s a blog post in here about it somewhere, but I resolved to stop doing the client work and focus on improving the business.

I wish I could say that it happened overnight, but it didn’t! It took years to shift everything over. Part of it requires developing the right processes, part of it is having the right people with the right clients, and the rest is just dealing with your own habits.

But I’m at a point now where I probably only spend 30 minutes per day on client work that I could be giving to someone else. That’s not bad!

And it frees up tons of time for me to manage the business and work on growing it, which is what I’m doing.

It was hard to get to where I am, but it’s nice to be able to trust my team with things and just send them work without having to worry. It feels… Functional.

And it’s less stressful now, because historically when I’d get bogged down doing things myself, I would just get more frustrated because I knew that it was preventing me from growing.

But now it’s all good!

So I think that’s actually a great success. So, time to celebrate.

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I Should Always be Reinvesting Back Into the Company

I had an epiphany the other day and it’s that I really need to be utilizing all of the credit I have available to me and reinvesting large amounts of the money I make back into the growth of my company.

Maybe this seems like an obvious things for many people but for me, it was a total departure from how I’ve operated. Historically I’ve never paid for marketing and my costs have always been very low, so anything I made was basically just straight income for me.

But now that I’ve successfully purchased another hosting company and quickly grown my business that way, my mindset has completely changed. What if there was some magical way to continue spending my revenues on things that will get me new clients?

I say that tongue-in-cheek, but it really is so different from what I’ve done historically that it’s actually a novel idea.

I actually had the thought while reading the book Sapiens. The author is discussing Consumerism and Capitalism and describes how the wealthy capitalists reinvest all of their earnings back into growth, while the consumers, well… Consume. They spend what they make on stuff.

While he by no means glorifies capitalists, it still made me think about how I’m running my business and realize that I could really be doing things differently.

So now that I’ve decided to do that, the question is: where do I spend this money?

One of my top choices is to simply buy more business. You get a lot of clients at once, on-boarding is simpler, and it just works. There is little-to-no sales process which is great. Plus I get all that link juice which is super nice.

But I haven’t tested whether it is repeatable to just continue acquiring businesses. I’ll have to reach out to a bunch of owners and see if I can find any that are looking to sell.

And then there’s the other options of paid advertising. Ultimately, I have some idea of what it’s worth to me to have new clients. If spending on advertising costs less than what clients are worth, I should proceed full-steam ahead.

The main thing is that I need it to be repeatable and scalable. Unlike in-person networking (which I can only do so much of), the right paid ad could be completely scalable. Spend more: make more!

So over the coming months, I need to work really hard to test out different marketing methods, and figure out which once I can repeat over-and-over again. I’m thinking that if I can get new hosting clients for $100, it is absolutely worth it to do so.

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Sign-up Form Results – Lots of Spam

So I’ve been letting my last experiment run for many months, and while it’s gotten more than 2,000 submissions… It’s pretty much all spam.

I was getting many submissions per day, which seemed great! But when I looked at the submissions, they almost all had throw-away Russian email addresses. Never a good sign.

So I decided to add a Captcha. Submissions plummeted, unsurprisingly.

It’s been about two weeks since I added that, and I have gotten a handful of submissions. However, I ran them through the website cleantalk.org, which identifies spam addresses, and learned that most of these, too, were spam.

It looks like I got maybe on legitimate submission in those two weeks.

I also didn’t have a single person legitimately reach out to me to start hosting, so I think that overall, there was 0% conversion. Not ideal

So I think it’s time to try something new.

New ad content is:

“Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress website? Email me at brian@pagecrafter.com and mention the code #FreeHosting10 for two free months of lightning-fast WordPress hosting. We will even migrate you for free!”

I can’t imagine it will be a whole lot more successful, but we’ll see! We could also make a variation that has a form submission but this seems nice and clean.

Stay tuned.

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2020 Goal – 100 New Hosting Clients

It’s 2020 and it’s time for some serious goal-making. And you know what my goal is? To add 100 new hosting clients over the course of the year.

A couple interesting notes on this: it’s actually fewer hosting clients than I added in 2019. However, that was just because I purchased a hosting company with more than 100 clients, so it was kind of cheating.

But then again: it worked! If all it takes is purchasing hosting companies to add them on like this, I feel like I should absolutely do it. I think I need to reach out to a bunch of hosting company owners and just let them know that if they are interested in selling, I’m interested in buying.

I just did a quick Google maps search for “Website Hosting” in the Twin Cities area, and what I found was astonishing. I found one company that seemed legit that apparently just shut down and literally turned off all of their client’s sites. Others seem to be fairly outdated and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they are in the same boat as Berry Bros was.

I think I’d be missing out on incredible opportunities if I didn’t reach out to every single one of these and see if there was any interest in selling. It just makes too much sense.

Alternatively, I’ve gone over many ideas for getting new clients, and I think that once things slow down a bit for me, it’s time to really ramp up those efforts. While the SEO and calls-to-action are things I should certainly work on optimizing, I think I should definitely start aggressively pursuing some paid-for marketing options.

I need to really sit down and think what a hosting client is worth to me. Are they worth one year’s expected revenue? Two? Three?

I should be willing to spend a good chunk of change on advertising that delivers results and brings new clients through the door.

Whatever it takes to get two new hosting clients every week, I think I should absolutely do. That should be my ultimate focus this year.

I want to continue posting here and monitoring my progress. Hopefully by this time in 2021, I’ll have well over 100 new hosting clients.

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Thinking About Goals – 100 New Hosting Clients?

It’s time to start thinking about goals for next year. My first thought was, “how about 100 new hosting clients?”

And it’s not a bad goal! Obviously, it doesn’t specify how I get them.

The interesting thing is that I’ll meet that goal this year. But it’s because I just purchased another hosting company and took on all their clients.

But does it really matter?

Sure, it’s been a ton of work, and I had to pay a decent amount of money for all of them. But are the acquisition costs really that different than they would be “in the wild?”

The ways I’m thinking about doing it next year involve driving all over the place and networking. All of those things take a lot of time and have opportunity costs associated with them.

It’s entirely possible that just buying these clients outright will be cheaper than any other form of taking them on.

It’s maybe still to early to get a proper sense of how everything went, but if this current acquisition goes well overall, my time may be best spent in the future trying to purchase other companies.

Sometimes the “easiest” way to do something is still the best way! It sort of feels like cheating but if it works, it works!

I think it’s just important to continue considering all options at this point and to try some new things out. I think a lot of options have merit, including going out and networking.

Unfortunately it just doesn’t seem like SEO is paying off, though it may still be too early to call. I need to review my posts about different tests and see if we can start converting visitors.

And in another post I’ll have to confirm official goals for 2019. I do like the idea of just adding new hosting clients, as I still believe that growing that part of the business is key.

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Work With the Right People

So I had an experience this week with a new contractor. I had a project that was running behind schedule, because my go-to contractor was not available to put forth any hours.

Long story short: the new contractor did an amazing job. The quality of work was pretty good, but the best part was she built this entire site in like 8 hours of billable work. Including designing it.

Sure, she’s more expensive than most I’ve worked with by a long-shot. But that’s just the hourly rate.

I would have expected this to take something like 20 hours for another contractor. But instead it was only 8. So not only will I pay her less overall than others, it also came through much, much more quickly.

It makes me realize that I’ve only experienced a handful of people to work with me. And having two of them resign in a short time frame put a bad taste in my mouth.

That was one of the biggest reasons I sort of didn’t want to build websites anymore!

But with a contractor like the one I’m now working with… The sky is the limit! She could literally be putting in only 20 hours per week for me and we could be pumping out 6-8 websites every month.

So now I’m quite interested in actually taking on more of these projects. I think we could bust through them super quickly and it would be mostly profit. And she would be happy because she’s making good money.

Moral of the story: maybe I need to put more thought into what type of work we want to keep doing, and I shouldn’t write-off these types of projects. There are always great contractors and employees out there, you just have to find them!

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Past the Hump for a New Habit

So I said I would update things here for new habits that I’m working on forming. So I am!

The habit I’m working on now is waking up without using the snooze button. The old habit was some 20 years in the making and is quite difficult to break.

But as discussed in the past, snooze sleep is terrible sleep, and I absolutely need to stop doing it.

For for the past maybe 3 weeks, I’ve been working on never hitting the snooze button. And so far I’ve kept to it! While I have physically hit the snooze button, I have not gone back to sleep a single time after my alarm has gone off.

It’s been hard. In particular, I think was hardest up until a few days ago. I’ve heard that new habits are harder and harder to keep up with right up until a certain point, and then they start getting easier. I’m happy to say I think I’m at that point!

I’ve been getting up way earlier, and it hasn’t been as much of a burden. Previously I’d have so much willpower depleted that I’d just sit on my phone, sometimes for literal hours. Obviously that’s not much better than sleeping through the snooze, but I was still building the habit.

Now I’ve gotten down to where I wake up easily and don’t even spend that much time on my phone. Work has been way more productive, which is amazing. I’ve had so much more time!

And this morning, mere moments before my alarm went off, I was half-awake, and I thought to myself, “I actually think I might be rested enough, I could probably wake up!” and I got up.

And weirdly, I don’t know that the sleep has even been incredible. I’ve been a little restless. But I’m not tired during the day. I’m thinking that maybe I actually don’t need nearly as much sleep anymore if I just don’t use the snooze. Maybe the reason I feel like I only am rested after like 10 hours, is because the snoozing has messed up my sleep cycle so much.

So I’m excited to see how this plays out. I’m hoping that within a month, it will start to be effortless, and I really won’t need to ever snooze again!

And once that habit is established, I can move on to another.

I’ll keep posting updates here.

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Initial Results of Internal Ad

Results are in! I’ve had the new ad running for something like 6 days and I can see how it performed.

So how did it do?

It did… Okay. For a 4-day period Monday-Thursday, we got about 20 unique hits to the page, vs. a historical average of about 8 during a similar time period.

So that’s 12 unique visitors. Not bad, not great. That was out of 3,466 visitors. Conversion is certainly bad, but these are people who came here for very specific problems.

Theoretically, all 12 of those people are actually interested in improving their hosting. The current ad copy reads:

Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress website? Click here to learn how to fix it.

It’s in bold but just regular font.

So we know they have a WordPress site, and we know they want to make it faster. That’s fairly targeted, and a great start.

Obviously I didn’t get any new business, but I’m not sure how optimized my “WordPress Hosting” page really is.

So what’s the plan now?

I want to run a handful more tests and see if we can maximize traffic to that page. See how we can tweak the copy and ad to get more people through the door.

Once I feel confident we can’t do a whole lot better, then it’s time to revise that page (or build a new one?) to gear it towards conversion. We’ll need testimonials, maybe a nice-looking video (I can put that together by recruiting BNI people to be in it), and an enticing offer. But that’s later!

For now, I want to brainstorm some ideas for what I can try in this ad. So here are ideas:

  1. Instead of just linking them, ask them to enter in an email address to receive the secret to a faster WordPress site.
  2. Ask them to enter in their site and email, and we’ll check why their site is slow for free.
  3. Include an offer right there. “Tired of dealing with your slow WordPress site? Click here for 3 free months of lightning-fast WordPress hosting.”
  4. Wish your WordPress site loaded as fast as this one? Click here to learn how to make it happen.
  5. $25/month is all it takes to make your WordPress site this fast. Click here to find out how.
  6. Many WordPress sites can load twice as fast overnight. Enter your URL and email to see if yours is one of them.
  7. Include an image with one of these popular variations to see if it helps.

That’s all I have for now! I think all are worth testing out, so I think that’s what I’ll be doing the next couple months. It will be fun to compare results.

I think I’ll start with #1 and see how that goes. Stay tuned for results!

 

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The New Product Offerings

I wanted to basically collect my thoughts on paper (hard drive?) regarding the changes I plan on making in my business. I’ve gone back and forth on a lot of things and I’d like to just have some clarity here about what we’re going to offer.

Originally, I thought that we would just provide one, single service that couldn’t be customized at all to our clients. However, I no longer thing that’s the best choice. We don’t need to be that simple.

As long as I don’t personally need to be involved in the day-to-day services for our clients, I’ll still be able to scale everything properly.

I’m thinking we’ll reel people in with our core product: managed WordPress hosting. We’ll offer it at fairly reasonable prices to try to get them hooked in. Since the “managed” portion constitutes the bulk of the costs, this will be an incredibly attractive offer.

Then, we’ll offer upgrades. These would be offered when they are signing up, and would include:

  • Basic Email Hosting (up to 5 inboxes, but upgradable for more)
  • WordPress updates (Plugins and Core)
  • Theme Updates (for those with premium themes that need to be manually updated)
  • SSL Certificates (With options for all the ones my host offers)
  • Compute Boosters
  • Malware and Hacking Protection (Basically we install Wordfence and monitor it regularly (weekly?), and if a hack appears, we take care of it. Requires the updates service)

Additionally, I think we’ll provide the following hourly services as requested:

  • Breakfixes (If the site goes down, we bill hourly to fix it)
  • Hack fixes (if they didn’t already have the protection)

I’ve considered allowing for content changes and other additions, but at least for now I want to avoid that. We don’t want to compete with web developers, since some of them might actually be our clients. Additionally, the entire purpose is to avoid all of the quoting and subjective nature of that entire field. We want our services to be extremely rigid so that we can replicate and scale them.

At the moment, I think it makes most sense to target IT companies. Since that’s what’s already working with our similar, existing services, I have reason to believe it will keep working. They are the ones who have little knowledge of web services but are asked to deal with it anyway. We can relieve that headache.

I haven’t yet figured out exactly how to market to them yet, but that will come. Honestly, Facebook and Linkedin ads are looking pretty attractive, but I need to figure that out. I might reach out to a bunch directly to begin with.

I intend to speak with a couple IT company owners to get their feedback before I start. I think this will help me figure some things out ahead of time and smooth over potential issues.

I plan to build a series of online forms as the on-boarding process. They’ll be able to select their options, set up payments, and then submit relevant information to help us migrate them.

Once I’ve got that set up, I need to get a few clients to actually go there and sign up. If I’m sure it’s working, I can then go full-speed ahead on marketing.

The goal is to find some kind of marketing system that is totally automated but still has a positive ROI. Once we have clients, they are likely to stay. So getting clients will be the hard part. If I can get clients in an automated fashion and still have a first-year ROI that is positive, I absolutely need to aggressively pursue that option.

In addition to pursuing regular marketing means, I should probably also be focusing on my SEO. Consistently writing articles I think has the possibility of really benefiting me. Since I already have decent rankings and a large SEO presence with this site, it shouldn’t be too hard to start funneling traffic to the right places.

The other thing to consider is that a large chunk of my traffic might actually be hapless IT providers googling how to solve their client’s problems when they don’t really know how and don’t want to. In other words: our ideal client.

So there’s a few steps to go, but I think I need to try and organize my thoughts and the steps involved a bit more, and then power through them!

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The Future? Managed WordPress Hosting & Updates for IT Companies & Web Designers

I had an epiphany today. I asked myself the question, “what part of  my business is the most consistently profitable and also easiest to manage?”

The answer? WordPress hosting and updates.

And where does probably half of that business come from? IT companies and other web designers / marketing companies.

We can solve a problem. Particularly with IT companies, they have a ton of clients and all of them ask about website hosting or basic maintenance for their websites. Often these companies know little about it, and don’t want to deal with it at all.

That’s where we come in! We provide fully managed hosting where we deal with everything for them. We migrate sites, we deal with hosting issues, we install SSLs, everything. And we even provide updates to WordPress sites to keep them secure.

We take all of the headache out of it. And our prices aren’t crazy so they can still make money on top of that.

And you know how I know it will work? I already have a bunch of these clients! My IT partners have been hosting their sites with me for years and they seem to love it. They value there is incredibly great.

I already have some traction on my website in terms of SEO in these areas, and I could use that to start funneling people to a new landing page to test how well it will work. If I have some luck, I could even create some targeted Facebook ads try to really try and scale it and get immediate feedback on how well it will work.

This is also an area where I could really create processes that make every single step very simple and I could have a staff that knows exactly how to handle everything in a fairly automated fashion. Ideally I would only need to manage business operations down the road and wouldn’t need to interact with clients or handle issues myself, ever.

I’m really just starting to think through this now, so there are still some questions to be answered but so far this seems very promising.