The WP Mayor Podcast: Recent Episodes

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In this episode, Gaby and Jean Galea talk to Aaron Edwards and Joshua Dailey, co-founders of Infinite Uploads and WordPress contributors, about Web3, NFTs, and WordPress with Web3 WP. Aaron and Joshua have spent more than 20 years developing and maintaining enterprise WordPress sites. Also, they launched the first (and only) WordPress NFT.

Episode Highlights and Topics: * Aaron and Joshua’s journey into NFTs, bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies. * NFTs: Non-fungible tokens used as payment gateway secured by blockchains. * Why NFTs? Smart contracts and digital wallets can be used to own unique assets. * NFT Projects: How to use scripts, open-source code/design, and wapuu characters. * NFT Technology: Application will transform how music, video, and content is monetized. * WordPress decentralized publishing and Web3 decentralizes financial governance. * Educate, Explore, Experiment: Ways to understand Web3 purpose, security, technology. * Learning Curve: View, read, and customize open-source code for token standards.

Resources/Links:

• Infinite Uploads
• Web3 WP Website
• Web3 WP Blog
• Web3 WP on Twitter
• Web3 WP on Discord
• Joshua Dailey on Twitter
• Aaron Edwards on LinkedIn
• Ethereum: Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs)
• WordProof
• WordCamp
• Web3 WP Wapuu NFT Experiment on GitHub
• Ethereum: Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
• OpenZeppelin
• Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) v1.0 - W3C
• Castos
• Jean Galea’s Blog
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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In this episode, Gaby Galea talks to Sean Brison, Head of Growth at Lasso, about content creation and running a writing team. Lasso is an all-in-one affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress.

Episode Highlights and Topics: * Lasso: Built out of necessity based on trials of working with other plugins. * Content Creation Fundamentals: Know your target audience and company’s principles. * Key Ingredients: Impartiality, authenticity, and conversational makes for good content. * Selfless Mentality/Ethical Marketing: How much value can you provide to customers? * Affiliate Content: Search queries, product reviews/comparisons, how-to guides work best. * Buyer’s Journey: Content sparks interest in specific products to meet specific needs. * Boxes, Buttons, Tables, Lists: Add these to posts to help produce content that converts. * Link Real Estate: People click different things, give them more options/places to click. * Lasso’s Roadmap: How to order, group, put content into pillars using keywords. * Affiliates: Take care of those people who actively promote your product. * Mediums: Get good at one before moving on to another to repurpose content. * Giveaways: Create buzz, increase views. People love freebies, discounts, and coupons.

Resources/Links:

• Lasso
• Lasso on Twitter
• Sean Brison on Twitter
• Sean Brison on LinkedIn
• Crazy Egg
• Wirecutter
• Castos
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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In this episode, Gaby Galea talks to Rich Tabor, Head of Product at Extendify, about blocks, block themes, Gutenberg, and the future of WordPress. Rich has a knack for designing, building, launching, and scaling WordPress products.

Episode Highlights and Topics: * Block Editor Backlash: Change is hard, especially when it affects your business/lifestyle. * Minimalism: Find balance/happy medium between what you want and need to build. * Gallery Block: Start with simple, single block and scale up to discover a whole new world. * WordPress Future: WP is leaning into editing entire websites, not one content piece/post. * Block Themes: CSS custom properties to match preview and themes you can trust. * Too Much Control? Locking things inhibits people, but having guardrails is important. * Global Styles: Available within the site editor interface to set look-and-feel standards. * Gutenberg: Component that drives the look and feel of websites, room for improvement.

Resources/Links:

• Rich Tabor
• Extendify
• Gutenberg
• WordPress Patterns
• Tailwind CSS
• React
• Elementor
• GoDaddy
• json
• Gutenberg GitHub Repo
• SquareSpace
• Castos
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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In this episode, Gaby Galea talks to Adrian Tobey from Groundhogg about lessons he has learned in the WordPress plugins business. Groundhogg offers marketing automation and CRM for agencies and small businesses using WordPress. Adrian has built thousands if not millions of marketing campaigns, sales funnels, and email sequences on behalf of other companies to solve legitimate problems and generate results.

Episode Highlights and Topics: * Shoemaker’s Son Syndrome: Similar to digital marketing agencies focusing on others. * Same Issues, Different Day: How to migrate and integrate with WordPress? * FormLift: Adrian’s first freemium business in WordPress to integrate Infusionsoft forms * Dropout: Education through experience was better than education through classroom * Pain Points: The best products are the ones that solve problems. * Pricing Model: Pros and cons of choosing freemium or premium product plans. * Cost Perception Fallacy: Specific marketing/CRM problems are expected to cost money. * Buy it! Eliminate the possibility of someone not spending money on your product. * Adrian’s Marketing Strategy: Don’t market free, but market paid to set expectations. * Post Status: Who’s who of WordPress business network/community is real and works. * Reviews: How/when to ask for and get the social proof needed to sell and support the product.

Resources/Links:

• Get 15% off Groundhogg (use coupon code: WPMayor15Off)
• Adrian Tobey on LinkedIn
• Infusionsoft (now Keap)
• FormLift
• Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
• Post Status
• React
• Castos
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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In this episode, Gaby Galea talks to Jason Schuller and JR Farr, two of the four co-founders of Lemon Squeezy, a plugin that helps simplify the selling of digital products. Lemon Squeezy fits under the Make Lemonade product portfolio and the digital maker crew hopes to continually launch and build new products together.

Episode Highlights and Topics: * What is Lemon Squeezy? Easy-peasy way to sell digital products online * End-to-End Solution: Easily do everything online as a digital creator with one-stop shop * Pain Points: Digital creators/makers can build things, the problem is selling those things * Lemon Squeezy is and probably always will be a SaaS-based product * WordPress Integration? Working on easy-peasy way to access, embed, and use plugin * Other Platforms: Lemon Squeezy can be used with any platform - it’s pretty flexible * Merchant Records: Creators upload products and Lemon Squeezy handles payments * Marketing: How Lemon Squeezy helps companies add context to their email messaging * Lemon Squeezy Price: Subscription depends on plan, customers, and features for now

Resources/Links:

• Lemon Squeezy
• Iconic app
• Make Lemonade
• Mailchimp
• ConvertKit
• Castos
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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In this episode, Gaby Galea and Mark Zahra talk to Kyle Maurer, Director of Operations at Sandhills Development (recently acquired by Awesome Motive), about general people operations, career progression frameworks, the best way to handle compensation, and organization hierarchy.

Episode Highlights and Topics: * Company Leader: Clearly communicate the vision to team/employees. * Company Culture: Function efficiently and create a fulfilling place to work. * Career Progression Frameworks: Hire the right people and give them opportunities to grow. * Climbing the Corporate Ladder: Not all people are going to be or want to be managers. * Compensation: Career progression with change in level or title often results in pay raises. * Ongoing Debate: How much discretion is allowable - as little subjectivity as possible. * Fixed vs. Variable Location: Use equitable, simple, and reliable data for salary ranges.

Resources/Links:

• Kyle Maurer on LinkedIn
• Sandhills Development
• Awesome Motive
• Trello
• GitHub
• Castos
• TranslatePress
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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In this episode, Gaby Galea talks to Lesley Sim, co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that helps users send newsletters from within their WordPress dashboard. Lesley and I discuss what Newsletter Glue has to offer and about the business side of starting a WordPress plugin and marketing it.

Episode Highlights and Topics: * Newsletter Glue: Started with an old membership plugin with Mailchimp add-on * Timeline: Newsletter Glue launched as a free plugin in August, then turned pro * Newsletter Glue: makes writing, designing, publishing in WordPress faster and easier * How Newsletter Glue works: Sends blog posts as newsletters via email service providers * ESPs like Mailchimp: Specialize in deliverability and make sure bulk emails get sent * Patterns: Use your own and/or those supplied by Newsletter Glue * Show/Hide Feature: Decide what goes into a blog post and what goes into a newsletter * Clients: Combination of bloggers and eCommerce to newsrooms and publishers * Membership Plugins: Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, Memberful, Pico * Community/Connections: Learn how to grow your business from other plugin owners * Discovery Questionnaires: Get to know clients by changing how you ask them questions * Email vs. HTML: Newsletter Glue is optimized for email; HTML is for web sites * Framework: One-to-one, one-to-some, and one-to-many to market WordPress plugin * Newsletter Glue Affiliate Program: What works best - live streams and demos

Resources/Links:

• Newsletter Glue:15% off first purchase (use coupon code: WPMayor)
• Lesley Sim’s Email: hi@newsletterglue.com
• Lesley Sim on Twitter: @lesley_pizza
• NewsletterGlue on Twitter: @NewsletterGlue
• Newsletter Glue on YouTube
• Mailchimp
• Block Editor
• MailPoet
• Post Status on Slack
• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Spotlight (Instagram feed plugin)
• Elementor
• Easy Digital Downloads (EDD)
• Castos
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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In this episode, Gaby Galea talks to David Vogelpohl, VP of growth at WP Engine, about optimizing a WooCommerce store’s performance for increased conversions and WP Engine’s WooCommerce hosting plans.

Episode Highlights and Topics:

• Speed Optimization: David describes how speed directly influences sales.
• Core Web Vitals: Google uses page performance as a ranking factor.
• Google considers 3 components for a Core Web Vitals score:
  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
  • First Input Delay (FID)
• Plugin Performance: Evaluate yearly to determine if purpose is to generate value, money.
• PageSpeed Metric: Compare and segment mobile, geography, and ISP levels.
• Hosting: Woo stores are dynamic and why it matters - no significant caching, core server.
• Content Distribution Network (CDN): Stores website pieces on servers around the world.
• ElasticPress: Solution that makes WordPress search better to make conversions/sales.
• Cheaper, Expensive, or Managed: How to select the best hosting option, price, provider.
• Fundamental Mission: Deliver performance, ease into market, and drive more sales.
• Visuals: Images and themes impact speed optimization, but CDN helps Woo stores.
• Page Builder Plugins: Functional tools to fill in critical holes and gaps to deliver value.

Resources/Links:

• David Vogelpohl on Twitter
• David Vogelpohl’s Custom Google Analytics Report
• WP Engine
• WooCommerce
• Core Web Vitals
• Google Analytics
• PageSpeed Insights
• Search Engine Land
• WP Rocket
• NitroPack
• Cloudflare CDN
• ElasticPress
• React
• WPCore
• Elementor
• Gutenberg Block Editor Filter
• Beaver Builder
• StudioPress
• Genesis Framework
• Growth Suite from Flywheel

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Few hard-and-fast rules need to be followed when marketing a business online. Search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and search engine sales (SES) are three pillars that can boost website traffic and grow your business.

In this episode, Jean and Gaby Galea talk to Jared Bauman, co-founder, and CEO of 201 Creative, a digital marketing agency.

201 Creative helps businesses enhance SEO to produce more leads, SEM to supercharge growth by increasing awareness and demand, and SES to make real money and customers. Many agencies stop at the SEO phase, but it takes more to be successful.

Episode Highlights and Topics

• Specialties and Services: 201 Creative focuses on SEO, social media, email marketing.
• Target Audience: 201 Creative’s clients tend to be in small- to mid-sized creative niches.
• SEO Content Challenges: Approach to online marketing to grow businesses, drive traffic.
• EAT: Expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are required to create content that ranks.
• Skyrocket Growth: Even without a SEO plan/strategy, be consistent and relevant.
• Content Translation: Language is predominant ranking factor, but location plays a role.
• Aged vs. Fresh Domains: Backlinks are less important, new sites take time to rank topics.
• SEM: Turn traffic metrics into leads to make more money and solidify brand message.
• Money Mindset: When to hire an agency - when there is an expertise or scale gap.
• SWOT Analysis: Evaluate strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
• Algorithms and Agencies: Know how to measure, monitor, evaluate data/executables.

Resources/Links:

• Jared Bauman on LinkedIn
• 201 Creative
• Semrush
• Ahrefs
• Castos
• Jean Galea’s Blog
• WP Mayor Email
• WP Mayor

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Do you need help with your website’s speed? Is it too slow? Configured wrong? Is your cheap hosting not good enough? Do you just want it to go from slow to fast or just fast enough? Speed is only one thing to solve.

In this episode, Jean and Gaby Galea talk to Brendan Tully about optimizing WordPress site speed with WP Speed Fix.

WP Speed Fix provides speed optimization for WordPress websites to solve slow site problems, fix Core Web Vitals issues, score higher in Google PageSpeed Insights, troubleshoot slow backend issues, and optimize WooCommerce checkout speed.

Episode Highlights and Topics

• How and why WP Speed Fix became a standalone service and separate business.
• SiteSpeedBot: Speed test app built to test and optimize sites, plugins, and themes.
• Core Web Vitals: Practical implications related to reliable tests measuring performance.
• Uptime and Reliability: Monetized commercial websites should have uptime monitoring.
• Big Pages: SEO and ranking issues - fix the page size to make the problems go away.
• Lazy Loading: Images outside viewable area don’t load until user scrolls; slows site time.
• Non-Critical/Essential Tools: Remove, pause, or turn off channels to improve speed.
• Content Migration/Site Audit: Simple sites are straightforward; others are problematic.
• Database Issues: Too much stuff can cause checkout/caching problems and slow speed.

Resources/Links:

• Brendan Tully on LinkedIn
• WP Speed Fix
• SiteSpeedBot - Speed Test App
• Core Web Vitals
• PageSpeed Insights
• WooCommerce
• UptimeRobot
• Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider
• Google Lighthouse
• Google AdSense
• Google Analytics
• Google AdWords
• Elementor
• GeneratePress
• Gutenberg Plugin
• WP Rocket
• Autoptimize
• ShortPixel
• Redis
• ServeBol

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Do you have customers in different countries or that use different languages? If you want to translate your website and go multilingual, you should consider using the Weglot plugin. It makes WordPress sites available in multiple languages in a matter of minutes.

In this episode, Jean and Gaby Galea talk to Augustin Prot, co-founder of Weglot. The plugin helps developers, marketers, business owners, entrepreneurs, and other types of users make their websites multilingual to generate revenue, leads, traffic, and results.

Episode Highlights and Topics

• Weglot: What it does and what it tries to solve.
• Getting Started: Simple steps to installing Weglot plugin.
• User Profiles: Who is primarily using Weglot plugin.
• 3 Main Use Cases: eCommerce, marketing, and private apps/websites.
• WordPress and Weglot: Idea and implementation of the language service approach.
• Challenges: API and service solutions for payments, commissions, and credit cards.
• Own vs. Host: Connect to Weglot for language translation, and remain the content owner.
• Site Speed: Weglot loads pages in other languages in milliseconds via cache, on-the-fly.
• Location: IP address not automatically matched to countries or origin languages.
• SEO: Google tends to rank and reward relevant multilingual content and websites.
• Language Lead Gen: Invest in translation tool for traffic, business, and interest signals.
• Translation Management: Classic translation list, edit translation, save to refresh page.
• Weglot Pricing: Freemium and free-trial depending on number of words and languages.
• Best Practices and Big Problems: Follow Google’s do’s and don’ts for SEO and domains.

Resources/Links:

• Augustin Prot on LinkedIn
• Weglot
• Stripe
• Google Translate
• SmartKeyword
• Elementor
• Yoast SEO
• Spotlight
• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• WordCamp

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Welcome to the WP Mayor Podcast hosted by Gaby Galea, Content Manager at WP Mayor. In this episode, Gaby introduces listeners to the WP Mayor Podcast, what it is, who it's for, and why it was created.

Episode Highlights and Topics:

• WP Mayor’s blog discusses WordPress plugins and services to help you choose the best products for your website.
• The company behind WP Mayor also develops plugins - Spotlight Social Media Feeds and WP RSS Aggregator.
• This unique perspective helps to better understand your needs and provide business insights.
• The podcast will take the form of a discovery call, getting to know the guests' products, how they work, and the team that develops them.
• The WP Mayor podcast is designed for WordPress users, website owners, designers, and others in the WP community.

Resources/Links:

• Gaby Galea on Twitter
• Spotlight Social Media Feeds Plugin
• WP RSS Aggregator Plugin
• WP Mayor

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What goes into the process of developing, acquiring, starting, and maintaining a WordPress plugin?

In this episode, Gaby and Mark talk to Cristian Raiber, CEO of WPChill, a company that offers the Download Monitor, Strong Testimonials, and Modula plugins.

WPChill is a WordPress development studio located in Romania. Currently, WPChill’s products power more than 600,000 online businesses and have been downloaded over 5.8 million times.

Episode Highlights and Topics

• 2020 Year in Review: Cristian shares numbers, graphs, and future plans for WPChill.
• WPChill: Started with WP theme shop and switched back to agency work to survive.
• Modula: WPChill saved up enough money in one year to buy and acquire first plugin.
• What and Why: Build on products that help people, solve a need, and solve a problem.
• Partnerships/Collaboration: As WordPress matures, there’s more money and players.
• User Feedback: Customers tell companies not what they want, but how to fix a problem.
• Freemium/Premium Models: Depends on financial support to build user base/feedback.
• Plugins: Data need to be collected, analyzed to understand user experience, personas.
• Platforms and Plugins: SaaS solutions moving into WordPress space for convenience.

Resources/Links:

• Cristian Raiber on Twitter
• WPChill
• Download Monitor
• Strong Testimonials
• Modula
• 2020 Year in Review
• Liquid Web
• Freemius
• MailChimp
• WP Rocket
• Spotlight WP
• WooCommerce
• Castos
• RebelCode

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Even in 2021, it feels like everybody has a podcast, but the percentage of podcasts to blogs, websites, or social media accounts is minuscule.

In this episode, Jean and Gaby talk to Craig Hewitt about starting a podcast with Castos, a podcast hosting and production service.

At Castos, Craig comes across people who got their start on some other channel and want to expand to connect with more of their audience. Podcasting is one of those content channels.

Episode Highlights and Topics

• Target Audience: Castos is for podcasters and creators who value, appreciate content.
• Where’s podcasting popular? Mainstream in the U.S., but catching on quickly elsewhere.
• Podcasting Process: Audio file is attached to RSS feed (i.e, list of associated site items).
• Recommended Podcast Platforms: Amazon, Google, Apple, Stitcher, and Spotify.
• Call to Action: Website brings people back to one place to engage and comment.
• Video vs. Audio-only: Podcasting is super efficient in creating content in multiple ways.
• Two Flavors of Transcripts: Castos’ transcriptionists or machine-generated AI transcripts.
• Listener Demographics: Depends—everybody is different when consuming content.
• Cost: Don’t buy the best or most expensive equipment; spend $10,000 or less to start.
• Common Questions: Why are you podcasting? What do you want to achieve? Who's your audience? What are they interested in? What are they worried about?
• Castos Process: Sign up for an account, give your podcast a name, upload first episode.
• Castos Stats: Track popularity, number of listens, top episodes, and listening platforms.

Resources/Links:

• Castos
• Castos Academy
• Seeking Scale Podcast
• YouTube Republishing
• Spotify
• Apple Podcasts
• iTunes
• Samson Q2U
• Audio-Technica ATR2100
• Squadcast
• Hardcore History Podcast