Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, David Waumsley. Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there, and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. One small, this is episode 157 entitled honey traps for website clients. It was published on Thursday the 5th of December, 2019 my name's Nathan Wrigley. And just before we begin, a few bits of housekeeping, we would like to share some links over on WP Builds, just so that you can keep in touch with all the things that we're doing. And we do do quite a lot related to the WordPress community. So the first page. Is WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe over there. You're going to find a whole bunch of ways that you can keep in touch with all the content that we put out. So for example, you can subscribe to us on your favorite podcast player. You can find our Facebook group and YouTube channel and so on and so forth. There's a couple of forms to fill out should you like to be kept up to date with what we're putting out in terms of podcasts, but also the news that we put out each and every Monday. So that's WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe. The other one is WP Builds.com forward slash. Black. Now, believe it or not, even though black Friday and cyber Monday have gone, we've still got quite a few offers on that page, so that's WP Builds.com forwards slash. Black just in case you've got any cash left in your wallets that you want to get rid of, go and check that page out because there might still be something which is up for grabs. Some of them are running for several weeks after the traditional black Friday sales have finished. And the other one is WP Builds.com forward slash advertise should you wish to put your product or service on the WP Builds podcast and get some attention about your WordPress specific plugins, service, theme, et cetera. And a few people that have done that. Are these guys. The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by WP feedback, our client communications eating up all of your time. If so, check out WP feedback. It's a visual feedback tool for WordPress that is specifically designed to get you and your clients on the same page. You can check out WP feedback.co for more details and cloud ways. Cloud ways is a managed cloud-based hosting platform for WordPress. Unlike others, they'll let you choose the servers from top cloud providers like Google cloud, Amazon, and digital ocean. There are no restrictions on the number of websites per server, and you can try cloud ways using promo code WP Builds, and you'll get $20 free hosting credit. And finally, page, build a cloud. Work faster and your page builder of choice by reusing your cloud. Save templates, important export, any louts to any of your WordPress websites. Page builder, cloud works with element or BeaverBuilder breezy Guttenberg and many more. And you can get a free trial up and running [email protected]. And we really do thank all of our sponsors for helping support the WP build podcast. They really do make a great difference. Okay. Just a quick reminder, I always somehow managed to leave this till the end, and I thought maybe I should mention it at the beginning. On a Monday, we put out a 30 minute news episode. Maybe you've heard that I sum up the WordPress weekly news for the previous week, and also. In the, in the Facebook group and also ly Eve on the WP Builds websites. I still do P build.com forward slash live or the Facebook group is WP belts.com forward slash Facebook. You can join us. I'm joined by usually three word Pressy people and we chat through the news and it's very entertaining. We get quite a lot of engagement in the comments. But yeah, it's always nice to have a larger audience. So if you want to join us for that, that's Mondays in the afternoon, 2:00 PM UK time. Okay, let's get stuck into the main content today. So this is episode 157 it's a discussion with David Waumsley and I. It's based upon the book watertight marketing, Bri, Briony, Thomas. And in this one we tackle this subject of honey traps for website clients. Now, the idea of this really is based upon the fact that usually you want to try something before you buy it. So you want to try. But buy some shoes. You want to try them on. You want to buy a phone, you want to play with it first. How do we do that when what we're offering is a website. Surely we can't build it and let them play with it. Well, maybe there's some other ideas and that's what this podcast is about. I hope you enjoy it.
David Waumsley: [00:04:37] This discussion. We're called in honey traps for website clients, and this discussion is another in the series inspired by the book water type marketing by Briony Thomas. And very quickly the book we are using or ripping off shows us. 13 areas or leaks as the book calls them, where businesses can lose potential customers or clients. So we thought each of these would make a good discussion topic in its own right, and it might be helpful for our business or in our roles as providing digital marketing help for clients. So conceptually we are working open an imaginary. Funnels starting at the narrowest point, the bottom to the widest point at the top. And we've already discussed some leaks. So we started with forgotten customers at the bottom of our funnel. These are the people that we may have neglected our existing customers and they might not know. What else that we do. Those poor onboarding, not realizing that new customers are on high alert and need to be smoothly welcomed into the point where they really trust us and see themselves as our customers. Lastly, we did no emotional connection, which is more about our brand identity and connecting with potential customers, and now we are moving on to what she calls. No gateway. Nathan, do you want to explain what she's talking about with no gateway.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:03] First of all, congratulations for getting through that summation of everything that we've done over the last three discussion episodes. Yeah, that was good. Yeah. So this is, this is a really interesting topic. First of all, David has actually read this book, whereas I'm sort of like just sucking his knowledge up and trying to try to stay along for the ride, but it's really interesting. So the gateway is the idea of being able to try something. Before you kind of commit to it, I suppose in a way. And, and the, the, the commit in our business, I guess is large sums of money committing to spending a lot of money on a product. And the analogy that David wrote down for me is kind of like trying on clothes. So there is literally no way of purchasing clothes effectively other than trying them on. Now I know that. In this day and age with infinite returns where you can buy something and return it, you can, you know, you can iterate through a thousand different variations of a, of a pair of trousers or, or a jacket or whatever it might be. But the best way of knowing is to actually wander into a shop, try several on, and then eventually say, yes, that's the one. It's completely tangible. You, you figure it out. But we, in the. In, in this sort of, you know, online selling websites space, we, we don't have an equivalent, or at least it's not entirely obvious what an equivalent might be. So that's kind of what this is about. The persuasion of trying before you buy is very, very effective. But what on earth could we possibly give away or let them try before they actually slapped down the money for the website? Is that about right? Is that what a gateway is.
David Waumsley: [00:07:48] Yeah. I think that's printed up as a good cover of what she's talking about. There's a couple of other concepts that she's thrown in as. As well, which we ought to cover up because I think what we talk about will be rubbish. And the stuff in the book so much better, but she talks about being able to offer a product ladder. So this is a complimentary set of products or services that can lead from an initial lower value to the thing where you're going to make some profit on it. So you've got something that you can kind of lead people up. So I guess that's, that is one of the problems, isn't it? Getting that kind of first payment from somebody. Don't you think that you're selling?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:08:24] Have you got an example of what a product ladder actually looks like in the real world? You know, so where you sort of trying to get people to sort of gradually step up, how might that look? Even if it's nothing to do with online, it could be a real world one or an online one.
David Waumsley: [00:08:38] Yeah, well she's gone that little chart actually, which gives some examples and and we know it, I think anyway, certainly when it comes to knowledge business and that kind of things, marketing and consultancy. So she's got something like a free online tool. So you might have a mini audit, which is something which I know a lot of people do offer, don't they? They offer a website audit on people's site. So some people are doing that. You and I aren't doing it. Oh, we,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:06] no, I don't really do that. but anyway, we'll come to that later. But yeah, good idea. So is that like at the lowest rung of the ladder, if you like, just some way of hooking people in and you're kind of giving them a, well, you're not really trying out the website building service, you're just trying out whether you and they fit, whether the way that they communicate works for you, whether you get along with each other, that's really what that's about. And then it's sort of thinly disguised as, as giving incredible value where. Probably it's not. Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:09:37] Well, I mean the, the example she gives, so it would be like an annual loan online tool. so the mini audit would be your sort of free, I guess, often. Then the pay thing could be a sort of audit and report. So a three day marketing audit that you could do. So that would be a lower level cost. And then you might move into a. Consulting exercise a longer period, but that could be about the whole building of a site, couldn't it? Effectively, if that first audit is about what needs to be changed with your site, you could slowly lead up to the new site that needs to be a built. So yeah, I think some people have employing that kind of thing.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:16] It isn't something that I do, but I do like the idea of sort of slowly, I suppose it's in a bit way, it's like warming people up, isn't that you? You give them something, in this case, your free online audit tool, something very straightforward, presumably mostly or completely automated. They fill out a form and it gives out some, prescribed answers or whatnot. And then you kind of move them up and you say, look. You know this, this is slightly automated. We can do a much better job if you, if you give us a little bit of money and we'll, we'll dedicate some actual human resource into this and then keep going up and up and up and up, selling and upselling until, until eventually the goal is the website, I guess.
David Waumsley: [00:10:55] Yeah. Do you think some people though do offer the pretty website audit as a, as a manual job that they're actually going to give them a report on there? The end of the day, they're going to look over their site. I mean, then probably got something prefilled and they know what they're looking for in terms of problems.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:11] Yeah, that's true. in my case, I, I just don't do that. I would, I'd happily look over their site, but this is probably a trick that I'm missing in the, I would probably ask for. Some kind of fee in exchange for that just because it takes time, but, but this is where that discussion is, isn't it? This is about the, the value that you give for free, and obviously if you are really in need of clients, and this is something that's consuming your, your thoughts that, yeah, why not give something away for free, presumably you don't. You don't spend hours and hours and hours on this free audit, you just do a fairly templated job. Tick some boxes, examine a few pages of the site and what have you because, well, we don't want to give away everything for nothing. I guess.
David Waumsley: [00:11:59] Yeah, exactly. Well, you know we talked before this and in a way you've blown out this whole conversation cause you said you're, that most people come to you already knowing that they've kind of want to work with you. There's the referrals, so there's almost no need for you to. Spend any time on the gateway is there?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:18] Yeah. In my case, I know we've, if you've listened to this podcast before, you'll know that my business is a primarily a local business where local sites, are built for local customers. And I live in a fairly small town. It's not minuscule, but it's big enough to support. Me and the, the sort of outlying villages and towns and what have you, are big enough to support what I do. And so word of mouth has been the most effective tool for me. and I was saying to you before we began this call, I got an email just the other day where. Somebody said, you know, we're needing a website and your name kept coming up, so we're getting in touch with you. So in that sentence, I'm working on the basis that I hope, at least the fact that my name in inverted commerce kept coming up is enough. A reassurance. Let's use that word, reassurance that they can trust me. Yeah. And I, I really don't do a great deal of this stuff, but I know that because you've pivoted recently, you don't have that same local feel to your business. You're going for the global market. You're, you are going to have to spend some time thinking about this stuff, and I'm sure that's the case for a lot of people who are listening to this.
David Waumsley: [00:13:28] Yeah. I, I mean, mine is the opposite problem because, I mean, it was fine for a while while I was working with a colleague who was based where I used to live, so we were working on a client projects. Then now I kind of, I'm out and about, needing to top it with new clients. Now, fortunately, I'm okay because existing clients are either been passing on new work to me or I'm getting some referrals. So it's enough to keep me going, but I'm certainly aware that. I kind of need to branch out and it's a global market to be now because I'm just not located anywhere. I don't have that connection. I'm not going to, you know, ask Bob the plumber, you know, who does his website, you know, because I'm not going to see Bob the plumber and that kind of stuff. So, yeah. So I really do need some of these gateways. I need some way of attracting people in a low risk. Cause it's all about the risk, isn't it?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:14:17] Yeah. Just, just. A slightly bizarre question, and maybe a sort of slightly controversial question. I don't know, is any of this particular stuff, is there any sort of disingenuousness to it? I don't know if disingenuousness is a word. Is it disingenuous? In other words, are you. Offering are you claiming to offer in any of this? Do you believe something of value, which really isn't, or is it simply just sort of like a lead magnet? In other words, if you were to, let's say you do your, your online mini audit or whatever it might be, does it stand alone. Is there actually enough value in it for somebody to then go off to another person and say, look, I've had this audit done. These are the things that I need doing. Look, can you make a headstart on my website or are we simply doing this as a, as a mechanism to provide. enough, enough, what's the word? You know, you're trying to sort of get them into your process so that they feel, okay, I can trust them. There's not quite enough in the document that I'm holding to go with, so, okay, I'll step up and I'll pay for the next level. You know? So is it an audit in the sense of, let's take an example. If I pay for my house to be surveyed, which in the UK is like some kind of legal requirement, that survey has to be portable after I've received it and hold it in my hand, I should be able to go to any estate agent or what have you, any lawyer, any mortgage company, and say, look. There it is that everything that you need to know to crack on. Do we have the same here or are we just offering a little tantalizing bit.
David Waumsley: [00:15:52] Yeah, I didn't know. I didn't know what people offer, and I have another problem with it as well, because just the way I am cynical is that I feel if I did have a website, I D I don't know if I'd want to take somebody up on that because I would feel okay. Duty bounds really to give any work that needed to be done to that person, perhaps other people wouldn't. So it would prevent me from engaging in the whole system. Even if I thought a website review might be a good thing. I do want somebody to look over it also, you know, I might just be worried that. That if they're offering this for free, it's going to take up their time. Then they're looking for some payback. So they're probably going to look for problems, aren't they? So it's like if my car's working, I take it into a garage, or they going to just find problems because I'm there. You know?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:39] I don't think, I suspect that a proportion of people do view a lot of these offers through that prism. And so. You know, some people are going to see it in the, in a different light and with a different spirit, and they'll say, Oh, that's great. Oh great. Somebody is going to take a look at my website and give me some data back. And of course there'll be a proportion that feel that, Oh, goodness me. No, that's clearly a disingenuous. It's a lead magnet. They're just trying to suck me in for some more work, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, and I suppose what we need is a whole array of different techniques, not just a website audit, a whole. Ton of different gateway offers and maybe maybe we'll get onto that.
David Waumsley: [00:17:19] Yeah. I, it's not the one that I would pick. I mean, I think I mentioned before that I really want to put some time together to put a little freebie course together that I can use that would be helpful to existing clients, but also be a lead magnet. So, you know, kind of email funnel and that just would stand on its own. You know, that talks a little bit about just very quick fixes they can do to their websites to perhaps. You know, improve their conversion rates and that kind of thing.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:49] So I think that a lot of videos, don't you? I know that you do a lot of videos now. It's slightly. Slightly strangely, those videos are all, well, certainly the ones that I've watched, that they're aimed at people who clearly would never need your, your products or services because you're explaining this of menu, shies of BeaverBuilder layout, some of the options within a module and so on and so forth. But if you have, you strayed more into that yet. You know, the, the. novice client kind of videos, and if so, have you found them to be well-received, viewed, commented on.
David Waumsley: [00:18:25] No, I haven't and I want to, but I think funny from my website, if I could have a little, you know, sign up to this and get this little course, and it would be private videos for that, that I'd like to do. But you know, I think it would be a very easy thing to do. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but not the concept. Anybody I guess, could do this. You know, you just have to think of those kind of. Five minute things, you can explain to somebody about little changes they can make on their website. You know, just just to understand in our proposition value works or something you know, to, to put your head to there or just, I don't know, just there's a whole bunch of tiny little things which I wrote down somewhere, which I just thought that could make a nice little series that would stand alone. And hopefully the idea is that it's a little bit of tribe. I see before you try it out or try before you buy rather than, yeah. Yeah. With that, because at least it gives you, it gives them some indication that you might know some stuff.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:21] Yes. Yeah, and I suppose if somebody arrived on your website, depending on the kind of, the way it's been optimized, the SEO that you've, you've. Put put into it and what have you, you are going to hopefully know a little bit about the, the problem that they're experiencing. So as an example, I don't know if you've got a a care plan webpage where the SEO is clearly all about problems with websites. It might be that they've ended up on that particular page because of they've got a problem with their website, something's broken and they need a quick fix. So. The, the thing that you offer, the video that you offer might be different on that page to your generic homepage where you are offering something a bit more generic. And in that sense, you might just like to, I don't know who, something is. Something is as blenders, just introducing yourself, saying who you are, showing people around your office and and so on and so forth, what you specialize in and et cetera.
David Waumsley: [00:20:16] But I think all of us can just offer a little freebie course or something in some form or little email, funnel that would just. It's a little freebie service to a client, which is made for anybody. So it doesn't target anybody. So they won't feel that they're being put under pressure to have to go with you, the, you know. So I think, I think that would still fit as a gateway, wouldn't it? Into your products. You give something free as long as it's followed up with the, the next move that you might want to con, you know, if you have some issues with . These things, or you need somebody to help with the you, you know, you can move them into actually buying something off you. I just wonder, actually with websites, I mean, I, I wonder if another route into getting clients is to help them on their, I know some do help them on their existing website first before they would sell them a new website.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:09] Wow. That is, that is a controversial subject is now you, are you talking about helping as in literally helping like for free or are you talking about helping us in just assisting as a, I don't know, on an hourly rate or something like that?
David Waumsley: [00:21:23] Yeah, I was thinking more for paid, you know. But you know, perhaps if you gave, let's say you put something on your web Mudget they're not going to get to your website if they're not looking for one. But you know, perhaps you could find some way to find people where you, you gave them. Some think of value about websites or digital marketing and then still made yourself available to do tweaks on their existing site before perhaps lead into the fact that they might want to come with you wholesale on a new site at some point. It could be, it could be a route in.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:56] To me, it all feels like the whole purpose of this is, is a, is a trust building exercise. It's not so much about letting, making them aware of your processes and you know how many website clients you've had before. At least that's it. If I were, if I were to spend more time doing this, that's the way I would want to frame it is just a bit more personal, a bit more, this is who I am. This is what I look like. This is what I do. This is how I talk. This is the kind of things you . Perhaps could expect a little bit more of a trust building exercise. I'm just wondering if all of this always has to be caught behind, like a lead capture form, you know? In other words, so your case, you've done these videos, do you, do you put those videos out on a, on a webpage completely. Public facing, or do you have those behind a, an email address, subscription form or something like that? You know what's at what point do you decide there's value in this, but only exchange for an email so that I can contact you later? Or do you take the approach that, look, there's a value in this for absolutely everybody and all I want to do is build up trust and hope that some of that is sticky, so I'm just going to put it out there and let everybody view it whether they put their email address in or not.
David Waumsley: [00:23:09] Yeah. You know, that that would make more sense, wouldn't it? Actually, to put it just publicly and, but then, you know, not everybody can do that, can they?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:17] No. I mean, you're right on a lot of people would find that, I suppose objectionable because you are in a sense giving something for absolutely nothing. But I think one of the things that this podcast has taught me is that doing something for nothing can actually be. Can actually reward you in ways that were unexpected. You know, there's all sorts of things that have, that have come about from doing this podcast. And, and, you know, here we are sitting here just chatting away. and it's just content. There's no, there's no paywall. It's just out there for anybody to grab. And, and some people seem to like that. and it has unexpected consequences, but it does. Create quite a lot of, it does create quite a lot of work in terms of actually doing it. And I suppose at some point you've got to justify it for yourself. You can't just keep making courses and keep making courses and never, never convert those people unless somehow you are independently, enormously wealthy.
David Waumsley: [00:24:10] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these things are the really difficult, I mean, it's fairly easy for the stuff that we buy a lot of, which is WordPress plugins and apps, and with products like that, it's very easy for them to just offer a free trial,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:26] isn't it? Oh yeah. I mean, you've got it all the time. Don't, you know, try the SEO plugin for 15 days or something like that. Try this, that, and the other. And that. It's perfect because you are actually buying a product which is prebuilt. So in a sense, it's a bit like buying a car or buying something like that. You know, you, you, you're allowed to go and test, drive it around the road for a few hours and what have you. And here's our plugin. We believe it's great. Try it for a couple of weeks if you don't like it. No big deal. We'll either refund your money or we won't charge you in the first place, but website building, you can't do that. Can, you can't get 15 days into something and then them say, actually, you know, I'm not, I'm not liking it. I'm just not going to pay you. So it's really different. And I don't know what the perfect answer is. but I, I do like the audit, but I'm wondering if there's other ideas around it as well.
David Waumsley: [00:25:21] I've got a few, and some of them are partly done, but they're not going to suit most people. It's just my experiments into the idea of moving more towards training people. So I've got my life. Demo site, which has got some templates on it, and it's got, for me, it's got Beaver builder in and some of the plugins there, and it's all made simple and it's, you know, somebody signs to that. They get a little video that explains how they can use it and they've got it for seven days. Now. This is all great, but I'm really tried to out because recently it's only been returning customers, so I haven't had the opportunity to see if that's going to help new people too. Make the decision to come with me because I've, I've not bothered showing it to people who already know.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:00] Yeah. So what's the messaging on that? Are you, are you going to be kind of like reaching out to, I mean, clearly the whole, here's how to use Beaver builder video series is of very little use to people who are already using BeaverBuilder cause they. Probably yesterday. So are you going to be sort of like putting a landing page together and then driving traffic to that with, I don't know, cold email or paid ads or how are you going to know.
David Waumsley: [00:26:26] No, it's not. It's not so much about that. I'm just really using that as an example, as a stepping stone product, if you like a freebie that somebody can try. So they've already needed to have made contact with me before they get to find out about that. So in this case, they would need to have some intent that they're thinking about having a website done and they're considering me. I don't know. It just say, Oh yeah, yeah, we do this and this is how we work. You buy a book a day or 70 days or whatever, but first, if you want to try out what you're getting. In terms of the website itself. There's an example there. You just go and sign in and you can play around so you can see how much you can do to be able to change your own website when it's finished. And that's the idea, isn't it?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:05] The, the amount of work that you must've put into that upfront on the hope that people will, get in touch with you and sign up in that way. How many hours do you reckon you've put into making those videos and setting up the demo install and the, presumably when they enter their email address, it spins up a demo in some way, shape, or form.
David Waumsley: [00:27:23] Yeah. What it said, it didn't take me very long because I'm using, I'm using a plugin, you know, and there were a couple of really that could be used anyway. People are using the WP Ultimo, which we like, don't, where's the concert? And there's the Moto presses, demo builder. So it doesn't take long if you've already just got a website built up and you'd just give them the, editor access. To the site, which clears away most of the stuff and just hide a few things. And I put one video that just says, this is how you use it, so you can, you know, so it's, it's a nice thing there, but I haven't, you know, like most things we talk about, I haven't really fully made use of the ideas yet. So it's, you'll see that one over time, but it is a, it does fit into a sort of a kind of gateway is that it is a, an attempt to allow people to try something. But of course, that's not gonna work for all the people who like to keep the clients. Out of the the website or wanted just restricted to very simple areas they can change.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:18] Oh yeah. And I would imagine that's a significant proportion of the people who build websites, you know, they don't really necessarily want the clients having complete control over everything, whereas you have a very different approach than you want them right from the get go to, to understand how to use a page builder and hopefully do as much of it as for themselves as they can. So yeah, that is slightly different for most people, but I'm just interested to the lengths that you've gone to there. To set up that demo install. You see, my approach is so archaic compared to yours, and because I'm largely going to people's homes or offices, or I'm, I'm communicating via, I don't know, something like zoom or what have you. I will do the exact same thing but face to face. So I will, I will spin up a, a version of vanilla install of WordPress with. Something like BeaverBuilder in it and a basic theme. And then I'll just, I'll just show them how they could, you know, how they can operate. So I'll do it. And it's not even on a sort of very polished level. It's just, look, you traditionally have a header here. Let's just drag a header in and look, you'll notice that now I've got the option to amend that text. And I would do that by typing in here and okay, underneath that, what if we put an image? Okay, let's see how you do that. And I just show them and, and it's always very interesting to me that. They're, they're sort of mesmerized by how simple that process is. And so I don't really need to do that for very long. And after a few minutes I say, look, look at all these options down the left hand side. Cause I lock the, a lot of the sort of controls, the modules all on the left hand side. And I sort of say, look how many options there are. Look, we've got a portfolio one and we've got a gallery one and just very briefly explained. So, and then... You know, kind of say some facts. And so you can see over time it becomes really easy to amend these sites and you get a bit more experience with it and so on and so forth. And it doesn't take long. It turns out that with most of my clients, most of them enjoy that. Moment and then they don't really want to get involved with the, with with the page builder anyway. So it kind of pushes it back to me for, for the work. So it, I've never noticed that being a, an impediment to me actually having to build things cause they, although they'd be Giled by how easy it is, they're also kind of, well I don't have the time. Could you, could you just do it. Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:30:35] Well, that's interesting. How long have we been talking? I didn't know that you did that, that you showed them the page builder in the, you know, in the initial conversations.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:44] Yeah. I mean, I don't always, you know, as an example, a couple of months ago, I went to a, a building firm. They've got a great big office in town, and you could just tell that this guy was. I dunno, he just wants to get his fingers on the computer. You, it just was that kind of a guy, you know, he wasn't quite happy to watch me doing it, so I just, I've got it all set up and I showed him a couple of things. I just pushed over to him and, and then he started dragging things in and, and I got the job, built the site, and he hasn't touched it since then. So, you know, it was just, it worked. It was just an effective sales pitch in a way. he was beguiled by the possibilities that, or some point in the future he could. amend things if he wanted to, but he's too busy. He's too busy with his building company, but it was, it was a very effective way of. demonstrating to him, and I feel that kind of was a, was a, a pretty good gateway, but it's very labor intensive. You know, I've got to get in the car, I've got to set up a demo, I've got to go and be there at the right time and you know, make sure that my calendar's free and all that. Whereas yours is much more go to this page and just sorted out, watch the video. It's much, much less labor intensive. When you repeat it, yours was way more labor intensive to set up, but I think that by the time I've done mine twice, we've probably spent an equal number of hours. Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:32:04] Generally what, and I, this is one of my thoughts on this. I mean, there's just some people that are just going to want to play with their own websites and some are not. And in some ways I don't think we necessarily have to sort of make the lines for, make it difficult for clients to do that. I think if you show them like you do . They just like the fact that he's there, but they probably won't touch their sites at all.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:27] Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:32:28] Yeah. I think it's still a selling point, actually, often to show that the page builders these days, even if I know most of them won't be interested at all, and if they weren't. If there were the type of person who likes to fiddle around, they will just start fiddling around anyway. There was one client that I had who was building their site Regenesis and everything was hard coded it. It just wasn't five minutes before the guy started tinkering around with it. Clearly must have just didn't know any PHP buzz clearly had done what I do, sort of understood how this section was connected to this page on the, the PHP template and just moved it around. It was staggering.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:07] Right. Interesting. So I mean that's, that's interesting as well. You know, each person is going to want to have a different gateway to each other person. And I suppose in the end you've got to, you've got to decide what your, what your niche is and what kind of thing that they're going to respond well to. We're going to get a bit of pushback on this though, aren't we? I suppose in that we are. We are advocating, or at least the discussion is dwelling around the idea of doing a ton of stuff for nothing at the beginning. And I know that a lot of people will probably find that, well objectionable. The idea is that you should get paid for everything. Even things like discovery sessions should be paid. but perhaps that's not the way that, that it always has to work.
David Waumsley: [00:33:48] No, but do you know what I think discovery that's cause the work content. I mean, I think you could probably start with a paid offering that is less risk than the main website. So if you're, you know, if you're trying to sell a 10K plus website or something, that's a lot of money to take off somebody. If you offered as your sort of gateway product stepping stone, a no risk discovery period where you offered to work with them to scope out the project, but they're talking about something that you would clearly say they could use to go to anybody. If you don't want to go with us, then it's a kind of stepping stone, isn't it? There's less risk. Something they still need you to do.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:27] Yeah. Do you do much of that kind of discovery? I mean, I know that you, you're not going to be doing it in person, but do you do it? Do you actually spend time in that sense, or do you just sort of crack on based upon materials that they've sent you in forms that they filled in and whatnot? Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:34:42] I've done a couple of, I've sold a couple of, discovery periods before, but they've been just not what I thought they were going to be as a product, that they really weren't. I thought we were gonna be talking about kind of user identities, that kind of thing. And really when I needed to pull it out is when somebody couldn't get their brief together for me. They didn't. We really had to sort of flesh out what it was that their site needed to do for them, you know, on the technical point of view. And I also had to say, you know, I'm going to need to, if we're doing this fairly cheaply, I'm gonna need to see whether there are plugins or way in WordPress where we can do it without it being costly. So you'll need to pay for me to just check that as possible. So that's the only time I've really ever used discovery for that kind of thing.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:28] So your experience was you weren't that convinced by, it didn't work in your sense? I think the discovery process, I mean, I have to be very honest about this. I, I, I don't do an awful lot of this other than sitting down and having a chat and going through my, my documentation where I tried to get out of them what it is that I need. It's not. It's less about what, what they need, if you know what I mean. Because like I said many times before, I'm dealing with local clients and I often know what their business is all about anyway, but I'm, I'm, I'm probably, I'm not very confident in those situations. I don't really feel like I'm yet. what's the right word, particularly effective at that? I think I'd be better hiring somebody in if that, you know, if I got the 10 20,000 pound website where we really needed a deep dive, I think there'd be people who'd be positioned to do that much better than me. because I often get kind of go down blind alleys and, and, talk about the wrong things or ask the wrong question, then discover halfway through, Oh. Good grief. We've wasted half an hour. I'm not. I'm really not where I wanted to be, so yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:36:33] Yeah. You know, I mean, the people who talk about paid discovery periods as a, as a sort of gateway, that the only people I've heard talk about the, well, Chris lemme does that, but, you know, he's kind of known for producing so much content. And Forbes. Being somebody known for doing consultation, so I wouldn't, you know, somebody is not going to come to me and I'm going to be able to offer this because they're not going to trust me on that too, to even start that process. So, so it's not been an option. It's only been . It's not really, my discovery period has never been used as a, as a stepping stone to doing a website with me. They've already decided, Hey, I just wanted some money up front before we commit to how much it's going to cost ready, or how much time it's going to take. That's it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:19] Towards the end of the document that David and I look or we share when we do these podcasts, you've put a list of kind of like nine possible ideas. Now I know that we've gone through. A few of these already, but maybe it'd be a good idea to just riff around some of these other bonds. you mentioned freebie website reviews and the product ladder, freebie courses and email funnels. We've mentioned discovery period. You've done, live demos. So that's, that's me, that, that is where I fit. Number four on your list, live demos. I'm, I'm more than happy to do that. I really enjoy doing that actually. And the, the, the reason I like doing that is largely because I don't feel that I'm. I'm doing anything new. Essentially I'm just doing what I do on a day to day basis. I run through, building pages, with, in my case, Beaver builder and WordPress, and it feels completely organic. And I'm, I'm also in a real comfort zone. They're in the, if they ask me any questions, I can offer the answer, cause I probably know it. Whereas with, with some of the other ones I've, I've never put together the free because I just don't have the time to do that and I don't have the inclination to do that. So that, that, that live demo fits me really well. what's this webinar thing? How, how would you run a webinar or what are you thinking? Fill a people up for like a once a month session.
David Waumsley: [00:38:37] I think, I can think of one person who's done that. Friend of ours, Clark Marshall, they ran a webinar once, so they had a, a contact in a, a certain niche and they ran a webinar for them, which I think was just genuinely more about using their websites for marketing, but we didn't, that they were able to. Sell on their services and how they can help with that website that they might want. So that was a nice little freebie stepping stone.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:05] That's a really interesting idea actually. I suppose you'd have to, you'd have to market that within an inch of its life and really hone in on what it was. Because people attend webinars for your, well, I, I think mostly they don't watch it like it's television, you know, it's not for entertainment. They go with a purpose in mind and they're hoping to fix a problem. So if you could. figure out what it was. So, for example, there's, chap in the, in our Facebook group who's often making lots of lots of very, fabulous comments. It was called Chris Hughes, and he owns, a website, a WordPress management. Business whereby he'll take over the, the maintenance and the upkeep of your WordPress website. I can see webinars fitting perfectly for him because each month he could do something about the typical problems that are faced by WordPress website owners. And then towards the end, he could get onto how his business, would solve all of those and take those headaches away whilst also giving value along the way.
David Waumsley: [00:40:01] Yeah. Yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:40:02] yeah. That's interesting. But because mine is just generic, I'll build any kind of websites. I don't really feel I've got the, I don't really feel I've got the messaging right for that because I think people show up to a website not wanting something generic. Usually something a bit more specific.
David Waumsley: [00:40:18] Yes. That's the thing. And it does take some, I mean, if you know someone, I think in their case it was fine. They, they knew someone who had a big group, I think for coaches, and they could just advertise their webinar, which was going to talk about what they knew and that might be of use. To the people who were training to be coaches themselves, and I think that worked for them. But, yeah, I just, I think I, it would be hard how to reach the people in the first place. With that, I guess there are lots of business networks where perhaps you could advertise within them for a particular. I dunno just because a lot of those people just won't know what they can get out of the digital marketing. So you could do that and then try to sell your website services on a topic
Nathan Wrigley: [00:41:02] idea though, because in with my model of, of going out to people's offices, I'm permanently on a one to one ratio, you know, literally is me. Demonstrating how to, how I can help to one business, and I do it one at a time. Whereas with the webinar, you know, you might see it as a complete failure if only one person showed up. But it's still the exact same odds as me turning up to an office. I still do that, you know, and I've got the additional problem of mileage and driving and timeshare dueling. Whereas if you did the webinar, you know, it's, it wouldn't be a failure if one person showed up. That would still be in my eyes. A success cause you still got the same olds and you could then talk to that one person. All right. All right, Jeff, you're, it looks like it's just me and you. Let's, let's, let's have a real proper chat because it's, but if you turn out to be very good at it, you could have two, three, 10, however many people came on the line. So I think, I think that webinar, it is actually quite inspired.
David Waumsley: [00:42:04] Well, we move on to the next one, which is, it's just more my silliness. Again, you know, we had a whole episode poking about my poster, didn't you? Yeah, I was going to put up in a, which I never did. I still keep holding back on this. So this is connected with the latest idea on what I might do if I'm desperate to try and pull in some more customers from London. So the next time I might, when we go to London, put up a poster that just has a live event. Which you couldn't accommodate a number of people around the table. Probably the sort of 10 to 12 people and have a free maker website with WordPress half day event or something really costly. But I actually think that a freebie like that might attract a lot of people just looking around at the courses there are offering that kind of thing. They seem to get filled even when they're charging quite a reasonable amount. So unsuspecting, this is my theory on this, that if people did come to that, they would see the basics of what you would teach people. Perhaps, you know how easy is to say, spin our site with something like, astrocytes or something like that, which will on a page builder. But if you show them how much more they could do with you. Yeah. You know, you might pull some people in, so I don't know if this is an idea that might, they certainly probably won't be done this year, but it's just an idea out there to really do that. I'm playing with.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:43:29] I think, I think that's inspired. I guess it requires a certain temperament, doesn't it? It requires you to be a, you know, a, a rack on to, you've got to have the ability to stand up in front of people and confidently speak to the room and realize what your audience is and why they've showed up and get your messaging right. But I think you'd be very good at that. it's just, there's a, there's a quite an expense isn't that you've got to, make sure you've hired a suitable place, presumably, you know, make sure there's food and drinks available and all of that kind of stuff as well. And, it's, it's not something I've ever entertained, but I, I think, I know, cause you and I again know people who've done this and it's been tremendously successful. It's managed to, in, in one afternoon gather them heaps of business.
David Waumsley: [00:44:14] Mm. Yeah. I think it's worth taking a punt on something like that. I mean, particularly if you've got the space that you can do it with, that I have to hire at great expense place, particularly in London. So that's why I've been thinking it's a great, an opportunity to do that. And particularly with the free advertising. with so many people going, pastor railway station, it's one to try out, so it's not going to be available to most people, but at least it's another, another way in. But again, it's not going to work for many businesses. If you really want to be commanding high prices, this isn't gonna. This isn't gonna work for you, is it? It's going to work for me.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:44:48] Okay, so the next one was number seven. Interesting. Putting some kind of forum together or a group. Well, I think a lot of people have made this their thing, haven't they? You, you know, you only have to log into Facebook and see the endless different kinds of groups that are out there. The idea of being the sort of thought leader in a particular group, whether it's marketing or building sites with BeaverBuilder or building sites with elemental. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. If you're the, the person who's. Curating, moderating, posting frequently in those groups. It doesn't have to be your own group either. I suppose you can do that through other groups. I wonder, you know, how many, how many times have you seen in not so much the WP Builds group, to be fair, but in other Facebook groups and exchange where work has come out of it, somebody expresses a problem and then a few moments later it's clear that they've hired somebody to do it. That happens quite a bit.
David Waumsley: [00:45:39] I always wonder about that because it seems like a quite a, another thing that would be quite costly because if you run a group genuinely, you're gonna be providing a lot of information to people about how they can do it for themselves. Yeah. And, and, Yeah. Well, I guess that's just a follow on from what I was saying earlier, but I just wonder how many, you know, how much work there is in that for, you know, for the person who's going to run that group and the time it's going to take them.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:46:07] Yeah. It seems like forums, self hosted forums have kind of died. The death in face, in the, in the, you know, in the tidal wave that is Facebook and so on. So it's just an interesting idea though, and something that you can set up in a, in a heartbeat, you've gotta be committed to it and keep going back, haven't you? And what's this thing about? Gillette razor blades. What? What was that all about?
David Waumsley: [00:46:27] You know what, that's interesting because I wrote this down and then I saw Brian, his own comment about this. So with product business says she mentions the gateway off of being a free sample, like disposable razor blades. So the Gillette model, I was introduced to this concept. Never heard of it before, but there are a bunch of people, and I'm still very attracted to this, who, if you like with versed a lot, the, the website is almost the, the cheap product that you put out there too. Engage people. So they will take on your hosting and care and, and, and it's taking that, razor blade model because, you know, you give the, you've got a disposable razor blade in the core product is that kind of baby. You've got all of the extra things, you know, you. Yeah. You have to have the, sorry, you're given the holder for the razor blades, but you have to keep buying razorblades for that hold all the time and don't you. Yes. And so the website, you know, and I am attracted to that. And again, it's something that's not gonna appeal to most people. And I think if your trial trying to charge for high value product with a website, much of these gateways aren't gonna. The work on there, they were about offering something free, but it does, I, I, you know, it does appeal to me that idea of keeping a web, the website costs very low or at least a basic site to start with, with the idea that you might get that lifetime value from that customer as they increase what they want to do with their websites as they continue to pay you for the hosting and maintenance. So, yeah, that's the Gillette model really.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:05] That's fascinating. It's really interesting. I'm always full of these fascinating ideas. what's the last one? Excuse me. I've just got frog in my throat. something about free beauty is.
David Waumsley: [00:48:17] It was just a stupid idea. I think we should move on, but the thought was, well, I'll just explain it now because you know, we've got the websites as a service model hadn't we was out there and it, you know, most of those offer as weeks, we be Squarespace do a free tier to attract people in to try it, to buy. And I just wondered, and it's just a thought, whether that. Ever could be used to move people to a full service version of a website.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:48:48] it feels like that the tide is going in the opposite direction, not, not directions. I feels like you'd be, struggling against the tide, but I could be wrong.
David Waumsley: [00:48:57] Yeah. You know what though? As soon as I've said that, I've just realized there is an example again, same friend Clark, I think he's actually done something based similar to that actually, I think because he's got two, two businesses effectively. One is DIY and one is their custom work, and I'm sure he's had people convert from the DIY. To the customer because they've gone in and the, you know, they provide the support as well for doing the DIY, but they've just gone, hell yeah. You do first.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:49:26] Yeah. Just get fed up with actually maintaining it. And I'm a little bit like my guy who was beguiled with the page builder, but then you know, quickly got back to the stresses and strains of running a successful business business, building houses, and realized he didn't want to actually have anything to do with his website at all.
Yeah. And the difference is, of course, with Clark, this isn't a freebie tear that he's offering. They'd still had to make some commitment to going into their DIY, but it's still a possibility, isn't it? You know, very low cost option to build your own website using, you know, the these tools that we now have, you know, particularly WP Ultimo. It's getting. Getting a good plug for free, isn't it today?
It really isn't.
David Waumsley: [00:50:08] You know, you can kind of set these things up. but yeah, the freebie tear would scare the life out of me. Cause the idea that you would have to pay for the hosting for somebody who never moved off it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:50:17] Yeah. I think a free, I think a, a freebie trial period is better than a freebie tier. I mean, obviously. In the, you know, you go to a SAS app, there's always a free tier. Isn't that just about, but it's so hobbled as to be utterly useless. Normally I can't think of too many apps, where the, the intention is to give something that's useful, useful. Although having said that, I think Elementor a lot of people just use the, the free version of Elementor and are quite happy with it. But anyway, they've clearly managed to upgrade most of those people onto their, their paid plans, so that's good. Well, David, to be honest, we're on 47 minutes. Is there anything urgent that we missed out towards the bottom of our document, or are we basically done? Do you want to give it those ones go on.
David Waumsley: [00:51:02] Well, there was one thing that we talked about, which we skipped over, which was just about the whole speculative design thing. I don't know if it's worth discussing or before we go.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:11] Let's go for it. Yeah.
David Waumsley: [00:51:12] Yeah. Cause when I came into build insights, that was the big thing. Everybody was saying, no more speculative design. It's, it's, it's evil, it's bad. It's just wasting your time. But yeah, I just wonder now whether we've gone far enough to change that approach because there's so many templates, so many, free examples of free images and icon sets and all that, that we could easy throw together a lot of example, homepages. And all you need is a PDF to show somebody that. If somebody is asking you for a design of what do you think our website should look like? I don't see why you can't pull something almost off the shelf. Slightly change it a little bit and hand that over as a sort of speculative design to sort of engage with somebody in the first steps to whether they might want to come with you.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:51:58] Yeah. I think when, when that was all being shouted about, don't do any designs, you know, a speculative design, it was because it was actual labor. Whereas now. You know, websites, because of the, the way that they are built now, it's all rows and the rows can be templated and the pages can be templated and you can literally throw together a half decent webpage in a matter of minutes. So long as you're not trying to do the SEO and you're not trying to get the messaging bang on, you can throw together something which looks half decent. I, yeah. I don't know that I'll be doing it. Yeah. I don't know that I'll be spending a great deal of time building mockups for people, but I can see that if it takes seconds, especially if there's a process of automating it. We, we had an interesting chat before we recorded about how you could combine something like ACF with a page builder and within minutes fill out five or six fields that were specific to their business and have those like merge tags, if you like, populate an entire website. You could have that done in a few seconds.
David Waumsley: [00:52:59] Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:02] It's the setting it up. It's always the setting it up, which is troublesome. Okay, so, next week or not next week. Next time you and I have a discussion episode, we're going to be doing leak number five, which is something to do with approving no critical approval, but we won't get into that just yet.
David Waumsley: [00:53:20] Yeah, I, I'm not even sure what that's about. It's under the same category here. It's all about kind of trial in that stage where people might have an interest, but you need to sort of move them on a small steps though. It's in the same sort of section. So it'd be interested in this one.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:53:34] Yeah, we need to, well, you need to go and read the correct chapter and SWAT up before then, but nice. Thanks for chatting us chatting with me today, David. That was lovely. Well, there we go. Another interesting episode. I hope you enjoyed that. Hope you found some of that useful. I do like these discussions with David and it's this whole topic of trying to mop up areas where we might be leaking clients, before we've even got them as clients is really interesting. And yeah, certainly try as you buy is something that I use all the time in the real world. I want some shoes. I'm going to try them on. I want a phone. I'm going to. Can I play with it in the shop before I buy it? And so coming up with some ideas of the kind of things that we could do to enable clients to do that without us having to build the entire website first seems seems like a really sensible idea. Have you enjoyed the episode. The WP Bill's podcast was brought to you today by page builder cloud. If you want to dramatically speed up your WordPress website workflow, then check out page builder cloud. It securely saves all your templates to your own cloud and you can then reuse them on any other website in seconds. Page builder cloud works with elemental BeaverBuilder, breezy, Gothenburg, and many more. And it's not just for page builders, though. You can save your contact forms and ACF layouts too, so get a free trial today at page builder, cloud.com and doggie P and up wanting four of us will be directly affected by mental health related illness, WP and op supports and promotes positive mental health within the WordPress community. This is achieved through mentorship, events, training, and counseling. Please help enable WP and up by visiting WP and aap.org. Forward slash give. Okay. Join us next week. We'll have another podcast for you or join us on Monday for the two things that we do. The, the news, which I prerecord, it's about half an hour long, and also the live news 2:00 PM UK time over at WP Bell's dot com forward slash. Live. I have some Latin cheesy music for you today, and I can certainly. Guarantee. It's incredibly cheesy, so enjoy that and bye. Bye for now. . .
