Good morning! How was your weekend?

Pretty normal weekend here, although the wife and I had some fun yesterday customizing a plan for one room using a bunch of Ikea. Kinda cool what you can customize using Ikea pieces. Kinda fun, too. 😉 

Time to kick off what is hopefully going to be another productive week.

Ya ready? 🙂 

Well, ready or not, here we go… starting with a packed issue of the newsletter. So, let’s roll…

Here’s what’s on the menu for this issue…

• GROWTH STRATEGY: Making more by giving less.

• SITE STRATEGY: A Simple Intro To Taxonomies - And How You Can Use Them

• TOOL OF THE WEEK: Automatic Youtube Video Transcripts + Easy Fluent Forms Styling

• WP TECH BUZZ OF THE WEEK: WordPress acting more like Apple?

Featured This Week

Making More By Giving Less

I think the days of selling products or memberships with the idea of getting a LOT of stuff for your money… are probably over.

I played that game for a long time myself. Heck, the first flagship course I ever created for bloggers was called Blog Masters Club. And it had 16 course modules. 16! 🤪 With transcripts, worksheets and the whole enchilada.

Of course, times were different back then.

But, some of us are a little slow to realize just how much things have changed.

I see a lot of people still busy little bees creating their big online course. And they’re thinking there will be so many modules, office hours, live training sessions… all these things.

Or even worse, they lean into that volume with their marketing. They try to sell their membership by saying how many things are inside of it. Hundreds of videos, weekly office hours, yada yada yada.

Heck, the membership now known as OnePass over at the Blog Marketing Academy played this very game. But, it doesn’t work that well anymore.

… because people are already overwhelmed.

People are overwhelmed by content. By social media. By media. By all the blog posts being published. By all the Youtube videos. Pretty much any topic under the sun, you can find free content to show you. Free or super cheap. It isn’t hard to find it.

We’ve got inflation of information. We’re drinking from a damn firehose.

So, you coming along with your big online course or coaching program with a bunch of videos and modules and “calls” to attend? Not only do people not care, but it can actually work against you. You’re just piling onto the overwhelm they’re already feeling.

Times have changed.

Some of the best performing newsletters out there have grown because they curate and summarize the top news and trends in their industry. It keeps people from having to wade through all that crap on their own. Instead, subscribe to the newsletter and have things simplified.

Simple offers that make things simpler.

People want simplicity. They want less overwhelm, not more.

How can you build an offer around that?

What if your monthly membership program was, in essence, just a newsletter? Or just a PDF library. One PDF a month.

What if your membership was one exclusive, but highly valuable email newsletter?

What if that course you’re intending to sell is specifically made to be SHORT. Remove all the fluff, build in every possible shortcut… and just get them from point A to point B without any overwhelm. Cut through the noise.

Brevity is valuable. Simplicity is power. And it can be good for business.

A Simple Intro To Taxonomies - And How You Can Use Them

OK, let’s do a bit of WordPress 101 here. Because a lot of people who use WordPress don’t know this. Because the word “taxonomy” isn’t exactly everyday lingo. 😉 

A taxonomy is basically a set of classifications to group something else. When it comes to WordPress, a taxonomy is basically a way to categorize content.

Blog posts have two taxonomies by default assigned to them. Those taxonomies are categories and tags. People see those in the WordPress interface and they see that they can assign categories and/or tags to any blog post and provide some order and organization to their blog post archives.

But, WordPress is highly customizable. And you can actually create and assign as many taxonomies as you wish. You can literally mold WordPress into your specific needs.

I’ll give you a simple example…

Let’s say you have a big pile of articles. And you’ve used the built-in category taxonomy to categorize your articles so people can jump into sections. Cool.

But, what if you wanted to also organize articles by TYPE?

For instance, tutorials, editorials, news, strategy, etc. You use regular categories to group by topic, but you create a NEW taxonomy to group by TYPE.

It’s easy. You just create a new taxonomy. And you assign it to blog posts.

You could hand-code this and use no plugins, but the easiest option is definitely just to use a plugin. My preferred tool is Advanced Custom Fields. This plugin does a ton of things we won’t go into here, but one thing is also does is creates custom taxonomies.

Here are the simple options for a basic taxonomy called “Types”.

You can alter other options if you like, but you just give it a plural and singular name and a “key” for how it will work within the database and in URLs if you end up having URL sections for various types on your site.

Then you’ll see “Type” as another option to select when you’re writing a blog post. And you can easily create archive pages for your article types and show this type on your articles.

You can use these custom taxonomies to provide more organization to your content. You can use them on custom post types and create some amazing database structures for custom content, listings, etc.

Heck, you could even use a custom taxonomy specifically for mapping calls to action to your content. Use it just for internal purposes, but you use your opt-in plugin or whatever you use to look at that taxonomy in order to dynamically pull in the most appropriate call to action. Easy, global control for your opt-ins.

So many options.

Automatic Youtube Video Transcripts + Fluent Forms Styling

This week, I’m going to share TWO small, but useful tools for you. Both are web-based.

The first is a simplistic, but useful tool where you can pull the transcript off of most Youtube videos for free.

Just paste the URL to the video in… and it’ll pop out the transcript. That transcript is very likely being pulled direct from Youtube via the API. Here’s how that could be useful:

• If you post Youtube videos to your own blog, you can now more quickly get and post transcripts on your blog along with it.

• Maybe throw the transcript into a PDF and offer it as a content upgrade (after the optin)

• Maybe use AI like ChatGPT to summarize the transcript and give you a nice summary you can use on Youtube itself or on your own site.

The next tool is useful if you’re using Fluent Forms, which happens to be my go-to forms plugin for WordPress.

Sometimes, you really want to format the look of a form beyond what you can do with the built-in editor. And you can use CSS to do it. Thing is, not everybody knows how to hand-code CSS.

Get it the way you want, then copy/paste the CSS code into the custom CSS section for your form.

Convenient little tool, even if it is somebody’s hobby project. 😉