My Pivot To Tech Services. How Has It Been?

August of last year, I was sitting in a campground, in my RV, in Boone, North Carolina. And I recorded a video.

Real Talk On Recent Pivots At The Blog Marketing Academy (And Why)

I talked about some changes I was going to be making with the Blog Marketing Academy. And a massive part of that was going to be a shift from a 100% focus on courses and instead more fully embracing doing website tech services.

In terms of content, I was going to get more techy. I said:

And I just embraced that I am doing service work. Basically, I take all the things I’ve usually just talked about or recorded videos about… and now I actually build that stuff for clients all the time. And one of the things I love about that I said right in that post:

My goal was to make my business be a better reflection of what I want to do and where I think my “super power” is.

And, it’s funny. I had to get over the fact that, in this world of online business and the stupid “guru” game, the idea of doing this kind of work is almost frowned upon. It is “time for money”. And that’s bad, right? You’re supposed to hire grunts for that kind of stuff and make everything scalable, I guess. And there I was… basically taking on clients and building sites again.

Was it beneath me? A stupid move? Was I going backwards?

I must say, those thoughts came to my mind.

And over the last many months, I’ve had several clients of mine who have followed along with me for awhile ask me how it’s going. They knew about my “pivot”.

It has now been well over a year. And soon we’ll even be entering a brand new year of 2023. So, how’s it been going?

Yes, a high majority of my week now is spent tackling various aspects of WordPress “plumbing” for clients. I now spend way more time doing that kind of stuff than I do creating content. That’s been a definite shift.

Because of my longtime presence at the Academy and all of the content, I’ve done no outside marketing for it. Business comes from the website and my Youtube channel, most of the time. Frankly, most people who do this kind of work do not have a web presence like I do. They just have brochure-style sites, usually.

I spend much of my day answering questions for clients (usually technical), discussing site setup strategy with people, building their membership sites, getting carts set up, getting FluentCRM sites hooked up to Amazon, setting up marketing automations, fixing up BuddyBoss sites, migrating sites between hosts, helping clients get their DNS figured out, yada yada yada. 🙂

I still create content, of course. I do THE EDGE every Monday morning. I try to create a new post and video for the site every week and I am also now going back into the archives and modernizing older content and recording videos for those, too. A content site like mine requires upkeep and I definitely spend at least a full day (often more) per week just attending to content creation.

In terms of course training, I can’t say I’ve been hitting that one out of the park here. I have several things I want to do in terms of members-only training for PRO, but I do need to devise a better time management setup for myself to ensure it gets done. If there’s anything that’s been the bigger challenge with this pivot, it has been balancing the time demands of client work with the internal work of the Blog Marketing Academy itself. This is something I intend to address as we begin the new year.

I will say, though, I feel that online courses have become commoditized to a high extent. For that reason, I do definitely like that the core of my business doesn’t revolve around trying to launch or record courses all the time. That’s a tiring business if that’s all you do.

In many ways, my business is simpler now. It feels simpler.

I like what I do. I enjoy working with clients.

Income is now a three-pronged thing, split between client services, membership income and affiliate income. And it works.

As we move into a new year soon here, some of my goals for my own business are:

• Over time, do a full audit of older content on BMA to bring it all up to my current standards, including videos with each one.

• Along the way, streamline calls to action across BMA to reflect the current nature of the business.

• Implement new systems for new and updated content for PRO members and improve the marketing for the membership side of the business again.

• Improve internal systems and likely hire to help speed up throughput for client services. Gotta move this thing beyond me if it is going to expand, clearly.

There’s always things to improve. To get better at.

In my pivot post, I said:

And while there are always things to make better and that’s part of the fun of being a business owner, I will say… the Blog Marketing Academy now better reflects me. Warts and all, really. But, I definitely like what I do these days. And that was indeed the point.

Tech Talk

The world seems to be having a collective high over AI these days, with ChatGPT impressing people so much people are starting to predict the demise of Google. One WordPress developer even asked it to code up a simple WordPress plugin for him... and it did.Part of the buzz over AI right now is the Lensa app in the app store. People have been using it to generate AI images of themselves. And yes, I admit.... I did it, too. 🙂This stuff is definitely powerful. As I said last week, I have no interest in having AI "write" content for me and I think that's going to backfire. Much like the use of article spinners. But, there's no doubt that AI-powered tools are no fad. I just think it is important that people keep in perspective what AI is... and is not.Back in the world of WordPress and stuff...Siteground has announced that PHP 8.2 is now available on their servers. This is the most modern stable release of PHP. Most hosts don't offer it yet, so Siteground is definitely ahead of the pack on this one. You don't generally need to concern yourself with the innards of what these PHP version releases are all about, but the short story is... modern PHP usually means faster websites. And if your hosting is still using old versions of PHP, you might want to look into upgrading it or changing hosting to somebody who offers it. Always test your site, first, to make sure the code is compatible. You can see my video on this topic when Cloudways announced end-of-life on certain PHP versions.In the world of BuddyBoss (which I use myself), they've got an interesting post about the backstory of forking off BuddyPress and bbPress and how they have evolved past that. Basically, they've been free to develop faster by not being constrained by the initial reliance on those older products. Of course, staying true to their open source roots, the main BuddyBoss platform remains 100% free and open source. When you pay for anything, you're getting the PRO add-on and/or the themes (which are pretty awesome).