Mastermind.fm

The European investor's favorite podcast.

Episode 107 – Matt Medeiros Shares Some of His Wisdom

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The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

I have been following Matt Medeiros’ work for a few years through Twitter, Youtube, podcasts and so on. Recently I got in touch with Matt and purchased one of his services, User Feedback Videos, for our WP RSS Aggregator plugin.

I loved his take on things and we got talking from there. Matt accepted my invite to the Mastermind.FM podcast without any hesitation and we were on Skype just a few days later. To me this was a bit surreal as I was used to watching videos of Matt for so long. In fact, at one point in the recording you may notice I seem a bit lost… that’s just because I thought I was watching a video while Matt was explaining something. It then clicked that this was a call and I had to speak, so on we went.

This episode focuses around the topic of managing multiple projects at different stages.

Matt has been involved in many areas of the WordPress space, even having a background as a car salesman, so he has been juggling multiple jobs and projects throughout the years. At the moment he works as an Account Executive with Pagely while doing a number of other stuff, including User Feedback Videos and hosting the Matt Report podcast.

I’ve taken on a more managerial role in the past couple of years, even more so now as the CEO of the team behind WP Mayor, WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings. Recently we also made some changes to our team, so figuring out what to focus on at what time (and why) remains a major task.

In our call, Matt and I discuss some of the pain points one could face in such a situation, how to approach them, and how to overcome them. Listen to the full episode to learn more and understand why even the most experienced minds and the best teams sometimes struggle in these areas.

Enjoy the show!

Mark

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Episode 106 – Interview with Mr Retirement Asif Rahman

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The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

In this episode, Jean joins Asif on the show to have an informal chat between friends.

We touch on some important topics such as:

  • the current state of WordPress and thoughts about its future,
  • what it means to retire in your mid-thirties,
  • the impact of travel and living abroad on our lives,
  • how our parents’ lifestyles shaped our choices and motivations
  • life in Bangladesh

Asif is one of my favorite people in the WordPress community; I really respect what he’s managed to achieve so far and best of all the fact that he has remained very humble and open to sharing his knowledge with anyone who approaches him for help and mentorship. I wholeheartedly support the drive to have Bangladesh host their first WordCamp ever, and hope to have the chance to visit this country in the near future.

Enjoy the show!

Jean

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Episode 105 – SEO Research with Joshua Hardwick from Ahrefs

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The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

SEO research may sound daunting to some, but there are some basic methods and tools that everyone should be using.

The Ahrefs team recently got in touch with me when I published this article on WP Mayor discussing WordPress’ performance in comparison to other CMS options. That led to discussions around Ahrefs, and eventually, this episode.

I’m joined by Joshua Hardwick, the Head of Content at Ahrefs, to discuss SEO research techniques using tools from Google, Ahrefs, and others. We delve into a number of areas that every site owner should be aware of and a few technical ones for those who already know the basics.

Among the topics we discussed are:

  • What is SEO?
  • What is keyword research and what tools can we use for it?
  • What are backlinks and how can we build more?
  • How to understand what type of content you should focus on to bring in more visitors?
  • Analyzing your competition through tools such as Ahrefs.
  • Finding competing domains that you weren’t aware of.
  • Does social outreach have an impact on SEO?

We went a little deeper in certain areas so it’s certainly worth listening to the entire episode. Whether you’re just getting started with SEO research or you’re looking for some new ideas, Joshua’s got you covered.

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Episode 104 – Our Essential WordPress Plugins List

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The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

This week I welcomed back Jean Galea to the podcast as we found some time to discuss the plugins we’re using at the moment, and why we chose them.

Although Jean and I work together, we rarely find the time to have discussions such as these since we tend to focus on different projects, so this was an opportunity to see what each of us was doing. At the same time, we’re hoping to give you a better idea of how we run our websites and perhaps point out some plugins you weren’t aware of before.

Throughout our discussion we focus on plugins and a few SAAS tools that have integrations with WordPress.

Since the WordPress sites that we run are focused around either content (WP Mayor) or e-commerce (WP RSS Aggregator, EDD Bookings), our choice of plugins is also centred around these markets. Even if your sites are not focused around heavy content or e-commerce specifically, there are some great little nuggets in there for you.

I won’t list down all the plugins we use here, but here is a quick overview of the main ones we have used on all or most of our sites over the years.

  •  Content & Subscriber Management
    • Nelio Content to manage our posts more easily
    • Replyable to be able to reply to post comments through email, without having to log in to the dashboard
    • Akismet or Anti-Spam to prevent spam comments from, well, spamming your site
    • MailPoet to send out newsletters and to reach out to subscribers
    • Optin Monster to run various campaigns on our sites to attract subscribers
    • SEO Framework or Yoast SEO to ensure that our content is as optimized as possible
  • Forms
    • Ninja Forms as our main go-to plugin, having been introduced to it by James Laws, the other founder of this podcast
    • Gravity Forms is an established solution we used before and still do on some sites
  • E-Commerce & Marketing
    • Easy Digital Downloads and its extensions
    • WooCommerce and its extensions
      • Official extensions
      • Trusted 3rd-party WooCommerce extension stores
  • Analytics
    • Monster Insights, a great tool from Syed Balkhi
    • Hotjar Connecticator to connect to the Hotjar service for heatmaps, site visitor recordings, polls and more
  • Social Media
    • SNAP by NextScripts
  • Affiliate Management
    • AffiliateWP to run our affiliate programs on-site
    • Thirsty Affiliates to store affiliate links from other programs and cloak them
    • Impact and Shareasale as alternative ways to run an affiliate program when you need a more professional solution
  • Backups & Security
    • BlogVault to manage our site security and backups in a simple and reliable way
    • ManageWP to manage multiple sites from one dashboard, including running updates
    • WP Security Audit Log to track how multiple users are using our websites, which is especially useful when you have multiple authors or editors
  • Others
    • Advanced Custom Fields to be able to customise our websites with custom fields where we need them
    • Elementor as our page builder of choice when we need to create a quick website for which a default theme won’t do the job
    • Classic Editor; given that we are unsure of what Gutenberg will bring with it in WordPress 5.0, this is a safety net of sorts
    • PerfMatters, probably the most important of all, to control on which pages certain plugins run, which is essential if you have certain functionality that you only need on a few pages (giving you better performance site-wide)

We mention a few more plugins throughout the show that meet certain other needs, so be sure to listen in and learn more.

Are there any other plugins which you use religiously on your WordPress sites? Let us know in the comments to give them the exposure they deserve.

Episode 103 – Reaching $25M in Sales with Markus from ThemeFusion

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The episode is sponsored by Plesk and Freemius.

In episode 103 I am joined by Markus Schwingenschlögl, CTO of ThemeFusion, the company behind the Avada WordPress theme. Markus had recently answered a Q&A for us over on WP Mayor, hosted by David Scott, Envato’s PR and Communications manager. This episode is a follow-up to that Q&A, so I recommend reading the Q&A before starting to listen to our conversation here.

Marcus is an integral part of the Avada theme’s incredible growth on ThemeForest, the WordPress theme marketplace from Envato. They recently hit the $25 million mark in sales with an average rating of 4.77 out of 5 stars from over 21,000 reviews. Those numbers do not lie – the ThemeFusion team is doing a lot of things right.

In our discussion we go over a number of the areas that ThemeFusion has focused on in order to achieve this feat. These included:

  • The idea of focusing on the development of a single theme with the introduction of one-click install demos for various use-cases.
  • Methods of gathering and using user feedback through comments, reviews, support and a community Facebook group.
  • The tracking of feature requests through Github and the idea of building new features according to use-case requests, not just feature requests.
  • Other ways of gathering ideas for new features and use-cases.
  • The importance of design and attention to detail.
  • Why it’s vital for all your team, developers included, to maintain a connection with your user-base.
  • The need for a solid company structure to take things in the right direction.
  • The premise of releasing a mature product rather than being first to market, even if it means playing catch-up at first.
  • The importance of the WordPress community at every stage of developing a product or service.

I would like to thank Markus for sharing his thoughts and insights with us. Remember, if you haven’t read the Q&A we did on WP Mayor, I recommend starting with that here.

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