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So Totally Business Savvy, Episode Two.
Hello, everybody! Welcome to So Totally Business Savvy, my name is Dean Soto and I am a business and technology consultant but I’m also a full-time IT security rep so you get a little bit of both, the consultant/solopreneur side and you get the full-time corporate side. But we’re here to commiserate, collaborate, do whatever we can to professionally develop and make our workplace and career just a happier place to be.
Once again, welcome everybody! I’m so excited that you’re here and I’m so happy about what we are going to talk about today and that is WordPress. At least, once a week, we will talk a little bit about tech. Maybe we’ll just have a smattering throughout the week, I don’t know. But today, we’re going to be talking about WordPress and why it would behoove you and me and everybody else to use and to see what WordPress is all about.
Now, there are two types of WordPress: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. We are talking about WordPress.org. WordPress.com is a web-based platform for blogging but WordPress.org is, it’s made by the same makers, but it is what is called self-hosted. You can put that piece of software on your own web host and do really whatever you like with it. But the best thing about it is that it is absolutely free.
Now you would expect something that is free to be maybe substandard, maybe it wouldn’t be something that you would want to necessarily use with and entrust with your business. But if you have ever tried WordPress before, it is extremely powerful, extremely powerful. And if you don’t believe me, why not ask, say, CNN, Wired Magazine, eBay; all of these different places use WordPress in some form or another, whether it be on their main site or on a subsidiary site that they have. But it is not just them; ton of other credible places, credible businesses use WordPress.
Years ago, WordPress was created to be a publishing platform, a blogging platform but it has turned into such an easy way to have a content, what’s called the Content Management System. You don’t have a static site but you don’t have a blog as well. You can update and make it look the way you want to. You can have little featured articles and so on that call out to potential customers or show off your design skills and so on. The possibilities are endless. The possibilities are absolutely endless.
And so, some of the things that you can do with this. Why are we talking about this today? What can I do as either a full-time corporate professional or a small business owner? What can I do with WordPress? Well, let’s talk about the small business owner because I think that it has the most application to small business owners.
Years ago, when the Web was first formed, in order to have a website, you really had to find someone that knew what they were doing, that knew how to code HTML, knew how to form tables and all that other stuff that’s involved with HTML at that time at least. And you would pay thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars in order to build your site. And people still do that today; they still go out and spend a good amount of money on building websites which is totally understandable. You want something out there that if people were going to visit, you want it to look good, look professional, show your image, and so on, and be attractive to those people.
I did a blog post about this over Prosulum.com, p-r-o-s-u-l-u-m.com—that’s my consulting business, blog and website. I did a blog post about this I think three or four posts ago. And what if I told you that you could build an entire business website, and I’m not just talking about a website where people are going to come and see your business and such. I mean, an eCommerce website where you can sell things, where you could have a merchandise and fulfill orders and ship and package and all that other stuff. What if I told you that you could build that for under $200? You would think I was absolutely insane and crazy, but guess what, with WordPress, the power of WordPress, you can very easily do this.
And I did it with one of my sites called Totosoto.com. I sell Home Theater PCs similar to Roku boxes and stuff but a little bit more, a lot more flexible and I built that site in a matter of three days and I’m not a web designer. I do Web project management but I built that site in less than three days and it is a fully functional eCommerce site—under $200. Now there is a monthly charge for the shopping cart and that ends up to be about $20 and that’s through Foxycart. I love Foxycart, it makes it so easy.
But think about that. Two hundred dollars! A $200 initial investment and you can have a fully functional business. Of course that’s minus any incorporating cost. But if you’re a sole proprietor, other than paying the taxes involved in whatever state that you’re in, that’s pretty dang awesome—$200 to start your own business! And that’s what you can do with WordPress.
But that’s not all you can do with WordPress. There’s so much more that you can accomplish. And that with other means of doing things, with the other way of paying someone, it’s just unreasonable; I’m not saying that you shouldn’t pay someone anymore, don’t get me wrong, but if it’s out there, if you can do it with just sweat equity, do it! Do it! So, especially as a small business owner, the opportunity is out there.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I just did a website and I did that website (not under $200) within three days, another one that was in three days—just this last weekend actually—and I did that with WordPress as well and it was for a major, major corporation. And when they saw it, they thought wow, this is fantastic, this is such a great site! And to me, my overhead cost was about $70 plus my time. And they didn’t get it for under $200 but they did get a website and that’s how much it would cost them if they had done it themselves and had a little bit of sweat equity. But you know, they hired me, they wanted me to do it and that’s fantastic, that’s fine; but it was not, definitely, it was not under $200.
So, for a small business owner, that is amazing, absolutely amazing, absolutely amazing! But what about a full-time corporate-type person, what can I do with WordPress? Well, for one thing, you can have it be your resume. A lot of people out there get searched and I had this happened to me at an interview I recently had. Yes, I interview, I always interview even when I’m not necessarily looking to leave, but opportunities are out there and I was interviewing at an another aerospace company and first thing they did was they checked out my LinkedIn profile, they checked out my blog, they did all these stuff prior to me even stepping through the door.
So, what better way to impress someone who’s going to interview you than have your own site with all your accomplishments—proven accomplishments? Maybe you have video, maybe you have audio; maybe you have blog post, testimonials and so on. What better way to impress those who are thinking of hiring you for a job than to show them this. The investment is absolutely minimal but the gains that you can have are tremendous. And a lot of people do this, and they tend to be a little more of the design oriented. But they go out there, they build these websites that show what they can do. And guess what? They usually get the job; they usually get the job unless they really just do something that’s stupid on the blog or site that they’re creating. Typically, people want to see that you have initiative, that you have creativity, that you really care about what you do, and that you have expertise as well.
And so, the opportunity to go out there and show those things is tremendous and the cost that you’re going to be spending is maybe, the Web host, a good Web host cost about $150 for two years, and then a domain name you can get at Namecheap for maybe $7 for a year. That’s pretty crazy. That’s an easy investment. And then you can make that into your personal blog, make a personal brand and so on. So later on, if you ever want to move out into a solopreneur, entrepreneur type, you have the credibility, you have been building up a lot of equity in yourself. And that’s an amazing thing that you can do.
But there are other things that you can do as well. Maybe on the side, there are tons of people who need WordPress plug-in developers; Realtors, insurance agents, tons of other people that use WordPress as a means to advertise their services or as a means to actually service their clients and so on. They need people who can make specific plug-ins for them or specific themes. And so maybe if you have some kind of design skills, maybe you have some kind of development skills and that’s what you are doing in your full-time job, why not advertise yourself as a plug-in developer and get some side money? And you can make a whole lot of money especially with niche, niche things, niche, niche markets.
Every time I go to a Meetup or Tweetup and I mention WordPress, the first thing that comes out of anyone’s mouth is, “Oh, do you do plug-ins?” That’s it! I mean 99% of the time, if I mention WordPress, they say, “Do you do plug-ins?” And I say, “Yes, yes, I do plug-ins.” Personally I don’t develop them myself but I know people who can do it and I can manage the project and still, even with that, I can make money off that. Pretty cool, pretty cool!
If you are a designer, design some themes! There are a lot of premium themes out there, there are a lot of premium themes that you can get whether it’s through WooThemes, or a Theme Forest; there’s a whole host of different places. There are even free themes out there. There are a lot of free themes, place that I go for, no, I don’t go there but I like searching there because they always have tons of them—advertised, not advertised. I don’t even…how’d I explain that?
Anyway, I go to Smashingmagazine.com and you type in “free WordPress themes” and usually they’ll have blog post that say, “A hundred and forty free of the best free WordPress themes,” or if they had, “60 of the best-looking business WordPress themes for free,” and so on. There are tons of places like that that advertises free themes because people need them, want them; and the people who designed them get visibility and exposure and business off of that. So Smashingmagazine is one.
The other one is Instantshift.com. They are another Smashingmagazine kind of look-alike. I don’t know, maybe they’re a subsidiary of Smashingmagazine but they have tons of themes that are noted in their blog post and most of them, the majority of them are absolutely free. And you know, the free themes are not (they are looking for the best themes) substandard themes. I used, for my business, a free theme for a long time and it worked out just fine. But the problem you’re going to run into with free themes is that they don’t come with any support. So as WordPress starts being developed more and new versions come out, there is a chance that your theme will break and you will need to find someone to fix it.
But anyway, digressing, design themes! When I buy a premium theme, sometimes I don’t want it to look like everyone else’s. So I’ll hire a designer to re-skin it, to make it look another way but still kind of keep the same form of everything. And that saves so much money because all they really have to do is change imagery around and that’s it. Something that if I were to build from scratch, if I were to build something like that from scratch, it would cost thousands of dollars; it absolutely would! But if I like the way things are placed and so on, and I just want to change the look and feel of it, then in a matter of maybe $600, sometimes even less, depending on…. For me, I would outsource it to the Philippines, India and so on, whatever, and I would get it for a way, way cheaper, typically around… A good developer like in India, I mean a really good one is probably around $14, $15; but you know, someone who’s around $8, $9, $10 would do just fine and make it the way you want to. So there’s so much opportunity out there to do side things.
If you’re in the corporate world and you’re thinking, “What can I do?” “What can I do to earn more money?” Just with WordPress alone, that’s it! You have two right there. Actually, you know what? You don’t have two. I’m not going to even think of more. So you have becoming a plug-in developer, you have becoming a theme designer, re-skinning premium things and so on.
Perhaps you can be a consultant like I am. Just like I said before, my overhead cost for building that one site is about $70. I did it myself and sometimes I hire other people to do it but for the amount of money that I made back, that was considerably less money than I made and that’s just because people need powerful things, things that work. And if you have the expertise and the knowledge to give them that even if it cost you $5 in parts and you charge, say, $3,000, that’s not a bad thing and that’s something that you can take advantage of and if they are going to make tens or it maybe even hundreds of thousand dollars off of your $3,000 consulting, then fantastic! That’s awesome! They are much better off than the way they were.
Or perhaps, you can be a copywriter, a WordPress copywriter. People always need good marketing, good writing that bring people to places on their website that they couldn’t get people to go to before. So if you going to write really well, then that’s another thing that you can do with WordPress and there’s so much that you can do as a full-time corporate-type of person. And how long have we been talking about this compared to a small business owner? There’s a lot more out there for you, guys. There are really is. You can be a freelancer, you can just do side things like that.
Other things that you can do, let me give you two more examples. One thing you do is build your organization’s website, whether it is a non-profit organization or an organization within your company. You can build a website that shows off what you guys do because a lot of times, you can get very lost especially in a big corporation. It is very easy to be kind of pigeonholed and lost and not let anyone know what you’re doing. So, you can build your corporate WordPress site. Sometimes this is hard because you might be on an Intranet or whatever, but that’s an opportunity.
And you can also build a community around in events that you started. If you didn’t hear the last podcast, it was all about getting something started. So do an event! Do some kind of event that it is either fun or something informational, or whatever. Do something and use WordPress as a means to gather. You can use it as a means to gather people who are getting registered, a means to, put out news about it, to put out blog posts about it, to do public relations and so on.
There’s so many things that you could do with WordPress and this is just a brief overview. If you really want to go into it, there’s tons of plug-ins that can help you with anything—from SEO, to linking, to eCommerce (like I said before), to whatever, really whatever your heart’s desire.
WordPress is absolutely awesome, totally awesome. So with that being said, this is just the first delving into more of the technical, more of the technology-driven things I can help you in your business or help you wherever you’re at in your career.
If you have any questions, please, please feel free to either comment on the Pro Sulum blog where this is posted up until I find another suitable area for it. You can comment on there. You can email me at dean@youcanworkless.com. Probably the best way to give any type of feedback as to Twitter, you can follow me at @deansoto; my handle is @deansoto and or better yet, call us on our feedback line: 714-643-5301. That’s our feedback line. Once again, that’s 714-643-5301.
I don’t know why I keep on saying “us” and “we.” I’m the only person here. I’m not royalty or anything like that, so I’ll be happy to hear from you and if you have any questions specifically about WordPress, specifically about anything that we have talked about, even if it’s maybe saying consulting or pricing or whatever, just let me know and I’ll be so happy to answer your question.
So, I hope you guys have a great rest of your week, you’re just starting off and God bless, and I will see you in next episode.
