You've built a website – congratulations! Now you can venture on the eternal quest to optimize it (speed it up).
Why is website speed important? The one-sentence summary is: No one wants to wait.
The less time people have to wait, the more time they have to browse your site and convert — whether that means filling out a lead generation form or checking out on your eCommerce store.
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I’ve been working in the WordPress and online marketing world since 2009. In that time, I’ve seen little blogs and individual posts blow up and become big deals.
I’ve also seen a more organized SEO research-driven approach at Nexcess, LinkedIn Learning, and WooThemes.
Their process involves finding the perfect:
The goal is to increase a piece of content’s SEO value and draw more traffic — and the bigger the organization, the more strategies and tools are used.
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2020 has been… a lot. I generally don't think of years as good or bad. But I do think 2020 is uniquely bad. We had (and are still going through) a global pandemic.
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One of the things I get to do at Nexcess is influence when & how much we discount our products. There are some obvious dates like Black Friday and the New Year. But there are also less obvious dates like the end of summer, Halloween, and WordPress' birthday.
Should we put our products on sale? And if so, by how much?
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It's a new year and I have a new job.
I'm proud to say I'm joining the Liquid Web / Nexcess team as a Product Marketing Manager for WooCommerce.
If you're in the IT space you might know what that person does – but more than likely you don't. So let me explain why I'm so excited.
A product manager (which is a different role) decides what to build and they make sure the engineering team does so. So after a product manager you will have a list of features.
Of course some features are more important than others so what a product marketing manager does is figure out which features we want to talk about, which ones we need to highlight, and which ones we need to highlight multiple times.
In short a product marketing manager helps with the strategy about how you speak about a thing. And I'll be talking about our Managed WooCommerce hosting.
I've had a few conversations with hosting companies over the years and I've been tempted but never pulled the trigger. With Liquid Web / Nexcess they're doing something I'm really excited about and that are their new Managed WooCommerce hosting plans.
It's my 3rd week on the job and at the end of my 2nd week we launched our brand new plans.
In the WordPress world we've have Managed WordPress hosting for quite some time. I think I got my first managed hosting account back in 2012 or 2013. And they're great.
They turn WordPress from something you have to maintain into something that just works. And that's magical.
Liquid Web announced a Managed WooCommerce plan back in 2018 and they focused exclusively on speed & performance. They were amazing for established stores that have a bit of money to spend.
What's new is they just announced a $19/month entry level plan. This means for $20 a month you can run your own WooCommerce store and have Nexcess manage it for you. That means you can focus on your business while we take care of the boring updates.
You're probably a little confused about the difference between Nexcess and Liquid Web. The short story is Nexcess is now a Liquid Web brand and they're putting their Managed WordPress & Managed WooCommerce hosting under that brand.
In 2020 you'll see Liquid Web / Nexcess promoted at WordCamps and moving forward you'll likely see just Nexcess promoted at WordCamps.
I've been working for myself for 3 years and it's been great. I now get to work more closely with awesome people on the Liquid Web / Nexcess team. And I get to focus on what I do best.
I love articulating what people want and trying to write messaging for them. So I'm very excited for this next challenge.
Last year I committed to building a physical product. And I did this because I understand the people who get into eCommerce. I want know what state of mind they're in, how they handle their finances, and what they do before they even start building an eCommerce site.
Last year I promised to get a product ready to launch on Kickstarter:
By the end of 2018 I want to have a product ready to go. I know the publishing and/or Kickstarter process can be long so by the end of 2018 I want to be ready to go under contract with a publisher or be ready to start planning my own Kickstarter campaign.
And I'm going to officially mark that goal as complete. I'm planning to launch my product on Kickstarter February 5th.
More than just having a product ready to go I learned a lot about:
Before we start talking about manufacturing and order minimums let's just talk about making the product itself.
Product Development includes the initial idea of the product, creating a prototype, and iterating on the product. I started product development over a year and wrapped up most of the development ~6 months ago. But I'm still occasionally tweaking the product. It's a phase that you can go through as you're going through other phases.
I showed my product to literally hundreds of people over the last year. And one of the things I learned is that you have to be incredibly good at filtering feedback. In the morning I might get a bunch of criticism about my product and that afternoon I'll get praise for those exact same features.
As a creator you have to vision (or mission statement) for your product. And every time you get a piece of feedback you need to view it through the lens of your vision.
Unfortunately not everyone is your target demo. So even with careful vetting before you show them your product you're going to have to listen to a lot of feedback you're not going to use.
One of the biggest changes to my product came about 6 months into development. At the time I had a much smaller product. It was minimalistic and fit into this vinyl wallet.
Wallet concepts from September 2018.
And people loved how portable the game was. But they was consistent feedback on the thin paper tokens. In fact people said, “I know this token is just a prototype so I can't wait until the full version has a nicer token”.
Three sets of tokens for Fry Thief. Top are acrylic tokens which were eventually replaced with wood versions. Left is hard cardboard. Center are cardstock tokens that fit in the wallets.
But that token would have been exactly what they would have received in a finished product. The token wasn't thin because it was a prototype it was thin because that's what fit into the wallet.
People said things like “I wish this was nicer” and they said “I love the thin wallet”. But no one was clear and said, “I'd love nicer components even if that means upgrading to a small box and getting rid of the wallet”.
I had to come to that conclusion myself. So listen to your audience; they're dropping all of the right hints. But when you hear contradictory advice you'll have to experiment and see which one your audience prefers.
Once you have a product it's time to let people follow along. About 6 months ago I created a landing page. This landing page is the perfect place to send people when people ask for more information about your product.
As people playtested my game if they seemed like they had a good time I'd prompt them to sign up for the email list. I sent out tweets, put a link in my email signature, and otherwise promoted the game in simple ways. This is where you get your first fans. And it's likely to come from your personal network of friends & family.
What's great about this step is you don't need to know your entire marketing message. If you have a name for your product you can get a domain, building a landing page, and start building that fan base.
When it comes to landing page builders I wanted to try Kickoff Labs since they promised a “viral” element. If users share your landing page they automatically share a unique link and they're rewarded with points for each signup. As long as you give away a prize of some sort there's a nice incentive to share the page.
I had 410 users sign up through my landing page. Thirty of which were directly referred by another user.
30 of my 410 leads were referred by other users.
So when it comes to landing page software you don't need to get the premium landing page builder. Kickoff Labs is excellent but you don't need to pay that much. As long you can easily build a landing page with a signup form it will be good enough.
After you have the basic idea for the product you want to create it's time to look for manufacturers. I started this process pretty organized with a list of ~10 manufacturers and found a few that seemed like great fits.
Unfortunately the more I promoted my product the more manufacturers found me and pitched me. You need to learn how to say no quickly. I was inundated with requests and thoughtfully answered each one. I lost a month of planning due to me chatting to each manufacturer that approached when I could have simply stuck with my first choice.
Pricing is something that baffled me before this experiment and it still baffles me. From economics classes we have the supply & demand curve which helps you figure out the optimum price.
Look how easy it is to find the optimum price in this model.
While that works great in retrospect how do you use this to price a new product?
I compared my game to similar games and found out that $15 is a pretty good price.
One thing I learned is that comparing to similar products on the market isn't necessarily a good idea. A month ago CMON (a huge board game company) reported losses of 4.1 million dollars. And unfortunately a lot of board game fans use them as the model for Kickstarter success. I don't want to follow in their footsteps. And if they weren't a public company I never would have known they were failing so badly.
You can use similar products on the marketplace as a starting point. But you have to look at your numbers. I know I can order 1,500 units from a factory, ship them to me, and ship them customers all while charging $15 + shipping.
You start marketing your product before it's completely done but at a certain point you need to ramp up your marketing. And there's a lot here:
I haven't talked much about marketing my product and that's because I'm still going through this process. I've been experimenting with Facebook ads (which can be brilliant or terrible), podcasts, reviewers (influencer marketing), and sharing updates via social media.
What I can say is even with all of my sharing on social media, direct outreach to friends and family, and prompting playtesters I'd probably only have about 100 followers to my project. The rest of the leads came through Facebook ads.
Getting attention is one of the hardest things to do online. There's a bajillion other products out there. Why should I look at yours? Even if I would be interested in your product how do I find out about it without you having to pay an arm and a leg?
I'll continue to market my game and sometime after the Kickstarter share my marketing results.
After that I still have a lot to do and learn. Namely how to take pre-orders via Kickstarter & how to fulfill orders.
If you sell eCommerce websites to clients one of the most valuable selling points would be help with marketing. As the eCommerce entrepreneur I already have a lot of other tasks. If you have proven methods to market my product I'm going to be seriously interested.
And since marketing starts prior to the full eCommerce site you can get in the door with a simple landing page and marketing assistance.
One thing that's not helpful: don't throw out MORE ideas. There's a billion ideas to promote ideas, websites, and products online. I don't need more ideas. I need metrics that show me you know what you're doing and you can get the job done.
If I've done my job as an eCommerce entrepreneur and have enough margin in my products price then hopefully you can maximize that margin and help me get the most number of sales & fans to turn this into a profitable venture.
I've been writing a series of posts about creating a product. And for the most part I've been sharing things I've been learning and things “I've done right”. Today I wanted to share something that didn't break in my favor.
The traditional model of buy ads, get eyeballs on your product, and make sales is a tired model. Sometimes when a new ad platform debuts there's a brief period where ads are so cheap it's easy to get in and get a ton of eyeballs on your product but eventually those cheap ads disappear.
You can continuously innovate in the advertising space making more and more advanced ads to minimize your advertising costs. Or you can choose to not play that game and instead invest in a product that markets itself.
Earlier this year there was a week where I was a bit depressed. I've helped plan or organize every single WooConf from the very first event in San Francisco back in 2014:
#WooConf – ship your idea! (@ The Village at 969 Market – @thevillage969) https://t.co/uYzL2XzTlk pic.twitter.com/wQietuZtc3
— Patrick Rauland (@BFTrick) November 3, 2014
All the way to Seattle in 2017
Every 100ms delay costs 1% of your sales. @mindsizeme #WooConf pic.twitter.com/KsdY8YOHju
— Patrick Rauland (@BFTrick) October 20, 2017
So in early 2018 when I heard that there wasn't going to be a WooConf I was really sad. After all this is something I fought for and loved.
And about a week after I realized something… it's the internet. Anyone can do anything. You don't need permissions slips & you don't need orders from on high. You just do. So I did.
I reached out to Brian Richards who runs WPSessions & WordSesh. And we were able to take what he learned from WordSesh and we created WooSesh.
Brian and I had a few meetings and on March 13th I reached out to Automattic about speaking at the event and later we'd talk about sponsoring.
Brian and I had a few goals for this project. The first is that we had to have deep learning. With hundreds of WordCamps around the world most people have access to entry level information. We wanted to focus on deep content.
That's one of the reasons we made the event two days. Day 1 focused on anyone who builds stores. And day 2 was for people who write code. If you want hard core coding tricks show up for day 2. If you want to learn how to manage & run your store show up day 1. And many people did just that.
Goal #2 was to create community. We wanted people to show up at the same time and talk about things in real time. Crowdcast was an excellent choice for software because it includes a live chat which moved so incredibly fast throughout the event!
A lot of online events promise recordings. We of course want to record everything but recordings can let people be lazy and watch on their own time which works against the goal of community.
So we compromised and we gave recordings for free to anyone who attended at least one session live. And this seemed to work great. If you're in a distant time zone you can attend one of the sessions, engage the community, and watch the rest on your own.
We planned WooSesh for over 7 months and put in hundreds of hours planning the event. And the results were phenomenal.
We wanted to get 800 registered attendees and have 400 people show up live.
Instead we had more than 2,800 people register & more than 1,400 participate live during at least one session. Nine hundred of them watched the keynote. We had more people watch the keynote than our total registration goal. That's incredible!
To get these people we went on podcasts, created short videos showing the speakers & their content, and worked with WooCommerce to write a guest blog post on their site. WooCommerce also promoted the event in their newsletters.
All of these combined, plus all of the live tweeting during the day, brought in nearly 3,000 people.
The short answer is hell yes.
The sponsorship model worked really well for us. After we partnered with Automattic as our single sponsor, we were able to focus entirely on the content without worrying about revenue.
Of course it's not just about what Brian and I want. Attendees also want to see this next year.
Having two people work on an event like this was huge. I've worked on other projects that really stressed me out but doing this with a partner like Brain made the event run smoothly.
We were able to help at least 1,400 people and more than 900 people learned about the latest and greatest features that the WooCommerce team is building. And the people who watched can spread that message even further.
If you attended WooSesh – what did I miss? What would you like to see done next year?
One of the most interesting parts of making my own product has been learning the difference between what you make and what people will buy.