Helping you achieve your business aspirations. No BS. Real changes & fresh ideas that can take you to where you want to be, from someone who understands and has been there himself.
Sometimes trying to achieve your business goals can be clouded by the day to day operations or technical difficulties. Matthew can help you with mentoring or one-on-one business consulting. Matthew is extremely skilled in both eBay and Amazon marketplaces and has worked for two auction management companies.
Matthew has a Business Consultation page and you can contact him on his dedicated Contact Matthew page.
This is probably going to be the shortest post I’ll ever write, but its ramifications are deep and possibly distasteful. The question is…
Are you a busy fool?
Those sales you made yesterday, did you actually make money? Go run the numbers.
So the USA finally got the eBay Fashion outlet yesterday then. There are 12 retailers in total in the launch and an astonishing number of them are using Fooition shop designs & templates.
Where this article is going to be different, instead of focusing on why it exists (which in my mind an exceptionally positive event) and who is included, I’m going to break each of the stores down and explain where I believe they could do better in their presentation and implementation on eBay. Yes its just launched, but there is a lot to be learned from.
Scot Wingo from ChannelAdvisor has done a decent breakdown of what the extra perks are for them and who is included, he’s missed out the strike through pricing option that you’ll see in use on most of them and only hinted at the sheer amount of abuse that these retailers will gain in daily deals, exposure and PR from eBay. You only need to look at the eBay UK version of the fashion outlet to spot that it’s a heavily closed shopping experience to the outlet stores.
It should also be noted that Outlet stores have a different eBay shop structure to the normal eBay shops, that allows greater flexibility in what can be done. On the outside the implications are subtle, however, they are exceptionally more powerful and I’m sure in time the rest of the community will get these options.
I’ve put together this video that runs through all the fashion outlets on eBay US. The question is to you, what can you learn from them to improve your eBay activities?
For new or smaller businesses, this entire article is going to fly straight over your head, however for larger businesses and for me personally, its a question that has been bothering me for quite some time now. Months apparently.
That question is:
Why do sales through a specific sales channel, tend to stay consistent?
In this article I address this question and it wasn’t until I asked for help, that the real answers came through. It’s also raised further questions, such as how do you deal with this, what options do you have and how can you tackle this with your business model. I actually feel I am now left with more taxing questions than I originally started with.
This really is the upper extremity that I am considering here, if your business is new or is not optimised using any of the 3 rules I cover in a moment, then you should not even concern yourself with this article at all. However, if you’re hitting “limits” on different sales channels, then you really need to read this.
For a number of years now, I’ve seen merchants selling on multiple platforms hitting a limit of what can be done with a marketplace. For example, businesses that are in a specific niche, their sales will rarely go above or below a 20% window on a daily basis.
There may be “spikes” in sales on a daily basis and seasonality does have a positive effect on most businesses. But overall, most businesses stay consistent.
To understand why I’d be asking myself this question in the first place, I have been working on a set of 3 rules as the basis of expansion/profitability, they also spell “ESI” or are pronounced as “easy!”, which is the ultimate goal of where I am going with these and there is a fourth part that I discuss later in this article. Anyway, the for now these three rules are:
However, it’s common for a merchant to hit a “limit” on a specific marketplace like eBay or Amazon and I was not happy that “operational efficiencies” were the cause. I know first-hand after spending a few months helping one specific company on-the-ground overcome these and was not happy with the standard reply to such a question. There had to be another reason.
Another aspect has concerned me greatly; what if a client I am working with is actually at 95% efficiency of a channel, what really are the options and what can I do to help them overcome this inherent boundary?
There was only one person that I knew that could possibly hold the answer or even comprehend what I was referring to in the question. This person was perfect for a number of reasons, the first that he has been in this arena longer than I have, seen more merchants than myself on the differing marketplaces and critically seen the sales data to back this up. That person was Marshall Smith from ChannelAdvisor.
Here is the first email, that I sent over to Marshall. Noting that I have been bothered by this for months. In a conversation on Monday of this week, it was pointed out I had been asking the participant the same question in January.
Hi Marshall,
Here is a question, that I think only you can answer.
Its a question that has been bothering me for quite some time, “Why do eBay sellers sales stay consistent?”
To be more precise, I have noticed that specific sellers sales, never move out of say a 20% window, for example seller X has a average sales of £10,000, the daily fluctuations mean that their sales will never (or rarely do) move outside of 2K below and 2K above.
Surely there are too many factors for a business to consistently land in the same “window” of sales every single day. I understand why this maybe engineered to happen, but that raises more questions that it answers as the most obvious one is “how to you break or work this limitation?”
Have you seen this also?
The first reply is below, it clearly shows that Marshall understands the common issues that occur and why I was right to ask him in the first place.
Matthew –
When I see that situation it’s the same as a regular retail business that’s hit a certain volume and ceiling in their current business practices, so that growth is just not an option for them as they’re trying to run things. They might have a software solution that’s put a ceiling on how much they can get done because it’s not as efficient as they need and a lot of time is spent managing the technology.
They might be short on people (or have chosen to stay at a certain size) and they’re doing all they can every day so there’s no room to grow. Even more common is that people get comfortable and aren’t looking for a change – look at all of the people that have complained about eBay’s changes in the last few years rather than embracing them and recognizing that being ahead of the curve means they’ll pick up the business their competitors lose. There have been plenty that are willing to do that, but even more that had gotten comfortable and just want to keep doing what they’ve always been doing.
One of the things that I’ve found hardest over the years when trying to explain the value that we provide to users is getting them to value their own time. Many times there’s a sole proprietorship that’s been running things using something like Turbo Lister and spending hours and hours every day just to manage their sales. They see it as “free” but aren’t accounting for how much time it costs them to manage that information. Even if they just stay on eBay, coming over to us is going to save them time that they can use to grow their business or go do some other leisure activity instead.
If we just cut the amount of work they’re doing from 6 hours to 3 hours every day (and we’re usually a lot better than that) then we’ve saved them 60-90 hours every month. For that fee that we charge, broken out on a per-hour basis, they’d be hard pressed to get someone that could handle that amount of information and that level of capability to guarantee their business keeps running the same as it’s always been for that amount.
They free up their time to expand their business or focus on customer service, areas that usually didn’t get handled nearly as well before. Yet, they see it as a “cost” because they weren’t calculating the value of their time that they were spending inefficiently to run the business before.
So many of those people have gotten trapped in a pattern where they have something that’s working that they don’t want to change because they fear change or don’t think they have any cash to invest into the business. Most of the time those types of sellers never even get to the level that we’re going to be dealing with them as they fall out of the sales cycle for one reason or another.
If they’re a serious business and want to grow then there are things we can do for them, but if they haven’t figured out the business cycle and a mid to long range plan to grow then we’re going to be big and scary to them.
We’ve had people tell us we made changes to their business that took 8-10 hours of daily work down to just 1 hour a day. Then they finally had the opportunity to grow their business, source more product, expand product lines, hire more employees, and finally get growth back into their business.
Marshall
Note: I understand that the above is quite a lot for most of you to take in, what this question did in short was highlight that Marshall was the right person to ask. We both [Marshal & I] had reservations that some of you may just not “get this” at all. If this is the case, then the rest of this article is probably a waste of your time.
Ignoring that Marshall has created a dozen articles worth in that reply alone, lost about 90% of the people that may read this [Stay! This really does hit gold shortly], it clearly showed that he was the right person to ask.
However I needed to redefine it, we had missed the goal I was looking for. And trust me, we hit it the jackpot in his reply to the following:
Howdy Marshall,
Ah it shows that you understand!
Now remove the users and the software as variables or imagine they’re 90% efficiency.
Why do their sales stay within a 20% window all the time? No major fluctuations, yea some days less, some days more, but never outside of their “boundary”.
Take Amazon sellers, they get the buy box, the sales flood in, its price dependant for sales volume (ignoring lots of other stuff), eBay its different, there is some form of cap or barrier in place??
Now this is where we hit the jackpot and I strongly suggest you read this at least twice as it’s that important:
There’s no buy box in the eBay experience, so you’re subject to the whims of what people are buying at any given point. At a very macro economic level, the demand for most items is pretty consistent and follows a standard pattern.
People replace their shoes on a certain cycle. At a macro version of the economy, there are always X% of people that are shopping for shoes. That keeps the demand at a pretty consistent stream. Then when there’s not something adjusting the demand direction like the Buy Box, then the sellers are exposed at about the same rate that they always are, causing the sales to be within a reasonable statistical level of average.
To parallel to another environment, think of the casino – any individual user might win or lose on the smaller scale, but at the big picture of all of the people playing all of the games the house knows what their rate is going to be and how much they’re going to make as a percentage of the overall bets. That house advantage is the macro version you’re seeing among these sellers where the growth pattern is to:
* improve their placement in the exposure to capture a larger proportion of the regular buyers (Buy Box)
* expand their product line to make the universe of potential buyers for them to be a larger group
* expand the distribution channels to open up the existing product to a larger overall audienceSince you can’t (really) get the Buy Box on eBay (eTRS and Best Match only goes so far) then really the only way to grow is to expand the product line or do additional stuff off-eBay.
A lot of people get comfortable with their products and what they know of eBay, so they don’t change any of these things and grow up to the point that they’ve captured “their share” and then are stagnant from that point forward.
That was okay in the past when eBay was growing at such a clip that people were seeing 20-30% annual increases because they were just riding on the coattails of eBay growth, but when that slowed down they weren’t ready and just got frustrated and confused.
When they pay attention to the types of things we both talk about, that’s when they’re able to address one or more of these points and expand their business again instead of being stuck on a plateau.
Marshall
What Marshall had highlighted were the following:
You cannot imagine the gravity of these 5 points were to me. I had been pondering over this for several months and in this one reply, which was comparable to being hit in the face with a kipper. It all became clear. It’s also raised bucket loads of other questions, but it was finally answered.
In short, as Marshall puts it so aptly, “You can no longer ride the coattails of eBay for growth”. This also extends to every other marketplace there is as well. There is an inherent cap to the number of people looking for a specific product on a specific day on a specific marketplace.
Yes, globally this number may be a huge, however on a macro level each and every marketplace, the number of customers you can reach and convert is limited.
In the 3 rules of ESI, I give equal value to each of rules, that is, that efficiency carries a weighting of one, the same as sales channels and inventory. However within each of these, the weighting is not equal and it’s the combination of them that equate to something higher than just 3.
However, if just one is exceptionally poorer than the rest, then that heavily out weighs the others. In simple terms (I like to use metaphors, get used to them, there are more) its like a Ferrari with elephant as a passenger and coal as the fuel, you got some of the right gear, but you ain’t going anywhere.
If you’ve got a great listing template and no inventory, if you’ve got a world class backend system, but no sales channels, if you’ve got masses of inventory and a limited backend tool and only a single marketplace. You’re not going to get very far and there is no way you’ll ever hit the boundaries that we’ve been discussing in this article.
This is why its absolutely critical to your business that you pick the right tools for the job, because without them you’re not going very far and with them all in harmony, you’ll outpace “The Stig“.
I hinted earlier that I am working on a fourth part to the ESI structure, this is one is special, because this one is a multiplier. While the others cumulatively have a positive effect, this one is ultra special because with this one executed currently multiplies the gains of the first three.
The multiplier is “Why”. Why are you doing what you are doing and what guides you to what you are doing. A business with no drive is pretty much only ever going to tread water, however, if you lob in the magic of a say a CEO like Steve Jobs that will ensure that a company will succeed huge personal cost, then this is a multiplier.
My equation (again I am trying to keep this as a simple as possible) looks like this:
Results = (Efficiency + Sales Channels + Inventory) x The “Why” Factor
As you can see, even if the sum of the E, S & I are low, if you say have someone or a purpose to add in a “Why Factor” then all these are multiplied and that is why I believe that most small businesses that stick longer than a year, have this very special ingredient.
Determination and grit are absolutely required and its these kind of factors that multiply the results. I am reminded over a conversation in a meeting a few months back, where it was blatantly obvious that my role in the conversation was to highlight that what they lacked for, did not matter. What did, was that they had the determination to make it happen, “The Why Factor” and I think you might have already guessed it, they are winning.
A stark summary of this entire article, is that there is a limit to what you can do on a single marketplace.
The inherent cap, does not impact all business models, if you’re business is subject to multiple customer bases (eg. B2C & B2B) and/or irregular stock levels, then this cap is going to yo-yo and give inconsistent sales on a frequent basis, by its very nature. However if your business is homed-in on a specific niche then if you’re not at this wall yet, then you will be soon (or later).
I’d like to extend a public thank you you Marshall from ChannelAdvisor. It was not my intention to use his replies in this article, but as I started working on it over the course of over a week or so, it became apparent that without his replies, the story of arriving at the final answer, would fall far short without its inclusion. Thank you.
Image Source
OoooO Look it’s shiny! Wanna Ride?
Magpies are drawn to shiny things, they collect bottle tops and anything that they can add to their nest when trying to attract a mate. It gives them “the edge”.
Humans have this same trait, we like new things. We’ve been trained by a culture of decades of marketing that we need the latest technology, because it will make our lives better, or so we’ve told.
I know this all to well, after the conversations yesterday at the eSellerPro conference, there are a lot of “shiny things” kicking around. Let’s take a few specific ones (Kris take note of Magento):
I’m not going to bore you with the endless list that your “magpie” manager (that might just be you) is being hounded by the media hype to be involved in. You should be doing social, you should be doing facebook, you should be on Twitter, you should be doing eBay, you should be doing Amazon, oh and you should be using Magento; you should be doing this and you should be doing that.
Let’s take “Magento” for a moment, so you’ve already go your website up and running and running and have customers visiting each day. You may have seen it for the past 2, 3 or more years, but if a customer comes to you for the first time today, what do you think?
Does he scream OMG this website is soooo old, it’s got this bug, it’s missing this feature, oh would it not be sooooo cool to have this or that?
The customer is looking to see if the product is right for them, they may be looking for social triggers to ensure they feel safe, they want to make sure that the product or service is right for them and all the common things that happen during a transaction.
You should be doing what is measurable and what is required to gain the confidence of the customer that what you are offering is the right product for them. It does not matter if the checkout is 10 pages long, they’ll get through it, if they have “SOLD” stamped on their foreheads.
I like you, get attracted to the shiny stuff. We’ve been programmed to by endless hounding by mass media & even peers to do this and that.
Magpies use shiny stuff to attract a new partner, we use these things to attract managers, peers, friends, customers & status. But the difference between magpies & humans is that great big lump on top of your shoulders.
By knowing that something is shiny means you can focus on what really matters, what actually converts and making it better. Use your lump, it’s your edge.
What’s shiny to you?
Go on admit it, you have something that is shiny. I know I do. But what really matters? What really converts?
In case you’ve missed it, I’m holding another Free Webinar this evening at 17:00 GMT with MD of ChannelGrabber.com, Daniel and one of their users, Jason who is also one of the ProjectE 6.
If you’ve never used an “automation tool” to manage the differing sales channels eBay & Amazon, then this webinar is for you.
There are typically three spikes in an online small/medium business, the first spike is when you start selling in the first place and dedicate time, the second is when you add more sales channels and the third is when you use a tool like ChannelGrabber to automate as much as possible and to refocus on better inventory data and more inventory.
These are my three rules to expansion, efficiency (internal & external), more sales channels, more inventory. A tool such as ChannelGrabber underpins ALL of these.
The webinar will be broken into two sections, the first will be hosted by Daniel and he’ll explain why a tool like this existed and how it can help you.
The second part will with Jason, an actual user of ChannelGrabber and you’ll hear “a real customer” that uses this for his business
I’m off to a “customer council” with eSellerPro tomorrow and don’t fancy trying to host the Webinar from hotel wifi.
You can register here http://lastdropofink.co.uk/workshop and it starts at 5pm tonight.
See you there!
Foreword: I wrote this in January and wasn’t quite prepared for the effect it had on myself and several others. I’m reposting it this morning as it might help you too.
The irony of this entire blog and some of the articles I have written here is that sometimes I do not even follow my own suggestions I choose to share with you. There is a very good reason for this, I’m looking forward to sharing this with you and hope that you follow suit.
Yes, that really is Women Playing Football in Lingerie
These are the fans that are stood at the side of a game, it doesn’t matter who is playing, the point is, you are stood there doing nothing, wishing you could play, thumb up your bum, where as the players are already playing and enjoying their game.
Players only get good through practice. Professional’s only become great when they research and know the game backwards. Do you think David Beckham got good by having his haircut? Do you think I know the stuff I know, by sitting on my arse and wishing I did something else?
This is part of the definition of an Expert from Wikipedia:
An expert is someone widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.
An expert, more generally, is a person with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study.
Let’s break this down so it’s completely ‘Matt proof’:
An expert is someone
YAY, we’re at an advantage there we are talking about someone, that is a human, just like me and you.
widely recognized as a reliable source of technique or skill whose faculty for judging or deciding rightly, justly, or wisely
So, we’re still talking about a human and they have scored some recognition for their achievements. Remembering they are human, they have probably made some royal screw-ups too, mostly likely not so well publicised.
is accorded authority and status by their peers or the public in a specific well-distinguished domain.
They gained this recognition by most likely their peers or some governing body. This could be as simple as the people you work with or it could be recognised body such as AACSB (the Association of Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) who themselves are recognised by their peers as being distinguished. I wonder how that happened?
An expert, more generally, is a person
Sorry no Dolphins. I hope you’re getting my point, we’re all human.
with extensive knowledge or ability based on research, experience, or occupation and in a particular area of study.
Now here is the mother-load. Prodigies are over-rated and are you one? Didn’t think so, I’m certainly not.
How do you think this person, gained ‘Extensive Knowledge’. That’s right he got-in-the-game and played. And played lots.
So back to my original point, sometimes I do not follow my own advice, at these times, I decide that by being in the game, I can learn a lot more about the game by playing.
Meeting peers, playing with peers and ultimately gaining the experiences that leads to being pronounced and being an ‘Expert’ by your peers.
Seeing a very experienced MD be intimidated by my knowledge & experience last week is quite an achievement. I play hard. I know my arena. I’m extremely passionate about my game, this shines through. You can too.
Sometimes you get caught out, but that’s OK. You are on the road to becoming an ‘Expert’.
I’m amazed by the frequency of certain visitors to this site. I’m not publishing how many hits I get, but I am extremely pleased on this blog’s success. Four months in, its known amongst the right people, I’ve been told to STFU twice and have even had to apologise three times. But I’m in the game and playing. Where are you?
Who fucking cares.
No one is ‘lucky’, you make your own luck.
No expert was born an expert, they played hard.
That’s why in places this blog sucks. But that is OK. I am in the game and I am playing. Get in the game regardless of what’s going on. Right Now.
Come join me, I need you, the other players need you. Let’s play.
I’m really excited to be able to announce that on Tuesday 13th September, I’ll be holding the next Webinar & have roped in two fantastic people to join me.
Here is your personal invitation and you can register here.
The first is Daniel Williams, Managing Director of ChannelGrabber and we’ll be delving deeper into why this product was created, how it helps businesses who sell on-line and what it can do for you.
The second is Jason. Jason is one of the 6 businesses that I’m working with as part of the ProjectE. You’ll be able to hear directly from one of the ChannelGrabber users, why he uses it, how it’s impacted his businesses and how it’s enabled him to work on his business and not purely in his business.
I half-mention this in the video above, to be able to do “Multi Channel” effectively, then you need a tool in the background to support you & to apply processes, so that you can work more efficiently in and on your business. ChannelGrabber makes this task very easy and is exceptionally affordable.
eSellerPro are holding a “customer council” that I have been graciously invited to on Wednesday and are attending the public “customer conference” event on Thursday. If you’ve missed this, then you can see the full article for the eSellerPro at Lords here.
BTW if you’re attending, look out for the bold bloke wearing purple & come say “hi!”.
This workshop is on Tuesday 13th September at 5pm UK Time. There are only 100 places and on the first workshop there were 81 attendees, register now before all the places are taken!
If you’ve already registered for the “Wednesday Workshops” from two weeks ago, it’s the same registration details. No need to re-register and you’ll be sent an email automatically just before the event on Tuesday. (Thanks Andre for pointing this out to me!)
Please arrive early, it will take a few moments to download the free GoToWebinar application and if you can arrive a few minutes before hand, you won’t miss the start of the meeting.
Register now, only 100 places!
The first workshop there were 81 participants, the application only supports 100 and I’d hate for you to miss out. You can register here.
Buyers make a commitment to you, do you make a commitment back?
Lets think about this for a few moments as its sometimes just glazed over, its very easy to do so, with suppliers calling, all those emails to answer and packages to pack, not to mention the kids are going to need picking up later. But are we missing what a epic journey your customer has just been on?
Unless you’re selling “consumable goods” like bread & milk, the buyer that just purchased from you, has probably been through quite an ordeal to make that purchase.
eBay isn’t a one-click purchase, Amazon can be, I used it once, but still prefer to “checkout” to ensure the details are correct. Its even worse on most websites, with no uniform checkout process. They [the customer] has had to work to make the purchase from you and even then they still have doubts.
So with the buyer in mind, lets flip-ourselves into their shoe, to see what they’ve completed to actually buy the item from you.
Its like getting married (an experience I’m looking forward to next year), one party is making an epic commitment to you, what are you giving back in return?
Its easy to get consumed with the day-to-day actives and forget that your buyers have been through an epic ordeal to buy the goods or services from you.
What are YOU going to do?
What can you do to make the buyers tasks easier? What can you do right now to over-come barriers or quash doubts?
Image source: Adamjonfuller
To give you a heads up, tonights “Wednesday Workshop” is being postponed, there are a couple of reasons for this and includes politics and a bloody awkward (good, I hasten to add) situation with ProjectE.
I’ve got to dash as its playgroup this morning, however I have a treat for you with a special guest next Tuesday & will spill-the-beans this afternoon.
More to come later!
I’m looking forward to sharing this with you as its changed my views on how I can help more people in less time and its all thanks to the six business I’m working with as part of ProjectE.
On face value this post is pretty much just about me, its the kind of post that I write in the background and rarely share with the outside world. However I have one critical question I need your help with at the bottom.
I’m still hammering down the details of where I am going, both personally, professionally and with ProjectE and I’m taking the opportunity to share it with you as in the past few weeks, I’ve found this sharing process very beneficial and its helping me move forwards and narrowing down how I can help you more effectively.
If you missed the invitation, this was a pretty big investment from myself and it was all on the fork of ‘commitment’. I had been procrastinating for ages around the entire project and I could feel this project slipping away from me. Then decided that I needed to get public and make a commitment that I could not back out of.
So I did and it went spectacularly as well.
I covered he results in a couple of earlier posts, you can view the original invitation on YouTube here that I set live on that Friday and the full invitation also on YouTube here that I posted the following Monday, along with the supporting article here.
There is nothing like jumping in with both feet I can tell ya!
With procrastinating over, I ended up with 56 applications and spent an entire weekend sifting through them. It was my intention to work with just five, but a sixth sneaked in. Hey I was already in the deep end, what would one more do to me?
Shortly afterwards I made arguably the worst video to date (see here) which promoted me to get more professional, especially after that damming, but valid email I got, which I covered in the article “Are your video’s so bad, they need this feedback also?”
And up to today, we’re now into our third week of working together.
I’ve not mentioned who they are yet, I’m saving this for later this week (hint hint), however its becoming glaring apparent that with the right content and structure (which I’m still hammering out) that one hour per week consulting is actually working and having a positive effect on all of the six businesses.
Frankly I was a little concerned on what could be covered in what is just 8 hours of my time spread over a period of eight weeks, plus some extra time as a group and the real impact of it.
What I’ve found so far is that the tool-set of experience I have at my disposal is actually very “wide” and I had completely over looked that if I focus the six businesses on actionable points at the end of each of the meetings, that in the time we’re apart, they can move at a rate that suits them and still be ready for the following week.
Its a case now of working out how I can detail this process for not only personal one-on-one projects with new clients, but to also make it scalable (and affordable for the masses) for ProjectE.
Its also proving exceptionally useful as for a long time I’ve not focused on exactly “how I can help” & “where I can help” and are refocusing on some critical pages to this site.
The first is the pending redesign of the ‘Contact Matthew’ page, this page does not have a clear goal and the new version has a defined set of goals and will be a marked improvement.
The second is a new page that I should have added months ago called “Work With Matthew” and its proving fun exactly what to include on this page and its on my weekend to-do list, by the time this post goes live, it may already be live on the site.
I’m so lucky to be able to work with the chosen six businesses
The commitment to them takes up my entire Friday and part of Thursday evening too, but that doesn’t matter, its great fun & I can see tangible benefits to them already.
The biggest take-away for me so far is that one hour per week is working and as I mentioned, its a case now of scaling this, removing the mist and defining exactly how I can help you grow your businesses.
I need YOUR help!
In the past I have frequently come across the statement “Matt I know you can help me, but I’m not sure how”, I’m actively addressing this.
However flipping the question back at you “Where do you feel that I can help you?” Answers either in the comments below or privately via the “Contact Matthew” page.
One of the huge reasons for WordPress being the number one CMS, besides it being free & there being countless development resources available for it, is because there are thousands of plugins & extensions for WordPress. Some are free, some are paid for.
I’ve been through hundreds of plugins, I’ve found really useless ones and I’ve found fabtastic ones. Its some of these “fabtastic” ones I’m going to share with you in the rest of the this article and I think they might be useful for you too.
Oh and all the plugins I mention here, they’re ALL free.
This plugin isn’t for everyone, 99% you need not even look at this one (great start eh?). It enables you to control the WP categories and group them together and show them as groups for specific pages.
Its not used on this site, however I’ve used it on much larger scale sites where content needs to be broken down by category and sub categories. This plugin allows you to group them up and show a side widget that is dedicated to that “group” of categories.
If you have a deep category structure that goes past 2 levels, then this plugin may help you show categories that are specific to the category root.
To make this a little more visual, imagine you have this category structure:
Its quite likely that the content that is in “Sub Category 1-1” is very different to the content found in “Sub Category 1-2“, think “WordPress” and “Book Reviews” for these and the sub categories for each are apt sub versions of “WordPress” like “plugins“, “tips & tricks” & “How to Guides“, where as the “Book Reviews” category is broken up into sub categories based upon genre.
This plugin allows you to show just the categories that are below the main category, so the users that are viewing the “WordPress” content, get a sidebar navigation for the “WordPress” related categories and the users viewing the “Book Reviews” content, are shown the categories that are related to that. Oh and categories can in live in multiple category groups to give maximum flexibility.
Like I said, unless you have massive amounts of content in a complex category structure, 99% of you can ignore this plugin. However when you do have deep categories, this plugin can help users unravel the mess. I hope the colours helped!
I only found this one a few weeks back, amazingly it only found 15 broken links, of which 8 were on purpose (two old articles that used ‘keywords’ in the links). However the remaining links were all dead.
A nice touch to this plugin is that it’ll show them on your dashboard, although there is no cron option and I disabled the update every hour option as that’s a bit excessive
I tried about 5 different contact form plugins, this was by far the best of them all.
Exceptionally flexible, I’ve used this plugin on every WP site since.
This plugin is also directly linked to #4 Really Simple CAPTCHA which allows you to put a spam captcha option to the forms and if you look in the footer then you’ll see this in action.
This plugin is brilliant, but was a complete ‘mare’ to get right as there were no examples with the plugin.
In short it allows you to make extra post and page templates. I use it for the super wide page layouts on this site and on other sites, I’ve got a couple of versions for different media types. You can see an example of the wide format in action here.
Quickly and easily add your Google Analytic’s code to your WP site.
I just found this one on Saturday afternoon, I wish I had know about this months ago. Allows to lock your site down to specific users and display a maintenance page along with a counter. Simple, but very, very useful.
You’ll find this on the right of most of the pages & “thanks” to Rob Cubbon for forking me on this from one of his articles I read.
This plugin makes the integration of newsletter subscriptions childs-play and works with custom providers and the major ones like MailChimp, iContact, AWeber, PHPList and so on.
See the funny bar on the left, where you are about to press the Google +1 button to? That’s sharebar. Its actually missing the +1 button for Google by default, but its pretty easy to add it in.
BTW Did you press the +1 button?
Thank you!
Really handy for pre-making content. The short codes it makes are a bit long, but none-the-less exceptionally useful. Saves me/you hijacking the functions.php file and borking the sites like I have been known to do on occasion.
Look at the comments form at bottom, notice the check box?
Enter a comment saying how fab this article is and check the tick box.
Beautiful!
The traffic I get here warrants the use of such a plugin. In short this makes the site load faster. Users typically see a 50% increase in page load times from just activating this plugin, let-alone tweaking it.
I prefer this one as I can set up custom CDN’s and have spent a large amount of time focused on ensuring that this site loads fast. There are a lot of options, the defaults will be fine for most blogs.
I used to use “All in One SEO”, until I read Yoast’s damming (yet fair) report on it and moved to this version. Very comprehensive and more features than what used before, really one of those set-and-forget plugins
This is really handy for “code”. If you’re posting blocks of code in your articles, then this plugin is pretty neat.
It uses the PRE tag and adds styling options, a big tip for this option is to always edit your posts/pages that have “code” examples or snippets in them, as HTML only, the WP editor will each these for breakfast.
One of my pet-hates with WP is its user control, this plugin helps manage the poor user access control and adds the level needed when working with staff, editors and content writers.
A big tip for using this is to create your own and test it with a sample account to ensure it behaves as you expect!
This is simplest of them all, install and activate. Thats it. No config options, it just pushes all the JS files to the footer and makes the site load faster, as the JavaScript is the last to load, allowing the rest of the site to render first.
This is another personal dislike of WP solved in one plugin.
The left hand menu takes up too much room. This plugin solves this by putting the entire menu system along the top, allowing for more writing space. Which considering the point of most WP sites is to create content, has to be a good thing.
I tried a few that were supposed to change the editor, this one actually works and allows you to alter the layout of the HTML editor option in the page/post creation pages.
You can get rid of the options you never use and organise the ones that you do need and use in a layout that makes sense to you. Dab-handy!
The breadcrumbs at the top of this article are powered by this, so easy to add and on some themes will auto-insert.
Worth noting that this is actually included in the earlier plugin from Yoast.
General paranoia is advised when working with any open code platform, this plugin helps cover the obvious. It has a few neat features like a backup option and the provides the ability to change the table prefixes on the database used for the WP site.
WordPress is free and the vast majority of plugins that you’ll ever need are also free.
These are my top 20 free WordPress plugins, I do use a few paid-for plugins, I have had plugins coded for me and I have also created my own for highly specific uses.
I’m wondering if you have a favourite WP plugin I’ve not mentioned here?
If so let me know in the comments below.
In the next 3 or so articles, I’m going to be covering the aspects of WordPress that I wish I had known about a long time ago!
Many of these I wish I had known about before experiencing the ‘ah-ha’ moments when it finally clicked and realised that it was either exceptionally neat or was the answer to me bashing my head on a brick wall when trying to do something “odd”.
WordPress & blogging is not something I have really talked about much here before and its one of skills & experiences I take for granted, but rarely share with the outside world. It wasn’t until October 2010 that I bit-the-bullet and started writing about myself, however I’ve been using WordPress for years.
In these next few articles, I’m looking forward to sharing with you my experiences with you and also homing in on the aspects that will help me, help business owners take the plunge or refine their work using WordPress. However we need to start at the beginning.
WordPress in it’s simplest form is a “Content Management System”, a common name for this type of tool is “CMS”, however Alice the rabbit hole goes deeper, much much deeper.
With some 25 million, yes million downloads, the free hosted version that when checking today at WordPress.com they’ve almost 100 million words in a single day, WordPress has become the #1 free CMS.
There are many reasons why this is happened, these include:
In short, there are other blogging & CMS tools that are available, however my personal opinion (& some obscene amount of other people on this planet) believe that WordPress is the best there is.
I avoid politics, however I, as you, cannot ignore that the PM uses WordPress!
You want names? Lets try some of these:
So do not even try to tell me that an “Open Source” CMS is not viable to be used for business use, I’m using it right now & I’ll laugh at you.
I’m not going to mince my words here & I make no apologies, if you want to procastinate on this, that’s your choice, however:
“Getting started with WordPress is piss-easy”
Three steps that will take you less than 2 minutes:
Congratulations.
To clear a little mist, there are two versions of WordPress, there is either the free hosted option which you just made or the self hosted option. These are found at http://wordpress.com/ (free hosted) and http://wordpress.org/ (downloadable)
There are positives and negatives to each. As you’re probably a business owner that is reading this, then I would ask you the simple question below:
Do you want absolute control over everything about the CMS?
WordPress is the #1 content management system on the planet and there are many reasons for this, the two primary ones are that its free and its so easy to use. Its used by massive corporations, the Prime Minister, individuals like myself and people just like you.
There are two versions, ones free hosted and also for those who want more control, a download version is available and this the downloadable WordPress code which you’re reading right now.
I’ve not covered why you want to start using a CMS and I’m not going to either. I’ve also not covered how you can install WordPress on your site as frankly there is no need, most hosting providers provide a one-click solution to install it and if you get stuck, they’ll be able to help you or just check YouTube.
If you’re looking for a reliable host for the self hosted option & have one-click installs of WordPress, then I personally recommend Evo-Hosting (which this site is hosted by) and also Heart Internet, which I have used for years.
Create a free WordPress site
It takes only a few moments, even if you have no intention of using it, take action now and break your WordPress virginity https://en.wordpress.com/signup/
