Putting WordPress to Work
Carrie: Howdy everybody! Welcome to officehours.fm. I am your host Carrie Dils. Today I have (I think it’s a three-peat guest) Curtis McHale. Curtis? How are you doing?
Curtis: I am pretty good today. I think it is a “three-peat”. Am I the only one now?
Carrie: No. Let me see. Diane Kinney has you beat. Bob Dunn is equal with you. It looks like Andrew Norcross has been on the show three times.
Curtis: They’re all better looking anyway.
Carrie: I know. We’ll just say that you are the preeminent guest because you keep getting invited back. For those of you who have not had the pleasure of meeting Curtis, or reading his blog…Curtis? Will you introduce yourself?
Curtis: I am Curtis McHale. I have been building WordPress stuff for 10 years now or so. I actually have been doing more and more coaching in the last few years. My original training is actually counseling. I generally help people run a business without working all the time because that sucks.
Carrie: It does suck to work all the time. And you are the master of scheduling, discipline and (I’m trying to find the right word) you really are probably the most disciplined human that I know. It’s enviable that you can actually stick to that schedule. You just released (and what you didn’t say is that you are a prolific blogger and over at CurtisMcHale.ca). Curtis blogs all the time on business and more so on business than code, even though he’s a wicked smart developer. Curtis? You just released a book called Finding and Marketing to your Niche. Can you share a little what that’s about?
Curtis: So one of the questions I get asked a lot by my coaching clients and by people that just email off my site is how do I get more leads? I did a whole blog post series on it. It’s about 10 posts back in March last year. I realized that I still had a lot more to say and that means it’s a book. So I started writing a book on it back in January of this year. I did another whole month of talking about it. The book covers a little bit on why you need a niche because if you don’t know you need it, then don’t bother reading the book because you’re going to waste your time. It’s about how to find your niche and then a whole bunch around it…do you blog, do you write books, do you podcast, do you do webinars, and how do you use your email list? It goes through a whole bunch of different marketing strategies you can use and tells you about them. It tells you how to do them well. Then it ends with a way to follow up with your leads long-term so that you can do stuff. Like I was following up with lead for some development work for two years. It’s a middle five figure project now after two years of emails every couple of months. It’s about how to do that and how to plan that out.
Carrie: Let me speak for myself. As a freelancer, the marketing aspect has always been challenging. That’s not necessarily something that I’ve been historically great at. So you talk about before you can even market to your niche you actually have to define one. How do you recommend that people find out who they’re meant to serve or who they should be serving?
Curtis: Part of it is a process. Let’s say that up front. I have developed a niche over the years. I also have refined it many times and changed it. I’ve probably even tried ones and then said, “this was terrible”. Then I stopped. It is not something that you do once and then you’re done for the next 10 years. For a long time with my development clients, I have been looking at eCommerce and membership sites. This year I have narrowed that even farther down to just membership sites. Specifically, working with the marketing aspect of it (not so much the code although I can write code and I will write code) for it. With my coaching side of the business, it’s been about finding leads and landing them. I’m going to refine that again or change that slightly over this year. Maybe I’ll bring my wife into the business little more as well. A bunch of what I do is even talking to spouses. So if you have this ideal business and you end up working all the time…I had a client a couple of weeks ago who said he was only going to work like 12 hours on the weekdays and eight hours on the weekends. His spouse was like totally ok with that. Then I talked to them together on a coaching call. She was like well that’s just less than before. I said ok because it’s better. We figured out how we can work it down to like 10 hours a day and an hour on weekends. I’m keeping them accountable for that. We’re actually going to work it out to 8 hours a day five days a week and that’s it. Hopefully, we can work it out to less in a little bit so there is more freedom. I cannot remember the last time I put in a 40-hour week in the office. If you plan well then you just really don’t need to be in the office. You can be productive while you’re there because most office people only work like 5 hours worth of real work in 8. So I try to do 5 hours in 5 days most of the time. After this podcast, it’s like 12 o’clock in the afternoon. I got here at 8 and I will leave once our call is done. I have one little thing to do and then I will be home by like 1:30 and I’ll hang out with my kids for the rest of the day in the snow.
Carrie: This is actually a 3-hour interview today.
Curtis: (laughs) By the way, I have to leave it half an hour (I’m kidding).
Carrie: I’m glad that you mentioned that finding a niche is a process and that it’s ok to get it wrong and try again. I feel like there’s all this pressure of oh my gosh! I’ve got to get it right. If you don’t get it right then everything that follows will just fall to pieces. Would you say for your coaching clients that freelancers are your target?
Curtis: Yes for my coaching clients it is. I get a little more specific and I say a technically oriented freelancer or a small team. I’m working with a set of partners and they have two people working underneath them who want to have good processes for following with their clients. They want to have good processes for their proposals and they don’t work all the time. That is my niche. So I don’t officially work with…if I say it on my site…like someone coming out of an employment situation. Although I do have clients that are in there, but that’s not specifically who I market to. They have seen me talking about freelancing or how to run a freelance business or your own business and they say I would like to do that and I don’t know how. They have come to me. I’m working with people that are non-technical as well. That’s fine. Even though I have a niche, I gear my marketing towards that. So you notice a lot of the examples I use on my site I’m talking about web development or web development projects. That doesn’t mean that other people aren’t going to come to me. It just means that I can focus my niche and my marketing on those people. I even know what conferences I should attend to talk to people. I know that looking at a 50-person agency could I help that agency owner? Yes, but then my marketing would have to be geared differently to talk to that agency owner and talk a lot more about working with your team than I would otherwise.
Carrie: You know? You just keep making important points. I am going point out the points. So not only is it ok to not get your niche right the first go around but marketing to your niche needs to be addressed. It does not mean that is the only person you can serve. It just means that’s who you’re targeting. I guess that’s important and sort of an “ah ha” for me as I’ve been gone through a similar process. So you talk about the mysterious three level marketing plan. Actually, it’s not mysterious. You do have this thing called the three-level marketing plan that you talk about in your book. Can you walk us through what that is?
Curtis: The three-level marketing plan takes all the marketing strategies that I’ve talked about while blogging, writing books or podcasts. It says if you’re not doing anything where do you start? I think the base level you start out in Level One is to start writing for your blog once a week. That’s where you start understanding that blogging takes a while to build up. I have (I don’t know) something like 1200 posts on my site now. It’s still is not performing in many ways that I would like to see. I don’t think I am as popular as other people out there. Does it bring in leads? Yes. Do I continually get people saying wow! I just found your content and there’s so much there. Yes, but only because there is so much there. I’m not like you can start week one and people will say wow! You did one post and there’s so much content on your site it’s amazing! That’s not where you’re starting. After you nail that in Level One I recommend you start looking at podcasting just to get some your content out there on a regular basis. Having an email list is another example in Marketing Level One. Level Two adds some more things. Right now if you’re saying I did start marketing Curtis and said I want to do what you do. I would tell you I have a piece of content coming out on some site five times a week. You’d say what? I can’t do that! I’d say “you’re right, you probably can’t yet”. After 1200 articles on my site, I write really fast so it’s really quick for me to get the writing aspect out of it. With podcasting, I find that easy as well (partly because I don’t do any editing). I just put the podcast out there. When someone suggests that I should do an intro I have to weigh I could do intro or I could do another podcast. What is the better use of my time? They usually say they will take another podcast and it’s fine. Outside of the three levels of marketing, if you need a client right now, go shake some hands. That’s the fastest way to build trust. The farther you are removed from someone, the less trust you’re getting with them in every interaction. So it’s going to take more interactions with your site, with your Twitter account with all those digital things which feels super easy. It’s easier to sit here behind your monitor than it is to go up and speak at a conference. Or you can just meet someone and talk with them over coffee at a conference. Shake their hand. They are going to trust you a lot quicker and be able to make a purchase a lot faster. That is also in one of the Levels but it is a little later because, in theory, you built some confidence at that point in what you’re saying. Whereas, if you need a client now get out there and shake hands immediately. That’s the only thing you should be doing. Forget everything else.
Carrie: So what about that confidence piece? How does one acquire confidence?
Curtis: This one for me is hard to teach. I’ve been a pretty confident person my entire life. One year, when I was like 19 maybe, my boss said “hey Curtis? Can you drive a standard?” I said “Yeah sure.” I figured I could drive a standard. This was like a multi-ton truck in the middle of Toronto with a bobcat on the back. So was like 40 feet of something or 30 feet of the truck behind me that I was driving through downtown my first day of driving a standard. We made it home. I think the big thing is to have someone to believe in you. I think Tim Ferris talks about the jar of awesome. I’ve talked about a file that I used to keep in Evernote of the comments when someone said: “hey this is super helpful.” Knowing that you are super helpful is a way to continue to keep your confidence up. Knowing that simply because you know how to set up WordPress and had a blog post you are now Gandalf to someone, right? Gandalf is the Wizard in Lord of the Rings who fights demons after falling for days through water and fire and onto a mountain and all this other stuff. That’s what you are to someone. Just because you know how to set up WordPress with a couple plugins and you can make the theme not look dumb, you’re not Gandalf. You are so far ahead of people that are out there. You don’t know even know it yet.
Carrie: Yeah. Any time you know more and then somebody else you can their Gandalf. There’s something we all know better than someone else.
Curtis: That’s right. Even between you between you and I Carrie, I’m probably the stronger developer, right? But when it comes to Genesis you are one of the people I can ask.
Carrie: That is true.
Curtis: So in that way you are Gandolf to me. You’ll have the answer immediately and I’ll spend a bunch of time looking. I often end up your site anyway and think oh! I can do that instead. There is a lot that you know. You need to build up that confidence. Sometimes it’s just talking to yourself in the mirror. There are lots of self-help places that say tell yourself five wonderful things about yourself in the morning. That’s good. It seems a bit fruity. Am I not going to say, Curtis? You’re good-looking. Although, I am good-looking, handsome and humble. But telling yourself that and just reminding yourself that the things you find so easy are because you’ve been doing it for a bit. You have put some time in doing whatever (setting up WordPress, doing marketing automation, doing design, whatever it is) you are better than someone out there. When you’re looking at scaling up and let’s say doing bigger projects, or taking on bigger work the thing you need to remember is if I’m going to charge someone $1000 dollars can I say that we can conceivably make $3000 out of this work. You’re going to see at least a three-times return out of it. If can say yes, then you’re doing the client a great service. You should be like hey! This is awesome for you. If you saw someone hobbling around with a broken leg and you had a cast that could likely fix that for them and help them would you be like oh! I don’t know if I should give this to them. The cast is kind of ugly looking. You would give it to them. You are doing this to help people. Don’t be shy about telling people that.
Carrie: That’s a great frame of reference. I am back chatting and having a good time with Curtis McHale. Curtis? I like that thinking about approaching clients as we have something of value and benefit to offer. There’s no need to be shy or timid about that. I do think it takes time with those client conversations. You need to do it over and over like you said before you can feel comfortable with it.
Curtis: For me, even before I did WordPress stuff, I spent the time from when I was 19 until I was almost 27 trying on other businesses for size. I’ve run different businesses for construction and a whole bunch of stuff for years. By the time I was doing web stuff I had already had those conversations with clients a bunch.
Carrie: So you talk about creating content. Of course, there are multiple benefits to creating content such as establishing your authority and getting people to find you organically through search engines. What about people that just don’t like to write? They would rather poke themselves in the eye with a rusty nail then start a podcast. What are your suggestions? Do you have to have content?
Curtis: Yeah, you have to have something for sure. I think at a certain level you have to get over it. There are things that I do not love about running my business. If I were to say that I did I’d be lying to you. I do not enjoy going out to networking events. It’s not because I don’t think they’re useful, I just don’t enjoy them. I would rather spend the evening hanging out with my kids instead. So, you are going to have to go over it. For some writing, you can hire a writer. I have a writer that I’ve used for some of my email courses. I have recommended her to clients and she gets on the phone with them. My client will set up a couple topics they want to talk about and they’ll talk about the topic for a while. Maybe they will provide some content or a place she can find out about it elsewhere. She’ll write it for them. They read it, they correct it and they publish it. That’s it. That’s a great spend for your marketing.
Carrie: All right! But you do include a content creation guide or you talk about that in your book. And you have on your site on how to create content. You said you can crank out a lot of words pretty fast because you’ve done it for so long. For people who don’t have that habit or discipline yet what are some recommendations for getting over that initial hump in getting started writing?
Curtis: The first you do is block out a day regularly. Just do it. Sit down and write. I often recommend you do three things with your writing. First, you outline an article. Second, you write a different article and third, you edit an article you’ve already written. If you can continue to do that regularly then you will continually have some content to go. When I wrote more technical stuff, I would often encounter a problem that a client had. I would stop immediately and record a quick screen cast. I would show the problem off and show my solution to it. That was it. I would put it out and not worry about it anymore. I very rarely have done a whole bunch of editing on screen casts because I just don’t feel like it really. I stopped doing those screencasts three years ago. I still have people say this is a great screen cast. Can you do this type of work for me? We can do that. Then we do a good decent five figure project for them. The other thing to remember is your marketing efforts. Many people only need to bring in 6 to maybe 10 clients a year. You don’t need to have their 500 clients. You’re not charging $9.00 a month for a service. You’re charging a couple thousand dollars for website design or low five figures for an eCommerce thing. For me, with coaching, I only need like three development clients year. That’s it. I’m only looking for three really good people to work with.
Carrie: How do you vet the people that come into your pipeline to know if they are good for you?
Curtis: I have a series of 9 questions now. So the initial prospect email that I send to pretty much everyone is…why you need whatever the feature is now and why is it more important than something else you could be building? Have clients or internal staff been asking for this feature? What would happen if we didn’t do it? How would that affect your business negatively? What will happen to your business while we do finish it? How is it going to move you to next level? How are you going to measure the success of the project (is it time saved, more conversions to email, more sales or whatever)? What is the timeframe for completion? What is the budget you have for the project? Who are the decision-makers that decide if the project moves forward? I do not get on the phone unless I have those questions answered. That’s it. Some people get it and say that they only wanted a $200 thing. Why are you bugging me about this with all these questions? I say that I don’t want to do a $200.00 thing. You could find somebody else. Occasionally you have someone that gets really mad and calls you a terrible person (and whatever). I have another email template that lets me type the four letters I would like to type and it spits out have a wonderful day and good luck with your project. You’re never going to say anything else. Nothing else would be constructive really. It doesn’t matter really what they say after that. I just wish them luck with their project because they identified themselves as not a client I want to work with. Even if they come back and say sorry I still say have a good day and good luck with your project. That’s it. After that, I always get on the phone with the client and I was get on the phone with the decision-maker. I was talking to a larger company where there’s a marketing person driving the web project and the CEO. If the CEO decides if the project moves forward then I have to talk to the CEO. If they say that the CEO doesn’t have time for it then the project is not that important, so I’m not going to bother. Now if I talk to the marketing person for the rest of the whole project that is totally fine. I don’t have to talk to the CEO every time. There have been a number of projects where I have done that and pushed hard where I have to talk the CEO. The marketing person thought they had $15,000 and then the CEO says we have $5000 to do this project. I say have to say we can’t do it for that. There is no way. Either they adjust, figure out how it can be worth it or they move on and find someone else to do it cheaper. I just let them move on and I don’t worry about it.
Carrie: You know what I love about that? You are providing value even in that initial email. You are forcing people to think through those questions. You’re asking great questions that a consultant would ask. You are asking questions that maybe they hadn’t thought of yet. So before they even get a response from you, they’ve already been able to take something away from a transaction. I don’t know why somebody would get mad about that.
Curtis: It happens. Maybe once I year I get I just needed this little thing…and yada, yada, yada. I just go ok. Good luck with that project. Have a good day. I have had clients that get that email template and say whoa! I was expecting to spend $500. I’m guessing based on these questions that you are well out of my budget. Here’s what I want to do. Do you have any other options? It was more than 500 bucks and I say yes here some other options. I actually put them on my list to follow up with them. I will follow up with them for occasionally for years. I will follow-up with someone for three years and when they’re finally ready to step up to a bigger project they will step up to the bigger project with me because I had emailed them every couple months for years now.
Carrie: Stalker!
Curtis: You know what? Way too many freelancers are afraid to say hey! You’ve got something broken? I can help you fix it. Many say I don’t want to bug them. Clients will let you know when you’re bugging them by saying don’t email me again! If they haven’t said that, keep emailing them. I have had leads not respond to me for like a year but I kept emailing me. They came back with I’ve got a project right now for you because I kept emailing them.
Carrie: Be in front of mind when the moment arose.
Curtis: Yep leveraging your email list for that and getting them onto your email list and continuing to follow up with them that way is a great thing as well. Even if someone is on my email list, I will stick with the three-month follow-up. I will send them another email just personally and say what’s up? I have one former client and I know he likes triathlons. I ask him how his triathlon training is going? He has asked me about some of the mountain running or climbing that I do. I will update him on the latest. We talk back and forth and that’s it. We don’t talk again for a few months. Then I follow up again in a few months.
Carrie: Do you still use that tool Contactually?
Curtis: Yes I use Contactually. I would say it alone has reminded me of at least one $15,000 to $20,000 project a year. It just comes back in my feed and reminds me to follow up with that person. I follow up with them and them hell yeah! Actually, we are ready to go. The first day I ever used Contactually, it was super expensive. It felt super expensive at the time. The first day it earned me $14,000 US. I’m in Canada, so it’s like $800,000 Canadian (in our play money).
Carrie: Curtis? We’ve got a couple of minutes here left together. I know that you’re an avid reader. Can you share maybe one or two books or podcasts that have been particularly helpful to you recently?
Curtis: Helpful to me? One show I really love is the Tim Ferris show. It talks about lots of different things. It’s not just a business. It’s not just about weightlifting or food or whatever. It is simply interesting and continually helps me think of new and different ways, which is really what you want to with your business. For books, probably the best book I read last year (actually we’ll go with two there). The first one is How to Read a Book. If you read How to Read a Book you will realize that you been reading very poorly and start getting a lot more out of the books you’re going to read. The second one is Deep Work. Deep Work by Cal Newport is just great. I was already very focused as Carrie said because we were in a Master Mind together for a while. I was always very focused and this helped me puts more of an edge on it. I have done this stuff now (like my phone is always in do not disturb mode). That means you can’t call me unless you’re my wife. Unless you call twice, that’s the only people who can call. I don’t get any text message notifications ever. I get no notifications about anything. It lets me just sit down to focus and work.
Carrie: Good stuff! I need to figure out how to turn off the notifications. Here’s the deal. My husband complains if my phone is off because then he can’t reach me. Apparently, I need to always be reachable. I think he likes me or something.
Curtis: Do you have a telephone?
Carrie: No, we actually don’t.
Curtis: My wife can see my schedule all the time. She knows it’s podcast time right now because I have it on my schedule. She’ll look and knows Tuesday’s are generally podcasts where I record things. She’ll look at it and knows to not call him unless there is blood (copious amounts of blood and I’m going to the hospital). That’s the only reason she will try to interrupt me on Tuesdays because she sees it on my calendar. Other days it’s a little freer. But even every day of the week there is a period of time that is blocked out. If you tell me we need milk, I do not care. I don’t want to know about it. Tell me after. She does very well at that now. Certainly, at the beginning, it was a trial. Even when my wife first came home just before we had our first kid (maybe it was the third day she was home on maternity leave). We get a full year in Canada. She took her leave a few days before the baby was born. Probably it was the third day. She comes in and says “Hey Curtis?” I handed her 20 bucks and said like go away. If you want me to take time off, you have to go away. I cannot keep stopping every three seconds. She was like what do you think we should get for the baby? I do not care right now.
Carrie: Oh my gosh! Did you say that to a nine-month pregnant woman go away here’s a $20 bill? I’m surprised you didn’t get a black eye out of that.
Curtis: We talked about it better later. She went away and now it’s better. It’s been snowing here which is very rare for where I live. There are snowdrifts up to my nose right now. I’m not very tall but it’s still 6 feet of snowdrifts easy. I cannot ride my bike back and forth so I am working out of the house occasionally upstairs in our bedroom. I don’t have an office there anymore. She knows to generally stay away if she can and keep the kids away if we can. If she needs the car I can’t get to my office for the day.
Carrie: Yeah. I do think that setting those boundaries is incredibly important when you’re working from home, especially when the family is home at the same time. I still would have punched you.
Curtis: (laughs) When you’re pregnant, you can’t move very fast.
Carrie: (laughs) You could have dodged it!
Curtis: Even in my office here…I don’t don’t technically work with anyone here. I run it from another organization but I still have a few friends that work here. When they have knocked on the closed door I opened it and said hey! The next time, when my door is closed, I’m really focusing on something. They will walk by it after that. I will leave it cracked when they want to come talk.
Carrie: There it is. The Curtis McHale philosophy of keeping people away.
Curtis: What’s your job when you’re at work? Are you supposed to be talking to everyone around? That’s why you have to work 10 hours to get like five or six hours of work done because you spent like four hours talking. If that’s what you think is the most valuable thing to do with your time, go talk for four hours. I don’t care. I think that hanging out with my kids or having the freedom to say I can go for coffee at 2 o’clock with a friend is a much better use of my time. That’s what I do. Honestly, if someone is super annoyed about it or mad because they can’t just come to my door that is totally their problem, not mine whatsoever. I don’t worry about it. Clearly, I’m a jerk. As I said, I told my pregnant wife to go away.
Carrie: You are awesome Curtis McHale. Thank you for taking the time to hang out with me on this show today. Where can people find you online or take a look at your book Finding and Marketing to Your Niche?
Curtis: You can find me at curtismchale.ca. Under the shop is where you will find the book and other ones as well. I’m Curtis McHale on Twitter and Instagram.
