BACKGROUND OVERLAY SUPERPOWERS ACQUIRED! (Class-Based Custom Overlays in Oxygen)

More about this video

THE CUSTOM CODE PART OF THIS VIDEO ISN’T REQUIRED. SEE THE PINNED COMMENT OR UPDATED BLOG POST FOR DETAILS (But I’d still recommending watching all of that part because you’ll still learn stuff ).

I’ve been slightly bummed about creating background overlays since I started using Oxygen because the styling has to be set at the ID level.

This is less than ideal because you have to recreate the style every time you want to use it (or copy and paste a section) and there’s absolutely no future-proofing. If something about the style needs to change, you have to manually change it everywhere you’ve used it.

When I first tried to assign overlays to classes, it didn’t work and I just abandoned it because I was busy. It was something I’ve wanted to revisit and I finally got a moment to really sit down and address the issue and come up with a workaround.

I’m just calling this technique “Custom Overlay Classes” and there’s three parts to this technique. It’s fairly simple and elegant and the small code snippet that’s required can be copied from my companion blog post…

GET IT HERE: https://digitalambition.co/watch/background-overlay-superpowers-in-oxygen-class-based-custom-overlays/

Once you acquire these superpowers, you’re free to add as many overlay classes as you want. As long as you use the same starting convention, “overlay–” you’ll never have a content layer issue.

You also have the full range of styling options, from double overlay colors, to gradients, to patterns, to more images, to custom code, to filters, to blend modes … the whole bag of tricks.

Have fun!

0:00 Intro
01:28 Old Method
06:10 New Technique
08:45 Fixing Layering Issue
12:50 Future-Proofing
17:40 Seeing All Options

Video Transcript

0:00:00
I can’t believe I haven’t done this yet. I have not given a sneak peek inside of my inner circle. And so I want to do that today. Now if you don’t know what the inner circle is, I’m going to talk about that more in this video. I’m going to give you some context as to why the inner circle even exists in the first place. And then I am going to share my screen and take you inside of the inner circle. So you can see exactly how it’s set up, exactly how it’s organized, what there is, you know, what we’re offering through the inner circle basically and what the experience is like in case you decide you may want to join. So let’s talk about context first about a year ago. I started creating oxygen trainings on YouTube and agency related trainings here on YouTube. And I didn’t have any followers at the time really. I didn’t have anything going. It was basically starting from scratch. And my first video ever was how to set up oxygen properly. And I introduced a lot of at the time where kind of advanced concepts for how to set up oxygen builder. And the video took off. It was like astronomical. You know, for the size of the oxygen community, it was like racking up tens of thousands of views in a very short amount of time. And hundreds of comments. You can go watch that video if you want. It’s kind of at a date because a lot of stuff has happened since then. But the video is still there and you can you can see it if you would like to go see it or maybe you’ve already seen it. Anyway, I really love the momentum. It felt really good to produce something that so many people found value in. And I have a lot of history in the web development world. I have a lot of history in the agency world as well. And I really thought to myself, hey, I have a lot to offer. So I’m already getting traction. I’ve got to keep going with this kept creating oxygen trainings kept creating.

0:01:49
Agency related trainings as well. And over the course of the coming weeks and months, my inbox and my direct messages on Facebook and pretty much everywhere else that people can access me. Just started to blow up and people were basically saying, Kevin, you’ve got to go deeper. You’ve got to go further. You got to create courses or something. You’ve got to give us something that’s premium like we want to see everything that you’re doing with your agency trainings on all that stuff. We want you to go deeper on oxygen. We want full oxygen builds. And I started thinking about it. I didn’t take any action at the time, but I did start thinking about it. It was very interesting to me as a concept. I knew that I did not want to create courses. I didn’t want to be boxed in to like, I got a creative course on this and a course on this. And I got to figure out how to sell these courses. And then courses obviously like it’s a lot of work. It’s each course is going to be at a premium price to be worth it. I didn’t want to go that route. I decided, you know, there’s got to be some other method of delivery. If I’m going to do something like this. And so I just kept thinking about it. And then one day I was like, I could do a community, you know, I could create a premium community where as we could even have people vote on trainings, right? What trainings do you want to see? I’ll create those trainings. I’ll create what resources do you want. I’ll create those resources or give you the resources that I already have. And instead of it being confined to like, here’s a course or here’s a package or something that you purchase. It’s just like, why don’t you be a member of the community? And if you’re a member of the community, you get access to everything. And we’re not going to drip content or anything like that. It’s literally, you join the community, you have access to everything, you stay as long as you want. And if we do that, because that’s less pressure for me, it’s a little bit less work, right? So what I have to do is log into the community every day, help people out, which I already do. And then create trainings, put them in the community. And now they’re available to everybody. It’s very simple. And I can do this on a different platform. I don’t have to build a whole back end of a website with logins and all this stuff. I can just utilize like a third party platform. It got really interesting. And I started asking people, like, would that make sense? Would you want to join something like that? And everybody said, yes. So I did an announcement video. And I said, hey, here’s what’s coming. It’s called the inner circle. And here’s what it’s going to be. Here’s what it’s going to contain. And I launched it. And it went really great as well. Like I was going to say astronomical. I mean, it wasn’t like thousands of people joined, but we crossed a hundred member mark very, very fast. And I’d even said to myself, look, I’m going to, I’m going to start this thing in $20 a month, because I wanted to be accessible to as many people as possible. At the same time, I needed to like, you know, pay for my time and effort and all of that and the costs of the other costs of running it. But I think $20 is fair. But that’s an entry level price. And when we cross a hundred members, I’m going to raise the price.

0:04:50
Well, we cross that hundred members fast. In fact, today we have over 800 members in the inner circle. And I still haven’t raised the price. I just decided to leave it. I was like, hey, it’s really accessible to a lot of people. Most people can afford it. Let’s just leave it at that. Because it’s doing really well. And it’s no skin off my back like I’m making the money I need to make for the time and an effort involved in this and all the value that I’m giving. And people don’t really have to scratch a lot of money. I’m going to scratch a lot of money together to to participate. So it’s just worked out. It’s really worked out. And so what I want to do is for any of those of you who might find value in this or who have been deciding whether they should join or not. I want to give you an inside look. I want to take you inside the inner circle. And I want to show you around show you what’s there. How it all works. Let’s go ahead and dive in. Here is the inner circle. It is not a Facebook group. It is not a old like forum software or anything like that. It is built on a modern platform called circle. Interestingly enough, right? It’s circle.s. Oh, if you want to check it out, it’s a platform that anybody can use. And it’s just a really, really good experience. It’s very organized. It’s very easy to log in and participate in. There’s a mobile app. There’s a desktop version that you can just access online. And everything is organized on this left hand side over here. And I’m going to walk you through all of these sections. The first part of the inner circle is the fact that there is a discussion area. And it’s an organized discussion area by topic, which means that you get access to all 800 plus members who are in the inner circle for these discussions. We have a general discussion area. You can see it’s all very organized. You can see on the right hand side, you know, likes and comments. These are all like, you know, pretty new threads here. We have an agency talk section. We have an oxygen and WordPress talk section. We have SEO talk. We have accessibility talk. Compliance talk. There’s a feedback area. You know, if you create a website and you’re like, Hey, I really want feedback on this. I want feedback on the user experience or the design or how did I do with SEO here. Anything that you want feedback on, you can get it inside of this feedback section. All you have to do is post and people are going to start giving you comments and constructive feedback. And that’s really important is that this community we have focused very heavily on culture. And what you’re going to notice inside of the inner circle is that the culture is honesty, but it’s also friendliness, constructiveness, positivity. You’re not going to see, you know, back and forth arguments and a bunch of people shit talking other people or products or anything like this. It’s very, very positive environment. We have a job board. If you want to hire somebody, you can come in and post what you need. If you’re somebody that’s looking for additional work, you can go right to the job board and perhaps find somebody that can hire you for the work that you specialize in. That could be oxygen work. It could be bricks development work.

0:08:04
It could be digital advertising work SEO work, whatever your kind of specialty is. There’s people in here who need those specialties and they are looking to hire tools in deals. I have my entire master list of tools and apps in here. Literally everything from design and dev to money and business. What do I use for accounting? It comes down to email and marketing SEO tools that I use. It is a master list. There’s people talking all about these tools that they’re finding and great deals that they come across. That’s a really important section. We have the request line where you can I put in my ideas for trainings here and people can upvote them and comment on them. This is all sorted by popularity. This is kind of how I decide what generally what trainings are going to come out next or in the very near future. You can come in here and add your own ideas and everybody can vote on them. There’s just an endless list of ideas in here. We do events from time to time. Then those are the discussion areas. Then we get into the actual training premium training areas. We have agency trainings, all organized here, foundational training, sales and closing, pricing and money, project management, even little stuff like analogies. I created this section called analogies because I think analogies are very important in both sales and working with clients. We have analogies for pricing objections, analogies for web design process. It’s not just mine. People have shared their own analogies that work really well for them. Just little stuff like that that provides tremendous value. But then there’s stuff that objectively just people have told me the value is almost insane. If we look at something like pricing and money and we come down here and see a training like how to scope a website project where I walk you through exactly how I scope $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 website projects, how I’ve scoped $100,000 website projects, I walk you through step by step exactly how that’s done. I give you my price list. You can actually access my entire price list inside of the inner circle the day you join the inner circle. That’s insane. Take this training as an example. How to add $15,000 to every website project with this easy to sell discovery package. This is something that everybody should be doing. I walk you through exactly how to do it. It’s not just for your benefit. It’s for the clients benefit as well. If it’s something you’re not doing, you’re not making this money. How many projects do you do a year? If you do 10 projects a year and you can make an extra $15,000 on every one of those projects, the value is astronomical compared to the price that you’re paying to be in the inner circle. I’ve literally gotten dozens of comments and messages and emails from people telling me, Kevin, you’ve added, like I do your trainings, I implement what I learn, and I’ve literally added tens of thousands of dollars in revenue to my agency or to my freelancer business. Those messages all the time, the value on the agency and freelancer side is tremendous. Then we get into things like custom website training. Here’s your oxygen tutorials. We have a code snippets library. All of these helpful snippets, and these aren’t just for me. You can see that anybody can come in here and post code snippets, have discussions about them, very, very helpful. I even myself pull code snippets from here because people share really awesome code snippets. There’s oxygen query builder library. How do you query this? How do you query that using the advanced query builder in oxygen and then very similarly in bricks as well? There’s recipes for all that stuff. There’s user experience trainings. There’s CSS and SAS trainings. Then we get into full site builds. Here’s one that’s a perfect example of the sheer amount of content that’s in here. If you want to see a real world site build, this is not a hey, we’re going to make up a site and do trainings about it. This is an actual client site. This is an actual client site. There are just dozens of hours of footage from start to finish of showing how a real client site is built in oxygen.

0:12:33
With all of the problems and challenges and we got to figure this out, we got to figure that out. You can see exactly how all of this stuff is implemented. Next is a section that lots of people really love that they didn’t expect to get so much value out of and that’s the SEO trainings. I have a long background in history in SEO. This is a big part of the inner circle that I know a lot about. It’s one of my areas of expertise. There’s general SEO trainings, discovery trainings. We go into local SEO and technical SEO and digital PR. There’s a lot of stuff there for you. There’s additional resources. I have agency resources like printables, downloadables, stuff that you can give clients, stuff that you can use to work with clients. There’s recommended reading section. I also want to point out that there is a roadmap. This is a public roadmap. If you look at the roadmap, you can see all of the trainings in every category that have been published. You can also see what’s on the horizon. Like I said, you can come in to vote for these things in the request line once you’re a member. This dictates exactly what trainings are going to come out next. That’s available publicly. Everybody can see that. Let me show you the dashboard here so you can really see the analytics of the inner circle. Again, I said we have over 800 members. What about active members, though? Because a lot of communities have a lot of members, but only a very small percentage are actually active. You can see right here, there are hundreds of daily active members. These aren’t people who are logging in like once a week or a couple of times a month. These are people who are logging in every single day. We also have our 30 day active members, Mark. You can see we’re very close to 750 active members that people who are active every single month. So obviously communities do have some inactive members and we actually reach out to those inactive members and try to get them active again. Some of them are just too damn busy making a lot of money that they’re not logging in right there. They’re taking what they already learned and they’re implementing it and they’re making a lot of money and they’re serving more clients and things like that. That’s why they’re not logging in, but there’s also fall off as well right. I just hit puberty or something. I don’t know what happened there. But check this out. We also implemented a member of the month very recently because the circle dashboard gives us access to, hey, who are the top members? And this is actually not just like by posts or by one metric. This is a combination of metrics such as, are they commenting? Are they starting posts? Are they liked?

0:15:14
Do they get a lot of likes and love from other people in the community? And so every month we pick a new member of the month. You can only win once every year. So that means that lots of people get plenty of opportunities to win. And so for example, Andrew, just one. So anybody can compete for this spot by being an active commenter, a post starter, being very appreciated in the community. And then you can give legit prizes to the member of the month. Like you might get a 60 minute coaching call or consulting call with me. That’s like a $300 value. You might get a lifetime license to automatic CSS. You might get a free six months of the inner circle. You might get some other plug-in like we might give you an oxy extras lifetime license to that plug-in. So whenever we feel like we’re going to offer that month, we give you a choice of what you want. And the member of the month gets to choose the prize for that month. So very, very cool stuff. Keeps engagement high. And like I said, we build a culture of engagement. We built a culture of don’t just come here for your own benefit. Come here to help others as well. I get tremendous benefit from what people share and post and talk about inside of the inner circle. So that goes to show right there that it is an active, engaged community. And again, it’s on a platform that’s very, very easy to use. And I want to point out another thing too. Because there are some, you know, I don’t, I don’t want you to like don’t call me a guru or like anything like that. I’m not that. Right. But there’s a lot of like gurus online who start communities or courses or things like that. And they sell them in sell them in there. Now where to be found, right. This isn’t very important to me. I need to be the top member every single month in the inner circle. That means I’m commenting the most posting the most. I’m well liked in the community, right. I need to be in that top spot every month because that’s what this community means to me. It is my thing, right. I’m building it and I need to be participating in it. And it’s easy for me. It’s easy for me to win every month because I love what I do. Right. But I think it’s important to point out that this isn’t a situation where you’re going to come into the inner circle and be like, hey, where’d Kevin go, right. Kevin’s right there every single day. It’s why he’s I’m on the top member list. I’m just awkwardly going to talk about myself in the third person. Why I’m on the top of the member list every single month. So hopefully this gives you guys a sneak peek into exactly how the inner circle is organized with the experience is like.

0:17:57
You’ve got this easy home feed where you can just see all of the like latest stuff that is being posted. There was our member of the month for April 22 post right there. Just really, really tremendous value in here and a great overall experience. Let me go back to camera here. So that’s the sneak peek of the inner circle. If you’re interested in joining, we would absolutely love to have you. I know that we’re going to be diving into bricks more soon. So this is an open welcome to the bricks community as soon as they get wind of what we’re doing with bricks trainings and agency and freelance stuff as well. There’s a lot of people using bricks for their agency and freelance business. And then as we expand into other builders, it’s just going to continue to grow. It’s going to continue to get more and more powerful. We are building, I think, the absolute best community for developers, agency owners and freelancers. And again, open invitation. If you guys decide you want to join, I would love to see you inside. That’s it for me today. I’ll be back very soon. Cheers.