Digital Agency Table Talk 003

0:00:00
All right, what is up everybody? Welcome back to another digital agency table talk. This is episode number three or session number three. We’re going to take a minute to just let some people join in from around the world. While we do that, I just want to talk about, first of all, when you get in here, definitely drop a comment. Let me know you’re here. Marnaud says, at work today, cannot pop into the green room. No problem, my friend. Next session. I want to get you in here. Green room is filling up. I’ll talk about what the green room is in just a second. Hey, the Hunsey, yes. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

0:00:42
Okay, so what is digital agency table talk? Well, everybody is joining. We already have 20 viewers and counting. So this is good. Digital agency table talk is a way for freelancers and agency owners to come in and get free coaching, advice, insights, whatever. We could just have a topical conversation as well. And everybody gets to watch for free on YouTube. The goal here is just to provide tremendous value. And if you are in my inner circle, which I’m going to pop up the URL here on the screen. So digital ambition dot CO slash inner circle, that’s a way for you to participate live and actually make this interactive, which makes this different from anything else that I’ve seen happening on YouTube or with podcasting or whatever, right? It’s usually there’s an AMA, like it asked me anything and it’s just the person reading questions.

0:01:40
I wanted to go above and beyond that. I wanted to do something a little bit different. So we actually allow people to come in live on camera on mic and be a participant in digital agency table talk. So you’re going to be able to hear from other freelancers and agency owners, these discussions, the questions that they ask, all of the value is free on YouTube. But if you are an inner circle member, you actually get to be a guest on the show. That’s kind of the exclusive part of this. So being a guest on the show, coming into the green room, being on camera on mic, getting to ask your questions, that is exclusive to inner circle members. That’s the exclusive side of this, all right? So the link is on the screen right now. If you want to check out the inner circle and see what that is all about, obviously there’s way more to the inner circle than just being a guest on digital agency table talk. But this is a really good aspect of it for sure.

0:02:34
So what can we discuss on digital agency table talk? You’re going to hear conversations and questions about things like getting leads, closing deals, SEO, so I have a heavy SEO background, digital marketing questions in general. People can ask for feedback on UX or UI or their dev. Best practices is something that I cover all the time. Project management, issues with clients, pricing and pricing models and philosophy, scaling and agency growth. We have general WordPress topics, page builders, ACSS, automatic CSS. If you have questions about ACSS, if you have questions about frames, all these things can be asked if you are a guest on digital agency table talk. So let’s see where everybody is coming in from. All right, we got Marcus Tobias, Silent Phil is back. James Andrew. Chaja, I think that’s how you pronounce it. Justin, Jermot, Akram, Nicholas, Jan, John, I’m probably slaughtering half of these names.

0:03:39
All right, good to see all of you. We’re up to, we’re about to cross the 50 viewer marks. This is fantastic. I have a topic that I do. Maybe you want to talk about at some point, we’re going to prioritize the people who are in the green room. If the green room slows down for whatever reason, then I will jump over to this topic. It’s about website as a service, this pricing model that I guess is gaining a little bit of traction and a lot of people are interested. And they’ve been asking me about switching over to website as a service and they kind of want to know what the pros and cons are, what I think about the pricing model in general. So I may end up getting into that. But like I said, we’re going to prioritize people in the green room. Here’s how the green room works. It’s, so this is a live broadcast on the back end, which you can’t see right now are people waiting in a little holding tank called the green room.

0:04:29
And the link to get into the green room is inside the inner circle. So you can go click on that and you will just make sure you have a camera and you have a mic and then you’re going to wait your turn basically. And so when I’m ready to bring on a guest, we’re going to bring them in from the green room. Now the thing about the green room, the caveat is there is a limited number of spaces in the green room. So if there’s, you know, 10, 12 people trying to get into the green room, you may not be able to get in. If that is the case, just keep trying, especially as you see somebody drop off, right? So you can be watching the broadcast as a guest drops off. I kick them out of the green room so they can go watch the broadcast like everybody else and that opens up a new space in the green room. And so then you click the link again and then you should be able to get in with any lock. So right now the green room is not full.

0:05:12
There’s a few people in there, but it is not full. So if you want to get in, you can absolutely get in right now. And we’re going to go ahead and go to our first guest. Our first guest is Alex. I’m bringing him up on the screen right now. How’s it going? Alex. Hold on. Alex is muted. All right. I unmuted you. Alex. How’s it going? Not much, not much. So before we dive into topic today, let’s let everybody know what is your background?

0:05:40
How long have you been doing this stuff? Just kind of give us a rundown. Yeah, that’s a good question. So I started doing graphic design at high school and I slowly just kept upgrading my skills. So graphic design turns to web design, web design turns to web development and web development turns into bio free-lancer. Now I’m transitioning to become an agency and this is my first real year. I actually am doing it as like I’m paying attention as a business owner and not doing a job. So I actually lead me to my first question. My first question is what do you spend your time as an agency owner and what do you focus on because I have a tough time. My main goal is to get 50 sales meetings a week. But a lot of time I’m getting toured back between client meetings and developer needs something and then somebody needs something. My time is on scatter.

0:06:31
It is kind of annoying. And now my next question was what’s your first strategic hire you did for your business? Not to maintain the business like a developer. Somebody that helped you grow the business. Got it. Great questions. Okay. So let’s start with first strategic hire because this leads into how you’re going to be able to free up your time to doing other things. And what you brought up is super important. It’s the difference between working in your business and working on your business. And if you want the agency to grow, you’ve got to be working on the business. The more you’re working in the business, the more the growth is typically going to be limited. So my very first hire was a developer.

0:07:13
And so the developer is somebody that’s a role, obviously, in what we do, especially if you specialize in mainly doing web development. So an agency that’s doing PPC mainly or SEO mainly, this could be a different story. But for us as web designers and developers, having a dev that you can offload a lot of this working in the websites is going to be the first big step for you. And so that’s immediately going to alleviate your time. Now right now, how many projects, typically, how many projects are you able to handle by yourself, do you feel? Like at the same time. I’m really bad with time management because I focus a lot of time on growing. Then at the last minute, I probably had like a week to hit my deadline, dad, just doing that. It really stresses me out. But what I do now is straight is straight. Why I get a project is straight to a developer.

0:08:05
I don’t touch it at all. Okay. I’m just the liaison between a client and a developer and makes for everything’s on task. So that’s probably like 20% of my time. So I’m just focused on being a project manager and the rest is just prospecting. So right now you have a developer that just handles the whole development side. Yeah. And then I’ve got to just pick some things and like, you know, just slowly get up to like teaching and bam and stuff like that. But he’s good. He’s doing he’s doing good work. Okay. So what part of the projects are you handling right now? I do onboarding and I basically just be the lead things on the project manager. Okay.

0:08:44
That’s it. Who’s doing design for the projects? I have a freelancer that I work with once in a time. But we don’t really we kind of have like like a couple of design standards and we just kind of like the client choose from that. We just make sure things are just looking right on mobile. So not 100% custom. I would say like 20% custom. Okay. So you’re working from just templates, themes, things like that right now? Yeah. Like basically we use frames now and we just kind of like fill in the blanks. Okay. Got it. So it’s that and this is my second strategic hire.

0:09:18
All right. Starting out with devs that can do the dev work and obviously a designer. They can do the design work. Then you then you get a project manager. So you have to get somebody who’s doing what you’re doing right now. And that project manager is going to be the liaison between the client and your company. And also the developers and the designers that are on the project. So that project manager, do you guys do a like a statement of work with all the deliverables and everything? Yeah. Okay. And you’re the one selling the projects, right? Yeah. Okay. So you sell a project.

0:09:51
It has a statement of work attached to it. You take that statement of work or using project management software right now. Yeah. We base camp. Base camp. Okay. So you take obviously of your project card and base camp. You take that SOW. You put it in the docs and files area and you ping your project manager. Your project manager opens up the SOW. All the tasks are right there. All the deliverables. They build the task list and then they assign the design tasks, the designer. They design the dev task to the developer and then they manage that project from start to finish.

0:10:21
And if the designer has questions, they ask the project manager. That project manager needs to have a decent understanding of how all of this stuff works so that they can answer those basic questions. Now there may be some advanced things that they eventually have to ping you on. But this is going to alleviate tons of the little back. The stuff that’s right now that’s pulling you into these projects, this is going to alleviate the vast majority of it. Yeah. So that’s the secret right there. I’m trying to, it’s hard to find a project manager that knows the things I know. Correct. I take, I need to start documenting what I do and trying to fill some, I filled that roll in because it’s a little bit everything. But I need to have like a standardized process. It seems like you have to take alleviate 80% of the project management and they’ve got to ping you 20% of the time.

0:11:10
That’s still 80% gain. Right. Right. Yeah. What I would look for is somebody with a design background or a dev background who’s also really, really organized and who likes the concept of managing multiple projects. Because there are a lot of developers and designers that they don’t want to be locked into one specific project, you know, until it’s finished. They kind of like to bounce around. They like the creativity of moving from project to project, things like that. The benefit of having somebody that has a design background or a dev background is if somebody on the team is stuck, right, or you need more hands on deck for whatever reason. Not only are they managing the project, but they’re actually, they’re actually going to jump in and execute a little bit. Whereas like a normal project manager that doesn’t have these technical backgrounds, they’re stuck too, right?

0:11:58
They can’t really jump in and help. So if you have somebody with designer dev background who can be your project manager, right, they have the project management skills, but they also have some of this background, you get a two for one in that. Yeah, that’s actually a really good point right there. I like that one. Yeah, and it’s not really like a unicorn situation the way most people would think it is. You know, there’s a lot of designers and developers out there just having to be super organized and good at communicating, you know, and find them and, you know, fill the role with them. Mm-hmm. But yeah, that’s, I always thought that being unicorn, but it’s kind of funny because I’m thinking about everything you’re saying. And I’m like, my developer is pretty organized. He’s a really good organized guy. Yeah, he could tell me exactly one of the things to be delivered and is delivered.

0:12:41
I’m like, probably just promote him. Yeah, so do it internally. That’s a good way to do it. Personally, my project manager, my main project manager is not no design or dev background, so it doesn’t fit that mold, but we have more people on the team who have those backgrounds, right? So I have one developer who’s stuck on something, there’s another developer that can come in and help them figure that out so that I’m not always having to go in and solve those issues, right? And that kind of goes back to something I said last time, which is make sure you hire people who are already competent, right? If you have a bunch of people who are green and your ideas that like you’re going to train these people from scratch on how you do things and yada, yada, yada, that can be somewhat of a disaster situation, you know? The run, the run way for getting somebody competent is way too long.

0:13:29
And then if you have too many people who aren’t at that higher level, you have to constantly solve problems. That’s all it’s going to be. So hire people who are already competent that you can basically plug and play into the projects. That’s a good point. I’m like, keep that in mind. By the way, you know, it’s going to cost more, right? To do that, but it’s way better in the long run. So yeah, but not a question to do your project managers interact with the clients so they take that out for you. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I don’t want to be doing that. That’s a lot of time.

0:14:00
And it’s also a lot of keeping up with every single detail. Because I can’t really have a conversation with the client if I don’t have all the details. And if I’m not working on the project, then I don’t have all the details, you know? Exactly. So my project manager, their job is to be, they have to know the details of all these projects that they’re managing and then be able to communicate with the client. So when the client has requests, they’re able to make tasks out of those. They know who to assign them to. And then they can get back to the client with status updates and things like that. And then the other thing is being proactive, you know? So it’s very important to be, and this is something that I didn’t do a long, long, long time ago, but I learned as just super important over time, is proactively communicating with the client. So every Monday, we do what’s called a Monday Mingle, right? So my project manager, every Monday without prompt, right, from the client goes in and updates the client on what we did last week and what we’re planning on doing this week.

0:14:56
And then if we’re stuck on anything, they make a request for whatever we need from the client at that point. So every Monday, the client is getting a structured update from us. And that prevents the client from ever feeling like, I don’t know what’s going on with my project or what is the status or what have you. And they don’t ever have to reach out, you know, say, hey, what, you know, give me an update. The update just come every Monday and they know to expect an update every single Monday. And so the project manager is kind of always on top of every project and I don’t have to be. But I can actually go in and read those Monday Mingle updates if I need to know, you know, what the status is on a project. So it’s good for me to have those too. Yeah, I like that Monday things. I feel like a lot of things I’m just doing is updating the client and letting them know like, hey, you’re stuck on this thing because you didn’t give us this and constantly follow up on there.

0:15:45
Yeah, it’s a lot of time. It’s a lot of time. So yeah, you got to get yourself out of that role because you said you want what, like 50 sales calls a week. Yeah. That’s a lot. How are you getting? How are you landing these? A lot of outreach, a lot of outreach. Col calling or call emailing or what? A little bit of everything. Col calling, calling emailing. Basically I come in like, hey, I’m calling calling you. I noticed you don’t have a website and do you want to talk about it? So you’re pretty much the boss.

0:16:11
Let’s change a little more to get you first, you know, but it’s like, it’s like guessing now. Then we talk, we can do discover, then it goes for a meeting. So that’s why I want to do. I come for a sales role. So I do myself marketing. I know a little bit, but I just know how to prospect the elites and that’s why I want to do. Eventually, I only teach that process to a sales team, but I need to get more meetings first. Right. Right. So it’s good because so many agencies and freelancers lack this side of things. You’re never going to be struggling. If prospecting is your strength, then your agency is at a distinct advantage.

0:16:56
You are right in thinking that, hey, I’ve got to stop going into the projects and doing things and communicating with clients because my strength is prospecting and growing this agency and getting more clients. And as long as you’re getting more clients and you’re getting them at the right price, you’re going to be able to have whatever team you want to have on the back end. And they’re going to be able to do great work for you. So you’re in a perfect position, right? So the other question would be, how is your pricing? Are you pricing enough to afford these people on the back end? Yeah. So firstly, what I did, I made sure, I think is the book you recommend, Profits First. And I took the training on that, then I saw watching some videos. Basically, I’ve tried price on my services at 90% margin. So wherever it is, we sell it at 90% of that. Then it gives enough for everybody to be eat.

0:17:47
So I could get a good share, the developer get a good share, everybody gets a good share. But it’s hiring people and basically trying to fill in that puzzle and try to get more meetings to feel the machine. So everybody, I could constantly keep up the upkeep. Got it. So 50s of the goal, what are we at right now? What do you mean? How many calls are you on every week at this point? This week is seven. Seven. Okay. All right. So, how many of these are you actually closing? Like one out of five-ish. Okay.

0:18:21
So that’s not the same. So if you were at 50, you would have some serious work on your hands. Yeah. Okay. So that’s where we need to get to. Yeah. All right. So eventually, this is not me. This is just me having a sales team. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah. I think step number one right now is you got to find that project manager to fill those shoes and get you out of that situation so you can go full steam ahead on prospecting.

0:18:47
All right. Well, appreciate that. I can’t really put your advice in. I’ll probably maybe come back a couple weeks from now and show you the progress. Yeah. Absolutely. Give me an update for sure. All right. Sounds good. All right, man. Thanks for coming on today. All right. All right. See you. All right.

0:19:06
Here. See how everybody is going. Hopefully the audio is good. It was perfectly fine last time. Nobody’s complaining in the chat. So all this is good. Justin says, SOPs for the win. For sure. SOPs, if you’re not familiar, standard operating procedure. You need to have all your procedures documented. That makes onboarding these new team members a lot easier. All right. The Hunsey has some quick questions. So, the Hunsey, come on into the green room, man. Let’s ask these.

0:19:39
I’m trying not to take questions out of the chat so much. I want to prioritize people who are coming into the green room. And because that’s what this show is all about, right? That’s what Digital Agency Table talks all about the guests. So come on in and let’s get it done. Please expand on transitioning to bricks. Same thing. Alex. I don’t see you in the green room, Alex. So come on in the green room. And we can discuss bricks or whatever else you would like to talk about. All right. Good stuff. All right. We’ve got Sebastian, Gabriel, and Fredrick.

0:20:16
And it looks like Gevez. Hopefully, that’s how you pronounce it in the green room. Like I said before, if the green room happens to be full when you’re trying to get in, then just wait. Just wait for somebody like Alex just left. That means a spot’s available. Bam. Try to jump in. Click that link and get in. So I’m going to bring Fredrick on next. And we are going to discuss whatever he would like to discuss. I’m going to unmute him. I’m going to try to unmute him. And we’re going to add him to the show. Fredrick, how’s it going?

0:20:43
Hey, Gevez. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. Just a quick note. Like, if anyone is watching this video, I highly recommend to join the cycle region like a few weeks ago, but we got a lot from it. So I feel recommend to join you. Thank you. So a quick overview of what we do. So I’m running a web design agency based in Canada, Ottawa. And we are a team of five with some contractor on the site. And I have two questions for you. The first one is the base camp because we just switched to base camp. We used to use click up, but like you mentioned in one of your video, it’s too much features for what it is.

0:21:25
And base camp is the best word for now. It’s the adoption from your clients because right now you know that clients love to send emails. Yeah. Yeah. I would like to use feedback on the adoption of base camp from your clients. And the second question is on squaring because right now we hit like a plateau. We are around 40k revenue a month. But we have some issue to double this revenue. And we already using a website as a service, so if you have any question on that, I can explain how we are using it. Cool. So adoption of base camp by clients, yeah. Yeah. So what have you tried so far?

0:22:07
What is your method of trying to get them to use base camp? So we do two things. So we have an email and a translation. We are exactly using this program. So please register. And we’re going to jump on a discovery call and show you how it’s worked. You put your file, you come in, et cetera. And then we start putting everything in base camp and they received an notification. But like yesterday I still have client to send me an email and say no, please use base camp. But yeah, I’m not sure this weekend. Maybe every time this is an email, say maybe jump on a call and show them where to put it on the camp, but it’s time consuming too. I have the solution for you. All right.

0:22:49
You’re going to open your, you have a contract, yeah? Yes, we do. Okay, you’re going to open your contract and you’re going to add a section to your contract that says base camp or project management or something like that. And you explain in this area the contract, we use a project management system called base camp for all client discussion, for all task management, for all docs and files management. And you lay out why you use this system, right? So it keeps a track record of everything, it makes sure that our team has access to everything at all times. It makes sure that there’s context surrounding requests and things that have happened. There’s, you know, everything is timestamped, date stamped, and when things were completed, received, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. This protects all parties, right? It protects us as an agency and a freelancer. It protects you.

0:23:39
It protects your project. But what we say in the contract is you must use base camp. So we don’t accept text messages, we don’t accept DMs on Facebook or wherever, we only accept communication inside a base camp. And if you send an email, we’ll remind you of this, right? But now it’s in the contract. And also what it says in the contract is, if you request something via email or you request something via text message. And we fail to do it more like a deliverable associated with that request, doesn’t get done on time, doesn’t get done the right way, doesn’t get done at all, it’s the client’s fault. It says that in the contract, right? So they know, hey, there is a risk to making my request outside of base camp. It means that if anything goes wrong, it’s on me, right? I should have made this request inside of base camp in the discussion area or I should have created a task for it or whatever.

0:24:37
And so that is all in the contract and that protects, like I said, it protects everybody really. So if you do that and it’s a little bit more serious, then usually clients get the point and they will use base camp. And you can instruct them on the fact that, you know, if they like email, if you guys are using the discussion area inside of base camp, when you create a discussion and you tag somebody or somebody is notified on the discussion, they can reply the email and it goes into base camp, right? So just make sure that they know that. And if they want to start a new topic or something like that, they’ll have to log into base camp and start a new discussion thread. But if they’re just replying to something, sure, use email because that is going right through the base camp system. But if it’s something new, then you need to go create a task where you need to go create a new discussion and they’re contractually obligated to do that.

0:25:24
And if you put it in your contract as like a section and people are still not getting it, you can actually just make it a separate page that they have to, it’s almost like a waiver, right? Like so. And if you have a new discussion page on project management, read it and sign it and they have to e-sign that and then you stick it in base camp and you have that track record of them agreeing that they’re going to do all this inside base camp. And are you dealing like, you always have those kind of clients who doesn’t want to use a system and still email you, do you ignore them or just reply, use base camp, that’s it, that’s all. Well, what I do is I click forward and then I forward it to my project manager and then they take care of it, right? Yeah, they don’t want anything. They, they will be nice to a point and then, you know, they’ll just say this isn’t going to work if you’re not going to use base camp is basically the end response, right?

0:26:15
But you know, clients, they want their project to work, they want their project to be on time, they want their project to be done right. So, you know, they will adhere to what you want them to adhere to. But no, I mean, there’s, there’s some agencies out there and freelancers that are in like 17 different Slack channels, like every, every client’s got their own Slack channel that these people are in, they’re getting text messages out and then they’re like, I don’t know why, you know, we keep dropping the ball on things like, yeah, I wonder why. And clients have to be told that too, you know, so like we can’t be, you know, I explain it as you don’t want me in that other company’s base camp and, and DMs and stuff, I got paying attention to them over there and forget about you, right? Y’all all come to my place and I won’t forget about any of you and, you know, I think that’s fair to everybody. Yeah, I agree. We have the same issue when we decide to go with a team system and now all the clients are using it, but I think to put it in a contract in a separate page where they sign, I think you put the responsibility on them and when they sign it, they will remember.

0:27:14
Yep. By the way, once you have that signed area, you know, when my project manager is dealing with somebody, he’s like, well, we don’t want to do it, you know, it’s like, but you agree to doing it, right? So, you can always put that back on them. Yeah. Great. Thank you very much. And what about, so yes, for the plateau like screening your agency? Yeah. So, what’s that about? What do you feel is the, what’s stopping you from scaling? I think it’s maybe the leg that like we need more team members so we can take more project, but to take more project, we need to do more marketing and it’s in in between. So you need time to do marketing, you need time to manage yourselves, you need time to manage your team as well. But also like we just do web design for now in September, we have someone in our team that decide to do SEO.

0:28:03
So we start offering SEO and bring more money so that’s very good. But again, then it’s screening with your team, but I’m running into an issue when you square. You may have not the work for the person you hire, so you have more expenses. Yeah. So you have to find the in-in between. And that’s where we are. You said you’re on the website as a service model? Yes, so we have two options like when a client, because we have some clients who are sometime like a $10,000 project, it’s too much. So we offer as a service, so they pay every month, so we include everything like the OST maintenance, all the service, but in a monthly retainer and we host the site so we keep control over it. But this one, it’s nice because it gives the flexibility to a type of contract. So that’s where we use a website as a service and then they keep in the long run and we have clients for three or five years now on those contracts.

0:28:58
But you also do normal custom build, custom price projects where people pay upfront and or whatever. Okay. Yeah, we have a classic web design using OST and now we’re moving to Pinegrow, but like yes, we do have a web design on the service. Not a service, but just project. Okay. What would you say is your breakdown? What’s your percentage between standard traditional projects and website as a service projects? Oh, it’s very low. I will say maybe 10, 15% of our clients are on website as a service. Oh, 10, 15 on website as a service. Yes. Okay.

0:29:37
Most of them are on the traditional model. Yes. Okay. But then when we, we on the contract, like we have a 90% of those clients, we stay for clear plans. So we should jump to a care plan with one hour of support, like we manage more than 100, 180 website right now. So we have a nice recurring on this site, but yeah. Okay. So is it a problem? The biggest problem right now is that there’s not enough leads coming in or is it, there’s a waiting list because we don’t have enough people to do the work on the back end, which ones the work. Yeah, I think it’s the leads. Okay.

0:30:12
And we’re working to redesign our website to optimize for SEO for with the new service and all the service we’re ready offer. So we hope to have it ready by the end of November, but you know what it is, right? You work for clear. Yeah. You work for you. Correct. It’s not the fire. All right. So what are you doing right now for getting leads? Like where do they come from when they’re coming in now? To be honest, it’s only mouth to mouth. Yes, referral. Yes, referral. And we have, we still have a good ranking.

0:30:45
Sorry, such an end-regid. Like if you look up for WordPress, we are number one in Canada. So we get a few lists from that, much to mouth and linking, but we don’t have a PPC campaign or a specific offer. Like we have one time fixer deal. Like we want to use to generate leads. Yep. But we didn’t put the energy at the time on those as well. Okay. And so you do mainly web design development. You do SEO as well. Do you do PPC for clients? No. Okay. We don’t have the expertise for that.

0:31:20
Okay. So you do development and SEO, basically. Yeah. And support. Okay. Do you do design as well? Like a global design? Yeah. Or do you do, you don’t do any like branding or graphic design or anything like that? We do the graphic design for the clients. For the web. Just for the website though, right? Not for anything. Okay. And from time they come with the style guide and if they don’t have the style guide logo, etc.

0:31:44
So in the inner circle, I just published a video. The last one that I did was the three best places to get clients fast. Have you watched that video yet? I have two coordinates. All right. Good. So if you just implement those, because yeah, right now if you’re just mainly relying on referrals, as we know, we can get a lot of referrals, which is fantastic. Or sometimes there’s just like a dry spell of, hey, there’s nobody, nobody, no referrals coming in right now. And so we want to build these other channels so that all of our eggs aren’t in the referral basket, basically. So I would think that would be the primary thing, PPC for sure, building that referral network of other industry experts, right? Not normal referrals that I talked about in the video.

0:32:30
Yeah. Put all three of those things into practice. And let’s see if we can get your deal pipeline flowing a bit better than it is right now. Yeah, I just checked my note that I took on you on your video and method one, I put its strategic partnership and method two, I switched PPC with low scope work free. And then I will method three PPC, but PPC is very expensive in your field. So I think I’m going to use your advice where you suggest you use PPC on local market. Yes. Yes. Yeah. If you just do it in a local market, it’s going to be a lot easier for you. I think your conversion rate will probably be higher as well. And even if it’s hundreds of dollars for a lead that’s not even a project yet, it’s just a lead. If you’re pricing accordingly, like you’re pricing where you should be, then it’s still not going to be.

0:33:25
It’s going to be a drop in the bucket. So. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, definitely. So yes, it’s on my to do list. Thank you very much, Kevin. I will let the room for someone else. Let’s keep up the good work. I really love the NSECOL and really happy to join. Awesome. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming in today. Bye bye. All right. Cool.

0:33:46
Let’s check on the chat. All right. Everybody in the chat. Go ahead and while we’re here, just make sure everybody’s still awake. Go ahead and tell me where you’re from. And I also would like to know how long you’ve been doing this stuff. How long have you been a freelancer? How long have you been an agency owner? Drop that in the chat. I like to know, you know, just who’s watching? What kind of range of experience do we have? Drop those answers in the chat. We’ve got. Give us. I keep seeing this name.

0:34:18
I can’t wait. I’m going to have to bring them on next just so I can get the correction on the name. And then we’ve got Sebastian and then Gabriel. And the green room is full, but it will be one spot more is available right now. And then after the next one, there will be another one. So be ready to click the link. We’re waiting to get in. Yes. OK, so Romana says there’s 80 plus people watching, but only 21 likes. What is going on? I agree, Romana. I agree. What is going on? Click the like button. If you are here, we can easily just have 80 likes, like instantly.

0:34:51
If everybody just hits the like button. If you’re liking what we are talking about and the value that you’re getting, then you got to you pay with your likes. That’s what we’re doing here. Freelancer for 10 years in Western Australia says Justin, been doing this for 20 years. Johanna, Denmark, Freelancer for six months. So Cal since early 1995. Wow, we got a lot of people with a lot of experience here. Jason’s Freelancer for 10 years. Fredrick’s been doing this since 2013. Jan says Freelancer for eight years from San Blas Mexico. Love it. I wish I was in San Blas right now. 23 now. Okay.

0:35:34
Yes. All right. Cool. So let’s bring in YVES. Tell me how this is pronounced. Hey Kevin. Can you hear me? I can hear you. You’re live. So it’s Eve like Eve’s syllable or Eve’s or she just Eve. That it? Yeah. Okay. All right. I love it.

0:35:58
No problem. All right. So tell me your background. Tell me your background. How long have you been doing this stuff? So I’m just free. A new at the space. I started like a couple of months ago. I did some two, three projects. And now I’m at the WooCommerce project for a small. K-pop restaurant. And yeah, but I saw your video. I started with auction of Chen and pretty cool stuff. What you put in out there. Good.

0:36:30
Good. So what is your question or topic for today? So the first question about the builder. So I started the videos with you to watch with auction. Yeah. And now you switch to bricks. And now I’m like decide if I should change to bricks or should I stay by auction? Got it. Okay. All right. So as of right now, my official position is that people should be switching to bricks. I should consult my PR team before I go into detail on why. No, that’s not a thing. We can go into why. I’ll just put it out there.

0:37:16
So bricks obviously is built on a more modern framework. I’ll just write all these kind of off the top of my head. And then everybody in the comments section, go ahead and drop your comments about my comments as we do this. I want to hear what other people think as well. Bricks is obviously built on a more modern framework. So it’s I think going to be a better option going forward. It also in my opinion has a better user experience. So I’ve obviously have a lot of experience in oxygen. I now have a pretty good amount of experience in bricks. Bricks is still a 1.5-ish product, right, compared to oxygen, which is a 4.0 product. They are extremely similar in what they offer given the gigantic gap between their version numbers and their history, which is very, very impressive when we talk about bricks. Bricks is a fast experience. The builder loads very quickly. It is fast to use everything within the builder. And so general UX, I give to the bricks category.

0:38:20
Framework, I give to the bricks category. Leadership, I give to the bricks category. Responsiveness of development, responsiveness of listening to the community. I have to give this to the bricks team and to that category. Because there are numerous things that, you know, look as the developer of automatic CSS, as the developer of frames. There’s been a lot of things that bricks did not have that we needed in order to integrate CSS properly, in order to integrate frames properly. So I’ve been talking back and forth with Thomas and asking for various things. These things get implemented very quickly. So Thomas listens to the request. If it makes sense, he builds it. And he, you know, it’s not just listening to me. He listens to a lot of different people. And this is very good. He doesn’t thoughtfully, he doesn’t without just like baking in a bunch of nonsense that, you know, everybody and anybody is asking for. There is a road map, which Oxygen does not have. And so we’re able to kind of see what’s coming next on the list.

0:39:26
So there is a process in place for doing these releases and adding these features. But when I asked for things on the Oxygen side, I was told to make a feature request. And then I would send my entire community to go vote on the feature request. And there’s a lot of votes on it. And still, you know, nothing really, really happens. And as we all know, Oxygen feature requests, bug fixes, they can sit there for years. Years. And some of it’s very, very simple stuff. And so as a user, do I want to put in a feature request, knowing that it could just sit there for two years. Right? No, I want to put in a feature request when the developer is super responsive. And it takes a feature request that’s obviously good and that a lot of people have voted on and actually implements it. Now, I don’t know everything that’s going on on the back end with Oxygen. I don’t know how much technical debt that they have in terms of their development. And what Oxygen is capable of and what limitations the framework has. And I don’t know any of those questions. But what I do know is there’s not a lot of good communication.

0:40:31
And good communication is something that is very valuable. My products, I try to communicate as much as I possibly can and be as proactive in communication as I possibly can. And I respond to everybody. And that’s just how I do things. Bricks is very similar. Their lines of communication are very strong. There’s a trustworthiness issue with the so-fly as a company. And how they handled the breakdance release. This is well known. I mean, I’ve made my, I wrote a whole thing inside the inner circle. The people can go read very, very long right up on that whole situation. And it doesn’t matter what people think, but there is a trustworthiness issue there in knowing how that was handled. And the fact that the person who leads so-fly is, this is objective fact. Talks bad about Oxygen. Talks bad about the users of Oxygen. Okay, this is well documented on, on his own videos. All right. So the question becomes, do I want to be a user of a product like this?

0:41:40
And to me the answer is no. Because even if the product is great, even if the product is fantastic, the ownership to me, the leadership behind the product matters just as much. And it matters where this thing is going to be taken and how it’s going to be led. So when I look at a situation like Oxygen versus Bricks, it’s very clear to me that even though Oxygen is extremely capable, we all know that. To me, its future is in question, absolutely, because yes, they are going to maintain it. I don’t know what that means to what degree it’s going to be maintained or the speed to which it’s going to be maintained or how long it’s going to be maintained for. They say that it’s going to be maintained, but it’s very clear that it’s not a product that is going places like Bricks is, right? And so we have to take that into account that this very well could die. And like I said, it doesn’t matter how capable it is, that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It matters the leadership behind it and the decisions that they make and the way that they treat their community. All of that matters just as much to me. And so Bricks checks the boxes for all of these things.

0:42:44
And I don’t know Thomas personally. I don’t know anything about their team. They could, you know, they could go rogue tomorrow and do something completely off the wall just like kind of so fly did. We’ll have to find out. But at this point in time, I can just make decisions based on the information I have. And I have a lot of information I don’t like on the Oxygen side of things. I have a lot of information that I like on the Bricks side of things. And so that’s where I’ve moved and that’s what I recommend people move to. And that’s my official position. Perfect. Cool. Thank you very much. Absolutely. And the second question I had about age agency. You do niche down or I saw you video and you are more like broke and not broke broke. So you do more niches than only one. Yeah. Would you recommend when you start to like niche down or do everything what you can?

0:43:43
It’s this I get asked this a lot and the answer depends on your personality. So do you feel that you’re a very creative person who likes to, you know, do lots of different creative things in terms of like I like to strategize on this company over here. But then tomorrow I would like to engage my brain in a completely different way for this company over here. Do you like to do that or do you feel like it would be easier for you if you just handled all projects kind of within the same niche so that you don’t have to engage these different parts of your brain. You can just know what you need to know for this industry and just apply it to all these different clients. Which one is fitting you best? I think the second one like just have one one niche and focus to them and help them to grow. Okay, so you like one niche just deal with the same types of businesses over and over and over again. Yeah, okay. So clients and every other niches and now I’m thinking to like niche down just put one niche in work. Okay, you froze for a second there, but I think I get the gist. So what I tell people is if you niche down, it is going to be easier to market your business. Okay, it’s easier to get new leads typically it’s easier to write your copy. It’s easier to build a portfolio. It’s easier to do a lot of things.

0:45:17
And so a lot of people niche down because it’s a shortcut almost to it just makes everything easier. But what it also does if you are a creative type like I just talked about so for me, I can’t possibly choose a niche. And just now I’ve niched in certain ways. So I only work, I only do websites and projects for service based businesses. So I don’t do any e-commerce whatsoever. I 100% reject all e-commerce projects. Okay, so that’s a niche in itself. Right, it’s not like I do any and every project. It’s I only do projects for service based businesses. So that’s a niche in itself. But if I had to choose an actual industry niche within that, I would want to jump off a bridge because my brain has to be doing, like I like to be creative in these different areas and I like to solve problems. And I need unique problems. I don’t need the same problem coming to me over and over and over again. I want unique problems to solve. So when I work with businesses in different industries, they all present unique problems and I get to put my brain on solving those unique problems and challenges. And that feeds me. And so if I was stuck in a niche, yes, could I get clients easier? Perhaps. Could I really streamline processes? Perhaps. Could there be a lot of benefits? Sure. But at the end of the day, I would hate myself and I would hate my life and I would hate my job. And that’s not worth it. Right. So you can’t just make a business decision where you say, oh, these things are going to be better for our business. But at the end of the day, it’s going to crush your soul.

0:46:53
That’s not a that’s not a business decision in my estimation in my estimation because the business can’t survive that for very long. You’re going to get burned out. You’re going to hate your life and then your business is going to suffer anyway. So you should do what you love. And if you love working with many different types of businesses, that’s what you should do. And you should do the things that are needed to make that work. Okay. Cool. Thank you very much. All right. You’re welcome. Is that it? Yeah. That’s it. All right. Thank you. I appreciate it. All right. We got Sebastian and Gabriel. First I got to hop in and see what people are thinking. Mm-hmm. Okay. Got a lot of really good comments on bricks. People talking about WooCommerce. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Personless Cynthia says personally still feel it’s not a good idea to put all the eggs in one basket. However, bricks is a good option. Oxygen might still be a better fit right now for some projects. Yeah, there is. I mean, there is that argument, you know, where you can live in both worlds. You know, there is a team switching back and forth between two different builders can slow things down, can add some, you know, problems and issues. So there are definitely pros and cons. But it’s unfortunate. It’s just I see it as really, really unfortunate that this did not need to happen.

0:48:29
And with better leadership, it would not have happened. And we would all be not having this discussion. That could be a reality that we would be living in right now. All right. Which features would determine which builder to use? Well, I mean, in terms of features that they’re practically identical at this point, it just comes down to user experience leadership, things like that. So bricks was at one point missing a few features that were quite important. But at this point, it’s really no longer the case. And the plugin compatibility might be a deciding factor. That’s another issue, especially if you got a lot of those oxygen add on plugins. All right. Cool. All right. Let’s see who we’ve got in the green room. We got Sebastian and then Gabriel and then Cynthia is going to come on. And we’ve got some other person. I’m going to see if I can get Alex to join. There he is. Okay. Good. Alex will be in here as well. All right. Let’s keep rocking a roll. And we’ve got we’re about 50 minutes into this. These tend to run by the way. At least an hour. A lot of times an hour and a half just depends on how we’re feeling. But we’re going to keep rocking a rolling. We’re going to bring on Sebastian. Sebastian, let me unmute you. The guests has muted themselves. All right. Hang on. Can you unmute? Hello. Hello. Hello. How are you today? Very well. Thank you. I’m doing fantastic. So tell us a little bit about you. What’s your background? The first thing I have to say is the English is not my primary language. Yep. So probably I can say a very good the word. You’re doing fine so far. Thank you. I have a 10 more than 10 years. I start like freelance. Now I have my own business. So far it very well. Very fine. Regular clients. I have learned a lot of things with oxygen first. And now I’m start to with breaks. I have a lot of experience in Elementor is the more. More client. I I will project with Elementor is the is the most work I do with a lot of. Yeah. Just actually I want to ask you some from think is a lot of client ask me to do project with a lot of animation. I know is about UX. I know is bad for performance. But client ask me to do that. You should be a check out a motion that that page. I don’t know if you know it. How do you think? I try it but I think that it’s not very good UX. So I I can’t do a mulch on page like I think it would it will be more easy but no.

0:52:16
So start with why what reasons are your clients giving you for wanting all of this animation. I work with a lot of publisher. I don’t know if the job title. I think they sell to their client this. I don’t know. I think that they sell experience more than objective on the on the business. Got it. So you’re you’re not working with clients directly. You’re working through a third party. Yeah. My principal clients is agency. Do they just pay you an hourly rate or do you give them a price for how much the work is going to cost. Price for price. Okay. And what’s the average price you’re giving them. Let me see. It’s like a fight something. Okay. So $5,000 and how many how big are these sites like how many pages of the sites. I think I think there is a small small website. I can give you the link. I mean is it like five pages is it like 15 pages. No, five six page. Okay. So I mean, obviously you have to make sure that the amount for the animation is built in that’s a lot of extra work that has to be done. Are you coming up with the animation effects on your own. Are they telling you what needs to happen. I do the animation with Elementor the scroll figure. And they say, you know, we wanted to come in from the left. We wanted to come in from the top. We wanted to do this. They they outline all of that. I mean, and they when the the start they they want an animation more powerful. I can do I can’t do that. I want to do that with motion that page with I can I can. So finally, I do the animation with Elementor Pro. Okay. So I mean, it’s a situation where for me this is your in a distinct situation where you’re dealing with a third party and not dealing with the client themselves. And what are you in the US or what country are you in? Chili. Do you get any clients yourself that’s not through these other agencies. Yeah, yes, but there are small business. Okay. So like, you know, like budgets not as big and things like that. Okay. Yeah, like that. That’s 1000 dollars. Okay. One. So you’re you’re in a, you know, a unique situation where you probably need to keep bringing this kind of work in. So it’s it’s an unfortunate situation where they want animations. If you want the work and you want the money, you got to provide the animations. You’re not talking to the client. Right. The goal, I think, should be to start building up your own client base more and more and more and more. And it doesn’t have to be local to you. You can get clients in the US. You can get clients from other places. Okay. There’s ways to do this.

0:56:30
It should be somewhat of a focus because for me, when a client comes in and they’re like, one, I don’t sell them a bunch of animation. Most clients don’t ask for a bunch of animation. I don’t like animation. I don’t think animation is good for user experience and conversions. It doesn’t add a single dollar to the company’s bottom line. And so it’s just not of great interest to me. Right. And if a client were to come to me and say, we want these fancy animations and all this other stuff, I would talk them out of it because I would say, look, this is not what’s best for your users. This is not what’s best for your bottom line. If you want to pay a lot of extra money to make things look cool so that you can sleep better at night or whatever it’s doing for you, then fine. Right. But we need to really talk about like how this website is going to help your business and the animations are not. They’re not doing anything for that. Right. So I would talk them out of it for the most part, but you’re not in a position to do that. So personally, I’ve used motion.page like once in my life. I know that there are a lot of people who really, really like it. I didn’t have any problems with it when I used it other than the fact that there is a learning curve, obviously, to using it. But I just think you’re in a situation where if you want the money from these projects, you’re just unfortunately going to have to do the animation. And I think if you’re using oxygen motion.page is probably going to be the best tool. I don’t know how well it works with element or even if it does. I know that they’re, you know, the developers are big in the oxygen community. I think it’s primarily targeted at that if I’m not mistaken. So, you know, other than going to something like web flow, which, you know, are these clients dictating the platform that you’re building on? No, but I think it was is element or the first technology they want because it’s easy to the agency. The content. Yeah, but it doesn’t, you know, it makes your job harder doing the animations. That’s what you’re saying. It probably makes your job. Sorry, using element or makes your job harder to do these animations and everything. No more easy. Oh, it makes it more easy. Yes, there is not. It’s not a very fancy animation only basic like fade in. I can do that in element or bad fade in. Scrawl movement. It’s easy. It’s easy for me and easy for the mic client is the agency to edit the content. But I think that with. More good animation, you know, got it. Well, I would talk to me. You’re in the inner circle, right? I would make a post about motion.page. There’s probably a bunch of people with a lot of experience in motion.page in there who can jump in and help you out.

0:59:33
You know, I don’t know if you’re is your main concern that you are wanting to switch away from element or or not use element or you wanting to use a different builder, but then you’re without the animation side of things. I hate element. It is very good. It’s very good for client because they can edit content very easy, but I hate with oxygen is what like a great tool, great tool. Like you said before, I don’t like the top of the company. Yeah, and look very good. I think I would I will learn breaks very soon. Does everybody in the comments this motion.page work with bricks. Is it builder? It’s not builder specific to my understanding, right? Or maybe it is. I don’t really know, but drop a comment and let me know. Is it only for oxygen? Is it for everything? I look for tutorial for motion.page. I don’t find. I know for sure there are people in the inner circle who use it. And they’re probably more than willing to jump on a zoom call with you or whatever and show you the ropes and enough for you to be able to accomplish what you want to accomplish. If it works for bricks, then I would highly recommend you make a switch to bricks. Okay, so works with bricks works with bricks works everywhere works with bricks, not builder specific. So I would I would start investigating bricks ASAP and motion.page get somebody from the inner circle to jump on a zoom with you and show you the ropes with with because there’s a gazillion and one reasons why element or is not a good option. And I think you’re frozen on my screen. I don’t know if you’re frozen on the entire broadcast, but you’re frozen on my screen. So I will let me. Okay, we’re going to have to clear that out, but that’s what I would say is my takeaway is and drop a comment. Are we still good to go on the stream? I mean, I see myself fine. But he froze up on my end. Yeah, so switch to bricks because there’s a million reasons why I would say don’t use element or especially given the fact that you don’t like element or already don’t use something you don’t like and don’t use something that is obviously subpar in terms of other options. So get with bricks get with motion.page get with somebody in the inner circle and learn the ropes for that. Super mic made a tutorial. Silent Phil says there’s literally no videos on this if anyone knows it well make videos and you will do well. Melvin says it was frozen here too. Melvin, I’m not frozen right it was just him. Okay, Donzhi says screen is good design the crack as an amazing tutorial for beginners. I assume that that’s on motion dot page. Okay, so everybody go check out design with crack as channel. And it sounds like super mic has a tutorial as well that you may want to check out on motion dot page. That’s good to know that it’s not builder specific and it sounds like it’s it’s currently the best option for for that purpose. All right, let’s go to we want to make sure everybody can fit in so we’re going to go to Gabriel bring him on right quick. I’m going to add him to the left hand side Gabriel. How’s it going? I’m doing good. I’m reading from Germany. I want to say I’m doing a lot and taking lots of benefits from the inner circle and also enjoying a lot from the master board learning a lot amazing discussions with my team.

1:03:15
Excellent. How long are you doing the stuff? I mean, I actually am a physician. That’s my main job and I’m doing small gigs on the site since I know 10 years probably. Okay, but I took the decision to take my decide business more seriously and probably enough a couple of years, two years, I’m going to reduce my load my workload as a physician and then to dedicate to have more time for my business. Okay, I have to make sure. So what do you want to talk about today? Yeah, I would like to know your take on webflow. You have been asked this question a lot. I follow loads of people doing webflow on Twitter and I’m trying to. Yeah, so it’s a system of starting learning webflow because I started with oxygen. Now I’m on bricks and liking it a lot. Yeah, but every day when I check Twitter, I see how these influencers and people talking about what flow and I have the feeling that there’s a lot of demand with what flow. I don’t know if it will be easier to get leads if I start doing webflow. Okay, really good question. I see why a lot of people are drawn to webflow. I’ve wanted to investigate webflow in the past. You know, I’ve been interested in it. There are a lot of benefits to not being on WordPress in terms of stability, perhaps security, things like that. There’s some pros for sure. I believe that their front end builder is one of the best. And you know, a lot of people said, hey, oxygen is like the webflow for WordPress. Of course, webflow puts oxygen to shame in my opinion, you know, I wish that there was a direct like webflow for WordPress type thing. I wish the webflow team built a builder for WordPress, right? That kind of thing. So I see in that regard. And by the way, this is a good tangent discussion for all the people who want to argue that, oh, you got to dumb down the builders for people, right? Everything’s got to be dumb down for users because apparently all of us web designers and developers have dumbed and, you know, we can’t do the advanced things, right? And we can’t use advanced tools. So we got to dumb down everything. That’s the like, you know, the latest strategy. Apparently, that’s the why is element or great? Why is, you know, beaver builder great? Why is break dance great? Oh, it just dumbs down everything. It makes everything super easy. And they’re like, hey, we can’t build a big market. If we don’t dumb things down. Oh, really? Like, you know, the webflow, like billion users or whatever they have with like one of the most advanced builders on the internet.

1:06:28
Okay, so that right there puts that to shame. You know, you can make an advanced tool and build a gigantic community. It’s already been done. It’s called webflow. So in that regard, I really like what webflow has done. I love the fact that they came in as a leader, not another square space and another wicks with these dumb down builders. They said, no, we’re going to give advanced tools to people who want to build these websites. And then the other thing that webflow did, by the way, which is very, very smart is they actually taught people how to use their tool, which so many people don’t do. Probably one of the biggest oversights for all of the tools that are out there that don’t do this. So there’s a lot to like about webflow. There’s a lot to like about their product and the platform. For me, the biggest thing that I cannot, I cannot switch to webflow because of one philosophy, which is basically do not build on land that you do not own. And webflow is a closed proprietary system. It’s like Shopify, you know, it’s like you’re in it and that’s it. Okay. Now, I believe you can like export the HTML and all of this other stuff, but you know, massive hassles, like you’re putting all of your data in a content management system that you do not own and do not control. And of course, you know, people may say that about WordPress, but WordPress is open source, right? So there are there are advantages there. And that’s just the thing for me and I have a hard time selling clients, especially the bigger they are. Okay. So maybe a smaller client, smaller business, whatever, it’s not as big of a deal. But if you’re selling a larger project into a closed proprietary system, there’s a lot of risk there to the client. And then there’s a lot of risk there to you for making that recommendation in the first place. There’s some pricing stuff. There’s the questions about scale. If I really do need to bolt some things on to this for certain functionality is webflow going to allow me to do that. There’s a lot of different things that could go wrong in a closed proprietary system. So I just am not comfortable being an assistant like that. I like WordPress’s ecosystem, the open source nature of it, the fact that if oxygen screws me, I can switch to bricks. All my content is still in the content management system, right? I just may have to redesign some stuff and shift some things around, but I didn’t like get kicked out of my entire content management system. I didn’t get kicked off my entire host, right? Because webflow is hosting the sites as well. So we don’t know if webflow goes woke tomorrow and decides that we just don’t like you. So we’re just going to shut your website down, right? And maybe they do that overnight with no warning. And maybe you can’t access the backups. I don’t know, right? But that’s never going to happen on WordPress.

1:09:10
So it’s just we don’t know and it’s a level of risk to being in a closed proprietary system. So I just don’t take that risk. There’s nothing I have bad against webflow or their product other than that. So if you’re if those things don’t make you lose sleep at night and you want to give webflow a shot, then I would say give webflow shot. Perfect. Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for coming on. All right, let’s go to we’re going to do Cynthia and then Alex. All right, let me let me check chat real quick. All right. I love everything about webflow apart from being locked into their system. Okay, exactly. That’s why element or in such are and have the biggest numbers. And when we come to real hardcore agencies, most of them develop from scratch with theme frameworks done in house. And the fact that oxygen and bricks bring a high end environment is what are bringing devs to builders is what I believe. Completely agree should never be in a closed proprietary system. This is Alex at a client switching from Shopify to WooCommerce because of that Shopify all of a sudden deleted their shop. Yes. And I’ve heard horror stories from from many different industries. Even you know certain industries. You just wake up one day and you’ve got problems and your whole business is shut down and that’s that’s that’s a massive issue. All right, let’s go ahead and bring Cynthia on. Cynthia, how’s it going? Hi. Hi, hi, hi. Tell us. Hi. Tell us about you and your background a little bit. I actually graduated college within degree in it in 2014 and then I became a part time freelancer in 2018. And mainly doing front end development and a little bit of web development, although outside of WordPress and then I gradually rolled into WordPress and decided to go full time as a freelancer in 2021, the summer of 2021. So about a year and a few months. Perfect. So what do you want to talk about today? So I actually have a SEO question. So I’m like dipping into SEO myself and I’ve watched a lot of your trainings. Now I am not an English native speaker.

1:11:47
I live in Belgium and I’m a Dutch speaker, which are also what my clients usually speak. So Dutch and French are the two languages I usually work in. Now, it’s probably because we are such a like tiny country, maybe like a phlegmish speaker. So we only have about like 6.7 million. But it’s kind of hard to do keyword research because I get a not a lot of like keywords. I’ve tried Sam Rush. I have tried HREF so far. HREF has been the best one out of them in terms of numbers, but it’s kind of hard to find like topics to write on because like, you know, for one of like my primary keywords for one of my clients, I get like 32 in total, like with matching terms, like there’s only 32 keywords popping up and most of them have like 20 or less as a volume. So I’m kind of like, how do I like provide good content that does help because the ones we have written so far, the ones that are doing pretty well. So I had a few keywords that had traffic. So we already made content for that. They’re doing pretty pretty recently. I think over the past three months, about 18% was from organic search of all traffic websites. There’s also PPC direct traffic and then some like email stuff, but like how would you like. So first question would be so these are clients that are operating within this country, right? They’re not trying to get clients from everywhere. They’re trying to get clients from this specific country. So far, they might want to go to the Netherlands, but then there’s also kind of like the problem with Dutch poking in the Netherlands is different from Dutch poking in Belgium, which means that a lot of words are, it’s kind of like, I guess American English and British English, like, you know, we have different words for the same thing. So it’s still kind of hard there and I don’t want to like take the Netherlands in too much because it might still differ and we might not. Okay, rank for it. So give me an example of this like a client and something that you might do keyword research for like a term. If you can translate it to English. Yeah, they do like window repair and maintenance. All right, so you type in window repair in a trap. And then you’re using the not exact match filter, but you’re using like the phrase match filter, right? Yeah, both of them show me everything that has window repair.

1:14:31
Okay, and you’re saying that you basically get like 20 results back. Yeah, I can do more than I usually do. Yeah, I can let me actually see if I want to me hop into HRFs real quick. We can try to do this live. I can I’ve got hold on, I got to get on my other screen over here. All right. And then I’m going to go to I’ll share this in a second. If it’s actually worth sharing, let me get this screen out of the way. Okay. So I would put in Belgium as my target country. Do I have to write it in Belgium though? Or I’d like to probably have to write it in Dutch. I can I don’t know if you can see the chat inside of us, but that would be window repair. So okay. I just have to find that window. I’ve got a thousand windows open. Let me see where to do. Okay. Got that chat. Okay. Got it right here. Perfect. I’m going to put that in. It go. We’re going to put this on a matching terms filter. All right. I see what you mean. Okay. So there’s like less than one full page of results. Yeah. And then we’re looking at volume and we’ve got a hundred. But the good thing is, I mean, there’s a hundred. There’s 60. There’s there’s 30, 30. But does this have to be does their window repair confined to a specific area in Belgium? Or is this not the entire part of flambours? Okay. So all right. So you have, I mean, that’s still, you know, decent volume. The real benefit you have here is that it just says there’s basically no competition, you know, for the terms. Yeah. So that’s really good. But the answer your question, you know, it’s, you’ve got to just do the work you can within the size of the market that you have available to you.

1:16:23
And this happens regardless of country, you know, this happens with certain niches in the US where the niche itself is just not searched all that much online. So then it becomes a question of is SEO, depending on how much it’s going to cost the client to do this and the same would be true for PPC. Is it something that should be sold to them or should their money be placed in other forms of marketing and advertising? You know, you still have, there’s a population limit that they’re working with in general. So only a given percentage of that population is going to be searching for what they offer. And they’re only going to be doing it every so often in their life. So the monthly volume is going to be fairly low. Now it’s low hanging fruit in the sense that there’s not high competition. So it shouldn’t take a lot of work to actually rank for these terms. You’re just not going to be able to bring in tons of volume with it. But you do want to get what you can get and you want to convert those people into dollars. And then you want to do other things, you know, so you want to be doing SEO to a small degree, whatever degree is needed to get ranking, which is not much. PPC to a small degree to get whatever you can get from PPC and then focus on whatever other channels you can use to bring in clients that way. But yeah, it’s just you’re not going to be able to solve the volume situation. You’re doing the right search, you know, if you were doing the wrong types of searches, that would be one thing. But you’re doing the right types of searches. It sounds like so it’s just a volume situation that you’re not going to be able to fix. Okay, yeah, I guess I was thinking like I was missing something like you said, like some of the keywords we are ranking already pretty easy, which is like one blog post that was well written. So in that terms, we do, you know, we ranked pretty quickly, but I’m kind of like running out of ideas for content because like there is no search volume or not even a suggestion of really what people are looking for.

1:18:16
They’re already doing PPC, which is also kind of maxed out right now, kind of like at the max of it. So I already like suggested more traditional types of advertisement, TV, radio, maybe even YouTube, that’s something we want to explore. Yeah, especially because it’s quite the visual stuff, like how do you repair, you know, something a part of like a window you can show that show your expertise. So that’s something we’ve been like talking about. But yeah, I’m kind of like running out of this. What’s an example of a blog post that you wanted to write? Well, they don’t do just windows. They also do stuff like the shutters, I guess you would call it, but it’s like I don’t know if you guys really have these in America lot, but it’s like you can let them down yourself. It’s not like the ones that shut like this, but it’s like a rolling rolling type of shutter. So we basically made like a blog post of how to replace the, you know, like the rope that is in the mechanism to let it go down. And that’s one of the top ranking ones because we just like put a blog post out of it, told them like how to do it. And they actually are also getting leads from that blog post because it’s not the easiest thing to do. If you know you got a picture of this idea from keyword research. Yeah, okay. Good. So yeah, it’s you’re doing the right thing. Yeah, you’re just running into a population limitation basically. Yeah, probably and probably because it’s also a very specific niche. Yeah, that kind of stuck in and then there’s also like the trouble that we were ranking at a certain point for car glass. So because windows have glass and car have glass. So we were like popping up. You know, so we have to be really careful like with what we go after because you know, there’s different terms that also relate to windows and stuff.

1:20:15
So right. Yeah. Yeah. No, it sounds like you’re you’re on the ball. You know what you’re doing. So yeah, I don’t think there’s any you’re doing wrong. That’s causing the limitation. It’s just the population volume limitation. Okay. Good. Thank you very much for answering that and kind of like confirming what my kind of like I guess ID was or problem wants. You are very welcome. All right. Thank you for coming in today. I am going to try to find my correct windows here. There’s the window I want. Okay. All right. Yes. Thank you for coming in Cynthia. Happy to have you. We’ve got one more guest in the green room and then I will check the chat and see if there’s any quick things I can answer in the chat. But we’ve got Alex waiting in the green room. We have like nine, 10 minutes left on the broadcast. I want to get him in ASAP. So Alex, how’s it going? Hi. How are you? I’m doing well. I’m doing well. So give this year your background real quick. We’ve been in IT for about 30 years. Okay. And about five years ago, we started going to the digital design websites for our clients. Most of our clients on IT are small to medium size companies where they they’re not large enough that they are of their own IT company, IT employees. So we do the IT for a variety of companies up to a size where they don’t have their own IT. So we figured about five years ago we have to do more for our companies, our clients and basically improve their digital presence. So we’ve been slowly but we’re getting there with more and more digital become a digital agency. All right. So it’s it’s working. You know, we’re getting there. But it’s better than something finding good information. So first I want to say thank you for what you do. Quite often we’re trying to do something and say, how does Kevin do it? And we go and look at see how you doing. Look at the video. See, this is what the users maybe we should do what it does.

1:22:21
I mean, we’ve worked a lot of different things in base camp and recently made a proposal to a client that we probably proposed three times more and you got to deal following your your your advice. I love it. Talk to us about that we can have to do a nice proposal became a 20 page proposal as opposed to two page proposal. But we follow your advice and thank you again. I think you’re helping a lot of us out here. I really appreciate it. Absolutely. Well, you’re very welcome. And yeah, I just remind everybody, you know, you’re the one doing the work. So if you don’t do the work, it doesn’t happen. But you’re the you’re the one doing most of the work. So I had an initial question to moving from oxygen to bricks. One of the things that we do, we have to do a lot of newcomers. And when updates, we always concern we have sites that are live, you know, 24 hours a day. Yeah. When you do an update. And I’m actually, it’s been very good on updates come up. They don’t really break the site. The sites keep going. Yeah. I see on the chats a lot of the chats on bricks. A lot of people have so many issues. Are it bricks solid when an update comes into sites keep working or do they break down when you do updates? How much of a problem will be doing updates on bricks? So, you know, I’ll be honest, there, there have been some issues with updates. There have been some things that slip through the cracks that they probably should not have slipped through the cracks. That happens on oxygen to, by the way. You know, so oxygen is not perfect in this regard. But there are some things that, you know, I wish it does seem like bricks could improve the QA, you know, of releases. They were doing very rapid releases, which I think contributed a bit to this. They’ve, and not just rapid releases, but packing lots of things into rapid releases. And this is the same thing with automatic CSS, you know, in the early stages you want the product to move as fast as you possibly can. And you try to pack as much value as you can into each release. But the more value, you know, the more features things like that that you pack into a release, the more issues there are probably going to be.

1:24:39
And these products, you know, people are like, why is there a bug? You know, this should have been tested. And I think what a lot of people don’t realize is when the product gets to a certain size. There’s so many things going on in so many different scenarios that you can test a basic feature that you’re putting in, but you can’t test it in every environment in every scenario. And the way that people use it, you know, one person uses that feature differently from another person and they’re all in different browsers. They’re all in different hosting. And so, you know, some of these issues are related to the actual environment that bricks is running in. Some of them are related to how a person was using it before versus how it’s designed to be used now. So it’s not all on bricks, right? It’s not all on oxygen. It’s not all on the developer. There’s some of that involved. But there are a few things that seem like they could have been prevented over the last few releases. And the good thing is that I think Thomas and his team recognize that and they’re moving to make sure that that doesn’t happen as much as they can possibly prevent going forwards. And that goes back to the responsiveness of their team. And so that’s another reason why I chose them. So yeah, there are a couple times where updates broke some things. But at the same time, you have control over the update schedule. It doesn’t matter how fast they release them, you know, you can still choose whether you’re going to update or not. And there’s also safe ways to update. You know, so if you’re using a staging environment, quickly pop that site over to a staging environment, update the bricks version, check for breakage. There’s no breakage and go updated on your live environment and move on with your life, right? So I think another part of this is that users, especially on a product like bricks that’s still in relatively early stages and is moving very, very quickly. Users need to be more safe in how they go about. You can’t just willy nilly go in and say, I trust them, bam, and update, and then, you know, cross your fingers, right? On a live site that’s got a lot of stuff going on. It’s kind of important that this thing doesn’t break and you’re just crossing your fingers. I don’t think that should be the strategy, you know. So be a little bit more diligent in let’s get this on a staging site. Let’s test the update. If it’s a good update, then we’ll roll it out to the live site. So it’s on the user. It’s on it’s on the developer together to make sure that these updates don’t break sites. So that’s what I would say about that. So it’s not a reason in my estimation to not choose bricks or to not start using bricks by any means.

1:27:08
Thank you. Thank you. That was very good insights and yeah, that’s good insights. So I mean, we’re definitely going to test bricks and go from that. I have another question. One of the difficult that we have is turning around projects fast enough. So adding some difficult. We do a lot of who commerce work is having good programmers in the PHP to do customizing customizing sites for clients because each client is in different niches. We have a variety of medium sized companies that we’re trying to help. That’s the difficult way we find finding good programmers that can do some work. I mean, can you give us some insights on how can you grow about that? Yeah. You know, you have the inner circle at your disposal. So there’s a job board in there. There’s people who are great at PHP and JavaScript and they’re looking for work and you can go in and post what you need and you’re going to be able to recruit some people. I’ve recruited pretty much my entire team straight out of the inner circle. So and it’s kind of like a cheat code for me because they already watch my tutorials. They already know how I do things. They’re already kind of like pre-trained. So it’s just been really nice. So if you ask other agency owners, they might have other insights on where they go out into the real world to get people. I recruit almost exclusively out of the inner circle. So it’s a little bit of a more narrow answer. But you know, I have in the past tried to recruit off of upwork, mediocre results. I’ve recruited out of Facebook groups with I would say a little bit better results. I tried to recruit locally off LinkedIn terrible results. So you know, LinkedIn isn’t it? If you’re trying to get people who are local to you, I don’t know. I didn’t have great success with that. I’ve had the best success out of the inner circle straight out of there. So that’s what I stick with. Thank you very much. Thank you. Again, thank you for all you do. Much appreciate. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. All right. Let’s check the chat real quick. I want to put up the URL. If you guys want to be a guest on digital agency table talk, you have to be an inner circle member. You can watch me free on YouTube, obviously, and extract all the value. I do want to give a shout out to that one person who gave a thumbs down on the stream. Love you more than anybody else. We always have to have a critic. Always have to have a critic. But thank you for at least for your engagement. I appreciate it.

1:29:40
So let’s see. Sam, yep. Okay. So a lot of people still talking about bricks versus oxygen. I unfortunately still love oxygen. Don’t judge me. Hey, I’m not judging you, Evan. We all got to make our own decisions. If you still love it and still want to use it, then that is perfectly fine. But he does say I really like the bricks road map such a small thing can give a boost and trust with your base. Yes, it would be a, you know, I don’t know why oxygen won’t put a road map out, but I believe, you know, I believe in transparency. I think transparency is a valuable thing. I think that they should put a road map out. All right. I think the founder, Thomas is from bricks is German. They are known for quality. He is German. That is 100% true. And I do like some German engineering. I will say that. Seems like bricks will overtake oxygen in the near future with high and dev features. I think bricks has already overtaken oxygen as far as just features in general user experience goes. There’s a ton of benefits in bricks that are just not in oxygen. And I think people focus on really big things like, for example, conditions, which now is is fully in bricks with a UI and everything else. And I think people are focused on big things like that when really there’s just a tremendous amount of quote unquote little things that bricks does way better than oxygen does. The query loop, the repeater in bricks way better than oxygen’s repeater light years better than oxygen’s repeater. So just things like that, you know, that just make life a lot more enjoyable and a lot easier in bricks than they were in oxygen. So don’t just focus on like the big flagship type features, which I think at this point bricks is lacking maybe one of them, you know, but it’s really not a big deal. Last two to three releases have been smaller and haven’t been breaking stuff. That’s true. All right. In a few years, there will be another builder that then will overtake bricks. It’s an ever evolving world, which is both good and bad. I don’t know you never know. Listen, oxygen would not have been overtaken by bricks. And I don’t know all the numbers. I don’t have all the data and analytics, but to say definitively that bricks has overtaken oxygen. I will say that the bricks group is a lot more active. I know in the inner circle that I believe many more people have switched to bricks than are still using oxygen and people have switched to other things as well. But what I will say is just because bricks came along, right. So talking to your theory, Sam, just because bricks came along and existed. I don’t think was going to beat oxygen. I don’t think the oxygen beat themselves. That’s exactly what happened oxygen beat themselves that did not have to happen oxygen could still be in my estimation, the leader in the advanced devs page builder space. They’re not because of their own actions, not because bricks came along. Bricks just thankfully came along and gave us a doc to step on to from our sinking ship. That’s how I see that. And we had to put up with bricks playing catch up in terms of features and stability and things like that for a little while there. But thankfully bricks actually existed, but it wasn’t the existence of bricks that killed oxygen. And I don’t know that it would have. And you know, Thomas, Thomas should think it’s lucky stars at night because like he was just handed a half of a community, you know, based on something PR disaster in another community. Not to say that, you know, it’s very possible bricks would have eventually overtaken oxygen. And people would have recognized that, hey, this is fantastic. This is new builder. It’s got more modern framework and the user experience is better and yada yada yada. And they would have switched.

1:33:38
But it wouldn’t have happened the way that it did in mass like almost overnight. That was just a product of the situation in general. So I don’t know. Yes, more builders will come along. But let’s take a look at this. Zion quickly. There’s a gazillion things for Gutenberg now. Look at all of them and say which ones are really and then go watch my video on the 20 features that a page builder needs to have to be a legit page builder. Okay, did a whole video on it and look at the way these builders are trying to execute and they all have aside from bricks some fundamental flaws. And bricks does not have that fundamental flaw as far as I can tell. And so yes, there will be more builders for sure. But will they try to go the way of divvy element or will they try to be a bricks and oxygen but fail in their execution. There’s a lot of moving parts. There’s a lot of different things that could happen. So I don’t think we’re just going to get a new latest and greatest thing that just works amazing perfect out of the box and is adopted by everybody and everybody runs from bricks. I don’t think that’s going to happen because I didn’t happen with oxygen. Right. The only thing that happened with oxygen is oxygen being oxygen. Or the owner of oxygen being the owner of oxygen. Okay, what I love for oxygen is ricotta workspace. I’ve heard a lot of good things about ricotta. Okay, I also worked with oxygen for a long time by several plugins. Now I work exclusively with bricks and wonder why I don’t need so many plugins anymore. That’s another benefit Oliver. It does it does lighten the plugin load. I open a ticket about bricks is menu accessibility in 2021 Thomas replied and said that they will look at it. Do you think the menu is up to par with accessibility standards? No, I don’t think it’s up to par with accessibility standards. I don’t think that the menu system and bricks is a strong point of bricks. I think it needs to be completely revamped. Well, maybe not completely revamped, but lots of improvements need to be made to it for sure. I still think the best menu option for builders like this is in oxygen with oxy extras.

1:35:49
So not oxygen’s native menus. I just had this conversation with crack it today. I was talking to him on Facebook. And we were talking about menus because I thought very seriously about creating a menu plugin. And I still am. I don’t know. I’m waiting for like one of these other people to just do it right. They’re already kind of doing it. You know, just just do it right. It’s not. Shouldn’t be that hard to create an accessible menu that works for everybody. We don’t need to go crazy with all these like mega menu custom. Can we get a simple accessible menu plugin that handles some drop downs and things like that. And I don’t know why it’s so hard. But oxygen’s native menus are the worst. Bricks is better. oxy extras is the best. I wish that bricks extras would have. I’m sure they’re working on it. Okay, I’m waiting for it. But I still think even oxy extras the experience of building the menu with their system is still not amazing. And so there’s a lot of room for improvement in terms of UX even if you can get to the final conclusion that you’re looking to get to the experience and getting there could could be dramatically improved in my estimation. Menu is just a terrible situation in WordPress page builders from front to back. It doesn’t matter what which one you’re using. It’s just not a good experience and it’s not a good outcome in the most case. So it’s something that needs to be addressed absolutely. Someone will one day have to explain to me what ricota adds to workflow. Yes, I can’t answer that question for you because I don’t use it. So can’t get really going to depth there. All right, switching to bricks for code is even necessary because they do it right without eating add-ons that is true. Okay, menus are on the road map mobile and mega. I know I know I just I hope that the execution is done right. All right, that’s it for me today. It’s been a little bit over 90 minutes. I want to thank everybody for tuning in. Please drop a like drop a comment if you found value in today’s session. I would just love for you to pay that way, right? This is completely free to get this value on you to pay with a like pay with a comment and that’s it. I will see you guys. Oh, by the way, we switched to weekly. I’m going to try to be doing these weekly now. So next Wednesday will be back. So set your alarm same time same day. We’re going to be super consistent with it. And that’s it. All right, guys, I’m out. Peace.