Just wondering.
If you are a small agency – or a solopreneur – what is ONE thing you need to learn right now?
Why am I asking?
I am pitching a few ideas to write about for a new client and I need your input. Better to hear from you than to think of this all my myself.
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Lots. I want to learn more PHP to create custom themes and plugins. I want to learn to market myself/sell myself better. I want to learn how to cold call/email clients from LinkedIn. Theres a lot but those are my main priorities.
Fully leveraging what Gutenberg brings to WordPress for a highly customizable experience.
Want to go a step further and create a collection of fully featured blocks for the most important parts of a site.
These blocks will be configurable to change not just how they look but also how they function.
For example a block fetches and renders data. You can customize the endpoint, how the data is displayed, other related features to that blocks specific purpose and of course the overall look.
Essentially a theme and block plugin combo that will allow non technical users to build a “custom” site without the dev.
The dev(s) in this scenario would then focus on improving the theme and plugin with updates and adding new blocks and features as well.
SEO – No point building a website if you can’t drive long term traffic to it. Don’t focus on vanity metrics, focus on positive ROI.
I have been seeking a guide to help me get started with WordPress for over a year, and have to find anything that’s usable with no previous knowledge of WordPress.
I’ve been stumbling my way through figuring it all out, and I’m slowly making progress, but it’s been…. annoying to say the least.
I’d like to see a ‘DuoLingo’ style guide to WordPress; or perhaps one day be capabale enough to make one myself.
How to sell. You can have all the skills in the world, but that don’t mean anything if you can’t sell them.
I love all of these ideas. Please keep them coming!
I am desperate to know if it is possible to make video gallery with blocks or not. the videos in a grid like structure & should play on loop automatic without sound. currently we have image gallery but not videos
How to make a contact form send an email to myself, lol.
I spent 4 or 5 hours yesterday and today just getting email with mxroute setup and linked to my Gmail account. Now that I know the steps involved it would probably be a 10 or 15 minute process.
Small steps.
Every wantrepreneur business owner, (not established, new to digital marketing concepts and processes and terms and how they tie in with ROI), needs to be fully trained in understanding the value of committed marketing long-term.
We don’t know your capabilities, if you are familiar with SEO at all, who your esteemed client is or could be, what their site is about or focused on (if they know themselves and what their SEO could be, if any).
If you’re asking what struggling freelance WordPress developers need they need:
How to develop and build repeatable systems to bring in new clients (called “farming” when I worked for agencies)
How to pitch value (“you need more customers Mr. X? Oh, my Goodness. I could help with that. Would you invest $3,000 if that could bring in $30,000 worth of new leads in six months, Mr. X? Let’s talk if you think that’s worth it for you. Because I can tell you, newspaper ads, billboard ads, radio ads, are all more expensive and none can guarantee you success and all of them stop running your ad once you stop paying. Can we talk seriously about getting results Mr. X?”)
Learn how to pitch and then impliment the value of SEO and eCommerce. Almost every site I see has incorrect or no SEO at all and most don’t use eCommerce. That makes no sense. Every business wants to be on the first page of Google but most don’t know what SEO is becaus they can’t understand it and most developers never pitch it or know how to write it. Same with eCommerce. Everyone sells services or items, food, services, whatever. But most sites refuse to use eCommerce. Pitch value of what you could do if the client woke up.
Develop a repeatable daily use list and procedure for finding good, real, freelance work.
I know this is all content that could be in a freelance course or book but this is what freelancers / developers need to know how to do or they will forever be left struggling with cheap, broke, poor, confused, controlling, nonresponsive, wannabe yet lazy clients. I was trapped in that cycle for years until I learned to apply what I’d learned at agencies to freelancing. That was the only way out.
Trying to figure out how to best i create a forum or other community aspects. Or if I should skip WP all together
Understanding the power of ACF and how they can improve my sites.
React.
Headless – react
How to train an ordinary small business client how to make minor updates to their pages and, especially, to blog posts, product descriptions, etc., with the Gutenberg interface.
I can train someone with Beaver Builder for pages and the classic editor for posts in about half an hour. Over the phone.
Gutenberg? It takes half an hour to show them how to consistently get back to the dashboard or front end, because it depends on first explaining which of several particular contexts you’re in at any given moment.
I work with the 99% of site owners who don’t have an in-house or under-contract programmer to do things for them. So I’m committed to showing them how to do it themselves after handing them the keys.
Gutenberg blocks are legitimately cool. Based on time needed for training the editor and especially the block editor are usability dog’s breath.
So yeah, I need a way to teach normal people how to use it productively in less than half a day. [added] So do you.