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Editor:
Joining us this time is an online entrepreneur who focuses a lot of his attention in the area of software solutions and tools. Matt Garrett is based in the UK and has released numerous WordPress plugins and software as a service products over the years. In fact, you may have already heard of some of these because they include well known solutions, such as WPtoolkit.com and Easypro Marketing. So, let’s dive right in. Matt, it’s great to meet you.
Matt Garrett:
Hi, good to speak to you.
Editor:
Well, lots of people come on talking about information marketing. As I mentioned, though, your background is more about plugins and software, even though you do have info products yourself, but maybe you could start by telling us a little bit about some of the plugins and the software solutions that you’ve created.
Matt Garrett:
Well, first of all, I’ve got to give a lot of credit to my partners, because I work with several different business partners and I’m not really a software creation person. So I have these partners who come to me with brilliant bits of software. Sometimes I come up with the ideas, sometimes they come up with the ideas, but yes, the other people do the hard work of actually creating the products and they vary. So I’ve got one client, one partner called Tony Marriott where we work in the local marketing business. So we have a SAS app that helps local agencies find new clients and provide them with a roadmap of where they can go online, what they can do. So the kind of things that they should have in their business to help them market online, such as Google My Business, the YouTube channel, Twitter channel, et cetera, all these different things.
We’ll go through using the software, work out what they currently have and what they don’t have and put a plan together for them so that when we get in touch or when someone on an agency gets in touch with them, instead of just going and saying, “Here I am, I can do work for you,” you’re actually giving them some value. You’re saying, “Right, we can see what you’ve already done. Here’s a plan for the bits that you’re missing, and if you want, we can work with you on that basis.”
So the software prepares all that for you. So it’s basically looking at potential problems and providing a solution that you can then go to the client with. So that’s one business partner. That’s I say, agency client finder, attorney Marriott. The other main guy that I do work with now, I have worked with previous partners in the past on different SAS apps, but main one now is WordPress plugins with John Merrick.
Matt Garrett:
He’s been programming WordPress for well over a decade now, and we’ve got a suite of different plugins that cover different scenarios for website owners.
My favourite amongst them is what we call WP Profiler, which basically load it up on your WordPress site, and it’ll run a whole bunch of tests to work out if, for instance, your site’s running slow, what’s slowing it down because obviously speed or the speed with which your website or page loads is a big thing for Google nowadays.
It can affect your ranking, and obviously it affects people visiting site as well because if a page is slow to load, they might not stick around. They’ll just disappear and go somewhere else.
So you’ve got to have a fast loading page.
So this will actually look at your WordPress setup.
One of the things that a lot of people tend to do is get too many plugins set up.
Matt Garrett:
They keep adding more and more plugins to their site and that’s a big problem.
It’s a problem for speed, and it’s a problem for security because the more plugins you have, the more potential holes, security holes that you have for people to get in.
So this plugin will basically load the site and run through and show you visually how long it takes each plugin to load.
So you’ve got a very clear visual profile of your site speed and what’s slowing it down for loading speed.
So that’s one of my favourite ones, because it’s just a simple way of visually working out what’s causing your site a problem.
Then we’ve got other plugins.
So we’ve got a cash plugin, again, to speed things up. We’ve got optimization bits and pieces.
We’ve got a plugin for your error pages so we can monetize those.
So instead of just seeing a 404 page, you can put adverts on them.
Matt Garrett:
We’ve got a plugin for videos. So instead of having to use an expensive video host like Vimeo or something like that, you can actually pop them on some of the free services like Dropbox, but you can also pop them on Amazon S3, which is really, really cheap, and then the plugin allows you to deliver those three website very easily, because Amazon S3 can be an absolute nightmare to work out and learn how to use. So this makes it very easy, just upload videos to your S3 account and then the plugin links to that and puts them onto the page for you, so it simplifies the whole process. So that’s one that’s very popular at the moment. We just released it on AppSumo a couple months ago and that’s selling very well. So we’re looking at releasing some more of our plugins on AppSumo. So yeah, basically it’s all down to ourselves creating websites and doing things like that, we come across problems.
Matt Garrett:
When we come across a problem, once we’ve worked out what the solution is, if it’s something we can create a plugin to fix the solution for ourselves, then we sell it as well. So the practical idea is that we use ourselves. There was another one released last year where Google making changes that if you have affiliate links on your site, they can potentially penalise your rankings for that. So what we did was set up a plugin that will go through those, all the affiliate links on your site and add the different tags to the end of the link to make it no follow and things like that and to tag it correctly so that Google recognise it and don’t penalise you for it. So again, we just keep an eye on what’s going on in business and what we are experiencing ourselves, and when we come across a problem, create something that will fix it and then offer it to other people.
Editor:
Got you. Now, when it comes to info products, people always want to know how successful you’ve been. Is it the same with software and plugins or is it people just want to know, will this thing work?
Matt Garrett:
Will this thing work? It’s one of the things I love about it, is when you’re selling info products, you’ve got to have a lot of social proof as to how much money you’ve made and things like that.
With a plugin, the sales page is really down to a demo. This is how it works. This is what it does. So all you’re then doing as a sales process is getting that potential solution in front of people that have the problem or are about to have the problem, and that’s it. So it’s an easier, in some ways cleaner sales process because you’re providing solution.
Editor:
What made you move towards this area yourself though, Matt? I mean, was there a catalyst? Was there something that happened that made you go, Actually, this is the area that I want to pursue more”?
Note from the Editor:
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