55 - How To Monetise WordPress Websites

Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.

Verbatim text

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to WP Innovator podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hi, and welcome to episode number 55 of the WP Innovator podcast. This is Lee and today we’re going to be repurposing some content that I did a few months to go for the More Demand podcast. Now, this episode we cover how to generate money with your website. And this is something you can do either with your own websites as developers and designers, or you can do for your clients. So this is essentially packed full of ideas that you can utilize for your clients. They’ll also be a download you can go and check out on leejacksondev.com episode 55. You’ll be able to download the crib sheet that I did for this episode. All right, my phone’s ringing, so I’m going to go and I’ll let you guys listen on.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So today we’re looking at ways of monetizing your website. So let’s set the scene. You’ve got a website and you’re driving traffic to it, but you’re looking to generate revenue. So what ways could you do this? Now, in this episode we’re going to unpack some ideas and some strategies for generating income or more income from your website. Now, although we’ll be focusing on WordPress driven websites, the tips in this episode can be applied to most content management systems as there’s going to likely be similar add ons available for whatever platform you’re on. So for example, if you’re rocking Drupal or Joomla or any other sort of system, there should be a relatively similar plugin available that will do the sorts of things that we’re going to talk about and unpack in this episode. Now, what revenue generating opportunities you go for really depend on the type of site that you have and what sort of of audience that you attract. So this podcast is primarily focused on those who create content.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
However, later on in the show we will be unpacking some exciting ideas that you could market just based on the strength of your brand. And that’s not going to require you necessarily to be generating lots and lots of content. Although I will emphasize that content is always super helpful when creating websites or creating monetizing opportunities. Now then, if you’re not currently creating content, then perhaps it is time to do so. Content websites attract a wide range of visitors as they come to consume the epic value that you provide. So a great example of this alone would be Pat Flynn. Now, Pat Flynn, runs the Smart Passive Income podcast as well as having a huge website called, you’ve guessed it, Smart Passive Income. Now that’s going to be in the show notes for you to go and check out.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But if we review his monthly income report, it shows that the biggest percentage of his and he’s rocking something like $170,000 in a month. So as of January 2016, his biggest percentage of income was through the content that he’s generating. So again, looking at his January 2016 income report, one blog post I’ll emphasize that as one blog post he has about leadpages is generating him $15,000. That’s $15,000 of completely passive income, all from a blog and a webinar replay that he did in wait for it, September 2013. That’s right, September 2013. He earned £15,000, sorry dollars in January 2016 from content that was created in 2013. So I really feel like I should be pausing for effect here. All right, now you have already had a subtle clue to one of the methods of revenue generation.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So let’s start and unpack it a little bit more. That revenue generation technique is called affiliate revenue. So you may have gathered this method does not necessarily require a WordPress site. This is not necessarily plugin intensive or anything. But what you do need is some sort of valuable content on a website that could be in text format, video format or audio format that it’s of high value to the end consumers. What are the main points of Sorry, what are the main pain points of people in your industry? What problem can you help them solve with an amazing online product? So Pat Flynn, he’s in January 2016 he’s generated $60,000 as another example from a video guide that would help people set up a blog website in just four minutes. It’s only an eight minute video. He put it together in 2009.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Let’s recap that $60,000 he has earned through affiliate marketing on a video that he created in 2009. Yep, my mind was blown as well as yours should be. So I’ve already mentioned the LeadPages Blog with the webinar play and if you look through his income reports, you’ll see a common theme. He is generating valuable content, offering it for totally free and including an affiliate link to the product or products that will answer that specific need. So the content is geared and then answering the problem and it demonstrates the product or the service that he’s going to recommend so that the setting up a blog is all about getting it set up on the bluehost platform, and then he’s including the bluehost affiliate link in there, and that’s where he’s getting his revenue. So how can you replicate this in your industry? So let’s think about this. Do you already have a popular post that you could repurpose and add in some sort of affiliate links? Just take a look at Google Analytics. That’s going to help you ascertain what might be a potential target for you right now of content that you may already have.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, if we were to break it down, what you need to do then, the first thing you want to do if you’re going to create some new content is find a problem that your industry has or a popular question that needs answering. So that’s going to involve some listening, some research, talking to your customers, and again, you know, taking a look at things like Google Analytics, seeing where people are hitting your website with what sort of questions. Now, then this problem is gonna need a solution. Okay. Where the product in question has an affiliate program. So you’re answering the problem with a product, and that product has some form of affiliate program with it. So that will allow you to take a percentage of the income. So if you think about it, on the Pat Flynn video, people are signing up for bluehost.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is a financial transaction between that person and bluehost. The commission payment is the affiliate payment that’s going through to Pat Flynn and his team. Now, don’t be tempted to pick just anything or an affiliate program that gives the highest percentage, because this really needs to be a real honest recommendation. People are going to be able to tell whether or not you’re really passionate about the product or the service that you’re recommending. And people also really want to be able to see the sorts of results. So this probably should be something that you are using regularly that you are passionate about. An example for myself would be the Beaver Builder platform. I’m very passionate about what those guys have done over there, and I am always writing valuable information and giving away courses to help people with that platform.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So Pat Flynn was recommending the Bluehost from at least 2009, and again, he’s been using Blue hosts since before 2009, and he even claims to this very day that he hosts 99% of all of his websites. That’s to this day, in 2016. So there you go. It’s picking a solution that will answer the problem, but it does need to be something that you also really believe in, because that’s going to come through in the way you write, the way you talk about it, the passion and also the ability to display the sorts of results that whatever it is that you’re using can provide to your consuming audience. Now then, when you write or you record this informative article, video, podcast, whatever it is, you need to then set out what the problem is, show the answer to that problem, and then demonstrate what with the product that you are recommending, how it solves that problem and how that person can take hold of the product and get it to do exactly what it is you’re talking about. Show them, make it easy to do, maybe a video, maybe a step by step guide that they can literally go through and check off. So making it super, super easy. And of course, don’t forget to load in your affiliate link.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now there’s a few ways of doing this. The first one could be quite simply flat out using the link that has been provided to you by the affiliate program. However, you may find that that might be an ugly link, it might be quite a long winded link with things like a question mark and ID number at the end, et cetera. So they’re not attractive and they’re not very easy to remember when you are trying to maybe tell someone the URL over a podcast, over a video, et cetera. So it’s always worth to set up some sort of pretty URL. And there is a plugin for WordPress if you’re using WordPress called Pretty Links. And that will allow you to create a link to to the affiliate program that you have, but you’re able to bury that into yourdomain.com forward slash, whatever you want to put there. So it could be yourdomain.com Bluehost if you are doing an article on Bluehost like Pat Flynn was doing now then remember, if you don’t have time to do that right now, then just take 20 minutes to check out your most popular piece of content or pieces of content and then if there is a trusted product or service that you can include affiliate link in there for, then go ahead, grab link and then hit the edit button on that piece of content or on those pieces of content.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s why you have a content management system. You can go in and edit old content. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. If you’ve got an affiliate link that you can load in to a blog post of a related product to that particular subject, then go ahead, at least go and do that now. And then in the future or the near future, hopefully set yourself that goal of answering some of those questions. And again, connecting in with some good affiliate programs of applications, online products that or services that you have used and you trust and you really believe will add that massive value to the end user. Okay, so we’ve covered affiliate marketing. It’s super exciting.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It might be something though, that does take a little time, a bit of a slow burner because obviously you’ve got to get traction, etc. People visiting the post. And it also depends on the kind of reach and the community that you may already be involved with. But it’s definitely something, as the guys like Pat Flynn and others have demonstrate, definitely worth investing time and focusing on that as one way of generating income to your website. And remember, you don’t need to have hundreds of thousands of visits for this. All you need is a particular subject that meets pain points in the target industry that you’re targeting and boom, you’ve got something that people are going to go and want to check out. They’re going to go and learn some free, valuable information and more than likely they’re going to sign up for that product and again, you’re going to get that affiliate payment. Right, let’s move on to premium content.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So this is keeping on the theme of content, but let’s take a look at popular content on your website. If you crack open Google Analytics, you can take a look and see what posts, what pieces of content on your site are getting the most attention, where are people spending the most time, what topics are the quote unquote hottest? And if you’ve got a commenting system on your site, then go ahead and check out what subjects are generating the most interaction. So for example, in WordPress you could just filter all of your posts by comments and see how many comments you’re getting on particular posts, what is encouraging the most interaction, the most passion, the most questions, etc. All right, if you found one or two posts, then perhaps it’s time to start to create some premium content. So you found the subject everybody’s crazy over. They’re visiting that post, they’re commenting on it. Can you unpack that content even further? Can you add gold in there? Can you add extra value to that content? So perhaps the blog post was only 500 to a thousand words where you covered the basics of a particular subject for the industry. What else can you add that you believe is worth paying for? That people would pay some small amount to access that content.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now when I say some small amount, you may have something that is complete dynamite and you think it’s a high value purchase. And that’s totally fine because remember, when you’ve got a niche audience who really need complex answers or solutions, then people are definitely going to be worth, or interested, sorry, in paying what it takes to get their hands on that solution. Okay, now with WordPress, there are a range of plugins available that will enable you to give the first part of your valuable content away for free. So the idea there is you’re giving people a teaser or a taster of what’s available. So it could be the first few paragraphs, which then takes you to the big unveil, or however you say that word with their dot, dot, dot. But to get access to that, people need to get their credit card out and pay you some money to access the rest of that information. The cool thing about this is SEO. So way back when digital content was evolving, people were creating online page turners or PDFs, and they were putting them behind a paywall that got absolutely zero SEO traction, that search engine optimization.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely nothing through the search engines. And to be Honest, page turners, PDFs, they’re not really great fun for the end user. They’re not compatible with devices, they’re hard to use. And also, reading stuff on a screen is not always great. Technology has moved on so far. We’ve got iPads, we’ve got Kindles, and we still have the good old trusty printer as well. People might just want to be able to print stuff off and have a read through that as well as a physical version. So if you’ve got a responsive website, you’re giving away the teaser, the first few paragraphs of your really valuable content away for free.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Then you’re getting the best of both worlds. You’re getting SEO, you’re getting Google seeing that content, you’re getting people fed into that. You’re then providing that content behind username and password after a payment’s been taken that people can use on multiple mobile devices, that people can copy and paste if they want to put it in Evernote or grab some stuff and put that in Evernote, or again, they can just print it. So you’re giving them some really super accessible content. And that content as well is not hidden away from the search engines. Least enough of the content is visible to the search engines to get you that traction. But also the stuff, the real meat and potatoes, the real gold, is hidden behind that payment firewall. So let’s have a look at a couple of plugins that are available.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
The first one is called Pay per View and this is by the team over at WPMU. Now again, this is WordPress. I apologize if you’re not on WordPress, but I guarantee you there’s probably something out there that will help you out with whatever platform you have. But with WordPress, with the pay per view by WPMU, it’s quite simple. You simply activate the plugin, you set up the specific payment gateway that you want, and then on the article or the page that you want people to pay to view more, you simply paste in a piece of code at the point that you want the person to be to pay for the further access. It’s super easy, super automated works. With WordPress out the box and with the guys over at WPMU, you’re paying a yearly subscription fee not only to access that plugin, but you’re getting a whole wide range of plugins that will help you in other areas of monetizing your WordPress website as well as. Now bear in mind, if you only want to buy this one plugin, I believe they sell that for about $19 and you get the plugin, you get to use it.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You don’t have to pay a yearly subscription to their whole package to get all the other plugins, but it’s certainly worth taking a look at WPMU and seeing what other plugins they have on offer in there as well. And we’re going to touch on some WPMU plugins again later on in the show. Now the other plugin which is really cool, is called Leaky Paywall, which is quite a cool name. But the idea is, is they have a very unique way of doing things. So rather than giving you a teaser of the content, this is going to give you access to pretty much the entire website. Google can spider it as well, but as you’re consuming articles, as the visitor is consuming content on your website, there is a ticker, it’s counting how much content you’re accessing and when you hit a certain threshold, boom, that is when you are asked for some sort of payment. It might be a payment to give you credits. It might be a payment to give you a monthly, yearly or forever subscription to be able to consume the rest of the content on that website.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So it’s not quite the same as hiding a specific portion. This method gives you the ability to give people kind of free reign of getting access to your website. Taking a look through. But again that meter is ticking away and the minute they’ve hit the threshold that you’ve set, then they are going to have to sign up, subscribe, start to pay money to access the rest of the valuable content that you have. So that might be particularly useful for people who are getting a lot of traffic to their website. There’s no one or two particular, particular pain points that people are hitting on. They’re actually consuming a lot of content. You’ve got a low bounce rate, you’ve got people spending time on your website, consuming the content, using the search functionality, et cetera.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s definitely something that you should go ahead and check out again. It’s the best of both worlds. You’re getting revenue generation whilst you’re benefiting from SEO and you’re giving the end users that clean, accessible environment for them to consume your amazing and valuable content. All right, I’ll try not to get too excited, but let’s just take a short break to talk about content generation. Now, the two mainstream ways of generating revenue that we’ve just talked about are primarily focused at people generating content. So before we continue to the next range of ideas, I just want to encourage you for those who have generated little or no content on their site with just a bit of help. Now, this is also super effective for those who have been generating lots of content, but feel they’re running out of ideas now. Now, first of all, let’s look at types of content.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You don’t need to be writing thousand word blogs. You don’t have to have 100 of those on your website. Because content could also be a short how to video, four minutes long. Pat flindered. Or it could be a 30 minute podcast, it could be a 15 minute podcast as well, or it could be some sort of digital download, Maybe it’s a PDF document with some guides, how to, etc. Okay, how do you generate ideas for content? That’s a massive question. I’m asked all the time. And to be honest, it’s questions, questions, questions.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I find the magic for content creation is in the questions. So what are my clients asking me today? What is the most common question that I’m receiving? What questions are the community asking? So if you’re not sure where to find these questions, then just think back to a most recent meeting that you may have had with a client. What sort of questions came up? What are common client questions? Those sorts of things that you think you know what, I really should make a frequently asked questions of our website. Now, there’s also other services as well, like answerthepublic.com that’s answer the public dot com. We’ll get this in the show notes for you, but that’s Going to show you a range of questions related to specific topics. You pop in the topic, you pop in the question. It’s going to give you a whole range of other sorts of questions that you could be looking at and unpacking. Also, it’s a really good idea to keep a journal.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Keep a journal of what sort of questions are cropping up in meetings, in emails, anything that just, you know, grabs your attention. Get that down in the journal. They are all amazing topics for blogs, for videos, etc. A great place as well is to join Facebook groups. And I don’t mean join Facebook groups where your peers in your industry are, but go and join the Facebook groups where your target customer is, where is your audience? Where are they spending time? Go join those Facebook groups. Go join those LinkedIn groups, add value, answer questions in there because you’re going to raise your own profile, but also grab hold of any questions that you see and perhaps create valuable content. Short videos, short podcasts, or short blogs that will help people with those questions. Now when you have that question, the need, the pain point, then you have the idea for the content that you’re going to create.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Remember, that’s video, that’s podcasting, or could be simply a short blog. Now decide on the types of content that you feel you can commit to create. Note down all the key pain points that the people in your niche have and then just start to create content. That’s just three things to do. So decide, note down pain points and create some content. Three steps. Okay, let’s move on now to generating revenue on your website through the strength of your brand. You don’t have to be a content generating website, you don’t have to be producing consistent content to be generating money.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And if you’re lucky enough to have a strong brand, perhaps you have that through good social engagement online, or you’ve got a product that is highly respected in your industry, or you’re receiving a lot of traffic as well, again through the products that you might be selling on your website. And again, that is associated with your brand. Then there’s a whole range of other ideas that you could apply to your website. So enough about content generation and let’s delve into some more strategies for monetizing your site. So the first one would be sponsorship. So sponsorship probably sounds super obvious, but let’s unpack it a bit more. Now if you have a low traffic site, you may struggle to sell sponsorship. So I’ll say that from the get go.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
However, on the other hand, if you are attracting highly targeted visitors in a particular niche, then the value of your audience has a potential for sponsorship. The value of that to a potential sponsor would go up as well. So if you’ve established that you have a good volume of eyeballs, then consider what sort of businesses would benefit most from exposure to your audience. For example, if you’re selling world cinema DVDs and you reach out to a garden hose company for sponsorship, well, I think you can work out the results of that. The value of the audience to the potential sponsor is low. They would have to hope that x percent of all World Cinema lovers also like gardening and happen to be in the market for a new hose. However, on the other hand, if you review your sales and see what sort of products are the most popular, then you could be connecting with potential sponsors and advertisers in that particular area. So let’s use World Cinema again.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And we have the XYZ Zombie movie. That is the most purchased movie. It’s the most reviewed on your shop. Most traffic goes to that. So you now know that there is a merchandise company that specializes in selling T shirts, promotional products, models of the characters from that zombie movie. Boom. There is a potential sponsor. Now, the added bonus is if they supply for a wide range of other World Cinema fan bases.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Even better, you’ve got tons of movies, tons of real estate on your website that you could be offering to that highly targeted sponsor. Now, if you’re producing regular video or podcasts, then the exact same ethos applies. Targeted sponsorship is key. So who is your audience? What are their needs or their wants? And what company would benefit the most from exposure to your audience that your audience will also benefit from? So no matter what the download numbers that you have, you suddenly have something of greater value than if you think you cannot negotiate sponsorship because you’re not the size of Google, you’ve actually got super targeted audience with needs. You do not need to be the size of Google to be generating sponsorship. Now, another method, which is quite an interesting method is a membership website. So, so the idea of a membership site is a private area on an existing site, or maybe it’s a sub site, like a portal that contains content, training or perhaps even online tools that you may have developed that are of high value that people will be willing to pay you a monthly or a yearly subscription for. So again, content is one of those key attractions, but it doesn’t have to be.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So you could be a software developer who is creating valuable industry tools. You could put those inside of a membership site as well. So all of the Latest updates could be there available available online if they’re online tools. Or maybe the latest updates could be available within that and a community inside that membership site. Or perhaps you have access to tons and tons of data through the business that you are in and you believe that access to that up to date information, so it could be numbers, whatever it is, statistics would also be of high value. So yes, content is great, but if you’ve got access to other sorts of content that is highly valuable, that is worth paying for, then again you could put that inside of some form of membership site. Now the idea here is that people are able to pay you a monthly subscription. They get a username and password and accessing this information on demand, when they want to, when they need it.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now there’s multiple plugins and services to allow you to do this. You don’t have to use WordPress, there are plugins for Drupal and other platforms and there are also standalone services that you can go ahead and check out. Just have a look on Google Google Membership Website service and boom, you’ll have tons of options available to you. Now there is the membership plugin. Again this will be in the show notes. This is for WordPress and it’s from the guys at WPMU. So I mentioned they’ve got the pay per view. This one is the membership plugin and it’s pretty feature rich, but it is lightweight so it’s not going to add too much bandwidth or too much footprint to your website.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now with the membership plugin you can set up multiple levels and sell in multiple different ways. So for example, it could be a monthly or a yearly subscription and you could set one of them up to be free access so people can access a certain amount of areas. You could then set up gold, so on and so forth. They have the inclusion of multiple payment gateways, including the favorites such as PayPal and my favorite stripe, which is really good for developers like myself. And if you become, remember, if you become a subscriber of wpmu, you’re going to get their support as well. So you can still buy this for $19. I think something around that. But if you join up to their service, you’re going to get the full impact of all of the other plugins that they have on offer.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now there are other membership plugins for WordPress, these S2, membership, etc. But none of them have performed. And for myself and my own clients as well as the membership plugin from wpmu. But do check them out, do shop around because you may have specific needs for your industry, for your niche that you need serving with perhaps a more advanced membership system or something that’s more simplified as well. So go ahead and check out. Now the idea is you’ve got something of value like the pay per view, except it’s an area that you’re consistently updating with fresh content once a month. So you’re giving people a reason to return high value content, reason to return monthly or yearly subscription. It’s a great way of generating revenue and receiving those sorts of micro payments from customers, which could lead to bigger and better things in the future.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, another form of membership site, and this is another idea for you here, is creating a social media network, but a private one. So social media is huge and that in itself is an understatement. We’re all connected in all corners of the globe and I personally have developed friendships, relationships with people as far away as Australia and the usa. So we’re all connected. Six degrees of separation. I think that’s history now. I’m pretty sure it’s one or two degrees. But you can also harness the power of social media for your business and you can convert your traffic, your visitors, your customers into a loyal, super targeted community of peers.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that’s a social network that you own rather than Facebook or Twitter. This is a social media network that is based on your website. So again, let’s look at about WordPress and there is a platform called BuddyPress which includes things similar to your activity wall from Facebook. People can add each other as friends, people can generate groups, and there is a huge amount of support out there and a huge amount of extra add ons that will add all sorts of features to your social media network. So why should Facebook own your data when you could run your own social media network on your WordPress website? So go ahead and check out BuddyPress. The idea here is if you are unable to regularly generate content that you believe people will want to continue to pay for access for, then having this sort of social network means you’re charging people access for the networking opportunities that the social media network you have developed or you know have activated brings to them. So it’s an online space, a private online space that is safe. It’s for people to communicate, to ask questions, to help each other out, to share information.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Very similar to things like Facebook groups, etc. But again, some something on your website that you control and you can build that database up, you can continue as well to market to those people as well and offer all sorts of upsells so this, the beauty of this is that that content that’s been generated inside of this private social media network, it’s all user generated content. So people are going to be coming back, sharing, taking a look at things people have shared, discussing them, et cetera. And it’s all within a paid area that you’ve provided to your audience. And you can use the membership plugin, excuse me, and other plugins as well for WordPress that will integrate with BuddyPress to restrict certain levels so you can perh, give some people specific free access but then limit other areas. For example, you could block messaging and only allow people who are paid members to be able to message each other, etc. Bit like the way LinkedIn would do. So LinkedIn gives you so much access and then you need to pay for a service for InMail to send messages to people, etc.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So this is again a really good idea for user generated content, a social media network on your own website. All right, this next idea is gold. They’re all gold to be honest. But this is mind blowing people. I see jaws drop when, when, when I talk about this with people and I know I’ve set myself up big now, but this is pretty cool. And if you can get hold of this idea, I think you’re going to be really excited by it too. You have the ability to offer an amazing software as a service website system to your clients. So let’s think about this.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You have got a, maybe a product or a service or you’re a consultant and you have an audience in a particular niche. Okay. You could be offering them the ability to build their website on your platform. How? Well, let’s look at WordPress again and WordPress has a system called WordPress Multisite. The idea there is this is one installation on one hosting account with a domain. So it could be your domain.com but then you’ve got the ability to give other people their own website on that same installation. So their website would be their name.yourdomain.com or it could be yourdomain.com their name. Now this might all sound technical straight away, but to be honest, WordPress multisite is super easy to install.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
With WordPress there are a plethora of low cost, really attractive themes that you could install on this WordPress multisite to give your users options. And then there’s a range of really cool plugins that you can utilize to automate the setup of each person’s website, to take the credit card payments and to give them that sort of power and control. So first of all what you’re going to want to do is create a WordPress multi site site that includes perhaps a couple of plugins that are going to be useful to your industry. Let’s take a look at John Lee Dumas. He’s created the podcast websites system. So that is a WordPress multi site setup with a choice of a few themes that people can use but then baked in. He has activated several plugins which are of high value to podcasters, which includes things like the simple podcast press. So think about your audience, what sort of website would they want to build then? You can charge a monthly fee for this.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
This could be something as low as $25 or whatever pounds wherever you’re from, a month to something really high, like maybe 100, 200 et cetera, per month, depending on what sort of things you’re putting into the website you’re going to offer these people and also based on the value that it has obviously to the end user. So once you’ve put all these together, you can then activate another plugin from WPMU which is called Pro Sites and this will allow people to up on your website to receive their own site at your domain and then enter in their credit card details and their site is instantly activated. There’s another plugin as well from WPMU that will allow you to automatically populate that site with pre done content. So that will help the user get started. They just need to replace the example content that you’ve got and they could be live within minutes. And there’s also another cool plugin which will allow you to give them the ability to have their domain on that website as well. So their website will perform to anyone, including Google, as a fully bona fide self hosted website on their own domain whilst they’re using your service. Now I could unpack this more, but it could get technical.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So what we’re going to do is we’re going to include a brief overview in the download crib sheet as well as the plugins that you could go ahead and check out. So remember, you do have the ability with little to no programming experience, to be able to set up some form of value website building service through the strength of your brand or perhaps the strength of the content that you’ve been creating that people can use to build a site in your niche, your industry. So I told you, it’s gold. This is such an exciting surface and it really makes the ability of running something like Wix, but for your industry a reality. You could be running the squared space for your industry. Just to wrap this up, there is the visual. There are multiple visual tools as well available. Again, we’ll put those in the notes that you could be installing.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that just gives that extra kind of Squarespace esque or Wix feeling of flexibility to your end users. So not only are they maybe filling in a few pages, but you could also give them those visual builders. And again, all it has been is an exercise in you installing WordPress, installing a few plugins, configuring the core WPMU setup and you have a valuable resource, a pay for software as a service solution that is either based on your website or just based on a subdomain of your site or that you could then start to market through your site. So I told you it’s gold, it’s exciting. Go ahead and download the crib sheet that has all the information on that idea.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So I hope you found that useful. Do head on over to the Facebook group, share your experiences with affiliate marketing and all the other good ideas that we unpacked in this episode. That’s leejacksondev.com group and you will be

Lee Matthew Jackson:
redirected to the Facebook group. If you’re on Facebook right now, just

Lee Matthew Jackson:
tap in WP Innovator and you will

Lee Matthew Jackson:
find the private Facebook group where we

Lee Matthew Jackson:
can all connect, share cat pictures and

Lee Matthew Jackson:
also talk about WordPress and design and

Lee Matthew Jackson:
what you’re having for dinner and all that good stuff. Now we’ve got a really exciting run of interviews coming up over the next few weeks with the likes of Curtis McHale. We also have Adam, I can never

Lee Matthew Jackson:
say his last name, is it Prizer Prizia. He’s a prolific YouTuber, always doing WordPress videos.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We also have the return of the Kim. Kim Doyle will be on her way

Lee Matthew Jackson:
in a couple of weeks time as

Lee Matthew Jackson:
well with a fantastic interview. So we’re gonna have loads of fun over the Christmas period. So see you in the Facebook group.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
See you in episode 56 or I’ll see you on the other side. Oh no, I forgot. It’s not Halloween episodes anymore is it?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
See ya.