The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 69. Why Wordpress is Best for Bloggers with Grayson Bell

Episode Date: April 11, 2023

Grayson Bell, owner of iMark Interactive is joining us today to talk about all things WordPress. iMark Interactive is a Wordpress support and development company that helps WordPress clients with technical support, maintenance, and development.  If you aren’t sure if WordPress is right for you, don’t miss this episode! Thanks for listening! Connect with us on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsCheck out The Blog Depot. This is a community and course that we have set up for you if you need questions answered before you start your blog. Join The Ultimate Blog Bootcamp, our online course and coaching that helps you build the blog that you have always dreamed of.Check out BigScoots plans using our affiliate link to see what plan is best for you for your blog!Restored 316's TemplatesSHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode69

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm, and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success, and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life, all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. Today, we have a guest on that we are excited to share with you. He is going to be talking to us all things WordPress, and we get a lot of questions about WordPress. So today, we are going to get lots of answers. So without further ado, welcome to the podcast, Grayson Bell. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on.

Yeah. So Grayson owns the company iMark Interactive, and it is a WordPress support and development company. So he is going to be able to answer a lot of questions for us today. And we are so excited to dive in. But first, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started with this business and what you do? Yeah. So I actually started blogging on WordPress in 2004, about a year after it was created. I've created a number of blogs over the years. And then in 2012, I got started in a personal finance blog. And people found out that I knew a lot about WordPress. So they started asking me for assistance on certain things. And so then in 2013, I created my business and then worked on the side of my regular full-time job,

helping people with WordPress support. And then I finally left that job in 2015 and have been in this business full-time since then. And so we basically help people with WordPress technical issues, site speed, theme setups, bugs that might happen, or just doing some development where they might want some extra features that a plugin is not easily accessible or their theme doesn't allow. Yeah. It's always amazing how these things work out. We start down a road and then we find out other people want our help and support. And so it's amazing that you were able to create a business doing something that you really like and that you know a lot about. So I'm sure that's been an amazing journey for you. Yeah, definitely. It just fell

into my lap. And I've always been a guy that tinkers with things. So it just worked out. And our business has grown all basically by word of mouth, because we try to provide a good service and help people out as much as we can. And that's how the business grew. Yeah. I can say that you've helped Jennifer and I both out on both of our blogs and with Spark as well. So true to your word, you do exactly that. I've always appreciated that you're just very straightforward. You give us the facts. There's no fluff, which I appreciate. I try. I've always been someone that doesn't really beat around the bush. I will be honest. There's some people that don't like that. But

unfortunately, that's just my nature. And I like to be direct with... I'm nice about it, but I like to be direct and say, this is what it is. And most people enjoy that. Yep. I think it's important in this line of work, though, because technology is something that can be really overwhelming to a lot of people. And so if you get, I think, almost too fluffy with it, I'm using the word fluff for some reason. But then it's hard to understand what you're actually supposed to do. And that's why we really did want to bring you on to really pick your brain and share your brain with our audience. It's because I think that that's an important thing to consider.

Jennifer and I can say all day, we really think that you should be on a WordPress site because we are talking to people who are wanting to grow a blog as a business. But with that, it comes a course that we sell. So is that lens coming from that? Well, are they just wanting me to be on a WordPress site because they have a course to sell me or something? And the fact of the matter is, is that that's not the reason. And so let's dive into that a little bit. There's a lot of different website platforms that you can be on like WordPress.org, WordPress.com, Wix, Squarespace, all of those. And obviously, we recommend self-hosted sites for the people that we are talking to.

Who is a WordPress.org site, like a self-hosted site? Who is that best suited for? dot org site, like a self-hosted site, who is that best suited for? Well, obviously, WordPress self-hosted was originally just a content management system. It was for general blogging. But the beauty of it is that it's open source. So people are able to create on top of it. This is where all the themes, the plugins and the functionality comes from. So really, self-hosted WordPress gives you the most flexibility to not only start small, but grow quite large because you can do almost anything in it. Now, it might require some developer to help you

with some custom coding or stuff like that. But I think the plugin directory has over 55,000 plugins at this point in time and themes are several thousand. So you have a grand amount of options that you can do. So if you're going to be a content creator, it is the most popular content management system out there for a reason, because it provides you the most flexibility in starting small and growing large. Yeah. And I think that that's why a lot of people start blogging, quite honestly, is that they are... I mean, there are some who just want to do it as a hobby, and that's fine. But we're really talking to people who want to grow this as a business and

become lucrative with their income and all that. And so with that, I think that there's also something that can hold you back with the technology side of it. And so some people might kind of shy away and go into more of a drag and drop like Squarespace or Wix. How is that being kind of a beginner and choosing that other way going to affect them in the long run? So let's first make the delineation between WordPress.com and self-hosted because a lot of people get really confused on this. And this was poorly done on the WordPress side. This is something that we have been dealing with

for a long period of time. WordPress.com is the paid version of self-hosted WordPress. So it allows you to spin up a site in their system. You can do a free version, which is always gonna be on their WordPress.com subdomain. If you just want to do blogging where it's like a journal, old school, you can do that. Do that on free WordPress or even Blogger for that matter. But if you want to be a business,

you should be on self-hosted WordPress, which is basically a downloaded, installed version on a web host. So there are many, many web hosts, thousands of them. So you would go to them, pay for web hosting, and then almost every web host now has the ability to install WordPress with a couple of clicks. So you don't want to be paying for WordPress.com because if you actually want all this functionality, you have to pay a minimum of $30 a month, which is like their business plan, which for most people is if you're just starting out, really not economical. So you can go get a host for a lot less and have WordPress installed. So you want to make sure that you're going self-hosted. WordPress.org is the system.

But I've assumed and I'm pretty sure your course covers that. Yep. Yep. Definitely. So what is Squarespace or Wix? What are those in comparison to a WordPress self-hosted site? Yeah. So those are proprietary closed systems, as we like to call them.

They are owned and operated and managed by Squarespace Wix. Weebly is another one. Duda is another. These are basically paid blogging management or content management systems that allow you to drag and drop to develop your site. site. This allows you to design relatively quicker and you can build posts and all that kind of stuff. The caveat to these is that you are in a closed system. If you want something that they don't provide, you're either going to need somebody that can do it if they're allowed to, or you're going to have to just forego that feature. You also, you know, drag and drop systems, while they look pretty, they're often poorly optimized, which speed and usability is a huge thing right now. I mean, you can put up a beautiful looking site, but if it takes, you know, 15, 20 seconds to load on mobile, no one's going to stay. They're not going to wait for that. No. So these are good systems if you're a small business and you want a one, two pager, something quick that's just showing your business and you're not going to be making updates,

you're not going to be building content. If you want a business that's going to be content focused, that you're going to be doing blog posts and content marketing and web stories or any of these kinds of things, self-host WordPress is where it's at. Where we find the big issue for most people is that they get started on these platforms and then they realize they can't do X, Y, and Z. So then they get told by blogging peers and many of the groups they might be in, like on Facebook groups, that they should be self-hosted WordPress. The problem is that if you already have a bunch of content, it is a nightmare to move that stuff over because those are proprietary content systems.

And they often have a bunch of we like to call it junk in their content that gets pulled over and then you have to manually edit it all out. It's it's it's so time consuming. I mean, like we do migration services, but if you have like hundreds and hundreds of posts, it can be very expensive to clean that up properly. It's not easy to do. And so if you're thinking about doing blogging as a business, just start on WordPress.org, self-hosted WordPress. And then yes, there are struggles in the beginning. But if you break through them, and you keep going, you're going to be better off for it. Yeah, we've seen it. I think many times ourselves when we have somebody who has been given the wrong advice in the beginning or didn't just didn't know. And so they've started and created a ton of content on one of those other platforms.

And yeah, like you said, you can move that over. But sometimes you have to really sit down and think about is it even worth bringing this content over? Or do I just start again, start fresh with what I've learned now in creating content and start a fresh site? Because it can be quite a task to clean up and move all those posts over if you're even able to do it in the first place. Yeah, I mean, there are like migrator systems that will pull stuff over, but like Squarespace is one that's a really big issue where you can't actually pull the images over because the way that they code them, so they don't even come over. And then you have to try to like hack your way into getting those images to come over. It's not easy. And

let's just say, like, for instance, if you're bringing content over, if you want to actually clean it up and it be ready for WordPress, which uses a block-based type of post content editor, if you wanted to clean that up, it could be 30 minutes to an hour for each post, depending on how long they are, how many images are in them. How many images are in them? So you have to like take account for that. Even if you bring all that stuff over, you have to go clean that out because you won't ever be able to properly use the WordPress editor with all that junk code in there. So it's not fun. And really, these systems just make it difficult to move out of. Like they do it on purpose. It's kind of like a lock-in mentality.

They're like, you know, yeah, you can move, but really, I can't really easily get all that kind of stuff out. But they're happy to move you over from WordPress over. They have, you know, like good migrators to go the other direction, but there's no real good migrators to go from those systems over. When it comes to hosting your website, you want somebody you can trust.

That's why we recommend BigScoots. Not only do we recommend BigScoots to our students, but we both use them for our own blogs as well. We love them because as a new or experienced blogger, their hands-on 24-7 support is invaluable. Anytime we've submitted a support request, we've gotten quick responses from a real person ready to help. Big Scoots has an uptime of 99.99%, meaning your site won't go down at critical times like with other hosting companies. With managed and shared plans, you'll be able to get support that fits your budget. Big Scoots is the perfect hosting company for bloggers. Use the link in our show notes to find a plan that works for you. Yeah, I think that it all comes down to the mentality. So if

you're listening to this and you're considering starting a blog, I think that you have to think about your future self and put yourself 1 to 2 years down the line. I don't normally say this, but don't look at actually what's right in front of you. Instead, try to think long term. And what do you want long term? Do you want to build a blog business? Are you somebody that actually needs that? Or like Grayson said, do you just basically need a webpage that gives some people some information. If you are somebody who just needs that information, we're not going to tell you that you need to be on a self-hosted site. I mean, Squarespace or Wix or one of those others are probably enough for you.

But if the blogging is your business, then believe that you can do it. And I think that that is just a mindset shift, to be honest. Out of the gate is, okay, this might be really challenging to learn this. We have a lot of students who come in and are like, I have never heard of half of these words. I feel like I'm learning a brand new language. And essentially, you kind of are, honestly. You can totally do it. And I think you just have to take those small baby steps forward and know that it is a process to grow a blog. It's not something that happens overnight. But we live in this instant gratification society that,

I want my blog yesterday. I want to be successful yesterday. And just to be really honest, it's just not going to happen that quickly. It does take time to grow and build a blogging business. But one way that you can set yourself up for success is by being on the right platform from the start. And if you're not there, there's ways to fix it. Like we've kind of talked about, like don't beat yourself up. Don't be listening to this and be like,

well, I'm completely screwed now. Like I can't even be a blogger. I don't want anybody feeling like really discouraged. Know that there's always a way out. It just might be kind of tricky. Yeah, I mean, and the beauty about WordPress is that the majority of people in like Facebook groups and these courses use it, you know, and there's a large, very large like development community around it. It doesn't mean like us. I mean, there are tons of options that you could

go to for help. That's the beauty of it. When you're in the closed off platforms, there's a very large limit on what you can actually do in them. And there's going to be much fewer people that can do the work in them because it's not set up the same. So you have a large pool of people that you can pull from for help, no matter what that might be. It could be image creation, SEO, just general marketing, It could be image creation, SEO, just general marketing, ads, all that kind of stuff, development. You can have VAs, editors, all that kind of stuff. It's just the pool is much larger. And because it's the biggest content management system, people flock to it and it's open source.

So it allows people to build whatever they really want. So I have a story where a lady came to me not too long ago asking to set up WordPress and she only wanted one page. And it was just to have her like as an online business card. And I specifically told her, this is not a great idea. Like you should be on a Squarespace and Wix. And she was like, well, I've been told that I need WordPress. I said, are you planning on doing any content management? Are you building any blog posts, any page? She goes, no, I just want one page. I said, well, this isn't it. There are updates that have to be done. Plugins are updated regularly. WordPress is updated regularly. With WordPress comes the security aspect because it's the largest. It's often

a target for hackers. So if it's a site that you don't ever plan on updating, maybe once a year, and it's not content-based, go on those other systems. I think that's what they're for. And I think this lady, guy. But I'm going to give you what I think will work best for your situation. And for that, it was not WordPress. Well, I appreciate that. And honestly, being in this industry for now several years, I appreciate that most people really do want to help in that way. You were honest and said, this isn't the right thing for you. And I think that, like we've talked about, you don't know what you don't know,

but we have to like be learners and be willing to listen and learn with that. And so I appreciate that you're willing and able to just be honest about what people need and what they don't need. Because a lot of us don't have any time to waste or money to waste either, you know? And so knowing what we actually do need and being really honest about what that looks like can help you set yourself up for success out of the gate anyways.

Yeah. The beauty of WordPress is that you can do so many things. But the big disadvantage of it is that you can do so many things. Yeah. There's so many different people telling you this, this, this, this. It's all over the place. We see people that want to go big right out the gate with massive custom sites. I don't recommend this. I don't recommend just blaring right out of the gate with a huge custom site because you're learning something and you need to be able to play with it and learn it. You need to be using something that's right off the shelf that you can make some customizations to

and kind of be your own. Will it look like somebody else's? Maybe. But there are millions of sites created every day. So, I mean, what are you going to do? Okay, I'm glad that you brought this up, actually, because I was just having this conversation

with somebody not too long ago. She builds custom sites and told me the price tag of the custom site. And when we first started the Ultimate Blog Bootcamp, we put in our blog, it was like $5,000 to $10,000 about is what we ballparked it. And her services are $40,000 to build a custom site. And that number was just jaw-dropping to me. But I know it's not out of the ordinary for what people are charging for that. So she's not overcharging. She's charging what the industry is essentially paying. And so what is somebody who is brand new coming into this

like, well, hold on. If that's the goal to have a custom site, well, shouldn't I start there? So you're saying it's okay to start out on a theme because we believe it's okay to start out on a theme that's been well done. We recommend Restore 316 themes is who we recommend in our course. And so we believe in using a theme that's well done and all that. But I know that there is sometimes that disconnect. Well, do I need a custom theme? Or when do you know, okay, I'm to like level up and get a custom theme?

Like when do you know when you're ready? So yeah, this is a hot topic for a lot of people. So yeah, so Restored 316 is awesome. They use the Cadence framework, which we love. I've worked with Lauren at Restored for many years. And Cadence is a great theme. It provides you the flexibility to make changes that you want. You can make font changes, color changes. It's way easier than what used to be recommended,

which is Genesis, which was recommended to everybody. But that framework has fallen way behind in where WordPress is moving. So cadence is great. There are others like Bloxy and Astra that have similar feels, but it gives you more control. In regards to custom themes, I'll be honest. What we're seeing now is people moving away from custom themes, getting off of the custom themes and going straight off the shelf. And here's the reason why. Again, I'll explain both. But the reasoning behind it is that content is the main focus of a website now. Content.

content is the main focus of a website now. Content. Many sites look relatively the same on mobile, which is the majority of where traffic is coming from. People just want to read the content and find what they're looking for and get off. That's why bounce rates are so high right now or generally 85 to 95%, which is an average for almost everybody

because people get the content and they move on. It's like the TikTok YouTube shorts of content, right? They just grab it and they go. It's like 60 seconds or less and they're out. There are some sites that people will spend minutes or up to five minutes on. That is rare. So you have to think about it that way. And there are many people that do great custom sites. There are great designers out there.

But for most people, they're pulling back away from that so they can focus on not only just dealing with content, but then their sites are going to be updated by the theme creators. They're constantly updating their themes to be changing with WordPress, whatever the change may be, maybe security, maybe new features, maybe like SEO, all that kind of stuff. Integrations with different plugins. So you're getting that side

where you get to keep up with all these changes, which is great. When you have a custom site that was built, let's say we build a custom site right now. In a year, the stuff that was done might be outdated. It might just be outdated. And then you're not going to be able to update it. You're going to have to go get the developer again to update it. And they're probably going to charge you another fee, whatever that fee may be, to update the code to be compliant with a

Google change or some type of new SEO tactic or whatever it may be, maybe a security issue in WordPress. Or one of the big things we find is updating PHP, which is one of the, is basically how web hosts are run. PHP is what WordPress uses to manage data. It's basically the framework WordPress uses. It's a coding language. You don't really need to worry about that, but those versions update and older ones get deprecated. They no longer get updates. They no longer get security updates. So you have to keep up with that kind of stuff. If your theme was custom developed on, let's say right now, 8.0, and then if 9.0 comes out late next year and they deprecate 8.0, you're going to need somebody to update all that.

You basically stay tied into custom until you move out. So there's that. On the custom side, you know when you want it. There are some people that really want beautiful designs and really good speed and stuff like that. They want the whole package. That's going to cost you a pretty penny for a developer to do that because beautiful designs and speed don't often go together very well. They just don't. There's a lot of work that has to be involved. So if you want that and you want to look different from everybody else, custom is probably going to be the way to go. Now, again, those prices are all over the place. You can pay $2,500. You can pay $100,000. It's all over the place.

And it really depends on what you want, stuff like that. And for custom, it also comes down to maybe you want some custom features that really isn't found in a plugin or themes don't have it. So you want something very custom. It's going to have to be built into your theme. So we are seeing a lot more people move away from custom back into... We call them off-the-shelf customized, where you change some things so it doesn't look exactly like the theme that you bought.

But that's where we're seeing people move into. I love how you explained it. You brought up so many things that I never really even thought about, especially like with the updating. And man, you could really just complicate things for yourself by choosing to have a custom theme without really having a reason for it other than, oh, it's what other people are doing, or it would look really neat. But at the end of the day, it's really about the user, the reader, the person coming to your site. And I think you can fully serve them on a good, like you said, off the shelf theme, you're going to be able to serve your reader the content they

want. And that's really what it's all about. It's about that user about that reader. And they could probably care less about a ton of custom features. I would think it would be rare that most bloggers would not be able to serve their audience with a theme that they could just set up themselves. I mean, we have bloggers that we manage their sites for them. And on the technical side, we don't do any content creation or editing. But we have them and they're doing 9-10 million visitors a month off of off-the-shelf themes. That's incredible.

With just some minor customizations. Might be colors, might be fonts, might be a table of contents widget that opens and closes. I mean, stuff like that. Yeah. Stuff that's just minor edits, because it's all about the content. And here's the thing, like we talk about, a lot of people love beautiful looking fonts and pretty colors. Well, hate to be the bearer of bad news. Most readers don't care about your font selection. We've done several polls over the years. And as long as it's readable, and it's big enough, they don't care if you have a serif font or sans serif.

They don't care. They just want the content. And the one thing that I will say about... We deal with a lot of feminine-looking colors, which is perfectly fine. The problem is that they're not accessible. There's accessibility issues, which is also a big thing right now with people that have vision problems. They can't see those colors properly. So very light, you know, like light pink, like yellows that are on a white

background actually are not accessible. You can't most like people that have vision problems can't see them. So that's like one consideration that we try to talk to people and they give us like their color palette if we're trying to help them with some theme changes and we go, be happy to do it. But here's X, Y, and Z, you really need to think about a different color. Now, some people will go, you know, I'm just going to stick with it. And that's fine. That's their problem. But you have to just kind of throw that out there that like light pale color palettes aren't generally well received for accessibility. Bloggers often feel like they need to spend a fortune on a custom website to have a professional online presence. Not only do you not need to spend a fortune, you can actually build your own website with a beautiful theme that won't hold you back from success. That's why we recommend Restored 316 website themes. You can have the website of your dreams with a beautiful conversion focused online presence without breaking the bank. We love Restored 316 so much. It's the only website themes we recommend to our students because of the heart and soul they put into their themes. They're also so customizable.

So even if you purchase a theme that someone else has, you can absolutely make it your own using the block features of Cadence so it's customized to your needs without the price tag. To learn more about Restore 316 themes, click the link in our show notes. Okay, you just gave such great information there. I just think it's really encouraging because blogging, like entering in blogging as a business, it doesn't have to be something that costs you thousands of dollars. I mean, you just said it yourself too. So even 9, 10 million views a month, I mean, that's pretty incredible, amazing. I can only hope to reach that someday. But to be on a pre-made theme essentially, and still being able to do that, I hope the encouragement that our listeners are hearing is

you can get in the game on a theme that's already been built, like ones that we recommend. And so you don't have to have thousands of dollars to enter into the blogging industry. You have to have a passion and you have to have a willingness to learn. And I think you have to have a willingness to have important conversations. And you brought up a lot of things that all come back to the main thing of user experience. And I think that user experience is huge. And that's something that I don't think is really talked about quite enough as people are starting. You've said it a million times. People don't want to come onto a site that they have to wait 15-20 seconds. As you're starting your blog, think about how you feel when you go to a website,

whether it's on desktop or mobile. We don't want to wait 15 or 20 seconds. I'll click off. I'll click off before 5, quite honestly. No one will wait that long. No. We just don't want to. And if I can't find a recipe that I'm looking for, if I can't actually... If they've told me it's going to be about this and it's about something different, that's really frustrating. And so I think just offering that really good user experience by having site speed, which is going to help you with being on self-hosted, using a theme that really frustrating. And so I think just offering that really good user experience by having site speed, which is going to help you with being on self-hosted, using a theme that is reputable as well. And then the colors that you've talked about.

But being able to be on that pre-made theme is good enough to get started and good enough to grow for a really long time. I mean, I'm now convinced I don't think I ever need a custom site, which is really great news. My husband who's in finance is going to be so excited for me to tell him that we never have to invest that kind of cash. I mean, I'm not going to... Because I know a lot of great designers that do custom themes and they do a really good job. I've just always been one that says, if you need custom features, do it. If you need custom features, do it. But you need to know your why. You need to understand why you're trying to do it. And then you have to be able to gauge your ROI on that, your return on investment, because is it going to bring you more traffic?

Is it going to bring you more click conversions? Whatever that may be. Could be to affiliate, more ad revenue, whatever at that point in time, right? You have to be able to understand if that's going to be, you know, like if it's going to work for you. Because obviously, it's easier to get a return on investment with a, you know, like if it's going to work for you, because obviously it's easier to get a return on investment with a, you know, like spending $200, $300 on a theme template, maybe then spending, you know, $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 on a custom theme. You have to be able to,

you know, like realize that information. Like it's kind of different. I think most people, I mean, when I started blogging back in the day, you could do it all for less than... Gosh, what was it? Domains, depending on... Let's say $10. $10 a year. Hosting, depending on who you go with. If it's a promo, you can get it for $3 a month. Or other things might be upwards of $15 a month.. Just depends on who the host is. So I mean, you could, in theory, get started for less than $200 and run for a while and learn the ropes and then get a off-the-shelf theme that gives you a little bit more design and customization and stuff like that. So I mean, you don't have to go right out the gate big. I don't mind going all in if you want to go all in, but understand that it's going to be a process. It's going to take some time. There is no real instant gratification with blogging. It takes a while. Just with any business, you don't go, oh, I have an idea. Then the next day, you're some type of millionaire. There really is no overnight successes in business and in blogging.

It just doesn't happen. Nobody talks about all the work that's put in the back end because it's not sexy. No. It's not pretty. It's not pretty. It doesn't sell anything. It just doesn't happen. I unfortunately came across a lady one time that reached out. I think this was actually in 2020 during the pandemic. And she unfortunately was about to hit in foreclosure proceedings on her house. And she was told that she can make money blogging. She wanted to start a blog. And I said, and I'm very honest. I'm very upfront. And she wanted to pay us to set up her site. And I said, I will not set up your site. I will not take your money. And she wanted to pay us to set up her site. And I said, I will not set up your site.

I will not take your money. You need to get a job. Like, and that might've been rude, but you don't make instant money blogging. You don't. If you're about to go through foreclosure proceedings, you need to get a job. Yeah. You need to get a job now.

Like, you were worse off. So I didn't take the project. I wouldn't. And she was a little bit angry with me, but I'm sorry. You have to have real expectations with this kind of stuff. Well, I think it's your integrity too. You're like, I know that you're not going to make what you need to make in order to win here. And so, yeah. I mean, your integrity was at stake there too. So...

Well, yeah. I mean, if I took the money and then she's sitting there two months later and gone through foreclosure proceedings and she hasn't made a dime, I don't want to be the one that gets blasted on social media because I set up a site for her and somehow it didn't make money. Yeah. Because that's not like... I was like, this is not good. So I mean, you do have to have realistic expectations going in this. It's just like any other business. Yes, it is online. So it does have that advantage.

But it is like any other business. It takes time to set up. It takes time to learn. And the beauty of it, as you learn and grow and start making money, you can hire out other things. Yep. And at the end of the day, you're never going to know it all. It is something that you're going to invest in learning every single day of your blogging career. You're going to be learning new things. Things are going to be changing. And you just have to have that willingness to be a lifelong

learner, be adaptable, and be willing to go with the flow on all of this. Because I think people sometimes get frustrated at changes changes and then they also give up. And so the people that are going to be the most successful with it are the ones that understand going into it that things are going to change. You're always going to be learning and you just have to have that really good attitude about it. Yeah. Yeah. I always say that if you stop learning, you fail. I've been doing this for nearly 20 years now. Next year will be 20 years. I still learn something new every day.

And in this game, things change so much and so often. It's not a set it and forget it type thing. You don't just press a button and then it's good to go. You are constantly making changes, making edits, learning something new. You know, the beauty about this is, as I said, there's a large group of people that will teach you stuff, but you also have to make sure that you do your own research on what you're being taught. Because there might be instances where someone taught you or is teaching you something, but

that is like five years old data. That's not, doesn't work anymore. Like what worked in 2017, 2018 doesn't work in 2023. No. What works today might not work even three months down the road. It's constant change and you have to be able to evolve and be willing to evolve with it. Yeah. I think that's the big key is being willing. We often tell, you know, people are in our community. You have to be willing to pivot. Like that's the big key is being willing. We often tell people in our community, you have to be willing to pivot. That's in the job description is being willing to pivot. Something might be working for a while, but okay, it's time to pivot. It's time to learn

something new. And you can look at that one of two ways. You can get really frustrated, or you can flip the script and say, well, this is just the exciting part of my job. It will never be old. I will never get bored. There's always something to learn. And it's fun. Even with all the changes and the pivoting and everything over the years, I would never choose anything different than what I'm doing right now. I love being able to work for myself and write content that I'm excited about and passionate about. And I think that that's the beauty of it. You mentioned a while back about your why, knowing your why. And I think that that's a really important part as you begin your blogging journey is knowing why you're doing it and what purpose is it serving.

And if the only purpose is to make money, I'm going to tell you to go back to the drawing board and try again. Because it does take a little bit of time to make money blogging. And that doesn't mean that you should quit before you get started that stuff. I'm not discouraging anybody from that. But just being really honest that it does take time. It takes effort and energy and all of that stuff. And there is going to be some blood, sweat and tears before you likely see a paycheck come in. And that's okay. Because if your why is strong, and you know why you're doing it, you know the greater purpose of what it's serving. It's really flipping awesome when you get to show up in your truth. Yeah. I would never tell somebody to quit their job and jump into blogging if they've never

actually done it. This is a great side hustle, if you will, because it's going to take some time to build up. And there's also, we as humans evolve over time. What you're doing today and what topic you might be covering today, you might hate three years down the road, or you've just run out of ideas. And then you pivot. You pivot into what you know, but never chase the money. Those that chase the money end up failing really quickly because they don't actually have a passion or enough knowledge on the subject to cover it properly. And just because you see somebody making like $40,000 a month, if you don't know or care about that topic, don't jump into it. It's the same thing with a brick and mortar business or coaching or whatever

like that. And this is really something that social media has caused is all this grandiose, we're making X, Y, and Z, all this kind of stuff. So people jump into these business ideas and I come across them often. And I go, what do you know about this topic? What makes you... Because the thing about Google specifically and SEO is they want you to be an expert. Now, you might not be an expert in the beginning and you can learn it, but if you're not even passionate about it, you're not going to want to learn it. It's not something that's going to excite you, and you're not going to stick with it. So you have to pick something that you are either good at, or you care about to get good at. Yeah. Something that's been asked a lot lately. So I'm a health and wellness blogger. Health and wellness bloggers, the traffic doesn't

come as much as a food blogger or whatever. You got eaten alive during that eat. The eat of this and the Y-M-L. Yeah. Y-M-Y-L. Your money, your life. Yeah. Yep.

So Jennifer and I were talking about this last week. And I said to her, but this is what I'm passionate about. This is it. And so it's a choice that you make. Yes, I might not be able to grow my traffic as fast or as great as a recipe blogger, food blogger, whatever. But that's not my passion. My passion is not recipe creation. I've hired that out for my blog. And so... Because that does still serve the purpose.

But it's knowing that why and knowing, okay, I'm okay. I'm okay with that. That's not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is to make an impact. And there's a lot of ways to make money blogging that's not just tied to ad revenue. There's a lot of other things that you can do. We've had multiple podcast episodes about that. But just know too, just like what Grayson's saying is like, if you're not passionate about it, you're not going to want to put in the work when it's really difficult and hard. But if you are passionate about it, then you see that greater purpose. And I think that you're going to be willing to do the hard work. You're going to be willing to figure things out and pivot as things get tough. So that's... I love that it's gone this

way that we're talking about the why behind it too, not just the technical side. Gotten a little deeper today, guys. That's good. So I think it's important. Yeah. Sorry. I mean, I could talk about this all day. It just flows. I mean, even ask my wife. She's like, will you stop talking about this? I mean, if you've been in it for almost 20 years, it's just second nature. But it's interesting to see how everything changes. I still have a personal finance blog. I haven't written on it in years, but I mean, as you dealt with it, like Google with the Your Money, Your Life, which is mainly like personal finance, health, wellness, stuff like that, they really hit bloggers hard. Yep.

The sad thing is that they give these big sites a lot more credibility than they deserve. You can tell that a lot of stuff is written by freelance writers that don't actually know about the topic. They might have researched it for 25 minutes. So it's a lot harder for the personal finance and health and wellness bloggers to succeed. It's not that it's not possible, but if you were fully focused on ad revenue, you got decimated. And that's what I try to teach people.

It's like, stop focusing solely on ad revenue, you got decimated. And that's what I try to teach people. Stop focusing solely on ad revenue. Ad revenue should be like an icing on the cake type thing. You can do great with affiliate. You can do great with personal one-on-one coaching. I mean, books, whatever, selling printables, whatever. There are a number of ways to monetize. Never just focus on one. Great advice. Grayson, this has been great. You've said all the right things today. Let me just tell you. Did we even talk about WordPress? I don't know. I'm just kidding. We did. I love that we just talked about it all because blogging is multifaceted. It's not just

the technology piece. It's not just the niche piece. It's all of it. All of it's really important. I think we really just dove into a lot of really important topics that it's so nice to hear an expert's point of view on and just reiterate in everything that we're sharing with our students and on the podcast and everything.

So thanks for just sharing today your thought process behind all this too after years of research yourself. So if you could tell people how they can connect with you and then what services you do offer and provide, that would be great. Yeah if you could tell people how they can connect with you and then what services you do offer and provide, that would be great. Yeah, you could reach us at imarkinteractive.com.

That's I-M-A-R-K, interactive.com. Just know there is nobody that works there. His name is Mark. There is no Mark. I get called Mark a lot. The business name was actually created before iPhone. So I think a lot of people think it was... So I've had this business name before.

I even started in 2013. So I've had it and I used it. But yeah, you can reach us there. We do WordPress support and development. We have monthly plans for people that want their plugins and security managed for them. We also do ad hoc project-based things like development, theme changes, plugin add-ons or changes and custom code, stuff like that,

fixes when bugs come up, we can help with the hosting issues as well. We're kind of, we do a wide gamut of items. So you can just reach out to us on our site and we can see if we can help. We can also help with migrations if you're on Wix and Squarespace. Hopefully you're just beginning

because it's easier that way. If not, we can also kind of guide you if you want to manage it yourself to keep expenses down. We can kind of guide you on how to do the majority of it. Awesome. Thank you so much. This has been great. And just a personal testimony, you've helped me with my blog a number of different times with... I just rebranded last year and had to change domains and all that. And so you've been incredibly helpful. And just thanks for just being real and very direct. I appreciate the direct. And I can't recommend you enough. So hopefully, if anybody's listening who does have any help that they need

with our site, you'll reach out to Grayson. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at Spark Media Concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the ultimate blog bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.