573 – How To Get A Content Publishing System

Podcast: Download (Duration: 34:30 — 27.8MB)

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Justin Meadows

Podcast highlights:

01:36 – Some backstory on Evergreen Profit
05:27 – A solution for a real need
07:53 – How much is it?
10:51 – Making it work
12:11 – What’s involved in hosting
15:58 – The whys and hows of maintenance
18:15 – WordPress pros and cons
20:54 – Are you doing these things?
23:55 – The way support works
26:36 – What about marketing?
29:10 – Some train wrecks encountered

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness. Today, this is Episode 573. We will be talking about how to get a hassle-free content publishing system. And my special guest for today is Justin Meadows. Welcome, Justin.

Justin: Good day, how are you?

James: I’m very good. That sounds very Australian. You must be in Australia.

Justin: Yeah. Absolutely.

James: I imagine you’re not wearing shoes right now.

Justin: No, I avoid that as much as possible.

James: Well, I’m not wearing a shirt, but this is an audio so it won’t matter. I just came back from my daily surf, and I’m in the mood to find out how to make my life easier. I think this is going to be important for our audience because most of the stuff that I do revolves around content marketing in terms of the way that my business works. So it’s natural that my audience, who are listening to hundreds and hundreds of podcasts, are curious to know how this works and if they could do it for themselves.

So what I want to talk about is a little bit of an overview. As you know, on this show, we don’t dredge through your backstory from the time you were in kindergarten and the teacher called your name wrong and all that stuff. We get straight into it.

The background on Justin and Evergreen Profit

But just for a little bit of a base, I’ll just put this out there and then you can fill in the gaps. Justin, you’ve been in my community for years and years and years. You’ve come to the live events. I’ve seen you go into a few different ventures, but find your feet when it comes to the website development and supporting websites side of things. And you have a business called Evergreen Profit, and you are now helping people out with WordPress support, including hosting. But importantly, and this is the bravest part of all, you’ve taken on marketing support, which is helping people with all sorts of things from emails to split testing to getting content published on their site. How am I doing so far?

Justin: Yeah that’s pretty good.

So we started out doing SEO consulting and that sort of thing, and that evolved into WordPress development. I live in a small country town and so I can’t get in front of new clients and that sort of thing for website projects, so I went to the wholesale model and we still do that at Evergreen Profit where we help people resell websites and that sort of thing, so they don’t need to actually have their own in-house team.

And as part of that, we also cover the website support, hosting, maintenance, all that sort of thing, looking after the website once it’s built. And so, just recently though, I’ve realized that we actually, there is no reason why we can’t offer that part of the business out to the general public. So yeah, we’re now taking on retail clients directly and helping them out with looking after their website. Because as you were saying, for people who are coaching or just wanting to become an authority in their market, one of the best ways is to publish content and to have their own website.

As you know, I’ve learned from you about all the Own The Racecourse side of things, and that method. But in order to do that, you’ve got to get someone to look after the website. You don’t want to be dealing with all that yourself. And so, for looking after the website and getting that content published, there’s a couple of different ways that you can do it.

The first one is that you could either get some freelancers, you can go to oDesk or whatever it’s called these days, it keeps changing names. You can find someone, get them to do a job and you’re working on a project basis or a task-based pay basis. And that’s frustrating because you always constantly have to deal with someone new and teach them how to do the thing and they’re not invested in your business, so they’re not going to keep working for you if a better offer comes along.

So it’s an unreliable way to get things done, and the alternative is, as you’ve done, is to have your own team. That’s obviously the holy grail of doing this, because then you can publish the podcast like you’re doing right now, and send it off to your team and you’ve talked many times about how that’s easy and it gets turned over because they know what they’re doing. You’ve built up these systems, you’ve got some awesome staff that know what they’re doing, and it just works smoothly. But if you don’t have that, then you’ve got to start somewhere, and building up that team and having those processes in place takes a long time. It takes a lot of investment.

So our service is based around that sort of Goldilocks sweet spot in between freelancing and having your own team, where you don’t need to invest in all that infrastructure and training and staff, but you have the reliability that you don’t get with freelancers and that sort of thing, because we have the systems and processes in place. We’ve got a team that know what they’re doing and it’s just a matter of us working out how you want to be doing things with your website and with your content strategy, and then we can help you get it done. Easy.

James: There you go. That was Justin Meadows from Evergreen… Just kidding. Well that was an intro, I got to say. I’ll just sit back here and relax.

Answering a real need

There is another option that people take, too, and this is where they just set up a Facebook page or a YouTube channel, and they just do that, and they’re just publishing their content straight to that place. They’re uploading native content videos, they’re doing Facebook Lives or they’re doing their Instagrams and leaving it at that. And I’ve been adamant that that is risky, because when the platform decides to change their stance on this, you don’t get to keep your own content. Because you are the product, and you’re not building an asset.

And the inherent issue with building an asset is it’s actually a bit more difficult. It is more difficult to have your own website. You’ve got to have elements like design and then you have to update it and host it and point domains to it and set up email routing. And it is a bit tricky.

And look, a little team of five that I have in my business now, and I would classify us as a publisher, we’re publishing educational information and I’m doing coaching service, which we wrap around these two memberships at SuperFastBusiness.com and SilverCircle.com. I would still be looking at a wages bill that is in the hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year region, and that’s great for a multi-million-dollar-revenue business. It’s not great if you’re just starting out, and the risk is, you don’t want to go too far down the free path, and of course all your time will be consumed if you try to task source with individual people from Fiverr or whatever those freelancing sites are called.

Here’s a little interesting fact. I’ve never actually used those things in over a decade online. I’ve never used Elance or oDesk or a classifieds site to find a tasks sourcer. My approach has been you either hire someone in your team full-time or permanent part-time, or per contract on a permanent basis, or you find a service provider who is doing a good job of what it is that you need help with, which is what I’ve done for high-level things like design, Facebook ads, and super heavy programming stuff. You know, like API integrations and making all my things talk to each other.

In your case, Justin, I think you have created a good solution for the person who is on that journey where you’re starting out or even up to a mid-six-figure revenue. It still makes sense probably to contract this out, if you’re creating some content, you want it on your website, you want your website to stay alive, you want your website to be up-to-date and secure, and if you want to be focusing on the other stuff that’s driving your business other than keeping the thing afloat.

What it costs

I’m just curious, does this cost a lot? Because I imagine it’s not cheap.

Justin: Yeah, it depends on how you compare that. So we have a few different packages, because like you’re saying, having your own team is better, but you got to decide, I guess, what’s going to work for you. And you’ve got to start somewhere. And you quickly find that even once you hire one VA, they can’t do everything, either. They’re going to be limited. You can’t expect one person to know how to do all the different things that are required in having a website – maintaining that, publishing content, promoting it, all that sort of thing.

James: You would be surprised how many people expect that.

Justin: Yeah, that’s right.

James: They want to hire a VA who will… and you should see the job list. They know how to design, code, program, publish, transcribe, edit, update. They know social media and they can run Facebook ads. And I’m thinking, are you joking?

Justin: Yeah.

James: Not realistic. And then, even if you could find someone like that, it’s a good chance that at some point there’ll be a life change where they might want to move on to the next post, and then you’re stuck back to zero.

Justin: You’ve always got to be prepared for that situation. You’ve got to expect that it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of when.

James: That’s one of the good reasons to have a service provider where they have more than one team member.

Justin: Absolutely. And that’s something that we build into our business, is making sure that there’s always two people that can do any parts of the business. Because we don’t have, not everyone in our team can do everything, either. We’ve got developers, we’ve got project managers, we’ve got the server experts, we’ve got the page speed experts, and we’ve got some designers, and they all work together in order to make these things happen. So, yeah. And we just need to make sure that we’ve got that redundancy built into our business, so that people can rely on our services.

James: People do rely on your services. When I look at your client Rolodex, a lot of familiar names there. They’ve certainly come from our community, and some of them have been in the business for the whole time that I’ve been online. I know some of these people probably for 10 years.

Justin: Yeah. We’ve been looking after some clients since we’ve started. We’ve still got some clients that stuck with us for eight years at least.

James: That’s amazing. Now, you didn’t mention a price, but I will put a link to your website. You’re running this service from EvergreenSupport.co, at the time of recording this. We’ll put a link to a review that we put together. I had someone in my team go through your products and services and put together an overview of what’s involved.

But in short, if you’re really at a point where you just don’t want to do this stuff yourself, you could hand over to Justin’s team your WordPress hosting in the cloud, your monthly website maintenance, your unlimited minor website tasks, your monthly speed optimization and five hours of marketing support. It’s still going to cost you around about half the wage of a full-time person. So it’s about half a person’s wage, if I were to put it in terms of say, a Philippines virtual assistant. So that’s actually very well-priced.

Making it work

I’m surprised that you make any money at all, but the only thing saving you in that regard is that at least I’m helping you with your business behind the scenes. As your coach, I’m saying, Justin, make sure you get plenty of customers, because then you can balance the tasks across a larger team and get great reputation.

The reason you’re here is people just keep raving about the service within our community. Every time someone asks, where can I get this or where can I get that, there have been service providers that do some of those things. I’ve seen at least half a dozen people try and do the marketing support one. It’s something people always ask for. I’ve even tried to provide it and it’s a difficult service because a lot of the jobs are custom. However, if you are very patient and you get good briefs and your team’s switched-on, I imagine you’ve somehow made it work, Justin.

Justin: Yeah, well it is, as you say, it’s a tricky one because everyone’s needs are different. Everyone wants to have a unique marketing strategy, and they’re going to have a different audience, so they’re going to need to create their content in different ways, publish that out to different places. So we do need to create a system specifically for each client, but I’m happy to work with clients to just work out that process at the start and make sure that everyone in the team that’s working on their site is familiar with that process. And then once that’s in place, it’s easy to make sure that we are publishing their content consistently and they’re getting a great result.

The components of hosting

James: So we’ve talked about what is there, but I’m curious to go a little bit deeper and provide some value for our listener. Let’s talk about a few of the various components when it comes to hosting. What sort of changes have you seen over the last few years? And this is a question that comes up all the time. I know some popular bloggers have been recommending hosting solutions that they don’t use themselves but pays a good commission.

And then there’s, you know, in my case I’m paying for hosting more than your Epic support package, just for my forum, for a dedicated server. But I guess in my case, I’m being super conservative there. I don’t want anyone else on my server. It’s such an important piece of my business, and I can afford it because I have the members’ support there to get that dedicated server. And I’m using a supplier that’s my third or fourth server over 12 years, a different supplier. But what have been the trends and how have you managed to include that?

Justin: Yeah, so I think hosting is one of those areas where a lot of people don’t understand the difference between them. They think it’s all just hosting, you know? So I think that there was initially, people were… certainly when I started out, everyone was all about shared hosting. It was just the way to go, because it was cheap. It took a while before people started to realize that although it was cheap, there was a lot of problems with it, and so moving to VPSs and dedicated servers are a much safer option.

They also get you a much better performance, because instead of having hundreds of websites all crammed on the one computer, the one server, all using the same resources and they’re owned by different people and they’ve all got insecure passwords, and then who knows what sort of plugins and WordPress themes they’re using… So it’s very easy for malware to get into a server like that and affect everything on the server. Whereas on a VPS or a dedicated server, you have a lot more control.

Obviously, dedicated is the best because you have control of the whole server. But yeah, with cloud hosting, that’s what we’ve moved to more recently and that allows you to scale up to different sizes of server and resources and that sort of thing. And while it is still being shared, it’s more like the VPS where you have less people on there. And we have on our servers, we control who’s on there. It’s just our clients. And so you are only sharing it with a handful of other people. And you’re getting all the benefits of that cloud network, which allows you to scale up and down to meet the needs of your website. So that just means that we’re not putting arbitrary limits on your hosting like you might get if you go with one of the cheap shared hosting sort of solutions.

So that’s, I guess, been the biggest trend in hosting, is that we moved to the cloud. And also, caching has improved a lot. So moving, using… I guess it’s a complicated thing to explain, but there’s little data centers all over the world and they all hold a copy of your website so that not the entire website needs to be downloaded when someone visits your site. They don’t need to get the whole thing from your original server. Most of those website files can be taken just from a local cache that’s in a city, the closest city to them.

James: And that’ll make it load faster so the experience is better for the user, and there’s been some evidence that that increases conversions.

Justin: Yeah, it increases the conversions. It also helps out in Google’s eyes with regards to your SEO rankings and with your cost of your ad spend. The speed of your website affects the quality score of your ads. And so that will mean that you’re paying more for a click if you’ve got a slow website.

Monthly maintenance

James: Yeah. Next up is monthly maintenance. What sort of things are you doing? I mean, in my case I’ve got a webmaster on my team, and I know they’re updating our plugins and talking to our hosting company and we’re running security checks. How involved is that, and what happens if you don’t do it?

Justin: Yeah. If you’re not doing that, then like I said before, it’s a matter of when, not if, but you’re going to get hacked. So it’s definitely going to happen. It’s just a matter of time, because WordPress is constantly updating its software. And even though it now automatically pushes out updates for some of the plugins and for the WordPress framework itself, they can’t push out updates for the theme, and there’s always the chance that plugins will stop being supported and that sort of thing.

So you need to make sure that your website is getting checked over by a developer and that they can make sure that things are being updated correctly. We also just actually look at the main pages of the website and make sure it is displaying properly, we’re not just relying solely on automated uptime monitors and that sort of thing.

We actually take a look at the site. Go yep, it’s all looking good. We run a backup first, check the backup, update the software and run performance scans and malware scans and that sort of thing to make sure that everything is running fine. Make sure there’s no broken links or any other issues with the website. And then we check it all again to make sure it’s all displaying properly.

So it does take a bit of time, and it is important to do that, because if an issue is found, then it’s a lot easier to solve it if you’re the developer that knows how to solve it. So if you get someone else to look at it and they find an issue, but then you have to then go contact a developer to come in and make sure that you don’t break it. It can cause issues, especially if you have a live e-commerce site or something like that where you might lose out on sales while that’s happening.

So that’s why I believe it’s important to have a developer check the site that actually knows what they’re doing and can fix it if it’s broken. But the other thing is that, if you’re not doing that then you’re going to get hacked eventually and we have had people that we’ve built websites for and we’ve offered the service and they’ve said, “No, look, we’re just going to host it. We’ll look after it.” And they haven’t looked after it and a few months down the track they’ve come back to us and say, “Oh no, it’s been infected. We need to get it cleaned up.”

Pros and cons of WordPress

Some people that are obviously not a fan of WordPress often criticize it for being insecure, but it’s not so insecure in and of itself but it’s just that because it is so popular and there’s so many moving parts, it does need to be maintained on a regular basis in order to keep it secure. And if it is left, then it will become insecure fast and there’s so much malware out there that is targeting WordPress specifically because it’s now, I think about a quarter of the websites on the Internet are WordPress. So it’s such a large slice of the pie, it’s similar to the reason why people when they’re creating malware usually target PCs rather than Macs. It’s just the bigger target.

James: Right. I mean, the weakness is often the strength as well. It also means that your team can train on it and learn it and be able to instantly work on it. Whereas, I’ve seen a lot of clients get locked in to weirdo proprietary solutions that once the development company builds, they’re the only ones who can work on it or fix it. And there are often severe limitations.

Justin: Yeah.

James: Reminds me of when I was at Mercedes-Benz, we had some big global enterprise provide the website solutions and they wanted to charge me like $3800 to insert Google Analytics code into our dealership website. And I’m like, you’re kidding, right?

Justin: Yeah that’s insane. That’s absolutely something that we think is very important, is that the client has got the control of that asset, which is their WordPress website. That’s one of the biggest features of it, is that because there is such a large community of WordPress developers around these days, if there is a problem with our service, if they don’t like us or if we stuff up or you know, something like that, then they can just take it to someone else and get someone else to look after it.

So they’re not locked into us. Of course, we do our very best to make sure they are so happy that they never want to leave us. But the option is always there that they can. We do put training videos inside the WordPress dashboard and we let people have that option, to be able to do it themselves. But I certainly don’t recommend it, because if you’re serious about your business then you shouldn’t be fiddling around in your website. You should be focusing on what’s going to get your business to the next level, and that’s usually higher-priority things like creating content and talking to clients and that sort of thing.

James: Agreed. I’d never log into my WordPress website. It’s very important for my business, but it’s a question of who, not how, as Dean Jackson famously said. I like to get one layer back, as James Schramko famously said. His one’s just way more elegant. I give him big credit for that. I always mention it and credit him, because it’s transformational for someone who’s getting it wrong. If you’re still mucking around on your website, you’re doing it wrong.

Unlimited website tasks

On that topic, unlimited minor website tasks, what sort of tasks are you talking about? Because I’d like someone listening to this to identify if they’re doing these things, or if someone else is doing these things. Or if no one’s doing it, which is probably terrible.

Justin: I guess anything where you’re logging into WordPress, that’s where you’re doing it wrong, so any minor task. But it’s when you see those, oh, that wording could probably be improved, I’ll just log in and fix that myself, or I’ve got to update the photo on this page, so I’ll just log in and fiddle around with that, and then you end up spending half an hour because it doesn’t quite sit how you want it to sit and, you know, maybe you didn’t optimize the image before you uploaded it, so now you’ve made that page really huge and slow to download, all those sort of things.

Adding new products, landing pages, if it’s very simple, if it’s just, you know, a repeatable sort of page, a blog post, those sort of things, they’re included because that’s something that’s going to take less than an hour of your time. It’s really something that’s not major, but it’s something that you shouldn’t be doing and it’s something that you know, once you get stuck in those sort of technical problems and you find yourself tinkering and getting further into there and you’re just getting frustrated, it kills your mindset. And it makes it harder for you to be in a creative mode and to be thinking proactively with your business instead of reactively and technically.

James: I want to run an example past you of something that happened to me the other day and I want to see how it works in your business. I was speaking to a student of Silver Circle. It’s been 18 months since he came on board, and we worked out that he has grown 205 percent in 18 months and I thought that was really good. He was obviously very excited. They’ve gone from five to 20 staff. They’ve got five times more office space and they’re projected to continue this growth curve.

So I said to him, “Is it okay if we update our Silver Circle home page, because that’s something I’d love to document?” And he said, “That’s totally fine, go for it.” So what I did is I wrote down the quote, because I was literally transcribing what he said. He’s like, “Hey do you know we’ve grown to….?” I’m like, “That’s fantastic. Can I quote you on that?” So I wrote down the quote and I screenshotted it, and then I actually screenshotted his permission, because I emailed it, and then he emailed back, said, “Sure, go for it.”

So I screenshotted that and I loaded up to my Slack account in our sitechanges channel, which is where my webmaster sits, eagerly awaiting my next update. And then a short time later, she came back and said, “Updated.” So I just say, “Could you please update Silver Circle homepage with this?” She replaced the one that was there before, which was still impressive but not as tangible. And then it’s done, and the site’s live.

Now, I didn’t log into WordPress, I didn’t go mucking around looking for it. And because it’s easy, I’m more likely to continue to do this. I’m just going to progressively update all my testimonials over time to make sure they’re relevant and impressive, because I mean, if you get the result, why not mention it?

The way support works

So if I was a customer of your support package, how would it work? Like how do we communicate? What would happen?

Justin: Yes, we use email. By the way, I totally agree that making those kind of small changes and just getting it done, to be able to just go, yeah, that needs to be changed, just saying it, getting it out there, someone else deals with it, that’s exactly how it should be. It’s when you try and take it on yourself and you think, alright, there’s so many, I’ll wait until I’ve got a few things to do and then I’ll get in there and get it all done myself. It just gets put off further and further and then you end up not doing it for ages, and that sort of thing.

But yeah, so the way it would work with us is pretty much exactly the same, except instead of going to your Slack channel and doing that, they just shoot an email to us, to [email protected]. We will respond within an hour to either say, “Yep it’s done,” if it was really that easy, or if it was something that we weren’t able to just get done straight away like that and we have to maybe do it in a couple hours time, we’ll just get back to you and say, “Yeah, look, we’ll get onto that in a couple of hours’ time,” and then you’ll get another reply in a couple hours’ time to say it’s done.

James: Great. So it’s pretty much the same process except it’s a surrogate team.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely.

Optimizing your speed

James: What about speed optimization? What does that mean?

Justin: So that’s something that, as we were talking about before, it’s becoming more and more important because things like Google are now factoring it into both its SEO rankings and Google ad algorithms.

And the other thing is that people are becoming more and more frustrated. Well, I guess they’re more and more used to getting things quickly, so they will get quickly frustrated with an old, slow site. So it is hurting your conversions if you are too slow. So the monthly speed optimization is that we will check over your site, see how it’s working. Every month, we test it, and we might need to go into the database and clean things up or have a look at some plugins and see if they’re being supported still or if they maybe need to be removed. There’s generally a few small things.

Also, if you’ve been publishing content, it might be that the images haven’t been optimized properly or you know, there might be things there that we need to do to to optimize the site and make sure that it’s still running as fast as it possibly can. So that’s something that we do on a monthly basis as part of that package. And sometimes, it’s only minor, but I just find that if a site has been left for three or four months without being looked at, it tends to get slower and slower over that time. It’s mostly due to changes in the database growing and that sort of thing. So we just check it on a monthly basis to make sure it’s all good.

What about marketing support?

James: Right. Now here’s the big daddy. The marketing support. It’s a general topic, but again, whether someone is interested in the service or not, it’s really I just wanted to serve it as a checklist to see, what are business owners actually doing in their business? I know just off the top of my head we are publishing content. So we record audio, it gets put on our website as a podcast, and we transcribe it. We illustrate it sometimes, we broadcast our customers about it. We’re doing this on a weekly basis. Are any of those sort of tasks in there and where do you draw the line?

Justin: Yeah, it’s a tricky one with regards to where we draw the line. I think we just need to have a chat with people on a as-needs basis and see what it is that exactly they want us to be doing. Because like we talked about earlier, this is very customizable. People want content done in different ways. We’re not going to create a video for you, but if you create the video and give it to us, we can strip out the audio. We can create some Instagram images that’ll go with it, or a banner image that can go on the Facebook post about the video to publish it, or on the blog post. Those sort of things. We’re repurposing the content that you’re creating.

So this is something that I’ve been doing myself, and that’s where we set up the systems and then we have been helping out our other clients that we’re looking after their website, we’ve started offering it to them. So generally, it’s a matter of taking their content, repurposing it a little bit, doing the actual publishing of the post on to WordPress so that you don’t have to worry about logging in. And then we’ll stick those ads on your social media accounts, schedule in an email for you. Those sort of things are generally what we’re doing. So it’s not high level content creation that we’re doing for you. It’s more leveraging the content that you create.

James: Right. Well that sounds fair. So it’s basically an as per applicant basis, like if someone’s punching out a video a day, that might be overusing the service.

Justin: Yeah.

James: What if they’re not publishing content? Does it build up as a credit? Does it expire?

Justin: It does expire. So that’s just the five hours maximum per month is that package. If people are needing a lot more work than that, then we’ll customize a package to suit. But I sort of think that that five hours of work per month is generally a good starting point and that will cover you for publishing one piece of content a week. That will cover the basics, I guess.

James: I mean, it’s amazing. It could really only work if not everyone claims five hours every month. You are the ultimate in humble pricing, I think.

The train wrecks they encounter

What sort of train wrecks come to you to fix? Like, you talked about before, people are not securing their website or updating it like they’ve got it, you did develop the site from your website development division, and they go off and run it into the ground. What about from an ongoing business perspective, what sort of tips could you give someone, having seen a lot of websites in your agency?

Justin: Yeah. So I guess one thing is that the worst case scenarios that we often encounter is that someone has got someone to build their website and they’ve used a theme that they’ve bought from Themeforest and they’ve just customized the theme files to get it to how they want it to look. And quite often that is something that we really can’t work with. If you’re customizing the actual theme files then that means that that theme can’t be updated.

As I talked about before, when we get into that monthly maintenance and WordPress updates something and the plugins update and the theme then needs to be updated in order to patch a vulnerability against malware, then you can’t do that without wrecking all of the whole website’s design and all the changes that you’ve made to it.

So you need to make sure that you’re using child themes, and so that’s where you get the theme and you create what’s called a child theme of it, which holds all the customization that you’re going to make to that theme. And then the theme can be safely updated without breaking all of those customizations.

So that’s how we build our sites, and if someone comes to us with a site that hasn’t been done like that, then it really is a case of we’re going to have to rebuild your site. So that’s obviously not a very ideal situation. Over the last couple of months, we have been getting quite a few people coming to us who we’ve had nothing to do with before, but they’ve had their site hacked and they’re coming to us saying, “Yeah, look, we need to get this cleaned up and can you maintain it so this doesn’t happen again, because it’s been a massive stress to my business?”

James: It might be an upfront lump just to get it fixed and then it’s an easy maintenance program.

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. The stress that you go through dealing with malware and getting that fixed up and that sort of thing is really, it’s just so much worth in having that monthly maintenance checks done just to make sure that it is secure. It can really throw you out for a whole month dealing with malware on your website, if it’s particularly hard to clean up.

James: Yeah, I’ve seen some classics. It’s something that we do see sometimes in the membership. Hey, my site’s been taken offline, I can’t access it, can’t contact the host or whoever built it. It’s like, some people really, just like they’re throwing the keys away and being a bit reckless with their site.

Justin: Yeah, that’s it. You wouldn’t do that with your house, just leave it completely unsecured and that sort of thing. Or your shopfront, if you have an offline business, you would certainly make sure that your shop was secure, or your factory. So even on online, you’ve got to make sure that you’re taking those precautions to keep your website or your business assets secure online.

James: Yeah, I’m not so worried about my house anymore because the internet sucks that bad. I don’t think anyone’s going to want to come here. It’s all good.

Summing things up

James: So Justin, I think we’ve rounded out our sort of logical topics for our discussion today. I really didn’t want this to be perceived as a huge sales initiative, you know, product spiel. It is something that is important, because everyone who is listening to this podcast has or should have a website. So it’s a relevant topic.

I wanted to cover some of the major gotchas and I wanted to be able to provide a solution for everyone who has ever asked me, I love the concept of Own The Racecourse, how do I get a team? Where do I start? And I’m just going to say, head over to our review of Justin’s service and get on to it. Evergreen support is the way forward for people in that in-between phase until they’ve got a big business.

And when I say big, I mean look, let’s not be silly. In Australia, a small business is up to deca-millions, which is hilarious, right? Almost all of us are running micro-businesses even if you’re doing a few million dollars a year. But until you’re doing a million dollars a year, you probably don’t need a five-person team in-house. It’s great when you get there, and I’m just blessed with the team that I have.

I’ve got the little team now compared to the big team we had, and I’ve tried to do some of the things you’re doing, Justin. We’ve had website development services and we’ve had SEO services. And running a service business takes a certain skill set, and whilst we were doing well with it, I’m a lot more relaxed now that I don’t have a service business. So my hat is off to you. Big kudos for taking on such a challenge, and I’m thankful that you’re providing great solutions.

So there you go. This has been episode 573, and I’ve been speaking with Justin Meadows. You can find him at EvergreenSupport.co, and we’ll also link toa review where you can check out more about his offerings on our own website here. So thanks, Justin, for coming along and sharing.

Justin: Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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