In his December 2 article Creative Haystack Listings, Jason Fried of 37signals used a sample from my advertisement on Haystack as an example of creative marketing on the service:
I’ll quote the exchange we had in the article’s comments:
(Me) Thanks for the mention! Haystack has [cliche alert] changed the way I do business. I’m booking clients with bigger budgets who actually come to me. That’s a vast improvement on trolling Craigslist where hardly anyone replies to emails and when they do, they “have a limited budget” (read: spec).
…Last month was the most profitable since I went freelance eight months ago and I don’t think it’d be possible without this service. Keep up the good work!
(JF) AWESOME . That warms us up inside! So glad to hear Haystack is bringing you good business. Thanks for listing. Continued success.
Wow, that whole writeup and exchange definitely made my day. Not only is Jason Fried one of my business heroes, but since I began freelancing, I’ve never been an example on a public blog. I feels great to be recognized—one of the things I miss most about working in an office.
Another funny thing is that the logo/slogan I created actually did take a while to get just right, so I appreciate the fact that someone took notice (I hope potential clients do, too). It was a design and marketing experiment that seems to have worked. By the way, I also appreciate the traffic spike I received from Signal vs. Noise that day. Thanks, guys!
Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at OfficePort Chicago for the official 1-Day WordPress Workshop. This event seems to be sold out but hopefully, there will more workshops in the near future for those who can’t make it.
My topic list includes WordPress themes and plugins, so I thought I could provide a list ahead of time of some links we might use during the discussions.
Finding the Perfect WordPress Theme
WordPress Plugins List – The Most Useful + Highest Quality
- Fluency Admin
- Google Analyticator
- All in One SEO Pack
- Ajax Plugin Helper
- Akismet
- Redirection
- Twitter Tools
- WP-DBManager
- WP No Category Base
- Get the Image
- Gravity Forms
- Lightbox Plus
- flickrRSS
- Pods
- More Fields
- GigPress
…And Other WordPress Resources
November 13, 2009
Stuff We Love
Digging into WordPress by Chris Coyer and Jeff Starr is neither boring, nor outdated, which is more than I can say for 99.9% of all the ebooks I’ve read over the years. The book was released earlier this week as a .pdf download, but at over 400 pages, you’ll definitely be getting your money’s worth.
If you want to know everything about WordPress 2.8, than look no further. I’ve learned a lot from this book already (even as a guy who’s been using WordPress for three years) and I’m sure you will, too. The authors are also promising to keep updating the book over time and your purchase secures a lifetime subscription to any new version they may release. My vote is that Digging should become the new official WordPress codex. Great job, gentlemen!
Want a sneak peak? Here’s a sample chapter. Let me know what you think below!
November 12, 2009
Stuff We Love
This announcement from WPMU.org should easily make topic list for the next show of WordPress Weekly.
First, they revisit old territory with a semi-dis to Automattic and their alleged third-party commercial cock-blocking, then the announcement of WPPlugins, the supposed app store for WordPress plugins.
Is this goodbye to free [quality] plugins? Maybe, but if this service is to catch on, it’ll take six months to a year for real adoption, so no need to freak out just yet.
The major problems WPPlugins face are: 1) plugin developers haven’t seemed to be very commercially oriented in the past, so I’m questioning if the best and most well known devs will switch over now and 2) WordPress has been in development for almost five years and thousands of free plugins have already been released. If the business strategy really wanted to succeed, it would have had to have been to the market long before 98% of the WordPress plugins ever to exist were already created.
I guess we’ll see, but I can’t see why a developer wouldn’t want to monetize their work. This WPPlugins deal seems incredibly fair. I haven’t read the exclusivity fine print, but Incsub, the company behind this project, as well as the better known (and personally loathed) WPMUDev Premium project, only gets 10% of each sale or plugin subscription.
If the service came out a year or two ago, I would predict nothing but great success, but now, who knows? I have a feeling that the biggest predictor might be the adoption (or download) numbers of WordPress in general. If they’re rising, then the market is getting larger, which means quality (and more importantly, dependability) will begin to become more important to the “average” WordPress user. And not surprisingly, average users do equal value with price, hence their aversion to open-source technologies in the first place.
Bonus trivia:
- Will questions about these premium plugins be allowed on the wordpress.org forums?
- What will Automattic’s reaction be?
- Why didn’t Automattic create this service themselves a long time ago?
October 12, 2009
Blog,News
…but, then again, so is everyone else. Check me (Jason Pelker of Item-9 Consulting) out anyway–I’m being interviewed on Chicago public access about WordPress.
Looking good, right?
