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Need for Speed

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

Nick M.

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Background

I've dabbled in some other adventures before, all of which have not succeeded for one way or another. The biggest problem: there was no problem to solve! The next biggest issue was on execution (keyword: "dabbled").

So now, utilizing my experience coding websites as a hobby for years, I will speed up other business's WordPress sites. Luckily, I'm only just out of college and have plenty of time to work on this.

Why focus on website speed in particular?
  • Very clear value proposition
  • East to demonstrate value
  • There's a plethora of slow sites
  • Speeding up your website can literally change your business overnight
Best of all, most developers, business owners, or website designers have no idea how to really speed up a site.

The Main Issue

Many business owners don't know how much they need a fast website. Yet there's been tons of research to show that every millisecond counts!


You could go on for days finding similar articles.

The hardest part will be to communicate the value upfront. My current solution: find websites that are absurdly slow and do cold emails.

Progress

Sent out some cold emails last week, got one sale (completed successfully) and another reply expressing potential interest. Still in the early stages, but making progress.

This thread will document the weekly process of starting out from scratch and growing a large business along with all the twists and turns it takes to get there.

Stay tuned to see how everything turns out.
 
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ApparentHorizon

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I'm in this space.

What I need is a WordPress consultant to speed up my clients' sites. Someone who can keep up with the changes in technology. So far I've found 1 who actually delivers, out of the million plus web devs out there.

Business owners won't/don't care about our optimization guides. Caching, CDN, PHP 7.3, etc.

You'd fare better in web design groups. Your stuff would be in high demand, if you can demonstrate value.
 

Andy Black

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What @ApparentHorizon said.

I’m constantly referring clients to my website optimisation friend.
 

Nick M.

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I'm in this space.

What I need is a WordPress consultant to speed up my clients' sites. Someone who can keep up with the changes in technology. So far I've found 1 who actually delivers, out of the million plus web devs out there.

Business owners won't/don't care about our optimization guides. Caching, CDN, PHP 7.3, etc.

You'd fare better in web design groups. Your stuff would be in high demand, if you can demonstrate value.
What @ApparentHorizon said.

I’m constantly referring clients to my website optimisation friend.

Great advice! I'll get into looking at targeting web design groups.

Any advice how to do that? My initial instinct would be to research many of them and reach out to them with past projects to show that I can add value to their group. Of course, as @ApparentHorizon points out, it's really all dependent on showing that I can add value to their workflow and their final product.
 
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Nick M.

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What I need is a WordPress consultant to speed up my clients' sites. Someone who can keep up with the changes in technology. So far I've found 1 who actually delivers, out of the million plus web devs out there.

Definitely. Technology on the internet changes very rapidly. It's like at least every 6 months now there's a decently major change in web technology.

My current plan to tackle this is that right now I'm documenting the process I use to speed up sites, testing every single aspect for the most optimal solution, and then retesting it rigorously every 6 months (at the bare minimum).

Business owners won't/don't care about our optimization guides. Caching, CDN, PHP 7.3, etc.

And neither do most "site speed developers" I've noticed. Like Caching, CDN, PHP 7.3, minification, CSS/JS concatenation, and the other standard tricks are just the bare minimum.

Like you mentioned, business owners don't care about any of this stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even care about a faster site, per se, but rather the results a faster site brings them. From what I can tell so far, the value is not in the actual work that goes into speeding up a site. It's how a fast site helps their business.
 

Andy Black

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Great advice! I'll get into looking at targeting web design groups.

Any advice how to do that? My initial instinct would be to research many of them and reach out to them with past projects to show that I can add value to their group. Of course, as @ApparentHorizon points out, it's really all dependent on showing that I can add value to their workflow and their final product.
“Show, don’t tell” your expertise.

Ideally get to know group owners and get invited in to help their members with XYZ. Else go in helping folks in a non-spammy way.

Check out my inbound sales braindump in my signature.
 

ApparentHorizon

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Great advice! I'll get into looking at targeting web design groups.

Any advice how to do that? My initial instinct would be to research many of them and reach out to them with past projects to show that I can add value to their group. Of course, as @ApparentHorizon points out, it's really all dependent on showing that I can add value to their workflow and their final product.

You can go to Facebook and search by group. Web design, web development, wordpress, etc.

No need to create an outreach program. I'd do the opposite. Document your process, share all the details with these groups. Then the people with the money to outsource this work will find you as the expert. They'll reach for you instead. (As Andy pointed out - show...)

(Don't forget this forum. Plenty of web devs and owners here ;) )

That one guy that I hired for WordPress optimization...

He made easy to follow videos, which I implemented on 1 site. Then paid him to do it for an important project.

So unlike Andy, I learn to do it myself, because some scenarios don't make sense to outsource. Other large projects, I put together a team and let them handle it.

While you document your process, have your own website as well.

You said you sent out 1 cold outreach and got a paid gig. Remember to repeat success. Keep reaching out to these leads. The same thing applies, provide the value to them. (aka render the service successfully in exchange for your fee. Case studies are nice.) Then a tipping point will come where they're all coming to you instead.
 
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Nick M.

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“Show, don’t tell” your expertise.

Ideally get to know group owners and get invited in to help their members with XYZ. Else go in helping folks in a non-spammy way.

Check out my inbound sales braindump in my signature.
You can go to Facebook and search by group. Web design, web development, wordpress, etc.

No need to create an outreach program. I'd do the opposite. Document your process, share all the details with these groups. Then the people with the money to outsource this work will find you as the expert. They'll reach for you instead. (As Andy pointed out - show...)

(Don't forget this forum. Plenty of web devs and owners here ;) )

That one guy that I hired for WordPress optimization...

He made easy to follow videos, which I implemented on 1 site. Then paid him to do it for an important project.

So unlike Andy, I learn to do it myself, because some scenarios don't make sense to outsource. Other large projects, I put together a team and let them handle it.

While you document your process, have your own website as well.

You said you sent out 1 cold outreach and got a paid gig. Remember to repeat success. Keep reaching out to these leads. The same thing applies, provide the value to them. (aka render the service successfully in exchange for your fee. Case studies are nice.) Then a tipping point will come where they're all coming to you instead.

Thanks @andy and @ApparentHorizon a lot. I'll definitely keep both the inbound sales braindump and helping people out by sharing information in mind. Here's a quick update.

Facebook

Personally, I'm not a fan of using social media in general for personal use. But for business use, I can get behind that (ironically for many of the reasons why I don't want it for personal use). So I've never had a Facebook account. Created one and created a business page that I could use. However, as I was about 80% completed with that process Facebook locked me out of the account to prevent fraudulent accounts. I'm in the process of getting access to it again. I think part of it was because I made the personal account as private as possible (because I don't want people finding me personally).

Website

Got a site up and running. Also has a specific pricing structure and product offering. And, of course, it loads fast (typically under 1 second for most parts of the country).

Just need to give it blogging capabilities so I can start an inbound sales process.

Other Inbound Efforts

Because I haven't gotten Facebook setup yet, I looked for several other forums for WordPress online to help contribute to, including the Stack Exchange WordPress forum. Probably not as helpful as Facebook, but at least it's something.

Expanded on Outreach

To try and repeat my success so far with cold emails and outreach, I setup an autoresponder so I could quickly send out more personalized cold emails (with automatic followups) while spending less time. That way, I can repeat the outbound success while having more time to work on inbound endeavors.

Moving Forward

I read one of @andy's posts about how whenever he answers a question and helps someone out, he reposts his answer everywhere that's appropriate. So, for the next week my plan is to create helpful content/resources and help as many people as possible in the areas of site speed. And every time I create something that's helpful, put it in all appropriate places to help even more.

I really do appreciate your thoughts and suggestions.
 

Andy Black

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I read one of @andy's posts about how whenever he answers a question and helps someone out, he reposts his answer everywhere that's appropriate. So, for the next week my plan is to create helpful content/resources and help as many people as possible in the areas of site speed. And every time I create something that's helpful, put it in all appropriate places to help even more.
Just be careful with this. In my haste to post helpful stuff in other groups I ended up coming across as "content marketing" more than being helpful. I dialled it back and personalise help for each group. I'm even taking it as far as creating personalised videos in Facebook groups (where the owner has specifically invited me in to help their members).
 

Nick M.

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Just thought I'd post a quick update here for the progress thread.

Sales

Right now, I'm getting 1-2 sites a week to speed up. Haven't yet gotten a repeat customer, but building up great reviews from everyone that I'm using to help get more customers.

Outbound Efforts

Cold emails didn't work at all. Though I wasn't getting bad open rates (38%), reply rates or even the number of people clicking on a link were close to 0. Didn't even net a single sale from them.

So I've moved onto other methods. Currently, I'm getting most of my business through UpWork where theres 5-6 people a week explicitly looking for WordPress site speed. Also, I've setup a landing page and running some Google Ads on it. Still fine-tuning the search terms and text for the ad to make sure the right people are coming in, but generating qualified leads already through there.

Inbound Efforts

Definitely growing the number of articles on my blog and interacting with people on Facebook.

Overall

Everything is growing despite the fact that I've had several obstacles at every step so far. Just got to keep trying new things and seeing what works.
 
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