Let’s Get Nerdy: All things Website, Hosting, Affiliates, and Automation with Jim Carter & R.T. Custer

I think the most important way to start is you have to balance what you need now with where you want to go and how you want to build your business over time. Right, there's, there's nothing new there, but you really have to take the time to think about that. It's, it's almost like if you knew you're going to do a cross country road trip, are you going to be the most comfortable in a Prius or are you going to be the most comfortable in a car that actually doesn't just get you more miles to the gallon, but is going to maintain that distance?

What is keeping you from growing your business to the next level? I'm Jess Burgio, one of the hosts here for Fast Foundations, the podcast. Between the three of us, my co host Jim, RT and I have grown several businesses scaling beyond seven figures. And you know what? Not a single one of those businesses came with a blueprint. For years we poured time and resources into our businesses from salons, tech companies and product based businesses navigating success and failures on our own. For all of us though, it began to change in 2019 when we found a community of like minded entrepreneurs and industry leaders to mentor us. That community was Fast Foundations. Just like the mastermind, we're bringing on experts and having discussions to give you tips to not only improve the foundational skill sets you need, but to also fast track your growth. We'll dive into the core pillars of what will make your business succeed. Whether you have a brand new idea that you're looking to turn into a business, or you're already a successful entrepreneur looking to scale, this community is here to take you to the next level. Let's dive in.

Welcome to the Fast Foundations podcast. This is another slash, the first Ask Carter and Custer episode. My name is R.T. custer and I'm Jim Carter, sitting here with the Jim Carter who's just chomping at the bit. I'm ready to tell you about all this technical nerdy shit that we had to and get to do. The question today that was posed, Jim, is why did we choose WordPress and what other things, technical things, did we choose when we were making the decisions around building fastfoundations.com yeah.

And it's a great question, right? Because when faced with building a business, which so many of us do constantly, there's a lot to consider, there's a lot to think about. There's a lot of just I need to get something live now, but also I don't want to screw up my future plans. So let's actually just zoom out and not that far ago. Let's just think about a month or month and a half ago. So right now, recording this mid August, we are accepting new enrollments for the next round of FAST Foundation's Mastermind. A few months ago, when we realized, okay, it's time to start accepting sales soon, we need to be able to announce this to our current Mastermind members. We are getting ready to open up the online component, which we've talked about and hinted at, which we're really excited about. And we, we started having these conversations of. All right, well, we have some business needs. We don't just want to send payment links and then just figure it out and then have everything in Google sheets. And you know that works. And it technically worked for us on the first one, which the Mastermind members knew they were part of a little bit of an experiment, but the experiments working. I mean, dude, our renewal rate is insane. I'm, I'm so proud of that. And we wanted to serve our members at the highest rate, but also have something really sustainable. Yeah. So rt, I remember when, when, when you called the meeting for, for us and, and the team to talk about what are the business requirements, what do we need? How do we set things up for success? There were, there were a few key components. Right. So first we just needed to understand like what we were building. We needed to have a platform that was fast, that was simple, that was capable of hosting everything from this podcast to having the ability to take sales, to have sales pages, to have a simple checkout flow. We talked about having affiliates, which there's now effectively a great affiliate program which is all hosted by fast foundations.

Um, and we need the affiliate payments, like not just an affiliate program, but also automations around how do those affiliates get paid so that we don't have to have somebody like Heather, which. Thank you, Heather, if you're listening to this, for helping us figure out all the different affiliate links and different links and all that stuff last time, we don't need anyone like in, in house to create those links, automate the payments. Like it just happens. That was a right. That was a big one. How do we keep this thing lean?

Yeah. And reducing all that overhead. Right. So it's not even just affiliate payments, but it's. Do we want a human to have to run credit cards every month? No, of course not. We want an automation to do that. So thinking about that, we talked about all these different business requirements and we realized, okay, well, let's just start to unpack that, and this is what I did with our tech team is we just sat down and we looked at all of our options. So I think the most important way to start is you have to balance what you need now with where you want to go and how you want to build your business over time. Right? There's, there's nothing new there, but you really have to take the time to think about that. It's, it's almost like if you knew you're gonna do a cross country road trip, are you going to be the most comfortable in a Prius or are you going to be the most comfortable in a car that actually doesn't just get you more miles to the gallon, but is, is going to maintain that distance? So we wanted to look at a couple of like the titans in the ring. We started with thinking about, okay, is it, is this like a job for Kajabi for example? I'm a big fan of Kajabi. I've used it for years. And when thinking about Kajabi, for example, you know, they have the affiliate program, they have the payment links, they have the members, they've integrated email marketing, all that was great. But we also knew that we needed some more flexibility than it offered. Right, which is why you do your homework and you think through it. And then I thought, well, maybe Shopify. And then, I mean, rt, you're the Shopify expert. You know, we, we talked about, is it called recursion or refersion?

One of those Refersion is awesome. It's an awesome app within Shopify for, for affiliates. And technically, yeah, Shopify could have done most of these things, but Shopify wasn't built for this kind of stuff. And there are SEO consequences of, of those, both of those other options, you know, and, and that's really, when we look at this and I, I like the, the car analogy of like taking a road trip. It's every five months, we're taking a cross country road trip and you know, we have to prepare for that within those five months. And it's like throughout the, the five months between our launches because we do a six month mastermind. And so there's one month where we're like filling the next round. And so we have to not just use that one month, we have to set up systems and processes to build our email list, build all of our lists, build our social media, build excitement for it, and then say, okay, the next round is open and then get 50 people for that next round. And so I like that analogy. It's not as simple as just Packing the car, hopping in and hitting go like you, you have to think about it and, and plan for it ahead of time. And a month long road trip every, you know, five months takes several months of planning and thinking and talking before you actually get in the car.

That's it. So we did that. We, we kind of went down those, those roads and we realized, man, we're going to do a lot of analogies on this one. So if you're new to the show, which everybody here should be, because I think it's episode five.

If you're new to the show, welcome.

Because a lot of analogies, just get ready for the analogies, get ready for the dad jokes. This is going to be fun. So we, we settled on WordPress. And by settling on WordPress, I don't mean it was our last pick. WordPress still powers a third of the Internet, so it's still a titan in the ring by any means. And there's a reason that so many companies, so many businesses use it. People have different mixed opinions about WordPress. In my personal past, I built more WordPress sites than I can count. You can set it up to do incredible things, but it also can be overwhelming because it's a little bit more of a blank slate and it's no longer just a utility for publishing blog posts or having a quick turnaround site. It really can take a lot and you can, you can do a lot of damage with WordPress. And we realized, okay, well, with the right plugins, the right configuration, this is going to be our best bet. So we chose WordPress and that went down this road of great. Well, if WordPress is going to be the main component of how we're going to build this business, then we need to make sure we've got the right plugins, the right settings, and the right strategy to actually put it all together. So, really excited to dive into this episode and explain a lot of the things that we put in place here. And I just want to share from the ground level, from where we hosted it, all the way to the ideas about how we optimize it. So that way, if you're thinking about building something similar to what you can now see at fastfoundations.com, which is long form blog posts hosting this podcast, Fast Pages, a beautifully integrated checkout system, an affiliate program, subscriptions, and more and more and more, then you can, you can play with the Big Docs and you can run with it like us. So let's actually just dive right in.

Yeah, so I think the, the first, the first decision with all of this stuff. Once, once we, once you or, or we made this decision of, you know, Kajabi versus Shopify versus WordPress versus just any other ideas. Once we're like, all right, we're going to use WordPress, then it's like, where are we hosting it? So you went with WordPress engine to keep it all kind of in the same or WP Engine to keep it all in the same world. What was your methodology behind that as the host?

Yeah. So WP Engine is one of the leading WordPress hosting companies. I've worked with them for years. I actually have a few friends that worked there years back there. There's a lot of ways that you can host a website these days. You can build your own infrastructure, which is not fun unless you're a developer. And even if you are a developer, it comes with a lot of extra things to know.

Just don't do that.

Yeah, don't, don't, don't do that. You just don't do it anymore. You can sign up for one of like the GoDaddy, you know, two dollar a month, you know, shared hosting environments. I also just very rarely recommend that. That's if you just need something to throw online and you, you are planning on forgetting about it, but it has to be there and it, we should.

Do a whole episode on hosting because I think there's a lot of people like, like me and I know Lindsey, we have like 30 domains just parked in GoDaddy because we just want to make sure we have those domains and I never know, do I just keep it there, do I bring it over? So let's, let's put a pin in that one for sure because that'll be a future episode.

I'd be happy to expand on it. So I'll run through this, but we'll expand on this on future episodes. So you can do it yourself. You can do a really simple shared setup or in this case now, because WordPress is so broadly accepted, there are WordPress hosting environments. And I'll try to stay away from too many of the tech terms here, but the idea is that WordPress is its own piece of software, right? When you set up WordPress you are simply installing software on a computer that runs and that comes with things to know about WordPress. So high level WordPress requires the PHP programming language. It requires typically what's called a MySQL database. Sometimes there's, there's ways to work with it otherwise and there are certain security things that come into that There are certain ways that you set that up in order for it to function really well and to thrive. And if you just get a cheapo, whatever, off the shelf hosting environment and you just throw WordPress on it, it may not be secure, it may be open to vulnerabilities, it may be open to attacks. But when you choose a WordPress hosting company, in this case WP Engine, that's all they do. All they do is host WordPress sites. They know exactly what to look for, they know how to hedge threats, they know how to get on top of it. They run a lot of the core updates for you and it just reduces a lot of that overhead. It's really not that much more expensive. So. And by the way, everything we talk about here, we'll link up in the show notes. So if you're taking notes or if you're on YouTube watching, don't worry about it. We will link here. You can check them all out. So we opted to go with WP Engine. We have an agency account there for Carter and Custer. It's where we recommend for all of our agency clients in 99% of the cases. Sometimes there's a wild card, it just doesn't make sense. But fastfoundations.com is hosted with WP Engine out of the box. It's clean, it's fast, it's optimized, and it's ready for growth. Then we took it a step further. And there's a concept when you own a domain. Some of you may have seen this when you register a domain and wherever you register with it says, where would you like to point your DNS? And DNS stands for Domain Name Servers. That is basically air traffic control for your domain name. If somebody types it into the web, it looks up at that DNS record, if you will, and that DNS record will say, here's where your hosting is. It does the same thing for email. If you send an email to your domain, your email may be hosted with G Suite, for example, but your domain may be hosted with WP Engine. So that's how it starts to do this proxy and it allows it to route whatever quote records are needed to say this is where it lives. So we host again in 99% of the cases, all of our DNS with Cloudflare. And Cloudflare is a really fun startup that probably a little over a decade old at this point. They originally won like the TechCrunch Disrupt Award and they were, they started with the mission to just make the web a safer place. And it's turned into this massive company, but they have a lot of out of the box optimizations and also work really well with WordPress. And it just offers really easy to use ways to work with your DNS. So our team of pros at this, we, you know, we put it all together, that's all the base stuff. But if you're looking for a clean way to set up a WordPress site, recommend WP Engine and a really easy way to work with DNS. We typically recommend Cloudflare, but again, your mileage is going to vary. We're using those car analogies. If you need to just kind of take a step back and do it simple with whatever you, wherever you purchased your domain name, you don't have to use any of these. This is just going to be our recommendations along the way.

Now that's the base. So you have your WordPress site, you have hosting with WP Engine, you have DNS through Cloudflare. That's kind of where most people start and that kind of gets you to the landing page or the point where then you make a decision of, okay, what do I want this to look like? And so the next decision for a lot of people and if you have a developer or, and a designer or an agency building all this for you, they'll make these decisions for you. But these are all good things to ask about, like who are you hosting it with, how are you handling DNS and if they recommend something else, you know, that's okay. But at least you have this like base knowledge. If you're doing it yourself, then you probably want a theme. And so we went with the Astra theme and we used the Pro version. What was your methodology behind that theme and that version of that theme? Jim?

Yeah. In this case, I am not the designer, nor do I ever claim to be. So this was a recommendation from our designers. There are so many themes out there for WordPress. It's, it's immeasurable, right? You just, you just can't get on top of it. But Astra has sort of taken a rank as one of the leading theme frameworks, if you will. And what that means is it's, it's got a lot of those building blocks that just make it easy to do a lot. And there are so many templates and styles and things that just work really well with it, that it's just a really good foundational piece. So we went with Astra and we have a. I think there's an agency pro license. I can't remember what we pay for at this point anymore. But it's neither here nor there. We, we went with the Pro version because it unlocks a lot of these ready to go extra things that are just going to help us with, with growing the site. And we complement that with the Elementor plugin. And Elementor is our team's absolute favorite. Let's call it what you see is what you get or you know, drag and drop type of interface builder. And the reasons why are because when you take a really powerful, really robust, really supported theme and you pair it with a really robust, really supported, really powerful plugin that helps to work with that theme and make all of the elements on your site clickable and easy to update. I mean rt, you can get on there and update it. Any of our VAs can update it. Anybody on our website.

If I can do it, anything is possible.

There it is. So. But it just box so much more potential and it gets you out of having to deal with all that code.

So once you have your theme and you add Elementor, which lets you edit the theme really easily. Question. I think at this point somebody that's listening to this is like, okay, if I have all these things, doesn't something like Squarespace basically just give me all of this at once and I just like I'm. Squarespace is basically built so I can just drag and drop. And isn't that the point of things like Squarespace where they just kind of make it super easy on people like me that I can just design my own website? So what would you say is the pro to doing it this way and like starting fresh from scratch with WordPress and adding these things? Because in my mind we're getting to the same place for probably similar cost. Maybe Squarespace is even a little less. So what are your thoughts behind that? And why should you do it this way and not just slap a Squarespace up there?

Yeah, it's a great way of thinking about it. And the answer is flexibility with granular control versus making sure that it's the right platform that handles the road trip like we talked about. So I don't know if Squarespace handles affiliates. I don't think they do. I absolutely could be wrong there. But I did not look into Squarespace as an option there because I knew that it also didn't handle the subscriptions that we needed the way that we needed to do. I knew it didn't handle the, the deep integration that we needed that control over to really build a powerful business. So that's why if you kind of zoom Back out and go to the beginning of what we talked about here. If you're doing your homework and figuring out, okay, what's my immediate need, but then where do I really want to build it? There's two trains of thought that I like to teach when it comes to tech. One is definitely build for where you're going, but don't lose track of where you're, where you're turning into. Right. We learned this actually at one of our Mastermind trips. Remember when we did the Chris, we went to the, the racetrack. Where were we? Radford. Radford racing out in. Yeah. Redford Racing out in Scottsdale. And for everybody here, we, we went to this racetrack and we jumped in these like beast, like Dodge Diablos. It was just awesome. We had a, we had a blast. But it was also an entrepreneur training camp. Right. And the guy there, he said a really, really awesome line that stuck with me, which is, when you're driving, you, you have to always be looking where you're going because if you're just looking at where you are, you're gonna crash. Right. So think about it. If you're behind the wheel and you're driving down the road and you know there's a turn coming up, but you're not looking at where you're going with that turn, you're gonna end up in a place you don't wanna be. And it's.

We were on some racetrack where. We were on a racetrack. Left turn and then there's another left turn right after that. So if you don't see that and you try to accelerate through the first turn, you're gonna go right off the track at 100 miles an hour. So he was, he was looking out for our safety and his insurance liability.

Yeah.

But really didn't want paperwork that day.

Let'S put it that way.

Yeah, it's. No, it's a huge, a really, a really good analogy. And like, I think, you know, I just threw out Squarespace as one. I think there's like 50 examples probably of companies similar to Squarespace that try to make this whole process of what you're describing easier and just start from not scratch. And that's really, that's why I like Shopify is you just sign up for Shopify, you connect a domain and you buy a couple apps and you buy a theme and then you're like basically good to go. But most people don't realize that as you layer those things on every single app that I add in, Squarespace would be the same way every app and every theme can significantly reduce the loading page and the time, or the loading time to load a page and all that kind of stuff. And these are things we just don't, most people don't think about when you're just taking one road trip. And that's really back to the analogy. If we were just doing one six month Mastermind one time, yeah, we would just toss something up here real quick and none of this matters, but we're building something that's hopefully going to live on the Internet for like 10 plus years and we're going to use actively all the time. So it, it has to be fast, it has to be clean, it has to be easy to edit. And that's why we're making these decisions.

This way and that that's exactly how we built this business, right when, when we first picked up the Mastermind model and we said, let's go, right, we're going to have the first event in, you know, a month. And when we announced it, we didn't have the time, the space, the resources to even consider any of this stuff. We sent simple payment links and we had Zapier throw like, great. We had a new person that put it in, it put it in Slack and we all celebrated and then it put it in a Google sheet and then we figured out what to do with it. Like, we were scrappy and, and we figured it out. But we also learned by doing that what the business requirement should be. It would have been immature and not the right time for us to make a lot of these decisions before we had some kind of traction. But we also, you know, in, in the way of thinking about this as a business, we got paid to figure it out, right? Everybody who joined that first round and supported us and saw our dream and our vision for it, they gave us the feedback that we asked for and now we're implementing it. So that's why squarespace could be the right choice. And for your business, whoever's listening right now, you could be the right choice. But just don't lose track of where you're going with it. That's why we're doing this whole episode is I want to explain what went into it so you can understand the ethos behind our choices.

So speaking of money, let's talk about money. Once we have this website which, you know, now with all the stuff we just talked about, you have a website that you can design and make look beautiful and functions and is fast, but now it's like, all right, how do we take their money? So you surprised me when you came back and you said, let's use WooCommerce. And I was like, I thought WooCommerce was its own website platform. What are you even talking about? And then you were like, no, they actually have a WordPress like Plugin. And I'm like, okay, cool. So what's your methodology around the WooCommerce plugin for WordPress?

Yeah, so WooCommerce is one of the largest supported commerce plugins for WordPress. There are a lot to choose from. I can't even really think of most of the others right now because there's so many. But when you, when you think about how do I enable Commerce on my WordPress site? WooCommerce has kind of taken the rank. It started as a fun project and then it really turned into a whole business. Now it's, it's owned by the Automattic company. That's the name Automattic, that's the company that, that runs WordPress. So it's, it's been taken over by developers and really embraced and supported. And it's one of those things that if you were choosing between that and something else or you had all the choices, you just need to ask yourself how robust of a payments system do you need? And similar to choosing the hosting platform, similar to choosing the base system, you have to ask yourself, do I just need to sell one thing and I don't need to worry about SKUs or taxes or shipping or any of that, or do I really need to think about, okay, this is a thing, Maybe I need some options, maybe there's variations, maybe there's sales, maybe there's discounts, maybe there's cross linked products and it's okay if you don't have all that right now, but the last thing I want you to do is to set something up and feel like it's your end all, you know, like it's good and it's going to cover me and then realize, oh man. But now I can't sell to that one person now I can't support that business now I don't have the ability and I've got to go back in time. So WooCommerce is actually very, it's free. They kind of do it as like that freemium type of idea where they do have pro support but the base plugin is free. You can install it then when you really want to start using it, similar to what you're talking about with Shopify, how you can build, you, you can pay for certain apps and that still reduces dev time. WooCommerce is very similar. There are certain extra plugins. So they're called apps on Shopify, right? They're called apps, I think. Is that right? Yeah, I'm not. RT's are Shopify experts. So I'm always going to. For you on that.

Yeah, On Shopify it's apps and on, on WordPress it's plugins.

Plugins. Right. So that's, that's, that's the difference. And with WooCommerce plugins, some of them are provided by the same company, so it's the same developer set and you just know the quality is going to be there. Some of them are third party and some of them are great. So we went down the road of saying, great, we're going to use WooCommerce as the base system. We don't have to have a whole fancy shopping cart and all this other stuff. All of our links are actually just click and then I've got an extra little redirect that just takes you right to the checkout page. So we don't even have a cart because we don't need one. If somebody's buying something from us right now, they're just moving right into checkout. And that's all in the concept of reducing the steps in the funnel. So we use plugins for Google Analytics just because we want to make sure that we have the full picture moving across the whole shopping cart, knowing who's adding things to their quote unquote cart. If they start checkout, if they finish checkout, I want that data in Google Analytics so I can see the conversion and the roi. For our team, right now we're using Stripe as our payment processor. So there's a really well adapted Stripe gateway plugin. And then the big one is what handles our subscriptions. So subscriptions are key for when you're running a subscription business. I think that goes without saying. So you have to be able to support setting up a product that may be paid now, may be paid later, may have a free trial, maybe not will come and, you know, be infinite and it's available until you cancel it or it's got a certain amount of subscription periods because let's say like a mastermind, you can pay over time, but we're not asking you to pay in perpetuity. So those three plugins are sort of the key ones that we use with WooCommerce and that gives us the ability to set up our products and our services and our subscriptions and it gives us the flexibility to be Able to change things up as we go.

And with the subscription model, I mean, a lot of people are talking about subscriptions now. And if you can create a business that has subscriptions, then you have a much higher success rate or potential success rate. But the only thing I wanted to add to that, Jim, is that when you are making that decision of do I need a subscription payment processor? It's not just that pay over time, month over month in perpetuity until they cancel. We also use that subscription to take payments. And there's lots of other ways to do that. Like there's companies that you can say, okay, it's this much upfront and then this much a month for two or three months. And that's my payment plan. The last round, the first round we did this. We, we manually ran those payment plans once a month, which was fine for the first time and is totally cool if you want to start with that. But having something that functions like a subscription that then you hack and use as, as a payment plan just makes things fully automatic and really easy.

Yeah, because it also reduces user error. Right. Like full transparency. We mischarged somebody because we hadn't yet built an sop. And I remember we ran that one and I was like, shit. So had to reach out to them. Hey, really sorry, you know, we, we, we charged you the wrong rate. Fortunately for them, unfortunately for us, it was a lower rate. So, you know, we have integrity and we're like, you're good. Don't worry about it. It's on us. Like, it was our error. But those things happen, right? So I'm not saying those will never happen. When you're using a piece of software, you may discover that the way you set something up, there's a little edge case and you're like, ah, maybe I got to restart that subscription. But you've got software working in the background for you while you sleep. And there's, there's something really, really special about that. So, yeah, we wanted to make sure that we had the right really robust, but minified version of how we were going to handle our subscriptions. We, we put in everything into that to make that great. And something that I really wanted for us was I wanted a really clean checkout. So one thing that I just don't like about WooCommerce is the checkout. Still a little clunky. It's getting better. But everybody that I know loves the Shopify checkout. It's just, it's simple, it's elegant, it's responsive, it's. It's fast. It thinks for you. And while they have their own, like, shop Pay, you know, system to kind of make that even easier, I wanted to make sure we could support Apple pay, Google pay, all of those extras that just make it easier for somebody to say, yes, I'm in. So a while ago, I actually found this. This plugin called Checkout wc. And again, all this will be in the show notes. You can check this out. You can check out the Checkout wc. Yeah, like I said, this is.

This is about as check out our.

Heavy as it gets. Check it out, check it out. Check Out WC was built by this small team of developers who basically wanted that. They wanted to. They wanted to replicate the Shopify checkout interface, which Shopify poured so much money into all of the user research, and they're continually adjusting that, and this team did an amazing job. And it just completely takes over the. The Woocommerce checkout flow. And it basically gives you the Shopify checkout flow. And it's gorgeous, and it works great. Great. And it's got all kinds of extra features, like you can do order bumps, people can adjust their cart, you know, in real time. You can hide or show coupons. It shows all that stuff. So we have a really simple checkout flow now.

Super awesome checkout.

And it works.

The best way. Best way to check it out is to go to fastfoundations.com, sign up for our Mastermind, and complete the entire checkout process.

It's really the perfect way to test it in real time and click that button. You definitely want to check that out. Yeah.

And complete the checkout. And speaking of that, you know, one of the big things that we're using to get people to. To check out our website and check out the Mastermind is the affiliate program. And that was like, the number one thing that we wanted in this website is like, all right, if somebody refers a friend to the mastermind, which, P.S. we have an amazing affiliate program, so hit us up if you haven't seen that and check that out and get yourself on the affiliate list. But how do we reward people that are, you know, sharing fast foundations with their friends if their friend decides to sign up? So we went with Affiliate WP for that. Right?

That's it.

And tell me about your logic around that, Jim.

Yeah, so similar is doing some homework, right? So many people think that I just have all of this in my head, and I've used every piece of software out there, but I Google more things per day than probably most people think. And when we were doing our homework. I went right back to the drawing board, like, okay, well if we're committing to WordPress and we're going to be using this, we need to know what some of the top performing affiliate plugins are for WordPress. That was a mouthful, but there are a lot to choose from, similar to checkout and all that other stuff. So I went and I just deconstructed the features. I was like, okay, well there's a few things that we need. So we need to have the ability for somebody to apply, we need to have the ability for us to approve, we need to have the ability to customize who gets what percentages based off of what products or services. So quick example of that. We are offering a flat rate, really generous amount for people who sign up for the Mastermind. That's also a period in time, right, that's going to end after a certain point because we have a wait list. But it's not like we're taking reservations for the next one at least yet. Now we also are launching our online community and we want to offer a commission on that in perpetuity because we want that to be worth it for people. So there's flat rate, there's commission, there's commission over time. There's also there might be some private products that we don't necessarily want everybody to be able to promote. And if you came in by way of a cookie and you happen to choose something else that might not be on the agenda. So we wanted to have a really simple version for the affiliate, but know that we could handle the complexity on our side just to make sure that we had control and a fine kind of tooth of how we were actually presenting the program. So because of that, this plugin offers things like that, right? It offered the ability to sign up approvals, it gave us the custom way where we could set up recurring referrals, set different prices based off of what products. It even has a zapier integration so we could send downstream things like let our team know when there's a new affiliate approval in Slack or maybe trigger a different email, something like that. So affiliateWP had all of those features and more and that was the choice at the end of the day and really easy to set up. They also have an out of the box affiliate portal that's just gorgeous for the affiliates. So it gets rid of all that WordPress junk and they just look at what they want to see in terms of visits and conversions. And it looked like a great choice based off of the research that Our team did.

And when we share this in the show notes, we can show you like, here's a link to those apps that, that we chose or I'm sorry, the plugins that we chose. But then we can also say here's a link to fastfoundations.com affiliates which will show you what that actually looks like on the front end. If you want to sign up to be an affiliate, here's like, you can follow that flow and again you should. And the only way to follow the whole flow is to sign up to be an affiliate for Fast Foundations, which I highly recommend because we'll pay you as you refer people to Fast Foundations. So check that out. Check the link out in the show notes. Let us know what you think of what this looks like on the front end and if we're missing anything on that. But now you can see like we used this on the back end to show people this on the front end.

That's it.

So that's the website. I mean, yeah, that's, that's like the whole thing. Obviously we can add to it over time, but with all those options, we can add to it fairly simply. So I know you and the team have spent a lot of time on like other like clients websites, you know, for Carter and Custer, and applied a lot of the optimization techniques to Fast Foundation. So you put together like a quick list of like random things that people probably don't even know or think about that you could add to your WordPress site to optimize it. So what comes to your head first on that list?

Yeah, good call. There are a few sort of must have plugins that are, that are on my list that I always recommend. They're in our SOPs. The first is something to optimize all of the images that you upload. So you know how it is. You take a photo with your phone, it's in, you know, almost 4K. It's, you know, it's massive photo. It, you know, it could be 8 megabytes or something like that. Well, we don't want somebody to just load that entire photo on your site. Right. It slows everything down. It's a red flag for Google. So WordPress out of the box does not necessarily optimize photos, even though it gives you an editor, because they're the utility. They're saying, maybe you want this, maybe you're a photographer and you have to have the full quality photo. So there are some image optimizer plugins that are great. The one that we recommend is called Short Pixel It's a one word short pixel image optimizer. They have a bulk processor. They've got their own like flavor of how they compress. And what's really nice about it just runs in the background pretty cheap. You, you add a couple credits, you know, 20 bucks worth or something like that and it'll last you a while. And you can batch process everything that runs through. In the event that it processes, you don't like it, you can actually roll everything back too. So it's really nice the way that that works. We love using that because we can have full screen big beautiful images and it also will do everything down to the little thumbnails to make them lightning fast to load. So that's one is, is if you're going to optimize your site, the lowest hanging fruit is typically images and media. It'll also do PDFs and things like that too. Yep.

And that's a pro tip in general, if you don't use WordPress, if you're on Shopify or something else and you're not optimizing your images for load speed and making the images retain their same quality, but having them be basically smaller file sizes is what we're talking about. Definitely hop on that. There's lots of other ways to solve that problem for other apps.

Yep. So that's, that's image optimizations. Another one that sometimes people tend to forget is analytics. Big fan of data. If you know anything about me, you know that big data guy, big data fan. We've got a couple plugins that we typically recommend there. So I did mention this when we're talking about WooCommerce is there's a Google Analytics WooCommerce plugin for the WooCommerce plugin. Very meta, but not that kind of meta. You know where I'm going with that. We use that to handle plug inception, pushing everything to Google Analytics. There's one plugin that I like for WordPress that handles all the Facebook pixel stuff and it's called Pixel Cat. And I don't know why they named it that, but it does have a cat emoji on it. It's kind of fun every time you go to it. What's nice about Pixel Cat is it's really simple. Just copy and paste that pixel ID. And it's got an integration with WooCommerce. So that gives you the flexibility to be able to say awesome, I want to build a custom audience based off people who went to my site, they started checkout and they didn't finish for Example or people who did finish checkout, I want to hit them with another offer. I want to hit them with a follow up sequence, you know, things like that. So pixelcat's my recommendation for a simple free Facebook pixel integration. Because otherwise you have to do that all in code and that's a mess.

And if we're on the subject of things that have weird names that we're not really sure why they have names, the next one is Hotjar, which if you haven't heard of Hotjar, check it out because the analytics you can get from this plugin and it also works on Shopify and other websites too. It's really cool. It basically like Big Brother style, shows you where the traffic is going on your website. It gives you heat maps of like where people are clicking. The best thing I've found from this is sometimes on your website you don't even realize it, but people think they should and can click on something that's not clickable. And so there'll be a. On a heat map it'll be bright red and it's like everyone, why is everyone trying to click on my face? Like my face isn't a button. But like for whatever reason your face looks like a button in that picture and people are trying to click on it. And so you replace that image, make it not look like a button, and then people will click on the actual button. That's just one more scroll down. And there's little stuff like that that hotjar helps you with. Can't recommend it enough.

Yeah, definitely. If you're for button looking face. That's. I love that.

Maybe a, maybe a bad example there.

No, it's a great. You know what I mean? So things that might look like had I not measured the data, never would have known everybody wanted to click my face.

So yeah, why is everybody clicking on that? Just gotta click that. That's. That's what, that's one of the things that hotjar does. Tons of other analytical things that it does.

So really cool stuff in that platform, man. We. It does everything from scroll maps to like mouse tracking. And it even is just, it's got some little utilities that you can plug in where for example, if somebody's about to leave your site, you can do a really quick like it'll pop a little window up that just says hey, before you go. You know, you've seen that before. And those are called exit intent pop ups or modals or something like that. It does a lot of that out of the gate. Free version's awesome. It Gets a lot done. They have a paid version. Highly recommend the paid version. If you're an agency like us. They also have an agency account. That's something that I've paid for forever. I remember when they were a startup, I reached out to them and I've just known them forever. And crazy egg, there's a few of these other fun named ones that help you to do these heat maps, but hotjar is my favorite. So I think that covers all the data and the analytics. There is really getting into Google Analytics, getting into Facebook and then there's new TikTok pixels and stuff like that. Your mileage is going to vary there. Whatever you need is all good. There's typically a plugin for it, but those are the big three.

So the next one we have here is about accessibility and that's a big question. We get a lot. There's lots of ways to solve that on different platforms. But for accessibility services, we went with userway for WordPress and I think that's very important because people can actually sue you if your website is not accessible and so can't, can't recommend this slash, mandate it enough. It's literally like a federal thing. Make sure your website is accessible. Get yourself an accessibility plugin or app on your website or have somebody review it because you just don't want the liability from that.

Yeah, we, we've been down this road before and it really just begs the question how much are you willing to lose if you don't stay compliant and just being a kind human, making sure that your website is accessible. That's actually what I should have mentioned first. That's what I wanted to say is. Yeah, you're doing this because you're doing it with intention. Right. You want to make sure that if somebody is dyslexic that they have the ability to read your site in a better way that works for them. If somebody is blind or partially blind, that your site can speak to them. Right. And the traditional way to do this is you have a development team add all kinds of HTML, all kinds of extra things in there, and that is a massive cost. But there are new, there are new plugins, there are new services that are coming out. Rt, what's the one that you use for. For Vortic and Shopify.

On Shopify there's an awesome app called Accessibly Accessible and okay. Yep. And there's. I mean, honestly though, if you search the Shopify marketplace like the App Store for accessibility, there's like seven options and they're all. Yeah, there's there's free versions, there's paid versions. And what, what we did on, on my Shopify site and, and that I would recommend is download one of these apps, pay for it, get all the use out of it, optimize your site and then have a developer come in and just say like, okay, instead of paying $20 a month for this service, what can we just build into the website for? You know, a few hours of a developer's time. So I pay up front for having that all done and then I can turn off the app and I don't have to pay them forever. And that's what we did for Vortech and I, I would recommend that. And I'm sure that's a service on like Fiverr and Upwork that people can help with. So but in the short term, just throw one of those apps or plugins on to make sure you, you cover yourself and, and make sure that you are serving all people. That's it that want to view your.

Website just, just to hit go, right? And we, we want to make sure that anything that you've launched and put out into the world is accessible. So that, that's a big one. That's one of the, the things that we absolutely love to have with all of our, our sites, our agency clients and we wanted it for fast foundations as well. So that's another one that's high on the chopping list. Another one that this is something that few people rarely consider is the deliverability of email that comes from your website. So there's, there's two types of email that can be sent. I'm going to, I'm going to highly generalize here for a second. There's three. There's personal emails that you send from your own account. There is marketing email that will come from an ESP like email service provider that actually gets everything out there. And then there is transactional style email. So that means congratulations, you just made a purchase. Sorry you're having trouble logging in. Here's a link to reset your password. Whatever the transaction email is now typically your personal email, if we're going in on those three examples, your personal email, the deliverability is handled by whoever you have personal email with. If it's Apple mail, then Apple's handling deliverability. If it's Gmail, Google is handling the deliverability. Then if we zoom out and we think about the email service provider or the marketing service, let's say a mailchimp klaviyo, you know, whatever that is, they're handling the deliverability as well. But what happens when it's these really important one time emails that remember this is typically when your user or the person that's on your website is in a flow state and they're sitting there clicking refresh like an impatient, you know, fill in the blank because. Or maybe that's just me. But when it says we've sent you an email, you're sitting there waiting for yeah, that's it. And do you want to trust your $2 a month shared hosting provider to get it out? Probably not. And even something like WP engine, even though they, they put work into it, they're more focused on the hosting, they're not worried about the developerability for sure. So there are transactional email services that their whole purpose in life is to make sure that when a request comes in to send an email it goes out immediately and it's got the highest deliverability possible because sometimes those are your most important emails. Something really think about. So there's a service by the companies called Wildbit which they've just produced really good software for developers for years. I used it back in my coding days and the service is called Postmark and you know, we're talking, there's a free account but like 10 bucks a month and I think you get like thousand or ten thousand credits of emails. A simple plugin and then putting it together does take a little bit of work. So this might be something you do want to have your developer do for WordPress but I can't recommend it enough because when you need to get a transactional email out to somebody and it lands in their spam, that's horrible. Or they're just not getting it in time or something. And yeah, we all have the attention spans of fruit flies so if you can't get it to somebody quick enough, you could lose that customer. We're talking high intention customers. So highly recommend that plugin. Again we're going to link all this stuff in the show notes but I love, I love always setting up our clients and now our companies as well with a service like this to just make sure that when somebody expects an email to go over the wire, they're going to get it quickly.

So we got two more. One thing that you never want to forget about and one thing that Jim, you're an expert on is SEO. So what are your tips around plugins for SEO?

So these days I recommend it's a service, it's a plugin called rank math SEO. Now if you've ever used WordPress or you know you may, you may say, what about that one somebody told me about? It's called Yoast. Yoast has been around for a long time. It's still great. It works great, it's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. I don't need you to change if you've been using it. But Rank Math came out a few years back and they, they have a free version that gets a lot done and they have a pro version that actually will take some of the analytics from what's called Google Search Console, which is like your one on one communication layer with Google, to analytics companies. And it pulls all that together and actually gives you really robust reports right inside WordPress, which is really nice. And the reason I like Rank Math is it consolidates a lot of other plugins in one spot and it makes it really easy to toggle features on and off. You don't need to be an SEO, you don't need to be a technical person to work with this. But Yoast kind of takes a little bit more. And what I love about Rank Math is that it centralizes these features, it puts it all right in front of you, and it gives you sort of writing tools and gives you hints and things like that to really have a robust site. So just a personal preference right now, I'm liking Rank Math SEO as a plugin for WordPress a lot more than Yoast. Both work great. Yoast SEO and Yoast Pro, as well as Rank Math SEO and then rt. You talked about optimizing websites. So we have a secret weapon that we found that has not been really widely celebrated or talked about in the WordPress community by this. Oh, God, I can't remember. They're. They're in a, they're in a foreign country, they're. I think they're outside of Europe. But this plugin is called Nitropack. And I have never, in all the years that I've been coding, working on WordPress sites, seen one plugin optimize a WordPress site as incredibly well as this plugin. And I mean that, like you can go from maybe having a site score with Google from like 10, 20, 50 straight up to the 90s. And some of our clients, we even hit full hundreds, which is nearly impossible to do. But this plugin can do it. And it's got a free tier and it is a paid plugin. It can get pricey at scale, but the work that it will save you and your dev team and your product team, or your whole business of having to have somebody go in and optimize all that stuff is incredible. And my favorite thing is they made it really easy out of the box. So there's a slider that just says I don't want any optimization to a little bit to getting more aggressive. And my favorite is that all the way to the right is Ludicrous mode.

So Ludicrous mode.

There's nothing wrong with having Ludicrous mode on your website, let me tell you that. I'm here for it. So highly recommend Nitro Pack out of the box. It does some incredible work for your website and it's really fair priced as well. So I think that puts a bow on it. That's, that's really the big optimization opportunities, the abilities to compress images, measure your data, make sure that everything is really accessible, get the deliverability of your email out the door and then do everything right with SEO, including site speed. Because if you've heard any of my content where I talk about SEO, one of the biggest contributing factors to your SEO is your site speed. So if you're going to pour any money into anything, make your website faster.

And I think, you know, one thing that maybe we can just build from this episode, Jim, and I'm just kind of thinking out loud here, but speaking of SEO for us is like all the things you want for your WordPress site. And maybe we can say like entry level, you need these things. Like the first third of the episode is all about like base model. Just make sure you have these things and then like if you want to get crazy with it, grab these things too. And then like here's how to optimize it. And if you have all of it, you know, we can put links to all of those services, but we can also say this one's $19 a month, this one's $29 a month, this one's free. But we recommend this upgrade and because when you add all this stuff up, you know, now your, your $20 a month basic website just went to maybe 150amonth or, or something like that. But it just kind of depends on like we started this episode with what you're doing. You know, if you're just trying to get started. Here's our recommendations. If you want a long term website that you never have to think about and has everything, all the bells and whistles, then yeah, it's hundreds of dollars a month, but you have all the bells and whistles. So we'll at minimum put that all in the show notes of this episode. But I think that'd be kind of cool. To have like a, you know, recommendations page. Just thinking for like our clients too. I mean, I think our clients would be like, even if you had somebody else build your website, it's like, hey, just double check, make sure they use these things. Because that's what we recommend.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Anybody who's listening, if, if that would be helpful, shoot RTRI a DM either on Instagram or shoot us text. Everything's listed, gonna be listed here in the show notes. But if that would be helpful for.

You, I'm gonna like YouTube video right here. After you subscribe. Make sure you subscribe first before you comment. You're not allowed to comment unless you subscribe.

Subscribe.

I don't know where the subscribe buttons are there.

Somewhere.

It's somewhere. But. But yeah, hit us up. And if you need help with any of this stuff, we'd be happy to help. Whether you're in Fast Foundations or not, our mission is to just show people the power of masterminding. Not just masterminds, but this right here, this is a mastermind episode. It's like, Jim, you're an expert on all this kind of stuff. So how do we share that in a way that doesn't cost, you know, thousands of dollars a month like most agencies charge?

That's it. That's what we're here for.

That's it. And that's what we're doing with these, you know, ask Carter and Custer episodes of the Fast Foundation's podcast. Thank you for listening, watching. If you're here on YouTube, wherever you are, wherever you're at, subscribe, like, share. Leave us a review please, so that more people can hear this. That would be wonderful. And yeah, we'll see you next time.

Looking forward to it. Thanks, brother.

Thank you so much for tuning in. For more free business tips like this. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and follow us on Instagram at Fast Foundations. What was your biggest takeaway from this episode? We want to know. Tag us on Instagram, share this episode with a friend and leave us a five star rating and review so. So we can reach more incredible entrepreneurs like you. We're so glad to have you as part of our community. Go to our website, fastfoundations.com for details on our next in person event. This podcast is sponsored by Carter and Custer Agency at Carter&Custer.com.