How Thrive Architect Can Improve Your Website Workflow

Hey everyone, it's Shaun Whynacht here over at shaunwhynacht.com or bluecowmarketing.ca. Well, today I want to go through Thrive. Now let me just open up another tab here before we get into this and show you what I mean by Thrive. Now I've been building websites for well over 10 years now for clients, for myself, and I've used numerous different themes, right? You can go to ThemeForest, you can buy a theme and all that. Some of them use different builders and things of that nature like Elementor, and, and, um, you know, now you got Beaver Builder, all those different WordPress builders that are out there. But then you got the independent themes. Now in the last 18 months, I've started using Thrive Themes for my sites and all of my client sites that I build. And what I love about these guys is that not only do they offer themes, but they offer a wide suite of plugins. That's right. So when you— and first of all, why does that matter? Well, when you have a developer that's developing the themes, the builder, and a suite of plugins, everything's going to work together. How many times have you been in this case where WordPress has released a new version and you update your WordPress site and bam, Your site goes offline because your plugins aren't updated. Your theme doesn't work with the plugins. Your theme isn't working with WordPress. All of that can be eliminated with Thrive Themes. Now I'm going to show you how I use it in my site. I'm going to walk through the different parts of the builder and what I love about it. So Thrive Themes, um, a great suite of products. So let's go ahead and look at it. So I'm going to reference my shaunwhynacht.com site. I really use this site mainly for my blog. That's where you're probably seeing this tutorial, uh, if you're not seeing it on a social platform. But let's go ahead and I'm going to log in to my site. So I'm just going to pause the video so you don't see me logging in, you know, being secure and all. So I'll be back in just 2 seconds. All right, so here we are logged in, and as you can see, I've got 7 updates. Now if I go ahead and click on this we're gonna see that there's a couple other ones for podcasting, things like that, but we've got mainly our Thrive plugins that are installed here. And this is what I love about it— when there's an update to one, there's usually an update for all of them. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to quickly update all these plugins, uh, and then everything is going to be up to date with our website. And then we're going to get into showing you how it all works and really the, the benefit behind using it, uh, and what I really love about it. So just like that, all the plugins have been updated. Now Thrive, when they first came out and when I first started with it, you had to log into their website and you had to download each plugin individually. Now they've got one plugin you put into your site called Product Manager. So when you go ahead and install that You can come in here and you can see all the different plugins that they offer, plus the different themes that they offer. Now you might be saying to yourself, well, there's not a lot of themes, but with Thrive, it allows you to do a lot more than just a single theme. You've got full control over developing the whole site. We've developed many sites over the years, uh, and over the last 18 months, probably, you know, close to 20 different sites, and I use the same theme. Right, I use the same theme file. Now if the site's using a blog, I'll use this one over here just because I like the blog layout on that one. But when we look at the different plugins, we've got Thrive Leads for lead generation. We've got Clever Widgets, which allows you to show different widgets to different pages and different people. Whereas out of the box with WordPress, you're really limited to the right-hand side based on either a page or a, a, um, a post, or if you've got a different plugin in there, it could allow you to have it based on a certain thing like WooCommerce or things like that. Headline Optimizer— Headline Optimizer allows you to have split testing in your, your headlines so you can see which one is, is converting better, getting more attention. Um, you've got Ultimatum, uh, the Ultimatum plugin here, which allows you to do, um, evergreen countdowns on webinars and things of that nature, which is really very powerful these days. Ovation— you're, you're living and breathing on social proof and, and comments and, and testimonials. This plugin allows you to get people to submit testimonials right in your website. You can then approve them, sort them, and then show them in a plethora of different ways throughout the site. Quiz Builders— we all know that quizzes are a huge lead generator. This allows you to build intuitive quizzes and branch them out. You've got the Thrive Apprentice e-learning. You want to build an online course? Apprentice is the way to go with Thrive. Now Architect is the main builder, so you're going to see that, that this site has Architect installed, and we're going to go into the Architect because that is what this video is all about. Then you've got Comments, and then you got Optimize, which is going to optimize your site and allow you to split test different pages that you have on the go. So Without further ado, let's go ahead and let's jump right in. Let's go as if we're going to do a new blog post. So we're just going to go New, Add Post. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually start the post that I'm using for this video. So you're probably watching this on the post and this is me starting it. So let's give it a catchy title, right? Uh, My Ultimate Review of Thrive Architect. All right, so this video, like I said, is, is all about Architect. I did go on a little bit at the beginning about the entire suite, but I'm going to talk about Architect. And again, I'm going to do other videos about the other plugins moving forward. So once we got that, once you go in here by default with WordPress, whether you create a page or a post, you're going to get the default builder. And this is the new builder, um, that's in here. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go save as draft just to save it. I'm not going to post it yet, I'm just going to save it. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to make it a blog, make it uncategorized. I'm just going to resave that. Now here's the power. I'm going to launch Thrive Architect. It's going to open in a new tab, and this is a full-screen immersive experience. What it's going to show you is it's going to load the page, it's going to show you all the plugins there or the right-hand side widgets that are there and everything. It's going It's gonna allow you to start to build the content. Now, this is how it's broken up. Just like other builders like Elementor, the left side is kind of like your inspector. This shows you what you're editing for the different elements. On the right side, you're able to hit the plus sign and bring in different elements. So I've already got my title up here, which is great. Now I could go ahead and I could put in some text. So there's two ways. You can just click on the item and it will drop it to the bottom of the page like this. In this case, you're editing above all the, the comments and author blocks that are here, and you can go ahead and put in some of the titles for, um, the blog. Now I'm not going to go ahead and write all the titles here, but this is where you— and again, every time I do a video I can't type— this is where you would be adding text. Awesome. What else can we add in there? So we can add in images, we can add in buttons, columns. Um, they've got this new option for content blocks. So if I'm going to click on this, here's the other way you can click and drag and it will drop it in where the blue line is. Now a content block has been new within the last 30 days of recording this video, but they've got preset formatted text blocks and content blocks that you can easily go and add in. So for example, if I wanted to put an image with a quote here, let's try this one., and I can say, okay, let's use this one, insert into content. It's just gonna drop it in. So now I can go ahead and edit this, right? I can put in, um, you know, change the text, change the name, you know, upload the photo, all that kind of stuff. Okay. Um, and it's as easy as, as just clicking on the element, going on the left-hand side. We can tell that there's text over the top. This is column. So I know just from experience, this is a background image. So I can look for background style, and there's the image right there. I could delete it. I can go to my library. I can choose another image, and maybe I want to put myself in there, right? Boom, there we go. Now I could write a quote about myself and put it in here, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to go ahead and just hit the little, um, trash can there and get rid of that whole item. And there's a column still there. Click delete. Now when it comes time to putting this video, obviously I'm going to record it, I'm going to then upload it to my YouTube channel, and then I'm going to go ahead and put the video in here. So as we scroll down, let's just first look at everything that's in here. We've got background sections, we've got a content block which allows you to put in a block just like this and be able to put different backgrounds and things in there. I click to tweet, maybe we want to put in a Twitter message, so and click on this, you can go ahead and you can type in there, um, something like, want to learn more about the power of Thrive Architect when it comes to editing and building your own website? Check out this tutorial. Review by, I'm gonna go ahead and tag myself in Twitter. Perfect, now, now it's in there. So what I can do is because I've selected this, on the left-hand side again is all the settings. So click to tweet if I wanted to change that button. This is the text I put in. If I wanna mention myself like I did there already, so I can actually delete that and then go ahead and put myself in there. And if I wanted to send them to a custom URL, so for example, if you do this on this page, it's gonna send them to this page and we'll attach this page to it. But if you want to send it to an alternate page, maybe you want to talk about a product or service, you can go ahead and put in the URL here. So when it shows up in Twitter, they're able to then click on it, click the link, and then go to that product. So that's what that means. So really great, powerful options that are there. We've got content reveals. Now what a content reveal is, let's just bring that in here because this is kind of a cool feature too. This allows you to put content in there, whether it's a video, a button, or things of that nature, and delay how long it is until it shows up. Why would you use this? Well, let's say you're building a, a landing page for a prerecorded webinar. You know how we talked about evergreen just moments before? Well, in essence, let's say you have a 10-minute webinar video. You're sending somebody to that video, and then at the end of the video, you're gonna drive them to purchase a product. But you want them to consume that content. Maybe you don't want that button to show up, right? Or you've got a series and you have a button that you want to show up to the next video. Well, let's not have that button show up right away. Let's say we wanted to go ahead and put a button in here. And again, this tutorial is not me building this, this blog post is me showing you all the features. So I'm going to throw a button within the constraints of this. And let's just say we're going to call it, we're going to click on it. We're going to say, okay, um, let's, uh, actually I'll show you this here first. We go click on the button. We've got different styles too, right? So you got different styles in here of buttons that you could use. I kind of like the rounded ones. So I'm going to say here, click here to view next video, right? And let's say my video above this is 10 minutes long. First of all, I'm going to change the color, going to match my color scheme here. And I'm going to say, okay, at 9 minutes Okay, so I'm going to click on the content reveal, and I'm going to say at 9 minutes— oh, 9 minutes and 20 seconds, reveal this content. So what will happen is when the page is loaded, you won't see the button. 9 minutes and 20 seconds into the page being open, the button will show up. The other thing you could do is you could have a redirect to a URL that will automatically do it. You can also have it that you can say auto scroll to content when revealed. So if you had a different piece of content lower down, you could have it then automatically move you down. With the buttons, again, like anything, you've got full control. You want to change the width, boom, slide it out. You want a super large button, make it a circle, full page. You've got full flexibility of doing anything you want with this builder. It's really quite intuitive. So I'm going to close that out. So We got countdowns, so we can throw in a countdown here that's gonna start, it's gonna count down to a specific date. So let's say you're, you're doing a website where you've got an event coming up, maybe a golf tournament or a corporate event or a promotional event. Hey, put that date in there, count it down. Only 23 days left until this big conference or whatever it is. Builds a sense of urgency, a great way to do that. The other type of countdown that you can throw in here is what's called an evergreen countdown. So this countdown is based on when you hit the page. So you see it all the time where you, you go and you buy a product and you hit a thank you page and it's like, here, add this bonus on here, only available for the next 23 hours. Well, in most cases, that's an evergreen countdown, meaning that if you came back, it would still be counting down because your browser has been cookied. But if you clear your browser history and come back, that counter is going to reset. And this allows us to go ahead and put in the, the the amount of days, so if it was like 2 days, 12 hours, 4 minutes, and 21 seconds, and then start again after, I don't know, let's say 30 days, then the countdown will start the moment you hit there and will start to count down. After 30 days, it'll reset, right? So you're gonna have to think about when's that customer lifecycle and when are they gonna be hitting your page because maybe they'll come back a lot sooner and you wanna put a new offer on there. Okay, all right, so as we go down, we've got credit card. This doesn't allow you to take credit cards. Basically all it's going to do is give you the credit card logos and you can see, okay, maybe I don't take PayPal or Google Pay or Apple Pay or Bitcoin, right? I can delete them if you wanted to put that logo set on your website. Your custom HTML, so if you want to put some tracking codes in there, you got some embed codes you want to do for other outside services, you can go ahead and do that. Custom menus, it allows you to put in a custom menu so you're not just linked to the main menu up here. So if you had a submenu that you wanted to create within WordPress, uh, Discuss. So if you've got a Discuss account for comments, you can go ahead and integrate that. Dividers, Facebook comments, um, fill counter. So you see this a lot where people go ahead and you go to the website and they say, okay, um, you know, we are at 75%. Um, right, register. So you have a conference, you can go ahead and update this and change those numbers. And it's really— allows you to change the percentage. And what it will do is it'll actually, you know, if you're 50%, you can make that like 51%, and it will actually color and draw to that point when the page loads. You've got icons, Google Maps. So putting a Google Map, it has never been easier. So if we go ahead and put this in here Here, I'm going to put my address. All right, there we go. So that's where I'm located, Nova Scotia. There's my address. No longer do you have to go over to Google Maps, find it on there, find an embed code, you know, figure out your, your, um, longitude and latitudes. Simply put in a very easy address you can zoom in, you can zoom out. You can really make it quite easy to add in those Google Maps to your sites. Let's see what else we got here. We've got icons. That's just a basic icon you can put in there. Allows you to go ahead and actually search. So let's just say you wanna put in a phone icon. You've got a ton to choose from. Let's say we're gonna choose this one. There's an icon. Oh, let's make it the color scheme of our business. There we go. So basically using Font Awesome Icons, it is a great way to, to make your site content stand out and become relevant. Um, we've got lead generation. Now this is a powerful one. This is the one that connects to, um, your Thrive Leads plugin. So if you're using a CRM, even if you got MailChimp, uh, we use ActiveCampaign. Infusionsoft, HubSpot. There's a whole bunch. So what it is, it allows you to put a form in here that's going to push that contact through to that outside system. So go ahead and click Connect to Service. We've already got ours connected to ActiveCampaign, but I'm just going to show you here quickly all the different services you can connect to. So like I said, you've got Artbreach, AWeber, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, Drip, GetResponse, HubSpot, iContact, Infusionsoft, ClickTip, Mad Mimi, right? There's a There's a ton in here. You go down, you got GoToWebinar, WebinarJam, Zoom, EverWebinar. So just think about that. If you're using any of these webinar systems, now you can register people right through Thrive, right into those systems without an outside API connection. WordPress, creating a WordPress account, you got social integrations, right? You got email deliverability options that are in here. Like I said, there's a lot of functionality with going ahead and doing that., but maybe you don't have an API connection. You've just got a web form embed. No problem. You can click to switch to HTML, paste in that form code, and it will format and look awesome in this type of format. And again, like I said, we're going to get into more videos about, uh, in-depth content, like how to build a landing page, how to integrate it with your, uh, your different CRMs and things of that nature. Post grids. So maybe we're writing a review here. We want to actually put at the bottom a couple other articles. We can click and drop this in. It's going to pull in some of the articles that we already have. But if it looks like crap like this does right now, we can go ahead and make them vertical. We can say, okay, let's, uh, actually I'm going to do— go back to the horizontal layout. And we're going to say, okay, let's do grid. That's fine. Okay, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to click OK. I'm going to go down here, I'm going to start to change the image height, change the font size. It looks a little snazzier. Look at that, there we go. So there's some additional posts that are in there that could go down below the content. We've got progress bars, so just like the, the status wheel that was up there. So progress, how far along, social shares. So do you want to share this content? You can go ahead and click to those, and you can go ahead and say share, and it will actually open up the, the social media share options, uh, to bring it into the post. Star ratings, uh, so like 4 to 5 stars if you're putting in testimonial things, uh, tables, table of contents, tabs, testimonials, uh, toggles. So I use these a lot sometimes for clients. Um, so let's say you want to have a dropdown, so you can say in here, um, uh, like category 1, then you drop it down, then you put content in here. Spell— you want to put another one, add a new. We go category 2. See, just like that. Now let me just show you, uh, one that I've just finished up, how I've used that. So this is an auto parts store in northern British Columbia. This is all built in Thrive. So this is using that square template, just basically built out into a, a landing page long-form content. So they have a spot at the bottom where they, they do different support in the community. So here we go. Here's that dropdown. So you want to click on it, shows you what's there, right? It's basically just an accordion menu, right? It allows you to just shorten up long-form content into different categories. You can obviously put videos in there or anything you would like, but that's a great way to do that. And then there, there's just an exit intent to try to get people to like the social media channels that are there. Again, exit intents, all possible with Thrive. Let's look at the videos. Again, videos are something you'll put a lot into a website. So you're going to go ahead and you're going to go and create a video and you're going to throw it up on YouTube, Vimeo, wherever you want. Let's go pick one. All right, uh, yeah, let's see. Let's Google myself. Here's a— here's an old video back in the day. So you're just going to take the URL at the top, you're going to copy it to your clipboard, going to come back here, you're going to choose which source it's from— YouTube video, Wistia, or a custom source. So you can actually upload to your website a video file and link it to there. I don't recommend it. You're using your own hosting bandwidth, so use a, a service provider. It's going to go, it's going to pull that, that content and put it in here just like it was on YouTube. Now you've also got the option to change some of the styles. So if you don't like it like this, you want to make it look like a monitor, you can go ahead and do that. Um, you want to make it look like a phone, you can do that, or you can just keep it just as it is. The other options under advanced is you can do autoplay, hide the logo, you can hide the controls, hide full screen. You can even upload a custom thumbnail if you don't have one on YouTube so that it's not actually pulling the, the YouTube image here. It'll have like a proper branded image that you would design in Photoshop or Illustrator or anything like that to really help you out. With your system. The benefit with this too is you're also getting a YouTube view if they watch it within your site. Okay, so that was videos. We've got WordPress content. There are some plugins that you use where you do need to use the WordPress side, not a lot. Something new, audio. Let's say you're doing a podcast. Go ahead and choose an audio file that might be uploaded. So here's, you Here's one of our podcasts. Actually, let's use the Naked Business one. Throw it in there. Now you've got a player. Really easy to do. You've got some customization, autoplay, looping. You can actually have sources from Spotify or SoundCloud as well. So that's a great way to embed that audio into your different pages or your blog posts. One little tip here that I recommend is if you are a blogger and you like to write, record an audio version of it. I know myself, I'm not going to read a long blog post, but I'll hit play if there's an option there to listen to you reading it. You can also add in some additional feedback narrative as well. Call to actions— you want to go ahead and you create one of these custom call to actions that are already pre-built. Go ahead and drop it in, and now you can change the heading colors, change the links to the buttons, all that fun stuff to really build those pages. Contact forms. So just unlike like a lead generation form that's going into a CRM, this in essence what this is doing is it's allowing you to go ahead and send out and get to the— there we go. Um, it allows you to add a form so people can actually email it through to you. Uh, so you can go ahead and you can add in things like, um phone numbers, websites, reCAPTCHA in there. After they sign up or submit, who's it gonna be sent to? After they submit, is it reloading the page? Is it taking them to a custom URL? Just showing them a success notice? Are you emailing them a confirmation of the message? So some basic stuff, but allows you to put it in there. So if you're doing a post and you say, hey, you know, you don't have a quoting system, you wanna put in there that says, hey, submit this below to get a quote. And then instead of message, you say, tell us about the project, then they can write it here and send that through. So we utilize that a lot for different clients and different pages. And then we've got numbered lists, we've got pricing table, pricing table. So this is something that you've, you've primarily before had to pay for a paid plugin to do. So if you got a different service here, actually, I'm going to drop it in here. And allows you to put in the different options here for what you do. But you've also got other designs that are pre-done, makes you look pretty snazzy. So if you like that one, you can go ahead and say choose template, and there you go. You can just go change the content. Say you got 2 levels, you can just delete and go from there, and you can change a little bunch of stuff, separate the, the space between. Really a great option for building out those tables. And then if you got other things down below like Thrive Leads or quizzes installed, then this is the Thrive integration side of it. Now here's the thing, let's say you build a great page or you build the base post, right? You've got all the different stuff. You know that every time you, you go and do a, a blog, you're going to have a Twitter block, you're going to have a video, you're going to have some social sharing, and you don't want to really go ahead and and build it out every time, right? You don't want to be like, oh man, like I got to do this every time I do this. Um, what you'll do is, let's say I'm okay with this, this is what I want to, want to keep in here. I want to save this as a template. So I'm going to go to the right-hand side and then click on the little gearbox. I'm going to say Save as Template. So I'm going to say Default Blog Post Layout. Save. Now the next time I do a blog post, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to New Post, and then when I come in here, what I'm going to be able to do is I'm then going to be able to load a blog post template right into the system. One of the other things that I absolutely love about Thrive is the ability to do something called symbols. Now, what is a symbol? Now let me just show you here. I'm just going to exit out of this, save and exit. Remember, it's not published, it's still in its mode. So let's say I am doing a webinar, okay, and I do a quarterly webinar every 3 months. That's a business model, okay? And this might be yours too. And you're creating blog posts and your blog posts get traffic month over month, even old ones. Well, if you had to go ahead and put in a promotional block to promote that blog post, then what you would normally do is you'd go into each blog post. This is normally what you would normally do, and you would go ahead and you would create— in this case, it would probably be something like a call to action. Right, so we're going to go ahead and we're going to pull in a call to action. We're going to put it in the middle of the content and we might say something— we use this one here just for the sake of this— and it could be, um, next webinar, join me and learn about Thrive. It's coming up on July 7th, 2019. Okay, so this would be a button. It would link to it. Okay, so say that, that was the case. Obviously, for styling, this doesn't look as good. I'd make it look a lot better, but for the sake of this demonstration, we want to have this across all of our different blog posts. But here's the caveat. We're going to save this not as a template but as a symbol. We're going to call it Test Webinar Blog Block, okay? Because I'm going to delete this later, and I'm going to say Save. Now I can go ahead and— I'm just going to delete that right now— and I can go into all the other blog posts. I only have to do this once, and I'm going to go Plus And I'm going to go down and I'm going to find the templates and symbols, and it's going to be right here. It's usually at the top under Foundation. And drop it in. I'm going to say Symbol and put it in. Now with the symbol, what it means is this is a global element. So if I just go into any blog post after this webinar and I want to promote the next one, I edit the symbol. I could change it out and I can say, okay, next one's going to be on like August 17th, right? Change up the content, click done. It is now updated on every other instance. It shows up on every other post you have on your website. You don't have to go one by one through everyone. This feature alone makes Thrive worth every penny over every other builder. That I've had. Not to mention all the other suite of, of elements that are in here, but this is something that I use over and over and over again in every build. It saves time, it creates consistency, and now your older content is up to date with the most relevant content that's out there. Building and using symbols is a phenomenal feature of Thrive. So with that being said, like I mentioned, I'm going to be doing more and more tutorials on Thrive and other elements of Thrive. But if you're interested in getting Thrive for yourself, okay, now I'm going to be obvious here. You could go to thrivethemes.com on your own and buy it. Yes, it's going to give you the exact same price and everything that's there, but Because I did this tutorial, you want to show some love, I'm going to include a referral link in the video, in the blog post, that if you click on it, I'll get a small little percentage. Thank you. You'll get the exact same prices if you went here, but this is a way to show me thanks for doing these type of testimonials. But how much does it cost? Let's go ahead and take a look. As you know, with every type of SaaS business, you've got either monthly, quarterly, or annual billing. You save if you pay annually. So you need, as an individual or business owner, a Thrive membership. This is $19 a month if paid annually. So 19 times 12, whatever that works out to. If you're an agency like us and you want to install this on, um, 50 of your sites or client sites, just with this one, if you have, you know, up to 25 of your own websites I mean, most businesses have a couple, right? But you can install it up to 25 sites, unlimited access, up to 25 sites on every theme, every plugin, the entire Thrive Suite, just for this small amount. Now, if you want to pay less out of the gate, you have to pay quarterly. So, you know, there's $90 is what you'll pay starting right away, uh, from there. And then every quarter you'll charge that $90 in this. So this is a great investment into your business because they're always rolling out new features. In the 18 months I've been using them, there's been new features added to that architect that's come out. There's been new plugins created. It is a phenomenal system. So again, thank you very much for watching this tutorial with me. Like I said, if you're interested in Thrive, please go ahead, click on the link that's included in this video. Or at the bottom of the video in the blog post. I really appreciate it, and thanks for watching. If you love this, please comment, rate it, give us your feedback. I'd love to hear from you. Thanks, and have a great day growing your business.