223 - How we built the WP Buffs business

Interview with Joe Howard and Nathan Wrigley

So today on the WP Builds Weekly WordPress Podcast, we have Joe Howard from WP Buffs.

WP Buffs is a growing WordPress website management and support service business. They take care of all the sites that you’d rather have someone else manage.

You know doubt heard of this kind of business model in the past. You might even be a customer of theirs, or perhaps one of their competitors. And that’s kind of the point of the podcast today.

Five years ago, Joe Howard, the guest of the podcast today and the founder of WP Buffs, saw that managing other people’s WordPress websites was an area of growth. More WordPress websites were being created, and many agencies wanted to hand the burden of keeping them updated, backed up and safe, to other people.

Thing is, other people saw this opportunity too. Competition in this space is fierce. I’m sure that you can think of a bunch of different companies who are in this space, and many of them have been around longer than WP Buffs. So that causes a problem. How do you get your business noticed in a market that already has some substantial players?

Joe’s answer: content.

You go out there and do the hard work of finding out what it is that people are searching for. You then create content tailored to those searches. What you don’t do is create a whole ton of content that you think / assume people are interested in; perhaps they will be, but most likely you’ll get a greater return on your time if you do the research up front.

So Joe and his team were finding the questions that most people had around the WordPress space. What things were repeatedly being asked? What questions were people frequently needing answers to?

Once you know what people are struggling with, you can create content which answers those questions, and you’ve got yourself a pretty reliable stream of traffic.

Now, this might not be the content that you’d personally choose to write (although it may be), but the important distinction here is that it’s not about what you want to write about. It’s about growing the business, and so writing content that the market tells you is needed.

It might also be that this strategy does not pay off overnight – in fact I’d be really shocked if it did. You need to be in this for the long haul.

You need to write content which is good enough to rank on Google, but you also have to play the SEO game and write often. Make the search engines see you as the go-to place for all things WordPress.

In Joe’s case it’s worked. He was able to get the traffic that he desired and then make the WP Buffs upsell to the people visiting the helpful content that they’d created. Many people come, and some will be persuaded by your offer, not all, but some. And that’s key… the more content you create, the more authority you have. The more authority you have, the more people who will come to your website. The more people who come to your website, the more upsells you can show. The more upsells you can show, the greater the chance that you’ll convert some of them to your service.

It’s a self fulfilling cycle, but it requires the tenacity to keep going and realise that each piece of hard-written content is another brick in the wall; a brick that is shoring up your business.

So find out on the WP Builds podcast today how in five years Joe has made this strategy work for him. From side gig, to thriving company with dozens of employees.

You’ll also hear about the fact that the WP Buffs content strategy has changed over time. Blog posts are one things, but there’s more to content than writing. WP Buffs now does podcasts, videos, and virtual events.

It’s an interesting chat about how hard work can pay off even in a field that seems like it might already be full up!

The audio was recorded on a day in which Joe was at home with his family, and we get little glimpses of that in the background!

If you have anything to add them please comment below, or go to the WP Builds Facebook Group and comment over there – look out for the thread for episode #223.

Mentioned in this podcast:

WP Buffs

Virtual Summit

WP Buffs Podcast