This post will help you understand how WordPress tools fit together on your coworking space website.
If you are ever talking to a web person or chatting and someone says ‘oh yeah, WordPress is sooooo simple, you should use that!’
Run, away – they are a liar!
It is so simple!
What a phase!
Phrases that has given me so much pain over twenty years I’ve been freelancing or running my own business.
Any automated marketing tool from Mailchimp to MailPoet, to Salesforce to SendFox and FreeAgent to Freshbooks needs you to set it up and learn how to use it.
These few tools are what we use on the websites we make.
While my gang does not make websites for clients, but we run websites for projects and know how to design the flow and how to guide people around.
You know to point them in the right direction towards your call to action – the jargon for this the “wireframe”.
And when you do your web design and build a company and you know what you want and why they’ll love you and be able to help you even more.
Here is our tool kit
Elementor
What does Elementor do?
Elementor sits on your site and enables you to move things around to look like the way you want it to look.
That may sound like something you think you can do anyway, but unless you can code you can’t.
It is as close as you can get to arranging pages on your website like you would images and words in a PowerPoint or Keynote slide deck.
It also connects to hundreds of other design tools, email apps and heaven knows what else.
So you can have that email sign up box where you want it, there are still rules to follow and things you can’t do – but £u
Get started with Elementor here.
WishList Membership Plugin
What is WishList?
This simple plugin makes your WordPress Website into a membership site.
We use it on London Coworking Assembly so we can take payments, run subscriptions and arrange people into different workgroups and membership levels.
For example, you could have Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum level memberships.
It plugs into everything from all the email providers, payment providers and Zapier.
I like it because it has been around a long time. It powers well over 100,000 websites and Tracy, the co-founder, still cares and answers emails personally even after a decade of running the company!
MailPoet
Ok, you probably guessed this is for email newsletters.
I love it, I mean if you could marry an email service I’d marry this one.
BUT it only works on WordPress so if you move to Drupal or Webflow or something happens to your website you could get stuck.
Why is MailPoet so good?
- It is at least 1000% easier to work out than MailChimp and other popular platforms.
- Setting up welcome and sales funnel emails is more like writing a good blog post rather than performing open-heart surgery.
- You can drag and drop content from your website like blog posts, podcast and other pages into your email.
- Because it is on your website, it means you have another good reason to go to your website, rather than your website gathering dust in a long-forgotten corner of the internet.
Castos – for Podcasts
What is Castos?
It is a podcast player that plugs into your website, so you can publish a podcast like writing a blog post.
Castos also hosts your podcast so you can publish to Spotify, Apple, Google and all the others.
But there is more; it is a podcast plugin designed from the ground up to work with WordPress and specifically the Genesis Framework – I’ll stop there because it is already too geeky.
It is one of the original podcast plugins and is my favourite.
Craig, the founder, has been listening hard to the podcast and WordPress community for years is always gently evolving Castos while maintaining a rock-solid product.
Start using Castos with a free 14-day trial.
CoShedule
What is CoShedule?
It is a social media management tool and then some.
You need to know we use a mixture of Social Bee and CoShedule for all the Engaging People social media projects.
The main reason you will want to use Coshedule is that it plugs directly into WordPress and shows up at the end of a blog post.
If you run multiple WordPress Sites, you can plug them all into CoShedule and then do everything from the CoShedule calendar and dashboard.
Your head still hurts, and it is a lot to deal with, but in over a decade of playing with websites, social media and calendars, this is the best calendar I’ve found.
Play.ht
What is Play.ht? Play it? Oh, I get it!
It turns your blogs posts into audio using an artificial intelligence (AI) text to speech thing.
How is this useful?
For me, your faithful narrator Bernie, this is great.
I find it hard to read text and listening wins hands down every time –
read more about that in this post.
The best kick is that you can send your blog posts to an audio feed to make a podcast.
And as people are listening to a post, it increases time on site, so Google and other search engines will think you are the place to be.
WP Engine
What is WP Engine?
It is a rock, robust website hosting.
Everyone has a web host, and if you are getting an excellent deal for hosting your coworking space website for £5.99 a month with a free email address, you better sort your shit out and move right now.
Before WP Engine I was with StudioPress, by CopyBlogger for years who then sold to WP Engine.
Both places have given me fantastic service and uninterrupted service.
The customer service is via a 24-hour, super responsive human chat, not some crappy bot.
I pay extra for a WordPress Plugin automatic updater which saves me time and keeps everything synced up. It’s like having apps auto-updated on your phone.
Best of all, WP Engine even gets cheaper – not more expensive!
Get started on WP Engine today here.
App Sumo
If there is one app, you can’t live without what would it be?
AppSumo is a deal platform for freelancers and small businesses.
I mention it here because there are always lifetime deals on WordPress plugins and tools.
For example, I got MailPoet, WishList and Play.HT on AppSumo.
These three tools alone have saved me thousands of pounds and introduced me to a whole new range of possibilities and people.
Warning, you have to think about what you are buying!
I’ve been an AppSumo member for five years, and in the early days, I brought a lot of stuff because it was cheap, looked fun and gave me an excellent idea for a new business.
These days anything I buy on AppSumo has to save me time or add serious value or profit to my workflow.
If you do buy something, you don’t need you have 60 days to return it, no questions asked.
