Live Coaching: How and When to Monetize Your Podcast with Nathan Wrigley

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It’s another live coaching call! This time I have podcaster and WordPress site builder Nathan Wrigley. We chat about how I format this show, record the bumpers and the intros, and the benefits (and potential pitfalls) of batching. Then we roll into making money: how to find and land sponsors, and when to think about monetizing your podcast. Nathan has been a podcaster for a long time, so it was great to field his questions as well as get his perspective. Plus in Build Something More, we talk about what it’s like to run a virtual summit.

Top Takeaways

  • Have a good process for outreach to guests and sponsors. You can better track, schedule and batch!
  • Should you think about monetization before you launch your podcast or after? It’s a great question! You should think about why you’re starting your podcast and how you can monitize. But you should wait to launch until you have a money making plan.
  • One this is absolutely necessary though: Build your email list!

Show Notes:

Joe Casabona: Real quick before we get started, I want to tell you about my free weekly newsletter called Build Something Weekly. Each week, Monday mornings generally, you will get an email with a little bit of insight around WordPress and/or podcasting. You’ll get the latest of these episodes with the top takeaways, show notes, and more, and you’ll get the latest content from the previous week. You’ll also get a recommendation.

It is action-packed for your Monday mornings. It is free and it is weekly. And you can sign up over at buildsomething.email. Check it out. It’s a free weekly newsletter over a buildsomething.email.

Intro: All right. Hello, everybody. It’s another live coaching call this week and this time I have podcaster and WordPress site builder extraordinaire, Nathan Wrigley. We chat about how I format this show versus how he formats his show, how to record bumpers and the intros, and then the benefits and potential pitfalls of batching. After that we roll into making money, how to find and land sponsors, and when you should think about monetizing your podcast.

Nathan has been a podcaster for a long time. So it was great to field his questions as well as get his perspective. Plus in Build Something More, we talk about what it’s like to run a virtual summit. So I am really excited for you to hear this call because I think Nathan offers a lot of his own really good insight and ask some amazing questions for both veteran and beginner podcasters. Check it out. Let’s get on with the interview.

Joe Casabona: Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. My name is Joe Casabona. This is Episode 237. Today’s sponsors are TextExpander and Nexcess. You’ll hear about them later on in the show.

I am extremely honored to have my friend and fellow podcaster, Nathan Wrigley, on the show. He’s a podcaster over at WP Builds. And he does a bunch of other stuff which we’ll get into. But today we are doing another live coaching call. So Nathan will be asking me the questions, which is great. He’s a very good interviewer on his podcast. So Nathan, how are you today?

Nathan Wrigley: I’m very well. Thank you for having me on. I’m really pleased to be here. I have a question right off the bat because of your introduction. So your introduction was totally different to the way that I do it. You just mentioned the episode number and you also mentioned a couple of sponsors which tells me that you already know when this is coming out to some extent. Is that how you run it? Do you do know as you record that it’s Episode 237, 238, whatever it might be? You’ve got all of that written down somewhere?

Joe Casabona: Yes, great question. Well, we’re going to dive right into it. So yes, when someone’s when… so you use a Calendly link or SavvyCal. I think it was Calendly. I tried SavvyCal for a small amount of time, but Calendly is better for my needs. Either way, when you fill out that form or any podcast guest fills out that form, that information gets sent to two places, Notion—used to be Evernote, but now it’s Notion—and Airtable. And when it gets added to Airtable, I go in I take the information and I put it in the lineup.

Sometimes it’s based on if I think episodes will go together, but usually it’s like first come first served. In your case it’s I had a slot earlier. And then is an index called Episode in Airtable that is auto-numbered. And that is the episode number. So for sure, I know the episode number, the daily record.

This ties my hands a little bit because if I have a guest that cancels or something has to get moved around now I need to either re-record intros or slot in an episode in an earlier spot. But in general, it’s been working out really well for me. And then I know the URL right off the bat too. So during the episode, I could say, “You can find the show notes over at streamlined.fm/237.”

The sponsors I try really hard to get them booked super far in advance so that I know. I have a max of three slots in each episode. You might have noticed I only said two sponsors. If I happen to land a sponsor in the coming weeks, I will add that to the beginning bumper. TextExpander picked up all of 2021 back in November 2020 and Nexcess over the summer locked in the rest of the year. So I’m fortunate enough to have sponsors booking out far in advance.

Nathan Wrigley: It’s curious. I had a process which it tricked me up a couple of times in that I decided I would batch a load of episodes. So I went really far into the future. I mean, absurdly far. In some cases, I was three and four months already recorded. And then I kind of realized that actually some of this content is going to feel a bit stale. So I then had to backpedal and put people who really ought to have been coming out in, let’s say August and had to bring them back into June. That was a lesson to me that I actually said I would never repeat.

And then the next year I repeated it and did exactly the same thing. It was just in an endeavor to free up my summer a bit more. I was just curious because I simply do the podcast recording now as an isolated piece of content. So I begin it with a “Hello” and we get into the interview topic, and I end with a goodbye. And then I always go back into my audio editing software—I use Logic—and I record a bespoke thing for the beginning of each episode and then tail at the end of each episode. That way I can put in the ads and what have you. So I was just curious that that was entirely different to the way I do it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that is a great point. So, for the outro, I don’t because we roll right into Build Something More. But I do actually record a separate beginning bumper as well because I want to summarize a little bit about what we talked about post conversation. And that is where if I happen to book a third sponsor, I’ll mention them there. And my editor is good enough that if he notices I basically say the same exact thing two times in a row, he’ll fix it. But I do like to say at least the episode number again and do the regular… This is on me a little bit. I feel super weird diving right into the hello part, right?

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, okay.

Joe Casabona: I feel like I need a little bit of ceremony to intro the show. And the same thing with the outro. Ideally, I would just say, “Nathan, thanks for joining us today,” and then you say goodbye, and then we end it. But that feels really awkward to me. So I need to say the outro twice.

Nathan Wrigley: It’s interesting. Because I’ve heard a few podcasts where they’ve just got the tenor of the music just right and it fades in over the goodbyes. And it just works. But I’m with you. I have to record something at the end where… it’s almost like the plenary at the end of a lesson. You know, I just sort of summarize what’s been said.

There’s really no point because everybody’s heard it already. But regardless, I record this little bit saying, “Oh, this is what we talked about today.” And it seems to work it. I like it. And I get some feedback saying, “Actually, that’s not without merit.”

Joe Casabona: Actually, I was just going to say this is important. This is something I teach my podcasting students. You make websites, right? You are a website maker. When responsive design first started to get big, 10 years ago now, Ethan Marcotte… responsive web design came out 10 years ago this year. And his article is even older than that.

But when it first came out, the idea was I think Luke Wroblewski first said this: essentially when you have a mobile website, one eye, and one finger, right? Which means that the person who is on your mobile website is probably also doing something else. And that’s absolutely true. I’ve like co-opted that to say: when someone is listening to your podcast, you probably only have one year because they are driving or gaining or corralling the children.

And so repeating the important points I think has a lot of merit, right? I always say the important things at the beginning, make sure to listen for this. Then there’s the interview. I will usually repeat the things I think are important during the interview. And then at the end, Here’s what you learned. And then I have the top takeaways that I started adding to my show notes too, because for that reason, right, you want to drive the important point home.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s like a classic educator’s plan for the following hour, isn’t it?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: “Here’s what we’re going to do. Here it is. Here’s what we did.”

Joe Casabona: That’s exactly right.

Nathan Wrigley: It works really well. I was curious about the advertising bit as well. And you mentioned that you’ve got them a long way into the future. There’s two parts to my question. The first part is, how do you do that? What is the process that you have for actually communicating with your sponsors? How do you find the new sponsors? Where do you put them? Where do they go when they’re not quite a sponsor but they’re interested? How do you do that whole process?

And the second part of that question is, is… I’ve completely forgotten what the second part is. So I’ll remember that whilst you answer the first bit.

Sponsor: This episode is brought to you by Nexcess. Look, I know what it’s like to spend too much time managing your website instead of your business. In fact, the previous host for this very show made it harder for me to focus on creating content, because I was always trying to fix some problem with my website, especially on new episode days. And that’s why I switched to Nexcess.

With Nexcess‘ managed WordPress hosting, I don’t have any problems to fix because Nexcess fixes them for me, usually before I even know about them. I don’t need to worry about my site going down on new episode days or updates or backups. I don’t even need to worry about plugging vulnerabilities. Nexcess has me covered. That’s why I can be so consistent.

And now they have membership sites with WP Quickstart, a membership site, especially if you’re a creator or small business owner like me can be a fantastic way to increase revenue. But there are too many moving parts for most people who just want to set something up and start making money. Membership sites with WP Quickstart does it all for you. That is great hosting.

So check out Nexcess today if you want a website and not a project. For a limited time, you can get 50% off your first six months. Just go to streamlined.fm/nexcess. That’s streamlined.fm/nexcess for 50% off your first six months. Thanks so much, Nexcess, for being a sponsor of How I Built It.

Joe Casabona: So I will start off by saying I am historically bad at using CRM. And I wish I was better but I’m not. So what I will generally do is keep a list of companies and contact emails somewhere. That somewhere just creates more work for me so I would recommend like just using one CRM. Click up seems to be like the new hotness these days. I have basically… right now it’s mostly Airtable because I’m in Airtable a lot anyway. It’s interested, reached out. Like the classic like CRM statuses

And then what I’ll do is move the ones that I want to reach out to into a Google Sheets spreadsheet. And here’s where the magic happens. In that Google Sheets spreadsheet, I have a bunch of different fields: first name, email, season I want them to sponsor, reason I want them to sponsor, next available spots, and then ready to send. And so this allows me to create an automated but personalized—slightly—email that I can then send to like say 20 people all at the same time.

Nathan Wrigley: Got it.

Joe Casabona: It’s really important those fields are like why I want them to sponsor. Because I don’t want to just send them a generic “Hey give me money for my show.” I say like, “I want you to sponsor because this like fills out… it’s like a Gmail Mad Libs but like a really boring one. It’s like, I want you to sponsor because… and then whatever is in like column G or whatever. It’s my personal reason. I know how the sentence ends so I format it the right way.

What I’m trying to do a little bit more of now, because when this podcast was more focused in the WordPress space, I had a lot of contacts in the WordPress space. So it’s just like, “Hey, do you want to give me money for stuff?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we have a WordCamp budget or we have an advertising budget.” Last year was, “Yeah, we have a budget that we’re not using now.”

But now that I’m kind of moving outside the WordPress space, one needs to form relationships with people before they’re going to just like hit them up for money, I think, right? So now I’ve been kind of getting more involved with like influencer stuff. I don’t really have a process down for this though. So I’m a little hesitant to like talk about it. But basically, people will reach out to me, we’ll talk a little bit, I’ll maybe do a video for them, I’ll mention my podcast and see if they’re interested there.

Or it’ll Be products that I’ve been using a lot, right? So like I’ll be reaching out to Notion very soon to be like, “Hey, I’ve been using this in my podcast process. Are you interested in sponsoring, blah, blah, blah?”

So I think there wasn’t answering their advice.

Finding sponsors I’ll say I tap my network, I look at tools that I’m using. And if I’m listening to similar podcasts, I’ll hear who’s sponsoring those because I know that they’re open to podcast sponsorship. And then as far as reaching out to sponsors, I basically keep a running list an Airtable, and then I move it over. I guess I’m paying for Airtable now so I could do this just with Airtable.

Nathan Wrigley: I think there is something to be said about the unwieldy process sometimes. That is to say an unwieldy process can actually be a good process because it forces you to go through the action of moving a name from Airtable over to Google Docs, or whatever it may be. Whereas sometimes I think automation does tend to stray into the bounds of a little bit impersonal. And you know, you receive the email where clearly the merge tag for your name has gone slightly wonky and there’s a bracket at the end of it or something like that. And you feel, “Ah, okay, that wasn’t as authentic as it could have been.”

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s a really good point, right? I mean, we’ve gotten those emails where it’s like, “Hey, (name), I was looking at…” I wrote a guest post for siteground.com, and so I’ve been getting emails that’s like, “Hey, Joe,” or “Hey, Joseph…” I might be like, Joseph on that site. “Hey, Joseph. I just found your website siteground.com.” And I’m like, “Yes, my website.”

Nathan Wrigley: That’s right. I get lots of emails explaining how people have read my blog. And I really don’t have a blog. I have a podcast. There’s very little in terms of content. So there’s red flags immediately for me. I have remembered the second part of my question, if that’s all right.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: This is a sort of newbie question but I am interested because I’ve got a few friends who are curious about starting up their own podcast. Where do you sit on the whole monetize it now or just get it going, get an audience, do it for a year, do it because you love it, and then think about monetizing it? I feel this is a really important thing.

I did my podcast for two years before there were any ads. That wasn’t by design. That was just because I enjoyed doing it. And then I started to get sponsorship, but that was purely by accident. But I feel that if I was doing it again, and if I had the time and the space, I would repeat that process, but I’m not sure what you think.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m going to reference a Chris lemma blog post that I’ll put in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/237. This is what I say. The number one thing that you should do before you start a podcast is determine why you want to start a podcast.

Nathan Wrigley: Right.

Joe Casabona: So you know, start with why, right, the Simon Sinek book. Because no matter whether you want to monetize or not, that will determine the direction you take your podcast in. I would also say that sponsorship is not the only way to make money with a podcast, right? I mean, there’s membership. That’s another popular one.

But there’s also things like selling your services, establishing yourself as an expertise. I talked to authors and course creators about you know, what should I do? How should I make money podcasting? Just talk on the microphone, and people will hire you or buy your book or buy your course. Not just. I don’t want to put down how much work it takes.

So when you’re starting a podcast, if this is like a hobby, I would say, don’t really worry about monetizing it. But if it’s something that you want to use to establish authority and to grow your business, you should have at least an outline when you start. I’m going to start, I understand this is not going to make… I mean, let me finish this thought. I understand this is not going to make money for the first six months but I do want to put the tent poles in place to try to make money.

Amazon was in the red for like the first six years of its life or something like that. But Jeff Bezos had a plan and now he’s flying rockets to space. So I’m not saying that you could be in a rocket but if you at least think about it, it doesn’t need to be perfect. The most important thing about content creation is ship it, right?

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: But if you at least start thinking about what are the ways this podcast could make money, then you can start putting the tennis balls in place to eventually monetize it. The last thing I’ll say here is start with this. Build your email list from day one. Because no matter what, those email addresses, will… like, if you can’t find sponsors, but you’ve got 100 people who signed up for your mailing list because they listen to your podcast, that’s 100 people that are now part of your audience who are into what you’re saying, into what you’re talking about. And if you do have a product or a service, you can reach out to them first. And that is a way to monetize your podcast, not directly but indirectly.

Nathan Wrigley: My metric forevermore of success is going to be whether I have a rocket. I don’t yet have a rocket. One of the things that I looking back on… it was actually for boring reasons that I won’t go into. I was actually sort of compelled to look back on some early episodes. And I’m going to be forgiving myself. Because I was woefully bad. And I think you have to do that for yourself at the beginning.

Your equipment won’t be what you may end up with, it might be a bit tinny. You’ll probably not be that great at asking the questions. You may stumble, you may need to literally pull to pause the recording, you may pick the wrong guest and have to politely say to them, “Look, I’m sorry that that episode isn’t worthy of being aired. Apologies, should we have another go? Or is it alright if we just don’t use it?”

One of the things that I needed to learn was how to talk and think at the same time. I still find that quite challenging to be asking a question, listening to the answer, and at the same time pausing what they’re saying so that I can follow up with the appropriate question. I actually write a lot of show notes. I write a lot of things that I would like to say down in the kind of order that I would like them to come out because I’m not that great at working on the fly.

I’m saying all of this because I think you’ve got to forgive yourself at the beginning. Just get it out there with whatever you’ve got to and forgive yourself in the future.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. I just recently wrote a blog post called The First Stuff You Should Know Episodes Were 6 Minutes Long.

Nathan Wrigley: Nice.

Joe Casabona: And that’s like if you’re podcasting or you’re into podcasting, you’ve probably heard of Stuff You Should Know. It’s one of the longest-running… It’s a prolific podcast. It’s-

Nathan Wrigley: I love those two.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, they’re great. Josh and Chuck.

Nathan Wrigley: They are unbelievably cool.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: Let’s just talk about them for a second if that’s right.

Joe Casabona: Absolutely.

Nathan Wrigley: Do they write their own stuff?

Joe Casabona: That is a great question. And for a while, yes. So I’ll kind of summarize My Stuff You Should Know article here. The podcast launched in April 2009 and it was around six… it’s like seven minutes now because they do dynamic ad insertion. But it was about six minutes long and it was Josh-

Nathan Wrigley: Josh and Chuck.

Joe Casabona: It wasn’t even Chuck in the beginning.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, Chuck was not?

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

Joe Casabona: It was Josh and his editor Chris. And they were basically just not reading verbatim, but going over articles that Josh read and Chris edited. So it was short, repurposed content. And if you listen to that episode, and then listen to them today, like 12, 14 years and over a thousand episodes on, they sound so different.

It’s echoey, Right, because they were just kind of finding their bearings. Chuck didn’t even make an appearance until one month in because he was also a staff writer and they were talking about one of his articles. And their chemistry was so good that I think it was three months later Chuck became the regular and they became Josh and Chuck. So all of this is to say, just start. You’re not going to know where you can improve until you actually do something right.

Nathan Wrigley: They are absolute masters of making something that is probably written down sound like they’re just making it up. And I don’t mean making up from a factual point of view because I’m relying on everything to have been fact-checked. But it just sounds like they’re just having this little conversation. I’m often curious like are they sitting down and they literally writing on a piece of paper, like, “You do that bit. You do that bit.” Because they seem to interrupt each other at the perfect moment. They epically good. You know, kind of messy, swampy, sloppy sort of presentation. There’s just no fast, there’s no guile. It’s a beautiful podcast. It’s wonderful.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, they do a really great job. And for a while they had a camera in the studio, right? So you can kind of see how they did it, or at least how they set it up—to see how they did it. But you know, they each bring their own notes. They pick a topic, they do their own research, and then they bring their own notes. And this is important. If you are a longtime listener, you’ll know that they batch a bunch of episodes. Their episodes are timeless, right? Not like timeless.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Casabona: They are genuinely not time constraint. So, they can do probably a month’s worth of episodes in one or two sittings. And then go back and do a bunch of research on their next few topics, and then do them.

Nathan Wrigley: What’s curious as well is that they also have a podcast, which I’m going to describe as eclectic. Literally, no two episodes cross… Well, I mean, they’ve done so many now they’re cross-pollinating a little bit. But one podcast episode doesn’t in any way connected to another. And we’re always told if you’re doing a new podcast, find the niche. And I just find it so interesting that their niche is we have no niche. We’re just going to talk about anything we like on every episode

You know, they’ll talk about why did dogs sneeze or something, and then the next episode, who invented the guillotine or something totally wrong. I’ve just made those two up. I’ve no idea if they were. But that kind of thing. And I really like that. I love the fact that you don’t know what you’re going to get. If it weren’t for the title of the post, you wouldn’t know what was going to come. I really, really… there’s something beautiful about that approach.

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And now let’s get back to it.

Joe Casabona: Man, well, this time has flown by. We have a few more minute if you have any questions. In Build Something More for those of you who are part of the Creator Crew, we didn’t really talk intro with Nathan but Nathan is a man of many hats. And one of those is running the Page Builder Summit with Anchen le Roux.

Nathan Wrigley: Anchen le Roux.

Joe Casabona: Anchen le Roux. They do a great job every year. It’s very well run. I’ve spoken at a two of the three years including this one. And so in Build Something More, I’m going to talk to Nathan about what it’s like running a virtual summit because I would love his insight

Nathan Wrigley: Right.

Joe Casabona: So if you are not a member of Creator Crew, you can sign up over at buildsomething.club. It’s five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, and you get ad-free extended episodes a whole day early, as well as a bunch of other stuff. But yeah, I’m excited to talk to you about that.

But Nathan, this is your time. So far, we’ve talked about intro and bumpers, finding and tracking sponsors. Should you monetize now or just start? I think that’s a really good question. Because I think that it’s kind of a double-edged sword. It’s easy to get bogged down in the like “I’m never going to launch this unless it makes money.” But also people can get bogged down in this costs so much, I can’t continue doing it because podcasts do cost money. Unless you use like Anchor or something. And that’s a whole other discussion. So I think that having a plan in place is really important.

Nathan Wrigley: I have one more question if that’s all right.

Joe Casabona: Right. Yeah, absolutely.

Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned your email list from the start. I don’t know what you use to gather that. Again, imagining that we’re beginning a podcast for the first time since like the motif for this episode. Where would you be searching to gather that email list? And which services have you used and preferred over time?

Joe Casabona: Yeah, I am a huge fan of ConvertKit. I had a hard time recommending ConvertKit for a while because they didn’t offer a free plan. And I know that if you don’t have a list, it’s kind of hard to justify 30 bucks a month, 29 bucks a month for something that’s literally making you no money. And so I would say like, Hey, if you want to just start one like probably MailChimp is good.

MailChimp, you know, as we record this, it was recently announced that Intuit is going to buy them. I use QuickBooks. We’ll see what happens I guess. I don’t want to be like a doom and gloom, acquisition person. But I moved off of MailChimp several years ago and on to ConvertKit. ConvertKit is now free to start for your first thousand subscribers.

And the reason that I recommend ConvertKit is they are very heavily focused towards creators, right? So content creators, musician, stuff like that. But they also have really nice landing pages. And I think a problem that a lot of podcasters have in the beginning is they don’t send their listeners anywhere of importance.

They’ll say, “Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts…” Now it’s “follow us,” right? “Follow us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.” And that is a very unclear call to action. So I would say, set up a landing page with ConvertKit. You can point a domain to that landing page. So it could be like your podcast.com goes just to a ConvertKit landing page. Between you and me, and now everybody listening that’s a service I’m probably going to roll out for podcasters who don’t have a landing page.

And so you go there you say, “Sign up for my mailing list.” There will also be subscribed buttons for you to subscribe in Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you want to. “But go to mypodcast.com and join the mailing list. You’ll get notified when new episodes are out, you’ll get the top takeaways or whatever.” And again, that’s free for your first thousand subscribers.

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. That’s good advice. Thanks very much.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. My pleasure. Well, Nathan, this has been a pleasure. We have a little bit of extra time. Are there any other questions that you have with respect to podcasting, or we’re both in the WordPress space, podcasting with respect to WordPress?

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. It’s not really a question. It’s my version of that I feel like.

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley: I don’t actually use ConvertKit but I have been using a WordPress plugin, which I know you are well disposed towards, I think called Newsletter Glue. And if you are a WordPress user, is well worth checking out. It’s by a couple of developers and it’s really great. It uses the reasonably new block editor interface which is a component of WordPress, which allows you to drop little bits into your copy if you’d like.

And in this case, you could drop in a subscribe form or you could actually create blog posts that then become repurposed. I don’t know if you can connect it to ConvertKit. I’m going to guess that that’s no. Yes? No?

Joe Casabona: You can’t.

Nathan Wrigley: Not yet.

Joe Casabona: I told Leslie… because you’re right, Newsletter Glue is fantastic. I did a live stream with her on how to use it. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well. I said, “As soon as you have ConvertKit integration, I’m in, I’ll get it.”

Nathan Wrigley: It’s got this wonderful capability of making your blog post and your newsletter at the exact same time. So if you’re familiar with the sort of create the copy for your website, then go over to your, let’s say, ConvertKit, in your case, you have to paste it and find the image once again and stick it at the top and all of that. It allows you to seamlessly do the newsletter and the blog posts at the same time. So it’s kind of doing double duty. I really, really recommend it.

Because it’s using the block editor, it’s fairly new but it’s being developed very much in the open and at a really fast pace. And they’ve added a few things in the very recent past which made it even more special. I love it. I would highly recommend it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s great. And over on the ConvertKit side, Brennan Dunn released something called a template pack to make your… I think it works with ConvertKit and Drip to make them look nicer. But you know, when it first rolled out, it was like, Spin up Node.js and I’m like, “I’m out.” I’m a developer and I don’t want to go anywhere near that.

Nathan Wrigley: No.

Joe Casabona: He has since built a web interface, like one place where I can do everything. And like ConvertKit does have a WordPress plugin that will turn your posts into newsletters. But again, the benefit of Newsletter Glue is like you… it’s really nicely designed. So for example, there’s a really good free plugin called Podcasts Subscribe Buttons by Second Line Themes, and including those Podcasts Subscribe Buttons would be a breeze with Newsletter Glue. So, you know, I think that there’s a lot of benefit to that. And that’s a great workflow.

Nathan Wrigley: One of the main benefits is this sort of slightly hidden feature that they don’t seem to shout about. And it’s the ability to take a piece of content and say, “Okay, this is in my blog,” and you click a button in the sidebar and you say, “Actually, I want this to appear in my newsletter as well.” Or conversely, you could say, “I only want this piece of content to go in the newsletter.” Perfect example of that would be the subscribe form. There’s absolutely no point in attempting to put a subscribe form in an email newsletter. After all, they’re subscribed. You can’t put it in a newsletter anyway. It’s a form. But you could say, “Okay, disable that in the newsletter, but everything else just send it across.” It’s brilliant. Highly, highly recommend it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, love it. That’s awesome. Well, Nathan, this has been fantastic. Thanks so much for your questions. I hope they were helpful. If people want to learn more about the stuff you’re doing, where can they find you?

Nathan Wrigley: The website that I have is for WordPress people, implementers, and what have you, and it’s at wpbuilds.com. I’m on Twitter, although I genuinely have no idea how Twitter works. That’s not an exaggeration. I honestly am confused by it. But it’s @wpbuilds. Occasionally I can muster a reply but it’s a bit hit and miss.

Joe Casabona: Yes. Twitter is a scary space and place. Awesome. I will link to those two things and everything we talked about. in the show notes—it’s going to be a rich, link-filled show notes episode I think—over at streamlined.fm/237.

Nathan and I are going to talk about running a virtual summit for a few minutes in Build Something More. Again, if you are not in the Creator Crew, you can sign up. And you know what? There will be a sign-up button right on the show notes page over at streamlined.fm/237. I tell people that they need one clear call to action. So I need to practice what I preach. Howibuilt.it/237 is where you can find everything.

Nathan, thanks so much for joining me today and spending some time with us. I appreciate it.

Nathan Wrigley: You’re welcome. Thank you so much.

Joe Casabona: And thanks to everybody out there listening. Thanks to TextExpander and Nexcess for sponsoring the show. And until next time, get out there and build something.

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