066: Picking Tools That Stand the Test of Time with Kronda Adair

I met today’s guest, Kronda, online a couple of weeks ago. She had reached out to me because we use a lot of the same tools and philosophy and said “we just have to meet!” Almost immediately after we got on a zoom call, I knew I wanted to have her be a guest on the podcast. Kronda is a web developer turned marketer. She helps service based business owners learn to use content marketing to sell their services. Kronda and I share the same root in our business journey because we were both developers. I transitioned to integration and systems. Kronda shifted her focus to content. It’s so neat how we both started in the same place, but ended up in different places. Nobody’s business is a straight line from “I want to start a business” to “I’m doing what I love and providing my audience exactly what they need.” Kronda’s journey: Developing WordPress websites for clients. Maintenance of websites (to try to create recurring income.) Niche down to marketing focused websites (because there her clients would understand how to market the website!) Content marketing, training and instruction. The evolution came about as she realized that the websites she had built for her clients weren’t actually helping their businesses! Simply because they didn’t know how to use their website as a marketing tool! “Content marketing is huge right now! It’s basically television!” Kronda explains, “you watch television because it’s entertaining, but people make television to sell you stuff. That’s really all we are doing just in a different medium and on a different scale.” About 3 months ago, Kronda transitioned into teaching content marketing to business owners. It’s a winning business model for her. Not only does she remain in the digital space, using the knowledge that she has acquired to help others, but she works with business owners who are engaged and want to learn. They WANT to understand it even if they are going to hire it out. I can totally relate to this… When I put systems in place for my clients within a project, I am creating a blueprint for them to use again in the future. It’s not a once and done solution. A lot of people KNOW they should be creating content (text, video, images) for their business. The problem is they don’t know what to create and having a strategy behind their content. This is where Kronda gives them a framework that is based on their customer journey. It’s so important that business owners realize that their customers are 100% on a journey. This journey consists of not knowing about them becoming aware of them discovering their problem discovering the solution to the problem purchasing. So now that you know that information, it makes content creation easier because you can see what people need to learn about your business in each stage of this journey. A great way to think about creating content is, as Kronda suggests, think about what mistakes your market is making... When she thinks about the mistakes people are making and what’s keeping them up at night it gives her plenty to write about. As business owners we tend to talk about the things we know about. But what we actually need to be doing is talk about what our future clients need to know. In the end you are selling something that is solving their problem. What you do and how you do it are less important than “Are you going to solve my problem?” It’s all about putting your target market in the center of a bullseye and focusing on what they NEED rather than the what and the how. Even though Kronda has transitioned into content marketing she still advocates for certain tools because the content still has to reach people somehow! And while our content distribution channels are varied, at the core, Kronda and I believe that your website is at the core. As I mentioned in the conversation, Kronda and I have developed a very similar WordPress tech stack… we both page builders, themes and plugins we like because these are the things that we have found to make it the easiest to get content out into the world. Kronda made a significant pivot in the way she makes her income. But did not make a pivot in the way she provides value. I know there are a lot of listeners on their own journeys and making their own pivots in their business. You shouldn’t throw everything away when you make a pivot. You can pivot and still provide value in the same area of expertise! "When we are creating content, we aren’t just creating it for today. We are creating it for our future self as well.” -Jaime Slutzky" "I want to be able to answer virtually any question with a link." -Kronda Adair" There are so many ways to tackle online business. Kronda’s pagebuilder of choice is Beaver Builder. Her landing page builder has of choice is Thrive Architect. I use Beaver Builder for both websites and landing pages solely because I want to have fewer tools. There are so many conversion tools available with Thrive Architect that allow Kronda to test different pages. I was curious to know how she came to these tools… short answer, Facebook groups and online communities! Beaver Builder is one of the first tools that she used that actually worked and was easy to use. It’s also easy to teach people to use. The great thing about Beaver Builder and Thrive Architect is that if you decide to switch to something else it leaves you the html that is very portable to take somewhere else. I just want to take a second to explain what we mean by shortcodes versus html... Whenever you uninstall the Beaver Builder and Thrive Architect all the content that you have added in to your site defaults back to normal, readable html not broken shortcodes. These plugins are modular and don’t leave a nasty footprint of having to go in and do cleanup on your code. Another program I know that often has messy clean up involved is Google docs. When you are writing something in Google docs and you copy and paste it into WordPress it’s actually copying extra html markup which doesn’t usually cause a problem but it’s not the best thing either. This is just an example of something I have noticed because I am on the back end of stuff. I’m sharing this because when your developer gives you a piece of advice we aren’t giving it to you just on aesthetic reasons alone. Kronda has lots of articles about these exact subjects. Another article she has is about premium plugins. We discussed the benefits of premium versus free plugins and how we tackle who purchases what and why! One thing she was adamant about was educating her clients on were the things that their site runs on. She would make sure they knew what was making their site run and that if they parted ways what things were going to become the client’s responsibility. So that it’s not a shock for them if they part ways and they are now responsible for the plugin payments. When you buy a premium plugin, you are buying because you are paying people to support the product, to keep it running, to keep developing, to keep the bugs out, to make it better, and to ultimately make your site work better and do more for you. These premium plugins give you access to a team a developers that are creating a really good product rather than hiring a single developer to do what you need TODAY. Tomorrow you may need something different. We could have spent a lot longer going deeper on WordPress, but that doesn’t benefit you, the listener (reader!) So we switched topics to touch on a few other facets of content creation that are relevant! First: File Organization Kronda believes organization is so important. She has a video solely on organizing your files. If you think about when you go to create content or go to use it and it takes you 5-10 minutes to locate it -- you have just wasted precious time. Using a program like Dropbox or Google Drive allows you to create an organized system of where you can keep your files and you know where they are. This allows you, or your VA, to put their hands on these files whenever you need to. Second: Video Creation Kronda uses ScreenFlow for making screen casts of things that she is doing on her laptop and she wants to show how she does a particular process. Loom and CloudApp also do this things if you don’t have a Mac. Evernote, Google Docs, and Bear are great for text. She uses a Blue Yeti Mic for podcasts. But she also encourages people not to get too caught up in the tools especially in the beginning. It’s more important in the beginning that you are actually creating the content. You can grow into getting as fancy as you want with tools. But there are alot of tools of there that are free and easy to use when you are just starting out. And finally… my two cents :) The WordPress editor makes it easy to do elegant text formatting (using either the classic editor or gutenberg, the new editor). Take advantage of the bold, italic, underline, blockquote and headings buttons… They are very simple to use and make things easier for your consumer to read. No matter where you are in your business, tt’s worth spending time just making your text more enjoyable for your consumer to read… if they enjoy reading it they are going to share, comment, and interact with you. Connect with Jaime: Instagram: @techofbusiness Twitter: @techofbusiness Facebook: @yourbiztech LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimeslutzky/ Email: [email protected] Connect with Kronda: Website: https://www.karveldigital.com Tools minicourse: https://www.karveldigital.com/tools Instagram: @karveldigital Twitter: @karveldigital Facebook: Karvel Digital