This year felt like the longest year of my life.

Since so many things happened, I didn’t get a chance to document it all in one place. This is why I do a yearly recap each year (2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015), so I can keep a diary for myself to reflect on as I get older.

I have also been told by many friends, family members, and readers that they love my year end recaps, so that is just double motivation for me to write this blog post.

Plus, I think it’s going to be helpful for Solomon as well.

Reflection is probably one of the most underused yet powerful tools for #success.
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Let’s take a look back at everything that happened this year (caution: it’s very long).

TLDR: I turned 30, bought multiple companies, hit a mental burnout, nearly lost $1.4 million dollars in a fraud case (recovered $1.3M so far), and I am closing the year stronger than ever.

Here’s a table of content in case you want to jump to specific sections:

• Personal Highlights
• Business Highlights
• Acquisitions & Investments
• Lessons Learned
• Favorite Books of 2020
• Goals for 2021

Personal Highlights

This year, I turned 30 years old, and I really wanted to make it a memorable year. Well, sometimes you gotta be careful of what you wish for.

I think it’s fair to say that 2020 is one for the history books.

This year taught me many lessons that I’ll share later in the article, but above all it reminded me to truly appreciate and be grateful for all that I’m blessed with: an amazing wife (Amanda), beautiful kiddo (Solomon), loving parents & extended family, great friends, supportive team members, financial stability, and good health.

We started the year with a trip to Punta Mita, Mexico (same spot as 2018 and 2019). It was for a business mastermind that I’m part of, but a lot of my entrepreneur friends also bring their families.

The Four Seasons property is beautiful. My co-founder in WPForms, Jared Atchison, also joined us on the trip along with his family.

As always, it was a great time hanging out with other entrepreneurs, sharing our wins / lessons, and of course enjoying the beautiful location.

In February, I did a quick trip to Atlanta for another business event, and then the news of COVID started coming out.

I had a trip planned for Thailand to attend the first-ever WordCamp Asia, but I ended up cancelling that. Shortly after, the event was cancelled too for safety reasons.

Beginning of March, we had my growth fund company mastermind in Orlando. During this week, all the COVID lockdowns started to happen.

One of the founders had to leave early to go back to Australia, so he didn’t get stuck in US.

The stock market started crashing this same week, and the whole world started going in a frenzy.

COVID lockdown and restrictions completely changed our travel plans for the rest of the year.

Like everyone else, we were stuck at home. This allowed me to spend more time with family which was awesome.

However, the lack of planned travel and activities negatively impacted my daily routines. I had extra time on hand, so I started working more hours.

For me, work is my hobby, addiction, and often a coping mechanism. With all the craziness in the world, I found work to be really rewarding. Not to mention, we were lucky to be in an industry that was seeing a lot of growth.

Well, those extra hours started turning into late nights and super early mornings (very much like the old university days).

One after another, the bad habits started compounding. I started drinking more coffee and eating more junk food which led to bad sleep which led to less exercise motivation which led to significant weight gain and before I knew it, I was in a downward spiral heading towards a mental burnout.

By June, I got pretty close to a full burnout.

Lucky for me, my wife is a clinical psychologist, and we’ve been together since high school days. She saw those patterns and helped correct the course.

We had a discussion and came to the conclusion that I cannot take care of myself without her lol.

No but seriously, we realized how much of an impact travel & activities had on my mental well-being. So we started to look at how can we travel safely in COVID times.

Since Florida is a huge state with great weather, we decided to take a road trip and rented a beach house in Destin, FL (about 8 hour drive away from Palm Beach).

This change of scenery and pace was very helpful. My co-founder, Jared and his family drove from Texas to meet us, and we used this time to do some quarterly planning for WPForms.

My close friend and MonsterInsights co-founder, Chris Christoff, drove up with us as well along with my brother (Zain), and my sister (Sameen).

The road trip travel idea turned out great, and we all felt safe with this way of travel. The only thing was I still ended up working a lot more than I had hoped. While I felt a bit relaxed from the change of scenery, the burnout was still lingering.

So in the month of July, we decided to do another trip in FL by renting a beach house on Anna Maria Island. Except this time, I only worked half days. My parents joined us on this trip, and they really enjoyed being able to get out of the house.

This trip in July was very good and the break was just what I needed to get over the hump.

Since the road trips were working well, we planned another remote work trip in the month of August to St. Augustine, FL.

We got a nice beach house and spent the week there. Chris and my brother Zain joined us for the trip as well. We also got to hang out with my college roommate and best friend, David Pegg and his wife Jesse.

I had planned our bi-annual growth fund company meetup in September, but since COVID travel restrictions were still in place, we couldn’t do the meetup in person.

This meant that I had an empty giant mansion in Orlando that we had rented for those dates. So we decided to drive up to Orlando with my brother & sister. Chris and Keri (friend) also joined us.

I led the growth fund meetup virtually over Zoom, and it actually turned out pretty good.

This trip was just working remotely from a different house since we couldn’t cancel the reservation. Didn’t take many pictures, sorry

October was my big 30th birthday month, and we were going to be stuck at home. I didn’t feel comfortable getting on a commercial plane, and we had already done several road trips.

Not to mention, we were in the middle of acquiring PushEngage (more on this later).

However through a pretty cool set of circumstances and connections, I was able to get a private plane to take us to Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Of course, I decided to turn this trip into a workation. I knew that Jared wanted to spend some time on WPForms 2021 planning, and Chris wanted to do the same for MonsterInsights. Since Chris lives near me in Palm Beach, he was able to join us on the flight.

We made a quick detour to pick up Jared and family from a tiny little private airport in Victoria, TX, and then flew to Jackson Hole where we spent two weeks.

Btw, the Jackson Hole airport is absolutely gorgeous!!!

Since we were there during shoulder season, the town and the national parks were pretty empty which was great for us.

We spent the weekdays product planning, and the weekends exploring Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National park.

We also did daily hikes around our house and the trails nearby.

Overall, I’d say this trip turned out to be over the top awesome especially because I had already made peace with being stuck at home for my 30th birthday.

Here are some photos from the trip:

November is always a crazy month for us due to all the Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals. Not to mention, we were still in the onboarding / transition phase for PushEngage, so I was just heads down busy.

In December, once all the sale madness was over, I used the same contact to take my parents on a private flight to the coldest weather they’ve ever been to: Big Sky, Montana.

We spent two weeks on a Mountain Lodge near the Ski resort. Since it’s early season, there aren’t a lot of people on the slopes.

This was Solomon’s first time skiing. He was surprisingly good and didn’t want to slow down.

Being out here in a remote place with great views of the nature is the perfect way to end the year. I did a lot of personal and business goal setting / planning here for 2021.

Here are some photos from our Montana trip:

As I look back, I feel truly blessed to be able to do all that we did this year despite the craziness happening all around us.

Maybe it’s me hitting 30s and getting wiser all of the sudden, or it’s the unprecedented events of 2020, but I have learnt to practice gratitude every day.

It’s a great exercise that I highly recommend. Practicing gratitude has incredible effects on improving mental health, relationships, and happiness. Not to mention, it’s great for reducing stress too!

Business Highlights

2020 turned out to be another successful year for us in business. Although the uncertainty of the first week of COVID lockdown was crazy because we saw a small drop in sales. However, we rebounded well similar to many other tech companies.

This year, we revamped three of our products, acquired several companies, invested in few more, and our existing businesses saw a lot of growth as well. Collectively our software products are now being used by over 15 million websites.

Fun Fact: The Awesome Motive team is fully distributed (remote) with over 140+ team members in 27 countries. That’s roughly 106,000 websites per AM team member. We’re a small team, but I’m proud of the impact we’re making. Want to join us, we’re hiring

Since I have multiple companies, I’m going to break up the highlights by each business.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the best conversion optimization toolkit to help you get more subscribers & sales, so you can make more money from your existing website traffic.

It’s one of our flagship brands that’s well-known across multiple industries. Each month, we help optimize billions of sessions for our customers, so they can turn their website traffic into subscribers, leads, and sales.

In 2018, I stepped out of the day to day of OptinMonster to focus on the overall strategy of Awesome Motive. However since my co-founder, Thomas Griffin, had a new addition to his family, I stepped in to fill the gaps while he was on paternity leave end of Q1.

It was a lot of fun to get involved in the day to day again.

I worked with the team to completely revamp our WordPress plugin to offer a more native user experience.

This was a HUGE project, and I’m really proud of the work our team did. Basically, the new plugin update makes it easy for WordPress users to create, manage, and publish all OptinMonster campaigns right inside WordPress.

As part of this update, we also added a limited free plan which is only available for our WordPress plugin users. So far it seems to be working really well.

We also launched TruLead, our smart lead verification technology that automatically filters out bad leads like spambots, temporary email addresses, and other markers of unqualified email submissions. This helps you save money on your email marketing costs, improves your deliverability and sender reputation, so you have maximum reach.

Aside from that, we also added a lot of new improvements such as a brand new Publish Screen, significantly improved personalization & targeting workflow, inline editing support, improve webhooks integration, Google reCAPTCHA for forms, ability to switch campaign types, signature mobile exit-intent technology, and tons of new campaign templates.

Our team also made major performance breakthroughs which made OptinMonster 98% faster for sites with a lot of campaigns. This was a BIG win for our customers because of the upcoming Google Web Vitals update, but in the process it also helped us significantly reduce our bandwidth costs.

We’re working on some really neat features like Custom Domains that will be coming out in 2021. This will let you bypass adblock and unlock further performance improvements. We’re already using this feature on several of our sites and with some enterprise customers.

Overall 2020 ended very strong for OptinMonster. We had to make some big changes and hard decisions to ensure the longterm growth of the company, but I feel we have a lot of momentum behind us, and I’m really excited for 2021.

WPForms

WPForms is the most beginner-friendly WordPress form builder in the market.

This year, WPForms passed 4 million active installs, and it is now in the top 10 most popular WordPress plugins of all time. (To put in perspective, in 2019 WPForms had only passed 3 million installs).

We continued to maintain our 4.9 out of 5 star rating average with over 7700+ five-star ratings. Reading WPForms user reviews gives me a new level of energy every time.

Our growth is proof that WPForms is hands down the best WordPress form builder in the market, and I truly believe it can go toe to toe with all major SaaS form players.

This year we expanded our integration ecosystem by making it easy for our users to connect WPForms with Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, Authorize.net (payments), WP Activity Log (security), WPML (multilingual sites), and page builders like Divi and Elementor.

Furthermore, we launched our Webhooks addon to make it easier for our customers to connect WPForms with just about any platform that has a webhooks API. This is in addition to our extremely popular Zapier addon that makes it easy to connect WPForms with over 2000+ other services.

Fun fact: WPForms was Zapier’s 6th fastest growing app in 2020 alongside Facebook, Zoom, and Webflow. We’ve made this list 3 years in a row now.

Due to our fast growth, we prioritized improving our anti-spam solution by replacing our old Honeypot technology with the new WPForms Anti-Spam protection technology. Along with that, we also added an integration for hCaptcha, so users now have a privacy-friendly alternative to Google’s reCAPTCHA.

Right before the Black Friday sale season, WPForms team built one of my favorite addons, User Journey. This lets you see all the pages a user visits before they submit your lead form. This insight is great for improving your overall conversions. Combine this with our conversational forms, form landing pages, and form abandonment addon, and you have one of the most powerful form toolkits to grow your business!

Aside from that, we also added many other improvements such as access / permission control for large teams, entry editing, modern dropdown fields with multi-select option, word count limit for fields, email allow & block list, limit date and time fields for appointments, a much improved WPForms onboarding challenge, and a super helpful help screen in the builder.

WPForms plugin is now translated in 20 languages, and we’re continuously working to expand our translations to make WPForms more accessible to other global markets.

As I mentioned in my last year’s update that I fully stepped out of WPForms, so I’m really proud of all what the team has accomplished this year. A lot of the credit goes to my co-founder and friend, Jared Atchison, for his amazing leadership.

I’m really looking forward to all the new features WPForms team is working on launching in 2021. It’s going to be AWESOME!

P.S. Their team did a cool year in review page that you can check out as well for more details.

WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is the #1 email deliverability plugin for WordPress, used by over 2 million websites.

This plugin is part of WPForms division, and we acquired it two years ago to help fix the larger email deliverability issues in WordPress.

Last year, we finally released a Pro version which has been a huge success. Overall, this plugin has continued to grow in popularity, and now it’s in the top 20 most popular WordPress plugins of all time.

This year, we added several SMTP mailer integrations based on user requests such as Zoho and SMTP.com. We also greatly improved our Email Logs by adding an easy to use search feature.

Aside from that, we updated various other 3rd-party integrations to make it easier for users to connect such as Amazon SES, Gmail, etc. We also improved our error resolution interface to make it easy for beginner users.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It is currently being used on over 2 million websites, and it’s also in the top 15 WordPress plugins of all time.

This year we added several useful features to further cement MonsterInsight’s place as the #1 analytics plugin for WordPress.

We added a powerful headline analyzer right inside the WordPress content editor, so you can optimize your headlines to get a better click through rate (great for both SEO and social media). If you’re using the plugin, then you should already have access. If not, then you can try the web version of headline analyzer.

The other feature that I’m really proud of is our Popular Posts addon. This lets you display inline popular posts, or a popular posts list widget to boost your pageviews. Furthermore, you can also use it to display popular products in your eCommerce store product pages to increase revenue per session. See how it works.

Other notable features that we added included: a brand new site speed report for web vitals, weekly email summaries with tips, ability to export reports in PDF for sharing with clients, clean custom tracking URLs with PrettyLinks, new multisite network setup wizard, improved Google optimize integration, and more.

Last but not least, we also added Contextual Insights into the plugin to help you make better data-driven decisions.

2021 is going to be an exciting year for MonsterInsights because we’re working closely with a team at Google to add GA v4 support as well as do a gtag.js migration both of which are coming very soon.

SeedProd

SeedProd is now a fully revamped drag & drop landing page builder for WordPress (that’s both easy to use & FAST).

For those who don’t know, SeedProd joined Awesome Motive in late 2018, and at the time it was the #1 coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress with a lot of addons.

Amongst them, the most popular addon was landing pages.

Even though SeedProd didn’t have a drag & drop page builder, our customers were still using our landing page module to build custom pages because SeedProd had something other leading page builders didn’t: Speed!

The WordPress page builder market is huge with players like Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, Brizy, Oxygen, etc.

The problem with just about every single provider was they will slow down your site.

And as we know, speed is important for both SEO and conversions.

When I looked at the landscape for building landing pages in WordPress even for our own internal use, I found myself leaning towards SaaS players like Unbounce, Hubspot, Instapage, etc.

So I wrote down few important factors that were missing in WordPress page builders that I wanted: fast loading landing pages, complete design freedom so my landing pages aren’t tied to my WordPress theme, and the ability to have design systems for our marketing team.

These three things became the fundamentals in our decision to revamp SeedProd into the best landing page builder in the market.

We launched the new version in October, and it’s been very well received.

Now, you can build landing pages that are completely independent of your WordPress theme design.

You can have custom headers, footers, content layouts, etc without slowing down your site. It’s basically like building a fast static website similar to Webflow, except in WordPress.

With our smart design system, you can make saved sections and block formats, so your marketing pages are consistent.

We have third-party integrations with all top email marketing services like MailChimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, Drip, ConvertKit, Zapier, etc.

There’s also a built-in subscriber management database that lets you collect email addresses and manage them inside WordPress.

Our custom domain mapping feature allows you to turn any landing page into a micro-site using a unique domain all from a single WordPress site.

For example, you could turn site.com/landingpage into myawesometool.com without setting up a separate WordPress install.

This is great for publishers / influencers who often use easy to remember domain names for their lead magnet squeeze pages and webinar landing pages.

It’s also awesome for PPC agencies because you can manage all your client landing pages from a single WordPress install.

Essentially, you can offer your own version of Unbounce or Instapage for only $199 per year instead of paying hundreds of dollars per month to the SaaS landing page providers.

This is still a very new plugin, but we’re working fast to add more design blocks, new templates, and other smart features to make it the most powerful landing page builder in the market.

I am super excited to use all the things SeedProd team is working on in 2021.

RafflePress

RafflePress is the most powerful WordPress giveaways and contest plugin.

We launched this product in 2019 as part of the SeedProd division, and it has continued to do well.

Since most of our focus was on SeedProd revamp, RafflePress development was slow. We added few new features such as LinkedIn giveaway actions and GetResponse integration. Aside from that, we continued to refine the plugin to add enhancements to our already powerful set of features.

Giveaways are an incredibly powerful hack to quickly increase your traffic, social followers, and engagement.

Through out 2020, we did several monthly giveaways for our customers across various products. It’s a great way for us to add value to our community members.

I built RafflePress for our own internal use because I wanted the flexibility that I simply didn’t have with SaaS providers. Not to mention most of them would charge website owners between $1000 – $3500+ per year for all feature access.

Even though it’s not our biggest business unit, I’m glad that we’re able to offer this solution to WordPress site owners.

TrustPulse

TrustPulse is a powerful conversion tool that helps you increase site conversions with real-time social proof notifications.

It’s part of the OptinMonster division of our company, and just like OptinMonster it works on all website builder platforms including WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.

We added several new features such as our Click AutoMagic activity detection which can now automatically detect user clicks and turn them into live activity notifications.

This combined with our automatic form activity detection makes TrustPulse a very powerful solution for showing social proof.

TrustPulse is another product that we built for our internal use and have made it available to the market at a fraction of the cost of any competitor.

We do this because one of our missions is to help small businesses grow and compete with the big guys

WPBeginner

WPBeginner turned 11 years old in 2020. I love the impact we’ve made on so many lives through our blog tutorials, videos, and our support / community team.

What started out as a small blog in 2009 has become the largest free WordPress resource site for beginners.

Due to the pandemic, this year we helped more users get started with WordPress than ever before.

It’s pretty cool to see WordPress now powering over 39.3% of the top 10 million websites. What’s even bigger is that this year for the first time in history, more websites are built with WordPress than “static HTML or no platform”.

Our WPBeginner Engage Facebook group passed over 66,000 members, and the WPBeginner YouTube channel passed the 220,000 subscriber mark. Both of these were huge team accomplishments. 

What many don’t realize is how much free WordPress support we offer through WPBeginner. Over the last year, we hired 2 new full-time and 2 part-time support team members to dedicate 100% of their time giving back to the WordPress community through free support on channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

This year, we also created a new WordPress Core contributor role and welcomed Peter Wilson to our team. Peter is a well-known WordPress developer and a prolific WordPress core committer. He is now spending 100% of his time working on improving WordPress core and our free open source plugins.

WordPress has had a huge impact on my life, and I’m really honored to be in a position where we’re able to increase our contributions to the community. We’ll be doing a lot more of that in 2021.

Now coming back to the WPBeginner website updates:

We added two new free tools on the WPBeginner website: WordPress theme detector and a free business name generator. We also added a free business tools page that has a list of all our free tools.

I switched the WPBeginner website hosting to SiteGround Enterprise platform. This was the first time in 10 years that I made the change on WPBeginner hosting. I wrote about 6 reasons why we switched to SiteGround.

Last year, I promised that I was going to work on the WPBeginner site redesign and maybe even launch it by the site’s 11th birthday. Well that didn’t happen.

With that said, we did work on and finish the design work. The theme is in the coding process, and I am confident that we’ll be releasing it in 2021.

Since it’s a huge undertaking, we’ll be releasing it in phases. I have a grand vision for WPBeginner in 2021, and I’m going to do my best to add all the new sections by the end of next year.

If you’re an amazing Sr. WordPress developer that wants to work with me 1-on-1 to build some really cool projects on WPBeginner, then email me using the contact form with your portfolio & Github profile. This position is not listed on AM careers page.

Acquisitions

This year, I made three major acquisitions and took an investment stake in one additional WordPress portfolio company.

AIOSEO

AIOSEO is one of the three major acquisitions that we made this year, but this one is special because of it’s history and the impact it had on my WordPress career.

For those who don’t know, All in One SEO for WordPress was the original SEO plugin started in 2007. Today, it’s being used by over 2 million websites, and it’s in the top 20 most popular plugins of all time.

When AIOSEO came out, I was one of their early users, and it was actually the first SEO plugin I used on WPBeginner in 2009.

I got to meet Michael Torbert, founder of AIOSEO, many times over the years at WordCamps and the community summit. He is one of the nicest guys and someone I truly admired.

In 2009, I had just turned 18, and I was a relative newcomer in the WordPress industry. I will never forget how kind Michael, Cory Miller, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and other WordPress celebrities were to me. They invited me to their private parties, introduced me to other awesome people, sponsored WPBeginner, gave me advice, etc.

Michael Torbert, Steve Mortiboy (now at AM), and AIOSEO will always have a special place in my heart.

Ok coming back to the SEO plugin journey, behind the scenes stuff.

After a very successful launch of OptinMonster in 2013, Thomas and I started talking about starting a SEO plugin. He was so excited that one weekend in 2014, he even created a plugin wrapper and some initial code.

But we were a small team, and I decided that it was best for us to focus on our fast growing product, OptinMonster.

Each year after that, WPBeginner census survey kept reminding me that our users want us to build a SEO plugin. The number of requests kept going up.

In 2016, when we launched WPForms (contact form) and acquired MonsterInsights (analytics) from Yoast, we briefly discussed investing in the Yoast SEO plugin as well. But the timing wasn’t right for Joost and Marieke, so those conversations didn’t go anywhere.

After the 2017 user survey, I once again saw SEO at the top of the plugin requests, so I started the conversation with Michael at AIOSEO. We actually got pretty close to agreeing on the deal, but that ended up not going through.

Since then each year, I followed up with Michael and other SEO plugin owners for a potential deal. If you haven’t done acquisitions before, it’s not easy to convince entrepreneurs to sell their business. You just have to be persistent.

In 2019, we decided that we will be entering the SEO market in 2020 whether it’s through a build or a buy. I reached out to few SEO plugin owners, and this time the conversations went a bit differently.

I flew up to Raleigh to meet up with Michael in person and few months later, we had come to an agreement. We closed the transaction first week of January 2020.

We assembled a great team which is led by our newest AM partner, Benjamin Rojas. They have been working really hard on a full revamp since then. We launched version 4.0, which is a full rewrite, to our Pro users in November. The response overall has been very positive.

We have significantly improved the code base, added many new features, and have setup the right infrastructure, so we can quickly build new features over the coming months.

Since WordPress plugins are downloadable products, and each site can have different plugins / hosting configuration, it’s really hard for us to test every single edge-case scenario.

I’m very proud of our team’s commitment to customer success. Anytime an issue is reported, we work tirelessly to resolve it.

Personally, I don’t enjoy plugin rewrites, but I also know that sometimes they’re necessary. The 2021 roadmap for AIOSEO is very bright.

We are planning to add some really smart SEO features that will help more small business owners improve their website SEO rankings.

Some of these features we had custom built for WPBeginner that we’ll be rolling out to the wider community.

I know it’s hard to see the progress on surface, but I can promise you that by the end of 2021, AIOSEO will be the most powerful WordPress SEO plugin in the market.

Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon is the second acquisition that we made in 2020.

Over 1.4 million websites use Smash Balloon plugins to easily display their social media content in WordPress.

Basically, Smash Balloon is a combination of four plugins that makes it easy for you to create and display custom Facebook feeds, custom Instagram feeds, custom Twitter feeds, and custom YouTube feeds on your WordPress site.

We have been recommending these plugins on WPBeginner since 2016 because they’re easy to setup and most importantly ALWAYS reliable.

In 2019, I was presented with an opportunity to invest in Smash Balloon along with another well-known entrepreneur & investor. I was going to be a minority investor through our WPBeginner growth fund. However, due to unforeseen circumstances, that deal ended up falling through.

Fast forward few months, John Brackett, founder of Smash Balloon, and I had a short conversation that ended up with him agreeing to join Awesome Motive.

You see, John is an amazing young entrepreneur, and he wasn’t ready to retire / give up 100% of Smash Balloon. After our quick conversation, we worked out a deal where John became a new partner in Awesome Motive.

This allowed him to continue leading Smash Balloon, the product and team that he absolutely loves. Except, now he has more resources, and a peer-group of other founders, AM partners, to collaborate with.

Personally, I’m really excited to have John be part of our team. In our few short months together, he has pushed me to get better at explaining and refining ideas.

Ok coming back to some product updates:

This year, we launched a brand new product called Social Wall. It lets you combine and display all your recent social media content on a single page. Click here to see the demo.

We also made our biggest contribution to WordPress by fixing the Facebook and Instagram oEmbed issue through our plugin. Basically starting October 24th, the default FB and IG embed functionality in WordPress stopped working due to a breaking change in the Facebook API.

Since our plugin require users to connect with the Facebook API anyways, it was easy for us to implement the fix. This ensured that over 1.3 million websites that are using our FB and IG plugins would not have broken embeds on their site.

I’m very proud of our team for acting quickly and releasing the fix.

Aside from that, we implemented many performance and caching improvements across all Smash Balloon plugins to make sure that our plugin will never slow down your site.

We also added better error reporting and fallback features, so if your API ever gets disconnected, then your social feed content is cached and will continue to display. Our plugin will now notify users through the WordPress Site Health feature to fix these connection issues ASAP.

Smash Balloon team has continued to grow, and we’re looking forward to bringing more awesome features in 2021.

PushEngage

PushEngage is a leading push notification software with over 10,000+ customers in 150+ countries who use the platform to reliably send over 9 billion notifications each month.

This was our 3rd major acquisition in 2020, and it has a similar story as the other two acquisitions.

I was first introduced to Ravi Trivedi, founder of PushEngage, in 2017 by a mutual friend Harsh Agrawal (ShoutMeLoud). This was at the time when I first started using push notifications on my sites.

I tried to invest in the company back then, but the timing wasn’t right.

We continued to use push notifications on our sites because how powerful they are.

To put in perspective, my push subscriber list is larger than my email list, and push notifications consistently make the top 5 traffic sources on WPBeginner.

Basically, if you aren’t using push notifications on your website, then you’re missing out. To learn more about what they are and how to add them, see my tutorial on how to add push notifications to WordPress.

In 2020, I decided that I wanted to build a deeply integrated push notification solution that did automatic subscriber segmentation and worked seamlessly with our AM products + our various cart platforms.

We started building an internal solution beginning of July, and then 3 weeks later, I got a random email from a friend, Andrew, who told me that I should chat with Ravi from PushEngage about a potential acquisition.

As soon as Ravi and I started chatting again, we knew that this was the right time for both of us.

We quickly came to an agreement where the entire PushEngage team joined Awesome Motive, so we can build the most user friendly push notification solution for WordPress and beyond.

Ravi got a clean exit which is what he was looking for. He agreed to stay for 3 months to help us through the transition, and he’ll be leaving us in the coming days to start the next chapter of his life in 2021.

We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I’m up for the challenge.

Our goal over the next 12 months is to build deeper integration with other Awesome Motive products, and popular platforms like WordPress, WooCommerce, Shopify, MemberPress, and others.

Along with that, we want to greatly improve the workflow as well.

Growth Fund Companies

All companies that I invested in through the WPBeginner Growth Fund saw a lot of compounding growth.

MemberPress team launched a brand new Courses platform, so now you can easily create immersive learning experiences. This of course combined with the eLearning boom with COVID drove a lot of new users to our platform. I intend to use this to launch some courses in 2021.

They made tons of improvements to the Pretty Links, ThirstyAffiliates, and the free Members plugin for WordPress. The team also continued their work on the revamp of Affiliate Royale, but due to the explosive growth on MemberPress, this deadline got pushed to 2021.

Formidable Forms saw a lot of revenue growth this year because they completely revamped their website design. They also made it easy to create interactive calculators in WordPress to help you generate more leads. Also due to popular requests, Formidable expanded their Views feature to make it easy to create beautiful Directory Listings template.

While working on the directories, we were presented with an acquisition opportunity, so the Formidable team acquired both the Business Directory Plugin for WordPress, and the WordPress Classified plugin. The team has already started working on improving those products and adding new features for 2021.

Last year, I invested in Rymera Web, the parent company behind WooCommerce Wholesale Suite and Advanced Coupons. Both of these brands saw great growth.

Advanced Coupons is quickly becoming the go-to smart coupons plugin for WooCommerce because it lets you do BOGO deals, loyalty programs, free shipping coupons, and more.

This year, I invested in UncannyOwl, the parent company of a fast growing WordPress automation plugin, Uncanny Automator, and a suite of e-learning plugins for WordPress.

I’m really excited about the opportunities and potential of the Automator plugin. The best way to describe it is that it’s Zapier for WordPress. It helps your WordPress plugins talk to each other, so you can better automate your website processes without writing any code.

Other Investments

Majority of my focus this year was on our online business, so I didn’t make any major moves in the real estate market. Frankly, I think the prices were just too high for my taste.

A lot of people pinged me through out the year to see how my commercial real estate business was doing. Thankfully, it wasn’t negatively impacted at all, and all my tenants continued to pay rent on time.

I own a lot of gas stations that are leased out to corporate tenants like Circle K. Since these were essential businesses, their sales in most cases were positively impacted at least from what I know.

Another commercial building that I own has Wells Fargo as a tenant, and despite the banks being closed for a period of time, they continued to pay rent on time.

I also own several residential real estate properties, and thankfully all of our tenants have good jobs. We stay in constant communication with them to ensure we can help in any way that we can.

Aside from real estate, I did take advantage of the stock market dip to make some major investments which of course have turned out quite well.

While I was too young to remember the dot com bubble, I have seen two major market dips now (2008 and 2020).

In these times, it’s easy to get greedy. I have taken a more disciplined approach with a large margin of safety which helps render all short-term forecasts unnecessary.

I’m investing in good businesses that I believe will be around way after the pandemic and be worth more than they’re today. Several people have asked me for stock tips, and I just don’t feel qualified to offer that.

If you’re investing in stock, please do your own research. Don’t listen to wanna-be YouTube / social media investment gurus.

This year I also invested in several other entrepreneur-led funds that have a focus on acquiring internet businesses. This included Tiny Capital by Andrew Wilkinson & Chris Sparling, SureSwift Capital by Kevin McArdle, and few others that I can’t name just yet.

Going into 2021, I believe we’re going to see more “portfolio entrepreneur” funds.

I’m talking with several entrepreneur friends who have had multiple successful exits, and they’re looking to raise strategic capital for acquisitions.

It’s quite interesting to see this trend.

The fundamental concept isn’t that much different than my own WPBeginner Growth Fund except everyone’s focused on their own circle of competence whether that’s Shopify businesses, Amazon FBA businesses, DTC brands, Pet market, etc.

Company Retreat

Awesome Motive has always been a 100% distributed company, and we do not have a central HQ. This has definitely proven to be an advantage during the COVID times.

However, each year we used to do a company retreat where we flew everyone to a central location. This year, we were planning to meet up in Park City, but it was cancelled.

We did have a virtual retreat, and it turned out quite well, but it was no substitute to the in-person fun.

However earlier in the year, we did do a smaller team meetup for OptinMonster. Looking back at the photos, I’m so thankful to work alongside such an amazing team.

Want to join the company? We’re hiring! See the open positions and please apply using the specified method.

Lessons Learned

Like every year, I learned a lot in 2020 through reading books, talking with other entrepreneurs, and through trial-and-error. Below are some of the most important lessons:

Trust, but verify … so you don’t suffer huge losses

Earlier this year, I was working on an investment transaction, and all parties involved were trustworthy.

Towards the final stages, when it came time to wire the money, I got the instructions over email and sent the funds.

Well it turned out that one of the legal counsel’s email accounts were hacked, and the bank account information sent to me was incorrect. I nearly lost $1.4 million dollars due to this wire fraud scam.

A day after sending the wire, I got a text message that the money still hadn’t showed up, so I got on the phone because domestic wire transfers are nearly instant.

Only then everyone realized that the account information sent to me was wrong.

I immediately contacted my bank, Wells Fargo, and they started the investigation process right away. I also filed the FBI report, police report, and sent over all the necessary details.

The next few weeks that followed were extremely frustrating.

Due to “client privacy”, neither my bank nor the receiving bank’s wire fraud department would tell me anything. I think this was all part of legal b.s. where everyone was trying to cover their asses.

No one wanted to tell me whether my money was still there, if I would get it back, or on what timeline I should expect to get an answer.

Everything I read and heard during this time was that once the money is wired, it’s really really hard to get it back.

I was also surprised that none of the legal authorities got back to me despite the fact that I had filed a detailed report.

After three weeks of frustration, I got really persistent and started reaching out to all contacts who had connections in the FBI or another federal law enforcement agency.

Luckily one contact came through, and I got introduced to a very helpful agent at Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who agreed to take the case.

I still don’t have full details on what happened behind the scenes, but I know he issued subpoenas to the banks. Basically after DHS got involved, the process started to move a bit faster.

After 10 weeks, they were able to recover $1.3 million dollars and send it back to me.

I’m still short about $100k, but honestly I’m grateful that we recovered a large chunk of the money.

The investigation is still ongoing, and I hope that I recover the rest too, but I’m grateful that I got a large portion back.

Because if you read online stories, most people aren’t this lucky. Even the wire investigator lady at my bank told me that this was the largest recovery of her 35 year career, and she said this was made possible by DHS involvement.

This was an expensive lesson to learn. From now on, I’m always calling to confirm wire information over phone, no matter what.

Also if you’re a lawyer, accountant, escrow company, or anyone else reading this article, please use strong passwords and turn on the damn 2-factor authentication for your accounts.

Practice gratitude every day

2020 has been a challenging year, and I don’t think I would be able to keep my sanity if I didn’t start doing this daily exercise.

Before you go to bed, take a deep breath and reflect on all that you’re grateful for.

After you end your work day, take a deep breath and reflect on all the things you accomplished.

Instead of focusing on the negatives, appreciate all your wins, no matter how big or small.

The fact that we wake up healthy, have food on the table, a roof over our head, a beautiful family to talk to … is something we often take for granted.

Despite all the negativity in the world, practicing gratitude helped me stay positive even through the most troubling times this year such as during the wire fraud issue, my mental burnout, etc.

If you’re looking for some resources, check this video on breathing and this simple article on practicing gratitude.

Persistence is a great substitute for talent

Despite all my accomplishments, I feel I’m quite average when it comes to talent.

Both of my younger brothers are more talented than I am, but I tell them that what I lack in talent, I make up with my hard work, persistence, and ability to wait for results (patience).

Napoleon Hill said it best:

Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.
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I’ve been reminded of this lesson every year of my life, but this year it showed up way too many times.

When I lost $1.4 million dollars in wire fraud, it took me about 2 hours to get over it. I had no idea if or when I’d get it back, I just decided that I’ll make at least one phone call a day to ask for help and also catch up with friends.

The acquisition of AIOSEO didn’t happen because of luck or talent. I just kept following up with Michael since 2017 because I knew that eventually the timing would be right, and I just wanted to be there when it was.

Same thing happened with PushEngage. Even though I didn’t keep in touch with Ravi after our initial conversations, I was persistent in asking all of my friends and business brokers if they knew of entrepreneurs in these verticals that are looking for an exit.

None of what I do would be possible without the support of my wife, Amanda. What many don’t know is that Amanda and I started dating in high school when we were 15 years old.

I wasn’t the best looking nor the smartest, but I did try to be the nicest. Amanda turned me down probably more than 20 times before she agreed to date me. I was just persistent.

Each time you hit a roadblock or fall down, it’s absolutely frustrating, but you just have to keep moving forward.

Since I write these recaps not just for me, but for Solomon to read as he grows up, I want to share this big life lesson that persistence is often a great substitute for talent.

Most people will give up and move on. If you’re disciplined, patient, and persistent, you’ll eventually succeed.

Paranoid optimism can help you thrive during challenging times

When the news of COVID started coming out, I started reading what was happening in other countries. This led me to proactively cancel my trip to Bangkok.

The more I read, the higher my anxiety got because I had only read about plague and Spanish flu in the history books. Never did I think that we would live through something like that.

And then few weeks later, all the lockdowns started happening in US.

People started losing jobs, several of my friends had to do massive layoffs, and some entrepreneurs in the Facebook groups that I’m part of had to shut down their entire business.

Basically every news channel or social media feed was full of COVID news, and honestly I don’t think I have ever experienced anxiety like this in my entire life.

Over the last decade, I have done very well financially. We live below our means, have no debt, and technically I can retire whenever I want to.

I always used to joke with friends when they ask: what’s keeping you up at night these days … my answer was that I sleep really well.

But this 2020 anxiety changed that.

I am not sure why I was paranoid, but I was waking up at 2 a.m in the morning at least 3 times a week. This is even early compared to my regular 4 a.m mornings.

I would get out of bed, make myself a coffee, and start working.

I knew as a family we would be fine no matter what, and I was optimistic that we’ll get past this pandemic, but for some reason I was still paranoid.

Even though our businesses started seeing the COVID sales bump, I remember calling Thomas one morning to talk about a contingency plan on how we can best prepare ourselves to ensure that we don’t have to layoff a single AM team member during these times.

I think Morgan Housel said it best:

Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan.
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We talked about optimization ideas, increasing reserves, ways how we can better support our team, our customers, and each other.

Basically, a lot of great ideas came through from that conversation. We unlocked optimizations on our server expenses and various other areas of the business.

We used the new savings to give a COVID stipend to help our team members with unexpected expenses such as purchasing new office furniture because now their spouse or other family members were also working from home, etc.

Like most software companies, we also granted subscription extensions and discounts to customers who were struggling with recurring expenses or business slowdown.

We also started optimizing leaky buckets in our business that are easy to overlook when everything is going well. This led to an increase in new revenue as well.

My paranoid optimism combined with the hard work of our team helped us not just survive but thrive during these challenging times.

Other Lessons from 2020

Since this post is getting quite long, I’ll just make a short bullet list. Maybe will write more about these in details at another time:

• Change is the only constant in life. Ones ability to adapt to those changes will determine your success.
• Never underestimate the power of optimization.
• The oil industry can teach us many lessons. Learn from oil refining and apply those concepts in your business.
• The last 2% makes a huge impact. Pay extra attention and don’t rush.
• Invert, always invert. Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance.
• Flexibility is a huge advantage especially during challenging times. It helps you make better decisions … or more often keeps you from making stupid ones.
• Avoid single point of failures because they’ll cause you to lose confidence … and you should never lose confidence.

Favorite Books that I Read in 2020

When it comes to reading, I’m very slow. Maybe it’s because English is my second language, or maybe it’s because I often re-read and pause after pages to really reflect and understand what’s being said.

Several blog readers have asked me to share what were some of my favorite books this year. So here are my top five that I read this year:

• The Tao of Charlie Munger
• The Psychology of Money
• Fortune’s Children –  The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt
• Being a Rockefeller, Becoming Myself
• Confessions of the Pricing Man

I also read several other books like Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick, The Great CEO Within, LoserThink, etc, but they didn’t make my top 5.

When it comes to reading, I prefer the hard copy.

I’ve tried audio books, and they’re great for stories, but I find it challenging to listen to business books that are discussing charts & fundamentals. Also because I like to re-read pages and pause to reflect, audio books just don’t work for me.

My Goals for 2021

I’m not going to list out product-specific goals because each one of them have fairly elaborate roadmaps.

My personal goals for 2021 are:

• Have more unscheduled time in my calendar
• Continue doing monthly trips in whatever form possible – clearly I need it for my mental health
• Continue finding small but compounding improvements to unlock extreme growth in all areas of life
• Reimplement deep thinking time, so I can spend more time learning from what I don’t see
• Delegate more often and get out of the way

Despite all the challenges of 2020, I feel truly blessed to be able to do what I love every day.

Here’s to a better (and hopefully more normal) 2021!

In the meantime, enjoy more pics from 2020

The post This happened to me in 2020 – Year in Review appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

Since everything happens so fast, I usually don’t get a chance to document it all in one place. This is why I do a yearly recap each year (2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015), so I can keep a diary for myself to reflect on as I get older.

I have also been told by many friends, family members, and readers that they love my year end recaps, so that is just double motivation for me to write this blog post.

Reflection is probably one of the most underused yet powerful tools for #success.
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Since a lot happened in 2019, let’s recap everything (caution: it’s very long).

Personal Highlights

2019 was by far the most balanced year of my life. I excelled in my various roles including being a good husband, a good father, a good brother, a good son, and a good leader.

Most of the credit goes to prioritization, having the right support, and saying no … A LOT!

At the start of 2019, I made it a priority to reclaim more of my time. To make this happen, I revamped my ideal weekly agenda and time-blocking sheet with some very big changes.

I decided to dedicate Fridays to personal growth. To make sure I stick to this, I also made a “no business phone calls” rule for Friday which I only had to break once in 2019 (in the month of October).

This was a great decision because I read a lot, listened to podcasts, and overall learnt a ton. I felt from a personal growth point of view, 2019 was my best year ever.

I also significantly reduced the amount of external calls, podcast interviews, and other meetings that I used to do, so I could focus more on our AM team and my family.

In 2019, Amanda and I started doing weekly date nights, and I highly recommend it to all my entrepreneur friends.

I also started doing quarterly board meetings with Solomon which is inspired from this book (thanks Dan Martell for the recommendation). Solomon loves “Baba and Baby time”.

Oh and did I mention, Solomon turned 3 years old. He’s growing up soo fast.

It’s quite interesting to watch the world through his perspective. He tries to imitate my work habits on his mini computer and our old house phone (this is hilarious to say the least).

In 2019, I continued the #dotcomlifestyle trend where I combine travel and work. Basically as long as I stay disciplined, I can work from anywhere in the world that I want, when I want.

We started the year with a trip to Punta Mita, Mexico (same as last year). It is for a business mastermind that I’m a part of, but a lot of my entrepreneur friends also bring their families too.

The Four Seasons property is gorgeous and that’s why we all voted to go back again in January 2020 (yup, I’ll be there in two weeks).

In February, I went to San Diego to attend Traffic & Conversion Summit conference. I gave two killer presentations, and OptinMonster was one of the event sponsors.

At T&C, I attended a yacht networking party that my friend Brandon organized. It was a lot of fun, but I left early and didn’t get to properly thank Brandon. A week later, he passed away in a fatal helicopter crash. R.I.P.

Life is too short. Please say thank you and I love you frequently to your loved ones (sadly I also couldn’t take a photo with him on the boat since he was running all over the place).

March was a busy month for me. I did our first ever WPBeginner Growth Fund meeting.

As you may know, in late 2018, I decided to invest in WordPress focused businesses through my growth fund which I called WPBeginner Growth Fund. I had all the founders meetup in a giant house in Orlando. We did brainstorming strategy sessions, thought-exercises, and live tear-downs of each others products. It was a lot of fun.

After the meetup, I went on a big family cruise with my parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. We went to Cozumel and Costa Maya, Mexico for spring break.

Immediately after that, I flew to Mukan located South of Tulum, Mexico for a mini-mastermind with 9 of my entrepreneur friends. It was a lot of fun and a great learning experience. Each of us had major breakthroughs that turned out to be very valuable through out the year.

Fun fact: we booked out the entire Mukan resort which is in the heart of a UNESCO heritage site. It was gorgeous, see the photos below from my March trips.

April, I was heads down working on implementing all that I learned. Although I did take two trips. First was to Los Angeles for a quick business event and then another to Gainesville, FL to receive the Horizon Award from University of Florida.

In May, we took a partner reward trip to celebrate the growth of WPForms and MonsterInsights. My business partner Jared and Chris both brought their families. We went on a cruise trip to St Maarten, Puerto Rico, and Haiti.

This was a great way for us to recharge and for our families to connect. We came back energized to work toward our new milestones which we ended up hitting before end of 2019

June was a crazy month for me. I was on back to back trips. First, I went to a charity networking event called Cookie Off in Toronto. I got to eat delicious chocolate chip cookies and connect with smart entrepreneurs. Not to mention, we raised $200,000. Only my friend Sol can pull off something this awesome.

I then flew straight to my all company retreat in Orlando. We flew everyone in our team for a week long retreat (more on this in the Business highlights section).

After the company retreat, I flew straight to LA to speak at my friend Neil Patel and Eric Siu’s event called Marketing School Live. I did a fireside chat with Eric on how to design your thinking for unstoppable growth, and it was a lot of fun. In the future, my goal is to have all of my presentations be in a similar interview format.

Here are some photos from the month of June:

In July, I also took my annual trip with my close friend David Henzel. We visited Istanbul (Turkey), Munich (Germany), and Vienna (Austria).

While our families got to hang out with each other, David and I geeked out on what we both love, startups and growth.

August was the month of implementation for me. I took a quick trip to Lake Tahoe to hang out with my entrepreneur friend group where we shared new business insights, learnings, and reviewed each other’s goals so we can hold ourselves accountable.

September, I flew to Tucson, Arizona to attend Pressnomics which is a conference for WordPress business owners. I decided to do our second WPBeginner Growth Fund meetup there as well.

On this trip, I had my first Rattlesnake encounter … ask me to tell you this story in person because you really have to see my reactions.

In October, we had Solomon’s 3rd birthday party. We decided to do it a week early, so he could go to Disney for free (yup I’m cheap).

After that we went to WordCamp US which was held in St. Louis, and then immediately after that I went to Park City, Utah for another business event. Amanda and Solomon joined me for both events.

November is always a hectic month for me due to Black Friday / Cyber Monday promotions. But this year it was even more hectic because I was also reviewing several companies to invest in (not all investment deals are publicly announced yet).

Despite all that, I did manage to take a weekend cruise to Bahamas with my in-laws. It was their first cruise trip in 10 years, and I’m glad we got to spend quality time together.

Unlike previous years, December ended up being even more crazy than November. We decided to do a pilot team meetup for WPForms on top of our annual company retreat. Luckily it was in Orlando, so it was a short drive for me.

Immediately after the meetup, I flew to LA to meet with Josh from Rymera. I invested in his companies through the WPBeginner Growth Fund.

After that I flew back to West Palm where I had my content team in town for our New Year planning. We spent a week together and planned out over 6 months of content for WPBeginner.

I then spent the last week of December in Karachi Pakistan where I attended my cousin’s wedding. Pakistani weddings are a lot of fun, and I’m also glad that Amanda and Solomon got to experience it.

Here are some pictures from December trips:

As I write this recap, it’s clear to me why many of my friends think that I was on vacation for most of the year, but just wait until you get to the Business highlights section.

One of my goals for 2018 was to bring back my remote work style and never let it go again. I carried the goal into 2019, and I’ll be continuing it in 2020 as well.

Basically as the company grew, I felt that I was restricted to a central location but that simply isn’t the case.

I can work from anywhere that has internet. I just need a computer and be disciplined. I call this the #dotcomlifestyle, and I often use the hashtag in my tweets / instagram posts.

Business Highlights

2019 was a very productive year for me in business. We launched three new products, I acquired stake in few more companies, and my existing products saw a lot of growth as well. Since I have multiple companies, I’m going to break up the highlights by each business entity.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most powerful conversion toolkit to help you get more email subscribers and make more money from your existing website traffic.

It is our flagship brand that’s well-known across industries and serves some of the largest companies in the world. We help optimize billions of sessions every month for our customers, so they can turn their traffic into subscribers, leads, and sales.

As I mentioned in my last year’s review, I stepped out of OptinMonster day to day in March of 2018, so I could better guide the strategy of all our brands at Awesome Motive.

My co-founder and friend, Thomas Griffin, stepped into the President role, and he has done an amazing job in leading the product forward.

Through out the year, many of you have asked about clarification on what’s my role in OptinMonster. I’m still the co-founder of OptinMonster, and no I didn’t exit from the company.

My role is very similar to a strategic advisor. I chat weekly with Thomas, we plan quarterly on big picture strategy, and I still lead the larger business development deals because they often involve multiple companies in our portfolio.

This year, our team crushed it with product innovation in OptinMonster. We launched a brand new account dashboard and a new campaign dashboard. This allows users to better organize their campaigns into folders, easily search campaigns from multiple sites, and more.

We also added native analytics to OptinMonster, so we’re no longer relying on Google Analytics.

Aside from that, we added several notable features like gamified spin a wheel optins, chatbot integrations for Facebook Messenger, tons of new personalization and targeting rules, mobile-specific templates, improved WooCommerce integration, attention activation feature, and integrations with tons of third-party services like Zapier, Jilt, Bronto, etc.

We continued to add more guides and courses to the OptinMonster university which is available for FREE to all OptinMonster users.

Overall, I’m very proud of what we accomplished and I know 2020 is going to be even better!

WPForms

WPForms is the most user-friendly WordPress form builder in the market.

This year, WPForms passed 3 million active installs, and it is now in the top 15 WordPress plugins of all time. (To put in perspective, in 2018 WPForms had only passed 1 million installs).

We continued to maintain our 4.9 out of 5 star rating average with over 5000+ five-star ratings. Reading WPForms user reviews give me a new level of energy every time.

I truly believe that WPForms is hands down the best WordPress form builder in the market, and it can go toe to toe with all major SaaS form players.

We started 2019 with a series of big releases including our powerful Form Landing Pages addon which allows you to create distraction free form landing pages in WordPress (similar to what you would do with Wufoo) without the high costs.

We then launched our conversational forms feature to help boost form completion rate. This allows you to create interactive form layouts in WordPress (similar to Typeform) without the high costs.

We translated WPForms into several top languages like Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, and Russian.

On top of that, we added tons of notable features like smart email fields, smart phone fields, weekly email summaries, AJAX form submissions, Google AMP support, reCAPTCHA v3, multiple fancy file uploads, and a whole lot more.

We also launched the WPForms Care initiative where we offer 75% off discount for non-profit organizations.

Prior to WPForms, I felt that the WordPress form industry was stuck in the land of mediocrity. I’m so proud of our team for pushing the limits which has forced other players in the industry to innovate as well. I believe this level of competition is healthy for pushing the WordPress ecosystem forward

Last but definitely not the least, I have fully stepped out of WPForms day to day operation as of June 2019. My co-founder and friend, Jared Atchison, is leading the company as President of WPForms.

I am really looking forward to the new features that WPForms team is planning on launching in 2020. It’s going to be EPIC!

P.S. They have a really cool 2019 Year in Review infographic that you can check out.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It is currently being used on over 2 million websites, and it’s also in the top 15 WordPress plugins of all time.

This year we completely redesigned the MonsterInsights plugin to make the setup process effortless. We added a brand new setup wizard to make it easy for users to enable the right settings with just a few clicks.

We reorganized the settings screen and even removed a lot of setting options that simply should be defaults in my opinion (decisions over options).

Aside from that, we improved affiliate tracking, enabled automatic scroll tracking, added front-end page insights, and launched integrations with MemberPress, LifterLMS, and other popular plugins.

After the major changes, we spent a lot of time on tweaking and improving the user experience in our various Project Delight sprints.

Unfortunately, we were not able to launch the pro version of our Exact Metrics plugin due to various internal reasons. However I’m confident that we will be launching it in the coming month because we’re in the later stages of development / testing (the new design look gorgeous).

MonsterInsights is one of my most favorite plugins because it helps me grow our business with confidence. I can setup proper analytics tracking with just a few clicks (and no it’s not the same as adding Google Analytics script in the header). MonsterInsights goes way deeper with events tracking, custom dimensions, etc, without writing any code.

I sincerely believe that it’s easy to double your traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights helps me make data-driven decisions to grow our business.

SeedProd

SeedProd is one of my newer companies that became part of Awesome Motive in late 2018. It’s the leading coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress.

In 2019, SeedProd, passed over 1 million active installs (800k last year).

We didn’t add a lot of new features in SeedProd this year as most of our focus was on the new product, RafflePress, that I’ll be discussing later in the review.

With that said, we have huge plans for SeedProd in 2020 which includes a complete revamp, improved user journeys, better templates, a brand new builder interface, and a whole lot more.

I want to make SeedProd the most powerful tool for businesses to jumpstart their new website / project launch. Expect some big news in Q2 / Q3

RafflePress

RafflePress is the most powerful WordPress giveaways and contest plugin.

This is one of the three new premium product launches that we did in 2019.

RafflePress is part of the SeedProd division of our company. When SeedProd joined Awesome Motive, they had a simple giveaway plugin called Viral Giveaways, so we decided to revamp it into a new product.

I have always wanted to build a giveaway plugin that was both EASY and POWERFUL. But most importantly, something that scaled for a large site like WPBeginner.

Giveaways are an incredibly powerful hack to quickly increase your website traffic, grow your social media following, and get more email subscribers.

So why don’t more WordPress site owners run giveaways on their site?

Well that’s because there wasn’t a single good giveaway plugin in the market. The few that existed either didn’t have all the features, or they weren’t optimized for performance … meaning they would significantly slow down your website, if not crash it entirely.

This left business owners to look at SaaS software for giveaways. While solutions like Gleam or Rafflecopter are powerful, they’re extremely expensive costing between $1000 – $3588 per year to access all the powerful features.

We spent a lot of 2019 building what I believe is hands down the best WordPress contest plugin in the market. Not only that, it can also rival the leading SaaS giveaway players without the high costs.

If you’re serious about growing your website traffic, subscribers, and social following in 2020, then try out the viral growth features of RafflePress. We have been using it through out 2019 in our various businesses and are planning to do even more in 2020.

WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is the #1 email deliverability plugin for WordPress, powering over 1 million websites.

This plugin is part of WPForms division, and we acquired it a year ago to help fix the larger email deliverability issues in WordPress.

In 2019, we finally released a Pro version that includes powerful integrations like Amazon SES, Office365, and a much requested Email Logs feature for WordPress and WooCommerce. We also added a VIP done for you service for beginner users who often struggle to setup SMTP for their WordPress sites.

Aside from the paid features, we also improved the free version by adding new integrations like SendinBlue and Pepipost.

This year we plan to add more integrations and better features to help our users fix their email deliverability issues.

TrustPulse

TrustPulse is a powerful conversion tool that helps you increase site conversions with real-time social proof notifications.

This the last of the three new products that we launched in 2019.

TrustPulse is part of the OptinMonster division of our company, and just like OptinMonster it works on all website builder platforms including WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.

Several folks asked me why did we build this app when there were several that already existed in the market. The truth is that we already had a plugin version of this built for years, and we used it on our own sites.

We would have users ask us which tool we used, and we had to say that we’re using a custom tool. The leading solution in the market were simply too expensive for small businesses (charging $20 / month and then going higher … for something this simple).

So I decided to make a powerful tool that not only has a free version but paid plans start at $39 / year. Yup that’s 1/10th the cost of popular competitors

With all that, I’d say that we didn’t do a good enough job in promoting TrustPulse, and I know the team is working on doing a better job in 2020, so it can be used by more eCommerce websites.

WPBeginner

WPBeginner turned 10 years old in 2019, and it still feels quite unreal to say that out loud.

I’m truly grateful for all the support that users and the larger WordPress community has given us through out the decade. I look forward to the next 10 years of helping WordPress grow to over 50% market share.

This year, we finally launched a free Facebook Group called WPBeginner Engage to help beginner and non-techy users do more with WordPress. In just 6 months, we have passed over 23,000 members and the engagement there is phenomenal.

I have been doing exclusive Facebook Lives, recording training videos, and our team is also answering WordPress questions (all for free). You should really consider joining the group.

Our YouTube community continued to grow, and the WPBeginner YouTube channel passed the 150,000 subscriber mark which was my goal for 2019.

This year we also invested in creating original YouTube content series to help users get more traffic, grow your email list, and make money blogging. Check out our playlists.

I am planning a design refresh for WPBeginner since the last new design was launched right before Solomon was born (over 3 years ago). I am thinking about adding several new sections and tools to the website. Currently all the ideas are in my head, and I need to write it down and then make a plan to execute on it.

Maybe on the 11th birthday of WPBeginner, we’ll unveil a new design refresh? Guess will just have to wait and find out.

Growth Fund Companies

All companies that I invested in through the WPBeginner Growth Fund saw tremendous growth.

MemberPress added new revenue channels, made product improvements, and acquired two plugins: ThirstyAffiliates and the popular Members plugin for WordPress.

They also continued the work on Pretty Links and a revamp of Affiliate Royale which we’ll see more of in 2020.

Formidable Forms launched v4 of their form builder interface and several improvements. We also improved the marketing efforts and made changes in the conversion funnels to unlock significant revenue growth.

I also invested in Rymera Web this year which is the parent company of Wholesale Suite, Advanced Coupons, and Inventoroo.

As we expand our eCommerce offerings, I believe the tools from Rymera will be a great compliment to what we’re building at Awesome Motive.

I’m in the middle of closing few other deals at the time of writing this, but I can’t announce it until they’re finalized.

Other Investments

It was a fairly silent year for me in real estate since the market has been quite high. I was able to get a pretty good deal on a Gas Station property in Ft. Lauderdale, so I ended up buying it.

The most important rule that I learnt from my mentor in real estate is that you make money on the BUY (not on the sell). I try to stick to this discipline.

A lot of you have asked me about why do I invest in gas stations? First let me be clear, I don’t operate these. In all my investments, I’m simply the landlord, and I lease the stores to top rated tenants like Circle K, etc. In some properties, I also control the petroleum contracts, but all of these investments are passive and require no involvement from me.

Good gas station properties are located in high-traffic areas of town which means they’re good real estate. I can always repurpose the real estate with another retail tenant when electric cars take over

Company Retreat

Awesome Motive is a 100% distributed company, and we do not have a central HQ. While this is normal in our industry, often normal world people get really shocked to hear that our team is spread across multiple countries and continents.

We do an annual retreat every year where we fly into a central location. This year we all traveled to Orlando, Florida.

Our annual retreats are by far one of my most favorite trips. I get to hang out with some of the smartest people in the world that work alongside me to serve our customers. I’m truly proud of everything that my team accomplished in 2019.

Below are some photos from our company retreat, our trip to Disney World, and a fun night out at Top Golf:

Looks fun? Want to join the company? We’re hiring!

See the open positions and please apply using the specified method. Please DO NOT email me personally because that tells me that you don’t pay attention to details, and you won’t be a good fit at AM.

Lessons Learned

Like every year, I learned a lot in 2019 through reading books, talking with other smart entrepreneurs, and through trial-and-error. Below are some of the most important lessons:

Complex doesn’t have proportional ROI

As entrepreneurs, we always want to do better. The challenge is that sometimes … more often than we like to admit … we end up confusing complex / sophisticated solutions as better solutions because they just sound cool and maybe make us feel “smarter”.

While sophisticated solutions may make sense in theory, more often than not complex doesn’t add proportional value.

Instead it actually ends up costing more both from pure $$ standpoint as well as loss of productivity, time investment, learning curve, on-boarding, etc. which are even more expensive long-term.

In 2019, I was reminded of this lesson numerous times whether it was working with my new portfolio companies, reviewing new proposals / pitches from team members, and even when evaluating some of our existing internal processes.

At Awesome Motive, one of our core values is that we labor for simplicity. We used the word LABOR because making things simple is hard work!

As we grow in our businesses / careers, it’s easy to lose sight of that. My goal for 2020 is to hold this value even closer to my heart.

Consistency is more important than Intensity

Like most people, I started 2019 with a New Years Resolution to lose weight. I failed … at first.

Basically, I set unrealistic expectations for myself which sounds cool in stories, but after few days I simply ended up giving up because it wasn’t realistic.

Fast forward 3 months, March 2019, I was the heaviest I had ever been in my entire life, and I simply accepted this state of mediocrity.

This didn’t sit well with me because I’m NOT lazy, and I’m definitely not mediocre. I know that I excel at every area of my life except for this, and I had to fix it.

I turned to the lessons from one of my favorite books, Atomic Habits, to build better health habits.

Instead of setting yet another unrealistic expectation, I decided to set 4 small tasks that I’d do every day which included: a 30 minute light physical activity, removing sugar drinks, drinking 4 liters of waters, and two meals with lower portions than what I was used to of.

I tracked this in a journal and apps, so I had a visual indicator of my progress.

Most of it was fairly easy because I just walked for my 30 minute activity while I listened to podcasts. My main sugar drink was coffee, so I decided to remove sugar from coffee, and it tastes just fine. The 4 liter water intake per day was hard for me, so I downloaded a water tracking app. The meal part was not too difficult either because I still ate everything I normally would (just slightly less of it).

In short, I didn’t have to make any drastic changes. However the consistency of my small actions compounded, and I was able to achieve great weight loss results.

I have continued this into 2020, and I look forward to living up to my identity of being disciplined in both business and health.

Saying NO is the ultimate productivity hack

As I mentioned earlier, 2019 was by far one of the most balanced years of my life. I got a lot done, I was able to spend time with family / friends, and I was still able to dedicate a decent amount of time to learning / personal growth.

What changed?

I said NO … A LOT.

In my ideal weekly calendar, I dedicated only 3 hours a week for External Meetings / Interviews / Calls that didn’t fall under the “Critical / Urgent” criteria.

To help protect me from myself, I also gave up my entire calendar management control over to my executive assistant.

This gives her autonomy to say NO and move things around without my involvement so everything fits my ideal calendar.

Some people complained to me about this because we had to say NO to their podcast interview request, or I wasn’t available for a 1-on-1 call.

But the reality is that in most cases the matter that needed to be discussed in 1-on-1 either didn’t need me being involved or was handled equally as well over email.

Bottom line is say NO a lot in 2020 and FOCUS on what matters most to you!

Tying frustrations with roles instead of people helps you be more positive

When you have a lot going on, it’s easy to get frustrated. Sometimes you even end up taking out the frustrations on the wrong person at the wrong time … which is really bad.

Other times, the frustrations end up boiling up and can significantly hurt a really good relationship with a friend or colleague.

The challenge is that most people don’t know how to properly communicate through it.

My general reaction is anger and confrontational when I’m frustrated, and I simply didn’t like that part of me.

I wanted to improve, so I started reflecting on this a lot.

I came to a realization that in almost all the cases, my frustrations wasn’t with the person, but it was with the role or specific act that person was performing in their respective role.

This realization was significantly helpful because it made it easier for me to communicate my thoughts in a positive way without hurting anyone’s feelings or burning a relationship.

While this may seem simple or come easy to some of you, this was a big AHA moment for me

Problems need energy to expand

Whether it’s business or life, there will always be problems.

As entrepreneurs and leaders, one of our key responsibilities is to solve problems.

Earlier in the year, one of my highly qualified team member came to me with a “BIG” problem that they had spent a lot of time thinking about but couldn’t solve. Within few minutes into the conversation, I was able to guide them to a working solution.

They asked me how was I able to arrive at a solution so quickly.

My answer: I didn’t give the problem any energy to expand.

Often when trying to solve problems, we have a tendency to go down a rabbit hole which ends up taking us further away from the actual problem. Not only that, it also introduces new problem scenarios which just makes thing more complex.

This process is called giving problems energy to expand. The more energy you give it, the bigger and more complex the problem will get.

If you don’t catch yourself, you end up in a situation where you’re simply stuck, or worst you have a solution to a problem that probably doesn’t even really exist.

This isn’t a new lesson for me, but I wanted to share it here for my team, my future self (incase I forget this lesson), and hopefully one day Solomon when he reads these blog posts.

To be a good problem solver, you must be decisive. Don’t give problems energy to expand. Remember, complexity is the enemy of execution. Labor for simplicity!

Listening to Understand is a Powerful Habit

If you have read any leadership book, heard a podcast, or saw a presentation, then you have likely heard something along the line of Good Leaders are Good Listeners.

This phrase is used so much that it almost feels cliche.

During one of my reading / thinking days this year, I some how landed on the topic of listening, so I started reflecting on this.

The more I read, the more I realized that I often listen to reply vs. listen to understand. This isn’t unique to me either … it’s actually true for most people.

Most of us suck at listening.

Because majority of our development years, we’re thought to speak / talk. It’d be generous to say that 95% of our childhood training is on speaking vs. 5% is on listening.

During my research, I read a stat that most individuals can speak at a rate of 175 to 200 words per minute, but we are capable of listening and processing words at 600 – 1000 words per minute. Since we’re not at full capacity, our brain drifts off to other questions or even preparing a response.

This past year, I spent a lot of time practicing being an active listener. It has made conversations more fun, and it’s also been an extremely powerful learning tool.

When I’m not careful, its easy for me to revert back, but I’ve gotten better at catching myself.

I will continue working on this skill and hopefully one day I’ll master it.

My Goals for 2020

I’m not going to list out product-specific goals because each one of them have fairly elaborate roadmaps.

My personal goals for 2020 are:

• Continue doing family trips – I really enjoy them
• Find more small but compounding improvements to unlock extreme growth in all areas of life
• Become a better mentor and regularly share my breakthroughs with my team and younger family members
• Delegate more effectively and get out of the way

2019 was an amazing year, and I’m truly blessed to be able to do what I love every day.

Here’s to an even better 2020!

In the meantime, enjoy more pics from 2019

The post This happened to me in 2019 – Year in Review appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

Like every year, it was the best year ever for me both personally & professionally.

Since everything happens so fast, I usually don’t get a chance to document it all in one place. That’s why I started doing a yearly recap (2017 | 2016 | 2015), so I can keep a diary for me to reflect on as I get older. Plus, I think it’s going to be helpful for Solomon as well.

Reflection is probably one of the most underused yet powerful tools for #success.
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Let’s recap everything that happened to me in 2018 (caution: it’s very long).

Personal Highlights

The biggest highlight of my personal life is Solomon. He turned 2 years old this year. Now that he can talk and express his feelings, he’s a lot more fun because it’s easier to communicate with him.

Solomon has a pretty strong personality and sometimes I feel like I’m negotiating with a mini version of myself (except he’s more persistent).

It’s crazy how much he has developed cognitively in the last year. He has opinions about music, time, driving directions and just about everything else.

Despite all his opinions, I’d say that we got quite lucky because Solomon is pretty easy going.

This year, we made conscious effort to have Solomon learn both languages: English and Urdu. He has picked up a lot of words in both languages.

Since my parents live only 5 minutes away from us, this has made it easy for Solomon to learn Urdu. We see my parents 5 days of the week, and we talk in Urdu there.

Overall, I think I did a pretty decent job in spending time with family and balancing work.

One of my goals for 2018 was to go on more family trips, and we crushed this goal. Some of my friends thought that I was on vacation half of the year, but that wasn’t the case.

I simply prioritized bringing back my old remote work environment which I often call the #dotcomlifestyle, basically the ability to work from anywhere I want, when I want.

I felt that I had lost this part of me as the company grew, and I made it a priority to fix that in 2018, and I did (more on this in the lessons learned part of the recap).

We started the year with a trip to Punta Mita, Mexico. It was for a business mastermind that I’m part of, but a lot of us brought our families as well. The Four Seasons Property there is gorgeous. We’re going back in January 2019 again. The pictures below don’t do it justice. I’ll make sure to take better ones this year (now that I have an iPhone).

Even though I have a big family here in United States, I have an even bigger family in Pakistan. This year, we took a trip to Pakistan and Dubai to see family. It was Amanda and Solomon’s first time to Pakistan.

They got to meet my grandmother, aunts, uncles, and so many cousins. It was a lot of fun.

I think it was quite cool for Amanda to see the area where I grew up, and she really liked meeting everyone in person. Previously, she had only chatted with them via Facebook or Skype.

We will definitely be going back every few years because I believe its important for Solomon to know his heritage and have a connection with our family back in Pakistan.

We took a quick weekend cruise trip to Bahamas because I have found that there’s no better spot to brainstorm than in the middle of an ocean at night or early morning on the balcony of your room.

It’s just so quite and peaceful. The only thing you can hear is the waves running into the cruise ship, and your thoughts.

This was a quick family getaway because I had several business trips in between where I was away from home.

We did a family trip in Asheville, North Carolina with my siblings, cousins, and close friends that are practically family (Christoff and Keri).

We rented a beautiful estate and went zip lining / river rafting. Everyone had a great time. I specially enjoyed spending time with my brothers and sister. As we grow up and have our own busy schedules, it’s very important to get together and spend quality time.

We played a lot of games that we used to play when we were kids, and it was a lot of fun.

Last year we went to Turkey to hang out with my really close friend David Henzel and his family. This year we decided to take a family trip together to Spain and Italy.

We flew into Barcelona and spent some time there, and then took a cruise trip to Italy. I was able to convince David that cruises are not just for old people. We took Royal Caribbean’s Symphony of the Seas (biggest boat in the world).

We stopped in Rome, Pisa, Naples, and few other places. Overall this was a very fun trip because our kids are only few years apart. Not to mention, David and I can talk to each other pretty much all day.

The pizza and pasta variety in Italy is just amazing, and it’s DELICIOUS. I definitely want to visit again and do a road trip, so I can tour different areas and try out the local food.

Last year, I missed my goal of visiting two national parks, so this year we visited 4 national parks.

We flew into Utah and did a scenic road trip. We saw Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, and Zion National Park.

Aside from that, we also saw few other state parks.

Normally we stay in hotels, but this time we got adventurous. We stayed in a luxury Yurt, a cabin, and a tiny house. These were pretty cool experiences.

I also have a lot of business friends in Utah, and I got to hang out with many of them. This was a bonus perk.

Utah is a very beautiful state, and I definitely want to visit again.

To round off the year, I took a Ski trip with my brothers. This was Zain’s first time going Skiing, so we kept it easy. We did an East Coast mountain which most Pros won’t even call mountains

The important part is that I got to hang out with my brothers and have a good time.

As I do the recap, it’s understandable why my friends might think that I was on vacation half of the year, but just wait till you get to the Business Highlights section.

To round off the personal highlights, this year I received the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from University of Florida (my alma mater).

This was a very special award for me, but what made it even more special was that I had a reserved parking spot with my name on it.

If you have studied at a large university, then you know the struggle of finding parking on campus as a student. When I saw the spot with my name on the sign, I felt like I had made it in life (lol).

Business Highlights

2018 was a very productive year for me in business. Since I have multiple companies, I am going to break up the sections for each business.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is the most powerful conversion toolkit to help you get more email subscribers and make more money from your website traffic.

Over the last 5 years, we’ve taken OptinMonster from a small plugin to one of the most well-known brands in digital marketing.

In March of 2018, I decided to step out of the day to day of OptinMonster, so I can properly oversee all of our brands at Awesome Motive.

I felt that OptinMonster was getting to a size where it needed a dedicated full-time President / GM. My co-founder, Thomas Griffin, is now serving as the President of OptinMonster.

It has been great to see the evolution of our business and the people within it.

Just because I stepped out doesn’t mean progress stopped. The OptinMonster team accomplished a lot in 2018 starting with the launch of OptinMonster 5.0 which came with a brand new drag & drop campaign builder.

As part of this release, we also revamped the display rules to offer even more powerful targeting features. This is precisely what makes OptinMonster the best solution in the market.

Aside from the big release, we also added several new campaign templates, email conversion summaries, a new beta program, and my favorite Smart Tags feature.

Smart Tags basically makes dynamic personalization easy. Previously OptinMonster offered this feature as part of our API, but it required coding.

With the new Smart Tags, you can now add personalization like user’s name, location (country, city, state, etc), time, and other items inside your OptinMonster campaign to boost conversions without writing a single line of code.

The OM team also launched the OptinMonster University to help users get more out of OptinMonster. The plan is to add more digital marketing courses in 2019.

WPForms

WPForms is the most user-friendly WordPress form builder in the market.

This year WPForms passed 1 million active installs, and it is now in the top 25 most popular WordPress plugins of all time.

We continued to maintain our 4.9 out of 5 star rating average with over 3000+ five-star ratings. Reading WPForms user reviews give me a new level of energy every time.

We added a lot of powerful features in WPForms including: surveys & polls, form permissions (form locker), conditional form confirmations, Stripe recurring payments, Drip addon, rating fields, likert scale, NPS fields, image choice fields, custom input masks, better terms of service field, GDPR compatibility, Gutenberg compatibility, and so much more.

I started WPForms to create the most beginner friendly WordPress form plugin.

To stay true to our mission, make smart WordPress forms easy, we created an internal challenge called the “WPForms challenge”. The challenge basically said users should be able to create a simple form and start collecting entries in less than 5 minutes.

Every time we added a new feature, it was my goal to stress-test the user workflow and make sure that we always stay true to our mission.

With the rapid growth of WPForms, I know that we simply can’t think of every use-case ourselves. As a team, we decided to make the WPForms challenge public and make it part of our new user onboarding flow as a guided-tour of WPForms.

This means that every new user can give us feedback, and the added accountability will allow our team to continue improving the workflow while adding more powerful features. Read more about WPForms challenge.

Towards the end of last year, we acquired WP Mail SMTP, the most popular SMTP plugin for WordPress, and we completely revamped it to solve the email deliverability problem in WordPress.

Since this plugin wasn’t properly maintained previously, these updates helped us earn the confidence of WordPress community. I believe that’s why WP Mail SMTP also passed over 1 million active installs without any major promotion from our end.

Seriously I can’t do enough justice to all what WPForms team accomplished in 2018 with just a few paragraphs. If you’re interested, take a look at the awesome 2018 Year in Review infographic WPForms team created.

MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the most popular Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

This was a huge year for MonsterInsights as we added several key features that were needed to complete phase 2 of the business revamp.

For those of you who’re new to my blog, I acquired the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin from Yoast in 2016 and renamed it to MonsterInsights. At that time, it was a dying business making very little revenue.

I created a 3 phase plan to revamp the product and the business to truly make the best analytics solution for WordPress.

• Phase 1: Make it “effortless” to send all interaction data from WordPress site to Google Analytics
• Phase 2: Make it “effortless” to get the stats that matter inside WordPress Dashboard
• Phase 3: Make it “effortless” to make data-driven decisions.

We completed phase 1 in 2017, and I’m proud to say that we completed phase 2 in 2018.

This year, we launched a brand new Overview Report inside the WordPress dashboard. We also created customized reports for Publishers and Ecommerce websites, so you can see the stats that really matter. Along with that, we added few more reports including: Search Console report, Form Conversion report, and Custom Dimensions report.

We also made sure that MonsterInsights is GDPR compatible with our new EU compliance addon.

In August, we finally added one of the most requested features, Google Analytics Dashboard widget. While the feature looks simple, it requires a lot of creativity to add without exhausting Google Analytics API limits since we operate at such large scale.

Last but not least, we launched a page-insights feature, real-time reports, and custom link attribution.

We started work on Phase 3 in 2018, but we couldn’t get it live. I’m confident that we’ll get it live in 2019.

Aside from all the above, we also acquired Google Analytics Dashboard Widget for WordPress (second most popular analytics plugin for WordPress), and rebranded it to ExactMetrics. We didn’t do any major updates to this plugin in 2018, but in 2019 we’ll be releasing a premium version.

MonsterInsights has become one of my most favorite plugins in 2018 because it helps me grow our business with confidence. I sincerely believe that it’s easy to double your traffic and sales when you know exactly how people find and use your website. MonsterInsights helps me make data-driven decisions to grow our business.

WPBeginner

WPBeginner had another excellent year. Can’t believe it’s about to turn 10 years old on July 4th, 2019.

I have been thinking hard on doing something very special for the upcoming 10th anniversary of WPBeginner.

This year we passed 100,000 subscribers on our YouTube channel (currently at 122k subscribers). As a reward, YouTube sent us a Silver YouTube play button.

This is my second Silver play button because I already have both the silver and gold button for List25, which has 2.4M YouTube subscribers.

The WPBeginner button looks different than the original YouTube silver button because they changed the award design.

This year we also switched WPBeginner to HTTPS because of the massive website security push by Google. If you haven’t done so, here’s a step by step guide on how to properly move WordPress from http to https (also includes instructions on how to get a free SSL).

As part of this switch, we added Browser Push Notifications to WPBeginner. In the last 6 months, we have added 260,000+ users in our push list. This has been a great new traffic source for the blog.

2019 is going to be a challenging year for us because we have to update almost 2000 articles with new screenshots for the WordPress block editor (aka Gutenberg). If you’re new to the WordPress block editor, then check out our Gutenberg tutorial.

List25

In October 2018, I sold List25 to Ramon Van Meer of Pink Java.

List25 was a side project that I started in college as an experiment to see if I could dominate YouTube and other social networks with viral content.

In 2018, we passed 2.4 million subscribers on YouTube and 570 million total video views.

The List25 project never really fit into what we did at Awesome Motive, but I kept it for as long as I did for sentimental values. Not to mention, it generated a pretty good side income, and it was a great place for us to experiment.

However as we double down on our small business (b2b) software business, I needed to eliminate all distractions and focus on what really matters.

This was a bitter-sweet moment for me, but in the end, I believe I made the right decision for me as well as the List25 team.

SeedProd

In October 2018, we acquired SeedProd, the #1 coming soon and maintenance mode plugin for WordPress. Currently SeedProd is being used by 800,000+ websites.

I have met John Turner, SeedProd founder, at numerous events and have a lot of respect for what he has built.

When I announced the WPBeginner growth accelerator fund (more on this later), John was one of the people who applied.

After several conversations, we decided that a full acquisition makes more sense for SeedProd given the synergies between our brands and existing products.

I’m extremely excited about what’s coming next for SeedProd in 2019. I can’t share too much details here, but I’d say keep a close eye.

Growth Accelerator Fund

In August 2018, I announced the WPBeginner Growth Accelerator fund.

It was the first-ever growth fund focused entirely on WordPress businesses.

My goal was to invest in a small group of WordPress focused businesses. Along with the investment, I will work intensively with the founders to refine and optimize their existing product / processes by using the Awesome Motive playbook.

Companies will also get to benefit from our vast media resources and the business network that we have built over the last decade.

Over 90+ companies applied to the accelerator, and I invested in:

• MemberPress – #1 WordPress membership plugin.
• Pretty Links – most popular affiliate link management plugin for WordPress.
• Affiliate Royale – create in-house affiliate program for WordPress membership and eCommerce websites.
• Formidable Forms – advanced solutions-focused WordPress form plugin.

I wrote a more in-depth analysis in my blog post about the first round of WPBeginner Growth Accelerator companies.

Other Investments

This past year, I also decided to invest in two companies that are essential to our business.

CloudApp is a productivity tool that speeds up business communication, and I really love it. Our entire team uses it to quickly create and share screenshots, video screencasts, animated gifs, and quick video recordings. You can also annotate screenshots that you take.

I hear a lot of people raving about Loom, but I think CloudApp is 10X better.

It seamlessly integrates with Slack, and our customers really love it when our support team creates custom video replies for them. Bonus, you can use your own custom domain for links.

Since it’s become an essential tool for our business, I decided to invest in CloudApp in their recent round. I highly recommend that you check this tool out.

ChurnBuster is the second company that I decided to invest in. If you run a subscription business, then you’re likely losing a lot of money to involuntary churn (failed payments, credit card declines, etc).

Overtime this number grows and most entrepreneurs completely ignore the problem. ChurnBuster solves this problem with a smart dunning process. From my point of view, this is practically free money!

A lot of entrepreneurs think they can build this in-house, but trust me it won’t be as good. I tried it already … and then I thought it was wise to invest in their business. All of our companies use ChurnBuster, and they have recovered hundreds of thousands in failed payment for us.

Company Retreat

In the WordPress ecosystem, it’s quite normal to have a remote team. However in the normal world, people get really shocked when I tell them that our entire team is remote (spread across multiple countries and continents).

We do an annual retreat where we all fly into a central location. This year we all traveled to Cancun, Mexico.

Our annual retreats are by far one of my most favorite trips. I get to hang out with some of the smartest and most caring people in the world that work alongside me to serve our customers. I’m truly proud of my team, and all the work we did in 2018.

Below are some of the photos from our annual retreat:

Looks fun? Want to join the company? We’re going to be hiring in 2019.

If you are an experienced UX designer, WordPress developer, search engine marketing specialist (PPC), copywriter, video educator, or social media manager (with a proven track record), then shoot me an email with your resume / portfolio.

Lessons Learned

Like every year, I learned a lot in 2018 through reading books, talking with other smart entrepreneurs, and through trial-and-error. Below are some of the most important lessons:

Processes are your most important product

As your company grows, you need to start treating your processes as the most important product of your company.

Writing down processes and creating checklists are the fastest way to onboard new team members and grow efficiently.

Aside from that, you must have processes for accountability and making sure everything is running smoothly.

In my 2017 year-end review, I mentioned that we have invested in creating a company hub. This year we expanded on that even further by documenting a lot more processes.

I highly recommend reading the book, Traction by Geno Wickman if you’re just starting out.

Some other books that I enjoyed reading this year are: Atomic Habits by James Clear, Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 days by Jake Knapp, and Who: The A Method of Hiring by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.

You can do anything you want, if you prioritize it

I used to say that I can work from anywhere I want … when I want.

I felt that I had lost this part of me as the business grew. I was afraid that if I travelled like I used to, then it might impact the business performance.

But my fear was not based on any evidence.

In mid 2017, I decided that I will not let this fear hold me back.

I made it a priority for me to bring back the #dotcomlifestyle in 2018. I started changing things, so we could travel more.

I created systems and processes, so that I could travel with my family while working remotely.

I would say it worked well in 2018 considering I did all the accelerator company deals and sold List25 between August – October (while traveling to New York, Mexico, Spain, Italy, and Utah).

The key is to be disciplined and set concrete work schedule that you MUST NOT skip, no matter how hard things get!

Hire Help Faster

As an entrepreneur, we wear a lot of hats and juggle a lot of things.

Some of the things that we do can AND should be outsourced / delegated.

This year, I decided that I am going to focus my time on tasks that I love and/or only I can do.

I started with delegating everything I hated doing that I know others can do. This included most work around the house and running errands. I hired a part-time Life Assistant. Her job is to do all the normal things that a housekeeper would do, plus run any local errands that we need.

I also recently hired an executive assistant, so I can delegate tasks that I find myself procrastinating on such as booking flights / hotels, appointment scheduling, managing my calendar, meeting planning, etc.

This was by far one of the better decisions I made for productivity in 2018.

My only regret is that I waited too long to execute on this. This was one of my goals for 2016, but I didn’t do it until 2018.

Curated Events are Almost Always Better

I used to attend a lot of conferences in the early days of my career. However as I progressed in my career, I found most large conferences added very little value.

Yes, you meet a lot of people, but you rarely build long-lasting relationships unless you do smaller dinners around the event, and actually follow up with people afterwards.

Typically when you return from a large conference, you’re exhausted and rushing to get back to work. All business cards that you collect usually end up going in trash.

That’s why I started attending smaller more curated events. This allowed me to connect on a more personal level with some of the most brilliant entrepreneurs.

For example, I went to Cabo for a mini-event that Eric Siu (a good friend of mine) organized. There were a total of 9 people all doing amazing things with businesses ranging from 5M to 50M+ in revenue.

I got invited to a small 50 people event by a friend of mine. There were about 35 family offices and 15 accomplished entrepreneurs. I learnt a ton because there was just so much experience and wisdom in that room. The family offices alone managed over $700 billion in wealth.

I also organized few small meetups for WordPress entrepreneurs around WordCamp US (large event). Since a lot of people wanted to come, I got a meeting suite at Westin Nashville.

In 2019, I will focus even more on smaller curated events.

My Goals for 2019

I’m not going to list out product-specific goals because each one has fairly elaborate roadmaps.

My personal goals for 2019 are:

• Fund the Family Foundation – After a lot of back and forth, we got our family foundation approved. The goal for 2019 is to start offering grants and of course create a nice looking website for it.
• Reduce Conference Travel – I want to further reduce my conference travel. If all goes according to plan, I’ll only be at 2 big conferences in 2019 (Traffic and Conversion Summit and WordCamp US)
• Continue Doing Family Trips – I really enjoyed our family trips in 2018, and I want to continue doing these in 2019.
• Document Every Process – As I delegate more, I need to get better at documenting everything (even the smallest of processes).
• Keep a daily journal – I have never done this before, and I am looking forward to start doing this in 2019.
• Take more photos with friends – I realized that I didn’t take enough photos in 2018. I need to get better taking photos with all the awesome people I hang out with.

I really enjoyed 2018, and I’m truly blessed to be able to do what I love every day.

Here’s to an even better 2019!

In the meantime, enjoy more pics from 2018 (just because).

The post This happened to me in 2018 – Year in Review appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

This also explains the recent spike in emails from people asking how much money I make which gets annoying, so I’m hoping this post will also serve as a canned response.

As many of you may know, I am the founder of several very well-reputed online businesses including but not limited to: OptinMonster, WPBeginner, WPForms, MonsterInsights, AIOSEO, and over dozen more.

Collectively my software is used by nearly 20 million websites and help power over $1 billion in creator earnings each year.

Combine that with my offline businesses and investments, I have everything that I need to live a comfortable life with my wife and family for years to come.

So what is my current net worth? What was my net worth two years ago? or what will be my net worth in five years from now?

I used to ask these questions myself and get really anxious. I would compare my net worth with others and try to create competitions in my head until I realized that these questions are meaningless.

Things change all the time.

Knowing someone’s net worth is NOT going to help you succeed.

However understanding the metrics you use to judge your own net worth will help you set smarter goals which as a result will help you succeed.

I’ve been told by many that “it’s easy to say when you are rich”.

But in reality, we were a happy family when we had little in our bank account, and we’re a happy family now – and for me that’s the most important metric!

At this time, you’re probably thinking that I’m trying to avoid the question: what is Syed Balkhi’s net worth? and to be honest Yes I am.

I’ve always hated income reports because I don’t think they’re productive. They also tend to attract the wrong crowd, in my opinion. And until one of my companies go public, I’ve no interest in sharing any of the finance details that I don’t have to.

If you continue to follow what I have to say based on the merit of my work that I have done, then I appreciate having you, and I look forward to adding tremendous value to your life and business with the lessons that I learn.

If you were here only to learn about my net worth from Google, I’m pretty sure you’re disappointed by not seeing a traditional $$$ value listed here.

However please check out my sites:

OptinMonster – serving over billions of impressions monthly

WPBeginner – the largest free WordPress resource site

WPForms – best online form builder used by over 5 million websites

and all other software companies and investments.

Also if you want me to invest in your business, take a look at WPBeginner Growth Fund.

The post What is Syed Balkhi’s Net Worth? appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

Entrepreneurship is an emotional roller coaster. There are ups and downs through out the entire journey, but very few things come close to being as emotional as selling the business in an entrepreneur’s life.

Whether you’re starting a new business or thinking about selling an existing one, my hope is that you’ll find some of these lessons valuable in your journey.

Background Story

Unlike my other ventures, I am not the original founder of Envira Gallery or Soliloquy.

These two WordPress plugins were originally started by my business partner, Thomas Griffin. Almost a year after Thomas and I partnered up to launch OptinMonster, we agreed that these two plugins would benefit tremendously if they were merged into the Awesome Motive family of products.

This was a great decision because both products saw tremendous growth, specially Envira Gallery. We turned these products into a great business that was extremely profitable. We put in place a great team for Envira / Soliloquy that allowed Thomas and I to focus on our growth software, OptinMonster.

In 2016, we also launched WPForms and acquired MonsterInsights to improve our growth software offering.

As our marketing-tech software suite grew, it started to become clear that these two products did not fit our long-term vision.

Finally, in December 2017, we sold the business in a multi-million dollar transaction.

Now that you have the background, let’s take a look at some important lessons from the transaction.

1. Clean Financials and Separate Tax Returns Help A LOT!

Often first-time entrepreneurs have a tendency of running multiple projects from the same business entity. I know a lot of freelancers and WordPress agencies launch premium WordPress plugins and run the revenue / expenses through a single company.

This leads to extremely messy books because you don’t properly calculate / allocate expenses. Why does that matter? Because typically businesses are valued on an EBITDA or Discretionary earning multiple. If your financials are messy, then there is a very likely chance that you won’t get the best of valuation.

Not to mention, it’s very painful to separate the business out should you only want to sell one project.

Also if you’re not careful from an asset protection perspective, then you can significantly increase your liabilities.

One of the things that I had learnt earlier in my career was treating each product as a separate business unit can be tremendously helpful in an exit (should you ever have to pivot or change directions).

This is why the first thing I did when Thomas and I agreed to make these two products join the Awesome Motive family was to restructure them as independent LLCs with a proper ownership structure.

Doing this allowed our financials to be very clean from 2014 onward. This also meant that we had to file separate tax returns, have separate merchant accounts, separate P&Ls, etc.

While you might think it’s a lot of overhead, the benefits are totally worth it. As a CEO of multiple businesses, I can’t stress how important it is to have a clear picture of each business unit at all times.

Also having each product as it’s own business unit gives you the freedom to sell each business separately. In the beginning, we only wanted to sell Soliloquy but ended up deciding to sell them as a package deal to boost the value proposition for the buyer.

If you want to attract the best buyers and have a smooth transaction, then it really helps to have clean financials / books.

Aside from that, having separate tax returns can be very helpful in making your business listing SBA eligible which helps increase your buyer pool.

2. Hire a Broker to Improve the process

Like most things in life, timing is very important when it comes to selling a business. Often first-time entrepreneurs don’t know how to start the sell process. This often leads to delaying selling which can mean lower valuation multiple if the business isn’t growing or is slowing down.

While you can list the business on an auction-based marketplace like Flippa, I believe it can be risky if it doesn’t sell the first time around.

You could reach out to potential buyers yourself if you have a good network, but this isn’t always feasible for everyone.

Hiring the right business broker can be very helpful because they will help guide you through the process. I used Quiet Light Brokerage for this transaction. You can reach out to them and mention my name. Alternatively, I’m always happy to make a personal intro to my direct contact (just shoot me a message via my contact form).

3. Interview the Buyers Diligently

Often first-time entrepreneurs are afraid to ask questions to buyers because they don’t want to “piss off” someone who’s about to pay them a lot of money.

In my experience, I think it’s very important to interview buyers diligently because you’re about to handover your customers / business to them. That’s a lot of trust, and your reputation depends on it.

Not to mention, choosing the right person or company will also increase the likelihood of actually closing the deal. Just because you have a letter of intent (LOI), doesn’t mean that your deal is done.

It’s quite common for deals to fall apart during the due-diligence stage that happens after signing an exclusive letter of intent (LOI).

Last but not least, if you are signing a seller’s note or have earn-outs, then it becomes even more important that you trust the buyer.

General word of wisdom: If you are not happy with the guaranteed money, then don’t do the deal. Earn-outs, seller-notes, etc are not guaranteed.

4. Being Rational and Patient is VERY Important

The process of selling is like an emotional roller coaster. As an entrepreneur, you give everything to build a business. Selling it isn’t easy, even though sometimes it’s the right to do.

During the transaction, you’ll deal with a lot of frustrations. It’s important to be rational and patient.

You might have unreasonable ideas on valuation. It’s important to check the market to see what multiples businesses are being sold at, and be reasonable during the transaction. Otherwise, your chances of getting the deal done would be quite low.

The hardest part for me was saying good bye to the team. I considered each of them as a friend, and I really wanted to keep them at Awesome Motive. But I know that wasn’t possible.

Lucky for me, I have a very level-headed business partner (Thomas), and that’s truly a blessing.

5. Document Your Processes

When you’re running a startup, documenting processes isn’t a top priority. It’s a lot more important to just get things done.

However as you grow, you understand the importance of documenting processes. This becomes even more useful when you’re ready to sell the business.

It gives buyers comfort and peace of mind knowing that they’re going into a well-run company.

I also recommend evaluating the tools you regularly use and think about how hard would it be if you were to switch. For example, it’s fairly easy to transfer PayPal / Stripe subscriptions if they’re separate accounts (like we did).

However if you have a single Stripe account for multiple product businesses, then that can be a big headache.

We also kept all our affiliate accounts separate for each company, so at the time of sale we simply had to handover the accounts.

Our WordPress hosting for the two sites were provided by SiteGround, and they were very helpful in the transition.

Things like GSuite and HelpScout are very hard to transfer. We had to write a custom script to migrate HelpScout data to the new account. I wish HelpScout build an easy way to do this because it’s much needed. GSuite was a lost cause.

It’s surprising how many companies don’t think about migrating data from one account to another. At OptinMonster, we made sure to build the ability to transfer optin campaigns from one account to another

Anyways, I hope you found these thoughts helpful. If you’re considering selling your business and want someone to talk to, I’m always happy to help. Shoot me a message using my blog’s contact form.

The post 5 Lessons from Selling a Multi-Million Dollar WordPress Plugin Business appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

Because of how fast everything happens, I usually don’t get a chance to document it all in one place. That’s why I started doing a yearly recap, so I can keep a diary for me to reflect on as I get older. Plus, I think it’s going to be useful for Solomon as well.

Let’s take a look back at everything that happened this year (caution: it’s long).

Personal Highlights

I did a lot of juggling in 2017 – trying to be a good dad, a good husband, and a good son.

Solomon turned 1 year old, and it’s amazing watching him grow. From learning how to sit up, then crawl, and now walk / run, is by far the best moments for me in 2017.

Also for those who haven’t yet experienced fatherhood, it’s crazy how much control an infant/toddler has over your schedule. Most of our personal schedule in 2017 revolved around Solomon.

One of my goals for 2017 was to increase family time, so Solomon can have the same family experience that I had when growing up. To make this happen, I bought my parents a house 5 minutes from us. This was a great decision.

Solomon gets to spend time with his grandparents almost every day, and I get to eat my mom’s delicious food. Although the second part has caused me to gain weight which my doctor isn’t too happy with.

We also made conscious effort to go out for breakfast and dinner with our aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. This was a very pleasant addition to my life considering the last 9 years I spent in a college town away from family.

Between trying to spend more time with family and parenthood, I wanted to make sure that Amanda and I continue to have regular date nights. Thanks to my mom and my sister for babysitting Solomon, we were able to do that. And it’s getting better as he gets older.

I failed at my other two goals: remove profanity from my vocabulary and visit two national parks.

But I did travel a lot, and towards the latter part of the year, Amanda and Solomon joined as well.

We took Solomon to 3 different countries (Turkey, Mexico, and Bahamas).

Turkey was A LOT of fun. We spent two weeks there. Thanks to our good friends David & Yurda Henzel for showing us around.

We also took a family cruise to Bahamas with 17 people. First time for my parents and Solomon too. We had a blast, and I would love to do it again.

Here are some random photos from my travel in 2017.

The school project that I started in 2016 with Cambodian Village Fund was completed, and the “Syed Balkhi Learning Center” opened in 2017. I wasn’t able to make it to the opening ceremony, but to my surprise, I received a Medal of Honor from the prime minister of Cambodia.

Completely out of the blue, I got invited to have dinner with the United States Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. The dinner was held at the Treasury building, and it was humbling to be in the company of several nation leaders and top entrepreneurs like Shahid Khan, the owner of Jacksonville Jaguars.

I also received the Technology Award from the Pakistani News Channel (GeoTV) where I sat down and got to chat with the new Ambassador of Pakistan for United States.

Last but not least, I was inducted in the United States Cricket Hall of Fame for the work that I have been doing with Cricket Council USA over the last few years in helping expand the game of Cricket in U.S.

Business Highlights

Since I have multiple companies, I am going to break up the sections for each business. But before I do that, check out the new company website design of Awesome Motive Inc. I’m super proud of this one.

OptinMonster

OptinMonster is our flagship product, and it saw a lot of growth in 2017.

We launched version 4.0 which introduced a lot of infrastructure changes that helped us improve performance by 57%. We redesigned the OM dashboard and added necessary account management features like sub-accounts, permission control, activity logs, and custom branding to help our enterprise and agency clients.

We also added powerful targeting features like InactivitySensor, sound effects, and shareable MonsterLinks.

Last but not least, we finally launched our native Shopify app to help reduce cart-abandonment and increase eCommerce revenue with OnSite retargeting.

Aside from the product features, we redesigned the OptinMonster marketing website. This was a huge project considering we added over 100 new pages to the site.

We pushed out dozens of amazing articles, case studies, and launched our Facebook group.

I learnt a lot of lessons from OptinMonster when it comes to managing a growing team, creating strategic partnerships, and how to be better prepared for growth. More on this in the lessons learned section.

WPForms

A lot of folks laughed at me when I told them I was going to launch a contact form plugin for WordPress in 2016.

Fast forward to 2018, in less than 2 years, WPForms is now running on over 800,000 websites, and we have a 4.9 out of 5 star rating average. That’s because it is the most user-friendly contact form solution for WordPress. Don’t believe me? Try the free version yourself to see the difference.

We added tons of neat features like form abandonment addon, invisible captcha, ability to create custom form templates, form column layouts, new email marketing integrations, offline form addons, form importer, new translations, and more.

We also acquired the most popular SMTP solution, WP Mail SMTP, to help solve the email deliverability issues that comes with WordPress. In December, we completely revamped the plugin to make it easy to use and more reliable.

MonsterInsights

We launched the redesigned MonsterInsights website and plugin in January 2017. For those who don’t know, I acquired this plugin in 2016 from Yoast, and it’s the largest Google Analytics integration running on 1.9 million websites.

Through out the year, we added several powerful features like: URL builder, Google AMP addon, Forms tracking, enhanced eCommerce tracking, Facebook Instant articles tracking, Google optimize addon, telephone link tracking, and more.

Finally, MonsterInsights has become the plugin that’s a MUST HAVE for all of my websites.

I believe 2017 was phase 1 of our revamp of this powerful plugin. In 2018, we will enter phase 2, which includes better reports for beginners. My whole goal is to make analytics easy for WordPress beginners. Simply sending data to Google Analytics is equivalent of sending it to a graveyard for most business owners because they have no idea where to find most of it.

I want to bring back the relevant data back to WordPress in a simplified reporting dashboard. I think version 7.0 will do just that. Here’s a sneak peek.

2018 is going to be huge for MonsterInsights.

Envira Gallery and Soliloquy

As announced yesterday, we have sold both Envira Gallery and Soliloquy to a private buyer, Nathan Singh.

One of the “problems” of a fast growing business is that you have to carefully choose what to focus on. Most of my focus in 2017 was on our growth tools.

This caused us to severely neglect Envira and Soliloquy which I believe wasn’t fair to our community of loyal users who have supported us all these years.

I’m very happy to have found a new leader in Nathan who shares the same values as us in building a customer centric product and company.

I know as this news spread, I will be getting a lot of emails with questions related to the price, sale process, and everything in between. Here’s what I can share:

This was a multi-million dollar transaction that involved banks which made for an interesting learning experience. The due-diligence process took two months, and we closed the deal before the end of 2017.

I learnt a lot of lessons from this sale. Some of these I will share in the lessons learned section of this article below.

I also intend to write a separate blog post talking about my detailed experience from acquiring these two plugins, growing the business, and then selling them.

List25

List25 is a side project of mine that I started in college. We are closing in on 2.3 million subscribers and we passed 552 million video views mark on our YouTube channel.

I missed my goal of redesigning the site in 2016, and I wasn’t so happy about that. We did a complete redesign of List25 website in 2017, and it turned out to be good for us.

Since I spend two hours a month managing the website, I brought on a third-party ad management company, SnigelWeb, to help improve our revenue. Overall, they have done a great job.

My goal for 2018 is to finally launch our merchandise store for List25. This will also give me the chance to play around with Shopify in great details.

WPBeginner

WPBeginner had another excellent year. We grew our website traffic and our YouTube channel passed 10 million video views.

However I fell short on my goal of reaching 100,000 subscribers on YouTube – we only got to 80,000 subscribers.

While we reduced the output of our videos, I felt the quality of our videos improved significantly. We also created some of the best WordPress tutorials in 2017, and I’m very proud of the team.

My goal for 2018 is to increase our content output while maintaining the same high quality. I also have a few secret projects planned, but I won’t be sharing those just yet.

Real Estate

I added a very special property to my portfolio in 2017. It’s a Wells Fargo building that I used to ride my bicycle by when I was growing up. It’s kinda cool to say that I own it, and the bank is my tenant.

I’m also creating my office in this building. It’ll be a new experience for me, since I’ve never worked out of an office before.

Aside from this commercial property, I also bought two residential properties for rental income.

I could’ve definitely bought more if I borrowed money, but I like being 100% debt-free. Some people call me crazy because I can grow a lot faster by borrowing money (specially when borrowing is so cheap), but I’d rather grow slowly and have peace of mind.

Press and Mentions

I got tons of press mentions through quotes as well as having my articles featured in top publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, HuffPost, TheNextWeb, and countless others.

Three that I’m particularly proud of are:

I was recently recognized in Inc magazine as one of the 6 online entrepreneurs who’re giving back.

I was recognized on Forbes for my work on List25 / YouTube – it also contains 8 tips to grow your channel.

Larry Alton did a story about my background on Inc talking about how I started the company.

I was also mentioned as #2 in the list of top 10 online marketers to watch in 2018 on Entrepreneur Magazine.

Lessons Learned

I learned A LOT in 2017. Below are some important lessons:

Have a Right Business Structure

There’s a lot of due-diligence that’s involved when you sell a business. One of the best decisions that we made early on was to keep every product in a separate business entity (LLC). This allowed us to keep our books clean because each product had a separate Stripe / PayPal account, separate bank account, etc.

This made the due-diligence process very easy for us because we had all the documents ready to go.

If you have a business with multiple products, and you think that there might be a time where you will sell one of the products separately, then it’s best that you establish separate business entities.

We still used Awesome Motive for management purposes (i.e hiring employees, paying shared expenses, etc), but we did regular inter-company invoices. This sounds like a hassle, but it worked out really well for us in the Envira / Soliloquy sale.

Invest in building a company hub

One of the best things we did this year was to finally invest in our company hub for the team. A hub is a website where our team can find all the relevant information such as team directory, SOP manual, announcements, style guides, company calendar, videos, etc.

I looked everywhere, and I couldn’t find a solution that did everything that we wanted. So we built one using WordPress.

Be more Intentional

I used to attend a lot of conferences every year, casually learn a few things, and never implement most of them.

In 2017, I made it a point to be intentional about everything I do. This forced me to be better at just about everything.

When I attended an event, I had a purpose of what I wanted to get out of it. And surprisingly enough, I found the events that I did attend to be very valuable for my business.

Monitoring Systems

This sounds so simple, but I bet you that most businesses don’t do this properly. Up until 2017, I was doing it wrong as well.

Yes, I had an uptime monitor setup for my website which notified me if our websites went down.

What we didn’t have was monitoring system for our cart and lead-gen forms. If you’re spending money on ads to bring users to your site, this can be a major blow if something isn’t working right.

Due to a server configuration issue, our cart had an error but everything else on the website was working fine. So the uptime monitor didn’t notify us. We didn’t know about the issue until a customer emailed us. Something like this should’ve been caught right away, but it wasn’t which caused us to lose a lot of $$$.

Now, we’re using Pingdom Transaction Monitoring solution. If you’ve an eCommerce website, then this is something you should seriously consider!

My goals for 2018

I’m not going to list out product-specific goals because each one has fairly elaborate roadmaps.

My personal goals for 2018 are:

• Start a non-profit organization – The more success I have in my professional career, the more I want to give back. We have already filed the paperwork, and both Amanda and I are excited about this.
• Create a video show – Most folks don’t know this, but I actually get quite nervous when I get in front of a camera. I want to break out of this in 2018.
• Continue doing family trips – I really enjoyed our family trips in 2017, and I want to continue doing these in 2018.

I had a lot of fun in 2017, and I’m truly blessed to be able to do what I do every day. Here’s to an even better 2018!.

In the meantime, enjoy more pics from 2017 (just because).

The post This happened to me in 2017 – Year in Review appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

2016 was a very special year for me both personally and professionally.

Since everything happens so fast, I don’t always get a chance to document it all in one place. That’s why I started doing a yearly recap blog post.

Let’s take a look back at everything that happened this year.

Personal Highlights

We have a new addition to our family: Solomon Balkhi.

Becoming a dad is truly a life-changing experience (both literally and figuratively).

The whole process has given me a new perspective on how much parents love their kids. I have always loved and respected my parents, but now I have a completely different level of appreciation for everything they have done for me and continue to do so.

Before you ask, here are some photos of my little man.

Amanda finished her PhD in Clinical and Health Psychology. I’m super proud of her. Although not a fan of Dr and Mr. Balkhi title. Gotta level up my game, so I can get a honorary doctorate

Now that Amanda is done with her degree, we said good bye to Gainesville and moved back to our hometown of West Palm Beach in our new home that we built last year.

One of my resolution for 2016 was to spend more time with family and really live up to the “family first” core value. The moments of joy that this brought was amazing.

I bought my parents a new house, so my mom can have everything she wanted in a dream home and be close to us – 5 minutes drive.

Amanda and I traveled to the national parks in California (Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite). It was such a relaxing trip and truly beautiful.

This year, I partnered with the Cambodian Village Fund to build a school in a small Cambodian village. The school will open in February 2017.

Business Highlights

Since I have multiple companies, I’ve broken up things by business.

WPForms

Earlier this year, I launched a new WordPress contact form plugin with my friend Jared Atchison.

I wrote a full behind the scenes story of how we came up with the idea and why we created WPForms.

So far it’s being used on over 50,000 WordPress websites, and our users absolutely love it. Try the free version, so you can see the WPForms difference!

Our goal is to make the most user-friendly WordPress form builder, and we’re working hard at it. See the WPForms 2016 recap to see all the new features and addons that we added.

OptinMonster

Last year, we converted OptinMonster from a WordPress plugin into a SaaS. This year, we truly pushed the limits in making OptinMonster the most powerful conversion optimization platform on the web.

We launched a brand new campaign builder with 3 different campaign views (yes/no, optin, and success). We added powerful behavior personalization features like Dynamic Text Replacement, Geolocation targeting, Onsite Retargeting, Onsite Follow up campaigns, and so much more.

I can proudly say that there’s not a single solution in the market that even comes close to offering the personalization features that we do.

See the full 2016 recap of OptinMonster to check out all the new features that we added.

One of my goals was to make OptinMonster blog the best conversion rate optimization blog in the industry.

We pushed out dozens of amazing articles, case studies, eBooks, and cheatsheets. I’m really proud of our team and super excited for 2017 product roadmap.

I learned a lot of lessons from OptinMonster when it comes to price increase, recurring billing, and churn recovery. More on this in the Lessons Learned section of the blog post below.

Envira Gallery

We doubled down on Envira Gallery in 2016 and the results have been very positive.

We redesigned the user experience for creating galleries and added several new features such as Adobe Lightroom to WordPress, Featured Content gallery, Downloads addon, Breadcrumbs, and more.

Currently, Envira is running on over 70,000+ WordPress websites.

Soliloquy

Following the success of Envira in 2015, we revamped Soliloquy website. We also revamped the slider creation workflow to match Envira Gallery.

We added new features such as the ability create WooCommerce product slider, featured content slider, and a presentation slider that converts PDF to Slides.

Currently, Soliloquy is running on 80,000+ WordPress websites.

MonsterInsights

I acquired the popular Google Analytics plugin from Yoast and rebranded it MonsterInsights. We spent several months rewriting the entire plugin from scratch.

We’re currently finalizing the Beta releases, so we can launch the new version in January.

This plugin is running on over 1 million WordPress websites including the likes of Bloomberg, so we want to make sure that it goes through extensive testing before we push the new version live.

2017 is going to be an amazing year for MonsterInsights, and I really can’t wait to launch our new version.

List25

We passed the 2 million subscribers mark on our List25 YouTube channel. Currently we’re at 2.1 million subscribers and 461 million video views.

Out of all YouTube channels, List25 is ranked #1141 (crazy isn’t it).

I’m really proud of Juan, Mike, Tristan, Crystal, and the entire team for consistently creating amazing lists on the site.

One of my goals for 2016 was to finish the redesign of List25, but I failed. There was a lot going on, so I outsourced the project to a third-party agency.

While they did a good job on the actual design, their code quality wasn’t up to par. I have decided that I’ll code the site myself and launch the new design before the end of February.

WPBeginner

WPBeginner had another excellent year. I launched the WPBeginner redesign, and so far all the feedback has been positive.

We doubled the size of our YouTube channel and now have over 500 free video tutorials that have been watched by over 6 million people. Currently the channel has 47,000 subscribers, but I would like to pass 100,000 by the end of 2017.

Themelab

I decided to shut down our premium WordPress theme club, Themelab. We simply couldn’t allocate the resources to create new themes because our plugin business is thriving.

Majority of it was a focus issue. With so much going on, I couldn’t spend the time to properly market and grow the business.

I’m still deciding about what to do with the website. Several folks have been asking us to create more advanced WordPress tutorials, and it’s possible that Themelab becomes a place for that.

Real Estate

My real estate business is doing great. I added a new gas station / C-store to my portfolio.

I also bought two new residential properties to rent.

I could’ve definitely bought more if I borrowed money, but I like being 100% debt-free. Some people call me crazy because I can grow a lot faster by borrowing money (specially when borrowing is so cheap) but I’d rather grow slowly and have a peace of mind.

Press & Mentions

I got tons of press mentions through quotes or having my articles featured in top publications.

This year I got featured in Mashable, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc, HuffingtonPost, Fox Business, VentureBeat, Yahoo Small Business, TheNextWeb, and countless other publications.

Lessons Learned

I learned A LOT in 2016. Below are some important lessons:

Plan for the Unexpected

My lawyers did an excellent job in creating my corporate structure few years back including trusts, wills, and all that good stuff. But to be honest, the importance of it didn’t hit me until we found out that we were going to have a baby.

For the first time in my life, I started thinking about the “what ifs”.

This helped me solidify my goal, my mission, and what I want my legacy to be.

I created new trusts, made more donations than any other year before including donating wp.org domain to the WordPress foundation.

One of the best lessons 2016 thought me was to always plan for the unexpected.

Automated Billing for Everything

Until recently, every WordPress plugin relied on voluntary subscription renewal. A lot of plugin authors offered renewal discounts to encourage users to renew the plugin.

After seeing the success from OptinMonster SaaS, we decided to challenge the status-quo and converted all of our WordPress plugins to recurring billing.

If the results from OptinMonster are any indicator, then I think 2017 will be great.

Following our lead, several others in the WordPress community have also started doing automated recurring billing.

Valued Based Pricing

We increased our prices for OptinMonster by 40% this year, and we saw no change in the number of sales. Except as you can imagine, our revenues increased significantly.

Despite the price increase, OptinMonster is still the most competitively priced solution in the market.

We added tons of powerful features over the years, some that you won’t even find in other “enterprise” solutions that are charging $5,000+ per month. When you compare that to a mere $348 / year, it’s a no-brainer.

If you’re thinking about increasing your price, then carefully evaluate your industry to see how your product compare against others. After that do the math to see what different scenarios would look like (i.e what happens if you lose a percentage of your customers). Lastly, do split-test to see how your audience reacts to different prices.

In our case, we simply took our old monthly price and made that our annual price. By default we always showed users our annual options, but during the test we showed users our monthly option first.

We saw no difference in conversion except that more people chose our monthly option. We talked with several customers who thought the $199 plan was per month and were surprised to see how cheap OptinMonster was.

This was a great business decision for us.

Involuntary Churn Recovery

If you’re running a SaaS business or have recurring revenue, then you know about involuntary churn (failed payments).

We’re now using a company called Churn Buster and I highly recommend them. This is basically free money

1-on-1 Brainstorming Partner

I’m part of several masterminds and I love them because I get to learn so much from really amazing people.

In 2016, I started doing something different. Having 1-on-1 brainstorming calls with a select group of friends.

For example, my friend David Henzel and I talk every week to discuss different challenges we have, new things happening in our industry, our life etc.

We keep a running journal of the things we talk about in a Google Doc. During the week, we add discussion points there so our conversation is efficient and we make sure we always start and end on time (to the minute).

This is great because not only do we learn a lot, but I get a fresh new perspective. Lastly, it’s great for my mental health.

I am doing this with a few different friends at various intervals (i.e weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly). I highly recommend you to try it!

My goals for 2017

I’m not going to list out business goals because each product has it’s own roadmap, and as you can imagine the overall goal is always growth.

My personal goals for 2017 are:

• Increase Family Time – I have a tendency to start filling up my schedule. Because of this, I don’t spend enough time with my extended family. In 2017, I want to spend more time with family, so Solomon can have the same family experience that I did when growing up.
• Visit 2 National Parks – For the last two years, we’ve been visiting national parks. I want to continue that trend and visit at least two new national parks in 2017.
• Remove profanity from my vocabulary – I tend to drop f* bombs and other inappropriate words at times. With Solomon growing up, I need to choose my words wisely.

2016 was such an awesome year that this article doesn’t even do justice, but oh well. Here’s to an even better 2017!

In the meantime, enjoy more pics from 2016 (just because).

The post This happened to me in 2016 – Year in Review appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

I say this every year because each year we improve from the lessons we learn.

After seeing the pictures I posted on my Twitter and Facebook profiles, several folks asked me if I could share the benefits we get from the retreat and what planning lessons I’ve learned.

Since this was our 4th annual retreat, and I have no plans on stopping, it has to be good.

Benefits of Company Retreat

We’re a remote company, and we rely on tools like Slack, Zoom, etc to stay connected as we work.

But there’s something really special when all of us get together under one roof. Below are the 4 biggest benefits we get from company retreats.

1. Renewed Energy towards our Vision

Company retreats are a great place to break department / team silos and have everyone galvanize around the bigger picture.

2. Hidden talents and stories

There’s a lot you learn about your teammates when you’re under roof. Maybe you lived in the same city several years ago or they’re a great chef or they’re an amazing photographer.

The stories you hear about people’s experiences are great for building deeper relationship.

3. Better Bonds

Nothing brings a remote team closer than a retreat.

Putting a face and person behind the avatar that you talk with on Slack is amazing. Sure there’s video chat and meetings, but they’re not the same.

Playing games, having a drink, having dinner on the same table helps you build tighter bonds and relationship with your team.

4. Hackathons

This is my favorite. We always end up doing cool stuff during hackathons. This year, we built SupportAlly – a tool to help our support team provide better support.

We also started working on several neat ideas that will turn into awesome features inside our products.

If you are thinking about doing a corporate retreat, I highly recommend it. DO IT. Trust me, you will not regret it.

Now that we have covered the benefits, I want to share 3 planning lessons that I have learned. These will help you plan a fun and productive retreat.

Lessons from Planning a Company Retreat

After planning 4 company retreats, I think it all boils down to 3 things. Location & length, Activities to do, and Managing costs.

Let’s take a look at each of them in details.

1. Location & Length

When planning a retreat, the biggest question you have to answer is where do you want to plan the retreat and for how long.

For the last 4 years, I’ve planned our retreat in Florida. Why?

Because I’m located in Florida. Second because we have great beaches and tourism. This past retreat was in Orlando.

I’m always tempted to do our retreats somewhere in the Caribbean or in South America, but since our team is global (majority U.S), it’s easier to just have it in the states and submit visa application for our international team members.

Our first retreat was only 5 days long, and it felt too short. The last 3 retreats have been 7 days, and it’s perfect.

Doing it in Orlando this year was good because we were near a major airport. The past 3 years we were in St. Augustine and Palm Coast (beach houses) which were definitely fun but airport commute was longer.

The best thing you can do is try to find connecting flights from same hubs. We use Delta, and it’s cool to have several of your teammates be in the same flight from Atlanta to final destination.

2. Activities to Do

Keeping everyone entertained and productive can be a challenging task.

In the past, we have done Jet Skis, mini-golf, bowling, pool tournaments, corn hole competitions, flag football, Catan (we love Settlers), and tons of other games.

The one that’s easiest to co-ordinate is Bowling (no matter your group size). As our team grows, some activities like Jet Skis aren’t feasible for large groups.

The first two days of our retreat is pretty relaxing. We eat, drink, swim, and have great conversations.

The third day, we have presentations where each team lead gives an overview of what has been done in the last 6 months as well as sharing the roadmap ahead. Each is followed by a Q&A, suggestions.

I also do a State of Awesome (townhall) style update which is tons of fun.

From than on the retreat is fairly ad-hoc with the exception of the Hackathon.

We dedicate 3 hours to build something awesome that our team can use, and the whole team works together to make it happen.

We have tons of breakout where team members can break into small groups to address a specific challenge that we’re having.

Sometimes results from breakouts can end up being a presentation for the entire team.

3. Managing Costs

Flying all the people to a central location, accommodations, activities, food, etc can all add up in cost.

The best way to start any planning is to set a budget.

We have had great luck finding luxury houses of VRBO. This past year, we used Luxury Retreats.

Aside from flights and venue, your next biggest expense is food.

In the past, we used to go out to eat every meal. This is fine if you’re a small team, but as your team grows this become hard to scale.

This retreat, we hired a private chef who worked at Disney before starting his own business. Probably one of the best decisions.

We had healthier food that taste great and it was cheaper. I was quiet surprised by how much cost effective this was. Not to mention the time you save from not driving to a restaurant and waiting is amazing.

Multiple course meals with options (that’s healthier and cheaper) — this is a no-brainer!

Booking in advance is another way you can save. For activities, always ask for a group discount. Most companies offer that (whether it’s bowling alley, jet skis, mini-golf, etc). They all have it.

Now it wouldn’t be a retreat post, if I didn’t share some pictures. Below are some that I randomly picked:

Hope you found this update helpful. If you’re thinking of planning a company retreat, then definitely do so.

Also don’t forget to checkout my article on 10 business mistakes that every entrepreneur should avoid.

The post 4 Benefits of Company Retreats + 3 Planning Lessons that I Learned appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

Since I have been in the affiliate marketing space for the last 11 years and have had this discussion countless times, I shared with him the #1 biggest mistake every new company must avoid when setting up their own affiliate program.

But before we get to that, let’s cover the basics first.

What is an Affiliate Program and What are the Benefits?

An affiliate program is a referral system where you incentivize others to recommend your product by offering them a commission for every sale they refer.

It’s like having a sales army without having to pay a salary.

This is why I call it the ultimate low-budget high-impact marketing plan for startups.

Setting up your Affiliate Program

The most important decision that you have to make when creating your own affiliate program is the platform you choose to power it.

And this is where most beginners go wrong.

The biggest mistake you can make when setting up your own affiliate program is using a self-hosted affiliate tracking and management software.

Now I understand that often people choose this route because it’s cheaper.

But in the grand scheme of things, you ALWAYS end up losing!

Here are 6 reasons why I always use a third-party affiliate management system and you should too.

1. Better Tracking

Most self-hosted affiliate management software come in form of plugins that run on your web hosting server.

But the reality is that your hosting server is not optimized for accurately tracking all the clicks.

A simple error can result in you paying double the commission for every sale. Trust me, I have been on the receiving end of double-commissions many times, and as an affiliate I love it.

But this is precisely the reason, why I always use a third-party affiliate tracking platform.

2. Better Fraud Detection

I should start by saying that most self-hosted affiliate software don’t have ANY fraud detection.

If they claim they do, you should triple check every details and learn exactly how it works (because it doesn’t).

When you use a professional platform, they regularly monitor the clicks and referrals.

Their fraud department will email you to let you know about any suspicious activity or affiliate, so you don’t lose money.

I have witnessed too many businesses payout commissions only to realize they were duped. One of my friends’ company fell victim to this and lost six figures before they made a switch.

There’s a reason why some of the largest brands in the world rely on hosted affiliate tracking platforms rather than building an in-house software.

My tip: learn to learn from others mistake.

3. Automated Payouts

As a business owner, time is money.

You shouldn’t be wasting that on sending out affiliate payments.

The best part about using a hosted affiliate management software is that they handle all payments (domestic and international) automatically.

Your affiliates will always be paid on time which only improves your relationship.

4. No Accounting Overhead

If you’re a U.S. business, you’re required to issue a 1099 to each person you paid more than $600 to.

If you’re in EU, then regulations are even worst.

As a business owner, you shouldn’t have to worry about this.

The overhead and hassle on this part alone is worth paying the negligible fee for using an established affiliate marketing platform.

5. Easier for Affiliates

Believe it or not, by using an existing network, you make it easier for your affiliate partners because it’s one less dashboard they have to login to.

It’s one less W9 or tax papers, they have to fill out.

It’s one less payment they have to worry about because the networks consolidate the payments and send it in bulk.

As a super affiliate, I prefer to work with companies who go through a network because it helps build trust. There’s no way they can cheat me because they can risk losing their account (and vice-versa).

6. Network Effect

When you join a larger affiliate network, you allow your business to get more exposure which helps in recruiting more partners.

This is precisely the reason why some companies are part of multiple affiliate networks.

I hope after reading all the above reasons, I have convinced you to not make the mistake of using your own self-hosted affiliate management system. Usually it does.

The next question I get asked is: what are the best affiliate platforms out there?

Best Affiliate Network & Platform

There are dozens of affiliate network and platforms out there. The ones I recommend are:

1. ShareASale
2. Impact Radius

There are distinct advantages of each, so I’ll break it down below.

ShareASale

They’re one of the largest affiliate platforms with a huge network of affiliates. They have been around for 15+ years. I use them for our business.

The biggest advantage of ShareASale is low costs: $650 to get started and then you pay a small commission on each sale your partner refer.

This is good for small businesses, because you don’t have any monthly commitment. You only pay when an affiliate makes a sale.

For example: your product costs $30, and you offer your affiliates 10%, then they’ll get $3 and ShareASale will get $0.60 cents.

My biggest pet peeve with ShareASale is their user-interface design looks like it was made in 2000 (which it probably was).

However, I can personally vouch for the team because I see them twice a year, every year, and they’re an outstanding group.

Update: I didn’t know that ShareASale also offers an Enterprise pricing plan where you can pay a flat fee (again because we don’t fit the bill for an Enterprise client). But Brian (CEO) pinged me to let me know about it.

There’s a UI update coming in a few months. Super stoked to hear this.

This is why I love ShareASale because their team is always helpful. On top of that, he showed me some other feature that I never used but plan on doing so:

– Marketing Automation for Affiliates
– Promo Code Tracking (we use this already)
– SKU based tracking for large retailers.

Impact Radius

This is one of my favorite platforms, and I recommend every large company to use them. I have referred several companies their way.

Why? Because their technology is top-notch. They offer more tracking options than you can think of.

Their user experience is leaps and bounds ahead of ShareASale.

The only downside is their network is not as large as ShareASale.

I have been seriously contemplating switching OptinMonster’s program to them because we’re at a point where it financially makes sense.

The biggest downside of Impact Radius for smaller businesses is that they require a monthly fee and usually a 1 year commitment. Most of their deals are privately negotiated, so their pricing isn’t as transparent.

Conclusion

If you’re deciding on creating an affiliate program for your business, it’s a good decision – go ahead and give it a try. It’ll almost always grow your business.

If you’re thinking about cutting costs on affiliate management software and going self-hosted, then I recommend you scroll up to the top and re-read this article and keep doing that until you come to the right conclusion:

ALWAYS USE A THIRD PARTY AFFILIATE PLATFORM!

That’s all for today. Hope this article help you setup an affiliate program the right way.

The post Setting up Your Own Affiliate Program? Don’t Make This Mistake! appeared first on Syed Balkhi.

Every day I get at least one email from readers like yourself asking about my recommendations for coaches, experts, training and/or courses. Sometimes you want to know if I have a course or training and other times you’re looking for my opinion on a specific “expert or their training”.

While I want to answer as many emails as I can, it’s not always feasible to go in details. That’s why I thought it’d be better to just share my vetting process that I use.

Now more than ever, you’ll find an expert on every corner of the internet. There are self-proclaimed social media experts, conversion experts, pricing experts, marketing experts, podcasting experts, webinar experts, business experts, etc etc etc.

Some of these experts are actually very well-read and well-spoken which makes your decision even harder.

If you’re like me and only want the BEST, then you have to skip past the bullshit.

The easiest way to do that is to sort the experts in one of these categories: Selling the Shovel vs. Mining the Gold.

What I mean by that is look at their experience and their business model.

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Does this person have experience in what they’re talking about?
2. What’s their story? Have they succeeded on multiple projects or are they a one-hit wonder?
3. Are they practicing what they preach?
4. Does their business model revolve around teaching you to be successful?

Ideally you want to learn from someone who has experience, have a proven track record, practice what they preach, and coaching is not their primary business.

In my experience, the best coaches / mentors you can get are the ones that don’t actively sell their time or services. Often they’re too busy mining the gold themselves.

You can learn from them by watching how they operate their business(es) and if you’re lucky you can get an opportunity to talk to them.

You’d be surprised that a lot of these people are fairly approachable on social media. You can meet up with them at conferences (i.e take them out for coffee or breakfast).

Alternatively, you can book a call with them on services like Clarity (prices vary per person).

For example, if you’re looking to learn about building and promoting successful WordPress products, would you rather learn from someone who has a product that’s making less than $5k / month or someone like Cory Miller from iThemes who has a proven track record of building multiple successful products that generate millions.

There’s a lot of noise everywhere. But when you look past all that, you’ll find the do’ers, and those are the people I respect A LOT.

Those are the people I like to learn from.

In no particular order, some people you should consider following:

• Dan Martell
• Sol Orwell
• Cory Miller
• Tony Perez
• Michael Hyatt
• Jason Cohen
• Babak Azad

Before I get another email asking about this, no I don’t sell any courses or training. I might in the future, but right now I’m too busy mining the gold –> growing all of my businesses.

You can book a call with me on Clarity and I’ll do my best to share my experiences and lessons to help you grow your business.

If you liked this article, then please consider sharing it with your friends. Also don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Selling the Shovel vs. Mining the Gold appeared first on Syed Balkhi.