Joe: 00:00 All right. All right. Welcome everybody to another episode of show tme the nuggets. It's your host Joe Troyer and I'm here with none other than Matthew Woodward. And I'm going to bring Matt on or Matthew on in just a second. But before I do, I've got to give him a little introduction and we were just talking behind the scenes here before the show started and I gave a Matt a compliment and I thought I'd share it with you guys. So at the end of the day, I think that there are a lot of personal brands that haven't done real well in the marketing space and haven't grown to what I would call a a a a media property or they have never been able to kind of get those legs. And I think of Matt as one of the people that has really been able to do that.
When you look at his tutorials and case studies and income reports and everything else that he's been doing really since 2012 his blog has become a big, big deal in this space, I believe. And I think that he's done a great job kind of transitioning from quote unquote Guru and, and personality, so to speak, to actually building what I would consider a media property. And again, I don't think a lot of people have done that. So Matt man without further ado, I just want o welcome you.
Matthew: 01:16 Well, thank you very much. That's a very flattering introduction.
I'd like to say that was all done by some great grand plan and I'm super intelligent and all those things, but really all came together by accident. The blog is just sharing the lessons I've learned exploring what I love doing, you know, and luckily that's grown into, into what it has today. It was never the plan. In fact, it was just testing. Can I rank content without building links? And well, yeah, I hate to say it, but right.
Joe: 01:56 Yeah. That's awesome. So for those of you guys that don'tknow, Matt, you guys can find him over at matthewwoodward.co.uk and Matt, real quick, man, before we dive deep, would you just do, do me a favor and give everybody a little bit of an understanding of kind of the world that you come from before digital marketing and SEO and your blog. Give us a little back background if you will.
Matthew: 02:18 I mean, I've always had a natural interest in business and how people work and yeah, I was that kid that was knocking on doors and washing cars, cutting grass, you know, and whatever, you know, I was buying bags of sweets at the store next to the bus stop before school and breaking them up and sell them an individually, like to meet me, make sense that they, the kids at the same bus stop as me. Why don't you just buy the bag of sweets in any bay off me individually for like a big markup.
So all of that kind of naturally progressed in many different forms over the years to where we're, where we are today. And it's been a journey. You know, it's taken me through the corporate world, which is a, I guess many people know. It is like taking a journey to hell and back and you know, I learned a lot of things there that I couldn't learn anywhere else and eventually, you know, I, I always had that burning, like I gotta move forward and move forward and move forward in the corporate world.
Matthew: 03:23 Didn't allow me to do that. It's very rigid and that works very dynamic. So I guess since I was young, everything was pointing in, in this direction, you know when I started my interest in web and building websites, Google didn't exist. You know, we were doing them in notepad. PHP wasn't the thing. Wordpress, what was that? You know, like didn't, didn't exist and you know, I was just into that anyway before I knew you could make money with it. So it really, I've been in the right place at the right time in history, along with my natural interest for everything to converge and, and bring us to, well, I guess this conversation right now.
Joe: 04:06 Yeah. Yeah. All right, fantastic. Good stuff. And so fast forward to today if we will, if we kind of skip, skip all of that and skip everything in the middle for a moment, what's your day look like now? What are you focused on? What's your concentration? Where, where do you spend your days? What are you thinking about today?
Matthew: 04:24 Okay, well, I was lucky enough last year to clear my deck. We have a lot of sites which freed up first a lot of capital and a lot of time and resource in it and everything else. I decided at the start of the year I was going to renovate the blog because I, I kind of across the end of 2017, 2018 and I wasn't really giving it the, the love it needed. I, I was tied up in a project. So in, in the last year, I've mostly been focused on renovating that. I've been focused on building out a new fleet of affiliate sites. Previously all my sites were based in price comparisons. Now that [inaudible] now they're all based in different movements. You know, different, different movements of people. Because I think that's a, a great way, you know, to, to encapsulate that, that tribe mentality and, and also use a marketing skills in a way to give back while also taking a fair bit of the profit of the affiliate pie as well at the same time, you know. So that's why I've been focused at for the most part.
Joe: 05:33 I love that. Give it and take it at the same time.
Matthew: 05:36 [Inaudible] Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's
great because you can give a use SEO and marketing to give a
voice to two different movements and usually those movements in one form of like buying products. And I like affiliate links. So
Joe: 05:51 It's interesting. I read somewhere you said, and I don't
remember exactly where it is, but you said one of your super secret powers is the power of observation.
Matthew: 06:00 Yeah. Yeah. Talk about it quite a lot. The power of observation
for me, it's something I used as a kid growing up and just, just watching like why people do things, how are they doing it? And, and it's something that has really helped me in the SEO career and certainly get ahead in the affiliate game because most people are distracted by tools and data, big automation, this, that, and the other. Not many people are actually just looking, you know, like not many people are just, they can't see the woods for the trees. They're just not looking like, do the search, look at the results. What do you like? What don't you like? You know, figure out why they're ranking just by looking, not by looking at other metrics from third party is just using the computer between your ears, you know, to, to, to kind of observe and figure it out.
Matthew: 06:52 And I've learned most of most of what I know doing exactly that, and not just in SEO, but you know, in, in general life as well. Like, you know, if you observe someone's achieving something you want to achieve, well, okay, how are they doing it? Why are they doing it? What mistakes did they make? Observe all of that and use that to, to, to grow yourself. So it's a great, a great tactic to use in general life, but really good in SEO because everyone else is using tools and data and this and that and the other, no one's, no one's using these.
Joe: 07:25 A hundred percent. Yeah. I mean at the end of the day, like
business is business. I was sitting in a mastermind the other day and after two days in this session, it was great. No pitch, just all content. And everybody sharing their takeaways and guy stands up and he's like, my biggest takeaway, I can't believe it. I finally figured it out. We didn't invent business, right? Like this. It's, it's not a, it's not something made up. It's not something that's brand new, right? Like we've all been there before and we all overcomplicate things. I think at the end of the day, looking at your competitors like where do they have areas of one-ups and which ones do you like and which ones don't you and what can you learn from them on a surface level, nobody does anything.
Matthew: 08:08 Yeah. This is one of the big problems with SEO because of
barrier to entry for SEO is so low. You've got an awful lot of
people in SEO that have absolutely zero business acumen, absolutely not a clue, you know, like clueless. So that, that really shows when, when, when, when, when you, when you talking with things and the basics of sales and marketing haven't changed in like 150 years. How we apply those principles has, and it's easier to apply those principles ever before, you know, before to do conversion tracking. They have to do like five different print ads, have a different coupon in a different code and then hopefully, you know, like now that's just bang, click like we have that, that's so underutilized. A, and I can imagine marketers from eight years ago looking at what we've got now and how we're using it and just thinking in, you know, people just lack that basic sales and marketing knowledge and business acumen. And I think you need all of that as a foundation to then go to SEO and look at how you can make SEO relative to businesses goals. And how that fits into an overall strategy that, that really is lacking in general. Yeah.
Joe: 09:23 100%. I feel like the fundamentals disappeared and it's all just tack this. Yeah. And Yeah, cause that disappeared and nobody knows, nobody knows the questions to ask anymore.
Matthew: 09:33 Yeah. people understand the pieces of the puzzle, the tactics or
strategies, but no one's putting a, a, a coherent like holistic marketing strategy, which encompasses SEO together and that,
Joe: 09:46 Yeah, you a man. Completely agree. So looking at at your blog,
man again, I gave you a compliment earlier. I think you've done a great, great job of building really at the end of the day a media brand and a content marketing machine in the space. And so I'd love to get, I'd love to get your feedback and your unique perspective because you've been there, you've done that, you've had a successful blog, you know, what do you think is the 80 20 today, right? Or if you applied the 80 20 to itself, what's that 64 four like what do you think is when it all boils down, right? If you had to rebuild Matthew woodward.co. Dot. UK from scratch again, like where do you think you would focus your time and your efforts?
Matthew: 10:32 Okay. I, I, you know, as I've built it and I've, I've made my fair
share of mistakes look what, why does anyone, why does a whole world talk about game of Thrones, right? Is because the content that they put out on that screen is so captivating so engaging. So it ticks every trigger in an audience's mind. Like, you know, those scripts aren't written by accident, they're jam packed. We have open loops and, and, and it's a copy writing masterclass, like any TV series script. It really is. So again, applying that lesson to the digital world, what made the biggest
success to the biggest difference to the success of the blog is a quality of the content that are put out. And that's often where people skip over. They kind of glaze over that, you know, they're like, right, okay. I've got it. Certain artist want to build some links and you know, I, I call it obsessive compulsive backlink disorder where people are so obsessed with backlinks, they've not taken care of building a foundation that Google loves or even humans love.
Matthew: 11:43 Right? And then from the get go, it's an uphill battle because no
one wants to link to a piece of shit blog posts. Like, you know what I mean? Like you're, you're pitching trying to pitch to get links in and you're making your job 10 times harder than it needs to be because you've produced a crappy piece of content. It was actually excellent content. You wouldn't have a hard time link-building and people often so, so set on getting the links that they don't take care of, of that foundation. Google loves or humans love. So that I believe is the biggest difference or why I saw the success I did. I looked at the problems my audience had. I made content that solved or my when engaged them with that, those answers. And I was just recording what I was doing. It was nothing, it wasn't anything special to, and you know all and, and, and I couldn't use SEO at the start. That was a challenge. So I had to rely on content quality. I don't really have a choice. So that, that's, that's the biggest mistake I see a lot of people. The, the, the glaze over the importance of the quality of the content is the heart foundation, the soul, everything. And without it, you just can't succeed.
Joe: 12:57 I love the, a obsessive compulsive backlink disorder. Okay. Yeah.
We'll see what the link that in the, in the show notes as the OSI BD. So absolutely love that. But I think that everybody skips it. The skips, what you just said, because it's, you know, content is king and solving problems is really the, the big thing. And understanding your audience. Yeah. I think it ultimately, at the end of the day, it's like what's their pain and what's their frustration and then how do I help them get a result and what your content has to be about. And I think that people have just want so tactical focus that they've lost perspective of that key principle.
Matthew: 13:39 Yeah. Yeah. And the, the, you know, lots of people build
Amazon affiliate sites. And that one question I love to ask is what value does your site offer me over and above going direct to Amazon and searching for the product. And if you, you, if you, if you stutter with an answer to that question, you're doing something wrong. You know for me it was price comparisons. Granted Amazon was mostly the cheapest, but it added the
value there. It couldn't have got that value on Amazon, you know? So if you're just writing for a keyword and all the rest of it, well you, you gotta look where it, where can I add value? And often adding value isn't that difficult. You just gotta think a little bit.
Joe: 14:26 Awesome. So if we really bring this home, when you look at
your site, what do you think are the top posts that have added the most value, that have gotten the most traction, that have been the Aha moments? And then how are you leveraging that kind of in those lessons moving forward?
Matthew: 14:44 I think the whole thing's been an Aha moment and there's not,
there's not really like a certain thing that stands out to me. The, the blogs been there to share my lessons and, and, and ultimately elevate anyone that's reading it and that Sh, I mean, you go look at the testimonials page, you'll get bored before you even get a quarter of the way down the page read in that I guarantee you know, it was because of how helpful my content is. I live in Costa Rica right now. I changed my entire life once I met someone and that was through him reading my content, applying it and seeing a big change in his business. And he outreach sent an email to me, we met like, and that changed my entire life. You know, it change. I, yeah, if it wasn't, if it wasn't for the business, I wouldn't speak English.
Matthew: 15:31 We only speak Spanish in the house. So there hasn't been one
Aha moment for out at all. Really it's just if I can boil down the, the, the, the entire success. It's just focus on helping people solve their problems, help connect people's problems to solutions as quickly as you can. And from that, you'll find success in one way or another. Don't worry about how am I going to make them money? It'll come back one way or another. Maybe some of your contents information or sometimes it's more commercial, but always connect to the person's problem, to a solution for your content. Find a way to insert an affiliate link. That's great. But that's really the, the, the model that I use across all, all, all of the, all of my web properties. How, how can you give someone a solution to the problem as quickly as possible? And that's what's really, yeah, yeah.
Joe: 16:27 100%. So when you have an idea and you decide that you want
to write a piece of content on it, what's your, what's your, what's your writing style or how, how do you do that? Just lock yourself in a room and just one session and you bang it out. You let you know, do, do you outline it and think about it for a couple of days and kind of come back to it like what's, what's
your process? Or maybe there just is no process, but how do you handle this internally?
Matthew: 16:59 Everything starts with an idea, right? So I have a, a notebook
just to post ideas and as I'm collecting those, and it's really important that you're involved in your community. Even if you just observe in that community the types of questions people are asking and the problems are facing, the challenges they have and those kinds of things. And just over time you're going to naturally collect a range of content ideas when you, where you can apply your expertise or knowledge in a way that helps people solve those problems. And that list will just naturally progress. At some point. You're going to look at that and be like that one. That's that. That's it. That's it. Without any data look up about any anything, any, you know, you're just going to know that's the one because of how you've been observing the community and the questions that you'll just know.
Matthew: 17:48 So I feel like that about a post. Then I outline it. Short
description, the purpose of it. What should the target word count be? You know, I'm, I'm not a fan of, of 10 times in your content. To me that's just a waste of resource. Go look what's ranking already. If there's a bunch of pages around a thousand words ranking, they're the ones to, to, you know, you throw act out in words or maybe 1000, 100. You definitely don't need to write 10,000 words. So let's look what's already there. The power of observation. What do you like about each of them? What don't you like about each of them? What do they do well? What do they do bad? Where could you improve? Where could you add additional value? All of those things need to be covered when you in out your content specification.
Matthew: 18:36 Then I just structure it out. Introduction, headline, headline,
headline, headline, headline, summary, and use that as the skeleton to, to write everything out along with all of the other notes I've made. From there once it's written, it's handed over to an assistant. They do all the format in for me. They take care of ordering any custom images and infographics and anything like that. They put it all together and then it comes back to me. I take a review if we're happy with it, you know, maybe we made me make some final tweaks, edits or whatever, and it's out. It, that's a process that used to take me a lot longer than it does today.
Joe: 19:19 You've written blog post, that's for sure.
Matthew: 19:22 Yeah, I think there's been about 400 on the blog over the last seven years. Uso it's a relatively straightforward process. You
know, I have the idea, I flesh it out, I write it, someone takes care of the format and making it look good images and all the other stuff that I really hate and,uand it comes back for the approval and off we go. Sometimes you create a video. UI got a video studio right here behind me. Uin that case, similar thing, content goes create a script based off the content. I'll come stand here. This, this right here is I'm a teleprompter and a, I'll do the video here and uin that case a video, then just get sent to an editor and he takes care of it all and then my assistant puts it in the post for my review. Uso that's, that's, that's the process we use. Mostly managed through a Trello and hubstaff. Okay.
Joe: 20:21 Yeah, definitely. Use Trello and Hubstaff as well. So very familiar
with those tools. Definitely would recommend them as well. Keeps things super simple. Both tools, very easy to use, very automated.
Matthew: 20:33 If you want to scale your business, you need those two tools, it's
not even a question, just just go buy them. [inaudible] Need to buy [inaudible] it's free.
Joe: 20:42 And what do you think are the things that get people caught up in that process? Like, what do you think your key takeaways are on that writing process and getting the content live right from the last seven years of you perfecting that system? You said, obviously it takes a lot less time now than it used to. Any takeaways on that?
Matthew: 21:05 Yeah. First of all, process, you know, you got to have process
and before there wasn't process, it was just me kind of like with a list of ideas, knee jerk in no plan, no schedule. I was like, well that's cool and, and Oh shit, now I need some graphics so I'm going to add a, Oh, I'll do him.
Matthew: 21:25 And he looked awful. I spent a bunch of time doing and looked
awful, terrible. You know, and it wasn't, it just lacked organization and process completely. So once I actually stepped back and looked for like, well, what is the process and this, done that, done that, well, which bits do I hate? Huh? All that middle bit. Okay, well how can I, you know, and just wrote the process out, sits in the Trello board and you know, the, the blog post production just moves list to list down the line, you know, it's a production line. And I think a lot of people miss out on those systems and processes, but again, that goes back to not having that business acumen yet. You come into SEO almost from the wrong angle if you worked in a corporate world. Oh, he know all
about process. Yeah, I think that's where a lot of people have a, have a small weakness.
Joe: 22:29 100%. All right, great. So then that covers kind of the, the
content side of things. What's worked for you, Matt, in terms of content promotion? What hasn't worked? What's been kind of the, the, the outliers for you, if you will?
Matthew: 22:44 Well, what got the blog off the ground? $600 a month. One
$4,000 a month to $6,000 a month. Three. Uwhat got back off the ground was literally I was writing, creating the content, solving people's problems that I found in forums at Facebook groups in existing,uand then going back into those same communities and helping people with their questions that were related to the topic and at times linking to the tutorials and created,uof which some have recommended affiliate products to, to solve the problem. Uthat really is as, as you know, in the, you know, in the trenches as you can be with it. UI was just in the community, just engaging people. Were we in helping them say, like I said, connecting people's problems to solutions as quickly as possible. Uwhen you haven't got any SEO standing, well, you got to go bang, you got to go knock on some doors, you know, old school. Uand I was doing that when I was a kid afraid of doing it now on, on the digital.
Matthew: 23:47 Well, you know, which is essentially what posting on forums is.
It's knocking on a cold door,
Matthew: 23:52 See who answers, you know. So that's I, and that's just an
underrated strategy. You know, people just don't deal with that, you know, they just don't, they forget about the human go, go connection, good connect, go connect with people. You'll, you'll, you'll soon as you, as you elevate other people, they'll elevate you. It's a, it's a positive cycle throughout and, and people don't get on board on that or they're just trying to elevate them, you know?
Joe: 24:20 100%. Yeah, definitely. It's, it's amazing. Like I talk with so many
agencies for example, and they talk about, you know, the their systems, their processes, you know, the, there was [inaudible] ideas and I asked them, what's, what's the result for the customer in three months or six months? They have no idea what's the, what the ideal result for the customer in three months or six months. And they have no idea what vertical is that you're serving. I have no idea. Which of your prospects do you serve the best? Like how many clients do they have? How big is their team? I have no idea. In there. They've had the consumer data in a dashboard and that's it. Yeah. And then it's
like, so the biggest question I have for you, Joe, is how can I serve my audience better? It's like just serve them, period.
Matthew: 25:06 Yeah. Just, just so I have just, just [inaudible]. Yeah. Yeah. And
you know, that that plays back into what I'm saying. People are distracted by data and analysis and tools and automation or less like, like we've become so disconnected in, in, in a way where we're actually more connected than ever. And I think we feel like, not just in business, but across society as well. And you know, you're seeing it leaking into, into agency life as well. Yeah, it's just, it's just how it is. But I think that's a great advantage for people understand that 100% because we were lucky in that we're lucky in that touch right now, you know,
Joe: 25:43 Definitely, definitely 100% as, as an entire society. I would, I
would definitely agree with you as well.
Matthew: 25:49 So I'm hiding in Costa Rica.
Joe: 25:55 So one of the things we tried to do here on the podcast, Matt and the reason that we call it show me the nuggets is I like to always get somebody to, to share a system that they have a process, that they have something that they've learned, something that's actionable. Like we've talked about some really good stuff and everybody needs to definitely take notes so far on all our takeaways and, and we've been spot on in terms of takeaways in our businesses. They, they match up a lot. You got to bring the human factor back into it and if you help enough people, you know, get their results right, you're going to get what you want out of life as well. W what's in terms of SEO like to reel it in, what do you think is like a fast actionable technique tactic that somebody could go implement, you know you know, this weekend or tomorrow a system and process that's not going to die, right? That they could go implement, we could keep this thing evergreen and this will always be something that they come back to you and say, Hey Matt Man, that, that, that little piece of gold and that nugget, let's fantastic, what would that be?
Matthew: 27:01 My success comes from doing the basics, right, the basics of
business, the basics of, of, of every family and the foundation. And one of the basics that turns a lot of people off but is important is website speed. And the reason it's important is because it's, it's not just one of Google's confirmed ranking factors, it's one of your customer's ranking factors as well. Now Google built a tool and, and take it with a pinch of salt if you like, but it allows you to put your business numbers into it and your current website speed on low time and it tells you how
much money you're losing per year. And it will say, look, if you just increase your website speed by one second, this is how much more you're likely to make because of the increase in conversions you'll see and everything else. So I'm on my blog now.
Matthew: 27:53 I regularly review the performance of, of the blog. And I was finding problems. I was like, Whoa, Whoa, whoa. When did, when did that happen? You know? So if you've not paid attention to your website's feed for awhile, don't assume that it's just cool, right? Yeah. You're browsing it every day and it loads quick for you because it's cached on your local thing. But you know, a lot of people are actually seeing via mobile data many times 3g not 4g and that's where the, the real test of things comes in. So if you haven't paid attention to websites, speed for awhile, go use a Google tool to calculate how much revenue your your website's losing right now. Even if you think your website's fast, go put the numbers in. You might be surprised at what you see. And website speed can be a scary topic because often it requires the help of a developer.
Matthew: 28:50 It's quite a complicated thing to undertake and then that
becomes expensive and, and all the rest of it. So we do a couple of things that allow you to, to increase your website speed relatively quickly in a couple of hours without spending too much money. And that, first of all, your customers are gonna love you for it and Google will as well. And you're going to see, you're going to see traction in your search results. And you know, not everyone's going to see similar results. Some people sites are going to be loading in at like 10 seconds. Right now. Some peoples are going to be pretty fast at four, but there's always room to improve. If you're not below two you should be, you should be trying to get one to two. So the first step of that really is to find out what is your performance right now, where we starting from.
Matthew: 29:39 And I've got a full tutorial that's you. I've got a video that guides
you through this process on my youtube channel. That shows you how to get a benchmark for where you are now. But we got to know where we're starting from. Right? most people already have a caching plugin installed. It's amazing how many clients I've dealt with that don't like amazing. You just assume that it's just something that people take care of. Right? But it's amazing how many people don't. If you don't have a question in plugin installed, go install one. It's free. You can use any of them w three total cash. There's some excellent guys on how to set it up. Just go set it up. It's, it takes five minutes and you'll instantly
see you see gains if you're not using one. Optimizing your images.
Matthew: 30:26 And number one, a common one I see all the time. You know
when people like put like a, a fancy background image, you've got Elementor that load of the background and it's the full resolution 5,000 by 3000 and it's seven megabyte photo and Oh yeah, I see that all the time, all the time. And image has been done. Resize, like just, just go in, install a short pixel plugin it'll cost you a bit of money, but it's gonna reduce your, your, your image sizes by 60 to 70%. Now if you haven't got any money, okay, well go use the free WP smush plugin. That will also reduce your image sizes by around 30 to 40%. But if you really, really care about website speed, short pixel is a very small investment and it will do wonders for your, your image compression, which trust me, your mobile traffic will absolutely love you for, especially when I sat there on 3g trying to load that seven make photo.
Matthew: 31:34 Another quick hack that you can do to increase website speed is
to lazy load those images and videos. Now if you don't know what lazy loading is, it's when you scroll in the images load dynamically as you're scrolling. Some of you may have had the experience where you're scrolling pages jumping all up and down and it's annoying. It's really bad user experience. But if you use the lazy load or plugin completely free, there's a, there's a we tick box that says include lazy sizes aspect ratio plugin. I cover it individual in the post. You just tick that box and it, the lazy load will be smooth. Perfect. Without any of that jumping around, it really won't have a negative impact on your user experience. It will only increase your website speed. And Trust me, I tried a bunch of plugins to find one that worked right?
Matthew: 32:26 Full disclosure, I don't use it on the blog. I use WP rocket. WP
rocket is a premium plugin. Again, it's a very small investment. It's complete is one of the best purchases you will make for your business. If you're not using it. It comes with a bunch of advanced features. It's got its own caching system. So if you're using a free caching plugin right now, you can replace it and it does a bunch of other things like a optimizing your Google analytics script, any Facebook pixels, Google Fonts, which are quite commonly using. It does a lot of things in just a couple of clicks and you'll see great, great, great benefits from using WP rocket, but it does cost a bit of money. If not, you can just use w three total cash for the caching and lazy load, the lazy load or plugin for the lazy load.
Matthew: 33:12 And you're going to miss a lot of features there, but you know, if
you haven't got budget, you haven't got budget, those two things will certainly help. Once you've taken care of that cloudflare, it's, it's a no brainer for the most part, completely free content delivery network. It has a bunch of other features that will, will help speed things up. Such as a enabling the Broccoli compression and a bunch of other technical stuff. You don't need to understand. Watch a video. I share how to set it up. And once you've taken care of those things, cashing plugin, image compression, lazy loading, WP rocket, for the most part, you're going to see drastic, drastic, drastic improvements in your overall site speed and how it's loading. So those benchmarks that you ran earlier, you're just going to run them again and see where you've improved.
Matthew: 34:03 Now that process, I actually applied on my blog and I took the
average page size. Now I was coming from a place of optimization. I was already optimized. It's something that I actively do. Many people listening won't be. So I was coming from an optimized place and I took my average page size down from 2.2 meg to north 0.8. So that's a 62% reduction page requests were down by 60%. A average load time went down by 41% before my average Google page speed court score on mobile was 28. In some cases it was low as 14. Terrible. let me tell you why you must be paying attention to your mobile page speed. If you haven't already been moved, you're going to be moved to the mobile first index. You likely got a message in Google search console. That means Google judges the performance of your desktop site on the performance of your mobile site first.
Matthew: 35:00 So if your site loads really well and performs beautifully on a
desktop, but it's an absolute dog on a mobile, that is an anchor that's costing you money every single day. It's got to be mobile first. It's gotta be rapid look good and load well on mobile first. And that includes getting a good score on Google's page speed tool. Now don't just think, oh, I've got a 90 score on Google's page speed tool, therefore my site loads fast. That's not necessarily true. You still need to go and do those checks yourself. But you certainly need to have a high school there. And you'd be surprised how many people don't, especially when you look at mobile. So when you take care of all of that, and again, it depends on the depth of the problem to how much of a, of a, of a increase in traction you're going to see.
Matthew: 35:53 But that's a very something that you can do in a couple of hours
without spending any money. If you do want to spend any money in upgrade, you set up a little bit you can do for, for, for
less than Kinda like 70 bucks. Which I don't believe is a big investment for your business and you'll see your customers or love you for it and Google will love you for it. It's a confirmed Google ranking factor. And if you wondered, wondering how much your slow website, even if you don't think your website's slow, go plug the numbers into Google's tool to just get an estimate of how much revenue you may be losing a year. You'll probably be surprised cause well, I was [inaudible]
Joe: 36:31 100%. I probably do it about once a year. And I'm always
shocked at how much bloat I've created the teams created in just a year or it could be six months, but I'm always like, I'm good. And then I have a weird experience or somebody says my shit's loading slow. And I'm like, what do you mean? And I'm all cocky about it and I go look at it and I'm like, holy crap. Like we had
Matthew: 36:57 Five weeks in or you know, a plugin or a day in the plugins
performing slow. The, there's so many ways it can creep in, even if you, you're active on it. So if you, if you take your eye off the ball, it's very easy to, to, to, to, to see a big drop off there. But luckily it's pretty easy to fix as well. So just make sure he paying attention to it. If you're not paying attention to it, you're losing money right now. Don't even, I even know why. Still listening to me. Go do it right now. Just stop. Go do it. There's no reason not to. But that's, you know, it's a common problem we see from our agency clients as a common problem when people drop me a comment saying, Hey, what do you think of my site? I'm like, well I got bored of waiting for it to load.
Joe: 37:43 Yeah. Yeah. And there was some good resources in there too.
Some, some tools I've heard of and some tools I haven't, I definitely haven't done anything with the lazy load. So that one was interesting for me. Definitely use WP smush but haven't heard of the other one. So I'll make sure I can load that up as well. Some good resources there that I haven't seen in my team hasn't seen that. We'll definitely be checking out. So thank you. Definitely go. Awesome. We appreciate all the, all the deep shares and also the, the tactical thing that everybody can go implement now in an hour or two. That's always great. So thank you for those shares. In wrapping this up though, so to speak, Matt I always, I always ask kind of a color Shay question at the end, but a lot of people ask like, what are your favorite three books?
Joe: 38:32 Which I think is great. I'm a reader, I like books, but I like
practical books. There's a lot of books that I read that I'm like, yeah, that's great. But it wasn't very practical. Like I read it, I
thought it was a good book and it made me think, but it had no impact on my business and it really had no impact on my life either. And so I like to ask from like a practical standpoint, when you look at Your Business, when you look at your blog, you look at your, your, your, your agency, what's the one book that you think you could point to and say, this is the one book that made all the difference.
Matthew: 39:06 The book that I've read the most times and I've revisited many
times and each time I revisited took over lessons that each time I've reread it, I've gone like, Oh yeah, I've been using that. You know, I was like, ah, yeah, that's where that came from. You know, with Napoleon Hill and think and grow rich, like the classic right. And absolute classic. And that's really being the one that, that every time I read it I'm like, yeah, yeah, cool, OK. And it gives me a different direction. You know, it's like,uit's like there's a new series of the book every time, but it's the same book. It's not actually a new series, it's just my life's moved on to a different season, you know, and with new learners, everything else. And that changes the way that I interpret the lessons and everything else. Uyou know that that books greatly rooted in essentially you taking control and deciding where or what, where you want to be or what you want to do. And it just happens. And it does seem to be, that's how a lot of things have come about in my life. So that would be the, the, the book, the book.
Joe: 40:12 Wonderful. I appreciate that. And, and it's funny you saying that
at the end, like just you grasping control and deciding where you want to go. Like that as a takeaway. One when you said that I think my favorite books are that take away, right? When I think about my favorite books and books that I've read that that's definitely a common thread and a common core. And, and it's the ultimate reinforcement to always be reading those types of books because it keeps you thinking in that manner. And I would see y Napoleon hill thinking grow rich would be that way, but also why you keep reading it. And it would be kind of new and new lessons to take away as your [inaudible].
Matthew: 40:51 Yeah, yeah. It basically boils down as, look, when, when you get
in your car, you decide where you're going to go and you drive there. Same thing. Literally success as the same thing. Get any car, decide where you are, go and driver. That's that. That's it. People make it a lot more complicated. Granted, you might be on the, you might be driving there and there's a tree in the road and you can't get past, but just take a different route. I mean, we've got Satnav, right? You know that's it. Like decide where you want to go and go there. That's it. That's what, that's what
most box boiled down to, right. Taking control of that mindset and understanding that you do have that decision making ability in your life. You do just decide and if you want it, everything will, will gravitate towards that. But you've got to decide where you go in first before you can start gravitating towards it. And that's where
Joe: 41:44 I think just to spending time having that conversation with
yourself often. So that you don't forget where you're going and why. Right. And change your priorities, change where you're going changes. But often we just kinda head down sprint thing and we look up and are like,
Matthew: 42:01 Oh yeah,
Joe: 42:05 Right. Like you're driving down the road, you're thinking you're
thinking and you're like, yeah, I've just missed my turn shit. Yeah. And that happens all the time in life. And I think it happens way too often cause we don't, we forget to look up.
Matthew: 42:17 Yeah, of course. Yeah, definitely. I mean that's why I live in
Costa Rica because there isn't all other consumers and capitalism, rat race or life. People look around and smile, you know, kind of weird when I go to the states or England and I'm like, hey, how are you doing? And people look at me like, why are you talking to me? Weirdo go away. But here everyone's always looking around for talking and smiling, you know? So definitely something I observe in a first world.
Joe: 42:45 Well for sure. So if people want to look you up, Matt, they want
to reach out. They want to say thank you for coming on the podcast. They want to look you up, they want to follow you. Obviously we'll link up to Matthew Woodward and the blog. Where else can people reach out to you? Or where are you active on social? Where are you not? Let's drop a couple links for ya.
Matthew: 43:04 I'm, I'm not terribly active on social. I tend to go on Facebook
and look at the messages and be like, oh, I should have replied to that like six weeks ago. You knew. Oops. The best way to get me really is through the comments on the articles. If you're facing a problem or anything, just, just ask a question. Don't be afraid. Like, this is, you know, this is what I'm seeing. Whatever it is, whatever it is, just just ask. The entire success of the blog has been built on helping people solve their problems. If you've got a problem, bring it and, and bring it through the comments on their blog. It'll get answered. And, and, and then help, help you progress it to, to that next level. I haven't got a product to
sell you. I haven't got anything really to, to, to promote or push you into or anything else. Just hit the home page. There's three categories, SEO, blogging and working from home. If you're struggling to meet your first dollar online, you want to go in there and in there it's all broken down by category of problem. You know, just, just, just find what it is and, and, and that's, that's really the best way. Alternately maybe you'll end up on, on my testimonials page, but that all starts from bringing me a problem. So don't be afraid to do that. I love that
Joe: 44:20 Too. And I love that you do it publicly, right? It keeps that
community going and growing and it ties them into thinking about that problem and seeing it again.
Matthew: 44:28 So how's also, not everyone appreciates it. Exactly.
Joe: 44:35 That's my style. So I like it. So, Matt, man, I just want to thank you again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. And I know my community, everybody's going to get a ton of value out of this, and I'm sure you know the little nuggets behind the scenes and digging into your back story. People will enjoy it as well. I know that I did, so thank you so much, man. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And if, if we've touched on anything that we didn't drill down into, you want to know more about, just confine me and asked me the question. I'll, I'll, I'll gladly drill down into it more for you. Thank you for having me on. It's been a great talk casually. Thank you. Definitely appreciate it. All right, everybody, you've seen another episode of, show me the nuggets. We'll see on the next episode. Have a fantastic, fantastic day, Joe Troyer Signing Off. All right, boss. Thank you, man. Yeah.
