The following article is with Lee Jackson, Founder of Angled Crown, a leading WordPress development agency and media brand with a mission to help agency owners focus on and engage their true strengths as they build reputations as the “go-to leaders” in the communities they serve.
We sat down with him to find out about his success growing his business through content.
(Jan) Hey Lee, thanks for being on board with us to chat about growing a WordPress agency through media and content marketing. Can you give us a brief intro of who you are and what you’re doing?
(Lee) I’m on a mission to help de-stress agency owners through services, education, and community. So to facilitate this I’ve been running Angled Crown for the last few years as an outsourced development house for agencies that want to offer digital services.
We’ve built up a great reputation developing whitelabel themes and plugins for agencies around the world. As we are all geeks, we LOVE that we can focus on the code while the agencies focus on what they do best which is the visuals.
(Jan) We’ve been in touch for a couple of years now and one thing I admire the most about your work is how consistently you’re creating content. Your main business is running a white-label WordPress agency, so why are you spending so much time on content?
(Lee) Our mission has been clear from the beginning. We want to help others. We can offer services to only a few agencies at a time, but we can help countless thousands by creating online content. This is a one-to-many relationship.
The podcast now gets thousands of downloads a month and we’ve been able to grow a huge and supportive community on Facebook which has been a wonderful experience and has helped drive the direction of the content we create.
This has the added benefit of raising our profile in the industry which helps us attract higher quality leads. This doesn’t necessarily mean higher-paying etc. We gauge the quality of the lead based on the experience of the agency owner. Our target client is a very experienced person who has a good grasp of the online world, marketing, and can communicate well.
By helping others, we are attracting like-minded clients. Everyone’s a winner.
(Jan) How did you come up with the content strategy that you’re currently following? There are countless articles on the best times to post on social media, what media types to use in content, etc. Does all of that really matter?
(Lee) We decided to be consistent. Show up on the day we say we are going to. Yes, there are many articles telling you what works best. We found that simply showing up at the same time every Monday helped.
With regards to WHEN to post we did the research ourselves because every audience is unique. Our audience is global and we were finding afternoons here in the UK and the late evening was a better time to post content out for most locations.
THEN the algorithms changed on most platforms where time no longer seems to matter so rightly or wrongly, we just stick with the original times we decided to post stuff out at and we focus on ensuring we are showing up with good quality.
If I am brutally honest we don’t follow stats, we measure direct engagement. That means who’s connecting with us and reaching out. Do we get messages in our group, do we generate questions and conversations. Do people reach out on DM or email?
(Jan) In my personal experience, creating content so consistently is challenging. As a developer and agency owner myself, I have to spend time working on my client’s websites and managing my team. Do you have some magical hacks that help you free up time for content creation?
(Lee) Absolutely. Batching. That is it!
Yesterday I recorded three new episodes back to back. Today I will be spending a couple of hours writing up the show notes, titles, doing the artwork and scheduling them. That gives us three weeks of content in the can. The day after I will do the social posts and schedule those and I can set and forget.
(Jan) You’re everywhere in the WordPress world, being featured on all sorts of podcasts and websites. What challenges did that growing publicity bring into your world?
(Lee) I literally can’t think of any challenges. It’s been a wonderful experience where I’ve made so many friends. I guess my Facebook messenger is SUPER busy as a result but I welcome fresh connections.
I’ve always shown up as myself which helps, so people are getting to know the real Lee. That takes a lot of pressure off. In my past life, I used to try and project a professional exterior and dress as such. Hated every minute of that.
(Jan) When it comes to using WordPress for your business, how do you turn your raving audience into leads and clients? Can you share some of the tools you use?
(Lee) As the personal brand has grown, people have naturally wanted to align themselves with my journey. This leads to listeners and guests reaching out to do business with our agency direct without any particular push from myself.
We also use retargeting to put out messages to people that visit the podcast pages and this allows us to serve specific ads on the different offerings we have.
My mission has always been about reducing/removing stress from agency life. The podcast is a one-to-many resource for me to support people around the world. This has also lead to the buildup of a paid community where we have weekly calls and I produce workshops to help agency owners. We’ve also launched a live event which I’m super excited.
You can find more of what I am about in my recent episode 200. This drives everything I do.
(Jan) Lastly, I’m wondering about the business side of the results that your content brings… in keeping up with that amount of traffic, public exposure, requests and the (I hope) growing number of projects – how did your day-to-day business change?
(Lee) Our business has shifted a lot. Although we still do the day-to-day theme and plugin development for our clients we also now create a lot of content and provide a lot of consulting.
Growing the podcast, the YouTube channel, and other resources have allowed us to talk the talk, walk the walk, and attracted people that want help along the way.
Showing up to the community you serve and adding tons of free value helps raise your profile and generates amazing opportunities. Life will never be the same.
If you are an agency needing help with social media, content, metrics, testimonials, plus more, download our “14 Strategies for Your Next WordPress Post Launch Plan” book to help your agency grow.
