Episode 21: Start Blogging & See Where Building with Blocks Can Take You with Jake Pfohl

Jake Pfohl has been one of the most active members of the Kadence community since the early days of Kadence as an innovator in building effective websites with blocks. Jake started his blog, StartBlogging101.com and evolved into a full library of design solutions with StartBloggingBlocks.com. In this episode of The Kadence Beat, Hannah and Ben talk to Jake about how he got started blogging and his evolution towards providing solutions to help other bloggers do more with WordPress and Kadence. Jake, Ben and Hannah talk about the challenges of getting started, how sharing your expertise makes awesome content, and where they are focusing their learning now.

In addition to audio, this is a video podcast. Watch on YouTube, or find us on your favorite podcasting app.

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Timestamps & Links

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:18 How Jake got started blogging
• 7:18 Features in a theme are great, but what about performance, Core Web Vitals
• 8:25 Get started blogging
• 9:36 What is the most challenging aspect of getting started
• 12:55 Action comes before motivation, don’t wait for motivation
• 14:06 Blogging success from amazing content
• 15:40 Write more comprehensive blog posts and use headings
• 17:21 Kathy pops in because you cannot keep her away
• 18:33 What Jake is learning about, Ed Mylett
• 20:31 What Ben is learning about
• 21:57 What Hannah is learning about
• 23:26 Getting started with Kadence Cloud
• 27:12 Jake’s online community on Facebook: WordPress Without Page Builders by StartBlogging101
• 30:00 Ben’s absence from social media
• 31:04 What’s next for StartBloggingBlocks
• 35:00 Jake’s feedback helps Kadence be better
• 35:54 Using AI effectively
• 37:55 Thanks and conclusion

Transcript

Hannah: Welcome to episode 21 of the Kadence Beat Podcast. If you joined us for episode 20, then you know that we kind of mixed things up and left Ben out of it. Well, now we’re really mixing things up and Kathy’s not here, so this could really be a disaster. But we’re to give it a go and see what happens. Ben, how’s it going?

Ben: Good. I think the only way, the only reason this isn’t gonna be a disaster is because we have a guest. If we were left to do the podcast on our own, like we have a guest, so we can just focus on that. But if it was just us, like no one would want to listen to us.

Hannah: Well here’s the deal, if it was just us…

Ben: Kathy helps so much.

Hannah: She helps so much. But what normally happens, for any who don’t know, Ben and I are siblings. Ben’s my big brother. I’m his little baby sister. And in meetings where it’s like just the two of us or like just us and Kathy, so quickly we’ll start just talking about like Ben’s kids or his family or whatever and it’s like, oh shoot.

So as much as I’m sure that you would all love to hear us talk about Ben’s cute kids, we will spare you today. And we do have a guest. Our last episode we brought in Maestro Stevens, and we just had such a great time chatting with him. He’s one of our top affiliates and an amazing member of our Kadence community, and we were like, we should just keep doing this.

So we reached out to another one of our top affiliates and someone who was just doing incredible things in WordPress. And so yeah, we’re gonna bring him in. So we have Jake Pfohl here with us today.

Jake: Hey. Hey. How’s it going guys?

Ben: Yeah. How we doing?

Jake: Fantastic episode 21. Does that mean someone’s gonna buy the Kadence Beat a drink for turning 21?

Ben: That’s a good point. That’s a great point. We should have all been drinking on episode 21.

Jake: In the holiday spirit.

Ben: Yeah, well, I for one am super excited that you’re here, Jake. I’ve been a big fan of yours and I’m been following along as you’ve grown an audience of your own and really staked out a place in the WordPress community.

It’s really cool to see what you’ve done and also just to have you in our community is a huge, huge blessing to everybody that joins the Kadence community. You are like the most outstanding member of like, you’re super, super helpful,and you’re doing a lot of really cool stuff in terms of tutorials and even like with this new, not new I should say, but fairly new like cloud library.

I’m really, really excited about everything you’re doing, so it’s fun to have you on. We’ve chatted a few times, but not that many. And so it’s really nice to have you on and, and hear what you have to say and what you’re thinking about.

Jake: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Really appreciate it. Yeah, and I’ve been obviously big followers of both of you guys for quite a while, since the Kadence theme came out.

So I’m really excited to share some of my expertise and knowledge and have a chat with you guys.

Ben: Cool.

Hannah: Love it. Jake, how did you find Kadence and how’d you get started with it?

Jake: Yeah, so, I started blogging, if we go back in 2014 I started blogging and I literally bought a little book called How to Start a Blog on Amazon.

It was $3 and it taught me how to set up web hosting and get your domain name purchase and all that kind of thing. I just started a tech blog. I was writing about all sorts of things that I was interested in. Like, it was so random. I had like technology, WordPress, like music on there, like it had zero niche or anything like it was, it was not, it did not have a focus. But it was funny. It was like less than two years after starting it, that blog was getting, I think, 30,000 visitors a month, like readers. And I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea how to monetize anything. And I was actually using the X theme with the Cornerstone page builder.

It was like the first cool theme that I had saw. And I was like, oh man, this thing’s awesome. And, I think I spent like 60 bucks to get that. But my page speed started getting like, so, so slow. In fact, I was looking at old analytics and it was saying that my page fully loaded time, was an average of 17 seconds, which is absolutely atrocious.

like content was obviously loading before then, but like by the time, like all the scripts that had to run and everything were finished, it was like 17 seconds. And I started losing, a ton of like, traffic, like my, my website was so slow and so I was like, I have to make a change. And I started taking blogging a lot more seriously in 2019.

And that’s when I switched over to Astra with Elementor page builder in 2019. I honestly only used that for about six months and the page speed was still not up to par to my liking. And I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was using third party page builder still. And I wasn’t on the best hosting.

And then in 2020 obviously Adam Prieser, I’m sure tons of people know that name in the Kadence community, made a video about the brand new modern Kadence theme. And I saw it and I was like, this thing is amazing. I was like, this, this theme is everything that I’ve wanted in the theme.

And there were just so many things with the Kadence theme that were so easy to use. Like, this sounds so silly, but… When I was using Astra at the time, in order to just show the updated date, like on a blog post, I had to write like a little like custom piece of CSS to like hide the publish date and show the updated date.

And in Kadence, it was just a flip of a toggle. Like it was so easy and like for beginners, like there was, that was a question that was like asked all the time in like these communities was like, how do I show the last updated date? And it’s like, well, you have to write a little piece of CSS.

And I was like, it shouldn’t have to be like that. Right? Like it should be so much easier than that. And the free version of the Kadence theme had so many features when it was first released. In fact, there wasn’t even a pro version when you guys released it in March of 2020. And there were more free features in that, in the free Kadence theme when I got it than I had in Astra pro which I had paid $50 for at the time. And so I was like, this seems just incredible. Like more people need to, you know, start using this. And I, and I started just raving about it and, and it kind of just went from there.

Hannah: Wow. That’s awesome.

Ben: It’s cool to hear your progression through like technologies and themes and then understanding like, oh, I need to get a better host at some point. I definitely, I mean, I did a lot of that path way, way back in 2012 when I started first like looking into development. And that drove me to develop my first theme. And that was, you know, 2012 was a totally different world of themes and everything else. But it’s cool to see cause there is a progression and it’s cool to see that, like, for so long it was feature based, and we were all trying to get features to build our websites. And then features finally caught up. And then it was like, we need performance. Like, it really switched hard to like, I can’t just have a theme that gives me a million options. I need to have like really good performance. And so that’s like been a huge goal of mine, of how do we continue to develop really cool features and keep the performance really good.

Jake: And core web vitals, you know, are such a huge thing. I mean, if you go on explodingtopics.com or whatever, it’s like core web vitals, that trend is just like this massive trend upwards in the past couple years. And, yeah, I mean, using the Kadence team, you know obviously paired with a fast host, you know, with dedicated resources and things like that. Like it makes it so simple to pass core web vitals on your website. Whereas like all these people are like using like asset cleanup and all sorts of things to like, just like get rid of the bloated mess that they have because like the code’s not modular and that kind of thing.

Hannah: Jake, I’m curious, what made you start a blog and what were you initially blogging about?

Jake: Yeah, so, like I said, like with that tech blog, I started literally just I would just write about anything that I was interested in at the time. And it was just kind of funny because like a couple of the posts like ended up taking off and making up the majority of my traffic.

You know, that 80/20 rule of like 20% of my posts were bringing in 80% of the traffic kind of thing. But it was actually in learning about that tech blog, figuring out like how to build an affiliate blog, going through all the like, struggles of like page speed and performance. And it was in learning all that, I was constantly searching things, you know and watching YouTube videos and and taking all that in.

And then that’s when I finally decided to start my brand of StartBlogging101 which I think I bought the domain in like 2017, but I never took it seriously or added to it until like, it was like late 2019, early 2020, about the time that I started using the Kadence theme. And so yeah, that’s when, that’s when I started, taking that brand, taking all the knowledge that I had learned with that previous blog and just teaching others how to build their own, you know, fast, profitable WordPress website.

Ben:You guys started doing starter blog 101 which is awesome. You’re doing a lot of stuff. What do you see as like, as you’re helping people start their blogs and you are like really targeting in on that people group, what do you see as like one of the biggest challenges for them right now in starting a blog?

Jake: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say the number one problem that people have is literally just getting started. And I know that sounds simple, but in talking to like friends or family or just anyone, I’m like, “Hey, like you should, you should start this blog and, and you should, you know, start an affiliate blog that can bring in, you know, some passive revenue through affiliate sales and things like that.”

And, people that don’t even know about like WordPress or whatever. They’re just like, how do I get started? They have no idea how to even just get started. It’s like, it’s like they don’t know about like what, you know, having to buy a web post. They don’t, you know, like, how do I purchase my domain name?

How do I install WordPress? And then like, how do I just get started, like with building a landing page or like creating a blog post? And so that has been like one of my main missions is to help bridge that gap for beginners and make it as easy as possible for someone to be able to get a blog started and then, hey, here’s like I’m, you know, the overall plan is, Choose like one of these, like child themes or it, it’s just basically like a, like a starter template that like Kadence offers, you know, this, here’s like different child themes to choose from that can get your blog started.

Here’s all the templates, you know, that, that I have, that you can add to easily build that page and kind of go from there. So yeah, I mean, I would just say it’s, it’s, it’s getting started because that’s, that’s the biggest roadblock for a lot of people and they just need to take that first step and, and get in there.

Ben: Yeah. When I used to build websites for people, way back in the day, people would come to me and be like, Hey, how, like, how should I get started? Or whatever. And I would always, because I was a little jaded because of how many people like said they want to get started then don’t. Right. Especially if you’re doing that for money.

But, so I’d be like, go and write three blog posts and when you actually have content and then come back and talk to me. And then generally no one would. And honestly I think that’s horrible advice now. Like that’s, so I’m just telling you how like mean I can be. Like, I would tell most people like, just get your first blog post published and make it good enough that you’re, that you’re willing to share it on social media, like work on one and make it good enough to show, cause like you don’t need everything figured out and a whole series of blog posts or anything else.

If you can just write one and get it posted, that is going to give you the energy to go to the next one. Versus like feeling like, okay, I wanna write a recipe blog. And so now I need to like compile 20 recipes and figure out how to get ’em all. And it’s like, no, just, just start with the most basic, get one posted that you’re willing to share with people, and then that’ll get you all the way energized to keep going.

Because you’re right, like it does feel like a whole lot to like, I gotta build a whole website and to make this all like work and figure out how am I gonna monetize and all that. It’s like just to me, just get one posted and go from there and it’ll energize you to like take off.

Jake: I 100 hundred percent agree with that. In fact, there’s a lot of things that I’ve like read online that a lot of people, you know, they kind of focus on like that inspiration and motivation to hit, to then lead to action. But really it’s like action leads to the inspiration and the motivation kind of thing. And I’ve found that to be so true, especially in building the blog.

We all have those days where you’re just sitting there like, man, I, I have not gotten anything done, you know, with my blog, or I haven’t, I haven’t like, done anything to like, you know, work towards my goals today. But if you just, if you just get in there and just start something, you know, start writing a blog post, you’ll start, you know, you’ll start to get that, that spark, and then it’s like, oh, okay.

And then you, that motivation comes, it, you know, it just keeps rolling.

Ben: It’s like working out. The hardest thing to do is get to the gym.

Jake: A hundred percent.

Ben: Just get your feet in the doorway. That’s like, if you can do that, you’ve made it.

Hannah: Yeah. It’s so true. Jake, there are obviously so many people who have blogs and they’re unsuccessful and unsuccessful.

I mean, People don’t go to them. And maybe you don’t have an answer for this, but I’m curious if you know what, or like what you would say was like your number one reason why your blog has become, when it became, like how did you start getting 30,000 views? You know, like what were kind of some key things you were doing to bring people in to make your blog so successful?

Jake: Yeah, so the very first blog, I would say,it, it was, it was funny, and I’m probably gonna get a lot of flack for this, but back in 2014 I wrote a post and it was how, or sorry, it was why Android phones are better than iPhones at the time, and right, right. Yeah. And,it was just kind of funny.

To be completely honest, like it all ended up just being organic traffic that came in and I started out ranking some of the major websites out there for certain keywords, you know, like Forbes and, and, and CNET and things like that, which was just absolutely crazy to me, and like I would just say one of the biggest pieces that has gotten traffic, has gotten people to share the content, which ultimately naturally leads to links, which I really like, is just creating amazing content. Like it really just comes down to that. It’s like if you can just create the absolute best content about a certain topic because of the expertise that you have or whatever it is.

I promise you that it will start ranking, people are going to link to it, people are gonna feel, you know, like they wanna share it. They cuz they wanna tell other people about it because it is the best thing out there, whereas I, I see a lot of people and I’m not saying that this is wrong at all.

I mean, it just completely depends on what area you want to go in. But, tons and tons of people try to crank out as many blog posts as possible. You know, these little, like 1,000 word blog posts and sometimes that can work. You know, I mean, if the content’s great and you’re just like trying to, you know, get some search intent for a certain piece, that’s fine.

But like my main focus has always been comprehensive articles. You know, like I have a couple articles that are 10,000 words, which is insane . But like the, especially as Google evolves, Google is looking for search, search intent, right? They, they want to, they want to take that and show people exactly what they’re looking for.

And so every single time that you can break down a blog post into a different section, just think of that as being kind of its own little blog post. Like, like you can literally make a heading that answers a question. And if someone searches that question on Google, and it’s the best, you know, answer according to Google, they’re going to send people to that, your website, they’re gonna point directly to that little section. You know, it’s probably gonna be like highlighted and you can do that all in one comprehensive blog post. I like doing that so much more around a single topic than making, you know, a single blog post for every single little question. And I think that that’s been a huge piece for helping drive traffic.

Ben: That’s cool. Awesome. That puts your content too, more in a situation where you’re updating it when like it’s needed versus like needing write a new blog post because that old blog post is out of date. You’re building more of resource posts than like super timely, like this is irrelevant in six months kind of post.

Kathy: Hey, I heard somebody talking about amazing content and then I heard there’s this party happening and I’m not there, so I had to like pop in. Because that’s amazing content itself!

Jake: I get the whole trifecta of Kadence people. This is amazing.

Ben: You came to save the day, is that what happened?

Hannah: We tell Kathy to take a break and she can’t do it.

Kathy: My ears started burning cuz I heard somebody talking about amazing content and then they were adding amazing content onto that, you know, and Jake was just like on it and my ears started burning, so I had to jump in and say, that was amazing.

Hannah: That’s hilarious.

Jake: It’s Kathy approved. All right.

Kathy: I love it. Great job you guys. I’m going back to my corner.

Jake: Oh, that was a, that was an abrupt ending. I, yeah. And she’s gone. Good. Talk to you later. That’s hilarious.

Hannah: Kadence would not be what it is without Kathy. She’s the best.

Ben: Yep, she’s awesome. What are you excited about learning right now?

Jake: Just would you just say in general?

Ben: Yeah, it doesn’t even have to be WordPress related. Like what are you really excited about right now?

Jake: I could look up WordPress stuff all day, you know, every day kind of thing.

I love finding new ways to do things, you know, figuring out the the best products and that kind of thing, you know, that I can research and start using to help with the blog. But I mean, just outside of WordPress, I mean, I’m always, you know, reading a book. Or listening to an audiobook.

I’ve been getting into audiobooks quite a bit or listening to the podcasts. I’m a big fan of like just self development kind of stuff. I’ve always kind of been a fan of that. I mean, there’s just there. So many to mention but I mean, you guys talk about, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller all the time.

If you have a website and you want to hone in on your messaging and, you know, get customers and loyal customers, I a hundred percent recommend that book. In fact, there’s still things that I need to do on my website to really fully follow that brand, but that’s a good one. I, I’ve listened to and read a nber of like Russell Brunson stuff for marketing and like funnels and that kind of thing.

One of the latest books I read was the Power of One More by Ed Mylett. I’m not sure if you guys have heard of Ed Mylett, but absolutely amazing. He just overall just like kind of life, like if you wanna just supercharge your life, a lot of them are very business related. So like if you, if you have an entrepreneurial like mindset, I hundred percent recommend Ed Mylett and I mean, every one of his podcasts he brings someone in and it’s 45 minutes of just pure gold. I mean, it, it’s like, it’s like listening to like a small novel of wisdom every time you listen to one of those things. I’m very eclectic when it comes to the things that I’m into and listening to.

So I just kind of try to soak it all in How about you guys?

Ben: Learning? I think there’s I just started leadership book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And so there’s that aspect like outside of WordPress where I’m like, as Kadence is growing and I’m trying to figure out how do we function better as a team.

I’m really, really interested in systems right now in terms of like, how do we create just better internal systems for how we do communication and meetings and all of that. And so that’s like, I, I would say that’s like a non WordPress learning area. I think, you know, WordPress related right now my head is, is totally just what’s going on in Gutenberg and where we’re gonna innovate and really thinking about as we come into the next year, how we’re gonna do some, just some, some pathways into more full sight editing stuff with the theme and some new ways to just help customers make content easier, like getting started easier. Aand then of course, like, you know, this is, everyone’s heard about Blocks 3.0 at this point, but really getting that out the door with the new UI for all of our blocks and all of that. So,I guess that’s like, those are the big ones for me.

Hannah: Yeah, for me, non-work, press related. I think the biggest thing I’m learning is how to run a lot and not get injured. I’m training for the Boston Marathon in the spring and just always trying to figure out like how to get my body/health in like optimal shape. So that’s been kind of interesting to like dive into nutrition more and things like that. That is incredible. And then WordPress, thanks. And WordPress, marketing has been, Aatually it, it shouldn’t be a new thing because I’ve been working with Kadence for like eight years, but, but for the longest time and really probably before Kathy, we didn’t really have much for marketing.

Like it’s really just amazing that Kadence became when it became without Kathy. But it’s been fun to see, just to learn so much, so much about marketing and, and how it looks so different for us than it does for other people. Like we have such an incredible niche with our Kadence community and just growing that has been so fun and learning more about what it looks like to kind of steward that.

So, yeah, that’s been fun. I’m not really a researcher. Learning is like, like I love to learn, but I’m not someone who’s like, oh, let me go like research this thing for 10 hours. I love having close friends who love to do those things and then they can just, I can glean from them. But like my least favorite class in school was a research class, so I’m like it’s just not for me.

But I like learning. But yeah. Okay. But Jake, another question for you, if you could go back to like when you started, or even just a couple years ago, what’s something that you would tell yourself, and this is, in WordPress context, what’s something that you would tell yourself or something you wish you would’ve done differently, you know, a couple years ago.

Jake: Yeah. I would say, I mean, two years ago, that was about the time that I started going, you know, full in on like building, you know, with blocks, right? Just using Gutenberg, the built in WordPress block editor. I had, I had ditched third party page builders at the time, and I’d say if I went back two years, I wish that I would have just told myself to continue on that path, which I have done, you know, and just been like, Hey, like this is going to be, you know, the future of WordPress. Like, like blocks are fantastic. I wish I would’ve known that all of these, like things like Kadence Cloud and all that would come out and that I had started, you know my cloud library even sooner.

Because, you know, I just see so many people shifting from third party page builders and coming over to block based themes and, and tools and and things like that, and it’s just awesome. It’s awesome to see that, that movement and everybody continuing to go down that path. Yeah.

Hannah: Speaking of Kadence Cloud, when did you start using that and what made you kind of start making that a part of what you do?

Cause it’s a little bit different from what you were doing. It’s, I’m offering design libraries is a huge part of what you do isn’t right?

Jake: So the design library, it was funny, like, so in building my affiliate blogs and things like that, like I, I started StartBlogging101 and I would have all these different things that I was doing for like product reviews.

And I’d have a little section in like my sidebar that says like, Hey, here are the resources I use. And I’d have like a, I’d use like Kadence to like have a sticky like CTA that when people like scrolled down, it would say like, Hey, here’s like an ebook, you know, with like a lead magnet for like a form or whatever.

And I’d get all these people, like the most common question I’d get is how do I, how do I build this little thing on your website? And so I was like, okay, well I can like, I can create a tutorial for you. And so I have a nber of like written tutorials and like video tutorials out there showing you how to build like all these different like little components, like a pricing table or maybe like about the author section or like a little like product box for like putting a product in there.

And I was just like sitting there and I’m like, you know, you can go through this tutorial, but it’s like, it still might take someone, you know, one to two hours to build this little component themselves. I’m like, it’d be so awesome if I could just take this like template and just allow someone to just use it on their website easily.

And then it was like May of 2021 or whatever it was, you know, Kadence Cloud came out and I was like, this is absolutely amazing. I’m like, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I can now have people, you know, I can put all these templates that I pre-build, I can have them just host it in this library.

People can connect up. It takes literally like three small steps. I think you connect in like less than a minute, and people can be importing in these templates with one click on their website. It just works perfectly. Kadence has the global color palette, which is such an underrated thing in my opinion.

I know that there’s a lot of themes that have that right now, but it’s like the fact that you can just bring in a design and have all of your brand colors there, like instantly is is amazing because it’s like in the past when you’d use templates, it’s like you would import something in and it’s like you’d have to go to like the button and you’d have to go to the border or whatever, and you’d have to like set every single thing to the color that you want.

And I know that sounds easy, but it’s like you don’t realize how easy it truly is when you don’t have to make those, you know, several hundred extra clicks to set your colors. And it comes in and it just looks beautiful right off the. Yep.

Hannah: Jake, you have your own community on Facebook, is that right?

Jake: Yep.

Hannah: What’s that called?

Jake: Yeah, so it’s WordPress Without Page Builders by StartBlogging101. And, so I started that in April of 2020 and that’s actually the same time that the Kadence Group came out. And I ended up joining the Kadence Group in, in May of 2020. So I’ve been in that group for about two and a half years now.

But, yeah, so I started my group in in April of 2020. WordPress Without Page Builders. And it didn’t actually have that name until December of that year. And that was more or less because I, I did start to find my niche, right? Like I, I started to figure out like what, what people are into and that kind of thing.

And it’s, it is very Kadence based, but I mean, it’s for anyone that just wants to learn how to build a, you know, a fast profitable WordPress site, you know, without using third party page builders. We have a number of people in there that are using all sorts of, you know, popular themes. You know, whether it’s Kadence or Astra or Generate Press or Blocksy or any of those.

Just any of those that are like really focused on Gutenberg. But as I said, I mean, it is, it is very Kadence based and I do have a nber of Kadence tutorials cuz it’s my favorite thing to use.

Ben: Which we appreciate.

Hannah: We love to hear that. It would be bad if you were like, yeah, it’s my second favorite theme.

Jake: That’s my second favorite theme to use.

Ben: We are stoked that you’re a fan of ours cuz we’re fans of yours as well.

Jake: Appreciate that for sure.

Hannah: And we’re all in your Facebook group as well.

Jake: Yes. Yeah, when you guys, when you guys joined, I’m like, this is amazing. So Hannah joined my group and I was like, I was like, oh man, like this, this group’s gonna be famous. I’m starting to get all, you know, the Kadence team here. Kathy was in there and then Hannah invited Ben in there. And it’s funny because like when someone joins a Facebook group for, for people that have Facebook groups, you can see how many groups people have in common with you. And so I always know if someone joins a group, like I can see like, oh, this person’s in, you know, these seven other WordPress groups. Cause I’m in like, probably like 50 WordPress groups. And the only WordPress group that then was in was the Kadence Community. The Kadence Facebook group. And I was like, there are so many Facebook groups out there. And Ben’s now Ben’s now in my Facebook group that that means I’ve officially made it.

Hannah: That’s hilarious. That also shows that Ben is not active on social media.

Jake: Well, yeah. That, that’s, we’re, you know, we don’t need to talk about that. We’re just gonna pretend like Ben just loves this group.

It’s his second favorite group right behind the Kadence Facebook group.

Hannah: It’s so funny.

Ben: I’ve had to limit what I’m doing on social media to keep my sanity. But I’m, I’m actually really, I’m really hopeful that I’m gonna be more involved next year. It’s one of my things I’ve been thinking about is I want to be more involved in the community directly, I think for sanity and cuz of workload I’ve really had to not be that involved. But that’s something I’m hoping to change cuz I do like it. I just, there’s so many things happening right now and I’ve had to be like, okay, this is one I can at least step away from for a while.

Jake: It’s like a part-time or full-time job. I mean, if, if you’re, if you’re in there and like, I mean, I’m sure Hannah and and Kathy both, I mean, you guys are constantly involved in the Kadence group, and I mean, there is just, there’s so many people coming in and asking great questions and Yeah I mean, and you’re doing such amazing work, Ben, that it’s like, yeah, I completely understand. You know, you needing to, to step away, not, not be involved in that, in that social media aspect and, and just focus on development.

Ben: It’s gonna come back. because I do, I do wanna be more a part.

Hannah: Well, Jake, what’s next for StartBloggingBlocks?

Jake: Yeah, so, StartBloggingBlocks. What’s next? So right now, in fact we launched in April of this year, and at the time we had only 30 templates. And so now we’re in December 1st. It’s crazy that we’re in December already, we are right around 250 templates already. We have templates for building affiliate blog posts, so there are a ton of templates in there that are focused on blog posts.

So that’s gonna be like alerts, that’s gonna be CTAs, that’s gonna be product boxes, you know, all sorts of things that like, let you create an affiliate blog post. And then we also have a different collection called the Page Building Collection, and that is strictly focused on different sections and things for building a landing page.

So that’s gonna be your hero and content sections. That’s gonna be like testimonials, that’s gonna be frequently asked questions, pricing tables, anything that you might need to build an entire landing page that’s going to convert. And all of our blocks are completely conversion focused. You know, it’s like you can have a website that looks beautiful, you know, and has the best design.

But you know, you need it to sell at the same time, too. And so that’s what I’ve kind of really focused on with the blocks, is having something that looks really, really good and it’s conversion focused and has been proven, you know, to convert and, and sell and that kind of thing. And then,actually just this past weekwe released two more collections.

One is a social collection. So I actually got the, the, the idea from one of Kathy’s blog post. She showed you how to make a complete Linkree page using Kadence, and I was like, that’s such a great idea. I’m like, if you have a website that’s hosted on a domain, I’m like, you can just make a link page, you know, /links or /linktree or whatever and you can have all your links listed there. And you don’t have to pay Linktree a cent, you know, you don’t have to pay for that subscription. And you have like, you have way more customization options available to you cuz you can build it however you want. And so I built a number of these link tree templates, like full page templates that all you have to do is just, you can, you know, enter in your images, enter in your your links, and then put an image of yourself.

You can put your Instagram handle or you can put it, you know, in whatever bio you want. And, also with that social collection, you know, our like social CTAs, so like get people to your social pages and, and entice people to click there. And then the other collection, which I’m super excited about that came out this week was the Full Pages collection.

And so in that collection we have like full sales funnel. So there’s one that we, that’s like an ebook sales funnel. So I mean, you click once and this thing is an entire page that comes in, I mean, your hero section, your content sections, testimonials, all in one fell swoop. And all you have to do is put in your, you know, your ebook image, you know, fill in the, the copy that you want and you’re, you’re basically done in it.

There’s a nber of called action buttons, and then also blog posts outlines are, are a huge thing that we’re gonna be focusing on. So right now we have a blog post outline for like a product review. And it’s so cool because it’s like you click once and you have you know, like you have the intro, you have this whole product summary that, that I have built out that looks just great.

I’ve used it in a number of my product reviews and I’ve gotten the featured snippet on a number of my product reviews. You know, from using just the little, the little paragraph the sectioned off paragraph and that product summary. And then I have like a whole outline that, that Google loves, it just has that structure.

It has your product pros and cons. It has, you know, product alternatives and things like that. So we’re gonna be focused on a lot of full page blog post outlines for all sorts of blog posts that you might write, whether it be like a listicle, product review, a comparison post, how to, you know, that’s something that I’ve been working on and writing for a while, and so I have a lot of knowledge there and I’m gonna turn that into a template.

Hannah: Come on. That is so awesome.

Ben:That is so cool. I’m stoked to hear you talk about that. A lot of people don’t know. Jake’s like helping Kadence a lot with feedback on a lot of this stuff. Like we’re making different parts of cloud and how that works better because Jake emails me and it’s like, Hey, this is okay, but it could be better. What do you think? I think you’re right. I think it could be better. Let’s do that. Which, yeah, we we’re gonna be pushing out an update for full site, those full page ones. You, you want the auto scroll.

Jake: The autoscroll, which is, yeah, the auto scroll will be awesome. Cause like we have this screenshot, right? And it’s like this super, super long, long screenshot and people have to fix, we’re gonna fill down to see it. We’re gonna fix that. Yeah. It’ll be awesome. You just like hover over it and it just kind of starts slow scrolling the page, you can see the whole thing.

Ben:So you do a lot of product reviews. What non-Kadence product, like are you excited about right now that is in WordPress so you’re like, ah, I think this is really cool.

Jake: I’ve gotten in a lot, I’ve really been into like the AI tools kind of thing. I, I really like to see some of the AI tools that are coming out. You know, you have a lot of popular ones like such as Jasper.AI and things like that.

And one thing that,I haven’t really told many people about this, but. One thing that I wanna do, and I, and I know that Adam Prieser coming out with a nber of, of products, you know, the Sure products, so like SureCart, SureMembers, SureTriggers, which is like automation platform. And then they’re gonna be releasing SureWriter, which is a AI writing tool as well. And that is going to have a WordPress integration, so that’s gonna have a WordPress plugin. And what I’m hoping to eventually do, and I don’t know if this is gonna be possible, but what I would love to do, Those full, those full blog post outlines that I want.

I would love if in those blog post outlines, I write an AI command that people can have in there, and all they have to do is just plug in like their product name and they can run that and it will go and automatically, like start spitting out information in the editor. that would be an amazing way to create a blog post a lot faster.

Now that being said, I don’t use like AI tools a ton for my writing. More than anything, it’s to help me get out of like writer’s block. So like, I’m like the hardest part for me, like, and it’s just like, you know, starting a website is like getting started and like, there’s so many times I like start like a product review and I’m literally staring at like this blinking cursor for like 10 minutes and I’m like, I don’t even know, like how to start this product review.

And, you know, I’ve, I’ve liked AI writing tools for that kind of thing is they’re really good at, you know, writing persuasive copy. And then, you know, it’s like I’ve been writing for a long time on my blog, so I always tweak it and I would a hundred percent recommend, you know tweaking that content that gets spit out and making it your own. But that’s one, been one of my. Big focuses recently.

Hannah: Cool. Well, Jake, thanks so much for joining us today. I feel like we could just chat all day and ask questions, but Oh, we can do this. Probably end this at some point.

Jake: I was just gonna, I was just gonna say at the end here, like I, first and foremost, I, I just wanna say thank you guys like, so, so much for all, everything that you have done.

I mean, you guys, the tools that you have made have honestly, completely changed my life and it’s been, it’s given me the tools to be able to change the lives of thousands of others that are in, you know, my Facebook group and everyone that that comes to and read my tutorials and, you know, figures out how to, how to build a website for themselves.

I mean, it is, it is life changing, the things that you guys are doing. I say thank you so many times. In fact, like Ben can probably vouch for this or anyone on the Kadence support team, I write novels of, of emails. So like if you took all of my emails to Ben,you could probably like po publish like a thousand page eBook.

In just questions and things, I don’t stop talking and. And in my emails,they’re probably like, this guy Jake, like, says thank you 55 times in an email and I’ve never seen that before. So, but like I do truly honestly,appreciate everything that you guys are doing. I mean, Kadence would not be, you know, what it is without you guys obviously.

And I’m so appreciative of, of all that.

Ben: Well, we feel the same about you, so I definitely recommend everyone go check out what Jake’s doing, Join his Facebook group and, yeah, definitely go to his website. Like it

Jake: Yeah, I’ve gotten to play around a little bit with his cloud library in helping fix some stuff in Kadence, and it’s very cool. I’m very stoked about it. Well add some

Hannah: We’ll add some links in the show notes for Jake’s stuff, but thanks so much, Jake. Thanks for being here. Thank you everyone for listening. And we’ll see you guys next time.