On Sunday, Bridget Willard announced her latest project, Launch With Words. In collaboration with Ronald Huereca, who performed the development work, they built a plugin that helps clients jump-start routine, monthly blog posts. In the future, there will be premium “content packs” that include content for various industries.
The Launch With Words plugin is essentially a JSON importer for blog posts. The plugin itself is simple. However, the idea is what makes this plugin special.
“The audience is small business owners,” said Willard. “So many of us in the WordPress ecosystem are overeducated. We are annoyed that clients don’t know how to do X, Y, and Z. But that’s not their job; it’s ours.”
Willard wrote starter content for both the Twenty Nineteen and Twenty Twenty default WordPress themes. She said it occurred to her that theme starter content is great, but why was no one tackling this for blog posts?
“This plugin comes from something I’ve been saying to friends for years, ‘launch with words; get paid faster,’” she said. “Lorem ipsum is such a pain. Seriously. As someone who partners with WordPress agencies and freelancers to write copy for website launches, placeholder text is my nemesis.”
Willard runs her own business, which offers social media management, copywriting, consulting, and business coaching. She is a marketing consultant who has been writing for the web since 2001.
“I was a secretary by trade with a background in accounts receivables and collections,” she said. “After I earned my teaching credential, I spent a year teaching junior high and high school math before I realized I didn’t like parents. But hey, that bachelor’s degree isn’t wasted. I decided to go back to office work and landed in accounting (hello, algebra). I excelled in accounts receivable and collections but was at the top of my salary range.”
She left the construction industry in 2015 and began working for an advertising agency. During this time, she helped build the GiveWP brand. She also led the WordPress Marketing Team for two years.
How the Plugin Works
Launch With Words simply imports content. On its own, it does nothing else. Willard provides a downloadable JSON file via the Launch With Words website. This “starter pack” is available for free to everyone. It includes 12 draft blog posts to keep users blogging on their site for the next year.
While it is geared toward freelancers and agencies working with small business owners, anyone can use the plugin and starter pack. If you are having trouble pushing out content regularly, the monthly prompts could be the injection you need to get the creative juices flowing.
Each draft post includes a topic theme, topic type, and blog checklist. The topic theme is centered on usual events or holidays that match the month of the year. For example, the following is the theme for May:
Topic Theme: Summer is around the corner and, if your business is seasonal, you may have a bit of extra time or be swamped. It generally depends on your sales cycle.
This is a great time to go to your inspiration journal and look for a case study that can be written. Get the content published before people start going on vacations and forget about hiring a small business.
Just pull up each month’s draft post, follow the topic, and go from there.
Willard says that the plugin builds off the services she offers. “This plugin absolutely solves the repeated issues I encounter with people — namely, ‘What do I write about?’”
She has not started using the Launch With Words plugin with her clients yet. In the past, she has used the Website Content Questionnaire, a tool she built that others can copy to their Google Drive for free.
“What makes web copy great is having a bit of the backstory about people,” she said. “What makes them different? Do they like hockey? Did they start working in fast food? Are they building sites for the healthcare industry?”
Premium Content Packs
Willard will begin offering premium content packs soon. Each will come with 12 fully-written blog post drafts for each month of the year, catering to specific industries. She plans to launch these individual packs at $497.
“I get asked how I come up with prices often,” she said. “Because I look at websites and products and SaaS services constantly, pricing is now intuitive to me. It’s pretty easy for a developer or a small business to throw down $500 knowing it will give them content for a year. It’s a crazy low price. I’m not a fan of the word ‘cheap.’ But this is buying in bulk. This is the Costco model.”
The blog posts should range between 300 and 500 words, a service in which Willard would generally charge $200.
“Anyone can tweak the copy to localize it or make it their own,” she said. “Before you ask, the only thing worse than duplicate content is no content. It’s not novel to offer content; what’s novel is to offer content that lives in a blog post. It’s not an RSS feed from a syndication service that you can’t edit. It’s amazing how much franchises pay for boring content to distribute to their networks. Any business should have access to quality content that they can localize.”
One has to wonder how Willard could pace herself and produce quality content for these premium packs. However, she is no stranger to the writing process. She has published several books, writing four in the past year.
“I write to teach,” she said. “If you boil my essence down, I am a teacher. A few people have encouraged me to publish books. I have two Christian-based books out on Amazon that I did on Lulu.com, but it was so painful, I didn’t bother.”
It was not until she talked with Nathan Ingram, a business coach in the WordPress space, at WordCamp Seattle in 2019 that she decided to give things another go. He introduced her to Kindle Direct Publishing, a driving factor behind her more recent publishing success.
“So I took a blog series idea, ‘Dysfunctional Love Songs,’ and wrote and published that book in April as my COVID project. In October, ‘Keys to Being Social,’ my life’s work was published. ‘The Definitive Guide to Twitter Marketing’ was written on a Sunday in January. My fourth book, ‘How to Market Your WordPress Plugin’ is with my editor and will be published this year.”
Willard said these writing projects have helped her stay focused on positive things during the Covid-era.
“Otherwise, it’s easy for things to turn dark — if we’re all going to die, why pay off my credit cards? You know? I can’t just sit around watching Netflix. I do, but I need an outlet.”
She does not plan on going it alone for all of the premium content packs. She is already in talks with writers in other fields who would be better suited to the specific subject matter. However, Willard will lean on her construction-related expertise to build some of the packs.
“The best advice writers give is that you should write what you know,” she said. “It’s the first chapter in Anne Lamott’s ‘Bird by Bird.’ I’ve been writing about construction for 20 years. It won’t require very much research. I mean, if I can sit down on a Sunday and write 7,000 words on Twitter for that book, I’m pretty sure I can write 12 blog posts fairly soon.”
Thank you so much for featuring our new plugin. I’m super excited and ridiculously happy with how Ron built my vision.
I hope we can help small businesses use their WordPress websites to do what they are intended for — democratize publishing.