#158 – John Overall on How Podcasting Shaped His WordPress Journey

Transcript

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, how podcasting shaped our guests WordPress journey.

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[00:01:11] Nathan Wrigley: So on the podcast today, we have John Overall. John is a veteran in the WordPress podcasting world, bringing over 16 years of experience with the WP Plugins A to Z show. He’s an early adopter of WordPress, and has seen the platform evolve and grow, and has built a wealth of knowledge around plugins, which he thinks have been pivotal to WordPress’s versatility.

John shares his journey into the world of podcasting, initially using it as a tool to grow his business, and expand his expertise within the WordPress ecosystem. He gets into how the podcast landscape has shifted from its early days to the present, with technological advances making it easier than ever to produce and distribute shows.

We talk about the evolution of WordPress plugins, how they have shaped the WordPress platform over the years, and John’s unique approach to managing and understanding these powerful tools, making a podcast to help him better understand what each plugin does.

John also shares stories about his interactions with his audience, and how the podcast has forged connections that might not be the norm for client relationships.

We move into the ever changing WordPress environment, and John shares predictions and insights about the platform’s future, and how he’s using podcasting as a medium to continually learn and adapt, which in turn benefits his audience.

Something new for John is how he’s involving his family in his podcasting journey. His daughter has breathed new life and perspectives into the show, hoping to appeal to a younger generation while retaining his loyal audience.

If you’re passionate about WordPress, podcasting, or just interested in understanding a holistic approach to long-term content creation and audience engagement, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you John Overall.

I am joined on the podcast by John Overall, how are you doing?

[00:03:20] John Overall: I am doing fantastic, thanks Nathan. I appreciate being on your show.

[00:03:24] Nathan Wrigley: I am really pleased to have John. I want to call you Jonathan. Is there a time when you were a Jonathan or have I just misremembered?

[00:03:31] John Overall: No, no, I’ve been called Jonathan, Johnny, Johnny Boy. I answer to all kinds of names. My mom actually calls me Alan because she refuses to call me John.

[00:03:40] Nathan Wrigley: Well, it’s an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast today.

Very frequently when I interview people, people tell me that they’ve listened to my podcast and I find that really, I get quite emotional when people do that, I think that’s lovely. But the tables are turned, because today I’m here to say that I have listened to Jonathan’s podcast many, many times in the past.

And I was just saying that there was a period of time in my life when my children went to music lessons. And I used to accompany them to those music lessons, and I had to sit in the, if you call it like a waiting room, basically. Every week I would sit there faithfully listening to your plugin podcast, you know, it was the, we call it A to Z, but you call it A to Z. And I would listen to you talking about plugins, and giving them ratings and what have you with your co-host. And so this is a bit of a stars in my eyes moment. I’m so pleased to have you on the podcast.

[00:04:31] John Overall: Well, I appreciate that. And yeah, the WP Plugins A to Z, and we do call it Z here in Canada. But when I had my American co-host in the beginning years, he called it Z. So we used to argue with it. And then we actually have someone, our intro, one of my listeners, he recorded it, and we have a minor intro that says, it’s WP Plugins, A to Z, not Z. It’s still something we use. It was generated years ago by one of the listeners. But yeah, it’s been a longstanding show. It’s been around for over 16 years now.

[00:05:00] Nathan Wrigley: So I really didn’t know that podcasts were a thing. And podcasts came into my life at the moment when mobile phones had apps that could do that. I didn’t listen to them on desktop or anything like that. And it was always for me, a bit of dead time. I wouldn’t listen to them in the car or anything like that. I would always listen to them in a moment where I was sat in a chair and had nothing else to pay attention to. And I just found them immediately really, really important in my life.

And then I found WordPress. And then quickly found a bunch of podcasts which I listened to, and yours was the one that somehow settled in my brain as the, I’m going to music now, I’m going to sit for half an hour and consume the podcast.

And really, without listening to podcasts like yours, my life would’ve been very different, I think. Because it occurred to me that, as I was listening to you and your co-host talk, I got a sense of, well, you’re not a media personality. You are not somebody who is sitting in some sort of CNN type studio producing content. You are a guy that does the kind of job that I do. And I got a real sense of, gosh, maybe this is something that I could explore at some point. And there we go, and the rest is history. That’s now all I’ve done for many years.

[00:06:07] John Overall: Well I will gladly take the credit for expanding podcasting. I’ve enjoyed podcasting since the beginning. I discovered it as I graduated from my applied communication program at college, which led me into the internet. And it was shortly after that that we saw the rise of it. And of course, Adam Curry from the No Agenda Show, who is known as the Pod Father, he created podcasting as it stands today with the RSS feeds.

And he’s even ensured that it’s going to stay a free and open source platform due to the now existing podcasting index. Which is where everybody gets that in their newfangled apps. Like I quit using the apps from the Apple store for my podcast. I use the newer apps, because they do a much better job and they go into the podcast and index for everything.

So, yeah, it’s really great. And the nice thing is, what it did was allowed me, with WordPress in particular, was to expand my knowledge. Because I used it to build my knowledge. I saw WordPress and what it was doing with the plugins. Because in the beginning, WordPress was great for a blogging platform. I started using it probably about version two, so they were like two, maybe two and a half years old when I discovered WordPress.

I’d seen it once before when it first came out, and one of my clients put it on my server and I almost banned it from my server because its use of resources was ridiculous. It was literally crashing one of my servers. But I ended up working with it, and it kept getting better and better and better. And then when they introduced the plugins to it, to expand it into a full CMS, I went, oh dear God, this is going to be huge.

And I’ve watched it as it climbed from like, I went back recently to look at my first episodes. My first episode there was less than 9,000 plugins available for WordPress. I watched it grow and grow and grow and grow. And now there’s over, hundreds of thousands of plugins. The WordPress repository has only 50,000. At one point they had 90,000, so they’ve cleaned out a big mess, it has expanded it, and it’s going to take, you know, WordPress is going into, it’s in a changing mode right now.

WordPress is in a massive flux right now, with all the things that have occurred in the last six months. But many people have been panicking, oh my God, It’s going to go away. It’s like, no, it’s not going anywhere. It’s going to change, and a lot of things are going to be different, but there’s too many people in the world making a living, depending upon their daily bread, their monthly rents, having WordPress fully functioning. And there’s companies that are as big as Automattic, if not bigger, that are using WordPress.

I was reading an article yesterday of the top 12 websites built in WordPress. We’re talking NASA, The Times magazine, well, we know whitehouse.gov is using it. And you look at them and some of them are just insanely developed. And if it wasn’t for the plugin capability of WordPress, it wouldn’t be possible.

[00:08:52] Nathan Wrigley: When you look back over all those years, so rewind until, let’s say the month, the year before you began your podcast journey, what was the thing that kicked you into doing podcasting? Was it just like a bit of serendipity? Did you know that you wanted to create audio content or was it just a bit of an accident?

[00:09:09] John Overall: It was a bit of everything. What it really was, was I was just starting, I had just sold my computer store, so I was working off of money from selling a successful sale of a computer store I had for several years. Because I sold out the computer industry just before it went full mobile and impossible to really make a living with a computer store. And I was going back to the internet and developing websites and I was exploring things.

I looked at Drupal, Joomla and WordPress, trying to figure out what would be the best CMS system so I wouldn’t have to write PHP code, and CSS by hand anymore, or at least minimise it. And I needed a way to reach people. And one of the ways, podcasts was just starting to pick up at that time, that was somewhere around 2010, 2011, right around there. And it was just starting to pick up, and I realised, wait a minute, people are listening to the podcast. I can start putting out a podcast and I can focus. And I looked at WordPress and I realised, you know, what would be the best component to focus on in WordPress?

And so I chose plugins. And I went, okay, well I needed a domain. I went, WP Plugins, well, A to Z. And I had this really crazy idea at the beginning, because there was so few plugins, I was going to cover WordPress plugins, literally from A to Z. My first 20 episodes was A, B, C, D plugins starting with those letters. I got that far into it and I went, okay, this ain’t going to work, there’s no way.

And people were adding them at a continuous rate every week. And I went, okay, this isn’t going to work, but it still constitutes, the name constituted everything. So I just started diving into what I thought was the best plugins, or if I used the plugin and I thought wasn’t very good, it was a way to warn people, please, avoid this plugin. Don’t make my mistake.

So it was all of those things. So it was a little bit of serendipity, but what I was more after was growing my business. And it literally did grow my business for several years. I would suddenly get a call, or an email from people, because I put my email and everything into the shows. I would get emails from listeners saying, hey, I’ve been listening to your show for several months and I’m having this WordPress problem, and you talked about it. Can you fix it? And I said, well, hold on, let’s see what we can do.

And so I still have six or seven clients from those early years, that have been clients ever since they came to me. And they came to me because, when people listen to you on podcasts they begin to trust you. They start to feel like they know who you are, because they’ve been listening to you. You’re a friend, you’re not a stranger. And because of that, what happens, I had people, they would contact me and I asked them for, I’m really cautious about what information I get from my clients to access their stuff, their hosting or whatever. And I get people and I ask them for this, and all of a sudden they’ve given me all of their keys to their castle. And they have no idea who I am. They don’t know if I’m trustworthy of that, but I’ve built that trust by the way they’ve heard me talk over the however period of time, months or years they’ve listened to my show.

[00:11:55] Nathan Wrigley: It is interesting because from your perspective, you haven’t given out any metric which might be a measure of trust, but you have. You really have. I mean, giving that much time and putting out your thoughts, and speaking like you speak, and talking like you talk, and the language that you use, and the way that you present yourself, it does lend trust.

And it is very, very similar with the podcasts that I listen to, dozens that I listen to each week. And I really do get a feeling that I know these people. I never thought of using a podcast as a marketing tool to be honest. But I do remember the sort of bits that you would drop in, and I thought, yeah, that was kind of interesting.

Yeah, perfect, it ended up creating new business, not just a bit of fun that you had to crowbar into each week.

[00:12:38] John Overall: It literally helped build my business, and it made it successful to sustain me for many years. And that’s what I’ve enjoyed. That’s part of what I’ve enjoyed about it.

The other is, I got to meet lots of people virtually, all over the globe. In addition to the, well, we’re going to do episode 642 next week, and in addition to those episodes for just the WP plugins, I did interview shows, which were a separate episode. And I’ve done over 150 of those over the years.

Plus I’ve also had three or four other podcasts, I kept thinking I was going to start different podcasts for different things, and I’d get maybe 20, 30, 100, 200 episodes into them, and then that’s like, okay, I don’t have time for these ones anymore, and they just fall by the wayside. In total I’ve probably got 2000 episodes of podcasts behind me for various podcasts.

[00:13:23] Nathan Wrigley: You really are a veteran of this industry. How has it changed? Just for those of us who are podcasting nowadays, it’s so simple. There’s a tool for everything. There’s a SaaS platform for everything. You can pay your monthly subscription, and it’ll more or less podcast for you really. But back in the day, when I started there were definite hurdles, but you were many, many years before me. So I’m imagining there was lots of hurdles to overcome just to get the thing out there.

[00:13:49] John Overall: In the beginning it was really hard, especially if you had a host, a co-host. It’s like we didn’t have the easy software like we’re using right now for recording back and forth. Even now, I don’t use this software for doing mine. I use Microsoft Teams for recording with my co-host. But in the beginning we had, oh, what the heck was it called?

[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: I’ll tell you what I used at the beginning and this will kind of date me. I used Skype.

[00:14:13] John Overall: That’s it.

[00:14:13] Nathan Wrigley: That was it.

[00:14:14] John Overall: That was it? Skype? I was trying to remember what it was. It still loads on my computer when I reboot my computer and I have to shut it off because I just haven’t got around to, well, I haven’t rebuilt my computer for almost 10 years. I’m getting a new one this next year, because my computer’s finally ending its life.

But yeah, Skype. And the other thing was, is we didn’t have the easy ways to clean up the audio feed that we have now. You get those high pitch wines, or bad cable, or background noise, or whatever, or even the mismatched audio levels. You had to actually go in and kind of edit that a little bit to get your audio as clean as possible.

Because the biggest thing from the beginning I knew is, it doesn’t really matter what you’re talking about, if the audio’s not clean, people will stop listening. If the audio’s got annoying noises or something, or they can’t quite hear, or one host is suddenly blaring in the air and the other host is like a mouse talking in the other ear, they go, oh, I can’t listen to this. And they won’t listen to you.

[00:15:09] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know, it’s really interesting because somebody warned me of this right at the beginning of my podcast journey, and they framed it even more than that. They said that if you’re watching a video and the quality of the video is poor, you’ll forgive that. But you’ll never forgive bad audio. You just can’t watch something on, let’s say, YouTube or a film or whatever if the audio is crackly or distorted. There’s just nothing, you know, unless you can lip read, there’s nothing coming at you that’s useful.

And I remember taking that to heart and thinking, okay, that’s important. But then being frustrated by the technology that, just things like Skype couldn’t keep up. There’d be dropouts in everything, and so editing was a nightmare.

[00:15:48] John Overall: Yes, it was. And although pretty much all my shows are live to tape, I discovered a program that’s called Level Later. And it’s a very old program, but what it does is you can take any audio file with multiple levels in it, you throw it into this, it runs it through some passes, some computer magic, and it comes out and all the levels are perfect in it. And I’ve been using Level Later for years now, because no matter how hard I try, I can never get the levels perfect when I’m recording it between two hosts. Because I’m not using intermediate software that’s doing it for me. I record mine straight to OBS.

[00:16:22] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, if you are thinking about getting into the podcasting world, and we can decide whether or not that’s useful these days given the dearth of podcasts. But if you are, honestly, it’s so straightforward now. I’m using, currently, an app called SquadCast, but there’s a whole bunch of rivals out there in the marketplace. There’s things like Riverside.FM and many, many others.

And they allow you to record through a browser, and in this case, John’s track and my track will be isolated, I’ll download them both. And so that never happened. Before it was just one track that you had to, if your audio is mucky, then so was mine. There was no way of separating those two.

But now yours will come separately, mine will come separately, and if I’ve got 10 guests, they’ll all be separate. And then I throw them into, similar to you, I throw them into an app which basically cleans things up and automatically levels things. And then will create transcripts, and it’s just miraculous. It’s so, so straightforward.

[00:17:13] John Overall: It’s gotten really good. I’m, re-embracing all of that stuff. For the last four years, I’d taken my business down to the minimal levels of what I had to put into it, and I focused on my farmstead that I have, my urban farmstead. And in this last year I realised I needed to get back to my roots, and my WordPress and all of my other work. And so this last year we’ve been rebuilding everything.

And the WP Plugin show, it went off the rails for a little while. I got a little political for a little while and lost a large chunk of my audience, and a lot of them are coming back now because I’ve got it back to what it was, the show it was before. It is allowing everything, and also I’ve got a new co-host in there, my daughter, been training in my business for the last five years to take over this business as I get ready for retirement time.

She’s become my co-host on there. In fact, she’s more of the host than I am now. She does more of the talking and more of the direction of the show each week. Which is kind of interesting. It makes for a more interesting show, having a different viewpoint on it than mine. Because I think I went, when Marcus left the show back in 2016 or 17, and I did like four years of just me on the show. And it’s really hard to be a single host on a show week after week after week.

[00:18:27] Nathan Wrigley: I feel your pain.

[00:18:28] John Overall: That’s why you need guests or you need to have a co-host to help keep some life in it. Anyone who tries to do a podcast, like podcasts nowadays. Yeah, anyone can do them and, yes, there is a dearth of them, but the problem is, if you go look at those podcasts, about 80% of them never make it past episode 30.

[00:18:45] Nathan Wrigley: Or even, I mean, it’s probably like 50% past episode one in all honesty.

[00:18:50] John Overall: Yeah that too. They find out, wait a minute, this is a lot of work, and it’s really hard. It’s usually the ones that try to do it by themselves and they’ve got the momentum for the first 10, 15 episodes. After that, you’ve got to keep pushing yourself.

[00:19:02] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s a grind, isn’t there? And although we’ve just made the case that making a podcast is straightforward, from a technological point of view, it’s easier than ever. But the grind hasn’t gone away. And in fact, new grind has been added in.

So when you began, and when I began, social media was a bit of a thing, but not really. It wasn’t kind of an essential component. But now it’s almost like the only distribution mechanism, outside of RSS, and perhaps a WordPress website.

All of those pieces have kind of got bundled in. So you have to make sure to promote it, and cross-promote it, and create, I don’t know, alternative, different snippets of it that go on this platform and that platform. So there’s a whole load of other things.

It isn’t something that, unless you’ve got a real passion for it, it’s something that, like you said, episode 30 is probably going to be where you get and give in because you start in New Year, brand new, New Year’s resolution. January, I’m going to do a podcast, and you keep going for a little while. And I was telling you that there are very few things in my life where I’ve had the capacity to stick at it, but podcasting for some reason has worked for me. I guess I just like listening to my own voice.

[00:20:05] John Overall: There’s that aspect too, listening to your own voice. Sometimes I listen to myself and I go, really? That’s me? You don’t get used to that. No matter all these years, I still can’t get used to my voice.

But the other thing is, for some people, a lot of people use it to help improve their knowledge in their particular area they’re podcasting about.

I like history podcasts from time to time. And those ones there, it means it’s a serious history buff doing a podcast about something he’s excited about. And what he’s getting a chance to do is share to the world what he’s doing.

The same I do with WordPress, I share things to everybody about what is in the WordPress world and what’s changing. And now our show has moved in a different direction. We dropped down from the number of plugins we do each week. We have more discussion about things we see happening. There’s new segments coming into the show that’ll be talking about, here’s a problem in WordPress we found, how we solved it, coming from my daughter’s perspective, who, she’s five years into this, so she’s relatively new and everything. It’s like everything’s brand new to her. A lot of it’s all, oh yeah, it’s just CSS. I don’t understand that Dad. And I was like, oh yeah, you’re kind of new at this. I have to explain things.

So when I’ve discovered problems, there’s problems I can solve in like 20 minutes and it takes her five hours because she doesn’t know where to go to see the problem. These are what I’m starting to bring back to the show. Stuff that used to be in the show and it had gotten lost along the way. And it’s also we’re talking about what we see changing in the WordPress environment, and how we see this environment evolving over the next couple years.

We did a show, our Christmas and New Year’s shows were prerecorded. We do prerecorded shows usually about that time, so we can spend time with the family and not worry about the show. But we’d made predictions of what was coming in the New Year that hadn’t yet come to pass. By the time we did our first show, a week and a half ago, by the time we did our first show for the New Year, we had already had two or three successful predictions of what was changing in WordPress.

We’re both starting to see this, which is exciting in the fact that, oh, okay, this sort of event is going to happen in WordPress and this is where it’s going to go. With all the doom and gloom, as I mentioned, the doom and gloom as I see, like I follow the forums over at the Reddits, and Twitters, and all over the place because I get our news from everywhere to keep up. And I see a lot of people, doom and gloom of people abandoning.

I tried abandoning WordPress at the introduction of Gutenberg. I even took my show towards ClassicPress. And that happened for about two years. And then I realised, unfortunately, ClassicPress didn’t have a community momentum behind it, and WordPress kept going. Even though I currently build in WordPress, I don’t use Gutenberg, because no matter how many times I try to wrap my head around it, I can’t get my brain to think that way. And so I use Elementor for all my builds. And it allows me to continue using the Classic Editor.

But that sort of thing is going to continue. They were going to supposedly stop supporting the Classic Editor, but unfortunately it’s not happening, because a good 50% of the WordPress community still uses the Classic Editor, and a page builder of some sort. Versus 50% that are using Gutenberg. And they can live together. It took me a while to realise that they can live together. You just have to work with it.

I have a couple of clients who use Gutenberg. I can sort of muck my way through it if I really work at it. But it’s going to continue, and these things are going to keep changing and evolving. The WordPress plugins, I’ve seen the developers creating some amazing developments. When we just launched the new website for our business, we actually have a whole WP Pro A to Z lineup, WP Plugins, WP Pro A to Z.

When we launched our new site, I found a plugin I didn’t know existed, which will be coming in one of my shows, upcoming. If you need a booking plugin and you use Gravity Forms, somebody wrote a full blown addition to Gravity Forms for a booking plugin. So you don’t have to go spend money on another third party service or a service as a software, SaaS service where you’re putting out money. You pay for this one plugin, integrate it into Gravity Forms and you get everything. And now it’s all in one form and you still control your data.

[00:24:07] Nathan Wrigley: I really like the idea that you had of having that kind of theme running through, because in any of the podcasts I do, basically each episode is atomised, you know, it’s just an episode and then you listen to a different one, and there’s no real connection necessarily between the episodes. And I really like the idea of having a thread which runs through.

But also, I am really curious about plugins in particular, and I would love to have the excuse to play with them. Because then it would be, air quotes, then it would be work suddenly. The excuse of, what are you doing? I’m doing work. I’m playing with a plugin.

[00:24:39] John Overall: Play with a plugin, figuring it out, throw it on one of my dozens of domains that I’m doing nothing with, that collect all kinds of stuff.

No, the other joy is, as you mentioned with plugins, is of course, because once developers rediscover us, and the way we review stuff, and we give honest reviews, we tell them, truthfully what we find wrong and what we don’t. We give a good, honest rating. It’s very seldom we’ll give a rating as low as a two, but it has happened in the past.

We don’t automatically like give it a five, it has to be worthy of a five. Most of them fall between three and four, which is where most of them are anyway.

But the other joy is, is I get developers, they got a premium plugin and they go, hey, you want to check it out and I say, yeah, give me your premium plugin and a license, all give it a review.

So I get to play with premium plugins without having to spend the money on them, which is a joy. But it also allows people to find out what it might do. And the other thing that’s coming again, I used to have training videos, create training videos on how to use plugins. In fact, my training videos on my YouTube channel, some of them are still some of my highest rated plugins.

[00:25:38] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that I was really lucky being in the WordPress community, then discovering podcasting. Because I feel like all the pieces of the jigsaw, which go into making a podcast, are easily handled with WordPress. And so that was just a nice bit of serendipity. If you understand how to put a website up, well, that’s one thing you kind of really do need if you’re going to have a podcast.

And there’s plugins which will handle the RSS feed. There’s plugins which will handle the contact forms. There’s plugins which will handle the display of your website if you’re not using Core. And so I felt that talking about WordPress, and having the capacity to use WordPress was a real boon for me. Just made the whole thing much more straightforward. But like you’re describing about your daughter, not the same for everybody.

[00:26:21] John Overall: Yeah, well, one of the interesting things about, when you mentioned a plugin for this and a plugin for that, you remember the early days of the Apple advertising, There’s an app for that.

[00:26:29] Nathan Wrigley: For the iPhone, yeah.

[00:26:30] John Overall: We used to say for the longest time, well, there’s a plugin for that.

[00:26:32] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And there was.

[00:26:34] John Overall: There literally was, and there still is. And if you don’t think there is, it’s easy enough to build. It’s like, I’ve actually gone so far, in the last couple of years, to pay developers to create plugins for me. Sometime around the end of this year we’ll be introducing a plugin that has not been created yet for any of the things on WordPress. We’ve been working on something, and so that’s a little tidbit of what’s coming. As we get closer to the beta release, which is expected, the beta release is expected September, October of this year. Then we’ll be talking more and more in depth about this plugin.

[00:27:07] Nathan Wrigley: Do you still intend to keep going with your podcast into the, basically into the future, forever? Do you have a sort of timeline, like when you get to, I don’t know, a thousand episodes of this particular podcast, that’ll be it?

[00:27:18] John Overall: As long as the show has still got listeners, and some audience, and it still provides value for what we do, no. Because one of the biggest things, and even my daughters realised this. Because she has to do research for every episode, because a lot of people don’t realizse, okay, you do a podcast, oh, it’s about an hour long. They don’t realise that that hour long required three to four hours of research in preparation of your notes and everything for the show, plus whatever post-production, everything else. By the time you’re done, a one hour show is usually a five to seven hour investment of time.

The thing is, when you’re doing that research, what it does is that increases your knowledge, because you’re looking at things you hadn’t looked at before, and it helps increase and input more knowledge into you, and expand your knowledge as an expert in the field. Many, many people started podcasts as a side hobby, and turned into experts in their field, because of their podcast. That’s what it forces you to do, is it forces you to become an expert in whatever field your podcast focuses on.

[00:28:18] Nathan Wrigley: Did you ever get into creating podcast websites for people?

[00:28:22] John Overall: No.

[00:28:22] Nathan Wrigley: No, me neither. And there’s some part of me which regrets that, because I think that would’ve been a real good wheelhouse for me.

[00:28:28] John Overall: It would’ve been, and it would’ve been except for, you would’ve been changing a lot, and the investment in time and the screenshots for it would be even higher than the investment in time I’ve got now.

It was all about how much investment in time versus the return on that investment in time. It is how I’ve done it.

I did training videos, and my training videos are still some of the highest viewed videos on YouTube, and they’re old and ancient now, and they’re out of date. And I even got a question from one of the training videos, what was it, a couple of months ago, somebody contacted me and asked me questions. I said, oh, dear God, I forgot I did that.

And when I went and looked at it, I said, I’m sorry, it’s out of date. I haven’t used that plugin in four or five years now, so I don’t know. And this is the problem of it. And so I’m starting to create new ones, partly because I’m creating these training videos for my clients to be able to manage their sites. Because my job as a web designer is not to manage their website forever, but build them a website that they can do all their own content and not keep having me having to put the content in, because they don’t want to pay the fees for simple things like adding content.

And so we build websites to do that, but they need instructions on how to do it. So we build nice, simple training videos that they can go look at and remind themselves how to do it. And so I’m actually starting to do that with the plugins again. And for plugins, in fact, one of my training videos for a plugin I did a few years ago, the plugin developer adopted that video right into their code as their training video for how to use the plugin. I do do very detailed, and something people told me was, I’m very good at translating geek to English.

And that was the nice thing is, if you try to tell them how to do it in geek, and a lot of computer guys, they can’t translate geek to English.

[00:30:09] Nathan Wrigley: Also you have this strange thing on an audio podcast where in many cases you’re trying to describe the functionality of something, which would be so much easier if you could just see it. So it does this, and the way it does this, oh, okay, and you have to try and explain it. And sometimes that involves saying, well, you have to tick this box over here, and then go over here, and do this, and this.

And it really does make you stop and think, what’s the best way to describe this? What’s going to work? What’s not going to work? And I think you’re right, it does make you think around the problem. They say that if you can teach something, then you truly understand it. I think there’s a little bit of that in there.

[00:30:42] John Overall: That was the other thing I did in the beginning of WordPress. I actually taught WordPress. I had courses here in Victoria where I live. I had night classes that people would sign up and come pay me money to teach them how to use WordPress. And I did those for about, all the way up until version four of WordPress when YouTube got flooded with tutorials and my courses became irrelevant. But for a few years, that was another way I expanded my knowledge was I taught it to people, because in preparation to teach it, I had to know what I was telling people.

[00:31:10] Nathan Wrigley: You mentioned that there was a period of time where you fell out with podcasting or it fell out with you, or whatever it may be. You sort of dropped away from it. Did you find though, that when you came back, you mentioned that the audience is sort of still there? The curious thing for me is, I noticed this just the other day, a podcast that is in my podcast player that I have never listened to for years, and the reason I haven’t listened is because they just went away, but it’s still there.

And then they came back. RSS is a bit brilliant like that. Because there’s no algorithm feeding it to you, there’s no algorithm like on YouTube saying, okay, now what about this. It jumped right to the top of my playlist. And I suddenly thought, gosh, I haven’t seen that one for a while. Click play, and the first words were, we’re back, we’ve had a couple of years off or whatever.

I thought that was really cool. So I did wonder if your audience, by just mere fact of the way RSS readers work, and RSS feeds work with podcast players, if they’d stock with you, even though they didn’t know they were sticking with you.

[00:32:05] John Overall: I’d say about one third of my audience, in truth, I never left it entirely. We would always put out a episode of WP Plugins A to Z. We would put out an episode, at worst it fell to an episode a month is what happened. It was never completely off the air. But the audience dropped down to, we’re about one third right now the audience we used to have.

And a lot of them left me during my period of despair with the world, is lack of a better term. A lot of them left me during that period there. I chased a few of them away. Some of them I will earn back, some of them I won’t. Some of them have retired, I imagine, because what was interesting is my audience for the most part is as old or almost as old as me. And I’m pushing, you know, the upper echelons of fifties now. Because I’ve been doing this since my early forties. And some people, they’ve aged out.

We’re actually, because my daughter is a millennial, she’s in her thirties now, we’re going after the people in her audience segment. We’re changing our audience focus. We’re no longer worried about the old time geeks, the ones that know what they’re doing. We want the younger people who don’t know where they’re going, what they’re doing, they’re looking for advice, they want to do these things.

We’re working the audience to go after the younger generation, the millennials and the Zoomers, who are just now coming up into, okay, I need to build a business. What do I choose for building my website? Do I go with WordPress? Do I go with Shopify? Do I get Wix? Do I go crazy and go on a Drupal website? You know, it’s like, what are they going to do?

And so we’re hoping that we can find these people that are hunting, and get them to look to us for the expertise and advice, and come see me. Like, I now have 25, actually 26 years now of experience in this industry. So I’ve just started offering consulting services for building a website. Because a lot of people don’t realise it’s like, you can dive into your website and you can spend, what’s your time worth? Is your time worth money, or is it not as valuable?

So you can spend the next 70, 80 hours trying to figure things out. Or do you want to buy a few hours of my time and get some direction, and save yourself hours and hours of time, and know where you’re going with your website. Like, we’ve been fortunate enough to, in the last couple of years, build some very high frontend websites such as we rebuilt the website for the sierraclub.bc.ca, here in Western Canada.

So we’ve had a few high-end websites like that we’ve built the last couple of years, to be able to showcase the kind of work and capabilities we have now. So it helps show that, yes, we have expertise in this. And I’m just going back and tying into all my years of knowledge now and bringing it back forward.

[00:34:44] Nathan Wrigley: I think that’s a really credible thing to be able to show as well. You know, I’ve been doing a podcast for 15 odd years or something, it’s definitely a lot of credibility. But also I think it’s great that you’ve managed to sort of co-opt your daughter into it. So not only has that breathed a whole new generation of an audience into the podcast, but it’s also binding you to a family member, a close family member, and I think that’s lovely.

[00:35:05] John Overall: Yeah, well, I’m also trying to co-op my granddaughters into it too.

[00:35:08] Nathan Wrigley: Really a different generation.

[00:35:10] John Overall: Neither one of my sons are much interested in technology, they’re so, so. But my oldest son’s become an electrician. My youngest son is looking at possibly going into trades as a welder. But my oldest son definitely is being an electrician, he starts as an apprentice as soon as he graduates.

But it’s really good to bring in your next generations. If you have them, bring them in. If they’re excited in any way, find which component of your business they might be excited in, and put them into it. That’s one less person you have to worry about. And you can help ensure that maybe your business will last a couple of generations.

[00:35:43] Nathan Wrigley: Well, Jonathan, unfortunately time has got the better of us. I really appreciate all of the content that you’ve put out there. I hope that it carries on and you’ll be able to make the new show with your daughter a real success. Where do people find you?

[00:35:55] John Overall: You can find us online at two places, WP Plugins, A to Z, or Z for the Americans .com. And that’s where the show is hosted at. And all of our show notes are there. And you can also find us at wpproatoz.com. That’s our company website.

[00:36:12] Nathan Wrigley: I will definitely put all of those links into the show notes. Jonathan Overall, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:36:19] John Overall: Thanks a lot, Nathan. It’s been a pleasure.

On the podcast today we have John Overall.

John is a veteran in the WordPress podcasting world, bringing over 16 years of experience with the WP Plugins A to Z show. He’s an early adopter of WordPress, and has seen the platform evolve and grow, and has built a wealth of knowledge around plugins, which he thinks have been pivotal to WordPress’s versatility.

John shares his journey into the world of podcasting, initially using it as a tool to grow his business, and expand his expertise within the WordPress ecosystem. He gets into how the podcast landscape has shifted from its early days to the present, with technological advances making it easier than ever to produce and distribute shows.

We talk about the evolution of WordPress plugins, how they have shaped the WordPress platform over the years, and John’s unique approach to managing and understanding these powerful tools, making a podcast to help him better understand what each plugin does.

John also shares stories about his interactions with his audience, and how the podcast has forged connections that might not be the norm for client relationships.

We move onto the ever-changing WordPress environment, and John shares predictions and insights about the platform’s future, and how he’s using podcasting as a medium to continually learn and adapt, which in turn benefits his audience.

Something new for John is how he’s involving his family in his podcasting journey. His daughter has breathed new life, and perspectives, into the show, hoping to appeal to a younger generation while retaining his loyal audience.

If you’re passionate about WordPress, podcasting, or just interested in understanding a holistic approach to long-term content creation and audience engagement, this episode is for you.

Useful links

WP Plugins AtoZ website

SquadCast

Riverside.FM

ClassicPress

Elementor

WP Pro A to Z website

Gravity Forms

Sierra Club BC website