Books I Re-read When I Need Business Inspiration:
- Moneyball: A book about how statheads turned the business of baseball upside down!
- Never Split the Difference: Learn how to listen & connect better with people!
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work: Most of my friends run agitated companies. This book will teach you how to install calmness in your company.
- Company of One: Take the reigns and build a business that makes more sense for you (and your customers and your employer and your…)!
- Powerful by Patty McCord: Learn how radical honesty can transform your business and life.
- Uncommon Service: This is the best purely business book I have ever read.
- Four Hour Workweek: This treatise to effectiveness changed my whole outlook on life in profound ways – business, marriage, parenting, etc.
- The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Businessy & tactical? Sure. But if you suck at marketing like I do, I can’t think of a better place to start.
- Getting To Yes: My go-to workbook every time the going gets tough in a negotiation.
- Find Fulfilling Work: Finding your Why? is the biggest challenge most business owners face once they reach year 3 or so. I completed this workbook after a couple of iterations of my business, and it pushed me harder and farther than I thought possible!
BOOKS I ESCAPE INTO:
- The Lord of the Rings – This is, hands-down, the best book ever written.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey – A better companion than the movie (which is also great)! The book takes us to places that are physically within reach, yet…so far away…
- Gods Behaving Badly – Did you ever wonder what life would be like if the Greek Gods (Zeus, Hera, etc.) were the real religion? And what if they lived in a run-down flat in London? Wonder no more! Funniest book I ever read. Cleverly-written. Etc. etc. etc.
- Winnie-the-Pooh – The original snark. Joyful & simply amazing.
- The Agenda – The inside story of Bill Clinton’s first budget. Dry? Absolutely. Fascinating? Holy shit!
- Peter & The Starcatchers – If you dig Wicked, you’ll love this prequel to Peter Pan.
BLOGS I READ
BUSINESS BLOGS:
MARKETING BLOGS:
MOVIES & SHOWS I LOVE!
What book club would be complete without a listing of companion movies?! Here it goes…the only movies you should ever feel compelled to see:
- Spaceballs – Best movie ever.
- Dumb & Dumber – Okay…maybe this is the best movie ever…
- Star Wars Episodes IV, V, VI – These never get old.
- The Matrix – Brilliantly-creative, genre-busting, goosebumps-inducing!
- The Fog of War – Bean counters, politicians, morals, and the urgency of war. I’ve never seen a more revealing look behind the curtains of the human condition.
- Little Shop of Horrors: Zany musical comedy at its best!
MUSICALS I LOVE
Nothing has surprised me more in the last few years than my growing love for bombastic musical theater! It’s what I listen to in the shower, it’s what I think about in my free time. I love it. Honestly, my music theater vocabulary is not big, as I’ve only seen a relatively-small number of shows. Here are some of my favorites:
- Book of Mormon: The musical that got me interested in musicals.
- Little Shop of Horrors: The ending was a surprise, because it ends opposite than movie!
- Jesus Christ Superstar!: This one changed the way I think about musical songwriting.
LISTEN
COMEDY:
- George Carlin‘s Back In Town
- Steve Martin‘s Wild & Crazy Guy
- Rodney Dangerfield‘s No Respect
PODCASTS:
- Planet Money
- Fresh Air
- Behind the Bastards
- Presidential
- The Brian Lehrer Show
- Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast!
- The Fall of Rome
- WordPress Weekly
- HawkTalk
- Stuff You Should Know
- Levar Burton Reads
- The Axe Files
- Revisionist History
- Savage Love
- Judge John Hodgman
Programming Tools
BUSINESS-BUILDING RESOURCES
RESOURCES
- Free Beginner WordPress Class By Email
- My real-life sales process (includes real phone & email scripts that you can use!)
- Plus my Top 10 Things you need to know before hiring someone to build your website.
- Free Beginner SEO Course
- How to outsource WordPress Development
BIZ CONCEPTS & FURTHER READING
- The Quickest, Simplest, Funnest Website I’ve Ever Built (i.e. Google’s website builder)
- My real-life sales process (plus phone & email scripts!)
- Tech solutions are the answer to your revenue problems.
- Why I never recommend people redesign their website.
- Plus my Top 10 Things you need to know before hiring someone to build your website.
- Books I recommend
- When you shouldn’t pay for WordPress Maintenance
FREE WORDPRESS TECH LEARNING
WORDPRESS PLUGINS
- Organic SEO: Yoast SEO for basic organic SEO tech (Get the premium version if you’re a blogger).
- WordPress Forms, Quizzes, Surveys, Etc.: Gravity Forms for anything form-related. I use it for my contact form, Website Cost Calculator, and for my payment pages. Add the Zapier add-on to connect to everything! BONUS: Set up your Gravity Form to send to your cell phone via sms!
- Credit Card Processing: Stripe.com + Gravity Forms/WooCommerce.
- Cloning Landing Pages: Duplicate Post for cloning your home page to a new landing page.
- Quick Landing Page Builder: Divi for quickly designing beautiful landing pages.
- Email Pop-ups & Opt-ins: Bloom for email popups. Someone in the group mentioned copy-and-paste Mailchimp embeds, which work great, too.
- Website Calendars: The Events Calendar Pro was mentioned as buggy/bulky, and that’s been my experience with it, too. I recommendCalendly.com for 1-on-1’s and Eventbrite for everything else (the are both cloud-based apps that you can embed in your emails and website).
- WordPress Backups: Jetpack Backups for cloud website backups, and Backup Buddy for local/amazon/etc. backups. (Read my writeup about why & how I use Jetpack on almost every site I build.)
- WordPress Website Migration: WP Synchro or Migrate Guru
- 301 Redirects: Safe Redirect Manager by 10up
- WordPress Security: WordFence. The only reputable WordPress security plugin I know of with a Web Application Firewall built in!
WORDPRESS HOSTING:
- Pressable
or WP Enginefor the best WordPress hosting + automatic nightly backups. (If you need something cheaper, try GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Hosting.) p.s. I used to recommend WP Engine, but I cannot do that any longer. In my recent experiences, their customer support team has become an extension of their sales team and is no longer a team I can in good conscious recommend (my colleagues have reported the same).
WORDPRESS THEMES
I only recommend these two builder themes. Use anything else at your peril.
DIGITAL TOOLS
- Alternate Phone Number: Google Voice
- CRM: Contactually
RELATED MEETUPS
- A book club for growing small business owners, freelancers, & founders. (FREE!)
- Minneapolis St. Paul WordPress User Group
- Women Who WP
- Small Business Breakthrough
Accounting, Invoicing, & Biz Tools
- Invoicing: Harvest
WHERE TO HIRE WORDPRESS PROS
- Local: mnwp.directory
- Remote: Upwork.com (for custom dev) and Fiverr.com (for templated stuff). Learn how to outsource WordPress development.
Books I read this year (2021)
- How to Age by Anne Karpf
- The Whoopi Goldberg book
- How to worry less about money
- The Barack Obama book (listened)
- The Anne Lamott book (listened)
- the Neil Degrasse Tyson book
Books I read this year (2020)
- The Michelle obama book
- The Bob Woodward book (listened)
Books I read this year (2019)
- The Netflix HR person's book (listened)
p.s. Here's the toolset that The Mighty Mo! WordPress Design currently uses.