Interview with Willie Jackson

Nick: I’m here with Willie Jackson. He is a man that pretty much needs no introduction as of these past few days. He’s got a story of courage, creativity and chasing your dreams to tell us about and before we jump into that lets find out one fun fact about Willie.

Willie: A fun fact about me is I tell people I haven’t broken a bone. That is actually not true. The doctor broke my collar bone when he was yanking me out. There’s a fun fact about me.

Nick: Got you. So what are you up to these days? How could people find out more information about you and I know you’ve got just picked up with, you’ve got something going on with Seth Godin. Tell us about that.

Willie: My goodness. So the biggest thing is I’m moving to New York City tomorrow. It’s kind of big. There’s a project that Seth is working on called the domino project. It’s a partnership with Amazon and long story short it seeks to revolutionize the publishing industry. If you look at the way the music just as a comparison if you look at the way the music industry has gone over the past, since we grew up and started listening to music. We saw things go from the way our parents used to listen to music with physical media to the digital world. Everything is mp3s. Everything download. Everything is free frankly. So instead of adjusting to that the music industry started suing their best customers and it’s created a vicious cycle and as Seth Godin says stick a fork in it. It’s done. Similarly you can see some trends in the publishing industry where things like manifestos, pdfs, eBooks, ereaders, kindles, nooks, all those things. The landscape is changing and it’s changing quickly. Seth has a lot of experience because he’s a bestselling author 13 times over. He just has a lot of ideas on how things can change and how we can continue pushing things.

So I have no idea what the responsibilities are going to be. I have no idea what my role in this is going to be but I’m one of six people hired to help bring this into life. To say that I’m excited is an understatement. I’m looking forward to getting started.

Nick: That’s awesome. So how did you even get word of that situation, tell us the whole back story on that.

Willie: I’m a subscriber to his blog and he published a post called in search of accomplices. I think if you search for that you can find it and he described it in brief and mentioned that he’ll be talking more about the domino project and I thought about it and I thought about it and I said I’m just going to throw my hat in the ring and I did and it was 3AM in my typical vampire fashion and I started typing and I started typing and I filled out the Google doc application and a week or so later I got an email asking me to come interview. It’s been a thrill ride since then. I haven’t gotten much sleep since then. It’s been pretty exciting but look to New York to interview, it wasnt really an interview per se but it was a group brainstorming session. We talked about ideas and got to know each other and it was just an incredible environment and so Seth I mean he’s in a league of his own. So to be involved with someone like that is I think it’s going to be a really good experience to say the least.

Nick: Very cool. It sounds like this is going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity and this year you’ve been setting yourself up so that you can move into something of this nature. You didn’t know what it was but you’ve been setting yourself up. You really got on my radar at the beginning of this year and it’s the last day of the year that we're recording this and it’s amazing man. I could really tell you dude you’re and up and comer a shining star. I’m excited for you. You’re one of the boldest individuals I know.

Willie: I appreciate that.

Nick: I’m happy we get a change to record this.

Willie: Yeah man let’s do it?

Nick: So with that said how would you describe someone that is bold? You’ve watched some of the becoming bold interviews. You’ve mentored me on what you think becoming bold should be about and what not. So we’ve talked a little. What’s your take on that?

Willie: I think put simply taking action that scares you to death. So in spite of obstacles, we can always find excuses for not doing things that scare us but where the excitement in life comes in, not just in our actions, the excitement in even the quality of life that we seek to build for ourself is taking action despite our fears. I guess how that relates to me is the fact that I left my comfortable corporate job. Tomorrow would be nine months. So it’s been a thrill ride since then. I left my job in April to freelance fulltime and it’s been quite a journey. I don’t want to say postponing my decision of keeping me from making the leap was the fact that I have a mortgage and that was the biggest thing. I’m 25 and I have a house that’s much larger than what I needed so that was a big consideration when I was thinking about making the leap but I had to do it and here I am and somehow I survived so the net appeared thankfully.

Nick: So what was the breaking point that made you take the leap?

Willie: That’s a whole interview by itself. I was on a project I didn’t enjoy a lot. So I travelled. I was on a plane twice a week most of the time. I was on project inputs and while most of the people were phenomenal some of the work was interesting for the most part I wasnt engage. I wasnt fulfilled and it just reached a breaking point. I had to give a presentation on something that I didn’t know very well and the people who were on the receiving end of the presentation didn’t know what I didn’t know so it wasnt that bad for them maybe but it was just an awful experience for me because I didn’t bring any kind of pride of my work to the table and it was just a coming together or my frustrations, my apathy and just my performance. I was really disappointed with myself. For the first time in my life I had two panic attacks that weekend and at Sunday when I was packing to get on the plane again. I couldn’t catch my breath. I was just; it was a panic attack, anxiety part whatever you want to call it. I could my mentor. I called my boss. I called my folks and I was like you know ma I can’t do this anymore. so they got me agreed to go into work the next day because my flight was already booked of course but after that as it happened I was to attend the lift off retreat next weekend with Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey in Arizona and that was actually the last week I worked. So I ended up riding out my vacation time and just hustling. So I build my business to the point where I could set sail and that’s what I did.

Nick: I remember right when all that stuff was happening you were really involved in the wordpress community. Did all that take place about the same time?

Willie: It’s funny how, things were just going like this. I got involved with the wordpress community of course the thesis theme and I basically built my business around there. No advertising, no spamming, no nothing. Clients have come tried to take care of people and referrals keep coming my way and miraculously I’ve maintained for nine months since then. So it’s been quite a journey. I’ve been very fortunate.

Nick: That’s awesome. How did you, so your niche is pretty much speed, data backup and the like. How did you get into that?

Willie: That has emerged as a result of my work and some other people that I’ve worked with. I’ve built this skillset as a result of some of the work that I’ve done and it started with just tweaking html templates and it grew to wordpress and I started understanding how wordpress can be bent to my will and I meet the needs of my clients for it. along the way I started building servers and understanding the important of speed and the next thing you know it I’ve built a comprehensive skillset around a behind the scenes aspects of running a website that a lot of people don’t give a lot of thought to and with a lot of the announcement that a search engines like Google, so Google was the main leader for this in basically saying speed is important and the reason they did that and the reason why they pay attention is because its now ranking factor so all things being equal the faster site is going to rank higher than a slower site and that really gets people’s attention so a lot of companies have put a lot of research, a lot of effort, a lot of tools into making websites faster and I’m just able to do that for clients and its fun.

Nick: I’m going to have a few questions for you a little bit later in the interview about how, like some practical tips that you can give people on that. So created your own niche, is what you did.

Willie: That’s right. It has evolved and I followed that path.

Nick: Since I would consider you one of the leaders in you r industry respectively the subset. We find out how you got established, how does someone stand out from there?

Willie: Doing good work, sharing as much information as possible and empowering people to do the work that you know how to do without you. So one of my strong business philosophies is empower people to do what you do instead of hoarding information. I think it’s a mindset of insecurity when you keep all of your information to yourself without sharing with people. So what I try to do regardless of the client, regardless of their technical level of experience I always make my information available. this is what I’m doing or I’ll walk you through how to do this without me or I’ll basically try to empower them to do something in my absence because not only does it help me master my craft by teaching it, it gives people the confidence in referring other people to you because you’re not like a black box service. So being very generous with information is that’s the biggest thing with me.

Nick: That’s a very admirable, I come from the affiliate world and it’s the complete opposite. It’s a black box of information. As you know it, I mentored you a little bit. We just talked.

Willie: Call it like it is. You did mentor me absolutely.

Nick: We talked about some of the affiliate things and you’ve seen some growth in it.

Willie: Absolutely. It’s the kind of thing whether you pay attention to it or you dont. You always see people with affiliate programs but if your eyes aren’t open to the world you don’t understand the possibilities in terms of income generating potential frankly so. I started incorporating it into my work. So if I’m recommending a product for clients in the first place why not have an affiliate relationship with the vendor and send them to my link. there are shady ways to do it like including your affiliate link in an email and say sign up for this but I don’t that’s shady but that’s not the way I’d like to it. I think you should make it clear that you’re providing somebody with an affiliate link if that’s how you’re marketing it and making it clear what they’re doing. In some cases if somebody signs up under you then you get affiliate commission on top of that. So I think everybody can win when you do it the right way.

Nick: Right I totally agree. So we're going to move into like a broad question. In your eyes what makes someone successful in life in general?

Willie: It’s a very personal definition. I’m thinking it’s a touch question to assign an answer to0 broadly because it’s so personal. it’s really too objective in that some people can assign or determine their success by a certain net worth or a certain number of assets but I think in terms of quality of life and I guess the biggest distinction for me is understanding that you need to appreciate the journey instead of the destination because when we idolize a destination on our mind we don’t understand or we don’t appreciate the importance of the journey and just stopping to breathe and be thankful for what I’ve got along the way even where I haven’t reached the point where I’m not or where I’d like to be. It was a critical change. I actually started doing that right before I applied to the opportunity with Seth Godin. so it’s really interesting to see how things will really take off when I stopped worrying about reaching a certain point and really being thankful for the steps cause just being able to quit my job and wake up at noon if I wanted to and stay up until wee hours cause that’s my natural bio rhythm. That’s a blessing. That’s something I appreciate a lot so I’m being thankful for the little things like that had a profound impact on my outlook.

Nick: I think that a good point you mentioned is success is very personal. It’s determined solely for yourself and that’s something that most people miss and living into to other peoples goals and other people's dreams. That’s an easy pitfall to jump into. So how did you get onto that path?

Willie: It’s easy to see the wrong way of doing things when you’re in an environment like the corporate world. I realized very quickly that I did not want to climb the corporate ladder but I figured as everybody lies to themselves I’ll just get a little experience and then I’ll get out. of course three years later I’m like oh my gosh I’m still here but I saw people further on in their career who’d been there 18, 20 years, who have give 18 years of their lives, two marriages and in return they got a BMW and a six figure salary. To me there are much easier paths to six figure salaries and BMWs without giving your life to a company. I use to see email sent by the higher ups at all hours of the morning of course they might be in other time zones or on other sides of the world but most of the time it’s the fact that their job owns them and that’s just not something I was willing to give up. I had a younger sister and I at one point she was interested in medicine and I didn’t lecture her on what she wanted to do at the time but the point is I wanted to set an example for what was possible and I always had a strong belief in it but I knew that if I wasnt living it I couldn’t provide an example to my friends and my family about what could happen.

My father worked off the farm when he was 18, joined the military, built a career, married my mother later. so on a very small level he’s taking large steps based on in a relative sense where he started and he made a very big leap and by that same token I’m trying to make a leap based on the opportunities offered I have been provided and makes some massive moves and the key is not to define myself by current expectations. So I don’t feel like I need to get graduate degrees. I don’t feel like I need to reach a certain level of income in the corporate sphere. Living boldly on my all terms, that is powerful if you know how to walk in that authority. So that’s kind of my perspective on it.

Nick: That’s very awesome. That’s bold in the sense alone that you’re very willing to shun, not shun but what’s socially accepted isn’t the path that you’re taking and that alone is bold.

Willie: The quickest way to unfulfillment is trying to align yourself with other people’s standards for living, absolutely.

Nick: I couldn’t agree more. So let’s talk a little bit about mentors. You’ve had your share of mentors. I’ve had my share of mentors. Let’s hear about some of yours.

Willie: I’ve been fortunate I’ve had a ton of mentors over the years and in different areas that helped me with different things. Some of them didn’t even know they were mentors. My most visible mentor right now Pam Slim from escapefromcubiclenation.com. Pam has been absolutely the most instrumental person in my corporate exit and helping me ramp things up and just maintain a proper perspective on progress. kind of leading this next generation of people like us who are not satisfied with the dream of climbing the corporate ladder, following the rules that people normally follow and just following a templated lifestyle, just rejecting that completely and walking in some very, I won’t say it’s easy but it’s very simple. there are a series of steps, very predictable actions that you can take to build a lifestyle that you want and she’s been so incredibly instrumental in just mentoring me, providing me with support and making some really key introductions for me. So Pam is my number one flag waver. I love Pam to death.

Another one behind the scenes, I don’t know if a lot of people in our world know him but his name is (16:18). He’s a cloud developer consultant out of Tel Aviv. He’s actually in my big project. I don’t know how much I can talk about it but he’s an agent on the project right now and he’s been an incredible mentor to me. He’s a solo consultant. He does his own thing but he runs a very, very sharp operation and I actually got to meet him, funny story I met him on twitter. I tweeted something about integrating Amazon S3 and cloud front with wordpress and he saw it and he had that save search and he was like I’d love to see something like that and we started following each other and just started talking. I ended up doing a couple of sites for him. We did a little business and he had a layover in Atlanta a few months ago. So he flew from Israel, had a layover in Atlanta before he went to California so were actually able to meet. He was able to crash at my house for a little while as well. It’s just amazing the way that our world is right now because were connecting with people literally from all over the globe. You and I both have friends and clients all over the world. So it’s just amazing to see how things have come.

Nick: I think we actually met via twitter, via the thesis WP thread and you’re super active in that. So I think twitter is more and more from traffic, people are looking at it too much from traffic. In my eyes I think twitter is more about the relationships. You get access to people you wouldn’t otherwise have physical contact with.

Willie: All barriers are removed absolutely.

Nick: I think that is a huge growth potential for people watching that if there’s someone that you think you can learn from or someone that you enjoy following let them know that and connect with them because that is huge. That’s something that you did early on and Willie you’re the man of introductions, pardon my phone call. Its keeps on ringing. You’re the man of introductions like I love, I admire your ability to see an opportunity for someone else and connect them with other source. Most people say if there’s any way I can help you let me know and I’m guilty of that but you actually find ways to help people and I really admire that a lot.

Willie: I benefitted from it so much. It just makes logical sense to me. It’s one of the ways I connect the dots in my head and it comes back around. I guess I end up benefitting a lot more than people do when I introduce them to whatever it is. I just think it’s the right way to do. I figure if we don’t help each other none of us are going to make it.

Nick: I totally agree and that mentality is something that is up and coming I think a lot and twitter is a huge, social media in general is a huge growth factor for that mentality because for a long time I’ve found that people that want to hoard success have a harder time attaining it. I’d rather all my friends be successful along with me and that’s an awesome mentality.

Willie: I think Chris Rogan illustrates that really well because I’ve seen nobody else gives so much and ends up receiving so much. I’m not even talking about the receiving part back but he’s success is very evident. I sent him a shoutout recently saying that I celebrate his success because I met him in person and he’s just an incredible person with his engagement, his clarity of thought and he has a ridiculously awesome memory. I can’t stress that enough. I don’t know if you interacted with me. I don’t know if a lot of people interacted with him in person. His ability to recall names and events is uncanny. It’s disarming.

Nick: He’s insanely humble.

Willie: He really is. Just a very, very cool dude. Interaction without the fluff even though he’s very much a social media darling. He’s just Chris and I love that about him. I love that he gives so much to everyone all the time. So I’m really, I just celebrate his success like I said.

Nick: I agree. He’s an awesome guy. Hopefully someday we’ll get him here on becoming bold.

Willie: When are you going to do it?

Nick: Hopefully soon. So let’s talk a little bit about your niche. A lot of people that are watching this maybe have some web experience or aspiring. Let’s talk about some basic tips and then a couple of advance tips.

Willie: For underwater umbrella I have several hats I can put on.

Nick: Whatever comes first? What’s the biggest thing that you think beginners must know right now.

Willie: I guess if you’re building websites, building a web presence is building any kind of serious operation I would recommend wordpress hands down because there’s such a strong community behind it because if you’re looking to do something chances are somebody’s already done it and chances are there are skin artists suited for it. next recommendation would be to find a theme or theme framework that you can start building some expertise around because that’s really where the master comes in. you can hack together a template but there are a lot of considerations that need to be made like the thesis thing for example, topography, search engine optimization, readability, design control for your clients less technical. You don’t want to pull out all these things every single time so there are some tools that you can invest in to make your operation a lot better and my developer’s license has paid for itself many, many times over. So pick a great tool, build a business around that. It’s my best advice.

Nick: I watched your interview with Pam slim on data backup and data security. She lost her stuff. I watched that and I was like wait hold on, I don’t even back up. So I was even backing up some of my websites.

Willie: Websites are important.

Nick: Yeah even some of our affiliate sites weren’t backed up. So I was like hey hold on, something is wrong. The tool you mentioned in that interview if I remember right was WPDB backup.

Willie: That’s right. There’s WPDB backup. There’s WPDB manager. there's several simple backups that will long, story short take the database and email it to you on a schedule or back them up to your server in a basic form that’s really a quick and dirty way to backing up your site. the distinction I made there that doesn’t back up all of your images and your uploads, those need to be grabbed from your FTP or more comprehensive backup solution but at the very least definitely have a regularly scheduled backup of your database if nothing else cause I mean once it’s gone. It’s gone and it’s awful.

Nick: Even my dad who’s a programmer he’s got a ton of php, java, pearl experience, what not. When he takes a look at wordpress he’s looking for the files to edit on the server and I’m like dad it’s all database driven. You know that and I think people that are first getting started miss that, that its database driven and you need to be grabbing that database because that’s where the content is at.

Willie: It’s hard for some people particularly who don’t come from a technical background to grasp the fact that there’s something else that you can’t touch that’s powering the website. So it’s important for people like us to spread the word about backups even they don’t understand it. Do it anyway because it’s critical. When it’s gone you’ll understand it.

Nick: Totally. Like one of my earlier affiliate sites got hacked. It’s the first site I ever put up and it made about a $100 a month. It was my first step in the dark and it was successful kind of perfect storm but long story short it got hacked because I wasnt updating wordpress and I didn’t have a backup of it. so that caused a huge headache and learning experience for me early on that I need to stay on top of that and I need to backup my databases because I got a similar Viagra hack or pharmaceutical hack on one of my sites that was, the site never ranked the same ever since. So it’s kind of unfortunate but as always you can move on to you see other opportunities you move on.

Willie: So at higher level backups and security are incredibly important. There are plugins to take care of the services to look at like security SUCURI.net, volpress automatic is the company of the wordpress of course. They have a service called volpress that you can I guess apply for subscription to cause its currently in beta, invite only. the $50 a month I pay for that and I have like three levels of back up and security on my sites even though my site is not doing much in terms of traffic or affiliate links or anything, it’s my home on the web. It’s my face. It’s what people see when they greet me. So if I don’t have my stuff to show so the proof is not in the pudding. It’s worth the investment for sure.

Nick: It’s like hacker websites get hacked the most.

Willie: Right. You’re asking for trouble. It’s worth the investment for sure.

Nick: So advance tips. We just covered the basics. What would you say to someone like me that may have some experience but I might be missing something.

Willie: The biggest thing that you can do in terms of backups and security, there’s an overlap there. it depends on your perspective but I use a plugin called automatic wordpress backup which it can take based on your settings full site backup of your site every single day plus any arbitrary ones and it backs it up to Amazon s3 which is a, I explain it to people as a hard drive in the cloud. It’s an unlimited storage in the cloud and I back up a dozen or so sites to s3 everyday and my bill is what $20 something dollars. Incredibly good value, mindless set it and forget it backup. So I’ve had issues when I was doing some cleanup. I was a little careless. I wiped out and entire client site without realizing it. Got an email from them saying is your site down. Maybe were hacked or something. I was like let me look at it and I can restore it from a backup in moments, literally in a few moments. It will really save your butt.

Nick: I totally agree. So basically you’re on a track that is unbelievably awesome. Your trajectory is off the charts in my eyes. What can we expect from you in the next six months from the Seth Godin thing, your personal life, what’s going on in your world?

Willie: I’m going to be experimenting a lot. I haven’t figured out what I’m going to do when I grow up but this opportunity with Seth Godin and the domino project is for six months so that will be definitely, you will expect updates over that for the next six months. I’m going to be trying out different things. I’ve got a lot of ideas I wanted to move on websites and personal projects and my goal, I’ve actually been planning this out in basecamp to make sure I’m staying on track with my own milestones but I’m going to be trying something every month. It might fail. It might fail in public and that’s fine but I know I need to get it in habit of launching frequently. So I have no idea what you can expect. One of the biggest thing that is ready to launch but I’m just getting the model right is a website performance consulting business, just a whole lot of services from there. I have to be careful not to get mired in the wrong type of work and attracting the wrong type of client because my personal philosophy is I’d rather spoil 50 clients and charge an arm and leg for them or charge an arm and leg for my service than for 5000 people and not have a life. I’d rather be poor and happy.

So being very careful to have the right partners in that and the right business model and one of my partners is actually getting married in Zimbabwe so Anthony when you see this welcome and congratulations. So I have no idea what’s coming so stay tuned and well all find out.

Nick: That’s awesome. So promo plug time. Where can people find you, let’s go down that route.

Willie: Just williejackson.com, that’s my often, not really, that’s my updated blog from time to time I post updates on there. Actually I probably will do a lot more writing beginning in the New Year. I do a lot of writing. that’s not on the blog but I enjoy frequently publishing and if I’m going to be around the master himself who publishes daily there’s no reason why I can’t step my game up and start building some better publishing habits so williejackson.com definitely and williejackson is my handle on twitter. W-I-L-L-I-E, if you spell my name with a Y I will come and stab you. Williejackson on twitter and willejackson.com.

Nick: You’ve just recently dropped the L out of your twitter handle.

Willie: I did. We shouldn't even mention that because people get confused but I had some uniformity right. it used to be my user name I think on some obscure network I couldn’t do my name so I put the middle initial in there and then I just grabbed that across different ones but then with the announcement of the domino project people started following in and mistweeting me as I say like I’ve got to change it so I switched over and fortunately I had both handles so the transition was pretty seamless but yeah williejackson, no L.

Nick: Awesome. So we're wrapping up with one thing that I always wrap up it’s the hardest question ever. What should I asked you that I didn’t?

Willie: What are three things that you can do to speed up your site without hiring me for my ridiculously expensive services? Number one. Reduce the number of HTTP requests. So things like calls to style sheets, plugins, all those things require your website to ask the server for something. If you use a plugin, if you can remove it that would be best but there are plugins and this is like the hub of my performance vision it’s called the W3 total cache plugins by Frederick Townes. It’s an incredible plugin. I would pay money for it. Don’t tell Frederick that. I’d pay a lot of money for that plugin and get to know that plugin. That would be my top recommendation. If you can learn to use that you can do what I do and more. It really changes everything in terms of website performance regardless of skillsets.

Nick: So there’s two more.

Willie: So reduce the number of HTTP requests, W3 total cache plugin and you can implement these with that suggestion. The next one is do some image optimization. So make sure you’re not uploading images like directly off of your digital camera. Crop them. Use something like smush.it.com or image optim if you use a Mac to compress your images and make sure that they are the right sizes. So don’t upload a huge image and scale it via html. Make sure it’s uploaded in the proper size and the other thing that I see a lot of performance increase from is invest in a content delivery network. Something like Mac cdn or level3 through vps.net which I could throw some audio affiliate links in here but I can’t do that just yet. Incredible performance potential. cdn is nothing more than a network of computers around the world that replicate your static content and serve it from wherever its closes to your visitors. so you might not notice the speed increase, you will but you might not notice a dramatic speed increase but it’s very, very important particularly if you have content being served to the visitors all over the world. So dramatic performance increase can be seen if you do those three things.

Nick: Very cool man. I’m so excited to see that 2011 holds for you. Shining star in my eyes. A huge, huge trajectory.

Willie: Thanks for having me man.

Nick: Thanks for sitting down and well be following you closely.

Willie: You got it. Alright signing off.

Nick: Alright.