The Coding Thrill

I’m falling into a trance right now! No… I’m not intoxicated or pumped with drugs. Haha! What I mean is the so-called flow state. That really exists. And I always get that when I dive deep into the code. You feel like you’re in the matrix.

What drives me at the moment is to finally “work” on SNIP again and on other functions than just the setup wizard. Some time you just need something different, even if it’s still to work on the same plugin.

Oh well… and I’m happy that I finally made the decision not to leave CodeCanyon. At least for now. I’m still not 100% satisfied (I’ll tell you a little story about that in a moment), but the numbers speak for themselves and there are just too many unknown parameters. Somehow a stone falls from my heart and I am clearly more relaxed.

Conclusion of my “Blogging Challenge

As always: articles like this come about because I read the book Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson. He wrote in the book that you should blog every single day for a year. As I mentioned before, I don’t have the time to do that, but at least I manage to publish two blogposts every week. That makes me a bit proud. In the end, it’s also very easy for me. I have always enjoyed writing. Now I have more than 20 articles in the category “Plugin journey“. Brilliant!

Brilliant especially because there seem to be people who are really interested in what I’m doing here. Me, the one-man WordPress plugin show, so to speak. 😆

Yesterday, for example, I got a very long and detailed email from Mario, a master goldsmith from Germany. Thanks again for the nice email with an insight into the daily work with WordPress respectively SNIP! He gave me a few tips on how I could make SNIP even better. It is super important to me to be as close as possible to my customers.

After all, I had already received a very cool and detailed email from a client living in the US who gave me some good marketing tips. He was ultimately very averse to CodeCanyon, which is why I was considering leaving. But well… this topic I have explained long and wide.

Frustration with CodeCanyon

Nevertheless I would like to talk about CodeCanyon again. This is to illustrate once again how frustrated I sometimes get with the platform.

When you edit your product settings, you can specify which software your product is compatible with. In the case of a WordPress plugin, these are other plugins or the WordPress versions themselves.

Here is the accusation: CodeCanyon never manages to keep the list of WordPress versions up to date. In the current example, WordPress 5.7 has been up since March 9. Today is March 25. After half a month, the list hasn’t been updated yet.

As you can see in the image above, there is a “Let us know” link so you can report current versions. I usually do this the day before a WordPress release because I’m always top informed through my (German) WordPress newsletter anyway and know when things happen.

Now you would think that this is just a small thing. But unfortunately this is not the first time. Potential customers are scared from buying an incompatible plugin. I realized that this is a big issue when a potential customer pointed it out to me in a comment on CodeCanyon.

So specifically, I raise the accusation that the procedure already goes in the direction of business damage. Because without up-to-date information, there are also fewer sales. You can argue how many sales that is in the end. But I’m sure that this is not irrelevant for plugins with a lot of sales.

I don’t quite understand why this is the case. CodeCanyon does have people on staff who know what they’re doing. I’ve already met some of them at WordCamps. It should be easy to update such a form, shouldn’t it?

It makes you feel a bit … how can I put this politely? … disadvantaged.

Anyway… I’m already a bit trapped inside the portal, as my last blogpost shows, but I don’t want to get upset about it any longer. In the end, it’s burned energy. All I can do is to figure out how to work around these problems.

Now, back to the headline itself:

The Flow

“The flow” does fit my name a bit, doesn’t it? Coding is simply my thing. Add to that headphones and good music and I can completely immerse myself. In fact, this also works with other todos. For example, I’m currently working with ConverKit on my first Sales Funnell according to Russel Brunson. Wow, that’s a challenge too, but it’s a cool thing. I hope to finish the job next week. I’ll probably share the results here on the blog again anyway. I’m already looking forward to the reactions.

Now back to the flow: I started this week to make SNIP compatible with Advanced Custom Fields. It’s not the top priority at the moment, because there are other todos that are more important, but I just wanted to start coding again. And what should I say? I really enjoyed it. Let’s see when I can finish the todo.

This is how it goes on

Well, now I’ve ranted a bit about CodeCanyon, got rid of what bothers me and was able to show that I’m really into coding again. Of course, all this is far away from my original goal: to double the traffic. On the other hand, I don’t think that my sales will increase dramatically if I double the number of visitors. Because currently they don’t do that either. It’s rather the other way around: They are decreasing (again)! Totally annoying.

But I won’t let myself be dissuaded. Maybe the Sales Funnell will bring a decisive turnaround.