WordPress is an amazing piece of open source software with a huge community behind it. As with that comes opportunity to use it to make money (in the right way).

For the past 6+ years, I’ve been using WordPress in a number of ways to make money personally and build my personal brand and an audience. Of course, the last four years we’ve been building an entire company based on it — with over 180+ professional themes and plugins and over 350+ hours of on-demand WordPress web design training.

I recently gave a talk to a local group on this subject and wanted to share it also for the benefit of our community via a free webinar on Wednesday, May 23 at noon central standard time.

In this webinar, I will talk about the four categories of making money with WordPress and offer 5 tips for making money with it from my experience working in the community as well as starting iThemes.

As part of my StartupSofa blog where I try to offer resources to budding entrepreneurs, I’ve just released a survey to see where you are in the entrepreneurial adventure.

If you’re looking to start a business, or already doing one part-time (or heck even full-time), please take 30 seconds to fill this out survey so I can better serve you.

The StartupSofa Entrepreneurial Survey

Websites are the best, most affordable, yet underused marketing tool for small businesses.

But sadly few businesses understand how to utilize these powerful, measurable marketing vehicles for their businesses.

At Made by Wheat, our professional web design services company, we’re doing a special educational workshop on Feb. 23 titled “7 Keys to Successful Business Websites.”

In this free webinar you’ll learn how to:

Signup for this special workshop led by myself and Ty Carlson of Made by Wheat here:

7 Keys to Successful Business Websites
Thursday, Feb. 23 at Noon Central Standard Time
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/227459018

The good news is … SOPA and PIPA have been delayed by the House and Senate.

The bad news is … they will come back with brand new clothes, a shiny new name, and more teeth soon. In fact, they could come back with a venegeance because of the forces behind them.

Millions of people rallied together to tell those who represent us that we will fight to protect our freedom on the Web — the greatest communications tool ever invented.

These are historic times. People coming together to present a unified voice. I am inspired. I think we all are.

The protests were billed as the largest online protests in history with sites blacking out. WOW!

I know this for a fact though: People will come together only when something seeks to destroy what they hold dear.

SOPA and PIPA did that for those of us who enjoy, respect and cherish our web freedom. It rallied us all together.

But the fight is not over.

YOU, like us, must be ready to let your voice be heard …. and the power of your vote known to those who represent us. The message must be clear:

Seek to take away our web freedoms by legislating crappy bills, and we’re going to put you on the unemployment line.

Looking at these numbers … I think some people in Washington started to take notice.

We can and we will vote them straight out of office. So I hope the lobbyists helping to create these flawed bills have a job open for them when that happens.

So this week is an epic week, a historic week … one we cannot forget. They will simply wait for our fervor to die down, and sneak something sleazy in again.

We must be ready for the next wave.

In the meantime, here’s a quick thought for the industries who have sought to buy (I mean “lobby”) the votes to get this legislation created and passed:

Instead of protecting your once cash cow, now withering business models and spending millions of dollars to legislate it back to relevance … HOW ABOUT REINVENTING IT INSTEAD?!

Make [whatever you produce] BETTER for the world. Not just your pocketbook.

Think about value instead of how fat your vault is.

For examples, please look to iTunes for the music industry. Netflix for the video rental industry. And Google for the entire advertising industry.

If you don’t … we’ll continue to vote you out of business with our pocketbooks … and as you recently saw, the people who represent you.

I’m pleased to announce our new web design services division named Creative Services by iThemes and led by our newest team member Ty Carlson.

I began my entrepreneurial journey first as a freelance web designer in WordPress before I started iThemes full-time in January 2008 (and still get random requests for custom work which I don’t do anymore).

As such we’ve endeavored to build tools and offer training to help others become web designers and build high-quality sites for their clients.

I continue to be amazed at the opportunities for good, quality web designers all over the world, but none of us should be amazed at it. (Google with over 30,000 people and almost $30 billion in revenue didn’t even exist 15 years ago!)

Dependable and able designers and developers are hot commodities right now. There is more work than able and/or available people to do it!

Through our Creative Services division, we want to serve a different and unique kind of client who doesn’t fit our iThemes “ideal” customer, but wants more custom, hands-on consulting and design services.

Often I say that iThemes is like the Home Depot of web design. You come to our store, pick out the tools and templates you want to use and you do-it-yourself. We offer a great support forum backed by knowledgable and helpful moderators, but ultimately, you build your sites yourself.

Made by Wheat will serve customers who want to pay someone else to just do it for them.

So with this introduction, I wanted to offer some details about Made by Wheat and what you can expect.

WHAT IS CREATIVE SERVICES BY ITHEMES EXACTLY?

It is a team (or company within a company) we started to offer custom, high-quality web design services using and showcasing all of our products — from iThemes Builder to BackupBuddy and everything in between.

It is led by Ty Carlson, a veteran web designer / developer from Oklahoma City.

This is our custom services division. We will work hard to keep the brands separate, except for showing off work done through it that illustrate what you can do with our products. Made by Wheat will market and find its own clients.

WHY ARE WE DOING IT?

We decided to push forward with this for a number of reasons, including:

1. To give our customers what they have been asking for – which is custom services for our products, primarily, iThemes Builder. We’ve long had a services page on iThemes and have gotten an increasingly large volume of requests, but to date have been referring to other outlets. We will continue to refer most of those services out to others, but this will give us an outlet for custom sites. And we’ve actually done client services before. Almost two years ago, we were doing all client work through WebDesign.com before we unveiled our training membership. We ultimately shut that down as it was bad timing on our part.

2. To be a showcase for our products – We want to show what’s possible with our products through our services division, in particular, iThemes Builder. You can see Ty’s work on my personal site here at CoryMiller.com, built with iThemes Builder.

3. To be a shining example of how a custom web design shop can be run – I anticipate us using the things we’re learning, almost every day, with this team through our WebDesign.com training division and other venues. As such, it will serve to be an actual R&D lab. My hope is we can share tips, tricks, ideas, trends and more to our community.

4. To give input to our dev teams on how to make our products better – having a custom shop in our company allows our dev teams from iThemes and PluginBuddy to hear from and see how the Made by Wheat team is using it, what needs to be improved, and what gaps we have in our product offering.

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There’s a little bit about Creative Services by iThemes.