I wrote the first Bolt Update two months ago and I love being able to build a business where I am free to be open with the community I am trying to serve. So here a Bolt Themes update.

Personal:

I am still learning to not set unrealistic deadlines when it comes to creating products for many people who will use our tools on many different websites with different configurations on their servers to the next guy, which can result in things not working 100% if not done properly.

I replaced my laptop with an HP 15 last month, it a lot quicker than the machine that I was lent to use while I tried to replace my computer but, to be honest, I still miss my MacBook Pro, I will eventually buy another MacBook Pro just not right now as our exchange rate was not stable which the prices of Apple Computers up quite a bit.

What we’ve done in the last few months:

We have been making a lot of decisions in the last 2 months current things that need to happen.

Tutorials = more sales:

During February, I created quite a few tutorial and February ended up being my best month since I launched this business, so the increase in tutorials, lead to an increase in traffic which lead to an increase in sales. I found this to be an interesting formula to growing sales, in march I didn’t really write anything and last month my sales dropped back down to what they’ve been averaging since the first month.

Email provider changed:

We used to use ManDrill to deliver our emails to our customers and we used to use MailChimp to send our newsletter out, sadly MailChimp merged mandrill into an addon for MailChimp which cost way more than it used. I have moved all our email tools over to Sendinblue which seems to be a better tool in my opinion. you can see our post about Sendinblue here.

What I want to do with Bolt Themes:

Products:

We are working on, way to many things at the moment but a big part of that is I’ve realised that to do this full time I need to grow the revenue quite drastically and the best way to do this is to grow our product catalog.

Current Products:

I feel that really time to start planning these updates for both Section Style Manager and Divi Commerce (Divi Commerce already has some cool stuff planned). if you have any style suggestions for Section Style Manage I am open to suggestion, just leave a comment.

New Product:

There are quite a few new products that are going to be released by us in the next few months, some that I am really excited about releasing.

Shortly after I posted the first Bolt Update I had to kill off one of the plugins that had spent half a year working on because that evening Elegant Themes released a sneak peek at Divi 2.7 and one of the main new features was what I working on with the exact same name but it fine they did a better job than what I had done.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently going through Extra Themes source code, I bet you can guess why I’ve been doing this. It quite interesting look at how Elegant Themes did the category builder I see other oppurtunutity for this function (Maybe in Divi Commerce :p)

Trying to grow a child theme catalog which is also quite time-consuming but is a must for this business to grow especially because our theme page get a lot more visit than any other page, which tells me the community is looking more for child themes than plugins.

Content:

In the last few months I mainly only created tutorials for Divi but it I find myself wanting to create a greater community around Bolt Themes blog, So I am thinking of writing more WordPress related post, Reviews, Interview with people in the Divi & WordPress community, Tutorial and series on how to build something in specific for example quite often people in the Divi group have asked for examples of job portals built with Divi.

So I have an idea of what I am wanting to do with the Bolt Themes blog, I am definitely open to guest post, I really want to grow the Bolt Themes community.

Adoption:

I really am looking for ways to grow the Elegant Theme, Divi &, of course, the Bolt Themes community through what we are involved in here at Bolt Themes.

The way I want to grow these communities is by bringing the user of abandoned plugins on the WordPress repo over to the Bolt Themes community, where we consistently promoting Elegant Themes products.

I am searching the WordPress plugin directory for plugins that I feel would fit in with what I am trying to do at Bolt Themes which have not been updated in 2 years and then contacting the owner of those plugins to see if we can take them over and create updated version which is compatible with the latest version of Divi.

There you have it we are working hard on growing a community and this business, which is a massive task for just one person to do on his own, as this business grows I will move away from being just one man behind Bolt Themes.