Interview with Davinder Singh Kainth of The WordPress Weekly

The WordPress Weekly is a news publication that… has been in the news quite a bit recently as Davinder promotes the first edition of The WP Awards. If you haven’t voted yet make sure you before the 30 November deadline.

The WordPress Weekly is relatively new too. The archive counts 71 editions making it over one-year old. The first edition was reached subscribers in July last year and  Davinder has done a great job producing a quality newsletter week in week out. Which explains why The WordPress Weekly has been growing so fast.

Interview

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started with WordPress

During my college days (2000 – 2005), I was lucky enough to have a computer at home (thanks to my parents). I started writing about various software tips on a Blogger (Blogspot) blog. It blew up in no time, and as such, there wasn’t much search competition in those days – anything you wrote came on Google’s front page in no time!

Around the same time, WordPress made a debut, and I moved from Blogger to WordPress. That’s how my WordPress journey started and still going strong!

2. You’ve been a Digital Consultant for over 14 years. What is your focus and what kind of projects do you work on?

If I look back at my career, the type of work has changed or evolved every two years. I am sure if I did the same very thing – I would have burnt out from the internet and sitting in some jungle! I followed the path trekked by most freelancers, starting off trying to make sense of the whole business on the internet, ferociously finding clients, and then guessing on price points.

I started off doing brochure websites and then expanded into membership and custom LMS websites. In recent years, I have spent more time coaching and consulting clients to get refined visibility through better content structuring, social media broadcasting, and much-loved (for me) email marketing that works.

3. Introduce The WordPress Weekly: what is it and who’s your target audience

Besides doing the usual work to get the base income going – spending time on things, you love to do (aka side projects) is very important. With this firm belief, along with my love for WordPress and my email marketing experiments – TheWPWeekly was born. It is for people like me, be it starters or experts at building web stuff using WordPress. Honestly, I have been blown away by the response to the “TheWPWeekly” project.

Also, connections made with fellow WordPress users via this project have been blissful and productive.

4. How did you build it? What’s your WordPress stack and what platform are you using for sending out emails?

I kept the tools stack for the “TheWPWeekly” very simple and minimal.

It uses Astra Theme with page layouts created with core Gutenberg blocks made fancy with the manual CSS code.

I use MailerLite to handle email marketing and ConvertBox to trigger popups at the right places to catch the visitor attention.

5. Have you tried any newsletter plugins such as Groundhogg and Mailpoet? What are your thoughts about managing newsletters from within WordPress?

Yes, I have used Groundhogg, Mailpoet, and even FluentCRM for email marketing hosted on WordPress. Since I wanted to keep things simple and was already using Mailerlite for my other projects – I just went with the same tools stack to save time!

6. What does your publication workflow look like and what tools do you use to manage it?

I am very boring when it comes to online tools glitz. I have my Gmail always open – so, if I can do something specific using the existing Gmail workflow – I do that instead of getting into a new tool. All the links for the newsletter content are managed in the Gmail inbox along with Google Docs. I write the newsletter post directly on the website in the block editor. Once it’s finalized, I copy the post content into the MailerLite editor (5 mins job, all the formatting, and links magically appear).