What You’ll Learn in This Episode
Ahsan Parwez is a WordPress veteran with over a decade of experience, having worked with companies like Cloudways, Brainstorm Force, and Convesio before launching his own venture, WP Dots. In this episode, he shares how SEO has evolved since 2011, the marketing strategies behind scaling Astra Themes’ blog traffic, and why community building and founder interviews have become central to his growth playbook.
[00:00:00.20] – Speaker 1
Hi there, welcome to The Digital Jayasty Show, your go-to podcast for digital marketing insights that drive business growth and career success. I am Jayasty Anandan, your host, and this podcast is brought to you by Digital Jayasty. That’s my digital marketing consultancy helping businesses worldwide. You can check it out at digitaljayasty.com. Whether you are a B2B business looking to expand your online presence or a professional in a full-time job or freelancing, this podcast is designed to help you learn from top marketing experts. If you are watching on YouTube, subscribe to my channel and hit the bell icon for updates. If you are listening on any podcast app, follow “The Digital Jayasty Show”, and if you like the show, leave a rating. All right, let’s jump right in. It’s my pleasure to introduce today’s guest, Ahsan Parwez from Pakistan. Ahsan is a true WordPress veteran who has been immersed in the WordPress ecosystem for more than a decade. He has built an impressive career working with some of the most respected names in the WordPress hosting industry, including Cloudways, Brainstormforce, and Convesio. Ahsan runs his own agency and is deeply committed to building and nurturing the WordPress community.
[00:01:10.26] – Speaker 1
Before focusing entirely on his ventures, he balanced full-time positions while building a successful freelance career. What I find particularly fascinating about Ahsan’s journey is his transition from working with established hosting providers to launching hostwp.io. There’s something compelling about someone who has seen the industry from the inside and then decides to create their own solution. So today we have Ahsan here to share his insights and experience. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Ahsan Parwez and let’s hear from him why he started the hostwp.io.
[00:01:47.08] – Speaker 2
Hello, thank you for the introduction, very kind introduction, and it’s my pleasure to be here. As you said, I’ve been involved in the WordPress industry for quite a long time now. So from back then in 2014, I had the chance to work within the WordPress industry, and I have been very active in the WordPress hosting space in particular. So now, currently, as you said, like over the years I’ve worked with hosting brands and WordPress companies, and now I’m running my own business. So the business is called wpdots.io. And under wpdots.io, you can find multiple projects that we currently run. One of them is a hosting company as well that you mentioned, hostwp.io. So hostwp.io obviously came because I was so involved in the WordPress hosting space, and I saw so many hosting companies not investing in the right technologies. So I thought, how about I try it on my own and build my own thing? So using Lightspeed Enterprise, all the latest versions of PHP and all the technologies, all the caching services, all the security services. So we have come up with a solution that provides managed WordPress hosting using Lightspeed Enterprise servers that are completely optimised, completely secured.
[00:03:11.11] – Speaker 2
And we have launched it under the brand name of hostwp.io. And then there are other projects that I believe we are going to be talking about in this podcast.
[00:03:21.21] – Speaker 1
Yeah, sure. Amazing. Okay. So you started as a junior SEO professional in 2011 and now run multiple successful WordPress-focused businesses. So how has the SEO landscape evolved since your early days of building irrelevant backlinks?
[00:03:37.22] – Speaker 2
Yeah. So my career as an SEO started back in 2011. So those were very simple days. If I remember correctly, there were like 8 to 10 websites at a time I was doing SEO for any company that I was working under. It was an agency that was doing client work. So they used to give me 8 to 10 websites of different niches, different categories to do SEO for. So. Back in 2011, the thing that mattered most was building backlinks. Now, it doesn’t matter what kind of backlinks you were building, like, were they completely relevant or not. So a food blogging website can go on, let’s say, a mechanical website or those kinds of things. Like, you had to build backlinks. So I used to have this large inventory of websites that allowed backlinks through various means, like submitting your articles, doing directory listings, creating social media profiles. So I had always had this long list of websites, like the number ranged from 500 to 600, and the primary activity was building backlinks for my 8 to 10 websites I was doing SEO for. And back then it was very easy to rank on the first page of Google if you had so many backlinks.
[00:04:59.27] – Speaker 2
So it used to take like 2 to 3 days to rank on the first page of Google for my website. So it was pretty good, pretty easy. But over the years, SEO has evolved for the better, and there is less spam now. So you have to focus on producing quality content, make your website faster, and even make your website more accessible to various people on the web. So things have changed, things have improved, and I would say starting SEO back in 2011 and seeing it evolve over the years has improved my learning and understanding of how things have been working around. So building backlinks, it’s not the primary thing now. It’s about building a quality website with quality content that answers the queries perfectly. So things have changed.
[00:05:50.05] – Speaker 1
All right, so working with companies like Cloudways, Brainstormforce, and Convesio gave you exposure to different aspects of the WordPress ecosystem. What were the most valuable lessons you learned from each experience?
[00:06:04.04] – Speaker 2
So I’m primarily a marketing guy, but over the years, working with so many WordPress companies and having so much experience building WordPress websites myself, I count myself as being a person who has the right balance of technical knowledge plus marketing knowledge. So I’m able to combine both of these knowledge and, you know, work for these companies. So the challenges were quite different moving from Cloudways, Brainstormforce, and Convesio. So at Cloudways, I’ve worked the longest. I think it was like 8 years I worked over there, and being one of their founding members, they had zero customers. So I had to start everything from scratch over there. Traffic was non-existent, and the team was non-existent as well. So I had to do things in different stages. But over time at Cloudways, I was leading the marketing team that was responsible for Cloudways’ growth in the WordPress space. So I led a team of digital marketers, SEOs, community marketers, affiliate marketers, email marketers, technical content writers, and during my time at Cloudways, I had to perform duties under different teams as well, providing support, doing product testing, launching new features, in essence doing a role of product marketing as well.
[00:07:30.17] – Speaker 2
So most of my skills, I would say, I learned during my time at Cloudways since I was one of the founding members and did so many various things; I had to learn from business, doing QA, writing content, and everything in between. So at the time when I left, I had a team of like 22 people strong, and you know, they were pretty talented. And the last few things I had to do at Cloudways were hiring international talent from different countries, even the US, European countries, and all that. Then moving from Cloudways to Brainstorm Force. Now Brainstorm Force was, I would say, already a successful company. So the challenge over there was bringing order to chaos. Now the team over there was highly skilled, very knowledgeable. People knew about WordPress; they knew what they were doing; they had a lot of experience writing content, doing SEO. Creating video content, even the social media guys, email marketers, everyone over there was very talented. So my main role was to bring order to chaos by creating synchronised goals between these teams. Now, if you have a very talented team that is producing their own content, everyone’s doing their own thing, you won’t see very good results.
[00:08:58.12] – Speaker 2
Now, if you align them let’s say you align content writers, SEOs, video content creators, social media guys, and email marketers, and they start working together in a synchronized fashion, then you can see not only growth in traffic, sales, and business, but even you start to, you know, get new ideas and new innovative ideas that you can work around. So at Brainstorm Force, working with a highly talented, experienced team and creating OKRs – objectives, key results, goals and aligning them. Aligning them was the main thing that I had to do. And then moving on to Convesio. Now, Convesio is another hosting provider, and over there the team was very small, and I joined when there was like only one other person in the marketing team. And over there I had to build, you know, come up with new strategies because Convesio was targeted to upmarket audiences, like very critical online businesses like membership websites, LMS websites, large publication websites. Now that demands that you create a content plan or a marketing plan that is quite different like you are used to before in the companies I was working for. So over there at Conveso, I had to come up with a plan to target LMS websites, membership websites, enterprise websites.
[00:10:27.25] – Speaker 2
So if I can give you one example for an LMS website, what I did was create a content plan and keep LMS hosting as my target business keyword, as the central pillar keyword, and write everything in between that LMS or membership websites would face- issues that they would face. Those issues were probably for security and for scaling their projects. So we used to write a lot of content. So within like 2 months, we were able to rank Convesio for the LMS hosting keyword on the first page of Google. We were ranking on 1 or 2, and we were generating leads daily. So the experience was quite different – moving from Cloudways, Brainstormforce, and Convesio.
[00:11:16.11] – Speaker 1
Okay. So when you were working with Brainstormforce, you increased Astra Themes blog traffic from like 1,800 to 5,000 daily visitors in just 6 months. Could you walk us through your strategy and what specific actions drove this growth?
[00:11:31.21] – Speaker 2
Yes. As I said, at Brainstormforce, there was a talented team. The product was highly successful. WP Astra is obviously the most used theme till now in the WordPress ecosystem. But when I joined them, I was surprised to see their blog traffic on wpastro.com. The blog traffic was minimal compared to what I thought they would have. So upon analysing, I saw they had less than 2,000 per day on their blog. And then I thought we could focus on increasing the traffic because there were so many keywords we weren’t ranking for. And there were so many impressions on the blog. So I came up with a content plan along with my SEO team over there. So we created like 300-400 topics, identified them with the seed keyword being WordPress theme, because Astra is a WordPress theme. It made sense that we rank for all the WordPress theme keywords. So we came up with around 300 topics. And we started writing complete guides on how to build a real estate website, how to build a portfolio website, how to build an e-commerce website. Now within these articles, we were using, obviously, WP Astra, the starter templates that they had, and all the other products, add-ons that they were selling.
[00:12:58.20] – Speaker 2
So it was a complete strategy of creating content that promoted their own products and interlinked with their other products on the website. So not only on WP Astra were we publishing content, but we were publishing on other websites that they had, like Ultimate Addons for Elementor, the other domains that they had. So we were publishing around 10 articles per week. And within 6 months, the traffic jumped from 1,800 to 2,000 per day to 5,000 per day. Now this traffic that we were able to increase not only increased the traffic, I would say, but also started generating relevant businesses and customers for them for all of their products. And from then onwards, it became really easy to, you know, write any article related to building their website. And, you know, topics never end. Why? If you cover one topic, then there’s another topic that you can identify and write about. So eventually we started writing guides about using Elementor page builder and using Gutenberg to build the website. So there were like always 2 versions of articles.
[00:14:12.27] – Speaker 1
All right, awesome. Now your WP Founders Initiative has published like 150 interviews, so how have these conversations contributed to your business growth, and what unexpected benefits have you discovered from those interviews?
[00:14:31.27] – Speaker 2
So at WP Dots, one of our projects is WP Founders. It’s very low maintenance project that we run, and we publish around 2 to 4 articles, 2 to 4 interviews per month of founders from around the globe. So it’s only specific to, you know, getting stories from founders of WordPress companies. Now these WordPress companies can be plugins, themes, service companies, hosting companies, and all that. And the main idea behind WP Founders is to motivate the next generation of people by, you know, publishing the stories of already successful WordPress founders. Now we have around like 150 interviews published on WP Founders, and I would say this domain is a centrepiece of what WP Dots stands for. Since we are so involved in the WordPress space, we need to stay in touch with all these founders. Now, having all these interviews published, it’s really easy to stay in direct contact with founders of the companies, not only the teams and employees, but directly with founders. So it becomes really easy for us to collaborate with them. Let’s say we want to ask them about listing their products on wpdiscounts.io, or would they be interested in publishing some content about hostwp.io?
[00:16:00.22] – Speaker 2
Would they be interested in checking out our services at checkwp.io? So it becomes very interconnected with everything that we do. Whether it be hosting, whether it be wpdiscounts.io, whether it be our own services that we want to do. So WP Founders allows us to stay in touch with the founders of other WordPress companies and then collaborate with them.
[00:16:25.12] – Speaker 1
So you mentioned the US market being more willing to pay than other regions. So what cultural or business differences have you observed that influence pricing strategies across different markets? Since you have been running an agency, you know how different markets work. So maybe you can share your experience of the US market.
[00:16:49.20] – Speaker 2
Yeah, good question. So since I primarily focused on, you know, producing content or marketing in the English language, English being my primary marketing language, I would say, and the companies that I have worked for, obviously work mostly in the English language, but I have worked a little bit with multilingual websites. So what I have analysed over the years is that English is used in other countries as well apart from the US. Then there are a lot of Asian countries that use English as their primary language online. Now the traffic behaviour is quite different between, let’s say, North American and Asian countries. So I’ve seen people in the US searching for solutions online, and if they find a solution, even if the solution is within an article or on your landing page, they are much more willing to make the purchase and try out the product or service firsthand as compared to audiences in Asia. Now you get a lot of traffic from Asian countries as well. And you get constant traffic, but you don’t see as many sales or conversions happening compared to traffic from the US. Now, the thing is that people from Asia tend to do more research online.
[00:18:14.17] – Speaker 2
They would watch YouTube videos. They would go on other social media platforms. They would try to find reviews and articles. People from the US do that as well, but they are much more willing to try the product firsthand. And people in the US tend to get on call, get on chat much more often compared to Asian countries. So I would say the US is a big market. People are much more willing to try your product firsthand. So for every business, I would say the US should be your primary target.
[00:18:48.13] – Speaker 1
So you had mentioned that Facebook communities were significant for Cloudways growth. So how do you see the role of community building evolving over WordPress for WordPress businesses today?
[00:19:01.17] – Speaker 2
Yeah. So community marketing, a lot of people don’t know, it’s a very, you know, good category of digital marketing that is taking, you know, a lot of centre stage these days, but a lot of people tend to stay away from community marketing because it takes a lot of time. But for every product, I would say it’s very important to stay transparent and become a trustworthy business. So community building, a community around your product, is very important. Just like at Cloudways, we used to have a users community, so whenever new users signed up with us, registered with us, we used to have links within the platform and in the emails that we sent to the customers that they could join the users community. In the users community, what you expose people to is other customers. You connect them with other customers. Now, if a new customer sees that you have thousands of other people using Cloudways, or using your product within the community, and they are helping each other out in the community, it builds transparency and trust within the customers. So it has a lot of benefits in building a community.
[00:20:26.08] – Speaker 2
One, you become a trustworthy brand. One, you become a transparent brand. And the other advantage is that the customers can help each other out. So if a customer is having a problem, they can ask other people in the group, and the questions are open. It’s a public forum where people can, you know, ask questions to us. And people can also find use cases like how other people are using your product. Now that if you have seen a lot of page builders, a lot of WordPress products, plugins have their own groups on Facebook. So A person could ask a question like, how are people using, let’s say, a certain form plugin to build a form for a different, you know, use case? So people can ask; they can, you know, share their own work that they have done. And, you know, communities should be a centrepiece of investment for products that, you know, obviously are marketing online. So communities do take time to run, but they are a very good investment for any product that wants to build their own brand in the long run.
[00:21:40.22] – Speaker 1
Awesome. Before we wrap up, can you just share an overview of your 5 projects that you are working on? Though we have covered some, like hostwp.io and WP Founders and stuff, you can still give us an overview of it before we wrap the session.
[00:21:59.09] – Speaker 2
Okay. So WP Dots is working on a lot of products. We are a very small team of like 6 people, but we are constantly growing, growing our products and working day and night to improve, you know, our own products, our own websites, and also producing a lot of content that you may have seen online. So there are various projects that we have launched, but there are some upcoming projects that you may soon see launched under our brand. One of the projects that we run is checkwp.io. So it’s a complete service agency that we run. We provide web development, maintenance, even content writing, marketing services to people, and obviously improving the security and performance of the website. So we also have a section of our company that focuses on building websites for people. So not only are we building websites for our own, our own projects, but we also provide these services to people. And then we obviously have wpdiscounts.io that we have worked really hard on for the past like 2 years now. And the idea behind wpdiscounts.io is that a lot of people still, you know, when they are trying to make a buying decision, there is only like 1% or 2% of the traffic people who try to find best prices or discounted prices for the product before they buy.
[00:23:32.10] – Speaker 2
So wpdiscounts.io is one of the projects that we have built. It will be a complete directory of WordPress plugins, WordPress themes, services, and hosting companies. And you can subscribe to wpdiscounts.io, visit our website and find the best prices for any product that you are willing to buy. So most of the popular products and all the products in various categories are already listed over there. And the idea is, you know, to allow people to make the best buying decisions. And also find alternatives to popular products that they might be missing out on. So wpdiscounts.io is one of the projects that we work really hard on. Then wpfounders.com we have already talked about. And then there is hostwp.io. So on hostwp.io, we have a very long-term plan of building a very scalable hosting company that provides best-in-class support that is directly provided by WordPress experts. And it utilises all the latest technologies like LiteSpeed Enterprise. Now, LiteSpeed Enterprise is something that we offer because we have noticed, like, as your WordPress websites grow, they tend to become very resource-hungry. Then there are so many people looking for better hosting providers, and then they end up paying like hundreds of dollars per month just to run one of their websites that is, that is a really high-traffic, very complex website.
[00:25:12.17] – Speaker 2
But the thing is, if your underlying technology isn’t updated, isn’t optimised, then you would, you know, just need to throw more resources, more server resources on the website, and still not get the performance out of it. So, like, the thing that we used at hostwp.io, is it is a very efficient system that utilises the resources in the best way possible. So it also reduces your server resources and the cost of your hardware with the optimised enterprise-grade software. So we have very long plans with all the projects that we are doing there. Like I mentioned, there are like 2 other projects that we are willing to launch this year. So it’s a long journey ahead.
[00:26:02.07] – Speaker 1
Wish you all the best with all the projects. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your valuable insights with our audience. Your expertise and practical tips will help our viewers and listeners for sure. So could you let us know the best places to find you?
[00:26:19.04] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I’m very active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. So it’s easier to find me over there. And also for any of my projects, you can contact me through any of the websites I have.
[00:26:35.02] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I’ll drop that links in the show notes as well. Thank you so much, Ahsan, for your time. Wish you good luck with all your projects.
[00:26:44.17] – Speaker 2
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye.
[00:26:48.26] – Speaker 1
This podcast is brought to you by Digital Jayasty. If you want more tips, strategies, and interviews with top marketing experts from around the world, make sure to subscribe and follow The Digital Jayasty Show. Thank you for tuning in, and I’ll catch you next time.