 Good morning everybody. How's everybody doing? Did you enjoy the first session? I hope so. So welcome to the session here is WordPress as a digital marketing hub, the Gutenberg edition and I am Rebecca Godin. So these are our wonderful spot organizers. Thank you for putting this on. Our wonderful sponsors and bold grid thank you for the connector. And of course we're at WordCamp Toronto. So a little bit about myself as I said I'm Rebecca Godin. I have been a freelance word press developer for a little bit over three years. In this time I have made beautiful websites for lots of clients that were unfortunately not having traffic go to them so they were just sad little websites on the internet with you know crying because nobody came to visit them. And I realized that making a website is just not enough anymore to really you know grow your business and get traffic to it. So in September of this year I decided to just switch from being just a freelancer and making my own agency called Geeky Chick Labs. And pretty much what it is it's still a WordPress agency so we I make WordPress sites but I do all the digital marketing stuff as well to hopefully drive you know the traffic to websites and grow businesses because that's what a website is really for is to help grow your business. I am originally actually from Orlando Florida but I moved to LA 20 years ago. My husband is Canadian actually. He's from New Brunswick so I'm used to coming up and being in the cold a lot. So I live in LA with my husband our son two dogs and a cat. We have a little zoo that has grown smaller through the years. And when I'm not you know programming and doing digital marketing campaigns I'm playing video games and tabletop games reading cooking. I really love to cook baking especially and being a hockey mom because hockey is surprisingly very popular in California and it takes up a lot of time. You can't see that link very well but that is the link to the slides and you can follow along for future reference. I'll put it up again at the end so that you can get that as well over there. So this is what we're going to cover in here. We're pretty much going to cover plugins that go over that work with your WordPress site to do reputation management email marketing. Yeah. Social media feeds and sharing retargeting SEO Google Analytics. And then at the end we're going to talk about how Gutenberg is going to affect this digital marketing hub that we're creating. So reputation management. What is it. I think it is the most important thing to put on websites right now because it is something that is small to do and will have a big impact on businesses. Reviews are very important. Pretty much more and more consumers are going online to make their purchasing decisions through you know seeing reviews. So about 85 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal reference from a friend or a family member. And of those 73 percent of consumers are actually trusting local businesses with online great online reviews more. Pretty much all the plugins I'm going to cover are going to be free plugins. Most of them like WP review this one is there's a free version and a premium version that you can pay for. This one is great because it actually lets you send your customers to your site to leave a review directly on your website. And then you can choose if you're going to do like a five star review out of 100 percent or 10 points. The really good thing about this is that when you have that negative review you get to nip it in the butt before it gets out there because one negative review actually hurts you way more than one positive review helps you. So if you're doing Yelp or Google or Facebook reviews and make these things that allow you to bring in that information from the outside outlets onto your website. The only thing is you have to put it on a sidebar or on a widget. So for the Facebook reviews and keep the naming conventions I'm not sure why. But you know it's really simple you put the plugin on your activated on your on your WordPress site put in your account information for those and then you can kind of put where you want with a short code say where you want to put it on. So email marketing is one of the top three digital marketing channels for companies right now. They're the top three choices because they're really great at telling your story gaining brand awareness and just increasing sales. I feel that email marketing is one of the best better choices because it's pretty and the most important thing is you can really target specific segments of your a lot of people died it was like a big news story. Mailchimp for their email marketing service. So this plugin called Mailchimp for WordPress by Baricode. It's really great because it lets you create custom forms and then put them onto your website and then you go to Mailchimp pretty much and get the key. Put it in the plugin and then it links pretty much all the information people put in and it goes directly to your Mailchimp account. So then you have a copy of whatever is going on of the information on your WordPress site but you also have their information automatically sent to Mailchimp. Mad Mimi is a great alternative to Mailchimp. A lot of people don't know about it because it is I think it has a little bit of bad connotations because it's a go daddy kind of subsidiary but for most people they have not used an email service provider kind of thing. I usually recommend going with Mad Mimi because it's very easy intuitive and simple to use but it still gives you a lot of power to be able to segment and do drip campaigns and all that wonderful stuff. They have a free version and of course a paid version. If I tell people if you can definitely go up to the medium paid version which is about $10 or $10 American dollars I'm not sure on the Canadian a month because it gives you a little bit of a story. A lot of people don't have a link to it because it is a premium one but pretty much it lets you make any custom kind of form that you want and it connects to any email service provider email marketing service provider. So it will connect to MailChimp, to Mad Mimi, to AdSense, ConvertKit. If you need that functionality and the extra stuff go for it but for most people it's not needed. You can use Ninja Forms which is what I use personally to create custom forms like more on the gravity form side. That is free the extension for MailChimp you have to pay for. Now they do not support Mad Mimi anymore on Ninja Forms 3.0 which is the current one. If you want to use Mad Mimi, you can use the Ninja Forms 2.9 pretty much. A lot of people use Contact Forms 7 for their free extension. I haven't used one it's in my repertoire but it is it gives you fancy stuff it lets you do the pop-up slide-ins and the email opt-ins that are a little bit nicer that they come in or they pop up. I feel that that kind of stuff is distracting. I hate it when I have pop-up on on websites that I go to but if someone wants that functionality it's available there. I'll do questions at the end. So going back to what I said at the beginning of the email marketing I'm going way too fast of the email marketing slide. Top three choices are the best for telling your brand story, gaining brand awareness, you know increasing sales. Social media is actually the number one digital marketing platform for that and a website is number two and these are two that really need to be connected. So because you know we're building that hub the analogy I like to use is that your website should be like Grand Central Station where it's the main place that information goes in and out of. So with email with the social media you're going to want to always make sure that your web address is in your you know social media account bio information of course to bring that don't know website but I found you on social media and then you want to always have the extra content from your social media accounts on your website. So people that know about your website can see that extra information and know about your social media accounts. So if you have an Instagram feed or a Facebook feed or a Twitter feed that you want to bring in Smash Balloon makes these wonderful plugins and I normally stick with these if you only have one of one. If you want to bring in more than one feed or you want to do social media sharing at the same time this is probably the only one that I tell people that is premium that you should buy and you should spring for if you're going to do more than one feed or you're going to do that and that social media sharing because it does everything. So the feed them social does the Instagram feed brings in Facebook brings in Twitter it brings in YouTube and it does Pinterest all those five social media feeds plus the social media sharing and liking icons and if you've been working with WordPress for a while you know the convention that you don't you want to minimize the amount of plugins that you use. So this kind of kills you know seven birds and one stone and definitely helps with that keeping the plugins to the minimum. This one's a little different so this one's called WP to Twitter. I like this one because even though I don't use Twitter so this one's great because instead of bringing in your Twitter feed to your WordPress site it actually will send a tweet out every time that you put a new blog post up and it gives you the option to go ahead and say that you just want an excerpt of your post with the link the read more link or you can just say hey there's a new post come and check it out and it'll give you the link to it and then if you just want to have social media sharing and like buttons on your pages and posts then you're going to go ahead this is the one I've always used is social media share buttons and social sharing icons by ultimately social but like I said earlier and I'm gonna reemphasize this if you're gonna do that and a feed you know go for feed them social feed them social does have a free version on their website you can't get it on WordPress plugin repository but it gives you very limited very limited functionality so that's why I always say spring for that that's probably the only one that I say go for it pay for it it's worth it so we're gonna go on to retargeting I find that this one is the one that most small businesses don't know about so then they're they're not using it but how many of us have been on Amazon and you're shopping you leave Amazon you go to Facebook or to a website that uses you know Google Google ads and then all of a sudden you're seeing the ads for what you were searching for on Amazon or you go to American Airlines or some other big airline like that and the same thing happens when you leave well it's all done through retargeting so basically this is you know a little tracking code or cookie that we put on our site and then it'll bring the information in you kind of want to the way it works is that you set up certain events to happen so when the event happens that's when the tracking is implemented there's two ways of doing that of course the Facebook one is done through a Facebook pixel so you have to have a Facebook business page and then you go and apply for a pixel code and you'll get that and then with this plug-in pixel your site or the pixel cat these are ones that would allow you to put in your pixel code onto into the plug-in so it'll put the code on all your pages for you you set up the events that you want to happen say like they fill out their their shopping cart but leave it that kind of thing or they visit a certain page or they look at certain products those are the kind of events you would set up so then when that happens the pixel code you know kicks in and then when they go to Facebook they're gonna see ads for you for your business and then with the Google tag is pretty much the same thing you get your your through all your Google console manager now is where you get all your information that you would be able to do this and I always found the name a little weird because it's Duracell Tomies Google tag manager for WordPress but it's on the skiger you know but it works the same way so you would put in your Google all your Google stuff and the Google tags that you want associated with your page and then when they go to a page that has the Google ads implemented that's when they see all your stuff like I said this is probably the one that most small businesses miss but it's a really really great strategy because the more that you're in the mind of your potential customer or client the more likely they are to come back and actually purchase from you so moving on to SEO and analytics this is something that everyone should be doing on their website already so we're gonna cover it just a little bit everyone should have an SEO kind of pro you know plug-in the king of SEO plug-ins for WordPress is Yoast so there is the free version and the premium version but usually that the free is is usually more than enough for most people the way if you haven't used Yoast the way that it works is that it allows you to go to each page or post and put in the keywords that you want this page to be looked for and ranked on you know your your search engines and then it'll go ahead and give you information on how to improve the content that you have on your page to get you know good SEO or okay SEO or bad SEO it'll tell you all that like I said the I love this because of that you know there's the wonderful saying going around that content is king for SEO but I like to tweak that a little bit because it's not content it's quality content that is really the king for SEO because if your content isn't good doesn't isn't user friendly doesn't really give people the information they're looking for there's really no no point in having your content because that's what a website is for it is to give information about your business and make it easy to find and then everyone should have Google Analytics already running on their website the two big ones plug-ins for this is Google Analytics dashboard for WP that's the one that I actually use I've been using it since it was the former name of GADWP but the most popular one actually is analytics for WordPress by Monster Insights so this is the same thing you go to Google Console or Google Analytics you get your code you put it in here it tracks everything for you when you go to your WordPress dashboard you'll have a simplified version of the analytics that you can see there so it's all in one place as actually going to Google Analytics to get you know the more detailed reports but it kind of gives you an overview of what's going on on your website in the back and then we get to the big questions on everyone's mind is how's Gutenberg going to affect this digital marketing hub all these plug-ins and just you know my WordPress my WordPress site in general I actually and it's pretty good because I think it's not going to change much on how things run for your plugins and themes and things of that nature because you know as it is right now it will support classic editor for quite a while if you don't if when you bring in your content into Gutenberg you know the old content is classic it really more affects the newer content that you're putting in and then I'm going to just give you a few advice on transition a little bit easier and also it's just good good web development practices in general that you're we're going to talk about so it's not just doesn't just work for Gutenberg so the most important thing I think is always having a testing or a staging site if you are using WP engine or one of the premium managed hosting WordPress hosting sites you're already going to have this usually built in so it's a testing site I call it testing site it's a staging site and you just hit a button where it creates a copy of your live website for you to play around with on the back end that isn't visible you know for everybody and this is where you're usually going to do all your stuff so even without Gutenberg this is where you would do all your plugin updates make sure everything's working nothing gets broken when you have all these updates so for Gutenberg this is the first thing I tell people is set up your testing site go ahead and upgrade to WordPress 5.0 with Gutenberg or you know even all Gutenberg to play with beforehand because if it breaks it's easy to or you don't like how it works you can just go ahead and activate this plan and everything's back to the classic way and like I said don't be afraid to play and explore with Gutenberg on this test site because of the fact that it is just a test site that's all it is it's not going live when you're ready for it to go live and everything's working then you can hit the button that says push to life site and that's when all this information goes through your life site and if you don't like how it looks or works or it's broken or anything like that there's the other button that says you know revert back to life site so it cleans all of the stuff you've been playing with and brings back that life site onto the testing site and I feel essentially Gutenberg is going to help this digital hub on the long run because of that whole quality content is keen for you know getting people to the site because it's gonna make it easier to do the formatting and making the design better so and for Gutenberg you know everything's all in little blocks or sections so you get that styled however you want but say you don't like where it is on the page later well you can move things around easier it's like I said it's just easier to format and make things pretty as I like to say it's like putting the makeup on your website and that's pretty much it so in conclusion I hope that you have seen that using your digital marketing site in this way or your website in this way really creates that that hub that digital marketing it makes it easy convenient for all your clients and customers to see a lot of information in one place makes it easier for you as well because you can manage and see all this information in one place for you as well so pretty much you're turning your WordPress site into a tool to grow your business that's it thank you and then there's that and then we're gonna do questions so your your question is pretty much if you're in a local area and you only concentrate in that one little area if you need SEO so it's so more of like the niche market and if you still need SEO yes SEO is still necessary no matter what there's different levels of SEO so there is that local SEO there's the national there's the global and even for the niche it makes it easier for people to find you on the internet so well the SEO plugins are just a tool to help you rank higher make sure that your content is written the proper way because SEO has changed a little so it used to be of just if you have if it is a Lady Gaga site that you have Lady Gaga all over the place so yes the search engines are let's say their algorithms or computers but they're looking for certain things that make it easy for people to read so even if you have Lady Gaga all over the you know your keyword all over the place and it's too you know so it makes it easy for people to find but now the way the SEO is written is done as if it's not easy to read for people then it's not going to rank as high another thing that's very important now is making sure that your website is mobile friendly as one of the main things that helps you rank higher on SEO but with the plugins make sure that you are actually meeting all those goals that help you rank higher so the question is how to use like click funnel and lead pages on WordPress it's pretty much you're gonna use those plugins or outside services with in conjunction with WordPress I didn't cover a lot of the outside services with WordPress but they're there and they're paid which is usually why I don't unless people want to go that extra mile for those kinds of things I don't hear it would just be going to that service and paying for it and putting it in WordPress it would you can do it in several days of just creating a special page landing page that that does that kind of same thing and then put in the the form like with gravity form or ninja form or that kind of thing yes yes well if you if you go to my website which is geeky chick labs you'll see my portfolio where they're all there yeah on the majority of them I will use those even on my own website I use those labs.com yep yes it's just easier for so let me repeat the question so your question was is it better to you know what's the benefit of using the Google Tag Manager plugin and just copying and pasting as a developer hey you can totally just copy and paste the plugins are usually for people that are not developers and it still makes it a little bit easier even when you are a developer to just have the plugin and just put the code in one place and have it you know generated and all your pages for you. Let me repeat the question if I have any plugins for semantic markup I do not because I'm because of my background that I actually started doing C and C++ programming way back when I like having a lot of control and I actually make all of my I do custom themes for everybody and I do not use page builders or anything of that nature so I have good control over that kind of stuff yes yes it is I have so what is the difference between like MailChimp and Constant Contact I have never used Constant Contact I have not had any of my clients use it because every most people want to start off with the free to see how it goes and then then they build up from there so it's usually with MailChimp I think it's mostly it's just that you have a little bit more functionality with the premium ones that I've been aware of even with MailChimp from the free to the paid version there is just more functionality that you can use but like I said with those if you want to make your own plugin you know your own forms it's going to be like Ninja forms or gravity forms that allow you to make your forms and then move to that but like I said for me like most people that I work with only use MailChimp or if they don't use anything I start them on with the mail Matt and Mimi well on the free version I think it's five thousand two thousand yeah I'm like I know it's in the thousands and then it's how many lists you have it's one list for the free and then you have to go up from there and then Matt and Mimi is like five hundred contacts for the free and you know it's unlimited sendouts at that point yeah yeah that's when MailChimp starts it may not be worth it it starts going for two lists I had two lists for a while and it was like five dollars a month for the extra list so it's not too bad but then when it also depends on the amount of contacts that you have but if you're happy with what you have I you know unless you're looking for a cheaper alternative which it sounds like you might be then that's when you you know we do a little bit of research any other questions yes I I these are the ones that I discovered and just stayed with because they've worked well hmm so I mean there's a lot more plugins than what I I covered but like I said these are the ones that I've been using for a while hmm yes so to repeat your question for the Facebook pixel retargeting I don't do many people I haven't quite figured out so I'll get there I mean I haven't really anything else yes it does yes yes yes yes like I'll get there but like I said if you go and download the ad the slide deck all of them have links to the actual I get there hmm yeah so the last one anything else perfect thank you