 me présenter. Je m'appelle Francesca and I'm going to speak English. Je voulais faire ça en français, mais mon français c'est horrible. Maintenant je n'ai pas parlé français pour un, peut-être l'année prochaine on va faire ça en français. This year we're gonna do this in English. So my name is Francesca. I'm the WordPress community manager at SiteGround, international web hosting company, but for the purposes of this talk I'm the founder of Chippew Bee, who's a blog and this whole talk is based on this experience. So it's the year 2013. I'm leaving abroad and I'm miserable. I am juggling a day job that I don't particularly enjoy and I'm trying to start my own business. And what do I do? I go online and read blogs from American entrepreneurs that tell me that I can start a six-figure business, basically out of nothing, that I can get 100,000 followers on Twitter in a few months, that I can build a business that will make me money while I sleep. I would really love that, but you know this kind of advice, but it doesn't really work for me. So I'm miserable, but one good thing comes out of following all these blogs and chats and forums is that I meet other Italians, other women from Italy who are also starting this online businesses, which was kind of a new thing for Italians at the time. And so we start wondering, can we do something in Italian that will be helpful and that will fit the Italian market? Can we help other female creative entrepreneurs? That's how we saw each other. To all get better at this new adventure of making money while we sleep. Something that I don't think I ever did, by the way. So if that was the advice you were looking for, I'm sorry I'm not the right person, but I know about blogs. So since at the time I was making a living of building websites, I was like, I can do a blog. We can do this pretty easily. So let's put together some people, a blog, and let's start it. And of course we will do this for free. We will share our knowledge and skills for free because we are on a mission. We wanted to make it easier for female creative entrepreneurs in Italy to make a life that they like. Five years later, which is kind of a long time in the internet terms, Chipubi is going strong. Chipubi is a terrible SEO name that will never, never got us discovered. It's Casa Piubottega, home plus studio. No one makes the association, no matter how many times we write this. But this is what the name is based on because most of the people that read and write for Chipubi are home workers and this is why we call it with this incredibly unuseful name. And this is the website and as you can see it's super simple. There's nothing innovative about the design. It's a blog and we like it to be a blog because we concentrate on content above everything else. So this is Chipubi basically yesterday. And we did pretty good. When I say that in five years we're still going strong. These people, these numbers might seem very small to other companies and you know company business blogs and stuff like that. But for us always remember that we're talking about this niche of female creative entrepreneur and we basically cover it all in Italy. That's more or less the capacity that that market has and we cover it all. So we have 80 authors. We're very, very popular on Facebook where we have over 12,000 people. We have a really good engagement rate with our posts. We have a really good number of readers, monthly visitors to the blog. And I think one of the stats that really say a lot about the quality of the content is that 56% of male readers. The whole thing is declined at feminine, I don't know how you say it in English actually. So all the articles are, hey sister, new girl, you should do this. And the fact that 56% of our readers are men that can overcome the fear of being called hey girl, it means that the content is valid and people read us because the content is good and not because we're a blog for female creative entrepreneurs. So on September 5th, 24th, we celebrated our fifth anniversary. And I have to say I learned a lot about running this blog and not just about blogging, but in general about business, of course, and supervising distributed teams. 80 people is not a small team. And so this is more or less what it goes behind the scenes and a bit of tips if you want to start a blog for your business or community. So let's start with the basics. So if you have multiple authors, the first thing you need to do is actually manage all the roles and not just in terms of hierarchy, you know, a company hierarchy who does that, but actually in WordPress how you manage all these different people. So we assign different roles to each user and to have a more granular control over what everyone can do. We use this plugin. I don't know if any one of you knows it. Members by Justin Tadlock. It's a free plugin. You can find it in the WordPress.org repo. So we kept the same names that WordPress assigns to user, admins, editors, authors and subscribers. But for each role we went a bit more into details of what kind of permissions we want everyone to have by using this plugin. So for example, you see we only have three admins. It's me, the founder, the actual editor in chief and the developer that helps us with the code when we need it. Then we have editors. They can do whatever they want except for installing, plugging and things. But in terms of what they can do in the posts themselves before and after publishing, they can do everything. Authors are the people that are active in the blog in this particular season. They can post, they can upload their posts, edit it up until publication. When the post is published, they cannot edit anything anymore. And then we have the subscribers who are the people that wrote for us in the past and they're right now temporarily or permanently out of the picture. So they cannot do anything besides editing their own user profile. And this is how the plugin looks. You can honestly go into each part of the website and decide what capability is going to be granted and which one is going to be denied. So it's in Italian. You have articles, pages, media, comments, Yoast SEO, taxonomies, appearance. Some are in Italian, some are in English, doesn't matter. You get the idea. Some polyglots didn't do their job. But you can go and actually change at a very granular level what everyone can do. There are two reasons why we have this kind of management of roles. The first one is that tight editorial ship. We, as I said, content above all. So it's very important for the newsroom, what I will call the newsroom, so the editor-in-chief and the editors to supervise the content that we put out there. So if an author wants to change their content even years after publication, it's not a problem. We actually really encourage that. We actively edit the first post we had because five things are a long time in the Internet. But we always want to have the supervision of an editor that has the general editorial overview for the whole blog in mind before we go and do something. And security. Reducing the capabilities that people have to do stuff on the website reduces the surface of attack in case of hacking. So we try to keep a higher level of access to very few people that at least we trust that you have good passwords at a minimum. So now we have the people. We need to keep them busy, right? So the first thing we do, decide how many times we want to publish in a week to create, to put these people at work and to create a calendar. What I would say, the experience here is don't post every day if that's not working for you. And if it doesn't work with your schedule and stuff like that, we started out posting five to six times a week. Then about two years in, we did a survey, we had almost 1000 replies. And the vast majority said, you're posting too much, we cannot keep up with you. So we went down to three times a week. And we started doing longer articles. So they really feel like a mini essay. So I'm not, if someone is writing about Facebook, they're not just going to write what's the difference between a profile and a page, which is a content that you can find anywhere and written in basically 400 words, you'll find a 2000 words article that will really deep dive and go deep into the issue itself. So we moved to three articles a week. And basically, in about two months, the readership doubled. So we were, I mean, the people that replied were right in asking us this. It all starts with paper and pencil. I print out or the editor in chief, it depends who's doing the calendar. In this period, we print out a Google calendar empty sheet for every month we want to fill up. We say, what are the days where we're going to publish? I write down when I do it, I do it manually. I write down the list of all the authors and start going, you know, one by one, putting them in the calendar, and put a number next to their name. So I make sure that everyone gets exposure. If someone asks, no, I want to write just twice a year, no problem. If someone says, I want to write every month, no problem. But it's really, really handmade, a simple approach that has worked very well for us. So we always also have a couple of backup articles. So if someone suddenly cannot deliver, we can have someone something to post. But also if we don't post because we miss one date, it's not a problem. Again, it's a volunteer run blog. We all do this for free. So our readers are very understanding if we miss something because they know the story behind the blog itself. Once we have the calendar on paper, and it works, every author basically covers one topic. So I might use the two terms interchangeably because one author, one topic. So we make sure the calendar, all the topics are spread out during the year. So we know that we cover all the things we want to cover for that period. So after this, we move the calendar to Trello, which is a free project management tool. And we keep it really simple there. We don't actually manage the workflow there. We use it to store stuff, basically. And this is how it looks. Very simple. This column, it's ideas for articles. So if someone read something in a blog, or in the newspaper, or they come up with an idea, and they think the topic is good for QQB, they'll put it here. And we might assign it to someone. Then we have the calendar, the dates, the blog, or the other things we're doing. We have a bit of archive with the workflow and a few documents. So if someone doesn't remember what are all the steps, and it will become clear in a moment why someone will not remember all the steps, I can go there and see all the steps. And finally, we have that column where you see Kedya Lesperta has asked me anything. It's something that we used to do on Facebook that worked very well for us. But then at some point, we were all tired of doing it. But we're keeping it there, because maybe one day we will have the energy again to do it. So we'll keep it there for better times. And this is what the calendar at the end of the day really looks like. So we have the date, we have the topic, the person, and every time something gets done, we just check it. So we have the authors, we have the calendar. How does a post get published at the end of the day? It's a very long process. And it's the pride and joy of QQB. And five years later, every time I meet readers, one of the things that they always highlight is the quality of the content and the fact that you can tell that behind each post there's a research. It's not just words thrown on a page because, oh, we have to publish something, you know? And this is why. So behind the scenes, we have a number of people. I added their Twitter handle if you want to follow them, some of them post in English and they're very interesting people. So we have an editor in chief right now. It's Daniela Scapoli. And this person is in charge really of picking the best possible content for the blog. She reads the proposals we get from authors. She communicates with existing authors to come up, for example, with a series of posts on a certain topic that will fit that period. She might reach out to two authors who want to feature in the blog. She puts together the editorial calendar or I put together the editorial calendar. This is a bit depends on how busy we are. But in general, she has the grand vision of what it will look like in QQB for the next few months. I don't know. Email marketing. So she'll decide that for the next three months, we will concentrate on writing about the strategy behind email marketing. And then for three months, who will write about MailChimp to talk about the tools of the email marketing. But there's need to be a vision. Otherwise, everything is going to be a bit disconnected. And then we have the editors. This is the name they have on WordPress. But I like to think of them as the newsroom because they have different roles. So we have copy editing in addition to Daniela, which is also a web writer in her daily life. We have another lady called Anna Maria. She's a business writer and she read every post and see that everything is okay. Tie posts, syntax. Sometimes she has to rewrite quite a lot. But it's okay because sometimes we really want to talk about a certain topic. We cannot find any strong writer for that. So we will go to the best possible person to talk about that even if they're not strong writer. And we will help them out with the writing because we believe they really have something to say. And maybe they don't know how to say it in the best possible way. So we will help them out. We have photo editing, media, every poster comes with a picture and with a sentence over it. So she reads the whole article and she decides what kind of image will go better with that content to describe the content. We have Barbara that takes care of Instagram, Christiana Facebook and then we have Tatiana. So every every article is also checked for SEO. And she can give some suggestion how to make it more readable. We're not super interested in getting tons of readers just because we have something to sell them because we're not selling anything. So we're not optimizing for search engine with a business objective in mind. But basically because we think that the content is good and we want to reach out as many possible people. And in fact, we're very, very well ranked for a number of articles. So if you look for that in Italy, you will find us in the first position, including some articles on SEO. So we're doing well. What it means is that basically every article gets read by four to six people before it gets published. And this is how we maintain the quality and it's a lot of work, as you can imagine. And this is why a lot of people are doing this because we really believe what comes out of there needs to be the highest quality possible. And the whole process is very long and it takes a lot of steps. We're going to go briefly over everything. So the first step is talking to the author. The editor in chief will communicate with the author and come up together with topics they can talk about. And sometimes we're not really sure that the topic will fit. So we might ask them to rearrange stuff. So the editor in chief will work closely with the author. Then finally, this can happen also months before the article is published. The author uploads the post in WordPress in the website. And then the editor in chief has the first read. She goes through it, suggests some changes if there are changes that need to be done. And then the editor work on it. It can be the editor in chief because again she's a webwriter or it can be Anna Maria which is a business writer and she go and check that everything is all right. Then media comes in. She reads all the article to see what's the best possible image for that. And she will upload the image. Then Tatiana does her SEO magic, whatever that is. Find a round of changes. Something needs to be done. Let's check this one more time. Sometimes we ask people to read it that have no idea what this topic is about especially if it's a... We have a chartered accountant. I don't know what it's called in in French. And we have a lawyer. So sometimes they write articles that we want to make sure people understand what they're saying. So we ask someone to read it. And then finally the post gets scheduled and it goes out into the word. After the publishing we still publish on Facebook and on Twitter. So as you can see a lot of steps and a lot of people checking what's going on. So yes there's a lot of communication going on and we do it mostly mainly in two ways. The first one we use this free plugin. Have you heard of it? Edit flow. Has anyone heard of it? It's a really good plugin. It's developed by Automatic. You can also find it in WordPress.org and it's a plugin that provides with lots of editorial functionality. I would say that it can be very useful for team that collaborate on a blog. There's tons of features. We mostly use it for editorial comments. So it will add some boxes at the end of your post where you can comment the article and reply to communication. This is exactly what it looks like. It's like Facebook comments basically. So you have the first say, hey I'm sorry I haven't replied to you before. I should put the image for your article. Can you please give me the the sentence to publish? Oh sorry. Okay use this and then the editor comes in and say, ah thank you for the proposal. I vote for this one. And then all right that's good. Image ready, ready to go. And these are the comments that you find it basically in each article we publish. And then despite my hate for Facebook groups and my love for Slack, I try to move everyone to Slack. It didn't go well. Most of the people that write for for gpb are on Facebook so it doesn't matter how much I want to move them somewhere else. It makes complete sense to be on Facebook and this is where we brainstorm our idea. We have two groups actually the editors newsroom but this is more of a technical group where we just say oh I cannot see the image or we had a poster scheduled for 8am and something went wrong you know stuff like that. But then we have the authors groups that it's a lot more interesting because that's where the discussion happens. You know someone comes on and say oh next month I'm going to start writing about podcasts. Do you have any requests? What would you like to know about that? 25 comments about what the other authors want to hear about podcasts. So and we also have a lot of laughs and fun on that so that's also good to create company culture what we'll talk about. The other thing that I think really separates us from other blogs is how we find all these authors and how we onboard them. This is something that I'm very obsessed about onboarding people in the right way so they can be effective for the long run. When we want to add someone new when we want to maybe want to explore a new topic or someone say hey I cannot write anymore I cannot commit anymore to writing so we need to find someone else for that topic. We usually either do a call for articles so we post something in our social media or blog post and say hey we're looking for someone that will write about this thing or we invite people. If we know that there is one person that we really want to see on chpb then we will invite them. We try to do a mix of these two things because I really think it's important to have this front point of views also from people that are at different stages in their career. We don't always need the super top expert on a certain topic sometimes we need that fresh eye on that very same topic that might bring something completely new than the things we have read about for 20 years already. So this is how we do it if someone say yes I'm up for it we go through a very very thorough vetting process so we will go to these people's social media we'll go to these people blogs to see what's their style and it's not just to see how they write because again we can always trust our editors to make them sound better. I'm heavily edited every time I write I'm like just make me sound good so change whatever you want but we want to make sure that they will fit with us. It's something very hard to describe because you know what the vibe is like yeah if you have been reading the blog long enough you know what's the vibe we want to create so we don't only look for the good writers we look for people that we feel are partners that they believe the same things that we believe and we've been advocating for for five years so this is why we check whatever they're producing and finally we have some legal paperwork I know it might sound a bit overkill for a free blog that goes out whenever people can make it go out but I think it's important to create a professional relationship even if there is no money involved so we have in Italian it's called scrittura privata private document it's between people you don't need a lawyer for this and it states what rights the public publisher has and what rights the author has so for example in our case the copyright and intellectual property stays completely with the author we ask them to release the content with the creative commons license and we also ask them not to repost to the same exact article anywhere else because we want our content to be fresh and then we create a user on our blog we ask them to open graviter.com because we want everyone to have a face we're not in a nameless corporation a nameless business blog where the marketing team writes no these are real people each one of them with the story their face so that's all important the other reason why I think it's important as I said there's no money involved so the minimum we can do to thank people for doing this is give them visibility so I know visibility doesn't pay bills but this is not how people make their money although everyone that has written for a long time in chpb and has wrote written interesting content usually has seen more business coming in so this is why we do it and we tweaked a little bit we use the genesis framework as a basis so we tweaked a little bit the code for the author bio that it comes in with the with the platform to add as many social media link as possible so and at least twice a year we invite all the readers to go look through all the authors and go click on those links and if they want to hire someone please go check what they do because you know these people are really good people and really great professionals and the other thing I feel strongly about is teaching everyone how to use WordPress I know it sounds dumb maybe because they're like oh everyone knows if you're a writer if you're a blogger you know how to use WordPress wrong I see so many articles just coming you know copy pasted from Word with all the CSS so that's when we realize we have to teach people how to leverage WordPress for what it is a publishing platform first and foremost so we provide every new author with a welcome pack where they have you know screenshots of how to and now I'm producing one because we're switching to Gutenberg so I'm producing one this weekend about Gutenberg I'm going to do it tomorrow on the bus I have four hours good wi-fi so it's a perfect occasion so you know we teach them exactly how to format text and how to use all the WordPress options what to do what not to do because the editors or the SEO expert will do better than them and we also set expectations and guidelines how many words do you need to write basic of SEO and we provide a list of common grammar mistakes that I know it sounds very condescending but it's great because we all have those words that well I don't know in Italian at least there are a few words that were like do I put an accent don't I put an accent do I do this so we give it to you so you don't have to worry about that and that also people were really like you know I felt like oh my god I'm telling 40 years old women how to write this word and they were actually no that's great also when I have to write something for myself now I go back to that list because I know I will find the answer and finally the thing that I really I'm really passionate about hence my job and I'm the community manager is the community and in this case it's something that I would like to call company culture even if this is not a company I think over the years we created the culture the first thing I think it's very very important in any kind of community blog business family doesn't matter it's ban trolling and pettiness now I wish I could tell you that it's all unicorns and star and everyone is wonderful and we never had problems we did have problems both with authors that were a bit petty like oh she got published twice and I got published just one I saw you if you reposted that on social media five times and I didn't get reposted why did she get that slaughter no that's not gonna happen not on my watch I usually ask these people you know after they're done with three articles I'm like hey thank you for your contribution now we're gonna bring someone else on board for this because we really want to give more voices unless someone gets really vicious then I'm like just get out I'm very very strict about this same thing about petty comments it happened in the past that some authors were attacked I stepped in and doesn't matter what I'm always defending the author because if I pick that person to be in my team I'm not just the editor-in-chief I'm the mama bear for all these people and that's how I feel and that's how Daniela feels now and we all feel a little bit like that so trolls are no go offensive comments they get deleted I don't care if it sounds like a dictatorship it's my house my rules all right so it's never pleasant to deal with these things but you have to deal with with them as soon as possible otherwise they get big and you don't have time to deal with that the other thing that I learned is delegate so for the first three years I did everything and I felt I was indispensable without me chpb would collapse untrue I actually was now I know that I was the bottleneck for some of the things that chpb could have become because I didn't have time to deal with that so last September I was hired full time by sideground and I was like well let's close the blog of course because we have 80 people but I'm obviously the only one that can do stuff here and I was like well let's hear what these people these 80 people have to say about this and everyone's like no and Daniela raised their hand and she said I'm good to go I want to keep doing this and I'm happy to do this so that's when I learned that sometimes delegating is really good and it's really helpful and I realize it's very helpful to motivate people if you're in an environment that you know will appreciate your efforts and promote you which is again not the case of promoting no one gets paid but you know you can be more effective in a certain group then you will step up and then if you're the person there you need to step down and let other people shine and they'll take ownership and they will go with it and chpb has been going great even without me being involved beside being an author when they need a post about WordPress basically and welcome change so the first year when someone in chpb told me I cannot write anymore because I'm too busy I was like what you don't want to be with us for the rest of your life are you leaving me that's how I felt and it's terrible because then people were scared to tell me that they wanted to leave and then their articles were not as good as they were and like well their heart is not really into this they're not leaving so again that's a sign that something is wrong so now I actually welcome this as an opportunity if someone says I'm too busy or you know I'm not I'm not feeling very creative lately so I honestly don't know what to write about child good no problem so you're another in another life it's not a problem so I think I think having changed and having new people is always good and that's like the core of the blog right without the readers a blog is nothing it doesn't matter if you have the best possible content and if you have a wonderful design and incredible writers if you don't have readers you don't exist so you have to find a way to communicate with your readers not talk at them teach them always be the know it all I know this you listen that's not how it works you have to find a way to engage people so we had a lot of things we did over the years for example on Facebook every Friday afternoon we post graphic that says follow Friday now is the time to promote your business and we had weeks where we had more than 80 people going into the comments and say hi I'm Joe and I have a crochet business and you know this is my page come visit me and it's beautiful because you I think one of the best thing that came out of that is that people started collaborating because they found themselves in the comment of that post which is beautiful in the past we had monthly tweet chats we had a book club which was amazing but it was so time consuming that after about one year and a half no one really could keep up with that but it had like a thousand people already in the same book and enjoying that and I actually have two ladies that are they pinged us a couple of weeks ago and said what's going on with the book club I'm like ah we cannot I can do it so maybe it will start again and I think again nurturing the community nurturing real relationship with the readers it also makes it easier again to onboard the new people because they've been reading you they're passionate about this and then it might encourage someone when it's time to bring someone new on board and say hey I've been reading you for a while and I think I would be really good fit for this and I can talk about this topic so this is really important so I think now it's your turn so despite the fact that basically two months after blog appeared also articles that says blogging is dead have appeared blogging is not dead at all blogging is alive and kicking and it's still one of the most important tools you have in your content marketing arsenal so use it wisely it doesn't matter if you're growing your you use it to grow your business to grow your community it's always great to communicate in a way that it's a bit more permanent than just you know a post on Twitter that disappear after 15 seconds I saw a graphic a few months ago that basically the shelf life of a tweet is 30 seconds while the shelf life of a good blog post is two years so imagine that in terms of you know investment in your business so even if you're thinking about a blog for your business think about making it into a multi-author blog because more voices and shared responsibility will definitely help you grow so that's all for me thank you for listening and if you have any question here I am thanks it really varies because we ask everyone to submit their post at least 10 days before publishing day so we have enough time to work on that we have some authors that upload six posts in advance because they have a very clear idea and you know it's timeless content so they have a very clear idea on what they're going to talk so they post everything in advance and then it's great we have some authors that upload the night before publishing but in general in general we it takes about 10 days from the moment the author uploads the post on the website to the moment we publish probably if you know if we were a real newsroom and people were paid to do so then it would take us probably a day to go through all the all the things but since we're all volunteers we honestly do this when we can for example the person that does the images she usually tries to do them two or three like the whole week at the same time she does that usually on Sunday night because it works for her so she takes all the posts that are ready and she does that in once the SEO expert also she tries to do everything at once the editors they're okay doing it when it happens so but let's say the rule should be 10 days yeah in terms of writing or in terms of people that write that's impossible because again we don't have an editor that can work eight hour a week on this eight hour a day on this I've got to say that it does feel very coherent because people have all the authors before becoming authors have been readers so they know the style we use the editors try to you know edit not really in terms of tone of voice for example but more in terms of readability we want to make things as clear as possible so for example this is why I say that I use editing I love it when they edit me because I tend to go on a spiral and you know I start thinking of something and then I open a parenthesis it's like oh that thing and the and then they're like no this needs to be more linear yeah I mean the tone I think somehow created the chip you be tone naturally by writing you know the first group of writers were kind of a group of friends and we knew each other and some of us had similar life stories and similar businesses so we tended to create a bit of a style and when I say all this thing like hey girl say hey sister it's true we really write about this and we this is why for example it's very the work with the lawyer and the accountant are very these are the people that we have a hard time finding someone that fits chip you be because they especially the lawyer tends to talk legalese and so we need to make that a bit more readable and approachable for everyone but we we cannot really go so much into you know editing really the tone of voice of everyone and I also wonder if it's the right thing for this kind of blog or probably if it was a company blog I would say that's a lot more important to achieve some style coherence but for us we have a bit we have a little bit you know in terms of for example don't use to use you which you cannot say in english obviously it's always you don't use profanity unless it's me I use profanity all the time but as I say to my son I created you I'm allowed to swear so that's more or less how it works any other question that's all right but how many is approaching no one is approaching us that's awful I wish they did so this is one of the biggest regrets I have I see people with content that is far less interesting and numbers that are really smaller making quite I wouldn't say a lot of money but making some money out of it but we were so pure at the beginning we were like no we really felt like open source right we're like no we're giving this away for free all this knowledge because we believe in this I wonder if five years in what will happen if we try to monetize the other thing is to monetize you need someone that it's dedicated to do that and we have no one that it's really dedicated to do that so every year in September we say okay is this year we start selling something I'm like oh we should try and then we start saying yeah but who has the time to do this and you know the accounting is not simple because we need a company or we need one of us to issue invoices and my accountant told me you want to issue invoices for nine years ebooks find another accountant I'm not going to deal with that so yeah there is there's definitely the numbers and and the content to monetize but we're not being actively searching for this no one is actively saying hey I really wanted to do something so that we're not doing it for now we still believe that this is our way to nirvana merci à vous