 Raise your hands, automaticians. OK, so I'm very glad to be here. Another reason for me to be very excited today, this is my first WordPress talk outside my country, India. Other than the talks I've given to my colleagues, thank you. So I'm going to speak today not too much about the software and the code part of it, which I leave to my colleague, Sudeep Tho. I'm going to speak drawing experiences from what brought me to WordPress and to the community. It's about something which is called to WordPress, which is to help people publish their ideas or what I call in my words, create their own medium. So my background, just to give a very quick introduction, I have been a happiness engineer doing technical support and wrangling happiness for automatic. Since January 2017, I've done quite a few odd jobs before that. And what brings me to WordPress and what got me actually into digital marketing itself, not just WordPress, is a community project which I did for my ethnic community based in India called as radioidli.net. Just to break it short, it was a website which began in Blogger with embedded YouTube and multimedia content. And just when I discovered there is WordPress.org, I moved it to a self-hosted WordPress site. And that's where my learnings about websites, about hosting, about analytics, about marketing. Way before Facebook hit India, things like I used stuff like Yahoo Groups, Google Groups and other discussion forums. So all those learnings came from this small community project. So yes, we are here as WordPress community, but this ethnic community project also gave me a lot of insights. That's what I'm going to share bits of what I gathered from that experiment, which finally led me to where I am today, enjoying a good career in WordPress itself, right? So yes, another disclaimer, I'm not good with coding yet. So I just know HTML, CSS. I know that if you show me a code of a theme or a plugin, I know what that particular PHP loop does, but if you ask me to write it from scratch, I will need help from colleagues or the experts, right? So why am I choosing this topic? All of us are, when we mention the word ideas, the first thing that comes to our mind is perhaps Albert Einstein or those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs or inventors, the founding fathers of WordPress or other projects, right? But let me tell you, each one of us has what's called as ideas or sparks within us, right? So if we are ready for a quick call of hands, let's do this together, right? So how many of us felt this in our mind? I can write well, I can rhyme well, maybe a little bit, but I'm not a writer, not a poet. So how many of us have felt this even in a slightest sense? Don't be shy, right? Ideas, okay, I'm okay with singing. I have my own style, my own genre, but I'm not sure if I can really dare to take it out beyond the bathroom, right? So how many of us have felt that? Rahul, I can see, I've been there as well. I am not a politician, oh, politics is dirty, right? And I'm not a journalist, I don't write for any newspapers, but yes, I do have a political opinion or I have an opinion about things happening around me in my country, in my locality, in my community. How many of us have felt that? Quite a few of us. Sometimes we felt the need to do something about it, write about it, express. Well, we are talking about ideas. I'm not a qualified teacher since we have teachers here as well. I would like, but I would like to study together if not teach with a larger community of students or interact with teachers around the world. We do feel things like this. Now, quoting Seth Godin from his famous TED Talk, ideas, all of us have ideas, but those ideas which spread very well, they succeed. And they end up creating what we call as impact and they end up changing things around the world. I was just mentioning that Matt Malinweg was a blogger, was a journalist at that point in time with CNET. He had a personal, what's called as a developer's itch to make a better blogging software which could understand emojis and symbols better. And that became the founding point of WordPress which is today 30% of the internet, of all the websites. So it all begins with ideas which spread because of some good purpose, because of various reasons. Of course, the talk gives a good reference about how do ideas spread. So all of us have our ideas and even if we think we do not have our own ideas as WordPress professionals, we help our clients and many other people, maybe our friends, our relatives, we help them spread their ideas. And that's why ideas always need a proper medium to propagate to spread out. And that's where the role of WordPress as a content management system or as a software came into my life for my small community project and today it's powering some of the largest projects as well. Now, why is it that CMS like WordPress can really create an immense impact which perhaps was not possible in the past? Or it was not, it was perhaps in the hands of only a powerful few. In the past or even till now, to some extent, a successful medium happens if you have great infrastructure and good distribution. So infrastructure is where you bring the ideas, host it or print it and then it goes about and it has to be distributed through a vast network whether it's the newspaper boy who wakes up at 4 a.m. and gets that newspaper to your home or there's so many stores and places from where you pick up your reading material. So or even vast amounts of money being spent in marketing through digital or any other medium to make things spread out, right? But the good point out here is back in the past, if you had to have a very powerful medium, you need to have a very good press with those huge printing machines, lots of paper, lots of cost to procure that which means you and of course it's a regulated industry as well. So you needed to have some good industrial backing which means good finance, some deep pocket, the promoters and of course you needed some political support to make all those things happen. So press which is the infrastructure was like very heavy but now that we have word press, the barrier to do that is actually come down and that's the main point of my talk today. So sites can begin with a zero budget and again to begin with something, you need not have complete coding knowledge. When I did radio idly, I just had to, I only had the information or the skill of just writing emails. So when I logged in, I didn't even know what's a content management system but when I logged in there was a place where I could add title, I could add the content, I could embed somebody who told me you can copy paste this code from YouTube to here and the video will start showing there. That was my moment of truth or whatever you may say. Now to learn that the barrier was minimal as compared to the technology involved in the earlier mediums. So which is where impact is coming in and yes, people can begin, let me put a disclaimer here that I'm mentioning an automatic product. So even for people who are not very well versed with starting their own websites that are resources like we have something called as learn.wordpress.com. The whole idea, wordpress.com was created was that people who do not have any knowledge about hosting, who do not have any knowledge about the infrastructure part, we are reducing that barrier further by giving a free platform to begin and then gradually upgrade if you like. And yes, all of this still gives you the freedom to move things out to a self-hosted site. So the beauty is you can now, unlike in the past wherein you had to procure infrastructure and huge distribution you can actually begin with zero budget and I can tell you there are quite a few websites around the world written by influential journalists and thought leaders which still run on either blogger, on blogspot or the wordpress.com sub-domains as well. But people come to them because of the content, because of the unique ideas they bring in. So yes, it is good to have your own domain but let that not be a barrier for you to start or for your clients or anyone to start. Let them get a taste of it. Once they are convinced, once they start making money of it, they grow stronger and they can have their own projects coming up. And yes, when we talk about distribution, we today have social media wherein we can create discrete pockets of interest. It's not that I publish a huge billboard, wherein there is so much of wastage to people to whom the message is not relevant at all. Yeah, so if I'm having a website on pets and more specifically cats. Yeah, so within pets also we got a niche of cats and dogs, right? So if my medium is about managing cats or managing pets, I can create an interest group within various social media whether it's Instagram, whether it's Facebook or Twitter. And for all you know, there are already groups in all these media wherein people are talking about this, this unique interest that they have. So it doesn't take too much of effort for us who are writing in that particular space to go and check each of this popular social media as to which are these places where my interested users are already talking. Can I get in with a conversation and maybe put useful content from my website out there and then make the site popular? That's what I did with my community website. I saw few distinct groups of Yahoo groups, Google groups. Those days, India had a social media thing called as Orkut, which was a Google product. So it was very popular in India and Brazil. So there were groups within that speaking about heritage, about history. But out there I found younger people wanting to show their talent. And that's where I actually got in conversation and created this medium. So distribution also, if you do it properly, you can do it beginning with zero cost. And then later on you can think about maybe going for the paid way of advertising. Throughout all this, there are various ways in which you can start a website for free. Or some might argue saying that why do I need a website? Let me create things on Facebook. Or let me create something on Twitter. What you need to be always aware is wherever you are posting the content, who owns it? And tomorrow if I have to move out the content because of some conflict or the other, how portable is it to move it out and resurrect the content elsewhere? Now that's where the beauty of WordPress as an ecosystem comes in. So suppose you even begin with creating a free website on WordPress.com. You reach some point in time wherein you grow out of all the features available there. Or you want to move the content to your own website. You can just export the content to exactly the way it is, to a self-hosted website. So that's where I'm speaking both about I mean, there is total freedom. You completely own the content and you can also port it out anytime. And even backward portability, if you say that you don't have the money to money nor maybe in some cases the traffic of the sites grow and you may want to bring it back to WordPress.com because some users find things, the infrastructure of WordPress.com better, they can even bring it back. It works both ways. So the point I'm making here is freedom to move the content and always owning the content. So when you are on Facebook or when you are on Twitter, you are on rent. It's a hotel room, right? It's good for people to meet there, but yes, when you want to call people, you need to call them to your home or to your permanent office. So that's where a website or something developed using WordPress actually helps. So how do you get started to spread your own ideas? Think of an area of interest, a unique, of course you can make your own personal blog wherein you write almost about everything that you do perfectly fine. But if you want to make a real powerful medium, it has to be focused on a particular interest or a particular passion, which many others will then follow and map themselves into, right? So you could begin with an area of expertise or passion. In my case, it was my little community. In some other cases, people like music. It could be a genre of music. You just keep writing about it on a regular basis. And when you begin, you are not really sure about how much time or how much money you want to invest to reduce your risk. You can begin with a free platform or with a low-cost platform. And what's most important is for any medium, what worked for me with Radio Idli project was I defined a weekly periodicity. I made it a point to post every Friday. And through the week, I would gather content or recordings from various people. And then I would do a weekly edition. And that really brought a bit of stickiness from users and they would really expect content to come on that point in the day. So publishing regularly and creating a content calendar really helps. So you can create a content calendar around some good events happening, pertaining to the community. It could be some small event that you might be organizing, different parts of or different subtopics that you might have within your own interest. You can do that. And to be very honest, something which really helped me was many times we get caught into this loop that my site needs to look like the most beautiful magazine website in the whole world. Like I want to make a replica of the New York Times or the CNN website. But if you ask the person how many articles do you think the CNN website shows in the front page? And how many sections and subsections does it have? Do you have the same number of complexity? No. But the bright side is you can begin with something very simple. The way it worked for me was I did not have too many sections to begin with. So it was just people giving their own recordings, singing anywhere between traditional Konkani songs to Bollywood songs. So it was only songs to begin with. And then people started coming with photographs of religious and colorful festivals which have been celebrated for hundreds of years in different parts of India, of coastal India, where my community thrives. So over a period of time, it turned into a blog with categories. Music, religious events, concerts. So we had categories which grew over a period of time. And once I had categories in place, once I had adequate content in place, I could experiment with different themes on a test website. And then from a blog website, I gradually moved from a blog website with a featured content on top. And once I had about, say, about 100 plus articles, I moved on to a magazine theme. So my approach, rather than design, and then let's figure out the content later. For a medium, it's the other way around. First, get enough content, and let the content direct you or give you ideas to create, or let the design follow the amount of content that you get. Who knows, the nature of your content would be so unique that it would suggest a different kind of a design, not the standard magazine themes. So for example, you are into podcasts. So maybe the nature of your content would demand a sort of a beautiful player on the top right of the site, which would align itself in the middle when you look in the mobile phone, because it's a very different genre. And of course, there will be a subscription button if people want to subscribe to the podcast, feed itself on their devices. So just an idea, just an idea out of my mind out here. So begin with something simple. Design can be tweaked further. That's another beauty of WordPress.com, or WordPress software in general. Things inside, rest in pages, posts, media, there are discrete content modules which can be reorganized and displayed in a variety of ways. So, indeed content is the king. Don't be shy. Don't be shy of starting with a subdomain and don't be in a hurry to pump in a lot of money initially. So invest and upgrade gradually as your audience grows. And one example of what I mentioned about thought leaders still running on subdomains is a gentleman by the name of Ajay Shah who is quite an authority in economics in India. He's a professor, plus many people follow his views on economics. If I'm not mistaken, it still runs on blogger. It's ajayshad.blogspot.in. So, yeah, blogspot or blogger is out of our community thing, but I'm just giving an example that a medium can exist out of a free itself while it can hold very valuable content. So now we spoke about how do you go about building the website, getting your content together and letting the content guide you on the design of the website. Now the next question, how do I let people know about it? So many times people I worked on some client projects earlier, they were so excited they would publish first on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and then they would say, oh no, since I've already posted it everywhere, why do I post it on my website? A good approach for a person involved in building a medium would be publish first on your website and then crosslink it, crosslink place those links on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. There are of course tools to auto-publicize on these platforms the moment you publish over here, but personally I'm an advocate of writing your own personalized snippets for that particular medium, so for Facebook you can read more lines so write maybe 2 or 3 lines out there and then add your content Twitter is a shorter characters so write something which is catchy which may be a hashtag or two and the content goes there Instagram is more visual make sure you use a very good image with a square form factor preferably and then add the link so when you publicize make sure that you adapt the content for publicize first on the website and then adapt the announcement as per the social media that you are using and then you share your social links based on the way you like and very important social media as we know resists anything being sold or pushed to them so as far as possible try to get into an existing conversation saying that okay you are talking about politics in Southeast Asia here is what I wrote about and here is a summary about what I had written if you need to read more here is the link so this is a nice and fair way of plugging your content rather than saying hey this is my website it's the best view on Southeast Asia go and read this so naturally people will say oh this person is just blowing his own trumpets and without actually making a conversation so the promotion has to be in a very human conversation way and that really helps comment genuinely on other similar blogs so if your website is about culture of your particular place there might be other culture websites so whenever you write genuine comments or your own views out there or appreciation out there your link appears there naturally and of course you get not necessarily a SEO backlink but real humans will see your link and click when they see that yeah this website looks something very similar right so that's how you get virality there are projects like dailypost.wordpress.com wherein there is a topic given and if you link to that topic your content shows alongside that of many others who have also posted their topic and that actually brings in a lot of traffic from people who are really interested in that the topic which is announced I would recommend you to go through this of course I'll give you the slide as well for you to check now coming to the topic of search engine optimization biggest disclaimer this is my personal view search engines think of it from Google's point of view or from your point of view how many of us over here would like to be cheated none right so imagine Google who is making a sincere attempt to show the most relevant results based on some 200 questions some 200 plus questions as they claim but Google's agenda is to show agenda is to make the user happy not the advertiser slash lister happy so Google's first agenda is if somebody is asking for the best sushi joint in Singapore there would be 200 questions it would try to get the most accurate answer for that based upon the from where the person is asking there are different parameters on it so if I create a website which just happens to have a title of best sushi in Singapore and we expect to do certain technical tweaks to get our chances brighter so that's possible earlier but day by day Google doesn't like those tweaks so increasingly Google doesn't like things which are done for the search engine but Google will love you if you do certain things which improves relevance to the user and experience to the user so by relevance to the user you write best sushi joint in Singapore but in Orchard Street or something which is much more accurate and close write some good content about your personal experiences which is and in a language which the locals will understand because guess what the local will do keywords search using his language not the standard English so to make the user experience better you need to speak the user's language which automatically translates to good keywords for Google and second in the experience part that's where most of the SEO tips actually help like using a relevant title the length of the title the length of your Parma link or using a real Parma link rather than slash question mark page id equals 1 2 3 4 it's not that Google hates it it's like life becomes easier if you use real English in the link since the users love it hence Google loves it so increasingly you will find any of the search engine updates leading towards a point wherein it will be the exact emulation of a user normal users don't see what's the code on the site they will only see what's the relevance of the content and what is the experience that they get things like how does the mobile appear on a mobile device how does the content appear on a mobile device so it's likely that your site will rank very well on a desktop but not as high in mobile because somebody else has got a better mobile design so these are the simple philosophies of SEO which will increasingly in my opinion take over as compared to those tweaks or get your site in top 10 within next 30 days so those techniques will increasingly diminish because naturally Google doesn't want to be cheated by things done for the search engine they want genuine things done for the user and hence for Google so when you do that when you write content focused on your topic of interest when you write it for the users and you write it in their language so users searching in their own language will naturally get to your site over a period of time and that's the last part of my talk thanks for bearing with me so long so a marathon of many small steps it's not that you can create a medium overnight most of the things that you see which go viral die down equally fast so how many of us still dance to a certain style when it came it was a rave we still do dance but it's not no longer a rave as it happened then but if you were to look at some of the classic songs like the old jazz and others so people there is still an audience which which is there out there so what should be your approach you might hire the best people to write you might hire the best people to run your website but on your own if you were to run a medium out of your own passion what I mean by level up user is someone who knows almost all the admin WP admin features if not the complete PHP code you need not know the PHP code you need not know CSS but you get into WP admin you should know what each of the the options on the menu does whenever there is a new menu option which appears you should be curious enough to say hey what does this button do click if you've seen Dexter's laboratory the way the button and the thing blows up so here nothing blows up upgrade to a paid plan only when it's justified for and for very clear reasons rather than the glamour of owning it right and upgrade to a self hosted WordPress.org website at the right time in case you are beginning with the WordPress.com site and hopefully one day it's my wish that one of your mediums will turn into a WordPress VIP customer or something that requires that scale of service and it's not a thing out of imagination it's perfectly possible it has happened right so I would like to end on this note from the automatic creed which is like a nice paragraph on which guides us in our work and even in our life which says that we are in a marathon and not in a sprint so no matter where we need to go or how far the goal is the only way to get there is put one step at a time and with that I would like to thank all of you so my Twitter ID is at NarthPie and of course I'll be here to interact with all of you do we have time for any questions or maybe I think I already missed my time or how are we with the time we have time for questions so why don't everyone grab some pizza and get us a portion sure that would be great thank you so much sure 15 oh I am not on time