 Today is more of a practical demonstration. So I'll actually show you how to put this together. And the purpose of it is to show you some of the plugins that you can use and some of the third-party services that you can use to create this. So you can either use it for yourself or for those of you that have got clients, then you can implement this for your clients. And it's a good additional stream of income if you do this for your clients as well. As a point of fact, I probably spend less than one minute on this every week. In fact, I probably don't even spend that long. I've got it to that point there. And this is one of the systems or processes that Craig talked about earlier where you set something up and then you automate it. So this is for me, this is truly automated and for my clients, it's truly automated as well too. So yeah, my background is I did live in Wellington for quite some time. I was born in Norfolk Island, lived in Wellington, had a mortgage-breaking company for 10 years there, got out when the GFC hit, which was a really good time to get out. Went to Australia and set up a web development company. And I wasn't quite new at it. I'd actually developed a website for my mortgage-breaking business way back in the early 2000s. And that was one of the reasons that took our sort of small local firm to a national presence with, I think we had three branches at one point, but mainly driven out of one office, but where we're working nationally or off the back of a website. So yeah, run a agency up in the Gold Coast and work from home. And if I bring you through the next slide, you'll see there it's this little picture of a snake there. The reason for that is I do live in the countryside. I came from New Zealand where there are no dangerous creatures. I moved to Australia where everything wants to bite you or eat you. And working, so I live in a rural area and we have our own free-range chickens. And during the day, while I'm developing, you just hear this, the chickens have this unusual squawk. And you've got your egg-blowing squawk. You've got a rooster-as-after-me squawk. And then you've got this frenetics of squawk like there's something wrong. So I'm down the stairs, I'm just whipping outside. Sure enough, there's a snake in the chalk house. And what I learnt from coming from New Zealand is that it's actually not that hard to just grab it by the neck, pick it up and throw it out of the chalk house. So, stress from clients is nothing compared to picking up a snake and throwing it out. So that really just put work into perspective. So I've been around WordPress since around 2008. I was looking for a system where I could build a website that I could change quickly and not have to pay a developer $120 or $180 an hour to change a price on something that we were selling and take three weeks to do it. I didn't know they were called CMSs. And a friend of mine introduced me to WordPress back in 2008 and I thought, well, where was this when I needed it back in the early 2000s? So I've been with WordPress since then, love it, and have been through all of the developments and changes. For those that are getting into it now, it is just so much easier than it used to be back in 2008. So it's a really good platform to use and it's more powerful than you probably realise. And there are applications that run on it now and organisations that run on it now that you probably don't even know. Probably the biggest one in Australia would be News Corp and most of their publications are all served. You know, when you're reading it, they're all served on WordPress. So you're looking at it WordPress. And what you'll see in the future is there'll be a lot of sites or applications you visit that run on WordPress, but they don't use a WordPress front end. They're using something else, which is sort of what News Corp does as well with some of their information. So it's very, very powerful. But what I'll talk about today is it's really a business talk and it's about communication and how you communicate to your clients and customers. And when I was in my earlier business, sending out a regular newsletter was really important. Actually trying to sit down and find the time to send out a regular newsletter and put the whole thing together, that was really hard. And what I found is that most people start off with really good intentions to set out a newsletter and they might get two out and that's it. It's done and it's over. They haven't got time to do it anymore because they're in the business of actually doing their business. So this here is to address that. So you've got a regular newsletter that goes out without taking a lot of time and it just happens. So what it isn't about is it's not about SEO. So there's nothing, no SEO strategy here. It's not about driving traffic to a website. It's not about promoting your website in any way, shape or form. It's got very little to do with the website. It's not a call to action. It's none of those sort of things there. But what it is is it's about having regular, consistent contact with your client base. That's probably the key thing. Can you imagine a relationship if you're married to someone or you've got a relationship with someone and you see them once a year? It's probably not gonna go that well. So part of a relationship is you're seeing that you're talking regularly, you have fights, you have good times, all of that sort of stuff there. It's the same in business. So all we're doing is we're just encouraging more of that interaction with your client base. It is about providing value, so providing additional things to people that is useful for them. Now value means it's useful for them, not for you. So you're not pushing stuff onto them, but you're giving them stuff that they find interesting, that they wanna come in and find out more about. It's about nurturing your client base and it definitely is about marketing as well. So this is an online marketing strategy. But I hear you say, people don't read news that is. We get so many emails coming into our inbox that most of them get deleted before they read. Well, that's true, because I do that. In fact, I use G Suite or Gmail to collect all my emails. The great thing about that there is they've got these tick boxes and you can tick the top one and you hold the shift key down and you can tick the bottom one. It highlights a lot and you hit the delete key. Boom, they go on. So that's probably gonna happen to your newsletter that you send out. So the strategy you put in place, it's probably gonna happen to that. But you know what? It really doesn't matter because what it is about is about keeping you and your business top of mind for them and it's about being there regularly. So it's that whole advertising thing. Like why do businesses advertise on TV and every ad break, you see the same ad over and over and over again? So it's about getting your kids to sing those jingles so that your kids now are reminding you about these ads that keep on popping up on TV. They really annoy you, but the end of the day, annoy you or what? Guess what? You remember them. So this is all about remorse. It's not about annoying your clients but it's just about having you top of mind and remembering you. And there's a marketing principle out there called RFM, which is recency, frequency and monetize. And what that means is that people buy off people their trust. And so how do you gain that trust? Is that one is that you've spoken to them or communicated with them recently. So at the point of time they're making a decision, they remember you because you've just spoken to them. The other one is that not only have they just spoken to you now or communicated with you just now, but they've done it every week for the past year. So when they're making a decision about which web development firm should we go with? Should it be this one here that I've just Googled or should it be this one here that's been sending me information on a regular basis that I find of value, there's been some really interesting stuff in it. They seem to know what they're doing, seem to know what they're talking about versus this one here I've only just met, which do you think they're gonna go with? So this is about creating that sort of relationship, building the credibility. And it doesn't matter what it's a web development business or financial services business or what was this, this works for pretty much all businesses, particularly service businesses. And then the last one is monetized because obviously once they're in the buying mode, they'll actually spend the money with the one they trust and the one that they know. Does that make sense? But I hear you say, writing newsletter is too hard. I've got no time, spending all the time in the business, working in the business, running the business. I've got issues coming out of my years, I've got to deal with clients for goodness sake. And they keep coming in and they've got problems and issues and I've got to try and sort them out. So there is no time. So when do you do it? Late at night after you get home and you've got your works over, you've finished your accounts. So it's now time to write the newsletter at one o'clock in the morning. You've got a few hours before you have to get up the next morning. And then there's, well, what do I write about? So probably an abundance of topics, but when you sit down to write, can you think of anything to write about? Usually that's when the blank page happens and the blank mind's there. When the blank page and the blank mind meet, all you get is nothing. Or time port, it becomes a low priority. So when a client rings up or you've got sort of something there that's of an urgent nature, it sits on the top of the pile. This newsletter actually isn't urgent at all. So it just keeps on getting pushed down as all these urgent things get sort of thrown on top. And once you've actually put pen to paper or a keyboard to computer, then you've got to do the design, the layout, you've got to find images that are relevant to it all. You know, that's why most newsletters probably get about, there's about two that go out and then it stops there because it's just too much work and it's too time consuming. So 17 minutes. Could we really do a newsletter in 17 minutes or less a week? Well, it is all about the setup. It's about automation and it's about delegation. I should do this in my business. We have a newsletter that goes out once a week, every week without fail and I spend no time on it because we've set it up to automate. I do have someone that works on it and for her, it probably takes her, if she's spending 17 minutes on it a week, she's spending, you know, that's probably the most check she spends on it going through this process here. The key to it is, is OPC, leveraging other people's content. And there's lots of well-written articles out there that are by people that know a lot more than I do, that write a lot better than I do and a lot more interesting to people than, you know, what I could write. So if it's there, why not use it because your clients and customers probably haven't seen it. So all you're doing is you're grabbing their content and presenting it to them because they understand who wrote it, they're interested in who actually gave it to them. So when you're giving a gift, you don't actually have to make the gift, you just have to give the gift. So the first place to start is, in your business, there's probably things that you receive that you subscribe to that are of interest to you that you know are gonna be of interest to your client base. So that's a good place to start. For me as a web developer, probably what's not of interest to my clients is why PHP 7 is good as opposed to PHP 5.6. It's really interesting to me, but that's not interesting to my clients. But what may be interesting to my clients is how to get another 1% additional revenue from your website without having to do a whole lot more work. So that sort of thing might be interesting. Or how to get 10% more traffic or how to get another 1,000 visitors to my site, which then convert into another 10 customers at $200 a shot. That there starts to become interesting. Now PHP 7 might actually help with that in terms of speed, but actually it's the result. So you wanna think, when you're giving people information, what is it that's gonna add value to them and often what adds value to them is something that's gonna save them time or save them money or make them money in their particular business or industry. So if you've got that top of mind, then you're looking in the right places. So when I subscribe to newsletters or blogs and my virtual assistant often does this, she's got a, we've set out a set of criteria, so she's got criteria that she works to. We'll use a service, a third party service like feedly.com and we'll subscribe to it. And all of those articles just come into our feedly account and then all we have to sift and sort through is just interesting articles that are in that there. So that's just aggregate the content that we find is interesting. Often use a dedicated email account. So mine's really imaginative. I use subscribe at positivebusinessonline.com and so that's what we use to subscribe to any articles or posts that are out there. So it's not filling up my inbox or with that, it's just a dedicated email address. So it is all in the set up and what I'll run through now are the WordPress plugins that we use to set this up. So and I'll make these slides available. So if you want to follow this through, there's a formula here, you can follow all this through and implement it yourself and it will work. So first one I use is a plugin called Tribulant Newsletters. It's available in the WordPress plugin repository. That's the free version that's in there. There is a pro version which I recommend that after you've tried it out, get the pro version because that's got all the features. I think this is limited to 100 subscribers or there is some limitation there but to buy it, it's about 50 bucks. So it's not expensive. So install that, configure that. There's a part of the configuration is you probably can't actually read this but this is the configuration screen. The important things that we do is we put in a subject line. So this subject line's on every email so it might be I think ours is probably really exciting like positive business online news, something like that but we just use the same subject line all the time and the reason for that is when it hits the inbox they know who it's from. So they've got the email address they know it's from and as soon as they see positive business online news it's like these are these people again. Remember it's just keeping top of mind. We set, you have to set the number of posts. So you can set the last five posts or last 10 posts that go out. We set it at sort of a hundred. We're never gonna publish more than a hundred there but we just wanna make sure that everything we publish there goes out in the next newsletter and we set the start date for the posts that are there and how often we send it. So we send ours once a week. Might be more appropriate for you to send it once a month. If you really wanna be top of mind send one once a day or even twice a day but you probably get a lot of unsubscribes if you do that. And you can create your own theme, your own newsletter theme so that it's branded to yourself so you can load that up, you can have your own theme so your branding's from front of the clients as well too. But configuration page, you'll be able to have a look at this on the slides when you get them. Obviously you need a subscribe form so you can get people to subscribe to your newsletter. And one of the good things is if you use a plugin like Gravity Forms you can connect your Gravity Form to this newsletter form and so you can have all of your landing pages and opt-in pages, all of them connecting through the newsletter so every time you grab an email address on the website, your contact forms, all feeds into your newsletter. And you can segment it by, so you know what landing page they came from so you can be as granular or not as you like with it. So the plugin, the Tributant plugin has got pretty much a lot of the features that your MailChimp saw your campaign monitors have got as well and if you didn't wanna use that plugin you could use Campaign Monitor or MailChimp or any of those other services it works with that as well too. Also use a plugin called Quick Page Post Redirect Plugin and we'll show you why we use that. There's the configuration we use, that's just for you to go and sort of copy when you do it but essentially what we do is, oh, I'll tell you about it. The other plugin that we use is Jetpack. And what we enable and configure on Jetpack is the auto share to social media. So whenever we publish a post that's gonna go into the newsletter that every time it publishes we send it out on social media as well. So it goes out into Twitter and to Facebook, LinkedIn, I don't know, just how many of I got there? Tumblr, Google Plus, few Google Plus accounts. Yeah, so there's lots of places it goes. And in fact, there's someone that I met here today, he said, oh yeah, I see you all the time on Twitter. Well, that's probably from all the articles that we publish through the system here. So that's top of mind. So someone I've never met before knows me because she's seen our stuff out there on a fairly regular basis. So that's part of it as well. And I've got clients that say, I know you from somewhere and we've never met them before but my images, like my profile images out in all social media, so I use my face out there so they become familiar with my face but then I'm also publishing stuff on a very, very constant basis. So that gives people a feeling that when they meet you, they actually feel like they know you. So that's part of it. And when people feel like they know you, then they're more likely to trust you and they're more likely to come and do business with you. So there's a handy little feature in WordPress which is a little button called Press This. How many people have seen that and know where that is? Who has no idea where that is? Excellent. This is a really cool tool that not many people know about but makes publishing content really, really easy. And I think it's in tools. If you go to the dashboard there under tools, then you'll see that little Press This Market. That's what the button looks like. All you do with it is you put your mouse cursor on it, you click on it and drag it up to your bookmarks bar and let go and then you'll be able to use that on any website you visit in that browser and I'll show you how that works. This is how it works. Oh, actually I've got a video on it. So let's play the video and we'll show you. Maybe we won't. How to play this video? Oh no, is it going? There it is. So what we're doing is there's the Press This. See we've dragged it up to the toolbar there. And this is Feedly. So here's all the articles that are in the Feedly account. So you see it just brings them all in. And so when we go to a user, we select one of them, use the Press This, we open it up in the browser. So we've now gone to one of these articles that we've found. So here it is, we go and press that Press This thing that we dragged up to the toolbar. That now opens a post in WordPress, a draft post in this format here. So now we can format it. So we're gonna add an image to add as the featured image. And then we're gonna add some categories. So we'll categorize it so it sits in the right place on the website. And we'll also add some tags as well. So this is all happening on this screen here. And then once we've done that, we'll go down and we'll publish it as a draft post. So on that bottom right hand area that you can see a little blue button, that one there. So we'll click that and we select draft. You can actually publish it straight from there, but we just select draft because there's a few other things we wanna do. So then it opens it up in the WordPress Editing dashboard. So we can edit it from here. So select the text editor and then we're gonna take the URL of the source because the URL's in there. We're gonna copy it and drag it down into this area. This is the quick redirects plugin. So we're gonna put the link in there so that we're gonna be able to redirect it to that link. And when people come to the site, they'll be able to open it on the actual site itself. We'll now schedule a publish date and what we do is we publish every day. So we put an article out every day. So it publishes on our website every day. So it's only an excerpt. So that's what appears in your archives anyway as an excerpt, but it's only an excerpt that we're publishing from this site. And when you click on it, when it's live, it takes you straight through to mods. So this one here, the article is taken from mods. So it takes you straight through there. You don't even see it on the front end of your website. You actually wanna see it on the front end of your website. Just uncheck those two tick boxes here. And then what are we doing? I think we're just changing the date there, setting the date. Decide we're gonna publish on a different day now. And then we'll go and preview it on the front of the site. So this here is taking us through to the front of my website now. This is what it looks like on the front of my, this is actually a 2014 theme I think. We've just got a vanilla website. This is what it looks like here. So it is just the excerpt, but they'll never see it. So now we'll just tick the, to make it live again and to make sure that it redirects to the original article and now it opens up on mods. So this is it on the mods. So they don't even see it on the front of my website. This is the newsletter when it goes out. So every week, every article that we've published, we publish these once a day on our website and it collates all of the, you've got an image, a headline, and an excerpt into the newsletter. This is what you see in the inbox. Now, when someone comes and clicks on, say, a link, they'll just scan through, all people do is they scan through and say, is there anything interesting to me here? No, no, no. Actually, this one looks really interesting. They'll click on that link there. It goes through to my website, but they don't get to see it because it just goes straight through to the website that the article is hosted on. So I haven't written any of these articles. They have people far better and far more talented than me that have written them. All I've done is sent them this here of stuff that they may be interested in. So it makes sense. So the purpose of it is, I just send this out to them regularly. There are some ancillary benefits on the website for doing this, but there's 15 steps. Remember I said it's going to take you 17 minutes a week? Well, it's only 15 steps to set up and each of these steps is less than a minute anyway. So we set up the press this. Set up Feedly to grab your articles. Go to your website. Click press this that was up on that top bar there. We select the featured image. We categorize it. We tag a file. We open the standard editor through publishes draft. We set the quick links so it redirects through to the original article page. We just format it a bit just to make, there's sometimes there are words in there that are not quite right. You might write a custom excerpt there if we want. You can do that sort of thing. Schedule the publish date. And we check the social media settings. So when it publishes, so every time it publishes, it also publishes to our Facebook page, to our Twitter, Google+, whatever. So that all goes out there. So that gets published before our newsletter gets published. So these things are constantly going out. So we're all over the place. Test the link, rinse and repeat. So just do that. Imagine if you wanted five articles in a newsletter, just do that five times, you could probably knock that out in 15 minutes or so. So easy, eh? And so this way here, you've got no excuse for not doing it. Because you've always got 15 minutes somewhere. You don't have to write it. You don't have to find images. You don't have to look at this blank page with a blank mind and come up with nothing because you've got lots of stuff on the web. You find stuff that's interesting to you and interesting to your clients. And generally, if it's really interesting to you, it's probably interesting to them as well if it's in the same sort of field. So there's nothing hard about that because you're interested in it as well. And so now you're just serving up value week after week after week. And then when the people are ready to buy or they're ready to do something with you, who's top of mind? Well, you are because they've seen you every week. You seem to know what you're talking about because you're publishing stuff that's really good when they click on the links, it actually makes sense and it adds value to them. So in their eyes, it just lifts your credibility over and above all of your competitors because how many of your competitors are doing this? Probably none or one or two. So they're probably spending way more time on it than you are, but you're just doing it in under 17 minutes a week while they're sweating three or four hours a week to do it. So you're on the beach while they're writing their articles. Easy, eh? So, oh, that's a finished product. So that's sort of what it looks like. Oh, I'm missing an image there. We didn't put a featured image and one of them, you know, a good thing about that is that one really stands out. So they'll probably click on it and read it. There are some additional ancillary benefits with this. One is that if you set up your categories right on your website, so we've set up categories for things like SEO, things that are related to SEO, things that are related to creating content, things that are relating to Facebook. I don't know what they all are now. I don't do it. But what happens is, is that all of those categories, you've now filled up your category pages with all of these articles there that are interesting. So your category pages look like your newsletters, but now you've got sort of, you know, five pages of articles on, let's say, SEO. So it means when people come to your website, you've actually got a whole lot of content there. When they click on them, they still go to another website. And on my one, they all open up on a new webpage, so they still stay on my website, but they're opened up in another page. But now your website becomes a resource that people will go to because they know that there's material in there that is gonna be of interest to them because you've aggregated it and collated it all. From a search engine perspective, when you've got a whole page, an archive page on search engine optimization, how do you think that's gonna also work on your search rankings? Or, you know, widget making or pancake making. You know, you've got all the 15 ways to make pancakes on one page. You know, so from a search engine perspective, you can now optimize that archive page and you can put a, so let's say an opening description on it, with, you know, here are the top articles about pancake making. And so you can do a little bit for optimization as well too, so you can start to get good search juice on it as well. You can reuse some of the really popular articles. So with the plugin in there, you can track who's clicked on what, who's opened what, so you know exactly what's happening. If you find some articles there are really popular, you can create another broadcast newsletter or mailing out and you could just include all the popular articles and when you're in there, it's just a tick box of I want this one, this one, this one, and this one, click Q to send and it's gone. So you've got an extra resource for all your popular things. You could use it in an autoresponder as well too, so when someone signs up on your website for, you know, the 16 greatest things about whatever it is you do, you can send them that 16 greatest things and then queue up an autoresponder of the 15 most popular articles that relate to that as well, that you've curated off the web that you've sent through an newsletter before. And so setting up that autoresponder probably takes you less than a minute too to queue up each autoresponder. So you have 15 autoresponders set up that you haven't written, that still keeps you in touch with your clients. You can create new subscriber lists to access specific categories. So if you've got a landing page on gluten-free pancakes, you can set up a landing page there. People can sign up to gluten-free pancakes. They're on your list now and then you can send them in an autoresponder articles only on gluten-free pancakes. So now you can be quite specific and targeted to your client base in terms of what they indicated they were interested in. So if you're sending them stuff that they are interested in, then it's more likely they're gonna come back and sort of deal with you because you've shown that you understand their needs and interests. That makes sense? So there's probably more that you can do with it, but these are just some of the things that we do and we work with our clients with these as well and set these up for our clients. We've got a building inspector, pest controller, accounts, what do you got, bookkeeper. We've got them all on the system here. They never have to worry about them using it again. I've got a virtual assistant that runs it all. All we do is we say for the bookkeeper, these are the topics that people are gonna be interested in. We do a bit of a survey of the clients. They're interested in for a bookkeeper. Do you think they're interested in tax? No, they're interested in things that run a business, how to be more profitable, how to get more out of my staff, how to deal with customers that are paying the arse. So these are the sorts of things that are interested in. So those are the sorts of articles that we look for for this bookkeeper and those are what goes out to her customer base and she gets new business off that. So if you wanna find out the step by step way to do it, there's the link, it's on our website. So go there and all this is on the website or you go to our website and search news editor. It'll come up in search or you can go to SlideShare and it's there in SlideShare as well to this exact presentation. But since I wrote this, you can actually automate it to do it quicker than 17 minutes a week. You can actually use a service called Zapier or Zapier, however you say it and it will grab articles from, that you've curated infeedly and automatically send it through to WordPress as draft posts. So you don't even have to use the press this button and they're sitting there. So then once a week you can just go in, just check it all, just go through that setup in terms of putting the redirect link in, you might put a featured image in. So just go through that process and send it through. So that's probably saved another five minutes a week using something like Zapier or IFTT, which is another service like Zapier. So here's the resources we use. So go press this, it's in the dashboard, use it, get that from tribulent.com or you can get it from the WordPress repository or go to tribulent.com. That's where you'll download the newsletter plugin. Use a quick page post redirect plugin from the repository, use feedly, use Zapier. That's all it is. And that's how you find me. That's it.