 Grazie. Ciao Tutti. And that's about it from me and my Italian. I will talk in English. So I have a question for all of you that are present here, because the topic is about telling stories and storytelling. You as WordPress developers, professionals and businesses, when you get the statement or when you hear people tell you that you need to tell stories in order to get clients and get more businesses, do you struggle to come up with the idea of how to do it in a more meaningful way and even if you come from something that is very specific or technical, how to be relevant to your audience in order to get that sale? Raise up, like if that's something that you struggle with. Okay. Well, that's why we are here today. Hopefully, we'll get you to learn more about how to tell meaningful stories that drive your audience to connect with you, to have more kids and ultimately sale. And to that end and again, raise hands if this is something that you consider storytelling is when this topic comes to mind, like storytelling is form or shape of selling without being too salesy or too icky. And this is like common question or common answer I get when talking with my clients about storytelling because this is like the presumption people have about storytelling. But in fact, business story is not about sales, not about selling per se. It's a scope of tools and a technique that helps people connect with you more meaningful way in a deep way that comes from understanding. If there's something you know, when it comes to sale, whether it's marketing or business related, people buy from people they know, like and trust. That is the LT tactic. And in order to get yourself a product of people who know, like and trust you, you will do it through storytelling. So I will, for this presentation, I prepare several examples. So whether you are a developer who are building sites or you need site on WordPress. And then instead of going more technical, more into this is what will WordPress do for you. You start with the story to introduce the transformation your client will have in order to understand deeper meaning why they need WordPress and not Joomla, for instance. And for that, let's say this is your prospect. And she has a small bakery in her lovely neighborhood outside of Verona, and she wants to broad her bakery business. And instead of going to her, like, yeah, you will do that all within the site, you can introduce a story for your other client, let's say it's Bianca, that has a similar bakery in the town. And you built a website for her that brought her more clients, more recognition. And she was able to go out of the just local neighborhood. And by saying it that way, we're almost here, her mind clicks, like, okay, I can relate to Bianca and to her story. And it all now makes sense. Instead of just going, like, Oh, if you know how to use word, you will know how to use WordPress. It's that easy. Just go and let's sign the deal. I will make you a site. You need to come from the prospect's mind. What is that? One thing, one more goal I just want to fulfill and to, like, put in place, she wants to grow her business. How can her business grow by you building her site, just like Bianca did before, and building that site that broadened her horizon, the same you can do with her. So then, by knowing that and introducing her story, Bianca's story, as an example, she's Francesca is happy, and she now understands what needs to be done. And only then, when you paint a picture and you show the transformation, you can go more into specific details, technical stuff, how to use WordPress better, and how exactly that results. Now, what do these brands have in common? Airbnb, Coca-Cola, Tupperware, Lego, Nike. Can someone tell me? They've all built their names and their brands on stories. So, Airbnb, it's not about taking places. No, it's reviving sense of home wherever you are. Coca-Cola is not selling drinks. It is selling lifestyle. And I would add another thing on that list that is WordPress, that is not selling CMS. It sells a reliable and safe home for your stories. So, when you put it in that perspective, things get to have more sense and more clarity. And you need to be clear, clear, not clever in order to tell better stories and in order to sell. So, to sum up, facts talk. They tell, but stories are the ones that ultimately sell when you tell them correctly. Because if you just state the facts, state the features of your product or your service that you offer, that is not merely interesting, nor relevant to your prospects. Why? Because they don't know the topic or your experience that much well as you do. And it's like you're speaking different language. But when you introduce it from way of the struggles and their needs, and you make it relevant to them, and you do it through stories, that is the exact moment when you make a connection from that connection, you build trust. And from trust, you go to say. Now, I will give you another few examples. Like, if you are a WordPress developer or you do WordPress maintenance, and you want to offer those services to your customers, instead of saying, okay, I do WordPress maintenance, I'm coming from marketing experience. I had no idea what the maintenance was or why we needed. And then again, as a marketer, I get clients who are from WordPress, and I need to write stories about their businesses, about their services. I needed to educate myself about the topic in order to bring it up to their target audience. So everything that I'm talking to you now that I'm sharing is something that I am using constantly and have been using for past 15 years. And I know it brings results. It's not something that I read somewhere and just copy pasted for this presentation. So instead of just telling, okay, I do WordPress maintenance, and then like Francesca will say, okay, so what's in it for me? You can explain it through a story like, okay, so I built a site for Bianca, but she didn't include the regular checkup, which resulted in crashing site. So if you want to escape that struggle, then you can maintain safe and secure environment within your WordPress site by having me to maintain monthly regular checkups in order to have your site safe, secure and online. And when you feel it, it can sound like, why would I need to do that? But you need to do that because people don't know you, maybe they don't trust you. And if you want to sale, you need them to know you like you and trust you in order to do so. So you will better present your offering, whatever it is that you do when you tell it through a story. Another example, again, if you're a financial advisor, and you offer people or friends or businesses consultancy for annual savings and stuff like that, like those are all two technical details, two narrow financial things that common people don't understand. But if you introduce it through a story, through a struggle, let's say that one of your clients, she had like a big mess with her car, it wouldn't start, she couldn't go on anymore, it's beyond repairs. And she needed a new car because you were such a good financial advisor and you came up with some annual plan, she said, not enough money to buy a new car, all because of your services that you provide. Because people, like, I don't know if I need a financial advisor or why I need a financial advisor or what can he bring to the table that is good and relevant to me. But when you introduce your services or what it is that you do, from the perspective of your target audience, what their wants and needs are, you know what it is that they want ultimately, and you package your offer in a way as a solution for that, you do it with telling stories. That is the moment when you convert them from prospects into your clients. Now, to sum it all up, like I mentioned four times before, you need a story. That story needs to have relevant examples, specifically not to your target audience. When you have a story, when you have an example, that is when you make a connection. And that is the first step from being unknown, semi-known to known person or business. And then from that, build trust by being continuously present and talking about what you do and how it helps your target audience. And only then, when you have blocked that trust, you can make sales. Without this tactic, without these steps, when you just go out and talk, there isn't much connectivity. And you can miss out many deals closing if you don't introduce that like no intract factor. Now, like in everything, there are several, like not just the rules per se, but recommendations when it comes to storytelling in a manner. And these are these seven types of most used stories or categories that you can use to describe whatever it is that you do, no matter industry you're coming from. And even some of you might say, okay, but maybe my competition is doing the same thing that you talk about today and using these types of stories. Nevertheless, competition isn't you. They don't have your thoughts. They don't have your experience. They don't have your authenticity that you bring to the table, which is precisely what makes every story, no matter what type you choose, that much different and original. So starting with the underdog story, like or nonhero, that could be a new Bivorpress developer who is just starting out looking to make a name for himself to get clients. But because nobody knows him and he's just starting out, he doesn't have clients or anything to do business wise. So instead of dropping out or giving up, he's persistent. He visits workshops. He visits conferences much like these. And in time, his persistence, he pays up. He either do some freebies for family members or helping out at the discount rates for friends. And in time, he gets more known. He showcases his work. And sooner than later, people come to see him as more reliable, more trustworthy, and giving him offers for a job. So that's the underdog quest. That can be a story about like, I will take me for example, I started doing online professionally in 2008, wanted to make an online site for women like women's magazine. In Serbia, there weren't plenty or at all women magazines online, like a lifestyle magazine. So I wanted to make it something relevant, something important to me and to my target audience. And I started doing it in Jumla, because in 2008, WordPress was really, really bad. And I didn't connect with it. So I started using Jumla for four years and almost four years, and it was crashing down. It was totally delusional. So I wanted to make it better to update it. And came upon one young developer who convinced me to still try WordPress. It is much better. Okay. So I like struggled, but said, okay, let's do it. So in my pursuit to find something that will be more reliable and better for me and my audience, I really made the great choice because not only did I transfer my site to WordPress and gain much more visibility and ease of use instead of the old way with Jumla, but it also brought me to here today, because it was just one step more towards WordPress ecosystem and everything that we do collectively together. And again, for him, he made not just great client who paid him on time without question asked, but also a good friend and a good testimonial for years to come. Then another type of story is like journey return. This is a similar, like all these types of stories are in part similar, but it's the context that give you differentiator. So in this journey return, it can be a story about, let's say, you as a WordPress professional want to broaden your horizon and want to challenge yourself to do something different. So perhaps from doing maintenance, you want to now build sites or you want to go to learn storytelling and copywriting techniques. So you are pursuing this new career, new path and describing what it does to you and how you grow. But ultimately, it all brings you back to the one core idea, which is as we all know when it comes to WordPress, helping others and the WordPress community is as strong as the people that are in it. From regs to riches, it can be a story about, let's say, call him Marco. He's a really talented professional guy who has several products that he wants to sell but doesn't have physical location. So what he does, he comes up with making an e-commerce site, put those products on the site, but doesn't stop there. Instead, he learns all the marketing techniques, social media marketing and invests his time and energy into excellent customer service. And by doing so, not only that he succeeds with his e-commerce business, but he's recognized as someone trustworthy, someone credible, and this behavior helps him not only succeed with his e-commerce site, but along the right, he comes up with two, three locations of physical stores because of it. Now a comedy, it can be an anecdotal story, whatever it is that is funny and relatable. So let's say we have Gabriela and she is a designer and she has a request from a client who wants some unicorn call to action button and it's instead of asking client to clarify what she means by unicorn call to action, where that client meant she wants something unique and special and out of this place. Gabriela was like straightforward, she really thought that that client wanted a real unicorn, so she made some animation call to action button and sent it off to the client. And instead of client being okay, this is not what I asked for, no, I don't want to pay you, client went aboard, she loved it and that way it became something funny, something relatable and something that people love. It doesn't have to make like any deep sense or doesn't have to be salesy in order to sell. People might not like hire you out of one story, but if you are consistent and you keep showing up and telling something interesting, relatable, like relatable is the most important, you can come up with more conversions, more sales than finishing off with the tragedy because yeah, in the core of storytelling is evoking emotions. So you need both like balance from comedy and tragedy. Tragedy can be Marco, where he while maintaining his business and great e-commerce site, he didn't think of maintenance and what happened, he didn't have put services that in place, so his site was hacked and some user data was leaked, which ended up with him losing his credibility and trust with his audience, so he needed to recuperate it. So this is like tragedy is a type of cautionary stories that you can talk with your clients, so they are getting to know you better, how are you overcoming some struggles, some issues, and to give it like a teaching point moment. And then for rebirth, that can be again, Marco overcoming that obstacles that he has instead of like losing all the trust, what steps did he take in order to rebuild his credibility, his trust in people and what he does to like recuperate that lost user data. And what is that common thing that all these types of stories have? Knowing who your target audience is, what is that that they want, what is that that they need, what they search for online. And when you know that, then you can know what you need to do and how to package your offer as a solution to their needs and to their wants. But what if we want to tell our stories in writing to put it out there? Well, we do it with this old good friend called SEO. And with optimizing our stories and to demonstrate to you, this is like what I call anatomy of a good written text. And no matter what industry you are coming from, no matter if you're writing for a website or a blog or social media posts, or a landing page, whatever, like the sizing is different, but the context is the same. These are the main things that you need to include in order to get more visibility online. Starting with the title, which is the most important part or every story, the key determinator, whether people will click that title to read more. And if we know something that is that eight out of 10 people won't click that title, if it's not interesting enough, relevant enough, engaging enough, but not click bait. So don't go into that trap. The same goes with meta description, which is like a sentence or two that explains the title better and preferably has the key phrase that you want to rank for that is same goes with the title. And then the content itself needs to be of utmost relevance to your target audience to answer their every question to provide as much as information they need in order to fully understand what it is that you're talking about and what you offer. Within that text, it's not sufficient to have just text. You need to have multimedia, whether it's a GIF, whether it's video, some form of photograph, because not only Google likes it, but people need some kind of distraction because we are like golden fishes. And if we don't have something to hook us to the end of the text, they will go away. And then when you provide all the necessary information in order and with all the types that both Google and people love, then you come with call to action, very specific things. Once you provide the value, the useful information or the help them fulfill their goal, it's time to ask something in return. So you need to give in order to get something, whether it's like leave a comment, subscribe to my newsletter or write me a quote for my offer, whatever it is, tell people what you want from them after you provided them relevant solution. And then because the Google is not all mighty and even he or she or they need help, you would need to share what you wrote on social media, just to give it a little push and to get it quicker. Cheers. To give it a bigger push to broader audience. And I will be quick. So I will present you examples, just not to be abstract. These are examples of my text that I wrote for myself or for my clients by doing just exactly what I told you. So this is like what are photo licenses. Like it's not that general and still not deep enough to like gather 20 people, but you see this is a text that I wrote for a max company from Serbia, who is developing premium WordPress sites. And this is a text from 2018, still on the first page of Google, like they don't have paid marketing, nothing. Google adds nothing, just content marketing and telling stories, just the way I told you today. Now manage WEP. I write also for them. So you see online presence WordPress, like number two, totally organic. They're just paying me to write stuff that I think are good for their target audience and will do good on WordPress. Then again, simplify WordPress user management. Like this is the ultimate goal. This is like position number zero. This is like the something that you really want for your business or your clients to do. And I managed to do this again for manage WP, just by telling stories in a way that I'm sharing you today. And of course, this is my own copywriting versus content writing versus storytelling. Again, there is story league than me from Serbia, I think in English, but knowing what I'm doing to come up as close to the first result that I can. So it's not about what you sell, what you offer. Marketing is not about that, as Seth Godin, the great marketer Seth, said it's not longer about stuff that you make, but the stories that you tell in a way that I'm recommending you tell today. And that is why I'm finishing up by answering who are the people, who is your target audience? What is that has to do with you and why you need to speak with them in that way? And why did you offer precisely that which you're offering to them? And by answering what it is that bothers them? What are their desires? What are they searching for online? And again, why does it matter? And what it has to do with you and your offer? And why are you better than competition? By answering these questions, you will get your stories exact and clear every time and get results. This is my promise to you. And finishing off really quickly, what about CharGPT? We can finish up this talk without mentioning CharGPT because everyone is using it today. So like me and for that each and every this example except of the quest, which is mine, CharGPT told me and suggested that I use only because this is the exact presentation I used in Milano in 2019. And I wanted to spice it up and to make it more relevant and to use more relevant tools to make it a bit different. So I use and ask CharGPT to come up with the examples that I show you. And how did I do that? Well, this is the prompt exact prompt that I use. This is what I wrote in like an input and ask him to come up with the examples that I shared and showcase today. And whether you're using CharGPT or not still, there are like quick tips. How did I come up with this? And like best, ultimate best practice is how to come up with great inputs every time. Like the answer CharGPT will give you is only as good as input you provide. And it needs to come from defining the instruction being as detailed as you can and to prompt the context to give relevant information about what it is that you want from them to put them in a role like I did, you are a WordPress expert, a specialist, whatever it is, and to prepare it what it is that you want from it in order to give you the back, the information that you want and always even applicable use real examples because although CharGPT is great and can provide useful information, it's not perfect and it doesn't understand context unless you provide it to him. So these are like my final tips and I really hope that you enjoy this talk, which I'm finishing right now. Thank you very much and giving time to you and your questions. Thank you. Thank you, Ivana. Let's hear for a couple of questions. Yes. Matteo. So first, before the question, I want to say just a word about CharGPT. Yes. I tried it, but what I noticed is that sometimes I indicated something, but the thing was that this was not following my rule. So I will, for example, say it's okay not do this and it will do this still also if there was this. Anyway, the question was this. So you said before that position zero, right? Position zero the point of Google. Yes. I was asking, but in this way you're letting people do less navigation on the site because people are just seeing the answer directly. What do you think about it? Do you think it's really, really convenient for someone to stay there or maybe it's just better to stay in the first position without it so you can have just the user to click it? Yeah, that's a great question and thank you a lot because it gives me opportunity to explain. So it goes both ways. When you are position zero, yes, people will get the information and move on, but those are not your people. The people that want to work with you, the people that find value in you in offering the answer within that small part of the web and the search engine result, will want to click to find out more and then you can convert them. So it's like a freebie that how to say it in English separates like weed from the quality stuff. So that is really for me and for my clients and from my experience, this is something that works very well. So, okay, some part of people will find value from the zero search result and move on, but the one who don't, who click, those are the ones that are warmest and those are the ones that trust you enough that then you can convert them into your prospects, into your clients or buyers. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, I'm sorry we don't have any time anymore. I'm here to like, if you want to ask me something more or to just talk in the hallway in between talks, Alexander, including you. Yes, I'm here. Thank you.