 And my name is Andreas. I have been following this community for a bit of over one year now. I have never given a talk before, so I thought why not do it in the last talk of 2018. So I have been using WordPress on my daily life and also for work pretty much on a daily basis for the last five years. I usually enjoy building stuff with WordPress that are beyond blocking. So for example, I have done some logistic solutions, some registration platforms and so on. But today the talk will be related to how you can build and manage a community of people, a community of users using WordPress as your backbone. And this is what we do on our business, on our website Just Run Lab, which I am one of the co-founders. Right, so for today I will just give a short introduction of what we do. Now I am going to share with you about how was our mindset when we got started and maybe you can find some ideas to apply yourself. Why is this? This is not really working. This is jumping around like crazy. Which pattern? This is the first slide, the next slide. So after that I will become a little bit technical, talk about some plugins that you might need to use when you manage a large number of users. Talk about how you can keep growing your community and close with a challenge of opportunities that come along the way. So starting with who we are today, we are JustRun Lab.com, the largest website for runners and active individuals in Asia Pacific. We have about 300,000 users that give us about close to 800 pages per month. The main functionality that people use us now is to discover events and register on our platform. They can also get discounted tickets. We have a very new dashboard where you can keep track of the events that you joined. You can keep track of your progress and unlock badges. So we are working a little bit in gamification of running. But what I'm here to discuss today is about this function where people can start their own blog on our website. We have about 150 authors at the moment and the community keeps growing. But let's see how we started. So it was back in 2013. And that was a time where I had just arrived in Singapore a few months ago. I was interested, I'm still interested in running myself. I was a bit fitter back then. And it was December, so Singapore month I was coming up. There were thousands of people literally out in the streets running, but there was no platform, no website for people to discuss. People to find information and review the events. So I thought, why not do one myself? And the first thing I did is I just bought a $10 domain on Bluehost.com and I launched three different platforms. So one was a forum on phbb2, which is a free platform. The blog of course on WordPress plus a Facebook page, which of course you can do it for free. And just like that, just when I was born, and I will show you how it looked like. But before that, I need to share this, that if you are not embarrassed with the first version of a product, you launch too late. So I'm a bit embarrassed about the design, but I will show you anyway. So this is how just when I looked in 2013-14. This is our first logo and the homepage. So you can see we started having articles, blogs, forums, the running event calendar, which now evolved to be the ticketing platform. But most importantly, when we focus today, it's about this button over here. So you can see that it says bloggers are wanted, join the team. And this is how we started building the community. So back to the mindset that we had during the first month, how you can apply this to your case. First thing to do is you need to pick a subject that you really like, because you will end up talking and working on it basically every day. The good news is no matter how specialized and weird your interest might be, you are not the only one who has this interest online. You will always be able to join you. And maybe you don't want to go too broad in the beginning. So if you, for example, you're interested in cooking, you might start with, I don't know, cupcakes first and then go into different recipes. Next point is that in the beginning, you should take this as a hobby. It's not the time to start thinking about your protection of your IP or your business plan or P&L, this kind of thing. There will be a time for that later. Very, very important. These days a lot of things are free online. So of course we have WordPress, we have free forums, a lot of premium software. So you get Canva, for example, for your graphic design. You can get Cloudflare for your security casting and a lot of other resources. Use the forums, use free resources, stack overflow. Next is about your content itself. So you need to be committed and consistent. If you want to attract other people to work with you and write for you and create content for you, first you need to create content yourself. Last is, I think, yeah, don't quit your days off yet. If you are lucky, there might be a time for that later. But it takes time. Because here we're talking about community building. We're not talking about a fast-track explosive growth startup model. All right, so once you set up your blog, you start creating your own content, how to attract people. First thing is you need to let them know that they can join you. So this is an actual graphic that we created. We posted on our home page, as you saw, as well as our Facebook page and so on. And very important is you need to find people that share the same passion and do what they do for the right reasons. So you need to come up with a few lines to actually set the expectations, tell them what you expect from them, and try to give something in return. So right now this is, we are in a position where we can give free tickets, we can give free products or blogs, but it wasn't like this in the beginning. So just try to think some ways to reward them. But on the other hand, you don't want to make this a very business transaction. So you don't want people to write for you just to get something out of it in return. You really want people to write because they love it. So you need to balance this a little bit. Next step, very important, is make it easy to join. So we have a very simple form with a few things that people need to fill in. We get this form, then we set up the account for them. And when things start getting a little bit more difficult, is you need to start thinking about how you're going to manage the people. So this is a screen so that I took yesterday from our admin panel. As you can see now, we have about 90,000 registered users, each account. So when you come to a stage like this, a workplace management is a little bit difficult. So you need to plan ahead. And I will show you now some of the ideas and plugins that you need to start using. So now it's become a little bit technical. So the first thing is you need to understand what are user roles, what are capabilities in WordPress. By default, you might have seen this screen when you tried to create a new user. By default, WordPress comes with six predefined roles, which are administration, editor, author, contributor, subscriber. The idea behind assigning roles to every user is that different roles can perform different tasks, which are called capabilities. So for example, you wouldn't want your commercial subscriber to be able to delete posts, or maybe approve posts, or edit other people's posts. So by default, all these roles have certain limitations. Then the good news is that you don't have to be limited to the six roles. You can actually extend this to as many roles as you want. Throughout the slides, I will just recommend a few plugins, which are free. So you can maybe keep notes if you want to. So for example, with user role editor, you can add any number of roles that you want, and give them capabilities. So here is a screenshot of how it looks. So you will see that I have created a role here called Just Run Lab Logger. And this specific role is able to edit posts. But for example, you cannot delete posts from other people. So as you start having different levels of users, you need to start making this kind of plan. Some other example would be that subscribers can rate posts, but they cannot publish posts. So there's a hierarchy. The next idea is you need to think about decluttering your backend. And what I mean by that, this is how our actual website looks like for the admin. So you can actually see there's a million settings options here, as well as the toolbar is quite loaded. You can set up things like the actual post layout. You can add new categories. You can choose tags, whatever. So if you actually show this to your bloggers, they will probably leave and never come back, or they will do something which is then you met up to your website. So you need to make it a bit easier for them. So this is the same website, the same exact page, but how it looks from the blogger. The way to do this is by plugging, which is really great. It's called Adminimize. How it works is you will go and find all the roles that you have assigned. We'll put it in columns. Then you will go and find all the basically actions and display options that exist in your WordPress. By default, everything will be accept, which means that everybody can see everything. But you can start deactivating things for different accounts. So you can see, for example, that administrator can do everything because nothing is checked. And as we move towards less important roles, we see more restrictions. The last thing that becomes very important is your automation of communications. So there will be cases where, for example, somebody submits a new post for review. They will need to know that their post has been received, it's pending moderation. On the same time, your moderator will need to receive an email so that he knows that he needs to go in and either approve or reject the post. Okay, so there's this plugin called Post Status Notifies. It's free again. And what you can do is you can set different triggers. You can set different emails. You can set who will be the recipient and basically automate the whole workflow. Okay, last three very small but quite essential plugins that I found. By custom login, you can basically use your own logo on the login page. This one is very funny. It's a great plugin. It does what it says, require feature image, which means that if there's no feature image set, nobody can submit or publish a post. And I found this because we always had the problem where people upload media inside the post but they forget to set the feature image. So yeah, this makes things easier. I just want to show that basically no matter what you think about, there's probably a plugin and it's probably free, so it's great. And on a general note, you will definitely need a very good plugin for your forms. I totally recommend Formidable. You can do even more advanced things like automated user creation the moment they submit. You can do ratings basically by your imagination. Okay, so now that we have our process in place, how do we engage our members to grow the community? The first thing would be to guide your newcomers. So this is the actual email that even today people receive once they set the account. I just want to stress these three things you need to tell them what to expect. So how long it's going to take for the post to be published, what will happen once the post is published, all these kinds of things. And you probably don't want to give them too many information at first. So I just literally only show them how to get started. If they want to look at the guide, I just link them to YouTube. So far it has worked. Most people know more or less what to do. So nothing more is needed. You need to keep educating your authors around their way. One idea would be to create a mailing list only from the people who write for you or Facebook group or something like this. You need to keep letting them know of new features. So for example, last year we launched a feature where you can create a review and then bend it to your post. Of course we cannot expect that people will go and dig up for this by themselves so we need to let them know how to do it. And since they are already familiar with the editor, you can just create a short visual guide for them. Don't forget to give them credit because they do work for you. So this is how the blogger page looks for us right now. So all these things are totally customized. They upload, they can customize their page. You get a counter, a number of posts. If you click on bloggers by all, you will see all the data that they have submitted and things like this. Of course, author box on every of the posts, you can go a bit further and create special tags so people know that this person is a blogger, is not paid by you, which actually is a good thing to do. Yeah, very important. Let them be themselves. Don't add it too much. So I will show you two actual posts and this is from our Facebook. So what we do is we post every first post on our Facebook as well. So this guy literally starts, I'm not like most reviewers who sugarcoat things. So he's trying to be himself and the engagement is literally amazing. And as you can see, this is totally organic. There's no nothing paid. On the other hand, you will see that his photo is a bit blurry. It's not what you would call a professional post, but this is what we see the communities like. This is another example of another girl being herself with amazing engagement. And I mean, like I said, these people, the English is not great. Their photos are not great, but how they can connect to the community is really great. So try to do that. Next is try for your community to see you as a friend, not as a vendor. So one simple example that we do, we have the birthday of every one of our members. We send them a personalized card. And we do things like if you're a guy, you will get a guy runner. If you're a girl, you will get a female runner, different colors, all these kind of things. You'll be surprised how many people actually reply to this email and say thank you. It's a really nice thing to receive always. Okay, again, after a point when you hopefully have made some money as well, try to reward your users. This is again an actual example. We created this, it's a medal basically. We send it to our top bloggers along with a very short note. Basically, we just told them thank you for your contribution. We could have not done it without you. And as you can see, it's not only good for them, it's also good for you because they will go ahead and post it on the social media so you keep getting the word out. Okay, of course, with growth there's always challenges. So here I have you to keep in mind. Again, when you're managing so many people, you try on the other hand to keep a consistent branding. It might be challenging. So different people might want to use different colors. So you need to find a balance to what you can allow and what you cannot allow. Technical side becomes quite difficult. One problem is the constant updates of WordPress and plugins. So now Sean will show us the good thing. I need to communicate this to 150 people. See how. Security becomes important when you have, you're basically dealing with personal information, passwords of thousands of people, so you need to take it seriously. System architecture administrator becomes a big headache. For example, many of you might be familiar with caching, the idea of caching, but when you serve a website which is totally customized to the user, these ideas don't work anymore, so you need to start planning differently. And of course things like how you optimize in SEO, but at the same time accommodating so many different writing styles. Other things to keep in mind, what guidelines you set. Is there any conflict of interest? So for example, is there someone who is just trying to get into your website to sell his own product or something like that. And of course legal IPs might arise as well. Also with challenge come opportunity. So first is like, I saw the growth is organic and can be viral and is free. And as an example, these are all generated post by the community. We didn't spend a single dollar on Instagram, for example. You end up creating brand ambassadors organically. And funny enough, this is not a teaser that we produce and sold. She actually downloaded the logo, she printed on her teaser herself. So how great is that? And as you grow, you move along, there comes a time when you start to think of it as a business, you need to start thinking about how to monetize what you have. I'm not saying to monetize the bloggers, so we don't do, we don't manage them or promote them or make money out of them in any way. But we do try to find other ways. For example, we sell tickets, we sell advertising space, so on. Yeah, I think that's all I wanted to share. These are all the plugins that I showed, so you can take a photo of this. These are my contact details. Feel free to reach out for anything. And if you have any ideas, so you are interested in what we do, drop us a line. We're always looking for people to work with. So thank you.