 Welcome to WordCamp, the marketing section. Part of the marketing section. Definitely my comfort zone, because I've been completely hostile on the last topic. Anyway, it only wants to tell me what Gutenberg really is. Please, I'd love to know in non-technical language. My name is Charlotte, and I have a blog called Diary of Musungu. It's been on WordPress for the last eight years. WordPress is just one of the best things ever. If you're a newbie, welcome to this wonderful world of WordPress. I'm a marketing manager by train, as well as a blogger. I just want to share a few tips that I've learned over the last few years of being a blogger. I've done a lot of things the hard way, so hopefully you can take a bit of a big step forward and cut out some of that wasted time. One of my big disappointments when I first started blogging was that it was only my mum who was commenting on my blog. Occasionally it was my dad and occasionally it was my aunt. I felt like blogging into this big void for about two years. In a way, it didn't matter because my writing was definitely improved. What I learned along the way is that for every hour that you spend writing, you spend about three hours promoting it. I definitely didn't do that to start with. If you are starting out, think really hard about how you're going to promote your blog or your website and get to know the influencers, the people who are going to share your content and look for those shortcuts because that's legitimate. It's going to keep you motivated as well because if you've got a full-time job and you're blogging, which is what I've been doing all this time, there are times when you think, oh my God, why am I so immaculate? I've got coming home and I set myself this huge task of writing a blog and nobody's reading it interacting. There are points sometimes where you wonder what you're doing. So get as many people as possible to comment and share as soon as you start blogging. So I'm going to look at a couple of the ways that you have for promoting your blog, social media, email marketing and getting back links. So what's social media all about? Why do you need it for a blog? So the most important thing is you need to drive traffic to your blog or your website and you want to get people to sign up to your newsletter. And of course, if you're promoting your blog links through social media, you're going to improve your Google rankings as well. Facebook business page. It's one of the best things that I've done. I think it's three or four people only have a Facebook business page. It's great. I have more interaction and fun on there and actual enquiries for work than I do anywhere else. So if you have a blog or a business, you need a business page. You can't create a personal account for a business. And if you do, Facebook will find out one day and they will delete that account. But the Facebook business page is great because you can do targeted advertising and you can also keep a really good record of who contacts you. And I'll show you that in a minute. So when you create a post on Facebook with the business page, you can boost it to a much bigger audience. So for example, if I didn't update this afternoon, I might get 30 or 50 people like the update. But if I put just five or $10 in, I can get three or 500 people. So you can see the huge difference that is. But the problem is we're all Facebook slaves now and I'm one of them. But Facebook keeps changing their algorithms as they say. So every few months they change the way they do things. And if you get into Facebook, you really need to keep up with the latest trends. Facebook is a big topic in its own right, but just to say that if you have a Facebook business page, this little blue box at the bottom is where you go to boost your post. And that gives you, then opens a new section where you attach your credit card. And you can get visa credit cards easily now in Kampala. A UBA Bank of Africa do one, only cost $20,000. And then you decide who you're targeting, the audience, the budget, the duration of the advert, etc. This is an example of a popular post. You need your message to be quite short and to the point. People's attention span is very short. And if they have to click on the little box at the bottom saying see more, most people won't. So you really have to capture people's attention in the first few words. What I've done there is I've linked to the full blog for further information. And I've tagged, as you can see in blue, I've tagged various companies and individuals. I've tagged Wild Frontiers Uganda, they were the client, and I also tagged the photographer. And you can see here how the different colours on the bottom show the people I reached organically and the people I reached through the boosted posts, the advertised elements of this. And you can see I've got 19 shares, which is very exciting. And I've got a lot of interaction on this and I spent less than $10 on this. Again, for the same promotion, I had some really great content that the client had given me and a good story and the call to action was to go to Wild Frontiers website and book a boat ride in Mercheson Falls. Facebook is brilliant because it gives you a complete breakdown of the number of people who saw your adverts. There were over 1,700 clicks on photos, 13 clicks through to the client's website, 65 I think shares, and it tells me how much I spent. I spent £7 on a seven day promotion and 32,000 people were reached. It's very cost effective for now, but of course Facebook can double their prices tomorrow. And if you're all your fans and followers on there, then you've got to go again with it. So this is another reason why I really like the Facebook app because this is the messaging part of Facebook for business page, which you see is far more comprehensive than within the personal page. And if somebody interacts with me professionally, I prefer to have the conversation here because then I can put them in a little... I can categorise people. So do they want to know about tourist visas? Do they want to know about their training programmes? So I have different labels here for categorising the conversation, much as you have categories in Outlook. And you can also have notes here, which keeps a track of the kind of things that you've talked about. And also you can click on someone's personal Facebook profile and if they have their settings as public, which a lot of people do, then you can find out a bit about the person you're talking about. So Instagram. I'm just going to do one slide on Instagram. It is the biggest network. It's the fastest growing network right now. Some people will say the days of Facebook are numbered. It's kind of stagnating. Instagram is really where it's at now. It's very easy to use. It's Facebook photos and hashtags and it's trending right now. So if you are promoting a blog, try and get some visual content. And when you do your latest post, you can link to it within Instagram. But you can't put hyperlinks in Instagram like you can with Facebook or Twitter or lots of other social media. You can only put a link in your biography, your bio. So it means that you change the link in your bio every time you add a new blog. And then when you post your photograph and your hashtags, you put link in bio for the latest blog. It's as simple as that. It's on Twitter. Quite a good number of us are on Twitter. It's interesting. I think for the market we are here, for the group of people we have here, bloggers, influencers, techie people, you have to be on Twitter and you get a lot out of it. But it's interesting if I speak to other industries, some of them are not at all interested in Twitter. So the thing to consider is where is your audience? So that's how you decide whether Facebook is best for you or Twitter or Instagram. And of course you can run several simultaneously. But it's surprising how many people are registered with 10 social networks and then are really surprised that they're not getting much effective feedback or what have you. But it's like how many of us can actually manage 10 social media channels. Just be good at one or two or three maximum and you make the choice based on where your audience are. That's the important thing. I'm not keeping an eye on time. Can somebody please give me five minutes for everyone out because I do talk a lot. I just love this meme and I'll show it every opportunity I can. Trevor Noah was apparently coming to Uganda about a year or so and we had a lot of fun on Twitter, trending hashtag. What was it? Trevor Noah visits Uganda. So I think it was Matoki, a website published a story about him coming to Uganda and everyone on Twitter was absolutely ballistic. When you get here, you've got to go down to Wanda Geronita, a Gita Rolex made by Sula. Before we knew it, everyone was putting together these memes, these photo-shopped images of Trevor Noah doing very Ugandan things. But then we heard that he wasn't coming, that it was incorrect. I don't know if it's fake news or whatever it was. But that made people go into overdrive and do even more of them. The reason I'm telling you this is not just because it's fun, but if you want to promote your blog or your website, look at what the trending hashtags are and see how you can get in on it. You can get some free publicity out of it, you can get some extra followers and you can show people the personality side of what you're doing, the fun side of what you're doing. Trevor Noah didn't actually come here, but he is pictured on the back of a bicycle. He's drinking an old special. He's even outside Shell. I think that might be Magogo. He's got 25 million followers on Twitter. He did actually say, at one point he said, no, Ugandan, I'm not coming. It's not true. Then a couple of days later he said, okay, Ugandan, you win, because we've been trending for about three days non-stop, be number one. He said, but when I get here, I want Sula to make me that Rolex. So, yeah, how much time do you spend on social media to create impact? Well, as I say, remember what I said at the beginning, which is that for every hour you blog, you're supposed to do three hours of promotion. I'm not sure if I do that much myself, if I'm honest. I'm usually racing towards the next story, but anyway, there's the theory and there's the reality. So, how much time should you spend on social media and think about it in two ways. I would always try and plan an element of your social media activity, but also be reactive as well. So, planning means you know what you're going to be writing about this week or this month and you know what you're promoting, and that can include old content as well as this week's content. You can put together a schedule like an Excel spreadsheet and decide what you're talking about and how you're going to promote it and what the messages are going to be. Yeah, so, as other people have said, try and blog on a regular basis. Does anybody follow Bico Zulu? Yes. Yeah, he's the most incredible writer. He's a Kenyan writer and he publishes every Tuesday at one o'clock or something exactly to the minutes and you can set your clock by him and he's got a huge amount of readers. I don't even know how many, 100,000 and there's a competition amongst his fans to be the first person to post. Every week you can see like 30 or 100 people racing to beat him to the deadline. So, that's become part of his personality now. I'm not going to go into this in too much detail, but remember that if you've published something you've got to be online ready to answer questions and comments and so on. I'm not going to go into that adding value. Some people write a comment and then the blogger just says thank you. What a waste of time. Link to another story you think they'll like. Ask them what they'll like. Try and develop a relationship with them. Because remember social media is a two-way conversation and you have to be there reacting quickly and yeah, this is your moment. When something's gone live and somebody comments or retweets react like, retweet, reply, etc. It can be really overwhelming to get into the world of social media but there are some tools that can really help you manage your social media activity. Hootsweets is the one that I like. There's a really good app that goes with the desktop version and it's free if you manage I think three channels and that way you can schedule up your activity. So, you can just slide Saturday morning and I'm going to set up my updates to promote this week's blog on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. So, you can set them all up to go out different times of the day. And you can also follow certain different conversations or other bloggers. If you want to follow lots of bloggers you can actually have a column within Hootsweets and it's easy to check on people. Other tools that I use No, that's not too much time on that but Hootsweets, make a note of that one. How am I doing for time? I'll keep on going until you tell me to stop. Email marketing. People tend to forget about email marketing in these days of social media but I would say it's just as important as ever and in fact it cuts through the noise of social media and it goes directly to someone's inbox. So, if you think about it it's more likely to respond personally to what's in your inbox than to try and follow every little thing that happens on Twitter and Facebook etc. So, if somebody gives you their email address and their Twitter handle etc know that you're going to get a much better response if you email them and if you have a blog think about setting up an email newsletter system. This is a screenshot from Mailchimp. Mailchimp is the industry leader. There's another one called Abe Webber as well and this is an absolute superb system. So, anybody who's got a blog or a website needs to use this system and it can integrate really easily with WordPress. So, for example, if you go to my home page and you click on subscribe as of course WordPress site it links to Mailchimp. Somebody inputs their email address and it automatically updates my database of contacts. So, you can customise your Mailchimp database with whatever you like and you get ratings according to the number of people who've opened your emails and gone through to your website and so on. So, it's not just the list of email subscribers but it's a really comprehensive marketing tool as well. This is a sample of a Mailchimp template. So, here you see the editing options very much like WordPress and on the left you see what it's going to look like when it arrives in somebody's inbox and there are hundreds of themes and designs you can choose from and it's free. Mailchimp, I just love this. It tells me exactly how many people have seen my emails. It can tell me 383 people have opened my email 93 have clicked on a link that goes through to my website 24 emails have bounced which means I need to clean up my database because people have changed company or I've spelt their email address wrongly and two people have unsubscribed. We're then looking at Mailchimp and by the way they have the most superb tutorials so they teach you the whole process of setting up a database and if you want to do A, B, split testing you can send out different emails to different groups of people and see which one gets the best response rate so it can get quite technical but it can give you very good marketing data. Which of your blogs are popular? What kind of content should you create more of based on the number of people who are opening an email? So how do you get people to sign up to your email address? A few suggestions are sign up to the email newsletter you can put that in your email signature Y stamp is a very good email signature if anybody wants to customize that so Ys W I S E stamp.com and I have one that automatically links through RSS to my latest blog so I find that's really nice and it looks really smart as well create an email sign up tab on your Facebook page again Mailchimp links really well with Facebook and it's very easy to set up you just copy a bit of code you don't actually have to have any coding nor later experience you can also tweet a link to sign up to your email by you know it's part of your schedule once a week or more often than that you can send a link to sign up to your email newsletter system this is the last section you'll be pleased to know commenting, guess blogging you also value of commenting why do people do it? Well as a blogger you need to think about have a hit list of three or five blogs that you really admire and perhaps you want to share some of their traffic or get to know the blogger him or herself personally and set yourself up as a go-to person for a particular subject so by commenting on other related blogs you can help build your own following and you can put a link into your blog so don't put a link to your homepage always put a link to a specific page because sometimes the homepage is not the best page of your site plus google likes it if you're linking to different parts of your site so yeah you can comment and leave a link to your latest post on another blog site you can also write a guest post for sites whose content is related to yours I get a lot of requests for guest posts and if it's about travel and tourism in Uganda in East Africa or culture or something that you know it's about fun in Uganda then I accept those but if you've got a wine company in South Africa well no I'm not interested because my readers aren't going to be interested in that but you can easily just do a google search for guest posts and you can see related websites and blogs that might accept your guest posts and be relevant to the kind of subject you're talking about and of course having links so it helps if you'll see an SEO and it helps in your positions in search as well as getting more traffic to your site you can also try and get a listing sometimes you get a paid for listing on a relevant website I now have listings in my travel directory is anybody here working in tourism right okay so I've got a this is the new version of my website that we released a couple weeks ago I don't think you can see it too well but there's a section here called directory which is for lodges and tour operators to advertise in as well so I've done doing a search engine optimisation program we are going AMP what do you call it? yes that's going to kick in soon as well so I'm expecting a lot more traffic to my site and hoping that tourism industry in Uganda can benefit from that this is a sample of one of the adverts that now features on my site the benefit is that the hotel for example gets their own URL as well so if somebody googles nestill hotel there's a good chance they'll find them from my site which is going to hopefully get a lot more traffic as AMP kicks in is that right? I didn't understand much about what you said but it all sounds good okay so that's it I'm sorry I went very fast but I'm around all day if anybody has any questions any questions now? I covered everything obviously is that microphone working? yes this is some of what I teach the tourism industry in a lot more detail so I do workshops and I can also do in-house training one-to-one training I've got experience of that so I'm very happy to do that I did a project with Will Francis and I set up the email newsletter system for them so I spent two days with them I actually set up the database set up the templates and then we talked about strategy as well and they're still using that system so thanks for me I was reading and then Uganda kept you all told you not to go with and the different experiences you're sharing in the book about the one place I'm singing in my trophy and all that I don't know maybe we could help your experience of being and why Uganda picked up why Uganda sometimes I think Uganda chose me because I didn't know anything about Uganda ten years ago I came here in February 2009 so I've been here nearly ten years and I wanted to I wanted to live in Africa since I was a teenager but I don't even know why which is the funniest thing and then I wanted to volunteer and do something a bit more meaningful than the life I had in London and I got a job as a professional volunteer in conservation I actually had job offers in other countries before Ghana and Cameroon but every time I asked someone about Uganda they just said go they just said go, you'll love Uganda so I just came on this wave of good feeling and as soon as I got to Integra it felt right as soon as I got to Integra the first day and it hasn't always been easy but I've managed to create something so that's kept me here and it's interesting I thought that after a year or so I would have gone everywhere in Uganda but it's like Uganda's got bigger which I think represents the fact that we're developing and there's new things coming up all the time like for tourism there's always new lodges and new activities so to me it's still as exciting as it ever was hi, genius thank you the ones who questions the page and who gives the number so we'll do a device in the first post then we'll go to our fellow people for a call a device in the first which is the organic way so that's the case well, you can't get away from putting money into the Facebook page now that's the bottom line we all wanted to grow our followings organically so we don't want to do that anymore so we don't want to buy fans but you do want to target people that have a particular interest in what you're promoting so what I do when I boost the post I boost to people who like the page and their friends because they're very likely to have interests in common I don't actually buy new fans as such but if you just do a boosted post a few people are just going to come out because of their friends' interests how many fans do you have at the moment on the page? what one you're trying to boost? if you go to within the Facebook page there's a section called business manager you have to first register with it once you go into that section it's like the google advertising dashboard it's really comprehensive you've got a lot more features within that and then you can really target a particular demographic so you could target people between 35 and 40 who live in a particular park in particular interests you can really drill down to get the kind of customer that you want so if you use that kind of target thing then I think you have to do it if you've got that small number to start with but have very targeted focused campaign but Facebook is a huge application for example somebody is telling me that they wanted to get people who like outdoors holidays from Canada because they thought they would like to come to Uganda so they actually targeted people between 30 and 50 who like hiking in Ontario in Canada it got very specific and you'll only pick up a few people but you know they're going to be the right people to interact with you yes I can send you the link to the Google form you have to pay in advance and then you get a year's free listing so there's a small listing and it opens up to your own page as well so your own URL on my site and are you a tour operator or are you just using it as an example okay so you fill in this Google form and send me your logo within 48 hours you can be live and everyone gets the free Facebook page update as part of that process that's why I was asking you what kind of business you are the cheapest advert is 200,000 a year for minimum quickly my question is when you look at people there the new block most blogs of same people have like a couple almost that they kind of project them it's not like a standard that can be used to generate points cartoon character Betty Booth and I saw her with a little puppy one day and it's about this logo and I've had a lot of fun with it but I don't know if someone is better positioned to answer that question okay I think we're done thank you very much