 In 2012, I had this idea that I wanted to interview people and share their story on a blog. At that time, I was studying in college, second year. And the only way I knew how to build a website was by writing STML CSS code and doing back-end development. But the challenge was that I didn't know how to do that, and I still wanted to have a website. So a friend told me that I should look into WordPress because it's extremely easy to create a website. And that was the first time I heard about WordPress. So I started looking into WordPress, what it is, their themes, their plugins. And I searched for a lot of themes, and I downloaded them to create my blog. But the challenge was that even after I downloaded the theme, I didn't know how to use it because I was extremely new to WordPress. But there was this one theme that had step-by-step tutorial on how to use their theme. And the only reason why I used that theme was because they had a YouTube tutorial. A few years later, when we were developing themes for other users to use, I remember this. Because as a user, I found that video extremely helpful. So when we were building themes, we created YouTube tutorials step-by-steps. And here's a screenshot of one of the tutorial that we made. It took me around seven hours to build these tutorials, and it has got more than 200,000 views, 1.8k plus likes and hundreds of comments. Hi, my name is Raushan. I am co-founder of Codewing Solutions. Some of our products are Rata themes, Blossom themes, and all of the travel engine. I've been using WordPress for more than 10 years. And I have worked with a team to build more than 150 products. And I hope that this tutorial, this presentation, is going to be helpful to all of you. Now, before I move into different marketing channels that I'm going to talk about, I want to get a sense of audience that we have today. Could you raise your hand if you are owner of products? Just can I see a raise of hands? I can see a couple of them. How many of you are marketers? Could you please raise your hand? Great. How many of you are part of product development team? OK, OK, great. So the first marketing channel that I want to talk about is YouTube marketing. Like I said, how I got introduced to WordPress because of YouTube. So when we were building this product and we were doing marketing of our themes, I want to share one thing that happened while we were doing this. At very early stage when we were building product, we had very limited resources. And so I was doing support, I was doing product development, or at least on the strategic side, I was doing a lot of other things and also making video tutorials. So we had created three video tutorials for three of our products. And we had, at that point of time, probably 10 or 12 products. And for those, we didn't have video tutorials. However, we were utilizing a lot of marketing channel. We were doing search engine optimizations. We were exploring social media. At one point of time, as we were looking at different data from what is working for us as a marketing, we realized that the three product for which we had video were bringing in 80% of the revenue. Three products which had video were bringing 80% of the revenue. And that has amazing impact on how we were thinking about marketing. Before that, we were building, of course, the videos, but not in a very comprehensive way. After that, we changed our strategy and focused a lot on YouTube marketing. And I'm going to share with you how we are doing YouTube marketing so that you could also utilize that for your products. So there are two ways how we do YouTube marketing right now. The first one is we create video tutorials ourselves. And the second is we work with a lot of influencers so that we could leverage their subscribers and then their influence. Now, of course, both have their pros and cons. When we were starting doing YouTube video for ourselves, there were a few challenges. For example, we didn't have a lot of subscribers. So if you start your YouTube marketing from the very start, you don't have, let's say, you have, let's say, 100 subscribers. The challenge would be that even if you make a lot of videos, you'll not get a lot of views. And we'll talk about how you can increase the visibility of your videos as well. But the pros are that the cost will be less. You could also make sure that you understand your product very well. And like I said in my earlier story, the reason I use that product, because it had a step-by-step tutorial. And so you could cover your product step-by-step and make sure that your user understand how to use your product, because nobody knows your product better than anybody else. And so that's an opportunity for you to create a very comprehensive guide for your user to use your product. Of course, the downside I said earlier is that you will have a limited reach for that. So we started working with Influencer last year to promote some of our product. And one of the advantages that we saw with Influencer Marketing is that we create one video with, let's say, somebody has 100K subscriber. And tomorrow, we'll be reaching out within 24 hours to hundreds of thousands of views. And that was one of the extreme insight that we use for marketing of our product. Now, when we were doing just videos for our products, we could create one videos, two videos, and we'd get a few hundred views. But when we were working with Influencer, and not just one, not just two, but 100 of Influencer, our views skyrocketed. And a lot of people started to learn about our products, because the advantage that we were leveraging was somebody else's subscribers who have spent hundreds and thousands of hours to build that subscription base, but also the trust. Because if somebody is recommending your products, they're not just going to recommend, because you are paying them. They also need to trust in your product. And because they have, sorry about that, so we're basically leveraging the trust of somebody else, because they would try our products, they would like our products, and they would recommend our products. And so this is how we were doing YouTube marketing. Now, while we were doing YouTube marketing, a lot of people stopped at just creating videos and are working with Influencer. But we went further ahead and tried to increase the visibility of our videos. And we did it in a couple of ways. First, we made sure that we have that on documentation base. I believe that if you have video tutorials, most of you include on your video tutorial page. But we also include on our sales page. On whenever somebody downloaded our products, we sent through product download notes. We also added on our documentation page our support food to notes, and so on. And it helped us in many ways. Now, if you have been doing YouTube marketing for some time, if anybody does here YouTube marketing, no. OK, I see one hand. The way YouTube marketing works is more people watch your videos. And they engage the YouTube give positive signal to your videos. And one of the ways how we were able to increase the ranking of our videos on Google search engine was also by having these videos in a lot of places. Now, to give you a few stats on how it worked for us. Last year, we were doing YouTube marketing for one of our products, which we're pending for a pretty long time. We thought we'll do YouTube marketing, but it was pending. And within a couple of months, we saw increase of 30% in our revenue. And I believe that it was mostly because of the YouTube marketing that we did. And so I would highly recommend that if you have not been doing YouTube marketing, please look into that. Another thing that we have done with the YouTube marketing and the couple of strategies that we use, because all of us probably know that we should invest into YouTube marketing. We should do it, because that's where a lot of people learn about how to use product. But a couple of things that we have done that has worked exceptionally well for us. One of the strategies has been that when you go to Google and you search for certain things, you see results. And the same goes with YouTube. And if you're doing search engine marketing, you want to dominate the search results. And the same thing that we had strategy for our YouTube search result. We work with a lot of influencers. And the idea was that at least for top three or out of 10, out of 10, three rankings should be our videos or videos about our products. Because in that way, we were able to get a lot of views for our product. That was strategy number one. Another strategy was that we wanted to work with regional people or create content in regional languages. Now, I believe most of you understand English. But there are a lot of people around the world who don't understand English. And they still want to use your product. But the challenge would be that there's no video tutorials on how to use your product in their language. And so we started to work with a lot of regional influencers and create video tutorials in their language. And a result, we have seen sales from countries that we had never thought or never had sales before. Another advantage that we had with this approach was that, let's say, if somebody is searching in YouTube from Google, from the United States, somebody is searching from Australia, and somebody is searching from Nepal, where I'm from. You'll not get the same search result. What somebody will get from the United States, somebody from Australia, what I'll get is will be different. Maybe a few similarity, but it will be different. And the reason why that works is YouTube gives priority to regional content. So if I speak Nepali, which is the language I speak, and there has been some video tutorial on the keyword that I've been searching for, at least one or two video will be in my language. And so with this approach, with regional content approach, we were able to get ranking in different countries for our keywords. Because if you talk about English, the competition is extremely high. And it can be extremely challenging to get on ranking. Like, one way that generally people do YouTube marketing is that you create a video, now you get a views, right? And it stops there. Our approach was that we create videos, we get views, but at the same time, we wanted to get a lot of ranking for the long-term benefits. And so that approach worked extremely, extremely well for us. So that's one of the marketing channel that I want to share with you. I'm sorry about that. I had figured this out yesterday. Something is not working today. OK, so the second marketing channel that I want to share with you is Affiliate Marketing. How many of you have Affiliate Marketing program for your products? Could I sit as a fan? Awesome. And how many of you don't have Affiliate Marketing for your programs? Can I see hand? All right. May I know why don't you have Affiliate Program for your? OK, OK. Anybody else? Can I say why they don't have Affiliate Marketing for their products? Anybody wants to share? All right. So I've talked with, I recently started using Affiliate Marketing for my products. And I heard a lot about this. I am also Affiliate Marketers. I used to do Affiliate Marketing for other products as well a long, long time ago. But I had not used Affiliate Marketing for my own product. But I think last year, I started getting into Affiliate Marketing. And there are a couple of things that I realized while I was doing Affiliate Marketing. You might have noticed that most of the sponsor that we have today, all of them have Affiliate Programs. Bluehost, Sitegrounds, Dollipi Rocket, GoDaddy, all of them have Affiliate Programs. And so what is the reason these big brands have Affiliate Program? It is because you can increase your marketing effort at a scale without paying anybody anything as a salary. So let's say I come to you and say to you that, OK, I'm going to send a lot of traffic for your website. But you don't have to pay me anything. I'm going to send you hundreds and thousands of traffic for your website. Don't pay me anything. But if you get sales for the traffic that I bring you, give me 30% of it, or give me a certain amount of it. And that is the power of Affiliate Marketing. If you have to hire, let's say, one marketer or two marketers, how much you can hire? Maybe 10, maybe 20, 100. The cost is going to be extremely high for marketing. But with Affiliate Marketing, you can work with a lot of influencers to increase your product sales. So the reason why we got into Affiliate Marketing was initially when we were trying to push our products to ask other influencers to list our products in their articles, let's say 10 best themes, 10 best plugins, blah, blah, blah. And so we would reach out to them and send them, can you include our products in your article? And most of them would ask, do you have an Affiliate Program? Because how much marketers survive is they make money through promoting other products. And so we didn't have Affiliate Programs back then, and we missed on a lot of opportunities. So we created these Affiliate Programs, and currently almost 5% of our revenue come just from the Affiliate Programs. And so a couple of things to keep in mind when you are getting into Affiliate Programs. First thing is you need to have a simple Affiliate Page, and that's pretty easy to do. You have lots of plugins. We use Affiliate WP plugin for doing that, but you can find a lot of plugins. And then you have to make sure that those Affiliate pages are visible to the audience when they come to a website. For example, do you have that in your header, or do you have in the footer? Are you sending that or notifying users that you have an Affiliate Program on your website or not? And therefore, it's extremely important that you educate your users that you have an Affiliate Program. What we also did was we reached out to a lot of influencers, a lot of bloggers, informing them that we have Affiliate Programs and sign up for it. For example, so we have WordPress Teams, we have WordPress plugins. And so we figured out who have articles about WordPress Teams and who promote other WordPress Teams. Now, if you go to Google right now and you search for, let's say, best WordPress Teams or best WordPress plugin, you'll notice that out of top 10 products, most of them will have Affiliate Programs. And the influencers who are recommending are also linking to the Affiliate Programs. And this is how the industry works. And it's very important to make sure that you are reaching to a lot of influencers who could promote your products. So that's the second marketing channel that I wanted to share with you. And moving on to the third marketing channel, email marketing. Can I see a raise of hand who use email here? OK. Pretty much everyone. I started email marketing a long, long time ago when I was building the first product. But after that, I stopped it for some time. And I started to do email marketing again in 2022. And this is currently one of my favorite marketing channel. And I'm going to show you how I'm doing this affiliate marketing through emails. And probably you will be able to take away some learning from here. So the two ways how we do email marketing. The first one is that we do broadcasting. Second one is we do email automations. So what is broadcasting and what is email automations? Let's talk about that. Let's say we have developed a new product. And we want to notify to all our users. We have more than 200,000 subscribers. So we want to send them an email that we have launched this product. Or we have Black Friday or Cyber Monday deals. And we want to inform all the subscribers. So we send an email. And this email is sent to everybody at the same time. Maybe a few minutes difference. But you get the idea. So we broadcast an email. The advantage of broadcasting email is that you can get instant results. And you can notify users at the same time. So if you have, let's say, a deal, you don't want to wait for 10 days or 20 days to inform them because you have deadlines. So we do that. Second we do is through email automations. Email automations basically means that you create a sequence of email. And these emails are triggered at a certain point of time when a user takes certain action. For example, if somebody downloads your product, or in our case, somebody downloads our product, we send an welcome email. When they take a certain action in that email, we send another email. So we have a couple of emails that we send when a certain action had taken. And it has worked pretty well for us. To give an example, so recently we got an email from one of our subscribers where we have sent this email. And one thing that we do with our email is that we keep our email very personalized. And we also tell our story on how we build our product. For example, one of our products is Blossom Team. So my wife and I found this product. My wife is here. So the idea of we build this product was when we had this one product and we were looking for feminine WordPress themes. And there were not a lot in the market. And there was a lot of challenges to females to build a female website, a female-friendly website. So we built this Blossom Team. So we tell this story on how we build Blossom Teams. Similarly, for one of our products, which is the WP Travel Engine, I have ten years of experience of working with travel agency on building their website and marketing their website. So I tell the story on how I was able to come up with this idea and what is added on this product. What happens with that is people know your story. Like, probably you'll not remember my speech, but probably you'll remember that when I was in 2012, how I learned to build a website. Because people remember a story. And that's how we connect with the audience. Now, there's something about interacting with the founders. So all of our email goes through founders and we get a lot of amazing responses. Somebody recommends features to our products. Of course, we collect feature requests through other platform, but they also send an email that, oh, why don't you add this feature to your product? This would be very special. They have questions about upgrades. They have questions about some services that they want to buy. In fact, recently we had this one question from a lady who wanted to buy two of our monthly subscriptions. And probably we don't have God that sells if it was not through personal emails. And so it has been extremely, extremely helpful for us. Now, it's extremely important that whenever you're doing any of these marketing, like you broadcast or you do email automations, you have to segment your users. Now, what I mean by segment, right? Anybody understand what is segmentation here? Okay, I can see one, two hands, four, five. Okay, great. So what is segmentation? So let's say we have 200,000 subscribers, right? And if you send the same email every time to everybody, it might not be beneficial for everyone, right? To give an example, let's say somebody has downloaded Education Theme, somebody has downloaded Coaching Theme, right? To example. So if I send coaching messes to educations and education messes to coaching, they will probably unsubscribe from the newsletter, right? So you want to segment this user and send very personalized emails according to what is essential to them. To give an example, if somebody has downloaded a product which is about, let's say, yesio, right? So I want to send articles about marketing, I want to send articles about yesio, right? Or if it is about blog post writing, I want to send article about that because you want to personalize and you want to upscale that, right? And so probably many of you have been getting a lot of emails from a lot of product companies, right? And you might have also unsubscribed that. And the reason why we unsubscribe is when something becomes irrelevant to us, right? So it's extremely important that whenever you segment a user, you send personalized email. And you can do that through automations. See, there are a lot of plugins in WordPress that you can tag whatever action or whatever product they have downloaded and segment them. And we do a lot in all of our products. So that's the thought thing that I wanted to share. In email marketing, just to give another example, before I came to World Camp Asia, I sent an email to our users promoting one of our affiliate program, right? And out of 100 clicks, we were getting 10 sign up, right? And that was 10% conversion, right? It was quite unbelievable when I saw the data, but probably it happened because we have been sending a lot of personalized emails. We understand our audience. So therefore, segmentation become important. You don't want to send the same email to everybody else. You want to make sure that you identify and segment this user, and so that send the email different to each of them. So that's my third point on email marketing. And here is a screenshot of one of the campaign, a few of the campaign that we have run. You can see that out of, let's say, we sent 8,000 emails. We had almost 2,000 click or open, open. When we sent 1,400, we had 5,800. 2,800 we sent and we had 1,800. So you can see that how many peoples are seeing the emails that we're sending. And this is the power of email marketing, right? When you are into different platforms, let's say YouTube, let's say Search and Optimizations, right? Anytime they can ban you, right? Maybe some of you also have been restricted on some platforms. But when you have your own email, those are your asset, and you can send those emails anytime, anytime you want, right? So that's one of the benefit and power of email marketing. Now, the fourth marketing channel that I wanna talk about is WordPress org marketing channel. And this is something that was extremely, extremely helpful to us at the beginning of our product. So when we started building product, we didn't have a lot of budgets and we were focusing mostly on WordPress org marketing channels. And there are a couple of things that we were doing and I think that will be beneficial for a lot of you. So depending on whether you have theme products or plugin products, or you have hosting, something else, right? The certain ways how you can market these products. For let's say themes, what we were doing. So there are two, at least in my knowledge, there are two ways how people are marketing WordPress themes. Either they create a brand, okay? So your brand and your theme become popular because of brand. Or second is dominate the search on WordPress org. Now there are three ways generally how people discover WordPress themes or plugins. The first one is WordPress org repository. Second is on WordPress dashboard. And third is by search engine. And through optimizations, you want to be able to improve your ranking on all of this because if your product is ranked on top positions, you are going to get a lot of clicks. And I'm going to show you one slide where we did a small optimizations and how we were able to increase our organic traffic by four times, right? And so if you have themes, one thing that we did was we included keywords in our product, product name. So for example, one of our product is Blossom themes. And so we had our product name and then we had the keyword. For example, Blossom coach, right? So whenever somebody is searching about coaching theme, there's a Blossom, then we have coach. Somebody search for shop, we had Blossom shop, right? And that works very well for us for two reasons. One, on WordPress org itself, when somebody is searching for let's say shop or coaching or anything else, they would discover our product. One, second, also on search engine, right? If you go to search engine, let's say like Google and you search for coaching WordPress theme or chic WordPress theme, you'll see some products which are ranked from WordPress org. Of course, your website might also rank, but they also give priority to WordPress org in terms of ranking. So that worked extremely well for us. In terms of plugin, plugin is slightly different from the theme. There are a lot of things to take care of when you are optimizing your plugin. There is of course title, which is important. So you want to keep the keyword of your product in the title. For example, let's say if your product is about search engine optimization, yes, you, right? To give an example, let's say Yoast, right? Yoast is one of the most popular plugins. So they have Yoast, then you'll see they have SEO in their keyword because people will also search about, go to WordPress org and they will search about SEO, right? And that's how they will discover. You have to make sure that your keyword is also included in the descriptions. Your support, you have to provide support and make sure that the tickets are handled properly and resolved. You have to make sure that it is compatible with the latest version with WordPress org. Now, the last thing I want to share here is, and that has worked extremely well for us. At least when we had this feature section in WordPress, or how many have seen this feature section in WordPress org directory, theme directory, right? Okay, I can see a few hands, okay. So back then when it was, I think a couple of years back, one thing that we focused on was translation. And I think a lot of companies have seen not doing that and that worked extremely, extremely well for us. So whenever somebody is from different country, not English, we're not speaking English for some other countries and they go to their country, WordPress org directory and they search for their keywords. If you don't have your theme or plugin optimized for those keywords, it will not show up, right? Even you might have a lot of active installs, great reviews, it will not show up. So we figured that out and we did translation of our themes. And I remember back then, we translated our theme into Japanese and a lot of Japanese volunteers are very, very kind to us and I made a few today as well. And because we translated our theme into Japanese, we saw a large number of customers coming from Japan and buying our product. In fact, at one point of time, out of 100 customers, probably 10 to 15 were from Japan. It happened because of that translation. As we figured that out, we started to do more translation of our product. So one of the ways how you could leverage this is just reach out to people who translate. You can go to WordPress org, find out who translate the products and just request them and they will be very, very happy to volunteer and do the translation. So that works for us and I hope that it might also work for you. Now, it's important to know that there are a lot of marketing channels and you might also have the questions which marketing channels should you focus on, right? I have talked about, okay, this is one of the example that I mentioned earlier. I want to show the slide up to my patients. So this screenshot is from HRIV, which is a search, it's a yes you tool which gives you a lot of analytics. And you can see that before we did the optimizations, we had probably 15 traffic, right? And after the optimizations, we had almost 100 traffic. And it's a very simple trick. It took us like a few hours to do this but it worked for us. And this traffic is not from WordPress org itself. It was from Search Engine, which also means that we were getting a lot of traffic from WordPress org as well. So like I said, there are a lot of marketing channels. We talked about four, right? But which marketing channels should you focus on? Now for that, you need to find what is your customer acquisition cost? And that is the key to remember. So let's say you work with Affiliate Marketer or Influencer and let's say you're spending $1,000 and you are getting sales of 2,000. So basically your customer acquisition cost is $50, right? And so you need to figure out what is your customer acquisition cost throughout all the marketing channel. If you have budget, try everything, right? There are a lot of marketing channels. But if you're limited on budget, you need to figure out what is your customer acquisition cost and then decide what is the marketing channel that you want to use. Okay? But remember that some marketing channel will work for you, some might not work for you. When I started, I was doing like long, long time ago Google Ads marketing and it didn't work for me back then. Now I'm doing experiment with Google Ads marketing and it's working for me. So you have to be open-minded, try a lot of things and then hopefully something will work for you. So with this I have come to conclusion of my presentation. So just to wrap up the key takeaways. The first one is the YouTube marketing. You want to work with a lot of influencer. You want to do yourself. But make sure that you are also targeting regional content by working with a regional content creator. Second was off-lead marketing, right? There are a lot of companies doing it. You should also explore if you have not already doing that. Third was email marketing. You can broadcast, you can send email automation, but make sure that you have personalized the content. Tell your story, I think that would be extremely powerful and make sure that you have segmentations. And the fourth is WordPress org marketing, optimize, but make sure that you also translate your content. With this, I would like to. Second one was off-lead marketing. So with this I have come to conclusions of my presentations and thank you so much. If you have any questions, please.