 Wow when I was practicing this at 11 30 p.m. Last night Staring at a wall It doesn't do any justice to what you actually get when you're standing in front of an audience So yeah, this is a big deal for me. I've been wanting to speak at WordCamp for for quite a few years. I Yeah, I got in this time because somebody called in sick So that was cool Yeah, I made them sit night in So Yeah, this is this is kind of a big deal for me because I've this is the first time I've actually spoken at a word camp So it's kind of kind of cool Thank you Now I'm very mindful of time and I tend to I Tend to just waffle I've been told that a lot. So I should just move along And Beautiful time keepers here. So they'll keep me on track anyway, okay, so Welcome to my presentation. I am going to be going through For the next 30 to 35 minutes. Hopefully less than that, but we'll see I'm going to take you through 10 things that You know your WordPress website can do that you may not know it can do Now we know that WordPress is Quite a fantastic Content management system. You can build beautiful websites with it, but There are plugins that can extend The functionality of your website beyond your your mind Blow your mind. So, you know, there's two objectives that I have for this Presentation the first one is to blow your mind and to get you to the point of saying, ah Why you can do that? Cool And the second thing is see this see that little rocket up on the screen. Yeah Yeah, we got to get that rocket to the planet Okay, and if you look closely the if you look closely at the rocket You'll see a little WordPress logo. Okay, that's a flag So we're going to get the rocket to the planet and pitch the flag on the planet. Okay, that's the second objective So does that sound all right? Yes, thank you All right, let's get into this shall we so Who am I? Hi, I'm Paul I do three things Try and keep things simple. I'm a dad and stuff like that, but this is my business II sort of thing So, yeah Like Ingrid said, I run the company called Gold Coast business websites Where we build WordPress websites teach people how to build them and manage them and and we also do ad hoc and all that sort of jazz with websites also Look after another brand called WP Genie Which is a WordPress website care service? So I've just extended that on and it's the typical, you know, you sign up for a monthly subscription And you get wishes So you get additional tasks with the particular plans that you sign up with It's pretty neat. Check it out. The other thing I do is I Organize and co-host the WordPress Gold Coast meetup So if you are in Southport on the Gold Coast next Thursday And you're just driving down ferry road at around 6 p.m Then popping to the tavern the ferry road tavern We can join other WordPress like-minded people and Learn more about your WordPress website. I highly recommend you coming along to that So yeah, that that runs on the very last Thursday of every month and it's completely free. Thank goodness for our sponsors kinetics WP engine and WP Australia Couldn't do it without those guys. So kudos to those guys. Thank you. All right. So that's me Let's get cracking Joey into the 10 things that your website can do that. Maybe you didn't know that it could Yeah, so with any one to ten we always start with number one one, right? So let's have let's have some fun. All right, number one turn your website into a proposal generating machine All right, who here hands up Be honest Do you guys who sends proposals out using PDFs? Right cool, and look there's nothing wrong with that, but I encourage you to have a look at maybe just changing your mindset a little bit and Changing the way that you send your proposals And I was doing the exact same thing up until the end of last year and I started Utilizing my website as a way to send my proposals so There's a couple of ways that you can do this and the first way that you can do this is to install WP proposals it's a plug-in. It's totally free It's totally awesome and what that does is it puts a a new post type Into your dashboard menu as you can see on the menu on the arrow And that allows you to create proposals on your website. So Just like adding a page or a post you can then create a proposal and then you fill out all the fields like the customer name and all the All the ingredients of what you're offering In your proposal and then you hit publish and then that sends an email to the client With a link that they click on and then they get taken to your website With the details of the proposal now it knocks the header and the footer out. So it just creates a nice a nice sort of you know like a nice template and Then they can and then the customer can just put their email in at the bottom to accept and We're done Very easy So I used to send up like PDFs and then you know the clients would have to you know Get it on their phones and they would read through it and then they'd have to pinch and zoom in to have a look and And then they had to they had to actually print off the last page of the proposal to sign the agreement So to print it off sign it and then they'll take a photo or they'll scan it in and then send it back to me and that That takes a lot of time So I haven't your proposal system on your website Can really save time and I must say That since I I integrated this into my website at the beginning of this year. I've had at least I'm being probably quite Humble here, but yeah, probably about a 50% uptake in my proposal acceptance Just by changing that one little thing So I'm not using this plug-in. I've done it a different way I've gotten a couple of other plugins to help me build my own custom Post type and this is what mine looks. This is what mine looks like So on the left you can see that Yeah, I've just got a proposal post type and then It's just like adding a normal Post editor to your to your website and then I've got some fields So client name and proposal date the total investment and I keep mine really simple I've just got bullet points lists of what's included in the proposal and That's all I have and then what I use is I use a page builder called Elementor to build out the template and then I I use a couple of plugins to build the custom post type and One of them is called custom post type UI which creates the custom post type which creates the proposal post type and then I use advanced custom fields pro to use to build the the fields and then I Yeah, I integrate the the short codes from the advanced custom fields And then I put that on the template and then well, it just it all works really well I won't go into great detail about it, but But I tell you what it is amazing. I've spoken to my clients and they love it They love getting these proposals and as I said I get I've gotten a pretty big increase in in the acceptance rate So that's number one. Let's move on to number two All right, this is pretty cool personalized website content So there's nothing greater than hearing our own name. We know that's right. So we love the sound of our own name So when that you So with this idea is that you you can create content and Directed to specific people So you can personalize it so you can say hi Bob or hi John or whatever Whatever the person's name is and there's a really cool plug-in That allows you to do this really really easily And it is called the get params plug-in Alright, and what that does is that allows you to Create a short code. Well, it creates a short code for you and then you just pop that into Where you want it to go? So you might have you know, happy birthday Mary something like that or happy birthday And then the short code then what you do is You create a well you create a link Just like you see on the example there So you got your website address the page name and then you've got a query string. Does everybody know what a query string is? All right. Well, that's a query string. So you've got where it's got the The question mark and then param name equals John so What you do is if the person that you're sending the personalized Content to is called John then you would send them that link Okay in its entirety or if it's Michelle you send it to a you change John to Michelle boy, whatever So then what you can do is you can create things like this So I've a sense. So this is how this is what I've done. I've created a template using Elementor I've got happy birthday the words and then I've got the short code which you saw on the previous slide I've got that next to next happy birthday and then I've put my little message and Then I send the the query string that I showed you there so my what my my website address and the page name and then the Question mark param name equals Michelle as you can see on there and then basically the query string Takes the name from the query string and replaces the short code with the name. That's in the query string. So It's really Sorry You could yeah, I mean the Absolutely, yeah, you can do definitely do that you can have video you can like that that Background of the balloons is just a YouTube video and I've just got that on loop So it's pretty easy So that's number two. Let's move on to number three All right, anybody who is interested in the blockchain technology Blockchain anybody Yeah, anybody heard of it or not over it Yeah, yeah, cool. Awesome. Yeah, it's a it's a big thing. It's a big thing So, yeah number three your blogs on the blockchain Has anybody heard of steemit? No. Oh, hello. Whoo-hoo Cool. Yeah, she's a plant. No Steemit is a is a website where you can Create content and get paid for that content from the community So we call these micro payments and and you get paid in cryptocurrency Also known as steam dollars. I think yes steam it so The the idea of this is that you would you create blog posts on your website, right? You're gonna do that anyway So with this particular plug-in called steam press You can set it up so that when you post a blog on your website. It can automatically be pushed to your steam it account and Then if you know people really like your content and they love it they'll upvote you by paying you in Cryptocurrency and then you can take that cryptocurrency put it on exchange Sell it and actually make money from your blogging content Pretty cool, huh? Pretty cool So you've heard of medium.com So it's similar to that where you know you put a blog post up and and people clap I think it is or So yeah, it's basically the same as that but you get actually paid For your content so steam press allows you to blog on your website And it then forwards that blog over to your steam it Account and then puts the blog over there Where you can potentially get paid which is pretty neat so You need a steam it account Just install the steam press plug-in and Then you configure the settings to the blog content to then steam it and I'll show you a screenshot What I mean here, so Here's your blog and then you got like a puts a little option there to then tick box to then forward to steam it and that's it so There's there's roughly around about 1.4 million active members on steam it Something like that. Yeah, so it's pretty cool and it's growing All right, so let's move on number four marketing automation in your dashboard This is pretty awesome Anybody heard of groundhog? Groundhog Groundhog day, yeah Bill Murray love that movie Well, groundhog is a it's a fairly new plug-in. I guess sort of newish on the scene, but it allows you to Set up email funnels directly in your dashboard so similar to what you know active campaign and Those other like get drip and all those other third-party services that you can use to create More complex Funnels or email marketing sequences or automation Groundhog basically simplifies all that and creates It's own user interface within your dashboard and then you can set up triggers and all sorts of stuff that send out emails when somebody does something so You can manage and store your own list so you're not you're not at the mercy of of the third-party services So you can actually control your own list completely and have control complete ownership over it and You can save money on using external third-party services as well. Now, of course Groundhog is You know very simple if you need more complex stuff, then you would go and use active campaign or the other big the bigger Sort of players, but if you just starting out and you just want to you know tip Dip your toe into automation or if you've got like an e-commerce site and you just started out then this is a good starting ground because it works well with all major e-commerce platforms as well like WooCommerce and and others as well So this is a screenshot of just an example funnel that you can set up So this one here is just basically, you know, you create a form and then when somebody fills out the form An email is then sent So they might feel at a form to download something of value like a PDF or whatever and Then you trigger that and you send them the email with the PDF and then you can set up other actions to To deal with that that person So then if you so if you have an email that gets sent to them and they say, you know, click on this email Take some back to the website a landing page and then it says here's your download link and then you can actually Then trigger another another email like two days later using this system To say hey, you know, what do you think of the PDF? And then you can set up other triggers like say another two days later after that send another email So it's pretty cool. I encourage you to check it out if you want to sort of get into this Yes, it's free Capital letters Get it now Download it Yeah, some it's on the WordPress repository. So yeah, it is pretty neat. It is again. It is limited. There are limitations to it So just be just be aware of that. All right number five Okay, make your forms work harder for you people All right, what do I mean by this? so There's there's so many times that I've come along websites and You know when I'm looking at a website and I And the my clients asked me to you know look over it now one of the big things I check is does the contact form work That's a really important thing Because sometimes they don't work they stop working So but Most of the time I find that when I'm when I'm testing these contact forms I put in my details, you know, hit the send button and Then like a little message comes up underneath that says Your form is submitted. Thank you. I'm like, you're welcome What does that mean, you know, did it really get sent, you know, what happens next, you know Well, I get you know fanfare from the people that I sent the email to like, you know Well, I get a call like, you know two minutes later. What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen? I don't know So This is what I mean by make your forms work harder for you So, please Ensure that all your forms have at least a thank-you page that takes them to another page after they submit That says thanks And guess what you've already learned you can personalize these thank-you pages as well so you can thank the person By taking their first name that they put into the form and put it on to the thank-you page. So thanks Bob While you're waiting for us to get back to you Why don't you check out our FAQ page where most of our commonly asked questions are or Hey, why don't you download our 50 page PDF on How you should get your contact forms working better for you Something like that, but yeah, please so please people please I implore you just at least set up a thank-you But a next step a thing that just says hey, we acknowledge you We've got your message and we're gonna get back to you at least something All right Okay, I got another point here. Oh, yeah Yeah, so you can add additional upsells and offers to those thank-you pages as well Which is pretty cool so you can you know say hey, why don't you sign up for our? 17 minutes Strategy session something like that so Pretty cool stuff. All right. Let's move on number six correct DIY landing sales pages. There is no excuse For you to not use your WordPress website to house your landing pages You know yes, you can go and use other services, which I will not name You know why who I'm talking about You know You know, but there is no excuse that you can't use your own website to house your own landing pages in fact, you could create a custom post type using custom post type UI and Advanced custom fields and you can well you wouldn't if you may not even need to use that But you could create your own landing pages within your own site so then you can direct traffic to your site to your landing pages and There are a host of plug-ins that will help you build beautiful landing pages such as Elemental Brissy site origin Beaver Builder and Can anybody guess what the next one is? Oh? Gutenberg. Yes Well done guys. Well done So yeah, there's no excuse. There's an example of probably really poorly badly designed Landing page that is one of mine. Sorry But the important thing is when they fill out that form guess what happens they go to a thank-you page Exactly no little message that comes up saying your form is submitted. Thank you All right, let's move on okay number seven so from here. I'm gonna get a little bit. Thank you I'm going to get a little bit unconventional now and a little bit weird but Not that I've already been weird But there's just there's just some slides that I put in here that are just gonna whack my own head I don't know you know why I put these in but I've just done it So let's just do this and can you see the rocket the rocket's getting closer to the planet? So where we're on our way so anyway So you can use your WordPress website to go social and what do I mean by this you can become a Mark Zuckerberg You can create your own social platform on your own WordPress website. So this is great for organizations clubs anybody anything that you know brings people together and You own it. It's yours. You control it. There's no big corporation behind behind the scenes where they can Take it down take down your page So, yeah, you could just do that. So peep. So peep. So strange name, but it's plug-in. It's totally free You can create a social Media platform right on your WordPress website so Pretty random Yeah, pretty random So but cool. Yeah, cool. So anybody here that would maybe use something like this Sweet, okay, cool Thank you. Cool. Yeah, check it out. All right now Go headless WordPress now. This is getting a little bit technical but I Read a really great comment recently about this and somebody wrote the comment on Somebody trying to explain what headless is and then somebody wrote I'm still trying to get my head around Headless WordPress. I thought it was quite funny and I actually quite I kind of feel the same I've just thrown this slide in to this presentation to scare the bejeebers out of me and try and explain a kind of complex Sort of thing in a simple way. So you do this to challenge yourself when you're a speaker So anyway, anybody know what headless WordPress is. Yeah So, yeah, cool. Did you guys want to come down and explain that? Damn it. I'll pay you. I've got some money. No, okay. Let's have a go at this So, you know how WordPress is a custom management system. Yeah, or a content management system Yeah, CMS, you know, like it creates content you can put blog posts and pages and all that sort of stuff and And then it displays all that content on the front end. Yeah, so like the website Well with headless, it's basically stripping out the front end And they call it decoupling or decouple so you decoupling the The back end or the content management system part of WordPress and you're removing and stripping out the front-end component, okay How am I doing so far with this guys? I got all right Sort of ish Yeah, okay. Thanks Voted confidence Just put up like the five-minute one if you want So essentially Anybody heard of this thing the REST API It was introduced in you know WordPress 4.4 back in 2015. It's pretty cool. It's pretty awesome. It allows developers to Be able to you know get and push and post content from the WordPress Ecosystem or the content management system and push it to other applications other applications such as React or Gatsby. I've just thrown these in because they sound really awesome But yeah, and basically so essentially your your housing the content on your WordPress site and then you're Creating application like a web app or maybe a mobile app Which is basically pulling in or the WordPress component is pushing the content to then live on that other application and there's some benefits of this and That is faster load speeds because the application that's sitting over here That's getting the data from WordPress. That's not having to read a database or Fetch anything from a database. Thank you And it's it's essentially then like the content's just there Which has been fetched from the content management system. So how am I going with this guy's headless guys? Yeah, cool. Thank you. So you get fast loads of bits and of course you have a lot more flexibility and control for developers Which is pretty neat and If the CMS goes down which is WordPress then the application stays up. It's not dependent on the content management system of WordPress so So that's a really good thing as well, I would say yeah So if WordPress goes down you go fix that and then yeah, so How'd I go guys with the headless stuff? Was that all right? Yeah Cool again, just go and Google like I did at midnight last night For the the 100th time, you know, what the heck is headless WordPress now also if you are Around the Port Macquarie area next week. I think it's Thursday. Is it Thursday next week? Yes, the Port Macquarie meet-up group. They're going to be doing a thing on this Where you can take your laptop and You can follow along it's totally cool and they're going to be doing a headless with Gatsby Is that right? Cool. Yeah, talk to Roby. He he runs it Yeah, cool. So if you're in the in the neighborhood of Port Macquarie and Go go to the the meet-up and you'll learn more about this. Okay. I'm running out of time So the next one is or the ninth one is Go static with hardy press anybody heard of hardy press Cool. Nice. So hardy press is a service. It's kind of like a hosting platform Where you can go and build your website on that platform under like a staging site Kind of similar to cloud ways if you're familiar with cloud ways So you build your site and then you would press a button in the dashboard that says publish site and then what hardy press does is it does its magic does this thing Where it converts the website? Into a HTML based site so We all know that HTML websites load faster because they don't fetch anything from the database So all the content is there and that's what hardy press does and then what it does is it puts it up on its CDN content delivery network And they've got 30 servers around the globe Which then deliver your website to it so the the main benefits of hardy press is that load speeds Really fast they say up to 10 times faster The website is secure. There's zero maintenance. You don't need to do any plug-in or theme updates that puts My business WP Genie out of business But you know But you got a sort of note as well that it doesn't support dynamic websites That have you know shopping carts and all that sort of stuff So it doesn't support all kinds of sites if it's just a brochure site very simple Then you can put it up on hardy press and you can get it loading faster and you don't have to worry about it and Also, it only supports contact form 7 as well for the contact forms Sorry gravity form lovers So yeah, so that's how you press all right. Let's go number 10 the last one offer affiliation This is a very simple often missed opportunity here. Does everybody know what affiliation is? Have I spelled affiliation right? Yeah, anyway, it doesn't matter So essentially if you've got a if you're running an e-commerce sites or if you're running Some sort of service where people will come to the website and buy stuff Then why not? Why not create an affiliation an affiliate program on your website? So if you want to drive starting to drive traffic to your site and you've found you in the market You know you're trying to get your website out there Then this is a great way because you can then you know tell all your family and friends and say hey look if you can sign up to my affiliate program on my website and You know share this link with all your friends and you know pop it up on social media Then anyone who comes to the website and they buy then hey you get a commission a commission so This is really cool. So there's a plugin called affiliates manager where you can install that it's free There's a whole ton of other premium add-ons and stuff that you can pay for But you can get set up pretty easily with this particular plugin so Now the benefits of course great for generating leads free commerce websites Allows you to monetarily reward those who refer you or refer customers to you and It's a fully self-managed system. So you don't have to do anything. You can just send people a link and say hey sign up and And it all just works and then they can go and create a URL that then they can send out to their to their friends and stuff and Yeah And that's it. Whoo So we we got the rocket to the planet and you can see that yeah, we've got the flag. Well done guys Well done. We got there Okay, we've got time for a couple of questions. Do we have some questions one at the back here Just got a question on that WP proposal thing you showed as you showed us WP proposal But then you quickly went on to say you made your own. Yeah, why? Why did you not use WP proposal? because I Yeah, WP proposal Didn't really do what I wanted it to do. So I didn't really explain that you know on my proposal system Because on on the WP proposal system when you send the link you have all the information there That you add into the the fields of that plug-in And then at the bottom, it's just a it's just an email field that they have to put in their email address to then accept the proposal But I didn't want that. I wanted an actual form there with upsell opportunity And also a signature field there. So I'm using gravity forms on mine So I just wanted to extend it a little bit more which WP proposals didn't do for me. So But you know, if you're just starting out and you're wanting to get away from doing the PDF stuff Then WP proposals is a great option to start with but then you'll find you may find that it limits You in some way did you find that you when you said your proposals got more? increased conversion, do you think that other people were using? The same type of software and you have been disadvantaged because you're using PDFs So so we you know if you were quoting against three other companies and the other two people were using something like an online Quoting, do you think you were disadvantaged because you weren't? Well, I just think that yeah It all came back to the user experience and I did ask my clients this as well who accepted the proposal and you know, you have to ask questions to your customers to see if what you're doing is working And one of the main key factors in their decision-making was that they they found me to be more professional with that that process And they said that they got PDF proposals from their other companies But they found that they you know, they having the the technology and and sort of seen me use utilizing the website to create these proposal systems It gave him another tick against those other companies that weren't doing that. So So yeah, that's actually a really good point many years ago. I was told to be your brand And that's actually the hardest thing you can do. So if you're a web designer having Being your brand and having a technology based Proposing or proposal system. It's just part of being your brand. There's lots of options out there I use proposal fight and it really does make a difference for conversions Okay, any other questions? So is one of the one just behind you this gentleman here Hey, Jeff. Hey, Paul With WP proposal, can you set up several different proposals on the one website? To do different jobs Like if you're doing websites and then you're doing good with my business as a separate separate Well, you basically essentially just you're just creating another post. So, you know, so Yeah, each create another post and put a proposal on each post Yeah, you just change the proposal type I guess Yeah, so it's just you know, if you're sending a proposal to a client that needs I don't know Google reviews, then you create a proposal for that And if you have another client that uses that wants a website you build another proposal for Specific to that. So yeah, yeah, so you know, I got ten topics to for your next meet-ups Any other questions Okay, well, I'd like you to thank it Paul again for very very insightful topic I love having a bit of humor with stuff You