 All right, everybody, it's 12 o'clock, let's get this started. So today I want to introduce Greg Taylor. He's got over 12 years of business development and marketing experience. He is a co-founder of Trinity Web Media, and today he's gonna be speaking about a topic that I absolutely love about solution, about problems, figuring out the problems before we start this building stuff. Let's give him a warm welcome for Greg Taylor. So, how was Saturday, was it a good day here? Yeah, yeah. So, I talked today as we stopped selling and start solving problems. Now, the beginning that I kind of designed this talk, and, honestly, I spoke at a ton of work years before, but today we're talking about content marketing and content development. So, this is a brand new talk for me, new topic. So, I hope to learn as much from you guys as hopefully you learn anything from me. So, originally it was stop selling websites, start solving problems, but that's so niche to our world here in this talk, this word press community, that I wanted to just expand it to selling, and you can exchange, interchange Wordpress or websites with stop selling marketing, stop selling social media, stop selling anything and start solving problems. So, what I want to hit on is how often do we really talk about, and look, how often do we talk about, and what don't we, and how often do we talk about what the client doesn't need, what doesn't matter in the client, what only matters about us. So, first off, thank you to the work teams, the NDA, the organizers, volunteers. Anybody who's first working out here? What is in your second? Yeah, that's my sixth. I thought you had that. I thought you meant, what's that for? Oh, no. So, working out, for those of you who may not know, they're solely working on my volunteers, they donate their time, they donate their energy, they donate, actually, it can be quite disruptive to your business. You're not going to get it, right? And so, thank you to everybody who moves here, the speakers fly in from wherever they do it on their own dot, all for the love of the community. So, that's how working out works, and it was all, thank you for being here. It's a beautiful day in San Diego, and you're in a room listening to me, so, I don't know what's the matter with this. I don't know what's the matter with you guys, so, hopefully, casual, informal person, having no trouble. If you have a question, raise your hand while I'm talking, let's talk about it. I don't want to just have a, I just want to speak about what's your information at you, I want to have a discussion with everybody. So, please, please, please, if I say anything, does that make sense? That's anything you want to, maybe challenge, you say anything that you have experience you want to add onto, raise your hand and let's talk about it, right? So, who am I? So, when I was a great tailor, I started, we were impressed around 2008, and I just fell in love with the platform, I fell in love with what was about it. I fell in love with Matt's philosophy of democratizing publishing. I always felt like I had something to say, but nowhere to say it. And even if you don't have anybody who's gonna listen to you, as long as you have something to say, eventually, you know, another friend shall get together and listen to you later. You know? Not calling my screams, I'm sorry. But, you know, I mean, who calls? There's always an audience for someone. So, then I love it. So, I've been in work, involved with WordPress since 2008. I fell into the development side and the agency side sort of backwards. I'm a marketer by degree, don't hold that against me, please. And the marketers ruin everything, they ruin all the shit in the world, right? Look at Instagram. So, I fell into it backwards. I started the content agency, but what happened was, we were developing all this great content, all these strategies for companies and launching on terrible websites. We were not set up for success one bit at all. So, I fell in love with my love for WordPress. I went ahead and I started what was called marketing press at the time, which has then been acquired in Trinity Red Media, where now I'm a co-founder. I am 100% highly unemployed. I have a feeling that a lot of you guys got there. They're unemployed also. I started the company with $400 on my bank account, this is a true story, $400 on my bank account, a laptop with a will of do things a little bit different. And I don't know if anybody else identifies with that story with that. The will of do things differently. I got fired this pretty early. I didn't even see it in 18 months. In Arizona, which is like, I don't know you laugh, but you've been employed in Arizona without work, that is. But only because I wanted to do things differently. I was looking at things differently and they didn't always fall into a revenue model. They need to see how it's working to work. They're working with it. And they showed me the tour quickly. So who's this talk for? This talk is for anybody who is in front of clients, anybody who is passionate about WordPress, anybody who maybe runs an agency, maybe anybody who is talking about your passions or are talking about what WordPress can do for a business in Illinois. So big question. Who are you? So raise your hands. How many business owners do we have here? How many developers do we have here? He says, don't you guys do this a lot better than me? The developers here are shit happy. Every time I speak, don't you guys have to go talk about Bloomberg somewhere? Right? What's that? That was yesterday. That was yesterday. For all that you need to figure out. I bet, right? So you're gonna listen to me, okay, cool, okay? Do you have any creatives and designers? I love the fact that a lot of you guys are raising your hands more than once. That's awesome. So, do we have any writers? So, I was speaking at War Camp Orange County a couple years ago when we were speaking before and I asked the same question every time. So I can get a game to see who we're talking to and what happens is, I said, any developers, any of this, any of that? And what lady interrupts me? I said, hey, please interrupt me. You forgot me. I said, what's your name? She's like, Susan. Well, any writers, never leave the writers out. They're the first ones to blast on the internet. They'll write about you. Right? The dumbest mistake to make is the one that you make twice. So I'm never gonna make that one again. But, you know, I think that more importantly than anything, I think we're all creatives. In one way, shape, or form, I think that we are all creatives. And I know that sometimes, you know, like my business, I'm abstract in there. You know, I'm gonna get from A to D, how I'm gonna hit WXYZ before I hit the D. My business partner, he's very linear. Where he's gonna go ABCD to get to that point. But in what doing what he does, he's not creative. You know, running that side of the business, he's still a creative person. And I think that we are all creatives in one way or another. Because what we have to do is, we have to think, even if we write the code, right? How many ways is there to do certain functions? You know, maybe there's, wait, you have one way. You have one way. How many ways is the right way? Well, I guess that was a talk. That was yesterday's talk, right? But I think that if you don't believe that we're all creatives, there's a discipline. So if you ever say we're all creative people, creative, because what we really are is, we're creative problem solvers. You know, whether you're writing code or whether you're writing content, can you make sure you're just the writers? Or you're designing things or you're doing whatever. You know, we have to think in a certain creative conduit. Now, did anybody here solely, okay, is there anybody here who doesn't touch WordPress in their job function that solely runs the business? Don't bring this all together. The two things that bring us all together is we love WordPress. You guys are here listening to a guy who's doing a Sunday, a few o'clock, saying you ain't no, and we're creating things. I mean, that is the most important thing. It was that commonality right there. So why is this concept important? You know, I hate to say, you know, you need to think differently. I think that somebody coined that phrase already, right? So, I hate to say that because that's the obvious thing. Different is always good. Different isn't always good. Different is different. And which is fine. You know, you may do things one way, I may do things another way, but as long as we're doing something creatively, different is cool, you know, I'm all right with that. But nowadays, there's more noise in our space than ever. Anybody agree with that? Where does the noise come from? You know, Gary Vaynerchuk, I don't know if everybody's fans of Gary Vaynerchuk know what I'm saying. You know what I'm saying. I went back from New Jersey to my high school, played his high school in basketball, and I'm like, I'm still not a fan. He's too fucking obnoxious for me. I wrote a blog just about this, he's a fan. He's that right. But, you know, he says he's day trader. He day trades attention. That's what he does. And that's what people always really stop with me, is he day trades attention. So what happens is, why is everyone always like that? Who's this guy? Who's this? No, it's his snake, well, I don't know, I don't speak to you about it. Don't sue me for other reasons, by the way. But anyway, the snake well says, the guy who comes in, and the guy who comes in with no experience, that gets in front of somebody and says, I'm gonna build your house. Do you know that guy? You know? Is he on your Starbucks? Or are you on your bed of wells here locally? Exactly. So what, okay, this is a perfect discussion right now that we can cut it. You know, actually, I like this slide, I'm gonna get right back to it. People are skeptical about things that you don't understand. So when you deal with somebody, you can tell me that guy. If you're logical, maybe that big in the top 10 is how your crap was there. So give me one second here. Well, what makes the watch like crappy here? I mean, what's, let's hit that. What makes it crap? I don't know what they wanted to hear. Told you what they wanted to hear? It wasn't so strong. That's my favorite one right there. Yeah, I like it. Can you find it? It doesn't work. Does it work? I recently encountered a client website where the entire thing was built. This took more effort than disability at HTML. They injected the entire website in JavaScript. Yeah. Shut the front door, she said. See, I'm from a different country, but we were just like, shut the fuck up, right? That's incredible, right? What happens to our community when we're dealing with that? So, exactly, so like, you know, I kind of got sidetracked, but I love this thing. What did you... Well, basically, that scenario, the person who requires a site from the start of my career, because they told that person what they wanted to hear, they reflected everything they asked for, forget about what's right or wrong. Sure, how long did that? And I'm gonna get to this a little bit different, a little bit later in the presentation. Well, why did they come to that solution? Who's problem they solved with that? They're solving the road. What's that problem that you're solving? I don't have money. They have no money in their account. Hey, listen, okay, we're mostly business owners in here, right? How many times have you guys been a week? Like, I was called ceiling fan folks. Like, a lady in the middle of the ceiling fan. They were just like, holy shit, how am I gonna make payroll this week? Or how am I gonna make payroll next May period? Or how am I gonna do this? Or how am I gonna do that? Now, when he's ready to go to the hood, go sell some shit to some fucking slut, and they don't know any different. But that doesn't do anything for anybody. It doesn't better our community. It doesn't better your business. It definitely doesn't better WordPress. And what does it do? It puts us back to this. Well, in the end of the day, is it very complex? 100%. 100%. So, you talk about, oh, I'm sorry. So, going back to that. So, I don't know about the problem where I came in after a snake oil sale came in. And they didn't want to listen to a word I had to say, because they used WordPress, and did work for them, and they hated it. It poisons our community. Right. I'm sorry. It poisons, you as a professional, it minimizes what we do as professionals. And like, look, let's face it here, right? We are a highly skilled group of individuals in this room. I don't care what you do. I don't care what your expertise is. I don't care if you want to spend all day writing PHP. I don't care if you want to be a designer. I don't care if you want to do this. We're skilled individuals. One way or another. That's nothing. What do you think? Nothing. Well, you know, we're a highly skilled group of individuals. That's exactly what it does. So now, they're skeptical of you, because what you're saying is wrong. Because they've already been, their mind has been dead. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Now, does that happen within WordPress also? Let's not kid ourselves. So let's not kid ourselves. That happens within and amongst us also. Well, in one way, that's one of my, I have to be Gutenberg track yesterday. And that's one of my biggest concerns about Gutenberg. And I've heard other people say the same thing. The problem, if you want to call it that, with Gutenberg is it's going to make it even easier for anybody who doesn't know anything to build a website, to build a website, and make it look good. But maybe not be secure, maybe not function well, be fast. I totally hear what you're saying. I think that still remains to be seen. Oh, yeah, I'm not saying it's going pretty quickly. It's a potential issue that we're going to have to look at. But there's always a potential issue where the visual editor came on. I mean, it's just, you know what I'm saying? You know, I've had people say, oh, you've got some WordPress that's just moving and dragging and dropping and doing this. cmn.com is built on a WordPress, you know. Agency, you know, that dream is to work for it. It builds on big shit. You know what I mean? So it's like, while I hear what you're saying, I think that it remains to be seen. Well, instead of just fear, that's what I mean. Right, what's your concern? It's a concern. And it's a valid concern. It's a valid concern. Yeah? As a designer, it's going to be my life all that easier. Okay. It's going to allow you to be a lot more responsible than you would be for a website. All right. Kind of. It's like, who's waiting for who's got the countdown to a loop or a countdown? There you go, all right. I knew that I was in super hot topic. It's like, it remains to be seen now. It's going to help you, maybe going to bring people in that don't fall in here. The common violence cycle, what's the problem? Yeah. No, come on. We're talking. Well, so I can say the most. Where's the release of 4.0? What was the big thing about them was the post types or 3A, whatever? I think that unless you're in the 14th, unless you mess with it, I think that a lot of things remain to be seen. And education is a key factor to get the student. It's Y2K, I'll look over again. Who wears Y2K? Y2K. I'll have that hold. Yeah. No, did you? Yeah. What it is, is people want to do business with people they know, like, and trust. That's only 75% correct. Now, my math is not skewed. I understand there's all three things. Your math magicians would be 66%. People want to do business with people who can solve their problem that they know, like, and trust. Solve the problem is the key. So the thing is, is from there, the common violence cycle is solve the problem, get them to know you, like you trust you. Then they're going to meet with you. Hopefully they hire you the one that wants and then they're going to refer you. So the way that I position that is, in a more clever way, is know you, like you, trust you, try, buy, repeat, refer. That's the violence cycle we all want to go, that's the lifeblood of our business. No one likes to be sold with people like the buy. True, not true? Anybody not like the buy anything? But what we were talking about, there's no real barrier in entry. We're a person of the source, if ice cream, you have a laptop, or if you're really coming to a smart room, I don't know. You know what I mean? You can go ahead and you can get into this arena. But you're not going to be one of us, a highly skilled professional. So, here's a math game here. I had to look this up, that's fine, this guy's named Gene Rayworth. Gene Rayworth, I've never read a game with this thing, I don't know. So, there are only a couple goals, I say, any website that you're building. You're only, in my mind, there's only three goals. There's three goals that are, creating content for search positioning, for branding, to show that you're a subject matter expert, to build a community around your product service in Iran. Wordpress does that for you? You mean societies do that for you? And conversion. Conversion, in my mind, and when I'm using it, is getting a user to behave in an intended manner. So, conversion can be getting an aside for newsletter, get a buy socket, get a lot of content for it. That's conversions, that's what we do. Any goals I'm naming out? That's conversion. Every once in a while, I get somebody who says, my goal, the goal of my website is revenue, generated revenue. I always say, generating revenue is not a goal in itself. Generating revenue is a buy product of meeting one of these goals. I appreciate that, thank you. So, what are common business problems that we all experience in Iran? What common business problems that we hear about when we're meeting with clients, potential clients, or anybody at a happy hour, or whatever. The ones that I typically hear are these six. Your brand is invisible, they don't know who you are, they don't even know what you do or you have a website. Lack of revenue, that's a business problem, it's not. Brand perception, lack of loyalty, inferior product, inferior team, inferior XYZ, that's a business problem. An inexperienced team, an inexperienced business. Any other business problem that people face that they hear about? These are the six that popped in my head when I was business. Lack of time is small, lack of time, that's agreeable. Lack of direction, lack of direction. Don't care what they do, that's kind of like invisible like that one, but yeah. Where it's kind of, it's like, yeah, that, yep. A lot of companies where the problem that I got in is trying to transition to the modern world, so maybe be able to face people younger to. That's a good one, so lack of support, lack of support, that's like also almost inexperienced a little bit, but here we go with this, right? How many of these can be solved by what we do? I don't think, if you have an inferior product, there's nothing, there's not that anybody can really do it, it's sort of to help you. I mean, we can position it differently, you know. I did go to school for marketing, so I do, too. You know what I mean, inexperienced team, you know. Yeah, that's like, building on that, that's not a product or their site or whatever it is that they're just a structure, and they're trying to improve something that's just fundamentally broken, it's like trying to put, you gotta have something that's built from the ground up to be able to handle it. She said, look, take on a pig, I always say, lack some pinto. But who found a pinto, poor pinto, man. You all right, everybody with me? Nothing's like, we're not done with space yet? What's not a business problem? What's not a problem for the client? So actually, let me back up here. So a couple of these, I think that these two are operational problems, and the other are web slash marketing problems. Your great website that you built is not gonna cure or fix a shape of your organization, no matter how you try. No matter how much money they spend, they throw at you. Eventually, they're not gonna be a good client for you because no matter what you do, it's a failure, it's not a success story. You know, we wanna work on success stories. Who here has had a great success story with the word dress for a client? You know, something proud of it. You know, I believe in collaboration. I think collaboration is greater than competition. So if you collaborate with the operational side of things, or sales side of things, and I would just find our client, my agency, because operation side wouldn't get the hell out of the way and the marketing side. Because operations are something they could do marketing. When marketing, while we had internal discussions from meetings about their operations, we never said, you need to do that. That's not our business. We stay in our own range. I think my deal with the top four, we can stay in our own land and effect change. And like, you know, I love what Dre would say that, you know, he got into the whole world, word dress world, et cetera, et cetera, because he wanted to effect change. And that's the same as when I started my thing. So these are not problems. You have no money. You don't have an expertise in what they need. That's not their problem. Those are problems that a lot of people I see, and I hate to say the Starbucks developer or whatever, because I work at a coffee shop lots of times too, but you know what I mean, what would I say that I say that in chess and I mean, somebody who is going there, oh, I can buy you a web server, 300 bucks. How do I pay you to sell that? Oh, that's 3,000. Perfect. Oh, he's the right number one. Sure. I guarantee you top ranks for these search stars. I'll pay that. Anybody ever hear that competition? Like, I guarantee you it won't work. You know, I try to run away from those people holding my wallet. My wallet, my hand, my back pocket, which I think it'll take. But the problem is never that the people you're talking to do not have it yourself. That's not a business problem. A lot of times people will say, oh, well, the problem is you don't have a web server. Problem is you don't have a good marketing. Problem is that it is it. That's not the problem. The problem is you're invisible. Or nobody knows who the hell you are because you have the presence over here. That's the problem. Also, not problems. You're broke. Your business needs a new brand. You know, you're not a big brand. You're a big roll. All that stuff. They're not problems. The problems that you must have that night is business owners, right? But they're not common problems. You can't sell to your problems. You can't sell solutions to someone else for you to solve your own problems. You can. You're gonna do it once. They're never gonna repeat. Be a repeat client. They're never gonna refer you to anyone. Right? So, let's crack the code a little bit. Let's look at this a little bit differently and just play a quick brand game here. So, just a change of paradigm here. And it looks like I don't even have to do this because you gotta see the same page. It's just pretty cool. Red Bull, what is it? What kind of company is this? What do they do? Entertainment. It's a medium company that sells an energy drink. 100%. Who's an action sports? Somebody. Well, they are so immersed in skateboarding, motocross, sky diving, weird stuff. I don't even know what to call it. Right? Plane racer. The blue, I used to put that on there. I used to put that on there. I used to put that on there. Blue Top. Everybody know the Red Bull, Blue Top? That is so cool. They built these like big platforms. They built these like, it's kind of like a soapbox derby. They have to fly in the air and they don't tell you that. It's like. It's like. GoPro. What's GoPro? It's a content creation company. That's what they saw. That's the problem they saw. They helped us create content. And Nick Woodson, actually the CEO, he did a 60 minutes interview a while ago. He said they actually think that GoPro sometimes is a content enabling company. Does anybody have a GoPro in here? Any, okay. After you guys, how long have you been using anybody from like version like one, two, or three? How hard is it to get content off of that guy thing? It doesn't even get content barely even shows up. Right? It's like, it's a content enabling company. And they help you create content. But then it's like, what are you going to do? This company. I've never seen this logo before. It's a fashion company, they name it. Clothes for people who are active lifestyles. So what they are is they're a lifestyle company. You see somebody wear a Louis Louis logo, you know that they're in a certain thing. So there's some examples of this fashion. So let's talk about your company. Who's business owners? Who wants to share something about your company? What do you do? Where is it? What's your name? I feel like I should go to Bob. Yeah, nice to meet you there. You can see we do digital media marketing and video production, photography, web development. Have you been listening to me? You saw about the improbables. Yeah. I know I have to talk a little bit about that. Okay, but that's what it is. Have you repositioned that? And you start asking the questions to the client. And you say, you know, instead of, you know, they come in for video. One of the, why do they want to make the video? Yeah, actually I did come up with something that I forgot, because it's too kind of a spot, sort of, but, no, I mean, not a family, but. Oh, you're on a spot? Are you? No, I'm not. No, I know. No, I was thinking, you know, something more like, we help people tell their stories online. That would be more of a direction that you're. Absolutely, but how do you do that? Through video. Yeah. Anybody else? I think you know the punch line here. Yeah, tell me about your company, what you do. You help people, you, the problem you're solving is you're making people top of mind. You're making your friends top of mind. Now they get emails. As long as you're doing it right, and you're doing everything, you know, you're going to bomb, can't spam regulations and all that stuff, you're not getting too many spam, you know, you're doing things you're doing on that. You're right.