 Thank you everyone. Of course this doesn't work and I press the only button they told me not to press. It's 2013. I'm struggling to balance a part-time, day job and a freelancing career and at the time I was following a number of American entrepreneurs blog. How to make your first six figures, how to get 100,000 followers on Twitter, how to make money while you sleep. None of this applied to my business or in my market, which was Italy. I did find, however, a silver lining into this. I found, through this really unreasonable chance and classes and books and forums, a group of like-minded Italian women that were facing the same struggles I was. So we wondered, what if we create something for female, creative entrepreneurs? In Italy, I will do it in Italian for the Italian market, because in Italy at the time there were not 100,000 Twitter people. So how could we get 100,000 followers? There weren't as many. So let's do this. So at the time, I was building WordPress websites for a living. So of course I said, let's create a blog. That's the most natural thing to do. So we wanted to share our knowledge, talk to other women and see what happened. And since we were on a mission to help as many women as we could, we did this for free. And so Cipiubi, which is Casa Pibotega, home and studio, was born in September 2013. This is a screenshot. The design is nothing revolutionary. It's a blog. And the main thing about it is the content. Spoiler alert, the blog has stopped publishing in December 2022. But over nine years, we achieved great results. I personally learned a lot. I learned how to collaborate remotely and asynchronously. A word that I will never learn how to say in English. And how to optimize the editorial workflow, which is the topic of today's talk. So as soon as we launched, the response was amazing. And I know that for some of you, these numbers might look small. But remember, this is a blog for female creative entrepreneurs in Italy, which is a very small niche, especially in 2013. And we covered pretty much all of it. And the content, this is one of the things I'm the most proud of. The content was so good that we had a really big male readership, despite the fact that all our articles addressed a she and often used the stuff like, hey, sister, in our opening lines. I would like to say that we started with a strategy. We did not. And probably we never had one, let's be honest. But this was also intrinsic to the nature of the blog itself. In a sense, its birth was very similar to many open source projects like WordPress. We had the niche to scratch, finding information for women entrepreneur. And we started pouring our hearts and soul and everything we learned and everything we didn't know and we wanted to learn on the pages of the blog. Let's say we had a strategy, or at least we had some guiding principles. So we had three guiding principles. One was right for our specific niche. Don't get sidetracked. So it's female, creative, entrepreneurs in Italy, most of the time at the beginning of the journey. We did never wrote to impress other people. We wrote to be helpful. Two, choose topics that are relevant, that the audience finds challenging. This will help you create content that is useful and not, you know, we wrote a lot of how-to's and actionable articles and not some vague mission statements or, you know, theoretical musings. And three, make the articles readable, indexable, and accessible with a good semantic structure. I'm an HTML fan. So that was from day one. We had pretty strict rules about how to format our articles. And it needs to be shareable with featured image, text snippets, and other elements that will look good no matter which platform you use to distribute the content. So one of the first things we realized we needed to manage were roles. We tried a number of different solutions before settling on members, which is a free, freemium plugin that you can find on the WordPress.org repository. This gave us a more granular control over WordPress standard user capabilities. We kept the same user roles to make it easy for everyone and manage the permission via the plugin. So editors could edit articles, but they could not do updates. They could not install new things. Authors could only write their article, upload their article, and edit it until the publishing. Once the article gets published, only editors could edit the post. And finally, subscribers, which is the status we moved all the previous writers so they cannot do anything other than changing their user profile. We encouraged everyone to do over the years to keep it relevant. I keep pushing the only button that I should not push. It's incredible that nothing has exploded yet. So I have decided early on to limit the access for two reasons. First, quality of the content was very important for us, so we wanted to review every article before it went online and we wanted to make sure that nothing would be changed without an editor permission and oversight. And second, I really wanted to reduce the standard capabilities to lower the surface of attack in case of hacking, something that happened to us very early on the process. So that was a good lesson, so we tried to implement better security processes. The plugin is very easy to use. You have all the WordPress functionality and plugins on one side, and then you can just give the capability, grant or deny to the person. It can go very granular, so that's very useful. And the other thing that I really wanted to limit, and I think anyone who has ever written for a blog knows this one, the ability to create tags and categories. Four years ago we did a content audit. We had over a thousand tags, which were reduced to 60, and we had over 30 categories, which were reduced to eight. This makes it so much easier for the reader to move around the blog and find the content that is really relevant for them instead of seven different variations of the word. Portrait, portraits, headshot, headshots, avatar, gravitar, you know, they all mean that that person faces there. So we tried really to limit that to focus on how easy it would be for our readers to go through it. Again. So over the years we found all these wonderful people that we then had to manage their user capabilities and ensured that their writing would really fit ChipUB style and mission thanks to our onboarding process. So anytime we wanted to add or needed to add new authors to the blog, we used two processes. A call for contributors and a direct invitation. We did a mix of both because I really believe that a variety of established and new voices is very important for a blog like ours, but basically for any blog I would say. So when someone responded to the call, we vetted them. As I said, the content was the number one priority for us. So it didn't matter if you had one follower or a million follower, all it mattered is are you going to write something useful for our readers? That's it. So we checked their social media profile, their blogs. We assessed their writing style, tone, how they talk about the topics they were expert on to see if it was a good fit for our own readers. And we had the screening calls to get to know people better because we wanted really to avoid us attention seekers. I would love to tell you that we never had any attention seekers. We did have some, but we dealt with it very gracefully, I want to say. And once the authors were selected in one way or another, we sent them an agreement. It might sound overkill for a free blog run by volunteers, but this was very important for us, again, to guarantee a certain quality standard. It was also a way for us to lead by example in an industry in 2013 where it was kind of the Wild West in Italy back in the days for the blogs. So we asked the first lawyer that wrote for CHPB to draw up an agreement for our authors, which to this day they have the copyright for what they wrote. They can ask us at any time to remove or change the material. And in return, we kind of asked them not to duplicate the content for SEO reasons, but also for ethical reasons. You're either writing for us or you're writing for yourself. Both are fine, but just don't piggyback on one or the other. All the content is still available and will still be available until my friends at Sitegram give me hosting, which I hope is forever. And it's released under a non-commercial, non-derivative, attribution, creative, common, international, 4.0, whatever license. So we asked all the authors that didn't have one already to create a gravatar. If you're not familiar with what a gravatar is, it's a hosted service where you can link your email to your profile picture. We can also have different emails and profile pictures, so they will show in WordPress, and not only WordPress comments and posts. So then we created the user profile for the author and asked everyone to add as many details as possible, high ties, as links to the website and social media. Also Karim got here. I'm going to remember this. Every author had an author box. This is mine. At the end of single articles and at the beginning of their archive, post-archive. At the time, I love doing a bit of coding. I'm terrible. No one ever wants me to do it. But at the time, I extended the standard functionality of WordPress to include as many links as possible to the author box profile. Now there's a block for that, but at the time I just tweaked some PHP to get as many links as possible since no one was ever paid to write for a Chpubit. It was really important that everyone would get maximum visibility out of it. And not everyone was familiar with WordPress. Shocking. I know. But there are still people out there that elusive 57% that don't know how to use WordPress. So we taught them how to use it to increase their productivity but also to improve their professional growth. So we gave each new author a welcome package. I'm very proud of this. I have to say, but talking about this, I'm like, I can't believe we did all of that. So with a lot of instructions, how to fill out your profile for maximum visibility, how to format the post for the HTML aficionado here, how to write for SEO without forgetting the people. Guidelines on how many words to use. What else did we put? We put common spelling mistakes. And I was very wary of this at the beginning. I was like, people are going to be offended. Instead of people years later, thank me for that welcome package because when I have a doubt about how to write the thing in Italian, Italian has tons of accents. So when I have a word about how to use the... Oh, hello, Stefan. How to put the accent. They go back to our welcome package. So that's great. We built the documentation over the years. So it wasn't this good at the beginning. But if you're starting now, there are two international resources that I advise to use, and one is very much for Italy. One is MailChimp Style Guide, which is also released under a non-commercial, non-something, yes, to something else, creative, common license. I wish I could remember those, but I never do. And the other one, shout out to the other people that provide the free membership to Chibubi, is the Yoastessio Academy, which is a great resource, and I'm not saying this because they're here, but it really is. Even the free training is really worth the time you're going to put into it, and if you can upgrade, do it. And then the other one is Italian is a very opinionated, gendered language. And because we wanted everything to be first for female, and then we expanded this, there's a big topic in Italy about how inclusive our language is, but this is a guide we use from an Italian linguist that really helped us bring it up a notch in terms of writing. So once we gathered all the writers, we created an editorial calendar. At the beginning, and again, I don't know how we did this. Now, when I tell it, it sounds just insane. We posted six to seven times a week. Then, a couple of years into the story, into the publishing, we ran a survey, 900 people replied, that's a lot of replies. Like, we didn't expect that response, and the main reply we got was, we cannot keep up with you. You're writing too much. So we decided to move to three times a week, but long-form posts. And that really helped us, not only we doubled the audience, but we really managed also to place ourselves better in search engine result pages. So to create the calendar, I didn't use any fancy tool, paper and pencil. I printed out Google Calendar pages, filled them with the names of the authors, in the days I knew we were going to publish something, and then decided, like, we have a whole here, what are we going to do? Are we going to invite someone to write? Do we need, maybe we miss a category, we miss a topic completely, so we're going to invite someone new to write. And this was great. I mean, it's virtually no cost, and it helped us so much over the years. And that's how we also brought new authors in, because we saw that, hey, there's visibly a place where there is no one, so we need someone to fill in that spot. And that's how we found new categories or new articles. Then we did use the fancy tech. We moved everything to Trello, which is a free project management tool. We used this board to have the calendar as a list, and then on the left, you see ideas for articles. So if someone found, you know, around the web an interesting article, and they thought it would be a good fit for Chpub, but it was not their topic, they would put it here, and someone else would pick it up. We had workflows and documentation, so everyone could refer back to it at any time if they had any doubt. And also we used it to manage the social engagement campaigns, community engagement campaigns we would run at the time. And then the last step was really to put the Google Calendar pages back into Google Calendar with the publishing dates, and when you see editing, it's because that's the editor that needs to edit the next article, which is something we're going to talk now in the posting process. Up until now, we've talked about the roles, the prep work to set up the blog, so let's look at how this over a thousand articles got published over the years. So there was a number of people involved behind the scenes. Our newsroom, shout out to Aaron Sorkin show fans. That is me, a mama bear, because whatever I do in life, I'm a mama bear. So the editor-in-chief main responsibility was, of course, well, not of course, we discovered what it was, because we didn't know, so we made it up, to pick the best possible content for GPOB. We had three over the course of nine years. I served for the first three years that I handed over to someone else, and then they handed over to someone else. And so the editor-in-chief is responsible for reading all the proposals, vetting the speakers if, you know, there needs to be vetted, guiding the editorial vision of the blog. What else? I have a list, but I don't know if I put everything. Putting together the editorial calendar and, you know, all these things. The author main focus is one, writing. Writing the best possible content they can for our readers. That's it. They don't need to worry about anything else. They could get inspiration for various sources, industry news, their own subject matter, they were all subject matter expert, or one topic or another, so that. Or, and this was really the thing that helped us the most over the years, it was the whole group of authors were female creative entrepreneurs. So we had our target audience within the group. We didn't need to do a lot of research. It was enough for someone to raise their hand and say, hey, I don't know how to invoice now. In Italy we have like 27,000 fiscal ways of doing things, of registering a company. So, you know, I was like, I have no clue how to invoice. And then the accountant of the group was like, excellent idea for this month post, let's do it. So, you know, it was very easy to, we never ran out of topics basically. The editors were the biggest group inside the newsroom. We had copy, photo, social media and SEO. So copy editors reviewed all the posts, of course, to adjust the language, tone of voice, spelling mistakes, but sometimes they rewrote entire articles. Why? We picked an author that were really good at what they did, but they were terrible writers. It doesn't matter. They still have the experience we need to provide good content for our readers. So your copy editors would work with them to get those ideas and knowledge they had on paper. Then we had the person in charge of picking an image for each article we had, and not one of the templates we used. I'm looking at times, sorry. Like, using the same 10 templates all the time. Every single article had a different image. So we had a template then to add a sentence that would represent the post content. So wherever we would distribute this, it would go together with a featured image that would tell you what was it. Then, of course, social media folks who were really present throughout the years on Facebook. We experimented with Instagram. We failed miserably. What is written there? Because five minutes. Oh, my God, I'm late. So social media, SEO. We really tried to cover it all to make the best possible content. I'm really late. So six people read each article before publishing. That's a lot. But that's what ensures a consistent quality throughout over a thousand articles. So to manage it all, we used Publish Press, which is also a freemium plugin. We used its free version, but also some paid modules to manage. It really provides great help for editorial workflows for teams that have to share all this information. So we used the editorial comments the most, but we also created user groups. So the right people would get notifications at the right time. And we used the checklists. Checklists are great. Pre-publishing, pre-go live checklists are great. They can be as loose or as mandatory as you want them to be. Here are some examples, a comment, the checklist of must have and nice to have, required, non-required, and then notifications at the article level. So this is the whole process. It looks insane, but that's what worked for us. I won't lie. We came up with this completely randomly and intuitively. None of us had any previous experience in large blogs or publishing companies. So I'm very proud to see this on stage because after I went to work in WordPress agencies and companies, I realized that this is how it's done. This is how actually big companies do that. Having a detailed process really made us incredibly efficient for a group of volunteer contributors. So I would say don't be afraid to be directive. That will help people. Removing the guesswork always helps. So the last important piece of the puzzle is the human factor, and also the hardest to manage always. My number one rule I would say in life, not just for blogging, is ban trolling and pettiness. So if a writer started to complain about what they were given, how much visibility and things like that, it was time to have a talk. And if commenters got abusive or personally offended one of the authors, no mercy, IP blacklisted, person banned forever. Ban trolls and bullies. That's really my number one rule in life, I would say. Again, it happened, but we dealt with it immediately, firmly. It was not pleasant, but it was necessary. If at any point, this is also something that I learned at Chipp Ubi, if at any point you realize someone or part of the process is becoming a blocker, figure out how to remove that. And if you are the bottleneck, like I was, remove yourself. Delegate. So for more than three years, I felt that I needed to do everything. I needed to know everything. I needed to control everything. Guess what? Chipp Ubi was not growing because it was everywhere. So luckily, I realized I had a lot of work to do, so I couldn't keep up with that. And that's when I realized that delegating is a wonderful skill in life. And documentation, Milana, documentation matters, hashtag. This was really helpful to ensure that we would hand off the project as an article to someone more or less seamlessly. And it's also important to empower people. When we saw that someone was really invested in Chipp Ubi, we said, hey, do you want to do something else? Do you want to be an editor? Do you want to manage one of our social media channels? Do you want to bring up a new initiative? That's great to empower people. You'll never know where the next great teammate is going to come from. Don't forget to welcome change. Again, this is the Italian mama bearing me. Whenever someone wanted to leave, I was like, oh, no, how? We built this together. Why are they leaving me? It's natural. It's okay. I will have to convince myself to do that when my son turns 18, but that's for another topic, for another talk. So I started seeing this as an opportunity. If someone is not as creative and as driven and doesn't have the mindset, doesn't have the energy at that time to write, then we do a disservice to our readers. And it's an opportunity because they go do something else and there's new space for people that actually have the energies and have the creativity and have the mindset in that moment to bring something new to the table. Finally, a blog without readers is nothing. Find a way to talk with your readers and not to them. Listen to them. We had different initiatives on different channels to communicate as much as possible with our readership. We had Facebook. We had this follow Friday that started on Twitter and we're like, let's do it on Facebook, where people have more space to write. It was back in the day where only had, I don't know, 120 characters, whatever. So on Friday we would post something and people could reply with a link to their business and a lot of collaboration started out of it, which is beautiful. Cost zero. We had, before Instagram was cool, and that was really a fail because we were on Instagram from the beginning and we had this hashtag on piano, which in Italian is both, I have a plan and I have a desk. So we asked the people to post the pictures of their desk, messy, curated, doesn't matter, and we would repost them or tell us what they were working on, which is also a great place where you get a peek inside the lady that did the earrings. So, you know, you can find what she's up to. We had monthly Twitter chats, a book club. I forget something, I'm sure. And we open call for contributors all the time. And I believe, and I still believe, that Chippy B readers made four incredible new authors because they knew exactly what the blog stood for as readers first and as authors later. So, despite the constant flow of his blogging dead articles, which basically have started to appear the day blog were invented, so we've been at this for 20 years, blogs are not dead. In the last few years, we've seen time and time again how risky it is to put our content in someone else's hand. We've seen how much the open web is under threat from proprietary solutions. And in terms of branding recognition and positioning, a blog is still a really good tool, a powerful one to have in your content strategy toolbox. So, use it wisely. And I'm sure it will help your business and community grow. That would be all for me. I'm Francesca Marano, the director of engineering. I'm not a coder, so I deal with learning and growth of our wonderful engineers at XWP. You can find me in these places. I'm usually Francesca Marano everywhere. I'm late to reply to everything, but I would love to continue the conversation either here or online. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much, Francesca. We still have some time for questions and answers. Oh, do we? Fantastic. We do. I thought I was running super late. But we made sure to a lot, a little bit of time, so I see in the back. Oh, I don't see because I don't have the glasses. Hello. Hello. I made it back. So, how did it work out for the authors, the availability strategy? It did work out so well that the first group of authors left me heartbroken because they got so much business out of this visibility they got from that blog that at some point they were like, we don't have time to write for ChpB anymore. We have to write for our own cells. We don't even have time to write for our blog because it's business, business, business. So it worked very well. Thank you for the question. Other questions. But I need someone to point me somewhere because I don't see anything. I don't have my glasses. Over here. Hi. Hello, Francesca. Yes, I'm coming over there. Otherwise I'm not going to see you. I hope I don't trip on the way. It's going to make for a fun moment. What was finally the reason not to continue with blogging? And was it like a team decision or was it just it was just done the project? What was it that you stopped? So I think things have a life cycle. As I said, the ChpB was very grassroots. It was born out of necessity. The first group of authors were desperately lonely. We were women that were launching online businesses at a time where this was not so common in Italy. So we really were enthusiastic about it. We wanted just to share all the things that we did well and all the things we didn't do well with other women. Over the years, a lot of big players came into the market. Some big Italian newspapers started their female-driven initiative to use their diversity, equity and inclusion budget, I believe, because a lot of men write for those blogs. So, you know, when you have Corriere della Serra, which is like, I don't know, the daily... I don't know the name of the... Well, it's a big newspaper. So when they have budget of millions, you know, and they start opening these satellite projects and satellite blogs for women, for women in tech, and then there was this, you know, women in tech. Everyone is a woman in tech, which is great. I love it. I'm a woman in tech. But at some point it was like, what do we still have to offer? And also we were tired. Does this volunteer work? And you know how tiring volunteer work is. So we went at it for nine years. And then last year in September, we said, okay, we're gonna pivot, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that. And also when we started, we were all in our early 40s, in our early 50s. So we were like, I'm too tired for this. And we found a new generation, but then also this new generation got a bit older and they got a lot of business, thanks to the visibility. So at some point it just ran its course. But I'm very happy the content. I'm now doing a new content editing audit to just leave the evergreen content because, you know, if there is some Pinterest stuff there that is not relevant anymore, I don't want it there. So we're doing this slowly and just, you know, reducing the number of articles and focus on the evergreen content. And I really hope it's gonna be stay up for many years. Thank you. John, you had a question. I'm coming here so I can see you. Wonderful talk, thank you. Thank you. Did you, at some point, consider monetizing it? Why not? All the time. Why did it end up shutting down exactly? Because it was also a lot of work. Like monetizing a blog is not as easy as people think in it. So we were all the time, oh my God, we have so many readers. We're gonna get rich out of this thing. Nothing. We maybe we made like 120 euros for a sponsored post once in nine years. It just didn't felt we wanted it. We wanted it badly because we're like, we're giving great content. It's great content. We, but finding sponsors, finding how to monetize it is a job and we were already so busy with the content that we're like, okay, what are we doing? Are we keep focusing on the content and be, you know, up late to do this? Or do we start looking for sponsors? Do we start looking? We didn't want ads. It didn't feel right for the audience. So yeah, we didn't make a buck. And I'm so grateful for the people that sponsored us from day one because no, not from day one, the first two years I paid for everything. So yeah, we thought about it, but... Meh. We have time for one more question. I don't see any question, but I also... Okay. Sorry. I'm so sorry. Thank you Francesca. Thank you. Oh, once again. Let's give a round of applause for Francesca. Thank you so much.