 Since we're in Nashville, and this is kind of a tradition that I do when I speak at word camps, I'll go with, um, That's all I got. Okay. I'm out. I do travel with the harmonica because why not? It's so small. All right. Want a clicker? Clicker work? Sweet. Hi. Oh, hit play. Yeah. There we go. Sweet. Now I'm out. Okay. Uh, quick survey. How many people have a website? Okay, other way around. How many people have no website? No judgment. No, I'm kidding. It's totally fine. My dad has no website. He's 88 years old. He'll never have one. So that's fine. Last time you updated a website, Gutenberg aside, let's say this week didn't happen. When's the last time you actually updated your site? Well, last, I should stand here. Shouldn't I'm sorry. And hello to the stream, by the way. Hi, everybody. All right. So how often do you really back up your site and update it? Anyone do it consistently besides me? Am I the only people do? Cool. Those who don't? Total shame. No, I'm kidding. It's okay. All right. So I just wanted that information because I just needed some information from you for later. And your mother's maiden name. Send those in, please. And just last four socials. All right. So the old way of websites were this. Static, HTML, tables and frames. Who remembers tables and frames? All right. Who still uses them? All right. As always, yeah. Of course. Yes, you do. I saw you yesterday. And truly custom-coded. Every site was custom-coded, hard-coded. This still does actually happen not in a good way sometimes. It's unfortunate. And this was the old sites. Remember this one? Right? That was awesome. Here's one more. Who remembers Ask Jeeves? All right. Who does not remember Ask Jeeves? You're under 20. Right? Okay. New websites. Of course, they are CMS database-driven. We all know CMS stands for, I really hope, by now. If you don't, also no judgment. Optimize for speed. And they're easily updated and maintained. I say easily because easy is relative term. What's easy for you may not be relatively easy for my father. I use him because he's old and not here. All right. And of course, new sites. This is a WordPress site. It's a Sweden website. Here's one also in WordPress. Really pretty. A lot of use of white space, empty space called CanYouStartYesterday.com. It's a fabulous site. Full disclosure. It's one of mine. All right. All right. So just to kind of, we're going to get to what the things are in a second here. The big stats. 86% of U.S. population uses the Internet. Not the biggest in the world. We are not the biggest by far. 40% of the global Internet uses one or more, one billion people have bought goods online. 65% of web usage is now mobile. Right? How many people bought something in the last week on their device, on a mobile device? I did. Black Friday is over Monday. I am so broke. Sucked. But I got some great deals. Let me tell you. My wife does no idea. Well, unless she's watching this right now. This is a problem. All right. Local stats. Local being just kind of local to areas in general. Not my local, not your local, but just kind of a local version of things. 85% of consumers use Internet to find local businesses. Okay. Here's a survey for your question. How many people remember the yellow pages? Right? How many people never heard of the yellow pages? Don't lie. Oh, well, okay. We have an older audience. That's okay. Cool. Surprising. 33% of people read stats and reviews to make a purchase. Again, 65%. I put that in there twice. Sorry. Okay. So what is the proper care feeding and growth? What's this kind of breakdown to? So a couple of things. Design and functionality, content, and engagement. Okay. Content. Kelly was awesome. Content is key. Right? It really is. It's important. Design is important, too. How many designers in the house? I love you guys. How many actual developers? Mostly like you guys. No kidding. Okay. So the care. Design and functionality. Is it mobile ready? Number one thing. April 21st, 2015. Google made it so mobile got higher rankings, right? I believe that's the correct date in that timeframe. You want to be mobile ready. It really is important. Design for mobile first, potentially, right? SEO, super important. A moving target. I am not an SEO expert. I tell people hire someone smarter than me or hire someone smarter than yourself. If you don't do SEO, sub it out. And then functionality. Make sure you're using the right tools for the right service for what you do. Recently came across a client who has e-commerce. They're running Woo for a jewelry store, but they don't sell online. Right? What? Someone said what? Who said what? I want to give you something. Thank you. That's all I'm going to get you. That's all you got. That's all I got. So they use Woo because the previous developer installed Woo because they wanted to have a saved list form that you could print out, go to the jewelry store. This is what I want to see. The problem is they now have 14,000 lists that will never use or print it out. And a ton of spam and link bait because of the way Woo system is set up. There's literally no authentication that these accounts are real or not. So use the right thing. If you sell something online, then use Woo. If you don't sell, don't use Woo. Or just don't do that. Don't do e-commerce online if you don't need e-commerce. There are better solutions here. All right. Content. Feeding. You want to feed it. Content. Fresh and in which format? Fresh means consistently new and updated. Evergreen's great, but you want to keep people coming back. The format's important here. I am not a blogger. I, like Kelly, am a podcaster. I have two podcasts. We'll get to that at the end of this last slide. Do you write? Great. Then blog. You want to hear your voice? Great. Then podcast. You're showing how to do something, then do video. Okay? Make sure you have the right format for your audience. Make it relevant. Don't talk about Laravel. I don't know where that came from. If you're talking about CSS. It may not make sense. Okay? And actionable. When you have content, make it actionable. Someone can do something with that that day. Make the answer and help their questions. You will get further in life if you help other people get further with their life, right? It's a famous quote. I totally butchered it. It's fine. Customer engagement. Growth. Social media. Owning and renting tools. Tools is the wrong place for this. But social media. Fantastic. Who uses Twitter? Snapchat? LinkedIn? All those social media. Fantastic places to go to to get people to come back to your site. You want to own the engagement. At any time, any day, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, they might turn things off. And you don't have the engagement. I'd rather have a list of 50 people who I know want my information versus 500 likes. Likes don't matter anymore, right? It feels good. Oh, it's not like my post. But I want their email address, honestly. Owning and renting, that's the whole concept, right? Hub and spoke. Make sure people come back to your site, okay? So now the growth. This is always important. People say, how do I grow my engagement? How do I grow my site and my business? So I had the epiphany a year, a little over a year ago. Moved from California to North Carolina. Anyone here from California besides me? A couple of people. Anyone still live there? Okay. Why? No, I'm joking. No, it's okay. I'm a native Californian. I'm a Laker fan through and through. Dodger fan as well. Kind of sucks. Not a LeBron fan. No, it's okay. I know. I live in North Carolina now. And I learned a year ago, business was okay, but I had some of my friends, competitors were all friendly in this business, doing really well and I was not. I'm like, what's the difference? It's the tools. The number one tool they use is a CRM. Anyone know, anyone use a CRM? Anyone never heard of this term before? Content, I'm sorry, customer relational manager, right? CRM is massively important. Use a CRM. I won't tell you which one I'm using right now. If you want to ask after, you can. The key is it helps me track things. Everything gets into my CRM. My old way of biz dev was this, total shotgun approach. I would email, warm or cold lead, let's say, the person. BCC, my Trello board. So a copy of my email would go to my Trello board. And that was it. So if someone contacted me, I could go back and see what I sent. Not the best way of doing business. So one in 50 would get back to me. Really bad odds. Now I get much more engagement because I follow up with a CRM. You can track things. This is really small, I'm so sorry. 81% of people, what's that say? I just, it says track everything. So I track everything. Everything gets of value in my CRM. And I follow up consistently all the time. Okay. Next tool, email marketing. Who believes this does not work? Well, good. Or you're lying to me. Email marketing works. It does. It's annoying to some extent. You can take advantage of people, but don't. But email marketing works. Lead magnets work. Trip campaigns work. If you have the right audience, if you have the right content. Okay. And then finally here, oh, exit intent. I love this one. When someone leaves your website, before they leave, you can say, hey, one last thing. Right. It's fabulous. I honestly love exit intent. I mean, I don't want them to leave my site, but I have one more, one more shot at it. Okay. And then, oh, fancy transition. I don't know where that came from. Last but not least, abandoned carts. How many people do sell something online in this room? So like actually have a shopping cart system that they make sense. We lose so much. 78% of people will leave the cart empty. They'll put something in the cart and they leave. I do it every day on Amazon. I say, yeah, I'll save this for later. And I do. I go back and look and want to see what's going on. But I will, and I do come back sometimes where I just save it as a list later. But 78% of people put something in because we have 72 tabs open in Chrome. Right. Oh, it's not just me. So happy to hear that laugh. Good. Whew. It's not good. My fan kicks in. It's just weird. So abandoned carts. I use the service now to save that. People then come back because you can actually have a campaign for abandoned carts. All right. So that in a nutshell is the growth. Right. So to repeat, we want to have the right content, have the right services and have the right ways to engage. Okay. John F. Kennedy said this. There are risks and costs to action, but there are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction. Huge believer in this. You have to take action. And with that, you will see results. You will grow your business. You will grow your environment, your engagement of customers and your site in WordPress 2019 and beyond. And Q&A, if you have any questions. But before that, this is really about me real quick. I'm Adam, by the way. So I have two brands. Well, three. Concierge WP. It's my agency. Kitchen Sink is my podcast. So I do have a weekly podcast. And that's where I give back every Monday for the past 249 weeks in a row. I don't miss ever. Okay. I'll make sure I knock on wood there. I'm actually looking for two people to interview tomorrow. Brand new WordCampers. If you've never been to WordCamp, come to find me. And also Get Options podcast, another show as well. So that's how you can find me online. If you have questions about the tools I actually use, I'm not trying to sell you anything. I just want you to take action and do things consistently. And I do have, like, if you want to know the one secret, that's what it is. The secret to growth is consistent action every day. Okay. That's all I got. Thanks.