 Hello So I want to echo the idea of having some kind of note-taking device your phone or laptop works, too I hate paper But some people love paper so no offense if you like it we're going to talk about I need to project more Can you hear me in the back? Barely all right. I need to project more all right So we are going to be talking about data-driven marketing with WordPress and laying some foundations for that If my clicker worked hey, it did All of my fonts look crazy on here because originally it was set for 16 by 9 and these projectors are not that so enjoy the font show That's me. I organized the Raleigh SEO meetup I also host a WordPress help desk in Raleigh and I help businesses Build their WordPress websites at opsis.com So we're going to go over some of the fundamentals of online marketing So we have an idea of what we're going to talk about today how to measure your success with online marketing common goals and ways to connect those goals with KPI and ROI We're also going to talk about how to avoid technical common technical challenges and Some places to go for more information and guidance So I've got some quick questions for y'all. This is where you're going to need that note-taking device so you can answer these questions What do you want people to do when they come to your website? Take a few seconds jot down whatever that number one thing is that you want people to do and then if anybody wants to holler them out we can Share a couple of them real quick Anybody want to share with the crowd? Okay, you wanted to follow your website Wanted to buy something Do you have an e-commerce site and your manufacturer? Okay, so they actually buy on the website Okay, so there may be a multiple step process there who else Answer a call to action. Okay, so you're taking the content marketing stuff around here. I presume who else just throw some out Make an appointment Engage, okay Next one Why do you want people to do that? There we go. Now we're getting somewhere. So follow the website so that way you'll get paid So there's actually something else that you want people to do follow the website as the backup option depends on your business model You want them to return? Yeah Anybody else want to throw one out why you want them to do that so that's what to do Why do you want them to do that? Of course making money helping people all right and How does this impact the bottom line of your business? This is what all of this is getting to oftentimes I hear from Potential clients that they want more followers on Facebook as an example last time I checked you can't pay your rent with Facebook followers So it all gets down to how does this impact the bottom line of your business and being clear on how you're building that model? And how you're optimizing towards that goal So we're going to measure success in order to figure out where we're going with this Quick little example to show you what a dashboard could look like if you're measuring some goals You can see the light blue line. This is organic search referrals So you can see spikes and dips as people are coming in off of search engine optimization into this site This is just some dummy data measured in single dollar values. I hope nobody's excited about earning six dollars But it's an example to show you without having to violate anybody's privacy on the sites that I'm managing Direct typing you've got the green line there. So that's if somebody Gets your URL goes directly to the site types it right into the browser Depending on the different types of marketing campaigns that you're doing you would expect different movements in these lines So if you've just done a mailing campaign where you've sent a piece of actual physical mail To your target clients you would expect to see a bump in direct typing Coming into your website if that campaign was successful if you just did push with some content somebody out here was talking about calls to action so content marketing and You've got that content to rank in Google Ranking is great, but if you've got no traffic coming in off of that it doesn't matter So you would expect to see some movement in these organic search referrals and this particular graph is measuring goal completion So if we get a hundred people to come to the website because they found some content in Google and they don't do anything Those hundred people are worth exactly zero to that business. We got to have people actually doing something So some common goals Most of you guys we got a few examples of business models I think just about everybody fits into one of these five categories here So real quick does anybody have a business model that they're working that doesn't fit in one of these No, all right So we're gonna connect business models with some goals on the other side e-commerce just shout it out What's the goal of e-commerce? There you go. That's an easy one if you have a subscription business model. What's the goal on the other side? Subscribers membership site Lead generation All right, you guys kind of have where this is going This is where you can get into those different pieces and that multi-tiered funnel that you're putting together Where you have people subscribe to a mailing list and then eventually you're gonna sell them a product or service I think it was automotive equipment or was that right engines? so you may have social media followers and Subscribers on mailing lists, but ultimately you want to get them over to something where they're buying a product or service And you can do some backwards math to be able to figure out how much is one more subscriber on my mailing list worth This connects goals to key performance indicators to a return on investment one of the things that we always get asked for those of us that are Digital marketing professionals is how can you demonstrate the return on my investment here? If I give you a thousand dollars for this marketing campaign How are you going to show me that you're putting money back in my bank account? And in order to do that you've got to work out. What is the value of another social media follower? if that's what we're doing what is the value of another email subscriber and it's a rough estimate and it helps you to determine How good of a job you're doing connecting with your ideal audience in some of the other sessions here? You've heard people talk about speaking to your ideal audience The better you do at speaking to that exact audience the lower your cost will be per conversion And the higher your profits will be per conversion So by measuring those things down to the per conversion level You can see those last thousand people that we brought into our email list when we sent them out that campaign And they only converted at 10% and normally we've been converting at 30% Those last thousand people that we just brought in are not our ideal customers How can we tweak that campaign to speak to our ideal customers? so From goals being sales subscriptions memberships leads and influence We can get The key performance indicator e-commerce is a little bit easier for measuring some of these things out because the transaction happens right on the site Not everybody has as easy a time as measuring these things e-commerce has its own set of challenges Measuring the performance of their campaigns is not one of those. That's a lot easier for them Subscribers members Subscribers calls emails for leads depends on what type of leads those are coming in I was speaking with somebody out in the hall about using call tracking So using that data to be able to capture how many leads you have coming in and then how many of those leads actually convert Depending on where they're coming from With that key performance indicator, you can then calculate an ROI with sales. You can go directly to money Ecommerce having it a little bit easier there subscribers sales through messaging so if you have a thousand people that are subscribed to your mailing list and you send them a Message about a sponsor's product or an affiliate link or something of that nature That's where you're going to capitalize on that audience or a message about an event that you're having or however You're selling something to that Mailing list over time as your mailing list grows you can measure those conversion rates You can also measure the conversion rates for specific products and be able to determine is that product resonating with my audience based on how likely they are to buy it or Is my audience changing over time based on how they respond to an offer that I've made previously with a different set of my audience With members sales have paid membership dues I Output of sales funnels with subscribers and Sponsorships and ad revenues a lot of businesses yours Maybe you were talking about getting people to come and look at your website that could be a business model that is monetized through sponsorships or ads along the sides So you're actually wanting to optimize for people to click on those ads You want to get them to come to the website and you want to get them to keep coming back But ultimately you want them to click on an ad and go away and that's how you earn money And I don't know if that's specifically yours, but you're not in your head. So I'm gonna go along with it I'm right close. Okay Yeah, a lot of times it's a good idea to layer multiple different business models So you may have one business model where you're getting people to view and click on ads But then you have another piece where you get them to subscribe to your email list And you make different offers through that email list. So you have multiple pieces that create a virtuous cycle So here's how we can calculate the ROI of Various KPI I'm having fun with these letters everybody before you walked into this room. Were you familiar with KPI? All right, anybody still at this point lost and doesn't know what I'm talking about with KPI All right, I was just about to say if anybody's embarrassed. I'm gonna explain it anyway All right, so KPI is key performance indicators These are the numbers that we can actually measure in order to get an idea of whether or not our business is succeeding at the objectives that we want ROI is return on investment So if somebody comes to you with a marketing campaign and says hey, you give me a thousand dollars I'm gonna do this marketing thing and I'm gonna get you sales on the other side You want to see for that thousand dollars that you spent on advertising you got five thousand dollars that came in and sales You subtract your costs. You're still ahead. Hopefully depends on your margins. We're not going to get into all that math but if you need help with this talk with an accountant and They'll help break down some of these numbers for you And then KPI is where you can measure things like subscribers to an email list that are not directly related to a revenue number So if we have a profit from sales that e-commerce business model That's a direct relationship Whatever profit you got from that sale. That's your return on investment email subscribers Multiplied by a conversion rate So if only 10% of your email subscribers buy a thing and you have a hundred email subscribers, you can expect to sell 10 things Multiplied by the profit for each of those things that you sell if you make a hundred dollars on each of the things that you sell and you sell 10 of them you made a thousand bucks by sending out an email not bad for clicking the send button Right, but you had a lot of work to build that email list Members lifetime average lifetime value. This is a important distinction that a lot of people overlook If you have a membership site and you spend $500 to get somebody to join your membership site that costs $49 a month First month that sounds pretty stupid spending $500 to get someone to give you 50 bucks a month You're losing money But if they spend the next 10 years on that membership site paying $50 a month and you only spent $500 to get them in there That's worth every penny. So you got to have an idea of how long are people going to stay on your Membership site as we get further down. We've got some lifetime value kind of numbers as well. So Subscribing to your email list if you have an educational bend to your site You may expect that within three years somebody is going to go from being Novice at whatever it is that you're teaching them to be an expert and move out of your mailing list because they already learned everything That you have to share that might be the lifetime value of somebody being on your email subscription list You can use some of these numbers to be able to work backwards and figure out how much can I afford to pay For an ad to get a new person to get a new subscriber to get more visitors to my site so I wanted to make this a little bit more concrete and Lay out a little mathematical problem here to explain it to you So we have a course that sells for $150 10% of the people that receive the email will buy that course 50% of the social followers become email subscribers and 1% of the website visitors become email subscribers So that math then works out that each and every sale brings in $100 in profit We can expect to get $10 in profit from each person that subscribes to our email list So if it costs us less than $10 to get a new email subscriber We want to keep doing that if it costs more than $10 to get a new email subscriber. We stop doing that $5 expected profit for each social follower and $0.10 expected profit for each new visitor to the website So if you're only making $0.10 for each new visitor to the website and you can do some SEO content and bring in another Thousand visitors to your website. I Didn't do the math in advance and I should have backed myself into a corner there $0.10 times a thousand anybody real quick Want to throw out the number a hundred bucks? All right, so you can spend a hundred bucks on that piece of content Thank you. Yes standing in front of an audience math becomes difficult Technical challenges so Google estimates that it blacklist 10,000 websites daily I heard another talk that was this morning about WooCommerce security and they were talking about how by showing the little Lock in the top of the browser that this site is not secure that has a significant impact on conversion rates for e-commerce websites Well, imagine when it shows up in Google search results, and it says right underneath it this site is not Secure and then if that message sticks around for any length of time Google says okay, you guys aren't a serious business anymore We're just going to take you out of Google and completely They're pulling 10,000 sites a day because security is not being addressed properly So you can avoid that by having strong passwords doing backups. We all know this right back up your site Avoid excessive customizations What was the number from the trivia yesterday? 55,000 or 65,000 plugins are available on WordPress Some ridiculous number like that I think all of us that build WordPress websites and manage them for other people have probably seen folks that try to install all of them That's a really good way to end up with problems on your website just because there is a plugin doesn't mean it needs to be installed Use strong passwords. This may surprise you but in 2018 only Six or eight months ago. I got contacted by a client that said hey my website's down. It's been hacked What's going on? I said hey, give me a login information. I'll take a look they call it out to me the login password was P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D 123 and I said I found the problem So that's just 2018 I didn't think that I still had to say this but we do Password is not a valid password Use strong passwords If you don't know what that is Google it There are countless articles written about defining strong passwords. Do not share accounts I run into this still a lot where you have one account and everybody in the organization uses the same login everybody doesn't have to be an admin and Do install updates I grabbed this screenshot show hands anybody seen a number larger than 22 updates that needed to be done A few of them. All right. Yeah Let's say for example one person is the master of all accounts, but you wouldn't want to give someone administrative Access to one of the accounts on a list of five for the company so the company has five sides But you want them to go to one only they can't have access to the others. Okay I guess Are you running WordPress multi-site? Yeah, so the question was asking about being able to give access to only one site and Immediately I was thinking you must be running WordPress multi-site because if you had five separate installations of WordPress This wouldn't even really come up as a question because they'd each have separate users It has been a lot of years since I have set up a WordPress multi-site site So I don't know if things have changed But I presume that you can set an admin for an individual WordPress multi-site. I'm getting a nod in the back So it sounds like I'm right Yeah, yeah, so super user gets access to everything within the multi-site. Yeah All right, so Quick show of hands who here has a WordPress website that is not backed up We'll admit it All right, there's a couple people that That's the equipment. Okay. This is an important one. Thank you for reminding me If your website is backed up and you do not know how to restore your website from the backup Your website is not backed up now. Who wants to raise their hand? All right, we got a few more so Z net ZD net did a survey and this is not specific to WordPress websites, but 39% of us participants surveyed never back up their work Given that that's never back up their work on their computer and then we're talking about WordPress it probably is similar And since only three people in the room were willing to raise their hand. There's a few liars here All right, where can you find support This is what you have to know to be a WordPress developer probably a few more things but show of hands Who knows all the things on the board there? All right Not knows the words knows how to do those things Okay, so about a third of the room not bad for a word camp conference So if you don't know these things you're probably going to have questions about at least these or probably a lot more things as well Meetups conferences and the internet are good places to go look for help I gave you a little short list of places to start your WordPress dashboard has an event section and it lists things that are on the Meetup sites right there in your dashboard So you can recognize those the WordPress help desk that I do gets a ton of people that said Oh, I was just working on my website and I noticed this event. It's right around the corner I signed up so that's a great place to start from there. You can go to meet up directly because The dashboard only pulls in the ones that are official WordPress Meetup events and there are a lot of unofficial WordPress meetup events so go to meetup.com type in WordPress see what's in your area Word camp. I think everybody here has heard of that before I Make dot WordPress dot org This is a great place to figure out the people that are making WordPress What different groups there are that are doing that and how You can connect with them Show of hands who here knows before I'm saying it right now That there is a group of people that are actually building lesson plans for you to be able to teach WordPress That are part of the contributor group for WordPress One person. All right, so that's news for everyone There are a variety of support channels There's One of my favorites the next one here codex dot wordpress dot org anybody been to that Few more people have been to that so that's kind of like the It can be It can definitely be confusing if you're completely new to WordPress the codex can definitely be confusing however, if you are a Developer trying to learn how to create plugins and themes and such that's a great place to go One of my favorite things in the codex that I regularly send people to is the article on child themes As you start building out your website and you're trying to figure out what is a child theme? How does this work the codex has a wonderful resource on that and it walks you through the manual process of creating a child theme I look at it the same way that my statistics professor in college looked at matrix algebra They felt that you should probably do this once by hand in order to appreciate what the calculator is doing and so I always recommend to folks to go and build a Child theme once by hand in order to appreciate what the Plug-in that you can click one button and it creates your child theme for you what it's actually doing Now the reason for that is that as you continue to build things with your child theme You're going to want to know where that code is supposed to go What files are supposed to be where and by having done it once manually you'll understand that better That's a bit of a tangent, but bottom line go take a look at make.wordpress.org take a look at codex.wordpress.org See what resources are available there if it if only because you'll be able to know what to come back to And then wordpress.tv, which is where that video is going And what are you going to do with this information? I mentioned having some paper out or some sort of note taking device Everybody that's been to conferences before knows that this happens all the time You come to an event you spend all day learning from people You leave here super jazzed and excited to do all the things that you just learned about Two days later you're busy with work and you don't have time for this And all of that stuff that you are super excited about nothing happens This talk is not going to be one of those If you make an accountability appointment with a person to whom you've committed The likelihood of you completing that task goes up to 95 So you're almost certainly going to get something done if you commit to doing it Tell someone to do it that you're going to do it and make an appointment to follow up Here's what I want you to do for your accountability partner with that note taking device Now that you know all of this information that I just shared with you What task will you be completing? Make sure it's measurable and realistic When will this be done? Set a specific date not a week from now or well a week from now you could actually get the date But sometime within the next six months is not specific The end of May that's specific How do you want me to follow up with you? I'm going to give you my contact information. You're welcome to reach out to me I will personally be your accountability partner. Let me know how you want me to follow up with you If you don't want me to do it contact your friend The keynote speaker if you guys were here for that mentioned having a buddy that's going to call you out on your BS This is a great opportunity to use that buddy And if you need it, there's my email address at the top Shoot me a message. Let me know what to ask you about what day to do it I will put something in my calendar. I will follow up with you about that I will not sell you anything And those are the things that I do if you have any questions No questions We covered everything thoroughly Oh, I saw a hand start to go up Where do they live? Yeah, the slides live on uh Oh, what's it slide share on linkedin. Yep, and uh Oh, it's not all on here My first name is frank middle initial c last name jones So if you search slide share frank c jones You'll find it directly So Click funnels is a cool platform. It gives you a whizzy wig. Uh, what you see is what you get easy way to build those things However, uh, you can also build those things with a variety of page builders Elementor, I know is talked about here. I know that thrive themes. I've used many times before Wp bakery several folks have talked about here and that's just three off the top of my head Essentially what Lead pages and services like that are doing is creating a specific type of page called a squeeze page And all that you need to do within wordpress is Create a blank page that doesn't have your header or your footer and then build the rest of that page around there There's tools within wordpress that allow you to do that without having to pay that ongoing monthly fee So it depends on whether you need the ease of use Or the lower cost, but you can solve the problem in multiple ways On wordpress any of the page builders will allow you to do that Elementor was one of the ones that I mentioned thrive themes Wp bakery anybody else know a Divi Divi, yeah Yeah, squeeze page is a particular type of landing page where essentially people have two choices They can either do what it is that you're asking them to do the call to action or they can leave They can't get lost in the blog or link out to your social media channels and never come back from facebook They can either do what it is that you're asking them to do buy the product subscribe for the email list Whatever or they can click their back button go do something else So you're squeezing them to do something. Yes I'm sorry So Is this only supposed to be about facebook or anything else? So the way that this connects with facebook is that you might have followers that are paying attention to your business on facebook That then come over to your website and interact with your business in some way But they could come from anywhere so it could be more than just facebook All right So I have been working in conversion rate optimization So that's me personally working with a variety of clients with that with opsis. I'm making the transition away from being frank that does work and Become a business that has a team of people that solves a collection of problems So opsis is focusing on wordpress management and building simple wordpress websites As a way to start having a conversation with clients and move into more advanced marketing services Yoast is the one that I use on most of my sites Sorry, I keep forgetting to repeat it. Uh, the question was is yoast Uh favored Framework or our others preferred Given that yoast can slow things down a little bit So The first piece I use yoast on most of my sites that being said I am also Tinkering with rank math is one that I have on one of my sites that I'm exploring with right now Just to see how that works out I the green light system. I also organized the rally SEO meetup group Um, so I use a variety of tools for search engine optimization that go beyond just yoast as a starter tool It's really easy to sit somebody down and say make all the lights green So that's a huge feature for beginners but Aside from editing uh meta titles and descriptions. I don't use most of the other features that are baked into yoast As far as the optimization piece goes if you properly optimize wordpress, uh, the plugins don't bloat it as much um I run uh my sites on my own vps servers that are optimized the way that I want them and uh I can make them load fairly quickly But if you're Using a five or ten dollar a month hosting provider, you're going to run into some challenges there anyway Uh, and I always like to recommend the right solution for the right stage of business If you're new and you're just beginning you don't need to deal with any of those optimization things that i'm talking about Just stick yoast in there make the lights green and prove your business model once you've moved beyond that Then we can optimize further with other things Anybody else? Yes, sir What ab testing do you use to see what works? What's working for conversions? So there are a variety of ab testing What ab testing tools do I use I With the clients that i've worked with i've used a few different ab testing tools oftentimes Thrive themes has some split testing tools that are plugins That i've used with them A couple of others that the names aren't coming to mind right now, but Most of the time we're dealing with what i like to refer to as business level statistics Not academic level statistics If you're an academic and you're looking at the math that we're doing here You're going to just laugh because we don't have anywhere near statistical relevance But if I run an ad campaign and i've got two different facebook ads They've both been shown to a hundred people One of them's gotten me 50 clicks. The other one's gotten me two clicks I don't need any software to tell me to turn off the one that got me two clicks And keep going with the one that got me 50 clicks right presuming clicks are the things i'm after as opposed to conversions If we are measuring conversions Just to twist that example a little bit if those two clicks both turned into a sale And the 50 people that clicked on the ad nobody bought anything I'm actually going to turn off the one that got 50 clicks and stick with the one that got two clicks that actually bought something Does that make sense? So it's a matter a lot of it is very basic level math that you don't need software to do the heavy lifting You just need to set up an experiment where you have test a and test b and then let it run to where you have At least 50 or 100 or so Uh, it depends on your market for some people 100 people might actually take weeks to get there for other people It might be hours So There's a lot of variables there. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's sufficiently answered. Okay Any other questions? All right, please before you're done Do we'd love your feedback?