Celebrating 10 Years of North Carolina's Original WordPress Conference
Learn tips and tricks for managing your business!
Intended Audience: Beginners / Business Owners
Speaker: Drew Wilde
Don’t be afraid to try something new! Optimizing your website through experimentation can help you level up your site. Brainstorm ideas and learn about some user-friendly technologies to help you get started.
Intended Audience: Business Owners / Designers / Developers
Speaker: Sandy Edwards
As the owner of a WordPress agency, I find myself in need of good tools, and one important tool for my business is a Project Management system.
Choosing a Project Management system can be an overwhelming and daunting task. I get asked frequently which project management software they should use for their company, or even which system is my favorite.
This talk will discuss why I chose different setups for different companies I have worked with over the years, and the pros and cons to each.
Intended Audience:Business Owners
Speaker:Adam Silver
This is part 2 of the Podcasting to Grow your Business session.
Growing your business is about building trust and whats more trusting then your voice? Where writing a blog post may not come easy to people, speaking is very natural, and intimate.
Podcasting is growing (once again) and it’s not that hard to do! In this session, I’ll show the workflow, best practices and ways to monetize.
Adam will be presenting this as a live workshop, actually producing a real episode of the KSWP Podcast in front of the audience. Come and be a part of his podcast.
Intended Audience: Beginners / Business Owners / Content Creators
Speaker: Steve Mortiboy
We know how important social media has become in our online marketing strategy. Eyes on your social media posts can convert to site visitors which can convert to sales. Great looking social media posts capture a visitors attention and influence click-throughs.
This session will cover how to use Open Graph and other social meta tags to create great looking social media posts and how to debug common problems with your social sharing.
Intended Audience: Beginners / Business Owners
Speaker: Sharon A. Dawson
The white screen of death! You were simply uploading content, updating a WordPress plugin, or clicking on this neat thing to see what it does and then your screen goes blank. You cannot login to your website. You can’t even see your WP login screen anymore. HELP!
In this session, you’ll learn how to break your WordPress site by:
* Updating to the latest version of WordPress
* Updating your plugins
* Adding new plugins
* Adding 301 redirects
* And much more
Most importantly, you’ll learn how these seemingly innocuous updates that should be easy to make on your website can break your WordPress site if not done properly.
Intended Audience: Beginners / Business Owners
Speaker: Ray Mitchell
It’s true that having a strong social media presence is important, but when your latest viral post drives them to your website, will your business be seen as credible? With a little planning, you can design a WordPress website that will create and leverage trust signals to gain the confidence of your site visitors.
Participants will learn how to do a “trust audit” of their website and leave with an actionable plan to improve the trustworthiness of their website.
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: Nathan Ingram
Are you one more bad month away from walking away from your WordPress business? The anxiety of unpredictable income can make you miserable. In this talk, Nathan will explain how to stabilize your business with a growing stream of recurring income.
Key Takeaways:
1. Why recurring income is crucial
2. How to package, price and sell a WordPress management plan
3. Easy to use worksheets to help you create new services for recurring income
4. The difference recurring income can make
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: Natalie MacLees
In this talk for freelancers and small business owners, I’ll talk about how committing to regular, tiny changes in your business can lead to big rewards and improvements over time. For the past year, an accountability partner and I have been completing weekly challenges for our small businesses – and we’re both surprised at how big a difference these little habits and changes have made to our businesses and our lives – we both feel better, more in control, smarter, stronger, and just more generally amazing. In this talk, I’ll share our approach, how we come up with the challenges, and invite folks to join us!
Intended Audience: Beginners / Business Owners
Speaker: Michael Baylor
Google wants to capture the user experience end to end. Much of that starts with Google My Business. More than 50% of businesses have not claimed their Google My Business account and that is a problem. This talk will educate on the importance, how to leverage it, and how to integrate it into your SEO Strategy.
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: Kathy Drewien
Ah, clients—we need them, we crave them. WordPress consultants and freelancers mostly live in attraction mode, constantly building a vibrant roster of sweet-spot clients. But not every client is a good client. So while you’re courting new relationships, beware of the challenging types of clients almost never worth the trouble.
After this session attendees will be able to:
– Identify danger signals before engagement
– Learn 5 steps for handling difficult clients
– Discover how to politely fire a challenging client
– How to prevent future nightmare clients
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: Beth Livingston
Let’s face it, the technical solution from one WordPress provider is probably going to look a lot like the next one. There will be a theme, plugins, maybe some custom css or a little coding – but generally, the proposed solutions will be similar. So how do you set yourself above your competition when your technical skills and solution are fairly equal?
What if you were able to tell your client that:
– you have a way of estimating the project so that there are NO surprises along the way
– you have a way to plan for and manage change that does not include an arbitrary “pad” amount added to the estimate
– you have a way of defining the website and gathering the content that reduces the chance for scope creep
– you have a way to ensure that the project gets completed on time and within budget
In this presentation, I will show attendees how to craft these sections of of their project management methodology and use it as a unique value proposition when presenting to a client.
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: Ben Meredith
In customer support, which is better, promptness or empathy?
What does playing guitar or changing diapers have to do with wowing customers and users? (It’s probably not what you think.)
How can your support go from “good” to “Amazing!!!@!”
In this talk, the Senior Support Technician for a growing, international WordPress plugin business which supports roughly 200 customers a week will show you how you can level up your support team using skills learned from foster (and biological) parenting, playing guitar, and five years of supporting both free and paid WordPress plugins.
We’ll cover:
– The most important driver of customer happiness in product support
– How to outsmart your own personality deficiencies to excel in empathy
– Something you can start doing today to immediately see results in email/ticket/forum support.
There’s no secret formula for success in support, but armed with the right tools, attitude, and training you can make WordPress better, one ticket at a time.
Attendees will walk away with a better understanding of how to excel in empathy and tools to help themselves and their teams provide better support.
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: AJ Morris
Come hear how a small community of small businesses joined forces to combat the big box stores with their own eCommerce Marketplace shop. You’ll hear how they handle aspects like shipping, orders, inventory, all while running their own retail store fronts.
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: Aisha Adams
Creating an online brand community through your WordPress Website is an excellent way to increases customer retention and removes the complete dependency on add and promotions to drive sales. Let’s discuss why and how to grow your online community.
Intended Audience: Business Owners
Speaker: Adam Silver
Growing your business is about building trust and whats more trusting then your voice? Where writing a blog post may not come easy to people, speaking is very natural, and intimate.
Podcasting is growing (once again) and it’s not that hard to do! In this session, I’ll show the workflow, best practices and ways to monetize.
Adam will be presenting this as a live workshop, actually producing a real episode of the KSWP Podcast in front of the audience. Come and be a part of his podcast.
*This session will last approx 90 mins.
WordCamp Raleigh 2019 is over. Check out the next edition!