Arizona Technology News
Page.ly’s conference, Pressnomics, quickly sold out of the 150 available tickets, so if you weren’t able to attend, here are a few things that I took away from each of the speakers on day 1.
Fun fact: It would have cost $10,000 to remove that giant chandelier that is right above the projection screen (you can sort of see it in image above).
Topic: SEO
George Ortiz (Via Skype) — WordPress Themes & Plugins: A Data Story
Would you do X if it didn’t have a perceived SEO value? If yes, do it. If not, don’t do it.
The first speaker was supposed to be George Ortiz remotely, via Skype, but because of the shoddy hotel wifi connection, his presentation had to be canceled. George was replaced by Joshua Ziering (from Vuurr), who delivered a content-rich presentation about SEO (search engine optimization).
For example, Joshua recommends that we write meta titles and descriptions that make a deliverable “promise” to potential visitors. Description tags and titles must be written to entice Google searchers to click on your web site. Don’t give in to the temptation of listing keywords in your title tag, because that just makes your site look spammy. If your listing looks spammy in Google’s SERP (search engine result position), then no one will click it, which will eventually result in a negative impact on your rankings.
There were four things that anyone listening to the presentation should have taken away:
It is awesome to talk about about bringing “value” to the Internet when executing your content strategy, but there are challenges that you might run into that weren’t brought up or discussed during the presentation or Q&A:
It is challenging to do “real company shit” that brings value to other people, but as a business owner, you can’t ignore SEO or try to game the system with BS tricks because both of those strategies could lead to your company’s demise.
How to build something bigger and better than you [SLIDES]
“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.”
- African Proverb
Throughout his presentation, the room could easily see Cory’s passion for his company, employees, and family. It was motivating and inspiring to get inside of his mind and see what kind of thinking has helped his company (iThemes) become successful.
Cory’s biggest motivator was not the fear of failing, but the fear of REGRET. He didn’t want to look back at his life and wish that he would have done something else. He started out by freelancing WordPress designs and finally realized that he could do more if he built a team around him. He cited an old African Proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together.” Ithemes montra is actually “We go far together”.
A few questions that he asks himself:
Once he answered those questions, he created a way to move forward.
Cory talked about how he considers his employees family. A family that sometimes fight, but still stick together. There are no rock stars or divas at iThemes. He stated that “bitterness leads to poison” and “anger comes from unmet expectations.” He did mention that break ups are really tough to deal with and that they had to depart with people that weren’t cutting it or who didn’t share their goals.
According to Cory, nothing builds a team like adversity. He told a story about how during the early days of iThemes, their server went down and they were scrambling to get it back up. Everything got wiped out and they actually had to copy and paste Google’s cache to get their pages back up. He said that they learned their lesson the hard way, but now have redundancy in place with multiple backups. That particular crisis lead to two co-workers forming a strong relationship because they shared the experience together.
For a while, he was paying attention to his competitors and what they were doing, but soon realized that he needed to focus on his own unique journey and story. He really emphasized creating your own journey and story and not to worry about what company X is doing. He then went on to say that the only things that matter are you, your loved ones, your team, and your customers: keep a laser focus on what really matters.
Great Expectations [SLIDES]
Knowing what is expected of you is better than having to react to unclear expectations.
Alex’s presentation was about managing and meeting expectations with clients. He used his firm’s (Crowd Favorite) past experiences of not clearly setting expectations to help enlighten the audience. He shared what went wrong, what they learned, and how they continue to try to set expectations for clients in the future.
Some key points that he made are:
Alex wrapped up with a great strategy for hiring people to replace a role that you are currently doing. He said that it wasn’t the right approach to find someone who would make the same decisions as you, but it is best to find an intelligent person who will make decisions based on the same VALUES as you.
Design Thinking = Value [SLIDES]
Do you want a website or do you want a solution?
Ward Andrews, from Draw Backwards, talked about Design Thinking and how it’s not about style; style is the end result. Failure is a natural process of growth, but you identify the failure early, take a step back and fix it. You can’t always fix failure with more design, and sometimes you just have to start over. Good design is about clarity and discovery.
He briefly talked about 3 companies that are using design thinking in their products:
Nike — shoes are a commodity, but they are great at telling a story
Nest — simplified something that has been broken for years
Apple — they make technology invisible
During the design thinking process, you need to first figure out what your end goal is. What is your purpose and then work backwards from there. Businesses exist to solve a challenge. Do you want a website or do you want a solution? Ask yourself “what if we did this or that?” — this will lead to innovation, which will bring value to the business.
Do: Envision the future above all else.
Do: Make the big decision.
Do: Keep a journal to become more self-aware of what you learned that day.
Do: Connect viewpoints, disciplines, ideas.
Do: Control time and space.
Ask: What is the one thing we do, the one thing that we stand for?
Don’t: Take comfort in your great idea.
Don’t: Begin with features.
Don’t: Start with visual design.
Don’t: Let the perfect solution stop you.
Get people in one location to solve big problems, if possible. Anlaytical thinking is for the present and past, while intuitive thinking is for the future. Design thinking bridges the gap.
The business of WordPress: the ecosystem behind 17% of the web.
Pete, from Automattic, the juggernaut in the WordPress space broke down some interesting statistics for the WordPress industry.
Financial Tips for Business Owners [SLIDES]
The best way to get people to meet performance goals is to look them in the eyes and ask them if the company can count on them to deliver.
Dave started his presentation with a good reminder for us all: when starting a new business it is a good idea to know your vision. What do you want to be? Also, think about what your end game is. How and when will your business reward you?
Pay attention to your operational structure so you can work on your business and not in your business. Taking yourself out of things and creating a repeatable, systematized, and automated business model with recurring income will help insure a financially successful business. Don’t create a structure that has a single point of failure. It is OK to have one person do one role, or one person doing many roles, but it isn’t OK to have many people for one role. An example would be if a husband and wife start a business and can’t figure out who is in charge so they give each other the titles of CEO and President.
Planning and budgeting is important when thinking about your financial road map. Pay attention to monthly revenue, expenses and capital budgets and how they translate to your cashflow. Know the metric that is most important to your business being successful. This can be unique to any business. For example, when Dave’s company provided financial services to a local restaurant, they had some trouble figuring out the best metric to which they should pay attention. They settled on focusing on customer wait times. The closer the wait time was to 15 minutes, the better it was for the restaurant. Too much less than that, and there wasn’t enough business. Too much over that, and they were turning too many people away. So, the restaurant was able to focus on this number as a health indicator.
Dave recommends having a monthly meeting for financial results.
He also had some suggestions that relate to employee productivity and hiring:
What Happens when Your Entire Company becomes Social? [SLIDES]
Content is king, marketing is queen, and your blog is your castle
Yes, more and more companies are using social media for marketing and spending more money on social advertising . However, the problem is social media is not an ad play, it’s all about content. If your company is on the internet, you are a media company. You have content everywhere else but your own site. Don’t do that. Start everything on your blog. Your blog should be the single voice of authority for your company.
Determine your social media objectives and share them with your employees. Create guidelines and a collaborative infrastructure. Operationalize content and distribution. Build employee social efficiency before you let them into the wild. Gamify employees participation with contests and leaderboards for people who share the most popular content.
Note: I had to leave early, so I wasn’t able to catch Gregarious Narain’s presentation.
Zachary Burruel has extensive experience with a whole bunch of abbreviated inbound marketing stuff. He does that marketing stuff on a daily basis over at Axosoft, which is the company that makes OnTime, a badass agile project management tool. When Zachary isn't working, he is reading hacker news, nytimes, and wsj. You can follow him @nkiegrea.
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