Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

I spent this past weekend at WordCamp Boston. If you use (or want to use) WordPress, this event the best use of $20 and 14 hours of your time you will ever spend. The event was well organized, the speakers were dynamic and interesting, and the presentations were instructive and inspirational. As is always the case with a well run conference, its value is equal parts information and motivation. And therein lies the rub…

The agony: So much great information, but my head is swimming with possibilities.
The ecstasy:  I have a plan and a blueprint.

While this blog post is – in part – a review of WordCamp, there is also plenty of good stuff that applies to internet marketing regardless of the platform you’re using. In other words, don’t stop reading if you’re not a WordPress user.

One last note: There were three simultaneous tracks running so, obviously, this is my review of the 1/3 of the conference that I saw. I’m sure there was other excellent content and fabulous speakers.

Big Picture: Strategy

A number of presentations covered planning and strategy. As Christopher Penn mentioned in his presentation, “The strategy of, ‘If you build it, they will come‘ only worked for, like, the first five blogs on the Internet.” If you want readers for your blog, and if you want your blog to actually accomplish something, you need a plan.

Don’t Be a Tool

My award for Cleverest Title goes to John Eckman, who had the audacity to suggest that WordPress may not be the best solution for every website. His point was that, too often we select a tool first and then try to shoehorn our strategy into that paradigm. In a humorous and briskly moving presentation, he chronicled the potential pitfalls of selecting a CMS (content management system) and presented five strategies for getting the CMS decision right; business, technology, content, engagement and optimization. Developing these before deciding on the tool will help ensure that everything is aligned.

You can view his presentation on Slideshare: Don’t be a Tool: Content Management Strategy

Now What?

My favorite presentation of the conference, “How to Market Your Blog (okay, Mom’s reading, now what?)” by Chris Penn gets my award for Best Presentation. I would have paid the $20 and sat in the horrible I-93 traffic just to see this presentation. At the end of his talk, he said “Well, there you go. Eight weeks of marketing education in forty minutes.” And he wasn’t wrong. Chris broke his talk down into three categories; grand strategy (why?), strategy (what?) and tactics (how?). Using a mind-map to illustrate the relationship of the dozens of topics he covered, the presentation was fun and informative.

You can download his mind-map here: How to Market Your WordPress Blog

Inbound Marketing

There was no way I was going to write a review of WordCamp and leave this out, right? The talented and vivacious Karen Rubin gets my Energizer Bunny award for the presentation with the highest energy. Karen delivered an overview of how to implement inbound marketing on your blog with a nice balance of strategy and tactics. Being a certified inbound marketing professional myself, much of it was review but I still took away several helpful tips and nuggets. One that I intend to investigate is the Hubspot for WordPress plugin she mentioned. It has some badges and a call to action feature that looks helpful.

Karen’s presentation isn’t online yet, but hopefully it will get posted to her talk on SpeakerRate: WordPress & Inbound Marketing: How to Generate Leads With Your WordPress Blog

Tactics

Most of the presentations I saw fell into the category of tactics (as opposed to strategy) and there was no shortage of tips, tricks and advice here.

Security

D.K. Smith grabs my Head-Slap award for the most sobering wake up call in the conference. He revealed some basic best practices everyone should follow in order to put in place a baseline of security that will protect from script kiddies and basic malware. With regard to plugins, he advises that you keep it simple and use these three: Login LockDown, WordPress Firewall 2, and WP Intrusion (could not find a link). Other suggestions include using secure FTP, configuring long passwords and blocking folder indexing using the htaccess file.

Custom Post Types

K. Adam White receives my Rookie of the Year award for his presentation, Stepping Into Custom Post Types. He is a natural at presenting and seemed really comfortable for his first ever presentation. The information was well organized and helpful. While these tactics were obviously quite specific to WordPress, the concept of extending a CMS and making it your own is worth considering. Using custom post types is a way to automate content creation and organize it in a way that makes it easier to develop and maintain.

Check out his presentation on Slideshare: Stepping Into Custom Post Types

Convert or Go Home

Last, but by no means least, my Can I Get an Amen! award goes to Ross Beyeler’s presentation on conversion. With all of the inbound marketing evaluations I perform, the lowest score is consistently conversion. It’s something that is either not done well or completely ignored by an overwhelming number of websites. Ross did a nice job in presenting conversion from a designer’s standpoint and suggested five principles for designing for conversion;  audience segmentation, clear messaging, building trust, targeted offerings and clear calls to action.

Check out Ross’s presentation on Slideshare: Converting the Crowd

If anyone else has a review of WordCamp Boston 2011, feel free to leave a link in the comments and I will add it to the body of this post.

Updates:

From FirstTracks Marketing: WordCamp Boston 2011 Review

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “The Tangled Web.” An effective web presence used to mean a well-optimized (for search) web site. But today, the ever-expanding world of social networks is both complicating and simplifying the process at the same time. This week’s links reflect on how social media sites are impacting search and connecting with one another.

#5: Your Income, Home Ownership & Parenthood Status Now Available as an API

RapLeaf has taken some heat over the past couple of months. Privacy concerns for consumers are going to have to be balanced with the openness of the Internet. The U.S. Congress is even making noise about a “Do Not Track” registry for Internet browsers that is similar to the “Do Not Call” registry for telemarketers.

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#4: Facebook Testing New Registration Social Plugin

Facebook is looking to extend its fingers further across the web by providing web developers with more tools to simplify their tasks. By offering a free registration system for web sites, they are strengthening their position as a standard identity provider on the web.

Link: All Facebook

#3: LinkedIn Launches Share Button

I have no idea what took LinkedIn so long, but they have finally created a share button for web site owners to allow users to easily share their content with LinkedIn. Sharing is fundamentally changing the world of search marketing and is eating away at the monopoly search engines have had since the inception of the Internet.

Link: Mashable

#2: Twitter Proven to Impact Search Engine Rankings

In my Personal Inbound Marketing talks, I frequently encourage people to use Twitter as much for the inbound links as for the engagement. In other words, even if you don’t have a lot of followers there is value in posting your content there in the form of search engine juice. This article provides more supporting evidence for that strategy.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Why WordPress rules the Web

Blogs are the engines that drive Inbound Marketing. There simply isn’t a better system for delivering your remarkable content in a search engine optimized format. Here’s another person’s opinion on the subject.

Link: SEO Theory

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"I'll take Vincent for the win (FTW)!" (image courtesy of Greenery on Flickr)

The most popular post on this blog, “Create a Compelling Resume Online With WordPress ,” was written two years ago. One of the commenters recently asked:

Jon, it’s been nearly two years since you posted this article and the economy and job markets have changed significantly. How do you feel your Resume-as-a-Wordpress-site has performed in comparison to the traditional brochure, or single page, resumes people have been publishing?

I’m really glad somebody asked me this question, as it has given me the prod I needed to provide a much needed update on the results. The bottom line is that the results have been terrific. I’d boil them down to the following three categories:

• Convenience
• Data
• Results

Convenience

I’ve relied heavily on my web site when communicating my background and skills to a variety of people. Sometimes, I’ve used the site to respond to job opportunities by including links to my professional bio, a sampling of my public speaking engagements, or links to all of my social media accounts. While it’s very convenient to have these links at my disposal, the best part is really the flexibility. I can embed presentations, documents, images, and even video. You can’t do that on a paper resume.

Data

Analytics is the fifth pillar of Inbound Marketing and it has been very valuable to have the insight into traffic sources, engagement measures, and keyword analysis. If you’re using WordPress to host your online resume, there are lots of great plugins that make it a snap to integrate Google Analytics. Consider the following:

Click on image for full size

This screen shot shows that more than 40% of the traffic to my online resume comes from this blog. That exemplifies how important content is to driving web traffic. Using analytic tools gives you an understanding of how people are finding you online. Also, it gives you an understanding of what interests visitors to your resume:

Click on the image for a full size

Results

OK, what’s the bottom line? Has my online resume produced results? Answer: oh yeah!

Some of the results are hard to quantify. I’ve earned consulting business and speaking engagements and the degree to which my online presence helped can’t really be measured. It’s probably time to start thinking about ways to start collecting some data (even anecdotal) along those lines.

But the best example just occurred several months ago. I received the following email from a project manager of a local software company:

Click to view full size

This is a perfect example of how an online resume can leverage the Long Tail of the Internet to create opportunities. In my how-to article, one of the features I cover is using blog categories to group together your experience and qualifications. This email came about because I categorized some of my work with the web content management system “DotNetNuke,” which is how and why I was found in this particular instance.

Click to view full size

However, the best news here is that after meeting with this company and discussing my Inbound Marketing services, I was able to secure a long term consulting contract instead of a day or two of work to modify some web pages. During an interview with one of the owners of the company, I was evangelizing the benefits of inbound marketing when he asked, “OK, then how did we find you?” When his employee answered, “Inbound marketing,” the job was mine.

Inbound marketing FTW!

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Choosing a basket for your Internet eggs.”

#5: WordPress Wins Open Source CMS Hall of Fame Award

Since the most important aspect of an effective inbound marketing strategy is remarkable, shareable, readable content, it therefore stands to reason that choosing the right basket (content management system) for your eggs (content)  is also going to be critical to success. I’m a huge fan of WordPress and the Open Source Awards agree.

Link: PacketPub

#4: iPad ‘newspaper’ created by Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch

Publishers are spreading their eggs in all kinds of baskets (print, open web, walled web, mobile, social media) in an attempt to figure out the best business model in a Web 2.0 economy. We now see the Oscar Madison and Felix Ungar of media by planning an iPad-only publication.

Link: The Guardian

#3: Ask the Wise Guy: Facebook Fan Page or Website?

Guy Kawasaki is nothing if not a “bottom line” kind of guy (rimshot). In this article, he does a great job of explaining why he put all of his eggs in the Facebook basket for his latest book, Enchantment. The bottom line is that if you’re trying to establish a web presence for something more ephemeral and less permanent, then skipping the website and going for a Fan page may very well be your best option.

Link: American Express Open Forum

#2: Facebook Introduces Anti-Email: Social Inbox, Seamless Messaging, Conversation History

Where are you going to put your e-communication eggs? Facebook is betting on the current trend of teens and twenty-somethings shunning email in favor of texting and instant messaging. But the central issue here may turn out not to be the technology, but the trust. Facebook hasn’t engendered a very high degree of trust lately, but we’ll see whether convenience and expediency win out over trust.

Link: Fast Company

#1: Long Live the Web

Tim Berners-Lee authored a sort of “State of Internet” article this week. Much of it discusses eggs and baskets, and the threats to both. He argues that net neutrality (lack thereof) threatens to crush certain eggs while failure to adhere to open standards threatens to diminish the quantity and diversity of baskets we have to choose from. It’s big thinking from a big brain about big issues.

Link: Scientific American

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Whether you are a sole proprietorship or global technology company with 20,000 employees, inbound marketing is accessible, affordable and essential. Contact us today to learn how you can attract and convert more customers from your online presence.

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