Bringing together WordPress users of all levels
There is a Developer’s Code Share on Monday, October 5, 2015, 7:00 PM to 8:45 PM. We invite anyone with fun, interesting, or useful code to show your stuff. Post your code in the form below so we can add it to the presentation. Thanks!
[gravityform id=”3″ name=”Show us your code!” title=”false” description=”false” ajax=”true”]
Last month Rich Plakas covered what those new to WordPress need to know about Best Practices for Website Design. Based on our member’s requests, this month Rich showed attendees how to implement them in their WordPress sites. Rich reviewed some websites to help attendees to know what to look for in a best practices-designed site.
Here are two links Rich Plakas spoke about in regards to sliders or picture carousels:
http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad/#.
http://makeyourselfvisible.com/internet-marketing/should-i-use-website-slider/
PRESENTER: Chris Mercer, you can catch his weekly PODCAST at: http://seriouslysimplemarketing.com
FaceBook is putting a firewall between personal and business accounts.
Go to http://business.facebook.com to get a free account.
If you have an existing account with which you paid for FB adv, you can migrate it in. Use your regular FB email and migrate the pages you already manage in.
Use your normal FB login.
Once you log in, it takes you to your dashboard. If you have a business page, you migrate it into this account.
Promoted Posts
You have your page and your page administration — which is where you do notifications and promoted posts.
Promoted posts are ‘boosted’ — these are the easiest type of Facebook Advertising you can do. You share your post, you want anybody to see it, you pay for that.
Your primary audience are people who ‘Like’ your page — people who ‘Like’ your page and their friends, are the people you choose through targeting
Location
Total budget for a campaign $5-$50, will tell you how many people you will reach.
What if you have a local, geographically limited region, it’s easy.
FB tells you how many people you will reach, based on how much $ you spend, where it shows, what demographics.
Share your post, boost a post from your website and drive people to your blog.
People you choose for targeting will be anyone out there.
Do lots of testing to see which market does best.
You could go to custom audience.
First you want to promote from people who liked your page.
It used to be that whenever I would share a post and 1000 reached — under the new FB process — my organic posting only reached 16. It means they filled up in their feed, not that they read it or liked it. The more you promote it, the more will like your page.
Just do one thing, practice it before you do more.
Boosting posts is the easist way to start advertising on FB.
After that…
AD MANAGER:
Choose the objectives for your campaign.
Put $100 in, and again and again. And you make $10, then $100 more and you make $30.
You can upload a list of email addresses of your buyers and only market to them and people like them.
Interests, kayaking, it offers other similar suggestions. And shows how many in an age group, region, behaviors,
There is a library of images from Shutterstock, all included for free.
Associate the images with a page.
You need to type in your headline.
Type in body copy.
Character length changes regularly by FB
You can add a button. It shows up in the ad and has a call to action.
Deeper description is the New Feed (only shows on desktop)
As you build the ad, you see a preview of what you are building.
All ads point to the same spot, headlines, descriptons are teh same, but you can test different images. It will tell you which ad, with which picture, got the most likes.
If you click on the image, it will go to your destination URL.
There’s a desktop news feed and a mobile version. Right hand, is when youa re in FB and they are on
Turn off the right hand column — it doesn’t work on mobil
FaceBook considers it an impression if it shows in their stream.
Use in your Ad the keywords for which your destination URL is optimized. It will help with relevancy. Congruence in headlines.
We name the campaigns so you know who you targeted–best practice.
Internet Marketing Gurus
IM Tools
SSM Like Us
Verify your results with Google Analytics.
Reach: How many people had it in their streams
FB does general reporting. You can set up custom reports for each day.
Click through rates will be on a report
CPM,
It’s very targeted, people who are more than likely going to be your buyers.
Good blogs to follow:
SocialMediaExaminer — the best blog
PPC Hero, good for Adwords
Social Media Ad Genius (run by a guy who runs Social Media Blackbook)
When Mercer gets back to us with additional Blogs to follow I will post in WP Austin notes.
You can look at the cost per click and see how it varies by country, etc.
FB changes constantly. A moving target.
You spend a long time in Campaigns.
FB Tracks everything and because of that, you can see how people are connected to your page.
You can learn about their lifestyle.Are they single/married under Audience Insights in the Ad Manager.
Re-Marketing. When you come to my site, a pixel is placed on my site and the computer reports only to people who saw your page already. You can get very specific. In last 60 days, people got their pages shut down because the marketers got too good at pixel marketing.Good for building marketing personnas.
Pixels and cookies are almost the same thing. Cookies are physical things that stay on the browser. A pixel fires a snippet of code.
Pixel Code, you copy and paste into your footer.php. It’s a tiny Javascript snippet that has your unique id and tells facebook the moment the page loads, in the user’s database it says what page he has seen. This is why ads follow you.
https://www.ghostery.com/en/ is one of several sites that protect you from re-marketing so ads won’t follow you.
You can upload your list of customer email addresses or phone numbers and FB will find them and let you add a look-alike list and you can target people most like your customers.
You can tie FB into your GA account. Each keeps track of their own stats.
The power editor on FB (really advanced stuff)
UTM Tracking.
UTM_Course=Facbook&urm_mwwsiuxm=cpm_campaign=ssa&…
There are two kinds of pixels,
Custom Audience pixel code (put it on every page)
FB tracks what they see.
To track conversions, go to Ad Manager/Conversion Tracking.
O’Lance, edesk, you will find the people who just took the Social Media Ad Genius course and learns it and starts executing on it. Pay $500 / month to start out. Give them access to your business account they will run and test and keep up.
On the higher end, those people will start charging. Get them early in their educational learning curve. Some charge $10K a month just to test. Some will charge 20% of what you you spend. If you don’t have time, ask how they do re-marketing, can I garget someone who is just my buyer.Ask a few questions. Give them $200 in the account and see what they can do.
Test, mobile, desktop, dif groups,see which ones respond best. Try different budgets. That ishow PPC advertisers do it. THey may lose a lot of money over $5-$10 campaigns. Most fail — but limit your losses and go with your winners.
Adwords has certifications for PPC consultants. FB does not yet.
MLM – stay away from
Diet – wellness, stay away from because of privacy issues.
FB has its own news feed, not an RSS feed.
The worst signal you can send FB about an ad is tell it to never show this ad again. FB freaks out. Don’t do it if it says sponsored.
If you do a promoted post, the shorter, the better.
If you promote a post, $5/day for 5 days, you will get 500 people, not 15.
FB has rules over images: you cannot have more than 20@ of the add be text. FB loves images. So logos may need to be small. Can’t promote images that have lots of text. They love video. The more video ads, the better. Use video testimonials.
now video is cheaper than an image.
80% of people on FB are on mobile. Its cheaper to reach on FB. Soon as you share it, it will show up organically. If you boost it, and the image doesn’t meet their approval. It takes 10 mins to go through. It’s machine language.
Thanks to Karen Kreps for taking and sharing her notes from Mecer’s class.
…And a huge thank you to Chris Mercer for sharing hisFaceBook experience and knowledge with our WordPress Community… I want to remind you all of Mercer’s last point: The purpose of advertising on FaceBook or any other social Media platform is to drive traffic to your WordPress Site. Social media platforms can come and go and change their rules and process from one breath to the next — your WordPress site is your business.
Presenter Brandon Kraft
follow@Kraft
Scribe:Donna Blumberg
Jetpack (here called JP) is built into WordPress.com (here called wp.com) sites. He briefly explained the difference between wp.com and wordpress.org (self hosted sites)
Some themes may not have the portfolio features (settings > enable feature if available), but all sites on WP.com include JP.
JP is available at jetpack.me/ or by installing it as a plugin on wordpress.org (self hosted) sites.
JP is modular – can turn off whatever features you don’t need. some of the ‘bloat’ is due to language translations needing to be included.
When installing JP, must have either a wp.com user account or a wp.com blog or site. The user account does not require a wp.com site. When logging in through jetpack, there is an option for user account only, not a site. JP will go to signup.wordpress.com/signup – can sign up for just a username, not a blog address. If created a wp.com accidentially, can set it to private (requires a login to access content).
WP.com currently hosts about 50 million sites. Per w3techs.com, (an independent site) which checks site roots, about 23% of the top 10 million sites are hosted by WordPress.
Developers can link to JP while working on a site, then can create a user account for the client after going live; site stats are not interrupted. Can disconnect then reconnect with another account and won’t use anything. stats persist. The only issue with site stats is if the site URL is changed, the historical stats may not be retained; contact JP support.
Site stats are recorded on WP.com server. Doing this helps avoid performance issues if high traffic. Google Analytics is great. Downside: can be complex, may be more than is needed for smaller sites. Google Analytics was introduced before JP stats.
Google vs. JP (WP) Analytics – WP is a lesser performance hit, since the stats are less complex and less detailed about the viewer (ex: wp – just shows the country of IP address, less info about the viewer’s browser, etc.) JP stats show at a glance how many people visit the site or specific posts or pages by day, the source (eg from facebook) and more, Jetpack is great, free and can be easier to understand than Google Analytics.
Stats are extendable – stats_get_csv() pulls from stats.wordpress.com/csv.php
When logged in, can see the stats sparklines at the top, above the dashboard.
Places to view the JP site stats
Stats settings –
Activating JP modules
The handiest modules are automatically activated. ones that don’t touch the back end(?) are automatically activated
Site stats –
The dashboard includes site stats as a graph. Click on the stats graph on the self-hosted site to drill down to more stats details on wp.com for that site (a surprising amount of detail!). It includes info on referers, top posts & pages, search engines & terms, clicks, extended stats for each post. Google changed what it reports so google’s section doesn’t show (‘unknown’), where viewers go after visiting your site.
On the wp.com stats page, one of the sources may be spam; can click the … and the link to spam sites to hide spam stats (wp.com still tracks, just won’t show it)
Automattic is including more site stats management through wp.com stats – multiple sites as long as they have the same account.
There was a lively discussion about JP features being limited on local sites.
Photon –
Brandon discussed the JP Photon Image service. It works with dynamically resizing photos, and is great for for the tiled image gallery. Instead of uploading multiple sizes of an image, use JP’s Photon module to cache different sizes of images on wp.com; this can help speed up a site. Photon rewrites and redisplays/caches on wp.com (stored on your server). Automattic (wp.com) is opening data centers overseas to deliver cached images closer to visitor and transfer some of load to wp from your site.
Photon doesn’t work with video; use videopress $60/year, it currently has some limitations and is being being upgraded.
SEO –
Ex-canonical sends original source with image to keep Google stats accuratedeveloper.wordpress.com – has photon image api; photon server is open source.
The terms of service require using JP to use photon, no technical requirements..
Caching –
WP Super Cache plugin is built by Automattic, has full page caching. It’s automatically added by HostGator with the 1 click wp install. Turn it off during development. WP Super Cache plugin works well with photon.
What about conflicts w/ other plugins?
They will disable JP counterparts of other themes – ex, if Contact form 7 is used, the JP contact form is disabled. (He showed a lengthy code subroutine that listed numerous plugins that can override – disable – their JP counterparts or otherwise have to be considered). When conflicts are discovered, the JP developers either work to fix the JP issue or contact the other developer They want to be good neighbors.
Brandon mentioned that JP and /Yoast SEO both have a place for a validation code from Aoogle analytics.
A possible issue: Open Graph Tags (site header – when sharing a post on FaceBook, to associate a designated image, etc.). JP will add that automatically unless it detects another plugin that also does that. See codex article Always Use Open Graph with Jetpack.
What about backing up JP?
Use vault press – back up everything. (not free)
Other questions/answers
Automattic just brought plugin brute protect – block pwd guessing. will be in next release of JP. similar to limit login attempts in other plugins.
If you can’t activate a grayed out feature, the developer may have left it in dev mode.
What types of blogs/sites are not allowed on wp.com?
Spam, hate sites, porn, outside ads (need to do that through wp); they have some eCommerce options.
Accessibility
JP team is aware of accessibility issues and are working on them. an accessibility consultant is involved. Still room for improvement.
Thank you to both our presenter, Brandon Kraft and our Scribe:Donna Blumberg
As we do every year, the Austin WordPress Meetup Organizer surveyed our members. Mendel presented the survey results to your intrepid program planners and some community volunteers and we can up with some major changes to how we will structure the 2015 Austin WordPress sessions.
The group agreed that the distinction between “beginner”, “intermediate”, and “advanced” was unclear, and not helpful for those trying to decide if they should attend a meetup. Instead, a more useful matrix of Meetup designations was developed:
• Content
• Implementor
• Designer
• Developer
• Bus. Manager
•Beginner
The team also decided that we would encourage our presenters to model the sessions as:
• Best Practices
• Emerging Topics
• Stylistic Shootout
• Development
The operative question for both topic and audience should be “What are you trying to do with WordPress?”
Some topics discussed were specifically for beginners, other targeted toward the developer group, but most were intended to have multiple levels of content that would satisfy a broad range of skills – starting with basic information, and leading into advanced detail.
Child Themes
Maintenance / Security / Backup
What to expect from Designers and Developers
Non-profit matchup – an easy way to get involved in the community
Core Contribution
Code Sharing
Remote Experts (Skype / Hangout )
Lightning Talks
Privacy Law ( Presenter: Mercer )
“Responsive” is not the same as “Mobile”
Video Content and Video Sales Letters (VSL)
Cool Classroom Work – General Assembly
Setting Up a Development Environment ( Presenter: Eli )
Best Practices
Intro to Social Media ( Colleen / Christina )
Social Media ( Thomas Umstadt )
Social Marketing (Presenter: Mercer )
Design: Print and Web (Presenter: Eli )
Theme Frameworks and Roll-Your-Own
SASS and LESS
How to Make a Plugin
Best Plugin Stack – Round-table of Favorite
Accessibility ( contact: Cousette / Hiram / Carie Dils )
Electronic Digital Downloads (EDD) (contact:Shawn Davis )
Membership Sites
Email Marketing; Choosing and Using
Analytics
Tools Roundup for Designer and Developers
Establishing a Budget for Your Site
Value-Based Pricing
Managing Your Clients
How to Bid a Project
Marketing Funnel – Start to End (Presenter: Mercer )
Showcase – Membership show-off
Speed-dating – Clients / Designers / Developers
Business Skills for WordPress Designers and Developers
Tax Law for Designers and Developers
Emerging Topics in WordPress and the Web
We are in the process of reaching out to our members to have self- identified as presenters, trainers or speakers so we can start scheduling the balance of the 2015 Austin WordPress Meetup Programs.
If you have suggestions, or wish to volunteer to present for a specific topic just message us here on our new FaceBook page.
