This week: unethical marketing, wp-config, deployment automation, more news in Gutenberg and much more…
My name is Todd E Jones and I love strategic storytelling.
I started creating WordPress websites when I wanted to have a football blog. I have since gone into the world of business messaging and started Copyflight.
I help service businesses clarify their company story and use it to create unique marketing messages that attract ideal clients.
Since 2014, Orbit Media, led by Andy Crestodina, has conducted an original survey of bloggers.
These bloggers are professionals. They are B2B content marketers, so they are paid to write, not hobby bloggers.
The statistics are always interesting to me. Crestodina shares them compared to recent years.
I am particularly interested in length in words and time to write their blog posts.
The article also includes a list of blogging strategies that are working in 2022.
What makes good content writing? What drives results and leads? These questions are the focus of the topic in this article at Grow & Convert.
Frankly, reading this article is like getting a crash course in the process by Grow and Convert. The same process that delivers monster results for their clients.
The article includes lots of examples for each point so you can see how it works.
The article starts with 4 key problems with a typical content approach and continues with the Grow & Convert process for writing articles that generate leads.
One of my new favorite persons to follow on Twitter is Amanda Natividad. She is always bringing up something I haven’t thought of before.
She is VP Marketing at SparkToro, officially a Marketing Architect.
A while back she laid down a thread that blew my mind and caused me to pause. It was about what she called Zero-Click Content.
She turned it into an article where she fleshed it out more.
She made a fantastic argument for delivering high quality, value driven content on unowned platforms like Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
If one doesn’t click, how do we know it is working?
Amanda says this:
“But how can we get value if we can’t get trackable visits? Just like our marketing forebears did: through hard-to-measure brand lift.”
After years of hanging around Copyhackers and attending their Tutorial Tuesday, I noticed I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the traditional persona model.
Then I met Adrienne Barnes and learned even more why I didn’t like traditional personas. The most important thing to know about your customer isn’t whether they eat breakfast 6 am or 7 but why they choose to buy.
The idea is to create your persona based on the Jobs to Be Done Framework (JTBD).
In this article by Carolyn Beaudoin at Copyhacker, she breaks down the reason to use the JTBD Framework, how to do it, and why to make the switch.
She calls for us to abandon traditional persons and ICPs (Ideal Client Persona),
“‘Cos traditional ICPs and buyer personas leave out some key details you really need to know to write high-converting copy. So you can capture more market share.”
She looks at several examples, even examples of Copyhackers’ own Copy School.
The article is thorough, so grab a cup of coffee before you dive in.
Google Business Profile is always changing. How can a service business use GBP without an address? What things will change in the next few years for Google Business Profile?
What can you do if your Google Business Profile is suspended? How can you help your clients better managed their Google Business Profile?
These are some questions that I discussed with Google Business Profile expert Tricia Clements on the latest Messaging Matters Show.
Mark Zahra has gathered in one place most of the unethical marketing methods used by WP companies. He wonders what are the consequences of applying such practices.
Ross Wintle wrote a great guide about wp-config. I really like the tip on how to validate it.
You can now sign up for the Alpackit beta. Alpackit is a really cool tool for creating and automating development environments for WP. It’s really worth trying out.
LearnDash is taking cutting-edge e-learning methodology and infusing it into WordPress. Trusted to power the learning programs for major universities, small to mid-size companies, startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers worldwide.
Rich Tabor explains what the content-only editing for blocks is and how it differs from blocking editing in blocks.
Nick Diego shows how he made his last presentation with Gutenberg’s blocks. It looks really cool and is very easy to edit and fix.
MasterWP has launched a workshop website. At the moment there are already two available, but 6 more are already in works. I’m very curious about the ones about WP-CLI and Accessibility.
Qode introduced a set of blocks and templates for Gutenberg. It’s also nice that they prepared patterns that are styled and those with minimalist styles that act as wireframes.
Pantheon has created an interesting series of articles about the front-end and how it has changed over the years.
Jonathan Wold describes the loop as a mechanism by which we can drive our product development.
Lawrence Ladomery has just launched WP BizDev. It was created to help find employees related to broadly understood marketing in the WordPress space.
A very interesting test suite for WordPress themes. I can imagine how to use it in combination with additional tools (like AXE) so we can check whether our theme works in every situation.
Mary Voelker talked a bit about the official WooCommerce agency partner program at Do_the Woo.
It’s time for Hacktoberfest. Which is a great opportunity to start your adventure with Open Source.