WP-Tonic | WordPress | SaaS | Bootstrap SaaS | Startups

This week Benjamin Ilfeld from 10up.com joined Jonathan Denwood and his co-host Kim Shivler to discuss Google Analytics.

Benjamin is the Lead Audience and Revenue Strategist at 10up. They focus on the audience and revenue side of the business for their customers.

Benjamin explained that while Google Analytics is a tool to provide insights into traffic visiting your site, it’s like a Swiss Army Knife that isn’t specific to one need. It’s generic and to get the most from it, you need to configure it to meet your needs.

For example, if you are running an eCommerce store, you want to filter out bot traffic to make sure anyone visiting is a potential customer.

Ben also recommended configuring views and filters in order to fine tune what you see. He always recommends creating a test view that is your sandbox. Use this like a test or staging area before putting anything into a live view. Once it’s live it will show up in your reports.

Google Analytics and other tools give you insights into your data, but what is really important is to set goals and have a measurement plan. The tools them provide the measurements, but if you don’t know your goals and what you want to measure, the numbers don’t matter.

This week’s roundtable gathered to discuss Design Elements for your WordPress website including selecting a color scheme, and fonts. Sallie Goetsch, Adam Preiser, Kim Shivler, and special guest Amanda McCoy joined host Jonathan Denwood for a lively discussion with plenty of links to resources to help you with your own site.

Amanda McCoy spoke at WordCamp Sacramento 2017 on color palette selection, so we invited her along to share some insights. She works in both web and print design, and likes to select colors that fit the project. If you take a look at her website, you’ll see what she means. Her portfolio shows plenty of examples where the colors set the tone of her message. She also says to keep it simple for your website. You only need a few colors.

Adam has several tutorials on fonts and colors. One of his pet peeves is when he can tell, at a glance, what WordPress theme people are using because they haven’t taken the time to change default fonts and colors.

The group also covered the difference between free fonts and copyrighted professional fonts. Make sure that you are using a free font or have paid the licensing fee if you are using a professional font.

Resources to help with fonts and color palettes:

Type wolf - a site dedicated to what’s happening in the world of type.
https://www.typewolf.com/

Font pair helps designers pair Google fonts.
http://fontpair.co

More Meaningful Typography by Tim Brown is an article explaining how to successfully use typography. It is published on the site A List Apart.
https://alistapart.com/article/more-meaningful-typography

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web. A practical guide to web typography.
http://webtypography.net/

Practical Color Theory for People Who Code
https://tallys.github.io/color-theory/

Color in UI Design: A (Practical) Framewory by Erik D. Kennedy on Medium
https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/color-in-ui-design-a-practical-framework-e18cacd97f9e

Color Theory 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Complementary Colors, RGB, and More by Caroline Mercurio on Storyblocks
https://blog.storyblocks.com/tutorials/color-theory-101-a-beginners-guide/

Open Color - an open-source color scheme
https://yeun.github.io/open-color/

We have Adam Preiser joining us as our special guest this week. The founder of WPCrafter one of the most popular YouTube channels around giving training and reviews connected to WordPress themes, plugins or anything else that's connected to WordPress. WPCrafter channel has over 30.000 subscribers!!!

Getting traffic to your site is great, but what happens once people arrive? This week, the group discusses conversion rates of site visitors to email subscribers and explores ways to improve conversions.

Special thanks to our sponsor IntelligenceWP. IntelligenceWP is a WordPress plugin that extends the functionality of Google Analytics and provides real-world insights into your analytics right from your WordPress Dashboard.

It was a full house this week on the WP-Tonic Friday Roundtable with plenty of ideas shared for improving conversions.

Step one, of course, is to get the traffic to your site. Once they are there, to convert them to subscribers, the key is to create valuable content.

Tom explained education pieces of content and attraction pieces of content. Content has different roles some pieces are meant to attract like wikipages, and blog posts. White papers and other premium pieces of content are meant to educate, and can be delivered in exchange for an email address.

Put CTAs (Call to Action) on Blog posts pointing people to premium content. Have them sign up to receive premium content.

Have relevant testimonials. For example, if you are doing something about security, put case studies and testimonials about security on the site.

Creating a sales funnel in WordPress is easy. You don’t need ClickFunnels.

A sales funnel flows from the Top through the Middle to the Bottom.

Top - The top of the sales funnel consists of small lead magnets like a checklist or two minute video.

Middle - At the middle of the funnel, you’ve nurtured relationship. Now you offer something more like a free course or a premium podcast series

Bottom - The bottom of the funnel is a higher value, bigger piece like a live webinar. Note that some people might move right to the bottom.

Call to Action - people sometimes forget to ask - or even “Tell them to do it.” Click this, I promise you’ll like it.

Having analytics is more important than AB Testing. Know what’s working.

AB Testing good for landing pages to understand the right copy. When you start looking at the entire Attract > Engage > Convert chain more robust things with analytics helps. Track page attributes what topics, what tone did we take, what hooks did we use and see how they work across multiple posts.

Create profiles for your audience - who are they - and tag your content that way.

Check page attributes. See what hooks you used and see how it converts.

The biggest key is to get the tracking (data collection with Google Analytics) started. You don’t have to jump in and decide to become an expert. Just get it started and as you go you can grow. You need the data, so start collecting it now.

Tools for Sales Funnels, Conversions and Engagement Management
Zapier - zapier.com
IfThisThenThat (IFTTT) - ifttt.com
IntelligenceWP - intelligencewp.com
SendGrid is a mail sending service - sendgrid.com
Zoho has a $35.00/month option for all of their tools - zoho.com
Drip - drip.co
Active Campaign - activecampaign.com
Mautic - https://www.mautic.org/

This Week’s Roundtable:

Tom - IntelligenceWP.com

Adam Preiser - youtube.com/wpcrafter or wpcrafter.com

Matt Ingot - freelancetransformation.com

Adam Fout - bluesteelesolutions.com

Sallie Goetsch - wpfangirl.com

Chris Badgett - lifterlms.com (podcast LMSCast.com)

Jonathan Denwood - WP-Tonic.com

Kim Shivler - kimshivler.com

This week, Jonathan Denwood and Kim Shivler interviewed Nancy Lyons, CEO of Clockwork, an award winning, interactive design agency. Clockwork is known as one of the best places to work in Minneapolis, and Nancy shared insights on how to create a people-centered corporate culture, and why it's important to consider that different employees work and process in different ways and how allowing this increases engagement. Nancy is co-author of the book Interactive Project Management, Pixels, People, & Process which takes a people-centered approach to delivering outstanding digital products.

This week, the WP-Tonic Roundtable featured Sallie Goestch, Lee Jackson, John Locke, Kim Shivler, and special guest Larry Swanson along with host Jonathan Denwood to
discuss WordCamp Seattle and WordPress Hooks: Actions and Filters.

Larry, of EllesMedia (https://ellessmedia.com/), is a content strategist who is co-organizer of WordCamp Seattle, so we kicked off our session with an peek at what this year’s WordCamp Seattle features. Four tracks including a WP 101 Setup track are available with a speaker list that includes frequent Roundtable contributor Morten Rand-Hendriksen presenting Gutenberg & the Future of WordPress. WordCamp Seattle will be held November 4-5, 2017, and tickets are on sale (https://2017.seattle.wordcamp.org/).

The discussion of Hooks focused on explaining them and providing resources for learning to use them.

Think of a hook as a place to hang something - the same way you would think of a physical hook - not a piece of software. When looking at WordPress, a hook is a place where you can hang your code into the WordPress code. Actions and Filters are each a type of hook. These are used in the development of both plugins and themes.

Actions allow you to add or remove code, while Filters let you modify or replace specific data.

At it’s core, this is actually all PHP programming, so an “Introduction to PHP: course is recommended for anyone wanting to develop WordPress themes or plugins.

Not sure what actions and filters are being used on a WordPress page? Simply Show Hooks (https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/simply-show-hooks/) is a plugin that will show all hooks on a page making it easy for developers to find where they can hook into.

Resources for Using Hooks and Creating Plugins:

WordPress.org Codex Writing a Plugin (https://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin)

WordPress.org Codex Hooks Reference (https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API)

Simply Show Hooks (https://en-gb.wordpress.org/plugins/simply-show-hooks/)

Envato Tutorial (https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/the-beginners-guide-to-wordpress-actions-and-filters--wp-27373)

Pippin’s Plugins tutorials on Plugin Programming (https://pippinsplugins.com/learn/)

LevelTen is a Dallas based digital agency that specializes in large Drupal web projects that is now trying to developing relationships in the WordPress community.

Ron Huber & Tom McCracken, the creators & founders of the IntelligenceWP Plugin are our special guests for the WP-Tonic Podcast.

As Google Analytics experts, Ron Huber & Tom McCracken provided insight into how frequently people make basic mistakes when endeavoring in implementing Google Analytics.

Ron & Tom shared examples on how marketers can go a lot farther with Google Analytics besides using the default settings. By configuring how content is scoring on a website and how well it is doing based on a variety of factors can give marketers better insights on what will generate value for them.

https://getlevelten.com/

https://intelligencewp.com

Our Panel

Sallie Goetsch: from WP Fangirl

Jackie D’Elia: from Jackie D’Elia Design

Jonathan Denwood: from WP-Tonic.com

Morten Rand-Hendriksen: from LinedIn.com

Main Topic

” How To Managed Difficult WordPress Projects.”

News Stories For This Week

1 - WordPress Abandons React due to Patents Clause, Gutenberg to be Rewritten with a Different Library

https://wptavern.com/wordpress-abandons-react-due-to-patents-clause-gutenberg-to-be-rewritten-with-a-different-library

2 - Perspective on WordPress

By Scott Bolinger

http://scottbolinger.com/perspective-on-wordpress/

Justin has made a career as an e-learning consultant where he has implemented global training programs for Fortune 500 companies.

Passionate about e-learning and WordPress, both Justin and LearnDash have been featured in multiple industry publications, including Forbes.com, ELearning! Magazine, Training Magazine, INTERCOM Magazine, EdTech Magazine, Chief Learning Officer, and Learning Technologies by the Association for Talent Development.

Justin’s experience-based vision has helped make LearnDash the most trusted WordPress LMS plugin for major universities, continuing education providers, and entrepreneurs world-wide.

Justin Ferriman

https://www.learndash.com/about/

Kimberly Shivler

Kim Shivler helps business owners master communications and technology in order to increase sales and improve customer service.

Kim has worked as a writer, instructor, developer and serial entrepreneur for over 20 years. Her business experience includes computer network and database administration, technical training and writing, project management, web development, and work as an aesthetician and spa owner. She also worked for large corporations including Tivoli, an IBM company, where she was part of the worldwide technical sales and marketing team.

Combining her experiences in business and technology with her Bachelor of Arts in English and Masters of Education, Kim provides workshops, strategies, and consulting services designed to help businesses succeed.

https://twitter.com/KimShivler
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlyshivler/
https://whiteglovewebtraining.com
https://howtobuildanonlinecourse.com
https://kimshivler.com

Jonathan Denwood

https://www.wp-tonic.com

We have a really special WP-Tonic round table show here which was recorded live at Sacramento WordCamp 2017 with have special panel of WordPress experts plus we did a joint podcast with Chris Badget the host of LMScast podcast. It was a really fun show and I got to say that the team that organized this years Sacramento WordCamp have done an amazing job.