For our April 2020 meetup, we held our first virtual meetup.
Here are a few notes and highlights from our April 13, 2020 meetup, hosted by co-organizers Randy Walker and Deborah Edwards-Onoro.
Continue reading “Takeaways from April 2020 Meetup: Get Answers on Your WordPress Project”
These are the sources of WordPress news we discussed at the meetup on March 9, 2020.
For our September 2018 meetup, two members shared their WordPress journey:
Thanks to Phil Salatrik and Colleen Sullivan Leh for sharing their experiences and stories about their WordPress journeys.
Their talks are a reminder to everyone working with WordPress that we all come from different places, whether it’s creating static websites, MySpace, logging, or starting a new business.
After the presentations, we enjoyed a good discussion about learning WordPress, dealing with spam, and setting up staging sites for WordPress sites.
Thanks to everyone who attended.
Check out the meetup welcome slideshow with info about upcoming events, three things about WordPress, and our WordPress meetups in metro Detroit.
Here are some of the resources and links mentioned during the meetup:
Stop by the meetup site for a few more photos of the meetup.
Shoutout to A2 Hosting and Grand Circus for their sponsorship of our Metro Detroit WordPress Meetup group.
For our April 2018 meetup, three of our members spoke about a WordPress site they worked on (their own or a client site), discussing how they built the site, challenges they faced, and successes.
Thanks to Cleo Parker, Jill Myllyoja, and Jim Luke for sharing their insights and experiences with their sites. We had a lively discussion with questions and suggestions for our presenters.
It was a great meetup! Thanks to everyone who attended.
Here are some of the resources and links mentioned during the meetup:
Stop by the Meetup site to check out the great photos that Dave Rotter took during the meetup.
Shoutout to A2 Hosting and Grand Circus for sponsoring our meetup, we are grateful for your support!
Thank you to all who came out for our November Meetup! It was a great success and everyone I talked to about it loved everything Sylvia had to say about blogging.
Sylvia Hubbard is a Detroit author and founder of Motown Writers Network. She has published over 40 books on suspense romance and one book on Internet Marketing for Writers. She presented various tips and tricks on the basics of blogging, how to organize, monetize, and get content to keep your blog up and running for 365 days without driving yourself to distraction.
“Blogging is part of social media, you should engage.” – Sylvia Hubbard
The presentation started by going over the basics of a blog. A blog is a collection of regularly updated articles or stories on a website, sometimes written in an informal or conversational style as well as more formally or as a case study.
A blog helps you establish authority, as well as creating opportunities for you and other people. By establihsing authority and blogging consistently you become a thought leader in your space, while helping other learn from you and your work. There are a lot of different ways and things you can blog about as well.
The variety of different blog types help you to fit into the niche that you want. We went over a few different types:
The web being what is is today, there are a variety of tools to help you get a blog up and running, most of the time for little to no cost.
The blogging platform you choose matters. The short list of Blogging platforms that you are free to explore: WordPress.com, WordPress.org, Blogger, YouTube, Tumblr, Medium and More. Though our Meetup we are partial to WordPress, the other options out there work well in a variety of circumstances.
One of our leaders, Deborah, wrote a blog post on WordPress.com vs WordPress.org that has a great comparison of features.
WordPress.com is like an apartment. You can’t change the complete structure, or move everything around. But some things can be changed to your liking.
WordPress.org is like a House. You are open to do anything you want. You can change the structure completely, make it look exactly like you want it to.
The platform you choose will depend on the content you want to put out, your audience, your preferences on how the platform works. You also want to take into account the must haves to gain and retain your audience.
Whatever platform you choose, make sure that you give your users access to: Email Subscription, Feed-burner, and Sharing Tools. WordPress and Blogger have a widget for the various necessities.
If you want to do a blog about something you may have different types of content, using written words, spoken words or video. So you may use a combination of WordPress, Youtube and SoundCloud to host your blog posts. You should definitely strategize before getting to far ahead of yourself.
Your first step in anything is to plan, planning is a great habit to get into. I personally have a plan for the plan and a backup plan just in case. Sylvia suggests keeping a blogging journal and that you should set up an Editorial Calendar. Gather your ideas and make your decisions, the what, why and how.
Once you have an answer to all of the above questions you can get started. Knowing what you want to blog about, why people should read your blog over the competitions and how you are going to get people coming back gives you a great backbone. After establishing that, work out your plan of attack and get going on your editorial calendar, plan of the next year of blogging with different types of content.
So overall you want to keep a theme for your blog and talk about your expertise and knowledge in the subject matter, but as mentioned before it can sometime spill into multiple niches.
Start with an introduction to the blog, tell the users about your story. Give the users the reasons why they should read your blog. Give the users a sense of what your pillar content and what they can expect to read on your blog with a variety of different ways to post.
People say content is king, but consistency is queen and she wears the pants! – Sylvia Hubbard
Each week you can post a few different ways that highlight your content. Sylvia showed us a different way to post every day of the week, users like consistency.
There are even more ways to post, these can specifically get you some unique traffic increases:
Remember: do not babysit, bandwagon or boast. Don’t just write something to have a presence. Do not jump on every trend, especially if it does not relate to your readers.
Talk about the subject, platform or brand, but don’t sell too much. You want to give value, give resources and share other blogs in your brand.
Remember what you have done in the past to the best of your ability. Same as in like don’t make the same mistake twice. Be sure to evaluate your successes and failures and learn from them, then teach others, so thay don’t make the same mistakes. Learning and sharing is important for growth.
Don’t forget to keep to your goals that you set, develop new goals, hit them and exceed them. If you do not have relevant, consistant content and you are not engaging your audience you may not make it too far.
Content + Consistency = Success
Metro Detroit WordPress Meetup Group 