October 9, 2017 — Over the past year I’ve been quite successful at freelancing as a WordPress developer and I’ve developed some tips, tricks, and strategies that have proven to be extremely effective a earning a great living as a freelancer.

My talk is called “six figure freelancing” and it covers how I manage to earn at least $10,000 every month as a freelancer. I’d love to share my story with others and help them become more successful as well.

Presentation Slides »

October 9, 2017 — Our success as freelancers is built upon the lessons we’ve learned from our biggest mistakes. In this talk, Nathan draws on more than 20 years of freelancing experience to share important lessons he had to learn the hard way and common mistakes we all can avoid.

October 8, 2017 — WordPress now includes a full featured REST API with default routes for content and the ability for plugins to add additional routes. This provide new ways to read and write data on your WordPress sites that is perfect for use with JavaScript-driven interfaces, apps and more. But do you know what exactly what is available and how to use each route?

Every WordPress site is unique, so every site’s REST API will be different. In this talk you will learn how to use route discovery to learn the answers to each of these questions, for every site.

Presentation Slides »

October 8, 2017 — I started my business in 2010 as a way to make money part-time while being a stay-at-home mom to my 1 year old daughter. Now, two kids and 7 years later, I’m running an agency full-time with my husband and trying to have some semblance of work/life balance in a business that never stops and a house with 3 kids.

This talk will be about my own personal experience – struggles and triumphs – over the past 7 years going from part-time freelancer to full-time owner of a business that supports my entire family. We’ll talk about finding purpose and striving for business success, and what that means when you’re a parent of young children.

In addition to sharing my own experience, I will be reaching out to other WP business owner parents and be interviewing them to see how they manage work/life balance, and incorporating their advice and experiences into the talk. These interviews will be recorded so that audience member can watch them after the fact.

October 8, 2017 — “How do I improve my rankings in Google?” – The ultimate question for anyone who has ever built, owned, or managed a website. There isn’t one right answer to this conundrum, but there are many proven ways to help boost your site’s authority and friendliness with search engines.

We will explore the anatomy of a website as it pertains to it being an active participant of the world wide web with on site SEO best practices as your digital citizenship. Through this idea, we ‘ll cover the basic page elements that every site looking to rank well in search engines should include as well as tips, tricks, and tools for effectively and efficiently incorporating these components using WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

October 8, 2017 — The web plays a lot of roles in modern life. It’s a world wide network designed to be available and accessible to everyone. The types of people, their range of abilities, and their types of devices are quite diverse. How can we, as developers, impact this diverse user base? How can we make the web a better place? The approach we use to develop our code can have a significant impact. That approach is the combination of accessible design and progressive enhancement.

October 8, 2017 — Just as an occasional Tweet is not a social media campaign, having a blog doesn’t mean that you’re doing content marketing. While blogging is a key component, a weekly blog post probably isn’t enough by itself to give your business the boost you want. Let’s talk about strategy, branding, and developing a killer content marketing plan with your WordPress blog at the core of it all.

Presentation Slides »

October 8, 2017 — The ongoing optimization of your WooCommerce store can lead to increased conversions, higher sales and more income. The purpose of this talk is to help you achieve these three goals and to optimize your store into an efficient selling machine. We will cover all aspects of improving your WooCommerce store – from choosing a theme, to optimizing your pages, to integrating plugins, to adding in features that will increase your conversions and sales. You will learn the most effective tools and techniques for optimizing your WooCommerce store and reap the rewards of your positive actions.

Presentation Slides »

October 8, 2017 — My first year in business, I made a whopping $12,000. Before taxes. You can bet I “celebrated” with a whole bottle of (cheap) wine and a lot of tears. I’d worked SO hard, only to feel like a failure. Five years later, and my rates have shot from $500/website, to over $10k/website. It’s possible, but it’s not an easy process. In my talk I break down how I improved my skills, created a better customer experience, and was able to raise my rates–and how others can too! It’s not all about code or design skills, the most overlooked soft-skills of customer service and communication played the biggest role in commanding higher prices. I want to help others utilize these skills so they can boost their prices too.

October 8, 2017 — Branding your business lies in large part on how well you’re able to convey why you do what you do, and to put it into a narrative that your perfect customer understands. This is a simple framework based on the Hollywood blockbuster model.