May 29, 2017 — If you’re a local business then your customer base is local to you. You want customers to come in your store or call your number. You want customers to find you when they search for a local business. In the world of search, the rules on how to rank locally keep changing. In this session we’ll look at current guidelines for optimizing your WordPress site for local search and we’ll discuss the best tools and techniques to use. Attendees will learn how local SEO differs from traditional SEO, how citations and review matter, how to manage your online presence and how to optimize your site for local SEO.

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May 28, 2017 — Do you know that if you have a picture of a duck having it face left or right can increase your conversions by 40%?

Think this sounds silly? It is, but backed by research. Spend some time to learn about what a/b testing is, what things to test, testing methodology and the best tools to use for your WordPress site.

Everyone will get a handout of the very same checklist I use when A/B testing our client’s sites. One of our clients, an insurance company, increased leads by making just a small 2px change.

Want YOUR site to be tested live? Please tweet me your URL @MPMIKE with the hashtag #TESTME. Selected sites will get live feedback and examples.

When you launch a website, you are guessing. Sure the guesses are educated based on experience and data, but you can maximize your ROI with good A/B testing

May 28, 2017 — There is so much information put out there about growing a business, about SEO or marketing in general. One area that doesn’t get much love is customer service.

You can get the clients in the door, but then what happens? You want to do a great job but at the end of the day you’re stressed out because things are all over the place. The client wants this or that and it was never discussed.

In this talk, I want to discuss ways to provide an excellent customer service experience while keeping you sane and your bills paid.

May 28, 2017 — Understanding your users’ behavior will help you improve the user experience of your site or product as well as how you market to new users.

In this talk, you will learn how to use different types of surveys to learn about your users. We will discuss:

– Using surveys to segment your audience
– Creating survey questions without question bias
– User research surveys
– Post-sale surveys
– Experience surveys
– When to survey your audience or users
– and more…

May 27, 2017 — Everyone wants to get more done with their day, but we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that putting more hours in at work results in more productivity. I’d like to dispell that myth and offer practical solutions for freelancers and teams to maximize their productivity while working less hours.

May 27, 2017 — Lots of people think website accessibility is a “nice to have” feature when in reality it’s a “must have” feature. In this session, we’ll demystify the WCAG 2.0 guidelines and show how when you make websites accessible it benefits everyone. You’ll be well on your way to being an a11y ally!

May 27, 2017 — Being able to convey both factual meaning and human sentiment through the written word can be challenging. From emails to project updates to tweets, we are constantly sending text artifacts out into the world that may not jibe with what we MEANT to say.

Who needs this talk? EVERYONE! “But devs don’t need to know how to write well,” you say. Sorry, but developers do need to, for:
* Clients (both current and potential) – being able to explain technical issues in a way that is both intelligible and digestible is a key work skill. Many WordPress developers and businesses live and die by solid RFP responses;
* Coworkers – website development can be a solo gig, but often involves code collaboration (even if your collaborator is your future self #docbrown). How you update (or solicit updates from) your co-workers can make or break a project. The words we choose only become more important in situations where cannot rely on body language (such as in Slack, email, forums, or work tickets);
* the WordPress community – when all you have are Core Trac ticket updates, how we bolster support or provide actionable feedback to our peers is crucial. A poorly crafted forum reply can drive someone away from open source contributions, so being able to respond in helpful, respectful ways is a skill we all must hone;
* Yourself – Do you tweet? Do you publish content online? Are you seeking work and need to craft RFP responses or application cover letters? All these require stronger writing skills than a one-and-done draft.

This talk is for anyone who uses words to convey ideas. I will lay out examples of words to avoid and offer alternative ways to convey similar ideas. By sharing easy-to-implement tips and tricks on writing, I will help attendees communicate better in any situation.

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May 27, 2017 — JetPack enables powerful social sharing tools in WordPress for content publishers to cross post to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Path, and Tumblr. In the early days of social crossposting, it was relatively impossible to manage the content of your social share. As Open Graph was introduced and all the major social networks adopted the technology, plugin developers started to build connections between WordPress and the primary networks, so web publishers could manage the post title, description, image (or video), and link shared into each social network.

In this session, WordPress consultant, Tony Zeoli, will walk through how to optimize your posts, pages, products, or post types for social media using a freely available plugin with a powerful social meta manager. Tony will show you how to set up your social meta values and then debug your posts using Facebook’s Debugger tool, so that Open Graph dumps the cache of previous page content in favor of the new social optimized information. He will also go over how to add your Facebook admin IDs and profile IDs, so that Open Graph can validate the content publisher.

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May 27, 2017 — Join VP of Product @ Bluehost and co-Founder of MOJO Marketplace Brady Nord for insights and trends from years of selling WordPress services, themes, plugins and hosting.

May 27, 2017 — In the life of most freelance business owners, there is an ongoing battle between strategy and execution. We struggle with trying to improve our business with better systems and processes in the middle of the chaos of daily activity. This talk offers a simple strategy that you can implement to move your business forward in the middle of the whirlwind.

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