October 9, 2015 — Maintaining any business for 20 years is difficult. But keeping a tech business running strong for 20 years is a big challenge. Zeek Interactive just turned 20 and Steve will discuss how to stay ahead of the game in an ever-changing tech environment.

October 2, 2015 — Are you a freelancer who is at capacity with clients but aren’t earning the income you would like to be? Are you a freelancer looking to expand your reach beyond the one on one client work? If you answered ‘Yes’ to either or both of those questions then this is a must see talk for you!
Helena will help you plan your first online course by helping you with following tasks:
Do you have a list? If not start building one now so you can survey your list to find out what they may want.
Can your current skills, the ones you use in your freelance business with one-on-one clients, translate into an online course?
– Skills assessment.
– Target market – who are you be able to teach your skills to?
– Creating your course – delivered live or pre-recorded?
– Minimum viable product and iterate as you go or at each release.
– Fitting course creation amongst current work.
– Cut back on one-on-one work to make time to deliver the course.
– Specific launches or Evergreen course.

Presentation Slides »

September 29, 2015 — Every business that uses or intends to use WordPress faces common obstacles. These may include finding qualified developers to build a theme, finding particular plugins to achieve a task or not knowing where to find help online to fix an issue.

In this talk I will discuss many of these common pain points I have seen businesses have. I will share resources where you can find solid answers from the WordPress community. You will also learn some important concepts behind maintaining your WordPress site, as well as questions you can ask a developer if you are looking to hire.

Takeaways

Resources for choosing a good theme
Resources for finding solidly built plugins
Questions to ask any theme or plugin developer you intend to hire

Presentation Slides »

September 16, 2015 — Just in case you forgot: Facebook and other social networks actually
serve a business purpose. If you want to generate a strong social
media ROI over time, connect your business goals to your efforts on
social media. Shift your energy to YOUR BUSINESS rather than the of
unending grind of creating content, and learn how to combine your
creativity with what your clients and customers want to produce
results. Then learn how to implement the right social media tracking
and reporting systems, so once you establish your company or
organizational goals, you’ll know when you’re hitting them. Find out
what data to evaluate regularly to refine your social strategy and
make sure it’s performing for your business and your bottom line. Make
social media work for you–without the burnout, aimless effort, and
inefficiency that waste the money and resources of so many businesses
and nonprofits.

Takeaways

– Learn an easy method to associate each social media site your business or organization uses with specific and even measurable financial, marketing, and communications goals
– Learn how to use Google Analytics data and other social site statistics to guide your strategy for reaching your social media marketing goals
– Learn how to communicate with your team that you have designed a results-oriented social media plan, and what data they can expect to review each month or quarter
– Take home a list of recommended social media tools designed for use with WordPress

September 14, 2015 — Troy talks about why recurring revenue is the holy grail and how you can create recurring revenue in your WordPress business. During the talk Troy teaches you how to package up your recurring revenue offer, how to pitch it to clients and how to build infrastructure to automate most of the work.

Presentation Slides »

August 18, 2015 — Explore exciting topics like: why it feels like you keep building the same project over and over again, balancing work, life, and business, how to motivate designers without buying them another shiny new Apple product, and so much more in this oftimes-sarcastic and always-painfully-true talk about all of the ways I almost went insane while trying to run my business. Why learn from your own mistakes when you can learn from (and hopefully avoid!) mine?

Presentation Slides »

August 5, 2015 — Many software companies and freelancers are able to build fantastic websites, but they have no idea how to decide what to charge. Unfortunately, poor pricing decisions can destroy a company’s financial future and mean the difference between owning a successful business and being forced to live in a van down by the river. In this presentation, Adam presents techniques to determine the most appropriate pricing strategy for your WordPress projects.

July 17, 2015 — Successful WordPress entrepreneurs share the lessons learned while building a company from scratch and tell the tales of all the challenges and trials experienced along the way.

July 16, 2015 — While adding eCommerce functionality might not be the first thought, there are HUGE benefits that you can create without selling goods – the topic would introduce a variety of methods, in addition to addressing existing store owners on how to better engage their audience.

July 13, 2015 — This talk focuses on my five key tips and tricks to creating better product photos for social media, marketing, and website use. While we will focus heavily on the photography side of things, there will be social media tidbits thrown in along the way.