Corey Maass and Cory Miller continue the development of their new WordPress plugin, Crop.Express. They delve into the world of image-generation tools for content marketing. In this insightful conversation, they explore creating customizable templates to generate visually appealing images for blog posts, social media, and other channels. Discover how these tools can help marketers enhance their content, highlight important quotes and summaries, and streamline sharing. Dive into the workflow and envision a future where content creators can effortlessly generate eye-catching images that elevate the presentation and value of their posts.
Top Takeaways:
- Continuous Learning: The WordPress ecosystem constantly evolves, so staying updated with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices is crucial. Engage in continuous learning through online resources, forums, and communities, and attend WordPress events and conferences.
- Security Measures: WordPress security should be a top priority. Implement robust security measures such as using strong passwords, keeping themes and plugins up to date, using reliable security plugins, regularly backing up your website, and staying vigilant against potential vulnerabilities.
- Performance Optimization: Website speed and performance are essential for user experience and search engine rankings. Optimize your WordPress site using lightweight themes and plugins, optimizing images, leveraging caching techniques, and minimizing HTTP requests. Regularly monitor and optimize your site’s performance to ensure a smooth and fast user experience.
Mentioned in the show:
You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:
- Corey Maass
- Cory Miller (CEO, Post Status)
- Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)
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Transcript
Session 14 Corey & Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live
[00:00:00] Dude. Hey.
[00:00:04] Cory Miller: All right. Session 14. I had to go on YouTube and look, but golly, that’s been. Three months, three and a half months. Been good stuff. Had fun on these, but we have some good things to talk about today. I think you were gonna show me some of that stuff and come up with a punch list of what you’ve been manically working on.
Yeah, I’m meager man. And I know the other part of the agenda is now baton is. Getting handed over to me to really drive marketing and the work of, that I can actually do with your class. Yep, exactly. Genius and insight and feedback. All right, you want to any thoughts or do you want to kick
[00:00:53] Corey Maass: it off and No, lemme share. Which 1:00 AM I sharing? [00:01:00] Share, update, plugin. Let’s make it smaller. Come on window.
You see that? Okay? Yep. And hold on just a second. Where is.
Real life needs and leads of a dog. Must be in the office with me at all times. Okay, go lay down. All right we have a blog WordPress install. I’ve been testing with Yost, but for the fun of it, we’ll leave that. Deactivated general settings. Oh, it’s interesting that didn’t reset. But anyway, the title of this blog tagline, so this is the description of this blog.
So I’m just like, some things I [00:02:00] want to sensible, sensible defaults basically And looking at these variables because they’ll show up later. If you go, so you have a WordPress install you’ve just downloaded O M G I M G we need Oh, you have that WorkFlowy document I think I shared with you.
Yeah. Did. So these are, I’ll take notes here. Plug in marketing. So it’s like, what do we call the damn thing? I plugged in. It’s O M G I M G and all capital letters we decided on, which I love. And then what do we call it? I’m, so a couple of neat things with this. We, I think we, we touched on it a little bit or I was thinking it earlier today, is we don’t need, because we’re not going in the plug-in repo, we don’t need a readme, we don’t need there’s a bunch of SEO [00:03:00] stuff that we don’t need to worry about, that we were messing around with Crop Express.
But I think we still want, we still need a description for here. We still need do we just call it O M G I M G? Do we want another word? Image builder, maker, candlestick maker, something in there. So yeah, what do we call it? What should be like, What we see on the plugins page,
Description name oops. All right. So anyway we activate it. It takes you to a welcome screen. Right now it says, welcome to O M G I M G. Let’s get you started creating your first image, an open graph image for your site. The first image is the image people see when they share your [00:04:00] sites on socials.
So we can review all this copy later, but Roger that we just need an icon I’ve been using, actually let’s do, if I go to post status, it’s gonna be the real lit litmus test, right?
Is there a high res version? Hey, look at that. Holy leash. Nikes. No, that’s good. It’s an svg. Okay which we don’t support currently. We’re gonna want to I can. I got it. Because we can just go SVG to p and g. It’s one of my favorite. These are my favorite sites. There’s this whole series of sites that look just like this.
It’s compress P and g. Yeah, compress jpeg, compress All these are my favorite sites. With the elephant. And I contacted this person once and I was like, can I give you money because I use your websites,[00:05:00] every day. And he is no, I make more from ads than you could ever give me.
Okay. It’s a good problem to have anyway, so let’s show.
Did it really make it that small?
Oh, no, it really does make it that small.
Okay. So yes, you should send me a version if you have it.
I should have asked you for this earlier,
SVG whole doc. Why not? It really is that small though.
What size do you need? I’ve got just as big as possible with the transparent background.
I’ve got three 20,
[00:05:41] Cory Miller: about three 20. Let’s see.
I had these made for Different social platforms. So they’re already scaled down.
Yep. Do you want an eps?
[00:05:54] Corey Maass: I think I’ve almost got it.
[00:05:55] Cory Miller: We’re illuminating some of the things that we’ve talked about,
[00:05:59] Corey Maass: right? [00:06:00] Yeah. Around tight.
Yep. Yep. This is compelling listening and watching for anybody out there. There we go. I got it. And I’m being a little pedantic because I want this to be a good demo for you. Oops. Export p and g thousand by a thousand giggles. Heat export. Having fun. Download save. All right, I got it.
[00:06:39] Cory Miller: Here we go.
LeBron Giggle in their heat map software is probably going, oh my God.
[00:06:44] Corey Maass: Tertiary dancing. All right, I’m gonna drag in the PS logo, see if this works. Hey, you get a little preview. So there’s a bug. Go bugs [00:07:00] dropping image shows preview, but placeholder doesn’t. Disappear.
Doesn’t matter though. So you create, so this is going to automatically generate the first one based on I think it’s the, oh, let’s find out. And there’s a fatal error because get options hasn’t been set site. There’s a little live coding for you.
Oh,
obviously I haven’t walked through this in a while.
Oh. Called up there. I see.
What did happen?
Oh, I know what I did. Yeah. So change this to until good options. [00:08:00] There we go. Let’s try that again. Refresh. Grab the PS logo, P and G
and nothing happens. Okay, skip. Anyway it should have created one, but we’ll create one. So this is the other workflow, basically the idea being that welcome screen, you drop in a logo and then it just spits one out. Yep. So that you’re not, so that you’re, on board you, and obviously we’ll tweak that.
But I wanted to get that we had talked about. The experience of it. Essentially you drop an image and it’s just done and then you’d click then option to set it as an OG image. But here we’ll say created open OG image. Right now we’ve got logo only and then side by side are mostly working.
Top bottom isn’t done and simple was the old version I need to clean up, but we’ll start with logo only. Let’s see if this works.[00:09:00] We’re close. Line app, line one 20. Oops. Of course I’ve been hacking away at this, so lots of errors. I get it. No issue here.
But anyway okay, so real simple, I just want this to go away. If set.
There we go. So real simple options here. You’ve got a background and you’ve got an image. And so that’s all the options that you’ve got here on the left. So you can set a background color. So if we go to Do you know what color the post status orange is? It’s the,
like the official
[00:09:51] Cory Miller: I don’t think it’s,
[00:09:53] Corey Maass: oops, I spelled you wrong. Post status.com. There we go. [00:10:00] Inspect.
It’s that one. Okay, so hypothetically you’d come in, you’d say, oh, and I’ve added global options. So there’s under settings, you can set a site name if you want it different than the WordPress name, site description, site url. There’s also going to be Default colors. So it’s if you create a new one, instead of you having to set the background color every time it’d import these.
I also think I showed you, I just added or showed a screenshot. I just added support for Google. Fonts a little clunky but is working, which is cool. Ah, okay. So this is what it was supposed to do, is it creates your first project With, here’s your channel, here’s your template. So logo only, open graph.
So anyway, back in the editor, so you changed the [00:11:00] background color to be the post status one, and of course it doesn’t paste FC 78 15.
FC 78 15. So there’s the post status low color. I added an overlay just by default, so if you wanted to add like, A gradient, something to make it a little more dynamic. I’m gonna add a little toggle for this so you can turn it off all, all together. You can also rotate it so you can make the gradient come from a different direction if you want.
I guess the hack right now is you would just go in here and make this the same as that orange. Okay.
Looks like it’s still adding a gradient, but anyway. But the idea is right now I’ve added, I’m basically flushing out. I’m trying to flush out like one of each option, like a color picker, a or slider, [00:12:00] a bunch of different things. And so we can keep adding these selectors basically. So you can, you’ll have options all day long.
You come over here and. So that’s how you could figure the background, right? And then for the image this should by default, say site logo, which is the thing we uploaded. But I’ve added support for the media library. So if you wanted to do let’s grab one of my testing document WordPress.
Nope. Testing. So I’ve been using this gear, so you could also select an image from the media library or the default site logo. You set the size, you could rotate it. Rotate it if you want to.
So dead simple. Save your changes. And it’s there every time, right? There’s an option to view it, [00:13:00] full screen. And then there’s the, you saved say download. I don’t know if you, I don’t think you can see that part, but it downloads right now. It’s a funny name, but we’ll give it a better name when you download it so you’ll know what it looks like in the download.
And then there’s also the option to save it as your open graph image. And so we don’t really have a way to demo that, but what it does is it will it’ll write headers to your, to, to the website so that anytime your website is shared this’ll be your OG image. Okay. And then also so I think, so it’s saving it as OG image.
Yeah. Puts it into your media library and then. And then that’s what gets shared out. So another bug here or an extra feature we want is to save. In addition, to save as to download, we wanna be able option to save to media Library. [00:14:00] So it’ll just show up in the media library. And saving is the OG image.
So when you go back to projects, there’s a little flag that says this is your OG image, cuz you can only have one obviously. And so it’s if you set a different one. So here’s that same menu you can download directly from here. Or save it as the OG image. And then, and this’ll replace whatever one is the OG image.
Let’s create another. Go ahead. Yeah, let’s create
[00:14:26] Cory Miller: another one. But how did you get the name Project five? Number
[00:14:29] Corey Maass: five. So it’s, these are just like posts. So if you create A post has an id. So project number five. So yeah, one of the Go
[00:14:39] Cory Miller: ahead default, or we just naming that by default or do they have the
[00:14:44] Corey Maass: What would we name it?
[00:14:47] Cory Miller: No, I was it. Do we, do they have the option to name it
[00:14:52] Corey Maass: something different? Oh, they don’t yet. So let’s add that to the list. Custom project [00:15:00] name
because, yeah, I thought about that too, like that once it gets up to 1,986,426, it’s like, what’s, which one are we talking about?
[00:15:12] Cory Miller: I’m just thinking too, for sorting, like we probably want to say it’s O N G I M G and then they name it like default homepage or something. And then when we get into the single post pages and stuff, maybe it’s post ID or post name and number or something like that.
Just so they, when they see this page, it’s gonna get pretty filled.
[00:15:37] Corey Maass: Yep. Yeah, the here it says SITEWIDE images. I don’t think this is working right now because I’ve made a bunch of changes to the site version. There is a menu option here for O M G I M G per post. Yeah, it’s totally broken right now.
But it’ll, when it’ll look similar, [00:16:00] but it, but up here it says, Name of post, today’s specials or whatever, and then it, and then has your images, so you do have context. But yeah under the project number name we’ll want to come up with some naming convention. The other thing that I, so let’s do that custom project name, but right off the bat, maybe a date or we could do the name of the template.
Default project name, using date or template or both because it would be like April 26th. OG image would at least give you some context.
[00:16:40] Cory Miller: Ni picky. But when you say CRI project, that button right there. Yep. C. Could that be create O n G? Im G.
[00:16:48] Corey Maass: Absolutely.
Not nitpicky. That’s the kind of stuff I please jump in. Okay. Especially cuz most, most of those changes are small. Yeah. Yeah. I
[00:16:58] Cory Miller: think coming back to the branding, like [00:17:00] that’s what we’re doing is M G I M G and that’s what they’re getting and I think
[00:17:04] Corey Maass: that’s good. Yep. Okay. Let’s do another open graph.
Actually let’s do an Instagram and again. So instead of logo only now we get into side by side, so it’s a bit more complicated.
So this is a logo on the left and text options on the right. So again, we do a background color. See there’s a little bug of. That border.
[00:17:35] Cory Miller: You’re a very daring dev. I always like doing this stuff though, but a lot of devs have worked with her, like they don’t want to see, they don’t want you to see some of this. I’m like,
[00:17:45] Corey Maass: Hey. Oh, I want you to see it as broken as possible. Cuz then it’s like one, one, it’s part of the journey and what we’re trying to illustrate with all of our, everything we, we’ve been doing in public Mo honestly, most of our conversations have been [00:18:00] public.
And that’s I also wanna show, this is as part of our journey. You have barely usable products, but it’s, then you clean it up. So same thing, overlay color, make it nice and ugly for you. So let’s just do white and green. With that angle. The image, again, you can choose, that’s supposed to be site
site, logo side.
Just clicking through to see that it all works, so it changes to this other thing. Or you jump back and it’s the site logo, make it bigger title. So this is the stuff that I’ve been really working on right now. I’m, I don’t have Google fonts enabled. I. But you still get the idea. So we’ve got some default font families basically.
So if you wanted handwritten I [00:19:00] don’t know if bold works. No, I was just doing that this morning. But you will have the option to ignore this input and you will have, but you will have the option to say bolder italics, cuz it’s I want you to be able to customize the text to your heart’s content.
Text color. So you might hear, you might match the orange type of thing, text size,
but you’d say, I want this tighter. There’s line height. If you wanna get, what’s that tweak to your heart’s content. Exactly. And again, these are not quite the, like you gave me some comps of the ultimate post status. Social image. And so based on that, I want to give us, give you all the options.
If you were a customer coming in, you’d say, okay, I’d upload my logo here. I might choose a a font that not looks like that. [00:20:00] Like that. I’d want it bold, I’d want it all caps. So we want all those options. And then, Be able to make it look good in the context of this template. There’s the title, then you go to the subtitle.
And so you’d have site url, site description. Remember I said, this is where we put in the description of the blog. But it’s like most likely you’d want the title of the blog and the url, so you’d do that, but it’s, and there’s a setting for let me save this. So there’s a setting again. So by default, if you’re like, our webs, our website is http and www, but we really just want it to be post status.com or if you had a short u r l, po.st or something like that, you could put that in here.
So let’s do post status.com. [00:21:00] Save. Go back to here. Oh. So you know, this is what your project screen looks like. So you’ll see all of your projects. And yeah, we’re gonna want ability to sort projects by name most recently updated, et cetera. So we’ll add that to that screen. Jumping back in here, Seesa.
Now, the, by default it brings in post status.com, but there’s also an option of custom text. So if you wanted to put in dot, something or post status.com, link to, something specific, a blog, something like that, right? Text color X size, but you get the idea.
[00:22:00] So yeah, that’s where we’re at.
No problem, dude.
[00:22:05] Cory Miller: So from the premise of the Sitewide OG image probably when I was doing that for, it was so good. Can I show you some stuff
[00:22:14] Corey Maass: real quick? Yeah, absolutely.
[00:22:16] Cory Miller: Okay. So I was playing, this is off topic, but I was playing with some of this, like more into the blog post stuff. So you can see some of these things. I was just like trying to be the client. This is not it. Okay. Where did that play with it?
It’s in our.
Oh, here we go.
But this side by side image, I think side by side thing is gonna be really great for the in, in just what we need for. Initial stuff. Yep. So I was running around with like logo on top here.
[00:22:52] Corey Maass: Yeah, your number 15 is what I was emulating and then. Once, once I’ve got all the kinks worked [00:23:00] out, it’s easy enough to duplicate it to, I called it top and bottom or something.
So logo above, and so that becomes your like 14 or 13 where it’s the same elements on the page. Just, up and down instead of left and right. Yeah, I really, as I was
[00:23:18] Cory Miller: doing this just for post, I was like, this is what, this is really what you need. You just need. Logo, brain thing, tagline. And so that was really good for me to go through that experience.
But yeah, I guess I’ve got four cards here. Put it on the right, put it on the left, but it above, but it below.
[00:23:40] Corey Maass: Yep. And I, and so actually I’m now thinking, so maybe I. Like I do the, just an image, cuz that was one of the ones we saw on that gallery. And then, and I think it’s a really good place to start.
Basically it’s the simplest. And then we will, [00:24:00] and then I will adjust the side by side to be, we’ll call it the, like the default business card. And I will put in little toggles that are like, Because again, it’s, I’m trying to flush out potential options, right? And so if there was an option that was like logo left top, right bottom, cuz it’s all essentially the same.
All of those cards from our perspective are the same, just reordering of things. But logo, title, U R L. And I just lock that shit down and then we’re ready to publish, essentially, like I, as you saw, like I wanna, I want to clean up the welcome screen a little bit more cuz I do think that onboarding’s gonna make a big difference rather than it just being a blank screen when you sign in and it’s done.
It was pretty simple to implement. Yeah, I really think, and then,
[00:24:58] Cory Miller: Go ahead. Just go to the experience [00:25:00] is like those five are all we need. Yep. Specifically for the homepage you saw here, just this is for next level step stuff. Yep. But I was like, when you told me I could have a screenshot, I was like, oh yeah.
[00:25:16] Corey Maass: Oh yeah. When once I add that, like that’s gonna be a lift. Because it’s, a screenshot within a screenshot kind of thing. But so I’ll circle back to that. But is, so is this your official, the official font of post status? Yes. And what font is it?
Go round A round. I believe
[00:25:40] Cory Miller: it’s a Google font.
Yes, it is.
[00:25:43] Corey Maass: Okay. And do you make it bold or is it just, is that how it comes? I
[00:25:49] Cory Miller: I did for this stuff. I don’t know the original, how this is all done, but I was trying to match it and Sure. That won’t work for me. It is bold.
[00:25:58] Corey Maass: Okay. [00:26:00] So by having Google fonts right now, so there are 1500, I think 1,508 Google fonts, and we, just so you know, right?
So that we are not, because a plug-in, can’t call, dial out without permission and you can’t get Google font information without an API key. We can’t expect our users to go through all those steps, so you have to enable Google fonts within the plugin. But I set it up so that now I’m just bragging, but I’m proud of myself.
I got us a Google a p i key Once a day we hit the Google Fonts API and get all the information. We store it on omg.co. I created a little API there, and so the plugin, anybody’s [00:27:00] plugin will hit omg img.co. That meaning our website to get all the font data, and then it’ll be, and then it’ll be cashed on in their own website too, but, so it was, The sort of clever way if I do say so myself, not, it’s not super tricky, but so we, so pretty quick, I was able to pretty quickly add Google font support the without the user having to do much, which is cool.
However, right now all it does is create a dropdown that has 1,508 names of fonts For you, for now that you can, you would just go, sorry, select Vare around from that dropdown. But we’re gonna have to add some way to preview all of those fonts, anyway, I wanna make sure that Varela round bold works for you.
You don’t do italics, you don’t rotate anything, but I had fun implementing that [00:28:00] stuff. And for you, it’s just a white background. Yeah. Oh, so I want to add, toggle the background overlay. So you can just disable it and just say, set a white background. And then that default. Color picker. I couldn’t, I had to type in the color.
I couldn’t paste it in, which was a pain in the ass doesn’t support pasty. So I think we want a better color picker so that somebody could go copy an eight. Most people are gonna have a hex code color and so they’re gonna want to paste it in. Yep. Okay. So gimme 20 minutes. Just sit there quietly for 20 minutes and I will have this ready for you.
Just kidding. Okay. I can
[00:28:50] Cory Miller: be quiet. So then I went a little further into thinking through how we want those, and I came back to this. [00:29:00] Yep. Featured image stuff and going and let you know, just try to present some what we probably want on things. I did show, I did see. Yep. There, I did it. Let’s see if I can, your
[00:29:15] Corey Maass: hair’s getting long.
Huh? Your hair is getting long. In that picture,
[00:29:21] Cory Miller: I showed you that thing. I just saw some from Twitter, but it was just a quote with a person’s picture on it. I was like, that’s cool. Cuz a lot of the podcast stuff we’re doing
Like something like this where you have the person you’re interviewing with their little quote. I’ll keep working on those. Thinking about those, cuz those outputs were really good. Like we do so much audio, video stuff. And really been working with content journey to break those down more and more where you get clips and stuff like that, that then go out on social that are more valuable content on there [00:30:00] than just listen to 45
[00:30:01] Corey Maass: minutes.
But what you just said more valuable, we were talking earlier about like taglines and concepts and stuff. More valuable images.
I really like that.
Okay. Because we were talking like. Making you look more professional, which I bucked at cuz it’s it implies you don’t look professional now or as opposed to like we are. And also going back a handful of conversations that we had where it’s like crop Express was solving a problem.
We were a wrench, you had a bolt. We could help tighten the bolt faster kind of thing. Whereas this, technically you can live without this, but we are making ev making your website better.
[00:30:52] Cory Miller: It’s the polish. Yeah. It’s like you said, the last mile of Polish, yep. Done work doing [00:31:00] the 45 minute thing, doing the thing.
And then this is that last mile that you said, I’d like that toughest mile of just polish. Yep. We’re making that really to display that. When I was thinking through the blog post stuff, I was like, that’s what I’d want is, when we shove out a podcast episode that’s not guy, oh, they did another thing.
But if we have that quote from somebody in there that really resonates, then it’s I should go and look more. And what we’re trying to do on the content side is break those up better and better with transcripts, show notes and stuff like that.
[00:31:36] Corey Maass: Yeah, initially, so I’ve added that. Basically it’s a content field, so it’s like you pull in the title of the website, you’d pull in whatever, right?
But that, that the last option was custom text. And the label on the left would say quote, and then you’d say custom text. And you’d put in a quote and you’d have [00:32:00] this saved as a default. So you’ve got post sta, a white background and the post status logo and U R L in the bottom right print that, that’s quote number one.
You’re now looking at that screen that has all of your projects and you’d say duplicate post or duplicate project. You change the name to quote number two. You’d go in paste in the second quote, and now you’ve got two of those images, same picture of the woman, but two different quotes. So you’d download one to post on socials on Tuesday and you’d download the second one to post on socials on Thursday.
Gosh.
[00:32:39] Cory Miller: So it’s been a bit a second on this blog post thing. So all those, I gather, you’re probably setting it up where it’s set in the front. When you do a post, there could be these options that you could fill in to create all those images. And right there I can do that. So I’m looking at [00:33:00] the post, oh, that quote there is the template plug and play.
Like if you saw on this one screen, I was
Why you get to Drift.
I think that’s where we’re gonna get in. The valuable part is something that looks nice enough and allows me to share those things out.
[00:33:25] Corey Maass: Yeah, and I think, like we’ve talked about, I. A number of those different templates of, or scenarios, an image that you generate that’s got a picture of a per, for your interview, you’ve got their picture on the left, and then you’ve got a quote and you can make five of those five different quotes, but it’s essentially the same image.
And initially, Today, tomorrow, this week, like I’ll set up that template next week. You’re using it and you’re plugging it. You know you’re gonna have to cr [00:34:00] recreate that template every time. But a week from now, I’m gonna give you the option to duplicate a template and or save a template. For reuse, essentially.
So then step two is gonna be okay. It’s I set it up once for each post and then and then I’ve gotta manually plug in those quotes and then step three, like basically to verify that, that we are using it this way and that these are loops that we want to close or processes that we wanna make faster.
It’s like I’m picturing a. A screen where essentially you can quick generate, if you’ve got a bunch of these templates that like, opens up in the sidebar, your, you go and you look at your blog post and you highlight something, and then you select from a dropdown like, plug this, whatever text I’ve highlighted into this template.
So it’s highlight a quote. Generate a quote, image [00:35:00] highlight, quote number two, generate quote, image, highlight bullet points you instead of the quote template, use a, use the bullet point template and you just go bang. Okay, all done. Go back to I M G O M G I M G project screen and there’s all of those different templates populated, already with your logo, but quote one, quote two, quote three, bullet 0.1, bullet 0.2, bullet 0.3.
So I think it’d be
[00:35:27] Cory Miller: okay, let me just make sure we’re on the same page. And I’m sorry if I missed this, but, so I was thinking post templates I’d want for most post ads content. I put down quote and summary slide. It’s probably the two big ones, just summary slide about what this content is about and then actionable cool quotes on that.
So I started plugging up MGM G. I could create a template for the post things that would show, then [00:36:00] set there for its to global, and then I’m in post writing, post and go ready for the OG images, click. Oh, I want to do, I gotta have a summary slide that’s already in my template over you on the post. And then same thing with quote, I’d have that option too.
Those templates would show up
because right there, from a workflow standpoint, I’m thought about, I’ve done the work of thinking about some of the key things that would drive value on the post content summary slide, which is our featured image thought. And then the quote Thing and I’ll, maybe the bullet point would be the third for me is like we, we talked about these three things, which could be a variation of the summary slide.
Sure. And if I did that, what that would do for me on my social channel is just talking this out as opposed to as, okay, I’ve already illuminated in a graphically appealing way what this long form post is about. Then I have those images for [00:37:00] those channels. LinkedIn, Twitter primarily for us at the appropriate sizes and stuff.
I think we’re cooking. Yeah.
[00:37:10] Corey Maass: Yep. Yeah, I like we’ve talked about the baseline is an OG image, ideally auto generated The moment you hit publish, you’ve based on a template being populated with the title of the post and then down the road with a screenshot of the post, and or the featured image.
But once you’ve done kind of what is considered the word press basics, you’ve added categories, you’ve added a featured image, you’ve written your blog post, you’ve hit publish. Already when you share it, it looks damn good. There’s maybe a little bit of setup, but if you haven’t set up an OG image template or an OG image template for a, for that post, [00:38:00] then at least when somebody shares it, they get the sitewide business card, like you’re describing it.
But with the next step. Every post that gets created automatically has a business card, but has the title of that post built in. And then step three, you could essentially recreate reuse that same one, let’s say make it a square for Instagram. And so again, you’re going, up and out with all these things and it’s just a matter of how you use it.
So like at post status, your. You’re going, okay. Baseline is an OG image, but we also then want and that’s gonna cover your LinkedIn and Facebook. But you’re like, but we need a square for Instagram. Copy. Change it to, I didn’t show you that part. So it’s like that we select that channel.
You saw that the second image I created was for Instagram. You can actually change that live. So you could take a rectangle image, you could replicate it, so [00:39:00] now you’ve got another one. But you could say, now make this square and it’ll just change. And things might move around on the screen.
So you might want to go tweak, tweak some of those sliders. But if you’ve already done the work once, copy change screen size.
[00:39:14] Cory Miller: Okay, let me talk this through. From a marketing customer Perspective. So what I’ve gathered, cuz I want us to capture this for the market, my marketing work, but I’m, I need to say that out loud to you.
So what this has done for me as the content marketer at Post status is it’s in my workflow. It’s creating I’ve said my templates, I’ve thought these things, o n g has helped me. Do those, think through those these are the basic things you can do to add value to your post.
So it’s in my workflow. It’s great cuz I’m going to my post. I’m adding new podcast, new blog posts, whatever. I’ve already done this initial workflow work to set my templates that are there for me when I need it. It looks nice, [00:40:00] like it doesn’t look like shit. It looks nice. And then the third is it, this is just direct speed.
It illuminates the value of the post better. I’m pulling out the things to showcase what the post actually is, so I’m enticing people to do that. The fourth I didn’t add down here though, is making it super easy to go off and share. So for marketing wise, right there, we talk to content marketers first.
They’re already doing this work. Yep. It’s in your workflow. It’s gonna look nice. It’s gonna share, showcase the value of the landing page better, and then it’s easy to share.
[00:40:43] Corey Maass: So that last mile talking about the last mile is the hardest mile. Is also an aspect that I think. Mar like marketers and marketing agencies, it’s going to make sense to [00:41:00] them that we don’t close the loop on actually publishing to your average person.
I th I anticipate this being a discussion. This we’re gonna have to have over and over again. Corey, with his little music blog. In a perfect world, We would generate images for each channel and then we’d click a button that would say, push these to these channels. Yep. But it’s, but that is so a big, messy step.
Yeah. And there are tools that already do it. And again, from a marketer or an agency is already going to be using a radar, a buffer, a hoot suite to queue up and publish this content.
[00:41:59] Cory Miller: Yeah.[00:42:00] So I was thinking though, like your Instagram, I go, huh, when am I gonna use that? But the Vida bars company, Lindsay has an investment in helps.
She’s got shampoo and conditioner bars. She primarily uses Instagram, right? So she’s creating a post, wants something that then she can download and just upload back to, that publishing option. They’re great services that do all that. To me, it’s yeah, we’ve handed it on the thing, now go use your tools, your workflows.
Yeah. You’re already in that workflow. But man I think that’s awesome. Okay. I’ve only, sorry, I’ve only got four more minutes, but here’s my question to you. What do you think needs to happen for it to be ready for
[00:42:39] Corey Maass: production on Postex? Like I said, I need to clean up some of these bugs and I am now going to, so I’ve already created options that, that post status based on the template you gave me, I think we’re [00:43:00] pretty much covered.
Like we’ve got Google font support. You can upload a logo, you can pull in a title, and I am going to clean it all up so that it works and you stop seeing errors when you first install it. But I’ll make sure that essentially the first template covers. The post status template and I need to replicate it.
Like I said I’ve been hacking away at the Sitewide version, and so I’ve done this a couple of times. I just need to copy all my updates over to the post version. And then you’ll have all the same features on for sitewide images or for post specific images. And then we’re, and then you can at least start messing around with it.
Okay.
[00:43:43] Cory Miller: Do I need to do a little bit more work for you, like sh on the post templates, take a podcast or whatever content we have and think through. I’d want to quote from here. I’d want the summary slide for here. Do you want me to do a little bit of that work? [00:44:00] Like with live action stuff and Google Slides?
[00:44:02] Corey Maass: Yes. Like the more work you do thinking through these templates, I don’t think we’re gonna I’m not gonna be able to deliver most of it tomorrow, but we can create one, yeah. Or we can create the one that’s similar to the Sitewide business card that just covers your basics. It’s got a logo, it’s got the title.
So it, and then you like, cuz I wanna get this to you so that you’re like, you are pub, you publish and you’re like, Hey Corey, I’m trying to publish this for tomorrow. I need X, Y, Z. I’m like, okay, now we have a real world scenario, let me go add that. Here’s
[00:44:41] Cory Miller: what I’m gonna do. Then I’m just gonna think about, I get one featured image template thing.
Yeah. And to just showcase the value of the post. And and work on a couple of thoughts with, I’ll take one post and start doing it. Maybe take another [00:45:00] one and start doing it, and then deliver that and go, Hey, I think these are the basics for that one thing. And that gets me huge way into showcasing the value post and everything else.
Like you said, it’s crazy. Yep. With that. So I’ll
[00:45:14] Corey Maass: do that. And then like I said, I mean we’ve I’ve set up the technical side of serving, of selling this thing using e D on the website. Yeah. So we need to start thinking about a homepage, cuz we’re not gonna be selling tomorrow.
But you and I both know that the first version is 10 versions, in a day, or, in, within a week before we actually let something stay online. Yeah. We wanted you sent over a design you like and then we’ll but we need some words to start putting on that page. So start thinking about that.
Okay. So
[00:45:58] Cory Miller: really for me it’s [00:46:00] homepage and the post template.
Okay. Can do. Awesome. Love it dude.
[00:46:08] Corey Maass: Thank you. We’re so close. We’re so close.
[00:46:12] Cory Miller: Yeah. Too, and I love the way we’re doing it. It’s like we have a live action thing that we’re making it better and I’m putting on the hat of actual users cuz I am Right. Helping formally, I think that’s such a good way to do product that sometimes has been a mismatch for me, but I’ve got the live action, thank you.
[00:46:31] Corey Maass: Great. We’ll talk soon.
