Marketing a WordPress Product Live: Session 1

Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, Corey Maass and Cory Miller discuss plans for the second season of their show. They consider rebranding and focusing on marketing a WordPress product. They discuss potential topics such as selling and scaling a business, and the progress they’ve made with their WordPress product. They also discuss the importance of open graph data, optimizing images for SEO, and the value of simplicity in marketing a WordPress product. They plan to submit a talk to a WordCamp and provide tools to optimize content sharing. They also discuss upcoming product features and the importance of providing value to their audience.

Top Takeaways:

• Product Value Proposition: The conversation underscores the value proposition of their product, focusing on its ability to simplify complex tasks related to image optimization and branding. The product is positioned as a solution that goes beyond existing options in the market, providing a unique set of features.
• Anticipation of New Features: The anticipation of upcoming features, such as branding, watermarking, and pixel-perfect device mockups, is highlighted. This serves as a persuasive element for potential customers, suggesting that the product will continue to evolve and provide additional value beyond its initial offerings.
• Cost of Staying in the Status Quo: A recurring theme revolves around the “cost of staying where you’re at.” The conversation emphasizes that maintaining the status quo, especially in terms of content visibility and marketing efforts, may have negative consequences. This concept is presented as a compelling reason for users to consider their product.
• Balancing Technical Details and Simplicity: The participants discuss the balance between catering to users who may want to delve into technical details and those who seek a simplified solution. The product is positioned as a tool that can be beneficial for both types of users, providing straightforward solutions while acknowledging the more intricate aspects for those interested in them.

Mentioned in the show:

• Canva
• Photoshop
• Beaver Builder
• Google Docs
• Social Media Examiner
• WordCampUS
• Twitter
• Yoast
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Slack
• Pinterest
• ChatGPT four
• Crop Express
• Fiverr
• Upwork
• Rank Math
• WP Minute
• Post Status

You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Corey Maass
• Cory Miller (CEO, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status Draft podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis.

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS.

Transcript

Corey Maass (00:00:00) – To talk about.

Cory Miller (00:00:03) – Let me get it on YouTube. Hey, we’re going to change this right? To season two marketing.

Corey Maass (00:00:11) – Yeah. Think we should

Cory Miller (00:00:13) – Okay.

Corey Maass (00:00:23) – Yeah. Cory and Corey market a WordPress product live.

Cory Miller (00:00:40) – Okay.

Corey Maass (00:00:44) – There we go. Season two, session one.

Cory Miller (00:00:52) – It’s still setting up. Just give it one more second. All right, here we go. You want to kick us off?

Corey Maass (00:01:06) – Season two. The impromptu decision to call it season two because yeah, we’re switching to Cory and Corey market a WordPress product live. So session one.

Cory Miller (00:01:20) – It’s awesome. Evolution.

Corey Maass (00:01:23) – And where we we left. We left off at session 30. That gives us 30 sessions to pivot to somebody acquiring this, because then the next season will be all about selling a business, getting acquired.

Cory Miller (00:01:41) – Promoting. Selling. Yeah. Scaling. That’d be a great one to have selling, scaling and selling. So there’s our four. Or we can just skip the selling.

Corey Maass (00:01:54) – There you go. Yeah. At some point, like this is an open office behind me and that we have, you know, eight employees.

Cory Miller (00:02:04) – I like it. We’ll get some wallpaper with a team, you know, or something.

Corey Maass (00:02:08) – And speaking of wallpapers, your your background is looking beautifully updated.

Cory Miller (00:02:16) – But it’s better I like it. I get inspired when I walk in here and that was.

Corey Maass (00:02:22) – It’s a neat effect. It looks really good.

Cory Miller (00:02:27) – Well. So to catch people up for where we’re at. If you just joined us for season two episode one last season, we did Cory and Corey launching a WordPress product. We went through pivots. We went through a lot of the development, customer centered conversations. We’ve now got our product out, which is called OMGIMG.Co and launched that what, 2 or 3 weeks ago. And now we’re into okay, we’ve got the product built, we’ve got the product out. We’ve had a sell or two. Now we got to do the work of marketing a WordPress product. So it’s going to be a fun season. This is more like I feel like I have more to contribute here than I did on, you know, you’re the developer.

Cory Miller (00:03:16) – We both ran products, built ran scaled products. And so this is typically my fun space. You’ve got something to market now. How do we do it?

Corey Maass (00:03:26) – Exactly right. So we yeah, we have, we have, um. I think I made public a version that’s 0.0.8, and we are currently up to 0.0 0.19. So I’ve done 11 releases, um, averaging probably one one every other day or something. Um. We are. I guess I’m launching into just a little product recap. Um, we. The building. Building images looks really good. Um, I am the next big, like, necessary thing for me. It has been that I’ve been building towards and I’ve taken the first steps of of integrating is essentially you create a template. That. So then you open it with a post. And so the title is automatically populated. And the the existing featured images are automatically populated or what have you. Um, but right now that’s a separate step from. So you’d write your blog post and then you still have to open.

Corey Maass (00:04:41) – OMGIMG. And one of our big selling points is not jumping into Canva or not jumping into Photoshop. So still easier if you’re within WordPress and it auto populates with your post title and whatnot. But bringing that right into the post edit screen. So that’s that’s the next big thing. That’s that’s coming where if you upload a featured image, you can essentially click a button that says, now generate your your open graph image. And then a thousand other features. Um, but so on the marketing front, um, I have taken a few passes at the. Marketing site, the homepage. Um, one of the big changes is actually. Maybe I should share. As he rises. Home. Zoom. Share screen. The chrome. I’ll make this more YouTube shaped. Um. I see my screen okay?

Cory Miller:  Yep. 

Corey Maass: So, um, I we when we, when we initially launched, actually, I’ll go up to, when we initially launched, we were using the phrase it was an image is worth a thousand words or I don’t remember what it was.

Corey Maass (00:06:27) – Um, or do you know, do more with your featured images. But I in revisiting this page, um, I really liked, especially in the wake of Twitter dropping their titles. Um, the phrase let the image, let your images do the talking resonated a lot more with me. Um, and I’ve tweaked our little headline here. Use your WordPress content to create valuable, shareable featured images for your website and social media. Tweak that a couple of times. Um. And then I went with I moved from the before and after slider to just a screenshot. I’ve actually created a couple of weekends ago. I. Got excited and I’ve created a couple of different versions of videos or like slides. I think I can actually show you if I go into edit mode. Um. So I had created this carousel that was like from from post to OMGIMG to socials to try to show the like, you know, from your post to, you know, if you brought that into OMGIMG the result is socials.

Corey Maass (00:08:01) – Um, but I, I hate this. So I decided not to make it public yet. Um, but I still feel like we want at some point we want to update this to to have. It doesn’t even have to have motion, but to have something that indicates like here is the easy workflow. 

Cory Miller: Yeah. 

Corey Maass: Um, and then a couple of days ago added a big, ridiculous banner promoting our Black Friday specials. Um, a section that I added totally stole this from, I think give WP maybe or no sold this part from Beaver Builder. I mean inspired by Beaver Builder. But yeah, looking looking at other people’s landing pages. Um, I liked Beaver Builder has has a real simple images of the product, you know, title title. And then they go right into, you know, who is this for. And I realized that we would people would benefit from seeing this, I think because as we’ve talked about a lot in season one, you know, who who is this for? And and we’ve set our initial pricing based on who we think it’s for.

Corey Maass (00:09:27) – But in particular it’s the to I think the role that you and I can really relate to is the person who’s trying to do it all themselves, so they don’t have a graphic design team or service. And but they know that they need good, compelling featured images and they need to set open graph images. Um, so talking to the solo publisher again wording, all this wording is up for debate. But that’s where I landed initially. And then for agencies. Um, you know, here’s more that you can do for your clients. And your clients can do for themselves. Um. And then the video, the integrations, and then all the before and afters that we had set previously.

Cory Miller (00:10:19) – I like this.

Corey Maass (00:10:20) – There’s some weird font stuff going on. But anyway. So I guess I’m. So what I’m. What I’m. Coincidentally doing is. Setting the stage for season two. If we’re going to be talking about marketing. Most things start with the marketing site, the homepage.

Cory Miller (00:10:46) – I like this a lot.

Corey Maass (00:10:52) – So we also have. I think three. Yeah. Um. There we go. So I’ll fix these as we as we chat. But. So yeah, initially marketing, initial marketing efforts. We’ve got a nice homepage. I wrote an article about, um. Twitter has removed the image. Headlines use OMG to put them back and have been trying to push that via Twitter. Um, we’ve got our Black Friday deal going on. Which, for better or worse, I called Turkey 2023. Um, and then we’ve got this listed on. Close to 20, um, Black Friday Lists.

Cory Miller (00:12:09) – Excellent.

Corey Maass (00:12:12) – Okay. Now what?

Cory Miller (00:12:18) – Um, okay. So, like, good work on all this on the website. Looks nicer. Um, hitting on the key things that we’ve talked about in the past. Okay. So we talked about last time. We’re like the problem we have is are people problem aware. You know and like when you said publishers. All the things you can do with open graph images that just that everybody’s looking to stand out.

Cory Miller (00:12:57) – To get an edge with this. Real perceived competitive content thing. Um, I like how you focused on seller publishers still using websites as the primary driver for content. And then, you know, the premise is like Post Status, we publish on the site, we push out to to share people. And tend to think like. What if, just for a theoretical for a second, we’ll see if we want to do it real. We put together. Let’s say you and I are asked to give a WordCamp presentation. On open graph images. And we say basically like Twitter is one of those, you know, publish content here, shared on the other sources. And we go, you know, that the opportunity, we present the opportunity. Look, you discovered the Google icon stuff. Twitter just had this thing Facebook like, and we just went through and said, these are the opportunities to stand out when you’re sharing your content. And we, we, we gave all the channels like in the plugin.

Cory Miller (00:14:23) – You built all of those channels Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, you got those. And. That presentation, I think, could be a good shot to say maybe it’s not full on problem, but it’s like opportunity, you know? 

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Cory Miller: We make them. Opportunity. Where? Not a problem. Where? And problems in there. And then we can say, okay, after we give the educational talk about like open graph can change and increase, you know, your traffic like give the extra blame, we give all the channels, see all they see all the options. Like when I was just googling, I was trying to look at Social Media Examiner because they’re a heavy producer is like show some of the samples, like here’s Google, look at this site. This is all these things that you can do. Here’s Facebook, you know, all these things same all the way down. And then we go, okay, the problem we found. Is that’s really time and light in time intensive. You have to go to Canva.

Cory Miller (00:15:34) – So we give options like go to Canva. Create them in all these sizes. Go back to your WordPress site. You know, give them the steps. Go ahead and tell them like here is the long journey to do to take advantage of this. There might be other options that you think of. And we say we built on TMG to do this effortlessly. Corey I think that could be. Really good for what we’re doing. 

Corey Maass (00:16:04) – Yeah. I like that.

Cory Miller (00:16:06) – From we’re giving a talk to Word at a WordCamp. I think at some point, if there’s one around you or where can you submit this talk, by the way, and then go give the give the solutions. Here’s, here’s some ways to get this done. Canva, Photoshop. You know here here’s the sizes that you need. You know and then here’s our solution OMGIMG and we’re not. I mean, we should give them the tools to do that and then just go. It takes a long time to go into WordPress or we built it right in with specs right there.

Corey Maass (00:16:47) – Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean, I have no problem presenting our product as the solution. They can choose not to do that. But that’s a really neat take because it’s. I mean, we all do this. Where there’s all these other steps we know we have to take in whatever we’re doing. You know, when when you’re. Sending an email to somebody, you need to make sure that it’s going to the right person. You need to make sure that it’s coming from the right email address. If if you’re like me and you’ve got multiple email addresses, you need to make sure you let Grammarly highlight everything in red. So then you go back through and fix all the typos. Like there’s always a checklist, right. And and ultimately if somebody stopped you and asked you, you know why? You’re like, I want to appear professional. I want to make sure this email that contains my credit card number doesn’t go to the wrong person. I want to dot dot dot. And so.

Corey Maass (00:17:46) – You’re absolutely right. Like if if we have essentially the guide of okay, you’ve finished uploading the new product to Woo, not WooCommerce Woo, if you’ve finished writing your blog post, whatever it is, you know, here’s the checklist. Because unfortunately, and this is something that came up in the the post Status meetup a couple of days ago, um, was all the things that are not built into WordPress now. And the debate whether you should have to install plugins to do all this stuff, or if it should be baked into core. And for me, the big takeaway was like it just highlights how much the internet has changed. Like you can’t just write a blog post anymore. Like if you write a blog post, there’s there’s a number of things that needs to contain, including a compelling image. But then, you know, unless you’re Seth Godin, like, you actually have to do something with it or you don’t, or you don’t care about getting readers. If it’s a journal, then then it sits there, right? But for most people, you finish writing a blog post and then what do you do? You go put it on Twitter, you go put it on, you go, you have to go put it out there in order to get people to come in.

Corey Maass (00:19:04) – And so if we’re like, you’ve written all your words bang through the next steps because these are this is the checklist. This is the modern checklist of all the things that you just have to do. If you want to get eyes on whatever it is you’ve just published. Regardless of the the problem that like you said.

Cory Miller (00:19:26) – Well, now we just know that’s brilliant because now you just stated a problem that they are aware of, which is it’s hyper competitive right now. Every chance you can to stand out matters. So we have. We have started with problem problem and problem. Awareness is God. It’s a different day from 2008 when I was publishing what is FTP. And I could get that rank. Now that’s hyper competitive. So we’re trying to find ways to stand out. Here’s one way open images social sharing images to your content that show up. Here’s all the things you can do to make that stand out. And then here’s the way to the solution. The solution is to do that. So I’m writing I’m writing notes now I guess.

Cory Miller (00:20:21) – Notes the same notes that isn’t here. It is on my regular zoom, but not on webinars, I guess. Um, anyway. Just trying to get where we can.

Corey Maass (00:20:38) – We have a couple of Google Docs going, or we could start a new one. 

Cory Miller (00:20:43) – Okay. Yeah, I was just starting to. Okay. Yeah. Let’s do a Google doc. Well, first, I think just before we get into this, I really think this is a great thing to put out there. It’s a foundational hub we can refer back to. We can post the slides on all the other things, all the socials, and it’s basic training for why you need OMG. 

Corey Maass (00:21:19) – Yep. Yeah. And I had fun, so I did that. Um, what was supposed to be a 92 second intro to OMG, that turned into a five minute video because that’s what happens. Um, but I actually wrote the script for it in a way that as I was walking the viewer through the different screens, I was like, I’d pause and then I’d say, you know, this is the image builder screen, or this is the settings screen with the intention of I made this one five minute video, but I’m going to cut it into sections.

Corey Maass (00:21:55) – And so then I will have a 62  second video that explains the builder, or the 62 second video that explains the settings page. And then I can use those in the support docs. I can use those elsewhere. So I’m also thinking using planning on using that same kind of thinking for what we’re talking about here of if we if we make the ultimate guide to open graph essentially. And but we talk about. What you specifically should should need to do for Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn. We could even get into, like Hacker News. TikTok is video, but there’s still ways. There’s still things we can talk about. We can, if we create one WordCamp talk like you said, we can also and we and we have a video. We can also break those up into sections. And then those videos can stand on their own as well.

Cory Miller (00:22:55) – You, like, kind of roughing this outline out?

Corey Maass (00:22:58) – Yeah, this is great.

Cory Miller (00:22:59) – You can start putting slides together and like, do a webinar side of it while the recording slides out.

Cory Miller (00:23:05) – Put it on the website like. Okay.

Corey Maass (00:23:12) – Yeah, because I also mean, what I’ve been benefiting from is. Creating these kinds of assets, and then also doing this kind of high level thinking because it it then informs the wording that we use elsewhere, and it’s even trickling all the way down to informing the product where I’m like, oh, you know, I want to be able to click through these steps more quickly. And right now in the plugin, you have to go over here and you have to go over here. So let me figure out a way to to streamline this. 

Corey Maass: So some of the specifics, I think the title will generate itself ultimately. Um. But the specifics start with Facebook. Like move that to the top because it’s it’s Facebook. Invented it, quote unquote. Right. Like the open graph standard was their creation. It is. It is meant to be open. I believe that their intentions were good overall. You know, it isn’t. It is. They just they they said, let’s standardize something.

Corey Maass (00:25:05) – And so there’s a default. Uh, image size that they have to find. When are you looking for?

Cory Miller (00:25:14) – Uh, your Twitter.

Corey Maass (00:25:17) – Oh, go to  slash articles. I don’t. I don’t think I’ve actually I don’t know if this actually works or not. There you go. There’s a page I need to clean up. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So so Facebook, you know, they they invented it. There’s a handful of tags. Um, so we are obviously focused on images but the, the title that. So it’s like you post an, you put a link on Facebook and Facebook sucks in the open graph in information if it’s there. Right. And what’s interesting about that is that your title, the title of your blog post could be, you know, Twitter X removes images from headlines, blah, blah, blah. But the title that they might actually suck in if you’ve got an an open graph tag could be different. Could just be, you know why you should post on Facebook and not Twitter or you know.

Corey Maass (00:26:27) – Elon Musk keeps messing with my photos or whatever it is, right? It could actually be different. And that’s that’s kind of it’s something that’s interesting that a lot of I think a lot of people aren’t thinking about, but it’s like why you need a Yoast or an SEO framework or a all in one SEO plugin. People are like, but I’ve already put in a title, I’ve already put in an excerpt, and it’s like, sure, but this, this block of information, these couple of sentences are used in yet a different place than your excerpt, or, you know, your actual blog content. So Facebook is a great way to just introduce the concepts that the the basics of where and when and why. Open graph data, including an open graph image is important. Nice. You can go to format and then remove formatting. Or you just had it.

Cory Miller (00:27:40) – I was trying to think I was I was going to your benefits here to go. Uh, the benefits of open graph images. Like having these.

Cory Miller (00:27:52) – We’ve got it somewhere.

Corey Maass (00:27:56) – There you go.

Cory Miller (00:28:03) – I’ll get it at some point.

Corey Maass (00:28:07) – That’s weird. It looks still. Looks like it’s the different color. Um. But it’s like it’s I. I don’t know that. Yeah. Enhance showcase content and and specific for different channels to um. And then anecdotally. Um. Having more. It puts more keywords on the page like I don’t I don’t know that Google ranks because like, they, you know, they essentially made the the description meta tag obsolete because people were abusing it. And so I’m, I suspect that the same they’re not putting a lot of weight on any meta tags at this point because again, they can it’s it’s kind of a way to game things. But um. You know, but it is an opportunity to put more words on the page, essentially. And in parentheses there you could basically the say the SEO benefit.

Cory Miller (00:29:48) – Something to the effect of like polish. Make it look more polished, polished and professional. 

Corey Maass: Yep. 

Cory Miller (00:30:11) – Mm. Stuff to stand out in a hyper competitive. I can’t. Landscape.

Corey Maass (00:30:15) – And then my favorite one to talk about is. You can’t it. It helps you control. How you look when other people are talking about you online. Because. Because I’ve touched on this in a few episodes, but. Me posting on Twitter is or Facebook or anywhere about my thing is one thing, right? Um, and and when you’re a a small fry like me, that might be the majority of of how this gets used. But if you are. You know, a New York Times or, you know, some big news source. Stories are getting shared between third parties and. Right. And it has nothing to do with, you know, the New York Times publishes a story, and then Corey posts, you know, at at Corey on Twitter, did you see this story and includes a link and the, the data that gets pulled in. You know, New York Times published it, right. But they have no control over I could be like, hey Corey, see how stupid this article is or how brilliant this article is.

Corey Maass (00:31:33) – It helps control how your perceived third party when shared third party to third party.

Cory Miller (00:31:48) – Absolutely. Okay, so we got enough there. They invented it. I think. Here’s where we like one of this down a little bit. But showing like the. Opportunity is here to stand out and it’s going to make you, you know, further entice people to click. You know, that’s all increased traffic. 

Corey Maass (00:32:16) – Mm hmm. Yeah. It’s it’s all. What’s it called? Inbound marketing. Right. The more you, the more you get it out there, the more people are now going to come back to your your site, your article, your product.

Cory Miller (00:32:40) – Right. Then channels will go like some of the stuff you’ve got on the OMGIMG site, like the before and after.

Corey Maass (00:32:49) – Mhm.

Cory Miller (00:32:50) – This is the way it mostly looks. I think given these. All these examples. You know where they look. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Cory Miller: What the. Like, what are we really talking about? You know, it’s like, oh, when you show this right here, I know this looks like a Facebook post.

Cory Miller (00:33:17) – You know. 

Corey Maass: Right. 

Cory Miller: We’re talking about this right here. Same. Same.

Corey Maass (00:33:23) –  Yeah. And I need to do I need to to. To another version of these screenshots. Because these are all the composition or the, you know, compose a message realized and what, what we actually what I want to emphasize more is the like once you’ve actually posted on Facebook, once you’ve actually posted on Twitter X, um, you know, here’s how you’re represented. And this is again a way to control it.

Cory Miller (00:33:52) – Yeah. And I think I love your labels, by the way. But showing like, okay, here’s Facebook this, you’ve seen this. This is this is an opportunity. Twitter that’s you’ve seen this, this is opportunity all the way down to I should put that Slack. All the way down. 

Corey Maass (00:34:12) – Yeah. And what, what I the best example and I, I, I still haven’t figured out the best way to capture this, but like, I’m, I’m most active on, on Twitter and Twitter is the most merciless where they will.

Corey Maass (00:34:31) – Gray box. Gray box, gray box. If you don’t have an image for them to suck in. You see a gray box. Whereas Facebook and like depending on. Depending on how you you share, it will either go find the first image of the page or they will just leave it off. So they they do a little they’re a little kinder. If you’ve not done your due diligence essentially of filling in the blanks, the open graph data blanks, you know, then then they’ll leave it off so you don’t you don’t come across as looking bad. Whereas on Twitter, you know, it’s something that that of course I’m noticing because I’m in this space and probably most people don’t notice the way I do, but now it drives me crazy. I want to message every single person that when something gets shared and it’s a gray box, I want to send them a message and be like. You know, here’s how to fix this. Like, this is how you look on Twitter and you may not realize it because again, most people type into a box and hit go hit post, you know, and then they might look at notifications if somebody replies blah, blah blah, but they don’t and nor and nor should they really like go look at their profile.

Corey Maass (00:35:48) – Right. But um, the the the ultimate. Version of this. The ultimate analogy of this is Instagram, right? So you’ve got Instagram doesn’t pull in open graph but you like I was I was taught by a marketing person. It’s like you look at the Instagram grid is important right. Like there’s there’s scrolling scrolling, scrolling. And so you want to you want your images to jump out, that kind of thing. Um, but there’s also like if you go and you look at the, the the like we we are Instagram slash OMGIMG.co and you go there and most of we’re working on this right. But the most of the images are they’ve all got our purple and they’ve all got our Montserrat font and they’ve all got, you know, big lettering. So there’s consistency in, in branding and, and stuff like that. But it’s how people are viewing us. And I had to it had never occurred to me to go look at like my own Instagram grid, essentially.

Cory Miller (00:37:19) – I want to move this down.

Cory Miller (00:37:20) – To see. So like. Okay. Title. Whatever. Hey, problem we all have is it’s Hypercompetitive and we are looking for every opportunity to stand out. The opportunity is we’ve seen. We want to tell people about, especially in WordPress is something called open graph or, you know, the. It’s basically what you see when you post an article on Twitter, LinkedIn, yada yada. Um, there’s. This is going back. Facebook started it. You know. And if you tell you’ve all, paste your link in somewhere and don’t like how it represents, that’s open graph. There’s code specifically to tell those social sites what to tell them, what content. Okay, so that’s the primer. And then I wonder if we move this part. Don’t say the benefits to it. Just say look. Here’s the channels. This is what they look like. Facebook. They actually invented it. Here’s here’s a. Here’s an example of open graph go down. You know here’s how the opportunities would open graph on Google.

Cory Miller (00:38:36) – Same with Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack. Somewhere down here. It’s like. We think this is. To say opportunity. Um. Somewhere in here is like, okay, here’s the channels, here’s what they look like. So they see them and go. Yep, I’ve seen that I understand that. That’s okay. Now connect that back with open graph. And then I go. How do we. What’s next? We said, here it is. We think. Why look bland, you know, boring, stale or nothing at all. Like, that’s that’s another problem.

Corey Maass (00:39:28) – The gray box.

Cory Miller (00:39:30) – So if you use these which you can. The technology is there. Um, the biggest benefits you can stand out. We think, you know, you can use these images to see. Know like entice people to click. Like we’ve all seen the boring featured images that take up a huge amount of space. Why not capture that space package and showcase your content. Summarize content.

Corey Maass (00:40:09) – Ooh, yep.

Cory Miller (00:40:16) – Um.

Corey Maass (00:40:17) – Well, and one we haven’t talked about creating a shareable image unto itself.

Cory Miller (00:40:30) – Then the image itself.

Corey Maass (00:40:33) – So it’s like a. Never mind. I guess it’s out of the context of this.

Cory Miller (00:40:44) – It’s like, I mean, your competitors are up there. They’re doing stuff too. This is your edge. You can summarize content. Maybe it’s. It’s not something like opportunities to do stuff with these open graph image, which we’ve already stated. These are called open graph. That’s this is how they work. Now you can. So we’ve introduced that concept which you’ve passed year of educated me on it where understand it and I connect it to those images okay. Open graph equals those. Now here’s some ideas for standing out. Like maybe that’s this.

Corey Maass (00:41:35) – Yeah. So benefits entice people to click. So some of those are benefits and some of those are ideas for standing out.

Cory Miller (00:42:20) – What is it? Some benefits like. Inside, but it’s. Eight. Why don’t you take this critical space that they actually give you its featured image as an ad space. The size of an ad. So like.

Cory Miller (00:42:39) – It’s this thing of why not use it to. I don’t know what the word for. It’s not benefit, but it’s like, why not use that to entice people to click to showcase the brand?

Corey Maass (00:42:58) – Yeah. It’s, um. It’s like the. A few years ago, the buzz was all about creating info graphs. So instead of just saying something. You’d actually create an interesting. Graphical representation. And so we’re, we’re kind of in that same principle where it’s like an, an image of somebody working at a computer doesn’t mean anything. But if you include the name of your post, you know, ten ways to be more productive, that’s going to be more clickable if you put the first three things on how to be more productive, set timers, you know, use noise canceling headphones, get organized and then. Dot, dot, dot, you know, click through for seven more like you’ve already added value. You’ve made it super compelling. I’m now interested because you’ve proven to me that those first three are are worth something.

Corey Maass (00:44:02) – Let me click through. You know, there’s just so many ways to be clever with this. And there’s benefits for. Like there’s obvious benefits from the person creating this stuff. Like the one that jumps out at me is like, you know, we talk about branding, like having consistent texts, excuse me, fonts, putting your logo and stuff like that, but it also like from the person consuming it, they’re also going to see it. You mentioned it here down below I think of like the they’re going to go, oh, this person is trustworthy. More trustworthy because I see that they’re willing to put their logo on this or I recognize their colors and their fonts. So I know that I like their voice, I know that I like their content, you know, so there’s there’s value in consistency and value in. How people how people perceive you. It’s not just it’s not just you putting stuff out there.

Cory Miller (00:45:09) – So we showed it talked about. And you know, here’s what we frankly seen over the last years.

Cory Miller (00:45:15) – Like there’s this big bland their just taking up space. Not being used properly or.

Cory Miller (00:45:41) – And like this is like. Problems. Like they’re just bland. Nobody’s doing it. This is. And this is a. I don’t know the problem. This is a blue ocean. What it.

Cory Miller (00:45:56) – This is an opportunity for those that get in first, to really pioneer it, to really leverage it. Just like SEO someone one day goes, oh. I can rank my sites. If I do these things on my page. Then this industry was born. I don’t want to say it like a gold rush, but like. Hey. Opportunity. Untapped. Potential. Untapped.

Speaker 3 (00:46:23) – Yep.

Corey Maass (00:46:27) – So I’m just looking at some of my notes, um, for other things. And there’s actually. So the same way that we sort of stumbled upon the images in Google search results. Um, there’s, there’s a thing called Pinterest has its own thing called a rich pin. And you can essentially it’s it’s a twist on open graph.

Corey Maass (00:46:57) – But if somebody if somebody shares something on Pinterest, there’s there’s again, data that you can convey and ways that you can make it look better on Pinterest, which is one we never I don’t think we’ve ever talked about in 30 sessions. But, you know, Pinterest is its own ecosystem. So absolutely crucial for all of those, you know, cooking blogs out there because that’s, you know, where else do you store all of your favorite recipes, but you put them all on a Pinterest board.

Cory Miller (00:47:43) – This is where I think we should make a good a big statement. Like you said, Pinterest, all these things. This is untapped potential for content creators.

Cory Miller (00:47:55) – We think the featured. Image OG image. And now transform, use leverage like to take advantage of this space to really. I don’t know some. Like, I think this is we should have a big slide that says this is untapped potential for content creator.

Corey Maass (00:48:22) – And we and the other, the the other thing that that jumps out at me to here is something that, that we sort of talked about at the beginning of the hour is.

Corey Maass (00:48:35) – And we are we we are obviously becoming experts on this stuff like. We have to. We want to, you know, this is this is our niche. But we also can get to the point where our tool can make it simple and we can distill it down to, you know, here’s all the here’s all the benefits and here’s all the, the stuff that’s involved and here’s the history. But but we also can do essentially a summary at the end of the talk, a slide that’s like here’s the. You know the basic. Here’s the three basic things you have to do. Because like, you know, at some point somebody wrote us about. The arduous task that is writing a blog post. And then they go, oh crap, now I have to go find an image, and now I have to drag it into Canva and make it da da da da da. And it’s like, okay, so. Write your blog post. And then and then as part of your check box or checklist, make sure there’s an image.

Corey Maass (00:49:41) – Make sure there’s a featured image. Make sure there’s an open graph image. You know, fill out. Basically fill out the the fields provided by an SEO plugin and you’re done. But you get in the habit of, you know, especially if you use something like OMGIMG, it’s like three clicks and you know that not only are you covering your bases by creating an image, but that image itself is the most value. It can be valuable. It can be. Because that’s always like, to me, those are the best WordCamp talks where, you know, I’m I’m going to hear from an expert. They’re going to nerd out for 45 minutes about whatever the topic is. But at the end of the hour, because I am not an expert and probably I need to know, you know, I need to know 3% of everything that they know, distilled down so that I can go on with the rest of my day. But I’m covering. I’m covering my bases like we can. I think we can provide that in this kind of talk.

Corey Maass (00:50:56) – Are you on GPT four? 

Cory Miller (00:51:06) – Yeah. Well, let me make sure. Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:51:31) – You know, I still. Well, right? It’s the schema stuff. That’s what it is. Okay.

Cory Miller (00:52:37) – All right. Chat to your work.

Corey Maass (00:52:44) – By the way, I. I’ve done some work in developing for Gutenberg professionally and then also for Crop Express. Right. We created a custom block and that kind of thing. I tried to pull, I needed to to make a little side panel for OMG. For Gutenberg. I’m like, don’t remember how to do this off the top of my head. I went and looked at the Crop Express code. It’s like, don’t try to pull it out piecemeal. Don’t really remember Google. Google, Google. No ChatGPT. Tell me step by step how to do this. Bang. Ten minutes later.

Cory Miller (00:53:31) – Um, well. That’s working. I was kind of thinking.

Corey Maass (00:53:35) – Maximizing visibility. Hell, yeah.

Cory Miller (00:53:39) – Yeah. I was kind of tweaking on some headline things, though.

Cory Miller (00:53:42) – Is like the one straight to the point is get more traffic and click get more clicks to your WordPress content. That’s really what we’re talking about. Get more clicks to you. 

Corey Maass: Yep. 

Cory Miller: Brand exposure is for sure. Like this. Transforming. I mean, another version of this, this same talk could be how to transform WordPress featured images for more clicks. 

Corey Maass (00:54:26) – Yeah, it’s a good point.

Cory Miller (00:54:30) – Because your research at WordCampUS was like people got the featured image, become teacher.

Corey Maass (00:54:41) – Yeah.

Cory Miller (00:54:41) – Transforming WordPress featured images for more clicks for more traffic. This is going to be a wealth of good information for just doing this on the. Teaser wouldn’t have thought about that teaser.

Corey Maass (00:55:11) – Oh, yeah. That’s exactly what it does. It teases your content. Without being overtly clickbait. Come on, Google Docs, do better. Oh. It’s markup. Or mark down.

Cory Miller (00:56:26) – Content creators can transform featured images for more traffic. Just gonna write some of these.

Corey Maass (00:57:11) – Want to share that doc with me?

Cory Miller (00:57:13) – I’m just being lazy.

Corey Maass (00:57:17) – Or smart.

Cory Miller (00:57:34) – Which one of them? 

Corey Maass: The top one. 

Cory Miller: Like where the creatives. From invisible to invincible. And I like this one the best. We can give enough technical to go. Oh, that’s a lot of work. But wait. That’s a good point. The cost of this. What are you missing out on?

Corey Maass (00:59:11) – Yeah. How many people aren’t clicking?

Corey Maass (00:59:34) – Okay. Love it.

Cory Miller: Like this.

Corey Maass (00:59:45) – WordCamp Verona is this weekend. Maybe I’ll go.

Cory Miller (00:59:49) – There you go.

Cory Miller (00:59:54) – I think we schedule. A time. Do it. Promote it to our list on the Twitters. Like, hey, we spent a year on this and we’ve unearthed an opportunity. You know, and just say it as that. This past year we’ve really dove in. This is an opportunity to stand out, to get an edge, to look more professional. We’re going to be sharing that on here. And again say, I mean there should be a slide. Here’s the here’s the specs for all the channels.

Cory Miller (01:00:35) – You can you can Google these two and find them. Um, hey there’s another slide. Here’s the code you got to do. You know, you got to have a meta tag and all that or whatever. Tag the image tag. Here it is. And then go, okay, Canva, Photoshop, you can do that at canvas. Got some resizing things in there you can use. Now the next step is you’re going to have to do that. Maybe you spend like 30 seconds saying. I mean, how would you do that? Would you have to like if you had a blog post and you wanted an og image for Facebook? How would you even do that? 

Corey Maass (01:01:16) – Like, I mean they, they yeah, they, they have and Canva has and a couple of other services have it like they will attempt to resize it and generate all the sizes you need. It costs money. And I, I don’t know, I can’t speak to the results. And I’m sure as they’re introducing AI, they’re getting better, but it’s still not I don’t find it as fluid, you know.

Cory Miller (01:01:44) – But we say like, okay, you know, they’ve got a resizing feature on their paid plans that you can do that. Here’s the image specs. But see there’s another problem. Like how would you if I go to Canva. Tell me, tell me as a developer how to do this. I go to Canva, get them resized. That’s cool. Canvas made that easy, but I still have to have the OG image. Tag. Right. So how would you tell somebody that’s not going to buy OMG? How would you tell them to do that? Because how do you put that in the. You know what I mean?

Corey Maass  (01:02:19) – I mean. You you you have to have. Yeah. I mean, there’s there’s some real hack and slash ways to do it, but you at the end of the day and again this is, it’s. It the more I say it. I’m stuck on this, obviously, but it should just be baked in to WordPress and so maybe it will at some point.

Corey Maass (01:02:41) – But like you need an SEO plugin that essentially gives you what you just said. Custom fields. So there’s now a field on your post edit screen to put in your og title, your og description. You know, choose a few other options, and then that gets published along with the article in the head in the code of the head of the page. So, yeah, I mean, you know, if you’re an advanced developer, maybe you rolled your own. There’s a couple of. I’ve actually noticed in a couple of Facebook groups, people have been saying like, okay, I don’t want. Every freakin bell and whistle. And so it’s interesting as ever, in in WordPress and elsewhere, you see the big players moving upstream bells and whistles, bells and whistles. And so now we’ve actually seen a couple of new players come along that do the very bare minimum of essentially what you’re describing, like they just add a few fields, because for a lot of people that’s all you need.

Cory Miller (01:03:46) – So maybe we just say you need to find a plug in.

Cory Miller (01:03:50) – There’s some SEO plugins that do it. You’re going to need to copy the this here here’s like we show a slide. Here’s the here’s the tags. You’re going to have to copy this one into that. You know there’s a couple of plugin SEOvplugins kind of do it too. You have to copy this code. Make sure you have the image link. You have to upload that. Maybe you just give them a summary like okay, you’re going to have to now take it from Canva, upload those into your media file. Now go to some of the SEO plugins. Have it. Here’s the code for that. Like I think we walk them through it. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Cory Miller: And then because you’re going to get to them and go I’m not going to do it. You know, like, that’s way too much work. Okay, so that’s the way to do it. We’ve given you the education. This is this is another problem, you know?

Corey Maass  (01:04:41) – Yeah.

Cory Miller (01:04:42) – Maybe someday it’ll be baked into WordPress. Probably not. Now we created this other solution which is OMGIMG does all that for you.

Corey Maass (01:04:53) – Let me walk you through that. Click click click.

Cory Miller (01:04:57) – That’s on. Yeah, there’s some plugins out there that let you do that, but you’re going to need this. These meta tags. You’re going to have to do all that stuff. But we just walk it through it and then we say, okay, we just told you all that. That’s the way to do this. That was a problem to get this kind of stand out, competitive edge we built. OMGIMG does all that for you? 

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Cory Miller: That’s very honest. And it leads in the path of struggle, which is the reality. And then. Okay, here’s ours. I want to tell you real quick what it does. Does all of that. Click publish. Good.

Cory Miller (01:05:41) – So we presented a problem, offered an opportunity. Giving them solutions that are just the reality. And here’s ours that does it for you.

Corey Maass (01:05:55) – Yeah. 

Cory Miller: Pretty compelling.

Corey Maass (01:05:57) – Yeah. Well and it’s and I, it’s the. I don’t remember whether it was here in a meetup that I talked about ages ago.

Corey Maass (01:06:05) – I heard the an expert who sold through webinars and he’s like, the way you get through, get over the ickiness of selling at the end is you just tell them up front, you’re like, look, I’m going to I’m going to give you a lot of education. I’m going to give you a lot of value. Most of it. You can go muddle through for free. And then I’m going to show you why my product’s better if you want to buy it, great. If you don’t, I’ve shown you all the other the I’ve given you all the information, background information you need. And I’ve shown you how to muddle through for free.

Cory Miller (01:06:41) – Okay, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna do this for Post Status because I think it’s really elegant. You know, a lot of the salespeople go like, what is the cost of staying where you are? But this is really good little formula. So just for one second, I want to do it for Post Status. Okay. Most of our sponsors, what do they want? They need they.

Cory Miller (01:07:02) – Their imperative is they have to reach their prospective customers. So they do pay per click. Cool. I hope you’re doing it like go spend money. You need to do that. That’s. You need to do SEO. Go do that. Um, okay. Now you’re still going. I need to find more people. All right, so this is why you sponsor and you advertise on WP Minute. This is why you come and sponsor Post Status. It’s like. We’re not those things. You should go do those things. Those are ad networks. Those are.

Corey Maass (01:07:37) – Yeah, they are other, other checkboxes on the list. No question.

Cory Miller (01:07:43) – But when they get to, they know they have to. You know, their imperative with their company is, um, more. Okay, have you done these? Good.

Cory Miller (01:07:54) – Okay. You’re looking for a next step? Yeah. Thank you. Community training WP Minute. Go to Post Status. This is why you sponsors. You want brand exposure. So when you’re showing up on SEO, you’re showing up in pay per click.

Cory Miller (01:08:10) – And you’re also over here on where everybody hangs out. 

Corey Maass (01:08:17) – Yeah. Somebody. But there was a post yesterday of like, okay, I have a plugin. Now what? And one of the best responses was like, where do your customers hang out? And you know and and if it obviously that’s a broad statement like there are and I’ve heard it said of like, you know, your startup buddies are not are not your customer. And so for me as a plugin developer, maybe my customers aren’t in Post Status. I mean, they are, but hypothetically, you know, maybe they’re not, but they are still the influencers and they all still have clients who they’re then going to pass the solution on to or what have you. So you have to go where the fish are biting, essentially. Or or at least I don’t know, the. The fishing lore are sold. I know there’s some other, but yeah, you’re absolutely right. Like you cover your bases like it’s not Post Status or but it’s it’s yeah, it’s Post Status is is one of those things that, that you know, in the WordPress world where it stands now is is Post Status is a necessity once you reach a certain level.

Cory Miller (01:09:38) – So we were sorry. I can’t help myself because now this is a really good thing. It’s okay. It’s just another way to say this. But, like. So my marketing assistant Lindsey’s. So train marketing people doing your task, getting all that done. What are the options? Fiverr. Upwork. Hiring. Intern. Uh, like.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03) – Okay.

Cory Miller (01:10:04) – And. Are someone. Somebody that already trains all those to delegate them. Like go through those. I’ve been wanting to do this with there’s two and it’s the same with ours. It’s like the options Canva and Photoshop or your options plus probably custom code. Like somehow they’re going to have to. I’m sure there’s a plugin out there, but like they’re going to have to find it and like do it manually. In fact, Corey, I’m not saying we do this. I’m saying just on our list is like. Hey, you want to go to Canva? You want to go to Photoshop? But the problem we just identified too, is like.

Cory Miller (01:10:42) – Cool, I got it. What now? Well, leave it up to the featured image, potentially in the social to potentially pull the right thing. Or maybe there’s a very basic free plug in this, like if you really want to do it the hard way. There’s a free plug in that OMG could do that’s like, you know, image tag. That’s it. All it does is put it in your HTML.

Corey Maass (01:11:07) – Yep. Well. And and what I, what I really don’t want to do. So.

Corey Maass (01:11:16) – We we are already seconds away from being that, but not free. 

Cory Miller: That’s true. 

Corey Maass: Because like if, if you don’t have because it’s us, us offering to create an og image. And if you don’t want to run an SEO plug in us not doing that for you is stupid. So we already will. Um, like on your home page, on pages where nothing is set, we will automatically. The og title is the name of the page, the description is the excerpt. Like we cover some bases, but we don’t currently.

Corey Maass (01:11:51) – We don’t let you edit those. And I don’t want to because honestly, like, I don’t want to chase that forever. I would rather let the Yost’s and the all in one SEOs and the SEO frameworks and the rank maths handle those problems. Like we want to stick to images, but um, but yeah, mean there’s. It’s not. It’s not a big problem to solve.

Cory Miller (01:12:15) – Well, take take my free thing off the board for a second to say. Go use Canva in Firefly and all those. Upload them and we’ll you know, we’ll attach the right tag. So let’s say you don’t even use our image generator.Go do it. 

Cory Miller (01:12:34) – Thank you. Here, right now on Black Friday. Cyber Monday. Hey. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Cory Miller: Save yourself a lot of pain and agony. Just use it as that. Like we don’t need a free one. We can say that’s worth $50 a year. Currently at Black Friday. 

Corey Maass (01:12:51) -Yeah.That mean. We are. Two two.

Corey Maass (01:13:00) – So, so two big features that are coming soon, right? Technically, already we cover branding, watermarking.

Corey Maass (01:13:12) – And I think I had mentioned last year, like along the way, something that occurred to me, I was like a great free plug in would be one that just watermarks every image you upload. Does does nothing else, set it and forget it, but in the lower right hand corner. Obviously you’d say yes or no somewhere, but basically every image you upload gets your logo in the corner. That’s all it does. But like, that’s whether we release that as a separate plugin and or whether it’s free. I don’t know yet, but we’re going to have that in OMG. And then the other one that that again, I had already solved in version one. And so now we’re I just am. It’s on the list to reintegrate with version two is mockups. So it’s a screenshot of your homepage or a screenshot of whatever page you specify wrapped in a browser window or wrapped in a device. Which, by the way, I have a guy off of Upwork creating. Original versions of all these devices.

Corey Maass (01:14:20) – So they’re pixel perfect. So those will get incorporated soon. But like, none of this stuff is incorporated in into I don’t think anything I’ve seen. So we’re going to have, you know, we’re going to be so far ahead with, you know, the image options. We can do it. I’m very excited, obviously. And so there’s going to be to your point, there’s going to be eventually. I mean, I think it’ll be fun that there’s going to be people who actually buy the plug in for different reasons, not just for the one value prop that we currently offer.

Cory Miller (01:15:05) – When I was thinking about MYMA. It’s back to us here. It’s like. When you were saying you sorry, I went. I went on another direction when you were saying you had that person do the pixel perfect stuff. It was like, really? It’s I love says this. What’s the cost of staying where you’re at? Staying status quo. And for ours is get a wash. In a sea of content, you know, doing nothing, that you just don’t look as good and you’re content that you’ve spent money and time on doesn’t get as many eyeballs.

Cory Miller (01:15:45) – That’s that is quote for my MYMA is like, well, you’re not your business isn’t growing. You’re not doing marketing. What’s the status quo with that? Those aren’t. Just staying where you’re at is not always a good thing. So. I love our section of like. So you should ask that. The other thing is the solution is don’t do anything.

Corey Maass (01:16:17) – And that’s okay. Like if you don’t care, if you don’t need it, if it’s a again, if it’s if it’s a personal blog, if it’s a journal, you know, if you’re just documenting stuff for your benefit. Like there’s a lot a lot of that, you know, then then fine. Um, but solo publisher, you know, small business or you’re building a brand or whatever it is, then, you know, then these are again, you know, I like what we what we’ve talked about, like presenting how it can be hard or it can be simple. And so we’re, we’re already making, you know, like, like we’ve said, we basically we have testimonials from people where they’re like, it’s already hard.

Corey Maass (01:17:04) – You know the product needs to make it simple, but it’s like, you know, like anything, you can learn all about it, or you can just tell me what to do. Think I don’t necessarily know. Have to know how the hammer is manufactured. Hand me one and show me how to to put in a nail. You know. And and that can be the takeaway. So you you said I’m nerding out over here. You said status quo. Um. Which fun nerd coincidence. The translation in Latin is existing state, which is like a techie term, but. What is so status state existing quo doesn’t quite work. I was like, there’s status quo and then there’s Post Status quo. But but quo is existing and so Post Status quo does. The translation doesn’t work, but the concept does. There’s there’s status quo and then there’s Post Status quo. 

Corey Maass (01:18:19) – Anyway, gotta get back to work.

Cory Miller (01:18:20) – We too. Thanks dude. 

Corey Maass (01:18:23) – My pleasure as ever.

Cory Miller (01:18:25) – Episode one. We’re now in the season two.

Corey Maass (01:18:28) – Boom!

Cory Miller (01:18:31) – All right. See you.