Marketing a WordPress Product Live: Session 6

Transcript ↓

In this podcast episode, Michelle Frechette and Corey Maass brainstorm strategies to enhance their product’s appeal and visibility. They discuss adding engaging features to their website, similar to how children desire flashy bike accessories. They explore the idea of reframing their website to highlight the product’s awesomeness, keeping an updated blog, and engaging in public speaking to be genuine and relatable. The conversation shifts to outreach for non-profits, suggesting giveaways, leveraging SEO, and integrating with other software. They consider sending products to post offices, aligning with national events for promotions, and sponsoring meetups. The episode concludes with excitement for future plans.

Top Takeaways:

• Diversified Marketing Strategies: Corey and Michelle discuss a variety of marketing strategies to promote OMGIMG, including speaking at events, participating in podcasts, hosting giveaways, sponsoring meetups, and organizing discount events. This highlights the importance of diversifying marketing efforts to reach different audiences and maximize exposure.
• Focus on Education and Value: Michelle emphasizes the importance of educating potential users about the benefits of OMGIMG and why it’s essential for their websites. This underscores the value of providing educational content and positioning the product as a solution to common challenges, such as improving website imagery and open graph implementation.
• Community Engagement and Support: The conversation explores ways to engage with the WordPress community, including supporting nonprofits, participating in WordCamps, and sponsoring meetups. This highlights the significance of community engagement and building relationships within the WordPress ecosystem to foster trust and credibility.
• Strategic Planning and Execution: Corey and Michelle discuss the importance of strategic planning and execution in marketing initiatives. They outline specific action items, such as creating presentation topics, developing a media page, initiating outreach campaigns, and organizing discount events. This emphasizes the value of setting clear objectives, prioritizing tasks, and implementing strategies systematically to achieve marketing goals effectively.

Mentioned in the show:

• Give 
• Big Orange Heart
• WordCamp
• WordCamp Canada
• Yoast
• RankMath
• Post Status
• StellarWP 
• National Today
• Canva
• Sticker Mule
• BuiltWith
• Meetups
• SquirrellySEO

You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Corey Maass
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, 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

Michelle Frechette (00:00:00) – I think I just left too much time. Yep. Okay. It’s almost there.

Corey Maass (00:00:07) – Going live to YouTube, going live to YouTube.

Speaker 3 (00:00:09) – To you to go in writing.

Michelle Frechette (00:00:12) – Redircting to YouTube. Okay let me. I have to mute it. Otherwise I’m hearing a seven second delay in my ears. I don’t, have is the link. If you can tweet that out from the brand and I will add the brand to my home Twitter. I have literally been offline for over a week and I am still catching up on so much.

Corey Maass:  I’m sure. 

Michelle Frechette: And then I will take off. I will take over a lot of doing that. Yeah. Okay. It’s not good to watch yourself on zoom. I mean, on YouTube at the same time. Anyway, hi. We’re back.

Corey Maass (00:00:58) – Hello. We are back.

Michelle Frechette (00:01:02) – How are you doing?

Corey Maass(00:01:04) – . Doing okay. Feeling a little weary. The world has me weighed down. No, I just didn’t sleep well. And. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette (00:01:17) – And I was in Asia, and then I came home with pneumonia, which knocked me on my, rear end for at least a week.

Michelle Frechette (00:01:26) – And so I am still a little congested, a little nasally. Not my normal, beautiful, sonorous voice. I’m making that up as I go, but I’m upright and I’m drinking tea and all of the things, so it’s good to see you.

Corey Maass (00:01:45) – All we can ask.

Michelle Frechette (00:01:46) – I took stickers, I gave away stickers at WordCamp Asia. So you know where the whether those find their ways onto people’s laptops or bulletin boards or whatever, you know, I wonder, I wonder what percentage, I mean, I’m sure sticker giant and whatever, they probably have all kinds of studies out there, but but percentage of stickers that are handed out at a conference actually make their way. Home and to someplace where people will see them, and without them, nothing. So I think it’s always good. And people really liked the Prism Prismatic ones more than the other ones, which I thought was pretty cool.

Corey Maass (00:02:26) – Yeah, yeah, that didn’t surprise me. And that’s part of why I jumped on those.

Corey Maass (00:02:31) – Like I mentioned before, I really needed an affiliate link for Sticker Mule because I plugged them all the time, but, they were. Yeah, coincidentally, they were doing like a deal a day, a couple of months before WordCamp US. So I was like, they know that I’m listening. And so I just bought whatever they told me to buy every day, including the, the holographic ones, and figured those would be a hit, and honestly, I they’re, they’re kind of on brand, right? Like they end up refracting, rainbows and, you know, so a little more interesting and we’re all about the interesting visuals. So yeah, I think those will be the way forward. In starting to plan my own trips to WordCamps this year, I ordered myself some business cards and in this case. So for simple design tasks, I usually use Canva. I keep trying to give them my money and they just don’t want it, frankly.

Corey Maass (00:03:35) – I mean, they do, but I don’t need any of the, the pro stuff, and I’m not going to pay for something I don’t need, right? I already pay for Photoshop, but that’s overwrought for designing a business card, even though that’s how we all used to do it, but then I wound up actually…

Michelle Frechette (00:03:50) – Its just so much easier to pop over to Canva.

COrey Maass (00:03:52) – Right?, I mean, and it’s that’s the whole point. It’s like the baby Photosho., and so I actually wound up ordering business cards through Canva for the first time, and, the results are good. So, I so, I finally got to give them some of my money.

Michelle Frechette (00:04:07) – Nice. Well, I’m sure they’re happy to to have it.

Corey Maass (00:04:11) – I’ve for especially for, the last few products that I’ve done, like I always I mean, part of part of why you and I work well together on this is, like, we like a friendly product and friendly vibe. And so,, I was actually going to get them.

Michelle Frechette (00:04:32) – It was like I felt like I was on an elevator there, standing desk.

Corey Maass (00:04:35) – Yeah. Sorry.

Corey Maass (00:04:36) – Raising the. Raising the desk up, but doing the, like, round corners.

Michelle Frechette (00:04:40) – Oh, I like that.

Corey Maass(00:04:41) – It makes it, like, friendlier, you know. And then the for the first time, I did a QR code because I feel like those are actually becoming more common use, and had the good idea. I’m obviously I’m not the first one to do this. I didn’t turn on my ring light. I’m not the influencer that I should be. But, I’m obviously I’m not the first one to do this, but I had the good idea of creating a dedicated landing page for myself so that when you go there, you don’t just go to the OMG homepage, you go to like the Corey page. Because if I’m weird, 

Michelle Frechette: The curated experience.

Corey Maass: Right, with a contact form. So it’s like email COrey right here, which I thought was a good idea.

Michelle Frechette (00:05:29) – I like that I’m feeling jealous that I don’t have that myself now. Not that I would have anything to say, but I like that idea so very much.

Michelle Frechette (00:05:38) – That’s great.

Corey Maass (00:05:40) – Well, just. Yeah. Like I’m I’m in moving forward with OMG, moving forward with a new product. I feel like I’m in the zone lately doing better and in thinking this kind of stuff through like the you know, what’s what’s the experience I think paying a lot more attention to. SEO but at a at a. And the companion to that is is content. You know how is content laid out on the website? Well.

Michelle Frechette: Yeah exactly. 

Corey Maass: And so part of that is the, and creating as many pages as I can, frankly, for the Googles.

Michelle Frechette (00:06:21) – That Google’s I um.  I have feedback on the stickers just from the point of view of somebody who collects them and will put them on their laptop under certain conditions, and the condition is it cannot take up huge amounts of space on my laptop. So I think we should get some stickers done that are like an inch and a half by an inch and a half and take those because, like, I would put that on my laptop.

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Michelle Frechette (00:06:48) – But I run out of space on my laptop because I, I have a thing where I always put at least one sticker from every place I speak, and so I speak a lot. So that means I’m filling up a lot of space that way. And then also stickers for things in which I have a personal stake. So like when I was with Give, I have the Give stickers on there, Big Orange Heart stickers, things like that. And so of course I’ll put an OMGIMG sticker on there as well. But right now there isn’t room for the big stick around there, so I have to figure out how to make that happen.

Corey Maass (00:07:15) – Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I ran with whatever they told me to get. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah, for sure.

Michelle Frechette (00:07:20) – Reorder, on reorder. We should take think about that.

Corey Maass(00:07:25) – We have. Yeah. We’ve got you know, 100, 100 or so that were just from whatever they, they may be ordered last year.

Corey Maass (00:07:33) – But it seems like the hologram ones and smaller. 

Michelle Frechette (00:07:39) – Yep.the hologram one go really well. The hologram ones, people absolutely adored those I gave away. I think all of the ones that I had that you had mailed me, yeah. Which reminds me, you should mail me some of your business cards, because I will be going to WordCamps that you won’t be at, and I can hand out your business card to those people and explain who you are and why they should go to that page and get in touch.

Corey Maass (00:08:02) – Yeah. Love it. We’ll do it.

Michelle Frechette (00:08:03) – You don’t have to overnight them this time. They did come quickly though. Yeah. Me too. I was really happy and I was like I was I opened it up and there they were. And I was like the angel saying. The inside of the envelope lit up just like it was on Pulp Fiction. I’m kidding. I didn’t do that. But, metaphorically.

Corey Maass (00:08:21) – Well, that was that was the you know, it was.

Corey Maass(00:08:24) – I thought you were leaving Tuesday and. USPS said 3 to 5, and I’m like, okay, great. And worst case, it gets there Monday. And then you said, I’m leaving Monday. And I went gulp. So yeah.

Michelle Frechette (00:08:36) – Oh yeah. We left, the flight was at 6:45 a.m, so I left my house at 3:45 a.m. to be able to get to the airport. It was arduous journey there and back, flights canceled on the way back, and overnight, I could now say I’ve been in San Francisco because I had to spend the night in San Francisco.

Corey Maass (00:08:58) – So did you get to go out at all, or were you just.

Michelle Frechette (00:09:02) – God, I was so tired and I was so sick already. I literally toyed with the idea of taking an Uber to the Golden Gate Bridge and back, but it was going to be like $80 to do that. And I was like, nobody wants to be, you know, coughing in the back of their Uber for an hour and a half to, to go look at that.

Michelle Frechette (00:09:19) – So it just means I have to take another trip later. Yeah. That’s right. Exactly.

Corey Maass (00:09:23) – Yeah, exactly. That’s like I’ve got a. A trip planned to New York City. I used to live there, and so I’ve seen all the sights, but obviously I have. Or not, obviously, but I haven’t been there in many years, and so we’d love to. Spend some time, but basically I’m going to be there overnight. And so I’m like, you know what? I’m just going to go, go to the show that I’m going to and then leave again. And, as much as I want to, like, overdo it. I’m getting to the point where overdoing it isn’t worth it, you know?

Michelle Frechette (00:09:57) – Yes, yes, I was very cautious about what I did outside of actual WordCamp in Taipei so that I didn’t get sick, which, you know, it didn’t work out. But anyway. But can you imagine if I had done even more? But I did, you know, picked a few.

Michelle Frechette (00:10:14) – We picked a few things we wanted to do and made sure that we did them, and we spent one day sightseeing as opposed to a day at the front end, day of the at the back end and that kind of stuff. And, yeah, it was it was a really good experience, and I’m glad that we did. And I’m, I mean, I get sick once a year like this anyway. So I guess if it has to be at the tail end of an amazing experience, I’ll take it.

Corey Maass (00:10:36) – I always I always used to be the,, the overdo it person, like, cram as much in as possible. And looking back, it’s, it’s ridiculous that I got away with as much as I got away with, because it’s like, I remember planning that I was. I planned a trip to England, went to a buddy’s wedding in Manchester, and to get home, like, woke up in the morning in Manchester. Had to public transportation to the train. Train from Manchester to London.

Corey Maass (00:11:09) – Different train out to the airport had, you know got on the airplane and flew home. But it’s like any one of those connections could have gone wrong and I would have missed my flight. And it was it all comes to thankfully came together, and now I know I a day in between things.

Michelle Frechette (00:11:30) – But if you’re going to miss a flight, the way home is better than on the way there where you’re going to miss the event. So we didn’t miss the flight. We got literally 14. I think it was a 12 hour flight because the tail winds,, flying east is faster than flying west. So it was almost two hour difference, flying back. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. Crazy. 

MIchelle Frechette: But you get off the plane and you turn your phone back on and it’s like, oh, you don’t have a flight to San Francisco or from San Francisco to Chicago. And so we had to, you know, wait in line with, wait for my scooter. And by the time we get there, all of the connecting flights had been taken by other people.

Michelle Frechette (00:12:06) – So the next day was the best thing that we could do. But it worked. It was fine. I got some extra rest on the way home, so can’t complain too much. But, you had sent me a message yesterday or the day before talking about how we want to do more than content. So do you want to talk about that a little bit and then. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Michelle Frechette: And then I look, I have, I have a list of things that. 

Corey Maass (00:12:34) – Nice! Yeah. I just so, the journey that I’ve been on, right, is, starting we so we, we launched in October, got through Black Friday, which was a whirlwind and then said, okay, you know, time to settle down and start doing conventional marketing. And that led to buying of books and doing lots of research and everything. So that, I mean, marketing is marketing, right? Like you could be a brick and mortar or whatever, but. Everything online, I think as much because there’s everybody.

Corey Maass (00:13:09) – Most resources are obviously trying to sell you something, so much of it is SEO and content and inbound marketing. And I’m like, okay, you know, I’ve been online for 20 plus 25 years and marketing for 20 years, and everything’s all about inbound marketing. So I was like, this sounds familiar and it’s comfortable. So off I go and and sort of in wrap trying to wrap my arms around it. The gist is, of the primary method that I had been learning is like, okay, you any number of these keyword tools for your paid, you do some keyword research and then you generate content for those keywords and rinse and repeat, and. I finally got. So it took a while to sort of catch up and feel like, okay, I’ve got a sense of the process, and, and you inject in that, like, so what keywords? Well, the product certainly does certain things or has certain features. And so you try to do keyword research against that.

Corey Maass(00:14:18) – And, and then some of your customers are certain types. And so you try to coincide the features with those customer types. But I kind of two weeks ago I kind of hit a wall where I was like, you know what? Like our product is kind of unique, and not that there aren’t other things that make the images and not and blah, blah, blah, but like the combination, the matrix, I feel like of keywords, and whatnot is kind of unique. And so I’m like, there aren’t really keywords that I feel like we’re chasing, and, and in fact, I, I worry that, at least some of the keywords. So I get to minimize you. Sometimes there’s a point where you can’t watch yourself talk too much.

Michelle Frechette (00:15:16) – I understand.

Corey Maass (00:15:18) – But anyway, so I was like, you know, people, I’m starting to really get the sense that people. And and and I think we’ve come to this conclusion over and over and over again over the last year.

Corey Maass (00:15:29) – But like people are not searching for open graph. People don’t know what’s open graph is right. And I’m sorry to all the people who do, but it’s like it’s not a it’s not the you know, what’s on the tip of everybody’s tongue, right, and so WordPress for sure. As a keyword, as a concept, as whatever featured images, I think so, and then, you know, post image or images associated with content or, that kind of thing. Right? But it’s like, yeah, I’m not finding. That there’s a lot of that. The vein, to use a weird mining analogy, that the vein goes deep or goes long, right? Like there’s bases that we can cover. And I certainly think that there is a base of content to create. And, and certainly there’s articles that we can keep putting out and, topics we can cover and guides that we can put out and stuff like that. But like, it just kind of occurred to me that I was like, oh, maybe content SEO marketing is not the end all, be all. For us.

Michelle Frechette (00:16:41) – I think. I mean, I 100% agree. I don’t think the people are going to find us that way. Or they could, but those are going to be like the MVP kind of people that know what Open Graph is and that kind of stuff. I know that they even have that issue that they want to solve. And and the more I thought about what you said about that, I thought, you know, usually when we talk about marketing, we talk about what pain point are we solving for? And, you know, when you are, let’s say I wanted to buy a diamond earrings. I don’t have a pain point. I have a want. Right. 

Corey Maass: Exactly 

Michelle Frechette: Right. And so, like, we’re not solving we’re not we’re not Yoast solving SEO. We’re not WSforums solving the need for a form we are making, taking something that they have and making it better, giving them the opportunity to really embellish and do some really cool things. But they don’t know that they have a pain point because it’s not something they’re like, oh my gosh, I wish I knew how to XYZ.

Michelle Frechette (00:17:36) – And so we do have to solve a different problem. It’s it’s not showing them how they have a problem to solve. And and listening to what their problems are. It’s a hey wouldn’t you like this bling? Isn’t it pretty? Doesn’t this look better? And how can this help you? And you didn’t even know it existed kind of thing. Right. And so I think the content marketing I and I will never say don’t do it. We have to have it. It’s really good stuff. We want to have, blog posts and we want to have social content and things like that that really highlights what we do. And, what what OMGIMG does of course. And so when somebody lands at a site, I always say if you land on a site and the blog hasn’t been added to in a year, it’s a sign, right? And so we want to absolutely continue to build that. But I start but I really agree with you. And so I started to think, what are some other things we can do? And I mean, not that we weren’t thinking along these lines anyway, but what are some things that we can do to really kind of step up that know, like letting people know, hey, this is this exists.

Michelle Frechette (00:18:41) – And I really started to think about, is it Derek Ashour? You know, Derek, don’t you? With the, he’s got the confetti. The. 

Corey Maass: Oh yeah. Right. 

Michelle Frechette: So, like, I paid a subscription to have. Confetti shoot across the screen when somebody hits submit on a form. Do I need that? No. Did I think that was cool? As soon as I learned about it? And did I want it on my site? Yeah. And that’s what we want is we want people to go, that is so cool. I have to have that. And so notifying people, telling them, look at this cool thing. Don’t you want it to? Like when I was a kid, I had a bicycle. Regular seat. We want a banana seats. We want a banana seats. And we wanted a bell and we wanted the, the, the streamers that come out of the handlebars. Did we need those things? No. But did it make us hella cool? As the kids in the neighborhood who had banana seats and flags at the back and all that stuff, right.

Michelle Frechette (00:19:39) – We want people to go, I want the cool bike. I want to be the cool kid my blog has to sing, and that’s one of the ways to do it.

Corey Maass (00:19:46) – So it’s made me feel so much better. Michelle.

Michelle Frechette (00:19:49) – Because I’m old.

Corey Maass (00:19:52) –  No, no, no. I mean, yes you are, but I’m old also.

Corey Maass (00:19:57) – But no, like I, I had sort of when I realized that. I don’t know, like I found it. Discouraging. And it’s funny because it’s like Cory and I talked about this last year of the difference between we’d we had almost always, built problems, products that solve problems. And we were actually both a bit excited to have a problem, have a product that was this kind of, value add rather than. Solving a, you know, what is it?A V8 drink instead of a bandaid kind of thing, but but when I, when I sort of realized I found it discouraging. That’s the word that I was looking for, I was like, oh, I don’t I don’t know what to write about, but the fact that the way you just described it is like it just shifts the value.

Corey Maass (00:20:57) – Like I think it shifts, for me, it’s it’s like all the thinking that I’ve, I’ve ever done because everything you read about is, you know, talk to the customers, find out their problems, solve the problem, solve the problem, what’s the problem? And it’s like we don’t solve a problem, and that’s okay. Like we’re we’re just freaking awesome. And so.

Michelle Frechette: Exactly were the cool kids. 

Corey Maass: I kind of wanted like that totally reframes I I’m not even kidding. Like, I feel like a weight lifting off my shoulders. 

Michelle Frechette: Oh good!

Corey Maass:  It’s like. I want to revisit the homepage like and and I may or may not have to change much, but like revisited as like I’m selling you this awesome thing rather than like, I kept trying. I was like, what’s the problem we’re solving? And like, there is the open graph image problem and there is…

Michelle Frechette (00:21:54) – Yeah. It’s not frivolous.

Corey Maass(00:21:56) – Yeah, you will get more clicks, you know, but it’s like it, it’s a, it’s a, yeah, it’s a program.

Corey Maass (00:22:03) – It’s a. It’s something better.

Michelle Frechette (00:22:05) – Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So are you ready to hear some of my list?

Corey Maass (00:22:11) – I’m not done.

Michelle Frechette (00:22:13) – Okay.

Corey Maass (00:22:14) – No, I’m just kidding.

Michelle Frechette (00:22:15) – I’m going to mute myself. I don’t I don’t think you’re you’re not seeing right. You’re not looking at my face. So you aren’t seeing every time I mute myself to blow my nose. So that’s probably a good thing to.

Corey Maass (00:22:28) – Anybody who’s been on a call with me knows that I’ve always got a tissue right here, and I’m like, I’m also the. During Covid, they were, there was a meme about different zoom types, and I’m one of the zoom types was like the guy who like, every time you see him, he’s drinking from a different vessel. And I’ve always got multiple, multiple vessels.

Michelle Frechette (00:22:51) – I love it.

Corey Maass (00:22:53) – Yeah, no, but I wanted to make one before we change subjects., yeah. Two things. One, it’s funny that you say about the blog because, there was a tweet today where somebody said, put up a poll and said, if you’re considering buying a like a SaaS product, a WordPress plugin, and you go to their blog and you notice they haven’t updated it in a while, does does that count against them or do you not care or whatever?

Corey Maass (00:23:26) – And this the snarky but I thought very apropos response was, I never look at the blog. It’s just for SEO anyway. And I was like, ouch. But that’s kind of the exercise I feel like I’ve been doing. Like, I’m not I’m not putting out literally keyword nonsense, but I’m definitely trying to write the first basic things for. You know, the why. So Google looks at what.

Michelle Frechette (00:23:55) – When you have a free plugin in the repo, the first thing people do is to look to see when was the last time it was updated? Because there’s no blog, there’s no anything that’s that’s to show the relevance there. Right? But when you have a premium plugin with nothing in the repo, the way you can show that you’re in earnest working on this is that you’re updating your blog and you’re adding content, because if your plugin is dead, you’re not going to do that, right? And you’re not going to spend time and money and energy to do those things, because even if you’re not paying somebody else to do it, time is money.

Michelle Frechette (00:24:26) – And so, and even if you’re using ChatGPT to write it, which I’m not recommending that we always do that, but it’s a it’s definitely a starting place for a lot of people. Right. And we talked about that last time, but having updated information, it’s like, what when do you look at the footer and you see some of these footer hasn’t like the copyright hasn’t changed since like 2021 and you’re like, it’s 2024 now, you know? And so those are just some of those indicators that let somebody know that we are working on this. This is a project that is ongoing and that as long as we keep up with showing new content, we are in earnest marketing it and also developing it. So I think that that’s one of those things like.

Corey Maass (00:25:13) – I’ve started doing, in addition to the content we’re putting out, like a very simple blog post about each release, even if it’s just a few sentences, and then and then also usually sending using that as an excuse to send out an email to customers, followers, whatever.

Michelle Frechette (00:25:35) – Do we have a change log?

Corey Maass (00:25:36) – Like so. I was just about to say that. So there’s a change log, and I think nerds and developers know to go look at that. But again, I’m always trying to think about, like, my clients who don’t know what a change log is. But if there was a little banner or somewhere on the website, I mean, real one of those just simple bars that just said, you know, version six, last released four weeks ago or two weeks ago or yesterday, would be a neat indicator of essentially that the equivalent of what you just said. And that would be an easy enough to to pull from. Every time I update the plugin, it updates the, the the post essentially on the, on the website, and I could just pull the modified date so I might add that to the website.

Michelle Frechette (00:26:29) – Now the the flip side to that is because I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a second, of course, is that people who aren’t developers and that that level of into it, they’re just building the website for themselves or their business often.

Michelle Frechette (00:26:44) – And I’m in the plug in business. Right. So I’ve, I’ve worked with Give and other plugins for a long time. We often hear, why are you updating it all the time. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. 

Michelle Frechette: What’s wrong with it that you’re constantly updating it as opposed to looking at it going, oh my gosh, they’re adding more features. They’re secure. They’re you know, they’re so, you know, on top of things that there’s, you know, it’s like every time I log into my website, it says, I have to update your plugin. Well, yeah, because we’re making it better and we’re adding features and it’s rich and it’s, you know, you’re getting your money’s worth this way. But to some people that’s kind of like, not again, you know. So you kind of have to temper that a little bit, you know, don’t want to in the banner at the top, but perhaps a box towards the bottom of the site. 

Corey Maass: Yeah. Yeah

MIchelle Frechette: Iis where I would put that.

Michelle Frechette (00:27:26) – So just because, perception is reality to a lot of people and perception is what they think it is. 

Corey Maass (00:27:34) – No matter what you what you do, you’re going to piss some people off.

Michelle Frechette (00:27:37) – Because some people are or they’re just going to they’re going to be confused and confused. People will often put on a demeanor of abruptness because they don’t want to show ignorance, so they assume defiance instead. 

Corey Maass (00:27:51) – Yeah. Well put. All right. Hit me with your list.

Michelle Frechette (00:27:54) – Here’s my list. Okay, so and some of these are not going to surprise because we talked about it before too though. But I think we need to get you applying to speak at events, whether it’s an online event or something you could drive to. And WordCamps are the ideal place to do that. And no, you cannot get up on stage and plug your plug in, but you can get up on stage and talk about for a year, building in public and what the what it looks like to start marketing in public.

Michelle Frechette (00:28:21) – So putting together a pitch for like that, for, for topics I think would be something that people would find very interesting. And you’ve got so much data, you’ve got all of these, these live, live events. They’re all on Post Status’s websites. So there’s lots of places that you can point people to. And I’m sure a lot of data points that you could pull from there. So I think that’s something that we should start to work on and take a look at. What WordCamps would be feasible for you to travel to,, understanding that every time you do that, it’s also money that you have to spend in travel and that kind of thing, but that I think we we could look at some strategic ways to do that, and I don’t remember if we talked about this, but WordCamp Canada might be a good place to look at that. If you have a passport or a way to get across the border.

Corey Maass (00:29:04) – That one, that one no because they are so focused on inclusivity and underrepresented and whatnot.

Corey Maass (00:29:15) – That I actually thought about applying, but it seemed pretty. Definite that they did not that they have what they. They want specific things.

Michelle Frechette (00:29:30) – Let’s talk later too, because if it was a you and me thing, as opposed to just a white guy thing, then we might be able to talk about that process and why building in public is helpful to people who don’t have the,the, I can’t think of the words to say the the funding to be able to go and learn things on their own and how this has been an educational experience not only for us, but for other people as well. So there might be something there.

Corey Maass(00:29:55) – I didn’t hear you when you or didn’t absorb that. You said like looking at building in public as a topic and that’s that’s a new one that that maybe would overlap. That’s a that’s a good angle.

Michelle Frechette (00:30:06) – And you and that’s a hashtag and a and a movement you’ve been following and have a lot of experience with. So I think you’d have a lot that you could share that way.

Corey Maass (00:30:16) – Yeah, that’d be cool, and I’m hoping long term, as we’ve talked about, to become more and more of an advocate for, accessibility and stuff like that, but I definitely am, I refuse to be the, the, the white man who reads some articles and then gets on stage as the quote unquote expert. You know, so that so I’m very I look forward to attending those, those, presentations, but when.

Michelle Frechette (00:30:50) – But when you.

Corey Maass (00:30:50) – Want to but if you thought of the other angle.

Michelle Frechette (00:30:53) – Yeah, yeah. And when you, when you do a talk on building in public, you can talk about how accessibility was important and maybe it wasn’t something you thought about at the beginning, but it’s something that you’ve worked in since then. And all of those things that you and Cory did over the last year that you and I have started to talk about this year, I think would make really good data points for other people. And encouragement to other people of why not try something, right?

Corey Maass (00:31:14) – That’s a neat way to look at it.

Corey Maass (00:31:15) – I spoke at, I flew myself to WordCamp Belfast 4 or 5 years ago. Mostly because there was a music festival that weekend and, coincidentally, WordCamp Belfast was that weekend. So I used that WordCamp as a write off. So that was a pretty awesome coincidence. And, but the and the irony was I pitched two talks and they accepted both of them, and so that I was getting got to go to the festival. But I did get to see all the headliners I wanted. But one of the things it was a. Not one of my stronger talks. It was the only time that I ever gave that talk, but they essentially did. You know, some of the smaller camps will do lightning talks. And this was a, I think, like a 15 minute lightning talk, but where I spoke a lot about imposter syndrome and insecurities and feeling isolated. And because it was kind of the first it was, around when people were, were really starting to talk about, you know, the mental struggle of doing what we do and whatnot.

Corey Maass (00:32:33) – Yeah so I think that that could, that could tie into that as well of.

Michelle Frechette (00:32:37) – I do too.

Corey Maass (00:32:38) – The benefits of building in public. But, you know, but being honest about all of the stuff, the, the emotions that we feel and the fact that I have, if we’re honest, I have failed for 25 years. I have a successful career, but in building product, I have only pretty much failed since 2004. Failings in 2004. That’ll be the headline, but anyway. Yeah. That’s interesting. Thank you. That’s. Yeah, we should we should start to flush that out.

Michelle Frechette (00:33:08) – Definitely. And then the next thing would be to get on more podcasts to talk about all of these things. Right. And so like I had you on our podcast for WP Consolations over at StellarWP. We should put that out again. We should point to those things instead of just when they happen. It should be we should have a media page. I don’t know if we have one yet, but we should have a media page on the website.

Michelle Frechette (00:33:31) – Make it out a media page. So that when we have when we’re mentioned in blogs or when we are, on podcasts and things like that, we can link to those and people can go back and watch those things and have that, with your headshot and, you know, a couple of blurbs and things like that. We build out a media, a media kit., right. I know, I mean, yeah.

Corey Maass (00:33:55) – YeahI, I,, this is this is very timely. I. Just recently started a new marketing mastermind. And one of the things that came up was, was just this, like a good, easy, friendly, generally contributing way or way easy way to contribute to WordPress as a whole. There’s all these great podcasts, get on all of them. We all have interesting perspectives. We all have interesting experiences. But I had been starting to struggle with what to talk about. Like there was,, you know, when I started to apply for and then they’re like, what do you want to talk about? I’m like, my product.

Corey Maass(00:34:38) – But that’s there’s I can’t like you said, I don’t want to just be an ad for it. So, you know what? What can I talk about? So I think, yeah, if we sat down and started fleshing out like a build in public, you know, bullet list and a images, you know, bullet point.

Michelle Frechette (00:34:56) – Yeah. Even like think about like from a marketing perspective, talk about how you’re not solving a pain point, but you’re creating a product that people need anyway. Like that’s there’s a disconnect that goes to your brain when something you say to somebody marketing, oh, we’re not solving a pain point. Wait, what? I mean, well, yeah, kind of. But it’s like, no, nobody is not you. You can have a blog without using OMGIMG, you could have a blog without images right at all. But why would you want to? Right  like I don’t have to have purple hair? I freaking love my purple hair, right? Like yeah, yeah kind of thing.

Michelle Frechette (00:35:31) – Anyway, so getting on podcasts and pitching some of those ideas I think would be great too. I think we should do some, some swag giveaway. I think we should it would I, I am really happy to create a swag store for OMGIMG and put it on the website, right? Like I’ve done that for. I mean, you actually have to create the page and then I will put the put the the plugin on there, using. Printful. So it’s print on demand and, WooCommerce ties together. And then when we want to give something away, we just make a coupon code. And, you know, every month we pull a name and whatever, and somebody can buy a hat or a t-shirt or whatever. So I would love to start doing some giveaways that way., Press releases. I had that on the list. I already mentioned that a little bit, but,, I think having a press release on the site, even I told somebody earlier today, I’m like, even if you’d never send it out to anybody, you make a press release about the fact that you have this, it goes on your media kit, and then people can have that one pager that says, oh, this is what they’re doing now.

Michelle Frechette (00:36:37) – I think we should also send it out. So we send it to like Post Status, but we are Post Status. But you know what I mean. Like we would send it to those other places that are like Post Status. So people have a little more than,, you know, creating. They don’t have to look us so hard for the news and they have things that they can use right there. I would love to do some giveaways of the product itself. Like, are you a nonprofit? Here’s how you can apply to get a copy of this for your nonprofit, and, you know, kind of work in tandem with some other ideas, some other people that are doing something like that. So, you know, maybe one once a month, we give away a copy of the software to a nonprofit that otherwise wouldn’t pay that money to have anything, because having worked at Give for years, I know that people are so often working on incredibly tight shoestring budgets that even $59 a year or $100 a year, for one plugin at Give was, you know, completely outside of the realm of possibility for them.

Michelle Frechette (00:37:37) – Because that’s bags of dog food that they would put in dogs dishes for their, you know, their pets, animal rescue, as opposed to paying for something like, like this, they would be like, well, I’ll just use Canva and I’ll download it and I’ll upload it again, like, but you don’t have to, because if we’re going to give this to you for free.

Corey Maass: Okay.

Michelle Frechette: Yes? 

Corey Maass (00:37:55) – Let me let me interrupt. Yes. Because so here’s a really fun one to combine with. What you just said. There’s like three things here, so, one of the other threads around content creation that isn’t blog posts, keyword stuff, whatever, right is I am in the process of fleshing out. A page per integration? 

Michelle Frechette: Yes.

Corey Maass: Because long term we want to have relationships with Yoast ,Rankmath, and, you know, basically any, any other plug in software that we integrate with. Ideally they talk about us. We’ll have to work on those relationships, but I recently realized that, almost all of the SEO plug ins put comments around the tags open graph or meta tags that they generate, which means that we can use a site like Built With to find all of the sites that use Yoast, Rankmath, SquirrellySEO, whatever.

Corey Maass (00:39:08) – So I already sort of had in the back of my mind like, okay, once we’ve got these integrations like, and we can do like the, the blunt force one, there is. Cold outreach. We see you use Yoast. Have you thought about using, you know, our plugin that partners well with. And maybe we’ll do that someday, what I love. And then. And then the other thing that I’ve done in the past is,. And I feel like you’re the perfect person to spearhead. This is, every plugin I’ve ever had. People have contacted me and said, I’m a non-profit. You know, can we get a free copy? And I, I want to be, you know, 1% cynical, right? I don’t want to just give it away. You can’t. And so one of the things that I heard about years and years and years ago, I.

Michelle Frechette (00:40:00) – Know if you’re gonna say it, I love this.

Corey Maass (00:40:02) – Right. Send me a postcard. Yeah, send me a like I need.

Corey Maass (00:40:06) – I need you to, you know, buy a postcard and a 50 cent stamp, and I will give you my $100 plugin for free. But you must send me a postcard. The sad fact is, I’ve never had anybody take me up on it. But again, I feel like if we do some, we if we make a campaign out of this, you know, and, and do some outreach and say, you know, all we ask for is, you know, frankly, like, if you’re a non-profit, send us a t-shirt, send us a hat, send us something. We will take pictures of ourselves wearing your swag, and you will and we will give you the plugin for free because we would love to support you. 

Michelle Frechette:  (00:40:47) – Or your stickers or whatever.Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:40:47) – Yeah, exactly. So we can kind of do it like, you know, let us give you a little bit of free promotion to our audience and we will give you this product for free, which will make you look better.

Corey Maass (00:40:57) – And basically it gives us stuff to talk about. It gives us, you know, warm fuzzy feelings helping the internet get better. And, and then if and if we can do any sort of if we can get to the point where people are contacting us, we can do either the postcard version or the swag version or something. I think that’d be so much fun.

Michelle Frechette (00:41:18) – I love it, I wrote it down, I like it.

Corey Maass (00:41:23) – And combining all of it. I just realized that again, we can look at we can find nonprofits that use a certain plugin. And so we already know they’re on WordPress, and we already know they’re using a tool that we integrate with. So we could kind of mush it all together and send them a pitch.

Michelle Frechette (00:41:41) – True. And we could even combine it with some of like one of the things that I used to do with what I was working more on th Give side of things is look at the, national TODAY.com. Right. Look at.

Michelle Frechette (00:41:54) – It’s at least once a year. It’s like Save the Whale Day, and another day it’s like, save the Rhinos and another day it’s, you know, Lithuanian Heritage Day and all of those kinds of things. Right. And so I would go in, I would just search for Save the Whales websites and look at the top ten of them and see if any of them were using Give. If any of them were using give, I would shout them out on social media because hey, this you know, you can save the whales and do it through one of our websites or through our plugin, etc. So let’s say that we decided it was going to be like there’s there’s so many national days around pets because people love their pets. And what do they love to do is take pictures of their pets. Right. So you look for some website that is a dog rescue or a cat rescue or pet rescue, whatever that’s using WordPress. And we reach out to them and say, hey, we want to help you make we want to help you make your blog better so that you get more donations around the stuff that the the work that you’re doing.

Michelle Frechette (00:43:00) – And, do some outreach that way and give away. One a month. So that’s a start to prime the pump a little bit. So those are some of the ideas. I know that there’s opportunities to sponsor MeetUps. Right. So what does that look like. Every MeetUp is different to some people. It’s like, you know, it’s by sponsor for this month 50 bucks cover our pizza, that kind of thing. But we also talked about speaking at MeetUps, which is also one of my topics.,because we’re going to have you come and April, which you have to I think I have to confirm the date and everything with you, but, do a presentation about what is OMGIMG and why is it important and what is open graph and why do you need to have these things on your blog? And so, let’s start talking about it that way and getting people to kind of learn about it through the MeetUps, because you can do that online most of the time and not even have to leave, you know, the comfort of your home, so to speak.

Michelle Frechette (00:43:59) – And then. I know that every year where I work, we have a week in,,we have a week in, around Black Friday, of course, but we also have a week in July where we have a discount week. And so we discount things for a day. I mean, we or we could just play like, hey, we’re going to we’re targeting this weekend, you know, maybe it’s Mother’s Day because you’re going to take pictures of your mom, like, whatever it is, like kind of figure out a way to make it also around imagery that people might want to put on a blog and things like that. And then, you know, we’re going to have a three day sale, 30% off, 50% off, whatever we decide, and just, you know, blitz that all over the place, socialize, and in our, in our newsletter as well. So just some of the ideas that I came up with after reading your note yesterday.

Corey Maass (00:44:54) – Amazing.

Michelle Frechette (00:44:56) – Cool stuff. All right.

Corey Maass (00:44:58) – Yeah.

Corey Maass (00:44:59) – Yeah. Love it, love it, love it. I’m trying to think of., I feel like. Yeah, it’s cool because the different kind of content creation like let’s look at essentially, again, coming up with those bullet points. Let’s pick some topics that that I could talk about. At least this is how I always did talks. It was like, what are the topics? Just start fleshing out an outline enough to be able to write a synopsis so that you can essentially write a pitch. And then when a talk gets accepted, go, okay, now let me generate slides and flush out the full the full talk. So I think that would be the yeah next week. Let’s start doing that.

Michelle Frechette (00:45:49) – I like it. We will. 

Michelle Frechette (00:45:52) – That’s all I got for this week. I mean, it was a lot.

Corey Maass (00:45:56) – It’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Yeah, I think,. Thank you. I don’t feel like I am. Giving enough energy back.

Corey Maass (00:46:05) – I’m very, very excited. But like you, I’m worn down. And. And so I think we should wrap up for today, but I love those ideas and like, let’s start fleshing them out starting next week. That’d be amazing.

Michelle Frechette (00:46:19) – Sounds good to me.

Corey Maass (00:46:21) – Well, thank you, Michelle. Welcome home. 

Michelle Frechette (00:46:23) – Thank you.

Corey Maass (00:46:24) -I hope you your health gets back to hundred percent.

Michelle Frechette (00:46:28) – It has to. There’s no alternative for me, so it will. I just need to be able to rest. The problem is you lay down to sleep, and that’s when all of the congestion settles in your chest. And then you’re up coughing all night, which means you’re not getting sleep. So it’s.

Corey Maass (00:46:43) – Just exactly.

Michelle Frechette (00:46:44) – Every day gets a little bit better. And that’s how it works. It’s incremental. It’s not like I was sick yesterday, and I’m not today. One day you’ll be like, hey, I slept all night. That’ll be good. Alright.