The WP Summit 2015

Today you’ll learn about WordPress fundamentals and WordPress hosting, two very important topics that already decide whether you’re building a powerful website or just an average one.

Dan Norris Building Great WordPress Sites With Even Better Content Marketing

Dan is an entrepreneur, award-winning content marketer, and co-founder of WP Curve. Together with Alex McClafferty he took WP Curve from scratch to $500k / year within 15 months, making WP Curve one of the fastest growing companies for WordPress support on a global scale.
He wrote the small business book 7 Day Startup, and his weekly newsletter goes out to 14k subscribers. And he wrote a post about 7 mandatory plugins.

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why you need to have a content marketing strategy right from the start
• How content marketing can work for you
• What plugins Dan installs on almost all of his WordPress sites
• How the website review process of WP Curve works
• How long you need to test content marketing strategies
• What Dan teaches in his best-selling book 7 Day Startup

Rachel McCollin - What WordPress Beginners Need To Know About WordPress

Rachel McCollin is a WordPress expert, organizing WordCamps in Birmingham, and has written three books on WordPress – the fourth book being in progress right now.
She’s writing for major WordPress and web-development related platforms like Smashing Magazine, WPTutsPlus, or Opera.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What kind of websites you can use WordPress for
• Why using WordPress is like a diet sometimes
• How you can manage content creation the smart way
• How basic responsive web design works
• How you can manage multiple WordPress installations easily

Jason Cohen - WordPress Hosting Demystified

Jason is the founder of WP Engine, the world’s largest WordPress focused web hosting company. He’s a serial entrepreneur and founded 4 startups, two of which were sold with millions in profit. He’s also a mentor for startups at Capital Factory.
WP Engine is a sponsor of the WP Summit, because they believe this event can contribute on a global scale to the WordPress community.
Connect with Jason: Website | WP Engine | Twitter

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why some WordPress hosts are expensive and others cheap
• Which WordPress hosting is perfect for your website
• How you can use WordPress smarter every day
• What really makes WordPress sites and online businesses thrive
• Why plugins & themes are holding too many WP users back

Welcome to The WP Summit!
Today you’ll learn about WordPress design and themes. These are major topics for anyone running a website, but major challenges as well. Today’s speakers will explain how you can bootstrap your own design, optimize it, and hire WP freelancers properly.

Alex Harris - Create A Website Design That Boosts Your Conversion Rates

Alex Harris is a web designer for over 14 years, and he’s focusing on conversion-optimized design. That means he builds websites that convert traffic into leads or customers. Given that he ran 5,000+ A/B tests for his clients, he has amazing expertise in this field – and a lot to share during his interview.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What design best practices you need to know about
• How design influences your conversion rates
• What common design mistakes kill your conversion rates
• How you can easily tweak your website design yourself

Mark Asquith - Learn How To Bootstrap Beautiful WordPress Sites

Mark runs an award-winning UK agency for design and website design called DMSQD. He also runs the Excellence Expected podcast, where his interview help you overcome the daily challenges of being an entrepreneur.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What makes good website design
• How you can bootstrap a beautiful website
• What to look out for when choosing a WP theme
• Why WP themes need to be connected to your brand

Tomaz Zaman - What You Need To Know About Working With WP Freelancers

Tomaz Zaman is the founder of Codeable.io, one of the biggest outsourcing platforms for WordPress projects. They have pretty tight quality standards and only hire skilled developers, to tackle the issues you’ll face when hiring a WP freelancer on oDesk or elance.

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why Tomaz founded codeable
• How codeable works differently from oDesk or elance
• How you can transfer their work ethic to hiring a freelancer on any platform
• How you make sure your WP project stays on track

Welcome to The WP Summit!
Today is all about building online businesses using WordPress. Countless entrepreneurs use WordPress to build their business platform, bloggers make money from it, and lots of other business models exist that can be leveraged using WordPress. The speakers will bring clarity into this realm!

Aj Amyx - How To Build A Profitable Online Business From Scratch

Aj is the co-host of the Movement Marketing Summit and GameTime Movement, bringing together world-class speakers like Michael Port, Sue B. Zimmerman, Jeff Goins, and more.
He’s a business coach for entrepreneurs, guiding them from building the business model, to scaling their business online and making an impact in the lives of their customers.

In this session you’ll learn:
• How you can create a sustainable business model
• How you can validate your business idea
• How you build your business online
• Why WordPress is such a great tool to build an online platform

Amber Vilhauer - Online Business Strategies For Beginners And Advanced Entrepreneurs

Amber is the CEO at NGNG (No Guts No Glory) Enterprises, and she and her team have built more than 300 WordPress websites for her clients. She helps her clients to create profitable business models and websites that support their business.

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why you don’t just put up a website and walk away from it
• How you can start building your business with a strategic approach
• What plugins are mandatory for your blogs
• How you can build great websites and converting sales funnels

Nick Loper - The Side-Business Blueprint For WordPress Users

Nick is the Chief Side Hustler of Side Hustle Nation, a blog and podcast teaching about building businesses on the side. Most of his businesses nowadays use WordPress, even though he started off investing $10k in a custom-developed affiliate shop for shoes.
He’s a TEDx speaker, entrepreneur, and educator – and he offers his website checklist (51 items!) for FREE for all WP Summit attendees!

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why WordPress is perfect for starting a business
• How you can make money with affiliate marketing
• What profitable affiliate business Nick dreams of for years (but never acted upon)
• How you can keep going strong even when days get longer

Stephen Esketzis - Building Highly Converting Sales Funnels With WordPress

Stephen is a specialist for building sales funnels and for social advertising like Facebook ads. He runs a digital marketing agency, interviewed superstars in the music scene. After a while he shifted his focus to online marketing strategies, which he shares on his blog and podcast.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What a sales funnel is and how it works
• How you turn visitors into leads and customers
• How Facebook advertising work and why it’s so powerful
• How to market to those people who already visited your website
• How to scale an online business using Facebook ads and sales funnels

Deven Patel - Monitoring WordPress And Business Statistics The Smart Way

Deven is the founder of Cyfe, an all-in-one dashboard to track your most important business and website metrics. Cyfe connects to services like Google Analytics, Salesforce, mailing list providers, and lots of other services, displaying their statistics in one place.
Cyfe is a sponsor of the WP Summit, providing me with statistics all about this event.
Deven also has a generous offer for you at the end of this video!

In this session you’ll learn:
• What metrics every WordPress user should track
• How metrics give you insights on the performance of your website and business
• How to take the right conclusions from your metrics
• How you can make your life easier when tracking metrics

Ryan Magdziarz - How To Create A 7 Figure Coach’s Website

Ryan is the director of Winning International, on the mission to help more coaches build 7-figure businesses and raising $1 billion for charity over the next 10 years.
He led a digital marketing agency building WordPress websites, built and sold an app, invested in other businesses, and now focuses on coaching coaches to help them make a massive impact in the world.

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why Ryan uses WordPress for all his clients
• How you can build membership programs that sell
• What themes & plugins you can use to build a 6- or 7-figure site
• How you can build a sales funnel that converts

Tim Paige - Success-Proven List Building Techniques For WordPress Users

Tim is the Conversion Educator at LeadPages, a software company providing landing pages and other tools that make lead generation easy as pie. He grew their list by over 40k subscribers, and runs their official podcast and webinars.

In this session you’ll learn:
• The most common mistakes in list building
• What lead magnets perform best
• What content upgrades are and how they work
• What giving pages and taking pages are
• What lead magnet outperformed a one-hour chat with LeadPages CEO Clay Collins

Natanael Oliveira - All You Need To Know About List Building And Conversion Optimization

Natanael started his traditional career as a salesman. When he discovered WordPress he used it to become #1 salesman in the company, and finally started his own digital agency Marketing Com Digital. Nowadays, his agency has grown to be one of the biggest players in the Brazil, offering digital marketing and WordPress related services!
For All Access Pass owners, he gives away the exact emails he uses in his sales funnel. Those emails helped him grow a raving audience, ready to buy his services.

In this session you’ll learn:
• How Natanael used WordPress to boost his sales as salesman
• Why WordPress was the only way to build his own business
• How he creates content that attracts engaged visitors
• How he turns his website visitors into leads and customers
• How you build your own business using his techniques

Welcome to The WP Summit!
Now that you know how to bootstrap a beautiful WordPress site, have a strategy for monetizing it, and know how to build a list, let’s dive into content marketing. Today’s interviews will help you create content that naturally ranks and turns your visitors into raving fans of everything you do!

Jason Amunwa - Smart Content Marketing And Measuring Its Success

Jason is the Product Director at Digital Telepathy, working on the products, WordPress plugins like SlideDeck, Hello Bar, and Filament. He focuses a lot on what drives engagement on WordPress blogs, and how you can create content that engages your readers to interact with what you have to offer.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What WordPress plugins you need on your WordPress
• Why the majority of blogs are not a good experience for readers
• How to measure the engagement on your blog
• What content structures make your website more enjoyable for your readers
• How to build a solid relationship with your readers

Andy Crestodina - Content Chemistry That Turns Visitors Into Raving Fans

As Strategic Director at Orbit Media, Andy has provided web strategy advice to more than 1,000 businesses over the last 12 years.
Andy loves to teach web marketing, both as a public speaker and on the Orbit blog. He has written more than 170 articles on content marketing topics including SEO, email marketing, social media, and Analytics.
Says Andy, “It’s both art and science. This is why I love web design and web marketing. It’s a place to be both creative and technical, artistic and analytical. As soon as I realized this, I was hooked.”

In this session you’ll learn:
• What content hubs are and how you can create them
• How a content schedule works and what benefits it brings
• How to write great headlines and captivating content
• How you get traction with your site right away
• How to write content that benefits your SEO

Welcome to The WP Summit!
Social media and SEO are two powerful tools to drive traffic to your WordPress site, and to build a loyal audience that’s craving for your offers. Today’s speakers will teach you success-proven strategies to build a massive following on social media, and to rank your WordPress site in Google. Sounds good?

Francesca Alexander - The Art Of Generating Social Buzz For Your Site

Note: Skype & Google Hangouts both didn’t want Francesca and me to record an at least mediocre quality video. So we went for audio only in this interview.
Francesca runs Social Global Grind, a digital PR botique for independent full-service digital communications agency specialising in luxury fashion, beauty, lifestyle and wellness brands.
Francesca and her team, leads an established PR boutique of well-connected fashion and beauty contacts. The firm believes in Kalology Social Media, which is the philosophy of beauty, and the ways in which beauty influences society. We specialize in inspirational graphics and story telling through the visual arts. We are the experts in consumer behavior and the psychological responses to beauty and artistic experiences.

In this session you’ll learn:
• How you can create an effective social marketing strategy
• How you stop wasting time on social media
• What an effective content schedule looks like
• How you can build a following on Twitter
• How relationship building works in social media

Alex Moss - The Nitty-Gritty About SEO And Social Marketing

Alex is the Director of FireCask, a digital agency specialising in online marketing, WordPress development and creative content marketing. They have worked with all kinds of businesses small to large. Clients include 123Reg, Amy Winehouse Foundation, Expedia EAN, Downtown in Business and Global Integration.
He also is the co-founder of Peadig, a WordPress framework focusing on performance, SEO, and ease of use. Peadig’s plugins have been downloaded 1 million times so far.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What SEO myths you can ignore
• Why black hat SEO still works in some areas
• Why it’s good to forget about SEO from time to time
• How content ranks naturally
• What factors influence the ranking of your WordPress site

Mark Bowness - Building a Facebook Audience That Loves You

Mark Bowness is the founder of Live Change The Revolution. We met in one of his Facebook groups, that he uses as lead magnet on steriods. He’s an expert in building enthusiastic communities, and runs several Facebook groups (some with 8,5k+ members).
In these Facebook groups he applies extremely powerful strategies, that help him serve the members by delivering relevant information, educating them on certain topics, and simply helping them out.
Thereby he positions himself as an expert, and has sold more than $150k worth of products to his groups.

In this session you’ll learn:
• How you can build a hungry tribe on social media
• Why having that tribe can decide on success or failure
• How you can grow an engaged Facebook group, begging you for your contents and offers
• How Mark built his group from 0-5000 members in just 12 months
• How I myself will apply this technique in the rest of 2015

Welcome to The WP Summit!
Podcasting and virtual summits are two ways to grow a huge audience and deliver exceptional value (if done properly). You can use these to build relationships with influencers, position yourself as authority in the field, and most importantly, to serve your audience and answer their questions. Today’s speakers will give you step-by-step walkthroughs for podcasting and virtual summits.
No intro video today, but a LIVE HANGOUT at 1pm PST.

Navid Moazzez - Skyrocket Your Business With A Virtual Summit Running On WordPress

Navid is a virtual summit strategist and has created a ravingly successful Branding Summit in 2014, interviewing 88 experts on personal branding. After running this life-changing event, Navid now focuses on coaching others who run virtual summits themselves. He mentored me during this event and he works with Aj Amyx who spoke on Day 3 of the WP Summit.

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why virtual summits can be true game changers in life and business
• How you can create a strategy for your own virtual summit
• The steps it takes to run a virtual summit
• What background work went into the WP Summit itself

Omar Zenhom - The WordPress Blueprint To Creating Successful Podcasts

Omar runs, together with Nicole Baldinu, two podcasts, called $100MBA Show and Webinar Ninja. The $100MBA Show is a daily podcast, supporting his course $100MBA with content, sharing short and concise lessons that listeners can take action upon immediately.
The $100MBA Show won the award “iTunes Best of 2014 Podcast”.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What makes a successful podcast
• What equipment you’ll need to get started with podcasting
• How you can connect your podcast to WordPress
• How you can grow a raving audience for your podcast
• How you can monetize your podcast

Welcome to The WP Summit!
So far we’ve covered fundamental strategies on building businesses with WordPress and getting eyes onto your website. Now let’s turn those visitors into leads and paying customers! Today’s speakers will knock it out of the park, and will help you increase your conversion rates dramatically!

Oli Gardner - Effective Conversion Optimization For Online Businesses Using WordPress

Oli is the co-founder of Unbounce.com, a world-leading company providing services for building landing pages and split-testing those. Unbounce helped their clients generate almost 250 million leads, serving some of the world’s biggest companies.
Oli’s passion is the psychology behind conversions, what exactly makes people tick online. He also is an amazing photographer, showing his images on his personal website.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What conversion optimization is and why it’s important
• How to structure highly converting landing pages
• What simple exercise you can use to increase your conversions
• Why button or text color is not that important as you might think

Liston Witherill - Master Copywriting And Turn Your Website Into A Lead-Gen Machine

Liston is the Chief Creative at GoodFunnel, to the time recording this he was working for SnapCopy by Copy Hackers. He writes copy that actually turns website visitors into leads for your business, and shares amazing formulas and strategies in the interview.
Just like me he’s an audio-snob and he can’t stand low-quality speakers.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What copywriting is and why it’s important
• How you can start to think like a copywriter
• How you can write compelling headlines
• How you get your readers to love your content

Today’s interviews might well save your business when things get tough. Yes, the strategy parts we talked about on Day 1 – 8 are important, but when something goes wrong, you’ve got to protect your WordPress! And that’s when today’s speakers come into play.

Akshat Choudhary - Fail-Proof WordPress Backup And Security Strategies

Akshat is the founder of Blogvault, one of the world’s leading service provider for WordPress backups. Blogvault is a WordPress plugin that connects to their servers, creating backups of your site on autopilot. You can also use these backups to migrate your site to a new web host, to test new plugins, or to search for contents you already deleted.

In this session you’ll learn:
• What WordPress backups are and how they work
• When you’ll need WordPress backups
• How you can automate them using free tools
• Why having a 3rd party backup service might be a good idea

Tony Perez - WordPress Security For The Not-So-Technical

Tony is the co-founder and CEO of Sucuri, a world-leading company providing security services for websites, particularly WordPress. They help you detect malware on your website, protect it from hackers and automated attacks, and monitors the traffic accessing your website.
Tony very rarely does interviews like this one, which is why I’m incredibly humbled having him on the WP Summit!

In this session you’ll learn:
• Why all WordPress sites are targets of hackers
• Why you’ll get hacked sooner or later
• How you can give hackers headaches
• What tools you can use to protect your site with no technical knowledge

Pere Hospital - How Entrepreneurs Can Protect Their Online Business

Pere Hospital is the founder and CTO of Cloudways, our web host for the WP Summit. Cloudways is a new kind of hosting company. Unlike traditional companies like Bluehost or Hostgator, they provide cloud-based hosting.
This means, you can scale your server when you need it. When you know that you’re getting a lot of traffic because of a promo campaign, you upscale the server to have your site work smoothly. When traffic decreases after the promotion, you scale down your server and save money. Pretty amazing if you ask me!

In this session you’ll learn:
• How you should think about web security
• How hackers work
• What you need to ask your web host about web security
• Basic ways to protect your WordPress site

Welcome to the closing keynote of The WP Summit!
Today we’re closing the WP Summit with Rand Fishkin, the founder of Moz. Rand is one of the world’s leading experts on Inbound Marketing, which is the exact topic of this talk. Enjoy!

Rand Fishkin - Marrying Inbound Marketing And WordPress

In this session you’ll learn:
• What inbound marketing is and how it works
• How you organically attract backlinks and referrals
• How being honest and humble affects your marketing
• Why building relationships is one of the best SEO tools