We’ll talk about what trends to look out for in 2018, how to create content that resonates and converts, and current SEO tips and tricks to be found on the web.

It’s common to view your competitors in business as barriers. However, if you shift your thinking to view your competitors as opportunities for collaboration, something unique can happen. In this talk, Tim and I share our experience from partnering with competitors in a crowded niche WordPress market, through “Coopetition”, to help us grow our business to over 7 figures annually and achieve success. In this talk we will be sharing our journey of how working together has helped explode our WordPress business. Through the world’s eyes, the people we partner with are competitors. We’ll be sharing some of the benefits of coopetition, as well as some practical ways that listeners can turn their competition into coopetition.

Lessons learned from developing and maintaining the GitHub Updater plugin. How I deal with bugs, feature requests, issues, PRs, user support, and more. Everything I learned about plugin support I learned in the operating room. Interacting with surgical patients and their families involves a similar skill set as maintaining an open source software project. I’m not so certain that the reverse is true so as the saying goes, “Don’t try this at home.” But come find out my surgical pearls to software support.

You can’t fix what you don’t measure. How well is your WordPress site doing? How do you know? Google offers free analytics for all website owners. WordPress has several methods to set this up on our site. We will look at what you need to do to start collecting data, how to interpret what you collect and next steps for your business.

It’s the inconvenient truth that all aspiring bloggers must face – just because you write a great blog post, that doesn’t mean anybody is going to read it. You could pay for traffic through things like Facebook ads and Google Pay Per Click, but is that really a viable solution to increase your readership? If you’re like most bloggers, simply boosting your posts on Facebook probably isn’t the answer. In this session, we’ll talk about how your blog can help you build a large, loyal following of interested readers, and then what to do with those people once they get to your website.

WooCommerce 101 In this fundamentals course, we will be going over how to set up and configure WooCommerce. Topics covered will be: Why WooCommerce? How to Install A walk through the settings Set up your store and add products And how to run your store.

Mindfulness – “The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” Security can seem intimidating and complex for many, but we shouldn’t (can’t) let that stop us from doing everything we can to secure our WordPress sites and ourselves. After all, our websites are often part of our livelihood. In this session Adam addresses the “big picture” of personal and website security and breaks down the fundamental tasks needed for a strong security plan online. He provides an actionable checklist on what audience members can implement immediately to better secure themselves online in addition to their WordPress websites. After attending this session, audience members will have a better understanding of personal security online and how it affects website security as a whole, as well as steps they can take to mitigate risk in the future.

Has a client ever wasted your time in a consulting session? Ever had a one-hour consultation turn into 3? Have you experienced the sinking feeling that comes when you leave the consultation and realize you failed to ask a key question? This talk provides answers to these issues and more. Attendees will leave with a clear, memorable outline to manage the client consultation.

An introduction to using WordPress

Security on a Shoestring: Kim will talk about a number of free WordPress plugins for increasing website security that folks are not likely to know about. These include IQ Block Country, NinjaFirewall and iThemes Security (free version – This one is well known, but worth talking about). Also included will be a discussion of testing WordPress websites for vulnerabilities with WPScan. Kim will wrap up with a discussion of Let’s Encrypt for free SSL’s.