Category: torquemag.io

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Today, we’re going to dive headfirst into the world of affiliate marketing, where clicks can turn into cash and partnerships can pave the way for growing your brand, business, and website. Our guest today is Dustin Howes, the chief coach at performancemarketingmanager.com, and he’s going to tell us how bloggers, influencers, and savvy entrepreneurs can turn their passion into profit by promoting products they love. Boy that’s a good alliteration there.

Dustin, how are you doing today?

Dustin: Great. Doctor Popular, so good to be hanging out with you again. I miss our days at WP Engine, man.

Doc: Right on, let’s kick this off. Why don’t you tell us how you got into WordPress?

Dustin: Oh, absolutely. It’s been a good, I don’t know, 12 years since I started my own site, like I went to a meetup in Austin and they were talking about starting your own blog and people were teaching you how to do it and I remember it being pretty difficult to create and spin up your own WordPress site. And since then, I feel like WordPress has just gotten so much easier through the years.

But that was my first foray in digital marketing world. And eventually, I became an affiliate manager over at WP Engine, and really engulfed myself into the WordPress community, going to the WordCamps and hanging out with that kind of folk, and really enjoyed the camaraderie of the WordPress community itself. 

Doc: When you got into WordPress, you were saying you went to a meetup in Austin about building a website. Was that to get into marketing, or is that just you were kind of doing it for just your own personal blog, and then marketing kind of came out of that?

Dustin: Well, I’d already got my start in affiliate marketing and I’d watched all these folks making millions of dollars on their blogs and absolutely killing it, just making a living starting it. And I said, well, I mean, why can’t I just go and do that? So that’s what I started to go and do. And what it turned out to be is getting the groundwork to understand what affiliates actually go through and how hard it is to create an affiliate website and be an entrepreneur in that space. 

So I grew a lot of empathy for the affiliate partners that I work with today by learning what they have to go through in building a site. And so that first framework of creating my first blog turned into me creating five other sites at this point and getting better and better at WordPress and being the entrepreneur that I am today.

Doc: For our listeners, let’s go ahead and describe what affiliate marketing is, and what are some of the basic models of affiliate marketing?

Dustin: So in its essence, affiliate marketing is click and sales based traffic. Going from one website to another and then crediting the affiliate partner with a commission for that end sale. 

So let’s take, for example, you have a website that has traffic and that subject is electronics, right? You say this is the best computer, and why, and here’s where you can go and buy it. And that link goes to Amazon or a Best Buy or something of that nature, a place that actually has these things for sale. And that end user that read your blog and clicked through your link goes to that website, makes a purchase, and then that website kicks you back a commission of the sale.

So you might earn 5 to 20 percent of whatever the sale actually brought that company.

Doc: And that could be pay per sale, or you might get paid per click, or you might get paid per lead that you generate.

Dustin: Yeah, absolutely. All of the above are possibilities in affiliate programs. I highly suggest you pay per acquisition, a CPA, for the sale. Leads and clicks can get a little hairy if you’re creating affiliate programs that pay out on leads and clicks. It could get a little bit sketch in terms of fraud because there can be a lot of sites that join your affiliate program, bring you a whole bunch of clicks and leads that are fake and get paid and then leave you high and dry.

So when sales actually happen, that’s a much more dependable route for you as a company to be paying out just when you actually make money.

Doc: And I think for the point of today’s conversation, we’re going to focus on the affiliate side, the blog that’s sending the traffic to the larger companies. Is there a type of size that affiliates usually need to be? Is there such a thing as oh, you’re too big to be in affiliate marketing, or you’re too small to be in affiliate marketing?

Dustin: I don’t think there’s ever a too small, the too big is debatable. So let’s start on the small side. When you’re just starting as an entrepreneur in affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing might be your key to getting your first earnings on your website. Your website might have low traffic and you’re trying to rank for certain keywords that you’re writing about. And so when you do that, affiliate marketing can be a great revenue source while you continue to build content. And eventually you get to a point where your traffic is in the hundreds of thousands of visits per year or even per month. And then you can start considering other avenues of traffic or ways to utilize the traffic that is coming in.

And that’s where things like AdSense come in, where you can earn just on images being up on your site and impressions, and you get paid on that. It’s much more minimal than affiliate marketing. And if you’re good at affiliate marketing on your website, then you really never go back to anything else. 

But then at the super level, when you’re getting hundreds of thousands of visitors per month and maybe even to the millions, now you have the availability to name your own prices for the pages that you’re promoting companies, and you can take on sponsorships for being on your website for extended periods of times, thousands of dollars to be sponsors on this page that is getting all this kind of traffic.

It’s really an evolution. But affiliate marketing is a great starting point and there are many companies out there, huge publications like CNET that are still using affiliate marketing today as their main source of revenue.

Doc: And I do want to let people know, we are going to dive into the WordPress side of things. After this break, we’re going to talk about plugins and benefits of WordPress. But before we do, just one more question, just kind of on broad affiliate marketing definitions and things like that. If someone listening were to get into affiliate marketing, if they’re interested in that, what sort of objectives or goals should they try starting off with or setting for themselves?

Dustin: I think the best advice I could give anybody that’s getting into creating content and developing their website is try to rank on Google first before becoming an affiliate. So, Adam Enfroy has an incredible journey around this where he would build a piece of content, let it rank for three months with organic links, and then go back and optimize it with affiliate links.

And that way, you give Google a chance to index your site and recognize you as an authoritative figure before you go and try to make money off of that site. And this is a really good strategy for those starting out. You don’t need to go and try to make every penny on every blog post that you create.

Create the content first, let it rank, and then come back to it at a later time when you have the time to optimize it for commissions.

Doc: Well, I think that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to continue our conversation with Dustin Howes, and we’re going to dive into the tools and benefits of using WordPress for affiliate marketing. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, chatting today with Dustin Howes. Howdy, Dustin.

Dustin: What’s up, Doc?

Doc: And we are back to talk about the WordPress side of things. We’ve been talking about affiliate marketing. We’ve been setting kind of the definitions for people like myself who maybe don’t know much about it.

And Dustin’s been explaining kind of the different models and the different practices you kind of want to do. And we definitely want to dive into what benefits WordPressers might have from affiliate marketing. So let’s start with that. Is WordPress a good platform for this type of thing?

Dustin: I would say it’s not the only solution, but like the major go to solution for affiliate marketers out there. So there are other Content Management Systems that could work with affiliate, but in my experience, it has been the easiest route to getting a website up, getting it ranking on Google and making your life easier in the long run when you’re building out new content, just because of the ease of what posts and whatever solution you have internally for maximizing the value of SEO, whether it be using RankMath or Yoast or whatever plugins. WordPress is just so simple in terms of making an affiliate’s life easy.

Doc: And my first hunch was going to be, you were going to say, yeah, there’s lots of plugins for this sort of thing, but you’re actually just mentioning the benefits of WordPress in general. It’s easier to spin up and it’s great for getting that SEO tuned. There’s a lot of tools for that, but let’s talk about the plugin side.

Is there like a plugin ecosystem for affiliate marketing or is that not really how this, this kind of a business works?

Dustin: There are definitely plugins that you should be utilizing. Obviously you have your optimization plugins, right, your WP Rocket or whatever you may be using to optimize the speed of your site, always beneficial because affiliate sites are going to rank higher on Google if they’re running faster.

So you need your good WordPress hosting, you need plugins that are maximizing the value of your site speed. But as far as affiliate plugins, one of my most, well, one of my most used in favor is Pretty Links. Thirsty Affiliates is also a good solution here, but Pretty Links allows me to make a link and then share it anywhere on the internet and redirect it through my affiliate link. And it makes it look a lot cleaner. It makes my work easier if I’m spreading the word about one product. And then they change the landing page and give me something else. I don’t have to go throughout the entire internet and change that URL. I just have to do it one time in Pretty Links, and it just makes my life so much easier changing it in one place on my site, and it changes it throughout my entire site. So Pretty Links is one of those must haves for me as an affiliate marketer.

Doc: I want to say I use Pretty Links on all my sites actually. And it’s super handy. I’m not using it for affiliate marketing. It’s very versatile. It’s free in the plugin repository, and it’s great for if you are on Instagram and you wanna create a very short link, you could say like, torque mag.io/newsletter.

And the newsletter could go to that longer form, even sending it off to like a MailChimp signup page or something. So Pretty Links is great. And I can totally see, I don’t use it for affiliate marketing, but I’m sure that’s very easy to see how going from just using it for link shortening, to using it for tracking links and shortening URLs and being able to manage those links after you’ve already shared them without having to, as you said, go through the internet and find every mention of it.

You could just change that, that one pretty link. And you don’t have to worry about the, you know, if the URL has changed, your URL can be just switched to forward to the new one.

Dustin: Yeah, it’s super easy. So Pretty Links is an absolute must. Another suite of my favorites are Syed Balkhi’s suite of plugins out there that he uses. He’s the best affiliate in the WordPress community. He started WP Beginner 10 plus years ago and became a monster affiliate for all these programs.

And then he started absorbing up a lot of plugins like WPForms and he created Monster Insights and the PopIt plugin. I can’t think of the name real quick. Doc, you got it?

Doc: The pop it plugin.

Dustin: OptinMonster, excuse me.

Doc: Oh OptinMonster. Yeah.

Dustin: All those are really great tools for affiliates to be recognizing how their site is, is doing, what traffic is the most valuable. And like WP Forms is great for opt-in situations and getting more into in-depth of where you get the initial sign up so that people come back is super important for the affiliate. You need to be building up your email list today so that you can optimize that traffic at a later time. 

Those kinds of plugins are great for building up your list so that you can promote something that you really believe in 10 emails down the line. Even when they leave your site, well after that, they’re gonna be coming back to you as an authority figure. And if you have their email address captured by one of those awesome plugins, it just makes your life so much easier.

Doc: And you touched on something that I think we could talk about here. There’s no rule saying that you have to be genuinely interested in what you’re setting up a blog for if your goal is to get into affiliate marketing, but I do imagine a lot of folks are really into horses, and they already have a blog that’s maybe doing well, and they want to just write about that, and then kind of start adding in affiliate links.

Is that sort of the normal progression of things, or do you find that people just find a hole in the market and say oh I think I can own that and try to spin up a blog around that?

Dustin: Two theories here, or two routes about this. One is you can blog as a business, like you can start blogging and creating a new site today and start blogging about something you really believe in or you don’t believe in. Like if you just see a niche in the market that you really want to get into that is untapped, then go for it.

But the best blogs and the best content out there is from people that have a passion about something and really want to be a part of that community and vertical. So yes, if you’re starting a blog about horses because you love horses, that is a great starting point. And then you can go and monetize it later with affiliate marketing.

But the best way to be looking for those partners that you could be working with that are based around horses is go and join an affiliate network, go join a big affiliate network like ShareSale or Impact, become an affiliate on their platform, and then you can search for all the merchants, advertisers that are out there that have a product that you could sell on your website easily. 

So for your horse folks, it might be saddles. Go and look for the best saddles out there and find a website that you want to send people to that has an affiliate program. Now, yeah, you could go search the ShareSales and the Impacts and the CJs of the world for advertisers in that space, or you can go directly to the brands that you really like.

Go down to the footer of their page and look for an affiliate program or ask customer support if they have an affiliate program if you can’t find it there on the footer. And then go and join those, those programs for the products that you really believe in. And if you don’t have to believe in the product to be a good affiliate, but it helps, if that makes sense.

Doc: On that note, we’re going to take one more short break, and when we come back we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Dustin Howes, and we’re going to talk about how to manage these tools using WordPress, so stay tuned for more right after the short break.

Doc: Welcome back to Press This. We are talking to Dustin Howes about affiliate marketing and WordPress. Dustin, we’ve talked a lot about affiliate management. Can you tell us what is affiliate management? Tell us a little bit more about that.

Dustin: Yeah, you got it. So affiliate management is the other side of the equation. All the companies that you’re out there promoting as an affiliate need somebody to manage the partnerships that are coming in. So for example, WP Engine, I was running their affiliate program for a few years there. And I was working with all the affiliates that were driving traffic to WP Engine to create the sales that have built it up to what it is today.

So affiliate management there aren’t a lot of courses out there for brands to go and take and learn how to effectively run an affiliate program, but I’ve created one out there. There are literally hundreds of courses that you can take as an affiliate to learn how to be a good affiliate.

But when it comes to the affiliate management side of things, and being a good affiliate manager, you either have to go to a conference or learn this on your own, working for an agency or somebody else. So my particular skill set is running affiliate programs, and it just so happens that being that I’m an affiliate myself, and I’ve worked with so many affiliates in the past, that’s why I could talk about being an affiliate and how to be a good affiliate.

Doc: Yeah, how best to manage Dustin and other Dustins out there.

Dustin: That’s right.

Doc: Yeah, and we did kind of specify earlier that parts of the conversation were about the affiliate side of things, being the people sending the traffic. So it is kind of interesting that you said there’s not necessarily those resources out there for people who are like receiving the traffic on how to deal with those affiliates.

So that’s kind of cool that you have a program out there just for that kind of specific thing.

Dustin: Absolutely, and it’s a do it yourself course that I sell at performancemarketingmanager.com, and this goes soup to nuts of like creating an affiliate program, launching it, and then scaling it up. So one of those things that a lot of companies do is they don’t come up with a good strategy before they start an affiliate program and that is a recipe for disaster because if you think you can just create an affiliate program and all these affiliates are going to show up at your doorstep, you’re absolutely wrong.

So, it is hard work, creating an affiliate program that people actually want to join. So, there’s a lot of intricate details that go into developing that affiliate program the right way.

Doc: Let’s wrap this up. How can people find you online?

Dustin: You can go to dustinhowes.com. Find me at me@dustinhowes.com. And if you’d like. Any advice, being an affiliate or an affiliate manager, or you’re thinking about creating an affiliate program, go to dustinhowes.com/pod15, and I will give you 15 minutes of my time for free to point you in the right direction and help you on this journey.

Because that’s what I like to do. I like to hang out with new people and help them in any way I can.

Doc: Right on. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dustin. It’s been really interesting learning about this side of things.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: Affiliate Marketing Insights with Dustin Howes appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

I’m going to tell you a quick secret. I love signing up for newsletters. I think I’m a bit of an anomaly here, but if we aren’t close personal friends, I’m probably not going to follow you on Mastodon or Instagram or Facebook, but I won’t think twice before I sign up for your newsletter.

If you have a restaurant, here’s my email. You got advice for game design? Sign me up. Weekly WordPress news roundups in my inbox? Don’t mind if I do. So I’m already sold on the advantages of communicating to your customers directly through email. But I thought some of you listeners might need some encouragement to explore the newsletter space.

So I’m happy to say that today’s guest is Lesley Sim. The co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a plugin that turns your WordPress site into a powerful newsletter CMS. And we’re going to talk about why you should be getting into newsletters. 

Lesley, let’s kick things off with just telling us how you got into WordPress.

Lesley Sim: Hey, Doc. Thanks so much for having me on. I always love coming on these podcasts and live streams. My WordPress origin story, wow. I think my first exposure with WordPress was in 2016. I was trying to build a site for a craft beer business that I had just started and given where I am now, you can tell that that didn’t work out.

As it turns out, craft beer breweries are hard to run. so we were looking for a cheap way to build our site and that’s kind of the first time I stumbled upon WordPress. And craft beer didn’t work out and I ended up going deeper down the WordPress hole, starting a digital agency where I did marketing and build sites for clients.

And then just before the pandemic hit, I kind of got sick of that. I’d been doing it for a few years at that point and dealing with clients. Sometimes it’s really fun and fulfilling and sometimes it can be really frustrating. And I was like, Okay, I’ve given this services thing a good go, maybe it’s time to try my hand at products.

And since I’ve been working in WordPress for a while now, I was like, okay, maybe I’ll try building a WordPress plugin. And that’s very, very briefly kind of how I got started and how Newsletter Glue came to be because the WordPress plugin that after some trial and error, I decided to build was Newsletter Glue.

Doc Pop: I don’t know if I knew that you were a craft brewery business owner before this. That’s really cool. I always love hearing these extra little stories at the beginning of the show. So, is the craft brewery, how you got into, I need to make a newsletter plugin, or was that, after you already kind of dived into WordPress, you saw this need for that?

Lesley Sim: After I’d already kind of dived into WordPress, so I’ve been doing WordPress for a while and newsletters started getting more and more popular. I think as RSS kind of faded into the background a little bit, which I’m personally really sad about because I always loved RSS, I think people needed a way to stay updated and newsletters were it.

So I think around 2019, 2020 was when Substack started becoming really popular. And yeah, so I kind of wanted to do my own newsletter and then that’s kind of how I got the idea for Newsletter Glue.

Doc Pop: Yeah, definitely pouring out some craft beer for RSS and I was a heavy RSS user, so that might explain why switching to newsletters where it was basically my email now is the RSS aggregator. Right. That’s kind of how it probably works. It’s like something like that.

I mean, I’m sharing my personal information where with RSS I didn’t have to do that, but that’s maybe what you and I have in common with why we got into newsletters. Can you tell us about what is Newsletter Glue and what gap does it fill in the market?

Lesley Sim: Newsletter Glue works with publishers, media companies, and newsrooms, and we help them connect their email service provider, like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, ActiveCampaign to WordPress. That lets them build their newsletters inside of WordPress, the way they’re already writing their articles. So the way I think about it is, if you have a team of editors and writers who are already spending all their time in WordPress writing their articles it’s kind of a pain for them to then switch brains.

To log into MailChimp, for example, and fiddle around with that editor and write their emails in there, and historically that’s always taken a long time and it’s less intuitive because you have to write in a separate pane than what you’re seeing. So we do a bit of all of that. Writers can instead just log into WordPress or they’re probably already logged into WordPress and just spin up a new post or a new newsletter inside of WordPress and start writing. And that experience is a lot faster. There’s no onboarding needed if you have new writers, because everybody, most professional writers, freelance writers already know how to use WordPress.

And the other side benefit of that is that now all of your newsletters are really deeply integrated into your WordPress site, so that means if you want to do paywall stuff or SEO stuff with your newsletters, you now can. Whereas previously, all of your newsletter archives were inside of MailChimp and it’s a different URL and you don’t really have much control over that.

You’re not able to have subscription forms on your newsletter archives because they’re sitting in MailChimp and on and on and on. So just having that deep integration is really huge for growth and branding and all of that stuff.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said about the integration in your site. You’re talking about using the SEO from the newsletters as a benefit to your site, and that’s interesting. But you briefly touched on one thing I just kind of want to address here is MailChimp and Substack. If they go away, which we’ve seen very similar services go away recently, if they go away, then you’re maybe at a difficult position, right?

Because Substack hosts your newsletter and MailChimp has hosted versions and then the version in the email box, but there’s not going to be that archived version where if you’re using something like Newsletter Glue, you can, depending, I guess, on the privacy settings, the public settings that you’ve allotted to each post, you can kind of keep those hosted and people can still find them later, right?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, that’s exactly it. And if you wanna migrate email service providers, then again, same thing, right? You don’t have to manually migrate ’cause everything’s already on your WordPress site.

Doc Pop: You’re talking about email service providers. I feel like we’re near the end of the first section here, but let’s try to get into that. If I’m using Newsletter Glue and I’m going to have to have a host for my site, which I would have to have anyway, am I also going to have to pay big money for an email server of some sort?

I don’t know how that works.

Lesley Sim: Yeah. So, all of the customers that we work with already have MailChimp accounts or ActiveCampaign accounts, and at the size that they’re at, it’s typically really, really hard for them to move off it. They might have a whole bunch of segments, tags, automation set up in there already.

But at the same time, they don’t like the day to day work, doing the day to day work inside of those platforms because they’re not really built for easy writing. And so that’s kind where we come in and help with that day to day newsletter operations.

Doc Pop: So, if I have a site, a WordPress site, again, you don’t have to pay hosting for that, but I would also have something like a MailChimp just to handle the newsletter serving. And what’s the integration like for that?

Lesley Sim: On our end, it’s super easy. So they just need an API key and key that in, and then we connect everything for them behind the scenes.

Doc Pop: Okay. And you probably do that like in the dashboard, in the WordPress dashboard, right?

Lesley Sim: Yes.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I love it. Okay, that totally makes sense. I haven’t used Newsletter Glue yet, but I can totally kind of imagine what it’s like there, because I’ve used several other WordPress plugins. When we come back, we’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, I’m gonna continue talking to Lesley Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue.

We’re gonna talk about why you need a newsletter in the age of social media. And we’re going to talk also a little more deeply about how this is going to integrate with your WordPress site and kind of questions about new features that are coming to Newsletter Glue. So stay tuned for more after the short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to Lesley Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue, a wonderful newsletter plugin that turns your WordPress website into basically, I don’t know, Lesley, what do you call it? A newsletter CMS?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, I would say it’s a newsletter builder, but newsletter CMS sounds good too.

Doc Pop: We talked about my love for newsletters, and I definitely think there’s a place for newsletters. I’m hoping maybe, Lesley, you could try to tell some of our listeners who might be putting a lot of energy into Instagram posts or TikTok videos, and they’re putting all their energy into there.

And maybe they think newsletters and email are kind of dead. What would you tell them? What statistics do you have saying, saying, actually, these are still really common? Or, you know, what would you try to tell someone to kind of convince them that they need to be in the newsletter business?

Lesley Sim: Wow, that’s hard. they’re just slightly different marketing channels. With social media platforms, that tends to be kind of where you go if you don’t have your own audience. So you’re going on a different platform to try to get found in the first place, but once you’ve grown an audience for yourself, you really want to bring them into your world, your universe, your Marvel cinematic universe. And that’s kind of where newsletter come in. 

Because again, when you’re on a social media platform and you’re trying to get discovered, you’re at the mercy of the algorithms. Once your subscribers or your loyal customers or loyal followers know about you, they do want to know about if you’re a donut shop your Friday, you know, donut special. Or if you’re a hairdresser, there are monthly discounts. If you come in every month, you get a 20 percent discount or something like that. 

They don’t want to have missed it because the algorithm didn’t show it to them. And so that’s where newsletters come in really handy. So you bring in, let’s say, something like 10 percent of your social media following into your newsletters and they’re your most avid fans. You can ensure that whenever you have a promotion or a discount or even just a story or an update to share, those people are going to get it. And that’s kind of the best way to build rapport with them, build a deeper relationship in a way that you just can’t on social media. 

And you own those relationships, right? Because people have opted in, they’ve actively given you your email address. They want to hear from you, which is a very different vibe from social media where they kind of are scrolling randomly happen upon you and follow you and then forget about you five minutes later. 

So I would say that’s not an either or kind of thing. It’s not like you either do Instagram or you do newsletters. It’s more like a funnel where, Instagram and TikTok and social media in general is kind of at the top of the funnel where you are going out of your universe into someone else’s universe to find subscribers and followers and then you’re drawing them in deeper into your funnel via the newsletters and then you know at the end of the day to your shop whether that’s online or in person.

Doc Pop: I like that. It’s not either or I think that’s good. I have been stating things as if they’re binary, but like, yeah, Instagram is great for giving flavor to your business and communicating with your customers, maybe having a back and forth and giving them behind the scenes. But if I’m following an artist, I don’t want to find out about their Monday night art show on Tuesday morning. Because the algorithm messed things up. 

And similarly, if I’m following an artist and they have a new album coming out, I can’t click on a link from Instagram, not super easy, but in an email, totally could. So I like that idea that maybe do both. It’s not one or the other, but it sounds like newsletters have a little bit more of an actionable kind of like, here’s a time dependent thing, or here’s a link we want you to click.

And that maybe is their benefit. Does that sound good?

Lesley Sim: Yeah and I think as your marketing operations grow then obviously you can do more. We’ve got lots of publications using us that publish multiple daily newsletters. And so that’s something that you can aspire to. So it’s not just last minute discounts and stuff like that.

Doc Pop: This is another thing too, I’m thinking very specifically about newsletters as a way to communicate to your customers, but there’s a whole generation of newsletters, post Substack, as you mentioned, there’s a whole generation of newsletter writers that are turning that maybe into income, like writing the newsletters isn’t a way to drive business, it is the business, and does Newsletter Glue support features like that?

Lesley Sim: Not directly, we do work well with a whole bunch of different paywall plugins and software. LeakyPaywall is one of them that we work really closely with, Memberful is another one that lots of our customers use, and so on.

Doc Pop: What about Patreon integration? Is there any kind of integration there?

Lesley Sim: Not right now, but that’s really interesting and I’ll have to look at it.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I’m a Patreon user so I’d love to talk to you about that afterwards. 

So let’s talk about some of the features that somebody can get from Newsletter Glue that might be missing from other things. Like I’m assuming you have Gutenberg integration in Newsletter Glue?

Lesley Sim: Yep. So that’s actually one of the big things about us. We use the block editor. So if you’re still using the classic editor, you’ll find that when you use us, you are faced with something a little bit new, which is the block editor. And one of our core features is that we have a whole bunch of different blocks that really dramatically speed up your workflow.

So customers, on average, say that they save one to two hours per newsletter using us, or you could also say that we cut your publishing time in half. And that’s just because a lot of them, when they’re building email digests, for example, they’re sharing links to their website or to other websites. If they had to do that in an email service provider, they would have had to manually upload the image, type out the heading, type out the excerpt, turn it into a link, and do that five times or ten times, depending on how many links they’re sharing in their newsletter.

With us, you just need to paste in the URL or you can set a bunch of features and filters and it automatically pulls out the articles from your site. And so that takes seconds instead of 20 minutes or half an hour, depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Yeah, so that’s kind of one of our main features.

And then also, once you’ve got your newsletter all set up, it’s really easy to hit publish and send the newsletter out from WordPress instead of having to go into Mailchimp to do it.

Doc Pop: Is that how you also manage your subscribers and things too, is through the WordPress dashboard? Or is that something you’d be using the MailChimp side of things to do?

Lesley Sim: That would be on the Mailchimp side of things. So we focus really heavily on the building part, like that kind of the daily work that you have to do to send out the newsletter. So we’ve also got really powerful automation features, so it’s kind of like RSS emails, which if people aren’t familiar with, basically you can set an RSS feed to send out as email notifications every time a new article is published.

While that feature has existed for a long time, it’s kind of always given me anxiety because you don’t have any control over what that final newsletter looks like. And so we built an email automation feature where, while you can also send it out automatically based on a certain time that you’ve set, you can also set it to just save as a draft.

And so this lets you automate 90 percent of the work or 99 percent of the work, and then go in that 1 percent, check that draft, send yourself a test email, update the subject line, and if you’re happy with it, then send it out. It saves a lot of time, but also prevents you from being scared that you’ve accidentally sent out something that you didn’t want to send out.

Doc Pop: I guess just one more question on that when you’re filling out this post or this newsletter form, is there also kind of like Yoast SEO integration if you have Yoast SEO so that it works later on down the line or is that kind of a separate thing?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, so because it’s just in the block editor, you can also use Yoast and do all of the keyword stuff and make it search engine optimized.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Leslie Sim about Newsletter Glue, and I guess we’ll just talk about the state of the industry, so stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host and Email Newsletter Addict, Doc Pop, I am talking to Lesley Sim, the co-founder of Newsletter Glue. And I think one of the things I want to talk about, kind of like changing gears a little bit, we talked about social media and websites, SEO, email newsletters.

We haven’t talked about podcasting, which is a thing that Lesley, I don’t know if you know I’m into, and you had just started a new podcast called Sticky. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Lesley Sim: Yeah, we recently moved to focus on media companies and newsrooms, like I mentioned earlier. Before that, we were kind of targeting anyone with a newsletter, which is kind of a classic business mistake. And so once we moved to focus on media companies and newsrooms, I quickly realized, oh, we need a new way of marketing to them.

And I wanted to provide really high quality content that would help people who are already professionals in the business and not just kind of, me for example, in my room studying my own newsletter for the first time. If I was like an amateur newsletter writer, I would need very different content from someone who has been writing a newsletter for 10 years for a large publication, for example.

And so, I quickly realized, okay, I can’t interview myself or we can’t rely on really basic experience when we write newsletter type articles anymore. And that was when the idea for the podcast came about because I realized that the best people to interview to get really high quality expert level content were expert industry operators.

And so, I’ve been lucky enough to have a whole bunch of customers and friends who have been in the industry for a while, and I got in touch with them and set up a whole bunch of different interviews. The podcast launched this week, the first episode drops next week, and I’m really excited.

The quality is really high, and I feel like even if you’ve been in the newsletter publishing business for the past 10 to 15 years, you’re still going to learn valuable insight and advice from the episodes, so I’m really excited about it.

Doc Pop: Who’s your first guest?

Lesley Sim: My first guest is Alyssa Doin. She used to be head of deliverability at ConvertKit. I think now she’s head of audience growth, still at ConvertKit. She’s been working in deliverability for many years now and has dug into some narrowly deliverability issues. And so we kind of covered that in the podcast. 

And I tried to keep it really, really actionable. So you really hear what you should do in this case? What should you do in that case? And I think I’ve already shared it with some people who are in the news industry and they’ve already found it really helpful.

Doc Pop: And speaking of actionable, if you are a marketer looking to get advanced advice on your email newsletter needs, you can go to sticky.fm to find out more or just look for Sticky on your podcasting app. Did I nail that?

Lesley Sim: Yes, that’s perfect.

Doc Pop: nailed it, And also, while we’re talking about call outs, you can follow Lesley on Twitter @lesley_pizza, or you can follow Newsletter Glue on Twitter as well. And I think on that, Lesley, I’m going to thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been great having you on. Is there anywhere else that you want to tell people to visit before we wrap up here?

Lesley Sim: Nope, that’s about it. NewsletterGlue.com is where you can find more about us.

Doc Pop: Right on. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Lesley. It’s been really great chatting with you. This is Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. Each week we have conversations with different folks in WordPress. Next week we’re going to be talking to Jeff Paul from 10Up about a new open source detector that he’s built so you can scan WordPress plugins and make sure they’re compliant for your needs. I’ll let him tell you more about it next week, but it’s gonna be a fun episode just about open source and business, and maybe what 10 Up is up to these days.

I’m also gonna be at WordCamp US, which will be already finished by the time you hear this podcast, but hopefully, if you were there, I got a chance to say hi to you.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: You Should be Using Newsletters with Lesley Sim appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Faust.js is a JavaScript framework made to unleash the power of WordPress for headless websites. Faust is one of the only, if not the only, JavaScript frameworks specifically built around headless WordPress, and Faust.js officially came out of beta on June 12th, 2023. And may even have some features coming up soon just in time for WordCamp US, which is happening next week. So my guest today is Joe Fusco, a Senior Software Engineer at WP Engine who’s working on Faust. And we are going to talk about some of these new features and what’s changed since Faust has come out of beta.

Joe, how are you doing today?

Joe Fusco: Good, Doc, thanks for having me.

Doc Pop: Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. Let’s kick this off with just letting us know, how did you get into WordPress? 

Joe Fusco: Yeah, of course. So my WordPress origin story, I started using WordPress in 2013 around version 3.5. At the time, I was just working on an idea that I had, just building out some minor sort of sites and tinkering around and actually got my foot in the door with a local agency in Rochester, New York, building some custom themes.

And from there, I got my first remote job working for Inksub, which is the company behind WPMU Dev, EduBlogs, and Campus Press. So I got a little time with each of those parts. So I worked for those companies and then from there, I actually moved down to Tampa, Florida, where I had an opportunity to work for a manufacturing company that was using WordPress not only for their marketing site, but kind of internally as well for a bunch of different tools. So I got my feet wet with Headless WordPress then.

I did a lot of custom development there. That was during the pandemic, so everything was switching to remote. I actually had an opportunity to come back to Rochester and that’s when I started working for WP Engine. So yeah, it’s been great ever since.

Doc Pop: You mentioned something there, I hadn’t thought about, but you were doing WordPress, working with some great themes and products. And then when you moved to Florida, you were still doing WordPress, but you were doing headless WordPress for a factory. Like that sounds really interesting to me and I feel like you gotta dive into that tidbit just a little more.

Joe Fusco: Absolutely. Yeah. So this opportunity, I just got an email one day saying, “Hey, we like your stuff on GitHub. Can we have you come down?” 

And I thought it was fake at first, it just seemed really spammy. And so I was like, yeah, sure, I’ll come down.

And they offered me a job. It’s with one of the world’s largest door manufacturers. They have a few buildings out in Tampa. And it was really surreal, moved the whole family down there, we were there for three years. And it was a lot of headless sort of components that we started to build out.

So the actual org, the marketing side was very familiar with WordPress. They were very much invested in WordPress. So using WordPress headless kind of made sense just given that we already had those systems set up at the time. So yeah, there was some pretty cool things that were created out of that, like some door configurators.

Doc Pop: I love this, thank you so much for diving into that. 

Joe Fusco: Oh yeah.

Doc Pop: I love that the story took this turn into the world’s largest door manufacturer and headless WordPress technology and it’s all tied together. Let’s get back into talking about Faust. I believe that Faust.js first, WP Engine first launched a version in late 2021.

Like September 2021. And just recently, a couple months ago, they have come out of beta with the official release of the product. Can you just tell our listeners what is Faust.js and what has happened in those few years between the start of the project and it coming out of beta?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so certainly, Faust.js originally started as a, I believe, a sort of a hackathon project and then evolved from there. Went through a few different sort of phases. One was with GQty, which is a GraphQL Client. From there, it just wasn’t the best tool for that time as we were scaling.

So we decided to switch to Apollo. And from there, we’ve been building out a lot of new features. Most recently coming out of beta, we just wanted to kind of indicate to the community that this is a production ready sort of framework, so while nothing specifically was tied to that 1.0 release, there have been some huge sort of ideas that have come out that we currently have RFCs for on the GitHub. 

Doc Pop: So let’s talk about these RFC’s. First off, I don’t see many requests for comments on plugins in the WordPress community. Oftentimes, it seems like maybe developers are listening, checking on Twitter or things like that. But, the actual kind of opening it up and getting feedback. That’s pretty interesting. Maybe that’s because this is such a big project that that’s why y’all are doing that.

But I was wondering before we get into the specific RFCs, maybe you could just tell us why did y’all go to GitHub and reach out for comments from users?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so Faust has been an open source project. However, it’s been sort of corporately sponsored by a WP Engine. So with that comes its own challenges. We have our own process internally, but we’re on GitHub open source, and there’s the whole open source culture.

Around that with other engineers contributing back. So there was really just a little bit of a gap that we were noticing with feedback and not everything being out in the open, or I guess you could say building in public with these decisions.

So wanted incorporate RFCs into our workflow. Get some feedback from the community directly and iterate just in public on these thoughts. So it’s been great so far. We’ve loved the feedback that has been provided and look forward to doing this more.

Doc Pop: One of the first tickets that I saw was a request for comments on React components to Gutenberg blocks. This document provides a detailed proposal for converting existing React components into Gutenberg blocks. People listening should know what Gutenberg blocks are, but these are the block-based editing that WordPress has pivoted to. Can you tell us about what the proposal here is for?

Joe Fusco: The React components to Gutenberg blocks. This is sort of the next evolution of the React Gutenberg bridge, if you will, and essentially what we want to do is take existing React components that are in a Next application and just have those kind of automatically sync over to WordPress. So, if you have a Gutenberg block created in one spot. You don’t have to go and duplicate that and install a plugin and have it on both sides with duplicate code. So we really want Faust to be able to handle that and facilitate that sort of connection between the two ecosystems, if you will.

Doc Pop: And what are the challenges with doing something like that?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so challenges so far, I mean, we’re definitely still sort of discovering different things with this, but we’ve built some POCs so far and getting us like 90 percent of the way there. So some of the challenges right now, one of the big ones is naming. I know that that’s kind of like not a technical thing, but just, what do we call this thing?

Naming’s always hard. But beyond that, trying to make WordPress think that this block, that WordPress doesn’t normally look for blocks like that are remotely somewhere else, but just getting it to play nicely with WordPress. So as far as WordPress concerns, it would just be a traditional sort of block that you would create maybe with the WordPress helper. I think it’s like NPX create block. 

Doc Pop: In the request for comments, have you all gotten any feedback on this specific issue that has helped your team or has shown that there’s a priority that you didn’t expect to hear about?

Joe Fusco: Not at the moment or not yet. I think a lot of the conversation so far has just been sort of conceptualizing what this idea is, because we’re in this space now where like, no one’s really done anything like this, from what I could see. So a lot of innovation here. And with that comes sort of building those mental models for the community to understand.

Doc Pop: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. This is definitely uncharted territory, as you’re talking about, even with naming. Naming parts of it is difficult, and there’s a lot of working parts, but also I feel like Gutenberg and the Block Editor is still maybe a moving target. Has that been kind of an issue when you’re developing something around Gutenberg that there’s a change from core that was unexpected, or is Gutenberg pretty stable these days?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, great question. So in the beginning, when I joined the team, yes, there was absolutely some changes that were happening that were kind of setting us back a little bit, just different sort of schemas and whatnot. I would say this year, it’s been pretty stable, at least with the parts that we’re utilizing of WordPress.

So it’s been a lot better. We’re really only focusing on those production ready things, but still keeping our ear close to the bleeding edge features of Gutenberg.

Doc Pop: And that’s a good spot for us to take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to continue our conversation with Joe Fusco about Faust.js and Headless WordPress, so stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, we’re talking to Joe Fusco from WP Engine about Faust.js and what’s happening with the request for comments for some proposed changes. And we were talking earlier in the show about how not many of the plugins that I follow put out requests for comments that I see, but maybe they do, and I’m not that tuned into it, but we’re talking about the ones that are being put out by the Faust.js crew now, and we talked about one RFC for React components to Gutenberg blocks, another one that I think is worth bringing up is Next.js, AppRouterSupport, and Faust. Joe, can you tell us what is the proposal here?

Joe Fusco: The Next. js App Router support and Faust proposal. We’ve done a bit of research into just seeing how we can support the new App Router feature in Next.js. So with that, we propose some possible solutions here. 

But essentially, what we’re trying to do is AppRouter is using React server components. So what that means is we can kind of fetch data from WordPress on the server, rather than making one big sort of GraphQL query to grab everything as you can currently see in our current examples on the Faust repo. So yeah, we’re all really excited about this.

It kind of opens Faust up to be more framework agnostic as well. Just being able to support React server components in general. So, you can imagine maybe you have some custom fields on a post and maybe some custom fields somewhere else or like a menu. Ideally, we want files to be able to handle fetching those or at least be able to provide utilities to help developers sort of lower that friction to getting started with WordPress and headless.

Doc Pop: And I see as part of the proposal, it’s saying that with the introduction of AppRouter, there is a new file called head.Js that has custom support for fetching metadata, which should help users with SEO. Can you talk a little bit about the benefits there?

Joe Fusco: We’ve been working on or just kind of brainstorming how we want to handle this. So SEO is a huge part of WordPress, lots of SEO plugins, and really on the headless side SEO is not, it’s not really prioritized, at least with headless WordPress. It’s kind of like roll your own sort of solution.

So we want Faust to be able to fill that gap and we think that this metadata API could definitely help us get there.

Doc Pop: And also as part of this change, you mentioned it would help keep Faust agnostic. And I’m seeing here that that’s going to help plugin developers and people who use plugins. Can you talk about what this change means? Why AppRouter support could help plugins work better with Faust?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, yeah, certainly. With this proposal, it’s somewhat of a paradigm shift. We don’t think so much like replacing how Faust is currently set up, but more so like just offering more utilities and a helper. So you can imagine a WordPress plugin has some custom settings. Faust provides a tool to just quickly grab those on the front end in your Next app. Yeah, just kind of help facilitate that connection between those two ecosystems of WordPress and Next.

Doc Pop: The WordPress Rest API was released in 4.7. I can’t remember if it was maybe 2016. And I’m just kind of curious about what GraphQL, ’cause we’re talking about that a lot with Faust.js. What does GraphQL offer that maybe people couldn’t get from the REST API that’s in WordPress core?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, yeah, great question. GraphQL allows, I would say the biggest thing, without getting too much into what GraphQL is, but I just shaping your data like how you want it. So I can decide like, hey, I only want X, Y, and Z to be returned from WordPress. I can send a request that just has those things in the order I want them.

And GraphQL through WP GraphQL plugin will provide that in the exact sort of shape that I want. So I’m not having to filter through a bunch of fluff in a response. That might be like REST. There’s a lot of extra stuff there.

Doc Pop: WordCamp US, I mentioned at the top of the show, WordCamp US is coming up, as far as when we’re recording, it’s next week. I’m just kind of curious if, first off, if you’re planning on going to WordCamp US and if people can reach you there. And secondly, if there’s going to be maybe any Faust or GraphQL representation there, like at the WP Engine booth, or any maybe new announcements coming out about that.

Joe Fusco: Yeah, yeah, certainly. So I will definitely be heading to WordCamp US. Pretty excited about that. This will be my second one. I think my other one was in Philadelphia in 2015. But yeah, I will be there, happy to answer any questions, I’ll be hanging around the WP Engine booth. There will be some other folks with me, I believe it’s Jeff Everhart and Jordan Maslin, so definitely come and say hi and pick our brains.

Doc Pop: WP Engine often has great swag. I haven’t seen any, but are there gonna be any stickers or anything for Faust? I don’t know if that community kind of has its own branding yet.

Joe Fusco: So, I don’t believe that we’ll have right now any Faust specific stickers. I do know that there will be other swag there, but yeah, we’re kind of at the beginning of just starting to somewhat brand Faust a little bit as it matures.

Doc Pop: On that topic, if people are interested, if they’re listening to this and they’re interested in Faust, what is maybe a good thing for them to do to learn about it and kind of dive in a little bit to try it out?

Joe Fusco: We would love to have y’all, anyone interested in trying it out. I would say the best way is to just visit our site, faustjs.org. You can head over there to the Getting Started section, and it’ll walk you through one of our example projects, where you can just set it up with a single command and get it running and see how the data flows and works there.

Doc Pop: For that sample project, it’s web based. Do you know if that’s the same as the WordPress, I think it’s called, I don’t know if it’s the WordPress sandbox, but like the kind of online web version of WordPress where you can kind of try it out without actually hosting it. Are y’all using the same thing there?

Joe Fusco: So we don’t have any of the WordPress Playgrounds set up on our current site, but that is something that I’m personally looking at and I’ve been geeking out about too. So I have a Code Pen I could share after this, with a link that has the Faust WordPress plugin set up with GraphQL in the WordPress Playground.

So that’s definitely a quick way to check out the WordPress side of things.

Doc Pop: On the website that you were just mentioning, can people also find a link to the GitHub? Or should we give them a quick link for that as well?

Joe Fusco: Yeah, I can add a link to that, but yeah, GitHub is WPEngine.Faustjs, and that houses our NPM packages and the WordPress plugin, so come and check it out,

Doc Pop: We’re going to take one more quick break, and when we come back, we’re going to wrap up our conversation with Joe Fusco about Faust.Js, GraphQL, and Headless WordPress, so stay tuned right after this short break. 

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, we’re talking to Joe Fusco about Faust.js and some of the things that are coming. We’ve talked about the request for comments. We’ve talked about officially coming out of beta. We’ve talked about WordCamp US. And I guess the last thing I wanna ask Joe is I’m always curious when there’s new technology like this, if there’s ways for me to kind of see it in the wild.

Are there any good examples you can think of Faust.js being used in the wild for people to kind of play around with, or at least just hear about the story of how it’s being used.

Joe Fusco: Yeah, absolutely. So we’re really happy with the amount of adoption that Faust is getting so far. So much so that even WP Engine right now is utilizing Faust and hosted on our Atlas platform. So definitely check that out, see how blistering fast it is and yeah, it’s really cool. 

On faustjs.org, we are planning to add a little showcase section that highlights some of those awesome sites that are currently using Faust. And yeah, one of those being our main site, WPEngine.com, on the Atlas platform as well. 

You don’t need to be on WP Engine to use Faust. Just want to clarify that. It can be used with any sort of platform. But we do feel that Atlas is the best environment for Faust to kind of be hosted on.

Doc Pop: And we didn’t talk about Atlas in particular. Do you want to quickly tie in the difference between like Atlas and Faust? 

Joe Fusco: Yeah, so Atlas is WP Engine’s headless framework. So that’s like, if you want to host a WordPress site, and the Node side, the next step, Atlas is where you want to go. There’s also a bunch of other tools that are offered with that, such as Atlas Search. It’s pretty powerful, a lot of awesome features going into that and actively being developed.

Doc Pop: Well, that’s a great spot for us to wrap up this conversation with Joe Fusco. If you’d like to learn more about Faust.js, you can go to faustjs.org. You can also find them on GitHub. And I’m sure if you look around on Twitter and other places, you’ll be able to find people talking about it as well.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

The post Press This: How Faust.js Listens to the Community appeared first on Torque.

Welcome to Press This, the WordPress community podcast from WMR. Each episode features guests from around the community and discussions of the largest issues facing WordPress developers. The following is a transcription of the original recording.

Powered by RedCircle

Doc Pop: You’re listening to Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. Each week we spotlight members of the WordPress community. I’m your host, Doc Pop. I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine, and my contributions over on TorqueMag.Io where I get to do podcasts and draw cartoons and tutorial videos. Check that out.

You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, your favorite podcasting app or you can download episodes directly at wmr.fm. 

Wherever you look online these days, it seems like the web is consolidating into fewer and fewer pillars. Now, on this podcast, we often focus on ways to optimize your WordPress website or improve your SEO ranking for Google. But on this episode, we’re going to just talk about a philosophy that celebrates individuality, a realm of freedom and expression that might challenge our perceptions of the WordPress user experience.

Today, we are going to be talking about the IndieWeb, which is a group of web designers and users who are creating the type of web that they’d like to see, a non corporate web. The existence of an IndieWeb, implies the existence of a dependent web. And so these are the folks that are trying to fix that.

So today, we are going to be talking to David Wolfpaw, a website mechanic for FixUpFox, as well as a theme and plugin developer and a contributor for the WordPress Community Team. David, how are you doing today?

David Wolfpaw: I’m doing very well, yourself?

Doc Pop: I’m doing great. I’d love to kick this off by just hearing about how you got into WordPress.

David Wolfpaw: Absolutely. I’ve been doing web development for over 20 years now, looking back before WordPress was around. But I didn’t actually get into WordPress until 2008. So I’d been around for about five years at that point. I’d been using other CMSs. I’d been doing a lot of PHP coding, you know, separate of using any CMS.

And quite honestly, I just wanted to try out a few different tools for managing my own personal website at the time. I was already blogging prior to that, but I was doing blogging in the manner of just writing new pieces of content at the start of an HTML page and uploading it to a server. So finding that there was a tool specifically built for that, it was pretty easy to get on. But I also found that when I started using WordPress, I brought a lot of my own existing habits to the WordPress space. 

So for example, when I built my first WordPress website, I had no idea that there was a navigation system built into the dashboard. So I went in and edited the header.php file every time I wanted to change a link to a page or something. So, you know, not everything is immediately apparent to someone who’s not used the software.

Doc Pop: And WordPress is still your main CMS, or do you tend to kind of explore Joomla and other CMSs as well?

David Wolfpaw: No. WordPress is still my main CMS. I have worked on some Drupal sites before along with some other CMSs and other non-blogging non-site builder platforms. But I continue to return to WordPress time and time again.

Doc Pop: And let’s get into that main topic. What is the IndieWeb in your definition?

David Wolfpaw: Yeah, so I would first direct anybody to visit IndieWeb.org to find out information about a wide variety of IndieWeb related topics. There’s a whole section specifically devoted to WordPress there. 

My personal definition of the IndieWeb is any site that the user is building for themselves for their own purposes, that doesn’t just mean like personal use, but it could also mean for business use, that is disconnected from a third party centralized service. What I mean by that is you are building your own website or using your own social media that is hosted elsewhere, then building a Facebook page to promote your business or using Squarespace to build a website for yourself. Those things have their own uses and their own values, but you have a lot less control over them.

Doc Pop: And what are some of the other CMSs that are part of the IndieWeb? If Squarespace would be a third party that you’re dependent on, what are some of the CMSs out there that are popular in the IndieWeb community?

David Wolfpaw: One big part of it, I guess one thing that I didn’t bring up is that, usually it’s things that you are self-hosting. But I do wanna make a distinction that you do not need to be self-hosting, to do something that you’d consider part of that or at least I don’t think so.

But that you have the opportunity to self-host. So you might use the Ghost CMS, for instance, or WordPress.com. And you may have, those companies host it for you, but when it comes to platforms like WordPress or Ghost, two that I would consider very popular in that realm, you have the opportunity to self host them if you want.

And also you have data portability. So if I start a website on WordPress.com, and I decide later that I want to self host that website, I can do so without losing any of my content, because WordPress has led the way in making data portability very important when it comes to your content online so I can easily take all of my content and move it to my own site.

Doc Pop: That rings true to me. I feel like I’ve talked to Tontek throughout the years about the IndieWeb and heard that self hosting was kind of a big part of it. I always thought it was like a requirement. But the way you just phrased it kind of makes me think the reason I don’t use Twitter anymore is maybe because I want to be able to own my content and move it around and not be dependent on someone. 

And even though I’m not hosting my Mastodon instance, I could, and the same reason I have my personal website on WordPress instead of on some other places, I’m not dependent on that other place in terms if they make a policy change or break something, I can always have my website under my control, but beyond that, I also have the option.

I’m not self hosting. I can’t imagine self hosting my site, but I have that option. So I think the data portability and all that kind of goes together. And just because I’m not hosting my own site doesn’t mean that maybe I’m not still following some of the principles that are building philosophies of the IndieWeb.

David Wolfpaw: Absolutely, I would agree with that. One example, earlier this year, Automatic hired Matthias, I don’t think I’ve heard his last name out loud, Pfefferle, and if I’m mispronouncing it, Matthias, I’m sorry. Specifically to work on ActivityPub related plugins for WordPress, both for WordPress.org users, but also for people on WordPress.com. 

And I’m highlighting that as the larger, what I would consider a more centralized company in terms of if you’re hosting on WordPress.com, you are bound to they’re decision making about the hosting platform, but you still have that ability to do some of the more IndieWeb things such as communicate cross platform. 

The real reason I want to make that distinction that I don’t think hosting is the only thing is it has a lot more in my mind to do with what you can do with the things that you have. A good example is that without using a third party tool that’s just double posting things, and I’m just going to say this is notwithstanding any of the weird confusion going on with centralized social media right now, which, I’m sure all the listeners know, you can’t just make an Instagram post and have that show up as a Twitter post as well.

You can’t post a story on Snapchat and have that also be available for people on Facebook. But when it comes to the IndieWeb, you can do things like that. I can use my Mastodon account to listen to music from a FunkWale instance, which is a decentralized music platform. There’s things like Peertube, so I can I use my account on my Mastodon instance to comment on people’s YouTube channels, for instance, using Peertube, and I don’t need to maintain a separate account somewhere. 

Right now, a lot of the different platforms are seen as clones, I would say, like PixelFed is what a lot of people call an Instagram clone, which is a fair assessment, but I think it’s less, we’re just trying to copy what this platform has done, and more of a these are the ways people have decided to share themselves online the tools that we have, photo, video, text, audio, and there just happens to be a centralized company that’s done that first.

Doc Pop: You mentioned the idea of how we would’ve done that before would’ve been like cross posting or double posting I think is a better way to put it. Where if you want something to go out to all the different places, you literally post it on Twitter and then you copy paste and you post it to Facebook or whatever.

And I like how you’re talking about this positive feature of the IndieWeb through the ActivityPub is how you don’t have to double posts. You can just choose how you follow things and choose how you share things. You could share on Pixel Fed and somebody following on Mastodon could interact with it.

And we are going to bring this back into WordPress because ActivityPub has great integrations with WordPress and there’s a lot of crossover and a lot of potential for how we’ll be able to share and comment. And do all sorts of powerful things from WordPress while still having something that feels like the web we know today.

Just a decentralized version of it, and we’re gonna get back to that after this short break. So stay tuned for more with our conversation with David Wolfpaw, right after this.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop. Today, I’m talking to David Wolfpaw, a website mechanic for FixUpFox, and we are talking about the IndieWeb, and we’re gonna talk about how the IndieWeb can help keep the web weird and how WordPress can be part of that. Right before the break, we talked about plugins that are available and the potential for WordPress to kind of crossover with things outside of WordPress.

David, let’s get into that. What sort of tools are there to help WordPress users join the IndieWeb?

David Wolfpaw: The first thing that I would clarify is I think that if you are hosting your own WordPress site, you are already de facto part of the IndieWeb. You are doing all of the things that I would consider core to the IndieWeb ethos. But you probably want to go beyond that. You probably want to discuss ways that you can interact elsewhere or that you can do more with your own site.

The first plugin that I would suggest is the IndieWeb plugin itself, just because it’s an easy name to remember. And the IndieWeb plugin doesn’t do anything on its own, so much as wrap together a lot of functionality of various other plugins. I would compare it kind of to Jetpack in that way, in that you’re installing one tool that helps you manage a variety of different tools.

So some of the things that the IndieWeb plugin itself provides is a way to do web mentions. So when you use a Webmention, you are notifying another website that some activity has taken place on your website. So an example of how I use the Webmention plugin on my personal site is that I can write a post on my site and then I can copy the link to that post and I can write my own post on Mastodon, being like, hey, blah blah blah, I wrote this article, take a look. 

When somebody responds via Mastodon, that will show up on my personal website. So no longer does somebody have to go to your website and go fill out the comment form down there and wait for your approval there. Although I’ll specify, you can still set comments to require approval on your site. So it’s a lot easier way to get engagement and more interaction on your content, which I found that it leads to more engagement because it’s a lot easier for you to see a link and make a comment about it where you’ve seen the link, as opposed to having to follow it elsewhere. 

Another tool that I want to highlight within that plugin is the syndication links. Think about it kind of like canonical links. Basically, if you are cross posting to other places, you have a way to indicate where it’s been cross posted, where people can get other copies, and vice versa, if those sites support syndication links back, you’ll be able to, again, get more traffic to your own site. So one example that I use here is Medium.

If anyone regularly uses Medium to blog, you do have the ability to post to your own website, post the same content to Medium, and then use syndication links to ensure that people are going back to your own website.

Doc Pop: I wanted to just kind of mention, first off, for anyone listening, the IndieWeb plugin that we’re talking about, and probably the others that we’re talking about, these are all available in the WordPress repository, wordpress.org, and the IndieWeb. I love that description of it as sort of like the Jetpack for this, because it is a package of plugins, right?

It’s like a suite of plugins, or am I wrong on that?

David Wolfpaw: So basically it lets you use that as a way to install other plugins. And you can also deactivate them from there. So it’s not saying that Post Kinds or IndieAuth or Micropub are built into this plugin so much as it’s a portal for you to get them, more readily. But it does have its own settings and options that allow you to connect to other plugins.

So what I mean to say is if you, let’s say, have the syndication links active, you can choose which providers you have set up. You can choose how it’s going to look on your website. and you can set up specific API keys to use it for other websites, but you can, you can go in there and say, I specifically want to activate GitHub so that if somebody interacts with something via GitHub, it will come back to my site.

And for developers that can be very useful depending on what kind of project they’re working on. I mean, there’s a variety of different things. There’s also a tool that’s heavily integrated called Bridgy, which is another way that it’s external of WordPress itself, but it can be integrated with this plugin to allow people to do cross posting between websites that allow it.

Doc Pop: That’s cool. You mentioned one of my favorite use cases that I’ve experienced. We haven’t talked about the ActivityPub plugin yet, but I’ve got the ActivityPub plugin. And when I post from my personal blog, it goes up to its own feed, sort of independent of my Mastodon feed. It goes up as a different feed.

And if people leave comments on it if they see it as a post and they’re like, oh, here’s my comment, it shows up on my blog post. And so I go to my blog and there’s this natural feeling. It’s a comment to the post and it’s so cool as a writer to just make that ease where, you know, someone could post on one place and it shows up on another and it just feels seamless and natural.

It’s super cool.

David Wolfpaw: Oh, absolutely. If you were tolook at the back end of my site, and look at posts and look at the comments on posts. I could probably identify the day that I activated that plugin because suddenly there’s so much more engagement and to be clear that engagement is always there or presumably it’s there if you are sharing things elsewhere, but the problem is it’s all siloed in other places.

And I’m not just saying this in terms, like when I’m saying engagement, I don’t just mean like it’s good for the SEO and everything, although I think that it is, I also think that it’s good to be able to as much as we talk about decentralization in the IndieWeb, it’s good to be able to centralize the conversation a bit in a place that you have more control over. 

So again, you both have that decentralized aspect of people can respond on whatever platform they’re most comfortable on or wherever they see it, but you have that ability to combine everything together in a place that it’s useful to me to be able to see it all there.

Doc Pop: We’re running low on time, but I do want to talk about two things: rel= me and ActivityPub. First let’s start off with, can you tell us the significance for WordPress users of “REL=me” on Mastodon and sites like that?

David Wolfpaw: Yes, so rel=me that is an attribute for link elements. Basically, you would post an HTML link element or an anchor element, either or, and you can use that to indicate that you have to verify. So I can go to my Mastodon account. And put in my account, I have DavidWolfPaw.com. And then on my website, on my personal site, I can put a link to my Mastodon account.

Being able to put those links on both directions using that rel=me attribute. is a good enough indicator that I’m an owner of that. So it’s a way to verify yourself on those platforms. When a lot of people moved over from Twitter, they wanted to know, like, you know, how do you verify? How are people having checkmarks in their bio when they’re not verified?

The answer is it doesn’t really work the same, but you can verify in a more I’m proving that I am who I say I am kind of way. And you can do the same with other platforms that are built in, such as GitHub has it built in, and I believe Tumblr does as well, there’s a few others.

Doc Pop: Yeah. Everybody should have it built in. It’s inexcusable that they don’t.

David Wolfpaw: Well they want to keep their walled gardens, but yes, I agree. Everyone should have it. 

And then the other thing is the ActivityPub extension. If you look at my Learn WordPress Webinar concerning the IndieWeb. I didn’t really address that plugin quite as much because while it existed at the time, even though that was only a few months ago, it was not nearly as fully fledged as it is now.

And I think that speaks volumes to, one, how much more work a developer can do when they have the support of a large company like Automattic, and two, how much more focus there is on this. I’ve been on Mastodon for, you know, almost seven years now, but only in the past year or so for various reasons has it really taken off.

Doc Pop: I think that’s a good spot for us to take another final break. And when we come back, we’ll wrap up our conversation with David Wolfpaw about how we can go back to the web’s weird roots. So stay tuned for more after this short break.

Doc Pop: Welcome back to Press This, a WordPress community podcast. I’m your host, Doc Pop, and we have talked about the IndieWeb, its philosophy, how you can apply it practically to your WordPress usage, and also how you use other social media sites and integrate it all together. 

And on this final thing at the beginning of the show, I talked about how it feels like the web is consolidating into fewer and fewer silos. And I kind of hope to see those shaken up, but that may or may not happen. And it seems so different than the early days of the web, which wasn’t just about weird. I mean, it was definitely weird, but it wasn’t just weird. It was experimental. It was fun. It was creative. It was so expressive. 

And I feel like we’ve certainly lost something there. And so, David, just kind of at the end, I wanted to hear your thoughts about how the IndieWeb can help keep the web weird and why that’s important.

David Wolfpaw: Yeah. I’ll just say for myself personally, I am a bingo card of intersectional different marginalized groups. I’m a queer person who is Hispanic and I’m neurodivergent and et cetera, et cetera. I can go on and on about all the different things that the centralized web does not treat too kindly, is probably the most polite way I can put it. So there are a lot of places where I have not felt very welcome online, but a lot of the IndieWeb spaces that I’ve found have really been a much better, healthier, stronger community than I ever had on any other platform.

So I think that’s really important because it allows people who might not otherwise be heard or who might be silenced on a platform because they might make a dangerous suggestion like we shouldn’t be killing trans people, and allow them to say that without being banned. I also think it’s just better when you have a bit more control over the things you’re posting and the things you share online. 

You don’t know what’s going to happen to these platforms over time. I think even a year ago, August 2022, if you asked people what Twitter would be like today, they probably wouldn’t be picturing the reality of Twitter in August 2023. Because it hasn’t even been a year since that sale was made final.

But it’s completely different. I’m completely off that platform after over a decade of using it. And I still keep going with the self hosted Mastodon, and since I have, I just find it’s a better community. 

I’m trying to think of a good way to put this. I think that an important part of keeping the web weird is that it makes it antithetical to advertising. So, while I don’t consider advertising itself a bad thing, obviously we all are doing it for our businesses, for our own sites the people listening to this probably do a lot as well. I think you can understand that the ad industry on the web right now is broken, and it’s been called the original sin of the web.

I don’t disagree with that, and I think that having more personal control means that you don’t have to rely on that quite as much to share what you want to share. I’m not thinking about the economics of posting tutorials to my website to share with others. I’m not thinking of how many impressions I’m going to get on a photo that I take. Because that’s going to lead to a brand deal or something. 

It can sound a bit counter to how a lot of people view being online. But also, all of us are just trying to live our own lives online in some way. And it’s just a lot more enjoyable when we have a bit more control and when we don’t feel that we’re beholden to what someone else thinks is brand safe or appropriate.

Doc Pop: I have to say, I have benefited greatly through the work that people have done to make these IndieWeb tools and to make the web more open, and I just think it’s so much better. Things aren’t necessarily free ’cause they’re not paid for by your attention and advertising and stuff like that.

There’s a little bit more of a learning curve, usability, sometimes it can feel different than these other things. But these are tools that have been made that I benefit from. I’m so glad for the work that’s been done, and I totally acknowledge that these tools are created by marginalized people who didn’t feel safe on other spaces and they built all of the groundwork that now I just get to come in and, you know, see this beautiful like Pixel Fed and Mastodon and all sorts of things that have been built by people who needed to create a space for their own, but it’s so inclusive and such a great features to them because of whatever reasons that they had in their philosophies.

That I just think the web is so much better if we can kind of bump off the corporate web. And as WordPress users, we’re already halfway there. So David, I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us and for telling us about the IndieWeb and the different tools that are available.

If people want to follow you online, where do you recommend sending them?

David Wolfpaw: Yeah. You can find my personal website at davidwolfpaw.com. And then you can also find me on Mastodon. 

Doc Pop: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, and thanks to everyone who’s listened to this episode of Press This, a WordPress Community Podcast on WMR. We have lots of great episodes in the can as well. We’re a weekly podcast. Check out last week’s episode with Rogier Lankhorst from Really Simple Plugins about SSL and Really Simple SSL.

Doc Pop: Thanks for listening to Press This, a WordPress community podcast on WMR. Once again, my name’s Doc and you can follow my adventures with Torque magazine over on Twitter @thetorquemag or you can go to torquemag.io where we contribute tutorials and videos and interviews like this every day. So check out torquemag.io or follow us on Twitter. You can subscribe to Press This on Red Circle, iTunes, Spotify, or you can download it directly at wmr.fm each week. I’m your host Doctor Popular I support the WordPress community through my role at WP Engine. And I love to spotlight members of the community each and every week on Press This.

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