Create Paid Content for Brands (without needing a large following)

Whether you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re just starting out… creating great content for brands is one of the best ways to make money. Throughout this session, you’ll discover ways to use your own skill-sets to bring value to brands, regardless of what your own personal following might be! You are able to provide value whether your content lives on your own platforms, the brand’s platforms, or both; and it’s your job to get creative with how you package your value. My goal is to answer the following questions…

What services should I offer?
Chances are that your blogging experience has turned you into a one-stop-shop media company! And there are many ways that you can bundle those skills into services that companies are willing to pay for. We will discuss a variety of specific and marketable services as well as ways to figure out which services will be the best fit for you personally.

How can I market those services?
Once you have a clear idea of what you’d like to provide to brands, you need to convince them that you are the best person for the job! The good news? There are endless ways to market your services, and we will dive into various strategies that you can start implementing right away. The bad news? They all take time, effort, and consistency. There are clear paths to success, but there aren’t any shortcuts.

Who should I reach out to?
This part of the process is so crucial! After putting in so much time and effort into the services and the marketing strategy, we are just ready to throw it out into the world and see what happens. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a massive following already, this method won’t get you very far. Instead, we want to be strategic about finding new direct contacts that are a great fit for what we are offering. Again, this is time-consuming (and oftentimes brain-numbing), but it works!

The beauty of this process is that any blogger can follow it and find a new source of income. Once we start thinking of ourselves as mini media companies, a whole new world opens up!

From Template Tags to Twig: A Journey Through WordPress Templating

WordPress has been around for over 15 years. During that time the thinking about templating and themes has evolved as WordPress has grown. This talk will cover the various approaches around getting data from WordPresss to rendering a beautifully structured webpage. From templating tags to templating engines like Twig, what are the pros and cons of these different approaches? My thinking on templating has certainly changed over the years and this talk hopes to open your eyes to new possibilities to templating and WordPress.

How to Use WordPress to Build Your Nonprofit Website

The number one goal of any nonprofit website is to help the organization meet its mission. Whether it’s driving donations to help bring access to clean water or recruiting volunteers to build new homes and restore playgrounds, a nonprofit’s website can greatly help with this. This session goes into how to use WordPress to drive and collect donations and recruit volunteers as well as tips and tools on how to maintain a healthy WordPress website over the long-term.

WordCamp Lancaster 2019 is over. Check out the next edition!