Creating Content, Schema and WooCommerce Marketplace and Admin

Brad:
We are back with another episode of Do the Woo podcast, episode number 16. I’m the lesser half of your hosting team, Brad Williams. I’m joined by my better half, Mr. BobWP. Bob.

BobWP:
Hey, I’ve never been called a better half. This is a first, so I’m going to turn up the volume just when you said that part and we’ll just go back down. Just put on a quick loop. So I’m relish in that for a moment and yeah, I’m just going to sit here and think I’m the better half, at least for the time being,

Brad:
At least for the next 20 to 30 minutes or so. We’ll let you have that, Bob. We’re really excited. We have a brilliant guy on the show, friend of mine we’ve known for a number of years. Mario, what’s going on? Mario, thanks for joining us today.

Mario:
Hey, hey, thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure and yeah, been chilling here at the office, just waiting for the right time to start a podcast. I’m super stoked to spend the late afternoon also with Mara, who’s kind of sleeping next to me. Mara show up here again, as you can see,

Brad:
It’s always close by. Of

Mario:
Course. Yeah, she’s protecting the couch here apparently.

Brad:
That’s a good doggie and you don’t do enough videos, you’re not really online enough, so we’re excited to bring you here. I’m just kidding. If you follow Mario, I know he puts out some amazing content and some really interesting ways too, which is cool. Maybe we’ll dig into that a little bit. But before we get into that, why don’t you tell everyone who you are, what you do? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Mario:
Yeah, absolutely. So I am the CEO of WordPress agency called DevX. We are 40 plus people tackling all sorts of enterprise grade WordPress gigs, dealing with large publishers and handling hundreds of millions of pages a month. Also working with fast-paced startups, usually those that get funding and say, okay, what should we do? Investors are really pressing us big time that we need to launch stuff every single freaking week, and that’s kind of what we do for the most part. I’m a WordPress score contributor since version 3.7, I believe, and have been doubling into WordPress since 2,200 six, I think. So, yeah, I’ve been around for a while, dealt with all sorts of community stuff here and there. Worked as a freelancer and consultant for a while. Then kind of grew the agencies simply because I wanted to deal with different kind of stuff on the surface.
In addition to that, I love writing, so you can find some of my stuff on sides if you have probably stumbled upon Forbes, helping them, posting entrepreneur, and much of other among a series of different other niche slash vertical related business journals. So this kind of one of my hobbies, and as you said, I’ve been trying to deal with video for a while. It’s not really bringing the best out of me, especially with that Arabic beard that seems scary at the airports every now and then, but this is something that I’ve been enjoying as well and trying to record more. So always open to new topic suggestions for videos that I can be helpful with.

Brad:
Yeah, I think obviously like I mentioned, we’re friends and we actually talk quite a bit. We share strategies and business advice and challenges. It’s great just to have that back channel with someone in the industry, similar agencies. But one thing that’s always struck me, and I know we’ve talked about this quite a bit, is you mentioned the content piece, but I think from my perspective, you do a little bit different than I think a lot of people out there. You like to not only push content on your own websites, obviously on your company site and on your personal site, but you push content through good content through a lot of different channels like LinkedIn. I know you’re real big on Cora, I believe still. Maybe touch on that a little bit, why you’ve decided to do that versus just keeping all the content within your own sites and your own platform.

Mario:
Of course. So once upon a time when I was actually familiarizing myself with open source in the first place, I was pretty happy with the idea of open source. But in the WordPress context and PHPN development, it’s mostly about code. It’s rarely about opensourcing knowledge about open sourcing, say training materials or designs or anything like this. So we really wanted to expand on that and kind of build a culture of open source in the true form of open source, like share as much as possible, as best as possible, as broad as possible, and someone may pick it up and actually learn from you and become a better person and who knows what’s going to happen in 5, 10, 20 years from now. Back in 2006, I started training technical courses for certain private universities here and colleges and even high schools, and now 20, 13 years later, it’s really making a difference.
I see people running RD departments with 200 people actually teaching stuff. I taught them a decade ago and just kind carrying the same torch like the Olympics, just bringing the same knowledge over and over and over again and scaling it. So previously when I was doing that, the caveat of this was being kind training goal that on site and just reaching 20 people, 50 people, a hundred people, no more than 200 people because you can hardly gather more than 200 people in a classroom or a university hall. So I said, I really want, obviously people love this stuff and whatnot, so I really want to share more and what are the best places to do that and since video wasn’t all that popular back in the day and now you had bandwidth and pixelated 0.3 megapixel images and all that jazz, I said, okay, let’s start with writing and let’s just start pushing more and more and more and more content, start aggregating it into certain verticals and just that’s essentially how it started about a decade ago and lately, over the past two or three years, I’ve just been transitioning all my WordPress content that I’ve been writing and said, okay, let’s scale it to more digital consulting and business strategy and business advice both for agencies, both for clients, both for entrepreneurs and kind of freelancers.
And everyone was trying to scale a business dealing with all the stuff that we deal with on a daily basis, which is a broad set of products. Its sales and marketing and recruitment, business strategy, technology, revenue, a bunch of different topics. So sooner or later you mentioned that I’ve been more or less active in Quora. The Quora media stuff started reposting some of my stuff on Forbes and Huffington Post at the same time. I had several publications on Entrepreneur, and this is how I started pitching some of my pieces here and there on recruiter, on publishing executive on some of the other magazines, handling millions or tens of millions in traffic every single month and simply try to break them down into reasonable segments into miniseries, so to speak, tackling different challenges that we’ve been dealing with internally. And this way I’m both educating pretty much everyone who’s interested in reading that in the first place. I’m using this as training resources for my team or for onboarding new people and everything else. And this is kind of how I’m making my life easier because I’m just channeling all this knowledge into content and this is kind of expanding the reach through all of those different journals, not just being our company website or my website or Medium block or anything else. I said Medium on the WordPress podcast.

Brad:
We will allow it. We’ll allow it. Yeah, like you mentioned the idea of open source. We first got into as very developer heavy content topics out there, which is definitely true. The reason I love this is because you’re giving back knowledge, so you’re still sharing your knowledge and experiences and being very open and vulnerable about it too. You’re out there saying, look, I don’t have all the answers. This is what I’ve tried and maybe it worked, maybe it didn’t. I’m still tweaking it. So from the idea of giving back, you are giving back in the open source mentality just in a different way. And not only that, you’re also promoting yourself and promoting your business. So there’s so many wins to this approach. I’m a big believer in content too. Our blog at Web Bev Studios for a long time, we’ve been pushing content. It’s a great way to share what we’re doing.
It’s a great way to give back. It’s a great way to get our team a break from client services and write about maybe a new technology or something they they’re playing with and obviously it’s helped our business grow. Now, I’m definitely very interested, as we’ve discussed, looking at some different platforms rather than the mentality of everything has to be on your site to expand it to things like LinkedIn, which has some really amazing content and some of your stuff on LinkedIn is pretty much viral with the amount of likes and shares and comments and engagement that I’ve seen. It’s pretty amazing. So are you seeing that where not only, I don’t think, and correct me if I’m wrong, your intention is to use it only to get business. You enjoy doing it, you enjoy giving back, but there’s an added benefit of business walking in the door. Are you seeing a value to that from the business perspective?

Mario:
Yeah, so I can’t say it’s all about tourism and just being 100% completely open, doing 100% open source work and stuff like that, because I used to do that for three or four years and to be completely honest, I was more or less miserable. I was spending 90% of my time completely on open source and giving away and support forms and stuff like that, and it was not really profitable. As everyone says, you can’t show your badge of credentials that commits and go to the supermarket and say, Hey, look how many I’ve got, right? And say, well, excellent. You got to pay in cash or card, right? You can pick one. So I mean, I’m really all about giving away, but I’m also very cautious with regards to the fact that you need to help yourself first before you can help everyone else. So for the most part, I’ve made myself a promise to help myself and the company first made sure that we are profitable and that we are moving forward and once we got a certain, let’s say profit margin, we can spend all the other time on creating tutorials or building open source software or going to conferences, sponsoring, attending, speaking, whatever it is, just making sure that we need the and needs so to speak at the end of the month, which is extremely important.
So going back to the content itself, content has helped me get some business, which makes a lot of sense because with so many agencies and freelancers and vendors and everything else out there, it’s so hard to actually figure out who’s doing the best job out there, especially when it’s a service business because with products it’s kind of okay, you can get a friend buys A BMW or Mercedes and you like the car and you know that when you go to BMW or Mercedes, when you buy the very same car, you’re getting 99.99% the same quality
And it’s real easy with services, it’s so unique that you can’t really make sure that you’re going to even get the same type of quality, even if you get a recommendation or a referral because it’s so, so different. You don’t really have processes that are so well set in stone that every single person who starts is following everything to the T. It just doesn’t work like this. I’ve heard lots of stories from people going to, let’s say big PR firms or advertising agencies and they say, well, I’m a small contract for them, which is why they’re assigning me to assistants and interns and folks like this. So I’m not really seeing the value out of the big business because they have so many employees and someone has to train the interns and they basically get real life production projects for people who can’t afford paying the big bucks for the senior partners and essentially they’re working with college graduates or something like that to get a job done.
So there’s this balance that even if you have the brand, it’s different. So since we’re a smaller agency, again, we are 40 people. We are not HP or IBM or something like that, or let alone Microsoft or Googles of the world. So since we’re a small team, I really want to outline the way I think and my processes and my vision and the way I see things and the way we do things at their so that it pretty much helps everyone. It helps the prospects decide on whether they’re in alignment with what we share as goals and missions and purposes. It helps possible employees of ours. It helps people who we actually employ but don’t meet me on a day-to-day basis. So it’s really strengthening everything into one single bit, which is what we call employer branding. It’s important for the senior leadership or whatever you want to call it, to just be as transparent as possible so that everyone who is interested in the political aspect to things they can decide on, whether they support the role or doesn’t or don’t and essentially make the final decision

Brad:
To kind of bring this back around to WooCommerce. I do think, in my opinion, I think content is great in any industry. So whether you’re in the services business or I mean Bob, that is your gig is content, but also in the product space, if you’re selling a product, whether it’s digital or physical, there’s a huge value to content beyond just the content on the product page. Of course, maybe you could speak to that a little bit or even Bob, if you have some thoughts around that in terms of how people that are running WooCommerce scores can actually leverage some of these ideas and some of what you’re doing from the content side of the house.

BobWP:
Yeah, I was actually going to ask Mario, I know he’s on LinkedIn quite a bit and a lot, I shouldn’t say quite a bit, and I’ve been on there more than I have been in the past few years. I’m actually doing a local WooCommerce meetup tonight about creating a content strategy.

Mario:
That’s awesome.

BobWP:
One of the things I was curious about LinkedIn, what I’m finding is I look at it and I think, okay, how can store owners, especially people that develop products, how can they really use LinkedIn? And what I’m seeing more and more on LinkedIn that seems to really be working videos, basically showing very cool products and how they’re being either manufactured, how they’re being used. I mean, these aren’t your PR type of videos. These are just very in depth. In fact, I find myself watching more of them than I never ever thought I would, only because they hold my interest and it’s like, wow. So I’m seeing a lot more of that on LinkedIn, and that is where I think on that platform, the value obviously is because I also see those particular videos are being shared a lot. What’s your thoughts on that, Mario?

Mario:
Absolutely, and mentioning the how video really helps promoting products is definitely extremely helpful. That kind of reminds me. I just have a hoodie out there in the other room, which I bought, and I actually dealt with the custom because it was shipping overseas and it was a really tough adventure for me to just get a couple of hoodies, but I saw a hoodie that an influencer that I followed on LinkedIn was wearing, so I just texted him, love your hoodie. I really want to get one. Just send me a link. And he said, well, I actually know the guys. I’m in their affiliate program or whatever. Here’s a 20% coupon, just grab however many you want. And I bought two or four of them, extremely awesome. I’m going to show you photos later, just I don’t really want to run right now in the middle of the show, but extremely also something that I got inspired by thanks to LinkedIn video.
On the other hand, I saw someone linking who really made professional badass videos and looking at the comments, it seemed like he’s a YouTube rockstar with hundreds of thousands of subscribers from YouTube, and he was teaching people how to make videos and do all that jazz. So I followed his YouTube channel as well, and he inspired my decision for buying a mirrorless camera for my stuff that’s great for vlogging and all that jazz for the right type of lenses available for this. And essentially I’m following his advice using his affiliate links and everything else because I see him as an influencer because he has really helped me understand and taught me some stuff that I didn’t know in a way that made sense in a way that’s backed up by social, which is again, very important by having all the commentaries and all the other subscribers and just building credibility towards that.
And especially with, so there are kind of three different types of stores, so to speak. I would say some of them are enterprise just being the IBMs or HP of the world selling custom stuff. And it’s, for them, it’s really important to establish the brand because otherwise nobody’s going to buy their specific stuff. When I get a Cisco router, I know that this is Cisco, I know their academy. I have people in my office who have graduated CCNA and CC Ps and all the other certificates who networking can. I know that there stuff is good and expensive and good, but they have a brand and that’s why I’m using their store. Then the second category is kind of consumer products. That’s completely B2C, but then again, custom stuff, say books or Ries or stock folders or things like that. And then again, it’s similar to the enterprise grade, but LinkedIn is probably not the best place there.
But just doing review videos or how do they call them, the box opening, boxing, the unboxing videos for just showcasing how it’s packaged and how cool it looks like and things like that. Or if you take a look at Shark Tank packaging is so important, really just the way you market the product, even if you’re selling something that’s already widely available, just putting a letter box or something like that, that makes it look so much better. And then you have kind of the third category, which is stores selling the type of stuff that’s available pretty much everywhere else. I’m talking about computers or other types of accessories or smartphones or cameras again, and then it gets a little bit tricky, but again, branding can help you convey your message as to what exactly makes you unique, what exactly makes you different. Do you ship? Just as an example, we do have three telecoms here locally, and one of them, they have a solid contract with Apple, so they always ship.
They allow you to pre-order Apple stuff and whatnot. The other brand they work with Samsung, and the third brand I think works with Huawei or someone else, but you know that they have specific unique proposition. If you’re an Apple fan, you probably have a contract with the first one. If you’re a Samsung fan, you can get the second one and get the VR stuff and then get the Dex to turn your phone into a computer and all that jazz. They’re hooking you into an entire ecosystem, which makes the brand different than the other two brands. And again, same with stores. Are you working specifically with a certain vendor that makes you unique, you get probably better discounts or you get stuff sooner, or you don’t have to wait for a month for something to get shipped? Or do you have the cheapest, I dunno, accessories or do you work with a local various artists, brand underground folks who do custom handmade packaging for you? Again, YouTube and content and everything else help you tell the story and establish your unique selling proposition, making people buy from you as compared to everyone else,

BobWP:
Right? Yeah, and I think I found that on LinkedIn and maybe one of the draws there for me is that they find very interesting products that people have. I mean, amazing stuff. And they’re also, the videos are done professionally, and not that you have to do that, but I noticed that that really has more of an impact the story when they’re telling it to me than somebody just maybe jumping over on YouTube and looking at somebody else talking about the same product in their office or something. So there is a real difference there on what they’re finding or what people value on LinkedIn versus other platforms. But it’s interesting. And yeah, I have an hour to tell people how to do a content strategy with WooCommerce, and you’ll appreciate this. I just pushed out today a 4K word article on how to create a content strategy, and it just kept going and going and going, and it was like, oh, okay, I got to stop here. I didn’t get in depth with it. But yeah, it is definitely interesting.

Mario:
You can turn it into email series.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’ve got lots of plans for it. I think it’ll be one of those cornerstone. Hey,

Brad:
Awesome. The best thing about having someone on this show that does a lot of content, a lot of video, you can just tee up a topic and let ’em go, and it’s amazing. So that was all some really great information, Mario, thanks for sharing that. But let’s go ahead and move into some topics as we’ve got a couple on the list, don’t we, Bob? Where do we want to go? Want to talk about the new dashboard?

BobWP:
Yeah, we can talk about that. I think it’s interesting that I’m going to call that up here because I have it over on my other screen here. Where did it go here? But it looks like they’re doing a little bit better reporting with the new WooCommerce admin for the central dashboard. They say 14 unique data points, and I think it’s just the fact that those will be available. I mean, there’s other services that get into a lot more and get into the abandoned carts and have beyond, as far as I always say it wrong, is that right? Meteoric? You know what I’m talking about talking. So anyway, those kind of things. And I just think, yeah, just is, I mean, think it, it’s good basic data. I’ll be putting a link in there and probably a lot of people maybe have already seen it, but the new reports that are going to be available, at least in the admin area, it’s a good touch.

Brad:
Yeah, I like it. I mean, I think as store owners, one of the most important thing is the data, the reports, the sales, the products, just the more data, the better. So you can really understand your customers and what’s working and what’s not working, and get rid of the products that aren’t selling and keep pushing the products that are, and any way to highlight that in a way that’s easier to consume because that is tough, especially if you have a big store and a lot of traffic and a lot of customers or even Google Analytics, you start digging into just basic analytics and it gets overwhelming very quickly. What is the data I should actually care about? So just kind of enhancing this to the point more information, it’s more customizable, so you can kind of focus on the data points that you care about. Exports a lot of filters so people can, and other plugins and services can tap into this. It looks really nice. I also like the feature plugin idea. It just helps things iterate faster. So you can just install the plugin, test it out, play with it. They can push up versions as they’re ready. They don’t have to wait for new versions of WooCommerce. So it helps. Big features like this really come to life much quicker, to be honest. So I think

Mario:
I also do quite a lot of the new activity panel, to be honest, this is one of the secret add-ons of the dashboard, so to speak, but it really helps just having something like push notifications and even probably just having an add-on that taps into your phone and just sends notification, Hey, your quarter of this product is nearly over, so just call your warehouse and ask for additional supply and stuff like that. So this is something that’s extremely nice because so far it’s a bit tricky to just track all your products and probably order by quantity or something like that. And this activity panel really makes a difference, makes it a living dashboard of sorts.

Brad:
Yeah, that is cool. I mean, there’s one notification I will never not get tired of hearing on a phone is when a sale comes in and just ding, ding, ding or a cash register

Mario:
If

Brad:
That’s going on all day long. Awesome. You know what I mean? The easier we can make that the better.

Mario:
Yeah.

BobWP:
All right, so what’s next? Well, do we dare, we’re just going to 3.6 is coming out in WooCommerce and WP Tavern did an article, of course, they weren’t the only one. There was like 5 billion other places that did talked about this a little bit, plus other related subjects, but it was around the marketplace suggestions that it was. And I think what’s cool is if you go through the history of this and not that, but is that other thing, Jetpack, we could talk about that, but specifically this, at least it looks like they listened to their listened before they actually put it out and people were talking about it in the beta and then through the rcs and stuff. But yeah, it is a touchy subject and it did cause a little bit of a tension amongst the community. I think the WooCommerce, I’ll turn it over to Brad and let you take it from there. What are your deep thoughts from Brad Williams?

Brad:
Yeah, I love how dramatic WP Tavern is and one of the most unpopular changes in the history of WooCommerce. I mean, on one hand I get what they’re trying to do, but I think the way they implement it was really silly to put product extension or extension suggestions on the product edit screen makes zero sense. Literally, it mentions in the article, a lot of people vented, it just kills the workflow floating in your products. And now these kind of ads basically are popping up and you could, they call it dismissing, but it was more like snoozing. They’ll show back up later. You had to put a filter in to completely kill it. It seemed like it was an obvious one that was going to get pushed back on, and I’m sure they had internal conversations knowing there would be some pushback, but went ahead and talked about it and we’re going to implement it until it got a little too noisy.
So I think it was just kind of an obvious misstep. And obviously WooCommerce has a monetary advantage to or reason for wanting to do something like that. You put more extensions in front of the user’s faces, they’re more likely to purchase something, they can make more money. But I think if this is what they’re trying to do, I think there’s a better way to do it. Putting it on really any kind of ads or anything on the content screens, whether it’s a post or a product or anything is a bad spot, you’re interfering with the workflow at that point. Not to say other plugins don’t do that. I’m sure some do, but it’s not a good look. And for something as big as WooCommerce, that’s an automatic property, it’s just a misstep. So I’m glad to see that they listened to the feedback and decided to remove it rather than just kind of forcefully push it on everyone, even though there’s a lot of negative feedback. So hopefully they’ve learned their lesson. I guess we’ll see. My assumption is it will come back in a different form at some point in some other, maybe on the settings page or on the product, or I’m sorry, on the plugins page or something like that. But we probably haven’t seen the last of it.
You got thoughts, Mario? Let’s hear. I,

Mario:
Yeah, I mean, I completely a hundred percent agree with you, and I definitely think that it was really killing the user experience. I really don’t buy that. They certainly said, oh, actually this is violating some stuff. We’re so sorry about that. I mean, come on. They’re not a inexperienced team of three people or something like that. We all know why they did it and what their intention was. It wasn’t a mistake, it wasn’t a push by a junior or something like that. We all know what was the reasoning behind that. But again, if it was a plugin with say 500 or I dunno, 10,000 installations now, kind of a third party vendor just selling extensions to their own stuff into a setting stage that’s just promoting other add-ons to their product. That’s kind of one thing. But WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce point out there without any doubt.
And since they have the marketplace that’s leading all, I dunno, extension sales in the WooCommerce ecosystem, then cherry picking certain extensions that they happen to provide to the broad audience and suppressing the rest of the market is really what pisses me all the most essentially. It’s really one of the problems with WordPress in general, and again, the WordPress versus automatic thing, it’s really how everything affects the rest of the ecosystem. And if you take a look again automatic, they have wordpress.com, which is competing with some of the site builders out there, obviously because they have a hosted ready to go free solution, yada yada. Then they have WooCommerce, which is competing with these digital downloads and marketplace market press, the two market presses actually, and BigCommerce and a bunch of other solutions too. Our card 76 or whatever was it. Then you have hosting companies, they have, then you have Jet Part that has a multitude of features, and suddenly it becomes a little bit weird when Jet pack adds something and then WooCommerce adds something and then this adds something and it starts to become a little bit weird for the rest of the ecosystem to coexist with WordPress as a product if they don’t really know what sort of stuff will show up in WordPress through Jet Park or through WooCommerce or through something else like recommended hosting vendors who wordpress.org that really have to pre install jet pack and stuff like that.
So that’s essentially the most problematic thing that I see in all that transition, which is kind of the bigger picture of how Automatic and the other brands owned by automatic in certain capacity affect the rest of the WordPress world.

BobWP:
Yeah, it’s interesting, and I sit back, and I’m not going to go into this too deep, but my thing is

Brad:
Has thoughts.

BobWP:
I do have a lot of thoughts. I’m not going to share probably 90% of ’em, but I spent almost 20 years in the normal business sector, and I call it normal. I call it outside open source before I stepped into WordPress. So these things don’t quite affect me in the same way that it affects the majority of the inner community because I am still on that thought wave of business. So don’t always, it’s hard for me to sometimes step back and say, okay, we’re in open source, I know this, there’s these volunteers, there’s all these things going on. So I have a lot of stuff that I want to say on Twitter that I decide not to say because I know exactly what it’ll do. But at the same time, for me it is, it becomes overwhelming these things, and I understand it from the perspective of others, especially all the other plugin developers and everybody that’s looking at it and going, whoa.
And then there’s another part of me that says, Hey, it is business as usual, which probably is a cop out. And people would say, yeah, Bob, that’s the problem. Well, hey, I’ve been there, done this a long time, so I’m not going to dove on that too much. But it does give me a lot of different, sometimes I wish some of the people that are in open source, especially a lot of the people would have experienced in outside of open source for the same amount of time. I think sometimes you would have a little bit different perspective on some things. It wouldn’t make anything right, but it would also make it a little bit more understandable how some approaches are tried or attempted and hey, yeah, stuff hits the fan and it turns into the snowball. It often is, but I sit back and I just watch the chaos. I create content. It’s like, okay, I’ve heard enough of this. Let me go back to that content. I

Brad:
Mean, I just need to lead by example, I think is the short answer for me. You look at WooCommerce, you look at Jetpack, these are major plugins that are used by millions of websites, and if they’re doing stuff like this, it’s kind of telling everybody, oh yeah, it’s okay. So imagine if all the other plugins started doing stuff like this. It’s not okay, and it would be an awful experience for WordPress users and ultimately would hurt WordPress as a whole. So lead by example, when you’re at the top, you have a certain responsibility to do things the right way so that we can all lead or we can all follow. So

BobWP:
Yeah, so interesting stuff everybody’s got, and I think there’s some good points there brought up. So one more quick thing, and I don’t know if you guys have anything, Yost when we’re recording this. They just came out with their newest release and there seems to be a push on, oh, push on schema, schema, schema. And I’m somebody that I’ve used those for so long and I think I understand it, and then I think I don’t. But as far as WooCommerce, I know that probably plays into a lot. I don’t know if either one of you have any thoughts on, yes, this is very cool. This makes a lot of sense. Any deep thoughts on that? Either one of you?

Brad:
Yeah, so Schema, if you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically markup you could use within your pages to basically structure data in a way that other platforms could interact with that data. It’s very similar. Having a structured like RSS is a structured format for syndicating content. Schema in terms of WooCommerce world, by and large, is for your product data. And it’s how things like Google will pull in your product data into search results, could pull in reviews and review data and ratings into search results. Sometimes you might see a product in Google and it has like a four and a half out of five stars. Well, how do they know that? It’s because the product pages have proper schema markup for those products and for those reviews, it gives ’em a structured language or structured content that they can go grab and they know how to parse it very clearly.
They know how to understand that versus taking all the gibberish on the page and trying to figure it out, which is what has happened in years past. A good example I tell people is like Pinterest, if you ever go to Pinterest, pull up a recipe on Pinterest, it pops up on Pinterest, it says, Hey, here’s the actual recipe. It shows you the recipe on Pinterest in the hover. That means that they have recipe schema data on the actual recipe post on their page because Pinterest and other sites are able to grab that very clearly and show it on their site. So basically Yost is tackling the problem with when there’s a lot of different schema markup on a page, what happens? It becomes kind of a jumbled mess. They put some examples in there and it gets a little technical, but essentially they’re putting a little more nested structure around it to kind of say, Hey, all the schema market, maybe there’s seven different groups of schema markup on the page.
This is what it means, this is how it’s related. The clear example they give is sometimes when you have a product and a lot of related products, Google and others could get confused on what the actual product for the page is. They might think a related product is the product of the page when it’s not. So they basically made that super clear, what is the actual main entity or the main product on the page? What’s the other stuff? So by and large, it’s really a huge, it’s a big update and it’s pretty much behind the scenes. It’s one of those things that I don’t think there’s much, if anything, they have to do for it to work and just take advantage of it. So yeah, it’s a great update by Yost. And if you’re not familiar with schema, check out schema.org. There’s a lot of information about it. You can look at the different types that are available for different types of content, and if it makes sense for your website, you should look at implementing it.

Mario:
And to add on top of what Brad just said, I think it’s really important to implement all sorts of micro data that’s pared by Google in order to increase the size of your Google search results. And again, Pinterest was a good example. There are a bunch of other snippet that you can actually see on Google, like rating and reviews is one of them. Other suggested page for the same website is another one, which could be categories, could be other key leading pages for recipes. This could be the preparation time and so on. It’s really, Google is trying to get smarter and provide more information in a contextual manner even before people actually land onto your website. So the more Google serve real estate you can occupy, the better for you because you’re more prominent and you get a higher chance that people actually land on your website compared to other websites.
Another thing that’s interesting, even though it’s probably sci-fi to some extent, at least for us WordPress users inside owners, is voice search is really rising big time. And with Alexa and ECU DOT and all their other resources, more and more households are actually acquiring Alexa devices in addition to your bunch of others. And of course, Alexa being called by Amazon is going to compete with a bigger fraction of WooCommerce business owners who are trying to sell fair and Square to their audience. But again, Alexa being probably the leading manufacturer of voice search, home health home devices, is going to make it really trickier. So your other option more or less is having a Google Home or Cortana or Siri or something else that’s not really Amazon driven, that is parsing these sche or data and ranking you higher simply because you have more information provided to the user and increasing your chances for customers to start, well, essentially to land on your product as compared to others. Based on the latest ads that I read, over half of the households in 2022 are going to own a voice control device like Alexa, Google Home, and so forth in just, well, in just three years from now. So half of the people are probably going to start purchasing, and you better be prepared for that.

BobWP:
Good point. Alright, well, Brad, what do you think? You think

Brad:
It was a good show? It’s a good show. Definitely appreciate you being on Mario’s. It’s a lot of fun, covered a lot of good stuff. I’m always fascinated by the content angle. At the end of the day, this is a WordPress show and WordPress is all about publishing content management, so it’s really kind of the heart of what we’re doing here, whether you have a store or not. So definitely some fun conversations. So we kind of liked it. Wrap the show up just talking about a little something maybe that’s coming up in the event you might be going to or anything like that. Anything on the horizon there, Mario, for you?

Mario:
So we are working on some tooling for something that’s extremely fun, and we are probably going to release it open source soon, even though I don’t want to commit with specific timeframes. But

Brad:
Essentially we’re going to need a date from this

Mario:
At a time. Yeah, let’s make it for next year so that we have at least three or four months to say that. But essentially soon, probably over the coming couple of months, we are working on which some open source libraries on the screenshot testing queue that helps you refine your website or keep tabs on your website before and after deploy, before and after update and so forth. And for WooCommerce users, it’s really tricky if your prices suddenly disappear or your checkout button disappears or something else due to an unexpected updating anything on top of your website. So what this two, even though it’s a little bit more techier first, we are going to work on dashboards and all that jazz, but at first it’s going to be something that you can set up on a $5 a month server or other kind of post solution, register a bunch of pages and say, run screenshots every single day or every five days or whatever it is.
Just configure it and then create screenshots of those pages that you’ve selected. Next day it turns the same screenshots overlaps the images, makes image recognition, says, Hey, I see that say 99% of your page is the same, but there’s 1% missing. And then you can open the screenshots and say, oh, look, my social media icons have disappeared, or my checkout boxes disappeared, or the price has surprisingly changed for something like that. So it makes it really easy to cure your website with just a couple of minutes every single day when you wake up and have your coffee and just scroll through whether something has gone wrong on your website as compared to just forgetting about it and losing money or wasting a lot more time actually browsing through 30 products on your website, making sure that everything is inact.

Brad:
Wow, looking forward to that. Definitely keep us posted. I love automated tooling, stuff like that. Anything you can do from an automation standpoint when it comes to testing around deployments and qa, I mean, can save not only a lot of money, but a lot of resources, team headaches as well. So

Mario:
Headaches for sure.

Brad:
Yeah, sounds like an interesting idea. Definitely keep us posted when it comes out and we’ll take a look at it for sure. Yep. What do you have coming up? You survived the marathon?

BobWP:
Yeah, I survived the marathon and now I’m buried, of course, I’m broken record here. I’m buried speaking of automation. God, I need some, seriously, I am splitting up my site. I’ve actually started on it. So if you look@bobwp.com is now totally WooCommerce focused, and my other site is going to be more around content marketing, which is basically all the other stuff. So I’ve discovered that of the 1300 posts that have survived on my side over the years, that about 400 are WooCommerce focused. But the other amount I have to actually go into each post and decide whether I focus it on WooCommerce, move it over, what do I do to move it over, do I update it, all this stuff. And then Gutenberg is somehow doing weird things to my excerpt every time I export and import. So I have to go in and clean it up.
It’s a long process, and as much as I hope to have it all done by the end of this month, a chunk of it will be, I’m continuing to do that. I’m in redirect. Hell, and what can I say? It is a crazy, in a way, it’s an interesting experience. I’ve never done this. I mean, it’s one thing to move a site, but another thing to split up a site into two sites and it doesn’t quite, it’s not just a knife down the middle and leave it there and they fall apart. So fun stuff, but I’ll survive.

Brad:
Well, you know what they say, half of all websites end up in a split, right?

BobWP:
Yeah,

Brad:
No, yeah, that’s whatever. I’m trying to perfect my dad joke game here. You know what, that does sound like a really good piece of content that you could put out when you’re all done, about what you learn, the process, what you do differently, and how you ended up with getting split up. So we’ll look forward to that one once you, yeah,

BobWP:
Really writing again,

Brad:
But very cool. I don’t have a lot coming up. We have our big annual company retreat next week in Georgia, so our whole company’s going to fly in and hang out for a week. So I’ve been really focused on that. So looking forward to seeing the whole team. We’re distributed, as you guys probably know. So this is always a big event for us to get together and have some FaceTime and do a little bit of work and a lot of fun. So it’s going to be a fun week. So looking forward to seeing everybody next week. But yeah, that’s my horizon there. So let’s wrap it up. I do want to mention, don’t forget, we have the Bob’s hosting special, 50% off your first two months at Wu, managed hosting over at Liquid Web. Just use the promo code, Bob WP Woo, all one word, Bob, W-P-W-O-O, and you can get half off the first two months of your hosting at Liquid Web for WooCommerce. That’s a pretty awesome deal. Take advantage of that. Bob, anything else I forgot. Nope, I think

BobWP:
You did it. I’m just going to let you do this every episode now. You’re so good at it.

Brad:
I got a Mac for it. Mario, real quick, where could people find you online?

Mario:
Mario passion.com. What’s dot com? Yeah, it was mario.com. You can find social links to Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora. I have a daily Instagram with my piece of wisdom and a bunch of other places, YouTube as well. But yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m mostly spending my time on. And again, you can find everything on mario pressure.com.

Brad:
Awesome. Definitely check out Mario’s site, check out his content, look him up on LinkedIn, Cora, it’s some really great stuff, some really insightful stuff, especially around the running a business, which is what I’m very much into as I run my own business. So Bob, you’re just Bob WP everywhere, right? That’s how

BobWP:
They, yeah, just that’s it. That’s it.

Brad:
And I’m WilliamsBA everywhere. So look us up online. Let us know how you like to show what you’d like to talk about, and we will see you again in a couple weeks.

BobWP:
Alright,

Brad:
See you. Alrighty. Good show.