A Blogstorm, Unpacking Blogging

BobWP:
So here’s the deal. The other day I was thinking about the three Cs: community, commenting, and coding. Okay, I lied. I wasn’t thinking about coding at all. Coding, I don’t think about it much. It’s never in my face. I know it’s there. I know people do great stuff with it. I hear people talk about it. So the only reason I put that in there is it just sounded better. I really wanted to talk about community, commenting, and blogging, but it just didn’t sound as good. But that is what has been on my mind lately. Well, actually I lied again because that wasn’t on my mind lately. It’s always on my mind. That’s all I think about is this stuff. So I got to quit lying about things and just get to the point here that it’s really something I am thinking about.

Like I said, a lot, those three things. And as a result, I got into some conversations. I had a conversation actually with Bryce from Metorik. I don’t know if any of you know him, but he was on the podcast lately. We were talking about community, the builder community where they can connect and talk. We threw a few ideas around. Then it moved into another whole thing because of some stuff going on. And of course, I had to have a conversation with Ronald, one of our hosts here, Ronald Gijsel, and we always have great conversations and we started talking about this stuff and we thought, why don’t we just take it live and talk about it? So, I twisted Ronald’s arm and he’s popping back in to actually, he called it, what did you call this? Do you remember what you called this?

Ronald:
Different ideas. I think my latest is almost like unpacking blogging with Bob or was there another reference to that? It’ll come to me. But yeah, I’m really excited actually just to discuss it live and ask you a few questions, what the goals are and bring it back to me and be very lengthy. And maybe at the end of this call, or this recording, we will come up with a final solution, a way you’ll have to give it direction and go for it.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. I was actually looking back, you called it a BlogStorm.

Ronald:
BlogStorm. Yeah. We were doing a brainstorm about everything around blogging. It’s a BlogStorm. Yeah.

BobWP:
So we’re just going to go for it here. And I hope Ronald said we’ll put some ideas together, thoughts, just what’s on our mind. I’ll set the stage. There was a point where I took the blog off because some part of my brain said, oh, I wanted to focus on audio and have everybody focus on the audio when they get there. And of course, I started to look at the site and thought it felt, I think I wrote this somewhere, it felt naked. It was like, where’s a blog? This is conversational. This is community. This is what it’s all about. So in turn, we’re working on bringing back the blog to Do the Woo, and that’s where this came because I had another idea. I had an idea about a newsletter and all this stuff kind of meshed together and Ronald deals with my crazy thinking and my train of thoughts and stuff. I brought up this newsletter idea and only because I keep hacking away at that thing. I’ve done that for so many years and never really progressed. What are your thoughts? I mean, you gave me some feedback. We won’t go into a lot of the details there, but just give me a thought.

Ronald:
Yeah. The thought that came to mind is newsletters are great, but newsletters or anything, email notification of something that’s bigger. And so if you write a newsletter with long form, I dunno what is long form these days, but something that gives you everything in the newsletter, you don’t need to do anything other than read the newsletter. That’s great if you’re in the moment and in the moment of reading a particular topic, but also on a device that makes it pleasant to read it. And once it’s buried in your inbox, it’s kind of gone, difficult to get back and that moment when you send out hundreds of thousands of newsletters, what you see in the status within the first couple of minutes, you see a really high spike of the opening rate and then it sort of diminishes pretty quickly after that, even within the same 24 hours. Even if you have an intelligent system that sends the emails at the best time or thinks it’s the best time with the highest opening rate, I do always wonder what the engagement rate is. So in other words, you send a newsletter, you think I have a huge post, but how engaged are people who read your newsletter? If it’s a call to action to click through to something, that’s really easy, but maybe it’s like, oh, it’s an email from Bob. Okay, great. It’s quite long. I’m doing something else. I’m switching between 15 different tabs and different windows and other things are happening at the same time. Are you really absorbing the content and engaging it? It’s really difficult to do that. And so it’s great to have a notification, but maybe that notification should be, hey, there’s much more content in the blog and here’s your weekly reminder to explore and here are the things that have been happening, have been fed by our presenters and guests. And guess what? If you’re interested in coding, here’s a category, everything around coding, or here’s a category, everything around community and thought. And that got me thinking like, hey, how much content? We’re coming up to 500 podcasts now?

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah. This will probably be, I’m not exactly sure the number, but we’re at around 500 in the 530 somethings.

Ronald:
Oh, so we passed that. Yeah. Amazing. So apart from me, all the other super interesting guests, some of them I’ve interviewed as well in the past, they all have really interesting things to say that it would be great to have quotes, snippets, or even get them to write something on your blog. Anyway, that got me really quite excited about the opportunity and bringing back blogging, which is the core of WordPress.

BobWP:
Yeah. And that’s what I mean. Like I said, I have Ronald there to smack me alongside the head. Every once in a while I get these little ideas and I’m doing them for maybe one specific reason or I’m thinking, how can I make this part better? And then I realize I have things inside there that are already bubbling on the site. One of the things you brought up, I’m going to flip back here, is you had brought up what Matt Mullenweg said and on his, I think he said it on his blog post about WordPress turning 21. And then I said it again in his talk at WordCamp Europe just a couple of months ago, and let’s say I pulled up the blog post and he gave 11 things that he’s just been thinking about. He says people should be thinking about one of them was blogging, commenting, and ping backs need to be fun. Static websites are fine, but dynamic ones are better. Almost every site would be improved by having a blog or a great blog. So when I looked at that, it was like I thought, man, back what, 2010 or so when I was blogging, that was kind of the heyday of blogging and everybody was commenting and it keeps nagging at me, this thing he said, and it’s not just what he said then, it was reaffirmation is what it was to me, what’s been on my mind when we started the new site, when we did the redesign to do the Woo. When we launched that in March and then officially at WordCamp Europe, we decided to open up comments again. And of course, that’s always a challenge. And I think there’s this thing inside of me that just, I won’t give up on it. Comments are there, there’s got to be something happening. So I’ve been publishing ping backs and stuff and some different things and it is true. It’s like there’s so many ideas and thoughts going through my head.

Ronald:
Yeah, I think you touched on something really important and that referencing to Matt, but it just occurred to me that WordPress is 21 years old and WordPress, not everybody started 21 years ago, but for 15 years we’ve had a number of new publishing platforms, mostly social media come, I mean they’re still here, they didn’t go away, but your audience might have moved to different platforms over time and definitely many, many, many more. And when you think of the next 15 years, are any of them still going to be there and relevant? But your blog will always be there. So you build up your diary, your journaling in a way over all those years and that’s owning that content as an asset is huge. So even if you don’t blog for the sake of SEO, it’s still within your own control that you can reuse on purpose and people can search for it and find different things. And I think that’s something that really, the longer we do this stuff, the more valuable it is that you really own that.

BobWP:
Yeah, exactly. And for me, I think one of my challenges lately was my site BobWP.

Ronald:
That was huge by the way, wasn’t it?

BobWP:
Yeah. And we were talking about that because I had my initial thoughts were kind of going back and forth between the two. So I would repurpose some of the content on Do the Woo over at BobWP.com, and as much as I thought that was a good strategy, it didn’t really play out as I thought. And of course, Ronald, when we talked, he hinted maybe that content should be under Do the Woo.

Ronald:
Can you describe a little bit of your first thought of the content strategy when you were doing BobWP

? What were you publishing and how was engagement? I know some of it was testing plugins and so on, and probably old versions that are totally irrelevant. That’s why you don’t feel it’s feasible anymore. But yeah, maybe you could share a little bit of it.

BobWP:
So the whole thing with BobWP, what it’s always been, it’s always been a piece of something. And back in the day I would do tutorials and stuff, and that’s why a lot of this content no longer exists because it was really mostly about stuff that was at the time. And that stuff became outdated very quickly unless I went in and updated it, which I did. And when I actually separated the podcast that was originally started on BobWP, it was for that reason because I knew that I wanted to focus on Do the Woo. I wanted to build a brand more around that or build the buzz or get people directed to that. And so my strategy was always, I always had BobWP there and I did a little bit of blogging here and there, and then I came to the point where, like I said, I started thinking, well, should I start cross-promoting the two? Because a BobWP brand is known out there, which seemed like a good idea. My thought was that yeah, I could do a lot of back and forth because some people will go to BobWP and then I can send them over to Do the Woo, give them a snippet of that. Actually, it didn’t work as I strategically planned because there wasn’t as much traffic going to BobWP anymore because I let it mellow out, which was on purpose because I wanted my focus on Do the Woo. So that was how I kept looking at this and kept looking at this and I’ve actually made a decision going through all this. I’m at a point in life people can kind of say you’re at a certain age or you’re at a point in life where, okay, what’s going to be the next thing? Well, mine is really Do the Woo. It’s my focus. So I thought this is where I need to be all the time on Do the Woo because it’s always going to be, even the experiences I can share doing my own thing over however many years can always fit somewhere there. And as a result, I just recently made the decision to take down BobWP as a site and use my Gravatar profile, BobWP, basically as my website now for BobWP.

Ronald:
Your business card.

BobWP:
And that was a long process and a lot of people have done that and I feel like that’s going to be the best thing I can now focus directly on Do the Woo. I moved some of the content back over from BobWP over on Do the Woo because it fits there and stuff. I just done some of the old posts and stuff. So that was that whole thinking through process. And in the middle of that we talked about it and stuff and we had, oh, I’m drawing a blank, Ronnie from Gravita and listening to him even occurred to me, this is such a great thing because it’s just I can send people where they want to go.

Ronald:
Yeah, it’s like a massive signpost that’s attached to on top of your head, isn’t it? Are you business? You have a pleasure, are you sending money or are you just curious who I am? And then there you go. Just go wherever you need to go. Yeah, just one thing.
Nice. Do you question for you then is do you feel that BobWP might have served a different audience to where you are now with Woo? I know you’ve moved some of the content, so there’s a little bit of an overlap, but I wonder if there’s even a strategy where you say, Hey, there’s some probably personal stuff that might not always be suitable for the Woo audience and even if I write this one blog post per year, it doesn’t matter. It’s just there. So I have a space that can run it that can publish and that’s okay. And for everything else there is Do the Woo.

BobWP:
Yeah, I thought about that and I want the BobWP brand now to be the gateway to Do the Woo. So that’s why I kept thinking when I looked at the site, it’s like I had people, you can go to do the Woo, you can see where I do this and all this stuff, but I felt like it was its own little piece there and honestly I started to realize that I was trying to force myself, it felt like the right move something in my gut and that’s kind of how I’ve always done things and maybe sometimes I regretted or something, but for now I just feel like because I basically have some content somewhere still on my WordPress dot com blog and I can always revive that sometime.

Ronald:
Yeah, it probably makes a great archive that even 10 years looks like I did that is a photo of me and whatever and then it’s still there. I think that becomes really a nice way your own tool of bringing back something that might be relevant even later, even if the minute on something. I also have another question then. When you think about the content for Do the Woo, how do you think about that? So do you want to write for your audience or how do you want them to engage and bring them in and get them to engage with to Do the Woo brand?

BobWP:
That is the fun part to think about, but the challenge I think for me, the site where I’ve moved my whole mindset is that blog becomes an arm of what Do the Woo stands for. And that is having hosts that have already shown interest come in and write guest posts and they can or having even a guest come in and do it. But as you and I talked about before and I think you alluded to a little bit is how that conversation can be carried from a audio podcast or somebody that talks about something in a podcast and says, I’m doing this five months later they do it. Do they want to come in and write a little bit about it

Ronald:
Or what came out of it? What’s the outcome of that initial podcast?

BobWP:
It can tie in really easy and make this circle back and forth between the content and how to get people there and engaged. Aside from thinking of creating a forum or some membership or all the crazy stuff that’s available to us that I don’t even want to touch on It is it’s all through that commenting and how to get people, how to drive them there. And that’s through social, it’s different ways. There’s different things that I’ve discovered are Jetpack now that we’ve used that we’re using that for a lot of our stuff that there are things I want to test with that and try to drive people back to leaving comments and having conversation. There’s some stuff I even talked with somebody from Jetpack at WordCamp Europe and we can do a couple ideas back and forth and we’re continue that conversation. So I’m thinking of some different things. I’ve had a few other people suggest things or actually ask for things that this might be an interesting way to leave a comment and how that can without giving any of a way, I don’t want to say I’m going to do it and then I don’t do it, but getting people to go between the podcasts and the blog and keeping that conversation flowing in some way and somehow interjecting the comments in all of that. And it’s not going to be an easy task

Ronald:
Different ways, isn’t it? Because you have on one hand you really want to engage with the podcast, you want to listen to every word that’s being said, but there are times when you might also just want read the LDR of that podcast and I’d like to say, okay, that podcast probably is not for me, but I’m glad I’ve read the headline into it. Are you going to commit yourself to a soccer match for 90 minutes or almost two hours, which is probably a lot of kicking balls back and forth. Or you’re going to say, no, give me the five minute highlight, that’s enough and if the match absolutely fantastic with quality soccer football, I’m going to go in and watch the full thing. Or if it’s a team or a category that you support, I’m definitely want to listen them know what the whole thing.
So I think the block is also a little bit of a bridge between the full commitment or just a really short version of that or if you have been intrigued by the podcast, a blog could be a way to express your gratitude, your follow up question, sharing it with somebody else because from there you have to learn the links to the podcast. I mean there’s so many different ideas to really use the podcast as the center of it all that again, Gravatar, it’s signposting to everything and everything around that particular topic and maybe write about references of other speakers or podcast made in the past, which you may not have discussed in the podcast itself. So I get really excited about this though.

BobWP:
You’re right because when I go through any transcript and it’s kind of what I was doing with BobWP a little bit is it’s like one question is a post in itself. Somebody has given you a direct answer to one specific problem or one specific challenge, but within those transcripts there is tons of information that can be pulled out and be very in themselves are little nuggets I call ’em gathered throughout that are standalone because they really tell you something right there, maybe even something you can take action on or something. And by itself sometimes you miss those things because like you said, you’re listening to this long podcast for 45 minutes and that little piece comes in there and then it’s gone

Ronald:
And you want to maybe reference that to somebody else. It’s like, oh, was that 23 minutes or 28 minutes and then it’s kind of lost. You’re going to listen to the whole thing, maybe busy, but if the highlights are set of reference, quote that into a blog post. Yeah, that’s a good way to share that though. I was going to ask probably two questions. I know one of the biggest reservations to start

a blog is your time commitment and I think in our discussion I’ve touched a little bit on that’s like don’t commit yourself to a weekly or a daily something just whenever it’s right, whenever you feel like it. And quite often a newsletter when you say, Hey, I have a weekly newsletter. That’s pretty tough to always fill a newsletter with something inside for every single week to the point that people actually might even be turned off by it because it’s the same stuff you read five times over everywhere you in the WordPress ecosystem. So on one hand you have the time commitment, which is really tough, especially if you have busy schedule and you have five recordings in one day. How can you commit yourself to writing these blog posts? Maybe there are hack tools and then the second part is publishing, and I know you alluded to that earlier. How do you get people then to read it and how do you get to publish it? I’m glad that you mentioned Jetpack. They have some publishing tools across many different networks.

BobWP:
And I think that is the challenge because nothing absolutely drives me more nuts than going to read a post and at the end of the post they say, we would love for you to leave a comment over on X and they give you a link about this post and I’m like, now you’re making me go back over there. But everybody tends to do that because that’s where they feel all the conversations. But also it’s a huge mess of stuff that just goes by quickly. I mean you need to do it, but the commitment I think some people spend on social is way beyond. I mean even though they feel there’s a lot of engagement, they’re looking at their views, this is viewed by 10,000 people, this is great. Well how did that all play out? What did you really get out of those 10,000 views? What engagement was there?

Ronald:
When you publish something to Twitter to X to Facebook and Instagram, it would be nice to have a link to those particular posts but also a little counter of what the engagement is on those or whether like 15 comments or 200 comments, it could be quite intriguing to actually go and discover that or even have some of that be reposted into the comments section of the blog to sort of bridge that data. I dunno how easy that is, but that really good truth for thought, what you just shared

BobWP:
And somebody just shared recently a person that is using the Fediverse pulling in content and stuff, but on their site they’re pulling in all basically their feed of everything they say out there and it’s all living on their site as a one page is a long feed. I know that next time anybody’s at a WordCamp and you want to have a nice lengthy conversation about all of this kind of social stuff, I’m find Robert Windish from side, he’s thinking, how can we make WordPress a social platform and that means your blog and stuff like that. And he has a lot of really, I mean he will talk your ear off about it, but he has a lot of interesting ideas and he’s kind of on the mission himself and that kind of brings it in, how do you tie this all together? How do you still make your site the place where people will go to? And I think we’ve gotten out of that habit, the

Ronald:
Data liberation project, probably not excelling as far as we want. It’s not always about moving side to a different platform, but it’s also pulling in information from other platform into your own side, whether it’s private or in case of WooCommerce, it could be moving data from shipping platforms or accounting platforms but also public comments, relevant comment from social media into your own play. And I think again, what I said earlier that if everything you did or published is on WordPress that you can totally control with your own tools and what it looks like, how amazing is that? How many issues would would’ve prevent it? I think people will start to realize that as things mature, WordPress is always there and will always be there, even selling a hundred year plan. So I’m pretty confident that that’s going to be the case

BobWP:
And I think is there’s, even though some people really dedicate themselves to maybe a certain platform or feel that even though they still have a site that more and more people are starting to think just can’t go on or continue this way, there’s a bit of frustration I think on some people’s level and a bit, I mean I’ve even cut down my time on social just because I feel like I’m just, yeah, it’s, it’s too much anymore. I still depend on RSS, that’s how I keep up on everything is my R SS feed and that I go in and check all the time. That’s the easiest way for me to do it and still the best way

Ronald:
Controlling what comes into your inbox, what you read, what newsletter you subscribed, which block do you want to get into your feed. It’s super important that you take control over your own life. I noticed that with my own certain social media profile, how destructive it can be and we dunno quite what the result is going to be in 10, 20 years time and how their attention is going to be. But these are all challenges that we start to see the tip of the iceberg. I just want to go back because we brush over that creating the content, like writing the content and I know AI tools are big and they’ve been around for quite a few years and blogging you could almost just do it with a couple of prompts. What are your thoughts on that using AI tools in the broadest way?

BobWP:
For me personally, I don’t use it to create any original content. I’ve sometimes asked for a few ideas and even then it, it’s very rarely where I use it the most is repurposing content and that means existing content and I have exactly that through the transcripts. So when I mean my transcripts to give you an idea of my workflow with the transcripts, which makes sense, that leads into other content is when I get a transcript, I have it done through rev.com through their AI and I go through and I correct some of the names brands and then I take that same transcript and I run it through chat GPT and I tell it to just find any spelling errors or small grammatical errors. Sometimes you have to be careful with the prompt or it’ll actually start eliminating parts of the transcript. So I try to keep it to just really small things, which that usually fixes quite well and from that I’ll ask it to give me one or two paragraph intro to it and it’s never written exactly like I want, so I use it as a basis to just do something and then I’ll ask it for some key takeaways, which is where I think it is a lot better at and that’s the best use of it is on existing content, not on creating original content.
And then I would go through and make sure it reads and take out the word delve, which AI seems to love so much. Everybody delves into everything and it just drives me. But that’s where personally and I think where it works best, I’m at an advantage because I basically have original content through the audio. I just need to have that transcribed and then work with that content. But original stuff still for me personally has to come from my brain.

Ronald:
You could teach the LMS to be more like Bob and if you keep teaching it with your prompts probably can get much better in weeks and months to come, but that does take time. It needs to learn that as well. But that’s really interesting. I mean even just a few years back I recall you would send off your recording to be transcribed by somebody and it would be quite an expensive server and compare that now with these A alarms it’s an amazing value and so much faster and almost instant.

BobWP:
Oh yeah, and it’s something, yeah, for years and years I paid Rev to do human transcripts and that budget became higher and higher as I did more content obviously and more podcasts.

Ronald:
Right. Then a little bit unpacking the part of publishing to where your audiences are, where your tribe is at, but I know in your case you have so many new audiences and communities across the globe speaking different languages. Do you track that? Do you analyze that or you don’t even go that fast right here it is. There are a few ways to find it.

BobWP:
Yeah, I’ve tried to do it and there’s never a rhyme or reason for whatever happens with any content. I mean a certain spike in listen and sometimes you try to track it and you think was there somebody that just happened to share? It’s out there somewhere that you don’t know about and there’s no way you can track it because suddenly it’s just out of the blue you’ll have five, six times as many listens one day as you did for the last five days or something and you can go and look at that topic and often the topic doesn’t make sense either what made this happen or was it shared internally somewhere? How do you

Ronald:
Feel about others writing on your blog or for you, is that something, I know you talked about a little bit, but what are your thoughts around that? How far do you want to extend it? You want to keep it only within co-host or anybody that’s been on the podcast and even to the point where it’s almost could monetize the way because of anybody that publish on your platform with the audience that this build up there is some value to that.

BobWP:
Yeah, one of the wonderful things I have is I have a group of co-hosts. If I have an idea and this is how the newsletter thing is exactly what I did with that and I can bounce an idea off and when I bounce the idea of bringing a blog back right away, several of them were like, oh, I’d love to guess both. Which it’s not easy to get people to guess posts because it’s tough enough for them to write content for themselves. So for sure the hosts to me a no-br

ainer, especially if they want to follow up or write about one of the shows they’ve recently done. The guests almost are a second no-brainer because the opportunity to give them to follow up on something or to add to the conversation say, wow, after the conversation I thought about this one piece or I thought maybe they want to elaborate on one thing they were asked, they answered it one minute, but they have a lot more to say. So those kinds of things, I think it’s ideal. The podcast is run by the community. I mean I do all the grunt work, but I host you. I bring in guest hosts and all these guests and I want the blog to be that too as far as open guest spots, but I’m going to be very selective. I don’t want tutorials, I don’t want them writing about their product. It’s not

Ronald:
The audience that you’ve built up. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And get the feedback as well in the bottom of the blog have some sort of rating tool that’s used for how would you rate this content? And so they kind of use that as a way of working where depending on the number of readers and the feedback that you get is better provide the content that readers are interested in. The other thing I saw that crossed my mind working with user levels within WordPress publisher and editor admin, whether certain speakers who might want to follow up on things or even add a supportive blog post, whether they have some sort of levels that they can add and own that piece of content.

BobWP:
Yeah, I guess I could say get in the groove of how I do this with the post and I still want it to be that community oriented piece and I want them to feel like they have a bit of control over that. So it’s an interesting thing to think about because I think that’s an important part.

Ronald:
Yeah, it’s that community that you build up and it’s also back to the comments and empowering some writers to control and manage the comments and the conversation and that’s like bringing that back. It then becomes not quite a forum, but it is that engagement not just between the author and a few comments and that probably brings in more folks to then want to comment because they can get the audience with the speaker, with the writer and leave some nice words or ask for the question, what did you mean we did quote or does also apply to X, Y and Z. The other cool thing I found with the Jetpack tool, creating the social media images, so when you publish that something did you see that you add your featured image and a bit of text and within the post itself it generates a social media image that’s formatted for the different platform. Again, it’s one of those little hacks that just make so much easier to create a content, publish it and not be dragged down like, oh, I need to do this, I need to do that. And then weeks past you still haven’t published it because having that threshold as lowest as possible direct from public I think is key to just keep going. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect, even if it’s a light mistake, update it. Yours.

BobWP:
Exactly. And

Ronald:
Just going back on the newsletters, because we have to bring that back in because that was the original idea is like I’m going to start with a newsletter and now we, instead of really focusing on blog, blog block and all the advantages, there’s still a place for newsletters. Where do you see that sort of fall into place?

BobWP:
When I visualize in my head for a newsletter and ideally what I like is I want to keep as much of this content on the site and drive people and have it as a teaser. And of course as it has been, or I guess you don’t call it newsletter, but when people get notified of a post, I mean just knowing this is a content and you can go back through and listen to what you want to read, what you want, but also is how to have that content go out automatically but also be able to add a little custom content to it to make sure that people, this is how you can more easily comment or by doing this and make it a little bit more visible. Add little snippets of something in there that

Ronald:
Quotes from the community like, oh, Ron said this on X and that followed up in a comment here and that’ve got some great conversation going, get engaged in this if you care about this stuff or here’s a quote, I got the community talking and it was relevant here and there. And yeah, it also a good way to introduce other platforms within the own ecosystem. If you have a guest speaker from a Woo ecosystem or from a third party developer, it’s nice to be able to reference that in a newsletter I get.

BobWP:
And I think there’s a lot of potential, but I don’t want to make the newsletter, like you said, this is kind of more of a prompt the newsletter. And what I really want to do is when I get this all in place and things moving along, my next endeavor is to get Matt Mullenweg on. I’d love to just talk with him about blogging, comment and ping backs

Ronald:
And did you now who is also fantastic, I know if that he should bring in a guest Tim Ferris and I know he and Matt have shared so many ideas around blogging, like long form short form. Also Seth Godin and I’ve written to some podcasts around how easy it is to share something or not at all really the thought process behind blogging and I think Matt is pretty good at that. He can share something very short, one paragraph and it’s out there or some really long bits of tech, but it’s the short ones that I’m going to take way more time to think that through. Very easy to talk and write paragraphs and paragraphs. At some point people will disengage and you kind of lost them, but keeping it super short and to the point that’s real.

BobWP:
And I think that’s kind of what I’m thinking about too is a lot of this and I think the site is ripe for that because there’s a lot of content we can share that is short and to the point rather than just going on and on and giving 11 tips of whatever. I mean those have its place.

Ronald:
Yeah. Here’s another thing, you’re building up international communities and having the content of tribe or even the blog post, but having it with Google now, it’s so easy to have your full page translated as well. It’s almost instant. Well, it is instant. Which is a great way to repurpose content.

BobWP:
It is.

Ronald:
And both ways, if you have somebody writing in a lanugage that it also accessible to English speakers or to German speaker and yeah, that’s probably something that’s not talked about a lot, but super easy.

BobWP:
That would be really interesting, like to open that up. We’ve done that to some effect with the one podcast where we have the community come in and talk about their own WordPress community and their locale and in their native language, and so they’re actually talking to their community. That’s another whole piece of it. And I think it is, you’re right, I know there’s podcasts in the space that does the podcast in several different languages. They actually have somebody do it in four or five languages. A little bit of the news, WordPress news, and I think there’s something there to be looked at for sure because we’re a huge community.

Ronald:
I haven’t checked the figures, but I would sort of maybe 60, 75% of Woo users don’t live in a country where English is the first language. So maybe two thirds who don’t have English foreign language, they speak English, but to truly engage with them anyway, I guess we’ve come to the conclusion that blogging is pretty cool. I think there is blogging for anybody for yourself, whether it’s a personal diary that you have public and then you have your personal one that you keep private, whether it’s for yourself or for your business, for your ecommerce site. I think blogging for the sake of SEO definitely has value, but I don’t think that should be the prime goal to block call because then you end up in not very pretty or very well organized content to hit certain keywords and I think that puts people off. But write it for your, like you do with social media, keep it short to the point with a link to your product, to your podcast, wherever you want people to go to or the call to action. I think that probably has a good reason to consider it again.

BobWP:
Yeah, for sure. And definitely I think we’ve touched on enough different thing given our thoughts. Some of the direction Do the Woo might go. So if there is not a perfect post to come in and comment, anybody listening to this, this is a post because we’ve talked about a lot of things and I’m sure everybody that’s listened to it has actually thought, well, yeah, that makes sense, or nope, this is the way I would do it or this is how it works for me.

Ronald:
And maybe that’s the comment, call out what are the forms of blog posts or good examples of other forms of blog posts like rich content, whether it snippet the codes or a gallery photos or sound snippets or maybe a poll to get voting. That all can all be part of a blog pro. It doesn’t always have to be just paragraph or words.

BobWP:
Right, exactly. So we’re going to encourage everybody listening now to come and leave a comment.

Ronald:
I’m inspired now. I’m going to revisit my own site. I haven’t touched since I started working at quite a few years now. It’s all very well preaching about it, but maybe we should all get back to blogging. I think it’s a good way.

BobWP:
Well this has been great and yeah, everybody hope you enjoyed it and let us know your thoughts. You’ll go into the post, leave a comment.

Ronald:
It’s been a great Blogstorm, Bob

. Yeah,

BobWP:
I’m sure you’ll be right alongside there, at least in spirit one way or another.

Ronald:
Yeah, I need to write one of the first posts or co-write to see what.

BobWP:
Alright, Ronald, thanks everyone for listening and yeah, let us know what you think about all this stuff we were talking about. Alright, thank you all.

Ronald:
Thanks Bob.