Business, Automation, Community, and Contribution at WordCamp Asia

Amir Arabnezhad – The Future of Support: Why 3 Tiers Saves Customers’ Tears

Hi. I’m Amir from Barn2 Plugins, and I’m going to tell you why having three tiers of support in your team is important. If you dunno what those three tiers are, just imagine you’re selling WordPress based products or services. Obviously you have some  developers and some support engineers on your team, but when it comes to the support team, most teams have tier one for general and basic technical support and tier two for narrowing down issues and a little more technical help.

They refer the tickets to the developers for more complex problems. This is not a good practice since it might distract your developers from their other tasks. They need to spend more time on replicating the issue, and the customer should wait longer for a reply. A tier three is someone with development, debugging, and communication skills who can take most of the technical tickets, help the customers in customization, and give the developers a good point to start with in debugging the issues. This way your customers get a response way quicker and they are happier. Your developers stay focused on their important tasks and your resources are managed better.

Just make sure  that each ticket stays on the lowest level possible and you have someone in charge of the team. I will talk moreabout how to find someone with this skillset and how to manage a team with three levels of support engineers. My session is called The Future of Support: Why 3 Tiers Saves Customers’ Tears. See you on February 18th in WordCamp Asia.

Angela Jin – Panel: Building WordPress Communities in Your Country

Hello there. I’m Angela Jin, a sponsored contributor from Automattic. WordPress has an amazing community and we work, network and make friends online and in person. It makes perfect sense that you might want to bring some of that magic home with you. But starting a new local WordPress community can be daunting.

Where do you even start? So if you’ve ever wanted to bring together other WordPress users, builders, developers, freelancers, anyone enthusiastic about WordPress, where you live, come join my panel at WordCamp Asia on building WordPress communities in your country. You’ll hear stories and learn tips from others who have successfully nurtured their local WordPress community and leave inspired to do it yourself. I’ll see you there.

Ben Evans – How You Can Contribute Localized Content to the Learn WordPress Site

Hi, I’m Benjamin Evans from Automattic. I’m also this year’s team representative for the WordPress training team. Are you familiar with the website Learn WordPress? If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, then take a moment to check out Learn.WordPress.org. WordPress is the official educational website for the WordPress project.

It is a central hub for people wanting to either learn or teach about WordPress. The site hosts multiple types of community generated content, and at both learners, teachers and contributors of WordPress. My most favorite type of content are the online workshops. These are live online sessions where I get to interact with other users who are interested in sharing ideas, learning new skills, or sharing what they know about WordPress. At the moment, the majority of content on Learn is in English, leaving a huge opportunity for contributors to translate content. or even create new content in their locale. The WordPress training team is actively searching for contributors who will help us globalize Learn today. Sounds interesting. You bet.

To find out more about how you can get involved, come hear my talk at WordCamp Asia, first thing Sunday morning on February 19th. Look for the session titled How You Can Contribute Localized Content to the Learn WordPress Site. See you there.

Carl Alberto – Automating QA Through Visual Regression Testing

Hi folks. I’m Carl Alberto from the Philippines, currently working in web ops platform called Pantheon Systems as a WordPress solution architect. I’ll be talking about visual regression testing tools available out there, and how you can add them to QA automation toolbox for your WordPress sites. One tip that I can share from my talk is regarding the backstop JS usage for visual regression testing.

It’s one of the most popular and actively developed and a versatile tool that we have tested out there. As of today it has over 500 forks and over 6,000 stars in its GitHub repository. It’s s well documented, can be added to your continuous integration pipelines, be it in GitLab, Travis CircleCI, GitHub actions or whatever you fancy. Backstop JS requires no JS for installation. A couple of commands to initialize your reference site, which is your live site, and compare it against your staging site where changes like WordPress core update, plugin version changes. CSS modifications or new customizations that you implemented can be programmatically compared in terms of how much percentage it viscerally changed.

The top will also tackle the advantages and shortcomings of its usage as well as SaaS offerings out there. If you didn’t want to maintain the infrastructure and coding the process from the ground up. So please join me in WordCamp Asia 2023 in Bangkok, February 19, 9:50 AM, track two for developers, see you all folks.

Carl Alexander – A Look at Serverless WordPress

Hello, this is Carl Alexander from Do the Woo Podcast. At WordCamp Asia I’ll be talking about serverless. I’m supposed to be sharing a tip with you, but it’s a bit hard to share a tip about serverless WordPress because it’s so new. And that’s a bit what the talk is about.

But if you’re a WordPress and especially a WooCommerce builder, I think it’ll be really interesting for you to learn about serverless WordPress because it deals a lot with how to scale WooCommerce, how to handle more orders, how to just have your WordPress or WooCommerce application behave better under duress, under stress, especially when you’re dealing with these large sales and things like that. So if you’re really interested in learning about the next phase of hosting, you should listen to my talk, it’s titled A Look at Serverless WordPress, and it’ll be on the first day of WordCamp Asia.

Carole Olinger – Stepping Back To Move Forward

Hi everyone. My name is Carole, and I’m a culture and recruitment strategist at Yoast. In my session, Stepping Back to Move Forward at WordCamp Asia, you will not only learn why you should always prioritize your health and the benefits of taking a personal inventory from time to time while challenging your inner pioneer spirit, we will also explore how to define our personal values and set the right priorities for professional and personal success and fulfillment.

We will look at the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, as well as those of FOMO, the fear of missing out, and its far more pleasant counterpart, JOMO, the joy of missing out. But most importantly, together we will break down the stigma of mental health issues. This is going to be a so-called Lightning talk, and I bet you can find 10 minutes to contribute to this important cause and join me on an introspective journey. Yes, well, see you in Bangkok on Sunday, February 20th at 11:20 AM.

Hari Shanker – Ten Minutes on Five for the Future: A Commitment to WordPress and the Open Web

Hi, my name is Hari Shanker. I am an open source program manager at Automattic, and I am delivering a session on the topic Five for the Future, a commitment to WordPress and the Open Web at WordCamp Asia. WordPress is an open source software that relies on volunteer contributors from all over the world for its sustenance. Companies and individuals benefiting from WordPress can sponsor contribution time towards WordPress through the Five for the Future program. However, did you know that contributing to WordPress not only benefits the project itself, but also supports its contributors? Did you know that there are ways for contributors and businesses to grow with their own contributions to WordPress.

In my session. I will delve into this and I will aim to demystify contributing to WordPress. I also hope to share a framework that will help individuals and companies in building the contributor journeys for WordPress. So if you are a WordPress user, or if you build products or websites using WordPress, my session is for you. Come join my session on February 19th at 10:10 AM See you all soon.

Jonathan Wold – Business Models in the WordPress Ecosystem

Hi, I’m Jonathan Wold, one of your co-hosts for Do the Woo. One of the things that I’ve noticed in my conversations with product founders in the WooCommerce space and WordPress broadly, is that it can be difficult to know how to navigate just this idea of business model. What type of plugin do you build? Who’s your audience for it? Are you focusing on B2B or B2C? How are you gonna make money? Are you gonna do a freemium model, premium? How are you gonna get distribution? How you gonna help your target audience know where your product is? How are you gonna handle licensing? These are the questions that come up.

And while a lot of folks will just copy what they see others do. There’s a lot of opportunity that we’re seeing to do just all of this better, and that’s what we’d love to see. We want to see the WooCommerce space grow. We want to see product founders have successful product businesses that are able to meet their potential.

Here at WordCamp Asia I’m gonna be doing a talk titled, Business Models in the WordPress Ecosystem, where we’ll look at some of the data, we’ll look at some of the most popular plugins and what they’re doing and the models, and we’ll talk about the characteristics of a business model. We’ll break down the most popular models and talk about the benefits and trade-offs of each of those models, and then end with giving product founders guidance on choosing the model that’s best for them and and what to do next. So I will look forward to seeing you there.

Nirav Mehta – The One Sentence Secret to Marketing, Influence and Getting a Yes

Hi, my first successful business venture was 30 years ago at the age of 13. After that, I kept pursuing new ideas, working hard, learning, and persisting. I’ve launched India’s first electronic magazine, a thriving web agency, and then a series of seven figures off of businesses. My name is Nirav Mehta, and in my lightning talk I will share with you the ultimate formula for charisma, influence, and impact.

Consider this, we are all in the game of persuasion, almost everything that we do. Building products, creating websites, writing block posts, and sales pages, and emails and tweets, answering customer support. Well, almost everything has one goal, to persuade, influence, convince somebody. To inspire them to take action.

But there is a catch. We can spend a lifetime mastering the art of persuasive communication, but even the most powerful strategies are useless if we cannot remember them when we need them. On the other hand, it has never been easier to be powerfully persuasive, never. All you need to learn are a handful of core principles. And when I discovered this strategy, I could clearly see that every top marketer, every top selling product, every successful business was using it, and it doesn’t require good looks, a silver tongue or infallible logic.

It doesn’t require confidence jam, or a magnetic personality. Persuasion is really simple when one cuts through all the smoke, cutting through the smoke is the hard part. So join me at WordCamp Asia, and let’s master the one sentence secret to lasting influence. A sentence that elegantly sums up all wisdom about marketing, charisma, and impact.

Prasad Nevase – Using WordPress.org APIs for Community

Hi, I’m Prasad Nevase from rtCamp. When you want to choose a plugin from three to four plugins, you go through the plugin description, check reviews, and compare some other parameters. At WordCamp Asia, I’m going to talk on the same thing and explain about a community tool we build to solve this problem. See you soon there.

Shilpa Shah – Starting Your WordPress Blog, the First 6 Months

Hi, this is Shilpa Shah from WPCubicle. Whether you’re a freelancer or an agency or a small business owner, you’ve got to have a blog. That’s the one place you can showcase whatever it is that you’re selling, your skills, your expertise, your products. Setting up a blog is pretty easy, but creating a loyal audience for it, and building a really interactive community around it can be far more challenging than you think. While we are all creative enough to come up with a brilliant plan that’s sure to work, actually sticking to that plan and diligently executing it is the tough part.

When Google’s algorithm updates, bring your traffic crashing down, it’s hard not to think about pivoting and succumbing to the shiny object syndrome. Or worse than giving up. But the only thing that will get your blog to become a success is to simply keep going, putting one foot in front of the other every single day. I’m gonna talk more about this at my WordCamp Asia session, Starting Your WordPress Blog, The First 6 Months. My session is the first one on the first day, 10:00 AM local time. I hope to see you there.

Sunita Rai – Hiring Fresh Graduates to WordPress Marketing Jobs

Hello world. I am Sunita, a WordPress marketer, currently leading the marketing team at ThemeGrill. I’ve got a tip for you. If you own a business, you may want to build a robust marketing team for promoting your products, but it may not be so easy if you’re running a small scale business, with a limited budget and resources, hiring a team of experts is not a viable option.

Or in another case, if there are limited candidates in the talent pool, it can get really hard to find the right people for the job. If you can find, you still have an option, building your team from scratch, through internship programs. You can hire fresh graduate, train them internally and prepare for the marketing goals you need.

But yes, you need to have one, or some expert trainer and also lots of dedication. Not so easy either, but I say it’s worth it. Firstly, you get your dream team. Next, and most important, you connect fresh minds with WordPress jobs and the open source movement. Sounds interesting? If you want to learn more and are planning to attend WordCamp Asia, please join my talk at 2:20 PM, 19th February, 2023, track one. Hope to see you there and thanks Bob for the opportunity.

Tarun Sikder – Writing for Your Audience: Learning the Art of User Intent Content

Hi there. This is Tarun Sikder. I’m a content writer by profession and a writer by heart. I’m currently working as a freelance writer for a number of global brands. First of all, I would like to thank Bob for inviting me to share some tips related to my WordCamp Asia talk through the Do the Woo podcast channel. I have been researching for a while and discovered that workplace businesses around the world are suffering from a content creation and marketing perspective due to their inability to generate user intent content. This is actually when I realized the importance of generating quality content that speaks the user’s mind. Let me just share some tips for all the freelancers, our professional writers out there who want to learn to create user intent content for best results in their professional career.

First of all but I’d like to say that always try to ensure you write your content, keeping one user in mind. And next try to determine what your readers are really craving for in the content. Before you start writing, ask yourself to determine who is your reader, what do you want them to do, and why should they do it?

You could also perform the “So What?” Test. Now if you don’t know what this test means you should visit my WordCamp session to find out more on it. Coming back to the tips actually we know that the readers span is very low nowadays. And to keep your reader’s attention, you should try make your content as relevant and personalized. Nobody wants to read long paragraphs with complex words that they can’t even understand or follow properly. So all you’ve got to do is find a way to say more without writing more. You can do this by crafting sentences that sing with your readers.

And if you are a freelancer, or a developer who writes technical content, you must learn the art of incorporating stories into your writing. You can get some more insights on top of the school tips with some valid examples visiting my session at the WordCamp this year, 2023, I invite you to join me at the event to enjoy my exclusive non-professional talk on writing for your audience, learning the art of user-oriented content. I’d love to see you guys all there. Cheers.

Thijs de Valk – You Are Optimizing the Wrong Things

Hi, I’m Thijs de Valk. I’m the CEO of Yoast, a company you might have heard of. So there’s a lot of things you can be focusing on when running a business online. It’s hard to actually find the right stuff to focus on. What needs your attention the most. A lot of times people are focusing on stuff that can have an effect right now, but is that always the best option?

How will that actually affect your business in the long run? There is so much to know, track and figure out these days, we’re slowly becoming blind to what it actually is that builds great businesses. It’s not you testing everything on your site or your newsletter, nor is it the amount of money you spend on advertising. It’s much more likely to be about your product or your service. In my talk, I’ll show you what I think people are focusing on that they shouldn’t and what I think people should be focusing on and what they should be optimizing and optimizing for. Don’t optimize for more sales. Optimize your product. Optimize your service.

Time to get that energy and those resources back and spend them on the things that will make your business thrive. So please come to my talk. It’s called You Are Optimizing the Wrong Things. Thanks.

Topher DeRosia – Success Stories of HeroPress

Hi, I’m Topher from HeroPress and I just wanted to give you a quick tip for speaking at WordCamps. My tip is to engage the audience as much as possible. Have friends in the audience that you know you can mention or call on. My talk at WordCamp Asia is called Success Stories of HeroPress, and I know some HeroPress contributors will be in the audience.

We’re working together so that I can engage them from the stage and it makes the entire audience feel more connected to the. I’m speaking on February 18th at 1:30 PM. That’s the first day of sessions. See you there.