donations

View on separate page

Transcript

Intro: Before we get too deep into this season, I wanted to make sure you and I have a good baseline for creating content and engaging with the audience. Taylor Waldon, the content strategist for Give WP does a fantastic job of this. We talk about how Give is expanding their niche, and why creating the right content is crucial for them to reach the right people. This is a must listen for anyone who’s creating content for their small business, no matter what they do.

 

Joe: Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that asks, how did you build that today? My guest is Taylor Waldon. She’s the content strategist at GiveWP. Taylor, how are you?

 

Tylor: I’m great. How are you doing today?

 

Joe: I’m doing very well. Thank you. Thanks for joining us today. I’m excited to talk to you about our topic which is getting audience engagement. I don’t feel it’s something I’m particularly good at, and I’m excited to learn. But let’s start at the beginning. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

 

Tylor: Sure. I am the content strategist at GiveWP. I started out as a content writer about two years ago—a little bit over. Pretty much the rest is history. It’s WordPress history actually. I fell in headfirst for my first WordCamp, got into GiveWP, spoke at a ton of WordCamps. As I’ve gone through my career path with Give, I’ve learned a ton about not just content marketing, but plugin content marketing in the WordPress ecosphere, because it’s very, very different from any other type of marketing that I’ve ever done before, but also very similar. So it’s been a wild ride.

 

Joe: Awesome. That’s really interesting. I’ve noticed that the WordPress community, in general, feels a little bit different from other groups. I know we didn’t talk about this beforehand, but you mentioned that marketing in WordPress is a little different. Can you elaborate on that? Because, again, I kind of struggle with marketing to the WordPress community. So any tips that could help me would be amazing.

 

Tylor: I think I bring kind of a different perspective, too because I came from the outside to the inside. But we actually have been struggling with this. Full transparency at Give is getting beyond the WordPress community because we’ve been so great at that part. So I think when it comes to WordPress, it’s really honestly about actually being involved in the community. I think you do a great job of that because I’ve seen you at WordCamps and things. And I think that’s how we met.

 

So WordCamps honestly, I think have been key with WordPress, and then Twitter, which sounds like so backwards in today’s world because when I approached marketing two years ago when I was starting out Give, I was like, “I hate Twitter.” But that is where WordPress is live, talk, communicate. There can be a billion Slack channels, but Twitter is where everybody comes together like a giant WordCamp. So I’ve noticed that actually involving yourself in conversations is really important versus posting. Because we’ll go through slumps at Give—slumps in terms of social media—and we’ll look at our Twitter feed, we’ll look at our Facebook feed, and we’re like, “We’re posting the same amount. What’s different? Well, we didn’t participate in this Twitter chat this week, or we weren’t involved in this WordCamp this summer.”

 

And that’s been really key, but we found ways to compensate for that, especially with no WordCamps right now. But I guess my main point is that you have to actually be in both in the community. That’s the biggest part. So I think that Give has really benefited from that. Because I know that Devin, Jason, and Matt have all just been great at networking through the WordPress community. And they came from there in the first place. So that’s been awesome. And expanding beyond that has been a really great learning experience for everybody.

 

Joe: Yeah, that’s fantastic. I mean, you’re absolutely right. WordCamps are huge. I have been going for a long time, and I attribute my success to that. But getting involved in conversations on Twitter is something that never really occurred to me because I just view Twitter like if YouTube comments were a separate thing. Like that is Twitter. So it’s like there’s a lot of good but there’s a lot of bad. In fact, I was watching probably a mutual friend that we have get trolled by some idiot today. I didn’t say anything, because I don’t know how that will help.

 

Tylor: It doesn’t help feed the trolls. So at Give we started our new community outreach coordinator. I think I said that properly. He started a collection of our favorite trolling tweets, because you know, we’re Give; we’re going to get trolls on our ads and things like that. So we have tons of that too. It’s definitely all about tuning it out.

 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That’s fantastic. And it probably lays some good groundwork for what we’re going to talk about today, which is audience engagement. You said that you came from outside the WordPress community, and I know that there’s a lot of other stuff that you might do, right? I was checking out your website and stuff like that. So what is your pre–WordPress background and what’s the kind of stuff that you like to do professionally as far as marketing and content goes?

 

Tylor: I kind of have the classic failed writer story. I got into marketing and college as a backup option because I wanted to be a writer. I had no idea they would go hand in hand eventually. That was the beginning of content marketing as an industry. So my first ever project as a marketer was a blog. And from there, it went onward.

 

But as far as my side projects go, I really only have courses now available on my site, which I’ve totally failed to keep up or add more to, because I’m just so busy. I’ve pretty much done away with freelance work except for creative writing. I’ll totally consult with somebody, but I’m not going to lie, I hiked my prices up because I just don’t have time for it. But before I was working with Give and in the WordPress community, I worked with WordPress and I was a content writer for a marketing company, and I was a copywriter and I was a social media manager and I did all of those other things.

 

I used WordPress all the time, but I had no idea that community was there or how these companies even became WordPress companies. So, going to that first WordCamp was an eye-opener. Then from there, I think it took me about probably a year to actually fully understand the community, even though I was totally involved in it.

 

Joe: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. Like I said earlier, I’ve kind of always been in the WordPress community. I’ve been using WordPress since 2004. So that has kind of affected my view on the community versus outside the community and things like that. So it’s really cool to see somebody getting in from the outside and seeing exactly how it works and how that affects your work. Because Give is doing I think a really great job of supporting the community, putting out really great content. I had Matt and Devin on the show like three years ago. I think they were around Episode 50 or something like that.

 

Tylor: Yeah, I think we still share that sometimes.

 

Joe: Nice. Yeah, that was a really fun episode. So it’s really cool to see how well Give in general is doing.

 

Sponsors: Today’s episode is brought to you by Smile and their product TextExpander. Save time typing and boost your productivity with TextExpander. You know I’m all about automation, and TextExpander is a great way to get started with automation. It allows you to create your own snippets for a repetitive text that you tend to use everywhere. Add the text, create the snippet, and boom. Save precious time and keystrokes. One of my favorite snippets is for my address. So instead of typing out my full address and risking typos, I simply type #addr and my TextExpander does the rest, filling in my full address for me. I also have snippets for my street, my city, and my zip code.

 

But that’s not all TextExpander does. With its advanced snippets, you can create fill-ins, pop up fields, and more. You can even use JavaScript or AppleScript. Another one of my favorite and most used snippets is when I type “PPT”. That will take whatever text I have on my clipboard and convert it to plain text. So I’m no longer fighting formatting when I copy from a Word document, a Google Doc, or a plain HTML page, like a website.

 

I also use it for common links, email messages, which I can completely customize with fill-ins and drop-down menus, and even date calculations. I’m currently writing a book and TextExpander has been instrumental with that. TextExpander is available on Mac OS, Windows, Chrome, iPhone, and iPad. So pretty much anywhere you do computer. If you’ve been curious about trying TextExpander or all automation in general, now’s the time. As a listener, you can get 20% off your first year. Just visit TextExpander.com/podcast and let them know How I Built It sent to you. That is TextExpander.com/podcast for 20% off your first year.

 

Now back to the show.

 

Joe: Let’s talk about your content strategy, and then we’ll talk about engagement. Are there certain things that you know? You’ve got to put out a video every week or you’ve got to put out a blog post every other day, what’s your strategy look like?

 

Tylor: This is probably the most fun topic to talk about right now because we’re in the middle of transitioning our marketing department to grow with the company. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but Give has grown immensely over last year. We hit 90,000 active installs. As a marketing team with one writer, it’s tough. Let me back up.

 

We approach it from the beginning. When I came in to Give, Matt and I kind of butted heads on which pieces would have the most engagement. And I really think that it depends on the audience you’re targeting them to. Because all of our pieces have engagement with the right audience. Then recently, like I said, we’re trying to transition our engagement from WordPress to the broader nonprofit community so that we get a bigger name than just with WordPress because there’s only so many people that know WordPress that you can reach with that.

 

So now we’re focusing away from tutorial and product-oriented things where WordPressers might be looking for that functionality to the benefits and what people are looking for problem-solving within the fundraising community. Cameron Jenkins tweeted about this yesterday, I think. She said that she listens to customer phrasing with their customer support calls to find out what terminology they’re using. That’s something I kind of do too. I listen to what our customer success and tech support teams say our customer concerns are and common questions. And then I go into Search Console and I figure out what similar terminology people are using the search and find our website.

 

Because that’s going to be different data that I’m getting from Keyword Planner. And 90% of the time, most of those words don’t show up in Keyword Planner. But I’m getting clicks from them on Google, and I can see that in Search Console. So I use all of that to kind of build an empathetic mindset if that makes sense and figure out what people are actually looking for.

 

For example, I noticed that our brand searches and WordPress-oriented searches stopped fitting the community standards for WordPress terminology. So WordPress capital P, dang it. We were getting searches that are like “donation plugin”. Just weird phrasing. So I started noticing that instead of the specific WordPress phrasing, we’re getting more broad in general phrasing. So I realized we have expanded past our WordPress community and we’re reaching people who don’t really know what WordPress is, but they want Give. Totally different search intent. They’ve got to be introduced to WordPress now too if that makes sense.

 

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. And that two minutes is worth the whole episode. Like if you stop listening now, which you definitely shouldn’t, you have gotten a lot of value. Because listening to customer phrasing I think is something that I learned very recently and constantly need reinforcement on. So thank you for reinforcing that. Because it’s true, you want to use the words that your customers are using, because those are the words that your customers are ultimately searching.

 

It’s really evident when you read—and I’m completely guilty of this—when you read a software product’s copy and you could tell it was written by the developer. Like, “We used PHP and React.” And like, “No one cares about that at all.”

 

Tylor: I got struggle all the time with our developers and with Matt and Devin, and I’m like, “Nobody cares.” And they’re like, “We care.” And I’m like, “We need a developer blog.” We have one, by the way.

 

Joe: Nice, I’m going to link that.

 

Tylor: But it’s such a common problem in all of software.

 

Joe: Because it’s the exciting thing, right? For the developer, it’s like, “Look at this thing that I built in React. Maybe I even learned React to build this.” But your customer, like you said, wants a solution. That’s why my podcast course was called “Build your Podcast Website with WordPress,” and Chris Lema was like, “”No one cares if it’s WordPress.” That’s like saying, “Build your shed with a Black and Decker drill.” You don’t care about the drill. You just want to build a shed.

 

Tylor: And you want to do it fast and easy.

 

Joe: Yeah, exactly. So just to reinforce your workflow here that I wrote down, you listen to customer phrasing, mostly from your support team, and then you search for similar phrasing in the Google Search Console, right?

 

Tylor: Mm-hmm.

 

Joe: And then you come up with content, I guess, based on the most popular searches in general, or the most popular searches that don’t yield a result yet? What’s that like?

 

Tylor: That’s a little bit more of an art than a science. It depends. So if you’re getting tons of impressions, but no clicks, it might be that people are looking for that but you don’t have the right page or your meta description is wrong. You have to look at your site and the pages they are hitting and determine that. Or maybe you’re getting tons of clicks, but your bounce rate is super high, then your ranking is falling. You need to figure out what you put on that page that people are not finding that they wanted to find.

 

So it’s kind of like you have to look at the page, look at the data, and then even search Google and Keyword Planner and cross-reference with other things. I found some topics that way, where I didn’t realize that somebody was searching for like a “donation database.” You’ll notice in the next few days we’re going to publish a new page on our site about the donation database. It was one of those things where I was searching through Search Console and looking at our terminology and some of the requests from customers about connecting with the CRM. And they’re looking for a donation database, they’re not looking for all the other terminology that we were trying to use.

 

So it was just really interesting to take it from that approach and tweak our page. But each page is different. So that makes it hard to pinpoint what you do.

 

Joe: Interesting. I’m a little relieved to hear that because I’m like, “If it’s more of an art than a science, I just need to get better at the art.” However you would do that. Real quick, donation database, is that a list of possible donors are a list of people who have donated before or none of the above?

 

Tylor: Donated before. So with Give, when somebody gives, it creates the database of donors and donation history for reporting. We have built-in donor notes, but you can take that database and export the data or use Zapier to put it into Salesforce.

 

Joe: Very important to nonprofit organizations because that’s the list of people that they’re going to hit up next year, or whatever, or next fundraiser. Again, that’s super interesting. Yeah, really cool.

 

Tylor: Also, side note, I totally didn’t even think of this as an example, but donation form templates was something that people were searching for and looking for and asking for for years. That didn’t just inform SEO on our site or our content, but we actually just released Donation Form Templates because of the terminology that people were using and realizing what they were looking for. Because we considered Give as a form template, but they didn’t.

 

Joe: Interesting. Interesting. So you figured out the term that they were using and then renamed your…No. But you released a new feature with that name, right?

 

Tylor: Yeah, introduced a new feature. So a different type of form that really is a template. And we’re going to add more. But it was just so interesting to me that the same terminology that I was coming up with in my research was something that informed our product direction. That’s been coming down the line for years. But I’ve even just noticed that as I dig more into our core pages and our SEO that templates was something that we really needed. And that’s something that we talked about for a long time, and then it became part of the product roadmap. It’s pretty cool.

 

Joe: That’s fantastic. As we record this today, the new version of Give is out? Is that right?

 

Tylor: It is. It came out today.

 

Joe: Nice. Congratulations on that.

 

Tylor: Thank you.

 

Joe: I’ll be sure to link everything that we’re talking about. It’s 2.7, right?

 

Tylor: 2.7.

 

Joe: I will link to 2.7 announcement in the show notes over at howibuilt.it.

 

Tylor: Appreciate it.

 

Joe: Yeah, of course. This is great. We have some things that we can do to come up with our strategy, and then kind of figuring out what content to write more of an art than a science. Once you figure out that content, how do you get people to engage with it? Are they engaging on different social channels? Do you have clear calls to action? What does that look like?

 

Tylor: It definitely depends on the type of content again. If it’s a tutorial, we’re going to focus that heavily on our Facebook community group, because that’s the users that we know already use Give and would love that. Our newsletter responds pretty well to tutorials because most of them are Give users. So we make sure that we send out the right content to the right channel and then share it at the right time.

 

So we’ll write good stories about customers who use Give and our fundraising, which are normally more about their cause than about Give being used. Sometimes it’s a little bit the opposite. But those are great for weekend shares and engagement. In addition to scheduling them in the right channels and at the right time, like I said, you have to get involved in the conversation. So I’ll seek out Twitter chats, specifically to see if there’s a way I can sneak in a link to a blog article. Don’t tell anybody.

 

Joe: Your secret is safe with all of us.

 

Tylor: Thanks. But yeah, things like that. Or just you using listening tools to keep tune in on that topic and see if there’s another way to sneak in a link. I’ve also noticed that instead of just posting from the brand, we use our employees a lot like brand ambassadors. So when I share something I wrote or when Michelle shares something she wrote, or Ben, it gets tons of engagement. And most of the time, our top social media posts or mentions are from employees. Because Team Give is really a brand ambassador atmosphere for Give, which is pretty awesome in terms of content strategy, because without that, it’s very difficult to build that type of engagement.

 

But it’s interesting because we don’t all just engage with Give or each other. We’ll mention Give and other people will engage. It’s kind of good to just build that atmosphere within your team. Or affiliate community because I know tons of people have affiliates. Give incentives for sharing or engaging. I don’t know. Really finding social proof to get people involved and break that boundary of silence.

 

Joe: Yeah, this is great. Also, you’ve made me realize that I think I’ve interviewed like half of your team on this show, including Ben and Ali. Ali is also part of Give, right?

 

Tylor: She left not too long ago for WP Buffs. But yeah, we’re still good friends. She’s still an awesome brand ambassador of Give.

 

Joe: Nice. Nice. So I’ll have to get Michelle on the show now, too. I’ve been on hers.

 

Tylor: I was going to say, “Haven’t you been on her show?” You should definitely get Michelle on here.

 

Joe: I know.

 

Tylor: She’s a wonder woman of WordPress.

 

Joe: Awesome. I like what you said about engaging with your affiliates too. Because again, that’s something that I personally don’t feel like I do well. I definitely don’t communicate with them as often as maybe I should. I just told them about Podcast Liftoff, my course, but they didn’t know it was coming unless they are on my regular mailing list. Again, that’s another thing I want to be better at. And it helps. It seems like it really helps, right? Name recognition and getting the word out.

 

Tylor: It does. We recently just started paying way more attention to our affiliate program and trying to facilitate that engagement. And it’s been really paying off. It doesn’t even really matter what kind of content we send them. Anytime we send them a newsletter and let them know what’s going on and give them more tools to promote Give, we’ve noticed that it’ll at least increase engagement from affiliates that week if not sales. Usually, it does increase sales from affiliates.

 

With the 2.7 release, we talked about sending out topics and ideas for them to talk about Give with because it’s a major feature update that they can use for content marketing on their own sites. I think that that almost handholding support—it seems like hand holding to us, but it’s really great for affiliates—also helps because it gives you backlinks to those key pieces that you need. And it helps you ask them to share the things that you want shared the most.

 

Joe: I keep saying “that’s fantastic.” But I don’t know what else to say here. Because I mean, again, what you said might be handholding is just making the affiliates’ job easier. Like you could just say, “Hey, I have a product out. Go check it out and share it.” But something that I did that I know at least a few of my affiliates appreciated was I put together a whole Google Drive folder for them with images and what document of stuff that they could say and like tweets and quotes.

 

Tylor: You might have inspired us to do something like that. We looked at tons of different things like that, and we were like, “We need to do this.”

 

Joe: Well, fantastic. I stole it from Erin Flynn. Friend of the show Erin Flynn. Because she does that for all of her affiliates, and I’m on her affiliate list. We’re in a mastermind group together. So I like to kind of keep tabs on what everybody’s doing so we could talk about it. Especially she, I think, sends out a specific document with just tweets that you could copy and paste with your affiliate link.

 

Tylor: Wow.

 

Joe: I thought that was really cool. Again, makes the affiliates’ job easier. I can just copy something from the dock and just tweet away. I don’t even have to think about writing a tweet.

 

Tylor: That’s awesome. This might be sidetracking, but I’m wondering if you’ve had any experience with affiliates who use CBC and search ad marketing instead of content marketing.

 

Joe: I do not. The first time I heard about this was I think people were doing it for Basecamp back in the day. They were doing like paid ads with their affiliate link. That’s what you’re talking about, right?

 

Tylor: Yeah, yeah.

 

Joe: Is that something that you’ve experienced?

 

Tylor: We have a few that do that. I’ve just noticed that when they do it right, it’s really great for them.

 

Joe: Wow.

 

Tylor: So I was wondering if anybody else has had that experience. Because we’ve talked about sharing some of our Search Console data to give them better insight on what terms people find our site with. So it was just a thought that went across my mind because we haven’t done that yet. But I didn’t know if that would be something an affiliate that would even need or want.

 

Joe: Yeah, that’s really interesting. This is a small sidetrack, but I think it’s super interesting. Affiliate marketing in general, I think it’s tough for a lot of people unless they’re doing it all the time. I can say I probably wouldn’t take out ads. But if an affiliate program was killing it for me…My number one affiliate program is Amazon because it’s just really easy to drop in Amazon of associate links places. But I don’t know. I don’t have a complete thought here. I just think that’s really interesting, because you could see the investment paying off. Especially if it’s a good payout, if you’re paying like 25 or 50 cents per click, and you’re making 10 or 20 bucks on an affiliate sale.

 

Tylor: It was new to me. I had never seen it till the last few months, and I was like, “That’s smart.”

 

Joe: I mean, that’s cool because that’s another way that people are engaging with your content. I mean, people who are literally willing to spend some money to promote your content.

 

Tylor: That brings traffic to our site. Tons of traffic. But as far as engaging too, they do share more things on Twitter when we send those things out. So it does help a lot to have that affiliate program going strong.

 

Sponsors: This episode is brought to you by iThemes. Did you know that 60% of website breaches occur because a vulnerability could have been patched but wasn’t? That means having software with known vulnerabilities installed on your site gives hackers the blueprint they need to take over your site. Every day it gets harder and harder to keep track of every disclosed WordPress vulnerability. You have to compare that list to your plugins and themes by version and make sure you’re constantly updating.

 

To solve this problem, the iThemes Security Pro plugin created a better way to protect your site’s against software vulnerabilities, the number one culprit of WordPress sites. The new improved WordPress security site skin powered by iThemes performs automatic checks for known website vulnerabilities and automatically applies available fixes so you don’t have to. That’s some peace of mind. I could speak personally to this because as somebody who has repaired hacked websites, I know that it could be costly and dangerous to lose information, especially when it’s personally identifiable.

 

iThemes Security Pro also includes a ton of other features to help you keep the bad guys out. Brute force protection, two-factor authentication, password list logins, uncompromised password protection. Plus a whole lot more to keep you safe. If you want to start securing your sites today, head over to howibuilt.it/ithemes to get the best WordPress security plugin to secure and protect WordPress. iThemes is giving How I Built It listeners a 20% discount by using the code “HOWIBUILTIT” at checkout. Again, that’s howibuilt.it/ithemes. That’s howibuilt.it/ithemes, and use the code “HOWIBUILTIT” at checkout for 20% off.

 

And now back to the show.

 

Joe: As we come to the back end of the conversation here, you’ve mentioned Google Search Console a couple of times and Keyword Planner. Are there other tools that help you? We’ve had Ahrefs as a sponsor on this show before, and I got to use it for a while and it was super interesting. Are there any other tool recommendations that you have for people listening?

 

Tylor: I never use Ahrefs so I’m going to check it out now. Ubersuggest’s by Neil Patel starts free and it’s really great to get that insight into how you’re performing with search and comparing to competitors. I’ve used that in conjunction with – oh my gosh, what’s it called? Oh no, I’m forgetting. There’s another website that I was using that would give me page errors and low content counts and things like that.

 

So I was using Ubersuggest’s to get keyword data and main search console errors compared to competitors. Then there’s this other tool that I’m totally blanking on. I want to say it has “King” in the name that would show me page by page errors and could track the changes so that I could see what the content was before and after. I think the free one was pretty limited, but it was really powerful. Both of them are super powerful.

 

Joe: Interesting. I’ll see if I can find that other tool to link in the show notes. I wish I could help you out there, but I can’t.

 

Tylor: I can ask Matt Cromwell later. He pointed me to it in the first place. I’ll send that to you. I can’t remember. I can’t believe I’m blanking on that.

 

Joe: It’s cool. It’s been a long year.

 

Tylor: ContentKing.

 

Joe: ContentKing. Okay, cool. Cool. Cool. I will link that in the show notes as well. That’s fantastic. Just to kind of sum everything up, because there was a lot of information here, and I want to try to give listeners and myself a clear action plan. So if somebody doesn’t have the customer support that Give has, what do you recommend for figuring out what terms their potential customers are using?

 

Tylor: If you’re not already using Search Console, so you don’t have that insight, start with Google. Search what you would think of and then look at what other people are asking. Then also they have the related questions towards the top of the search, and then at the very bottom, they have related search terms. And they’re different. One is questions and one is term. So you can kind of take both and form a cluster of what you think is most relevant. And just keep searching through all until you’ve exhausted all those options. Then just put that in Keyword Planner and see what the volume is on all that. I’ve also used Google Trends, but it’s much more broad and less easy to find that type of stuff.

 

Joe: Got you. That’s great. Because then this is helpful, as far as…I’ve heard like, reach out to your customers, and have interviews with them. But if you’re just starting nowhere, start with Google Search Console. I think that’s great.

 

Tylor: Or honestly, if you’re starting from nowhere, look at all of your biggest competitors. What company do you want to beat out of their position in the internet? What position do you want to take? And then look what they’re ranking for, what they’re targeting, and sorry, but steal it.

 

Joe: Yeah. Why reinvent the wheel, right? I mean, I’ve done the same thing. If I can’t find the right words, or if I want to make sure I’m not way off, I’ll look at other competitors. Of course, I’m not just copying and pasting their text, but I am getting an idea for the words that they’re using, and then I know how to differentiate myself too as far as why should they buy from me instead of them?

 

Tylor: Yeah. For example, Give has a massive competitor that I won’t name but we didn’t have a “fundraising” category on our blog. And they did. And I was like, “That is a huge search term. Why don’t we have that?” And that just clicked in my mind that we need that. It was the easiest thing, but it was because I looked at a competitor site. And it wasn’t that I stole anything from them, it was that I realized we were missing a category that was major.

 

Joe: Yeah, right. And you think that’s a good idea. That makes perfect sense.

 

Tylor: That worked really well, too.

 

Joe: Awesome. Awesome. That’s great. Then the other thing I want to reinforce here is your move from the WordPress community to the broader nonprofit community because I know a lot of people listening are probably from the WordPress community. But I’ve done something similar on this podcast where I was very focused on WordPress developers at first and then I’ve moved to the broader small business owner category, talking to people who are like me where I’m at, right? I’m asking you a lot of questions for me, but I know that the people listening are also having the same struggles.

 

So aside from a broader audience, do you think that…and this is like very opiniony so feel free to answer however you want. What big value points do you see, and going from WordPress too, trying to appeal to a broader audience?

 

Tylor: Well, especially not even just nonprofits, but with any organization, a business, a nonprofit, a bureaucracy, anything, most of the time they’re coming into it with an idea of what they need or what benefits they want out of it. They may or may not have WordPress already. But given the fact that WordPress powers almost 40% on the internet, it’s a good chance that they do. So just the people who already know WordPress, Give is synonymous with a donation plugin pretty much.

 

Even for that 10% that doesn’t know Give as the donation plugin of WordPress, basically, of the WordPress community that’s not worth our 80% of effort to breach that 10% Now we really want to focus on that broader community that uses WordPress, doesn’t really even know that they use WordPress, but they want to do online donations. They just know that they have a website somewhere on something that they open occasionally.

 

Joe: Right, right.

 

Tylor: I know that sounds like we’ve saturated our WordPress share, but I think that that’s true as far as charity and online donations goes because we’re not regular e-commerce. We can’t hit the 900,000 active installs without reaching that broader community because there are new people coming into WordPress every day. And especially now with COVID, we’re reaching beyond nonprofits even to creators and small businesses who just moved to e-commerce and might need to tip their employees because you can add a tip jar or things like that.

 

So now we’re reaching out of our baby steps, I guess. So it’s less about getting outside of the WordPress community as getting brand recognition with the fundraising community because that is who we are. We want to be the democratization of generosity for more than WordPress for all of fundraising.

 

Joe: I think that’s perfect. You start with the extra niched down group that the founders were most familiar with, and then you grow out from there. I think that’s perfect. What you said about reaching more than just nonprofits, I forget who it was. Forgive me if it was you. But somebody asked me a very pointed question about why I was using Patreon instead of Give, which I’m not using anything right now. But when I set up my crowdfunding…

 

Tylor: I might have asked you that.

 

Joe: I might have been. And I didn’t have a good answer besides like, “Well, I could do it in like five seconds.” But I mean, that said like the fees for Patreon favor scaling. I’ll just say. Definitely favor somebody who already has a big audience. All that is to say that…

 

Tylor: We have a customer and affiliate who uses Give and Patreon. He’s a musician. So he has his tip jar with Give. And I don’t think he set up recurring donations because he wants to push people to Patreon for that. But I mean, I would even set it up on both options. Because Patreon has a built-in audience, you have your own website. There are tons of revenue options for creators. I’m sure that I’m the one who asked you that because I think I remember that.

 

Joe: Well, in the near future, I will. If I ever roll out a membership again for the podcast, it likely will not be on Patreon. So Give is going to be a strong contender there.

 

Sponsors: This episode is Sponsored by CircleCI. Whether you’re on a development team, manage a development team yourself, or you have a business that relies on working software, a good process is so important to making sure you’re creating high-quality work. Continuous integration or the ability to check and manage code automatically can help you and your developers streamline the process in a big way. And CircleCI is here to help. Designed for modern software teams, CircleCI‘s continuous integration and delivery platform helps developers push code with confidence. Trusted by thousands of companies, from four-person startups to fortune 500 businesses, CircleCI helps teams take their software from idea to delivery quickly, safely, and at scale. Visit howibuilt.it/circleci to learn why high performing DevOps teams use CircleCI to automate and accelerate their continuous integration and delivery pipelines.

 

As someone who’s worked on big coding projects for big companies with distributed development teams, I can tell you that continuous integration tools have helped us make sure we deliver working code to our clients. It helps instill trust in our team, and it lets our team focus on solving new problems instead of dealing with the same ones over and over again. So once again, learn how CircleCI can help you and your business at howibuilt.it/circleci. As a special bonus for How I built It listeners, CircleCI is having a virtual raffle where you could win a pair of the newest Sony noise-canceling headphones. Improve your team’s processes and enter for a chance to win at howibuilt.it/circleci.

 

And now, back to the show.

 

Joe: Well as we reach the end of the episode, I do need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

 

Tylor: I’m going to give them all. My biggest trade secret honestly, is one that half my team laughs at me for all the time. Outline everything. Outlining has saved me from so many things and it makes you realize ahead of time that where you’re going with something isn’t where you wanted to go. There’s just so many benefits. And it helps with SEO because you get those keywords in places, in the headlines, and you just kind of have it in your mind before you write. So that way you don’t think about it. But outlining seriously is my secret. That is not a secret.

 

Joe: I think that is a great secret, so it’s not a secret. Because I outline my courses, obviously but I definitely would benefit from outlining my blog posts. I wrote two this morning and the direction changed halfway between writing both of them. I started to write a heading and I’m like, “This doesn’t make any sense. Maybe I could actually think about what I want to write first.”

 

Tylor: Yeah. And then sometimes you’ll find out, “Oh, this is an entirely another article.”

 

Joe: Yeah, yeah. That is pretty much what I discovered. I had a “why podcast” blog post, and I’m like, “This is really like three blog posts.” Which is great because I need a back catalog of content because as we record this, my wife is one week out from her due date. So I’ll be preoccupied for a little while. But I want to keep that. I’ve been really good this year. One YouTube video and one blog post every week

 

Tylor: Wow, that’s awesome.

 

Joe: It was harder than I thought it would be.

 

Tylor: I almost had a great streak going. But I think last week, I might have failed at posting on the Give site for the first time since Christmas, maybe.

 

Joe: That’s okay. That’s like when you don’t close all your Apple Watch rings once in a two-week span. And I’m like, “I’m not going to be upset about it.”

 

Tylor: Totally. And it was all preparation for Form Templates.

 

Joe: I’ll check it out. Well, Taylor, thanks so much for joining me this week. Where can people find you?

 

Tylor: My personal website is a little bit down right now, so you can find me on Twitter or the GiveWP blog. I’m focusing on a creative writing project. So I’m not planning on revisiting my course site anytime soon.

 

Joe: All right. Fantastic to learn more about that creative writing project. Be sure to follow Taylor on Twitter. I will link everything that we talked about in the show notes. But just in case you’re driving, your Twitter handle is @telizarose, right?

 

Tylor: Yes, exactly.

 

Joe: Awesome. Again, I will link those in the show notes as well. Well, I guess for those of you who are driving, don’t go on Twitter right now. But for those of you who are listening, and just want to type it in Twitter, there you go. Taylor, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

 

Tylor: Thank you.

 

Outro: Thanks so much to Taylor for joining us this week. She talked about a few things that I think bear repeating. First of all, use the words that your potential customers are using. I think this is so important. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way. It’s something that I think everybody needs to keep in mind right. I think the exam we used in the episode was only the developer cares what programming language the product is written in. But your audience wants to know how your product solves their problem. So definitely keep that in mind.

 

Also doing certain types of content, engaging with your audience, and your affiliates. All lessons I relearned throughout the course of this interview. So thank you to Taylor for imparting such great knowledge on us this week. For all of the show notes, you can head over to howibuilt.it/179. Thanks so much to this week’s sponsors. They are TextExpander—glad to have them back—iThemes and CircleCI. The show would not be able to happen without their support. So be sure to check them out and thank them.

 

If you liked this episode, give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps people discover the show. And until next time, get out there and build something.