Once a month, the Morris County New Jersey WordPress Meetup group hosts an event where new topics pertaining to WordPress are discussed. The meetings are held at Pam Ann Marketing in Denville and coordinated through Meetup.com, a website that endorses business and social events.
A Recap of Past Meetup Topics
In May, the topic of the Meetup was WordPress security, featuring speaker Pete Verrone of Spinneret Web Consulting. Verrone touched upon internet safety and methods to prevent hacking.
In June, the topic of the MeetUp was WordCamp, an event which took place in Montclair, NJ earlier that month. WordPress is the subject of every WordCamp, and this was the first-ever WordCamp to take place in NJ.
About WordCamps
WordCamps are different from WordPress Meetups. According to WordCamp Central, WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. These miniature conferences occur over the span of a weekend and are hosted in various locations globally. They feature a variety of different sessions related to WordPress, as well as other digital marketing topics.
For example, Pam Aungst, president of Pam Ann Marketing, spoke at WordCamp Montclair on the topic of “Killer Keywords: How to Write Content for both Humans and Search Engines.” This topic educates individuals on how to select the proper keywords when writing website content so that both humans and search engines can recognize what they are searching for. Her presentation used modern-day approaches to semantic and contextual keyword optimization.
Aungst will be speaking at the upcoming WordCamp Lehigh Valley in August as well. She will be focusing on Search Engine Optimization basics.
July’s Meetup Featured MailPoet
The Meetup earlier this month featured speaker Tom Zuzik, with a presentation on a plugin called MailPoet. He spoke about email marketing via WordPress. His presentation was also broadcasted on Facebook Live.
MailPoet is a free plugin for WordPress dashboards that over 300,000 websites are now using to keep in touch with their subscribers. Users can quickly add content and images directly from their media library.
The Meetup Group’s Goal: “Demystify” WordPress
This past Meetup drew an audience of eighteen members, including John Tully, the co-organizer of the Meetup alongside Aungst. Tully owns Delta Strategic Marketing, an online marketing agency.
“WordPress itself is, you know, designed to be easy to use and yet you turn the corner, you open the curtain a little, and it gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. So these Meetup groups are designed to try and demystify some of it,” Tully commented.
The Meetups are welcoming and new speakers are encouraged to come forward and share their knowledge with other individuals who are wishing to learn more about WordPress and how to run a website.
“We’re very, very open to people if they have a particular topic, if they have something that’s kind of WordPress related but it doesn’t have to be specifically WordPress, it could be a small business online kind of topic,” remarked Tully.
Attendees Find Meetups Informative and Impressive
Hamilton Blackwell, an employee of Keller Williams Realty was at the Meetup hoping to learn more about low budget email marketing.
“I’ve caught the digital marketing bug so I’m trying to learn anything and everything really about WordPress and email marketing,” Blackwell commented.
After Tom Zuzik’s presentation, Blackwell saw MailPoet in a positive light. “The MailPoet program- it definitely seems like, you know, very efficient, very useful, and something that would save hundreds of dollars,” he said.
Mary Stone of Blairstown NJ, a columnist who writes for The Press and has a website called Garden Dilemmas, has been to previous Meetups and has also listened to Aungst speak at WordCamp in Montclair NJ. She was satisfied with the results of this Meetup.
“I now realize I don’t need Constant Contact and I can do my emails to my client base,” comments Stone. “I have a bunch of clients that I’ve been trying to solicit to encourage to subscribe to my weekly column, and so that’s my objective. It was awesome to learn that so I can save fourteen bucks a month.”
Ken Nowak is Website Manager and Developer for Car Craft Auto Sports in Dover, NJ. His goal from attending the Meetup was to learn more about websites and how to manage them.
“This is probably my sixth or seventh Meetup,” said Nowak. “Basically I need to reteach myself about websites… I was kind of rusty with it and now I kind of know how to run it,” Nowak commented on managing his website. “I have a bunch of contacts I can call every time I have an issue and it’s almost like magic,” Nowak concluded on his opinion of the Meetups.
Cassandra James, an entrepreneur who regularly attends the Meetups in Montclair NJ, was looking to better her skills at putting her self-development courses online.
“It over-delivered cause it was more than I even expected,” James said on the topic of Zuzik’s presentation. “I didn’t know what MailPoet was but I was just like, let me go cause the more I hear about WordPress the better, but yeah it exceeded my expectations.”
The presentation caught her attention and she intends to start using MailPoet right away.
“I have so many obstacles with what I’m trying to do,” started James. “I had a Mailchimp account which I didn’t even know how to utilize yet but now I don’t have to worry about it cause I’m going straight to MailPoet,” she concluded.
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that offers a free plan, however, it limits a customer’s amount of subscribers as well as how many emails a customer may send daily and weekly.
Next Meetup: September 10th
The next Meetup will take place on September 10th and will feature Liam Dempsey of LB Design from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The topic of the virtual presentation will touch upon a case study of how Dempsey made small changes to a WordPress theme that delivered big results for the client.
These Meetups help bring customers and clients together who are willing to learn more about WordPress. The spectrum of audience members and their businesses are very broad and diverse. Anyone is welcome to attend, even if they are merely curious about the topic of WordPress. They can access when the next events are being held here.
- Morris County Monthly Meetup Educates Attendees on WordPress - July 16, 2019
- WordPress vs. Wix vs. Squarespace for SEO: An Interview with Pam Aungst - July 2, 2019
- An Interview on Author Bios with Pam Aungst - June 25, 2019
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