As a first-timer on our WordPress meetup, she immediately dives in by showing her WordPress project. She has been around: originally from Oezbekistan, she worked in the social sector in Poland, Italy and Ethiopia. Switching to the commercial sector, she moved to Ireland and worked for Google (Adwords). Now she has landed in Belgium and started to work as a freelance consultant for startups.
Anna started her blog, iqloris.com, 3 years ago. She started out with a bought theme (Discover) and asked the help of a freelancer to build the current theme and features. For her, the blog is all about having fun and brand building.
To engage her visitors, she uses a couple of plugins:
- Sticky share buttons (floating on the left side when the user scrolls down)
- OnePress Social Locker Social Locker is a set of social buttons and a locker in one bottle.
Give people a reason why they need to click your social buttons. Ask people to “pay” with a Like/Tweet/+1 to get access to your content, to get discount, to download, to watch a video, to view a funny picture or so. And it will help you to get more likes/tweets/+1s, traffic and customers! - Contextual Related Posts: Display a set of related posts on your website or in your feed. Increase reader retention and reduce bounce rates
- NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster to automatically publish a new article on her social media channels
- Blog2Social – similar to the above-mentioned
- Yoast SEO to be findable with ease of use
- SumoMe Plugin – allows easily add social buttons, contact forms and contact us bar
- BJ Lazy Load – Lazy image loading makes your site load faster and saves bandwidth
While iqloris.com is up and running, Anna is currently working on a new project: an online academy on how to build your business. She showed us the work-in-progress, a site she’s building herself thanks to Divi. Take away’s of what will be important in the convincing/selling process:
- Address a customers’ fears and show them how you can help them to make it right. Fear drives people and is very recognizable.
- Give social proof about yourself or your product
- Focus on content & storytelling (trend ’17): build a brand first before selling your product straight away
- Engage, engage, engage with social plugins
