Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I’m feeling somewhat trepitant about this demo because about to step into a place that
I’m not really an expert but it’s in response to many, many requests that I’ve received
to start talking a little bit about my WordPress installed, about how I’ve setup my personal
website and how I integrate that with my YouTube Channel.
So I’m willing to do that because I did go on quite a voyage of discovery.
Starting a little over a year ago, I decided to build my own WordPress site.
Now I had no experience in WordPress.
I had used Drupal as a content publisher, not as a site creator and the site was built
for me before by somebody else but when I started on this new venture of growing the
DottoTech YouTube channel, I decided I’d better build a WordPress site to support it
and the site has morphed quite a bit into the site that you see now.
As I look at it, I realized it’s a bit of a hodgepodge.
It is definitely a homemade website but it does serve my purposes at this particular
point, until I have money at least to invest on having somebody that really knows what
they’re doing put something better together.
So I will agree, if you will agree, to the following contract between you and I. I will
tell you how I’ve set things up with the caveat being if you follow exactly what I
do, there’s no guarantee it’s going to work for you because I am not an expert but
I have made it work this way.
I’ll show you the tools that I use, the reasons that I used those tools and then you
can take that for what it’s worth.
Does that sound fair?
In that case, let’s take a look at my WordPress installed today on DottoTech.
All right, my WordPress install.
This is what my WordPress site looks like, DottoTech.com, if you have a look at it.
Now my goal for my site was for it to be a blog site.
When I started producing my content on YouTube, what I was looking for was I was looking for
video blog.
I was looking to create videos that would replace what other people do by written blogs
and I would do that with radio shows, with podcasts and with these sorts of videos.
I like audio and video content.
I’m better at creating that so I wanted a site that would support that.
So I went around looking for a theme.
Now when you buy WordPress or when you install WordPress, if you’re doing a full WordPress
install on a server—I’m not hosting this on WordPress’ site; I’ve got my own servers
that I’m hosting on—when you start looking for different themes, you will be overwhelmed
by the number of choices you have and it’s kind of starter kits.
Themes are like starter kits where they’ve laid things out and they look beautiful but
they never have to support any real content.
So what we do is we take their theme and then we convert it.
We look for features that are in another theme and then we convert it into our own theme.
If I’d started right at the beginning, if I was to start over again, I might not take
the exact same path that I’m on but then again I might.
So it’s a good thing I don’t have to.
But I finally chose to purchase my theme package from Themify.
Reasons?
Well, they’re a good Canadian company based in Toronto.
They do Shopify which is an awesome shopping site, shopping tool.
I was thinking, not sure the direction that my content was going to be going, if someday
I might actually have a need for a shopping cart where I’m actually selling stuff.
I don’t know so it seemed to me that I need to kind of tie in with these folks and they’ve
got some really nice themes.
The other thing that they’ve got is they’ve got a really nice Whizzywig editor.
What you see is what you get.
They’ve got a very nice editor that allowed me to feel a lot more in control as I assembled
all of the different pages and post structures for my site.
So I felt comfortable with the tool.
It was an easy tool to learn to use.
There are probably several dozen really good theme sites out there.
If you choose Themify, great.
Their technical support has been very good, their themes are beautiful and they’ve been
nice and stable.
I’ve never had any issues, technically speaking, with Themify.
And because I bought this, I am an automatic what’s called an affiliate, which means
that if you actually buy and choose to use Themify yourself, I’ll get a little bit
of money if you click on the link that’s in the description field below.
There you go, full disclaimer.
I’m selling Themify now to you.
I’m not really because I don’t think I’d make enough money to make a difference in
my life but it would be nice.
So as with all of the different them companies, you take a look at all of their themes and
when I went through and decided what theme I was going to get for my site, I wanted one
particular feature that it had to be.
It had to be this one here, Responsive, because I know the world is moving to mobile.
Responsive themes, theoretically at least, will resolve themselves properly to mobile
devices.
When I started looking at the themes that they had available, I wanted to look for one
that was responsive that I could use that would properly format my site for both mobile
and for desktop or tablet playback.
Going through all of their themes, you know what theme I chose?
It’s this one here, Bizco, really their most basic theme.
This is what Bizco looks like when they tell you.
Let’s just run the demo because you’ll see that the result that I created has very
little to do with looking like their site.
There it is.
That’s what the Bizco promo looks like.
If you go into layouts, well I guess it’s not that different once you start looking
it at some of the different layout forms.
This is what their site looks like.
Actually, I kind of like it.
I think I might change mine, to take mine a little bit.
At any rate, that is what I began with.
So what happens is you purchase the theme and then you start your WordPress install
and you typically will get a technical support person to help you with those first steps.
Then you install it and you’ve got a blank theme to set things against.
Let’s go into my dashboard.
This is the net result that I have.
So this is my dashboard with the Bizco Themify theme installed.
That allowed me to create the basic page structure that we’ve got.
Let me show you my page.
I’ll just show you my page.
I’ll just show you my homepage and what it looks like because it looks nothing like
you might think it should look as you’re editing because some of these things, we’re
dealing in HTML Editor.
We’re dealing with a website creation package.
So it would be nice if everything looks like it is on the page and there are packages that
would do that but even this package doesn’t do that for us too much.
It will to a certain extent.
But here is my homepage and the tool that I use or using Themify, we click on the Themify
Builder tab and this beneath it is the actual layout.
This is the structure of my website.
Now how Themify works, the reason that I liked it, is they have this drag and drop interface
where I choose the asset that I want to put on any one of my web pages or blog posts and
then I could just drag it down into these fields here where I could then configure them
to display in the field.
Any website is really just a database.
The content within the web is a database so by properly tagging information as you bring
it in, by properly tagging your blog posts and all of your different features within
the website, you then have the ability to be able to create some external structure
to your internal data.
Does that make sense?
I hope it does.
But let’s just take a look at what I got.
So the very top thing I’ve got is an ad which I won’t bother showing you.
Then I’ve got a little divider and then I put a slider.
Now they’ve got a system-wide slider that they’ve got that runs across the whole top
of the page.
Did you see that on the landing page when I showed it?
I had that for a while but it took up so much real estate in my site that I figured when
people come to my site, they aren’t going to be really attracted by the graphic brilliance
of it.
So having a big beautiful slider at the top is not as important as getting them into the
content that they might be looking for, content like how to take my webinars or how to view
the latest show or how to watch my videos.
So I modified the slider just to contain basically promotions.
I made it much smaller, fitted it more and then I set it up so it would just display
mainly my webinars, the webinar replays and the free content that I have that I have at
the very top of the page.
But did you see how easy this is?
You just go in here and you choose the type of content that’s going to be in each one
of these fields and then you basically import it.
Now you use the media manager to import the graphics and then you create basic links through
to different pages doing this, but that is how I set up, when we take a look back at
the site, that’s how I set up this structure.
What we were just looking at right there is this slider here as this goes across.
So I’m not going to get into too much detail here.
I’ll hear from you in the comments are or by email if you want me to actually get in
and show you some details on how I use this software.
I’ll be guided by my audience as far as how deep the demos go but suffice it to say
for now that I use Themify to build the basic structure of my website.
I also knew that I was going to be selling some courses and doing some other promotional
things.
So I wanted a tool that will help me do the internet marketing side of it because I don’t
know how to create what they call squeeze pages, sales pages, how to create a structure
in order to get people to purchase or to get people to enroll in different services that
we have.
I don’t sell a lot of stuff online but I do sell occasional courses.
I’m in the middle of a course right now that I sold.
So this was the page that I created to sell that course.
Now this is what’s called in the biz a squeeze page.
I think it’s called a squeeze page.
But it’s called a landing page, I guess, but it’s more of a squeeze page.
This basically walks you through all the features and benefits of my latest awesome course that
you can buy at this particular time when I first delivered it for $97 with the Add to
Cart.
And oh my gosh, I’m creating excitement and intensity and how you can get to the end
of that page and not have purchased from me, I have no idea.
Surprising, the number of you who were able to do that.
Nevertheless, I don’t have the graphic skills to create this page on my own.
I need suggestions all the way along the way and I was smitten about last summer by the
product called Optimized Press.
Optimized Press!
It sounds like Optimus Prime, doesn’t it?
Folks out of England make this site and basically it will actually allow you to create an entire
website if you want.
You can install this as a full theme or you can install this as what’s called a plug-in
in Word Press.
Let me back up the bus a bit.
So Themify is the theme that I got installed in my site.
If I had chosen to I could have made Optimized Press the theme and I could have built the
whole site in Optimized Press.
When I was kind of hedging my bet back at the very beginning of this video, that was
the consideration I was going through in my thought processes.
I might just use Optimized Press if I was starting from the beginning again.
But since I’m not, it’s a moot point, isn’t it?
But it’s something you might consider taking a look at.
Now what Optimized Press does is it really is designed to help you create a sales type
environment and a sales type page.
Let me go back into it.
Actually, let’s go to this page here and let me show you the difference between editing
a page that’s done in this sort of a tool and the one that was done in Themify.
Now Themify will give you a Whizzywig editor, even more so than what I showed you but for
me it works best in my kind of structured environment.
This tool has this full-on live editor.
Now I will give you this caveat.
This tool works 95% of the time but occasionally things break in this tool and that does end
up being a little bit frustrating or it doesn’t quite resolve the way you think it should.
But we go through basically creating a page using a tool like this by bringing different
modules in.
They’ve got this ability to add what they call element.
Let’s say I wanted another element right within here.
I just click Add Elements and what these are little macros, sort of, that will allow us
to plug different types of features into this page, everything from beautiful little video
players to tools to purchase.
You can actually create the links to opt-in pages so people can opt in for your newsletters.
All sorts of things are attached here and the tool has also a fairly robust API extension
library.
Oh boy, Steve now you’re talking.
API’s are when this application will talk to another application directly without us.
For example, I have an Aweber email autoresponder account.
I can set up from within this tool—actually I’ll show you.
Let’s say I’m going to set up an autoresponder page.
If I want to go in here, I want to go into a membership—I think it’s called membership.
I know what it’s called.
It’s called opt-in form, opt-in box.
I was stuck on the membership name.
If this was not a sales page but a page where I was going to say “Please sign up for my
newsletter” let me show you how the API integration works because this is a big deal
as you set things up.
So you choose what it’s going to look like.
Maybe that’s going to be the look of the opt-in box that you want and then you can
put in and then you choose the integration type.
This is where the integration occurs with an outside service.
I want this to integrate with my Aweber account.
So now it’s actually talking, because I set up in the backend an API integration,
I can actually click here and I can choose which mail list you’re going to be subscribed
to if you sign up for this list.
So let’s say it’s for the Master Caster list.
I can put in a different headline for it, something interesting and I can even add a
bunch of text.
They’ve got the nice Greek text here.
So you can do all those sorts of things and you can choose what your submit button is
going to look like, which is ‘Get instant access.”
I’ll change that to ‘Sign up NOOOOOOW!’
then I’ll go insert.
Now watch what happens.
See that?
Isn’t that beautiful?
Sign up NOOOOOOW!
Something interesting.
If I save this page now, that box will be built into this page so as soon as you visit
this page, you’ll be able to see this opt-in form and if you subscribe, it will actually
then communicate with my Aweber account and start enrolling you in my autoresponder.
So do you see how these tools make it so much easier for us to create rich-looking pages
to create interaction with our audience?
This is Optimized Press that does this.
This does it for full pages.
I’m just going to close this now because I don’t want Sign up NOOOOOOW!
in my thing.
It’s asking me to confirm and I’ll cancel it.
We’ll have to say okay.
There it is.
Now we’ll move away from it.
There we go.
All right, so it turns out though a very cool feature within this is that Optimized Press
interface will also allow me to use the editor just in things like posts.
Watch this.
When I create a brand new post, when I do my video post, I take a little bit of a short
cut.
What I want is I want—let me go to my YouTube channel here just quickly so that you can
see.
So typically speaking, I’m signed into YouTube.
Which account am I signed in on?
Let’s go to my proper Dottotech account.
Talk amongst yourselves.
Here we go.
And I’ll go to my Creator’s Studio.
You get to see everybody whom I’m subscribed to.
Let’s say I wanted to include this video here using Google Drive for presentations.
I just copy that link then I go back into my post editor and I just choose Add Element.
And lookie, lookie, lookie, the exact same elements that were available when I was working
on the page are available to me here.
So I type in here—what am I looking for?
I’m looking for video player—so I type in ‘video player’ and this is what I love.
This is so fast to create a nice little embed.
I choose the style of the video player which is the basic one.
I choose that I want it to be a YouTube video, I put in the URL of the YouTube video and
then I say Insert and you can’t see it there but that little embed code will create a video
that looks like this right here that’s playable back in the window.
Brilliant!
Isn’t that brilliant?
So Optimized Press, I use it as a plug-in to create those landing pages and those squeeze
pages and the odd time that I sell something in the odd time that I sell something or I
want you to subscribe to one of my newsletters or something like that but mainly I use it
to help me fast-track the creation of these video posts because that’s mainly what I
do.
Is there a better way to do this?
If you are watching this and you’re a WordPress aficionado, might you have lots of better
suggestions for me?
Absolutely true, you will because I’m not sure that I do all that great of job on it,
but I do a job that works for me and you’ve been asking so now I’m sharing it.
So I want to encourage you to please comment down below.
Tell me if you want to see more of details about how WordPress works and if you want
me to include some WordPress-type tutorials in the regular mix.
This one is a bit of an anomaly.
This one will be a one-off unless I hear back from you that you guys want to learn more
about how we do this kind of content publishing and if this is interesting to you.
If you’ve got some suggestions for me of better ways to do it, please share it with
me but be polite.
I mean I’m doing the best I can.
With that, that is it for this episode.
Reminder: There are three ways that you can stay in touch with me.
If you click on any of the links just over my shoulder right now, you can subscribe to
this channel which I encourage you to do.
If you click on the newsletter subscription, you’ll be brought to one of those pages
that I created in Optimized Press and you will be able to opt in for our newsletter.
That way you’ll get updates of all of our videos plus notice of any of our upcoming
webinars or special events.
And finally, DottoTech is a community-funded website through the site, Patreon.
If you want to know about community funding and what a crowdfunded site looks like, a
crowdfunded content looks like or what the whole story is behind that, please visit our
Patreon page.
I explain it all to you there and for as little as a dollar a month, you can ensure that DottoTech
continues to arrive on an almost daily basis into your YouTube channel.
With that, I hope that you found today useful.
Links to all of the products that I talked about are below in the description field and
both of them, I think I get an affiliate fee if you buy it.
So please buy, buy, buy!
Until next time, I’m Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!