Meet our Subject Matter Experts

April 8, 2016 By Darren Rowse

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In our team meeting today I learned that we’ve had over 1,200 responses to the survey’s we’ve conducted to help shape our event. That’s 1,200 responses that have helped us understand where you’re at, what you want, what your challenges are, and numerous other ways we can help you with our event.

From that research we knew we needed to offer more workshops – which means more speakers, more rooms, more AV, more staff! Not a small undertaking at all, but we wanted to ensure we were meeting your needs and covering the topics that were most important to you.

We also wanted to make sure we found speakers who are subject matter experts that can deliver the goods. So we turned to those who are already working with us and who will become regular contributors for ProBlogger year around! It is largely due to their generous commitment to our event and community that we have been able to offer you a bonus track. These speakers will be helping to deliver a lot of the workshops and some will be presenting in other tracks and/or running half day classes as part of Sunday Sessions.

I’m very excited to introduce to you our ProBlogger Subject Matter Experts for 2016!

 

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Kelly Exeter

Kelly Exeter has been a designer for nearly 15 years. In the past six years she has worked with some of Australia’s top bloggers including Styling You, Fox in Flats and Woogsworld. A blogger herself, Kelly‘s approach to blog design goes beyond simply making things look nice. She also works hard to ensure the blogger’s brand is enhanced by their blog design, and that the design is incredibly functional too.

As she and her husband own the web and blog hosting company Swish Online, Kelly is also across the tech side of owning a blog (more than she’d like to be actually!). Swish Online hosts some of Australia’s biggest blogs and as a result, Kelly has seen pretty much every ‘thing’ that can take a blog offline … and knows what to do to ensure these things happen as infrequently as possible.

www.swishdesign.com.au              www.swishonline.com.au

 

Fundamentals Session

The 5 + 5 formula for great blog design

Great blog design goes well beyond your site looking really slick or pretty. Your blog needs to be both functional and beautiful. It must *do* something – for both you and the reader. This presentation will send you home with a checklist of 5 functionality items and 5 design items against which you will be able to critique your own blog design like a pro!

Expect to learn:

• Why great blog design is crucial
• The difference between functional design and beautiful design (and why you need both for a great blog design)
• The 5 functional design items every great blog design needs
• The 5 aesthetic design items every great blog design needs
• Some examples of great blog designs
• Real life critiques of current/existing blog designs

 

Workshop Session

Getting Your Back-End Under Control

Are you familiar with the backend of your blog? Do you know why you should always keep your WordPress version updated? Are you aware of the pitfalls associated with many backup plugins? If not, then I don’t want to alarm you … but your blog is in danger! Mainly from hackers but also from … you

This highly practical session will remove the fear you have of the technical side of your blog and show you the simple and easy things you can do to ensure it:

• Is kept secure from hackers
• Is backed up properly
• Is always running as quickly and optimally as possible.

In short, this session will ensure that should something terrible ever happen to your blog, you will be able to get it back up and running in less than a day.

 

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Jim Stewart

Jim Stewart, CEO of StewArt Media, is a recognised digital marketing expert. Jim is ProBlogger’s SEO subject matter expert and he will be sharing his vast SEO knowledge over the course of the conference, including what are the top SEO tools and why you must be using them and 5 things bloggers do wrong. Jim has worked closely with bloggers successfully doubling traffic and improving site performance. What Jim doesn’t know about SEO and blogging isn’t worth knowing, check out his sessions to take advantage of his wealth of experience.

www.stewartmedia.biz

 

Tools, Tactics & Techniques Session

Top SEO Tools and How To Use Them

With the right tools bloggers can easily implement SEO on their site. This session will give you practical and usable advice on the best SEO tools and how to use them. Includes Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Google Search Console, majestic, Google Analytics and how to check your rankings properly. You certainly will start using these SEO tips and tools once you see them in action.

At the end of the session you will be able to:

• Understand how to easily identify issues with your site
• Monitor the changes made
• Check your rankings the right way
• Identify where your traffic is coming from

 

Workshop Session

Bloggers’ Top 5 SEO Blunders and How To Fix Them

Spend an hour with Jim Stewart exploring the top 5 areas where bloggers go wrong with SEO and more importantly how to fix them. This is for bloggers who want more than a basic introduction into SEO. You will learn strategies to structure your content, improve site speed, site map configuration and how to rank quickly and easily. Implementing these strategies in the right order is key to successfully increasing traffic to your website. Jim has done it many times over, just ask him.

Expect to learn:

• What Google thinks of your site
• How to rank quickly and easily
• How to leverage your content so Google loves it
• How to make your site lightning fast
• How to use Yoast properly

 

Sunday Session

Double Your Traffic Using This Step-By-Step System

Jim Stewart will be hosting an SEO Masterclass for the benefit of experienced bloggers who are seeking to take their blogs to the next level.  Jim will demonstrate his techniques for doubling traffic, and is ideally suited to anyone wishing to learn systems for doing SEO themselves. Attendees will be shown strategies to maintain and update their blog SEO, how to create checklists of measurable actions, and the importance of building an audience alongside your SEO.

Attendees will be able to leave with these important learning outcomes:

• Find out if Google hates you
• Simple things you can do today that will have a massive impact on ranking
• How to structure your content for search engines
• Learn how to jump above the #1 spot with Featured Answers
• Daily & weekly checklists to maintain your rankings

 

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Angela Ponsford

Angela Ponsford is one half of Dotti Media and is a self-confessed Facebook Ads nerd. She loves geeking out over clients’ Facebook Ad campaigns and figuring out how to get them the best results. Angela also works with clients doing one-on-one Facebook Ads coaching, runs Facebook & Instagram workshops and is the co-creator of ‘Get InstaSavvy’, an online Instagram course for Aussies. When she’s not on Facebook you can find her on the roller derby track as her alter ego, Slingshot Polkadot. She lives just outside Byron Bay with her husband and twin daughters.

www.dottimedia.com

 

Tactics, Tools & Techniques Session

Beyond the Boosted Post – Get Results from your Facebook & Instagram Ads

Getting seen in the Facebook & Instagram newsfeed is a challenge for already time-poor business owners and bloggers. And Facebook Ads often seem like just another distraction that waste money and produce little results. In this session Angela will show you how you can create simple ad campaigns that don’t blow your budget.

Expect to learn:

• The most important things to get right before creating your first ad campaign
• An understanding of the difference between Facebook & Instagram ads
• Tips for running Facebook & Instagram ads on a tight budget
• A look at some successful and not-so-successful ads

 

Miranda Ivey

Miranda Ivey is the co-owner of Dotti Media and is all about the ‘big picture’ when it comes to social media and online strategy. With over 10 years experience in Marketing and Publicity, Miranda’s goal is to uncover the best version of ‘you’ possible and sell it to the world. Quite possibly the worlds only roller derby playing social media entrepreneurs, Miranda and Angela of Dotti Media are fast gaining a reputation for delivering high value online workshops and training with a distinctly Australian flavour.

www.dottimedia.com

 

Angela Ponsford and Miranda Ivey will be co-presenting the following Workshop and Sunday Session.

 

Workshop Session

Converting Web Visitors & Video Viewers into Fans & Customers

The secret to high performing Facebook Ads isn’t just about having the best copy or images; you have to be targeting the right audiences. In this eye-opening session, you’ll learn how you can turn your website traffic and even video viewers into ready made audiences for your Facebook Ads.

Expect to learn:

• How to use Facebook Tracking Pixels to create audiences in your Facebook Ad account
• The difference between cold, warm & hot audiences, and how to craft Facebook ads for each of them
• Why you need to consider Video as part of your social media strategy
• Understand Facebook Ad lingo
• How to use split-testing to get the cheapest clicks (and save you money)

 

Sunday Session

Get Launch Ready with Facebook Ads

A workshop for bloggers who are ready to sell their ebook, products or online courses. Learn tips on how to write authentic ad copy, find the best target audiences and set the right budget that suits you. Then we’ll dive into setting up ads in the Power Editor and finally reading the results so you know what’s working, what’s not and when it’s time to change things up.

Expect to learn:

• Why your website landing pages and email sequences are just as important as your Facebook ads, and how to optimise them to get results
• How to set a budget for your ads & get clear on calculating ROI (Return on Investment)
• How to use the Power Editor to set up & duplicate campaigns
• Highly effective strategies to uncover your target audience
• What metrics to look at so you know when to change things or keep your ads running

 

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Kate Cook

Kate Cook has been a Digital Marketing Consultant and Social Media Specialist for over 5 years. Starting her career working in agency and later moving to head up the social media marketing for Domino’s Pizza Enterprises, Kate has a breadth of experience across a multitude of industries. Kate shares her digital marketing learnings on her blog Small Paper Things. Small Paper Things Blog has been shared across social media more than 80,000 times and has recently been recognised as one of Australia’s Best Business Blogs for 2016.

www.smallpaperthings.com

 

Fundamentals Session

Building a Social Media Strategy to Support Your Blog

This session will be for anyone looking for some hacks and ideas to build an effective social media strategy to support their blogs. It will help you to identify which channels to choose to invest in, how to optimise your existing strategy and the best tools you can use to manage your efforts.

In attending this session you will gain a greater understanding of:

• Each social media network and how to choose the right platforms to promote your blog
• The psychology of how users interact with messages on each platform (and how to get your message right)
• Tips on how to ensure your content “cuts through” the noise on social platforms
• How to use social media insights to improve your social media strategy and blog content
• Which tools to use to efficiently manage your strategy

 

Workshop Session

Understanding The Data That Will Help You Be a Better Blogger

These days, there are so many ways to collect an incredible amount of data around our online content efforts, but what’s the use if we don’t know what data we’re looking for or what impact it can have on our blogging strategy? In this session I will take you on what a typical “data dive” looks like for me. Which analytics tools I use, what I look for, the insights I derive and how it helps me to improve my content strategy.

In attending this session you will gain a greater understanding of:

• Analytics: How to set up your analytics tools to help you to see the most important data
• Content: what is working well that you could do more of? What isn’t resonating so well and why?
• Audience: who is it who is engaging with your content the most? How can we better understand them and serve them with content that will add value to their lives?
• Promotion: which promotional channels are driving the most high quality traffic? Which channels should we invest more time and energy into? How can we optimise promotional efforts?

 

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Jeanette Jifkins

Jeanette Jifkins is really passionate about identifying the practical legal solutions that fit your business. Her strategy is to ensure that legal problems are avoided, or at least contained and managed quickly in the unlikely event that they occur, to give you the opportunity to stay focused on growing your business with confidence. With more than 17 years experience helping over 1000 clients protect their business both large and small, Jeanette has a range of strategies that give her clients clarity and certainty in the ever changing online world.

www.onyxonlinelaw.com

 

Fundamentals Session

Common Legal Issues For Bloggers

You’ve started a blog (or are wanting to), your traffic is growing and you’re gaining traction and popularity. The last thing you need is legal problems derailing your plans. Would you like to avoid legal issues in the first place; have the confidence to respond to problems if they arise; and know when you do and don’t need to call for further legal advice? This session is designed to help you understand some of the most common legal issues facing Bloggers and to give you some strategies to deal with them.

Expect to learn:

• How to copyright your content and avoid breaching others’
• Your obligations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
• About the limits of Trade Mark protection
• Why you need a disclaimer to limit your liability
• Why you should have legal terms on your blog
• Whether you need to make disclosures and what kind
• Your obligations regarding other people’s comments on your blog
• The fundamentals of anti-spam compliance

 

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Sam Nordberg

Sam Nordberg shows people just like you how to take their passion and knowledge and create an online course that sells. With over 10 years’ experience training others, she’s taught a huge range of people including training members of the Australian Defence force, Emergency Services, Government Departments and Surf Lifesaving Foundation. She knows how to make the process quick and easy, so you can leverage your business and have a bigger reach.

www.samnordberg.com

 

Workshop Session

Anyone Can Grow Their Business With an Online Course

Everyone is talking about online courses at the moment. You’ve heard that an online course is a great way to grow your business, and increase your income, but it feels overwhelming… right? Maybe you’re not sure how to pull it all together… or maybe you’re not even sure where to start? Maybe you don’t see how it would work for you? Course creation doesn’t have to be scary and can work for everyone. In this session Sam will take you through how to turn your passion and knowledge into an online course, to generate warm leads or build leveraged income into your business.

Expect to learn:

• Create clear outcomes that will make course writing easy
• The technique for getting stuff out of your head and onto paper
• How to effortlessly create chunks of content that your customers will love
• Create content take engages and gets results
• Create a plan for how a course will help you grow your business

 

Sunday Session

Course Creation Masterclass – Creating your course

It’s time for rubber to meet the road (or pen to meet the paper). During this Masterclass, we’ll focus on creating your full course outline and building your first chunks.
This is a hands on masterclass, where you will write, build and get hands on input with creating the beginning of your own course.

Key Learnings:

• Create your course structure from beginning to end
• Learn how to effortlessly create chunks of content that your customers will love
• Create content take engages and gets results
• Build feedback cycles, choice points and story arcs
• Utilise your customers learning styles and intelligence types, to their advantage

 

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Alita Harvey-Rodriguez

Alita Harvey-Rodriguez is known as one of Australia’s leading Digital Marketing Futurist and the brains behind Milk it Academy. A training platform to advance marketers skills into new school digital leadership roles. For over a decade Alita has worked with global brands including SAP, Experian, SEMRush, TS14+, Estee Lauder, Myer & Online Retailer.

In 2015 Alita was appointed to the Board of Advisors for the Australian Technology and Gadget Expo along side Google Earth inventor David Lorenzini. Today Alita works with Retailers and small businesses to help find clarity in digital leadership by leveraging data to reveal hidden profits and build humanized communication strategies that creates raving fans out of consumers who buy again and again. She does this by taking business and customer centric data and use’s it to find more people who behave and identify with your most profitable customers and then implements strategies to reach them effectively.

Alita is a regular contributor to Womens Agenda, SEMRush, internetretailer.com.au, 2015 ORIA Judge (Online Retailer Industry Awards) and the leading lecturer at the Digital Marketing Institute for Email Marketing and Marketing Automation.

www.milkdigitalstrategy.com.au

 

Sunday Session

Email Marketing & Lead Automation Masterclass

Do you need more inbound enquiries? Do you need more lead or online sales? Do you need more time to work on your business not in it? We know it can be hard to generate leads. Especially if you’re a non-digital native OR your expertise in your business simply isn’t in marketing. If one of your goals is to work smarter not harder on generating new business, this training system is designed perfectly for you.

Expect to learn:

• How to grow a list by 130% with an irresistible offer in less than 30 days
• How to implement the perfect automated email marketing lead & loyalty funnel
• How to piggy back off social media to boost results
• How to get 50% of new subscribers buying from you in under 10 days
• How to leverage existing content to build rapid trust
• Add thousands of dollars of revenue automatically by getting the right content to the right person at the right time
• Reduce your time spent marketing

 

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