WHAT WIKIPEDIA CAN’T TELL YOU ABOUT WORDCAMP KOLKATA EVENTS

INTRODUCTION

I did not want to attend this event; I thought it would be only about boring coding, programming stuff and not something for a Luddite like me. Anyway, I made the booking of the event, a day before the event. This blog will be a lengthy one, as I learnt so much and I have so much to share with my reader.

EVENT DETAILS

Event Name : WordCamp Kolkata 2019 (WordPress Meet up)

Venue : Biswa Bangla Convention Centre

Date : 3 March 2019

RAHUL BANSAL

Rahul Bansal is the director of www.rtcamp.com, providing enterprise WordPress solution. He has successfully bootstrapped his organisation from 6 employees in 2009 to now 60 employees in 2019. He is a cheerful person and spoke about Hiring talent in the WordPress ecosystem.

Talent should work with you, and not work for you. Rahul Bansal showed Abraham Maslow hierarchy and said that after some level basic salary does not motivate an employee, and they seek love and sense of belonging in an organisation.

He said that nowadays privacy is a myth and employer must trust their employees. We should attract employee who are superheroes.

He suggested one novel criterion, to look for Social Media profile of candidate before hiring. If the candidate is communal and has shared a lot of hate message and fake news post, then he is a misfit for an organisation.

A person with a poisonous mind can create a lot of politics and conflict in the organisation.

Always be civil to the candidate, because he has spent his time and money to reach out to the venue for interview. Always try to leave good memories with the other person.

We are not doing any favor by hiring a candidate or giving them a job. We must consider that the right candidate is doing us a favor by joining our organisation.

Even the rejected candidates should have good memories of the HR Manager and can refer some of their peers.

PARTHA BHATTACHARYA

Partha Bhattacharya is the Owner of Hubskills.com and a content creator and course seller at Udemy.

He said that no technology is successful if the end user is not satisfied.

Content can be anything like text, audio, video or images.

We can earn online by selling tangible items like a t-shirt or selling digital items like consultancy, courses or ebooks.

We can research about selling tangible items from a website like Quora, Google Trends and Amazon bestseller list. We can use marketing analytics software tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush to do research and those who cannot afford, can use Flikover Group buy SEO Tools.

We can make niche blogging sites to inform, to educate and to entertain visitors. Earning can be done by selling affiliate products.

A UK based Psychologist teaches online about rooftop gardening and dog walking.

He said that it is a myth that you need to be an expert at selling anything online.

ASIF RAHMAN

Asif Rahman is a tech geek. He is an entrepreneur and WordPress enthusiast. He has attended more than 100 WordPress meet up all over the world.

He has successfully founded many Start-ups like The Tech Journal, The Dhaka Times, WPdeveloper.net , Analytify , Geeky Social, AamarPay, 3rdBell

He has also been an early investor in Facebook.

He has been very successful and made enough money to retire at the age of 34. If you are interested in knowing more about him, you can read this blog of Asif Rahman.

He spoke about why you should attend WordCamp?

Advantage of attending WordCamp (WordPress meet up)

To stay on edge about what’s happening in WordPress ecosystem.
Partnership opportunity
To visit new places
Meet new people and talent

What will not happen at WordCamp (WordPress meet up)

You can not sell product at the venue
You can’t become speaker if you are a sponsor.
You can’t learn anything in a single day.
You can’t find a Girlfriend or a Boyfriend. ?

He said that he made a lot of money by adding a single line of code to many free plugins available and then selling them at premium.

He gave some advice, which is worth gold, he said that if you price your product cheaply, then the customer might not buy, thinking it to be of low quality.

Sometimes, if you highly price your product, then the customer will buy it, thinking it to be of premium features.

Some customers are bound to leave, and you can’t do anything about it.

TALEHA KHAN

Taleha Khan is a Blogger, Vblogger, radio jockey, TedX Speaker, Creative & Technical content writer, Photographer, Food walk Leader, Emcee, SEO & Digital Marketer, Traveller, Software Engineer, and Social Media Influencer. (A long introduction of her, i copied this from her Blog) ?

She is a very talented young girl. She spoke about Applying Agile framework in Blogging.

Taleha Khan told to never ever shy away to share the story in your way. You should nurture your Blog each day.

Make a vision board of your Blog. Decide and give weight-age to each task.

Always demo or review content before final release.

Tips to attaining success in Blogging

• Consistency in posting Blogs
• Better Content
• Streamlining tasks.
• Doing it SILO

She concluded by saying, “whatever goes around comes back,” so stop worrying.

RAHUL D SARKAR

Rahul is the CEO of Peergrowth Technologies. He spoke about Inbound Marketing Strategies.

Inbound Marketing is to draw customers to our products & Services.

Inbound Marketing Strategies

• Buyers Persona
• Dominate SERP
• Unique value Proposition
• Personal brand
• Content Marketing (Blog, ebook, Guides & Video)
• Social Media
• Remarketing
• Conversion Funnel.

PANEL DISCUSSION – FUTURE OF WORDPRESS IN 2019 & BEYOND.

Participant :

Rahul Bansal (Director rtcamp.com)
Bhanu Ahluwalia (mythemeshop and Rankmath SEO plugin)
Asif Rahman (Tech Entrepreneur)
Aslam Multani ( COO, Multidots)
Moderator: Purnendu Dash

Aslam Multani said that his company philosophy is to serve people and solve the problem. You will always have challenges in company, but different challenges at a different stage of the cycle. But you must build process in place. He said that WordPress is now focussing more on JavaScript.

Bhanu Ahluwalia said now WordPress is WYSIWYG – Gutenberg and later it will move towards Website Builder. He said that unless & until the product is good, marketing can’t help it.

Rahul said that everything starts small and later becomes Big. Consultancy business will always stay. People focus on what they are good at and outsource what others can do it well. When you look back at your job and can say that you could have done it better, then you are growing. Earlier WordPress started for the publisher, but now it will move towards marketer.

Asif Rahman said that theme industry would undergo a lot of changes. Many people love WordPress because of woocommerce, and many people will move towards SAAS. The only way to succeed is to test & evaluate. There is no simple answer.

AFSANA MULTANI

She spoke about effective ways to build a better customer experience.

Earlier there were only limited options in the market, but now you have plenty of options to spend your money.

Always serve your existing customer, as finding the new customer is tough.

You should always take good care of your customer; else someone will do.

Some of her suggestion

• Add your personal touch
• Be polite & humble
• Don’t be lazy
• Maintain support channel
• Greet your customer
• Spend enough time with your customer
• Establish your guidelines
• Ask for a testimonials
• Positive / Negative feedback
• Close feedback loop
• Show empathy to the customer
• Use your word wisely
• Welcome to customer complaints
• Do extra for your customer.

LAST WORD

Before I wind up this blog, I would like to apologise to few speakers for not mentioning their talk in this blog. Either few of the topics were too technical for me to understand.

You can also blame on the delicious food, which made me feel lazy & drowsy, and I missed to take notes of a few speakers.

The event was excellent and worth all the money and time. I met some cool people and their achievement and contribution to the WordPress community is exemplary.

I must also mention that I was able to meet Bhanu Ahluwalia, who is the owner of RankMath SEO Plugin, one of my client, requested me to use this Plugin while doing SEO for his website.

Many of the participants and speakers had come from the neighbouring country Bangladesh.

I must also applaud the volunteer, who worked tirelessly behind the curtain to make this event, a great success.

I will cherish all these memories for years.