AI Meets CMS: How WordPress Is Powering the Next Wave of Digital Marketing | Nick Gernertt

 You're sitting on a massive content asset,
 but are you future-proofing it against the AI revolution?
 Or is Google about to steal your traffic?
 We're cutting through the buzzwords with Nick Gerner,
 CEO of WordPress VIP, who reveals the pragmatic future
 of content creation and the critical difference
 between rented and owned digital land.
 Watch now to unlock the owned land strategy
 and learn the one AI-driven SEO back-linking hack
 that will instantly boost your organic rankings.
 If you're trying to connect with your customers
 and you're trying to catch attention,
 you have to be doing this in a way
 where you're able to move quickly
 and you're able to engage authentically and directly
 and usually the best way to do that
 is not through six gatekeepers in the organization.
 That's what we think, actually, like WordPress
 and WordPress VIP, like brings a superpower
 into these big companies,
 because it's like, get the rest of the stuff out of the way.
 You don't need the complexity for complexities sake,
 the simplest solutions or the best solutions.
 This is right about now with Ryan Alford,
 a Radcast Network production.
 We are the number one business show on the planet
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 Well, it starts right about now.
 Right about now.
 What's up guys?
 Welcome to right about now.
 We're always talking about now.
 We're always getting right here.
 Today, we have people on and they're doing some amazing things
 and they're doing things with brands
 that you've never heard of, technologies you've never heard of.
 But there's a word that I would guess
 97% of our audience probably know it.
 It's WordPress.
 He's the CEO of WordPress VIP.
 Nick, Ernord, what's up Nick?
 Hello, how are you?
 Great man.
 Thanks for joining us.
 I do think our audience knows the name WordPress.
 Watching the evolution of WordPress
 from the blogging platform to really the go to CMS
 for most definitely mid-market agencies
 and clients to all the way up to the corporate level
 as the transition and evolution.
 It's been fascinating to sort of watch
 that evolution of the company.
 And I'm sure you had a seat right at the table.
 Yeah, a seat right at the table.
 And I think WordPress started 2003
 through think about where we were there
 and then where we are today.
 It's been a long through that and continued to grow.
 Market share still inches up.
 It's harder at the like once you reach certain scale
 like I mean that number that's a big number
 you keep moving up 43% of the top 10 million websites
 are powered by WordPress technology.
 Talk about working for a company
 that has that market share and then bringing to life
 dominant CMS overall.
 But again, bringing to life the brand for corporate
 to kind of go direct to that transition
 is kind of what I was kind of building to all this.
 The my space and all that is you're at this level
 and everybody respects you, you're greeting them
 but then trying to be the corporate king for go to
 was that a hard transition to get people to make mentally?
 As ubiquitous as WordPress is on web
 it's not in that corporate sense.
 There was niche adoption of WordPress
 from a we use it for the corporate blog.
 A big challenge for us is like how do you take something
 that is as ubiquitous as WordPress
 but also ubiquitously known for its blogging
 and maybe more consumer and small business
 and up to mid market.
 And there's everything you know about working
 with large organizations that's the intangibles of
 how do you show up as an account team?
 How do you show up as understanding their business needs,
 their objectives?
 How do you meet them there so that whatever software
 we're providing and as much as I wanna say
 software is the solution to everything.
 Really, I think 70% of its people
 and that's actually one of the strengths of WordPress
 is that it's so centered around people
 and creating access for people
 that the 30% actually that technology impacts
 in the organization we do really well.
 But how do we really bring people together
 because so much of actual success and digital
 and everything else is like can you access the tools,
 can you access your audience, can you access your customers
 et cetera.
 And so much of the existing market for my perspective
 prevents that, actually doesn't enable that.
 We're like how can we open that up?
 How do we focus on opening that up?
 So that our transition is really,
 how do you take something that the web at large has accepted
 and said this thing's great fit for purpose
 but enterprises have a bit of skepticism around that
 to spend many, many, many more years
 trying to really help serve that market and adapt
 who knows what happens in the next 20 years
 of WordPress's story.
 It seems like some of these platforms and CMSs
 that I think are starting to wind down,
 I hope they are, but I've always been skeptical
 they're complex for complex sake.
 What I love about WordPress is yeah,
 you gotta learn it and get your way around it
 but it's meant to be easy but robust.
 Words like digital transformation
 and all these things were architected in a ways
 to create massive budgets to extract a bunch
 from an organization that was looking for a solution
 to a problem that they really didn't understand
 what the root causes were in the first place.
 When you fast forward to today,
 look at all the layers that now have been created in the stack.
 What is the MarTech stack?
 What is the web stack that I bring together?
 My developers are telling me we need to do this thing
 and use these technologies.
 My executives are telling me these analysts
 are recommending this highly complex
 and an enterprise level solution.
 And usually when we say enterprise level,
 it's like they're overly complex, heavy handed,
 massive suites of things that you don't end up using.
 And that's the status quo.
 And from my perspective, it's like that beautiful simplicity
 you're like preaching to the choir here
 on from a WordPress perspective.
 That's how we show up differently.
 It's just we'll come into an organization
 of a couple hundred thousand people
 and they'll say our existing technology,
 six people know how to update our digital properties
 at a 200,000.
 We got six people internally that can touch this thing.
 And our goal is in like how do we open that up?
 How do we turn six into hundreds or thousands?
 The reality for marketers and organizations is
 if you're trying to connect with your customers
 and you're trying to catch attention,
 you have to be doing this in a way
 where you're able to move quickly
 and you're able to engage authentically and directly
 and usually the best way to do that
 is not through like six gatekeepers in the organization.
 That's what we think actually like WordPress
 and WordPress we have to be like brings a superpower
 into these big companies
 because it's like get the rest of the stuff out of the way.
 You don't need the complexity for complexities sake.
 The simplest solutions or the best solutions.
 What I always liked about WordPress
 is that you could do things quickly using and having
 and to open this, having the open source side
 and then all the plugins.
 It's a wonderful thing.
 The way you guys are willing to work with
 so many other partners
 because so many other things need to talk to things.
 When a client comes to me
 and they do have maybe some complexity or whatever,
 that's why I'm always WordPress is top of mine.
 Okay, it's the fastest to integrate.
 It has a plugin for that, a plugin for this.
 And some people get their hair in a mess over all that
 but that's what I've always liked about WordPress
 is the willingness to sort of partner with anyone
 to bring these integrations to life
 and seemingly do it in an open way.
 You get to focus on actually solving new challenges.
 The most frustrating thing to me is when you come up
 with 10 different ways to integrate
 with whatever CRM you're using.
 In reality, you're like thousands of other organizations
 that have also needed to integrate with that CRM
 or that digital asset management platform
 or an ad platform or analytics or any number of things.
 Why spend the time recreating these elements
 and then actually spend the time on what are your business
 challenges, what are your business opportunities?
 How do you focus on those?
 Because authentication systems and CRMs
 are not value generating activity.
 Creating your own CMS is not creating more value
 for your organization.
 How do you let this ecosystem and our organization help
 with solved problems that you really just focus
 on business strategy and execution
 and your customers or your audiences?
 New problems.
 That's way more engaging anyway.
 What's been the general WordPress slash WordPress VIP,
 slash automatic sort of corporate position on AI in general
 and even your own sort of position
 on how it's been coming to unfold the last couple of years?
 There's a lot that's exciting in this
 and I'm also the person that wants to be really pragmatic
 on what are new approaches, new technologies, et cetera,
 bringing to the work we need to do.
 And how do we actually stay focused on the value of that
 and not just necessarily chasing trends?
 Because a lot of the complexity we were just talking about
 comes from the temptation to maybe chase trends
 and throw things in there and hope they actually
 make things better, particularly generative AI.
 This idea that machines can generate text and images
 and video, et cetera, in ways that we have just not
 been able to do historically is exciting, especially
 when you think about our role as a content management system,
 where the source of record and creation
 for a lot of these things, our position
 is what is the best of those two things coming together?
 Because like anything, you want to focus your people time
 on the most valuable activities and let the machines do
 what they're well suited to do.
 From our perspective, it's like how do we make humans
 give them superpowers in this moment here in doing this?
 We don't see it, I don't see it, and I don't see it anytime
 near where there's a strategy where it's just
 like what we just let the machines now run
 our content strategies, our content creation, everything.
 We actually view ourselves as kind of a platform
 by which a lot of folks will just experience AI
 and maybe not even fully realize their experiencing AI.
 It's just like, wow, the tool just works really well
 on these tasks that I need to do around it.
 We're looking at how do we help our customers
 take their analytics, their content performance,
 what has worked, et cetera.
 And how do we actually feed that into the content
 that is generated through AI?
 If you're looking at, I want headlines or titles
 that perform better, we can actually help say
 based on historical performance, we'll write headlines
 in your tone voice or your business tone
 based on your performance and we will recommend things.
 And so we're looking at this as a way to say,
 we can start to get predictive on how to help customers
 understand what has worked historically
 and apply that to the future.
 We're looking at that as saying
 that how do we take our unique assets we have as an organization
 which is a lot of data that otherwise you don't necessarily
 have access to and how do we apply that
 to things that get generated.
 No matter what you're trying to get at the content
 whether it's entertainment, education,
 whether it's the brochure or the TV show
 that's encapsulated video and encapsulated on the site.
 No one needs to know you exist.
 Other than the corporate person that you work with
 but the user experience, that's a fascinating kind of analogy.
 Totally agree with everything you're saying there.
 And our job is well done when we kind of just fade into the back.
 And as long as we're enabling folks to do their jobs
 and as long as people can get what they need when they need it,
 that's the job well done and it's not about us
 like having a physical spot somewhere in that stack.
 You guys are leveraging the technology,
 bringing a better experience to life.
 It's not the packaging thing to call it AI.
 We just call it a company using technology
 in a good way to make your experience better.
 Folks want to know about AI right now
 and folks want to know what your product is doing.
 I don't think it's as much about AI.
 It's like folks want to know like what are you doing
 to keep up with the pace of change?
 Please talk to me about how you're shifting with change.
 AI is that lens we view it through right now
 but it's like how adaptable are you really?
 You need to talk about it, we need to talk about it
 through the lens by reviewing things
 and also I don't want to overstate
 that somehow this is an entirely new product.
 This becomes something that actually takes something
 you've already been doing and improves upon it
 in ways that are really exciting
 and haven't been transformed this way in many years.
 Just an exciting shift in the work.
 How do you guys think about SEO
 within the landscape of the product
 and just overall with everything happening with AI?
 The foundation is WordPress has had SEO
 sort of it's core since its earliest days
 that in most cases we'll see folks migrate into the platform
 and immediately see a dramatic SEO improvement
 just because of all the care and attention
 that's gone into how documents get structured and delivered.
 It's just very SEO friendly way.
 Stay now in that search train just a little bit with AI.
 It's interesting, you know, Chatchy PT.
 Are you guys seeing or you have data that supports
 people Googling or Chatchy PT?
 Are you guys seeing those kind of trends in that data
 and reacting in any way to it?
 What's informing these models tends to be a lot of the content
 that's been created and exists across the web.
 We've been helping folks navigate attention
 like what's fair use of my content
 and we're trying to help at a platform level.
 Like look, if you want to restrict certain things
 or whatever, like we want to help you there
 and make sure you've got those types of things.
 The website and web in general have a significant role
 to play for the foreseeable future
 and what informs the responses
 and what is considered fact and opinion, et cetera,
 comes from these sources.
 Yes, there's a certain amount of training models
 against those things, but I don't see it usurping
 the importance of the sources anytime soon.
 But we're helping folks navigate
 the fair use of their content.
 And then, your point on what are we seeing
 from a trend standpoint in terms of consumption
 is we were asking ourselves over the summer,
 that was the introduction of AI summaries on Google,
 was that leading to a decline in Google referral traffic
 to our customer websites where people searching,
 they got the answer in that synopsis
 and then they never actually clicked the blue link anymore.
 That's the big fear that folks are worried about
 at the moment.
 We dug into a bunch of data around this.
 Overall, we're actually seeing referral traffic
 from Google to the websites that we look at,
 which we're looking across a couple hundred million
 visitors every day.
 So it's significant amount of traffic.
 It Google referral traffic's actually increasing right now
 in aggregate.
 And then if you've got any kind of peel that back,
 there's disparity, though, between the size
 of the organization.
 What we're seeing is like the bigger you are as an organization.
 Kind of to your point, the better you are
 at navigating SEO, relevancy, et cetera.
 So you might have teams you can dedicate to this
 more than the smaller players.
 It's not as evenly distributed from big to smaller.
 And that spread, that gives us more of an impetus
 to say, how do we help folks navigate this?
 Despite whether or not they have massive teams
 that can stay on top of these things or not.
 What we're seeing is look, if you're able to engage
 and build great content, backlink, get related,
 do all the things that help you.
 You're maintaining at least or even
 a growing audience right now.
 And so we're going to continue to monitor this
 and watch this and just help folks navigate
 what may or may not change in this.
 There's a well-earned, healthy amount of skepticism
 towards Google at the moment.
 And how much should I rely on them for traffic
 and as a platform that directs people to me?
 I think that's fair.
 They are a very important source of traffic, though.
 And I think it's both like leveraging that
 and also thinking about how do you have a strategy
 that doesn't make you overly dependent
 on anyone particular technology.
 You know this better than I, but it's
 that over dependency on anyone's social platform
 or search, or chat GBT or anything else
 might help you in a six to 12 month time horizon
 and may really hurt you on a multi-year trajectory
 if you're trying to think long-term.
 Same rules still apply.
 How do you have like a, well,
 how do you hedge against overdependence
 on anyone particular company to drive your business?
 We're trying to help folks navigate that
 because we think we as WordPress
 and something that is open, we're not a platform
 that owns your data or you or anything else.
 You actually own all of these things.
 We're here to help you kind of navigate that
 and have a stronger own presence on the web.
 You nail the word there at the end,
 but I was gonna go as like rented versus own land.
 And I've always seen WordPress
 because I'll say this to people,
 look, take advantage of the platforms.
 I'm not a hater on the walled gardens.
 Just know that's rented land and not own land.
 WordPress may sell products and services,
 but they are part of the good guy own land territory.
 And I've always coached that to your website
 needs to be your own property, your newsletter,
 your website, your content.
 You've got to own it and have places that it lives
 and sort of your yard and not your neighbors
 or the beach house you're renting down the street.
 They could go away at any time.
 One good storm away from gone.
 So yeah, Nick, it's been a pleasure, brother.
 Where can I keep up with everything you're doing?
 Learn more about WordPress VIP, et cetera.
 You can find us wpvip.com.
 You can find me on just about any channel
 at my name Nick Gerner.
 You'll find me there or WordPress VIP
 all over the typical network she'd look at as well.
 So find us all there and I really appreciate the time.
 This has been a ton of fun.
 We're very aligned on many of the things
 that could be great here.
 So I appreciate it.
 I'd love to have you back on the show regularly, Nick.
 Hey guys, you don't find us.
 Ryan is right.com.
 We're bringing it together.
 All the best, all in business and marketing here
 on the show.
 You'll check out WordPress VIP.
 We'll have the show notes where we link to all the content
 from today, Nick's information and WordPress VIP.
 You can follow me on that.
 All the social channels that Ryan offered.
 You'll see that blue check before you can buy it.
 We'll see you next time.
 I'm right about now.
 This has been right about now with Ryan Alford,
 a Radcast Network production.
 Visit RyanisRake.com for full audio and video versions
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 Thanks for listening.