Just creating on the web isn’t the best approach when you’re trying to be a successful creator or business owner. Alberto Medina knows that, and he, with his team at Google, are dedicated to helping creators by showing them how to be more successful.
Joe Casabona 0:02
Hey everybody, and welcome to next level laughs a podcast that explores tools, tips and techniques for hosting and managing websites presented by plastc. Today, our guest is Alberto Medina, he is a developer advocate at Google. And we are going to be talking about success factors on the web, we'll be answering the question, what does it take to succeed as a web of creator. Now, before we get started, I do want to give you a quick reminder to subscribe to this podcast to get the latest episodes as soon as they come out. All right, now, let's get on with the show. Alberto. How are you today?
Alberto Medina 0:39
Thank you very much. I'm very well, happy to be here. psyched about it.
Joe Casabona 0:44
Thanks so much for joining us. I'm very excited to have this conversation. Because as you know, as the pandemic started, I think a lot of people turned to doing more content creation and just general creating on the web. And it's important to not do that in a vacuum and kind of figure, I'll just put out whatever. And if it's, if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't, right. So having some key metrics to understanding what success looks like, is going to be very important. But before we get into that, I do want to ask you a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Alberto Medina 1:19
Awesome. Yeah, these are important questions. I'm super excited about talking about it with you. So I work at Google, in the area of Developer Relations. And specifically, I am a web advocate. And that is just personally my career. I advocate for the open web, I believe that the open web is a key component of society and the world as a whole. And especially in when we come to think about content creation. The Open Web has many qualities that makes you unique, and super awesome. So I work at a team at Google, basically, we're our whole mission is to do everything we can to ensure that web creators can be successful. And consequently, then we could have a healthy and vibrant and successful open web portal.
Joe Casabona 2:07
That's, that's fantastic. I love that. And, you know, you mentioned Google why so why specifically Google?
Alberto Medina 2:15
Yeah, that's, that's a very interesting question. Many times I have asked, I have been asked, Why do you work for Google? Right? So like, and I go back to the principle of I am a web advocate, right. So I am very interested in doing everything I can to contribute to the evolution and the quality of the web, for everyone, and Google, like many other organizations are is a company that depends on the web, right? So we are a web company. Therefore, the success of the web is at the core of our success as a business, likewise, for players glass, you know, for many other organizations, what makes Google unique is that Google is a very, also strong organization very, very big, and therefore have the resources that to invest in that world right together to partner with, you know, Microsoft, and Mozilla and all the web ecosystem that are stakeholders in this in this mission. So Google represents, for me an opportunity to actually be backed up, be supported with the right amount of resources so that we can do the world that we want. Google is a very big organization, but we focus on that part of, of working on the evolution and future of the web. That's the reason why Google actually can play an important role.
Joe Casabona 3:35
That's, that's fantastic. I love what you said, right? The company depends on the web. And so success for the web is success for Google. That's a rising tide raises all ships, right.
Alberto Medina 3:45
Yeah. And I said, we know exactly. That's a very good point, right? Because it's important to understand that. for Google, Google understands that the success on the web is not a zero sum game, actually, quite the contrary. So the only way that anybody succeeds in the web is that if everybody succeeds in the way in the web, right, so Google cannot survive, or cannot succeed, if there is not a vibrant and healthy and successful community of web creators doing stuff. Therefore, it is in our best interests that do succeed that everybody succeed so that we have an ecosystem that is actually rich and vibrant.
Joe Casabona 4:19
That's, that's fantastic. I absolutely love that. And so you, you mentioned Google, of course, is a very big company. They've been thinking about success on the web for a long time. So I suspect you have several things that we could talk about when it comes to success on the web. So why don't we dive right into that? What are the keys to success on the web?
Alberto Medina 4:43
Yeah, that I spend a lot of my time thinking about these questions together with my team. I'm on the leadership of Google. And if you think about it, when you when you take a look at successful sites and successful, what VA does, they do a variety of things very well. So first and foremost, they basically provide high content quality, they bring value to users that engage with their content. But that is super important, but it's not enough, right. So they also ensure that the content that they deliver is deliver with high performance accessibility, they bring joy to the user, when they engage with the content, they also need to monitor how their content behave, how the users are interacting with the content, what's working, what is not working, right, they also need to ensure that they have a way to make their content that is sustainable. And that basically points to the area of monetization, how they are going to actually be able to support themselves and keep creating awesome content continuously. And those are the major areas and they succeed, you need to succeed in all of them. And each of them entails a set of components that then you have to nail down. And actually this is interesting, because then, in a way, it gives you a sense, like, well, if I understand everything that I need to accomplish, then I will be able to accomplish easier. And at the same time, you realize that there are many decisions that you had to make along the way, and many things that you had to take into account. So to be able to be successful. So the question is, how do you do that? If you don't have the resources like, like a company of Google or like a, you know, you don't have 10 developers? How do you succeed? If you, you know, you don't have the technical skills or the resources, so that the success is not only confined to people that have the resources?
Joe Casabona 6:36
Yeah, that's, that's a great point. And so just to recap, and we'll dig deeper into each of these. But there are four success factors you outlined here, high content, quality, performance, monitoring, and monitors monetization. And I want to start with the first one, you mentioned, high content quality, because, you know, you hear there are lots of people and tools are saying like, you know, we're SEO experts, we can help with this, we can help with that. But if you don't have compelling content, none of that matters, right? Because it's not just about the pageviews or the hits, it's about the engagement with the content, is that right?
Alberto Medina 7:18
Exactly the value that you bring to your users like, and the pain is interesting, right? Because the higher the quality of the content, the more room you have to make mistakes in other areas, right. But the user could tolerate a little variation of Google and user experience if they are getting a lot of value from your content. So you have to make sure that you are bringing that value that you're you know, you're you find your own unique voice, you create content that is high quality, and as a part of that is hardest to help people with because you cannot tell people what to do or what they want to talk about. But whatever, assuming that they have that voice, and they have found that voice, then you know, they should build it on top of the other foundational components.
Joe Casabona 8:03
Yeah, absolutely. And finding your voice I think is a really important point to drive home because, you know, I could watch you know, whoever Mark Rober, right he's, I love his videos, and but I can't I can't make a video like Mark Rober, right, if I tried to imitate Mark Rober, my content wouldn't be as good, I need to make my own content.
Alberto Medina 8:25
That is very, very good point that you're making, right? Because it points to the issue of like, okay, so I want to say something. And I want to basically create content for the open web. But then how do I do it? Like what content format when when when we say web content, actually, is a multi dimensional concept, right? web content is vvo. Its stories, there is a new modern format, it stacks it emerges. It is podcasts. So there is there are many ways to create web content. So what are the format? What is the way that you're going to use to actually reach your audience and many times some multi dimensional strategy, right, so you can have a podcast and a video series and create web stories. Therefore, you give your user multiple entry points to your content strategy.
Joe Casabona 9:14
Yes, yes, absolutely. And so you mentioned stories, right? This is something that has kind of caught fire in the last few years, right? It's maybe maybe first it was, maybe Snapchat did it and then Instagram did it. And then tik tok is a thing. And now, even LinkedIn, right has stories. Sweet there, you name it. Yeah, exactly. As we're talking about the open web, what can What Can somebody who is concerned about putting content on the open web do when it comes to stories because we basically just named a bunch of platforms that are closed off platforms?
Alberto Medina 9:51
Yes, exactly. That's a very good point. So the way that I look at it is like stories belongs to the content part of content quality, right? Because You're using stories as a powerful format to engage your users and insert a piece of format that actually is useful. Yes, that has caught fire recently in the last few years, because it's a very powerful format. And people love it. And until recently, the stories format was a format that was available only to users on cross platforms. Right. And then this has, there are several advantages from those plants from the ease of creation, the basically all embrace the ephemerality of stories and so on in certain ways. But they also have some drawbacks, and you don't own your own content, your current, your stories can only be shown in that particular platform, and so on. So web stories, basically makes the powerful stories format, available in the open web, therefore, you have the same benefit of the stories format, but now you own your own stories, you control the monetization of your own stories, you can share and distribute your, your stories in different ways. And you have universal reach that comes by being in the open web.
Joe Casabona 11:04
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's fantastic. I really love what you said about monetization. And again, we'll get to that in a moment. But you know, there, these platforms are not necessarily sharing the profits with you for all of the views that you're getting on your story.
Alberto Medina 11:22
So they are making all the money and then you You are the content creator. And and most times, it's okay. But some people create content, and imagine that they could basically sustain themselves and create awesome content and make the world better. So definitely, they should own that part as well. Yeah. And also you have situations like, for example, like, imagine that you are a local news publisher, right? And you look, you have a news outlet for a little town somewhere. And then you use stories, you can, you know, when we talk about monetization, there are many things that could be done, one of the things that you could do is to do direct social advertising with your local business, right? So you go to the bakery, next, you know, in the corner, and I said, Listen, you know, the local newspaper, have a story section, we could have a story ad for you there. And then you have these relationships that are unique to your local community. And then basically, you control all that. So that's very powerful.
Joe Casabona 12:13
Yeah, that's great. And then the local news outlet, the local news publisher is such a great example, because local local news outlets are having trouble. Not necessarily having having trouble making the switch from like a primarily print medium to a digital medium has been very tough for them. Because yes, you know, you have ad blockers and paywalls. And, and empowering them to do more like direct ad sales is great. I love that. Yeah. So that his content, high quality content is important. It's going to be a multi, it could be a multi channel experience, but you need to find your own voice, and deliver it the best way that you think is possible. Now, let's talk about the second success factor here, which is performance. When you say performance, you say deliver a high quality performance. So we're not necessarily talking about like page load speed or anything like that we're talking about the way the content is delivered.
Alberto Medina 13:12
It is like a combination of things. So when we talk about performance, I like to think about performance and accessibility together. Accessibility in terms of the concept of accessibility, but also how easy it is for me to consume the content on how intuitive it is. But definitely loading speed is is a factor, right? So if I am a user, and you have awesome content to offer, but I go to your site, and it takes 25 seconds to load, the likelihood that I'm going to abandon your site is very high. So now you are the unique the only game in town for the thing that you had to say I may wait for the 25 seconds. But if there is an alternative, they probably want to go to the one that takes only five seconds to load. So but that part of performance is very important. But also the you know, how this content behave once it is loaded into your device, for example, I could be reading my content and suddenly the theme blocks, right? Or I am like engaging with your article. And suddenly you throw up something that interrupt my flow, because you want to catch my attention with an ad or something, though those are actually part of the user experience. And then you as a publisher, you need to decide, well, if I want to maximize the joy of my users, therefore, I'm going to take that into account on every decision that I make. Right? So you have to think about how do I make my site to load fast? How do I make it run smoothly? How do I make it so that he doesn't block when the user is engaging with it? Anyway, so how do we optimize the user experience as a whole?
Joe Casabona 14:38
Yeah, I think that's great, because, like you said, fast loading is so important. You know, I read a stat A few years ago, that 80% of users have been in a site if it takes more than five seconds to load or something like that. And that's so if you have a slow site, people aren't going to be consuming your content, but the User Experience aspect of it is very interesting to me. Because the, the models that pop up, right, they are effective for the content creator, right to build the list, but not if they dissuade the user from actually reading the content, right. So like an example of this is, I am going to if if I go to a website, and they immediately hit me with a pop up to sign up for their newsletter, I'm probably just gonna leave, I don't know that I want to sign up for your newsletter yet, because I haven't actually read any your content. Whereas on the web, maybe if I get all the way down the page, I've read the whole article now hit me with the modal, or on a mobile device, just have it at the bottom of the article, don't even have the pop up, because mobile pop ups are not great most of the time anyway,
Alberto Medina 15:52
as I said, right, the right way to look at either the, I think that what I what I like to think about or what I will advocate for is to, to be to be aware of this reality and and include that reality in your decision making process. Right? So we recognize that for publishers many times is very important to have that more than that purple, because that is what drive revenue. And we are talking about that well, how do I make my content that is sustainable? And we agree with that we cannot we we don't want the publisher to feel like okay, well, but you are telling me not to monetize what what works. But what we are telling or what I'm telling you, like be conscious of it, and then make decisions like if you are giving your user a lot of value, then they are going to be more likely to tolerate your because they want to support you as well. Right? So it's well that he's thinking, you know, you're always giving me this pop up. But man, you always give me so much value. And I understand that this is what he needs to sustain his business. Yeah, I'm going to engage with that. Right? Number one, number two is like what do you show in those pop ups? Right? So many times, I'm very surprised when I am caught up in some cross platform thing, which actually I see an advertising that is certainly right, something that I clearly need, I just got a dog two months ago, and I see some dog advertising stuff, I say, Oh my god, I need to get this toy. Right. So you give something that the user wants to read. So you basically run you're not gonna give an advertiser about diapers is you don't have any idea if a person has a baby or not. So all the thinking process is like holistic, and then you have to be aware of it. And if you think of it, and then you make the decisions, taking into account the user experience, then you'll want to make the right decisions, even if it's not always optimal for the user, but it's going to be pretty very often optimal.
Joe Casabona 17:42
Yeah, yeah, that makes perfect sense. You want to I mean, I I read, I read an analogy that it was like, you know, you don't ask to marry somebody on the first date. Right? You Exactly. You want to court them a little bit. And then you have the ask.
Alberto Medina 17:57
It's like, that's a great a great analogy, right. So you let the user get into your site, gateway. Oh, wow. This is very, very good article. And then Okay. Oh, look at that. That is an interstitial here. Okay. Well, physicians are actually not good at I don't like to even mention the name. But whatever you want to come up with you say, but but you already have the user is engaged, he's interested in the site loaded very fast. So he's happy about it. You could use actually plasma capability so the user can actually save what he's reading for reading for later or providing offline access to your site. So all these, you know, features are also related to performance and content quality.
Joe Casabona 18:36
Yeah, absolutely. And because this is such an important topic, I want to ask, you know, how does one track and optimize for their site's performance? we kind of talked about, kind of big picture what to look for, but do you have any? Do you have any actionable tips for us?
Alberto Medina 18:54
Yeah, those are definitely that's a very good question. And I noticed that we haven't said exactly what performance is in the bottom line is like, because you know, somebody's listening to us must be saying, like, Oh, that's great. So the word though I don't want the switch of performance, what I make it happen. And that is one of the biggest challenges in the open web, right? Because from a technical perspective, it is completely possible to build websites that perform extraordinarily well, right? It happens and, you know, if you have the resources, you have the skills, you can do it. The problem is that is very challenging, because there are many technical aspect that you have to achieve. And for 99% of us, including myself, is very difficult to first be aware of everything that is needed. And even if you are aware of everything that is needed to make it happen. And even if you are very good. You also has to deal with monitoring content quality, monetization, then you don't have time to do the thing that you know how to do but you don't have time somebody has to do these things as well. So it simply To understand that you need to find solutions that allow you to incorporate the performance factors. But once you have them you have is something that you cannot achieve once and then that's it, right? So it's a continuous effort that you have to continue meeting during the life time of your site. So that's when monitoring tools come in. I don't know you have heard about the coldwave, vitals f4. And the COVID. vitals is an initiative that has been spearheaded by Google that actually provide a unified way to think about performance, you know, a set of metrics that allows us to understand well, you know, what is performance from the user perspective? And also, from the system's perspective, what are the metrics that have to account for then a set of tools, you ask me, how do we measure this, there are a variety of tools that you can use like this, like PageSpeed Insights, there is lighthouse, there is web page test. And there are others that you can actually use to see how your site is performing with respect to these performance metrics. So that you know, okay, if my site performs well here, then I could say, with certain confidence that my users are getting a good experience. Now, so. So that is the answer. So that is a variety of tools that you can you go to web dot depth, there is, you know, information there about PageSpeed tools or like speed tools. And it's one article specifically that I like that is like how to reason? Or how to think about tools. And then they analyze all of the ones that are available, and which one give you what and how can you use it in a coherent strategy to make sure that you understand the performance of your site?
Joe Casabona 21:43
That's, that's fantastic. And it, it makes perfect sense, right? I love what you said about you know, it's, it's a challenge, because the business owner, let's say, or the content creator, is off is not necessarily a Server Admin, right? It's, it's the same reason why I drive my car, but I don't work on my car. I don't know anything about my car. And if I just spent all of my time rebuilding the engine, I would have no time to drive it around. So
Alberto Medina 22:12
are you had to use a car to take your kids to school? Then when are you going to fix the car? So even if you know how to fix the car, you don't have to you want a car that works? Well, you don't need to be able to I want to spend two hours of my day fixing the car, because I just don't have time. If I can hire a mechanic full time to be my house, then Okay, then fine. I can deal with it. But I don't have that luxury.
Joe Casabona 22:36
Yeah, absolutely. But then you mentioned the core web vitals right at web dot Dev, that's almost like the car inspection, right that, that most most states in the United States at least require you to get your car inspected every year?
Alberto Medina 22:50
That's a good analogy. I like I like that. Yeah, it seems like he's actually give you a way to, to reason about that. And to think about, well, even if I'm not technical, I can understand that these metrics actually translate into something good for my user. And therefore, you have tools that tells you how good your site is, with respect to them, even if you don't understand exactly what a technical aspect is, you know, that is a metric is met, then you are good to go. And if it is not met, then what are the tools that you can use? And how do you track them down? and so on?
Joe Casabona 23:22
Right? Not everybody's gonna know what like lazy loading images means, but they're gonna know that a D is is worse than an A right?
Alberto Medina 23:29
Yeah, exactly. And I want to mention something I don't know you have heard about the page experience, ranking signal that is gone is coming. Later in May. Basically, Google had been advocated for for good content, quality and performance. And for a long time. And the initiative of the core word vital is combined with a other factors that make a site very good, like mobile friendliness, accessibility, or security, and so on. And they are combined, all those factors are combined into a ranking signal that is called page experience. Right? And the idea is that if you have two sides, and everything else is equal, the side with higher page experience should higher rank higher, because the user is going to get a better experience. For example, if you and I create the same content, identical content, right, but my content is served on HTTPS, that is a secure version of HTTP, and yours is not, then it is in my interest to serve the secure site to the user first, because they usually want to be safer and better now. And that's not saying that I want to say I want to give the user improper content that not what they were looking for your link on the other side is now if a user is looking for something that is only on that site, then Okay, here it is, you know, be careful and then we actually chrome and other browsers have then they have to say the site is not secure. But the notion of the Patric page ranking signal is that we want to actually make the best experiences available to the user as easily as possible.
Joe Casabona 25:11
Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. And it makes perfect sense. And so that combined with some of these tools helps you the content creator, make a better experience. Now, before we move on to monitoring, I have something in my notes here that I really want to ask about. And that is, user perceived speed, right? And that's theirs. If a user is staring at a blank page, then they know the website's not loading, right. But if you go to some of these other websites that we've mentioned, they'll partially load, right, they'll they'll at least let the user know that something is happening, right. So can you dig in on on user perceived speed a little bit and exactly what that is, and how it can help with your general performance and experience. So we can
Alberto Medina 25:57
we can touch on it briefly. But basically, one aspect to see is like you should avoid blocking the user experience, right? So the scenario that you just described, happens in many occasions, because the mechanisms that are used to display the content to the user are blocked, while something else is happening. So it might mean that you are loading a bunch of images, and you don't show anything on till this image is loaded. But that image is not optimized is loaded from our low, slow server, and therefore the user is just waiting there to see what happened. So if you could guarantee that that flow is never blocked, and the user is going to get some meaningful content as soon as possible, then you have no more chance even in the EMA test long to load. Because the way that you loaded it, you're guaranteed that didn't block the user experience. So that is basically what what it means. So there is resource prioritization, using lazy loading of images make making sure that you don't block the main thread of your browser, this kind of, you know, actions. Again, I emphasize that if you don't have the technical skills, or even if you have the technical skill, achieving all these things is not trivial, right? All you have to do lazy loading, don't block the main thread, optimize your emails, make sure that you have an awesome hosting provider, oh, my God, so many things, right. And then if you you know, even if you are a developer, then you have to make thinking about this all the time. That's why Google has been working on projects like amp right in which actually tries to get all these performance optimizations in a turnkey solution for you, so that you can, as a developer, or as a user, take advantage of all of them. And you know that if your site is incompatible, then blocking, the main thread is not going to happen. So you have that certainty, and you don't have to make it happen yourself. And that is a big deal, right? Because you say, Okay, I am confident that if I do things this way, things are going to be okay.
Joe Casabona 28:02
Yeah, absolutely. You, you want to send at least the content, like even if it's just the content, right, you want to send that first before sending, like some kind of big, heavy images, or if you're loading like 400 fonts, to make everything look really nice. At least give the user something so that they know that they can at least start consuming your content as soon as possible. Right. That's, that's fantastic. So let's move on to our third success factor here. I think we started talking about it a little bit. That's monitoring, right? So we mentioned the webpage tests and things like that. But some of the things that we didn't mention, were things like a B testing, right, and real user monitoring. So what let's What can I create? Or do starting out to monitor the performance of their content? And then what are some, maybe what are some more in depth or advanced things that they can do?
Alberto Medina 29:02
Yeah, so I think that techniques like AV testing, or something, are are in my perspective, I think that they are not. They don't apply to many creators, right? Because if you have you are, you are developing a site and you have a development team, and you have the resources. And you could basically use AV testing, which is a very important technique to determine if you have two alternatives to do something, which one will perform better. And actually, this actually made the point that to make here is that AV testing allow you to, to actually try different ideas. And in order to know which one is the best, then you need to monitor the performance of your content on both versions. And performance. performance of your content means how many users click on that feature, how many people click the live bottom, how many people continue the journey after getting there. So that is the word AB Testing aspect is, but the important thing is that you need independently of AV testing or not, you need to figure it out how your company performing. Right? And there are several tools. You know, for the sake of time, we can mention, for example, Google has several tools that are specifically built, and, you know, distributed for helping people to monitor their content that is Google Analytics. There is free every everybody can, you know, use it. And then you can get information about users that are accessing your site, where are they accessing it from? How many? How many in real time, from where languages, so many informations that you can say, Wow, look at these, my content is very popular in this area. And it's interesting, oh, by the way, they lie this content. Okay, now, I'm going to create more content about that. We have Search Console, right. So search is a very important aspect of driving organic traffic to content creator site as an understanding how search is looking at your site, how is processing your site, not only Google search, but also being an other search engine is very important. The contents of Google search, we have the Search Console tooling family in which actually created quite a lot of information about how users are finding your content, how many, how is your site ranking? You know, if you have arm, how is your arm content, behaving and so on? So when we come to the area of monitoring, I think about what tools can I use to understand how my site is performing. And some of these tools allow you to incorporate real user monitoring. So if your site's going to Google, for example, there is an initiative that is called the chrome UX report. That is really, you know, there are more than a billion users using Chrome, then we, you know, we capture performance data anonymize of how sites are behaving, so we can say, well, 75% of your users are experiencing this quality, and that kind of thing. So you can say, wow, this is very, very interesting, because I need to many times, something that happens is that people develop a site he performs well in your machine, and then using that you are killing it. But then it turns out that people accessing your site from Brazil are like screaming for help, because they think doesn't load and you all but I tried, I tried the my iPhone, it works nice, right? But they are using, you know, a $100 phone, and that doesn't work. So one thing that I want to mention here is like these Google tools, and I'm thinking about in the context of WordPress is something that I spend a lot of time working on. We have, for example, psyche, psyche, this app logging that Google is developing, in which actually, we seek to bring these awesome monitoring tools in one place. So if you install psyche, you can monitor Search Console, you can integrate your search console monitoring into your site, you can integrate your analytics monitoring to your site. And you can also integrate how your monetization tools are, you know, if you are working with Google monetization, like AdSense, for example, you can also monitor that and you have also an A psi PageSpeed insight integration. So this is one example in which, as a creator, you want to solve the monitoring success factor, one way to do is okay, how can I get everything in one solution? I don't want to be installing this and that. I don't know. Can I have a solution that in which I have everything I need? That is the idea, you know, try to like solve the problem in a turnkey way.
Joe Casabona 33:21
Yes, absolutely. So there are there are a lot of ideas that I really want to reinforce here. The first is that ABX testing good for development. But you know, with content, you're right, we're not going to like record two different versions of this podcast and sequel as What does better. Exactly. But you can use monitoring tools to see what does better, for example, right? I I really started getting into YouTube videos over the last year. And I tried a different, a few different kinds, using analytics and the statistics I have. It's very clear that my WordPress content far and away does better than any other content I put out on YouTube. And sadly,
Alberto Medina 34:02
so that's, that's a form of AV testing. Right? So that's,
Joe Casabona 34:06
yeah. And then what you said about a site kit to or the I'm sorry, the the chrome UX reporting. I love that I actually wrote about that in my HTML and CSS book, because it is important to know that, you know, it's, it's working on my machine is like the worst thing a developer can say to somebody who's having a problem, right. So you want to understand how the vast majority of your audience is experiencing your website or other audiences so that you can really grow your content. And it sounds like with that, and with a site kit, you can get this really full view of how things are going on your website. Which, which means the more people who can consume your content, the more sustainable it could be. Which brings us to our final success factor, which is monetization, right? It's, it would be great if we could all do what we wanted. for free, but if we're gonna keep doing this and put real time into putting out high quality content, then we do need to find a way to put food on our table. Right?
Alberto Medina 35:10
Yeah, totally. And that is an extremely important point. You know, I always remember my father, when I was a kid, when I didn't know anything about what I wanted to do. He said, like, it is amazing. If you could get paid for what you love to do. He used to told me and I said, like, Oh, forget about it, I want to be a rock star. And I definitely Yeah, if I could be a rock star and be paid for that, that would be awesome. But monetization is a very important aspect, when we come to the issue of sustained sustainable content strategy. And monetization have many forms, right? So you can monetize in many ways. You can add subscription, you know, ways you can have free, you know, premium model for certain things. You could have advertising in many, many different ways you can have the debt sold, you can have, you know, you know, programmatic advertising and so on, you can have donations, you can have, like YouTube is, for example, one way to do it, you you do ads, but also you let people contribute to you donate to your channel. So, the important thing to think about this is like, well, you cannot use name performance and content quality and monitoring. And then how do you pay the bills? Right, so like, So now, if you want to do that, then you have to say, Well, what is a sound monetization strategy? For my use case? If you have a local news room? The example that we talked before is that well, what about if I have need extra advertising with the local bakery and the hardware store? Okay, but actually, I have a podcast. And I have a followership, let me ask my followers do you want to donate to my podcast so that you can support my content creation and people, a lot of people do it is you have like a million subscribers in YouTube channel. If one person decides to donate you, you can pay the rent this month, or you can basically have money to do the thing that you need to do. So this is a multi dimensional concept. And then, what I want to convey here is that you have to put it in your strategy, you have to nail it down, so that you can be successful.
Joe Casabona 37:10
I think that's great. And it's really important to highlight that there are multiple avenues for monetization, right? So I work a lot in the podcast space. And most people are like, well, I don't have sponsors. And I'm like, Well, you know, I think Seth Godin said you only need 100 superfans or or 100 raving fans, right to make money off of what you do. And so if you have 100, people who are willing to pay you $10 a month, right, that's, that is a good amount of money to make for your content, especially starting out.
Alberto Medina 37:39
So and then you and then you see how every single relay fight. So if you if you can focus on, okay, I have something of value to bring to my users. And you you feel I want to do it this way. And I'm going to care about the user experience. So I want to try to do it in a nice way. And then I'm going to monitor to see to make sure that I calibrate how my content study work, then they only they shouldn't strategy, when once he plays is going to work itself out. Because you are giving the user what they want. You're doing that with good performance, you're monitoring to make sure that you don't make mistakes. And therefore you should have certain amount of people that actually is very interested in into many times, what happens is that people just want the monetization so they don't focus on the content quality. But the people don't contribute to me. Yeah, because you are focusing first on the money. And that could be problematic.
Joe Casabona 38:30
Yeah, I am, I am a perfect example of that. When I launched my podcast, I launched a Patreon alongside with it. And it didn't go well. I took it down. I thought about what my listeners wanted and what I could really actually offer them from my point of view. And I have a lot more members today than I did back then when
Alberto Medina 38:50
complete sense makes me very happy.
Joe Casabona 38:53
Well, thank you very much. We've been talking for a while here, the success factors are incredible. As we wrap up, I do want to ask, right, because there are many people out there and that use WordPress as their solution for creating and for their e commerce business. So as we wrap up here, how can Google and plastc tools help people who are using WordPress for content and e commerce?
Alberto Medina 39:19
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. Um, I would just briefly you know, from the perspective of Google, we are actually committed to to contribute to the open web in general. In the context of WordPress specifically, we are working on on a variety of products that are open source. For example, I am specifically very focused on arm for WordPress. We have an AMP plugin for WordPress that actually seeks to deliver on this promise of good core web biters on page experience, that we have the we're developing psyche that brings all these Google monitoring tools into one place in your dashboard. We are working also on a pw a feature plugin that seeks to integrate service workers into WordPress core, we are contributing a lot to WordPress core. In the latest release, I think that three of the major features that were released were authored by by our team, and so on. And, you know, blessed my understanding for what I know from Blake is also they offer awesome solutions that actually bring, again, when you think about successfactors, having a good hosting platform, a good way to deliver your content to your users extremely important. And I think that players focus is on that aspect that is so important. So if you have content quality, you know, good content quality that you want to deliver, then they are going to help you to achieve the performance content success factor, and also the monetary success factor, they are going to allow you to use these tools or that tool. So in that way, we are complimentary. And we want the same thing.
Joe Casabona 40:50
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just I'll just reinforce there that in Episode One of season two, we spoke to ns meguiars. And he talked about specifically a suite of tools, reinforcing the things that you're saying, Alberto about measuring performance, and measuring all of these metrics for who's using this site and how they're using it, and how quickly your website is loading and how well it's doing in search traffic and things like that. Yeah.
Alberto Medina 41:20
Yeah. And also, you know, I like the the interactions that we have with pleth, for example, we like, we I think we share a common goal of a successful web. And, you know, people many times say like, Well, you know, you're doing, you know, companies do this for business interests. Yes, there is always a business interest, because we are always trying to succeed. But as I said, at the beginning, success in the web is not a zero sum game. So if users if content creators succeed, players succeed, a player succeeds, Google succeed, and Google succeeds. you succeed. You know, everybody sucks, you know, it's a it's an interrelated environment. That's something that makes me It's very exciting to be part of.
Joe Casabona 41:59
Yeah, absolutely. I, I love that. And as, as we wrap up here, I want to ask you something. Because in the pre show, in our, in our pre show notes, we touched on this. In my other podcast, I always asked the, the guests to give a trade secret. And I was wondering if you could offer us a trade secret, right, basically, some some actionable advice that a lot of people don't generally think of.
Alberto Medina 42:27
Yeah, I remember reading about this. It's very interesting, right? Um, and I'm thinking that you know, what would be the most important thing that I could think of, and I think that you touch upon it, when you when you mentioned about your own experience with your podcast, when you started, and then you realize that this didn't work or that didn't work? I think that that is something that probably I refine, in my experience working for Google is that thinking about the user, like thinking about who are you doing things that you do for, actually, is a very, very important pillar of any effort, because then you're doing it for motivation that actually is meaningful. And then Google has a principle that I like that he says, like, focus on the user, and every thing else will follow. So I will say that that is a very important premise to keep in mind. And also think about things holistically, like, you know, think about, you know, what you do, as a whole, like, we are talking today about accessing the web, what what does this mean, it's very easy to get caught into this, or this detail or that detail. And there is so much information or so much complexity, that is very difficult for anyone to say, wait a second, what is exactly happening. So try to step back, think about what you want to achieve as a whole look for the right pieces of information, make sure that you find the influencers and the people that have information to help you and be sure that there are solutions out there. So that it would be my advice in that way is not only is abstracting away because thinking in these terms require like you said something that I like step back, think about it, and then you know, connect to your heart of what you want to achieve. And then Lisa is going to happen.
Joe Casabona 44:16
Fantastic. I absolutely love that. Alberto. This has been such a great conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us. If they want to learn more about what you and your team does, where can they find you.
Alberto Medina 44:30
I have been spending a lot of my time recently on the AMP plugin for WordPress. So I really encourage everybody to look at that as an option for you know, bringing performance in a turnkey fashion to your site. But also there is information about psyche, the human psyche, you will find information about that and I have been spending a lot of time also on the area of web stories specifically in the context of the web stories editor for WordPress. So if you go to WP dot stories dot google or story thought Google, there is a lot of information that you can learn there. I'd actually encourage you, everybody, you and everybody to experiment with stories and get into into this powerful format to convey your, you know, to add quality to your content strategy.
Joe Casabona 45:19
Awesome. Well, I will put myself on the line here. And I will say that I will go ahead and install the WordPress stories plugin on my own site shortly after this awesome hang out here.
Alberto Medina 45:31
Hang on also, like, you know, also if like people would like to follow me on Twitter, that will be great. So we can basically been taught my I my handle is I have Medina. That's a weird handle. But you can you can look for me there. And then yeah, that would be great. I'm always looking to engage with people on Twitter. I love it.
Joe Casabona 45:49
Awesome. Well, I will include that and everything. There are so many great resources here. We'll include that in the show notes in the blog post that accompany this episode. over@plesk.com. Alberto, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
Alberto Medina 46:04
Very nice meeting you, sir. I'll see you next time.
Joe Casabona 46:07
Likewise, likewise and for everybody out there listening. Until next time, remember to take it to the next level.