Right About Now with Ryan Alford
Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, talks AI, SEO, and Owning Your Digital Space
Tue, 19 Nov 2024
In this episode of "Right About Now," host Ryan Alford and guest Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, discuss the evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform to a dominant content management system (CMS). Gernert shares his journey from digital agencies to leading WordPress VIP, emphasizing the platform's importance in the corporate landscape. The conversation explores the challenges of convincing large organizations to adopt WordPress and the role of AI in enhancing content creation. Gernert advocates for a human-centric approach to AI integration, ensuring technology empowers rather than replaces content creators. The episode underscores WordPress's commitment to simplifying digital content management.TAKEAWAYS Evolution of WordPress from a blogging platform to a leading content management system (CMS). Market dominance of WordPress, with 43% of the top 10 million websites using its technology. Challenges faced by corporate clients in adopting WordPress as a primary business tool. Corporate skepticism regarding the use of WordPress for complex applications. Importance of security, compliance, and reliability in legitimizing WordPress for larger organizations. The role of people in digital transformation and the need for broader access to digital tools. Comparison of simplicity versus complexity in CMS platforms and the advantages of WordPress's user-friendly nature. Integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in content management and its potential to enhance human creativity. Current state of AI adoption among WordPress users and the goal of seamless AI integration. Future outlook for WordPress, emphasizing the importance of adapting to technological advancements and user needs. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE. Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding. Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts 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. You know, sometimes, Nick, 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 think i would guess 97 percent of our audience probably knowing why we know our audience pretty well they know it it's wordpress he's the ceo of wordpress vip nick earnert what's up nick hey well hello how are you
great man thanks for joining yeah man i you say the word wordpress yeah you know it's like people know what wordpress is they they know websites you don't have to uh i don't have things especially if you're talking to marketing people or are digital or just somewhat in the landscape uh i think we've heard of wordpress so uh carrying the brand for 11 plus years. Good job.
I don't know that I get to take all the credit, but you know, I'll take it right now. We'll assign it to you. That's fine. All right. Thanks. I appreciate that. Oh man. Uh, Nick, I appreciate you joining us. I'm excited to talk all things WordPress and you let's set the table for our audience. Let's give them a little bit of a, who Nick is both, uh,
Beyond WordPress and maybe otherwise, you know, a little bit of your background.
Oh, man. All right. How much time we got? Thank you. Thank you. So, yeah. So it's great to be here. Thank you, Ryan. It's always fun to talk. Big fan of yours and what you've done over the years as well. So congrats on this.
yeah so as you mentioned i'm the ceo of wordpress vip um which is a business that's within a much broader ecosystem that is the wordpress ecosystem that kind of what you know that i'm i'm very happy if 90 plus percent of your audience has immediate recognition of wordpress um you know i uh my background prior to you know the 11 years you just gave me credit for uh in this was
All digital agency comms, et cetera, on the practitioner side. So pretty much for my entire career leading up to this moment, I was working in digital agency at some level of it as a starting as a, as a freelancer all the way up into working into an, one of Omnicom's brands there. And so I have a really a deep love of the,
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Chapter 2: How has WordPress evolved over the years?
Like one of these examples was like Boeing, you know, like a pilot named Randy. He was blogging, he leveraged WordPress, but it was in no way like the corporate homepage or anything like, you know, that was core to business operations. It was like, yeah, that's fine as a side project. And really the whole vision was like, how would you legitimize this thing?
So it's not just playing a second or tertiary role in the enterprise, it's playing like a primary business aligned role at the center. And so a big challenge for us 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?
But then there's a mental model that says it's good to a point, but not for this point sort of thing.
And so a lot of where we end up focusing in that transition and where we focused as a business was like, I'll talk about it like food, shelter, water of like the hierarchy of needs of enterprises is like at that base, you have to be able to speak authoritatively around security, compliance, reliability, etc. Like last night, I think was a big night for a lot of web traffic here.
And that's I know that. folks will uh view this but we're chatting here today uh after last night was election night here in america there's a lot of organizations that rely on our platform through a night like that it's like how are you how do we reassure them that we are ready to go from traffic and everything else that's going to come in sort of that critical moment that you don't get back
It's like that moment goes past, you can't rewind the tape and then, all right, we fixed it. Let's try it again. It's just gone. So we had to invest heavily in just that foundation there. And then there's everything you know about like working with large organizations. That's the intangibles of like, How do you show up as an account team?
How do you show up as understanding their business needs, their objectives? How do you then meet them there so that whatever software we're providing, and as much as I want to have, say, software as the solution to everything, really, I think 70% of it's people. And that's actually one of the strengths of WordPress is that it's so centered around people and creating access for people.
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 in 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 from my perspective prevents that actually doesn't enable that so we're like how can we open that up how do we focus on opening that up so that our transition is really like 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 we've you know been spending 11 years and we'll continue to spend many many many more years trying to really help serve that market and adapt as you know who knows what happens in the next 20
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