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

Speaker 1 Look, we get it.

Speaker 4 You can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about AI this or AI that.

Speaker 7 And if you're like most people, when it comes to AI, you're impressed, but you have a few concerns.

Speaker 8 But what if AI was used not as a tool to replace people, but as a way to help understand people

Speaker 1 better?

Speaker 11 AI from SurveyMonkey is designed to do just that, from crafting the perfect survey, which is harder than you might think, to analysis that digs deep, finds patterns, and surfaces trends quickly.

Speaker 14 SurveyMonkey's powerful suite of AI capabilities make it faster and easier than ever before to get insights from real people, helping you make confident decisions for your business.

Speaker 11 Try it today at surveymonkey.com slash Ryan.

Speaker 16 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?

Speaker 16 We're cutting cutting through the buzzwords with Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, who reveals the pragmatic future of content creation and the critical difference between rented and owned digital land.

Speaker 16 Watch now to unlock the owned land strategy and learn the one AI-driven SEO backlinking hack that will instantly boost your organic rankings.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And usually the best way to do that is not through six gatekeepers in the organization.

Speaker 15 That's where we think actually like WordPress and WordPress VFP like brings a superpower into these big companies because it's like get the rest of the stuff out of the way.

Speaker 15 You don't need the complexity for complexity's sake. The simplest solutions are the best solutions.

Speaker 17 This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network Production.

Speaker 17 We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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 It's WordPress.

Speaker 13 He's the CEO of WordPress.

Speaker 13 Look, we get it.

Speaker 4 You can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about AI this or AI that.

Speaker 7 And if you're like most people, when it comes to AI, you're impressed, but you have a few concerns.

Speaker 8 But what if AI was used not as a tool to replace people, but as a way to help understand people

Speaker 1 better?

Speaker 11 AI from SurveyMonkey is designed to do just that, from crafting the perfect survey, which is harder than you might think, to analysis that digs deep, finds patterns, and surfaces trends quickly.

Speaker 13 SurveyMonkey's powerful suite of AI capabilities make it faster and easier than ever before to get insights from real people, helping you make confident decisions for your business.

Speaker 11 Try it today at surveymonkey.com/slash Ryan.

Speaker 15 Coordinator, just let me you can go whenever you're

Speaker 18 Hey, small business owners, let's talk about how Found can help you wrangle your finances once and for all. When was the last time you felt like you had your business finances totally under control?

Speaker 18 Every expense categorized, every receipt tracked, every invoice sent. Oh, and you were prepared for tax season.
If the answer is never, you're not alone. And that's what Found is for.

Speaker 18 Found is reimagining what business banking should be by putting your bookkeeping, invoicing, and tax tools directly into your business checking account.

Speaker 18 They've automated things like expense tracking, finding write-offs, and budgeting for tax time. You can even send invoices for free and pay your contractors, everything

Speaker 18 all from one app.

Speaker 18 Look. I struggle with this myself.
I pay contractors left and right,

Speaker 18 here, there, everywhere. Keeping up with all of it as a small business owner with multiple companies is next to impossible.
That's what I love found. They help me with this.
They'll help you.

Speaker 18 I basically replace three apps with just found, and I don't miss the stress at all, and neither will you. Take back control of your business today.
Open a found account for free at found.com.

Speaker 18 That's f-o-u-n-d.com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank.
Banking services are provided by Lead Bank, member FDIC.

Speaker 13 IP, Nick Gernard. What's up, Nick? Hello.
How are you? Great, man.

Speaker 6 Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 13 I do think our audience knows the name WordPress.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 15 Yeah, a seat right at the table. And you got to think WordPress started 2003.
To think about where we were there and then where we are today has been along through that and continued to grow.

Speaker 15 Market share still like inches up. It gets harder at the like once you reach a certain scale, like I mean, that number, that's a big number.
You keep moving up.

Speaker 15 43% of the top 10 million websites are powered by WordPress technology.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 That transition is kind of what I was kind of building to all this, the MySpace and all that is you're at this level and everybody respects you,

Speaker 13 but then trying to be the corporate king for go to. Was that a hard transition to get people to make mentally?

Speaker 15 Because as ubiquitous as WordPress is on the web, it's not in that corporate sense. There was niche adoption of WordPress from a, oh, we use it for the corporate blog.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 How do you show up as understanding their business needs, their objectives?

Speaker 15 How do you meet them there so that whatever software we're providing, and as much as I want to say software is the solution to everything, really, I think 70% of it's people.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 Can you access your customers, et cetera? And so much of the existing market, from my perspective, prevents that, actually doesn't enable that. We're like, how can we open that up?

Speaker 15 How do we focus on opening that up? So 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.

Speaker 15 But enterprises have a bit of skepticism around that. You know, spend many, many, many more years trying to really help serve that market and adapt.

Speaker 15 Who knows what happens in the next 20 years of WordPress's story?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 What I loved about WordPress is, yeah, you got to learn it and get your way around it, but it's meant to be easy, but robust.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 When you fast forward to today and 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?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 out of 200,000.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And usually the best way to do that is not through like, look, we get it.

Speaker 4 You can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about AI this or AI that.

Speaker 7 And if you're like most people, when it comes to AI, you're impressed, but you have a few concerns.

Speaker 8 But what if AI was used not as a tool to replace people, but as a way to help understand people

Speaker 1 better?

Speaker 11 AI from SurveyMonkey is designed to to do just that: from crafting the perfect survey, which is harder than you might think, to analysis that digs deep, finds patterns, and surfaces trends quickly.

Speaker 13 SurveyMonkey's powerful suite of AI capabilities make it faster and easier than ever before to get insights from real people, helping you make confident decisions for your business.

Speaker 11 Try it today at surveymonkey.com/slash Ryan.

Speaker 18 Okay.

Speaker 18 Hey, small business owners, let's talk about how found can help you wrangle your finances once and for all. When was the last time you felt like you had your business finances totally under control?

Speaker 18 Every expense categorized, every receipt tracked, every invoice sent. Oh, and you were prepared for tax season.
If the answer is never, you're not alone.

Speaker 18 And that's what found is for found is reimagining what business banking should be by putting your bookkeeping invoicing and tax tools directly into your business checking account they've automated things like expense tracking finding write-offs and budgeting for tax time you can even send invoices for free and pay your contractors everything

Speaker 18 all from one app

Speaker 18 look i struggle with this myself i pay contractors left and right,

Speaker 18 here, there, everywhere. Keeping up with all of it as a small business owner with multiple companies is next to impossible.
That's why I love found. They help me with this.
They'll help you.

Speaker 18 I basically replaced three apps with just found, and I don't miss the stress at all, and neither will you. Take back control of your business today.
Open a found account for free at found.com.

Speaker 18 That's f-o-u-n-d.com. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank.
Banking services are provided by Lead Bank, member FDIC.

Speaker 15 Six gatekeepers in the organization.

Speaker 15 That's where we think actually like WordPress and WordPress VFP like brings a superpower into these big companies because it's like get the rest of the stuff out of the way.

Speaker 15 You don't need the complexity for complexity's sake. The simplest solutions are the best solutions.

Speaker 13 What I always liked about WordPress is that you could do things quickly using and having and the openness 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 mind okay it's the fastest to integrate it has a plug-in for that a plug-in 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 Because authentication systems and CRMs are not value-generating activity. Creating your own CMS is not creating more value for your organization.

Speaker 15 How do you let this ecosystem and our organization help with solved problems? You really just focus on business strategy and execution and your customers or your audiences, new problems.

Speaker 15 That's way more engaging anyway.

Speaker 13 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 years.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And how do we actually stay focused on the value of that and not just necessarily chasing trends?

Speaker 15 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 text and images and video etc 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 we're 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 I don't see it, and I don't see it anytime near where there's a strategy where it's just like, look, we just let the machines now run our content strategies, our content creation, everything.

Speaker 15 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 they're experiencing AI.

Speaker 15 It's just like, wow, the tool just works really well on these tasks that I need to do around it.

Speaker 15 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?

Speaker 15 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 of voice or your business tone based on your performance, and we will recommend things.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 We're looking at that as saying, like, 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?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 That's a fascinating kind of analogy.

Speaker 15 Totally agree with everything you're saying there. And our job is well done when we kind of just fade into the back.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And it's not about us like having a visible spot somewhere in that stack.

Speaker 13 You guys are leveraging the technology, bringing a better experience to life. We don't have the packagey thing to call it AI.

Speaker 13 We just call it a company using technology in a good way to make your experience better.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 what we're viewing things.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 13 How do you guys think about SEO within the landscape of the product and just overall with everything happening with AI?

Speaker 15 The foundation is WordPress has had SEO sort of at its 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.

Speaker 15 It's just very SEO friendly way.

Speaker 13 Staying down that search train just a little bit with AI. It's interesting, you know, ChatGPT.
Are you guys seeing or you have data that supports people Googling or ChatGPT?

Speaker 13 Are you guys seeing those kind of trends and that data and reacting in any way to it?

Speaker 15 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 of like, what's fair use of my content?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 The website and web in general have a significant role to play for the foreseeable future in what informs the responses and what is considered fact and opinion, et cetera, comes from these sources.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 But we're helping folks navigate fair use of their content.

Speaker 15 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: was the introduction of AI summaries on Google, was that leading to a decline in Google referral traffic to our customer websites?

Speaker 15 Were 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.

Speaker 15 We dug into a bunch of data around this.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 So it's significant amount of traffic. Google referral traffic is actually increasing right now in aggregate.

Speaker 15 And then if you've got me kind of peel that back, there's disparity though between the size of the organization.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 What we're seeing is, look, if you're able to engage and build great content, backlink it, relate it, do all the things that help you, you're maintaining at least or even growing audience right now.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 They are a very important source of traffic though.

Speaker 15 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 any one particular technology.

Speaker 15 You know this better than I, but it's that overdependency on anyone's social platform or search or chat GPT 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.

Speaker 15 Same rules still apply. How do you have like a, well, how do you hedge against overdependence on any one particular company to drive your business.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 You actually own all of these things. We're here to help you kind of navigate that and have a stronger owned presence on the web.

Speaker 13 You nailed the word there at the end. I was going to go is like rented versus owned land.
And I've always seen WordPress, because I'll say this to people: look, take advantage of the platforms.

Speaker 13 I'm not a hater on the walled gardens. Just know that's rented land and not owned land.

Speaker 13 WordPress may sell products and services, but they are part of the good guy owned land territory and i've always coached that that 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 in sort of your yard and not your neighbors or the beach house you're renting down the street that could go away at any time one good storm away from gone so yeah yeah nick it's been a pleasure brother where can everybody keep up with everything you're doing learn more about wordpress vip etc you can find us wpvip.com you can find me on just about any channel and my name Nick Gerner.

Speaker 15 You'll find me over there or WordPress VIP all over the typical networks you look at as well. So find us all there.
And I really appreciate the time. This has been a ton of fun.

Speaker 15 We're very aligned on many of the things that could be great here. So I appreciate it.

Speaker 13 Love to have you back on the show regularly, Nick. Hey guys, you know where to find us, RyanisRight.com.
We're bringing together all the best all in business and marketing here on the show.

Speaker 13 Yo, 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 all the social channels at Ryan Alford.

Speaker 13 You'll see that blue check before you can buy it. We'll see you next time on right about now.

Speaker 17 This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities.

Speaker 17 Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 Look, we get it.

Speaker 4 You can hardly go anywhere or do anything these days without hearing about AI this or AI that.

Speaker 7 And if you're like most people, when it comes to AI, you're impressed, but you have a few concerns.

Speaker 5 But what if AI was used not as a tool to replace people, but as a way to help understand people better?

Speaker 11 AI from SurveyMonkey is designed to do just that, from crafting the perfect survey, which is harder than you might think, to analysis that digs deep, finds patterns, and and surfaces trends quickly.

Speaker 6 SurveyMonkey's powerful suite of AI capabilities make it faster and easier than ever before to get insights from real people, helping you make confident decisions for your business.

Speaker 11 Try it today at surveymonkey.com/slash Ryan.