Launching a WordPress Product in Public: Session 15

Transcript

In this episode, Cory Miller and Corey Maass discuss their progress on a project related to image generation and sharing. They explore the use of Open Graph (OG) images, social media platforms, and the importance of consistent branding. They mention the need for a logo and discuss the design concept, leaning towards a fun and vibrant style. They also touch on website development, pricing, and marketing assets. The conversation revolves around simplifying the image generation process and creating a user-friendly product. Overall, they aim to finalize the project’s features, branding, and logo to move forward with the launch.

Top Takeaways:

  • Logo and Branding: The importance of creating a logo and establishing a consistent branding for your project. You want a logo that represents image generation in a fun and vibrant way, potentially incorporating bright colors and a big, fun font. It should look good on different merchandise items like t-shirts and baseball caps.
  • Image Generation and Sharing: The main focus of your project is image generation and sharing. Using a logo generation tool and exploring concepts related to image generation, sharing, and open graph images. The goal is to make the process of generating and sharing images easy and efficient for users.
  • Project Progress: The progress of the project, including bug fixes and updates. The plan is to address the bugs and implement additional features and improvements. Once the sitewide and post-level functionalities are handled, the project will be ready to share with others. Defining the project’s style, including the logo and overall branding, is an important next step

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Transcript

Session 15 Corey & Cory Launch a WordPress Product Live

C&C 15

[00:00:00] Cory Miler: All right. Hold on before we go live. Okay. Um, what’s on your mind 

[00:00:21] Corey Maass: today to talk about? It looks like you’re streaming to YouTube, but I’m not recording.

[00:00:33] Cory Miler: Okay, I’ll just push record.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Corey and Corey on launching a product lot has been happening in the background. Mainly Corey’s been on a manic work streak, but we have a working version of the plugin on post edit and uh, he gave me a walkthrough yesterday setting stuff. Corey, what are we, what’s on your mind today to talk, talk about?

[00:01:03] Corey Maass: Uh, I think we are, uh, getting close to the first milestone of actually having a product that you, you specifically could start using. My clients could start using maybe, um, I’m gonna install it on all of my websites. Um, But I think we can start. I’ve got a, after the installing it on post status yesterday, which we chose not to do live, which worked out just fine.

Um, but we’ve got a, a pretty slick little product, um, a short punch list of bugs to fix that I’m working on, um, over the next couple of days. Um, But I think we could start pivoting to how we’re gonna present this publicly. Um, you know, start setting up the marketing site. I’ve got the e-commerce set up. I think it works to actually take money.

We haven’t tried that yet, but that’s okay. Um, so yeah, I think it’s the, the next steps to talk about here now are, you know, what we need. So, I mean, for us, but also talking abstractly about. You know, once you have a product, uh, what do you do? So 

[00:02:33] Cory Miler: yeah, with the product, we’re in this interesting phase, which is working.

It’s working. When we put it up on a live site, yesterday, we were both making notes about where the product is. But I, I still go back to, I think this is so valuable. Me putting on the client customer hat and actually using it. And more so than I think any product I’ve had before is really using it and thinking about it creatively.

How I want those things to come out, I think is gonna formulate back to products. So, so while it already has like our initial OG image, open graph image for site wide. We did some reviews in the past episode. Um, I did some work and I, I really saw some patterns in the synthesis. Mm-hmm. What, like, it is gonna go do.

Well, you, you were like almost simultaneously building it, which is awesome. Um, I gotta tell you from yesterday, um, we got, we got some polish that we, we know we’ve been working on, um, that you even saw and were like, oh, we need this. Um, I love your openness again about hearing feedback and, Hmm, before using it just shows how good of a data of an entrepreneur you are.

But the, the one I’m really eager to is getting to the blog posts because for this product, uh, it’s, it’s more so than just an open graph image. It’s like a social image to share with the post to make it compelling. I think all that work we did with Crop Express, So it’s all good. Mm-hmm. Helped, like think through what we’re doing now.

But I, I got giddy, you know, that I did some of the work when we did the pattern for the home, home or site default. Uh, I went on with some of the blog posts and I was like, this right 

[00:04:34] Corey Maass: here is the money. Yep. Yeah. I’m, I’m with you. I think I, one of the. Pivotal moments for us with crop.express was you said, you know, I’m, I’m mental octopus.

I’m all over the place, you know? Yeah. Over here we do this and then we could do this, but it could do this, and over here it’ll do this and, and you’re like, what if we start with the feature image? I was like, that’s. You know, brilliant dart to the center of the dart board kind of thing. Um, and so with this, I really liked you, you did essentially the same thing where you’re like, OG image for the site.

And it was an easy lift for me to add that. So on activation, the plugin takes you to a little welcome screen, which doesn’t look pretty yet, but that’s fine. You upload a logo and you click a button and your site has an OG image. And so we are, I love that you install the plugin and a handful of clicks and we are offering value.

We are taking it already to um, Bringing, bringing your site. You know, we keep de debating about how we actually do this wording, um, but, or, or how we word this. But, you know, within a few clicks, our plugin makes your website more professional. Um, if you’ve got Yost installed, maybe you’ve already got an OG image.

If you don’t, we provide one, um, and our plugin will override. The image. So it’s like whatever you’ve done in Canva or elsewhere, you know, you can update, you can update regularly, that kind of thing. Um, so yeah, I’m, I’m with you. We’re, we’ve, we’ve reached that minimum viable product mentality in that we are immediately offering value, which I think is really cool.

Um, and then, The next, next thing following that OG image thread is, yeah, for each blog post, for each product, um, figuring, you know, again, initially it’ll be a, uh, a manual process of like, oh, you’re, you know, essentially for every blog post you, you are adding going forward, um, Once you’ve set up the blog post, you then can go set up your OG image.

Um, so we get there and that, that honestly is about 60%, 70% of the cleanup I need to do anyway. I. We are product complete, we are ready to sell a product. Um, and then, yeah, down the road, uh, there’s, there’s obviously lots of fun and, and interesting things. One, you know, like I wanna be able to, we’ve talked about, but I wanna be able to, like for you on post status, you’ve got, you know, dozens or hundreds of posts that already exist and so they will benefit from the Sitewide OG image.

But wouldn’t it be nice if you set up a template for a stand, you know, a template that goes with a blog post and click a button and it retroactively goes back and creates OG images for each of those blog posts, stuff like [00:08:00] that. Um, but I kind of think that that’s one that’s neat. You know, that’s icing on the cake.

That’s a version 1.1 kind of feature. Um, but also I, I do think we want a little bit of validation. Before that happens. Um, and or if we find ourselves twiddling our thumbs and you’re like, yeah, for post status, I we really need this, then we can call that validation and I can implement it. But, um, but yeah, it’s, it’s flushing out.

Being featured complete as far as OG images is, is the way to start. And obviously right along with that, it’s easy enough to create, um, a duplicate image that is square so you can throw it on Instagram or whatever. Yep.

Um,

behind the scenes, I think what’s really cool is. We kept, but after doing the, the first install yesterday on post status, Corey set up a first basic OG image. And then due to caching, we couldn’t see it. We could verify that it was there by viewing the source. And we knew the image was there, but we couldn’t see it.

And just now during our call, uh, Basically what’s funny is our Slack, private Slack conversation is just us posting post status.com back and forth, back and forth, trying to see the damn thing work and uh, Corey just posted it and adjusted it did just show up and that is one of the most satisfying things ever.

So yeah, it’s working.

[00:09:48] Cory Miler: Absolutely. I do think if I just put on the post status as a customer hat, Um, we do a fair amount of content and we want to, we have a significant following on Twitter and in, uh, LinkedIn and I particularly camp out on LinkedIn for a second. It’s really compelling to me and, and I, a couple years ago, I kind of, okay, I’ve just accepted invitations over the years.

Now I’m gonna see what this is about. I, I really think, especially with Twitter’s implosion, There’s a real value back to LinkedIn. Um, even more so than was there. But when I think about post customer for a second, we do a piece of content. We could just do the typical thing, copy, link, paste into Instagram, put a couple of words in it, do that thing.

Um, I think there’s value though, that image of like, I was just thinking like we do these weekly roundups with tech and business and like, or make wordpress.com for instance, or make WordPress, um, having like just the headlines. Mm-hmm. You know, like weekly roundup is the tech roundup and then there’s three or four bullets of like what goes into that.

So they’d know a preview of like, oh, I’m interested, I’m gonna click through, go to the link. That’s valuable to me because right now I’m just gonna take a link post in there. Hope the featured image looks decent, cuz it always pulls that. So, like, to me that’s value for, for post status. Client hat is like, it’s just right there.

Um, I can take a couple steps while I’m in the post. When I get it done is when I usually put it over there. And now somebody, somebody might schedule that, that’s cool. However, I kinda like post share it. Sure. Uh, and having that right there with like, I keep going back to my slide content slides I’ve done for talks and do different things and you know, some header with wall points and, and I think what I worked on the.

Image templates that you also mentioned was like holding in an actual image to that. Right. That’s always capture thought to me. But if it’s there, pulled in, adds a little visual pair pto where it’s just not like a slide. 

[00:12:20] Corey Maass: Yeah. We’re gonna, it’s, there’s, there’s all these, from a text standpoint, there’s these, these loops that, or these circles we’re gonna want to close.

Um, Because it’s the, and, and we’re gonna have to think through the, the workflow, the UI for this, um, which, and it might be as simple as a button, but there might be some setup beforehand. So, we’ll, we’ll have to walk through this, but it’s like, that’s why I tried to wa I tried to talk this all out. I, I don’t know, two or three calls ago where I was like, okay, the first step.

And just a minute ago, in fact, the first step is the OG image. For the site. The second step is the OG image per post, which you’re gonna have to set up manually. Fine. Like we’re, we’re, we’re building a product. The, uh, one of the, the circles that I want to close for you and for, for the product pretty quickly is you, you’ve created a blog post or, again, I, I want to keep harping on product too.

Neither of us are in e-commerce. Particularly, but I, I think this is gonna be a lot of value. Um, but whatever it is, a post of some kind, you up upload a featured image. That featured image gets used in an OMG I M G, an OMG image. We’ll call ’em that. And then a, and then there’s an option to replace the featured image, right?

So it’s like you’ve uploaded a temporary featured image that then gets incorporated into a template. And generated as an an OMG image that then replaces the featured image so that the, essentially the headline on the blog post, wherever, however the featured image was used, which like you said, a lot of the time when you share.

The featured image comes up and I, I, there’s going to be instances where an OG image is almost moot because the featured image works has two purposes. One is as a featured image, like if you’re looking at a blog post, and the second is if somebody shares it. You know, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn will automatically pull in the first image, usually the featured image, which will be, which will act as the OG image.

So, so it’s one asset, multiple purposes. Um, but in both instances, I think that there’s, you know, when we were first really exploring this, we went and looked at, um, WP Beginner, I think we looked at, um, Prius’s blog and, and we saw that a bunch of them, or the two, I think the two of those, and a and a bunch of other sites, the featured image, it was almost redundant, but the featured image itself was s shareable because it had the blog post title and stuff in it.

Um, and I liked what you said a minute ago of like, often, right now you upload a featured image of. You know, business person at laptop looking businessy, you know, it’s, you know, and it might be a photo of, of somebody. But, but then you go and you share it and you hope that it’s relevant and you hope that the people will see a title that’s, that’s, you know, links the image to the content.

Whereas we’re, we’re talking about is, um, Yeah, is inserting, inserting the title right into the image. So again, it might end up being a little, it might feel redundant, or as you’re doing the workflow, it feels redundant, but you’re, you’re guaranteeing that every image has more value. Um, and then, yeah, here you’re illustrating the second.

Loop that we wanna close, which again, feels kind of meta, but it’s the like, create a blog post, take a picture of the blog post, pull that that picture in, um, to an, an OMG image, and then use that to share, or even as the featured image. So you’re gonna end up with, and in theory if you do this, uh, A couple if you, if you create a template using the featured image or create an OMG image using the featured image, and then take a picture of it, you could end up with, you know, a picture of a picture of a picture of a picture all the way down, which is kind of fun.

Anyway. Um, But I think that that’s, you know, we’re talking about value and, and a, one of the ways that we achieve value is information. So, headlines, excerpts, bullet points. The other way we, a, we add value is something com is, is by creating a compelling image. And I think at least right now, with the way or a current trend, That achieves, this is exactly what you’re showing, which is, um, an image of content, but in the context of a device.

So on a screen or, um, yeah, on a cell phone, on a desktop, that kind of thing. Yeah. 

[00:17:37] Cory Miler: Was, uh, just looking at this for a second, thinking about when you’re saying the featured image, Is how, like I don’t mm-hmm. Feel like super, uh, energized by what I did here on these two. And I was like, okay, well, you know, when you go, like there’s, there’s two parts.

There’s the social value, we’ve already talked about that, but there’s the search value. Mm-hmm. The image is a piece of content that summarizes mm-hmm. Inspire someone to click through, but like almost go, like that’s thinking of it as a piece of content that is an image piece of content, but it has valuable stuff on here.

Um, and like it’s really that slide format is, you know, everybody takes a picture of really good presentations when they’ve got slides. Cause they’re like, this is cool. I don’t know what this is called in Google, Emmett Google search, Google Images, but, Makes me think when we get to this part, we need to have a caption.

Mm-hmm. Um, that when the image is out there, there’s a caption. It seems like, I don’t know what this is called within Google, the image side of things, but like, it’s an opportunity I haven’t seen really explored that I would mm-hmm. That I would like. You’re, you’re searching and those, that image side comes up too, um, where there’s.

Interesting content summarized for you, like right there, right. Um, that’s really valuable. So I was trying to think like, okay, how would you really want that to look like if you don’t have a featured image, which is my problem easily. Um, you know, would we put, even if there’s, I I was just thinking about 

[00:19:33] Corey Maass: that for a minute.

Well, I like the idea too of, um, And I hadn’t thought of this before, uh, essentially a default featured image like we are using a logo. So let’s, like for post status, you’ve got, you’ve got the little PS infinity symbol everywhere. Um, but also the ev I think a lot of people associate like the homepage of post status has that image of people at.

One of the, the, you know, the post status conference years ago, um, that hasn’t changed in 10 years, excuse me. Um, but, uh, you know, but that’s, it’s now, it’s now it’s a bit of your branding, right? Like that’s now a photo that, that people might actually associate with post status. So if that was, um, if that was the standard featured I, the default featured image that got pulled in everywhere, you know, even if, like one of the things that we’ve talked about is.

Image, uh, is, is tr image treatments. So it’s like as a ba if the background was two women chatting with that was, you know, converted to black and white and had, and had an orange filter over the top. And so it was just, again, these are, these are all of the things that humans find compelling, even if it’s not obvious or.

Upfront or obtuse. Um, you know, having, having two eyes and a s and a smile is known to be compelling to humans at a subconscious level. So it’s stuff like that that, um, these little simple effects that we can start to explore down the road, or, I mean soon, sooner than later, but it’s like, as we’re going along, as we’re learning about this stuff, we can go, oh, right, let’s just add a default option for, you know, these background treatments.

Yeah, just looking at seeing. 

[00:21:35] Cory Miler: Mm-hmm. Some publications like, obviously these 

[00:21:38] Corey Maass: are,

it’s interesting. Yeah. I mean these are, you know, most of these featured image as a background. Yeah. Title pulled in and selected. Put this at the top of the bottom, and some of them have an excerpt below the title. That’s the whole thing. You know, and so it’s, it’s up to the authors or you know, publishers since this is New York Times to find compelling images.

Yeah. I mean, and so un you know, we’ve talked about that at various points. That’s not a problem we’re choosing to solve right now. Um, so as the publisher of a given blog, you still have to go find that compelling image. But once you do, we give you all these options to do something with it. And what I really like is we’re defining a, a process.

So it’s once you, yeah, that’s the picture. Um, once you essentially define your style, So it’s like I, I, I’ve talked about, I’m a musician as a hobby, and I actually have a, a new track coming out tomorrow. And so I’ve put that on my band camp and, um, you know, for every track that I finish, every re you know, release that I do, I now go into Canva.

I hit copy or duplicate from the last. Release image that I created. Yeah. And I changed the title, the text, and I changed the image. But that way the font is always the same. The font size is always the same. The colors, font, colors are always the same. So that’s what we’re talking about here is like you creating exactly what you’re doing.

Say this, you created this and saved this for a first blog post. The idea would be then to say, save this as the default. Blog post featured image template. So then you go into, you, you say word in WordPress, you say add new, you write a new blog post. When you jump in to OMG I M G, this is gonna come up first.

Do you want it, you know, right away create your, you know, A an OMG image from your saved default blog post OMG image template, and you say, yes. And it sucks in the headline, it sucks in the featured image and you might go in and tweak it a little bit. You know, like if the headline’s really long or it’s more fun to have like, just like you showed on that New York Times Instagram a second ago.

Depending on the image, you might want the title at the top or the bottom, but most of the work is done with you done for you. You tweak a couple of things, you know, move a couple of sliders and then you’re good. Um, I’m excited about that. I think that that’s gonna be neat. I think that it’s going to be, it’s one of those things that

one of the challenges is going to be for, because it, because they are associated with publishing. It’s. It’s a, it’s a hurry up and wait kind of product. That’s one of the only things, red flags that I have. So it’s like, if there’s a button for creating these images for all existing posts, that’s huge value.

Right? But this is also one of those, like you install it. And then you have to go write a blog post. And that’s why I’m really glad that we’re creating a sitewide OG image. We can create sitewide social images, you know? But if you don’t have, if you’re not gonna write a blog post until tomorrow, you don’t have a reason to use the plugin until tomorrow.

Now we talked 

[00:25:32] Cory Miler: about assigning. Mm-hmm. You could go back to a previous post. Mm-hmm. So I wonder if there’s a thought where we put a preview of a post, you know, To get ’em started or 

[00:25:43] Corey Maass: something. Mm, that’s awesome. So what I took, 

[00:25:47] Cory Miler: one of the big things I took for that is the fact that people do are in the rhythm of doing a featured image.

I think I defaulted to these templates because I don’t. Mm-hmm. That’s my mindset. So I just was trying to play for a second. I go, I think these things still apply, you know? Oh, for sure. Image on left. Image on right image as background with opa. I was trying to find an opacity here, but, um, yeah, and then you want headline, like pin on the photo.

Do you want it up here? 

[00:26:18] Corey Maass: Right. You don’t want it, you wouldn’t want it to cover a person’s face, so you’d move it to the bottom left. But if the image has people on the bottom, then you want it at the top or whatever. So, yeah.

Yeah, I’ve, you know, as I’ve been developing, so I, I did a, for anybody listening to this who didn’t watch the last one, go watch the last one. Um, because we did a, a little walkthrough, um, and, and showed my initial approach to the product specifically, we are not, Canva, we are not drag and drop like I and I at various points.

Like the developer in me wants to take this to the obvious extreme. Um, and, and that in many respects is Canva, which is drag and drop and, and infinite options. And. And I think, I mean, part of that, it it part of, I don’t want to go down that path because it’s just a hell of a lot of work and I want to just get this damn thing out the door.

But I also do think objectively that I, at least for now, prefer this approach because of what we’re talking about. Like if you want to go, if you wanna be in Photoshop, be in Photoshop. If you don’t, if you’re, if that’s a bit too much. Go jump into Canva, get creative, go wild. But this is, to me is meant to be quick and dirty as underselling it, but you know, quick and useful.

It’s just another step in your workflow. And that was, which is kind of the conclusion we came to out of Crop Express was like, you’ve got this workflow, here’s a pain point in your process, but it shouldn’t be the entire process. Yeah. 

[00:28:14] Cory Miler: Well, just like playing with this, I go, okay, I get it. You know, put it in the background.

We’ve got left and we’ll have a right version of all this stuff. Yeah. But there’s an option of like set featured image as background. Then they can play with the color options you’ve given them. And I mean, I call that pretty good. Yeah. If, if you’re in the, if you just want headline and photo. This is an option if you want, I think, which is gonna be even BA could be even better, is like there’s a piece of content, like 

[00:28:53] Corey Maass: mm-hmm.

Yeah. Again, I think that that’s like, that’s version 1.2, right? Where we, you know, one of the things that got us really jazzed talking about this early on was you brought up slides. Um, we’ve talked a few times about, um, drop, uh, poll quotes, drop quotes, block quotes, whatever you call ’em. And so, you know, I’m excited about, again, version 1.2 or whatever, where.

We actually have a little wizard that says like, here are the quotes from the page. Ah, and this is where we bring in ai and that’s why we, we make 2 million. Um, but, you know, throw this content at, at our integration with ai and it come and it comes back with three different bullet point summaries of the content.

And then we, as we automatically just drop that content in. There you go. We figured out the AI integration. I knew it was just a matter of time.

[00:30:10] Cory Miler: I’m using in a service called podway. Test it out. Yep. Um,

I can see how something like this 

[00:30:24] Corey Maass: would look. Yep. Exactly. And this is where, again, like once, once a, once a template is defined, cuz these are all placeholders, right? So you’ve got a placeholder for the photo, the, the, the image of. The content, you’ve got a placeholder for the title, and then you’ve got a placeholder for a three bullet point summary.

Now either you can write that summary or again, we could have something write it for you, or you could have something write it for you. Um, but I love the idea. So one of the things that, so I’ve been playing with chat g p t, like everybody else for one of my products. I went into chatGPT, and I said, Write 20, um, 20 tweets.

Yeah. Broadly speaking, you know, for the topic of my product. And then I said, write 20 tweets that target creatives. Specific to my product and then business people, you know? And so it was very similar content, but slightly different. And so in the end, instead of 20 tweets over and over again, I wound up with 60 tweets.

And so I scheduled them one a day. Right. And so I’m picturing something very similar here where it’s like, you know, If you, if you had your featured image for the, for the, you know, the, the one you’re doing in right in front of us, you’ve got three bullet points. You’ve got a title, you’ve got a featured image.

Right. But like this is just one and. In, in our world now, you can’t, you’re never going to, or you shouldn’t, uh, just tweet about something once. You don’t write a blog post, tweet about it, and then forget about it. You need a long tail of content to be able to share, right? And so ideally, Not only would you say generate, like, say if this, what’s in front of us right now is, is your, you know, saved template.

Not only would you say generate this, but you would say, generate five variations of this. And you, I, this is again where I think I AI is a perfect candidate. You’d say, you know, Hey, chatGpT, here’s my article. Summarize it. With three bullet points in five different ways, and then we suck all that in. And then picture a page that just has this template with the different content.

You know, so there’s six versions right down, and you, and you go, which ones do you wanted to use? Bang, bang, bang. Save them all, you know, and then schedule them all. And that way, and you’ve got one that goes out each day or you do two days, four days, eight days. 16 days. So again, you get this long tail of content that isn’t identical but is all relevant.

That’s gonna be huge.

Yeah. Assuming that people are actually promoting their content the way they’re supposed to. Right. 

[00:33:33] Cory Miler: Which is, is is part of the challenge. 

[00:33:37] Corey Maass: Yeah. Yeah. I think that I, you know, your emphasis we’re on call 15, right? So your emphasis throughout all of our conversations on agencies and on professionals, teams, et cetera, while it’s not, I’m very much like the solopreneur in entrepreneur.

Whatever other funny way you wanna say the preneur word. Um, but I think small, I build small products for myself and so other people in my shoes. And it’s not at all that I won’t use this, but again, I, you know, I’m, I’m working with clients that have dedicated social media managers. They’re the target agencies that are doing full-blown marketing campaigns.

They’re the, they’re the target because again, it’s these, this long tail of content that that’s going to require variation, that are going to benefit the most from this. Yeah. 

[00:34:49] Cory Miler: Yeah. I’ve been thinking really much in that regard as like, okay, what would I want? How do I, it’s like, This slide for that post, you know, something like this, like a treatment over here doesn’t take up too much space for the the brand, but at least brands it.

Yep. This is a post status thing, and then this is really informative content like mm-hmm. It’s really that summary. Too long, didn’t read. Yeah. Take this for any post. It’s like you said, you can throw that into Chatgpt and get a bunch of these things, but like, yeah. I don’t know if I worked on something like that, but I go, this case study warrants a lot like headline.

This is a roundup we do about what’s happening in WordPress core based. Basically, she has these every, every week. These are the things you would just pull from it. Three things you need to know. Have chat. ChatGPT, help you with that if you want, and then to put it here and then you go, okay. What I would normally do is say, save this as an image, and I’d go over to what if I should do that real quick.

Uh, there we go.

Stay right there. I need to work on the image, image size, of course, but then you’re just putting in alt text. I dunno why the logo didn’t show up. Oh, it’s right there. So you know, if you think about it, right there. You’re okay. You’re, you’re a member of Post, so select the idea is you can look at this and see it a glance, some of the things going mm-hmm.

And then decide to click on. That’s value for the social right there. We’ve already mm-hmm. We’ve already talked about that, I think, but I think philosophically, I’m shaping this a little bit up and my mind is, it’s the too long, didn’t read now. Mm-hmm. You get this and whatever this. Uh, Google image. Like what would be example where if I, here, lemme see how to change a light pole, light switch.

Something. You, you know what I’m saying? Like this, people also ask, there’s some, uh, search criteria. They come like this, you know, the video content that shows up. There’s sometimes, I guess it’s more pinteresty type stuff like,

Like of a better word, video show up. But isn’t there a section where images show up sometimes? 

[00:38:08] Corey Maass: Yeah. Search for a product, search for, um, say like that. So, um, there you go.

So it’s like in shopping is what I found. Okay. This one. So now hold on, hold on. Um, click and start dragging one of those images like this. Yeah. Did it? Yeah. I just discovered this this morning. So you can drag an image into Google Lens to do, uh, to find out more meta information about. That image and whatnot.

Oh, really? Which I think is, so right now it’s sort of a hidden feature, but I think that that’s coming down the road too. But it’s like, you know, Google, pretty much any, any of these services now can do image parsing, or excuse me, text parsing from images. So they’re also going to be reading these images, which is really, really cool.

Regardless of what alt text you might provide. Do you know what this 

[00:39:20] Cory Miler: is called in Google? Is this 

[00:39:21] Corey Maass: og? Uh, I would assume so.

[00:39:34] Cory Miler: Img, but it’s 92 by 92.

Anyway, I, I felt like there was, it’s, it’s more of the Pinterest thought. You know, it’s like you go, oh, office. 

So when we think about the blog post stuff, This is pulling something here. It’s gotta be OG based, right? That’s what I’m trying to find. Say look at that six is, and then give it a little icon.

[00:40:43] Corey Maass: Be honest. There’s no direct way to make your images show up, but somebody has to have figured this out. 

[00:40:48] Cory Miler: Yeah. Because if we can get the specs we haven’t, we give the client a per a potential to let that show up. Yeah.

Because man, that’s compelling. I don’t know. Like this is Zoom ideas. So look at all these images in this display. There we go. See this. Well, I don’t know how they’re getting all that. This, this search comes up sometimes. See this? Mm-hmm. That’s what we’re unlocking. Whatever this is, we’ll figure it out and say This is what you want.

This is what it’s called. And um, OMG mg does it? Yep. Do the possibility to do it, because I think this is where you start going into, I wish I had an idea for this, but I mean, the PINTERESTY type content. Mm-hmm. Recipes. 

[00:41:52] Corey Maass: Oh, there you go. 

All of these are really interesting, um, personality tests too, to see what you come up with on the spot. No, I 

[00:42:08] Cory Miler: was like, they’re gonna know I’ve been liking an celery recipes, 

[00:42:14] Corey Maass: but see they as one does.

Yeah, so there’s, there’s an I that that image is right there. How do we,

and it looks like 

[00:42:29] Cory Miler: it’s 92 by 92 or that ratio, whatever, that Nope, that’s not. 

[00:42:34] Corey Maass: That’s not it. It’s a slightly rectangle, but it’s not. And so what’s, what would be interesting is, um, view the view the actual source rather than inspecting. So just right click anywhere and say view, source

and search for OG colon image.

Keep typing image. It’ll pop up. Oh, sorry. 

[00:43:00] Cory Miler: Hey, so this is interesting. Is this the action type 

[00:43:04] Corey Maass: content so that, that you’d populate by like description you’d do in Yost and we certainly could do more. Um, like if you don’t want to have Yost installed since we’re already adding header, we could add more headers.

But again, not I, I don’t want to chase that if we can help it.

Same. Go to this. Yeah.

You missed a two on the end, so it re cropped it. Oh, interesting. 

[00:43:52] Cory Miler: So it’s live 

[00:43:52] Corey Maass: cropping, that’s all it’s doing is Google. So the ogn, yeah. So it’s right. So, um, but it’s, but where is it? Why, why does it take the square? Because it doesn’t necessarily know, I mean, not all these websites are gonna have that auto cropping, right?

So, so somewhere too, it’s saying there’s a square image. Let’s, let’s throw that into the search results. Look at this. They’re, they’re pulling the Twitter card too. Mm-hmm. It’s 

[00:44:24] Cory Miler: already baked in, I think. Yep. Interesting. I I just go, man. Um,

you know, some of this, like, these are appealing photos for sure, but I go, if you can put some piece of content right here, That’s helpful. Yep. 

[00:44:52] Corey Maass: Yeah, I mean, and that’s the presumption, is that, so actually before you jump, um, go click on the one you just talked about or ultimate click on Ultimate, you know, any of these with that, that has a title, right?

So go to that website. Oh, it’s you. That might be YouTube. That’s not gonna help us.

So they’ve got these big pictures, but I, what I’m trying to determine is if they have, like they’ve explicitly set an OG image that has this extra value in it.

Yeah, so they’ve got two two, oops. Oh, that’s fine. I’m sure the first one just gets sucked in

the article.

Yeah, I, so we’ll do a little research. We’ll find one of these, find a good example of this, and then see if we can’t decipher, you know, and or, um, do some more Googling to find out a, you know, when and what is what, when, and why does Google pull in an image in their actual search results? And, and not others.

You know, is it, is it just an OG image and they’re cropping? It, is it, is there some other tag we don’t know about,

but I’m, I’m anxious to get. This like when the first couple of templates done and out the door and in front of people, because I think it’s, you know, kind of like how your brain has said, oh, but what about this? And then, oh, I found this other thing over here. Like, it’s also, you know, but we started with, here’s what post status is.

Branding already looks like we want recreate that as a starting point. Um, other people are gonna come to us. Vva from FIUs and Sayed from WP Beginner and whoever are gonna be like, okay, but you know, we need a way to accommodate our, our branding or the way the treatments we’ve already decided on in Canva if we’re gonna, you know, because we want our images to be pretty consistent, you know, across all socials forever.

You know, how do we create recreate hours? And it’s like, oh, okay, so we need the option to do background treatments or turn the whole thing 90 degrees, whatever. It’s, you know.

Yep. But that means that one Corey needs to finish the thing once and for all, and then two. Yeah, we wanna start getting the, the marketing asset aspects, assets out there, um, shopping cart finalized and stuff like that. Cuz it’s like, even if we get some beta testers, um, and we give them licenses or let them sign up for free or discount or something, you know, first year free, whatever it is, like we wanna get that sorted out.

[00:48:30] Cory Miler: Started with that yesterday and we didn’t need it. Didn’t get it finished. So I’ve got my screen up here where I started it, the logo, and then the website is part two. Uh, going back 

[00:48:43] Corey Maass: to pause, squeeze, I started, um, flushing out just putting rectangles on a page for the homepage of O M G I M g.co. So it’s quite literally just boxes of color, but ready to have, [00:49:00] um, content float into it.

Okay. All right. I’m gonna try to 

[00:49:08] Cory Miler: carve off some time. Gotta get the logo going in process and then, uh, the website stuff. So 

[00:49:16] Corey Maass: I think, yeah, it’s like I’m, I think standard, standard formula, you know, compelling tagline, value prop, a buy now button, you know, three icons with. With compelling value, props good enough.

I mean, that’s all we need to start, so,

okay. Yeah. If 

[00:49:45] Cory Miler: I have an hour, um, I can get that cranked, cranked enough to start flushing out our page.

[00:49:57] Corey Maass: Simpler is better. So, you know, feel free to delete or [00:50:00] hide rows. Like yeah, but just enough that we, it looks like something, um, like 

[00:50:08] Cory Miler: here a box headline, what it does for you, how benefits you, three things show up in social.

Yeah. And then features are like the nuts and bolts things and Yeah. Pricing. Yep. Yep. 

[00:50:31] Corey Maass: And yeah, and I’ve been waiting to do, like, there’s, there’s, at this point I’ve used e d D enough that I’ve got standard styles that I copy from site to site and ways to set up, like being able to sign in and manage your subscription kind of thing.

Um, obviously they make it very easy, but I have a way that I like to lay things out. Um, but I’ve been waiting to do that. We, we need a logo, which helps us define a style and colors. To then carry that throughout the rest of the site. So our branding is somewhat consistent. So I’ve, I’ve been holding off on that.

Um, you know, but all that takes an afternoon once we’ve got, yeah. The general look and feel

back in our 

[00:51:16] Cory Miler: conversation to, uh, put into there, do we want to go, I know we talked about this in Slack. Do we want to go with a. The eighties funky thought. 

[00:51:32] Corey Maass: I, I mean, because of the OMG part, like I definitely think we want something fun. Um, but I don’t have any religion around how the rest of it, since I’m not creating the logo, like I’d rather.

Anybody grabs, whatever, whatever comes to their mind, like, that’s why we pay them. It’s like when I get on Fiver, I hire five people to do logos because I’m, I’m honestly paying them, not so much to create a logo, but to apply their own thinking to, you know, here’s a, here’s the color palette that, that jumps out at me when you tell me what the, the product does kind of thing.

So

idea is,

[00:52:23] Cory Miler: It’s kind of almost like a Mac app. You know, you’re, it’s the thing that’s solid that helps you look, look good and do things faster. Yep. Um, with images, Paula Showcase, I’m looking at some of these icons in my tray 

[00:52:44] Corey Maass: here.

Yeah, I started walking through, um, uh, product hunt, uh, um, featured, uh, uh, what was it? Make logo.ai. And I started plugging things in to kind of, and they, they want to charge you for the actual logos, but it was kind of neat that they came up, they present you with a bunch of concepts and so it was like, um, A magic wand over an image.

So it’s like image generation or, um, cuz I, in the description I put in sharing and I put in, um, open graph image, you know, image generation. And so it was like, you know, do you want. Uh, a canvas or the, you know, the, the thing that the artist uses to put the paint on, um, the palette. I was like, eh, you know, do you want a magic wand to poof, an image appears?

Eh, that’s getting closer cuz I want it to be that easy. You know? Do you want an icon of, they had one that was like, um, you know, a picture like a. A fake painting that had people all around it, like, you’re sharing that? I was like, no, definitely not. That’s terrible. You know, so it’s like these concepts of, um, of what we want, want it to represent.

To me it’s image generation, because that’s part of, that’s the, if you’ve got a workflow in the middle, you know, you’ve gotta write words, but you’ve also gotta generate images. And to me, that’s the problem we’re solving. But that’s also, that’s, that’s feature not benefit. Yeah. I, 

[00:54:36] Cory Miler: I’m looking to pro probably kind to get some thoughts here to put into the designer.

Okay. I think I’ve got enough here. I’ll riff on. Cool.

Okay.[00:55:00] 

All right, 

[00:55:00] Corey Maass: man. I, I just need a logo that looks really good because I’m gonna have a t-shirt made for Word camp us. 

[00:55:06] Cory Miler: Yeah. Oh, that, that’s even better. Um,

it’s almost like, huh? Okay. How would we want that to lick on the shirt? 

[00:55:19] Corey Maass: That actually helps me frame it to me, to me again, because of. Because of the OMG in the name, and we talked about going all, all caps, it’s like not a rainbow, but gradient of bright colors, you know, big fun font. Like I don’t want it to be goofy.

I don’t want it to be clown like, um, and that’s why I guess I’m shying away too from. Um, actually your, your MAC icons concept is, is a good idea of like, over to me. A lot of them are overwrought, three-dimensional, big drop shadow kind of thing, and it’s like, eh, I want, I want something, you know, more fun than that.

Like if you, if you were gonna have a magic wand, like you’d want a bend in it, you’d want it to be almost cartoon-like or something. But then it’s, but then it’s not professional enough, so I don’t know. I don’t know. Uh,

it has to, it has to look good on your baseball cap there and it’s gotta go look good on my chest here. Yeah.

The swag is more important than anything, let’s be honest. It is 

[00:56:45] Cory Miler: a good frame for me though, is like, how would that pop and how would we want that to look?

[00:56:54] Corey Maass: Yeah.

All right. Let’s be done today. Um, I should have an update for you soon this week. Um, addressing all the, um, the bugs and extra bells and whistles that we talked about. Um, And in particular, I want to, like we said, I want to cut everything over to we’ve, we’ve got the sitewide handled, we need the post per post handled, like you said today.

Um, and then plug in a logo, plug in a little, uh, style once we’ve got a style defined and then the plug-ins, I think ready to share. So that’ll be cool.

Okay. Cool, man. Keep me posted. All right. Well thank.

This article was published at Post Status — the community for WordPress professionals.

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