Pressgram - Community Education Event

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight we're here with a community education event, and it's about Pressgram. And is it the next best thing for bloggers? It's looking like it could be a really, really good app for us to use and a tool for us to use in blogging, and we're going to talk about it tonight. And tonight my guests are— I have Dustin Stout from DustinTV, Jenny Melrose.

Hello.

John Saddington, who is the creator of Pressgram, and he's here to answer some questions, and Ryan Hanley. Alright, so we're gonna let Dustin kick it off, and he's gonna talk a little bit about his experience with Pressgram because he was really one of the first ones I saw that was speaking about it with any regular— any regularity. And let him go into it, then we're gonna talk— switch around to some of the other speakers. If you have questions you can leave them in the comment bar, and we have a comment tracker on, and we will see your questions and we will do our best to get to them. Alright, so let's turn this over to Dustin. It's all yours, Dustin.

Well, thank you, Chef. I appreciate you inviting me on to talk about Pressgram. I am a huge fan. From the beginning, I was a big fan because it was a John Saddington project, and I'm a big fan of John and everything that he's done. In the past. And so when he came up with this idea, he started a Kickstarter project for this idea of taking back ownership of your content. As a blogger and as a designer myself and a content creator, that's something that's very near and dear to my heart, you know, that content ownership. And it came out— you know, this idea came from when there was this big controversy about Facebook owning your content and then the big debate over the Instagram terms of service, and I was a big Instagram user, and when all this came out, I was a little— like most people, I was a little perturbed, so to speak. And when John came up with the idea of owning your own content and giving the power back to the content creator, I was immediately on board. So what Pressgram is, for anyone who doesn't know what it is, Pressgram is a photo publishing iOS app. It's for the iPhone only currently. Android users, your first question is going to be, "Why isn't there an Android app?" Well, it's only on iOS for now, and John will attest that he's actively working on the development of, at least the pursuit of, an Android app. But currently it is only for iOS, and it gives you the ability to Publish filtered beautiful photos to your self-hosted WordPress blog, in a nutshell. Is that good?

That sounds pretty good.

Sounds about right to me.

All right.

Are you sure that you didn't develop this?

You know what? I actually did, but John just thought Sightikun is much prettier.

Yeah, I'm just the official ethnic spokesperson.

You're the face of the project.

Sounds good. Jenny, why don't you tell us about your uses of it and how you found it to be?

Sure, I'm Jenny from the New York Modernist Family. I actually saw Dustin post about it because I pretty much stalk anything that he puts up as of recently, especially with the recent post.

Flattered.

Of course. But I have been using it more to kind of see how it will work. I was nervous about it at first because I wasn't sure how it would work as far as having it on my homepage and not being able to see my posts that were recent. So once I was able to figure out that you could actually put it and have it as a category, that it was almost hidden, and once people had the link they'd be able to get to it, it just made so much more sense for me to start using it. It gave me the opportunity to actually let people know more about me, like the background things that were going on, not just here's the perfect post, here's the perfect food, you actually get to see the behind the scenes kind of, yeah, it doesn't always look like that. And it gives my audience a little bit more into who I am with my family as well. So I've been using it probably for about 2 weeks and I'm loving it so far.

Great. Okay, so you think it's a really good tool as a blogger to have this for the type of bloggers that we are, where we're picture-oriented and we post about food, we post about what's going on in our lives. So that, that's a good point to make because I was wondering about that myself. Okay, Ryan.

So I also found out about that, the app through Dustin, because I crush on him hard too. In a design, for design aspects, I have the least, I have one of the worst abilities to design and I dig on his design. Well, I saw him post something on Google+ and was completely enamored by it. Big content creator, mostly for, what is probably my biggest client, which is my family's independent insurance agency. So how I've been using it, I also have a little content marketing consultancy on the side. So for those two spaces, I've set it up with— so the app is able to provide me to integrate with both blogs from, from the app, so I can work seamlessly sending content to either one from the app, which I think is fantastic. And on the insurance agency side, so it's a small business, What I do is I'll go to one of our clients, sit down with the owner, you know, get like a bro shot, you know, like the put the arm around bro shot in front of their sign, and then we'll post that. Or, and then I use the text aspect of the app to then tell a little story about why people should be stopping into this, you know, this dry cleaner, this retail store, or restaurant, wherever I am. And, you know, these business owners love it. So from that aspect, I'm able to really tell the story of our clients using the app and be mobile posting these pictures, you know, almost real-time to our space. And from the other side of my business, I just really use the images to tell stories. So different things that are going on, I'm able to, you know, I was a big Instagram user, and then just like everybody else, or a lot of people, when kind of the "you don't own your images" thing came out, I immediately became disenfranchised. And then when I saw this post, I mean, you essentially have all the tools of WordPress blog to tell a story around an image that you just didn't have with Instagram. And it has been a complete no-brainer for me and is pretty much part of my everyday life at this point.

This is really cool to hear, by the way, Ryan. You are a super user, which you are blogging every day and it's really exciting. I didn't know this was a Dustin Stout Crushalot session.

I didn't know either.

But that's really cool. What's so neat, Ryan, is that one of the biggest hopes of mine creating this application was actually for people just like you, the brick-and-mortar companies. For example, my wife and I are huge foodies and we love to visit the food trucks. We look for food trucks. We're actually there scoping one out for this Friday's event. Even though they were closed, we were still checking it out. We were so excited about it. The biggest issue with brick-and-mortar companies and mobile companies like that is they don't have time to blog. We've always thought, man, every time I buy something from them because we just love the food, I'm like, "Hey, do you have Twitter? Do you have Facebook? 'Where are you guys at online?' They're like, 'Haha, you know, we don't have any time.' I just kept thinking, there's got to be a simple way where, especially with food, you can grab, take a photo of your customer, of what you're doing, where you are in the city, and then be able to post it to your WordPress blog without having to sit in front of a notebook, have a Wi-Fi connection, stuff like that. And so one of the biggest kind of market sectors that I had hoped to encounter was the small brick and mortars, which is really cool that you're doing that. So that's really encouraging to me. Thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, well, I'll tell you, um, one of the biggest parts of my business is I speak with independent insurance agents about helping them with their content strategy. And this weekend I was in San Antonio for an event, and one of the things that I did was I actually pulled out my phone, because one of the big issues that independent insurance agents run into is that we've never traditionally marketed, so time to actually produce content is a huge issue. And I've tested the app I can produce a picture with, you know, a nice amount of content, 300 characters, 400 characters posted onto the blog and shared in 2 minutes and 13 seconds. And you can even do it quicker in some instances, it depends on how much kind of tailoring you do. So I did a bunch of tests, so I tell people right in the presentation, like, here, all your excuses about not being able to get content to your blog 2 minutes and 13 seconds. I mean, if you can't find 2 minutes and 13 seconds to create some content for your website, like, this is the easiest tool to do that.

Yeah.

And people love it. They just— they were going crazy about it.

So sounds like an awesome case study. I need to— I'm going to follow up with you after this.

Now I have a question. Although you can send it directly to it and publish right away, if you take your picture but say you want to add more content to it before you publish it, can you just save it and then publish it later?

Not right now. Version 1, you don't have the option to go back and publish, but the next version we're gonna have a drafting area where you could save and then publish posts or images that you weren't able to publish at the spot.

Okay, great. And you can always go back and edit it anyway and add to embellish it.

Okay, there's a workaround for that though. You can just take the image with your camera, with the camera button, not inside the app, and then pull the picture through into the app from your camera roll. So if you did want to take a picture and didn't want to, you know, go through everything right in that moment, that's kind of, I guess, the workaround right now.

Okay, great.

That is the way that I actually do it, because having a 4-month-old and almost 4-year-old, I can't— I'm not able to do it right then and there. So I take my pictures from my camera, and then I go back through just like Ryan said and use the app that way.

So Jenny, what kind of posts are you doing now with it? I mean, I know you're more of a craft or food driven, so you wouldn't have your techniques in there or your recipes in there. So what type of posts are you doing?

So far it's been a lot of the girls, just because that's just at the moment of what's coming up. I found through Google+ that I've kind of let people know a little bit more about me and what goes on behind the scenes with my family, because it's a large part of who I am and what my blog is about. So it has been a lot of the girls. I actually was just going to put the link to it in the comments because I think it was Marjorie that asked to see what the URL was directly to it. But it is a lot of the girls right now. But I would actually be looking to do some of the food that's behind the scenes, especially the mess-ups, because it kind of shows what really goes on.

Not the perfect kitchens that we display on our blogs, no. That would be good.

I met a— this has been a really neat experience for me as I've met kind of different industries. And Ryan, now I know kind of an independent insurance guy, which is really kind of cool. I've met a lot of new markets, and you know, in a very lot of ways I'm fairly sheltered. I kind of hang out with my engineering software guys. But I met a food blogger, which is, I think, is on this event right now, which would be awesome, and she's here in Atlanta. And she was educating me on the food blogger network and all the work that goes into it, which I had no idea that— it makes sense to me now, but I had no idea that it's a true production, you know, where you set up the shot, you get the right camera, the lighting, make sure the item or the food is perfectly settled with the right background images and all that stuff. And so She was telling me that, and she gets asked to fly out to different places now to do this, but it's not something that you can take really quickly with an iPhone, add a filter, and voilà, there you have it, because she's got an ingredient list, etc., etc. So she was saying it doesn't sound like a perfect use case for those high-quality, super done-up food blogs, but I think, Jenny, when you mentioned kind of the mess-ups, kind of the real-life stuff, I think that is a very strong use case. In a lot of ways, it can give a cool behind-the-scenes. I know one film company is experimenting with it, with behind-the-scenes. Instead of the super polished, you know, products that people buy and the special features, they're like, well, why don't we just do on-the-spot random stuff of right now what's happening. Someone just slipped on said, or someone just dropped a camera, or look at that, that was messed up. And it kind of gives a little more reality, a real taste of what's really going on. So I love that, love that suggestion, Jenny.

Very good. We do have a question here, and Jenny's gonna look forward to post it, but let me pin this. And Karen Granrud asks, are you going to discuss how to set it up? I have it on the phone but not sure how to set it up on the blog side. Can someone walk us through that a little bit?

Sure. Dustin can do it. While he's doing it, I'm going to find— I made a video. Go ahead, Dustin.

Sure. If you're on your WordPress admin, your dashboard, just like you would find any plugin for your WordPress install, just go to plugins. Hit Add New and do a quick search for Pressgram, I'm pretty sure the first thing you'll find is John's plugin. Now once you activate this plugin, what it does is under the settings, I believe it's settings, you'll have an option to hide a specific category or to assign a specific category to be hidden from your homepage. Let me find it here. Yeah, it's under Settings and General, I believe. So what you do is you decide what category of Pressgram posts are going to be assigned to. I've created a category called Pressgram. Very simple. Easy to remember. I think you've done that as well, Jenny. So you assign it a category, and then Activate the plugin and from that point on, anytime you publish a post that is under that category of Pressgram, it's hidden from your homepage. So from your main blog feed, it will never show up. For people to actually see your Pressgram categories, they have to go to your blog/category/Pressgram. I've actually got it set up to where you go to dustin.tv/Pressgram and you can see all of them there. I've eliminated the category. But it's pretty simple, pretty straightforward, keeps it easy. And you can just be sure when you're publishing through the app, there's a little category section and make sure you write in your Pressgram category so that it's assigned the proper category.

Now I have inserted a link to a YouTube video which Dustin just walked everyone through to connect to WordPress. I'm not sure if everyone can see that though.

I just copy and pasted it and put it on the event so it's there for them.

Thank you. Mm-hmm.

Great. Alright, so that sounds— that doesn't sound too difficult, and I'm assuming Android will work about the same way once we get that up and running. John, what everybody's gonna be asking you, so when do you think you're gonna be able to look at something for Android?

I mean, the product itself It won't be too difficult to build, but I do need time. The biggest challenge is one, I'm the only guy developing it right now, and I only know Objective-C, which is the coding language for iOS and the Mac. And so most likely what I'm trying to do is find— I'm building a team, and so if there's any awesome Android developers who believe in our vision and what we're trying to achieve here, I would like to talk to you. In a serious way. So I'm trying to build a team around the Android product, and hopefully I would love to start developing that later this year, which would be awesome, and it shouldn't take too long thereafter. But as long as I can find the right people, I think we'll be set.

That makes sense. You want to get a good team together to give you a good product like you already have for for the iPhone. Yeah, you don't want to come out with something that's not going to work as well.

So I want to satisfy all the chefs out there, food bloggers.

Absolutely.

All you Dustin lovers.

Well, there's a lot of them out there.

You're making me blush.

We'll have to get you from— we're trying to bring the color out of blue back there into red for you. All right. Yeah. Sounds good. Good question. Here's a question here. Tom Batkin wants to know, are you going to be able to log in via Google rather than Facebook, Twitter, or email in the future?

Yeah, I'm looking at other login systems. Right now I'm doing a lot of polling with the current users to see what people want and use. Ultimately, I would love a suite of login options. But over time, we'll see what popular opinion demands. So yeah, that would be an awesome feature. And if you do have a feature, you can go to help.pressgr.am, help.pressgram, and submit a feature request. I take those all the time.

Okay, Karen has another question here. Let's see if I can pull it up. Says, great, can I add it as a sidebar image like I can do with my Instagram feed? Would someone want to do that or better off not to?

That is actually something that is not too difficult to do. It's not— there is a plugin called Really Simple Gallery Widget by a gal named Helen Husandi, who's actually part of the WordPress team in a lot of ways. That's Really Simple Gallery Widget, and you can actually tell it to insert images right in the sidebar. It's not affiliated with Pressgram, but I have had a conversation with Helen to actually add some more features to her already awesome plugin. That's a great place to start right now, and it's free.

Sounds good. Does that work with anything else besides Pressgram, or is that a widget to pull other images?

Yes, in fact it'll pull anything from your media library, so not just Pressgram, it could be anything else.

Sounds good, because I know Instagram is getting more popular. In fact, I just added it to my sidebar because people, you know, it's another place to draw people from. So, you know, I think we're really looking forward to this for all of us, and I think it's going to be a good tool for food bloggers once we understand how to use it in its applications. It's just like with Instagram, I see some pictures on Instagram that I know people didn't take with their camera phone so I don't know how they're changing them or uploading them and then shooting them out. It's like they're finished pictures from their blog. I'm sure there will be other workarounds too to use it.

I like the idea. I think you can do that with Google Drive.

Is that what it is?

I think you can upload them to Google Drive and then take them off Google Drive to your camera roll and then they're uploading them out of there to the different services that they're going through.

Well, I mean, technically you can save any photo online to your phone.

Yeah, that's how I do it. If you have iCloud too, yeah.

Okay, with iPhone you can do that. I, yeah, I haven't— I'm not that technical. I'm still a bit of a dinosaur even though I do do all these Hangouts and stuff. So I got a Samsung 4, a Galaxy 4, and I'm just I'm still amazed that I can wave my hand over and it does, you know, does anything. I'm learning all these little intricacies. Well, that's good to know, I'm sure. But, you know, I think the whole idea with this isn't to capture the perfect image, it's to capture the moment.

Right.

And I think so many of us as bloggers are so worried about that perfect image that maybe it would be nice to get back to capturing the moment for a change, you know, still have our really decked out, perfect Photoshopped images of our food, but every now and then just to show real life, a slice of real life, especially if we're traveling or we're going out to eat, it would be a nice way to show some things.

The other thing to add in too is that if you did do it from your phone with that image from your blog, you could actually use that gorgeous image and put it up into Pressgram and then you have a clickable image, which in Instagram you can't do. Instagram, you gotta go all the way back to the profile, get the website, and then search through everything. Here you can actually, within Pressgram, you can type right in what the URL is to find that post, and you'll be able to click it right from there to go directly to that post about your food or whatever it is that you're going to.

Yeah, and that was—

that's sort of my biggest qualm with Instagram is that it's impossible to drive real traffic towards anything you're creating because everything you're creating stays on Instagram. It's not clickable, you can't link it to your website, you just got to hope and pray that your image is compelling enough to have people get off the app, go into their web browser, type in your domain, and then find it that way.

That was really my biggest personal need when I built it is I've built a career out of my blog. I've been blogging since 2001, so I just am somewhat obsessed with blogging. As an entire medium of communication. And since it's my home base, my online digital home base, I want everything to funnel to my blog. That's where I've built my products. That's where I've recruited teams. That's how Dustin and I connected at one point, and then we met up in the real world. That's how I've solicited raising venture capital for my previous startups. And that's how I've developed my brand, my personal brand. And so my blog is very important to me, but so to give those page views away to corporations or businesses or other applications that aren't really able— you are not able to control was really a downer for me. And so being able to maximize my image sharing and coming back to my blog was very important to me. And so there was a very practical and pragmatic reason why I created it.

Good reason. We have a couple comments here. Lisa Lee, sometimes I upload my blog photos through Dropbox onto Instagram, same idea as a Google Drive. Renee Dobbs, and that's who you met in Atlanta.

Yeah, she is awesome.

She is.

For a while. She is a— she's an awesome food blogger. She, she's the one who educated me about all the stuff, and she always gives me a big hug. Thanks, Renee.

She is a very nice person. Renee said it's great for food bloggers who do restaurant reviews. And Lisa Lee mentioned that she can't find it for Android, and yeah, we did go over that. It will be out shortly, as soon as John can get his team together to develop the Android app. So we will get to that.

So anybody else like to say anything about Yeah, I mean, I'm just so excited that you guys are using it. Dustin, Jenny, and Ryan, you guys are awesome evangelists. I'm so thankful for you. One of the things, kind of two things, and I'll let you guys kind of close out and stuff, but two things that are vitally important to me that I want you to know about me as the creator of the application. One is that my goal has always been to be the super user. So don't you dare try to beat me on my own network. But I think this is philosophically very important, and it helps you know as users that I am committed to this application just as much as you are. I built it for myself originally. It was a side project that I was building at nights and the weekends, and then it was my wife who suggested I put it on Kickstarter to make it very much a public project. And so it wasn't originally the plan to make it a public application, which is really cool because thousands of people worldwide now use it, which is really very exciting. But I am a user just like you guys, and I'm building the features that I believe are going to create the most value for me and for you. And so I think that's very important. Just think of all the applications that you use out there, and you don't know if the founders or the founding teams are really super users. I think that's vitally important. And 2 is I'm listening very actively. The reason why I love things like this, the reason why I love listening to Dustin and Ryan share stories and how Jenny's using it is because I'm actively taking notes. Like, I really care about your feedback. I want it to be the best darn application that we possibly can make. And so if you have feature requests, go to help.pressgram.com and I will Seriously consider those things because those are valuable to you and most likely they're valuable to me. So thank you guys for being awesome and being on this Hangout and Jeff for inviting me.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Now if there's anyone out there, if there's anyone out there who's like me and heard what John said about being the super user and immediately took that as a challenge, I just checked and John has over 400-some photos already logged into Pressgram. I'm at 48, so John, all I'm saying is look out.

What's so crazy though is there's a photographer, Zach Arias, who's here in Atlanta. He's kind of a famous guy, and the moment he got on, he instantly eclipsed me with users— followers. And I'm like, there's something very like— I don't even know how to describe it, but when a photographer, a famous photographer I guess, instantly has more followers than the creator of the app, there's some strange internal emotion that happens. Zach and I are friends. We had drinks a couple weeks ago to talk about this and other stuff. I was like, "Man, Zach, you're such a biatch. How could you do that?" Anyway, but yeah, at some point. More famous people, maybe even you, Chef, will be on and you guys will totally rock my world, which is cool. That's awesome.

John, I'll be happy just to be able to use it. And you know, you have to get yourself over here on Google+ a little more because this is really where it's happening. I know you have the sign-in for Facebook and that whole thing with Facebook and Instagram kind of ties hand in hand. You know, there's somebody's hand in your pocket every time you use both of them. So not so on Google+.

Dustin is literally like my source of Google+ information. Dustin has learned a lot from me, but I have learned so much from Dustin about Google+. I am just not a super user like he is. I'm taking notes, and this is kind of an additional step getting there.

Well, Chef, I'm glad you said it because I think I've been pestering John for the past 2 years since Google+ started, at least. So it's good to hear somebody else say it besides me.

I think we have to take turns pestering our friends because I know my friends are sick and tired of me doing it. I've been preaching the gospel of Google for so long now, they're like, "Ah." My wife's the same way. "Oh, he's starting again." If we're out in public, she just cringes if someone mentions, "What do you do?" or something.

They all turn eventually.

Yes, come to the dark side. Come to the dark side. It's not really. Google just really has been giving us so many wonderful enhancements and changes to the program and has added so much. You know, it's sometimes— I can see how coming on late it would be difficult for some people now if they haven't started using it.

Is this late? It seems like it's still very early.

You know, it is, and I do keep telling them that too, that it's not really late in terms of users Although, what did we just pass? A billion, uh, used registered users?

I think somebody created a graphic about that or something.

Yeah.

And Facebook just has a slight edge on us right now, and you know, there you go, John. You're having too much fun tonight. See, you gotta come on Google. You can't do this on Facebook.

Yeah, I have a severe case of ADHD.

But yeah, so if there's any other questions, now's the time to ask them because we're going to close out in just a couple minutes. Anybody else have anything they'd like to comment on? Ryan, Jenny, anything else?

I was looking at the version 2 post that you put out, you know, looks pretty good. I'm looking forward to that. I just— I actually— I'm gonna— this might be bad or good. I don't use the network that much. I just love the features and push people to get on and use. I actually don't spend much time inside the app, like the social network itself, because I, you know, it ends up putting so much engagement onto the actual blog post that you create on your WordPress blog that you just— that's why I give it so much love when I get to Google+ because it's like I want people to know that, you know, the app that I'm using, but you're ultimately sending them to your home base and it just ends up being a win-win for everybody.

Well, that's—

you know, there is one more thing that I wanted to touch on real quick since we're wrapping up. And, you know, for those of us who are bloggers really trying to extend our reach and really try to grow our online presence, I think in conjunction with Google+, Pressgram has so much power to drive, not only traffic but also authority to our blogs. You know, there's all this talk about the SEO and Google+ and there's debate back and forth, you know, how the SEO correlates and all that fun stuff. A little while back I wrote a tiny little post about social signals and how Google+ does a better job than any other social network at sending social signals to your website or your blog. And so if you look at how I've been using Google+, I've really incorporated the idea of capturing images and posting them in such a way— there's a little technique that I discovered, I wrote a little post about. And if you do it right, you post a link, you post a photo and get a link to that photo in your blog, the ability to send every one of those +1s to your website and get the credit for that and get those social signals built up. And we know that numbers aren't everything, but the reality is psychologically when you go to a website or a blog and you see there's a lot more numbers up there in the little button bubbles, it does something. It creates authority, it creates this essence of trust or what have you, popularity, whatever that is. But the, the fact that you can take those Pressgram posts, publish them on your blog, and then connect them through Google+ and send all those social signals instead of posting it on Instagram or Facebook where it gets these likes, and all those likes live and breathe and stay on that network. You're able to drive all that social activity and have it credited to your web property, not someone else's. That's one thing that's really powerful to me. And I think the partnership between Pressgram and Google+, and if I had my way, Pressgram would be the first publishing app that gets access to Google's API. I just feel like there's so much potential there, especially for those of us who, you know, who really want to drive traffic, to drive, you know, those social signals and social activity— to where it belongs, to the content creators.

And just the intrinsic nature of images, I mean, people have an emotional reaction when you're sharing these images and they want to see what other images you have. So what I found personally is that people that are coming into my site through Pressgram shared posts are ultimately spending more time on the site because they're wanting to see, well, what other images does he have here, what other stuff is he doing?, because that image grabs them. So just, just the intrinsic nature of images themselves is bringing a different type of attention to your site, is maybe a better way to put it. And, uh, I have to agree with Dustin 100%. I, since I started using this, it's also more fresh content on your site. So if you're able to post 3 times a week and now you're, now you're putting 5 Pressgram photos out a week, that's 8 new fresh pieces of content Then I'm going back in and filling those up with more text even and almost adding an entire story to them later on. It's not like you have shallow content. I mean, it's rich content with a nice image, very valuable. 100% agree. I am looking forward to each new update. It just makes so much sense to me as a small business guy. I can just see this being a tool that small business professionals actually use.

Yeah, Ryan, you actually do a really good job. And I get every notice every time you add the pressgram, like, "Oh, it's Ryan again. Oh, it's Ryan again.

Oh, it's Ryan again." Yeah, my bad about that.

No, no, that's totally fine. It's just like, and then I read it, I'm like, "Oh, this is what he's doing, and here's the content, and here's the story." I'm like, "This is exactly why I made it.

You're doing a better job than I am." Well, I think I only have like 3 people actually following me in the app, so I think you're still doing a better job just now, but I appreciate that very much.

Cool.

Well, I think with the new updates to Google too, that you get— it's talking about publishing right to your blog with it instead of being lost in Instagram or somewhere else. It's going to come into the trust factor. Dustin, you mentioned that a couple times, the trust factor, and Google is looking at these things, and anything that adds to your trust factor is going to bring you up higher in the rankings. It's all going towards the author, the content, you know, the person that's writing the good content, the one that's producing the good content. So the more good content we do through our blogs is going to benefit us greatly, and that would be, I think, would be a really good way to perk up somebody's blog too. So excellent, very good. Alright, one last note here. Zee's Cup of Tea says a Google+ login for Pressgram would be great for photographers on Google+. So John, there's another challenge for you there. We mentioned it earlier.

Okay, Zoe. Zoe's a friend. She's awesome.

And also I'd like to mention that there is a Pressgram community on Google+. If one of you guys has the link to that and wants to share it. Where you guys can go in and talk about Pressgram more. John, are you in that community?

Yeah, I should be.

I'm hoping you are.

As he clicks the Join Now button. Yes, I'm in there, can't you see?

I'm number 100. Yeah, I'll get— let's see if I can— honestly, here's what's so cool is I've got people like Ryan, like Dustin, like you, Jenny, who are so passionate about this that these people— some of these people have volunteered their time to help me manage the community. It's been such a really cool thing that people have bought into it so emotionally, and that's really helpful for me because I'm so busy engineering the product that I— without their help, I actually wouldn't have time to engage at all. These community leaders like Zoe who just asked the last question is a part of the Google+ leadership team and she's doing a fantastic job. I love empowering people to do what they need to do. Ryan, I love giving you the right tools and hopefully better tools to come with version 2.0 and just saying, "Hey, have at it. This is your business, your life. We're not here to get in your way." Just build great stuff, you know, and we'll let you do it. So for the fact that I don't even know the Google+ Community Hangout, whatever, I'm just making stuff up right now while I'm trying to find it.

Google+ words, as many as we can.

Hashtags.

Just throw hashtags. There it is. It's all the way at the bottom. So I'll link this up right here, and I'm going to put it in the text area, so Jenny, maybe you can help me out because I don't know how to do that.

We have another comment or question here from Karen, and she says, Ryan Hanley just brought up something that I was wondering about. Since the app is new, do I need followers there for it to be beneficial?

Actually, Ryan has already answered that question. He's incredibly unpopular but very effective.

Yeah, that's absolutely— how does that work then, Ryan, if you don't have followers? How are they coming to you?

So I guess because my— what I like about it is getting the image to my blog, and then once I have the image on my blog, then I'm using— I'm actually sharing it out through the social sharing buttons and all the avenues that I normally share. And I'm going to—

So what Ryan is doing essentially is there is a social network part of the application, but more importantly, when you link it to your blog, you're leveraging your blog traffic. And we know just by sheer force of quantitative fact that the more times you blog, you publish a blog post, the more opportunity you have for organic traffic, direct traffic, and the like. And for someone like me and Dustin who really leverages our blog as our station of online existence and our identity and our brand. It's vitally important. And so the social network inside the actual application can be secondary to the content that you're creating to the blog. And so it's based on a number of different ways to use it. Just like anything, it's how you use it which will ultimately determine your success. But you don't have to be, you know, incredibly popular to have it work for you.

I know I had asked Ryan how he was doing it because it looked like he was using it as— it was almost like it was a— the picture ended up— I was just seeing how you had shared to me how you had done it as far as posting. Like you would post on your blog, you would edit it, add more to it, and then actually share directly using your share tools from your blog to put it out there.

Yeah.

Yeah, sorry about that. Somebody walked by my house and my dogs went berserk. So basically what I do is I share the image to my blog and then I build out a little story behind it, usually 150 to 200 words. And then just like you would a post that you built entirely inside of WordPress, I'm, you know, either depending on how I want to share it, I'm sharing it inside of Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook, and any other social network. You know, actually Pinterest is really great for sharing Pressgram images too and driving traffic back. So I would share the images just like I would any WordPress post that I had built kind of inside the native system. I'm just taking the image and exporting it through the Pressgram system and using it as a way to kind of capture that image in the moment, if that makes sense.

Okay, it does. And here's another question for you, Jenny. Karen wants to know, so Jenny Melrose, if your page is hidden and you're not using it as a live post, how are you seeing more traffic?

Because what I'm ending up doing is I am sharing it from there so that it doesn't have to be right on my homepage. I can actually then use my sharing tools to be able to put it out there. So I can use my Facebook, I go to Google+ and I can actually upload it just like I would share anything else on social media.

So you just treat it as a normal post then after that point?

Yes, it's just— the hidden page ends up being so that it just doesn't fill up my home, my front screen and then it's just, you can go just get all of my Pressgram images. You don't have to set it up that way, to me it just made sense because I'm gonna randomly post things sometimes at 2 AM when I'm up with the baby.

So yeah, and that's actually how exactly how I do it, just like, like Jenny. Is if you go— and Jenny, again, I'm sorry, if you can help me— you go to john.do, which is my main blog page, but then if you go to john.do/photos, that's where all my press images show up. And if you go to john.do, which is my homepage, you won't see any of my photos. So you get my long-form content, like the really stuff that I've labored over and the stuff that I really enjoy writing. But if you go to /photos, that's where I share all of my Pressgram images. And I share those on Twitter. And I have 200-something thousand followers on Twitter, and so all of those people go directly to that image. And so that's where all my traffic is also from naturally occurring organic traffic. That's how I've seen a 30% increase of traffic just in my own blog. I get a decent amount of traffic already. That's been awesome. It's just for me to— especially if you're a blogger and you don't have to raise your hand, but it would be cool if you're at home and you can raise your hand anyway. Most bloggers have experienced that ceiling, if you know what I'm saying, where you've hit 1,000 page views and you can't seem to get through, or maybe 500, and you're like, "Ah, why can't I break through this?" ceiling, and for me, I'd hit that. I've been kind of trending this very consistent up and down, and there was just this ceiling I couldn't get through. But when I started posting with Pressgram, I blew through it, and now I'm really— I'm trending to grow again. So that's been really, really cool just from a blogging perspective.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I guess as a food blogger then too, or any other type of blogger, we could probably create a page within our blog so they didn't show up on our main page and went there directly, like on the top on the toolbar, and just have PressGram.

Yeah, it's just a category, just like what I'm doing.

Yeah, that's a good idea.

WordPress, you can actually build out content on top of the category feed. So like if you go to RyanHanley.com/PressGram, it actually has like a little bit of intro text on top of it with social, you know, I, I coded in a couple of social sharing buttons and stuff and a way for people to actually subscribe to that category page's feed. And then underneath that is the feed of PressGram posts. So I actually will sometimes just share out my PressGram category page as a way to just attract more people who are interested in those images, and then I've also given them a way to subscribe via RSS and email separately to PressGram posts. Um, because I didn't— people who subscribe get each new post that comes out, and that's kind of been the same for a long time, so I don't want to disrupt that flow. So I just gave them an additional way if they were interested in subscribing, and I probably only had that feature up for about a week, but I've gotten like a a dozen or more people who have, which is interesting considering that they're just subscribing to image posts.

Ryan, you're like a badass, man.

I don't know about that.

You're like seriously doing this strategy thing here with the feed. I don't even do that. Yeah, I'm like, I'm sitting here looking at your page, I'm like, what the heck? Like, I should do this.

So when these posts to your blog then, they wouldn't necessarily go out on your RSS feed?

No, they go out on their own RSS feed. So I built a new RSS feed through FeedBlitz to handle just the PressGram posts.

Ryan's a real content warrior.

That way you don't overload your regular subscribers. He is a content warrior.

Now I'm blushing, you know.

Well, we want more people to start stalking you too, Ryan.

Jenny, I haven't embarrassed you tonight. What can I do for you? Man, no, seriously, Ryan, this is awesome. I'm looking at this, I'm like, yeah, there's a consistent piece of content there describing what you're doing and opportunities to subscribe to that particular feed. Man, this is cool, man. I think I'm going to steal this.

I need someone who can build in— well, we can talk about this another time. I'm having issues building in the rich meta tags out of a category page. I just don't know coding that well.

I can help you with that.

Yeah.

All right, Zoe, what do you want?

Here we go. Note that for any WordPress.com blogger here, the plugin only works if you have a WordPress.org self-hosted blog. WordPress.com does not have plugins. So this wouldn't work also for Blogger then, would it?

No, on WordPress.com, no. You wouldn't be able to do that kind of category specification, but I have seen many WordPress.com users either add— create a new photo blog entirely, like a new subdomain, like if it was john.wordpress.com, now it's johnsphotos.wordpress.com. I've seen a lot of that. Or they just post once a day, you know, and so it doesn't mess up their flow of writing. But lots of options for those WordPress.commers because there's a lot of you guys out there.

Excellent.

Alright, well, unless anyone has anything else they'd like to add in, I think we're going to call it a night. It's been a very informative night. I know we got a lot of— I've learned a lot.

And I'm the guy who created it.

Well, that's a good thing, Dan, if you learned something.

I'm taking all these notes and I'm like, what? I have more questions about what I'm doing than probably the audience does.

Well, that's a good sign. And that should show everybody that John is willing to work and listen and help us through this. So I know everyone's anxious for the Android, and we'll hopefully get somebody to help you with that and work on your team to build the Android.. And then all of us Android users will be just as happy as all the iPhone users. And there we go, press grant. He's got it. Alright, so this has been a community education event for the G+ Food Bloggers community, and I thank you all for coming. Dustin, thanks so much for your time here tonight.

You're welcome.

See ya.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure. Jenny, thank you so much for showing up and helping.

Of course, Chef. Thank you.

My pleasure. John, very nice meeting you this week, and I'm glad you had a good time in the Hangout with your hats and stuff. That'll really make for a good show. And Ryan, always nice to see you. Thanks for coming in tonight.

Chef, for you, the world, my friend.

Oh, thank you, sir. All right, friends, thank you very much. And don't forget, this Friday I have the second edition of Good Day Google+ showing up. We'll see you then at 1 o'clock Eastern Standard Time. For now, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and we're going to call it a night. Have a good night, my friends.

Good night, everybody.