This week, Adam Fout, John Locke, and Adam Preiser joined host Jonathan Denwood for Episode 260. This week, the roundtable covered three news stories relevant to the WordPress and online community.

Story 1 WordPress 4.9.2 was released and patches an XSS Vulnerability
https://wptavern.com/wordpress-4-9-2-patches-xss-vulnerability

This was an important update and brought up the overall importance of keeping your sites updated to keep them as secure as possible.

The topic also moved into recent security news about people buying plugins and themes and using them to spread malware. Those managing the WordPress repository remove plugins that aren’t updated.

Adam Preiser addressed Tide, a tool to run automated tests against plugins in the WordPress directory. This was announced at the recent State of the Word address. He wondered if this will also be expanded to provide some security scans possibly using machine learning.

https://xwp.co/tide-a-path-to-better-code-across-the-wordpress-ecosystem/

https://make.wordpress.org/tide/

The second story covered was The Best Tech Newsletters compiled by codeinwp.com.

https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/best-tech-newsletters/

This discussion mainly covered are newsletters still important and relevant?

Jonathan asked the team what newsletters they receive that they still read.

Adam Fout reads:
Search Engine Journal - https://www.searchenginejournal.com/
Copyhackers - https://copyhackers.com/

He thinks email marketing and newsletters is still important and doesn’t think you can get enough information from what you see in click rates. People may only read the subject line all year and then click on a special and buy. It still keeps you in front of your customers.

John Locke reads several including:
Whitespark Roundup - https://whitespark.ca/
Phil Rozek’s Local Visibility System - http://www.localvisibilitysystem.com/

He says key is making sure you have great content that your target audience will be interested in.

Is there a preference to have one main story or a spread of little stories?

He tends to prefer a deeper dive. He likes focus and quality content.

Adam Preiser

He finds he has the news before a newsletter arrives because he still uses an RSS Reader. He doesn’t actually read any newsletters.

He pointed out that it depends on your audience.

He doesn’t send regular newsletters to his lists, but does send updates sometimes and particularly includes personal information about himself. His point is to build a relationship with his followers, not just consider them a number.

The sponsor for this episode is IntelligenceWP (https://intelligencewp.com/) - a plugin that helps you make sense of your Google Analytics data.

For the third story, the group covered - Black Friday and Cyber Monday generate huge revenue for WordPress products by freemius.com
https://freemius.com/blog/black-friday-cyber-monday-wordpress/

People know this is a time of year to spend money. The plugin and theme space is no different. People expect sales at this time of year and buy during this time of year.

Adam Preiser is the roundtable member who is most involved in affiliate marketing. During the Black Friday period of time he put a live chat on his website. People go there and ask him to decide between plugins, themes and what to buy.

He had at least 300 live chats and when he saw how much people purchased, he was surprised.

The challenge is will people just wait until the discount days? Are you training people to wait for the sale?

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