A few NerdPress team members sponsored/exhibited at FinCon 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia this past week and I thought I’d distill the numerous conversations I had with attendees, speakers, and sponsors into three key takeaways.
- Own your audience – Creating and distributing valuable content for an audience (whether free, behind a paywall, or a mix of the two) is a lot of work. Online platforms and social networks end up benefiting more from your hard work long term – so be sure to capture the audience along the way. Combine that with decreasing usage of search engines and increased usage of AI, the age of build it and they will come may be over. Using Hubbub’s Save This feature is one way to turn traffic into subscribers. Also, jumping onto the fediverse and owning your social graph is another.
- Focus on what you do best – Managing a community, fixing issues with your website, and navigating the ever-changing online media landscape are each full-time jobs onto themselves… continue to focus your time on what you do best. It is why NerdPress was a sponsor – it is worry free support for WordPress websites. Many FinCon attendees had outgrown their current platforms, and are now looking to use WordPress and its plugin ecosystem to build more powerful websites.
- Structure your content for AI deals – This last takeaway may still need some time to bake, but more and more AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are making revenue-sharing deals with content platforms and creators as they share that insight in their products. Structure your content and licensing to allow for this new wave of monetization before it peaks.
Visiting Atlanta in fall is… very warm! It was nice to be downtown and see the FinCon audience be so enthusiastic about what they do.