309 - Bridget Willard on WordPress, Why Twitter is the Best, and Relationship Marketing

Today’s guest is Bridget Willard. Bridget is a teacher, marketer, and social media specialist. She’s also the co-founder of the Women Who WP Meetup. Bridget specializes in helping her clients with relationship marketing.

Though Bridget is a teacher by trade, she became a self-taught marketer early on, which lead her down a winding path that eventually brought her to working with WordPress developers.

Bridget’s Chronic Fatigue Syndrome made it challenging to take on most jobs, so when she learned about WordPress and Twitter, she felt it was the perfect fit. Twitter opened her world to being able to create real relationships with people online, people she would have never had access to otherwise.

Recently, Bridget’s husband passed away and it reaffirmed for her that people and relationships are what matter most in this life, so she strives to connect people and strengthen those bonds everyday.

As a freelancer and remote worker, she found it was too easy to simply stay inside by herself all of the time, which lead her to co-founding the Women Who WP Meetup. She also began speaking at WordCamps and is very active in the WordPress community.

You can currently find Bridget at Women Who WP meetups, or speaking at a WordCamp near you. And, of course, you can find her on Twitter.

In this episode Bridget talks about:

• Changing career paths and taking opportunities as they come.
• Creating opportunities by building real relationships with people both in person and online.
• How Twitter is a gold mine for listening to customers and building relationships because they tell you what’s important to them through their tweets.
• Growing a client base by truly listening to what people need.

Main Takeaways

• You can get great opportunities from building relationships with people, but you have to truly care about those people or it doesn’t work.
• Automation is an important tool for marketers, but if you have a set it and forget it mentality, there’s a lot you’re going to miss, especially if you’re trying to build relationships.
• You can’t measure the things that matter most in life, so sometimes it’s not about engagement or ROI, it’s about people.
• Just because you don’t have all of the clients you need or are making the money you need doing the thing you love doesn’t make you a failure. You are only a failure when you quit.

Important Mentions in this Episode

• Women Who WP Meetup
• WordCamp
• Bridget Willard on Twitter