Marketing Goo, WP Tavern and My Interview with Marcus Couch WPCP: 021
You know you’re on the right path when someone reaches out to you to encourage what you’re doing… even when it’s something you’ve just started and you don’t even know them.
That was my first interaction with Marcus Couch. Not too shabby, huh?
Marcus is one of those natural ‘Go Givers’ (book by Bob Burg) and an amazing community builder (I almost used the word connector as opposed to community builder but he really does so much more than connect people). After one of my first podcasts had aired I received a tweet from Marcus saying he liked the show & to keep it up (I swear I took a screenshot of the tweet but for the life of me I can’t find it. 🙁 Note to self: keep better track of this stuff!)).
Marcus has had a pretty amazing career and his journey to WordPress is a little different than some of my previous guests (of course everyone’s journey is interesting… it’s one of my favorite elements to the interviews) in that it was due to having a podcast in 2004 that he found WordPress! I know I didn’t even know what a podcast was in 2004. Just sayin. :-)His background was in graphics and technology, which then led him to music and doing artwork for album covers (I asked him if there were any bands he worked with that we would know… and due to having grown up in suburbia and being a high school student in the late 80’s you can probably guess my knowledge of rock music was pretty much Van Halen, Def Leppard, Poison.. you get the picture, but he did share a band with me).
When he found how easy it was to produce an RSS feed with WordPress for his podcast (prior to that he had been hard coding it) he jumped on it right away. Once he put the podcast on WordPress it skyrocketed the show to the point where he had a weekly feature broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio! I told him when I received his bio that I had no idea he was such a ‘celebrity’. From being the marketing director of Entrepreneur.com to working with companies like Absolut Vodka, Footlocker and Godaddy ( to name a few), Marcus has gained been around the ‘marketing block’ so to speak (was that a completely goofy sentence?). The work he does with clients today is based on getting them results. He shares a really cool story about an experiment he’s running which is creating some solid proof for his skills when it comes to results for his clients.
Community Builder Extraordinaire
Marcus and The WordPress Community
When Marcus tweeted to me about my podcast he let me know he was co-host of the WordPress Plugins A-Z podcast with John Overall. They review the latest & greatest WordPress plugins, both bringing to the table a few plugins they’ve each found in the WordPress plugin repository (*listen to the episode to hear how many plugins are added to the repository daily!). I love how Marcus connected with John to join him on the podcast – he simply offered (after hearing the other co-host was leaving the show). Novel idea, huh?
TIP!
Without a doubt, one of my biggest ‘takeaways’ from this interview with Marcus was that it’s really not as hard as we think to reach out and connect with people. Marcus jumped into the WordPress community with both feet (for both the podcast and WP Tavern, but I’ll get to that in a minute) and even received some snarky comments from people. But it didn’t stop him. Fortunately for us he stuck with it and continues to give back to the community.
Just this past June Marcus joined WPTavern.com where he writes about, surprise, WordPress plugins. I have to tell you that I must have asked or commented a few times about when he actually sleeps! I find myself time challenged just to keep up with this site, content and clients, let alone a few sites!
Marcus is stellar at bringing people together and pooling resources and sites into one place to better serve his audience, which of course led to another new WordPress venture called WordPress Radio! WPR.fm (like the call letters for a radio station. yea, he’s clever like that!). He’s pulling together different WordPress podcasts (my show included… Thank You Marcus) and audio content into one place. This is still a fairly new venture and coming together quite nicely if I do say so myself. I’m excited to see where this goes and have offered to help with the site in any way I can (yes, I totally caught that I just mentioned my ‘time challenge’).
Whether it’s on one of his own web properties or one of the many places he contributes to the WordPress community, be sure to connect with Marcus and get to know him. You won’t be disappointed.
Links from this episode
Marcus Couch
Marketing Goo
WPR.fm
