On Tuesday, July 31, 2018, Affiliate Summit East at the New York Marriott Marquis closed with a keynote built around a simple format: Ask the WordPress Experts. Our founder, Brian Messenlehner, and David Vogelpohl gave the closing keynote, a bigger version of their popular Ask the WordPress Experts session from earlier Affiliate Summits. Brian shared the talk under the title Advanced Strategies for Common WordPress Questions.
How it got to the keynote stage
The keynote grew out of a run of sessions. Brian and David presented DIY Tips for Building Big Things with WordPress at Affiliate Summit West 2017 in Las Vegas, then Automate Your Super Affiliate Empire with WordPress at Affiliate Summit East 2017. The question and answer format proved so popular that the organizers gave it a keynote slot in 2018, with the speakers' bios on the keynote page of the printed program.
Why a Q and A works
Affiliate publishers do not need a lecture on what WordPress is. They need answers to the specific problems in front of them. An open format lets the room drive the agenda, and the questions at events like this tend to fall into a few groups:
- Speed. How do I make a large, plugin heavy site fast again?
- Scale. How do I manage thousands of product or offer pages without doing it all by hand?
- Security. How do I keep a high value site from getting hacked?
- Growth. How do I add memberships, email capture or an app without rebuilding?
- Hosting. When does cheap hosting start costing more than it saves?
The advanced strategies behind those answers are the same ones we use at AlphaWeb: profile before optimizing, cache aggressively, automate imports with care, lock down logins and the REST API, keep plugins lean, and put the site on hosting built for WordPress.
What came after
Brian returned to Affiliate Summit East in August 2019, again at the New York Marriott Marquis, for a talk about affiliate marketing and WordPress, and to Affiliate Summit West in 2019 and 2020. Over the same years, AppPresser, the WordPress mobile app platform Brian owns, kept growing, and in 2024 it powered an Affiliate Summit event app with RSVP, QR code tickets and BuddyPress social features.
What it means for clients
A keynote is a nice moment, but the value is in the years of real questions behind it. When a client brings AlphaWeb a slow, fragile or overgrown WordPress site, chances are we have heard the question before and have a tested answer. We audit, fix the biggest issues first, then build the site the business actually needs.
If you have a WordPress question that nobody has answered well, ask the experts at AlphaWeb.
At a glance
- Event: Affiliate Summit East 2018
- Date: Tuesday, July 31, 2018
- Venue: New York Marriott Marquis
- Session: Ask the WordPress Experts closing keynote, shared as Advanced Strategies for Common WordPress Questions
- Presenters: Brian Messenlehner and David Vogelpohl
Related: Affiliate Summit West 2017: DIY Tips for Building Big Things with WordPress, Affiliate Summit Europe 2018: Talking WordPress in London and Webinar: 12 Fresh Strategies Super Affiliates Use to Optimize Their WordPress Sites.
Have a question about this event or a project like the ones mentioned here? Reach out to AlphaWeb and Brian will be glad to talk it through. We are always happy to compare notes on WordPress, mobile apps and migrations.
Photo gallery
