• MaAnna Stephenson
• WordPressing since 2006
• WP Level: Expert User, WordCamp Nashville 2013 Speaker
• BlogAid

MaAnna Stephenson found WordPress when she needed to create a blog for her book site, which she had built in static HTML.

Within two years, she launched BlogAid, offering classes and consulting to help non-Geeks learn the ways of WordPress. She’s created a vast video tutorial library, her “Tips Tuesday” podcast is hugely popular and, if Google+ means anything to you, more than 3,600 people have MaAnna in their “circles.” Among them are other well-known WordPress and G+ experts.

“Learning WordPress changed everything about my business. I moved away from being a coder and into the User and management side of owning a site,” she says. “I change my business model at least once a year to keep up with the changes in tech, online business trends, and WordPress itself.”

She built BlogAid while working fulltime as a field service electronics engineer. As WordPress grew up, so did BlogAid and earlier this year MaAnna left the “day job” to devote all her attention to her own business.

Often clients come to BlogAid after going it alone. MaAnna trains other people to create and run successful websites, which includes learning to harness the power of WordPress itself, SEO, content marketing, and conversion.

“There is no other field of endeavor where folks think they can make money overnight without having some idea of how to do it. It costs way more, in both time and money, to try to do things on the cheap and figure it out as you go. Those that invest in their online business make more money than those that don’t. That’s the bottom line.

The old coder in MaAnna relishes getting early looks at WordPress updates as a beta tester and appreciates that the WP team develops at a plugin level first before adding new functionality to the core.

“I believe that will be the future of WordPress and give it the ability to grow in different directions for different business models,” she says.

As part of the build-up to WordCamp Nashville 2014 Faces of WordPress will highlight members of Middle Tennessee’s great – and growing – WordPress community. We will feature WP users at all levels, newbies to advanced developers. And mark your calendar. This year’s Big Event is May 3, 2014.