Tips Tuesday – 2022 Last Half Plans, Lasting Impact Blog Posts, PHP 8.0 Tests Coming

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Back half of the year plans
• Mindset consults to make more money
• PHP 8.0 tests coming this week
• ClassicPress is faltering
• Is misogyny in WordPress real?
• How women can thrive in WordPress
• Why caching plugins drop Photon support
• Yoast SEO premium now supports IndexNow and my upcoming tests
• Why I think Google will create its own ping system instead of using IndexNow
• How to build a blog that has lasting impact on its readers

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BlogAid Happenings

Welcome to Q3 and the last half of the year, y’all.

Are you where you want to be with your online journey this year?

I am, and I’m not, and I’ll explain that in a moment.

Site Services Update

We are running into August now for all new site service requests.

And please be sure to fill out the correct form for the service you need, including:

• General Contact for consults
• Site Audit for a new audit or checkup
• Migration for moving to better hosting
• Migration/Audit combo to save money on both services

These forms collect different info needed for that project and are what get you into my queue for that service.

Back Half of the Year Plans

The start of Q3 is a great time to evaluate where you are with plans for your site and marketing and such.

I tend to pile on big plans at the first of the year, as that’s when so many of my followers are available to work on things with their sites, and I want to have those new things available before spring, or at least before summer.

Digital Downloads

And this year my focus for the first half was to do a deep dive into helping y’all move from a blogging for ads mindset type site owner to a direct pay content creator.

About ¼ of my clients were already doing those things and I’m seeing another ¼ of my clients make great strides in that direction.

I also invited my trusted partners to provide workshops and guides to help us get our digital downloads humming along.

So, mission accomplished on that front.

Ecomm and Memberships

I also hoped to do a super deep dive into creating a store or membership site in the first half of the year too.

And I made great progress with the membership part of it until all the motivation juice to do it ran dry.

I was super excited about the fact that I could easily set BlogAid apart from the pack in helping clients jump into these things because I could bring things to the table that other agencies could not, like:

• Turnkey setup
• Site speed and security
• ADA compliance
• Theme layouts and content that converts

The more I hobnobbed with current membership site owners, the more I began to realize that they are just like the majority of bloggers – they just don’t really care about those things or the money they are leaving on the table due to what they don’t know is hurting them.

And just like bloggers, they work themselves silly being on some type of hamster wheel of pumping out content or ads or such to get new buyers.

The Key is To Build Tribe

When folks move from a passive blogging mindset to direct pay, the big hurdle is with changing their focus from one-off visitors and sales to building a tribe of loyal and engaged followers who also become repeat buyers.

Mindset Consults

That mindset switch is also the bulk of what I cover in my consults, especially for folks who want to run member sites.

All they think about is their content, and maybe their marketing.

The real money is in retention, including renewing subscriptions or repeat buyers.

Part of that mindset switch involves how they deliver the content too, including not giving away the archive store, or missing upsells or bundles and such.

Goals for Back Half of the Year

So, I’ve adjusted my 2022 goals to line it up with this reality.

My new goals for the last half are:

• Focus more time and attention on the tribes I already have.
• Promote what I cover in consults to encourage more of them and focus on each person’s individual needs, not just broad advice.
• Continue building my secret project that combines everything I know and teach, plus the new things I will be teaching as not only a new venture for myself, but also as proof of concept of all these things. 

Evergreen Content is WAY Easier

This new venture is evergreen content that has mass appeal, sort of like my woodworking site.

And if Heartwood Art taught me anything, it was that making that combo successful is WAY easier with evergreen, mass appeal content than getting those same mass eyeballs and clients could ever be with a service-oriented business. 

Plus, this will put me deeply into the same online game as my clients too, just like Heartwood Art did. 

But it is a niche site and everything points to money and there is money in everything about it.

What Are Your 2022 Back Half Goals?

I saw 2020 as the year that folks re-evaluated their lives. 

And I saw 2021 as the year folks made plans for big life changes.

2022 is playing out as the year folks enact those big life changes.

And like me, many folks are now taking this time to adjust what’s working and what’s not with making those changes.

So, how goes it with you?

What were your goals for the year and how do they need to be adjusted?

What boulder is in your way for getting those things done?

Do you need some help or just someone to talk it out with?

I’m here for you!! Let’s chat and get you on your way!

Or, let me know what you’d like to see covered on BlogAid that would help you meet your goals.

BlogAid Village Happenings

PHP 8.0 Tests

As I mentioned last week, I’m putting together tutorials and checklists for my BB Hubbers, who are my DIY Site Audit clients, and Webmaster Training folks to help us make the switch to PHP 8.0.

I’ll be releasing those later this week and we’ll start our testing next week.

I suspect it will take us through the end of July to finish documenting what we find, including plugins that aren’t PHP 8 ready.

This way we’ll have enough time to nudge the developers to get their stuff fixed before we all have to switch to PHP 8.0 in November.

That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips and news.

WordPress Tips

The tips this week are a little off the beaten path, but I feel like they are relevant to share given the current political climate of being a WP site owner or someone who works in the WP ecosystem.

ClassicPress is Faltering

Last week I mentioned that the way Gutenberg was released in 2018 caused a major split in the WordPress community.

A big part of that split was the creation of ClassicPress, which is a fork of WordPress based on 4.9 that does not have the block editor or the new FSE theme blocks.

After 4 years of trying to run ClassicPress as an open and committee driven project, they are nearly broke and the leadership has resigned.

Plus, they just can’t get devs to show up and do the work for free.

Hmm, imagine that.

WordPress has a LOT of corporate sponsorship. Businesses that make money in the WP ecosystem give back by sponsoring devs to work on WP. That includes hosts like Bluehost and plugin companies like Yoast.

Plus, any dev who wants to contribute to WP for free can do so, and there are plenty of them. It’s how they learn and get recognition in the community.

ClassicPress has relied mainly on fundraising and free dev work.

And even with everyone being able to vote on what’s done, and a committee to provide leadership, there are egos and divisions and folks who just don’t do what they said they would do.

And I think this speaks volumes about the hubris in the dev community in general when you put the leadership of software in their hands.

This is also why privately held site-related businesses are thriving and leaving WP in the dust as far as getting out releases that are in touch with what end users want.

So, we’ll see what impact the faltering of ClassicPress has on the whole of WP and where those enterprise-level devs turn their attention.

Misogyny in WordPress is Real

A bombshell of an article was published on Post Status this past week about how women in coding are treated badly.

I believe this is true of the tech world in general.

The author cited a few examples but went on to say as bad as these are, the WP community is not as bad as some other tech-related sectors. And I can attest to that fact.

My entire working life has been in fields that are primarily populated by men.

I can honestly say that I was never hired as a token and I’ve never been discriminated against due to gender either.

I credit that to being someone who actually knows their field and gets results, and maybe giving off a no-nonsense vibe coupled with a vibe of someone you’d like to go have a beer with or go fishing with. I ran with the pack and got treated as such.

With site stuff, I’ve been in WP and SEO Facebook groups that were heavily testosterone laden and disrespectful with all manner of inappropriate sexual and misogynistic declarations. Most were not targeted to any single person, just generic objectification and degradation of women in general. 

When several women in the group spoke up about it, that stopped. And women have been involved in the administration of those groups since too, as they were recognized as folks who knew their business.

The only time I have been personally disrespected by a WP group was during that whole WP Performance Team hoohaa. And that was not gender related. It was just the hubris of the devs.

I will also say that the WordPress Foundation has worked hard to ensure that it is a globally inclusive environment where all are welcome. And they have a very strict code of conduct that is enforced at all WP gatherings, including local Meetups and such.

So, if you read posts like this, and you are a woman in WP, don’t let it scare you off.

Jerks can be found everywhere. And the women who speak up about it are being heard. And things are changing.

How Women Can Thrive in WordPress

If you are a woman in WordPress, most definitely go see this PressThis interview with Sam Munoz where she talks about her online journey and how she has helped shape the community to be more inclusive.

Plus, she shares the importance of all of us speaking so we can all hear different perspectives that move us forward.

Image Tips

Caching Plugins Drop Photon Support

None of my clients use any type of plugin for image optimization.

All of them now properly optimize prior to upload.

During their first site audit fixes, we got rid of the plugin they were using plus all of the orphaned double image load it stored. You need tech help with that, as just deleting the plugin leaves all of those extra images on your limited hosting disk space.

Some folks were also using the plugin’s CDN service called Photon.

That service is actually provided by Automattic and is supposed to be only used by those who are on WP.com hosting and who use JetPack.

Automattic has now enforced that policy and are making other caching plugins, like WP Fastest Cache, drop inclusion of that service.

None of my clients have anything to worry about with this.

But, if you are not a client yet, and you have this integration setup, you most definitely need to check into what you should do about it.

SEO Tips

Yoast SEO Premium Supports IndexNow

Okay, I’m a little shocked by this change of heart by Team Yoast.

When Microsoft’s IndexNow first came out, both me and Yoast said no way, don’t use it.

Microsoft simply does not have the infrastructure to crawl the web for its Bing search engine like Google has to crawl for its search engine.

So, Microsoft made a way for us to ping it when we have new content – and that’s what IndexNow is all about.

But, the way they introduced it required a dev to hook up the API.

They changed that by introducing a dedicated plugin. And they also made their API available to integrate with SEO plugins and even at the Cloudflare level.

But, it was still horribly inefficient with the way it did the crawl. Microsoft changed that and now have a single API connection that is efficient.

And that seems to be the only issue with it that was fixed enough to cause Yoast to integrate it into the premium version of their SEO plugin.

But, they didn’t say a thing about the other serious issue with IndexNow, and it’s likely the main reason Google is still holding out on adopting it.

IndexNow crawls things for indexing that it shouldn’t. You know – the things we have marked in our SEO plugin to not crawl or index.

When I first read Joost de Valk mention this integration in his personal blog, he went on and on about how it would be great if crawl bots only paid attention to what’s in our XML sitemap. That is the thing that our noindex directives impact. When we turn on that setting, that URL comes out of our XML sitemap.

But, that’s not how bots crawl.

They use our sitemap as a directory, but they go on to crawl whatever they want, including those URLs that we have marked noindex, if they want to see it. They just usually honor that directive and leave it out of search.

My Test of IndexNow

So, here’s what I’m testing.

I’m going to turn on IndexNow at the Cloudflare level.

Then I’m going to publish a new page that is marked noindex.

And then I’m going to monitor Bing Webmaster Tools to see if that page gets crawled and then see if it gets indexed.

• Crawled means seen by the bots. 
• Indexed means that the search engine deems that content worthy of being displayed in search results. 
• Ranked means how high or low it shows in those results.

Once we have those results, then I may get the premium version of Yoast SEO, turn off IndexNow at Cloudflare, and create another page and monitor it.

This way we’ll know if Yoast is keeping the page from being submitted to the search engine or not with either method.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Google Will Likely Create Its Own Ping

My other prediction is that Google is holding out on incorporating IndexNow because they are building their own ping system.

They do that copycat move with everything else that comes along, like with image optimization. They couldn’t just support what was already out there. Noooo. They came out with WebP, which only Chrome supported for over 4 years.

The IndexNow way of doing things, if it works well, is far, far, far more efficient.

But there is no way I see Google using anything made by Microsoft, even if it’s better for the web and the planet.

Hubris of devs.

Blogging Tips

How to Build a Blog That Has Lasting Impact on Its Readers

Let’s circle back to the mindset of building tribe.

ProBlogger has a nice post this week that dives deep into these 3 questions:

• Who are your readers?
• What do they need?
• How will they change as a result of reading your blog?

Last week I shared my business mantra of “I’m in business to make money helping people – in that order.”

Well, these 3 questions cover the “helping people” part.

And I think they are questions that you need to ask yourself at least once a year because things change with your online adventure.

Maybe you started out with a focus for your site and then discovered that something else on it is what folks really latched on to. 

You’d be amazed how much that happens.

Or, maybe you just weren’t very clear at the beginning with all the ways you could monetize your content.

I think I have a really good answer for the question, “What do they need” regardless of what topic you cover.

Folks need two things:

• An answer to a question
• Something that makes their lives easier

And here’s something to think about with these two things.

You answer the question to get on their radar.

And then you sell something to them that makes their life easier.

Now when you think you about your blog posts, maybe you won’t just create passive content.

Maybe you will deliberately create content to attract eyeballs.

And then create content that moves folks into your funnel more directly.

And then deliver content that ensures they hang around and buy more things from you.

That’s what tribe building is all about in a nutshell.

Has this sparked a new perspective for you?

Let us know here in the blog comments, or anywhere you see this post online.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

Thanks for sharing this podcast and post with your blogging buddies, and for leaving comments and reviews too.

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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.