Tips Tuesday – AI Images Course, Content Silo, Threads, Blogging vs Vlogging
Hello Happy Site Owners!
Tips this week include:
- How to get an early bird discount on the AI images course.
- Meta Threads hits 70 million signups in first 24 hours and why this is huge
- How to create multiple Threads accounts
- Content Silo workshop this week
- Google is rethinking robots.txt because of AI
- Should you have a shop on your WP site or use a 3rd party platform?
- WP will finally be dropping support for PHP 5.6
- What is the future of blogging in a video obsessed world?
AI Images Course Launch – Early Bird Discounts
I’m thrilled to announce that the AI Images course will be officially opening this week for early birds.
Get on the AIDiscoverHub News list to get your course link and your early bird discount.
There are 3 tutorial sections for:
- Midjourney
- Photoshop AI
- Leonardo.ai
There are already 40+ tutorials for the Midjourney section, and more coming every day.
Hence the early bird discount.
You will be able to take the first part of the course immediately and then as I release new tutorials.
Social Media Tips
Threads Hits 70 Million Signups in First 24 Hours
Threads is officially the fastest growing app in history, even breaking the record set by ChatGPT signups in the first day.
No matter what you think about Instagram and Twitter, the new Meta Threads is going to disrupt them both.
And I think the primary reason why is due to Twitter’s continued shenanigans.
It’s interesting to me that Meta tied this new app to Instagram as they almost seem like direct competitors to one another.
I believe Twitter folks will make heavy use of Threads.
But I’m wondering how folks who use IG regularly will treat it, especially those that were never active on Twitter anyway.
So, Threads made a big splash the first week. We’ll see if it has staying power.
How to Create Multiple Thread Accounts
I chose to make https://www.threads.net/@aidiscoverhub my main account to be active on with Threads, as I see it as a great way to keep on top of the mountain of conversation happening with AI.
I did bring over my other IG accounts, just to ensure they get connected and the username tied up. But I don’t intend to be very active with them there yet, including BlogAid.
So, you can have multiple accounts, but there is no easy way to switch between them yet.
See this post on how to do it, cumbersome as it is.
SEO Tips
Content Silo Workshop This Week
Creating an internal link structure on your site is one of the best SEO things you can do.
It helps your readers find more of your content and stay on your site longer far better than just throwing category links at them.
It also helps Google understand what you write about and gives them another hierarchy of links to follow on your site – and Google LOVES hierarchical link structures.
Yoast calls the top of your content silo your cornerstone content.
ProBlogger calls it your pillar content.
And that’s exactly what we’ll be covering in this week’s workshop.
It’s always a good time to jump into the DIY SEO course.
Google Rethinking robots.txt Because of AI
The robots.txt file was created 30 years ago. It’s basically an road map of your site that is written specifically for the bots that crawl it.
You may have heard the news that OpenAI removed the beta feature to search with Bing from ChatGPT Plus users because it was able to easily access paywall content. (See details on AIDiscoverHub.)
And that’s got Google rethinking robots.txt.
There are already ways for online publishers to flag their content so that AI bots can’t crawl it. But here’s the thing.
The directives in robots.txt are suggestions. Well-behaved bots abide by them. Ill-behaved bots, and even sometimes Google itself, does whatever it wants anyway.
So, I applaud Google for inviting AI folks to the table to discuss what needs to be done about this issue.
But the fact is, there is already plenty of hack around paywall tutorials out there now. Doing it through ChatGPT just made it a little easier for non-hackers to do.
What OpenAI and Google are trying to do is keep AI tools from automating the process to crawl current news and such.
As mentioned, this is the opening of a conversation about it.
Nothing is changing yet.
And I’ll keep you posted on when and if it does.
Product Tips
WP Shop or 3rd Party Shop?
For the last 3 years I’ve been encouraging my blogger clients to very seriously think about moving away from ads as their main revenue and get into making their own products, whether that be digital downloads, a course, or a member site for community and coaching.
But that also brings up the choice of whether to host it on your own WP site or use a 3rd party platform, especially for a shop.
Here are some things to consider.
Shopify is crawled by Google and Yoast has an add on to help with product listing SEO.
Shopify also has a $10/mo version where you don’t have a storefront there. But you do get the interface to make the listings and then the HTML code to add to a page on your site.
Etsy is crawled by Google and has loads of traffic. And there are lots of competitor analysis tools for it and your SEO there.
With all other platforms, including your own site, you’re on your own for ranking SEO and getting traffic via your own marketing efforts like social posts and videos. It’s a lot harder to get seen.
I hear folks say that niches are saturated on Shopify and Etsy and that they cost too much compared to doing it on your own site.
The fact is, you’re competing against them anyway, doing your own marketing anyway, but not getting their extra traffic or high SEO rank in general search.
I think having your own WP site for a course or membership is a great idea.
But for a shop of goods, including digital downloads, I think 3rd party platforms will outperform, as far as eyeballs and volume of sales.
WordPress Tips
WP Will Drop Support for PHP 5.6
I am so glad to see this news!
WP 6.3 will release in August. And they plan to drop support for PHP 5.6 – finally!!!
That version hasn’t been supported for years and it is a security liability for any host that still allows its use.
That’s a big reason me and my peeps are on Iridium Hosting, as they don’t allow unsupported PHP versions that put the servers and all sites on them at risk.
The current stable PHP version is 8.0 and WP and all modern themes and plugins are tested on it.
I helped all of my clients easily make the transition from 7.x a year ago. And I’ll help them transition to 8.2 when most everything has been tested with it.
PHP is the core coding language everything about your site is built on.
If you have no idea what PHP version you’re running, you could be in for some catastrophic breaks with old themes and plugins if your host also drops support for older PHP versions that are no longer supported.
Get Help That Keeps You Up to Date
If you want to work with someone who keeps you ahead of these curves and makes it easy for you to avoid issues, become a site audit client.
While everyone else is panicked about sudden changes they didn’t know were coming, and downtime on their site, my peeps are calmly going about their day because they had it done 6-12 months in advance – and got to do it the easy way with clear instructions and support.
Marketing Tips
The Future of Blogging in a Video Obsessed World
Yoast has an interesting article this week of what they think will become of blogging given the double whammy impact of videos and now AI.
I hope you read the whole article.
But the one thing I hope you pay attention to the most is this quote about the numbers:
“According to Web Tribunal, “there are more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites in the world. Their authors account for over 6 million blog posts daily, or over 2.5 billion annually.”
Writing a blog post is the easy part. Getting eyeballs to it is the work.
If you are of the mindset that you can just automate your marketing because of time constraints, and that you need to spend that time writing more blog posts, you’re not looking at the numbers right.
Marketing is the ticket.
You could write one blog post a year and spend the rest of your time promoting and do better than you could writing a blog post every day and putting your marketing on auto pilot.
Rethink your reliance on SEO too.
It is so much harder to rank on Google than to get a following on a video platform, especially since most of your competition is not doing video.
It’s also easier to get seen on a subset site, like Medium and Reddit.
Having a product gives you more places to be seen – and to make money directly for your work.
As the Yoast post says, the blogging landscape is changing.
Change with it.
