Tips Tuesday – AI Scraper Bot Workshop, More Shopify Stores, Major Facebook Change

Tips this week include:

• More consults for store and member sites
• Meeting with Shopify store owners
• Why we’re hitting Shopify and Printify at exactly the right time
• What’s new in WordPress 6.7 – video tour
• Major Facebook profile changes
• New VPN with dedicated IP tutorial
• Update to the wp-config file settings in WordPress
• New AI scraper bot workshop coming to DIY SEO course
• GA4 Conversions tutorials coming
• Why I’m using the Brave browser more

BlogAid Tips

I’ve been putting in some super long hours at my desk for the past 2 months. But it’s all good! 

Taking care of my clients and learning and teaching new things is my happy place.

Covered Up in Client Work

I send reminders toward the end of the month when site audit checkups are due. That’s because some folks want to start right away and others need to delay a week or so, and that helps me make my schedule.

Well, EVERYBODY wanted to start right away for November!!!! That includes the full, annual audit checkup folks as well as the new, quicker 6 month checkup folks.

Client work is my top priority, so I’ve rearranged my tutorial making schedule a bit.

More Consults – New Stores and Member Sites

Plus, several of my clients are making their 2025 plans and came in for a consult to chat it out.

They have a much clearer picture of what they will be offering and what platforms best suit the delivery and ease of managing.

Some setups require a lot more admin and management time than with others. You have to factor that into your time and money budget too, not just creating the product or course.

And you NEVER want to pick a platform before you know what you are going to deliver and how you plan to retain folks – EVER. That’s the costliest mistake I see new store and course owners make.

You first decide what you are going to deliver, how to do a feeder program, how to upsell it, and how to retain your customers. The platform needs to have a way to provide you with all of that.

In just 1 hour, my consult clients get perfect clarity on all of it, and we find 4x more money in what they want to offer than they originally thought.

And then they get perfect clarity on the part the platform plays and which ones will make it easy or hard to do.

After one such consult, my client said I’m like the ChatGPT of money making ideas!!! 

Yep!!

Let me help you make the most, and save the most with your new project :-) 

Meetings with Shopify Store Owners

A couple of my clients set up their Shopify stores earlier this year.

They were so nice to make time to meet with me this past week because I had all kinds of questions and checks, especially about the things you can do with a Basic Shopify plan that you may not be able to do on the Starter plan.

And I learned about ways the Starter plan is not as limited as I thought.

Wow!!!! That was so helpful!!!!!!

And they picked up a couple of tips from me too.

Plus, Shopify changes by launching new features or improved ways of doing things. And some of them are so new that I had not heard of them yet. You need to have a store already to see those new things. So, learning about them was a real bonus and I will be including them in my courses.

Hitting This Right On Time

Earlier this year, Shopify went through a huge code makeover. 

They are coming out of their Liquid coding language and moving into standard CSS and JS.

It’s called Shopify 2.0.

And honestly, I’m glad that I’m coming in after that change because it is massive, and it makes everything better.

Same with Printify. 

Their new pop-up store was launched in beta the week I got in. And they’ve already made several improvements to it.

Plus, Printify just partnered with Printiful, who was their main competition.

The companies will stay separate for now, but I can see everything moving over to the way Printify does things.

I am VERY excited about all of the new integrations and partnerships that Printify is making and I believe they are going to give Amazon and Etsy a run for their money this coming year.

I would not be at all surprised to see them open a marketplace, which is the main thing Shopify is missing that the others have.

Right now may be the best time of all to get into making merch!

Get on the eCreators Hub Newsletter List

If you are at all interested in e-commerce, subscribe to the eCreators Hub Newsletter.

That’s where I’ll be sharing more in-depth news about what’s happening in the e-comm world.

And I’ll be sharing what’s coming from ECH with new courses and guides too.

And if you’re in a course on ECH, you’re in that email list, but not the newsletter. So be sure to subscribe.

WordPress Tips

What’s New in WP 6.7

I sent an email out to all BlogAid News subscribers on Sunday with info on why we most definitely won’t be the first to update when WP 6.7 rolls out today.

Visit this post to see a video tour of all the Gute styling features.

I can’t imagine what has taken WP so long to catch up to the styling features that block plugins have had for years. But I’m so glad they are finally focusing on that!!!

Social Media Tips

Major Facebook Profile Changes

Y’all need to read this now.

Facebook is about to remove the option to have public followers on your personal profile.

You need to decide if you want to set it to Professional Mode to combine friends and followers into one audience.

See her FB post about it for more info – but also read this clarification post too because we don’t have a deadline of Nov 14 for everyone.

Security Tips

New VPN with Dedicated IP Tutorial

As you’ve heard me report all year long, the cyber security situation is getting worse every month.

Cloudflare has been right on top of it with new settings and features that we’ve been configuring as they roll out.

But they have also had to tighten their IP checks on incoming traffic, especially with regard to anything trying to hit our login page, as we now have special rules for that.

So, it’s imperative that everyone keep their IP whitelisted and up to date in the Allow rules.

But many folks work off the wifi side of their router, and that IP rotates more frequently than the hard line connection. And some of my peeps work from multiple locations, so they have several IPs.

To solve the problem of having to constantly update the IP address at Cloudflare, you can get a VPN with a Dedicated IP and list just that one.

I made a new tutorial for my Hub clients on how to do it.

The new habit they’ll need to start is turning that dedicated IP on before they log into their sites and then off after they finish working on it.

You don’t want to use that dedicated one for any other web surfing, as it gets tracked, and then sold on the black market, and then flagged. And then it is no good.

If that happens, you can choose a new dedicated IP from the VPN and whitelist that one. So, not the end of the world, but better if you can remember to use it properly.

Webmaster Tips

Update to wp-config File

There has been a change to one of the core WP files. I’m not sure when it changed, but it was within this year. 

The change involves a directive for the path that all links use. That’s not just your permalinks. It’s for plugins and themes and other things too, as they have files spread out all over.

In site audits, I’m starting to see errors about that path not being up to date, even though nothing shows broken on the site yet.

But, that won’t hold and things will break eventually.

So, I’ve updated the wp-config file tutorial in the Webmaster Training course for it. That’s the second update to that file this year. 

And I’m updating all of my site audit Hub clients as they come through for their check ups too. This is just one more reason we went to the quick 6 month checkups, so I can make these updates as they roll out.

Get an Audit

Y’all, things change all of the time on the back side of your site and with hosting servers!!!

This is why it is so critically important to do a full site audit at least once a year and/or to get maintenance with someone who keeps up with these changes.

I offer a reduced rate to do live audits with my webmasters so they can be sure nothing is getting missed.

I 100% guarantee that 99% of folks who offer $50-$100 maintenance packages are not keeping up, much less ahead with things like this. They only address them after there is a break.

Not my peeps!!!!!! And not the peeps with the folks in my webmaster training!!!!

So, if you are doing your own maintenance and you think you have it covered by just keeping plugins and such updated, you’re missing a lot!!!!

And if you’re paying someone, send them to my Webmaster Training site and ensure they know how to do everything in those tutorial lists.

And if you want to be doubly sure, get an audit and I’ll show you what they are missing that is putting your site at risk.

SEO Tips

New AI Scraper Bot Workshop Coming

We now have a way to see which AI scraper bots are hitting our sites, and exactly what content they are accessing.

I’m putting together a new workshop for the DIY SEO course right now for it.

If you’re in the course, look for an email soon on how to see these bot hits and what info to start tracking.

I’ll be getting together live with folks who are seeing specific kinds of hits and making more tutorials for several courses, including the DIY SEO course and EZ Metrix and I may expand the GA4 tutorials I had planned for the Shopify Starter plan for digital downloads course to be in these 2 other courses as well.

FYI, I sent an email with a big discount code for the DIY SEO course to BlogAid News subscribers on Monday. Look for that and get in on these AI traffic checks.

GA4 Conversions Tutorials Coming

I had a look at the conversion tutorials I had in my GA4 course a few years ago and compared the info in them to the way Google has changed how we do conversions.

It’s all different now.

So, I’ll need to start from scratch on the new tutorials, and that’s going to take a little longer than I had hoped.

But I definitely want to try to get them out before the end of the year so we can start tracking them at the start of 2025.

Using the Brave Browser More

I use Chrome for logging into my Workspace account, where I run my whole back office. I always have 3 tabs open for email, my to do list, and my calendar.

But I use Firefox for all of my web work. And that gives me an extra security buffer to be in a different browser for all those logins. 

I don’t know what’s up with FireFox. I’ve used it forever, and it was the best browser for web work. But it has been a PITA all year with how they have done their security. It’s too tight and things just don’t function well.

So, I’ve been using the Brave browser more often now.

It was super easy to import all of my bookmarks and such from Firefox.

I was missing the Firefox extensions I use often, but my Webmaster peeps gave me suggestions for the Chrome equivalent extensions this week, as Brave is also Chromium based.

If you’re curious, Chromium is an open source project that provides the framework for several browsers, including Google’s Chrome.

Which browser are you using these days?

Anything other than Safari is better, so don’t use that on any device. You’re not seeing the web as it was meant to be.