Tips Tuesday – August Core Update, Google Trends, Protect Your Site
Tips this week include:
- There are only 4 web jobs
- What kind of product farmer are you?
- Ad spend is not the only way to market
- Listen to your peeps
- Social security numbers stolen
- Protect yourself online
- Super Rollback plugin
- WP Playground has a new offline mode
- Latest AI Overviews case study
- Google August Core Update could revive rankings
- Some sites showing signs of recovery
- What’s in the Google Trends update
BlogAid Happenings
This past week I’ve been splitting my days between client work, creating tutorials for the new Google Docs Digital Downloads course, and refreshing my coding skills so that I can do a deep dive into the backside of Shopify.
I’ve also been digging into the new features in GA4 and Search Console to add new tutorials and workshops to EZ Metrix and the DIY SEO course.
And I’ve had chats with a couple of my clients who have successfully moved from primarily being bloggers and into being store owners. We discussed their journey and what they needed to learn and do to make that transition and what they are doing differently now, plus what they need to keep making more money with their ecomm venture. (Ecomm includes products, memberships, and courses.)
There are Only 4 Web Jobs
There are a lot of ways for me to help folks be successful with their online venture.
And in my research to find where I need to point my efforts to ensure the success of both my business and that of my clients, I realized that everything about making money online falls into 4 categories.
They are:
- Dev – which is the technical side of sites
- Design – which is for themes as well as graphic elements for promotion
- Marketing – which covers the content for the site, newsletter, social media, and video
- Training – which includes courses, consults, and coaching
DIY site owners start out doing every bit of the first 3 that they can and only hire out the parts of it that they can’t figure out themselves or by spending money on the last one for training. And that training can be a substantial upfront cost.
By contrast, ecomm folks hire out as much of the first 3 things as they can, and spend little to nothing on training. The only part of it that they may be hands on with is the marketing. And even that is focused on creating the product, not the scheduled promotion of it.
What Kind of Product Farmer Are You?
Let’s consider how Farmer Brown makes money.
He has to buy at least these things up front:
- Land
- Seed
- Tractor
Then he has to work it like crazy to grow and harvest.
Keep in mind that he has not been paid a thing up to this point.
And this much covers the Dev and Design parts.
Now it’s time to do the promotion part of Marketing.
Did he invest enough to:
- Feed his family and have a little left over to sell to the neighbors, meaning just the folks he can already connect with through a newsletter or such. Blogging falls into this category.
- Load up the bed of his truck and park on a busy street to catch the eyes of those passing by, meaning his own social media and paid ads. This is a beast you have to keep feeding to sell in small spurts.
- Load up an 18-wheeler to sell to local grocery stores, meaning this is a contract that he can fulfill year over year with guaranteed pay. Memberships and courses fall into this type of recurring revenue.
No matter what you do as an online business owner, you are producing a product for sale.
And you have to spend money to make money.
To me, the difference between a DIY site owner and an ecomm site owner comes down to how much they are willing to spend up front based on the outcome they want to have.
That spend is in both time and money.
An ecomm site owner may create just one product. But they spend way more time and money in marketing the beegeebees out of it.
A DIY site owner, specifically a blogger, stays on the content creation hamster wheel because producing more product is the only way to make more money.
Ad Spend Is Not the Only Way to Market
I know you’ve seen ads from folks who claim to have made 6-figure revenue in 2 weeks. And if you buy their book or program, they’ll teach you how to do the same.
What they don’t tell you about is the 5-figure ad spend they did to make that 6-figure launch income.
The real question to ask is not how much total revenue they made, but how much net income they had after all of the expenditures to market the thing.
That could be $100k in revenue with a $25k ad spend or an $80k ad spend. The net income difference between those 2 is significant, as is the upfront money you need for the ads.
While ads can be a very effective if you know how to create and run them, they can also be an expensive way to market.
There are other ways to get the word out to a receptive audience about your product.
I made 5-figure months with the GA4 courses and I only marketed it to my newsletter subscribers and I made it available for affiliate sales. They told everybody they knew about the course.
For the AI Images for Profit, I made strategic alliances with other folks who had an AI program, and again, I made it available for affiliate sales.
I’ll be doing the exact same thing for eCreators Hub courses.
Listen to Your Peeps
Networking and forming strategic alliances can lead to sales from a warm audience far better than Facebook ads throwing things at a ‘look alike’ type audience.
And all it costs is time to do that networking and build those relationships.
That includes building relationships with your current followers and/or clients.
ALL of my business ideas come from chats with my followers and clients, as well as my strategic partners.
I know what they are struggling with and what they need and where I can help them.
Do you ever offer opportunities for your peeps to give you feedback and input?
Send a survey. There are free ones available like Google Forms and Survey Monkey.
You may only hear from 10% of your folks. But those are the people who will be most interested in your offers too.
Let Me Hear From You
Do these business mindset tips help you or give you ideas about ways you can improve your business?
What are you struggling with?
What could you use help with?
I know time is always a concern. Are you spending too much time creating product and not enough time marketing it or building strategic alliances?
Leave us a comment here on the blog or anywhere you see this post online. You can also simply reply to this email and let me know too.
Security Tips
Social Security Numbers Stolen
Last week it was revealed in a class action lawsuit that there was a major security breach of a company that holds data for agencies that do background and other law-enforcement checks and such. And the hackers got 2.9 billion social security numbers.
There are sites available to check if yours was stolen, but it’s best to use services that check for more than this breach.
Some folks are finding that their info has been stolen 5-15 times.
Years ago the government mandated that all 3 major credit reporting agencies make a way for folks to freeze their credit for free. All you need to do is call the numbers listed for them and no one can apply for credit using your credentials until you remove that freeze.
If you haven’t already done this, then let this be your wake up call to do it.
Here’s a quick video with details from someone I’ve been following for a few years.
Protect Yourself Online
All this year you’ve heard me say how much worse the cybersecurity situation has gotten.
Y’all, it’s really BAD.
You MUST take your online security seriously.
- Use a unique password that is 16 mixed characters for every online account you have.
- Rotate those passwords at least once a year.
- NEVER click a link in an email that takes you to the login of an account. Go to the vendor site directly and log in from there.
- Log out of every account when you are finished with it. Don’t just close the browser.
- NEVER be logged into anything in the same browser you’re using to check emails.
- Add a recovery email and/or phone number to every account that offers it.
As for 2-step factor authentication (2FA), many vendors with logins have taken to issuing a token via email or SMS to verify your login, whether you turn on 2FA or not. Those tokens last for up to 30 minutes compared to 60 seconds for those issued on a 2FA app. (I’m not a big fan of the 2FA app or TXT message way of doing things. See this for why.)
The point is, your online security, including that of your site, starts with you.
It’s not just about how much me or any other entity can set up firewalls to protect you.
If you do something to compromise your computer/device and then log into your site, then you can send malware or login-copy code or such right to your site.
It’s a LOT more of a hassle to get hacked than to take preventative measures.
Get a Site Audit
A big focus of a site audit is security.
Everything about site security impacts speed and site functionality.
If you are one of the folks who reads Tips Tuesday but have not had a site audit, you are gambling with your site.
You are also losing money.
There is NOTHING that is set-it-and-forget-it with site security.
There is NO security plugin that protects your site adequately, and ALL of them chew up more hosting resources doing the little bit of protection they offer.
If you’ve had an audit in the past, but you are no longer in the Hub, then you’re missing all of the changes that come throughout the year as well as the global changes that get updated during your annual audit checkups.
Now is the time to request your audit. It costs far less than fixing a hacked site.
And the peace of mind it will give you is beyond any dollar amount.
Webmaster Tips
Super Rollback Plugin
For webmasters who maintain sites for others, you may want to check out the unlimited license for the new Super Rollback plugin.
What differentiates it from WP Rollback that we love and have used for years is that it can also rollback premium plugins.
It literally holds a copy of the previous version before doing an update.
Of course, your backup has all the previous version content too, but sometimes that includes the plugin and wp-content > uploads folder, plus the database. And, restoring from a backup is risky and should only be done as a last resort.
I’m not going to advocate purchasing this plugin for regular site owners, as WP Rollback suits our needs.
But, for webmasters who maintain sites, the unlimited license is cheap insurance against the time it would take to fix or restore a site from a faulty premium plugin update.
WP Playground Has New Offline Mode
Playground is a great alternative to spinning up a dev site just to test a new plugin or theme.
And now they have made an offline version available, which is especially nice for devs and designers who prefer to work locally anyway.
It also has PWA support.
There are a few caveats with it, so be sure to read the full announcement before you install it. They also have instructions for how to get it too.
SEO Tips
Latest AI Overviews Case Study
The nice folks over at Search Engine Ranking have been doing case studies on what type of queries result in triggering an AI Overview on Google and what type of info and links show up in them.
AI Overviews (AIO) are Google’s way of basically showing you summaries of the top 10 links that would normally appear on page 1 or in Featured Snippets anyway.
Here’s the latest AI Overviews case study.
It’s definitely worth reading the summary near the top of the article.
And here are a couple of things in it I found interesting.
- Youtube.com (linked 1,346 times), Linkedin.com (linked 1,091 times), and Healthline.com (linked 1,091 times) are the top-linked websites in AIOs.
- The current dataset shows zero Reddit and Quora links in AIOs.
If there is a video that matches the query intent, no matter what platform the video is on, it will show up in Google Search one way or another.
If you have any way to make a video of your blog posts, seriously consider doing it.
August Core Update
Google released a statement about the focus of their August Core Update.
Here’s the bulk of what they said:
“This latest update takes into account the feedback we’ve heard from some creators and others over the past few months. As always, we aim to connect people with a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches. This is an area we’ll continue to address in future updates. This update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web.”
So, if your site was hit back in Sept and Oct of 2023 with the Helpful Content Update, perhaps this August Update, and those still to come, will right that ship.
They also said on X that this rollout will take at least a month, so expect volatility for a while.
Some Sites Showing Signs of Recovery
It’s been 11 months since the Helpful Content Update rolled out last September.
And none of the core updates since then have mentioned helping legit sites that were hit recover from it until this August core update.
But, the current ranking bug that Google has not fixed for over a week, is hindering their ability to get trusted data to see if the recovery is real, and if so, by how much.
Less than 2% of my DIY SEO course members were hit. But if you are one of them, be sure to keep an eye on your Search Console metrics every week, and put that data into historical context with year of year comparisons.
Hopefully Google will get that bug fixed soon and you can start seeing trusted data again.
Google Trends Update
Google’s Trending Now tool is updating faster.
That means that you can more easily catch a hot trend before it dies out.
The tool is now more customizable as well.
This is definitely something we’ll be doing a live workshop on in the DIY SEO course soon.
