Tips Tuesday – BlogAid YouTube and TikTok, Google Fonts and GDPR, NFTs, 6 Video Styles

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• The new BlogAid Live YouTube channel has launched
• Track SEO Performance workshop is coming up
• The BlogAid TikTok channel gets going this week
• What’s on my new social media landing page and how to build yours
• New Common Site Audit Fixes doc is available
• The new quick check schedule I’m putting together for routine maintenance
• It’s finally safe to update to WordPress 5.9
• Does your About page need help?
• Proof that AMP is dead
• How Google’s strongarm tactics are making the internet more secure
• What’s up with the new court case on Google fonts being non-GDPR compliant
• Good news from Genesis, and who created their newest FSE theme
• Sensei LMS has a new block layout for course material
• Why you want to check out The Tilt and what I’m learning from it
• A new twist on how quantity can bring quality content
• 6 video styles for educational content
• The Utility NFTs that I’m excited about
• A primer for how you may want to use NFTs for your digital products
• Big events come to the metaverse and the bugs they’re finding
• Why your next Super Bowl party may be in virtual reality
• VR conferences may be popping up soon
• What the new crypto pay for Google and Apple means for us
• Why I’m excited about TN leaning into crypto
• And why now is the time to adapt and thrive and make money doing it

Listen to the Podcast

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Spill the Beans Livestream tonight

Do join us live tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid LIVE YouTube channel. This is a sister to the regular BlogAid YouTube channel. So, be sure to subscribe to BlogAid LIVE so you get notifications on live events. We spill the beans on this week’s news, breaking stories for the day too, and special info just for those who watch. And the replay is available here on this Tips Tuesday post later too. But the live party is so much more fun.

Replay

Who I Help

All BlogAid posts and tutorials are intended to assist business-minded, hands-on bloggers and webmaster designers who are serious about making money and who want to stay up-to-date with site changes. And our BB Hub is a private member site and Facebook group for my site audit clients that has lots of extra perks and support.

BlogAid Happenings

It’s been an insanely productive week around here!!!!! I’ve made a bunch of goodies for us!! I’ll tell you all about them in a moment.

Tips Tuesday Livestream is Moving to YouTube

But first, as I mentioned at the top of the post and podcast, I got a second YouTube channel setup for BlogAid Live.

And that’s where we’ll be doing our Tips Tuesday Livestream from now on.

I wanted to mention it again here since some folks who just read the post scroll past those intro notes.

Be sure to subscribe to the new channel for alerts because I’ll be setting these up as events and I believe you can get notifications and/or reminders for them.

Track SEO Performance Workshop

In this week’s live DIY SEO course workshop we’ll cover how to accurately track your SEO performance.

It’s super important to know how your posts are ranking.

Plus, doing this type of data mining will give you all kinds of ideas for improvements as well as open your eyes to what folks are searching that brings up your posts. Sometimes it’s not what you think!!! That just gives you more keywords to focus on.

This is the last of the core foundation workshops. Next week we move into the on-site and on-page series of SEO workshops. 

Going Live with TikTok

This past week I finished up my TikTok course. 

And I’ve been practicing layouts and methods so that I can document my process and make creating videos cookie-cutter easy for myself for all the different types of videos I’ll be making.

I’ve also changed my mind about telling y’all which course I’m taking, and here’s why.

It doesn’t work like that on TikTok.

You can’t just take a course and then start publishing like you can on other social media platforms.

TikTok has a culture – and the only way you are going to get a real grasp of that is to get a TikTok account and watch videos, learn the culture, and see what appeals to you and will appeal to your clients.

I watched for hours over weeks and I saw all manner of different trends and ways of doing videos.

After a while I started finding styles that would work well for the type of content I wanted to publish that would also appeal to my intended audience, and that became what I wanted to learn how to make.

And then I started finding instructors on TikTok itself. It took some sorting through, but I finally found instructors that made the kind of videos I wanted to make, and who have a course for me to learn at my own pace compared to mentorship type things.

Then I started following a bunch of TikTok instructors because the news and the trends happen too fast to cover them in a course. So you have to be on TikTok to see that sort of thing too.

Plus, there’s no reason for you to wait on me.

Get on TikTok and DYOR – Do Your Own Research.

You’ll find the info you need while you’re learning the culture.

New Link in Bio Page

Before I could start posting on TikTok or doing YouTube Shorts or IG Reels, I needed to make a new “Link in bio” type page – sort of like the one I have for Heartwood Art. However, that one focuses on my latest projects and popular blog posts.

But, for the new social media landing page on BlogAid, I wanted it to focus on ways for folks to follow me and then my courses and services.

Please do go check it out and let me know what you think. It is a work in progress.

And thanks to all of the BB Hubbers who gave their feedback on it too. Your feedback helped so much. And I know all of this inspired more folks to get busy making their social media landing page too.

FYI, I teach you how to build landing pages like this in the Gutenberg Ninja course. And yes, if you want to build a LinkTree looking page of just buttons or such, it’s super easy to do that with Gutenberg too.

And here’s another tip: You can title the page anything you like and then change the permalink slug to something super short before you publish it, so you don’t have to use a Bit.ly link or such.

BB Hub Happenings

Common Site Audit Fixes and Info

Last week I posted our new DIY Site Owners Guide in the membership.

And then I totally revamped the doc for the common site audit fixes that were done for you.

It’s a super handy reference because we do a LOT of site owner education through the audit process and it’s impossible to remember all of that.

Plus, it’s super hard to remember the things that were done for you that were only listed in your monthly Site Work doc, like your security, backup, new email setup, and more. 

So, please do have a look at that updated doc for a refresher.

New Site Quick Checks

Before we start the live workshops in the DIY SEO course, I send out a series of emails for folks to do super quick checks for changes to SEO plugins, Google Connections, and a whole host of other things.

Everybody in the course loves those as they know their SEO foundation is solid without having to watch all of the tutorials for those things again.

Well, I’m going to borrow that idea for the BB Hubbers and set up a series of monthly emails for our routine quick checks that need to be done on either a quarterly or twice-yearly basis.

Once I saw the full list I realized it’s just too much to do on the quarter calendar months. So, just doing something every month will be faster and easier and they will still keep their timing.

I hope to get us started on those by the first of March.

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

WordPress Tips

Safe to Update to WP 5.9

I sent an email to all BlogAid News subscribers last Thursday with instructions on how to safely update to WP 5.9.

So far everyone has been able to do the update with no WP issues, so that’s great.

SEO Tips

Does your About page need help? 

That’s the question our visibility expert buddy Denise Wakeman asks and answers in her recent post.

Your About page may or may not be the most viewed page on your site.

But it most definitely should be the page that comes to the very top of Google when someone searches both your name or your brand name.

And what’s on that page may make the entire difference in whether someone decides to follow you or not.

Plus, every page on your site is a sales page. Your About page is not about you. It’s about what folks can get from you on your site.

So, be sure to jump on over to Denise’s post and see her tips for crafting a super About page.

AMP is Dead

I told you so. 

In fact, I told you years ago not to set your site up for AMP. The few clients who didn’t listen to me were sure sorry they ever tried it because they watched their site revenue drop lower than whale poop.

And now the nice folks over at Mediavine have tests to prove just how dead AMP is and why you don’t need it to get into Google’s News carousel.

I’m sure there are a LOT of companies who are totally pissed at Google about this, as they spent millions of dollars, literally, to convert their site to be AMP compliant.

And then the lawsuits hit that Google was favoring AMP compliant pages, so now they started including the more authoritative sources in their News carousel again.

And now AMP is totally defunct and these companies are going to spend even more money getting out of AMP than they did getting into it because it’s harder to remove all that junk.

The good news is that the cost of getting out of AMP will be offset by the lifting of format restrictions and they can again include ads and other money-making things on those pages again.

What Google Wants is Not Always Good for You

Folks, just because Google says they want something a certain way does not mean that it’s good for your site.

And Google has a LONG history of: 

• creating something
• Giving us perks for using it
• Tweaking it until it’s impossible to setup or do right
• Complaining no one uses it, or uses it right
• Dropping it

Google’s Strongarm is Sometimes Useful

On the other hand, there are times when Google’s 80% stranglehold on the browser market can be put to good use.

There are international security consortiums, of which Google is a member, who want to promote security industry standards for all websites.

They use the popularity of Google Search and the Chrome browser to give perks and penalties to sites in an effort to get them to conform to these standards – like HTTPS for secure data transfer.

So, Google is not the one coming up with the standards, but it can definitely push its weight around to get site owners to comply.

And I’m glad, because I do my best to keep my clients and followers 2 years ahead on standards like this, but the majority of site owners don’t hear about them until 2 weeks prior to the penalty deadline, and then they are all in a panic to get their site into compliance.

I’m still cleaning up sites who used some form of HTTPS free trickery that doesn’t fully comply and just redirects all of their links.

READ: The Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use Free HTTPS for more details.

READ: The Top 7 Myths about HTTPS Conversion if you’re still confused about the difference between a free SSL certificate and free HTTPS conversion.

Design Tips

Google Fonts Break GDPR Compliance

A German court has declared that bringing in 3rd party Google fonts to a site is not GDPR compliant.

That’s because you have to give your site’s IP address to Google to request delivery of the font to it.

This ruling is going to open a huge can of worms for embedding any 3rd party thing. 

A trend started last year with some new 3rd party child themes for Kadence to host fonts locally to help with Core Web Vitals and such too. 

But honestly, fonts are the very least of those issues and I see no real reason to make that change during site audit fixes.

And I wouldn’t lose any sleep over this court ruling either, nor would I make a change to my site over it yet.

Let’s see how this thing shakes out, as I’m betting it will be tied up in court for years.

Genesis January News

I sure was glad to see the Genesis News folks report that Brian Gardner is back at WPEngine to help usher in Full Site Editing (FSE) for Genesis.

Brian was the founder of Genesis and sold it to WPEngine a few years ago and then retired as the lead dev, I think a year ago.

But, he’s back, and he brings a new fully block-based theme with him. It’s called Frost.

Jump over to the news report and see Frost, plus all of the other new themes from Genesis.

And for those of you who are thinking about dumping your Genesis theme because it’s slow, keep in mind that it’s your bloated child theme that is slow, not the Genesis Framework.

And I have proof!!!

READ: Astra, Kadence, Genesis, GeneratePress: Deep Case Study for speed comparisons.

All of my BlogAid sites are still on Genesis and you see how fast they are.

So, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater on this.

Membership Tips

Sensei LMS Introduces Block Layouts

As y’all know, I’m starting my deep dive into all the new features of membership site setups.

I was delighted to read this article about the Sensei LMS adding block style layouts.

An LMS is a Learning Management System.

Sensei is owned by Automattic, which is the parent company of WordPress. And they make lots of other plugins like Woocommerce, JetPack, Akismet, and more.

Sensei is also a direct competitor of LearnDash, which I reported to you recently, was purchased by LiquidWeb’s plugin branch, StellarWP.

There are several other LMS plugins, but these are 2 of the more popular ones.

And you would think that Automattic would have brought block styling to Sensei long before now, but I guess that required a full rebuild on the backend.

They say it is only for the layout of the course pages, not the entire LMS. But it really does clean up the course pages nicely and is a big improvement in UX (User Experience).

Video Marketing Tips

Check out The Tilt

I’ve been reading The Tilt ever since Denise Wakeman mentioned it in one of our BB Hub Huddles.

But, I’ve been doing a lot more than just reading their posts.

I’ve been digging into how they created their hybrid Web2/3 site. They use their own cryptocurrency for access to their paywall content.

It seems to me that they paid a dev to do a custom setup for them.

But, what I’m finding in my research on how to do such a thing is that there are several publicly available bridges for it, and many more on the way.

And these are the bridges I mentioned a few Tips Tuesdays ago that I’m interested in learning how to build as I continue to move BlogAid toward a Web3 business in ways that I can take my current clients with me.

So, more to come on this as I dive into it and have things to show you.

But for now, I want to share some nice posts from The Tilt that I think you’ll find interesting.

How Quantity Brings Quality

Y’all know the old adage with blogging that constantly cranking out content for the sheer sake of having more post titles out there does not always translate into creating high quality content.

Well, this article on The Tilt turns that notion on its ear. And I think it’s a worthwhile read, especially if you want to break into video.

They say that cranking out content consistently helps you hone your writing skill and your methods.

When I first started doing screencast video tutorials for BlogAid, they were a little rough around the edges. And they took me forever to storyboard, script, and produce.

But all these years later, creating that type of tutorial is a breeze and I can produce very high quality tutorials that folks love. And I can do them in about half the time it took me in the beginning.

Same thing happened with my Heartwood Art videos, which included combining still shots with live action video. And all of that was a VERY different process from making screencast videos.

It took me 30 hours to do the first video tutorial.

But now I’ve gotten a LOT faster with the storyboard and the production methods and I’ve cut that time in half. Yes, it’s still 15 hours from start to finish with producing both the post and the videos, but that’s because I have to repurpose all those still images for both parts of the project. And as most you know, image production is a very time-consuming task.

But the point is, I’m in agreement with this post on The Tilt because the consistent doing of it is what made me faster and better.

And that will work for you too.

6 Video Styles for Educational Content

Speaking of video tutorials, the nice folks at The Tilt have a super post with 6 styles to use for overhauling your educational content.

They include:

• Interviews
• Video tours
• Whiteboard animations
• How-to videos
• Motion graphics
• Animated character videos

Definitely go check out this post as they give you great examples of each style and I bet you’ll get a lot of new ideas and inspiration from them.

Web3 Tips

Utility NFTs are Here

Remember me telling y’all that these cartoon art NFT things are mostly scammy and a little insane? 

And remember me saying that there’s way more to NFTs than this and I’m focused on the utility side of them?

Well, we are finally seeing those quickly become a reality, and to me, these are great examples of use cases for Smart Contracts.

Propy is a CA. Real estate firm that is auctioning 2 residential properties as NFTs. Note, these properties are in FL, and Miami is considered a major crypto hot spot in the country already. So, this concept is not at all foreign to the folks who are likely to be bidding on these properties.

A U.K. department store called Selfridges will be selling NFTs and digital fashion in its London street store. And you can purchase them with a regular credit card.

It’s also worth noting that several crypto exchanges have partnered with Visa and Mastercard to offer crypto credit cards so you can spend your crypto like cash too.

NFT primer for your digital creations and communities

Folks, you know that I have been asking you to be cautious about entering the NFT art fad.

They’re great if you’re a creator and can sell them, but not so good for buyers as I think this insanely priced fad will fade and you could get stuck holding the bag on an overpriced jpg that you can’t sell.

But, you do want to learn about NFTs for things like your e-books and member sites and such.

Social Media Examiner has a nice primer post that will introduce you to these concepts, so do give it a read.

Sandbox Metaverse Concerts

Music NFTs and artists are performing in the metaverses now too, and it’s a great way to get found.

Plus, there are some really big concerts happening as artists turn themselves into avatars to perform live in VR.

A big news story hit last week along these lines with the announcement that the Sandbox metaverse has partnered with Warner Music to create a music theme park that will feature their artists.

It’s worth noting that this is the metaverse Snoop Dog bought a huge plot of land in early on and has already been hosting concerts there with some big name artists.

Big events like this get big air time in the news. But it also helps normalize such events and opens the door for smaller events too.

Samsung Decentraland Event Fails

But, for these big events, this new metaverse tech is not without its share of bugs.

There was another big, brand sponsored event in the other popular Metaverse last week. Unfortunately it had so many glitches that it was just dubbed a failure. 

But, the fact that folks are spending money and time to create such events, and folks are buying tickets, means that the devs are interested in tackling the scaling issues, and big money people are willing to invest in paying them to make it happen.

Once they get the scaling issues figured out we’ll see more Web2 things move to Web3.

Virtual Parties

Did you know there are already rooms in metaverses where you can gather virtually with your friends for watch parties.

They look like a big living room with a huge TV screen.

I expect this is how folks will connect with their VR friends for activities more and more. And that includes the new friends you make from just hanging out in the metaverses now. There are already bars and open chat areas where folks can strike up a conversation right now.

And some folks who hang out there a lot are already becoming famous as their avatars.

Plus, if you can afford to buy land in these metaverses, you can create your own space for meetups too.

VR Conferences

CoVid coop up caused so many conferences to do them as live streaming events last year.

And I expect things like these Sandbox concerts will normalize going to events in the metaverse. I also expect by this time next year that we’ll see more conferences having a Virtual Reality version, maybe as a bonus, like for their after party or such.

And let me tell you, there is already a LOT of profitable networking going on in some of these metaverses too. I hope to be jumping in by this summer.

Coinbase Partners with Google Pay and Apple Pay

You’ll soon be able to use these mobile features to pay with your crypto currency.

So, what does this have to do with Web3?

Nothing and everything.

As crypto continues to become mainstream, more folks will want to get into trading.

And they will start flowing money into Web3 projects, like NFTs and blockchains that solve problems, like the utility NFTs I mentioned.

And that will educate and normalize the move from where we are now with the internet to where we are going.

Don’t rely solely on me to report the news and opportunities here. 

DYOR – Do Your Own Research and start seeing for yourself how you can get in on this wave of change and opportunities.

Early adopters make bank.

Tennessee Leans Into Crypto

On a personal note, I sure am excited to see this news!!

Tennessee lawmakers will consider forming a study committee aimed at making the state “the most forward thinking and pro-business state for cryptocurrency and blockchain and to foster a positive economic environment for blockchain and cryptocurrency.”

I believe these lawmakers are taking a hard look at all of the money flowing into Miami FL as it becomes a huge crypto hub. Same with all of the money pouring into TX as they are very pro crypto there too.

But mostly I think it’s about all the crypto conventions. Did you know there are more hotel rooms in Nashville than in New York city? It’s not just Music City, it’s Convention City too.

Adapt and Thrive

I hope it has become clear to you by now that Web3, crypto, and metaverse related stuff is very quickly being adopted and normalized.

I also hope that it is super clear to you just how many trillions of dollars are flowing into and out of these projects.

More than anything, I hope this has ignited some sparks in you to figure out how you can adapt and get in on the leading edge of the incoming wave so you can set yourself up as an early adopter who will make the most money from it as more and more consumers come into the space.

Wrap Up

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

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