Tips Tuesday – Content Revamp, Digital Downloads, Image SEO, Clarity, Spectra

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Content Revamp series starts this week in the DIY SEO course
• Gutenberg Ninja course is closing this summer – and how to get in before it does
• How to create your digital download workshop is today for BB Hub members
• WordPress 6.0 release candidates are out, and where to get update instructions
• Follow up on what happened after I removed my free option
• Details on what’s up with Astra’s new Spectra release
• Google drops crawl support for some image and video data and reaction from Yoast
• Why not to use Clarity with GA4
• A must-see company that turns text into real-looking avatar videos
• What I’m reading to help me meet my Q2 goals

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BlogAid Happenings

We’re well into Q2 of 22 now. What’s on your mind as you consider the near and long-term future of your site and how to best monetize it?

I’ll share what I’m doing near the end in a new section for What I’m Reading that is helping me and will help you too.

BlogAid Course Happenings

DIY SEO Content Revamp Series Starts This Week

Most of y’all know that I was an electronics engineer for 30 years and that I did a lot of technical writing and training during that time.

Well, years ago, one of my former webmasters switched careers to become an SEO copywriter who specializes in working with engineers. She said she chose that niche because of me and that all of those engineers deliver content exactly the way I do.

They tell you the whole story, and then they give you the resolution as the very last sentence.

And that last sentence becomes her title or hook.

Then she literally writes the story in reverse, but leaves the step-by-step in order. She just puts it at the end.

This year, it dawned on me that I laid out the live workshops of the DIY SEO course the way an engineer would.

First we check your SEO foundation.

Then we break down all of the SEO opportunities you have on your site and in your content and how to make the most of them, plus what not to do.

And at the very end, I tell you how to make those changes.

In my mind, I figured you would want to know how to do all the things, and then actually do them all at once.

Doing it that way would keep you from updating the same stuff multiple times. But more importantly, it would help you not revise a whole bunch of stuff while making all manner of mistakes because you didn’t have the whole story.

But, it’s clear that this year needs to be different due to Google dinging folks for updating existing content. And folks who are in at least their 2nd year with the course have already applied the big changes and now want to get busy making all the new tweaks from this year’s updated info.

So, I’m going to take a chance and modify the order of the course.

This week, we’ll be starting our Content Revamp series of workshops. I usually have that at the end.

It’s a 3-part series where I help you: 

• Identify what types of changes to make
• Easily get a list of all your content and ways to prioritize it for changes
• Actually make those changes in a way that makes Google happy instead of confused or upset with you

Guteneberg Ninja Course Closing to New Purchase and Renewals This Summer

Quick reminder that the Gutenberg Ninja course, as it is currently delivered, will no longer accept new purchases or renewals come late June.

The subscription is for 6 months, so everyone who did purchase or renew prior to that cutoff date will retain access through the end of their term.

I may bring a course back under that name later as a limited time workshop or such, and the focus will likely be on the bare bones basics, and then on how to build landing pages and/or tweak full page Block Patterns.

So, if you are planning to switch to Gutenberg and you want a full course on it, now is the time to get in, as you’ll also get updated info from the next 2 WordPress updates of 6.0 and 6.1, depending on when your subscription expires.

BB Hub Happenings

FYI, the BB Hub is a private membership and community for my DIY site audit clients that has lots of perks and support, like the ones mentioned here.

How to Create Your Digital Download Workshop is Today

I’m so excited to meet with my fellow BB Hubbers for today’s workshop on how to create your digital download.

There are so many platforms and apps to choose from.

This will be a show and tell session where Hubbers share how they did theirs, plus links to resources for courses and such, like how to create one in Canva.

I’ve also got a new cool tool to share that I had never heard of before and it looks interesting as well.

This is the power of our village and how we all help each other succeed.

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

WordPress Tips

RC1 of WP 6.0 is Out

The first Release Candidate (RC1) of WordPress 6.0 is now available.

I expect RC2 to become available later today.

A Release Candidate means that no new elements will be added and we are just testing for bugs.

The final, public release is expected on May 24th.

And I’m already working on my What’s New in WP 6.0 tour post for you so you’ll know what’s coming.

As usual, we will not be the first folks to update.

And BlogAid News subscribers will be the only folks to receive my update instructions when I think it is safe for most of us to upgrade.

So, be sure you are subscribed.

Follow Up on Removing My Optin Giveaway

The first workshop in the BB Hub Digital Downloads series was for us to do a bit of research into what our competition was offering.

For BlogAid, I discovered that none of my competition offers any type of freebie. They just have a weekly newsletter for more tips and news you can use.

And, as I reported in a recent Tips Tuesday, I believe the ebook I offered titled “What Every Site Owner Should Know” was too geared toward newbie site owners. And that’s not a good fit for the info, services, or courses I offer.

So, I had a LOT of churn in my email list.

And since I removed that ebook and just started advertising it as Tips Tuesday for a weekly newsletter, that churn has stopped.

Be Sure to Open BlogAid Emails

In the coming months I’ll be paying closer attention to my open rates and removing folks who don’t open anything for months.

I’ve had a few folks tell me that they save up Tips Tuesday to read later. But the facts are that this info is time sensitive and they never really get around to reading it anyway.

So, I’m just paying to deliver info to them that they never consume, and that also means they are not all that interested in my products and services either, as they also are time-sensitive and based on the rapid changes you have to know as a DIY site owner.

That means I’m paying out with no hope of return, and that’s silly for me to continue doing, right?

So, please be sure to open emails you get from me, or you may stop getting them in the near future, as they are not doing you any good sitting there unopened anyway.

Theme Tips

Details on Spectra from Astra

In last week’s Tips Tuesday I reported on all the insanely confusing messaging we got from Astra about their new Spectra offering.

Turns out that it is a page builder based on Gutenberg blocks.

And it looks like they want to compete directly with Elementor.

Even though they have already changed the name of the Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg plugin to Spectra, it appears that it is still the same plugin. We have zero idea if they have any plans to change it further. 

What we hope, and will scream bloody murder about if they don’t do, is that they keep it backward compatible with how it works now no matter what else they add as a Spectra-only thing later.

There is a Pro version of Spectra. 

A few of the designers in my Webmaster Training are checking into all of it now.

And we will be conducting apples to apples testing with building out a real-world page with Astra Pro and UAG and then comparing it to one built entirely with Spectra.

That will include a battery of tests by me on the JavaScript bloat and how that impacts speed and such.

We have already run into some issues on our sandbox sites with Spectra and are in touch with Astra support and they are taking these issues very seriously. So that’s hopeful too.

And you know I’ll keep you posted as we go.

SEO Tips

Google Drops Crawl Support for Some Image and Video Data

Google announced that they will no longer be crawling some data related to images that was currently being carried in our XML sitemaps.

Those elements include:

• Caption
• Title
• License

All of this relieves some bloat in the XML sitemap and makes it faster for Google to crawl.

Team Yoast announced that they have already removed this extra data from your XML sitemap that the Yoast SEO plugin generates for you.

So, if you are using that plugin, you’re already in compliance.

And Yoast will soon be updating the Video SEO plugin for those new Google changes.

I also sent out an email about this to my DIY SEO course members and why not to drop using some of these attributes over this. 

Here’s why.

What’s good for Google is not always good for our sites or our readers.

Plus, Google changes its mind all the time.

Clarity and GA4

If your site is verified with Bing Webmaster Tools, and I hope it is, then you may have received an email from them on how to integrate Clarity with GA4.

Don’t do it.

In fact, just say no to Clarity.

Bing is a search engine owned by Microsoft that wants to be a Google rival.

Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft’s version of Google Search Console.

Clarity is Microsoft’s version of Google Analytics.

Here’s the truth.

Microsoft does not have the global infrastructure or budget to proactively crawl the web for content like Google has.

So, for the last year or so they have been inventing ways to have us submit our content directly to them.

They even came out with a WP plugin that has an API for auto submission. That’s because it took a dev to figure out how to hook up their API with a hard-coded solution, and not enough site owners could figure out how to do it.

The problem with their plugin and any other automated way they have given us to do it is that it does not respect the nofollow, noindex, noarchive settings that we may have on some of our content. In other words, their automation submits things to their search engine that we don’t even want crawled much less considered for indexing.

That includes thin content pages like the Thank You page where you send folks after they submit your contact form.

Yoast has spoken about this too and says Bing’s automation is no good.

But, here’s the biggest reason to not use Clarity.

It gives Microsoft access to your data.

Oh hell no!!!

Google does not have access to your analytics data. 

So for now, keep manually submitting your new post and page URLs to Bing. It takes all of :20 seconds to do.

And I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for an automated way to do it that works well.

Video Tips

Synthesia AI Videos from Text

Holy flipping cow, y’all! 

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is seriously blurring the lines with realistic avatar videos.

Go check out the demo on Synthesia to see what I mean.

For those of you who don’t want to be on camera, just use one of their realistic avatars to speak for you.

And you can even create an avatar of yourself and have it speak your text for you.

Now, this thing is not free, and they host your videos, so you don’t own them outright, meaning that I didn’t see a way for you to download them to your computer. But, you can embed them anywhere, just like a link from a YouTube video.

Folks, there are all kinds of cool AI sites popping up for things like this, and creating a custom graphic for you based on your text description, and so much more. 

If you’re interested in this sort of stuff, let me know and I’ll include more of them in Tips Tuesday as I come across things I think would be helpful to you.

What I’m Reading

At the top of today’s tips I asked what you are focused on in Q2.

For me, it’s all about creating tribe and nurturing that audience. 

And it’s also about building brand awareness.

Those are 2 different kinds of content to create.

The nice folks over at The Tilt have a super post on the distinct differences in creating content that builds you relationships and content that makes you sales.

Both involve telling a story. But the focus of it is different.

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.