Tips Tuesday – Content Silos, YouTube Milestones, Shorts Get Eyeballs 

Tips this week include:

• Tracking email open rates
• RSS feed to email – why not to use it
• Flip your time this summer
• Content Silo promotion
• Celebrating YouTube milestones
• Shorts get eyeballs – LOTS of them, and fast
• Watching your metrics works
• Try it and see – a path to success
• What you need to know about the FAIR project for WordPress

Welcome to Q3/H2 y’all!!!

How’s your year going?

I’ve got some good marketing tips and wins to celebrate that will inspire you to Thrive in ‘25!!

Let’s dive in!

Marketing Tips

Tracking Email Open Rates

Last week I said I was going to clean my email list of folks who had not opened emails in a long time.

One of my readers let me know that Apple email doesn’t allow tracking of opens.

And I’m betting that’s why my open rates seemed to fall so much – folks are reading my Tips Tuesday post right on their device using email services that don’t ping back the open.

So, how are we supposed to check the effectiveness of our lists now?

Please share your ideas in the comments, or anywhere you see this post online.

RSS Feed to Email

One of my webmasters was helping a client change email list providers. And the client had RSS to email which she used to notify her list of a new post.

But, she posted in our Facebook group that the new list service was getting blocked as a bad bot by Cloudflare security. And another webmaster replied that his RSS feed was getting blocked too. 

So I created an exclusion rule the lets the feed be exempt from the security. 

This is not something everyone needs to do. I have not found an issue with any of my feeds or the client sites I tested getting blocked. It was a special case that was due to the location of the servers for the list service, which was the Netherlands.

Beyond that, if you’re still using RSS to email, stop. That’s a super old, lazy way of marketing.

If you can’t take a moment to write a personal note to the folks on your list, why should they take a moment to read your email?

Flip Your Time

Most bloggers spend 90% of their time creating new content and 10%, or even less of their time promoting it.

In fact, most bloggers look for every way they can to automate their marketing so that they don’t have to spend any time on it at all, like the RSS to email thing, or bulk publishing to social media.

Y’all, that’s totally backwards.

For those of you with tons of content already – stop creating more.

Spend this summer mapping out a promotion plan for the last quarter.

How many ways can you repurpose the content you already have into:

• Emails
• Meta posts on IG and FB and even Groups
• Pinterest
• Videos

Maybe consider a compilation post on one of your topics, or promote your Content Silo (see below for a new Challenge to do exactly that.) 

DIY SEO Everywhere Happenings

Content Silo Promotion

A couple of weeks ago in the DIY SEO Everywhere course, we learned how to make videos in Canva.

And then last week we learned about YouTube Shorts.

This week, we’re going to do a Challenge to make a video from the images we have in our Content Silos.

This will be a fantastic way to promote a whole bunch of posts you have on a topic.

And it will be especially helpful for folks who do seasonal posts too!!!

Don’t have a Content Silo yet? There’s a group of workshops in the course that show you how to create one. 

I just finished making Content Silos for Heartwood Art, now that I have enough posts to feature topics this way. And I made YouTube Playlists to match them and featured those on my channel’s home page.

Video Tips

YouTube Milestone Celebrations

Heartwood Art

Last week I crossed the 6k subscriber milestone on my Heartwood Art YouTube channel!!!

Keep in mind that I had let this channel lie mostly dormant for 4 years. And before I started getting serious about posting to it again this spring, I was just over 5k subscribers.

I’m telling you, paying attention to metrics has been the key to my growth. 

Larry Snow

I am so proud of fellow Webmaster, Larry Snow, for reaching the 10k subscriber milestone on his YouTube channel. (Congratulate him on his LinkedIn post here). 

Larry makes streamlining your digital marketing so easy. So definitely go check out his channel!!

And let me tell you, hitting this milestone, especially in this niche, is no easy feat.

Tipper Pressley

On her Celebrating Appalachia channel, Tipper hit 300k subscribers!!!!!!

See her celebration video here and listen to how fast she and her husband were able to grow this channel to the point that they were both able to leave their day jobs and do this full time.

Y’all, THIS is the power of connecting with your audience in a personal, heartfelt way.

And they connect back with you too!!!

Shorts Get Eyeballs!!!!

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been reporting that I had intentionally made longer videos out of segments so that I could crop them into Shorts.

Well, I got a whole batch of them made and that helped me standardize a layout and workflow.

I posted my first Short last week and BOOM! It took off immediately.

Then it went sideways for a couple of days with views and then took off again.

It got more eyeballs in a week than some long videos I posted years ago.

And it linked to the longer video that has all of the related segments.

I’m definitely hooked on short-form content for getting eyeballs!!!

I’m not the only one getting more views. YouTube reports that Shorts get 200 billion daily views.

200 BILLION – daily – let that sink in.

Watching Metrics Works

During that Shorts workshop, we also had a look at when to post a video. I just happened to hit one of those times with this first video. And seeing the view count go up so fast definitely encouraged me to make a posting schedule based on those metrics.

Plus, woodworking is a seasonal thing. So I’ll be checking those metrics every month to see if posting times change.

For this Short, I also used the AI tool in YouTube, that we covered in another workshop, to help me with the title and description. ALL of the videos I’ve made that way have gotten better views.

I looked back through my older videos to see if I could make Shorts of them too.

But I checked with that AI tool to see if there was interest, and guess what? Nope, not enough interest to waste my time editing that video down to a Short.

I’m also watching metrics for individual videos to see where folks drop out and I’ll make sure to tweak my storyboard to keep them watching longer. That’s going to trip the wire for YouTube to suggest that video to more folks. 

Folks, the time you spend in your metrics is SO worth it!!!!!! It helps you make the most of your creation time and makes you the most money.

Plus, YouTube is bringing AI tools to search on this platform too. This is exactly why I flipped the DIY SEO Everywhere course on its head this year. You MUST learn how to show up in AI search – it’s on all platforms now.

Try it and See

I did make 2 mistakes with that first Shorts video on Heartwood Art, and I covered those in the YouTube Shorts workshop last week in the DIY SEO Everywhere course so y’all could avoid them.

One of those mistakes impacted monetization and the other one required me making some changes to my layout. So, I had to redo that first batch of videos I made. Fortunately that was a fast fix and they are ready to go again.

And you know that bullet point list that I have at the top of Tips Tuesday?

Well, I got the notion to make a scrolling text video out of it for my BlogAid channels, including Meta profiles.

I asked for opinions in our SEO course Facebook group and everyone said the same thing – it scrolls too slowly.

And one person mentioned that maybe having movement in the background, however subtle, made it hard to read too.

Another person mentioned that she would rather flip through a carousel.

I’m grateful for the feedback. This is how you learn and do better.

But you do have to put something out there to learn from!!!

My dad told me that if you don’t have room to fail, you don’t have room to try.

This is that advice in action.

You CAN do this!!!!

Just sit down and try something.

And if you’re in the DIY SEO Everywhere course, post it in our Facebook group for feedback. 

WordPress Tips

The FAIR Project – What You Need to Know

Y’all remember me reporting at the end of last year how Matt Mullenweg started a dumpster fire at WordCamp US by threatening to sue WPEngine. I’ve done my best to stay out of all the hoohaa that followed. I have only reported what I think would be helpful for you to know.

Matt just kept making things worse, and when long-time WordPress contributors started calling him out on it, we all discovered that WordPress.org is not owned by the WordPress Foundation. It’s owned solely by Matt.

That, and Matt’s unilateral actions against hosts and contributors (by blocking them) scared the crap out of everyone.

It also made many of those long-time contributors meet behind closed doors to come up with a plan to remove the single-point-of-failure aspect of access to all things WP.

It has now been released to the public and is called FAIR – Federated and Independent Repositories.

Basically, these are mirrored versions of everything found in WP.org, but they are controlled by a board with full transparency – no single person owns them.

This project is backed by Linux, who also sponsors the governance for many popular Open Source projects, such as Node.JS.

And the folks involved in creating and maintaining FAIR are the very people that I’ve had THE most respect for in the WP ecosystem for the last 2 decades.

I do believe that we need this FAIR project.

But I also believe that there are issues to address with it still. 

Following are posts that I culled from the news that I think you will find helpful in understanding what’s going on. 

Bottom line – you need to know this is happening, but we will not be making use of it yet. I’ll let you know if/when we will participate with the way we get plugin and theme updates and such.

• New FAIR Project Aims to Decentralize WordPress.org Services, Backed by Linux Foundation and Hundreds of Contributors 
• Playing Fair with the Future of WordPress
• WordPress Co-Founder Mullenweg’s Reaction To FAIR Project