Tips Tuesday – Ecomm Mastermind, YouTube Tutorials, Theme SEO, Video on Social

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• More BB Hub Masterminds coming up for Ecommerce
• 3 new YouTube tutorials added to the Video SEO Booster course
• Update on the theme SEO tests
• What are you wasting your time on today?
• A super infographic for video on social platforms
• Why not to ask your host to fix your slow site
• We’re coming to the final release candidates for WP 5.8
• Why I’m excited about the new Sketch Book drawing block in Gutenberg

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Spill the Beans Livestream tonight

Do join us live tonight at 8pm ET / 5pm PT on the BlogAid Facebook Page. 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.

BlogAid Happenings

It was a very productive week around here and I’m making headway on all fronts to bring more goodies to you, which I’ll tell you about in a moment.

Availability this week

I’ll be out July 15th and part of the 16th this week. So, if we have an open project, or you email me, I’ll be a little delayed getting back to you.

More BB Hub Masterminds

We had a great session this past week for our Contingency Plan mastermind with BB Hub members, who are my site audit clients that signed up for all the extra perks and support.

This is something that all business owners need, and that includes you as an online business owner.

READ: Make a Contingency Plan for Your Website and get your 4 plans squared away for both short and long-term unavailability.

In 2 weeks we’ll kick off our Ecomm masterminds with special guest speakers to share info about using Woocommerce and Shopify. Plus we’ll get our first look at the new Mailchimp Shops, which I believe is still in beta. But it looks like it might be a promising free alternative.

In the following weeks, several folks in our village will be sharing their experiences with selling downloadables and printables on platforms like:

• SendOwl
• Gumroad
• Member sites
• And more

We’ll get to hear the pros and cons of each so folks can choose the right fit for their needs.

It’s super important now to diversify your income streams.

3 New YouTube Tutorials Added to Video SEO Booster

New tutorials have been added to the Video SEO Booster course!!

The Upload YouTube Video and Section Overview tutorial has been reworked a bit for more clarification and details.

A new tutorial has been added for a YouTube Upload Checklist that goes into more detail about all of the sections you need to check as you go through the upload process.

A new tutorial has been added to the Sponsorship section for adding your Amazon Affiliate Links to your videos. And it includes how to add your YouTube channel to your Amazon Affiliate Program settings too.

Theme SEO Tests Update

All of the speed tests have been taken on the out-of-the-box themes and on the demo sites that were all created the same on each of the 4 themes I’m testing, including:

• Kadence
• Genesis
• Astra
• GeneratePress

And now I’m deep into the SEO tests this week.

I already have data on the native schema markup that all of the themes output, and it’s all over the place in what they support. Plus, it’s the older microdata schema language, which will work, but is not what Google or Bing prefer these days.

They want the JSON-LD schema markup. And that’s what the Yoast SEO and RankMath plugins output.

The problem is, only Genesis auto backs out its microdata schema when an SEO plugin is installed.

So this week, I’m gathering the screenshots for what to look for on your site, and how to test it for what your schema markup situation is like.

And I’m testing all of the tutorials provided by the theme makers for the code you need to add on all but Genesis to get things to work well for you.

I’ll be adding all of this info to both the Video SEO Booster course as well as the DIY SEO course.

It’s super important for you not to confuse Google and Bing with mixed tags around your content.

Once I have my test themes fixed up, I’ll be moving on to testing videos in recipe and how-to plugins, as they output their own schema markup.

Many of my clients have multiple videos on their posts and it’s critically important to ensure that all of the various SEO elements are cooperating with each other.

I’m just insanely happy to be past the delays and making good progress on all of these tests again.

And I know many of you have been waiting on all of these tests to move forward with your plans. I appreciate your patience and I’ll be releasing more info soon.

What are you wasting your time on today?

I sent out an extra treat for podcast listeners on Monday.

It’s a post from the Hobby to Money Making site series with 3 examples of stuff I’ve done that either was a waste of my time and money, or had direct ROI.

So, what are you wasting your time on today?

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

Video Tips

Video on social infographic

If you do video now, or want to in the future, you definitely want to see this super infographic on Social Media Today. 

It lists out the different social platforms and what types of videos work best for each audience.

And it lists the aspect ratios to use for each platform too.

That’s a super handy reference guide for us.

Speed Tips

Don’t ask your host to speed up your slow site!

This past week I saw reports of how hosts are handling requests to speed up a site.

SiteGround is now charging a minimum of $50 and all they do is apply their SG Optimizer settings to your site, which includes all manner of stuff that will goof your site and make it so you can’t even purge cache enough to see your latest changes.

And NameHero got one person into a hell of a mess with suggesting she use their LSCache plugin and QUIC CDN. She had to pay me to get back out of the mess that created with having to change her permalinks to www to use that CDN and do away with the SSL certificate she thought she had to buy. The same mess will happen if you try to integrate Cloudflare through SiteGround too.

And all of it is total bullshit.

I’ve also heard of catastrophes when site owners got their host involved in helping setup the new Ezoic speed trickery too. And the person I heard this from says her site has been down for days and she is also out money for buying an SSL certificate that she didn’t need.

Now this is a non-client and would have helped her avoid all that. But dang!!!

Sites are technical things

Folks, sites are technical. You are not a techie.

I don’t care what tutorials you read, they are not going to address your unique site setup.

Hire a pro to help do it right the first time because in the end, you’re going to be out more money if you have an amateur do it, and that includes you.

WordPress Tips

WP 5.8 RC2 out

The second release candidate for WP 5.8 is out, and I suspect there may be an RC3 later this week as they continue bug fixes prior to the official release on July 20.

We will not be updating right away when it does come out.

And most of us will likely need the Classic Widgets plugin, even if our theme framework updates to accommodate the Full Site Editing changes coming to the sidebar.

That’s because your child theme may or may not pick up on those changes.

I’ll begin my WP 5.8 testing next week when I feel like we have hit the final release candidate.

And I’ll be making you a video tour of what’s new, including changes to Gutenberg.

But I won’t be updating the Gutenberg Ninja tutorials for a couple of weeks after 5.8 rolls out, which will be around first of August.

That’s because we likely won’t be updating to WP 5.8 until then.

This is a HUGE change to the WP core code, and there are bound to be issues with it.

So, we’re going to wait it out.

Be sure you are subscribed to BlogAid News as those are the only folks who will get my full update instructions.

Gutenberg Tips

New Sketch Book Drawing Block

Oh what fun!!

The Gutenberg folks are coming up with all manner of entertainment blocks and the latest release is a new Sketch Book block. It allows you to draw something right in the editor.

Now, this thing is in beta, and it does require loading another JS library.

So, it’s not something I’m recommending you use.

But, I wanted to highlight that the block devs are thinking about more than utilitarian things and these might lead to more interactive websites soon for us too.

This is all part of the Block Experiments Project and there are other fun blocks in it too.

The Block-a-saurus one is a side-scrolling T-rex game.

And the Ghost Written Headlines block is pretty eye-catching as it looks like someone is actively typing out the headline.

So, forget gifs and other animations. We’ll be seeing more animated and interactive blocks coming to Gutenberg.

Wrap Up

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

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