Tips Tuesday – GA4 Tutorials, Twitter Alternatives, Shortform Video, PHP 8.0 Update
Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!
Tips this week include:
- PHP 8.0 forced upgrade may break sites soon
- 4 new Google Analytics 4 default report tutorials have been added to the course
- Why you need to check your Universal Analytics setup – 80% have it wrong
- New post on What is Google Analytics 4?
- New post on Google Analytics 4 vs Universal Analytics
- An invitation to follow the 200+ shortform videos I’ll be making from the 56 new posts I’ll be writing
- An in-depth review of TikTok vs Instagram for visibility
- The Twitter alternatives I’m checking into and why
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BlogAid Happenings
Happy holiday week to my peeps who celebrate.
I’ll be clocking out a little early on Wednesday and then taking the day off on Thursday to eat, sleep, repeat.
I will be working lightly through the rest of the weekend.
WP 6.1.1 Special Update Instructions Sent
My BlogAid News subscribers received my special update instructions for WP 6.1.1 over the weekend.
There were several bug fixes in 6.1.1. And we’ve been testing one of the big core updates, which is the new database caching, and all seems fine.
So, I believe it is safe for everyone to do the update.
If you have a theme dev that is telling you to hold off, very seriously consider switching to a better theme.
I’ve heard the Feast Design folks are telling folks to hold off until January. That’s insane.
Reusable Blocks Work Again
Last week I asked y’all to let us know what Reusable Block alternative you are using and told you what I was trying, which was Content Blocks.
I’ve been using Content Blocks on my member sites for years. But, I was always placing that shortcode on pages, which worked fine. Turns out that it doesn’t work well at all on posts, though, as it fools the post into thinking that it is a full block of content and my social share buttons were being duplicated above and below it in addition to them showing up at the top and bottom of the post as normal.
Now, WP 6.1 was supposed to have fixed the issues that were making RB’s so glitchy for the last couple of years.
So, I made a new one and WOOT!!! It works!!
There is no longer that goofy save twice thing either with the Publish button.
So, I’m back to using the native Reusable Blocks
PHP 8.0 Forced Update Coming Soon
I’ve also heard some theme devs say that they are still not ready for folks to update to PHP 8.0 yet either.
Folks, that’s a huge red flag.
8.0 has been out all year and they have had more than enough time to do testing.
Same for plugins.
Support for the current version of 7.4 ends on Nov 29, which is right around the corner.
And hosts will be forcing everyone to update – ready or not.
I took my peeps through the upgrade back in July and we found several themes and plugins that were not ready. But, we had plenty of time to deal with making those changes and doing the upgrade.
And I can also tell you that most hosts are not ready either. Sites on anything other than Iridium hosting were breaking the site immediately after upgrade. And even the ones that didn’t break, the sites slowed down because the rest of the PHP settings are horrible. They are so bad that they literally slow down the entire server.
Move to Better Hosting
If you’re ready to get off your crap host with crap settings and crap support, get my Migration Service to help you move to a better host where me and all of my clients are and where everyone raves about the support.
And yes, you need migration help. You don’t want to bring all of the cPanel junk at your current host over to your new host.
And you have 1 shot to do proper security on your site so that you kick all of the bad bots hitting you now to the curb, and they can’t follow you over either.
Plus, you can combine your migration with a site audit and save money on both services.
Site Services Update
The current wait list for all site services is running into the end of Dec or early Jan, best guess. And it stays pretty heavy until spring.
So, if you’re ready for a site audit checkup or you need any type of site service by the new year, now is the time to get that request in.
BlogAid Course Happenings
Google Analytics 4 Default Report Tutorials Added
Folks have been raving about the bite-size tutorials in the GA4 course!!
As I was doing my research for the course, it became super clear that there were so many new concepts and terminology to learn that we would all need to take it in small doses to avoid overwhelm.
And folks in the course immediately responded to that approach too.
Plus, folks who got in early have been taking this like a drip course with the new tutorials being added every couple of days.
They already have everything set up and tested and they are getting all of that GA4 tracking data during their end of year blitz to their site.
And now they are diving into all of the default reports and seeing how to make them more useful.
This week I’ll be starting on the tutorials for the custom Explorer reports, which is the really exciting part of GA4.
Custom reports are SO easy to make in GA4.
Please don’t fall for buying templates like you had to do with Universal Analytics. They are not worth it. Plus, GA4 is in active development. And good luck getting any premade templates to stay updated!!!
They are just so fast and fun to make that you can do your own and get exactly the info you want and laid out exactly how you want to see it.
Check Universal Analytics Setup
When I was putting together the setup instructions for the Ultimate Google Analytics 4 Course for Bloggers, I had to assume that 80% of folks have their current Universal Analytics setup incorrectly.
So, I made a tutorial for how to check that.
And how do I know 80% have it wrong? Because that’s the percentage I see when helping folks through their HTTPS conversion and in the DIY SEO course.
And last week, I helped a new site audit client move off SiteGround and over to Iridium.
Like most folks on SiteGround, she had been using their HTTPS trickery to simply redirect all links to the canonical version of her links.
Now, keep in mind that’s not just your post or page link – it’s also links to every image and such too.
Once we get all of the links in her database converted, we did a live session to check her UA and GA4 setup, plus her Google Search Console setup.
And sure enough, all of them had issues.
She had not been tracking or viewing data on her canonical URL for her site in GA.
I’m betting her analytics will shoot through the roof now that those are fixed, plus all hits to the site are correctly going to the canonical now too.
Folks, if you depend on your analytics to help you make money, like qualifying for an ad agency or to engage in brand sponsorship, you can’t afford not to have these things set up correctly!!!!!!
And that’s why I take folks through those checks in both the GA4 course and the DIY SEO course too.
That’s especially important if you plan to check your new GA4 data against your current UA data. It won’t work if the UA is not setup correctly and the GA4 is!!!
And that’s just one more thing that separates my GA4 course from all others.
It’s right and it’s tested so you can be 100% positive everything is set up correctly.
New GA4 Articles
This past weekend I got my marketing ducks in a row so I can start churning out GA4 posts and videos.
The first 2 GA4 posts have been published:
FYI, the featured image on that last post was made by DallE 2. I just typed in 2 robot boxers in a ring and wasn’t it nice of it to spit out 2 boxers with my brand colors?
Follow My Video Posting Journey
I also spent time this weekend playing with new video recording setups and new microphones and such too. I believe I’m ready to start making several different lengths and looks that will give my shortform video quite a bit of variety.
I did a lot of posting to Instagram for Heartwood Art, but I will be starting anew for it on BlogAid. FYI, my handle on IG is MyBlogAid. And it’s just BlogAid on TikTok. And of course, it’s BlogAid on YouTube if you would like to follow me there and watch this video posting frenzy I’m about to start.
I’ve got a list of 56 posts to write on GA4. And snippets from those posts will yield about 200 videos.
That will give me about 1 video to post every day for the next 6 months.
And I’ll be creating them in batches, which makes it all so much easier and faster to do.
I’ll be reporting on the numbers as I do take this journey and I sure hope it inspires you to do more video for 2023 too.
That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.
Video Tips
TikTok vs Instagram
This past week I had a consult with one of my clients who is just crushing it with shortform video content. I know about TikTok and YouTube. But I haven’t been keeping up with the Facebook family of apps. And before I started doing a bunch of video recording, I wanted to ensure I know how best to repurpose them on all on these platforms.
TikTok is becoming a big-time search engine. More folks are turning to it for info than going to Google Search.
Let that sink in.
And to help promote that change, TikTok has increased their caption character limit to 2200. That’s huge, y’all!!!!
But, Instagram and especially Reels, has a solid audience of fans too. And they are doing their best to keep up with TikTok, so it’s definitely worth posting to both.
Then I came across this post from the nice folks at Convince and Convert with the 6 big differences between TikTok and Instagram.
I took one look at the demographics of who is using both of those apps and it reminded me a whole lot of who the big demographic was for Pinterest.
So, if Pinterest was a driver of traffic for you, take very seriously the idea that your audience may have moved to these more video-laden apps instead, now that Pinterest has become mostly a shopping mall.
Social Media Tips
Twitter Alternatives I’m Checking Into
I realize that most bloggers don’t really make use of Twitter.
Me and my peeps in the DIY SEO course certainly do, as Google crawls Twitter. Making a tweet is the first thing I do after I publish a post.
As you likely know, Elon Musk has been nothing but a chaos creator since taking the helm at Twitter and that is sending the masses who do use it to a couple of alternatives so they can get themselves established elsewhere before losing their entire audience.
The most popular alternative is Mastodon, which is a decentralized, federated network of servers.
Okay, what does all of that mean? Well, I will need to write a full post to explain it.
But the skinny is that the whole thing is made up of individual servers. Think of these as independently run hubs. And then all of the hubs can also talk to one another.
So, your first task is to decide which server you want to join, or if you want to create your own.
I’m in the process of checking out the different servers – there are LOTS of them. And I’ll let you know which one I start with.
The beauty of it is that you interact with any server and you can even move to a different server.
Like I said, it will really take a whole other post to explain it all. And I want to jump in and scope it out more before I do that.
Remember Jack Dorsey? You know, the guy who was the CEO of Twitter. He just announced the private beta release of his latest project called BlueSky.
This is a non-profit initiative that Dorsey commissioned back when he was still the CEO of Twitter.
Like Mastodon, BlueSky is decentralized, but the underlying infrastructure is different.
And the app code can be used by other social media accounts that adopt it, allowing you one master login for all. Remember when G+ tried that? It worked and folks liked it.
But what’s really different about this from Twitter is who owns the data. You do, as the creator of that data.
Over 30,000 folks have already signed up for the beta. And BlueSky has hinted that they are close to making it public. So, I will be keeping my eye on this one.
This is a new platform that bills itself as “real people, real news, civil conversations.”
There is a waitlist for it and I have not signed up for that as I want to see what this becomes before getting involved. I’m thrilled someone wants to make social fun and safe again. But I don’t have big hopes that they can pull that off and not get into a free speech mess.
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.
