Tips Tuesday – Hotlink Protection, Kadence Author Box, Video Tools Everywhere 

Tips this week include:

• Be sure you’re opening BlogAid emails
• Update on that huge leak of login credentials
• Why to check emails all over your site
• Hotlink protection tutorial
• Kadence Author Box tutorial
• YouTube Shorts workshop
• Yoast SEO fixed AI classes goof
• Why I’m checking into whether llms.txt files are a good idea or not
• Seeing more images in SERPs
• Why I’m doing siteless vlogging
• VEO3 coming to YouTube Shorts
• Canva adds VEO3 access
• Midjourney adds videos
• TikTok makes still images into videos
• Facebook makes all videos Reels
• YouTube Shorts get views!
• Why it’s plain that video is the future

BlogAid Happenings

I’ve been a tutorial making maniac for a week!! 

And, I completed the revamp on the Heartwood Art site to bring it out of mothballs and change the focus from carving to woodworking. New tutorials came out of that too.

More on all the new goodies in a moment. 

Clearing my email lists

My Mailchimp analytics have been showing a drop in open rates all year. 

That’s particularly surprising on Tips Tuesday, since I started emailing the entire post.

So, in the coming weeks, I’ll be clearing my lists of subscribers who haven’t opened any emails in a long while.

For member lists of folks connected to my courses, I’ll be reaching out personally to check if you’re getting the emails. 

All of the emails I send are time sensitive, and I sure don’t want you to be missing that helpful info!!!

So please be sure to open the emails you get from BlogAid and take action. Just being a tip collector won’t help you!!

Security Tips

Leak of Credentials Update

Last week I sent an email to all BlogAid News subscribers about the HUGE login credentials leak, and a warning to get busy changing all of your passwords.

More news has come out about this situation. It was not a new data breach. It was years of credentials collected by malware being posted on a platform where just about anyone could access it.

Folks, login credentials, or even just stolen email addresses, are big business on the dark web. And many hacker wanna-be’s can’t afford to buy those lists.

So, they were all over this freely available list!!!

I expect phishing and other scams to go through the roof for the rest of this year.

Here are a few reminders on how to stay safe:

• NEVER click a link in an email from a vendor, no matter how official the email looks. Close that email. Go to the vendor site and log in to see if there are any legit messages/notifications.
• Mark phishing and other junk email as spam, don’t just delete it. Your email provider builds a database of what is marked as spam to help filter it out and shut these folks down. Marking as spam helps them gather that info quicker, which helps everyone.
• Rotate your passwords at least once a year. Use at least 12 characters, even more is better. Ensure it contains capitals, numbers, and special characters too.
• If you use 2FA, ensure the authenticator is not on the same device you’re using to log into something.
• Seriously consider removing bank, credit card, or any other financial app off your mobile devices.
• Ensure all of your smart devices, or any things connected to the internet, have the latest software including your router, TV, thermostat, and more. Any of these things can compromise your wi-fi that you use for your laptops and mobile devices.

Hub Happenings

Perks, tips, and success stories of site audit Hub clients.

Check Emails All Over Your Site

Y’all know I’ve been doing a big revamp on Heartwood Art to bring it out of mothballs and convert the focus from carvings, which is where it started, to a woodworking site.

In doing so, I discovered that I had multiple email addresses in use on the site.

I sent my Hub clients an email with all of the places to check the emails they have in use (there are at least 6 places).

And sure enough, clients with older sites like me had more than one email in use too.

And keep in mind that some of those changes require authentication first. So be sure to follow through with that task.

If you want to use an email that is different from the one in your SMTP plugin, contact me and we’ll get it set up.

Hotlink Protection

The site niches at the highest risk for hotlinking are:

• Products
• beauty/fashion
• food

I’ve been working with one of my clients for nearly 3 months to create proper hotlink protection for her site.

And let me tell you, there are a gazillion web apps that are hotlinking to site images and then posting them on Pinterest with their own affiliate links. This is a great way to put a stop to them using your images!!

You can’t just turn it on at Cloudflare or add a rule at your hosting.

That would block a LOT of legit bots from getting the images they need, like Google and Pinterest. While neither of those hotlink your images, their initial download of them look like the same thing to this protection rule. Same with the legit AI bot crawlers.

And that is why it has taken 3 months of monitoring for me to come up with:

• A way to test for hotlinking
• Exclusion rules
• Fast ways to monitor

A new tutorial has been sent to both my site audit Hub members and webmasters.

Monthly Routine Checks

My Hub clients get an email every month with one quick thing to check on their sites, like their home page, or sidebar, or such.

That way they know the info on their site is up to date.

Or, those checks might be for a plugin setting that needs attention, like Yoast SEO needing a database optimization.

These checks take about 5 minutes and it’s a super easy way to know that all the little things are taken care of on the site, especially in areas that we tend to ignore.

SEO Tips

Kadence Author Box Tutorial

During the Heartwood Art revamp I traded over to the Kadence Author box way of doing things.

And, I made a tutorial while I was doing it. It is available on the BlogAid YouTube channel.

See Kadence Author Box Setup

Authorship Loop Tutorial

For the DIY SEO Everywhere course, I included that Kadence Author Box tutorial, plus a whole bunch more info about making a full author loop on your site.

Remember G+ social platform? Google created that as a way to help you create a verified digital identity. They used that to connect you to the content you created no matter what site it was on. That was back in the day when guest posting was a big deal for backlinks.

And there was a specific way to set up that authorship loop so all of that authority came to the content you wrote on your site too. I used to teach it in the course.

After Google killed G+, the whole authorship loop thing kind of died with it.

But now, AI SEO has brought it back.

So, I’ve got new tuts in the course for you so you can gain that author authority.

YouTube Shorts Workshop

Last week we had such a fun time making videos in Canva!!! They are so fast and fun.

This past week I’ve been making clips from my longer videos on Heartwood Art to use on Shorts and elsewhere.

There have been changes at YouTube Shorts, so this week we’ll do a workshop to go over those.

And, I’ll be sharing how I:

• batch make these videos
• choose my publishing schedule
• How YT AI is helping my videos rise in the rankings fast!!

Yoast SEO Fixed AI Classes Goof

Last week I warned you not to use the AI Tool in Yoast because it was putting a class tag in your content for ai-optimized.

Well, the team at Yoast has fixed that bug. But I would still not use that tool.

This stumble has brought all of the Yoast SEO haters out of the woodwork again.

Like this post on Search Engine Journal that is full of misinformation.

They say that the bug could have been prevented if they had a test site to check if there were any negative changes. Duh!!!! Just like every other bug in WP, themes, and all other plugins.

And they said that using copy/paste from MS Word or ChatGPT copies underlying formatting. Nope!!! 

WP has stripped out underlying markup for years now – well, 99% of the time it does a good job of it. But, it never hurts to check the HTML code now and then to be sure.

So, don’t believe all of the trash you read about Yoast. I still recommend it, and for good, tested reasons.

llms.txt Files

Yoast SEO has begun supporting llms.txt files to help AI bots find and figure out your content.

It’s sort of like a cross between a robots.txt and an xml sitemap that is made for AI crawlers.

I’m checking into whether this is a good idea or not.

And I’ll post my findings in the DIY SEO Everywhere course.

Seeing More Images and SERPs

This is new. 

I did a search for Kreg Rip Cut and my tut on Heartwood Art came up with multiple images from within the post in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)

I put a screenshot of it in our DIY SEO Facebook group.

This looks like a thing Google is testing and I don’t know how long it will last.

But, with my new focus on short video content, I have not been including still shots, or even transcripts, on my posts this year.

The fact is, my videos are ranking higher in regular Search than my posts do anyway. So, I have literally given up on trying to get the posts ranked.

People watching the video is what gets me paid, and I don’t care where they view it.

Video Tips

Siteless Vlogging

In fact, I’m so over trying to rank blog posts that my next endeavor is going to be a teaching channel on YouTube. There will be no associated site.

It will be on how to make videos with the software I’m using for my music videos.

And, that music video channel will not have a site associated with it either.

I’ll let you know when those channels go live later this year.

VEO3 Coming to YouTube Shorts

VEO3 is Google’s AI video generator tool. And it has gotten rave reviews because it has synced sound.

Well, naturally, they want to integrate it with YouTube.

See: YouTube to Add Google Veo 3 AI Video Tool to Shorts

Y’all, you need to read this post even if you have zero desire to make AI videos.

It will prove to you what I’ve been saying about just how important short vids are now.

Canva Adds VEO3 Access

We had such a fun time last week in the DIY SEO Everywhere course with making videos on Canva. They are so quick, easy, and fun!!!

And Canva just announced that they offer access to VEO3 on their paid account.

Y’all, this is going to eventually remove reliance on their video templates.

The only caveat is that the VEO3 vids are 8 seconds max. That’s pretty much the same with most AI video generators.

But, that is plenty for B roll type vid splashes, or vids that can make good use of segments.

Midjourney Adds Videos

And this is the one that might do them all in.

Midjourney has long been the leader in AI image generation.

And now they have released their first iteration of AI video generation – even on their $10/mo plan.

What is so insanely impressive about this first version is that it brings most of the MJ functions with it – like being able to use a reference image and style preferences.

That’s going to allow you to keep the same character or look throughout the video segments.

I’m sure they will continue to add functions over time, just like they have done with the image generation.

TikTok Makes Still Images into Video

Well, this is fun.

TikTok has unveiled”the next evolution of TikTok Symphony, our suite of generative AI tools designed to streamline creative production and spark bold new ideas. We’re introducing new state-of-the-art generative AI tools – Image to Video, Text to Video, and Showcase Products – to make it easier than ever for marketers to unlock new creative potential and to create and optimize TikTok-first content.”

Read the full article: Creativity at Scale: Meet our latest Symphony Generative AI Tools

Facebook Makes All Videos Reels

You no longer have to be confused about where to upload videos on Facebook, or how long your videos are.

Facebook is rolling out a change to make all videos fall under Reels.

I don’t know if there was any marketing advantage to having Videos and Reels functions, but those will obviously be over.

And I don’t know how these things will show up in the feed.

Read the full article here: Making it Easier to Create Videos on Facebook

This, coupled with their new video editor will hopefully draw more folks off TikTok and other platforms and keep them on Facebook.

YouTube Shorts Get Views

This weekend I started editing my newest long videos into segments for Shorts and then linking to the long video.

Wow! They sure do get a lot of views quickly – like 350 in the first hour. And the views on the longer one are now going up faster too. That’s because you can link to your longer videos in the Shorts video.

I used the new YouTube AI to help with the title and description. Man, does that ever work well. I’m totally hooked on it.

I was disappointed to discover that YT removed the ability to change the cover image back in May if you upload via desktop. You can’t even do it on mobile now. It would be nice if they would just show the first frame, but they rarely do.

I’ve got about 10 segments in each of my recent long videos. I’m editing them in bulk and scheduling to release one every 2-3 days.

And I have my workflow squared away, so they are fast and easy to do.

Now I’m looking for ways to bulk schedule them for publishing on Instagram and TikTok too.

Videos are the Future

Every platform is trying to compete with the success of TikTok.

The one thing all of them are missing is payment – real payment for creating short videos.

And TikTok is beating everyone with their TikTok Shop, as far as attracting creators to hawk products.

Only non-Shorts videos pay well on YouTube. However, Shorts can be strategically used to point to the longer videos, and no other platform has that.

None of Meta’s platforms pay as well as TikTok or YouTube, but they are where you can nurture an audience if you want them to go to your site or buy your things.

So, each platform definitely has its pros and cons.

But the bottom line is that video is the future of making money online – with or without an associated site.

Let that sink in.

And then find a way – any way – to get on that train.

You may discover just how fun it is!!!