Tips Tuesday – Instagram Mastermind, Cookie Tracking News, Ezoic Ads, Blogging Budget
Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!
Tips this week include:
- Why you need to make a blogging budget for time and money
- Why it’s worthwhile to do new or hard things
- The Instagram mastermind is this week in the BB Hub
- Updates on theme testing, video SEO course, and site services
- What’s new with the Grow Social Pro plugin and what you need to check
- How the major revamp at GitHub will impact our plugin support
- What to check if you use the GDPR notification from Mediavine
- What we’re testing in the WP 5.8 Beta 4 that just released
- A preview of the WP 5.8 theme editor
- Is AMP finally deprecated for good?
- Why I can no longer offer support for sites running Ezoic ads
- How expert roundups get you more traffic
- Huge news with Google delaying removal of 3rd party cookie tracking
- Why now is the time for you to diversify your revenue and traffic streams
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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
Welcome to the last week of the first half of 2021 y’all!!!
Is your online business where you hoped it would be as we go into the 3rd quarter?
Both BlogAid and Heartwood Art are and aren’t where I wanted them to be at this time, but I’m making great strides on getting them both caught up.
Make a Blogging Budget for Time and Money
Y’all know that I’ve recently been tweaking my available office hours and that I work a half day on Saturday and off on Sunday, which also includes time off from all BlogAid Facebook groups too.
That has done me so much good!!!
And I’m only available for half a day on Monday for client work because I produce Tips Tuesday that afternoon.
All that time off also means that my email inbox is overloaded Monday morning and taking care of what’s in it, including site service clients reporting in that they are done with their parts and are waiting on me, is about all I can do on Monday.
Plus, there have been a whale of a lot of delays this year with my planned projects, such as the theme tests and the video SEO course and that piled more work on me all at once than I can handle.
So, I’m tweaking my daily schedule again to accommodate having fixed hours for these projects that are outside of client work.
And that got me to thinking about why all bloggers need to budget time and money for their site success.
So, I wrote a post about it for the Hobby to Money-Making Site series.
It addresses the bad habits most all new bloggers get into when they first start out. And too often they never revisit that mindset.
So, no matter how long you’ve been blogging, I hope you will give it a read and see where you fall with budgeting your time and money and if those things are bringing you success or not.
Doing New or Hard Things
As you may recall, in last week’s Tips Tuesday I celebrated getting my first post out on Heartwood Art since November.
This weekend I finished my next project and already have the video well underway too.
Creating a tutorial video is time consuming, but well worth it.
My posts enjoy an average of 5-7 minutes of time on site.
Same with the videos on YouTube.
And all of that radically increases the SEO value of them and Google pushes them to the top of search on both Google Search and on YouTube.
And that has a snowball effect to grow my audience.
Last week I shared with you the power of evergreen content and that despite my lack of content creation, my subscriber rate and watch time continues to increase like crazy.
I’m not that far away from being able to monetize the Heartwood Art YouTube channel.
And I’m now budgeting the time to focus on that site and channel to get it to that point.
That includes making more time for my woodworking Facebook groups too, and sharing my posts there when it’s appropriate, as that is a big driver of my traffic, next to SEO.
My woodworking site puts me closer in touch with the kinds of sites my clients run.
And the real money in that site is from all of the testing and suggestions I glean to better be able to help my BlogAid clients.
So, I’m not looking for the little bit of Amazon commission I earn every month, or the YouTube ad revenue I hope to qualify for soon to be the main money maker.
But I am looking at that site and YouTube channel as a money maker for BlogAid content, services, and courses, and that’s why I need to dedicate both a time and money budget to make it work well.
It’s more work. And it can seem hard compared to doing things we are already familiar with.
But the fact is, most bloggers are not going to put in that work. And that is just one more reason I’ll be successful from doing it. I have far less competition for videos than I do for blog posts.
Same with learning new social media platforms.
Maybe my competition isn’t there yet because they don’t want to make time for learning the platform, or the medium it requires to succeed there.
I do.
And I hope you do too.
Instagram Mastermind this week
I’m so excited to be meeting live this week with my BB Hub members, who are site audit clients that get extra perks.
We’ll be kicking off our first summer mastermind by sharing our Instagram stories.
Some of my clients are making good money there from sponsored posts.
And folks are reporting that they are now getting good traffic to their site from IG too.
Plus, I’ll be sharing how to create an IG landing page on your site so that you don’t have to use LinkTree or any other 3rd party service.
I also teach how to do that in my Gutenberg Ninja course as well.
Contingency Mastermind next week
Right after our IG mastermind I’ll be sending out emails to the BB Hub membership with steps for creating a contingency plan for your site.
We’ll be breaking it up into manageable segments, which is going to help us have motivation and accountability for getting it actually done.
And then we’ll have a live session to chat about it.
A contingency plan for both short and long-term absence from your site is most definitely something you need to have when you run an online business, especially if the person you have assigned as your POA knows nothing about what you do, or even who to contact to help them if you are unavailable to take care of things yourself.
And this will give you such peace of mind knowing that it is done, too.
Updates on theme testing, video SEO course, and site services
You may recall me reporting a couple of weeks ago that when I installed the demo sites for the theme tests that 3 of them went goofy. The designers have them all fixed now and I’m resuming my tests.
For the Video SEO Booster course, I’m going to have to rework a couple of the YouTube upload tutorials, as there have been critically important changes to some settings. I covered all of that in the default upload settings already, but I need to make the upload tutorials more of a step-by-step for some of the sections that only have your default settings. You may need to tweak more of them than I originally covered. And this will make it an easy-reference checklist too.
And, I need to wait on doing the recipe video and the rest of the how to video tutorials until I finish the next batch of tests on the themes, as all but 1 are goofing up your schema markup output. And I need to have that data to tell you what to look for and fix for your videos too.
I will be releasing the course right after the YouTube tutorial updates, though. And will get the new tutorials for recipe and how-to added later. So, we’re close.
For my site services wait list, we are solidly into September now.
So, if you want to get a site audit and/or combine with a migration this fall, now would be the time to sign up.
That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.
Plugin Tips
Your Grow Social Pro by Mediavine JavaScript has been optimized!
If you use the Grow Social Pro plugin, perhaps you have noticed a message at the top of your admin pages.
It says:
“The Legacy jQuery version of our JavaScript is now deprecated, and all users have been switched to the Optimized JavaScipt. If you find an issue with the optimized settings where you need to revert to the jQuery JavaScript, please contact Mediavine. You can revert the JavaScript so on the Grow Settings page under Misc.
After July 2021, the jQuery JavaScript will be removed completely.”
I believe this has to do with the jQuery changes we faced back in WP 5.5, I think it was, where that update broke a bunch of sites that were using an older version of the jQuery library.
Many folks had to install a jQuery Migrate plugin for a while until all of the plugins or their themes were updated to run on the new library.
So, if you are still running that extra plugin, maybe this week would be a good time to try to deactivate it and see if all is well on your site, as most all themes and plugins have been updated now.
If you do find something still broken, you may seriously want to consider dumping it for a theme or plugin that is keeping up with the changes in the WP core, as they are seriously behind the times and it will affect both your site speed and security.
Major Revamp Coming to GitHub Issues
WordPress has a few places where you can report issues and/or get involved in the dev side of things.
One of those places is on the support forum for each plugin that is listed in the WordPress.org plugin repository. That’s the first place I go to report any issues I see and/or suggest improvements.
But, that’s not the place the developers hang out.
The actual WP devs participate in a Trac ticket system for addressing core code issues, and for making proposals for changes to the WP core.
But that’s not where plugin devs hang out. They use GitHub.
And GitHub is undergoing a major revamp of how they order and present forum-like posts, where reference data is stored, and more.
I’m telling you this because I see these improvements as a way to make it easier for the devs who make the plugins we use to address fixes needed and/or there may even be a public support or ticket area there too.
I don’t see WP moving away from the Trac system.
But I can see plugin support moving from the current WP plugin repository to GitHub someday.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a way to upvote feature changes and such?
I don’t know that anything like that will be available, but we do need some way to get more end users involved, don’t you think?
GDPR for Mediavine Partners
If you run ads from Mediavine, and you’re using their GDPR solution instead of a GDPR/cookie plugin, it is supposed to only displays to visitors with IP addresses where the laws apply. And if your target audience is US based, then they won’t see it, and that is going to reduce the requests from your site and may fix CLS and speed issues too.
But, I have a site audit client right now who was using a GDPR plugin that we think is the cause of delayed interaction time and she switched to the MV way of doing it.
I ran new tests from the US and sure enough, never saw the GDPR message.
But when I ran tests for Paris, all testers showed a warning, and that’s not good.
She is working with MV support for it and I’ll be letting my BB Hub members know about the outcome and what we did to resolve it.
Please know that this is not legal advice on GDPR and you should use whatever compliance method makes the most sense to you.
The point is that you test things to ensure they are working as expected and don’t just blindly trust that it is.
WordPress Tips
WP 5.8 beta 4 is out
WP 5.8 is set to release on July 20.
Beta 4 is now out and I expect this to be the last beta version.
After that it will become RC1, which is the first Release Candidate. That means all changes will be frozen and they will only be doing a bug scrub up until the public release.
It is very likely that most of us will need the new Classic Widgets plugin when we update to 5.8.
BlogAid News subscribers will get a step-by-step set of update instructions, so be sure you are subscribed. If you’re getting Tips Tuesday via email, then you are subscribed already.
And I’ll have a full video tour of 5.8 when we get closer to release date too.
Theme Tips
Preview of WP 5.8 theme editor
This tip is for my webmasters.
WP 5.8 will include the bulk of core code for the new Gutenberg theme editor.
WPTavern has a nice write up on what the theme editor can do when you use a block-based theme. It’s pretty cool.
And this is where all of our themes will be going later this year.
For site owners, I don’t suggest jumping to a block-based theme yet – maybe we’ll do that in early 2023. So, not so much for you to see here, unless you’re just curious about what’s coming down the road.
Speed Tips
Is AMP Finally Deprecated for Good?
In the urgent need for speed that so many site owners are faced with now, I’ve seen several put their site on AMP.
I sure am sorry for them. They will find out the hard way that their revenue is going to fall lower than whale poop soon.
And as hard as it may have been to get on AMP, it’s a bear from hell to come off it.
The NameHero blog has a nice post on the quick death we all expect soon for AMP.
Google has already declared that they are not reserving the top news carousel spots for AMP sites.
Remember how many years Google has pushed hard for folks to do AMP?
And yet it will become just one more thing that Google made hard to implement, then complained no one used it, then deprecated it.
And some SEO folks laugh at me for advising folks not to use WebP with their images.
I just don’t trust Google, especially when there are other modern file formats we can use for images, like MozJPEG, that have already been around a while, are natively supported by all browsers, and give you the exact same speed benefit as WebP.
READ: Why Squoosh is my favorite image optimizer and use it instead of WebP.
No Support for sites using Ezoic
In last week’s Tips Tuesday I reported on the trickery that Ezoic is using to speed up their ad delivery.
They literally take over the entire delivery and do the same sort of trickery with it that NitroPack does.
They do this by you pointing your domain nameservers directly to them. Or, if you are on Cloudflare, they inject themselves into the middle of that and take control as the DNS manager and proxy.
I will no longer offer support for sites using Ezoic because it ties my hands on both security and speed.
That goes for existing clients as well as new clients.
I’m not sure I can even do a full audit on such a site because I can’t see the trickery they are applying.
So, if you are following my speed and security suggestions and anything goes wrong on a site running Ezoic ads, contact them for support, not me, please.
I’ll be updating our BB Hub Perks and Terms of Service for this, and that sites with Ezoic cannot qualify for the new HOA hosting either.
That’s how strongly I advise against using this type of trickery.
I want you to earn money with your site. I just have to put limits on the support circus I involve myself in.
Blogging Tips
Create Expert Roundups for More Traffic
Have you ever created a roundup type post that features a bunch of different experts on a topic?
They can be a really good source of viral traffic.
I see roundups like this on Pinterest all of the time. Unfortunately, many of those are stolen content and/or images that are used without permission.
That’s not the way to do it.
Instead, I’m in a few blogger Facebook groups where folks ask for submissions on a certain topic.
They give you a dofollow link to your site and credit for your image too.
I’m thinking about doing some of these next year on Heartwood Art so I can feature woodworkers who inspire me.
When you do this right, you gain friends among other creators too, and that’s always good for business as well.
If you’re curious about doing these, the nice folks at Blogging Wizard have a super write up and guide for how to do them.
Monetization Tips
Google delays removal of 3rd party cookie tracking
Holy cow! This is such big news that it hit every major news publisher the day it was announced.
Here’s Google’s official announcement on why they are delaying a change to 3rd party cookie tracking.
And here’s just one article on how Adtech stocks surged after the official announcement.
There are plenty more articles with the news for you to see too, just Google it.
Here’s my take on it all.
Every other major browser already eliminated 3rd party cookie tracking last year so your privacy would be better protected.
Chrome delayed making any changes to tracking because they’ve got a big dog in the race, namely Google Adsense ads on sites.
And then when Google did announce they were dropping 3rd party cookie tracking, they shook the ad world by saying that they were not going to replace it with anything.
And then found out they lied, as soon afterward they came out with FLoC as a replacement.
I’ve talked about FLoC ever since in Tips Tuesday and even recently wrote a post about a proposal for WP to block FLoC.
FLoC stands for Federated Learning of Cohorts and it is Google’s primary machine learning tool involved with how the new Privacy Sandbox works.
The pushback on this thing from everybody in the cyber privacy community has been immense!
And they are saying that it is going to lead to discriminatory profiling.
The fact is that Google is being sued all over the globe for both privacy issues as well as monopoly issues right now.
And their new policies and methods are just going to make things worse for them.
So, I’m thinking they are backing up and taking another look at this whole thing.
I believe they are sticking with the devil they’ve already created, and dealing with the lawsuits on that, as they already have a ton of money tied up with those things.
And the 3rd party cookie tracking as it stands is rolling more money into their pockets to pay for all of it.
Ad agencies are spinning this into saying their own, newly created cookie tracking methods are even more important than ever.
Time to diversify your revenue streams and traffic sources
Here’s what I think of that.
I told you for 2 years that the Pinterest bubble was popping, and so it has.
I’ve been telling you for 1.5 years now that the blogging for ads bubble is popping.
No matter what becomes of the cookie policies, you need to seriously think about diversifying your revenue stream so that ads are only one part of it, and maybe not the biggest part.
That is exactly why I have been pivoting BlogAid since this news first hit in early 2020 and why these summer masterminds this year are so important.
We’re looking into how folks are getting brand sponsorships on IG and other hot platforms.
I’m making a new course so you can get a revenue stream coming in from YouTube.
And the rest of our summer masterminds will focus on ecommerce, including:
- Selling your own products, including digital downloads
- Starting a course
- Running your own sponsored ads and brand placements
These things are so important that despite delays with any other projects I had planned for this year, I will be keeping this schedule as the priority.
We are literally running out of time and you can’t afford to wait any longer with diversifying your traffic and income streams. And I hope that you will budget the money and the time, and do what may even seem hard at first to point your online business in a different direction.
Two years from now you will be making money as other sites fail all around you.
Every prediction I have made for the last 7 years has come true.
I’m in the business of keeping you ahead of the curve.
And I already have the info you need and will help those who will listen.
Let’s keep you in the money amidst all of these changes and riding the incoming waves!
Wrap Up
That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.
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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.
