Tips Tuesday – Instagram Strategies, Repurpose Videos for Shorts 

Tips this week include:

• Live Instagram Strategies chat with special guest this week
• Google Search Console AI Mode
• Two months of groceries paid for by videos
• Repurposing for Shorts
• Think ahead to be efficient
• I didn’t start this successful – but I did start!
• Hotlink protection rules in the works
• New robots.txt for AI crawlers
• Cookie plugin research

DIY SEO Everywhere Happenings

Instagram Strategies – with Special Guest

Last week in the DIY SEO Everywhere course we had such a fun time building Link in Bio pages on our sites.

Everybody was amazed at how easy they are to create and style. And folks who are using services like LinkTree are dropping them in favor of doing it right on their site!!

Doing this page gets us set up to prosper from all of the eyeballs we are going to get from Instagram.

This week, we have a special guest speaker, Stephanie Calahan, who will join us to discuss her Instagram Strategies.

Stephanie has some of the best, and most effective posts and videos I’ve seen on IG to both nurture her existing audience and grow loyal fans.

I’m positive everyone will be super inspired with what she’ll be sharing with us!!

AI SEO Tips

Google Search Console AI Mode

Ever since Google introduced AIO (AI Overviews) in Search, our Google Search Console (GSC) metrics for Average Position have been worthless.

It used to be that seeing Position 1 meant that your post was in a Featured Snippet.

But now, if you show up in the AIO results, then your post shows as Position 1.

For Heartwood Art, I show Position 1 on nearly 400 posts.

That ain’t right – not even close to right.

And then when I scroll past all of those, I start seeing normal Average Position number for 1.06 or such. That means my post was shown on Page 1, but not in the AIO batch.

To fix this mess, Google is rolling out a new AI Mode in GSC, as reported in the SEO Roundtable article titled Google AI Mode Reporting Coming To Search Console.

We don’t know what this thing really is, what it will look like, or when we will get it.

What I do know is that I can very easily see my position now in my custom EZ Metrix GSC reports.

And what else I know is that most of my AI Search clicks are not coming from AIO on Google Search. They are coming from other AI Search like SearchGPT (from OpenAI) and Perplexity.

And I can very easily see that in my custom EZ Metrix reports too.

Those clicks are not very easy to see in GA4 – at all. So, in my mind, Google needs to seriously devote some time to that platform as well as GSC.

Video Tips

Two Months of Groceries Paid for by Videos

Last week I received my Google AdSense payment for YouTube, as well as my Amazon Partner Program payment from what folks who watched those videos purchased.

To date, I have 2 months of groceries paid for from my hobby Heartwood Art channel. 

Now, that’s just a couple of weeks below my average, which is half my groceries for the year. 

But, considering that I didn’t start posting to YouTube again until the end of March, that’s great!!

For the last 8 weeks, I’ve been averaging about 2 hours a week on these new videos.

So, that’s 2 months of groceries for 16 hours of work. How ‘bout them apples?!?

Would you work 1 day a month at another job to get 4 weeks of groceries paid for?

Yes, you would!!!

So, why aren’t you doing videos?

Repurposing for Shorts

My latest video is on Jigsaw basics for settings and features.

It’s 18 minutes long.

And you may say, “Hold up! You told us to make shorter content.”

Yes, I did.

But go have a look at that video and you’ll see how I made short sections all the way through.

These are perfect for chopping up into short videos.

In fact, I’ll be revamping the layout for vertical so that I can put the into YouTube Shorts where I can have a link to the full video.

And these short ones will help me revive my Instagram and TikTok presence too.

Plus, these segments make is super easy for YouTube to add automatic chapters and insert mid-roll ads as well.

Think Ahead, Be Efficient

At the end of this first jigsaw video, I mentioned there would be another one for making cuts with the tool.

That will give me all kinds of shorts out of another longer video too.

And, ALL of these videos point to a product that folks can purchase with my affiliate link.

Getting paid twice is nice!

From 2 videos, I’ll likely end up with 20 short videos.

And once I get my workflow figured out, I’ll be able to batch make them in an hour or so.

That will allow me to schedule posting them in batches too.

So, I’ll consistently be adding content in the most efficient way possible.

I Didn’t Start Like This

I ran my YouTube channels, and my video making process very differently when I first started out 5 years ago with revamping Heartwood Art from a carving site to a woodworking site.

And I even walked away from it for 3.5 years because the videos just took way more time to create due to the way I was doing them.

But, along the way I refined my video recording methods, storyboarding, and editing skills.

And now that I’ve flipped my mindset to making shorter videos and/or repurposing longer ones into shorter ones, the whole process has gotten faster and easier.

It’s a joy to make videos now! It’s even better to get paid for them.

So, I didn’t start out like this.

But I did start!!!!!!

You can do this.

Just pick up your phone and get going with it.

Security Tips

Hotlink Protection Rules in the Works

A few weeks ago I reported that I’ve been working on new hotlink protection with one of my clients.

Her images were being hotlinked on multiple sites overseas and in multiple apps.

That was causing a drain on her hosting resources because she was delivering her media to way more than her own site visitors.

We’ve been monitoring the referrer and server links and tweaking a special rule in Cloudflare to stop those sites from hotlinking while allowing other social and search platforms to access the images.

Here’s the thing. Pinterest, Google, and others are not actually hotlinking your images. They download them and serve them from their own hosts servers.

But, when they make that initial download connection, it looks the same as a hotlink request. And that’s why they get blocked if you just add regular hotlink protection.

And, that’s why we’ve been monitoring the hits for the last 3 weeks – so we can exclude the platforms we want to allow.

At this point, I believe we have a good rule set. But we’ll continue to monitor for the next 3-4 weeks to be sure.

At Cloudflare, we can see the AI crawlers, and most of them come through on a monthly basis now.

So, we need to let that cycle run again to ensure the rule set is working and they can get the images.

While monitoring, we are THRILLED to see all of the sites and apps that are getting blocked. Y’all would not believe how many crap apps are out there that do a Google search for images related to their app, then trace back the canonical URL, and then write a JavaScript function to hotlink to those images in a random order. We’ve seen 40-50 of these things, at least.

New Robots.txt for AI Crawlers

The other thing I’m seeing in the new Cloudflare AI Crawler Beta logs is what these AI bots are looking at on our sites.

I’ve been monitoring hits on my sites, and having a look at the hits on client sites as they come through for their regular site audit checkups.

I’m seeing these bots get into areas where there is nothing for them to index and I want to put a stop to that.

Now, we already have a great robots.txt file at the hosting level. But, that file is a suggestion to bots, not the law.

Cloudflare has given us a way to create a robots.txt that will be enforced and allows us to be super selective about what goes into it.

This week I’ll start testing it on my sites and monitoring how the bots react to it.

And then I’ll bring that new setting to all of my site audit clients and ensure that we do get crawled by the AI bots for our actual content so we show up in AI Search, but so we don’t have bots poking around in places they don’t need to be, and chewing up our hosting resources while doing it.

Cookie Plugin Research

A few months ago I alerted my site audit clients about a specific cookie/GDPR plugin that was conflicting directly with the caching/optimization plugin we use.

And I advised them to check out another cookie plugin that might work better for them.

Well, we were informed that it conflicts with the ad agency cookie script that they use. And, we found out that the cookie plugin has changed and has a limit of hits on the free version.

So, now we are researching other cookie plugins that meet all of the requirements.

Here’s the thing.

We did not know about these conflicts immediately when the new cookie plugin was installed. In fact, it was month’s later, when we had other issues we were troubleshooting, that we found out.

Get the Help You Need

Plugin conflicts is just one of the reasons why it is so important to be with a site tech like me who stays on top of things, and in a village of site owners who have super clean, optimized sites, and know how to keep an eye on things properly too.

If you have been a long-time Tips Tuesday reader, but not a site audit client, you’re not getting the full story or all of the help that you need.

Come join our happy village of site owners who have peace of mind and are making more money!