Tips Tuesday – Last Chance Holiday Deals, DIY SEO Quick Starts, AI in Workspace

Hello Happy Site Owner!

Tips this week include:

• Last chance on BlogAid Holiday Deals
• 2024 Site Success Predictions for Hub members
• DIY SEO Quick Starts have begun
• New Metrics Tutorials on the way
• How an applied SEO consult will help you
• Did you get an email for how your forms performed this year?
• AI images are paying big
• Why writers need to keep tabs on AI video
• AI has come to Workspace
• More AI plugin reviews underway
• Why now is a great time to try something new

Welcome to the new year!

I believe this will be a time of big pivots for most site owners.

I also believe you will need support and community now more than ever too.

And that’s exactly what I’m working on for you.

So let’s hit the ground running and get this party started!

Last Chance on Holiday Deals

This is it!! The last few days on super savings from BlogAid on the courses and services you will need the most in 2024.

I’ve got HUGE discounts for you this year on the things you need, including:

• DIY SEO course – save $100
• Webmaster Training – save $190
• Site Audit – save $100
• Consults – half off
• AI Images for Profit – first month for $1
• AI Success Club – 25% off plus $900 worth of bonuses

See the Holiday Deals page for all the details.

And tell your blogger buddies about these deals too!!

BlogAid Happenings

2024 Site Success Predictions in Live Hub Session This Thursday

I’m really looking forward to meeting live with my site audit clients this week to discuss what we see coming for 2024 and the big changes they are making.

I’ll also be revealing the new things coming from BlogAid that will help with those pivots and ensure my clients stay in the money.

DIY SEO Happenings

Quick Starts Have Begun

In the DIY SEO course, before we dive into the live workshops, we always do a series of quick checks to ensure the foundation of our SEO is super solid.

This week members are receiving emails with instructions on what to check, and there have been some really important changes this year too, especially with the Yoast SEO plugin.

These checks are fast and easy to do and they ensure your critically important SEO settings are exactly right.

This includes the global schema markup for your whole site that has become so very important to Google these days, especially since the Helpful Content Update.

New Metrics Tutorials

In the survey I sent to DIY SEO members a few weeks ago, I asked how many of them had been hit by the Helpful Content Update. Fortunately, only a few had, which is great.

But, in checking into ways to help folks determine if they had been hit, and what had taken the biggest dive, I discovered just how poor the reporting is in GA4 and GSC to figure that out.

So, I came up with better ways for us to evaluate those metrics.

And I’ll have new tutorials in the course soon for how to use Google Sheets with some simple formulas so you can get the whole truth about what’s going on.

Applied SEO Consult

It’s one thing to learn about SEO. 

It’s another thing to figure out how to apply it to all aspects and areas of your site.

One of my site audit clients got into the DIY SEO course last year and did a good job of applying as much as she could to her site, plus she changed the way she wrote all new content because of that course too.

But, like most folks in the course, she discovered that there is WAY more to SEO than just keywords and such.

This is exactly why folks stay in the course year after year. 

Once you get savvy about the 30 or so places that Google looks hard at on your site and with your content, it takes a while to shore up what you have, and to get in the habit of applying it to all new content.

But, even with folks who have been in the course for a while, I still see that they are missing some things. That has a lot to do with them being buried in their content all the time and not looking at the whole site the way Google does – even though that info is in the course.

Get an SEO Check

Site audits are mainly focused on security and speed. So, I only do shallow SEO checks during them because so many site owners miss the really big stuff, like not having your top schema markup right, as that is THE main thing Google is looking for with your content. 

But I do look at other things during the audit when I’m checking security and speed that also affect your SEO, like your author settings and such. Now that Google has so much more emphasis on authority, that’s a big thing to have right.

My client has also started another site that is far more niche, and has much higher potential of being even more profitable than her first site, which is making money.

Growing her authority in the niche, and growing her email list are her top priorities for this new site.

She asked for a deeper SEO check and in 15 minutes she had 5 big action items that are going to completely transform how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks her site for authority on topic.

And now she also has a way to ensure that the focus is squarely on the visitor’s journey and capturing that audience on her email list.

I teach the mechanics of all of this in the DIY SEO course.

And with this consult, now she can see new ways to apply those methods on her site and how all of those areas work together in the eyes of Google and for her site visitors.

In other words, in 15 minutes it all clicked for her. 

She totally gets how the whole picture works, and exactly how it works on her site with her content and with the goals she wants to achieve.

Contact me for a live session and get another set of eyeballs on your site.

Plugin Tips

How your forms performed this year

Did you get an email with that Subject line?

Me and all my peeps use Formidable – have for years. And the plugin suddenly decided to send out this email for performance – with a big fat 0 on it as we have all that tracking stuff turned off.

But, the real issue with it was that it had no branding of any kind on it.

Honestly, it looked super fishy. In fact, my spam detector fired off on it.

I put a comment on the Formidable plugin support page asking that they change the wording and at the very least, add branding, as some folks have more than one form on the site.

With phishing attacks being up 300% last year, it’s super important to ensure that you make it clear who the email is being sent from, and why someone is getting it.

And, it’s a good idea to offer a very clear way to opt out of such notifications too.

AI Tips

AI Images are Paying Big

Last week me and the folks in the AI Images for Profit course had a live chat where we covered how folks are making real money with AI images.

A couple of folks are doing so well with it that they have put blogging on hold. That said, her blog followers were the first folks to buy her wares on Etsy. And they have given such good reviews that now Etsy is starting to promote her.

So, blogging still has its place in this AI image world.

During our session, we also chatted about new ways to get the attention of national organizations to help you sell your products made with the help of AI too.

A few folks are making so many products that they regularly run up to the limit of their tokens every month on some of the AI generation tools.

Good thing we cover so many different tools in the course, as that gives them choices for using the best tool for the product, and helps them never run completely out of tokens or needing to pay more for them, or relying too heavily on one platform.

We also covered some of the new features coming in Midjourney version 6, which has been released in Alpha for most folks, and in Beta for a few others.

And we did comparisons with it and DALL-E for creating text in the AI images too.

Why Writers Need to Keep Tabs on AI Video

It’s truly stunning how fast AI image creation has improved, and I expect that blistering pace to continue this year.

That’s why a course is a great way to stay on top of the changes and make the most from them, including ways to make the most money.

But I think the biggest improvements have come with AI video.

For all of 2023 I kept close watch on what you could do with AI images in video, and with AI video directly.

It is AMAZING!!!!!!

And it’s only getting better.

I predict that this is the way movies are going to be made, and there will be a LOT of money for creators in 2024 because of it.

I’ll tell you the secret to who is going to make that money – the best stories are going to win.

I believe video creation will be so easy in 2024 that everybody will be able to generate their own shows.

So, then it comes down to creating compelling stories that keep viewers hooked.

For everyone reading this who has a thing for creative writing, you very seriously need to be keeping up with what’s happening in the AI video world.

AI in Workspace

2023 was definitely the year of ChatGPT.

And I think it is an amazing AI product.

But, I have profound concerns about privacy and security with some aspects of it and/or ways of using it.

That’s why I’m going all in on the Google’s Duet.ai, which is for Workspace users.

It has many of the same ChatGPT functions that folks enjoy, but it’s private and secure.

And it can do things for your business that no other AI can do.

Plus, everything is right there in the business tools you already use, like Docs and Sheets.

I’ve been working hard on new services for help with analytics of all kinds and from all sources.

And I’ll be putting together packages to help bring AI into Workspace for site owners who are super serious about their metrics, like bloggers who also run shops and member sites and/or who run ads and free webinars or other lead magnets.

This will also be for those who run teams, or need VA help, or just want to automate as much as they can.

You’ll be hearing more about it later this year.

More AI Plugin Reviews

I’ve got a whole list of popular plugins that now have AI in them.

I’m working out the review schedule for 2024.

And, I’m checking into the themes that are going to have an AI component to them too.

Tips Tuesday Plus subscribers will get that bonus info.

In fact, some plugins have already quietly slipped in an AI component on us and I was able to warn my TT+ subscribers about how to turn it off because it was a security issue.

So, this is info you definitely want to get and stay up to date on.

Try Something New

An interesting conversation popped up in our site audit client’s group.

Some of us learned to type back when it was fashionable to double space between sentences.

And some folks never got the memo that practice had fallen out of vogue since True Type digital fonts came into existence.

Some folks still double space. And some folks are dropping that method.

And some are even fixing their older site content to remove it as they update that content.

And it got me to thinking that a new year is a great time to change a habit or try something different.

The fact is, everything about the internet has been the wild west since its inception.

We’re all just making it up as we go along.

There are no real rules.

But there are habits and methods that perform better than others.

And then someone comes along and finds a novel way to use a platform and literally invents a new successful method.

So, don’t be afraid to try doing things a different way, or just try something for the fun of it.

Sometimes coloring outside the lines makes for the best artwork.

And you’ll never know what spaghetti will stick unless you throw some at the wall.

Give yourself permission to try, and to see, and to move on with what works and leave what doesn’t.