Tips Tuesday – LastPass Changes, TikTok Fall Trends, AI Image Creation Tools

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• GA4 Course tutorials are underway
• How niche sites leave money on the table
• WordPress 6.1 betas continue to roll out, and the timeline to final release
• Where to get WP 6.1 update instructions
• Login Lockdown changes developer hands, and what that means for its future
• Grow now has 3 email list integrations
• LastPass drops PayPal payments and increases prices
• Successful TikTok Fall trends to use this year
• How you can max out on Google’s new focus on images and videos for mobile search
• The image AI tools I’ve been playing with lately

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BlogAid Happenings

Welcome to Q4, y’all and the full-on race to the end of the year!

My 2 main focuses continue to be mostly the GA4 course and a little bit of client work.

I even put my secret project on hold until I get the GA4 course done. And I’ll give you a progress report on that in just a bit.

Site Services Update

September is usually a light month for client work as folks are super busy preparing all of their fall and holiday site stuff now that the kiddos are back into school.

But, it picks up again in October and doesn’t let up through the end of the year.

Right now the wait list is about 2 weeks, but I expect that to lengthen a bit as we go.

If you are due for your annual audit checkup, please fill out the audit request form or the migration/audit combo form if you’re moving to a new host.

And, if you’re new to BlogAid services and want to get your site all fast and secure and ready for the holidays and new year, now is the time to put in that request.

BlogAid Course Happenings

GA4 Course Tutorials Underway

Woot! 

I’m delighted to share that I’m about half way done with writing the scripts for the GA4 course tutorials!

I think there are about 20 so far.

Now, don’t let that scare you. As promised, they’re all bite sized.

Y’all know I get right to the point in my tutorials – no fluff.

And these tutorials are laser focused so you can complete one whole task at a time and then move on.

The sections are short too so you can easily do 15 minutes at a time and get a whole related group of things done as well. In other words, good stopping points are built in.

In the survey I sent out, most of you said you preferred to just sit down and do it all in one swipe.

That ain’t gonna happen.

I’m positive you’ll appreciate these short tutorials and short sections and find it easier to divi up your time with it.

And here’s why I think that.

GA4 is not just upgraded GA3. It’s a whole other animal.

Right off the bat I’ll help you switch to that mindset that will make it so much easier for you to take hold of all the new stuff.

And then each section has a super short overview so that you’ll have the whole picture of what you’re about to do in that section before you do it.

That will help you make better sense of the whole thing too and give you distinct mile-markers along the way.

And that will give you confidence to know that you completed an entire goal and can take a break if needed, and I believe you will need them. I did.

More than anything, breaking it up like this will help you grasp each concept. And you’ll step through how radically different GA4 is from GA3 without overwhelm.

In fact, I believe you’ll be super excited about just how flexible and powerful GA4 is, and all the amazing things you can track with ease.

Plus, if you add a new money-making tier to your site, you’ll be able to easily add the tracking for it too.

That’s the beauty of learning these concepts in little bites. 

You’ll get the what, why, and the how.

That’s all the happenings around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips and news.

Monetization Tips

Is Your Niche Site Leaving Money on the Table?

Niche sites make more money – we’ve all heard that. 

But, if you aren’t creating multiple revenue streams in your niche, you’re just leaving money on the table.

It’s a lot easier than you think, and it makes more money than you can imagine.

See my Sunday post for ideas on the income stream tiers that you can easily add to your offerings.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 6.1 Beta Update

The WP 6.1 Beta 2 was released last Tuesday. And I expect the Beta 3 to roll out today.

The final release is expected on Nov 1, so these betas are actually coming out 6 weeks in advance, which is unusual. They are normally out 4 weeks in advance.

Will this help them catch more bugs before the final release?

If the last few releases are any indication, I doubt it.

And most of the bugs are in the new Full Site Editing (FSE) additions, that none of us use or want.

And that holds up the first point release, like 6.1.1 for the bug fixes of things that do affect most of us.

So, we’ll see, and I’ll keep you posted.

Plugin Tips

Login Lockdown Changes Hands

In their latest update changelog, Login Lockdown listed that WebFactory has now taken over development. 

They also said that more info would follow and that for now, some urgent updates were being made.

WebFactory has been building plugins and such for over a decade. And they do run a blog, but I didn’t see a word about Login Lockdown on it.

This is one of my favorite plugins and I’ll be keeping VERY close watch on what becomes of it because we all use it.

Grow Now Has 3 Email List Integrations

Are you using the Grow plugin for your social share buttons?

Well, you can do a lot more with it than that.

They have now added 3 ESP (Email Service Providers) integrations for:

• Convert Kit
• MailerLite
• MailChimp

Here’s one key takeaway from the article that I want you to pay close attention to:

“As third party cookies are scheduled to disappear, it is becoming more and more imperative to collect first party data to improve personalization of your email campaigns with your audience. Integrating your ESP with Grow is a great way to kick start this process.”

Folks, your email list is THE most important thing you own in your online business.

Building a tribe and nurturing it through that list is the way you continue to have an audience from which to extract an income.

For folks who are running ads via Mediavine, I think they totally botched their Grow integration for collecting 1st party data when that first came out.

Your visitors thought they were signing up for your email list, and they weren’t. They were signing up for Grow to give them permission to run personalized ads on what they tracked about that visitor. Nor were those emails shared with you.

They’ve fixed that issue. But you are sharing your email list with Grow.

And you are probably still missing a whole bunch of folks on the email list that you do own.

I’ll be talking to my Hubbers (my DIY site audit clients) about this. And together we’ll come up with creative ways to recapture those lost emails that were in that sign up feature when it first came to Grow.

Security Tips

LastPass Drops PayPal and Increases Prices

You may recall in recent Tips Tuesdays that I suggested you consider using LastPass as your password vault. 

They have a free version, but it is limited to one device, and you may need to log into things from multiple devices.

The paid versions had an annual plan for $12 for years. But, I guess inflation is catching up to them and they are making some changes with that.

First, they are dropping PayPal. And if that’s what you used for your annual subscription, they will be canceling it just prior to renewal.

Also, they are going up from $1/mo to $3/mo with their Premium plan, so it’s now $36/year.

While a 3x price increase seems steep, I still think that’s super cheap for the level of security and convenience it gives you.

Thanks so much to fellow webmaster Michelle Phillips of Codefetti for the heads up on this change.

Video Tips

TikTok Trends for Fall 2022

One of the best ways to get more eyeballs on TikTok is to use music and video effects that are trending.

The nice folks over at Search Engine Journal have a whole list of the top trends for this Fall so you can get in on them right now.

And some are super seasonal, like Halloween and such.

They even give you examples of how the trends are currently being used.

And take note – this article is on a site dedicated to Search Engine news.

Let that sink in!!!

And remember, TikTok has recently expanded its description character limit to 2,000. Make use of it as that has everything to do with it working as a search engine for you.

Google Mobile Search to Focus on Images and Videos

If you think TikTok as a search engine is not making waves, listen to this.

At the annual Search On conference, Google announced 5 big changes to mobile search.

The new focus is squarely on images and video.

And honestly, I think the only reason images are going to pop up is when there is a shortage of relevant videos to display.

Over the coming months as this thing rolls out, you’ll see the difference in the search bar itself.

I imagine this thing is going to be jumping all over the place while they tweak it.

So, go have a look at the screenshots in the Search Engine Journal post for what we might expect to start seeing in the very near future.

And if you do Web Stories, let us know if you see a big bump up in hits to those too. I think these changes are going to breathe new life into them, even if it’s just for a little while.

And you better believe that I’ll be keeping close watch on these changes and updating the DIY SEO course for how to make the most of them.

Image Tips

New AI Image and Video Tools

I’ve been having a bunch of fun with new AI image and video creation tools lately.

You literally just type in a text description and the AI creates it for you.

Some even have edit features and can generate variations for you too.

Links to AI Image/Video Creation Tools

• Labs.openai.com – has the new DALL E 2
• Midjourney – still in beta, but you can play with it
• Meta’s Make a Video – can sign up for beta research

FYI, the featured image in the Is Your Niche Site Leaving Money on the Table? post was created by DALL E.

I typed in “photograph of money scattered on a wooden table” and the background of what you see is one of the variations it spit out.

I put my own green overlay and text on it.

And it sure beat the heck out of searching through endless photos on free, or even paid, photo sites. 

Plus, there is zero chance of copyright infringement and I can freely use this image anywhere.

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.