Tips Tuesday – SEO Bot Block, Front Porch Chat for Making Money Online

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Expansion of the bad SEO bot block tests
• What plugins are changing hands with Awesome Motive buying Sandhills Development
• New speed metrics in the Lighthouse 8.3 upgrade
• A front porch chat for the change of season all bloggers are in now and what it takes to get more eyeballs and make more money with your site

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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. And our BB Hub is a private member site and Facebook group for my site audit clients that has lots of extra perks and support.

BlogAid Happenings

Happy fall to all of my northern hemisphere folks and happy spring to my southern hemisphere peeps. 

The change in weather has me energized. Cooler temps rolled in with the equinox and it has been nice ever since with no skeeters.

And there’s definitely a change of season happening with online marketing now too.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a chat, just you and me here on the podcast. 

So let’s catch up with what’s going on today.

Let’s get the wee bit of news for the week out of the way and then we’ll sit out on the porch and have a chat.

BB Hub Happenings

Challenge more bad bot countries

One of the advantages of me doing so many site audits is that I get to keep an eye on the countries that hackers are proxying their bad bots through.

And when I start seeing a rise in bad bots over 6-9 months from a specific country that my clients don’t do business with, we add it to our firewall.

We already have 20+ countries challenged.

And I sent BB Hub members a tutorial last week for adding 2 more that have become a growing bad bot source throughout this year.

That’s the beauty of the “done with you” service I offer.

If you just have someone to tell you what to do, and when, and then make a simple “click here, do that” tutorial, you can keep your site fast and secure yourself. 

You don’t need to hire a site tech to do it for you.

And, this is a totally different thing than the SEO bot blocks I’m still testing.

Cloudflare has to be configured

Plus, just having Cloudflare is not enough. 

It has to be properly, and fully configured to be effective, like all of these firewall settings.

Besides the speed of the CDN, there are all manner of settings for:

• HTTPS – several of which make Google super happy
• Site encryption level
• Page rules for the caching
• And more

I’ve never seen a host setup Cloudflare at all, much less fully.

They just internally point your domain nameserver to it.

And some hosts insist you make your permalinks www to do it too, which is total BS. You don’t have to do any such thing when you get your own Cloudflare account.

This is why I take my site audit clients through the Cloudflare setup live so they can see all of the speed and security they are getting, and so it’s super easy for them to make these other updates themselves.

It’s all part of the huge DIY site owner education you get during an audit.

Plugin Tips

Awesome Motive acquires Sandhills Development

I followed Pippin Williams of Sandhills Development for years.

He is the developer behind such wonderful products like:

• Easy Digital Downloads
• WP Simple Pay
• Payouts Service

But, I think he’s just fried at this point. WPTavern quoted him as saying that he has just lost his passion for both WordPress and creating great products for it. 

Honestly, I think all of us are fried on the sheer pace of rapid change we’ve experienced in the past few years with WP. I can’t even imagine what a chore it is for developers to keep their code base up to speed with not only WP, but PHP and JavaScript changes too.

So, he sold his company to Awesome Motive.

They own several big plugins like:

• OptinMonster
• MonsterInsights
• WP Forms

And since so many of Awesome Motive’s products already use and integrate with Easy Digital Downloads, they have a vested interest in seeing that product development continue.

So, the purchase makes sense.

They say that the whole Sandhills team will be brought over, but unlike many of the recent acquisitions I’ve reported this year, I don’t expect the new owners to keep their hands off these products.

In fact, I would not be surprised if they didn’t fully rebrand them along with even tighter integrations in their current products.

That’s exactly what Awesome Motive did when they bought the Google Analytics plugin from Yoast and rebranded it as MonsterInsights. And that was my last straw with using any of these GA plugins. We hard code it now.

READ: How to Add Google Analytics to Your Site for how to do that.

I don’t think I have any clients currently using EDD for selling digital products as it’s actually heavier on your site than Woocommerce, and that’s a behemoth too.

But if you do use EDD, be on the lookout for changes.

Speed Tips

Lighthouse 8.3 brings new speed metrics

Lighthouse is a tester made by Google that has a ton more tests and metrics than you see in popular online testers such as Google PageSpeed Insights, WebPage Test, and GTMetrix.

Those online testers bring in parts of the Lighthouse tester, like the Core Web Vitals scores.

Well, Google has tightened the criteria for the scores, as well as how they are weighted.

WebPage Test had brought in the new weighting system already. And now GTMetrix is based on Lighthouse 8.3 that has the new weighting system that accounts for the overall score is gives you for both Performance and Structure.

When doing site audits, I have the paid version of GTMetrix that allows me to use an iPhone on a fast wifi connection. That’s a real-world assessment of your site compared to something like PageSpeed Insights which uses a Moto phone that is 4x slower than an iPhone, and uses a Fast 3G connection, which is 2x slower than home wifi.

So, just know that criteria has changed since your last audit and if your site was marginally passing before, it may not now.

FYI, in audit fixes, we go as deep and as far as site owners want to go with speed. It really comes down to what changes they are or are not willing to make to achieve perfect metrics, like change of theme or some plugins or even just layout choices.

Front Porch Chat

Let’s talk about the season of change that’s happening right now, and how you can make the most of it.

Retiring Sites and New Ventures

I’ve had the joy to work with several long-time clients who have been at this online money making thing since 2006 and up.

This past week I consulted with a long-time client on her options for properly retiring her site. And yet another client has contacted me this week to help retire her site too. 

I’ve had more requests for that this year than in the whole time I’ve run BlogAid.

And I’m so happy to help them do it in a safe way that also protects their domain and all of the hard work they’ve put in over the years so someone else can’t make use of it.

Plus, I’ve been having some fantastic conversations with more of my successful, long-time clients and webmasters who are ready to pivot into new ventures too.

And some of them will become partners in new ventures for BlogAid as well.

You’ll be hearing all about the journey as we get going with it. Just know that I’m very excited about the opportunities presenting themselves from so many angles that will allow me to bring you the info and services you need to make money online.

It’s all about relationships

Blogging can be a very isolating and lonely business to be in.

Plus, with the changes all of us have been put through with the pandemic and such over the last year and half, we can feel even more cut off and have new struggles that we have to find a way to deal with.

Since early 2020 I’ve been devoting a whole lot more time to having conversations with my peeps after our live business session to see how things are going with them and what their plans are.

And that has helped both of us plan for our futures better too.

Show me your site, I’ll show you the money

I’m in the process of opening the consulting side of my business back up because these conversations have reminded me how beneficial that type of chat is.

That’s especially true for my new clients who are in the first phases of launching their online business. They end up taking 4 pages of notes from those conversations.

And those chats are helping my long-term clients pivot into new profitable ventures too.

More masterminds and bonus sessions

That’s also why I’ve been doing bunches of live sessions with my BB Hub members, like all of the e-comm masterminds we’ve had this year.

And like the bonus session we did last week for holiday content silos in the DIY SEO course.

I’m lining up more of those for you right now, plus webinars and interviews that will be publicly available too.

I REALLY want to spend a lot more time with my peeps and get in the trenches and into specific details with them about their sites because that’s the most helpful info you can get in addition to the foundational instruction you get in the courses and through site audits.

Recipe Video SEO update

I’ve finished with my data mining on my test sites and have definitive recommendations for foodie folks who want to include videos in both their posts and their recipes.

And, thanks to the help and insights from working with one of my foodie blogger clients, I now have recommendations for those running Mediavine ads on their sites too.

What I don’t have is definitive proof of how Google will interpret all of the different schema markup on your post.

That’s because Google is not handling all schema markup properly.

Even Joost de Valk, creator of Yoast SEO, is complaining loudly about how Google is not interpreting some schema markup well.

So, I do know exactly how to properly markup all of the rich results data that we can get on our posts.

But what Google makes of it is in flux.

This means that we’ll have to mark it up correctly and test what becomes of it over time as Google constantly changes what it recognizes and also changes what it is promoting.

The good news is, I’ve found 14 ways to mark your rich results up wrong and in ways that we are sure confuse the crap out of Google.

And I’ve already started adding those tutorials to both the DIY SEO course as well as the Video SEO Booster course for things like fixing the mixed schema markup output on themes like Astra and Kadence.

This week I’ll be running tests on live production sites where folks have thrown the kitchen sink of stuff onto the site, thinking more is better.

Those results will allow me to finish my tutorials on how NOT to do a post.

And that info is just as valuable as how to do things properly.

Less ads = more money

This is akin to the advice I give all of my site audit clients who run ads too.

And there seems to be a monetary line on who follows this advice and who doesn’t.

My peeps who are making less than $3000/mo all reduce their ads. And they double, triple, and even quadruple their income.

But my peeps who are making $3k-$6k/mo won’t try it. They say this is not side money. It’s their mortgage and car payment and they can’t afford to gamble.

Okay, I get that.

But my peeps who make $10k-$20k/mo all listened to me.

Folks, it’s not about the ads. It’s about the traffic.

Too many ads on a site makes for a slow site and a horrible User Experience for the folks who do wait out the slow load time.

They just leave.

And they don’t come back.

Site owners who have a great User Experience build tribe.

The revenue is not the only metric to watch.

• Their time on site goes up.
• Their bounce rate goes down.
• Their optins go up.
• Their social follows go up.
• Their repeat visitor count goes up.

They aren’t working so hard to get traffic anymore by having to replace the 20k folks who left and will never return every month.

And then the whole thing starts snowballing on them and they easily gain even more traffic faster.

Fastest way to make money

Let me tell you something.

THE fastest way to make money online is to sell something.

Your content is what you are selling. 

That content could come in the form of:

• How-to
• Entertainment
• Product

That’s it.

Everything online falls into at least one of those categories.

Here’s the secret.

The more category overlap you can get, the more you can sell.

Let me tell you something else.

Blogging only for ad dollars is the SLOWEST way to generate income.

It also has the least of the 3 content category overlap potential that I mentioned.

THIS is why all text bloggers need to be looking for how they can overlap into more of those categories.

The sheer power of video

Let’s take Heartwood Art as an example.

I plan every post to also have a video.

That video features me at the beginning, usually in my signature overalls.

That, combined with my accent, and teaching style gives the entire video a certain flavor.

It’s informative and entertaining.

And it has strategic additional content linking and affiliate link product placement throughout.

That means that every post on Heartwood Art has all 3 content categories.

And now I’m having a ball playing while I learn to make short video clips with my phone of me doing stuff in the shop. They are both how-to and entertaining. And if they bring me traffic from other folks wanting to see more on how to do that, there may be a product sale too.

I have another client who sews and she makes videos of her hands doing one type of stitch. It teaches and entertains.

Another client who is a coach makes videos of styled text that ask questions that hit the nail on the head with the very pain points she helps her clients overcome. And sometimes that text is over a video of her feet walking on the sidewalk, or her hands writing them out. It’s not just still graphics that change in the video.

Again, all of it is both entertaining how-to stuff that will result in more follows and then eventually product sales, even if one of those products is a service.

And if you get enough of a following on these video platforms, brands will seek you out.

I have clients right now that have brands crawling all over themselves to do sponsored videos on both Instagram and TikTok.

It’s not all about bringing folks back to your site anymore. It’s about building tribe every place you can.

So, if you’re still only doing text blogging for ads, just keep in mind that brands want to work with folks who do videos now. That’s where the sponsored money is.

No more excuses

Folks, if there is ANY excuse standing in your way of making a video, you’re losing money.

There are too many apps and too many flavors of video content for there to be any reason why you can’t produce a video.

If lack of time is the excuse, you need to seriously consider dropping whatever you are doing that doesn’t have as much ROI potential and make the time to start doing videos.

I hear these excuses just like you would hear them if someone tried to explain to you why they don’t want to do whatever 3rd party platform thing that has been bringing you more eyeballs for the last several years – like Facebook and Pinterest.

How much traffic and money would you have missed all this time if you had not jumped on that opportunity?

You’re missing that much and more by not jumping on video.

The idea that you can only build on your own land is dead.

Creators are getting paid directly from other platforms now.

It’s not all about just sending folks to your site.

It’s about getting eyeballs.

You will need to reach beyond your site to do that – just like you did with Facebook and Pinterest. Now it’s carousels and featured videos in search engines, plus YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

My job is to help you make money

I want you to succeed.

I want you to be found in search engines, not just your posts, but in featured videos and carousels.

I want you to have a fast, secure site that visitors stay on once they get there.

I want you to have landing pages you can easily create yourself.

I want you to sell downloads and printables.

I want you to have courses.

And, I want to see you get brand sponsorship everywhere.

That’s what BlogAid is all about – helping you make money.

That’s what my site services and courses help you do.

I cover all of the angles with things that are directly related to your site.

And now I’m vetting and partnering with more folks to cover everything else.

Y’all know that I keep you way ahead of the curve.

You also know that things change so fast now.

I hope you’ll take this journey with me to make the most of every online opportunity there is.

And I hope you’ll move from thinking of yourself as a content creator and adopt the mindset of selling your content and get all the how-to, entertainment, and product overlap you can, every way and everywhere you can.

Wrap Up

That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.

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