Tips Tuesday – Setting Up Shop, GEO vs SEO, Video Marketing

Tips this week include:

• New tutorials for AI Images for Profit and DIY SEO courses
• New setting to disable AVIF compression
• Got my Shopify dev site set up
• Why more of my clients are opening stores
• Setting up a shop is one thing – running it is another
• How consult helps you make money, not hassle for yourself
• Ad money and the new Chrome privacy settings
• Google revamps crawler documentation
• There are way more Googlebots than you realize
• What the heck is GEO? You’ll be hearing more about it
• Top social trends published monthly
• Why all of my course marketing will be video

BlogAid Happenings

Tutorials

I’m still a tutorial making maniac right now. This past week I updated more tutorials in several courses and I’ve got more on the calendar for this week, mainly in the AI Images for Profit course and the DIY SEO course.

New Disable AVIF Compression

I sure hope you’ve switched over to the AVIF compression format for your images!!

In fact, it is so superior that we can’t stand for there to be any further compression on it, even for extra speed.

And I’m delighted that Cloudflare has a special Rule that we can add to turn off compression just for AVIF images.

I sent info to my site audit Hub clients as well as my Webmaster Training members on how to do it.

Marketing

I’m also making my marketing sheet of ideas as I go through updates on all of my courses, including the EZ Metrix course and the new EZ Digital Designs course. Both are over on the eCreators Hub. More on that in a moment.

Coding

Last month I spent some time getting HTML and CSS back in my brain. And this month I’ve been spending several hours a day each week learning JavaScript for eCommerce.

And now I’ve set up a dev store in Shopify so that I can learn their Liquid and JSON coding languages. JSON is an extension of JavaScript and is what WordPress wants theme devs to use too.

Shopify store owners need the same sort of services that I provide for WordPress site owners – specifically speed and functionality.

But, there are very few standards when it comes to Shopify themes and especially with apps, which is what they call their plugins.

So, I need to be able to dig into their code more to offer that help and improve their shop.

Hub Perks 

I helped 2 of my site audit Hub clients this past week with issues that popped up, like Google marking their site as unsafe. We did all manner of scans and checks and never found any issues. We told Google things were fixed and it took off the warning very quickly. 

It was such a relief to my client to have trusted sources to turn to when something that scary happened.

This past week I also did 3 site audit checkups for my Hub clients. The annual checkups ensure that all of their security is up to date, all of their coding and directives are current with hosting changes, and we remove any orphans left from plugins that were recommended to be removed in the last checkup, or due to other upgrades and changes they have made.

We also have a chat about what they have coming up in their biz, and we have a mini consult to help get them going in a good direction with it. 

More Stores in the Works

This past week I enjoyed 5 client consults for the new stores they are planning to open in the near future.

We talked about ways to walk them into it without a big time and money commitment by using POD sites directly, or the Shopify Starter plan that is inexpensive and integrates directly with your site and/or social platform selling.

Those things are a LOT cheaper and FAR easier than having a full Shopify store.

And, we discussed some of the research they need to do first to protect their copyright and perhaps even trademarks, as one will be making merch that is associated with characters in their books and podcasts.

Get a Consult, Make a Plan

The biggest mistake I see shop and course creators make is asking for generic recommendations on the best platform to use.

And, their highest criteria is that it be easy enough for them to set up by themselves.

That’s a recipe for leaving oodles and gobs of money on the table and inheriting bunches of headaches.

I’ve been helping clients through the process of making money online for 20+ years.

Before they set up anything, we have a consult first.

Here’s why.

• Their head is totally wrapped up in creating the product, not on how to sell it.
• They don’t know the different ways their creations can be delivered and why some make more money than others.
• They haven’t considered upsells.
• They haven’t considered buyer retention.

In under an hour, we talk through all of those things and more.

And we make a plan for each one.

Then, and only then, do we choose a platform that can deliver that plan.

My clients make 4x more money because of that conversation.

Setup is One Thing. Running it is Another.

After that consult, my client’s highest criteria quickly moves from ease of initial setup into ease of making money and ease of running it long-term.

Their criteria also moves away from what they believe will be the initial cheap cost into what will be the long-term cost of actually running it.

Take Woocommerce for example.

The plugin is free.

But, you’re going to find out real fast just how many limitations it has.

The free Woocommerce plugin is a basic framework.

From there you will need at least 10-15 more free and paid plugins to make it work the way you need it too.

And those plugins are not all made by the same vendor either.

Then you have multiple integrations to set up and keep working together too.

It’s a complicated mess of a site that needs special stuff to help it try to run fast because you can use standard speed configurations with it.

And then if you want to add something like a membership to it, you just created one of THE most complicated sites to set up and maintain, not to mention the money outlay for all those paid plugins.

I’ve got plenty of other platform and plugin examples that have the same issues.

But the point is, what you see on a platform’s sales page is far from all there is to it.

Make Money, Not Hassle

Before you jump into a store, or membership, or even a coaching program, let’s chat.

Tell me your ideas and I’ll show you the money – all of it – how to make it and how to spend less while you’re doing it.

I’ll also help you find the caveats and pitfalls to avoid and ensure you’re ready for the admin side of whatever platform you choose too.

Monetization Tips

Ad Money and New Chrome Privacy Settings

If you run ads on your site, then you need to read this post titled Disgruntled consumers fuel fears over Google changes.

The post is a bit twisty, with saying there is a problem, then saying there isn’t, then reversing again.

But, the takeaway in it is that the privacy settings in Chrome, and the way Google is dealing with the cookie issue, will impact your bottom line.

That’s especially true if advertisers start fleeing, like they did with a recent Apple iOS privacy change.

SEO Tips

Google Revamps Crawler Documentation

In recent audits I’ve noticed super heavy crawls from 2 new IPv6 ranges.

It took a little time to figure out what it was, but it is most definitely a new Googlebot.

Now, Google has been good to tell us the name of their bots, and announce any new ones that they add. 

But, in the reports I see, many of them just get lumped into the generic Googlebot heading.

So, I don’t know what this new crawler is looking at, specifically. But I do know that it is gobbling up all of the content on the internet as fast as possible.

There are WAY More Googlebots Than You Realize

Google has been adding to their own Crawler Documentation so heavily in the past couple of years that they decided to split the overview up into 3 sections.

See this post from Search Engine Journal about the revamped Crawler documentation.

And I want you to scroll down halfway to see the long list of all the different types of Googlebots that crawl your site.

You’ll see that each one is focused on a different element.

That’s exactly why I have so many workshops in the DIY SEO course.

You learn to optimize every single element on your site for each of these bots.

There’s way more to SEO than just content and keywords.

What the Heck is GEO?

With the expansion of AI Search results, I believe we are going to see a new buzz term start cropping up everywhere.

It’s called GEO – Generative Engine Optimization.

It’s where Generative AI algorithms overtake regular Search algorithms.

In other words, it’s how to optimize your content to ensure it shows up in AI search results.

The nice folks at Search Engine Land have an article titled How to Implement Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Strategies.

The article is LONG and DEEP.

And they show you the new GEO reports in the SEMRush tool.

Most of the strategies are the same in GEO and SEO.

But the key difference is monitoring what shows up in AI assisted search and figuring out how you can perhaps modify current content or create new content to get in on it.

Let me tell you a secret before you start jumping through these hoops.

Google has been using AI to rank posts for a lot of years already.

What I have found with AI assisted search results is that they are showing mostly the same top 5 results you get in regular search. They’ve just added an AI summary of the info, along with links and metadata to the articles they used for those summaries.

So, if your posts aren’t showing in the top 5 of regular search, it’s not likely that they will show in AI assisted search no matter how much you tweak them for that.

Keep following the methods and strategies I teach in the DIY SEO course and if Google decides that yours is the top post, then you’ll make it into both types of searches.

Marketing Tips

Top Social Trends Published Monthly

The folks over at SEMRush have a service for analyzing the top social trends and telling you how to adapt and create your content to get in on the trends.

See their latest trends report post.

And I want you to pay attention to ONE thing about it.

Every one of them is a video.

Y’all, THAT’s the real trend – video.

What they’re showing you in this report are the flavors of the month and how to adapt your content to get in on it.

Video, Video, Video

When I launched AI Discover Hub, I was making at least 5 videos a week, mainly for TikTok, but I have a YouTube channel for them too.

I embedded those YouTube videos into posts, along with the transcripts.

I’ve since changed direction with AI Discover Hub, and am now only promoting the AI Images for Profit course instead of all AI news.

I have new faceless videos in mind when I return to marketing that course.

And when I launched the eCreators Hub, I intentionally decided to not make blog posts. All of my marketing for it will be video. And they will all be faceless videos too.

My videos on Heartwood Art are the main money makers to this day, even though I have posted very little on that site in the last 4 years.

I honestly don’t care if anything other than video from these sites show up in Google Search anymore.

Video is where the discoverability is happening.

Are you in on it yet?