Tips Tuesday – Storyboard Posts and Videos, Apple Mail Privacy Protection, MailChimp and LearnDash Sold
Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!
Tips this week include:
- How storyboarding makes creating posts and videos faster
- Bonus live DIY SEO course session for content silo and republishing of seasonal posts
- WP Fastest Cache tutorial has been updated
- Update on the Cloudflare bad bot blocking tests
- Update on tests for CleanTalk anti spam service
- How Apple’s new privacy protection will impact email tracking
- Intuit buys MailChimp
- More info on Google changing titles
- LiquidWeb acquires LearnDash
- Brian Gardner of Genesis joins WPEngine in a new role
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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
Wow, y’all!!! I feel so energized.
This past week I literally reveled in being caught up with the bulk of all the delayed projects I’ve been trying to complete all year!!!
And I spent the bulk of the week checking a whole bunch of smaller stuff off my to do list and that felt so good too.
Plus, I’ve had the physical and mental energy at the end of the day to enjoy my woodworking hobby. I now have 2 new projects completed and I have their posts and videos well underway too.
And, I’m very excited that construction lumber prices have fallen to the point that I will now be able to afford to build the garage shelving I need so much. I wanted to do those in the spring but I just could not justify the inflated cost. But, now it looks like that is going to be my next project.
Storyboarding works!!!
A couple of years ago I wrote a post for my Hobby to Money Making Site series on The Art of Storyboard and Photojournalism.
When I changed Heartwood Art over from a carving site to a more general woodworking site, I knew that I wanted to make a video for every build.
And that was such a smart decision because some of those posts and YouTube videos have stayed at the very top of my most popular list for 3 years now.
Now, videos do take a lot more time investment than just still shots.
But, with proper storyboarding, I can plan my videos and stills for exactly the story I want to tell in my post. And that makes the flow of it so much easier.
It takes practice.
But now I can literally write my posts based on the pictures and videos I take. And that written post becomes the voiceover for the video too.
That is the power of photojournalism. The images literally tell the story.
And this has made the whole production so much faster too.
I almost have an assembly line process.
I’ve also promised myself that I will finish each project’s post and video before going to the next project too.
So, the desire to be in my woodshop building stuff highly motivates me to be at my desk and finish up these productions.
Content Silo and Republishing bonus session for DIY SEO course members
And, I’m excited to finally have the Heartwood Art home page edited to show a seasonal post that I did last year. It’s a wooden jack-o-lantern that’s a super fun and quick build and a great project to do with the kids.
That, and a discussion in a blogger group about republishing posts to bring them back up to the home page category widget prompted me to create a mastermind for my DIY SEO course peeps on how to use a content silo for your seasonal posts.
THIS is the shear power of Gutenberg at play because you don’t have to rely on widget-driven home pages anymore.
You can make your own home page and feature whatever you want without republishing posts to bring them to the top.
And you can lead folks to the top of content silo page that you created with all of your posts in the order you want to show them to folks too.
Plus, how to build a content silo for all that juicy internal linking is a workshop in the course already.
It’s just that I think we need a live session to show how to use it specifically for seasonal posts too.
So, we’ll be meeting live this Thursday to discuss it.
WP Fastest Cache tutorial updated
When you add a Javascript code to a widget for something like an optin or sponsored ad or such, that needs to be excluded from Javascript optimization that WP Fastest Cache does to make your site faster. Specifically, from deferring the execution of the code, which ends up placing it below your footer at the bottom of your site.
I had already added the way to fix this for ConvertKit’s code to the tutorial, and for that one, it would be best to use their shortcode anyway.
And FYI, if you use Gutenberg, there is a shortcode block that would be best to use for it too.
But one client had some JS code for an ad that showed up at the bottom of the page, so I expanded the tutorial to include a generic JavaScript exclusion section.
And, the tutorial now has a new Table of Contents at the top too.
If you’re curious, that was made with Gutenberg, not a Table of Contents plugin.
And that’s something I show you how to do in my Gutenberg Ninja course too.
Cloudflare bad bot block test update
As you may recall me reporting over the last couple of months, I’ve been running tests to block the majority of SEO agency bots from crawling our sites and then giving that info to our competition to beat us at content marketing.
I posted a screenshot on the BlogAid Facebook page last week so you could see the numbers I’m seeing during site audits and get a clue just how bad this problem is and why we can’t tolerate 15k-30k extra hits to our hosting resources a month.
And those bingbots are not legit either. They are scrapers and hackers masking as bingbots.
The tests on my own site are working so well that I expanded it to test on a couple of BB Hub client sites because they get way more traffic than BlogAid and they run Mediavine ads.
I did my mid month checks and boy oh boy is it ever working!!!
We had a 50% drop in bad bots on one and a 70% drop on other.
That’s going to save on their hosting resources like crazy and reserve all of that hosting power for their human traffic.
It will also keep them from going into any overages and needing a bigger hosting package. So all this testing time is well worth it.
There have been zero ill effects to their traffic and we have confirmed with Mediavine that there is no disruption to ad revenue or tracking too.
So, this definitely looks like a go and I will be either making a tutorial for my BB Hub folks or I’ll just start including these firewall rules during site audit checkups after a few more tests.
CleanTalk test update
I’ve also been testing the CleanTalk Anti-spam service on all of my sites for the past month.
This is a paid service, but it is stupid cheap. And I have been unable to find a free solution to protect both our content spam and contact form spam that works well.
Akismet is supposed to do both, but it doesn’t work as well as it should and chews up your database in the process. So, we need another solution.
But last week, I had some folks new to BlogAid report to me that they were seeing a spam firewall screen when they visited.
I asked my BB Hub peeps to visit and they had no issue, and did not see the firewall screen.
The next day, I saw the firewall screen when I went to visit my site not logged in and discovered that it was being generated by CleanTalk.
I asked my webmaster training peeps about it and discovered that this Anti-spam firewall is a new feature that is obviously buggy.
And it took checking on a setting to remove all of the plugin’s collected data before totally deleting it and installing anew.
None of my other four sites had this issue, including member sites that are on sub-domain of BlogAid.
I had installed the plugin with all the default settings and there are a LOT of settings!!!!
So, this week I’ll be gathering data of what CleanTalk has been blocking, and then turning off that firewall. Later I’ll go back in and see what it is not blocking anymore.
I’ll be digging into all of the settings, especially this Spam Firewall setting, to better coordinate with the layers of security I already have on our sites.
THIS is why I do all of this testing before I recommend something for y’all to use too.
Plus, I’m working with the devs of CleanTalk to improve the onboarding experience and their interface as all of it looks like it was built by engineers back in the 80s and not for the end users of today.
In fact, I’ve never seen an online product that made it so confusing to purchase, connect, or get support. But, I will also say that the support is super fast and accurate. So that helps.
I am likely to recommend this service widely, but I can see that I’ll have to make a tutorial for it first. And I’ll be doing that after I finish my testing.
Site Services update
This past week we moved 8 projects to completion and I was able to onboard several more folks who are already site audit clients and they were coming in for their annual site audit checkup.
All of them are super, duper quick and cheap, like 2-3 days. And that’s for the gathering of the info, the audit, the live chat, and the fixes.
So, if you’re on my wait list, I’ve already contacted the folks that we’ll be onboarding this week and in the next couple of weeks.
If you haven’t heard from me yet, I appreciate your patience and I’m getting to all projects as fast as I can!!! And as all of my site audit clients can tell you, it’s worth the wait!!
If you are in need of a site service, we’re booking into the Jan/Feb timeframe now. That is a best guess and could be weeks either side.
That’s all the news from around here. Let’s jump into this week’s tips.
Marketing Tips
Apple’s new privacy protection will impact tracking
The huge news last week for all email marketing folks was an update in the iOS15 release for all Apple devices that includes new privacy protection for folks using the native Apple Mail app.
I want to thank fellow webmaster Larry Snow for bringing this news to my attention.
I also want to thank BB Hub members Gaye Levy, Stephanie Calahan and Natalie Gallagher for schooling me on just how big a deal this is.
When I first got my iPad and iPhone I already BlogAid on GSuites. The tutorials I came across for hooking up my GSuites email to my devices said to use the Gmail app. So, I never used the native Apple Mail app and had no idea that other folks did. Boy, was I mistaken!!
And I want to thank all of them for the links from various email list service providers that I’ll share with you in a moment too.
Here’s what Apple said about the new privacy feature in their official announcement:
“In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location.”
Basically, this could impact your ability to measure your email campaign success rate because it will be much harder to track opens.
Now, any in-email activity will still be tracked, like clicks on links.
But the fact is, we pay money for these list services. And it’s important for us to know if an individual subscriber is opening our emails or not. We don’t want to pay to continue to send them those emails. I know many of my peeps regularly purge their lists to keep from paying even higher prices as their list grows.
So, it’s not just a matter of vanity metrics here. This means real money to us.
Here are a few links that my peeps shared with me from the most popular email list services in reaction to this Apple Mail app change.
Intuit buys MailChimp
I want to thank fellow webmaster Larry Snow for bringing this news to my attention.
The announcement didn’t mention any big changes to the basic email list service that we use.
I think their focus for changes is just on integration of the two services, and mainly for selling.
I use MailChimp, so I’ll be keeping a close eye on this for us.
SEO Tips
More info on Google changing titles
You may recall me recently reporting that Google has a new system for changing post titles and it is based on the post content, not the searcher’s query.
Well, they got a LOT of questions and feedback on that announcement, so they released another post with more details.
Basically, they are trying to eliminate junk or inaccurate titles from search results, as best as I could determine from the examples they gave.
For instance, one of the examples was a blank title, meaning that the post title was missing, but it had the delimiter and the site name.
Another example they showed were titles that had a previous year in them, but the post had been updated or republished for the current year.
And then other examples were boilerplate titles that weren’t descriptive enough, like a recap of a TV show that didn’t have the season numbers on them.
So, given these examples, I don’t think anyone in my DIY SEO course has anything to be concerned about at this point with this new system.
But, of course, I’ll be keeping my eyes on it to see if they expand it, or how else it is being used.
Member Site Tips
LiquidWeb Acquires LearnDash
Seems like every few weeks this year we’ve had a big acquisition announcement in the news.
I think we’re going to end up with 10 companies that own everything WP related.
This week, the big news is that LiquidWeb has purchased LearnDash.
LiquidWeb is primarily known for being one of the world leaders in hosting. Several hosting companies lease their servers, like NameHero and parts of Iridium Hosting where our HOA hosting for my BB Hub peeps is.
But, they are also the parent company for a lot of plugins and such too, as well as companies like iThemes, which acquired Kadence themes earlier this year.
For the most part, they put a solid financial footing under these companies, but they still leave them to run themselves.
I suspect that will be the case with LearnDash too.
And if you run a membership site, you may have heard or LearnDash. It’s a nice user interface and offers course members a way to track their progress through the course.
I don’t use it on BlogAid’s courses because my tutorials update way too often, and they are not offered in modules where you MUST complete one before you have access to the next one.
I do lay out my courses so that you can take them in a top-down fashion, but you also have the freedom to access anything you want anytime too.
Fun News
Brian Gardner joins WPEngine
For my webmasters who design in Genesis, you’ll find this announcement interesting.
Brian Gardner is the creator and founder of Genesis and StudioPress.
And those were purchased by WPEngine back in 2018.
Brian has remained with the company since, but I think it was mainly as a liaison during the changeover.
He now has a new title and full-time position with WPEngine as Principle Developer Advocate.
And I really think this is all about using Brian’s clout and connections in the WP community to get more folks onto the Gutenberg train, especially with Full Site Editing.
I met Brian in real life during the WordCamp where WP 5.0 and the Gutenberg editor were released. I asked him about Genesis jumping on it and he said they had no plans for that yet as Gute was just not ready for prime time – and he was right.
So, this new role is a bit of circling back and moving Gute and WP forward in a very responsible way.
I’m looking forward to hearing what Brian will be doing in his new role and how it helps move us along even faster through this revolution of change.
Wrap Up
That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday.
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