Tips Tuesday – Summer Sales, Turn Readers into Buyers, PHP 8 Tests, Foodie Pattern Plugin

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• Why the Video SEO Booster course is closing for now and how I’m revamping it
• Super Summer Sales Event is coming soon, and where to get first dibs on limited discounts
• Page Content SEO workshop is this week in the DIY SEO course
• Tutorials on the new Cloudflare interface are coming in the Webmaster Training course
• PHP 8 tests have begun and not everything is passing muster
• How the excessive pings from free downtime monitors are hurting your site resources
• The critical info that downtime monitors don’t tell you
• New Pattern plugin for foodie bloggers
• WebP as default is still being pushed by the WP Performance team despite criticism
• Why we may or may not see a new WP plugin checker
• How to turn blog readers into paying customers

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BlogAid Happenings

It’s been a slow week for client work due to so many folks on vacation. So I took this time to make some changes at BlogAid, including changes to courses, audits, and messaging.

Video SEO Booster Course Closed

Thanks to everyone who joined the Video SEO Booster course.

When I built this course, I had a target market in mind, specifically foodie bloggers who ran ads. But, during the last part of the testing, and after I had built the majority of the course, I realized that they would not want to run YouTube videos on their sites. They would make more money with running video ads from their ad agency.

So, the main demographic for the course, which I already had plenty of access to, was not going to work out, and that has made it a break-even on revenue course unless I started a big marketing campaign to attract a different audience.

And, I have also come to understand that bloggers who do make videos are putting most of their time and energy into Instagram Reels and some are venturing into TikTok. Most are just not making long-form video, which is what does best on YouTube.

That’s a shame because I’m getting paid by putting the info in this course to use for Heartwood Art, as are my peeps who also do long-form content. They are building a very loyal audience too.

And video will pay even bigger for the secret project I’m currently working on, as video marketing is the centerpiece of it.

But, it has become evident that I just don’t have the audience for this course and I don’t plan to put more time and energy into getting that audience until maybe this time next year.

And even then, I won’t run this as a standing course. I’ll bring it back as a limited-time mini course for folks who want to get in and get it done and who are super serious about getting their videos to the top of YouTube and Google Search, plus getting the SEO benefits of more time on site and lower bounce rate too.

So, the course is currently closed for purchase.

And I’ve asked everyone in the course to cancel their subscription in their PayPal account.

They will still have access to the course material for the remainder of their subscription.

And when all of them expire, I’ll revamp it into a mini course.

So, gone for now, but not forever.

Other Courses Will Remain Open

Y’all may recall that I also closed the Gutenberg Ninja course a few weeks ago too.

And if you’re in any other BlogAid course, you may be wondering if they’re going to stick around.

Let me assure you that the DIY SEO course and the Webmaster Training courses aren’t going anywhere and will remain open and updated.

Site Audit Price Increase

During my mid year and year over year evaluation of BlogAid, I realized just how many checks I’ve added to the site audits, and how much I have been absorbing price increases with all of the software and vendor services I use to be able to do audits.

I’ve always priced audits too low because I saw it as a foot-in-the-door offer to build long-term relationships with clients.

And I still see it that way.

But the fact is, I can’t keep absorbing these price increases nor absorb the extra time needed to do the audits and the live chats to go over the report, which are included in the pricing.

So, the audits have been right priced now.

But, that first audit is the only one that will cost you that much.

Audit checkups are fast and easy and have been flat feed for my BB Hub Plus members, as they qualify as DIY site owners.

You can see more details about that, and the perks of being a BB Hub Plus member on the Site Audits page.

Super Summer Sales Event Coming Soon

For those of you who meant to get an audit soon, no worries.

I’ll be launching the Super Summer Sales Event very soon and will be offering audits at the original reduced rate for a limited number of sign ups.

We won’t actually be doing your audit until late August or September, and you don’t pay until after it’s complete. 

And I’ll be offering a discount on the DIY SEO course and the Webmaster Training too, as well as a discount on consults and live sessions.

BlogAid News subscribers will be the first to know when the sales event starts and will get first dibs on the limited number of discounts on some items.

Site Services Update

The waitlist for site services is running into the end of August / first of September range, best guess. And I expect that to go to the end of September quickly when I announce the Super Summer Sales Event.

So, if you have an audit checkup due, or you’re ready to move to better hosting and you want to get it done before end of summer, now would be the time to fill out the appropriate form.

BB Hubbers, you can find links to all forms in your membership dashboard.

BlogAid Course Happenings

Page Content SEO Workshop

This week we come off our summer break and meet live for the DIY SEO workshop for Page Content.

We’ll be covering all the things that Google crawls and how to max out your SEO.

Plus, we’ll cover why to not give a flip about SEO on some pages and write them purely for conversion.

New Cloudflare Tutorials

For this entire year I’ve seen Cloudflare tweaking its interface every week, sometimes every day.

For the past 2 months I’ve seen 4 different interfaces, and sometimes there are different ones within the same account that has multiple sites.

It’s nuts!!

But, it looks like they are finally flipping everyone over to the beta interface they were testing with the tools in the left sidebar instead of icons along the top.

So, this week I’ll get started with making new tutorials for my Webmaster Training folks and hope to goodness that Cloudflare doesn’t make a major tweak right after I finish.

I will be releasing the full tour first. I try to update that at least once a quarter to catch everyone up on the latest tools and settings.

BlogAid Village Happenings

PHP 8 Testing Has Begun

PHP is the coding language that is used in WordPress and for our database.

The version we are using is configured at our hosting, along with all of the settings needed to make our sites fast and secure with regard to our PHP support.

We are currently running PHP version 7.4. But support for it will drop in November.

That means we need to start testing version 8.0 right now to ensure nothing with our themes or plugins breaks. And if there is a break, we’ll have time to deal with it.

I made tutorials for my Webmaster Training members as well as my BB Hubbers, who are my DIY site audit clients last week.

We’ll all be reporting our findings and answering questions to ensure that everyone is ready for the switch well before it happens.

So far, only one client has reported an issue with the switch, and we think it is her old theme. We’ll be doing a live session soon to look into the error logs and verify the issue.

My two member sites had an issue with one of the MemberPress addon plugins that showed no updates, but was behind by 3 versions. 

There is also an issue with one of the popular reply to comments plugins not working on PHP 8 as well. And BB Hub members should check our PHP 8 Facebook post for more details and recheck your sites, as the issue did not show up for me until my second check the next day after I had purged all caches.

And my book site had a really strange issue that I’ll be checking into this week. The site seemed to work fine, but the login page was blank.

We’ll continue to test for the rest of the month until we get everyone switched over.

And then we can put this behind us and be well ahead of the forced upgrade in November. We’ll be calm and living our lives while others are screaming and grasping for help.

That’s the perk of being with someone who keeps you well ahead of the curve and on good hosting that is guaranteed to have correct PHP settings.

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

Security Tips

Excessive Downtime Monitor Pings

When I do audits I look at all of the bots that are hitting your site.

You can’t see those in Google Analytics. You have to look into the host logs.

And then I suggest security measures for cutting out all the bad bot hits that are just chewing up your limited hosting resources, like CPU, memory, and I/O which is Input/Output on the database.

You want to reserve those resources for human visitors and not let the bad bots make your site run slower either.

One of the issues we are running into with excessive bot hits are the free downtime monitors that site owners use. 

Unfortunately, the frequency of the pings on those free ones can’t be set to less than 5 or 10 minutes.

Let me show you the toll that takes on your hosting resources.

• At 10 minutes that’s 4320 pings a month.
• At 5 minutes that’s 8640 pings a month.

Unless you are running a transactional site, like a store that is making sales every 5 minutes, you have ZERO need to ping your site that often.

Plus, when Cloudflare or host servers are experiencing a malicious attack, they are going to flip into mitigation, which scrutinizes frequent pings and blocks them. 

That has 2 detrimental effects on your site.

• You get false warnings that your site is down. It’s not down. The bot was just denied access.
• Mitigation is a bottleneck. Think of it like a DUI checkpoint on the road. The traffic backs up. And with all these bots trying to get through, they clog the whole thing up and make access to your site super slow for your human visitors.

So, if you think you really need your downtime monitor, let me ask you 3 questions:

• When was the last time your site was actually down?
• Was there anything you could do about it?
• Was the issue due to crap hosting or an attack?

If your site is not down more than once a year, you don’t need to ping it every 5-10 minutes.

If your site was down due to issues at the host beyond normal maintenance, you need to move to better hosting.

Get a Paid Monitor

If you still feel that you really HAVE to know if your site is up or not, get a paid monitor and set to ping in 30 minute intervals because 48 pings a day is still WAY more than enough.

And if you flench at the idea of not getting something for free, then you’re stuck in the newbie blogger mindset, not the business owner mindset, and you need to address that and see this as a valuable business expense.

That alone will tell you whether you HAVE to know if your site is up or down or not too.

It’s Not About Up, It’s About Slow

Most hosts boast 99.9% uptime. And the good hosts meet that stat.

So, the issue is not whether your site is down. 99.9% of the time it’s up.

The real issue is the server running slower than normal.

And your free uptime monitor is not going to tell you when that happens.

I use NixStats. It’s the same service that some hosts use to let them know when their servers are running slow.

But it has a super goofy interface and is not easy for non-techie site owners to read either.

There are TONS of monitoring services available.

I think it’s time for us to have a look into them and see what we like.

But, I’m going to need help with those tests.

So, I’ll be calling on my Webmasters to see what they use for the clients they manage and we’ll do some comparisons.

And I’ll keep you posted.

Gutenberg Tips

New Pattern Plugin for Foodie Bloggers

WPTavern has a nice review of a new plugin from WPZoom called Block Patterns for Food Bloggers.

It’s a nice collection of patterns that retain a consistent style.

I didn’t see anything in it that you could not do with the UAG plugin, now called Spectra Blocks.

And I have not tested it for bloat. I know that Spectra Blocks has no bloat.

But do have a look and let us know what you think.

WordPress Tips

WebP as Default Still Being Pushed

Y’all may recall that something absolutely snapped in me over the WP Performance Team debacle with regard to making WebP the default image no matter what format you upload.

The devs pushing for this totally disrespected every other person on the team that voiced why this was a bad idea.

And they pushed their proposal out to the public anyway, with strong motivation to get this into the WP 6.0 release.

What they got were their asses handed to them with over 300 folks telling them why this was a horrible idea.

So, they finally backed off, regrouped, and did some of the research they should have done in the first place.

Now that research has been released and they are still disrespecting all of the negative feedback and pushing for this thing to be in WP 6.1.

I left the WP Performance Team over that hoohaa and I’m not going back.

But I will do whatever I have to do to keep this crap from rolling into WP core.

That includes calling on you again to voice your concern. The sheer volume of negative feedback is the only thing that stopped it before and will likely be the only thing that stops it again.

I’ll keep you posted on when it’s time, and where to voice your concerns.

And thank you for stepping up because this affects all of us.

Plugin Checker Proposal

FYI, this is not the only controversial thing that sections of the WP Performance Team are working on. 

There’s a proposal for a plugin checker to ensure plugins meet minimum standards to be included in the WP Plugins Repository.

In my opinion, this should have been done 19 years ago when the first plugins were developed for WP. And, WP has made some strides with requiring a few plugin standards, but they don’t go nearly deep enough.

So, what we have now are devs who want to set those standards at a much higher level.

Yet we have other devs saying that it will be used like a weapon against devs to adopt WP coding standards and that will squelch development.

Wait, what?

A WP plugin might have to adopt WP coding standards? What could be wrong with that?

Well, a lot.

In the past 5 years we have seen a major influx of plugin and theme devs who have coded for years outside of WP to an entirely different standard.

They think WP code is smelly poop.

And because of the general hubris of devs, they think what they know is so superior that they don’t try to adopt WP coding standards. They just make what they think is a bridge from their way of doing it to the WP way of doing it.

And the result has been a bunch of high quality themes and plugins that break – often.

They think their code doesn’t stink, but in reality what it doesn’t do is play well with WP.

One popular ad agency decided they wanted to get into the plugin and theme business and I’ve butted heads with them over their code several times to the point I’ve just given up.

There’s another popular theme framework that was breaking every time they did an update and we literally had to hit them over the head by publicizing negative reviews to get them to change their code to the WP way.

So, if this new plugin checker will require devs to do things the WP way, maybe that’s not so bad, and we’ll have less of these plugins breaking all the time.

Monetization Tips

How to Turn Blog Readers Into Paying Customers

Moving from the mindset of blogging for ads into blogging for direct pay can be a little challenging in that you may not realize where you’re leaving money on the table.

The nice folks at ProBlogger have an excellent article full of tips to help you start thinking about how you craft your content, and even new content ideas that will turn your readers into buyers.

I especially like Tip #2 for those who do affiliate marketing.

Don’t just put links to stuff in your content.

Make a big deal of it – literally a deal post.

Everybody loves saving money and getting a deal is strong encouragement.

What tip in the article did you like best?

Which one can you put to use right away?

Let us know in the comments anywhere you see this post online.

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.