Tips Tuesday –  UpdraftPlus and AMALinks Issues, Build Email List, Content Marketing, Video

Hello Happy Site Owners and Webmasters!

Tips this week include:

• BlogAid Holiday Deals are still going with discounts on all courses
• New DIY SEO tutorials are underway
• Info on Code Name Ida will be going out to BB Hub members this week
• Why all bloggers need to take the WP annual survey this year
• Fixes for UpdraftPlus and a new nuisance warning that came with it
• What’s up with AMALinks and Cloudflare plugin conflicts
• How to exclude Web Stories in WP Fastest Cache
• 3 tips for building your email list with awesome content
• 8 fresh content types that every marketer should consider for 2022
• The new YouTube Analytics that Google is testing
• 16 best Instagram giveaways and contests to run
• Why I think Social Media Today missed the mark about the IG feed going to all video

Listen to the Podcast

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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!! Tomorrow is Dec 1!! Welcome to the sprint called year end.

And I can’t say how happy I am to be on track for finishing all of the projects that I wanted to complete this year. I have to tell you, 6 months ago I didn’t know if I would be able to do them all or not. And it feels good to have the overload behind me and be on target with creating more goodies for you!!!

This past week I’ve been doing deep research into our online future. I’ll have a post out for you in Dec with details. 

And I’m deep into creating my plans for 2022 and will have a post out for you on what’s coming for the first quarter with BlogAid soon too.

Just let me say that this is the most excited I’ve been in years about the changes that are coming and I look forward to making the journey with you.

To that end, I’ve got a whole bunch of ideas posts for you this week that will get you excited for using your existing content in brand new ways and that’s going to give you a way to start this journey from right where you are now. Plus, I think you’ll have a whole lot of fun doing it too!!!

Holiday Sales still going

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are in the rear view mirror, but that doesn’t mean you’ve missed the holiday deals at BlogAid.

All courses are on sale through the first week in January, as some folks want the tax write off for 2022. 

But, you may want to go ahead and jump into at least the DIY SEO course before then because we start our live workshops in January and you will want to take the standing tutorials prior to that.

DIY SEO Tutorial Updates Underway

And speaking of, this week I’m updating all of the Yoast SEO tutorials in the DIY SEO course for the new things they’ve added plus interface changes they’ve made.

And, I’m gathering my notes from these updates to make our Quick Checks that we’ll do prior to the live workshops.

Those Quick Checks are a series of emails with 5 minute checks to ensure that you are up to date on all of your SEO foundation settings.

The fact is, you could have the best keyword research in the world, but if your technical SEO is borked, you’re just confusing Google because it either can’t crawl your site or it finds errors and mixed schema markup when it does.

That’s what sets my DIY SEO course apart from all others. It ensures you have a solid SEO foundation to build upon.

BB Hub Happenings

Code Name Ida Update

Since it was a short holiday week last week, and because we have all been buried in sales emails, I decided to hold off sending the Ida info to you.

I will have it out for you soon in an email, and a note in our Facebook group so you can respond with your test results.

And thank you to everyone who helps with the testing!!!!

This is something every single site owner needs and the power of our village collaborating is going to help us get answers and solutions much faster.

Site Services Update

We continue to be on time with site services and we’re currently working diligently to finish up all the projects we started in November.

I’ve even onboarded a couple of projects slated for December start dates this week too.

We’re also holding steady with February being the start time for all new project requests – that is best guess.

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

WordPress Tips

Take the annual WP survey

Quick reminder to please take the WP annual survey.

It’s about 8 minutes and has a lot more end user related questions this year.

So do make your voice heard.

Plugin Tips

UpdraftPlus fixed for backups but has new nuisance warning

After a 2 month long nightmare with UDP support, the plugin seems to finally be fixed for everyone, we hope, at least with backups.

Please update to at least version 2.16.65.25 on the paid plugin.

And many of us with low-trafficked sites are now getting what amounts to a nuisance warning of:
“Your website is visited infrequently and UpdraftPlus is not getting the resources it hoped for”.

We have had one person report a brand new issue with links being appended with doing cron, and it is related to this low-traffic issue.

I literally can’t afford to get into the mudhole with them again over this and was looking into the best way for those of us getting the error to set up a custom cron job with the correct frequency for it that will get rid of this nuisance, but still not ping our sites enough to cause resource issues. 

And then a client with a currently open project let me know he is getting a similar error message and his site is super high traffic. 

So, it looks like I’ll be getting mired back into this mudhole again.

Thank you to all of my BB Hub folks for helping test and your patience through this process. And let’s hope UDP goes back to being “old faithful” for us. It’s rare for this plugin to have issues like this, which is the biggest reason we stuck with it through this.

I just hope I don’t have to lose my non-billable hour shirt dealing with them on behalf of all my clients again over these new issues.

The best thing that came out of me screaming like I did is that I now have a direct contact with their support to report widespread issues like this if they happen again.

It shouldn’t be like this

A work with a LOT of plugin and theme devs and most all of them see me as a knowledgeable and helpful site tech who keeps them from getting 100s of support tickets from non-techie site owners. 

I’m sorry it took 2 months and finally screaming to wake up UDP to that fact.

AMALinks Conflict with Cloudflare Plugin

If you use the AMALinks plugin, and have your site on Cloudflare, you may not be able to create new affiliate links.

Thanks to BB Hub member Shea Winthrop of All Garage Floors, we now know that the issue is with Guzzle, which is code that first appeared in the Cloudflare plugin with version 4.7. It is using an older version of Guzzle than the AMALinks plugin is using and that is the cause of the conflict.

We are checking with CF support now to get a resolution and may have one by the time this posts, so be sure to come to the live show tonight for updates.

And FYI, the only reason you need the CF plugin is to resolve all visitor IPs back to the original, else all of your analytics look like visitors are just coming from the CF IPs. You could actually remove the CF plugin from your site and it has no bearing on your site being on CF. That is done via pointing your nameservers to them.

But, we are not removing the plugin for now and will wait for CF to either roll their old Guzzle version out or upgrade to the current one.

SEO Tips

Exclude Web Stories in WPFC

If you have Web Stories on your site and you use WP Fastest Cache, then you may need to exclude your Stories from the caching and optimization.

I’ve updated my WPFC tutorial with a new section on Web Stories Exclusions that has a link to test if your Stories have an issue, and if so, how to fix them.

It’s super fast and only has to be done once.

Thanks to BB Hub member Sharon Rhodes of The Honour System for bringing this to my attention and to Julien Casanova of Cultures Traveled for additional testing help.

Content Marketing Tips

3 Tips for Building Your Email List with Awesome Content

Y’all know that I’m encouraging you to move into e-commerce next year and start getting paid directly with all of the info you create.

Well, one of the first steps in that direction is to build your email list with folks who will become a warm audience who are ready to buy things from you.

The nice folks at Blogging Pro have a super post on how to reuse your current content to help build your list.

The fact is, for those of us who have been around a while and have a bunch of content, we’ve seen it skyrocket to a high ranking position and then fall. Well, even if that particular post doesn’t rank high now, that doesn’t mean it isn’t insanely good content. And you can repurpose it as an attractor for your email list.

You can also reuse it as tips in a drip-marketing campaign.

Get more great tips like this in the Blogging Pro article so you can get signups galore and make good use of the excellent content you’ve already worked so hard to create.

8 Fresh Content Types Every Marketer Should Consider for 2022

Y’all already know that video, in all forms, is going to be THE biggest new content type to make in 2022.

And to help you start making that video journey, this post from the nice folks at the Content Marketing Institute is going to help you repurpose the content you already have into different forms that I believe will help you start thinking your way through a video shoot too.

I think my DIY and craft peeps are going to really like the #2 idea for creating an Instructographic.

And that flows right into the #3 idea for creating a storyboard.

When you get these 2 things down, then you’re already in the mindset for creating a video storyboard.

Then go read my post on The Art of Storyboard and Photojournalism.

As I’ve reported recently in Tips Tuesday, I’ve gotten so practiced at this that it’s making my post and video production way faster.

In fact, it’s so helpful that this topic is the first module in the Video SEO Booster course too.

And you may also want to read a sister article on the Content Marketing Institute about Why Visual Storytelling Demands More than Just Images.

I firmly believe that wrapping your head around these concepts is going to make your blog posts and videos truly connect with your audience. And they are going to stay and read/watch your content for a whole lot longer too.

Video SEO Tips

Google Testing New YouTube Analytics

I’m keeping my eye on this one for us!

It’s still in the testing phase and I’ll let you know when it becomes available.

Digging into our metrics helps us know what folks are keying on and how to make better videos for even more watchtime.

And more watchtime improves our ranking on YouTube and will get us seen higher in suggested videos.

It could also help get our videos featured in the Featured Snippet section of Google Search and in video carousels on page 1 of search.

So this is big!

Instagram Tips

16 Best Instagram Giveaways and Contests

Do y’all remember Rafflecopter and doing giveaways on your site?

Well, now’s the time to think about doing them on Instagram.

The nice folks over at The Blogging Wizard have 16 examples of super giveaways and contents that folks ran with great success on Instagram and I’m sure that it will give you a bunch of ideas on how to do yours too.

Instagram Feed will be Video

I think this Social Media Today post missed the mark. They accurately report that the IG feed will focus heavily on videos now. It’s IG’s way of trying to draw back younger users from TikTok.

They will fail.

Where this post misses is on why. 

Meta is counting on their version of the metaverse to be the main draw for younger users. Nope. Facebook’s idea of the metaverse is actually pretty tame and lame as far as young folks go.

The real excitement is in the 12-15 other metaverses that are currently being built around gaming and sports and music in general.

But keep this in mind.

The parents of those kids will be the ones forking over the money for the VR headsets and such. And they will be trying them out too. And Facebook’s version of it is going to be right up their ally.

Video is going to help lead us into Virtual Reality. That’s why it is so crazy important for you to get in the game with it.

And, even if the young’ens don’t come, that’s okay. You will be getting more eyeballs on your content from your target audience while this push for video lasts, which will be years.

Also keep in mind that every social platform is now focused on video, so there’s not going to be anywhere to hang out online to get away from it either.

Video will be the norm until VR takes over.

You can do it!! And I’m going to help you through this transition time.

Wrap Up

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

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Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for more tips and resources and I’ll see you online.