Good morning! How was your weekend?

My family and I spent the weekend out in the RV camping near the beach. Was a great weekend…. except for the part where I spent the first several hours after arrival debugging various problems the RV kept throwing at me.

Anybody who has an RV knows. 😉 They can keep you busy. And, if something is going to happen… it is gonna happen “out there”. Not in the cozy confines of your parking spot. LOL. 🤣

Heading on back this morning to kick off a productive week. So, let’s get goin’ here…

Here’s what’s on the menu for this issue…

GROWTH STRATEGY: Simple paid traffic strategy for bloggers

SITE STRATEGY: Backing up your videos and images

What do I think of Thrive Themes today?

WP TECH BUZZ OF THE WEEK: Video playlists in Presto Player 2.0!

Featured This Week

A Simple And Easy Paid Traffic Strategy For Bloggers

My article last week that paid traffic is basically just a fact of life now definitely got some responses. Not from people who disagreed because… I think people kinda know this has been true for awhile. But more on…. how?

What ad channels do you focus on? How do you get an ad approved? How do you not go broke doing this?

Here’s the thing…

First off, I do not present myself as any kind of paid traffic guru. Far from it, in fact. I know just enough to be dangerous. 😉 

But, I also like to keep things simple. Repeatable. So, the last thing I’m going to be doing is a deep dive into the in’s and out’s of the different paid traffic channels. I’ll leave that to others who know far more than I.

I do want to present to you today, though, a simple strategy. And it works great for blogs.

This is just plain dirt simple. 🙂 

When you write and publish a blog post, don’t just share it on social media. Run an ad to it.

This could be (and often is) as simple as posting to your Facebook page. Then “boosting” the post. Invest maybe $20 into amplifying your blog post out to the right target market for that blog post.

So, we’re not talking about big money. Plus, a boosted post has a natural end to it. When your budget runs out, it just stops.

You can do the same exact thing on Twitter / X or any other social network, really. Your “ad” is basically no different than what it would look like if you were to share the post organically. You’re just putting a few bucks into specifically boosting that post into the right circles of people.

Then, if you find it works well, you can turn it into an ad that keeps running.

A few things about this simple strategy:

Since you’re creating real CONTENT, it is much easier to promote (and more natural) than trying to run people into a landing page or sales page.

It doesn’t look like an ad. It looks like blog content being shared. Which people are used to and more receptive to.

It forces you to actually think about conversion on your blog post before you publish it. This would be a stupid strategy if the blog post had no point. 🙂 So, make sure it has a strategic reason to exist and that you have calls to action and you minimize distractions. In essence, make the blog post a sort of pseudo landing page.

When you boost, use audience targeting to put it out in front of the right people. As best as you can. Use this to increase exposure. And don’t sit there and stress over it. You learn more about what works the more you do it.

This is far more effective than just smashing the publish button on yet another post and just hoping for the best.

This also really keeps your head in the game that this is actual content marketing and not just blogging. This is business. Your content should have a point.

Your entire mindset changes when you spend $20-ish dollars on every post to kick it out there. If you can afford more, go for it. I think $20 is sort of a minimum spend, though.

Give it a try.

Get used to having a budget for this kind of thing.

Backing Up Your Videos And Images

How do YOU back up video files and images that you upload to your site? Do you back up, for instance, your Youtube videos? Do you organize and backup the images you upload to WordPress just in case something weird happens?

Any videos you upload to the internet should be backed up locally. That includes Youtube, Vimeo… or any other remote service.

Easiest solution is just to use an external hard drive. This way it won’t clutter up your main computer. Have a special folder for your video backups. Make sure each video file is named so that it makes sense and you’ll know what it is.

In my case, I use a network attached storage (or NAS) device from Synology. It sits in my office and has 12TB of storage. I just archive all my videos on that thing (plus I use it for much, much more than that).

There’s also the extra information you enter into these services when you upload videos. Things like title, description, maybe a transcript, etc. It is good to back this stuff up, too, in case your channel went away for some reason. What I’d recommend is to keep a document, note, or something similar which contains this info. Include a link to the video on Youtube and info about where the backup is. With all this backed up, you could literally re-create your Youtube or Vimeo channel from scratch if you ever had to.

As for your WordPress Media Library, first off you absolutely need to be backing up your entire site and keeping local copies of it. Never blindly trust your web host to do that for you.

But, I also like to keep a local image archive. Not just of my own media library, but any other images I find useful. And I personally use Eagle for this.

This application is SOOOO useful because it is totally visual. It is SO much more useful than just archiving image files into a bunch of folders. Eagle makes your image library USEFUL.

And in my case, I store the Eagle library on my Synology. You could store it on your computer, but just make sure the computer is backed up.

Oh, and with Eagle, you could also include the image meta info like alt tags, description, etc. All easily searchable. Can even link it to your blog post so you know exactly where the image is used on your site.

The big thing here is to have a system. Whatever it is that works for you. Make it part of the process of uploading a video to Youtube or uploading images to WordPress… to also set it up in your own local library.

This is one of your important aspects of digital sovereignty.

My Updated Thoughts On Thrive Themes

As many of my long-time readers know, I was a massive fan and proponent of Thrive Themes for a long time. You can read my full review here. But, these days, I have cooled off on it a bit and don’t use it much anymore.

First, I want to be clear… I still think Thrive Themes is good software. It works pretty well and is quite capable. I still have clients who are using Thrive Architect or Thrive Theme Builder and it works quite well. I will say, though, that I have also personally converted a few of my clients AWAY from Thrive Themes.

There are two things that happened right around the same time here.

First, I decided to personally switch to Kadence Theme. Not only do I find Kadence to be easy to use, but it also blows Thrive Themes away in terms of site performance.

Thrive Themes just comes with a lot of…. payload. This is not a fault of Thrive… it is just the nature of a product like this that offers such visual building. Page editors are generally known for bringing in bloat and it forces you to use solid caching and other optimization strategies to get good performance metrics.

Plus, these page builders entice newbies to use all kinds of fancy-dancy whiz-bang stuff all over their pages. Because they can. 🙂 But, it is really hard to optimize and streamline a bloated, massive landing page. Especially if it is built with a page builder. 🤷‍♂️

So, once I began using Kadence myself and saw how much faster all performance metrics were when using a block-based builder and theme, I had a hard time seriously recommending Thrive to anybody.

Secondly…. Thrive Themes was acquired by Awesome Motive.

Awesome Motive is the same company behind WP forms, OptinMonster, Monster Insights, etc. They (unfortunately) own a lot of brands in the WordPress space. And while I respect many things about them as well as their founder Syed, I find their marketing tactics to be…. aggressive. For further reading on that front….

One of my biggest concerns is that AM is going to go in and “ruin” Thrive Themes by changing the culture into something way more salesy.

Frankly, they didn’t help the situation by changing their affiliate model so drastically that it wasn’t even in my interest to bother promoting it much anymore. Just keeping it real with ya on that one. 😇

So, that’s where I stand on Thrive Themes today.

I respect the software. It still rocks in all the ways I thought it did before. But, it is a performance hog if not used just right. And I’m not the biggest fan of the company who now runs it. And I now found and use a better tool.

My main theme recommendation today is Kadence.