Before I started writing the recap introduction for this year’s annual Facebook Live extravaganza, I peeked at my profound words from 2020.

I opened with: It was a weird summer, y’all.

While the same words would’ve been just as applicable this year, we’re not about redundancies on the Mediavine blog, so I’ll just say: It was another interesting season.

We kicked off this season’s Summer of Live by asking for topic submissions from all of you amazing content creators. And man, did you guys deliver!

We had a tough time choosing from so many incredible speakers, but we managed to narrow it down to three months of content on topics ranging from social media to offbeat income streams.

Our mission statement at Mediavine is helping content creators build sustainable businesses and part of the way that manifests is by providing free and easily accessible educational content for the blogging community at large.

For the past 12 months, we’ve been expanding our efforts to include even more ways for our audience to consume our content. From our bimonthly newsletter to our new podcast, On Air, our goal is to pour resources back into the blogging community that has already given so much to us.

And we’re not stopping here! We’ve already issued a casting call for topics and guests for the fourth season of Teal Talk, our bimonthly Facebook Live series, and we’d love to see Y-O-U apply.

Now, onto the episode recap! Which ones did you find the most helpful?

Episode 1 — 5 Pinterest Secrets and How To Gain Traction With Them

Guest: Amy Locurto, Living Locurto

In our season premiere of Summer of Live, Amy Locurto from Living Locurto and Amy’s Circle joins Jenny Guy, Senior Director of Marketing, for a chat about using Pinterest like a real user to boost your Pinterest results. Learn tips to effectively use Pinterest’s most popular features, including Pinterest Trends, Idea Pins, video pins and more.

Don’t miss the transcript of this episode filled with Amy’s Pinterest secrets!

Episode 2 — 5 Ways To Earn More With Affiliate Marketing

Guest: Jessica Turner

With Amazon Prime day right around the corner, now is the time to fully monetize your channels and take home a Christmas income in June. Founder of Affiliate Marketing for Influencers, Jessica Turner, joins Jenny for a discussion about making this your most lucrative Prime Day ever. (Don’t be dissuaded by the Prime Day chatter; Jessica’s tips are evergreen!)

Episode 3 — Blogging On A Budget

Guest: Latasha Peterson, Arts & Budgets

There’s a whole lot of tools out there for bloggers, all of them promising the moon on a stick. How do you get through the hype and find what will really help you grow without breaking the bank? Latasha Peterson of Arts and Budgets gives us the lowdown on which tools will get your growth into the green and keep your bank statements out of the red.

Read the transcript of Latasha’s episode.

Episode 4 — Blog To Page – Become a Published Author

Guest: Jeffrey Eisner, Pressure Luck

Growth in your business isn’t only about website traffic! Jeffrey Eisner of Pressure Luck drops by Summer of Live to share his secrets for expanding beyond your blog and into the world of bestsellers. He’ll be sharing his firsthand experience and tips for any content creator interested in becoming a published author.

Watch the episode and check out the transcript with Jeffrey’s presentation.

Episode 5 — Facebook For Bloggers

Guests: Melanie Ferguson, Southern Crush at Home

Melanie Ferguson from Southern Crush At Home shares proven strategies to transform Facebook from a headache to an additional revenue stream and traffic source. No matter if you’re a Facebook master or novice, Melanie has tips that will help grow your blog!

View the transcript of this episode along with Melanie’s presentation.

Episode 6 — Stories to Grow Your Audience

Guest: Jane Ko, Taste of Koko

Whether you’re a first time content creator or have been making videos for years, we’ve all noticed the recent changes to the social media landscape: TikTok and Instagram reels have arrived. Jane Ko explains how she creates videos that keep her audience coming back while having fun along the way. Jane also answers listeners’ questions, ranging from how she collaborates with restaurateurs to how she uses software to optimize results.

Episode 7 — Photographing for Pageviews

Guest: Stephanie Keeping and Melodee Fiske, Pretty Focused

As a food blogger, there’s one key ingredient to your success: taking delicious photos of your recipes. But how do you do that with the seemingly endless competition and incredibly complex Google algorithm?

In this Summer of Live, Stephanie Keeping and Melodee Fiske break down their system of taking amazing photos that drive page views and expand their audience. Using real-life examples and statistics on how a few principles for their photos greatly increased their popularity, this episode is great for food bloggers who are just starting out or trying to recalculate their businesses.

Episode 8 — TikTok You Don’t Stop

Guests: Amy Flanigan, Belly Full

“TikTok isn’t for content creators.” Have you heard this before (or perhaps thought it yourself)? Amy Flanigan of the website Belly Full — who also has 600k+ TikTok followers! — is here to change your mind.

Join us for this episode of our Summer of Live series to get Amy’s top tips for expanding your brand by getting real with your audience in short video content.

Check out the transcripts for Amy’s episode.

Episode 9 — You Can Always Write More

Guests: Claudia Tavani, My Adventures Across the World

If you’ve been creating content for any length of time, chances are that you’ve experienced a case of writer’s block. Do you know the feeling? You just can’t get excited to write and every topic feels like it’s been done to death.

Enter Claudia Tavani. She’s a longtime blogger who believes “You Can Always Write More,” and she’s here to help you niche down to get unstuck ASAP.

Episode 10 — SEO Mythbusters

Guests: Eric Hochberger, Mediavine and Mike Pearson, Stupid Simple SEO

Oft maligned, mangled and misunderstood, SEO is nevertheless pretty mandatory for achieving sustainable success as a content creator. But with all of the contradictory “expert” advice out there, how do you separate the really important from the really big nothing? That’s what we’re here for.

On our Summer of Live 2021 finale, Mike Pearson and our own Eric Hochberger weigh in on today’s most prevalent theories and advice as well as listener questions.

Thanks for joining us for a quick trip down memory lane! We’ll see you on an episode of Teal Talk soon. Like our Facebook page to keep tabs on our upcoming videos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel to catch the replays!

The post Summer of Live 2021 Recap appeared first on Mediavine.

One of our favorite sayings around here is: Diversify your revenue streams! Now, that might sound odd from a company that provides full service ad management, but our company mission is building sustainable businesses for content creators. And a business relying on only one income stream is just not sustainable. 

This interview happened in the Summer of Live 2020 and our guest was the wonderful Katelyn Fagan. She’s a blogger at the site What’s Up Fagans and an instructor on her Best Blog Courses, where she loves to teach bloggers how to make more money.

Katelyn shared some absolute gems for optimizing existing posts to maximize affiliate revenue, the best link type and placement for conversion, Amazon Affiliates and more. 

Now, to the earnings!

Helpful Resources

View Katelyn Fagan’s Affiliate Marketing Slides.
WordPress Gutenberg — Should you switch to WordPress Gutenberg?
Mediavine Ads and Affiliate Marketing — How to find the right balance.
Shorter paragraphs — Increase your RPM by shortening your sentences and paragraphs.
Mediavine’s Create Plugin — Learn more about our WordPress plugin for content creators.

The post Improving In-Post Affiliate Earnings with Katelyn Fagan: Mediavine On Air Episode 7 appeared first on Mediavine.

The post Repurpose Like A Pro with Gertrude Nonterah: Mediavine On Air Episode 4 appeared first on Mediavine.

With Discovery Optimization, you can grow your social media accounts by focusing on how your target audience uses social media to discover content.

Ciaran Blumenfeld of Hashtracking and Juiced Social joined Mediavine’s Director of Marketing, Jenny Guy, in an episode of Summer of Live to speak about Discovery Optimization and strategies for growing a niche social account for your business.

Some of her tips might surprise you and make you be more intentional with your business account! (Originally aired 7/30/20)

Watch the video here or check out the transcript below.

Growing Niche Social Accounts with Ciaran Blumenfeld

JENNY GUY: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Mediavine Summer of Live. I’m Jenny Guy. I’m here every week talking with industry experts and getting their best tips for your business success.

It is Thursday, July 30. Today is the International Day of Friendship, plus National Cheesecake Day. Is that a coincidence? I think not. If you can’t be with your friends in person today, enjoy a cheesecake with them on Zoom. Make the best of the situation.

July 30, which is crazy, also means it’s almost August, bringing us back to school. My guest and I were just talking about that which, in the time of Coronavirus, means rapid social media debates. How often in the last week have you wanted to delete your social accounts and go off the grid, but you can’t because it’s your job? I cannot be alone. There have to be people. There have to be other people out there who are feeling this.

Even in the best non-Covid of circumstances, most people would say that they have a love-hate relationship with social media. And that is especially true for website owners and content creators. Historically, social media has been a great source for driving traffic until those pesky algorithm shifts whack us and our traffic nosedives overnight.

Mediavine always encourages bloggers to make social– or solid SEO a priority as organic traffic is typically the most reliable source. Although we do know that there are Google algorithm shifts. But that is not what this episode is about. We will not derail and talk Google algorithm shifts. But who out there has felt personally victimized by a social media algorithm shift? Who in the audience? Comment and tell us what platform, and how you were impacted slash how big of a drop you saw.

But record scratch. What if there was a different way for bloggers to use social? According to today’s guest, there absolutely is. And she’s here to tell us all about growing niche social accounts that deliver real site traffic. Let’s meet her.

Ciaran Blumenfeld is CEO and founder of Hashtracking, a social media analytic service and Juiced Social, an AI-enhanced service that publishes optimized hashtag lists for 2,000 plus topics. She is an OG blogger at Momfluential. She was named one of the 15 most powerful moms in social media by Working Mother Magazine and has been featured in Forbes, the New York Times and Fast Company. Follow her on Instagram. We’ll share that link and share her website.

Welcome to the Summer of Live, and thank you for applying to speak in Baltimore and for doing a ‘rona pivot and being game for a Facebook live.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Well thank you for having me. I’m a little bummed that I didn’t get to go to Baltimore because I went to Johns Hopkins, and any chance to go back to Baltimore is always exciting for me. But–

JENNY GUY: Oh my gosh, it’s such a great city.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Yeah, love Baltimore. I hope we get back there sometime. But this is great too.

JENNY GUY: I mean, we’re making the best of it. We had an awesome site visit there about a year ago, and we were like, Baltimore, hidden gem. This is amazing. And the crab, and the– everything. It was a great city. We were pretty excited about it.

But we are gonna make the best of it today. Guys, if you have questions for myself or Ciaran, please post them in the comments, and we will get them asked. But let us talk a little bit– people are posting how they’ve been victimized personally by social media. And there’s quite a few.

Amy Katz said Facebook. It’s nothing like it was a few years ago. Anna says, Instagram and stuck for a year now at the same level. So different things happening out there. We had someone just say they live in Baltimore.

So Ciaran, you and I were doing a little bit of talking beforehand, and I want to get into some of that now. While many people aren’t fans of social media– there’s complaints about it and backlash on it all the time, especially now– you founded two companies all about it. So you make your living there, and you obviously find it stable enough to literally bank on. So tell us why you love social media.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: I love the immediacy of social media. I love the flexibility of social media. I love– most of all what I love about social media is the ability for niche groups to find their tribe on social media. It is such a powerful thing when people find each other.

And there are so many groups on Instagram and on Twitter that you don’t even realize that they’re there until you start doing the kind of deep dive into niche communities like did when I was creating all of the topic categories for Juiced Social. Things like, you know obscure, sports. There’s a sport called skijoring, where people have sleds that are pulled by horses.

JENNY GUY: Whoa.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Yeah. You know, there is a vibrant skijoring community on Instagram. There’s slime communities. There’s communities of people who make charcuterie boards. There’s a community for everyone. You know, there’s a niche group for everyone. And these are the good things about social media.

These are the authentic groups of people who are able to kind of come together in this virtual meeting space and interact with each other every single day, you know, and have that give and take. So I think that, you know, in our in our desire to get lots of likes, and to get brand deals, and all of that, we sort of sometimes lose the social from social media. We lose that initial impetus that was why we went there, you know, connecting with our tribe.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, I think that for sure that’s a very– I mean, I’ve always used it to remember people from past experiences and past places I’ve been or worked. But it for sure is a way to– it’s out there. I mean, whatever it is that you’re into, there are your people, they’re there. You can find them on social– we have people saying–

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: The boards.

JENNY GUY: Yeah. The boards– I want– charcuterie boards are life. I’m loving all these companies that are popping up to make charcuterie boards. I think it’s fantastic. OK.

But with all those good things you just said, we have all heard bloggers and content creators— digital content creators say they’re quitting social. They’re no longer investing time in it. How is your method different? You pitched this topic to us. What is niche strategy?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Because I think the frustration that everyone’s feeling is that– and I will blame Instagram for this mostly, because when Instagram first came out, their algorithms operated on very much a velocity kind of strategy. Which means that more people that liked your posts quickly, the more your posts got seen. And that was very easy to gain. And a lot of people gained it.

And it just became this arms race for the number of followers and how much exposure you could get. And people lost sight of the niche community. They didn’t care who was seeing their post or why they were seeing their posts. It was just get the biggest number. And it’s very frustrating because people who wanted to be authentic didn’t want to buy traffic or engage in these sorts of schemes.

JENNY GUY: The pods.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: The pods. The purchase traffic, the pods, the– you know, there’s many different schemes out there. And frankly, they work. You know, even if it’s paid advertising. Some of it works, like, to get that velocity.

But I think that it was a very negative thing for a lot of bloggers and genuine niche community members because they felt like their posts were never seen. And they felt like on the one hand, the posts were never seen because they were comparing themselves to these mega influencers with hundreds of thousands.

And it’s an ego thing also. It’s definitely ego. It’s like, nobody likes me, nobody’s see me, why am I doing this. I’m not getting results. And then there’s also this feeling of it being this magical thing where you can’t control anything.

Like, who knows. Who knows why your post is being shown or hidden. Is there a shadow ban? Does Instagram hate me? Does, you know, Twitter not really want to show my post? Nobody really knew what was kind of making their posts show other than having lots of followers and lots of likes. That was the one thing that people felt like they were in control of.

And oftentimes doing it black hat ways, you know, to get results. I think that algorithm has gotten a lot more sophisticated, particularly in the last year and a half. So some of those black hat methods are no longer working for people.

And a lot more of the niche, kind of original niche stuff, is becoming effective again. But I think people need to sort of have a real heart to heart with themselves and examine what their goals are before they employ any niche strategy and algorithm strategy.

Because I’m not talking about here today, like, how to get a million followers and get brand deals. If that’s your goal, this method is not the method for you. If your goal, however, is to sell your own services, to drive traffic to your website, to build a strong and committed following for your site, or your service, or product, et cetera, then this stuff works.

JENNY GUY: I think that all of that was very– we’ve got a lot of people chiming in about their own personal frustrations with these things. We’ve got Ellen Folkman, she just said, I’m over Instagram. It seems to grow when I ignore it. Michelle Price says, wow, Ciaran is talking directly to me about my Instagram experience.

There are a lot of people that are empathizing with this. And I’ve heard a lot of publishers and content creators talk about how frustrated they are when they’re seeing brand deals go to these people who have purchased followers. And that’s how they’ve gotten where they are. And that’s frustrating.

But as you’re saying, they aren’t your people. And they won’t last forever. And I do think– I don’t know, I would ask that to you and I would ask that to our audience. Do you think that brands are getting more sophisticated about their ability to look at a following and note whether or not their engagement– I know that there was a significant shift from working– being a brand myself and seeing the shift between just follower numbers on social media to actual engaged following, to whether their comments are– you’re getting comments, you’re seeing interaction, you’re seeing– you’re asking about DMS, asking about actual relationships with their followers.

I’ve seen a shift. What about you, Ciaran, and people in the audience?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: It really depends on the brand. So some brands are very, very aware of all of the fake and inflated numbers, and prefer to work almost exclusively with micro-influencers. Like, they don’t even want to work with mega influencers because it’s a lot of money for, know, scattershot and then not reaching your audience.

So some brands are very, very up on it. And other brands are not so up on it. It also depends on the brand’s goals. Like, are they just going for general exposure? Or are they going for sales within a targeted niche? So if you are the content creator, you need to ask yourself, do I want to be a mega influencer and have big brand campaigns that are just going for exposure and going for the scattershot?

And if the answer– if the answer to that is yes, then go ahead and buy yourself some traffic. I mean, that sounds awful. But, you know, do advertising, engage in pods, and all those things if you just want those big numbers for that type of stuff.

But if your goal is really to drive traffic to your own site, and to grow your own community, your own niche, and to have loyal followers and people who will buy your product or service, or buy the product or service of very targeted brands that you choose to work with, then, you know, then you can do that through building your DO. I call it DO.

DO is like the SEO of social. It’s Discovery Optimization. So everyone kind of knows at this point that you can do SEO for your website, but you can do DO, Discovery Optimization, for your social feeds. And it doesn’t matter if it’s Instagram, or if it’s Twitter, or if it’s TikTok. Whatever your social feed is, they’re all algorithm-based. And they all sort of have the same ingredients for discovery optimization, although you may have more of one thing in one platform, and more of one thing and another. But there are known things you can do.

JENNY GUY: Very much true. And I love what you’re saying is that it’s a way to link together all of the pieces, to make those– so if you’re a content creator with a website that you already have, a voice, and a different niches or a niche that you’re talking to, and you’re wanting your social accounts for that website to be an extension of what you’ve already done, it only makes sense that you would only connect to those people that are interested in the things that you’re actually talking about.

OK. People are freaking out. They want to know about Discovery Optimization. Let’s talk about it. So what can you do to grow stronger and more engaged niche communities on social media? Talk to us about DO.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So I think you have– do you have one of my slides?

JENNY GUY: I do. I do.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Just to explain what DO is, you know. People don’t really think about– they don’t think about social media in terms of search and in terms of discovery. So DO is what you do that helps people find your content. DO is something that you do that affects how often your content is shown and how authentic your content is viewed by the platform, which then leads to more discovery.

So discovery is when your posts are shown more often in your follower feeds, when your posts show up in hashtag feeds, when platforms recommend you in their suggestions to users, and when your posts are promoted in roundups, or collected into a hashtag feed, or to a local feed. Basically it’s your post being surfaced and shown more in the same way that SEO causes your URLs in your post to show up higher in search lists. So DO does the same thing, but it’s through discovery.

We could just dive right in if you want to. What happens that causes discovery. How do you train the algorithm to recognize you and to reward you with discovery. And really, I talk about algorithm training in the same terms that I talk about in dog training. It requires consistency, and patience.

JENNY GUY: And that’s a great way to think about it. And I love– the main thing, and we talked about this. I’ve looked at your presentation. It’s so exciting because it takes out that weird social black magic element of having no control, having no ability to do anything about it, rather than just being buffeted around by the social winds, you’re actually able to train. Let’s look at this one real quick, though. Let’s look at the slide real quick.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: OK. So as I was saying, you know, how discovery happens every single day on social media is, you know, when people open up their screen– and whether that’s on TikTok, or whether that’s on the explore page for Instagram– they see your post. And the way that your posts are chosen are not just about how many likes you get. I mean, people think very simply, and think back to the days when you could gain things and show up on the popular page with a number of likes.

But it isn’t just that anymore. The algorithm is actually a lot more sophisticated. And the algorithm knows, for example, whether your followers tend to like posts with the same hashtags that you use, whether they follow other accounts that are similar to yours, whether your velocity– which is how many people liked your posts in the short term– always comes from the same group of people.

That’s, like, one of the caveats of faking it with pods, is that algorithm starts to recognize, OK, they always get 10 quick likes from these same 10 people. We’re just not gonna count that anymore. The algorithm is really, really smart.

JENNY GUY: Excellent. And yes. And, as you said, it’s gotten significantly more sophisticated moving forward, especially, you said, in the last year and a half you’ve noticed a shift. Is that correct?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Yeah. So I mean, I guess probably all of this sounds kind of scary. It’s like, oh no, I can’t do this. I have to do this. What am I gonna do? And it’s actually– like, I don’t mean to scare people because the things that you can do are very, very simple things that aren’t all that time-consuming. Like, doing things like engaging in pods is actually far more time-consuming than the very simple things you can do to train the algorithm to recognize you as a niche authority.

JENNY GUY: So talk a little bit about the difference between a niche following and a quote, “big” following. I mean, and obviously that’s a relative term.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Yeah. A niche following is really a following where you have followers that are your people, that are your fans. They like the same stuff as you. It’s very targeted. And to really– to get this sort of Discovery Optimization effect, you really have to hone your niche.

You have to know exactly what your niche is. And you have to stay in your lane. You have to really focus on your niche. I know, like, for me personally, with my personal account, that is the hardest thing of all. I just want to post about anything and everything. But if you have a blog, or if you have a business, it’s really critical to hone your niche and only post about your niche.

You’re not using that account to like your neighbor’s baby pictures, or your cousin’s puppy, or anything unrelated to the business. Because that algorithm is looking for patterns. And if the patterns that you’re feeding it are, I like baby pics and dogs, then the algorithm is going to say, your account is about baby pics and dogs. And maybe you’re about soap, like, really is what you want to be about.

So if you are setting it up as a niche account, you want to clearly define what your niche is, clearly define who your followers are, and clearly define what sort of content, and what sort of stuff you’re putting out, and what you’re engaging with.

JENNY GUY: So that’s an important key, is to know what you’re gonna engage with. Guys, can we go ahead and share Ciaran’s presentation so everyone has that? We’ve got that– she’s got that available. There are some great links in there. We’re not gonna show every slide as we’ve been doing these last few weeks. But lots of great information for you to follow along on your own screen, see what you can from the screen share, and then look at when we’re done.

And then I’ve got a comment from Leah Ingram, which I think is an important one. She says, this sucks. If the same people like your stuff, you don’t get rewarded. What–

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: That’s–

JENNY GUY: –are the legit people in your niche?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So yes. Leah that’s a very good point. I didn’t mean to say that you don’t get rewarded it’s the same people. I’m talking about if it’s, like, literally the same 10 people who like it in the first 10 minutes every single time you post, you’re not gonna get rewarded for velocity. Velocity is a specific thing that algorithms look at, which is how quickly people like your posts.

If they are legitimate people who like that type of content, you’re still gonna get the benefit of having people who are genuinely interested in your content, you know, that the algorithm will recognize. Like, you have community members who are genuinely interested in your content. But the algorithm will also recognize that maybe you’re using those community members to gain velocity, and won’t reward you for the velocity.

JENNY GUY: So this is another really helpful question. So Ellen Folkman says, so is it OK to share other bloggers content? What if they’re outside your niche? I’m sure– I imagine that makes a difference there.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: If they’re outside your niche, then you’re probably not serving your community or yourself by sharing their content. You know, it’s nice to do as a friend. I would share in your personal feed. But if you’re sharing content that isn’t within your niche, then no, you’re outside your lane. Don’t do it.

JENNY GUY: OK. And that and the same goes for even liking friends content. Is that accurate?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: The same goes for liking content. So I have a checklist of the sorts of actions that– and it’s my presentation, but basically all of your actions on social are tracked and followed. OK. So these are the things that you really have the most control over.

You don’t have the most control over everything with an algorithm, but you do have control over what you post, you have control over when you post, you have control over the ways that you post, whether you’re commenting on something, whether you’re sharing a video, whether you’re sharing someone else’s content. You have control over that. You have control over what you like.

And you have control over what you follow, who you subscribe to, and you have control over your hashtags. And when I talk about hashtags, some people think, like, I don’t use hashtags or, you know, I only use my own hashtags. But you have to think about hashtags more holistically because every time you comment on content that contains a hashtag, you’ve now associated yourself with that hashtag.

And, you know, the algorithm is smart enough to know when it’s an outlier and you just like something with a weird hashtag versus you always like posts that are about cheese boards and charcuterie. Like, that’s really your thing. But you’re associated with hashtags even if you don’t use them because you’re associated with the hashtags that the people you follow use, and you’re associated with the hashtags that you follow.

So it’s a good idea to be really kind of intentional about following hashtags, making sure you follow hashtags that are your hash– that are your topic, that are in your niche. And then also looking at the people who are big posters or well-liked within those hashtags, and engaging with those people. Because by doing that, you’re training the algorithm to recognize this is what you’re about. You’re just reinforcing over and over again with your own content as well as your interactions, if that’s what you’re about.

JENNY GUY: So interesting to think about the fact that even if you think you’re not using hashtags, you are just based on the posts that you’re liking. That the algorithm is looking at everything you’re engaging, with everything you’re liking. So fascinating. Great advice.

OK, Leah says, OK, for the when you post, I use Tailwind to schedule posts to Instagram and Pinterest. Tailwind recommends optimized days and times. Any thoughts on that?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: You know what, if you have Tailwind or another service– I think Later does that as well– it is a great idea to follow the recommendations because they are looking at when your audience is on there and when they’re most likely to respond to your content. And again, the more– Instagram, in particular, still gives weight to velocity. So you want to post at a time when you’re gonna get the quickest return on your posts. So I would say yes, it’s important to pay attention to that.

However, I would not get obsessive-compulsive about it. If you can’t post within that specific time period, it’s still more important for you to post consistently. And when I say consistently, it doesn’t mean you have to post the same time every day. But you want to post the same number of times per week. Because you want to keep waking up your audience. You don’t to disappear.

JENNY GUY: OK. Excellent. Very helpful. Did you want to talk anymore about the problem with good optics and skinny fat accounts?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So I could talk a little bit more about those big accounts. I don’t want to dwell on them too much, but I want to sort of reassure people who are very discouraged by, you know, all the fake out there. I actually had a slide, like the virtuous circle and the vicious circle.
The people who are faking it, it’s getting much, much, much more expensive for them to fake it. And the rewards are becoming less and less. So the virtuous circle is basically a situation where you’re posting authentic content, and the people who are liking your content are doing it in a timely fashion. They’re your true followers, they’re people who are interested in the types of content that you post, they are engaging with your content.

Because it’s really like, wow, this is the stuff they like. And that signals Instagram that you’re an authority, that you’re authentic, that you have a real account. And then Instagram kind of rewards you with more discovery. And this isn’t just Instagram, this is really any algorithm-based platform.
But what happens in the next slide, the vicious cycle, which is how I would describe those skinny fat accounts. I call them skinny fat because they have great optics, but their health is really, really not good. So every time they post, they need to gamify, they need to engage in pods to get those likes quickly, they have to buy likes, they use hashtags to gamify. These are all things that have to– they have to purchase.

Instagram is that algorithm– or any algorithm which is growing and learning. I think there’s something like 90 million posts a day. I mean, think about all that information and how quickly these algorithms can learn. They start to recognize any gamification type of behavior. They recognize when the people who are liking your content have never liked your content before, or have never liked similar content to yours before, when the comments don’t look like they’re human comments, they’re just sort of like a string of emojis.

All of these things– then you get dinged for that. And then you have to spend more money to get better-quality fake. You know, you have to get fake 2.0 that is more expensive. So there’s, like, a whole inflation cycle for people who have these faked accounts. And I think– you know, my one true prediction that I will make a prediction and stand by it, is that it’s going to get harder and harder and harder for people to be successfully fake on platforms like Instagram.

I saw a lot of fakers just abandoning ship from Instagram and jumping to TikTok at the beginning of this year. They were like, oh, it still works TikTok. It’s not working so much for me anymore on Instagram. It’ll get harder there too because the algorithms are smart, and they can see the patterns of fake.

Just like, if you or I looked at an account, and looked at all the commenters, and we were like, oh, this account has no profile picture. This account has one follower. These don’t look like followers if we can do it, the AI can do it a million times faster.

JENNY GUY: And it’s good to hear that it actually does matter, and it is getting smarter. Christina Riley says, do services like Smarter Q, where you loop your content, hurt your discovery?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: I’m not familiar with that.

JENNY GUY: OK. OK. Well, let’s go to– can you ever– so let’s talk about training that algorithm. We kind of skipped ahead, but let’s get into the nitty gritty of it. Can you ever really beat this ever-shifting algorithm? And it sounds to me like what you’re saying is it’s not necessarily these seismic shifts, it’s more just improving, and improving, and improving on the algorithm. So talk to us about beating the algorithm, please.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So I don’t think you can beat an algorithm. I think you can be your authentic self and be consistent. I think it’s sort of like going on a diet. You know, you can go– you can eat healthy, and you can take a walk every day, and you can follow best practices, and long-term you’re gonna see the benefits. You may not have overnight results. You may not have, like, you know, some smashing story to tell within a month. But you’re gonna have the benefits of overall health.

And I think, even right now, a lot of people are like, ugh, no one’s on social or, oh, I don’t know what to post on social because the pandemic. But it’s actually a really good time to just lay the foundation for your niche. And you don’t have to set huge goals, but maybe your goal is posting five times a week, and being really niche-specific, and using really niche-specific hashtags and engaging with really niche-specific accounts. And that’s enough because you are signaling your authority, and you’re laying the groundwork for future Discovery Optimization.

JENNY GUY: And love hearing that. Sarah says, no not like a diet. Sarah, I feel you. It is not a good time for diets in our life. Leah says, then why can’t the algorithm find all the I want to be your sugar daddy people on Instagram? Fair question.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: It finds them, but they, like, kill them, and they pop right back up again like horrible mushrooms.

JENNY GUY: They are. They’re like gremlins. You fed them after midnight. OK. Let’s look at what the algorithm actually tracks, OK? Let’s talk about that.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So the things you have less control of– so you can control, like, what you’re posting, and all that other stuff. But the algorithm is also going to be looking at how fast people respond to your posts. That’s the velocity portion. And I wish it wasn’t weighted so heavily still, particularly on Instagram. It’s less weighted on other platforms. But it is something that people look at because if people react quickly to your content, it’s a sign that they really like your content.

They’re looking at who interacts with your content. Are these people who are genuinely within your niche and within your interest. They look at the intent of your engagers. And intent is something that’s just become much more important this year as we’ve had the save button show up on a lot of different platforms.

When people can do more with your content besides just like it, or comments on it, when they can share it, and when they can save it, those are very, very strong indications to an algorithm that people identify with your content, and that they intend to return to your content. And that affects also how much time they spend on the platform. And any platform, any social platform, wants to keep people there. So if you have content that people are marking save, or that they’re sharing with others, then that’s just increasing the overall time on the platform. And they really want to reward you for that sort of stuff.

So it’s important when you’re creating content to think about, is this something that is save or share worthy? Because you’re going to increase your Discovery Optimization when you share something that people want to return to. So it could be, like, a recipe, or could be instructions, it could be a guide of some sort. These are the sorts of posts that lead to more discovery.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK. And let’s go to your next slide, and what the algorithms reward. So let’s highlight that really quickly. I like the space background.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Oh my gosh, I can even read it. But the algorithms, as I was saying, they reward you for the actions people are taking, the ways that–

JENNY GUY: –different. There’s more specific, other than just, I like something. Now there’s–

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Now there’s different ways. You know, not all engagement is equal on every platform. You know, for a while there videos were getting a lot more play on Instagram. And sometimes, like, the saves are considered more valuable because people saving things is showing intent. And they’re really trying to build time on platform.

So the things that the algorithm rewards change from time to time, how much they reward each specific thing. However, all of these things are important. So rather than obsess about, oh my gosh, I have to do only video because right now they’re weighting things to video, I think it’s just healthier to be balanced. You know, to say OK, these are the things that they reward. They’re gonna reward things like swipes, comments, sticker interactions.

You wanna make sure you’re giving people lots of different ways to interact with your content. So you’re gonna see greater discovery optimization if you don’t just do feed posts, if you do stories occasionally, and you give people ways to interact by either, you know, taking a poll, or commenting on a sticker, or swiping up, or– you want to give people more ways to interact because the more ways that they interact, the more time they spend on the platform, the more the platform will like you.

So it’s important to be aware of those opportunities. If you can’t do them all, don’t beat yourself up. You can still build your niche and build your authority without taking advantage of every single opportunity. But if you want to supercharge, you know, you should be aware. You’re gonna get more overall exposure, and the algorithm is gonna like you more, if it sees that people are interacting with you in all the different ways they can. If that makes sense.

JENNY GUY: No, it absolutely does. Giving people more opportunities to encounter your content and to interact with it. I love that, getting people involved. And you’re very right. And it still seems to me that while it’s not quite as extreme, video is still getting preferential treatment and weight in the algorithm for sure.

So you said all the things you have control over, some of them you can’t. I want to talk more about that intersection between good SEO and good DO. So let’s break that down.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So I’m not sure what the question is.

JENNY GUY: The interaction between SEO and DO. How can you take the practices, or good SEO, strong as SEO practices, and have them translate over into social.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So you want to think about your Discovery Optimization in terms of search. So good SEO practices include really honing your niche the same way, and really knowing your keywords, and really knowing your audience, and making your content available to that audience and easy for them to find. I think that for Discovery Optimization, hashtags are really important because hashtags are low-hanging fruit. And a lot of people use hashtags inappropriately and incorrectly. They don’t follow the hashtags that they’re actually content that they’re interested in, they make up their own hashtags, they hashtag for brands, which, actually, you’re then sending your traffic to the brand. You’re not getting the traffic from the brand most likely. You’re sending people away.

JENNY GUY: How do you properly use a hashtag? Tell us what a hashtag is. Obviously you’re a big fan.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: The number one thing you want to do when you’re choosing a hashtag is you want to say, is somebody searching for my content? What’s the search term? Don’t even think of it in terms of a hashtag.

Think of, like, what’s the keyword, or what’s the search term, that somebody is going to use to find your content. It’s not happy birthday. It’s not congratulations. Those hashtags are pretty much useless because nobody is searching congratulations looking for content. They may be looking for graduation party cake, they may be looking for graduation card.
So you want to think, what are people searching for. And that is the hashtags that you then want to go out and say OK, what are the hashtags that are the things that I want people to search for and find my content. And you want to look at what hashtags are being currently used, how popular they are.

If it’s a hashtag that, you know, is getting used constantly, you’re just gonna get buried in that feed. If it’s a hashtag that’s used once every five years, nobody’s really looking for it. So you want to look for hashtags that have a decent amount of traffic, but not too much, and that are really gonna lead people– that are the keyword that are gonna to lead the people to your content who want to find your content.

I think it’s really smart to look for hashtag adjacent communities. And an example of a hashtag adjacent community is if you are a home decor blogger, you look for home staging hashtags. Those are people who are very interested in home decor. Or if you are somebody who does recipes, and you have beautiful photographs of your tabletop display, you want to look for a tabletop display hashtags. Something where the community is very interested in the same sort of stuff that you do, and the hash tags are appropriate for your post, you can pull in an adjacent community. And those people could be very loyal to your content because it’s similar enough to the niche that they’re interested in.

JENNY GUY: So if you’re doing your– I wanna hear about how you do your hashtag research other than just going to your site and getting a great keyword list of hashtags– how you’re doing that and are you doing this for each individual platform? Or once you’ve done your hashtag research, does that apply to all platforms?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So I pretty much use Instagram for most of my hashtag research because I find that people use the same hashtags that they use on Instagram on other platforms unless there’s, like, a specific TikTok challenge, or a specific Twitter thing going on. If it’s a community or a niche hashtag, they generally cross platforms.

And the way I like to do research– if I’m doing it manually, I’m going to say, OK, what’s the keyword. I’m literally gonna type it in. Instagram’s gonna give me a list of suggestions, and I’m just gonna start looking at them one at a time, and looking at the feed and saying, do these images look like what I’m about? Or would the people who like these images like my image? Does my image belong in this collection of images? What we’ve done with Juiced Social is we’ve trained AI on this process so that we can look at 100 million posts, you know, in a week or less. And humans cannot do that.

JENNY GUY: No. And why would you want to?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: No, and why would you want to? So, I mean, every single list on that site started out with human research. It started out with us going out and finding, you know– we think that there’s a community around this topic, and there’s some hashtags around this topic. Let’s find the ones that are being used right now, and look at relative speed, or the relative amount of use, and how related they are to the topic.

JENNY GUY: Sarah Auerswald says, how do you see the hashtag stats? Like, how often they are used. Where do you find that information?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So Instagram will show you. They don’t give you a lot of information, but they’ll tell you how many times the hashtags have been used overall. It can be difficult to tell whether that use is recent, or whether that use is all time. So, you know, hashtag could’ve been really, really popular, you know, two years ago, and you see that there’s millions of uses. But everyone kind of stopped using it. You can look at the feed and see how recent the posts are, and sort of get an idea of how often the hashtag is used right now.

JENNY GUY: OK. I want to talk a little bit about what DO looks like in practice. I’m gonna push our faces away and let you talk through this slide because this is the nuts and bolts.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: This is the nuts and bolts, and it’s actually super simple. But, you know, it’s a mental shift for most people because we really think about discovery as being this sort of, like, magical thing if we use the right hashtag, or, you know, people like you enough.

But it really is a very consistent practice of posting consistently in your niche and using your niche hashtags, which means, you know, every day when you post about orange juice, you’re using the orange juice love hashtag. And you’re showing a picture of orange juice or something having to do with orange juice. You’re following accounts that are about orange juice, you’re following hashtags that are about orange juice, you’re engaging with that content every single day.

Whenever you go on, you’re engaging with the content that you’re about. And hopefully– you have less control over this, but– if you’re really being authentic in your engagement, you’re convincing your platform that you are about what you say or about, your stuff is going to be shown, and other people are gonna start engaging with your content that are really about what you’re about. So you’re gonna get engagement from those orange juice people.

So this is like, in a nutshell, the most simple, you know, expression of what we have control over and how you should be thinking about algorithms in general on social media to maximize your chance of discovery. You know, whether you use video, and, you know, how you get people to interact, that stuff matters. But this stuff, on this particular slide, is what matters the most. It’s that you’re walking the walk, talking the talk, staying in your lane, and being really, really conscious and intentional about your content, and really authentic about your content. Because that is the foundation that you really need to get that strong niche following and to build your Discovery Optimization and your authority.

JENNY GUY: And that is– for those that are following along with the slides, we can share that link again– that it slide 17. It’s basically the nuts and the bolts of what we’re talking about here. We did a little bit on this earlier, but I want to just reiterate. Are there specific social platforms– you said this works on all social platforms, but it can work differently. You said you primarily do your research on Instagram, in terms of hashtag research.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: In terms of hashtag research, I primarily look at Instagram because community hashtags, like I said, sort of cross over onto other hashtags. But in terms of your consistency, and your staying in your lane, and your engaging with that content that is, you know, in your lane, it doesn’t matter what platform we’re talking about.

Algorithms are just like a puppy that you’re training, you know. If every single time you say sit, you push its butt down and then you give it a treat, you’re training that puppy that sit means this and that’s the reward. You want to do the same things over and over and over again and very consistently with any algorithm-based platform.

JENNY GUY: Do you recommend focusing on one platform at a time, tackling multiple at once in terms of social?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So it depends. It depends on you, first of all, like, how much time you’re willing to put in. I would say that you should claim your space on every platform where you think you want to have a presence. Claiming your space, like I said earlier, doesn’t have to mean that you’re doing three stories a day, and you’re using all the stickers, and all the polls, and every way that people can interact with you. It may just be as simple as saying, I’m gonna commit to a four posts a week. I’m gonna be consistent and intentional about it. And I’m gonna make sure that I’m following and engaging this much every single day.

I think it was Gary Vee, he had, like, a grow your Instagram strategy that he shared. And I had to laugh because he didn’t sell it as a algorithm-training type thing, but it was really the same sort of stuff. And people were like, wow, his method really works. And basically it was looking at hashtags that are in your niche, following those accounts that are in your niche, and engaging with them daily.

I mean, it’s small consistent practices. How much you want– if you want to do more, you want to spend more time and engage with more accounts, and you want to use, you know, more– you want to do stories, and do more, your results may happen faster if you are putting yourself out there in more ways. But the results are gonna be there, slow and steady, even if you put in minimal effort. So if you don’t have the energy to do it everywhere, then fine, don’t beat yourself up. Just get that baseline of, you know, those very basic things like what you post, what you follow, and what you engage with.

JENNY GUY: That is really helpful. And how much time would you suggest is a good place to start, like, in terms of if you’re wanting to do a bullet calendar or something like that out your day?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: You could get a lot done in 20 minutes a day.

JENNY GUY: Per platform?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Per platform. 15 to 20 minutes. I mean, you know what, personally I think TikTok takes way more time because making videos takes a long time, at least for me. It takes a while for me to make videos. But interacting is really easy, on the other hand, on TikTok, so–

JENNY GUY: OK. So in terms of– this is a question we get all the time for SEO. We talk about SEO and a lot of people ask about cleaning up their old posts and their old content. How does that translate? How does SEO equal DO for social?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So that is a great question because yeah, a lot of people have old content. And I think it is really important to make sure that your feed reflects who you are because when you are, say, using a new hashtag and you’re attracting someone to you, that is your opportunity to gain a new following. The first thing they’re gonna do is click on your profile, they’re going to look at your feed, and if you’ve got a bunch of old, random content that isn’t about what your niche is about, you’ve lost them.
Like, you need your feed to be really niche-specific. And you need people, within two or three seconds, to see it and know that you’re about what you say you’re about both in your description and images that you have. So I think it is really important to clean up and curate yourself. Like, from the get go, hone your niche and make sure what’s there isn’t all that old stuff.

JENNY GUY: And that’s all platforms, regardless of anything.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: All platforms. Anywhere whether there’s an algorithm. The same as you would do for your blog, how you’d get rid of all that extraneous content that’s confusing the algorithm, do the same thing.

JENNY GUY: We actually don’t recommend people delete old content. We ask them to, especially if it’s getting any traffic, we ask them to polish it. We ask them to– but deleting content, it’s just not a great use of time because people– you know, if you have 800 posts, people are not coming to your home page and digging. But you’re right. On a social media feed, if you’re scrolling through– like, you know, if you’re on someone’s timeline or you’re looking at somebody’s feed, you’re seeing it. You’re seeing what those are.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Right. Old content on a blog– like, if it’s getting traffic, it’s great. But people aren’t, like, showing up at your home page and then being like, wait a minute, this isn’t what this is about. You know, when people show up on social media, all they see is that feed.

JENNY GUY: OK. I’m gonna go back because we had a bunch of questions. Pamela said, I just saw this now with Ciaran. I want to go back and listen from the beginning. Cyd, who works here with Food Fanatic, said I should stop watching endless videos of old Olympic gymnastic competitions on Instagram using my primary blog account. Cyd says yes, you should definitely stop.

I mean, we’re not saying don’t watch those. We’re just saying not with your blog account. Anna says, so we have a theme dinner party platform and post the parties and the recipes. Does this strategy mean that we should not acknowledge and post about, say, National Girlfriend Day?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: I think it’s fine to acknowledge and post about National Girlfriend Day, and sometimes using those hashtags, it’s like a great idea for content. But you want to make sure that you’re saying, this is the dinner party for National Girlfriend Day that we’re hosting. You want to always tie it into whatever your thing is about.

JENNY GUY: Yes. So make sure it’s clear and that you’re showcasing those consistent hashtags, right? If you’re always posting about hashtag dinner party, hashtag eat at home–

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: But you get– I mean, you get up to 30 hashtags. So, like, you know, maybe 10 or 15 are your sort of niche-specific and consistent ones that you use. Maybe not every single post the same 15, but you have that pool of hashtags, 15 of them are really niche. But you have space for other things and to draw on other people. And it’s OK to use a really popular hashtag here and there because you may win the lottery on it, you know. You may attract a lot of people. Or maybe it’s not specifically your niche, but you’re showing a dinner party for that, so why not use your extra hashtags.

JENNY GUY: #olympics, #olympicdinnerparty. Let’s tie it all together. So then we’re making sure that we’re all on this for– are you saying delete old junk posts on Instagram?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Is the couch still for sale? It’s a yes.

JENNY GUY: OK.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Delete the old junk posts. If they’re not really niche-targeted, then they’re not doing you any favors. People aren’t going to be searching for them, and finding them, and going oh, like, I need to follow them ’cause this is what I’m about, and they’re about. If they’re not gonna serve that purpose, then you don’t need them.

JENNY GUY: OK. Good to hear. So slightly different than from what we would say with SEO. Because that’s not something we would say for you to invest a lot of time in, is to go back and worry about all of these old posts. OK. What kind of results have you seen from this? I think that’s the thing that we all– you said it’s slow and steady. What have you seen from your clients and from yourself, and how do you track those results? What metrics are you really looking at?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So it’s slow and steady, but sometimes people do, like I said, win the lottery. Sometimes people will use a hashtag from a hashtag adjacent community and they’ll go from, like, 100 views on a post to 12,000 views on a post just because that hashtag hit within that feed. And then what you really want to look at, though, is when you get all that traffic, when you are being discovery-optimized and your post is being shown to so many more people via a hashtag, or just via good optimization and, you know, maybe it’s being shown more in people’s feeds that follow you, you want to look at what people did once they saw that.

So did people visit your profile? And once they visited your profile, did they follow you? So this is why it’s really important that, if you use a hashtag you’re getting 7,000 new people who are then, oh, let me check this person out, let me look at the feed, you want them to follow you. You want them to then, you know– you want to capture them and you want them to be your regulars.

You want to look at also how often your posts were saved, and how often your posts were shared because that is something that platforms are looking at to represent intent. If somebody is saving your content, that’s somebody who wants to come back. And if a lot of people are saving that content, then you should be creating more of that content. That’s the sort of content that, you know, people are very hungry for.

And if people are sharing your content, it’s content that they identify with. It’s generally things that, like, oh, my friends will think I’m cool, or my friends will think I’m clever. You definitely want to create more shareable content. And those people then, hopefully, will follow you because they wanna come back to you for that same sort of content. But even if they don’t follow you, you know, the saves and the shares are super, super important.

JENNY GUY: So how do you track all of this, and do you have any recommended tools? Because there are a lot of tools out there that a lot of people are using. So tell us what your thoughts are on that. And now this is not hashtag sponsored by anyone. We’re just asking her for her opinion off the cuff.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: So, I mean, with platforms like Facebook and Instagram, it’s gonna be your own analytics. You should have a business account, and you’ll just go in and look at your own analytics. There are third-party tools that you authorize to sort of present your analytics in much prettier formats, like Sprout does it. There’s a bunch of different ones.
But personally, I think you can just– platform analytics. You can see all of that. You can look at and see how many people found– in the discovery column, how many people found your post from feed versus hashtags or other. I still don’t exactly know what other is. I don’t know if it’s link sharing, or what other is.

And, you know, what I do, what my company does, hashtracking is more about your own hashtag and your own campaign. So we can provide much a deeper dive analytics into who has engaged with a particular hashtag, and how many people have used the hashtag, and the exposure of a particular hashtag. But just as a content creator, when you’re growing your own account, you want to look at how people are interacting with your individual posts.

Another important thing to look at in stories is when and where people are exiting because that’s where they’re bored with your content. And you wanna know.

JENNY GUY: Yep. Absolutely. Very helpful. And what you can do to pull them back in. And, like you said, it’s very much like SEO. When you find that something is hitting with your audience, you’re getting out there, make more of that thing. Do more of that. Don’t copy it, but similar content is very– related content. Huge.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Yeah. And it’s often surprising. I have a blog that is about haunted travel, and I found whenever I use a witch-related– witchcraft-related hashtag, I got phenomenal exposure. And apparently those are my people.

JENNY GUY: People are loving the witches. There’s nothing wrong with that. I really did like that season of American Horror Story, Coven. One of my favorites. One of my top seasons. Do you recommend scheduling versus live posting for social media posts?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: I am a big fan of scheduling just because, as a creative, as much as I walk the walk and talk the talk about algorithms and all of this stuff, I understand patterns but I am terrible about executing them. I am the least consistent person that I know. I am just– it’s very hard for me. So I am a fan of scheduling because you know you’ve got that baseline. But ideally it’s a mix. Ideally you get things scheduled, and then you go in, and you interact. And maybe you schedule your posts, but you’re liking things, engaging with things, commenting on things in a more human way, like, here and there and everywhere.

JENNY GUY: And as you were saying before, you think that rather than setting a crazy, I’m gonna post five times per day on each platform, you said it’s more helpful to set a reasonable goal like five times per week, like five feed posts. But does it matter in terms of consistency with day and time? Like every single Tuesdays and Thursdays are when I post. Is it just letting it find the best time?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Yes and no. OK, so in terms of the algorithm, the algorithm wants to see that you’re posting consistently. But in terms of your audience and, like, human beings, people want to know that they can tune in on Tuesday. So if you’re somebody who is telling your audience, like, every Tuesday I’m gonna share a recipe, or every Thursday I’m gonna reveal my new project, you want to be consistent and cognizant of that. And that is a great human trick for getting audiences to pay attention to you and follow and convert.

But in terms of the algorithm, you just want to see consistent use over time. So whether that’s five times a week, or whether that’s once a day, or whether it’s three times a week, the algorithm is just gonna say, OK, this person hasn’t quit if they haven’t posted in three days, because their pattern is they post three times a week. They get to know your pattern. And they’re not going to sort of ding you for not posting or think you’re a dead account suddenly if you don’t post for two days.

On the other hand– I just wanted to say, if you don’t post for a while, you should be aware that if you haven’t posted for a while and then you suddenly post, there is an effect of them wanting to– you’ll get higher exposure when you post after not posting for a while. And you should really take advantage of that. But you want to make sure you’re consistent after that because you only get it that one time, and then if you don’t post again they’re like, ah! What algorithm is that?

JENNY GUY: Bad. Dead–

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Psych.

JENNY GUY: Still dead account. Psych, I haven’t heard that one in a while. So you’ve got– this has been so mind-blowing and very helpful. Will you please tell us you’ve got some special offers for our audience?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: I do. So if you’re interested in finding some hashtag lists, we have a coupon code for Juiced Social, MV20. We’ll get you four free lists. So it’s $20 off any order. I would recommend you look for some lists in your niche, or some hashtag adjacent lists. The hashtag lists have up to 300 hashtags that are the most recent and most engaged hashtags. So we look every two weeks at what’s being used within each niche. And then I also offer consulting on the site. So that’s $20 off you could use on consulting. And we also have a group. It’s groups slash Discovery Optimization on Facebook. And if you join the group, I will give you a code to download my ebooks. And I have a book on content that converts, and I also have a fun– if you’re somebody who likes workbooks, I have a fun workbook to help you sort of organize yourself and plan for your Instagram account.

JENNY GUY: So helpful. We’re gonna drop some of those links. You’ve also got the links to her presentation, and those are hyperlinked in the presentation so you can click over. The code right there is MV20. And then we had one quick– we’re gonna go slightly over. Do you have any recommendations for a scheduler? That was one of the last questions that we had.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: I use both Tailwind and Later. I use, interestingly, I use Tailwind for my personal account, and I use Later for my business account. I like a little bit– I like the way Later does links and certain things better for the business accounts. But I like Tailwind my personal, so those are my two favorites for scheduling.

JENNY GUY: Very helpful. Ciaran, this has been awesome, and so great. And we’re sharing all of that into the comments so people can find you afterwards. Is there anywhere else they should look for you?

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: You can find me on my personal site, ciaranblumenfeld.com. And you can find me on Facebook. I’m always on social media. I’m Ciaranblu on Instagram and on Twitter. And I’m always online.

JENNY GUY: I mean, I think that’s kind of the nature of the beast with our jobs. And also it’s kind of our personalities. Thank you so much for being here, guys. Next week we have an awesome episode coming up. It is our much-anticipated– Thursday, August 8, 3:00 PM Eastern time– we have our Publisher Support Live.

We’re gonna have Heather Tullos, who is the Director of Publisher Support, and Carmen Stinson, the Assistant Publisher Support Manager, on her first live. We can talk Dashboard, we can talk optimizations, plugins, video. You’ve got questions, Carmen and Heather have the answers that will make you the dollars. Come by. Everyone say a big thank you to Ciaran for an amazing hour. Very helpful. And everyone stay safe out there. We’ll see you next week.

CIARAN BLUMENFELD: Thank you.

JENNY GUY: Bye. Thank you.

The post Summer of Live: Growing Niche Social Accounts with Ciaran Blumenfeld appeared first on Mediavine.

What are “understatements of the century for $200, Alex?”

Between a global pandemic, economic woes and uncertainty over just about everything from wearing masks and safe vacations to back to school, we were all really craving some normalcy and human interaction.

And in a ‘normal’ summertime at Mediavine, we have the Summer of Live. The concept of our summer live show is fairly simple: One all-new Facebook Live episode a week for 12 weeks, where we interview experts on any and all topics designed to help content creators build sustainable businesses.

This summer would mark our third Summer of Live and, like everything else in 2020, we needed to pivot a bit with our content plans.

As we had to cancel our annual summer conference due to Covid-19, we decided to take that incredible lineup of speakers and invite them to be guests on the Summer of Live. No airplanes or in-person hugs or seafood in Baltimore, but the same awesome topics and expertise brought to the Live format. Luckily, all our speakers are pros and they were totally game to make this work.

We were scheduled to start our summer programming on June 4th, but with incidents of further violence reflecting the systemic racism embedded in our culture, we paused the Summer of Live and put necessary focus on the ongoing We Stand With You initiative and PSA campaign. (We encourage everyone to learn more about We Stand With You and join us in supporting Black and BIPOC communities.)

After a dark two weeks (literally and figuratively), we started our Summer of Live programming on Thursday, June 18th with the wonderful Gee Nonterah and wrapped up on Thursday, September 3rd with Wanderful CEO Beth Santos. Those 12 episodes currently have over 19,000 views on Facebook with even more coming, now that the episodes have been edited and uploaded to the Mediavine YouTube channel.

As cheesy as it sounds, it’s truly my honor to host the Summer of Live and Teal Talk. Providing free and easily accessible educational content for the blogging community at large is a big part of our mission at Mediavine and I relish the opportunity to talk with our audience and expert guests each and every week.

We are always looking for ways to provide more educational content, as well as ideas for what you guys want to see next. In fact, we’re planning a brand-new email newsletter, available to anyone within the blogging community (whether they’re currently a Mediavine publisher or not!) We’re rolling that out in a few weeks and we’d love to send it to you! You can subscribe here.

Now, onto the episode recap! Which ones did you find the most helpful?

Episode 1 — Repurpose like a PRO: How to Turn 1 Blog Post into 15 Pieces of Content

Guest: Gertrude Nonterah, My Online Biz Journey

Are you making the most of your content? Many people will publish a blog post, share a link on their social media and call it a day. But they’re wasting a prime piece of content real estate! Gertrude “Gee” Nonterah of MyOnlineBizJourney and host of The Create and Prosper Show shared her expertise on taking one blog post and turning it into 15 different pieces of content for multiple platforms. You worked hard on that blog post, make it work for you.

We took Gee’s advice and published the transcript for this Live as a blog post for all our reading lovers out there.)

Episode 2 — Improving In-Post Affiliate Earnings

Guest: Katelyn Fagan, What’s Up Fagans

This episode was tailor-made for bloggers who are ready to diversify their revenue streams by maximizing affiliate earnings. Mediavine publisher and affiliate marketing expert Katelyn Fagan from the blog What’s Up Fagans? loaded us up with actionable tips on everything from which affiliate programs are must-join to placing links that get clicks AND sales.

Don’t miss the transcript of this episode filled with Katelyn’s affiliate marketing tips!

Episode 3 — Google Analytics

Guest: Sherry Smothermon-Short, Painless Blog Analytics

Truth time: Are you a Google Analytics fanatic or are you in the, “I can find pageviews and that’s about it” camp? Wherever you fall on the GA spectrum, the awesome info from Mediavine publisher and founder of Painless Blog Analytics Sherry Smothermon-Short will help. She shares tips on finding content ideas, optimizing for income, identifying replicable successes and avoiding potential data pitfalls, plus how GA + the new Mediavine Dashboard = BIG EARNINGS.

You can read the transcript of this great Google Analytics episode here.

Episode 4 — Quickly Reach a Wider Audience with Multiplatform Videos

Guest: Meredith Marsh, VidProMom

If you’re still on the fence about creating original video content, it’s time to get off that fence and get behind the camera. The VidProMom herself, Meredith Marsh, came by the Summer of Live to teach us how to quickly repurpose video content for multiple mediums and magnify the reach by 5x. No, that’s not a typo, it says five times more reach.

Watch the episode and check out the transcript of Meredith’s video tips.

Episode 5 — Mediavine Updates

Guests: Mediavine Co-Founders Eric Hochberger and Amber Bracegirdle

Sponsored by Agathon, provider of WordPress hosting with a focus on speed and stability plus the expert support you need as a professional blogger so you can focus on growing your site.

With all travel halted (thanks Covid!), it was extra special spending a little time with Mediavine Co-Founders Amber and Eric during this episode. We had a blast talking about everything on the Mediavine roadmap, from Create Indexes and video playlists to Grow and Trellis.

The transcript of this episode spells out all of the Mediavine summer updates for you.

Episode 6 — Going Gutenberg

Guest: Lynn Woll, Create Whimsy

Lynn Woll of Create Whimsy came by the Summer of Live to convince us that WordPress Gutenberg will make your life easier and your site more attractive. Get all the tips and tricks to ease your transition and make the most of those awesome reusable blocks.

Episode 7 — Growing Niche Social Accounts that Actually Deliver Traffic to Your Site

Guest: Ciaran Blumenfeld, Hashtracking

The Problem: Diminishing returns due to shifting algorithms make it difficult for content creators to justify putting continued time and effort into social media platforms.

The Solution: This Summer of Live episode with Ciaran Blumenfeld, CEO of Hashtracking! Learn how to adapt web-based SEO techniques to drive social media discovery, engagement and ultimately, conversion. Watch and free yourself from those pesky algorithms.

Episode 8 — Publisher Support Live

Guests: Heather Tullos and Carmen Stinson, Mediavine

It’s an undisputed fact that the Mediavine Publisher Support team is the best. Even Google thinks so. They’re working with publishers every single day to help them increase their revenue and answer all their questions. So it was a real treat to have queens Heather and Carmen, our Director of Publisher Support and Publisher Support Manager, respectively, on hand for an AMA. We learned a lot and laughed a lot, which is the perfect Summer of Live combo.

Episode 9 — How to Have a Successful Mastermind Group

Guests: Lynsey Kmetz, Moscato Mom, and Leah Althiser, The Frugal South

Real talk: Blogging and working from home can be isolating. That’s why we believe it’s so important to find your people, a group that brings synergy, accountability and friendship that can change both your life and your business, helping you to continuously level up.

In short, we all need a mastermind group. In this episode, experts Leah Althiser and Lynsey Kmetz covered everything from finding and starting the group to growing those relationships and the tools that make communication a snap.

Episode 10 — Automations: Your Invisible Employee

Guest: Erin Chase, 5 Dollar Dinners

Sponsored by BigScoots, offering completely hands-on managed WordPress hosting, purpose-built with WordPress in mind to deliver industry leading performance and reliability.

Running your own business is a lot at the best of times. Throw the insanity of 2020 in the mix and we’re all running ourselves ragged trying to keep up with the chaos of blogging. Erin Chase and AUTOMATIONS to the rescue! From tasks to email to social, the info in this episode will help you get your time back.

Episode 11 — Triple Your Income (While You Sit at the Pool)

Guest: Hilary Erickson, Pulling Curls

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a zillion times: Diversify your revenue streams! Courses can be a great source of income and my guest for this episode has actually tripled her income in this way.

Mediavine publisher Hilary Erickson of Pulling Curls shared her thoughts on everything courses from finding your topic to marketing and sales.

Episode 12 — From “Me” to “We”: Transforming Your Blog Into a Business Bigger Than Yourself

Guest: Beth Santos, Wanderful

Any business 101 course will tell you that a company built on one person is set up to fail. But how do you start scaling when your blog has been a one-person show up to now?

This episode was an inspiring discussion with Wanderful Founder and CEO Beth Santos, where she shared actionable tips and real advice from her journey transforming her one-woman blog into a sustainable company built on community, network and scale.

Thanks for joining us for a quick trip down memory lane! We’ll see you on an episode of Teal Talk soon. Like our Facebook page to keep tabs on our upcoming videos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel to catch the replays!

The post Summer of Live 2020 Recap appeared first on Mediavine.

Yes, really! It’s time to get on board. Meredith Marsh from VidProMom was on the Summer of Live with Mediavine’s Director of Marketing Jenny Guy.

She showed us how to take video content beyond YouTube by quickly repurposing it for other social media channels to really magnify the reach. (Originally aired 7/16/20)

Watch the video here or check out the transcript below.

Reach a Wider Audience with Multiplatform Videos

JENNY GUY: Hello, everybody. It is Thursday, July 9th. How did that happen? Welcome to the Mediavine Summer of Live. I’m your host, Jenny Guy. How you doing?

Tax day, day two, is next Wednesday. Where are you guys at with that, all of that? Are you already filed? Are you filing an extension? Tell us in the comments, what — if you are all set to go with your taxes, part deux.

As a year, 2020 it’s been a bit of a doozy. But for today’s episode, we are not going to be focusing on all of the less than positive things that 2020 is known for. We are going back to a simpler time, a time before masks and quarantine hair, although my guest today’s hair is impeccable, when we kicked off the second Roaring 20s in an all-new decade of video, on an echo, video, video, video. I’ll do my own.

Here at Mediavine, we have never made our passion for video a secret. We had the Year of Video, which led to a Decade of Video. And, on New Year’s Eve, this past year, we celebrated a brand-new Decade of Video. So we are forever encouraging, pushing, pleading with Mediavine publishers to produce more original video content so they can cash in on those industry high CPMs and keep up with advertiser demand for their pre-roll.

But those digital advertising dollars are not the only reason to prioritize video creation. Anyone who spends time online — and with social distancing, that is all of us, all the time — knows that video is everywhere, on the social media platforms, on all web sites. So create video content, right? What do you have to lose?

Record scratch. Video is hard. It can be expensive. And the vast majority of us are doing it solo, without a team of filmmakers standing by to help. So how can you make video easier and, beyond creation, make sure that you’re getting the most bang for your video investment buck? Enter my guest, the VidProMom herself, Meredith Marsh. She is here to teach us how to quickly reach a wider audience with multi-platform videos, and I am here for it. Let’s meet her.

Meredith Marsh is the creator of the Video Pursuit Society, a membership community for bloggers who want to reach a wider audience with YouTube and social videos so they could impact more people and make more money in their online business. Don’t we all want all those things? On the VidProMom YouTube channel and blog, Meredith teaches video editing tutorials and camera how-tos while your thriving side-hustle podcast listeners learn about growing an audience and earning passive income as a content creator.

Meredith, welcome. Thank you for joining me.

MEREDITH MARSH: Thanks for having me, Jenny.

JENNY GUY: It is so good to see you. Guys, if you have questions for myself or Meredith, please post them in the comments. We will get them asked. Otherwise, you know that this is kind of special because, as with all Summer of Live 2020, we’ve brought over our guests and topics from our canceled-due-to-COVID Baltimore conference. So we are going to be sharing the link in the comments from Meredith’s slide presentation. She was one of our awesome presenters, and she’s been kind enough to pivot and join us here. So please open those slides in another tab, and you can follow along or bookmark or download for later. But we are going to — we’ll do a screen share if we absolutely have to, but you guys can’t read them anyway, so we’ll just tell you what slides they are.

OK, question for audience, and then we’re going to start doing questions for Meredith. Are you producing original video content, guys? Who out there is doing it? What platform are you using most often if you are doing it, Instagram, YouTube? Please tell us in the comments.

Meredith, all righty, how did you get into video? Where did you start? How did you learn? Did you have formal training, or did you teach yourself?

MEREDITH MARSH: No, I had no formal training. So I’m a total introvert. I’m not an on-camera person at all.

JENNY GUY: Great.

MEREDITH MARSH: (LAUGHS) So I started back in 2014-ish. I knew I wanted to start a blog. I thought, like, oh, I can do that. I had a background in web design, so I did like all the nerdy stuff, but I thought I could probably create content. So I set out to start a blog, and it was just a matter of figuring out, what am I going to blog about?

And I happened to buy a GoPro camera for my family, I think, on a whim, like on a Cyber Monday deal. And I was like, we’re going to use this and we’re going to record stuff and we’re going to go do fun things. And so I created a video with it and I showed my kids, and they were in awe of this video of them. Sledding and making Christmas cookies.

And I thought, I have to teach other people how to do this because I wasn’t seeing — you know, Facebook, at the time, people were just, like, dumping their kids’ photos and dance recital videos on Facebook and using Facebook as an archive. You know? And I thought, we can do better than that. And I’m sure there’s other parents that are like techie, nerdy, gear-type people that are like, yeah, let’s get a GoPro.

So once I did the keyword research to figure out, could this be my blog thing, I realized it could. It was kind of a good time, a good topic. So I started doing GoPro tutorials, like how to use a GoPro camera and then how to edit GoPro videos, which I was kind of just learning my way through that myself. But it seemed like a no-brainer that I should create video tutorials and not just blog about it, and so that’s what I did.

And I kind of just — I applied what I knew about SEO for blogging to my YouTube channel, and I started gaining subscribers and getting comments. And every couple of weeks, I’d go over there and be like, oh, look at, there’s more subscribers. Oh, people are asking me questions in the comments. Maybe I should respond.

And I wasn’t — I didn’t think of it — I didn’t realize how powerful it would be. I just thought it seemed like a no-brainer that I should put my videos there. And so once I started seeing that I was kind of racking up an audience there, and GoPro reached out to me to do a giveaway, and I just was like, oh, this YouTube thing is — this is a thing. Like, this thing people should be doing.

JENNY GUY: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: So that’s kind of how I started, but I never set out to start a YouTube channel. I never thought, I want to be a YouTuber. And I just– it was like something I felt like it made sense to do in conjunction with my blog, so I just did it.

And I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. And, I mean, it was really weird. It’s awkward talking to a camera. It’s awkward, you know, like, seeing — you know, I’ll run into people in my town, and they’ll be like, oh, I saw your video. And I’m like, really? Like, which one? Like, what do you — like, don’t talk to me. Like, I don’t talk about it. And it’s just awkward. It’s so awkward.

So it’s not natural. It’s never been natural, but it’s been really, really fun. And so, now, I help other people figure out how to create content, and what content to create, how to start and grow their YouTube channels. And it’s really — it’s fun helping other people get — be where I was at, but get kind of like out of their comfort zone faster than I did.

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: So that’s what I do and how I got started.

JENNY GUY: I love hearing — it’s really inspirational to hear that it wasn’t a- I wasn’t — I didn’t take — I didn’t go to film school. I didn’t spend a lot of time learning a ton of tech in college. Like, you learned it on your own just by putting things together.

And we actually have a bunch of questions. Matt Freund is saying, “How about using a GoPro for a food blog, cooking videos?” This, we’re actually not doing a ton of talking about GoPro today. But before we dive into your topic, let’s actually — do you mind answering that, real quick, a little bit about GoPro?

MEREDITH MARSH: Matt, you could. There are people that do that. The problem with GoPros is they’re action cameras. They have a really small sensor, like a light sensor, so they’re really best outside where you have lots and lots of natural light. Otherwise, you don’t really get the best image like you would inside with a DSLR camera or a mirrorless camera. So but there are people that do, so I’m not going to say you can’t, but there’s probably better options.

JENNY GUY: Better usages for it. I mean, what if you had if you’re cooking on the grill or you’re cooking outside?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: That would be great. We have a Mediavine, a Publisher Support Specialist, Karla Greb, who said, “I just ordered a GoPro. I’m going to need to check out your blog to help me figure out how to use it.” Yes.
Matt Freund just said, “So I’m probably better off using my phone,” for his cooking videos.

MEREDITH MARSH: Possibly, yeah.

JENNY GUY: OK.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Alrighty, we’ve got a bunch of people that are saying YouTube and Mediavine. I have Facebook and YouTube — where they’re posting video content. Mediavine Facebook, and YouTube. YouTube, videos two times a week. Yes, Facebook and YouTube. Adding it to blog posts.

And we also, everyone, posted the slides for Meredith’s presentation, so please grab those. There’s some great information there. We’ll be telling you when to look at what, but we’re just having a conversation, right now.
So I alluded to this a little bit ago, talking about the impact video is having on digital content creation in general. But why is video creation so important? I want to hear it from you, and why should our audience be prioritizing it at this point in time especially?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, well like you already said, video’s on every platform. And I think it’s because it’s so — it’s engaging. It’s like the next best thing to talking face-to-face with somebody. And it’s so easy to create, now. And it’s easy with, you know, everyone has, like, 3G, 4G, 5G internet everywhere they go, so it’s easy for platforms to serve up video really quickly and easily.

So it’s — every platform as a video platform, now. So, you know, even if it’s not your face on that video, it’s still the content that those platforms are favoring, in a lot of ways. So that’s why I like video.

JENNY GUY: Totally. I mean, in terms of busting the algorithm, you do with video. When people are talking — it — we experience it on the Mediavine page. We get the most reach with video. Like, that’s where you can break through with postings, so it’s a part of every strategy. It’s prioritized everywhere.

And we’re going to talk more about YouTube in a minute, but as you’re going to tell everyone, and most people, though, at least know this. You’re going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but at least most people know that it’s the second most powerful or most popular search engine on the internet is YouTube.

MEREDITH MARSH: Mm-hmm, yeah.

JENNY GUY: So it’s worth it. Guys, how would you — audience, how would you rank your experience with making videos, on a scale of 1 to 10? Drop that in the comments. Tell us how you feel in terms of experience.

OK, Meredith, for those who are Video Pursuit Society members — and say hey to us in the comments if you are — your MEGAphone Method is very familiar. But for anyone who isn’t, will you give us a crash course in your MEGAphone Method? This is where we’re getting into the repurposing.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. So with the MEGAphone Method, you can turn your — I like to say you can turn your message into a megaphone with video content. But there’s so many different platforms, different ratios, different expectations. Like, if you open up TikTok, it’s a very different expectation than YouTube. And so, like, how do you manage all that with your content?
So with the MEGAphone Method, the MEGA, M-E-G-A, in MEGAphone stands for — the M stands for start with your Main platform. So probably for a lot of Mediavine publishers, your main platform may be just your blog, just writing your blog posts. And so if that’s what you focus on first in terms of creating your content, then focus on that. And then turn what you have into a video.

So, for me, my main platform is YouTube. So when I’m thinking of content, I’m thinking in terms of a video. A lot of people, it’s podcasting. And so plan that main content, and then figure out what to do with it. So start with your main platform first.

And then the E stands for Edit once, and then repurpose. So — and everyone has a different workflow and everything– but, for me, I create a YouTube video and I focus on the edit of that YouTube video. And then I turn it into an IGTV video. And I could also turn it into a Pinterest pin, but I don’t. I just don’t do that (LAUGHS). I could.

JENNY GUY: You could. I just don’t.

MEREDITH MARSH: So I’m focusing on the one thing, and then turning it in to all the other things. I will also embed my video through Mediavine, sometimes, not all the time. I haven’t trained my VA to do that yet, so not every video goes that route. But that’s kind of the workflow there. Focus on one thing, and then turn it into all the other things. Make those other things kind of fit what you’ve already done.

And then the G stands for Go long, Go wide, and Go deep. And what I mean by that is use your videos to– go long is like look at the longevity. I mean, we all hear, Mediavine publishers, I’m sure you know a lot about SEO. You know the value of creating evergreen content that people are searching for today and five years from now and 10 years from now.

And with your video content, you want it to be the same thing, right? YouTube is a search engine. It’s owned by Google. It’s the second largest search engine, second to Google. So when — if you’re just focusing on, let’s say, Instagram Stories and that’s the video strategy that you’re adopting, there is no longevity there. Those stories are gone after 24 hours unless you save them to a highlight, but they’re not searchable. Whereas, if you focus on that long-form, long-term content, then you’re going to attract people down the road.

Go wide is just go on all the platforms that you want to. It might make sense for you to post your YouTube videos to LinkedIn. A lot of people do that. I do it sometimes, but I usually forget that LinkedIn exists, so –[LAUGHTER]
But it might be perfect for your niche. If it makes sense to post it on IGTV, post it on IGTV.

And then Go deep is just a reminder to always be getting people to go deeper with you. Get on your email list, join your Facebook group, like what — wherever it is that you’re creating a community or getting people onto your own sort of property, if you will, so all your eggs are not in one basket. Then you can use video and you YouTube to get people to go deep with you.

And then A is just Alignment. You just always want to make sure that your — and this is more for a beginner content creator, but you want your content, your video content, to be aligned with what you’re doing. So, you know, don’t get lost in like Search Engine Optimization-land, where you’re like, oh, I can rank for that. But if that has nothing to do with the people you want to attract to your channel, the people you want to have in your audience, then there’s no point doing that.

So make sure that your content’s aligned with your ideal audience, your ideal client, aligned with if you have a digital product or program or a service. Or make sure it’s all aligned with that and not just like, oh, this looks like it’s trending, I think I can go viral, because it just won’t make any sense.

JENNY GUY: Having a goal in mind for what you want these people to do, you can get these people to look at you, but once they are looking at, you what do you want, and how do you retain them? And, like you said, with going deep, you don’t — get yourself an audience that is not subject to an algorithm shift, a social media algorithm shift or a Google — like any of those things. Make sure that you — and your email is where those people live. Those are your people, so do it.

OK, let’s talk a little bit about different formats and orientations for the different platforms. And let me grab that slide. OK, so you’re talking about landscape first, and how you worked through all that. You talked about the orientations here?

MEREDITH MARSH: Mm-hmm, yeah. So, for me, this is an example of what I do, visually.

JENNY GUY: Oh, great.

MEREDITH MARSH: So I have my YouTube video. It turns into an IGTV video, the full video, the full thing, so I put that on IGTV. I also send an email to you my email list to let them know I have a new YouTube video, and I link it back to the YouTube video. If I’m sending the email, like right when I publish it or within the first couple days, I send them directly to YouTube.
| then I can, and sometimes do, put that video as a Mediavine video on my blog, but I always embed the YouTube video either way, right, into my blog. So it’s going to — those are my three kind of main places that I sort of distribute my video to.

And so that would be perfect for somebody who’s creating that landscape content first, so a YouTube video, a Mediavine video, Facebook Lives, you know, that’s landscape, or horizontal.

If you were going the other way, which I think there’s a slide for, if you were focusing on doing Instagram Lives, for example, if that was your main platform — and so now you’re vertical. All your videos are vertical. You can turn them into a landscape video pretty easy with almost any video editor. And so you have — you can kind of see, in that slide, on the right, you have your vertical.

And then where your video is not, you can have a background, you can have branding, you could have slides with words, back there. You could have like, I don’t know, stock video footage or something back there. So you can create a video file that is horizontal that you could put on YouTube or put on wherever you want to have your landscape video. So embed it into your blog post or upload it to Mediavine.

I’m not sure if the Mediavine video player is optimized for like if you put a vertical video. You’ll have to tell me, Jenny, because I’m not sure. And then, the same thing, you can send it right to your email list. And you can also use your email list to — so you’re sending videos to your email list. Then you’re also using your videos to get people to sign up for your email list, so it’s like a little bit of a cycle there, which works with any dimension of video.

So that’s a workflow that you could use if you’re focusing on vertical videos first. So Instagram Lives or Instagram Stories would work for that as well.

JENNY GUY: So in terms of– we are getting confirmation on the vertical video format, I would encourage everybody– so, Meredith, where are you with YouTube subscribers currently?

MEREDITH MARSH: I am, I think, just under 47, something like that, 47,000.

JENNY GUY: 47,000, right. OK, so you are already in a good monetization place with your YouTube strategy. For those that have smaller channels and are working on growing it, and even those with larger channels, the monetization and the ROI is going to be much higher when you’re uploading the videos through the Mediavine dashboard. So we would encourage you to do both and to — especially if you’re creating longer-form content for YouTube — then edit it down to a 30 to 45 second video clip, and put it into your blog post there. That makes sense for that.

That way, you’re still reaping the benefits of those. The highest CPM, basically, that we can offer for a single ad unit is with pre-roll inventory, so do that, please. And then you can also put that title card at the end. With the Mediavine video player, you can put that title card at the end, which enables you to direct people to your YouTube where they can subscribe to your channel there, see the full video there, however you’re doing this.
We don’t recommend those long-form videos. Like, we would not upload a — this Facebook Live would not be uploaded through the Mediavine video player. No one would watch that on your website. No one’s going to watch an hour-long video on your website or a five-minute-long video, really, for the most part. It’s a different platform, so you’re wanting to edit to the greatest hits or the 30 to 45 seconds of the best thing, stuff like that.

We have a lot of questions. Let me go back. OK, we’ve got people saying that — they’re ranging from the 3 to 5 range, a lot of people. We’ve got some 9’s, people that are super into video. Vikkie Lee says she’s a 9 for YouTube. She shares DIY videos to put back in the community what I get out of it too. She now has about 50,000 subscribers. And then she tries to write posts after and optimize them on her blog.

So that’s really a good workflow. That’s similar to what you do, Meredith. Lori says she’s about a 2. She’s made a few videos and knows the basics of editing and Premiere Pro, but is still struggling to understand the big picture and how to put them to use. I think that Meredith would have a lot of tips on that, both on her website, in her Facebook group, in her podcast, all those things.

OK, we had a question here from Vikkie Lee. “Meredith, what’s your stance on Facebook pages such as Bored Panda and LadBible asking if they can share one of your YouTube videos?” And Larisha said, she’s not sure what Meredith will say, “but my understanding is that it goes against Facebook’s new terms or original content and you could be penalized.”

MEREDITH MARSH: I don’t have a stance on that. I’ve never done that. They’ve never — I don’t make viral videos, so they have never approached me (LAUGHS). So but I know people who have, and I think — man, it’s so easy, I think, to — for them to find people who don’t know that they should, like, research it or ask around. They’re just like, oh, yeah, cool, sure, go ahead. Take my video. And then they’re like massively profiting from it. So I don’t really have a stance.

I mean, if it’s something — it’s totally, I mean, it’s a personal decision. I don’t know that it helps you grow in any way. I’m not totally sure on that.

JENNY GUY: I mean, from an SEO standpoint, we talk about syndication all the time in terms of — but you’re getting the backlinks, you’re getting– which gives Google, gives authority to your profile, whether you’re letting them take an excerpt of your post or — but if a brand or someone wants to use your video content or your recipe or your craft or whatever it is, they need to be paid.

So Morgan Smith McBride says, “I have started creating one-minute videos for Mediavine from my longer videos. I was embedding YouTube videos in my blog posts, but I believe they’re slowing down my page and hurting viewability because of decreasing page speed. Should I just leave the full video on YouTube only and not put it on my posts at all?”

I talked about this. Morgan, no, I think you should edit a small clip of your video and upload it up through the Mediavine video player, and tease to that. Tease to go into your YouTube channel and subscribing there where they can see the full video. But if you’re creating this video content, you want to monetize it in every possible way that you can. And you’re going to get much, much higher returns on your investment that it takes to create a video by uploading it as well at the Media — I mean, double-dip, triple-dip, quadruple-dip.

That’s Meredith’s whole thing. You gotta get a multi-dip sundae.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Do that.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, and I think it’s — I mean, YouTube is a discovery platform because it’s a search engine. So, in a way, it’s almost like you don’t even have to embed your YouTube videos into your blog posts, especially, obviously, if you have access to Mediavine’s video player. But it’s more so your publishing a piece of content on a discovery platform and bringing people into your overall audience. So it almost– it’s totally up to you whether you put it into your — it may have no benefit having it in your actual blog post because the benefit is that that YouTube video is on YouTube, not that it’s in your blog post.

So but I like Jenny’s advice of create a shorter video, use the Mediavine uploader, and benefit there. But, I mean, you can always link out to your YouTube video and — but it’s more like the other way around. Use YouTube to get people into your overall audience, onto your email list, and so forth.

JENNY GUY: And Morgan was clarifying there. She was saying, “I’m definitely putting the one-minute video on Mediavine.” She meant embedding the full-length video into the post as well. I don’t know that I have a strong — I mean, Meredith would you embed an hour-long video into-

MEREDITH MARSH: An hour-long video?

JENNY GUY: Or a long video, a full video, let’s say five to seven minutes?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. I mean, that’s what I do now.

JENNY GUY: Yes.

MEREDITH MARSH: But, honestly, I do that because it makes sense in terms of that video is my main — that’s my main piece of content. So the blog post is kind of a supplement to the video. So I don’t think — if a reader landed on my blog posts, I think if they just read it, they would be like, yeah, I don’t get it. I’m lost. They kind of need that video. So it’s, you know, I think it depends a little bit on your content and on your readers.

JENNY GUY: Definitely true. OK, we’ve got a question from Sue. OK, we have an answer on the vertical video. People are — to the Mediavine video player, we believe you can upload that vertical video to the Mediavine video player, but you need to choose the 16-by-9 format so you get the black, or whatever color you choose, for your box.

OK, Christina said, “We upload our whole video tutorial to Mediavine and YouTube. If the videos are long on Mediavine, are there less ads? Would short ones mean more RPM?”

So yes. In short, yeah. The sweet spot is about 45 seconds because we believe that’s pretty much what audiences are anticipating and what their attention span holds. Plus, an ad runs as a pre-roll to that and then runs afterwards, in-between.

So when you set up the playlist, you’re Up Next feature — I’m sorry, not playlist, your Up Next feature in the Mediavine video player for the way you want your videos to play. It will auto go to the next one, but another ad will run. It’s somewhat similar to having a short sidebar. You want to give a chance for that ad to refresh with another premium paying ad. So a 45 second video, as opposed to a five minute video, you can have an ad. So yes, correct.

OK, let’s — we’re getting a lot. “Could you show a screenshot for people to click to view the long video on YouTube?” We will work on getting that in for you. In the meantime, I can’t get that here on mine now.

OK, Sue says, “Should my videos that I upload to –” well, we’ll talk about– let’s talk about video uploading in a minute to Mediavine video player before we get too lost in that, down that rabbit hole.

“How much editing do you recommend doing as you repurpose videos for different platforms? Is there a universally recognized sweet spot for video length on each one? Speaking of that, how much time is reasonable to spend editing for repurposing, and do you have any favorite video editing tools? Because editing is kind of the name of the game. You can get out and shoot it, but —

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. Yeah.

JENNY GUY: How do we make it usable and professional-looking?

MEREDITH MARSH: So what I have been doing, I don’t edit anything — I don’t re-edit things for other platforms. So I’ll repurpose it, turn it into a vertical for IGTV, but it’s the full YouTube video. So I’m even, in that video, I’m saying like, this is — welcome to my YouTube channel, or whatever. I don’t actually say that, but you know I mean. I’m referencing the fact that this is a YouTube video or subscribe or whatever, and that’s going on IGTV the way that it is.

If I had to do more than that, then I wouldn’t do it. And so it’s like done is better than perfect, for me. So for your brand and your audience, it might be totally different.

So how — what was the question? How much time?

JENNY GUY: So I asked a lot of things, all at once. Yeah, how much time is reasonable? So with the MEGAphone Method, you’re creating the content. Then you’re editing it for the primary platform, for its primary use. Then when you’re repurposing it, how much time are you putting into that repurposing?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. So to repurpose it into a vertical format, I use ClipScribe, so which entails uploading it to ClipScribe and then choosing the template that I want, and so a vertical format. When I put my video in the middle of that vertical, because it shows up in the Instagram feed, so I want it to be in the middle so people can actually see it as they’re scrolling through the feed.

And I — with ClipScribe, you can create your template so you can like — you have a spot for your title and you have a spot for your captions. It does automatic captioning, and so it’s pretty quick. My VA does it. I don’t know how much time he spends, but it doesn’t– I’m not really editing it. I’m just uploading it, changing the title, checking the captions are spelling my name right and —

JENNY GUY: That’s helpful. I mean, always.

MEREDITH MARSH: And, yeah, and then I export it, and then I upload it to IGTV. And so I usually save it as a draft in IGTV. I just, same title as my YouTube title usually, same — the top description, top part of my YouTube description is usually the caption for IGTV. I just — like, it’s just copy and pasting. And then I’ll save it as a draft so that I can publish it whenever I want to publish it.

But you can schedule IGTV videos through Facebook’s Creator Studio, which is something that I recently found that I could do. So there is that option as well. So it’s just a few — I mean, it might take half hour, 45 minutes to do that part.

Like I said, I could put that on Pinterest. I just don’t. I really don’t have a reason. I just don’t. So but that same video could be put on Pinterest because it’s in that vertical format already.

And then, yeah, does that answer your question?

JENNY GUY: It does. Yeah, talk to me a little bit more about ClipScribe and why you love it and how much expertise you need to have to really make use of it, would be great.

MEREDITH MARSH: Oh. Yeah, you don’t really have to have much expertise. And I have a couple of videos on my YouTube channel about this, about using ClipScribe and repurposing your videos into vertical. So there’s – and there are — there’s ClipScribe, there’s Kapwing is another one. There’s one called Zubtitles. There’s Quicc, but it’s not spelled like the regular quick. And there’s a couple others, and they all basically do the same thing.

And a lot of them have the automatic captioning, which is really handy. So, with all of them, you upload your video. Or, like in the case of Kapwing, you can actually just pull your YouTube link to that video, and it will just like pull it in and download it. And then you just choose how you want your vertical video to be laid out.

Like, I put title at the top, video in the middle, captions at the bottom. You could put your logo on there. And then you export it, download it, and then upload it wherever you want to put it. It’s really pretty easy.

JENNY GUY: We love hearing super easy. And there are videos, like you said, on your website that people can get quick tutorials on starting ClipScribe. You’ve mentioned a lot of different editing tools. What made you arrive on ClipScribe? What made you land here?

MEREDITH MARSH: I think I just had a friend that was using it. And I was like, hey, how do you do that? And so she told me what she — it’s kind of — it’s hard. They’re all new tools. They’re all like — it’s like the Wild, Wild West. So they all work differently, and it’s hard to kind of like search for the type of tool that you’re looking for because this is — like, repurposing your videos, it’s sort of like a new concept because of all of the different platforms that we have.

JENNY GUY: Very, very true. We had other people — so could you do a rundown of some of the other programs that you listed in addition to Kap– ClipScribe? I’m sorry, I was thinking — I’m thinking Kapwing. I’m thinking all — this is it, Quicc spelled differently than quick. So I’m trying to go through all of them.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. Yeah, there’s ClipScribe. There’s Kapwing, Quicc.

JENNY GUY: Can you spell that, or come close to spelling?

MEREDITH MARSH: Kapwing is K-A-P-W-I-N-G.

JENNY GUY: Got it.

MEREDITH MARSH: Larisha has it in there, in the comments.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic.

MEREDITH MARSH: There’s Quicc, which is, I think, Q-U-I-C-C, or something like that. Zubtitles, with a Z, is another one. That’s all I can think of off the top of my head.

JENNY GUY: They’re all good, and they’re all — we’re dropping links in there for people to grab them and go check them out. See what you like the best. I think a lot of it is what interface makes you happy the most.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. Yeah, and you can also create vertical videos in a regular video editor. Like, not all a video editors, but a lot of them — Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush, Final Cut Pro, Filmora — most of them allow you to create a vertical video. So you can edit your horizontal video just the way that you would, and then just pull it into a vertical format and do whatever you want with it.

But the other — like Kapwing and ClipScribe have that automatic captioning, which is really helpful.

JENNY GUY: Super helpful. OK, well that’s really helpful. So just try things out and see what works the best for you.

OK, so what is your filming and editing and publishing schedule like? When do you publish videos? Do you post all in the same day or do you drip them out? And everybody’s biggest question, how do you stay consistent with your creation?

MEREDITH MARSH: Hmm. I don’t stay consistent with my creation. (LAUGHS) That’s the answer to that.

JENNY GUY: I mean, yeah, that’s very — it’s — we love honesty here on Summer of Live.

MEREDITH MARSH: So I have had varying, like, schedules. So back when I started my blog and my YouTube channel, I had a full-time job. And I was much more consistent when I had a full-time job because I knew that I had to do a little bit every day.

So I would publish videos on a Thursday for no other reason other than the first one, I think, was a Thursday. So I was like, OK, the next one goes up next Thursday. And so I knew that in order to have it published on Thursday, by Wednesday evening, it had to be done, edited, ready to go. The blog post had to be created. So in order to be ready for that, then, on Tuesday, I had to edit the video, or at least create a rough edit. And so, by Monday, I knew I had to have had it shot.

So, over the weekend, I would usually figure out, what am I creating this week, and then spend a little bit of time, if I could, to shoot the video on the weekend. If not, I would just do it when I got home from work on Monday and then worry about editing it on Tuesday.

And so that kept me consistent because there was no way to just wait till the last minute. There just wasn’t time for that. So, now– and those videos that I was creating were like how-to videos.

JENNY GUY: Right.

MEREDITH MARSH: I was talking to the camera. Hey, this is Meredith, blah, blah, blah. And then, a lot of times, it was a screen tutorial. So that’s easy-ish to record because you don’t have to do your hair and your makeup. You don’t have to have good lighting. You can just do it when your kids go to bed. And you do it at midnight. Nobody knows.

So — and that’s what those were. So intro, screencast, outro. I call it a tutorial sandwich because it’s just easy.

JENNY GUY: Sounds delicious.

MEREDITH MARSH: Now, my videos are a little bit different. They’re not really a tutorial sandwich. It’s a lot more talking head, a lot more B-roll. The videos I create now are more difficult to create, like from a creative standpoint. So I spend a lot more time shooting and a lot more time editing my videos now because it’s like an art form. You know, it’s like it takes more time to draw– like to paint something, to paint a real painting, than it does to draw a stick figure. But you have to start with a stick figure, right?

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: So my workflow, now, is I shoot a video, and I try to get one up every week. And so I kind of spend all week stressing over getting my video done for the week, but I don’t have a regular schedule. But they usually come out on Friday or Saturday.

JENNY GUY: So one of the biggest things we talk about on all, the SEO like a CEO series and on Theory of Content that our co-founder, Amber, was involved with and all of those things is that the best way, the best SEO strategy is to continue creating content. And that’s the truth with YouTube as well. YouTube really values content, new content being pushed out and consistent content being pushed out. So, yeah, it’s something that the best thing you can do to have good SEO and to improve yourself in those search results on all platforms is to make more videos constantly. It’s a monster, and it needs to be fed.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, and I will say, too, that I spend a lot of time upfront planning a video, doing the keyword research and figuring out what I need to cover in the video, what I need to say, like exactly what I need to say in the video. So I kind of — I’ll do that on my computer, and I’ll kind of batch plan a handful of videos so that when I am ready to film, when I do have my hair done —

JENNY GUY: Yeah. Yeah, you can knock them out.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, I — it’s, yeah, because other — there’s — the more time you spend planning and preparing, then the quicker it’s going to be on the back end when you’re editing. Because it’s not — like, you could spend 12 hours editing a video. But if you were super-prepared and you had a script and you knew what you needed to say and you knew what B-roll you needed or what tutorial screen thing you needed, then you just have all that stuff ready to go and you can greatly shorten your editing time.

JENNY GUY: And so you answered one of my follow up questions in with what you were saying. You do script yourself, then?

MEREDITH MARSH: I script — yes, I do script my videos. And I just recently sort of changed how I do it. So what I do is I think, like, what is the actual content that I’m covering? What are the three tips or what is it, like the actual content, the meat, right? And then I will go in and figure out what to do for the intro and what I need to do at the end to finish the video.

So one of the things on YouTube that can be kind of tricky is you don’t want people to leave your YouTube video. So you want people to keep watching as long as possible. That’s what YouTube wants. That’s what you want. And so when you start saying– like wrapping up the video, like, thanks for watching, hope this was helpful, the viewer knows they can get off the bus now. There is no other value coming. And so they’ll leave to go watch something else, and you don’t want that to happen.

So I don’t really do much of an outro. I just kind of like get to the end of the content and be like, OK, now go watch this video. So–

JENNY GUY: Yeah, love that.

MEREDITH MARSH: So, yeah, so and I have an iPad Pro.

JENNY GUY: You Irish goodbye your YouTube videos basically?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. I have an iPad Pro, so I’ve been writing out my scripts lately, which I find to be really helpful, versus typing them out. So, yeah, that’s how I do it.

If I don’t — and I don’t necessarily say word for word what my script says, but if I haven’t run those words through my brain already, like, I can’t spit them out. Like I just can’t. It’s like 12 takes, and I hope I got it and I have to figure them out ahead of time even if I go off-script, and which I do a lot. But if I don’t have those words there, then I find it takes me a lot longer to shoot.

JENNY GUY: It does.

MEREDITH MARSH: And I feel — like, I get sweaty and I get stressed. Like, did I really cover everything? Did I say everything I needed to? So, yeah, I like to be as prepared as possible.

JENNY GUY: I — yeah. Again, it’s not fully scripted by any stretch of the imagination, what we do here with our lives, but I know generally what I want to talk about. I have some points. Of course we go off script and read comments and do all the things, but if I don’t it’s — it’s just throw and smearing stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks. Like, you don’t want that.

I also wanted to circle back around and ask you about SEO research on YouTube. When you’re talking about doing research for your videos, are you doing it in YouTube? And tell me how you do that, please.

MEREDITH MARSH: So SEO, so keyword research, you can just use YouTube for that. If you were going to do that, you’re basically just typing in stuff into the Search bar in YouTube and seeing, are people watching videos on this topic? Yes or no?

You know, look at the videos that are in the search results. Does your video belong there? Does it make sense for it to be there? Are there other videos there that have a million views, hundreds of thousands of views? That’s a good sign that people are watching videos on that topic. And so that’s kind of the simple way to do it.

There are other tools. Like, TubeBuddy is a favorite of mine, where you put in your keyword or what you’re thinking your keyword will be, and it will tell you. Like, basically it tells you yes or no, either, yep, you’re good to go or, no, you should really refine that or change it up a little bit. And what’s really nice about that is, if you have the paid version of TubeBuddy, it’s actually looking at your channel and the data on your channel. And it’s comparing and saying, like, for you, yes, you should do this or, no, you shouldn’t.

So the other thing about TubeBuddy is it helps you to optimize. So I mean, like, it’ll tell you, yep, your title looks good, your description looks good, or you need to add some more of your keyword in there because you said this was your keyword, but it’s not in there. So it’ll tell you those things to help you optimize.

JENNY GUY: Kind of like Yoast for YouTube.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, exactly. Exactly, and it can be hard, at first, to — when I just got off of a group of coaching call with my people, and they’re like, but it says there’s too much competition for these things. So I’m like, that’s because you have a channel with no videos on it. So it doesn’t matter what you choose, it’s going to be too much competition because you don’t have anything to compete with. So you have to start somewhere.

So it can be kind of, I guess, sort of off-putting or disappointing to use tools like TubeBuddy at first. Because it’s like, of course you can’t compete with that. You never created a video before, but you have to start there. So I more so like to look at, are people really searching for this and really watching these videos? More so than, can I compete, when you’re first starting out.

JENNY GUY: That makes a lot of sense, and it’s very helpful. And I love the idea that they’re analyzing your channel. Are they analyzing your subscribers and seeing what types, other types, of content they’re consuming and helping to —

MEREDITH MARSH: That, I don’t think they go that deep.

JENNY GUY: OK, I was just curious.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, they’re kind of — I think they’re mostly looking at your topics and how those topics have performed for you. Yeah, and they’re not all, it’s not always accurate. Because, sometimes, I pull it up for a client who’s like — does archery, and I’ll put it in and it’ll be like, yeah, VidProMom you should do an archery video. And I’m like, what? Why is it telling me that? Like, that’s kind of concerning.

[LAUGHTER]

JENNY GUY: It’s a personal recommendation. They just want you to learn it. Why not?

OK, Sue wanted to know, “Can you re-explain what the sandwich video is?” You were talking about the how-to tutorial, that you made the tutorial sandwich. She said, “What is in the middle of your tutorial sandwich?” It is not bologna.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, it’s not bologna. So the middle of the sandwich is the actual content. If you’re doing a — for me, my tutorials are usually a screen recording, so that’s the meat of the sandwich. If you’re doing like a craft video or cooking video, it’s the crafting or the cooking part.
And so you have your intro, where you’re talking to the camera. And, you know, it’s a talking head video like this, and then you have the meat part. And then you would have an outro. And so —

JENNY GUY: What about condiments? I’m just saying.

MEREDITH MARSH: (LAUGHS) Yes. So, yeah, that’s what I just call it a tutorial sandwich.

JENNY GUY: No, it’s helpful. It’s good because your bread is your intro and your outro. And then your meat, it’s the stuff in the center. Although, I’m a carb lover, especially during the time of Corona, so I will take just the intro and outro because I love carbs.

All right, Larisha was saying, “When we added a second video every week on YouTube, we noticed faster growth. It’s exhausting, though.”

MEREDITH MARSH: Mm-hmm.

JENNY GUY: Yup. She also was commenting, they do so much video content, Larisha and her husband Andrew, was talking about shot lists and scripts, so helpful, very much so, and storyboarding.

We’ve done some storyboarding in the Marketing department when we need to create a video. Susannah, our Senior Graphic Designer is amazing at that. And this is what you want. Think about what your goal is. Think about what kind of adjectives, what you want people to feel when they’re watching the video. That’ll help you, like all of those things. Use feel words. Have feelings.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, storyboarding is something I just started doing.

JENNY GUY: Yeah?

MEREDITH MARSH: And because I have a fancy iPad Pro, I write out my script, and then I go back, kind of like in the margins, and just draw in what I need to have on screen there besides just me talking.

JENNY GUY: That’s awesome.

MEREDITH MARSH: So it’s kind of like storyboarding in the margins. And then I’ll go back in and make little notes on things like emotion, as like little reminders of, this is the emotion that the viewer should be feeling, so make sure you’re putting that emotion out there, just as little reminders. It’s sort of like lazy storyboarding.

JENNY GUY: I think it’s awesome, and now I want an iPad Pro.

MEREDITH MARSH: You should. It’s great.

JENNY GUY: It sounds amazing. I think that, yeah, it’s like a neglected part. Like even if it’s a how-to video, you want to think about what experience you want your viewer to have, always. And when we’re writing, we think about that too. Answer it, take — think about your viewer. Put yourself in their shoes. Why do they want to keep watching, and what do you want them to take away from it? And how do you want them to feel?

MEREDITH MARSH: Right.

JENNY GUY: April said, “What do you use to make the videos were the top part is video and the bottom part is a photo? Can you add music to that?”

MEREDITH MARSH: You could use any video editor to do that. You could also use the online editors that we mentioned. Like, I think you’d be able to do that with Kapwing. I’m not sure about the others. I think you’d be able to do that and ClipScribe too.

And, for music, you can add music and Kapwing. I think if you’re going to be doing music stuff, to me, that sounds like I would just pull that into a regular video editor rather than using an online tool, unless it’s like– I mean, if it’s like a 30-second video, that might be different.

But, yeah, I’ve never added music using those online tools because I’m always doing it in my regular editor, which I’ve been using Final Cut Pro.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. OK, so all sorts of options there for tools. Let us have another question for Meredith. So how do you drive your email list to your channel and blog and videos? How do you keep that loop closed and keep things moving?

MEREDITH MARSH: So my — when I publish a video, I open up my email editor, which I use Kajabi because that’s where my courses and stuff are, so just use their email platform. So I just — I take — usually break up my — the top part of my YouTube description into something that’s a little bit more like human, like it sounds like an email. You know?

JENNY GUY: Right.

MEREDITH MARSH: Copy, paste, do a little bit of rejiggering of the words. I usually put in a screen grab of the thumbnail, and then link out to the video, and only to the video. I don’t link out to other stuff. And so that’s how I send people from my email list to go watch the video. If it’s — like, I have some old, not old, but I have email sequences, like evergreen sequences.

JENNY GUY: Sure, drip campaigns?

MEREDITH MARSH: Those I extend to my blog, because those I’m like, go watch my media finance. Right?

JENNY GUY: Yeah.

MEREDITH MARSH: Whereas with a fresh YouTube video, I really want those eyeballs on that video right then. And so, yeah, that’s how I do it.

JENNY GUY: Because that first 24 hours is really important on YouTube, correct, in terms of where you’re going to get placed in search results?

MEREDITH MARSH: It is important because, yeah, I mean the more views that you have, YouTube recognizes like, oh, this must be a good video because look at all these views we’ve had in the first few hours.
So, yeah, it does help, for sure, the first 24 to 48 hours, usually.

JENNY GUY: Do you ever prime your audience for a new video? Like, get ready, this is going to drop, to try to boost those views?

MEREDITH MARSH: I never have, but I know sometimes people do. I’ve seen people they’ll do like an Instagram Live, like 10 minutes before the video is scheduled on YouTube. And so, which I think is really smart. I just have never tried that before.

JENNY GUY: Interesting, I just was wondering because I’ve heard many people attended a lot of sessions on YouTube, and I heard people talk about that that 24 hours, not 48 hours, or YouTube places a lot of weight on the traffic on that first time period, so it’s important to get a good start.

Michelle Platt says, “Do all of your current videos feature your face? That’s the hardest part, getting myself camera-ready. Any tips or filters?” No.

MEREDITH MARSH: Tips or filters (LAUGHS), I like that.

JENNY GUY: It’s like cardboard box.

MEREDITH MARSH: So my videos do feature my face. Hopefully, they feature my content and my face is just delivering it. But, yeah, I — this, being camera-ready is definitely a barrier for me, for sure. And, sometimes, I just don’t feel like doing my hair or doing my makeup. Especially now, when I don’t even have to leave the house, sometimes, I am like doing my hair and makeup at 3pm to shoot a video or to like join a live.

JENNY GUY: Today, yes.

MEREDITH MARSH: And then —

JENNY GUY: I was like, bye, guys. I’m about to go get 20 minutes and do this.

MEREDITH MARSH: And then I’m like, have dinner and go to bed, and it’s like, why did I spend all that time on my hair? So, yeah, it’s definitely a barrier.

One really great tip that I have is if you have — if you get your hair done at the salon, just plan to shoot a couple of videos that day.

JENNY GUY: Very smart.

MEREDITH MARSH: I have done that before. And I always — I’ve done it like once, and then I think I’m going to do this every time, but I never have videos ready to be shot on my salon day. So it hasn’t happened, so–

JENNY GUY: And you can never make — I mean, I’m not saying you. I’m saying any, me. I can never make my hair look the way my hairstylist makes it look ever, ever, even when they’re like — I’m like show me how to do this, step by step. Like, I’m five, show me, and they do. And then I get home, and it never — I would say, Michelle, yeah that’s a huge barrier.

Ring lights are huge. Natural lighting is a big thing, so always go into a place that has natural light, and then augment it with a ring light. They’re not expensive. There’s a ton of them on Amazon, and it’s a game-changer.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, I am a big fan of really like flooding your face with light. It really does hide just like little skin imperfections and blemishes and stuff. You just have to make sure that, like, if you wear makeup, that you put on a little extra eye shadow, a little extra lipstick and blush so you don’t look ghostly.

JENNY GUY: Contouring is helpful, too, a little bit, just a little bit of like, you know.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah. And, also, too, if you can, just plan to batch film some content. And so that you’re only doing your hair and makeup once and then recording three videos, instead of doing it every week or something like that. But, yeah, I guess those would be my tips. But I totally — you’re not the only one with that barrier, for sure.

JENNY GUY: No, everybody feels that way. Like, everybody feels that.

Is that your puppy, Meredith?

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, my dog is barking. I think maybe my husband’s home. I’m not sure.

JENNY GUY: Is there a name?

MEREDITH MARSH: Somebody could be breaking in.

JENNY GUY: Is there a name for that dog? Well, I hope someone’s not breaking in.

MEREDITH MARSH: No, his name is Aries.

JENNY GUY: Hi, Aries. It’s good to hear from you.

OK, we’re almost out of time, but we’re going to tell everybody where they can find you, coming up next. And then what is the number-one thing you want someone who is just starting out with video to know? Like, a crash course, they’re going to start or they’ve just started creating video and they want to get into the repurposing game?

And I’m going to have you come back in one second. I’m going to say that. I’m going to quickly announce– and I’m going to mute you while Aries is making his presence known. It’s for your thinking.

Guys, we have had an awesome episode today with Meredith. We are going to share that link to her presentation one more time so you’ve got it, and we’re going to share some more links of where you can find Meredith. The Summer of Live continues next Thursday, July 16th.

We have guests, names that you’ve probably heard before, Eric Hochberger and Amber Bracegirdle, our Mediavine co-founders, we’re going to talk playlists and indexes and Grow.me (editorial note: now known as “Grow”) and all sorts of fun stuff about where we are, give everyone an update, and it’ll be a lot of fun.

I don’t think — I’ve never had the two of them on at the same time. It’s going to be a party!

Meredith, back to you, please tell us — first, thank you for all of the amazing information. You are such a resource. Please tell everyone where they can find you and what you can offer them in terms of services if they need help, and then how to jump-start their video content career.

MEREDITH MARSH: Yeah, so thanks for having me, first of all. But the best way to kind of dive into what I have to offer is just go to my YouTube channel, if you search VidProMom if you just search Meredith Marsh, you’ll probably find it.

And I have a really great download called the Social Video Blueprint —

JENNY GUY: Yes, please do that.

MEREDITH MARSH: — which it gives you some kind of ideas of different ways that you could repurpose your content, whether you’re going from horizontal to vertical or vertical to horizontal. So that’s where I would tell people to start, if they’re like, oh, I don’t know how to wrap my head around all of this.

And, of course, reach out to me on Instagram. My handle there is @meredithmarsh.co. I love to get DMs from people and questions, and that’s kind of where I really like to connect with people.

JENNY GUY: And we’ve got all those links shared in there. You’ve got Meredith’s presentation, you’ve got her YouTube channel, we’ve got your Instagram. And then that Social Video Blueprint is shared in there. It’s a free download. Pick that up and get started.

Just get making video. It is, it’s hard for everyone. Like, everybody does not like this.

All right, Meredith, thank you so much. You’ve been great to have.

MEREDITH MARSH: Thank you so much for having me.

JENNY GUY: All right, and go tell Aries hi. It sounds like he needs some attention. We’ll see you next Thursday, you guys.

The post Summer of Live: Reach a Wider Audience with Multiplatform Videos with Meredith Marsh appeared first on Mediavine.

* Editorial note: Since the airing of this episode, “Grow.me” has been rebranded to “Grow.” *

From video playlists to Grow.me and, yes, Trellis, Mediavine Co-Founders Amber Bracegirdle and Eric Hochberger are sitting down with Mediavine’s Director of Marketing Jenny Guy to dish about all our coming attractions and share their best optimization tips.

Don’t miss this episode, sponsored by the lovely folks at Agathon! (Originally aired 7/16/20)

Watch the video here or check out the transcript below.

Mediavine Summer Updates with Amber Bracegirdle and Eric Hochberger

JENNY GUY: Hey, everybody. It is Thursday, July 16th. And you are watching the Mediavine Summer of Live, which as of today, is at the midpoint of our season. I’m Jenny Guy. I’m your host and Mediavine’s Director of Marketing. Welcome and thanks for watching, y’all.

How’s everybody doing out there? I’m kidding. I watch the news. I know how we’re doing. But for the next hour, we are going to forget about the dumpster fire in the world around us. We’re going to attempt to do that. And we’re going to talk about our businesses.

And I would like to kick things off with the audience. Please comment with one thing that is making you happy or getting you through this tough season of life. It can be a recipe. It can be a news story. It can be a GIF– I love GIFs– or a meme, a meditation routine, or practice that’s working for you right now. Whatever you’ve got that might help us all get into this better mind space, share and share alike. That would be amazing.

Things that are getting me through today, one, RBG is out of the hospital. I’m pretty excited about that. And also working with businesses that have similar values to Mediavine as well as the strong base of commitment to their customers– that makes me happy.

And the company that our episode today is brought to you by checks all of those boxes. Agathon— what up– provides WordPress hosting with a focus on speed and stability plus the expert support you need as a professional blogger so you can focus on growing your sites.

Working closely with our Mediavine engineers, Agathon has optimized their new high speed hosting platform for the Trellis framework. We’re going to talk about Trellis today. The power of Trellis combined with the speed of Agathon’s next gen hosting offers the performance you’ve been waiting for.

Join the wait list today and be the first in line when Agathon’s Trellis-optimized hosting becomes available publicly. That is so exciting. We are putting the link into the comments right now. So you can sign up for that and be ready to go. We are going to talk about Trellis later. We have been friends with Agathon for a long time. So for more information on them, check that in the comments.

Another thing that’s making me super happy today is a little help from my friends and colleagues. And that means the two people I have a guest today. I have Mediavine co-founders, Amber Bracegirdle and Eric Hochberger. They’re here. We’re going to do a State of the Summer Vine. We’re going to talk about everything that’s been happening and that will be happening around these parts, and taking your questions for them.

For anyone who doesn’t know who these two are, Eric is not only a co-founder, he’s also the CEO of Mediavine, which is definitely a shout-out to the HairClub president– also a client, which Eric is not a member of that, if you cannot tell by his quarantine hair. He is a computer programmer who leads all of our technical initiatives and is the architect of our ad tech. He’s also known for his Go for Teal and SEO like a CEO blog posting video series. And he’s crazy about Shih Tzus. Hi, Eric.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not too much cats, but hello.

JENNY GUY: No, we don’t love cats. Amber is also a Co-Founder and our Chief Brand Officer. She’s a longtime blogger at her site, Bluebonnet Baker. And she initially came on board Mediavine to run Food Fanatic, which is one of our owned and operated sites. Bottom line, they smart.

If you’ve got questions for Amber or Eric, drop them in the comments, please. And welcome to you guys. I don’t think I’ve ever had all of us, all three on, at one time together.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: No, I think we’re going to do it– where were we? Chicago, maybe?

JENNY GUY: A year ago, probably.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah. And you were out sick.

JENNY GUY: I was sick, yeah.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So Eric and I ended up doing it on our own. And it was–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not quite the same.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: –sad.

JENNY GUY: Well, I’m sure it was great. I watched it. It was great. I also forgot today what year I had a surgery. I’m like, was that last year? Was that two years? I don’t even know what– I don’t know what time it is or what time is at all.

But let’s do this. There is a lot happening at Mediavine these past months. And we’ve got so much exciting stuff to discuss. But first, let’s just get this out of the way.

Last week was a busy week for all of us, partially because a paid version of one of our WordPress plugins had a less than awesome thing happen, which was a bug in Grow Social Pro. Eric, will you please tell us what happened, and how we fixed it, and also how we’re making sure that never happens again?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so first off, huge apology to all of our publishers and non-Mediavine publishers that are running the paid version of Grow Social Pro.

We had two bad versions of the plugin that basically conflicted with certain settings if you had on in Yoast and you had those other settings on in Grow Social Pro. The combination of the two of those over certain versions of these two versions of these plugins would basically undo the other one’s ability to output meta tags onto the page.

And certain plugins, such as WPRM and Tasty Output, recipe card metadata through the Yoast plugin, what ended up happening is that stuff was accidentally being removed if you had basically our plugin instead of Yoast outputting that.

So what did that mean? As a result, a lot of, unfortunately, recipe bloggers lost their rankings inside of their carousels. So they no longer had rich snippets. Or they no longer had recipe results. This was temporary. It was a quick fix that we were able to release within a day, actually that same day. We sent out an email to all of the people affected.

And hopefully everybody was able to update in time. I know a lot of people were seriously impacted by this. And we’re sorry. But going forward, we have a lot of checks in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
We’re spinning up all new testing environments to make sure that every version. And we already have a very intense QA, or quality assurance process, but it’s going to be more intense as a result of this.

We’re going to make sure that we are running every version of Yoast that we can, at least recent versions– WPRM, various themes, various frameworks, various settings, most importantly. And we’re going to make sure that we’re not impacting other plugins going forward, at least the most popular ones that our publishers will be running.

So the best we can do is say we’re sorry. We will make sure this will not happen again. And I can assure you from both quality assurance and from the engineering side, we’re taking this very seriously. And this will definitely not happen again.

JENNY GUY: Our QA department has been working behind the scenes for a long time. But now they’re actually an official QA department. Eric, who’s in our QA department?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It’s a great question.
[LAUGHTER]
So it’s led by Doug, who is actually a former Support Engineer over here who has a QA background. He’s taken over our QA department. And on his team, he has– I should know their names because that’s what you do when you have an 80-person company, right? You know every person’s name.

JENNY GUY: No, you shouldn’t. That was my fault. Guys, I ambushed him.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Ambushed.

JENNY GUY: That’s what happens now. It was an ambush. Also, he’s kind of sick if you’re wondering why he sounds a little Bea Arthur-ish. He’s also in a basement in another state.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Surrounded by cats– as much as I love cats, I’m allergic to cats and they do this to me.

JENNY GUY: That’s why he sounds like that.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I can actually attest to that. Because the first time that Eric ever came to my house in New Jersey, my giant Maine Coons made him very ill.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Those are not cats. Those were, like, tigers, I’m pretty sure.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I mean, yeah, they’re like my–

JENNY GUY: She’s always like, just stay at my house in San Antonio. And I’m like, I don’t want to die. So I won’t.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: No.

JENNY GUY: Thanks for the offer. So we do– and then Amber, I’m going to have you address a little bit about how we publicly respond to this.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Right.

JENNY GUY: And if somebody missed anything, that they could make sure they don’t get missed the next time. Eric, take a sip of water.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So we immediately sent out an email once we knew that there was an impact. It’s a little bit difficult. Because some of our Grow sort of customer lists are not in our main customer service tool yet. That’s one of the things that we’re working on.

But we also sent out a blog post the next day. We held on that because I thought we were still waiting on some technical stuff. So I do want to send out an I’m sorry that we didn’t have a matching blog post to go along with the email. That was completely on me. I understood us to be waiting on some technical information and didn’t push anybody.

And so the next day, as soon as we realized that was not the case, we got one out that detailed everything that was going on. And that will not happen in future– as soon as we send out an email, we will have a matching blog post on the website.

JENNY GUY: And I think, just to let everybody know, if there’s ever something happening behind the scenes– we’re known for transparency to a fault here. That’s not a– I mean, and I say to a fault as the director of marketing. There are times I’m like, you don’t need to– and everybody’s like, we’re going to say that.

So we talk about everything always. That’s never– that’s never a thing that we’re going to keep from you. If there’s a problem, we’re going to say, we done effed up and this is how we’re fixing it in the future. So and then Amber, if they’re not on the list, talk a little bit– either one of you, whoever wants to, if Eric has a voice or whoever can talk about it– why would people not be on the list? There was a migration of the plugin, there’s a little bit of a history here with the Grow plugin to begin with, right?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Right. Eric, do you want to talk about the technical aspects of that?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so we have the Mediavine Marketplace, which is actually we took over from Social Pug. So it’s the same place you would have purchased it before. But you have to make sure you have the right email address in there because that’s the email address we’re going to have on file for all paid users of Social Pro.

A lot of people get it through their host or through what’s called an agency license. In the case of an agency license, we’re not going to have your email because your host or the agency that has the official license key, that’s the person that should be receiving those emails and that’s the person that should be supporting you. That’s the idea behind an agency license.

So I know a ton of people that were running this didn’t get an email. And a lot of times, it’s because you weren’t the one that actually paid for the license. If you are officially the license holder, just make sure you log in to marketplace.mediavine.com and put in your latest email address to make sure you get these in the future.

JENNY GUY: OK, awesome. If you have questions though and you’re confused, you don’t know what happened, still wondering about whether this is impacting you, email us at grow@mediavine.com. We’re here to talk to you. We have specialists on-hand that are well-versed in the plugin and can give you assistance with all of those things.

Shifting to something pretty exciting and positive. We talked about this a little bit the last time you were here, Eric, and weren’t in a basement. But this is so new, it’s barely in beta Grow.me.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Mm-hmm.

JENNY GUY: Onboarding has started– oh, FedEx is here. If you hear sounds, that’s what’s happening. Eric, talk to us a little bit about– people are now on here. And if you guys are on the Grow.me and you’ve got the beta on your site, please give us a shout-out in the comments if you’re doing that.

And then we’re really excited about Grow.me. And it’s not just because of what it is now. It’s what it’s going to be in the future and what our goals are for this plugin. So will you talk a little bit about that and what the heck I’m talking about with Grow.me?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so Grow.me is what we’re kind of calling the next evolution of Grow. And it’s basically going to be user engagement, marketing, social networking, social media, whatever you want to look at it as. It’s going to be a chance for your readers on your site to engage better with your content, and share it, and be social. It’s everything that Grow was.
And it’s going to slowly be– more and more features are going to come to Grow.me. And it is free for all Mediavine publishers, at least the initial feature set. It allows your users right now to favorite content on your site, allows them to view bookmarks across all of the sites running Grow.me. It allows them to share your content. And it has a lot more coming, including options and a search feature.

So we’re really excited about everything Grow.me is going to be. And I think we have 250 people that are going to be starting the initial beta test already. So thank you, guys. It’s also going to be using similar technology as how we do our ad management, our script wrapper. So we need people to basically help us test things. Because that’s how we’re always innovating so much on the ad side.

We have publisher sites. So we’re able to run small percentages of traffic to be able to test things on. We’re going to be able to do that with Grow.me. So what you’re seeing today is– we call it an MVP, or minimum viable product. You can think of it as version zero or version one.

And in the future, everything is going to be adding upon this. So it’s all going to be based upon your feedback. Use this thing. And I think the most exciting things is it’s going to help everyone gather first-party data, which we have– we talked about a lot in the blog post. A little complicated to go over here, but it’s basically to help you survive what’s going to be known as the cookie-pocalypse, or when third party cookies go away in Chrome. So it’s going to help you make money and help readers engage with your content more.

JENNY GUY: And I’ll just explain this in the way that I understand it. Because when Eric talks about this stuff, I’m like, what? I don’t know. Cookies are going away. Cookies are the way that you serve personalized ads. Personalized ads are the ones that pay the most.

So if you want to have good ad earnings, you have to find a way to get this personalized data. And the way that we’re going to do that is through Grow.me. So help us develop the plugin that’s going to help us down the road when the cookies die. Cookies death sound sad, and should happen in 2020 to go along with everything else that’s horrible that’s going on in this year.

Can we please post the sign-up for the beta in the comments so that people can jump in there and sign up? I’m excited about this. I think it’s going to be amazing.

So we’re going to talk about the plugins here in a second. But right now, I want to talk a little bit more about Mediavine ad management. We’ve had some pretty cool features that kind of quietly released. We’ve been talking about them for a while, though. And I want to talk about them since I’ve got you guys here.

And most of it is in our very favorite video realm that we love talking about. So let’s– where do you want to start, Eric?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Video, video, video.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, the video, video, video, video– the meta video. Eric, where do you want to start?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I think we should go with the quickest one that we should just announce. Because I think people been waiting on this one for a while. So you’re now going to be able to include basically a default caption track if you don’t have any spoken word inside your videos. That’s going to be something you’re going to be able to enable under Video Settings.

Hopefully we turned that online. And if not, if anyone is listening from our product or engineering team, turn the flipper on, please. We want basically to offer you guys a chance– if you have music only, click one button, and that will be the default for all of your videos. And then you can upload captions for anything that needs more specific captions.

It’s going to show a little musical note at the bottom to indicate that music is playing. And that’s, again, if you have no spoken word and you want to be able to help for your ADA compliance or basically helping people with disabilities know that there’s no spoken word, this is only music playing. That’s a quick and easy one we should probably start with.

JENNY GUY: That’s an exciting thing to bring in. And then the next thing, which I know you’ve been very excited about discussing for a long time, is playlists. So let’s talk about that.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right, so after– I think, two years ago when I first started announcing this.

JENNY GUY: It’s been a while.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: And we kind of launched a preliminary version, the Up Next, which basically shows videos after your video continues– finishes. So that’s the first version of playlists we could release and it was the quickest. Now we’re allowing you to create your own custom playlist right on the Dashboard.

So that’s going into beta testing– actually right now, it’s already in beta testing by what we call our internal publications, or our poor Support Team that runs their own blogs also has to test everything and also people on the brand team. Sorry, guys. Thank you– I mean, thank you guys for helping with the initial round of testers.

And then after that, we’re going to release it to more of the public beta. So you should start getting invites or hearing more about playlists probably in the next couple weeks. Because we’re finding all the initial bugs on our own sites. And then we move on to our publishers. And that should be coming very soon. You’ll be able to create your own playlists, which are– yes, your own, not just up next. They’re really here.

JENNY GUY: Super exciting. We’ve been waiting on that for a while. And I want you Sue to know– Sue asked a question about Create. We’re going to come back to Create in just a little bit. And I’ve got your question. So do not worry, I will get that.

And then finally, Outstream, talk about that.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right, so this is still in the year of video. We want to make sure that all our publishers– or sorry, decade– what are we calling it now, century?

JENNY GUY: It was the year of video, then the decade of video. Now we’re the new decade of video–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: The new decade.

JENNY GUY: –the roaring 20s of video, yeah.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: OK, in the roaring 20s of video, we want to make sure that even if you’re not producing video content, you’re able to monetize the high earning video CPM. So we developed our own, what’s called Outstream player, and the idea of Outstream is– it’s called in-stream if it’s a pre-roll ad or a mid-ad. So the ad plays in-roll, or in-stream. It plays alongside the stream, the stream being your video content in this case.

Outstream means there is no stream, so it’s outside of the stream. It’s a terrible, gross name. But Outstream just means that it’s a video ad without video content. It gives video advertisers a chance to still get the reach they would have gotten. It’s going to appear inside of your content as if it were an ad, but now it’s going to be animated.

Because we built the player ourselves, it’s optimized for pagespeed. Do not worry. It pauses when it’s out of view. It only plays when it’s in view. So it’s not going to be a very disruptive user experience. It’s not going to earn quite the same as in-stream. So please still continue to upload your videos. It’s going to be the best earning potential you have. But these are a great way for content creators to be able to monetize basically text–

JENNY GUY: How do I–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –on the same levels.

JENNY GUY: –get those?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Good news, on this one we actually went opt-in for everyone on this one. You can opt out if you want email in or change your settings. But I don’t think most people are going to have complaints with this. It’s already boosted CPM significantly since it’s been live the past, I believe, month or so. So it’s doing very well. Unfortunately, we do not offer different reporting on it. It’s just going to be blended in with your in-content ads.

JENNY GUY: Michelle Palin just said what I think all of us are thinking. So it’s out, but it’s in, and it’s video, but it’s not. Got it, exactly. And then throw in Eric saying stream like 75 times. And that’s basically a synopsis of our last few minutes.

She also said making custom seasonal playlists will be awesome for fall and really any season. That’s– do you guys see other ways that this will be great for user experience and revenue, moving up with playlists or any of our new video features?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, I mean, Sam, one of our lovely Publisher Support people, the other day was talking about like a custom list specifically for her cocktails I think. That was going to be really cool to sort of specify on her cocktail posts that that gets the playlist, the cocktails playlist.

And then you can basically think about it in the same way that you think about categories. You can provide a venue for a category or an event, like fall, you know? I think there are lots of ways to creatively think about this. And I would encourage everybody to also think outside the box, like what’s going to be most useful for your reader? And that’s how you should create playlists.

JENNY GUY: Kylie says, will the captions be available on already updated videos, uploaded videos, or just new ones? Like can we go flip a switch?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So you’re going to flip the switch and it’s going to be the new default. So any video you did not upload a caption to, existing or new, is going to get those automatic captions. So existing videos will be captioned for you with one click.

JENNY GUY: Yes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That’s going to be awesome.

JENNY GUY: One click, quarantini playlist.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Technically two, you’ve got to click it and I think hit Save. But yeah.

JENNY GUY: I mean, Save is important. Save is always– although Google Docs has broken everyone of the save. I used to be like a spastic saver. Every 30 seconds, I would save to make sure everything was backed up. And then Google Docs–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I have so many Google Docs thoughts right now. They’ve changed everything.

JENNY GUY: I know. It’s awful. Is anyone else– Google Docs, like was this supposed to be better? Because it is not better, whoever did that.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: And also, could have maybe not done it in 2020? We’ve got enough going on.

JENNY GUY: It’s also with Facebook that keeps updating. And people are like, where’s my button? I can’t push anything– just irrational anger. Michelle Hall says, will that be in Video Settings? So she’s not seeing the captions yet. Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I went ahead and I turned the flipper on. Engineers, come on.

JENNY GUY: Oh.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. So if you go into Video Settings now and just refresh it, you should see. You might have to do– it’s called a hard refresh. Hold on the Shift button as you refresh. That will clear out your cache. And then you should be able to get access to the setting under Video Settings.

JENNY GUY: Awesome, it’s there you, guys. It’s on. It’s live. Whoo.
Another headline feature that is relatively new at Mediavine are our PSA campaigns. We started with a COVID-19 option. We’ve since added the We Stand With You. And I have heard rumors that there are additional campaigns and feature causes in the works. Amber, will you tell us a little bit about how these started, why they’re so important to us, and how people can still get involved?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Sure. Yeah, so they started with a wonderful idea by Laurence Norah, who is one of our travel publishers, wanting to give back with regards to information around COVID-19. And once we had built it, it was just kind of like, oh, we can do a lot more with this.

And so the PSAs, the idea behind them is that instead of the ad collapsing if there’s not an ad to fill, we will send out a PSA instead and fill that spot so instead of it not being there at all, you’ve got one of our designed PSAs for whichever cause you’ve opted into. So we’ve got the COVID-19, we’ve now got We Stand With You in support of Black Lives Matter.

And so enrollment there, we’ve got 1,307 for COVID and 644 for We Stand With You. It’s a quick opt-in on your Dashboard. You can do one, you can do both. You can actually– if you opt into both, the engineers are so clever they’ve made it so that you get an equal distribution of them. So you don’t have to worry about, oh, I’m only going to see this one kind. In fact, I was Food Fanatic the other day and I got both.

JENNY GUY: That’s cool.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Because I’d been there for a while. And it was Susannah’s beautiful artwork. And then it was the UN artwork that we– we worked with the United Nations. They have an entire database of artwork that can be used. And so we’ve– they’re just so pretty. And I love that we’re able to give back in that way.

And with the We Stand With You, we’ve now got– I was getting there. We’ve now got art that we commissioned specifically from Black artists because we really felt like that was the way we could support the Black community right now, is by displaying art from Black artists. And so you’ll now see those instead of our original designs. Or, I can’t remember– are we doing both, Jen?

JENNY GUY: We’re emphasizing the work by Black artists. That’s what we wanted to do. And it’s really incredible. If you guys look– and if you visit our landing page for the We Stand With You, you can then go check out all of those artists.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: The artists, yeah. Yeah, so that’s really, really lovely. And then on social, we are doing Amplify Melanated Voices. We’re making sure that we are amplifying our bloggers of color. And we also have a new social giving campaign internally that started with all of this, realizing that we really should be providing our employees with more ways to give back to the things that are important to them.

And so now we’ve got a matching program internally so that employees can choose charities that are important to them. And we will match– I forget the exact numbers of how much we match per employee. But I know it’s pretty awesome.

And then the other thing that we’re doing is we’re looking for more charities and causes to amplify, including things like childhood cancer research, maybe childhood hunger. We really want to give people a lot of ways to opt in.

And as happens with so much of our technology, we don’t realize always the other positive effects that these things are happening. And I’m going to hand it over to Eric to talk about that because the PSAs have actually solved an additional problem that we weren’t even thinking about.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so there is a new web vital statistic called Cumulative Layout Shift, CLS. Probably have gotten some notices of it in your–

JENNY GUY: Flies right off the tongue.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly, right in your inbox and you have no idea what it is. But basically, it’s does your content shift and move around as you’re scrolling through the page? That can happen if you’re lazy loading images, or as ads load, or in our case, as they collapse if we didn’t have an ad to serve.

So that can, if a user is scrolling super fast, have kind of a layout shift as it goes to collapse. So we’ve done, instead now, we’ve served a house ad, it never has to collapse. So it actually helps you solve for CLS. So that’s why, as Amber mentioned, we’re going to have a lot more PSA options coming to make sure that everyone has a cause they can hopefully want running on their site. And if not, we’ll eventually be bringing the ability to upload your own house campaigns as well.

JENNY GUY: So lots of– yeah, Brenda just said I love this idea of helping other causes too. I have some ideas. And Michelle Palin said yes on childhood cancer. So there’s a lot. We’re uploading, and getting more ideas, and talking with different groups that have been impacted by COVID-19 and their fundraising efforts in ways that we can continue to give visibility to these really worthy causes.

Going back, sorry, Michelle was saying a kid– a kid made me miss the answer to the question of whether flipping that switch affects only new videos or if we already have to do something to apply it to uploaded videos. No, the switch does all of it.

And then Zona said– Zona told her– sorry, and then Sue said, where do you set– where do you set that all your videos are just music?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So once you turn that on, it’s just going to assume everything is music unless you–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Unless you–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –upload it– right, unless you upload a caption track to it. So it’s just going to be under Settings under your video player, which will be basically a default closed caption. They’re just going to enable.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Luke is excited about our own house campaigns. We’re excited about that too. Noreen just said, this is just another reason for Gary to ignore those other guys. Which, Noreen– for those that don’t know, while the lives are happening, my team, the Marketing Team, is putting all of the awesome comments into a channel that we have. And every time you type Gary now in Slack, something happens. And it made me crack up.
But Eric, just Gary– does Gary have anything to say today?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, I think we should leave my alter ego to the couple of Facebook posts. And the problem is, I honestly prefer not to waste our on-air time talking about the competition’s dubious tactics. I prefer to focus on all the awesome stuff we’re doing here at Mediavine. So Gary will occasionally pop up on a Facebook post. But that’s about it.

JENNY GUY: OK, Gary. Well–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It’s because I don’t have a mustache right now.

JENNY GUY: I mean, if we had a disguise, maybe we could talk about it. But without it– no.

OK, I want to talk– I promised Sue we would talk about Create. It is our OG Mediavine plugin. It’s our flagship, our most valuable content plugin. And we actually just put out a long-awaited feature. And users are pretty pumped about it. Talk to us about Indexes, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so Indexes are also now in beta testing again, only amongst our internal publications. We don’t want to do this to our publishers just yet. And those are basically going to allow you to create custom recipe index pages. But more than that, you can use them for custom home pages, custom category landing pages.

You can basically build what we’re calling Indexes. And they are a list of either your most popular posts, your most popular cards. You can hand-select them. You can do them based upon category. And if you’re using Create, you can do them based upon even things like cook time. So you can say, like, here are my five-minute recipes. I don’t know if we have five-minute recipes. That’s very fast, sorry. Here are my 20-minute recipes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: There you go.

JENNY GUY: Well, it makes more– I mean, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s my only five-minute recipe. Perfect, so it’ll be an index of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

JENNY GUY: Just all the different variations.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: It makes my heart go pitter-patter. I love it so much.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Indexes are going to be absolutely beautiful and super flexible. We’re going to use Gutenberg, basically, as the page builder it’s meant to be, and allow you to build beautiful-looking landing pages.

JENNY GUY: That’s exciting. I’m going to pause for a second because Noreen said, could we pair up with Operation Underground Railroad? I think that’s an amazing idea. Let’s have– if you guys have suggestions for charities that you’d like to see us maybe reach out to for potential PSA campaigns, give us a email at sponsored@mediavine.com. We can take that, and reach out, and see if they’re open to working with us. We just shared Gary’s recent post–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Especially if you have a contact there, include that in your email.

JENNY GUY: Super helpful. If you’ve done work with them, if it’s like St. Jude’s, or something like that– if you have a name that will help us a lot cut through the red tape and get the ads rolling.

OK, Sue’s question– I’m going to go back to that now on– going back to–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Amazon– something about Amazon.

JENNY GUY: Yes, she is having problems with Create Lists not working right with Amazon affiliates. Is this getting fixed? I add the link, and then after saving, it is gone.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I would definitely email create@mediavine.com with that issue. I haven’t heard of that issue right now.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, I haven’t heard about that. So it might not be widespread. And so definitely, the team should take a look for you at the email Eric said.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. We can take a look at that. OK, so let us move forward a little bit. Eric, is there anything else going on for Create though, coming up that we should be on the lookout for?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, I think a big part about Create is similar to what we’re doing right now with Grow. And that’s making sure that we’re going to tie everything into our support portal a little bit better to make sure that if, you know, heaven forbid something does happen again, we’re able to notify everyone as quickly as possible.

So I think you’re going to see Create right now focus on Indexes, getting everything integrated a little bit better with our support portal, working on any bugs such as Amazon issues you might have with the list. But then the next round of features, we’re going to be very excited to announce soon. But basically, they’re going to focus a lot around recipe cards. And in particular, bringing things like better nutrition calculation, imperial metric conversions, all the kind of stuff that I think people have been asking for, we’re going to give recipe cards a little bit of love after kind of house cleanup and indexes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So Diane Herrera, I believe, just made me think about what might be the issue with the Amazon API. And that is– and I had this problem myself– if you don’t have at least three sales through your Amazon affiliate account–

JENNY GUY: Diane said, I had this issue with Amazon and it was the API issue with Amazon.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Right, right, right. So this is what I’m saying, is I had the same problem with the API. And basically, you lose your account, your specific affiliate account loses API privileges if you don’t have at least three sales a month, is what Seth explained to me, one of our engineers.

And sure enough, I had a few friends buy through my affiliate link and then API access came back. So if you haven’t had sales for a while, that may be the thing that’s happening. But if you have had sales, definitely email us.

JENNY GUY: Or email anyway. We can tell you that via email. Whatever you want to do, we’re here. Yeah, if you guys have suggestions for anything, e-mail sponsored@mediavine.com. That’s great for the landing page.
Brenda was asking– she said her dog was barking because he’s sick of Zoom calls and webinars. Which, like, same, dog. So yes, email. And it’s sponsored@–

OK, even though we’ve decided to largely ignore the corona, the ‘Rona, for this live, and talk more about upcoming things with our business, we can’t talk about the current state of things without acknowledging all of the pretty seismic changes that have been happening as a result of COVID-19 this year.

And one of them is absolutely the cancellation of almost every in-person event for all of 2020, all conferences, including our own conference in Baltimore that was supposed to be last month. So a lot of– we all have the sads. Everyone has it. We all have cabin fever. But we are working a lot on ways that we can continue learning, and community, and all of those things, building those virtually for content creators.

So Amber, would you give us a little teaser, please?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, we’ve been talking about ways that we can support folks that want to try and pull together learning opportunities. As you know, we, over the past few years, have sponsored people who are planning retreats. And we, as a company, have decided we should probably pull back from encouraging in-person events, even when we’re not the one pulling them together, at least right now.

And so– I mean, I live in Texas. So COVID is definitely an impact on in-person events right now. And so what we’re thinking is we’re going to do some updates to our retreat form. And then if you are potentially planning a virtual retreat and looking for sponsorship, that we might be able to help out.

So we don’t have everything in place yet. But we will make an announcement and probably do a blog post and all of that once we’ve figured out all the particulars.

JENNY GUY: So yes, please be thinking. We’ll make sure everyone has the information. And we will open up the form again to– since we had a lot of things that we’re not able to do right now, we’re trying to think of what we could do.

And what we can do is support– yes, for you guys, and give you guys the opportunity to– it’s not the same. But at least you can choose your Zoom background. That’s kind of cool. We do that every time we have our monthly Mediavine call. It’s always a fun adventure to see what terrifying and wonderful backgrounds people have put on their Zooms.
So at least you’re talking to other humans. That’s good conversation.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: We have some special souls that work for us.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yes, we

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: They make my heart melt everytime.

JENNY GUY: It takes a special, special– I mean, it’s a competition. It’s definitely a competition voted on by emojis on the favorite.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Mine is always the Ferris wheel at Disneyland, now that I’ve finally been, thanks to some lovely travel bloggers back in February.

JENNY GUY: Doesn’t that seem like that was a different life?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That was like nine years ago, is what it feels like.

JENNY GUY: I mean, Eric and I were sitting in a pub in Dublin listening to live music. And we were crowded in this tiny, little room. And it was all these people. And they’re all just breathing and talking.

JENNY GUY: No, it’s horrible. It’s scary.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Think about it now and you’re like, nope. Mm-hmm.

JENNY GUY: No. I have visceral reactions looking at pictures from past things that I did. Like, it’ll pop up and I’m like, they’re too close. Don’t breathe.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: When you watch movies now that were recorded. And you’re–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Obviously pre-COVID, right?

JENNY GUY: Unsafe. Diane says the other issue with the API is the key codes not syncing up on Amazon. So deleting the old keys and getting new ones fixed for me the access key and secret key. So maybe try getting new keys and entering in Settings. This thing happened when Amazon change their API.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yep. That’s another good idea.

JENNY GUY: Aw, thanks, Michelle. Michelle I just just want to say that I appreciate these live sessions you do. I can watch while folding laundry right now. And I feel like I’m not only learning some things, but having adult interaction outside of my fam. I mean, the adult part is a little bit dubious. But–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Interaction.

JENNY GUY: But it’s a social interaction, for sure– for sure. OK, Jordan Cauley is trying to reach me even though I have my notifications muted. And then said never mind. So that’s fun. I thought he was trying to call me because we’d said something tragically wrong. No, he said never mind.
OK, let’s pivot to last but not least, what do you think we saved to our last prepared topic for the live? It could only be the one thing– Trellis.

OK, Eric, we talked about this a lot the last time we were together. But there’s always room for more. So tell us, do you have a update on how many sites we have now that are uploaded that are running Trellis?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s probably why Jordan was messaging you. He probably launched another two of them. He wrote, “no, never mind.” So– [LAUGHTER]

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Oh, the live is happening right now. I guarantee it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Honestly, the blog post that we posted during my last live is probably the best place to go and get updates on everything that happened with Trellis. I actually don’t have a recent count. I think like 70-plus was the number we had before, right?

We basically launch like five to 10 of them a week of beta sites right now. New stuff I can talk about that’s happening to Trellis that I think are pretty exciting– so we already have one plugin called Trellis Images that helps you kind of optimize images for you automatically so you don’t need something like Short Pixel. And that will be included in your Trellis monthly fee. So it’ll be basically free if you’re already running Trellis. You now get all of your image optimization done for you. No need to pay for another service.

In Addition, to that, we’re going to be working on other plugins to help supplement all the cool things that Trellis does for you, including making things prettier. So one of the next things we’re working on is a category landing page plugin for Trellis, so to help you make a custom category landing pages, add content to your category pages. If you follow my SEO like a CEO series, this is awesome for keystone or cornerstone content when using Yoast term. Don’t worry.

JENNY GUY: Better than Outstream.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Better than Outstream, exactly. Though– OK, we’re not going to go in the architectural nerding.

JENNY GUY: No.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: OK, so cornerstone content categories are sometimes very key for that. So that plugin is going to be awesome for Trellis. In addition to that, we’re bringing in all the hook functionality that people come to expect from Genesis. So we’re working on that next for Trellis.
So if you’re wondering if anything is happening during this beta from now until likely September when you’re running it, yes. It will be only better by the time you get to launch this thing in September.

JENNY GUY: For anyone that missed, why are you saying September, Eric, in case they haven’t read that blog post?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, the big news. OK, so we are going to officially open up the beta in September to anyone. So right now, the way we’re doing it is that everyone who applied to the beta– and there’s like almost 1,000 people that have– we are just going down the list and sending out invites in small batches as we try to test out various different scenarios to different hosts, different plugin combinations.

We’re trying to get right now as many testers as we can but in as many different unique combinations as possible. And so it’s going out in kind of small waves. But the plan is by, September just to open it up. If you want to help us beta test or basically Trellis on your site, it’s going to be open for anyone.

JENNY GUY: OK, so much exciting and so many comments. And I’m also finding out why Jordan is messaging me. So standby on that. OK, people are so excited to be in the Trellis plug-in, in the Trellis beta.

Luke Ward says, I love Trellis Images as a standalone plugin. Will that be happening?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, sorry. When I say standalone plugin, I mean it is a plugin that you can run in addition to Trellis. So both that and the category landing pages are going to be built specifically for Trellis. They will not run with non-Trellis themes. I don’t think we’re working on standalone versions at this time.

JENNY GUY: OK, give me a second. I’m going to go back. I’m going to scroll back through to Sue’s comment. Sue said, she does have sales– we’re talking about Amazon’s API from Create, just to refresh everyone’s memory.
She does have sales with Amazon last month. She e-mailed to someone. She said they’re working on a fix. But she said she was worried that we do not know it is a problem. We do know that it’s a problem. Jordan was messaging me– Sue, I know, like, this is a thing that I am always shocked to learn, but Eric doesn’t know everything at every moment, which is such BS. I’m like, it’s a let-down every time.

We are working on it. That’s why Jordan was messaging me. And that will be with the next er-release of Create. The next update will be addressing your particular issue. So someone is dealing with it, Sue. We love you. And we would not not deal with you.

OK, the other thing– so many questions. OK, Diane said, will Trellis be compatible with Element and will it work OK with Rank Math for SEO?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I can tell you Element, or really any page builder, we are not going to be optimizing Trellis for. And we have no intention of. Those basically go against the idea of page feed.

JENNY GUY: Whomp-whomp.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I’m sorry. They may work, which will be great. But we’re never going to make sure those are optimized. We’d rather– like, we’re going to work with plugin traders like WPRM and Tasty, right, we know that you’re going to want to have a recipe card that maybe is not Create. So those will be optimized hopefully for Trellis.

But something like a page builder that goes against the idea of pagespeed, that’s not something– it goes fundamentally against what we’re trying to do with Trellis. Gutenberg is what we’re going to be recommending. We’ll be releasing styles, and additional blocks, and things that can help you turn Gutenberg into what you want it to be, a page builder built for page feed, built for SEO, and built for ads.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Well, and also, other page builders aren’t great for ads, right, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right. So we’ve developed insane amounts of technology to get around the issues caused by page builders over the years to make sure that it disrupts your ad earnings as little as possible. But at the end of the day, they don’t produce good quality HTML. You know who loves good quality HTML? Google.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Google.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So if you’re not doing it for our script wrapper, do it for Google, where they tell you to use proper HTML in their SEO starter guide and everywhere across Google. It makes your pages load faster. And yes, it’s easier for our script wrapper to find where to insert ads if it’s easier to read your HTML. Good, clean HTML helps everyone.

JENNY GUY: OK. So with Trellis, the point of it is to make it easy to create those beautiful-looking pages the way a page builder would without using a page builder that’s going to fork up all your HTML. Eric, will you please talk about– someone talk about that in English. Thank you.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Amber, you’re better at English. You want to try it?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Well, I haven’t played with that part of it yet. So I feel like–

JENNY GUY: Eric, you talk about it.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: –I’m not great at it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right, I’ll do my best to speak in English.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I can translate him once he says things.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So yeah, the idea is going to be basically turning Gutenberg into a page builder. That is the idea behind Trellis. That was the idea originally behind Gutenberg. But Trellis was built after Gutenberg. We had that awesome advantage. That’s the idea behind what we’re doing with Trellis.

So you’ll be able to create all the beautiful home pages that you’ve seen on the internet, using combinations of basically Create, which gives you Gutenberg blocks, Trellis core stuff, and things that are going to be available in the child theme you’re running. You should be able to build a home page, category landing pages, regular pages that you want. Let’s say you’re selling an e-book, whatever it may be. You should be able to build that without needing a third party page builder. You’re just going to use the built-in stuff in WordPress.

JENNY GUY: OK, that being sense to me in English. It worked.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: So that was good.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Good job. Good job, Eric.

JENNY GUY: OK.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I didn’t need Amber to translate. Good.

JENNY GUY: All right. Hold on.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I’ve trained you well.

JENNY GUY: Michelle, what are you asking? If we are on Trellis, will we need to go in and activate the plugin?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Oh, for Trellis Images.

JENNY GUY: Trellis Images.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: No.

JENNY GUY: No, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Trellis Images is going to be a separate plugin, yes. It’s not actually– it doesn’t work with all host yet. So as much as we wish everyone would build a Trellis-optimized plan like Agathon– shameless plug– not everyone’s going to have support for Trellis Images as it currently was. We’re working on a new version that’s in beta testing now that should work across a wider range of hosts.

So chances are, if we did the install for you, one of our support engineers already tried it. And if it worked, its on and running on your site. If it didn’t work, it’s deactivated.

So it’s best, if you’re in the beta, to email trellis@mediavine.com. Work with our support engineers. This is what they’re here to help you do right now. And we will get Trellis Images configured for you. Come September, obviously we have to have all these kinks worked out so that anyone can just go and install it if you’re running Trellis.

JENNY GUY: No pressure, engineers. Also, this episode is brought to you by Agathon.

[LAUGHTER]
Good job, guys. Diane–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Random question– random question before you go any further.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, what’s up?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Can you hear the music that is blaring from behind me or not? No?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No. Is it good?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I have a four-year-old that’s decided to jack up the Car’s playlist behind me.

JENNY GUY: Oh.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: And I can hear it. But if you can’t–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Life is a Highway– what do we have right now?

JENNY GUY: Yes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, it’s like the wall is shaking, guys. I’m so proud that this microphone is not picking it up. Yeah.

JENNY GUY: I missed that. OK, Diana says, what if your information has changed since we applied for the Trellis beta? I am sure I have changes that would make you pick me before September.
[LAUGHTER]

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Email trellis@mediavine.com with your great– I don’t know, reason why we should run you. I don’t know the best way to do it, honestly.

JENNY GUY: Can you talk a little– give us a little insight– first of all, how many sites are running it, like 70-something? And how many applications, over 1,000? So this is not a personal affront.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right.

JENNY GUY: Why are we choosing the sites that we’re choosing for the beta?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I mean, it’s literally going down to I think one group we did were hosts. So we wanted to test all the different hosts out there. So if you are on Agathon, we love you. But, you know, we didn’t need 100 Agatha people or 70 Agatha people. We needed 10 from Agathon, 10 from Big Scoots, 10 from WPOpt, wherever they may be. We’re basically going through the hosting companies.

That’s just one example. We want to test different PHP versions, different WordPress versions, different themes that you may have been coming from, whatever it may be. I can’t give you the exact formula behind it. But you’re welcome to email in and say why you think you have a unique case that we should run it. We’re always looking for new beta victims. So maybe you’ll be selected.

JENNY GUY: That is not the official marketing for any of that.

JENNY GUY: So let’s not– and we did a different niches, and we did different sizes, and we did different– like, we wanted as many different things, so different variations on all the stuff.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: First site, true story, to launch on Trellis was not a food blog. I know people probably think it’s built for food blogs. It was actually a gardening site, right? Which I think is the more fitting thing for Mediavine.

JENNY GUY: Yeah. OK, Lance, has a great question that wasn’t even planned, as opposed to Eric’s really awesome segue into Agathon. Lance said, do you guys have a recommend Gutenberg training? I need to get with the program. Lance, do I have good news for you?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Next week on the Summer of Live, I have Lynn Woll coming on to talk about going Gutenberg.
[EXPLOSION NOISE]

You don’t even have to ask. It’s already happening. That’s how great we are. OK, Cyd, who is working on Food Fanatic and also is a blogger at the Sweetest– I think it’s the Sweetest Occasion. Yes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: She says, my site was moved to Trellis– oh god, the comments moved. My site was moved to– Cyd, that was last week. And The pagespeed improvement was insane right out of the gate.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, she went from like 50 to 97 or something on mobile within– like, before they even–

JENNY GUY: She showed us screenshots of it. It was really cool.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, we were all really excited.

JENNY GUY: OK, Sue said– OK, Michelle, do we have to switch to Gutenberg? Can we continue using classic with Trellis? Eric, do you have to switch to Gutenberg to use Trellis?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You don’t have to. But if you want to get all those page builder features and build custom home pages, you’re going to need to. And a great thing that I’m sure we’ll cover next week is you can also use Gutenberg on certain posts and certain pages, and not on others. So if you want to write most of your posts in the Classic Editor and just slowly work your way into Gutenberg, you’ll be able to do that. But there’s no hard rule that you have to run Gutenberg to use Trellis.

JENNY GUY: But if you want to learn more about Gutenberg, you should tune in next week to the Mediavine Summer of Live. So just saying that. Amber, did you have something to say?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Oh, I just– you know, I was scared of moving here to Gutenberg. And I watched a couple of tutorials that I think next week will be very helpful for people who haven’t delved into research yet. And now I’m a major convert. Like, on my site I’ve got Trellis, Create, and Grow, Social Pro. And it’s magic how they work together.

So I personally think once you make that dive, you won’t regret doing so. Like, it’s just a mental block right now. And I totally understand that because I was there for a long time.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, there’s so many tricks you can do with Gutenberg too that people will reveal, that you couldn’t even do it the Classic Editor. You’ll be in.

JENNY GUY: Super exciting and fun. And we’ll learn more about that next week. OK, Sue says, will I be able to use my child theme with Trellis that I’m using with Genesis? Or do I have to find a new child theme that is made for Trellis?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You would have to use a new child theme that’s made for Trellis. One of the things that we want to work on on the next few months is working with major theme developers, including Feast Design Company, that we’re working with, to port over some of the child themes over to Trellis. But they would need to be updated to be Trellis-compatible.

JENNY GUY: Awesome, OK. Noreen says Trellis kicked up by site speed amazingly paired with Agathon’s new host server. Mind blown. Rose says, Gutenberg is definitely not as scary as it looks. I was a reluctant convert and I love it now. That’s very exciting. We’re so glad to hear–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, she and Palmer are also trying to get me to karaoke the car stuff on the live.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, I just wasn’t going to–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Do it!

JENNY GUY: You brought that out. I was going to leave that where it lied– where it lay, where it lied? I don’t know. OK, any other questions about Trellis while we’re here?

And let’s do like a little preview for why people should want to switch to Gutenberg. You said there’s lots of tricks, lots of different ways you can use it as a page builder without having to use– without all the bad things that come from page builder. So why else should you want to use Gutenberg?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Why don’t you go, Amber. You’ve actually used it.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: You’re not supposed to admit stuff like that, Eric.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I will. I will be a blogger one day, I promise.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So the reason I like it so much is exactly what Eric was talking about, right? Like, I don’t have to go and find the individual things or go into my recipe card plugin to create my recipe, and just use a short code. Like, there’s all these different– it’s literally just building blocks.

Like, they call them blocks. And I think that’s a scary word for some folks. But literally, just think of it as your vision board. And you’re building blocks in your blog post. And some of them are text. And some of them are images. And some of them are your recipe card, or your list, or whatever the case may be.

And it’s really easy once you put that building block in to move it around and to change it. And then you can make blocks that you reuse over and over again. So you can have your Amazon affiliate disclosure that you don’t have to retype every time or you don’t have to have a separate plugin to display that.

And that’s coming from someone that has barely used it, right? Like I’ve updated Bluebonnet Baker to use Trellis and use Gutenberg in Create and Grow. But I’m not blogging everyday like so many of you guys are.

And I think that just those are just the limited things that I have found that I thought, oh, this is so smart, this is so cool. And I think once you start playing around with it, you’re just like, there’s so many little things like that come out.

And you’re just like, well, that’s a lot easier. Like even making updates to certain things where you used to have to go into the Media Center, now it’s in your sidebar. And so you don’t have to open up a separate window or anything like that. You’re just able to fix stuff much quicker as well. I think the user experience is just better.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so I was playing with Create Indexes. And it’s a great example of you’ll be able to go into a new page, you’ll be able literally drag and drop the hero image here, and your index, then a heading, then your index.

And it’s all just going to render beautifully on the front end. And you don’t have to worry about what the HTML is under the scenes. It’s going to take care of that. And it’s going to actually output correct HTML, which I cannot stress enough how that does not happen when you use a page builder normally.

JENNY GUY: And why is it bad when your HTML is incorrect, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You confuse Google, in short. There is something called semantic HTML. And that’s using HTML semantically, or the way it was meant to be used. So you use something like a P for a paragraph of text, a paragraph, Right? It makes sense.

When you use the built-in, either Gutenberg or even the Classic Editor, that’s what it’s putting all your text in. When you use a page builder, it’s going to insert everything into divs. Divs are just a generic container, right?
That’s a small example. But that’s the kind of stuff that you lose when you use a page builder. They’re not going to use proper HTML where it’s meant to be used. They’re going to use it to give them the customization they need. It’s going to produce also what are called a lot of Dom elements. Those are a bad thing for pagespeed. It’s one of the warnings in pagespeed insights. Dom page builders–

JENNY GUY: Divs and Doms– and I’m laughing hard. I’m sorry.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Everywhere. You don’t want Divs and Doms

JENNY GUY: Lousy with Divs and Doms.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You want Gutenberg.

JENNY GUY: OK, Brenda said, I was afraid to switch. But I’ve been using Gutenberg for almost a year now and already love it. She can’t wait for the live next week to learn even more features.

Michelle said, Amber, did you go back and switch over all your old posts or just used for your new ones?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So huge disclaimer, I used to plugin to switch all of my old posts to Gutenberg blocks. I started out just doing a post that way and playing around with it. And then there is a plugin that I used that will convert everything to Gutenberg blocks. And then I sort of spot-checked the older stuff to make sure it looked OK, which it did.

And so I will say, look, I can’t vouch for that plugin. It worked for me. But you can search for it. It’s like Gutenberg Block Converter, or Classic Converter, something like that. And that’s what I used so that it– I’m just using the same editor throughout. And then I was able to ditch a plug-in, I was able to ditch the Classic Editor plugin. I don’t even have it anymore.
And then once I had converted everything, I didn’t need the converter plugin. So I mean, with Trellis, I think I have like nine plugins now. And they’re all just like little things that I had before. Once I finished getting everything converted from– because guys, I’ve been blogging so long, so much of my old posts don’t even have a recipe card in them. They use a plugin called Print This that hasn’t been maintained for like 10 years, which is terrible. This is terrible of me.

And I need to get them all converted to Create. But because they’re just a block of text, I can’t run the importer that we have. That’s just not how it works. And so I’m slowly converting everything into Create. And then I’ll be able to ditch that plugin. And I’ll have like eight plugins. And it’s amazing. Like, the site is so fast. And it’s so pretty. And it just makes me happy. And it’s one of the things that I think is going to get me blogging again. So, exciting!

JENNY GUY: Christine Cook says, I’m finding myself constantly updating old posts to Gutenberg because it’s fun. I mean, that–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: It is fun.

JENNY GUY: You can’t really– basically the best endorsement you can get is that I’m doing it voluntarily because I just like doing it. That’s exciting. OK, Emily says, can we create a new home page with categories even if we don’t have Create?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: If you’re running Trellis without Create, is that the–

JENNY GUY: That’s what– I think that’s the question, yes.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Create is going to power the Indexes, which I think you’re going to want to use for your home page and for your category pages. But it won’t be required. You’ll be able to use just regular Gutenberg blocks.

But Indexes are going to give you a lot of power to be able to do like– I think the recipe indexes and the home pages, you’d probably want to be able to generate. They’re going to look beautiful.

And it’s important to note that you can run Create alongside a different recipe card plugin if you don’t like create as your recipe card plugin or just don’t want to move everything over. And you can just try it out. You can mix and match. Create will play very nicely alongside other plugins.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Megan said she’s only switching old posts are she updates for other reasons. So it’s not something that you have to go in and do right now. Like, it’s not it’s not a mandatory thing. It’s an as you have time. Plus if it’s fun, like instead of needle point like I’m doing– I’m needle pointing 700,000 things during quarantine– you can update posts to Gutenberg. Why not?
OK, Sue said, what is the plugin to convert recipe cards to Create?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So–

JENNY GUY: She has WP Tasty.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, so this is one of the things that I think people assume that when they install Create, they have to convert everything. Because every other recipe plugin, their converter is part of the plugin. With Create, it’s a separate importer so that we can keep Create itself nice and fast.

So if you have Create installed, there is a link to the importer in your plugin list. When you find Mediavine Create there, you’ll find a link to the importer plugin. And Tasty is one of the supported ones, I believe.
So, yeah. And then once you’re done converting, you can just uninstall the importer. One less plugin.

JENNY GUY: I love less plugins. OK, we’re almost out of time, which is a real bummer.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I feel like Eric had something to say then.

JENNY GUY: Eric, did you have something?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, I was just going to say, I want to make it very clear. With Create, you can run it just to be your index builder. You could run it just to be your list builder. People do that. We at Mediavine are making a conscious effort to make sure that even our ads are optimized for WP Tasty and WPRM because we know a lot of our bloggers run those. So we’re not asking anyone to move over.

We’re even working on– we already launched it– the idea of Jump to Recipe, even optimizing for that on other cards. So by no means do you have to use Create for your recipe card plugin just to use it.

JENNY GUY: Also, it’s free. So like, you’re not going to have anything to lose. It’s not super heavy. There’s no reason to not try it. If you think it might be something that you’re into, you might as well just try it. It’s not going to hurt anything.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That’s something that…

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to use it for your recipe card plugin.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That’s also something that’s super fun, right? You don’t have to install it, and install the importer, and import everything. You can install it, and try it on a couple of recipes, and see if you actually like it, like the UI, like how it looks on your front end. You can have different recipe card plugins running recipes in different posts. It doesn’t hurt anything.

And so you can actually give it a try before you commit to changing forever.

JENNY GUY: Nothing is forever. It’s all temporary. OK, we have two lives coming up that I’m going to talk to you guys about. And we’re almost out of time. Yes, Trista is in our Lead Launch Engineer said, free, free, free. Love the list. Can’t wait for Indexes. Thank you, Trista. Good to know you’re here.
Next Thursday, July 23rd at 2 PM, as I’ve already mentioned, Lynn Woll of the website Create Whimsy, is coming by to get everyone going Gutenberg and convince everyone who is still on the fence– yes, I am still on the fence– to jump off the fence and go. OK, so Lynn, that is your– that is the Gauntlet that has been thrown. Please come.

We also have another live in between these lives on Tuesday July 21st. It’s at 2:00 PM. It’s happening exclusively in the Mediavine Facebook group. I’m going to be talking to Jake Poses, who is the co-founder and CEO of Jumprope. I don’t know if anyone out there has heard of it. I’m using it.
We’re going to be talking about ways to rock out your stories with easy to make how-to videos, and then also using those how-to videos, uploading them to your Mediavine Dashboard, having more video– video, video, video– high CPMs, all the acronyms you could possibly want at the same time.

Sue said, I like it as Create card has a nutrition card for free. We love that too, Sue.

OK, guys, we also heard loud and clear in the Mediavine Facebook group that some of you would like transcripts of these published as blog posts. So that is the next thing we’re going to be adding to our content so you have it.
And then the other thing that everyone wanted, which Eric has commanded us to start doing, is the podcast. So we’re going to be working on a podcast as soon as we can. We’re going to keep getting this content out to you. We really appreciate having Eric and Amber here with me, guys. Thank you.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: You’re welcome.

JENNY GUY: Thanks for coming.

JENNY GUY: And I think we’ve probably slayed Eric’s voice at this point. So we’re going to end it. And you guys have a great, great rest of your afternoon. Thanks, guys. Bye.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Thanks, everybody.

The post Summer of Live: Mediavine Summer Updates with Amber Bracegirdle and Eric Hochberger appeared first on Mediavine.

Whether you’re here, there or somewhere in between, Sherry Smothermon-Short of Cub Scout Ideas and Painless Blog Analytics is here to help. She stopped by the Summer of Live with Mediavine’s Director of Marketing Jenny Guy to help you unlock this wealth of information. Plus learn how GA + the new Mediavine Dashboard = BIG EARNINGS.

Find content ideas, optimize for income, identify your replicable successes and avoid the 7 potential data pitfalls. (Originally aired 7/2/20)

The post Summer of Live: Rocking Google Analytics with Sherry Smothermon-Short appeared first on Mediavine.

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” — Dr. Seuss 

The days are getting shorter, school’s back in session and are you ready for some football?! Fall is falling all around us, which means that Summer of Live 2019 has come and gone.

That’s 13 Facebook Lives in 13 weeks!

I’d just like to say that I HAVE THE BEST JOB.

This is my second summer interviewing experts from around the blogging and digital media industry and it’s hard for me to believe that anyone enjoys it and learns as much from it as I do. 

The Brand team has a blast coming up with topics and scrolling through our digital Rolodexes to find the perfect guests for each week.

For the first Summer of Live in 2018, we covered a wide range of topics and got perspectives from multiple blogging niches.

For our second year of programming, we wanted to think a little outside the blog so to speak and devote each month to a specific theme. 

In June, we took a deep dive into some popular topics at Mediavine, like our most valuable content WordPress plugin Create. July was all about going beyond the blog, exploring ‘side gig’ revenue streams like course creation and book publishing. 

And we couldn’t close out a summer of programming without focusing on the bottom line, so we spent August making it RAIN!

We’re breaking down and linking to each of our 5 August episodes below, but remember, every episode of the Summer of Live (and Go For Teal and Teal Talk and all of the videos we make) are always available on Mediavine’s YouTube channel.

Make sure to subscribe and not miss an episode!

Summer of Live: Season 2, Part 3

Episode 9: Monetizing With Video

Guests: Meredith Marsh of VidProMom and Kristen McDonnell of Studio Knit

To kick off Part 3 of the Beyond Blogging series, Jenny talked with Meredith and Kristen about “the decade of video” and how video has become one of the biggest money makers for Mediavine publishers.

Both of these amazing women are amongst Mediavine’s top video producers and video experts.

They love to share their expertise and passion for video to help encourage others to incorporate more video into their work.

Learn about how Meredith and Kristen use Mediavine’s unique video tools, as well as YouTube, for better SEO and traffic which of course leads to more money! 

(Recorded August 1, 2019)

Episode 10: Affiliate Marketing Strategy

Guests: Amanda Williams of A Dangerous Business and Jeannine Crooks, Client Services Manager at Awin 

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about affiliate marketing, then you will definitely want to watch this episode of the Summer of Live.

Affiliate marketing is often an underused revenue stream, but thanks to these two experts, Amanda and Jeannine, you can learn how to really earn and diversify your income. 

(Recorded August 7, 2019)

Episode 11: Stepping Up Your SEO Game

Guests: Morgan McBride of Charleston Crafted and Joshua Unseth, Director of Marketing at Alarm Grid and co-host of the SEO podcast Theory of Content

Episode 11 was our most watched Live this summer.

We’d like to think it has something to do with SEO, but we’re also pretty certain Josh’s confession of having a secret Beanie Baby blog has made those views climb too.

We’re on the hunt for it, don’t you worry!

You can’t talk about making money without discussing SEO. If you’re ready to implement some tactics that can help your site grow, this episode is for you.

Jenny hosted these two SEO experts, Morgan and Joshua, to talk about the power of SEO and ways you can step up your SEO game. You don’t want to miss this Live!

(Recorded August 14, 2019)

Episode 12: Unlocking RPM, Part 2

Guests: Lance Cothern of Money Manifesto and Dorothy Kern of Crazy For Crust 

Since Unlocking RPM was one of the most popular episodes of the Summer of Live 2018, we decided to bring it back for part 2!

In this episode of the Mediavine Summer of Live, we took our Beyond Blogging focus to Lance and Dorothy who broke down how they utilize Mediavine’s tools to increase their RPM’s and revenue.

Watch this episode of Mediavine’s Summer of Live just in time to get prepared to up your earnings for Q4. 

(Recorded August 21, 2019)

Episode 13: Building Traffic

Guests: Jenn Fishkind of Princess Pinky Girl and Tanya Fleming of My Forking Life 

Even though traffic isn’t the only important metric, it is definitely a vital component for website success.

In this last episode of the Mediavine Summer of Live, Jenny talks with Jenn and Tanya as they share their secrets to growing traffic.

Whether you are already a Mediavine publisher wanting to increase your revenue, or a content creator who is striving to apply to be a Mediavine publisher, you won’t want to miss this chat about why traffic matters. 

(Recorded August 29, 2019)

Just because the Mediavine Summer of Live is over doesn’t mean the learning and fun will stop.

We are taking a short break before we resume with Season 2 of Teal Talk!

If you have suggestions for topics or guests, we’d love to hear them at sponsored@mediavine.com. 

The post Summer of Live: Season 2, Part 3 appeared first on Mediavine.

If you haven’t been following along, the Summer of Live is our weekly Facebook Live series about all things Mediavine and blogging. (more…)

The post Summer of Live: Season 2, Part 2 appeared first on Mediavine.