Podcast Episode 12: October Marketing Roundup _ Search, Social and Website News
===
[00:00:00] Hi everyone. I'm Pip from Seymour Digital Media. You're listening to Know How Marketing Lab podcast. This podcast brings together different experts in marketing from our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks, Marketing Mixer. Each week we get on here and we talk. About something. Search marketing like Google Ads or seo, social media marketing from Facebook to TikTok or website marketing.
[00:00:24] If you're a marketer or aspiring marketer, a business owner or entrepreneur, this podcast for you, we're gonna share the best seo, search, social and website strategies. We share tips and. Google ad strategies, what's going on in the current market. Each week we discuss something exciting and awesome in marketing.
[00:00:45] If you don't know me, I'm Pip and Cyberpunk Geeks Marketing mixer with Greg Re and Fallon, who are all gonna introduce themselves and what they do. Okay. Over to. Hey everyone. I'm Greg with Original [00:01:00] 72 Creative and we're a full service website graphic design, digital marketing firm in Vancouver. Hi, I'm Rena Little from Little Works Indy Media, and I have a little marketing agency also in Vancouver, and I am Fallon.
[00:01:14] I work with Pipettes Digital Media. We're focus on search engine market. So each month we get on here and talk about all the things happening in our industries. Each of us specialize in different things, but there's a bit of crossover. Greg is the website guy that knows pretty much everything there is to Nobel websites.
[00:01:34] Really? So he claims Anyway, Greg, I claim that, but you were talking earlier, Greg, about a new WordPress thing coming out. What's going on? Yeah, they're in release candidate two for the newest version of WordPress 6.1. And scheduled release for 6.1. Should be November 1st. A couple of. Notable things would [00:02:00] be, there's gonna be a brand new theme for 2023.
[00:02:03] Like the last theme, I believe was fully block based theme builder, which means you can install this theme and completely customize it how you want header splitters content, like it's completely block based. Theme, which you can also have stylings too, and it's when you set up the theme, there's like a picker of up to 10 different colors and font styles that you can choose from initially fully customizable after you choose it as well.
[00:02:36] That sounds amazing. Yeah. Board based themes, they're not really a thing yet, but their WordPress is really pushing. Their default theme in that direction. But if you look at other popular frameworks, Astra Cadence, Generate Press and those, they're still not block [00:03:00] based themes. They're customizable themes with header and footers that you can customize.
[00:03:06] And then you use the Block Builder, Gutenberg Block Builder within the content and posts to create your content. So it's. like a hybrid almost. Current themes. Yeah. The more I learn about websites, the more I know that I need to leave it to the professionals. Like that honestly. You get to a certain point, you're like, I like my specialty over here.
[00:03:32] This is where I'm really interested. Cause I do oftentimes wanna bash my head against a wall when I try to do things. Mind you, by the way, Greg, I do need your help with something later. Feeling is Shopify cuz it's got something new with a block builder thing. Is that what Greg's talking? Yeah, it's very similar to that, where the new Shopify is entirely block based.
[00:03:55] I think they fully rolled out hydrogen, which is the coding framework, [00:04:00] and so it makes it super easy for them to do block building, no matter the page. So before it was just block building on the homepage. Now it's gonna be block building on product pages. Then you could save them into templates, and so then you could reuse them later on and it's this is my, Oh, that's be super fun.
[00:04:16] Yeah. Yeah, it's a, it's quite, it's actually pretty cool. I've played around a little bit with it and I went, Oh, okay. This is already like doing analysis paralysis to me. I'm like, there's too many options here already, which is good. The block builder for Shopify is very similar to the one for WordPress.
[00:04:33] There's obviously differences based on how the back ends, I said, but it's definitely gives you a lot of flexibility as well. So yeah, that's definitely one that has been pretty cool to see as well. Just makes it super easy. Non coders to get in there and actually get like the exact way that it looks and it's not gonna be some like overly janky dragon drop system like Divvy or Meta where they were, or an Elementor where it's just like they did a [00:05:00] lot of, It was useful in a lot of ways, but definitely the new systems are a lot better, I think are gonna be the.
[00:05:05] The start of the push of this was definitely with the like Elementor and DV and those page builders because they are in essence, Building a page with different types of blocks and that, so that's where the block builder came from, is separate building blocks that you can insert within the page wherever you want to.
[00:05:30] And that's really what these page builders came out of is the ability to be able to open a page and be like, Okay, what do I want this to look like? And start throwing. A column block and then putting in text in each column. And so that block building type of functionality, it's really given the tools to people building sites to really create complex layouts [00:06:00] however they like.
[00:06:00] So this is just more of a push from WordPress to bring the platform up to date with what these page builders. Created in the native WordPress, as well as any other platform, which is basically just using that block based feel of being able to take elements and throwing them wherever you want on the page.
[00:06:23] The earliest version that I can think of for block builders was MailChimp. I wanna know if anyone was doing that before mail. That's a good question. Yeah. I wanna know where did that originate from? Cause that is actually quite brilliant because it takes the design out of the hands. You don't have to have a designer, you don't have to have a developer.
[00:06:45] You can really just DIY things really quite easily. Now I would actually argue that . Yeah. Because although you have the functionality and the ability to do. That doesn't mean people know design and [00:07:00] how to actually put something that's look good, That's a whole nother conversation. But what I'm saying is for people like photographers who know basic compositions from photography, which is, that's where I come from, is that I can actually.
[00:07:16] Figure out where my design elements can mostly go. And MailChimp already, like they give you, they don't give you six columns, they give you three columns, they give you two columns, and so they set you up to not fail already. Do you know what I mean? Like they don't give you all of the options, but they give you enough options that you can actually manage.
[00:07:36] So absolutely correct. If you have zero skills, then you're gonna wanna look at a book like the design for. Non designers, but, and yeah, there's some really ugly looking things that people have put together using block builders. But I do think that the potential is there for people to get a basic thing happening without having to invest a whole lot on their own.
[00:07:57] Especially for the people just starting [00:08:00] Yeah. Send out an email and get to your clients. And one of the most disappointing things about Shopify was the fact that you couldn't do very much. Yeah. Super disappointed. Yeah, yeah. Unless you bought the custom themes, which always seem to have glitches.
[00:08:16] And word for which is meant to be easy. It's very complicated, but let's get back on the topic, is what you're trying to say. No. I I love the website stuff because it is such a fundamental part of marketing and websites are, people don't often associate them with marketing. They're their own kind of like email marketing.
[00:08:37] What's the, I like to say the redheaded stepchild of marketing to say . You know what I mean? That's just, cuz you know it's old and it doesn't work on, it's just a whole different ballgame anyway. Yes. Okay. Other things in the news. News, Let's go with social. . Okay. So we were having this conversation, if you caught me rambling on, when [00:09:00] Pip goes live, usually we get a countdown to go live.
[00:09:02] I don't know what happened this time, but anyways, my ramblings were in our notes. We had that Facebook group stories was a thing launching, but that's not true. Stories have been rolled back, of course last month. It's reals. That is the thing. So you can, you, you now have the ability to do that. Then some of the other things are YouTube.
[00:09:23] Look, what's the difference? A story, one on Instagram, one on Facebook. Yeah. Story is just one sort of image real. You can use one image to make a real, but it's video based really is what it's, Yeah. Cause I always associated reels with Instagram and stories with Facebook, but it is, in fact, reels are the video stories are the yeah.
[00:09:46] They're basically stealing the names and using them arbitrarily across all platforms. So they're just, Yeah, really. I had to tell a client this week, I was like, Okay, so you have shorts on [00:10:00] YouTube, you haves on TikTok, I think, and then you have reels on. Instagram and stories on Facebook. She was like, Oh.
[00:10:08] I was like, You actually have a lot of all of that on all of them. And that's one of the confusing issues. And really now I'm looking at the platforms thinking it's really about your target market and less about the type of media that you're putting out. And a lot of that media, as we've seen, you can see the little TikTok logo in the corner of the Instagram.
[00:10:32] Videos and all of that stuff so it just gets put out. Yeah, it can be really confusing. You're absolutely right. So we can't really think about the platforms as different media formats as it traditionally was. We have to actually think about our target market and where they are. So it's has to do with more about demographics.
[00:10:51] Basically wanna get it all up there everywhere. I think the short form videos, like I really do dig the one to two minute videos where I learn something pretty quick. [00:11:00] I think that's the future, right? Yeah. When TAC put up their five minute videos or whatever they were for, or five minute videos, or I find myself.
[00:11:08] Scrolling before they're finished. Yeah, I Quick ones. It's a bit long. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And so the next, what elses going on? Yeah, so I guess in November they're launching handles for YouTube, which is not that different than the vanity URLs that you could get previously. But I noticed that they started to put out roadblocks as to whether or not you could get those vanity.
[00:11:30] I was trying for quite some time to get what you used to have a thousand followers, and then you had to have different things in place and you had to wait to get the notification on your dashboard in order to get it. But now they're launching, I think it's November 17th, where you can get what they're calling a username.
[00:11:45] And it looks like, from what Fallon was saying the other day, the username is gonna allow you. Act more like you do in social platforms where you can, What were you saying the other day feeling where you could add as [00:12:00] url? My guess is that it's gonna be like adding people like you could make, and so that's gonna be like a way that you could then connect different mentions.
[00:12:07] So that person, and it just seems to me like that, that they're looking for a way to kinda make it closer to. TikTok or Facebook, like how they network people is not like, Yeah, it's like you know these people and because of that, you're probably gonna have these personality traits because you know them.
[00:12:24] And TikTok does it for like taste, so it's Oh, you like cat video? Show you more cat video. And so that's how they network these things. Yeah. So whereas YouTube used to just be a place where you put things to go out and then they included the streaming and you could interact with comments during streaming, but now you're really gonna be able to be way more social.
[00:12:43] So I think we're gonna be, have to start thinking about YouTube if we haven't already as a social space. It's funny cuz it always had a lot of chatter in the comments, but it also had so many trolls. I know. It's terrible. Yeah, it's terrible because I think you have two settings. You have private [00:13:00] videos and you have public videos.
[00:13:02] Unless. It's not unlisted is, It's true, but it's not like a Facebook group where you have an audience, right? You don't know who your audience is. It can be anyone. It's beyond just who's subscribing to you. So it's like having a public facing, it's like a Facebook page really, where it's public and anyone can find you, and anyone can look at your stuff, which is totally fine, but that does get, you know that's what.
[00:13:27] It makes you open to more trolls and problems in that way and comment, moderation, problems, . Yeah. You can turn off the, like I have it set so that to mediate the comments first. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I've never tried that. I've always just left comments up because I figure it's an algorithmic. Push unless it's completely terrible, like against human rights and things like that.
[00:13:50] But generally speaking, I leave bad comments almost everywhere. , right? I might hide them, I might hide them, but I really don't delete. I find that actually things can really [00:14:00] escalate if you delete, people will start doing things like screen capturing your conversation and then throw it into other spaces that you don't have any control over.
[00:14:09] So I don't think that deleting is necessarily the best. Didn't you tell us yesterday, Rena, or tell me it was so exciting? Like some of the best, I don't know. Maybe it's a tip versus the news, but you know how you can do the chapters in YouTube videos? Oh, yeah. Okay. This is something I figured out yesterday because I wanted to do this.
[00:14:30] I, You've been out for a while and I love her actually. Me too. Yeah, but that's not the best part. The best part is you can. Just embed one chapter on your blog post. So basically what I'm looking to do is I create this very long how to blog post, which I'm really digging and I wanna have all of the screen caps on the how to, but I also have a video.
[00:14:53] But instead of having the video up at the top and then having this really long scroll down scenario, we're gonna just [00:15:00] embed the chapters that pertain to that next. Large a step, and then the next video with the next set of steps so that people can utilize the two different learning styles within the blog post.
[00:15:13] I'm very excited about that. And not only that, it'll create longer watch time or more watch time, so it'll actually, it's a, it's quite a good strategy. I'm gonna try it too. . Yeah. The best strategies in my mind are the ones. Fix a user experience. It's true. And because those are the strategies that Googles is gonna keep around.
[00:15:35] It's never a gray hat, it's always right. . Want to know more about seo? We've got a class for that. Our mission is to educate students about the right tools, techniques, and strategies to grow their businesses using the most up to date search engine marketing optimization techniques and tools.
[00:15:57] Find out [00:16:00] [email protected]. Yeah, at speaking of Google. That was such a good lead in Google's always doing things and to make a better user experience. There's been several updates and you know what's really funny is I've had a client who is bailing on me. I know it's really sad, but it's cuz they don't see value because SEO is it's a hidden profession.
[00:16:22] You don't see what people are doing and it's hard to tell people that don't know hey, there's algorithm. So even if you're doing really well, all of a sudden you could get hit and there's been like four Wow. Or five in the last like three, four months. It's been like a lot. We're not gonna get dinged with the spam update, and if you're getting dinged with the spam update, you should really look at what you're doing.
[00:16:48] But yeah, if you're on the good side of Google, usually things keep working. But that being said, we all make mistakes, right? I took a whole bunch of pages off my site, or like that had been [00:17:00] published mistakenly, and so I have a bunch of 4 0 4 pages, so therefore I've created a bad user experience, right?
[00:17:05] And one of the things you fix right away is 4 0 4 pages. So even at Get it Wrong. I don't believe you did that they weren't supposed to be published. I didn't know they had been indexed. I see. I should assume. I see. Yeah, it can take a little while for things just for the people out there. It can take a while.
[00:17:22] That's the other thing. You get a site up and then the next thing you do, a week later, you get an email from a client saying, I can't find my site online. I'm like, I just sent the site map. And it takes people a while to find it and index it appropriately to keywords. So you guys launch websites, Do you do a site map for.
[00:17:40] Oh yeah. Okay. It's automatic. Typically, when I throw up a site to have all of the basics of SEO in place and an index file for the spiders. The one thing I was gonna say about that was that I'm not sure if people could be fully aware that, because everybody [00:18:00] knows, like you can create a page. I'm talking WordPress here.
[00:18:03] You can create a page on your WordPress site and publish it, but if you don't put it in the menu, there's no links. And if nobody knows, But if you have a good plugin in place that is creating that XML file of your page structure and you publish it, it's gonna be in that. So next time Google comes and looks at that, they'll see it and they might look at it and start indexing it, even though you've created the page and not put it in your menu.
[00:18:31] But it's published. It is still accessible, so it's possible for people to get to it. So don't publish. Pages that you don't want to have in these files. . One slight correction of that part is you do wanna have a connected somehow to other pages. An orphan page is definitely not a good one cuz you could just have it like it connects to a blog post and it's on the blog page.
[00:18:57] So then it still is like out there. But you wanna [00:19:00] connect in the case of landing pages, wouldn't you do orphan pages that are not indexed. You just put the no index thing. That's usually what I do for landing page. Landing pages. You would do no index. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's, I like know the other thing, we got a question.
[00:19:17] Let me just say hello Julie. Nice to see you. Yolanda. You are right. It is confusing. And Greg and Fallen. And Rena, this is for you. This is not a question for me. It is. What is a good plugin for creating those XML files? That's the one. I just used that one out the box yo. Or Rank Math. Most of the SEO plugins will have an XML file option, I believe.
[00:19:43] I remember WordPress saying that they were actually putting it in their system, that an XML file for a page structure was automatically gonna be in the system. Also, I have to check on. [00:20:00] I seem to recall that, that a version of WordPress at some point might have put in that file automatically. A lot of people are doing, and I really like it on the footer.
[00:20:13] If you look at the big. Big businesses like Apple or Amazon, in the footer they have It's like a site map now, right? Yeah, actually, and that's what I was gonna say. Before everyone goes and jumps on and makes their giant menus at the top of their WordPress site. You don't need to have them there.
[00:20:33] You can put just your main ones up at the top and then you can put the whole entire thing in the foot. Yeah, it kinda like that and that's a design change that is relatively new and we see design changes over the years. Yeah. I wonder what next year will be like. Everybody was upset with the hamburger menu on a desktop, I have to say.
[00:20:55] I know. Which is really funny cuz it's really , but, And everybody, [00:21:00] But when you look at it for us from usability point of view, On a big desktop show the menu so you don't have to click something to get somewhere. Like the usability of it is less, the look of it is clean and people like clean. But I go usability over clean any day.
[00:21:21] Yeah. Yeah that's really funny because people really know how to use it on their mobile, so it really makes me it's, I just find it so ironic that it's like second nature on a mobile, but you can't find it on the desktop. People know they find it, they see it, they know what I'm get. The point I'm getting across is that if you have all of that real estate and you can show it so people can see it without having to click something, that's a much better usability.
[00:21:50] Yeah. Then hiding it and having the user being like, Okay, what pages are on this site? Okay, I gotta click here. Something appears and then they [00:22:00] can get somewhere. So Yolanda is asking and definitely, I guess the consensus is no, don't use it on your desktop version, but definitely you need to use it on your mobile still.
[00:22:11] Is that Yeah. Yeah that's. Sorry, I'm just learning how to use e cam. It seems . Oh, I like Yolanda comment. Visibility over vanity. Visibility over vanity. It's true. Yeah. But I, man, I still, there are still some, not all sites, but there are occasionally some really beautiful sites that I see that are.
[00:22:33] Appropriately beautiful. Like where the form and function and the point of the site matches. And I don't want a menu across the top on those ones, it depends like everything's context. Yeah. I'm not a fan of mega menus and those are like when you go over like Google, inside Google platforms, like Google ads.
[00:22:57] In their platform. They have mega menus, [00:23:00] or I think Amazon has, it just, it's a lot of information and you're just, and then you have, what is it? Choice paralysis. Oh my God. Oh my God. Okay. But back to the news, . I don't know. Okay. So when I was a little kid, I watched this thing called Gary Good News. No, Good news is good news.
[00:23:17] If you've ever seen that or heard of that, I really wanna know because people think I'm crazy. Other than that, we. I don't know. Have you guys noticed when you type in your business name into Google now or you can type in my business, Google shows up. It's all new how it looks. They've changed the how it looks.
[00:23:35] So they want you to use your Google business profile in the search engine results pages, and they are pushing it hard. I sure are. I dig it, but people do have to learn how to use it. It's a little confusing, better than it was two weeks ago. Better than it was. So we have that and failing.
[00:23:51] What's going on with, What is it called? Is it called Data Studio? Data Studio has been finally integrated with a company that Google bought [00:24:00] in 2020 called Looker. It does a bunch of machine learning and business intelligence stuff. It's definitely very enterprise. And so now Data Studio is now called Looker Studio, which I'm not a big fan of that name.
[00:24:12] That's a funny name to choose. , it's like it's your look Studio. Yeah, it's one of those ones like, it should have been like Data Studio with the Looker. It's what it should have been, but data, it's about the data. So it made so much sense. Now people are gonna be like, What is this thing? You're like, Oh, you just look.
[00:24:30] Or I'm gonna forget, and I'm gonna say it's something to do with a sense and I have no idea what it's called. . Yeah. So it does actually open up, like there's apparently gonna be a paid tier. It's now being integrated into the 360 platform, which is like their enterprise. Like you get the privilege of giving Google a hundred thousand dollars a month to get their enterprise software.
[00:24:52] And so apparently so who was using that? None of us, I don't think. And yet, Just yet. Yeah. Not this week, [00:25:00] Not this. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think we're quite there just yet. If we added up, if we got a whole bunch of more clients and then we were on a, we were premier partners for Google, then May maybe, Or do we have to be a solo business to get.
[00:25:15] My understanding is it's like Coca-Cola, like that's who's using the three platform, Someone who's spending several million dollars in ad budget and a hundred thousand dollars is like a rounding error to their budget. Speaking of Coca-Cola, which reminds us of Pepsi. Pepsi has recently pulled out of doing I was thinking about that.
[00:25:35] Yeah. And so I'm thinking when Coca-Cola stopped advertising, they lost half their market share to Pepsi. Now Pepsi's pulling out of Super Bowl, so are they gonna lose some market share is something that you're gonna come up. It was. Yeah. And who is the company that, I think I said that. Is it Apple somebody?
[00:25:54] It's so interesting. It's Apple Music. It's Apple Music. That's exactly what it was. Now I remember Apple Music is going [00:26:00] to have the Super Bowl spot, and I think it was for something like 5 million a year or 7 million a year over five years. Oh yeah. 7 million over five years. That's what the contract is.
[00:26:10] That's a. Seven point. Yeah. That's cushy. They must be. They're making so much money. . Speaking of that, which is really interesting, a bunch of numbers came out today. Facebook's down. Google's down. Yeah. Shopify's up. They beat expectations. So that's interesting. As like the eCommerce boom is still not like it's I was thinking people would be going back to shopping in stores and there would be a little boom drop, but That's interesting. That's very interesting. I think people like to shop online now a little more. Yeah. If this, if it's good service. It's funny cuz Costco never entered that. cause they couldn't do it. I don't know if you ever saw Costco's ability to order stuff. Do they're eCommerce. It's terrible.
[00:26:58] They do. What they've done is they've [00:27:00] joined Instacart and that's how they sell online in, Yeah, I used it. I quite like to using it because I do a lot of grocery ordering. I don't do grocery shopping. I get mine usually from SaveOn Foods or studs, but you have to think in advance. I had a last. Event that I was doing, book Club and used Instacart, had the dude go to a Costco and pick out the things that I wanted and had delivered in two hours.
[00:27:30] It was fantastic. Holy but Jesus, that's like . That's a lot. We are out of time. We hit most of our news stories. Oh, did I Did wanna cover one last one, just, it'll only be a minute, but Figma getting purchased by Adobe. Oh that was a big one that happened. It was a $20 billion deal. And it'll be interesting to see how that goes through cuz like Yeah, this, I'm sure that they were doing that before the interest rate.
[00:27:56] Was all solidified before interest rates went up and now they're gonna be [00:28:00] paying out the nose for that 20 billion. But Wow. And we're still, Oh, go on. I guess Musk is buying the Twitter. Delaware made em by Twitter. Yeah, We'll see what happens there. So if you don't know on, I think is it the fourth Thursday of every month we get on here and we do our roundup of all the things.
[00:28:22] What is it? Search, social and websites. And then every week we do get on here and we do a talk. And if you're wondering what the talk's about it is in our header image that Greg so graciously makes us so people are agreeing with the arena about Instacart and ordering. And Musk . We'll see you all next time, and if you are watching us somewhere like YouTube, just know we do have a Facebook group called Cyberpunk Geeks, a Marketing Mixer.
[00:28:48] Come join us over there. All. Bye bye. Roll. Bye.
[00:28:52] The conversation never stops in our Facebook group, Cyberpunk Geeks. Join us at [00:29:00] facebook.com/groups/cyberpunk geeks to ask your questions, meet new friends, and learn even more about search, social and websites.
