The Ultimate Blog Podcast - 127. How Katie Kimball's Blogging Needs Inspired Her Husband to Create The Blog Fixer

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

On this episode of The Ultimate Blog Podcast, we have the pleasure of interviewing Katie and Kris Kimball, the dynamic duo behind The Blog Fixer, a service that aids bloggers with technical issues. Katie shares where story about her shift into the world of blogging and Kris shares how his expertise in technology provided support for her blog, which ultimately led to The Blog Fixer. We dive into blogging obstacles that The Blog Fixer can help and also talk more about things like the significance of user experience and SEO and accessibility. This was an incredible episode that we hope can help provide further support for your blog. Also, be sure to tune in to hear a special offer that Kris and Katie are offering to our listeners!Thanks for listening! Let us know your thoughts on Instagram: @sparkmediaconceptsWe would love to have you join us in the Ultimate Blog Membership in 2024. HERE is the link to join!Check out the show notes (link below) for more information including links and resources mentioned in today's episode!SHOW NOTES: www.sparkmediaconcepts.com/episode127

Welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast with Amy Reinecke and Jennifer Draper. We're on a mission to empower women who want to start or grow their own blog. This podcast is for women who want to learn blogging basics and who crave inspiration and encouragement. Whether you're just getting started or have been a blogger for years, we're excited to welcome you into this space where we are passionate about creating community over competition. We are bloggers who want to encourage you to believe in your potential, step outside the norm and step into a life where you create your own schedule, your own success and your own story. Join us for weekly episodes as we navigate blogging

and work from home life all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. all while raising a family and having some serious fun along the way. Welcome back to the Ultimate Blog Podcast. We have a really exciting podcast for you today about a product and service actually, but actually the story behind it, which I think is going to be really awesome to share with you guys. And this all kind of started actually with a conversation with the owner of The Blog Fixer, who is Chris Kimball. And we were talking back and forth about sharing what The Blog Fixer can do to help bloggers. And in our conversation, he said, I really would like Katie, my wife, to join us for this podcast interview to share more about her story too with blogging. And so that's what we're going to do today. And so this is actually a

husband and wife duo that we have, Chris and Katie Kimball, and they own the blog fixer. And Katie is also a blogger. We're going to hear more about her blog and her story. But first and foremost, just welcome to the Ultimate Blog Podcast, Kimball's. Thanks, Amy. Thanks, Jennifer. It's kind of funny that you said this is exciting because this is techie stuff. So it's only exciting for the right person. only exciting for the right person. Bloggers like tech stuff. We like that. We want to be successful. And really, the tech side is important. So let's hear a little bit about the blog fixer to start. Who do you serve with the blog fixer? I mean, we serve bloggers, right? It was all born out of Katie starting a blog, what, 10 plus years ago? 15. 15 years ago. Boy, time goes fast. And she had technical needs and I had technical skills and we kind of figured out how to bring those together to make a product and to serve both her and her colleagues.

Yeah, being married to your tech guy is very handy. When we started Spark Media, Jennifer's husband is a tech guy. And so we would be like, Sean, Sean, help us again. And be like, you guys got to figure this stuff out. So I borrow Jennifer's husband in the beginning of our business too. It's very nice to have that. Yeah. Very handy to have a backup. Yeah. For sure. So let's kind of go back to the beginning. Katie, you said you've been blogging for 15 years. Do you mind sharing a little bit more about your blog and your story and how you got started?

Yeah. It makes me kind of an OG, but I say I still feel like a rookie because everything changes so fast all the time. You don't get to settle in and just kick your feet up in the world of blogging. So back in 2008, I had been an elementary teacher and we were married pretty young. And when we started our family, I knew I couldn't be a good teacher and a good mom at the same time. So I left teaching, again, pretty quickly after starting teaching. And when I ran our family budget, we were in the red. I thought, oh, no, like, do I need to sell Pampered Chef? Like, what do I tutor? Like, what do I need to do to get this back into the black? And I was learning to learning to cook, learning to feed my family a lot healthier. And my teacher brain was always going as I'm,

you know, burning things and failing and spending a lot of time at the cutting board. board. How can I help other moms speed up this process and avoid making the mistakes I've made? So I had a book idea. I did not know at the time that a book is neither fast nor effective for making money at all. But I had asked a magazine editor what he thought about my book idea. And he said, well, maybe you should start a blog and see if there's an audience for your idea. Literally thought, what is a blog? I didn't even know what it was in 2008. And three months later, I had started kitchenstewardship.com and was, you know, built an audience, was started, you know, you make that first Google ad sense, like $9 and 13 cents. Oh my gosh, I made money from my blog. I didn't anticipate the blog making money, but when that became a reality, and I was enjoying it so much,

and that community feel, comments were a thing back then. And people would read every post you wrote. It was so different than today. But within six months, I thought, I don't need to write a book. I just need to keep doing this. But I was constantly saying, honey, honey, can you help me? So Chris, did you have any like tech background at that time? Or did you have to kind of figure it out with her? No. So I went to school to be a programmer. And I was working in the banking field, making home banking software for credit unions and banks.

So yeah, I had a lot of decent tech knowledge and also a lot of just general web knowledge because I worked in putting people's statements online. So I kind of had a good background that matched up a lot with what she was getting into. Yeah. Yeah. So when she said to you, honey, I'm going to start a blog, what were you thinking? I'm just curious. Were you like, are you nuts? No. I was excited. I was a little bit more informed than her. I knew what a blog was at the time. And I knew that some people were making some money from it. And I knew that she was a good communicator and good writer. And I thought that could be a decent option for us to kind of move forward as we were starting a young family. And I was early on in my career and stuff like that. So I thought it was a great option to explore. And we were just talking

yesterday. He reminded me that we had conversations right there at the beginning, because I started out on the free WordPress, where you can't have advertising. And so right away, he's saying, yeah, but let's, let's talk this out. Because if you don't have ads, and you end up building a readership, they'll be trained that you don't have ads. So maybe it's better to put them on. So I think within 10 weeks, we switched to the self hosted WordPress, But I had completely forgotten about that conversation and how he's really been integral in helping me along the way, both with the tech and talking things through. I still remember it was probably a little less than six months into blogging. It's like 1130 midnight. He's like in bed, like, honey, come to

bed. I'm like, I've just got to check one more thing. And I had installed a plugin that updated my feed burner subscription to a correct number. And I'm dating myself right there because who knows what a feed burner subscription is. That's where people used to subscribe to blog feeds, which meant they saw every time you published a new blog for those of you who aren't over 40. And I had thought I had about 100 readers. And I had like in the mid 500s for real, which felt so huge to me at the time. Like I was like jumping up and down. There are 500 people who like my work. Like imagine all of them in a lecture hall, you know, it was so exciting. And it's funny to look back because now 500 feels really tiny. You know, that's like really a disappointing number. Only 500 people read

my new post. But back then, I was so excited. I think that's such a great reminder to new bloggers to celebrate those wins because those are so important and so big when you're getting started. And like you said, imagine those 500 people in a room with you and you have direct access to talk to them. that's incredible. So yeah, I hope everybody that gets to that point will celebrate that kind of a win. I also think it's funny that you, you know, you guys talked about how you started on the WordPress.com instead of WordPress.org. And that was kind of my go to at first too, when I was going to start my blog, I was like, Oh, I'll just put it on. What is it called? Blogspot. That'll be easy. I know how to do that. And my husband also was like,

um, no, that's not how you're going to ever be able to monetize it. So let's just, I'll, I'll help you get started and we'll, we'll do it the right way from the start. And so not everybody has a husband or somebody that's willing to sit down with them and do that. So I hope everybody listening to the podcast takes that to heart. Let's get this started off the right way because you'll just thank yourself in the future when you really are ready to monetize, that you're already set up and ready to go for that. So can you talk a little bit about some of the things that you were struggling with tech-wise in those early days that kind of

led to those conversations about, okay, what can we do to solve some of these issues or to make things a little bit easier for us? Yeah. I mean, the big one, I'm sure I asked for his help all the time, but they're all distant memories. I don't remember most of them, but Chris said he can still remember me walking into the room and saying, I'm screwed. Like Google just did this thing. This was back, when would I even know when it was? 2011 or something, 2010. Anyway, Google first said, you have to no follow any link that has any money attached, which would have been any sponsored posts, which I used to do and any affiliate links. And at that time I probably had a few hundred posts and I said,

I'm, I don't know what to do. Like I'm going to have to touch every post I've ever written and fix this. And it's going to be, take me like two or three months of my blogging time that I was fitting into the edges at nap time. And after the babies were in bed, I thought I'm, I'm going to hate it. It's going to suck my soul. Maybe I should just quit. I won't be able to write for a couple months. This is horrible. Or you're going to have to pay the little revenue she was generating at the time. Yeah, just go back to zero. Yeah. And so Chris is a huge automation guy. And you talk about how you fix things. Yeah. So she told me this and I got all excited. Talk about how you fix things.

Yeah. So she told me this and I got all excited. I know how to fix this. And she's like, yay, you nerd. You know, a lot of what I did in the banking space was I was changing data from one format to another to work with basically bank archival or presenting data that, you know, was not meant to be on the web to present it on the web. So I was pretty good at changing things from one format to another. So I was like, I can easily write you a program to evaluate a link to decide if it's monetized or not,

and then add no follow. So that was really how the blog fixer got started. That was the first thing I did was, Katie, I'm going to help you with this. I can write a program. Instead of taking months, we can do this in a couple hours. And yeah, I think the first time we ran it, it no-followed like 30,000 links. 21,000. Yeah, that would have taken me forever. Oh my gosh. And then she said, okay, so I have a bunch of colleagues that also have this problem. Perhaps we can help them out too. So that was the first bit of the snowball that started rolling. I think that brings an important thing to light. And that's something that we started as bloggers, but then started Spark Media later.

And it's kind of thinking about how can we give back to the community? How can we make this better for the industry as a whole? And that's exactly what you did. Because now you still have to click no follow. Like if you're writing a blog post. So for anyone listening who doesn't know, when you share an affiliate link or a sponsored link, essentially any link in a post that you could earn commission off of or you are getting paid to share, you have to click no follow. So if you haven't done that, that is why the blog fixer is here today. Because they can help you do that really quickly. But you have to do that just for guidelines to stay in compliance. And so making sure that that is done is really important. And that's a step that you don't want to skip when you're writing a blog post for sure. And if you have, I think that the important thing to note is, let's say that this today right now is the first you have ever heard about this particular thing. There's no need to panic. It is okay. It can be fixed and you can change it going forward. But also there is a way to fix it and do that rather quickly

with a service and product like the Blog Fixer. So thanks for creating something like that, first and foremost. So out of curiosity, how long ago was that? Like how far into your blogging journey did that happen? It had to have been

maybe just a year, year and a half, I'm thinking. Had to have been pre-2011. It was not time for you to have 21,000 monetized links. a half, I'm thinking. Had to have been pre-2011. It was not time for you to have 21,000 monetized links. I know, I was busy. Yeah. Yeah, you really like hit the ground running. And what I love about that is that you started it

and maybe it was you, Katie, not knowing like where this could go. But I think Jennifer kind of alluded to this, but having somebody kind of in your, I'm going to say community or on your team who kind of is like, Hey, I can see though where this could go. Like this, this could be something, you know, and having like a cheerleader and Chris was obviously that for you. We hope that people who are listening to the podcast, like maybe you don't have that in your life that we can be that for you, that cheerleader, like, hey, you can do this. And you can grow a company by doing this and take yourself seriously and treat this

as a business from the start is a really, that's a mindset that we hope that people get into, because it is a viable career option that you can have for sure. So you started with like, no follow links links and you helped a couple of colleagues. And then how has that evolved since? Where has the blog fixer kind of gone and who do you help today with it? Yeah. So, I mean, it started out as a side gig. Like I still had my corporate job and I was helping Katie and then we kind of started helping a few of her friends. And then we started realizing maybe we have something here, right? So we had our fourth child in 2014. Fall 2014. Yeah. So, you know, once he was two months old, I'm like, this is the perfect time. Let's quit

my job and start a new business. So that's what I did. But, you know, it was nice because Katie's blog at that point had really grown. And so we had a nice parachute. Like, you know, and we weren't totally betting the farm on things. So that's kind of how it went. And I actually remember there was a weekend where she took the kids and went away. And I like just got down and coded and I kind of grew the blog fixer into what it is today. Like I created the architecture and the way it works today. is today. I created the architecture and the way it works today. And I can remember seeing it work for the first time Saturday night at one in the morning, all alone in my office. And I got it. It's done. It's here. The eureka moment hit. And I realized this can be viable.

So basically, I created the software and it's modular so that we run a variety of different fixes. Nofollow is one of our fixes. We have somewhere between 15 and 20 fixes. And then we do a lot of custom fixes for people that say, I need this special thing to change. So it's an expert in changing your content on your site. So if you have 100, you have 1,000, you have 50,000 posts, we can go through and make beneficial updates to all of those. Right. Following a rule, basically. Yeah. Welcome to 2024. Is this the year that you want to go all in with your blog?

Are you ready to learn new things and connect with other bloggers to level up your business? If you're ready, we are ready for you in the Ultimate Blog Membership. The Ultimate Blog Membership is our blogging membership that is for the blogger who wants to stay up to date on the latest and also build a network of blogging buddies to hold you accountable and push you toward your goals. We have two coaching calls each month. One is a live Q&A session where you will join us both and ask any and all questions you have about your blog or blogging in general. The other call is a coaching call where we bring in guest experts or teach ourselves and teach you new ways to level up your blogging business. You also gain access to us all month long to answer your questions in

our online forum, discuss new opportunities you're considering, connect with other bloggers, and keep you accountable in your blogging business. If this sounds like what you've been missing in your blogging business, click the link to apply in our show notes. We hope to see you in the ultimate blog membership in 2024. Well, I think one of the things is when you're a blogger and you're trying to do all these things on your own and you're finding out, oh, I have to mark my links, no follow. Oh my gosh. And then you find something else out and you're so overwhelmed. I think a lot of people are like, oh, this is just too hard. I'm going to give up. But I think what's awesome is there are people now who are starting to be like, you know what, I figured it out and I'm going to help you,

which is what you guys have done. And it just helps the industry as a whole. It helps other bloggers. And I think it's incredible. I'd like for you, if you don't mind, just to talk a little bit more about some of the top fixes that you offer. Some of the things that newer bloggers may not think about or may not know about that you would like them to know so that they get started off on the right foot. Absolutely. So nofollow remains the biggest seller, the biggest thing people come to us for. The second one would be what we call our internal permalink redirect fix. And what that means is a lot of times when you start out in blogging, your permalinks have dates in them, the year, the month, the day, and then the slug.

And then probably at some point, an SEO expert in an article you've read told you, that's not optimal. You just want the slug. So you change that and you create a redirect on your server so that the old links still work and they redirect to the new links. But when that redirect happens, when someone clicks on the old link and they go to the new link, there's a slowdown both for the reader because they have to process that redirect. And on the server, there's CPU cycles that are taken up to process that redirect. So what RFIX does is it looks for opportunities where you've linked to a different part of your blog, an internal link, but the redirect is happening and we just replace that to go straight to the correct link now. So you avoid all that overhead, for example.

Yeah. So in other words, in the body of your post, you know, if you hover over and you say, oh, like, where is this link going? It's going to go directly to the correct link instead of going through that old ugly link, you know, to the new one. And so it just reduces overhead. That would be something that you would never, you'd never bother to pay a VA to do ever because it would go every single post. So that's like, if you have to touch every single post, you borrow my husband. And we have several SEO experts and they do the content audits, you know, you pay them to go through and here's all the problems you have. And that is the most, the most recommended fixes.

Let's get these fixed. The blog fixer can do it pretty quick and easy for you. So that's a low hanging fruit for you to do. And then also our link target fix is pretty popular. So we change or optimize where a link opens, whether it's in a new tab or the current tab. And the recommendation for this has changed over the years. It used to be every external link should open in a new tab. Every internal link should open in the same tab. Recently, the recommendation is most links should open in the current tab and affiliate links only should open in new tabs. And there's a variety of reasons for that, but that is probably our third most popular fix. Okay. That's news to me. Jennifer, did you know that? No. Oh, that's news to me too. Okay. So can you repeat, let's repeat that one more time because that is different

than what we teach on right now. So if that's like a new recommendation, it's good to know. So will you just repeat that one more time? Sure. And this is a recommendation less than a year old. So like Katie said, and you guys are saying things change all the time. So you have to kind of be ready to be flexible, right? So any link that's not an affiliate link should open in the current tab. An affiliate link only should open in a new tab. And is that because of mobile? Because people, if you're on mobile and you're opening a ton of tabs, people get really confused. Yeah. It's, you want to avoid link fatigue for your reader. I'm sorry, tab fatigue.

So all these tabs are opening up, especially if they're on a computer, right? All of a sudden, they have all these tabs. A reader can choose to open any link in a new tab if they want. You can control click, you can right click on it and say, open a new tab. But as a site owner, if you're forcing it to do it they can't do it they remove that choice yeah and for those affiliate links chris am i right in thinking that the blog fixer also adds that that little symbol with like an arrow it's kind of an arrow in a box that denotes that you're going to go to a new tab yep and that is the second recommendation with

new tabs should be denoted as they're going to open in a new tab. And so the Blackpixer does all of that. Yeah. And it all really comes back to that user experience. And that sounds like just another one of those things that, you know, we're trying to create a better experience for the user. We figured out what they like, what they don't like. And yeah, just customizing it. don't like. And yeah, just customizing it. So as bloggers, it's a benefit to us to follow along with those recommendations. Because not only will that help us, hopefully with Google, but it will

help us with our readers, because now we know what their preferences are. Really, SEO is all about making your reader happy and whatever you can do to do that. Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's a great tip. I know another fix that you offer is the alt text within photos. So I'd love for you just to share a little bit more about how that works because the alt text on a photo is essentially for accessibility purposes. So for someone who is unable to physically see the image or read the post, and they're gonna use a different program to essentially read,

then that program would tell them what they see in a picture. So when you upload a picture into your blog post, you need to have alt text. And so how does the blog fixer kind of do that? Because if somebody, this might be news to somebody listening, for instance, how does it go back and do that? Because if somebody, this might be news to somebody listening, for instance, how does it go back and do that?

Because otherwise they're going to have to go back to Lord knows how many photos and add alt text, which would be a complete nightmare. Or maybe they've done it the wrong way. Maybe they've just left their image in there. So is that something that you provide? And what does that kind of look,

that process look like? I'd love to lay the foundation for this, right? As an OG blogger, I remember Chris saying, oh, there's becoming online ambulance chasers now who are finding blogs that didn't use the alt text correctly and are suing them for ADA noncompliance. And I'm like, alt text what? Because there was a very large span of time

where we would stuff that alt text for Pinterest. Do you guys remember that? You're putting in the title of your post. You're putting in extra keywords. It was a hot mess. Oh, yes. Had tons of hashtags. Can you imagine being a visually impaired person and having your computer read all that junk to you? They probably complained and that's why we're here. I mean, really, quite honestly. Yes. Yes. A hundred percent. Like they're like, what are, what are they even talking about me more? Yeah. And the first couple of years of the blog, my pictures probably did have the alt text of IMG underscore 0456, you know, the name of your image. So I was, I was not excited about that, but luckily I'm married to the guy who makes mass changes in your archives.

So we coded something for that. You can explain that now, Chris. Yeah. I mean, so we search out both missing alt tags, which is a problem, right? You just didn't put one in. But then also we have a variety of ways to find bad alt tags. Maybe it's too long. Maybe you've, you know, stuffed it with hashtags, stuff like that. So we have kind of an algorithm we can use to search and say, not only are they missing

or they're bad. And then we put all those into a nice little tool and you can just scroll through the tool. Here's your image. Here's the alt tag. Here's the post it's on. Write a new alt tag, click apply, boom, it's done. So you just kind of go through that. It does take some time. It's a manual thing too, but it's kind of the fastest way you're going to get those updated. And you're going to make Google happy because they use those for searching images. And that can be a decent source of traffic, especially if you're an image heavy blog, but also you're doing the ADA compliance stuff correctly.

Yeah. That kind of thing. You can fairly easily hire a VA because it's all in one you're not going in and out of every post and hitting publish you're just in one dashboard image alt image alt kind of back and forth and you fiddled with ai when you first wrote this yeah we used a microsoft and a google ai and it just turned out they weren't accurate enough if you gave them a picture of lasagna they couldn't tell you it was lasagna. They said like, you know, brown blob on a plate or something like that. We tried to do it with AI. I think very soon it will be extremely possible

to do with AI, at least to help you. But I think there's always going to be that human element where you have to look and say, okay, did the AI get this right? You know, it's really hard to get the context. And especially if you're zoomed in, I work with a lot of recipe bloggers, and there's steps, you know, pictures of each step. And that's kind of hard for the AI to understand. Are we looking at sugar? Are we looking at flour? Are we looking at, you know, some other white substance? I love that you brought up the AI piece. That's why I asked, because I want to remind bloggers that in a world that AI is so prevalent and talked about all the time, there is still need for human connection, for human words, for our voice, for our hands on the keyboards doing some of this work. Don't rely on that solely. You are still going to have to do some of the work and that is a really important message

that I hope that you gather. It doesn't mean that you can't use it in some capacity to help, but to use it in every capacity, in all capacity, I think you're just gonna get yourself in trouble in the long run. So. I agree.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so there's obviously so much that the blog fixer can help an established blogger with that maybe needs to go back and think about things. What is an easy way that they can see? Maybe somebody listening is like, I have no idea. How would I know what my blog actually needs? Is there a way that you assess that, that you can look at somebody's blog and say, hey, these are all the fixes that you need? Absolutely. And that's what we call our

site scan. So we offer a service that's our site scan, which we'll get in and we'll check your blog and we'll look at all the things that we can help with and give you a report and say, you know, you need 1000 nofollow attributes on your monetized links. You have 1,500 redirects that we can help with, et cetera. We put that together in a package and we say, here, if you'd like to fix these yourself, you may. Or if you want a shortcut, we can help you out with those services. We'll put together a custom package and often we can give a little discount to through that scam. And we get to give that away today, right? Yes. So that's usually like a $50 scan, but because Amy and Jennifer are hosting this podcast and have us on, we want to give a

little gift to their readers. So if anyone goes to blogfixer.com slash ultimate blog, you'll be able to get a free site scan, which is it's kind of a big gift, because it's a manual process, like Chris's team will actually get access to your blog, like he's a real person, you can give him his, you know, a login for his team. And run this site scan, the only way to do it is on the back end. So running that site scan, and you'll get this amazing report, where, you can absolutely, you can hire a VA to tackle things. There's some really good SEO stuff on there too, right? Like does that have the like short headers or like a post with no images and stuff like that? As a bonus, we include a content audit spreadsheet, which will give you a nice

overview of all the content, all the articles you have on your site. You can sort by things like word count and it will identify posts that have problems. Maybe you don't have an image on this post. Maybe there's an HTML error somewhere in there that you can go in and fix. So that's a bonus that we include with the site scan. My team and I use that all the time. So when we're doing content audits, like, okay, we've got to, back in the old days when I would publish five blogs a week, they were not pretty. They were not evergreen, right? You have your old giveaways. You have the, hey, I'm going away for Christmas. I won't blog for a while. Like, oh my gosh. And so you can very easily sort this content audit spreadsheet by, like you said, word count. Oh,

73 word post. We should probably kill that one, you know? Post without images, post without headers, it just very easily helps you find problem areas that then your team can go back through and foretell some stuff and delete and get rid of the flack, the things that you don't need anymore. Yeah. I mean, that's really something a blogger could do every year, right? Like, they could come back each year and just set a date on your calendar. Like, I don't know, this is going live in May. So in May of every year, I'm just going to set a date on my calendar, run a new site scan, see what's happened over the last year. Because I assume as new things happen and come out, because like you said, that's just the art of blogging, that there's going to be

new offerings that you're going to come up with. And so like just kind of using that as a check against yourself. And I mean, like we said, we are human. And so you might have done a post that you think you added the alt text, but you didn't. Maybe you completely forgot that. And it can go back and be a good checker. So that would be something that I would recommend just putting on a calendar to just as just kind of a housekeeping item for your blog each year. We will put a link to that in our show notes. So be on the lookout for that free site scan.

That is a really generous gift. So thank you so much for giving that to our listeners. That is so helpful for people who have been blogging. And I know that you also have an offering and something that you can do that new bloggers and people have been blogging a while, but don't you have a plugin as well that they can put on their site and then use forward that way? Do you have one? Yeah.

So we call that our live fix option. So what that does is we have services that fixes all your content up until the point that we apply the service, right? But now you're going to create new content, you're going to change content. So we have our live fix option, which means that the plugin will remain on your site. And every time you click update, every time you add new content, edit new content, it will apply all of the other services you purchased. So you don't have to worry about nofollow anymore. You don't have to worry about if something's redirecting, you know, you don't have to

worry about any of the other services you purchased. They automatically are applied anytime you click update. And can I just say, that's amazing that I've never, I have not had to mark a link as no follow for 10 years now, because you just, you hit publish and the blog fixer does its thing. And so that cuts down. I call that the falling action, right? You've finished your content. Your pictures are perfect. Everything's in there.

And now I have to go through in bold and no follow and add some more affiliate links, right? Like all the boring stuff. The blog fixer live fix does at least half of that for me. And so I can go like make dinner. Yeah. half of that for me. And so I can go like make dinner. It's kind of like the cars that have the automatic cruise control that adjust the speed. You don't even have to think about driving anymore. No, we always say, you know, we take care of the boring stuff so you can get back to doing what you love the most, which is getting your message out. That's why you blog. That's why you're

starting it. Yeah. We try to take care of that other stuff. And I'd love to talk about too, if we have a minute, why the blog fixer is different than other plugins. Because I think when bloggers get a plugin, they go, oh no, all the gurus say,

don't have too many plugins. Plugins will slow down your site. Right? That's a big concern. But the blog fixer really is different because it changes the content permanently. So Chris can talk about what a filter is, but many plugins run via a filter, which means that they're changing that content as it loads for each person, right? So Jane in Australia is reading my post about scrambled

eggs. It loads and then like a lot of my plugins would have to run to make that content look correct. But that's not how the blog fixer works. It actually makes the change in the post. So you could go in and see it in the HTML, which is cool. It means if you want to uninstall the blog fixer plugin, you can and you don't lose anything. And also it's faster because that filter creates an additional like couple milliseconds, you know, of load time. And so that's why gurus say, don't have too many plugins, but it's don't have too many plugins that use filters. And the blog fixer doesn't. Did I cover all that? What else makes it special? She's been listening to you, Chris. She's been listening.

Yeah. No, the trick is we change it permanently in the database. So you want to get rid of the plugin after our services, that's fine. Everything you've purchased from us is going to be there forever. And there's, you know, people don't do that because it is more complicated. You know, there's a lot of different places in WordPress where data is stored. And so the blog fixer understands how to update all those different places, which is something, you know, way back when nofollow showed up, I started looking, is there an existing solution? Like I want to reinvent the wheel. And there wasn't one that just changed the content permanently. And so that's why I

ultimately created the plugin and why I'm in business today, because we're unique in that aspect. I think too, you have like this inside view of a blogger's life. What? Because your wife's doing it. Yes. And so that would be awful if you uninstall the plugin and you lost all that work and you think about everything that you would have to like redo. So I mean, I think that you just have a very special lens coming at this when you're creating these things. You obviously have a blogger that you're working with side by side, who's saying, Oh, we need this, or we need this, or this would be awful, you know, or, hey, this would be really nice. I think you can make something like that, you know,

that you have this like inside scoop that maybe other people don't have, you know, because they're not in the day to day life of like what blogging looks like behind the scenes. Yeah. And when you think about all those plugins that you shortcode, I'll go and I'm like maybe trying to get a new affiliate. So I'm reading someone else's blog posts and I go, Oh, dead shortcode. Do you ever see that? Where like you can see the little brackets and somebody has shortcode. And I know what that means as a blogger. That means that they had a plugin that did a thing. They uninstalled that plugin or that plugin died, right? The person abandoned it and it wasn't updated.

So you had no choice. Or had a security issue. Yeah, you had no choice but to uninstall it. And now your blog is bloated with all this ugly, weird looking shortcode that no longer does anything. By the way, the blog fixer can take that out. Which is kind of a circular thing out. We don't do that. Also, we can fix that with the other dumb plugin. Yeah. Yeah, I that is so important, because I've looked at plugins before thinking, oh, this might be a great tool to help me. But I'll reach out to the plugin developer and say,

hey, what happens when I uninstall this? Well, it all goes away. Okay, well, I'm avoiding that one. I just am. So I love it that you guys do that. Not that people will want to uninstall it. I think your service is fantastic. But just knowing like that kind of integrity exists, and it's such a helpful and blogger focused service. I think that's really important. I agree. Thank you so much for Chris. Thank you for creating all that you've created for bloggers, but thank you for sharing your story too. I think as bloggers, I think hearing the story is always really important and impactful. And when you know, like anything in any one that Jennifer and I recommend, especially since creating the podcast, we love to have these

conversations with people. So you really get to understand, this is why this is helpful. This is how this is helpful. And these are the faces behind what we're offering. Because I think it gives you this understanding that a lot of people in this industry truly are there to help further the industry, to help all bloggers become successful. So Katie, thanks for being so willing to share all of your problems with your husband. So the blog fixer could be designed and help all of us. It is very much caused a ripple effect. So thanks for kind of paving the way there. And I would love for people to be able to find the blog fixer and also go to your blog, Katie. So if you guys wouldn't mind sharing where they can do that. every summer. And then Chris, of course, blogfixer.com slash ultimate blog for that free site scan. And you know what I was saying to Chris last night was after people listen to this podcast,

they have so much power because when you understand how the blog fixer works, right, that it makes these mass changes throughout any post on your blog, following a rule, and it makes them permanently. When you come across a new problem, you go, Oh, I think this could be a job for the blog fixer. I should email Chris and see if he has a fix. And that's where all these new fixes come from. When he gets enough people saying, oh, this is a new problem. He goes, okay, now I can create a real fix for that and sell it and help other people. So your listeners are now part of that. They can be part of something new now that they understand the power of the blog fixer. Yeah.

And I hope they all take advantage of that incredible, generous offer that you guys have made. Oh, for sure. Yes. That link for the free site scan is in the show notes. So please be sure to do that. Even if you have like five or 10 blog posts up, if you're a new blogger, please just take advantage of that site scan and see.

Just get all your ducks in a row. Make sure you're off on blogger, please just take advantage of that site scan and see, just get all your ducks in a row, make sure you're off on the right foot. So thanks for joining us today. And thanks for listening. It's been a pleasure. Thanks. Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you'd like to continue the conversation about blogging with us, please find us on Instagram at Spark Media Concepts. You can also sign up for our weekly newsletter where we share blogging tips and inspiration. You can sign up by finding the link in the show notes. For those of you who are ready for the next step and want to start your own blog, join the waitlist for the ultimate blog bootcamp. The link to join the waitlist is also in the show notes. Go out and make today a great day.