Hi there Reader,

Welcome to July’s Blogging Newsletter from your friends at Food Blogger Pro. We hope you had a great month!

July is typically a pretty quiet month –– the Summer Slump is a very real thing that affects bloggers in all niches during this month. But that wasn’t the case this year!

We have some major social news, as well as some other helpful tips and strategies from trusted resources. Let’s dive in:

1. Hello, Threads! 👋

One of the most notable things that happened this month was the release of Threads, Meta’s competitor to Twitter (or… X. More on that in a bit).

Threads is a text-based app that “takes the best parts of the Instagram experience and creates a whole new app around text, ideas, and sharing what’s on your mind,” according to Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

It is the fastest-growing app in history (gaining 100 million users in five days), and it’s currently available in more than 100 countries.

That said, daily users have decreased quite a bit since those first few explosive days –– there are about 13 million daily users on the app, which is a 70% decline from their launch numbers.

It’ll be interesting to see how Threads evolves over these next few months. If you’re interested in learning more about the platform, Later has a thorough article all about it.

We’re also welcoming our Social Media Expert, Andrea, on The Food Blogger Pro Podcast in a few weeks to chat through how food content creators can utilize Threads to support their businesses. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting app so you don’t miss that episode!

2. X-ing and Re-Xing on X? 🤔

If that heading confused you, you’re not alone. This month, Twitter was rebranded to X.

Parts of the Twitter/X site have been updated to reflect this name and branding change, but it sounds like more will be coming as the company works to add new features to the site (like audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking) in pursuit of turning it into an “everything app.”

There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to the future of how the app will work and what the replacements for terms like “Tweeting” or “Retweeting” will be, but time will hopefully tell.

​Read more about the story here.

3. A new Core Web Vital called Interaction to Next Paint. 🎨

First, and most importantly, Interaction to Next Paint will not be a ranking factor until March 2024.

But! Google sent out a bunch of emails about Interaction to Next Paint this month that sent website owners into a frenzy to learn more about this new Core Web Vital.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will actually take the place of an existing Core Web Vital called First Input Delay (FID). INP includes all user interaction on a page versus FID, which only measures the user’s first interaction on a page.

As you can probably tell, this is a pretty technical topic, so be sure to check out the blog post from our friends at NerdPress all about this update and how to improve your INP score.

And if Core Web Vitals still confuse you, no worries! You can check out these resources as well:

• ​407: How Core Web Vitals and Image Size Impact Search Ranking with Andrew Wilder from The Food Blogger Pro Podcast
• ​Intro to Core Web Vitals from NerdPress

4. Improve your post rankings without creating new content. 📈

Wouldn’t it be great to see your existing posts improve their search rankings?

​In this article, Ahrefs is recapping 15 different tactics to help you do just that.

These tactics do not require creating any new content. Instead, they’re focused on optimizations to existing content, and they’re ranked by potential impact, confidence that it will succeed, and ease of implementation.

Included are tips about adding different elements to your posts, linking, and ensuring your posts are actually getting indexed.

It’s a good one! Find the full article with examples here.

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And that’s a wrap for this jam-packed Blogging Newsletter! Happy (almost) August, and we’ll see ya next time! 👋