Facebook Decides To Prioritize Groups, Video & Events Over The News Feed & Pages

I’m so excited when massive change comes to a platform because people freak out and worry that the sky is falling and they can’t recover.

Facebook just announced massive changes that will begin to prioritize the new feed and pages in the coming months. These changes will make groups and video & events the priority, helping people engage in the communities they love, not just the pages they follow.

I’ve made a pretty bold claim here. The sources I am citing are Mark Zuckerberg himself, as well as the video he showed (see at the bottom of this article) and what was on screen.

Facebook Watch (the TV portion of Facebook App) was not mentioned, but it was highlighted and the new app design is making video and content more important than ever, along with groups!

Source: Facebook

Facebook is becoming more of a content driven, consumer based app similar to the psychology of Netflix or Hulu, where it will become a destination to watch your favorite show and to engage with your favorite content.

For those who aren’t putting out content, you will be missing out on the opportunity, and struggle greatly if you don’t shift and adjust.

What this means is simple: You can no longer get away with a cute quote graphic, a photo, looking cute, or your old following tricks that got engagement, likes and shares before!

NOW - You must contribute to the world around you and make content, building a community first!

For those who don’t know how to do this and skated by for so long on old school 2012-2016 tactics of Social Media marketing, they will begin to cease to exist. The facebook platform will return back to what it originally was for:

Friends to interact in small close knit communities.

For you to thrive as a business you must learn how to shift with what’s happening, instead of being reactive - TAKE ACTION!

Facebook Groups will be where people congregate and start to take a larger role than the news feed.

To get your content in front of people from a page, you WILL have to advertise, and won’t be able to just rely on organic content anymore - UNLESS your content is truly a destination, not just information.

What does this mean?

Think about Netflix, Hulu, your favorite TV stations, you turn to these when you CHOOSE to watch what you want to. Facebook is taking on this model, where people will CHOOSE who they want to see content from and engage with based on what they want as the only priority.

If you are not making content and building a community that truly brings value, you will lose!

Expecting to succeed off of some likes, comments & shares will no longer work anymore. Instead, producing content that shifts the hearts and minds of people, grabs them by their heart strings, and contributes lasting results and transformation for those who watch your content will be key.

Getting lots of likes for existing - because people “Like” your content or how you look won’t work anymore!

Instead - we must innovate, we must create content that helps people, that people want to watch, engage with and grow with.

I’m urging you right now, stop doing things the old way. Posting photos, and quotes just to get likes without contributing to the lives of those who are on your page will not work anymore! You must think about what drives your audience, and what they want most from you.

What can you do to create a cosmic force of nature that people can’t help but visit on a daily basis with the same level of draw that their favorite TV show or coffee shop has to offer?

If you aren’t a destination, a place people want to visit every day to get the latest content update, you will not survive, and you will have to rethink everything that has been working for you up to this point.

Now that groups are a priority, people will have an opportunity to choose which communities they want to engage with the most. As content creators, we have to create the community our audience wants to engage with. Dedicated group communities to stay relevant will be key.

Free groups and paid groups will now have a place side by side together. Where as the Facebook Page & Newsfeed were more of a priority to keep your content in front of your target audience, putting it into a group will be a vital new step. Top content creators and destination driven brands will need to adopt this method.

The future is bright. How will you respond?

Tonight, as I write this, I just launched the Grow Your Life community group where we can engage and grow. I will share EXCLUSIVE content with you that you won’t find anywhere else!

Join the #GrowYourLife Community here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/growyourlife/

Reference for more research, this is another great article on this topic, also I suggest watching the video below: https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/30/18523265/facebook-events-groups-redesign-news-feed-features-f8-2019

Why Does Everyone Need A Website (Even If You Don’t Have A Business)

Back in the 1990s when the internet was first coming of age, having a website was like a badge of honor that only the elite, or skilled had. If you had a website, you “made it” – and this led to the tech bubble of the early 2000s, 2001 where if you had .com after your name and were publicly traded and you can make billions of dollars

Fast forward to Web 2.0, and Social Media – we interact with the web completely differently than we did back in the 1990s. Websites became these portals to learn from & engage with. We used them not only for information, but with the creation of Social Media – the internet became a part of our every day life, and the value of a website became seemingly diminished

Now, we’re in 2019, where it seems like everyone who’s anyone is a podcaster, blogger, runs an ecommerce business, has an app, you name it, but there’s still those of us who are just normal every day people that are good with just having a Facebook Page, and an Instagram.

This is changing – and the future is changing. For you to stay ahead of the curve, and ahead of the game – you have to have a website. You need a presence that connects you with the world around you. It’s a form of digital real estate and you are staking your claim in the digital landscape of tomorrow.

Up until now, this year, that entire process has been extremely complicated, for most people – they don’t know where to start. This has been solved with products like Squarespace, and online courses like Website Building Made Simple are designed to help eliminate that technical barrier of entry, and help catapult you from where you are now – to having a professional website that gets results for you.

Even if you don’t have a company, or a business, having a website is an import thing for you to have moving forward in the new digital economy that is being birthed right now.

We are at the cusp of an entirely new version of the internet, and those who will succeed are those who take action NOW and start building their online presence. If you start today, you will be years ahead of 98% of the world population that still doesn’t understand the value of all of this.

The way the internet and computers are right now will appear as archaic to us in 10 years from now as computers did in the 1950s.

If you have something inside you that you want to share, you need to build a website around that thing.

If you offer a product or service to people, you need a website to inform people about what it is that you can offer.

If you have a desire to mobilize your voice and get your thoughts out there in a way that can impact people for the future, you need a website.

Even if you don’t know where to start, having a digital website that features your resume, and accomplishments, as well as links to your Social Media, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn – can help you get a job with an employer. On your resume you can direct them to your website, and you can develop the narrative of who you are and share with people more about you.

Automatically, to employers, having a website increases your social value to them exponentially. So if anything, have a website that you craft around you – BRAND YOU – and who you are. You will be prepared for the future of the next generation of the internet, and ahead of the curve.

If you don’t want to get left behind in the future, with robots and AI and jobs disappearing left and right, you have to build a website for yourself.

Download my course, Website Building Made Simple (coming soon) and get started preparing yourself for the next generation of the internet – and the future that is being created right in front of us. Don’t get left behind!

How To Pick The Best Squarespace Template

The first step when you are building a site on Squarespace is to pick the best template – and decide the wireframe of how you want your site to be designed.

I go into this topic in depth in my course Website Building Made Easy. I wanted to give this to you guys as well, for free, here on my blog because I believe it’s one of the first places that people need to start when they are deciding how to build their site.

Squarespace offers numerous templates and themes for building your site, all of which are very different from one another.

Squarespace uses common tools to build your site with very different templates to arrange how each part appears.

This website, for example is built on the Bedford Template. The reason I chose the Bedford template is because it is the the best design out of the box for blogging, influencers, and course creators. It also gives you a sidebar on your blog, which you can see, if you’re on a desktop, over to the side on the screen or below my post if you’re on mobile.

You have to first decide what the purpose of your site is. For most people, I would recommend the Brine Template, because it allows you to create beautiful modern layouts without very much expertise. Many other templates are also part of the Brine Family:

• Aria

• Basil

• Blend

• Brine

• Burke

• Cacao

• Clay

• Ethan

• Fairfield

• Feed

• Foster

• Greenwich

• Hatch

• Heights

• Hunter

• Hyde

• Impact

• Jaunt

• Juke

• Keene

• Kin

• Lincoln (discontinued)

• Maple

• Margot

• Marta

• Mentor

• Mercer

• Miller

• Mojave

• Moksha

• Motto

• Nueva

• Pedro

• Polaris

• Pursuit

• Rally

• Rover

• Royce

• Sofia

• Sonny

• Sonora

• Stella

• Thorne

• Vow

• Wav

• West

In my course, Website Building Made Easy, I go over every type of Squarespace template, and how to set it up for your unique scenario & use case. Over 10.5 hours of training to help you build your site right, the FIRST time!

When deciding which template to start with, first look at EXAMPLE sites built with that template. Every template in Squarespace has a portfolio built in to review.

1.) Go to Squarespace.com

2.) Click on “Templates” at the top of the site (navigation)

3.) Highlight your mouse over a template, and click “Preview *Template Name*” for example Preview Wells’

4.) Scroll down below the preview, down the page, and see “Customers Using This Template”

You will then find other customer sites that use that template.

You can then start to envision your site being built with that template itself!

When choosing a template it’s important for that template to be able to serve you, and serve your goals the best possible way.

By using the comparison charts below, you can decide on which features of your site are most important to you.

Then, you can start a Free Trial of Squarespace, and play around with things!

To get the most in-depth training on the internet about Squarespace, from start to finish for anyone, grab your copy of my course Website Building Made Easy, and you will be ahead of the curve of most people in your position trying to build sites with Squarespace!

Squarespace has a template comparison chart page that goes in depth on the following points:

1.) Page Types

2.) Site Layout

3.) Navigation

4.) Mobile

5.) Blog Pages

6.) Gallery Pages

To see all 6 comparison charts, visit https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/228344967-Template-comparison-charts (I’ve only posted one of them here)

Below is the chart I found from Squarespace.com for the basics of site layout.

To see all 6 comparison charts, visit https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/228344967-Template-comparison-charts (I’ve only posted one of them here)

Squarespace vs. Wordpress

One of the number one things that I get asked the most often is this:

“Why do you like Squarespace more than Wordpress?”

For me, I’ve built websites on Wordpress since 2009, and before that I was hard coding websites with PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript. Wordpress was the most cutting edge tool for the internet when it was created, and it is still extremely valuable for what it is.

However, with my long experience of working on a daily basis with Wordpress, I’ve found that 99% of anything I can do - or would want to do on Wordpress, I can also do on Squarespace.

If I can’t do it on Squarespace, I might be able to do it on Wordpress, such as membership sites, or advanced customization in PHP creating apps, social networks etc.

However, Wordpress is only valuable for those things as a proof of concept, prototyping system.

There are a few myths that people believe about Wordpress vs. Squarespace:

Myth #1: Squarespace costs more than Wordpress

One thing people bring up is “Wordpress is free, Squarespace costs money” and this is actually completely untrue. In today’s day in age, you do NOT want to build your wordpress site long term on any sort of cheap $5-10/month hosting platform. The amount of computing power needed for a site to compete in 2019 is not sustainable on cheap shared hosting platforms.

These are great, again, for prototyping on a shoestring budget, but I can prototype on Squarespace much faster than Wordpress with more professionalism.

Squarespace features the highest level of cloud computing and CDN hosting out of the box for your site along with SSL security as well.

The cost of everything you would need to match the quality that Squarespace offers will end up costing you MORE than Wordpress in the long run!

You will also have to maintain updates on your Wordpress site. You will have to maintain server security, maintain your plugins, update your code when new updates come in and quickly these things cost you either time or money, which will mount up to costing more than Squarespace.

Simply in time, to deploy the websites that 99% of people need, Wordpress will cost you more in 1 year than Squarespace will - when you add up your time at $15/hour minimum (which I know most of you, your time is worth much more than that) and you can do the same things, better on Squarespace.

Myth #2: You can’t customize Squarespace like Wordpress

This is the biggest untruth that I found! Squarespace gives you the ability to insert custom code into every page of your site to do any number of customizations in a much easier way than Wordpress.

The Custom Developer platform of Squarespace allows you to download the entire template and customize every aspect of it from the ground up, creating completely unique designs and features for your site!

Myth #3: Wordpress is more secure than Squarespace

This isn’t even close to being true. The amount of maintenance required to keep Wordpress Secure is a full time job. Wordpress itself is insecure just because of how it’s structured and built from the code up.

Squarespace is far more secure in every single way because its maintained by Squarespace, and they are constantly updating the code, making it faster and more secure!

Advaned DDos mitigation techniques prevent malicious traffic from even coming to your site!

Think of Squarespace as your very own IT department, with free, unlimited hosting, top-of-the-line security, an enterprise-grade infrastructure, and around-the-clock support.

Myth #4: Squarespace isn’t good for blogs
Superior to wordpress in every way when it comes to blogging. Every squarespace template is built with blogging in mind to create the highest quality sites for desktop and mobile that you can imagine with the latest design standards.

Blogging on Squarespace is as easy as writing your content, and pressing publish!

Plus blogs look really good on Squarespace, afterall! This site was built on Squarespace, and this is a blog! See what I mean?

Half-Myth #5: Squarespace is too hard to use compared to Wordpres:

Actually Squarespace is far easier to use once you understand a few basic ways it works. I admit, when I first came from Wordpress to Squarespace, I was a bit overwhelmed - but after I learned how to use everything, I don’t use Wordpress anymore to build any of my sites for my client sites!

I created a course to solve this issue. I decided to break down, from the very basic level, every aspect of building a site on Squarespace in a course that I call Website Building Made Easy.

In it you get over 10.5 Hours of training on Squarespace. You can learn enough to do the basics in just an hour and a half during my session on the Brine template. I break down all of the main functions of building a website on Squarespace, enough to get anyone started right away!

My goal was to activate people to be able to build any site they can imagine in less than 7 days using Squarespace - and I believe this is the best resource available on the internet for you to do just that!

Order your copy of Website Building Made Easy (coming soon)!

How To Accomplish Impossible Goals

I just got done doing the Grow Your Life Podcast Episode #1 about  How To Create New Possibilities For Your Life & Future - #GrowYourLife

In this podcast I broke down the secrets of how people can take whatever situation they are in right now, whatever is limiting them from reaching the next level in their life to accomplishing 100% of everything they have ever dreamed or imagined. Putting action behind their dreams and doing great things that others said couldn’t happen for them!

This is a passion place for me because I’ve seen people do this my entire life. I’ve seen people around me, people close to me, people I’ve worked with, clients and family members take completely impossible situations and turn them into success.

We have, inside of us, everything we need to manifest our goals and destiny. Whatever we want to - if we choose to.

Success is about the choices we make each day, and the compound nature of our choices that build upon each other.

There’s a still small voice inside all of us that is bigger than us, telling us “I wish I could do that” or “You should do that” and then we have another voice saying “Yeah but that’s not possible”.

What if it was possible? What choices would you make to go after that goal? How would you live your life differently? How differently would you talk about the world around you?

If you start by just adjusting your life 1% this week in the direction of what will serve you for reaching your goals, you will not recognize your life a year from now, a month from now, even a week from now!

Start by just making a choice to do something that will serve your goals, serve your future, your destiny, your calling today. Stop living from a place that is reacting to everything that happens around you.

Start choosing to create the possibilities you want for your life and the world you want to live in.

I break this down step by step in Episode #1 of my Grow Your Life podcast. Go listen to this podcast, and write some notes down. Start doing something that will get you 1%, 5%, or 10% towards your goals this week and see your life be transformed as a result.

How To Create New Possibilities For Your Life

People think we are born as a blank slate but there’s actually science that shows there’s passed down memories from your family members and your ancestors that influence the choices you make, and how you react to the world around you! It’s in our DNA. The research on this is pretty new, but there’s plenty of studies that show this to be true!

You can’t control this.

You also can’t control how you were raised, what parents you had, what situation you had growing up.

All of this combined together creates habits and a personality for you that starts to become who your identity is.

For most of us, this identity does a great job of keeping us alive, keeping us safe, and not harming ourselves.

What we do have control over is how we react to the world around us and the cards we’ve been given. The choices we make start to define the changes to this programming.

We have complete control over this part of our scenario, but most people believe that the way they’ve always been and the way their family is how they will always be.

However, doing so will break the mold of what has been programmed around us to keep us safe, and we start to get pushback from the world around us, our friends, our family when we start to operate outside of the original programming for our life.

Only when we break the mold of this programming by a conscious choice of our own that:

1. I will choose the life I want to live

2. I will decide how big I want to dream

3. I will choose to go after my dreams and accomplish them!

For many of us, this doesn’t come naturally because when we’ve tried this, it’s like touching a hot stove. We get burned, we get hurt sometimes, and we go back to our original programming.

But when you start to realize that you have control over the choices you make, not because you’re weighing the pros and cons, but rather because you are choosing the path you want for yourself (big difference) - only then are you able to create new possibilities for yourself and your life!

I broke this very thing down in my Grow Your Life Podcast Episode #1 about Transforming Impossibilities Into Attainable Results

You can create new situations for you and your family. You can choose to break the mold and go outside of the box of what life tells you is possible for yourself.

It starts with a choice - not because one choice is better than another, but because you choose ‘This is the life I want for myself and my family’.