Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here — you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This is the second episode of our finance miniseries, and today Bjork is sitting down with Nate Coughran from Cookie Finance. Nate and Bjork will kick things off by talking about how setting up an LLC can protect your personal assets and reduce audit risk and how keeping separate bank accounts for your business makes tracking your money way easier and less stressful. When it comes to taxes, creators can claim unique deductions, but it’s important to find the right balance. Nate emphasizes staying on top of your bookkeeping throughout the year to avoid end-of-year stress. And if you’re making over $75k a year, you may want to consider hiring a professional to ensure your tax strategy is solid and you’re setting aside enough for taxes. It’s all about staying ahead and keeping things simple. We hope you’ve enjoyed this finance miniseries and that it’s helped you refine your tax strategy as we head into tax season. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Nate, welcome to the podcast.

Nate Coughran: Thank you. I appreciate you having me on.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be geeking out on one of my favorite topics. Now, Lindsay, my wife, Lindsay often rolls her eyes whenever I connect with somebody and if it all gets into the realm of taxes, bookkeeping, most people would be like, I’m done. I’m out. But for me it’s like now we’ve finally gotten to the thing that I enjoy talking about and that’s the world that you live in. It’s your day in and day out. But one of the great things about this conversation is not only do you have an expertise in, one of the things that I would make the case for is one of the most important elements of running a business is the books, the accounting, the numbers, kind of your dashboard, but you have a specialty within the creator world, which is a unique world to operate in because it’s not like a business like the sandwich shop in the building that we are here. It’s not like a business, like a widget factory. It’s a very different type of business. So how did you get into the world of creator businesses and doing the accounting and bookkeeping for those businesses?

Nate Coughran: I started my career working for one of the large accounting firms, spent the rest of my career working in finance and accounting, but really the idea behind Cookie Finance started a few years ago. I have two sister-in-laws who are content creators on Instagram and while on vacation they were lamenting about just how old school their local CPAs were, didn’t understand them at all, giving them not great advice. When I did my own research on TikTok, I was like, oh my gosh, there’s so much fraudulent advice out there on TikTok and just poor advice, and I didn’t see a good unified voice of here is a CPA, an accountant who understands creators, understands that blurred wine because with creators it’s just this blurred wine of business and personal and navigating around that.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, you think of even if you have a lifestyle blog, how messy that can be because it’s like what’s business and what’s just my life? And my guess is there’s some decisions you need to make where it’s maybe not clear and you have expertise in that. So curious on the two sides. One is the old school CPA who comes from very traditional and the other is the extreme of a TikTok influencer who has these opinions on how to do this accounting hack. Do you have an example or two from each end of the spectrum that you saw as advice that wasn’t great?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, both of these are now clients. One, she does a lot of affiliate marketing through Amazon, does clothing, that type of stuff, fashion, and her last CPA said, Hey, you can’t write off any of the clothing you’re buying because it’s personal use. She made $300,000 from affiliate links through Amazon through her fashion, and when she came to us, she said, here’s my tax return from last year. My CPA said I had $5,000 worth of write-offs. I’m like, what are you talking about? You make 300,000 from Amazon. I can guarantee you spent way more than 5,000 on clothing. No, she said, I couldn’t because it’s personal, whatever. We ended up finding tens of thousands of dollars worth of deductions that were rightly owed to her, got her back $14,000 in taxes that she overpaid in because her prior accountant refused to give her some of those, I don’t even want to call ’em personal. They really are business. The business would not exist.

Bjork Ostrom: She couldn’t have done it if she didn’t have the clothes or the pieces that she was reviewing and talking about. Sure.

Nate Coughran: Yeah. The other extreme, one of our clients on TikTok that he’s a younger one. Basically, if he went out and bought a brand new Porsche, he could just write it off a hundred percent as a marketing expense. So long as he put his logo on the side of the Porsche, it’d be a hundred percent marketing expense and fully deductible. So I had to walk him through that. That’s not exactly how it works in the world of accounting. He’s like, no, but this guy, he buys all these supercars all the time and he says it’s a hundred percent deductible. I’m like, yeah, and he’s also going to get audited and have a lot of penalties and everything else. We are really here. We try to be, we’re very much in the creator space. We only work with creators, so we’re very in tune with what’s standard, what’s normal. We have creators across every platform, every niche possible making 60,000 a year to millions a year. So we really lean on that experience to help our clients navigate those deductions.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, can you help people understand, I think when you are on the outside, when you’re just starting, you think, Hey, there’s these hard and fast rules. There’s these things that I need to understand and here’s where the line is and this person said this, so it’s really that’s how it is. But one of the things that I’ve started to learn is it’s almost like there are certain things that have to be interpreted. Can you talk about on your end how you go through the process of feeling confident, making a recommendation, and even the idea of taxed law and cases that go, it’s like the IRS versus somebody else, and how those inform certain decisions to get you to a point where you feel confident saying, Hey, we can point to this. Here’s the outcome of this case, so now we know, or here’s the documentation within the IRS code that tells us this is how we can treat this. What does that look like and how do you make decisions to allow you to feel confident in the case for fashion or in our world with food, if you buy a bunch of food for recipes, how do you feel confident knowing if you can deduct that or not? As it relates to IRS and the kind of ambiguous, it kind of feels like these people who might show up at your door with a suit like in matrix and chase you down, how do you make sense of that and feel confident making the recommendations?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, so the first thing I would just tell is that the tax code is actually very ambiguous. The last real true major overhaul to the tax code within 1986, arguably the best year, the year I was born is in 1986 that has the last major overhaul to the tax code, and they intentionally have to make the tax code fairly ambiguous. It has to apply to millions of businesses across industries and niches. And so a lot of it is truly up to interpretation, which can be really frustrating for someone that’s not comfortable in the world of taxes. But pretty much every business kind of rule is if you feel there’s a greater than 50% chance that if you were audited that you would win an argument. Almost every CPA would recommend you take it because a lot of it is up interpretation. I sad, but it’s reality. It’s also up to the interpretation of the IRS agent who is auditing. You can get two cases. It could be an individual, which is frustrating. So there’s actually not a ton of law cases you were talking about. One that doesn’t really apply here, it applies to some of our clients though, like certain plastic surgery, there’s case a lot around it of you cannot detect certain types of plastic surgery and it’s gone through the courts and everything else, but most of it’s a lot opportunity. So one thing I’ll share real quick, the framework we use, yeah, that’d be great for really all creators to use when they’re thinking about is business personal is if you think about your phone, we’ll say Apple or Google, they had to spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing the phone, all the research development, packaging, the advertising, all of it. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop that new phone. They then mark up and then sell to you for a profit, well creators, and that’s called the cost of goods sold. All those expenses are called the cost of good sold. So people can, anyone’s like, Hey, what are your cogs? You’re like, oh, I know what that is.

Bjork Ostrom: And literally to break that down, it’s like what is the cost of the thing that you are selling? And so for Apple, the cost is all of the material parts, but also the time of the team members that maybe are building the software, but of this analogy maybe just easiest to say like, Hey, the parts of the phone.

Nate Coughran: Yep, that’s exactly right. And so for creators, what creators are selling, they’re selling their brand, their reputation, the trust, their views. That’s what they’re selling when there’s a brand partnership and a brand’s willing to pay you $10,000 to have a post or whatever, they’re buying what you have with your community. And so that’s what you’re selling. You’re selling your brands, your community, that trust, that you’ve shared with your community. And so any of those costs that you spend to build content, to build that brand, to build that trust, to build that engagement, all of those things are deductible. So if you’re a food creator, you need to spend money on kitchen supplies, on nice pots and pans and things like that. I would never be, if any of the food creators use my pots and pans, they would be zero trust. Really that’s using,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a pancake with a little Teflon on it,

Nate Coughran: Back splashes. You need to make sure you have a nice backsplash. All those things that are helping you build that content and all of that, those are how you should think about what should be deductible for the business.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. In our case, speaking personally, it’s a little bit easier because we have an actual office that we come to and we have an actual kitchen studio, and so the line is pretty clear if we are having something shipped to the office or the kitchen studio, it’s like, man, that’s really easy to classify that as a business expense is if we have something that’s going to our home kitchen, it feels a little bit harder. What about for people who are just in a home kitchen, you are ordering a new set of pots and pans. When I think of that from a computer standpoint, I’m like, oh, you’re ordering a new computer that’s a business expense, pots and pans. It feels like, well, I don’t know, you’re maybe using it like 50–50 for home and then for business. So in a case like that, how do you make a decision as a creator? And I know we could go through the whole podcast, could be like, okay, how about when you get your nails done for a video? How about that one? That’s not the point here. It’s just maybe helping people understand conceptually how to make that. What is the framework for making the decision on is this deductible or not?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, I would say just a very quick framework to use would be would I just go out and buy this on my own if I were not making content? So would you go out and buy new pots and pans just on your own, or are you buying it because you want upgrade the look, the aesthetic, the quality, whatever it might be of your pots and pans that you’re using for your shoots? And if that’s the intent, then it’s a business expense. It might feel weird because you’re saying back to my fashion creator, it feels weird. Well, I also use these clothes on day to day, but identify those clothes. I couldn’t make the content that then makes me money. So it is the intent that this is used for business. If so, then it’s a hundred percent business, even if part of it is used for personal.

Bjork Ostrom: And I almost imagine taking the stand, not that you would do that, I’ve never even met anybody who had to do that, but could I go in front of a jury and my grandma and say, here’s why I made this business expense and feel confident in doing that. It almost for me, that helps me kind of think through, do I feel comfortable declaring this as a business expense? What about on the risk side of it? In making that decision, I think it’s helpful for people to understand what does that mean if you get audited, number one, the risk is something is flagged in your return and then you’re audited. Even within that though, I think part of what’s scary is the ambiguity of what does that even mean and what is the risk within it? And I think people might feel more comfortable taking some of those deductions if they understand what the risk inherent is in saying, I think this is a business expense or not a business expense.

Nate Coughran: Yeah, that’s a really great question actually. So lemme talk about audits in general, less than 1% of all tax returns are actually audited, and that’s a statistic that the IRS publishes and they actually break it down by income category. The more you make, the higher your audit risk is, but for most creators it’s 1% or less chance of getting audited. So that right there, it is a very helpful to know, very low chance that you’ll get audited. Now within that, most of those people who are getting audited, it’s because they have really big red flags. So a couple of big red flags would be auto deducting your car,

Bjork Ostrom: Like the Porsche example and not mileage to be clear, it’s like you bought a car and you’re deducting the car.

Nate Coughran: Yeah, no, that can be deductible. I’m not saying you can’t because a lot of our creators do, but it’s being smart about, it’s saying, yeah, I bought this new car, but only 50% of it’s actually legitimately business. The rest is personal. And it probably becomes easier if you have a catering business versus just at home as a creator if you have a need to move things back and forth and equipment or deliveries, things like that. Yeah. And if you have let’s say a hundred thousand dollars of income in 200,000 of expenses when there’s these really big weird things. But for the most part, last year we did hundreds of tax returns for our creators. None of them were audited And as long as you kind of stick that framework I talked about. But just to answer the other part of the question of what does it mean to get audited, just so people kind of understand that. So less than 1% actually do. The 1% who do get audited is usually some pretty big red flags in there, but most audits, the IRS will send you a letter and they’ll say, Hey, on your tax return you have a line item where you had $50,000 for contract labor. Can you just send a support to back up that 50,000? Usually it’s only one or two line items that they’ll call out. They don’t want every single receipt, they just want high level the big receipts and some explanations of what it was. We’ve had a couple of clients where that happened. They send a little bit of support, a quick letter to the IRS and the IRS is like, cool, we’re done. I don’t know the statistic, but it is so incredibly rare that the IRS actually goes in, opens up the can and is digging into every single expense. You need a receipt for every little thing. Where’s the receipt for this Chick-fil-A? That is so incredibly rare. The IRS is much more focused on people making tens of millions and billions of dollars. That’s who they’re focused on, not people at the lower end of that are like, did you take these Chick-fil-A fries home and feed them to your kids because we’re going to add a percentage back?

Bjork Ostrom: I didn’t even know that. I didn’t know that about the potential of even a phase one where they would say, can you give us a little information about this specifically? When I heard my vision of it was always, it just goes from zero to 100 and 100 is we’re going to dive deep and look at every line item within your business. So it’s helpful to know even that information to know that’s the most common scenario. And then in a very rare location, they would double click into all of it and open up and look line by line. So point being, it’s helpful for us to know as creators what we’re dealing with, and the intent isn’t to be, the intent is to thread the needle with being aggressive but not overly aggressive. Aggressive in the sense that you are taking the deductions you deserve within your business, but not overly aggressive where you get into considering taking things as business expenses that aren’t actually business expenses. Does that more or less define their filter?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It helps no one but the IRS to be too conservative. One of our clients, he made well over $500,000. He was a video game YouTuber and he was so scared to take any deductions in the end, the only one take $3,000 worth of deductions on, call it half a million dollars of income.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow.

Nate Coughran: And I’ll call him John. I’m like, John, you’re simply known to the IRS. The IRS is going to be like, sweet. That’s a lot of extra income. And there were so many things that we wrote out that were very legitimate, but he just was so scared to get a game console

Bjork Ostrom: TV, mic.

Nate Coughran: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Subscriptions

Nate Coughran: So anyway, so definitely don’t be so aggressive that you write up every penny of your income. Don’t be so conservative that you take nothing.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and you probably deal with people on both sides where you have to have the conversation with somebody who’s being too aggressive. You kind of alluded to that and somebody who’s not being aggressive enough and finding that middle ground, which is what you’re so good at and why people should work with professionals like yourself because you’ve seen a hundred different returns thousands over the years and you’ve developed good insight into where the best middle ground is. And so often that’s one of the many advantages we get with working with somebody who has multiple touchpoint, but not only multiple touchpoints with multiple clients. In your case, it’s multiple touch points with multiple clients who are all in the creator space, which is one of the great things and why it’s so fun to talk to you. So switching subjects, I’m going to talk about a few years ago when I went to the dentist, and I’ll bring it full circle here. So I went to the dentist, I had a cavity, I went in to get it filled and I was like, never again. It was so miserable and I’ve had cavities before that have been filled, but just in this moment that was the breaking point for me. And so I was like, what do I need to do to never have to get a cavity filled again? And granted, I probably will at some point, but this was my plan of action. I was like, okay, I’m going to take the little floss tooth, pick things, pick floss things, I’m going to put ’em in my car. And that way when I get in the car, it is going to be easier to just have that as a routine and something that I do and I’m going to have a nightly routine that I go through every night. I’m going to go flush, I’m going to brush, I’m going to gargle with Listerine, I’m going to do all of those things. And I really locked in my system and the next time I went, I didn’t have a cavity. It was a great outcome and it felt really good. A very similar thing happened with my end of the year taxes, and my guess is there a lot of people that are listening to this can relate where we came to the end of the year and it was like, I don’t know, this was years ago, eight, nine years ago, and it was so incredibly frustrating. I hadn’t sent out, it was the first time that we had to send out 10 90 nines and I didn’t really know what that was. So it was sending out last minute, 10 90 nines. It was getting last minute information on expenses and revenue and deductions. And it was so frustrating that I had this moment where I was like, never again am I going to come to the end of the year and feel stressed and rushed. And what I attempted to do, and I’ve been iterating on this ever since, is to set up a system that allows me to get to the end of the year when we have to submit our taxes and we always file for an extension, which maybe we can talk about,

Bjork Ostrom: To get to that point and to never have to feel stressed or frustrated or this is the worst thing ever. And the biggest thing that I learned from that was I need to be spreading this out throughout the year. And so when there’s a little bit of an increase in pressure when we’re coming up to the time to submit our taxes at the end of the year in October in our case, but not anything like what it was, and my guess is there’s people who are listening who are like, I can relate to that. Can you talk us through, for somebody who is experiencing that feeling, how do you go from, this is stressful, this is the worst part of the job. I don’t want to be involved with this to, I feel like not only am I not stressed, but this is something that’s actually additive to my business and a helpful thing. Now, what are the major structures and component parts that we need to build as creator businesses to have that feeling as it relates to our taxes and our bookkeeping?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, great question. And that’s what we see every day of people stress. One of our newer clients who signed up two weeks ago when I was talking to her on the phone, she was like, I actually stopped making content at the end of this year because I was so scared of how much money I was going to owe in taxes and not knowing what was going on. I just stopped making content because I didn’t want to have to deal with it. And I’m like, Oh man, that’s not good. And so I totally get that. There’s a few things that we tell freighters regardless of how much you’re making, whether you’re just starting out in your journey or you’re established and you’ve been doing this for years, there’s a few things that you should do and put in place that really sets you up nicely for the end of the year. The first one, this doesn’t have to necessarily do with income expenses, but get an LLC, please set up an LLC. Most states it’s between 150, $250 per year for the LLC. It’s going to protect you, your personal assets, it legitimizes your business, it actually lowers your audit risk. When it comes to the IRS, it’s just good practice to get. We can talk about that later if we have time, but I’ll put that to the side, but that’s always the first things we say. Get that LLC set up. It’s really easy to do. Now in terms of the finances piece of it, the very first thing get a separate bank account, whether it’s just if you’re at Chase and you open up just another personal chase checking account or whatever you want to do. It doesn’t have to be a business bank account. It can just be like another personal checking account. Get a separate checking account, have all of your income funnel into that checking account. If you use credit cards, have a credit card that’s dedicated to the business. If you have three credit cards already, you just say, Hey, this particular Visa, we’re only going to use business expenses on this one, right? It’s separating out the business and personal. Now it goes back to understanding what is and isn’t deductible. That’s kind of what we were talking about earlier, but if you can have a separate bank account, all of your income for your creator business is going into that one account, all of your expenses are going out of that account or from a credit card that’s dedicated. Then once you get to the end of the year, it’s a lot less daunting because probably what you experienced, everything was probably mixed if I had to guess. And then you had to go through thousands of transactions that were personal and business all mixed together and you’re like, wait, was this Amazon purchase? Was this, I don’t remember. If it’s a business purchase, then you’re digging through your Amazon account of like, oh yeah, I need to pull this one out. What about this? And you’re going to miss deductions. You’re going to spend days and days and days going through thousands of transactions, try to separate them all. Where if you have that dedicated account and you’re really diligent about using it just for business purposes, when you get to the end of the year, then everything’s there together. If you are working on a CPA, it’s easy enough to be like, here’s all my bank statements now. Go make it nice and pretty in Excel. For me, that’s level one. The next one would be,

Bjork Ostrom: And real quick on that, do you have a favorite bank? So one of the things that we just recently did is I’ll tell people as we talk through, because I think it’s interesting to hear what we do. We have a Wells Fargo bank for a parent company, which is tiny bit, but then all of the operating companies we have use Mercury, which is more of an online focus bank. I dunno if you’re familiar. My guess is you’ve seen a lot of ’em. We’ve really loved that as a solution. We’re mostly online with what we’re doing, and so it’s great. There’s some things that are downside, like you can’t go into a bank location, but generally we’ve really liked Mercury and then we also use Wells Fargo personally and then for our parent company TinyBit. So that’s been great solution for us. Do you have other banks that you have noticed as great banks to work with or maybe even business bank accounts that have been good?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, absolutely. So, the big ones for us, Chase is probably the number one recommended. They are probably the best business banking solution in personal bank. They’re great Wells Fargo and Capital One. Why we love those, they’re really easy, like the online portal, everything is really easy to get all your information. There’s branches all over the place. They’re big, they’re well established. There was a banking crisis a couple years ago. It kind of exposed

Bjork Ostrom: Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah, it was like a literal run on the bank. It’s a wonderful life.

Nate Coughran: That was pretty crazy, and that’s why we really recommend clients go to those. They’re well established. We’ve had hundreds of clients use them. Mercury is also a really great one. If you want pure online only, those are the four we recommend. Actually, it’s Chase, Wells, Fargo, Capital One, or Mercury. Mercury, if you want just online only.

Bjork Ostrom: Mercury, being one that’s newer, doesn’t have the deep roots that a chase would, as an example. Yeah.

Nate Coughran: Yep, exactly. The ones that we really encourage you to stay away from would be like a local credit union. I know it’s great to support your local community and it kills me to say, don’t do that. We’ve had just a lot of clients who use kind of local or smaller credit unions or banks have a really hard time connecting those banks to different applications like QuickBooks or Xero or something like that, getting payments from different platforms. They’ve sometimes been flagged as fraudulent just because they’re smaller banks, they’re not.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s the systems aren’t as established and connectability.

Nate Coughran: Yeah, that’s usually what we say stay away from. We kind of like those bigger banks or Mercury. Those would be our recommendations.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, that makes sense. And there’s probably one of the things I’ve come to learn over the last decade of doing business is banks have, there’s different specialties that they have, and you might find that you could have a small account at a credit union, not really actively using it, but maybe you go there for a loan or there’s different banks have different specialties and so options there, but it makes sense for what we do, which is online based business, a lot of transactions that are happening online, the need to connect things with a QuickBooks account or Xero, the importance of that connectability means that you probably are going to have a company that’s a little bit more established and have those systems in place. So we have the LLC, the limited liability company setting that up to protect yourself, but then also it allows you to get an EIN, which is kind of like a business social security number. You go out, you set up a separate bank account, doesn’t have to necessarily be a business bank account, but my guess is that would be ideal.

Nate Coughran: That’s right,

Bjork Ostrom: So you have this separate bank account. Let’s say it’s at Chase, and then what you do is you start to run all of your transactions that are business related through that using the filter of, Hey, is this something that I’m buying because of the business? Yes. Okay, let me grab, I have my wallet right here. I won’t expose any of the credit card information, but my top card is a personal credit card. My second card is my business card, and what I find is my little system here is I keep my personal card when I’m just at home moving around. If I go on a business trip, I flip these, so suddenly my business card is the front one, but just earlier today went out for a business related lunch, use a business card. So then I travel, I’m going to be using the business card in one password. We have our business card saved, and in Amazon we have a business card and we have a personal card. So you start to run those separately. You start to get a system around that. My guess is that gets you quite a bit in terms of for you on your end as the person who then receives the information to be able to sort through it. But let’s keep going. Let’s say you want to continue to have things be really tight. You’ve made those changes, you are running things really clean through the separate bank accounts. What do you do to continue to level up along the way?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, so I’ll show two options. The first one is DIY. I would say if you’re going to try to do it yourself, don’t sign up for a QuickBooks type of platform. Why I say that is those platforms are great. We personally use QuickBooks for all of our clients, but if you’ve never done bookkeeping, you’re not familiar with accounting, it’s really easy to get it set up, connect your accounts, and then mess things up. We’ve had just countless clients who try to do zero on their own or QuickBooks on their own. They double count income. One client overstated their income by tens of thousands of dollars. Perfect.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like the opposite of write off. It’s a write on. Yeah.

Nate Coughran: Yeah. Because X was classifying their credit card payments as income rather than an actual payment. So it was really easy to kind of mess it up. If you are going to do it yourself, we recommend just having a simple income and expense tracker. You just lay out your income and ideally once a month you go through that bank, your bank account, you pull out all the income, you list out the date, the sorts and the amount and a couple columns over for the expenses, the date, the description, and the amount. And each month you just kind of go through and put those in. That will make taxes a breeze at the end of the year. Right? That’s if you’re going to do it yourself, just use a Google sheet or an Excel spreadsheet and just do it that way. It doesn’t honestly make sense to set up QuickBooks or zero almost guarantee you’ll abandon it after a month and then you’ll forget about the subscription and then you’re just paying for nothing.

Bjork Ostrom: And the idea is basically that’s what you’re trying to do within QuickBooks anyways, which is create a list of expenses, a list of the income, and figure out at the end of that month how much did you make or lose, and then at the end of the year, how much did you make or lose?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, exactly. So we typically tell people, if you’re making less than 60, $70,000 a year from your content creation, just try to do it yourself, right? To your point LLC, the bank account, keep a clean separation and just try to do it on your own to save yourself some money. As you’re building your business, you want to spend your money on reinvesting in the business and growing and not necessarily on a service like Cookie or someone else, but where it starts to actually benefit you to work with a professional is once you’re past $75,000 a year or you’re on track to do that in a 12 month period to work with a professional who can one, keep track of all that income expenses for you two, be an advisor to you like a sounding board of, Hey, based on where you’re at right now, we see that you’re not deducting this. You haven’t been deducting your internet, your cell phone. What about you haven’t thought about a contribution to a retirement account that could lower your taxes or becoming an S corp, which we can talk about later. There’s just a bunch of different things you want to free up your time at that point to spend time on the content and not in the weeds trying to classify things. That’s where it can become a net positive, right? If your accountant can find more deductions for you, take time off your or give you more time and be able to find ways to be more efficient with your tax structure. But those are kind of the two ways of the next level to go to. Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. We know that developing testing and publishing a blog around food can get costly, which is where Cookie Finance comes in. Did you know you can write off ingredients like flour, butter and chocolate chips that you’re using to produce content? Cookie Finance specializes in helping content creators like you maximize tax savings while handling all your bookkeeping, quarterly tax payments and personal and business tax returns. Plus they’ll help you uncover deductions you might be overlooking, whether it’s kitchen tools, camera equipment, ingredients, or even your food blogger pro membership. So you never miss out on savings month to month plans with no long-term commitments. Cookie Finance makes managing your taxes and finances simple so that you can focus on what matters most, creating amazing content ready to start saving. Book a free consultation with Cookie Finance today by going to cookiefinance.co and clicking on the Book an Intro Call button. And that was kind of where I ended up when I went through that semi crisis of like never again. What I realized is we need to bring somebody in who I think of this concept of super router as we scale up what we are doing and try to do more, there needs to be more super routing that we do. Something comes in, we don’t try and figure it out. Accounting question comes in, I’m not pausing what I’m doing and spending 90 minutes trying to figure out the accounting. I reach out now we have a fractional CFO, I reach out to them or bookkeeper like Cookie Finance as an example for anybody listening, reach out to them and say, Hey, I’m trying to figure this out. Can you help me? It’s bringing in that expert and you become a router. You’re still getting it done in the sense that the task will be accomplished, but it’s you doing less of it. In order to do more of what you specialize in, you have to bridge that gap in order to justify the expense. To your point, 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, you’re starting to get to that point where maybe you can start to allocate some of this while still having a salary and routing that to the experts. So I love that idea. And the big unlock for us at that time was going from trying to figure out everything. At the end of the year even, we did have separate bank accounts, personal and business, but it was trying to figure it out all at the end of the year, two every month along the way saying, Hey, what did January look like? Let’s review the categorization of these expenses. Let’s make sure that this is accurate. Okay, great. Is January good? Let’s close that up. Then we go on to the next month. And what happened was, and I was thinking about this, it started to develop into, we now have a dashboard, and I was thinking about this idea, if you have a car and you’re sold a car and it didn’t have a dashboard on it, you can’t see how fast you’re going, what the RPM is. You could still drive it, but you’d be at risk. And I think there’s a very similar analogy that can be drawn to running a business where your dashboard is, and it is your books, it’s the numbers, it’s the revenue, it’s the expenses, it’s what’s happening on a month to month basis. You can run your business without that, but there’s a lot of risk that’s inherent in that process. And so to the degree that we can develop this dashboard alongside somebody who has expertise in doing that, I think what happens is you start to understand the mechanics of your business more. Hey, actually why am I paying more in software now than I did last year? And at this point I’ve started developing, even just today, I did this and I’d be interested in you seeing if you have any ideas for adding to this developed a little system where we get the books now every month, and one of the things I’m doing is comparing this month to last month within QuickBooks, and then I’ll go and I’ll compare this month to this month last year, so I can see how did that change from last year? And then I’ll compare the last year to the last year before that. And so you can start to see, okay, they called the trailing 12 months, so if this is January, it’d be January, December of 24 compared to January, December of 23. And what you’re doing is you’re starting to understand how your business is moving and what impact it has, and also seeing similar to the dashboard on the car, wait, the red light is on. Why is that light on? I need to get that addressed. So let’s say somebody goes through these processes, they establish the LLC, they separate their bank accounts, they start to split out expenses in a really good way. They get to the point where they’re either DIYing it or let’s say they’ve gotten to the point where they can justify it. They work with Cookie, they do those, the bookkeeping of their expenses, and they have a good understanding each month. Once you start to get that information as a business owner, how do you then start to use it proactively? I think that’s where it gets really exciting.

Nate Coughran: Yeah. I’ll use two recent examples because I really like these and it probably makes sense for anyone listening. The first one was one of our creators on Instagram, and she, last year she did about 350,000. And her question to me was, I’m completely maxed out. I’m thinking about hiring a virtual assistant, but I just don’t think it makes sense and I’ll call her Sarah for generic reasons. And I was like, alright, Sarah, you made 350,000 with all your other expenses we’re going to take out, not include wages. You spent $50,000, so $300,000 net, how much would you pay this virtual assistant? It was like $20 an hour for 20 hours a week, whatever. We went through all the math, you kind of wind it up against your other expenses. I’m like, okay, but how much more time, if you had 20 extra hours each week to produce content, how much more money could you be making? It’s like, oh, well, I could probably easily make another 50,000. I’m like, okay, so you’re going to pay virtual assistant, call it 15, 20,000, but you can make an extra 50, 60,000. It’s like, oh, oh, right, right. Okay. That starts to make sense and the business can actually support it and you can see, and you’re not shooting the dark. That example of a dashboard, it’s not like, well, I don’t know if the business can support it, are redlining right now with the RPMs. Another good example is one of our creators, she, she’s really active with ads on Instagram. She’s a home decor before coming on board, it is all DIY. Had no dashboard, had no idea what was going on. And before she signed up, her very first question was, I’m running all these ads, but does it actually make sense to running all of these ads? And first we had to get in QuickBooks, we had to clean up all of her financials, get all the information, but then once we had the information, I’ll call her Jane. It’s like, Jane, for every dollar you spent on advertising, you increase revenue by $3.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, do that all day long.

Nate Coughran: Yeah. Where suddenly with that framework, she supercharged her ad spend and she went from doing 3 5400 in revenue last year or the year before. In this last year, she’ll do over a million. With that understanding of confidence.

Nate Coughran: That is a good decision. So much just this gut feel of it feels like it helps, but now you actually have the numbers and dashboard to back it up.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, and I think that’s a perfect example of once you have that information, you can make a confident decision whether it be on, Hey, I’m going to bring somebody in. I think that will either, and I think either a case could be made for either of these, this is going to increase my revenue or maybe it might not increase my revenue, it’ll just give me back a bunch of time. And I know that when I look, I have enough money to cover this and it’s worth it for me to spend this money to get 10 hours back so I can sustain myself as a creator and not burn out. Because that’s also important is that maybe it’s not that you are buying additional revenue, but you’re just buying peace of mind or headspace or lower stress. But all of that is aided by having that dashboard that you can look at. Do you recomme, what do you recommend in terms of frequency and even, I know this sounds so basic, but how do you do it? So somebody sends you, you’re working with Cookie Finance, they send, Hey, here’s what it looks like, and maybe you can talk about just the difference between accounting and bookkeeping real quick. Can you talk about that to separate the two of those and maybe how those interplay before we talk more about it?

Nate Coughran: For most intents and purposes for what we’re talking about, we’ll use accounting and bookkeeping interchangeably. It’s accounting, bookkeeping. It is making sure you’re categorizing all the income expenses and that you have a really good clear picture of your financial health. You get a profit and lot statement. You have a really good understanding of the numbers behind your business. So bookkeeping is just the process of on a monthly basis, going through categorizing all the income expenses, putting in the right categories, make sure you are capturing every deduction. That’s what bookkeeping’s role is. And then taxes that role is then to, on a quarterly basis, make sure you’re paying as much as you should be in quarterly taxes throughout the year. It’s learn that tax liability, tax planning, tax strategies, and that’s why where taxes come in, where bookkeeping wouldn’t. So it is a common question we get of should I hire a bookkeeper or a tax person? The first step is usually the tax person, but ideally it’s combined that way you’re not going to two different people, but a tax person typically won’t do the bookkeeping and bookkeepers won’t do the taxes. So ideally they’re combined into one place, you’re not going to multiple different places.

Bjork Ostrom: And idea being that really good books help inform the taxes. And so in our story, it was the tight bookkeeping that made taxes easier. But to your point, you’re always going to have to pay taxes, and so that will have to get figured out. But whether it’s DIY bookkeeping, like we talked about spreadsheet expenses and income, or at some point bringing somebody in who can do that, they say, okay, I see these transactions, I’m going to categorize them for you. That could be the bookkeeper accounting, it seems like almost would be then the next level above that, which could give you advice to say, Hey, have you considered this or this? Maybe you get some of that from bookkeeping as well, but a little bit more of the expertise around that. And then obviously taxes being kind of the event of paying those quarterly or yearly. So that makes sense. So going back to the question, let’s say you get January wraps up, you get books sent to you books. What do you do with that? How do you use that asset wisely as a business owner to help inform decisions to help learn? What would you advise people do with it?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, there’s a couple different levels. The first one is triage. Do you have enough money to actually pay your rent to cover those basic living expenses after all the expenses you spent on the business at the end of the month, how much is the leftover for you taking into consideration taxes? That’s something that we see time and time again. People don’t set aside money for taxes and they get to the end of the year and they get hit with the tax bills. It’s like, oh no, I don’t have the money. I spent all of this. So it is at the end of the month being like, okay, this is how much is left at the end of the month and you set aside X amount towards taxes and this is truly what I have to live on. It’s like the level one is those good clean financials help you make those decisions of, okay, I can cover my basic living expenses. And for a lot of creators at that basic level, it’s when am I making enough that I can quit my full-time job into this? That’s probably the first big thing that these financials help you understand is when does it make sense? I can quit my full-time job and this can cover it. If you’re shooting in the dark and it’s all mixed together, you have no sense. It’s like, I don’t know. You’re never going to be able to make that decision confidently without having, and we’ve helped many clients make that leap. We didn’t make it for them, but because they had the information, they felt confident leaving their full-time job, then it can start to go up from there of set aside money for retirement and actually taking that money and being able to invest it. It’s understanding how much is luck over what can you be doing with that money to now grow it? What can you do with that money to then grow the business? And that’s where we can give general advice, but a lot of times it’s creator, creator specific of, oh, actually I do have enough money to do this renovation to my kitchen, and I really do think that could help with X. Right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Nate Coughran: So it’s once again, going back to having that confidence and ability to know of what can you spend money on, can’t you, where do you need to tighten things up? Where can you be a little bit looser? Where can you invest your money, whether it’s full investments or to your own company? And then it can go much, much deeper and cooler analytics from there. But those are the foundational ones that usually people start with.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And one of the things that gets really fun, we could do an entire additional podcast on this, is when you get to that point where we talk a lot about making the transition from having a full-time W2 contractor job, and if your desire is to transition into being a full-time creator, it’s not the desire for everybody, but if that is your desire, how do you feel confident doing that? What does that look like? And then let’s say you continue to grow and build. How can you be strategic and smart about the additional income? Let’s say you surpass the income that you need to survive day to day, then what do you do with that additional income that is the best use of it? And like you said, it might be a home kitchen remodel, but it also might be investing into a food brand that is adjacent to your business, and then you become an advocate of that business and it helps it grow and the value of that grows. And so there’s a lot of really fun opportunities there in addition to just all of the 401k, all of these options that you can have another podcast for that. But one of the things that I think is important to talk about that you touched on just briefly, we’ve talked about on the podcast before, but I always feel like it’s important to mention is this idea of, so we talked about LLC and then we also talked about an S corp. That’s kind of confusing because an LLC can also have an S election. But talk to us about how all of that plays together and at what point should you at least start to learn about it or at least reach out to your accountant or CPA to say, Hey, should I be thinking about having an S selection or having this be an S corp?

Nate Coughran: Yeah, great. So at the simplest level, everyone should become an LLC. There’s no downfalls being an LLC beyond the couple hundred bucks. You need to pay each year to maintain that with the state. But LLCs are great when you become an S corp, and I’ll tell you about what that means in a second. You’ll always remain an LLC, so it’s not do I be an LLC or an S corp, everyone becomes an LLC. And then with that LLC, you can then kind of add on the S corp on top of that. And the big benefit of being an S Corp is saving what’s called on self-employment taxes. So as just a sole proprietor, if you have nothing or you have an LLC, the biggest tax you pay is the self-employment tax. It’s 15.4% that’s on top of your federal taxes and state taxes. That’s the one that people are shocked with. They’re not prepared. I talked with a new client recently and she’s like, my last CPA did my taxes so wrong. It was like I put all my income in the online calculator, it said X, I got my tax return and it was like $15,000 more than what that calculator said. And it’s because she was freaking about the self-employment tax. It’s probably the first time you’re filing taxes, whether you’re making a little or a lot as a creator, that’s going to be the big shock is that self-employment tax. So the idea is, and what the self-employment tax is, it’s social security and Medicare. If you work a normal W2 job out of every paycheck, you have social security and Medicare being taken out of every paycheck. It’s 7.65% of everything you make. What most people don’t realize is that your employer is also paying 7.65% in social security Medicare for you as well. So you combine those together, it’s 15.3%. So when you are self-employed, like are as a creator, you are both the employee and the employer. So you’ve made both halves of social security, Medicare, and that’s where you get that 15.3%. So as just a normal sole proprietor or LLC, you owe that 15.3%. It’s a gut punch and a lot of people aren’t prepared for that one

Bjork Ostrom: And to draw out from the meaning, so it’s tax. So who employs you yourself. So I think it’s helpful for us to understand that. And even within your tax returns, my understanding is if you just have an LLC, you don’t have an S selection or you don’t have an LLC and you just report it as income, like sole proprietor income, you just have one tax return because you are employed by yourself, so you don’t need a separate tax return because it’s just you, but then you’re taxed more on it that 15.4%.

Nate Coughran: Yep, that’s exactly right on top of all the other taxes you owe. That’s exactly right. It’s a great way to explain it. And so without getting too much into details, the S-Corp election essentially allows you to avoid paying up to half of those self-employment taxes. So if you are earning gross before all your expenses, if you’re earning call it $125,000 a year, the S-Corp election could easily save you 10 to $12,000 by having that election. It’s a massive, massive tax savings, but it does come with additional kind of compliance. One thing is you do have to file a separate tax return. You don’t pay additional taxes. It’s just kind of like an informational return you have to do each year. So you have to file a separate tax return. You do need to set up a legitimate payroll. We typically recommend Gusto. You need to put yourself as a W2 employee. There’s different things you have to register with the IRS. There’s different things you have to do that you definitely should work with a professional at that point. And so typically we say once you’re making consistently above 10 to $12,000 a month, call it a hundred, $120,000 a year, or you’re on track to make that in a year, it makes sense to make that election flip over to an S corp and start the process. Because even if throughout the year you paid an accountant $4,000, whatever it might be, you’re going to save significantly more than that in taxes by having that election, getting all those benefits of it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s that transition from you were self-employed, you were employed by yourself, you have this additional self-employment tax. Two, you’re no longer self-employed, employed by this. You’re a different entity. It’s a business that’s who’s employing you now, which means you have to be getting a salary from that company. So they’re paying you a salary and you also have to do a return for it because that’s a separate thing. But what it does is we don’t have to go into the weeds of why, I don’t know, but another podcast, maybe a deep dive on the reason behind the S-Corp, but tax law is written such that you get to eliminate that self-employment tax if you have that S-Corp. And so at that point, I like that. I like the a hundred thousand mark or 10,000 if you look at it on a monthly basis, or if you look at it on a yearly basis, a hundred thousand or 120,000 as a really clean marker of when you would make that transition. And to your point, that’s when you’d really need to make sure that you’re working with somebody who gets it, who understands it, who’s a professional, and can help you move forward with it.

Nate Coughran: Really easy to mess it up totally.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and with all of this, that’s my feeling is like the cost that you are paying, not only is freeing up your time, not only is it getting you expert advice, insight, additional information, but it’s also a security against making an error, which I feel like The more that you do it, the less prone you are to having that. You have those reps, you have that experience for somebody who’s doing it for the first time, it’s almost like a guarantee that you’ll have a hiccup somewhere along the way. So that’s actually a great transition, Nate, into talking about cookie finance, what you guys do and the way that you can partner with creators. Everybody who listens to this in some form or fashion, or a lot of people, I should say. I got a message from somebody in the management company that we work with for commercial real estate, and she’s like, I just started listening to the podcast. So I’ll say vast majority of people who listen to the podcast are creators. They have creator businesses, and Cookie Finance is such a great solution for these people. If they’re looking to level up what they’re doing with their bookkeeping, accounting, and taxes, that’s all stuff that you do. So if people are interested in exploring that, what’s best path for them to follow?

Nate Coughran: So our business really takes care of everything. We’re helping you form your LLC, we’re making an S-Corp collection for you. If it makes sense. We get your QuickBooks set up, we’re organizing your financials. Even if in 2025 and you’re like, oh man, I have all my stuff from 2024, we’re here to get everything organized for 2024. It gets you all caught up and cleaned up and organized. That’s what our team does, helping you with your quarterly taxes, tech planning strategy, all of that. So the best way on our website is just cookiefinance.co. annoyingly, .com was taken.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. Probably makes it more memorable though. That’s the thing, because you’ll always mention it’s do co and then everybody’s like, okay, they’ll make a mental note of it.

Nate Coughran: Yeah, that’s right. So cookiefinance.co. If you reach out, schedule time, even if you’re like, Hey, I don’t know if it makes sense, we’re more than happy to do free consultation. You can poke a time directly on our website, pretty much same day, get in contact with a member of our team and we can consult with you, talk with you about does it make sense to become an scorp, talk to you about deductions, walk you through anything, and there’s no obligation you can do that, and we’d be happy to chat with you.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. It’s a huge advantage for creators to have somebody like Cookie Finance in their corner. And like I said, the more that you can focus on your expertise, your specialty as a creator, and become a router in ways in departments that you don’t want to spend a lot of time with, I think those are the ways that you win long-term is bringing those people into your team. So we’ll make sure to link to that cookiefinance.co in the show notes, and we’ll have to have you on again, Nate, to have a conversation. There’s a ton of opportunities here and I know people want to figure out how to do it well and also want to figure out how to not have to do it themselves, and you can help them with both of that. So thanks so much for coming on.

Nate Coughran: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro forum. In case you didn’t know how it works, if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself. And on the forum, we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a Building Traffic section, a Photography section. We have an Essential Tools section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This week we’re going to be kicking off our four-part finance miniseries, where we’re going to be chatting all about the finance side of food, bogging, things like investing in your business taxes, how to negotiate brand partnerships, bookkeeping, and lots more. In this first episode in the series, we are chatting with Megan Porta. You might recognize her because she’s the host of the Eat Bog Talk podcast, and chances are if you listen to this podcast, you likely also listen to hers. Megan has also been a food blogger herself for over 14 years at Pip and Ebby, so she knows a lot about balancing her time between all of her areas of focus. In this interview, Bjork and Megan chat about how to approach investing as an entrepreneur.

Megan shares her strategies for making decisions about investments, how to invest in yourself, how to invest in your business, especially in the early days when you don’t have money to invest, and how these investments can help you overcome plateaus and avoid burnout. Megan also walks us through how she makes decisions about where she is going to invest her money in her business, including time tracking and reflecting on the pain points within your business. As we kick off a new year, this is a great episode to help you think about goals and vision for your business in the coming years. So without further ado, I’m going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Megan, welcome to the podcast.

Megan Porta: So happy to be here. Such an honor. Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you’re on the other side. You’re usually the one kind of queuing people up, asking the questions because you have a podcast. Many of the listeners on this podcast I’m sure are familiar with your podcast, but for those who aren’t, can you talk a little bit about it and how that got started?

Megan Porta: Yeah, it’s called Eat Blog Talk. It’s I think very similar audience to Food Blogger Pro, just any scope of food bloggers or entrepreneurs, bloggers of any sort, looking to gain relevant information about blogging and mindset and how to tackle this crazy world of food blogging.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it really is. Especially, I mean, you could maybe say this in any year, but I feel like especially in the last year, you felt that there’s just so much happening in the world of content creation, and then when you niche down in the world of food content creation, there’s a lot happening, and yet there’s still a lot of opportunity moving forward. We’re going to be talking about that specifically as we talk about in this series, the idea of finances and within finances, there’s this idea of investing, and we’re going to be talking about today, investing in your business, investing in yourself, and why that can be one of the best returns that you can have on an investment. But before we do that, I want to also talk about, so you have your podcast. You are also a content creator, is that right?

Megan Porta: Correct. I’ve been a food blogger for 14 years now. So yeah, an og. I just started a niche site as well. Oh my gosh. It’s not easy to grow a new site, but yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So this is recently you started a new

Megan Porta: Site. Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that in so far as you’re willing to share what that is? Yeah, of course.

Megan Porta: Yeah, it’s a breakfast site, so I am honestly kind of burned out on my initial blog, which is just kind of overarching comfort food. I got tired of making mac and cheese all the time and chili and all of that, so I was like, I do love making breakfasts for my boys. They’re both teenagers. So I thought I would combine that with a new blog. So I’ve just been chipping away at it for a little over a year. It’s called Easy Breakfast Ideas 101. I have no expectations, honestly, which feels kind of good. It’s taken the pressure off, but it’s just been fun. I’ve enjoyed it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So what does that look like for you as you look at those three buckets? So you have Eat Blog Talk, you have the site that you started years ago, and then you have this new one. How do you make decisions? Maybe this can actually be our entry into that conversation around investments. One of the ways that we think about investing is investing our time. How do you think about that across all three brands or areas of focus?

Megan Porta: It is hard, I’ll be honest with you. It takes a lot of intentionality, planning, forethought. I mean, I really do think out my time ahead of time always. I do a lot of batching, so I do, one day is podcast day. I’ll do one day of one blog and then another day, another blog, and I just have to stick to my schedule, otherwise it throws everything off and I have to just hustle to get back to square one. So yeah, a lot of intentionality and consistency.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a fitness guy that I follow and sends out an email, and one of the things he talked about today was this idea of boring being something that you have to accept in service of an outcome. And a lot of times I think people don’t understand actually how boring or repetitive certain things can be, whether it be creating content for a blog, for social media, doing a podcast. The conversations are always interesting and engaging in the world of podcasting, but it’s like the actual process of doing a lot of this stuff can be repetitive. It can repetitive be boring.

Megan Porta: I was just going to say that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. But the end result a lot of times is something really magnificent, and I find that to be true in the world of investing as well. A lot of times it’s a long period of time doing a similar positive behavior, and you could look at that with investing in real estate, investing in the stock market, but especially with investing in yourself or investing in your own business. But it can be hard in the beginning stages because it feels like there’s a little bit of risk involved or a lot of risk, even if it’s just your time you’re investing, it feels like, man, there might not be a return on this. I might not get what I want out of it, but especially if it’s money you’re investing, maybe it’s hundreds or thousands of dollars and you don’t know if you’re going to get a return on it. So as we talk about this world of finance, as we talk about investing, it feels like one of the first things that we need to address is this idea of mindset and how you even go about making decisions around investing in yourself. So based on the conversations you’ve had with hundreds of publishers, business owners, entrepreneurs, but also your own experience, how do you get into the right mindset when it comes to investing in yourself or your own business?

Megan Porta: I think looking at the people around you. So if you have a supportive network of peers, you start to see that the really successful ones are investing in themselves, especially if you follow people like Tony Robbins, like the big time entrepreneurs who make millions of dollars and who are hugely successful. I always like to think, are they investing in themselves? Of course they are. And not just that big of scope, but just people in our field, in our mastermind groups, in our Facebook groups, are they investing in themselves? And you start to see how that is paying off for them and their businesses. I think that is really important because that will give you confidence to do it yourself. And then once you take the leap and you start making those investments and they do start paying off, you see that it’s worthwhile. It builds your confidence, and you do get returns on those investments. And I think then you just kind of get the bug and you start doing it more and more and you see that, oh, it really can pay off to invest in your business and yourself.

Bjork Ostrom: So you had talked about a couple different examples of what that might look like, and I think of Warren Buffet often talks about that the best investment you can make is the investment in yourself. The example that he gives often is this idea of he was afraid of public speaking, and so he did I think Toastmaster or something like that where he got out of his comfort zone invested in himself, and how that’s paid dividends probably literally and figuratively over time for him. What does it actually look like? What are some examples for somebody who is a blogger, a publisher, a creator online who wants to invest in themselves, let’s say they’re in the early stages, they haven’t done that yet. What are some of the ways that you can actually do that? What does that look like?

Megan Porta: I think if you just look at your week and pinpoint the pain points, so what is causing you issues? Are you having issues with your web host? Does your website keep going down? Are you having issues with getting your emails out? Find that pain point or that struggle that’s happening now this week and start there and figure out a solution that you can invest in that’s going to solve that pain point. And I think starting there is such a good way to think about it because we all have pain points. There’s so much going on in our businesses and in our lives. So just finding that main thing and finding a solution for it because there’s really a solution, an investment solution for just about every pain point we encounter.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you have an example of a way that you’ve done that within your own business? I think, and I can share one too, I think it’s always so helpful to hear what that looks like for people who have gone through it before. So what does that look

Megan Porta: Like? You? Oh gosh. I mean, I have so many. Just three weeks ago, I was just so overwhelmed by my inbox, my a blog talk inbox just wanted to devour me every day,

And I had been feeling this pain for months. I was thinking about it on the weekends at nights. It was just ridiculous. So I thought maybe I could just have my assistant start combing through my emails and we can make it a process and see if this works, because I’ve always felt like I need to be the one in my inbox. Nobody else can do it. So we just did kind of an experiment, and it’s been three weeks now. It has been a process, but we’ve gotten to the point where it’s actually working and I’m not waking up on Monday morning, dreading my inbox. So yeah, that is just one little example that I have recently. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about specifically what you’ve learned in that process? I think a lot of people can relate with the inbox nightmares,

Megan Porta: Just letting go of control. I think that need to see everything. I don’t need to see everything. So giving control over to somebody else, trusting her to take care of it, just trusting the process, having faith that nothing is going to explode, no one’s going to get mad. That’s been probably my main takeaways from this whole thing.

Bjork Ostrom: I remember Dan Martel, who is a SaaS soft word. Yeah,

Megan Porta: I just read one of his books.

Bjork Ostrom: Buy Back Your Time, was it? Yeah. So I have a friend, a close friend who went through his program and on the first session, this is a great example of my friend Kevin, who now runs, it’s almost like a private equity firm where they buy software companies. It’s called Big Band Software. So they do great work, but he was going through Dan Martel’s Academy or whatever it is, I don’t know what they call it, but in the first session, Dan said, if you don’t have an assistant right now, raise your hand. And so half the people raised their hand and he said, if you don’t have an assistant, I don’t know what the time was. It was like, by the next time we get on a call, which is in two weeks, you can no longer be a part of this program. That’s how important it was

That how important he thought it was for the success of an entrepreneur as an example of investing in yourself. And what that does. And he’ll say, this is, and he says this in the book too, it’s not so then you can go sip my ties on the beach. So you can do a thing that is more valuable, that’s why you’re doing it. And so one of the things as entrepreneurs, and one of the ways that we can invest in ourselves is always look to level up our time and the return that we have on the time that we are spending. And the example of email I can really relate to that. It’s like, man, it’s really easy to spend a lot of time. For me, it’s like forwarding email to the receipts inbox that comes in for an Amazon purchase. And it’s like, I do that. I probably shouldn’t be doing that

If I was doing something else like another podcast interview that would be more valuable to put out into the world. And the problem set for me though, is a little bit different. It’s just a matter of me committing to it, creating a process around it, creating a system for it, because technically I can afford to do that. That’s not an issue. And I know that if I do it, I’m going to find something that’s more valuable. But what about for somebody who’s in the early stages and maybe they’re earning $500 a month, a thousand dollars a month, or no money for that person, what advice would you give them when they start to think about investing in their business when maybe they don’t know if that money’s going to come back or if there’s going to be a return on it versus somebody who’s earning 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 from their business a month and they know they should do it, and it’s just a matter of like, ah, I just haven’t gotten to it yet, and it’s their own hurdle that they haven’t jumped, but speak to the person who’s in the early stages that is hesitant to spend the money.

Megan Porta: And I get it because I’ve been there and it’s really hard to let go of your hard-earned money, not having a guarantee that it’s going to come back to you in some way. But I think this is where a trusted network of people comes in and is super handy. So if you can kind of ask around, ask your trusted peers what they’ve invested in, what has been worthwhile, and again, going back to that pain point, what are your pain points? I think web hosting is something that a lot of people skimp on. I know I did in the beginning and I had so many issues that, my gosh, I caused so much gray hair and just so much stress in my life for a while. So I think that’s one of the first things. I would recommend newer bloggers who are making $500 a month to consider investing in a really good quality web host and ask around, ask your peers who they use, ask if they have downtime on their blogs and all of those relevant questions. And then, yeah, I just think thinking about things like that, like your blog and then what else is causing you pain and

Staying within your budget, obviously and leaning on your community.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. The community piece I think is really great. And then also the self-reflection around, and it’s going to be different for everybody, but what is the thing that is the two analogies that I use, one is activity monitor. So if anybody uses a Apple computer on Mac Os, there’s this thing called activity monitor where this doesn’t happen a lot anymore with new computers, but if the fans are running super hot, you’d pull up activity monitor and you could see, oh my gosh, whatever program is taking up 110% of the memory. And so you force quit that program and then the fans cool down, and then it’s this stacked order of all the programs that are taking up more for us right now, it’d be Chrome, we’re on Riverside, we’re recording this podcast. That would be taking up a lot of the memory. But in our own world, we have those things, those programs that run super hot

And I think sometimes we don’t even notice ’em. But what you’re saying is take time to pause to reflect. It’s almost like mindfulness, like being observant of your own thoughts and saying, what are the things that are running really hot right now that are taking up a lot of figurative, but also literal memory right now? And then step two, what you’re saying is use your network. It’d be Google Plus people use those resources to identify a solution to that thing that is taking up a lot of memory and figure out a way to reduce the amount of resources that is consuming for you. The example being inbox, the second analogy that I think of is I had an operations class years ago when I was in college and they talked about this stream and they talked about the goal within logistics. It was like logistics and operations is in the stream. You’re trying to identify the boulder that is sticking out and you remove it and then the stream goes down a little bit and then you see the other rocks and then you remove those and the goal is to get the stream down to a trickle. So it’s just pebbles, it’s little things, but those rocks in those boulders are the things that we should focus on first. We get those out of the way. So the stream goes down, you identify some other ones, it goes down even more.

I’d have to look at that again because to me, the weird thing within it is like what’s the purpose of a stream going down the trickle? I don’t know if the goal is to get it to not be a stream, but that self reflection around what is the pain point for me? And then actively trying to solve for that. So what does that look like in terms of making that a priority? Because in your example, there’s the email inbox, and I think sometimes what can happen is we can think I will solve long-term this problem once I short-term get my inbox figured out. But I think what has to happen is that has to happen before when you’re in the middle of it. So how do you know when you’re ready to make that investment, whether financially you could maybe talk about that, but also how do you prioritize it from a time perspective?

Megan Porta: Yeah, I think financially, I mean that’s just a matter of knowing what your budget is, knowing what’s coming in, knowing what’s going out and making reasonable decisions. But I think if from a time perspective and a pain perspective, if something is painful enough, you are going to want to find a solution for it. And then I wanted to touch on one thing you were talking about. If you don’t know what you need to invest in or maybe what your pain points even are, a really good way to figure that out is to do time tracking. So track your time for a week, everything you do in your business, write it down. And then you can go back retroactively and just say, oh my gosh, I spent 19 hours this week in email or whatever. And then you can pinpoint and pull out what is causing you stress to work way more than you should be working, et cetera.

But to answer your question, I think the pain, just what is causing you the most stress, if it is stressful enough, you are going to want to find a solution for it. I see that all the time in just talking to a lot of food bloggers. I hear like, oh, I don’t know what to do. My welcome. I’m stressed about it, my welcome series. I don’t know what to write. I stayed up all night thinking about it. I’m like, well, that’s a cue that you should probably sit down and figure that out. So just being in tune with your thoughts and what’s keeping you up at night too. I know I can stay up at night thinking about random things. So take note of those things.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How about when you think of people who are not so people who are doing this, you gave that example, and I think it’s important to point out as a North Star, and a lot of times it’s people who are constantly thinking of investing as a way to level up. It’s hiring a coach to help them figure out how to be more productive or somebody to help teach them photography or video or whatever it might be in our world, an example is my friend Tony Ruly, who’s been on the podcast before. He knows Facebook advertising really well. We recently hired him to come in because we didn’t want to figure out Facebook ads for clarity. That’s not something that our team was good at. We don’t have experience with it. So we knew that it was going to be better to bring Tony in to help than it was for us to figure out how to do it on our own.

And even you’re talking about this, I think of Nathan Barry, the CEO of ConvertKit now Kit, and I was at a meetup a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about working with somebody to help them figure a thing out. I don’t remember specifically what it was, but the thought that I had was I looked back and I was like, this is somebody who has over a decade consistently brought in smart, capable people alongside him and his team. And the result of that is a multi-hundred million dollar business that has been created, not just because of that, but that being one of the reasons why it is so successful is strategic partnerships and advisory and bringing people in. But how about on the other side of it? What if you aren’t investing, and what if you don’t take the time or invest financially in yourself and in your business? What do you think that result is or what happens there? Well,

Megan Porta: I can speak to this firsthand because I have been there. I avoided investing for the first handful of years that I ran my food blog. I just thought I could do it on my own. I thought I would be fine. I’m smart, I can figure this out. But that led to, for me, it was a huge plateau where I just wasn’t growing and it was so frustrating. It was that spinning wheels hamster on the wheel syndrome that just like, why aren’t I getting anywhere? I’m doing the right things I think, and you just don’t know why you’re not growing, but you’re not. So I think that is probably the first thing that food bloggers can encounter. And then if you let that go on long enough, I think that can lead to burnout, which is also something that I’ve experienced quite a bit. And it’s horrible. And yeah, I don’t recommend that for anyone. And if you let that go on, you can quit. I’ve seen this happen multiple times. I’m sure you have as well. Bjork people get so burnt out and tired of just not investing in themselves, not investing in their businesses, not getting anywhere. So they’re just done and they sell their blog to prematurely or they just leave the business altogether. So those three things, plateau, burnout, quitting, are kind of what’s in store. I think if you don’t invest in your business and in yourself,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it buy back your time is such a great book to pair with this conversation because so much of that book is about investing in yourself and investing in your business in service of not only growing, but also in service of the work that you’re doing, being more enjoyable, being a better fit. And you talked about this showing up on Monday and not dreading it. We have our own businesses and we have the ability to control to some degree, not entirely, but to some degree control what it is that we’re doing and how we’re operating within those businesses. When you think back to reading through that book, were there takeaways that you had that you were able to implement or even concepts or frameworks that you think about within your day-to-day as an entrepreneur?

Megan Porta: Yeah, just what you said. And I actually think I got the email idea from that book where he was talking about the assistant. I already had an assistant, but you should be hiring out your inbox. It’s something that you just don’t need to do. So I’ve been thinking since I read it just about all of those things in my business that I don’t need to do that I don’t want to do, that I don’t need to do. And I’ve just been taking mental note of those because I don’t like to try to take care of every problem at once. I try to do one thing at a time so that we can take care of it really well. So the email, I want to get a handle on that, but then I have other things that I don’t really care for, I’m not probably the best at. So chipping away at those things. I think that was my main takeaway. But I agree. I think it’s such a relevant book and so good at just making you aware of things you can do to upgrade your life and your business and just be happier. I loved how he was talking about, he has a home assistant, what did he call that? Just a home manager, I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Home manager. Yeah.

Megan Porta: Yeah. And how every day the home manager has his smoothie that he likes and she basically puts it in his hand at the exact time that he needs it. Just like, oh, well. I mean that’s a goal eventually. I mean, it was just really cool to think about how streamlined his life is and how you don’t need everything in your life. Because I think we often think, like I was saying earlier, I need to be in my inbox. I need to be hitting published, I need to be doing X, Y, Z, and we don’t necessarily need to be doing all of that.

Bjork Ostrom: And so much of it is the continual process of those little level ups. And I think back to when Lindsay and I were first married moving into our condo, she had like $500 of money from babysitting. We bought a $300 Scratch and Dent Refrigerator because the condo we moved into, the one was broken. That probably wasn’t a season where we would’ve been able to strategically think about investing financially into having a home manager handoff a smoothie to us. But it would’ve been a season where we could have thought strategically around taking a half an hour out of my day and I didn’t do this. I would be better off if I would’ve. But taking a half an hour out of my day and just documenting the things that I am doing every day to not only myself, have a better understanding of what I’m doing and what the process is with it, and to have an understanding of day-to-day and what it looks like, but also then to be prepared for eventually when I did have more disposable income or we did have more disposable income to bring somebody in and to have identified that number one thing that would be really helpful for somebody to take over, even if it was just two hours a week, to then literally buy back some of the time for me to be doing something else or for Lindsay to be doing something else.

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How about in the really early stages, what can people be doing to invest in themselves if they don’t have the finances at this point to let’s say, spend $200 a week to hire an assistant, but they still want to think about investing in themselves, what does that look like? What are some things that people can actively be doing? And then let’s talk about once you do start to have those resources, what can you be doing?

Megan Porta: I think first, having the ultimate goals at the top of your mind to maybe write them down or something is really important because that gives you something to strive for. But in the meantime, what you can do is just invest in yourself. So that means maybe taking better care of yourself, setting aside two hours, one hour, 30 minutes, 15 minutes for a morning routine, and just investing in yourself that way. Like I mentioned earlier, time tracking is so huge. People are so reluctant to try time tracking because it’s kind of an effort. You have to be diligent about tracking your time if you actually want to make gains with it. But I think there’s so much power in that just knowing exactly where you’re spending your time is an investment in you and your business and then constantly tweaking it. I do time tracking all the time, at least once a quarter, sometimes. Last year I did it for six months. I was really confused about why I was so tired all the time. Why am I feeling so depleted? So I just wanted to know why am I so drained? I’m not working that much. What am I spending my time on that is draining me? So I think that is a huge way to invest in yourself as well. And then another,

Bjork Ostrom: What did you find out after those six months? Did you come to a conclusion?

Megan Porta: I did. So it wasn’t work, so I would track every minute. I was working between 20 and 25 hours a week. I was not working nights, I was not working weekends, I was not working crazy hours. What I found was that I had an increase in relationships, which was good. I mean, it was all good relationships, but I’m such an introvert. And

Bjork Ostrom: That you were drained?

Megan Porta: Yes, I was drained. I was very relationship energy drained. So I’ve spent this past summer and this fall just trying to manage that and really trying to let things go that I was holding onto. I’ll have a conversation with somebody and just kind of stew over things and then I’ll wake up at 3:00 AM thinking about it.

Bjork Ostrom: So

Megan Porta: It has been a process learning how to release those things,

Bjork Ostrom: But it was an outcome. Understanding that came out of tracking your time, seeing, oh,

Megan Porta: I’m

Bjork Ostrom: Actually getting together with people quite a bit. Generally speaking, people will be like, that’s a wonderful thing. But everybody has their own preferences and everybody operates in different ways. And for you as a realization, it sounds like, of actually this as somebody who, these are generalizations, but I can relate to this, somebody who feels energized by being alone. If you have moments where you’re with people, that’s a good thing, but it could be energy-draining. And so it sounds like, oh, need to shift and adjust coming out of that really interesting realization, how were you tracking time? Were you just putting it in a note doc or did you have an app? What did that look like?

Megan Porta: So I use Toggle. It’s T-O-G-G-L. It’s a free app. It syncs from desktop to phone, so it’s super handy if you’re on the go and want to track something when you’re out and about. You can do that really easily. And then when I’m at my computer, I just have it open all the time when I’m time tracking. And you can categorize projects too. So like e blog talk, I’m doing a podcast interview, you can really drill down and then each week you can create, or each day whatever, you can create a report and it gives you the breakdown of exactly what you’ve been doing.

Bjork Ostrom: How did you remember, because I’ve done time tracking before. The issue that I run into is remembering to do it. Do you have any tips?

Megan Porta: No.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Megan Porta: It does take a while to get into the habit of it, and that’s why I say people resist doing it because they will go for four hours and they kind of forget. But I think if you can think back on the last two days, you can probably piece together most of what you worked on. So if you realize, oh my gosh, I haven’t done it for four hours, that’s okay. Just stop and assess as best you can and write down what you’ve done for the past four hours. So don’t abandon it, just fill in the gaps and then keep moving forward. And then the more you do it, obviously the more ingrained it is. I said, I have my toggle app on my computer, so it’s just kind of a blatant reminder. You need to log your time. So you could also write, I dunno, put reminders in your calendar or write post-it notes or something just to remind yourself.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. How specific did you get with, this is getting into the granular details of time tracking, but I’m interested in it. How specific did you get with the bucket of category? For myself, I’d imagine it would be family fitness, food blocker, pro pinch of Yum. What did that look like for you?

Megan Porta: Yeah, I get pretty specific. So I divide out my businesses and so for example, a blog talk, I would say recording an interview, prepping for interview, I even divide that out. And then for the blog prepping post for writer publishing posts. So I get pretty down to the nitty gritty because when I have situations like last winter that I talked about, I really want to figure out what’s going on if there’s a problem. So I like to have more data than not enough data, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So in that season where you talked about experiencing this burnout plateau, what would your advice be for somebody else who’s maybe in a similar season, because you alluded to this, but the result of that can be you are so burnt out that you’re just like, I’m done. And you end up either quitting. If you have a site that maybe hasn’t been built to the point where it can be sold, or maybe you just sell it or you don’t sell it and you just let it coast, all of which financially being the series that we’re in, that’s detrimental financially, personally, it might be a good decision. It might be the best thing for you to sell. It might be the best thing for you just to step back to let something coast. But financially, if we have an asset and we can work on that asset and grow that asset, that’s going to be a really beneficial financial decision.

And so making sure that we are in the best place possible in relationship, in a high quality relationship with the asset that we have, which is our business, that can be really rewarding. And so just making the point that it’s important for us to make sure that we are as good of a place as possible as it relates to the work that we’re doing, because it’s actually a financially beneficial thing. It’s not just fun. It’s not just great to be working on things you like to do. It’s actually financially beneficial. So if somebody is in that season of burnout, if they are feeling like they’re at the end of their rope, kind of done with what they’re done with it, kind of what would your advice be to them to hopefully help somebody get through that?

Megan Porta: Don’t do anything drastic, because I’ve had that desire, just like should I sell my business? This past summer, I went through, after the energy drain, I went through a pretty long season of burnout and still kind of recovering from that. It was rough, and I had those thoughts. I was like, should I throw everything in the lake and just run for the hills? I mean, it was really bad. So I would say don’t do anything drastic. Just sit back and take care of yourself. Do what you need to do to get to a place where you’re healthy and able to run your business. Again, like you said, you want to like it and enjoy it too. But the good thing about blogging, I think, is that when you get to a certain point, you can leave your business for a little bit. You can just let it passively do its thing. I didn’t touch my blogs either of them from, I think it was mid-April of this year until the 1st of August. Literally did not. I didn’t update a plugin. Some of the plugins when I got back into it were not working anymore. They were just like,

You have destroyed your site, whatever. No, I mean, nothing was destroyed though. I mean, my income was fine. It actually went up, my revenue up. So nothing is going to explode. Just, yeah, the message is take care of yourself, step back if you need to hire people or even enlist family or friend, help if you need to minimally to keep things going, just do what you need to do to get yourself back on track. I think that is number one for advice on that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I’ve experienced seasons like that. Lindsay’s experienced seasons like that, and you’re talking about experiencing seasons like that. I think some of it is you do anything for a decade, five years, whatever it might be. I think all of us, I wouldn’t be surprised or many of us who have been doing this for a long time come up against those seasons. And I think part of it, and I’d be interested in your response to this, is that our lives change in really significant ways. I think of how different my life is today than it was seven years ago.

And yet our businesses kind of are the same. I’m still doing a podcast, I’m still working with Lindsay on Pinch of Yum, but our lives are very different. And I think part of the reason that we experienced whatever you want to call it, burnout or feeling like stretched too thin was because our lives changed in pretty significant ways. But we, or I’ll speak for myself, I tried to to operate in the same way that I was before things had changed for me. And I think there’s value in us recognizing that we sometimes are in seasons of making deposits into our business, the financial deposits, investments, whatever you want to call it, time investments, time deposits. But similarly, as we’re talking about finances, as we’re talking about investments, I think there might be seasons that our businesses need to give to us. We have invested into them in our case, 14 years, and I think it’s okay to ask of our business to invest, to give back to us in some ways in certain seasons. Do you resonate with that at all, or what are your thoughts absolutely on that? Yeah,

Megan Porta: Yeah. I mean, we do put so much into our businesses. My heart and soul has gotten into all of my businesses, and I think a lot of people listening can probably relate to that. Yeah, it’s like that analogy with just putting it in the oven and just letting it bake. Sometimes I have this thing in my mind when I start feeling guilty about the summer when I was ignoring my blogs. Every once in a while I would start to feel that guilt creep in, and I was like, no, I have worked so hard. It is okay to take care of myself. I’m just going to let bake and let it or let it simmer or whatever. Just let it do its thing on the stove, because like you said, it’s going to invest back in us at some point. But I think getting over the guilt is huge with that, just having grace with yourself and not feeling the guilt surrounding yourself with people who support that too, family or friends or peers, to just reiterate, you don’t need to feel guilty because everyone listening pours their hearts and souls into their businesses.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things as I think about investments in ourselves and in our businesses that I think is really true is that sometimes it’s hard with what we do because it all feels very personal, especially if you have a site that you’ve built as a personal brand, it feels like you are the brand and you are closely connected with it, as opposed to a business that you’ve created. Let’s say it’s a business that makes screws, it’s a screw manufacturing business, and you’ve worked really hard to build that up. And there’s a process. There are systems you can bring people in. You may or may not identify with it, but it kind of does its thing versus you are the thing

For people who are the personal brand. And I think maybe feel a need to show up in a way that you wouldn’t need to show up if you had a screw manufacturing business. How do you invest in your business in a way that you are supported to do the things that are life-giving for you without it becoming all consuming, without it becoming this ferociously burning fire that always needs to be fed and is always running hot. And it’s like you can’t step away from it. You need to throw firewood in all the time, and it feels like you have to be the one doing it.

Megan Porta: Yeah, I think this is a problem that we all face. We all feel this from time to time with social media and Instagram, being on reels and being in stories and showing up in your email and maybe YouTube. I mean, it’s like if I don’t show up in all those places, does my brand disappear? But I think that’s the great thing, again about a blogging business, is that you can step away and when you come back, people are very forgiving and understanding, especially if you’ve been through something, just explaining that to your community, grace. I mean, it all comes down to grace, knowing that people are going to have grace with you, having grace with yourself, and you can always pick up where you left off. Nothing is going to die if you take a week off or a month off or a summer. Just giving yourself that permission and seeing people like me take four months off and nothing bad happened at all. I think that’s also good to see kind of how other people in our space navigate this too.

Bjork Ostrom: I don’t remember if this is the exact post, and I just did a quick Google on it as you were talking about it because it reminded me of this. But I think of Brene Brown. Lindsay talked about this where she just talked about needing a break, and I don’t know if you follow her, but I just pulled up. So there’s this LinkedIn post, and I’ll just read it real quick. She said, I thought it was a break, but it was more of a breaking, not necessarily breaking down, but not down, maybe open. It’s been a tough season, but an important one. She said, I shared my thoughts in a post on the new website anyways, and the post is called Hard Seasons in Wild Hearts, and she talks about her mom passing away and the difficulty of that and just needing time to step back and

Megan Porta: Process.

Bjork Ostrom: But that as an example of somebody who’s kind of the ultimate leader in thought, leader in creativity, but also honesty, courage, all of those things.

And I think people resonate with it and you see it and people are like, I get it. And also maybe feel encouraged and empowered to do it on their own. And definitely if you are at that point where you have built your site to a point where you have some of that income, it maybe is passive in a way where you can step back a little bit. We talk about the idea of a train, and so often in the early stages, you’re shoveling cold into the engine of the train and it doesn’t move, and you do it the next day and it doesn’t move, and you do it the next day and it moves maybe like two inches, but after a while you’ve shoveled in enough coal where you can take a day off and the train continues to move. What if you’re in the early stages and you’re still shoveling coal, and then you show up, it moves like three inches, but you know, got to get up and shovel coal again in order for the train to move, and you’re not at that point where it’s completely passive.

Megan Porta: Yeah, I’ve been there too. I mean, that’s what the early days, early years were like for me. I mean, I’m sure you guys experienced that too, where it’s like you just have to keep showing up and you have to be consistent. But even so, I think you still are allotted grace. If you are mentally shutting down for whatever reason, there’s no other option. I mean, you’ve got to take a break and take care of yourself. If you don’t do that, your business, the coal, doesn’t matter. Nothing is going to operate ever. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. So

Megan Porta: I mean, you just have to assess how much

Bjork Ostrom: Push if the engine explodes. It doesn’t matter how much

Megan Porta: Cold you shuffle

Bjork Ostrom: In. Exactly.

Megan Porta: No, you can’t get to that point where you are burning out or you’re entering a depression or you’re wanting to throw your business in the ocean. You have to recognize the signs. Unfortunately, I’ve experienced burnout so much that I can see them and I can feel them almost instantly. I’m like, oh, here it comes. I need to do this. And then you kind of know what you do to take care of it so it doesn’t get out of control. But yeah, I mean, if you need a break, you need a break. But in those early days, that can be really hard.

Bjork Ostrom: And we all are creators to some degree, and the most valuable asset to us is our mind and our headspace. If what we’re doing is creating, and it’s one thing if you have, again, a screw manufacturing business that you can put somebody on the line or put ’em into leadership position to keep an eye on things. But if you were the person showing up and creating a thing, the headspace that you have to be in has to be a positive one. Otherwise, very quickly you’ll come to really not like the work that you’re doing. And Dan Martel talks about that. He’s like, I help people build businesses. They don’t come to hate. And I think the best way to do that is to start early by thinking about investing into your business, investing into yourself, and to build that in as a process over time. And one of the things I’ve thought about, I haven’t done this yet, but I’ve thought about what is my process to make sure that I’m investing into the business, working on the business, not just working in the business, thought about even every morning, taking a half an hour and having that half hour be the process hour or systems hour or delegation hour where I think about how to do the thing that I’m least effective and least interested in. And finding a way to bring somebody in to help with that as an example.

But do you have any thoughts on ways that we can make sure that we keep ourselves accountable to investing into our business or investing into ourselves?

Megan Porta: Yeah, I think going back to time tracking, just being really in tune with what you’re spending time on. Maybe you don’t need to do it daily, but doing something like what you’re talking about maybe once a week, just assessing how you’re feeling, what’s going on, what can you do to move your business forward and think about all the little details. And then once a month, I try to do this at the end of the month, I do kind of like a review, what worked, what didn’t work. And that’s not just tasks in my business, that’s also me. Do I need to work out more? Do I need to, did I go on a lot of walks? Did that help kind of assessing self-care as well, because it all matters. The healthier you are, the healthier business is going to be. It all matters.

And that really helps when I can be consistent with that. Just, okay, this didn’t work. I’m going to change this next month. This really worked. I’m going to implement more of this. So a lot of self-reflection, keeping in touch with your goals. And then also what we talked about earlier is just what’s causing you pain this week? Maybe that’s something to ask at the end of each week, just like, what’s my number one pain point this week and how can I alleviate it? Maybe not now, but when you have the funds or the time, maybe then.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think of Michael Hyatt who was not quite as active anymore. His company’s now called Full Focus, but had a podcast and would talk a lot about grading and leadership. And one of the things he always talked about was he has his family, he has his business, he has his wife, his kids, all these responsibilities. And he said, the most important of all of those is me. And it was kind of always unsettling a little bit to hear it, because I think what you want to hear is what’s most important is my wife or my kids. But he talks about the analogy he was giving was when you’re on a plane, they always say, and the masks drop down. If there’s something, they always say, put your own mask on first. And what he was saying is, I am the most important because if I am in a good place, I’m going to be able to do all of those other things better.

Megan Porta: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: And if I’m not in a good place, I’m actually going to be worse at all of those other responsibilities. And so my mental health, my physical health, my rest, all of those things are actually of critical importance in order for me to do the things that are really important, be a good, in his case, husband to be a good dad, to be a good leader. And so I hear what you’re saying, lining up with that, which is this idea that those things that we do are important, so important not only for ourselves, but for all of the other things that are surrounding us and all our other responsibilities. I know you’ve put together a list of ideas, not necessarily rank order because like you said, it’s going to be different for everybody, but a list of resources that people can even start to think about, what are the things that I can outsource? What are the ways that I can bring somebody in to help to kickstart this ideation process for people? So can you talk about where people can find that if they’re interested in downloading that? And then also talk about your podcast. I know we’re going to do a little podcast exchange here, but talk about your podcast and if people want to follow along with that, how they can do that.

Megan Porta: So the worksheet, it’ll also help people work through their fears if you do have a fear of investing. So you can do some maybe journal prompts or just that will help you talk through why you’re afraid of investing and what you’re afraid of. And then I also am going to include a huge comprehensive list of all kinds of things you can invest in, because as you know, there’s a ton. So if you want to download that, you can go to eatblogtalk.com/investments and the podcast, if you just go to your favorite podcast player, type in Eat Blog Talk and it should come up. Listen, we have over 600 episodes now, and then we also have a bunch of awesome groups that we run throughout the year. So if you’re interested in checking those out, you can just go to the website and that’s at eatblogtalk.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Megan, really fun to talk to. You we’re both in Minnesota. I don’t think we talked about that, which is so fun. It’s like the food blogging capital of the world, Minnesota. Here we are. It’s

Megan Porta: All these hidden little food bloggers live here. It’s so great. I love that you guys are here too.

Bjork Ostrom: So great to connect and looking forward to talking more. So thanks so much for coming on, Megan.

Megan Porta: Thank you so much.

Emily Walker: Hello there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro. We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to food blogger pro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Here’s the thing, we know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one, or I know some of you have done this, create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that’s soon to be outdated Anyway, that’s why we created Clariti to save you time, simplify the process and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clariti, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized, like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text.

Maybe there’s no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here’s a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from Wander Cooks. They said, with GA4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That’s awesome. That’s why we built it, and it’s so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of Clariti to set up your account. Simply go to Clariti, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. That’s clarity.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hi. Hello, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back Jillian Leslie, who you may know from her podcast, the Blogger Genius podcast, and as the founder of Milo Tree. In this week’s podcast episode, Jillian explains everything you need to know about selling a product as a food creator. Bjork and Jillian discussed the strategy behind developing a product and the importance of leaning into problem solving for your audience. As recipe developers and food creators we’re always looking to solve problems for our readers, and developing a product to sell to your audience is a really great way to lean into exactly what problems you’re trying to solve and what value you provide to your audience. Julian also walks listeners through the more practical aspects of developing a product, including how to scale products and generate recurring revenue for your business and how to overcome perfectionism within your business. While this interview is primarily about developing and selling products, it’s also a really great interview about adapting to all of the changes in the food blogging space and how to think about your business to continue to be successful in the coming years. As always, if you enjoy this interview, we would love it if you could leave a review or share the episode with your audience. It makes a huge difference for our podcast. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jillian, welcome to the podcast.

Jillian Leslie: Oh, it’s great to be back.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ve both been doing this for a long time now, where we are at the point where it’s like, oh, we were on the podcast before, was it like two years ago, three years ago? Oh, it was seven years ago.

Jillian Leslie: It’s crazy,

Bjork Ostrom: And I think it’s such a testament to continually showing up every day. We talk about that a lot and the importance of that within the world of business in general, really with anything. But if you’re going to build a business, people underestimate what you can do in a decade and overestimate what you can do in a year. And you’ve been doing this for a while. You’ve been at it for a while, and there’s been many iterations off of it. So we’re going to be talking a lot about product, but I want to start by talking about the origin story of the product that you have created because you are selling that and the inception moment with that is like you are also helping your product is helping other people sell product. So we’re going to talk about how creators, bloggers, publishers can be strategic in selling product. But before we do that, take us back to the moment when you decided to create a product that you were going to sell online.

Jillian Leslie: Oh, so you mean back to our first SaaS product, which means software that we started selling? Well, just like you were sharing with me about your tool clarity, you had your own solution and you thought to yourself, Hey, if this works for us, maybe this could work for other people and that’s exactly what happened with our first product, which was our popup that we still sell called Milo Tree. And now we built out a whole suite of tools for bloggers, but what happened was we needed traffic. Facebook was turning down the spigot and we’re going, oh my God, are we going to go out of business? And this was for our first blog called Catch My Party, which is still there, largest party idea site on the web. And all of a sudden we noticed Pinterest was driving us traffic and we’re like, what is this thing called Pinterest and how do we get more traffic from it? And so my husband who can build anything built us a popup that on Catch My Party, if you go there right now, you’ll see it. And it was saying, Hey, follow us on Pinterest. And lo and behold, it started growing our followers. And I think right now we have, I don’t know, 1.7 million followers that we grew organically on Pinterest just by putting this popup on our site. And we thought to ourselves, if this works for us, chances are it will work for other bloggers. And lo and behold, we built it out and people said, we want it for Instagram, we want it for TikTok, we want it for YouTube, Facebook. So we just did that thing that I recommend all bloggers do, all entrepreneurs do, which is listen one, solve your own problem.

And I call it eating your own Jo Food, meaning we knew we had a problem, we solved it, we continued to use our own product, so we’re like updating it just like every blogger would want it to be updated. And we started listening to people and they said, this is cool for Pinterest, what about Instagram? Or I want to grow my email list with it. And we’re like, Hey, that’s cool. And that’s really the thing when you think of yourself as a problem solver, you got this sixth sense and you’re always looking, is there something that I could do that makes somebody else’s life better’s great. During the pandemic, I was lonely. And so I started a coaching group for bloggers. And what I noticed was a lot of the bloggers had big Facebook groups and they wanted to monetize them. And these are incredible content creators, but they hate technology.

And the one thing that has always been our MO is if we can create technology that is complicated on our end so we can serve it up easy to you, that is our kind of sweet spot. So all of a sudden people wanted to set up memberships and get paid, and I was like, Hey, we could do that. I just was like, Hey, let me try and figure this out. And what I noticed was I had to hack together so many different tools and it was not easy. And I said to David, my husband, could we do this? And he’s like, yeah, we totally could. And so that was the birth of our Milot tree cart product, which is where you can sell unlimited digital products easily. And this is for people like bloggers who have so many, they wear so many hats.

What we noticed was people had audiences they had people to sell to, but putting together the pieces was way too complicated. And that was really how we launched Milot Tree Card, which we now have Milot Tree Card, a tool called Milot Tree Freebies, where we enable you to offer unlimited freebies to grow your email list. And we should talk about email because I think that while it’s always been important, I think people now are really understanding the power of email and also our popup app to grow your social media followers. So really it’s all about saying people always, bloggers are always told solve problems. Okay, well what do you do with those solutions? How do you then take this idea and actually turn it into a product that you can sell to people?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think it’s one of the things that will become increasingly important in the next decade of content creation as information, especially transactional information. How do you boil an egg? If you had a site 10 years ago that was a how to site on all the food stuff, it probably would’ve done pretty well because people are going to Google and they’re searching how to, if it’s SEO optimized, and you’ll go and you’ll figure out how to boil an egg or get a hard boiled egg for the next decade is going to look very different. People are going to be able to get that information, especially when the new version of the iOS comes out that integrates with OpenAI, it’s going to become more conversational. Voice is going to become much easier. People are going to be getting their information in different ways. That’s not to say that being a creator online is going to become less valuable. I just think certain types of information are going to become less valuable. And so what we need to do as creators is think strategically, like you said, what are things, what are the problems that we are solving? And if 10 years ago the problem was getting information to people in a kind of transactional, here’s how to do X, y, Z thing, I think the problem looking forward is going to be much different. And it’s probably based on tribes. Are you somebody who’s in a similar stage of life to me? Do you have similar problems? For us, it’s like we have two girls and they are as of tomorrow, four and six, and both Lindsay and I work and we also try and sit down every night to have dinner together. And so one of the problems we are trying to solve is how do we not be stressed, number one, and still make time to sit down and have dinner together as a family. So that’s a very relatable problem. That’s a little bit abstract and a little bit harder for chat GPT to solve. We could then create free content on that. And most of what we do is that where it’s a blog post, it’s a video, it’s in an Instagram short talking about kind of what that looks like, an example being Lindsay does something called the SOS series for Pinch of Yam. If you’re short on time, it’s kind of an emergency.

What do you do to create a recipe that’s really easy? The next level of that feels like it’s then creating a product that people would pay for those people who are consuming your free content, that people would then look at that and say, Hey, I’m a part of this tribe. I am like you. I have a similar problem and this problem is significant enough that I am going to pay you to help me solve it in a more efficient manner or to the result of the problem solved could look different. It could be time saved, it could be money earned, it could be peace of mind, it could be a thousand different things. But how do you know as a content creator when to stop with free content and move into paid content? Do you have any advice for people to help to transition into that world as they think strategically about free versus paid?

Jillian Leslie: Absolutely. So really, to be honest with you, information is becoming commoditized.

And that recipe that you, what’s the difference between you going to a blog for a recipe or eventually just right now going to chat GPT and saying, here are my dietary restrictions or in my refrigerator, or here’s a photo of what’s in my refrigerator, what should I make for dinner tonight? So that becomes less valuable. But in this world of AI where we feel more, I believe isolated alone, kind of like, whoa, I’m kind of floating here and I want that sense of community or somebody to connect to you become more valuable. So it’s like as you’re talking about your dinner, I want to see your dinner because maybe it looks like my dinner and maybe you guys aren’t perfect and maybe your kitchen looks like it’s a mess. Well, my kitchen looks like it’s messy too, and then all of a sudden you become relatable to me. You make me feel like I’m not so alone with my little kids at dinnertime. So it’s not just that I want your meal plan or it’s not just that I want a meal plan, it’s that I want Lindsay and Bjork’s meal plan because it’s the two of them being

Bjork Ostrom: Real struggling

Jillian Leslie: Through their dinner.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s nice of you to give me credit, but it’s Lindsay.

Jillian Leslie: Well, but it’s like to be clear, are you the dishwasher? How does that work? What is it? I’m curious. We are also very curious about other people, and so having a window into that would be valuable to me. So it’s not just that I could go to chat GBT and say, I need quick dinner recipes, but what is that extra step? So now you can, and for bloggers, especially a lot of food bloggers who like to hide behind their blogs, I’m going to say that’s not going to cut it anymore. Now do you need to be putting yourself on camera all the time and stuff? No, but you need to, I say this, have a point of view, have strong opinions about things. This is one of my strong opinions, which is, hey, what used to work might not work going forward in five years. So how do you position yourself, and I’m going to say step outside of your blog now, and B, I’m Jillian, but it’s weirdly not the Jillian show. It’s how Jillian can help you achieve your best life.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. One of the things that we talk about and think about a lot is this idea of what are the defenses against a new version of information acquisition that people have chat GPT as an example, or Gemini or Google AI overviews. And one of the ways that you can create a defense around that is what can that not do well? And it can’t be human. Well, probably in 10 years it be we’re already getting to the point of you’re crossing the uncanny valley. What is the test where it’s like human or not the test, the test. Is it a human on the other side or not? We’re there, we’ve kind of passed those points where it’s like, oh, actually this sounds like a person as I’m just chatting with a thing, but it’s still not human. And that’s one of the, for us as creators, one of the things that we have going for us is our ability to connect on a human level. And what that requires, like you said, is being in front a little bit more, being more personality. It’s interesting, there’s this long drawn out kind of conversation around people just want, in our world, people just want the recipe

Jillian Leslie: Get straight

Bjork Ostrom: To the

Jillian Leslie: Recipe. It’s

Bjork Ostrom: Like get straight to the recipe. Nobody cares about

Jillian Leslie: Your grandmother.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think we always said kind of true, but also I think some people do care about story, and I think moving forward, it’s going to be one of the things that is going to be most valuable is connection with an audience and with people who are actually following you, not just coming across your content or discovering your content. I think of our friends who have social followings, not in the food world, but they do comedy videos on Instagram and TikTok, and I’m thinking of one friend specifically who has millions of followers in this stage. It’ll come at some point. But in this stage of things, I don’t think he’s really worried about ai.

He has people who follow him, he produces content. That’s funny. People like him because they know him. His name is TJ Ethere, and if anybody wants to look it up, if we sit down and have a conversation, he’s not going to be like, oh my gosh, I’m super worried about chat GPT and my business because of it. Maybe that’ll change in five years when AI gets really good at creating video content, but it’s not there yet. So as people start to think about how to be more front and center, how to have more of their story included in the video content that they’re creating, how to build more of a tribe with opinions and a following, how are you seeing people think strategically about taking that and building a business around it? Not that you always have to do that. Sometimes you just want to do it because you want to do it or you want to do it because you want to spread a message. But for people who are interested in building a business around that following a lot of people who are listening to this podcast, how do you do that? Well,

As you start to develop following and that audience and that tribe.

Jillian Leslie: So first I want to say that our biggest customer base are food bloggers. Food bloggers have kind of figured out I need to sell something, but I don’t know what that means. And I say, sell an ebook of your best recipes. But here’s the caveat, it’s not just your 10 best recipes. It’s looking at what problem these recipes can solve. Meaning these are the recipes that you can make when your kids are having a meltdown. These are the recipes you can make when you’ve had a busy day or who knows, but wrap them in a solution, not just, these are my a hundred best recipes or these are my a hundred best. Maybe they cookie recipes because that becomes less valuable. What becomes more valuable is, oh my God, what is this problem and why is it relevant to me? Hopefully I understand this problem. I understand you having this problem so I can solve that up for you in a package of a solution. That’s great. And I have seen food bloggers, by the way, they already have the content, but it’s like, what’s the wrapper?

Initially it was like, I’ll just put my 10 best recipes together and sell it. And I’m like, that doesn’t cut it anymore. So we, for example, remember in food blogging, it was like you’ve got to be in a niche which is solving a problem, versus I just make pasta recipes whenever I want. Then I make, who knows that you have niche down? And so now it’s all about, okay, how can I hook somebody up and make their life better with my recipes? Now, are you going to buy your second home from your first ebook of recipes? No. But what you’re doing, and this is something I talk a lot about on my podcast, which is you’re looking for the connection. You’re looking for, I put this out and sell this, and people are taking their credit card and buying it because you’re onto something. I say, you’re a miner, you’re mining for gold. What you are first looking for gold specs

And where are they? And by the way, this is why your first digital product should be something you can put together really quickly and get out there. So this is why, for example, we offer, I was telling you AI generated sales pages. You don’t have to think about putting together a sales page. Boom, you’ve got your sales page, go sell it, go try to sell it. It doesn’t work. No problem. What other problem can you solve? Where can you take your current content, slice and dice it, put a package around it of I am solving a problem and sell that? And once you find gold specs, you dig deeper because guess where the gold specs are? The gold little pebbles are, and then hopefully the gold gets bigger and bigger, and then you can move up a ladder of different offerings.

Bjork Ostrom: Gold bricks, gold bathroom, gold house.

Jillian Leslie: I love that. Yes, absolutely. And then now can, I can tell you where the money is and

Bjork Ostrom: Where the money is. What do you mean by that?

Jillian Leslie: What I mean by that is yes, so lots of food bloggers, especially if they have email lists, can go to their email list and turn it on and probably make a couple hundred dollars if not a thousand dollars the first time they launch it to their list. But

Bjork Ostrom: With if they have a product, you’re saying if you have a product and you sell that product to your list,

Jillian Leslie: And I’m talking about maybe you’ve got a thousand subscribers, there is money in a thousand subscribers, there’s real money there. And if you’re not taking that money out, you should come talk to me because that’s like money for the taking. But

Bjork Ostrom: Now,

Jillian Leslie: Sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, I was going to say, I think it’s a really important thing because a lot of times we talk about email list, we talk about the importance of email list. I think people are starting to understand that becoming more and more important. But when you really start to feel that is when you have a thing and you want to promote that thing and to have the ability to send an email list that’s not going to be impacted by an algorithm, it’s not going to be impacted by SEO, it’s just going to go hopefully usually straight into somebody’s inbox. And what we’ve found is that is the most valuable resource for us in a situation where we have something and we’re hoping that people purchase that thing.

Jillian Leslie: Absolutely. Email is for almost everybody. I talk to their best sales channel, even people with enormous social followings because you’re not scrolling through Instagram in a buyer’s mindset. Now you might be able to get sales from Instagram, but it’s usually not as easy as email. And that’s the real value of email, which is why again, we created our product so that you can offer unlimited freebies to grow that list because that is your group that you’re growing your customer base. So it’s like that is really valuable now where the money is in recurring revenue.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask. It’s almost like there’s a friend who lives in the Twin City series. His name is Rob Walling. He created a company called Drip. It was an email company. That email company sold to Lead Pages, which was a company here in the Twin Cities. Now he does Angel, and it’s not really Angel, but he helps bootstrap companies, SaaS companies, grow and scale. He has one of the concepts that he has is called the stairstep approach or something like that. But it often is like, Hey, start with an ebook, a one-time transaction, something that is, and that’s the first step. And then eventually you get to this idea of recurring revenue, and that’s really powerful. So within the context of information within the context of a publisher or creator who has a blog and a social following, what’s the best offering that you can have that would also tap into some of that kind of recurring revenue? Gold.

Jillian Leslie: Exactly. Well, just what you were saying, I call it a ladder. So you want to get people in the habit of buying from you, starting with a small item. By the way, another place where people make a lot of money is bundling, bundling products together. Because if I can sell you one thing, but then for example, we offer upsells, Hey, I know you’re going to, if you buy these mittens from me, from me, I probably, I bet you might want the matching hat. And that’s a very strong selling strategy because if you buy the mittens from me, I already have you as a customer. So if you go away, I’ve got to go find another mittens customer. It’s much more lucrative for me to not only offer the mittens, but also offer the hat so that’s something to keep in mind. But in terms of recurring revenue, it could be a meal plan, for example, is a good way to think about it. Another one though that I think is incredibly powerful is if there is a way that you can start a community low-key community where you are showing up with information, but people will come for the information, but stay for the community. That’s the sticky glue. It could be about parenting, it could be about meal planning, it could be about who knows what. Now, it might work in your niche, it might not work in your niche. So maybe there is a type of content you can sell consistently printables, or this works with high-ticket items, like certain kinds of coaching. Think of a mastermind. But if you’re a blogger and you’re good at blogging, go teach other bloggers who aren’t as experienced as you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and in a lot of ways it’s like that’s what Food Blogger Pro was like, we saw this need based on me at the time doing this kind of state of the blog report. We’re like, oh, a lot of people are interested in this. Like you said, it’s a little bit ear to the ground. It’s not like we had this idea out of nowhere to be like, Hey, we’re going to start this thing.

It just was an iteration off of a thing that we were already doing where it’s like, I wonder if there could be a premium level to this free information we’re doing once a month, and there was interest in that. So it’s almost like you think of that latter approach. We’re doing the first rung of the ladder already, which is producing free content and publishing it to the internet. Then it feels like the skill that we need to develop is understanding how people respond to that. Is there an interest, is there a need or people asking follow-up questions?

Jillian Leslie: Can I stop you there for one second? I would argue it’s free content to get intentionally getting somebody on your email

Bjork Ostrom: List. Sure.

Jillian Leslie: That is a very, very important step. So free content could be on your blog, it could be on Instagram, on social media. And so your next job is to figure out how do I take this person off of TikTok, off of Instagram, off of YouTube, give them something of value that they really want, that’s like the first tiny solution to the larger problem I can solve for them.

Bjork Ostrom: And the point I was trying to make isn’t necessarily that from doing free content, you’re trying to sell a product. It’s almost like free content is your first attempt at product development. It’s your first attempt at seeing can you create something that people need or that people are trying to figure out. That is, and I think of Nisha from Rainbow Plant Life and she came on and talked about her meal plans, which I think were really successful. And she talked about the number of conversations that she had with her followers to help develop that product. But I think part of what we do and what I’ve noticed as a pattern is a lot of times people come to me and they’re like, Hey, I have this idea for a thing that I’m going to create, and they probably haven’t talked to anybody else to say, is this a problem for you? It’s almost like just exploring what do I want to do? What do I want to create? Which isn’t necessarily bad, but it is bad if it’s not helping anybody

Jillian Leslie: Or

Bjork Ostrom: If nobody cares about it, well

Jillian Leslie: Nobody, nobody’s going to pay for it. So this is something I talk about inside out versus outside in inside out is this, I’m in this shower and I go, Hey, I got this great idea of our product and I can already picture myself going to Canva and making it look really pretty and what my fonts are going to be and all this stuff, and then I’m going to put it out and it’s going to sell crazy. And I say, please don’t do that. What I recommend is you build your product outside in. That means what are people asking you? Even in your email, if you put links to stuff, you’ve got recipes, what are they clicking on? What are your top recipes, let’s say, and is there a way to think of a product that way? So please don’t have that brilliant. And this is why, again, I can be controversial in that I’m going to say, do not start with a course unless you’ve pre-sold that course at least four or five times because the amount of work you’re going to spend on that course to then go, okay, I’m ready guys. Here it is and hope that people, you kind of think, but to be honest, you don’t. I mean, how many times is it that pin your number one pin on Pinterest is something you could never have imagined? You think, and chances are your hunch is in the right direction, but until you test it, you don’t know. And that’s why I say you got to iterate quickly kind of. I’m releasing a podcast this week of myself talking about B minus work, which is, remember I am a big proponent and it’s the concept that people email me the most about like, oh my God, that’s really resonated with me because I’m going to say don’t do crappy work. B minus is above average, but it’s not a plus work because a plus work, it’s not profitable, but if you can do B minus, and the way that I say you’ve got to B minus is you press like post or you put it out there and you get that cringey feeling in your stomach still because it’s a little embarrassing to you. You’ve hit the sweet spot,

Then you can start getting feedback. You can see, do people like this? Maybe they like it, maybe they don’t like it. And if you, let’s say get three sales, I say, good for you. Now your job is befriend those three people and get on calls with them.

Bjork Ostrom: What do

Jillian Leslie: You like about this? Why’d you buy it? What else could I offer you?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it feels like, and as a quick point, when we launched Food Blogger Pro, the membership component, we had three months of selling it before we actually launched it. We helped use those funds to build the first version of it, and it was a great way to validate do people actually need this and are they interested in it? A great book if people would be interested in product and selling product is called Lean Startup. It’s like a decade old now, but Eric Reese talks a lot about this idea of minimum viable product

And tell me if this feels accurate, but I would say it’s like B minus in pursuit of a plus. I think sometimes people think I need to start with a plus, and I think eventually you want to get to a point where what you are doing is incredible. It is valuable. You’re always in pursuit of that a plus, and you don’t settle with B minus. But in the early stages you have that thing that feels like a little bit early, it feels like it’s not quite polished enough, and you put it out into the world in order to then start to get feedback, like you said, to have those conversations, to take off the rough edges of it because that’s going to get you to a work quicker than going into the lab, having the door shut, pulling the blinds and working on your thing, and then eventually getting to a point where you’re like, and now it’s a plus and I’m going to show it to the world.

But if you start with B minus or C plus even, and you put it out into the world and then you iterate on that, like you said, you have those conversations, it will compress the development of the product and the helpfulness of the product by getting it in front of people. So my question is to what scale do you promote a thing once you have it? Because I think the downside of that is let’s say you produce something that is B minus, you put it out into the world, you promote it super heavily and it’s actually not helpful. Then you’ve kind of cashed in a chip, which is like your promotion chip that I think deters people down the line from feeling confident to purchase a thing again. So would you recommend doing it to a limited list? You have 10,000 people. Do you do it to a thousand people?

Jillian Leslie: Okay, I’m going to say I’ve tested this in my own business and I’ve seen other people test it. Nobody’s thinking about you. So for example, your email shows up and you offer me something, I’m barely thinking about you. I’m barely reading this email and you offer me a thing and I don’t want to buy it, but then you come to me a month later with something else, I’m not going to hold that first thing against you. You’re not that important to me. So I’m going to say go put it out. And if people don’t like you, let them unsubscribe. I’m going to push because I speak to predominantly women, and I will say that we have our own female baggage, which is we’re scared. We’re scared to be judged, we’re scared to not show up perfectly. And so I want to get rid of the word perfect and I want to say nobody’s thinking about you. It’s funny because I’ve shared this, I have a 17-year-old daughter and I’ve taught her this whole idea of nobody’s really thinking about you because at 17 you think everybody’s thinking about you.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Jillian Leslie: And she’ll catch me when I’m obsessed with something. I’ll see a photo of myself and I’ll be like, oh, that’s awful. And she’s like, ma, nobody’s thinking about you. And there’s something very humbling about that. Wait, no, you guys should be thinking about me, but it’s also very freeing. So I say, go. And then you know what? People don’t buy it. Well, guess what? Probably in your audience you have your VIPs, the people who are always commenting on your posts or interacting with you, emailing you, befriend those people, and you go, Hey, can I talk to you? Will you tell me why this didn’t connect with you of all people? I thought you would buy this. What don’t you like about it?

I say, go send the emails to your list. Please don’t hold yourself back. And there’s something I have have tons of post-Its on my desk. I have a post-it. I can’t show it to you right now. I can’t find it called cursive knowledge. And this is something where I think people I talk to struggle with and cursive knowledge is this. You and I could be talking in a very elevated way about SEO and you. I think everybody in this audience knows exactly what we’re talking about because you know it and I know it. And because we know what we assume everybody knows it. And that’s the curse of knowledge. So what we were talking about previously is what do you know that you think everybody knows that I promise you they don’t. And can you sell that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a term that we’ve used before, this idea of expert enough where one of your greatest advantages couldn’t be that you are the ultimate expert, but you are expert enough to speak to people who are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 steps behind you. Whereas if it’s somebody who’s a hundred steps in front of you, then it might not be helpful. An example in my world is I’m trying to learn more about health and fitness, and I was talking to a conversation or I was having a conversation with my brother-in-Law, and I was like, I think I might subscribe to jama, which is the medical journal. And he’s like, oh, you should actually look at the New England Journal of Medicine. And so it’s like, I subscribed to the New England Journal of Medicine and I’m getting it now, and I’m like, oh, this is not for me. This is for experts.

It’s way beyond. And it’s like I’ll still probably read it, might find some helpful stuff within it, but if that was 20% of what it is, that’s probably the version that I would need. And I think there are those things in the world where we are expert enough to tell somebody else the things that we know and it’s actually more helpful than if it was an ultimate expert. I think the thing that I’m trying to reconcile, and it’s specifically around a belief that I have with Pinch of Yum, which is one of the things we hear recurring is people coming to us and saying, I love Pinch of Yum because I know that I’m going to come and I’m going to make a recipe and it’s going to turn out.

And I think it’s become a competitive advantage that we have as a creator, which is those recipes are tested four or five, six times, they’re iterated on over weeks. We eat multiple versions of ricotta meatballs. And once Lindsay feels like this is excellent, she ships it out into the world. And that’s become a really great moat that we have in the world of content creation. And I think if you are somebody who does that, that’s a competitive advantage that you have, which is like you consistently create excellence. And I am trying to reconcile those two things. I think I believe both to be true. Number one, get stuff out there, publish something before it’s a little bit ready, but it almost feels like that’s more in the category of product, in service of iterating and becoming better at your craft as opposed to, I think for Pitch of Yum as an example and other maybe food creators who are listening like content at scale. I think if have Pinch of Yum had four B minus recipes in a row, I think that would be detrimental to the business. So what are your thoughts on that, just in terms of reconciling those two truths really?

Jillian Leslie: Okay. But I would argue that your commitment to your audience is excellence in food, meaning that recipe has to work. Where I’m talking about the B minus is that’s kind of your promise. What I’m talking about is maybe the website isn’t beautiful, maybe the photos aren’t perfect, maybe the copy could be improved. But for example, if I, let’s say, I don’t know, I am a psychologist and I’m an early childhood psychologist. If I give you bad information for your child, that would be bad.

I’m talking about maybe I’m going to write, I have this expertise. So you have the expertise of unbelievably delicious food that’s easy to make healthy. I mean, at least that’s how I think a picture of Yu. And so that’s your promise. Now, if I’m a therapist, hopefully I’m an expert at helping you with your relationships with your children, let’s say. I’m not going to skimp on that, but if I’m putting together my ebook and I think to myself, Hey, I could help with tantrums, bedtime, these kinds of things, my book doesn’t have to be perfect, but my information, my promise to you is I can make bedtime better and that I’m not going to sacrifice on, I’m going to sacrifice on turning this into a video series and making sure all my font are perfect or whatever. And so I don’t know if people care that much about bedtime, so I’m going to put that out there. Now, if ultimately, guess what? It starts selling like hotcakes. Okay, maybe I could record that video series. Maybe I could go through the ebook and hire somebody to make it look a little bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: So

Jillian Leslie: I would say that your promise is your promise.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. I think that’s a really good differentiator. And I think what it feels like you’re getting at is how do you help people get out of their own way to move forward on their thing? And a lot of times what happens, and we see this in our world, an example would be somebody who’s tinkering with the logo of their website because they think that’s going to be the thing. But really it’s just like there’s this book called The War of Art, and he talks about it as the resistance,

And it feels like it’s how do you overcome the resistance, which keeps you from sitting down and doing the work, pressing publish. And it feels like in some ways it’s speaking to the resistance. How do you get past that? And one of the ways to do that is to release the tight grip that you have on having every pixel in the exact right space. What I also hear you saying is the information has to be great. If you’re telling somebody you’re going to do something, it has to be the thing that you’re telling them to deliver. But if it’s in a PDF, that if kind of crummy or maybe it’s not arranged in the exact right way or it doesn’t look super professional. And that’s been so much of our story I think of Lindsay created a photography ebook 12 years ago, and you talk about it’s not going to buy you a new house, but it paid our mortgage when we were first married and she worked on it in Apple pages and arranged things in a certain way. And to this day, we were just at a conference and writing next to somebody who had a site that was doing 10 million page views. And he’s like, that book really taught me photography. And if you were to look at that book, it’s like, it’s not super impressive. It’s a B minus in terms of the design, but it solved a problem, it solved a problem, solved a

Jillian Leslie: Problem. And

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, I feel like that’s in our world. A great example of what that looked like was we had a thing, we knew it was good information. Lindsay was good at teaching. She had the background in teaching, she was expert enough to do it, and on her own, she didn’t have a graphic design background cobbled together this book that communicated the information that actually was helpful for people. So I think that’s a really huge unlock to encourage people to show up and to confidently say, I have something that can help you. Here’s what that thing is. You actually deliver on that thing, even if it might be a little rough around the edges in terms of the deliverable landing page, the PDF, whatever it might be.

Jillian Leslie: So people will be like, we have this course conversation a lot. I have a lot with creators. And I say, okay, if you’re desperate to do a course, do it as some live workshops. Put them together and sell them. And then I said, when you do your workshop, hope that your tech fails, not in a big way, but in a small way because you don’t look perfect and be your audience. People who show up to your workshop will get behind you. And this is where I think that human piece matters. I think that my audience, like yours, I’m sure struggles with perfection. And I think perfection is poison. I think perfection keeps us stuck, makes us feel bad about ourselves and that it’s not profitable. And it’s so funny because then somebody that I was talking to did her workshop and had a technical problem and she taught cooking live and there was some dish rag in the background that she didn’t know was there, and she was mortified. And that’s that cringey feeling I recommend you get good at, but there’s something human about that. So it’s like lowering the bar.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. As you know, you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, but maybe you didn’t know that we actually have a membership for food creators and food publishers like yourself. We’ve actually had this option for 10 years. We talk about it occasionally on the podcast, but recently we had this realization of like, we need to let people know that we have a membership because sometimes people don’t know that exists. And there’s a lot of really incredible resources within a Food Blogger Pro membership. We have a community forum where we have FBP, Food Blogger Pro industry experts, a lot of people who you probably recognize from this podcast. We have a deals and discounts exclusive to members page where you can get access to discounts and some of the most popular tools for creators, a bunch of different courses on photography and video and SEO.

And then we do these live Q&As with experts. Recently we did one on SEO and republishing. We talked to Eddie from Raptive and he has years of experience in the world of publishing, and he talks about why the process of republishing is so important. I also do these coaching calls with Food Blogger Pro members that we record, and then we make available to everybody to watch and to learn and to listen. And these are one-on-one calls with other publishers or business owners to talk through the strategy for growing their business. And the cool thing about these live Q&As and these coaching calls is we actually wrap those up into a podcast that’s exclusive for members. So maybe you listen to the Food Blogger Pro podcast and you’re like, I wish there was more episodes that you could listen to and learn from. Well, you get access to additional content, additional podcasts if you join Food Blogger Pro. So if you want to check it out, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and click the Join Now button and you get access to everything when you sign up the back catalog of all the live Q&As, all the coaching calls, all the courses, all the deals and discounts and immediate access to the community forum. So again, if you want to check that out, go to food blogger pro.com and we would love for you to not just be a podcast listener, but also to be a member.

Jillian Leslie: The other piece that I just want to say where my audience struggles and my hunch is yours does too, is saying this, I’m so used to giving my content away for free that the idea of charging for it feels weird. Maybe I’m not worth it.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Jillian Leslie: That is something I talk a lot about.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s almost like the psychology of selling a thing and behind a lot of those things. Perfection, I think on the other side of perfection is probably fear. It’s easier to be perfect than it is to publish a lot of times because perfection can keep you from publishing, and that’s a vulnerable, difficult thing, whether it’s publishing a product or an email or whatever. And I think anything, it’s a skill. You show up and you do it, whether it’s a podcast like this, publishing an Instagram reel, as you develop that skill, you’ll get better at it. It’ll become easier. Not that it ever becomes easy in general, but it’s like a skill that you can develop. And if you are interested in building a business, I think it’s going to become more important that you understand how to sell a thing over the next decade, whether it be an actual product or somebody else’s product.

The idea of income from ads, which are passive on your site, I think will live on in some form forever, but I think it won’t necessarily be a business that becomes more prevalent moving forward. I think it’ll probably become less prevalent. And so if you do have a following, if you do have an audience, it’s going to become important that you understand how to confidently sell a thing, whether it be through affiliate, through a brand that you’re working with or your own product. And if it’s your own product, I would make the argument that that can be if you land it and if it is the kind of thing where there is a need and it’s helping people and you have the audience that needs the help for the product that you’re creating, that can be one of the most profitable things that you can do. So with that in mind, how do you go from that? Let’s say it’s a PDF, it’s information, it’s an ebook. How do you go then to the next level of recurring? Do you sell to that same group? Do you only sell to the people who have purchased something from you before? And then what does that functionally look like? If you are creating a community and creating content, creating a course, whatever it might be, how do you actually pull that off?

Jillian Leslie: A lot of it is relationships. Again, when you sell those early sales, those become hopefully your VIPs,

And they kind of are like the people who want to help you succeed. So every offering and everybody’s journey up this ladder looks different. Therefore get in contact with those people and ask them what they need and what they would want from you and reward them. Buy them a Starbucks, meaning it’s okay to do stuff like that, but you’re doing all of this research. Did I ever think to myself, oh my God, David and I, when we started Catch My Party, someday we’d be selling some tool to help bloggers sell digital. Like what? No, it’s because this has evolved. Now, ultimately, again, think about is there a skill you have and maybe you could sell it as coaching, maybe you could sell it as a video series. Maybe you could sell this as a community. These are just ideas. I don’t know what it will actually, nobody follows this path directly the same way, but the people who have the most success are the people who continually, I would say this, they know what big problem they solve. Let’s say I’m going to help you get in shape. And maybe what that means is you want to lose 10 pounds and you want to gain lean muscle.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s the transformation. What’s going to be the transformation,

Jillian Leslie: And that’s what I want to sell you on is your future self that I can get you there, but I’m going to paint the picture of how good you’re going to feel when you’re there, how you’re going to look in the mirror and feel better how your numbers are going to, your blood sugar’s going to go down, how you want to be eight, like 90 on the floor with your grandkids. Those, that’s the picture that I want to paint for you and sell that to you. And then what are the little steps along the way I can sell you to get there? And so when you might be listening to this going, I don’t know what big problem I can solve, but that’s kind of, then think about it, okay, what small problem can you solve? And then what’s the next step that you can kind of lead somebody on in their journey? And so it’s like these kind of, when you’re in the shower next time, just start asking yourself, what is it that I solve? How do I help people? And one technique that I think is really helpful for selling is to put on the hat of the helper my solution. I’m not selling snake oil, I’m not pulling a fast one on you. I am selling you something that can help you and improve your life. And all of a sudden, if I can understand that in my own head and I can communicate that to you, I’m not being salesy. I’m a helper.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I think even in my own life, I have a friend down the hall who does video, and we have another friend who’s building a, or they have a short-term rental Airbnb, some friends who are building a wedding venue, like a premium wedding venue. And I think about me within the context of them and those projects and it’s like, oh, I want to know about the business. I want to get plugged into the business. It’s hard for me, not with my friend who does video to not be like, Hey, do you need help figuring out some of the structural stuff within it? But my band is to do the things that I feel like we have created as a job for me, which is like, Hey, let’s have conversations about how people can improve their businesses. The nice thing is there’s also a need for that in the marketplace. For us, it’s Food Blogger Pro as a membership, but also then working with sponsors. And so to your point, it’s like this natural outflow of where I would already have a tendency to go, but also where people might ask questions for me. And so what you have is world’s great need and your great passion. I think sometimes we just talk about passion, but it’s like you also have that world’s great need part.

So on a very functional level, let’s say you start to figure that out, even working within a product like Milot Tree, what does that look like to connect all those things? Is milot Tree facilitating some of that? Do you check out and then do you manage the recurring membership component of it? And then do people go into Slack for that? Can you talk about just how people might set that up and what that might look like?

Jillian Leslie: Absolutely. So it’s funny because we have strong opinions, and one of them is I don’t want to be your email service provider.

I don’t want to be your course platform. What I want to be is the best way for you to get paid for you to have sales pages and market your product and for you to have a dashboard to watch and manage your sales and your customers. Therefore, we integrate with all major email service providers because I can’t tell you how many people I know have a course platform that’s really expensive and they have an email service attached to it. But wait, they want to use ConvertKit and now they got to hack that together. And I don’t want you to have to hack solutions together. I want you to use best in class services. So for example, when people say, I want to start a membership, I go, great, here’s what I recommend you do. I recommend you show up twice a month on Zoom because everybody knows Zoom. And the first time you show up, say it’s the first Wednesday and the third Wednesday of the month for one hour, you hold it to one hour. You teach something in the first session. Now, by the way, you can listen to this or not. This is just where I see people, just an example, have success. The second time you show up, it’s just q and a talking about whatever you discussed in that first session. I recommend you use a private Facebook group to kind of house everything. Why people are like, no, but there are all these other cool tools. And I’m like, you think you’re going to convince people to put an app on their phone and will know to come to use this app? People know Facebook whether they like it or not, and all you’re going to do is store stuff in that Facebook group and create a place for people to talk to each other. And I want this to be as low stress for you as it is for your people. Don’t burn yourself out. Don’t burn your people out. And then you’re going to communicate them, communicate with them via email. Hey guys, we’re meeting. Here’s this month, we’re talking about this topic, and here’s the link to the Zoom. And after we do the zoom session, I’m going to send you the recording and maybe there’s a PDF or who knows, but make it simple. I am all about keep things simple. Don’t ask too much of people and don’t over provide. Again, the reason people leave memberships, a lot of times, especially if it’s something like a crafting membership is they feel like they’re falling behind.

They can’t keep up. So it’s like, let’s lower the bar and let’s show up and let’s listen. Let’s listen to what people want. So for example, remember I did a membership during the pandemic and what I did, I said, okay, we’re going to talk about blogging and these are the topics I think we should talk about. But I came up with it and I held it lightly. And what I mean by that is we’re into, I don’t know, month three, and I could tell that the people in my group were having difficulty doing the work.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jillian Leslie: So I said, okay, no, no, no. We’re not talking about, let’s say Instagram in month we’re going to talk about is strategies like the Pomodoro technique, which is where you work for 25 minutes and then you get a five minute break, and then we’re going to talk about B minus work, and we’re going to talk about the ways to get your butt in the chair so that you can accomplish this amount of work. And so therefore, if I didn’t know that this would be important, but what I discovered was this is what my people were kind of saying to me like, Hey, how do I get this done? I’m burning out or I’m losing interest, or whatnot. So it’s like you’re listening and you’re adapting, and I think that is the way to, versus I’m going to start a membership and it’s going to have all these moving parts. No, you start simply and build from there very much what you were talking about. Yeah. You want that membership to ultimately be an A. And I’m going to say that’s because the delivery is so good, but really you start, even if you think you’re starting at an A plus, I promise you, for most people it’s B minus,

Bjork Ostrom: Right? Right. Yeah. It’s just your, it

Jillian Leslie: Starts

Bjork Ostrom: Misinterpretation of it. Yeah. So with

Jillian Leslie: Milo Tree, you have all this flexibility to sell digital downloads. Again, we deliver them, just upload it to our platform. You can do coaching, membership subscriptions, recurring revenue, all that stuff. We integrate with Stripe Best in class payment platform. We give you a really nice dashboard to manage all your customers. And I’m available if you have questions, go listen to my podcast, the Blogger Genius Podcast where I’m talking about the value of offering freebies and what is a good freebie. I break that down for you. And because there is ai, I’ve got prompts where you could come up with a freebie, a really cool freebie, like a cheat sheet in what, 10 minutes. So my hope is to support you along your journey.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I think one of the takeaways from that idea of not having, in this case Mylo Tree, not having it be all of the things is, and I think this can be confusing a lot of times for creators, publishers, I think sometimes we think the tool is the product, hey I’m going to sign up for this thing. And it’s really cool because you can do all of these things within it, but the tool isn’t the product. In the same way that if you build a home, you have a nail gun, you have a hammer, those are all tools to build the home, but the home is the product, not the tools. And I think what we are doing as creators and publishers who are selling either community or information, a lot of times both is the information back to our previous conversation around having the wrapping of the product B minus, but the actual transformation or the helpfulness of it being an A, that’s the thing that you are selling. It’s the information, it’s the community, it’s the transformation that somebody is going through. The tools are the tools, and if the information is good or the community is good, then it’s going to be helpful. I think of myself, I’m a part of a group, I don’t remember, it’s maybe like $200 a month and it’s a Slack channel.

Jillian Leslie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you

Jillian Leslie: Care? Do you go, Jesus, you guys, it’s on Slack. I can’t participate in this.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s a Slack channel, it’s a Zoom once a month Zoom call. There could be other ones you could join as a part of, and then twice a year conference that you could opt into if you want to go. So that’s a perfect example of it’s like I never once thought about like, oh, I wish the tool was better. It’s like, no, it’s a really good community. And the reason that it’s really good is because the founder of that group, it’s called Rhodium, he’s curated that group. He has a one-on-one call with every person to make sure that they’re going to be a good fit. And so that’s the product, is the community, and he’s developed a really great process around that. And then just used widely available, oftentimes free or low cost tools to support that.

Jillian Leslie: Absolutely. It’s funny, I live in Austin and we just recently, we went to a restaurant and it’s a James Beard award winning chef, and it’s the crappiest looking restaurant ever, but it’s very Austin, so it’s got picnic tables outside in the heat, and it’s got gravel on the ground and it’s Mexican like tacos.

Bjork Ostrom: What restaurant was it?

Jillian Leslie: It’s called Nixta, N-I-X-T-A. But the beans have duck fat in them. And I love this idea, which is the people in the, and it’s so delicious. And no, the ambiance is this kind of backyard picnic vibe. And I feel like I love that as a way of thinking about building your business because the food is so good, but it’s casual and it’s comfortable and it’s cool. So that’s just like where I go, it is not the tool, it’s the content of whatever it is you’re paying for. And my hunch is nobody’s leaving because it’s on Slack and Zoom,

Bjork Ostrom: Right? Yeah, exactly. That’s not a differentiator in that where people are like, oh, this would be really great if this was all fully integrated into one platform. It’s like people don’t even think twice about it.

Jillian Leslie: And if you’re spending your time having to go to YouTube to watch videos on how to use this incredibly complicated, all-in-one solution, which I was doing, I was subscribed to one, I put my course up, which took a lot, and I had to kind of be on YouTube trying to go, where’s the button for this? And I thought, oh my gosh, this is harder than I thought. And I’m pretty good at figuring out platforms. And so again, I want to take all of that away.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. You mentioned that you have a podcast, obviously Milo Tree as well, and you also mentioned people connecting with you.

Oh, I love it. And as a little teaser, I’m going to be on the podcast, I think we’re recording it next week. I dunno when it actually comes out. So that’ll be fun. So this is almost like a to be continued conversation. We’ll be able to pick it up and take it in a different direction next week. But Jillian, can you talk about if people want to follow along with your podcast, maybe a little bit about what that’s about? I’m guessing people would generally know Milo Tree if they’re interested in checking that out, and then even if they wanted to connect with you personally where the best place to do that would be.

Jillian Leslie: Absolutely. Okay. So please, I love, as I shared, I really do. I love talking to people about building businesses. I started my, how many years have you been doing your podcast?

Bjork Ostrom: Gosh, I should know the date that we first launched. I don’t know, 10 years.

Jillian Leslie: Okay. I think I’ve been doing mine about seven and a half now.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jillian Leslie: I think I’m coming up to eight years. And you were an inspiration. I was like, you started a podcast. I’m going to start a podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Alright, love it.

Jillian Leslie: So I started my podcast called the Blogger Genius Podcast. And the truth of the matter is, I started it to support our pop-up app. But really because the great thing about a podcast is you get to talk to people, you get to email somebody and say, come on my podcast, and then ask them lots of questions. So for a curious person, it’s been really fun.

Anyway, so it’s the Blogger Genius Podcast, and I think I’m up to like 350 something episodes. Really what I try to do is get experts on like you Bjork, and pick your brain and go, what’s working right now? And also share what I’m seeing where I sit and say like, okay, here is how a food blogger can have success selling digital products. Here is how to get started. Here is why a freebie is so valuable, but what is a freebie and how should you think about it? So that’s really what it is, and I’d love you to listen or subscribe, but please, I am an open book. Reach out to me at jillian@milotree.com. You can DM me on Instagram at Milo Tree, and if you want to get on a free 20 minute call with me, because I love talking to bloggers to future customers to really see if there’s a connection there. If I can help you just go to milo tree.com/meet and there’s my calendar book a time with me. It’s not a hard sell. It’s really because this is how I do our research for what we should be building and how best to serve you as a creator, as a blogger, as the world is changing in this moment with ai.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. It’s one of the things that I’ve found to be most beneficial anytime that somebody has an offer like that. I was at a conference and somebody’s like, Hey, we do an SEO audit. It’s like, okay, I’ll sign up for it. I’ll do it. Because what I’ve found is those are some of the most beneficial interactions that I have. Those conversations. Somebody from an outside world that understands our world, but can look in and weigh in on it. And like you said too, on your end, as we talked about before, one of the most valuable things you can do in creating a product is have conversations with customers. So it’s cool to see as we wrap up, what that looks like for you saying, Hey, I want to have a conversation with you. Not only can you be helpful, but it can also inform the decisions that you’re making with the products that you’re developing,

Jillian Leslie: Which is really cool. And I’ll say, I get this a lot, which is because I’m fresh eyes on your business, and I’ll say something and you’ll be like, oh my God, she’s a genius. And I’m like, no, I’m not a genius. I’m just fresh eyes. You’re so close. And I feel that way about my own businesses. I’m so close to them. Sometimes I’m blind. So it’s just nice to have somebody go, whoa, have you thought about this? Or have you thought about that? Those kinds of things. That is where I love that moment when somebody goes, oh my God, I’d never thought of that before.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Jillian, great to talk to you. We’ll talk to you in a week next week for your podcast. Thanks so much for coming

Jillian Leslie: On. Thank you for having me.

Emily Walker: Hello there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro. We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information. As you’re working to grow your blog and your business, you can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are chatting with Elizabeth Emery from the Food Blog Vancouver with Love. Elizabeth first started blogging in 2015 as a side hustle and then took her sight full-time. In 2018, Elizabeth shares more about the burnout that she experienced in 2021 and how she really fell out of love with her job. She talks about how she worked with a business coach to adjust certain parts of her business that she wasn’t happy with, and how leaning into the joy in her business helped her both find renewed excitement about her job, but also helped her business to grow. She chats about the importance of adjusting her sources of revenue and prioritizing passive income, how qualifying for an ad network has really transformed how she thinks about her business and how she’s worked to grow her income for her blog to a six-figure business This year, Elizabeth also talks about what quiet success means for her and why you don’t need TV appearances or cookbook deals to have a successful career as a food creator.

I really enjoyed editing this episode and love the perspective that Elizabeth brings to food blogging and think you will too. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Elizabeth, welcome to the podcast.

Elizabeth Emery: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s an honor.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Whenever we do a podcast, we do a little bit of a check-in before and talk about some of the things that we’re going to talk about and all of the things that we recapped as we kind of built the agenda. They’re all things that I’m really excited to talk about because I think they’re important topics for a variety of reasons. We’re going to be talking about money and making a sustainable income. We’re going to be talking about burnout. We’re going to be talking about diversification of revenue sources, quiet success, that phrase that you used, but I want to start is 2021, because it sounds like that was a season for you where you had been blogging, publishing, building this business for at that point, maybe six years, seven years. You’d been at it a while, is that right?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, less full-time. I’ve been doing the blog from about 2015, 16, but full time end of 2018. Okay,

Bjork Ostrom: Great. At that one. So you’d been working on it side hustle initially and then full time, and it sounds like that was a season where you, in your words were burnt out. What did that look like? What did that feel like? Tell us about that season in 2021.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I mean, it was awful. There’s no other word for it really. Obviously, we were still going through the pandemic, so there was sort of lockdowns in place, but by that time, I think it’s safe to say the novelty of lockdown had well and truly worn off for most of us

Bjork Ostrom: That first month. It’s like, we’re going to get so much done. Everybody’s going to exercise, it’s going to be a great thing, can watch day. Yeah. Now it’s like, oh, I just want to hang out with my friends and not feel weird about it and wonder if everybody’s okay.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. So by that point, I think as many of us did, I’d just sort of really gone hard into work and had got to this point where I’ve realized I was waking up in the morning, just dreading the day, and that is just a horrible place to be literally waking up thinking, oh, I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to shoot this content, got to do this on Instagram, got to do this for a client, and I’d basically just completely fallen out of love with the job, I think, and it looked very different to me to what it does now. My business has changed somewhat, but it was the worst feeling I could see. I was getting sort of depressed with all of it, and yeah, the best way I can encapsulate it though was literally waking up in the morning, dreading it, not wanting to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you think you were dreading? Can you pinpoint the things in your day that you were dreading or was it just kind of this general sense of dread?

Elizabeth Emery: I think it was both, to be honest. I think it was a general sense of dread, and then I think there were elements of my business that just weren’t working for me, and

It wasn’t further on that we’ll come to until I started working with a business coach that I realized it was a wake-up call for me to just adjust those parts of my business that I wasn’t happy with. I was putting too much energy into certain parts, like freelance recipe developments for clients and stuff, and it wasn’t my work. It wasn’t giving me the same sense of creative fulfillment. And I think the business coach I work with now, she’s brilliant, and she has this phrase where she says, if you are feeling burnt out, it’s always a sign that something isn’t working in your business, whether that’s a specific area that you’re giving more time to or whether it’s just something you need to stop doing altogether, not necessarily, but that for me, there were definite areas that I wasn’t enjoying, and I think Instagram, for example, was becoming a big drag by that point. It was relentless back then it was. You’d be posting every day or I was, and it was just hard to keep on top of it. I basically felt like a hamster on a wheel at that.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you feel like at that point, part of it was you felt like you had to, it was a thing you have to do and other people are doing it, and so this is what I have to do. What was it that kept you doing it? If the thing was making you feel dread or a certain level of like, oh, this is really depressing, or I am depressed doing this work, what was the driving force behind it to keep you doing it? Well,

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I think as you say, there is definitely an element of that’s what you think, that’s what you have to do. That’s what everyone else is doing, so surely I must have to do that as well. Therefore I will do it. This is just how it’s done. I think also at that point, my business wasn’t particularly sustainable. My income was very low from it, hadn’t discovered ad revenue at that point. I was quite late to the party with that, so I was really sort of focused on sponsored content and then freelance recipe development, both of which very labor intensive, you’re, there’s no passive income there. It’s you’re exchanging your time for income, and I think that

Bjork Ostrom: Every month is a blank slate. You have to show up, you have to earn it. There’s no kind of foundational layer of recurring. It’s up and down with ad revenue, but there’s no base level of like, yeah, I know generally speaking, I might earn a couple thousand dollars this month, and then you can layer on additional things on top, which that feels different than if I don’t earn any money from sponsored content this month, then I don’t earn any money.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, a hundred percent. You’re really having to hustle and put yourself out there and do it, and I think if someone’s not been in that experience before, it’s exhausting. It’s really exhausting, and there’s no element of being able to coast at all. Not that we coast, but with ad revenue, it is kind of passive in a way, and you can take a month off and probably terrible things aren’t going to happen. You’ll still have that income coming in, and I wasn’t there at that point. It was very much all on me, and I think I really felt that pressure big time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So let’s talk about your site a little bit. Vancouver with Love. So you’ve been working on it for nine-ish years, full-time, about half of that. Does that sound right more now, but tell us about your site and what the focus is with it and maybe anything that has evolved with it as you’ve been working with this business coach, if at all. And then we’ll get back into some of the changes that you made as you worked out of this season of burnout.

Elizabeth Emery: For sure. So my site is primarily vegan recipes, all vegan recipes, a little bit of lifestyle and plant-based travel with that, but vegan recipes are the main focus. It has been since I started it really originally the focus was vegan, gluten-free recipes because that’s how I was eating. Now all the recipes always have gluten-free options, so that hasn’t changed, but it’s primarily a plant-based focus, and that’s really my niche. I don’t specialize more than that perhaps I go more for dinner recipes and breakfast recipes, but the idea being that they’re easy and accessible for the most part because I know that my community, the audience I have, they’re not generally the people that are interested in spending three hours baking a four-layer cake. That’s how long it takes to make

Bjork Ostrom: Sure

Elizabeth Emery: They want quick and easy

Bjork Ostrom: They want, if there was one that took that long, your people wouldn’t be doing it.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it’s not who they’re, so yeah, it’s much more simple dinner recipes, overnight oats recipes, that sort of thing. I think whatever makes plant-based, eating more accessible to people, really, that’s what I

Bjork Ostrom: Do. Yeah, and you started eating vegetarian when you were four, is that right?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, yeah, I was four.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you tell us about that? So we have a three-year-old and a five-year-old. So right around that age, was it something that your parents had done or your family had done, or were you somebody who was aware of animals and animal product and that at a young age? What was that like?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it’s a funny story. I went to the butcher with my mom one day, and it’s weird, I can still remember it. I assume there were turkeys, birds strung up in the window, and I remember just looking at them with horror, why? What is that? And my mom was like, well, that’s meat. That’s what we eat. That’s where it comes from. I just sort of went, I don’t want to, if that’s what it is, I don’t want to eat that anymore. And she went, okay. And to her credit, neither she nor my dad ever tried to dissuade me. They were

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Elizabeth Emery: Very supportive. They weren’t plant-based themselves, but I think they had been thinking about it, and I think they decided if their 4-year-old daughter could do it, they could probably give it a go as well.

Bjork Ostrom: So did they start eating vegetarian at that point?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, yeah. My dad’s still pescatarian. He still has some fish, my mom and my sister fully vegetarian.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow. What a pivotal moment in all of your lives watching. I mean, you think about what could have happened if you didn’t walk into that witch store as a 4-year-old.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I do wonder because I think it’s very hard to make the distinction, the understanding of what meat is if you don’t have that kind of vis visual.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. I wouldn’t have known, I wouldn’t have understood what the chicken and my stew meant. I think it’s little kids naturally I think often don’t always want that. So it felt very natural to me to say no. And I can only say I was very fortunate that they didn’t try to make me meat. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: Dissuade you. Our five-year-old who’s very aware of things and feels things on a very deep level is starting to ask questions about the food that we’re eating. Is this, I forget the phrase she uses real or made, is chicken real or made? And it’s like, oh, chicken is real. It’s like the chicken that is outside, or is bacon real or made? It’s like, oh, it’s real. And I think what she means by real is is it an animal? And so we’ve always thought she has, as she starts to learn more the potential to be somebody who makes a decision to eat vegetarian.

One more quick example, we just got a frog recently, a tree frog, and she’s been really excited about it. Its original name was tree a tree frog named tree. And then when she went to stay with my parents for the weekend, she came back, she had renamed it to Rice, so now that’s its permanent name, rice, the tree frog. But we needed to get food for it. And so we got crickets and we were bringing the crickets in and she had this moment where she stopped and she looked at me and she goes, dad, so we feed these to the frog. And I was like, yeah, that’s what the frog eats. The frog will eat crickets. And she had this long pause and she said, do you think they’re happy? And I was like, oh my gosh, and it was for me. Then suddenly I’m wrapped up in the moral implications of feeding cricket, sewer, frog, and yeah, it’s a little four or 5-year-old, you feel those things and can make those decisions.

So anyways, a little bit of a tangent, but it’s really cool to hear as part of your story and now part of the work that you do, you help facilitate that for other people. And we talk about that with Pinch of Yum. So much of what we do is driven by, Hey, we want to have a successful business, but we also want to make a difference in people’s lives. And a good example is we do meal plans and the testimonials that come out of those meal plans are empowering and motivating for us to continue to do that because it makes a difference in people’s lives. But in order to do that, you have to be at your best as a creator. And there’s this person that I followed for a long time, he’s now moved into semi-retirement. His name was Michael Hyatt, just talked about leadership and creating and things like that.

And he always talked about the analogy of putting your oxygen mask on first. And he always talked about for himself it means fitness and health and making sure that he has margin and he’s not overscheduled. And I think about what you’re doing, the success in your business as you’ve grown that over the last few years, but also the mission of the business to help people eat vegan and to do that in a way that is sustainable and not overwhelming. None of that can happen if you are at a point where you feel like burnt out or you’re not passionate about it. So when you were working with, well, let’s go to the coach first. How did you have the idea to find a coach as a way to facilitate your way into maybe a better future? And even why did you make the decision to work with a coach versus just like, I’m burnt out, I’m going to wind this down and go in a different direction?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think the honest answer is desperation. I couldn’t go on the way I was, but I knew I loved the job. I am in my late thirties. I’d done a lot of other jobs before this, and I had pretty much hated most of them, and I’d never had a career I felt I truly wanted to be doing. This was the first one I felt I could see myself doing for years to come, and they excited me. And I thought, and

Bjork Ostrom: You had tasted it, you knew you liked the taste of it, but it had soured a little bit, but you knew that there was something there that you wanted to get back to.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I knew I could have some sort of success with it, whatever that was going to look like. I knew I could make it sustainable. So I’d got to this miserable point where I just literally was dreading the day and I knew something had to change. I wasn’t prepared to give the business up. And I thought, right, business coach, I’d followed this woman on Instagram. I’d listened to her podcast for several years, and as we know, the podcast is such a powerful method I think, of reaching people and it really made me want to work with her. She’s based in the UK and

Bjork Ostrom: What’s her podcast or the name of the coach?

Elizabeth Emery: So her name is Jen Carrington. Like I say, she’s based in the UK. She’s done various podcasts over the years. Her most recent one, I think the one I listened to was Your Simple and Spacious Business, and she’s another joint podcast called Letters From Hopeful Creative, which is a really good podcast. They’re both great. So I really knew that her style fitted me. She actually, she works with a chronic illness. She’s had a chronic illness for years, so she manages stay in her business by working around 10 hours a week. And it’s sustainable, it’s successful. She makes the income she needs to make, and I don’t have any chronic illness. I’m very fortunate in that regard. But I remember listening to everything she was saying and just thinking, that’s what I need. I need a more human approach to running this business because I’m being a hideous boss to myself. I’m forcing myself to do things I don’t want to do every morning because I feel I have to. And she takes such a more calm, kind, joyful approach to it that I thought, yeah, that’s the person for me. If this can help me find joy in the business again and joy in life really, because so much of our work is life. That’s what, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So I remember reading this book, I think it was maybe Stanford professors who had this class that was really successful, and then they put it into a book and it was called Designing Your Life.

They’ve also recently published one I think called Designing Your Work Life, which is more specific to career versus just life. And one of the exercises they have you do is there’s empty to full kind of like you’d see in a car, and they would have you go through and do an inventory of the different things that you were doing throughout the day. Does this make me empty? Doesn’t make me full. And it’s just a way to reflect on what you’re doing and how you as a creator individual respond to it. And things that I would love to do, sit down and do a finance review with Lindsay, she’d be like, please know, poke me in the eye a hundred times of the stick. But point being people really enjoy different things and get life from different things. What did it look like for you as you started this process of re-analysis or just analysis for the first time and working with a coach to get a lay of the land of what was happening, to even understand where things are at? Was there an exercise you did? Was there a process you followed?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it was more holistic, I would say. There wasn’t a formal exercise as such, but she was great at talking me through literally as you say, what is filling your cup and what is taking away from it? And it was completely eye-opening to realize that, for example, doing a lot of client work, doing a lot of recipe development. It’s a really important part, but it wasn’t, I was doing so much, it wasn’t filling my cup at all. It was really draining me. I felt like I had virtually no time for myself in terms of creating my own content for the blog because I wasn’t monetizing it through ads at this point. As I say, I was late to the party with that. So basically all my time was getting spent on client work and then sort of brand sponsored deals all for other people, which again, great work, but I was never, ever left with any time to build up my own block

Bjork Ostrom: At the end of, so in realizing that in your case, Hey, I’m doing a bunch of client work. For some people it might be really life-giving for you. It wasn’t, but it was monetarily significant. You saw this opportunity of, Hey, I want to work on my own thing and build that. That’s important. But a lot of times we are in a situation where it kind of feels like golden handcuffs. I have this income that’s coming in, but I also want to build this thing adjacent to what I’m doing because I think the long-term return on that both for my own wellbeing and maybe from a business perspective is going to be better.

And I think the equivalent could be a W2 job or a 1099 job or a freelance job. You talked about having a lot of these in the past, and I think a lot of people could relate to this idea of I want to build the momentum with the thing that I own that is like, that’s maybe not necessarily passive, but has some passive functionality built into it, but I also have to pay the bills and I have to keep this income coming in. What did it look like for you to adjust the dials on the different sources of revenue that you had in order to focus on your site, which doesn’t have an immediate return, but maybe has a better long-term return once it becomes a little bit more passive?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. Well, I will caveat this with saying I got very lucky with it. So because I’d had my site for quite a few years and I was sort of just about managing to do a bit of work, I’d recently learned what keyword research was totally. So actually attempting to do something with each post rather than just randomly putting out recipes, it was slowly building in traffic. And coincidentally, I think as I started working with this business coach, I hit the amount of page views that meant I was able to qualify for Mediavine. So that made all the difference. And I do think it was a bit of a fluke. I want to be very honest about that.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and to your credit, I think luck, we say this often, luck has dressed in overalls. You also talk about being burnt out, working so hard and putting in all this effort. And so it’s not like you opened your email account and somebody said, Hey, we’ve gifted you a website and now you qualify for Mediavine. It comes from years of doing hard work and showing up and creating good content. And even freelance recipe development plays into your ability to craft a recipe in a way where people respond to it and it’s a good recipe. And so there’s always a luck component with anything that we do, but we will never get lucky to the degree that money just randomly shows up in our bank account or traffic randomly starts coming to our site. It still requires hard work and effort in showing up for 6, 7, 8 years. I want to point that out as a part of your story, but I also appreciate you being humble and acknowledging that for all of us, our success probably has some degree of luck, but also a lot of hard work. But nonetheless, you got to this point as you’re working with a coach where you’re able to qualify or Mediavine started to get some of that feeling of like, Hey, even if I don’t work this month, I’ll get a thousand dollars, $2,000, $3,000. What was that like at that moment? How did that change things for you?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I mean, it felt like gold dust, to be honest. It changed everything. And as you probably know, when you first start with ad revenue, the amounts aren’t that high. I think it takes them a little while to figure your site out, figure out who you are. So it was sort of a few hundred dollars. At first, it was still fantastic, but it wasn’t higher numbers, but it was enough that I thought, oh, okay, this could be doable. This must be scalable. And the absolute key piece for me was being able to drop down the amount of sponsored work and client work that I was doing to a level that felt like it wasn’t burning me out, that I felt like I could manage. And then still having time to create content for the site and really, really focus on building that up and that I didn’t expect it to feel so different, but it was like night and day. It was suddenly I was actually looking forward to what I was doing. I really personally enjoy keyword research. I find that really fun. And when you hit on that phrase, that’s low competition and high search volume, it’s simple pleasures, I suppose. But I really enjoy that. And obviously it’s difficult with helpful content updates, and we never quite know what’s going to happen with Google with the algorithm. Not as you say, it’s not sustainable income, but just knowing I had that, what felt like a safety net, I think from ad revenue real game changer, for me it was the missing piece.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like art and science. I think of the movie Moneyball, which is about the Oakland Athletics, I think baseball team. And it was the whole idea of it was kind of the first, I forget his name, but it was the first person who really came into baseball and made data decisions around players, but there’s still an art and science to it. And before it was kind of like art, you think this person’s pretty good? You can see some of their stats, but not really into data. And so much of content creation is similar in that regard where there’s an art and a science. You could come across a search term with a super high search volume, really low competition, but if you know it’s not within the realm of what your people would want to make, it’s not something that you’re going to use or if it even feels like maybe they wouldn’t make it, but it’s not brand aligned.

And so it’s almost like this additional data point that you’re able to fold in to the process to make decisions and to inform it. And sometimes that will rank, then sometimes it doesn’t. No true formula for it, but especially for people who like that type of analysis, like yourself, it’s a really great tool to fold into the process. Some people, they start with it, it’s the first thing you do, and then you go down the content production line. Some people would have a hundred pieces of content they want to make and then they’ll inform their decisions based on keyword research. Can you share just at a high level the tools that you like to use and what the process looks like for you?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. I mean, I’ll be honest, I’m pretty basic with it. And I use key search. That was always my go-to and to be again, transparent with it, I live in Canada. I’m British, but I’m based in Canada. And a lot of these tools are based from the states and the exchange rate from Canadian to US to Canadian. It’s not kind to us at the moment. We don’t get an easy deal. So I think quite a lot of these tools are just out of the reach of a lot of Canadian-based creatives. So for me,

Bjork Ostrom: You mean US dollars to Canadian?

Elizabeth Emery: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yep, yep.

Elizabeth Emery: It’s a challenge. I know it.

Bjork Ostrom: You get like an upcharge.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, always, always. It’s a frustration for Canadians.

So for me, key search was an obvious choice just because it’s an affordable one, and I know there are much more comprehensive ones out there, but just in the beginning it wasn’t really an option for me. So I’ve had KeySearch stuck with that. It seems to have served me quite well. And more recently I started using RankIQ as well, but I use it more. I don’t really use it to write my posts as such. I’ll write the full post and then I’ll pop what I’ve written into RankIQ and if there’s any glaring areas that I’m missing out on, kind of use it for that rather than literally writing the post in,

Bjork Ostrom: See if there’s any gaps or ideas for additional things you could add in.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah. But yeah, that’s what I do. KeySearch is usually my go-to and then just Googling stuff as well because

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure

Elizabeth Emery: Can only tell you so much, can’t they?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, there’s little things even that I feel like every day I’m learning different ways that you can approach keyword research. Idea being like for example, looking at the order of if you search a certain term, an example not in the food world would be like how to do a backflip. Not that I was actually searching that make no attempt to do a back flip, but then looking at the tabs up above and seeing what order they’re in. So I’m looking at Google right now. I search how to do back flip and it says videos, images, forums, shopping news books that informs you a little bit on the user intent around that keyword. They’re probably going to want to see a video, whereas if you do something like school bag that’s going to show images and then shopping and then videos and then news. But as we’re doing keyword research, part of it is just understanding user intent and user behavior.

And so if you do a keyword search just using Google and you see videos is close there, that might be something that helps you understand, oh, that’s an important piece of content to include a video for. So I think sometimes that we don’t give enough credit to just almost like exploration research. It’s like, let me see what’s out there and how Google is structuring things and what content, how it’s being presented around the web. And so I think it’s great. It’s the art and science with what we do. It’s understanding the data that you have, but then also you at your core are a creator, you’re an artist. And then using that to inform some of the decisions that you’re making with the things that you’re creating.

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Bjork Ostrom: To go back, you start this process of kind of rebuilding and you get accepted and are starting to earn ad revenue. And it sounds like the business revenue grows kind of adjacent to your love for the business. You’re falling back in love with the business. Does that feel like it was true that was happening in lockstep? And do you think as you fell in love with the business, the natural outflow of that, it’s like you enjoyed the work and it was able to grow and thrive, or was it actually now that you’re able to see the business growing and creating income from it, it makes it easier to invest into the business? Or maybe both? What did that look like in that season as you came out of this 2021 burnout period?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I think spot on really. It was a combination of both for sure. And again, I will be honest, I was quite motivated by the money. I knew I always wanted to do something I loved, but I always wanted to make a good income as well. And seeing the money that you can earn increase from ad revenue is hugely motivating. I think when you haven’t really come from money as well, there’s a different sort of motivation behind you to some other people. And

Bjork Ostrom: Is that true for you? You feel that implying not coming from money?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, we never had a lot of money growing up and I think having been keenly aware of how much other people have had in comparison and things like that and just kind of growing up and seeing that around you, it’s always made myself and my partner as well really prioritize wanting to build a stable, sustainable income for us. So it is definitely been a big driving factor for me. I think it’s really influenced some of the decisions I’ve made. They’ve been more from a place of business sense rather than, oh, this would be a great exposure opportunity. For example, like writing cookbooks and stuff. I’ve gone more down the business route thus far because it’s been much more of a priority to really stabilize that. But yeah, I was motivated by seeing the income increase that was huge, but also just having more joy with it, falling back in love with business, like you say, realizing that I could take Fridays off and it wasn’t, the sky wasn’t going to fall in and just realizing I could have more breathing space. It’s all just given me the space to actually enjoy the business I’ve created and really find more joy in continuing to build it. I think.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so much of what we’re doing I think comes down to individual priorities. And one of the things I love about your stories, it feels like you really discovering that what’s important for me as a person, as a business owner for my life, for my business, and to let go of maybe some of the things that you see happening online and saying that’s that person and that’s important to them and that’s the game that they’re playing. But really to think of it as we are in a video game and we get to decide what the, not all of the rules, but even what the rewards are within the game that we’re playing. And for some people it’s purely monetary. I want to make as much money as possible for other people. They anchor around flexibility. I want to have as much autonomy as possible, or we’ve heard people say, I want to be famous, I want to be known.

And that’s a motivator. But to really look inward and for other people’s impact and for all of us, it’s probably a mixture of all of those considerations. Not that everybody wants to be famous, but just like I actually don’t want to be known at all, and that’s one of the things that I’m optimizing for, but to really look inward and to say what are the different things that I’m after? And to center on those. But it’s hard when you look outward and you see other people doing a thing and it’s like, oh, they released a cookbook and they’re doing a book tour that looks really cool and everybody likes it, or they launched a product, I don’t know what a hundred different examples. And one of the things that you talked about as we were checking in before was this idea of quiet success and that that’s something that’s available for people is quiet success. Can you talk about what that means to you? And was that always something you were aware of or did it come up over the last couple of years as you reflected on what you want work to be?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think truth be told, I wanted all those things. I wanted the cookbook deal. I wanted, I don’t know, present TV shows and stuff. I wanted to do the high profile stuff just for whatever reason. I was not in the right place at the right time for those things. And I have worked on pursuing some of them and it just hasn’t really worked out. So I think that has kind of pushed me down a different avenue. It’s kind of shown me that, okay, well these aren’t available for me right now, so going to do what I’m going to work on, what I can control and what I can control is building a quieter business. So I don’t have huge amounts of Instagram followers, I don’t have all of these high-profile achievements, but I do feel that it’s something that isn’t modeled to people. We’re taught that you have to go after the book deal, and those things are wonderful. They’re really wonderful. The person that’s just launched this book that’s doing well and all seems very high profile, what they’re not telling you is how little they got paid to write the book and

Bjork Ostrom: Or stressful. It was

Elizabeth Emery: Exactly how they had to work nights and weekends just to get this thing done. And there’s huge, huge value in books. I would love to write a book one day, but it’s also a very specific business choice I think that you’re making often. Advances typically aren’t high, sometimes they’re incredibly low and not feasible if you have an income that you need to maintain. So I think we’re sort of fed this idea of shiny success with all the achievements, and particularly as bloggers, we’re not really told that you can build a sustainable business like ad revenue can be very lucrative. You can do occasional sponsored posts on Instagram and things, and you can charge appropriately for those. You can do freelance work. There’s so many avenues I think you can go down to build up a reputable business. You’re just not necessarily becoming a star at the same time. But I do think it’s important to say it because it was something I never saw modeled and it wasn’t shown to me that that was possible.

Bjork Ostrom: And so often it’s not modeled because the people who are experiencing that quiet success aren’t out there talking about it. It’s a natural function of being quiet is that you can’t be heard. And I think about that in the context of business, broadly speaking, that there are millions of examples of people who have different businesses that are really successful and allow incredible autonomy. And you don’t know about ’em because they’re not on Instagram talking about it. They don’t do book deals, but they’re out there just kind of in the background running their businesses. So much of what we do, it’s on Instagram, it’s Pinterest, it’s showing up high-end search results. But even in our world, there’s a hundred different businesses that you could create that are successful, and you could, whether it’s doing something with photography or small boutique workshops or whatever it might be, endless examples of different ways that you can build a successful thing.

And so I think it’s great. It’s great that we talk about it. One of the things that you had talked about is this, as you’ve started to figure out the things that bring you joy, the growth within your business happening alongside that, and slowly but surely building up revenue income from your business and being on track to hit that six-figure mark this year, which is incredible. Congratulations. Thank you. And that coming from a variety of different places, it sounds like maybe primarily ad-driven, but talk to me a little bit about how you fill in the different parts of your business to get to that sustainable income level.

Elizabeth Emery: Of course. I mean, yes, ad revenue this year is the main portion of it. It’s probably about 60% of my income I think will be coming from ad revenue. And then the remaining 40% would probably be split between sponsored content, maybe a little more sponsored content on Instagram for brands. And then the other part is the freelance recipe development I do, which I don’t do a ton of anymore. I have one client that I do it for every couple of months. It’s quite nice because it’s a sustainable income and I believe in what he’s doing. So it’s nice to work with that. But yeah, that’s pretty much the split. I have those three income streams really.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Am I looking into this correct that you are with Raptive as a Raptive publisher?

Elizabeth Emery: I am, yes. I switched to them this year and it’s different experiences for everyone. I hear different things about different agencies. My earnings have gone up certainly since working with them. I can’t deny that, but I’ve, both of them, I’ve worked with Mediavine and Raptive and had great experiences with both.

Bjork Ostrom: And we talked a lot of creators who say the same thing, have had good experiences with both. And then when you are doing the sponsored content working with brands, is that primarily Instagram and how do those deals happen?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, it’s fully Instagram for me. My TikTok account is almost nonexistent. I have about 150 followers on TikTok. Yeah, it’s primarily on Instagram. I haven’t done any blog sponsored content in years. I just find brands that anymore. Sometimes I will pitch. Sometimes it’s brands that find me. Sometimes it’s returning brands that I’ve worked with previously. I did go through a phase where I did a heck of a lot of pitching and that I would say if someone’s starting out and kind of wondering how to go about it, I do recommend pitching brands to start with because then you’ll start getting responses come back in. And that was the way I sort of did it with that. But fortunately, I do get found by certain brands now, which is really nice. So in that way, but I do think people chronically under charge for sponsored content. Maybe it’s more of a Canadian thing than a US thing, but I know some people that will charge a couple of hundred dollars for a sponsored reel on Instagram. And again, not to be sniffed at if that’s where you feel

Bjork Ostrom: Comfortable. We got our first brand sponsorship was free bags of frozen vegetables.

Elizabeth Emery: Yes. Everybody

Bjork Ostrom: Starts somewhere in

Elizabeth Emery: There. Yeah, sure. I think the first one was a hundred dollars and a couple of three things maybe. But it’s one of the things I think is actually fascinating is I have some other blogger friends that I speak to and we realize how much people don’t talk about fees, we don’t talk about money. I really understand the desire not to talk about that stuff, but sometimes I think we’re kind of just not helping ourselves because you have no idea what somebody else is charging. I know friends, like I say, who will charge a few hundred dollars for a sponsored post. I know friends that charge a few outlets, several thousand. The spectrum is enormous. And I think generally we should all be charging a bit higher because all we’re teaching to brands otherwise is that it’s okay to really be willing to pay $300, which doesn’t cover our time. It doesn’t cover the resources. And I think it’s just important to know our value.

Bjork Ostrom: I had a conversation on the podcast recently with folks from Tastemaker, and Chandice is the person who does a lot of the Tastemaker Conference. Chandice does a lot of the brand deals for them. And I asked her, how do you know what to charge? How do you figure that out? She’s generally speaking, the best way to get better at understanding what your rate should be is to have conversations with other people. Find a group of five or six people and form a Slack group or a Facebook group or get together in person and say, what brand are you working with? What are you charging? Because what it does is it allows you to see, and the example I gave is like Zillow. Would you use Zillow for Canadian real estate? Okay.

Elizabeth Emery: No, no, I didn’t know

Bjork Ostrom: That. So it’s a real estate, residential real estate application. So you’d be able to go around and look and see how much is a house in my neighborhood selling for? But they also have this thing called an estimate, and the estimate is like, what’s the estimate or what this house is worth or your house is worth based on millions of data points of what other houses are selling for every year, square feet, things like that. But we don’t really have that in the world of sponsor content or brand work. And if we did, it’d be really helpful. Then we’d all be able to see, oh, actually this person who has a million followers is charging this. And so we kind of have to form our own little marketplace and do the analysis with a group of 5, 6, 7 people just to get an idea of what are you charging? And to say like, oh, maybe I need to be charging more or to sell somebody else. Maybe you need to be charging more. How did you go about increasing your rates and then when to stop? When are you at the point that feels appropriate?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really difficult question actually. I think I talked to friends to start with and it felt pretty good about what I was charging. Then spoke to some more friends and started to feel kind of rubbish about what I was charging because they were managing to charge so much more. I usually quote perhaps a little higher than I think some brands will go for. And then if they come down, that’s absolutely fine. If they say yes, that’s amazing, but then I’ve got that wiggle room. I’m willing to come down a bit. In terms of knowing when you’ve reached the right level, it’s really hard to say. I think what I’ve noticed in the last year or two is it is so different. The spectrum of what brands are willing to pay and what is just, it’s so vast. It can be quite hard, I think, to know what to charge. But I would say as a general rule of thumb, given that I really think most creators are undercharging for our worth, I would state charge more than you think you should be. Pick the amount you think you should be charging and then go a thousand or go several hundred over that because you’re most likely undercharging. And I hear this again and again from experts on this as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one of the things I’ve learned, so we’re working with some people, anybody who listens to the podcast knows that you’re starting to hear more podcast ads. So we’re thinking of ourselves as somebody who can do brand partnerships, which we hadn’t done for years, which seems like so obvious, but it just took us a while. But one of the things that I’ve learned in working with them is they’ve really said like, Hey, you’re not just selling podcast ads. You’re able to sell this kind of holistic exposure for this brand. And so they helped us kind of expand our view of it to say it’s on Instagram, but also you could include it in an email and you can, well, for us it would be on the podcast, but you can include it in email, you can include it in Instagram. There’s all of these platforms that we have as creators.

And so I think one of the other avenues that we can all think about is if a brand approaches us and they say, Hey, we would love to work with you, or we approach a brand and say, we would love to work with you. We might immediately say, how many followers do I have on Instagram? But really if you start to collectively say, and we can send an email out and the email will include a mention, and here’s what that looks like as a line item. It costs this much, and maybe there’s a blog post and you can start to put together these packages. I have a friend who has a site smaller traffic, smaller following, a little bit more higher value in the things that they’re selling. But he talked about putting together these million dollar packages for brands, but there’d be these holistic packages that would have an event and all of these different components. And so I guess it’s just encouragement for anybody listening to think strategically, not even just about pricing within one area, but to think about all the different areas and the pricing that you can build into a package for a brand. And I think it helps communicate the value when you break it up and show how it’s going to live across the web in different ways, and then also report back on that. So

It feels like you’re in a good place, especially when you look back to 2021 and what that season was like. What does it look like for you looking forward when you think of the next two or three years, what are the things that you’re excited about and moving towards within your business?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, honestly, ad revenue is a huge part of it. Just scaling that really has been very exciting, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what I can do as we are going into Q4 and Q4 and Q1 weirdly is a really good quarter for me. A lot of people are going, I suppose, sure. But seeing what I can do in terms of scaling that, it does excite me. It’s motivating because for the first time in my business, that feels like a thing. I don’t want to jinx it, say I’m in control of it, but because who knows,

I feel more in control of that than anything else. And it’s really exciting to build that. And within the last year, I’ve seen my ad revenue start a certain figure in the hundreds, and I’ve seven Xed it in the last year. And it’s such a good feeling to do that. It really excites me to know where that could go. So yeah, continuing to make the business sustainable. I’d love to do something like write a cookbook one day. Any other higher-profile opportunities would absolutely be welcome. I actually used to have a podcast very briefly, so I’d really like to bring that back because

It would be so fun and just kind of round the business out a bit more. I think really focus more strategically on different areas that I want to. I’ve definitely taken a bit of a break from, well, not a break, but I haven’t been posting quite as regularly in the last couple of years on Instagram. So I’ve just been getting back into posting a lot more consistently on there and kind of seeing what comes with that, but just sort of continuing to stabilize and build the business, which doesn’t sound really sexy to be honest, but

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah,

Elizabeth Emery: It works.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. And then last question for you as we round it out. Let’s say somebody is in a similar season where they’re feeling burnt out, maybe they’re where you were in 2021, what would your advice be for them now having been three, four years out from there?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, my heart goes out to them if they are, because I remember how it felt vividly. My advice would be you don’t have to listen to all the advice that’s out there. There’s a heck of a lot of advice, and I wish I hadn’t paid attention to everything, because some of it won’t apply to you. You don’t have to do all of it. And some of the advice that is being given out by people in the know is plain wrong. I’ve found in my experience, for me, it’s not been helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example of something that was reached as true that you felt not to be true?

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, and I’m not going to name any names, but

Bjork Ostrom: No, yeah, just generally speaking the thought or the advice or Yeah,

Elizabeth Emery: For sure. There was a very specific example I can think of. I remember listening to a podcast once from someone who’s very well-known expert in this field.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Elizabeth Emery: Somebody said,

Bjork Ostrom: I’m nervous that it’s going to be me. That’s going to be this story. Wouldn’t that be lives in Minnesota? Yeah. Name rhymes with New York. Yeah,

Elizabeth Emery: He has a food blog. Yeah. So this well-known person, someone asked the question on the podcast and said, can you do sponsored work on Instagram if you have less than 10,000 followers? And this person kind of categorically said, no, I’m sorry. You can’t. It’s just not going to happen for you. It’s not worth trying. Focus on building up your followers. I wouldn’t bother. And I remember listening to it at the time and thinking, but I started doing sponsored work when I had just over a thousand followers. And for granted, they’re not the same types of deals that I do now. They’re different brands, but it was perfectly possible for local brands and things like that, or newer brands. All of that stuff I think is possible. And that was just an example of a time I remember listening to that and thinking, but I know that’s not true. I know that’s inaccurate. And this person was sort of flatly saying, yeah, less than 10,000 followers, you’re not going to get any more. I wouldn’t even bother at that level. And I have less than 30,000 followers on Instagram. I don’t have a huge account, but I make a significant part of my income from sponsored content. It is perfectly possible, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and even the brands that we work with, I don’t know what the count is for Food Blocker Pro 12,000 people. It’s valuable for them to get in front of that audience because it’s like B2B, a single sign up for Yost is a really valuable thing over lifetime for them. And I think of, there’s this Alex Hormozi, he’s like a sales. He was really into gyms and then got into business. And I don’t know if you ever come across Alex and I forget his wife’s name, who also does a lot of content, generally great content, but any influencer content, it’s like they’re a 200% human. The opposite of quiet success. They’re loud success. But he talked about, nobody should quote me on these numbers, but it was a Instagram person, a person who had an Instagram account, it was under a thousand followers, but was making a million dollars a year.

And he’s like, we can find it and link to it in the show notes if anybody wants to see it. But she was helping dieticians. She was an expert at medical billing, and she was helping dieticians bill and invoice to insurance companies appropriately. And it would make the difference, it’d be like tens of thousands of dollars for these dieticians that they’d be able to make more in a year. And so they’d be willing to pay per a lot of money in order to work with her. And it was this great example of, it’s not about numbers, it’s about who are you talking to and what are you teaching and what is the value that you’re creating? And you could have 10 million people, but if it’s a certain subset of people who are, it’s like 10 million people who never want to spend any money in a year that’s going to be different than 10,000 people who are billionaires. Really extreme example. But so much of it has to, there’s a thousand different variables that play into it. And so I think it’s important to point out, broadly speaking to your point, to look at every piece of advice intentionally and say, is this true? And it might not be true. And a lot of times that general advice that’s meant for everybody isn’t necessarily great advice. And the best advice really is that advice, kind of one-on-one, somebody who understands your situation in the case of a business, understands your audience.

Elizabeth Emery: And to that point, I was just going to very quickly say, the second bit of advice I would give is don’t do it alone. If you can invest work with someone like a business coach, that can really help guide you through because they’ll help you find the joy in it again. And you have to love what you’re doing, otherwise you’re not going to want to do it. You can’t force yourself point. That is your system telling you something if you’re hating what you’re doing.

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s great. I think there’s all of these different experts in the world, and I think, and I’ve talked about this idea of a personal board of directors before, who are the people that you go to get advice on health, spirituality, business, finance, relationships. We can have all these people in our lives, some in a paid capacity like a business coach, others in a friend or a mentor capacity. But I think in any situation, if we’re intentional with building out those connections or establishing those relationships or paying for those mentors over a long period of time, let’s say a decade, we will be better for it. I was thinking of in bets, and if I were to place a bet on if somebody was working with a business coach or they weren’t working a business coach, would your business be more successful in 10 years? My bet would always be somebody like, you’re working with a business coach or personal trainer, would you be healthier in 10 years or not? Probably if you’re working with a personal trainer. And so thinking in bets as it applies to a long period of time, applying that idea of a business coach, it’s like, yeah, your business is probably going to be better

And you’re probably going to be happier if it’s a good business coach.

Elizabeth Emery: It’s an investment in everything. Your health, your mind, they’re all linked. Yeah, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So if people want to follow along with what you’re up to, where can they do that? How can they reach out to you? How can they connect with you? Let us know all the places that people can go.

Elizabeth Emery: Yeah, so the blog is Vancouver with love.com and on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook. If anyone’s on Facebook anymore, it’s at Vancouver with Love, so you’ll find me there.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Elizabeth, thanks so much for coming on. Just great to talk to you. Thank you

Elizabeth Emery: So much. It’s been an absolute privilege.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, that you share it. It means so much to us as a podcast if you share episodes with your friends and family, or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share ’em on social media or even in your email newsletters. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode and we’ll see you back here next week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there, thanks for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann, and in today’s episode, Bjork is sitting down with Chandice Probst and Abbey Rodriguez from the Tastemaker Conference team. From the days of bloggers to the rise of influencers and creators, Chandice and Abbey have witnessed firsthand how the industry has transformed, and now they’re working hard to legitimize the creator economy, to show the world that being a food creator is a real business and not just a hobby. They’ll round out the episode by sharing their approach to working with brands, and you’ll also hear them talk about how important it is to lean into the abundance mentality. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And if you’re interested in attending the Tastemaker Conference in 2025, be sure to check out the show notes for an exclusive discount code for Food Blogger Pro members available from October 15th to the 22nd. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Chandice. Abbey, welcome to the podcast

Abbey Rodriguez: Thank you! Hello.

Bjork Ostrom: Good to be here. We live in similar worlds where we talk to a lot of food creators, food publishers, and we live in this world, which is a very fascinating world of building businesses, digital businesses focused on food. And I remember we had a team member a long time ago, she was coming back from a conference and she sat next to somebody and they were like, what do you do? And she’s like, I work for a company that does training for people who are building food blogs. And they’re like, what in the world? But here we are, and this is really becoming an industry. We’ve been doing a version of this for 14 years, way back when we started Pinch of Yum, and it was new then, but now there’s not only people who are doing it, but also businesses like yours or ours being built, supporting the people who are building their businesses. So Abbey, I know that if we roll the tape back to when you first started it, you had some intuition around this being a thing, and a lot of the work that you’re doing now is continuing to showcase the fact that no, this is a legitimate industry. So where are you at at that time when you were looking at it and you’re like, I think that there’s enough here to support a business, to support these people.

Abbey Rodriguez: Yes. So that was 2017 when we started Tastemaker and I started it and reached out to Chandice as we were about to do our first event. I was like, please come help do us, come help build this.

Bjork Ostrom: How did you know each other? Had you been working together before?

Abbey Rodriguez: So Erin from Meaningful Eats, I knew her independently from my childhood best friend who was roommates with her at college. And so Erin was like, you have to meet my friend. You too would just totally get it off your energy, all the things. So we actually met at Expo West at another food event. Yeah, I was really pregnant too.

Bjork Ostrom: So you had that connection and you brought her in, you had this idea and you brought her in to say like, Hey, I’m thinking of doing this thing, this thing being a food conference, a conference for food creators, food publishers. Would you come alongside me? Here we are, seven years later, it’s still going strong. How have you seen it change in those seven years, the industry of food publishing or the industry of food creators?

Abbey Rodriguez: So I think one of the most interesting things I find fascinating is how we’ve tried to this metamorphosis of what do we even call ourselves? I feel like there’s even been this evolution of, it started as bloggers, then it started as, and then we went into influencers. And I feel like influencer might have a little bit of a negative connotation depending on who you talk to. And creator is just, I think it’s multifaceted fits. And I think the big thing right now that Tastemaker has shifted into is really helping to legitimize the creator economy from the food perspective, but really across the board, the work we’re doing here now is really focused on that. I’m actually getting my thesis in, I’m doing my thesis on the politics of the creator economy, getting my master’s degree in sociology. And I know we had some questions about, well, what does that even mean? What are the politics? What is that? So essentially the thesis is talking about how does the creator economy operate, first of all, and what are we doing to legitimize that? And really there is this element of then arguing the case for creators to be a decentralized business model against big tech monopolies. So very, very relevant to what’s happening with ai, what’s happening with Google, what’s happening with Meta, right? Any big tech that is really influencing, and I know you were on the hill with reactive talking about that. It’s very in line with the work that I’m doing. It takes into account the state takes into account big tech. It takes into account the creators themselves, the consumers, the corporations and brands that are also helping to fund this, how it gets funded, how it operates. Really, it’s the entire ecosystem of what the creator economy is because we know what it is. But I think there’s not much by way of academic research, which that is a huge part of legitimacy within a sociological lens is having research to back it up, having at the FTC is starting, they just came out with these guidelines five days ago. They just made a press release talking about indicators for fake use of social media, the fact that corporations are spending money, the fact that the FTC is coming out with regulations that we’re able to appeal to this, to senators on Capitol Hill against big tech is just huge in terms of the growth and where this is going. So pacemakers doing a little bit of that, but yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And part of it is there are things that are happening, changes evolutions within the industry, but to your point, part of it is researching, studying, understanding those in order to shine a light on it and say, and look, as an example, if you go to tastemakerconference.com, you can see the H one, the creator economy. It says this, the creator economy industry reached 250 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach 500 billion by 2027. Just a small example of showcasing the fact that, hey, this as an industry is important, economically speaking, there’s a lot of flow of money from businesses to one business to another business. Just because you would be branded as a creator or influencer or blogger, whatever it might be, doesn’t mean that it’s not a legitimate business. Is that part of what you’re trying to do is say, remove the just between, oh, I’m just an influencer or I’m just a creator to say, no, this is a business, period. What does it look like for you when you say legitimizing a thing, at what point, and maybe the answer is never, but at what point would you be able to step back and be like, mission accomplished, we’ve done what we’ve set out to do, what does that look like?

Abbey Rodriguez: I honestly think that looks like when you sit down at the dinner table with your extended family for a holiday and you turn to your uncle who’s 70 and they say, Hey, what do you do? And you’re like, oh, I’m a creator. And they respond to you with the same amount of respect and understanding as when you say, oh, I’m an accountant, right? Sure, an

Bjork Ostrom: Engineer.

Abbey Rodriguez: I’m an engineer. What I mean by legitimizing, and some of this I think is academic speak from a sociological point, if anybody is familiar with that, the definition of what you mean by words is different from one academic and researcher to the next. And so legitimizing means that it is socially part of the social fabric that is accepted, and that is a norm essentially. And just the creator jobs, creative jobs in general, I think have always been mistrusted slightly. They’re just somehow not legitimate in some degree. And I just think that a lot of times you can prove that through revenue and economic means.

Bjork Ostrom: I was just going to say part of it that feels like such an important variable within it, and I think one of the reasons is, and I’m thinking of building this in real time, so let me know if this feels accurate, but if you’re an accountant or if you’re an engineer, chances are that you aren’t going to, most of the accountants I know aren’t going to be doing that as like, oh, I really like doing this and I’m going to also do it in the evenings, weekends, and evenings unpaid. But if you’re a musician, it’s almost like you start there. This is the thing I love. This is the thing I’m passionate about. And when you say I’m a musician as a career, as a job, the sliding scale of what that could look like is, you could be Taylor Swift or you could be somebody who’s still taking lessons and playing open mic nights and collecting tips. And that feels like part of the challenge with what we’re doing is you look at somebody who’s publishing on Instagram, well, there’s a lot of people who do that, but there’s also a subset of people who are making millions of dollars doing it. And so like you said, the thing that kind of tips over is to say like, oh no, I’m earning the income equivalent to another business. And I remember a friend who she was having a conversation, and it wasn’t until she showed her dad her tax returns that she said that was this pivotal moment for her where suddenly he was like, oh my goodness, this is a business that you’re running. But she had to prove it to him, Which to some degree makes sense. When you’re an accountant and you kind of know like, okay, you’re grinding at this job. Maybe you like the job, but it’s not something that you’re also going to do as a hobby. And I know that Chandice, a lot of what you’re doing is you’re working in that world of revenue, you’re working in that world of seeing how much corporations or companies or brands are willing to pay. And that’s one of the things we’re going to talk about on this episode is how can we be smart as creators in establishing those relationships. But a lot of the work that you do is working with these brands, these companies. Can you talk a little bit about even from the tastemaker side of things, because you’re coming to these companies and you’re saying, Hey, would you sponsor Tastemaker Conference? Would you be a partner with us in this thing? Can you talk about their mindset a little bit as they look at creators in the creator economy?

Chandice Probst: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I feel like the verbiage of letting them know our goal at Tastemaker Conference is to legitimize the creator economy and to help them work better with creators. They understand, oh, okay, and I’ll use a lot of the same phrases. I’ll say, I am sure you already know this, but influencer marketing is shown to be 11 times more effective now than traditional marketing. And they’re like, yeah, I knew that a lot of times. And sometimes

Bjork Ostrom: The marketing director is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but maybe didn’t actually know that.

Chandice Probst: Those who do really grasp it, and I’ll tell you the tech are the first ones to grasp it are it’s easy. It’s easy with those who already are working with influencers and creators, and they understand that surprisingly within the food community, I’m like, you’re going to have the best food bloggers and influencers there and influencer the food brands, it’s harder because they still have that mentality of just get in front of the sales. We just want to get as much distribution as possible. So the food is harder than the tech, to be honest with you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. So which is interesting, you wouldn’t think that to be the case, but I think of even the companies that we work with for Pinch of Yum, and there’s a handful of, we just had one of these calls today, a handful of conversations that we have where it’s like, Hey, it’s our first time doing this. Can you explain this thing to me? How does it work? And these are established brands with huge marketing budgets, but the general trend is doing more of that. I think marketers, people are building brands understand it to be important, but there’s still a little bit of a lag on them catching up to it. And what you’re saying makes sense where people who operate in tech are familiar with the digital world. Their mindset is like, Hey, we understand generally how this works. We’re going to try and figure out a partnership with you. But for a food company, what you’re saying, Chandice, is they’re just like, how do we get into Costco? How do we get into in Midwest, it’s like Cub Foods, is that what you’re saying? A little bit. That’s their mindset as a marketing person,

Chandice Probst: And I try to explain to them, this will get you distribution. You can talk to the sales manager at a show where you’re just there for sales, but you are in a space with 500 of the best food creators from around the world. These are the people that are influencing what people eat, what people buy. So if they’re talking about your product, you better believe the grocery store is going to be like, we need that product on our shelves and the demand will come. And so it’s just switching that mindset is really difficult because for so long it’s been traditional print media, traditional broadcast media, and then going into sales. And so to combine both and let them know you can use some of your both budgets to do this and overlap, it’s been fun to see those who grasped it early on. And we’ve found that a lot of the ones that have grasped it early on are the foundations, like the National Watermelon Board, for example, people who are at the grassroots of it rather than the brand. So that’s been really fun to see. Same with the Idaho Potato Commission. They understand that. So it’s fun to see that, but it’s definitely a challenge in our community, and I’ve heard that from all of, I’m a blogger, Abbey’s a blogger, and it’s always been a challenge to get those brand deals and to then be legitimized enough that they pay you what you’re worth. That’s a huge part of it as well. And one of my favorite things that watching from year one to now going into year eight with tastemaker, with legitimizing the Creator economy, you asked at what point you see that. And for me, the first year looking at the demographic of our attendees and the way they believed in themselves, I mean many did, but many still didn’t to where we are now. And the diversity is so beautiful, and so many of these people now are like, this is what I’m worth. This is what I charge, this is my trust, the confidence there. And we’ve now moved into two different tracks for our education because education is so important to us. And so we have a beginner, intermediate, and an advanced. And so bringing back people like Holly from spend with pennies and Alyssa from the recipe critic and bringing those women back and them saying, we actually have a place here we can learn too, and then also teach as well has been so fun to be able to bring in that higher tech. Like Microsoft came in and taught about AI in the creator economy, and that was amazing to watch and see. And so we’ve been trying to up it in all areas from our education to our sponsorships, to all of the things that we provide.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I think when you talk about making sure that you’re getting paid what you’re worth, and this conversation around you are legitimizing an industry, and part of that is establishing your value on an open marketplace. You go to Facebook and you are bidding to get an ad to show up, and it’s like there’s no debate around what the cost should be because people just are transacting and it’s like you buy it or you don’t buy it. But it’s so squishy in the world of working with brands and sponsorships and partnerships like this, because I think back to our first deal was like Paula Deen’s, and we got 12 bags of frozen vegetables. It’s like, were we worth more than 12 bags of frozen vegetables? Probably. But we still felt like it was awesome. And that was important for us. It was the first step for us of working with a brand and having them send us stuff. And so for somebody, say it again.

Chandice Probst: Everyone has to start somewhere.

Bjork Ostrom: And for us it was frozen vegetables. But for people who hear that, you have to be able to get what you’re worth, how do you know what you’re worth? Sometimes it’s like you’re just starting out and maybe you haven’t crafted your product very well, your product being content, you’re still learning you as a person. Obviously we all believe people have unpassable worth, but your value in the marketplace might not be there yet. So what would your and both of you might have thoughts on this. Chandice, we can start with you. What would your advice be for people who are trying to figure out either in the early stages, what am I worth and what should I charge? Or maybe you’ve been doing it for a while and you’re like, maybe I’m worth more, I should be charging more. How do you approach that?

Chandice Probst: Yeah, absolutely. Well, my favorite concept is the abundance mentality over scarcity mentality. There’s enough to go around. So find a group of people, and we’ve seen the most beautiful friendships develop from tastemaker where these women now travel the world together, find a group of other like-minded creatives, because you need to have people like you to understand what did you do? What did you charge? And find the right ones. The ones who are willing to have the abundance mentality and be like, yeah, there’s enough to go around. I tell you what I charge. I can tell you that will be the number one helper for you. Because if you have five women in this group that you’ve created a little mastermind telling you what they’ve charged and based on their different following or page views or whatever, then you can really have a scale to build off of for yourself based on the number of or the engagement you have and followers on social compared to your page views and your newsletter. That is the best suggestion I can give you. And that one is just finding the right people, and that is goodness all around. It’s just it supplies. And then also within that goes sharing too, if you have someone reaching out to you for a campaign that you’re like, that is not my forte, but hey, Molly over at What Molly Makes, she’ll kill it for you. And be that person. Be the person who recommends somebody else, that brand will remember you and this campaign didn’t work. Maybe something else will. Or maybe they’ll have a friend in the industry that will see that this is a better fit for you. So be a person with the abundance mentality who’s willing to share and network and communicate. And that is my favorite way to build pricing. And then really just being firm in your communication with sponsors of letting ’em know, I like to say get a feel for what their budget is. I wouldn’t recommend putting the number out first necessarily, unless you have just a base where that’s your minimum, but kind of get a feel for what If they’re reaching out to you, chances are they know a little bit about your fall. They know that you’re going to be charged a certain amount. So ask what their budget is. You might be surprised. Sometimes you may have a number in your head like, okay, this campaign’s worth 7,000, and they may say, we have $11,000. Well, great, that’s wonderful. More for them. So I think talking openly with the people that you’re going to be working with as well and asking ’em what their budget is like also.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. When starting out a new business, it’s a pain to get through the LLC part forming that limited liability company. And my guess is it’s painful enough that many of you listening to this haven’t gone through the process yet. Well, the good news is that Tailor Brands makes it so much easier. Not only is it easy, but it’s also affordable to get your LLC with Tailor Brands. Tailor Brands offers all the legal requirements for LLCs such as a registered agent, annual compliance, EIN, and an operating agreement. All of these are really critical components of forming that LLC and having a nice and tidy business structure. Tailor Brands also walks you through each step of building a successful business and has everything you need all in one place, bookkeeping and invoicing, business licenses and permits, business documents, bank accounts, and so much more. And our listeners will receive 35% off Tailor Brands LC formation plans using the link tailorbrands.com/foodblogger. That’s T-A-I-L-O-R-B-R-A-N-D-S.com/foodblogger or just search, build a biz with Taylor. So get started today with Tailor Brands. I think of other marketplaces, this being a marketplace, you have a buyer and you have a seller. The marketplace of homes, and it’s like most states I think in the United States have this policy where you can see what a house sold for. I think maybe Texas doesn’t, but in Minnesota, we have a house in our neighborhood that just went up for sale, and we’ll be able to see what that’s sold for. And what that does is it helps normalize what your expectation should be for listing a house able to see, oh, this house listed for 500,000 and it sold for 5 75, so underpriced, so what’s our square footage compared to that one? And obviously there’s a lot of little variables that go into it, but what I hear you saying is a similar version of that where you’re able to create a little version of a marketplace to say, here’s where we are all at. And you can kind of normalize off of that. Obviously, the more you expand the scope on that, the more you’ll be able to see the average of what that’s like. But when you’re just operating in a silo, it’s just you. It’s really hard to quantify if you’re over, if you’re under where other people are landing, obviously the ideal would be if somehow suddenly all that data became public, but it never will. And so you have to have that trusted close community of people who are sharing what they’re doing and best practices and how they’re approaching that. Abbey, I saw you. This is, people aren’t going to see it on the audio version, but you kind of tapped your head.

Abbey Rodriguez: I was like, that’s a good idea. Yeah. What am I thinking with that? Well, that’s where, this is why and I are so great. I mean, we’re both visionary people, I think you have to be, but Chandice is very much to put it in research data terms like the qualitative person, the relationships, the nuanced things, getting those networks of people. And that’s kind of what Tastemaker is. But then you said, Bjork, there’s this whole quantitative approach. How do you actually quantify your value? What does that look like? And I think there is some, I don’t remember the creator’s name, that’s going to bother me. Maybe I’ll come back and you can put it in the show notes, in the show notes, include it in the show notes. But they have come up, I think with this app that you can go and post what you’re being paid. And so it is this aggregated.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, yes, yes, yes. And I also don’t remember what it’s called. Yeah.

Chandice Probst: It’s useful though. And they’re quantifying that so you can see, hey, but the way they’re quantifying it is, should you work with this brand? Walmart pays you on time and they pay you a valuable rate, or this brand does not so beware in it. It’s based on user feedback that they have experienced directly. But I think the other thing I was thinking that might be a cool tool to create within the food space, getting more ideas. But yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I was just looking through my little research list because there was, now that you’re talking about it, I had made a note like, oh, this is super interesting. I need to look into it. And of course I haven’t yet, but we’ll see if we can dig it up and include it in the show notes. And if nothing else, it’ll be a good excuse for people to go check out the show notes.

Abbey Rodriguez: But we also have our brand pricing calculator too, that I think we’ve talked about even a couple of years ago. Last time we were on here, sorry to cut you off, Chandice. And that’s been a very useful tool for people because we were trying to quantify that to give you a starting point, just to be like, Hey, what am I worth at minimum? And I created the calculator and base that off of just hourly wages and give a beginner immediate advance of just maybe look at this from an hourly perspective as a freelancer of things to consider for your time. And it has different variables in there to calculate percentages of your equipment, just all those things that maybe you’re not thinking of when you’re pricing out a project that we use. So, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, example being if a brand comes to you and they’re like, our budget’s $250, and you are like, oh, I could get paid two $50 to do a sponsored reel, that would be really cool. Number one, it might be cool and it might be worth doing if it helps you build your portfolio and if it establishes you in a way that allows you to have easier conversations with other people. But it almost feels like what you’re saying is just to get a floor.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re going to spend eight hours doing a thing, you have your equipment. And the way that I think about it often is if you were an agency and somebody hired you and your agency to create this piece of content, what would that cost? It’s always going to be multiple thousands of dollars at the minimum. And so in those early stages, you could take that agency approach. Now again, if you’re just early on and you don’t have the craft established yet, there’s still kind of that gap that you’re trying to close around photography skills or whatever it might be. There’s always the starting out point, and that’s maybe where you are getting a bag of frozen vegetables, but it’s like you want to move out of that as quickly as possible in order to get to the point where you’re at the floor getting paid what you would if it was an hourly rate or you’re an agency. And then as you build your following, and maybe this is what you’re getting at Abbey, that becomes a multiplier. So you have your floor, but then like, Hey, and I’m also going to be able to put this in front of 500,000 people, put a little bit of my brand equity on the line. There’s some risk with that. And so the cost for that then starts to get folded in as a multiplier On the work that you’re doing to create the content. So I’m curious to know what does that look like for you operationally? And I know Janice, you’re a COO, so you’d maybe have some thoughts on this. When you are having conversations with brands, let’s say you start to feel confident, here’s what our offering is now we’re going to really hit it. We’re going to hit the street, we’re going to start selling. How much of it is selling, how much of it is intentional outreach versus brands coming into you? And I ask within the context of Tastemaker, because I think it applies to anybody who’s out there as a creator as well. I think a lot of times we kind of are waiting around for the brand to come knocking on our door, which occasionally does happen, but the more that I learn about brands that are doing at scale brand partnerships, the more I’m coming to understand they’re out there pitching, selling, reaching out, doing intentional work to keep that pipeline filled. So what does that look like for you? And also what tools are you’re using to help with that?

Chandice Probst: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think part of legitimizing is creating a business that has, we have a marketing, we have a sales team, we have all of these things. And right now, maybe you’re only one person, but you’re going to have to allocate 15% of your time to sales if you want more of those partnerships. And so yes, it is sales. And one of the biggest things we do every year is we create our sponsorship deck and we set our prices and we set those based on the deliverables that are being provided. And our sponsorships are all-inclusive. So from the time you sign up till the end of the conference, so if you sign up right after the one conference, you get a whole year with us and we work together. If you sign up four months before, I mean you’re still getting the same deliverables, but we throw in a bunch more based on early sign up because we just want to reward those early adopters. So our sponsorship deck is set so similar to as your media kit would be set, for example. And another great way to do those media kits is to ask a friend what theirs looks like and let them share and kind of build off of that. So those are set. However, there’s a lot of times when they’ll come and say, this package looks great, but we also need X, Y, and Z. Okay, well we can add that on. No problem. That’s an a la carte. And not that it’s listed in the deck, but we can add it on. So a lot of times you’re building, making a personalized brand package, which is a lot of what the influencers are doing as well. They’re saying, this is the budget we have, what can you do? So you may be in between two of your packages on your deck and then build them something that works. And that’s usually a partnership that works well for everyone because you’re getting paid what you feel you should be paid and they’re getting the deliverables they want. Maybe this package has it, but this one doesn’t. And so it’s kind of a hybrid. So being willing to adjust is very helpful. I wanted to say, I wanted to note that with sales, it’s very hard. I have a very tender heart. Abbey’s a very strong, I’m strong, I’m a strong woman, but I have a tender heart.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Chandice Probst: So you have to remind yourself all the time. Abbey always reminds me business, it’s not personal, it’s fine, it’s okay, but they don’t like me. Me, she’s like, has nothing to do with the package. It’s the brand, whatever. And so I’ve learned that over the years because when we were first starting, it would be really difficult for me, Abbey, when we would get a no, it was a lot harder. And now I’m like not the right fit. That’s fine. Supposed to be here and we are not going to change what we know we are providing you and the value of that unfortunately. But what we can do is maybe you only have this, here’s what we can provide. We’d still love for you to join us. And so maybe it’s in a smaller portion rather than a full package. So keeping that mindset as you go about as a creator with sales, remembering that it’s business not personal. Your business is tied to your personal hobbies and love and passion and drive. You’re like, they don’t like my beautiful hobbies, but that’s not true. So remembering that is very helpful. The way in which we do it is I much enjoy being on the calls with people. I enjoy talking to them. I enjoy connecting and hearing what they’re wanting to do. I could literally cry when I have to do cold pitching and finding emails. It’s rocks in my backpack. That’s what Abbey and I call it. And it makes me want to just cry all day. So I don’t like to do that. And so we have an amazing sales team. They’re really good at it. Candace is incredible. I know Candace and Chandice kind of weird, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. I’m tracking.

Chandice Probst: Yeah, Candace is really, really great on LinkedIn. LinkedIn, I don’t even know how to use it. I updated my bio in a picture, but she’s on there finding the CEO of so-and-so and finding the people at DoorDash and great, so that’s her. She’s really good at that. And so she finds those people, she sends an initial email and then once there’s that reply where there’s interest, then I hop on a call with them. That’s where it’s a lot of fun for me. I enjoy that. But there is hours and hours and hours of reaching out on LinkedIn and Instagram and if you want partnerships, you’re going to have to do that. People are not, unless you are the very top, unless you are the very best, people are not usually just going to find you unless the real goes viral, unless you know what I mean. It’s work. And so that’s how we do it with our sales. And it’s been a lot of fun to see how that’s worked out and to try too. And

Abbey Rodriguez: We have a traditional sales pipeline too, in terms of tools that we use that are interesting. Some people use HubSpot for their sales pipeline. We actually use a company called Copper. They’re relatively new, easier for smaller businesses in terms of the sales pipeline and just like a CRM to be managing it to see, hey, here’s our sales goals and here’s a traditional sales pipeline of you have your unqualified leads, then you have qualified, then you have late stage, then you have closed one, closed the lost. And we use Asana and copper to then identify all the reasons why. So that say they’re closed lost, we have a reason why budget wasn’t there this year, or they’re just not interested or they don’t care about influencer marketing because then what that does, it allows us to revisit them the following year. So that that’s important data that we use to rework the people that we’ve already done that work to get the context. Because as Chandice was saying, that’s a huge part of that. And in terms of percentages, Chandice, how many people would you say that we are pitching directly versus those referrals versus people who approach us? I really would say those are the three funnels of how we get people referrals, hold pitches that do turn into a sponsorship or people reaching out directly.

Chandice Probst: Well, the people who are reaching out to us almost always close because they know who takes, they found us see the value. So those are our favorite. Those are really great. Isn’t that the same? The creator being like, okay, whoever wants to work with you, they’ve reached out to you. Great. So easy. The next one is referrals, which we found great success in this. So for example, just barely, Erin, you adore her too. She’s so great from Meaningful Eats. She just published her brand new beautiful linen cookbook and she was like, I have to introduce you to my friends over at FireWire Publishing. They’re so great. She introduced us one email and they’re now joining us at Tastemaker. We’re so excited. They’re amazing. And that was one email for Erin, again, going back to the abundance mentality. There’s enough to go around. And she was an affiliate for a referral program. She was in our referral program, so she got a percentage of that sale, so easy one email for her. So referrals are our favorite. I love those because the relationships are there. It’s my favorite when someone tells me this is who I worked with and they should be at Tastemaker. And so that goes into for your creators that are listening, again, a friend saying, I worked with this brand and they’re looking for another wonderful blogger to create for their holiday campaign, or I really love, they’re looking for someone who really knows how to create Peruvian food, and that’s not me, but that’s you. And so those kind of referrals are so beautiful and the relationships are built and bonds deepened with everybody. So those are great. I would say referrals and people reaching out to us, probably 45 or 50%. And then the 55% is us reaching out and finding those brands. But that also goes back to relationships. I go to Expo West every year and I meet with them in person. I’m there talking to Sarah at Roth Cheese, and I’m like, Sarah, you need to be. It’s a very relationship building. Those are the best ways to make long-term sales and fancy food show. We’re partnering with the Fancy Food Show this year with them, and that is massive for our attendees because a ticket to the show, A, it’s not open to the public, so you have to be a buyer or you have to be a sell or buy or you have to be media. And even still those tickets I think are $1,500, but all of our attendees get a free ticket to the Fancy Food Show. So they’re going to go down and visit with, I mean everyone’s there, is that how you say that? She Roth Jelly Belly, I mean everybody’s there. It’s really fun. And so those be places, connect with people. Those are the best ways to make those sales and naturally use products and tag them when you do and over. See, oh, this is someone who really does use our products all the time.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. Lindsay just did shop at Costco with me and when she’s there tagged eight brands and three of them reached out. And so it was interesting for us to have like, Hey, we’d love to jump on a call with you, not to pitch anything, but just to see do you work with creators? Just a touch point. And so to your point, she wasn’t paid to do it. It’s just like, Hey, this is what I’m going to buy when I’m here at Costco. The other thing that I thought was so interesting, I had a call with a friend recently and his business is in mergers and acquisitions, and he kind of sits in the middle and he helps buyers find digital businesses to acquire. And I was asking them about the playbook that people run post acquisition, what are people doing to improve this thing? And what he said is 95% of the time it comes down to sales. These people are acquiring a business that is a good business for whatever reason. It could be an app, it could be a digital publishing company, it could be software. And what they do, he said 95% of the time to increase the value of the business is they have a preexisting sales team or they put a sales team in place. And I thought about that within the context of our worlds because I would say 95% of the people in our space don’t have a sales team. You maybe have an agent that you’re working with, which I think qualifies as a sales team, but most of your time is spent on thinking, how do I increase traffic? How do I get more followers? Which is all good, but I think if you brought somebody on instead of a blog manager, as a sales manager, there’s some really cool potential there. And you see that once you get outside of other businesses when you’re looking at your business, it’s like, yeah, of course you have a sales team and it’s a huge reason why your business is successful. If you imagine taking that away suddenly it’s like, wait, we really need that in order to operate in the way that we do. And I think a lot of it is, well, sorry, go ahead, Chandice.

Chandice Probst: Saying a sales team with massive, for any successful business, my parents just started their second brick and mortar they have in Utah, and the first thing they did was hire a really good sales manager to hit their first year goals. That was the number one thing that was their goal. Because if they knew if they do that, then they would be much better off in some.

Bjork Ostrom: And part of that comes back to as we start to have this conversation earlier, the question of if you open a brick and mortar store and you’re selling whatever it is, you’re selling widgets. People are like, oh yeah, that makes sense. You have sales, you operate within this context. People know what they’re buying. Part of what feels hard occasionally is you might be having conversations with people and the first thing you’re doing isn’t even convincing them to pick you versus somebody else. You’re almost just convincing them to pick the industry, like, Hey, you should work with us. Because like you said, working with a creator is 11 times better, ROI on your investment. So do you have any advice for creators who are either looking to hire somebody in sales or just they themselves are looking to play the role of sales around? Do you even try and convince a brand or do you just go after brands that are already convinced? It feels like it’s a lot of work to try and both convince somebody and then close a deal versus having an idea of the landscape and saying, I know these brands are already working with creators. I’m just going to try and connect with those brands.

Chandice Probst: We absolutely reach out to the brands who we know are already working with influencers because the education is so time consuming to, like you said, and that’s so great, but come to Tastemaker and we’ll educate you there and then should be done separately. And so I would recommend for anyone listening, make a list of top 10 brands that you use and love. Now, be mindful of your audience. So if you’re someone who has 15, 20,000 followers on Instagram and maybe a hundred thousand page views a month, probably not going to be reaching out to anthropology or for their dishes that you love in your kitchen all the time, or to Walmart, I mean, but maybe think of some of those smaller brands that you work with all the time and make a list of 10 of those brands that you use all the time and you already love the product. It would be an easy sell for you because you already know everything about it. You’ve used it in many recipes. It shows up on your blog when you mention, this is my preferred jam, or this is my preferred whatever. Make that list and then reach out to them personally on Instagram or LinkedIn. Those are the two best that we’ve found. Certainly you can try other places, but those are the best that we’ve found and start that conversation. Now, if you’re someone who has much more traffic, you can go after some bigger brands. And if you’re a smaller one, maybe start with some of your local brands in town. Like someone had said Lehigh Roller Mills, it’s a Utah flower brand. That’s a great place to start because their distribution is smaller and you are a local creator that can even come in and do stuff in store for them and do things like that. So that would be my recommendation for that portion of it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Abbey Rodriguez: In terms of, can I answer the other part of that in terms of as a creator, what do you do to build your own team? How do you hire a salesperson? What does that look like? I think it’s a little tricky. I mean, we hired for the position of a sales manager specifically for this industry, and not a lot of people seem to have experience because it’s a very, very niche sell, which I have found to be interesting. And maybe we also didn’t have a massive budget to put it out there to the world and could have perhaps done that in a different way. But I think to your point of convincing people this is worth it is part of the battle, and that’s why both of our businesses exist, is to show people that this is worth it. And we’re using our time to educate brands. And actually Leslie from our team just helped create this sales funnel that we’re doing and really an educational funnel for brands specifically because we’ve seen a huge gap for that of brands need education. We’ve spent all of our time educating creators, but we’re like, wait a minute. Leslie’s like, well, what about the brands? Why aren’t we doing webinars and things? So we actually have, it’s a totally free thing. It’s the first one we’re doing it quarterly is on September 6th if you want to include that too, for anybody that’s a brand that wants to listen. But I think that’s a huge part of it as well, is the people who have the resources like us at Tastemaker, are you guys at Food Blogger Pro? What are we doing to be educating on the other side and creating those and facilitating that? And like Chandice said, the relationship we have with the Fancy Food Show, that is really our end goal is to facilitate that. We bring the education, we legitimize it. My personal research work I’m doing, it’s all in service of building up the industry so that more and more people can adopt this mindset of, oh yeah, this is just a natural part of our marketing plan. That’s my goal in 20 years from now, marketing teams to look at their strategy and be like, influencer marketing is a huge portion of it. And it’s not even a question, it’s just it’s what it is. And for your uncle or your aunt to know what you do and for it to just be like a normal thing. So anyway, that was the ramble answer. But

Bjork Ostrom: We always joke about how the one time that it was the most obvious moment of within our family, extended family being legitimate was when we were on the morning news segment doing a, for whatever reason TV just carries this weight where everybody’s like, oh my gosh, you’ve made it. Now you must have thousands of people who discovered you through this. And it’s like, absolutely not. I don’t think anybody came to our website because of it, but now our family all thinks that we have real jobs.

Abbey Rodriguez: So social proof is interesting.

Chandice Probst: My husband, he’s a big office fan. So when my chili got featured in Kevin Malone’s Chili Cookbook, he’s like, you’ve done it. You’ve made it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally, totally right.

Abbey Rodriguez: But I was going to say Sarvesh from Microsoft when told us that the influencers and creators that utilize AI in the proper way will far surpass those who don’t. And he explained it that, for example, ChatGPT or other, whatever you want to use, utilizing AI as a business partner. And so even having it help you as part of your sales team. And putting together, these are the recipes on my blog line site, this is what I do, this is what I specialize in. Give me a list of brands that I can reach out to that are already spending money on influencer marketing. We literally did that at Tastemaker. We said, this is what we do. Give us brands that are already spending money in this industry that we can reach out to. Beautiful list and it going and going and going. So utilize AI to help you. It’s not meant to take your pictures or create your recipes. It’s meant to serve as a business associate or

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like a research assistant.

Chandice Probst: Absolutely. And it comes up in just minutes, but don’t be afraid of that either, because that’s a great way to start building out your sales team and pipeline is through those resources.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. So this conversation is just like a little snippet of hundreds of conversations that you all are having the year with tastemaker, not only the conference, but also the webinars that you’re doing and the one-offs. And I know you also do, I just saw this incredible retreat in Italy, and I know that the overlap with our group is almost exact. Everybody who’s listening to this would be a great candidate to attend a conference or to go to one of the workshops that you all are doing. Abbey, can you talk a little bit about how people can follow along with what’s happening at Tastemaker? Obviously the conference is kind of the main centerpiece with what you’re doing, so if people want to attend that, and I think you maybe also have a discount code that you can talk about, but we would love to just shine a light on everything that’s happening with Tastemaker and let people know how they can check it out.

Abbey Rodriguez: Yeah, absolutely. So we’d love for you to join us at our conference. You can go to tastemakerconference.com and you can see our events. Just click on events and it shows you everything that is coming up. But we want to give all of the amazing Food Blogger Pro community members a hundred dollars off to the conference. It’s normally $699 for a basic business ticket. We do have VIP tickets as well and general creator tickets, business tickets, and VIP tickets, but it would be a hundred dollars off for any of that. And we also have our sponsorship and referral and our affiliate program for anybody that wants to join that as we’ve been talking about being a part of that community. And then we have a lot of free resources and things that we, we’ve talked about throughout our time here. Happy to include all of those as well. And you can follow us at TastemakerConference on Instagram too.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Chandice Probst: If you have any brands that you’ve worked with and you want to just reach out to me, I’d love to connect with them.

Bjork Ostrom: What was the, Chandice, you had mentioned the referral piece. Is that almost like if somebody refers a brand to Tastemaker? Is that how that works?

Chandice Probst: Yeah, it’s really cool. So we have two facets. The first is the referral where if they have a brand that they’re like, this is a great fit for Tastemaker, and they refer us again, that one email. Then when the sale closes, they get a percentage of that and it’s 5%. Yeah, 5%. But our packages, they’re higher than, you know what I mean? So it’s a really good deal for one email, and so.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s probably your highest hourly rate you’ll ever earn.

Chandice Probst: Correct affiliate program, which let’s say that you are a blogger who actually has a part of your business where other blogger, you talk to other bloggers or creators, maybe you’re a photography expert, and so you talk to other photographers, same thing. We give you a discount code to tell people to grab their ticket with your discount code and you get a portion of the sale from the ticket and they get a discount. So we try to make it kind of a win-win for everybody.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. If people are interested in that, should they just send you an email? What’s the best way to

Chandice Probst: Yeah absolutely. Chandice, C-H-A-N-D-I-C-E@tastemakerconference.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Great. Abbey, Chandice, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you and excited for all that you guys have going on. Thank you.

Chandice Probst: Thank you so much. Thanks for having us.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since this episode is coming out on October 1st, I wanted to fill you in a little bit on what will be going on inside the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. If you are already a member of the Food Blogger Pro community, this is a great way to see what’s coming up. And if you haven’t yet become a member, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about our community and join us. We are kicking off the month with a new coaching call with Keanu Taylor from the food blog Taste Test Tales. He is a full-time food scientist who recently launched his food blog on the side. This is a great coaching call about determining your target market, including the possibility of posting on platforms like LinkedIn, focusing on growth, how to narrow your niche, and what kind of time you need to dedicate to your business in the early years to start seeing growth. Next up on October 10th, we’ll have a Live Q&A all about Substack. We’ll be joined by Randa Sakallah from Substack. She manages the food vertical there, and we’ll be answering all of our questions about becoming a food creator on the platform. Next up on October 24th, we will be releasing a new and improved version of our WordPress Deep Dive course. This is a really detailed look into everything WordPress. So if you are just getting started or looking to become more familiar with WordPress, it’s a great course. Of course, we’ll have new podcasts every week and new blog posts as well. But if you would like to join us in the membership, there’s a ton more to explore there. Again, thanks so much for listening to the podcast. Hope you have a great week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Anne, and this episode Bjork is sitting down with Jen Matichuk from Memberful for the third and final episode of our miniseries, sponsored by Memberful. You’ll hear Jen talk about some of the ways that you can create a sense of community around your content from providing exclusive content to creating space where your members can connect with each other. She also emphasizes the importance of offering value beyond your free blog content. This can include behind the scenes content or in-depth recipe walkthroughs. Lastly, she’ll dive into some of the different tools that Memberful offers to keep your membership streamlined so that you can focus on what matters most building your community. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. We hope you’ve enjoyed the series and found it helpful as you think about ways to diversify your income streams. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

Jen Matichuk: Thank you so much for having me again.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re in this world where we were just at the time of this recording. Lindsay and I were out in New York and meeting with this advertiser partner that we work with, and one of the conversations, the conversation that they were talking about was this idea of diversification. And it was like, they’re talking about diversification from a traffic standpoint. Like, Hey, Google algorithm is changing and we need to be strategic about thinking about email signups and getting traffic from Pinterest. And also this idea of we need to be strategic as business owners to diversify the types of revenue that we’re having. And that’s why this little mini series that we’ve done with Memberful feels like it has landed so well is because it’s in this season of the ground shifting a little bit in the world of content creators and nothing seeming super stable. And so that’s why it’s going to be important to talk about what we’re talking about. You get the world of content because not only do you lead some of the creator partner efforts at Memberful, but you also worked directly with some well-known YouTube creators before you started at Memberful. So for those who didn’t listen to the first podcast, can you share a little bit of background with that?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, for sure. So starting with my previous job, I worked for these guys named Rhett and Link. I started working for them in 2013. I worked with them through 2019. I was really hired to help build out their social side of things, and that turned into helping with all of their video content and really making their mark on the internet in the social sphere, which is where they mostly resided. So at the end of that, I actually helped them then build out their membership just because I knew what their fans were interested in and I could really understand and read what they would purchase and what they’d be excited about. So I built that on Memberful, and that was my stepping stone into now working at Memberful and now helping people build out their own memberships within our product.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. I’ve watched a few other videos. My guess is 2013 to 2019 was an interesting time to be a part of their journey because I mean pretty expansive in terms of growth and probably pretty quick, what was that like just at a high level?

Jen Matichuk: It was crazy. Actually. It’s funny that we’re talking about this now because I found our 2014 goals on, I took a picture and my phone reminded me of it, and some of the goals were get 250,000 views on one video a week and post some original scripted content. And then you look at 2015 and 2016, and we were quadrupling those numbers and those were five year goals. So rapid is definitely a good way to explain what happened. The show really took off Good Mythical Morning, their flagship show. It really, really took off at a time when YouTube was changing. They introduced their partner program long, longer form content was being favored, Rhett and Link were really at the forefront of that, and people were coming back to them. They were consistent in their content. They were bringing people to their content all the time, every single day. People wanted to have a piece of that every single day. So to experience that growth was very interesting because sometimes it felt like I didn’t have to do anything and it would just still grow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. Which it’s like, it’s both of those things. It’s really good content. And then you have the multiplier of strategic use of tools, and that is so much of what we do. If you just had the like, hey strategy and you’re applying it to content, that’s not great, that’s not going to work. But also you can have really great content, but if you’re not understanding the strategy of the platforms or whatever it might be, marketing efforts, we’re going to talk about some of that today. You also won’t get the results that you need. And so it really has to be those two things in tandem, really good strategy, really strategic, and also obviously really good content that’s engaging and brings people back time and time again. So to recap some of the things that we’ve talked about in this series, the first episode in the series is really talking about specific in the world of food sites and food blogs. We have this issue, and the issue is that people are really reliant on usually a single source of income, but even if you have that single source being ads and a lot of times are majorly reliant on a single source of traffic in order to monetize those with those ads, which is Google, maybe Pinterest is second to that or direct, but there’s this, you’re not really building a strong business foundation because you’re reliant on a single source. And so that’s where that diversification comes in. In the second episode, we talked about one of the benefits of recurring or the benefit of recurring revenue or membership type revenue is that it’s predictable, it’s scalable. There’s the ability to kind of approach it from a standpoint of content marketing versus marketing content. So with Pinch of Yum, we market our content. We’re out there saying, Hey, you got to show up because we monetize via ads with Food Blogger Pro, it’s content marketing. We are showing up and creating content in order to market people to join our membership. There’s a different approach with it for that. When you look back to launching the membership component for Rhett and Link, how did that fit in? Were they looking to diversify? What was the mindset at the time for them launching this additional revenue source?

Jen Matichuk: It was definitely a piece of, it was to diversify for sure, but it was also a place that they wanted to create for those fans that really wanted more, I think the initial piece was diversifying, and then they realized, oh, this is actually going to be a really great spot. Because Front Link had what they called the Retina Link community before the board. They were big on YouTube when they kind of had a smaller following and it was just like a classic forum website, and It has since gone under, but this kind of turned into that place for the people who are originally on there. But once Rhett and Link realized, okay, we’re making money on the YouTube content, AdSense sponsorships through our videos, we started selling merch more frequently. That’s when we realized that there was much more than just those pieces. And there’s a way that you can just add and add and add. And membership really became a big focus because of that. So between membership, diversification of revenue, and the place for fans to exist and hang out with each other and get a little bit closer to Rhett and Link, that’s really what pushed into the membership world.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one of the things we know with Food Blogger Pro is you could maybe have a forum, excuse me or a group, but it costs money to support those things. And so if you want to do it well, and at a high level, you have to be strategic with saying, okay, what does the business component of that look like? Let’s talk about if somebody wants to do membership, if somebody wants to do recurring revenue, what are the different ways that they can do that? And maybe we can start with the Rhett and Link example of this exclusive community.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, definitely. I think that exclusive community is a huge, huge piece of a lot of memberships. There’s Discord is big for a reason, and even people streaming on Twitch and commenting on Twitch, it’s huge for a reason. People are there for that community. But we’ll stick with the Discord example for now. When we originally launched the Mythical Society with Rhett and Link Discord, we knew was going to be a component of it because we knew we had to have a place for the fans to exist. So really, I think if you’re thinking about building out a community, it can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. You can put as much or as little effort into it as you want to put into it. But the more you put into it, the more thriving it’s going to become. The more you share about it, the more people are going to want to become a part of it. So I think that there’s really three great ways that a community can be successful in thriving, and I can jump into those if you want

Bjork Ostrom: Me too. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, I think so much of it, I think anybody listening understands like, Hey, membership site, people sign up and they pay monthly or quarterly or annually or understand the idea of recurring revenue, but it’s like what does that actually look like for somebody who’s creating content? They have that business model, they understand content creation, but how do you start to be strategic about looking at different ways to section off certain access to you or whatever it might be. So yeah, if you can talk through those different areas, that would be great. Help fill out the picture.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah. Well, I’ll first start by saying a lot of people view building a community or a place for people to hang out as the hardest thing that they can do. They’re like, oh man, I’m going to have so much upkeep. I’m going to have to hire a moderator. I’m going to have to do X, Y, Z. But the beauty of something like a Discord community for example, is, and the beauty of technology is that you can create bots that can be moderators and make that side of things a little bit easier. So that’s the first thing. I’ll say that it feels intimidating, but it’s less intimidating than you would think.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And the bot would be like, Hey, if somebody says this phrase, don’t let it post. Or once a week have this prompt go out to see what recipe people are making or whatever it might be something that doesn’t feel too impersonal, but builds in some things that lift the weight off of keeping the community active.

Jen Matichuk: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Taking that off your shoulders. Yeah,

Jen Matichuk: I would say you would want to probably start with the one bot or a couple bots for the actual moderation purposes of keeping the community safe, especially if you believe that that is a fear. But when you’re first kicking off a community, I would stay away from a bot that puts out the prompts, et cetera. You kind of want to start with your own personal touch and make sure that things are going well on that side of things. And then push into a bot once you feel like, okay, I’ve got the whole of this. I can basically just let this go and make it so it happens on its own time. But I would say jumping back to the three things, the first thing is, and to jump back to the Rhett and Link example, it’s kind of providing a little bit of a closer access to the person putting out that community. So Link’s example, it’s, there’s a few different things that you could do, but your personality is linked a little bit closer to the content, so people want that closer access. So they do things like Ask me Anythings where they’ll say, okay, at this time on this day, you can jump in and you can post all of those questions that you have, and we’re going to type back to as many of them as we possibly can on this other side of that. Sometimes people film those at the same time and they’ll be typing the questions and just filming a piece of side content that they can then post alongside it and really double up in that content.

Bjork Ostrom: So as they’re answering the ammas, they’re recording themselves answering the AMAs, is that right?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, a little bit meta.

Bjork Ostrom: And talking about it as they’re typing. Is that the idea? Sure. Yep. And then it would just be something that maybe people would listen to after the fact. Yeah, it’s not exactly the same, but we’ll occasionally do a Live Q&A on Zoom within Food Blogger Pro, and then we have, it’s called FBP on the Go for Food Blogger Pro members, so they can listen to that after the fact, if not a part of the q and a or they weren’t able to make it, they don’t want to sit down and watch it on their computer. They can just subscribe to the private podcast and listen to it there. So I love that idea of repurposing the content or making it available in a medium that somebody would prefer to watch. And I would imagine the world of YouTube people are comfortable and the idea of watching video, and so you’re making something that’s maybe previously wasn’t available as a video and video format, which is great.

Jen Matichuk: Exactly. So you’re catering to the different pieces of your audience. Some people want to just type and be a part of that, and some people want to watch and some people want to read, and that is their own prerogative.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Jen Matichuk: So I think that AMA is a really, really great opportunity for bringing out that side and actually a really low hanging piece of fruit for that content. Another thing that is really great when it comes to an exclusive community is you get to talk with other people that also like the same things or thing that you like and connect with those folks. So this one in itself is actually what I would say is making that day-to-day membership viability really strong. So you have your weekly benefits or you have your monthly benefits, you have your quarterly benefits or whatever you’re offering for your membership. This is a daily benefit that you don’t really have to even be part of that. If somebody is active in the community and they choose to consider canceling their membership, they’re going to have to look and say, okay, what have I been doing? Oh my gosh, I’m in this community every single day and I’m going to lose access to that sucks. So it’s going to make them rethink where they’re seeing that daily activity,

Bjork Ostrom: Especially if it’s, I imagine in our world, our world being the world of food and recipe, you can imagine people, a great example of that is people who maybe have certain dietary restrictions and it’s like, man, let’s say you live in some random community in Minnesota. There might not be a lot of other people you can connect with who are also trying to figure out how to eat that way. But one of the things we’ve found to be really true is anytime we’re going through a scenario that’s unique or we feel like we don’t have people in our circle that we can reach out to, if we can find a community of people that already exists that can help walk other people through it. And there’s something about generally speaking, people want to help other people and if somebody comes in and they’re in need to be able to say, Hey, here’s what we learned, here’s how we did it. I think of we’ve interviewed Mauricio before and he has a site called the Perfect Loaf and they have the Perfect Loaf community, and it’s like people who are into bread baking. And the nice thing about that I would imagine is that you aren’t necessarily the creator, aren’t necessarily the one having to show up every day and be like, oh, I’ve got a post. I’ve got to create content. That’s probably a part of it, but part of the value is just the community itself and you facilitating that. Is that true?

Jen Matichuk: Oh, for sure. For sure. You’re talking about a bread baker for example. There’s so many people that are also on this journey that want to learn from people who are further along than they are, or they want to meet with people who are maybe in their same community that they’ve never met and bake bread together. Who knows? I have a surf magazine that’s one of my clients and they’re wanting to launch a Discord to create surf trips together. So it’s people that just want to connect and you’re facilitating that for them without having to be part of it every single day.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s cool. Can you talk about with that functionally, how is that working? You had mentioned Discord, and I think people might hear Memberful Discord and think those are two separate things. Is me facilitating the account access within Discord? Are you using Discord just as an example of somewhere you could do that? How does that all work together? If somebody were to say, Hey, I have a good social following, I have people who are coming to my website, I have an email list, I want to create a community. I’ve heard Jen say Discord, but I’ve also heard Memberful. What does that look like?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, that is a great thought. And being so deep in this world, I often forget that people might not connect the two. So Memberful will integrate directly with a bunch of different products. Basically we’re trying to meet folks where they’re at and we want to plug into something that’s already doing something really, really well versus create our own internal tool that doesn’t kind of flow. So in this case, discord is one of those. So we would plug directly into Discord. The way that it would happen is you would create your own Discord server. And again, this is something that you don’t have to go through this journey on your own. Like we’re here to help you out. We have a lot of people who are Discord experts on our team, but you would create your own Discord server and then you would click a button inside of your meaningful dashboard that basically will authenticate your Memberful dashboard with your Discord server by using a little key that connects the two. Once those two are connected, you can go ahead, and this might get a little technical on the Discord side, but you can create roles within your Discord that you can now map to the tiers that you’ve put together on your Memberful.

Jen Matichuk: When somebody signs up, they become a member, they click connect to the community, which is Discord. Once they’ve signed up, that’s going to take them over to Discord. If they don’t have a Discord account, they can create one and that’s going to automatically authenticate across their Memberful account. They already have a Discord account. They just click through, say, let this Memberful bot control your account, essentially giving them the option to bring them into that community. And then they’re in and they’ll have their little role, which says tier one or tier two or whatever tier they’re on in your program, they’ll be able to access all that content. Does that make sense? Does that work?

Bjork Ostrom: And the nice thing about that is then you have Memberful, in this case, facilitating the recurring payment Discord, facilitating the technology of the community, and it alleviates so much of the effort in building a thing and manage a thing and the technical requirements with it. And this is what I’ve talked about with 12 years ago with Food Blogger Pro as an example of how we’re interacting with the membership world. That’s our best example of that. We are building a lot of this stuff, and it wasn’t necessarily from the ground up, but it’s like using plugins and putting ’em together. And the best thing that you can do as a creator is figure out the existing technology that’s already exists that doesn’t require a huge lift. And then pairing those things together,

Bjork Ostrom: This Being such a great example of that. So you can start to see how, let’s say you have that social following, you have a website with visitors, you have an email list and you feel like, Hey, I like the idea of spitting up this exclusive community. Maybe you do a weekly Zoom call and it’s like, okay, then you have a Zoom link that you drop into a Discord channel a week ahead of time or three days ahead of time and say like, Hey, don’t forget. Add this to your calendar in a week. We’re going to be doing this call together. And instead of requiring developers and engineers and designers, you kind of have everything that you need as a digitally capable person. You can put those pieces together without having to do some super heavy development efforts, which is great. So we talked about within this exclusive community, a few different ideas. Number one, just getting closer to the creator. So maybe you have a following, I think of all the different worlds that could exist here, but a musician and people want to maybe hear new songs that are being written, or if it’s somebody who does recipe and food, maybe it’s like a live cooking class that you otherwise wouldn’t do in any other way. You’re just getting closer and answering questions in real time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interacting within Discord, connecting with like-minded people. So we use the example of you’re trying to eat a certain way or you have dietary restrictions or whatever. It might be just this like, hey, there’s a tribe and these people are like me. Whether it’s through interests or other different considerations, but it’s like a group of people who are into the same thing. And then you said there’s three. So what’s that additional consideration with an exclusive community that we could consider?

Jen Matichuk: So exclusive being the key word, which would be posting exclusive content. If you don’t have another place that you’re going to post this to, you don’t want to put this on your site because your site is strictly for recipes or something like that. This is where you could put that more loose content where it’s not fully edited and it’s not fully polished. That’s where this could exist behind the scenes stuff or silly little things that you want to put up if you want to show more of your personality to this audience that has already jumped in. And I would say going along off of one of your points you just made as a bonus point is if you want to share that Zoom link that is a real time announcement, these communities become a place where you can ping people in real time and they’ll get that ping on their phone if they have the Discord app, instead of sending an email and hoping that they’ll sift through their hundreds of emails to get an announcement. This is a real time situation where you say, Hey, here’s something, check it out now. And they’ll go ahead and they’ll check it out. They’ll get that immediate pain.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things I’ve thought about is almost like pop up meetups. So Lindsay and I were in New York and it’s like, Hey, it’d be really cool to just say we’re going to this restaurant or coffee shop six o’clock, come and meet up. And I feel like the filtering mechanism of having this community would be a great way to do that, where it’s not like this blast to the Instagram or whatever or email list, but you are filtering that down a little bit to this group of people and having the ability just to do more kind of spontaneous meetups or maybe not even spontaneous, you plan a 10 day road trip and make little stops along the way and meet up with people. Something like this great way to facilitate that in a great way to connect with people in real life. So I love that. So all of that under this exclusive community example. So as people are thinking about, Hey, what are the different ways that I might be able to create recurring revenue, create a membership site, the first thing we can think about is kind of this exclusive community. And the example from a technical standpoint would be pairing Memberful with a solution like Discord that’s able to facilitate the interactions within that community. Then you can pair in additional things like Zoom or other, even if it’s a scheduling tool, if you are going to do a meetup, you can start to pair those in. What about a second example of a way that people might be thinking about recurring revenue?

Jen Matichuk: So I think that another thing specific to people in the food world would be pay wall meal plans. Wow, I really butchered that.

Bjork Ostrom: We get it.

Jen Matichuk: Pay walled meal plans.

Bjork Ostrom: Say it five times fast.

Jen Matichuk: I dunno why that was so hard to say, but it’s probably something that a lot of folks have thought about that are food bloggers because you’re putting together recipes and people are probably asking, oh, I love what you’re doing here. Or there’s people with a specific diet you’re talking about and the followers of these folks, they really want more from that. So building out a paywall meal plan could be a really interesting place to dive into.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about that functionally, how you might imagine that working within the context of Memberful? So I think people obviously understand a meal plan. It’s like, Hey, it’s probably on a weekly basis. Here’s the plan, here’s groceries for it. Here are the instructions and ingredients. And a lot of times the great thing is it is repurposing content that already exists. So it’s not like you’re having to create new recipes. You can take these recipes that you do have and then you’re remixing them into a meal plan and that’s the value. It’s like the organization of those that creates the value. But then what does it look like to actually distribute that? Or how would it work within the context of Memberful of somebody who’s like, Hey, I would be interested in doing that.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, I think that the beauty of Memberful is that it’s very malleable and I think on our last podcast together I talked about how malleable it was, and there are a lot of different ways to do this. The way that one of my clients does it, which is Workweek Lunch, they use Memberful and they are exclusively meal prep, meal planning type creator. They allow you access to various levels of previous meal plans. So there’s two different levels. They say level one, you get the specific meal plans from the past, and then level two you get access to all of them plus our meal planning tool. And with that, they have built in an app that they use Memberful to paywall. And within that app you basically say, okay, I want to use this meal plan, and it selects all of those meals and you get the grocery list and you continue on. They also have dripped email that goes with that. So I would say that they are an example that they’ve been doing it a long time and they have perfected the way that works best for them. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend starting this way for everybody. I think that starting small and seeing how it works best for your community is probably the way to go. So in that case, I would say you don’t have to build an app that has all of these meal plans that filter in specific slots that people can easily download. It’s doing all the work probably at the top of the month. That is for the next four weeks when someone signs up, give them immediate access to just a boilerplate meal plan that you’ve decided to give access to anybody who signs up for at first, they’ll be able to see, okay, this is what I’ll get as my content. That would come every week, and then on Sunday mornings or something, send out an email with all of those recipes, how to put them into your meal planning schedule and all of the groceries for the grocery list and start with that. And you wouldn’t have to drip anything out because people are getting the same recipes for each different week rather than, okay, person A signed up this week, so they get week one of recipes, but at the same time, person B signed up three weeks ago, so this week at the same time, this person’s getting week one, they’re getting week three. So that’s where things can get a little bit tricky, and that’s where if you want to get to that place, you would have to rely pretty heavily on an integration with your email service provider Like Discord. We have direct integrations with those, but starting small and then realizing what works and what doesn’t and moving forward from that is probably the best way.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. And I think so much of it is just about starting. I think sometimes people get really intimidated by, and you have this huge system and has to all be perfect, and so much of it is starting and iterating, and it’s one of the great things about a membership site is you can have some money that you are earning, you can reinvest it in, it’s more valuable. People will stick around longer. So I love that idea of just starting and iterating over time as opposed to needing to perfect everything. In the example that you were giving, can you talk specifically again how that would work? So people would sign up, let’s say they do that through Memberful. So you’re setting all of that up. You’d have kind of a widget that you’d put on your site, like code that would facilitate the sign up, and then are they getting added to an email list from an email service provider? Would it be memorable sending out those emails? What does that specifically look like in that example that you shared?

Jen Matichuk: So let’s say if you’re starting really small, really, really small, the first thing that you’re going to do is you’re not going to have an ESP. You’re starting really small, so you don’t even have a

Bjork Ostrom: List. Email service provider.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, email service provider. You can use Memberful. So when somebody signs up, they’re automatically added into Memberful. And Memberful has some built-in tools that you can use. So if you want to immediately send them that first meal plan that I was talking about, you could in the welcome email that can automatically be sent out when somebody signs up can include all of that, can include all the information that one might need for that initial meal plan that you have it all queued up. You can also link them into their Memberful account where you could have a PDF waiting for them in that account that automatically has everything they would need. They could print out the PDF if they wanted to add it to their phone. So really two options there. And then moving forward from that. Memberful also has a built-in email tool. It’s a little bit more bare bones than using an email service provider, but like I said, if you want to start off small and not have to expand and buy all of these different tools, you can start there and send out your meal plans through that every Sunday or however often that you decide to send them.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So what I hear you saying is you can start really small. Let’s say you’re a creator and you have 20,000 followers on Instagram. Maybe you have some traffic on your website, you have some email subscribers. So you do have an email service provider, but you just want to keep it really simple. You could go through the process of saying, Hey, I want to do meal plans and for my meal plans, I’m going to do deliver them once a week. What you were saying is to alleviate stress, probably don’t scramble to do it once a week, plan ahead. So you know what you’re going to be sending out ahead of time a few weeks before or month before, kind of have that scheduled out. And then you’re just sending out in real time. So maybe somebody signs up and if they sign up on a Wednesday and meal plans go out on a Sunday, you can send them that PDF so they have something right away of value. But then just once a week you’ll have these meal plans that you have, you’ll send them out and you can just do that through Memberful. The thing that I love in that example is let’s say you have those 20,000 email subscribers or 20,000 followers and maybe a few thousand email subscribers, anybody who’s listening to this that has those numbers, you’ll get somebody to sign up and you have good content, you’ve produced quality recipes, you’ll get somebody to sign up and you will have a business that recurring revenue, which is a more valuable business than a business that doesn’t have recurring revenue, generally speaking. And the reason is because it’s more predictable, it’s more scalable. It’s all of those things that we talked about before. That’s what makes a good business. And it doesn’t require hundreds of thousands of people. It requires a few hundred people or a few thousand people who want to come to you to get a solution for a problem that they have. In this case, it would be help getting meals on the table through you doing the work of organizing the recipes that you already have into meal plans. So I love that. I think it’s a great way for folks in our world to think about taking content that already exists and finding other ways to make it valuable. So we’ve talked about exclusive community and pairing discord with meaningful and how that can work and the different ways that you could do that, the different types of content you could create within that exclusive community. We talked about this idea of people signing up for meal plans, paywall meal plans. So it’s not necessarily something you’re giving away for free, it’s something that people are signing up for and paying for monthly or quarterly or yearly. What’s the third example of ways that people in the food space could be thinking about creating recurring revenue or membership?

Jen Matichuk: So I think the third example is going more in depth on your content. So taking what you’ve already created. So you’ve made all these incredible recipes and expanding on those, making video content off of those, making a full recipe walkthrough video and showing people how to do this versus telling them the classic writers, the classic writer’s note is show don’t tell,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So one of the things, we haven’t ever done this, but I’ve always been curious what this would look like would be, let’s say for Pinch of Yum. So the food site that we run, we have obviously the recipe itself on the site, and a lot of times we’ll have, it’s almost like a trailer for the recipe, which is a short form Instagram video. And the thing that I’ve always wondered about is could there be, and I feel like this is an example of it, could there be a long form video that is the best possible step-by-step video that you could have that walks people through exactly how to make the recipe? And some people would say, oh, you should just post that for free, which I get, and there might be a strategy around that, but I’ve always wondered, what if you had that as an exclusive and you let people know, Hey, if your preference is video, you sign up and get access to this long form explainer video that we do with each and every recipe. If that was something that you were doing, how would that work? What would that look like functionally in terms of embedding that within the site? Or would it be a link and then the link allows you to sign up and then you view that video somewhere else? What would it look like in terms of implementation of that?

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, so right now, the way that Memberful functions is that if you are on your own WordPress site and you’re integrated with Memberful, you could create a post that is for members only. So once you create that new post, you basically are checking a box that says, make this so only active members can view this. And that’s in the simplest way that you can protect something within that post. You’re obviously going to have to add that video content. So if you’re doing this in depth recipe piece, that video is going to have to live somewhere. WordPress doesn’t have built-in hosting. So there’s a few different places that folks go to. There’s YouTube unlisted, and that’s the easiest and the most free version of this all.

Jen Matichuk: Also the easiest to share that link out with somebody else. So some people still use it and they just actually trust their community enough. And for the most part, those aren’t getting shared outside of the community.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean if you post a video on YouTube and you say, unlist, we want this to be an unlisted video. People can’t go to YouTube and find it. Exactly. But if you have it on a paywall post on your site and somebody goes to it, they then have access to it. They could click on the YouTube link and they could share it to somebody else.

Jen Matichuk: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So it’s not like the most restrictive, restricted content.

Jen Matichuk: Yes, it’s not the most secure, I would say, but it does the trick for a lot of folks. The next step would be something like Vimeo where you have to pay a little bit more, but you can also restrict films. I’m saying films because I’m synonymous with Vimeo Films. You can restrict your content

Bjork Ostrom: So, it’s like from an independent video producer standpoint, we’d call them films, otherwise referred to as videos in the content creator world.

Jen Matichuk: So you could restrict those videos to certain domains So that if somebody for whatever reason did get that link, it can only be viewed on your domain and your domain only has the content behind a protected post. So they would have to sign up to see that. And then you can get really, really technical. Let’s say you are making incredible money and you want everything to be completely branded and you’re feeling really good about it. You could use something like Wistia or JW Player where you can really brand the video player and then embed it into your own site. So that’s how Memberful operates right now. I will say that Memberful in the future, we are planning to offer video hosting on our internal Memberful site. So it wouldn’t live on your own website, but it could live on the Memberful hosted site that you could use as an extension of your site.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And for Food Blogger Pro, we do Vimeo, and then we do that exact same thing that you’re talking about, which is like, Hey, we’re going to restrict this. It can only show up on food blogger pro.com and they have decent branding. We can change the colors and the prompts and things like that as well, which works out pretty well. So I think people can imagine, Hey, what does that look like? You maybe have exclusive in-depth content where you’re covering something in greater depth than you would’ve in just a typical post video being a good example of that. But there’s probably other examples that you could come up with as well. So I think that helps to fill out the picture. You have this idea of exclusive community and we talked about Discord and pairing that with Memberful, there’s paywall meal plans and remixing your existing content into an organized structure and sending that out on a weekly basis. Maybe you’re just going super in-depth with certain recipes and doing a long-form video, and people are paying for access to that. All of which I think makes sense and allows people to stay within what they’re already good at, which is creating content. And building community is just finding a way to build something adjacent to what you’re already doing and charging for it. And what I love about it, and I said this, it changes the mindset from marketing your content to content marketing and changing to doing content marketing can be a real value add on the investment that you’re making in that content just due to the nature of how it’s being monetized. The last question that I have is around ad-free. Is that something that we can facilitate within a WordPress site to allow people to have an ad-free experience, or how does that work? I know we’ve mentioned that briefly before.

Jen Matichuk: Yeah, so it is something that folks are using. Oh, my dog just hopped on.

Bjork Ostrom: Love it. For anybody listening, there was a little dog cameo. What’s your dog’s name?

Jen Matichuk: It’s Riley.

Bjork Ostrom: Riley, she’s, she’s just

Jen Matichuk: Chilling in her favorite spot.

Bjork Ostrom: Welcome to the podcast, Riley.

Jen Matichuk: So, oh, I’m going to have to rethink this. Okay, ad-free. Ad free. I will take that from the top. So ad-free. Yeah, you can definitely add that in as a benefit, and people have added ad-free as a benefit into their Memberful offering. The way that you do it can vary based on the ad tech that you’re using. There is one specific way that you grab this snippet of code essentially that we can provide to you. And you’re going to be using short codes from WordPress as well where you add that into the head of your site. So you might need to call on a developer friend if you’re not super familiar with that. Or if you are a little bit more techie, you can add that in and call on your ad tech providers. So if you’re using RIV or something like that, you might need to send their support and email. Just be like, Hey, I’m integrating with Memberful. We want to offer an ad-free for people who have a logged-in state. And adding in all of those pieces into that little snippet of code essentially is if this person is logged in, then don’t show these ads in these spaces type thing. So it sounds simple, laying it out, it can be a little bit complex, but once you get it done, it’s done. And once are actually working on building out very specific guides to some of the top ad tech companies that food bloggers specifically are using, and we’re hoping to have those out sometime in the next quarter.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, that makes sense. And like you said, it feels like beneficial in an added benefit. It seems like the core offering would be one of those things that we talked about, exclusive community or meal plans or in-depth content. Those are the things that people would really be interested in. And I think with ad Free, it might be beneficial like, Hey, that’s kind of cool to do on top of it, maybe different than a, I don’t even know if New York Times does it, but New York Times, which would be like, Hey, you kind of have all of these different sections and all of these different ways that you might interact with it. Whereas I’m thinking of Pinch of Yum. It’s like people probably come there decent amount, but it’s not like they’re there everyday multiple times a day.

Bjork Ostrom: So ad-free, being like, Hey, that’s great, but great on top of some of these other offerings that seems like really should be the core of what you’re looking at. Do you have any creators that you would point Shine a light on that are using Memberful and like, Hey, they’re doing really good work on the internet and you should check ’em out?

Jen Matichuk: Yes. I have a bunch of food specific creators that I think are doing a great job. One of them is Jacques Pepin. Obviously people should probably know him, but he has a video recipe book that is really, really great and I would definitely urge people to check that out if they’re looking to create video content. Bittman Project is another one. Mark Bittman is running that side of things. He does a lot of content. He has so many recipes on his site, and he also does food musings, food writing, so they have a really beautiful site as well. We talked about Workweek Lunch.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jen Matichuk: One other site, Little Spoon Farm, they are just doing ad-free. So if you want to see what that looks like and maybe take that on as a place to start your membership journey, that could be an interesting spot.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Jen Matichuk: And another one that I point to often, her name’s Molly Baz. I’m sure a lot of people know her. I don’t think she’s traditionally a food blogger, but she releases one recipe a week and her personality really shines through. So if you’re starting to think that you want to put more of your personality into what you’re doing, I think she’s a great place to start because her writing is filled with her voice. And when she does her content on her Instagram or anything like that, that teases the membership. It really pushes people through. So she’s a great example for that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And a great example of marketing content marketing, somebody who’s smart about that approach and looking like, Hey, I have a product. I have an offering. I create content for free and I point people to that product. And that being just the different and smart approach to business, I think compared to a lot of food creators who, even if it’s just like Instagram, oh, you’re just growing Instagram followers to work with sponsors that can work and people have really successful businesses with that. But content marketing versus marketing content, if you have that product that you can sell as opposed to somebody else’s, it just allows it to be more predictable, more stable business, probably less stressful to some degree, You have more of a playbook that you can run versus trying to get the next deal. So Jen, you understand this world really well. It’s so fun to talk to you about it, not only because you’ve done it, you’ve worked with creators to implement a successful site, but I know that you’ve also talked with hundreds of other creators and publishers to help them do what they’re doing. And so it’s a gift to have you on to talk about all this stuff. If people want to connect with you or they want to take the next step with Memberful, what’s the best way for people who are starting to think about, Hey, this might be interesting for me to move forward with this. What’s the best way for them to take the next step?

Jen Matichuk: Send me an email. I will talk to anybody who wants to chat jen@memberful.com, one N. And yeah, I’m happy to have a chat with anybody who comes from this podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I feel like that’s the best call to action is there’s no download, there’s no URL to go to. It’s just like, Hey, if you’re interested, it’s shooting off a quick email. I tell this story a lot of, one of the most important things that I’ve done with Food Blogger Pro is before I went to bed one night, I sent an email to somebody who’s now a friend who I didn’t know at the time who had built a membership site, and I was like, Hey, we’re thinking about doing this. Could we just talk about what it might look like? And I wasn’t going to do it. And then I was just like, oh, you got to do it. Just do it before you go to bed. It was late night, sent it off, and that kicked off what was for us, a business that we’ve now run for over a decade. And so I think that’s great and a fun time for us, kind of how our journey started.

Jen Matichuk: That’s amazing. What a good story.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Jen, thanks for coming on. Great to talk to you again, and excited for people to take the next step here and not only to reach more people and have deeper impact, but also to help evolve their business. So thanks for talking through it and thanks for coming on.

Jen Matichuk: Thank you so much for having me again. It was a blast.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. I wanted to chat a little bit more about one of the perks of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you likely already know about these, but maybe you’re a new member or you’re thinking about becoming a member. And I just wanted to let you know about one of my favorite things in the membership. Every month we host a Live Q&A over Zoom with an industry expert and usually Bjork. They chat about topics ranging from republishing content to Google, algorithm updates, Pinterest or advanced SEO. Sometimes we’ll do an Ask Bjork anything or even questions about creating content plugins, site speed. Really, we cover every topic you might need to know something about as a food creator, as a Food Blogger Pro member, you’re given the option to submit questions in advance, or you can submit questions during the Live Q&A and the guest and Bjork will answer your questions and provide feedback. It’s always a really awesome opportunity to get advice and feedback from experts in the food creator community, and it’s just a really fun way to connect as members and get to know each other better these Q and as are hosted live. But we always post replays on our site and for our members only podcast if you can’t make it live. So anyways, it’s just a really great feature of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you aren’t yet a member, and this sounds like something you would like access to, head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more. And that’s it for this week. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Make it a great week.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. This is episode number two of our miniseries with Memberful, hosted by our very own Bjork Ostrom once again. In this episode, Bjork talks about how recurring revenue creates predictability, which then translates into stability for your business. One of the best ways to generate recurring revenue is through a membership site. By focusing on quality over quantity and building strong relationships with your audience, you can create a sustainable income stream that allows you to thrive. He also breaks down some key business metrics that can help you track your progress and make smart decisions about your membership site. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. Be sure to tune in for the third episode of our miniseries coming soon, in which Bjork chats with Jen Matichuk from Memberful about the success that creators have had with their own membership sites. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey everybody. Bjork here. We are doing today what is called a solo episode for this miniseries that we’re doing with Memberful. Now, Memberful is a platform that allows you to easily create membership sites. And as we are having conversations with Memberful about coming on and partnering with them as a sponsor for the podcast, one of the things we said was I think there’s an opportunity here for us to just take a step back and explain why it’s so important to consider having some type of recurring revenue within your business. And if you’ve been following along with this miniseries, the first one that we did really talked about this problem that a lot of food bloggers and creators face, which is relying on a single revenue stream like ad income, which can be risky. For some of you, it might not be ad income, it might be sponsored content, but the idea is it’s directly tied up in one single thing, like a source of traffic from Google maybe it’s Pinterest, where an algorithm change could really cause a dip in traffic overnight. That also exists if you have a really big Instagram following and you get an algorithm change and suddenly you’re not able to reach people or maybe you have three pieces of viral content and then the next 10 aren’t as viral and brands aren’t as interested in working with you, which is why it’s important that we’re having this conversation about diversification. In the first episode, I talked about some of the different revenue sources that you can have like selling physical products, you can do events where you host people in real life or maybe digitally you’re doing a digital event, affiliate marketing sponsor content like we talked about. And we also touched on this idea that you don’t need millions of fans or millions of visitors or millions of followers or even hundreds of thousands of followers to build a sustainable income. Sometimes all that it takes is those 1,000 or even 100 true fans, and that can be enough to help you diversify. Now, if you only have hundreds of people coming to your website and you’re monetizing the ads, that’s probably not going to be enough. But if you have a hundred people who are willing to sign up and become a part of your community to learn from you, to engage with other people who are on a similar journey, then there’s really something there. And that’s what we want to explore in this miniseries because what we’ve seen over the last year is that algorithms can change, and there’s a lot of risk inherent in this business, especially if you are relying on a single source or the majority of your traffic is coming from a single source. In that last episode, we touched on this idea of all of those options, singular products, physical products, events, affiliate marketing. The one that really stands out as a great opportunity for a lot of creators and a lot of publishers, not everybody, but a lot of publishers, a lot of creators is a membership site. And now some of you might think of what we’re doing with Pinch of Yum and say, “Well, you guys haven’t done a membership site.” But it was actually the second or maybe third kind of business model that we launched. We just didn’t do it off of Pinch of Yum. We created one for food creators. And the reason we did that is because Lindsay was creating content for Pinch of Yum. She had a great rhythm for that. She really knew what she was doing with that. And I was like, “Hey, what will it be for me? How can I start the process of building an online business along with what we were already doing at Pinch of Yum?” And the model that we chose was a membership model. So we had with Pinch of Yum, it was probably early, a little bit of affiliate. We had ad revenue, some product revenue, and then the really significant next thing was a membership site in Food Blogger Pro. In the first episode of this series, we talked about the reason why. Why is it important to think about this kind of from a problem solution standpoint? The problem is a lot of people have a single point of failure around traffic and traffic monetized via ads. That is awesome if you have it. It requires a lot in terms of numbers and it also has some risk with it in that as we’ve seen, Google algorithms can change. What should we do? We propose the potential of thinking about building a community, building a membership site, something with recurring revenue as a part of the main ethos of the way that the business works. And there are a few benefits that I want to talk about when it comes to membership sites and why it’s a game changer for creators. We’re going to walk through all of those today and I’ll explain some of the important concepts you need to understand if you’re thinking about creating one. First, we’re going to talk about the business metrics with it, and then we’re going to talk about some of the marketing considerations with it. Let’s go ahead and jump in. First, let’s talk about recurring revenue. Really recurring revenue is almost this kind of holy grail of business. If you’re not familiar with the term, recurring revenue is essentially money that comes in on a regular basis. It’s revenue that is recurring. Now, most often you think about that within the context of maybe monthly, quarterly, annually. A lot of services that we sign up for, think about Netflix, that’s monthly. And Netflix was such a incredible new business that is now worth billions of dollars because it took an old model, which was, you go to the video rental store, all of us who are old enough to remember going, walking the aisles, maybe you’re looking at VHS or a little bit later on DVD videos or movies. You go look at those, you rent one, you bring it back. That was the model. It was a one-time interaction, a customer who pays for a product. And it took that and it said, “Hey, how about we think about what people want, which is like people want to watch movies, but what if we turned that into recurring revenue.” And it created a billion-dollar business off of something that already existed, which was people want to watch movies, but they shifted the model behind it. And Blockbuster didn’t. Blockbuster no longer exists, Netflix does. For those of you who remember, for a long time it was not even streaming, it was just mailing you the DVD. So it was still like you’re renting a DVD. It was just a recurring model where they would ship it and then eventually they went into streaming. Think about it with this. With something like ads or one-time product sales, you’re constantly having to really chase down the next opportunity. For those of you who do sponsor content, you know what this feels like. You might have a brand that you work with on an annual basis, but a lot of times it’s maybe a deal that you have a certain amount of deliverables, but if you don’t sell the next deal, you’re not going to have that revenue. You’re relying on external factors like maybe the market conditions, and if somebody wants to work with you, or in the case of ads to your site, you’re having to deal with traffic and algorithms. But with recurring revenue, you know with a certain level of predictability, the income that will be coming in every month from your subscribers, it creates a sense of stability and it allows to plan for the future. And what’s important about this, and we’re going to talk about this in a little bit as well, is we all need to be thinking about our businesses as assets. These aren’t just things that earn us money. That’s true, that’s definitely true. But one of the things I want to do on this podcast is I want to help people think about the fact that they are building a business. And a business is a valuable thing inherently because it has the ability to produce cashflow. Now, the cashflow diversity and stability is part of what makes a business valuable. So we’re going to talk about that in a little bit. But first, let’s talk about the difference between a customer and a subscriber. Now, you could kind of use these interchangeably, but I like to separate them out and think of a customer as somebody who makes a one-time purchase. Maybe it’s somebody who buys an ebook or attends an event or maybe signs up for a cooking class. All of those are wonderful products, but what happens is once that transaction is complete, your relationship with that customer kind of ends. Like you might continue to have them on an email list and be able to reach out to them and sell another product, but you’re not going to get any exchange from that customer in the future unless they actively decide to come back and buy again. But with a subscriber, it’s more of a long-term relationship. They’re paying on a regular basis. We could use monthly as an example, but it could be yearly as well, because they find ongoing value in what you’re offering. They want to stay a part of what you’re doing. It’s a one-time decision they’re making. They join your membership or community or whatever it might be, and then they’re a part of it until a point where they decide they no longer need it. Now that inevitably will happen. But one of the cool things is, which we’re going to talk about in just a little bit, is you can then start to understand how long somebody is a member, and really the value that comes from that membership based on how much you’re charging, how long somebody’s a part of your membership. And over time you can use those metrics to make some really cool business decisions. Let’s talk about those metrics. These are kind of all in the world of SaaS, but it also applies to membership. Now for those who aren’t familiar SaaS, it’s usually a capital S, lowercase a, lowercase a, capital S. Stands for software as a service. And the term comes from this idea. Software actually used to be similar to going to Blockbuster and getting a movie. Software used to be a physical thing that you would buy. You’d go to Best Buy and you would purchase Microsoft Word and you’d come and you’d install it on your computer, or you would purchase Adobe Photoshop on CDs or multiple CDs for a thousand dollars and you’d put it on your computer and then you would have Photoshop. Now, over the last five, 10 years, companies have switched to having that software be what they call a service. So you sign up and you get access as opposed to having the right to it forever after you purchase it. And membership sites kind of work in a similar way where the metrics that you’d be thinking about as a business owner are very similar. Let’s talk about those. The first one is MRR. Now MRR stands for monthly recurring revenue. And what I love about MRR is the predictability with it. MRR is the total revenue you are generating each month from your subscribers. It’s really one of the key components for any SaaS business or in this case, we’ll just talk about it as a membership business. Here’s an example. Let’s say you have 20,000 followers on Instagram and you want to start a membership site and you think that you could sign up 100 people. You have a dedicated following, and people who are really engaged, they find value in what you’re doing. And you create a membership site and you think of those 20,000 people that a hundred of those would sign up for your membership site. Let’s say that they are paying $29 each. I want to give you a moment to think about what is the recurring revenue from that group of 100 people paying you $29. My dramatic pause. It is $2,900. And if you multiply that by 12, suddenly you have almost $35,000. You can start to see the power of a membership site or recurring revenue when you look at it from the multiple of a small group of people paying a larger, and by larger I mean $29 or even $10, $49, whatever it is, amount. And you can start to see how you can play the numbers game with that a little bit. Now, $35,000 for a lot of people, that might be a entry-level salary or a part-time salary. It’s certainly an incredible side hustle salary. So maybe you have a full-time job and you want to earn some additional income on top of what you’re already earning. That’s a great part-time job, if you are earning $35,000 by serving 100 people within your community. Now you start to play the numbers game and you can multiply that by man, what if there was instead of a hundred people? What if I signed up a thousand people out of all of my following? And you can start to play the numbers game a little bit and see how that plays out. Now those people aren’t going to stay with you forever, and that’s why there’s the important kind of opposite end variable to consider within the world of membership sites, which is this idea called churn rate. Now, churn rate is just the percentage of subscribers who cancel or don’t renew during a given period. And we can use it as a monthly basis to make it easier. The basic idea with churn rate is the lower your churn the better, because that means you’re retaining these subscribers. And one of the great things about having a subscriber versus a customer is you just need to convince them to stay a subscriber as opposed to convincing somebody to continually buy a new thing, which in my opinion is a lot harder. With churn rate, let’s say that you have a hundred people who sign up and in that same month, a hundred people cancel. Now, I would really doubt that would happen if you had a subscription, but just for the sake of demonstration, you’d have a hundred percent churn rate and you’d essentially be interacting with customers. It’s a one-time transaction, everybody’s canceling. Now, if you have a membership site, that churn rate’s actually going to be a lot lower. It might be 5%. Maybe on the higher end it might be 10%. So if you have a hundred people sign up or a hundred people who start within your membership at the beginning of the month and at the end of the month you have 90 people, that means you’d have 10% of your subscribers churning. Now, in that scenario, you’d be earning less in the first month than you would in the second month. However, you might be adding 20 new subscribers in that month. At the end, you’d actually be earning more because 10 canceled, but 20 joined. You can start to see over time how you can kind of understand the numbers game with this, and you can start to create really predictable revenue. And it doesn’t have to be millions of people that you’re reaching. It’s a small group of people that you are serving really well. And that’s what I love about this model. Let’s continue talking about some of the other important metrics. There’s customer lifetime value. Now, we just had this conversation in an email exchange with a friend of mine, Tony Rulli. He’s been on the podcast before. He’s a Facebook expert. And for Clariti, some of you, if you listen to podcasts, you’ve heard us talk about Clariti before, but we’re starting to think about, hey, are there opportunities for us to do paid advertising on platforms like Facebook or Instagram? And one of the ways that we are analyzing is we are looking at it and we are saying, what is the customer lifetime value? Right now, if somebody signs up for Clariti, the customer lifetime value for us might be a thousand dollars. I don’t remember the exact number, but it’s kind of somewhere in that range. Which means that if somebody signs up for a product, let’s say it was an ebook and we were selling an ebook for $49 on growth strategies for a blog, the customer lifetime value would be $49. But because in the case of Clariti, we have recurring revenue, we have this predictable, we have predictable metrics, we know that when somebody signs up for Clariti, that’s actually equivalent over time to, in this case, the example I’m using, I don’t know the exact number, but it’s a thousand dollars. And in the world of product, you can imagine what it would be like to try and sell a thousand dollar product. Oh my gosh, that would be really difficult. But in the world of subscription, to have a customer lifetime value, that’s a thousand, 2,000, $3,000 isn’t out of question. If you are creating something that is ongoing valuable for somebody. And so in this world, you start to think about, okay, a signup isn’t worth a $29 ebook or a $50 cookbook that I’m selling, it’s actually worth a thousand dollars. Wow, that’s a really incredible thing for a small business owner, a solopreneur to have the ability to do, which is to build something that is worth to somebody thousands of dollars. Cumulatively over time, they end up spending that much. How about the other side of that? Now, in the example of Clariti, we said we had to make some decisions and say, if we know that we have this certain customer lifetime value on average, what does the revenue look like from a customer? Then we can start to make decisions around how much we are spending. Now in your world, you might not actually spend money on ads. You could. It’s a really great thing if you’re able to figure it out because if you can spend one penny and make two pennies, you can continue to do that on and on and on. And it’s a really scalable business model that is a nice kind of diversion from organic, which can sometimes be unpredictable. But I think most people I’m talking to have access to customers. You have an email list, you have social following, you have a blog, you have the ability to speak to customers. But if you don’t and you want it to start experimenting with paying, you could look at the customer acquisition costs. CAC. And this is how much you’re spending to acquire each new subscriber. Now, if you are only doing organic content, you could maybe look at it like, hey, I’m spending the equivalent of $500 to make an Instagram reel. And from that, I hope to get two signups to my membership site. And if you know that you are spending $500 on that between your time, maybe a video editor, social media manager, and you get two signups, and those signups have a lifetime value of $2,000, suddenly that’s a really good exchange. You’re spending 500 in order to, over a long period of time, make 2,000. That’s great. The customer acquisition cost is this variable that helps you understand how much you’re willing to pay or work for getting that customer. Not as common in the world when you are just producing organic content, and that’s the thing that drives signups. But it’s important to mention within the context of all those other metrics. And the reason is because it’ll help you kind of think of the equation of how you’d want to grow or build or scale your membership site. The last thing I wanted to talk about with this is the reason why recurring revenue is important. And I alluded to this in the beginning, but this will also make your business more valuable. We’ve had conversations with lots of different people on the podcast who have maybe sold a business, maybe it’s a broker. We’ve talked to a couple of different brokers from Quiet Light. We can link to those episodes in the show notes. And if you follow along with any of these brokerages, you can see that there are businesses in our space, food sites, recipe sites, social media followings, that are being sold and they’re not being sold for tens of dollars. They’re not being sold for thousands of dollars, or some of them might be hundreds of thousands of dollars. There’s a lot of these that are being sold for millions of dollars. It’s life-changing amount of money. And one of the things that… If your approach is to be strategic from a business perspective, you can think about the value of your business. Now, this is a little bit of a rabbit trail, but I think it’s also important to point out. One of the reasons why we think it’s important to think about the value of your business is because when you look at everything that you have going on within your own personal financial situation, one of the things can be looking at like, hey, what is the equity in my business? And if you have a business that’s worth a million dollars, maybe you come up to a season of life where it makes sense for you to say, maybe the business is causing a lot of stress, or you have a life event and you want to spend more time with your kids or a parent who’s unhealthy. For some of us, we’ll go in the way of automating a business and it doesn’t require a lot of us, but for others, we might want to look at selling that. And it’s important for us to understand the value of our business so we can always have a pulse on what that looks like and make decisions based on that to be well-informed. We’re not going to dive deep into how to go about valuations and whatnot, but I did want to mention this idea that recurring revenue is one of the most attractive factors to any potential buyer or an investor. And the reason is because it creates predictability, and predictability creates stability, and people want to own and operate stable businesses. If you can show consistent income from a loyal base of subscribers, you’re minimizing the risk for a buyer or an investor, and they know that when they acquire your business, they’re not starting from scratch and having to sell things or do one-time sales, they’re stepping into a business that already has proven and predictable revenue. Think about it like this. If you have a one-time product-based business, your revenue kind of resets to zero every month. Now, you probably have systems, you probably have some predictability even with that, but for the most part, you kind of have to keep selling and finding new customers. But with a membership model, your revenue, it carries over each month. And as long as you’re retaining those members, you can build on top of that foundation, it kind of creates this snowball effect. And because of that predictability, businesses with recurring revenue often sell for a higher valuation or a higher multiple. Now, go back and listen to the episode I did long ago with Mark Douse, the founder of Quiet Light, where he talks about the importance of all these different variables within the valuation of a business. But the basic idea is investors or purchasers are willing to pay more for a company that’s consistently generating income versus one that relies on more volatile revenue streams, like one-off product sales or ad-based revenue. And especially in a season where there’s been a lot of fluctuations, like with Google algorithm updates, you can imagine the world of content sites, they were hit pretty bad. And I think anybody who’s familiar with the industry will probably come with a cautious approach when they think about potentially purchasing this as a business. Now, even if you’re not planning to sell your business, recurring revenue, it still strengthens your position as a business owner because a great business to sell is a great business to own. And if somebody really wants to buy a business, it’s probably because it’s stable, it’s predictable, it’s a solid business, and that’s the type of business you want to own. And so with that idea of stability, more control, and ultimately more value, let’s talk about how to actually go through the process of building that initial subscriber base. And I think for a lot of us, this is something that we understand, but it requires a little bit of a shift in terms of how we are approaching the content that we are producing. And I’m going to talk about it within the context of social media primarily. You are probably already using social media to drive traffic to your blog or your website, but I think that there’s a more effective way to use social media as a funnel, and that is a funnel to signing up to your membership. Here’s a basic idea of how it works. Platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, these are all platforms where your audience is already spending time in engaging with you. They’re scrolling through content, engaging with the posts that you wrote, and rather than just pointing them to your website or saying like, “Hey, go check this thing out here on my site, search for this and find it here.” You can actually direct them to your membership site and it’s not something that you’d want to be doing all the time. And I’d actually recommend pointing them not directly to a membership site, but directing them to the next step of something that is valuable. I’ll give you an example within the context of Food Blogger Pro, our membership site. One of the things that we do is we have top of funnel content. You are listening to it right now. Now, this is a podcast series we’re doing in partnership with Memberful, so we’re also touching on this idea of working with a brand or a sponsor. But for 10 years we’ve been doing this podcast of which I would say nine years we have been doing it without any connection to any brand. And we were doing it because number one, I like it’s great to connect with influential smart people, so I benefit from it. But also it’s lead generation into our membership site. It’s our top of funnel content, and we also push content to social media. We’re not as active there. It’s really the podcast is the main hub for us, but we also have social media following, and within all of that, an email list as well. And within all of that, the goal is to get in front of people. It’s attention from there. The most effective marketing funnels that we’ve had haven’t been when we point people directly to Food Blogger Pro, the membership site, to sign up, it’s been when we point them to kind of a next step valuable thing that they can join and become a part of. An example would be we do a series or we would do a webinar or a training session on how to grow your Instagram following. It’d be a free webinar. People could sign up, they could attend. We want to offer a ton of value, really helpful. And then at the end of that, we would say, “Hey, if you want to sign up for Food Blogger Pro, here’s the reason to do it. Maybe in the next month we’d be doing an Instagram growth strategy session where we’re all focusing on growing and scaling your Instagram account. So hey, sign up for Food Blogger Pro.” Maybe there’s a discount or some type of package that people get if they sign up. That is the process that works well for us. What I would say to you, if you have a following on Instagram, on TikTok, you have an email list, you have a blog, and you want to start thinking about how you can be a marketer. And instead of just trying to get traffic, you are trying to get people to join your community, to become a subscriber, you’re changing your strategy a little bit. What you want to do is think about what are the steps that people take and how do you make that incremental? So instead of just pointing somebody to say, “Hey, you should buy this really expensive thing,” and the only time that they’ve ever interacted with you is consuming free content on Instagram, there’s probably something in the middle that allows you to gain a little bit more trust and has a little bit more of an appropriate kind of stairstep approach where maybe they’re putting their email in and that’s the next level of kind of trust exchange that happens. And with them putting their email in, what needs to happen is you need to deliver them really valuable content, if that’s what you’re saying that you’re going to do. “Hey, sign up. We’re going to all learn to together how to consume less sugar within our diet, and we’re going to do 60 days, not like we’re going to cut it out completely.” Done that before in the past, which is a great experiment if you want to try and do it. Harder than you think, or at least as harder than I think. But that as an example, maybe you want to do that. You want to do maybe eating more veggies and you’re going to go through this process or real food. Maybe you have a certain diet that you eat, or maybe it’s just you want to help people cook really good, healthy food at home instead of ordering out, and you’re going to create content around that. You could do a free training, you could do a webinar, and then within that you might have an offer. The funnel really has to do with how many people you are talking to. And at each step along the way, you’re going to get a little bit more specific, and the value cost is going to go a little bit higher. If it’s on Instagram, there really is no cost. Somebody’s just signing up and they follow along or they consume your content. The next step might be they give you their email and the exchange there is they’re going to learn something. You’re going to help them. You’re going to really deliver value. After that, the step might be, “Hey, if you want to join the community, here’s what it would look like. It costs this much. Here’s how you’re going to learn even more. Here’s how we’re going to offer more value.” But that’s how you can think about a funnel, and it’s a shift from thinking about social media, email lists or blogs as just traffic, traffic, traffic. How do we get more followers, more people to come to the site? And it’s shifting that and starting to think about how do we get more targeted people who are going to be interested in the thing that I’m offering, and then how do I refine those steps along the way? Once somebody becomes a paying member, let’s say after that webinar, they do decide to join, they become a part of it. They’re invested in your content and you’re supporting them long-term, and they’re supporting you long-term. And as we talked about, that’s how you can create this really valuable, predictable, sustainable business. Now, I get it, building and managing a website, super daunting. It’s overwhelming, but the good news is that it doesn’t have to be. When we first built Food Blogger Pro 10, 11 years ago, it was custom. We built it from the ground up, all these different plugins, all these different parts and pieces, worked with a developer over the years, literally tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it. But it’s 2024, and there’s some great resources out there like Memberful. And Memberful has been kind enough to sponsor this miniseries. And the reason that we did it is because we think it’s a great solution. It’s not just for membership sites, it’s also content courses. You can do gated podcasts. And the last part of the series is actually going to be a conversation that we are going to have with Jen from Memberful, where she’s going to be talking about the different examples and models that they’ve seen that have worked well, and we’re going to talk about some ways that you can think about it more specifically, and I think it’ll be really valuable. These episodes have been really fun to do. Thanks so much for tuning in, for following along. If you haven’t yet, make sure that you subscribe, follow along with the other episodes that are coming out. We have some great interviews this fall, and the rest of 2024 is really going to be great. Subscribe, follow along episode three coming out in a little bit. Until then, stay tuned and make it a great day. Thanks everybody.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum, in case you didn’t know how it works. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself. And on the forum, we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tool section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins. All sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help with their questions. Casey Marquis and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to FoodBloggerPro.com slash join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann. In today’s episode, we are kicking off our three-episode mini-series with Memberful in which our very own Bjork Ostrom talks about the power of income diversification and memberships. In the solo episode, Bjork discusses the importance of diversifying your revenue streams and the risk that comes with relying on a single stream of income. Instead of consistently juicing one orange, in this case, that would be one source of revenue, he encourages creators to look for other oranges to squeeze. That could be in the form of affiliate marketing, sponsored content, or membership sites. If you’re looking to bring in recurring income, ultimately you want to think about how you can create a strong business without relying on one traffic source. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. Be sure to tune in next week for the second episode of our mini-series in which Bjork will talk more about the ins and outs of membership sites and tactics to remote your brand. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey, everyone. Bjork here. So I am recording a solo episode today. We occasionally do these. It’s actually been a while since we’ve done one of these, and one of the reasons why we don’t do them as often is because there’s just a different cadence with them. It takes a little bit more work. It takes a little bit more effort to think through and build an outline and really be strategic about what we want to talk about on these episodes. But one of the great things is we’ve been partnering with Memberful. I’m sure you’ve heard Memberful mentioned on the podcast as a sponsor, and they are sponsoring this mini-series that we are doing about membership sites, and we feel like it’s a really important topic. And the reason is because, well, it’s something that I think a lot of food bloggers and really in general creators need to hear, and I think it really comes down to a major problem with most food blogs, and more importantly, how to solve it. And so let’s not bury the lead. What’s the problem? Well, most food bloggers, and this applies to a lot of other content creators too, aren’t diversified in how they make money. For many, their main, if not only source of revenue comes from ads. And don’t get me wrong, ads are great. We use them for Pinch of Yum. It’s a major income source for Pinch of Yum, and they can be an incredible way to monetize your blog. You’ve heard from countless people who have come on the podcast and have talked about how life-changing it can be when they get ads on their site and they work with an ad partner and suddenly they’re able to monetize traffic. But the challenge comes when your success becomes too dependent on that one stream of revenue. You see, ad revenue is heavily dependent on traffic from sources like Google or Pinterest, or to some degree, social media. But really, we think of Google Pinterest and direct traffic as the main source. But if those traffic sources change, for instance, the dreaded algorithm update, your traffic can suddenly drop and with it so does your income. And we’ve also heard from countless people in countless stories about what that’s felt like and what that experience has been like. In the 14 years that we’ve done this, almost 15 years that we’ve done this, we’ve heard stories going back 10 years. So it’s not like a new thing. This isn’t an uncommon thing, to have to deal with algorithm updates, and specifically the problem of traffic from Google. And what we’ve found is that relying on a single stream of income that’s tied directly to traffic is risky. And it can be amazing when everything is working, but when things change, it can be a big blow to your business. And I’m sure you’ve heard stories of people who have experienced that within the last year, but especially if you’ve been doing this for longer, we’ve all had stories, either ourselves or from other people who have experienced some of the negative consequences of an algorithm update, whether that be an algorithm on a social media platform like Pinterest, right? So years ago, Pinterest was an incredible traffic source. If you really look back, Facebook, at one point, was a really incredible traffic source. Google now is really the traffic source that people talk a lot about. But here’s the thing, those algorithms change. And we’ve seen that with Facebook, we’ve seen it with Pinterest, we’ve seen it with Google. And what happens is a lot of bloggers try to just juice the orange. So when I talk about juice the orange, I’ve talked about that on the podcast before, it’s this idea of you have an orange and you’re maybe making orange juice, and you’re juicing the orange, meaning you’re trying to get the juice out of the orange. And what’s happening is we see a lot of people who just try and juice the orange even more. They ask themselves, how can I get more traffic from Google? But here’s the catch. Sometimes that orange has already been juiced as much as it can be, or it’s an orange that’s… There’s maybe some more juice in it, but what if there was a completely unjuiced orange sitting right next to you and you were making orange juice? So it would make sense to pick up that orange and juice that orange as opposed to trying to squeeze more out of the orange that you’ve already been trying to squeeze juice out of. It could be, in our world, a new revenue stream. And here’s the thing, it’s already within your reach. You just need to notice it and start working on it. For example, there’s lots of different ways that we could approach this. Let’s talk about social media. So many creators have built a strong following on platforms like Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube, but they haven’t found ways to leverage those followers into something more. And in the old model, you might think, gosh, how do I just get more traffic to my site? And that’s one way you could approach it, and it’s not a bad thing, but there’s more brand equity there. People trust you, they follow you, they engage with your content, but maybe they’re not going to your website as much as you’d like. And maybe in this current version, that’s the primary way that you are capturing some of that value, is just through traffic to your site. Or another scenario, let’s think about your existing blog readers and email subscribers. These are people who are already invested in your content. They’d probably be open to buying something you create. But the question often is, what? What are those people going to buy? And especially if the thing that you’re selling is ads, it’s not that people are actually buying something, they’re just trading some of their attention to be exposed to ads. Well, here’s where the diversification play comes in. There are so many different ways you can diversify your revenue streams without drastically changing what you do. And what I love about this is thinking about… Let’s say there’s a world where you are right now is completely locked in. Your followers, your email subscribers, your traffic, all of that is locked in and it’s not going to change. What are you going to do to make your business more valuable moving forward, if that’s your goal? Now, for some of us, it’s not, but let’s say that is your goal. So maybe it’s creating a physical product like a cookbook. You could do an in-person event or a cooking class. That could be one of the things you could do, and you could offer that to your audience. You could also explore affiliate marketing. However, with updates like Google’s, helpful content update, that’s become a bit trickier to execute on blogs. And I think a lot of people in the world of affiliate have maybe noticed that, but potentially it could work well in other places like Instagram Stories or on other social platforms, or one of my favorites is sponsor content. So let’s say you have a following on Instagram or TikTok. You can partner with brands that you love and are aligned with, and you can create a win-win for everyone. But if you’re looking for something with recurring revenue, and for me, that’s the real magic of some of the businesses that we look at, whether it be online businesses or brick and mortar businesses, is this idea of recurring revenue. You think of even car wash, and 30 years ago, you’d go put $3 in a machine, and then you’d wash your car. But now, there’s so many car washes that have this recurring membership subscription. And the reason is because recurring revenue is really valuable, and it’s different than these one one-time transactions. And it gives you stability. And for that, membership sites in our world are amazing. Now, let me explain. There’s this idea of having a thousand true fans. You’ve heard me talk about this before. Kevin Kelly wrote this really popular, iconic post years ago talking about a thousand true fans. And the concept is that if you have a thousand people who are diehard supporters who love what you do and are willing to pay for it, you can build a sustainable business. And it’s not just for food blogs or food creators, it’s really anything. It could be as a musician. It could be as somebody like my dad who does pottery. It could be as an author. And the other thing is it doesn’t have to be a thousand. It could even be a hundred true fans to start, or even fewer, depending on how the structure of how you’re collecting payments and what the cost of a membership site looks like in the scenario that we’re talking about. Now, here’s what I want you to do. Think about this. There are over 8 billion people in the world today, 8 billion. Now, half of those people have access to the internet, so that’s 4 billion people who could potentially come across your content. Now, obviously those people are scattered all around the world. And if we’re talking about the world of food, that’s going to dwindle that number down even further, but it’s still in the billions. And somewhere in that group, there are people who have problems that you can help solve. And I feel very confident that you, with your unique story and your unique skills and your unique passions, can find 100, 200, 300 people to help, to bring together, to allow people to help each other. We see that even within the Food Blogger Pro membership. We have this great community of people who help other people. And that’s just a few hundred. If you really scale that up, it could be thousands. And I would even be confident saying there are thousands of people that you could help. And the question is, how do you want to help these people? What kind of offer could you create that makes their life better while also diversifying the income that you have from your business and creating a more stable and predictable business? Here’s the key takeaway. When diversifying your income, you don’t need to make a complete shift in your business or learn an entirely new skill. The goal is to find that juiciest orange that’s closest to what you’re already doing. You can, again, imagine just holding that orange and you’re juicing it, juicing it, juicing it, and then you try and juice it a little bit more. But what the goal is to look around the table and say, “Actually, there’s another orange. I just need to grab it and juice that orange.” And that’s why I love membership sites, not only because of the recurring income, but they also allow you to build on what you’re already great at, which is creating content, engaging with your audience, and communicating with people online. Plus, you’re building a business around something you’re passionate about, something you could talk about all day long. So that’s the problem, and the problem is that a lot of us aren’t diversified. We don’t have this diversified source of income. And for many of us, we have 80, 90, 100% of our income coming from one source, which is ads, which, again, is great, but it’s reliant on traffic, and traffic is reliant on algorithms from places like Google or Pinterest. So that’s the problem, and the solution is diversification. And one of my favorite ways to diversify is to create content in the form of a membership site. We’ve done that with Food Blogger Pro. We’ve felt what that has felt like, and it’s a wonderful business model. So in our next episode, we’re going to be diving deeper into the benefits of membership sites. We’ll discuss how monetization works, the key metrics you should keep an eye on, and how you can start building your own. And before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to Memberful or sponsoring this mini-series. It’s a three part mini-series, so this is the first one. The second one, like I said, we’re going to talk about monetization, how that works, key metrics you can keep an eye on, because it’s a very different world than the world that we are used to when we think about traffic and ads, and how you can start building when you are interested in taking the next step. So thanks to Memberful for sponsoring this mini-series. As we’ll talk about in the third episode when we interview Jen from Memberful, they really make it easy to build and manage your own membership site. We built Food Blogger Pro from the ground up, and it was a lot of work. We pre-sold membership. This was like 10 years ago, maybe raised, I don’t know, eight, nine, $10,000. We used that for all the development and design costs, and doesn’t cost that much anymore. It’s one of the wonderful things about technology and advancing technology, is it all gets easier and more accessible. So I’m excited to talk more about how you can use their platform and future episodes, and really appreciate them dedicating some resources to Food Blogger Pro to make these episodes possible. And thanks to you for tuning in. And if you found today’s episode helpful, I’d love for you to subscribe, leave a review, share it with someone who might benefit from this content. And I will leave you with actually a quote from a newsletter that I subscribe to. It’s my friend Ewan. We’ll link to the newsletter if you would want to subscribe to it. And he talks about niche publishing and what it’s like to be a niche publisher. And for a lot of us, we are that. We are niche publishers, meaning it’s a small team with a niche focus. For a lot of people, it might be kind of recipes in general, but for a lot of us, we’ve found a niche and we are serving a certain audience. And here is what Ewan says in his newsletter, which I feel like applies to what we’re talking about. And he says this, “The age of the Mono channel publisher is over,” meaning someone that just publishes and gets traffic from one main area, he says, “it’s walled gardens,” meaning you have to subscribe. You have to sign up. You can’t necessarily just find it on Google and get in. It’s a community. So it’s a walled garden, diversification or bust. And then he says, “Okay, now that we have the scare fest over with, what does this all mean? As difficult as this transition is, it’s probably a good thing. It’s forcing indie publishers, so that’s like you and I, to create better businesses.” And then he says, “Dare I say real? The reality is that many of the old Google reliant publishers, even the largest pubs with millions of monthly users were just Google satellites glorified growth hacks. This, in spite of many publishers and creators actually producing phenomenal content.” And the point here is that these businesses were really, really just a feeder content for Google. Now, it works. It still does work. And if you can figure it out, it’s a great solution. But I would make the case that it should only be a part of your business. It shouldn’t be your entire business. And it’s important for us to think about how we can diversify and how we can create strong businesses that aren’t reliant on single sources of traffic or single sources of revenue. So stay tuned for episode number two in the mini-series. This is going to be great, and looking forward to connecting with you then.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum in case you didn’t know how it works. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself. And on the forum, we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tool section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The Forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. If you’ve been frustrated trying to discover actionable insights from different analytics and keyword platforms, Clariti is your solution. Clariti helps you manage your blog content all in one place so you can find actionable insights that improve the quality of your content. Not only does it automatically sync your WordPress post data so you can find insights about broken images, broken links, and more. It can also sync with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data, so you can see keyword, session, page view, and user data for each and every post.

One of our favorite ways to use it, we can easily filter and see which of our posts have had a decrease in sessions or page views over a set period of time and give a little extra attention to those recipes. This is especially helpful when there are Google updates or changes in search algorithms, so that we can easily tell which of our recipes have been impacted the most. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Caroline Chambers, who you might know from her super popular substack newsletter, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. Caroline’s career in food started out when she opened her very own catering business, and then morphed into freelance recipe development and a surprise cookbook, which she did for many years. With the start of the pandemic, Caroline finally made the switch to creating her own recipe content and started her Substack newsletter, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. Her newsletter is now the number one food and drink newsletter on Substack, and she has grown her business into a seven figure business, which is totally incredible.

Caroline has an awesome perspective on making her recipes unique and useful for her readers, and chats more about how she has grown her subscribers and how she converts unpaid subscribers into paid subscribers, and way more about her strategy with Substack and growing her business on this episode. Her second cookbook, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking is coming out today, on August 13th. We are big fans of Caroline’s here at Food Blogger Pro, as you might gather from the first few minutes of this episode, and just thrilled to welcome her on the podcast. So without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Caroline, welcome to the podcast.

Caroline Chambers: Thank you. I feel very excited to be here. I told the person who helped us set this up that when I was first starting out in the food world, trying to figure out what the heck I was doing, I used to listen to this podcast all the time. So when I got her email inviting me on, I was like, “Oh my gosh, here we are.”

Bjork Ostrom: Here we are.

Caroline Chambers: I’ve made it.

Bjork Ostrom: She would like to tell you, I was reviewing the show notes, she says, “Our team is a huge fan of her Thai-ish steak and Noodle salad,” so it’s not often that I get little fan notes, and it was italic text in the show notes.

Caroline Chambers: That makes me feel very good. That’s a really good one. That was a recent recipe and I’ve been getting a lot of, “This is your best work yet.” It was Noodley, steaky, cabbage, cashews, all the good flavors, so thank you. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks. Emily says, thanks, and thank you for being a podcast listener at one point. Really appreciate that. And here we are. We’re going to talk about your journey as a creator. It’s one of the things that we’ve been trying to prioritize is conversations with people who are building… Their career arc isn’t the same as some of the career arcs of the conversations that we have on the podcast, which oftentimes is like, “I’m going to go out, I’m going to build a site and I’m going to try and get a bunch of traffic, probably from search, maybe a little bit of social media, and that’s going to be the path forward.”

But the reality is there’s hundreds of different ways that you can build a successful career by publishing content online. And you’ve done that. Did you start out thinking about approaching it from the traditional standpoint of like, “I’m going to try and get a bunch of traffic,” or in that stage where you did talk about trying to figure it out, maybe listening to this podcast, other podcasts, what was your mindset then, and did it shift or has it always been in this space of maybe finding a different way?

Caroline Chambers: Oh, yeah. Yeah. If we take it way back to when I first got into the food world… So I started my career, my post-college career in advertising, hated it. And my husband was in the military, so we had to move. When we moved to San Diego, he was like, “Figure out a way to work in food. That’s what you want to do, figure it out.” So I first-

Bjork Ostrom: When was this?

Caroline Chambers: This is 2012. 2012, we moved. I was working in New York in advertising after I graduated from UNC, Chapel Hill. I had a few food clients, Don Julio Tequila was one of my big clients, and I got to do a ton of really cool… It was the early days of Instagram, Twitter. I was being flown across the country to attend Don Julio parties with Lil Jon, and tweet a blurry Blackberry picture of Lil Jon. That was my job. That was my job. Making $22,000 a year, whatever the hell, I was paid.

Bjork Ostrom: $50,000 of living expenses in New York.

Caroline Chambers: Exactly. Exactly. Nothing like it. So I started in advertising, got this introduction to the food media world that way, but again, Instagram still wasn’t really big. I always said, “I’m not a food blogger, I just don’t want to become a food blogger.” Once I moved to San Diego and my husband was like, “Work in food.” I was like, “I just can’t be a food blogger. It’s just not my thing.” Maybe Pinch of Yum was around back then, but this is like Smitten Kitchen was the food website, the food blog that everyone was going to. I was like, “No, that’s not for me.” So I started a catering company in San Diego and I loved that, but through that, had to grow a social presence to get it to succeed. And when I think about those days, I think that that’s when I first started listening. Do you guys… Was it around back then or was I a couple years too early on that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, would have been.

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, I think so. If not, it was my next iteration. I’ve been through about 50 food career iterations. As we do. But I definitely started trying to build SEO and brand traffic for my catering business, and was trying to create a lifestyle brand around that, and I just-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a lifestyle brand, meaning a digital brand connected to the catering? Or making the catering business a lifestyle business?

Caroline Chambers: Making the catering business representative of also who I was. So I was always, even in those early days, cognizant of the fact that I wanted me and my personality to be at the center of this brand. So Cucina Coronado was the name of the catering business, and it was very much pictures of me on the website at these events doing these things. I love food, and I love the connection to people that food brings. And I didn’t know back then exactly what I wanted that to look like, but I knew that… I’ve always had the Ina aspirations. I’ve always wanted to be an Ina in some capacity.

Was it just as a cookbook author? Was it with a show? Was it with a small food shop in the Hamptons? Whatever it was, I had aspirations of me being at the center of my brand. So lots of pictures of me doing the food thing. So yeah, started trying to figure out the like SEO and how to bring… I was putting random recipes on my catering website. I just always really struggled with it, and continued that struggle for many years until I kind of landed where I am today. Yes, definitely. Definitely attention to the SEO thing. There’s a lot of steps in between that we’ll get to.

Bjork Ostrom: In between. Yeah.

Caroline Chambers: Yes. But yeah, the SEO and traditional blog with Ads thing never quite clicked for me.

Bjork Ostrom: And let me know if this resonates, but one of the things we talk about is sometimes you can see a thing, and that thing that you see is somebody doing something that is representative of echoes of what you want to do. And it might be like, “Hey, I’m building a brand, and it’s a personality based brand and this person is doing it in this way.” And you kind of look and say like, “Okay, the way they did that is they figure out search traffic and they figured out…” So what does it look like to try and do that? It sounds like in you doing that, what you discovered is that’s not the path, and so then were you iterating and saying, “Let me try a different path to see if that feels better for how I am going to hike to this destination?”

Caroline Chambers: Let me take you through my path. So I had the catering business for several years in San Diego. Through that, I started getting asked by local magazines, bigger brands, to do recipe development. So recipe development is basically when a brand is hiring you to develop a recipe, but if you don’t have a name of your own, a brand of your own, they’re just taking that recipe, they’re white labeling it, so to speak, and they’re just putting it on Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi was and is still one of my recipe development clients.

And so they would take the recipe, I would have nothing to do with it. They weren’t paying me for my brand to be a part of it. Nowhere did it say Caroline Chambers and it would just be slapped up on their website in a magazine in what are those things called? Point of sale. When you buy a chunk of cheese and it has a little fold out tag that has a recipe on it. I created a lot of those. And so I started building a brand around recipe development, because what I found was catering was such a slog. I was literally 22 years old with back pain and getting gray hairs.

Bjork Ostrom: Icing your knees at the end of the day.

Caroline Chambers: Icing my knees and laying flat on my ground, just being like, “What have I done?” To make $1000 at the end of the day. I realized how much easier the recipe development side was than the physical, being in a restaurant or being in a catering business just from a literal physical perspective. I could sit in my kitchen and spend a day tweaking one recipe and make… I don’t know what I made for recipe development back then, let’s say $150 for a recipe, and that was so much easier than the labor that went into catering a party and making 300 bucks or whatever. So I started building a brand around-

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like B2B. You were known as somebody who other businesses could come to and do recipe development. But that probably left out the piece that you knew that you wanted, which is consumer connection to-

Caroline Chambers: It left out that narcissistic… yes.

Bjork Ostrom: No, and I would say I would push back against that. It’s connection, community, the ability to speak and interact with people, and it’s the same thing if you’re a musician, you can be a recording artist and you can go into the studio and create, and some people love that, but inevitably there are musicians who, if they were studio musicians and they never got to step in front of a crowd of people, that’s just a different dynamic.

Caroline Chambers: And to take that metaphor one level deeper, there are also musicians who are creating diddies for brands that have their name nowhere attached to it. So I was creating the diddy for a tied commercial, basically, and I was like nowhere attached to it. I would share it on this Instagram @CarolChambers. I’ve had that forever, and I would share it on my Instagram and be like, “You can go to the Woodbridge site and find this recipe.” But I was always missing that personal, you to me, you follow me on Instagram to get recipes directly from me. I was really missing that for many years, but I had built this job and this network of people who were coming to me consistently for recipes and I didn’t have the time to… Can you hear my dog in the background?

Bjork Ostrom: No. But it’s great. It’s like birds chirping in the park dogs barking in the house.

Caroline Chambers: That’s Cooper. I don’t live in New York City, but I do have a dog chirping in the background. I had built this steady income of recipe development clients, and so I always felt this piece was missing. I didn’t have time to post a recipe just on my Instagram for fun for my community that I had built there. But I had, I had such steady work, and so that piece was always missing.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s hard because you know that you could take an hour or two hours to craft a piece of content that you share with your audience, but it’s hard when you translate that into, and then I’m not going to get paid $250 in order to do the recipe development. And so then, I was talking to a friend actually this weekend whose brother is a family therapist and he’s just like, he’s working all the time because he’s attached this dollar amount to his work. And you know that if you’re not going to work in an afternoon that equates to $500 or if you are going to work on something, but it’s something that’s not directly tied to revenue, there’s also an inherent cost to that. So how did you-

Caroline Chambers: 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: What did it look like to navigate that?

Caroline Chambers: That’s so funny you say that. That’s exactly because not a lot of people ever bring that up. That’s exactly the cycle that I got into, and I think a lot of small business and entrepreneurs can get into that cycle of, well, I can’t take the time to build this business, because I’ve got this thing set up where I know that my hourly, in one hour I can make $200. And so what happened to me as a mom is that I also, I would get a babysitter for that two hours to develop a recipe in which I would make $300. So I’m going to spend $30, I’m going to make 300, my profit is 270. What happens when you’re trying to build a brand where you’re not making money at the beginning is that-

Bjork Ostrom: You just start losing money, because hiring a babysitter.

Caroline Chambers: You’re just, yeah. And so any amount, at this point when I made this shift, we skipped a point where I, in my mind… So basically in 2012 I started building this catering business, which then shifts to recipe development. I went and worked for a restaurant consulting brand in San Francisco for a piece, but I was still always side hustling doing this recipe development on the side, continuing to build that brand on the side, always left that company to go full force with the freelance recipe development because it was just so much more enjoyable, my own time, all the things. In that time period, I did a stint where I was food styling for the New York Times. My husband was in business school, we spent the summer in New York City and I got a freelance gig styling for the New York Times for the summer for Melissa Clark’s column with a really great food photographer named Andrew Scrivani, who was just such a great mentor and really showed me the ropes.

And through that I reconnected with an old UNC friend who is a cookbook agent, and she was like, “Okay, you’re in the food world. You’re doing all these cool things. Would you ever want to write a cookbook?” And I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t even have, I have 1000 Instagram followers leftover from my old catering business. I never even post there. I would never want to write a cookbook until I had a very clear POV on something cool.” I don’t want just another girl gets a community and writes a cookbook, not just like Caroline Chambers here are my favorite recipes. No, I would never. And at this point I had no community anyway. And she’s like, “Okay, yeah, well, you’re going to continue to grow your brand. I can tell you’re going to work on it. Let me know.”

Two weeks later she calls me and is like, “Okay, so I know you said you didn’t want to write a book, but I have a book with a very clear POV Chronicle books wanted to write a book called Just Married, and they needed a person who was just married to write it, who was a great recipe developer or whatever they were. She was like, they don’t need somebody famous. They don’t want the book to be about the person so much as the book.” I was like, “Perfect. I’ll write my first cookbook.” So I got my first cookbook deal in this very back channel only way that doesn’t really happen anymore. It’s pretty hard to get a cookbook deal these days, and I got one having no community, no following anything. So I wrote that book. It’s really successful. It’s still on the shelves at Crate and Barrel because it has its own life and now that I do have built a community, it has even more success. But basically… It published in 2017, so this whole time I’m still doing my thing freelance recipe development.

In conjunction with what you were just saying about your hourly time being so equated to a dollar amount. I also, when you’re freelance recipe developing or you’re a writer or something like that, your time can only go so far. I could only develop so many recipes in a week. I could only do so much with my time. It wasn’t a scalable business at all, and I kept, that was always in the back of my mind, just kind of needling me that it was so unscalable. I’m writing a recipe and I can only sell it one time to one person and then the recipe is over, I can’t… So that was always in my mind, it’s something that I wanted to solve.

Bjork Ostrom: And you probably also know inherently the value of the thing that you’re creating. It’s like your years and years of experience going into this and it’s like a single kind of transaction as opposed to what they end up using it for, which is putting it in the magazine or on a packaging that is distributed to 200,000 people. And so you know there’s value beyond the recipe itself, but maybe didn’t have access to that audience directly.

Caroline Chambers: Totally. It’s funny you say that because, so I still retain a lot of those original recipe development clients. I’m pushing them off more and more, because I just don’t have time with what I have going on now, but I have recipe development clients that I got in 2012 when I had to absolutely know online community, no name for myself that I still write recipes for, and my rate is about a hundred times what it was when I first started. I mean truly, I think I was charging $150 and now I charge, I don’t know, $5,000 a recipe in some of these cases and they still don’t put my name on those recipes. It’s just that I now know what those recipes are worth-

Bjork Ostrom: Are worth. Yeah.

Caroline Chambers: That time is worth, where it’s being used, where it’s being licensed out, the fact that they have full ownership of it versus only ownership for one year, they’re like these different things you can then negotiate. And so I’ve jacked my rate way up and every single time they’ve been great, in the contract. They never question it and I’m like, “Oh, dang it, I could have been making-”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Everybody ever who has done any freelance work looks back and is like, oh, you realize. And part of it too is like half of those people say no, but then half still say yes, and the rate is twice as much. You’re getting paid the same amount and doing half the work, but you don’t know until you try and have that conversation. The other thing that I think is true is, I think of when we were first starting out and you get a branded deal and it’s like we’re in a season where a week ago we bought a scratch and then refrigerator for $175 using Lindsey’s babysitting money, and it’s like just your perspective on money is also different where a smaller amount is worth more when you haven’t gone through the experience of even seeing like, oh, a company that is reaching out to you probably has a $500,000 budget for this campaign. And so the difference between you asking a thousand or 2000 feels really significant to you, but to that brand, it’s like-

Caroline Chambers: That is a drop in the bucket.

Bjork Ostrom: But you don’t know that until you know it.

Caroline Chambers: You don’t know that. Yeah. Another funny thing that I think I’ve realized with time is, these brands, you’re thinking like, oh, Tillamook is approving this. No, a 22-year old just graduated from journalism school’s working at an agency or whatever, who’s working at an agency that works for an agency that works for Tillamook is who is looking at this and they’ve been given $500,000 to whatever mess with, and so you asking for an extra 1000 is literally easier for her to just say yes to that than go out and find somebody else to ask for that money. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So we buried the lead here with some of this stuff with your story because one of the really significant periods for you, kind of an unlock I would imagine is the transition into building an audience on Substack and you have the number one food and drink Substack newsletter. My guess is there’s a little bit of that that compounds. I have a friend who wrote a book that’s like a number one book in the business world called The Personal MBA, and he talks about once you’re there, you kind of sit there, but you have to get to a point where you start in order to build it up. So-

Caroline Chambers: Yes, how did we get there?

Bjork Ostrom: How did you get there? What did that look like? And in a relatively short amount of time, when you look at-

Caroline Chambers: Yeah. 2017 is when Just Married, published, and at that point I had sort of started being like, okay, I’m going to be a published cookbook author. I better build up my Instagram a bit. But I still had that issue where I was a freelance recipe developer. That was my main income, and I had so many gigs coming in and I was just so obsessed with just what you were just saying, the equation of my hourly rate or my hour to making a certain amount of money that I wasn’t taking the time to develop those recipes for free to publish on my Instagram or on carolinechambers.com. I just wasn’t seeing the value in that. Basically I was like, “Oh, I wrote a cookbook. That’ll project me into the universe as a food creator.” No, it will not. So Just Married, publishes, it does really well just based on its title alone and where it has placements, whatever.

But it certainly does not all this, I don’t overnight just because I published a book, grow my Instagram audience at all very much realized a book is a great PR-able moment if you are doing the work and you’re a creator who’s hustling hard, but like-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a multiplier.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, it’s a multiplier, but just on its own, you can publish a book and no one will ever know about it if there’s not the right things in place. So between 2017 and 2019, I get pregnant, have my first son. The way that I cook very much changes. And so I have this genius cookbook idea for a book called What to Cook when You Don’t Feel Like Cooking and all of the ingredients would be less than 15 ingredients, nothing that’s difficult to find. Everything you can find in a normal grocery store, all the recipes would take under an hour and it would be a complete meal. So each recipe is a complete meal. It’s your grain, your vegetable, your main, or whatever. It’s a lasagna with a side salad. It’s the whole thing. The idea was you get a cookbook and you have to flip from the side section to the entrees, and then you’re not a confident cook, but you have to figure out does that broccoli go with that main? So this was everything all together.

So I pitched this book and all these publishers were like, “This is amazing, great concept, but oh, Caroline only has 2000 Instagram followers. Like, Nope, pass.”

Bjork Ostrom: Because you’re not going to be able to sell it. Is what they’re-

Caroline Chambers: You’re not going to be able to sell it. So the publishing landscape had changed that much from 2015 when I got the book deal for Just Married to 2019 when I was trying to sell this book that I was like, “No, but the name is so good, it’ll sell itself.” And they were like, “No, it won’t. You don’t know that.” No publishing now is at least cookbook publishing in my experience is you have to be able to sell the book yourself. So whether you are a rapper who has a huge audience and so they get a cookbook deal or you have a food blog, and so you get a cookbook deal, whatever, you have to be able to sell it. They don’t want to be in charge of selling it. The publisher, they want you to be in charge of selling it and have your own built-in audience to sell it.

So everyone rejects it. I am so defeated, and at this point I’m genuinely now looking back, I realize I wasn’t putting in the effort, I wasn’t putting in the effort to building my own brand and doing these things. And it was because of that I didn’t feel like I had enough time in the day to… I couldn’t hire a babysitter for $15 an hour to then do work for free to publish a recipe on my website. No way. That wasn’t good business. And then I am one of the many people whose career trajectory totally changed in March, 2020, all of a sudden my husband and I were both stuck at home with, I was pregnant with our second. Our first was one, a little over one, and I was literally working on a huge Cinco Mayo campaign for I Kid You Not Corona Beer. On March 16th, I was down in Monterey at a food photography studio shooting this huge campaign for Corona beer, and we were like, so Corona beer coronavirus.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s funny. Yeah, totally.

Caroline Chambers: So funny. Wonder what’ll happen. And then the next day, the whole world is shut down.

Bjork Ostrom: Shuts down. And everybody picks a collective golf.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, yes. So I get check from Constellation who owns Corona. I get my check from them, literally never hear from them again. I don’t even know if I ever sent final recipes. They were just like, “Ah, yeah, I think Cinco de Mayo’s kind of canceled for this year. We’re good.” So those recipes went nowhere and in consequence or in quick succession, all of my other freelance recipe development gigs were like, “Pause on that, pause on that. We don’t know what we’re doing right now.” Take yourself back, the grocery store shelves were empty. Getting food was impossible. It was an issue. And so no one knew how to market food, and the only people who paid me were people who market food. So I was like, okay.

I remember March 20th looking at my husband and being like, I think this is my moment to, I’m not making money anyway, so I’m just going to go absolutely ham on the internet. I don’t know if for listeners, have you ever had a friend who you’re like, oh, I think they’re trying to become an influencer because all of a sudden they start hosting a ton of stuff and talking in selfie mode to their camera.

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of trying out new versions of themselves.

Caroline Chambers: Trying out new versions of themselves, posting their meals that they’ve never posted before, sharing a link to their son’s swimsuit. You’re like, what the heck is going on? Well, that was me. That was in 2020 totally. And so my advice would be, I’ve had a lot of people since I started trying to be an internet creator or whatever the heck we call ourselves, I’ve had a lot of people, friends, friends of friends reach out to me and be like, “How did you do it? Were you not embarrassed? All of a sudden it’s like you just have to be so vulnerable. And also, who cares? If anyone sees you out there posting a link to your son’s swimsuit and talking to your camera about the great hike you just went on and they think you’re a dork, well then they can unfollow you. I think literally every single person in the world, I don’t care if you’re completely introverted, you hate talking to other humans. I think every single person in the world can be an internet creator because none of us are as unique as we think we are.

There is a community of people who wants to follow somebody, every single person on the planet. You just have to do it. So if you are like, “Oh, I could…” So many people who would be like, I could never, I’m way too shy. I could never, I’m way too self-conscious,” then just get on there and be self-conscious, do it. So I got on there and I’m super extroverted. I love chit-chatting, so it was honestly the easiest thing for me. I just got in there, started talking about my day. We live on an acre with chickens. I would take the camera on Instagram stories down to see the chicken coop, whatever. But my thing that really helped me grow is that I would do, it was quarantine kitchen, like quarantine kitchen with a Q, very chic naming. And I would be like post, because I had nothing else going on.

Remember nothing else going on except for keeping going in your old life. I would be like, tell me the ingredients that are in your pantry and I’ll create a meal for you. So people would write in and be like, I’ve got eggs, lentils, curry, paste, whatever. And I’d be like, “Okay, we’re going to make an egg lentil curry.” Do this, do this, do this. And people just, even if nobody made them, they just got such a kick out of the pantry mashups that I was coming up with that I started, and this is before Reels, which Reels are a really great way to quickly go viral and gain a lot of followers. So this was all just word of mouth, people being like, “Oh, you got to follow this girl.” She’s like, “You can type in what you have and she’ll tell you what to cook with it.”

So I started growing really quickly with that, and I started publishing recipes to carolinechambers.com just because people needed a place for them to live.

Bjork Ostrom: Where do I get it?

Caroline Chambers: And never, I don’t even know my WordPress login. I hate trying to deal with websites. And so I knew, okay, this isn’t how I’m going to make money, like driving SEO. This is never going to be how I’m going to make money. So I just kept building and trying to get more followers. I saw, I swear, I listened on a podcast or maybe it was on here, the importance of having your own newsletter, basically, Instagram can change its algorithm. TikTok could get banned, your website could crash or get hacked, and you could never see it again. Having your own newsletter list of people who you can capture them their attention instantly, and you don’t have to hope that the algorithm shows them your story, they’re going to get your email.

I saw somewhere the importance of that, and it really spoke to me. And so I started building a newsletter list and I would just send fun quarantine kitchen things like, here’s our idea. And it was a great newsletter, but it was just hacked together on whatever WordPress platform I was doing. So I did that for a long time, kept growing my audience. By December, 2020, I’ve had my second son, he’s a couple of months old, my cooking is getting even more… I feel like cooking even less. And this idea of that proposal I wrote, it just was in my mind and I couldn’t let it go.

So I just kept being like, “What could I do with that?” I still only had 10,000 Instagram followers. I was like, all right, what to cook? You don’t feel like cooking. Do I turn that into its own Instagram? Do I turn that into its own website? And Substack was just starting to gain momentum. People were food creators were really turning to Patreon, and I just didn’t dig that for some reason. And I guess I had good reason because has it flopped? Is it over? Is Patreon over?

Bjork Ostrom: Patreon, I don’t think so. But I know any type of contribution model is hard if you’re not… And Patreon, I know you can set it up with tiers where it’s like you get certain access to things, but it maybe leans a little bit into a tip jar. It’s not that, but if it feels like that, that’s different than product or subscription, and maybe there’s a little nuanced difference there.

Caroline Chambers: Maybe. I was seeing Patreons and thinking, okay, so people are going to have to leave Instagram, go to the Patreon app to access this. I was like, “I don’t think that’s,” my people are busy either young professionals, young parents. I was like, I don’t want to make them try harder to get content. And so then I was like, wait, I already have this newsletter. And I kind of heard about Substack and I was like, okay, if I could just continue to create value in my newsletter, I probably first got this idea in October. I already had this newsletter going for many months. People really loved it, but it was just a regular old newsletter sharing recipes from my website, sharing what we did, tips, whatever. I don’t know, it was just a very basic but well-thought-out newsletter at that point. And so I shifted it.

I shifted it to being a unique recipe every week, and I always, because it was COVID times, I always provided a substitution for every single ingredient. So literally I took the ingredient list, I copied and pasted it, and I wrote, because that’s the number one thing back then was like, “I don’t have baking powder. You have, right? There’s no baking powder in my town.” I was like, “Okay, if you don’t have baking powder, do this, this, this. If you don’t have flour, do this, this, this. You don’t have chicken. Okay, you can use shrimp, cook it for two minutes. You can cook beef, cook it for seven minutes.” It was a crazy index of substitutions. And that was when I really started to get a kind of cult following of people being like, whoa, you write these recipes in a way that I could actually follow.

And I also write, most recipe lists are like, add the flour, salt, and butter to the bowl. I write the full amount. So I’m like, “Add two cups flour, one stick butter, and two teaspoons of salt to the bowl.” And I put it in bold so people who aren’t super confident in the kitchen are falling recipes, just really clicking with these recipes. And so I started just, I knew, okay, maybe I’ll turn on this paid subscription model with a newsletter. So I switched over to Substack for my hosting in October of 2020, and I didn’t change anything. Nobody knew. I never talked about Substack. It just looked a little bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: It doesn’t look any different to somebody.

Caroline Chambers: It doesn’t look any different. All they did was receive an email. All it was no sweat off their back. But I changed the format. So I would still provide these once a week kind of chatty, here’s a soup recipe, it’s cold outside, whatever those newsletters. But I also was sending in the newsletter every single Sunday morning with a full list of substitutions, a unique recipe that I would just talk the heck out of on Instagram and be showing them behind the scenes of cooking it. The pictures, you can only get this if you’re on my newsletter. It’s just the best place for me to send it. I’m doing a newsletter thing. I’ve never been good to websites. It’s coming in your newsletter. So I just would rapidly get tons of new subscribers by being like, you can only access this recipe that looks so good if you subscribe.

And so I did that for several months, and then I, December, 2020, I think December 13th, 2020, I transitioned to a paid model. So I was like, if you don’t want to pay, it’s fine. You’ll still get one recipe a month. And that’s how my model still is to this day. First recipe of every month is free for everyone, but if you want to pay, it’s basically… I told the whole story about how I tried to pitch this concept as a cookbook. Everybody said no, but that I was going to self-publish it and bring it directly to the people one recipe at a time instead. And so I launched it at the price of a cookbook, $35. And I was like, this is my non cookbook cookbook. Kind of like F the publishers, they wouldn’t give me a deal.

So I’m giving myself a deal with my whole thing around it. And again, I probably had, I don’t know, 8,000 total subscribers at this point, and I converted a lot overnight, like 500 overnight or something. And I was like, whoa. All of a sudden, my, let’s say I was making $30,000 all of a sudden annual. I kind of fulfilled on that hope of being able to scale these recipes beyond just being able to sell them once. So instead of selling a recipe…

Bjork Ostrom: That was a singular moment where it was the clouds kind of part a little bit, and the sun comes through and you’re like, this is a moment where after a decade of pondering it, feeling it, the tension, knowing that you’re doing really good work, sticking with it, having a moment where it’s like, oh, this is it. Did it feel like that the moment, or did it feel like that looking back?

Caroline Chambers: It felt exactly like that in the moment. For weeks leading up to the paid launch, I was like, “Oh God, is anybody going to do this? Nobody’s going to pay for, there are a million recipes on pinchofyum.com, what’sgabycooking.com, New York Times cooking those Smitten Kitchen, why would anybody pay me in my own website, carolinechambers.com, there’s a million free recipes, why would people pay?” And so that’s what I put my effort towards was what sets this apart? What makes this worth subscribing and actually paying for it? And so that’s when I really leaned in hard to the way that I write recipes with those bold inline ingredient amounts and providing this huge, it’s really a massive list of notes and substitutions. Often it takes me longer to write the notes and substitutions than to write the recipe itself, really leaning into that. Because it very much is this, “Teach man to fish,” versus just hand them a fish.

Anybody can follow a recipe for shrimp and orzo. But once you have read these notes and substitutions and you realize, “Oh, I can swap in rice and chicken and add some cheese, and all of a sudden I have cheesy cheddar rice and chicken using the same recipe, but just slight tweaks, that’s where people feel really empowered by what to cook, we don’t feel like cooking.” But yes, to answer your question, it was this full sun through the clouds moment where I was sitting on Substack on my dashboard watching one more subscriber come in, I’d be like, refresh, refresh. And you’d be like, 35 more dollars, 70 more dollars. I’m going up in $35 increments. And people are really supporting me because for almost a year during the pandemic, I’ve been pouring myself out for free to give them as much help and assistance in the kitchen as I possibly could.

I was doing Zoom cooking classes. I’ve really connected with this community. And they were like, “Yes, Caroline, we are psyched to finally be able to support your work.” And I’m watching that this desire to create a product that is scalable. I’m watching it scale, refresh, refresh, refresh. I’m watching it scale in front of my eyes and thinking, “Okay, so I could have written that recipe for shrimp and orzo for 150 bucks, sold at once, never been able to use it again.” But now I’m writing a recipe for the sky’s the limit. I am writing one single recipe, and there’s absolutely no cap on how much that one single recipe can make me if I just keep hustling and adding more subscribers. So yeah, that was December, 2020, and it’s been an exponential growth since then.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

This episode is sponsored by Raptive. You may have heard of Raptive, formerly AdThrive as an Ad provider for over 4,000 of the world’s top digital content creators, Pinch of Yum included. But they’re not just an Ad provider, they’re a strategic partner that helps creators build their businesses with the resources they need to grow and monetize their audiences. They offer customized industry-leading solutions like an engagement suite called Slickstream, resources on email, strategy assistance, HR guidance, and more. So creators can focus on what they want to be focusing on, creating great content. If your blog has at least a hundred thousand monthly page views, 100% original content, and the majority of traffic from the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, or New Zealand, you can apply to become a Raptive creator by going to raptive.com and clicking the Apply Now button.

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Can you talk about what that’s been like to have that change? Because it’s a pretty drastic before and after. And it’s like in some ways it’s slow because it’s a decade of pursuing an entrepreneurial spirit, trying to figure out what it is, but it’s slow until it’s not, and then it’s not. And then today looks very different than four years ago or four years and two months. What has that been like to navigate that? Everything from suddenly, maybe there’s more pressure, maybe not. But also financially it looks different than it did before, and what does that look like to experience that change?

Caroline Chambers: Oh my gosh, so many things. The pressure thing is what spoke to me first. And so all of a sudden I am like, okay, I am pressing launch on this paid feature. And so overnight, I think it was overnight, I got like 500 paid subscribers. And I remember so vividly those first couple of months before I hired an editor, because again, we’re obsessed with how much money we can make to how much we had to spend on this at the beginning as entrepreneurs. So I didn’t hire an editor for months, even though I desperately needed one. I so vividly remember. So it used to go out on Sunday mornings. I recently switched to Saturday based on a lot of the feedback from readers.

So distinctly remember, every single Saturday night was a full anxiety attack. I would reread, read, reread, proofread, have my husband read, have my mom read 500 times, every single recipe went out, because I was so terrified of what if an ingredient’s missing? Because that happens all the time, when you just post something on Instagram, you forget the salt. Somebody says, where’s the salt? You add it because guess what, that was a free recipe, I don’t-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and you can edit the description.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, and you can edit it. And so I was just so terrified of these people putting their trust in me, paying me for something and then, I mean, there’s nothing worse being a food creator. You are inserting yourselves into such an important part of people’s lives, like dinner time especially. I mean, I just say especially I am a community member of the young family of the community. Especially though to me as a young mom, if dinner gets screwed up, because of something I messed up, and then all of a sudden this young mom or dad is standing there and their kids are starving and they’re starving, and the dinner was way too salty, or it wasn’t salty at all or whatever. Somehow I screwed up the dinner, that was so much pressure on me. And so Saturday nights became just fully anxiety riddled. I was panicked that I was going to make some mistake.

I finally ponied up and hired an editor, and that has made such a world of difference. So I think it’s just how I had to finally hire a babysitter for my son to do free work to grow the brand that is now a seven figure business. You had to invest a little, even though you weren’t making any money at the beginning to get to where I am today. It’s the same thing with hiring people to help with What To Cook brand and with the Caroline Chambers brand. Yuck for even calling myself a brand. But you know what I mean?

At first, I was so hesitant and I was like, oh my gosh, I’m making $30,000 now. It’s $40,000, whatever. I just kept seeing it tick up, and my husband went to Standford Business school, so he’s like, “Oh my God, you’ve cracked the code. You’ve created a business with absolutely zero overhead.” And I was like, yeah, there’s no overhead. I make all of this. And so to hire my first editor, I was like, “Oh, damn it. Okay, okay. I’m losing some profit, losing some profit.” But because I now have an editor, it’s now such a more beautiful, perfect publication and recipe than I ever would. And thus, more people tell their friends about it and it gets shared more. And thus, my subscriber numbers have raised so much. And same thing went for hiring my first graphic designer to fully do a branding suite for it.

I was like, oh God, whatever I spent $15,000. Is that really worth it? Yes, of course it is, because then your stuff looks so much more legit and beautiful, and people are so much more excited to get it in their inbox. My branding is really bright and poppy and colorful, and I want it to just be this pop of joy in their inboxes. So they’re like, yeah, they get that, and they’re like, whoa, it’s Saturday morning. It’s Sunday morning Caroline time. It’s what to cook time. And that branding really tells that message. So yeah, it’s been a lot of lessons of when is it important to spend the money? And also as an entrepreneur, and I’ve now grown from the one to two to three small boys in this house. I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a one-year-old.

And so valuing my time as the creator of all of this and knowing when it’s okay to outsource has also been a huge lesson over the past four years, or I guess it’s been three and a half years of What to Cook, but like you said, yeah, four in a couple of months since the beginning of COVID. But knowing when it’s the most important thing for me to actually handle myself as the creator of What to Cook versus, for instance, we write a monthly meal plan that’s hugely popular. A it’s popular with my subscribers. So it’s basically I take all the what to cook recipes. So it could be a recipe from 2020 with a recipe from last week, and I create a week long meal plan that sends out on the first of every month.

And this is a part of our evolution of, okay, now this is a seven figure business. We really need to start providing how can I provide more? I’m like, I’m making so much more money for doing nothing more. How can I provide more? So that was one of those things. They take us a lot of effort. It’s a five-day meal plan, and we basically turn, we’ll overlap ingredients. So if there’s chicken on Monday’s recipe and Thursday’s Cook all the chicken on Monday and then just reuse it in Thursday. So it really gets to this message of what to cook when you don’t feel like cooking. We know cooking is really hard for people. We want to make that easier. And we write a full grocery list.

So I used to write all those myself, and I used to write the grocery lists myself, because I was so afraid of somebody missing an ingredient. And now I’m like, “You know what? My editor has been with me for three years. She knows these recipes just as well as I do.” So she fully writes those, and I was so nervous when I first switched from me writing them to Molly writing them, and guess what? Nobody knows the difference. And now it’s fully Molly’s name, and people are like, “Sweet, thanks, Molly.” People love it.

I was so afraid of losing ownership or something or having people think, “Oh, Caroline didn’t write this, so it’s not valuable.” Well, guess what? They don’t think that I’m not that great. So bringing people into your team and into your fold, bringing people into my team and into my fold, I should say, has been such a huge part of this. Because the more it does become a bit of like, okay, if I hustle harder, I know I can get 1000 more subscribers by the end of the week. And with that hustle comes so much more work. Okay, how are you hustling? You’re creating another meal plan. Because you know people love meal plans, so you’ll get another a hundred subscribers.

You need help so that I can do that. My number one job is being a mom, but I also have a full freaking time job with all of this. So making sure that I can also enjoy my life has been huge and bringing in, I feel like my biggest lesson over the past four years has been assembling the right team to help and knowing that spending more money can make you more money.

Bjork Ostrom: And even if it doesn’t, it’s like a resource exchange. You’re trading it for time or it’s all resources that we have.

Caroline Chambers: Yes. Outsource the things that you don’t enjoy. Because that will mean that you’re able to be really creative and great at other parts that you do enjoy.

Bjork Ostrom: The other piece that I think is important that you pointed out is figuring out the pieces that you can outsource that don’t matter as much if you’re not touching those, or if you’re not a part of those. And you have self-deprecating and like, “Oh, who cares if it’s me or not doing it.” There are some things that people would really care if it’s you doing it or not, and it’s like preserving those. But do people care if you’re the one who figures out how to update their email address if they change emails? No.

Caroline Chambers: Great example.

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s 100 different things like that that we do as entrepreneurs every day that we can figure out slowly over time, as our finance resources increase, how do we get those least impactful things passed off to somebody else?

Caroline Chambers: Off our plate? Yes. The things that are bringing down our joy. And then I’m sitting there at the kitchen table, instead of hanging out chatting with my three boys, I’m like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, you haven’t received your email in three weeks. Let me stress that.” I had so funny you bring that example up, because I had a meeting with my… I now have a great team at Substack who are there to support me and help me grow because the more I grow, the more they grow. And they scrub into my data and help me make decisions. And I was like, “You guys, it’s killing me.” They basically changed their app, and so now more email issues happen. I was like, “Yo, the app issue is killing me. I get emails 10 a week, that’s like Caroline, I haven’t gotten my email in two weeks, and I’m having to respond to those individually.” And they’re like, Caroline, that’s why you’re on Substack. That’s why you’re not hosting on carolinechambers.com. Just forward the support team. The email, I was like, what?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, awesome.

Caroline Chambers: What? So yeah, I mean, I will say if anybody out there has been considering a Substack, the support within Substack from a technical standpoint has been so incredible, but also from a, “Hey, I’m thinking about changing this or adding a podcast or doing this,” and they can really look into your data and they’ve got a lot of smart people there thinking about it. And then also the community aspect of Substack. When I first joined, this was not the case. You very much had your own newsletter. It was just hosted on Substack.

Bjork Ostrom: Siloed.

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, siloed. Now it’s really like when you sign up for one Substack, they give you a list of 10 others that you might, that you can click and say, okay, I’ll join. And I think my latest growth was like 40% of my new subscribers are coming from within this Substack ecosystem. So every now and then I’ll go, oh God, okay. It sucks that substack is taking 10% what their cut is. They take 10% of all of your earnings or whatever. Oh, that sucks. Maybe I should build my own thing, or do I switch to member full, which is Patreons. I thought the Patreon had crumbled and was only Memberful, but I’m wrong.

Memberful kind of lives on your site. It’s hosted by Patreon, but it just looks, it’s like white listed, kind of branded as your own. Do I switch to that? I think they’d have a lower cut, and then I’m like, “No, look at this subscriber growth just from within this system.Emma Lovewell’s podcast or Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast or Emily Oster who’s a parenting person. She was on Substack and recommended me, and I got like 30,000 new subscribers through her. So yeah, it’s a cool program.

Bjork Ostrom: Is there a way to, do you have a rough estimate of like, Hey, if I get a thousand subscribers, here’s how many of those We’re talking to David Lebovitz on the podcast, and I think, I don’t remember if he should specifically, but he just talked about that as a platform and how great it is. But it’s one of the great things that’s different than the world of search optimization and getting traffic or even cookbook sales. It’s kind of hard to know. With this, it feels like you might have an idea of, if I can bring in 1000 free subscribers, my guess is 2% of those 5% of those on the landing page, they say one to 2% is a good conversion rate. Do you have something kind of in a rough number that you think about?

Caroline Chambers: Yeah. Well, I can tell you exactly what my numbers are. As of two minutes ago, I have 150,000 overall, and then of that 19,500 are paid. So what’s that percentage? Yes. So here’s one of my issues, and this is actually a role. This is a good therapy. This is a role that I need to fill. I am really bad at digging into my data and with my book tour coming up, my team’s like, “Hey, Caroline, where are your Instagram subscribers based?” And I was like, “How do I find that out?” “Where are your subscribers base?” “How do I find that out?” All of this data does exist. And yeah, basically I take any opportunity I can to get more free subscribers and to provide my free subscribers with really cool valuable content that not only shows them what to cook is, but who I am as a person.

Because I do think that I am a person who on Instagram, who my Instagram is Carol Chambers and I’m not just talking about food all the time. When I first started in 2020 trying to become a food creator, I was only talking about food. And thus my job was really hard and I was constantly like, what can I cook next? What can I share next? How can I create content? And one of I was like, God, Mattis… My then one-year-old, I was like, “Mattis is always in the background. I’ve got to get him down for a nap and then I can do my work.” And one of my friends was like, don’t you think that people wouldn’t mind seeing your one-year-old with you and hearing what he eats for lunch and how you create these meals and how you feed it to him?

And I was like, “Nobody cares about me being a mom. Nobody cares about that.” And she was like, “I would give it a shot.” This is my friend Alyssa. She was like, “I would give it a shot.” You’re not going to have a babysitter for the next several months. If you want to be able to create content easily, he’s going to need to be in the background sometimes and people need to know you’re a mom. And so I started, now I think my Instagram bio is food and motherhood or something because I talk about motherhood and my favorite romance books and my favorite Amazon sweatshirts just as much as I talk about food. But food will always be kind of at the center of what I do. So I take any opportunity I can to convert people to become unpaid subscribers, whether it’s, “Hey, I’ve got this, I’m interviewing Bjork on the podcast next week he’ll be on mine. Come on. You have to be a subscriber to listen whatever.”

And then once I’ve got them in my system, just finding a way to convert them. It’s funny on salad days, so I do a paywall, unpaid subscribers get every single recipe. There’s just a paywall before the directions start and salad days and pasta days are my highest conversions.

Bjork Ostrom: The winners.

Caroline Chambers: Those are my convertor days.

Bjork Ostrom: You do know some of the data, you do know some of the data.

Caroline Chambers: I do know some of the data, but I definitely, that’s one of the places that I’m like, actually, I could probably have some wins if I understood all this a little bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s super insightful from your friend. I think of in the world of content creation, there’s so many different angles you can take with it, but Gary Vaynerchuk, viral for some people, but he has this phrase that I really appreciate where he talks about, “Document don’t create.” And I think it’s such a great perspective shift on how to approach the creation process, which is you’re documenting, you’re not going into the lab and getting everything perfect, but it’s like how do you best document what’s currently happening? And I think that it’s not the only way, but it’s definitely one way, especially for people who are time constrained to create really compelling content because then you don’t have to create a perfect environment. The environment is the thing that makes for good content and-

Caroline Chambers: I’ve never heard that quote from Ol Gary, but I would say that’s the exact shift that I had when I started to see my numbers really tick up was less sharing a perfect walkthrough of a perfect recipe, more sharing like I’m walking down to the chicken coop to get some eggs. Oh my god, Mattis just wiped out in the pile of chicken poop. And okay, now we’re digging an outside bad. Like the funny parts of everyday life that we all have on our journey to cook meals for our family. We all are living… Whether or not you have kids, all of our lives are just a little bit of a S-H-I-T show. And so actually sharing that as opposed to this perfect pristine, finished, polished thing is when I really started to notice my community becoming a community versus just a bunch of followers. I’ve got people because they’re like…

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s story too. I feel like that’s what you’re doing is your storytelling, which is such a compelling part of why people want to follow. We could talk for hours, Caroline, and my guess is people would be able to figure out where to follow you online, but can you do a quick shout out for where people can follow you? And your cookbook is going to be coming out soon. You can maybe pre-order that you talked about going through the process of this cookbook. So do a shout-out for that. We’ll link to it. And where can people pick that up as well?

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, so the cookbook, yeah, basically after a couple of years of having the Substack, I got a call from a really cool publishing house called Union Square that’s owned by Barnes and Noble. And so they just have, they’re really interesting. They just published Dan Pelosi’s book if anybody’s familiar with him Grossi Pelosi and a lot of really cool people. And so they basically contacted me and we’re like, listen, if you’ve ever written a cookbook proposal, you know it’s a frickin slog. They have to be 50 pages long example chapters, example recipes, blah, blah, blah. This editor, Amanda Englander came to me and was like, your Substack is awesome. It is your proposal. Here’s an amount of money that I’ll offer you for a cookbook deal. And I was like, “Sweet.” And my agent was like, “Do you want to shop it around?” And I was like, “I sure don’t. Don’t want to write a proposal. I’ll take it.” So the cool thing is what started as I wanted to write a cookbook, couldn’t get a deal. So I did just upside

Bjork Ostrom: You’d Substack to like-

Caroline Chambers: Then circled me back at getting a cookbook deal.

Bjork Ostrom: Actually, some publishers, I’ll be okay with some publishers.

Caroline Chambers: Actually. Yeah, yeah. Not F all publishers, only some. It was funny, when I first announced that I was writing a book, I was like, are people going to be like, “Caroline, I thought we were anti-publisher.” And everyone was like, “What? You go girl. Like, no.” If anything, people were like, “This is hysterical that you started this being like, screw all these publishers who wouldn’t give me a cookbook deal you got.” So anyway, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking? The book comes out August. You can pre-order it now anywhere. Amazon, Barnes and Noble independent bookstore, and I’ll be doing a book tour 12, 13 cities. So check out, look out for that. You can find more information on @CaroChambers for Instagram. Whattocook.substack.com is my Substack newsletter. carolinechambers.com is my super crappy website, that may be by the time-

Bjork Ostrom: Which you don’t have a login for.

Caroline Chambers: Don’t even know the login for. So just say a prayer and hope it delivers you some sort of meaningful information. I am finally working on redoing that website. Everybody will be pleased here, but it will not have recipes on it. I’m completely removing recipes. That would be a whole other conversation about the decision to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: And the basic idea is it’ll be representative of you and where people can find you, but not the bulk of the information that you’re publishing, which would be on Instagram and Substack.

Caroline Chambers: Pinch of Yum is so I just keep using you as an example obviously, or Lindsay as an example, is a food blog. You go to her for food blog, but I realized I have this, carolinechambers.com is, it has recipes on it, but it also has, it’s like, what is this? And I’m not a food blogger, so sadly all of those recipes I’ve ever put up there going away. So if you love them, print them out. So yeah, carolinechambers.com and come see me on book tour and buy a book and that’s where I can get to meet you in person.

Bjork Ostrom: And people can follow on social. The book tour is, city’s not announced yet, where there’ll be or?

Caroline Chambers: Cities are not announced yet, but probably by the time this comes out, they will be. I’ll be in New York, Chicago, Boston, all over the south, SF, come see me and you can find it all on my website or on @CaroChambers. Or on the Substack, you can find it everywhere. All the information can be found everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: Like and follow.

Caroline Chambers: Like and follow. Subscribe for more.

Bjork Ostrom: And you’ll find it. Yeah. Caroline, super fun to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Caroline Chambers: So fun to chat with you. Thank you for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We really hope you enjoyed this episode. If you want to go even deeper into learning how to grow and monetize your food blog or food business, or you’re interested in starting a food blog, we definitely recommend that you check out the Food Blogger Pro membership at foodbloggerpro.com/membership. In the membership, we share all of our course content about topics like monetizing photography, essential tools and plugins, building traffic, and so much more. We also host monthly live Q&A’s and coaching calls to dive deeper into the topics food creators need to know about and have a forum where all of our members can ask questions and get feedback from each other, from the Food Blogger Pro team and all of our incredible experts.

We have received lots of amazing testimonials over the years from Food Blogger Pro members. We’ve helped over 10,000 bloggers do what they want to do better, including this one from Tammy, from the blog organize yourself Skinny, Tammy said, “This month, after 12 years working full-time in higher education, I resigned from my position to become a full-time professional blogger. This was a decision I did not take lightly, but in the last seven months, I made more money blogging than I made in my, ‘Real job,’ and decided it was time to take the leap. I strongly believe that because of the knowledge you share within your income reports and also on Food Blogger Pro, I was able to take my blog to a professional level. I have been and continue to be inspired, motivated, and educated by the information you so selflessly and graciously share with all of us.”

Thank you so much for that incredible testimonial. Tammy, we’re so happy to have you as a Food Blogger Pro member. If you are interested in becoming a Food Blogger Pro member and getting access to all of the content we have for our members, head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more. Thanks again for listening to the podcast. We really appreciate you and we will see you back here next week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. You spend a lot of time on your blog content, from planning to recipe testing to writing to promoting. But do you know if each of your posts are bringing you the most traffic they possibly can? With Clariti, you can see information about each and every post, which is automatically synced from WordPress, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console, so that you can make well-educated decisions about where your existing content may need a little attention. Think broken links or broken images, no internal links or missing alt text.

You can also use information that Clariti pulls about sessions, page views, and users to fuel the creation of new content because you’ll be able to see which types of posts are performing best for you. Get access to keyword ranking, click-through rate, impressions, and optimization data for all of your posts today with Clariti. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This episode is part two of three of our summer membership spotlight. As part of the special podcast series, we are sharing a piece of content that is normally exclusive to Food Blogger Pro members, and we will be sharing this on the last Tuesday of the month for June, July, and August. This month, we’re excited to share an audio version of a coaching call. Every month, Bjork conducts a coaching call with a Food Blogger Pro member where they submit three questions that they might have about their blog, business, social media, whatever it may be. This coaching call is with Cameron and Sarah from the blog plantbaes. They share more about how they first started sharing content on Instagram in 2021, and how they quickly grew their following to over 1 million followers.

They also talk about why they decided to start a blog, and then pick Bjork’s Brain about any changes they could make to their website to make it more user-friendly, to help with SEO, and to drive traffic to their email newsletter list. They also talk through what they might do to increase their business revenue and advice on getting backlinks, improving domain authority, and other just general SEO stuff. It was a long coaching call, but a really good one, and we’re so excited to be able to share it with a broader audience today. As a reminder, if you would like to become a part of the Food Blogger Pro community, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more and to join us. We would love to have you. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Cam and Sarah, welcome to the coaching call.

Cameron Crawley: Thank you very much. Very grateful to be here. Thank you very much.

Bjork Ostrom: You are up bright and early. It’s 7:00 AM there. I’m at the end of my day. So thank you, first of all, for getting up early, starting this day off. We’re just jumping right into it. It’s like maybe a little bit of coffee and then straight into a coaching call.

Sarah Cobacho: I’m ready.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I have some coffee here too, so at least we have that in common-

Cameron Crawley: Nice.

Bjork Ostrom: … right off the bat. But I’m excited to talk to both of you. With these coaching calls, one of the things that we do is we talk about what is a goal that somebody’s after, and how do we even just talk through what it might look like to get to that goal. One of the great things in your story is that you’ve built a following, and you have success on social platforms and a following on platforms, a million followers on Instagram. And that has been able to translate, from what I understand, into success with your site, getting that up and running. We’re going to focus on that a little bit. But I would love to hear about your story and what you’ve built through the years. And you’ve also been working on that together, which we might talk about, how Lindsay and I have done that through the years as well. But maybe, Sarah, do you want to start with just talking about your story and how you got started creating content online?

Sarah Cobacho: Sure. I was actually studying nutrition, and plant-based, and it’s a huge passion of mine. So we actually started the website and the old content creation thing while I was still studying as a way to build up for my nutrition clinic. It’s always been a goal of us. We’ve always consumed a lot of content. We love YouTube. It’s always been like an idea, but we didn’t really know what it would look like. And we started doing videos on Instagram and it took off quite quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: When was that?

Cameron Crawley: 2021, quite late.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah, end of ’21.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow. So it was really recently.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah. We’re brand new to this whole world, so-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, good for you guys.

Sarah Cobacho: So I said… Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you think it was about the content that you were creating that resonated with people?

Cameron Crawley: I think it was that Sarah’s-

Sarah Cobacho: He’s very good at making –

Cameron Crawley: … Sarah’s a nutritionist. I’ve got a video background, so it was very easy for me to jump on the camera and direct Sarah a little bit. And I think we also started right when Instagram were really pushing reels. But they’ve been going on for a little bit, but I think when we got into it, it was really like… So we got on that momentum already.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah, we’ve never posted any photos or anything. It was a hundred percent real from the beginning. And I think it’s a combination of while plant-based food is a little bit trending, but our recipe are really focused on the nutrition aspect as well. But I’m really, really passionate about eating. It’s always been my hobby, so I think it just works somehow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things that I love about that is… We often talk about what it takes to succeed in this world of content creation. It’s multivariate. There’s multiple factors. And one of the factors is do you catch the wave of the medium at the right time? And you spoke to that and saying like, “Hey, we were producing video content exclusively from the start,” and that’s what you focused on. That was definitely a wave. And then, it’s the respective experience and background that you each have. And for Sarah, you have this background and expertise. You’ve gone to school. Professionally trained in the world of nutrition. And Cam, for you, you have a bit video background, so it’s really cool to see all of those things come together. And then what you talked about is you’re just naturally passionate about it. So it’s like passion, plus the correct medium of video, plus your respective talents all coming together in a way where, if I’m understanding it correctly, in two to three years, on Instagram at least, you’re able to build to a million followers. Is that more right, less?

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Which has been kind of a wild ride, probably.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah. It’s been some scary times there because we both started working on other side hustles. And I was doing podcast editing and video editing and stuff like that before. Halfway through 2021 is when I was like, “Okay, let’s just do this full time. This is so exciting. I love doing this.”

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah. I think I had the nutrition clinic up for a good three months. And then we were like, “Okay, content.” This is so exciting. We get to do it together. We really love it. And we also get to touch so many more people. And when I was in clinic, its one-on-one, than this –

Bjork Ostrom: One to one, yep.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah, we get just so many people every day. It’s incredible. Such a fantastic opportunity.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And I’m sure you hear from a lot of people who follow up and tell their story of how the content impacted them and… which is awesome. And a global audience that you can speak to, which is just really, really cool.

Sarah Cobacho: It’s the most wonderful feeling.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome.

Cameron Crawley: Sarah spends like an hour and a half a day, just writing to people on comments –

Sarah Cobacho: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Interacting.

Sarah Cobacho: I respond pretty much every single comment that we get, unless they’re really mean.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Sarah Cobacho: It’s my favorite part, the community we’ve built.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Congratulations. That’s super exciting.

Sarah Cobacho: Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: What did that look like in the early stages, just out of curiosity? So you’re building this, you’re getting momentum. My guess is, in order to allow you to make that transition, was the initial business revenue sponsored content? So brand comes to you and says, “Hey, can we partner and you can feature this ingredient or this plant-based food,” is that what it’s been primarily up to this point?

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah, that’s what it was in the beginning. Mostly, yeah.

Cameron Crawley: And then pretty much the first two years. That was all –

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And then at this point, one of the things that we’re going to focus on is talking about the site and spending some time there. If you were to just say percentage-wise, if you look at the pie chart, what does the business look like right now in terms of revenue? Is it like 50% sponsored content, 50% ad revenue? Or just at a high level, what does that look like?

Sarah Cobacho: Well, I just finished our first cookbook, so that’s been taking us a lot of time. So we haven’t been really focused on getting brand partnerships. We’ve been really focused on that and the-

Bjork Ostrom: Cookbook, which is great.

Sarah Cobacho: And Cam’s been working on the site.

Cameron Crawley: The blog –

Sarah Cobacho: I’ve been working on the book. So we’ve just started again working with brands in the next few weeks. Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah, it’s nice.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think anybody who’s done a cookbook, or any book, knows you have to not do some things in order to do that thing.

Sarah Cobacho: Oh, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a big commitment. So let’s talk about… Oh yeah, go ahead, Sarah.

Sarah Cobacho: No, I just wanted to say for context, our brand deals are very different in Australia than what they look like in the US budget-wise. And it’s not really something we want to rely on. It’s not something I’d like to consider a little bonus. We are still quite restricted because it has to be still really fitting in what we’re happy to promote.

Cameron Crawley: Align.

Sarah Cobacho: … and align, which is not that.

Cameron Crawley: So on that note, our blog ad revenue is pretty much our main income source.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s great. And that makes sense too. With sponsored content, it’s not like you want to… Because you are so specific and because you are… my guess is opinionated, in a good way, about types of food and what food you want to eat. My guess is also there’s a bend towards… Was it Mark Bittman who says, “Eat plants…”? He has that phrase around… Essentially, it’s like, as much as possible-

Sarah Cobacho: Eat plants, not too much, not too something?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that. But just this idea of you want to eat plant-based and the best types of plant-based foods to eat is things where you can get as close to possible as where it’s produced. So point being, it’s not like a candy bar company would be like… who has a big budget, could come to you and be like, “Hey, can we work together?” You’d be like, “Sounds nice, but no.”

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So you want to be careful of the branded partnerships that you do, which makes sense. Cookbook will be coming out, which is great. And then now starting to think strategically about ad revenue from the site. So can you talk about where the site came in? You launched that at the same time. Have you always been working on it at a similar pace to what you’ve been working on with social, or what does that look like?

Cameron Crawley: I used to dabble in Wix and stuff like that, sort of basic drag and drop. So we had our website on there first. And we had it on there until last year in June when I started figuring out more of where we can make income on the side from our sponsored content. I was just Googling around and I actually landed on your articles on the income reports. And that was so inspiring. I was just like, “Oh my god, I didn’t realize this was a thing.” So the whole world was literally blown away. It was a whole new world to me. And then I found other people who’ve been obviously inspired by you to do income reports and they had following similar to ours on social media, so it really made it possible to me. So while Sarah did the cookbook, I pretty much spent that two months learning WordPress and transferring all our recipes over from Wix, which was a massive job.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: So that’s been live since, I think, August. And then we got into Raptive in September, so a month later.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Yep. Great.

Sarah Cobacho: But all the recipe were just the recipe card and Instagram photo and the Instagram caption. So they weren’t really blog posts.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So kind of getting the lay of the land, you have your social accounts, you have a… especially on Instagram, a good falling there, but on the others as well. You have your site, now on Raptive, and consistently earning money from that. And the goal would be, it sounds like, what does it look like to focus on the site as the next growth area? Is that more or less how you’re thinking of it or approaching it right now?

Cameron Crawley: I think for now we’re really satisfied with how it’s pretty much a passive income. We are happy to work on it and build it as much as we can, but we do want to focus on the next thing, which will be digital products. And then down the line, a community or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s fair.

Cameron Crawley: But for now, we’re definitely happy with where it’s at, and we want to improve it as much as we can so it becomes a solid passive income source.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Cameron Crawley: Or semi-passive.

Bjork Ostrom: Were you going to add to that? Yeah, semi-passive is probably the best way to describe that.

Cameron Crawley: What were you going to say?

Sarah Cobacho: No, I’m just saying in the next few month, it does look like a lot little admin, just rebuilding all of those recipes I’ve mentioned. But since September, we’ve been learning about blogging and everything and turns out I absolutely love it. So we’re now making those beautiful posts, and it’s a lot of fun. But we need to get all of those other recipes that are really good, but don’t have this full information added to them, so that’s a little bit of work in the background too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great. Awesome. You guys have done a great job, and I think we’ll continue to find success in what you do. You have the different components with your individual expertise, and also a proven history of creating content that resonates with people. Obviously on a blog, it’s different than what it would look like on social. But I think the core thesis of creating things that people want is the same. And if you go from having a million followers, from zero to a million in three to four years, there’s something there. There’s something that people want. And I would encourage you to double down on that and to really lean in. Because you guys have all of the different component parts that you need to build a really… You already have built a really successful thing, but to build it even greater and to reach even more people.

So if you were to say the general goal with the site is to increase traffic, to build a following, obviously to increase that semi-passive income that comes along with it, is there something behind that goal that then allows you to feel like, “Hey, this is what we’re really after. We each want to be at a point where we feel secure having this be our only thing, and both of our salaries come from this, in order for us to work on this full time”? Or for some people it’s like, “I really want to get to this point, so then I can hire somebody and they can help with some of the day-to-day, so I’m not having to work as much.” Or would you have something like the spirit behind the goal of growth that you could identify? And it could be different for each of you.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: Do you want to start?

Cameron Crawley: Sure. I think the goal would be to, as you said… To be honest, we’re so new to blogging, so I don’t really know what’s possible in terms of the numbers and how much we could actually make per year. At the moment, it’s covering the bills, which is really nice. So that’s why we’re already looking at maybe we need to start digital products and build a community. I don’t really know what’s possible in terms of the blog income. I know that it can be huge. But I think the overall goal would be that it’s something we outsource. And I think everything in our business we’d like to have a team to help handle.

I think we’re pretty similar to you and Lindsay in a way where you really love the tech side of things and I’ve seen you have so many different businesses going. That’s what I love doing as well. I love creating new projects, whereas Sarah’s really good at the creative side of things and being amongst her community. So I feel like there’s kind of a semi-passive thing. We don’t want to just retire and live on a Greek island. We want to do that, but also be working on projects-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Cameron Crawley: … and having like retreats –

Bjork Ostrom: Working on a Greek island.

Cameron Crawley: Exactly. And having maybe retreats, constantly be doing fun things and adding value to the world and to our community.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, awesome. That’s great.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah. Sarah, anything different?

Sarah Cobacho: Look, it’s very similar. But you are a bit more into the business. I’m a bit more focused on my community at this stage. I’ve just been really, really loving it. And that’s my passion project. This is not a side hustle. This is not a little thing. I’m seeing this for the next 40 years. I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I think the blog is going to be a very big component. And at this stage, I just really want to be focused to bring as much as we can. My mind is blown because Cam’s been working on this in the background for this last six months. But for me, it’s been two months since the book. So it’s just been a lot of fun and I think, yes, there’s a lot to do and I would love to have a team to help us take this to the next level.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Cameron Crawley: Some experts, to come in and-

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Totally. I think that’s one of the things that you’ll find, is as you continue to grow and scale it, one of the biggest unlocks is when you can bring somebody in who has that industry expertise. There’s a term that I thought of a lot within the context of what we were doing with business building, which is intentional ignorance. And it’s kind of an extreme example of what I feel like we should all at least be contemplating, which is how do you have somebody owning a thing, that is really good at that, that allows you to release it and to say this person has it? An example, I think, in our world, one of the experts in the Food Blogger Pro communities, Andrew. He has a site called NerdPress, and they manage the technical components for websites like yours and ours. And they’re really good at it and it allows people to step back and say like, “Okay, I’m not going to manage the day-to-day with this because they’re going to step in and do it.”

But there’s also something to be said… It contrasts or goes against that statement of intentional ignorance. Because there’s also something to be said about knowing just enough to be aware of what’s going on. So I think the phase that you’re in is good where you’re learning the ins and outs, the industry, you’re learning what you need to be aware of, even what is RPM as it relates to ads and things like that. So I think you’re in a really good place. But to also strategically be thinking along the way, “How do you bring other people in to help out?” You have some questions that you submitted here, and I would love to jump into those and start to talk about those. And we can hit some additional ones at the end, if we do have time. So the first question is what are your initial impressions of the website or the blog post? What would you focus on improving first? So anything that you would add to that, just to fill that question out?

Cameron Crawley: To be honest, it’s pretty… the website’s kind of… I just built it to the point where it could work and bring in ad revenue. It’s definitely nowhere near where we would want it to be.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Cameron Crawley: It’s not –

Bjork Ostrom: That’s going to be true for the rest of your life. Your site will never be where you want it to be.

Cameron Crawley: Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: Good to know.

Bjork Ostrom: Because ours isn’t either. It’s like-

Cameron Crawley: Oh, wow.

Sarah Cobacho: Oh, really? Because it looks wonderful to me.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, thanks, but it’s always… I think that’s one of the things that we’ve realized, is you have to get to the point where you’re just comfortable with things never being where you want them to be because you’ll always want them to be at the next level. So encouragement for you guys, it looks great –

Cameron Crawley: Well, then you’re going to have a heart attack when you say our one.

Bjork Ostrom: No, I have, and I’ve spent time with it. I was actually just texting my sister-in-law last night, and she’s starting a travel site. She’s into travel. And she’s like, “I’m kind of embarrassed by the first version of my site.” But I think the most important thing that we can do is, and what I said to her is, “Ship it and share it.” As much as possible, ship it and share it. And along the way, figure out what is the next thing you’re going to make a little bit better, and just continually improve along the way. So all that to say, with what you guys have done, it’s beautiful. And you’ve done a really good job with it. I think there’s two broad worlds that you can speak to. One is the technical considerations of a website. And with the technical considerations of a site, what you’re going to want to be doing is understanding Google Search Console, to go into Google Search Console and to look at it and to say, “Are there any warnings? Are there any errors?”

That is the hub where Google is going to come to you and say, “Here are the things that we see as either issues,” or technically errors, which is you want to fix that right away. Warnings, which are like… These are things you could be aware of and improve. Or opportunities, like here’s something that you could maybe look at adding. The technical stuff is going to be things like making sure that there’s no broken links, making sure that you don’t have what’s called orphaned content. That’s like a page that sits on its own and doesn’t have links in from any other pieces of content. You’re going to want to make sure that all your images are properly marked up with alt text. You’re going to want to make sure that you have internal links to your own pieces of content and external links to other pieces of content.

All of this stuff is like… you could just Google, “Technical SEO checklist,” and surface some of that stuff. There are other tools that will also do that for you. There’s a tool called Ahrefs, which we use. And Ahrefs will do… It’ll do SEO keyword information, but it will also offer audit opportunities. This is an internal tool that we built called Clariti that does some of that. All of these are opportunities to do the technical hygiene, technical hygiene, technical SEO hygiene for your site. And that would all be really important as well. But the other thing that’s really important is just to think about the brand. The brand is going to be one of those things that… In the conversations that we’re having with creators who are getting multiple millions of page views to their site, one of the biggest considerations is how do you create something that isn’t just getting a bunch of SEO juice and getting people click on it randomly and then look at it and leave? Because there are those sites and you can be really successful with it.

And it’s one of the trends that’s happened over the last three to four years, is people building out a post, kind of with search in mind, like SEO-forward content. But what you’ll notice is a lot of times it’s kind of bland. A lot of times it has not a lot of personality. And there’s starting to be a shift in the industry around SEO where there’s really… Personality-forward content is becoming more important. So what I would encourage you to do is check all of the boxes from a technical SEO perspective. Make sure that you’re fully optimized from all things technical SEO, but also to think really strategically about your brand. And your brand is a little bit of you, but it’s also a lot of your community. Like who are you serving? What are their problems?

And how do you let people know that you are going to be the person that’s going to help them solve those problems? I’d be interested to put it back to you to say… For the people who are following you, who are interacting with you, what would you say the reason is behind it? What is the reason that they’re connecting with you and following with you and interacting with you?

Sarah Cobacho: I have a cute French accent.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Okay.

Cameron Crawley: I think that’s a good hook.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure. But if it was… Even if you-

Cameron Crawley: Some people think it’s cute.

Bjork Ostrom: Even if you didn’t have a French accent… Or I’d say this. If you did, but if the content that you’re producing wasn’t helpful, people wouldn’t follow you.

Sarah Cobacho: Oh no, I’m just joking.

Bjork Ostrom: But also, I think there probably is some truth to it. And I think you can lean into it. I think it’s a wonderful thing.

Cameron Crawley: It’s love and hate as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Cameron Crawley: Some people are very irritated, which I think also works for us. It provides —

Bjork Ostrom: Which could be said about anybody who’s producing content for a million people. It’s like you’re going to have –

Cameron Crawley: They’re going to find something.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly.

Sarah Cobacho: No, look, our audience is actually really clear. It’s 93% women, and that’s consistent across all platforms. What I provide that is different from other people… There is a lot of noise around plant-based nutrition. Everyone’s been hearing you need to eat more plants. We do not push people to go vegan. Everybody does whatever they want. What I’m offering is if you want to feed your family or yourself a little bit more plants during the week, I have the perfect recipes that have been designed with nutrition knowledge in mind. So all of my recipes have a minimum of 20 grams of protein per serving. I make sure you get all of the nutrients of focus that you could be looking to have more on a plant-based diet. And all of this is done in the background. I talk about it into the blog post, the people who have been here from the beginning just know this is what we provide. And they taste really good.

Cameron Crawley: That’s the key. Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: I have a lot of staple, like breads, these kind of things. But I’m really trying to focus on easy meal prep, high-protein meal prep. They love this one to take to work, so you can feel food satisfied for the entire day and try to switch a bit to easy midday dinner as well. And we have a lot of Mediterranean-style recipe, because that where I’m from. I don’t know if that’s clear, but.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah, it ties into the… I mean, it’s a bit of a trend as well. Everyone’s into that.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And scientifically proven to be a healthy diet and not like a South Beach diet. It’s just this is a good way to eat, which is awesome. I would say with your site, one of the considerations would be really defining that, like letting people know on all the areas that people are coming into contact with you… Like the 20 grams of protein. I’m in this stage where I’m trying to eat more protein. Insofar as our five-year-old when Lindsay asked, “What are you going to get dad for Christmas?” She was like, “A protein maker,” which is awesome. Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: Oh, that’s amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: So if I was somebody who is… It feels like a really obvious and helpful problem solution. If I’m somebody who’s trying to eat vegan or plant-based, but also trying to be intentional to have enough protein, to know that you are a resource that does that is really helpful. And I would spell that out, even when you land on the homepage, having refining your headline, your H2… H1 would be the main headline, H2 would be the sub-headline. Really crafting who you are, what you’re about and what sets you apart. And I feel like some of those things that you just shared in talking to me about how you think about creating content, and the recipes that you’re publishing, are the types of things that you need to let people know when they come to your site. That’s going to be something that’s really compelling for people.

I think of a really good example. In a different world is Beth. Her name is Beth. She has a site called Budget Bytes. She has incredible recipes, but she’s also really… I mean, it’s the name of the brand. She’s created this really great following around connecting budget-friendly to recipes, and so that’s what she’s all about. And everything that she’s doing has how much it costs per recipe or per serving. And that, to me, is another differentiator where somebody would come and they’d say like, “Oh, this is really helpful.” Her tagline that she has in the middle of her site is, “Small budget, no problem. Cooking on a budget shouldn’t mean canned meals and ramen noodles night after night. Welcome to the world of delicious recipes designed for small budgets.” That does a really good job. And then everything that she’s doing, including here, is highlighting those different components and those elements.

Cameron Crawley: Oh, wow.

Bjork Ostrom: And so, I think as you think about your site and positioning it, make sure to draw those elements out, so people that do come to your site know maybe it is an emphasis on getting all of the different elements that you need in a meal. So what you’re doing is highlighting and saying how much protein each serving has, or maybe you’re highlighting macros, or I don’t know what it is. You know better than I do. But starting to integrate some of those differentiators into the site itself. So it’s kind of the technical considerations, and you guys will figure that out. You’ll get into it and you’ll know, making sure that that’s all well done. And then there’s the branding considerations around differentiating yourself and really leaning into your personal brand and into the ethos of the brand itself. So what are your thoughts or questions after talking through it a little bit?

Cameron Crawley: Firstly, do you think the tagline is a bit too broad, the, “Everyday recipes with a healthy touch,” just based on what Sarah said?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I would say, probably. The interesting thing, kind of the anti-example in this world, is Pinch of Yum. It’s a broad site that doesn’t have a super specific niche. If we were to start today, that would look different. But part of the reason we do that is it’s been 14 years, and it is what it is now. But if we were to back and start again with a new site, what we would do is at least to start, we’d have something very specific and niche. Not because… Well, reason being is we’ve used this analogy before, but if you’re trying to get somewhere, you could take a semi truck or you could take a motorcycle. And in the early stages, it’s going to be easiest to… You’re not going to be able to haul much, but to do a motorcycle. And then once you get some momentum, you can upgrade to a motorcycle with a sidecar. And then you can upgrade to a Geo Metro. I don’t know if you guys ever had Geo Metros or remember those.

Cameron Crawley: What, like a Fiat?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly, Fiat. But to start super small and specific. And then if you feel like you’ve tapped out that market, then you can land and expand and go bigger. But I think to start, it’s helpful to have something that you’re speaking directly to. To have an audience that you’re speaking directly to, and then from there expand beyond that. You already have that to some degree, being vegan, but it might be helpful to have it be vegan plus. Like vegan plus protein, or vegan plus Mediterranean. Just as a consideration, something that you could potentially think about. So other thoughts around that one?

Sarah Cobacho: Actually, I have a question on this, if that’s okay. Sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s great.

Sarah Cobacho: So just on this, because I’ve been wondering, this has been a really free-flowing journey for me so far, kind of like what do I feel like eating? I’m going to film it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Totally.

Sarah Cobacho: So I’m trying to be a little bit more intentional with my recipe choice at this stage. And I was wondering, it’s a fine line between something that I think would bring value on the long term and something that it’s going to do well on social media. It don’t usually match that well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Yep.

Cameron Crawley: And then Google keywords.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah. My style of cooking is I’m putting words of recipes that don’t really exist.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, great. That people aren’t going to search.

Sarah Cobacho: The last one that you’ve seen on the blog is me trying to do something that people will recognize a little bit more. And that didn’t work really well on social. So I’m wondering, do you think it’s best to focus on recipes that are doing… and there’s no right or wrong answer I guess, but just of your opinion, that are doing well on social? Or should I try to be a bit more intentional with SEO? Do I need to, I guess you answered, niche out on those recipes that do really well for me? Or do I need to have a little bit of everything, so when someone is in my site, they don’t have to go somewhere else to find this piece of information they could be looking for?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. I would say to do kind of a total reframe on it would kind of be going to an artist. And an artist saying, “Which type of canvas should I use?” Or, “Should I do ceramics or should I do still photography?” They’re all canvases and they’re all mediums. So I would say a lot of it comes down to… Because the world that we’re living in is one where it’s personal businesses. It’s not like a business where you’re producing widgets. A huge consideration is your own ability to continually show up every day and create content for 10 years. And the different paths to do that are… Not infinite, but there’s a lot of different paths. The people that I see doing really well in the world of search, generally are people who bend towards process, maybe are a little bit technical. Not scientific necessarily, but they’re going to be people who love to get into a keyword researching tool.

They love to spend time analyzing opportunities. They’re also really great at the craft of cooking. But generally speaking, they’re going to be people who are technical-forward and interested in that world, versus people who are charismatic and like to get in front of a camera and record and have a recipe that they feel inspired to share. That would be Lindsay. That’s the category that she creates in. She’s maybe collectively in her life spent six hours in a keyword research tool. It’s not something that she does. Because if she did, she would only create content for like six months and then she’d be like, “I really don’t like this.” So how she’s creating content is similar. It’s like what is something that I’m excited about? She’s aware of general trends and what’s happening and is creating content around that, but it’s not from a scientific analysis approach.

So I think as you think of your content creation process, I think what you need to find is on the spectrum of life giving versus life taking, or energy giving versus energy taking, where do you fall on that spectrum as a creator? Now, one of the opportunities that you have is maybe you have 10 pieces of content and you’re like, “These are all similar things that I’m looking at. I’m kind of inspired by these,” and then you pass that off to Cam who then… maybe you like that technical element a little bit more. You can do some keyword research. You can look and say like, “Hey, this one makes sense, but maybe we word it a little bit differently. Here’s how we should word it. And this feels like it’s the best opportunity for us from a search perspective.” And you could even call it something different on social than you do on the blog.

Sarah Cobacho: That’s actually a pretty good idea.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s all different versions of how you can use technical considerations around search to support your decision-making. A lot of people initially go into it leading with keyword research. But I think you can also put it as a second or third thing in your process. And you can lead with inspiration, and then refine with keyword research. Because I think there are a lot of people, and you might fall into this camp, who feel like it’s soul-sucking to find that there is an opportunity to have whatever the recipe might be, and then they’re not super inspired to make it. But they feel like there’s an SEO opportunity, so then you do it, but it’s not something you want to make. But for other people, they love that idea.

Cameron Crawley: Sarah loves the challenge, I think. That would actually help, if you have a limit.

Sarah Cobacho: I do like a challenge. If you come and you’ll tell me we have this –

Cameron Crawley: It’s like a Gordon Ramsay show.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, sure.

Cameron Crawley: … run to the thing and get the ingredients.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And if that’s you, it’s like… I think the point is understand all the tools available, and then use them within the context of how you as a creator are best going to be able to create. And you can draw it back to the artist analogy. It’s like one artist is going to use a marker different than another artist, or a paintbrush, or whatever it might be, but they still all have the same tool set. They’re just using it in a way that is best aligned with how they create. So it’s a little bit of a non-answer, but I think it’s so dependent on the individual.

Sarah Cobacho: I think it was a great answer. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Raptive. You may be like the many other Food Blogger Pro members and podcast listeners who are working towards increasing their traffic to be able to apply to an ad network. Raptive, which is formerly AdThrive, for instance, requires a minimum of 100,000 page views and brand-safe content to join the community. These qualifiers attract premium advertisers, and ensure creators like you benefit from Raptive’s expansive solutions and services. But if you’re not quite there yet and you want to be, Raptive can still help. Raptive put together a comprehensive email series, it’s 11 emails in total, that will help you optimize your content, understand your audience, grow your email list, and grow your traffic to help you reach your ad network goals. Pinch of Yum works with Raptive to bring in passive income each month. The ads show up on each Pinch of Yum post. And when that ad loads on someone’s screen or somebody interacts with that ad, Pinch of Yum earns money.

So more page views equals more money. And it can really add up over time. That’s why so many Food Blogger Pro community members are interested in getting their page view numbers up, so that they’ll be able to apply to an ad network and make money on display ads. So if you’re in the same boat and are interested in getting some traffic tips delivered to you for free, head to foodbloggerpro.com/raptive. The 11 weekly emails you’ll receive are designed for creators who have a working knowledge of SEO, keyword research, and email lists, but haven’t yet been able to crack that 100,000-page view mark. Go to foodbloggerpro.com/raptive to opt into this free newsletter series. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

The other thing that I would say that’s important to do on your site is to have a compelling… And you have this within the sidebar. But to really be thinking strategically about email, and to have a compelling… Even on the homepage, I think it would probably be worth it to have a compelling email signup offer. And the reason is because email’s going to become more important when third-party cookies go away. I don’t know how aware of you are in the industry or for anybody watching, there’s a big pivot that’s coming where Google Chrome is going to be removing third-party cookies, which means that advertising on Google Chrome is going to be less effective. The way to combat that is to have first-party data. And first-party data, the best example of that is an email address. And what you do is, in your case working with Raptive, you include an additional snippet of code, which Raptive will supply to you, and you include that code in your emails.

And then anytime that somebody clicks to go over to your site, it’s going to be able to identify them, and they are going to be able to advertise more effectively for that person, so you’ll be able to earn more. So just to really be thinking strategically about email. And that could be email on the site, but it could also be email within social. Like occasionally having a call to action within Instagram to say, “Hey, if you want this recipe, sign up here and I’ll send it to you via email.” Or whatever you can do to think strategically about having email sign-ups is going to benefit you down the line as well.

Sarah Cobacho: I think for us, a little meal plan or free book is a good one.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah. We have an e-book in our Linktree, or in our link page.

Sarah Cobacho: It needs to be updated.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah. But we definitely should do that on our website too.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think, we’re thinking about this with Pinch of Yum, the closer you can get to having the email sign-up be to the actual piece of content, the better. So if you have Mediterranean pasta, the offer being the top three Mediterranean recipes, top five, download “Sign up here to get the top five Mediterranean.” The closer you can get to the content, I think the higher conversion that you’re going to have. It’s hard to do when you’re first starting out because it’s like you just need to get something up. And the best thing to get up, like you talked about, is something that’s like “Okay, this is…” highlights the best recipes that you have, or plant-based breakfasts in this case. That’s awesome. I think that’s a great place to start.

Sarah Cobacho: This was what we came up with last year, because we just really wanted to have something out. Because everything was buzzing. We were like, “We’re not getting… It’s a shame.” But definitely can be refined to something more tailored to our current offering.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great. Cool. Let’s talk about this second one, kind of in a similar category. But the back half of this would be interesting to talk about. So how can we increase traffic from Google and search engines, which mostly comes from Instagram and social at this point? And then any advice on getting backlinks and improving domain authority? So any additional context around that one?

Cameron Crawley: Well, right now, most of our traffic’s coming from Instagram and Facebook. And then there’s direct, which I’m not really sure where that’s coming from.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think it’d be like people just typing in the URL-

Cameron Crawley: Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: … and coming to it. Or maybe a bookmark or-

Cameron Crawley: Oh, okay.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: Okay, cool. Yeah. So most of it’s coming from social media. And I’ve seen in Raptive, you can see, I heard you talk about this, how Pinterest have such a really high RPM. But our views are quite low or our outbound clicks from Pinterest are quite low. So I’m interested in that too, because Google obviously seems a lot harder to row and rank-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. It’s hard until it’s not. You do a bunch of work, you really hustle. And then slowly over time, what you’ll start to see is stuff will get picked up. But it is super competitive and there’s a lot of…

Sarah Cobacho: What do you mean by over time?

Cameron Crawley: What is the timeline you speak of?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Well, tell us specifically what this looks like.

Cameron Crawley: Yes. How long do I have –

Bjork Ostrom: I think it depends on what type of keywords you’re going after. If you’re going after long-tail pieces of content and you’re producing a lot of that content, it’s going to be shorter. If you’re going after shorter keywords that have a higher volume, that’s going to be longer. So I think it really depends on your strategy as it relates to the type of content that you’re producing, and what you’re trying to go after. So an example being… I’m just going to try this real quick, just to see. So high-protein vegan marry me pasta, you rank number one for that, right?

Sarah Cobacho: Woo.

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s great. How many people are searching for that exact term? Probably not many.

Sarah Cobacho: I’m not sure.

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s an example of your site. And it looks great. You have an image in there. There’s the links down below. I’ll just share my screen here so you can see what I’m seeing. That’s awesome. And it’s like you’ve ranked well for that. Now the question is if you remove high-protein and it’s just vegan marry me pasta, suddenly that now looks different. You’re still in the top five, so that’s great. Now it’s like you remove vegan and it’s just marry me pasta. Okay, that now looks very different. So what you can see is the idea is as you start to do keyword research, it’s like a snowball. You start with those long-tail little pieces of content and then you’re like, “Hey, maybe there’s this shorter keyword that has a little bit more traffic that we can go after,” and then you build on that over time. And then eventually, you’ll get to the point where you can start to have some of those shorter keywords with higher volume that you can start to get after. In terms of timeline for that, there’s so many variables.

Sarah Cobacho: I’m sorry about that.

Bjork Ostrom: Even just how many people are searching for a thing, the algorithm updates, all of those different things. But if you stick with it and continue to produce really good content, can look at the technical components. If you build out some of the community stuff, which we can talk about as well, and you start to be a hub for people, all of that will compound over time. But it does take a long time. So the backlinks, you talked about backlinks and domain authority. I think what we’ve found, there’ll be two camps of SEO people. One is you have strategies for backlinks. Like you work with an agency and they look for people who have a broken link around marry me pasta. They follow up and they say, “Hey, I noticed you have a broken link. You should update it with this link, which isn’t broken.”

A lot of intentional backlink building. Or reaching out and saying, “I’ll pay you $150 to include a backlink.” That would all be in the category, especially the paying, like Google as outright said you can’t do that. I don’t know how they’d ever figure this out. If we figure this out, you would be… I don’t know if you’d be delisted necessarily, but it’s just very much so frowned upon by Google. So we’re in the camp of how do you just think about what people would naturally link to and as much as possible create that type of content? And I think that is either just outstanding content that people love and they come back to and they’re like, “Hey, I made this. I really like this. This is super helpful.” Maybe it’s in a group of people who are trying to eat vegan and high protein as well, and they link to it. So just over time, naturally.

I think there’s also things that you can do where it’s community or campaign-type initiatives. So instead of thinking about content in a… like it’s a blog post, you could think of it in the context of a series or a campaign. Maybe it’s like you are doing something and you support a certain mission. And you say, “Over these next 10 pieces of content, we’re going to help support a food shelf in Sydney.” And then you go on a morning news show and they feature it. Anything that is unique or interesting where you can bring people around what you’re doing, that’s when it gets outside of the world of SEO hacks, and more in just human psychology. And naturally, what are people going to talk about, what are people going to think about? What are people going to share? What’s interesting?

And that’s where you can lean into the social side of it. You can get people excited on social about a thing that you’re doing. That would be where I would lean into it. People also talk about going on podcasts. But essentially, what you’re just trying to do is think about what’s something that people would talk about and get excited about, rally around, that would be helpful, that would be unique? You can put your marketing brain on, you can get really creative? Because that’s what the internet is, is people sharing stuff, talking about things, interacting online. And the more that you can get into the psyche of people by either drama, which in our world doesn’t really exist and wouldn’t make sense, or excitement or passion or novelty, that’s where I would encourage you to think about the world of backlink building.

Cameron Crawley: Okay, cool. Amazing. We need to get you in the news, somehow.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: Well, we do have some events with a puppy shelter coming up, but I don’t think that’s going to go in the news.

Bjork Ostrom: What is it that you have coming up?

Sarah Cobacho: I want to help raise fund for a puppy shelter. So I’m going to make cakes with a friend of mine who’s a baker. And I’m hoping to…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. But I feel like that… That’s awesome. And that’s an example of something that you could then talk about and share about. And you could share it on social, and there might be people who pick it up because it’s this really fun unique thing. And you could reach out to whoever would be willing to have you and talk about it there. So it’s kind of like PR. How do you get in front of-

Sarah Cobacho: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: … whether it’s news agencies, other websites-

Sarah Cobacho: So we need to think big.

Bjork Ostrom: … by doing something fun and unique and novel. What’s that?

Sarah Cobacho: We need to think big.

Cameron Crawley: Think big.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right. Sometimes it’s thinking local. In the early stages, I called our small town newspaper and was like, “Hey, Lindsay and I are both from the same hometown and we’re working on a website together.” This is like 12 years ago. And they sent out a reporter who wrote an article for us in the local paper.

Cameron Crawley: Oh, cool.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s little stuff like that. And I think from that then, you can say, “Hey, this small town newspaper did a feature.” You could take that and, say, the next level up, you could reach out to another newspaper and say, “We’re doing this thing. Hey, my friend and I are partnering to raise money for a dog shelter and we’re making dog cakes and here’s the dogs eating the cakes.” People would love that. So I think you have to be… The best version of backlink building, I think is creative, fun, outreach type work like that.

Sarah Cobacho: Good. I like that.

Cameron Crawley: And that would be win-win.

Sarah Cobacho: That’s my kind of…

Cameron Crawley: Can draw attention.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: That’s my kind of things. Sorry, just a very technical quick question. You mentioned before, orphan content. Does that mean that we need to have internal or backlink or link to our website or link to other things in every single post we make?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So it’s just what you wouldn’t want is you wouldn’t want a new piece of content to go out on your blog and to not have a link to that in any other pieces of content. So it’s different than a category page, technically. It’s different than the homepage where it’s linked to. Generally speaking, you want to have a web. There’s the World Wide Web, which is links everywhere. But you want to have a mini web on your website, which is all of the content linking to itself. So on the marry me pasta, maybe there’s another post that you have or another page and you’d want to say, “Hey, you might also be interested in this pasta if you want something that’s a little bit quicker to make,” or something like that. So it’s-

Sarah Cobacho: Do you think… Sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interlinking the actual content within itself.

Sarah Cobacho: That makes a lot of sense. Thank you. That’s something we’re not doing. And do you think… So meal writing, that’s something I keep pushing. But for example, a nutrition article to have on the website would help both with my branding, position me better as a nutritionist, and I could link that to pretty much every single pieces of content that we’re making. Like this is high in iron, “Hey, check this blog that… Check this article for my best tips on iron on a plant-based diet,” kind of thing?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And one of the ways you could think of that is hub-and-spoke. So in the world of content, you think of what is the hub? If you imagine a wheel, what is the hub, and then what are the things coming off of that hub? A category page is kind of that. But you could also create a post, in and of itself, that’s helpful and interesting for people that then links out to those other resources that you have. So maybe you create a post and it’s about the importance of eating high protein.

And I apologize for using that as the example, but it’s a good one. I’ll just keep coming back to it. The importance of eating high protein when on a vegan diet. It could be a nutritionist perspective on why that’s important. And within that piece of content, then you can naturally be linking out to other places on your site that highlights why that’s an important thing to do or recipes or whatever it might be. So yeah, I would say it positions you and your expertise around nutrition. Yeah, so I think it’d be super smart to do that.

Cameron Crawley: Thank you.

Sarah Cobacho: Thank you so much.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Last question is kind of a high level one. Any advice on what we should focus on and prioritize in our blog and overall business to increase revenue? So what I heard you saying in the beginning is awesome. And specifically around thinking strategically around increasing some of the passive, semi-passive income from the blog itself. But then also starting to think about what does it look like to have a community? What does it look like to have products? That’s where I think you can really start to be smart about content. There’s an interview that I did with Nathan Barry. He’s the CEO of email service provider ConvertKit. He had this series that he did called The Billion Dollar Creator. And his whole premise with that is creators are underselling themselves by just doing advertising on their blog and sponsored content. Because the real way to capture, fully capture the value that you are creating is to have an accompanying product or business that you are selling to your audience.

And so it could be information, it could be a product, it could be a course, it could be a community. Maybe it’s helping people think or helping people start to eat vegan, if they’re just starting out. Or you’d know your audience better, what it would be. But essentially thinking about what are the things that you could offer your audience that would be fully capturing the value of what you’re creating, versus a brand pays you $15,000 to do a sponsored post. The reason they’re doing that is because it’s probably worth 30, 40, 50,000 to them. But if it’s just you doing that, if you’re selling your own product, that’s where it starts to get really magical. I was having a conversation at a conference recently with somebody who started and has built a community, like a gardening community. And he was saying they operate their content at break-even.

So they maybe make a million dollars. They spend a million on it. Because they create tens of millions from a product that they’re selling. In their case, it’s plant products that they’re selling to people. And that’s what’s allowed them to have a business that’s worth tens of millions as opposed to a business that’s worth maybe multiple millions, which is still awesome and impressive and amazing. So as you think about long-term, what that looks like, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with building up a following and monetizing via ads and sponsored content. And you can create a great life and a great business. I think that depending on the degree to which you want to fast-track that and really think strategically about revenue…

Or in your case, when you talk about prioritizing on the blog and the overall business to increase revenue, what I would encourage you to think about when you’re in that space is to say, “Hey,” what would it look like to create either a brand within the context of your current brand, that is products? Or the example is Primal Kitchen, which… Do you guys have Primal Kitchen products in Australia?

Cameron Crawley: I don’t know if we do. I’ve heard of it. Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. That was created out of somebody who had a keto blog and then sold it for a ridiculous amount of money, not for the blog, but for the brand itself. So that’s where I feel like for somebody who has the things that you have, a passion and an expertise in a certain subject, momentum with growing a following, the skills and expertise you need to create video and content online, you guys have proven that. And an industry trend that’s going up, like plant-based vegan eating. To me, where it gets really exciting, and if I were to place a bet on a super successful, tens of millions of dollars outcome down the road, my bet would be around product accompanying content which you use to sell the product. That’s, I think, thinking of revenue optimization down the line.

Also, what you have going is great. And if you just continue to do what you’re doing and think about… A cookbook is an example of a product. Strategically selling the cookbook, maybe working with brands. I know you said you weren’t super interested in that, but working with brands that are aligned. And then just continually growing the traffic to your site over time, you’ll still have a great business. It’s just takes longer to build momentum in the world of content to a point where it gets to be a significant amount. But you’ll get there if you keep at it.

Sarah Cobacho: Sorry, quick question.

Cameron Crawley: I’m inspired.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah, me too. I wrote down all of your question. I’m going to have a little journaling sesh after this.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: What do I want? What does this look like? Just when you mean product, do you mean physical product or digital product?

Bjork Ostrom: Either.

Cameron Crawley: Which one would you prefer to do, if you had to do one today?

Bjork Ostrom: I mean, I think in your position, I would start with digital. Because I think you already… It’s just repackaging the way that you’re already producing content, which is video. And people know you. So I did a… I think it was something within the community where we were talking about product creation. And it was Nisha from Rainbow Plant Life. So it’s one of those that she recently did. It was maybe on the podcast. Or if not in the podcast, it was within the Food Blogger Pro community. And she talked about how she spent six months or something like that, just getting on calls with some of her followers in order to understand what it was that they needed. And in the world of software, they’d call it product development. You’re developing ideas around what the need is, and then you’re using that to inform what you end up creating.

If you wanted to dive deep into that world, there’s a book called Lean Startup, which is again, in the world of software, but the idea is kind of similar. But the basic idea is a lot of people, like in the world of software, they go and they’re like, “I have a really good idea.” And then they work on it for two years and then they launch it and they’re like, “Oh, this wasn’t actually a problem for anybody.” So in our world, it’s like you think that there’s a digital course that people need and you go into a lab and you record for a year and you launch and people are like, “I don’t really need that.” So the important step in stage is getting to know what people actually need. So it’s a lot of getting on calls and asking questions. And it’s awesome for people who follow you because they want to meet you and interact with you.

And then using that to say, “Hey, this is a theme that we see.” Could even be a Typeform server that you send out. So I think in your case, probably what’s easiest is to stairstep up. Like, okay, there’s sponsor content, there’s ad revenue, and then there’s a digital product. And you can sell people on a transformation, how to be healthy, successful, high energy, and still eat vegan. And then from there, you can start to think about… Well, and you’ll have a cookbook, which is a product, to think strategically about selling that. And then I think the opportunity is what’s above that? And it might be packaged goods, it might be certain kitchen things. I don’t know what it is at that point. You would know better. That’s, I think, where it gets really interesting, because then you have accompanying business sitting next to it that can grow and scale in a different way.

That’s probably, I don’t know, a three, four, five-year thing as you build up these other things. Or not. Maybe you get into it and you’re super excited about something. But the digital product stuff, I feel like, can be shorter term, as well as the cookbook can be shorter term. And I feel like that is a step along the way to get you there. You had one other thought. And I have time, if you have time, to just talk through what it’s like to work on a thing together. Do you want to hit that as the last question? Or what did that look like?

Sarah Cobacho: Oh yeah, I would love that. Thank you so much for your extra time. Really appreciate it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Sarah Cobacho: Cam and I work on this together full time. Obviously, we’ve been together for almost 10 years now. And because I know you and Lindsay have built this incredible business and you have a family and everything. So I guess I just wanted your insight on how does that look like for you and do you manage to disconnect from the business sometimes? Do we have to disconnect from the business sometimes? It’s very fun too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Sarah Cobacho: I just wanted your lifestyle ideas on this.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you feel like you want to disconnect at this point?

Sarah Cobacho: Not really. No.

Cameron Crawley: Not at all. But it’s more the feeling that we want things to be growing in the background while we go and take a break at the beach for one day off.

Bjork Ostrom: For sure.

Cameron Crawley: Because we work pretty much every day of the week. And you go to bed thinking about everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Sarah Cobacho: We spent almost a year without taking a day off unless we were sick. And we love it. But that’s what you said before as well, our consistency and being able to keep creating. Because I’m well aware that I cannot be doing this for the next five years, not taking a day off if I want to do this for 40 years.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right. So Lindsay and I, when we look back at the stage, because we were in a similar stage to what you were, we’re super nostalgic about it. We loved that stage. And we just loved the idea of working all the time and always having it on our mind. It was great. So I would say if you’re in that stage, awesome. Lean into it and capture that. Because there is something about… There’s this book called Big Magic. I’ve listened to it. I think Lindsay read it. And I think it’s in this book where she talks about this idea of the muse. And the muse, it’s a little bit almost spiritual. And you can take it for what you want. But she talks about the muse visiting you and she’s like… I think it’s in Big Magic. But idea being, if the muse visits you and you don’t honor it, then it kind of moves on to the next person who will honor the muse. And the muse being like an idea, a passion, an interest.

So I think as long as you feel like every day you’re excited to get up and work on the thing and get after it, awesome. I think that’s great. I think to a great degree, Lindsay and I are still in that stage. We just have more competing for our attention now with our girls at five and three. And so what we’ve had to do is just say we’re going to intentionally draw these lines in service of 10 years from now, 15 years from now. Not looking back and being like, “Shoot, we really missed this charming season of life.” But one of the reasons we are able to do that is because we probably compressed 10 years of work into five years. And now what we’re doing is we’re taking advantage of some of the flexibility of those investments that we made in terms of time into the business to allow for more flexibility.

I think we could be growing more or quicker if we were each working twice as much, but we’re just in a season where that sacrifice feels different. If we’re going to trade an evening now, the cost of that is inherently more than it was seven years ago. And so, we’re just more careful with that. But I think if you’re enjoying it and love it, it’s awesome. What a gift to be able to do that, and to be able to do it together.

Sarah Cobacho: It’s the best.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a fun thing to talk about. And some couples don’t have a lot stuff to talk about, and you guys do, which is great.

Cameron Crawley: We’re the reverse. We spend so much time together. At the end of the day, we pull out the laptop and put on a show to watch –

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Totally. Let’s just not talk about anything for a little bit. The other thing that I think maybe surprises people with how Lindsay and I work is… It’s kind of like we have our different departments within our day-to-day, and we act almost as consultants to each other for the things that we’re working on. I think that was less intentional than it was just lucky. And I don’t know what degree you have the division of labor with what you’re working on, but it seems maybe a little bit similar where… I know the stuff I’m working on. Lindsay knows the stuff she’s working on. At this point, it’s like I don’t know when a Pinch of Yum blog post is going out. She doesn’t know who’s being interviewed on the podcast next. But I am looking at search issues that come up and working with a team to fix those.

So I think part of it too, is just naturally over time, I know if I’m stepping on Lindsay’s toes. If I’ve stepped on her toes enough, then eventually I’m like, “Okay, I know that this thing here is going to be stepping on her toes.” And I can’t even think of an example of what that would be. But I think both of you being… having a high social EQ, you start to realize what makes sense to collaborate on versus just let somebody work on independently and over time. And probably to some degree, you already know what that looks like. I mean, it’s a great joy to be able to work together and also sometimes difficult. But I think it’s made us better in the long run for it, because we have to communicate well and be clear and open on how we’re working with stuff. Yeah, that’s exactly-

Cameron Crawley: We’re very similar.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: We have our own departments pretty much.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, which is great.

Sarah Cobacho: And there’s a trust.

Cameron Crawley: I think it’s perfect. Yeah.

Sarah Cobacho: Yeah, I think I trust his judgment 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Cameron Crawley: And I don’t have to think about the recipes at all, which is amazing. I just lay in bed all day and…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly.

Cameron Crawley: Awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a great job, if you can find it. That’s awesome. Any other last questions to wrap it up?

Cameron Crawley: Because with considering a community down the line, probably like a year or so away, and you’ve built Food Blogger Pro, maybe if you could give any advice on that, what’s the system, the best system for doing that, outsourcing?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Yep, totally. So I think with a community, there’s a ton of different ways to approach it. I think it’s super smart to think about doing it, just in general. This isn’t exactly community, but I know creators, food creators who kind of have a free community. And what they do is they curate a group of people who join them. Maybe it’s on a Facebook group, maybe it’s on a membership platform like Circle, and that’s what they use as their community. There could be a community that’s community-forward and then education in the background. Or there could be, I think this is Food Blogger Pro, the education-forward with a community component in the background. So part of it would just depend on what your approach would want to be. I went through a course and the course was… It’s called Pillars of Productivity. It’s by this author and creator, his name is Tiago Forte. It was great.

It was like six video lessons that were 20 to 30 minutes long. And then there was a community element and it was on Circle, a platform. But the reason I signed up was to go through the education. And then if you had some questions along the way, you’d ask in the community area. But you can also take the approach of saying, “Hey, we want to really develop a group of our raving fans, the people who are going to be the number one most interested people in what we’re doing,” and really curate that. We experimented with that a little bit with Pinch of Yum. We had what was called a VIP group, which was a Facebook group. We went to that group with questions of which logo do you like better? Or, “Hey, we’re thinking of doing these three recipes. Which one do you think we should do?” It just allows people to participate.

I think if it’s going to be something that you are asking people to sign up and pay for, there usually has to be some transformational element. You’re signing up like this, and then after you go through, then you’re going to be this. Like, we’re going to help you get from here to there, and here’s how we’re going to help you do it. So broadly speaking, I think community, much like a website, could be used in multiple different instances for multiple different purposes. But I think if the purpose is to create recurring revenue like Food Blogger Pro, there has to be transformational component, which usually means an educational component. Unless you’re doing something like curating a group of seven people and you’re going to have a mastermind to help people become… to help people eat vegan or something like that. So organizing and facilitating a group versus educating people on a thing to do.

A couple of the platforms. So Circle is one. I think it’s circle.so is maybe the site. Memberful, they’re our podcast sponsor, but they’re also a great company that allows you to spin up a membership site relatively easily. I would look into a pre-existing solution versus trying to build something on top of WordPress, and then just do it as community dot, as opposed to trying to integrate it in with the site, just setting it up on a separate URL.

Cameron Crawley: Oh, really? What would be the advantage of that? Just to make it easier?

Bjork Ostrom: Well, the advantage of it is that you can use an entirely different system outside of WordPress to run the platform. So in Google’s case, they have Gemini, which is their AI solution. But if you go to Gemini, it’s gemini.google.com, that’s an entirely different URL because it’s an entirely different technology stack.

Cameron Crawley: I get it.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s the difference between… As soon as you do the community.plantbaes.com, that’s a different… It’s outside of WordPress, it’s outside of your stack, and it allows you to just run an entirely different technology. Versus-

Cameron Crawley: Oops, sorry.

Sarah Cobacho: Sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: … plantbaes.com/community as the-

Cameron Crawley: Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: That would be, I think, the… If it was me, that’s the approach that I would take.

Cameron Crawley: Okay, cool.

Sarah Cobacho: Thank you. That’s very helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, hey, super fun to connect, to hear about your story. You guys are doing really good work, and continued success in building what you’re building. So if there’s ever anything we can do, reach out.

Cameron Crawley: Thank you so much.

Sarah Cobacho: Thank you so much. Thank you for being-

Cameron Crawley: So grateful.

Sarah Cobacho: … so generous with your time. And you know that we really appreciate you.

Cameron Crawley: Yeah.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I wanted to take a minute and just ask that if you enjoyed this episode or any of our other many episodes of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, that you share it. It means so much to us as a podcast if you share episodes with your friends and family. Or if you are a food blogger or entrepreneur, if you could share them on social media or even in your email newsletters. It really helps us get the word out about our podcast and reach more listeners. Thanks again for listening. We really hope you enjoyed this episode. And we’ll see you back here next week.