Bjork Ostrom: Are you a food blogger looking to boost your site’s visibility? With Yoast SEO Premium, you can optimize your blog for up to five keywords per page, ensuring higher rankings and more traffic. You can enjoy AI-generated SEO titles and meta descriptions and automatic redirects to avoid broken links. I love that feature and real-time, internal linking suggestions. Plus, take advantage of Yoast AI Optimize, which is their latest AI-driven feature. A simple click provides you with actionable suggestions that help move your SEO score closer to that green traffic light, which we all love so much. It’ll streamline your process and reduce manual tweaks. Additionally, you can get social media previews and 24/7 premium support. Now, here’s the wonderful thing for Food Blogger Pro listeners. Yoast is offering an exclusive 10% discount. You can upgrade your blog’s SEO game today with Yoast SEO Premium. Use the code foodbloggerpro10 at checkout. Again, that’s foodblogger10, the number ten one zero at checkout for that 10% discount.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there! Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here. Thanks so much for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast — you are currently listening to the very last episode of 2024! How crazy is that? We are wishing you all a very Happy New Year, and and we’re looking forward to wrapping up the year with another Food Blogger Pro Rewind episode.

This will be our second and final Food Blogger Pro Rewind episode, and we’re excited to feature a really great interview with Ashley Segura from TopHatRank and TopHatContent. Ashley is a total pro when it comes to content marketing, and she’s sharing some of her best advice for creators in this episode — everything from how to come up with great content ideas to what an ideal blog post structure looks like. We wanted to bring it back and make sure that everyone got a chance to listen to it if you haven’t already. Or if you listened to it when it was first released, this will be a good refresher for you if you’re looking for some content creation tips!

Before we dive in, we wanted to take a moment to thank you all for being a part of the Food Blogger Pro community. We hope the upcoming year brings you new opportunities, exciting challenges, and more reasons to celebrate. We’re so excited for all of the new conversations we’ll have in the year ahead!

And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away for our final episode of the year!

Bjork Ostrom: Ashley, welcome to the podcast.

Ashley Segura: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we met super briefly at Tastemaker Conference. It’s one of those things where you probably met 300 people. I met 300 people. So we’ve met in person, which is rare for a podcast interview for me to have like an in-person meeting and then to do the Zoom meeting. That’s fun. Good to see you again.

Bjork Ostrom: At the Tastemaker, you were talking about all things SEO, ranking, search, and really, that’s your background, Ashley. I did a quick LinkedIn review before jumping on the podcast and see that you have a long history, not only in content, background in journalism and creative writing, but also background in search engine optimization. It seems like where you are now, those two things have kind of come together. How did that evolve and how did that happen for you?

Ashley Segura: Yeah, that’s exactly it, and it’s really funny. I mean, I started in journalism, right from college. I was writing for the Times-Standard and absolutely loved writing stories and telling people stories. My first gig right after college was from my insurance agent. I was having a conversation with him, because I was about to rent another apartment, so I needed to get new insurance and he’s like, “Hey, you just graduated college. Could you build me a website?” I was like-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, “You’re a young person.”

Ashley Segura: Yeah, Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: “Can you do computer things?”

Ashley Segura: That’s basically how that conversation went. I, not knowing how to say no to new opportunities, it was like, “Yeah, sure. I’ll figure that out.” Watched, well actually back then, it really wasn’t watching, it was reading articles and learning about WordPress. I created a site, wrote all the content for it and then the next step was social media pages, because I was doing the college of social media, so I was like, “Hey, you’re going to need these as well.”

Ashley Segura: One thing led to another and I basically got his whole insurance company online and developed an online presence. After I did that for him, he’s like, “Hey, can you come and speak for the Board of Insurance in California? Kind of explain what you did and tell them a little bit more about this whole online marketing thing.” I did my first speaking gig, absolutely terrified. I think there were like only 12 or 14 of these insurance agents representing the State of California.

Ashley Segura: But went in, did it, and then I got clients from that. I started doing the same thing, writing content for them. That’s where I was able to still kind of have that journalism background and tell their story. But then, also through doing research and a lot of what I do now, trying to figure out what users actually want to know from this insurance company, not just how they got founded, what they do Monday through Friday, outside of the fluffy information.

Ashley Segura: I definitely needed to learn a lot more. I started working in-house, and became a director of marketing for an in-house brand, and then wanted to really grow my clientele, so I knew I was going to need agency experience, so started working for a couple different agencies to really learn how they run their business, how they run clients, and…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The agencies, you mean like-

Ashley Segura: yes, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s do an agency, see how an agency works.

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: In hopes of eventually doing your own?

Ashley Segura: Exactly. Exactly. I wanted to get hands-on experience. Meanwhile, I was still managing these insurance clients, then a couple other referral clients that I would get here and there, but working full-time.

Bjork Ostrom: You kind of had your own agency, like your side hustle agency, in the insurance niche, and then were working, your full-time gig with an agency that was a little bit bigger and established to learn. I think it’s so smart. The idea of you are learning on the job for what you want to be, an entrepreneur. It’s like lots of different, you’re a doctor or you’re a dentist, like you’ll do on-the-job training.

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Painting, whatever it is, construction. I think sometimes as entrepreneurs, we think, “Hey, we’re just going to go out and learn by doing,” which is great.

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: But one of the other great things you can do is learn by working underneath somebody. It’s cool to see that you were doing that. Along the way, what did you learn? What were the pieces that you started to pick up around what it takes to run an agency?

Ashley Segura: Well, I learned what I liked and didn’t like. I loved doing social media marketing and I loved content marketing. From an agency’s perspective, I was writing the content still. I wasn’t really doing the audits yet or the science behind the content. I was doing more of the topic ideation and creating the content.

Bjork Ostrom: For the agency, for your full-time gig.

Ashley Segura: For the agency. For the clients. Doing that, allowed me to hone in, “Okay, I’m not doing website development anymore. I’m not doing graphic design.” I dabbled in all of it. I was like a one stop shop, by myself and realized, “Okay, that’s not sustainable. If I want to really grow and have my own agency become successful, I need to just hone in.” I just honed in on social and content and that’s where I really started studying.

Ashley Segura: That’s where I went back again and did another in-house brand, doing a director of marketing for another in-house brand, just focusing mainly on their social and content. Then, that’s when I started speaking a lot more. Because at that point, I had a lot of case studies under my belt. I had a good idea of what worked and didn’t work. That’s really what brought me to where I am now to really understanding how to optimize content, how to run paid social, and actually get a return on ad spend and just amplify both of those assets.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right now, working with TopHatRank, which is an agent that we’re familiar with, have worked with in the past, are you still doing some of your own work with your own agency or is that something that you decided to wind down? I’m always interested in somebody’s entrepreneurial journey and kind of the decision points along the way. Where is that at for you now? Where do you feel like you learned in that process of doing your own agency?

Ashley Segura: In 2019, I officially closed my agency doors. That was around the time that I was working with Semrush. I was a speaker for Semrush, so I would build out case studies and then go teach it around the world. That was a lot. That was really difficult to try and do a balance of keeping any clients and doing that. I closed my agency doors, connected with Arsen mid–2019, and started doing operations for TopHatRank. About three months into that, him and I both saw this huge opportunity.

Ashley Segura: So many clients that come into TopHatRank, and just brands in general, when they start with SEO, they generally need something else in addition to that, or they’re coming to SEO because they’ve tried content and social and it didn’t work for them. They got burned or something happened. With my social and content experience, we decided, “Let’s partner up and let’s create TopHatContent and TopHatSocial.” We actually have three brands now.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Ashley Segura: That allows me to still have those social and content outlets and definitely do what I love, and still have from an entrepreneurial aspect, still be able to handle the operations for TopHatRank.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Operations for TopHatRank. Then, there’s kind of these sister agencies, TopHatContent, TopHatSocial, where TopHatRank, if I’m understanding it correctly, would be kind of audit-related work around SEO, maybe technical SEO. Here’s changes you can make to your site structure, or opportunities where you might be able to tweak things. TopHatContent would be a little bit more in the world of your experience with how do you structure content? How do you ideate content? How do you figure out your content roadmap?

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s some science to that, but there’s also some art to that. There’s a little bit, kind of that balance. Then the social piece, obviously, would be kind of in the world of social media marketing, which we understand.

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of those different categories make sense. I’m curious to know, just to talk a little bit more about your own entrepreneurial journey, what do you feel like you learned about yourself in that process? One of the things that I think is always a good reminder, and something that’s important to come back to, is this idea of like what we are doing, what we are after is finding the thing that is the best fit for us. That’s a constant evolution. For some people, it’s going to be an entrepreneur, but a solopreneur. It’s just you, you’re working on your own, freelance contractor.

Bjork Ostrom: For some people, it’s building a team and trying to scale that as much as possible. For some people, it’s partnering with somebody and working together on a business. For other people, it’s finding a job they really love and settling into that, and having a side hustle, if that works. What do you feel like you learned about yourself as an entrepreneur, as a creator, as you’ve kind of walked this journey of seeing inside of a lot of different businesses, a lot of different agencies, and even just working with other businesses. You get to see what those businesses are like. What did you learn about yourself in that process that has allowed you to kind of continually evolve and find something that’s a good fit?

Ashley Segura: I definitely learned my limits. I learned where I would max out working full-time, whether I was at another agency or I was in-house and still having my clients, my weeknights and my weekends was literally me on the couch with my laptop, doing all my client work and implementing everything that I just learned at my full-time job. After doing five years of that, that was enough. I was really scared to make that leap and go full-time on my own, but it was the best thing that I did, because so many doors opened after that. I also learned to limit myself in what I offer and provide.

Ashley Segura: That was a really big eye-opener. I started my journey with wanting to be a one-stop shop and offering anything online marketing-related, even branding and PR elements for a brand. Then, honing that in to where now, today, over at TopHatContent, instead of offering every service that a content marketing agency could possibly offer, we offer four, well now, we have a new one, five services. These are the best services that I’ve been able to find that actually make a difference with a brand’s content.

Ashley Segura: Instead of just trying to be competitive with every other agency that’s in this niche and offer everything that everyone else offers, we decided, “Let’s just hone in and offer what we know is going to get the most immediate results and actually provide a solution to what people are looking for.” That’s just basic business, but you get muddled with trying to be the best and offer it all. Then time goes by, and you’re still doing that. Limiting yourself has definitely been a big lesson and eyeopener throughout the journey.

Bjork Ostrom: Sometimes I think of the parallel with content and sponsored content. I think sometimes, when you’re in the early stages, it’s like the reason you do that is because you need to.

Ashley Segura: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, “I need to pay the bills, and so if you need a website designed, I’m going to figure out how to do it, because I’m scrappy, and I’m ambitious, and I’m in the early stages.” At a certain point, you meet your needs that you have from a business perspective. Then you can start to say like, “Great,” you kind of hinted at this, “what do I actually like doing? How do I do more of that?” Also, I was just talking three, four hours ago with a friend down the hall who has a video business. He was talking about learning this new system and this different type of editing.

Bjork Ostrom: I said, “You can see why people start to specialize.” Like in the music business, why somebody gets really good at like mastering songs after they’ve been recorded, because they can do it really quick, and it’s really good, and they can charge an amount that makes sense, and because it’s really good, but then they get really quick at it, because they specialize in it. There’s a book by a guy named John Warlow who talks about content agency. I think the one uses a design agency in it. I read this maybe 10 years ago or something. I don’t know if it was that long ago. It was a long time.

Bjork Ostrom: But he talks about how, in the book, he gives this analogy of this kind of chaotic design agency and how they really unlock their potential when they focus just on doing logos. They have a logo package, and you go through the process of getting a logo, and it can be repeatable then. The analogy in the book is like building a service business that can be acquired. That has to be one that’s repeatable and has a process. But I think any acquirable business is acquirable, because it’s a good business to run.

Ashley Segura: Totally.

Bjork Ostrom: And so, I think it applies to anybody listening here that would be service based to think about like, what is your process, and what is your system, and what is your specialty? Even for those who aren’t in the services businesses, I think it’s always important for us to think, what is our process? What is our specialty? What’s the thing that I can do that has some element of repeatability to it? TopHatContent, you talk a lot about content. We are in the world of content creators. That’s what we talk about day in and day out.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m curious to know when you are working with content creators, what are the things that you’re helping them with? Then, let’s dive into, talk about some of the things that creators and publishers can be thinking about if they’re interested in leveling up and getting smarter about their content. You mentioned four or five different areas that you specialize in, but maybe we could take a look more closely at a couple of those, content ideation, we had talked about, and topic ideation, and content structure as well, but what are those buckets that you talked about before?

Ashley Segura: Certainly. Content creators have content already created. You really nailed it with starting with a lot of different niches and then eventually honing in. We’ll have a lot of content creators come to us who used to, maybe six, seven years ago, write about travel, family and food, and now they just want to be a vegan blogger. They’re trying to figure out, “What do I do with all that old content? How can I brand myself as just a vegan blogger? There’s hundreds of thousands of other vegan bloggers, where can I stand out in this niche?”

Ashley Segura: Usually, where we always start with a content creator, because they have content already published, is with audits. We’ll look into a content audit, which basically just dives in, collects all the data for all the content on a site. Then, we start to organize it. What we’re really looking for, and this is something that anyone can do as long as they have the time, resources, obviously, always a key factor, but we’re looking for patterns within the data. Some of those older posts that either aren’t ranking anymore or aren’t relevant, figuring out what to do with them is the most important part of the audit.

Ashley Segura: Just mass deleting them is definitely not always a recommendation. There could be opportunities in there. That’s where you got to look at the competition and see who’s currently ranking right now? How are they structuring those articles to get ideas and figure out why they are ranking over you when you technically have the authority here? You’ve had this piece of content published for six years, you’re clearly a blogger about X, Y, Z, and have been creating content about X, Y, Z for this long, so why are they out ranking you?

Ashley Segura: It usually comes down to how a blog post is structured, how many backlinks they’re getting, what the link profile entirely looks like, and what the user journey looks like. An audit will give all of that information and then allow us to put together a roadmap of, “Okay, here’s what to fix for your previously published, you’re already published content. Here’s what to do with all of that. Now going forward, here’s some ideas on where you should go next in terms of creating new content.” Because they’re content creators, they still want to create new content, maybe not at the capacity that they were doing before. Figuring out a way, we’ll usually recommend, saying, “You need to break up your time in a very number specific way and strategy.”

Ashley Segura: Two-thirds of your time should be focused on updating your existing content. A third of your time should be focused on creating new content. That’s generally a safe recommendation across the board for all content creators, whether they’ve been creating content for two years, a year or 10 years. It’s not always reinventing the wheel with new pieces of content.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think of it almost as a store. As much as possible, I think in the digital world, if we can, for myself, at least, if I can come up with examples of physical things, it helps me understand it. I think of it as a store, let’s say it’s a retail store and you’re selling whatever it might be. Let’s say it’s a jewelry store. I think that in my mind, what can happen as a publisher, and I think of this even for a site like Pinch of Yum, is we just continually bring stuff into the store. We go out, we wholesale buy it, we bring it in and we put it on display, and then we go and get another thing and we put it up, and just do that.

Bjork Ostrom: For us, for 12 years, we’re gathering things and putting them up, but what we’re not great at, we’re getting better at this. I think publishers in general are getting better at this, but I think there’s still a huge opportunity to get good at this is to actually stop and be like, “Okay, we’ve been gathering pieces for 12 years. Now, let’s stop and look, like when somebody comes in, where are they going? What are they looking at? What are they really drawn to? This one, like the gold watch, we bought six years ago, nobody’s looked at that in the past year. Is it because it’s not in the right place? Is it because it’s not polished correctly? Should we try moving it, adjusting it, seeing if anybody interacts with it? If they don’t again, okay, maybe we take it out. Then, when people come in, they only see things that they really like and are really appealing.”

Bjork Ostrom: Like, “Maybe we don’t sell watches anymore. We just get rid of that. We focus on necklaces.” But it’s really holistic strategy around your catalog of content, the whole store, as opposed to just looking at each individual piece and being like, “Hey, do I like this piece? I’m going to put it in my store.” But then after 12 years, you kind of have this chaotic store that hasn’t been curated and things haven’t been optimized. One of the things that I heard you talk about was the potential of deleting content. In this jewelry store example, it would be like getting rid of the gold watch.

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: But you said that’s not always the best option. If somebody’s interested in looking at their catalog, and trying to catalog of content, and trying to make a decision around, do I keep this, do I not, where do you even start for that? Then the follow up question is, can you talk about the strategy behind potentially removing it, if that was a good idea?

Ashley Segura: Definitely. Trying to figure out what content is safe to delete, and what should be updated, where there’s still an opportunity, is literally looking at the traffic for the keyword. So often, those older articles that you published a long time ago may have, back then, had a lot of traffic, but now, people just aren’t searching for that. It’s just not, for whatever reason, that watch is not relevant to the customers that are walking through your store anymore. They only want to focus on necklaces, or only silver watches, instead of gold watches.

Ashley Segura: If you go in, and you don’t have to have fancy tools for this. You can just look at the keyword traffic. If you can see that there’s just not a lot of people searching for this to begin with, it’s not worth your time going in and trying to recreate that post, update it, do all new images, throw in a video with it, add 400 more words to it. It’s not worth that effort, because people aren’t searching for that to begin with. Even if you make those updates, and you may improve your rankings for it, those five people that are searching for it, it’s not going to drastically change the wheel for you.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. In that case, it would be, you’re targeting something that isn’t high-volume search. There’s just not a lot of people searching for, let’s say, I’m trying to think of an example of one that would be, somebody wouldn’t search for, pine cone, natural pine cone tacos. I just looked out my window and I saw pine cones, right?

Ashley Segura: There we go. That’s specific.

Bjork Ostrom: Super extreme example, but maybe you’re into natural foods. Nobody’s searching that, but you have that blog post on your site. It doesn’t make sense even to update it, because even if it was the most optimized post ever, there’s not going to be an audience there who’s going to be interested in it. An example in the jewelry world would be like, you have a watch, but it’s so big that nobody can wear it. Nobody’s ever going to buy it, because there’s not a market for it.

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: My follow-up question to that would be, what if there’s appeal in other areas. For instance, what if it’s a really funny post that a lot of people are sharing on Facebook? Or what if it’s gone viral on Pinterest? It’s less of the strategy behind it, because if it is getting traffic from other places, my guess is the answer would be you leave it. It’s more curious around search engine optimization. This is kind of a technical question, but like, would you potentially no index it? Then, Google is crawling fewer pages on your site, and you’re saying like, “Hey, don’t crawl this page.” Or is it more of an it depends?

Ashley Segura: It’s definitely not an it depends. This one’s a pretty black and white one, and one of those rare ones that it’s black and white. Before, for us, to actually recommend, “Hey, you should delete this post, or you should delete these 25 posts.” We’ll go in and look at the social metrics. We’ll use BuzzSumo. We’ll pull all the social data, and if there’s significant, and the word significant, that means something different for every single brand.

Ashley Segura: That could be 10 shares for one brand or 1,000 shares for another brand. If there’s significant social engagement happening with that content, then that, go ahead and just leave it, let it sit there. No index it. We also have instances where it’s a blog post, that was from 10 years ago and it was the family’s first trip to Yellowstone, even though they don’t write about travel anymore, but it means something to them.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Okay. Go ahead and just no index that, that’s safe. The ones where you don’t want to no index them, but you’re still not sure if you should delete them, but pretty much the last caveat to that is the link profile. If you have one or two strong backlinks that are pointing to it, even if you’re not getting a lot of traffic, but you have high authority backlinks, that’s helping give your blog, in general, a push up by saying, “Even though this post isn’t getting a lot of traffic, this big website is linking to it, so I do have a little bit of authority and do know a little bit of what I’m talking about.” That’s another one that we’re not going to want to delete. We’re not going to want to touch. You can just leave it as is.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. In the case of the travel post, I think anybody who’s been publishing for a certain number of years will have these pieces of content that are personal in nature.

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Significant enough that you want to leave up. It’s almost like a little milestone. We had a friend yesterday who’s like, “I’ve kind of given up on caring what it looks like for me to post on Instagram. It’s just become a way for me to remember a point in time.” That’s the value for them. I think there’s a little bit of that, depending on how you run your site, where for some people there’s these markers and they use their blog or publishing as kind of a milestone.

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe it’s like a cookbook is released and not a lot of people are searching about it, but you just remember that as a really significant thing. Or to your point, you do a recap of a family trip, or I think of Pinch of Yum, Lindsay was like, “Here are 10 things we did in Charleston.” It’s not a travel blog. It’s very much a food blog, but… You talk about no indexing. Can you talk about what no indexing is? Why it’s important and why we would use it and also need to be careful with it?

Ashley Segura: Certainly. No indexing is allowing that piece of content, that page to still live out in the universe, but telling search engines, “Hey, don’t worry about crawling this. I don’t need you to try and rank this piece of post. If someone’s searching for the things to do in Charleston, I don’t need this one to come up in search engines. I’m totally okay with this taking a back seat. This is just personally for me and on my site.” But that also is where you need to be very careful, because pieces of content that you actually want to rank and to be seen by people need to be indexed. They need to be crawled.

Ashley Segura: Search engines need to be made aware of them, so that they can put them in front of the right users. That’s why when you go through a content audit process, or say you’re even auditing your own content and you’re going back and forth delete or no index, or usually, those two bottom of the barrel options. Because if you delete something, you’re obviously not going to get traffic. It doesn’t exist in the cyber world anymore. If you no index it, you could maybe have some people from other pages on your website stumble across that article, but you don’t care if the traffic comes through, you’re not really concerned about that. The post is still live. It’s still living in the cyber world, which is important to you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Like somebody maybe has bookmarked it and once a quarter, they come back and they look at it. Or maybe would be doing an internal search on your site. Like using your site search would come across it, or maybe it’s on Pinterest somewhere and somebody clicks on it. They can still get to it if it’s no indexed, but you’re telling Google or other search engines, “Don’t show this.”

Bjork Ostrom: The word index comes from the index of sites. “Don’t put this in your index, don’t display it, don’t put it in your database, keep this out of search results.” The follow-up question, why would you do that? What is the benefit to a publisher by saying, “Don’t include this in search results.” Because it seems like you would just kind of want anything to be available at all times. What is the benefit of saying, “Don’t include this.”

Ashley Segura: Sometimes it can come down to content cannibalization. If you have other content that, say on Pinch of Yum, you have food-related content in Charleston, and you want Google to focus anything Charleston-related on the food portion and not on this travel blog that’s more of just a memory piece for you. This is kind of an opportunity for you to map the road out for Google, and for users, and search engines, and to tell them, “If you’re going to do anything Charleston related with my website, show them these pieces only.”

Ashley Segura: Then, this actually creates a proper user journey for both the search engines and for users, and it makes sense with my brand. Whereas if we go on the travel side of things, we don’t want anyone to drive over into that section on the map, because it just doesn’t make sense for either search engines or users with our brand.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That makes sense. One of the things that you had said a couple times is user journey. What is that?

Ashley Segura: Okay. I’m curious what the oven temperature needs to be for baking pork chops. I’m going to go to Google to type in baked pork chop, oven temperature recipe. I’m usually, my personal user experience, I’ll skip over the first few results that come up, because they’re spammy or they’re all recipes and ads. I’ll go down to the third or fourth, I’ll click on an article. I will then see the article. I’ll go through the images. I’ll go down to the recipe card.

Ashley Segura: I’ll get the oven temperature out of it. Then, usually a step or two in there, or an ingredient that I didn’t include will catch my eye. Now, I’m on the recipe. Now, I really like this recipe. I didn’t realize I should do sun-dried tomatoes with my baked pork chop. That’s going to make it taste amazing. Now, I like this brand. I’ve now had a positive experience with not just the recipe and the content on the page, but with the brand. I now appreciate them, because they just taught me something new and opened up my eyes to a different way to cook this recipe. Now, I’m going to go to their homepage. I’m going to see who the author is, learn a little bit more about them.

Ashley Segura: I may sign up for their email newsletter, I don’t know, depending upon how my user experience is on the homepage. If I kind of fall in love a little bit more with the brand, I’m going to go and see that they also have dessert recipes, and I need a dessert to accompany this, so I’m going to look at their desserts, and then go to their contact page, because I’m a marketer and see what PR opportunities they have available. That’s a user journey. That’s kind of describing user experiences. What a user does with your content before, after, I’m sorry. Before, during and after they’re engaging with your content.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. One of the interviews we’ve done before is with Kingston, who has a company called Slickstream. They just released a feature within Slickstreams called Journeys. It shows you like, “Here’s the journey that somebody’s gone through.” Obviously, there’s comparable things you could do within Google Analytics, but they’ve done it in a really user-friendly way. You can see, and they’ll send an email out and they’ll be like, “Here’s an interesting journey.” Sometimes we’ll see 30 people will come and they’ll look at 30 different pieces of content.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, “Wow, what was it about that search that brought them in?” Like what hooked them in? So starting to understand those journeys better, you can see how that would be impactful for your content strategy. One of the things that I wanted to dig into a little bit that you had mentioned is this idea of backlinks. I think we talk about backlinks a lot, but can you just explain the concept of a backlink? Then, how can you find backlinks for your site or for a specific post?

Ashley Segura: Backlinks are when other websites link to one of the pages on your website. This is most common, we’ll stick with the baked pork chop recipe. This can be seen as, say another blogger, a travel blogger came across this baked pork chop recipe that she or he made while they were on vacation in Nantucket. Totally shooting from the hip here. They linked baked pork chops and it links to your baked pork chop recipe. Now, anyone who’s reading this Nantucket post is going to naturally, if they’re interested in baked pork chops, which generally is what happens, they’ll click on the baked pork chop recipe.

Ashley Segura: They’ll land on your website. They’ll land on that post. They’ll now have an engagement. If this is a website that gets a decent amount of traffic, it’s been around for a while, has some good authority, you’re looking at now having a strong backlink. Lots of times, not just content creators, brands across all spectrums, small to huge brands will get links from directory websites, or Wikipedia sites, or forums, and things like that.

Ashley Segura: Those, well, aside from Wikipedia sites, most of them tend to be low-quality backlinks. Where you see that big difference is when it provides value to a user. If you’re ever questioning, “Is this going to be a high-quality backlink or a low-quality backlink?” Ask yourself about the journey. If they’re coming from this Nantucket blog post and clicking on the baked pork chop recipe, that’s pretty clear that they actually want to learn more about this recipe.

Ashley Segura: They want to make this recipe and give it a try. If they’re going from a directory site, you’re most likely not going to get a lot of clicks. You’re not going to get a lot of traffic. Yes, you got one backlink from it, but you’re not really getting any traffic from it, so it’s not a strong backlink. It’s not very helpful for you.

Ashley Segura: Getting those links from that Nantucket blog creator, it’s not easy. There are a lot of different secret sauces out there that SEOs have in order to try and get them. Some of the best have been through collaborations. In the food blogger world alone, there’s so many great Facebook groups out there where they’re just literally collaboration groups. They find relevant niches or niches that compliment each other, like obviously a vegan niche and a barbecue niche wouldn’t be great to link to each other.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Especially from a user journey standpoint, but there’s a lot of groups out there to where they try and help each other out. Like, “You give me a link, I give you a link.” But they make it relevant to the user, and they do it over time, instead of, “Here’s 50 new backlinks from this Nantucket person.” That’s pretty obvious. I mean, Google, as much as we all have lots of feelings about Google and search engines, it is pretty smart. It can tell when you’re doing something fishy like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right. An important point is that one, which is like, the closer you get to artificially manifesting links, the more dangerous it gets. I think, I forget what they were called, but it was essentially like, “Hey, 10 publishers, we’re all going to link to these 10 pieces of content in this single post, so there’s this web of connections.” To your point, Google gets good at understanding that. It almost feels like the opportunity is like the parallel in the real world, which is like, you have real genuine connections.

Bjork Ostrom: You have a network of people and friends who are doing similar things and you naturally link to each other. I think of our connection with Melissa, from The Faux Martha, who’s helped out with some of the design projects we have at the office. We link to her and her content, and she links to a Pinch of Yum. That happens in a really natural way over time. But it’s also, you want to be strategic about it and think like, “How do I do this strategically?” To your point, the importance of that. One last thing with it is there’s no real like metrics around low profile, high profile, quality, not quality. It’s kind of up to interpretation around.

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yet, there’s no rating system around links, officially. It’s just this general understanding like, hey, if we get a link from Minnesota’s biggest newspaper startribune.com, that’s probably going to be more valuable for us a better backlink than, to what you said, a directory of 1,000 different food sites that links to your page. Is that right?

Ashley Segura: Exactly. Kind of put on your PR, your public relations hat with this, whether you have experience in PR or not. The more popular you are, the more links that you’re going to get. The more popular you are at school, the more friends you’re going to have it. It can apply in the real world scenario. That’s a great way to kind of think about links. That’s why establishing authority is so important.

Ashley Segura: That’s such a broad term, but a way to do that is to really create great content within your niche. Great content is completely different from even a year ago of what great content looked like a year ago toward what it looks like today. Providing as much information as you can, whether you are an informative type of content creator, or an entertaining type of content creator, those are the two biggest, as long as you are addressing why a user would’ve originally come to your page better than anyone else, you’re going to be popular. You’re going to get links from everyone else. To see and figure out how to do that, it really comes down to looking at what’s currently ranking, take the all recipes, and take the huge corporate large brands out of the picture that show up on the first or second results.

Ashley Segura: Look at the third, fourth, fifth, six results of who’s ranking for a specific term and see what questions they’re addressing. I can guarantee you there’s a piece of information that you may not have yet. When you add that to your content and dive in deeper into that, that’s really helping to define the authoritative aspect that you need to really become popular and get natural backlinks without having to go out and ask everyone to be your friend.

Bjork Ostrom: Authoritative almost being synonymous with knowledgeable, like helpful, knowledgeable, giving people what they want, which in this world, it’s success with the recipe, but also answers to questions potentially.

Ashley Segura: Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: We don’t have to cover all the different pieces of it, but you talked about the content being different today than it was a year ago, especially true when you look at five or 10 years ago.

Ashley Segura: Totally.

Bjork Ostrom: We can think back to 10 years ago and read, write a piece of content and how different that looked and felt. It was almost more like a journal, but now you’re kind of structuring content in a way to make it as helpful as possible for readers. Then also what Google’s after, any search engine is after, is trying to understand what’s helpful and prioritizing that. What should a blog post look like? How do you actually structure the different components and pieces? Is there any kind of formula with it or loose structure that you can follow?

Ashley Segura: Kind of, a bit. I’m doing my best to not say it depends throughout this entire conversation.

Bjork Ostrom: But it also depends. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Also it truly does. No, really, diving into the food content creators in particular, there’s this one blog post and I’ll look for the link and send it to you afterwards, but there’s this one blog post that I always use as an example of a great piece of content structured from start to finish. It starts out with an image of the final product that, I think was a chicken recipe. I don’t even remember what the recipe was.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: But the content-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not what you were looking at.

Ashley Segura: … structure was so good.

Bjork Ostrom: It was the content structure. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: Yeah. The content structure was so good. It had a photo of the recipe right off the bat, had a few very short paragraphs, then right away with bullets of what you’re going to get into this. Right after the bullets, I think it was about a 30 or 45 second video. Then it started to dive into the steps, but it didn’t do it in step one, step two. It still wasn’t even a recipe card, it was more conversational. It still brought the user journey going all the way down. Then it had a three minute video in there and then it had more bullets, more content, and then the recipe card.

Ashley Segura: You’re hitting every type of user there. The one that wants the short, quick video to see how to do it. The one that actually wants to see the details and would want to watch a three minute video. The users who are just looking for the bulleted information, the me’s of the world that just need that oven temperature, but end up staying on longer because something caught my eye. Then, you also have the ones that still appreciate the story, there are users out there who still appreciate the story, not of how tomatoes were created, but of how you need to peel the skin of the tomatoes so softly after you saute them and they start to burn off.

Ashley Segura: They still appreciate that dialogue. A perfect structured content to me and what I’ve seen as being the most successful is when you offer something for everyone within one piece of content. That doesn’t mean it needs to be 2,500 words to do that. In this example, they used video elements and bullets to do that. Then the recipe card to get to the point, if that’s what you truly wanted after watching the 30 second video.

Bjork Ostrom: Both my parents were teachers and they often talked about different types of learners. They talked about visual learners, people who learn by listening, and then kinesthetic learners who learn by doing and actually interacting with things. You can’t do all of that with a screen. But the idea is for myself, I’d rather watch a video of how something is done, but I know a lot of people, even in this podcast, and there is going to be somebody here who’s going to be reading this instead of listening to it because they go to the podcast notes.

Bjork Ostrom: Even though they could listen to it, they read the transcript because that’s their preference for how they consume content. The first piece that I hear you talking about that’s important is making sure as much as possible that you are providing different ways for people to consume the content, video, short bullet points, longer explanation. It also gets to the point where it feels like, man, that ends up being a lot. Do you feel like there’s been a shift where before, if you could do two pieces of content in a week, now you’re probably doing one because that one piece of content takes twice as long?

Ashley Segura: 100% and two things on that. The first being, not every piece of content needs to have that much of an in depth structure for it to be successful. The ones where maybe you used to be ranking, but you aren’t ranking for anymore, or you’re just really in the middle, you’re on page maybe three or four, and you still haven’t hit page one, and you don’t know why, those are the pieces of content to where it’s worth doing this in-depth structure to where you’re providing something for everybody inside the piece of content. The second part of that is really trying to figure out with your resources what makes the most sense with how much you can actually create quality content in.

Ashley Segura: People are obviously consuming content faster than ever, the more the merrier, but it’s not making a big tick in rankings by you publishing five to 10 posts a week versus your top competitor who only does one a month. But that one a month is that full structure, it’s distributed across social media, it has social ads on it, it’s on all the platforms, there’s an email newsletter to go behind it, it’s getting natural backlinks. Long gone are the days of quantity over quality. We’re very much so in quality, a user’s not going to abandon your brand because you’re no longer publishing five posts a week.

Ashley Segura: Some content creators that put out the expectation, totally not food related, but maybe more in the self-help space or the educational space to where someone signed up for a subscription and is relying on that, that’s a different story. But for content as a whole, it’s so much more important to focus on quality at this point and focus on updating your older posts that are not quality and were more on that quantity aspect and creating quality in the future.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. When you’re dividing that up, I would imagine those kind of naturally fall into different sections. One of the things I see people occasionally do and we’ve experimented as well is it almost gets to the point where you can build in internal links and you can say… Jump to recipe card is technically in the internal link, but you could also have one that goes to the video, or you could have one that goes to the story behind the recipe, whatever it is. Is that something that you’ve seen done? Is there any strategy for that? Or it depends?

Ashley Segura: No, no, no. I’ve definitely seen it done. In fact, that’s what we do for our monthly SEO for bloggers webinar. I’m very pro of this method because I’ve seen it be so successful. We do these once a month webinars where we talk about SEO for bloggers and a week after, we publish a recap blog post. Originally, the recap blog post, we have the video, we have the transcript, we have the Q&A, we have about the panelists, there’s a lot of content on here.

Ashley Segura: Originally, we just had all the content pasted on. Then about three fourths the away into the first year of doing this, we added the buttons. Buttons right at the top above the fold where it would say watch the replay, read the transcript, go to the Q&A, learn more about the panelists. Just like we’re going to have on this podcast alone, for those who’d rather read the transcript, you click that transcript button, you’re going to scroll all past that other information. It’s a lot of information that you don’t want, you’re going to see the transcript, you’re going to be able to open the transcript, and digest that information.

Ashley Segura: From a content creator perspective, there’s all sorts of plugins that do this, the jump to buttons, having them at the top is so helpful. It’s not something that you should be afraid of. We have a lot of food bloggers in particular who will come to us and be like, “Well, they’re just going to jump to the recipe card and not read anything else.” Oftentimes, we find that not to be the case because they get into the recipe card, and because you did internal linking properly, and you have here’s what’s made with this dish, here’s what to make for dessert, or you like lemons?

Ashley Segura: Here’s 10 other lemon related recipes. People will start to dive into those other sections and they may not stay on that piece of content as long as you may want them, but they’ll go to other pieces of content on your website and start to engage with your brand as a whole. That’s where you’re satisfying everything from traffic, user experience, and brand exposure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We’ve talked about looking back at the content that you have, the jewelry store, so to speak, being strategic about content updates, potentially removing content, or not indexing it if it doesn’t fit. For the stuff that you do want to keep and revisit, making sure that you’re offering all the different elements for how people would want to consume that content, updating, refreshing that.

Bjork Ostrom: How about looking forward? Let’s say you start to realize the niche that you should be in, you’re kind of honing in on that. I think usually, creators have an endless amount of ideas, but the question is which one of those ideas is the most important idea to be working on? It’s kind of like topic ideation and also topic selection in regards to a piece of content. Are there any tools or recommendations that you’d have to help guide people in how to be strategic about what’s coming down the line for their content?

Ashley Segura: 100% and this is where you no longer have to guess. We are so lucky as content creators and marketers that we have data to support this and that we can confidently create a roadmap and a topic calendar and feel like, “Okay, if I’m going to put my resources and my time to creating this next quarter’s worth of content, I can feel very confident that people are actually searching for this, and it’s not too competitive so I actually have a fighting chance of ranking for it.” My favorite tool is Semrush’s topic research tool.

Ashley Segura: You go in and you put in a keyword. If the location makes a big difference to you, you can put in the United States or California, or you can put in the location to match the keyword. It’s going to populate a bunch of cards. Inside these cards or other related keywords that have medium to high search traffic volume. You can then click on the card and it’ll tell you the who, what, when, where, why, how questions that people are actually searching for that keyword.

Ashley Segura: It will also, on the other side of the card, show you the top 10 currently ranking articles for those keywords. You can literally see side by side here’s what’s really working well, because these are the top 10 that are… this is in front of the jewelry store, this is that window display item. Also find out before people come to the jewelry store, what do they want to see when they walk inside that by understanding what questions they’re asking. Those questions dictate the content that you should be creating.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like you’re stepping outside of the jewelry shore, what does somebody think before they step in? The example in the recipe world might be chocolate chip cookies, we use this a lot, but a question that people might ask would be how do you make soft chocolate chip cookies? That could be a prompt potentially that people are searching that you’d want to include in your recipe. Is that kind of what you’re getting at?

Ashley Segura: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: What are the pieces of content within your content that are most important to include?

Ashley Segura: Yes, definitely. There’s a few different things that you can get from just one card inside this tool. One of the things you’re going to be able to see is when you see the top 10 articles that are ranking, look for any patterns just in the title alone, because they link them. Before you even click on them and visually look at them, see if there’s any patterns. Going to the baked pork chop recipe, I’ve actually done this for baked pork chops. I discovered that three out of 10 of the top ranking articles about baked pork chops have the word juicy in the title as a keyword modifier.

Ashley Segura: That’s a clear indicator, okay, I need to make sure that my client includes the word juicy in their title when they’re going to use baked pork chop, because something about that is working and users and bots are liking that. Another thing is I’ll go into the questions and a lot of the initial questions are going to be great opportunities for headings, which will dictate, okay, what kind of pork should I get or what makes a good pork filet? Those kinds of questions you definitely want to make sure and make those H2’s make those headings inside your content and actually spend time addressing that.

Ashley Segura: But then you’re also going to find some questions that are slightly different that don’t go directly to just how to make a juicy baked pork chop. It could be is it okay to add lemon when you’re barbecuing a baked… or when you’re barbecuing a pork chop? Separate from the baked. Then that clicks, not only are people looking for baked pork chops, but they also want to know how to barbecue baked pork chops, and they want to do it with something citrusy.

Ashley Segura: Boom, that’s a new piece of content that I know is getting traffic, I can create a keyword around it, do the research, make sure that there’s traffic coming there, confidently knowing that there is, and then create headings. I would then take this barbecuing pork chops, run it through the tool again, see what’s ranking in the top 10, see how I can optimize my title, see what questions people are asking, make sure those are headings, and I’m addressing that information. Then this kind of just repeats. You can literally create so many, hundreds of new content ideas from just running this manual experiment.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s really cool. That’s within the Semrush?

Ashley Segura: Yes. Yeah. It’s their topic research tool. There’s lots of other tools out there that do similar processes, answer the public and whatnot. I just really love the way they organize everything into one card. You don’t have to then go inside answer the public and then use an SEO tool to double check the traffic and everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It seems like it’s a really good compliment to kind of the open creative thinking that you’re doing around I’d really like to do this recipe or this recipe or this piece of content. Then allowing some type of framework to help you guide decision making around which you actually pick and what you include within that content. Because sometimes that can be difficult. Sometimes it’s easier to make decisions with boundaries versus no boundaries and this feels like it gives you some boundaries.

Bjork Ostrom: Here’s some general guidance of things that you could include as an outline or H2. One specific question I had with that, kind of a follow up question as we round the corner here towards the end is there’s an FAQ box that you can include with Yost. Yost is the SEO plugin for those who aren’t familiar and it structures the content in a way where Google recognizes it as a question. Do you have thoughts around including questions within FAQ structured data versus as in H2 within the content?

Ashley Segura: Here’s a clear one where I will definitely say it depends.

Bjork Ostrom: It depends. Okay.

Ashley Segura: It definitely depends. You can certainly use the FAQ card. I mean, that’s definitely the cut and dry way to address the information and make sure it’s very obvious to both users and the search engines that, hey, this is my FAQ section. Where we’re looking at creating that great quality, that full structure content, you don’t need to do that because you so naturally do that within the content and you create a user journey. The questions actually make sense from one to the next.

Ashley Segura: You’re not addressing a question like what temperature do I need to bake the pork chops at before you address the marinade of the pork chops. As long as you can do it very naturally, I recommend doing it as headings instead of throwing it in the FAQs. But some content creators are very comfortable just throwing it all into the FAQ and it works really well for them. That’s where the it depends comes into play. But if you haven’t tried one or the other yet, and you want to get started with addressing more information with your content, I would recommend starting it into the headings first.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s where the art piece comes in. Where does it make the most sense? How long is it? I imagine an FAQ area almost as being a catchall that doesn’t require any flow to it. It could be any question in any order, whereas if there’s something that’s a little bit more important, you’d probably include it. If there’s a little bit more narrative around the why behind it, it might make sense to have that in the actual blog post content.

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Actually, there’s going to be a lot of people who have additional follow-up questions who are at the point where they’d be interested in potentially working together. You talked about some of the different services that you offer, but what’s the best way for people to connect with what you’re up to? I know that you also have lots of great free resources for people as well who are interested in continuing to learn, just a chance for you to shout out TopHatContent and all that you guys are doing in the different venues.

Ashley Segura: Definitely. Yeah. You guys can reach me over at ashley@tophatcontent.com for any content-related questions, happy to dive in and see how I can help. On Twitter, I’m @ashleymadhatter. But by all means, the content realm and the content world is always changing and figuring out how to optimize content is changing on a daily basis. There’s no question that it is too small or too large, because we’re all learning on a daily basis.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Ashley, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast. Episodes, ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes. All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show. So thanks in advance and that’s all we have for you today. So have a great week.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you a food blogger looking to boost your site’s visibility? With Yoast SEO Premium, you can optimize your blog for up to five keywords per page, ensuring higher rankings and more traffic. You can enjoy AI-generated SEO titles and meta descriptions and automatic redirects to avoid broken links. I love that feature. And real-time, internal linking suggestions. Plus, take advantage of Yoast AI Optimize, which is their latest AI-driven feature. A simple click provides you with actionable suggestions that help move your SEO score closer to that green traffic light, which we all love so much. It’ll streamline your process and reduce manual tweaks. Additionally, you can get social media previews and 24/7 premium support. Now, here’s the wonderful thing for Food Blogger Pro listeners. Yoast is offering an exclusive 10% discount. You can upgrade your blog’s SEO game today with Yoast SEO Premium. Use the code foodblogger10 at checkout. Again, that’s foodblogger10, the number ten one zero at checkout for that 10% discount home.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Food Blogger Pro podcast. My name is Ann, and in today’s episode, we’re sitting down with Stephan Spencer, who wrote The Art of SEO. Stephan kicks off the episode by going into why SEO is still as important as ever, even with the rise of AI. While AI may shift how we search, he assures listeners that SEO remains the backbone of the internet. So you should stay focused on your SEO goals, keep investing in strategies that work, and adapt to the evolving world of search. You’ll also hear him talk about the power of experimentation, why you shouldn’t be afraid to test out different tactics on your site, and how tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics can help you refine your strategy. Lastly, you’ll learn about the importance of creating content that resonates with your audience. Google rewards authentic, helpful content, so the more personal and valuable your content is, the better it’ll perform in search. Before we dive into this week’s episode, I wanted to take a moment to let you know that our Cyber Monday sale is currently live, and you can join Food Blogger Pro for a hundred dollars off of your annual plan. Plus, you’ll receive a copy of our brand new SEO workbook that we just cooked up for you. This offer is only available if you enroll before Wednesday, December 4th at 11:59 PM Eastern Time, 10:59 PM Central Time. So be sure to visit the link in our show notes or go to food blogger pro.com/cyber-monday–2024 to take advantage of our biggest sale of the year. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Stephan, welcome to the podcast.

Stephan Spencer: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: I was on the other side of the microphone not too long ago having a conversation for your Marketing Speak podcast, and one of the things we were talking about as we got into it was SEO. And I said this phrase that I say on this podcast occasionally, I said, it’s like an art and a science. And you’re like, oh, have you read my book by chance? It’s called The Art of SEO. And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so perfect. So you have been in the world of online business building, SEO specifically for a really long time. Talk to me about that title, The Art of SEO. Why did you come up with that and does that still feel true today?

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, well, I can’t take credit for the title that preceded me actually. There was a series from O’Reilly, the Art of Project Management and so forth. So the Art of Series was a top-selling series for O’Reilly.

Bjork Ostrom: O’Reilly being kind of these technical books that cover all sorts of different topics.

Stephan Spencer: Yes, I’ve been a fan of O’Reilly, the publisher and Tim O’Reilly the founder since the nineties. Since the early nineties. I actually learned Pearl how to program and build websites in 1994 and make them interactive using database calls and all that using Pearl from an O’Reilly book 1994. So I really loved and appreciated that publisher. I never would’ve dreamed that I would be an O’Reilly author, three time O’Reilly author back when I first picked one up and used it to learn how to build something. And so the Art of War is actually, I think, the original inspiration for O’Reilly’s Art of Series. But are you familiar with the Art of War by Sun Tzu?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, the Art of War. And then the other one that we actually talk about a lot is the War of Art. Do you know Steven Pressfield?

Stephan Spencer: I don’t know him, but I’ve heard wonderful things about his book. I know the book. Yeah. So The Art of War has this amazing quote that I love to share, and that is Tactics without Strategy is the noise before defeat. And I believe that applies to SEO, not just to warfare and all of marketing, really. So if you think about all the tactical stuff that people are so focused on with regards to SEO, what the latest Helpful Content Update musings are and the biggest winners and losers in the last core update and so forth, it’s so tactical that you get lost in the weeds, and that’s where you get slaughtered on the battlefield to mix metaphors. And I really want people to zoom out and think bigger picture because one SEO isn’t going away anytime soon because what’s one of the most popular websites on the planet? Google? And what’s the primary driver of Google traffic? Is it paid? Is it AI overviews or is it organic? It’s still organic and will be for quite some time. So these naysayers who say that SEO is dead and have said it over the years, and now the reason supposedly is AI, they’re off, they’re way off the mark. So keep investing in SEO, trust that everything is unfolding as it’s meant to, like divinely orchestrated, and just relax and make your site better for users. And for SEO, and I’ve seen a lot over these decades, I’ve been in the SEO game with I am building SEO into websites from the nineties. I actually started doing SEO before Google existed. And it’s some of the tried and true best practices foundational principles of creating a crawler-friendly website that functions and works and has all the proper redirects when needed and the robust text directives as needed and has quality content that’s not too small and not overly keyword dense just for SEO purposes and has relevant keywords in the title tags and all that sort of stuff is foundational and has been since the nineties. Why would we veer away from that? Because a lot of users are on ChatGPT now, they’re not getting the same level of quality of the response if they’re trying to do a search query, even with Search GPT, it doesn’t hold a candle to Google search. Now, there are some naysayers who hate on Google and its algorithm because it seems to have gotten less relevant as years have gone on. But the fact of the matter is it is most people’s go-to source when they’re searching for information on the internet. So I think we just all need to double down on doing stuff that is future proofing our website from an SEO perspective and trust that we’re not going to have the apple cart upset anytime soon.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So one of the things I love about that is I think sometimes for any creator they can get, let’s say, well early stages or people who have been doing it for a long time, you can get into it and you can start to get surrounded by like, Hey, what’s the best host? And that’s really good. You should be aware of that. It’s like, what’s the best way to structure a post? You should be thinking about that or what’s, how can I be using Google Search Console? Those are all really great, but to your point, and maybe the analogy could be when you talk about the art of something, we often talk about the world of music, and you could have the most expensive guitar with the best strings, with the best amplifier, and you could be on the world’s most beautiful stage. But if you’re not like a musician who’s trained for 10 years in playing guitar, it’s probably not going to sound good. And I feel like because we are in a world that’s technical, it can sometimes feel like, Hey, if we get all of these tactics right, then we’re going to be successful with our craft. And I think both need to exist. But the thing that is most important more than tactics is the art of it. Are you crafting a thing that people respond to, and then after you’ve played guitar for a decade and you get really good, you can think about the best strings, you can think about the most expensive guitar, you can think about the best amplifier. Those things are still very much so important, the tactics. But what really matters is the craft. But I think what’s hard is the craft is ambiguous. And so for people who want to get better at the art side of SEO, what does that look like? How do you get good at the craft of content that Google wants to rank? Not because the tactics are right, but because the content is so good that they want to prioritize that in a search result.

Stephan Spencer: Now, this dovetails very nicely with what we were talking about, tactics versus strategy, and that quote from the Art of War. I have one more quote I want to share with you that I think also frames this quite well. I learned this or heard this from Tony Robbins, and that is to be outcome-focused, not activity-focused.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah. So if you’re outcome-focused, you have the big picture in mind where you’re heading and whether these things will actually move the needle or not, you can tick the box off a whole bunch of best practice checklists for SEO and end up wasting a ton of time and not moving the needle hardly at all. So just really an important way to frame this whole conversation. So you’re talking about this ambiguous craft of SEO or what some people would actually call a black art. You’re just trying to reverse engineer this black box called the Google algorithm, and that even Google engineers don’t understand anymore because they’ve let AI take over and use machine learning to come up with its own criteria what Google engineers refer to as signals, right? These are ranking factors, and even Google engineers don’t know what those ranking factors are. So the SEO community has a better handle on it than Google engineers because we like to try and reverse engineer poke and prod at that black box called Google and see what works and what doesn’t work, and try and discern correlation and causation from each other. And so if you really want to focus on the biggest needle movers, the ones that are going to get you the outcome, you need to be willing to experiment and not just read what on the SEO blogs and even in the legit highly rated books such as mine, the Art of SEO, you cannot just take that at face value and assume it’s all exactly true. You have to test this stuff for yourself. Your mileage may vary as they say, right? So if you look at this kind of like an experiment or a set of experiments, then you can try something and see if it works and then revert back if you need to or try another experiment. Let’s just take something so basic as title tags. This is a really important element, has been since the beginning. Probably the most important element from an on-page factor standpoint, stuff on the page, you change the title tag and you’ll change your rankings almost certainly. So it could go the wrong direction or it could go the way that you want it, and if it goes the wrong direction, it’s not the end of the world. You just course correct. You treat this as iterative experiments to see what works and what doesn’t work. If you’re afraid to change your site because you have that coveted ranking for whatever coveted keyword, now you’ve backed yourself into a corner and you can’t make changes because you’re afraid you’re going to lose your rankings, and operating out of fear is never a good thing. So just be willing to be experimental with this. Try things that are going to be really easy to back out of and that don’t require a lot of technical acumen, like optimizing your title tags. And that’s something that you can use like a WordPress plugin that allows you to mass edit these and not just do them one at a time inside of the WordPress page and post editor. That’s not the smart way to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: If you have hundreds or thousands of pages, that would take you a very long time. So one of the things I imagine in that scenario is you do have a post that’s ranking well, and usually for us, we would say, Hey, if we’re going to experiment with something, we’re going to take a piece of content that we have that’s kind of doing well. It’s like it’s getting a decent amount of traffic enough where we can experiment and track it, but it’s maybe not position one for the most high traffic keyword that we have. We’re not going to go to that post. We’re going to go to one that’s maybe like, Hey, it’s position four or five and we’re going to tweak a few things and we’re going to see or tweak one thing. Usually it’s a better way to test and see what happens with that. An example, in our case, really easy example is like, Hey, we’re taking videos that are lower down on the page. We’re moving those up so people see those right away, and we’re just thinking that we want to do that across the board because we’re going to earn more from it if a video player is up and it starts sooner, but we want to see what impact does it have. So we do batch of five, batch of 10, kind of these mid-tier posts, then eventually scale up to the other ones once we feel comfortable with it. Do you have something that you’re using to track that with? Are you using Google Search Console? How do you know if it changes or you’re just looking in a search result? What’s the best way to know when you are experimenting to see the results of that?

Stephan Spencer: Well, you can use expensive tools to do SEO tests and probably our listener viewers not I’m spending that kind of money. Sure. So yeah, I would just recommend using tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and if you have at least one third-party tool for SEO, perhaps it’s A H Refs or Ahrefs as they call it, or SEMrush or Moz, probably the industry is more focused on refs as the top one, but regardless of, those are all really robust tool sets and they allow you to do keyword research and link research and competitive intelligence, all sorts of great stuff. So you can track rankings and improvements or decreases in link authority, and Ahrefs is referred to as DR domain rating and yeah, just URL rating, that’s on a page level basis. And then DR is domain-wide, and you track those metrics, you track the rankings and overall for the whole site, these are some metrics that I think are useful not just for your own site, but for any site that you’re trying to do a partnership with or even get a link from. You want to look at their organic traffic numbers and, of course, their DR score, the domain rating, and the number of keywords that they’re ranking for. So if a high DR site is willing to do a deal with you and do some co-marketing link build with you or send you some link equity, And they have great dr, but they have very little organic traffic according to Ahrefs and very few keywords that they’re actually ranking for in the top 10, that’d be a big red flag to avoid that partnership. That site probably is artificially propped up with a DR score in order to sell links.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a world that we’ve never gotten into, but I know some people are really strategic about how do we partner with a brand, maybe you do a joint venture. I think about it even in the world of podcasts, like you’re on a podcast and somebody will link back all of that collectively is really so important. One other tool that I want to mention before we get too far away from it, we’ve used a tool called SEO testing, which actually just brings in Google Search Console data. And then what it does is you’re able to say like, Hey, at this point we made this change and it kind of does the calculations for you. So it’s still the same data, it’s not new data, but it just is helping you understand any changes that potentially happened because of the update that you made. It’s hard to know for sure, but one more thing I want to go back to that I think is worth pointing out. Number one, Tony Robbins, you had mentioned Tony, he has this great quote on your site. He says, I know Stephan, this man is a genius, the top guy in the SEO business, which is such a great quote to have from such an iconic guy. I even have the audio entrepreneur to verify,

Stephan Spencer: Hit the play button, and then

Bjork Ostrom: Hear his raspy voice. That’s so great. So you had talked about this idea of outcome over, what was the other word? Outcome over

Stephan Spencer: Outcome-focused instead of activity focused. Activity focused. And was, by the way, just to call back on something that you had mentioned really briefly there, you said SEO testing.com. There’s another platform that you should know about if you do have the budget to do legit SEO testing, searchpilot, searchpilot.com. And the founder or co-founder of that is Will Critchlow, who you may have heard his name before in the SEO community. He’s the former CEO of Distilled, or maybe he’s still the CEO there as well. It’s a big agency and he hosts the Search Love Conference for many years. So he is a fixture in the SEO community and he’s heading up this testing platform, which at one point was called Distilled ODN. So definitely worth checking out. It’s not inexpensive though. So if you don’t have budget for Ahrefs or SEM Rush, you almost certainly don’t have it for this testing platform.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. Even when I look at the pricing, it’s all custom quote, so you need to reach out in order to get numbers from them. So this American Express Black card to apply. Yeah, exactly. Totally. So this idea of outcome, I was thinking about it as it relates to the work that Lindsay and I do. So context for us, Lindsay and I started Pinch of Yum 14 years ago, primarily 99.9% of the content on Pinch of Yum is created by Lindsay. She’s the creator, she’s the recipe developer, she published his content to it. And one of the interesting things I’ve been reflecting on even in this conversation is one of the ways that we work together is Lindsay is very much so what I would consider to be outcome focused. And you can let me know if this kind of taps into what you’re talking about, where she’s thinking about how do people come to this piece of content? Are they going to make this content? Is the recipe going to be successful? Is it clear? Is it easy to understand? Does it flow well? And she’s thinking about how do we change and adjust and improve things to get a better outcome from the content? I’m spending 0.5% of my time thinking about that. I’m thinking about, Hey, how do we make the site a little bit faster? How do we work with our team to improve Core Web Vitals? How do we make sure that we have those foundational structured data elements included? And my belief is that’s kind of the easy part because there’s generally a playbook. You can follow that playbook around best practices. It’s technical, it’s kind of like there’s a right and wrong answer with the tactics, but the outcome is more of where the art comes from. It’s like how do you create a piece of content that people are successful with and get people to that content via social media or email or whatever it might be. Is that a little bit of what you’re getting at?

Stephan Spencer: Boy, there’s a lot to unpack here. So let’s say for example, that you’re trying to get in people’s heads to understand what they’re motivated by and what problem they’re trying to solve. I learned this acronym. The acronym is upside, but U-P-S-Y-D, Unaware, problem aware, solution Aware, your Solution aware, and then decision. So you think of people who are at various stages of the buyer journey, they will have a certain level of sophistication and knowledge about the solution and how to go about implementing it. So let’s say that somebody is on a recipe and they want to, I don’t know, improve on it and maybe utilize it in a restaurant. I’m just being hypothetical here, that’s a very different outcome than somebody who is a busy mom that only has time for maybe 15 minutes in the kitchen because she’s got a lot of demands on her time with her kids. So if somebody has a set of constraints and you have addressed those constraints in a meaningful way, then that’s going to provide the user with a lot of value that’ll make it more link-worthy, and thus she’ll get more links to that content. Appreciate that. Even if you’re not asking for links, they’ll just spontaneously link to it And it will almost certainly be picked up as kind of next level content by the latest AI algorithms inside of Google. And so you’ll be rewarded in multiple ways. Now, lemme give you kind of a similar sort of scenario, but one that I’m actually in the process of implementing with perhaps no direct SEO benefit, but I don’t care. I’m willing to almost bet the farm on this. And that is to take my personal development podcast. So you have marketing speak, my marketing show, which you are on. And then my Real Passion is actually a personal development podcast all about spirituality and mindset and biohacking and wellness and all that. So that’s called Get Yourself Optimized. And we just recently relaunched that site as of a week ago, beautiful new design designed by Studio One Design. I love those guys out of Australia. And so this new site going to have, our vision is for it to have every single episode have an online course based on the podcast. So based on that particular episode, we will use Claude Chat, PT 11 Labs, Nvidia io, all in combination to create a three module video-based online course that will have things like reflection questions and multiple choice quizzes and worksheets and checklists even perhaps. And all of that is done through AI with some just QA before and a lot of disclaimers because AI has hallucinations still. Anyway, so that’s the vision is for every single episode. So we’re in the process of ironing out all the kinks, and we have some of our early adopter guests saying, yes, I want to be part of this pilot. And they’re actually letting us use their voice and AI-generated version of the voice using 11 labs that you cannot tell is not them. It’s so cool. We’ve narrating their own course for few things.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s that? We’ve experimented with 11 labs just myself out of curiosity, and it’s like, oh, wow, this is amazing.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, it is. It is. So imagine a faceless video. So it doesn’t have the face of, I don’t like using an AI avatar of somebody I know, HeyGen, is spookily good at this? HeyGen.com. But that feels too, I don’t know, uncanny valley to me and out of integrity or just kind of icky. So I’m not going there, but having the AI narration be the guest’s voice, I feel that that’s with their permission going to be something that’s cool and allowed. It’s not going to be weird. So imagine you as a guest, actually, you were on the other show, but imagine being a guest on this show and you get an email out of the blue saying, Hey, we created an online course. Here’s the video scripts, here’s the outline of the course. Here are the quiz questions and everything. Can you perhaps have a quick look at it and tell us if you like it and give us your blessing to move forward with implementing this? No charge to you. We just want to make our podcast website more of a learning destination and more active learning than just passive listening. And I guarantee you some folks are going to say, that is amazing. I want to work with you. Can I hire your agency? And maybe some will say, no, that feels too, I don’t know, weird or whatever for me. But then there’ll be others who are just kind of in the middle of the road. But the idea of this isn’t an SEO play because we’re not actually going to put the transcripts of those video scripts onto the website onto onto the page. What we’re doing is we’re adding to the show notes page that has the transcript for the episode, and then there’ll be a player with a picker for each module and access the quizzes and that. And that’s going to be a huge value add so that somebody, back to your point about going after the outcome that Wayne Gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going to be. So we’re skating to where the puck is going to be. I don’t think anybody at this point, any podcaster has done this on mass. I don’t think this exists yet. We’ll be the pioneer in this area of taking a podcast episode and turning it into an online course like a full blown, multi-hour online course based on the podcast episode and doing it across a whole swath of these episodes. I have 470 some episodes already. So that’s a way to create something that’s really remarkable. And I’m using that term very deliberately because I love Seth Godin’s definition of remarkable. And that’s simply this worthy of remark. If you create something that is worthy of remark, you are really going to stand out. You’re going to be that purple cow that he talks about in his book, and that makes you link worthy, that makes you buzzworthy, that makes it something that would interest an AI algorithm that’s trying to discern who are the top movers and shakers in a particular space. So on the other end of the spectrum, you have folks who are just trying to stay up with the kind of old school SEO tactics, tactics. And that’s not going to really futureproof your business because you’ve got folks like me that are in your space that are thinking completely outside of the box, and they’re going to leap multiple levels above you in this video game.

Bjork Ostrom: So I love that idea. And the reason is because so much of what search is, you have these platforms, we’ll talk about Google and it’s a platform trying to figure out how do you get the thing to people that is most helpful. And there’s all of these different ways that they’re doing that links being an indicator that we often talk about. But links are really just a reflection of something that happens in normal life, which is people remarking on a thing. It’s remarkable. And to go back to the music example, 50 years ago you would have a musician who was remarkable. And so you have Jimi Hendrix. It’s like he is remarkable. And people talk about it, they share about it like links, but it’s like a analog version of that. And so when the web comes around, how do you know what is worth showing to people? Well, you look at what people are remarking on, what people are commenting on. Now, obviously there’s hundreds of other variables, thousands of other variables that go into it. But what it’s getting at is the core of what we are trying to do in the world of content, whether it be with SEO or Instagram or Pinterest, you are trying to create something that is remarkable worthy of remark, and you are doing it in a digital space. And then the question is from there, how are you going to choose to create a business out of it if that is your goal? If your goal is to produce revenue, you create remarkable content. And then you say, do we want to do affiliate? Do we want to do ads? Do we want to work with brands? Do we want to sell our own product? But it all starts with having something that is remarkable and things are remarkable for different ways, for different reasons. It could be because it’s super helpful, it could be because it’s super funny. It could be because it’s super inspiring. These are all of the different reasons why something might become remarkable. And so for people in the recipe world, one of the things that I think people get into it and feel add tension with is like, Hey, I created a recipe. I covered all of the things that I should from a tactic standpoint, and it’s still not working. Why is that? Well, is it remarkable? And that’s the question that you have to sit with. So I love that as an outcome of this discussion is just really a reflection around how can you create content that’s worthy of remark? What a great takeaway. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens. Imagine your kitchen. It’s more than just a place to cook. It’s where your creativity comes to life, to where you nourish your family, your friends and yourself with food and conversation. Now, imagine sharing that kitchen with the world. Imagine inviting people in to experience your unique flavors, your personal touch, your passion for food. At Member Kitchens, they believe that every food creator has a special kitchen to share, and their job is to help you swing the doors wide open. Their white-label meal planning platform is your virtual kitchen. It’s fully equipped with everything you need to showcase your recipes and brand, build a loyal community, and earn a sustainable income. As one customer said, recurring revenue is life-changing. Your kitchen will integrate with tools you already use like Zapier and WordPress, and it’s fully configurable putting you in complete control of your brand and your business, all in an easy to use interface, backed up with stellar one-on-one support. So if you’re ready to share your kitchen with the world, set up your own member kitchen, visit member kitchens.com today to learn more and start your free trial and use the code foodbloggerpro for 50% off your first two months of any plan.

Stephan Spencer: And speaking of remarking, people, remarking about your content, in SEO parlance, there’s the term unlinked mention. So if somebody’s talking about your brand like Pinch of Yum, and they’re not linking to you, which happens a lot, And I know it ticks people off, if they pay for a PR firm and they get all this press and very little of it actually links to your website, that’s very frustrating. But it’s still going to count. Maybe not as much, certainly not as much, but it’ll still count because these sophisticated AI algorithms are picking up those unlinked mentions and have been probably for years. So it’s not all is lost. But yeah, you got to put the user first and the outcome first, and then all the tactical stuff comes as maybe an afterthought or comes along for the ride. And I just want to give a case example. I don’t have a food blog myself, but I’m going to use somebody’s blog that I’ve mentioned to you before about her site. She’s just blown up. She used to work for me, she was my va, my virtual assistant over a decade ago, and her name is Carolyn Ketchum. She has been blogging about keto and providing free recipes, and now recipe books, multiple, multiple bestselling, I think six of ’em, keto baking books that have been really going gangbusters. But she gets over 2 million page views a month, two to 3 million page views a month, and she’s been at this for 12 years. I have a great case study episode about this on my Marketing Speak podcast. Yeah, so she was not an expert on SEO, even though she worked for me. She did not learn all the SEO ins and outs. This was not a tactical play about applying all the Google cheat sheet stuff. It was really about being of value and trusting that this is going to lead somewhere. And she makes so much money super successful at those things.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s amazing when you find something that you are passionate about, that you are good at, and that there’s a need in the marketplace for it. And I think of that in the world of keto. My guess is she understands it really well. She’s lived that story. She can help people who are going through it. It’s probably noteworthy because of those things, or remarkable you could say. And it’s in a world where there’s a lot of people who are interested in eating in that way. And so all of those things together can kind of create this collective wave. Plus, I’m sure she’s smart about tactics, layering on top of it to make sure she’s or is partnering with somebody who does implementing those best case scenarios. So it’s really cool to hear. We’ll link to her as well.

Stephan Spencer: Her site is all day I dream about Food, which is a brilliant name based on the Adidas brand. All I dream about sports.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Stephan Spencer: Now, I don’t want to poo-poo tactical stuff. Let me give you an example specific to you actually to Pinch of Yum. It’s really basic simple thing that you could implement. So you have under your recipe categories, vegan, okay? Now you don’t rank for vegan recipes. That page is highly optimized, it looks like for vegan recipes. It’s the beginning of the title tag. It’s in the H one headline, and there’s top-rated vegan recipes as a sub headline, vegan dinner recipes, vegan, Instant Pot recipes, easy vegan recipes, et cetera. Here’s where the tactics come in that really will get this page and the pages that you’re going to create from this discussion if you so choose.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, great

Stephan Spencer: It will really sing to the search engines for the keywords that you’re trying to target. So what I think a missed opportunity for you is those categories of subcategories of vegan recipes such as top rated and vegan dinner recipes and vegan instant pot recipes, easy vegan recipes. You’re not ranking for those. So you’re not only not on page one for vegan dinner recipes, not just vegan recipes, but vegan dinner recipes. You’re not on the first 100 results. You’re not on the first 10 pages for vegan dinner recipes. How do you do that? You create a page all about vegan dinner recipes. All you have right now is a section on your main category page of vegan. That’s like vegan dinner recipes and then a sentence. And then you have some featured vegan recipes that are dinner recipes in a carousel that it’s not a rotating carousel. I hate it when those auto-rotate, but it’s a carousel. So all the stuff that’s hidden by that carousel, anything that’s hidden, is going to get discounted by Google if it’s hidden in a tab or within a hamburger menu, or you have to hit the plus sign or whatever it is, down arrow to display the thing. Know that Google is not going to give it full credit because it’s not visible by default to the user. You only have what, four or five-ish recipes featured fully visible, and the rest are, you have to use the slider carousel thing to see those next ones. And what, there may be 20, 30, I don’t know. I didn’t keep going, but there’s a bunch. What if you made a separate page just for vegan dinner recipes That would sing to the search engines for the phrase vegan dinner recipes instead of just being almost like an afterthought as a little section on your main vegan category page. Same thing with easy vegan recipes and so forth. And then it gives you also the opportunity to blow out the page because you’re not just going to have this little stub of that carousel and a part of a page. You want to fill that up with lots of valuable stuff relating to that topic, whether it’s easy vegan recipes or vegan dinner recipes. And you’re going to maybe provide some context around why dinner is the most important meal of the day for vegans or whatever. So it’s kind of like we had Bed Bath and Beyond as a client for a while, and they had, one thing they did right on their site is they had these tips and little factoids and things. So you’d go into a section such as bedding, and then you’d go from bedding into a subcategory like sheets, and then there’s Egyptian cotton sheets and all this. And you look at Egyptian cotton sheets, now you’re in a sub subcategory. And it gives you all this detail about why Egyptian cotton, what’s the big deal about Egyptian cotton and explanations about things like thread count and why that matters and what are good thread counts? How do I be a savvy shopper for sheets and not just get just bottom of the line stuff? So you could do the same thing with Pinch of Yum. And vegans are passionate. The running joke about how do you tell if the person is a vegan?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, you don’t have to. They’ll tell you. They’ll just tell you. Same with CrossFit. How do you know if somebody does CrossFit? You don’t have to know. They’ll tell you. Yeah, exactly.

Stephan Spencer: That’s awesome. I’m vegetarian, by the way, but

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so you can make that joke.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah, totally. You see how simple tactical stuff can help you to show up for keywords that you may have thought you just gave up on years ago, But you didn’t have separate pages dedicated to those topics. And also when you have these topics and you only talk about that particular phrase that looks very surface level, it looks thin content. That’s the term that Google has come up with. Thin content doesn’t just mean it’s a small word. A 300 word article is obviously thin content word article that just keeps talking about the same thing over and over again related to the main keyword. So this is an example I give fairly often, so I’ll give it here. And that has nothing to do with food. And that is if you were talking about lawnmowers, and this whole page is about lawnmowers and it’s thousands of words, but you don’t talk about lawn care or yards or grass or clippings or horsepower or weed whacker or gardening or any of that, that looks pretty weird. It looks shallow, and that’s thin content of a different sort. So you want to create something that’s really high value and has what some SEOs refer to as LSI keywords, latent semantic index, and you don’t need to know what that is. It’s probably not even used anymore if it ever was by Google. But the concept is important. You don’t use those related keywords like grass and yards and lawn care and all that on a page all about lawnmowers. You missed the mark and you probably hit the potential spam button inside of Google. So try

Bjork Ostrom: To create that. It’s important to have a fully comprehensive piece of content that covers all of those different elements, which makes sense.

Stephan Spencer: Well, I’d say if you go to sit in that other chair, imagine yourself as the visitor And they have expectations that you’re going to cover that stuff, then it would be a miss. It would absolutely be a miss. So one example I like to share is coffeechronicler.com has this ultimate guide to the AeroPress. I don’t drink coffee. I could care less about it, but they go to such extreme depth on that, how to piece about everything, about cleaning it and slurry and all that to recipes to infographics, just so, so much dilution, et cetera. It’s all there in one place. Now, if it was called the Ultimate Guide to the AeroPress and it only provided recipes for the AeroPress, I’d be like, yeah, that’s a disappointment. So you have to get inside the visitor’s head and see what their expectations are based on why they’re coming to your page. And if you hit that mark, then you’re probably well on track.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. One quick question, just out of curiosity. We talk about those category pages, what you’re saying makes sense. If you go to Pinch of Yum and you look at vegan, it’s like it’s a kind of roll-up of all the different vegan recipes on Pinch of Yum. But to your point, we could have a subcategory under vegan that would be dinner recipes. Would you imagine that the hierarchy of that being pinchofyum.com/recipe/vegan/dinner, that’s how

Stephan Spencer: You could do it that way, but I wouldn’t be worried about getting the URL structure exactly right to the page.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

Stephan Spencer: It doesn’t really matter. It’s not a major signal. So we don’t want to get lost in the weeds of supposed best practices that don’t move the needle. That’s that activity focus. Again, instead of being outcome focused, that’s not a needle mover. So if you had vegan dinner recipes with dashes between each word, HTML or PHP or something, or slash sure that that’s search engine optimal, but if it’s a big project for you to do it that way and you prefer to have it as slash category slash slash recipe slash vegan slash dinner, great, That’s fine too. That’s not going to be a big difference maker if you have one versus the other, or even if it had a number for your category ID or something instead. Yeah, keywords in the URL are nice to have, but it’s not major. And so if you think about how can I best use, utilize my time here, the very best use of your time is to create something really remarkable. So if no one else is, I don’t know, making an interactive dinner picker game or something, and you that could be worthy of remark, that could maybe get you on, I dunno, podcasts or maybe even on TV appearances if it’s particularly remarkable, and especially if you time it so that it’s timely for those appearances. So if you’re, I have done some TV segments about being a foster kid, for example, and I timed it so that I did those TV appearances during National Foster Care month, the month of May. So it’s like, Hey, it’s National Foster Care month. And we have next up Stephan Spencer, who is a successful entrepreneur and author and a former foster kid talking about the three big lies that people believe about foster care and foster kids coming up next. So that is timely and relevant. And so if you have a timely hook, you have an emotional hook like, Hey, people care about foster kids and the foster care system, they want to hear about it. If you have that equivalent with what you’re creating, that’s amazing. If you hit all the technical, tactical stuff, but you missed the emotional hook or the timeliness of it, then you’re probably not going to get the results you’re after.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I love that. One last thing that I’m curious to hear your reflections on, because I think a lot of people are in this head space right now. It sounds like you’re not super concerned about AI in the role of search optimization traffic going away. I think a lot people listening to the podcasts are nervous about that and nervous about, Hey, what happens if everybody uses chat gt? Which obviously that would be a huge shift there, but even as AI overviews rolls out, what if that becomes 50% of search results have AI overview? I know it’s something we think about that we’re concerned about, but it sounds like there’s not a huge level of concern for you from a search perspective. Is that true?

Stephan Spencer: It is not a concern for me. So maybe in the future we will have this dystopic world, but I believe in creating my own reality or co-creating it with God and believing in the most benevolent outcome coming to pass. So I don’t think we’re going to be slaves to our AI overlords. And somewhere in the middle there is AI usurping every opportunity for us to get free organic traffic. And I don’t think that’s common either.

Bjork Ostrom: And if it does, then people are going to stop letting these models train on their data, and then the outcome becomes worse. And so there is that. Yeah,

Stephan Spencer: So if you think about how would I best utilize ChatGPT or Claude or Llama or whatever, I’m going to ask a question and what then? That’s, that’s it. I’m done. No, I’m going to have a conversation. That’s why it’s called Chat. So if I’m chatting with, if I’m conversing with an AI, ultimately it’s going to get to the point where I don’t want to have that chat myself. I want my personal agent to be my representative and have that chat with whatever the large language model is so that personal agent I can entrust with things like my personal private health data and medical records, tax returns, financial records, all that sort of stuff, and say, Hey, keep this stuff locked up tight, but more about me than even my spouse does. Go and ask questions about this, that and the other thing of these LLMs and collect, collate and aggregate and curate and all those things, and come back to me with a final answer that’s coming. Certainly that’s coming, but there’s still going to be opportunities and needs for us to kind of get into the weeds. We’re not going to just make the biggest purchase decision of our life without doing our own due diligence. We’re just going to trust the personal agent who had a conversation with ChatGPT, and now we’re going to bet everything on red. No, we’re going to get involved if it’s an important, and so if you think about what’s likely to come to pass in the near term, it’s going to be more use of LLMs large language models for discovery and research and competitive intelligence and brainstorming and strategizing and things like that. It’s a great conversation starter, great conversation partner. But it’s not the same thing as, let’s say I’m searching for new, a new webcam, and I want the best webcam because I shoot a lot of video. It’s probably a CNET or one of these other sites that’s done a lot of testing. This algorithm, or let’s just call it a metric for now, that’s an acronym from Google. It’s called EEAT. Now, almost certainly Google has very effectively trained its machine learning algorithms on E-E-A-T. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authorit and trustworthiness. Now, show me an AI that has ever had experience with cooking a vegan dinner or basket weaving or scuba diving or representing itself in court, never any of those. So it won’t ever have that experience until it’s fully autonomous and dystopian future, hopefully a few years down the line. But in the near term, it’s not going to have the experience. And why was added to the EEAT because it started as expertise, authoritative and trustworthiness, EAT. And then Google years later said, Hey, you know what? There’s an actual another E that we need to add to this experience. Why? Because of AI. So if you’re mass generating a bunch of content that it can’t possibly have that experience of these topics, and yet you’re generating the content as if it does, you will be outed. The algorithm at Google will be very sophisticated at catching this sort of stuff. So much better than using an AI detector such as GPT Zero or something. It’s like, these are good, but they’re not great. Certainly, Google is great at it. They’re just not letting on that. They’re great at detecting this stuff. So you want to, again, just relax and take a breath and know that what you’re doing when you’re creating great content that’s remarkable and that it’s really helpful and that you really understand the motivations and the situation, the problems that your visitor is facing, then you’re dialed in to really set yourself up for success. Even if things change with algorithms and maybe even a new search engine out-competes Google at some point. I don’t see that coming anytime soon. I’m not concerned that Search GPT is going to take out Google. I don’t see it. I just don’t. Now, where LLM does come in handy is empowering you to do better SEO and more SEO if you didn’t have the time, the budget, and now you can use ChatGPT, you can use Claude, et cetera to create things like, I dunno, improve your XML site maps and write a first draft copy of some intro copy for each of your subcategory pages because you never did that before. That’s low-hanging fruit. You can definitely utilize chat. GPT and Claude are my favorites for helping you with some AI-assisted SEO tasks. Now, you can’t just trust that it’s all correct because it may hallucinate on you, and those are just boldfaced lies, essentially hallucinations. But you do the QA and the fact-checking and all that. Make sure that everything is copacetic before you launch it, but you can really multiply your potential impact by using ai. I love as a kind of

Bjork Ostrom: Assistant or companion to what you’re doing, not as the

Stephan Spencer: Replacement, right? As a facilitator, I love this quote. I think it’s from Mike Cannings, or maybe he got it from somewhere else. You won’t be replaced by an AI. You’ll be replaced by somebody who’s using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. That’s so great.

Stephan Spencer: Yeah. And another related quote, this one’s from Peter Diamandis. There’re going to be two kinds of businesses at the end of this decade businesses. One is businesses that are using AI at their core, and that includes even the local plumber and everything, and two businesses that are out of business

Bjork Ostrom: Because of the businesses that use AI. So it’s this reminder to us that as creators, as business owners, figure out how to use it because you need to be competitive. You need to be smart, you need to be efficient, but also to preserve that humanity in what you’re doing. And that being such a great balance, and I know you have this interesting balance that you strike with your, so as we close out, my guess is people would be interested in following along with what you’re doing, and you have both the get yourself optimized as well as Marketing Speak podcast. So talk a little bit about those and then shout out for where people can find you and we’ll wrap up. Yeah.

Stephan Spencer: Okay, awesome. So Get Yourself Optimized. It sounds like an SEO podcast, but that’s personal development, spirituality, biohacking and all that. So you can go to getyourselfoptimized.com for that one. And Marketing Speak is all things marketing, not just SEO. So things related to paid search and paid social and analytics and e-commerce, conversion optimization, all that. So that’s marketingspeak.com and all the transcripts. There’s checklists of takeaways, actionable takeaways. There’s a lot of great material there on those two sites. And then stephanspencer.com is my personal site that has a ton of SEO tips and best practices and training videos, all sorts of great research material. And of course, the book, the Art of SEO that I co-authored, published by O’Reilly, fourth edition. Don’t get the third edition. That’s like eight years old and a thousand pages instead of 770 pages.

Bjork Ostrom: Nice. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Stephan, thanks so much for coming on. Really fun to talk to you.

Stephan Spencer: Yep, likewise. Thank you.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here. We hope you enjoy this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Since we’re kicking off a new month, we wanted to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this December. Later this week, we’ll be publishing a Coaching Call with Erica from the Food Blog. It’s a Flavorful Life. In this Coaching Call, Bjork and Erica discuss how to hire help and outsource work, how to get started on Google Search Console, strategies for dividing your time, the best conferences for food creators, and how to build a community of fellow food bloggers. Next up is our Live Q&A with the one and only Bjork Ostrom. For our last Live Q&A of the year, we thought it would be fun to host an AMA or an Ask Bjork anything. We’re excited to answer all of your blogging and business-related questions, from how to get started to monetization to all things strategy. We’re rounding out the month with a brand new course all about the Feast theme and plugin. Whether you’re looking to make the switch over to Feast or you’re looking for a refresher, we’ve got you covered in this upcoming course. It’s going to be a great month, and we really hope you can join us for some of these new pieces of content. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member and would like to join us, just head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about our membership and how you can join us on Food Blogger Pro. We’d love to have you, and we’ll see you back here next week for another podcast episode. Make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering options, you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links, and other insights, so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better.

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’re making your good content even better. And that’s why we created Clariti. It’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. 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 Clariti C-L-A-R-I-T-I dot com slash 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 week on the podcast is our last episode in our Summer Membership Spotlight in which we’ve been sharing pieces of content that are normally exclusive to Food Blogger Pro members here on the podcast. This week on the podcast, we are wrapping up our miniseries with a replay of our Advanced SEO Live Q&A with Casey Markee. We host live Q&As on our membership every month with topics ranging from SEO and keyword research to photography, updating and republishing content, AI and plugins. Really just everything you might want or need to know as a food creator. For this Q&A, Food Blogger Pro members submitted many questions all about SEO, helpful content updates, best practices, topic clusters, category pages, AI, and so much more. While this Q&A is slightly edited, it should give you a feel for what the Q&As in the membership are like, and if you like what you hear, we would love for you to join us. You can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about what we offer, but without further ado, I’m just going to let Bjork and Casey take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Excited to have Casey Markee in from Media Wyse. My guess is a lot of people, everybody probably attending this, most people listening will be familiar with Casey, all that he does in the world of search because you’ve been doing this for a really long time, Casey, you’ve been at it longer than most people have in the world of not only online business and online marketing, but especially in the world of search. You’ve been in the world of search a really long time as well. Is it two decades now? How long has it been since you’ve been in the world of search?

Casey Markee: Let’s see, 2024, so this would’ve been starting my 25th year in search, 25 years, crazy timed.

Bjork Ostrom: 1999.

Casey Markee: Yeah, 1999, 1998, saw the good old days when we had Dogpile, Lycos-

Bjork Ostrom: Y2K. You could rank for the search term Y2K and you would’ve been a millionaire.

Casey Markee: Yeah, at that time it was pills. Big thing was pills, and that was good times. Pills and link schemes worked. All I had to do was throw a bunch of links at something and voila, I was the number one overnight until someone outlinked me. Then I had to go, then I had to outlink them, outlink the linker. It was good times.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s all of these little things that … part of it is your job is now, especially in the Covid world, is making sure that people understand what is best practice, what is a tactic that is actually working, and also understanding what is something that is maybe happening that you shouldn’t be doing, even if it’s working. And we’re going to be talking about a lot of those different things here today. We’ve got a lot of great questions coming in.

So as a reminder, if you have questions, submit those in the questions area. We will go ahead and try and hit as many as we can, and if you have any that you’re especially interested in hearing Casey answer, go ahead and vote for those, and those will help us know what people are interested in. We’re going to start with this one because a lot of people have been talking about AI, ChatGPT. I’ve been using ChatGPT to create coloring pages for my daughter. It’s awesome. Other people have been using ChatGPT for lots of other things, like advising SEO. So Kharitas, I think I’m saying that right, is saying, “How good is ChatGPT in advising on SEO? If it’s good, what prompts give the best advice?”

Casey Markee: Right, that’s a very good question. So the thing to understand about ChatGPT and LLMs or other large language models is they’re only as good as the inputs it receives. So the thing to understand about ChatGPT is it’s trained, just like LLMs, on multiple pieces of information. Now it has got a substantial corpus of information to work from. It’s basically open now. It’s very current. There used to be a delay in the information, but it is very current now, it’s real time in many aspects. But how it works is it’s not real AI, which I think a lot of bloggers might be confused by. It just generates human-like text in a one-word-follows-the-other model, so to speak. So it’s trained only on the knowledge it has access to, though it does again have an incredibly large corpus of data to work with. Well, ChatGPT would be great for a ton of SEO tasks involving … again, you saw Bjork mention it, you could do everything from coloring pages to keyword research to ideation, to have it write complete outlines, comparing-contrasting, grouping, you could take a list of keywords and organize it by semantic intent.

The sky’s the limit, but where a lot of bloggers get kind of hung down is how they can use it effectively, and that really involves understanding how to put together effective prompts. And a prompt is what you use to get what you want out of ChatGPT. So let me go over a simple three-step process that you might be able to use to your benefit. And the three steps involve role, task, and format. So let’s say that I wanted to do a prompt and I wanted to do something like generate a list of long-tail keywords around the keyword “banana cream pie”, and I wanted those keywords to have some kind of informative intent, which would be common if I wanted to write a complete post on banana cream pie. So I might phrase it in three specific lines, and the first line, that’s the role, and what you’re doing is you’re telling ChatGPT what role you want them to play.

So I would say, “ChatGPT, you are an experienced content writer with a deep understanding of keyword research.” That would be line number one where I’m just telling ChatGPT what role I want to play.

And you could set them up any way. Like let’s say my son was trying to write an article on Abraham Lincoln. He might go in and say, “You are an experienced historian with a deep understanding of Civil War area history. That’s how you would set the prompt up because you’re telling, you’re providing information so that ChatGPT can normalize the responses. Well, then after you’ve got that, then you go to your next line, the second line of the prompt, and that’s your contribution or what we call the task. And so if we go back to our example on banana cream pie, the task would be ”I’m going to give you a seed keyword, banana cream pie.”

So I’m going to give them that right there and I want you to give me … and then I’m going to go to my final line, which is my expectation, and that’s a format where I’m going to say, create it in a certain way. And I can create it as a list, a table, an Excel document, code, HTML. The sky’s the limit. And I might just say line number two, “I’m going to give you a seed keyword, banana cream pie,” and then my final line would be, “I want you to give me 10 longtail keywords with informative tent based on the seed keyword just as a list.” And then you’ll see that it will return and spit out that information based upon how you’ve organized your prompts.

Or you could just go in and be really … you could combine that and just say something like, “You are an expert in SEO and keyword analysis. Analyze recipe X for this keyword X and provide me a list of stemmed related keywords it contains.” So it’s really all about you having a conversation with ChatGPT based upon your end result.

And so people always ask, “Well, can we trust the outputs?” Well, just like with anything else, we test and test and test. You would never take the output from ChatGPT verbatim and paste it into your site or somewhere else. You would review it and maybe run it through Google. I always run it through a tool called Originality.ai to make sure that it doesn’t look like it was AI-generated, rewrite it accordingly. But in many cases, as long as you’re providing simple tasks, you can trust 100% the output it gives you. The more detailed you get, the more detailed your prompt needs to be to make sure that you’re not receiving what are called hallucinations, which is when the AI goes off the rails and starts giving you information that is not only 100% incorrect, but they make up facts thinking that that’s what you need to complete the query. And that does happen.

Bjork Ostrom: And it feels authoritative. It’s not like it’s like, “I don’t know if this is right.” It’s just like the response feels factual, but in actuality it’s not.

Casey Markee: Yeah, and again, and I’m all for using ChatGPT, I cover it in my audits. I provide detailed spreadsheets. As a matter of fact, I’m going to go ahead and paste over … Here are some free PDFs covering tons of ChatGPT prompts for SEO that I have bookmarked. These are very helpful for the average blogger, so take a look at those. They’re just free PDFs you can download and they’ll help you both increase the quality and veracity of your prompts, but also make sure that you’re getting what you need out of the system when you need it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one thing that we were chatting a little bit about before we went live was this idea of content that is entirely AI-created living within a post. So in the example you’re giving, it’s almost like a brainstorming exercise. You could also then say, “Write me a thousand-word post on this topic.” Can you talk about that line and what you’d advise creators when it comes to actually generating the written portion of a piece of content with AI?

Casey Markee: Well, Google just came out today, and again, we’re going to go back to the search liaison, Danny Sullivan. He just had a tweet today that was shared by my colleague Glenn Gabe, saying that, as a reminder, Google is against AI content, which is used to rank SEO. I want to be very clear about that because they said that they had clarified this months ago, but there’s still some, as any SEO will tell you, there’s always that gray space. Well, they’re trying to eliminate that gray space. They’re saying, we want you to use AI as a tool, but it should never be something that you use to publish complete pages, publish as your main way to get something to rank at the top of Google. That is against our guidelines, specifically our spam policies.

So how would you use AI to your benefit? Well, you would use it to rewrite existing content. One great way to use it would be … showing a client the other day how they can use it to steal. People also ask queries in Google. You go to Google, you find that people also ask queries that are there. You take those, you pop them into ChatGPT and have them rewrite it in a completely unique text, keeping the same information and word count, and then you rewrite it again so that you have that unique content that you can then put on your own site, with the hope being that you still … that people also ask Query from Google. That’s a simple way for you to use it as a rewriting tool.

Other ways, again, would be keyword research. Other ways would be putting together an outline. Maybe you wanted to do a complete guide on home pie-making. It will be able to show, based upon the corpus it has access to, what the main H2s or main subsections of that article would look like, and then you would slowly go in and start piecing together that outline based upon your own thoughts, based upon the information that ChatGPT provides, and the like. What you wouldn’t do is let ChatGPT write the whole thing.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s like how do you be selective in using it as a tool?

Casey Markee: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And it kind of can superpower what you do. Like if you’re a developer, it can be a really great sidekick or copilot, to use Microsoft’s term, to what you’re doing and superpower what you’re doing. But I have a friend, Jeff Coyle, MarketMuse, who’s also in the world of SEO, where he talks about really what it should be is it should be a multiplier on your authority, and you are an expert, you know what you’re talking about, and you use some of these tools to amplify that and allow you to create content in a more seamless way. And I think that’s a great way to think about it. It’s like, how do you use it as a multiplier for you as the creator?

Casey Markee: And you’ll see in those PDFs that I’ve uploaded that that’s covered. You’ll find ways, really novel ways for you to use ChatGPT based upon what you’re trying to do. It’s broken down business functions, marketing functions, research, education functions. There’s various ways that you can use that to, as you say, help build and reinforce your own authority.

Just remember the cardinal rule of using ChatGPT and all these other AI-powered tools. Always be polite. I always say please and thank you because I want to make sure that-

Bjork Ostrom: To ChatGPT, because when a day that, 20 years from now-

Casey Markee: When the day comes and our robot overlords take over, I want them to remember that I was polite.

Bjork Ostrom: Thank you and…

Casey Markee: When at all possible.

Bjork Ostrom: Always say thank you.

Casey Markee: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a great tip.

Casey Markee: Mark my words.

Bjork Ostrom: All right, so Lucy is asking, “What should we know about Google’s decision to push the removal of cookies back?” It just feels like this continues to happen. This maybe doesn’t fall in the world of SEO, but definitely in the world of Google. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Casey Markee: Yeah, Google said back on 12–14 that it would start phasing out third party cookies and they wanted to use what was called their Privacy Sandbox. They wanted to limit the amount of cross-site tracking by deprecating these third party cookies and this Privacy Sandbox was a way for them to do that. Well, it seemed all great and they started with Chrome, and they were going to go ahead and pull back the cookies across about 1% of queries and their goal was to have this done by the first half of 2024. Well, just a couple weeks ago, as a matter of fact, and I’m going to go ahead and find and share the notice, you just come to find out that this was not okay with the UK. The UK specifically was having problems with this because they weren’t sure how Google was going to approach the activity. So basically the concerns are tied to the UK’s Competition And Market Authority, the CMA. I’m going to go ahead and paste the post here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Casey Markee: But kind of as a summary here, it’s understandable. Google … it’s a lot more … we treat Google here in the United States with velvet gloves. That’s just always been the case. If Google gets both a lot that they cannot get away with in the UK and Europe in general, especially the European Union. The results that you see, if you’ve ever traveled abroad, are completely different than the results that you get here in the United States, especially with regards to intent or financial-based transactions.

And basically the concerns of the UK’s competition and markets authority is threefold. Google may continue to benefit from user activity while limiting competitors’ access to the same data, and that was their first concern. The second concern was that Google has the ability to 100% control the inclusion or the exclusion of ad tech rivals, so various ad companies on the list, and they could leverage their own ad tech services, basically Google Ads, previously AdSense, to have a benefit overall.

And then finally the third concern was that publishers and advertisers maybe less likely and effective in identifying fraudulent activity when they push this through. So long story short, they’re working over here to kind of make sure that at least before this goes full bore, that Google has addressed these specific concerns. And I’m going to go ahead and paste over the search engine land article that talks about this in a little bit more detail. I would say that the odds are very, very good that if a huge improvement is not made by the April deadline, this could be pushed back into probably the second or third quarter of 2025, so you’ll have a little bit more breathing room before we have this huge paradigm shift in the ability to lose our tracking data. And of course, that’s going to affect both our PMs and our bottom line ability to track the ads and on where our referrals are coming from specifically. I know it’s a big pain point, but there is … they’re still working on it so you have a little bit more time.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And it seems like what keeps happening is that just the can gets kicked down the road further, which is okay because it’s hard to know for sure how it’ll impact publishers, but the assumption is that one of the ways, and maybe the leading assumption is that it’ll make advertising less effective, which could then decrease RPM specifically within Chrome browser, which a lot of people use, and which is the primary one that would be impacted. So nice to have that delayed a little bit and good to have an update on it. So thanks for that.

Here’s a specific question around category pages. Vanessa’s asking, “What should a great category page include and should the SEO title have archives added to it to the end of it?” And then she goes on to say, “Yoast seems to have it set as default,” to have archives added, I guess. So talk about why category pages are important within the world of SEO in general, and then what does a great category page look like?

Casey Markee: Well, category pages are important because they’re like windows into the house that is your blog. I think you might’ve heard me say that on previous podcasts, but they’re very important as a way to showcase collections of our best content. Category pages these days have evolved into things that can rank at the top of Google for very high authority and high volume keyword phrases.

A good example would be the phrase “breakfast recipes”, which is incredibly high volume, and one of the most topped results in the world is Lauren Allen from Taste Better From Scratch. And I’m going to go ahead and paste over her example page here because it’s a great example of what a category page should look like when designed and optimized effectively.

So when we’re talking about category pages, what we’re doing is, as you said, archives has no place in a title. We’re not trying to rank for archives, we’re trying to rank for breakfast recipes, and unless you’re a big psych like Lauren is, the odds of most people on this call ranking for breakfast recipes or appetizer recipes or even dessert recipes is extremely low. But that’s why optimization comes into play. You want to make sure that you have a category page that you have full control over two elements. You have the On-page H1 and you have the Yoast title. The Yoast title and the On-page. H1 should easily match when at all possible. It’s very funny how I still keep running into themes that do not have the ability to set a custom archive headline. This has been a default design in Feast, Genesis, CultivateSites, others, for years, but even Cadence does not have that ability. If I always see everyone saying, “I’m going to move to Cadence, it’s so great.” It’s missing a huge optimization issue with the category pages. There is no archive headline.

And so for those of you who don’t understand what I’m talking about, the only way that you can change the name of your category page is to in turn change the name of the page, which in turn change the name of your breadcrumb. That’s not good. We always want the category, we always want the breadcrumb, the name of the page and the archive headline to operate independently. Just like every page on the site, we want to have full control over our headline, which is our H1.

So example, if we wanted to try to rank for breakfast recipes, I want to be able to make sure that my H1 and my Yoast title match. It’s a strong reinforcement signal. Talked about this previously, whenever you’ve done results or studies, for example, Zippy.com did one back in January of 2023, they found that when your On-page H1 and your Yoast titles didn’t match, Google changed the titles 63% of the time. That’s why we don’t get crazy-

Bjork Ostrom: To match? Or just-

Casey Markee: … to match. They chose one of them and you never had any choice of which one they were choosing.

So to do that, we have to fight the rewriting of our titles by making sure that we have a reinforcement signal. So I always recommend in our audits that the H1 and the Yoast title match, and we want to be detailed. So if you’re a relatively small or midsize blogger, we have to find out what it is about your recipes that’s unique. If you’re a gluten-free blogger, for example, every one of your category pages is going to be something like “easy gluten-free breakfast recipes” or “easy gluten-free dinner recipes” because that’s going to provide an ability for you through the longtail, to have a possibility of generating traffic, because you’re never going to generate traffic on just breakfast recipes, dinner recipes, and the like.

So take a look at this example that I pasted over from Taste Better From Scratch. You’ll notice that they have the custom titles at the top. You’ll notice that they have archive information at the top, information where we’re telling Google and users what the page is about. That’s very important. We don’t want to just have an empty page with just links to recipes.

Now, if you scroll down, you’ll also see the modular point of the page, the best recipe … the best category pages these days are ones where it’s not just a chronological list of all the posts. The best category pages these days are arranged with somatic versions of the recipes. So currently right now, everyone and their mother is looking for Valentine’s Day recipes or possibly game day recipes. So if I’m visiting an appetizer page on the site right now, I would like to have a custom block towards the top that says, “Here are my top game day recipes.” Right below that, I might have another section, “Here’s my romantic appetizers for two,” and then below that I might have all the rest of the categories or the rest of the recipes laid out accordingly.

Unfortunately, that is just not common in a lot of themes. Fortunately, I give it to Skyler, he just pushed out custom categories. So now you’re able to do that as a default in the Feast plugin for all of your categories. This is also something that you’ll see if you have a custom design site, you’ll want to add that functionality. Again, CultivateWP does it incredibly well, but it’s not something that you’re going to find by default and an Astro or a Cadence or whatever. You have to get a developer who’s able to do that for you. It’s just a very specific type of category soup that’s needed for those pages to be effective.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s great.

Casey Markee: And so take a look at the example there, and that’s pretty self-explanatory.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s almost, I think the general mindset shift that you have to have going into it is a category page is a page itself. It’s not just like a list of all of the different posts in that category, which a lot of themes will do that. You’ll have a category page and it’s just like a list, and it’s just chronological order of everything that’s in that category. But where it’s done best is it’s almost you’re viewing it as a page itself and the page is dedicated to highlighting all of the different content that’s in that category, and has different sections, and maybe there’s a paragraph of text, a short paragraph that explains things. So a couple of great examples that you included.

Casey Markee: Exactly. Yeah, and I’ve pasted over an example from Sally’s Bacon Addiction. She has an exceptionally designed site. She ranks at the top for a lot of her category pages, and it’s not just because she’s a strong site, though that certainly helps. It’s because her category pages are correctly and fully optimized based upon user intent. As you scroll through the cupcakes recipe example I’ve given you, you can see that she has it segmented. She has top cupcakes at the top and then allows you to scroll down to see seasonally relevant components related to cupcakes. And you’re going to find that that’s a similar approach that she takes to all category pages, and it’s definitely something I would recommend if you have the ability to do on your site, you should.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

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

This episode is sponsored by Raptive. When it comes to monetizing a blog or a site, display ads are a fantastic passive way to generate income on the content you’re already producing. In fact, Raptive display ads are one of our biggest revenue generators at Pinch of Yum. They make up nearly 80% of our overall monthly income. Raptive, which is formerly AdThrive, is on a mission to empower independent creators like you. And to date, Raptive has paid out more than $2 billion to creators.

Not only do they help creators generate ad revenue, they also offer creators many other benefits to help support them with their audience revenue and business goals. For example, Raptive creators get access to industry-leading tools like Topic, which helps creators to discover opportunities to improve their content and plan the structure of their blog posts.

You also get access to resources on HR and recruiting, SEO, email marketing, customized AB ad layout testing, and more as a Raptive creator. You can learn more about Raptive’s creator levels and what’s all included in each level at raptive.com/creator-levels. Then when you’re ready to apply, head to raptive.com and click the Apply Now button. Working with an ad network has had a profound impact on the way Pinch of Yum monetizes our business, and by being a Raptive creator, you’re getting access to results-based solutions that can really impact the way your business runs and grows. Learn more at raptive.com. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

We have a question here coming in around keyword research. So Mika says, “Can you recommend a keyword research tool?” And she asks about one that’s affordable. So can you talk about what keyword research is for those who maybe aren’t familiar, and then how keyword research tools fit into the equation?

Casey Markee: Sure. Well, if I’d be honest with you, if you’re on this call and you don’t know what keyword research is, I would say that that’s your first thing to do after we get off this call is to research. Go back, take a look at some of our past webinars. Go ahead and take a look at the SEO for Publishers webinar on keyword research. I’ll see if I can find a link for that. But keyword research is how we’re optimizing our site for what Google and users are looking for. Very simply put, our goal is to find not only those diamonds in the rough, keywords that have a low-competition, but a high search volume, but also keywords based upon our authority and our current content that we have an actual chance of ranking for. And that is a very fine line or tightrope to lock these days because it’s very hard to find keywords that not a thousand other people have already worked with.

It doesn’t matter if you’re using someone like RankIQ and you say, “Okay, RankIQ is telling me that I can rank for these keywords.” Well, it’s also telling a thousand other people as well that they can rank for the same keyword, and many times the tool is not removing, quote, those content briefs fast enough. And you find that you’ve got a lot of people using the same keywords and you’re wondering why you’re not having as much success as you’re supposed to have in the end.

But when we talk about keyword tools, there’s a lot out there. I tend to recommend Keywords Everywhere. It’s no longer relatively a free tool, though I think you can still get about 15 searches a month, but Keywords Everywhere is a browser add-on. You can use it through Chrome or Firefox or Safari, and what you do is you buy credits and that allows you to be able to search a combination of information. You can search the direct Google API from Google Ads, or you could go ahead and search clickstream data or you can search one or the other.

And that is a great way for you to have an access to very good data at a very small price point. For example, I think you can pay 10 bucks for 10,000 credits, which is good for several months. So if you’re starting out, Keywords Everywhere, very simple way to do keyword research.

The second tool would be KeySearch. I’ve been a big believer in KeySearch for years. Keysearch is also one of the only tools out there that has a direct access to the Google Ads API. Matter of fact, the only two that I’m aware of currently that do is KeySearch and Keywords Everywhere. It’s too expensive for everyone else based upon their volume. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Semrush or using some of these other tools out there, Hreps and the like, they don’t have access to the Google API and they’re using what’s called clickstream data, which is data that they’re getting from their own tools or from third parties, and then they run their own algorithms around that data so that you can get average traffic patterns, average volume, and what traffic you might be getting.

So that’s why when you go to Semrush and you see these huge waves in your traffic volume, those aren’t necessarily reliable because it’s not based upon your data, it’s based upon a guess, and guesses in many cases are horrible.

So again, if you’re looking to really do good keyword research, take a competent course. Many of you are probably familiar with Alika’s Cooking With Keywords. It’s still very good. She does a very good job of keeping that updated. I believe she still uses KeySearch and that and probably mentions Keywords Everywhere. Or look at one of our webinars that we’ve done. Keyword research is there is as many different approaches as there are raindrops, so in your case, you just have to find an approach that’ll work for you. The goal, of course, is to just get to use a tool and a strategy that you’re comfortable with. Just because you see someone doing something one way, doesn’t mean that you have to do it that way. You might find that a different approach works just fine for you.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And like you said, it’s a tool and the tool isn’t the answer, but it helps, much like AI, ChatGPT, it helps along the way. And you still have to create an incredible piece of content, you still have to talk about doing all the technical elements with it, but it’s a great tool that can kind of guide you along the way.

Speaking of structuring a post, somebody had a question here about video. Cherry says, “What’s the thinking behind adding video to each recipe post? I read or heard someone recently saying that after the HCU Helpful Content Update, Google is going to expect each recipe to have a video of that recipe included in the post.” And then she says, “Just curious if Casey knows anything about it.”

Casey Markee: Yeah, I’m not aware of any such statement, so I would say that I would question who swear or where you read that because I can assure you that if Google has said that, I’d know it. And I’m not aware of any such statements saying that they give any preference to recipes with video. On the contrary, video is really only good if you have quality videos to add. It’s not going to generate much traffic because Google changed how they handle videos and video thumbnails back in April of 2023. They eliminated them if they were not the predominant feature of the page.

So think about that. For you to have a video to generate any sort of traffic for you, you’d have to put that video at the top of your page, which in many cases would be an extremely poor experience for most users because they probably would not go all the way down the page, which might lower your RPMs considerably or destroy the ability of you to get that scrolling action necessary to even generate your ads in the first place.

Now, you could … we’ve experimented with some Bloggers, Feel Good Foodie comes to mind, where they tried to set up unique pages to highlight each of their individual videos. The problem was they’re thin pages that no one ever visited, there’s no traffic on them. We’re going to experiment next in adding full transcripts to them to see if they do anything. But so far, it’s been very mixed. If you have a video and you can add it to your recipe card or better yet, you have a video and you can upload it to your ad company and then they can have a pre-roll on that that they put higher in the post for you, great.

But no, there is no … and I’ve been doing this a long time. There are plenty of sites who dominate Google that have never embraced a video and that hasn’t changed. If video is something that you want to do, great, but it’s absolutely not a make or break. As a matter of fact, I don’t even recommend bloggers even consider investing in video until they’ve optimized or got to about 50,000 sessions a month and optimized for a quality ad company. Then and only then should they be thinking about video as just a way to increase their revenue because we can monetize those videos accordingly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So idea being, Google releases this update and it’s like, you can still rank for a video, but you’re going to only rank for a video if you’re creating content that’s video-forward. That’s kind of the primary reason you’re creating it.

Casey Markee: Yeah. The only time you’re going to see your videos anymore is if you go to the actual tab on Google that says Video.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. Right. Versus where they used to be included more, and you’d see thumbnails with videos on a-

Casey Markee: Yeah, organic video thumbnails have been eliminated, so that was a benefit of you continuing to add that. So whether it’s post-HCU or pre-HCU, that has a change. We’re not getting any video thumbnails and the search results these days, or carousels.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Cool. Thanks for the update on that. Here’s a question that I thought was kind of interesting. So this is from Maddie. She says, “I understand the importance of SEO, but it kills my motivation in creating recipes. Sometimes I don’t wish SEO to dictate what I want to bake or cook, and I just really want to create what inspires me. Do you have any specific strategies or thoughts on how to go through this or how to process that?”

Casey Markee: And that’s a tough situation to be in because when people come to me, they’re trying to do one thing: monetize. So the literal 90% of my business is either bloggers who are trying to monetize and qualify for an ad company or bloggers who have already monetized and they’re trying to significantly increase their bottom line. And to do that, that means that we have to cater to our audiences. We always have to determine, you might love to write lasagna recipes, but if your audience doesn’t like lasagna, then honestly you’re going to have to make the decision, “I’m going to be a hobby blogger for a long time.”

You have to determine whether or not this is a hobby or a business for you, and by doing that, you have to change your mindset. If you’re okay understanding that publishing things that you just want to publish is going to limit your reach and it might take you longer to build, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. It’s your site. You should totally feel the freedom to do that. But if you’re asking yourself, is there, can I do that and still make money? I think the downside of that is yes, but it’s going to be through social, Pinterest and email. It’s never going to be through organic search. And I think that’s the bare bones way to look at it.

Bjork Ostrom: And it almost is … one of the things we’ve been talking a lot about, I had a conversation with David Lebovitz on this, is it’s like, if your monetization in this space is going to be through ads and/or affiliate, the way that you’re going to get that is through some that traffic coming somewhere. And like you said, it can come from email, it can come from social, it can come from direct, but the easiest way, it’s still really hard, but the most popular way is maybe a better way to say it, is through search. If you’ve realized that search isn’t for you, then you probably needed to change either your monetization metric, and you could go pure social. You’re just going to create content on Instagram, TikTok, on Twitter, but what you’re going to do is direct everybody to a Substack newsletter, which is monetized.

Casey Markee: Exactly, which is becoming very popular. I get it. If you don’t want to blog, Substack is the way to go. I have known, David’s one of them, but there are plenty of others who have just started where they literally do nothing but Substack. The problem is it’s just like Google, what should happen? What if something happens with Substack?

Bjork Ostrom: There’s always a platform risk.

Casey Markee: Always a platform risk. So when we’re talking about this with SEO, it’s all about literally putting your bait in many different ponds, and that’s what it is whether your goal is to … You know, if someone comes to me and they’ve generated all their traffic from Pinterest and social, it’s a huge opportunity. I salivate because I know that I can make significant changes to their site and their content approach, and we could double or triple their traffic very quickly because Google is such a wide open pond that they’ve never really put resources towards, but that requires us to change kind of how they approach that. And in doing so, they might lose a couple percentages from the other holes as well. That’s like taking a Pinterest-first approach.

You can’t take a Pinterest-first approach to all of your content and be successful on Google, just not going to happen, because people stuffing their pages with long pins and other things, that’s an outdated practice, especially with the amount of people who pin from the app these days. We just don’t do things like that. There’s a very specific approach to putting together a recipe post specifically that will do well in Google, and it’s not the same as you would approach your content and Pinterest.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one other thought that I’d have really quickly for Maddie is potentially shifting the SEO focus. As an example, maybe you come up with 20 different recipes that you’d be really inspired to create, and then you do keyword research on those 20 recipes to say, here’s where I think the best opportunity would be, as opposed to only doing keyword research and then only creating the recipes that you see the keyword research opportunity in.

So I think there is that opportunity to shift when the focus is, knowing that … I’d be interested in your thoughts on this … if you lead with keyword research, you probably will find more opportunities to get more search traffic, versus if you approach it while looking at the recipes that you feel inspired by, there might not be the same opportunities, but you can still be strategic about thinking about search.

Casey Markee: And I’m all for that. I mean, there’s just some bloggers who, they have very specific recipes that, they’ve told me, I’m never going to rank for this, but I like this recipe. It was handed down to me. Maybe there’s an heirloom approach to it. Maybe it’s a legacy recipe. I’m going to publish it and have it on my site. I don’t see any issues with that. That’s common.

I think where bloggers get into trouble is making 9 out of 10 recipes like that. And as long as you’re not doing that, I think there’s room for success and truth to both camps there.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Cool. We’ll keep moving along here. This question says, “I’m building topic clusters. What would having multiple iterations or flavors of a recipe, for example, homemade ice cream, that is then tied back to a roundup post count? Is the roundup considered a pillar if it offers all the best tips and tricks for the topic?” So thoughts on this one?

Casey Markee: Yeah, I think when we’re talking about topic clusters, it’s very seldom that I hear a roundup being considered a quality pillar because they’re not usually quality in their construction. A quality roundup these days might have a very clear introduction. It might have you selling the user right at the top, here’s my top recommendation. Then it’ll have you listing your other recommendations, then it might have maybe an FAQ or some expert tips towards the bottom. But the days of just publishing a post with 80 of your top recipes, that’s just not an effective way to approach things these days. No one wants to wade through that amount of options.

So I think the better option would be for you to consider maybe a uniform post where, you know, a detailed guide on ice cream that then links out to all these individual recipes and reinforces those. So you put together a very detailed guide, that would be your pillar content, and you could use ChatGPT to go in and look at an outline for that.

If I was going to put together a detailed outline on ice cream and I wanted to answer the most common questions, blah, blah, blah, what would it be? And then it’ll give you pretty good information that you could then refine and publish it your intent. But I find that that is going to be a little bit more successful for you.

And that kind of leads me into … and I definitely want to make sure that we talk about this: internal linking. I cannot tell you how important internal linking … if we don’t remember anything today, remember this internal linking is one of the greatest things that you can do on your site to rank more effectively and faster. The problem is that people screw up internal linking all the time. We had an audit today and they’re a very successful blogger, but they had gotten some bad advice and they were going through their entire site and linking things like steak and dessert and turnip and corn and tomato.

Folks, that is the worst thing you can do for internal linking. When we link internally, we link by what we want to rank for. Please remember that. We want to try to be very somatic in our choices, very deliberate. If I want to rank for Salisbury steak, I need to go through and link Salisbury steak or Salisbury steak recipe or best Salisbury steak recipe, or “This recipe goes great with my Salisbury steak.” Those are the kind of things we link. We don’t go in and just link Salisbury and steak and think that that’s going to help us in the long run. That’s not how Google works. Google’s going to be looking at the topical reinforcement that we’ve done internally, following that, and that’s going to help us considerably.

So if you’re linking internally, and for example, Link Whisper are unfortunately terrible about this, it’ll give you many recommendations that are horrible … really focus on not necessarily the recommendations that Link Whisper gives you, but on being very specific, be very deliberate. If I’m trying to improve my ranking for a recipe, use our ChatGPT prompts, go over there, find 10 longtail keywords related to my recipe and start going through my site and linking by means of those 10 related longtail phrases. That’s going to provide more enforcement internally than you going through and linking random words just because.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so point being, internal linking is important. So you have a page on your site and you want to make sure that every page somehow is connected to another page. We don’t want it to be orphaned where it doesn’t have any links coming in. When we are linking, the words that we select to be the link are important, and what those words say and that … can you talk about why that is? That signals to Google to some degree.

Casey Markee: Right, and it also makes perfect sense to the user. Why would a user click on something that just says steak? It doesn’t qualify them. There’s nothing there. Steak? What kind of steak? I want to know, from an accessibility and from a user standpoint, where I’m going. So the more detailed your link, the better. Linking steak would be like linking “click here”. There’s no real value to users.

So if we go back to our ice cream pillar example, you should be going internally and linking to our new ice cream pillar by means of “homemade ice cream information,” “everything you’d ever want to know about ice cream,” “chocolate ice cream recipe example.” Whatever. Whatever those keyword phrases are, they need to be detailed, they need to make sense, and they need to be linked directly into our pillar to reinforce that internally.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. How about process shots? So Cherry says, “What are your thoughts on process shots? Are they still absolutely necessary in every recipe, even if it’s super simple? And then also, does every recipe post still have to be 800–1,000 words, or can we be more concise now After Helpful Content Update?

Casey Markee: Well, respectfully, not every recipe ever needed to be 800 to a thousand words before the Helpful Content Update. Word count is not now, nor has it ever been a ranking factor. There’s plenty of situations where you can go and look at the top results, and they’re not 1,000 words. They’re not 2,000 words. They might be shorter.

We always want to take a look at what Google is ranking and then emulate that. If you tend to find that the top five results tend to be longer recipes, then it makes sense that we might want to try to emulate that word count as close as we can, but we just want a more detailed and more useful recipe. Now, to me, it’s all about usability. Anyone who’s had an audit with me will know that I’m really big on being useful to the user, and to me, there is nothing more high quality than having process shots.

To me, I really want to optimize for toddlers and drunk adults. You’ve heard me say that as well. We want to really dumb things down as much as possible. If you’ve got eight or less process shots, then I really want you to start embracing columns, column blocks. They look fantastic on mobile devices. You have a column and a text block right next to each other. You have two. You have one side by side, and these stack incredibly well on mobile. But if you’ve got more than 10 process shots, which is very common, especially if you have incredibly detailed Indian recipes or pastries or fridge cuisine, it’s very commonly used for photo collages and I’m all for that. You would use a 1200 pixel wide four-photo collage. You would number those. You would number the individual steps.

And that way, you don’t have a recipe that has 20 photos. Instead, we can have a recipe that has 20 individual process shots, but it’s communicated in five collages, which is much more manageable for the user, much easier on the eyes scrolling, and it’s also going to prevent the page from being so big, we run into rendering issues with Google or paid speed issues as well.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think it’s a great reminder that a lot of what we’re doing is we’re trying to create content under best practices for Google, but a lot of what the best practices from Google come from are user experience considerations for people. And so it’s the art and science of saying like, okay, we have this hard data, and sometimes it’s actual metrics that we can use, but we also need to think about what are we doing? And what we’re doing is creating content for people.

Casey Markee: And again, it’s so funny, when I have these audits, I don’t necessarily give these recommendations because I personally like them. That’s not the case at all. We give the recommendations based on hard data. We’ve been doing usertesting.com surveys since 2018, which is almost about the point where you and I had our first sit-down, and since 2018 we’ve been doing these usertesting.com surveys all over the United States and Canada. At this point now we’re into the six figures of people we’ve interviewed, and it’s always different.

That’s how process shots came to be. That’s how the Jump To Recipe button became to be a standard. That’s what users wanted. So if you’re coming to a site and you haven’t surveyed your audience, that’s the only data that I would take as an argument when you have an audit with me that you shouldn’t be using process shots because we have the data saying that’s what users want. Just like having a labeled photo of the ingredients, people, they just love it. They love walking through the store and just pulling stuff off of the shelf. I don’t know. Call it the dumbing down of America if you want, but they love it. And so when people ask if that’s what we should do, I say absolutely, because that’s what the competitor’s doing and that’s what the testing shows. We don’t make this up. Hey, if the data said no one gives a crap about a labeled ingredient shot, I wouldn’t be recommending that in the audits.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And again, comes back to that user experience. That’s all what we’re trying to do is create a good user experience for people, and the best way to know what that is to ask.

Casey Markee: And please, we say this all the time, and I’m always surprised about they don’t do it. It takes no time at all for you guys to run a user testing.com survey of your audience. Just… the tool escapes me, but there’s a free site there that allows you to do that. You can do free heat mapping, you can install plugins. Take a look and see how people are interacting with your recipes. You can film a thousand sessions a day very easily. That’s a great amount of data. How are users interacting across very specific page types?

Set up your own survey. Survey Monkey. Use Survey Monkey to set up a very simple 10 to 12-question survey and have people send that out to your email list. What do you like about my site? What would you like to see? What about these features? What about these features? And then take that data and refine it based upon your existing audience.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. One more question coming in here that we’ll hit. We won’t have time to get to all of them, but this is a question about recipe schema and FAQ schema. So Christina’s asking, “Is using Yoast FAQ, frequently asked questions, in a recipe blog post creating competing schema with the recipe schema?”

Casey Markee: No.

Bjork Ostrom: And then she goes on to say, “I’m hearing some experienced bloggers going away from the FAQ block in favor of a handful of H2s or H3s that answer questions. Do you have a recommendation?”

Casey Markee: Yeah, that sounds like a personal preference. There is no conflict between the schemas at all, ever.

As a matter of fact, I always recommend using the FAQ blocks in all my audits because they look better and we can collapse them. If you install a Yoast FAQ block, then you can install a simple accordion plugin and collapse those, which improve readability considerably on scrolling. And more than that, it also allows us a bigger chance that we are going to be able to capture those people who also ask queries from Google. So I have no problem with it. Anyone who would say that an FAQ is going to place you at a competitive disadvantage has no idea what they’re talking about. I mean, I have literally seen it all, and I have audited some of the top food blogs in the world and they’re using FAQ schema just fine.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Casey Markee: So if you don’t want to use it, great, but don’t do it because some blogger told you that it has a conflict because that’s not true at all.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We’re coming to the end here. Casey, you have mentioned a couple times you do audits. You also do a ton of these live Q&As, podcasts. You show up in all different places around the internet. In terms of your business, you have Comic Con, your side hustle, which maybe there are some people who would come and visit you at the next Comic Con.

Casey Markee: Yeah. It’s going to be good times.

Bjork Ostrom: But a lot of what you do in your day-to-day is auditing sites, providing feedback, showing opportunities. And I know that you’re usually booked out pretty far, but can you talk about how people could connect with you if they’re interested in that, what that might look like, where people can find you?

And then while you’re sharing, Casey, would be interested to hear from anybody who’s tuning in live just to hear one takeaway, one thing that you learned, one thing that was new or one thing that was interesting in the conversation today with some of the answers that Casey shared. So people can be sharing that and thinking about that, and then Casey, if you can talk about where you’re most active online and how people could connect you to you if they’re interested in doing an audit.

Casey Markee: Sure. Well, the goal is to try to do as many of these free resources as possible, because I think for the average blogger, this is going to help you considerably, especially to separate the facts from the innuendo and kind of break bad practices. The FAQ is a good one. That’s ridiculous. You’re going to be fine using an FAQ block. If you don’t want to use it, that’s going to be a personal opinion. Certainly not going to hurt you.

But the goal of my audits is just to provide a learned eye towards what you’re doing and what you’re doing wrong. And what we’re going to do is provide a forensic review of how I or Google would view your site algorithmically. That’s it. Our goal is to show you, based upon a technical, and a content, and a UX review, what it is you’re doing, what is that we can improve, and how Google might view your site through the lens programmatically as an unbiased third party, or in many cases, a biased third party. You can see my information. If you go to mediawyse.com, I’ll put the link in here, or maybe I’ll have Emily paste that over.

Bjork Ostrom: Emily already dropped it in there.

Casey Markee: Yeah. You can go to my Contact Me page for … there’s a form there. It shows you kind of when we’re onboarding and the like. But most people, unless you have at least around a hundred posts, you shouldn’t have an audit. There’s plenty of information out there that I provide plenty of information. If you email me, I’ll provide a couple quick things you could work on and I’ll include a list of my podcasts and interviews so you can take a look at those. I know it’s tough out there. It’s never been more competitive to be a food blogger. If you’ve been doing this for a long time and you’ve like, man, I’ve taken this course and I’ve taken this course and I can’t get over the hump, audits might be worth it for you.

I know that Arsen, Top Hat Rank, they provide coaching now and they have also a similar audit to mine. No wait for that, so that’s something I would also recommend if you don’t want to wait five months to work with me. But SEO is all about the little things, and that’s the goal of an audit. Not everyone needs an audit, but very seldom does someone have an audit and wish they didn’t do it.

So on that note, that’s all I would say.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Casey, thanks so much for coming on. Some interesting takeaways here from people as they’re coming in. Sandy mentioned working on category pages is something that she needs to focus on. Christina talks about the anchor text. She always thought I needed to use the same wording for each one, like the original key phrase I’m trying to rank for.

Casey Markee: Yeah, totally, very common. But yeah, we want to vary that. Like I said, just top in, putting your focus keyword into ChatGPT, put it into Google. Look at the related results under there. If you put it into Google and you look at the autocomplete that’s going below you, that’s a great way for you to pull 7 to 10 examples of related or complementary anchor text that you can start building some real internal links to as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, Alison mentioned, “Going to work on formatting process shots into columns. Thanks for the tip.” Graham and Christina also talked about the schema question and that not being an issue to have two types of schema. So lots of stuff that people are learning and appreciate your insights, your expertise, and your knowledge and your willingness to share it and help the community here. So really appreciate it. As always, good to see you and thanks everybody else for joining in.

Casey Markee: Thanks everyone. Pleasure was mine. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: And we’ll see everybody around. Thank you.

Casey Markee: Take care.

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 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 enjoyed 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. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering options, you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links, and other insights so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better.

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’re making your good content even better. And that’s why we created Clariti. It’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. 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 Clariti, 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 week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Ann Smarty from Smarty Marketing. Ann has been in the SEO world and working as an SEO professional for almost 20 years and has a ton of expertise that she brings to share with us today.

In this conversation, Ann and Bjork talk more about why SEO is about more than building traffic and how to think more holistically about your SEO strategy. They also discuss the importance of backlinks and community building and how you should strategically take advantage of traffic when your traffic is on the rise. They round out the interview by talking about how important it is to diversify your traffic and income sources, which is something we talk about a lot on the podcast, but we really do believe it so you can’t say it enough.

With all of the recent Google helpful content updates and algorithm updates, we know that this will be a really helpful episode for a lot of you and we hope you enjoy it. If you do, please share the episode with your community. It helps our podcast so much and it means a ton to us. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Ann, welcome to the podcast.

Ann Smarty: Thank you so much for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be talking about something that I think a lot of people are interested in, which is search engine optimization. And the world of search is, it feels like I was talking with some friends recently, we were all laughing about how one of the scariest things, when you’re a kid, was like quicksand, it felt like quicksand was like everybody would talk about how do you escape quicksand if you ever get caught in it, but it kind of feels like that’s the foundation for the world of search right now. It feels really not very stable. Is that what you’re seeing with the clients that you with? And you’ve been at this for a long time, since 2010. How would you compare this current state of things to where it’s currently been?

Ann Smarty: Well, practically, if you talk about the realistic state of things, it’s not as dramatic as we talk about. So we’ve been losing Google traffic for about 10 years now. Google has been sending less and less clicks based on their changes with search engine result pages. So it’s been an ongoing trend, so we don’t see anything like this and then this, so it’s-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a major drop-off?

Ann Smarty: No, it’s still really mild for most of the brands. I know there are different cases with independent publishers, bloggers, and helpful content update and all of that but the overall trend is not as dramatic. We still expect it to be something huge, but from what I’ve seen, it’s really mild. Everything that’s going on, it’s a more buzz than really in practice, a lot of changes.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Well, it’s interesting. I feel like it’s, and what you’re speaking to is on a macro level, there’s been this continued slow progression towards Google sending less traffic to sites. So I think of the previous founder of Moz, Rand Fishkin, he’s gone on to start a new site. I’m trying to remember what the name of that is.

Ann Smarty: SparkToro.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, SparkToro, thank you. Where he talks a lot about this idea of search and the changing landscape around search and this kind of slow progression of Google capturing more of the results on the page. And what you’re saying is if you look at it incrementally over the last decade, it’s kind of consistently been happening, Google’s just keeping more of the traffic. But, there has been some really significant drop-off for independent individual publishers. Like, on a micro scale, I think a lot of people would look at it and say like, oh, actually there is that cliff for me based on helpful content.

Ann Smarty: That’s exactly why I made that note that independent publishers, personal bloggers did see a lot of jobs. It’s just we as SEO agencies and professionals do not necessarily deal with that because our clients are a little bit more developed budget-wise. So we don’t deal with as many independent bloggers, publishers, and that. But, I know that a lot of people who come to me with help, I used to have 100 K traffic and now it’s down to 10 visits a day.

So I’ve seen that and there is no way to explain to them what has been going on. And I think that’s the opposite of what Google was trying to accomplish as well. I still think that it’s something went wrong with how they try to adjust their algorithm to not depend so much on backlink, the main authority or site authority, the official Google’s name at this point.

So they’re trying, and I still feel optimistic to Google achieving that goal of surfacing everything that’s not popular, not so much linked to, but really authentically great. I think this is what Google users need as well. For example, if I want to go to a place, I don’t want necessarily Forbes or CNN reviews of that place, I need actual people who went there and found some great things to do and give me ideas that is driven from personal experience.

And from what Google told us, that’s their goal as well. It’s just in practice, it’s still not there, and possibly they’re still trying to get there because that’s exactly what their success relies on. At this point, there are other solutions to giving quick answers. All AI, generative AI platforms can give you exactly, Hey, you go to New York City, you see, I don’t know, all the obvious sites that are there, but most travelers do not need this. They need personal experience with that place, with that destination, and that’s what real small publications give you.

And Google has been saying that their goal is to somehow find the way to highlight and surface those personal experience-driven articles. So far we’ve been seeing the opposite. Sadly, a lot of independent publishers and bloggers have been impacted in a dramatic way by helpful content update that happened in September, then next in March, and Google is promising to fix this with the next call update. So we shall see.

Bjork Ostrom: Hmm. When you say Google, where is Google talking about that? Is that their search liaison, Twitter account, or where are you seeing them talk about that? Because I would assume some people would feel pretty hopeful about that, that have been impacted.

Ann Smarty: But there are a few public-facing representatives from Google that we are talking to and we are sharing our feedback to. Sometimes it’s helpful, sometimes it gets no response at all. Yes, there is an official Twitter account… on X, sorry, not Twitter, X, that represents Google public speaking license. That gives us some updates on what’s coming. And back I think in February or even January, that account told us await the new Google update and see what happens. Nothing happened that could be positive.

So we’re still listening to that feedback, listening to those updates with a lot of grain of salt because it’s not the way it’s predicted to happen in many ways, but there is no other way for us to know what’s going to happen unless the public representatives from Google tell us, this is something you should expect and analyze. And unless that happens, we don’t really know what’s going to happen to Google’s algorithm.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ann Smarty: But, the recent update from that official Google account on X, was that the core update usually they happen every quarter, so probably June, July something we can expect something to happen. That should fix a lot of helpful content damages that happened in September and March.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Fingers crossed, potentially or not. That’s the hard thing is you don’t know.

Ann Smarty: Yeah. It’s still very optimistic. In September, a lot of great publishers and bloggers were hit that did not deserve this, and there are so many Twitter accounts and discussions sharing those unfortunate stories. Some of them were even Google success stories. The Google has that success stories public blog that shares publishers that did exceptionally well on some topics and they highlighted. Even those people were hit by that update in September.

So we were expecting March update to fix a lot of what happened in September, but it didn’t happen. On the opposite, most of those blogs that were hit in September saw even more declines in March. So we’re still optimistic because that’s the only thing that we can do for those people who really share personal experiences and travel tips and cooking tips or whatnot. But so far it hasn’t been really good for them and I really feel sad about that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so your point, just to kind of recap here, let me know if this feels accurate. So you have your agency, Smarty Marketing, and you’ve been doing that for decade-plus now. What you’re saying is a lot of the companies that you work with are maybe it’s like a company of a hundred people and they have e-commerce maybe or all of these different components versus in our world, a lot of times it’s a small team, it’s an independent publisher, it’s one person, it’s a team of five.

Ann Smarty: Yeah, that’s all true. I actually have been in SEO for about 20 years, but I’m the founder of an SEO agency for about six months now, so it’s still a new territory for me. I’ve been the founder of projects, but never an agency. But to your point, that’s the most unfair thing. All the previous updates from Google hit most commercial queries and sites that were really, really expensive. Like, huge budgets. They could afford to change things and they could afford to get out of that or even start new sites or even there some… of course, there was some layovers. So Google Analytics has always been a problem.

But it’s always been about high commercial queries. So it’s loans, something that makes a lot of money and companies could afford to recover. This helpful content update, which will never happen again, it’s now part of the core algorithm for some reason that happened in September and March, hit the most insecure, the most vulnerable part of the internet, personal bloggers, small publications that somehow, yes, they started depending on Google traffic because they were getting a lot of it, but they did not deserve this for sure.

And in the history, and like I said, I’ve been in the SEO industry for two decades, this one is the most unfair update that ever happened because it impacted the most vulnerable part of the internet community. And that’s why we do not have clients that were impacted by it because clients who can afford SEO services are like medium to large-sized companies.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. In those cases, what are those companies doing? I think that would be the key that a lot of people would be interested in. It’s like, oh, if they can afford it, there’s got to be action that’s being taken. From what I’ve heard, there’s a lot of people who have gone through this and it’s like there is no way that you can identifiably recover from it. So what are those companies that are kind of mid-sized that do have the budget doing to recover?

Ann Smarty: That’s a great question and after months and months of looking at impacted sites, I have the answer. We have clients who have one major site and a lot of smaller sites that we’re using to touch different angles or informational intent and all of that. One huge trend that we’ve been seeing, and I know that’s not a popular opinion because Google is saying that links are not top three ranking factor right now, but one huge trend that we’ve been seeing is that sites with a lot of backlinks with a huge and ongoing and always fresh backlink profile, they have not been impacted by helpful content.

What I see in this is that imagine Google’s algorithm, all those always moving parts of it with different scores, with different aspects of it. Sometimes it’s usability, sometimes it’s content, sometimes it’s relevance, sometimes it’s, I don’t know, EEAT, which is not exactly the signal, but that’s how we call it. Sometimes backlinks. They are all trying to overbalance one another and backlinks seem to have a huge role in overbalancing, other factors.

So if your content is not even considered helpful, if you have a huge backlink profile with a lot of fresh authoritative backlinks going to it, that will overbalance other factors. And guess who has most backlinks? People who can afford this, brands who can afford this. So that’s why bigger brands were not as much impacted by helpful content update because their backlink profile, just overweight everything else that… or any other negative signals that could have been implied to them.

Bjork Ostrom: So lots of theories out there around how do things play out, what is the impact. What is causing a drop? What’s preserving a site that doesn’t drop? People talk about the importance of brand and brand being an important one. In your case, what you’re saying is, you have a theory around one of the things that preserved some of these sites being backlinks.

So maybe as an example, there was a site that was really good at creating quality content. That content ranked well, but maybe it didn’t have a strong backlink profile. Your theory as it relates to helpful content update is that backlinks is a variable that played into that and you see that as kind of a waiting mechanism and the more you have quality backlinks, the better your traffic was preserved. Is that kind of your theory?

Ann Smarty: It is a little bit the oversimplification of my theory. I think backlinks contribute to more ranking signals than just direct backlink profile. If you have a lot of backlinks, that could imply that you have a great site authority. If you have a lot of mentions that are linked to your site, that means that you have a brand power. So it could be more complicated than that, but definitely, I saw a very clear correlation between backlink profile and impact from helpful content update.

And that was even the screenshot going around the SEO community when for something like mattress reviews or something like that, all the top 10 ranking brands, ranking sites after the helpful content updates were Forbes, CNN, CNET, all of those very well known brands all dominating the top 10 of Google search results, which is the opposite what Google wanted to achieve with helpful content.

The helpful content update is named because Google wanted to surface helpful content, not content from big brands. But I think what went wrong is that these whatever signals come from backlinks, like I said, it could be direct signal. If there’s a vote that’s a vote, but I think it’s more complicated than that, there are more signals that are based on backlink profiles. Whatever happens wrong with that, somehow with the helpful content, that’s huge accumulation of signals based on links, overweight, everything else, and that’s why we only have those huge sites ranking for just about any query these days.

Bjork Ostrom: Hmm. And like you said, obviously lots of literally thousands of variables going into the algorithm and this debate in the SEO world, how much do backlinks matter? And what you’re saying is one of the correlations that you see in some of the data you look at… they talk about correlation, causation. One of the correlations is like, hey, maybe there’s a strong backlink profile or certain results. In the case that you shared the mattress results, mattress reviews, suddenly you’re seeing like CNN review site ranking well, whereas there might’ve been five years ago, five months ago or a year ago, somebody who’s a mattress expert, like an individual who knows mattresses really well and has spent the last 10 years building up a site about mattresses, suddenly it goes away and then some CNN reviews article is ranking.

So it’s interesting to see that shift and some of the theories around it. Can you talk more about backlinks? What is the controversy there if there is one in the world of SEO? And I heard you kind of allude a little bit to this idea that like Google’s saying, Hey, actually maybe these aren’t as important as they used to be, but then you’re kind of saying, actually they are pretty important when you look at some of the data. What’s the controversy in the world of SEO around backlinks?

Ann Smarty: There is not one controversy when it comes to backlinks. There are dozens of them.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, okay.

Ann Smarty: The whole history of Google using backlinks in their algorithm has been filled with controversy. And when I started, and it was many years ago, Google’s guidelines actually said, get other website linked to you. This has been the only part of the guidelines about backlinks. So we could actually do whatever we could, whatever it took to get those backlinks. So of course where there is an opportunity, there is a manipulation. So people started doing all kinds of backlinks, backlink strategies, including paying full links, donating full links, spamming comments full links, spamming forums, full links, dozens and dozens of questionable backlink acquisition strategies that Google one by one started penalizing. So at some point, Google told us, no, don’t get backlinks from other sites. Other sites need to want to link back to you. That’s the only-

Bjork Ostrom: It has to be organic, like-

Ann Smarty: Yeah, so they need to-

Bjork Ostrom: And as much as you try and manipulate it, Google’s going to try and stay a step ahead and say like, okay, yeah.

Ann Smarty: Exactly. So your site needs to be so great and so outstanding that other people would want to link back to you, and that’s the only way to get backlinks. Well, the problem here is that with that history of getting backlinks, any experienced website owner, if he or she has been around for five years, at least, know the value of the backlinks. At this point, a lot of people are just afraid of linking to anyone because they know that could be considered paid or manipulation, or penalization. It’s been quite a ride. So it’s both sides.

And I’m not even saying that Google is in the habit of retrospectively penalizing sites for things that were good and allowed five years ago, but now Google decides, no, you’re not doing this. So it’s a very complicated question in terms of controversy. There are too many controversies in building links. So what happened now, and from my point of view, and again that’s my personal perspective, Google keeps telling us that links are no longer important, not as important than they were, let’s say 10 years ago.

I agree with that. Not in terms of just backlinks, it’s just Google has been adding more factors. So 15 years ago, that was pretty much keywords on the page and backlinks to it. That’s it. Two signals. You could see the real correlation between changing your title tag, changing your copy, and then getting backlinks to the page and it boom, it starts ranking. Right now, it’s much more complicated in terms of how many signals Google is using to evaluate the page, to understand what it is about if it’s solving the problem if it matches search intent. So it’s much more complicated.

But, saying that backlinks are not the top-ranking factor at this point, I think that’s semantics, just like they were telling us there was no domain authority, but now we know there is site authority, so it’s the same thing just named differently. So I think that backlinks are core for the algorithm in many ways, not just one. It’s not just direct signal. Like I said, there are other signals that are fueled from that data as well. And I also think that Google telling us backlinks are not important is just the PR move from Google to discourage us from being-

Bjork Ostrom: From trying to artificially inflate rankings using backlinks.

Ann Smarty: Exactly. And I get it. Well, sure, I have been in this industry for many years. I know how many companies are making money from small businesses who don’t know better and they invest money in low-quality backlinks just because they know they’re important for rankings. So it’s not like I blame Google for lying to our faces. I do think that it’s semantics. They’re trying to just discourage businesses from wasting money on backlinks that do not necessarily make any impact. So it’s not like I’m putting any blame on anyone.

Google does have reasons to tell us that, but we do need to perceive it with some grain of salt and also because we are in the front end of helping businesses to rank, we know that still once you start a good link-building campaign, that’s when you see rankings going up. There is no other way to explain that. And it’s been the best for every client that we are dealing with. Unless you start building links actively, you do not see any moves in rankings. Whatever you do with the site, you can optimize it, you can make it faster, you can make it more user-friendly. Whatever you do, you move the needle only when you start building links to that site and it’s still the reality that we deal with.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So we have our Food Blogger Pro, we do the podcast, we do the content of Food Blogger Pro. It’s a membership site. We don’t really think too much about SEO a little bit. But we have our food site, we have Pinch of Yum, which is a food and recipe site that we do. We’ve never done active link-building on it. It’s never something that we’ve done intentionally, but we’ve created content for a long time, almost 15 years. We get plenty of traffic to Pinch of Yum without ever having done active link-building, but there are a lot of links that we have just from creating content over a long period of time.

My guess is there’s a class of creators who are like that similarly who have never done active link-building. So is part of it in the world that we are in right now, you kind of have to think strategically about doing active link-building or is there a world where you can create compelling good content and not go out and try and get links? You just try and create good content and know that people will link to you.

Ann Smarty: I love this question. You know what? Community building is one of the link-building strategies.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, that’s awesome. I love that. Yip.

Ann Smarty: That’s how I’ve been building links since day one in the SEO community, in industry, but that’s also the link-building strategy. That’s how you get backlinks, just getting out there, building your own community, being part of someone else’s community, or doing both. That’s how you get backlinks. So it’s not like you’re sitting in your small cell and creating your food blog. You just said, you had the community, so you talk people about what you do, you share your content, you do all of that, and that’s one of the best link-building strategies out there and that’s what I’ve been doing all the time. So it’s not like you haven’t been doing link-building, you just haven’t been-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Ann Smarty: Asking. You haven’t been asking for backlinks, but it’s fine. It’s also one of the SEO of the link-building strategies and the best one in the world is being part of the community. It’s just not many businesses can afford the time to do this, so they have to look for options. But this is absolutely the best way to build links, just being the part of the community of that niche that you are in.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that. One of the things that I think is great about that, similar to starting a business and you think like, oh, I want to make money, and if you’re just like, I want to make money, I want to make money, it’s kind of the equivalent of I want to get links. But, the best way to have a successful business isn’t to think just about making money. It’s like how do you create a really compelling product or service or helpful thing, and from that then you can be strategic about charging for it or having a fee associated with it.

Similarly, in the world of content, I think of as an example, a super basic example, when we were really early on, I sent an email to the local paper that Lindsay and I grew up in a small town and we’re like, Hey, we’re both from this small town in Minnesota and we have a site that we’re working on together, would you write an article on it? And they’re like, yeah, we’d love to. They sent a reporter out and did an interview.

But to your point, that’s a link, you’re building links. But it’s less of the tactics around it and more around the analysis of how do people naturally share things in the world and it’s community, it’s compelling product. It’s an interesting thing. 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 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 a hundred thousand-page view mark. Go to foodbloggerpro.com/raptive to opt into this free newsletter series. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

What does that look like in practice to actually be out there and to have the symptom of your actions being people linking to your site, but what does the actual action look like? How do you start doing that and be intentional with it?

Ann Smarty: I will tell the story how I started in the SEO world. I never asked for a link to my site ever in my whole career. What I did, I was like, I will start the blog that will promote my services and will tell the story of how I’m doing SEO or learning. At that point, I was still learning SEO. And so I started the site and then I was like, you know what? I’m lonely here, so I’ll go discover other communities that people have blogs or even solve SEO problems. Maybe I will be able to help them. Maybe I will ask the question so they could help me.

And I tried different communities. It’s also a learning curve. I was banned at some SEO forums because I don’t remember many details, but I remember that feeling when I was like, you are banned because you said things, so maybe you added a link somewhere that you couldn’t do this. So it’s a learning curve. Sometimes you will have success in some micro-communities, sometimes you will be rejected in some of them.

But, the huge thing here is just don’t stop. There is a great term, I think it’s serendipity when you create your own mark by just being open to all kinds of opportunities. So when I started my SEO blog, I didn’t know that I will become an SEO name or SEO brand. I was trying to learn stuff and maybe make some money. Yes, that was one of the reasons. But my big motivation was to learn things and to meet other people. And at some point, I found my home. That was Moz Community that we have articles, UMoz, I was writing for it, that’s it. After that, it was all smooth.

I found people who gave me work, who created opportunities for me to meet other people. I became editor-in-chief for Search Engine Journal after being months in SEO just because I was active. And then I became director of SEO at another agency. All of that happened when I was overseas across the globe back in Ukraine. I came to the United States seven years ago. But all of that things happen without me even meeting those people. But all those opportunities were found just being part of the community.

And yes, that’s how they were all linking to me because I was talking to them. They knew my site, they checked it, they subscribed to it. I describe it as if it’s easy to become part of the community, it is not. It does take a lot of trial and errors. Sometimes you get disappointed, annoyed by other people. I had a lot of bad incidents arguing with people, and then it backfired on my personal brand as well. So this happens just in real world, when you get to know more people, you get to know more bad people.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. I think anybody who has any significant following can relate to that. It’s like-

Ann Smarty: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: 1 in a 100, 1 in a 1000, whatever the number is, we’re all going to bump into people who maybe aren’t the friendliest people.

Ann Smarty: Yes, that is the way I built not just backlinks, but all the opportunities in my career and that went all from there, from just being part of that community. Or creating my own. At some point, my biggest win was to create my own community for bloggers to meet and exchange guest articles. It was back in 2012, I think. But, creating your own community and being able to be the leader there that people look up to, is the biggest win for me.

But, it didn’t happen right away, so I took four more years to just being part of the community before I created my own. But community building or being part of the community is the best way to do any business, especially with small businesses who cannot invest active budgets in getting backlinks. This is still the biggest opportunity because it is not just for SEO, it is not just for ranking. And I’ve been always saying that. That has always been my piece of advice for anyone, build links like you’re not building them.

Forget about Google or whether it’s no following or where it’s coming from or whatnot, just pursue any opportunity that you can find time for. Like, right now because I have my own agency, I’ve never done this before. I’ve always been doing other things in SEO, but now I’m like, I don’t care how many subscribers a YouTube channel has. They invite me to a podcast and I go there if I can afford time, of course, because it’s a busy life, but I try to pursue any opportunity because you never know.

Some people, you can just have one podcast and never see those people again. Some people will be your advocates. They will send you clients, friends, they will advertise you. They would talk about you on social media. So you never know. You just take any opportunity that comes your way and that is the biggest, the most effective way to build both your career, your success, and backlinks as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s great. And I think that comes back to that idea of the links become a symptom of the behavior as opposed to the behavior itself. One of the things that I think is so great, and I think it’s worth talking about a little bit is this idea that you talked about of community and intentionally engaging within the communities for which you want to be connected with, or maybe that your potential clients would be a part of.

I think one of the interesting things as people maybe try and translate that advice to what they’re doing, a lot of which people who are listening to this are food creators is one of the roadblocks potentially is a lot of people who listen to this podcast are trying to think just about traffic. All they want is traffic that then correlates to sponsor content or advertising deals. And one of the things we’ve been trying to or advertising with display ads for Raptive or Mediavine, one of the things we’ve been trying to encourage people to think about is what is the unique thing that you are offering in the world and how do you create a service around that or a product around that.

And that changes the value of a page view, of a visitor, of a user. If you can have something that is compelling, that is helpful, that is unique, and it also gives you the opportunity to embed within some of these communities like you initially did or then to create a community like you also talked about. I think of in a parallel world, there’s a podcast that I listen to which is for some people it’s probably like watching paint dry. It’s called Tax Smart Real Estate Investors, and it’s all-around tax strategies for real estate. But the founder of that company’s name is Brandon Hall.

He talked about getting into the bigger pockets community, which is a real estate community. And then from there, he launched his career by helping people in the forums. And it sounds a lot like you are his and I looked up on Moz in the forums 10 years ago. For you being a part of the Moz community, you get clients from that, you get people who want to work with you. Eventually, you launch your own community, you can then from that if you want to build an agency.

And so for anybody listening, if you’re interested in building a community or building a business, I would encourage you to think strategically about what is the service, what is the product, what is the thing that you can offer. Not that just advertising or working with brands and sponsored content capacity as a bad thing, but I think you’ll be able to fast-track the success of what you’re doing by following what you’re talking about Ann, which is kind of this playbook for embedding within a community and then having something that you’re an expert on that you can help them with.

And it could still be within the food world. Maybe you are a dietitian or nutritionist or you have an expertise on meal planning or whatever it might be. But to think strategically about that. Does that resonate when you kind of think back to your story and kind of the arc of what it looked like as you built your agency?

Ann Smarty: Absolutely. And one thing with, because I’m like in SEO background, I think, and I keep saying this, part of the SEO strategy is not just making immediate sales or immediate income from organic traffic, it’s figuring out what you do when you lose it. And we try to manage those expectations with clients, with just people we come across with because organic traffic is not something you own. You gain some, you lose some, you gain some. It’s been like this since day one.

So when you gain some, you don’t just make yourself happy with quick ads, you figure out how to utilize it to create something long-term. And that’s when we suggest develop a newsletter, develop a private membership site, start selling something, create a product, create something that you can survive with when you lose that traffic because this will happen and it happens for everyone.

I lost a lot of sites to manual penalties, updates, just changes in the algorithm. And you cannot just rely on Google traffic and be happy with the income that comes from it. You have to develop something long-term. And that’s something we always tell clients or in any conferences or meetups or we have monthly roundtables to meet with people who have SEO problems and things like that. And I always say that that’s the lifetime of organic traffic. I don’t know any site that has had Google organic traffic consistently for 20 years

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ann Smarty: Or just even this never happens, never happens. You either lose one or you gain some. It’s always a struggle.

Bjork Ostrom: Up or down, yip.

Ann Smarty: So thinking strategically about how you utilize it while you have it so that… I went to a food blogger conference in Chicago this year and I’ve met a lot of food bloggers who were impacted by helpful content update, and many of them were saying, thanks God, I developed an active Facebook group. Now I have that traffic. Or somehow I manage to develop my Pinterest account, so now I can rely on that traffic. Or thanks God, I have an active newsletter right now and I can survive from that traffic while Google is nowhere.

So this is the goal. You have to think about what happens when you lose it because it’s never permanent, it has never been permanent. And this is the point, almost every SEO audit that I’m making is always like, okay, this is where you are growing, let’s think about what happens if you lose it. What you are trying to develop this time at this point while it’s growing because I don’t know our link-building campaigns or our PR campaigns or whatever, but let’s think about now while we are here, what we are going to do when it goes down because this will happen depending on many circumstances.

Google updates, Google search changes, AI overviews, whatever happens, it’s always going to go down at some point and then you work to go back up. Maybe you develop new content, maybe you find new angles, maybe you restructure your site, whatever it takes to go back up, it takes time. And you need to survive this in between going down and up, you have to have a plan of how you’re going to survive.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And your point being if you do have that traffic, that traffic is attention, and make sure that you then direct that attention to other places like an email signup or social account so that you capture some of that when you have it. And then you can communicate to those people in a different way. I think of a great example, I have a friend who has a finance site or somebody that I know, and the traffic, I don’t know what it is, but I would guess it’s pretty similar to what Pinch of Yum, our food site, would be. But as a site, as a company, it probably makes 20 times as much as we do because he’s been really strategic about building an email following, capturing that attention, putting it into email, and they make most of their money through their email newsletter. And it’s like tens of millions of dollars that they’re making.

And that is a really, really incredible thing because 10 years ago they would’ve just been monetizing the ads, that’s what it was. But, he did what you are talking about, which is capturing those people that were coming to a site and was really strategic with saying, I know that this email is one of the most controllable things that I can have, so I’m going to use that as the main thing as opposed to it just being traffic. So I think it’s really wise advice. Do you have any insights on how to do that well? How do you get people to even sign up for an email list other than a form on your page or a pop-up that encourages people to sign up?

Ann Smarty: I’ll be very honest, I haven’t been very successful with email signups. What I did well was building a community and I built quite a few of those throughout my career. So I would create a private space for people to sign up and get some free help, free advice, and just before you know it, they’re helping each other. And anytime your name is brought up elsewhere, somehow they are there to protect and advocate for you. So that is something I’m much better at than emailing marketing.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Ann Smarty: I feel like email marketing is much less time-consuming, so I would love to learn that trick. Maybe it’s just this is what I’m good at, connecting people, networking with people and getting them, being private communities. So that is just my way. There are other great ways to create long-term assets and traffic driving. I know a person who lost all organic traffic to their travel blog, but they managed to create Google Ads and have a huge profit margin between paying for Google Ads and making money from affiliates program. And they somehow managed to do this.

So, this is something where I try to manage my client’s expectations a lot of the time. No one wants to hear that, but organic traffic is not what we own. It’s not what we can really control. We can do our best, but even if we manage to increase it, there is still a huge chance you will lose it. So figuring out what you do if you lose it, in my opinion, the best way is to create something you own like an email list or the community.

Bjork Ostrom: Community, yip.

Ann Smarty: Community, to me, has been more successful because in close touch and we have brand ambassadors, there are always a bunch of people. 5% of that community really comes every day to your site. For some reason, I could never figure this out how they are motivated to come to you. Maybe there is some term or concept to describe this, but for me, that’s why I like creating communities because it’s not just you. There are people who are willing to be there with you every day for some reason, they find you helpful, awesome, encouraging, funny, whatnot enough to come to you every day and support you. And that’s why I like community so much.

It could be a micro-community, you don’t have 100,000 people. It could be a thousand people, but if they are encouraged to be there and if they find value in being there, that can be priceless in terms when you have trouble, you can say, promote this, help me with this. And they will be all over the place and helping you get over anything.

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm. That’s great.

Ann Smarty: Yeah. One other thing that I’ve been successful with is also building my personal brand. And it’s not for everyone, it’s not for every business owner, but that also helped me to survive many downs in my project so I could switch from project to project pretty smoothly because people knew me. So that’s another thing to consider.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And you hear a lot of people talking about the importance of brand and personal brand in 2024 as a consideration, When you think of business building, think of brand building and those in some ways being synonymous. It’s a great tie-in, I think of Memberful, which is a sponsor of the podcast as a platform that allows you to build communities, one that we want to call out. But how have you built yours? Do you use a certain platform for it? I see that there’s, on your site, you can say Join a Roundtable. Is that the community portion of what you’re talking about or what does that actually look like for you?

Ann Smarty: Oh no, my community is more standalone. I had my bloggers at some point, and I have viral content, which is still my community. They’re all custom-built. I have the developers. It’s not just a forum or coaching community, it’s little functionality. So people were able to do something inside my blog. They could exchange guest posts with valuable content , they could share each other’s articles. So it’s connecting aspect of that community that they could always come in, get someone’s content on Twitter, X, Facebook, Pinterest, and then they could also add their own URL to have other people share that URL.

So it’s always something, not just talking or helping each other, my communities, but also action-driven with, you don’t have to have a huge following to get your content shared somewhere, this is your community to ask for some exposure on social media. So they were custom-built. I still plan, and that’s my plan for SEO to create some private community of independent SEO experts, so they’re not huge names to help them build their names, find gigs, maybe build their sites. So I’m planning to create that, something that is mostly motivational, inspirational, but not as action-driven as my previous communities. So I will look at that solution. What was it, Memberful?

Bjork Ostrom: Hmm. Yeah, Memberful. They’re a sponsor of the podcast.

Ann Smarty: I will look into that. I’m curious about all kinds. I hope I had more hours a day to check more things.

Bjork Ostrom: Look into those, yeah. I’ve also heard people mention, it’s almost like an education platform called SKOOL, S-K-O-O-L.

Ann Smarty: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I saw that, too.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s like you, we’ve custom-built our solution. I know people do groups, which is a little bit more of Facebook groups. Obviously, it’s more closed off than maybe some platforms if you’d want it to be a little bit more open. But the point is, and I think this is a really good takeaway from the conversation, to think more holistically around SEO and for SEO not to be this transactional thing where you put a token in the SEO machine and you get traffic out. But to think of it holistically as how are you building a community? How are you creating good content? How are you intentionally putting yourself out as an expert?

Getting interviewed, you talked about your willingness to go on podcasts and YouTube channels and the intentional effort around that, and a lot of it is slow work. Community building is slow work, but it’s impactful. And I think that’s a great takeaway or thesis almost for this world of SEO, which is kind of this holistic way of approaching it, which I think is really great.

My guess is, Ann, that people would be interested in following along with what you’re up to, maybe reading some of the content you’re producing. Where can people follow you on social media? Where can they get in touch with you, learn more about what you’re up to?

Ann Smarty: Yes, thank you. I’m Ann Smarty on LinkedIn and I’m very active there with weekly live videos, weekly newsletter. If you are not a LinkedIn person, I’m also on X as seosmarty, and on Twitter as Ann Smarty. And my site, my new agency is smarty.marketing. So check those out. Thank you so much.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on Ann. Really appreciate it.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and thank you so much for listening to that episode. We really appreciate it. If you liked this episode or enjoy the show, we would really appreciate you leaving a review or rating wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Ratings and reviews help get the show in front of new listeners and help us grow our little show into something even bigger. We read each and every review and it makes us so happy to hear when you’re enjoying the podcast or what you would like us to improve or change in upcoming episodes.

All you have to do is find the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, whether it’s on Apple or Spotify, or another player, and enter a rating and review. While you’re there, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss a new episode. We really appreciate it so much and it makes such a huge difference for our show so thanks in advance. And that’s all we have for you today so have a great 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 week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Shaunda Necole from the food blog The Soul Food Pot. She also happens to run two other websites, one of which is a personal website, and another of which is a travel blog all about Las Vegas.

In this interview, she shares more about her journey of entrepreneurship, starting from her first business owning a cheerleading product company to how she got to where she is today. In this interview, Shaunda also chats more about her love of keyword research and SEO and how that has really shaped the growth of her websites and the success of her businesses. Shaunda even provides consulting to other creators, especially those looking for some guidance after all of the recent helpful content updates. And she has a really awesome perspective on SEO and Google and just how to deal with all of these algorithm updates that have been coming at us lately. It’s a really fun interview hearing all about Shaunda’s journey, and we know you’ll love it, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Shaunda, welcome to the podcast.

Shaunda Necole: Hi, Bjork. Hi, everyone. Yeah, nice to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a lot of things that we can talk about because you’re doing a lot of different things, but I’d be interested to start with your fascination with the world of SEO. I know for a lot of people listening to the podcast, it can be a necessary evil. It’s like if people want to produce content, they want to build a blog, they want to build a following, and it’s like, and I have to do this thing that is SEO. It’s not true for everybody. A lot of people love it as well. And you’re one of those people who actually really loves the world of SEO and search. Did that come after you started to produce content online, or had you always been fascinated with that and you were like, “Hey, if I’m going to be fascinated with SEO, I might as well start a site?” What came first?

Shaunda Necole: Both are true. I have three sites, so at the very first site, it was definitely not the case where I knew anything about SEO. We ran a retail store for cheerleaders, so I had a cheerleading company before, and I remember people would send us emails, because we had a website, about, “We can help you with your SEO.” I had no idea what SEO stood for, so I definitely didn’t start the way that would’ve been ideal where I came in knowing how to do this first. By the time I got to the second blog, that was the case.

But I think my fascination started with Pinterest, where I used to teach Pinterest marketing. I still love Pinterest. If anyone’s not using it, it is a blogger’s best kept secret. Pinterest, being a search tool, what a lot of consumers don’t realize that it’s a search engine. It was just really neat just being a visual person to use Pinterest and to see all of the colorful bubbles, which are your keywords. And then when you search, unlike Google, predominantly on Google, you get a lot of text, and your results were on Pinterest, you get beautiful pins and pictures. It’s easy, and then you click through, and then you’re off to someone’s blog or website or product to find whatever it is that you came there searching for.

So Pinterest just made sense to me because it had that visual component to it. I began to really study, and whenever I’m into something, I am pretty laser focused, so I got laser focused on Pinterest. And then once I learn something, I’m always eager to tell the world and share, so I began teaching Pinterest. The fascination with search began from there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s almost like a gateway drug. It’s like-

Shaunda Necole: I love it.

Bjork Ostrom: … you have the images, so it’s not like 100% technical, and it gets you into this world of like, oh, you can create a piece of content, you can optimize it. It still is like a version of SEO, it’s just on a platform that maybe also has a band towards design aesthetic. And then it’s like, wait, now this similar but different can apply to another world, which would be Google. But some of the same concepts apply. I’ll be interested to talk more about Pinterest. Before we get too far away from it, I’m interested to hear about your first business.

The comparison that I have in our world are really good couple friends are launching a wedding business. A friend, he already has a videography business. He shoots videos for Pinch of Yum, and now they’re launching a venue called White & Sable. We can add a link to it in the show notes as they’re trying to build in their SEO.

Shaunda Necole: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s so funny because for 15 years we’ve been doing this like building a blog, and now Angela, our friend, is reaching out to me and she’s like all into this world of SEO because they have a site and they want to rank for it and they want to be strategic about it. So it’s been a really fun connection point for us. My guess is it’s kind of a similar thing where you have this cheerleading business, it’s a retail business, so it doesn’t need to be search forward, but you’re also adjacent in that you want to show up when somebody’s searching for a cheerleader store near me, or maybe you’re just have an e-commerce store. So what did that business teach you both about search, but also just about business?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, great question. And congratulations to your friends, by the way, I’m rooting for them.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, thanks.

Shaunda Necole: Well, I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years because of the cheerleading store. It all started because I was a cheerleader. It was one of the, sounds corny, but one of the best things in my life. I learned teamwork, responsibility, just really core values of community. And so I always carry that with me from high school. And then I have a daughter and I was so fortunate and very giddy and happy that she wanted to be a cheerleader. So we did the cheerleader, the travel circuit, and competition teams. And what I found as we dove all the way in on this is that at that time, we’re talking back in ’05, ’06, that there was nowhere to try on things, walk into a store, try things on. Everything was not even internet at that time, but catalog purchase, so you couldn’t just walk in, try on a pair of shoes. Cheerleading shoes run totally different than street shoes. So it was just a whole thing.

My husband, he’s been an entrepreneur first, so he was like, “Oh, there’s a void, let’s fill it.” He had no cheerleading background, which actually was amazing and excellent because he was always pretty much the person that could see the forest from the trees and would be able to guide us. We were emotionally attached because of teams and all kinds of things. So we started that store and we started with a website. What was it? I have to try to remember the name as we go along, but it was a website, kind of the plug-and-play. This was before Wix and all the tools that make it easy for us today. Business, I learned so much. I mean, it was just before the days of Square, so for example, for us, our cash register system was about $3,000. We couldn’t just get a-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and super clunky.

Shaunda Necole: Oh my gosh, yeah, big back, clunky, the whole thing. I learned so much about taxes actually because of payroll and we had employees and profit and loss. The big thing that we learned from the cheerleading store, which I think definitely transcended for me into going online, in the later days… Well, to start with first, we learned that it was really necessary for us to create our own products. That was really where our profit margin was going to be, in actually manufacturing our own products. So we scaled from a retail store in the mall to maybe about eight years later to a retail store in an office warehouse space because Amazon became our customer and they would buy directly from us in that point.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Shaunda Necole: We were manufacturing hair bows and hoodies and T-shirts and that-

Bjork Ostrom: All your own product? So you launched a brand and then you sold that brand through the channels that you had already established to resell other brands?

Shaunda Necole: Exactly. And so, Amazon had some light SEO in there. My husband played more with that at the time, but it was getting your products… Amazon ads, so we played with that when it was holiday time, and so you had to put the keywords in, and of course, when you launched a product, you wanted to boost that. Same kind of concept, almost like a podcast, getting those first ratings. I think it’s similar on Amazon today so that product would rise to the top. There was some light SEO in there, but we definitely just learned a lot about business. Working with Amazon, it was amazing for us. In the cheerleader space, we were the first company in that space to make it onto Amazon. We sold both channels where they bought from us, we shipped and sold directly to them in big pallet order sizes. And then we also sold as a seller on the platform as well, so it’s sometimes even competition between our own products. But we learned just the whole e-commerce thing. So when I came into the online space, I really had kind of a leg up on how things work from the whole Amazon business experience.

Bjork Ostrom: And even so much of what you learn is all the stuff that you talked about with a P&L and taxes. I think the reality of running on a platform, whether it’s Amazon or an e-commerce shop, part of it is almost like conditioning. I don’t know if this applies in the world of cheerleading, but I’ve just-

Shaunda Necole: 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: … been picking up tennis again and I’m like, “Oh, my wrist is always sore now.” I was like, “It was never sore when I played all the time.” And I feel like as an entrepreneur you get conditioned around, hey, we have the thing, which is cheerleading and the product, but then you also have the thing that supports the thing, which is the P&L and making sure that you’re keeping track of inventory and taxes and just the reality of all of that that surrounds a business. And it gives us an advantage and leg up, like you said, when you do start your next thing. What happened to that business? Did you wind it down, or is it still around, or did you sell it? What did that look like?

Shaunda Necole: We winded it down and it all took shape organically. All of our employees were cheerleaders, go figure, so we would purposely hire cheerleaders because they understood the business, they understood the sport, and that was people who are in that industry, it’s almost kind of die hard, so we needed people who really understood that model of sports. And so, as my last girls began, it was just organic, they would go to college and naturally go on and make a life for themselves. So I stopped hiring as they went on to do that.

To shorten the story of how I got into the online space, I transitioned into that, and it all just took shape together. But I started collecting a brand of product, McKenzie-Childs. I still collect them. Well, pre-COVID, they would have this in-person event every year, this huge sale where everything’s like 50 to 80% off. Their products are pretty pricey, so it was a really big deal. So fanatics like myself would go to the sale. It’s like a little village of 900 people, but 20,000 people would come in to buy all these products over three days. It was insanely wonderful. And so I decided if I’m going to go to this sale, the entrepreneur in me said, “Why don’t you put an ad out there and see if you can shop for other people and start a personal shopping service. They’ll be my clients, and they’ll pay me for it, and basically would just pay for my whole trip.” That’s all I even wanted, was just if I pay for my trip and I can buy stuff there, I’m good.

I did that. I easily got clients just from eBay, putting it out there. One of my clients said, “Hey, the brand is having a contest and you can skip the line,” because remember I told you there’s like 20,000 people that come through trying to get in, especially on day one. And if you win you can skip the line. So I didn’t have social media back then, so my daughter was just graduating from high school and she made my first Instagram account. From there, I did all this posting, and I actually won the contest. With all the hashtags we were using, I made all these friends that were collectors as well. It was just such a wonderful experience. I kept the account, and then she created my first website, which was a Wix site at the time.

That’s how my clients would keep in touch with me. I started blogging about the products and then every year at that sale I put up my product, which was my personal shopping service, and they would be able to purchase from there. It just totally evolved into my first blog, which is now my name shaundanecole.com, a lifestyle site, kind of all of us full of all of journalistic entries about what I ate today and what product I’m loving. So that’s how it took shape.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that I think is so fun to think about is when we let ourselves go and just our brains think about, “What do we love doing? What is something that we’re passionate about? What do people need who maybe are also passionate about a similar thing?” I think sometimes what we can do is we can get locked in on, “Hey, this is the path forward. It looks like this. Here’s how you do it,” but there’s a million, literally, a million different ways that we all be going about building a career or if not a career, like side hustle, at least to start income and revenue doing things that maybe we would be doing in different ways anyways. It sounds like for you it was that entrepreneurial spirit combined with this thing that you’re already going to do, which is go to this annual sale that they do. Essentially it’s like home goods, like dinnerware.

Shaunda Necole: Yes. Some furniture.

Bjork Ostrom: Furniture, things like that. For people who couldn’t go, they would hire you. And then was it commission based?

Shaunda Necole: Right. It was a flat fee to hire me and then a commission based, so I would get X percent of the amount that I shopped for them for.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that’s so great about that is day one, your business was profitable. You were starting this thing and people were paying you an upfront fee and a commission, and so it’s like you had this little community who knew the hashtags, you knew who to communicate with, you knew the conversations to have. How did that evolve? Once you saw that as a thing that worked, my guess is you continued to post on social, learn how to build a following there, you were posting online, started to learn more. What did it look like to evolve into what it is today where you can, as we were talking, the site might get a million-page views around the holidays, you have additional tour sites that you’ve launched? We can get into all of that, but before we do, I want to hear how it evolved out of that initial relationship for people to do the shopping for them.

Shaunda Necole: It’s what you were saying, the picture was pretty much painted that way. My daughter created the website, but initially I was just on Instagram. That was my platform, and that was new to me. I had Instagram for my business, the cheerleading company, but the cheerleaders ran that. It really wasn’t something that I did. So Instagram was really new to me, especially from a personal standpoint. It was just a personal thing at that point. It evolved into a business.

My business model, kind of funny, it was just I only got paid once a year at that point because it was an annual sale. What happened is the influencer industry took shape. I was posting, like you were asking, every day because it was fun. It was just something I love to do about this product that I loved. I have tons of it in my home, so I had content for days to create and share on Instagram. And so I just began to get followers. I often forget this, but really, Instagram was part of my first SEO part of the evolution because of the hashtags, which categorize things. When I even think about why I really enjoy SEO is I am a neat freak and it’s like everything has a place and there’s a place for everything, so bins and organization, that’s my jam. I think of SEO that way, of compartmentalizing things, compartmentalizing keywords and grouping things together.

Hashtags were very similar. Like you said, I learned my community, I learned what hashtags resonated with them. My goal would be to… now it’s always we’re trying to get top of search. It was to own the hashtag. So whatever hashtag I was using, I wanted to make sure that my Instagram posts were at the top of that hashtag because I knew my audience, that’s how they would… We’d look at the hashtag like a catalog as collectors of this product, and so I wanted to make sure that mine were top of search, and that’s how I garnered more a following by doing that.

So that’s how that took shape. And then I just kept writing on the blog and posting on Instagram and brands began to reach out. And that was how the business became profitable at that point beyond just one annual sale.

Bjork Ostrom: The one time of the year.

Shaunda Necole: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What did it look like when those first brands were reaching out? Was it interest in posting to the site, working with you in a sponsor capacity to write a blog post, or was it mostly Instagram? What did that look like?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, it was mostly Instagram. I didn’t, at that point, still know much about the blog. That was just home base for my clients to come to every year, so a lot of my energy was put on Instagram where I was posting there maybe one or two times at least every day. I think this was before Instagram Stories. Stories may have come the next year or so. My first brand that reached out was a jewelry company, and I actually ran into their physical kiosk in Disney at Disney Springs, and I almost had a panic attack I was so excited. And so my daughter’s like, “What?” So I had to explain, I had to go explain to the people working the kiosk like, “You gave me my first shot. You sent me product.” I was so elated. But that’s how it started with a brand just sending product.

And gosh, I think it was Nivea was my very first campaign, and it paid pretty well. I was floored at what the email came in and what they offered. And then I did a good job, the brand gave them more money to continue the campaign, and they came back for another round of the same product promotion. And so that just got really fun. This was probably like ’16, ’17, and by the time I got to 2018, I was looking for a manager. I really enjoyed the collaborations and they were all on Instagram. I don’t think I’d had a blog placement at that point. Everything was happening on Instagram, the partnerships. I thought that I need a manager because I don’t like the negotiation part. I am an entrepreneur. I understand like you said, P&L, and all those good things, but I like creating. I’ve always been a creator. I made hair bows. I’ve always had that gene. And so the negotiation part or the pushback, I’m not the person that goes and haggles for the car. I just want the price.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. And it’s also hard when you are the creator negotiating on your behalf.

Shaunda Necole: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a weird dynamic, maybe not for everybody, but I think it’s helpful to have somebody negotiating on your behalf. Let alone if you don’t like the process of doing it, what a relief to get somebody else to come in. So what did that look like for you to find that person? How did you go about doing it?

Shaunda Necole: It was like at that point, I’m not sure how it is today because I’ve had the same manager since that time, but when I was looking for a manager, I had some coaching consultation calls with some different influencer consultants. They were all in agreement that I should have a manager, but there were only maybe five that everyone knew and they were all at capacity. So one day, I think it was Brittany Hennessy who wrote the book, I think it was just called Influencer, it was a great book, and she-

Bjork Ostrom: She’s been on the podcast before.

Shaunda Necole: Yeah. Oh yeah, you have, exactly. So Brittany posted on Instagram a post asking… It was just a question that she asked. I don’t even think it had to do with agent specifically, it was just a question about brand and influencer relationship. As I was adding my comment, I started reading the others and I noticed this person commented, and whatever their comment was, she mentioned that she was an agent. She may have said, “As an agent, I think X, Y, Z about such and such.” My eyes lit up, and so I went and found her page through the comment and followed her and got in touch with her. And then here we are, I think, five years later that she’s still my managing agent. We actually found each other on social… or I found her on social media-

Bjork Ostrom: It feels appropriate.

Shaunda Necole: … and our first phone call… So appropriate. We just hit it off, and the rest is history.

Bjork Ostrom: How do you work well with a manager? I know you’ve heard all different people talk about experiences and, “Hey, I’m working with an agent or a manager and it’s really difficult for whatever reason.” Or some people are like, “Oh my gosh, it’s so nice to have an agent or a manager because for whatever reason.” So I think it’s helpful for people to hear their reflections like in your case, what are the things that you feel like allow the two of you to work well together and maybe talk through what that process looks like?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, I think for us it’s a lot of communication. And this is even separate from even her managing my brand or any collaborations, but we just hosted an influencer, we called it Influencer Oasis. So we had it for the influencer community in Las Vegas where I live. But we just really communicate well together. So we came together and hosted an event, exactly what I was saying in the beginning, to share our knowledge, her as someone that negotiates with brands and worked closely with brands and then myself just as an influencer and SEO strategist, sharing with that community how to level up, how to monetize better in the year.

We have a really just a good relationship, and there’s a lot of communication. For me, in the beginning, she helped give me a lot of structure, because this is, I always still say, it’s the wild, wild west out here. We are still paving the way of what this looks like as far as content monetization, whether that’s through brand partnerships or ads on your site, however that looks, or product creation. She gave me a lot of structure because I had no idea why brands chose me when they were reaching out prior to having someone help me negotiate that. So the first thing we did, she had me create a media kit. She would say, “X to this” or “Check mark yes to that.” She put things into perspective. We have monthly calls as an agency altogether, and she tells us what brands are looking for, what we’re doing that’s working, what’s not working. There’s just a lot of collaboration, and it’s just someone else who has their ear to the brand world streets, whereas I’m very engulfed in content creation. So it’s just really good.

At this point, she actually teaches and has a blog on her site also, so I’m able to even share the SEO side with her. But it’s also nice because she’s in the content creation arena now too so that she understands even more of what her creators are doing and the things that we go through. So I think the collaboration just works so good because there’s a lot of communication in our structure.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Does she post about brand like, “Hey, here’s brand news or industry news that’s happening.”?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What is the name of the site?

Shaunda Necole: She is Johanna with an H, so J-O-H-A-N-N-A, and then Voss with a V, V-O-S-S.com. And so on our Instagram, she has a blog also, she does share a lot of industry tips. She’s just one of those people who’s always like, “Hey, you got a question? Shoot me a DM, I’m happy to answer it for you.” So she’s just a very collaborative person.

But for me it meant the world not to have to negotiate things. So speaking gigs, I started to take those on, and I didn’t have to negotiate that fee. I wouldn’t have known what do I charge for that? And so she automatically did the contract for the speaking gig that comes from her. And so when I’d go somewhere, if I’m out of town doing a speaking gig or presentation, everything’s like A, B, C, it’s already set up for me. This time you’re here. This time you’re here. These are your deliverables. Make sure you use this hashtag or make sure this picture goes in, and they only want it shot at this angle. I like checklists, and so that’s what she really provides, that foundational checklist of things to make sure that are met for said project that’s taking place.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s so much parsing through that you have to do to pull out of a contract and be like, “What is this actually going to be about? And what are the expectations here?” The idea for you as a creator and creative to spend your time, number one, negotiating a contract, and then number two, pulling out the deliverables and the dates on those, it’s such a great thing to be able to put into somebody else’s court that then they take care of and for them to come to you and say, “All right, here’s what it looks like.” I think a lot of times you pay agents and managers well, but you also are probably making more than you would otherwise because, like you said, know rates and they know what to charge and what to ask for.

Shaunda Necole: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. All of that is… Oh, go ahead.

Shaunda Necole: Oh, I was just say quickly my, I think our first deal together, she upped it by a couple of thousand dollars and I was like, “Whoa.” She just knows what she’s doing.

Bjork Ostrom: All of this is like a profit center for you in the world of working with brands, you talked about speaking, you talked about Instagram, but we haven’t even touched the world of content and ads, which is another profit center that you have with your blog and website and building that up through search. What did that look like for you to balance the traction that you had getting paid to work with brands and sponsors with taking time to build up traffic, which you would monetize with display ads? How did you balance those two things? And then how did you get to the point where you had hundreds of thousands of page views?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, so in all honesty, I don’t spend much time with brand partnerships anymore. I really found my zone in the lane of content creation on my site specifically. So for me, it’s really important that I’m growing my brand. And when I do work with a brand, it would be more in a collaborative space where it’s elevating my brand also and not just where I’m doing the service for them. So I’ve shifted gears on how that works for me in my business.

SEO, so I have this one blog, my name blog, the shaundanecole.com, and again, just like most of us who have started with this, it was definitely throwing spaghetti at the wall, just whatever I felt like writing about, what I saw that inspired me, but it was completely, I mean for lack of a better word, random, the content I was creating. So Pinterest, it did and still does do very well on Pinterest, but Pinterest, which is great, unlike Google, doesn’t require you to have a niche. You can talk about all kinds of things, and it doesn’t matter. If you understand their search engine structure, if you need to get traffic for chocolate cookies, then you create pins for that and understand how that works. But you can also create pins for what I wore today, and that still works on Pinterest collaboratively with that. So when I-

Bjork Ostrom: Whereas Google, generally speaking, you’d want to stick to a category. So it’s not like you have a site with 200 posts and 100 different topics.

Shaunda Necole: Yes, yes. Google is very much looking for authoritativeness because it wants to trust that you know what you’re talking about. I mean, I always think of Google as a store itself, and they want to serve the best products to their customers who are people in search, people searching are their customers. So it wants to make sure that when it’s showing you something about what I wore today that maybe your niche is fashion on this particular style of what I’m looking for, and not that you write about fashion and chocolate chip cookies and what vitamins to take, that it’s all over the place. So they’re really looking to serve someone at mastery of what they’re doing to their audience. And so, again, that doesn’t matter so much on Pinterest, but it does with Google.

I got an Instant Pot. Instant Pot was all the craze, and I wondered, “What is this thing?” So my husband asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I was like, “I want an Instant Pot.” And so I got an Instant Pot, and I just found it to be the best thing ever. It says it on my blog, but I do probably 97% of my cooking in my Instant Pot.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Shaunda Necole: And so I’m from Virginia. I live both in Virginia Beach and in Las Vegas, so I grew up with Southern cooking. My parents are from North Carolina. So southern soul food cooking, it’s a staple. I’m in the South, and it’s just what we grew up on. So I began to take recipes that were traditional family soul food recipes and I learned that instead of … and a half to cook candy yams, I can do that in five minutes. It tastes the same, everything in the Instant Pot. So that became really an inspiration for me to recreate traditional southern soul food recipes but with modern kitchen appliance, whether it be Instant Pot, air fryer, and so that was my niche for starting the blog.

I met with an SEO strategist before starting because I was like, “I’m going to do this right this time. I’m not going to just start creating content and then figure out why this isn’t working.” She told me that, “I know you may think that you have some health content on your lifestyle site and that people will come here and then they’ll see your recipe and want to look at that too.” She’s like, “They won’t. They’re coming for a specific reason, and the other thing that you have there is not going to be of interest to them if it’s not related. So you need to separate the content.”

And so that’s what I did. So when I started writing about food, I completely separated food from the lifestyle site, and that’s how The Soul Food Pot, my food blog, took shape. And so from there, I was just very, very niche about that. So if I go out and I have a wonderful seafood or let’s say Italian meal, whereas before I’d probably think, “Oh, that’s great, let me write about that,” I don’t, it’s not southern soul food. So I’m very specific. That’s something I may post in Instagram Stories just to share with the audience, but it can’t make it to the blog. It’s not the genre of what I’m writing about. And so… Oh, go ahead.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting to think about just intent as a consideration when creating content. When you think of Instagram, oftentimes, but not always, or any other social platform, the intent is entertainment potentially or just curiosity or exploration. And so often with search, the intent is pretty clear. It’s like somebody who wants to make Southern Fried Chicken. They maybe will also read an associated post with it, but they’ve made up their mind, that’s what they want.

Shaunda Necole: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And so I think it’s really a good point to make, the one that you made around thinking about what is the intent of somebody related to the content that you’re producing and how does that change the content that you produce. Do you ever find it to be restrictive, like, “Oh, it’d be really nice if I could do this.”? Or is it actually freeing to know, “I can only do this and I won’t do this because these are the boundaries on the type of content that I’m creating.”?

Shaunda Necole: I think it’s the latter. It’s the freeing, because now there’s no guesswork about, would this rank, should I do this? Again, I like the checklist, I’m a organization checklist kind of person, so the boundaries are really good for me that I’m not guessing or, like I said before, throwing things at the wall trying to figure out, “Will this rank? Won’t it rank?”

For me, Google just makes sense. I would call them clues, but I just feel like the answers are already there. If you just study a search, you can just say, like you said, fried chicken. If we just search that and we pay attention to what shows up in the search results, because search intent, as you mentioned, is very crucial, and that’s the starting point. So if you were to search fried chicken, honestly what’s going to come up is probably restaurants. That’s typically what someone’s searching for. Now, if we add the word recipe to that, then that changes the game. Now there’s someone who wants to-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a different intent.

Shaunda Necole: … make different fried chicken. And so those are things that really matter that would be step number one in doing keyword research, is to understand what the intent is of the audience when they’re going in for that search. I do find it more liberating because it gives me more clarity as to what I should be writing about and what we can just leave for Instagram Stories and still content, but we just won’t put it in this space.

Bjork Ostrom: Lindsay and I talk a lot about this when we think about where does stuff go. We have all these options of these places where things can land. They can go on a website, they can go on a social platform, they can go on Pinterest, they can go on an email. I think that your point around understanding the intent of people is really good because then it helps to clarify, “Okay, this is maybe not something I’d post to the blog because you want to be genre-specific.” But if it’s still interesting and it’s still unique or people might like it, you could post it to Instagram. There’s not going to be like some algorithm hit because you posted about an Italian meal when you’re out in Vegas when the general theme is like Southern.

Shaunda Necole: Exactly.

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 100,000 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. And even if you’re not quite at the point of being able to apply to Raptive, they can support you in your traffic-growing goals through an 11-week email series. Head to foodbloggerpro.com/raptive to get access to this free series.

Everything Raptive does is in support of creators like you, whether you’re just starting out or bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site each week. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

So tell me more about splitting the site. So you had your site, it was your name, and then you’re like, “Okay, I want to be more strategic about this,” so you created The Soul Food Pot that’s going to be this focus on these soul food recipes, but also taking those and making those easier or more accessible, quicker, potentially maybe using Instant Pot or air fryer. And now you have a travel site where you talk about Las Vegas as well. How do you divide your attention between those? Or is it more of a playground and you’re like, “These are the things I like to do, and what do I want to post about today?” Tell me about the decision-making process with that.

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, I would say it’s more of a playground because anyone who knows me knows that I love Las Vegas. So I say now that I have the site I’m the newest spokesperson for Las Vegas. I actually, because of the site, garnered a book deal, so I have a travel book coming out next year in stores everywhere about Las Vegas, 100 Things To Do in Las Vegas Before You Die.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, it’s just super fun for me thinking I’m just small town Virginia girl that loves Las Vegas, and now I have a publisher who’s willing to support me in a book on that.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is also one of the benefits of picking a narrow niche, is that it’s easier for people to say, “What do you create content about?” If somebody wants to work with somebody to create content about Las Vegas, who do they go to? Well, they go to you.

Shaunda Necole: Right? It very clear.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s clearly defined. Yeah. Right.

Shaunda Necole: Yeah. So that was wonderful. It was an easy yes for them because the site existed. So it is like a playground. Sometimes I have to tear myself away like, “Oh, I want to write about this for Vegas, but I need to get this recipe up.” But I do feel that because of SEO I’m very in tune with my audience on both sites. It’s usually pretty clear as to what’s the next thing that we’re writing about, and I let the data also tell that story. One of my rules in SEO is that one of the pillars that I have for myself is not what you say, it’s what they say. And so it’s always the content creation is based on what the audience is looking for. Sometimes it comes in the form of a comment where that happened recently where someone said on the Vegas site, “Can you share things to do here and how to get an Uber?” I was like, “Oh, that’s amazing. Yeah, how to get an Uber in Vegas because if you’ve never been to Vegas, you don’t know really what that looks like. Do they come to the airport? Do they take you to the strip? What does that really look like?”

And so it was a great blog post. I syndicate to MSN. I think that one did amazing even on that platform. Sometimes it comes directly from my audience’s direct feedback of, “Can you share this type of post?” And then most of the time it comes from Google Search Console and what keywords I’m ranking for or what posts may need supporting posts because they’re doing well or we need to branch out. There’s more to cover ground on this one subject. So that goes for the food blog and the Vegas site. I can say that I am very in tune with what each site needs, and that’s how I tend to write from there. And for both, even SEO, they’re just things that I can talk about in my sleep, so it makes it really fun to create content and to share new content around both of those subjects where it’s soul food or whether it’s Las Vegas.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. A couple of questions coming off of that. One of the things, it’s interesting to think about the world of travel because it’s so different than the world of food.

Shaunda Necole: Completely.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you able to expense trips? When you go out, is that part of it? I feel like that would be one of the many benefits of a travel site, is suddenly that is your business.

Shaunda Necole: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s all… not all, but I would guess a lot of the things that usually people would consider to be tourism vacation is like, “Oh no, this is content, and therefore is a business expense.” That’s great.

Shaunda Necole: It so is, yeah. It’s almost like pinch yourself too good to be true because when we moved to Vegas, we fell in love with the Vegas strip, so we are those locals who constantly are going to the strip. We just had the Super Bowl, so when they are amazing things going on, if I’m buying tickets for any of the activations happening around town because of that, it’s totally a business thing even though we’re really enjoying this experience. So that is a really fun part of it. But yeah, definitely travel and food are two totally different, I guess, animals, you would say, like a cat and a dog when we’re talking about creating content.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that you talked about that I’d be interested to hear your reflections on are syndicating the content. You said you syndicated to MSN. What does that look like, and what is the thought process with that, and how does it work?

Shaunda Necole: It’s something that’s new for me, and I’m really enjoying it. The greatest thing ever, and again, it’s a pinch me moment, I can’t believe that they’re letting me do this, and it’s true, MSN’s owned by Microsoft, I mean they have billions of users, and you’re earning backlinks from this incredible source. So in essence, it boils down to you have content on your blog, and MSN allows you to literally add a plug into your site, click a button, and now that whole article, whether it’s a recipe or a travel article, goes over to MSN with all links that you have internally or even affiliate wise externally from your site. You maintain the canonical link, meaning that you maintain the original source link so you’re not competing with your content on MSN with the same content on Google, you maintain the original source link. Google just knows that this content was worthy enough and it’s just being shared over here. And MSN even says, “This post originally comes from The Soul Food Pot,” whether it’s corn recipe or whatever it is. So it’s amazing.

There’s an ad profit share with that. It’s just something I’ve just gotten into this year. Look, I haven’t even gotten to the money part of it, just the aspect of earning that type of backlink is just simply mind-blowing and incredible.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about what a canonical link is for those who aren’t familiar?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, thank you for getting me to clarify that because it’s a clunky word that I dropped in there. For example, in this case where it’s the exact same article being shared over somewhere else, Google would definitely recognize that and say, “Hey, hey, hey, what are we doing here? This is the exact same content. Shaunda, it’s on your site, on The Soul Food Pot, and it’s over here on MSN.” So what it is is MSN is categorizing it saying that, “We are not the canonical link, that we are not the original source link.” I call it in my head, it’s like the sanction link, the original source link, and so that’s your link or my link if it’s my content going over to MSN or any other platform it could be. In this case, MSN is coding it appropriately so that Google understands that the original source is The Soul Food Pot’s recipe in this case and MSN has now a non-canonical link where they are just syndicating or sharing that same exact content, but it’s over here.

It’s important that it’s coded correctly for Google because I think we all know we can’t just copy and paste a blog post on our own site and title it something different, that Google definitely frowns upon that because it’s not good for the user. The search intent is for what they search for, so we can’t just duplicate things and call it something else, and in essence trick the user or the search engine.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. Canonical, usually being a link that you don’t even see, a lot of times it’s just hidden behind within the code, like the structured data, but it’s a signal back like, “Hey, this is,” like you said, “original source,” and so Google knows that. You’ve mentioned a couple of different things, talked about doing some keyword research, talked about Google Search Console. What are some of the other tools that you really like from a SEO perspective that you find helpful in your SEO tool belt?

Shaunda Necole: Right, so I love a keyword research tool. Quite honestly, some of the tools that I used to live and die by when I’m creating an article have changed since the HCU, or helpful content updates, those that have taken place with Google from the end of last year. It was the end of quarter three they started, but around quarter four into where we are now into 2024.

My process is a little bit different. I still use a keyword research tool where I go in and just look at what’s the search volume on this? Is anybody even looking for this? How to approach it, what’s the best keyword that I should be using? I’ll start with Google to see, again, search intent, what comes up. If I’m putting in fried chicken, again, are they looking for a restaurant or are they looking for how to make a recipe? So we’re always starting with Google to make sure that we’ve covered ground on the search intent. And then we’re just playing with what’s the right keyword we’re trying to rank for here. Whereas I would really deep dive and take that further, I used to use a couple of keyword tools where I’d go so granular as to find out what questions are people asking. I had a tool that would pull specific questions from Google, but HCU has changed things. We’re noticing, of course, that content where it was like, “Oh, long form content, long form content,” it really isn’t wanting that anymore because it’s not as user-friendly.

Definitely we’re seeing Quora and Reddit forums showing up in search when we’re doing searches. I think everyone’s seeing that. Well, it’s because it’s actually easy, that it gets right to the point, it gets to the point of what the user searched for, and gives them a pretty quick logistical answer. Like I said, I feel like the answers are always in Google. By just performing a search yourself, you can see, I don’t even call them clues, just the answers of how Google really wants things for its customer. I hope I answered that question. I still use keyword tools, but not the same way.

Bjork Ostrom: Almost saying using Google as the primary tool, finding a keyword, and then just seeing what type of content is ranking well for this keyword right now, and using that as a soft indicator to inform potentially what type of content should be created for that keyword. Because it’s obvious like, “Okay, that’s the thing that Google prefers.”

If it’s in the world of travel content and you’re creating something like the best steak dinners in Las Vegas, you can see, is there somebody going super deep on an explanation of each restaurant? Is it just a list of the top 10 with one sentence after? And that can be something that informs what type of content we should be creating if the intent is SEO. When you are creating content right now on any of your sites, is it always SEO forward? Is that how you’re approaching all of the content creation, is thinking about SEO?

Shaunda Necole: It’s definitely SEO forward, but at the flip side of that, we’re not writing for SEO, if that makes sense. For Vegas, my site is Vegas Right Now, and so I like to be the first on the scene, the source. So when new things really happen there, I like to be able to share that. That’s really not necessarily an SEO thing, it’s just I want to make sure that we have really current content about what’s happening in Vegas today. We keep updates of shows that are happening so that when you’re coming to the site, you’re not getting last year’s shows showing up, it’s the current shows, like in the next three months that are happening. Then, of course, once we decide what article is going to be published, what that subject is, then there is definitely an SEO strategy because we want to make sure that people find it, which is very important.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You mentioned HCU, helpful content update. My guess is that most people are familiar with what that is and how that played out, some people might be super familiar with the ins and outs. But everybody probably to some degree has been impacted by it, some people pretty significantly, other people not as much. I know that you, along with creating your own content, work with other publishers to help sort through all of this. What are you seeing right now in terms of sites and blogs and the impact that HCU has had?

Shaunda Necole: Honestly, I feel like HCU has affected most of us. There are articles on my food site that we are rewriting just to be in that position that I talked about where it’s more directly to the point. So I shared a lot of stories because my recipes come with a lot of cultural relevance and stories of how my family may have gotten to this, so we are certainly doing updates. I like those challenges. It’s funny, I just like to know that I can be flexible and adapt to changes, so I embrace them and we just move forward in that direction.

But it’s a lot of what I mentioned, that whereas we would put so much into one article, that we really need to look at that and see like, “That probably should be two, maybe even five different articles. It’s probably not a one-article thing. There’s just too much.” I think of it on the travel side, it’s like dad content. So if you were thinking you’re going on a vacation, and dad’s probably the one who knows how tall the mountain is, who scaled it before, what year that happened. That would not be something that the average user, maybe mom who’s going in, or kids want. They just want to know what time’s it open, what time’s it closed. Give me just the things that I need as a traveler to know how to get to this national park or this attraction. And then in a separate article, we can dive into how high is it, how much did it cost to build it, all those dad kind of things. So that’s the way that I’m seeing, and like I said, we see the Quora on the Reddit show up, because they really condense that content into what the user really just needs to know very quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. You see the lists of sites that are impacted positively or negatively, and the Qouras and the Reddits are just off the charts. It’s just like there’s so many search terms that have been gobbled up by those sites. In the food world, if you’re just doing recipe content, a Quora or a Reddit maybe won’t cannibalize those as much… or not cannibalized, but take those over. But if you were doing best yoga pants or something like that and you ranked really well or best places to visit in Minneapolis, you could have ranked for that, and then suddenly now there’s Reddit and Quora box and it has all of these threads from these platforms, and it’s like, “Oh man, you can see pretty quickly how a single algorithm change can upend your business and change things.”

As we round the corner and close out, I’m curious to hear you, as you look forward within your business, you’ve had a lot of experience with business, we talked about starting with the retail store, learning the ropes, getting into the world of publishing online, both with your platform and your blog, and refining that process, and now here we are in 2024. What do you think of when you look out and you look on the horizon to where you’re going? As an entrepreneur, as a creator, where do you see the opportunities and what would your advice be people who are going to be in the game with you when you look ahead?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, I love this question. My strategy is always long-term, so it’s never just like for today. I’m always trying to see this as a full-fledged… It is a full-fledged business, but seeing that things that we’re creating are for the long-term and not just for today. One of the tips I would have is simply just being well-rounded, just not just brand partnerships. We sell digital printable products also. I do consulting. There are websites. And for me it’s more websites. I really enjoy the content creation. I really enjoy the SEO structure, so I look forward to a fourth site in 2025. My eye is on a pet site. I travel with my pets, and so I would love to share how I navigate that, how I get them on a plane and they’re quiet the whole time, and just share those stories. And they’re just used to it and they love it. So it’s just thinking long-term type of content.

I think we say evergreen content, but really making sure that we’re hammering down on things that are going to make revenue for years to come. I just don’t think in this day and age, maybe like five years ago it was different, or honestly, maybe a year and a half ago it was different, but as a content creator, we cannot ignore SEO any longer. It is crucial to how content is created. To rank top of that search engine, it’s very important to be in tune with how search engine optimization, how that optimization works.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, there’s something to be said about that idea of diversification, and we have versions of that. We have Pinch of Yum, we have Food Blogger Pro already as a software tool, but then also, and we don’t talk about this a lot, it’s like we have this other world of real estate. And it’s the ultimate contrast to all things digital, but the reason is, number one, similar to you, I think there’s something to be said about it’s enjoyable to have multiple things that you’re doing. I think for some people, if you’re only doing one thing and it was really narrow and that’s all that you’re doing, it might get old and you might burn out. Some of it is just being able to sustain yourself by having variety.

But the other piece that is so helpful is that you know that if one of your sites is impacted, you maybe have another site and that site might not be impacted. And so there’s a little bit of this load balancing that we can potentially do. You have to make sure it comes at the right time because you can’t start four things at the same time, but I think it’s really wise to think about what does that look like to balance across multiple things so you’re not just in one area and to have those different revenue streams that you can have as an entrepreneur and bonus if it’s all stuff that you enjoy doing.

Shaunda Necole: Totally agree.

Bjork Ostrom: It sounds like that’s true for you, whether it’s traveling with your pets or going to Las Vegas or making incredible recipes.

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, and definitely you mentioned the real estate conversation for another time, but that’s our family business. We have tenants and property, so it’s the foundation to all of it. But yeah, that’s a whole ‘nother wonderful conversation.

Bjork Ostrom: At the top of the hour, this is what happens, is then we open up this entire door that we can walk into and we could explore, but we’ll have to schedule another podcast interview. But yeah, I think it comes back to that, and I think a lot of the conversations, even that I have with creators who are at a certain point where they’ve been able to build up some profit, the question then is like, “What do you do with that?” It’s probably a series that we could do on the podcast, which is like, what do you do when you’re at the point where you have established success and have this profit coming in? Do you reinvest it? Do you, in your case, invest in real estate? Do you put it in the stock market? What are all those considerations which are fun but also potentially daunting decisions to make?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah. Definitely can be daunting decisions, but the geek in me, it’s another fun conversation.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, okay, it sounds good. Shaunda, if people want to connect with you, if they want to reach out, I know that you talked about working with other publishers and maybe people have a trip to Las Vegas coming up, what’s the best way for people to connect with you and follow along with what you’re up to and see all the other stuff that you’re doing?

Shaunda Necole: Yeah, absolutely. So Shaunda Necole is my site, and actually it’s the home base now, so from that site you can get… It’s Shaunda Necole. My parents were a little creative, so I’m S-H-A-U-N-D-A and Necole is very untraditional, it’s N-E-C-O-L E.com. And from there there’s a dropdown, I think, under About Me for my consulting services. But also on the homepage, if you want to know more about Vegas, you can link directly to my Vegas site, which is vegasrightnow.com. And then also on the homepage there’s a direct link to my food site, which is thesoulfoodpot.com. And on Instagram, I am also Shaunda Necole.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Last question for you. We’re doing a trip to Las Vegas, hypothetically, where’s the one restaurant that we need to go to? We have one night in Vegas. What restaurant is it?

Shaunda Necole: One night in Vegas, oh gosh, because on the strip off the strip. Well, I’m going to say this one because it’s dinner and a show, so it’s almost kind of like speak easy-ish, but it’s not completely hidden, but Superfrico. I just took some guests there because you get a dinner, you get a show, you get a DJ, it’s so Vegas.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. There it is, superfrico. Love it. We’ll add it to the list next time we go. Shaunda, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Shaunda Necole: Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me. I loved the conversation.

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.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how you can optimize the existing posts on your blog without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? With Clariti, you can discover optimization opportunities with just a few clicks. Thanks to Clariti’s robust filtering options you can figure out which posts have broken links, missing alt text, broken images, no internal links and other insights so you can confidently take action to make your blog posts even better. 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’re making your good content even better, and that’s why we created Clariti. It’s a way for bloggers and website owners to feel confident in the quality of their content. 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 Clariti, 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 week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Marley Braunlich from the food blog, Baked Abundance. Marley also happened to start working full-time at an SEO agency shortly after she launched her blog, and in this interview she shares more about balancing that full-time job and her side hustle, especially since they both happen to be in pretty similar industries, and how she’s managed the burnout that sometimes comes with balancing those two jobs. Marley also shares some tips and tricks that she’s learned from her full-time job in the SEO world and how she’s worked to optimize her site for SEO, including things like building domain authority and increasing her backlinks. Just a friendly reminder if you haven’t already, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a rating or review for the Food Blogger Pro podcast wherever you listen to your podcast episodes. Without further ado, I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Marley, welcome to the podcast.

Marley Braunlich: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here today.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about SEO. A lot of people are interested in that world, but we’re also going to be talking about all things like energy, creativity, burnout, outsourcing, things like that when it comes to the world of content creation. But let’s start with the world of search. So you made an interesting career change in 2021. Not only did you start your site at the same time, but you also started a new job in the world of search. So by chance, was it just like, Hey, I’m going to start blogging and start this SEO job, or what was going on at that time in your life where you made these big changes in your career?

Marley Braunlich: Yeah, I got really lucky because when I started my site, I didn’t know anything at all about SEO or keyword research, and it’s very interesting to think about what my site might look like today if I had never gotten my SEO job because who knows what I would’ve been posting, probably everything under the sun and probably no content strategy at all. So I’m very grateful that that fell into my lap at the same time. I started my blog about two months before I started my SEO job at an SEO agency, and I started my site just posting recipes for fun, things I was making for my friends and family. No keyword research, had nothing, no prior knowledge about that at all. I went from a marketing role over to this SEO role and it’s been really fun. I’ve learned so much and come really far with all of my knowledge about search, and I really enjoy helping my clients and seeing their sites grow, and I’ve been able to put some of that knowledge over to my site as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. It’s one of the things that, we talk about this idea of we are all CEOs over our businesses. And our businesses could be a part-time job, it could be a full-time job, it could be freelance, it could be entrepreneurial, but really what we’re doing is we’re figuring out how do we craft something that is a really good fit for who we are and what we’re about in our lives? And oftentimes there are those transitionary periods where what you’re trying to do is align with the thing that you’re interested in. And in this case it feels like you did a really good job of that, which is, hey, search is a really important piece of the puzzle for anybody who’s building a website, building a blog, and one of the best ways to get on the job training for that is to have a job within the world of search.

So tell us what that job is like? What did you learn in that first year? And when you get into any type of agency, my guess is there’s a lot of things where it’s like, Oh my gosh, this is really cool. This is new information. And you also realize everybody’s trying to figure it out. There’s some element of everybody out there, whether you’re the best agency in the world or somebody who’s just new and starting, you’re trying to figure out what’s working. So in that first year, what did it look like and what were the things that you picked up as little knowledge nuggets?

Marley Braunlich: Yeah, it was really interesting because as you start out with most jobs, you are mostly shadowing a lot in the beginning, the first couple months and just trying to learn how your company does everything and learn from your managers and the rest of your teammates. So it was a lot of just taking in a lot of information in the beginning and just trying to navigate what SEO is, and catch up to where everyone else was at. And also on calls, just as clients are also learning about SEO because a lot of new companies and just different people in marketing don’t always get that SEO knowledge. I know even in college and my marketing classes, I didn’t even really learn too much about SEO at all, so it was like the first time I was hearing about that.

And so just really learning alongside clients, alongside my team, starting out with keyword research, a lot of SEO basics with even just heading styles and making sure you have 1H1 followed by H2s, by H3s. It’s surprising how many people don’t even know that going into creating a website or a blog and headings are just all over the place, and just different website platforms have been able to work in web flow and WordPress and custom platforms. And it’s been really fun to see just all these different websites and different industries from cryptocurrency to telehealth and even more so to learn even about all these different industries as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s like you talk about a crypto company that’s building on Webflow and suddenly that’s a very different equation, a very different outcome that they’re looking for and also a different strategy. And my guess is that it’s fun in that it represents something that’s new and unique compared to in our world it’s you have a similar playbook, which is you have recipes, you’re trying to rank for those recipes and you’re trying to figure out what’s competitive, what’s not, but also trying to figure out you want to create inspired content, not just optimize for the sake of optimizing, but were there things like, let’s say tools, getting into it as you started to learn, what were the tools that immediately surfaced as, Hey, these are tools that agencies are using? Because oftentimes agencies have the reps, they work with 10 clients, 20 clients, multiple clients, and so they’re looking to use the tools and refine their processes in a way that are most effective.

Were there any that in that first year or just recently even that you were able to pick up and say, Oh, this is a helpful tool if you have the budget to use something that is going to really help inform your SEO experience?

Marley Braunlich: So, of course, we use all of the basics that many food bloggers are also going to be taking advantage of like analytics and Google Search Console. We use Semrush internally for keyword research. So I’m the most comfortable with Semrush. I know a lot of other people use other keyword research tools, but I find that one to be pretty easy to use now that I’m used to it. There’s a lot of info in there, but very helpful to do competitive research and really drill down and get really granular with the keywords. And then just recently a friend actually told me about a free plugin you can get that I think is very helpful for SEO and it’s called the Detailed Chrome Plugin, something like that, detailed SEO. And really helpful also. I use that now and I shared that with my team.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Yeah, detailed.com, we’re actually having Glenn on the podcast I think later on, Glenn Alsop, who’s the creator of that plugin. For anybody who’s not familiar, if you go to detailed.com, he does these great write-ups on search engine optimization, and he focuses on usually public companies and he talks through their playbook and he’ll do it based on quarters oftentimes. So his most recent one as of this recording was March 27th, and it’s called Detailed Q3: Analyzing the SEO Playbook of Digital Goliaths In-Depth Every Quarter. And he just goes and talks through, it’s these really long posts and it’s like, Hey, here’s the companies that, point number two, business news brand, Fortune.com is currently averaging 46.8 million monthly page views, 25% year-over-year growth, and talks about some of that information.

So for anybody who’s interested, it’d be a great one to check out. And he’s coming up on the podcast too. So what did that look like for you? One of the things that I think about is I have a friend who’s a painter and he often talks about last thing he wants to do when he gets home is paint, whereas people would be like, wait, you’re a painter. Isn’t it easy for you? And then you have the most colorful house in the world. But what was it like to navigate the world of working at an agency and then nights and weekends maybe doing some of that same work for your own site?

Marley Braunlich: It is really hard. It can be really difficult because I will sit in my computer and I work from home and you’re doing all of this work for different clients, helping move their site forward and grow their website, grow their traffic, and so you’re doing a lot of the same activities that you would be doing for your own site. So I sometimes will be wanting to do other things and just bake or do the photography side, and I’ll put off some of that computer work for a little later because I just need a break from my screen sometimes. And that’s where I think outsourcing could be really helpful. I’m still looking for someone to help out actually right now with just some social media and Pinterest types of tasks, and maybe a VA or something like that because I need a little break from doing the same things I do for work sometimes for myself, but still good that I have the knowledge to still do it if I want to.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, there’s something about, we all collectively probably have versions of this where you have the knowledge base, you have the ability to do a thing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are drawn to do that thing or want to do that thing. Everybody listening to this podcast if they wanted to could probably get really good at QuickBooks, could understand accounting, could get really into the details of Excel spreadsheets and the numbers for your business. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that’s what inspires us and why we do what we do. And I think one of the things that we need to talk about is work that isn’t necessarily work to just increase the bottom line or get more traffic, but work because it’s something that you enjoy. And for you talking about this idea of really enjoying baking, we talk about this all the time, there’s all sorts of different income and one of the types of income that you can get from taking a weekend to bake and document that with photography if you enjoy doing that is inspiration income or restoration income.

It’s good work to do because it’s something that you enjoy as opposed to the slog. And I think that everybody listening can relate to that and sometimes you need to have the slog, you have to work through it, but other times it’s like it’s okay to just name it what it is, which is something I enjoy doing and I’m going to do it because I enjoy it. So what has that been like for you knowing that? My guess is you’ve seen companies that you’ve worked with, or you’ve been able to do this X-ray vision into another site and see like, Oh, they’re experiencing a lot of this growth and saying, Hey, I can see that. I can know what that playbook looks like, but also to be strategic around saying, I’m going to show up in a way where I can continue to enjoy this and not get burnt out. And what have you done when you have come up against those seasons of burnout?

Marley Braunlich: Yeah, burnout is very real. It’s happened several times because like you mentioned, sometimes you just need to push through and just still keep your head down and do the work. And so that means I’m doing my full-time job during the day and then on the weekends or evenings I’m doing that same type of computer work for my website. And so I’ll go through seasons of that where I am really posting a lot more recipes or doing a lot of the keyword research and content planning, or trying to get back links in those Facebook groups and things like that. Other times I find that I really need to manage stress and find ways to take a step aside from the site and whether it’s just spending more time outside or just really trying to prioritize ways to de-stress and step away for a little bit and then come back whenever I’m feeling recharged, I think is really helpful whenever you’re experiencing burnout or just a little bit of stress with trying to balance that full-time job with a side hustle.

And that’s what I’ve been doing recently. So I think that’s been helping a lot and it’s getting me inspired again to jump back in and start creating more content and also redefining my content strategy to be, if I have less time to put toward my site, I want to make sure that the recipes I’m making and all of the things that I’m doing are really moving the needle. So trying to just really focus in on that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I think so much of what we do is how do we continually show up over a long period of time? We talk about that, and a significant part of that is figuring out when you are coming up against your limit and making sure I think of it in the context of a car. And if you’re running the RPMs and the red, there’s the little dial. I don’t know a lot about cars, but if you’re running the engine too hot and you just keep it there, eventually the engine’s going to fall apart. I don’t know mechanically what happens, but if you run it too hot for too long, it’s going to stop working. And I think when I think about what we do, we are knowledge workers, so we have our mind and we have our body, and those are the conduits for us to do work in the world and we need to do whatever we can to preserve and fine tune those, our body and our mind, because that’s what’s going to be the main tool.

We talk about tools like Semrush or Ahrefs or Google Search Console or Google Analytics. Really the best tool is our mind and it’s our body. And how do we treat that really well because it’s the most important tool that we have. And I think your point about understanding when you are coming up against burnout or where you are feeling like you have those seasons of stress to be aware of it, not because it’s self-indulgent, but because you want to treat this tool well that you have, which is your mind and your body, and to be really intentional with that. So I think it’s a really important point and I think that everybody to some degree experiences it, I think, if you are doing what we’re doing long enough, but not everybody talks about it. What does that look like for you specifically? Can you give examples of when you came up against that and decisions that you made to combat that?

Marley Braunlich: So I would say leaning into outsourcing and also coaching has been really helpful for me. So whenever I’m in a confused state of where’s my site going, it’s been two years, what is the point of all of this? I’m not on Mediavine yet. What should I be doing? Should I do social media or should I focus on SEO or now AI? And then you’re like Pinterest, so you’re all over the place and just leaning into getting advice from others and talking to other food bloggers, getting some help when you need it, I think has been really crucial to maintain my site and just keep moving forward, and not just giving up. So highly recommend doing that. I have a close friend that’s a food blogger and we’ll bounce ideas off of each other a lot and send voice memos and chat through different ideas we have and see what’s worthwhile.

I’ve had a couple coaching calls with some people I met through Instagram that are food bloggers as well. That has been helpful. I switched to the feast theme last year right around this time, and I really love the way my site functions now and how it looks, and that’s been really great. Yeah, so I don’t know. Outsourcing is exciting. Also outsourcing-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Marley Braunlich: … photography too.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. What have been the main takeaways or things that you’ve learned in those coaching calls?

Marley Braunlich: I would say, well, I’ve done two different coaching calls. One was more for pitching and that was with Candice Ward and I was in the early stages of trying to work with brands and wanted to fine tune that process a little bit more. So she was really helpful building up that confidence and giving me some tips on just how to communicate with brands and how to find the right brands. I would recommend looking into a coaching call with her. And then I also worked with Kayla, I think Kayla Burton from Broken Oven Baking, and she also is Food Blog coach on Instagram. And she was really helpful in getting my site moved over to the right hosting and theme, and she has just so much knowledge, even an SEO as well, and she has these free emails that you can subscribe to that I highly recommend people sign up for. She just sends out all these really helpful tips, and those have been awesome to see. She’s on it with all of the new changes that are happening in the food blog world, and those have been really, really helpful.

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

This episode is sponsored by Raptive. When it comes to monetizing a blog or a site, display ads are a fantastic passive way to generate income on the content you’re already producing. In fact, Raptive display ads are one of our biggest revenue generators at Pinch of Yum. They make up nearly 80% of our overall monthly income. Raptive, which is formerly AdThrive, is on a mission to empower independent creators like you. And to date, Raptive has paid out more than $2 billion to creators. Not only do they help creators generate ad revenue, they also offer creators many other benefits to help support them with their audience revenue and business goals. For example, Raptive creators get access to industry leading tools like Topic, which helps creators discover opportunities to improve their content and plan the structure of their blog posts.

You also get access to resources on HR and recruiting, SEO, email marketing, customized AB, ad layout testing and more as a Raptive creator. You can learn more about Raptive’s creator levels and what’s all included in each level at raptive.com/creator-levels. Then when you’re ready to apply, head to Raptive.com and click the Apply Now button. Working with an ad network has had a profound impact on the way Pinch of Yum monetizes our business, and by being a Raptive creator, you’re getting access to results based solutions that can really impact the way your business runs and grows. Learn more at raptive.com. Thanks to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

So going back to the world of the agency stuff, one of the things that I draw parallels to often is sometimes when you go to the ATM and you make a deposit or a withdrawal, they used to, I think by default, just print out a receipt, a little, and then they would set it. A lot of times people would just set it on top of the ATM. So sometimes you’d go to the ATM and you’d see 10 different receipts and it would have, how much do people withdraw? What’s the balance? It is just this weird thing, but it didn’t have any personal information on it. So you could get this X-ray vision into everybody’s personal finance situation. You have that same thing when you are working in the world of an agency where you get this X-ray vision into these different companies in the strategies that they’re taking.

Now, obviously they’re all different, like we talked about. You have a home healthcare business and you have cryptocurrencies and you have whatever, maybe a pharmaceutical company. But I’m curious to know if you could, in your work within those agencies, identify anything that was a repeatable pattern or behavior or things that were working for certain clients that were just interesting or notable? And maybe it’s around strategies or tactics, but also maybe it’s around just their team and the way that they produce content. Anything that you could identify when you look back at the interactions that you had for those companies?

Marley Braunlich: Sure. Yeah. I would say that some of the most successful companies that I’ve worked with are very just focused and driven with their site. They are very stay true to their vision and their mission. They know where they want to be, even if they’re not quite sure how to get there. And just a lot of energy and excitement as well around publishing content and being very consistent has helped drive a lot of that growth. One thing that is interesting that surprised me early on was looking at whenever you’re doing keyword research and you’re looking at the search volume, you’re looking at the competition, and sometimes clients can be uninterested in very low volume types of phrases.

However, I have seen some really big success in conversions with low volume topics that are easier to rank for much quicker. And you might think it says only 50 people are searching this a month, but you’re getting 200 conversions from that one topic. So very interesting to see doing a balance of those higher volume topics that are maybe more competitive and it’s going to take a little longer to rank on page one versus those low competition and low search volume keywords where you actually might get just as many if not success-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Marley Braunlich: … topic and conversions from.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one of the things that’s in our world that’s a consideration is you hear 200 visits and it’s like, Oh man, I’m trying to get to a 100,000 or 50,000, whatever it is. And so you think, Oh, incrementally, what does that actually mean? What does that result in? But I think one thing that we can all be thinking about and consider is monetization via ads is one thing. I think it’s important and a really good consideration. But there’s also different in the example of a cryptocurrency, maybe if it’s an exchange, a cryptocurrency exchange, and they sign up one new user out of every thousand visits and that new user is worth a hundred dollars a year, maybe. Suddenly the metrics around a visit look very different, where in our world, maybe a visit is worth 5 cents, but in the world of somebody who has a product, maybe that looks very different. And so for all of us, I think it’s one of the things that we can think about.

Even we’ve had conversations with people who talk about email as a really important consideration and whether it’s Substack or Memberful who’s a sponsor of the podcast, talking about these ways that you can create a product and that product can be something that you can sell, suddenly that creates justification for going after lower volume keywords as long as it aligns with the thing that you’re selling because of those 100 or 200 people, maybe one of those converts and you make $50 or a $100. So I think it’s important to think about the conversion of people as well, and not just to think of it from a traffic standpoint of this many visitors equals this many dollars, but it’s also hard to do. So is there anything that you’ve learned within that world just around strategy and what people are selling, or for the most part, do they already come knowing, my guess is they already come knowing what they’re going to sell and they’re just looking to increase traffic via search to sell more of that thing?

Marley Braunlich: Most of the time, yeah, I would say most clients know what they want to provide, whether it’s a service or a product. On occasion, there’s some early startups that are still figuring things out and things are changing real-time. And so we’ll help guide that process with the data and just let them know what we think is a good direction to move in. And then a lot of time people are coming and they’re focusing a lot on paid search, and they want to move away from that because you get stuck there, and now you’re only able to get paying customers through paid service-

Bjork Ostrom: By paying for us. Yeah.

Marley Braunlich: Exactly. So they’re really interested in organic traffic and getting customers that way. And so we’ll focus on really building that up and trying to balance the scales there with organic to paid.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of the things, it’s like when you are so used to the world of organic search, you don’t even really think about paid search, but for so many companies, it’s a huge component of what they are thinking about is how do you get people to your site? Well, we could do organic search, but that’s going to take a while. Let’s just pay for it. And the great thing about it is if you figure out a way, if you have a product and the product costs $50 and you can pay $40 on average for a conversion, that’s a positive return on that ad spend. And so you can just do that all day long. And it’s a great way to build a business, is through paid advertising. And it’s like we know a lot of businesses that do that, but it’s harder to do that.

It’s much harder to have some type of arbitrage on paid if what you’re doing is, or advertising revenue because you start to crunch the numbers and it’s like, well, it’s going to be like we could pay three cents to get somebody over, but that doesn’t really equate in the same way. So let’s say somebody’s coming to you and they say, Hey, you’re in the world of search. I’m starting from scratch. You have seen a lot of the tools that work, some of the tools that maybe don’t work, and they want to build their stack. They want to build the tools that they can use and the strategies that they can implement. What would your advice be to somebody who’s coming in without any experience?

Marley Braunlich: So we’ll do a full audit of someone’s site right up front and just see if there’s anything going on under the surface that we need to address. And there’s some education that takes place as well, getting people familiar with SEO and what the purpose of it is and why it’s important. A lot of people just don’t really understand why it matters, and so there is that education piece that is nice to go over early on. Really just following SEO basics I think is a great place to start because a lot of people are just not there yet. So really just with the heading structure, understanding, you should have headings on blogs, and it shouldn’t just be a bunch of paragraph text, adding alt text to images and optimizing the images, adding sizes and dimensions to those, just all of the good stuff that I feel like a lot of food bloggers are actually very good at.

Bjork Ostrom: Pretty good at, yeah.

Marley Braunlich: Yeah. Where if you’re someone just starting a company, you’re more with the idea of the company or the marketing and less affinity, gritty website stuff. So I feel that food bloggers probably have a really good grasp of the SEO basics and best practices, and we have so many awesome resources with this podcast, other podcasts and food blog coaches and things like that, that I think people can learn a lot from.

Bjork Ostrom: How about backlinks? You had mentioned that as an important consideration. There’s all different ways that you can get backlinks, everything from black hatty type stuff to just trying to create good content and hoping people link to it. Any thoughts around that or strategies that you’ve seen work well for people who are trying to build up their backlinks?

Marley Braunlich: So from personal experience, I’ve been growing my domain authority. I just checked earlier and I believe it’s around 32 now. So very happy with that since I really am still working on getting backlinks and still growing it. And site is still fairly young, but I just utilize the Facebook groups that other food bloggers are looking for links to include in Roundup posts, and I was really surprised at how well that works. I’ll get a report from Semrush that will let me know whenever I get new backlinks and whether they’re from trusted sites and trusted domains, and I’ll see the website straight from the food blog groups listed there. And it always makes me excited to see those whenever they actually go live versus just dropping a link, because you never know if you’ll be selected, but it really does work, and it has been the main way I’ve grown my domain authority.

So for other food bloggers, that’s a great way to go. I have tried to do a little bit of PR and just reach out to local magazines or just online magazines and sites that are featuring entrepreneurs, and I’ve had a couple placements like that, so that’s also helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I remember super early on, we reached out to our hometown newspaper. We wee like, Hey, we’re doing a thing. Do you want to do an article on us? And they’re like, sure. They sent a reporter down and interviewed us, and it’s like the article, it wasn’t a great article. I remember throughout the entire article, they used our first name and last name anytime they referenced us. It was like Bjork Ostrom thinks that, dah, dah, dah, dah, and then Lindsey Ostrom is, dah, dah, dah, dah. It’s just like, Oh, man, this is such a obvious small town newspaper article. But nonetheless, it’s like you have a link and then you can build on that. And I had a friend, Jason, this was way back, he had talked about this strategy, and he has a site called A Hundred Days of Real Food, and he talked about in the early stages for them, they would start with a small newspaper and then from that article they would use that as a reference for the next step-up.

So maybe there was the smallest state newspaper. So for us, maybe we’d get something in the county news review and then we’d go to the Pioneer Press and say, Hey, would you be interested in doing this? And then from Pioneer Press, we’d go to Star Tribune and say, Hey, here’s an article in Pioneer Press and building up based on the articles that you have that were a little bit easier to get, but all of it’s like it’s work. It takes a lot of work or help a reporter out, Harrow, Harrow. All of that is, it works, but it is work as well to get it done. But over time, cumulatively what can happen is you can, like you said, build up those backlinks and whether it be through the groups where people are doing roundups or hustling to get mentions and articles and stuff like that.

So that’s great. Anything else? If you were to go back, let’s say you were to sit down with yourself in 2021 when you’re just getting started and have these big career changes coming up, it’s one of the questions that I like to ask is a final consideration or a thought. If you were to look back and say, Hey, here’s the advice I would give to myself starting out, what would that be?

Marley Braunlich: I would’ve wanted to start out on a better theme right away. I wasn’t sure because I have so many hobbies and just things that I’m interested in. I start new things all the time and I never know if it’s really going to stick. So I should have just went with the better theme right away because I wasn’t passing Core Web Vitals. My theme was really clunky. I tried to put it all together myself, and I had no idea what I was doing, and I probably wasted just so much time trying to even get it ready to have a website that the Feast theme was just so much easier and there was so much documentation on how to make sure everything was correct, where this other theme I had didn’t have anything like that.

So I wish I just would’ve done that early on because it was something that did stick, and even if it didn’t, I would’ve not regretted starting it the right way, because it was just a lot more work, having to go back and change everything later and to remember how to do all of that all again.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Marley Braunlich: So that’s probably the biggest thing because that would’ve saved me a lot of time, and I would’ve just been at a great starting point early on.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Great. Marley, super fun to talk to you about your journey, the things that you’ve learned along the way. And my guess is people would want to connect with you and follow along with what you’re up to. Where can people follow along, like social media platform that you’d prefer? And we will include those in the show notes as well.

Marley Braunlich: Yeah, you can find me at Baked Abundance on Instagram. My website is bakedabundance.com, and those are probably the two best places to find me.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Thanks, Marley for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Marley Braunlich: Thank you so much.

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&As and coaching calls to dive deeper into the topics that 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, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. Here’s the question, are you manually keeping track of your blog posts on a spreadsheet or project management tool? Maybe it’s like Airtable or Asana or maybe you’re not even keeping track of anything at all. When it comes to optimizing and organizing your content, how do you know what to change?

How do you know what you’re doing is actually moving the needle? With Clariti, all of that stuff is easier. It’s easier to keep track of things. It’s easier to know if the changes you’re making are having an impact, and that’s why we built it. We realized that we were using spreadsheets and cobbling together a system, and we wanted to create something that did that for you.

Clariti brings together WordPress data, Google data, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and it brings all of that information into one place to allow you to make decisions. Also, inform you about the decisions that you’ve made and if they’re having an impact. I could talk on and on about the features, but the best way to understand it is to get in and to work with the tool yourself.

The good news is Clariti’s offering 50% off of your first month if you sign up. You can do that by going to Clariti.com/food. Again, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food to check it out. Thanks 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 is our last episode of 2023. The next time you tune into a new episode, it will be on January 2nd, 2024, which is just crazy to think about. We are wishing you all a really Happy New Year, and rounding out this awesome year of podcast episodes with an amazing Food Blogger Pro Rewind episode.

This will be our last Rewind episode, and it’s a really great interview with Cree Carraway from Cooking with Bliss. This was the second part of our Blogging with a Full-Time Job Series, and this episode really resonated with listeners. We wanted to bring it back and make sure that everyone got a chance to listen to it if you haven’t already. Or if you listened to it when it was first released, you might enjoy listening to it again.

We find that you always get something different out of these episodes depending on where you are in your own blogging journey when you listen to them. In this episode, Cree shares more about how she balances her full-time job with blogging, and how she prioritizes different aspects of running her business in order to avoid overwhelm.

For example, she strategically focused on SEO during this time to increase her site traffic in hopes of joining an ad network, but she decided not to focus on social media instead. She has a really great perspective in terms of balancing everything that’s needed as a blogger, and it’s just a really inspiring episode that we hope you’ll get a lot out of. Without further ado, I’m just going to wish you a Happy New Year and let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Cree, welcome to the podcast.

Cree Carraway: Thank you for having me, Bjork. I really appreciate it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s going to be a fun conversation about this series that we’re doing. It’s a series focusing on what it’s like to blog with a full-time job. You’re in this interesting position where you have your work and you have your side hustle as your blog, and you’ve had some success with your site and you’re getting some traction. Now it’s like, “Okay, this is a legitimate business.”

We’re going to talk about that, what that looks like, the mechanics of it. But before we do that, I want to hear about November 2019 when you were at this inflection point. It sounds like it was this point where you had some considerations around, “Do I do this? Am I burnt out? Is it too much?” Take us back to that point and where your headspace was at.

Cree Carraway: Yes, Bjork, for sure. I had, as you mentioned, so much burnout. I had taken a three-month break. At one point, four months, five months. I remember in November 2019, I decided to make a peach cobbler recipe. Excuse me, during that time, I hadn’t been really consistent, but I figure, “Okay, Thanksgiving is coming around. I’m going to make a peach cobbler recipe.” At that time, I hadn’t really focused on Google Analytics.

One day after making, or I think it may have been a week or so after making the peach cobbler recipe, I decided to look at my analytics. I was shocked that I had for that month from November 1st through, I don’t know, a couple of days before Thanksgiving, I had 15,000 sessions. I was shocked because I was usually used to seeing maybe 75 sessions, 150, and then it jumped up to 350 at some point.

But November 2019, I felt as though it was a turning point for me. With 15,000 sessions, I’m thinking, “Okay, now I feel motivated. I can really focus on trying to get into Mediavine.” At that time, that was my goal. I decided I’m just going to focus on SEO. I’m not going to try to do all the things. I didn’t know what was going on with Pinterest, so I just threw that out the door.

I felt as though I was spending too much time on Instagram, but I just felt like the return on investment was not great at all. I just really just focused on just trying to get into Mediavine. In June of 2020, I was at I think 24,000 or so sessions, close to 25,000. I decided to apply to Mediavine, and I was so happy that I had reached that goal.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. At that point, you apply, you get accepted, and you’re able to then start running ads, where I feel like there’s a couple steps along the way. When you’re in the very beginning stages, it’s like, “Wow, somebody came and they visited my site.” I still remember that in the super early stages for Pinch of Yum, when we’d post something and be like, “Wow, 10 people yesterday.”

I have friends who aren’t in the food space, but a mentor of mine who writes about philosophy and faith, and helped him early stages get set up with a blog. He’s like, “There’s somebody from Indonesia visited my site.” It’s just really exciting in those early stages. Then comes a point where you think, “Okay. What does it look like to have a new mile marker, so 1,000 people in a month, whatever it might be?”

Having these markers along the way, do you feel like in the early stages you had those? What were you anchoring off of? What was your goal in the early stages that you were shooting for? Or was it like, “Hey, I just know that I want to create some money from this and build this into something that is a business, and that was a little bit nebulous”? Where did you land in the early stages?

Cree Carraway: Well, are you referring to before November 29th?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. At that point, you’re like, “Hey, I know that I want to build this up to a point where I can apply to an ad network.”

Was that always the case, always something that you’d wanted to do?

Cree Carraway: Well, a little bit of an interesting story. Prior to food blogging, I had an online boutique. To make a long story short, there I wasn’t working with the best people.

It just felt like work. I actually ended up hating it so much. I just decided to just let that business dissolve.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. This was a business that you had started?

Cree Carraway: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What did you learn in going through that with starting a new business?

Cree Carraway: Well, a couple of things I learned was… Well, the thing that I learned the most, was when you’re hiring someone to try to understand why you’re hiring them. What I mean by that is I remember I hired a company to run Twitter at the time, and so I really didn’t know about Twitter.

I really didn’t know how to manage it. I really just didn’t know too much about Twitter. I hired this particular company to run Twitter for me. One day, I had gotten thousands of visitors, or not visitors. I’m sorry, what do you call when someone, I don’t know, what’s it called?

Bjork Ostrom: Like a Twitter follower or?

Cree Carraway: Yes, there you go.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, sure.

Cree Carraway: I’m sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: Suddenly there’s this huge increase from followers on Twitter.

Cree Carraway: Yes, exactly. I was really excited about that, and as days went on, well, actually as weeks went on, I felt as though no one was engaging. I’m thinking, “Well, at least one person should be engaging.”

I did my research, and so I realized that a lot of the followers were from India. As I looked at the accounts, it seems as though those particular accounts were not active.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like you get these followers, but it doesn’t really mean anything because it just could be any number.

Cree Carraway: Right, exactly. Once I realized that, I’m thinking, “Gosh, had I known a little bit about Twitter or how to manage it, maybe I could have caught that early.” Basically, I decided to let that company go, but in the meantime, I had dished out quite a bit of money to them. Then from that point on, I said, “When I hire someone, I’m going to know a little bit about what I’m hiring them for, so I can intelligently ask questions and things of that nature.”

But in any event, I decided to dissolve that company, and I felt like such a failure because Cree does not just let things dissolve and not do anything about it. Once I did that, I felt as though a load was lifted. However, I still wanted to build a company. I did a little bit of research online, and I looked up lucrative online businesses, and somehow Pitch of Yum showed up on the list.

I thought, “Wow, I really do enjoy cooking recipes.” From that point on, somehow I came across Food Blogger Pro. At that point, I figured, “Okay. This is something that I really enjoy doing. This is something that I think I can make into a business if I stay focused and do research and things of that nature.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You knew, “Hey, this is something.” That combination is such a great combination where you are passionate about it, and you want to hustle to build it into a business.

Sometimes people are just passionate and they don’t have the hustle, and sometimes people have a lot of hustle, but they don’t have the passion for what it is.

If you combine those two things, what a powerful thing that can be, and yet can still be overwhelming. At that point in November of 2019, it’s like, “Gosh, this is a lot. There’s endless things for me to do.”

Cree Carraway: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: How did you make the decision to say, “You know what? I’m not going to do any social media. I’m just going to focus on search”?

Cree Carraway: Well, because I knew that SEO would somehow get me to where I needed to be, I felt like that was the only thing. I knew that just doing Instagram or Pinterest was not going to get me there.

I had to really hone in and focus on SEO, because in my mind, that was the one thing that could get me into Mediavine, because I just knew just doing Instagram alone would not even get me at all. That I had to focus on that one thing.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. I had a conversation with a friend, friend of a friend, who does just Instagram and TikTok, and he does birth order humor. Older child, middle child, younger child, and how they respond to homework or whatever it might be. His name is TJ. Anyways, what’s interesting about it is like, “Oh, he’s in an industry doing work where he doesn’t think at all about traffic.”

All that he thinks about is followers and engagement, and the income that he produces is through sponsored content. In our world where you’re thinking about advertising dollars, if you’re not thinking about sponsored content or working with brands, it really is about traffic. With the changes in Pinterest, one of the main ways to get that traffic is through search. There’s also direct, you can get featured, things like that.

But it really is in our world, a huge driver of traffic is search. That being so important if you are looking to monetize via ads. If I’m understanding your story, you have this inflection point. November, you’re like, “Wait a minute, this is something where if I improve these numbers a little bit, then I can actually go through the process of applying to be part of this ad networks to start to create some significant income in a way where you’re also not having to have inventory.”

Cree Carraway: Right, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: If you have an online boutique, you might have $2,000 in revenue, but then you have $1,500 or $1,000 in expenses. That looks different than what in some ways can be pure profit. You have to buy food and do the work, and sometimes you’ll maybe hire pieces of that out, but that’s one of the great things about this.

One of the reasons why it makes it lucrative is because you don’t have a lot of back office overhead or cost of goods. When you first applied, when you got to that point, what did those first few months look like? Was that motivating to start to see $300, $400, $500? What did that look like, that amount? Then did that encourage you to work more on it once you saw the possibilities?

Cree Carraway: Yes. Okay. As I said, I applied June 1st. June 30th, I was actually approved.

I believe I received my first payout in September, and so it was for $431. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” For some reason I just expected $100, possibly $100.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah. The best part about this is you have a cheerleader in the background.

Yeah, what is the name of your dog in the background? Anytime that a dog can make an appearance, it’s a wonderful thing.

Cree Carraway: Right. Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. Her name is Ebony, and she’s a Chihuahua mix.

She’s actually in the backyard and I didn’t realize the window was cracked, so my apology for that. Hopefully, she’ll stop soon.

Bjork Ostrom: No, we all get it in this work from home reality that we live in.

Cree Carraway: Right, exactly. As I mentioned, so my first payout was $431, and I was blown away by that $431. I assumed, “Okay, so my next paycheck will be around $431, maybe $500,” and it was for $1,061. I just could not believe it. I was so encouraged and I felt even more motivated.

I remember saying to my mom, “Gosh, what if one day I can pay my mortgage through my payout from Mediavine if I wanted to?” My next payout was $2,550, and so it just went from there. However, then when you reach January, it changes.

Yeah. I’m like, “Oh my gosh.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s not so exciting.

Cree Carraway: Right, exactly. I remember January of ’21?

Bjork Ostrom: ’21?

Cree Carraway: Yeah. 2021, my January check, I believe it was $1,500. Oh my gosh. But after the first quarter, it gets better.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. For those, most people are educated in that world right now, but the idea being January, advertising budgets reset, scales way back. Even if you have more traffic, everybody’s suddenly interested in cooking and eating well.

Your traffic might go up, but earnings usually will go down in that first quarter, so you see that. Even in quarter to quarter you see that. Like the end of a quarter, money spend within advertising budgets will go up and reset.

Quarter three into quarter four you’ll see that. That’s why that sweet spot is really December at the end of the year, November and December.

Cree Carraway: Yeah, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: What were the things that you did and what were the things you didn’t do, that were most helpful for you to get to that point where suddenly you’re creating a substantial amount of income from your site?

Cree Carraway: I went through the SEO, I can’t remember the actual course name that’s on Food Blogger Pro, and I went back and read through the SEO on Threads.

Those can actually be overwhelming too because there are so many, but I just tried to just every day, just take in what I could. I listened to podcasts. That I pretty much listened to all of Casey’s podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Casey Markee, who is the Food Blogger Pro expert. You’ll see him in the forums in those SEO Threads, yeah.

Cree Carraway: Yes, exactly. I pretty much did that, and I started to be more intentional about my title. Yeah, that’s what I pretty much did. I just really dove into SEO, like whatever information that I found was reliable, was valid.

Obviously, all of Casey’s information is valid and things of that nature. I just really, really focused on his different podcasts or podcasts that he was on.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you remember anything that was a significant learning piece for you like, “Oh, actually I need to spend time in Google Search Console or keyword research”?

Or was there anything along the way that for you was significant in terms of a moment where you didn’t know something and then you did know something, and applying that new thing was impactful?

Cree Carraway: Right. Yes, totally. I started with Keysearch. I think they have a free version, I believe, if I’m not mistaken.

But anyhow, I remember using that for, or maybe they have a trial period, I can’t remember. But anyhow, I used their free service for I believe two weeks. I found that to be very, very valuable.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s the keyword, it’s optimization research tool, Keysearch?

Cree Carraway: Yes. Yes, for sure. Yes. I felt as though I would really benefit from their paid version. I purchased their paid version.

I decided to really focus on a monthly search that was around, I don’t know, 2,400 at the time.

Bjork Ostrom: 2,400 in terms of volume?

Cree Carraway: Yes, yes. I’m sorry, 2,400 in terms of volume. Yes. Then I started joining-

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about why you picked that number, just out of curiosity?

Cree Carraway: Yes. Well, I believe I recall Casey mentioning in one of his podcasts, maybe 2,000 or so monthly searches is a good point to start with. Don’t quote me exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. The idea being that if you’re in the early stages, you don’t want to start with chocolate chip cookies, which might have 100,000 because that’s going to be super competitive. You want to find this sweet spot and you can start to think about, “Okay, if I can rank number one or 2:00 or 3:00 for 100 pieces of content that get 2,000 searches.”

You can start to play the numbers game a little bit and say, “If you’re in spot number one for 50 of those, and then you get 1,000 of those clicks, that might be 50,000 page views in a month.” You can start to be strategic and think about how you can get those lower volume, but less competition keywords. That’s what you were thinking about.

Cree Carraway: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s super smart.

Cree Carraway: Yes, exactly. Yes. Then eventually I got a little brave, and so I started going for, I think, the highest during that time I went for was 4,400. But even still, I still stay within that range. Sometimes I get a little bit more brave and I may go for 6,000 monthly search, but that’s pretty much the tool that I use.

Sometimes I’ll go to Semrush just to gauge numbers there, because when you look at these different keyword tools, sometimes the volume can, I don’t know, it’s a bit different in terms of the keyword that you would like to aim for.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think it’s one of the realizations that is important within this world is the data isn’t 100% accurate. It’s the best guess at these tools don’t have direct access to Google necessarily. Sometimes they can pull in information via API, but it is a general.

It’s like if I was here and somebody was like, “How do you get to Duluth, Minnesota?” It’d be like, “Well, directionally you go north and if you get to Grand Moray, you’ve gone too far.” It’s that versus an exact calculation of this is exactly how many searches it is. Did you have a paid account for Semrush?

Cree Carraway: No, I did not. However, recently I decided to use their paid version for a couple months, but I didn’t see a huge benefit, so I decided to cancel that but I still stick with Keysearch.

Bjork Ostrom: Keysearch, yeah.

Cree Carraway: Yeah. You know what I did recently also, which was so valuable? I took, what course was that? It’s called Cooking with Keywords with I believe her name is Aleka.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Cree Carraway: If I’m not mistaken. But that was a really valuable course as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. The idea with that is all around keyword research for food bloggers.

Cree Carraway: Yes, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP, specifically a new offering they have called Cultivate Go. As business owners, I’m talking to you, one of the things we need to get good at is thinking about how we invest in our business. As someone who publishes content online, one of your most important business assets is your website.

But there’s a problem that a lot of us run into when we think about investing into our website, and it’s that it seems like there’s really two options. You have the like DIY, figure it out on your own, get really frustrated, spend a bunch of time, or pay tens of thousands of dollars to have a fully customized design and theme developed. But what if you find yourself in between those two options?

You’re a successful and established blogger, or even a new blogger who wants to invest in the best options, but you don’t have a budget of tens of thousands of dollars. That’s where Cultivate Go comes in. Cultivate Go is an offering from a company called CultivateWP, co-founded by Bill Erickson. An incredible developer that we’ve worked with in the past before we had our own internal team, and Duane Smith, an incredible designer.

For years, they’ve had their calendar filled doing these fully customized sites, but they realize that there’s hundreds of bloggers who want that same level of technology but didn’t have that budget. That’s where Cultivate Go comes in. It’s a semi-custom theme design and white glove site setup. That means that your Cultivate Go site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food blogs in the world.

You choose one of the core themes, you customize it with your logo, your brand colors, your typography. Then the CultivateWP team sets it up on a stage environment, and they can launch your site within one week and the cost is $5,000. It’s that perfect sweet spot for anybody who finds themselves in that in-between stage where you want the best of the best, but you don’t want to have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get it.

If you’re interested in checking that out, go to FoodBloggerPro.com/go or just search Cultivate Go in Google. One of the things that I love about your story, Cree, is that two pieces. One of the things that I heard you talk about was this idea of continual progress. It’s not like you’re going to try and do everything. You’re not going to try and do Pinterest and Twitter and Instagram.

You’re going to focus on one thing and make a little bit of progress on that, which we love that idea. The other thing that I think is so great is continual learning. Not only are you showing up every day and doing the work, but as you’re doing that, you’re also being intentional to learn along the way. What happens when you combine those two things, is you get to the point where you are right now, where you see success, you see growth.

I’m curious to know, when you look at today, we’re recording this in January. When you look back to November 2019, what has the progress that you’ve made with your blog, your business, what has that done for you? What is the change that’s happened because of the progress that you’ve made? Do you feel like you think differently? Are you acting differently? I’m curious to know what that’s done for you.

Cree Carraway: Actually, it’s more on a personal level. What I mean by that is what I see, well, I have two kids, and so they see me work really hard to build this thing. It’s so interesting that, well, my husband, he’s a big cheerleader of mine also, but so are my kids.

For example, when they see me working really hard to create this recipe or working on the blog post to have out during a certain period of time, my son, he’ll come up, he’ll pat me on the back, he’ll say, “Good job, mom. ”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Cree Carraway: Or my daughter, and so sometimes I’ll look at my Google Analytics and in my mind, I’m always trying to beat my number from the previous week. I’m like, “Oh, man.” Then she says, “What’s wrong?” Then I said, “Gosh, last week I had, I don’t know, 2,500 sessions on Saturday, but now I only have 2,400 sessions.” She’s like, “Mom.” She’s like, “Mom, but you have 2,400 sessions, mom.”

I’m like, “You know what? You’re right.” She’s like, “Mom, you’re doing great.” When you have kids and you encourage them in school, you encourage them in their sports or whatever extracurricular activity they may have, I encourage them so much. I’m their biggest cheerleader. When I hear them saying the same thing to me, I’m like, “Okay. They were really listening.” Because sometimes you think, “Are your kids really listening?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Cree Carraway: When they actually use the same words that I use for them, I’m like, “Okay, I think I’m doing a pretty good job as a mom.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Yeah, totally. It’s an opportunity for you to do a hard thing and your kids to support you in that.

Cree Carraway: Exactly, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: What a cool thing for the relationship that usually is us as parents supporting our kids in hard things, to give them the opportunity to support us or to support you. That’s really cool. I love that.

Cree Carraway: Yes, exactly. That it just makes my heart melt. Because if they see me working really hard and trying to build this business, I feel as though that’s going to always stick with them. They’re going to do the same thing.

As they get older, they’re going to remember, “Well, mom and dad worked really hard to build this business,” or whatever it may be, but just to just stay motivated, keep going, and just keep thriving.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Love that, Cree. You’re at the point now where you are making multiple thousands of dollars monthly from your blog, unless it’s January, right?

Cree Carraway: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: But also, as far as I understand, have you transitioned this into your full focus or do you have a full-time job that you’re also working on?

What does that balance look like and how are you making decisions around where to allocate your time?

Cree Carraway: Well, this is a side hustle. I do have a full-time job and a couple of things. I have a full-time job, and my son, he’s a high school athlete, and so his schedule is crazy. It’s crazy.

Bjork Ostrom: What sport does he play?

Cree Carraway: Basketball.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, great.

Cree Carraway: Yes. I feel as though-

Bjork Ostrom: Basketball is like a year-round sport. You’re traveling, you’ve got practices.

Cree Carraway: Yes, training.

Bjork Ostrom: It just never ends.

Cree Carraway: Right, exactly. I feel as though I have two full-time jobs. Obviously, he’s priority, and I try to, when it comes to my blog, I balance it around his schedule.

Unless my husband is available to take him to practice, to training, to traveling, to games, to this and that.

Bjork Ostrom: Whatever it is, yeah.

Cree Carraway: Exactly, exactly. But I really try to do what I can on the weekends, but he has games on the weekends too, but I really do try to sneak in one or two recipes if I can. I really have to be honest, I have no set schedule. I try to, but it doesn’t always happen because of his schedule or because of my work schedule.

I work from home, but still it can be challenging just trying to focus on the blog. What I have done, if I can, if my workload is pretty manageable during my lunch, I may sneak in a quick recipe and then on the weekends I’ll write the post about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I remember when I was working at the nonprofit, I would do a lunch sprint work. I’d go to Subway, I’d sit down with my computer and I’d get in, if I was taking a one-hour lunch break, which would be on the longer end, I’d get in a 35-minute sprint. It ends up being early mornings, lunch, evenings. A lot of times, I’d get home and I’d work evenings and weekends.

I think it’s one of the advantages being that it is, you can slot it in where you have time. I think for some people it’s an issue. It’d be really nice to be scheduled and follow a schedule, but one of the advantages is different than other side hustles, is maybe you’re just totally gassed on a Friday night and you don’t have the mental or physical bandwidth to invest in it.

You just say, “You know what? I’m not going to work on Friday night,” but then you can on Saturday morning and you can figure out when it works for you. Do you have thoughts?

Cree Carraway: That’s typically what I do. Sometimes I’m up at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning and sometimes I get my best work done because everyone’s sleep.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that by choice that you’re getting up then or you just can’t sleep?

Cree Carraway: Well, it’s both.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Cree Carraway: Yeah, it just depends. Bjork, it just depends. That’s all I could say.

Bjork Ostrom: We have somebody, Daniel on our team, starts his days at 4:00 AM and I’m always just trying to wrap my head around that.

I think I’m doing well when I get up at 6:00 and get everything in order. Then people like you and Daniel get up at three and start your day.

Cree Carraway: Right, exactly. Exactly, so it really depends. I look at it like this, building a business takes sacrifice, hard work, and if I need to get up at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning to get something done, I just want it out of my brain.

That’s one less thing in my brain. I do it, I feel good about it, at least it’s done. I could just go on about my day and if I want to work on it again Sunday morning or something like that, I’ll do that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, love that. In this series, we’ve talked to people about what that’s like to build their business while also having a full-time job. It’s a spectrum where some people are like, “You know what? I love what I’m doing in my day-to-day job, and I also love blogging. That’s a really good balance between those two things.”

Other people would say, “You know what? I would love to do this full-time and that’s my pursuit. My hope would be to eventually build it into a full-time thing.” Where do you land on that spectrum? What would your hope be when you look out 2, 3, 4 years, 1, 2, 3 years, whatever the timeline is, in regards to what this represents for you and for work?

Cree Carraway: Okay. First I want to say that I have a really good position. I get paid very well, but I would like to turn this into a full-time. I would eventually like for this to be my full-time job.

I don’t think I’ve reached my potential doing the food blogging. I have so many ideas as to what I want to do. Ultimately, that’s my goal is to one day soon turn this into a full-time job.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How you’re doing it is a really great way to do it. It’s similar to what we did, which is fitting it in when you can. Maybe the thing that you sacrifice most is time.

You don’t leave a lot of… It’s not like you have these weekly spa days where you’re taking four hours on a Saturday to unwind.

Cree Carraway: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Because you have family, you have your full-time gig, and then you have this. Not that you never get to the place of having more margin, but what that allows is for a more smoother on-ramp into this potentially being your full-time thing. As much as possible as you can draw that out, I think that’s great.

As opposed to sometimes what people do and teach their own would be like, “Hey, I’m going to do this. I’m going to make it my full-time thing. I’m going to start today even though I don’t know what it will look like or where the income will come.” But if you can get to a place where you build something where it replaces your full-time income, which that was the case for Lindsay and I.

She was a teacher, I worked at a nonprofit, so we didn’t have this huge lifestyle that we had to accommodate. But we were able to get it to the point where we said, “You know what? We’re at that point where we feel comfortable then making that switch.” We have some history with knowing that that’s been the case. That becomes a great switching point.

What about for people who want to go on a similar journey? They’re interested in following a similar path and saying, “Gosh, that would be really cool if I could get to the point where my site was making $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a month. That would be life-changing for me.” You’ve gotten to that point. What would you tell them in terms of advice and insight that you have being on this side of that initial journey?

Cree Carraway: What really worked for me once I realized, well, a couple of things. For me, what I had to do, I had to really stop focusing on the big bloggers. I had to really just stop following because I felt as though that was a distraction for me. Of course, the comparison game comes into play. I would say just really, and I know this may sound cliche, but just really focus on what you see as your vision.

Once you see your vision, I think that everything else will fall into place and that you will really come to a place to where it feels authentic. Because I know for me, at the beginning, I felt like nothing was working because I wasn’t being authentic. I felt as though I was trying to write the way other bloggers were writing. I felt as though I had to just create recipes based on what other bloggers were doing.

I felt like nothing was coming from me really, and I struggle with that so much. I just felt like I was not moving forward, until the moment I’m like, “You know what? I just need to stop following other people and just focus on what I really want to do with this blog.” Like I mentioned to you earlier, I had to pivot so many different times because nothing seemed right, but now it does.

But it took time, it took time. Once I realized, “This is my thing. I’m the director of this show and I’m going to do it this way.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. How would you describe your vision right now?

Cree Carraway: As far as where I want to take the blog?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things I heard you say was just really understand what your vision is and align with that. I’m curious to know what your vision is.

Cree Carraway: Right. Okay. Basically, well, earlier on I wanted to have a niche, but I just couldn’t find the right niche. I tried to do the healthy food route.

At the beginning, I felt as though everything was focused on quinoa. I made a couple of quinoa recipes, but I don’t really like quinoa.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Cree Carraway: I remember a few years ago, I think it was in 2017 or so, somewhere up in there, I did Whole30, but I just did Whole30 because I had a sweet tooth. I just wanted to challenge myself to see if I can go a month without sweets and cutting all this other stuff out. Then during that time, I’m like, “Oh, maybe my niche will be Whole30.”

But then I’m thinking, “Why would I do that when there are so many more successful Whole30 bloggers?” Alex of The Defined Dish, she was just killing it. I’m like, “Okay, that doesn’t make sense for me to do that.” Then I thought, “You know what? I’m just going to post based on how I eat.” I eat healthy already, but I don’t have to focus on quinoa and all these other dishes.

Bjork Ostrom: These are all the pivots that you were talking about along the way?

Cree Carraway: Yes. Then right now, my vision has been to just focus on how I cook for my family, whether it’s a healthy dish, a dessert, some type of bread, whatever it may be.

My vision is just to stick to how I cook for my family because that’s what I do. And because that’s what I do, that’s going to be easier for me to create posts around how I feed my family, if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Yeah. What’s great about that is it doesn’t require you to bend in a certain way to get somewhere.

Cree Carraway: Exactly, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like, “Hey, if you stopped blogging tomorrow, this is still who you would be.”

Cree Carraway: Exactly, yep.

Bjork Ostrom: If we can reflect the closest version of who we are. I feel similar in a way where if you and I were hanging out and the record button on this podcast it wasn’t flashing red, but it was just you and I having coffee, I think I would be curious about the same things and be asking you the same questions, because it’s just a world that I’m curious about. Point being, I think for us as creators, the closer that we can get to how we operate normally, the better.

Maybe becoming it doesn’t mean that you are willy-nilly and just do whatever you want. For me, I’m not going to do a podcast episode on self-driving cars. Even though Lindsay has this theory that if you talk to me long enough, no matter where we start in conversation, like you and I could start talking about quinoa and if we talked long enough, it would come back to self-driving cars.

But idea being that, “Hey, as much as possible, how can you get closest your content reflecting who your true self is?” Which is what I hear you saying, which is a really cool thing. Yeah, that’s great.

Cree Carraway: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: As we come to a close, I’d be curious to know, well, we’ll talk about where people can find you and follow along with you. The great thing is you’re starting to do a little bit more on social, which you can talk about, but we’ll talk about that. But let’s say you were having a conversation with yourself.

This is something that talking about the coffee shop conversation. You were sitting down with yourself in 2019 and you had a minute and you’re like, “Here’s what Cree from the future is going to tell Cree of the past. Here’s my advice for you.” What would that advice be that you’d give to yourself of two, three years ago?

Cree Carraway: Right. Pretty much what I just stated about just really focusing on your own vision and just staying true to yourself. To me, and I say that because that’s what got me over the hump really. To me, I feel as though, I believe I had mentioned this to you also, is that there’s so much noise out there on the internet in the food space, here and there on social media, Pinterest, and it can be so overwhelming.

Really, you have to just know what to take in, just what to take in and what’s going to help you progress slowly. Perfection, don’t go for perfection. It’s all about just progressing slowly. That’s another thing, I think trying to be perfect helped me back at the beginning. I still struggle with that, but I say, just get it out there and I can try to perfect it along the way.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that idea of perfecting along the way, I feel like it allows perfectionists to have progress over perfection when you say, “You know what? Let’s just ship this.”

If you really want to, six months from now, you can come back and improve it a little bit, but it doesn’t have to be perfect before you ship it.

Cree Carraway: Right. But that doesn’t mean that you put garbage out there, obviously.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. There’s a balance with that.

Cree Carraway: Exactly. Yeah, that’s my point.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that I think is important to point out as we wrap up here is this idea of protecting yourself a little bit from the noise and chatter. There’s a balance with that because it’s like you still want to know what’s happening, but I almost view it as opt-in content consumption. I think podcasts are maybe a good example of that.

Courses would be a good example of that, where you’re saying, “I need to learn and want to learn about this thing, so I’m going to seek that out.” But there’s something about the mental gymnastics that you have to do to avoid being riled up in some way. If somebody’s like, “Hey, flashing red light over here. There’s this thing, be aware of this. Or this thing over here, be aware of this.”

It’s really hard for that to not grab your brain and then to be consumed by that. There’s something about the sanity of dialing down the volume on inputs, especially inputs that you can’t control what the content is. Instead, dialing up focus in on-demand learning. Does that resonate? Do you feel like that was along the lines of what you were doing?

Cree Carraway: Yes, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Cree Carraway: For sure, 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: Cree, where can people follow along with what you’re up to? Find some of those old quinoa dishes that you posted, and maybe some of the more recent ones as well?

Cree Carraway: Right. Well, you can find me at cookingwithbliss.com. On Instagram, @cookingwithbliss. I archived all of my old posts yesterday, so I don’t have any posts there right now.

My plan for 2022 is to, I don’t know, just brainstorm on some type of strategy for Instagram. On Pinterest, I’m @cookingwithblis with one S at the end.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. I just want to point this out because you’ve done something that we’ve talked about a lot on the podcast and you’ve done it well, which is drawing a line in the sand and saying, we’ve mentioned this a couple of times, but I think it’s important to come back to it. I’m not going to do all of these things. I’m going to do one thing and do it well.

What’s great about that in this last section, is it doesn’t mean that you don’t do everything forever, but it does mean that you get really good at that thing. Then at some point you say, “You know what? I think I’m ready to roll in this additional thing.” What I hear you saying is, “I think I’m ready to maybe roll in Instagram.”

To some degree, it’s not necessarily a complete mastery, but you have some level of mastery of a certain thing. You know your plan, you’ve stuck with it, and now it’s folding something else in. I think that’s awesome and super wise that you’re doing.

Cree Carraway: One other thing I wanted to mention is, I don’t know, maybe this will resonate with some of our food blogging friends, but I was always afraid of email.

Before, I guess around, I don’t know, maybe the second week of October, I decided to create a quick-start guide around perfect holiday cooking. I created a five-day series.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Cree Carraway: So I did that. Then the last week of December, I decided to create this January Healthy Cooking Challenge. From the second week of October till today, I have 118 extra email subscribers. That was my focus, one of my goals into 2022 is to focus on email marketing.

My point in saying that, it isn’t as scary as I thought it was. To our friends out there, if they haven’t started email marketing, just try it. It’s not that bad. I thought it was really, truly bad at first.

Bjork Ostrom: Bad meaning difficult or?

Cree Carraway: Well, yeah, bad in terms of difficult. I just thought it was going to be so time-consuming. I’m still trying to understand it, don’t get me wrong.

But my point is that I tried it and I got, I believe, 114 or 118 more email subscribers.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The awesome thing about that is with email, it just layers. Now that you have that, you do the work once and that becomes a new multiplier on your content. Where people will come, they’ll maybe discover that, they’ll sign up, whereas before that just didn’t exist. People didn’t have that option to sign up.

Even if it’s a single-digit percentage, which it is with most people, of people who subscribe over to email, it still is a multiplier on your content that has a lasting impact. A great little note to wrap up on here. Cree, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It was a joy to talk with you. Really appreciate it.

Cree Carraway: Thank you, Bjork. This was so fun. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey, hey, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. I wanted to let you know that we have a live Q&A coming up. We typically have a live Q&A every single month for our Food Blogger Pro community, for our Food Blogger Pro members.

If you’re not a member or maybe you’re a new member of the community, maybe you don’t know what they are. I wanted to give you a quick rundown on what you could expect from a live Q&A at Food Blogger Pro. Like I mentioned, we have one per month, and in these live Q&As, we typically focus on a specific topic.

Whether that be photography, SEO, WordPress, developing recipes, we cover everything and anything on these live Q&As. Then Bjork or sometimes Bjork and a guest and industry expert, come on and answer all of our community’s questions live. Our community submits questions and then Bjork and whoever is joining him in that specific Q&A, will answer the questions live.

All of our past live Q&As are available for all members. They are just such a great time, and we love being able to connect in a way that’s face-to-face in a virtual setting. If you’re interested in joining our next Q&A and you’re not already a member, be sure to head over to FoodBloggerPro.com/join so you can learn a little bit more about the community and sign up there.

Then if you are already a member of the community, hello, hello. We hope to see you at our next one soon, and you can head over to the live tab whenever you log into the site to get access and register for our next live Q&A. Thanks again for tuning into this episode of the podcast. We appreciate you so much, and we’ll see you next time. Make it a great 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 week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Joe Pulizzi. Joe has been an expert in content marketing for many yxears, and you may know him from his book Content Inc. or his newsletter, The Tilt, in addition to his podcasts and the events he organizes. He knows content marketing forwards and backwards. In this episode, Bjork and Joe will be chatting about what content marketing even means in 2023 and how you can think about it different from advertising.

Joe also discusses the importance of differentiating yourself and delivering consistent content in this market and why you need to find your niche. Joe also shares more about what content tilt is and why you should apply it to your content strategy and why exit planning is so important for every entrepreneur and might give you a new way to think about the goals you have for your business.

One quick note before we jump into the episode. If you listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, a recent iOS update might mean that you are no longer subscribed to our podcast feed. If you head over to our show page at foodbloggerpro.com/apple and make sure that you’re still following the podcast, so just click that little follow button, that will ensure that the episodes you want to listen to are still downloading to your phone. Thanks so much for listening, and without further ado, I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Joe, welcome to the podcast.

Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having me. It’s about time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, this is old hat for you because you have the setup. This is first time with a new camera. People can watch on video if they want to do that later, but you are a podcaster among many other things. So talk about a couple of the podcasts that you do and then maybe just a quick background on your story because it’s really cool to hear how deep you’ve gone in the content world.

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, boy, I’ll try to keep it brief because I’m old now and I’ve been in creating content for 25 years. But yeah, I have two podcasts, a Monday morning podcast called Content Inc. It’s five to seven minutes long. It’s for content creators trying to become full-time content entrepreneurs, so hopefully something inspirational or informational on that. And then Robert Rose and I have been doing This Old Marketing since 2013, and it’s a news show covering content marketing and media news. So we’ve been working on that over 400 episodes on both of those. And I got into this whole business by starting in business to business publishing. I just fell into it. I started account managing projects with a company called Penton, and Penton Media was the largest independent business to business media company at the time, and I was in this little division called Custom Media, and Custom Media did stuff that Pet Media didn’t do anything, so Pet Media was the trade shows and magazines and then big websites and Custom Media-

Bjork Ostrom: Really traditional marketing type stuff.

Joe Pulizzi: Really traditional B2B stuff. And then I found out about this custom media thing. I’m like, oh, we started to help big brands like Microsoft and Agilent and HP and Autodesk tell their stories, and they did that at that time through quarterly magazines. So then we went from print, and then we got into blogging, and then we got into webinars and then social media, and I was like, this is amazing. I thought it was going to be the future. And in some ways it was where I said, “Well, these brands are going to have to start learning how to tell their own stories because we’ve got all these pipes available and they’re going to want to build audiences and then try to maintain or change behavior of those audiences.” And that’s when I left in 2007, my wife and I created what became Content Marketing Institute and our event, Content Marketing World. And then I’ve been the content marketing guy for shoot, a long time, 15 plus years into that area.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s so great about your story is you’re able to see the evolution of it. And so you can see echoes of probably some of the traditional things that existed 20 years ago that still live within the world of media and content marketing in 2023, but you’ve also seen the things that don’t work that used to work or maybe some of the things that people are still holding onto and trying to make those things work and they don’t really work, but for whatever reason, just because people have always been doing them, they still exist, and so they’re still around. In 2023 today, when you say content marketing, that’s a really big umbrella. How do you view that? What’s underneath that umbrella?

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I mean if I’m just saying content marketing, I’m talking about the philosophy or the strategy that a company would employ to say, “Oh, I’m going to create valuable, relevant, compelling information on an ongoing basis to a target audience in order to maintain or change behavior.” And you do that many different ways. You can do that through a podcast, you do through a blog, a webinar series, a custom magazine, event, all sorts of things. And it’s funny, you talk about, I’ve seen things. I’ve been around long enough to see things.

Bjork Ostrom: I’ve seen things. Yeah, totally.

Joe Pulizzi: And it’s funny. So over the past 20 years, it’s the same mistakes over and over again. And on the one side, most companies don’t differentiate themselves in any way. Basically they’re creating content just like everyone else in their space is creating content. It’s the same stuff. It doesn’t differentiate. We call that a content tilt. They don’t have anything that breaks through all the clutter and gets any kind of attention. They don’t build an audience and they’re wasting their time. And the second thing is they don’t deliver consistently. So we see this over and over again, how companies of all sizes, they start and stop. And that’s why when you see these successful content creators out there or brands, it’s because they continue on when everybody else stops. They’ve been doing it for two years, three years, four years, five years. Red Bull’s a really good example.

You talk about how did Red Bull become Red Bull Media House and one of the largest media companies in the world. They started in 2004-

Bjork Ostrom: And kept going.

Joe Pulizzi: They’ve been doing this for 20 years now. It started as a magazine. So those are the two things. So it’s easy to go in when I go into some of these companies and they say, “Joe, we’re doing all the things. What’s wrong?” I’m like, “Yeah, you’re doing all the things, a little bit into each one. You’re jack of all trades, master of none. You’re not targeted. There’s no niche here. You’re not building an audience. You might as well just advertise.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. And the difference between content marketing and advertising is advertising being you’re putting something out there, it’s getting in front of people, it’s maybe getting top of mind, but it’s not building an audience or telling a story. Do you feel like that’s the difference, or how do you differentiate those?

Joe Pulizzi: Well, that’s one of them, and you could look at it that way, but basically with content marketing, you’re trying to build and control your own channels. You’re basically trying to become your own little media company. If you’re advertising, you’re sending out your message in somebody else’s channels-

Bjork Ostrom: Just somebody else’s.

Joe Pulizzi: And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, everybody advertises, it’s no problem. But if you don’t want to spend the 18 to 24 to 32 months and really do the one thing really well, like I’ve got an amazing blog or an incredible podcast or an awesome YouTube channel, that’s where it starts. Or a lot of companies start is they say, “Oh, I have to do all the things. I have to be in seven to 13 different channels.” I’m like, “No.” And the ones that have been doing it a long, long time and diversified their way there-

Bjork Ostrom: Have a team.

Joe Pulizzi: You start on doing one thing really, really well.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the things we often talk about is especially when people are, they have a family and they have a part-time or full-time job, and they’re trying to build a content business, in our world it’s food bases, and they’re trying to publish to Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp channels comes out, “Oh, I got to add that in.” And suddenly you’re doing all of it kind of well, but not really well. You’re following best practices, but best practices only help if your content is excellent. And I feel like that’s what I hear you saying a little bit is focus in, get a narrow focus on maybe one specific channel, get really good at that, and this combination, novel, unique, consistent. Does that feel accurate? It has to stand out. It has to differentiate, and you have to do it consistently for long period of time.

Joe Pulizzi: That’s very, very accurate. The biggest recommendation that I make when I talk to content entrepreneurs is I never say, “Go do more of this.” It’s always, “Do less of something. Get off of X. You’re wasting your time on Instagram.” Maybe you’re doing… Maybe TikTok is your thing, maybe it’s YouTube, maybe it’s the podcast, whatever. Something has to start as home. And if you look at media business models 101, whether you start with the New York Times or Huffington Post or whatever, they’ve all done it the same way. They start by being really good and figure out all the intricacies of that one channel and they focus on one specific audience and how they can solve the pain points and the informational needs of that audience. So if you do those things and then you ask yourself, “Well, if we do the work, like you say, if we do it over a long period of time, can you become the leading informational expert over that thing if you do the work”, and if you’re laughing about that and say, “No, that’s crazy, we can’t do it”, then you’re not niche enough.

You got to go down and figure out, okay, there’s a content area that you’ve got to exploit more. You got to go deeper there. Or maybe there’s an audience. Maybe you’re not just targeting people that enjoy Hostess foods. Maybe it’s something even lower than that. Who knows? I don’t know. But you’ve got to go down to something that’s really, really underserved today, which is really easy to do actually, because we’ve got all these great tools-

Bjork Ostrom: So many things.

Joe Pulizzi: That help us find that. But it’s hard to make that decision because we inherently, as human beings, feel that in order to have the most opportunity, we have to go wide. We want to target consumers, we got to target 18 to 54 demographic or whatever you’re doing, I’m like, “That is not going to work. You start small and then you can broaden”, but you’ve got to build that audience first from a very, very small standpoint.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think a good example of that is the person who introduced us, Kate Ahl who has Pinterest as her focus, she knows Pinterest inside and out. She really understands it. She’s built an audience there. She’s built a business around that. And that building a business piece is one that I want touch on because I think that that’s the question that comes out of what is content marketing in service of? And for some of us, you’re building content and that content is the product. And what you’re doing is, back to that advertising versus marketing conversation, you’re using your platform to then bring advertisers in and then advertise against that content that you’re creating.

So you’re taking those, I think of AG1 or Athletic Greens in the world of podcasts, they’re not building a big brand. They’re advertising, but they’re using people who have built big brands and partnering with them to draft off of their audience. So there’s this idea of you start out, you have the focus, it’s niche, you have your channel, you’re going to become best in class in that niche on that channel, build a following in service of what? What does that lead up to and how? Do you need to know what that is at the outset of your content business building pursuit?

Joe Pulizzi: So you can do it either way. There’s no one right way to do it. But let’s say that I’m a solo content creator and I want to become big. It’s actually better if you don’t have a product that you just say, “Okay, here’s the audience that I want to target. Here’s the thing that I’m passionate about and love. I love this certain aspect of photography. I would like to show it. I want to talk about it. I want to instruct it.” And you go and create this amazing Instagram channel around that, whatever, and you start to build an audience. Once you get close enough to that audience, then that audience begins to know, like and trust you, they will absolutely tell you what things that they want to buy from you. I’ll give you an example. This happened with Content Marketing Institute. I was doing a blog four or five times a week talking about the how of content marketing and all the things that we could do and the strategies and how you could structure it.

And I was trying to sell basically a matching tool to match up content creators with brands that needed content and nobody wanted to buy that. That was the product, that’s what it was in service of, to use your terms. But nobody wanted that. They wanted, they let me know loud and clear, “Hey, Joe, do you have any training available for my team to understand content marketing?” “Joe, are there any events around content marketing that I could send my people to?” “Joe, do you do consulting around content marketing?” I didn’t do any of those things, but they told me loud and clear once we built this audience that they were going to do that. So it would’ve been easier if I wasn’t pushing this other product. Now that said, that’s what I would do right now, if you just a joke, you want to get into this space, I would say don’t have a product.

Launch your product secondarily, build an audience first. But if you’re Autodesk and you want to sell 3D software or CAD software or whatever the case is, you would then say, “Okay, well we’re going to solve these mechanical engineers challenges in this visual space and teach them all these things. And hopefully when they come to know, like and trust us solving their informational needs, they will buy more of our stuff. They’ll be more loyal to our brand, they’ll come to our events. They’ll do those sorts of things.” So basically sell more product or stay longer as customers. So that’s generally loyalty. Content marketing started as a loyalty driven activity through custom magazines, if you will. So you can do it either way. So big brands that are already out there, they’re doing it because ultimately they want to sell more stuff, which is fine, and content creators out there are doing it because they don’t really know what they’re going to sell yet, but they could do like a MrBeast did. MrBeast had no idea in 2012 when he started his YouTube channel that he was going to launch Feastables.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is a chocolate that he sells, which is like you would ask him 10 years ago, and it’d be like, “Ooh, no idea.”

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, now it’s probably, you tell me, you know more about it, it’s probably almost a billion dollar brand-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I would assume.

Joe Pulizzi: Getting to that point. But he launched that because he saw that opportunity because of the 100 plus million followers he had on YouTube at the time, which is probably 200 million now. So MrBeast launched it where I don’t have a product yet, then I’m going to launch all this other stuff. He launched the burger place as well. What is it? Beast Burgers or MrBeast-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, Beast Burgers, I think.

Joe Pulizzi: Beast Burgers, whatever. So he is launching all sorts of things because he built the large audience to do that. So that’s one way to do it. And the other way to do it is, “Hey, I already have a customer database. How do I get these people to rely on me more without selling directly to them?” So that’s why we’d never call our content advertising. We’re doing content just like any other media company does, because if it’s salesy information, nobody’s going to want to engage with it. So it has to be really, really good today.

Bjork Ostrom: So I interviewed Nathan Barry who has ConvertKit email platform, and one of the things he’s doing right now is they have a podcast that, it’s like a podcast tour, they’re calling it Billion Dollar Creator. But the idea behind it is that idea of what in service of what, and what he’s talking about is the importance of building a business that’s contact base in service of then selling a product. And it echoes a lot of what I hear you saying, which is be really strategic at being best in class in something. And you do that by being consistent, being novel, unique, and figuring out, I think this is the third piece with it, what is it that your audience needs? What are you great at? And what does your audience need? And find that overlap and continually create within that.

Eventually what will come from that when you have an audience is the ability to ask or see the need that exists for them and to create some type of product around that, whether it’s a service, whether it’s an actual physical product, whether it’s a company that does almost… Well, in your case it was like doing conferences. You build this audience and then one of the products that you have is you can do conferences or training. So all of these different options come from it. It gets a lot easier once you have an audience. And we’ve seen that too with the products that we’ve created. Having an audience makes it so much easier. Do you have any advice around figuring out what that is? When you have that audience, how do you formulate what it is and when do you know when you’re ready to actually do that, sell something?

Joe Pulizzi: That’s a great question. My answer is you want to drive revenue as soon as possible. Most of the content entrepreneurs I talk to or content creators getting into the space don’t have a lot of disposable income where they can wait nine to 12 to 18 months for somebody to give me money. So I talk about this in my book Content Inc. There’s 10 different ways to drive revenue, and most of the content creators I talk to drive revenue in five, six, seven different ways. So where it’s almost the opposite of what we talked about before where we want to focus on one channel and serve one audience really well, with revenue we want to do all the things to figure out what’s going to stick. So the lowest hanging fruit is you’re probably going to sell some kind of sponsorship or advertising.

It’s like, “Hey, I got a newsletter, I’ve got a podcast. Somebody wants to reach my audience. Great, I’m going to insert that ad.” Boom, you’re doing that right now. And they say, “Oh, okay, well, I’ve learned that we could actually do a side event or a webinar or something.” So you’re in the event space now, or you could do affiliate marketing and affiliate links, which a lot of creators do. You could sell books and eBooks and white papers and those types of things, and you could even do a Kickstarter program and get donations. So you could do all these different things, just like a media. By the way, those are all products that a media company would launch. They’re all, if you look at your local newspaper or website, any industry, they’re all making money all those different ways, and they’re doing as much of it as they can.

And then you’re on the outside, you might say, “Oh, okay. Now, what Nathan talked about, Nathan did his thing and launched ConvertKit. Great. It’s an wonderful email service. So he wants to sell more subscriptions, product subscriptions to that product.” Or maybe you’re a consulting person. It’s like, “Hey, I want to do coaching or consulting.” Well, you could sell all kinds of time for dollars that you want to from a coaching standpoint, or maybe you’re a big company like a Red Bull or an Autodesk or Microsoft where you want to keep your customers more loyal or have them buy more high ticket items, if you will, and create yield. So there’s 10 right there that you can go through and look at. So that’s the difference is we want to be singularly focused on the content side and build that audience. And once you build that audience, you’re basically staying up all night every night figuring out how can I drive revenue and keep the lights on?

And then you’ll figure out, you’ll say, “Affiliate marketing, that doesn’t work really well for my audience”, but you’ll say, “Wow, this event really took off.” When we launched Content Marketing World 2011, I started talking about at the end of 2010, I was hoping a 100 to 150 people would come to Cleveland for a big content marketing event. I had no idea that that first year, 660, would show up and four years later, we would hit 4,000.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s crazy.

Joe Pulizzi: I was just like, “Oh, let’s try it”, like a good content entrepreneur should do. So that’s where you get it, and you don’t necessarily have to choose, but you need to try a lot of those revenue components on that side, and then you’ll know which are the winners and which ones you can move on from.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And similarly to the different platforms, you probably will come out of that experimental phase with a leader like, hey, this is the main thing. You’re doing services, you’re selling a product, you’re doing conference, you’re doing training, you’re doing consulting. That becomes the main thing. But then you also have those additional revenue sources potentially that are supporting that are also there, but aren’t the main driver. But your point is, when you are creating, create singularly, focused in on one specific platform, one specific area, the thing that you are most natural at, that’s going to be the easiest for you to create on that platform. When it comes to the monetization side, think strategically about trying all of them, seeing what works, and then maybe out of that double down, is that-

Joe Pulizzi: That’s exactly right. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people mistakenly believe, oh, I need the focus on the content and audience side, and I need the focus on the revenue side. I don’t agree with that because you don’t know. You have no idea. Things are changing so fast with the audience. I don’t know. I didn’t know that an awards program would take off in content marketing, but it did, so great. That was a product that we could launch. I didn’t know that we weren’t going to be able to sell anything at all for digital advertising, but we had a waiting list for people to be in our email newsletter.

Who knows? It’s all different. It’s different in the food industry, it’s different in marketing, it’s different in whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Joe Pulizzi: So you definitely want to try that and test it out and then learn, fail fast, if you want to put it that way. Say, “Oh, that works. That one doesn’t. That one.” All I knew is that I was three years into this whole project and I’m losing money. And I’m like, if I don’t figure this thing out fast, I’m not going to be able to pay for the kids going to school, and my wife is going to hate me.

Bjork Ostrom: Motivation.

Joe Pulizzi: She quit her job to watch the kids, and I was the sole breadwinner. This is going to be bad quickly, so figure it out.

Bjork Ostrom: What turned in that point for you? What was the thing that was the breakthrough?

Joe Pulizzi: I fell in love with this product, this matching tool that I thought was going to be great, ’cause I’m like, “Oh my God, all these brands need content. They don’t know where to find it.” Google wasn’t the Google that it is now at the time. It’s like, “Oh, okay, well, we can be that match. We can be the eHarmony for content marketing”, and I wouldn’t let go of it. And I kept pushing it and pushing and pushing it. And then basically what happened, this was September of 2009, my best case study, if you will, that was paying for the service, I called to re-up the annual service, it was an annual fee that somebody had to subscribe into and talked to the CEO on the phone. And she basically said that they weren’t going to re-up, and we had delivered them millions of dollars in revenue. And they’re like, “Oh, they could find better ROI somewhere else.”

And I’m like, I don’t know what to do now. This is the best. I can’t do any better than this, and this person’s not going to sign up and buy. And so I was dusting off the LinkedIn, I’m ready to go find a job. And then that’s when I just sat down after feeling sorry for myself and wrote it on a cocktail napkin, believe it or not. And I wrote the model and I said, “Okay, we are going to focus on.” I got all this, started realizing, going through my email and started to listen to what my future customers actually wanted to pay for, and then put the model together, that became Content Marketing Institute, Content Marketing World, Chief Content Officer Magazine. And the goal was to be the leading destination for content marketing education. And then were able to do that in a couple of years from them once we pivoted away from that product that nobody wanted to buy.

Bjork Ostrom: And so it almost sounds like in you talking through some of these suggestions, it’s like you then looking back, that’s what you did. You built an audience. You said, “Here’s what we’re going to build an audience.” From that audience then listening and saying, “What do people need?” Creating that product and launching to that audience that you built?

Joe Pulizzi: That’s it.

Bjork Ostrom: Does that feel accurate? Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: That’s absolutely accurate. And then I was basically, the same model, everything we talked about, we were doing it really well. Our platform was the blog, and then the blog was paired with the newsletter. So that was working really, really well. And we kept hitting them over the head with, “Hey, sign up for this service”, and nobody was doing it. And then once we flipped that and said, “Oh, okay, well, let’s just stop. It’s not working.”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like saying what do you want to sign up for? And then people say that, and then that’s what you create.

Joe Pulizzi: It’s so weird how you become blind. I mean, they’re telling me, I’m going through these emails, I’m going through the blog comment saying-

Bjork Ostrom: So relatable.

Joe Pulizzi: “Joe, is there an event for content marketing?” And I’m like, “No, there’s really not.” Oh my God.

Bjork Ostrom: What would suggest I do if I want to go to event for content marketing?

Joe Pulizzi: So I mean, there were events, don’t get me wrong, but they were really small events, 75 people, a hundred people, they’re more workshop type things. And I said, well, nobody has built the event for the industry. And by the way, when my wife and I sold in 2016, the valuation of Content Marketing Institute came from the event. I mean, that’s why we were purchased because UBM, now Informa, wanted to buy Content Marketing World, even though we had six or seven or eight different ways that we drove revenue and profit, the big money maker was the event.

Bjork Ostrom: The thing for them that was most valuable was that event.

Joe Pulizzi: Was absolutely that event. And that’s where, it’s funny, I was just talking to somebody in a different call. We were talking about the importance of building a moat, and then Warren Buffett talks about this is he invests in businesses that have some kind of moat around that protects that business. When you build an event business or a membership business or a subscription business, you are building a moat that’s different from every other newsletter out there, every other YouTube channel. So as you build your audience and you look at the products you can launch and say, “Hey, is this something that we are uniquely qualified to launch that we can do that other people can’t?” So that you can build that moat in.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And the moat in that case is community. Is that what you’re getting at? Or how would you describe it? If you have a membership, if you have subscription, if you have this conference, those being moats is the level underneath that community.

Joe Pulizzi: I would say launching in a large scale event is something that most people weren’t willing to do or risk or had enough knowledge to do, but it’s because of the way we had built a community that we were able to do it. So we knew all the speakers because they were already on our newsletter list. They were already participating and guest blogging on our platform. They were in our LinkedIn group. We already knew all these people really, really well. So if somebody else was going to come in and say, “Hey, they wanted to do a content market, large scale content marketing event”, it’d be very difficult for them without that knowledge and wisdom and participation from these wonderful people that wanted to work with us and see us succeed ’cause we were helping them.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP, specifically a new offering they have called Cultivate Go. So CultivateWP, the agency or the company focuses on designing and developing food blogs, and it was founded by Bill Erickson who’s this incredible WordPress developer. We know because as I’ll share, we’ve worked with him and Dwayne Smith, who’s this incredible designer. And Bill developed a version of Pinch of Yum before we had our own internal team, and it was one of the fastest growing versions of the site that we’ve had. So as you know in this industry, word spreads quickly about people who do good work, and Bill and Dwayne have really filled their calendar over the past few years with doing these custom websites for some of the biggest food sites on the web. You can see the list on their website, and they would create these fully custom designs, but they would cost literally multiple tens of thousands of dollars.

And that makes a lot of sense if you’re a site that gets multiple millions of page views. But what they realized is there’s a lot of really successful sites who need the best technology in the world to power them, but can’t justify spending multiple tens of thousands of dollars. So that’s why they launched Cultivate Go. It’s a semi-custom theme design and white glove site setup. So you choose one of the core themes, they have multiple options, and then their team customizes the logo, the brand colors, the topography, so it matches your brand exactly.

And then they set it up on a staging environment where you can test it out, get a feel for it, and can launch your site within just one week. And the cost is only $5,000. And here’s the thing, you have the exact same features, functionality, and support as the themes that cost up to 10 times as much as a Cultivate Go theme. So that means your Cultivate Go site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food sites in the world. If you’re interested in checking it out, go to foodbloggerpro.com/go, or you could just search Cultivate Go in Google. Thanks so much to CultivateWP for sponsoring this episode.

One of the things, when you talked about Content Inc, the book, and you have this flywheel, I don’t know how you’d describe it, but two parts of that that I’d be interested in talking about, we can include it in the link to the show notes so people can see it, but you talk about selling, this exit and the last step is sell or go big. So I’d be interested in talking about that. And then also one of the steps is the content tilt, and The Tilt is the name of the newsletter where you talk about content entrepreneurship. So we don’t have to talk about each one of those. People can read the book, they can check that out. But can you talk about those two specifically, the second step of the process, the content tilt, and then this idea of seller or go big? And then if there’s other pieces to fill in, would be interested to hear that?

Joe Pulizzi: I’m more than happy to. Yeah. I’ve been working on this model for a long, long time, my own experience, but interviewing a lot of content entrepreneurs and what they found to be successful, and we broke it down to seven distinct steps that pretty much work in that order. But the second step is content tilt, and it’s important to talk about because it’s where we talked a little bit about this, where most content creators, whether you work for a brand or not, they completely miss the point. When they look at the content they’re creating, it’s just like their competitors’ content. There’s no differentiation. So basically your content tilt is how do we find a way to cut through all that clutter, breakthrough and get the attention of an audience in some way? So it’s basically how do you differentiate? What’s your hook? Why should people pay attention to you?

So all those questions are, you have to have it, and most companies don’t. In some of the presentations that I do, I’ll do a thing on cloud computing and I’ll say, “Look at all the content on cloud computing.” And I would go to Amazon’s page and IBM’s page and Oracle’s page, and I would take their content on cloud computing and I would put it side by side, and it’s exactly the same. I said, “Luckily, these companies are already billion-dollar companies and they don’t have to worry about having the exact same content. If you have no budget, you can’t think this way. And plus, let’s just say you were going to do content on cloud computing. You’ve already got companies that are putting millions of dollars behind this. How are you going to break through?

So we’ll brainstorm and say, well, it’s cloud computing for operational managers in the food industry space that live in the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: So that could be a niche that you could be the leading informational expert. So basically, I always challenged, when I used to do consulting, I always used to challenge the marketing team. I’m saying, “If we do the work, can you be the leading informational expert on that?” And when they stopped laughing and actually got to a point where they said, “I think we could”, it’s like, “Good, let’s do the work. Let’s go down to it.” The sell and go big-

Bjork Ostrom: The sell or go big.

Joe Pulizzi: I’m sorry. Sell or go big. I’m a big proponent of exit planning, and I believe exit planning happens before you start anything that you do. So for example, 2007, I left corporate America. I had a VP position in publishing as we talked about, left and started a business, and I wrote down in my journal that by 2015 that I would sell the company that I was currently working on for $15 million. So the &15 million was the exact number because I talked to my accountant and said I wanted forever money, money that I wouldn’t screw up everything. I wanted to make sure I could take care of my kids and my family. And I went and I talked to my accountant and I said, “What do I need to have $10 million at the end of this thing?” He said, “Well, you need 15 after taxes.”

Bjork Ostrom: After taxes and-

Joe Pulizzi: After taxes and the whole thing, to pay for all the stuff and to do the bonuses and everything, I need 15. So I said, okay, it is 2008, I said, in seven years that we would sell for that. Every decision that I made with the business, I looked at that goal. I’m like, “Okay, well will this help that happen? Not help that?” So I mean, I’ve worked with a lot of content entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs in general that have no idea. I did a workshop for about 50 entrepreneurs in all sorts of service industries and whatnot, and I said, “How many of you have some kind of exit scenario?” And one person raised their hand, said, “Yeah, I plan on my kids getting this.” And I said, does your kids know that they’re going to inherit your business? He said, “No, we haven’t talked about it yet.” So I’m like, “Okay, everybody stop. Why are we doing this? Why are you in the business that you’re at?”

So I would compel everybody listening to this, why are you in your business? Is this something that you’re doing as a hobby for the rest of your life? And that’s great, and that’s fine if that’s the case. I know a lot of people that don’t like exit planning ’cause they like to say, “I just want to live my life the way”, fine. I don’t. I wanted to travel more. I wanted to be around more for my kids than doing all the stuff that I was doing, not being a part of their lives. So I had specific exit planning goals. And so that as a content entrepreneur, you get to a point, I knew where I wanted to go that I wanted to sell and exit that business for a specific amount of money. And when we got to the point where I was able to bring in people to look at the business, I knew that we were going to be valued at that because I’d done all the research on it, but some people want to grow a big business.

Bjork Ostrom: So did you share it publicly? Did you sell it for-

Joe Pulizzi: Oh, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That was the number.

Joe Pulizzi: So 2015 came along, 2014 would’ve been the year to sell by 2015 to get them. We didn’t have the valuation then. We had to wait one year. I looked at it, I’m like, “We had to make some other decisions”. And the middle, so June of 2015, I knew that we were going to be at a point where we could get that valuation and we started to get people involved. I started that process. At the end of 2015, we did the memorandum. I did in-person meetings. I got the LOIs in, and we ended up going through the process specifically with UBM and so it was June of 2016, we sold for more than that $15 million number, so.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow, dude, that’s so awesome.

Joe Pulizzi: Everything worked out. Yeah, it was-

Bjork Ostrom: That’s incredible.

Joe Pulizzi: It doesn’t often work that way, but a lot of people probably don’t realize that I reviewed that goal every day. And I think when you’re that focused on something, and I’m not saying everyone has to do this, but I believe that everyone should have their goals written down that you should review them first thing you get up in the morning and before you go to sleep at night. It starts to work while you’re sleeping. And you figure out, “Okay, what am I going to do? What impact am I going to make on the world?” And that could be financial, it could be spiritual, it could be mental, physical, it could be whatever, family, whatever it is, focus on that. And the same thing holds true to building a content business, knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s incredible. What a story. That’s awesome. I think specifically the idea of writing that down and then achieving that within, I said it was a little bit outside of the timeframe, but essentially when you said you were going to do it is really, really inspiring. And I think a huge part of that is the mindset, like you talked about going into it to say, “Here’s specifically what I want to get out of it. Everybody doesn’t have to get the same thing out of it.” The point is, define what it is that you’re after, the reason that you’re starting. It’s that classic seven habits. Start with the end in mind.

Joe Pulizzi: That’s exactly right.

Bjork Ostrom: Apply that to your life, but also apply it to your business. So in your case, that was sell. You knew you wanted to have this life-changing exit where you would sacrifice for this defined period of time that would allow you to live differently after that. How about in the case of go big, what does that mean?

Joe Pulizzi: So when you get to a point, and like you mentioned Nathan Barry, really good example. He’s definitely going big, but he’s figuring out a way that he can still do all the things that he wants to do with this new billion dollar thing and whatever. When you get to the 25, 30, 35 employee contractor level, you get into a whole lot of issues of scaling. So you have to make sure that you know that the organization has to change. That’s when you’re hiring new operational people to come in, new salespeople, it’s a whole different set of headaches.

So it’s definitely not impossible. Every major media company that you know of has gone through that. They’ve gone through the, we’re a really small media company, we get to that 15, 20, 25, 30 employee level or whether that’s let’s say seven and a half to $10 million in revenue, and you’re like, “Okay, now we’re getting for a whole new set of headaches”, because I don’t want to say it’s easy growth, but it’s easier growth. Once you get what we call a minimum viable audience, in the book of an audience that’s willing to buy from you, and then enough of that audience that you can pay for the lifestyle you want, then you got to start, okay, we got this hockey stick growth.

It happens in almost every content entrepreneur business. So the first two, three years, you’re sparring, you’re figuring it out, and then you get to years three and five and you see this amazing hockey stick growth where they go from a hundred thousand in revenue to $2 million, $3 million, $4 million in revenue, and then they start to stall. You have to figure out, okay, well we’ve got the easy growth. You’ve figured out the one product category, and now you’ve really got to take it to the next level and figure out how you’re going to operationalize this thing. And it has to be without you, the founder. You can’t have your hands into all these things-

Bjork Ostrom: Everything, right.

Joe Pulizzi: That’s where really gets into hiring and firing and figuring it out. And honestly, they’re tough decisions I never wanted to make. I absolutely didn’t want to go there. And so I already knew, okay, good. I was at that point where scale or sell, I already knew I wanted to sell. And thankfully, it all worked out.

Bjork Ostrom: And you knew that number. So the interesting thing about that is then you got back into it, you started new things and pursuits and talk about what that was like. Post exit, were you able to do what you wanted to do and how was it different than you thought it would be?

Joe Pulizzi: So yeah, real quickly, so I stayed on with the company until 2017. Part of my earn out, everything went well, great. 2018, I took the entire year off. I did a 30 day no social media, no email in January of 18, and the rest of the year I worked on it. We have a nonprofit called Orange Effect Foundation, and I did more with that. I started working on my novel and I finished the novel in 2019, The Will to Die. So I started to use all different parts of my brain that I never worked before. I stopped the podcast, I stopped This Old Marketing and stopped Content Inc. And everything was great. It was spending time with the kids, and then Covid came along.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Joe Pulizzi: And to be honest, I started dabbling in a lot of different things because of sheer boredom. I don’t want to say I was bored, but I was like, I was home a lot. I wasn’t doing… 2020 was supposed to be a full year travel for my wife and I.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, change of plans.

Joe Pulizzi: And that didn’t happen.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like the most drastic change of plans, yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: So basically, and so here’s where your plans go awry, right? I was like, “Okay, what am I going to do now?” And I started to learn about the creator economy, and I started to talk to a lot of my friends who were trying to do this thing. And then I re-released Content Inc. which was originally done in 2015, and said, “Okay, this can be very helpful.” I said, well, I should do a newsletter. I should launch an event. I basically did the whole thing over again. And hindsight, I would absolutely do it again, but I wasn’t planning on doing the same model twice, which is basically what happened, which is why I then course corrected after Covid was done, and we ended up selling The Tilt and Content Entrepreneur, Expo CEX, to a wonderful company called Lulu, and now they shepherd it and I help them continue this thing growing.

Bjork Ostrom: Point being, you would do it again, but you wouldn’t use the same model. Do it again, meaning you’d get back into something creatively building something, but maybe not necessarily replicating the model that you had done before.

Joe Pulizzi: So I was very excited for the first year and a half of doing The Tilt. I thought we were doing something really different. We were testing out tokenization and content creators getting into that, and I was learning about things I’d never heard of. Nobody did. And then that the whole tokenization thing went down the tubes as…

Bjork Ostrom: Like web currency-

Joe Pulizzi: And all that.

Bjork Ostrom: And Crypto, yeah.

Joe Pulizzi: It didn’t work very well. And then we had to shift the model. And that model became exactly what we did before. And again, I love being involved with The Tilt, I love being involved with CEX, I will continue to, but I didn’t want to do the same thing again, once I realized that’s what we were doing. So now we ended up selling, which worked out really well. And as I told you before we talked, I’m working on my second novel, a secondary novel to The Will to Die, which was the first one, and just now I’m back traveling again and speaking and doing a lot of things that I love. So a weird 18-month period, which I guess was probably for a lot of people during Covid, figuring out what you’re going to do. But now I feel really good about what’s going on.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s cool. So we did episode 415 we did an interview with Matt Briel. Do you work with Matt at Lulu?

Joe Pulizzi: I just talked with Matt. Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: So encourage people to check that out. One of the things that you talked about is wanting to encourage people to figure out, as a creator, how do you sell outside of the ecosystem of Amazon? We talk a ton about that in that podcast. So it’d be encourage people to check that out, knowing that it’s now part of this Lulu ecosystem. Encourage people to check out The Tilt, which is, can you describe, elevator pitch, what The Tilt is all about?

Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, The Tilt is a free newsletter for content people who are doing any content creation, who want to build full-time businesses and what we call content entrepreneurs. Get it every Tuesday and Friday, and we’re trying to teach you and then cover the news that’s important to you as a content creator or professional content creator. And then the event that goes with that is CEX Content Entrepreneur Expo, which will be May 5th to 7th in Cleveland, Ohio. We’ll have 500 content creators coming together, learning on the spot, networking with each other, trying to support each other and build our businesses. So that’ll be in May. And then to your point about figuring out the ecosystem of books, our initiative with Lulu, which is really exciting for me, I get to work on something I haven’t done before. We’re trying to figure out how content creators can be successful, who launched books.

So these are, you launch a nonfiction or a fiction book, how they can be successful without having to rely on Amazon. And I’m a big rented land, own your own land proponent, whether that’s on X or on Instagram or YouTube or someone like Amazon, a content created, putting all their eggs in that basket and basically that they can make any changes. They’re not your followers, they’re their followers. You’re renting that land. And then what do you do with that land to make it your own and build your own business?

So I see that happening with authors on the Amazon side where Amazon’s making the decision on what’s going to work and what’s not, and I just don’t think it’s fair, and I would like to see more authors sell directly. So that’s what we’re trying to figure out with Tilt Publishing where we can take your manuscript, help you get that manuscript to publishing, and then set it up so that you can sell directly from your own website to your own fans instead of having to send them off to Amazon and having Amazon keep the profit and Amazon keep the data.

Bjork Ostrom: How do you reconcile, ’cause that might be something that people would say is like, “Wait, wasn’t that something we were talking about before where you should focus in on one platform, build your audience on one platform?” So how do you reconcile the don’t build your crop on rented land with the focusing in on one platform?

Joe Pulizzi: So when you make your decision to pick your channel, I don’t have any problem of what decision you make. You might say, “I’m going to go on YouTube because my customers or my audience are already there.” That’s what’s great about those platforms, they already have the audience. That’s why they’re so seductive. You could say it’s LinkedIn, you could do Twitter X, you could do Facebook, whatever it is, TikTok, you choose those. At some point you have to say, “Okay, how do I move all that power that I have or lack of power with the followers that I built on that platform to something that I can control?” More than not, that becomes some kind of an email newsletter or a subscription program or a membership where somebody is giving you their personal information, their email, and giving you permission to contact them. And then you don’t have to go through an outside entity

Bjork Ostrom: And an outside algorithm.

Joe Pulizzi: Or algorithm, exactly, and you have your own business. And by the way, this is again, media business 101. If you look at New York Times or you look at Huffington Post, or you look at any of the great media companies that have been built, they at one time or another, they say, “Okay, we can’t rely on all that social. We’ll still use it.” It’s fine. I’m not saying don’t use it. I’m saying don’t rely on it. It’s the same thing with Amazon. And we’re finding us with all these authors that have saying, “Okay, well everything that I have is on Amazon.” They don’t even let it be possible for one of your own fans, your own subscribers to purchase from your site and give you that information directly. And I think we just have to change some of that thinking. And my concern is a lot of new content creators aren’t even thinking about the algorithm that they don’t have any connection with those people directly and they can get booted off the platform at any time. And that’s what scares me about what’s going on right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and as an example, let’s say your book is super successful on Amazon, you sell a hundred thousand copies, there’s no way for you to connect with any of those people who purchase your book. You just won’t know. You don’t know who they are, you can’t connect with them. You have an event coming up, you can’t market to them.

Joe Pulizzi: My example is this. So Content Inc., a book, I’m very proud of, two editions that sold more than a hundred thousand digital, print and audio copies. I don’t have one piece of information from those hundred thousand. I would give a lot to get 5,000 of those names versus the hundred thousand that I sold. And that’s just the thinking that the changes. It’s like I don’t care about the sales, I don’t care about bestseller. I want the connection with my audience. So that’s the different way to think about it. And that’s why now in the future, all my books that I’m going to be writing will be sold directly from my own website.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Joe, there’s a lot of places we could send people for projects that you have been or are currently involved with, but what would your preference be if we did a shout-out, a few different places where people can connect with you, follow along with what you’re up to, because we want to make sure that we do that.

Joe Pulizzi: Oh, thank you. So joepulizzi.com, P-U-L-I-Z-Z-I is the best because you can get everything there. But I have my own personal newsletter there. So if you were going to sign up and you wanted insights from Joe, if you got anything out of this conversation, sign up to the newsletter there and you’ll get that. And then if you would like to meet me in person, I would like to meet you in person. You can go to CEX, which is May 5th to 7th in Cleveland, Ohio. You can sign up at cex.events and all the other stuff, you’ll find me in the social media sphere, if you will, but I’d rather talk to you directly. How about that?

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Joe, thanks so much for coming on.

Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for the opportunity.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey there, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I wanted to take a quick second to make sure you are aware of the Food Blogger Pro membership. So the Food Blogger Pro membership, Food Blogger Pro in general was started when Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom, Lindsay is the content creator over at Pinch of Yum, when they started getting a ton of questions about starting and growing and monetizing food blogs. So people would come to them and say, “Hey, I see what you’re doing. I love what you’re doing. How can I do the same thing?” So they just started Food Blogger Pro to be the place where food bloggers, food content creators, can go to learn how to start, grow, and monetize their own food blogs. So we have different courses, we have different events, we have different tools and deals for our community.

We have a community forum where members can connect, collaborate, and troubleshoot with industry experts and their fellow Food Blogger Pro members. And it’s just a really active place. I always like to say that your Food Blogger Pro membership won’t look the same the next week after you join because we’re constantly adding new content, new value to your membership. I wanted to read this testimonial from Food Blogger Pro member Alistair from the Pesky Vegan, and he says, “Starting a food blog can feel pretty daunting. More often than not, it’s probably something you’re trying to do on your own without much prior experience. Signing up to Food Blogger Pro was one of the single best things I could have done as it removed a lot of the worries I had and provided me with a supportive community and a wealth of invaluable information. When I think about the journey I’ve been on, I simply can’t imagine getting to where I am without this membership. Thank you.”

It’s so cool to see so many different experiences with Food Blogger Pro. We have tons of testimonials on our site if you’re interested in learning more. If you’re interested in learning more about the membership, what that looks like, what you get when you sign up as a member, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join. You get access to everything we have the moment you sign up, so no content is dripped. You can just create your own journey through our content and access what is most meaningful and beneficial for you. So again, that URL is foodbloggerpro.com/join if you’re interested in learning more. Otherwise, we’ll see you here on the podcast next week, and until then, make it a great week.

Emily Walker: Hey, there, this is Emily from The Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to Tiny Bites from The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. In this episode of Tiny Bites, Bjork is interviewing Jeff Coyle from MarketMuse, and they’re chatting all about how food creators can succeed in a world with AI. We’ve had a few recent podcast episodes about AI, but there’s always more to talk about because it’s always changing, and Jeff and Bjork will be chatting about creating content and SEO in a world with AI. They discuss how you can create AI-proof content, or whatever that means at this point in time, and specific tips and tricks you should use when creating content and things you just need to keep in mind to make content that can help you stand out amongst the crowd, both from other food creators and AI-generated content. It’s a really thought-provoking and useful episode.

I know food creators and, really, everyone will get a lot out of it. Again, head to the show notes at foodbloggerpro.com for more information, links, and details about the episode, and until then, just enjoy this episode with Bjork and Jeff.

Bjork Ostrom: Jeff Coyle, welcome to the podcast.

Jeff Coyle: Hi, how are you? What’s going on?

Bjork Ostrom: Good. Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Good.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to talk about all things AI today, and you’re the perfect person to talk about it because you are the co-founder of MarketMuse. You built essentially the thing that everybody was like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy, generative AI.” MarketMuse built a version of that before everybody knew about AI. I mean, is that generally correct?

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, absolutely. So we built and launched a large language model technology long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away. It was just at a time where it cost way too much to build it and way too much to manage it for a company that we were, and we realized that technology was going to have to catch up in order to do these things. We had built pieces of this type of technology since our inception, now, a little bit under 10 years. So we were building natural language processing components, which basically means you can analyze texts and do stuff with it, which is the basis of a lot of this, so being able to understand what it means to be an expert on a topic, being able to parse texts properly, know whether it’s the context it’s in, the intent it has.

All those steps come to usability and fruition with these types of experiences that we’re seeing today, but yeah. We’ve been about two years ahead of the market every time, which doesn’t always mean things go extremely well-

Bjork Ostrom: Right, right, right.

Jeff Coyle: And so we’re on the bleeding edge and bleeding a whole lot.

Bjork Ostrom: Gotcha. But point with it is like you’ve been in this world a long time. You know trends, you know where things are going, you know the search world on a really deep level, and that’s why I’m excited to talk to you about kind of the relation of content, search, and AI. This is a space you’re very familiar with, MarketMuse, this incredible technology that you’ve built. I was thinking specifically about our friend who has a site that they started to use MarketMuse, and they went from four million page views to 40 million page views, like this incredible story, but you’ve seen journeys like that. You’ve walked alongside people like that, and my guess is you’ve also been able to look inside of sites that have been impacted by changes that happen within the industry, and then suddenly, things aren’t working well for them.

And so you have this really unique insight into a lot of different content businesses and expertise around AI, content, and search, and one of the things that I think is really worrisome for people right now is AI, generative content, like this idea that you can go to Bard or ChatGPT and say, “I’m looking for a chocolate chip recipe,” and then it manifests a recipe, and that would’ve been somebody who would’ve gone to your site in the past. So is that true? Are we doomed? What does the future look like if you look into the crystal ball?

Jeff Coyle: Well, certainly for food, the impact of food bloggers, the impact of brands in the food industry, restaurants, all those … Everybody is impacted. Everybody will be impacted or has already been impacted. The reason that it’s not something that should be a like, “Oh gosh, this is going to cause us complete damage,” is because if you’re providing tremendous value already and you are consistent with that value, you’ve worked on your brand, you’ve built trust, you illustrate expertise, you have a leg up on people that haven’t. So if you are in the world where you are trying to cut corners or you haven’t put a lot of energy into this, it’s going to be more difficult because of the situation, like you mentioned, with a chocolate chip recipe. There’s a lot of different ways that the chocolate chip recipe is going to be impacted, and I’ve actually-

Bjork Ostrom: Absolutely.

Jeff Coyle: Not that example, but used a generic example, where I think it was chicken noodle soup, right? It’s a thing. It’s this abstract thing. It’s the chocolate chip cookie. How do you make your chocolate chip cookie recipe special? The answer to that question isn’t very different than it was a year ago, two years ago, five years ago.

Bjork Ostrom: What do you mean by that?

Jeff Coyle: You always really had to hack you behind it. There had to be some credibility. You had to be exhibiting expertise. You had to be illustrating that for one reason or another, your chocolate chip cookie recipe had something special, was bringing something more to the world. I think it’s a really great metaphor for what search engines are expecting. But it’s a two-sided debate here, because you’re looking at all the people creating content in the world, and then you’re looking at now, search engines are creating-

Bjork Ostrom: Creating content.

Jeff Coyle: That’s right, and it’s a different type of … There’s a second battle happening in the case where it’s-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s not just you competing … Yeah. You’re not just competing against another creator for a spot, you’re now also competing against a search engine, potentially. What I hear you saying is the best way to do that is to not be generic, like to not be plain vanilla.

You have expertise, you’ve established trust, and so when I think of, in our space, and I don’t know if you felt this generally across all different categories, but there was a little bit of a trend towards like, “Just give people the recipe.” All the people wanted the recipe. Essentially, kind of strip yourself out of it. Give content that is informational essentially, like answers the facts. I was always hesitant about that because it felt like what you’re doing is you’re reducing yourself to a piece of information that is competing against other pieces of information, and instead of introducing yourself and making yourself a really important component, and that being the variable, which is like, I mean, one you can control in a much more significant way, which is like you, as a human, and your expertise, your credibility, and even, if not for expertise and credibility, your connection with a reader or somebody who follows you and trust that comes with that connection.

So my question for you is, “How do you balance those two things? How do you give people the information, but then also make your humanness found within the content in a way, especially in our world, that doesn’t feel like, ‘Oh, you’re just telling me a random story that I don’t need to hear’?”

Jeff Coyle: Well, I think it’s being a marketer at the same time as you are a creator. And I’ve spoken with a lot of teams about this, or even an educator and a marketer at the same time, speaking with a lot of teams with recipe sites, food sites, brands, and that is where kind of it lands. But the one thing also is, “Is your plain vanilla recipe card, is it an instant answer?” Right? “Does it provide all the context?,” because that’s what we’re going to start seeing, and we’re already seeing it with Search Generative Experience, which if you haven’t seen it, you’re on a search results page, it asks you if you want to generate a text, or it already provides that.

It may show you some steps and ingredients, right? My-

Bjork Ostrom: So point being, like you’re on Google, you search for a recipe, and it’s like, “Would you like to see this recipe here?”

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. Almost-

Bjork Ostrom: Like it builds it all within the search result page.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. They’ll give citations now, but a featured snippet would be they’re actually providing a chunk of the page for you to click on. There’s another view, which is actually, it’s generating text from sources and citing them, but my debate has always been, “Is a recipe, is a great meal or dish that you make, is that an instant answer? Is that an instant answer type recipe?” I think that there are types of recipes that could be that, right?

So the ratio for simple syrup, it’s pretty much everybody’s got the same one, right? That’s your kind of apple pie and basics, but apple pie is very different, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jeff Coyle: Chocolate chips, there’s a lot of different ones. There is unique value to having that perspective and detailed. Can you go overboard? Sure. I mean, I think there was backlash to there being a thousand-word opus, and it making no sense, or they’re being low quality, but establishing your credibility through storytelling and writing content on all stages of the buyer journey, that’s being a good marketer and an educator.

So if you know something about a ingredient and things that people don’t know, you providing that context, mistakes people make, fast tips for doing this in maybe a different way, substitutions, if you are really providing unique value, you’re providing it multiple learning methods, a visual cues, audio cues, you got to do a lot of work, but you’re really separating yourself and you’re building your image. You want to get to the point where someone will trust your recipe by just a recipe card. If I get a Jeff Hertzberg bread recipe, I don’t have to think about it. I just say, “I’m going to follow it to the nose, and it’s going to come out really well.” But you don’t just get there overnight, and so you got to be … I think Google, as well as we, all have to recognize we aren’t there maybe, and if there is the possibility of providing unique value, cleverly doing that is still going to be the best practice.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s almost like it’s not just, “How do you figure out a recipe and deliver that?,” it’s also, “How do you, within that, position yourself and the recipe?,” or, “How do you market it?” So like, “How do you convince people that you’re the best person to give them that recipe, and this recipe is the best answer to their question of like chicken noodle soup? Like what’s the best chicken noodle soup?” Is that kind of what you’re saying?

Jeff Coyle: Absolutely. You heard me speak at a conference recently, and something that I mentioned in the round table the day before was, “Do not fake authenticity,” because that is where there’s going to be the heaviest hand from the search engines. If you try to project that you have this experience, or if you’re weaving yourself into the story and that story is not legitimate, it’s only going to take one small infraction for your trust to evaporate. So if you’re telling a story about your mom grew up in the hills of Tuscany, and she gave you this recipe, and then in another story, you’re talking about how your mom grew up in Ireland, and she gave you this recipe and you’re the same person, over time, that’s going to cause some chaos for you, and so being authentic is going to be the future of everything we do.

Bjork Ostrom: How much of that is tied back to an individual? Is the idea here that a search engine, we’ll use Google in this case, is able to track you as a author and a creator and build kind of a comprehensive understanding of who you are, and therefore, how authentic and the level of trust that Google, as a search engine should put in you?

Jeff Coyle: You, as an entity, as a publisher, as a corporation, as an individual, as a group of individuals who will legitimately make claims, and facts, and present data, yeah, absolutely. It’s not necessarily worth it to go down the rabbit hole of exactly how-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. How, but-

Jeff Coyle: But combinations of links to you, the original methods for calculating authoritativeness were heavily skewed towards the link graph and how that presented topic site section level authoritativeness, and it’s a great way of understanding the world, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Jeff Coyle: And as systems got it, as it became easier to analyze text, clarity, sentiment, expertise, and build all those things, that all built up. So years and years ago, and I just use this as a short anecdote, Google attempted to do kind of author-level assessment and rolled it out their system. It is one of those things where it was a little bit hack and slash. It wasn’t perfect-

Bjork Ostrom: Rolled it out, meaning, they tried to do it, and it didn’t really work, so then they stopped doing it. Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: It really didn’t. They stopped it, and then now, what you’re seeing is it has a trend back to that, because they know that that will be very important, and they have to keep working on that. They have to keep working on credibility because we’re in a world where the supply of content just went to infinity, so the collective mind-

Bjork Ostrom: Because of generative AI, like-

Jeff Coyle: Because of generative AI. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: You could create as many … There could be 10 million articles created today on a certain topic, and they’d all be a little bit different, but generally the same and from generative AI.

Jeff Coyle: And so the challenge is if that is true and there are commodity recipes, and let’s just say there’s hundred million chocolate chip cookie recipes get posted to the web tomorrow, how can a search engine do its job? And that’s where … Not that I’m being empathetic for the situation, what I’m saying, “What will be the deciding factor?,” that’s where your head’s got to be. It’s going to be, “Okay. Well, yeah, if there’s a hundred million commodity chocolate chip cookie recipes, why would I think mine’s special?”

Bjork Ostrom: And you have to have that mindset because that’s going to be the mindset of a search engine is, “Why is this one special?” So functionally speaking, what does that look like? Like you’re creating a site, you’re creating a post. How do you do that? Like how do you communicate trust and expertise?

Jeff Coyle: I think you are thoughtful for your audience, right? You’re thoughtful that … I’ve looked at heat maps, wayfinding, which is a fancy way of saying clicking. I’ve looked at these on so many recipe sites and so many food brands that have recipe sections. They also have lifestyle and recipe. There’s a blend of certain situations, and great majority of people do wish to read these things, all the contrarians on Twitter-

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, totally. 100%. Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: And they’re like, “These are terrible. Just send me …” Okay. Well, for those people, provide access to the recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: You want that recipe card? Make sure it’s easy for them to get to, make sure that that’s accessible, but also, education is critical. I mean, if I’m teaching someone how to … And I love cooking, right? I’m really into cooking all different types of stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Yup. Have a beer company that you’ve launched-

Jeff Coyle: I own a beer brewery.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Most people don’t know that, but I own a beer brewery in Georgia, Brunswick, Georgia, Silver Bluff Brewing Company, so I’m really into ingredients and quality. I make pizza, I make bread, a lot of bread and stuff, so I’m super into it, and so providing videos, providing quality imagery that illustrates that you have actually made this, right? You’re not just writing out, providing unique context. I always liked the example of when I watch transcript of my own, this podcast, what was I thinking? If I’m the person …

If it was you, could I add a little bit of value to each section? So even when you just make a video, could you go through that and even add more value? “Oh, well, you know, when you’re making caramel, make sure that you don’t do these five things or whatever. If you’re making naan, and you’re trying to do it on the same day, here’s the things that you need to make sure of, or else you’re beat,” right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: And so those are the things that are going to add unique value and set you apart. The tough part about that is, if someone chooses to distill your value down to a recipe, what is your recourse? And I’m asking myself the question because that’s one that I’ve been thinking about today. It’s, “What would I do if someone tried to distill one of my beer recipes down to six bullets, and how would I feel about that, and what would be the manner of … How would I deal with that? What would I do to present that?,” and I think that that’s the question everybody’s kind of got to deal with right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Point being, and this is something that we talk about a decent amount, but probably not enough as it relates to search, is one of the best ways to do well in the world of search is to understand the technical components, as you should. What does it look like to structure a site well, to have appropriately sized web cord, vital … Like all of this stuff do that, but ultimately, what we are trying to do is we’re trying to think about, “How do people be as successful as possible with what they’re trying to do when they come to our content and experience our content and interact with it?” And ultimately, you can push back on this if you feel like it’s incorrect, that’s what a search engine is trying to do, is help people be successful with the thing they are trying to do, and in our case, in our world, it’s make a recipe well.

And so what does it look like to walk people through that? The hard part is it depends. Some people like step-by-step photos. Some people like a video. Some people need a ton of background on the why, or they’re at least interested in it.

Other people just want the recipe card, and I hear you touching on that a little bit, which is like it has to be comprehensive. Does that feel accurate?

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, it is. Absolutely, and that’s from experience as well. I mean, it’s the part that’s, it’s painful that it has to be. I think that the food blogging community, and the recipes and food brands, and beverage brands had to get that religion sooner than other companies and other industries, and they’re in that process now. So B2B technology companies, for example, they’re years away of having gotten that religion, that they actually have to satisfy all the industries, and they have to have audio, and video, and they have to teach, as well as market, but food bloggers, they’re ahead of the game here because they’ve had to be there because their stuff had to be accessible to all different types of learners earlier than other groups, and so I do think that that’s why they’re often used.

I’ll give you a little bit of a … It’s also because the metaphor that’s frequently used for natural language processing is that topic model is a set of ingredients.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: So it’s very easy to connect the dots between these things, you know?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Point being, people understand that when you’re like, “Hey, you’re looking for a thing, and generative AI can do a good job of manifesting those things and giving those to you.” It’s also a good opportunity to paint the picture of like the gap that it still exists between going somewhere that’s somebody’s an authority. Like you talked about bread, I think of Maurizio, who we interviewed on the podcast. He has a site called The Perfect Loaf.

I know if I’m going to try and make a sourdough bread, I’m going to be more successful spending my time on The Perfect Loaf than I am right now using Bard and saying, “Give me a sourdough recipe,” and it’s because of all of those things that you’re talking about that are wrapped around it.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. I love that example, and it’s to say also is the collective mind of all the chocolate chip cookies in the world, the output that I want.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: I think that’s where it’s really going to be interesting. Then, the question then becomes is, “Is that the thing that Google will show me?,” because what they’re doing is not, so there’s a little bit of a misconception of if you’re asking a large language model to create a chocolate chip cookie recipe, that’s different than what you see in the Search Generative Experience. The Search Generative Experience is trying to grab chunks of text and information and siped them, almost like a buffet, buffet of chunks, and trying to present them in a logical way, and wrap that information up. So I think you have a lot of options for generating and interpreting the collective world. A large language model is giving you the collective genius of some set of websites, but is that truly how people are going to present them to you? So I think you have a yin and a yang, who you’re defending against here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, in the two different scenarios. One being like a ChatGPT, which generally speaking, is going to be thousands of sources averaged versus the Search Generative Experience, and I think that might be a new phrase for people, but what you’re talking about there is within Google, it’s a type of search result that kind of builds an answer. And what you’re saying with that is it’s usually going to be a collection of a handful of sources as opposed to thousands and averaged out.

Jeff Coyle: Perfectly said, yeah. Just imagine if they took the best snippets from five articles that represented their view of expertise, and then they presented that right there. They’ve previously had what they call featured snippets, which is one site, that’s a block, or … I’m generalizing it, but they’re smushing together what they believe presents a QuickBook report, as it were, and then some of those are getting into steps of a recipe, as I’ve seen as of today officially, so …

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you think of a prompt off the top of your head that would trigger … I know this stuff changes day by day, but so if people wanted to-

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. I was looking at one 10 minutes before we recorded, and if you have Labs activated, Google Labs activated, and you typed in caramel apples recipe, you should see a SGE or some similar ones. So that was one where I was looking at it just recently because I was explaining to someone explicitly how that worked and why they shouldn’t be worried about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, because they’ve been thinking about this for quite some time, and you may have different experiences with your Labs set up.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jeff Coyle: But I want to say that it’s Google Labs, and if you haven’t applied for that, if you’re listening, it’s one minute, you submit a form, and then you get access to some of these special experiences.

Bjork Ostrom: Early-

Jeff Coyle: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s awesome. That’s a great takeaway for folks who would want to check it out. It’s super helpful, and I think one of the big takeaways that I had from that conference that we were at and the talk that you gave was this idea of the importance of the expert. I think some people are like, “Wait, it doesn’t matter anymore if I’m an expert because Google and AI are going to be the expert, and they’re going to be able to replace me,” but what you’re saying is actually, it kind of superpowers you as the expert because now, you are more valuable than ever, but the key is you actually need to be an expert.

You can’t be somebody who’s just like really good at mass-producing content because that’s kind of gone away, and so it feels like the shift that has happened is a shift towards true expertise of the individual creating the content. Number one, my question would be, “Does that feel like an accurate representation of kind of the landscape right now?”

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, absolutely. It is that. There’s going to be some clunky things that happen and helpful content, the helpful content update, which is Google assessing your entire site at the site level for how good content is in their eyes. This Search Generative Experience, which is their ability to provide interesting observations about your recipe could be woven in, but in the end, yes, it’s another battleground for search. It’s an additional chunk of real estate for you to win.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jeff Coyle: And so the best sites, you’re going to be able to be there, you’re going to be able to have your regular result, potentially a recipe result. So I like to view it as this is just yet another type of search result. And over time, will they merge to one? Perhaps, but it’s definitely changed the way I think about what could happen and really focused me on recognizing that in the end, yes, the true expertise is going to battle. It’s not as simple as it used to be, but if you know the general recipe and you know the basic recipe, and you know why yours is unique, if you have tips for a particular recipe, if you’re providing unique value, those things are going to provide a lot of value for you over time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Sure.

Jeff Coyle: By the way, I remembered one of the ones I was looking at.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: If you have SGE activated and you did chocolate chip cookies recipe, you’re probably not going to see it, but if you type easy chocolate chip cookies recipe, you will see it.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, that’s interesting.

Jeff Coyle: So they’re doing some interesting things with intent, and so that’s interesting, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. And again, in order to see that, you need to make sure that Labs is activated so you can see kind of some of these early things that Google is testing.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So the second question that I’d have related to some of the expertise, this wouldn’t be pertinent for us, at least on Pinch of Yum, but for those who are working with contributors, like other people who are creating the content, is it just essentially the same thing that applies? Let’s say you have five authors who are publishing. You need to make sure that those authors are truly an expert on the thing that they’re publishing content about, because on a site level, you’re going to be assessed as like, “How authoritative is your site?,” and so if you have one person who’s writing about health related stuff and they don’t have the credibility for that, then that’s an issue.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. I mean, on the nose, what I’m recommending to teams in their operation steps is to make sure that the writer, either in your … If you’re sending briefs out or requests for, and you’re the expert, and you’re having somebody else write, you’re including your unique values, so the points of differentiation, point of view. Make sure you lean into these concepts, why they’re doing it, or if you’re leaving that obligation to the writer, they should be submitting those back with their draft, so somewhere-

Bjork Ostrom: So you, the expert?

Jeff Coyle: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: It depends on who’s the expert and who’s doing the review. That’s the easiest way to get to this point because a lot of people just write, and I’m totally cool with that, right? Yeah, sure. You have to know what unique differentiated value you bring, and if you need to force that step because you have lots of contributors, ask for it, if it’s their obligation, and then if it’s not, if it’s your obligation, include it in your request.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Then, are you then including your name? Are you including the expert’s name in the byline of the article, reviewed by-

Jeff Coyle: Yeah. For sure.

Bjork Ostrom: I’ve seen that, like article reviewed by da, da, da, da, da, like written by this person, reviewed and fact-checked, or whatever by this person.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, absolutely. Thinking of the trail of evidence, as I’ve heard it called internally at a large publishing company, but if you’re representing an admin or a group of writers, that doesn’t disqualify you here. You just have to explain it and say, “Yeah, we have seven people,” their names. “These are them over time. They’ve been part of this community. These are the current team members.”

Explain why you represent yourself as cool cup staff, you know?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Just make sure that you’re communicating authentically, and that’s going to be fair and appropriate enough for you to have success, so …

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. That’s great. We could talk about this for probably three hours, but these are supposed to be short episodes. My guess is coming out of this, Jeff, there’ll be people who are interested in MarketMuse, interested in connecting with you. Obviously, you have a deep wealth of knowledge around this.

Interested in checking out the brewery. You can do a little shout-out for that, if people live in the area or visiting. But can you give a little bit of an insight into how you work with creators? MarketMuse, talk about that a little bit, because this is a tool that’s built to help people who listen to the podcast and how people can follow along with you as well.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, so sure. You can email me jeff@marketmuse.com. I’m active on LinkedIn and Twitter, Jeffrey_Coyle on the X, Twitter, and then also LinkedIn. Feel free to shoot me a connection. Mention the podcast.

MarketMuse really helps teams who are publishing to learn what they should be creating, where they have gaps, and then how much … I like to say it’s the what, why, and the how much for content. So, “What should I be making?,” “Why?,” “What data is telling me that?,” and, “How much should I be creating?,” and then we take it all the way down to execution. So we have technology that will evaluate your existing recipes and give you insights about whether they are representing expertise, give you insights about potentially areas where they could be improved. We’ve just released a AI assistant that uses our technology in the background, so it provides more comprehensive outlining than any other product on the market right out of the gate, and we can work with you if you’re a one-person shop with a blog all the way up to, kind of we work with some of the largest publishers and food and food brands in the world, but please do that. Then, if you go to silverbluff.com, we ship to 44 states-

Bjork Ostrom: All right.

Jeff Coyle: Including District of Columbia, three of our products, and yeah, our Mexican Lager has won the U.S. Open World Beer Cup.

Bjork Ostrom: Award-winning.

Jeff Coyle: Silver medals in both, and we just got notice. We won Beer of the Year from the Brewski 2023, this morning. You’re the first person I-

Bjork Ostrom: Wow, breaking news on The Food Blogger Pro Podcast.

Jeff Coyle: So if you’re a fan of any IPA’s, Double IPA’s, or Mexican Lager’s, we have those three available, and then if you’re swinging on I–95, passing through Georgia, make a stop there.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. It’s just a through-line of excellence in everything you do, Jeff, whether it’s a beer or like SEO and search software.

Jeff Coyle: I try my best.

Bjork Ostrom: So thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Jeff Coyle: Hey, for sure, and I appreciate it, and awesome questions. I’ll put one last note. If you have been impacted by changes, if you are providing unique value, don’t lose hope.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jeff Coyle: Reach out. There are communities of people going through this. I’m one of those people, but it might not be fixable today, it might not be fixable this month, but if you were providing value, it will be a path. There will be a path, and I know. I’ve heard it a number of times, especially in this space, where I know you’re putting your heart and soul into those sites, and there are cavs, so just know that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Jeff Coyle: There are people who are thinking about this, and a lot of them are willing to talk to you about it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Jeff Coyle: Yeah, and so to do that, take advantage of this awesome community.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s really cool. Thanks. We’ve had those conversations with people who are in the middle of that, and it’s like extremely discouraging, but extremely encouraging to know that others are going through it. You have a change, and it affects your traffic, which affects your income, which affects your life, but a great reminder to keep after it, and there are people willing to help, like yourself, so thanks, Jeff. Really appreciate it, and thanks for coming on.

Jeff Coyle: Hey, take it easy. See you.

Emily Walker: And that’s it for this episode of Tiny Bites by The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We really hope you enjoyed that episode. Again, head to the show notes to learn more, and we will see you next time.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you’re listening to Tiny Bites from the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. As a reminder, Tiny Bites is our news or current events based podcast that we release whenever we feel like we need to get an episode out as quickly as possible. With all of the Google algorithm updates recently, we felt like we just needed to get an episode out to our listeners to chat about what these updates are, how you can best approach them for your food blog, and just what your mindset should be around all of these different helpful content updates and other algorithm updates.

Bjork is chatting with Ewen Finser all about these Google algorithm updates, and it’s a really useful episode that we know you’ll get a lot out of. As a reminder, head to foodbloggerpro.com/podcast to check out the show notes where we’ll include some links and other helpful information with just some more detail about everything that they chat about during this episode. So without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Ewen, welcome to the podcast.

Ewen Finser: Thanks, Bjork. Great to be back, I guess. It’s I think the second or third time I’ve been with you and with your audience.

Bjork Ostrom: We have these conversations, just you and I. Like for instance, in the Las Vegas airport when we ran into each other after going to a conference, Rhodium. And the great thing is we get to capture it and roll it up and send it out to thousands of people. And it’s great because you have this deep expertise in this world of content creation. And the nice thing about having a conversation with you is it’s outside of just the food space. You know the food space, familiar with it, but really you know content creation at large because you’ve done it in multiple different niches.

And so what we’re going to do, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background, and then we’re going to jump in and focus really specifically around Google algorithm updates, knowing that there’s a lot of people who listen to this that have been impacted, some positive, some negative by the recent one. But you know this world well because you know content and you know content production and you know digital content really well. Can you talk about why that is and your brief overview of the world of online businesses and content businesses?

Ewen Finser: Sure. Well, I’ve been stuck in this world for 10 years now.

Bjork Ostrom: And you can’t get out.

Ewen Finser: With a couple websites that hit and then over time launched a couple more, built up the team, and then kind of stumbled into a media company accidentally. And then I think another turning point was probably 2017, 2018, we had some significant exits and then was-

Bjork Ostrom: Exits meaning you had built some sites over the last three to four years.

Ewen Finser: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: They were doing well enough that you were able to sell those for a significant amount.

Ewen Finser: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So you kind of had this influx of capital.

Ewen Finser: Sure, yeah. And this was a great outcome. It was beyond what I’d ever expect was possible in the space. And then had this time to reflect on what I wanted to do. And through that was turned on to this idea of, well, scale really, because once you have an exit, you look at what do you want to do? Can we do it again in different verticals? And so we kind of went about, both within our core company, which is Venture 4th Media, it’s our holding company, we started launching new sites. And then raising some external capital from investors. And we have done that in various iterations, really focusing on this idea of ground up versus acquisitions and having done a little bit of both and realized that the grass is always greener, right? But having built and bought, really kind of understood the unit economics around building.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ewen Finser: And so we kind of set out with a bunch of different theses around verticals we wanted to get into. We used external capital to scale those from zero, and we’ve entered all sorts of verticals from gaming to fashion, to pets to tech. You name it, we probably have a site in a vertical that you’re familiar with. But really with this idea of let’s throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks and then double down on stuff that sticks. And so that’s kind of like our mantra is fire bullets, then cannonballs. Always be testing. We launch a bunch of sites all at once in a big cohort and then try to analyze the data and figure out which ones are working and double down on them.

And so I’d say the last five years has been focused on this thesis of how do we achieve scale? We’ve built tech platform to support our content process. We’ve built out our content teams with hiring writers and working with creatives, our design chops, all the stuff that you need to scale. And so today we’re kind of at this juncture where we have a lot of different sites out there in the wild. Some have matured very nicely, others that didn’t survive, and that’s okay, and a whole bunch of in the middle of that spectrum. Yeah, that’s primarily I guess on our monetization sites, affiliate and display ads. And we do some sponsorships as well, but essentially that’s what we have. It’s over a hundred different websites across these different portfolio companies that we operate.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. If I can say that back to you, let me know if this feels accurate. Venture 4th Media, it’s kind this company at the top, and this is a company that you own. It’s all content sites, so you produce content, but the interesting thing that’s maybe a little bit of a contrast for probably the majority of people who listen to this podcast is you take the approach not of going in. You aren’t creating content for a hundred different sites. You’re strategizing at the high level and saying, “Hey, we think there’s an opportunity in whatever niche it is, pets. Okay, let’s look at this category and think about what are the different categories underneath that we can create pet sites for.” Maybe it’s like you discover the opportunity to create a Dalmatian site and you focus in on Dalmatians and it’s dalmatianlovers.com, and then you go and you find Dalmatian lovers to create that content. And so they have to know dalmatians and they have to be good writers.

Your strategy is a lot around understanding an audience, understanding opportunity, creating systems around working with writers, bringing those people in and scaling those up. I think the thing that’s interesting about your role specifically is that a huge part of it is search and analyzing opportunities that you see using tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, these keyword analysis tools that give you a little bit of an insight into how people are searching online to find opportunities. And from the ground up, these sites don’t exist. You’re not acquiring them from the ground up, building them to get enough search traffic to make them into these valuable sites that you either keep and they cash flow and then you use that money to build other sites or to sell them because as we all know, a business is an asset and that’s a valuable thing and people would want to buy that. So does that feel like an accurate reflection of the landscape for you and Venture 4th?

Ewen Finser: Yes, I think that’s what differentiates us. Of course, we do some acquisitions here and there, but that’s not our core competency. It’s kind of bringing these things to life and you’re right, and essentially I kind of think of ourselves today as almost like a platform company in a sense. And then really what we’re about is finding experts. That’s its own skill. Where do you find people that are passionate about dalmatians and then bringing them into the system and training them up to the point where they produce content that is suitable for web audiences. And so really we found that’s been, I guess the secret to the sauce has been finding these experts. That’s the fun part for us is finding these people that are just so passionate about something, but they don’t necessarily have the whole business plan figured out. And so we kind of bring the plan, but we need the experts. And that’s I think, not to spill the tea a little bit on Google, but that’s kind of where they’re headed is experts, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Experts.

Ewen Finser: Who’s creating this content, not just what are the words on the page. And so we’ve found that’s actually the key leverage point for us.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. And so that’s a good tie into the topic that we’re going to be talking about, which is Google search engines, but really Google, and you kind of alluded to this, and I actually just finished up a conversation with Jeff, MarketMuse, who we both know also from Rhodium, and he was kind of reiterating this idea of the importance of experts, but we know all of these things from different places. We get information, but we really see the impact of those as Google rolls out these updates to their algorithm. And there was recently within… There’s always these algorithm updates. There’s little tiny updates that are happening, but there’s recently some pretty significant ones. Can we just step back and for those who aren’t familiar or are kind of new or maybe haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about search or educating themselves on the world of search, can you talk about what an algorithm update to Google is and what’s happening behind the scenes when those roll out?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, it’s been for 10 years to have seen everything, and I’ve seen this evolve. Essentially, the algorithm is what indexes and categorizes all of the content that gets published out there. And I kind of look at it like Google’s changing thesis on what is good content. Because a lot of times at the ground level for a blogger or sometimes operating one site, you’re like, hey, I lost my first position and it kind of feels unfair. It’s like, who moved my cheese? And it’s Google basically reaffirming a new direction for what they think is valuable. It’s this constant pull of Google projecting in this document called the quality rater guidelines, which is like the gospel. This is what they give individuals who are going to evaluate sites for whether they’re useful and helpful and all those nice things. And they project, this is what we want.

They want people just to publish quality content from out of the goodness of their hearts and do it the right way. But that’s kind of what they’re looking for. But then of course, because it’s an algorithm, there’s this whole SEO community that is on different ends of the spectrum are either following it to the T or they’re experimenting in this grey hat area where they’re gaming the system. And so Google’s in this constant tug of war with the people that are gaming the system, right? And there’s this fine line between SEO best practices and the gamification. And so it’s a whole rabbit hole we can go down, but essentially that’s what these algorithm updates are. They’re in response to some new information that Google has, some updates, some tweaks to what they think is valuable and how they measure that. And that’s kind of the messy part of it is it’s constantly changing, it’s constantly evolving.

Bjork Ostrom: And so you talked about grey hat, these ideas that they’re in the world of search for those who haven’t heard it before, there’s kind of these different hats that you could wear depending on how you approach SEO, white hat, grey hat, black hat. Black hat being like you found something that maybe is in violation of Google’s best practices or recommendations, but it works. And so paying for links would be an example. Paying for follow links would probably be one of those things that lands in the black hat world. But do you have examples of some of those algorithm updates that have happened in the past to help paint the picture of what that functionally looks like, what Google is going for, and then what it looks like when the algorithm update happens?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, back when I was getting started, it was Panda and Penguin. They used to name these updates after animals, and those were essentially targeted at spam and sites that were kind of just mass-generating spun content or using…

Bjork Ostrom: Spun content. Can you explain what that is for people who aren’t familiar?

Ewen Finser: I guess back in the day, and this is actually kind of full circle now with AI, you could use article spinners to just create content that had the keyword density, that had the number of phrases were repeated even to the extreme where you’d see someone publish a piece of content that just had a keyword list. Or if back in the day for the old folks at the end of the article, sometimes you would just put keywords as like, this is what we want to rank for. And Google’s like, okay, but of course that can be gamified. And so all these updates back then it was kind of about that is over-optimization that the SEOs were doing. I think more recently, a couple of years back, there was some Google health updates where they kind of targeted content that was, if you were giving medical advice, they kind of brought the hammer down on sites that didn’t have any business or Google’s eyes didn’t have business dispensing medical advice.

In the past, Ewen could just publish a health blog with medical opinions, and those could actually rank fairly well along with WebMD and all these other more authoritative sources. And so that was…

Bjork Ostrom: One that had maybe doctors fact-checking or writing the articles.

Ewen Finser: Right. And then I think maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago, there is the product review update where Google said, look, a lot of sites out there aren’t actually testing the products. They don’t have firsthand experience. They’re just regurgitating product specs. So that was the update targeting sites that had a preponderance of doing that frequently. And then this most recent helpful content update, which is kind of a further turning of the dial, which is I think I’d almost don’t want to label it quite yet because we’re still processing what it actually means. But in general, it’s kind of like Google is always trying to optimize for better, more helpful, more transparent, more authoritative, all these things are generally where they’re trying to go. They’re just measuring it in different ways and hopefully getting closer to the truth.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And it’s interesting, I’ll use the medic example, and it paints a picture really well of generally speaking, what is Google trying to do? Okay with that update, they were trying to make sure that if a piece of content was about health advice or medical advice, that the person writing it had the authority to speak on that. So it’s not Bjork or even writing about the best ways to recover from knee surgery because we thought it was a keyword opportunity and would rank well. It’s like a knee surgeon, but then the complicating factor is how you, and you kind of alluded to this, how do you distill that down into an algorithm or a process that a computer follows to make that decision on whether this person is an expert or not? And that’s where it gets complex where hey, maybe 90% of the time it’s going to do a good job of saying, this person probably shouldn’t be writing about it, this person should.

But 10% of the time, maybe it was a doctor and they did have complete authority on it, and for whatever reason they got caught up in this algorithm and their content was deprioritized in the search results. So it’s not perfect. It’s also interesting because what happens is these algorithms are pushed out and then people start to experiment and say like, okay, what do I need to do in order to appease this algorithm? And that’s kind of where either best practices or the grey hat comes in where you’re finding what are the opportunities to kind of manipulate or twist or kind of get around this. So what is your approach as you think of content creation serving the algorithm versus serving the user versus just doing the best piece of content that you can imagine?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, I mean it’s a really tricky dilemma. You hit on it. It’s like find the right balance. And I think at one level we kind of look at the horizon, we say, okay, let’s just publish quality content around topics that we think are interesting. And so I kind of lean more in on keyword research and market research to identify gaps in the market and then create topical plans to give to our team and work with our experts to create those plans and then go execute against it, right? In that sense though, I am working with the search engine, right? And I think even with its most recent helpful content update, Google’s said, well, we just want people to come back to this refrain of people should just publish helpful content, but clearly that’s not the way it works. People won’t just wake up one day and say, I want to write about, I don’t know, pottery vases or something.

And they just, oh, let’s write about that randomly. And actually Spencer Haws had a recent, I think article or post or something that kind of went viral around, is blogging dead basically… Or did Google kill blogging? And I think there’s kind this interesting dilemma where if you just bury your head in the sand and say, I’m just going to write whatever I feel like without having any SEO awareness, you’re not going to get very far because you may not be publishing the right content. You might keep doing that for months and months and not have anything to show for it. On the flip side, if you’re kind of over optimizing or really trying to hack your way and just creating the links or the topics that you think Google likes or have low competition or whatever, you can end up getting caught up in these algorithms as even some of our sites have, because even though we’re doing all the right things following the letter of law, we’re not doing any grey hat.

We are using data to inform our decisions. And so sometimes that gets us caught up in updates. And so it’s not a perfect science, but I kind of fall in spectrum of use data to inform your processes. Don’t get too hung up on keyword density or what do you put in the H2, H3, H4, because that tends to change a lot. And so it’s a little bit of a gamble that eventually Google’s going to figure out that your content is high quality. But at the same time, everyone always thinks their content is high. I don’t think there’s anyone out there that says, oh, my content is really bad.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Ewen Finser: It’s like you have to constantly reassess what you think is quality content.

Bjork Ostrom: The hard part… In our world, I can speak to this, I don’t know how true you see this to be true is a lot of times it works. You look at an outline that’s generated and you fill that in, maybe it’s even like you fill it in with some AI content. You kind of go the way of these data-driven content creation processes and it works, but then it doesn’t work. You get penalized for it. And so there is this weird art and science of being aware, being aware of what best practices are, being aware of what’s working, but then also, and I think this is at the core, and I would be interested in your response to this. Always trying to think about how is this going to be as best as possible for the person who’s going to consume this content?

Ewen Finser: Yes. I think Google has said that too is right for your audience. And so a hundred percent, I think putting it through that lens of even I’m constantly reminded of this when I go to search for some of my articles on my mobile device and be like, a lot of us might use Mediavine or Ad Thrive, and you’re like, oh man, all those ads, this videos popping up. You’re like, wait, is that really the best experience? And so that is a really good forcing function, right? And at the same time, to your point, we still have to use data to inform where we go. And so yeah, it is this constant. And so one of my approaches is just to experiment. And so we have a bucket of sites we call the skunk works where we just try different things, black hat, grey hat, white hat, just to test a hypothesis, or if we do this, we publish AI content, what does that do? But we don’t test that out on our babies. We do that kind of off to the side.

And for the sites we’re really focused on, we try to really invest in that high-quality content that really serves the user. But yeah, it’s a tricky balance and there’s no easy answer where you can just say, oh, that’s it. That’s the way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And it’s hard when you see somebody doing it and it works, but it feels like, wait, is that actually the best way to create content in the world? And maybe it is, maybe that’s the answer, but also a lot of times it works for a season, article spinning as an example. I guess the point is this. If there’s two things that you could chase, you could chase the trend that’s working or you could chase an understanding of your audience and content that resonates and problem solving, which is an abstract skill, and then kind of putting the exoskeleton around that of SEO best practices. That to me feels like the solution and it’s still not perfect. But generally speaking, it’s like human first. It’s understanding your audience, building around them and then saying, what are best practices from an SEO standpoint, technical type considerations.

Ewen Finser: And I think AI is a perfect kind of corollary for this because it’s this marriage of deep subject matter expertise with powerful tools. That’s where massive growth can happen. And so for someone who’s not familiar with the subject, if you pop it into some Chat GPT, you’ll get an article or you’ll get some words on a page that read well, and it sounds credible. It’s like that person at the dinner party who knows a little bit about everything. But if you poke under the surface a little bit and if you had that experience or that context or that expert in the room, they would immediately poke holes in that article. And so that’s kind of where the interesting part comes where if I were to use Chat GPT for, I don’t know, some digital marketing topic that I know about or I’m gluten-free so I know a lot about that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ewen Finser: If I were to use Chat GPT to create an article on that, it would be relatively easy for me to spot the inconsistencies, but also to leverage it to do certain things where I’m like, okay, it can do that. It can do that for me. It can be kind of an assistant, but I’m not relying on it for everything. And I think on either extreme, that’s where things can fall down, where you’re just publishing… We come across this all the time with some clients we’ve worked with where they’ve been publishing great content, they’re putting their heart and soul into it, but there’s been no exoskeleton to your point.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ewen Finser: And so it’s just very disorganized and it needs some of that tightening up from an SEO perspective, maybe internally linking better or having a better category hierarchy structure. And the flip side, there’s all sorts of AI sites in the wild that are just very well interlinked, but a ton of kind of spun sites where they don’t pass the smell test for an expert. And so both ends of those spectrums I think have problems, and it’s the people who could find that happy balance between those two that are going to have a lot of success right now and in the years ahead.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So helpful content update. Can you talk a little bit about what happened with that? And then I’d be interested to hear your reflections on what happens if you’re negatively impacted, what do you do? What was it, what happened? And then how do you respond?

Ewen Finser: Yeah, and also with the end in mind, the first thing we do after any update rolls out is nothing because-

Bjork Ostrom: Let the dust settle essentially.

Ewen Finser: We let the dust settle, particularly because these updates usually take about two weeks to roll out completely. And so some of what happens at the front end isn’t what ends up happening at the end or you’ll dip down and come back, or even this most recent update is very confusing. There was the helpful content update, and then there’s a core algorithm update and a spam update right in between. In a period of a month, really end of September through October, there were these three updates that rolled out. And so the problem becomes correlation causality. It’s like, well, this happened, so maybe, but what caused it exactly? And if you start messing with the dials too quickly, it’ll be very hard to determine, well, was that just a natural bounce? And we’ve had sites where they’ve been negatively impacted initially or even with one update two years ago, and all of a sudden with helpful content, they start bouncing back and we didn’t do anything to those sites.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So that’s like you didn’t change anything. It was just like Google-

Ewen Finser: Google turning the dial.

Bjork Ostrom: Fine tuning. Yeah.

Ewen Finser: And so we got in the zone of happiness or whatever, and then we got lucky. And so that’s the first thing we do is just assess the situation.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Ewen Finser: And then, yeah, so the helpful content update was really just a further fine tuning of this Google update algorithm discussion dialogue that’s been happening for years. And I think the difference for this, we talked like Jeff Coyle would be them using AI now as a classifier within their algorithm to make labels essentially about sites in general. Is this a helpful site or is this an unhelpful site? And so it’s kind of a site-wide classifier. I think that’s the big change in past updates where maybe in past algorithm updates you might have some of your articles were impacted, but not all of your site. This one was basically Google coming in and having this classifier saying the majority of your content is not helpful. Therefore, we’re going to kind of deprioritize anything your site publishes. And there’s been a couple interesting case studies here, and maybe I’ll send over a couple of them that I’ve seen where they’ve been trying to dig into really understand, well, what does it actually mean at a fundamental level. It’s all theories. Google’s always going to say, well, helpful content, that sounds great, but in reality, what does that actually mean?

And essentially, if a certain percentage of your content is deemed unhelpful, you’ll get kind of deprioritized so that for some of those sites that could be like 70% reduction, 80% reduction.

Bjork Ostrom: In traffic.

Ewen Finser: In traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: Have you seen that or know people what happened-

Ewen Finser: Yes, we do have some sites that did see that, but then complicating that there’s also… This was kind of a negative update. It wasn’t Google rewarding helpful sites. It was Google classifying unhelpful sites, whatever they thought. And again, so what they think or what their algorithm determines is unhelpful. And so you could have just been actually not impacted, but because of the changing in the SERPs, you could have seen some impacts. Right? For example, the most common search landscape change is now the elevation. And not because Google gave them extra points, but just because of how the algorithm works of Reddit and forums and Quora, all these user generated content platforms now are getting priority because they’re generally helpful sites, even if the specific Reddit answers are really not helpful, they’re getting priority.

Bjork Ostrom: Reddit overall is viewed in this update as a helpful site.

Ewen Finser: It’s basically labeling all these sites either… Well, I guess if you’re unhelpful or not unhelpful, and then I guess there’s some theory being, well, maybe there’s going to be another update where they reward helpful sites then becomes a positive kind of classifier. But as far as we know, as far as I know, it’s this negative classification of really it’s the unhelpful content update from what I’m seeing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of my curiosities with that, and you kind of alluded to this a little bit is I know sites, and I’m sure you’ve talked about some of your sites or know of sites that were negatively impacted, but we wouldn’t think of them as unhelpful. They’re like, Pinch of Yum in this case wasn’t impacted. I think probably saw an uptick. But we know sites that saw a downtick in terms of quality content, very similar in a very similar category as well. And so if I was listening, I’d be like, wait a minute, we put so much time and energy into our content creating this quality content. We’ve been doing it for 14 years. Is that what you’re talking about, where we’re now at the stage of trying to understand if something was negatively impacted, why that was viewed as unhelpful or do we know at this point?

Ewen Finser: No, we don’t know. And that’s the hard part, and that’s where some of these case studies are diving in and looking at the data correlation of like, well, a couple I guess heuristics that I’ve seen, right? Older sites have tended to perform better, so that could be maybe for Pinch of Yum because it’s been around for a while and it’s been a market leader. A lot of the leaders were kind of elevated. It’s almost like Google took the top 10 positions and said, okay, we’re going to have three authority content sites, three user-generated content sources and a bunch of e-com sites and maybe Facebook or LinkedIn or something. We want to spread it around a little bit. And so if you didn’t quite make the cut, that’s what it feels like at the end.

If you didn’t quite make the cut of market leader in your space, you’re at the end of the first page or bumped to the second page versus if you are… Reddit, interestingly enough, is usually not the first result, but it’s present on almost every single search query in the top 10 results. But in position, what I’ve seen is position two, but mainly three, four, five it’s like Reddit gets some sort of exposure in that middle of the pack maybe above the fold.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Ewen Finser: That’s one effect. The other effect is I’ve seen a little bit of correlation between shorter content actually performing better. Now I’m not sure if this is because it’s shorter or because sites that have been around for a while used to produce shorter content. So is it an age thing or is the content size? But certainly I think that’s kind of where Google might be headed. Another theory is that because they’re using AI, the classifier has a certain number of credits and so it can only look at a certain number of words on the page. And so if you have a 5,000 word resource page, it’s like after 2000 words maybe just whatever, I can’t do that, so I’m just going to judge you on your first 2000. And that’s another theory out there is that, well, if you have ad heavy setups or you have intrusive display ads or those pre auto roll video players or something that could be affecting it because that tend to get to that first kind of initial above the fold page load. There’s all sorts of theories like that.

I don’t know how much weight I want to put in any of them, but I think in general I’m kind of like, okay, yeah, user experience with display ads, that seems like something that could be a negative signal because again, coming back to if I’m a user, visiting a site, getting inundated with ads probably doesn’t feel good. I think that long content and the trend has been add more to your top performing pieces kind of over-optimize them, and if the easiest way to out your competitors is just to do more words, I think that has led to, again, from the user perspective, recipe sites are a great example where because there’s an incentive to have more content, to get more ad impressions, you have somebody looking for a gluten-free pancake recipe. They come to that page and they get in the beginning of time, pancakes were created by, and you’re like, no, no, no. I just want the recipe. But you have to scroll through and see all those ads to get their actual recipe. And so that’s something that seems to make sense to me.

But some of the other factors are, I think topical relevance might have something to do with it too, where if you’re too broad or all over the… Or just chasing keywords without thinking of the whole subject matter or the whole category, you might be getting into some trouble there too.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. It sounds like all of these are the contemplations that are happening early as the dust settles, as kind of a last consideration, last topic to talk about, what does it look like? At what point are you ready to take action as a creator? So let’s say somebody’s listening, they’ve been negatively impacted. It’s a bummer. They’ve been working for years to build up this momentum. How do you then start to rebuild? And I know sites really, huge sites that have had this, was like seven or eight years ago, 50% of the traffic goes away, but then they rebuild and they put things back together and they get the traffic back and even Pinch of Yum, we’ve had seasons where things have gone down and then things go up. But what does it look like? What is your mindset or what should the mindset be for a creator who maybe doesn’t have a portfolio of sites to hedge it, but they have one site, it’s been negatively impacted and now they need to rebuild after being hit?

Ewen Finser: Well, it’s a great caveat because obviously when you have many sites, sometimes we make the decision to forget about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Ewen Finser: Because it’s not worth it. And I think that’s still kind of affects maybe an individual site at a certain point, being really conscious of the resources you’re expending into the thing that isn’t working anymore. That’s just a helpful… To know at least allocate for those costs. But I think one would be now is probably a good time. I think the updates rolled out. There’s some chatter out there, maybe they’re going to come out with a correction update where some people get it back, the people that were mistakenly impacted will get some bounce back and that’s okay, but at this point I’m not really waiting for that. I’m still looking to take some actions. And so I think starting with the things that are just the easiest things that make sense that I was describing earlier and you were describing, if you just experience your content as a user, what feels like the right answer? And so a couple of things I might do in this situation if I had a site is actually I might turn down the ads for a little bit and just kind of try that or maybe Mediavine wrapped it.

They all have these different settings I think you can either manually or through their support, ask for them to do. Maybe go in the lowest settings for a little bit or getting rid of that intrusive video just to see if that has any effect on your user experience. And then I look at your content inventory. I kind of take a look at all the articles I have on the site, how much traffic are they getting and filter actually for the ones that are not getting any traffic at all and go through this exercise which can be called content pruning. But I think that’s one very specific thing you can do, but just assessing that content for running it through a process of keep and refresh is that article… Maybe it’s a topic that has volume around it that fits with your overall topical map, but just it wasn’t your best effort. And so go back and redo that content with your best effort and make it the best piece of content out there right now.

But the other approach could be actually it’s not really worth that effort, but maybe I’ll merge it with another piece of content that is similar and is kind of better. And so maybe that makes sense just to merge that content and redirect it. And then another approach could be just redirect it. It’s not getting any traffic. Maybe it’s an outdated recipe or you tried talking about… This goes back to the topical map. Maybe you’re looking at gluten-free site. You tried talking about paleo, you did 10 recipes on paleo. They never got any traction. Maybe you actually get rid of those articles and say, you know what? That didn’t work. That experiment didn’t work. We went a little bit too far. And actually maybe that is confusing Google as to what you’re an expert at. And so starting to prune those topics away, I kind of start there. And then I might look at the existing inventory. Where do we have big gaps? If we’re talking about, again, gluten-free is a good example and we’ve just never talked about certain or never create a recipe or a piece of content around certain subcategories within that.

Maybe go out and create those articles right now. And then I think those are the big things I do. I think honestly, anything else, I’m not so sure. There’s all sorts of theory about, because forums were benefited, maybe you should add comments back. I don’t think that can hurt. I think from a user perspective, comments could be helpful. A lot of times there’s some great goodness in the comment section as long as it’s not spam, but I’m not going to go adding a forum to all of my sites necessarily. But that’s something to think about. How do you increase engagement on the site? And so that’s tactically how I react to the update if you care about Google traffic. And then there’s probably another question of how do you diversify? So you don’t have…

Bjork Ostrom: Out of just searched traffic, and that’s where you think of email, you think of social, and we could spin up another conversation to cover all of that. That’s awesome. Really helpful to have your perspective on it. I know you’ve seen all sorts of different angles as you’ve worked with hundreds of sites. It’s such a rare thing that you have as an independent creator, independent business owner to have had hundreds of different touchpoints with different sites in different categories is just a super unique perspective. So usually at this point we’re like, hey, here’s how you can connect with somebody to buy the thing they have or to work with them. I heard you reference clients at one point. I know that you’ve been gracious enough with us. We’ve jumped on a call and paid you for your expertise occasionally, but is there a way that listeners could work with you in some way? Or is it just following along with you, joining your team if you need writers, but this is your chance to pitch, but what do you pitch? I don’t know.

Ewen Finser: Yeah, this is usually my problem, we don’t have a lot, but occasionally I do some consulting. It’s not a business line of mine, but I like helping other entrepreneurs and I like, I love content. So I kind of nerd out to it. You can find me on LinkedIn, Ewen Finser, E-W-E-N. It’s pretty unique name. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one. And just reach out to me that way. Actually recently, I was telling you Bjork, before the call, we acquired a newsletter called Niche Media Publishing. It’s Nichemediapublishing.com and that’s where I actually am sharing a lot of my thinking and reaction to a lot of the updates and what’s happening in the media world. And I don’t really have products in there yet, but maybe one day. So that’s a good way just to get on the list and keep in touch with me, my thinking. And then we do have a service called Content Teams, contentteams.io where we help brands find writers, but that’s also just a byproduct of what we’re doing all the time.

And it’s not a main revenue line or effort for us, but it is something we do offer because we do get approached by people saying, hey, how can we work together? Or-

Bjork Ostrom: How can we do what you’ve done with your process of hiring writers? And you’ve done it a hundred times and if somebody’s never done it before…

Ewen Finser: Yeah, I think that’s a good point. Because if you’re at that point maybe where you’re thinking of, oh, maybe I can scale it. I think there’s a growing trend out there where there’s like, I’m going to start a second site or a third site, and once you get maybe to that third site, that’s been my experience. It starts to get a little bit out of control. And so that’s where building a little bit of a team could be helpful. And that’s what we’re trying to solve. Basically, it’s a headhunting service. We’re not an agency. We just want to find you the experts or find you the specialists to help you scale your business and then walk away and not have anything to do with it long-term and not have to charge a retainer or anything. That’s the model for content.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. That’s great. And I just signed up. I’m your newest Niche Media Publishing subscriber. It’s official.

Ewen Finser: Cool.

Bjork Ostrom: All right, Ewen, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Ewen Finser: Awesome, thanks Bjork.

Emily Walker: And that’s a wrap on Tiny Bites from the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We hope you got a lot out of that episode. We know that Google algorithm updates can be really nerve wracking or stressful, and hopefully from everything you learned from this episode, you’ll be able to approach them with a little bit more strategy and just some more peace of mind. Like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode. Head to foodbloggerpro.com/podcast to check out the show notes and leave any questions you have for us there. Thanks so much for listening.