Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Memberful, looking to find sustainable sources of income from your blog this year that don’t include fighting against changing search engines and social media algorithms. With exclusive membership content, you can create a new source of income by turning your food blog into a membership business while creating the content you’re passionate about.

Memberful has everything you need to quickly get your membership program up and running with content gating, paid newsletters, private podcasts, and much more. Plus, Memberful seamlessly integrates with your existing WordPress website or you can use Memberful to create your own member home within minutes using their in-house tools. And with Memberful, you can create multiple membership tiers, limiting access to certain recipes, meal plans, and cooking tutorials to better connect with your most devoted followers and monetize the content you’re already producing.

By using Memberful, you’ll have access to a world-class support team ready to help you set up your membership and grow your revenue. They’re passionate about your success, and you’ll always have access to a real human when you need help. Food creators are already using Memberful to foster community within their audiences and monetize their content. And listeners to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast can go to memberful.com/food to learn more about Memberful solutions for food creators and create an account for free. That’s M-E-M-B-E-R-F-U-L.com/food. Thanks again to Memberful for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back Nisha Vora from Rainbow Plant Life. Not only is she the YouTube expert here at Food Blogger Pro, but she has also been on the podcast before and we’re just huge fans of everything she does, so we’re thrilled to have her back on the podcast today.

Bjork and Nisha kick off this conversation with a deep dive into the current status of food content on YouTube. Nisha shares more about her current strategy on YouTube, including her approach to YouTube Shorts and longer form videos and what monetization looks like on the platform. Nisha also just recently launched meal plans by Rainbow Plant Life, and shares more about the process of developing and marketing the meal plans and how she has leaned on her team to help grow this new part of the business.

She also chats a little bit about what the future of Rainbow Plant Life might look like, and how she balances creating content and managing the business side of her brand. It’s an awesome interview. We love Nisha, so I’ll just let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Nisha, welcome back to the podcast.

Nisha Vora: Hi, Bjork. So lovely to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about, so you are an expert in YouTube, so you’re in the world of our Food Blogger Pro community represent our source for all things YouTube, but you also have all the other platforms. You have a site as well. So you understand the world of blogging, you understand the world of content creation, and you also deeply understand the world of video creation. That’s one of the tools that you have used to build an audience. I’m curious to know from your perspective, when you think about what it is that you do, how do you refer to yourself? Do you think of yourself as a YouTuber first, a creator, a publisher?

Nisha Vora: Fantastic question. I literally had to fill out forms for a new doctor appointment the other day, and it was like, occupation, and I was like, “I don’t know?” So I don’t know. I do a lot of YouTube, but I don’t know if I identify as a “YouTuber,” because I do do other things. I think people who identify as YouTubers, that’s their bread and they’re on YouTube all the time. So I don’t know. I also sometimes say cookbook author. I also sometimes say food blogger, and sometimes depending on the audience, I throw in a couple things.

Bjork Ostrom: It almost depends on who you’re talking to as well. If it’s people who don’t understand digital media, you’re like, “Well, we publish content online. It’s kind of like a digital magazine.” You kind of have to frame it up depending on who you’re talking to. But how about this? What do you feel like is the most important platform or place that you publish content, your blog, YouTube, Instagram?

Nisha Vora: For me, I think I would say YouTube because the long form content really I think serves my strengths, which for me, I believe are teaching folks how to cook excellent recipes, which you can of course do through a blog, which I have, and that’s where all the tips and written content goes. But I think cooking can be a very visual thing, and so having a long form content for me I think is really important.

I also think that once my YouTube channel started to take off in 2020, that’s also when I started to get a lot more blog traffic. And having that personal connection with people who see me on camera for six, seven, 10, 12, sometimes 20 minutes, makes it a lot more likely that they’re going to go to the site, make the recipe, review it. So even though the blog is our biggest income earner out of the YouTube/Instagram blog, I think the personal connection that I can build on YouTube has been the most important.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. We had an interview today this morning, which we don’t do a lot of these, but it was an interview with a journalist for Digiday, which is this news outlet that reports on digital media, and they were interested in Google SGE, like search generative experience. For those who aren’t familiar, the little box, it’s experimental right now, you have to turn it on, but it generates a response at the top of a search result. And they’re like, “What does that mean for you if Google or other AI interfaces start to create answers, maybe it’s about a recipe, maybe it’s something else, and populate those answers, what’s your defense against that?”

And the best answer we had was to lean into our humanity and our connection with people. And it feels like what you’re describing is a version of that where video allows you to create a connection, establish trust, feel like there’s some sort of understanding of who somebody is, and that’s a really valuable thing that can’t be replicated by a chatbot or AI, at least at this point. Hopefully not in the future.

Nisha Vora: Not yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, not yet. But that’s something that is really important in this space because what we’re doing is as we are consuming content online, we’re trying to find places that we trust, and also people that we know that we feel aligned with. And one of the best ways to do that it feels like is video. You referenced long form, meaning the traditional horizontal video you go, you watch 10, 15, 20 minutes.

But I also know there’s been a really significant shift to short form content like YouTube Shorts comparable to Instagram Reels. It feels like, I don’t know, YouTube as well as you do, it feels like YouTube Shorts are an important growth consideration for channels. Does that feel accurate in terms of when you look at the landscape of YouTube right now, is it kind of like you have to be doing YouTube Shorts if you want to be growing?

Nisha Vora: It is definitely a good avenue for growth if you are interested in growing the size of your audience. Some of the shorts I’ve posted have racked up like three, four and five million views, and they bring in tens of thousands of followers. But I would also say YouTube has not quite found a way to integrate the two. So a lot of the new followers that come from Shorts, they’re a different audience. They have different interests, so they want to watch more short form video. They’re not the kind of users who are typically watching 10-minute videos, so you might gain 30,000 followers from a short, but that’s not necessarily going to translate into those same viewers watching your long form video. I don’t think YouTube has quite figured out how to mesh those two together. I think as a creator, it’s also a struggle because YouTube is like, “Oh, you should create short form content that aligns with your long form content.”

So it’s possible for some people. I’ve seen some people do it successfully. For me, part of my long form content value is teaching you how to level up your skills in the kitchen, and that’s a little hard to do in 30 seconds or 60 seconds. And so, I struggle with that personally. And I think a lot of creators do for many reasons. It’s really hard to do both of those well because they are very different types of content. They require different types of attention. They require different types of editing and filming. Yeah, so I think a lot of creators, including myself are in this like, “Where should I put all of my eggs? Should I split them between short form and long form? Should I do 70/30? Should I do a 100/0?” And I’ve toggled back and forth between those as well, and I’m not sure I have the right answer yet.

Bjork Ostrom: What is it for you right now if you were to say what the split is in terms of focus, what is it?

Nisha Vora: It’s a hundred percent long form.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Nisha Vora: A couple months ago, yeah, I posted maybe five or six shorts just to experiment. And in the past I was kind of doing maybe 20% short form, 80% long form, but as I mentioned, my follower count was going up or subscriber count was going up, but I wasn’t necessarily saying like, “Ooh, I’m getting more views on my long form videos because I have more subscribers.” So for me, it hasn’t felt like it’s worth it, but it’s possible. I also just haven’t been able to create short form content that long form viewers also want to watch and vice versa. It’s a tricky balance.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. I’ve seen a handful of different accounts. There’s a while where YouTube optimized for trick shot videos. For me, it’s just the best example of a YouTube Short where it’s like a guy in Iowa bouncing a ping pong ball off of seven two by fours, and then it goes into a cup. It’s like somehow I find myself being like, “Oh, I actually do want to watch this,” and it has 42 million views on it, so other people want to watch it as well. But then you look at the long form content, and this is somebody who has 1.2 million followers.

And I remember from an observation perspective as somebody who’s interested in platforms and creators, I remember checking back in and it’s like, “Oh, this account is growing pretty quickly.” And then you look and you can toggle over and look at the other long form videos like traditional YouTube videos, and it’s like, “Oh, low thousands of views.” Like 5,000 views or 10,000 views.

And it almost feels like it’s one platform. Maybe it’s like a grocery store where you go in and there’s the bakery, but then there’s also the dairy. And somebody who’s really good at making bread isn’t necessarily really good at making cheese. And some people will be good at both of those things, but they seem like they’re different departments. Is that how it feels to you?

Nisha Vora: Yes, yes. Yes, a hundred percent. I feel like there are two types of YouTube creators right now. One are people who started at least three, four or five, six years ago, including myself, who their bread and butter is long form content. They’ve found a way to make interesting long form videos. And then there are lots of people who started when TikTok came around who are really good at making short form videos and have seen explosive growth on YouTube as well through shorts. But most of the time there are exceptions of people who can do it all and hats off to them in their teams. But a lot of the people, the latter category are struggling with the opposite of what I’m struggling, is how do I get people to watch my long form video?

I have a friend who’s enormously successful with short form video, but just cannot get her long form videos to translate. And you’re right, they are different departments and they kind of rely on different skills and I don’t know, different little trigger points that people are interested in and can be very hard as a creator to not… You want to do it all, but at the same time, I think really focusing on one or the other can work to your advantage if you are really good at one of those because it is hard to do both at a very high level.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like you want to go deep on the thing that you’re good at and that’s working, but what’s tempting is to look at the other thing and be like, “Oh, this is also YouTube and so I’m going to do this because I’m good at this thing.” And so then it should translate over and it’s like, “Oh, actually it’s like a, maybe a different language, or it’s in a sport, it’s a different position and it’s not. Or in music it’s a different instrument.” And just because you can play the saxophone really well doesn’t mean because you’re in band, you can also play the French horn.

Nisha Vora: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: And so I can see how it’s tempting to look at it and say like, “Oh, I’ll just kind of do this thing over here.” But it’s learning a new skill it seems like. For your friend that has become successful with shorts, what does it look like for them to turn that attention into business revenue? I think that’s one of the considerations is the normal mechanism with long form content on YouTube. The easiest is you have monetization turned on, and while you still have to have a significant amount of views in order for that to translate into a meaningful amount, the amount of views is less than you would with long form than it would with short form. So can you talk about what that looks like maybe using a friend or other people that, as an example, who have these big followings with short form content?

Nisha Vora: Yeah, I do think a lot of people who have found success through short form content, one of the reasons among I’m sure many that they do want to break into the long form content on YouTube is that it is much more monetized. And I think at the beginning of this year or the end of last year, YouTube did announce that they were going to do a profit sharing system for short form content. But again, the number of ads you can display in a 30-second video, I guess shorts can be up to 60 seconds, but a lot of the popular ones are like 10 seconds. So the amount of advertising you can do through that is so trivial compared to a 10 minute or 15 minute or 30 minute video. So yeah, as far as I know, people, like I mentioned my friend who have a lot of success with short form video aren’t making a living from that.

Whereas if you are a creator, a long form YouTube creator, and you don’t have a large team, like lots of people to pay, and you’re getting several hundred thousand views per video, you can make a living from that alone. Of course, in order to get to that level, you often do need a team to help you out. So then you-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: … do have other people to pay, but you can make a living from doing just long form content. I think where you can leverage the short form content is with partnerships. I’m sure people listening are familiar with that, but you’ll see lots of short form videos that feature partnerships, and at least as far as I know, they can pay quite a lot. So you might not be able to get the advertising revenue, but you can make up for it in other ways.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so you work with the brand, the bet for the brand is, “Hey, you’re really good at creating videos that get a lot of attention, and we’re going to see if you can create a video for us. And if that video gets a lot of attention…” Occasionally you’ll also see people who will pay to promote that. So artificially get attention to that, but it feels like organic content. And so I could see that being an opportunity as well.

I think it’s an important point. In our world, I think the easiest thing that we can do is look at, or a common thing to happen is to look at how many followers somebody has on TikTok, or on YouTube, or wherever it might be, and think like, “All of those numbers are the same. A YouTube subscriber is similar to a podcast Listen, which is similar to a TikTok follower,” but there’s probably somewhere where this exists. I haven’t looked into it, because I haven’t thought of it until now, but what is the actual value of those respective platforms?

And it feels like even within the platforms themselves, how people are consuming that content differs. And it seems like one of the most valuable ways that people can consume content is in a long form format, podcast as an example, or a long form YouTube video because the amount of attention that somebody is giving, it makes sense, a 60-second short versus a 15-minute video. Inherently more attention is usually more valuable. And so if it’s a longer video, it’s more valuable. In the case of YouTube, there’s ads, there’s maybe more ad inventory that there’s selling against those. And so that makes sense.

So when you look at your platform, you would say YouTube, which is a hundred percent long form for you right now, you’d put at the top, “Hey, this is my most important platform because of how I communicate with people. The trust that it established establishes the relationship.” Would you put your blog alongside that or maybe underneath it in terms of when you look at what is most valuable?

Nisha Vora: Yeah, I would put my blog right below it. We’ll talk about my new subscription as well later, but that is a new business, and so that’s hard to rank those. But the blog is for sure enormously valuable as an income source, and it’s where the recipes live and it’s the thing that I own, and I’m sure you’ve talked about this at length with lots of different people about the value of owning a website that you get to control. Obviously you don’t get to control whether Google surfaces-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: … you in search results, but it is enormously valuable. That’s where my recipes live. And because the nature of my content is super in-depth and I want to really help you master every recipe that you make, there’s a lot of useful information in there. But I would also say my email newsletter is probably right below that. I don’t know if that’s the same as a platform?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, no, I think it’s different. Yeah.

Nisha Vora: That is something I do own. I can’t control whether people click or open an email, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: … there’s no one deciding whether my email gets delivered, right? It’s going to get delivered. So I’d say my email newsletter is right there as well. And I think to your point about the value of a YouTube subscriber, versus an Instagram viewer, versus a TikTok viewer, versus a blog reader, I think email newsletter readers have an enormous value in terms of they’re taking the time to sit there and read an email that you’ve written, and they’re often more likely to click over to your blog to read your recipes, or to buy something that you’re selling. And then below that, I put Instagram, which is-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: … a fun little place, but for my business personally is not a big part of what brings in money or brings in devoted followers and things like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is crazy, because you have the 800,000 followers on Instagram. I think anybody else would look at that and be like, and I think there probably are people who are doing Instagram full time with 800,000 followers. Have you made the decision like, “Hey, I’m not going to pursue sponsor content, work with brands.” And so you could technically do that and be very successful in it, but just have made a business decision to not do that on Instagram?

Nisha Vora: More or less. I’ve done, I don’t think I did any partnerships last year. I don’t have any on deck for this year. I enjoy Instagram to a certain extent, but I also have realized over the last several years that it doesn’t, it is nice to bring people in, but it doesn’t necessarily create a devoted following of people who are going to buy your products and go to your website. It’s so hard to get people to click over from Instagram. I know they have this new thing called Manychat, which I literally just experimented with yesterday. No, today.

And so that’s maybe an easier way to get people to come to your site, but for a long time I focused so heavily on Instagram, but I don’t know if that was the best business decision for me. On the other hand though-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: … if you are an Instagram, a hundred percent Instagram creator or a short form a hundred percent creator, you can definitely build a great community there and build a great audience there, but I think that you have to be fully focused on that for that to happen. The creators I’ve seen take off on those platforms are people who are a hundred percent there and have their focus a hundred percent there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So you mentioned Manychat. For those who aren’t familiar, this tool that allows you to do opt-ins or automated communication, it’s like a chatbot and you can hook that into Instagram. You can deliver prompts to people that say like, “Hey, DM tacos to get my taco recipe,” or whatever it might be. And so that being a place, a playground that you could experiment with, maybe that could result in conversions. Speaking of conversions, you reference this where you recently released a product, meal plans, and it looks awesome, was looking through the sales page and the process and it was obvious that a lot of work went into it.

And one of the things that I really appreciated in watching the explainer video that you released letting people know that this was coming down the line, was talking about the number of conversations that you had with people who followed along with you. In the world of software, they call it customer development, and it was going through the hard work of asking people what they actually need, which I feel like is so uncommon when somebody jumps into the world of products creation, information product, or software tools or whatever it might be. What was that process like and how long did you sit in the development stage crafting what these meal plans would be? And then we can talk about specifically what that looked like.

Nisha Vora: So I have been creating mix and match meal prep videos that are sort of like meal plans for many years, that have always resonated with my audience. Actually, this is hilarious. Started the version one of this in January, 2020, which-

Bjork Ostrom: Nice.

Nisha Vora: … as you know what happened in March, 2020, nobody wanted to do any meal prep. Then I started working on my cookbook. So it just went on a long back burner. But a couple years ago, as I started to build my YouTube audience, and my blog audience and email audience, I wanted to just figure out what are people actually looking for? I know people come to me for recipes, but what could make your life easier? And so I would ask open-ended questions in surveys to my email audience like, “Hey, you have five minutes, please complete the survey. And it would be questions like, what are your biggest cooking challenges? Or a drop-down of 10 different answers like, ”What are the things you struggled with the most when it comes to making weeknight meals?

And a lot of the things that people said were around like, “I want to eat interesting meals, or I want to eat good food, or I want to eat more vegan food, but I find it hard to do this on a regular basis, or I find it hard to get dinner on the table without spending an hour every night. And then I just default back to my five, 10 minute recipes that do the job, but aren’t very interesting and I get bored of.”

And so, we collected tons of data through that, through YouTube community polls and tried to map out what’s a product I could create that still delivers the value that I think I’m known for, which is really high quality, very delicious vegan recipes that aren’t your standard 10-minute meal with four ingredients and kind of taste the same, but how could I do that in a way that would meet some of these or take some of these burdens off that people were mentioning and do it in a streamlined way so that your weeknights felt a little bit less stressful and more enjoyable and you’re still eating meals that you would be excited about. So yeah, we did a lot of surveying, basically just type form. I don’t know the names of them, there’s just different websites you can use for that. So it was a lot of surveying at the beginning.

Bjork Ostrom: And then how do you take that and craft that into, what does that process look like? So you talk to people, you get a general idea, you know what you’re good at and maybe what you have a vision of for it, and then how do you marry those two things?

Nisha Vora: Yeah, so I mentioned I had been doing these mix and match meal prep videos because when I’m not knee-deep in recipe testing, the way I actually like to cook is to spend an hour or so on Sunday or whatever day works best for my schedule and make a couple of components or what I call components. Maybe a batch of grains, a pot of lentils, a couple of condiments, and then use them in different ways during the week so that I’m eating interesting meals, but I’m not cooking an entire meal from scratch every night.

And I know that resonate with people because I think people at least who follow me want to cook interesting things and eat interesting things, but planning what to cook, figuring out what you can make ahead of time, making a big grocery list, doing all that stuff is a lot of work and not necessarily, I think a skill that a lot of us learn growing up.

And so I started imagining what would this look like if I could get people to do an hour or two of meal prep on a Sunday, not to make a full meal from scratch, because they want the meals to be fresh, but what are the things that they could do and then combine them. Maybe use the same sauces to make two different meals, or maybe use the same pickled vegetable to make three different meals. And so that you’re kind of saving on the amount of time you’re cooking, but you’re still getting completely different meals.

So yeah, I kind of just started making meal plans, writing them down in Google Docs, seeing how many I could come up with without feeling like, “Oh, my creativity has been tapped, or it’s not actually doable to provide these high quality meals in a streamlined weeknight fashion.” And once I got to the point where I was like, “Okay, I’ve created many of them. I feel like I’m not going to get tired of creating ideas.” Then I was like, “Okay, I think we can do this. And so now we need to have everything tested by a Recipester.”

Bjork Ostrom: So one of the things about being a creator like you are, and also creating product is you’re creating the content. You’re publishing content, you’re doing the maintenance of everything that comes along with the day-to-day, and then you go into product development, you’re developing a product, but then you’re also having to build a system to deliver that product. So what did that stage look like and what did you learn? You go through the product development stage and you start to get an idea of what the type of product would resonate with your audience, customer development, do you feel like you can actually deliver on it? You test that out a little bit, and then you have to get into how are we actually going to sell this? What did you learn in that process as you started to learn about the system for selling it and even marketing a product, which is a little bit different than just creating content.

Nisha Vora: So many things to think about. So many things. In the early stages. I had told my partner Max. Max is both my domestic partner and my partner in the business, so I have to clarify, some people are confused. But I was like, “We’re starting an entirely new business. Are you ready for this?” And he was like, “No, no, no, it’s not. It’s just a little thing.” And I think since we’ve launched at least once a week, I’m like, “Do you remember when you thought it wasn’t a separate business?”

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Let’s do the rewind on that conversation, play it back in slow motion.

Nisha Vora: I’m not someone who likes to be like I told you, but-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Told you so.

Nisha Vora: … Yeah. But yeah, there were so many points to explore. Like how do we get this in user’s hands in a way that’s user-friendly, that’s not just my Google Doc with my way of processing information? How do we create an email sequence that gets people the right information at the right time or cancels them if they want to cancel or puts them back into a flow if they re-sign up? Just so many different things to think about. And so we actually hired last fall when we were like, “Okay, we’re doing this.”

We put out a job opportunity for operations, general manager type of role, and we were very lucky we found someone who used to be a product manager at a technology company. So she’s used to building products from the ground up and incorporating user feedback and tweaking the product as necessary. So that was enormously helpful for us in the two-and-a-half months before launch to have someone who could think about these issues, mostly her and Max thinking about them so that I could focus on more of the creative stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s great. What is the actual platform that you use for it? Is it a pre-existing platform or something you built?

Nisha Vora: So the meal plans are delivered through ConvertKit, just our email program, and then it’s just a PDF, so it’s not anything super complicated, but one of the things that we’re working on with Rachel, who’s our general manager/operations manager, is what does meal plan 2.0 look like? Is there a website? Is there an app? Is there a portal, et cetera. So we’re still in the very initial phases of I knew I had a product I wanted to sell that I thought would be useful for at least some people in my audience. So I didn’t want to wait until it was a hundred percent perfect, because that can take forever.

Bjork Ostrom: It will never come.

Nisha Vora: Yeah, it will never come.

Bjork Ostrom: That will take literally forever.

Nisha Vora: So I wanted to get it out and not be a perfectionist about it being the ideal platform. But yeah, now we’re starting to think about how might that change?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. No, that’s great. And know a lot of people, we’ve done the same thing, have delivered product through ConvertKit, and it’s like the system’s there, and especially if that’s a platform that you’re already using, I think there’s a lot of wisdom to spread yourself too thin across tools. You have this thing that does this, and this, and this, and this. And before you know it, you can have 12 different things and there’s something to be said about simplicity and siloing as much as possible what happens where.

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In terms of your different platforms, what did you find to be the most impactful when you go through the process of the marketing part of it because it all operate differently. We talk about email being kind of this direct connection. That’s usually my understanding, one of the best places to direct people to purchase, but also you have this longstanding relationship with YouTube people and people who are following along there. And there’s a couple finance people that I follow, and they’ve recently released courses, and it is interesting to hear them market those on their channel.

And the great thing about YouTube that’s different than email is then that exists forever. You’ll always have a link and you’ll always have a few people trickling in or thousands of people watching something. So in some sense, it’s this evergreen piece of content that’s always marketing for you in the background, but what did it look like for you if you were to do that same rank order in terms of platforms that were most impactful, would you be able to pinpoint ones that were more or less impactful?

Nisha Vora: Well, it was kind of a combination of YouTube and the email platform. I didn’t do any on Instagram. I still haven’t posted on Instagram that I have a meal plan subscription because I actually took a-

Bjork Ostrom: You got to do it.

Nisha Vora: … I know I took a break from Instagram in part initially just I needed a mental break from it. And then that was also when we were gearing up for launch and I was like, “I don’t have time for this,” so I didn’t do anything on Instagram for it. So I think you referenced, maybe you did, I’m not sure. I posted a sneak peek announcement video maybe two months, two-and-a-half months before launch, and it was a short video explaining why I wanted to create this product because of I’ve had these conversations with people in my audience and then showing a sneak peek of a meal plan and how it could help you in your life and how it could transform your weeknight meals. The product was definitely not ready then, but it looked good enough on an iPad.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Nisha Vora: And then from there, we had created an email automation like, “If you are interested in learning more, sign up for our wait list.” And that got lots, and lots, and lots of people on the wait list. And from there we asked people, “If you’re on the wait list, do you want to be a beta tester?” So we could have some beta testers test out the plans in their kitchen, get feedback from them, see if we needed to do any tweaking to the plans. So through YouTube we were able to build a pretty robust email list. And then in the last, I don’t know, period before we launched, we emailed people to let them know like, “Hey, this is coming soon. You’ve been waiting. Here are some exclusive discount codes that you get as a thank you for signing up for the wait list.”

And so it was a combination of YouTube and the email list. We did do a launch video at the beginning of January on YouTube, which was like, “How meal planning changed my life,” and walking you through the steps of how you could do it on your own. But also it’s a lot of work, so here’s our service at the end. So it was sort of a marketing video. It didn’t perform very well because I think a lot of people get turned off when you try to sell something.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: At the same time, a lot of people signed up for it through the video and still brings in some number of people even though it’s not a high performing video. So yeah, it was a combination of starting with YouTube, but then using that to leverage our email list and build a wait list and a community of people who are interested.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So now that you’re on this side of it, how long has it been since you’ve launched that?

Nisha Vora: Two months.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. What do you feel like you’ve learned about yourself as an entrepreneur, as a creator? It’s adding in a really significant additional, like you said, it’s a new division within your business, and I feel like anytime that happens you learn things about yourself. What have you learned about yourself in doing this?

Nisha Vora: I don’t think that I’m a great entrepreneur, honestly. I like being the creative, and so luckily I have Max on my team and Rachel who can funnel it in the way that it needs to in order to be a successful business. But I love doing the creative stuff. I love coming up with the recipes and I love putting the meal plans together, and it’s really hard to toggle off and back and forth between being creative and being the businessy stuff. Thinking about finances and thinking about marketing and how many people you need to get to hit X threshold. I don’t enjoy that at all, so I’m glad that I have people on the team who can handle that. Yeah, I would say for me, I did mention it is a separate business, but to the extent that I can just treat it as another arm of my content, it feels better to me because it’s just like, “Oh, these are things I love doing.” Not like, oh, “I have to think about revenue and all the things.”

Bjork Ostrom: Conversion rates on pages.

Nisha Vora: Conversion rates. Yes, all those things.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s insightful. And if you were to sit down and talk to Lindsay, she would say a very similar thing, and I think it’s something to be aware of for anybody who’s listening, who’s creator-forward, you find your draw towards creating a video, or a recipe development, or photography, or recipe, writing a recipe or whatever it is. If that’s you, I feel like the trick and the really challenging thing is how do you protect that? How do you protect the part of you that is nourished through the work that you’re doing and you get energized through it? Because I think sometimes what can happen is there’s opportunities and you can get pulled into those, but suddenly you’re doing something that even though is maybe good from a business perspective is not good from the health of your soul perspective. But then the question is, in your life you have Max and he’s able to step in and he’s able to do that.

It’s one of the reasons why it sounds like you’re saying it works well because you create content, you create the meal plans, and then the additional infrastructure around that you have somebody who’s able to come in and help with that. Do you have any thoughts for somebody who doesn’t have that. They’re at a stage where they’re a creator, they love creating, they’re interested in building a business that is around content, but they don’t have somebody who’s also like, “I’m excited to see if I can increase the conversion rate on this sales page.” What does that look like for somebody who’s in that position?

Nisha Vora: Yeah, so early on, I don’t think you should be trying to sell a course or a subscription. So let’s just start there. One of the things that I think is helpful is to be okay with practice. Getting into the mode of practicing. So I’ll just give you my example with YouTube, but this can apply to writing recipes, it can apply to food photography, it can apply to creating short form video is when I started YouTube, I was still working, so it was never a full-time thing, but I had no idea what he was doing. I was so awkward on camera. Watching it now I’m like, “Oh man, she is so uncomfortable on camera.”

And I could have just given up and been like, “This is not for me. This is not play to my strengths.” But I just kept doing it and I started to eventually get better pretty gradually, never overnight until the point where I think I was making a video one day and I was like, “Oh, I feel totally natural on camera and it’s easy to be myself,” because I just kept putting in the practice.

So I think part of it in the early stages is not giving up even if you don’t see results immediately, even if you don’t see results in the next six months or in the next year. I’m not saying you should continue doing something that you’re really bad at, but if you enjoy what you’re doing and it feels good, don’t give up because it means you probably just need to keep practicing. You need to keep honing your craft and you need to keep getting better at what you do.

I think it’s really hard with social media being so pervasive to see numbers, see folks who have millions of followers, millions of views, and it feels like they did it overnight. Almost always they did not do it overnight. And it can be discouraging when you start something new, or you start a new channel, or start a new platform and it’s not a hit overnight, it can feel very discouraging because you’re like, “Well, so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so has all this traction and all this success.”

So to the extent it’s possible, put on little blinders, I try to do that when I go on social media is focus on my content and what I want to post and what I want to share and what I want to interact with people and try as much as you can to just not worry about what other people are doing so that you can focus on improving yourself and improving your content and continuing to practice and continuing to strengthen the things that you are good at. I would say.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, I think one of everybody has an app idea. One of the app ideas that I would love to create, I don’t know what the name would be something more creative than this, but send only, you can only post. It’s like you have all of your respective logins, but you don’t have to ever worry about logging in and then suddenly a feed, seeing the feed or notifications. It’s only a dashboard for you. And you could create different versions of that with different schedulers and stuff. But I think it’s trying to solve that same problem, which is like you get into it, you get discouraged, you have other people showing you the concept that they’re creating, which inevitably you get into this compare and despair mindset if you’re there too long. But how about if somebody is that creator and they realize that they love creating, they realize that they commit to doing that.

One of the things that I think comes up occasionally is somebody is working on a thing, they’re the creator and they have somebody in their life, whether it’s a domestic partner or just a business partner that they’ve connected with somehow who handle some of that other stuff. I feel like it’d be interesting to talk about that for somebody who’s in a place that doesn’t have that, and what does it look like for somebody, let’s say they do eventually get good at creating, they do get some momentum and they do get to a place where, hey, they’re ready for the next step. It’s almost like I’d be interested to chat with you, but for the sake of that person who’s listening, how can they build their business if they aren’t the person who wants to do the business stuff or that’s not the thing they want to be good at?

And I guess maybe the answer is just like you either… It’s a drag and you put yourself through it and you do it, you don’t do it, or you hire somebody to do it. That’s probably the answer. What would your thoughts be on that for somebody who’s in that position similar to yourself, who loves creating and wants to protect that, but also knows they need some of the business backbone of all of the different considerations that come with running a digital business online?

Nisha Vora: Yeah. Okay. So a couple things. One thing that I have done several times when I try before I’m like, “I’m too overwhelmed with all these things on my plate. We need to hire someone.” I do an exercise that, I think it’s called the Eisenhower Matrix. It’s a four quadrant thing where you have a top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, and I can’t even remember which quadrants you put what in. But basically in one quadrant you put all the things that you currently do that you love and that you are the best at. For me, that’s recipe development and making YouTube videos and probably a couple other things, but let’s just leave those high level. In another quadrant you put all the things you love that you currently do, but that you’re maybe not the best at. I enjoy food photography, but there are lots of people who are better at it than me.

In another quadrant, you put all the things that you actually don’t like doing, but that you’re probably the best at, at least in your sphere in this current space. So for me, that might be getting the meal plans into a place where that feels really good. I don’t dislike it, but it’s really time-consuming and I wish I could maybe take some of it off my plate, but I’m not sure right now who that would be. And then the fourth quadrant is all the things that you do that you don’t actually really like and that you’re not necessarily the best at. So obviously those things you should outsource first. And so a lot of those might be the businessy types of things, like an accountant, a bookkeeper, what are all the other things I might have forgotten.

Bjork Ostrom: Analytics guru, like somebody to…

Nisha Vora: An SEO person who can-

Bjork Ostrom: A developer.

Nisha Vora: … Lots of different things that are required of our jobs and start outsourcing there. That’s not necessarily the same as hiring a business partner who will know how to do everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: But depending on how early you are in your career, I definitely recommend starting in that quadrant. And then between the other two quadrants the second and third one, it’s depending on who you can find that fits the bill better. You might hire for things that you’re good at, but you’re not the best at, or you might hire for things that you don’t want to do anymore, even though you are good at.

Another thing that I think could be helpful if you are at the stage where you have had some success and you are ready for someone who is going to come on and really help you take your business to the next level is this is kind of, I don’t know, not awkward to say, but a lot of people who are, I don’t know, I feel like a lot of corporate people who have a lot of education, a lot of skills hate their jobs and are looking for something else-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure.

Nisha Vora: … and looking for a more creative, more alternative path. And I feel like there are so many people out there who would be interested in working in a creative space, particularly if you are in a niche that they’re passionate about. For me, I’m vegan. And so I feel like I have a lot of people who are interested in working with me who are vegan because they have the same values or the same kind of things that they care about in life.

And so tap into your circles. Either people you know, maybe if you went to business school, there might be people you went to business school who would be interested in working with you. If you have a large enough audience, I guarantee you there’s people in that audience who would be interested in working for you and have certain skills that you don’t.

It’s going to vary widely depending on the skillsets that you do need and the type of person you’re looking for and how many hours and what their strengths are. But we’ve hired pretty much exclusively through my audience. It’s been very, very helpful and very rewarding. And we’ve had long-term employees who are really critical and vital to the team that we found just by asking people like, “Do you want to work for me?”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And what does that look like? So you put together a job description, you develop some of the examples of tasks somebody would be working on, projects they’d be working on. And then do you mention it on YouTube, send out an email? It’s probably all the above if you wanted to?

Nisha Vora: Yeah, I mean, it depends on where your audience is. I think email is probably the best place for that kind of stuff. I think people are thinking a little bit more professionally when they’re reading emails opposed to-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Nisha Vora: … scrolling Instagram. But I think I try to post it wherever it makes the most sense and to get as many eyeballs on it. So I would encourage people who have a sizable audience to tap into that if they are looking for a new employee, maybe their first employee.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And the other thing that’s so nice about that is somebody’s coming to the table and they know what you’re about. They generally know how you create content, how you’re showing up. It’s kind of hiring somebody from your tribe as opposed to somebody from the outside. And like in your case, if you get somebody who’s not vegan, that’s probably okay. But it feels different if somebody is aligned with worldview or the type of content that you’re creating. And for them as well. Beneficial for somebody who feels like this is important to them to then be doing that work. What a gift for people to do work that they feel like is important and matters. And also autonomous, you can operate differently than maybe you can within a big corporate company where it’s a little bit more narrow. So I love that.

And then also love the idea of building that matrix out and saying, “Hey, what are the most important things that I’m least interested in, least capable of doing?” And using that as a starting point to hire out, whether an agency, contractor, somebody freelance, maybe it is a part-time W2 role, but using that as a starting place, I think is, I love that. So that’s awesome.

What do you feel like when you look ahead the next year, two years, three years, what do you think is going to be most important? Where are you pointing the ship and what are you prioritizing as the world around us is ever-changing. Algorithms, platforms, AI, all of this. For you personally when you look ahead, where do you envision yourself going at this point? Knowing that it can always change?

Nisha Vora: I will preface this by saying, as I mentioned earlier, I love being the creative, not the entrepreneur. So in my mind-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Nisha Vora: … I’m thinking three, six months ahead, not three years ahead.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, which is great.

Nisha Vora: For me I like to just enjoy every day. But I also know I should put on big picture hat and think about this more. But I do think that with the increase in AI and just how easy it is to replicate certain things, I do want to continue doing video and leaning even more heavily into video until someone can completely replicate me, which who knows, that might not be that far away.

Bjork Ostrom: Next year. Next year.

Nisha Vora: But yeah, I think video just leaning more heavily into long form video, continuing to do it, doing more of it to the extent that I can. I also have my second cookbook coming out this year, and as long as it took to do, I do genuinely love writing cookbooks and the creative freedom you have to develop recipes that are about anything and to just work on this one big project. And so I would love to do more cookbooks in the future and have that be a big part of my work.

But I also think that there’s room to do more products and more, not necessarily more subscriptions, but maybe a course, maybe a physical product. People are always asking me for spice blends and sauces that they can buy at the store. And so I think the problem is there’s just too many options for me to be like, “Yes, in five years I will be doing X and I’ll be making X amount of money.” It’s like, “I could be doing a hundred different things.” And so I think that’s both a good and bad thing. I don’t know if it’s actually bad at all. I think it’s a good thing because it’s just like there’s so many exciting possible things to work on. And I don’t know. I like to take things not day by day, but week by week, month by month, and see how they shake out.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think part of it too, being a good creator is responding to what you’re excited to create. And I think that energy comes across in the video or in your writing or in how you are communicating, where if you are excited about the thing that you are doing. And for all of us listening, primarily what we’re doing is we’re creating content. That content is either monetized through product, or sponsorship, or ads. And so it’s important for us that our main product, which is our content, is captivating, is engaging. And I think one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that it comes from a place of true, genuine passion.

And I think as the world of information switches more to transactional with search, “Hey, give me this information.” Generative AI gives it to you. Our competitive advantage can be found in our humanity, which is like, “I’m going to go to this person, I’m going to go to Nisha because I feel like I want to interact with her content and with her, as opposed to a transactional interaction.”

And you do such a great job with that. So appreciate you coming on and sharing state of things for you. But also it’s an industry to hear what you see as a extremely successful creator. For people who want to follow along with what you’re up to, check out the meal plans, can you do a quick shout out for the best place to follow along with you online and also the meal plans?

Nisha Vora: Thank you. Yes. You can follow me at Rainbow Plant Life. That’s Instagram. YouTube. My blog is rainbowplantlife.com and you can check out the meal plans at Rainbowplantlife.com/mealplans. All things Rainbow Plant Life.

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

Nisha Vora: Thanks so much for having me.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum in case you didn’t know how it works. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself. And on the forum we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tool section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins. All sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members. It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together.

Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help members with their questions. Casey Marquis and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns. The Forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoy this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. I kid you not, I was going to record this half an hour ago, but I was in Clariti and realized there’s an opportunity for Pinch of Yum that is a project we should move forward with, so I created a video, communicated it with the Pinch of Yum team, and said, “Hey, we should move forward on this and really get to work cleaning this up.” In our case, what I had done is I said, “Hey, show me all of the posts in the past year on Pinch of Yum.” And then I sort ordered that in reverse order by page use, so I was looking at pages that on Pinch of Yum in the last year, got zero page use, and I realized we have a lot of really thin not valuable content, and it’s important to clean that up. In our case, we’re going to delete a lot of that content and we should have done that a long time ago, but we just didn’t get around to it.

And it wasn’t until I was using Clariti that I realized that was something that we should have done. I was able to see that. It’s a lot of old giveaway posts and things like that, so we’re going to move forward with that and clean up Pinch of Yum. That’s what Clariti is for. It’s to help you discover that actionable information to create a project around it, and either you can follow the project or you can assign it to somebody within your team and then track the impact that that has by making notes or seeing when you made those changes over time. We bring all the information in from WordPress, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. You hook it all up and then you can sort order and use Clariti like a Swiss Army knife for your content. If you’re interested in checking it out, go to clariti.com/food. C-O-A-R-I-T-I.com/food and that will get you 50% off your first month. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hello. Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We’re really excited to share today’s interview with you. Bjork is chatting with Shanika Graham White and Darnell White, the husband and wife team behind the Food Blog Orchids and Sweet Tea and the production company, Brooklyn Sweet Tea Productions. Over the course of the interview, they share more about the early stages of their blog and how they made the leap from just food photography to videography and then to opening their very own production company. They also chat about their workflow and equipment set up for shooting their recipes and what the division of labor looks like between them. Shanika and Darnell have had lots of success working with brands and they share really good advice for knowing your value and using that in negotiations with brands. I’ve just scratched the surface of everything that they cover in this interview. It’s a really motivational listen, and I hope you enjoy listening to the episode. Without further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Darnell, Shanika, welcome to the podcast.

Darnell White: Thank you for having us.

Bjork Ostrom: This is going to be a fun story, not only because we’re going to be talking to two people, which is always fun. Not only because we’re going to be talking about two people who are working together, but also two people who are together in real life and working together, which I really appreciate because Lindsay and I have navigated that and have been in that world, but also because you have two different businesses that you’re running but are also interrelated. You have the publishing side, which is the blogs, social, the following, cookbooks, which we’ll talk about. You also have a production company or a studio where you do photography and video, so a lot of things going on, but which one came first? What did you start with? What led you on this journey to begin without of those two things? The blog or was it the studio you were doing photography and video?

Shanika Graham-White: It actually was a blog, Orchids and Sweet Tea, which I started in 2016, and we were doing that for a while. Back then I was just learning photography, and so as you know, you start off and it’s like, “Ugh, this is what my work looks like.” And then as you go on, in time it evolves and then you go back and you reshoot and revamp, so that’s what started first. Then I think it was around last year, early last year, we started the whole production company and it’s really because Darnell found his passion in editing and videography, so we decided to create that as-

Bjork Ostrom: What’s that?

Shanika Graham-White: We were hoping to have that into a studio and evolve that into hopefully a team and make it bigger.

Bjork Ostrom: Is that something you knew Darnell in 2016 that you were interested in photography and video?

Darnell White: Honestly, no. Really, I had no inclination that this was the direction I was going to take. I think it just because I see the love that my wife was having for it and time I really thought blogging, you couldn’t really make any money from it, so I wasn’t really motivated like that. It was not until I think the pandemic happened, and Instagram pretty much was like, “We are moving into reels to promote your business.” So my wife was like, “You know what? This is going to be a game changer for us if we could learn this video thing.” I said, okay, let me give it a shot. Then as time went on, I started to develop more of a love for it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. It’s one of the things that I’ve seen for as long as we’ve been doing this. One of the things that I’ve seen is a lot of times people will have an entry point. For you it’s Orchids and Sweet Tea, and maybe that is what it is that you love. Shanika maybe for you what you love doing, you love creating content, you love publishing content, but there’s so many connected things around that. There’s writing, there’s video, there’s photography, there’s the math of accounting and bookkeeping. There is operations, there’s website maintenance. As people know who get into this there’s so many of those things around it, and what we’ve often seen is people then use the entry point and then use that as a gateway into another thing and it sounds like Darnell for you, that was photography and video.

The other thing that was insightful and I think important to point out is I think there are these waves that happen. Anytime there’s a big change in industry, and the really obvious one is a social platform goes from primarily photo-based to now video. We think about that with Facebook, that was a huge one that we went through. It was just photos and photos could go viral and it was like, “Oh, videos. Videos go viral.” But now it’s just not videos. It’s reel based content that goes viral, so Shanika can you tell me a little bit about that time when you knew, “Hey, this could be a really big thing for us.”

And the last piece that I’ll share that’s interesting to think about with that is I think with each one of those waves, creators have the potential to be a better or not as good fit with each one of those. It’s really hard if you’re somebody who is great at photography and that was your sweet spot and you could stage a photo perfectly, it would be beautiful, and then suddenly it transitions into video or reel based content, which is a little bit more user forward. Maybe it’s talking to the camera a little bit more and it’s a new set of creators that are then unlocked in a way. Did you know that was true for you when that pivot was happening and how did you know that?

Shanika Graham-White: To be honest, when I first, I think it was in 2020, saw that reels were becoming a thing. I think really, especially I think 2021 towards the end of that, and last year I saw that this is really becoming a thing. At first I was a little hesitant, although I knew that it would be a game changer because I was just like you said, I was just getting my voice and my style in photography, and then I’m like, “Oh, man, to fully transition into videos seems hard.” We dabbled into it, and obviously you have partnerships and you do video, but to really dabble fully into it, I was just like, I found it hard to figure out how to transition.

And so Darnell was really one that was like, “No, we can do this. We have to do video, and you can do it. If you just create a system and you just realize a flow, you can actually get it done.” So we started, I don’t know if you saw way back into the beginning of 2022 we started reels and it was just playing around figuring it out, like you said. Back then, I don’t remember how many seconds reels had to be, but we were playing around with it and then trying to figure out how then do you cause retention? because like you said, with reels versus videos, reels are very user forward, but at the same time you have to capture people in the first two to three or four seconds, and so if you don’t get that point, your whole video dissipates almost.

And so I think after we’ve just practiced, practiced, practiced, I was just like, “Okay, we can definitely do this.” And we created this system where, all right, I can still do photography and do the reels at the same time, and which is what I really do, I shoot once. We just stop in between a take, do the photography for the blog because you have to do, you have to show the ingredients and you have to show step by step. We literally stop in between each take, take photography then hop back in the video. It’s like you have to work your brain in a mathematical way to have it all done.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk a little bit about what your system is for that? Because I know some people will do, they’ll do a shoot and they’ll say, “I’m just going to do photography because that’s them. I’m going to go on photography mindset and then I’m going to do another shoot of this exact same thing and I’m just going to do it with video.” How do you go through the process of getting both and just doing it once so you don’t have to go and repeat everything again?

Shanika Graham-White: I think it’s just really mapping it out. How I first start is that I make sure that I write down, if I’m doing two recipes today, I’ll write down those two recipes, the ideas, then I’ll write down the actual recipe that I’ve actually at this point either tested or I know that it’ll work because it’s maybe based off of a previous recipe. Then after that, how I always tell people is to have your ingredients organized, so I literally will put everything in individual bowls or rankings or whatever, have everything around me in my station.

We have a setup of a C stand that does all the overhead, and then we’ll have a tripod that does more forward or three forts and then we also have a gimbal which Darnell holds, so we literally have three different cameras to capture views. And so we have our board, our station, and we’ll just have all our foods and ingredients laid out. First things first, I always take pictures of the ingredients because that’s like get that out the way. Then we head into the video and let’s say I’m making a cake, I’ll probably get to the point where I mix the batter, then we stop, do the photography, then we continue. It’s stop and continue depending on the points that you want to do for the photography.

Bjork Ostrom: And then this is getting really into the weeds. When you do an import, then are you importing all the photographs into one bucket and then all the… Are you separating at that point?

Shanika Graham-White: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, and that’s where things are filtered out into different buckets. Got it. You’ve built a really incredible Instagram following. Has that been, because you’ve been video forward in the process of creating content and any tips that you’d give for other people who are looking to build a strong following on Instagram?

Shanika Graham-White: Last year around the, I want to say I think my first reel went viral in April, and then after that, I think it was around May-ish that we really went hard on reels and did two a day, and I think that is what pushed the following because at that time reels were branching off to beyond your followers, so you’re actually gaining more people because it’s exposure, and I think that’s what we used as a way to build our following. Really my tip though for people I think is I know that now Instagram is so different, so it’s wonky now, but I think it’s just about going at your pace.

Now we’ve switched up for 2023. Last year we did two a day. Now we do maybe one and it just depends because now Instagram is pushing photos and the video, so we balance the two, but I think it’s just about finding your pace. I think it’s just about understanding what your audience wants and loves, which is super important and I think we know that for blogging in general. I think just creating your own style, because I know that it’s hard to stand out because there’s 1,000,001. Now influencers and bloggers are mixed in the same melting pot, and so I think just knowing your style and having your voice is just the only thing that’s going to make you stand out at this point, honestly.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. Darnell, along the way, you guys are doing a video, you’re figuring it out. What did the division of labor look like for you as you got into it and as a couple working together? And there’s going to be all sorts of people listening to this podcast. Some are in relationships, some aren’t. Some want their significant other to be involved, others don’t, but for those who have some type of partner that they’re working with, as you start to figure out division of labor, can you talk about what that looked like in the early stages and how did you go about saying, “Hey, you know what, I’m going to do this and help with this.” And to what degree are you working actually together throughout the day versus in your separate departments and coming together when you need to?

Darnell White: I would say because I’m more so the techie person. I love the camera equipment, the lighting, anything that’s tech related. I think it was naturally that gravitated towards the video production, so my wife was really more so into the creating aspect of it. She’s more of the creative mind, I’m more of the analytical mind. When it came to the video production, I had to somehow look at the photos that she did a whole production to make and say, “You know what, how can I bring this into video production and create a vibe so that people can understand that this photo can be brought to life?” After a while it was trial and error and I realized that I think I can go more into the video production because it’s not too far from programming because that’s my background where I came from.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Darnell White: That’s how it melded where it was like, “Okay, this is not too far off so I can do this.”

Bjork Ostrom: I feel like for somebody who’s outside of both of those worlds, they’d look at it and say, “Wait, those are two really different things.” How, in your mind, as you were processing it, how did those fit into similar categories and allow you to problem solve in the same way?

Darnell White: I think with the programming, what it taught me was you had to start with how you want to see it and then work your way up to that. When she does the photos, I see the end results already. Now I had to figure out a way to how can I shoot this in a particular way to bring it to life with the end result? Now when she’s mixing the batter, I’m looking at it from a perspective of, “I want to look at it where if I’m in the kitchen seeing my grandma or my mom cooking, how I want the viewer to see it.” And that’s how I build upon that and over time I just edited a certain ways to bring that to life.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s the piece there that’s really interesting and that we try and do as much as we can is to have a real life specific example of an individual that you are placing in the seat of user, because you could look at 240,000 Instagram followers or a million pages or whatever it is, but really those are all individuals and those are all people. One of the things that’s been such a great reminder for us is anytime somebody comes up and they’re like, “Hey, I made this thing.” That is almost more impactful than a thousand people viewing it, because you’re like, “Oh, you took the thing that I thought of and created and put into a digital format, and then you use that to make something in your home for people that were coming over.” And it’s like, “Oh yeah.” It’s really important that not only do you have the aesthetic, but you also have the instructions and information that gets people from point A to point B.

In taking the step forward, you have the site, you’re starting to get some traction with that, you published a cookbook in 2021, which is incredible. Talk to me about stepping into launching a new business with the production company, Darnell. What was that like? And how did you take the, I know it’s still early stages, but how did you take the first steps into moving forward with that?

Darnell White: Well, I think because we was already working for brands, and they ultimately was like, “We love your work and we want you to shoot for us.” And we’ve done a lot of work behind the scenes and it just felt natural because it was training us to do our own thing because we were already getting the traffic and the clientele for that. It just felt natural to say, “If we’re doing it for them on these one or two occasions, why not make it something where we can really cement ourselves in this field?” Because it’s not a lot of people in that video production, but they’re such big players and it’s like why can’t we come along and play as well. Our camera equipment is not too far off from them and our technology is not too different, so I think we can do the same thing. What helps is that we have such a big Instagram following at this point that can justify that so when it’s time to negotiate these things, it’s like, “Well, you see, the work is right here.”

Bjork Ostrom: You’re building a portfolio-

Darnell White: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Content that you can use to show brands that are interested in working with you. When you say you had already been working with brands, are you referring to sponsored content on Instagram or the blog they come to you?

Darnell White: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that’s one of the things that creators don’t give themselves enough credit for is we live in this world of, we collectively as creators I think publishers, influencers, whatever you want to call that type of work where we think we are going to get paid based on our following. Which I think to some degree, there’s truth to that. For the brand it’s like they’re paying to get some form of advertising, but oftentimes also what a brand is getting is media. They’re getting really great photos, they’re getting really great video. If they were to go to a studio and do that, it would be tens of thousands of dollars potentially for them to get a package of maybe even similar quality images and video.

But as a creator, you might discredit it and say like, “Well, I only have X many followers, I’m going to charge $250.” But there’s a lot of value if a brand is going to take that and use it in other places. How did you learn how to structure contracts and agreements and what the norms were? Or was it like, “We’re going to learn as we go with this”? Because it seems like something that maybe not a lot of people would share. You’re not going to be able to reach out to another studio and be like, “Can you guys help us get started?” What was that like to learn as you got into it?

Shanika Graham-White: Honestly, I think this is where it was beneficial to have the blog, because being that I do that and have contracts and partnerships with brands. From the blogging side and had to learn that, like you said, a lot of people don’t share, and even if you reach out to a creator, a lot of people are not, they’re a little hesitant to even share numbers because it’s such a competitive space. I think just, I learned a lot through going through talent management and seeing how they structure their pricings and why they structured a certain way, and then also a lot of trial and error. You have to do a lot of negotiating with brands and partnership. I think I learned the space of, “Okay, how much is it great to charge? What is the ball point of for reel?” At my right now, I look and say, “for reel, I start at 5,500.” For some brands, that’s a lot.

And granted, with everything there’s negotiation because it depends on the brand and the size and all that stuff, but I feel like when you look at, like you said, what are the many hats that you have to wear in one role? Now for video it’s like, “Okay, one might say 5,500, that’s a lot.” But then when you look at it like, “But you’re getting stylists, food stylists in the midst of it. You’re getting equipment that most people would have to rent that we bought. You’re getting edits, which takes hours upon time.” We break it down.

And so I think after doing market research, especially like he said in the videography space of people that we love like Parker Walbeck and these folks that we actually love that are in the product for videography space. We figured it out these are the little pieces. How can we then put it to what we know is valuable? And then as you said, it’s still learning from here because there is no solidified price. I think, like you said, it’s all about value-based, and so that’s how we look at our content now, value based.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting if you break that down and you really look at it, and I have a friend who’s in the video world. He’s in, he’s all over the place. He’s in Miami shooting this crypto documentary, and we have this running joke where, so he used to send a picture of him in a Lamborghini, not driving it, but video and then he was in Canada while back shooting this documentary called Pez Outlaw, which is on Netflix. The running joke is, he’ll always send me these incredibly beautiful photos, and then I just respond with the same picture of my window at our office with a snowy parking lot. It’s just inevitably, he’s somewhere awesome and I’m just in the same seat.

But one of the things that he often talks about is how expensive some of those shoots can be, because you have the assistant and you have the person who holds the camera, and you have the person who is the DP. It’s a little bit different, but similar idea where if it was a traditional shoot, you’d have those seven or eight jobs. That just adds up so quickly and when you break that down and show a brand, “Hey, we’re absorbing a lot of this. We’re doing the styling, we’re doing the editing, that’s all rolled up into this.”

I think as much as possible to take away with that, that I hear is in those conversations, help a brand understand how you’re dividing that up and what it might look like if you go somewhere else to give some perspective on the cost associated with it, the cost savings in working with somebody who can do all of those different things.

Shanika Graham-White: All of those things.

Bjork Ostrom: When you think of the split in your day-to-day, the work that you’re doing, how much percentage wise of your time is, are you thinking now about the blog, the building a following, cookbooks, things like that versus the studio and building that up as the business focus? Or is it 50/50?

Darnell White: I would say right now the main driving force is the blog. Getting traffic to the blog is one of our number one goal right now and I think the video production is the underbelly that we are trying to build up to a point where it can pretty much pay for everything, but it still takes time for us to convince brands that they should work with us. They see Instagram and they’re like, they’re really excited like, “Oh, we want that. We want that.” So we’re like, “Okay, let’s go over into the production side and see what we can do.” And oftentimes they don’t really want to go down that route because there’s no following there. They want the following, they want the engagement, they want this, they want all of that. We had to find a balance where it’s like, “Okay, we can give you that, but we also offer this as well.” And that is where we’re at right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. It’s interesting. It’s almost like they come, I would imagine the idea is they come for the following, they come for the exposure, but then it’s almost like a secondary offer, it sounds like, where it’s like, “Hey, also if you want to continue to have really high quality content, we have this as a service.” It’s one of the things that you see really big businesses do and I think small businesses could think about that more often. Which is just yesterday, I don’t know, I think it was a radio ad or something, but it was for an Apple Card, and I was like, “Oh, weird. Apple is in the credit card business.”

And they have been for a long time, but it wasn’t until I saw a formal commercial where I was like, “Oh, it’s an Apple.” And it’s obviously the big companies when you see that, but I think with small companies, and so far is you have the bandwidth to do it, to think strategically about, “Great, so we get this traffic in, we get these inquiries, that’s great. We can do a sponsor content deal, but what can we do in addition to that to potentially double our income?” Or it’s not really an upsell, but that kind of idea to have additional opportunities for them to work with you and to partner with you, which I think is just so smart.

I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about, for people who are wanting to break into that or get a little bit better, specifically with sponsor content, working with brands, what’s your advice to help them take the next few steps? Somebody who’s early stage, maybe they’ve done a little bit of it, maybe there’s a little bit of fear for them, and stepping into that world, what advice would you give somebody like that? Shanika you can start.

Shanika Graham-White: The advice I would give is to always go into anything. I know that usually we’re pitching to brands, we might DM to get an email or we might email them over always stating your value is my main biggest thing that I’ve learned along my journey. When I was reaching out to brand partnerships, I would just be like, “Oh, I so want to work with you and this is what I can do.” But now I’ve realized that brands don’t care. There are a ton of people that they can choose from, and so the whole point is to always reach out and stating automatically your value.

Like you said, now, it’s not just following, but it’s what do you bring to the table? And I think when I started seeing, I think after so many trial and errors and so many partnerships, when I realized that we actually have value. They actually come to influencers and bloggers because we connect with the community that we have, and so they can plaster that on a TV commercial, and maybe they’ll get millions of views, but how many people are going to stop and actually click over and say, “I’m going to buy that.”

Probably not that many, but if you have a community of, even if it’s 200,000 followers and you have a community where the moment you drop something, they’re like, “What is that? I want that because you have that, or I trust you because you have that.” That’s value, and so I think just going in, seeing your value, and also just correlating that and conveying that to the brand is my best advice, honestly.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Darnell, anything you’d add to that?

Darnell White: Honestly, I think you just got to trust your work. Really trust your work, because today with social media, a lot of the brands get excited over the number of following and sometimes I’ve seen literally the same work that we’ve done at maybe like 30,000 followers, and we haven’t really changed anything much. At a hundred thousand followers we realize that many of them is superficial, because if we was looking at the 30,000 followers and saying, “Man, our work sucks. We should stop this.”

When we hit a hundred thousand now they’ve seen all these people saying, “Oh, let’s work together. Let’s partner, let’s this.” And so now you got to ask yourself, “Well, was your work not good at 30,000 as it is at a hundred thousand?” Now it really is about trusting your work and seeing it through, because in this social media realm, everything is so trendy or viral or what’s the next hottest thing and it can make you feel a little insecure of your own work, because I’ve seen a lot of people on social media do such dope work, don’t get in trouble. Sometimes it’s just a matter of exposure. It is. You know what I mean?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. There’s a concept that I think a lot about, and I think it relates to this a little bit, which is who, not how many. As creators in the world, one of the things that’s really true is good work is good work, and it’s good work apart from the number of followers. Sometimes we don’t know why things get huge followings and other things, or why something goes viral, why something doesn’t, but if you focus on the thing that you’re creating, the work that you’re doing and producing as opposed to just the following, eventually, if you stick with it eventually, if it truly is good work, that will shine through.

I think what happens is there’s this spectrum, and there’s both sides are important. One side is the work, the creativity, and the other side is the distribution of the work. To understand how the distribution works is important. We talked about reels. Reels are going to be higher potential for that to go viral than a photo on Instagram as an example, so that’s the optimization of the distribution, but on the other side is the quality of the work itself. I think sometimes in conversations like this, podcasts like this or creators can sometimes get caught up in this idea of how do I figure out the platform? But they’re not really figuring out how to do good work and the good work is going to be the thing that perseveres.

But it’s also, it takes time. It’s low. I use the analogy often to music, but it’s like if I was starting to learn piano today, I wouldn’t expect to be a full-time pianist in a year and a half. I would say I might be able to get it if I try really hard and work on the craft every day in seven years. I think if we could have that same mindset, if we are just beginners with the creative work that we’re doing, I think it would serve us well. What was that like for you? And Shanika you can start, as you are learning a new thing, you’re in the early stages of it to persevere and continue on with it. Was that a hard thing to do?

Shanika Graham-White: Oh man. Yeah. I can’t say how many times I felt like quitting, how many times I probably had to stop and readjust, recalibrate, go back to the why center point and figuring out, like you said, getting back to focusing on the work. I think that’s just because there’s just always pressures on social media and this whole thing of virality and comparison, because I know a lot of people say you shouldn’t compare, but it’s hard when you’re scrolling on your screen and you’re constantly seeing so many different things. You end up comparing or you end up adapting to someone’s style because you’re like, “Oh man.” I either admire it or I see that it gets a lot of engagement. There’s plenty of times I’ve had to just stop for a moment and be like, “Let me get back to my why. Let me get back to the content.”

And actually, I think I’m trying to take a traditional, non-traditional route of blogging, because like you said, people like Pinch of Yum and Minimalist Baker and Deliciously Ella that I started in the game and those were the pinnacles of, “Wow, those were the bloggers that I wanted to attain to be where blogging was about you.” It wasn’t about keywords, it wasn’t about all the things that we do now. It was about, “Oh, maybe I can’t consume dairy, or I’m a vegan, and so I’m going to create a blog for people like me who want to figure out how to consume this lifestyle, or who wants to figure out how to make recipes for their family that are dealing with that.”

Now. I think it’s come to be this, it’s a business and it’s supposed to be, but I think it’s taken on more of a business aspect than back then when it used to be really about, “I want to help and build a community of people that are dealing with what I’m dealing with.” A lot of the times those bloggers would share health conditions or whatever they had, and they were like, “I just want to create for people who wanted something I needed.” I think I try to keep it that traditional. That’s what keeps me persevering. I still to this day look at them and say, “I still want my blog to be that, but I know that I have to make it a little bit more modernized to media and all the other things that it is now.”

Bjork Ostrom: The balance between personalization and optimization.

Shanika Graham-White: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: That world is always, there’s always such a push and pull there, and no easy answer to figure out what the balance is with that. Darnell, how about for you with photography and video? What was it like in those early stages as you were getting started to know you were in the early stages, you probably knew where you wanted to be, but there’s maybe a little bit of a gap there. What did you do to help close that gap?

Darnell White: I think what helped close the gap is when people on social media started to respond and say that they made the recipe and they would actually DM Shanika videos of their children enjoying. I think for me, I’m a sucker for the children. For me, to see these round cheeks eating, but in a squash pasta like, “Yum, yum, yum.” Oh my God, this is really going into people’s houses and people are creating this and feeding their families. I think that’s our secret sauce is to empower families to get back into the kitchen, because we live in today Uber society where you can Uber everything. DoorDash, you can do all these things. They come at your door. In some way, shape or form, it dumbs us down a little bit, because when you got to ask yourself, when was the last time, for example, you remember somebody’s phone number out your cell phone? You see a person’s name?

It’s those little small things that we can’t stray away too quickly from to say, everybody to some degree should learn how to cook something that’s whether it be a grilled cheese, whether it be rices and peas, whether it be whatever, but to see when we create the recipe and it goes into somebody’s house and they create it, and then they show Shanika a video, it’s a beautiful thing. I think that is what pushes me to say, “We got to keep going.” Because this is much bigger than us.

And some of them come back and say, “Our kids wasn’t able to eat any food, and we try this recipe and this one was a hit.” So our child is a picky eater, so we know where that comes from. To know that from one picky eater to another, they can understand it. Although they’re on a smaller level, we understand food can be increasingly intimidating and complicated, but if you can keep it simple with the flavors, just the moment you eat it or they smell it in the house, that’s enough for them to even want to buy. That right there is like, “Nah, keep going. You got to keep going.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. There’s so many things about work, how we work, how create that are not the logistical functional parts of it, so much of it is, you get a note from somebody and it’s encouraging or it’s a video of a kid eating and you’d think it’s numbers and it’s metrics, but a lot of times it’s those soft things that are encouraging and helpful. It’s also some of the non-metric based things that can be part of the challenge piece with it too, and can keep you from going forward. I’d be interested to hear your reflections, and we chat about this a little bit before, as you entered into the space as Black creators in the healthy food world, was that something that you knew getting into it? There’s going to be some things we might run into that are difficult here? What did that look like going into that and did you have any ideas around what it might look like?

Shanika Graham-White: Yeah, so I think for me, because I grew up in Florida and I didn’t know anything about healthy eating, so literally I was introduced to it because my mom’s a nurse, and so I think in my later years, probably late teens or early adulthood, I started really taking care of what I ate, or just my health in general. I think it was just this new concept that I didn’t really see, especially in the Black community. I think the hardest part for me now, even as a creator, is introducing really healthy foods to Black people. I know that I have such a mixed audience and I love it, and sometimes I will make a recipe and it doesn’t translate in the Black community because it’s like, “We are not used to this or maybe-”

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example of what that would be?

Shanika Graham-White: Gosh.

Darnell White: Overnight oats or something like that.

Shanika Graham-White: Oh yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Totally.

Shanika Graham-White: Right. Which is-

Bjork Ostrom: In the shore, in the suburbs of Minnesota, everybody’s like, “Overnight oats.”

Shanika Graham-White: Right, but then if I make it hot and I make it actual oatmeal, it’s received. I’m learning now in the space that I’m in a health space feeding the balance because I have two different audiences that follow me, so I’m always trying to figure out a creative way to be in the middle. Even with that example, like I said, now I’m like, “Okay, you might not understand overnight oats, but if I do it hot and everyone understands it, then I can give you the option of overnight oats.” And so maybe you quiet, maybe not. I’m trying to learn how to balance the two and that’s one of the hardest things-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting.

Shanika Graham-White: To the Black community because when you look on social media, a lot of Black influencers, a lot of them are the ones that are really with large followings and stuff. They make the typical extremely cheesy mac and cheese and a super fried fried chicken, the things that we’re used to seeing. I think when, like you said, when people are being introduced to new things, sometimes it’s a challenge for change and not everyone is willing to evolve into that change. Some people are like, “I’m rejecting it because I don’t understand it.” Like I said, I’ve just been trying to figure out the balance and having a creative way of translating both.”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. A lot of times people think about the intent of the content that they’re producing, and if you do affiliate content, they often talk about buyer intent, Best Shoes or whatever. In the recipe world, a lot of times what we’re doing is we’re thinking about intent. Overnight oats, I’m going to create a recipe because I know somebody’s searching for overnight oats. One of the interesting challenges that you’re talking about, and I’ve never thought about this before, but it’s almost like it’s maybe taking somebody’s intent, but introducing a new thing that is adjacent to that.

Shanika Graham-White: Yeah.

Darnell White: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s almost like education in a way to say, “Here’s another opportunity. Here’s a thing that you.” I’m going through this right now. I’m working with a coach, and every I’m doing… Every time I eat something I take a picture of it, and then at the end of the day, I send it to him, and then he gives me feedback on it. It’s been super educational for me to… And we live in the world of food. I’m not as much in it as Lindsay is, but to go through that process of food education or just another viewpoint on something like, “Oh, you could add cinnamon to this and it would be a good addition and it would be helpful.”

Has that framed up the decision making around what content you will do, what you won’t do? If you are planning out your content calendar do you have ways that you view certain types of content? Like, “Hey, we’re going to try and do this piece of content because it will rank well and we’ll get as many people as possible, versus I’m going to do this piece of content because it’s near and dear to my heart, and I feel like I love this recipe and I want to share it with people that follow me.” how do you approach decisions around content knowing the complexity of the dynamic of the audience that follows you?

Shanika Graham-White: That’s the craziest thing, because it’s twofold, because then there’s also the whole thing of what performs well on social media versus what’s Google search.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shanika Graham-White: There’s also that too that you’re also balancing, but I think for me, I try to balance between the two of what’s near and dear to me, and then also realizing I have to also figure out what resonates, and so I think that’s been my approach lately. I think about it, “Okay, what did I like in my childhood? All right, right? Is that something that a lot more people probably could relate to?” So now Biscoff cookies are a thing, so I’m thinking, “Okay, how can I transform a childhood nostalgia and put that into maybe something that’s of today and fusing the two?” That’s where I’ve learned to have my most creative point is figuring out if I know that people love pizza, what can I use that’s nostalgic that I can add to pizza?

Because I’m more willing and open to trying new things and testing out combos that might necessarily not be thought of and I think that’s just because I grew up an extreme picky eater, so my mindset is of a picky eater, so I think I’m constantly thinking of, with a picky eater, you need options, and so I think that’s why that translates into my content, because I’m always giving people options. I would make, for instance, I have a recipe that’s coming out that’s shrimp, fried rice. I use farro instead of rice, but I always give people the option, “You can use rice or you can use quinoa, or you can use, but these are things that I also know would work.” I love giving people that option, and I think that’s the creative point that I use now.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. It’s almost like not only is it decisions around what people would be, if you’re a picky eater, what would you like or not? But it’s also decisions around what would somebody have in their cupboards? Would somebody have rice? Would they have-

Shanika Graham-White: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: What’s a normal thing? There’s a, gosh, I wish I remember what it was. We could maybe look it up and put it in the show notes, but it was photojournalist piece around food around the world. Maybe it was in the US as well, and just people would empty their cupboards and they would do a picture of it. It was so fascinating to see in all of the different places around the world and in the US if I’m remembering it right, here’s what somebody’s cupboard looks like.It was like, “Oh, there’s so much variety and there’s so many different opportunities for people to create incredible things from that.”

But as people who are putting together a recipe, part of what you’re thinking is like, “Is this person going to have rice or not? What are they going to have this unique ingredient or not?” Or not even are they going to have it, but we grew up in a small town, both Lindsay and I, are they going to be able to get it? Is it even available at the grocery store if they did want to get it? And those are the things that I think are so helpful to wrap your head around as you’re going through the creating process for recipe development and whatever it might be.

As we come to a close here, I’d be interested to hear you reflect on a question that I’d like to ask occasionally. Darnell, I’ll start with you and then Shanika. If you were to go back and start over again, or if you were to go back and have a conversation with yourselves as you’re about to begin on this journey, what would that conversation be? Darnell, let’s say you meet yourself at a Brooklyn coffee shop, some trendy coffee shop on a corner street, and you’re like, “Hey, it’s me from seven years ago.” What would you tell yourself when it comes to building a business, building a following, creating?

Darnell White: I would say go easy on yourself because you’re going to get there anyway. At first it was man, the stress of it all. It was managing the business, managing accounting, managing household, day-to-day living, managing conflicts, managing social media and comments where they’re like, “Oh, I don’t like this.” It’s all those different things that chip away at you, and sometimes it does get you feeling a little down about your work and feel like it’s not enough or it’s not resonating, but I would definitely tell myself, just keep going and take it easy on yourself because you’ll get there eventually. Which is what is happening now.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s so great. Lindsay often talks about this idea of radical acceptance of yourself. How do you be accepting of yourself in all circumstances and gentle with yourself? That’s so great. How about you, Shanika, you go and run into yourself as you walk into the grocery store?

Shanika Graham-White: I think I would have told myself to be myself. I think when I look back, especially now that I’ve been focusing on SEL and revamping old posts, just seeing when in 2017 or 2018 when I created a recipe, sometimes I think to myself, what was my thought process? I wasn’t even as advanced to even have A tracks in those things. I think it’s probably finding inspiration from Pinterest, but I look and I say now, when I revamp it today, the way that it gets so much traction, I just think to myself, was it… I think it back then when I had less, I was able to be more authentic, but I think sometimes when you get to a point of options or you get to a point of growth, you then again, the pressures of what it is to be at the top or to stay at the top yet-

Bjork Ostrom: The stake are higher.

Shanika Graham-White: Yeah, so I think just be yourself from the beginning all the way until the end. Would be my thing.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I have a friend that works in the same building as we do, and his son was in the other day and he was leaving to go to, he’s on the golf team, and as he’s leaving, my friend who’s, his dad said, “Be yourself. Isaiah, be yourself.” And it was that same thing. He’s like, “Don’t try and emulate the other players. Play your game.” And I think it’s a good reminder for all of us. You got to be yourself. Love that.

Really great conversation. I think for me, what’s inspiring about it is people who are in it, showing up every day, doing creative work, creating new things. Excited for you guys and what you have ahead the studio, and a lot that we didn’t get to talk about, so maybe I’ll have to jump on another time, cookbook and all the other great stuff that you guys have going on. We’ll link to everything in the show notes, but can you just do a quick shout out to your site, where people can find you on social? And then also we have some brands that listen to the podcast as well, if they’ve ever been interested in reaching out for photography or video work with the production company, so just chance to do a quick shout out for those.

Darnell White: Okay.

Shanika Graham-White: Are you going to do the production company?

Darnell White: Okay, so for the production company is, it’s going to be BrooklynSweetTeaProductions.com. We’ll take care of all your needs. Anything regarding photography, videography, if you need evidence to see what it’s all about, head over to Orchids and Sweet Tea on IG. I’ll take it to you.

Shanika Graham-White: Yep. On IG, I’m Orchids the letter N Sweet Tea underscore, and then my main blog site is orchidsandsweettea.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Shanika, Darnell, thanks so much for coming on.

Darnell White: Thank you so much.

Shanika Graham-White: Bjork, thanks for having us.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey. Hey, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We really appreciate you tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I’m here with a special announcement. Are you ready for this? Because I’m hoping you’re sitting down. It’s a big one. One of the things that we pride ourselves here at Food Blogger Pro on is the fact that we always are contributing content to the membership, so our members memberships are always growing in value because we’re adding new courses, we’re doing new events, we’re adding new deals. It’s just a constantly changing and evolving membership in a good way because things change very often and new strategies need to be talked about, et cetera.

One of the new pieces of content that we’re really excited about for 2023, they’re called Coaching Calls. We’ve been asked for coaching calls are one-on-one calls with Bjork or with the team just so many times over the past few years and we’re finally doing it for our membership, so you can work through your specific blogging and business questions with the one, the only Bjork in these calls. You and Bjork will discuss your blog and your business, and we’ll record each conversation and add it to the membership so the greater Food Blogger Pro community can learn from the advice shared there.

Any active Food Blogger Pro member has the opportunity to take part in one of these coaching calls. We actually have an application that members can submit, and you can find that over on foodbloggerpro.com/live. If you’re an active member, be sure to go there and you can submit an application, but essentially we’ll go through the applications and reach out to you if we think there would be a good time for you to come on and have a coaching call with Bjork. We are just so excited about this, and if you’re not a member and really excited about the opportunity, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and get signed up right there. Otherwise, we’re really excited. We’re just so excited about this new content idea and we hope you are too, so that does it for us this week. We’ll see you next time and until then, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti, C-L-A-R-I-T-I. And I kid you not I was going to record this half an hour ago. But I was in Clariti and realized there’s an opportunity for Pinch of Yum that is a project we should move forward with. So I created a video, communicated with the Pinch of Yum team and said, “Hey, we should move forward on this and really get to work cleaning this up.” In our case what I had done is I said, “Hey, show me all of the posts in the past year on Pinch of Yum.” And then I sort ordered that in reverse order by page use. So I was looking at pages that on Pinch of Yum in the last year got zero page use. And I realized we have a lot of really thin not valuable content, and it’s important to clean that up.

Bjork Ostrom: In our case, we’re going to delete a lot of that content, and we should have done that a long time ago, but we just didn’t get around to it. And it wasn’t until I was using Clariti that I realized, that that was something that we should have done. I was able to see that, it’s a lot of old giveaway posts and things like that. So we’re going to move forward with that and clean up Pinch of Yum. And that’s what Clariti is for, it’s to help you discover that actionable information to create a project around it.

Bjork Ostrom: And either you can follow the project or you can assign it to somebody within your team, and then track the impact that that has by making notes or seeing when you made those changes over time. We bring all the information in from WordPress, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics. You hook it all up and then you can sort order and use Clariti, kind of like a Swiss Army knife for your content. So if you’re interested in checking it out, go to clariti.com/food, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food and that will get you 50% off your first month. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, hello, This is Bjork. As many of you know you’re listening to The Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today we’re interviewing somebody I’ve known for a really long time: Julie Tran Delly. She has a site called The Little Kitchen started in 2009, so she’s been on this blogging journey for a really long time. She’s going to be talking about what it was like for her to start. But she’s also going to be talking about what her time at Whisk was like. What Whisk is and how that is an important company to be aware of, how it integrates with TikTok. And as we know TikTok is an important platform where a lot of people are getting traction really quickly. And so if you are looking to build a following, one of the best ways to do that is to think about where do you best align in terms of how you create content, and what are the platforms where you’re able to get traction in a significant way.

Bjork Ostrom: And for those of you that like to create content that works well on TikTok, and you’d need to spend TikTok time on TikTok to understand what that is, that might be a good platform for you because people are able to build a following relatively quickly on that platform. So Julie’s going to be talking about her story, the things that have been helpful for her, how she continues to show up every day, and also being willing to try new things out like working for a company in an industry that you are interested in and aware of, and that aligns with your passions.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s what we’re all about here. How do you find alignment? Find the type of work that you want to be doing. And it doesn’t have to be working on your own. It doesn’t have to be building a blog, that creates revenue from advertising income. What it’s about is finding that sweet spot, the focus for you as a creator, as somebody in the world who is creating things, whether for your own site or creating things with a group of people at another company. The purpose is to find that alignment, to find that sweet spot where you’re showing up and excited about the work that you’re doing every day. So excited to share this conversation with you. Let’s go ahead and jump in. This is Julie from The Little Kitchen. Julie, welcome to the podcast.

Julie Tran Deily: Thank you for having me, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ve chatted before multiple different times, conferences, different touch points along the way. This is the first recorded conversation that we’ve ever had. So this will be really fun. We’re going to be talking about a lot of different things, your story, we’re going to be talking about the importance of video, TikTok, and Whisk. But before we do that I want to kick it off with a fun story that you have recently, proving the importance of video and how it can really be leveraged in a cool way. Where you had a video that went viral, had many, many millions of views, but you were also able to get ad revenue from that. So can you tell that story and what happened with that video?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah. I’ll just share really quickly. It’s a Facebook Reel, so I uploaded it directly to Facebook via the iOS app on my phone. I know you can upload it on desktop, but I don’t usually do that and I got 25 million views on that video.

Bjork Ostrom: What was the video about?

Julie Tran Deily: It was a crab rangoon recipe that’s been on my blog since, gosh, since the beginning, 2009 or 2010.

Bjork Ostrom: The amazing thing with that is and I think we forget about this. But for people who have been blogging for a long time, creating content for a long time as you have, we forget we have these gems that could be four, five, six, 10 years old that we could go back to and produce content around it. And it sounds like that’s what you did in this case where you’re like, “Hey, I published this a long time ago,” where the word reel wasn’t something that we ever talked about as content creators. But you can go back to that and you know the recipe, you know it’s maybe been successful in some capacity as a published piece of content, so then you can create in this case a reel around that. Do you have any idea that it was going to be successful? Were you like, “I knew this has some of the elements that might go into a successful video.”

Julie Tran Deily: A little backstory, and I can share a little bit more if you want me to. But back in April I actually joined and hired a social media coach, so I worked with her for about three months. But I actually filmed this footage with a video assistant before I actually started chatting with this coach. And we basically leaned into, and I did a lot of deep work on how I want to show up on social media and what I want to do. It’s going back a little bit. Everything that I do has to be authentic to me, even if it’s a part-time job or what I share on social media or on my blog. So we worked on that, and then I edited that video and she gave me some feedback, and I posted it on TikTok actually. So first it did really well on TikTok, it’s over 2 million views on TikTok. And kind of leaning into a trend, crab rangoon was actually trending for a while on TikTok and I was like, “I have a recipe already, let me just make it.” And it’s a tried and true recipe. So many people have made it. I’ve made it, I don’t even know if it’s hundreds of times. But I’ve made it so many times for family and friends that I just know this recipe works. And I thought, “Let me just make a video.” And I hadn’t got to editing it until I actually worked with that coach.

Bjork Ostrom: And working with a coach what were the things that came from that? What did you learn from those three months of working with somebody?

Julie Tran Deily: It was really interesting. I really liked working with her, her name is Sabrina Lawyer. And basically we did not make any traffic, any numerical followers, views, likes, any kind of goals like that. So it was actually really just doing a lot of deep work and figuring out what kind of content that I want to create on TikTok, so that’s the platform I was focused on. And it’s really interesting, and I think a big takeaway for a lot of people is you’ve got to experiment and you’ve got to try different things. And a lot of times I hear among food bloggers and content creators were like, “I don’t want to do this other thing because here’s another platform doing the same thing that TikTok is doing.” And if I hadn’t done a longer version of the video and shared it on Instagram Reels, which also hit over two million views. And then thought, “You know what, let me just try it on Facebook Reels.” And I’ll say this is really interesting because I overthink things too, and I also get stuck and I say I put mental albatrosses in front of me too.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: And so I understand how hard it is. And so I know a lot of times the things that I say I’m saying it for myself too. Is that I posted the Facebook Reel originally and it was before… I don’t even want to say this. We know that Instagram is really trying to lean into what TikTok is doing.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: And Facebook is wanting to do the same thing. And so I felt like they just poured in a bunch of code from Instagram to Facebook, but basically there were not a lot of the features that we see on Instagram Reels on Facebook Reels originally. You either had the voiceover and your audio or you could pick a song and it would dominate your…. so you lost your voiceover if you picked a song. So I had originally done that. And then I don’t know how many weeks later, I noticed that they had actually added in where you could change the levels of-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: … your voiceover and the music just like TikTok and Instagram Reels. And I thought, “Let me just try to put this video up and let me just try it again with my voiceover.” Because I feel like the voiceover and the ASMR with the sound of the crunching of the crab rangoon really helped. So I posted it again on Facebook Reels, so a second time.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Julie Tran Deily: And it took I think a couple of weeks to hit a million, and then in 24 hours after it hit 1 million it did another 10 million views.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow. And so you had posted it before, and that’s maybe a little bit of an encouragement to people to iterate, to continue to look and think about how something can be a little bit better. In your case the thing that was important is peeling back the music and increasing the voiceover, and also just the sounds surrounding the video itself, reposting it. So deleting the old one I’m guessing, reposting it.

Julie Tran Deily: No, I didn’t even delete the old one.

Bjork Ostrom: So there’s two.

Julie Tran Deily: There’s two versions and we are so precious about this stuff, and I am so guilty of it also really wanting to make sure our grid is really pretty. And because I was just in the spirit of experimenting on Facebook Reels, I’m like, “Well, let me just try this.” So that original video I think has 236,000 views on it.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Interesting. So one of the things you talked about as we were doing the podcast intake form was ad revenue from that. So can you talk about how you’re earning ad revenue from the video?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah, so Facebook actually makes it a lot easier. I’ve always had this pipe dream that Instagram would make the links in our captions on Instagram hyper linkable, clickable, tappable. And so I’ve just had a habit of always putting my URL in my caption on Instagram. And so I copied it over and I changed it a little bit, and I added it to the caption for my Facebook Reel. And it was really interesting. And then I just thought, “You know what, let me just put it in the first comment.” You can’t pin it but on Facebook the first few comments are usually the most relevant, the ones that are posted on the top, and those are the most visible. So between TikTok and Facebook and Instagram it’s easiest to link to your content. And that day when I had the 10 million views, I had enormous amount of traffic. And so I made ad revenue from Mediavine in one day equal to a previous month. So it was actually the month of May, it was pretty much the same amount and it was like, “Holy crap.”

Bjork Ostrom: Because you have this video it goes viral. And with that then you have a link in the description, but also commenting saying like, “Hey, here’s where you can find my blog or the recipe.” And therefore you get a ton of traffic to it. So it’s a great testament not only to experimentation, but also thinking strategically about what’s the outcome? What is the purpose of a piece of content, why are you posting it? Sometimes it’s just to grow an audience and a following. But oftentimes there’s ways, there’s strategies, kind of a call to action that we can be thinking about with any piece of content, and in this case it was linking back to your site. Video is an important piece for you. You talked about working with that coach, and it sounds like working with that coach was less about here’s a new tip or trick, and more about how do you want to be creating content in the world and aligned with the process where it feels like what you want to be doing. And I think with alignment comes sustainability. And sustainability is so important in this game because it takes a long time as you know, as we know to build a following, to get momentum, to get traffic and so I think that’s really cool. But I’m curious to know video. Why is video a draw for you, and why do you think it’s an important medium in general for creators?

Julie Tran Deily: Oh gosh, that’s a really good question. Why is video a draw for me? So I’m going to peel back a little bit just because… and remind me how many years ago were Tasty-Style videos? The really fast forward, really fast videos were really, really popular.

Bjork Ostrom: five, six, seven years. I feel like there’s a COVID time warp as well.

Julie Tran Deily: And even before then I created a couple of videos with my DSLR and I was editing it on my computer using Final Cut Pro and I posted a YouTube. And I joked because one of the videos, it took eight years to hit a million views. And then I have a couple of videos that only took a couple of weeks thanks to TikTok and Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels. And I did a little fast forwarding in some of those videos, but they were a different angle, it wasn’t the top down. And so when Tasty-Style videos came to the forefront I wasn’t really a fan of it. And I have a lot of great friends who have had a lot of success with it. But to be honest, it really wasn’t a draw for me, I didn’t feel like there was value for my audience and value for me to create it. It just didn’t feel right for me. So I really didn’t lean into video for a long time. And then with the advent of TikTok and really getting excited about… when I started work with Whisk last year, and I know we’ll talk a little bit about that, I started a part-time contract position with Whisk. It’s a recipe sharing app owned by Samsung. And I was really already getting into TikTok and really playing around with TikTok and really seeing the beauty of their algorithm, it is literally to me like a symphony. My mind was so boggled. If you spend a little bit of time on TikTok, it figures out what you like. It was like, “How do they know that I was going to like this? How did they know I was going to digital planning?”

Bjork Ostrom: And what’s interesting with it, just as a quick point, is I’ve heard it talked about as a shift from a social algorithm to a content algorithm. And what a significant change that is when you think of Facebook, it was a social media platform, it was social first. And it feels like TikTok was really one of the first platforms of that type of content, which would be video primarily where it was content first, it was optimizing around content. It wasn’t optimizing around your social network or people you followed necessarily. It was just like let’s surface the best content in TikTok’s case to keep people looking at the app, but also they’re looking at the app because they’re interested in it. Do you feel like that’s a fair assessment?

Julie Tran Deily: That is exactly it, it is not based on your follower graph. And so anybody that might be drawn to that type of content can find you. And if they decide they like it and they want to follow, they can hit the follow button. And they make it really easy to grow your followers because the follower button is right there on the video. I know that when Instagram reels first launched, people were saying, “I’m getting all these great views. I’m getting all this great engagement, but I’m not getting followers.” That little follow button wasn’t there for a while because they weren’t putting in… Obviously, they have to add new features as they go along. And so once people started seeing that follow button it’s just really easy. When we talk to each other, we’re like make it really easy for somebody to follow you or to do that call to action that you’re asking to do. Don’t make them hunt around for things. And that’s part of the problem of people’s follower growth on Instagram, when Instagram reels first came around on the block.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, interesting. So Whisk, tell me a little bit about Whisk and then the connection with Whisk to TikTok.

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah. I don’t know if you want me to go back a little bit of kind of my journey.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’d be great.

Julie Tran Deily: So I actually started The Little Kitchen my food blog in December, 2009. And I was working as a software engineer at the time. I know Bjork and I we’ve bonded over this. We’ve talked about this how I’m a forward dev. I was a backend Java developer for 10 years, and I decided to start this little food blog just because I really do have a little kitchen, that’s why it’s called The Little Kitchen. And it was just a hobby and then a couple years into it, I actually started making money and thought, “Wow, could I do something with this?” But it really wasn’t my dream to do this. This was never my intention to quit my job or anything like that. And then while I was working I actually helped organize a food blog conference. That’s how we met Bjork remember that in 2015 you and Lindsay spoke at it. And then I’ve spoken at different conferences over the years, and it was a little bit before I met you in 2015. I actually got laid off in 2012. And so I was really at this crossroad of deciding what I wanted to do. And I was distraught because I really thought that I was going to retire as a software engineer. I would do my reviews at the company that I was at, I was there for eight years and I would say, “I’m going to retire from this company.” Because when I know what I want I just say it, I’m not really shy about it. And then I was a little unhappy with where I was at that company. So then I decided to hop to another company and that was the position that I was there, I was working remotely and that’s the company that I got laid off from. And then decided to do this full time, and I was doing this full time for over nine years. And then over the last couple years, it’s been tough. I feel like it’s been tough for a lot of people. I didn’t even want to say the word anymore. It was tough and I was like not-

Bjork Ostrom: The word being…

Julie Tran Deily: Starts with a P.

Bjork Ostrom: Ends with andemic.

Julie Tran Deily: Yes, thank you, rhymes with… yeah. So basically, I wasn’t traveling that much. I wasn’t really motivated or inspired. I really need to be inspired and feel like I’m having meaning in my work. And I was really wanting to pivot and do something a little bit different. And it’s so funny, I told you this story, but I don’t even have to go into it, but I basically was working on my LinkedIn profile, and I found this posting for a job at Whisk. And it was like preferably maybe has a food blog and loves food, and it was community growth manager. And I was like, “Let me just try this.” And I have a couple other crazy stories that were kismet basically. And then I ended up having the interview and gosh it was literally the best interview that I’ve ever had, like, “Yes.”

Bjork Ostrom: How come what about it was…

Julie Tran Deily: It was just the person that interviewed me was just so open, and I was very open and it’s literally the way I like to operate. I’m full transparency, really open. I don’t really beat around the bush and I really don’t like being cagey. And if you’re trying hide something from me, “Ugh.” It’s going to give me a ugh feeling and I’m not going to feel really trusting, and I need to trust you to feel like this is going to work. My former boss, Jason, was really great and I was just so excited. I was like, “I want this job.” And it’s like, “This is crazy. You’re a food Blogger, you like to work for yourself, are you going to work for somebody else? Can you do this?” And I hit the ground running and I actually ended up just leaving there last month in August because it was too hard. It was too hard to try to do The Little Kitchen-

Bjork Ostrom: Two things.

Julie Tran Deily: … and Whisk. And I still don’t regret it though. The pivot was great for me, it’s what I needed and I learned so much. But I know that I also taught them a lot about creators and bloggers, what we care about. And also I feel like that’s realized that that’s one of my strengths is being able to synthesize, and take my technical background and really be able to share the space that we’re in just because it’s a hard thing that we do sometimes. And I think that it’s a struggle and sometimes it’s a real grind. And I think that some brands don’t really understand the many hats that food bloggers and content creators wear.

Bjork Ostrom: And the mindset that people have.

Julie Tran Deily: Yes, totally.

Bjork Ostrom: Even really small things I think of Whisk and the integration into TikTok, and how much content is pulled in or not pulled in and the opinions that would be what different people would have on that. But one thing I want to point out that I think is an important point when you’re telling your story is the constant evolution that we should have within our working careers-

Julie Tran Deily: Thank you. Yes. Applause there.

Bjork Ostrom: … around what our needs are. And that changes on a consistent basis. Sometimes it’s drastic where it’s like you really need something different. Sometimes it’s small changes over time that eventually lead to a big difference. But in the case of I think of Lindsay, a big change was we have our two girls. And okay, that’s a really significant change for Lindsay because she wants to spend more time with them, so what does that mean for her career? We’re in the middle of a name that shall not be mentioned, that’s happening globally.

Julie Tran Deily: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: The needs that different people have within that period of time from a social perspective, from an impact perspective. All of those should be considerations as we think about what does the work that we do look like and how is our day made up? And so I think it’s great that you point that out, and for people to stay light on their feet to say, “Hey, let’s give this a try.” And that’s what you did. And you tried it out, you got a feel for it. It seems like it served you well and you also served the company well. What was it like to make the decision to go back to working on your business full time?

Julie Tran Deily: I struggled with that decision for a couple of months because there were some projects that I worked on. And early on I’ll say it really says a lot about the company just because early on I think I was only there for less than two months. I decided the company’s distributed over 10 time zones, multiple countries. And so a lot of it was in Slack and we’d have some meetings, but a lot of times it was a lot of asynchronous work environment, which I know a lot of bloggers when you hire a freelancer or a contractor you know how that is. And I made a video for the CEO in late December last year and I was like, “Here’s all the things that Whisk needs and this’ll be great for creators and food bloggers. This is what I want, but I know this is what other food bloggers would want.” And pretty much, I think a 100% of the features and everything that I suggested ended up on the project roadmap for this year. So if you know anything about software development life cycle, you know that you can’t just request a feature and it’s not going to end up there in two weeks. It takes time and resources and energy, and then priorities are shuffled around and stuff like that. But it was really exciting and really it just was an aha moment, and it was awesome to feel respected and valued and really listened to, all those features. And some of them are still coming along the way, and I’m hoping they come out before the end of the year. And it’s really exciting because I got to put my mark on that product and I still really care about it and really passionate about it. But that’s why it was really hard because there were a few things that were like, “Ooh, I just want to see it to the finish line.” But Q4 is coming up and then also I just know myself, and this is one thing that I hope that more people really work on self awareness and really… Obviously, it’s always a work in progress. But I know that I’m very wishy-washy and indecisive until I decide. And once I decide I’m very decisive, that doesn’t make any dang sense.

Bjork Ostrom: I know you mean though, it’s like you’re contemplative and then…

Julie Tran Deily: I’ll seem to other people like I’m being indecisive and I would think I’d be like, “Oh, I’m probably driving that person nuts going, ‘Ooh, what about this or what about that?’” A little bit of a researcher in that respect and really trying to think about it. But knowing myself and knowing that I was really torn between the decision for a couple of months. So I pretty much knew before I knew, that this was going to be the right thing that I need to do. Last month I was really focused head down on finishing up a bunch of projects and giving a bunch of feedback, and tying up all the stuff so that I could just wrap everything in a pretty package. I still miss my coworkers and I think that’s a testament to the work environment and the culture.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Can you talk about for those who aren’t familiar, what is Whisk? And then a component of it is integrated into TikTok, but can you just explain what the platform is and how it works?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah. It’s a recipe sharing platform and there are some social aspects to it. You have a profile and you can post recipes and comments on recipes. You can save until into a recipe box recipes from all over the internet, but you can also add your own recipes, there’s also communities. What I really like about being able to save recipes from anywhere on the internet is that the instructions are not saved-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: … on there. So you’re going to view the instructions and if somebody saves your recipe, say they come to The Little Kitchen or Pinch of Yum, and they save the recipe into the recipe box, the instructions are there and the integrity of the link to The Food Blogger is kept. So they can tap over or click over and see the instructions on our website, so we can get the ad revenue.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. So essentially it’s a platform that allows people to save recipes if they’re somewhere and they see them. But to your point, it doesn’t save the instructions. So if somebody needs to see how it’s made they’d have to go there. Similar to Pinterest, we think of Rich Pins, it does a similar thing where it will save the ingredient list. So you know generally what the recipe’s about, but you won’t know how to make it so you have to go to the platform. How about the integration within TikTok? How does Whisk talk to TikTok and why is that beneficial for a creator on TikTok?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah, so Whisk is owned by Samsung. It was actually acquired by Samsung in 2019. It was a startup and it still operates like a startup within Samsung, which is pretty neat. And it’s not integrated; it’s a partnership with TikTok actually. So Whisk has a partnership with TikTok and there’s several different companies that have a partnership with TikTok. And when you are able to add a link, when you’re about to post your video there’s a little ad link button. I hope I have the terminology right. Sometimes you know how it’s looking at the phone dial. You need to look at it so you can tell you exactly what it is. There’s a little ad link button and there’s all these different options to link to different sites and Whisk is in there, and that little section is called a Jump. So that’s what TikTok calls it, that’s the terminology. So you can add the Whisk Jump into your video. And unfortunately the Whisk Jump is only available in certain countries. And I could give you the list so that you can put it in the show notes.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: It’s five different English speaking countries and basically they can tap inside the video and it goes directly to Whisk, shows the instructions, and then they could tap over and click over and see the instructions on your website. Did I just say instructions? The ingredients.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. So you have a recipe, you’re first putting it on Whisk, and then from Whisk linking in TikTok. Do you know percentage wise let’s say you post recipe, it has a 1000 views. Would you have a guess as to how many people click that Whisk button and then from that Whisk page, how many people click over to the recipe?

Julie Tran Deily: I don’t have exact numbers. I know we’ve had percentages that TikTok shared with us, and I don’t even know if I could share them.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: But basically the amount of information that you could give the user, if they’re really wanting to make the recipe, the more likely if they’re wanting to engage. And to me, if they’re willing to tap over and then also tap over to your website, that’s a really highly motivated person who really wants to cook that recipe. And so it really depends on the kind of content that you’re creating, whether you’re doing entertainment type style cooking on TikTok. Or if you’re really, “Here’s how to make it, let me give you some value. And here’s like how to make it so that you can be successful at making this.” And they really want to make it and bring them over and it really depends on the content. I know it seems like a wishy-washy answer, but creating great content that make people want to take action from it, I think that’s very important. And part of it probably has to do with how much explaining are you doing within the video itself. If you’re explaining start to finish, people aren’t going to need to go figure out via the instructions. But from what I understand it’s the one way that you could get people to your site from TikTok versus putting in the text to what the URL would be or something like that. There’s not a clickable way to add a link within TikTok is that right other this? Yeah, there’s not a clickable way and it’s not in the caption. And then once you post the video, you can’t edit that Jump. You can’t edit the caption in TikTok. You could put the link in a pinned comment in the first one, but I don’t think those are even tappable either. And you’ve got a LinkedIn bio type situation and you could do that. But it’s more of we’re thinking about how many touches it takes them to get to your site, if they have to go through a couple of different hoops. But I will say that if they are willing to go to that hoop they could become a super fan, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, yep, that makes sense. So am I remembering right that Whisk has a creator platform? Is that something that exists there or is that somewhere else that I’m thinking of.

Julie Tran Deily: No, they actually do have a creator fund and when I left I actually did join it.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Can you talk about what that is?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah. So bloggers and creators who are mainly social media creators who are creating recipes can totally join, and you make money off of your recipe views and reviews. And reviews on Whisk are called Made Its, so somebody left a comment saying, “Oh, I love this. I made this. I might have changed one little thing here or there.” And they leave a comment, then you actually make money on that.

Bjork Ostrom: No, that makes sense. If you were to say percentage wise when you look at the makeup of your business, I think it’s something that’s always interesting for people to hear about. Let’s say on a normal month, not a month where you have 25 million views on a video. Is it 90% from ad revenue, 5% is on content, 5% from creator fund? How does that fit into the pie graph of your business?

Julie Tran Deily: Right now I would say ad revenue is probably more 70, 80%, which I really don’t like. Just because it used to be a little bit more split with sponsored content. I’m not doing as much sponsored content this year and last year. The climate of everything has changed a lot, and I want to get back to working on pitching and working with brands again, because I actually love working with brands. So it’s one of those things where it’s like it is a little higher with ad revenue than I’d like. I know you’ve talked about this before, and you guys do it with your business very well of having multiple streams of revenue and really, really leaning in on that. But one thing I wanted to share about the ad revenue overall is that even though I didn’t really… it took me a while to lean into video, it’s still really important for my ad revenue overall. I shoot the video in vertical and I use actually Adobe Rush to edit my videos and they make it really easy. You just click a little button and you can make it horizontal. And then I download that and I’ve just started doing that recently, because I’ve done it different ways. I used to use InShot and stuff like that, to make a little bit longer video just for the media player on Mediavine, that’s who I’m with for my publisher network. And a lot of times video is anywhere from 20 to 30% of my ad revenue.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: So I think whether you’re not wanting to lean in on social media because you don’t believe in creating content for somebody else or another platform, really leaning in on it for your audience and your blog is really important because I just think about that little chunk would be a lot less. My overall ad revenue would be less if I didn’t have that 30% really from the video ad revenue on my website.

Bjork Ostrom: Point being two pieces that I’d be interested in talking with that. One point is you have a piece of content, it’s a blog post that you’ve published. A strategy to that would increase ad revenue is to think strategically about putting a video player in that post because video, there’s really high earning potential on ads that are run against video. You talked about the universal player, can you talk about what that is?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah, there’s a universal player and it actually shows up when you visit the site. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be that actual… they don’t have to go to the crab rangoon post to see the crab rangoon video. And so it’ll start playing, it does a pre-roll ad and then it will play the video. And then it will also play another ad, if they’re still on there it’ll play another video. You can create playlists, there’s all these things. I haven’t really done enough diving into it. And I remember and I don’t know if Mediavine added it, but I also requested at one point have categories.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: If they went to my site on a vegetarian recipe, that in the role it would just show vegetarian-

Bjork Ostrom: Vegetarian.

Julie Tran Deily: … recipes. And if they’re baked goods then just show them other cookie recipes or other cakes or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. If you create an individual video for a piece of content, are you placing the universal player with that individual video?

Julie Tran Deily: I’m actually just putting the video… I have the Universal player turned on.

Bjork Ostrom: Always on.

Julie Tran Deily: And then I can also embed the code in the video for that post.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Julie Tran Deily: In that blog post. But if that blog post doesn’t have a video embedded, it’s going to play a video from.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense.

Julie Tran Deily: … From the playlist.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. The other piece that was interesting that you talked about was Adobe Rush. So is that a iOS or mobile app that you’re using, or is it on your computer?

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah, in full disclosure I’m actually an Adobe ambassador and I’m not-

Bjork Ostrom: What does that mean? You’re kind of sponsored kind of thing?

Julie Tran Deily: I’ll occasionally create video content or social content and I get paid for it-

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, cool.

Julie Tran Deily: … promoting Adobe. But it’s so interesting because I was already a champion of… it’s Adobe Express is what I’m an ambassador for. And I was championing Adobe Spark and it turned into, they rebranded to Adobe Express for many years, and I would create my videos in Adobe Spark video. And I wish I had even more in with the Adobe Rush team, but sometimes they get emails from me for feature requests.

Bjork Ostrom: Seems to be a trend.

Julie Tran Deily: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, it is a trend.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is a great thing. As somebody who has software that we run, you know when you’re onto something is when somebody’s like, “Hey, you also do this?” You want that kind of stuff, so it’s great.

Julie Tran Deily: And you also feel good as a consumer, as a customer, as a long time Adobe customer, Creative Cloud customer, that they’re willing to listen to it and hear the feedback, they really want to hear from it. So yes, I use Adobe Rush to edit my short form vertical videos and… I have a whole workflow that I learned from a few other video content creators, but they used Premier Pro. I was getting really good at Final Cut Pro years ago, but I just didn’t want to sit on my computer, that was really what I said. I don’t want to sit at my computer all the time. And it’s so funny because now I’m 42, I have a herniated disc in my neck and my back, so I do have to limit my time on the computer.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Julie Tran Deily: I’m back on the computer editing using Adobe Rush. But what’s cool is there is an iOS and an iPad version too, so you could edit on your phone. I just like doing it on the computer. I use an Apple Trackpad, I’ve just switched from the mouse to the Trackpad, thanks to my friend Janelle. But basically edit that, and I like that you can copy a sequence really easily. It’s really great, you can select all your video, add it. It creates the timeline based on how you shot the video. So if you do shoot it out of order, you’re going to have to move things around.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting.

Julie Tran Deily: And then what I do in my workflow is-

Bjork Ostrom: Does it know that when you drop it in, you drop a file in and it knows via the timestamp when it was taken and then it orders it that way?

Julie Tran Deily: That’s a good question. So if you just do command A and select all of it does it in order, and then you could also pick it in different order. But if you have-

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense.

Julie Tran Deily: … 20, 30 clips like I do, I just don’t even bother. I just want it to be as quick as possible and use as many keyboard shortcuts as possible. And then what I do is I actually will save that sequence and leave that sequence. So it’s like that crab rangoon video that we initially filmed it was 18 minutes long, no one wants to watch an 18 minute long video. I leave that sequence as is, so that I don’t have to try to figure out what’s the order of what anymore. And then I copy that sequence in Adobe Rush, and then I do a version for my blog. So anywhere from two to four minutes long. And then I will copy that sequence and then do a shorter one. A minute long for YouTube Shorts and then copy that sequence again. And then cut even more for anywhere from, I don’t know, it could be seven seconds or 30 seconds or 20 seconds, or even 45 seconds for TikTok. So I like to do the shorter version for TikTok.

Bjork Ostrom: 0.7 seconds for TikTok. So one of the things you said was it will take a vertical and make it horizontal, what did you mean by that?

Julie Tran Deily: Oh, yeah. So there’s a little button on the top right like the viewer for your video, and you can change it to four by five, one by one, which is square. And then you could do what’s it nine by 16 or 16… I always put two the numbers

Bjork Ostrom: So it will crop to whatever you pick.

Julie Tran Deily: Yeah. It will take all of the clips in that sequence and zoom in-

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Julie Tran Deily: … and make it horizontal for you. And then you might have to readjust a little bit, but it’s literally a one click button to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. You had mentioned a couple different platforms, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels. If you were to rank order those in terms of significance or where you’re seeing the most traction or growth with your videos, what order would that be?

Julie Tran Deily: Okay. So I always do this where I can’t give you a definitive answer. Okay, so I’m going to say… I suck. I’m not going to give you a full answer.

Bjork Ostrom: Partial answer, that works.

Julie Tran Deily: Well, it’s going to be hopefully a more well rounded answer. Whoever’s listening is like, “What is she going to say?” So I love TikTok because I feel like I’m finding my people on TikTok. I don’t know if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Julie Tran Deily: This great community of people and the TikTok audience, and even my for you page or shortened FYP, just it’s giving me life. The content that I’m seeing, the creativity and the feedback that I’m getting on TikTok is great. As you can tell already, I’m a opinionated person and I’m a little snarky too. And I love that TikTok is helping me embrace my inner snark and sharing that on social media too. Because I’ve always wanted to be like, “Ooh, I don’t think that’s going to be appropriate for social media.” So I feel like TikTok is helping me really be Julie and really finding the people that really want to connect with Julie, you know what I mean? Julie from The Little Kitchen, Julie. So that’s why I really like TikTok, and I really love that there are people making the recipes on TikTok. When that video was going viral I got screenshots of my TikTok saying, “Where’s the recipe?” Even though they had the little Whisk link in the video and so it does minimize the number of questions you’re getting, “Where’s the recipe?” But some people will still get it and I was getting the DMs on Instagram. And so it’s really interesting I love TikTok because I’ve been able to really organically grow my Instagram account because of TikTok and leaning into reels, if that makes sense. Because I really do believe that my TikTok followers are coming onto Instagram and following me there. But also when Instagram was really suggesting a lot of reels content in our feed on Instagram, I was able to grow. I doubled my growth on Instagram and then I hate to say it, the Kardashians and a lot of content creators complained, so they shut that valve off. And once they shut it off, I was like, “Oof.” My little graph was like this and then it just was like steady again and I was like, “Holy crush, this is awesome.” Because they were leaning into the way TikTok is based on content, not your follower graph, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Julie Tran Deily: And I was like, “Oh gosh.” And they were also saying that smaller creators were going to benefit from that. and I really did benefit. It was a month long thing where I grew from 32,000 followers to 62,000 followers on Instagram. And I’m like, “Who does that today on Instagram? Not organically. Not using ads.” So it’s TikTok, but I’m sorry, I’m going to keep going for one second.

Bjork Ostrom: No, that’s great.

Julie Tran Deily: YouTube Shorts, I still think YouTube Shorts is still important, even if I’m not getting the growth that I’m wanting to see. We always want to see this exponential growth and that’s not always possible. We’re realistic and we know that leaning into YouTube really does help with back links from YouTube because of Google search, and also YouTube videos are showing up always on search. So definitely seeing a benefit on posting on YouTube Shorts and then obviously because we can really… the easiest way to link to video on Facebook. So I’m going to give the cruddy answer of all of it, and I know some people are not going to like that. But if I hadn’t posted it on Facebook Reels and just given it a shot, I just couldn’t have dreamed of 25 million views for one video, do you know what I mean? So that whole experimenting, don’t overthink it and just try it and get out of your own way of saying, “Oh gosh.” Because one of the things I did share with my Whisk team members, my former team members, is that as bloggers and content creators sometimes we get overwhelmed with a new platform or a new idea, or something else to learn and we’re worried about one more thing that we have to do. And sometimes maybe we kind of needed to get rid of that and really think about, “Is this going to work for me? Is this something that would work for my brand? Is this something that works for my personality that I could just give it a try?” Instead of immediately putting that block in front of you and saying, “This is not for me.” Because I really do feel like you close yourself to the universe for other opportunities when you do that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting. One of the things that you see with platforms, social platforms is you’ll see people who are really good, naturally really good at a certain type of medium. When that medium is prioritized you see them catch that wave. And I feel like for creators who are catching multiple waves, what it requires is reinventing yourself as a creator in different ways. And I you used the Kardashian example, seven years ago they could post a photo that’s very different than producing a piece of video content that’s 30 seconds long. And if somebody’s not interested in reinventing themselves, the wave eventually subsides and you just sink into the ocean where you are. Unless you’re willing to get back on the surfboard in this analogy and try and catch another wave to then be able to ride that type of content and the traction that you get from that. But it is hard and I think to your point sometimes people are just like, “Gosh, this is really tiring and I’m going to tap out.”

Julie Tran Deily: Yes And I totally get that. I totally get it.

Bjork Ostrom: “I’m done.” Which is it’s not bad. But what you can’t do is be like, “I’m going to persist and just cross my fingers and the old way of doing it is actually going to work moving forward.” Because sometimes that might shift and change. To your point with Instagram, they had the Kardashian thing and who knows how that all played out. But for the most part it’s just a constant evolution and we’re having to produce content differently in the world and needing to be okay with that, which is hard because you kind start from zero again when you are back to a new medium or a new way to produce content.

Julie Tran Deily: Definitely. And I will say I feel like that is actually a motto for life too. We have to constantly evolve. The economy shifts, culture shifts, things are changing constantly. Things were totally different when I was born 42 years ago. And even 10, 20 years ago and 13 years ago, almost 13 years ago when I started my blog. And it’s really interesting to me, it’s really cool to see some of the things are coming back, but some things are really just not coming back. I do think that blogs will continue to be relevant as long as people are still really going to Google and being in Yahoo and really searching for stuff. We’re always searching for stuff. I don’t always dragging down on my phone and hitting the search, to go as fast as I can instead of trying to go through my bookmarks even. But saying that I want to share something really quick, I’ll try to be really quick on it, is I was invited to an event years ago and I’m not going to say the name of the event or anything like that. But there were a bunch of food writers there and it was, I don’t know, maybe 40, 50 food writers and me and two other food bloggers. And I was like, “This is crazy they invited me, this is so crazy.” And I heard one of the food writers journalists working for print publications saying, “Why did they invite them? Why did they invite them?” At that moment could have been like, “Oh, I don’t belong here. Can you believe she said that?” I was like, “No, I belong here. I was invited, you know what I mean?” And I had a lot of fun and I didn’t let that ruin my day. But I saw the evolution over the years of the print journalists that did not embrace social media. And some of them even the ones on TV, some of them are editing their own video and they’re on Instagram doing reels and stuff like that. So if you’re not embracing or at least trying to lean in and learn and kind of see, “What can I use for this? What will work for me? I know this doesn’t work for my personality or this is not what I want for my business.” But if you just close yourself off to it, you’re going to be the person was like, “Why are they there?” And then within a couple years I kept getting invites to this event. Within a couple years it was like five food writers and 50 bloggers that they invited. So it totally changed, shifted over the years and being able to look at… see the forest for the trees and not just always keep looking down and having tunnel vision, I think. But I think that’s also a part of the way my brain works too, and probably the way your brain works too. Really just paying attention to what’s going on and pick what can work for you and what works for you. Because it is like you said earlier, I feel like the theme is creating a sustainable business for you. You can’t do all the things, but don’t close yourself off to all the things if that makes sense.

Bjork Ostrom: Be open minded, but also be willing to be focused on a specific thing and not try and do it all. So Julie, come to the end here. You’ve been at this for a long time and have a ton of experience in this world. What would your advice be for somebody who’s just getting started. Let’s say it’s their first year or first couple of years that they’re jumping into this world of creating content online, building a business online, what would your advice be?

Julie Tran Deily: My advice would be to really find some of the people that you really connect with on social media and try to connect with them offline a little bit. I feel like the people that I’ve been able to meet along the way and have chats with, chats that we’ve had. And also with other food bloggers and other content creators, constantly learning from each other and talking to each other, and doing that venting if you need to complain or vent with somebody who really understands because they have a stake in the game too, they’re in it too. And not really complain about working with a brand or stuff like that on social media. So being professional, but also finding your community among other content creators and other bloggers. Really building the relationship because you can’t do this alone, you really can’t. I wouldn’t have been able to like I say all the time. I’ve been organizing a little small mastermind group and it’s not paid or anything, it’s really just people that I love and respect and we just chat with each other. And the group has evolved over years and I’ve started different ones, but the one that I had over 2020 and 2021 they helped me survive those two years. Because you can’t do it alone and you really can’t talk to your in real life friends about some of this stuff, because they don’t care about it, nor they even know what you’re talking about. So it’s really finding your friend group and your community, like your coworkers in the community. I think that’s really so important.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s something that you’d usually have built in if you have a job that you’re going to where you would have coworkers, whether it’s a big company or a small company. You have people that you work with that you go and get lunch with. You can process out loud things that are happening. You don’t have that in the same way in the work that we do. And so what’s the outlet for that? Well, sometimes you have to create it and I think it’s important to point that out. In your case you created it. Sometimes people come to me, “How do I get into a group? Or how do I figure out how to join this group of people?” And so often I think the answer is you don’t necessarily make your way into a preexisting group, you instead think about what your needs are and try and find other people that have similar needs and create that group. I think that’s a great piece of feedback and insight.

Julie Tran Deily: You have to build that water cooler yourself, that virtual water cooler

Bjork Ostrom: To use the co-worker analogies. That’s great.

Julie Tran Deily: So you have to build it yourself, but also you said something that I’ve heard that people say that all the time, “Well, how do I join a mastermind group?” Like you said. And some people will say, “Well, how do I get invited to a retreat and I’m on the same page as you?” Create your own retreats, create your own groups, create your own little community, and lean on each other and support each other, but truly support each other. Celebrate each other’s wins. I really truly believe in building relationships that have no… you don’t have a ulterior motive. You just want to get to know somebody, and you never know what you can teach them and what they can teach you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s great. Julie super fun to chat as always. For anybody who wants to follow along with you too, maybe watch some of your content that you’re creating, whether it be a three minute video or a 32nd video or a three second video for TikTok, where can they find you and follow along with what you’re up to?

Julie Tran Deily: Yep. My blog thelittlekitchen.net. And on social media for the most part, everything but YouTube. I’m at @thelittlekitchn, but there’s no E in kitchen.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. Cool.

Julie Tran Deily: So it’s T-H-E-L-I-T-T-L-E-K-I-T-C-H-N.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. We’ll link to those in the show notes as well. Julie, great to chat today. Thanks for coming on.

Julie Tran Deily: Thank you so much Bjork.

Leslie Jeon: Hello. Hello. Leslie here from The Food Blogger Pro team. We really hope that you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. I wanted to really quickly mention something awesome that all Food Blogger Pro members have access to, which is our deals and discounts page. So if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you can access this by going to our homepage and then just clicking deals once you’re logged into the site. And essentially what we’ve done is that we have partnered with lots of amazing companies to offer our members exclusive discounts on their products. And so we have deals for lots of companies like WP Tasty, NerdPress, Slickstream, LinkedIn Profile, Tailwind, ConvertKit, InfluenceKit, the list goes on and on. And a lot of these are companies that we know bloggers are already working with or are familiar with. And just by being a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to different deals and discounts on all of these different companies and their products.

Leslie Jeon: So if you do want to become a Food Blogger Pro member and get access to these deals and discounts, you can easily join by going to foodbloggerpro.com/join. And there you’ll be able to look at our membership and learn more about it and join our community. I really hope that you enjoyed learning a bit more about our deals and discounts. It’s one of the awesome features of Food Blogger Pro I think a lot of people might not know about. So we wanted to quickly mention it in today’s episode, but I think that’s all we’ve got for you. Thanks again for tuning in. And until next time, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This podcast is sponsored by Clariti. That is C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com, and really the name says it all. The purpose of Clariti is to have a clear and straightforward tool that allows you to have clarity, that’s where the name comes from, into areas of opportunity for improving content on your blog, and managing those projects along the way. And what we found was for many bloggers, ourselves included, there either wasn’t a great system at all to manage projects or find areas of opportunity, or it was like Google Sheets or Airtable, which those are really powerful tools, and those are awesome tools.

Bjork Ostrom: And if you’re good at using Google Sheets or Airtable, and connecting all of the different elements that you need, more power to you. I think that those tools are incredible. But what we wanted with Clariti was to ease the burden of some of the more technical considerations that go into hooking all of that information up. And so with Clariti, what we’re doing is we’re bringing what we consider to be some of the most important information for publishers and bloggers, into the same place.

Bjork Ostrom: So Clariti brings in WordPress metadata. So how long your post is, what the links are, external, internal links, alt text within images or images that are maybe broken. We bring all of that information in. We bring in information from Google Analytics. So you connect your Google Analytics account, your Google Search Console account. All of that information comes into one central spot. And from there you can use Clariti to find opportunities. So maybe you want to improve the number of links that are coming to a certain post.

Bjork Ostrom: Just this morning, I looked for Pinch of Yum, and we have some new posts that we’re actually not linking to. So I made a note and I was like, oh my gosh, we need to link to these new posts that we’ve published within other posts. And I wouldn’t have been able to on my own, just think of that or check on that, if not for that being surfaced within Clariti. So you can find those opportunities, but then you can also create a project around those, to then make sure that you can check back and say, great, here’s what I need to do.

Bjork Ostrom: You can create tasks within that project and you can work through that to make sure that you improve that piece of content or that area of opportunity over time. And this is the key piece with it is you can take notes along the way. So you can look back three months, six months, a year from now and say, hey, that was an improvement that I made. Did that have an impact? Great. If it did, what are some other ways that I can do that in other places on my blog to continue to optimize and improve?

Bjork Ostrom: And what we’ve found is, especially for people who have been blogging for a certain number of years, a huge part of what you need to do is not only think about new content, but continually maintaining and optimizing your existing content. So it’s been fun to see Clariti grow as we’ve talked about it and shared with other publishers over the last year or so. And just last month we had 60 bloggers sign up to start using Clariti. If you want to check it out, the best way to do that is to go to clariti.com/food. So that C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food, and podcast listeners can receive 50% off of your first month if you go to that URL. And again, it’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks to Clariti for sponsoring this podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey there, this is Bjork Ostrom. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We do this podcast on a weekly basis for people who are interested in building businesses or building a following online, and there’s lots of different ways that you can do that. And we try and hit that from all sorts of different angles, all the different ways that you can do it, all the different ways that you can build a business, all the different ways that you can build a following.

Bjork Ostrom: And today we’re going to be looking at the angle of video, and we’re going to be talking about YouTube, growing a following on YouTube, but also just video in general. We know that it’s really important. All the social platforms you’re seeing are making a shift towards video as an important component and in a way to connect with people. And it’s inevitable that’s the direction that things are going.

Bjork Ostrom: So we’re going to have a conversation today with Caitlin Shoemaker. She has a YouTube channel with almost 800,000 subscribers, and she also has a food blog and that food blog is an important part of her business. It’s called From My Bowl and has published cookbooks, and just has a lot of experience building a following online and also building her business from that following.

Bjork Ostrom: And we’re going to be talking about the strategies that she uses for creating content, how she does that strategically for different platforms, how she shoots, how she edits, and advice that she has for other people who are interested in using video to grow following, and to build their business. So it’s going to be a great conversation, excited to share it with you. Let’s go ahead and jump in. Caitlin, welcome to the podcast.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Thank you so much for having me Bjork, I’m so excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We were chatting about a few things before we pressed record. Video cameras, audio, all of these different things. We’re going to talk about some of those things, because we actually had some folks in our Facebook group who had some questions for you. But before we do that, I want to hear a little bit about the lay of the land with your business. You have a successful YouTube account, you have a successful blog, but one of the interesting things with your story is you started with YouTube and then you launched your blog a little bit later on. So take us back to the day when you started your YouTube account. Did you know that you wanted to grow it into a business or was it you being passionate about video and saying, hey, here’s a good platform for me to create content on?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yeah, sure. I definitely went about creating my blog in a roundabout way than what I would say the standard recommendation is. But at the end of the day, I do think it worked out for me well. I initially started out on Instagram just because I loved video and food photography and cooking. And I saw it as a great way to combine all of my interests and find a community of like-minded people. And then from there I went to YouTube because YouTube was really popular at the time, especially amongst the vegan community, it was more food-based and you would share recipes and it was just another way to connect with other people.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I was just in college at the time doing it for fun. I was actually studying something completely different. I was on track to become a physical therapist, but then my YouTube slowly started to gain traction and I was able to start making money from my YouTube videos. And that changed my perspective. At first I thought it was just a fun side project, but then I was thinking that this is always a dream that I’ve had, maybe I should try to pursue it full time.

Bjork Ostrom: When was that you decided to do that?

Caitlin Shoemaker: So I ended up dropping out of that graduate school actually to work on YouTube and start my blog. And I’m very glad I did because I’ve been able to turn it into a successful six figure business. And I’m so grateful that I get to do what I love every day. But yeah, YouTube is definitely a sort of roundabout way. Typically when you’re creating recipes, the end goal I would say is to draw people to your blog where you have self-hosted ads and that way you make more revenue.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Whereas initially I was just posting the recipes in the comments or the caption of my YouTube video because I didn’t really realize that my blog was a way to further monetize my content, but then I actually came across a Food Blogger Pro podcast and learned about the importance of making a blog. So I would really owe a lot of credit to you guys.

Caitlin Shoemaker: I listened to a lot of episodes set up my blog, and then I started to just link the recipes from my YouTube videos to my blog. So in that regard, I think at that point I already had a couple hundred thousand subscribers on my YouTube channel. So I think that helped my blog get an initial push, that helped me get those consistent page views more rapidly than if I just started my blog from scratch because I had already curated a dedicated following of people who were interested in my recipes. And I also think that I’m not a total expert on this, but the domain authority of my YouTube channel at that point and then linking to my blog from that channel helped my blog gain a little more traction.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting. I think when you think of the change that happens from creating content as a video creator to creating content as a blogger, those are two very different skills. Do you feel like that transition for you required you learning a new thing essentially? Or do you feel like you had some of the innate content creation ability from video first, that you just repurposed into blog post? Does that make sense?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yeah, I think there was definitely a bit of a learning curve at first, more I would say with the technical aspect. I think that I didn’t really know how to structure a blog post for SEO. And I was just used to writing out the recipe, maybe not even including substitutions, because it was just what I did and not really catering it to the user more, just sharing my own creative experience. But I would say the more I looked into it, the more I realized that there were a lot more technical aspects behind it.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And coming from a science background, I actually found that fascinating. I know stereotypically I guess, you would think people are either creative and they want to focus on food or they maybe have more of an analytical prowess and they like to explore that, but I looked at creating a blog as sort of a math or science equation. And I was like, well, how can I figure this out? How can I tinker with this formula to make my blog post appear higher up? So there definitely was a learning curve, but I think I just enjoyed the experience.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I will say because I started with YouTube, I think later on, as we’re seeing the shift to video on other social media platforms, my experience in video that I already had through YouTube did help me with Instagram and then also putting videos on my blog, embedding the recipes themselves. So it’s a give and take and I don’t necessarily think any approach is the wrong one. I think I ended up doing what was best for me and it worked out in the end, but we can’t expect everyone to come out all guns blazing on all social media platforms, being the best at everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think that’s insightful. One of the things that I think is important and that we try and touch on occasionally is the focusing on your platform of highest alignment. And what I mean by that is where’s the place that you are most easily able to create content and have the least amount of friction and being okay, not doing anything else. And for you, it sounds like that was YouTube and not only was it enjoyable, but you also got to the point where you were able to get some traction and actually start to create some money.

Bjork Ostrom: I’d be interested to hear. What was it like for you at that stage where you were in college, you were pursuing this path of physical therapy and also doing this side hustle, hustle/ hobby, hobby migrating into hustle. What did the decision-making process look like for you as you started to think about, maybe this could be a thing and that means of winding down this other pursuit or dream or path that I had in mind. Can you talk through what that stage looked like for you?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yeah, absolutely. I originally wanted to be a physical therapist because I thought that the field was very creative. So I’ve always been into doing something a little bit different every day, which now I found with food blogging. If I’m making a different recipe, it’s a different approach or technique. So I found that was a mutual interest between the two platforms, and it was definitely a challenge when I was in school.

Caitlin Shoemaker: It started it in undergrad, so I had a little bit more free time. But then in graduate school I actually ended up taking a risk and not getting a job to pay for my student loans. And I decided to try YouTube instead. So I definitely sort had a drive, almost a fear of failure, which isn’t necessarily the best motivating factor, but I was like, well, I need to pay my student loans, how can I approach this while also having fun? And we’ll experiment a little bit.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I think I joined YouTube at a really good time when I was joining it, the platform was pretty well established, but it also was going through a phase where it was really highlighting food creators, especially I think vegan content creators. So I got extremely lucky and the videos that I started posting, YouTube started featuring, and it was resonating with a larger and larger and larger audience. So I realized, hey, I might actually have something here. So what I would do is strictly manage my time. During the week I would mostly focus on school, except maybe on my lunch break, I would dream up a few recipe ideas, et cetera.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I tried to get all my studying done during the week, and then on my weekends I would be creating content for YouTube. I honestly don’t know how I did it. I was in graduate school from eight to five every day. And then I would film three YouTube videos a week for my YouTube channel, and looking back, I’m like, did I sleep? I’m not too sure. But thinking back on it though, I did have a lot of fun and obviously I did sacrifice some social situations for it, but I didn’t really feel like my life was lacking anyway. So it was something that I was so passionate about and I was creating an internet community that I felt like I was having social interactions with too.

Caitlin Shoemaker: So eventually I would say as my YouTube video started to gain more traction, internally, I was wishing I could spend more time on YouTube videos and I didn’t want to spend as much time on school. And so I started to question, hey, this is supposed to be my future full-time job, but I’m sitting in class, and instead of taking notes on how to rehab an ACL, I’m thinking about, oh, I should post this recipe video next week.

Caitlin Shoemaker: So that was of the biggest indicator for me that while I was once passionate about this prior… PT as a career, it wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore. And I definitely had some worries about being a content creator full time. At the time it wasn’t seen as a sort of income. It was sort of, oh, you have a food blog. That’s cute.

Bjork Ostrom: When was this in terms of…. Around what time was this?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Let me see. I started my YouTube channel around six years ago. So probably around 2017, 2018, I would say is when I dropped out of graduate school to do blogging full time. And I would say that was when you started to see more paid partnerships on Instagram and YouTube of brands working with smaller creators. So I saw it as an opportunity to explore potentially making a full-time revenue and income stream from posting things online.

Bjork Ostrom: And did you have your blog at that point or was it YouTube strictly?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I think when I dropped out of graduate school at that time I had a blog, I think I’d had it for a couple of months. And around that time I was with an app provider, but it was a lower one where there was no minimum page views per month. So I wasn’t really making money with my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: Your YouTube account was?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yes, my YouTube account was making enough money. I would say. To pay my monthly rent and to pay for my groceries. So I had-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like college living, you haven’t had lifestyle inflation. As I remember a conversation with a friend and he’s coming out of an internship in college and it was like he got a job offer. And I think it was for, I don’t know, 36,000. And I remember us being like, what are you going to do with all that money? You’re starting out in your career and you haven’t had lifestyle inflation, and $36,000 is a lot of money. But as a lot of people know, as you start to get, whether it’s kids or housing or just general lifestyle inflation, suddenly you look back at that time and you’re like, wait, what happened in between that, that perspective changed? But it’s a great time to be starting a business because you don’t have these expenses that have built up in your life that require a certain amount.

Caitlin Shoemaker: I think I saw that opportunity and I realized as a person sharing an apartment with a roommate and not having a lot of monthly expenses, that was enough money for me to take a leap. And initially I did talk to my graduate school program and I just took a one-year leave of absence. So I had that as a fallback if I decided that this full-time blogging thing wasn’t what I actually wanted to do. But then a year quickly pass and I was making more than enough money to support my current lifestyle. So I was like yeah, no, I’m just going to do this full time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Was it hard to… They talk about this idea of a sunk cost where you’ve invested either time or money into a thing and you can potentially think like, oh, I need to continue with that thing because of this previous investment of time that I’ve had or money. Was it hard for you to say, you know what? I’ve invested a lot of time and money into this career, and I’m going to actually not pursue that or was that actually not that difficult?

Caitlin Shoemaker: It was difficult for me, I would say, especially because it was a three-year program and by the time I decided to leave it a year had already passed. So part of me was like, well, it’s only two more years. It’s not that much time in my life, and I’ve already committed a third of the cost. And then now I’m leaving with no degree. So I think that prevented me from leaving sooner, if I’m being honest, because was sort of about what other people would think of me, about the time and money I had spent.

Caitlin Shoemaker: But then after talking to a few of my peers and friends, I realized that I think with my generation, we do go after, well, what’s really going to make me happy or what am I passionate about? And so I decided to attempt to leave. And now in retrospect, I don’t really regret spending a year in school. I mean, it stinks that I don’t have a degree, but I still use my knowledge that I learned in graduate school.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I do think in some ways the research-oriented approach to the science that I learned in graduate school, I still can apply to my food job in some ways. And I had a good time while I was in graduate school. And for me physical therapy, I learned a lot about the human body. So I still use that in my own personal life.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s something that we discredit quite a bit, which is, a previous seemingly unconnected field or experience and how that can apply to what we’re doing. I think of Lindsay as a teacher, that was really valuable work. I worked at a non-profit and we would do partnerships with schools, speaking in front of kids. And it allowed me to feel really comfortable just doing a podcast interview as a for instance. And so I think it’s a good reminder for anybody who’s listening, that you might feel like you’re not equipped to go into a field, but chances are that you have skills and abilities that you’ve developed in a certain area, that can be applied in a new and unique way in a new field.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m curious to know, in those early stages, what did it look like for you to create an income? Was it YouTube ad revenue? Was it sponsorships? And how did you feel comfortable enough with that continuing moving forward? Because I think that’s always the question, it’s like, I have this history looking back of being able to… And I remember this for Lindsay and I, looking back saying, okay, we made enough to live off of, but what happens if we don’t have that moving forward? So how did you get to the point where you felt comfortable enough to say, you know what? I think this is going to continue moving forward, or maybe you didn’t know?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I would say, I didn’t know at first, like I mentioned, when I dropped out of grad school I was probably making, I would say between $1,500 to $2,000 a month on YouTube. And that was pretty much my income, but for a college student, I was like it’s not too bad. It covers my rent.

Bjork Ostrom: It covers what you need.

Caitlin Shoemaker: So I decided just to try it for a few months and because before I was of dedicating, maybe 20 hours a week to it, and then suddenly I had my whole week able to tackle things for my blog. I was able to create, I wouldn’t say more content, but better quality content, which I think was able to reach a larger audience. And around that time I had some YouTube videos that really started to take off and get hundreds of thousands of views, sort of went viral at the time, which gradually increased my income. And then everything I would say started to happen at once. So as my YouTube channel was growing, my Instagram account was also growing. And I started to get more offers from brands who wanted to pay me to promote their product. And then at the same time-

Bjork Ostrom: Was that on Instagram mostly or were you getting offers on YouTube as well?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I would say it was a combination, initially it was more Instagram. I think around that time I had around 50,000 or 60,000 followers on Instagram as well. And so I was getting some on there, and I had a few brands that I worked with on YouTube. It wasn’t as much, but the brands that I worked with were more interested in long term partnerships. So I saw that as more of a steady stream of income. I would partner with the brand for a year and I would post a video every other month featuring their product.

Caitlin Shoemaker: So eventually my income stream started to grow. I started to use affiliate links and that helped add. And then at the same time, I was also putting in time on my blog. And then eventually I got to the point where I was making around a hundred thousand page views a month. So I applied to AdThrive. And then once I switched to a better ad provider, that’s when I really started to make more consistent money from my blog. So it was sort of… A lot of things-

Bjork Ostrom: You diversified at that point too, which is great. You have YouTube and then you have your blog. You’re starting to make multiple thousands in those places. And it’s like, oh, suddenly you have a very healthy income that’s not from one place, sponsored content, Instagram, YouTube, your blog, that provides kind of some stability.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And that really helped me. I think I started to feel more secure and to know that this could be my full-time job when I started to get the more consistent long-term contracts, my blog income was stabilized per month. And I wasn’t only making enough to support my monthly means, but to have some in savings as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Were those brands reaching out to you or were you reaching out to them?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I actually let most of them reach out to me. I didn’t do a lot of outreach. I know that’s a great strategy and I have some friends who started making sponsored content through reaching out to other brands. But I actually, I think most of the brands did reach out to me, like I said, I had some YouTube videos go viral. So I think people were sort of experimenting with some YouTube sponsor content and they may have seen my video that way, or they may have come across my Instagram account, and that’s how they reached out to me.

Caitlin Shoemaker: I would say pretty soon after I left graduate school, I did sign with a manager, she takes a percentage of the sponsored income that I earned, but she does do some outreach for branch. So she ended up doing some outreach to branch, but I would also forward the emails I received for people looking to partner together.

Bjork Ostrom: Nice. And the idea with that, you get an email in, it’s great. But then if you’re the creator, then you’re like, oh, now I have to deal with the contract, negotiation. And so you have somebody that you work with in the management role where you just forward that on to them and say like, hey, I’m interested in this, or could you look into this. Is that generally how it works?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yes. Yeah. That I would think was one of the most helpful things for me in terms of giving me more free time to do the creative aspects of my job and have her handle the back end. So generally how it works is I’ll forward any conversations with brands to her. And it gives me the opportunity to play the good guy I can say, oh, I’m so excited to partner with you, here’s my manager, she’ll share all of the information with you. And then she can play hardball and be like, okay, well here are our rates.

Caitlin Shoemaker: How much money are you willing to give to this campaign? And if you can’t meet our budget, well, we’ll have to take a few things away, sort of all of the negotiation, which I’m not very skilled at. So it’s nice to have someone else do that for me. And then she’s also great at sending the reminders, hey, don’t forget to submit your content or okay now we need to submit the analytics. So it was a way for me to outsource some of the tasks that didn’t bring me as much joy.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is super smart, and as much as possible… Did an interview with, I don’t know if this has been released yet. I think it has. Emily Perron, and she is somebody who works with bloggers help create teams. She talked about this idea of working in your zone of genius. And I think for a lot of creators, not all creators, but for a lot of creators contract negotiation, probably isn’t zone of genius work. And so to find somebody who that is their zone of genius, there’s people who love negotiating and they love project management.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s part of leveling up as a creator is figuring out those people that are going to be a part of your team. They’re working in their zone of genius, you’re working in your zone of genius. Can sometimes for me, I think, feel like, wait, I’m giving this person this thing that I don’t like, and I feel bad about it, but it’s like, wait, you do like living in spreadsheets all day? I think of Pat, who is our fractional CFO. Great, you can work in spreadsheets all day. How did you find that person or did they reach out to you?

Caitlin Shoemaker: She reached out to me, but I think we had actually worked together on a previous partnership. So she was in the unique position where she used to work for a PR firm, and that specialized with brands, more specifically in the food niche. And then she left the firm to support creators instead. So I got very lucky, I’m realizing in this conversation. I had a lot of people reaching out to me, and she’s great. I haven’t switched management since I’ve worked with her this whole time, and she does a wonderful job.

Caitlin Shoemaker: But I do know that nowadays I think that influencer representation agencies are a lot more common now, where it’s something you can find either on Instagram or on Google. And I think you can apply to them nowadays too, that I will say a lot of them do reach out via email and have a whole marketing team as well if that’s something that people are interested in.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. One of the things you’ve mentioned a couple times that I would like to go back to is just being lucky. And I think that it’s important to point out. I think of it surfing analogy and I’ve used it a couple times, but I feel like luck plays into catching a good wave. And you talked about catching a good wave with YouTube or maybe somebody reaching out, but I think a huge part of it too, is being really good at surfing. You have to catch the wave and you have to surf it.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that in the world of business or entrepreneurship or creating, it has to be both. And so this is just me affirming you as a creator. There’s the wave and that’s important, but it’s also… Part of the reason why people are reaching out, why brands are reaching out, why you’re able to grow your YouTube account to almost 800,000 at this point, is because the content you’re creating is having an impact and people are resonating with it. So I think that’s an important piece to point out.

Bjork Ostrom: To really go back a little bit, or maybe it’s not even going back, but I’m just curious to know, as a creator, do you feel like stepping in front of the camera pressing record, which is a lot of what YouTube would be. And my guess is a lot of the success of YouTube is your personality. Showing up, recording, being somebody that people can connect with. Was that something that you feel like was innate? They talk about you can’t teach running.

Bjork Ostrom: People who are fast runners, they’ve trained and they’re really good, but you can’t teach it. You have people who are good runners. I’m curious to know. Do you feel like that also applies to building a brand on YouTube like you’ve done where you can just press record and step in front of the camera? Because some people are like, I don’t want to be in front of the camera. And can you train that or do you feel like that was also part of who you were?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I would say it’s probably a combination of both. I mean you can go on my YouTube channel. I haven’t deleted a single video. And if you look back at my initial videos, I can’t even watch them because to me, I look very awkward and uncomfortable and it is about putting yourself out there. And I do think with practice, you get a little better at delivering what you want to say and sharing more of your personality.

Caitlin Shoemaker: I also think personality-wise, I’m a pretty introverted person. So it’s always been easier for me to have one on one conversations or even in this case, speak to a camera. I think a lot of people think YouTubers are very outgoing and extroverted, but usually when you meet content creators in real life, you realize that a lot of us are more introverted or quiet, but it’s just the way YouTube cuts work that people seem like they’re always talking because we are, it’s a one-sided conversation, but it is a lot easier to talk to a camera for me than to talk to a large group of people.

Caitlin Shoemaker: So I’d say even from the get go, that did help me. I just felt like, well, no one else is in the room. No one else is looking at me. It’s just me talking to a camera. And if I mess up my words, I can say them again and I can edit it out. So I saw that as a better way. It’s easier for me than public speaking, I guess. And I will say the more YouTube I’ve done, the better I have gotten at speaking more fluidly. Initially it would take me five seven tries to say a sentence and I would have a lot of jump cuts because I would be stumbling over my words.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And now with YouTube, I also think I have a more relaxed attitude about it, where if I do mess up, it shows my personality. It shows that I’m human. And a lot of times I am able to speak more fluidly and I don’t need to make any edits or if I mess up, I just laugh about it and move on and people appreciate it as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So I think of Pinch of Yum’s YouTube account and essentially it’s the anti example of what a YouTube account should be, which is essentially just like us repurposing video that we’re putting in other places. Do you think you can build a successful YouTube account without being in front of the camera or do you think it needs to be personality driven?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I think that it is possible, I will say. I think YouTube is a really interesting social media platform, in that it’s more long-form content. So people aren’t going to go to YouTube to watch a 15-second video. They’re probably going to go to another platform, although there is YouTube shorts now, but that’s relatively new. I think there needs to be some sort of personality in the video, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be you or your face. Even within the food community itself on YouTube, I think there are so many creators who are doing a wide variety of things, even though they all revolve around food.

Caitlin Shoemaker: So I would say yes, the majority of people, they are talking to the camera, whether it’s a TV show style appearance, or for me, I talk to the camera at the beginning and end of the video. And then I do overhead for the recipes, but there are also YouTube channels who are more, I would say ASMR focused where it’s more peaceful and calming. And some of those, I think there’s one-

Bjork Ostrom: Can you explain what that, for those who aren’t familiar?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yes. Yes. ASMR mostly focuses on the food sounds and a lot of people find it sort of calming and almost meditative to here, the sizzle of something being seared in a pan or the bubbling of a pasta sauce. It’s not for everyone. Personally I enjoy it. But a lot of those videos, they come for more of a quiet, calming approach. I wouldn’t say that is the norm, but I do think it’s possible. That being said, I think YouTube is a hard platform to initially gain traction in, which is the case for a lot of social media platforms.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Usually your first a thousand followers is the hardest, but I think it can be done. It’s really interesting to see how people have taken the genre of food and bent it in all sorts of ways. I think in general, if you show your face or your personality, statistically speaking, you’re probably more likely to gain more traction. And then also if you don’t want to share your face to the camera, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Caitlin Shoemaker: I think there are lots of platforms who are very well suited to that, or maybe TikTok or Instagram is slightly better suited to that. And that might be more worth your time because YouTube videos do take longer to edit because they’re longer form content. So it might not be worth your time investment if you have a different way of doing things that you prefer to stick with, where you can go through TikTok or Instagram, where you can post shorter content.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you help me understand monetization on YouTube? I understand ads well on blogs. Okay. What is the RPM? When is that going to peak? Okay. December and November going to be great. It’s going to dip in January. I have an idea for that. YouTube, it’s like I have no idea. And in my head, the number that I always use is for, I know this depends on the genre. If you create insurance content like that, you’re probably going to get paid more because you’re running ads against high-value things like insurance or crypto, for example. But in the food space… Well, the number in my head that I have is for every thousand views, you get $1, is that generally accurate or there so many it depends with that. That it’s not worth using that.

Caitlin Shoemaker: So YouTube is very interesting in terms of the rate. It definitely changes. It’s something I could personally look into more. It definitely changes by quarter and you’re paid by video view. But what is unique about YouTube is that the ad that you get before your video can be totally unrelated to your content. It’s more just based on your personal search history. And it’s interesting. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience with running a blog, but sometimes your blog will run ads that people don’t like and they associate it with your brand and you might get a comment or a message, but on YouTube-

Bjork Ostrom: Political or yeah.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yes, exactly. But on YouTube, the ad runs on a different page. The video title is different. So people disassociate the ad that you see in your video or before from your content. So there’s less of a connection between it. And YouTube, when I first joined, anyone could join and monetize their videos. So you didn’t need to have a minimum amount of subscribers or watch hours. I know in the past few years, YouTube recently changed that. I’m not sure if the exact number, because I already have it, but you need a certain amount of subscribers, maybe we can add it to this show notes or something, or a certain amount of watch hours to start monetizing your account.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I will say initially, you don’t make much. I was probably making… Once I got accepted in the program, maybe like $300 a month. You need to have a lot of views on your videos in order to make money. And I think you’ll notice too, even the largest YouTubers, it’s typically not their only income stream. They typically sell merch or maybe they go on tour or maybe they have a book or they use Patreon. Usually people have some other supplemental income, even the ones who are getting millions of views on their videos.

Bjork Ostrom: And I just looked up those numbers, it’s a thousand subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. *-And then that allows you to apply to the program where you can monetize content. If you had a video with a hundred thousand views, would you have an idea of how much you’d expect to get paid for that or is that maybe you’re not jumping into the specifics of what that looks like?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I don’t jump into the specifics too much honestly. I can look at my creator studio though. It really depends on the month. And the thing about YouTube is it’s really hard to divide it by video because you just get paid every month based on the total sum of views on all of your videos. So it’s more like all of my videos got this many views. They do break it down by video. I think if you look further into the analytics, but honestly off the top of my head. I don’t know, sorry.

Bjork Ostrom: As a classic creator, it’s like, that’s where the focus is.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yeah. Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Speaking of creating. So you’ve talked about multiple platforms. YouTube is obviously a really significant one. At the time of recording, you have 778,000 subscribers, which is incredible. How do you think about repurposing content? So you talked about YouTube being longer form. Obviously the other platforms, Instagram, TikTok are shorter form. When you’re creating content, are you doing one piece so to speak of content, that you think about repurposing into multiple different platforms?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yes, definitely. I would say, especially for me when I was in school, I needed to repurpose as much content as possible because I only had a certain amount of hours per week to work on something. So my mentality was, if I’m making a recipe, I’m going to be posting it on my blog. I’m going to be posting it on Instagram. And I’m also going to be posting it on YouTube because I don’t have time to come up with three separate ideas. So, that definitely helped me a lot.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Nowadays I outsource more, so have more free time. But I would say initially my process was, I would come up with a recipe idea for my blog. I would photograph it. I would use those photos on Instagram, it was more of a photo dominant platform. And then I would also film the video and put it on YouTube.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And then as the internet has changed, the YouTube default aspect is more of the landscape ratio, which worked out perfectly because then I could edit that video down and embed that in my blog post as a video player, which got me more revenue. And then I’ll even say when Instagram started announcing video, I filmed a lot of the overhead, like hands and pans sort of tasty style content. So I would just rotate the YouTube video 270 degrees, and just change the asset because I didn’t have time and I’d be like, that works for Instagram. So I’ll just post it like that on there too.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I would say initially that worked really well for me. I’ve noticed over the last few years, especially, that Instagram and TikTok seemed to prioritize phone-based content, which is interesting for me because I mean, I come from a DSLR background. I’m like, well we want the highest quality? But I think people are just used to seeing phone videos. So that’s what they want now. So nowadays I do film each recipe twice. I film it once using my phone and I use that still for Instagram and TikTok.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And then I film it with the other aspect and I use that for my blog videos. Sorry, I film that with my DSLR camera and I use it for my blog videos. And then I use that in YouTube. So now usually with YouTube, I’ve noticed that multiple recipe videos tend to do well. So maybe over the span of a month, I’ll be like this month, we’re focusing on pasta recipes. So I’ll post three new pasta recipes on my blog, and then I’ll create a YouTube video combine and all those together. And I’ll say three 30-minute pasta recipes you need to try. And people tend to like longer format content and also content that can be useful in more settings. So typically multiple recipe videos for me personally do better than if I just said lemon pepper pasta.

Bjork Ostrom: So you would create three different pieces of content in your blog, which makes sense. But what you’re saying is you’ve noticed when you round up that content on YouTube, it performs better than if each one of those was a separate piece of content. Do you have any ideas why that is?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Honestly, I think it might have something to do with clickbait because if my title just title says here are three recipes. Well what are the recipes? They look pretty good in the photo, but I don’t know exactly what they are. I also think with YouTube people want more content, whether that could be multiple recipes. So for example, I’ve filmed the recipe, everything I ate for lunch, quick work week, lunch ideas, and people like that because there are five to seven ideas in there. So even if one doesn’t resonate with them, another one might.

Caitlin Shoemaker: I think another approach that I don’t personally do, but that works well is making a recipe and going super in-depth with the recipe. So you see popular channels like Bon Appétit, where they’ll spend 12 to 20 minutes talking about a recipe, going through the process, the history, their personal connection with it. I think when people come to YouTube, they want longer format content. So whether that’s more variety or more in-depth, they want one or the other, I would say. And for me with time constraints and in terms of repurposing content, it’s easier for me to just stitch videos together because if I wanted a super in-depth recipe, I would have to refilm that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we have a couple questions here coming in from the Facebook group that would love to talk through, and one is around equipment. So you had mentioned shooting at DSLR, and Julie is asking “What camera and filming equipment do you use?” So any recommendations for people who are looking for equipment?

Caitlin Shoemaker: So for my blog, YouTube and food photography, I still use DSLR cameras just because I think the photo content and quality is better. People who would typically stick to one brand. So I’m a Canon girl. So I have a Canon 5D, I think Mark III that I use through my photos. And then for videos I have, unfortunately they don’t make this anymore. I don’t think, but it’s the Cannon 70D. It has a flip screen that you can rotate all the way. So I have found that personally helpful. I would say nowadays mirrorless cameras are pretty much on par with DSLR cameras and the video quality is. I would say slightly better.

Caitlin Shoemaker: I haven’t changed my system just because I’ve already invested money into it and it’s working well for me. But if I was someone looking to invest in a system, I would maybe look into that. The Bite Shot, she has a YouTube channel. I think she has been on this podcast, but I would really recommend her. Joanie knows what she’s talking about in terms of photography, and I think she has a whole blog post on cameras that she recommends if you’re looking for more specifics. But that’s what I use for blog and YouTube.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And then for Instagram, I just use… I have an iPhone 13. I actually have a separate phone. It has no service attached to it. I just use it for work. And it’s great because it keeps me focused when I’m actually working. But I was at the point where I wanted a different camera. I wanted something that shot in more 4k or had higher quality for Instagram videos. And I was like, well, an iPhone’s basically the same price as a camera. It seems like people are preferring this content. So I decided to just purchase an iPhone. And I will say once I started posting iPhone videos, for some reason they did seem to get more attraction on Instagram and TikTok. That could be anecdotal, but I thought it was interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the weird things with the algorithm is like, is this what it is? It sure seems like it. But it’s hard to confirm. We did the same thing. And if you have the budget for it, that’s the big consideration, but it’s really nice to be able to separate your work phone from your personal phone. And you can also then keep the thousands of random food images out of your photo stream as an example. One of the things you had mentioned was outsourcing, what does that look like for you and how have you been strategic about outsourcing, because you had mentioned that resulting in just having more free time as well?

Caitlin Shoemaker: So as my business has grown, I’ve definitely started to outsource more. As you said, the tasks that I don’t feel super passionate about doing. So it initially started with my manager who oversees my partnerships. And then after that I ended up hiring a virtual assistant who helped with my email scheduling. That’s just something I’m not interested in. So I was happy to let someone else do that for me. So they do more email scheduling and then they respond to blog comments that don’t necessarily need my expertise, whereas thanking someone for making a recipe or offering a simple substitution.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And then since then I have also hired a video editor, which saved me a lot of time because editing videos can be very labor-intensive, especially for longer format content like YouTube. She helps me a lot. And then I also have someone who helps me format my blog post and does more copywriting. I write a basic skeleton of a recipe and she fills in because nowadays it’s not really about sharing a personal story. It’s more answering 20 semi-related questions to the recipe and providing specific details on how to make something, so Google is happy. So she handles that for me, so I can focus more on creating the content.

Bjork Ostrom: How did you find those people to work with?

Caitlin Shoemaker: My manager reached out to me and then actually for the rest of the people, I actually pulled my audience because I wanted someone who was already interested in my blog and passionate about the work that I did. And I just created a Google Form. And I asked them a variety of questions based on their availability. And I had them submit a resume. The video I was more particular about, I did have people edit a trial video versus just applying and then based on your resume, getting accepted. But I thought it was good to pull my audience, just because they already knew my style, my theme, what my essential core values were for the blog, and how I wanted it to grow, versus looking at some other website where someone might not be as familiar with my content and as more of a learning curve initially.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So is that a social media post that you put out, an email that you sent. As an example, we’re hiring for a virtual assistant, here’s what the job is, here’s how you can apply.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yeah, personally, I’ve always just done it through Instagram. I would just post an Instagram story with a link. And for me I had an overwhelming response, so I didn’t feel like I needed to further do it. So I think I posted the link twice. So there were two 24 hour windows where someone could apply and I ended up getting hundreds of applicants through there, and that was already overwhelming enough for me. So I just cut it off at that, but email would definitely been my second route.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. So as we come to the end here, I’m curious to hear your reflections on what the most important things were for you as you grew your business. If you look back at the last six years, seven years, the things that you can pinpoint as, hey, this was really important and it might not have been a single moment, but maybe a mindset you had or something you consistently did or maybe it was a single moment that was really important, a concept that you learned.

Bjork Ostrom: Is there anything that you’re able to look back on to say, you know what? This was really significant from the moment that I was like, I’m not going to go in the direction of physical therapy. I’m going to go in the direction of being a creator, and till now where you have a team, you’re extremely successful business, what were those things along the way that you feel like were most significant?

Caitlin Shoemaker: I think with YouTube, especially, but with all my social media platforms, one of the biggest things for me has been really connecting with and trying to understand my audience, because as a creator, I have certain projects or recipes that I want to create, but I’ve always valued my audience’s feedback, whether through an Instagram poll, asking them if there’s any recipes they want me to make or on YouTube, especially paying attention to the videos that people are choosing to interact with and the comments that they’re leaving, whether it’s asking for more or asking for further clarification on a topic. That was how it came up with a lot of my content ideas initially, listening to what people wanted.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And then from there, if you’re listening to your audience and creating content that they’re asking for, they’re more likely to watch it again. But I think it really helped me have an understanding of what my audience was looking for. And my niche specifically, I try to focus on easier recipes that you don’t need to be five star chef to make, but they’re still tasty and approachable.

Caitlin Shoemaker: And I think as I’ve continued to listen to my audience, create content like that, you create a dedicated group of people who are interested in seeing my take on a chocolate chip cookie. It may not be the top ranking one on Google, but because we have this long term relationship and they trust my recipes, they’re going to see if from my bowl has a cookie recipe before going to Google, which is very valuable.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I love that. It’s one of the things that I think is really underrated, which is talking and listening to your audience, and being humble in not assuming you know what people want, but letting them inform you of that. And there’s obviously a balance with that where you want to make sure it’s still stuff that you’re interested in and passionate about. But as long as they’re already following you, there’s a good chance that it aligns with directionally where you want to go.

Bjork Ostrom: So last question for you. You zoom back in time and you’re sitting in a biology class, learning about whatever physical therapist learn about, and you’re like future self sits down next to your past self and you’re like, hey, here’s some advice. What would the advice be? This would be more like mindset. What would the advice be that you’d give to your past self as you’re entering into this journey?

Caitlin Shoemaker: Honestly, I think I would tell myself to worry less and trust in myself more, which might be a common response, but coming from the whole uncertainty, is this going to be my full-time career? Should I drop out of school? Initially I was definitely comparing myself to a lot of other creators, which I think is something a lot of creators get caught up in. I see what five different people are doing really well. And I think I need to do all five of those things, but at the end of the day, that just leaves you scattered.

Caitlin Shoemaker: But the more I listen to myself and this is what I personally am passionate about, these are what my strengths are. I need to trust that my audience will sort of find me. I think that’s when I started to create content that resonated more with other people. And I was able to pave my own path. And now I have some things that I’m great at, some things that other people are great at. And there’s plenty of space on the internet for everyone.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Caitlin, if people want to follow along with what you’re up to, where do they go?

Caitlin Shoemaker: You can find me on YouTube @CaitlinShoemaker and then everywhere else, Instagram and TikTok. And my blog it’s frommybowl.com for the blog.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks Caitlin. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Caitlin Shoemaker: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Leslie Jeon: Hello. Hello. Leslie here, from the Food Blogger Pro team. We really hope that you enjoyed this episode. Before we sign off, I wanted to quickly mention the Food Blogger Pro podcast Facebook group, in case you haven’t joined yet. It is a great place that you can go to, to continue the conversation outside of our episodes. So in the Facebook group, we do open calls for interview ideas, we do Q and A with podcast guests. So you can ask the guest questions based on the episodes. And then we also have an opportunity for you to submit your own questions for upcoming interviews.

Leslie Jeon: So in the Facebook group, you can help shape the future of the podcast and the episodes, and it’s just a fantastic place to continue the conversation and interact with our guests. So if you haven’t joined and you would like to do so, you can join the Facebook group by going to foodbloggerpro.com/facebook. You’ll be asked to answer just a few short questions, and then we’ll approve your registration and you’ll have full access to the Facebook group. That’s all we’ve got for you today though. Thanks again for tuning in and until next time, make it a great week.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by our sister site, Clariti. C-L-A-R-I-T-I is how you spell Clariti, all different iterations of how people say it. But it’s Clariti because it helps you to be clear on what it is that you need to be working on and really gives you direction around how you can go around improving and updating and tracking the content on your blog.

Bjork Ostrom: We built it because we have been managing everything in a spreadsheet. So my guess is there’s two people listening to this podcast. One would be you are people who track stuff and you probably track it in a spreadsheet, maybe Airtable, maybe notion, and my guess is it’s a lot of manual work. There’s another group of people who just aren’t tracking anything and that’s okay, you’ll get there eventually.

Bjork Ostrom: But Clariti’s going to be the tool that’s going to allow you to do that more easily. It’s going to allow you to not spend as much manual time doing the tracking, updating, improving, and just generally understanding the lay of the land with your content.

Bjork Ostrom: And one of the things that I think is most important, a lot of times we talk about hiring on this podcast, but one of the things we don’t talk about enough, and I probably should talk about it more is some of the first positions you should hire for are software. It’s not an actual person you’re hiring software to come in and do a lot of the work that you are doing. And that’s what Clariti is for us.

Bjork Ostrom: As the Pinch of Yum team, Food Blogger Pro team, we use Clariti to take manual work away from our day-to-day tasks and we automate that. It’s one of the easiest ways to have your first hire. So if you’re thinking, “Oh…” I hear people talk about hiring a lot, who should my next hire be, my encouragement for you would let your next hire be a tool like Clariti where you’re going to spend 25 a month and you’re going to save an incredible amount of time. That’s what it’s all about.

Bjork Ostrom: So if you want to check it out, if you want to learn a little bit more about what it is and how it works, you can go to clariti.com/food and you can deep dive into the ins and outs of Clariti just by signing up for that list. And that’s not going to sign you up for the app. It’s not going to sign you up and process any payments or anything like that. It’s just going to allow you to understand the tool better through some onboarding emails that give you a little bit of context around what Clariti does and why we built it. So again, that’s clariti.com/food, if you want to check that out.

Bjork Ostrom: And as a last note here, we’re halfway through this 25 forever deal. So when I say you can… Think of hiring Clariti at $25 a month as a little team member who’s in the background working for you, that deal’s not going to last forever. We’re just wanting to get to our first 500 users as we’re in the early stages with this. You’ll still get a lot of value out of it.

Bjork Ostrom: But the great thing is as the value within Clariti increases, as we build out more features, as we build out more functionality, you will be locked in at that $25 price as a thank you for signing up early for being somebody who’s using the tool early on, giving us feedback, but also finding a lot of value out of it.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ve actually had two people this week, it was last week, actually that followed up and one person said, “I love…” it was all L-O-V-E capital, “this service,” and somebody else said the same thing in the Slack channel, which you can join and be a part of that after you sign up for Clariti to see how other people are using it and the questions that come up and offer any insider feedback along the way. So thank you to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, Hello. This is Bjork. As you know, you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast and today we’re going to be talking to Jenné Claiborne from Sweet Potato Soul.

Bjork Ostrom: I remember years back, Lindsay and I were having a conversation and she’s just like, “Jenné’s awesome. She does such good work. She’s so inspiring.” And that’s why it’s so fun to have this conversation with her today.

Bjork Ostrom: She talks about her mindset around business, how she’s really focused on showing up every day and putting good work into the world and the results that that has gotten her and whether it be a cookbook deal that leads to Tesla which was a fun conversation. It’s one of my… Whenever I see a Tesla, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, those are so awesome.” Jenné on our team, her husband works for Tesla. They drive a Tesla. I haven’t worked up the courage yet to ask her if I can test drive it, but maybe someday I will. So that was a fun conversation.

Bjork Ostrom: But also just what does it look like to build a business to 700,000 subscribers on YouTube and a successful blog and a cookbook, but also to be an involved parent and how do you balance those things and make sure that you’re being successful in both places. And she talks about her strategy and mindset for a lot of those different things as a successful business owner and what she’s learned along the way in the multiple iterations of different businesses that she’s had. So it’s going to be a great interview, really excited about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey, one thing I wanted to let you know about before we jump into the interview, though, is this survey that we’re doing. We want to learn more about you and here are the details for it. It’s a podcast listener survey.

Bjork Ostrom: First, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/survey. That’s going to pull up the survey. Not only are you going to get a chance to see what that survey is and to get the inside look at all of the things that we care about. That’s maybe actually not a huge motivation.

Bjork Ostrom: But there’s an additional bonus of a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card. You could buy the Sweet Potato Soul cookbook. You could buy new photography gear. You could buy a little dog that is battery powered and walks on its own which is what Solvi, our daughter, got for Christmas and she loves it. So in case you needed some ideas of what you would spend that gift card on. So you have a chance to win that. We’ll pick somebody from that survey.

Bjork Ostrom: It’ll be open until March 11th, the end of the day. So make sure to take action on that now, and after the survey wraps up, we’re going to record an episode that recaps the results. So we want to make sure that as many people take that as possible. So we can have some information not only for ourselves to inform how we can make this podcast better, but also to share with you once we release that.

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s enough on survey. Again, it’s foodbloggerpro.com/survey. Let’s go ahead and jump into this interview. Jenné, welcome to the podcast.

Jenné Claiborne: Hi. I’m so excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. We had a conversation before I pressed record where I wish I would’ve remembered when this was, but there’s a time where Lindsay and I were having a conversation, we were looking I think it was at your Instagram account or something, so Sweet Potato Soul, and we said, “Jenné just has magic fairy dust.” That’s a word that we occasionally use around somebody who just has it.

Bjork Ostrom: I also remember feeling like a version of that when I watched Justin Bieber, Never Say Never the documentary.

Jenné Claiborne: Wow.

Bjork Ostrom: I remember being like… There’s just something about… Obviously, a very different category of creator and-

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: … celebrity. But I remember thinking the same thing. Do you feel like that’s been true for you? Have you always been somebody who has felt comfortable being in front of a camera, being centered in that world? And was that always something that you’d hoped to do was-

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: … to be a creator or to be somebody who was known by other people?

Jenné Claiborne: Yes, absolutely.

Jenné Claiborne: It’s so funny. I was at my mom’s house the other day in my old bedroom and I was looking under the bed at all the junk and the papers and the journals and the photos and I pulled out a folder but a four-page long written note. I’m sure we had to do this-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jenné Claiborne: I’m thinking in high school, we had to do a letter to our future selves. So I found my letter to my future self. It was like in 10 years type of thing. So now it’s been 20, but I finally found it and I wrote that I wanted it to be famous. I wanted to be a famous actress because that is what I wanted to do back then and that I wasn’t sure if I was going to be there in 10 years. So at 26, but I knew that I was going to be on my way. And I didn’t end up becoming an actor. Technically, I did. I had a BFA in acting.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, sure. Yeah. Okay.

Jenné Claiborne: I did go to school for acting and when I graduated from school, I went to Boston University, I went to New York and I was pursuing acting. But once I discovered veganism because I was already into food, once I discovered veganism, I just went a different direction.

Jenné Claiborne: However, yes, I’ve always still loved being in front of people, knew that I wanted to have a cooking show. Just be in front of people because even when I was a little girl, I would always be entertaining my family, putting on shows. I wanted to be a dancer before I wanted to be an actress. But then I discovered acting and anyway… So yes, yes, yes.

Bjork Ostrom: My youngest years, I also wanted to be a dancer. Fun fact.

Jenné Claiborne: Really?

Bjork Ostrom: That we both share.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my gosh.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s so far from my reality right now. But there’s these home videos of me. My parents-

Jenné Claiborne: Wow.

Bjork Ostrom: … playing these random songs that aren’t great songs to dance to and as you can imagine me, I don’t know, I was maybe three or four.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my God. Were you doing interpretive dancing?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It was probably a little bit of all of it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good, but in my mind it was awesome.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So it sounds like from your story, when you discovered or realized that you wanted to eat vegan, was that a pivot in your path? Was this a significant kind of juncture along the journey that redirected you? Or was it discovering like, “Oh, I can actually create content on YouTube. I can do my own cooking show. And so I don’t need to go in this direction of trying to get signed to a movie or commercials or show?” Where did that pivot for you?

Jenné Claiborne: It was a mix, for sure.

Jenné Claiborne: So before I became vegan and I was in New York and I was pursuing acting, so I was auditioning for theater, for television, movies, commercials, everything, I was even doing print modeling, but about year and a half into actually pursuing this career professionally, I realized I didn’t want to do it. I realized I actually wasn’t passionate about it like I thought I was. So-

Bjork Ostrom: What was that moment that you realized it? Do you remember?

Jenné Claiborne: Well, I-

Bjork Ostrom: Or was it a slow realization?

Jenné Claiborne: It was a slow realization. It was going to auditions for things that were in my head below me because I was a classically trained actress and I’m going out for the dumbest commercials.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Like a Mucinex commercial on-

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like all of the-

Jenné Claiborne: And the not even having me act. It’s just make a face and turn around and that’s it. Not exactly what I thought I’d signed up for.

Jenné Claiborne: And so my passion for it was wearing off and I didn’t really have the same fire that I had in school. In school, it’s fun. You can be whatever you want in school. You could play… I’d play men sometimes in theater which was just so much more experimental and interesting. And then the real world, it just wasn’t like that at all.

Jenné Claiborne: Also the money. Of course, if you become a famous actor, you’re going to get paid so much, but I wasn’t making as much money as I thought I could. Theater wasn’t paying as much as I thought it would. And then I also didn’t like my… I had a great manager or agent, so it wasn’t him, but I just didn’t like the whole arrangement. So the whole passion is-

Bjork Ostrom: What do you mean by that? What do you mean by that? How that relationship worked?

Jenné Claiborne: Yes, exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Any management-agent relationship just didn’t feel like that’s how you want to work.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly, exactly. Because for me, I’m saying I actually thought I had gone to school to do just Broadway into huge Shakespeare essentially.

Jenné Claiborne: And my agent who actually also graduated from Boston University of the same program, he was like, “This is a commercial thing. You got to go out for everything.” Of course, I wasn’t at the level where I could be picky about the role I was going up for. You got to be pretty famous to be doing that which is great. You have to pay your dues, you have to be humble. But in order for me to be able to pay my dues and be humble, I also really needed passion which I didn’t have for. If I had all the passion-

Bjork Ostrom: That you have to grind for 10 years and while grinding, you have to actually like grinding.

Jenné Claiborne: Yes. You have to like grinding, you have to feel good about it, you have to know that this is part of your journey and you’re going to get to the place that you just want to be. And I just didn’t have it.

Bjork Ostrom: As opposed to getting your soul dried out after doing a commercial shoot being exhausted and-

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: And being in… I would do commercials where I would… So at the time, like I said, I was living in New York. We would literally film a commercial for all weather so we’d be wearing skirts and our toes out, short sleeves and we would film it in 20-degree weather and then we’d scurry back into the trailers or they would set up heaters on the street.

Jenné Claiborne: I filmed one of the first things, I can’t remember what it was for, it was a commercial for something and they had heaters on the street and we would all group, bundle around the heaters and shake and freeze. And at the end of all of that, I think the shoot was multiple days, 12-hour days, the end of it, I didn’t even get that much money. That was like, “Oh.” It was like a stab in my heart like-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Jenné Claiborne: … why did I waste my time?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And it’s almost like this separation of art and commerce where there’s this bucket of commerce acting where you get paid, you show up and do it, but it sounds like it wasn’t necessarily art and it’s-

Jenné Claiborne: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s maybe if you go in the category of art, there’s not a lot of the commerce. You’re not even paid-

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: … until you get to this top of the triangle where you’re able to do both, where you get $20 million to do it.

Jenné Claiborne: And so few people.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right,

Jenné Claiborne: Right. That’s like 20 people. You can count those people.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Jenné Claiborne: They’re that famous.

Bjork Ostrom: I had a friend who lived in L.A. for a long time. He was older than I was and so he was middle career and he went out to L.A. to do acting, he did a few commercials and eventually he just got burnt out, moved back to Minnesota. But he said… It was interesting because he was at a stage in life where some of his friends who did grind for 10 years started to book movies and supporting roles. He said, “To imagine doing what I was doing for 10 to 15 years,” he’s like, “it just wasn’t worth it to me.”

Jenné Claiborne: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s interesting to hear you talk in parallels to that.

Bjork Ostrom: So this combination of discovering, “Hey, I am passionate about some things, acting, artistry, and vegan.” Was there a crossroads for those two things to say, “Wait a minute. Maybe I can chart my own path and not have to grind and hope and pray that eventually I get to this place. Maybe I can just get to this place now. And when I am grinding, it’s actually going to be enjoyable?” Is that parallel kind of what your story was?

Jenné Claiborne: That’s exactly. Did you say commerce? That was a huge part of it too. The money.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: I got a job at a restaurant like all actors do and it was a vegan restaurant. Eventually after a year working there, I became vegan also. I was already interested, I was already vegetarian/pescatarian.

Jenné Claiborne: So when I became vegan, it was as though I had an epiphany and a light bulb went off. I realized, “Oh my God, this is the thing I can do,” because I knew I didn’t want to be an actor but like I said, I have a BFA in acting, what else am I going to use that for? So I didn’t feel qualified to do anything else. And I was going through an early, very early quarter life crisis.

Jenné Claiborne: So I became vegan and it was, like I said, an epiphany, “Oh my God, I can do this.” I didn’t know exactly what that would look like. But I knew I loved the idea of being an entrepreneur because I grew up… My parents are entrepreneurs. I knew I liked that. I loved being in control. I never wanted to work for anybody. And then the third thing was I knew I could make money. I could control my money. But how?

Jenné Claiborne: So like I said, I was working in this restaurant on the Upper West Side so it’s very wealthy area. I realized maybe I can start a private chef company because I’m a great cook. I couldn’t afford to go to culinary school but I knew I was a great cook.

Jenné Claiborne: So I started this private chef company and that was my way forward as far as having something I’m extremely passionate about, feeling like I have so much purpose around that as well, helping people become vegan for the animals, for their health, for the environment and I have all the control and I’m working for rich people so I can charge… And it’s really great amount of money, way more than I was doing those stupid commercials and I’m really in charge.

Bjork Ostrom: What was that like to get your first clients?

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my God.

Bjork Ostrom: How did that happen?

Jenné Claiborne: Let me tell you how long it took, first off. I started my business. I’m doing air quotes here because I started the business in October or something. I sent my email. I had my own newsletter. Did all that. By the way-

Bjork Ostrom: And this is October of?

Jenné Claiborne: 2011. And by the way-

Bjork Ostrom: 10 years ago.

Jenné Claiborne: … I already had my blog. I started my blog 2010. And I didn’t even say that because I started it as a hobby while I was still trying to figure out the acting thing. I was not really thinking about it. It was a hobby.

Jenné Claiborne: The private chefing company, I called it The Nourishing Vegan. I started it in 2011, October, maybe November. And I was hustling, hit the ground, had my little flyers, put up flyers at the restaurant where I worked at. I talked to all the patrons, all the people, like, “You’re rich. You can hire me. You don’t need to keep coming to the restaurant. I could cook for you.”

Jenné Claiborne: I told everybody what I was doing. I would do tasting at nail salons, yoga studios, hair salons, anywhere they would have me. I would bring my little food, set up a little table, have my flowers and make it look real beautiful and professional and trying to appeal to these people.

Jenné Claiborne: I did not get a client until May 2012.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow.

Jenné Claiborne: It took six months to get my first client. It was torture but I never gave up because I’m not that. I just don’t give up. If I pursued acting, I would probably be a famous actress by now. I never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up if I like it.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. That was going to be my question. And maybe that’s the answer is what was different between saying, “You know what? I’m not acting no more, but maybe a similar type of struggle around this,” but sticking with it to the point where you were able to book your first clients? What was different between those two scenarios?

Jenné Claiborne: Because I had this whole food thing. Veganism to me at that time was still so new to me. I was doing my blog so I was experimenting with recipes and sharing them on the blog and that was just… I would get a little bit of feedback, maybe one or two comments, but that meant the world to me and I really felt like I had a purpose. I felt like I need to help change the world by making other people go vegan. Whoever wants to go vegan, they need to know me because I’m going to help them. I felt this is my-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it was a really strong why.

Jenné Claiborne: Yes. I felt like I was born to do this. I felt like I was born to be a vegan and born to help other people become vegan. I never felt that about anything else in my life. Still to this day, I still feel that way. That is the only thing I’ve ever had that drive for.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s really cool. So what did that… You have your, and when you said you started your blog, that was Sweet Potato Soul in 2010?

Jenné Claiborne: 10, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And then you start The Nourishing Vegan as business where you’re doing private chef. So is that parties? Gatherings?

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Or is it an individual who’s like, “I want to eat vegan and I have no time to do it. Help me, please?”

Jenné Claiborne: It was everything but it was mostly the latter. So cooking for clients on a weekly basis. That first client within a month, it turned into three because she was-

Bjork Ostrom: Word of mouth.

Jenné Claiborne: She got her friends on board. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: And then that turned into five or six then Google found my website and so if you would search in New York City for a private chef, personal chef for vegan or vegetarian, I would be the very first to pop up.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Jenné Claiborne: That just took off from there. And so what I would do was like, “Yeah. Cook for the same people every week.” There’s only of course so many people I could cook for. I was doing meal delivery…

Jenné Claiborne: On Sundays, I would cook for my home and then deliver the food. I was also doing supper clubs in my own house and also around the city, was doing a lot of cooking classes in public places. Whole Foods at the time had a couple different locations where you could do cooking classes in the stores. Beautiful culinary kitchens. And then I’d also do cooking class in people’s homes. People would hire me for a birthday party to learn how to cook vegan or one on one, they’re just becoming vegan.

Jenné Claiborne: So I ran the gamut. I did all sorts of stuff all throughout New York and it was great. I was only me. I never hired anybody. And of course, I could have scaled more if I had hired other people but I just wanted all the money to myself. I was like, “First real business.”

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Jenné Claiborne: I was not parting with anything. I thought that it was so successful, doing so well.

Bjork Ostrom: What I think is so great about that is I think sometimes people in general will feel behind because they’re just starting out. So an example being like somebody’s starting today to build an Instagram following.

Jenné Claiborne: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: “I’m so far behind. Everybody’s worked so hard to do this.” But I think what we discredit sometimes is all of our previous experience that leads up to that point and the asset that we have in those seemingly uncorrelated skills and abilities that can be in some way folded into what we are doing now.

Bjork Ostrom: I see that in a really obvious way with what you are doing and acting where I would imagine part of doing, if you’re doing an event where you’re with people, it’s like you need to understand people and the feel of a room and to feel comfortable on your feet to come up with stuff. It moves into an improv version of acting. But-

Jenné Claiborne: Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: … there’s probably… Well, I guess it’s a question. Do you feel like there were things that you learned or knew from your experience as an actor that rolled into this new business?

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah, 100%. That presentation. So presenting myself. So much of what you learn in acting school is not actually acting but it’s about embodying a character, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: Way before you get to saying words and actually acting but putting on a character. So I was able to…

Jenné Claiborne: I’m actually an introvert, even shy person, but nobody would know because I actively put something on to… Even having this conversation with you right now, I prepared earlier and I was super nervous and I still feel very nervous but I’m an actress so I have like this persona that I put on top. That was helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Is it a named persona in your mind?

Jenné Claiborne: No. No.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jenné Claiborne: It’s not.

Bjork Ostrom: But it’s a mind, and I know some people have that where they’d be like-

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Like Beyoncé, Sasha Fierce.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s what I’m thinking of. That’s what I’m thinking of where-

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. But for you, it’s putting on the persona or the character of what?

Jenné Claiborne: It’s just a character of… It’s another me. And I’ve always had to be like this because I have a very boisterous family and it’s hard to get a word in, in that type of family. And as a kid, I was very shy. It was hard for me to talk to anyone so I had to basically learn how to be in a way comfortable and I had to really actively develop myself to fit into the family, and that person who I developed being I’m very outgoing and I want to entertain that is something that I became this person consciously.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: I can think back to as a kid thinking like, “Oh, I have to make sure that I am louder or I have to get them to look at me because if they don’t look at me, I’m literally going to be forgotten. So I have to do this to have them look at me.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think it would be inspiring for people who are listening who can resonate with that idea of being shy or… And that would be this way too. If I have a weekend where I’m not doing anything and it’s just me in the house, some people go crazy. I’m like, “I live for that. Awesome.”

Jenné Claiborne: Thanks. Don’t come over. Nobody, good.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think for people to hear you and to see you and to see how you are and to know that’s something that you’ve worked on is inspiring because it can be a skill that you develop and you can be aware of it and you can move towards whatever it might be like being more comfortable in front of people or for some people it might be speaking. So I think it’s really cool to hear you talk about that and inspiring in a lot of ways.

Bjork Ostrom: So at what point were you like, “You know what? This business is successful and this is a thing?” In the early stages, it’s like, “Is this going to be a thing?” And then with the business, I feel like you’re growing it and it’s like, “It looks like it could be a thing.” Was there a point where you’re like, “Wait, this is a thing?”

Jenné Claiborne: Well, okay. Kind of. Because, keep in mind, now, technically at this point I only have one business, The Nourishing Vegan.

Bjork Ostrom: Right.

Jenné Claiborne: I also have the blog. I didn’t call it a business.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m interested in the parallels of how those work together.

Jenné Claiborne: I always did them at the same time. I started my YouTube channel before I even started my business, The Nourishing Vegan.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jenné Claiborne: Because back then, it wasn’t obvious how you would ever make money from a blog or a YouTube channel.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: It was more… It was so difficult to just build your subscribers and your viewers and your traffic for the blog. That’s like, “I’m not going to put on ads. I don’t care. I have another business. I don’t need to-”

Bjork Ostrom: Not because it’s not worth it.

Jenné Claiborne: It’s not worth it. Who cares?

Bjork Ostrom: Early stages. Yeah. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: And for the blog off… I was reading a post about this yesterday. There’s a blog post on my blog, of course, about the recipe is for my vegan crab cakes and really the whole blog post is trying to… I’m advertising my supper club in my house.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right.

Jenné Claiborne: All the photos are about that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s the thing you’re promoting.

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: I’m trying to push people to The Nourishing Vegan, to my supper clubs. It was called The Little Harlem Kitchen. But that was the goal of the blog. I never was trying to monetize it but I did the blog and YouTube because it was fun. Why not? I never thought like, “Oh, this is a burden I need to stop. This is a waste of time.” I just never considered that. It was just fun. It would be great if it grew into something else. So why not just do it?

Bjork Ostrom: Yep.

Jenné Claiborne: Now in 2016, I was doing very well with The Nourishing Vegan, but the blog and the YouTube channel, the Sweet Potato Soul was also starting to grow. I don’t remember what my traffic was, I don’t remember what my subscribers were, but I had started paying more attention to growing my platforms specifically the YouTube. I don’t remember social media. I don’t remember the advent of Instagram though I was there and I was posting but I can’t even tell you back then, I have no idea. I don’t remember. But the blog and YouTube, I was starting to pay more attention to starting in 2015.

Jenné Claiborne: So what happened was I was on the train with a friend who is an author of… I think now she’s written 12 books. At the time, it was 10. And she said-

Bjork Ostrom: Who was it? We can give her a little-

Jenné Claiborne: This is Victoria Moran.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. And she’s amazing, she’s a vegan author, but prior to writing mostly about veganism, she was more a self-help spirituality author.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Jenné Claiborne: And she also lived in Harlem and we were going home and she said, “Jenné, I think it’s time for you to write a cookbook.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: I was like, “Maybe. But who’s going to buy it? My 12 clients?” She’s like, “Well, you have your blog and your YouTube channel. I think it’s like… You’re doing really well.” So she saw that in me which I didn’t think I was ready.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: She referred me to her literary agent. He signed to me. And then 2016 was the big year for me.

Jenné Claiborne: At the beginning of 2016, one, I got my first sponsorship deal. I had never reached out to a brand. I wasn’t trying to do that. But a brand, it was the North Carolina SweetPotato Commission.

Bjork Ostrom: Nice.

Jenné Claiborne: They reached out to me for a year or six-month long ambassadorship. That was my first ever paid anything from Sweet Potato Soul.

Bjork Ostrom: So that immediately opens the door-

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: … into like, “This is a thing.”

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Isn’t that funny? It’s like the other brands might have noticed or something because then after a month, then I’m like, “Oh, here’s two more brands who want to work with me.” And it just snowballed. That was crazy because remember, I’m still doing The Nourishing Vegan. I’m still doing my supper club. I’m still having my cooking clients. I’m starting to get busier.

Jenné Claiborne: Then in June 2016, I got a book deal with Harmony, which is the imprint of Penguin Random House. So that was a big deal too. And so now I’m having even more sponsorships and my YouTube channel’s growing, my blog is growing. I’m not even really trying. And then now I have a book deal.

Jenné Claiborne: So what happened was I just got overwhelmed and I had to start passing my clients off to other private chefs. I was just referring them away and saying, “I’ll be back. I just have six months to write this book. But let me do this and then I’ll be back to you the beginning of 2017.” That never happened-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Because things just kept…

Jenné Claiborne: … because this blog just took off.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting because you had done a lot of work up until that point. You had been putting coal into the fire and it’s almost four or five years of doing that with no intent. It sounds like with no intent of that being like, “Please, when is this thing going to take off?” But like, “Hey, I just enjoy the process of doing this.” And eventually there’s enough coal in the engine where it started to go forward. And then it feels like you’re trying to captain two different… Or what? No. What is it? A train conductor? You’re trying to conduct two different trains.

Jenné Claiborne: Two different. Definitely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: And it’s funny because… And it’s not… It’s not an accident that the blog and YouTube took off and then I got the book deal because I was very intentional about my business.

Jenné Claiborne: It’s funny. The end of 2015 and beginning of ’16, I was thinking, “How am I going to grow my private chef company? I need to bring on other chefs so I can take on more clients.” I was getting so much traffic to my private chef company, I just had to turn people away. That was my focus.

Jenné Claiborne: But at the same time, I wasn’t just being loosey-goosey with the blog and the YouTube. I was very intentional. I want to post the video every week. I want to do a blog post every week. I got to get better with my food photography constantly. I was very constantly, constantly, constantly thinking like that. I just wasn’t monetizing it. I just wasn’t expecting to make money from it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not like you’re reaching out to sponsors. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. I wasn’t doing that or I didn’t have an ad network or anything like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And I think… What I want to point out is you were really, and you just said this, but really intentional with it, but weren’t trying in the sense of like, “Oh, I just want to make money from this. I need to make money from it.”

Jenné Claiborne: Because I didn’t have to.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that’s what’s so great is you have… I’m trying to think of a good on the fly way to brand this, but the best thing I’ve come up with in the last 60 seconds is a bridge business.

Jenné Claiborne: Hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: You built this bridge between where you are now and where you were before where it’s a business in the sense that you have complete control. You don’t have a boss. But it’s maybe not scalable in the way that YouTube or Instagram or these other business units are.

Bjork Ostrom: But it did allow you, it sounds like, flexibility, autonomy. You could in a season where you have to do the cookbook, pass off some clients to other people. And I love that idea of working first towards a bridge business to allow you to have the freedom of flexibility in your case to not have to really push to do sponsorships that might have not been a good fit or to monetize too early which it’s just really cool to see that. And I think the first time that it’s been such a clear example of somebody doing that which is really cool to see.

Bjork Ostrom: Was it hard for you to wind down a successful business or was there enough progress with Sweet Potato Soul where it was like, “Oh, this feels like the right thing to do?” Or is there any part of you that wanted to hang onto that?

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Yeah, it was very hard and it still. I still have that website up. It’s like-

Bjork Ostrom: I was going to ask, what the-

Jenné Claiborne: I still use the email. I still use the email.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s part of… I was like, “I need to ask about this,” because this is the email and I was like, “So this must be like a bigger…” But it sounds like not.

Jenné Claiborne: No. No.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Okay.

Jenné Claiborne: My business now is Sweet Potato Soul LLC. It’s not… I have a whole different business and it was hard and even thinking about it now, it is hard. I don’t want to… There’s a part of me where I’m like, “Oh, I can always go back to that.” I just cannot, for some reason. All that work, even though I haven’t done it in… It’s been six years. It’s been five and a half actually. I just cannot-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, not six. Five and a half.

Jenné Claiborne: … let it go. Five and half. And I still update it sometimes. I just can’t let it go.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you still get people reaching out?

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: About once a day.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, really?

Jenné Claiborne: And at least one email a day. And now because I was in New York and then I moved to Los Angeles and now I’m here in Atlanta. Now I get primarily emails from L.A. because I’ve only been here in Atlanta for six months so now people think I’m in L.A. So at least once a day, I get an email from someone in L.A. wanting to book me.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting. So last thing on that before we move on, but what would your advice be or what did you learn about business with that first stage of your business development in your career?

Jenné Claiborne: Hmm. I learned a lot about the need to outsource even though I wasn’t doing it. But looking back, especially…

Jenné Claiborne: Everything is clear in 2020 hindsight, but looking back, I see like how I really could have scaled more and still been able to have The Nourishing Vegan and Sweet Potato Soul if I were able to relinquish some of that control and hire other chefs and bring on maybe an assistant to help me even to just coordinate other people’s schedules. I could still technically have that business and I think that’s one of the reasons I haven’t let it go because I’m like, “Maybe I’ll do it.”

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe there’s something there. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: Maybe there’s something there still. But definitely, that was the biggest thing. If you want to grow, you need to… You say it all the time and I hear it all the time on your podcast, it’s not who but how, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s-

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Or not how but who? Is that not how but who?

Bjork Ostrom: Not how who.

Jenné Claiborne: Not how but who.

Bjork Ostrom: Idea being for those who aren’t familiar. And this actually came up in conversation. It’s a name of a book which I haven’t read but I feel like it’s one of those books where it’s just the title. That’s the takeaway. But I notice of myself sometimes I’m like, “Oh, how do I do this? How do I do this?” But as business owners starting to think about who knows how to do this and go to that person.

Bjork Ostrom: An example being in my previous life did IT and actually really troubleshooting stuff. There’s a little part of me that’s anytime-

Jenné Claiborne: That’s the challenge.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. I forget what it was the other day, but something came up where I had to troubleshoot it and it was just the best. It was 15 minutes of troubleshooting this tech issue and I loved it, but it’s like I can’t do that if we have a team of 16 people who have random stuff.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s like who… And we hired a fractional IT service and they remote in and they help. And so I think that’s a great takeaway.

Bjork Ostrom: Did you roll those learnings into Sweet Potato Soul as you started to scale that up? And I’m curious to know how the learnings of the first stage or first chapter impacted the next chapter.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my gosh. Yes. And I’m still learning.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. As we all are.

Jenné Claiborne: Every single day. It’s a learning experience constantly. But yes, I definitely did. Just organization as well was super important for going into Sweet Potato Soul because my old business… And Sweet Potato Soul, it’s not just the blog. I’ve got the Instagram, I’ve got… Well, just social media in general. I’ve got the YouTube channel. I have the blog, I have the newsletter. And so it’s all these little different parts. And so yes, I had to grow a team. Didn’t want to. I had a lot of fear around that.

Bjork Ostrom: Where do you think that fear came from?

Jenné Claiborne: Letting go of control. Just afraid that someone else isn’t going to do it as well as I would do it and/or they would take such a long time doing it the right way that I might as well just do it by myself,

Bjork Ostrom: And how did you overcome that?

Jenné Claiborne: Just letting them do it. Purely hiring people, hiring-

Bjork Ostrom: Exposure therapy.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Exposure therapy. Also hiring the wrong people and becoming even more afraid. “Oh my God, see? Confirmation bias. I knew it wasn’t going to work out.” But still I know on an intellectual level that in order to scale and grow my business, I need to bring in the people to help me. So I knew, “This person didn’t work out, but yes, I will find the one who does.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: That’s a struggle because like most of us, all of us are led by emotion primarily not my intellect. So it was hard, but yes, I just pushed myself. And I did it.

Bjork Ostrom: it’s one of those things that I think is a skill working with people, working with the team, but we don’t think of it as a skill and I think there’s certain categories that we definitely think of as skills. Playing guitar, skateboarding-

Jenné Claiborne: Cooking.

Bjork Ostrom: Cooking, painting and we’re like, “Oh my goodness. I’m terrible skateboarder, but if I could do this for five to 10 years, then I’ll maybe be a good skateboarder.” Right?

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: “I’m a bad dancer. Five to 10 years, maybe I can be doing a YouTube dance channel.”

Jenné Claiborne: Right. You’d be Michael Jackson.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think when we think of working with a team or hiring, that’s something we don’t necessarily put in the category of a skill but I think it is. We need to get better at it. We need to improve at it.

Bjork Ostrom: I remember this conversation I was having with Lindsay. We were driving down the highway and we were talking about next chapter type software. We see things going, this is maybe a year or two ago or two to three years ago, COVID warps everything. I remember saying to her, “All the stuff that I’ve been good at I have to let go of and I have to get good at this new thing which is figuring out how to work with people and it’s abstract and I don’t really understand it.”

Bjork Ostrom: But what I love about some of the things that you shared was this realization of like, “Hey, you know what? I need to just commit to doing this. I know it needs to happen.” And so you just do it and learn over time, “Hey, this did work, this didn’t work,” and continuing to commit to it. So what does that look like now for you? What are the things that you’ve learned and who are the team members whether contracted, freelance, full time that are most important for your day-to-day?

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. So I actually brought on… I hired my first team member in 2019. It didn’t work out but then I… So I actually didn’t have anybody else… Also because I’m shy and because I’m an introvert, I don’t want to say I’m shy. I don’t like to say that because-

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, introvert.

Jenné Claiborne: I’m over that now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: For sure. The introvert is strong. I just don’t like having a lot of people around me. I just rather just work from home, work by myself. I like that. So that’s another reason I didn’t want to bring anybody on because I didn’t want to have to talk to people.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a work preference whereas some people would be like-

Jenné Claiborne: It’s a work preference.

Bjork Ostrom: “Ah, more people around me, the better. I want to work with the team. I want to have more calls.”

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly. And on the type of person who, because of this, the way I am, if there are people around, I can sit in silence. However, I’m going to want to entertain you. I’m going to want to feed you. I want to make you laugh so that’s like-

Bjork Ostrom: You have some burden of entertaining, hosting, making people feel comfortable.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: And then of course when you hire people you have… For me, I have that. But for all of us, when you hire people, you have the burden of actually having to give them work and pay them and so now you are their employer and they count on you and that’s a whole another… It’s a whole different thing. And so I didn’t want any of that.

Jenné Claiborne: So I hired my next team member, I thought she was just going to be part-time, the very beginning of 2021. I waited a whole year until I hired her. And now she’s full-time. She’s been with me since I think January 4th, 2021 just over a year now, full time, the entire time. I don’t think we ever did part-time maybe for a day and she’s great.

Jenné Claiborne: And her role has morphed. At first, I hired her just as an assistant because at the time my husband, my ex and I, we were splitting up and I was expecting for him to just move out of the house and I just needed help. Being a single mom, managing all that stuff. Had her. I don’t think she ever did any of the assisting stuff because I’m like, “Well, you know what I really need you to do-

Bjork Ostrom: And she’s smart and capable.

Jenné Claiborne: … all this business stuff.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Jenné Claiborne: She’s also a videographer. She went to school for that. So then she became my videographer and my editor. She’s still full-time even though I don’t even live in the same state anymore now we’re in Georgia. She’s still full-time. She mostly does all my editing. She also does my newsletter. She does a lot of my social media. Not my Instagram I haven’t outsourced that yet. But all the other stuff, Facebook, Twitter. Helps me with project management.

Jenné Claiborne: And when I moved down here to Atlanta, I also hired a videographer here and he’s been amazing. He’s part-time and he has his own business so he does lots of other things as well. And I also hired a part-time personal assistant because now I am a legit single mom.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally, totally.

Jenné Claiborne: I really needed that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the… So I read this book, I think I put it up there I won’t grab it, but it’s called Your World-Class Assistant Michael Hyatt-

Jenné Claiborne: Ooh.

Bjork Ostrom: … who’s a-

Jenné Claiborne: Gotcha.

Bjork Ostrom: He speaks a lot about leadership and business and whatnot. Anyways, hired Mary who came on board as an executive assistant. I’m like, “How do I even do this?”

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that was really interesting Mary’s in Michigan but they talked about the importance of that actual… When you’re business owner, it’s your work and your life and those aren’t separate. It’s all mixed together.

Jenné Claiborne: Hmm, I know.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m interested to know… Well, and the other piece within this is I think sometimes we do think of them as separate and so we have our business over here, “I need to hire for my business.” But I think for some people, a good first step is actually to figure out how can you hire for somebody to help with all of your other life stuff which you’re doing two, three, four hours, who knows, a day of that life stuff. What was that like for you to hire a personal assistant? What’s most helpful about that relationship and how did you find that person?

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my God. It’s so helpful. She’s a godsend because… So first off, what it was like was a little difficult because I have this thing where I don’t want… I just want to feed you. I want to take care of you. I want to be your personal assistant.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. It’s uncomfortable for you to have somebody taking care of you.

Jenné Claiborne: Right. Like, “Can you take the recycling and the trash out for me?” That makes me uncomfortable.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: And I grew up… My mom has a cleaning service and my dad has a commercial janitorial company so I grew up very blue-collar. I started working, cleaning houses at eight years old so that was my background. So I think I have a thing about actually hiring somebody to do that. I’ve never hired a cleaning service. Now that I live in Georgia, I have a cleaning service because it’s my mom. She does the cleaning. I’ve never felt comfortable… Whatever.

Jenné Claiborne: Anyway, hiring a personal assistant was like that too because you do… In the job listing, I posted it on Indeed. It’s very long. And in the job listing, I’m just like, “You know what? I’m uncomfortable with all this, but I’m going to write it out because then I’ll find someone who is comfortable with all this.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like you say, “Here’s exactly what it will be,” as opposed to saying, “Personal assistant and oh, yeah, P.S., it’s taking out the trash and recycling. Sorry. Actually, you know what? I’ll just do it. I’ll just do it.”

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s like a line item on the job description. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: Write it all. Laundry, taking out the trash, clean the kitty litter box. Everything. I wrote everything.

Jenné Claiborne: What I did, I took a week to notice what my ex does a lot because I was so busy with my daughter and just my business and my ex is doing a lot of this stuff that my assistant does now and so I just was… And he and I worked together with this like, “What do you do?” Okay. Yeah. Clean the litter box because I’m not going to do that. Just together made this very long list. Posted it on Indeed. I got a lot of the…

Jenné Claiborne: I did the same job listing in LA and here in Atlanta literally just reposted. So I got a lot of interest both times and the first person I hired in L.A. worked out great. She’s still full-time. The first person I hired here in Atlanta did not work out. Long story. But didn’t work out.

Jenné Claiborne: So I found another who is my assistant now and she’s great. She will do all of that stuff. She’s very sweet. My daughter loves her because we’re just all here at home and she’s helpful with my business as well. That’s amazing. She can take photos for me which I also put in the listing. Literally, everything I needed her to do. I put it in the listing. She can take photos. She can read books to my daughter. She can…

Jenné Claiborne: Right now, because she’s a lot younger, great thing about working with people in their twenties, she’s way ahead on TikTok and reels and everything because I don’t even pay attention. She’s my TikTok girl now. I’ll let her do that. That’s her part-time. So she does everything. She does have to do around the house and then she’s on the computer scheduling, planning my TikToks and like, “Okay, Friday, we’re going to film this, Jenné, da da da.”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s awesome.

Jenné Claiborne: So it’s great. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I think what’s inspiring for me to see with your story as it relates that is this idea of coming up against a complex problem and then figuring out a solution for it. And I think essentially that’s what we’re doing as entrepreneurs is. It’s a never-ending set of complex problems that were coming up against and it’s both personal and its work in their overlapped and it’s figuring out how do we both get what we need in our personal lives and our business and working with other people to do that-

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: … and it’s cool to see that.

Bjork Ostrom: So you mentioned TikTok, you mentioned earlier YouTube, you have almost 700,000 followers on YouTube now which is incredible. Instagram, I’m curious to know when you look at the pie chart of your business what are the areas that you are like, “Hey, this is the important thing for me. This YouTube is 50% of the value of my business and TikTok is 5%,” or whatever it might be. Would you be able to rank order like the top three-

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: … parts of your business?

Jenné Claiborne: Well, TikTok is zero.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my God. I have such a tiny TikTok. It’s so sad.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Jenné Claiborne: It’s so sad, but I haven’t really…

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Jenné Claiborne: So let’s see. I’m going to value it actually monetarily, not just in my head, because in my head number one is the blog but in real life, the blog is not number one.

Jenné Claiborne: So I would say 50% Instagram, I would say 15 to 20% YouTube, I would say… Yeah, 15 to 20% YouTube. And then the rest, just the blog. I’m not putting the blog and the newsletter together because those are very tied together, so blog and newsletter. And then other social media, Facebook, let’s give them Facebook, Pinterest, 1%. We’ll put TikTok in in that category too. Instagram is one.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting when you look at just pure follower account, you’d think, “Wait, YouTube’s really big. That should be more.” What’s the difference between those two platforms? Is it sponsorships and brands and that just being more aligned on Instagram right now than it is on YouTube?

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. And it goes back and forth too. Also for me, not just… So for money, yes. Right now more money is in Instagram and in TikTok, specifically reels in TikTok.

Jenné Claiborne: However, two years ago it was far heavier leaning towards YouTube. YouTube was the biggest thing. Even I had maybe a third of what followers that I have now but it was still super, super, super important to having YouTube channel and people were paying a lot of money.

Jenné Claiborne: Now I talked to brands and I’m not actually not really working with brands at the moment, but in the last year or so, they’d be like, “We’re not really focused on YouTube now-”

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, interesting.

Jenné Claiborne: … when I give them my rates. They’d be like, “Can we cut this? And how much money can we save?” That sort of thing. But yeah, YouTube-

Bjork Ostrom: And they would be focusing on Instagram.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Reels. It’s got to be video though.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, sure.

Jenné Claiborne: I don’t know… Is anybody doing… Maybe they still are. I don’t really know. But as far as with me in the last year, the main focus for every single one of my partnerships, not everyone, but the majority has been video. And so that’s either reels… Right now, going forward, it’s going to be reels until Instagram changes their whole approach. But in the last year it was just video in general. Instagram was just any type of video, IG TV, video directly to the feed, or reels, anything would work.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Interesting. And YouTube waning. So you’re still probably able to earn ad revenue from YouTube, but it’s not-

Jenné Claiborne: That’s a passive thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. It’s just going in the background. Whereas Instagram you’re able to get aligned brand deals. It sounds like focus on video and then your blog, any traffic there monetize via ads and potentially content there.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting to hear you talk about the importance of video.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Not only the significance of that just in terms of the traction, but also I think one of the opportunities… One of the benefits there is you are a good video person. It’s probably both of those things, if you were somebody who would fumble over your words and not know what to do. It’s another example of that-

Jenné Claiborne: I do that too.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Like your career and acting impacting what you do now in some way. What’s cool for me to see is like, and maybe this brings a full circle in the conversation, it feels like you’ve maybe fully realized your dream of-

Jenné Claiborne: Oh, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: … becoming an actor. Do you feel like that’s true?

Jenné Claiborne: Oh, yeah. Well, the actor, kind of.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not acting, it’s not a different character. You are you but you are getting paid to-

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: The high level of it is you are getting paid to be on video and for people to watch that.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly. And I’m probably getting paid more than the other people who I graduated with who are actually acting.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Yeah. And part of that having to… The reason for that, you own your brand. Everything about it is owned by you which is so cool to see.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Oh, I should also put the cookbook in that category too.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Jenné Claiborne: Or in one of the pieces. My cookbook came in 2018 so it’s been a long cut but it’s always been very well. And so a good part of my fancy car is paid for by my book royalties that I get every six months. So that’s also really good to have a cookbook that you actually will buy.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m curious, when you say fancy car, what is your fancy car?

Jenné Claiborne: My car, I have a Model Y, a Tesla.

Bjork Ostrom: You do? Ahhh.

Jenné Claiborne: I do.

Bjork Ostrom: I was going to say, “Don’t tell me it’s a Tesla,” because I’m going to be so jealous. Do you love it?

Jenné Claiborne: I do. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, man.

Jenné Claiborne: It’s awesome.

Bjork Ostrom: We-

Jenné Claiborne: You should get one.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. You just can’t. No. Here’s what I have. I have a Subaru Outback and I drive two miles every day. I drive here to the office and I drive home.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So there’s that.

Jenné Claiborne: Maybe don’t get a Tesla.

Bjork Ostrom: But also I don’t drive enough for the battery to be fully charged. So literally, every day-

Jenné Claiborne: Wow.

Bjork Ostrom: … I have this little… It’s worst and we need to get it fixed. There’s probably need to fix for it. I jump it every day.

Jenné Claiborne: What?

Bjork Ostrom: I go out to the car. It’s so-

Jenné Claiborne: Even in the snow?

Bjork Ostrom: Even in the… It’s –10 today. I go out-

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my gosh.

Bjork Ostrom: I hook up a battery. I start it. So anyways-

Jenné Claiborne: That’s so funny.

Bjork Ostrom: … I do have an appointment to see what’s wrong with it.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my gosh.

Bjork Ostrom: But there’s been multiple times that I’ve thought like, “Oh, man, I wouldn’t have to do this if it was a Tesla.”

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. This car is so easy. And here’s the thing. I’m not a person to get a fancy car. It’s just that because I just separated with my ex I needed a car because he took the car. I would’ve been happy to take that car. That was a little Ioniq, also it’s a hybrid so very good on gas, I would’ve been fine. It’s totally fine. But I didn’t have any car at all.

Bjork Ostrom: And this was your opportunity to be like, “Ah. You can-”

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. And my dad talked me into it.

Bjork Ostrom: You can maybe draw a little bit of a parallel to like, “Here’s this money I’m getting here-

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: … I can section this off-

Jenné Claiborne: Oh, I did.

Bjork Ostrom: … and it can go here.”

Jenné Claiborne: Because for me… We haven’t talked much about money-money, but for me, I’ve always been very good with money and I’m very conservative especially with money. And for me, if I’m going to have literally a liability, that car is sitting on the street right now, somebody can just ram into it. It is such a liability. So if I have any liability that has to be paid for by some passive form of income. It has to.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. It has to be connected to-

Jenné Claiborne: That’s my rule.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: That’s why it’s connected to the book royalties because… And I financed the car. I didn’t pay for it in cash. I financed it so I can invest the money elsewhere and my royalties, that is what pays for that car. Otherwise, I would not have bought that car. I don’t care how much money I have. It’s just a trick in my brain. That’s just like… How do you get rich without also saving and investing? It’s not by buying fancy cars and just paying for it from hard work. So anyway, that’s why I have a nice car.

Bjork Ostrom: If you have five more minutes, we’ve already gone over.

Jenné Claiborne: Of course.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have… Okay. Because personal finance is an area that I’m super interested in and I think there’s a subsection of personal financial which is business owner finance. I’m curious to know your stance on… So you’re making money. You have a successful business. What do you do with it?

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my gosh.

Bjork Ostrom: I have one friend who’s put it in a savings account.

Jenné Claiborne: No.

Bjork Ostrom: And other people who put in crypto. For me, I’m this middle of the road where you put it in index funds that are low cost.

Jenné Claiborne: Yep, that’s me. Yeah, we’re vanguard.

Bjork Ostrom: So talk to me more about that. Yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: Oh my God. I could be a whole another show truly, whole episode because when I separated… So prior to this, I’ve always been interested in money and I’ve been good with money but I haven’t been very financially educated. I’m still, of course, learning. We’re always learning.

Jenné Claiborne: But I was always a very good saver. I was always very good at making money. I was always good at… I wouldn’t buy the fancy car. I always knew if I’m going to buy the fancy car I’m going to make sure I have a house already and that car’s going to be paid for by something else that I don’t have to slog for.

Jenné Claiborne: However, really at the beginning of 2021, I really dove into personal finance because here I was becoming a single mom and I was the breadwinner anyways but still there is just something-

Bjork Ostrom: It just feels different where you’re-

Jenné Claiborne: It just feels totally different.

Bjork Ostrom: … it’s just me and I need to have…

Jenné Claiborne: It’s literally just me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jenné Claiborne: Right?

Jenné Claiborne: And so then I started looking at my money and looking at my whole business structure and a lot of stuff had to change because I was putting a lot of money in my savings account. I was not maxing out my retirement accounts even though I was eligible to do max and I was just really leaving money on the table, which I didn’t… I was saving a lot of money because I was going to buy a house in L.A. So I was saving. The homes are so much more expensive there. But when I decided to move here to Atlanta and I had my house. My house here…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Suddenly, the budget looks really different.

Jenné Claiborne: … it’s 50% less. So yeah. I had to put my money elsewhere and had to start thinking differently. And now I’m thinking very differently. And right now I’m looking for a new property purchase, a rental property. I’m also at the same time navigating, trying to figure out putting money in a real estate syndication. I do max out all my accounts now, HSA, I have a SEP IRA, all of that stuff and…

Jenné Claiborne: So my accountant, I got a really good accountant finally.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s one of those team members that I feel like is one of the most important early team members for business owner is CPA accountant. I would say like for CPAs and probably emailing them once a week. There’s just so many random because you realize-

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: … when you get to a certain point, your greatest expense is taxes. And so-

Jenné Claiborne: It really is.

Bjork Ostrom: … you want to learn what the rules are and play by them. And I think a lot of times people don’t know what the rules are. Retirement account’s being a great example.

Jenné Claiborne: Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Man, that’s going to make a huge difference long term and short term depending on how you do that.

Jenné Claiborne: Exactly. Oh my God. And I didn’t even realize. My mom opened a retirement account for me when I was young, when I was 18 and I just remember she did, “Put $50 in a month. A $50 a month. That’s all you have to do.” And I’m like, “Oh, I’m broke, I’m broke. Anyway, I’m not going to retire for another 50 years.”

Bjork Ostrom: So far out.

Jenné Claiborne: But now that I’m in my mid-thirties, I’m like, “Oh my God, it’s like tomorrow. How much money can I get in there?”

Bjork Ostrom: It’s on the calendar.

Jenné Claiborne: It’s going to grow. Yeah, it’s on the calendar.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s awesome. It would be a really fun episode to do and I feel like one that would be worth doing is another episode just on personal finance as it relates to-

Jenné Claiborne: Money.

Bjork Ostrom: … business owners.

Jenné Claiborne: And it’s hard to talk to other bloggers about this. Personally, that’s how I feel because I’m afraid to ask, but also for me, my little competitiveness I’m afraid to know.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Because then you know-

Jenné Claiborne: I’m afraid to feel behind.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Yeah. It’s that comparison trap type thing where it’s like, “Shoot.”

Jenné Claiborne: “How much money do you have in your retirement?”

Bjork Ostrom: You want to protect yourself against the comparison trap which totally, totally makes sense.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah, let me just protect myself. Just keep learning, keep doing better. But I don’t want to know all the details. I’m afraid.

Bjork Ostrom: Jenné, we could talk forever.

Jenné Claiborne: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: I just so appreciate your experience, your willingness to share that. And we’ll have to book another conversation here in the not too distant future.

Jenné Claiborne: That’d be so fun.

Bjork Ostrom: I feel like there’s a lot of different things we could dive deep on. So we talked a few different places that people can check you out and follow along, thenourishisngvegan.com is one although they can’t book you there.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah. Don’t go there.

Bjork Ostrom: Where else can people follow along with what you’re up to and what you’re doing and connect with you?

Jenné Claiborne: Sweet Potato Soul everywhere, sweetpotatosoul.com, Instagram, YouTube, the book. That’s all you need.

Bjork Ostrom: And the name comes from where is the last question. Where did that come from?

Jenné Claiborne: Sweet potatoes are my favorite food and have always been my favorite food. I grew up eating soul food and I knew my blog wasn’t going to be just all soul food but my grandmother always said that soul food is any type of food that you put love and your soul-

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, cool.

Jenné Claiborne: … into. So Sweet Potato-

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Jenné Claiborne: … Soul.

Bjork Ostrom: Soul. Oh, I love that.

Jenné Claiborne: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What a great name.

Jenné Claiborne: Thanks. Thank you.

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

Jenné Claiborne: This was great. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Thank you one more time to Jenné for coming on and sharing her story.

Bjork Ostrom: As a reminder, make sure to go through that survey foodbloggerpro.com/survey. We want to learn more about you and we want to make this podcast and this community better and the way that we do that is continually having these conversations with our audience. So make sure to go to foodbloggerpro.com/survey and fill that out and you get a chance to win a $100 Amazon gift card which you can spend on a little battery-powered dog or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: And that wraps up March 11th. That’s it for this episode. Make it a great week. Bye-bye.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by our sister site Clariti. You’ve heard me talk about it a few times now on the podcast and it’s a tool that I’m really excited about. We’ve been spending a lot of time and energy thinking about how we can build Clariti as the go-to source, the tool for bloggers who want to learn how to organize, optimize, update their blog content, in service of growth, that’s what we’re after. And we’re looking to build a tool to help bloggers do that and it came out of some of the things that we were doing for Pinch of Yum. So, Clariti gives you insights into the way your content can be stronger and more valuable for your readers, either through automatic suggestions. It’s not really suggestions it’s just like information like, hey, the alt text is broken here, or alt text is missing, you need to go in and fix that or the links are broken, you need to fix those.

Bjork Ostrom: So, not only does it help you optimize your library of blog content, maybe you have multiple hundreds of posts, or for some of us even thousands. But once you do that, it’ll help increase your traffic SEO ranking, revenue. But it also helps validates your updates with a direct integration with Google Analytics. So what we’re doing is we’re saying, hey, we want to tie all of this together. So we want bloggers to have the ability to not only understand their content, to see the hundreds or thousands of pieces of content that they have. To also see some areas they could improve that. Maybe there’s some things that are broken or missing that you could add. We want to allow people to also create campaigns. So if you do have things that you want to improve, great, you can create a campaign around that and say, hey, these 100 pieces of content, we want to optimize these 100 pieces of content, you’d use in Clariti what’s called the campaign.

Bjork Ostrom: But we’ve also released a new feature that integrates with Google Analytics. So now you can make a note you say hey, I made this update. And you can start to see what are the pieces of content and how have they have performed over a certain period of time. So you can look back and say, over the past 30 days, is there any content on my site that has gotten zero page views? Right? None of us want that. But maybe that’s a consideration around, should I have this piece of content on my site or should I treat this a little bit differently if it’s just there and kind of taking up space? Maybe I want to either republish it or just remove it. Some people do that with their content they say, how do I filter out this content? Or maybe you want to look back and say, hey, over the past seven days, what’s the piece of content that’s been doing the best? Or 30 days, what’s the best piece of content has been doing the best?

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe I want to focus on some monetization efforts on that, could I add a video to that piece of content that is going to earn higher ad revenue? So you have a ad player like through AdThrive or Mediavine, you create a video player and add that. It’s a great way to optimize revenue. Just start to think strategically around some of those decisions. And we’re building Clariti as a tool to help people do that ourselves included. So Clariti is C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com. And all of this happens automatically. So you set up your blog with the plugin that we have, you connect your Google Analytics, and all of your post information appears within Clariti it integrates with Google Analytics. And our goal is to make it as simple as possible to understand that. And what we’re doing is we’re offering early access, we’re calling it 25 Forever Plan for Clariti.

Bjork Ostrom: For anybody who wants to sign up early, be an early user, you can go to clarityi.com/food F-O-O-D to sign up and get on that early access list. We’re doing the 25 Forever Plan for anybody who signs up early as a thank you to signing up early. And also as a way to say hey, no matter what down the line when we increase the prices, your account will not go up, it’s 25 forever you’ll be locked in. Even if Clariti goes to a more expensive price point, $50, $100 whatever it might be. As an early user we’ll honor that 25 Forever Plan that you signed up for. So again it’s clariti.com/food, we’re excited about this, it’s going to be something that we’re focusing on not only for ourselves to use for Pinch of Yum and the other sites that we have but also for our users. It’s one of the things that we love doing we did that with WP Tasty as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Is building a tool spending lots of time, money, energy resources, building the thing that we use ourselves in this case for Pinch of Yum and for the other sites. But then offering it up for other people to use in a way where you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars building this thing. You only have to spend $25 a month if you sign up for the early access program. So foodbloggerpro.com or clariti.com/food is the best way to get there. Thank you to the Clariti team for sponsoring the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Hello, hello. This is Bjork and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Before we get into today’s interview with Benjamin, D. Benjamin from Benjamin the Baker, we are going to do a quick plug here for the Facebook group. So for those of you who haven’t yet heard about this, we have started a Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook group.

Bjork Ostrom: And you can get there by going to foodbloggerpro.com/facebook, that will redirect you to the page where you can apply to be a part of the group. When I pulled it up today, I can see that we have 12 people who are waiting to be approved to be a part of the group which is just so cool to see. Like this group is growing. And what’s fun for me is I’m looking at the names of the people here today I won’t say the full names, I respect the privacy of people. But it’s just fun to see like all these are podcast listeners. It’s Judy and Sachiko and Carrie and Marie and Jill and all of these people who are podcast listeners, that we finally get to see your faces and interact and be a little more communal in terms of what this looks like as opposed to just people listening. And maybe jotting down notes taking action. And then every once in a blue moon, we connect and you’re like, hey, listen to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: But now, we can actually have conversations here within a group. And one of the things that we do is we’ll publish a prompt like anytime that we have a guest coming on, we’ll say what do you want to hear from this person? So you get to help build the queue of questions. And we also will do occasional follow up. So an example is with Andrew’s episode that we published. Andrew from NerdPress, we did a follow-up and we’re like, hey, what additional questions you have for Andrew about anything that came up? So, it kind of adds a layer of additional conversation and additional information around each podcast. So, if you want to check that out again, go to foodbloggerpro.com/facebook, that will redirect you to the place where you can apply to be a part of the group which is really fun. When we’re recording this we have 130 folks a little bit more than that who have applied to be a part of that and I’m sure that number will go up each and every week.

Bjork Ostrom: As is the case watch this for a transition, with Benjamin and his TikTok account, Benjamin the Baker, also his Instagram account. What’s amazing here is it’s currently crossed the 500,000 follower mark. So his TikTok account specifically, and has had a lot of success with that and has started to work with some sponsors. And we’re going to talk to him about what that’s like to not only bounce his job as a teacher, but also what it’s like to think intentionally about kind of focusing on an area of interest, a niche, creating content that resonates his thoughts around what works well on TikTok and just general ideas and thoughts that he has around what it looks like to grow a successful following on social and specifically on TikTok. So, it’s a great conversation, I think you’ll enjoy a lot of the takeaways and things that he shares. Let’s go ahead and jump into it. Benjamin, welcome to the podcast.

Benjamin Delwiche: Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s going to be fun. We’re talking about TikTok. In researching for this episode, I pulled it up and immediately I was like I felt my age because I’m like, I don’t spend a lot of time on TikTok. And I was like wait, what’s going on here? What’s a duet? Like, wait you can do like a baking and a dancer duet? Like what is this world?

Benjamin Delwiche: There’s a lot going on.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s a lot going on. And you’ve had a lot of success there so we’re going to talk about that. And not only have you had a lot of success, but in a really fun niche. And you’ve also had a lot of success there while working a full-time job. So I want to talk about all of those things. But take me back to the first video that you posted on TikTok, did you know that you’re going to focus on this that you’re going to create consistent content? What brought you back to that point? Or was it even TikTok that you started with?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yes, it was TikTok that I started with and it was about coming up on the year anniversary of it. I think like a lot of people. It was, my wife had COVID we were stuck at home quarantining, baking is something that I’ve always enjoyed working in different bakeries, reading about it, experimenting. So I figured hey, why not turn this into a video?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that was a year ago. And in a year, so what is the one-year mark of your first, do you remember what the day was?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, I think it was the 30th of December.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. So which is a great marker, right? End of the year?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: So we’re coming up on this as we’re recording this will be published after that, but and today you’re at like 478,000 followers on TikTok and it’ll be even more once we publish this. So adding over 1000 followers a day, my guess is it didn’t start at that point or did it? Like within your first few videos, did you get traction right away and know like, oh my gosh, this is something that I need to invest some time and energy in? At what point did you know that you had something there?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, it was really crazy. So the first couple of videos that I posted were videos that I had on my phone from different things that I had filmed while baking. And first video or the first couple of videos that I made intentionally for posting on TikTok, one of them ended up taking off just a few days in and that was how to fill a piping bag and use a piping bag and kind of fix around that. And it was just incredible to watch the numbers of views go up and up. And it kind of caught me by surprise because I didn’t expect that kind of traction. And then that was the point I was like, oh, maybe I can share some other things that I have learned. And it was a while before I really started to focus on this experimentation side of baking, math and science side of baking. So it took a while to figure out that that’s really what I wanted to focus on.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I’m curious to know. So your background as a math teacher, that’s what you do middle school, high school math. Naturally, you have this combination and baking expertise and math and numbers expertise. And so in like some of your videos an example would be like cookies, like how are they going to produce a different result at different temperatures. It’s like it’s not just the ingredients it’s also the temperatures as an example. I can see how there’s this kind of cool mix between your experience with baking and then also your experience as a math teacher in numbers. So it sounds like starting out is like hey, I just like baking, this is something I’ve done I really like it. But over time it evolved into the niche of kind of science and experimentation around baking. Is that right?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, absolutely. Because for me that’s the side of baking that I really enjoy. The thinking about why certain ingredients do what they do or the interaction of certain ingredients or the ratios of the amount of ingredients. So that it playing around with different things is the side that I really like. I like decorating every now and then and doing those types of things. But for me it’s really the looking at why they do what they do.

Bjork Ostrom: Right. So we always talk about on the podcast how important a niche is. And the example or analogy I use is this idea of different vehicles and a niche in the early stages is kind of like a motorcycle where you get on it and you’re able to get a lot of traction really quick. And then maybe over time you can level up you can go to like a sports car and then you can go to a car and a semi and eventually you’ll have this double semi which maybe isn’t as agile in the early stages. But maybe the reach of it is a little bit bigger and similar to this like land and expand idea of picking a niche. But you see that to be really true with you where you were able to get a lot of traction really quickly early on. I’m curious to know, do you feel like the options within what you’re doing are like, have you just started to scratch the surface of it?

Bjork Ostrom: Or do you get to the point where you’re like, hey, you know what? Maybe I need to expand into not just baking but cooking. where do you feel like you’re at in regards to the niche and your focus and the amount of content that you can produce within that?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, I still feel like I’m beginning to scratch the surface. So I still really want to focus on baking. That’s the thing that I enjoy the most, the thing that I have the most experience with. I enjoy cooking but it’s not something that I know as much about. I don’t want to share things that I don’t really know as much about. But I feel like I’m flipping through recipe books frequently. And I see a line in a recipe that says do this or don’t do this. And that just makes me wonder, well, why not?

Bjork Ostrom: Why? Yeah.

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah. Can I run some sort of experiment to see well, what happens if I don’t do it or really zone in on that specific ingredient or that specific procedure?

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. So let’s talk about TikTok. So this crazy platform where you’re able to get a lot of traction really early on. You’ll see videos that you have 20,000, 50,000 views and like 1.2 million views. Like you have these videos that kind of take off on a platform like TikTok. Being a year into producing content there, do you feel like you have any idea when you’re producing something where you’re like, this one has a high probability of being a really viral video or catching on, or does it still feel like this could or couldn’t and it’s hard to really pinpoint one way or the other.

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, sometimes it’s still uncertain. There are certainly times where I think something’s going to do really well. And it does okay, or sometimes when I think it’s going to do okay and it does better than I expected which is always exciting.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Benjamin Delwiche: But I think the thing for me that I try to focus on is, and similar to teaching you go to my teaching background is, can I make an explanation clear and then have a clear visual that goes along with it?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s such good teaching. It’s like, you have two really specific skills, the ability to teach and the understanding of baking. And it’s cool to see those two things playing well together on a platform.

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah. And that’s really the thing it’s can the two really go well together? Because an explanation is one thing. And that’s something that’s very traditional, you read books, and you see these explanations about things to do or not to do.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Benjamin Delwiche: Adding a visual element to that to really drive the point home is something that I like to think about and tried to represent, and I think something that has been part of the success.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s cool. I made a note here when I was thinking through the interview and I talked about what is good content? And I talked about this reflection on good content being informative or entertaining, or ideally both. Like if you can get something that in this niche at least, that is both interesting to look at and has a certain level of entertainment to it but it’s also informative. And it sounds like that’s what you’re speaking to a little bit which is, how do I make this interesting, engaging, fun to look at, but also, where it comes out with almost like Lindsey and I talk about it as like bubblegum type content. Where it’s like this kind of juicy little takeaway. It’s like a tidbit or an interesting thing. And it seems like you really nail that where it’s clear, it’s concise, but it’s also helpful where people are like, oh, that’s interesting, maybe something that I didn’t think about before.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m going to try and express this and you can let me know if this is right. It feels like different than other platforms, there is an element of TikTok which is like, oh, interesting. Like that’s a cool little tip. And I think like in the cleaning world, where they talk about like hey, did you know that you’re like washing machine for your clothes actually has this little compartment that you need to clean once a year? But it’s like nobody knows that and this video goes viral. But I feel like there’s similar elements to any industry where it’s kind of like, hey, here’s this kind of cool thing that you didn’t know about and something that would be helpful next time you bake. Are you tracking with that? Does that feel like-

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, absolutely. So certainly that element of okay, it’s relatable, right? Most people are going to make chocolate chip cookies every now and then. So how can there be some informational aspect brought to something that a lot of people have an experience of doing?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Idea being hey, if you like cookies that are chewy, here are some things that you can do versus if you like a crispy cookie here’s some things that you can do. Which I think is really cool. So talk to me about your process. What does it look like in terms of equipment that you use? And when are you doing this? Right, like teaching? I have many friends who are teachers. Can’t do it during the day. Like you can’t do it during lunch. Your 17-minute lunch break. So it’s like nights and weekends I’m guessing, what does that look like for you?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, nights and weekends. I think the process goes kind of like I look around my kitchen see what kind of ingredients I have, different things I’ve been thinking about, flip through a lot of the cookbooks that I have and try to think of something that might be an interesting visual, interesting explanation. Walking through the aisles of the grocery store and seeing, oh, that’s an ingredient that I haven’t seen here before. And maybe I can explain something about it or do a test with it or something where you tried in the new recipe. And then in terms of the filming and the editing and all of that, yeah, nights and weekends.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And your setup is what? Your phone? And for those who haven’t seen them, we’ll link to your profile in the show notes so people can check those out. But it’s generally like we were talking about it as hands and pans videos. So it’s like you talking through a thing, it’s not like you’re on camera much. So it’s kind of top-down. Is that your phone? Do you have a stamp that you put it on? What does that look like in terms of your setup?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, in terms of my setup it’s pretty simple. It’s my phone and I have a cabinet right above my counter underneath, I put my phone in the catalogue. Film below and try to get short little clips and then edit them together and add a voiceover at the end.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what do you use for editing? Is that within the app or?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, at this point I just do everything within the app. So I’m thinking about and expanding into using an editing software or using a different camera. But at this point, everything that I’ve done is just on my phone and edited through the app.

Bjork Ostrom: I love that and here’s why. Because the best equipment is the equipment you have. And I think sometimes we can get lost in the thought of like, what camera do I need? What editing process do I need? But what it’s really about is the content that you’re producing. And is that content informative, is it entertaining? And if it is like great, equipment, like voiceover editing, that’s all a multiplier. But the thing you need to start with is like, does the content really hit? And in your case that’s a great example of that where you have your phone, you have a cupboard, you set your phone in the cupboard and you press record, and you do it all from your phone. And I think what’s amazing is and I’ve thought about this wouldn’t be in the near future. But I have this idea of wanting to as an experiment do like starting a business from your phone and like closing out all my computers for like a year.

Bjork Ostrom: And just saying like, can you build a business from your phone? Because I think in a lot of ways you can. Through social media, you can record podcasts, you can publish the podcast. And what you’re doing is an example of that, you can build an incredible following as long as the content that you’re producing is solid. So in terms of a content production standpoint, are you thinking ahead and saying like, hey, you know what? I want to do a video every week and release at this schedule, or is it kind of at this age where it’s like as you come across something that would be good, informative, helpful, hey, let’s record a video and publish it on that? Are you trying to do it on a rhythm of like every Monday, I’m going to publish no matter what.

Benjamin Delwiche: I’m trying to do a rhythm but it’s not really happening. At this point it’s more I have an idea. I have some time to film it. That’s when it happens. And then I have some time to edit it together. So I edit it together. So, I’m trying to work more towards having the schedule and having a sense of predictability.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Benjamin Delwiche: But this one has been, like I saw this ingredient that I had in my cupboard that I haven’t seen in a while like I want to do something with that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. And then how about the comparison or other platforms? So have you noticed like you publish a TikTok, but then you can also take all the platforms now for the most part have a similar kind of TikTok ask type option, right? You could do stories on Instagram, YouTube shorts. Have you noticed the ability to port over that content to other platforms and find similar success with something that does well on TikTok? Like, this had a million views on TikTok and then I put it on Instagram and it’s also successful there. Or are the platforms from a content perspective different enough where it’s hard to find consistency with one piece of content being successful across the platforms?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, sure. So I haven’t messed around much with YouTube but in terms of Instagram and TikTok, I have recently for about last half-year been posting the same videos on TikTok and Instagram just because people are on different platforms. And there’s differences between them in terms of the following and videos appearing. And it’s not always the equation of if it does well on TikTok it’s going to do well on Instagram, or it does well on Instagram it’s going to do well on TikTok. So, that has been interesting. See, I don’t know that I figured it out yet. But I just continue to try to do the best I can in terms of explaining it and having something informational. I know early on so before I started doing TikTok, I tried to post pictures of the things that I was making. And my photography skills they are okay, but they’re not great.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Benjamin Delwiche: So once I started doing the more of the informational or the explaining the teaching element of it, that started working much better for me and that it felt more genuine for me as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. And there’s something about finding the thing that works and then doubling down on that.

Benjamin Delwiche: Great.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s say you get traction here, people like this. What are other iterations and versions of this that I can continue to do? I thought about that this weekend when I saw Mark Rober video who does those awesome YouTube videos of like squirrel neighs or he just did like Glitter Bomb version 4.0. He essentially does a leveled-up one every year because it works and it gets millions of views and we talk about that with content where people are like, how do I get more traffic? How do I get more followers? And I think one of the ways to do that is to look at what works for you and then to iterate off of that. So you’re not doing the same thing. You’re doing something that’s related to it, or a little different version of that. Does that feel like early stages what it was for you is, hey, you know you want to kind of post in this general category of baking. And then finding the thing that worked and doubling down on that.

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, absolutely. So exactly, finding the ones that proved to pick up traction to be relatable. So looking at different cookies or talking about ratios in a dark chocolate ganache and then all of a sudden okay, well, now people have questions about, what if I want to make a ganache with white chocolate? So, it’s a very similar idea, the ratios end up being different because of the makeup of the different chocolates. But it’s that same idea of okay, how can I take something that maybe some people are weary to try and make it more relatable through using ratios or talking about just the makeup of it.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Talk to me about TikTok specifically, so not being somebody who understands it. My guess is there are some people who are listening to the podcast who are like yeah, know TikTok, love TikTok, post to TikTok, and there’s always going to be people who have had success on Instagram, Facebook, that are more like old guard creators. And they’re like, I just haven’t gotten into TikTok yet. Would you have any advice for people who maybe want to step into it around how do you be successful? What are the things that you can be doing? We know, it’s like good content, right? That’s any platform, but how about the tricks of the trade as it relates to the platform itself?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, I would say for me one of the biggest things is because TikTok happens very quickly. You’re watching a video, the videos have gotten longer over the past year but still, in my experience still stick to around the 20 to 32nd range. And they happen fast and you can just swipe on to the next one, is trying to really get to the point quickly. So don’t drag it on. If you’re trying to make a point, it might be able to be made in 15 to 20 seconds and that’s all you need. And then also minimize all of any extra distractions, because it happens so fast to have so many things going on at once where you’re trying to talk, you have the sounds of whatever you’re baking, maybe you have a song that has lyrics in it, it’s too much stimulation.

Benjamin Delwiche: So if you’re really focused on okay, if I’m doing a voiceover, I’m never going to include a song that has any lyrics to it. Something that’s a little bit softer, something that’s just instrumental, right? Maybe even sometimes don’t have music at all if I want the sounds of the baking to be in it. So, really trying to minimize all of those extra things so that the point that you’re trying to make is really the focus.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. So I was exploring your profile kind of looking at it. And then I was like wait a minute, there’s this like a duet and it was the ones that I watched it was three separate girls and they did like a let me whip, let me nae nae, whatever that song is. It was to something that you were baking. That was a moment where I was like, who am I and what is this world? But what’s going on there and is that you doing that? Or is that somebody picking up your content being like, we’re going to make a little dance-off of Benjamin baking this thing?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the cool things about TikTok is the creativity of everybody that’s on the platform. So that was never my intention and now the video was about making ganache. So I talk about if you want to have a whipped ganache, right? This is the ratio that you want to use. And then someone taking that and saying okay, well, I’m going to dance to this, right? I’m going to whip to this. It’s a cool thing that happens. Never my intention but they are fun to see.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and it was like, do you remember what it was? It was something like 1, 2, 3. Is that right? So it was one dance move and then it was two and then it was three.

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, because I showed three different ratios for making ganache if you want to have it for whipped ganache, or if you want to use it just for spreading, or if you want to have a piped ganache.

Bjork Ostrom: So awesome. So one of the things that I feel like is different from Instagram versus TikTok and I think that would be the platform that people can most closely correlate to would be, to your point maybe how condensed things are. Like on Instagram I think we think about, hey, you can be successful with a one-minute video that kind of like walks through the recipe. Start to finish and there’s maybe music in the background kind of like three years ago, four or five years ago kind of Buzzfeed tasty world, hands and pans type video. Do you see that type of content being successful on TikTok? Or does it have to be shorter, more informative, more entertaining, and less story arc even just in one minute of start to finish here’s a recipe? Or do you see that having success on TikTok?

Benjamin Delwiche: There’s certainly creators that have a lot of success doing that. So I think it’s about finding, as we talked about finding what you’re going to do and what you’re good at, and then running with that. I follow several creators both cooking and baking that do an arc of a recipe from start to finish and it’s amazing. I love it, I watch it, I’d sometimes try the recipes out myself. But for me, I like more of the short here’s a one piece of information that you can get out pretty quickly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. One of the shifts that we’ve seen happen over the last, so we’ve been in this world in some way for probably 10 years, actually 10 years. And early on, I would say for the first five years or even more six, seven. So let’s say from like 2010 to 2015, ’16, ’17, kind of that range. A lot of people would be content creators where they’d be blog first with social supported. So you start a blog and then how do you get social to support what you’re doing? I see a shift now happening where people are social first, they see that they have some traction and then it’s like, hey, we’ll get a blog here to support that. It’s important to have and might as well get that up and running. Can you talk to me about how you think of the platforms that you have? And my guess is your TikTok first.

Bjork Ostrom: But then what does that stacked order look like in terms of the other things that are important? And I know you’re still early in this and figuring it out. But the other platforms that you consider to be important is it like, TikTok blog, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, or what does that look like for you?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, for me right now it’s TikTok and Instagram. And then I’ve been working on trying to build out a website and a blog, it’s been a slow go of it. But for me it’s about, TikTok first for that visual element. And not just through pictures because I think for me at least when I’m explaining something I can have some visual element of breaking something open or mixing something or sliding a tray onto a screen that has three different things on it. That visual element of movement seems to be more engaging than just a picture on a blog site, at least for right now. Like you mentioned, I’m still early on and still playing around with things. So that’s why that’s first for me. But I’m trying to move also into the element of well, a TikTok or an Instagram real is a short 15, 20, 32nd thing. But there are people that want a little bit more of an explanation.

Benjamin Delwiche: And that really would call for a written up, maybe more traditional blog posts where it’s yeah, okay, here’s what’s going on, here’s why, right? And then also here’s a recipe that you can take away with more specific steps. So I try to post many of the recipes that I use in the comment section or in the caption, but typically it’s mostly the ingredients and then a brief a whole couple of phrases for the instructions of it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, recipe description and that makes sense. And there’s something about this equation, like a creator equation which is how much time do you have? What are your areas of expertise? Where’s the best place? What type of content do you like to create the most? I’m building this equation on the fly. So after it’s created, this is a creator math equation. So these are all the different variables to get our final greater success outcome. But it’s the what platform is the best for you as a creator? Time, your background and expertise. And I think there’s also some element of a hot platform. Like a platform that you’re going to be able to find success on, TikTok feels like a version of that. Where you’re going to be able to grow quickly in a way that maybe you couldn’t in the same way on Pinterest just because of the age of the platform and just how things look a little bit different.

Bjork Ostrom: So, not that Pinterest isn’t a smart platform to be on. But it’s one of the things that is fun for me to hear you talk about is kind of some of these filtering mechanisms of like, hey, blog would be awesome, it’d be important. But it doesn’t work great for the content, it takes more time for what you’re doing. And the way that you want to explain things is different. So it’s like, that’s naturally kind of filters down to TikTok is a good platform. I’m curious being this far into it and applying that equation of creator success, have you gotten to the point where people are starting to reach out and say, “Hey, we are a chocolate chip company and we would like to work with you when you do your next video on different baking temperatures.” Or have you had any kind of sponsor content stuff being a year in now? And what has happened?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, in the past couple months especially I’ve had different brands reach out which is exciting thing for me to have communication from these brands that I’ve been using and baking with for so long. Because those are the ones that I really like to work with something that I’ve already been using. And then they reach out and say, “Hey, would you be interested in featuring us in your next post?” Whether it’s a recipe or an explanation, whatever it is.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And that’s been within the last couple months, have you had any sponsored content deals yet or getting to that point? And I think one of the things for people who are early stages and it’s really fun to hear you do all this within a year. It’s both exciting and also a little intimidating to get to the point where somebody is like, “Hey, we want to partner with you and pay you money to produce content.” And it’s suddenly like, well, this is legit and you are now an influencer. Not that people aren’t influencers unless they do sponsored content. But it’s a pretty clear marker in the journey of a content creator who at least somebody who’s interested in creating some level of business around it. But how did you navigate that? Is it kind of like, you go into Google mode and research? What did that look like as those first deals started to look like they might be potential realities?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, definitely. I mean, doing research into what it’s all about because I’m still relatively new and I’m still learning things. So researching as much as I can, talking to people that are more established especially in the baking and cooking creation. Seeing what their experience has been, learning as much as I can from them. I’ve been very fortunate to have some deals over the past few months for brands and post stuff using their products.

Bjork Ostrom: What were some of the brands that you worked with?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah. So I’ve worked with Made In, they make amazing cookware and bakeware. Plugra recently for their butter is, again I’ve been using it for years and-

Bjork Ostrom: It’s the best when you have a deal where that aligns. And did they reach out to you or did you reach out to them?

Benjamin Delwiche: They reached out to me, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So is that through like a DM in TikTok?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah. So it actually started with a DM in Instagram and then transferred over to email then a phone call from there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what I love about your story here is that all of this is within a year. And I think that’s not always the case, a lot of times there’s a grind that has to happen. I think for us it was really like two or three years and this is early on like 2010, so it would have been 2012, 2013 we are like, wait a minute this is something that if we want to and if we’re intentional about it and really think through it, this could build into a career. And the same is true for you, you have all the things that you need to start to put together these elements to say, this could potentially be a career. And similar to us, Lindsay was a teacher, I worked at a nonprofit. That’s a really big deal, that’s a really cool thing to be able to kind of fold that into who you are and what you do.

Bjork Ostrom: This is really early in that process but you have thoughts around hey, if I continue to do this for two years, three years, this maybe could be what I’m doing full time or you’re like, you know what, teaching is a core part of who I am and what I do. That would never be something that I would like leave my job to do this or it’s still too early to even talk about that?

Benjamin Delwiche: I think it’s still too early to even talk about. I mean, I really love teaching and especially teaching math. So that’s not something that I really envision leaving. This is another thing baking is something that I really enjoy. So I love to be able to do both and to use the background that I have in teaching to explain different baking elements. Or on the other hand, bring different baking elements into the way that I teach math.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s a great…

Benjamin Delwiche: You’re going to find that crossover both ways.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So how about this, any tips, advice or inspiration that you’d give somebody who is early stages, maybe just as a creator but also within TikTok as a platform for somebody who is kind of tiptoeing into TikTok and saying, I don’t know if I want to do this, I’m a little bit hesitant about it. Any words of wisdom or insight that you’d give to people?

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, I would say try different things out. Especially I mean, unless you already have the idea of this is what I want to focus on and I know right away this is why people are going to follow me, try a few different things out, see what sticks and then don’t necessarily feel obligated to continue doing exactly that, but find different ways to then as you create different pieces. Now you’ve kind of started to realize, okay, well, this is actually what I really like to do. This is what I have the most experience with, this is what I feel like I can share. So then move your focus that way. Early on try different things out.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Iterate, test, don’t be afraid to press publish, see how it goes. Remember when TikTok was Musical.ly and Gary Vaynerchuk. You maybe know Gary Vaynerchuk, I feel like if you’re a creator in the world there’s like a 90% chance you come across his content whether you like it or not. But I remember looking, pulling it up, and seeing he was using it but it was just like experimental. But he wasn’t like he was producing content. It was like recording a video in a conference room and being like, hey, making a Musical.ly video, how does this thing work? I don’t remember exactly what it was. But it’s like, oh, that’s a huge part of it is just pulling it up, pressing buttons, seeing how it works, being light on your feet, pressing publish on something, seeing how that works, iterating. So I love that that’s the advice that you give for anybody who’s looking into it.

Bjork Ostrom: My second piece of advice for them would be once you do pull it up to go ahead and follow what you’re doing. So that’s a little transition into a plug for you to talk a little about where people can find you.

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, so I’m on TikTok and Instagram right now, Benjamin the Baker. Yeah, I try to share different explanations, different visuals, sometimes recipes. Whether they’re traditional recipes or something a little bit crazier, or a tip that I’ve learned from working in different bakeries. Yeah, most all are baking-related.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. And it’s been fun for me to check it out. I know that we’ll do that again. So Benjamin, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Really fun to chat.

Benjamin Delwiche: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, appreciate it.

Bjork Ostrom: Another big thank you to Benjamin the Baker for coming on the podcast. Such a fun story to hear his background not only as a teacher but working in bakeries and then rolling all of that up into this cool niche around numbers and science and math and baking and food. And then doing that strategically on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. So, a lot of takeaways there. Thanks again to Benjamin for sharing those. One more quick plug for the Facebook group if you want to check that out. It is foodbloggerpro.com/facebook. And that will allow you to be a part of the follow-up conversations when we have those. Maybe there’s additional questions that you have after a podcast episode goes live and you want to ask either the person who is on the podcast and you can get direct answers from them or potentially the Food Blogger Pro team. And you can also help build the queue for upcoming interviews that we have.

Bjork Ostrom: So, it’s going to be a great way to layer on a community element to the podcast and we’d love for you to be part of that. Again, it is foodbloggerpro.com/facebook. And you’ll have to kind of apply, there’ll be some questions and some prompts. And then once a day or so we’ll go through and prove anybody who is a good match which will be most people. So, that’s a wrap for this episode. Our hope with this is it helps you get a tiny bit better every day forever. We’re going to continue showing up each and every week in an attempt to do that. We appreciate you and we’ll see you again next week. Thanks.

Bjork Ostrom: Hello, hello, hello. You are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. This is your Bjork Ostrom. Today we are interviewing Tomas Hoyos and he’s going to be talking about Airsubs, a business that he pivoted into when we went through this little thing called a global pandemic. And he’s going to be talking about what that was like to kind of shift gears, to focus on a new thing, to build a business from the ground up in a new area that wasn’t anticipated and some of the success that they’ve had as a business because of the success that the customers, the people who use Airsubs have experienced and kind of when they started to realize that this is an idea that has a lot of traction.

Bjork Ostrom: The thing that’s most exciting to me about this interview is the fact that Airsubs, kind of the idea behind the business and what people do when they use Airsubs is they create content. They are creating content that people pay for. And I think there’s a lot of opportunity for creators, for food creators, people who have recipe blogs, to create a product around their content, as opposed to just creating content “for free” that you monetize via sponsored content or advertising.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s a really good category to be thinking about when it comes to building out the different revenue streams that you have within your business. And Tomas is going to be talking about the different ways that people are doing that and the success that they’re having. And I think it will be a really exciting episode for those of you who have been thinking about different ways that you can create income from your site. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and jump in. Tomas, welcome to the podcast.

Tomas Hoyos: Thanks so much for having me Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. This is one of those podcasts where I feel like it could be, we shoot for an hour usually, but it could be like a five-hour conversation. So I’ll try and get through the top 20% of what I want to talk to you, but we won’t be able to hit everything because your story is one that’s really interesting for me personally, it kind of overlaps with a lot of areas of interest. So I know that I’m going to learn a lot as well. And just as a little tease before we press record, you had shared a couple stories of users of Airsubs who were making multiple thousands of dollars a month with the product, but we’re going to use that.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to bury the lead, and we’re going to talk about first, the story of Airsubs because I think your story of pivoting during global pandemic, which a lot of people have had to do, is an interesting one to talk about, because I think a lot of people have this question of like, when do I continue to grind on the idea that I think might be successful versus shifting depending on what I see happening within the world. So rewind me back to, let’s say January, 2020, when life was a little bit more normal than what it is now. At that point, what were you working on and what was the focus from a business perspective for you?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, definitely. So first, thanks so much for having me. What did life look like before the pandemic? So yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Hard to remember.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly. The Airsubs story starts like about a year ago, right now in the beginning of the pandemic. And so at the time I was working on a startup and like many other businesses in the pandemic, we were deeply affected. So almost overnight we went from having tens of thousands of users who really needed our product to a lot less. And then I remember it was during that one week in March when the pandemic really took hold in New York city.

Bjork Ostrom: And you were in New York at the time.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. I was in New York city and the news was coming in waves and it kind of felt like a big line of dominoes. So first was there’s news coming from all over the world. There’s this coronavirus that not many people know about. And then I felt like the first shoe dropped when Tom Hanks tested positive for COVID.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Tomas Hoyos: Australia because it was just like this big figure that everyone knows. And they’re like, oh man, if Tom Hanks can get it…

Bjork Ostrom: If Tom Hanks can get it, I’m in trouble.

Tomas Hoyos: Exactly. And so then the NBA canceled their season, then the number of cases in New York-

Bjork Ostrom: Travel from China was closed off.

Tomas Hoyos: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: It was all on the same night, wasn’t it?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, it was crazy. It was just sort of this one night when everyone was kind of glued to the TV or glued to their phones checking Twitter. And so at the same time, in the next couple of days, I remember looking at a chart and I saw a 70% decline in our business in the main metric that we tracked. And so we were not alone, businesses across the economy were affected and there were obvious ones that lost out like restaurants. And then there were obvious winners like grocery stores and e-commerce.

Tomas Hoyos: And like many other people who were in our shoes, we pivoted because we had to and we launched a side project that’s taken off and become Airsubs. And Airsubs helps people host live virtual events and earn money. And so really the first thing that we noticed that led us to the idea was that everything was shifting to be virtual. And so anything that you were doing in person was now virtual. So if you were going to the office and not an essential worker, you’re now working from home. You were going to the gym, you’re now working out at home on Zoom. You’re going to a restaurant, you’re now buying groceries and you’re cooking.

Tomas Hoyos: And so we started to see this make its way into the world of creators just generally, and then specifically food bloggers. And so people were going live on Instagram and they were teaching things and getting people together in a way that was pretty cool, but it was also still really hard. And so we saw a food blogger teaching cooking classes on Instagram, and she was asking people to Venmo her with a donation for a ticket.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Tomas Hoyos: And so we figured that there had to be a better way to get your community together virtually, and then also create a way for people to make money at a time when a lot of people were having a really tough go of it. And so we had together a product that made it really simple to host virtual events and earn money and we launched it. And so we didn’t know how it was going to go. And we found someone who, she was already teaching some virtual classes and kind of hacking it together, manually doing a lot of Instagram live and stuff. And she would get 20, 30 people together on a Zoom.

Tomas Hoyos: And we told her, “Hey, we think we can help you scale this thing. We think we can help you grow it up.” And so we built this tool, we gave ourselves 72 hours to pull it together and we launched it really quickly. And then in the first week she hosted a class with 1,000 people together on Zoom, which totally blew our mind. We were looking at it and just constantly streaming through the pages of the Zoom. And in her first week she made over $50,000 doing virtual events, which was many times more than any that she ever made in week, never before.

Bjork Ostrom: And at that point for you guys as a business you’re like, there’s definitely something here. If this one person can do it, then there’s probably 100,000 people who can do it. We just need to get this in front of them.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly. And so your question before was about when do you know when to grind and when to pivot. And so one of our investors was, he’s seen a bunch of pivots. He was one of the first investors in Twitter, which was a pivot. He was one of the first investors in Lyft, which was also a pivot. And also one of the first investors in Twitch, which was a pivot.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And can you talk about each one of those? Because I think those, even Instagram is a story where it was, I forget what, it was like Bourbon, I think originally. But the idea being these companies started something, Slack being another example, started something and then you realize they’re not going to actually be the thing that you thought they were going to be when you first start and you go in a different direction. For each one of those, I think people would be curious to know. You had said Twitter, Lyft and what was the last one?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. Last one was Twitch.

Bjork Ostrom: Twitch, yeah.

Tomas Hoyos: So I’ll share each one of them what I know about it and I’m sure other people have better versions of, more accurate versions of the story. But as I understand it Twitch, which is now a platform that helps people stream themselves as they’re doing something. And a lot of video gamers use it, they’ll stream their screen as they’re playing a game with other people on Twitch so that everyone can watch it. So that originally started as Justin TV and Socialcam. So the original concept was a live TV show that never ended. So one was walking around and they had a camera on their head.

Bjork Ostrom: Justin. And his name was Justin. It was was Justin TV.

Tomas Hoyos: And he would walk around and it was like a live show all the time. And I think they realized at some point that there’s a reason that shows are however long they are-

Bjork Ostrom: It was 30 minutes as opposed to 24 hours.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly because all the in between moments are a little boring.

Bjork Ostrom: Super boring. You realize how boring your life is when you live stream it 24/7.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly. So I think they shifted from Justin TV to something called Socialcam. I don’t actually know exactly what Socialcam was, but I think both of those weren’t working great. And then some of them are…

Bjork Ostrom: I think it was a social network, a video social network, almost like a vine almost, if I remember right. So kind of in a similar space. But then eventually shifted. I didn’t realize Socialcam then eventually shifted into Twitch.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. Or I think they carved out. They started working on Twitch on the side and at some point they carved it out and they sold Socialcam. But long story short, they saw the things that they were working on weren’t going to be very successful in the long run and they found something that was really working and they were constantly experimenting on the side and they found one thing and ran with it. And then as far as Lyft goes, I think… They started as essentially like a ride sharing company. So it would be, I think it started at a college in upstate New York like Cornell and the founders conceive of the idea of people getting together to hop in a car and drive down to…

Bjork Ostrom: We were all going to Boston or something. Let’s all take a trip together if we’re all going to the same place.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly. And then I think they shifted it to be more of a concept of ride hailing, which everyone’s familiar with. It’s what Uber and Lyft do today. So it was sort of a derivative of what they were already doing that they shifted to. And then Twitter I think audio was the original concept and I think-

Bjork Ostrom: Oh yeah, that’s right.

Tomas Hoyos: … it had something to do with audio. But they also had this concept of micro-blogging, and then they shifted into Twitter. So to the question of whether you should keep grinding or whether you should launch something and work on something new, it’s a really hard question. And it’s a really personal question because you hear both stories, you hear people really persevere and they were just on the other side, right on the cusp of something amazing. And it was like that last little bit of effort that got them there.

Tomas Hoyos: And then there’s also folks who, they let themselves follow path which is really pulling them in that direction. And so I think the way that I think about it is, if you really are getting pulled in a certain direction where it’s like the only thing you can think about or it’s just so obviously more interesting or better or more helpful than what you’re already doing. I definitely, I’d probably lean into it. That’s how I think about it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah. There’s not a science to it, right? There’s not an equation that you can apply to it that spits out the answer of if you should keep going or not. But I think some of the things that I’m guessing you’ll talk about here can be indicators as to whether you should continue moving forward or not. Like is the thing you’re doing resonating with people? In its simplest form, whether it’s content or a product, are you creating something that people are responding to positively or actually have positive outcomes from it? So I think helpful to kind of frame up the conversation moving into talking about Airsubs, but also I think a lot of people are thinking about that if they’d been working on something for a really long time, do I continue to do this and hope that eventually I get that breakthrough moment or do I shift and pivot?

Bjork Ostrom: And what I hear you saying is there isn’t really a good answer and it partly depends on the product and the thing you’re working on. And it partly depends on who you are and what you want to be working on. Is it a good fit for you? Are you able to continue to do that for a long period of time? And are you getting kind of response from people that indicates, hey, this is something that I’m kind of interested in?

Bjork Ostrom: So eventually you pivot, your healthcare kind of focus before, healthcare world really changes. And now you say, wait, there might be an opportunity here for us to work with creators, everybody that listens to this podcast is in some way a creator. Tell me about that first initial success. For somebody to create $50,000, you said in the first week, is that right? What did that look like kind of start to finish? Is it somebody who’s really good at marketing, who had a huge audience and then what was it that they’re selling and how much did they sell it for?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. So first it was a natural extension of what she was already doing. So she was actually, our first user was actually a fitness instructor and we’ve now seen the product evolve in such a way that it’s really taken hold in the community of food and tons of food bloggers, recipe developers, food photographers are using the product. And that’s sort of a use case that’s going incredibly well for us. But the first user ever was a fitness instructor.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Tomas Hoyos: And so she had a big but not massive following and she had 25,000 Instagram followers. And she was already teaching fitness classes as part of a larger studio, Equinox. And so she had been teaching at Equinox for a little while, but had also been doing these classes on the side and had a little bit of a following on Instagram. And so I think what really drove her to be successful, at least in the beginning, is that she was early and have she was offering a product that people really loved because people love-

Bjork Ostrom: Really in the pandemic, meaning, hey, this was a unique offering related to the timing of when people needed to work out and they didn’t have a solution.

Tomas Hoyos: Exactly. So she was early in the sense that she saw, hey, gyms are shutting down, I’m about to get furloughed or laid off.

Bjork Ostrom: People have been sitting on their couch for a couple of weeks and they’re starting to think, I need to exercise.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly. And this is probably going to shift to Zoom and that’s going to be the default, at least for a while, so I’m going to lean into it. And so it was also a product that people loved. It’s a really good workout. And then also the way that she made people feel in class, feeling super motivated, really focused on community. It was just sort of a really great product. I think one of the magic moments for her was realizing that virtual can actually be a much better business for a bunch of people.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Than in-person.

Tomas Hoyos: Than in-person. So a core component of that is that you don’t have to be limited by physical space. So if you were teaching a cooking class or if you’re teaching a fitness class, if you’re doing it in person, you’re limited by the physical space that you have. So you’re limited to 20, 30, 40 people max. And what she realized is that not only shifting to digital lets you serve a larger audience, but it really doesn’t matter where they are. So they can be anywhere in the country or around the world. And the quality of the experience does not degrade that much with each person that you add. And so it actually ends up just being more fun if you’re in a class with 60 people versus 50 or 100.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like Peloton, when you go on a run and there’s 300 people and you’re getting random high fives, it’s like, oh, this is really cool. And then I’ve had it before where the internet cuts out and really quickly, it becomes not fun. When it’s just me on a treadmill running and oh yeah, this isn’t very fun, is it? Or when you have other people there’s an energy even if it’s digital.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. And there was something to being in that Zoom where there was 1,000 other people and you’re all seeing each other and you’re in your home working out and you see the sea of faces and everyone’s doing the same thing, it’s kind of this really crazy social experience where you feel like you’re in this picture and you’re in the movie that you’re working out too many people virtually.

Tomas Hoyos: And so that was really interesting. And I think the other thing that really clicked for her, and just been thinking about this and what we’ve seen, is that the business is just much more profitable in the sense that you don’t have to pay rent, you don’t have to…

Bjork Ostrom: Overhead. Yeah.

Tomas Hoyos: … you don’t have overhead. You’d essentially be a person who is also a company with a limited set of tools. The problem that she was running into is that she was hacking together all these tools and it was making her life hell to pull this thing off.

Bjork Ostrom: So she becomes essentially the tech department for a virtual class that she’s running, which is where Airsubs kind of fits in.

Tomas Hoyos: Exactly. So she has to build a website where people can go to the event. She has to integrate sign-ups. She has to integrate-

Bjork Ostrom: Payment processing.

Tomas Hoyos: … payment process. She has to create Zoom links and meeting links and she has to distribute them via email.

Bjork Ostrom: Then 10% of the people are like, my connection is fuzzy, what do I do? And it’s like, she’s working out and she’s like, sorry, I can’t help you.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly. And so what we saw is that there’s a way to build a product that solves those problems and makes it much easier to host a virtual event and earn money, but where it’s fun. You can focus on the things that matter, which are running a fun class or doing a fun event and earning money and not worry about the technology or the payments or some of the business stuff. I’m trying to make it incredibly simple to do this.

Tomas Hoyos: So what is Airsubs? It basically helps creators, but a lot of food creators host virtual events and earn money. And the most common thing we’re seeing is food creators hosting Zoom cooking classes and baking classes. And we’ve seen people get creative with virtual cookbook tours and other events. And we just kind of make it easy to get started so you can’t miss on that fun stuff. And again, it lets you set up a page, sell spots, handle ticketing, confirmation emails, reminder emails, automatically create Zoom links, sell in different ways. You can sell a membership, you can sell a package of classes, you can sell gift cards. It helps you build up an email list and then market the classes. It’s essentially like a virtual event business inbox.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So is it built on top of Zoom in a way? Where you sign up for your own Zoom account, you enter in your credentials for Zoom and then through API access, Airsubs kind of does what it needs to do. So then you essentially are going in and pressing start on a Zoom event and then people show up or how much do you have to be involved in kind of the setup process with it?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, it’s super simple. So our goal is to make it incredibly easy and how you can set this up in less than five minutes. So with Zoom specifically, you click one button and it hooks up your Zoom account and you never have to worry about anything else again. You will add a class that you want to teach and it’ll automatically create the Zoom link. And when people sign up, you’ll automatically get the confirmation email, the confirmation email has the right Zoom link. And so it just kind of takes all that stuff off your plate.

Tomas Hoyos: But with cooking classes specifically, there’s a few big picture themes that we’re seeing. So the first is that this is the perfect moment to run virtual cooking classes because they’re super fun. And if you imagine what the pandemic’s been like, it’s just been a really isolating for a lot of people.

Tomas Hoyos: No matter where you are in the country or where you are in the world, at one point you were in some version of isolation, distancing, lock down. And so there’s just so much human connection missing. And so it’s a great way to get together and learn something and make something delicious and people are cooking so much more than they ever have. And in talking to so many folks in and around food, it’s just interesting to see there’s just this huge surge in interest and demand. I get a lot of folks who are really having some very successful bread making classes and really crushing it with sourdough and sourdough…

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Tomas Hoyos: It had its moment in the last year. And so it’s just brought people so much joy where if you’re stuck in your and you haven’t seen someone in so long, it’s really refreshing to get together and be able to cook something with a room full of people and also with someone who you admire and you look up to and whose recipes you’ve been making for a long time.

Tomas Hoyos: And then for the people who are teaching the classes, it’s also really fun. Alexander Stafford, Allie Stafford was one of the first people to start teaching on Airsubs. And what she told me was that she feels like it’s like a party that she’s into, that’s-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Digital party. Yeah.

Tomas Hoyos: But it’s kind of nice in that she doesn’t have to get all the stuff there and cook for a million people. And so it’s just kind of brought people a lot of joy. And then the other thing that we’re seeing is that it’s also just been scale really well and it’s pretty lucrative. So we talked about it a little bit with why a virtual class is better than an in-person class. We’re seeing people consistently host these Zoom cooking classes with the 100, 200 people in them. And they’re charging usually somewhere between $25 and $50 a head.

Tomas Hoyos: And so it just ends up kind of being this really lucrative thing where the price point is still really accessible for people who want to take the classes. And the experience, the quality is really high. But when you get that many people together and it’s at that accessible price point and you aren’t limited by scale, it can just be really lucrative.

Tomas Hoyos: And then I think the other thing that we’re seeing is that people are charging for these events in a different way. So in the old world, if you were going to do a coding class, a lot of it would just be individual tickets. So you pay 25 or 50 bucks and you’d show up for class. And not that many people would do cooking classes that often. So many people have done in-person cooking classes. I’ve done Sur la Table in New York, feels like more of a special occasion. But when it’s virtual, it’s just so much easier that the frequency with which people want to take the classes and the fun, casual atmosphere of doing the classes makes it so that people want to do it more and more consistently. And so we have folks who are teaching two to four classes a month. And when you are doing it at that level of frequency, that is amenable to building it into a community…

Bjork Ostrom: Recurring.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. With a membership.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So people pay $25 a month and you just get access to the premium cooking class that is going to happen once a week at Wednesday, Wednesdays at noon or whatever.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, exactly. And so you save yourself a spot in every cooking class and then the other really creative thing that folks have done that a bunch of creators we’re working with have done is, they’re essentially recording all of these live classes. And so they’re building up this big video library of all these classes they’ve taught previously. And so when someone signs up for a membership, they do save themselves a spot in all the live classes, but then also get to go back and watch all the classes that have been taught previously. And every time that you teach a class, you’re essentially adding to this big library of classes you’ve taught previously. And so it’s sort of this concept of make money while you sleep or spend time-

Bjork Ostrom: They could sign-up and they could join and be a part of that and immediately have access on demand.

Tomas Hoyos: Exactly. Right. So you teach it once and then you continue to sell it over a really long period of time. And the memberships that people have launched have been really interesting just because it’s created this recurring revenue for people. And then there’s a bunch of reasons. I mean Food Blogger Pro, you understand the power of subscriptions and memberships. It’s just like a really interesting business model where you’re deeply aligned with your customer, where they have an incentive to use the product more and more over time. And then it’s really great to have that steady recurring revenue where you can predict how much revenue is going to come in per month and you can count on it and you can start to understand it and it grows over time, and you have this really big sort of asset that’s growing over time. And it gives you just enormous freedom and peace of mind to know that you have this consistent revenue.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s really interesting. So a couple of nitty-gritty questions for you that I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on, may or may not be relevant, but I’m just curious. You have 1,000 people, they’re all showing up and they have their own little Zoom square. What happens if one of them starts to get weird? Like what happens with the weird students, whatever that might be? Somebody who’s in a workout thing and they’re like, well, I always work out with my shirt off. And you’re like, that’s not how we work out in this class. If it’s just you, do you need to have somebody who’s facilitator or behind the scenes blocking people or kicking people out? What does that look like?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. So thankfully we have not run into issues here. To the extent that there was an issue, it’s really simple to kick someone out of a meeting or mute them. And so we didn’t have a very quick training program. Also for folks who are just getting started, we do offer moderation services. So if you want some help for your first few classes, getting set up. What we found is that when most people start teaching consistently, they become like experts of your own style and they really make it their own.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And you get tools in your tool belt to remind people how to be successful on the event and to… Well, do people have the ability to mute and unmute themselves?

Tomas Hoyos: Yes. Yeah. So it’s a class where people can unmute themselves and ask questions. You can set it up so that they can’t do that. What we’ve found is that the energy in the classes is very casual, it’s very fun and it does not become kind of a free for all. What most people will do is they’ll say, “Hey would love to see, no pressure, but would love to see all your faces. If you want to turn your camera on, feel free to unmute yourself and ask a question, just make sure to re-mute yourself after and drop any questions in the chat, we’ll get to them.”

Tomas Hoyos: When you do have big classes, whether it’s 100, 200, a few hundred people, what you’ll find is that you don’t actually get pummeled with questions. Usually there’s like a few questions that a lot of people have and one person will ask it and then everyone else will kind of just piggyback on it. And then also when there’s that many people, it’s actually like how many people get up and ask a question in an auditorium when everyone’s watching? It’s like a handful of people. So thankfully the energy in the class has been awesome. We haven’t had any issues, now we’re seeing many thousands of classes. So to the extent that there was an issue, it’s pretty simple though.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, sure. And I would imagine that’s a problem that would come up. The more successful you are in having more people come, the more that that actually becomes an issue. When we do live events, I’m thinking if we have 500 to 1,000 people in the chat area, at least that’s very different. It’s like, you can’t even keep up with it. So I’d imagine it would be depending on the topic and people’s comfort level with it, that occasionally, if it’s open kind of free for all, for anybody to ask might come up. There’s also, I feel like the issue of, that came up when we were doing Christmas carols with, Zoom Christmas carols, this holiday season. And there is the classic uncle who didn’t mute himself on Zoom.

Bjork Ostrom: And nobody can, you can’t sing Christmas carols on Zoom because it all comes in at different times. It was actually really awesome and really funny, but for me, it was like, oh yeah, there’s something here about managing this. So it seems like, especially if you’d have 1,000 people that there’d be at least 0.1%, whatever it might be, kind of one to 10 people at any given time who are unmuted and working out at home. So in those cases it feels like you’d have to have somebody who’s on mute duty to manage that, especially once you get into the higher numbers. But it feels like Zoom etiquette is understood enough. If you have less than 100 then chances of that happening aren’t as high.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. And for those really large classes too, there’s things like there’s a mute all button and there’s a participants panel, which anyone who’s talking and making noise automatically gets stuck to the top and then-

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Tomas Hoyos: … and just click their name, it’ll mute them right away.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That makes sense. And that’s kind of the tools in the tool belt where you start to learn eventually those settings and the ability to do that. We’ve gone through that. We’ve used different services for Food Blogger Pro to do events and very quickly you learn how to handle those. So how are people actually going about the… They’re probably not just setting up their computer and pulling up Zoom and using the computer camera, or are they? Do you have to have a professional kind of studio set up or kind of a pro-Zoomer version of a studio? How do people set up an area to actually shoot and broadcast a video?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. So first we have a bunch of resources on how to run an amazing Zoom cooking class on our website. And we also did a really cool event recently where we had some of our most successful folks talk about what their setup is. The good news is that you most likely have everything that you need to do the class. And so the setup that most people are doing is they’re using two devices. So they have their smartphone, usually an iPhone and we like it, where that is the main camera that they’re teaching to. And then they will also join the Zoom with their laptop, which will be right on side. And then they can look at their laptop to check the chat box for any questions, see everyone’s faces, and you can join with both devices.

Tomas Hoyos: And then as far as if you want to get super fancy with microphones and camera quality, you totally can. And we have people who have the best, most crisp cameras and microphones. But I’d say the vast majority of people, they use their iPhone that they already have and love, use a laptop and then maybe they’ll use some AirPods or a microphone that they have. But you’re pretty much all set with just your phone and your computer.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Yeah. The way computers are now, mics and cameras, if it’s a new one, it’s going to be pretty high quality. If you want to level up, have even higher quality camera, you could even do, technically you could even do probably multiple angles. If you had somebody who was acting as producer and making cuts and things like that. I’m thinking you could do a top-down shot. Maybe you have one in the corner. And as I’ve seen people who do this, once it becomes more normal and we’re getting there to being in-person again, you could probably do one where you have a small live studio audience for the energy to capture there, as well as it’s almost like creative live. And it seems like a lot of what you guys are doing is democratizing creative live.

Bjork Ostrom: So anybody can do a creative live event and they make the money as opposed to, I don’t know how creative live works, but I think it’s probably like a Rev share or kind of an upfront fee that they give folks. What about on the marketing end? How do you get people to sign up? What does that look like in terms of how often you have to talk about it and is there this huge spike where a bunch of people are interested, oh, online class? And then do you see it kind of tail off a little bit as it becomes more familiar? But I’d be interested in the marketing side of things, what you see.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, definitely. So what we found the most effective tactics for marketing are the ones that you suspect. So email. If you have an existing email list of people or a newsletter, that’s a great group of people to let know that you’re teaching virtual classes, you’re doing something where you’re getting the community together. Marketing is huge. And then Instagram is a great place. So the most effective form of Instagram marketing that we have seen is just going live in a story and talking to camera and telling someone about why they should come to class, basically giving them reasons to show up, hey, everyone, I’m so pumped or making my mom’s famous chicken parm recipe. I learned this recipe when I was little, I’ve always loved it. We’ve been making it for years. It’s one of the most popular things on the blog and it’s going to be delicious.

Tomas Hoyos: You should come make this, we’re going to have a really fun group of people, it’s going to be several dozen people, we’re going to make it together, it’s on Zoom. You’ll have it, we’ll make some extras. So you’ve got leftovers and swipe up the book if you have 10,000 followers or hey, the link to book is in my bio. And as far as you asked for frequency marketing, really, it depends on your goal for the event. How many people do you want to show up and what are you charging?

Tomas Hoyos: So one way to think about it is, is there an hourly rate that you want to enforce for yourself? So if you’re thinking I want to make $100 an hour or $1,000 an hour, you kind of back into how many people you want to come and the price you want to come.

Tomas Hoyos: And so you can sort of solve for how much you want to promote it. We have folks who don’t do that much marketing, but will still be able to fill up classes. So they’ll do it starting about two weeks out, maybe 10 days out for a class. They’ll do anywhere from one to four classes per month. And we’ll talk about each class a few times. So in aggregate, it’s really not that much effort from a marketing perspective.

Tomas Hoyos: A couple of things that are really interesting that people are doing that have been effective. So one is Airsubs helps you build up your email list. So you now have this community people who are coming and taking your classes and they’re signing up with their emails. And that’s an amazing pool of people who would want to come and take your classes in the future. And so-

Bjork Ostrom: And Kevin Kelly talks about 1,000 true fans. I don’t know. Do you know that Kevin Kelly post?

Tomas Hoyos: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Classic startup. But it’s a good way to figure out who your 1,000 true fans are, because these are people who are signing up and paying. So you know that these are people who love what you’re doing and following along. So do those emails live within Airsubs or can you connect that to MailChimp, ConvertKit? What does that look like?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. So anyone who signs up for one of your cooking classes, you have their email, you can download it and you can take it with you. So if you want it to reach people through email on another platform, you could do that. I mean, you can also import email contacts from another email list that you have. But what’s really interesting about that concept of 1,000 true fans is that many times you have these fans, these people really love you, but you don’t necessarily know who they are. You might be able or be able to reach them. So they may live for your Instagram stories or your Instagram posts…

Bjork Ostrom: Or just check your blog and not sign up for anything. Yeah.

Tomas Hoyos: Exactly. And so what’s really interesting is, we have folks who don’t necessarily have massive followings with millions of people or whatever it is. It’s much smaller but they’re able to build these really robust, durable, lucrative businesses with smaller communities of people where they’re consistently doing classes with 25 people or 50 people or 100 people. And that we see really good retention on that community of people. If you’re offering the classes consistently, you’re creating a fun environment and people like the classes, they will come back more and more as well. For someone that I have in mind too, has 1,000 true fans that she found through Airsubs, which she told me was she has tens of thousands of followers on Instagram, but the people who love her most on Instagram, she doesn’t have their email.

Tomas Hoyos: And so now it’s sort of her Airsubs community has become the subset of her Instagram community who’s most engaged and wants to engage with her. And it’s just the best thing in the world for her to be able to communicate with them directly. And then now she has all their emails. And so one person, Caroline Chambers, talked about this on a podcast recently, and she has this really interesting story where in her previous life, she was a recipe developer. And so she was 100% behind the camera. So she was not at all focused on building up her own personal brand and before the pandemic she had 1500 followers or something like that. And then the pandemic hit a ton of her clients who were paying her for her recipe development services, like their budgets dried up overnight.

Tomas Hoyos: And so she’s sitting there thinking like, all right, how am I going to go build this business and earn some income? She started doing these classes. And now she has classes routinely with a few hundred people in them. She has several hundred subscribers on her kitchen table cooking school membership that she uses Airsubs to manage. And she was really able to kind of build this community of people through cooking classes.

Tomas Hoyos: She built up this big email list. And then now with this email list, those were the first people that she told when she launched a paid newsletter. So she now has this really successful sub stack. She’s a top five food and drink category creator on Substack, she’s has a paid newsletter. And one of the reasons she launched a paid newsletter was that you couldn’t get a cookbook deal.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Tomas Hoyos: So she went and pitched her cookbook to a million people, and she said, you know what, I’m just going to do this myself. And I’m going to do a reverse cookbook. It’s not going to be, I’m never going to do a weekly newsletter and it’s going to be the same amount of recipes as if I put them all on a cookbook. And so we are seeing kind of this pollination of interesting business opportunities, but really when you’re talking about marketing, what it comes back to is just the basics. It’s telling people about it on a consistent basis.

Tomas Hoyos: Once they start to know that it’s something that you offer and that you’re doing it consistently, if you give it time for word of mouth to take hold, it can really grow over time. So sometimes there is a tiny bit of a spike in the beginning, but then it is sort of it kind of trickles up, at least from what we’ve seen.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That makes sense. And one of the things that I love about what you’re talking about is a lot of people in our space think about how do I get more traffic? How do I monetize that via ads and potentially sponsored content? And one of the hard things with a food site or a recipe site is there isn’t always a clear picture of what the product can be. And I think it’s universally understood that the best way to build a business is by selling a product, but for food creators, there’s oftentimes a question of what is my product?

Bjork Ostrom: A lot of times it’s cookbook, but those numbers don’t often work out. You maybe work as a publisher, the advance isn’t what you want it to be. And so what we’re talking about allows people to kind of think strategically, not about just how do I get more page views? How do I get more pages to my blog to make a little bit more from ads? But to think about who do I currently have who’s following me, who’s interested in what I’m doing? And what does it look like to take a small sliver of those people and to serve them really well with a product?

Bjork Ostrom: And you kind of hinted at this before when you were talking about the first person who used it and their experience as a fitness instructor and what they did, but the product has to be good too. And I think a lot of people get stuck in this idea of ooh, a new system, I’m going to do this. And then don’t really think about the actual product itself. And that’s so important to it. So you have the followers, you have the product, and then you have the system which acts as a multiplier. But what does a good product look like? What does a really successful live event look like for somebody who has the following and has an idea of what it is, but maybe doesn’t know? How do you pick it and know what will be awesome?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. It’s just fun. And there’s something magical about getting a big group of people together making something delicious and fun with someone that they look up to. And food is so many different things. Like friendship, it’s family, it’s culture, it’s memories, it’s like everything. And so bringing people together to make something together is just really fun at its core. And so as long as you don’t deviate too far from that or you have something really great to work with, as far as a common really successful class looks like, it’ll be, what’s a fun recipe, one main recipe and then a lot of times people will do a fun cocktail for happy hour.

Tomas Hoyos: So they’ll make one recipe. They’ll usually start with the things that are really simple and straightforward. Maybe there’s a recipe that their community loves or a post that gets a ton of traffic on their blog. They’ll pick something that’s really low hanging fruit and easy and they’ll make that. A lot of times people say, hey, do I need to create new recipes for these classes? Absolutely not. Just making it easy on yourself and are you sure? Someone wants another sourdough basics class. It’s like, well, it’s not that they want another sourdough basics classes, is that they want your sourdough recipe because they’ve been following you for a really long time and they really love all of the effort that you put into your craft and how do you make it accessible to them. And the tone that you use when you communicate what you’re teaching someone.

Tomas Hoyos: And so they really just want to make it together with you. And then there’s all kind of the, you have something to show for it. At the end of a class, if someone’s participating and following along, they have something delicious that they can share with other people. But a really simple class is usually one or two recipes. It’s a fun group of people, you’ll make it together. It’s something that is not going to be super hard for you unless you want to make it challenging. And that’s kind of what a really fun successful class looks like.

Bjork Ostrom: And is it half hour, hour? Have you found there’s a sweet spot on the recipe side? I’m guessing fitness workout would be 30 minutes to an hour, but what does it look like when you’re making a recipe?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. So I’d say it really depends on what your sweet spot is. The most common we’ve seen are 45 minutes to an hour and a half.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Tomas Hoyos: We have seen people do really long things on weekends. Someone did this heroic meal prep class. There was several hours. It was just this huge number of people cooking together, getting ready for a week and it was so fun and we had so much to show for it because they made a bunch of different recipes. We’ve seen a lot of the bread making stuff happen on weekends and that’s a bit longer. But yeah, the sweet spot is usually somewhere around an hour, plus or minus 30 minutes. That’s kind of been the most common class.

Bjork Ostrom: And how much of it is informational versus entertainment? Are people actually making these alongside the creators in real time?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. So two third… Usually it’s around two thirds to 75% of the class is cooking along with you. So the majority of people cook along, not a demo that people watch. And there are a subset of people who really love to watch. And so they’re essentially treating it like a live interactive TV show. And the TV show is an institution. The cooking show is an institution and everyone loves them and they’re super fun and awesome. They’re not live, they’re not interactive and you can’t ask questions. And so the few time that I watched a really huge cooking class, the amount of people I saw taking notes during the class, just blew my mind, it was amazing. They weren’t there to cook and they were just taking notes to make sure that they could really crush it when they did it later.

Tomas Hoyos: And it’s just a really… It’s a really fun, live interactive thing, but you can also make it your own. So if there’s civic culture that you want to create, whether it’s around when and how people ask questions or how many recipes you cook, there’s little funny rituals that people will create. And there’s little moments in there that just don’t happen unless you’re there with people live. So the other night someone was teaching a class and one of the questions was, hey, I see that cookbook on your shelf. What is that cookbook? What are the cookbooks you have in your house?

Tomas Hoyos: And the person who is teaching took a moment and she said, “Hey, this is super fun. Let me go grab my stack of cookbooks.” And then she went through and did a show and tell and talked about who were the creators, the food bloggers that had inspired her. And what were her favorite recipes and what are her cookbooks? And someone was like, when are you writing your next cookbook? It was just this really fun moment that took less than five minutes. But that just didn’t happen if you don’t have the serendipity of a really live, engaging, interactive experience with people who do really want to support you.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That’s cool. How much do you have to be an entertainer to be successful with it? If somebody is like, because a lot of people who I would guess who blog, maybe Instagram, they’re like, “Hey, this is super comfortable for me.” I can write, I can photograph, I can tweak this recipe a little bit, but then it’s like, it’s different. Right now, you and I are talking and I looked down and I see record and I know every single word that I’m saying is being recorded and it’ll eventually be broadcasted. But even this, we can go back and edit it. When you’re live, you’re live and that’s kind of scary for some people. Some people thrive on it. So how do you know if it’s something that you can do and be comfortable with and can introverts do live events? And if so, how do they be successful with it?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. So first, we see tons of folks and that’s one of their first questions that they ask us is do I have to entertain people and do I have to be super high energy? And the answer is no. You just have to be yourself. And if you want to do it, awesome, go for it. You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. But what I’ll tell you is, every person who does it says, this is super fun. It’s a group of people together. You’re sharing an experience that you really love. There’s some elbow grease that goes into it. It’s not no work. And maybe you get some butterflies before your first one.

Tomas Hoyos: One person in particular, Serena Wolf, was another person, one of the first people to start teaching on Airsubs. And then now I think she just did a class last night with a few hundred people on it. And she’s awesome. And she’s really funny and really high energy and great, but also is just so willing to laugh at herself and be down to earth. And she’s constantly cracking jokes at her own expense and she’s just not taking herself seriously. And she told me this story the other day, and she’s told her people publicly that she was shaking a cocktail and then she kind of put the top on and the thing went everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: Everywhere. Yeah. In some sense, people can kind of like that.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. The other thing too is just with live as a medium, the bar is lower when it’s live. If it’s recorded, the bar actually counter-intuitively gets a little bit higher because people maybe expecting a little more production value. In the next live if the pot clangs in one direction, no one really cares because they’re actually focused on their own kitchen and cooking the thing themselves. So it’s actually, it’s sort of counterintuitive there where the energy is really casual. And so you don’t really have to make it more serious than it is. You can kind of just show up and be yourself. And we see people who are super talkative and then we see people who are much more introverted and serious more or less. And it’s really just about getting people together who are passionate about something.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And part of it is what are you selling it as? If you’re selling it as entertainment, you should probably be entertaining, if you’re selling it as get the information you need to have meal prep accomplished for the week on a Sunday. If you can deliver on that really well, but you’re not super entertaining, great. You’ve still delivered on the thing that you said that you’re going to deliver on. Probably better if you’re also entertaining and engaging and interesting, which isn’t always an easy thing to do, especially if you’re by yourself to, I’ve done this with solo podcast episodes where it’s just you press record and then it’s just me talking into the mic for half an hour to 60 minutes.

Bjork Ostrom: Easier now to your point, the first few times you might have butterflies when you do it, but when you’re first getting started, it’s a new skill, it’s a new thing. And I think in so far as people can view that as it’s not the same as writing a blog post, it’s not the same as doing Instagram, it’s not even the same as doing Instagram live. It’s a new thing that you’re going to, unless you have previous experience with it in some form, you’re an actor or you’ve done improv or you’ve done cooking classes or has taught before, you’ll probably have to have some learning that goes along with it, which is expected.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. And I would think on that spectrum of entertainment and education, edutainment, no matter where you are, you’ll be somewhere on that spectrum and that’s… It’s just sort of being authentic to you and not trying to be-

Bjork Ostrom: Somebody else.

Tomas Hoyos: Yes. Something that you’re not. And you definitely don’t need acting experience or tons of public speaking experience. Again, it’s sort of like, I encourage people to just try one and see how you like it, because chances are you’re going to get a ton of energy from the other people who are there. And it’s going to be this really cool, fun thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally.

Tomas Hoyos: Someone described it as, I feel like I’m hosting a dinner party. I have a party to go to, but I don’t cook for everyone. And it’s also like, I’m sharing something that I know because I’m already comfortable, I already know how to make this, I’ve talked about it, I’m an expert here. And so it can be really, kind of this thing you share that you know.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And I think my point in it is if people show up and they’re super nervous to do it, or even if it doesn’t go well, maybe they do show up and it goes through and it’s like, that was kind of fun, but it was also super nerve wracking, that doesn’t mean that you should weed yourself out as somebody who can’t do that. And some people might not be interested in it and it’s just, you don’t have to be somebody who does all the things.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think, again, what’s really exciting for me about something like this, is it introduces an opportunity for those who do want to pursue it, or would it be a good fit to create a product. This is the thing that I’m offering to people who, if I have 100,000 people in whatever form, Twitter, Instagram, my website, who are showing up and I’ve never asked them to purchase anything, and now it’s like, hey, here’s something that’s going to be a little bit better, it’s going to be more personal, it’s going to be tailored in a different way, it’s going to be different experience.

Bjork Ostrom: Everybody listening to this will have, I could go so far as to promise, at least one, maybe 10, maybe 100 people who would fall into that bucket and be willing to pay to have some form of education, entertainment, edutainment, whatever you want to call it. Something fun, experiential that will help them become better as well. They’ll learn. You learn in a different way than you would watching YouTube video or reading a blog post or consuming a content on Instagram.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. And they also have something to teach. They have the market for that. There’s people who are really eager to do with them, but then they also have something to say, they have an expertise to share. And then on your concept of selling a product and having something to offer people, I think it’s worth revisiting just this concept of different paths to monetize. So I totally agree with you. People are realizing that having people pay you directly for something is really powerful when we’re buying a product from you and where you own the customer relationship, because you’re telling them something, they know what they’re getting, they know the value that’s ascribed to it and they’re paying for it and they get it in return. And there’s just something about that relationship, which is really amazing as a creator and also as a entrepreneur, as a business owner, where someone is paying you for something that they really want and you own that customer relationship, it is not the case that you’re monetizing through a third party.

Tomas Hoyos: And so one of the limitations of existing platforms is that you really are monetizing through a third party. And so whether it’s on your blog, when you’re trying to increase eyeballs to sell more ads, someone is the product. Someone shows up to your blog and they’re essentially the product and that’s okay, that’s totally fine. But it is really powerful when you have a direct relationship with them. And when you have these platforms that you’re using and they are really catalyzing a lot of your revenue. So with your blog, if you’re super reliant on eyeballs, a ton of those people are finding you through search, through Google and you’re really focused on SEO. And that can change really quickly, and you have to stay on top of it.

Tomas Hoyos: Same thing with Instagram. Everyone knows that their algorithm changes a ton. It definitely prioritizes certain types of content at different moments in time. I was talking to someone yesterday and he has gone from zero followers to 240,000 followers in the last four months because he is absolutely crushing food reels. And so they’re really pushing reel super hard.

Bjork Ostrom: And it was video three years ago.

Tomas Hoyos: Exactly. And you can be on the other side of one of these algorithm shifts, and when you don’t own the customer relationship or when you’re counting on eyeballs or reach through a platform, it’s just really tough if something changes really quickly and you’re not in a position where you have diversified revenue streams. So I think people are realizing, be a little less reliant on a platform. And with something like Airsubs too, because someone is signing up for a class and they’re paying you directly and they’re signing up with their email, it’s actually a really interesting way. It’s sort of a judo move with the platform, where it’d be really useful to you if you had the email addresses of all your Instagram followers, if they were like, I’ve bought from you previously, but you don’t. And the only place that you can reach them is through stories and through posts.

Tomas Hoyos: And so this is an interesting thing where when you’re doing these classes, thousands of people are taking them. Another way to reach that community people who really knows you on Instagram, and I think the value of diversifying your revenue streams. So you can do a little bit of everything. It doesn’t preclude doing ads on your blog or sponsored posts or cookbooks. There’s a lot of reasons that people write cookbooks, but there’s just another feather in your cap.

Tomas Hoyos: And then there’s also paid newsletters, is another interesting thing that the people are doing and this concept of trying to generate some recurring revenue so you can kind of predict how much money you’re going to earn in a given month is really powerful.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. Yeah. The takeaway that I have from what you’re talking about is being intentional to think about not just growing an Instagram, not just growing your blog, but also to think about, is there another place where you’re capturing that relationship with people, email being a great example. It doesn’t always have to be… I would almost be interested in kind of flipping that a little bit to say, maybe the funnel is top of funnel, right? It’s Instagram followers, it’s a blog followers. Then it’s some free offering via email. So you capture a bit broader and the ask isn’t monetary. And then using that email list to say, hey, we have this class coming up. And it probably can be a both end, but helpful to have just general email subscribers not associated with the purchase.

Bjork Ostrom: But also if there are people who are purchasing on Airsubs or whatever it might be, then you have both of those places where you can say, “Hey, I have people who have repeat customers.” Those are the easiest customers to have be customers again. And people have said, I want a more closer relationship with you than just following on Instagram, I’m going to sign up for your email list. You can market through that as well.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s an unlock for a lot of creators and we can kind of wrap on this, where a lot of people said, what do I do with my email list? Pentagram has whatever it is, 150,000, 100,000 email subscribers, what do we do with them? And it’s like, well, we’re just trying to figure out how to send a more helpful information, but we’re not really selling anything.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s easier with Food Blogger Pro, we have a membership, which is essentially a version of what Airsubs is doing. It’s content that you are selling and then you’re creating content around that for free, this podcast, and then talking about the membership. So you can see the model makes sense to me. There just hasn’t really been a good way to piece that together, which I think that you guys are doing. Obviously a lot of people are going to be interested Tomas in following up and learning a little bit more. Maybe even demoing a class. I know that you have some folks who, some great testimonials on your site, some super fit guys on there. The fitspo for me as I scroll through there. But if people want to check out Airsubs, learn a little bit more about it and maybe even take a class that somebody offering to see what that looks like, what’s the best way to do that?

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah, definitely. So you can always find us on at airsubs.com, and you can sign up right there to create your virtual studio, create your virtual cooking school. You can email me tomas2airsubs.com. You can follow us at Airsubs on Instagram. Those are great places to hear from us. If you go to airsubs.com/summit, we actually just recently did a conference for food creators where we had some really amazing people come speak about how they built engaged communities, how they’re using virtual classes and how they built big six-figure businesses doing virtual events over the course of the last year.

Tomas Hoyos: The recordings of those sessions are on that page. So feel free to reach out to us or to me. It’s been amazing to see the community in and around food uses to bring people together and deliver a ton of joy over the last year. It’s been a really hard year for a lot of people. And I think one thing that’s interesting too is that from what we’re seeing, this is here to stay. Folks from all over the world who want to cook with you, they want to get together with the community, they want to make something delicious. And so it’s kind of been amazing to see it take shape and continue to grow.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. That’s great. And I did what most people do to me. I would say two to three times a week, people will say Bjorn, good to see you or I’ll introduce myself and they’ll be like, oh yeah, Bjorn, Tomas. I said, Thomas. Does that happen to you more or less than people call me Bjorn?

Tomas Hoyos: I get everything. But I actually didn’t even notice.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. That’s what I sometimes say, even when I notice. So I might call you out on that.

Tomas Hoyos: Yeah. You’re all good.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Well, appreciate it. Thanks so much for coming on. I know that there… This is my prediction. There’s going to be a handful of people who will be inspired by this, will move forward with it, it’ll make a huge impact on them. And that’s what we’re all about. Tiny bit exists, our parent company over Food Blogger Pro to help people get a tiny bit better every day forever. And I think this would be a piece of the puzzle for some people, eye-opening and potentially life-changing. So Tomas, thanks for coming on the podcast. We appreciate it.

Tomas Hoyos: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Bjork Ostrom: Another thank you to Tomas for coming on and talking through Airsubs, not only his story in building the business, which is always interesting, but also the stories of creators who have had success with creating courses or creating experiences where they are able to bring a group of people together to teach something, but also to gather people together digitally to kind of hang out, something that we’ve realized is an important thing to do in a time where you’re not spending a lot of time with people. Hopefully that changes little by little.

Bjork Ostrom: But my hope in having this conversation is to kind of broaden the focus of what we are doing as creators and to let you know there’s other ways that we can be thinking strategically about business building. And as much as you can diversify the types of revenue as possible, you’ll build in stability to your business. Because as things change, we think back to March and April of last year, a huge change in how our business has worked. Advertising spend went way down, at least in the food and recipe area. But if you had other areas that you’re creating an income, maybe you had, you were using Airsubs or a comparable type of kind of product offering, you would be able to kind of diversify a little bit and you’d have a safety net when one area shifts and changes and pivots.

Bjork Ostrom: So a great conversation, a great business, one that we’d encourage you to check out if that’s something you’re interested in and appreciate you listening to this podcast. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be able to do this. So each and every week, it’s a joy to be able to share these interviews that we have. I know that I learned a lot from them. And my hope is that you do as well. The reason we exist is because we want you to help get a tiny bit better everyday forever. I hope this podcast episode did that for you. And we will be back here, same time, same place next week. Thanks.

Bjork Ostrom: Very excited to have Nisha on the podcast today. For the first time ever, we are doing a intro during the actual interview, so I’m going to set this up. You can let me know how accurate it is, Nisha. We’re going to be talking about a lot of different things today, growing your business with success within the past few years, which is great because a lot of people are like, hey, you have these people who have been blogging for like 12 years, which is great, but I want to talk to somebody who’s built something in a short period of time. You’ve done that. We’re going to talk about leaving your job as a successful attorney. We’re going to be talking about backpacking around the world. We’re going to be talking about hiring a team, which you’re starting to do, which is so important.

Bjork Ostrom: Then also, a lot of different platforms that you’ve had success on your blog, Instagram, YouTube. Anything I’m missing there or does that do a good recap intro of what we’ll be hitting here today?

Nisha Vora: I think that sounds good. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Cool. Welcome to the podcast. Super excited to talk to you, Nisha, for a lot of the reasons that I talked about before. Before we jumped into talking about your blog, your site, your business, I wanted to rewind the tape a little bit to 2014, where you have this kind of pivotal moment, it seems like, from reading about your story a little bit, where you leave your job as a successful attorney, successful lawyer, whatever bucket you’d want to put that in, and take six months to backpack around the world with your partner. What was that time in your life like, and why did you decide to pull the rip cord on your currently successful career and have a big shift?

Nisha Vora: Well, thank you so much for having me on the podcast, Bjork, big fan, so really excited to be here. Yes, 2014, definitely a pivotal moment in my life. I had been working as a corporate lawyer, one of those like big law firms on Wall Street for two years after law school and hated it as much as you could imagine hating a job for many reasons. I had the markings of success, like the trappings of success. I went to a “prestigious” law school. I’m using air quotes for people who can’t see. I was working at a prestigious law firm, I had done all the things like I was supposed to do in my field in terms of being successful, but I was miserable.

Nisha Vora: I was like, why am I living this kind of life where I dread getting up in the morning, even though I’m a morning person. I live for the weekends, but I can’t even enjoy my weekends because I might have to work, and I’m just living in a constant state of anxiety. My partner was also working a lot when we decided to just kind of up and quit. We’ve been planning for a couple of months about where do we want to travel and like how were we going to make it happen and how were we going to budget it? It was probably the biggest risk I had taken up to that point, being a very type A risk averse person.

Bjork Ostrom: At what point in that process did you know like, oh shoot, I’ve spent a lot of time building up to this being my career and now I don’t want this to be my career?

Nisha Vora: It wasn’t that dramatic because I knew that I didn’t want to work at a big corporate law firm for the rest of my life. I knew that was going to be kind of a short-term thing, but I also knew that I was young and that I didn’t really have that many other opportunities to do something this interesting and this off the beaten path, and it just felt like I was really stuck in that moment and I wanted to explore something different, and I definitely did that while we were traveling.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. In those six months, what do you feel like you learned coming out of it about yourself and career?

Nisha Vora: I call it my eat, pray, love moment, like as a joke.

Bjork Ostrom: But also seriously.

Nisha Vora: Yeah, it’s like you discover, what are the things that make me happy in life? What are the steps I need to do to build an intentionally conscious, purposeful, happy life, because being happy requires work in some sense, like you have to create practices that you cultivate and stick to. It just doesn’t like fall from the sky, and I really wanted to be more intentional about how I was living my life in a way that aligned with my values, but also would just make me happy and enjoy myself.

Nisha Vora: I’ve never been shy of working hard, so it wasn’t like I didn’t want to work hard, but I wanted to work hard for something that I was genuinely interested in. We had a couple of moments along the way during our travels where it was very clear to me that like, oh wait, you only have one life to live. Again, super corny, super cheesy, super vague.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, super real.

Nisha Vora: But also you’re like, oh no, but I really just have this one life, and if I’m not living it with purpose and with intention, anyways, I desire to make the world a better place and to make myself a better person, then what is the point?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you remember one of those moments when you were on that trip and you’re like, oh my gosh, one life to live.

Nisha Vora: Yes. We were in Nepal. We did a long, like three week … It was supposed to be a three week trek in the Himalayan Mountains. It was an October, which is supposed to be their best season for trekking. Unfortunately, there was a freak avalanche on the route we were on and actually like 40 people died, and they were a few days ahead of us on their trucks. So, it was just a complete freak accident and it was really scary. With hindsight, I was like, that could have been us. Things like that will definitely kick your butt into gear in terms of like, figuring out what kind of life you want to live.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting. Just this morning, I recorded a podcast, we’re doing this series called Book Nook, and it’s recapping certain books that we’ve enjoyed or talked about on the podcast. One of them is E-Myth, the E-Myth Revisited, and in that book, he talks a lot about how your business is a component of your life and you have to be just as intentional with building your life as you do with your business. I think a lot of what we do, and a lot of what people are interested in when they are building a business is also figuring out how to fit that well within their life. What is something that both I’m passionate about, I’m interested in, but then also, aligns with how I want to be living? Coming out of that, what did that look like? What did you change about your life and the work that you’re doing?

Nisha Vora: I returned back to New York city where we were living and I continued practicing law, but in a much different environment that was more aligned with my values of justice and equality. I also scaled back on the things that I thought were making me happy, like living in a luxury apartment and going to fancy dinners. It was more like, oh, no, the things I enjoy are spending time with friends and family, even if it’s not in a super fancy schmancy setting. I practiced basically non-profit law for almost two years, but after the first few months, I knew that there was still something missing. I felt more comfortable in that environment. I felt like I was working towards something better. But I just knew that I wasn’t really supposed to be practicing law.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. At what point did you realize that, like you were like, oh my gosh, this actually isn’t for me?

Nisha Vora: Yeah. Probably like six months in because I had great work hours at this point. I was working like 9:00 to 6:00, instead of like 9:00 to 10:00 or these crazy law firm hours. I was working with incredible human beings who were just like the most selfless, wonderful, loving people. It still wasn’t clicking, and a lot of the work I was doing was in court and I just hated the adversarial nature of it. I’m like, I should have known that’s what I signed up for. But until I was put into the situations, I didn’t realize how much I hated being in those conflict heavy situations.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Have you ever done StrengthsFinder? It’s like a personality quiz and it gives you your top five strengths. One of them is harmony. For me, every time I’ve done it, it’s like, harmony is always like a strength. I just really don’t like when there’s people that are disagreeing on things, which is like, I’m okay with it and we can work through it, but it’s like, I have friends who seek that out. It’s like, oh, they’re great attorneys. Those are people who you want to argue and argue hard and not give up. Whereas, if I’m in a situation like that, as quickly as possible, I want to get to a point where people are understood, they feel good about where everybody’s at.

Nisha Vora: Yeah, I wanted to make people feel good.

Bjork Ostrom: It sounds like a version of that was true for you. Whereas like, hey, I don’t necessarily want to be in continual situations where people are in disagreement.

Nisha Vora: Yeah, and there was also the more structural issues of like, I went to law school super naive and bright eyed thinking that I could use the law to change the world and help people. It’s a really conservative, static force that is hard to change. Obviously, it does change on occasion and very slowly, but I felt like I wasn’t really able to make changes in people’s lives in the way I thought that I could have very nicely.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Was the next version of what you imagined doing like publishing content online and building a brand?

Nisha Vora: No. When I had this second job where I had better hours, I just started posting to Instagram my food photos as a hobby. I have always loved cooking and food. I started teaching myself how to cook when I was a teenager. I was like, oh, I have all this free time. I’m just going to do this as a creative outlet. I didn’t even really know what a food blogger was at the time, aside from the fact that I had been to food blogs, but I didn’t know what it was like as a job. So, it was definitely just starting as just a fun outlet.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and at what point were you like, hey, I could actually do this?

Nisha Vora: I could actually do this, there’s two chapters to that. After about, I don’t know, eight months of doing, just like food Instagram really is all I was doing. I had a blog, but it was more related to the things I was talking about earlier like my experiments with happiness and the things I had learned from traveling. But I was like, oh, I’m having this success on Instagram. I’m like really enjoying this food space. Can I leverage that into a job, like an actual job at a food startup or food publication? Then a couple of years later, I was like, okay, can I leverage this into my full-time business?

Nisha Vora: I went to work at a food startup starting at the very beginning of 2017 at a place called Hungryroot. It’s like a healthy, casual, fast-food startup, delivering food in New York City and across the country. I started there doing social media, like recipes, photography, all these things. I was like, hey, look, I can do this on Instagram. I can do this for you too. I was doing that while I was building my own business on the side.

Bjork Ostrom: Did you know at that point? My experience was, when I was at a nonprofit, they needed help doing like random IT stuff. I was like, awesome, I’m interested in that. I know it’s somewhere that I kind of want to go generally speaking. Did you know at that point that the work that you were doing was leading up to something that you eventually wanted to do as a business owner? Or did it happen just to be that you came out of that with those skills and abilities that then you just, instead of working for another company, you folded that into what you wanted to do. Did you know it was kind of like on the job training for being an entrepreneur and building what is essentially a publishing business?

Nisha Vora: When I started, absolutely not. Again, I didn’t really know that people did this for a full-time living. I was just trying to get out of law and leverage my new found creative skills and to work where I was getting paid, I was getting a salary, I had benefits, and I was like, I liked the workplace, I liked the people, I liked the job. Initially, it was definitely not like, I’m going to then use these skills to start my own business. It was more that like Rainbow Plant Life continued to grow as a side hustle while I was working there and eventually it just became too much to do all of them at the same time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting. Lindsay and I had a similar experience where we’re working our full-time jobs and also working to build the thing that we’re trying to build. At some point, you realize you’re doing essentially two full-time things and you can’t do that for a long period of time. How did you know when to make the switch, and how did you feel confident in making that switch?

Nisha Vora: A couple reasons, I felt like it was time. One, I just knew that I was having this itch to be my own boss. I think that’s something I’ve probably had in my DNA. My dad is the same way. He’s like, I’ll never work for anyone else, once I’ve worked for myself kind of thing.

Bjork Ostrom: What did your dad do or does do?

Nisha Vora: He’s a doctor. He’s like semi-retired now, but he started his own practice without very much knowledge or money in a small town, and was just like, I’m never going to work for anyone else. So, probably part of my DNA. But also, I truthfully had a little bit of a mental health crisis. I was just working so much like 5:00 AM to 10:00 PM, Monday through Friday, probably eight to 12 hours on the weekend. I was just doing too much, and I felt like I couldn’t do the best at either of my jobs and I knew I needed to make a change. I felt like I had gotten a lot out of the job that I was working out in the food startup.

Nisha Vora: I had gone from just doing basic stuff on Instagram to managing really large photo shoots and things like that. I felt like I had developed a lot of important skills and gotten a lot out of it, and I just felt like it was time. The biggest, I think, not hurdle, but the thing that was stopping me was like stability. Again, being a lawyer in the past, I’m a risk averse person. I was like, am I going to be able to make a stable income? I would have taken a pay cut, that would have been fine. I just needed to know like, will I be able to make enough money to make ends meet, especially living in New York City? But yeah, it felt like the right time to make that switch.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. At that point, did you have like a year track record with your business and saying like, okay, I know that if I look back at how much I’ve earned from the site, Instagram, YouTube, whatever, it would be that, with some level of predictability, I can have this moving forward? Or did you have to backfill that and say, now that I’m focusing on this full-time, I’m really going to have to hustle to fill the gaps in order to live in New York City, pay rent, do all the things that you need to do, because I think a lot of people struggle with that.

Bjork Ostrom: When you are capped out, do you cut what you’re doing and say, now I’m going to focus on this full-time and really try and make it work, or do you do whatever you can to get to the point where you can get on the low end of what it takes to sustain day-to-day, and then make the switch once you’ve gotten there? For Lindsay and I, that’s what it was. We were coming from jobs, where number one, we live in the Midwest in Minnesota. Lindsay was a teacher and I worked at a nonprofit, so our lifestyle-

Nisha Vora: You weren’t making-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. We didn’t have a huge amount to replace from a lifestyle perspective, but still, there was a little bit of nervousness around that. We were really slow to make that transition. What did that look like for you?

Nisha Vora: I definitely wasn’t making that much in my business when I quit, because I wasn’t able to focus on that stuff. I didn’t even have ads on my blog at the time. I don’t think I had … I probably have enough traffic to have ads, but I did not have ads at all. I had a very small YouTube audience at that point, so I certainly wasn’t making enough or really that much at all. But I did have the cookbook, so I had written a cookbook. Probably my cookbook came out like a month before I quit, so I had like advances from that. It was a nice chunk of change.

Nisha Vora: I had savings from my past jobs, so I didn’t have a very clear sense of all the different ways I was going to scale up my business monetary-wise, but I also knew that I’m super hardworking. I’m pretty good at what I do and I knew that there was so much more room for improvement and optimization. Talking to other friends who were doing this full-time, I was like, I’m sure that I could make it happen, and if I don’t after a year, then I will reevaluate and try to find a more traditional job back in the workforce. So, it was-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think that’s something that sometimes people forget is like, it’s not do I do this or do I not do this? It’s you can make the decision to do it, but then also have a fallback. Like, hey, in a year, if I’m not there, I can fall back on these other things, whether that be, in your case, you could do law. You have the skills and abilities to do photography, recipe development, you can product manage, or project manage. If you were to go back and look at that time period where you did make the switch, would you have done anything different?

Nisha Vora: I would’ve made it sooner, honestly, for my mental health.

Bjork Ostrom: Why is that.

Nisha Vora: As I mentioned, just spent too many months being frazzled and all over the place. Also, again, I didn’t know that this could be a very financially lucrative career. I really had no sense of, if you could optimize certain things, then you could make a nice living. I think I would’ve just done it earlier and then I would have started this earlier in terms of … Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like, you don’t know until you know. With Rainbow Plant Life, you had mentioned that before, that’s your brand, what were the things that you did optimize early that were the most impactful? You get into it, now you have this time, you’re used to working 12 hour days, so it’s like you’re willing to hustle and work hard and you say, okay, I need to make this work as a business, what were those things that were most impactful?

Nisha Vora: I would say honestly, the first six months weren’t that impactful in at least in terms of the output and the results I could see. I was definitely putting in a lot of work on the input side. But I think the first six, maybe nine months were like building up towards that, getting the momentum, figuring out how to better write a blog post, figuring out how to like produce a more thoughtful well-planned out YouTube video. I think spending a lot of time on the analytics of my YouTube channel really helped it grow as much as it has in the last year.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about that? I think that’s a really … You had said two things within that. A thoughtful well or well-thought out YouTube video and then spending time within the analytics. How do you do that and what was the outcome for you doing that?

Nisha Vora: The how you do that part is a shout out to my partner who is like very analytical minded and loves sitting with the numbers, and I don’t at all. One, I just am not a numbers person, but I also think it kind of pulls away the creativity from me by focusing on all that. So, it’s a lot of him looking at that and saying like, okay, your watch time was really high in this month and that’s because we did two videos that really brought in a bunch of new audience members, and like, we should iterate on that and create more videos like this, or your audience retention is really low in this video. It’s probably because you just blabbed on at the beginning without getting straight to the point. Next video’s like, your intro has to be super tight and needs to be like 20 seconds or less whatever.

Nisha Vora: Then thoughtful planning out of videos, so I think when I first started YouTube a couple of years ago, I literally did not watch YouTube at all. I didn’t know how, why people came to YouTube, what they were looking for, and I was just like, oh, other vegan creators are making videos like three healthy salad recipes or three overnight oats recipes. I was like, maybe I will do that. It was never content I was super interested in because I would much rather create recipes where I’m like teaching how to cook and I’m showing you something a little special or a little bit extra.

Nisha Vora: And so in the last year, give or take, I’ve been like, okay, let’s be thoughtful about the content that I’m creating and making sure that it’s on brand, making sure that I’m giving value to the audience and not just doing what every other content creator is doing.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s such a hard thing to do though, because you see other people doing something and you’re like, I need to do that same thing.

Nisha Vora: Yeah, and of course, you might have success with it, but if someone else has already done it first and has done it better than you, you’re probably not going to see success with that, and also just in terms of like delivering value, how much more value are you delivering if we’re just doing an iteration of what someone else is doing, even if it’s totally different recipes, you’re not copying the recipes, but it’s still not super valued.

Bjork Ostrom: It seems like there’s kind of a cool balance that you have there, which is figuring out what your brand is, what’s on brand, who am I as a content creator, along with, how do people respond to the content that I’m creating, and then allowing the analytics and the data to inform how you are going to change as a content creator, as opposed to just looking at what somebody else is doing and saying like, well, I’m going to try that. An example being like tightening up and making sure that you have a short to the point intro.

Bjork Ostrom: It was one of the things I noticed when I was watching some of your videos is like, hey, you jump into it really quick, and the significance of watch time as it relates to a short intro. There’s a couple of things with YouTube that you mentioned watch time, and then there’s another, I forget what the other one was, but can you talk about some of the data that’s available in the YouTube backend and what you’d consider to be the most important data and the most important metrics about YouTube, knowing that maybe it’s not this place that you spend most of the time, if you’re like grocery, I’ll check isle seven for that stuff, and then people can go and learn more about it on their own, but what would you consider to be the most important metrics for YouTube?

Nisha Vora: Yeah, I would say watch time. That’s like the amount of time watched of your video. So, if you have a 10 minute video, but only three minutes of your video were watched, like maybe that’s not the best time, but if seven or eight minutes of your video are watched, like that’s probably quite good. The way to improve your watch time, again, part of it is like hooking your viewer in the beginning without giving them all this extra fluff. Unless of course, you’re already an established channel and maybe you’re known for vlogging and people are like, would you just spew off the cuff? Finding that hook, and then like, a lot of things that help are like constant cutting of different angles, like different like B roll.

Nisha Vora: Keeping the audience engaged instead of just you doing one thing on camera or just showing an overhead like, oh, and then I’m going to add this to the overhead shot and then this and this. You just like, you want to like provide different angles and different cuts and different jump cuts so people are staying engaged. The other that are, I think, important, I guess, I mentioned audience retention earlier. So, if you, within the first 30 seconds lose 50% of your audience, that’s really bad. You need to think about, how can I get at maybe like 60% or 70%, whatever the metric that you want to work up to, to get them to stay within the first 30 seconds.

Nisha Vora: Part of doing that is again, not blabbing in the beginning about use of things, but also delivering on what your title and thumbnail promised, and this is something I’m still working on., so I don’t want to pretend I’m an expert because I’m not. But if your title says that you’re going to teach someone how to make the best lasagna and you have this beautiful photo was on you in the thumbnail, but in the first 30 seconds, you’re talking about how your grandmother used to make you lasagna, and it’s just this narrative part, and you don’t see any actual lasagna that looks like the best lasagna, people are going to click out of that.

Nisha Vora: I think, overall in terms of YouTube, views in general are the most important relative to like subscriber account. You can have a relatively small channel and still, if you make an excellent video on a topic that people really want to watch or are searching for, you could get hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of views, even if you have a small account. It’s a little bit more of a meritocracy, think then like Instagram or having a blog. Yeah, that was a lot.

Bjork Ostrom: No, that’s great. It’s interesting, some of the videos that I watch, one, because I get sucked in because they’re so good for that exact same reason, but also almost as an observation of content creators on YouTube of which we’re … That’s not as specialty for us, but I’m interested in just from a content platform. I think of MrBeast Have you ever watched any MrBeast videos?

Nisha Vora: I’ve seen a couple, but I know he’s huge.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not like you’re going to have a MrBeast swag that you’re wearing or something, but for anybody who is interested in YouTube, I feel like it’s a great channel to check out, because some of the things that you talked about, like delivering on the title of what it is and how quickly things move, it’s amazing in a movie, in a TV show, or on YouTube, how quickly you have to cut from one thing to the next. It’s like a few seconds sometimes in between, and MrBeast content, the longer form stuff does a really good job of showing that. It’s like three seconds here, three seconds there, and it’s really significant things that they’re showing.

Bjork Ostrom: You could probably do a minute just in one area, whatever it is, like digging out a car to try and find the car keys, then you win … It’s like all of these crazy weird things, but it moves so quickly, and that just being so important for YouTube. You have YouTube, you have Instagram, that’s kind of where you started. You have your blog. Would you consider one of those to be the most valuable platform, and do you focus on one of those more than the others?

Nisha Vora: Oh, that’s a good question. I started with Instagram. I don’t think it’s the most valuable, I think it’s great for building a community and I love my community there, and so this is not to say that they’re not beautiful. I love being in my DMs with my people, all this stuff.

Bjork Ostrom: Not an observation that people can follow you there, but just like, yeah, business value.

Nisha Vora: I mean, I think it’s monetizing now. Maybe that’s going to be helpful for creators.

Bjork Ostrom: Through sponsor content?

Nisha Vora: I think they’re also monetizing IGTV, but IGTV is kind of dead, so I don’t really know what the plan is, but it also doesn’t drive traffic. If I look at my analytics, it’s such a tiny percentage of the traffic that goes to my blog relative to how big my audience is there. YouTube, on the other hand, is I would say the opposite. The people there are so much more engaged with you as a person because you’re on camera, whereas you can be on camera on Instagram, but if you’re a food blogger, it’s mostly your food that you’re presenting, and so a little harder for people to get invested in you as a person and you and your content, because there’s so many other food photos to look at. I think YouTube is super valuable for creating a very engaged audience that’s really, really interested in what you’re doing and when your next video is coming out.

Nisha Vora: They’re also going to be super excited to try your recipe. I think now, whenever I release a video, there are tons of people who are making my recipe that same day. They’re like super excited about it. Whereas like, maybe they’re doing on Instagram. I have no way of knowing, but there’s just so much more excitement around people who are following you on YouTube consistently, and they’re also going to be better, I think, blog readers in the sense that they’re spending more time on the page, at least from what I can gather. They’re more likely to leave a comment or rate the recipe or things like that.

Nisha Vora: I have a hard time comparing the blog with YouTube or Instagram because it’s not social media. It’s a bit different, but it is, I think super valuable in terms of building your credibility as a recipe developer, because that’s where people get the recipes from and that’s where they’re going to see whether it works or not and they’re going to leave they’re glowing or not so glowing reviews. Obviously it’s monetized, so you’re going to be getting what is essentially passive income for content that you might want to already create. But I don’t really know how to compare the blog with social media.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting. One of the things I see sometimes is somebody is like all in on YouTube and they are kind of a YouTube personality, and then the blog is almost like this afterthought where maybe they post their YouTube videos to that, or you see people who are all in on their blog, Pinch of Yum is going to be an example of this, and YouTube as an afterthought, where like, we have these videos, they’re kind of optimized for Instagram. They’re may be like a minute long. We’re going to post them to YouTube. As you know, that’s not a great way to produce content on YouTube, but I think you … What’s interesting with what you’re doing is, it’s a really good balance between both.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re doing an awesome job on YouTube, have a really strong following there, 500,000 plus, and you have a really well done site and a really quality site. The balance between those seems like a really hard thing to do. I’m interested to know, how do you do that? What does your day to day look like? Are you still working 12 hour days, but it just feels better because it’s work that you like? What does the day to day, week to week look like for you as a creator?

Nisha Vora: The one thing I will say real quick is that this is my planner and this is what that helps me stay like super organized in terms of like the different buckets, because I like, we’ll do a weekly review. I just did it this morning. There are the buckets of like, okay, here are the things that need to get done for YouTube, here are the things I need done for Instagram and for blog, and Pinterest, and all the different things. Some of it overlaps and some of it’s like very distinct. I try to set aside certain days for those kinds of things, although now that I’m writing my second cookbook, it’s like a little bit messier. But also, I mentioned my partner, he unofficially works part-time with Rainbow Plant Life.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Assistant? Is it Max?

Nisha Vora: His name’s Max.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, okay. Great.

Nisha Vora: He does a lot of the administrative upkeep and the operational stuff that I don’t have time to, so that helps to keep me organized. I have various people on my team who aren’t like full-time, but are really good at what they do, and so they help to like pick up the things in certain areas that I don’t have time for. Yeah, I still work a lot, but I also love it and it’s really exciting to be able to work on a business that I’m building that is super valuable to, I think, at least valuable to my readers and to my audience members, and also super valuable to me. I probably should work a little bit less, but I also, at the same time, really enjoy it. It’s a tricky balance.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s the thing that’s interesting to observe is, you could potentially be working the exact same amount that you were when you were a lawyer, but your relationship with that work might be different. I know that’s the case for me. If I have a really long day with work that I have a bad relationship with, that I don’t look forward to, or that I don’t enjoy the feeling of that is different if I have a really long day of work that I really enjoy. We kind of use this, it’s like there’s only one word for snow in the English language, but in other countries where there’s snow all the time, Minnesotas, we should probably have more than one word for it.

Nisha Vora: Yeah, you should.

Bjork Ostrom: They have multiple ways to describe snow, but I feel like the same could be true for work, right? You could work 12 hour day, and it could be like terrible work or awesome work, and what it feels like to come out of that is very different. At the same time, you had talked about starting to work with people who are supporting you. A lot of times, that happens within our family, whether that be, I know people who have hired or brought on their parents, sometimes a spouse, kids, depending on where people are at in their family and who’s available and interested and willing to help out, but it sounds like you’re also working with some people to support you who are outside of your family.

Bjork Ostrom: What did that look like to start building that team? I saw that you’re now also hiring somebody in kind of like a 20 to 30 hour capacity. So, it’s like, oh, this is officially starting to get into building a team. It’s not just you now and your daily planner, it’s now building that out into other people and sharing tasks and projects. What does it look like now and what are you building towards in terms of building a team?

Nisha Vora: My goal, at least for now is to take everything off my plate that I don’t think I’m the best at, or that I really don’t have the time for and don’t want to make the time for. I hired a video editor last year to edit a lot of my videos, not all of them, but the YouTube ones, some other things. I don’t dislike video editing, but I don’t have advanced skills, and it also takes up a lot of time. I have an assistant who works remotely and does a lot of behind the scenes social media stuff, Pinterest stuff, again, stuff that I could do, but I’m not necessarily great at, and she’s much better at, and it’s off my plate.

Nisha Vora: I am hiring right now for an in-person role to be like in the kitchen with me, who’s going to test all the recipes who’s going to like help me tweak recipes, just do a lot of kitchen things that I could for instance, develop three recipes a week instead of one right now if I had someone else doing that kind of stuff for me. I hired a CPA because I literally have zero interest or desire to look at the taxes and the financial stuff. Finding little areas where I’m like, this could save 10 hours of my week or this could save five hours a week or this could save 20 hours of my week. How can I do that? Now that I … COVID is sort of slowly lifting up and people are getting back…

Bjork Ostrom: Better than it was at its worst, for sure. Yeah.

Nisha Vora: Yes. I wanted to start hiring someone in-person literally, I was thinking about it last March and then obviously that couldn’t be done. As things start to get back into a little bit of a safer place, I’m definitely interested in continuing to build it more of a team that I can work with, maybe not every day in person, but a little bit more for structure and things like that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. How did you find some of those, like the assistant that you worked with and then the video editor? I think once you get into the rhythm of doing it, you kind of discover, oh, especially as a creator blogger, you have a built-in audience and people who understand you and kind of you know that they’ve self-selected into being … In your case, it’s like, there’s a good chance they’ll be vegan, and that’s probably an important piece for somebody who’s going to be recipe testing that they understand that. But how did you find those early people? What did that look like to bring on employee number one or team member number two or whatever you would want to call it?

Nisha Vora: My assistant was someone in my community who reached out and we kind of took it from there. For like the more contractor roles, I would say, where they’re like, we do video editing or we do blog maintenance or whatever, it was a lot of looking at what other people were doing in terms of like, if they listed, who they worked with, or if it was someone I knew, and I asked like, who are you working with? And are you willing to share that information? Or looking at websites for instance, and seeing like, who did the website or who do they list as like their point of contact for X thing that they do a Y thing, and kind of like going down a rabbit hole. So, it’s a little bit of a mix of both. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: What I love about that is I think one of the shortcuts that we can have as business owners is figuring out who, not what. It’s actually the title of a book. I was talking with my friend Bruno the other day, who has a site called InfluenceKit. It looks like Dan Sullivan, Benjamin Hardy are the authors, but the idea is like, you know that you need blog maintenance. You don’t know exactly specifically what it is that you want, but you know, if you find who it is that that does it and does it well, it’s going to be a shortcut to getting that done. I feel like accounting and CPA work is a great example of that. But essentially, finding the people who are really good at it, bringing them on and saying, I want you to do what you are good at in this capacity.

Bjork Ostrom: I think of another example of four TinyBit, which is the parent company over Pinch of Yum Food Blogger Pro. We knew that it’s going to get really complicated from a finance perspective, because we have one parent company and then these companies underneath. So, we were working with a fractional CFO who has a history in private equity, which is … They would buy all these companies and operate them. So, we’re like this really tiny version of what he used to do, but it’s great because I don’t even know sometimes what I need to know.

Bjork Ostrom: It sounds like you’re starting to look at doing that where it’s like, hey, bring in a CPA. Great. I don’t want to do accounting. They know accounting. The key piece to what you’ve talked about is finding people in similar industries. It’s helpful if you can reach out to people you know, maybe you’re in a group, Food Blogger Pro. You could go in and post to the forums. People have done this, hey, we need to CPA, ideally somebody in California, does anybody know anybody? If you have somebody who can say, yeah, we work with this person and they understand blogging and publishing, there’s going to be a shortcut there. You’re not going to have to explain stuff. They’re going to know, and they’re going to understand it.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have thoughts on how big you’d want to grow that? Do you have an ideal of like, hey, I would love to be a five person team, but no bigger than that. Then the second piece of that is, do you always want to be kind of the front and center? Is this going to be a personality driven brand where Nisha is the business and the brand, or can you see it building beyond that at some point?

Nisha Vora: For the first question, I don’t know. I am not someone who has like a five-year plan or a ten-year plan. I am very organized, but I also try to like stick to what’s happening now or what’s happening in the near future. I don’t have any specific thoughts about how big I want the team to grow or how big I might be able to grow it.

Bjork Ostrom: Which I wouldn’t have an answer for that either. Yeah.

Nisha Vora: As for the personality, I love what I do and I love the community I’ve created and I’m creating. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, but I have been having these conversations recently with other creators who have written cookbooks as well. As I think alluded to, I’m writing my second one now. It’s hard to be both a social media personality and a cookbook person. I think they’re kind of separate realms, where most people who write successful cookbooks are either chefs or have worked in test kitchens or food publications or things like that. They’re taken very seriously as food writers and as chefs or as cooks. Maybe some of them do social media really well, but most of them are … It’s a little bit like they have it, but it’s not like their main thing.

Nisha Vora: A lot of social media people are like, they might have a huge audience and a huge community, but they’re not necessarily thought of as like serious recipe developers or really people where you’re going to get the best recipes from. I’ve been having these just internal conversations, a little bit external, but mostly internal thoughts about like, which one do I want to be? Can I be both successfully, because it’s really hard to do both from a time perspective, but also from just, how do you want to be perceived? That’s kind of what I’ve been thinking.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have a leaning at this point?

Nisha Vora: I would like to be able to do both and I just don’t know if that’s … Technically, I am doing both right now, but I think I need to have the conversation with myself. Like, do I want to continue writing cookbooks? Do I want to be a corporate person? I’m writing my second one now, but do I want to maybe write like five cookbooks in the future or do I want to just continue building my business through social and through my blog? Maybe if I expand the team, I can do both, but it’s just an open question I have for myself right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you have to pause on certain things that you’re doing within your operating business, social media, recipe development, things like that for the blog in order to do the cookbook, or do you try and do both at the same capacity?

Nisha Vora: I mean, currently, I’m doing both. I have a few days of the week where I’m just mostly primarily working on the cookbook. Yeah, as a result, I can only upload to YouTube twice every two weeks instead of every week. I’m probably only sharing one new recipe on my blog per week as opposed to like two or three, which is probably what I was doing last year. Yeah, I post to Instagram now apparently two, three times a week as opposed to everyday. It hasn’t really made a huge difference, maybe a small difference, but I also am really, really excited about the cookbook stuff and need to just like spend more time on it. I’m telling you this to ingrain it into my head to remind myself.

Bjork Ostrom: For sure. I think one of the interesting things that I’ve noticed is I think those compliment each other. I think more and more you’re seeing people have success with cookbooks because they have a following, they have a strong YouTube following, they have a strong Instagram, they have a strong blog following, and publishers being really interested in people who can do like built-in promotion, which to some sense, somebody who is even a celebrity chef, unless they do have a strong following, maybe doesn’t have in the same regard like a celebrity chef would more than somebody who’s really deep experienced without a following.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think also, what you’re seeing is, going through the process of publishing a cookbook is a huge validation for areas that don’t have as much like credential validation. Anybody can start a blog, anybody can start an Instagram account, but not everybody can sign a deal to publish a cookbook. Those two compliment each other really well. The hard thing, to your point, is actually executing on both of those things, especially at the same time, but I see like both of those being such a great compliment and something that allows you to, on both sides, grow quicker and faster if you’re able to pull that off. One of the questions that I do have related to growth is, as you look back at the past three, four years that you’ve been doing this, four to five, what would be the accurate? 2017, four?

Nisha Vora: I would say 2017, because 2016 I had started my Instagram, but like I didn’t share recipe … It was for fun.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Past four years, relatively short amount of time, when you think about bootstrapping, meaning it’s not like you’re taking outside funding or anything like that, so it’s just you sweat equity, a content business, which also takes a lot of time. Like, if you’re building a software product and it takes off and people are interested in it, you can grow up quicker. Content’s a little bit harder. What do you feel like were the growth levers, if you’d call them that, that you were able to change or adjust or pull as you were going through the process of building this thing, or is it more of like showing up every day and figuring out how to produce stuff that’s valuable? Is it that, or were there things where you were like, this was something that kind of unlocked the next level of growth?

Nisha Vora: Definitely both. An example of a growth lever that we unlocked, I think, is just having … Optimizing my blog. I was on Squarespace literally until Christmas of last year. Squarespace makes beautiful websites of whatever they say, but they’re not good for food blogs and I had a very unoptimized blog there in terms of SEO, but also reader usability, so many things. Once we switched over to WordPress, like around Christmas of last year, so it hasn’t … It’s been like three months, I guess, it was an enormous shift in terms of traffic, time spent on page, to reader satisfaction, all of these things.

Nisha Vora: It’s a lot of hard work though, so to your second point, it’s like being really being willing to put in the hard work every day. I don’t want to glorify overworking because I think we have enough of that, but like …

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, you’ve been down that path.

Nisha Vora: If you want to build a successful content business, as you said, it’s a constant thing. You don’t just get to create content for two weeks and then you’re set for the rest of the … You have to be willing to show up every day, work hard, and also iterate on what works and kind of say by to what doesn’t work. For me, that like involves a mix of looking at what my audience specifically likes, but also doing a little mix of what I want to do, because what I want to do sometimes diverges a little bit, and if I didn’t do what I wanted to do, sometimes I probably wouldn’t be as happy.

Nisha Vora: I think there’s a lot of learning curves with all of these platforms, especially a blog and YouTube, and really investing the time into learning the things that you need to about those, whether it’s again, like we talked about, increasing your watch time on YouTube or learning how to optimize your blog for search traffic. There are so many things in all of these platforms that there are to learn, and you just got to take the time to learn them. Then once you get to the point where you can maybe hire someone to do it, great, but it’s important to understand those things and just put the time in.

Nisha Vora: I think investing in myself in terms of one, how can I improve my photography skills and my videography skills, but also two like, okay, I have some money that I could spend on X, but it would be so much better if I spent it hiring someone to take the business to the next level.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think that’s something that’s really hard, especially after you’ve hustled for a really long time and you’ve had sweat equity and you’ve been able to translate that into income for your business, to then take a piece of that and then put it back into the business. Is a difficult first step, but I think, once you do start to do that, the feeling of wow, somebody is coming in helping me with this, is the burden isn’t completely on my shoulders is such a freeing thing. One of the things you had talked about was the ability to stop doing things that aren’t working. Do you have thoughts on some of the things you’ve stopped doing or examples of that?

Nisha Vora: Yeah. I’ll give you two. I mentioned recently that I only post Instagram now two to three times a week, which is mostly because of my cookbook and I just can’t spend as much time there, but also, I think when I was posting every single day, I don’t necessarily think every piece of content I was posting was that useful or that valuable. Now I feel like I’m only posting the things that I think are educational or inspirational, or some other value to my audience. So, even if I weren’t writing a cookbook, maybe I would post a little more than twice a week, but I certainly wouldn’t need to post every single day because I don’t think it serves any value, and I feel like I’m actually getting more engagement when I focus on the higher value stuff instead of being like, well, I have to post again today. The second thing-

Bjork Ostrom: Just for the sake of posting.

Nisha Vora: Just for the sake of posting. If I had the ability to turn out amazing content every single day, then sure, but I don’t. The second thing is going back to YouTube and being more strategic and thoughtful. So, when I first started I was literally just like, again, as I mentioned, looking at what other people were doing and not really putting any thought or effort into how the video should be structured, how it should play out, things like that, and now I spend so much time in the pre-planning stage, which I think has been a huge factor the growth, and the reception to my videos is putting in that before work. Like yes, the filming part is super important, but the pre-filming part is probably even more important.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s George Washington. It’s like George Washington, Mark Twain, or Oprah Winfrey. It was one of these people that this quote is from.

Nisha Vora: Very different people.

Bjork Ostrom: No, it’s not actually, I just feel like they’re always … Like, there’s these random quotes and it’s like you see the same quote, but attributed to different people. But the idea of like sharpening your ax. Like, you have to cut down a tree, you sharpen your ax for seven hours in order to cut for one, versus sharpening for one hour and then hacking away for seven hours. It’s a really hard to do because sometimes it doesn’t feel like work. It’s a different type of work. It’s not actual production. It’s like pre-production, which feels different, but what I’ve seen is the people who have the most success aren’t trying to, to your point, aren’t trying to like publish on a schedule just to do it, and put so much time and energy into everything that goes up before the actual production of the content, before they actually hit record, which I think is a huge takeaway and something that’s really important for people to think about as content creators.

Bjork Ostrom: So, we’re coming to the end here. I’m curious to know if you were to go back, have a conversation with yourself, maybe you run into yourself as you’re hiking back in 2014 and you’re like, oh my gosh, good to see you past self, I have some advice for you. What would that advice be around, both building your business or creating this new version of a life that you’ve created?

Nisha Vora: Ooh, that’s a good thing. I would first ask for my fitness back from 2014. I would like that back. Definitely gone downhill, from trekking six hours a day to sitting on my desk. I would say, just get started. I think I have gotten started in certain ways where I didn’t like know everything before I started, so I’ve done that a little bit, but even more so, take those risks, leave your job earlier. You are a very hardworking person who learns things easily. Don’t let your fears of what other people are doing or your perceptions of what other people are doing hold you back, and just like put your head down and focus on what you’re good at and what you want to create. Just don’t let the noise get to you. I think those are like a couple of different messages in there, but …

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. Super helpful. Nisha, I’m curious, we obviously know where to follow along. I’ve been watching some of your videos and have been able to dive into that, but for people who are interested in what you’re doing and what you’re up to, where are the best places to find you and connect with you?

Nisha Vora: Yeah. I’m on Instagram fairly often, again, like not as much, but I’m at Rainbow Plant Life there. I try to share cooking tips and things like that and my stories all the time, so even if I’m not posting every day, you’ll see that. My blog is where all of my recipes live, rainbowplantlife.com. I share super detailed recipes there, so if you want to get into the why behind cooking, if you want all these tips on how to improve your vegan cooking, you can find that there, and similarly on YouTube at Rainbow Plant Life, where I share again, a lot of the why and I teach you how to be a better home cook, especially with vegan cooking.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Nisha, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, really fun to talk to you.

Nisha Vora: Yeah, thanks so much for having. It was really great. Thank, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Big thank you to Nisha for coming on the podcast and sharing her story. Interviews like that are not only packed with good information, but also inspiring. I know that, speaking personally, for me, it’s inspiring to hear how she approaches content and how she approaches the work that she does, and I hope that you had some takeaways from that as well. So, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, I will say for one year, two years, if you’ve been a long time listener, we would love it if you leave a review. It’s one of the main ways that podcasts can get exposure.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s one of the variables in the search engine optimization in the podcast world, and the more people we can reach, the better, and that would be hugely impactful for us. If you have, I would say a minute, maybe two minutes to jump in, leave a review for the podcast, whether that be on the podcast app, if you are an iPhone user, or maybe you listen on Spotify, any of the podcast aggregators that roll up the podcasts and allow you to play them, leaving a review would be hugely impactful and we would greatly appreciate it.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks for all that you do for this community, whether that just be following along with the podcast, whether you are a Food Blogger Pro member, and you’re actually engaging in the community forums and interacting there, or if you just occasionally reach out via email, we love all of those things and are deeply appreciative of those things. So, thanks for tuning in, make it a great week. We hope that you can get a tiny bit better every day forever, that is our mission. We’ll see you next week. Thanks.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hey, hi, hello, and welcome to The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. My name is Alexa, and we are so excited and honored that you have decided to tune in today because this episode is a good one.

Alexa Peduzzi: Webinars or live events can be a really great way to communicate with your audience, or sell a product or service, or maybe even just switch up the way that you produce content online. That being said, presenting information to your audience in a live setting may be a little bit overwhelming to you. There’s the marketing piece, the getting ready to go live piece, the actual presentation piece, and then the post-event follow-up piece, and they all have to work together to effectively communicate your ideas and advice. It can feel like a lot, but there are ways that you can streamline the process to help you teach and inspire your audience through these live events.

Alexa Peduzzi: Angel, the content educator over at ConvertKit, is a pro at hosting and facilitating live events, and she’s here on the podcast today to help you become more confident in presenting your ideas in a live setting. She’s an incredible communicator, presenter, and motivator. Seriously, I’ve attended a couple of her webinars before, and she is awesome. Her tips and events will help you overcome any doubts or uncertainties you might have about going live in front of your audience. It’s a great interview. Excited to dive in. Without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Angel, welcome to the podcast.

Angel Marie: Hello, hello. So happy to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Whenever we talk to somebody who is familiar with sitting in a chair talking into a microphone, it’s a good thing, because it’s familiar territory. That’s something that you actually do quite a bit. Fill people in about your role at ConvertKit. Actually, I’d be curious to know how you got into it.

Angel Marie: Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, like what you already said, sitting in front of a computer in a chair with a mic in front of you and a webcam, that is my day-to-day life, literally, but I definitely wouldn’t have it any other way. I have been on the ConvertKit team… Again, for those of you that don’t know me yet, I’m Angel Marie. I’m ConvertKit’s creator educator and webinar producer. I’ve been on the ConvertKit team for a year and a half now, where my responsibilities have everything to do with producing webinars, hosting webinars, promoting webinars, creating assets for webinars, and of course, building out any other kind of content to educate our customers. That’s literally my area of expertise.

Angel Marie: I’ve always had such a strong passion for entrepreneurship. Anyone that had this ambition, anyone that had this dream of creating something of their own and following the solopreneur or building their own team kind of path, I’ve always just been so passionate about helping people get there, because I wanted to get there myself. This all derived from a place of wanting to run and start my own business, which I have done for a couple of years now, and then also adding on working for ConvertKit, which is an incredible company that values exactly what I value as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, what a great alignment to be able to find a company in ConvertKit really focusing in on that. Initially, bloggers, but now it’s like, hey, creators, online creators and offline, musicians or whoever it might be, and you being one of those. I feel like that also opens up you to speak to other creators in a really authentic way when you are producing a webinar or chatting with people or whatever it might be, because it’s not like you’re disconnected from the things that are happening. You’re right there with them and you’re doing that. Was webinars and webinar production and the marketing side of things something you were doing before as you were building your business? What did that look, and what does that look like today, the business side of things for your own venture?

Angel Marie: Yeah, great question. Before joining ConvertKit, I never hosted webinars. I might’ve maybe did one or two where I was in the pre-production process of that, but never took lead in hosting them, never really understood the cadence of how often you should do it or different ways that it could benefit a business or a person.

Angel Marie: My specific background comes from digital marketing. I used to work for Reach Records, which is a record label in Atlanta, Georgia, under Gospel artist Lecrae. I worked in their digital marketing department just for a while, and then transitioned into working for a radio station based in Atlanta as well. So I’ve just had a background in digital marketing and promotions. As lovely as those jobs were in growing me more into the person I am today, they never creatively fed me in the ways that I was seeking. That’s where this position with ConvertKit of hosting webinars and teaching people about how to grow businesses really allowed me to thrive in what I loved to do.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s cool. For the longest time, I don’t know if you have this, where you plug your iPhone in and then there’s one song that it just always starts with. Now it’s Achy Breaky Heart for me, but for the longest time it was a Lecrae song. I don’t know. I bought an album many years ago, and somehow it got to the point where it was the plug-the-iPhone-in-first-song-that-plays song.

Angel Marie: I love it.

Bjork Ostrom: When you said that, I heard that playing in the back of my mind.

Bjork Ostrom: So it seems like a really good fit for you, and something that obviously is a good fit for ConvertKit as well, as it’s something they’re continually doing and putting resources behind. I think it’s an area that a lot of people miss out on. We think about blog posts, we think about emails, we think about social media, but there’s this other opportunity to create content in a new, unique way. When you first started to get into it, what were the things where you’re like, “Wait, this is a little bit different” or “This is a unique type of content that I’m having to produce, or skill that I’m having to develop”? Did you find that to be true that you were having to develop those new skills-

Angel Marie: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: And what were those in the early stages?

Angel Marie: Yes, definitely. The number one skill, the number one main thing that differentiated this between any other content pieces was broadcasting live. There is the ability to create prerecorded or evergreen webinars that you’ve had the time to prerecord and edit and all this other stuff, but at ConvertKit, we really value going live because we enjoy being as personable as possible. So I had to learn that, and it took some time. It was nerveracking for me at first to go live every week, and I was constantly worried about, “Well, what about this? What if this happens? Everyone is watching me. I can’t edit out anything.” I really had to personally learn how to get myself out of this anxious mindset of what would happen if people saw me mess up live.

Angel Marie: I compare it often to performing on stage. When you are doing live performances, if you’re a musician or anything like that, a dancer, if you’re doing a live performance in anything, people are watching you. If you mess up, if something happens, people will see, people might record, it could go viral, all these other things. The same thing applies to live webinars.

Angel Marie: I’m not saying that to scare anyone off of this podcast episode who might want to host a live webinar. It’s just a skill that you have to build up. You just really learn to take that live experience and to have fun with it, rather than allowing it to overwhelm you to the point where you are anxious about messing up because it’s live and you don’t have the time to edit. So I would definitely say that building up the skill and building up the peace to just go live and to have fun with the audience that’s watching, that took time, but it was worth building that for.

Angel Marie: I would also say it takes a lot more preparation than any other content that I have published in ConvertKit or on my own side hustle. The reason behind that is because it takes additional planning to figure out, what will the slides look like? What does the design look like? What are you going to talk about? What are you going to say? What’s the call to action? I think all of that planning feels more emphasized because you’re going to exercise it all when you go live. I really had to build up the patience, I had to build up the ability to go live and be comfortable with that, and I had to build up this sense of organization to make sure that I had it all planned out, I knew exactly what I was teaching and how I was going to inspire the people that were watching.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s a lot of content production that you can fix in post. If a photo is a little bit off or if you’re writing a blog post, even after you press publish, you can go back and tweak and change it a little bit. But when you’re live, you can’t do that. You could just not have a replay available, but it’s going to be out there and it’s going to be something that people watch and are watching in real time.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you find that there was an element of repeat exposure, where it’s like, hey… There’s a fear associated with this. I can think of that first podcast episode I recorded, first screencast tutorial I recorded, first live Q&A we did with Food Blogger Pro members. Every time, I can look back and remember being really nervous, but it was repeat exposure that led me to not be as nervous. It wasn’t some skill or ability that I’ve developed. It was just doing it more. Do you feel like that’s the case for you, or were there some frameworks and ways that you thought about it that made you approach it in a way where it wasn’t quite as nerveracking?

Angel Marie: Yeah, I think it’s a mixture of both. I definitely think taking that repetitive action of doing something over and over again until you get more comfortable, that’s just a simply psychology thing in anything that someone might want to get better at. It definitely had so much to do with that.

Angel Marie: But it also had a lot to do with building up the skill of being able to thoroughly speak live. It’s almost like comparing it to building up this knowledge or expertise to be able to speak on stage, instead of getting stage fright or instead of hesitating or mixing up your words or saying um a lot. That’s a skill that I had to verbally practice and I had to build up over time. Yeah, it took some time.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s interesting. One of the things that you said that I think is worth pointing out, not only the preparation piece, which I think goes a really long way, to have all of the things you need, the resources, the material, having gone through it multiple times, but then the piece that you had mentioned was the knowledge base to draw from in order to have a pool of thoughts or ideas.

Bjork Ostrom: When I worked for a nonprofit called Youth Frontiers, we’d go around to schools and we’d present, we called it the Respect Retreat or the Courage Retreat, and we’d talk about, “What does it look like to have respect within your class?” and we’d be in front of a body of students. One of the things we would talk about is the tools in your tool belt. I feel like building up that knowledge base is kind of like putting the tools in your tool belt. Part of it is repeat exposure, where you’re like, “Hey, I’m going out on this job. I know I need this tool. I’ve got to put the tool in the tool belt,” whether it be how to respond if your dog walks by in the background, or if things cut out, what do you do, or if somebody asks a question that you might not know. You develop those tools in your tool belt.

Bjork Ostrom: Also, I feel like part of it, and correct me if I’m wrong on this, Angel, but I feel like you probably have a bit of just being natural, like you’re probably a good talker. You probably weren’t somebody where your friends are like, “Oh my gosh, Angel is so shy.” Is that true? When it comes to doing live content, doing webinars, whatever it might be, do you feel like part of you has to be somebody who has a little bit of that bend, or could it be, “Hey, anybody can do a live event”?

Angel Marie: I think that anyone could do a live event. I just think the time that it’ll take to be comfortable with it, to be able to do it with confidence, is going to feel different for everyone.

Angel Marie: Actually, so many people that watch my webinars, or even people who might’ve seen my website or my business before I joined ConvertKit, everyone thinks that I am an extrovert; I’m just this extroverted, confident, outgoing person. In actuality, I have always been a very shy individual that had a lot of insecurities, and I was like that ever since I was a child. Now, am I a people person? Yes. Anyone that I talk to, I am kind. I am compassionate. I’m nice. I show passion in what I love to do. But when it came to big crowds and speaking, I was always shy. I was never the first one to talk in a big group of people. That is something I had to overcome if I wanted to level up as a leader.

Angel Marie: I think for anyone who might feel a little more on the shy or the introverted side that feels like they can’t do something like hosting a webinar for whatever purpose, I would argue against that. I believe that it is possible. I just think that it needs to be approached depending on the kind of person that you are. Yeah, I would just say that it takes a lot of internal work to get past those insecurities of feeling like you’re not good enough or you’re too shy to be able to host something like a webinar.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I love how you framed that up, where it’s like, “Anybody can do it. The on-ramp to being fully up to speed is maybe going to look different.” If you’re somebody who loves to talk, if you love being in front of people, if you have an acting background, whatever it might be, your on-ramp to doing a live event is probably going to be pretty short because you’re going to be really comfortable with it. But if you’re somebody who’s maybe more reserved, you get really nervous if the camera turns on and you’re broadcasting live, doesn’t mean you can’t do it, it just means that your on-ramp to being full speed on the live event highway might be a little bit longer.

Angel Marie: Exactly. I would give that advice to anyone that is more in that shy, introverted space, to just start doing things that get you out of your comfort zone so that you can level up to be more confident on camera or be more confident live.

Angel Marie: For example, you had mentioned acting. I actually used to act multiple times in Atlanta, Georgia. The film industry is really booming there right now. But I started taking acting classes because I knew that if I wanted to act, if I wanted to be front center stage, I needed to build up the confidence to do so. I literally forced myself to take acting classes. In those classes, they literally put you right on the spot. They make you get up in front of the whole class, and you have to say a monologue or do a piece with your partner.

Angel Marie: I would just encourage anything that you can find or do to help get you out of your comfort zone is only going to benefit you in the long run when it comes to situations like these.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think Warren Buffett talks about… There’s all those posts like, “Warren Buffett says these two things were the most important thing in his journey,” or whatever. But I remember reading an article, it was in the past couple weeks, and it was Warren Buffett talking about how the most important skill that he had learned in his career was through Toastmasters. I think it’s been around for 100 years, and it’s all about helping people feel confident speaking. He talks about the significance of clearly communicating ideas through verbal or written word, and how impactful that was for him. I hear you kind of saying the same thing, where it’s like, “Hey, I know this is something that’s going to be important for me, and I want to push myself, even if I’m uncomfortable doing it, because it is important in many different contexts, but especially if you’re going to do a live event like a webinar.”

Bjork Ostrom: We’ve kind of talked about the psychology of it. That’s a huge piece of it, maybe the most important piece. But there’s also the tactics behind doing a webinar. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast are content producers, but they’re probably not people who think about creating content that’s a live event or a webinar, or even marketing content, very much so like content to get people to come, to read, to consume, but maybe not thinking strategically all the time, I know for us it’s the case, at least, around, “How can we create things that are both helpful but also marketing related?” When you think of the webinars that you’re doing, what do those look like between the balance of content, “Hey, here’s something you can learn. We’re going to educate. We’re going to inspire,” and marketing? You talked about call to action, “Here’s something you can do. Here’s how you can use ConvertKit,” in your case. How do you balance that?

Angel Marie: Yeah, that’s a great question. I feel like it all starts from a place of knowing that when it comes to building any company or aiding in the growth and development of your own business, it takes a lot of trust between you and your audience. If you want more customers, if you want more buyers, if you want more prospects, you have to build trust with them. They need to trust you in order to feel interested in your product or service or whatever it is that you’re offering. One of the best ways that you can build trust is to connect with them on a personal level, and we found that one of the best ways to connect with them on a personal level is to host live webinars.

Angel Marie: We’ve gotten into this really healthy, strong habit of personalizing our webinar content where I am coming live on every webinar with energy, with personality, with fun, and at the same time making sure that I’m also providing the value that they came to learn on the webinar in the first place, so a mixture of that inspiration and value, and then tying it back around to how it can benefit ConvertKit as well. Of course, we run the webinars to benefit our customers, but in a way that how can we also tie it back to, “Okay, well, ConvertKit, our product, can also help you in these areas to thrive in the businesses you’re wanting to build.” We’ve found that really strong balance of grasping their attention and reeling them in with inspiration and defaulting to generosity, which is exactly what we value more than anything, and then at the end just tying it back around to how ConvertKit can help and why ConvertKit is here to serve creators worldwide.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have an example? What are some of the webinars that you’ve done that feel like a really good balance between those two things?

Angel Marie: Yeah, that’s great. For example, ConvertKit has recently launched ConvertKit Commerce, which is our product feature. It allows people to not only go about their email marketing strategies with ConvertKit, but they can also go about their digital product selling strategies with ConvertKit as well. To align with those product updates, we hosted a live webinar on selling digital products, and that webinar was for the purpose of teaching aspiring entrepreneurs, creators, musicians how to sell their music, how to sell their courses, how to sell their one-on-one coaching services, their ebooks, all of that stuff. It taught them how exactly they can make money doing what they love, just really reeling in that inspiration there, and then tying it back to, “Oh, well, ConvertKit is also here to make sure that you can sell your digital product with ease.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so laying it out, saying, “Here’s what it looks like. Here’s how you can do it, or maybe even different than how you can do it, here’s some of the whys, why it works, and the general outline, ConvertKit being a great example of how you can execute on that,” so making that tie-in to it makes a lot of sense.

Bjork Ostrom: How about in terms of how do you actually do it? We’re all familiar with Zoom. I’m guessing a lot of people are familiar with Instagram Live. We have these components where we understand, “Hey, we know what it’s like to sit in front of a camera and to talk to our parents during a global pandemic.” What are the tools… We use Zoom for that. But my guess is there’s a lot of different things that go into actually producing a webinar. What tools would you recommend that people use as they’re getting started or are interested in looking into it?

Angel Marie: Yeah, for sure. We at ConvertKit break our production into three different categories to make sure that we’re effectively producing and hosting webinars. We have our pre-production process, our live production process, and our post-production process. The whole purpose behind this is to not just say, “Hey, I’m going to go live. Come and join my webinar,” but to have a whole system in place that works, that benefits both your audience and you.

Angel Marie: Pre-production looks like the preparation. What assets need to be created, social media images, swipe copies to promote the webinar? We use Keynote slides to effectively build out the webinar content, making sure that we’re doing the right research. Then live production, we actually run our webinars on Zoom. Zoom has a webinar feature that has worked really well for us. There are other platforms that we’ve used in the past, such as EasyWebinar, WebinarJam, or BigMarker, which those are all good too. We’ve just found Zoom to be the easiest and most efficient.

Angel Marie: So we would use the webinar Zoom feature to go live, and always made sure that I had a partner in this production process with me. For example, it wasn’t just me going live. I would be the one live on camera, but I’d have an associate producer live in the chat, just to make sure that everyone who was watching felt supported and they were feeling engaged with. Also, she would send me private messages if anything seemed wrong so that I could quickly fix it. I feel like that’s a must. Try your best to have someone there with you so that you can have a successful production.

Angel Marie: Then post-production is more like a recap. Are you going to send out a replay email of the workshop? How are you going to connect with them after they’ve already watched it? How well did it perform, and can you keep track of those numbers? Just making sure that we just have this entire pipeline in place to keep up with workshop performance and engaging with our customers.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. In terms of the funnel, a lot of times people talk about funnels, ConvertKit obviously being an important part of funnels, starting at the top, how do you get people to actually show up? If you’re interested in doing this, you’re like, “Yeah, I want to get better at doing live events,” what would your recommendation be for making sure that you actually have somebody there to see you when you do go live?

Angel Marie: Yeah. As far as people attending the webinar?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Right. Let’s say that you have a food blog, and you maybe have some readers, you have some social followers, and you want to do some event, maybe have a cooking class, if we’re going to make it a really easy example, and you’re going to do a webinar, talk a little bit about some of the things you could learn, but then you’re going to sell a cooking class. Would you recommend anything and everything, kind of a spray-and-pray approach where you’re like, “Hey, I’m going to email my readers. I’m going to talk about it on social media”? Do you do paid ads to try and get people, or is it kind of, “Hey, it depends, whatever works for your audience”?

Angel Marie: Yeah. I definitely think that every audience is going to be different, and it depends on where your audience hangs out online. A lot of entrepreneurs, they find their audience on Instagram, or the majority of their audience might be on LinkedIn. That always depends.

Angel Marie: But once you really figure out where your audience hangs out online, that is where you’re going to want to double down on your promotional efforts. Just to be transparent, at ConvertKit, we make sure that we send out emails to our list promoting the workshop. We make sure that we run social ads so that other people who don’t know ConvertKit can see the free piece of content that we’re offering to bring value to their life and their business. Then we also will promote it across the company when it comes to the community. Anything live that we might be doing at that time, we’ll send out a notice to our creators letting them know that this webinar is here to help you, it’s here to enhance your daily life or your business.

Angel Marie: It definitely can go in a variety of different ways, but I would highly recommend email and I would highly recommend social media for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that makes sense. Let’s say you have 100 people sign up or 1,000 people sign up, whatever number you want to use. 1,000 people sign up. How many people do you find actually end up showing up to the webinar? Is it half, 25%? Does it depend on what the content is?

Angel Marie: Yeah, that’s a great question. We normally see an average conversion rate of about 20% to 25% of people attending live. So based off of how many people registered, well, what was the amount of people that attended that actually registered for this event? We normally see about a 20% to 25% conversion rate on the weekly webinars that we do. Then, of course, that number will increase if you decide to send out a replay of the workshop or make your workshop content evergreen.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. When you are doing… Do you call them workshops externally? It’s the functionality of a webinar, but it’s like a class, it’s like a workshop. Is that what you’re calling it?

Angel Marie: Correct. Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you doing repeat workshops, like, “Hey, we have an Email 101 that we do once a month, but then we also have timely and relevant workshops that we’re doing that are one-off or maybe just for a certain season”? What does that look like schedule-wise?

Angel Marie: Yeah, so schedule-wise, we schedule out workshop topics and content about a quarter ahead of schedule. The reason behind that is to make sure that we give ourselves enough time to make them live on our trainings page on ConvertKit, to make sure that we’re all good and set to go to promote them every week. We’re always ahead of the game.

Angel Marie: More specifically, we break each webinar topic down by category. We always do a webinar that has to do with starting your email list, more so for beginners, and then writing to your email list, selling digital products, all the way to more advanced workshops that might dive into segmentation or tagging, more of the technological advancements of email marketing. We definitely have a wide variety of topics. Now that we’re, at ConvertKit, branching off into different industries, such as musicians, we’re going to be creating content specifically for them, so that we can speak to their needs and their wants at that point in time.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Take me to the moment where it’s like, hey, you’ve got some people; you’ve sent out some emails; they’ve signed up; they said, “I’m interested in this.” Take me to the moment where you go live. Can you talk through, start to finish, the major chunks of what a webinar or a workshop would look like? Because I think that’s one of the mysterious things to people. It’s like, do you just get on and start talking? What are the chapters of a really successful webinar?

Angel Marie: Yeah, definitely. Our process is to hop on 10 minutes before you actually click broadcast. There should always be, and if there isn’t, there should be, but at least in our experience, especially using Zoom webinars, there’s always a feature to… They call it a practice session, where you can hop into the webinar early and make sure that your video, audio, all the technological stuff is good and ready to go. When you’re actually ready to broadcast live to the world, you would hit the broadcast button.

Angel Marie: We always make sure that we have that practice mode in place before we actually go live. I recommend that to anyone. Hop into the webinar, make sure you look good, the sound looks good, everything is good to go, and then when you’re ready to actually talk, you hit broadcast and that’s where you would start your spiel. We always start off having a very fun, engaging introduction. The reason behind that is because if you dive too to the point right away, then it doesn’t feel as authentic and original.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You have to connect a little bit. Who’s here? Where are you from?

Angel Marie: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: To speak about tools in your tool belt, what are some of the tools in your tool belt that you have in that regard? How do you transition into it, and what questions would you ask? How do you interact with people?

Angel Marie: Yeah. I always first welcome them into the webinar room. I let them know who I am, where I’m currently in, the state that I’m in now, and then I start engaging with them right away. After I give my short introduction, I’m like, “Okay, well, now I want to know a little bit more about you, so tell me in the chat where are you from. Let me shout out your city, your state, your country.” Just engage with them a little bit.

Angel Marie: Then from there, I transition into asking them about their dreams, so really circling back around to what brought them to this webinar in the first place so that it’s fresh in their mind, so asking them why they’re here, what brought them here, and then re-encouraging them with whatever that reason is as to why they showed up today, you want to give them the outcome or the solution that they seek. You are the educator that’s here to solve that problem, so re-encouraging that.

Angel Marie: Then from there, transitioning into the content. For example, I might say something like, “Yeah, so if you’re here, I see some people in the chat saying that they’re here because they want to learn how to connect with their audience through email. That is great. I know that you’re capable of doing that, and I’m going to show you exactly how. Let’s go ahead and transition into today’s topic.” Then from there, I would switch over to my screen share of the slides and dive right in.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you have a goal for how often are you trying to change slide to slide? I’ve heard some people say, “Hey, I never try and have a slide up for longer than a minute.” Are you trying to keep pace with any specific numbers in terms of how quickly you’re moving from one slide to the next?

Angel Marie: Yeah. I would say a minute max. That’s pretty ideal. But at ConvertKit, we appreciate and value personalization and just being truly authentic, so I might remain on a slide longer if there’s a question in the chat that I want to highlight live, or if I’m just wanting to be a little bit more specific because I can get a sense of confusion or people needing clarity. You could plan for, okay, every slide is going to be less than a minute, but at the same time you have to base that speed off of how your audience is feeling. If they’re in the chat and they’re like, “Hey, I’m confused on this” or “Wait, what did you mean by that?” you want to make sure you clarify.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s kind of like, how long should a blog post be? It’s like, “Well, how long do you need it to be to explain what you’re trying to explain?” Instead of using a hard-and-fast rule, say what you need to say and move on. But if you need to say a lot, be okay sitting in that place for a while.

Angel Marie: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So you get through it. You’re talking about the content. You’re focusing in on sharing whatever it is that you’re sharing. Then, eventually, there’s a call to action, CTA, you might say, industry term. What does that look like? How do you do that in an authentic way that doesn’t feel like, “Hey, then there’s the sell,” and it feels like the sell? How do you do it in a way that feels genuine, authentic, but is also… Realistically, you’re not just doing webinars for free. It’s a marketing thing for ConvertKit. How do you balance that?

Angel Marie: Yeah. I always have to keep it in the forefront of my mind, and I think anyone should, is that your mission is to serve first. When you’re going about the entrepreneurial or the creative space, such as being a food blogger, of course you want to make money doing what it is that you love, but the reason why you’re doing this isn’t just to make money; it’s to help solve a certain problem that your audience might be facing. You always want to lead with that. You always want to be intentional with that.

Angel Marie: I’m not going to name any names, but I have personally been an audience member on a webinar of an entrepreneur that I used to look up to, and when I was in the chat in this webinar, I can clearly recall how salesy and demanding it felt. This person literally would call out the names of the people in the chat. They would be like, “Angel, what do I need to do to get you to buy from me right now?” I remember being like, “Whoa, this is really intense.”

Angel Marie: We don’t do that approach. We want to make sure that we approach it with kindness and generosity, letting people know that we’re here to serve, letting people know that this product exists for the purpose of helping them. We don’t push. We don’t force. We just let them know how it can help them and allow them to make the decision.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. One of the things that we’ll talk about, you set up a link, convertkit.com/foodbloggerpro, which is a link to sign up for a ConvertKit account for free. For ConvertKit, is that the angle, like, hey, it’s a really good first step into using the tool? If people don’t know how to package things together and offer them to the people who are attending a webinar, what advice would you have for them?

Angel Marie: Yeah, that’s good. We definitely always say that ConvertKit is that first step that exists to enhance your business that much further. When it comes to our product, there’s a reason why we have recently launched a free plan. We wanted to get rid of any financial barriers that people were feeling for using a tool or a platform that could help enhance their business. That’s why we’re here. We want to help them earn a living, including if they feel like they don’t have the finances to start. We always lead with this intention of, “Hey, ConvertKit is here for you. There’s a free plan so that there’s no financial barriers, so that you can get started doing what it is that you love.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. One of the questions that I have that’s kind of a tactics question, when you are sending out the link for people to show up, is it just a Zoom link? Is it a link to the Zoom webinar, or is it embedded in some way? What does that look like in regards to that process?

Angel Marie: Yeah. We just send the Zoom webinar join link. If you use Zoom’s webinar integration, they will create an opt-in link for you for people to join the webinar. We literally copy that link, we link it to the emails letting people know, “Hey, you can join here.” We might link that on a specific button in the email, just so that call-to-action button is in first person, making it feel more personalized. So you might open the email and there’s a button that says, “Yes, take me to the webinar.” Then they would click and be redirected to the webinar room.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. In terms of the signup process, you have a landing page, I would assume built using ConvertKit, and then you have a ConvertKit email list, so people are then tagged with the tag that they are interested in attending a certain webinar. Is there an automation then that goes out to those people, or are you sending broadcast emails up to the point where the webinar goes live?

Angel Marie: The automation piece is what we tie in with the confirmation email. As soon as someone registers for a webinar on our registration/landing page, they automatically get a confirmation email, which we set up as an automation in ConvertKit. Now, the webinar reminder emails with the link to actually join, letting them know that, “Hey, we’re about to start. We’re going to go live,” we do that through ConvertKit’s broadcast feature, just so that people are getting those emails the day of, 10 minutes before, and that they’re ready to go the minute that that email hits their inbox.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, got it. Cool. Then do you do follow-up on the back end? People sign up, they see it, they watch the webinar, and then after… This is something that people don’t talk a lot about, or at least we don’t on the podcast. It’s a great way to build an email list because you have all these people who have signed up and given you emails, as opposed to passively being like, “Hey, sign up for my newsletter. Put your first name, last name.” Instead, it’s this really specific thing, so people sign for it, and then you have grown your email list. But are you then following up with those people after, both with the webinar and then general ConvertKit content as well?

Angel Marie: Yes, absolutely. We call it our replay sequence, where we follow up with them the evening after the webinar ends and a couple of days after that. That’s because we just want to check in, “Hey, how are you doing? The replay is still available. We’re here for you. Feel free to ask us questions.” You always want to circle it back around and remind them that, “Hey, this webinar is still here” or “This offer is still here,” rather than just letting it sit.

Angel Marie: But yeah, I would recommend to any creator, any food blogger, anyone in the entrepreneurial space, that if you are looking to grow your email list, webinars are one of the most massive list-growth strategies. It’s just a personalized way of being able to connect and build trust. They see you. They hear you. They’re being taught by you. They get a feel for your personality. It just emphasizes who you are as the expert in your field that much more.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. If you were to look at the Food Blogger Pro email list size, there would be these bumps along the way. Anytime there’s one of those bumps, it’s one of the times we’ve done a bootcamp or a workshop, comparable to what ConvertKit would do, and thousands of people will then sign up because we’re talking about how to shoot video content or the Instagram playbook that we use for Pinch of Yum. It’s just so obvious when that happens.

Bjork Ostrom: Another example in the food space, for Pinch of Yum specifically, it’s not necessarily a workshop, but it’s kind of an event-type thing, where we did something called Plant-Powered January and really focused on plant-based recipes. The same thing. It’s not this general opt-in that nobody is really excited about. It’s something really specific, and it’s a chance to join and be a part of something. You see a huge bump in email subscribers for that as well. I think it’s a great little takeaway in tactic and strategy.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re getting to the end here, Angel, but I’m guessing that people would be interested in actually checking out one of the webinars that you do or one of the workshops that you do. My guess is a lot of the topics you’re talking about would be really helpful for people who listen to this podcast. What’s the best way for people to see what’s coming up and to maybe connect with you on one of your upcoming workshops?

Angel Marie: Yeah, such a great question. You can easily just find your way to convertkit.com/training. Again, that’s convertkit.com/training. That’ll direct you to our webinar hub. You’re going to be able to access all the registration pages that we have up and running right now, so that you can opt in to upcoming webinars, depending on the topics you’re wanting to learn. There’s also a couple of on-demand trainings if you want to watch one right then and there, podcast guides, just a lot of different resources for you to use if you’re looking to grow your business in any way.

Angel Marie: Feel free to register. I’d love to have you on one of our webinars. In those webinars, I am just a very engaging person. I normally always connect when we go live to those that are attending, and then I always let you know where you can communicate with me one-on-one. If you’re wanting to start up a conversation in my inbox or if you’re needing additional help, I’m always here for our creators.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. That’s great. Then I’ll share this link again. For anybody who hasn’t signed up for email yet, or maybe you have and you want to check out ConvertKit, you can go to convertkit.com/foodbloggerpro. There’s no connection to us specifically for Food Blogger Pro, we’re not getting anything from that, but just a way to track anybody who signs up after checking out the podcast. We’ll link to that in the show notes as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Angel, really fun to connect with you. I feel like personally I took a lot out. I have some notes here that I’ve made on stuff that we can do to improve our processes. Selfishly, these interviews are always great because I feel like I can learn a lot from them as well.

Angel Marie: I love that.

Bjork Ostrom: If anybody wants to connect with you personally online, is there anywhere where you’re posting content, or would the workshops and webinars on ConvertKit be the best place to go?

Angel Marie: Yeah, I would say convertkit.com/training is the best place to go. If you’re wanting to connect with me on more the personal side of things, I am mostly on Instagram, so feel free to shoot me a DM at @angelmarieoffical, and I’d be happy to connect with you there too.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, Angel.

Angel Marie: Thank you. We’ll see you later.

Alexa Peduzzi: That’s a wrap on this episode of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. Thanks again for tuning in today. We hope you enjoyed this interview with Angel. If you’re interested in setting up that free ConvertKit account, that URL to go to is just convertkit.com/foodbloggerpro, all one word. You should be able to set up an account right there.

Alexa Peduzzi: Last thing I wanted to mention is that we are in the process of planning some free events for this year for our audience, for you guys. If you have any interest in potentially joining one of our free live events, be sure to get on our email list. You can actually do that right on our home page. It’s at foodbloggerpro.com. We’ll be sure to notify you whenever our next event is coming up. There is a little email opt-in right there in the front center of the home page that can also actually get you a free download for ways that you can monetize your site, so it’s a win-win situation all around.

Alexa Peduzzi: That is it for us, my friend. We appreciate you for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time. Until then, make it a great week.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hello. Hello. Hello. Alexa here, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. Today’s episode is a really exciting one. Today we’re interviewing Beth from Entertaining with Beth. Among other things, she talks about YouTube and finding success on YouTube. I don’t know about you, but for me, YouTube is definitely one of those social media platforms such as like a black box. I watch a lot of YouTube content, to be completely honest with you, but I just don’t really know how it works or how to be successful on YouTube. Other social media platforms are relatively simple to figure out, like Instagram, you post a picture, you use some hashtags, you connect and engage with other accounts, but YouTube is a whole different beast. Beth has the YouTube beast figured out.

Alexa Peduzzi: In today’s episode, she’ll share some information about how you can create engaging content on YouTube, how she’s found out that she can triple her revenue on YouTube and how to get YouTube to suggest specific videos when she wants to promote those specific videos. She’s just so excited about the type of content that she creates, and I hope that this episode will make you excited about, potentially, either leveling up your game on YouTube or just starting to post content on YouTube. It’s a really great interview. We hope you enjoy it. Without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Beth, welcome back to the podcast.

Alexa Peduzzi: Thank you so much. It’s so good to be here with you, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things I love doing whenever we have somebody who’s coming back on the podcast is, thinking back to first time that we connected, the first time that we talked. You were almost a single digit number podcast interview. You were episode 10, one of the very early episodes in 2015. September 2015 is actually a new publish stat. It was within the first few months of us doing a podcast. We’re still doing podcasts, you’re still building your brand working on producing content, but my guess is, a lot has happened since we had that first conversation back in 2015. Can you rewind the tape? Usually what we do is, we ask people to go all the way back, but because we’re able to pick that pick up here… and if people want to listen to your entire story, they can hear that in that episode, episode 10. You go to foodbloggerpro.com/10. But catch us up, Beth, what’s happened in the last five years in your world?

Beth Le Manach: Oh my gosh, so much, and so much thanks to you, Bjork. I have to actually say, after I was on your podcast, you introduced me to a whole world of podcasts.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

Beth Le Manach: I started listening to every episode you produce after that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s grassroots marketing for us, where the people we interview become listeners, and if we do that enough.

Beth Le Manach: Totally, totally, but it really helped me turn my little, what at the time was probably a bit of an art project, into a business and helped me because I think at the time I was still working for a media company called Kin Community. I was running their production and programming department and producing for this YouTube channel at the same time. That was a little bit crazy. I mean, I was working like 50 hour weeks, two hour commute. I have two kids. I think the moment when I got home and my husband was there serving our daughters cereal and fish sticks for dinner, I was thinking, “I can’t keep doing this.” Thanks to you and your podcast, I kept listening and I kept optimizing the business and learned all about this whole other world of blogging, which I didn’t know, because I was spending all this time in video and YouTube, and was able to turn that into a very significant part of my business too.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Beth Le Manach: I think the biggest change has been that, has been the ability to quit the full time job. That’s been the best thing.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, congratulations. That’s so great.

Beth Le Manach: Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: We were talking about this beforehand, but it’s a very long story that maybe I’ll tell him the podcast sometime, and I will connect this back in some way, but you’ll have to wait for the payoff. I was going to see this physical trainer, this doctor, the guy that I work with to do physical training, the personal trainer that we have introduced me to, and I didn’t know, but going into it, realized that he works almost exclusively with professional athletes. The only reason that I got in was because I had an in through this friend/personal trainer who goes to him because he’s this extreme obstacle course race guy. I get in there and it’s like, “I’m definitely not a professional athlete.” I joke that I’m a professional keyboardist, but after me comes in this a wide receiver for the Minnesota Vikings and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, these are incredible athletes.”

Bjork Ostrom: What I’ve found about that was suddenly I found myself wanting… just even today, I’ve been thinking about it, suddenly I want to be more athletic. I want to work out. I want to achieve a certain level of athleticism just by associating with those people in this very short window. Here’s the payoff and where the question lives, do you feel like in listening to the podcast and hearing interviews with people who were building successful brands or figuring out how to monetize from a blog or building a business in a certain category, were there actual tips and tricks and things that you implemented, or was it more of much like me being a professional wide receiver for the NFL suddenly saying, “Oh, I’m close to this. I can see this. I can see this person doing it. Therefore, I want to do it.” How much of it was the tactical and how much of it was hearing people, hearing their voice, understanding that it could be done and being inspired from that?

Beth Le Manach: I think it’s 50/50. I think you’re always inspired first. To be perfectly honest, it was a little bit overwhelming in the beginning, just knowing about blogging and SEO and Pinterest and all these different things that you had introduced me to. I kept thinking, “How am I going to wrap my head around all of this,” but then hearing success stories of people who did and knowing that if it’s possible for them, it must be possible for me. Everything you can, at some point, figure out and spend enough time to learn. I think that’s what has been so great for me is having someone like you show me the way and be such a great teacher, and just little by little knocking things off the list of the things I had to do to make it happen. Yeah, but I think being-

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. I appreciate that.

Beth Le Manach: Yeah. For sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Obviously a lot of hard work. Maybe to draw the analogy to personal training, it’s one thing for somebody to say, “Here’s what you do,” but it’s not successful unless you are actually doing it, which is really, really difficult, especially as you’re navigating full time job, family. What were the things along that journey, when you look back, that were most impactful? Lindsay and I talk about it as unlocks, like the things that unlocked a new level, or you’re able to upgrade or a new level of achievement. It might’ve been a mindset thing, but maybe it was actually a tactical implementation thing. As you look back in the last five years, as you made that transition, could you highlight any of those?

Beth Le Manach: I really think the turning point for me was reading that book, and I know you’ve read it too because I think I even heard you recommend it, is The War of Art. Is that the right title?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure.

Beth Le Manach: But yeah. And just showing up and doing the work. At some point, you can dream yourself away, but until you sit down at your seat, the computer, and just say, “Yeah, this is hard, but I just got to do the work.” That’s when things really shifted for me, because I think we do get into that paralysis analysis, but we’re like, “Well, should I do this and try and do that? Well, I got to take this e-course. Well, wait, I got to take the webinar. Oh, wait, I got to sign up for this.” You can start getting yourself in such a ladder, trying to learn everything that you don’t just sit down and do the top three things you have to accomplish for the day.

Beth Le Manach: That was another thing, just, “I have 25 things on my to do list, but you know what, today I’m doing these three and I am not getting out of this chair until I do these three things,” and just keeping your eye on the prize really helps.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Steven Pressfield is the author. He writes the book aimed at creatives in general, but talks a lot about writing and what that’s been like for him. He wrote the book, The legend of Bagger Vance, which was a movie that Will… I was going to say Will Ferrell, Will Smith… two very different actors, Will Smith starred in about… it was a golf movie. But anyway, so he’s written fiction, but then he wrote this nonfiction book and he’s written some other ones about what it’s like to show up as a creative every day. I think it breaks apart some of the myth around it as this thing where you show up and you feel inspiration and you only create when you’re inspired and says more like, “Hey, it’s a grind and you’re not going to want to do it, but you have to sit down and you have to start and it doesn’t always feel good and there’s going to be things pulling you away from it.”

Bjork Ostrom: That grit that you need, which I hear you talking a little bit about, is so important to show up and to do it. The other interesting thing, as you reflect on the last five years on making that transition, doing it full time, is this idea of introducing another element, another outlet as you think of yourself as a creator, not just on YouTube, but also with your blog. What did that look like to start to look at… almost like syndication of sorts, where you have your YouTube channel, but that’s not the only place where you’re creating content, you’re also creating in other places. Is that a fair synopsis of what that transition was like?

Beth Le Manach: Yeah. I mean, I think the real aha moment was going to a food blogging conference, and the bloggers who were at my table were very friendly and chatty, and I really felt like such a fish out of water. I was like, “Wow, I didn’t even realize all these people are making some pretty significant money from this more so than I ever saw on YouTube.” They’ve all lifted me. A lot of these bloggers also had YouTube channels as well. They started laughing. They’re like, “Beth, YouTube is a nice to have, but the blog is where you all the money is.” I’m like, “Really?” I was so inspired. I was like, “Wow. I feel like I picked the hardest thing first video,” just because video is so hard emotionally in a lot of ways, which we can get into that, and technically. There’s a lot of things around video that make it hard. Not that blogging isn’t like. I think where blogging is hard as learning all the technical and tactical skills.

Beth Le Manach: But after three days at this conference, I was like, “Oh my gosh. Okay, I totally know what I need to do now.” Then realizing that you just have to follow the money. The amount of time that you put into something has to correspond with what the ROI is. I realized like, “Okay, 60% of my time still needs to be on YouTube because that’s where most of the money is coming from. But the potential for blogging, I need to start putting 40% there and not 100% just on YouTube because I can see that really paying off,” and it has.

Bjork Ostrom: Did you see that play out in a way that you thought it would?

Beth Le Manach: More, actually, and quicker than I thought it would. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons why I think that is, but I think… well, I think doing the work. I think getting the site on it and doing all the SEO optimizations and taking a few courses here and there and going to conferences and being part of Facebook groups and constantly learning. I think that’s one of the things with this industry is. You can’t learn it all and then decide, “Okay, I’m done now. I’m just going to go run my business.” You have to allocate a certain amount of hours really in the week, and maybe a course or two each quarter, to continue learning because things change so often.

Beth Le Manach: I think if you’re willing to evolve with the changes, even if you may not like the changes… and algorithm shifts happen and all this other kind of stuff happens, but you have to stay on top of it if you want to continue to grow and earn a living from it.

Bjork Ostrom: If you had a pie chart and you were to look at that right now, what does that look like in terms of your business, percentage-wise, revenue from YouTube versus ads from your site versus sponsored? I’d be interested in sponsored; YouTube and then sponsored blog if that’s something that you are doing.

Beth Le Manach: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. The thing that’s crazy about this is there’s so many places you can earn money right now, digitally, that you could be chasing every rabbit in the field. I’m a one man band, so I don’t have the awesome husband, wife team or people who have another… it’s just me, and I’m doing it all. I’m shooting the videos and editing the videos, I’m writing the blog posts, and developing the recipe, so there’s only so many places I can be. Right now I decided that there are three main places that I earn the most revenue from and that’s where I will be spending most time. That would be; a third of it is YouTube, a third of it is the blog and the other third is Amazon. It’s Amazon affiliate, but it’s also Amazon video, which I am now able to earn income from.

Beth Le Manach: It’s going to be released, I think a little bit wider soon, but right now I’m in a beta where you can earn money off the videos that you upload to Amazon and the products you’ve tagged. If people watch your video and then end up buying anything within a 24 hour period in the common kitchen category, you get a percentage of. It’s less than affiliate because it’s on Amazon marketing, but it’s significant, it adds up. I am spending a lot more time now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting. This is a macro analysis of Amazon affiliate, but you see a shift happening where Amazon is pulling back the affiliate percentages you can earn as an affiliate who refers people from your site to Amazon. People who are really invested in the Amazon ecosystem know those percentages are consistently going down. If before you could get… I don’t know what the percentages are, but like 4% if somebody bought a certain pan. Now it’s like 1% or something like that. These numbers are going way down and the thought is that Amazon is doing whatever they can to shift people to going to Amazon as the place where they do an analysis of what product to buy and to do product comparisons.

Bjork Ostrom: What you’re saying makes a lot of sense, where Amazon is switching and starting to maybe move some of those dollars to incentivize people to create content on Amazon. Then also, in doing that, sharing some of that upside. What I hear you saying is like, “Hey, if you do a video, you put something together and in that video you mentioned a product or talk about a product that you use within that and somebody ends up buying something, not just that product, but something in that category, then you’re able to, as Amazon creator, get a percentage of that.” It sounds like it’s in the beta right now?

Beth Le Manach: Yes. That’s in the beta. It should be soon coming to most creators, especially if you have a influencer page. Have you seen those on Amazon where you can actually have your shop?

Bjork Ostrom: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Beth Le Manach: Yeah. I started with that. I’ve been doing a lot of beta tests with Amazon over the years, I don’t know why. Somehow they got my email and we’ve been participating in things. I find it really fascinating for food creators because so much of what we do is tied to our favorite product a lot of the times, whether it be your favorite whiskey or your small appliance or this and that, and my videos have always just included that because I think it helps people succeed in making the recipe. When Amazon asked if I wanted to do the video beta, I was like, “Oh, I’ve got like 400 videos and I’m always talking about products, why not?”

Beth Le Manach: Then it also can sync up with your Amazon page or shop so you can put those same products in there, so that when I do something on social media like, “Oh, fabulous, fine, Friday,” something I love, and I can send people to the Amazon shop. I’ve found that there’s much more conversion that will happen when someone is dropped into a shop environment, because it has all of my point of view versus just an affiliate link. I try to send people to the shop as most as possible. I think it’s almost like a-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s almost like a complimentary… it’s almost like you’d send somebody to your Instagram page where it’s a platform that you’re building, you have your own recommendations, you have curated products, and now also producing content on there. Is that something where you are producing video just for Amazon or are you producing videos and then putting them on Amazon as well, and how explicit do you have to be it being a product video versus a normal video that has a product?

Beth Le Manach: Yeah, totally. Well, I think what I figured out early on is that my programming strategy for video, because when I was hiring a crew, I had to really think about it because the crew would come and we would shoot four to five videos during that time. Those four to five videos, one had to be for SEO purposes, something that I knew was going to do well, because search is there, one is for the community. Things that people are really excited about, keep asking me to do, and I knew that it would be a community favorite, and one that was product focused, which I knew that I could use on YouTube, but I could also use on Amazon. I wasn’t doing it exclusively for Amazon, but it was definitely part of the strategy to have something that would work for Amazon.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s great. You hinted at this, you said, “When I had a crew coming,” obviously we are in very different season where being in close proximity to people in indoor setting is not encouraged, and so you’ve had to shift a little bit, my guess is, and we’ve talked about this a little bit. Can you talk about what that’s been like knowing that video is a really important piece of what you do? When you look at your history, it’s the way that you got started, the way a lot of people know you and knew you in a way where you had video that was you speaking to the camera professionally produced, there was a crew there you could tell, it was really well done, and then suddenly you can’t have people come to your house anymore to shoot these videos. What was that like to make that transition?

Beth Le Manach: Well, at first I was in denial a little bit, probably like all of us. The first two weeks of the quarantine, we were like, “Oh, this is interesting.” It’s felt like a big snow day, right? “Oh, we’ll just wait this out and see how it goes.” Then in one thing to it, I was like, “This isn’t going to get better really soon. I better figure this out because my whole business is tied to producing videos and what am I going to do?” Back in the day, I had spent a little bit of time producing my own videos and never wanted to go back to that because it was such a painful experience. I still look at some of those videos that are still on YouTube and I cringe a little bit, I think probably because I come from a video background.

Beth Le Manach: Even before all of this digital stuff, I produced lifestyle content for the Scripps Network, HGTV, Food Network, Fine Living. I always had this bent for video quality, so it would really bug me if something didn’t look good or didn’t sound good, especially if I was the one creating it, it was even worse. I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to do that.” But I realized if I was going to continue with this business, I could either show up or give up, and I wasn’t ready to give up. I had worked too hard on this and the following was still there. I just figured out a way of like, “How can I do this? How can I actually shoot this myself? And would people still watch it?” I think that was the big question, is like… I think that’s what’s so about YouTube is, it will confirm or deny your worst suspicions or best hopes because it’s so vocal, it’s such a vocal platform.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that look like? Is that through comments, through stats? Yeah.

Beth Le Manach: Both, really. You really know within the first… I would say, two hours, if something is doing well or not. I think YouTube does a really great job of giving you metrics. They now have new Snapchat metrics that will tell you the first 24 hours, how things are trending based on how you typically do. You really can find out. But yeah, it’s the comments. I mean, people can either be really, really kind or really, really mean. I think that’s probably true of most social platforms now, but YouTube especially. I think YouTube is just really tell it like it is.

Bjork Ostrom: Why do you think that is. Is that the culture of-

Beth Le Manach: I don’t know.

Bjork Ostrom: … the platform?

Beth Le Manach: I think so. I think because it’s been around so long, it’s also really anonymous, so you can have a YouTube account, butterfly one, two, five and it’s not connected to your Facebook page. I don’t know. I don’t know, but it is. It’s very vocal. Luckily, I have been very lucky and have a very supportive community, but still it’s scary to get out there and throw something up there that’s a hot mess, which is what my first video looked like.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have advice for people who… this is a little bit of a rabbit trail, but I think it’s important to follow… advice for people who that is their ultimate fear is putting something online where people can leave a comment and critique on anything from how they look to how they sound to what they’re talking about. How do you navigate that?

Beth Le Manach: I would just say that; a, it happens to everybody. It’s part of being initiated on YouTube. You have to know going into it that you will have some of the nicest, kindest things ever said about you and you will also have some of the meanest, almost awful things said about you, and it could happen in the same day. You know what I mean? Just know that that’s what’s going to happen. Then the other thing is, is because there are the blocking mechanisms, you can just block people, and it doesn’t happen often, but over the years it just happened where I’m like, “That’s super obnoxious,” and you just block somebody. I always think of that scene from the Wizard of Oz when… is it Glenda the Good Witch comes down and she has her little one and she has the evil witch and she says, “Be gone, you have no power here.” That’s what I think of, I’m like, “You have no power here. This is my channel that you’ve come into and you’re not invited anymore, so out you to go.” and that’s how I have to think about it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I would say, building off of that, if you are somebody who’s extremely sensitive to that and know that some of those things would bounce around in your head, maybe one of the best first hires to make is somebody to spend a couple of hours a week to filter through those and to make sure that the worst of those aren’t things that you see, because that stuff can be impactful in terms of having a longterm impact of how we think about ourselves or about the content that we create. Part of it is developing thick skin around that, which I think comes in time. I think your point to the statistics of it, regardless of who you are, what you do, how successful or capable you are, the statistics are percentage wise. There’s always going to be some of that.

Bjork Ostrom: Obviously that scales up and down, depending on what it is, and if you do something egregious, then chances are it is going to be higher, but it’ll just happen. But I think it’s also wise, especially when you’re first getting started, to allow yourself ample time for that thick skin to develop and not to jump into the weeds right away. You know that you want to produce quality content, you have a history with this, you hire a crew, they come in and then suddenly that’s taken away and you have to respond to that. What did that look like?

Beth Le Manach: It was really soul searching. You go through all the emotions, right? Where you’re like… you feel depressed, you feel sad, you’re like, “What am I going to do?” You feel stuck. Then you come around. At the same time this was all going on, my dog, our little puppy, fell off a garden bench and had to get emergency back surgery. I know, it was horrible. I know you’re a dog person, too-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally.

Beth Le Manach: … and so are we. They were like, “Well, no, he’s not going to walk again. There might be a 30% chance.” I’m like, “What? This dog is only three years old. How is this possible?” But he’s a biter. He’s a nippy little thing, not with us, but with most people. He’s such a fighter. This dog, lo and behold, just got himself up every day and kept trying to walk-

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Beth Le Manach: … and ow he’s like a walking machine. Yeah. I was like, “If he could learn to walk again, surely, I can learn how to shoot a YouTube video.”

Bjork Ostrom: Your inspiration. Yeah.

Beth Le Manach: He was. He so was. It just hit me. It was like, “Okay, you can sit here and have your own little pity party, or you can pull up your sleeves like you’ve always done and figure it out.” I think it does show you and the world what you’re made of. We all have those moments in life, and that, I guess, was mine.

Bjork Ostrom: It was interesting, we talk about the idea of posting your first video or getting started with it and some of the hesitations that you have, how do you imagine that with that first video, that was the new way of you creating video, maybe had a little bit of that?

Beth Le Manach: Oh my gosh. It did, and it was so bad, Bjork. It was so bad. You go see it. It’s still there. It’s a grilled chicken three ways, or grilled chicken three meals or something. I had not figured out how to set the exposure settings on the camera. It was nuclearly bright, the whole thing, and I knew it, but there was nothing I could do to fix it. What was just interesting about it is, people didn’t really care. They were just like, “A plus for trying, and we’re glad you’re back. We didn’t want to lose you because you let the quality thing get in the way.” I think that’s what really underscored for me what YouTube is all about, which is, at the end of the day it’s not the high quality video, and the professional this and professional that that people are really tuning into. It’s the personalities and your unique point of view. No one can take that away from you. You just keep showing up and you can deliver that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things that you said that I think was so impactful is “you” in YouTube, and you think about it and it’s like, “Oh, that’s really the heart and soul of YouTube, is you. It is the person.” You see that in regards to the channels that are most successful is, it’s very personality centric. I think it’s important to talk about that because for people who create food content, one of the types of content that has success on other platforms, or at least did in a season was this idea of hands and pans videos, which is almost the opposite of you. You don’t know who it is and it’s just focused on the recipe. Can you talk about the difference between one of those hands and pans videos and the success that might find on Facebook or Instagram or maybe a platform like TikTok, and then talk about YouTube and why YouTube is so different?

Beth Le Manach: Yes. I mean, I think what’s interesting about the hands and pans… and they do serve their purpose, it’s great to be scrolling through a feed and see that and get inspired and want to make the recipe, but what’s missing from those types of videos is, there’s no real emotional connection to them. Once you’ve seen one hands and pans, it’s hard to really differentiate others. They all look the same at the end of the day, where I think with YouTube, you’re really putting yourself out there. It really is putting you on the tube, in all of your quirks, sense of humor, POV, all of it, and people are buying into that. While, yes, there’s a YouTube app and people just scroll through their uploads, they have a personal connection with you. When someone has subscribed to 200 YouTube channels and they see you and they like your personality, they’re going to click on that thumbnail first because they already feel invested.

Beth Le Manach: In a weird way, in a very on demand world, it’s almost the last fashion of appointment viewing because people will say, “Oh, it’s Saturday morning. I know Beth’s going to post her video on Saturday morning,” because I’ve always posted on Saturday morning. That is very hard to get, I think, in today’s world where we’re a score based society. To get somebody to actually go to a platform because they know you’re on it with a new video that day, half your marketing is done. They’ve already known that. I only think a personal connection can do that.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s a different version of what growing up was. Your favorite show coming on at a certain time and everybody gathering around to sit down and watch it, but maybe on a more individual level people knowing, “Hey, there’s going to be a piece of content that’s coming out this afternoon and I’m excited about that because this is a channel that I really like.” I can think about a podcast as maybe a similar example, where if you have a podcast… I have MacBreak weekly comes out on Tuesdays, and I know that there’s going to be one to two hours of conversation around the latest in Mac and Apple world. That’s just something that I know, it happens on a schedule.

Bjork Ostrom: The other thing that’s interesting and maybe a little bit different with YouTube versus a hand and pans video on Instagram is length. Would you say in general that longer is better on YouTube, as long as it’s engaging the entire time?

Beth Le Manach: Yes, that’s exactly right. That is a really a new shift, I think, that we’ve seen on YouTube. I think when I started, you could get away with three to five minute videos. There was a world where hands and pans worked on YouTube, and I understand why people are doing it. I do understand making these videos that they can then put on their blog, they don’t really want to put themselves out there, but my feeling is, if you’re going to go through the pain and suffering of creating video… and we all know there’s pain and suffering, you might as well attract a new audience on YouTube. It may as well work for YouTube. You can always cut that video down into hands and pans if that’s what you ultimately want for your blog, but for YouTube now, you really need to have a 10 minute video plus, I think.

Beth Le Manach: But that you will get a great return on that for a couple of reasons. One, you are paying into more watch time for your channel. Not necessarily completion rate, but watch time. This is a new metric that YouTube has really prioritized over the last few years, which is, if you post a video that’s five minutes long and you get a 50% completion rate… so you have people watching two minutes and 30 seconds, you’ve clocked two minutes and 30 seconds of watch time. If you post a 10 minute video and people only watch it 50% of the time, you’ve clocked five minutes of watch time. It’s the higher amount of watch time that YouTube likes and will surface more of your videos in suggested and in all these other promotional places on YouTube that you are not getting audience. Exposing your video to new audiences that allows you to grow. That would be number one, is longer videos can help you grow on YouTube, but you have to keep their attention.

Beth Le Manach: You can’t go on there and be like, “Okay, I’m going to read from this cookbook now and get my 10 minute video.” You have to have the engagement because there’s hundreds of algorithms on YouTube, but engagement is one of them. It’s that balance of like, “What can I do for 10 minutes that’s going to keep people’s attention that they’re going to comment on it, they’re going to like it, they’re going to share, they’re going to put in a playlist?” And you’ll do all those signals that YouTube says, “Oh, this is a quality video.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It makes sense when you think of… if you had a one minute video, you’d have to have people watch 10 of those to equal the same amount of attention given to one 10 minute video. If somebody does watch a one minute video all the way through but then they also watch a five minute video all the way through, that five minute video is going to be much more valuable. It’s five times more valuable for YouTube because not only are they running ads against that, they want people to stick around, they want people to continue to use the platform. That makes sense, but then the question becomes, how do you create engaging content? What does that look like and what are the things that you need to be aware of from a content creation perspective?

Beth Le Manach: For sure. One other thing… we’ll get to that in a second, but one other thing that I want to also point out is, yes, a 10 minute video takes a lot more time to shoot and to edit, but you can triple your revenue from a 10 minute video because once you hit that 10 minute threshold, it clicks in that you can now put three pre-roll, three ads. You can do a pre roll, you can do a mid roll, and you can do a post roll. When I’ve looked at my analytics over the last few weeks when I’ve been doing longer videos, because shooting them myself, I can do longer videos because it’s not costing me any money, I don’t have to get four videos out of the shoot day, I’ve tripled the revenue. Even though I’ve gotten the same amount of views, because I’ve had three ad placement, I’ve made three times the amount of money. You say you make more on that.

Bjork Ostrom: With YouTube, are you picking when you want those ads to play or how many you want or is that just a general like, no ads, medium ads, lots of ads. How does that work in terms of deciding how many ads you’re playing?

Beth Le Manach: For sure. You can totally pick it. If your video is 10 minutes, then it’ll allow you that the box opens up and then you can check it for mid roll. If your video is not, you can’t. They are limited in that sense. You can manually insert them. Or what I do is, I let YouTube insert them based on viewer behavior. I think that’s actually better. The funny thing is, unlike a blog where people will complain about like, “Oh my God, there’s too many ads,” on YouTube people don’t. I’ve never seen it for that length of video because they’re wired to television. That’s how television is. You watch for a little bit, you get an ad, it’s different.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Yep. That makes sense. Idea being, you’re creating this content, this content is longer, and longer engaging content is going to be prioritized by YouTube and you’re also able to include more ads on that. When people go into it, if they’re used to creating these hands and pans videos, maybe have a little bit of a formula for it, you have to blow that formula up and rebuild it in a way where now you have 10 to 15 minutes of time to fill about something that you were previously communicating to varying degrees of success within a minute. How do you expand that or what are the additional valuable things that you should include in a video?

Beth Le Manach: Yeah. You can do it a couple of different ways. I usually use a few of these tactics in each video. Tactic number one, the easiest, is to do recipes that might have more components to it. If you just do a blueberry muffin, you’re probably not going to get a 10 minute video. But if you do a blueberry muffin with three different toppings, then that suddenly takes that one idea, and then you’re doing a crumb topping and then maybe you’re doing almond crunch or an oatmeal, or maybe you’re then doing a vegan muffin. You can do one recipe three ways. That’s one way to do it.

Beth Le Manach: Another way to do it is to inject personal stories and personality into a video in a way that is teaching people things but is also entertaining. If you’re stirring something and you say, “Well, you want to reduce these mangoes down,” because people will know that they’re not missing anything, there’s just stirring going on, that’s a great time to say, “The first time I peeled a mango or here’s how you cut a mango.” Some personal thing that starts to engage people with your story, with who you are as a person, so that over time when they watch enough videos and you bring up that mango story again, they’re already in on the joke.

Beth Le Manach: There’s something really powerful about being part of someone’s tribe in that way, that you’re always in on the joke. That’s another way to do it. Then the third way I would say would be to break down certain tips and things. If you’re making a beurre blanc sauce and then you show people how to do it, and then you can also say, “If you beurre blanc sauce breaks, here is how you fix it.” You’re not adding any new recipe content, so you don’t have to develop it, but you’re basically adding a tip that adds more time.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and diving deep in certain areas. I think part of that-

Beth Le Manach: Diving deeper.

Bjork Ostrom: … comes down to… Which path you go down depends on what you feel most comfortable with and capable of. If you are somebody who is maybe more left brain and love the idea of providing clear guidelines and tips and advice around, let’s say, perfecting a certain recipe or a coffee or something, you can do that. But if you’re somebody who loves storytelling and can tell really engaging stories around a recipe, then you could do it in that way. Some reflection on who you are and how you create content and the way that you do that puff, I think would make sense there.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the things that you had mentioned that I think is so fascinating and so foreign to people who don’t use YouTube is this idea of getting exposure to your content. In the blogging world, we think of SEO and search optimization, and maybe Pinterest a little bit as well. But what does that formula look like on YouTube? You talk specifically about this idea of different rings. For me, as I read through that, I was like, “Oh, that makes sense.” But it was a different type of idea for getting exposure to content.

Beth Le Manach: Yes, exactly. I think that’s a bit of something that people have to get their head wrapped around in the beginning, they’ll think, “Oh, I have 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. When I post a video, all 10,000 people are being notified,” but that’s actually not how it’s working. I think a lot of platforms probably now work this way, where you have to earn your self, earn your way through the various rings. When you post a video on YouTube, the people who get the notification first are your super fans. These are the people that typically watch your videos every week, they comment, they’re subscribed, they put things in playlist. It goes to them first. If the video performs well in watch time, in completion rate, in shares, all the different metrics that you did looks for “Oh, this video is resonating,” then it goes to that second ring.

Beth Le Manach: This might be the people who then watch your videos occasionally, they may or may not be subscribed, and so on. Until you get to what I would call the brass ring, which is that ring of… they’re not exposing your subscribers, they’re exposing the YouTube audience as a whole, and that’s the brass ring or the gold ring, because then you’re getting new subscriptions, and this can be posting it on home page or in up next, or in related to a video that’s not one of yours. When I’ve had videos appear there and you can look at it, you can see it in your analytics, it’ll say “suggested.” If your suggested is, say, at 10%, and then suddenly it starts to climb to 20, 30, 40, 50, 60%, you’re going to see tremendous growth there because that’s all fresh eyeballs.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. It’s interesting. I feel like a good example of that is this YouTube channel that started to pop up in my feed a lot, and it’s become a joke now because whenever this person creates a new video, I send it to my friends, which I’m sure then they just continually show it, is the Saxsquatch, and it’s a guy dressed up in a Sasquatch suit playing the saxophone, cover bands. It feels like a fringe YouTube, but what’s funny is, there was at one point, for whatever reason, YouTube said, “Hey, I think you would like this video.” I feel like it’s the ultimate YouTube suggested video, and now it’s something that I’m seeing all the time, but there’s lots of other examples of that. What’s interesting about it is, it’s based on your personal watch history and the things that you have been interested in, which maybe speaks volumes to how I’m consuming casual YouTube content.

Bjork Ostrom: But then it’s also… what I hear you saying is the performance of that video based on those earlier rings for that account. If it proves to be successful with the inner rings, the followers, the super fans, the people who know it and are familiar with it, then YouTube says, “Hey, if we show this to other people, they might also stay engaged with this piece of content like these earlier rings did.” It sounds like that’s how you get at growth is you get outside of your immediate rings by producing, engaging, interesting content that people continue to watch, and then eventually get outside of that to people who haven’t searched for your content or they aren’t looking for it, but they come across it because it’s a suggested video. Is that right?

Beth Le Manach: That’s exactly right. Which is why it’s so important to play to that super fan audience, meaning, do the content that they want, create content that they’ve already loved, because if it’s going to resonate with them, it’s like those rings in the ocean when you drop a pebble, it’s just going to reverberate. If you create something that doesn’t resonate with them, then you’re not going to get that early engagement signals that’s going to send to YouTube to widely distribute it. That’s what makes it easy, is just listen to the audience.

Bjork Ostrom: What does that look like for you? As you think about paying attention to your audience, listening to your audience on YouTube, would be an example of how you do that and then fold that into your production in a weekly or monthly basis?

Beth Le Manach: Yes. I mean, the simplest way really is just to ask them. You can always do that. I’ve started doing that now that I’m shooting these videos myself, because I’m only shooting one a week, so the ramp up time is really small. I can basically say at the end of a video, “Okay, what do you guys want next week? I’ve got this really great pasta recipe or this really delicious Nutella ice cream. Tell me what you want.” Then everybody chimes in and that’s easy enough. I just did that. But the way that I used to do it, because I produced so far in advance… sometimes that wasn’t as easy because people don’t want to delay between when they request something and then two months later, you bring it, that’s a little frustrating, is to look at past success.

Beth Le Manach: This is my new little YouTube grills hack that I think is so valuable and I’ve seen it play out really well, which is, looking at your analytics for your top 10 videos, what was number one or number two a year from now? I did this around Christmas time with this puff pastry video that I produced. I could see that over the course of two or three years, every December, this video would spike and would just do really well. That’s the thing that YouTube is doing now that’s a little bit different is they will resurface old videos. This is a video that was a video that was four or five years old, but whatever reason, it was in my top 10, because they are now surfacing videos. It doesn’t have to be a new video. Chances are, if you look at your YouTube analytics, I bet half of the videos are all videos that continue to perform the best.

Beth Le Manach: I took this puff pastry video and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to produce a new puff pastry video, knowing that this one seems to do well.” I did that and put the new video as an End Card in the old video. As that old video is getting all of these new views on it, it’s now driving to the new video. Then the new video had the End Card driving to the old video.

Beth Le Manach: Basically what you try to do is create a reciprocal relationship between those two videos because you knew one was successful, but the new one is going to be successful. What that does for YouTube is it tells them, “Oh, people who watch video A then suddenly watched video B. We should suggest these videos to each other in up next.” I’ve done that and in two cases had a video reach over 100, 0000 views in just seven to 14 days, only because the old video was so successful, it was driving all of these views to new video, and they continue to do well because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Once YouTube has established that connection, it just keeps connecting them.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. I’m going to recap here to see if I can understand that correctly.

Beth Le Manach: Sorry, it’s really in the weeds.

Bjork Ostrom: No, it’s great and it makes a lot of sense. With all of this, assuming the goal that YouTube is trying to accomplish is keeping people on the platform, which we’ll call watch time. As a creator, like you said, you want to think about creating longer videos, but another way that you can impact watch time is for people continuing to watch multiple videos of yours, and that being watched time. If they watch two, five-minute videos, that’s 10, two 10-minute videos, that 20. The idea is, you had a really popular video and what you did is, around the same season when that spiked, you created a related video, and then you put in an End Card on the old video that allowed people to click and play the new related video.

Bjork Ostrom: For those who aren’t familiar, End Card is just… essentially, it’s a little picture in picture ability to click and then see another video. Is that a good-

Beth Le Manach: Yep, that’s exactly right.

Bjork Ostrom: People would click on that and then they would watch the next video which was related. At the end of that one, you would put an End Card back to the old video. There’s this reciprocal relationship. But the interesting thing that you talked about was, it sounds like one of the things that happened was YouTube eventually saw that a lot of people watched that video by clicking on it and then started to autoplay it as a video that played right after they finished. Those are two different things. One somebody clicks on it and says, “I want to watch this video,” the second is, there’s an autoplay video once somebody’s done that just goes into the next video, like you’re watching Netflix or something, but on YouTube, they do a little countdown or something and then just start playing the video. That’s something that YouTube controls for the most part?

Beth Le Manach: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: What you’re saying is, there was potential that that was connected, where they saw a lot of people were watching the old video, and so eventually they just said, “Hey, let’s just autoplay this as the next video,” is that right?

Beth Le Manach: Yes, exactly. You sort of force the connection and that ends up creating a lot more views because the secret in this strategy is, you have to see, “What’s the video that’s on fire?” Because the video that’s on fire is delivering so many views. That video was delivering… I think in the course of 28 days at Christmas, it was delivering its own 100,000 views. I want to get in front of those people for my new video because I want this new video to do equally well, and it did. But you have to pick the video that’s on fire.

Beth Le Manach: Sometimes if you miss the window… and I’ve had that happen, I did a healthy lunch box series on a video that had about 3 million views on it, and it was with a brand, and I said, “Oh, well, let’s do it in January because that’s when that video is on fire and it has been for the last few years,” but because it was with a brand, they dragged their feet, we couldn’t get this. Long story short, the video did not post until February, did not do half as well because we missed the window because the old video wasn’t on fire anymore.

Bjork Ostrom: It happened earlier than when it peaked, and so it didn’t work in the same way as the puff pastry. That makes sense. One of the things that was interesting was, at the beginning of the show, you had talked about how expanding beyond just YouTube was really helpful in regards to building the stability of the revenue for your business, but obviously YouTube still being a source for that. For people who want to fold YouTube into their business strategy, create some revenue around it, what is the best way to do that? Is it ads? Is it working with sponsors? What do you see right now in terms of a revenue creation from YouTube and the best way to do that?

Beth Le Manach: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a good question. I think there will always be brands who want to activate on YouTube. If your audience size warrants it, you can command a pretty good amount of money for that. I have seen those fees go down over the years just because there’s so much more choice now for advertisers on YouTube.

Beth Le Manach: Yeah, it’s become a little bit saturated, but it’s a great thing to add in conjunction with everything else, and that’s what I have actually done is I’ve just done one price. I don’t piecemeal it all out. I do one price, and with that, they get the YouTube video, the blog posts, the social amplification, the newsletter, they get everything and I don’t let them pick it all apart. I just say, “Here’s the one price and you get everything.”

Beth Le Manach: They see it as such added value because so many brands right now need content, and they need video content. Video content is hard for brands to do. What they can do on YouTube, which is a great service for them, is they can use your video and cut it down and run it as a pre roll. They can take like-minded channels or demographic or interests and run it across other channels and you have your video… and you’ve probably all seen that where it’s like, “Wait, this looks like a YouTube video, but it’s an ad.” Then you click on it if you’re interested in it, and then it’ll take you to the full length video. That can also-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. The idea with that is, a brand will pay somebody to create a video and then they’ll run a little pre-roll ad that will be in front… let’s say it’s a flower company, and they’ll run it in front of a another cookie recipe, but it’s just a cookie recipe itself, which you click on and then you can see that. But essentially it’s a way for them to do a certain level of grassroots-y type marketing, where they’re getting in front of other content that already exists to see the content that they’ve paid somebody else to produce.

Beth Le Manach: Right. In an environment that’s at home, do you know what I mean? It feels so much more organic to run an actual YouTube video as an ad as opposed to an ad before a YouTube video. They really like that and that seems to work well. I would just put a turn on it. Most brand deals like that. They can only do it for three months. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. That’s great. Beth, we’ve covered so much and I feel like there’s so much more. We can do two or three episodes-

Beth Le Manach: I know.

Bjork Ostrom: … with the amount of knowledge that you have and your enthusiasm and your ability to speak into these issues that is encouraging and exciting for people. If somebody is in the place where you were five, six, seven years ago, they’ve been doing this, they’re excited about it, but they need to make that leap, what have you learned along the way that you’d give as advice to them in how they can make that transition if they want to be doing this full time or even just want to level up a little bit, what were the things that would be most helpful, whether that be an encouraging word or on-the-ground tactical things or reading a book, maybe it’s The War of Art, they pick that up and read it. As we come to the end here and wrap up, what advice would you give to people who are along that journey with you, but maybe a little bit earlier?

Beth Le Manach: Yeah. I mean, I would say, look at what it is that you really love about food content. Everybody has their own unique point of view. For me, it’s always just been this sincere form of love when we cook for people. I realized that getting on video, I had to get beyond the “Oh, I don’t like the way my hair looks, I don’t like the way I talk, or Oh, I don’t like…” because I had to keep going back to why I was doing it, which was to get people to make their own memories in their own homes and create this nurturing, loving environment around food for their friends and family. When I’m feeling insecure or when I have to like, “Oh my gosh, now shoot my own videos,” it was that feeling of why I was doing it.

Beth Le Manach: I think really focusing on the “why” because that sees you through the uncomfortability of it and the insecurity when you can really focus on what the purpose is. Then the crazy thing is that you find other people that share in that purpose, and that’s where you get this really amazing community. When they come back and say, “I’m the first person in my family to go to college and I made your apple tart when I told them I got my acceptance letter, and now this is a tradition for us.” You’re like, “Okay, mission accomplished. That’s what I set out to do, and that’s what’s happening.” That’s a great feeling.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s such a great reminder that we can have these numbers or metrics or goals around business success or whether it’s building followers or fans or likes. I think those are good and those are helpful, but those will never be as fulfilling as having a clear “why” and working to accomplish that, and they’ll also never be as motivating. Inevitably, you will get to a certain level and then just want to be at the next level and it doesn’t really end. To embrace that “why” and have a clear understanding of the purpose behind it is such a good reminder.

Bjork Ostrom: My guess is there’s going to be some people who are interested in following along with what you do, seeing journey as you continue to produce video and following along with what you do. Beth, where’s the best way for people to connect with you online if they do want to follow along?

Beth Le Manach: Definitely on YouTube on Entertaining with Beth and Instagram, Entertaining with Beth. Those are usually the two places I check first for comments in the morning so those are good spots to find me.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. So great. Beth, so good to connect again and hear what you’ve been up to, and thanks for sharing some of the high level advice, insight, inspiration, and then also some of those cool tactical things that are happening on the ground right now. I really appreciate it.

Beth Le Manach: Absolutely. It’s always good to be with you, Bjork. Thank you so much for having me. Stay safe during these crazy times.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. Yeah. See you too. Appreciate it.

Beth Le Manach: I’m saying… Okay. Take care. Bye-bye.

Alexa Peduzzi: And that’s a wrap for this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Again, thank you for tuning in and for making the show a part of your week today. I just loved this interview with Beth and I loved when she said that she was either going to show up and give up, and she’s worked too hard to give up. I think that’s just a really great reminder in life and in business and running a food blog, it’s easy to feel like you’re at a crossroads where you could either just give up and scrap your whole blog or keep going and pushing yourself. I just think Beth’s story and her experiences are just such a great reminder for when things get tough.

Alexa Peduzzi: We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you can leave us a comment on the show notes for this episode at foodbloggerpro.com/259. That will take you right to the show notes and you can check out some of the links that they mentioned in this episode, like the Saxsquatch YouTube channel that Bjork mentioned, along with some other resources that Beth mentioned in today’s episode, but that does it for us this week. We appreciate you. It’s just so awesome that you’re here. We love connecting with you in this format, and we’ll see you next week. Until then, make it a great week.