Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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

Bjork Ostrom: Nate, welcome to the podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Wow.

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

Bjork Ostrom: TV, mic.

Nate Coughran: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: Subscriptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nate Coughran: That’s right,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, do that all day long.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nate Coughran: Really easy to mess it up totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are speaking with Dana Hassan. She is an entrepreneur, content creator, self-taught baker, and the founder of Homemade Ish, where she has recently launched her first physical product cookie starter kit. Dana has spent the last decade building her business, reaching over 3 million followers on TikTok and launching this first physical product. In this interview, she shares how and why she transitioned from beauty and fashion content to food content and how she balanced networking and creating in the early days of building her brand. She describes that season as one of quiet hustle, which I think a lot of you will resonate with. Bjork and Dana also discussed the process of launching a physical product, why she decided to make cookie starter kits, how she built the team behind the product, developed a scalable recipe and the food science involved, and then everything else you need to consider when developing your own product. Dana shares lots of her tips and tricks for growing a following on TikTok, creating video content, and then how to leverage that huge social media following to support other aspects of your business. It’s a really enjoyable interview. I think you’ll take a lot out of it, so I’m just going to let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Dana, welcome to the podcast.

Dana Hasson: Hi. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about something that I personally don’t know a lot about. There’s a lot of things I don’t know a lot about, but one of them is TikTok growth. You have millions, multiple millions of followers on TikTok. But the other thing we’re going to be talking about that I also don’t have a lot of expertise or experience in is physical product, like creating a physical product to pair with your social following. It’s one of the things we talk about all the time. It’s great to do sponsor content, it’s great to build a following, but one of the smartest things you can do is start to think about, Hey, what does it look like to create a product adjacent to the following that you have? So we’re going to be talking about all those things, but before we do it, we always like to hear a little bit about origin story, how it got started. I know that you started to create content. Think about creating content when you were in school. Tell us about what that looked like and your exploration stage around what type of content you wanted to create.

Dana Hasson: Yeah, it’s funny because I always had a love for just visuals. Remember just being super young and forcing my family friends to grab their fancy camera and just start capturing myself or other just things around us. And so when I went to school, I studied fashion merchandising. I love fashion and it’s something that I still love very much. And we did a case study about Chiara Ferragni — I don’t want to botch her name.

And she basically is the OG on Instagram. She started with just a blog and the whole blogging and then Instagram kind of came along and at the time I think she had probably over 10 million followers. And it was that light bulb moment where I was just like, Hmm, okay, there’s something here. Maybe I should give it a full shot. And so I basically just started exploring. I downloaded Instagram. I did miss the wave of just weak algorithm where you can just grow blow up, unquote. And I was exploring. I was definitely just trying and posting. I mean, it was basically just my friends who followed me at the time.

Bjork Ostrom: And when was this the wrong time? Probably

Dana Hasson: Like 2016 I would say is when I was exploring and I basically told everyone around me when there’s a new app that comes out, please lemme know. I need to be the first one because I feel like I’ve gained the knowledge with Instagram and what to do on how to basically do it when a new platform comes along.

Bjork Ostrom: You developed the skills of content creation. That’s what you were practicing, that’s what you were getting better at, and then was the bet at that time. You want to know about these new platforms because willing to take the risk of showing up and being an early creator, there might be upside of being able to grow with the wave of the platform. There might be the downside of you spend a lot of time on a platform that doesn’t take off, but that’s what you were interested in at that point was to know about what these new platforms or the new apps might be.

Dana Hasson: Yeah, I had nothing to lose. I was in school. I just wanted to pursue something that wasn’t a traditional nine to five. And I interned to know that I don’t want to be in a nine to five area office, and I basically was just on the lookout, but at the same time making just as many connections as I can. I would just come into the city every day. I was on Long Island at the time with my parents and I was just literally asking everyone to just get coffee with me and I would not stop until they said yes. And so I

Bjork Ostrom: Feel like, yeah. And who were these types of people? Were they other creators or people who had jobs at agencies? What did that look like? I think that even that little nugget there is a helpful piece because sometimes we can look at somebody’s story and their arc and think, Hey, well, you did these things and you grew and you feel like you can understand it, building it backwards. But really there’s a oftentimes season of quiet hustle and it feels like that’s potentially what that was for you, which is quiet hustle. It’s not even you’re creating content, building a following. It’s like you were just trying to learn. It sounds like

Dana Hasson: I was trying to learn and just connect with everyone because my mindset was, your network is your net worth. If I am making as many connections and people can kind of spot me now than when I am hopefully one day becoming something bigger than what they’re seeing, they’re kind of like, Ooh, I watched this process go down and I want to be helpful and supportive. So back to your question, yes, agencies just like Brent pr girls that worked in agencies that are in-house or not and just anyone, and then of course other creators as well and creating content with other creators. But it was just like anyone that would say yes to me at this point.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And what did you learn from those early connections? Were there any takeaways that you could look back to and say, gosh, this was a nugget that I took away from this conversation, or this was the most helpful thing? Or is it more just collectively it was helpful to build your network?

Dana Hasson: I think, and this might be cliche, but being nice, honestly, I will always be just nice to everyone. And I feel like that’s something I learned early on because you do meet a lot of people, so when you’re nice, you honestly stand out. And that just felt to me like, okay, no matter what happens down the line, numbers don’t define me. I want to just be true to who I am. So I feel like them kind of just giving me a mirror of myself was mostly what was going on. But I wouldn’t say anything necessarily learning, it’s just networking, how to work,

Bjork Ostrom: Connecting with people. For a long time, my computer desktop was, there’s that common phrase. I think there’s a poster of it, work hard and be nice to people, but it feels like that’s kind of what that was for you is working hard. It’s networking, it’s reaching out to people. You probably get a lot of nos or non replies, but then you occasionally get somebody and there’s a connection there. And I was just having this conversation with Lindsay, my wife, Lindsay today around the importance, the important things I’ve learned from doing coffee, a lunch, having a connection with somebody where there wasn’t necessarily a clear objective, but it was a chance to connect. But so often what I found when I do have those interactions in those moments is they’ll mention something that I wasn’t aware of and I’m like, oh, that’s really interesting, and there’s a learning from that, or it’s a tool that they’re using that I didn’t know about, or maybe it’s a way that the industry works that kind of helps color the picture in terms of my understanding of the thing that I’m trying to get better at. And so it feels like there’s so much that can come from that, but oftentimes it’s not very well-defined. We don’t know.

How did you balance that type of time with people and connections, networking with the actual process of creating? What did that look like? Were you also trying to create a lot or was that more of a phase of learning and understanding the industry?

Dana Hasson: Yeah, so actually back then it was a tiny bit easier for me. I was focusing on just fashion and beauty. So that was just me going into the city, having a meeting and then snapping a photo of my outfit and kind of continuing with my day. Also, videos were not really a thing, so I’m consuming things. Were not really around. I feel like a photo is so much, I don’t want to say easier. There’s still a lot of science behind it, but definitely easier than video. And then I have to edit it and voiceovers and whatnot. So it was kind of like a multitasking meeting with another influencer friend, take a photo of me. I take photo of her kind of.

Bjork Ostrom: And you hear that a lot. There’s conversations I’ve had. I know my conversations with Lindy how content has shifted and it’s just so much more time consuming now, whether it be on social media or if people are creating content online, on a website or on a blog, the amount of effort that goes into any singular piece of content just goes up. A lot of that being video, like you said, but also what it takes to stand out, what it takes to be unique, novel, recognizable. There’s also a level of supply and demand. There’s a lot of people creating content. So you have to do a lot to stand out. At what point did you switch over to start doing video a little bit more? And my guess is that from one of those conversations, at some point when you were like, Hey, tell me about the new app, somebody was like, Hey, you should check out maybe Musically or TikTok, which is what TikTok was originally did right away, that was going to be a platform that was a good fit for you. Talk about the early days of building your following there.

Dana Hasson: So again, I was doing fashion and beauty, and that is what I thought was my biggest thing. And actually I found out about TikTok from my little brother because the little kids know about the hottest apps. And it was just a random summer day in July, 2019. So way before it was a thing. And I just saw him and his friend making a video with coins on the floor, and I was like,

Is going on here? And my parents kind of pulled me aside. They’re like, you should download this and give it a shot. And honestly, to me, the biggest thing is when you go on an app and then you see how many people have followers and you kind of gather and be like, okay, there’s enough people that are interested in this kind of content that I should give it a shot. And that’s what happened. Addison Rae was on my for you page dancing with her mom with 300,000 followers. So I was kind of understanding that there are a lot of people here and that I should try and give it a shot. But again, I did it very innocently. I didn’t tell anyone. I was kind of just like, let me just see what happens. And I was just experimenting with beauty and fashion. And then one day I decided to post a donut recipe for the record. I love food. I always loved food. It was always something I loved doing and hosting, so it wasn’t too out of the blue for me, but I just decided to post and see what happens. And then that video got 4 million views

And I basically was like, oh, it looks like we’re going to be baking for the rest of our lives now because

Bjork Ostrom: It’s naked funny. Yeah, it’s interesting. The same similar thing. There’s somebody I’ve referenced on the podcast before happened with a friend, his name is tj, where he was creating content online, was a really skilled creator, is a really skilled creator. And then one day created this video around birth order, youngest child, oldest child, middle child. And same thing where it went off.

I don’t know the exact story. I don’t know TJ super well. He is more friend of a friend, but I’ve hung out with him a couple times. But I think the general progression then from there was like, Hey, this worked. What if I did an iteration of this? It was a little bit different, but had echoes of that same type of piece of content, would that do well? And part of it is like think about songwriting. You write a hundred songs and then you write one song and it’s like, whoa. Something about this resonated with people you’ve practiced. You had 99 songs that didn’t hit. But I think the same is true with content where you kind of have to create a lot for a long time, be willing to try different things, be willing to experiment, and then to see if something hits. And then from there, see if you can replicate that in some way where it’s not the exact same thing, but it’s maybe a version of that to see if it continues to work. Is that a little bit of what happened with that first video that you created where it was like, Hey, this worked. Let me see if I can create another kind of adjacent piece of content that might also do well and that resulted in some of that early growth for you?

Dana Hasson: Yeah, so I would say that, and also reading the comments because I was like, okay, something clearly triggered these people to make this video blow up. And basically I kept on saying, should look like this after every step of the way that I was creating. And so I was just leaning in and I was like, all right, it looks like I’m going to be baking, saying it should look like this all the time. And it just kind of honestly just went viral every time I would post a video. It just did really well. And again, I think it’s the algorithm. Not a lot of creators were there. I was probably the first creator to not dance on the app too, which was very interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: Like Addison Rae, that was a huge thing. It’s like she, that’s what she was known for and yeah,

Dana Hasson: Exactly. I kind of was like, okay, I don’t know how to dance. I’m not trying to dance. Let me educate them in a different way. And I think that’s also why it kind of stuck.

Bjork Ostrom: So your point in that was you did this piece of content, you looked at it and you’re like, why did this go viral? You started to look through the comments to see if you could extract some understanding of what it was from that content that made it perform well. You started to see people reference a line that you said in the content, is that right where you said should look like this? And that for you was a learning? So then that was the thing that you looked at repeating in the content moving forward and started to notice a pattern specifically with that phrase. Is that more or less kind of what you’re saying you learned in that initial piece of content?

Dana Hasson: Yes, but also the baking, so it was kind of just a mix of both. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That was going to be my next question was did you try and experiment in the world of fashion by doing a similar thing and having a similar phrase, maybe even that phrase to see, Hey, does saying this work with fashion content, was that something that you experimented with?

Dana Hasson: Honestly, no. I was just kind of dividing my content into just a fashion category, a beauty category and baking. So I didn’t really overlap except for the fact that I would get super dressed up to the kitchen, but we’re talking, you couldn’t even upload videos to TikTok. It was straight up, you have to film on the app and post immediately, which is why people did dancing. It was effortless. You put on a sound, you just do it. So it was very different to hold the phone speak. There was no voiceover at the time, speak and bake and altogether. So I kind of just tapped into different categories until it was evolving.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s interesting, I did an interview, I’m trying to remember what episode it was with somebody who’s a creator, TikTok creator, and she talked about this idea of she had this salad and she’d shake a salad and she noticed that as being this variable within the piece of content. But I think part of what it is is there’s a little bit of experimentation with it, of course, and then saying, okay, what does it look like to create? Could you do this forever potentially? And I think one of the things that we sometimes want to do as creators is we find a thing that works and then we very quickly look for the next thing, and it’s like, well probably go deep with the thing that works and continue to do that. Now obviously there’s the element of wanting to have variety and be creative, but also it’s like if you find a thing that works, continue to iterate in that world as opposed to try and get too far away from it.

In the marketing world, there’s this concept that they talk about that I really love, and they say, one funnel can change your life, which it’s like it’s kind of marketing speak and whatever. But I think it’s really true that if you find one process, one funnel, and you’ve maybe seen this for your case, that can change your life. And I feel like an ultimate example is Tua, that phrase changed her life. But what it requires for us is creators is showing up, putting content out in your case, looking through, understanding that, trying to experiment with it and seeing if you can build and iterate off of it. In TJ’s case, it’s like he found a thing that works and it’s like these birth order humor videos and what does it look like to go deep with that while also then looking at how do you diversify around that without getting too far away from it. So as you’ve thought about your content, the things that have worked for you, what does that look like? How do you strike that balance between continuing to do the thing that works while also building other experiments around that and trying other pieces of content to see if you can get other things that work?

Dana Hasson: Yeah. Well, at first I was very focused on just growing. I didn’t even care. It was definitely quantity over quality. I was just posting five times a day every single day. And then Covid happened, which kind of worked in my favor, and everyone started downloading the app and posting and everyone were on it. But I entered Covid with a million followers, so I was kind of like, okay, what I’m doing is working, I might as well just keep going. So I was experimenting with different videos. I kind of knew, okay, my really big hits are my food, but then let me just do some beauty tutorials and just experiment with other things. And I feel like everything was just picking up at the same time people were coming to my page. So it was kind of being able to do all the things that I like in just different formats.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Lindsay’s talked about that with her. So Instagram is her primary channel platform, and she’ll do videos that are her in person in front of the camera walking through recipe, but then she’ll also do ones that are not her, and it’s more of a focus on the recipe. She’s doing a voiceover with it, and she’s had this kind of understanding of, hey, I think I can kind of understand the format for, it’s not a format, it’s not guaranteed, but the probability being higher with her not being in a video and it just being about the recipe and the potential for that to have some type of virality. All that to say she’s kind of living in this phase of experimenting, but not wanting to get too far away from the thing that works. And

I think it’s so wise as you talk about, Hey, I was growing, why not just continue to do the thing that worked and that was working? So do you feel like there’s anything that you could extract from that period of growth as you get to 3 million followers that you could share with other people who are interested in building a following, maybe on TikTok, it’d be the easiest one, or any social platforms in general, but what did you learn along the way that let’s say everything goes away, you’re back to zero, that you could implement pretty quickly today?

Dana Hasson: Yeah, consistency. Honestly, I think it’s annoying to hear because everyone tells you that, but it really is the secret. I was posting five times a day every single day for probably a year, which of course, I mean we were home, so it was much easier to just do it now even I can’t even, I’m like, how did I do it? I have no idea. But consistency and also just really understanding what are you passionate about? And then do it because it shows when you’re doing something that is forced and you’re just doing it, everyone is doing it, versus when it’s something you actually have some sort of knowledge, for example, baking. I mean, not everyone can just wake up in the morning and be like, oh, I’m going to bake and it’s going to be amazing. No, it’s a learning curve. So I think just finding that one, again, niche. I feel like I’m probably saying what everyone is saying, but

Bjork Ostrom: No, but it’s great finding

Dana Hasson: A niche and I don’t know, just be authentically yourself and if you keep on posting all the time, I mean, I don’t know. I feel like anyone can go viral.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We talk about this idea of tiny bit better every day. I think there’s one thing, and I think of spectrums. You could post a piece of content, which is like you watching tv and you could post it 10 times a day, and in 10 years you probably wouldn’t have a very successful content business. But let’s say today you started and you posted a video today and it was a video of you watching tv and it got two views, and one of ’em was like, this is boring, a comment on the piece of content. So you’re like, okay, what can I do to make this a little bit better? So the next day you post a piece of content, it’s like you watching tv, but then it’s like you get up in the middle of it and do a weird unexpected thing, and then it’s like, oh, there’s 50 people who watched it. Point being, I feel like it’s consistency paired with continual learning, continual improvement, and that execution paired with improvement, that to me feels like the secret sauce. And I’d be interested to hear your reflections on, if you look at the content that you’re producing in 2019, what have you done to make your content today better in order to allow you to continue to grow?

Dana Hasson: Yeah. Well, first of all, the app evolving I feel like has been helpful. Now I can film not on TikTok and then edit it how I want and then upload. So that alone is huge for me. But also just showing more luxury. I started and I was just putting click bait stuff, so food coloring and the craziest, the dessert the better. It was really just doing over the top things. But then I was like, okay, I want a different demographic of people following me and I want them to actually be going home and recreating my recipes and not just watch me for entertainment. And so I basically took a step back, moved to New York City, I got a really beautiful kitchen, and I just started creating really beautiful content that is not only just another recipe, but something that maybe can educate someone in a way.

But it took a long time and a lot of rejection. I mean, I remember at first when I started shifting away from food coloring, people didn’t even want to watch my stuff, and it was kind like, Ugh, I have to kind of still migrate that old content to show them that it’s still me. But you slowly shift away. And then last and last, and now I really never use food coloring anymore. I feel like my content grew up as I like to call it. I grew up and a lot of people that have been following me five years ago are like, oh my God, we grew up together. I remember when you were at your parents’ kitchen.

It’s kind of like we all evolve and I’m actually feel like I really physically feel like I’m going through that growth pain right now where I feel like content I was doing maybe three months ago doesn’t necessarily react the same that it was. So it’s kind of like trying, and I’m saying this out loud and telling to myself, but trying to not be so fixated about the views. And some videos are not going to perform as good as others, but just breathe in, lean in and see what does work. And kind of going back to square one and what can I do differently?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s such a common refrain that I hear when talking to people who have, it could be a hundred thousand followers or it could be 5 million followers,

But there’s this common refrain of like, oh, things were this way and now they’re this way. And it feels like the decision that you have to make. That’s a really hard one, is do I try and is what I’m doing what I want to continue to do and I’m going to stick with it and feel like, will there eventually be an unlock with that thing? Or do you consider the algorithm and look at something else that’s working? And do you shift a little bit that way? It’s a little bit of personal taste versus algorithm considerations versus observations of what’s working. No point in that other than for anybody listening that might feel that way to know that there’s this universal truth around trying to sort through all of that stuff. And it feels like our brains aren’t very well equipped to process all of that data, especially as it relates to ourselves.

It’s different if it’s something abstract, you’re looking at data from a sports team or you’re looking at data on a spreadsheet, but when it’s like you have a personal brand and that brand is the thing that has numbers attached to it, it feels like a hard thing.

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Are there things that you’ve done from a mental health consideration, mental health standpoint as you’ve been building this business to help protect yourself from that type of stuff?

Dana Hasson: Yeah. Well, first of all, kind of backtracking from what you said is the hardest part about this job is actually not having control. I have no control.

It’s kind of like I’m relying on outside factors, and that’s how I’m getting paid, which is very cruel and hard. And so yes, leading up to mental health, oh yeah. I mean, therapy has been life-changing for me. And then also knowing to just really be present and disconnecting from my phone and hanging out, talking to my friends and family and just, I dunno, doing normal things, which sounds, I mean, what is normal things, but normal things is for me not being on my phone, not thinking about posting or not thinking about filming everything that I’m doing in my life, which I’m very grateful. My content is not necessarily a, oh, I’m walking down the street. Let me film it. It’s very

Bjork Ostrom: Much, yeah, purely lifestyle. Yeah,

Dana Hasson: Curated, yeah. But again, pros and cons, right? Because what maybe I do need to dive into more lifestyle because that is where everything is shifted and it’s constantly, I feel like my brain is pulling me from different directions all the time. So it’s important to just, I dunno, stay grounded. I meditate a lot and just journal. I really try to prioritize my mental health because one, this can get to your head and you can just be like, oh, I am better than everyone. And no, this is just our job and we’re good at it and that’s great, but I don’t want to not be myself.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One of the things I think about occasionally is how would using my grandparents as inspiration? I actually have on my desk, it’s like the 1948 basketball championship for my grandpa. It was like a high school basketball championship, and then it’s like a mint tin from my grandma. But the reason for it is one of the things I occasionally remind myself of or think of is they lived, they had some really hard things in their life, but they also had a pretty charmed life, at least when I experienced life with them. And it was pretty simple. And I think of that for myself and trying to say, when you talk about normal things, it’s like they would really consistently get together with a small group of friends that they had, and they would have patterns around, they would do church on Sunday and they would do coffee on Saturday morning. And those as being the things that, for myself at least, I feel those as the most life-giving. And I think sometimes when I look at, they talk about checkbooks and calendars being moral documents, does my calendar reflect the things that I think would be best for me? Not always. And so I think that piece around, hey, reminding yourself to step back to connect with people is such an important thing.

One of the things I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on is the process of launching a physical product. So you have homemade ish cookies starter kit. One of the things we often talk about on the podcast is this idea of product, having a product, you have attention, it’s the attention economy. And then with that attention, our decision is what we do with it. We can talk about nonprofit, we can talk about a brand that is giving us money to talk about them. We can talk about whatever we want to and monetize via ads, or we could talk about our own product. And if it’s a good product, people go and they buy that. So in launching this cookie starter kit, the brand homemade dish, what have you learned in that process? Because it’s something that not a lot of people have done.

Dana Hasson: Yeah. Well, I always knew I wanted to have something. I didn’t know what it was. And I think mean the hardest part was probably just where to start. I think we all kind of have this fantasy of like, oh yeah, I want to have my own thing one day and I want to start this thing, but what is the thing? Honestly, looking back two and a half years ago now, I was just like, I’m launching a product. Everyone’s like, great, what is it, Dana? No idea. What is it?

And I remember just writing down, what is it? What is it? What is it? And I would just talk to every person around me and just be like, yeah, so I’m thinking of launching a brand. I dunno. I mean, obviously I like baking. I just kind of gather information and then once I start, I feel like getting some sort of a feel. I then start doing real research, which just like, okay, what is the most popular thing that people are purchasing or just things that people are loving. And I basically just dived really deep into baking mixes and how it’s so powerful, but then how bad it is for you and how there’s so many horrible ingredients. And as someone who touches food basically every single day, and I feel like we all do. I mean we need to eat to survive, but I do it also for fun.

It was just really eye-opening to me to just be like, wow, we really are consuming things without knowing what we’re consuming. And that is so scary. I’m obviously getting older and I’m like, wow, I really do care what I put in my body. Don’t get me wrong. I mean, it’s nice to have a little treat here and there where I don’t have to think about it, but it’s just something that really sunk with me. And so I just start diving deep and was like, okay, what if I actually created a mix that not only was just clean, simple ingredients, it was also something that was so easy, so delicious, and tasted homemade

Bjork Ostrom: From

Dana Hasson: A box.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, sure. That’s the idea of homemade ish where it’s something that you would feel like, Hey, this is, you’d go to somebody’s house and it would feel like they’ve made these cookies, but it’s actually something that’s a little bit simpler to put together. What was that process like? Who are the team members that you need to assemble in order to do something like that? My guess is there’s some, with a content business, you can download TikTok, you can start creating your own content. You can scale that up. You probably eventually work with an agent or maybe have a team member who helps with contracts, maybe a va. But when you get into an actual physical product, it looks really different. You have shipping, you have storage, you have the development process of the product itself and regulations around food. And so how did you go about finding and assembling a team for that?

Dana Hasson: Yeah. Well, I had no idea. Just have to say it because I think people are just like, oh yeah, you launched a sprint, you know what you’re doing. I’m like, no. And actually I still don’t. And I’m kind of just learning as I go, which is honestly the best part about it. But I think the first thing I did was like, okay, I need a recipe and I need someone to develop it with me, so a recipe developer. So I kind of just was backtracking. I’m a very visual person, which is why my product is very visually, I like to say beautiful, because I was just so focused on the visual. So actually first thing I did was hire someone to help me with packaging, even though I didn’t even know what my recipe was. So everything was a bit all over the place, but a graphic designer and then a recipe developer, and then someone who is going to help you with operations because there’s a lot that goes down into operations that I’m still learning and I feel like I still didn’t crack down completely.

And then, yeah, okay, great. Now, so then you need a warehouse. Am I going to shape it for my apartment or is someone else going to be doing it for me? And then also the recipe that we developed, it’s not a normal recipe, it’s a scalable recipe, so the ingredient sourcing is a different game. It was a lot of just learning and asking people and other founders that have been so incredibly sharing just would share information that I’m so grateful that they did, and honestly, that makes me want to share because I’m like, oh my God, they were so generous to tell me things that I honestly would’ve probably taken years to learn if they didn’t.

Bjork Ostrom: Like what? What’s an example of something that you think would’ve taken a long time that somebody shared?

Dana Hasson: Well, one of my friends, they have a pickle company. It’s called Good Girl Snacks. You should check it out.

Bjork Ostrom: Great, we’ll link to it.

Dana Hasson: And they basically connected me to my scientists, and I just know that without that knowledge, I don’t know what I would’ve done. I mean, I’m sure I would’ve figured it out, but it was just kind of like, oh, wow, they really were so amazing to do that for me that I’m so grateful and it would’ve really saved me. Well, it did saved me a lot of time. Of course, you still have to interview and see that it’s a good fit because I’m a people person and if someone has weird energy, I just cannot work with ’em. But it worked out and I still work with ’em and they’re amazing.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say scientists, can you talk about what that person does in the process?

Dana Hasson: Yeah, so basically they understand how to create a recipe but not a home recipe. So it kind of goes back to percentages. I’m still trying to understand it myself, or maybe I’m not saying it right, but they basically just think about things differently. So for example, when you’re packing dry ingredients, there needs to be no moisture. I wouldn’t have known. So things that you would buy at the store wouldn’t work for you to just pack it and put in a little box. It needs to be things that are just low moisture and I guess it’s a different product then because it’s not your typical, I dunno, sugar. So it’s just a lot of things that I feel like I didn’t know vanilla we’re using a powder vanilla where I feel like at home I’m using extract. So it’s just a lot of small things that a scientist would know and I can,

Bjork Ostrom: And so are you able to come to them and say, Hey, you work with a recipe developer in this case it’s a cookie recipe. You kind of get it to the point where you personally feel like this is something I’m going to be excited about. So you have this recipe that is fine-tuned for one that you’ve created at home and that you can bake. Then it’s taking that to a food scientist and saying, okay, if we were going to productize this and create it as something that can be sold at scale, how would you do that? Then they kind of apply their scientists formula to it and say, okay, I see you put vanilla extract in here. We actually do have to do a dry vanilla. Here’s what that would look like for the conversion from whatever, two tablespoons to this amount and dry vanilla. Is that kind of what’s happening in that step with the food scientist?

Dana Hasson: Yeah, I would say so. And then also just doing all the backend of things like the nutritional facts and all these things that I’m like, how do you know how to do this?

Bjork Ostrom: And is there some fine-tuning that happens there as well? Because my guess is you have your at home recipe that tastes one way, and then you have the one that will be the packaged version and then it’s tweaking the package version to get it to where you want it to be.

Dana Hasson: Yeah, so basically what I would do is they would send me the brands that we would source from would send me their ingredients, and then I would sit there with a scale and just measure it exactly as they would be packed. And then I would be able to kind of test and see what I like and what I don’t like. I remember the biggest thing for me was the salt. I couldn’t figure out the salt because salt is so important in baking, and I remember just baking and then being like, oh no, not enough salt or too much salt. And it was just stressing me out and it took so long. But I think that’s what makes a recipe perfect

Bjork Ostrom: Is the effort that you go through to make sure that you’ve painstakingly made decisions around how much each ingredient should be and whatnot,

Dana Hasson: And not giving up too. I feel like

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a hard sticking it, sticking with.

Yeah, if you were to go, and I can really relate to this, gone through this process with businesses before where you have an idea and you’re like, I’m just going to get after it. That’s the most important thing is you get after it and then you get to the point in your case right now with homemade, you can go on, you can buy this, but if you were to go back and do it again now on the second time, you’d be able to do it all so much quicker because the order to do it in where it’s like you don’t start with somebody from branding and then do the scientists and then the recipe development, the order that you’d go through for it, what would that order be if you were to go back and do it again, how would you stack that up?

Dana Hasson: I think idea first and then nailing the

Bjork Ostrom: Recipe idea being in this case

Dana Hasson: Cookie.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right.

Dana Hasson: What are you doing? What is your idea? Then I would say developing the recipe. Then dealing with operations, well, operations and recipes kind of hand to hand sourcing the ingredients as well. So it’s kind of the same step in a way. And then finding a manufacturer and then finding, I guess parallelly again, like a warehouse or if you’re going to do it in your apartment or you’re going to get a studio and do it and then

Bjork Ostrom: To store it,

Dana Hasson: To store it, and then you need a website developer to create a website, and then I think you can then launch, but there’s more to it to the packaging takes so long and that’s what delayed us the most, and it’s like things you don’t think about. They always tell you things are going to go wrong, but then it’s your case and you’re like, oof.

Bjork Ostrom: For other people it happens. Not for me, no, for me as well. When you say operations, what does that involve? What’s under operations?

Dana Hasson: Just sourcing everything. Someone who’s going to

Bjork Ostrom: Help every single ingredient, the bags that the ingredients go in, the

Dana Hasson: Things you don’t think about, the seal to close the box, just things that I’m like, oh my God, we need that. Or a barcode, I don’t know, I need a barcode. Just all these things.

Bjork Ostrom: And so you need to make, and my guess, who would be the person that helps with that if you are sourcing those? Is it a connection within the agency that has the food scientist or is there an adjacent operations industry that you work with?

Dana Hasson: So mine is all in one, but I would just look for operation, someone who is some sort of experience with operating literally the operation of the

Bjork Ostrom: Business. We had friends who were thinking of developing a drink,

And what was interesting as they were talking about it was I started to realize, oh my goodness, there’s these companies that exist and they exist in order to help people create and scale a product. And they have opinions on what bottle you would put in there, and then they also are able to create different variations of it that they were able to test and see if they liked one more than the other. And it’s this whole world that exists and you don’t really, I mean, I know there’s web agencies, I know there’s Facebook marketing agencies, but it’s like, oh, of course there’s also food product agencies. It’s just something that I’m not as familiar with. And so talk to me about the point where you go through the product development, you have the package, you’re able to have it, you’re able to ship it. How do you start to intertwine that brand with your content? What does it look like in terms of making sure you mention it enough without doing it too much? How do you make it organic without people feeling like you’re selling all the time? What decisions did you make as a creator in pairing your brand with your content?

Dana Hasson: Yeah. Well, so I feel like series is probably the best way. I basically was introducing something that people didn’t even know I was working on, so it was kind of like a surprise, this has been happening. So I really created a kind of how I built this moment, and I took the how me your mother sound, and I kind of backtracked and I was like, kids, this is what happened. And kind of just took them along of how I developed and what I’m doing without telling them what it is yet until the day I launched. And then the day I launched was kind of like, ah, this is it. So excited. But now that I am doing it, I mean, it’s only been a month and a half now, so it’s still very new, but I don’t think there’s right or wrong because I think if your content is genuine, they don’t feel like you’re selling anything.

And for me, it’s mostly brand awareness. I want people to just constantly see my box all the time, so when they do come across it and I dunno, an ad one day or on the streets or in a market or at Whole Foods, they’ll be like, Ooh, I’ve seen it before. Actually I know this brand, so I’m not even thinking so much conversion, more so just awareness. I want everyone to know about us. And then, I mean, conversion just happens because obviously they see it and they want to try it and they’re curious. So it’s kind of like, I would say a healthy mix of the two. But I’m still trying to figure it out. Sometimes I’ll go a week without posting about it and I’m like, I need to talk about it.

Bjork Ostrom: But I love that idea of investing your effort into awareness. And one of the things that I talked Nathan Barry, he’s the CEO of a company called Kit previously ConvertKit email marketing, he has or had a podcast called The Billion Dollar Creator. And the whole premise with it, which I’ve thought a lot about, and I think it makes a ton of sense, is this idea that creators have this ability to speak to a large group of people and they’re really good at it. And a lot of creators, if they’re interested in value maximization, like building a business that’s big, which not everybody’s interested in, but if that’s your interest, one of the best ways to do that is to build an adjacent brand. Because so often that brand can be bigger than the footprint of your following or the creators that you’re speaking to. It can be a launching platform into something bigger, more significant, more valuable, because it’s scalable in a way that us as an individual creator wouldn’t be scalable. When you think about what you’re doing is that a little bit of your hope is building an adjacent brand in homemade ish that is able to scale. Maybe you create other product lines within it, you create awareness within it, but that becomes, that eventually eclipses the content business side of what you’re doing.

Dana Hasson: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, again, I’ve been doing this for five, seven years now, five years on TikTok and then seven years overall. And you see, obviously it’s an incredible income and I’m so grateful for the opportunities, but I’m thinking about my kids and I’m like, okay, one day I want to have something that is so much more meaningful. Not to say that being a creator is not, but something that is more physical, you can literally grab it and touch. And I feel like that’s something that it’s hard to do and we’re just people on the screen. And yeah, I’m hoping that one day, hopefully not soon, I still love doing content, but it will be my main source of income. And then content is kind of like a side gig and I really do see it happening already. It’s kind of just crazy. But I started this brand actually, and I was like, okay, I’m pretending I don’t have any followers. I want to create a brand how, I dunno, any brand that has been so successful, like a Betty Crocker, how they started. Obviously every story is different and I’m still utilizing my platform, but there’s still so much business 1 0 1 that you still need to know. Just because you have a platform doesn’t mean you can cheat your way through it. And also navigating the fact that you don’t want to be a viral brand because then there’s no longevity really creating a strong foundation and something that I know will be longevity and not just like, oh, another really cool, just whatever

Bjork Ostrom: Flash in the pan kind of thing. And what you’re talking about is this idea that the things that you have learned as a creator also apply in the world of a brand because you’re able to, as a brand, use those kind of cheat codes for creating that you’ve learned over the last seven years, which a lot of times you have a brand who has a great product, but they’re trying to figure out, how do we show up online? Is what you’re saying. You kind of know how to do that. You’ve been doing it for seven years, and now you can do it within the context of a brand.

Dana Hasson: Exactly. And also, I do ads all the time. Brands pay me to create ads. So to me, I’m like, great, let me create my own ads now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. So can you talk about from a business perspective, if you look at the pie chart of your business, what does that look like? Is it primarily working with brands right now and then you’re backfilling and building homemade ish as your own internal brand that gets revenue for you? Do you have other types of ad income that you get from other places, just percentage wise, kind of at a high level? What does that look like and where are you hoping that it goes?

Dana Hasson: Yeah, I would say right now, I mean, again, I just launched, so I feel like I can’t even speak into the brand giving me sort of income yet.

But I would say right now a hundred percent of my income is from social media, from sponsorships and brands activation. I do a little bit of consulting as well. So that kind of adds in and mix in, since I have a lot of knowledge and I’ve seen it all, but where I’m hoping it would be, I’m hoping that it would be 90 10 of my brand being 90 and content creation is just the 10% that is fitting my income just because, I mean, TikTok is getting banned. That’s just another reason why you should have something that is more than just something you’re relying on. Other factors, my brand, it’s up to me. I can go to the streets every single day and hand out cookies and give people the spiel on this is why you need to buy it. And probably within two months it will blow up. But then it’s like social media, okay, great, I’m creating all this content, but then tomorrow they’re banning it and then I’m like, now what? I don’t have an income.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Can you talk about your thoughts on the TikTok ban and what’s happening with that? I know just from headlines, but I haven’t really done any deep dive on it as of today. We’re recording, this will obviously change and shift after the episode comes out, but what does that look like right now and what’s your understanding of the scene?

Dana Hasson: Well, it’s not looking promising, if I’m being honest. I feel like we’ve had many scares in the past five years, but this one for some reason just feels a bit too serious. Do I agree? And I feel like we have other things in America that they should focus on. Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. 1000%. I think TikTok is probably their least of their concerns, and they’re moving it oddly quick, which is also what’s super suspicious to me. But I mean, listen, I’m a big believer with everything happens for a reason. This is out of my control. It seems like they ask for an appeal, I think, from the Supreme Court, and they agreed to basically hear TikTok speak about it on January 10th, I think, which is just probably a week before they do ban it. But I mean, their goal is to sell it. They want people another company to buy it in the us so then it’s a US owned company. And I understand, of course. I mean, who am I to say anything about that? But I don’t know, it just feels like we would potentially go into every session because there’s so many businesses relying on it.

I dunno if you’ve gone just scrolling on your free time, but you can see so many people going live and doing like, okay, we’re selling our product via live. It’s the new QVC. I dunno. I just feel like if they really will ban it, it would be a really tough year for a lot of people. I mean, luckily we have other platforms, so I’m not so worried. My content is my content, I’ll just start binging Instagram content and then hopefully I can master that on YouTube and whatnot. And I’m sure a new app will come. I mean, honestly, we’re due for one, so I feel like that’s probably happening anyways. But I don’t know, it just really feels like it’s touching about freedom of speech here and it feels just a little bit suspicious again. But I have no idea what’s going to happen. I mean, right now I would say, yeah, it’s getting banned, but I hope I’m wrong.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting you hear, I think that’s the counter to it, is freedom of speech. Like, hey, this is a platform. It offers people freedom of speech. Obviously other side is like it’s controlled by an outside government agency, which with a tweak of the algorithm could potentially impact people’s political views or whatever. And so the hope would be that to your point, there’s a lot of people who, their job, they’ve left their full-time job, or they came out of college and this is what they’re doing. And so to take that away would be massively significant for thousands of people, obviously, and other businesses who might use it as a marketing platform. So the hope would be that they are able to kind of thread the needle on doing a sale. Maybe we’ll know by the time this episode comes out, fingers crossed that it’s successful and that all of our creator friends on TikTok continue to create. So we could talk on and on about creating products, the things you’ve learned, best practices for TikTok, best practices for Instagram. I feel like the great thing, like you said about doing what you’re doing is you have the skills and expertise that you’ve learned over the last seven years, and those can transport onto other platforms. Obviously it feels different when you have 3 million followers versus not having 3 million followers on another platform, but you can still accelerate that with the knowledge that you have. So Don, it’s amazing what you’ve done, continued success. If people want to follow along, they can do that on TikTok if it still exists by the time this podcast comes out. But where are the other places that people can connect with you? And then we’ll link to homemade ish as well.

Dana Hasson: Yeah, so Instagram, TikTok, I am a little bit on YouTube now, so all there. And then I have my websites, which I feel like just my name, donna hassan.com, and then homemade ish.com.

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

Dana Hasson: Thank you for having me.

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

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Megan, welcome to the podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: So this is recently you started a new

Megan Porta: Site. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Megan Porta: I was just going to say that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Megan Porta: I just read one of his books.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Home manager. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: That you were drained?

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

Bjork Ostrom: So

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

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

Megan Porta: I’m

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

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

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

Megan Porta: No.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Megan Porta: Process.

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. So

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

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

Megan Porta: Cold you shuffle

Bjork Ostrom: In. Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Megan Porta: Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

Megan Porta: Thank you so much.

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

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: So here’s a funny thing on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I don’t often talk about Food Blogger Pro membership. It’s a huge part of what we do and the reality is the majority of our time as a team is spent thinking about and working with the Food Blogger Pro members. So we wanted to take some time to remind people that if you want to take the next step, like go beyond just this podcast, you can join Food Blogger Pro. If you’re interested, all you need to do is go to food blogger pro.com. We’re going to tell you more about what a membership entails, and if you’re interested in signing up, you can just hit the Join Now button. What does that mean? Well, we have a community forum where there’s the food blogger pro industry experts, many names from which you probably recognize from this podcast. We also have deals and discounts on some of the most popular and important tools for food creators and food bloggers. We have courses that dive deep on photography and video and social media applications. We do Live Q&As with industry experts. Like recently, we had a conversation with an SEO expert named Eddie from Raptive where he talked about republishing and how to be strategic with your approach to republishing and why that’s important. We do these Coaching Callswhere I jump on with a creator and we talk about how we can look at their business and grow their business. And the cool thing is for those of you who listen to this podcast, we actually have a members-only podcast called FBP on the Go where we take some of these video lessons that we’re doing, like these coaching calls or these Live Q&As with experts and we roll those up into a podcast. So if you don’t have time to sit down and watch those, you can actually just listen to them like you do this podcast, but it’s a members-only podcast. So if you’re interested, again, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com and check it out. It’s a great next step for anybody who’s been listening to the podcast for a long time and wants to dive deeper into growing and building and scaling their business.

Ann Morrissey: Hello. Hello, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. In today’s episode, Bjork is chatting with Jaimee Campanella about time management outsourcing and how to create a structure for your business. You’ll hear all about Jaimee’s journey of finding the balance between work and family and how being intentional with your time is a game changer. From conducting a time audit to figuring out how to prioritize tasks, she explains how you can stay on track without burning out and make time for what really matters. Jaimee also talks about how you can create a joyful structure for your business, knowing when to outsource and why documenting processes is key for sustainability. If you’re ready to break free from the time scarcity trap and create a work-life balance that actually works, this episode will be right up your alley. If you enjoy this episode, we’d really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jaimee, welcome to the podcast.

Jaimee Campanella: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re going to be talking about something that we often hear people I wouldn’t say complain about, but as an example for Food Blogger Pro, for people who are members of Food Blogger Pro, we’ve had thousands of people go through the Food Blogger Pro program, have learned a lot. One of the things that we do is we do an exit interview. It’s a questionnaire and we say, Hey, what was one of the reasons why you canceled your account with Food Blogger Pro? Because we want to know better. What could we improve on? What could we change? One of the most common things is people say, I just don’t have time. There’s so much I have that I’m managing. A lot of times it’s people who have kids or you have a full-time job or family and a full-time job or just responsibilities and you’re trying to build this thing, you’re excited about it, but you can’t find the time. And we’re going to be talking about that today because you have an expertise and a lot of experience helping people find time to do the things that they want to do. But how did you get into this? What did it look like for you to find your own time to build a business around helping other people find time?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, thank you for asking and I think it’s so relatable to most bloggers out there. I wanted to start a business where I could be present with my family. I could define this experience of work-life balance that everyone was achieving. This was going to be my side gig. And while I was raising young children, and I knew that the systems and tools I had learned as an organizational expert consultant and time management strategist would help me in this field. But it was very different once I started my own business because I was experiencing all the time that I was disappointed with how much time I actually had to work on it. I still had the family, I still had the day-to-day responsibilities, and I was experiencing a lot of success at the beginning as people were referrals and different people were coming to me to work on different things. But I slowly started to lose my purpose of why I was doing it. And I started to get intoxicating. And I think this is something that a lot of bloggers talk to me about is the more I post, the more I do, the more I write, the more opportunity there is, the more money I could make. And I caught in that same cycle. I was doing more, taking on more clients, and then I was just feeling like I didn’t have enough time for all the things I wanted to do, stop my daily walks, my personal creative time, the future health of my business, and I was tired and overwhelmed and just felt burnt out by this thing I had created, which was supposed to be in support of my vision, of my life vision. So it was in this kind of stuckness, this place of burnout that I realized there had to be another way to approach this because all these amazing, I was working with people as a time strategist and consultant, and people were just suffering. And there has to be another way. There has to be another way that we’re not looking at this because we’re all successful, we’re all ambitious, smart, and yet we’re all struggling with time. And so once I kind of hit my own pitfall with it, I realized I needed to change. And once I finally did discover some of the tools and strategies which I teach people, that’s where I wanted to help people experience — that they could create the best of both worlds for themselves. You can have a successful blog, you can have a successful business and be a present parent or have that other job or whatever. The other thing is is these things that we create that we tend to let them control us. And that’s the first place I love to support people is shifting that perspective of feeling like everything’s out of my control to actually I am in control here and I can change the way I’m living.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It feels like there’s, broadly speaking, when you think of the time piece, there’s kind of those two buckets that you could put people into, one that you alluded to. I think a lot of people can relate with this idea of you’ve kind of figured some things out and you have some traction, and you start to get this feedback loop that feels really good, and it probably has some echoes of addiction, which is you do a thing and that you get this dopamine hit, and if you continue in that pattern, you will be rewarded for that. And to your point, it could be posting to social and seeing people respond. It could be landing a deal and getting money. It could be increasing page views on your site and earning more from ads. And that a lot of times can result in you doing more of that thing that is feeding the dopamine. But what it does is it creates a situation where you’ve blocked out all of these other things that oftentimes aren’t as dopamine producing, right? It’s really great for me to sit down. Last night I did, it was probably an hour and a half of stop motion with my 6-year-old daughter. She’s been really into stop motion, and it’s literally me. I have a little thing that sinks over to my watch. She moves a tiny character like half an inch, and then I take a picture and that is not dopamine producing, But it’s really valuable. And 10 years from now, I’m going to be really glad that I did that from five to six 30 as opposed to tried to land another deal for pinch of Yum, but it doesn’t feed me in the same way. So there’s that category of time and considerations. There’s also the category of people who are in the startup mode and you’re grinding and maybe you don’t have the dopamine or you don’t have that positive reinforcement yet because you’re trying to build the engine up so it’s going fast enough. So you do start to build some of those flywheels and in those patterns, and it feels like time is of equal consideration for both of those. Do you feel like your focus is more on the former or the latter or maybe both?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, I was going to say both because in that first scenario today you’re talking about hustle culture. The more we do, the more rewarding it’s going to be. The more successful I’m going to be if I keep churning, churning, churning and producing more. But at the end of the day, the experience really isn’t real success. Like you just said, if you’re not spending that hour and a half with your child, then you have resentment and then you have guilt. So yes, you might be making a lot of money, but the feeling of accomplishment, the feeling of success is just being diminished day in and day out. So it’s like

Bjork Ostrom: A false hit. And that being success and accomplishment more broader because you do have it compartmentalized within work, but you’re speaking to, I am viewing my life as successful because, and you alluded to this for yourself because you have a purpose that is defined as being a good dad, in my case, being a good mom in your case, or could be different for everybody. But is that what you’re talking about within the context of success?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, there’s this intentionality that you have to put forth, if I design my dream life, what does it actually look like? Is it about the numbers? Is it about the feelings, the experiences of having? Is it the memories I’m creating with my children or is it literally the bank account numbers? Is it hitting this amount of followers on my blog? And people often just have a really big imbalance or disconnection with that. They say, I want my business to look this certain way. I want my blog to look this certain way, but I feel like crap even though I hit those goals because I’m not really living my dream life vision. I’m not really in touch with why I created this business or why I am doing what I’m doing and they don’t feel fulfilled. So that’s the imbalance. And most people are feeling when they’re fighting with time. And the other scenario, you’re creating a startup, you might need to dedicate more time at the beginning of something, but that’s an intentional choice. And that’s the kind of shift is people speak in these scenarios, like time is happening to them, time is against them. And so in both, regardless of which bucket you fall in, you have to decide what is the intention? Yes, I understand I’m going to put an extra 40 hours upfront this week for this startup and I’m going to make sure that next week I spent extra time with my children, my spouse, or doing my hobbies. That’s a proactive approach to time. You’re not resenting your startup, you’re making a conscious choice. I am going to give more to this right now, but it’s not that I’ve just given away so much or I’m exhausted and it took over. No, it’s it’s choice. And I think that’s the distinction in all these scenarios that we’re out of touch with what choices we’re making, which are actually creating the experience that we’re having.

Bjork Ostrom: And why do you think people end up there? Because if you look inward, you probably have this feeling of, this doesn’t feel great, but a lot of times we stay in that position longer than we should, knowing that it doesn’t feel good. So in your experience in working with people, is it that they lose focus or they shift their focus, suddenly they’re looking at what other people are doing and then they think they should do that? Why do you think people end up in a position where they are maybe their own boss and we all technically are when it comes down to it, but you end up in a position where you don’t like what it is that you’re doing, even if you’re kind of deciding what it is that you get do.

Jaimee Campanella: Right? Well, there’s a couple scenarios people fall into. One is just there’s a lot of clients I work with. They’re holding onto the rain so tight, they are afraid to loosen up, they’re afraid to let go, they’re afraid to outsource. It’s like their other baby. Their business is their baby and they’re so dedicated to it. And so many people are like, I work, I’m exhausted. I’m working around the clock, but it takes me longer to train somebody to do it. If I’ll just do it myself, it’s going to be quicker. Or that mentality of no one else can help me because only I know how to do this. This is my brand, this is my look. So just really holding on so tight that they’re actually preventing themselves from moving forward. So I do see that a lot, that this perfectionist mentality where they just are not willing to see where they can take help to actually achieve the experience they want. And then this other cycle is people see that they’re in that spot and then they’re looking for all these different tools or tricks or ways to get out of it, band-aid solutions or the other side, I’m just going to outsource, but they don’t really know how to outsource and then they end up losing a lot of time and money or they’re like, okay, I’m just going to revisit my goals. Or I know this one woman was like, if I could just revise my morning routine, I know everything would change.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m like, if I could put that 10 minutes of meditation in,

Jaimee Campanella: And she’s like, okay, I want to journal a weight loss journey, cold plunge gratitude. I’m like, you’ve just added 16 things to your already impossibly full day and you wonder why you feel disappointed. So they just have these expectations. It’s not a realistic perspective of where their time is going. I think that’s another big piece of it. No one is able to look in and do it really audit where their time is going. So they just feel like those days at the end you’re like, I know I did so much today, but I got nothing done. It’s this loss of perspective of how much time things take where all the time leaks throughout your day. So you’re kind of cycling through this disappointment with yourself and time. And that’s the expectation you create with time. There’s just never enough. It’s never going to change. I just have to keep hustling. I have to work late at night. There’s no other time. So this looking for band-aid solutions or multitasking, but not really seeing the results at the end.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I just had this out the other day. So we use two project management solutions, tools, software. One is a tool called Things by a company called Culture Code. That’s the one that I use personally. So it’s like anything that I’m just doing on my own, I tracking in that. And then we use Asana, but with things specifically, one of what I try and do is I build out the things that I’m doing each day and kind of create a list of what it is. And I was having this conversation, so my wife, Lindsay, we’re business partners, we work on stuff together and we’re just talking about some work stuff. And I was like, I don’t think there’s ever been a day in the past year where I’ve actually done everything that I’ve put on my list and I’m just in this perpetual state of feeling like I’m underperforming. And I had this realization of that’s not a great thing psychologically to feel like I’m never doing as much as I want to be doing. And what would feel really good is to get to the end of the day and to feel like I did what I set out to accomplish. And the realization that I had, and it sounds so obvious, is I just need to reset my expectations around what I can actually do personally. And if I can’t do all the things that need to get done, then somebody else has to help me with those things. Or maybe there are some things that I’m trying to do that actually don’t need to get done and I’m just not doing them. So I can relate to what you’re talking about, and I’m sure a lot of other people can as well, where we set out to have these expectations of we need to do this, we need to get this stuff done. And what I came out of it realizing is, okay, I only have so many hours in a day, but if we can be smart about resource allocation, resources being time and money, if we can be smart about resource allocation, there’s probably a situation and it’s actually happening right now today where we can bring somebody in to help with some things that need to get done that I don’t have bandwidth for. And so today my brother-in-law’s over, he had the day off and we hired him to do just a bunch of house projects, and we’re lucky enough to be able to have the resources to hire him to do that. It’s another thing if you don’t have those resources and you have to think strategically around it. But that’s just an example of me real time trying to figure this out. We have all this stuff that needs to get done, how do we get it done with the resources we have both time and money and being strategic about that. So can you talk about a situation, a scenario, maybe it’s a creator, blogger, social media publisher that you’ve worked with maybe a before and after comparison. I think it’s helpful for people to hear a story of what it looked like before for somebody, some of the things that they did that changed and then what the result was after that. And then we can talk about some of the specifics of how people can work through that if they’re interested in having that transformation.

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, definitely. And the person I’m thinking of that comes to mind, her name was Lisa, and she runs a very successful blog. And when I started working with her, similar to you, she had this long, long list of things that she wanted to accomplish. She had lots of goals. She had no structure in her life. So the same experience you had is that you have this long, long list, but you never get it done. It’s dragging behind you. You’re resentful because you never feel accomplished. She was working like 60 hour weeks. She never took vacations. She was so addicted to her business and she was sad that she was missing out on her children’s life. She had three children and she was on vacation the one time. I remember the one time we finally got her to go somewhere. She was checking her phone the whole time, answering comments on the blog, just totally addicted to work and not able to see another way of running it. No systems and no structure, and just doing it all herself. She held everything in her head. The whole business she felt was reliant on her being online 24 hours a day. And it was costing her wellbeing, Her marriage, her relationships. And so while she said, I am so happy with the growth that I have in my business. I’m miserable. I’m miserable. And so that’s the starting point of a lot of the bloggers I work with, they are not ready to take help because they don’t see how much more they can accomplish or how they can really be satisfying the balance of why they started the blog to begin with because she wanted to be present with her kids similar to my own journey. And so that was her crashing point, okay, I need help. This is not working and I’m hitting rock bottom. And so the other side of it was creating structure. It’s like when you want to build your dream life, you have to start with the destination first. You have to know what the dream house looks like. What does it look like? What’s the blueprint? What’s the vision? You can’t hire those contractors and people to outsource the different tasks until you know what you want,

Bjork Ostrom: What you’re building,

Jaimee Campanella: What you’re building, what is it that you’re looking for. Otherwise, it’s like the bloggers are building brick by brick, by brick by brick, and they’re just building walls everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Jaimee Campanella: They’re like, this is not at all what I wanted. Well, you never laid out a blueprint. What do you want?

Bjork Ostrom: And so is that with Lisa? That’s what you started with is you said, okay, essentially you’re saying a year from now, what’s a life that you’re living that is

Jaimee Campanella: Ideal? And she was so clear once we finally got it out, she’s like, I want to work four days a week. I want to work four half days. I want to be producing this many posts per day. I want this much. This is what I want my business to look like, but I want to run every morning. I want to go to my son’s track meets. I want to be there for afterschool pickup. I want to have a date night with my husband. I haven’t gone out with him. I’m too tired, I’m exhausted. So once she started to create the vision for her life, then I was like, okay, we can make a blueprint from here. So then we did the audit. So first is what is the vision? What is the vision you want? And we can’t create structure for the vision until we know what’s all on the table. We have to empty the closet. We have to do that audit that I talked about earlier. So we did a comprehensive audit.

Bjork Ostrom: When you say audit, what does that look like?

Jaimee Campanella: Let’s put everything on the table, Lisa, what are all the tasks in your business that you’re doing? Writing posts, photographing posts, editing literally every single task. Let’s put them all in the table. Let’s organize them. We don’t even know where your time is going because you’re context switching all day. That’s what we discovered. One thing. She wasn’t batching her tasks alike tasks together. So of course she was distracted in between things. There was no focus time. She was just ping ponging from one thing to the next all day, holding tons of information in her head. She did not have asana before we started working together. So we did the audit personally and professionally, putting everything on the table. Let’s organize. How

Bjork Ostrom: Do you do that in a scenario where somebody is ping ponging and all over the place? How do you actually extract what they’re working on and when they’re working on it?

Jaimee Campanella: Sure. Well, I lead people through a lot of specialized exercises to get to that. So from all starting big picture, what are all the categories of your life? Let’s put, then we have to double click. We have to unpack what each and every, and that’s a hard process to do.

Bjork Ostrom: Kids, home, work, what would those categories be?

Jaimee Campanella: In-laws, vacation, house taxes, finances will think of all the big buckets of your life that you’re like, damn, I really wish I had a plan for any of these things. But we’re so insular. We’re just thinking business family, oh, got to get the dryer fixed business, this or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s this morning, it was like our windows are up, and so I’m having to reach out to the window company and it’s like I have a to-do for our water softener.

Jaimee Campanella: Right? Exactly. So all the things you probably are not categorically looking at, but they’re important. They weigh on you and then it becomes little fires that you’re constantly putting out. So it is very holistic and specialized. We go through every single category of your life. I give you examples because some people are like, oh, I can’t think of anything when it comes to that. And they’re like, oh, A will taxes, business taxes. Oh wait, all the doctor’s appointments for the kids. Of course those are all important. I do those in my sleep or all the invisible to-do lists that people hold. Oh, like the lawn care, all those annual things. So got to get them out of your mind. What’s fueling the feeling of overwhelm?

Bjork Ostrom: David Allen, who we interviewed on the podcast, I’m sure from getting things done, he talks about how terrible the brain is as a storage facility. He doesn’t use that word, but it’s really bad at holding tasks, but it’s really great at being creative. But in a situation like this where you’re talking about for Lisa, if she’s holding all of those tasks, that squeezes out all of the room for creativity. So you go through the process, all of these categories, it’s putting it down on paper, digital paper, making sure that you name it and you look at it, my goodness, there’s a lot of things that I do in a given day, week, month, year, everything from the three times, once every three year air duct cleaning to the once a week updating of plugins on my site. Everything gets documented. And are you just doing that on a Google Doc or where do you put that?

Jaimee Campanella: So when I get started with someone, it’s in a Google sheet, which they have shared access to. So this is a brain dump, it’s a glorified brain dump, getting everything out. So first is get everything out, how much time it takes you, and then we have to prioritize it, categorize it, and prioritize it. So we can look at one area of your life really holistically, and then we create structure. Okay, we have this big, big list. What is the time you actually have available? What do you want your time to look like? So for Lisa, she says, oh, I want to work four days a week from 10 to four. I have a really clear structure that we’re starting to set into place because in the ideal, she has the time before and after for other things. So we have to create the structure, create the blueprint, and then we have to prioritize all those things that we unearthed and that’s where we can make conscious decisions. These are things like, I remember she said, I hate video editing, but it takes me three hours a week. Okay, good. We’re taking that off your plate.

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s not do that. Yeah, let’s get that off your plate.

Jaimee Campanella: It’s all take it off. It’s like the first thing. What are the tasks that you enjoy doing that bring you joy, that light up your spark for why you started the, and most of the time, a hundred percent with all the bloggers, they love the creative work. She’s like, I love taking the photos. I love cooking. I just hate all the admin that goes along with it. Okay, so let’s take some of that admin off of your plate. So we go through this whole process of prioritization, then looking at the structure, the ideal structure, what fits, what doesn’t, and then we make conscious choices. What are you going to outsource? What are you going to consciously just put on hold? No more resentment. It’s just a conscious decision. This project is on hold. We’re going to re-look at it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not never. It’s just not now.

Jaimee Campanella: Exactly. And then we come to the time, time structure specific. You had mentioned that long list that you had, and Lisa had this similar one, and you wonder why you’re not getting everything done in the days because you don’t realize how much time these things take. So we have to put in a realistic time block for the things you are going to do. We have to create the structure that’s going to support you to feeling accomplished at the end of every day. I actually did what I set out to do. And

Bjork Ostrom: You can’t do that if you don’t have a realistic understanding of how long something is going to take. And if you’re like, I want to work four days a week, half day each day, and what your list requires of you is actually 50 hours a week, you’re just going to be in this perpetual state of time debt or project debt. So within that spreadsheet, you start to categorize and you look at it and say, okay, this is something that we know is high priority and high interest. You continue to own that. Then how long does that take? Is that the next step is trying to get accurate wtih time?

Jaimee Campanella: How long does this actually take you to fulfill to complete this? You love doing the cooking. It’s your favorite part of the business. You want to keep cooking. You don’t want to outsource that to anyone else. You’re clear, this is your passion. You need four hours a week. Great. So let’s put that as a priority time block every Wednesday in the morning for four hours, this is your cooking, you’re batch cooking. You’re not cooking a thing here, there throughout the week where you have to clean up and restart. Every week we’re going to do one big time block of cooking on Wednesdays.So then we start to create metrics, a puzzle, what are all the pieces of high priority of high interest, and create your ideal schedule. And then we see what’s left. And then we can always make different decisions, but we want to always lead with what brings you joy first. What is the priority and what is fulfilling? So we create the structure and just fast forward to the results of all of that. When I look at Lisa now, she is working those four days. She does have an amazing team. She does use Asana. We did a whole Asana build out. So she didn’t have any systems and she at first was like, I don’t know, learning something new. She was very resistant. But then now she’s like, how was I ever doing task management any other way with the team? Her income has more than tripled, literally because she was able to produce so much more for her business with people helping her that wasn’t attached to her time. So her results just, I remember the first year she’s called me, she’s like, you’re not going to believe it. I have a team. I’m working less and my business has doubled. The next year tripled. So it was just a upward growth and she’s taken so many vacations. She’s a present parent. Her whole life is completely different because she put in structure, she put in systems, she learned how to outsource at the right time in the process. Some people try to do it. What

Bjork Ostrom: Do you mean by that when you say outsource at the right time?

Jaimee Campanella: Well, some people try to outsource at the beginning, but they don’t know what to outsource. They don’t know how to outsource. So you’re looking at everything on the table and you’re like, oh, you do this, you do that. But it’s all piecemeal. There’s no system in place to even monitor that. So now you’re like, okay, now I’m managing what tasks I’m giving away, how they’re doing it, bringing it back. So if you do it too soon in the process, it’s like hiring the builder to build your house without having the blueprint laid out.

Jaimee Campanella: Just, you’re having people work and work and work, but you’re not getting the results you want.

Bjork Ostrom: So can you describe what it would be like to do it at the right time? What does it look like to do that? Well, when does it happen and what does it look like?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah. If you think about it in this whole house analogy or in Lisa’s analogy, first you need to know what you want. What experience do you want to have? What is the vision for your time? Why are you hiring a team so that I can go running so that I can work on my pottery or write a book or whatever it is. I want to free up more time in my own life. So be clear about your why. That’s first and foremost. And then you have to be clear on the blueprint. What is your business working towards? If you’re not clear about why you want people and what they’re meant to do, it’s a waste of time and money. I had this one person come to me and say, I’m just ready to outsource. I just need a VA to give some tasks away. They paid $5,000 a month for a year, and they’re like, I didn’t even know what to give the va. I was so disorganized. I don’t all over the place. I wasted so much money because they never did an audit. Everything was piecemeal. The person was just waiting around for tasks, but they hadn’t done the audit. They hadn’t created the structure. They weren’t clear about what they wanted to do, what they didn’t want to do. So once you have, I always feel like it’s very linear vision structure, and then you can give things out very systematically. Then you can hire the builder. This is the look I want. This is the design I want. This is the goal. Now build it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. This episode is sponsored by Clariti. Here’s the thing, we know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn’t it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one, or I know some of you have done this, create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that’s soon to be outdated Anyway, that’s why we created Clariti to save you time, simplify the process and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clariti, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized, like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text, maybe there’s no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here’s a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from Wander Cooks. They said, with GA 4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That’s awesome. That’s why we built it, and it’s so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you can sign up and get 50% off your first month of Clarity to set up your account. Simply go to Clarity, that’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. That’s clariti.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode. I think that idea of having a really well-defined outcome task project, whatever it might be that you give to somebody so they know here’s specifically what I’m doing, as opposed to bringing somebody in because you’re burnt out or you’re just tired and kind of hoping that they fix it for you. You have to create the structure that is going to fix the thing to then give to somebody to execute on. There are probably some scenarios where you’re just have somebody come in and be like, I just need you to do this. But that is almost a different hire. It’s almost like what people do when they hire you. Somebody who works with you isn’t having to come up with the process for figuring out how to shift and adjust their time. They’re hiring you as a consultant to come in, work with them to do that. There’s a premium for that versus somebody who’s going to execute on more of a playbook that you’ve created to take care of something that you’re doing on a recurring basis. My friend Barrett Brooks, he was previously the CEO or COO of ConvertKit now. Kit helped them grow from, I don’t know what it was, 3 million to 30 million or something like that. And so he went through this really interesting transition from a business, and I was having a conversation with him and he talked about this idea that businesses, startups, what we’re doing is essentially experiments and processes. And what we are doing as business owners is we’re experimenting, Hey, we think this might work with Pinch of Yum. Recently it was a new video format. Hey, there might be something here. Let’s change this up a little bit and do this experiment. Okay, now that we’ve done this experiment, do we think that it worked? Yes, we think that it did work. Now we create structure around it. We create a process around it so it becomes a repeatable thing. Here’s what the videographer does. Here’s when we shoot, okay, everybody comes in on this day. Here’s what it looks like for groceries to come in that day. And you build a system around it after you do that experiment. And I really love that idea of thinking about business as experiments and processes, or you could say experiments and systems, but the hard part is I think some of us are doing experiments, we’re learning, and then we just start grinding on them on our own without creating that process. So what does it look like on the process side of things? Even if you don’t have a team, it’s probably something you should be doing. How do you do that? Well, you mentioned Asana. I think people like to hear tools, but there’s also more probably philosophy that you could speak to as well.

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, no, definitely. You need a system to hold the processes from your experiment for this to be sustainable and repeatable, especially if it was a success. And I think that’s the thing with the bloggers half the time they started it not necessarily thinking this was going to be their full-time business or turn into a big thing. It’s like, I just love creative writing or cooking or some people are intentionally starting it. And some people started it as a hobby and saw growth and possibility. And those are a lot of the people that I have been working with recently. And even if they don’t have the team yet, they’re holding all those processes still in their head. They’re just repeating and, oh, what did I do last time? What did I do that worked? So Asana is something I encourage people as a great project management tool to start to document it, make it repeatable, give you automatic reminders, create templates so you’re not constantly recreating the wheel every single time. You need that structure, that system to keep your experiment going. Otherwise, it’s just you feel frazzled and all over the place. And even if again, when you’re in success, you’re like, I don’t know what I did last time. Or constantly wasting so much time in your energy trying to create the same circumstances or other people were just doing everything on autopilot and they’re like, I don’t know how I’m doing it, so I can’t train another team member because I don’t know what I’m doing. So getting those systems down and making them repeatable is a huge, huge part of sustainability and growth in this area.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you feel like there’s a little bit of a decision around what type of business you want to have? Because I think of the spectrum from artist, pure artist to pure scalable systems business. And one of the things that’s interesting in the world that we operate in is it’s not people who are just operational. I want to build and scale a business, but it’s also not just pure artists. It’s not people who are just painting because they love to paint or photography because they love to do photography. Oftentimes though it’s somewhere in the middle where there is art. And so I think sometimes some people might have reservations around saying, I’m going to build a system around this thing that I feel like I’m an artist and artists don’t have systems. And I feel like that would be a hard even I think of for Lindsay, I think she’s relatively organically process oriented. Hey, we’re going to batch video shoot on this day. She’s not going to load that into Asana and use that as a project management tool that she works through. I think she’s just naturally that’s who she is. But I think there’s even people on the other side of Lindsay who the idea of creating a system around their art feels almost like it’s discrediting the art that they are creating. Does that make sense? Sure.

Jaimee Campanella: It does. And I think so when you go into business, you need to know your wheelhouse or whatever you’re doing. If you’re a creative, you’re a creative. And that’s I think a lot of the reasons why people have resistance are pushback to creating the structures. You’re like, well, that’s not my thing. Or when I talk to the bloggers, they’re like, Asana project. That’s not my thing. I just want to cook and take the photo and be creative. So I think that that’s something that’s going to hold people back from growing, from repeating, from continuing that success artists are amazing and they’re creative, and I don’t necessarily have those skills. I’m on the other side of systematization and organization, but I know where I come into the picture. I’m not going to try to say that I’m going to do the most creative piece. I’m going to stay in my wheelhouse. And I think people who want to succeed and stay in their creativity, that’s where they need to know up. My vision is not to be doing business operations. My vision is not. That’s why you have a partner who does it, or upfront, if I want to grow, I’m going to outsource the team. I want to stay in my lane of creativity and I don’t want to give focus or time to any other aspect of what it would take to run a business.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that one of the traps potentially is there can be this transition from Maker. We could also say artist from maker to manager. And I think in that transition, you could potentially become miserable. You could free up your time and you could create systems, but now you’ve moved away from making to managing. So it seems like one of the keys for somebody who’s looking to scale an artistic or maker or personality driven business is to have somebody who is more manager than maker. You kind of alluded to it, you being an example of that, you’re somebody who’s systems oriented and operational. And my guess is there would be a thousand people who would dream of you being their partner because you would be able to create that structure and manage it without them needing to do it. And I think sometimes people fall into these partnerships by luck to some degree. An example would be Lindsay and I, I’m not purely operational, but I do more of the boring behind the scenes stuff, like a monthly meeting with our CPA and fractional CFO as an example, HR stuff, things like that, which allows her to stay more in the creative world. But for somebody who doesn’t have a partner from the get go, how do you advise them to transition into a business that has strong structure, that has strong processes, but doesn’t put them in the seat of operations and manager? Do you look to hire that person right away? How do you find those people? What does that look like?

Jaimee Campanella: Yeah, I mean, online business manager, when you get to a certain point, I mean I think at the beginning a lot of people hire virtual assistants because just someone to get the tasks done, to get things off of your plate. But then slowly that creative realizes now they are managing a team and a lot of their time is managing the VA and those tasks. And then that’s where that resentment builds. No, I just want to be in the creative. I don’t want to be people management and HR and paychecks and all those things that come with having a team. So there’s that creative who finds themselves already there and they’re like, I got to get out of here. I’m not painting anymore. I’m just leading. And so that’s where it’s very clear at that point, if you have the resources and you’re ready to expand your business, that’s when you would bring in an online business manager so that you can stay creative and you can have the right person to supervise the VAs and get all the backend processes done, create the structures, create the systems, bring in a consultant if you need to. But usually a creative is like, I want to be creative and I want someone else who’s going to oversee all the operations, who understands my vision and why I am doing this work. And then can execute on all the backend, the systems, the people management, the infrastructure, the tech, everyone’s website needs this and that. And they’re like, I don’t want to deal with another plugin. I just want to take the picture. I just want to cook the food or I want to, whatever it is. So it is important to have the right people in your team so that you can continue to stay focused on what really does make you passionate about your

Bjork Ostrom: Work. And it seems like there’s probably seasons that you need to go through if you’re interested in growing your business or evolving your business where you might need to endure a non desirable thing for a season. For example, you might be early stage and you say, I want to be at a point where I have an online business manager who’s overseeing a team. I connect with them and then they manage directly from there. But you’re not going to get there in six months. It might be two years, but you know that you’re going to work towards it. And in a season you might be the one managing, keeping track of the tasks, keeping track of the systems, even though it’s not your optimal zone of genius with the idea that when the resources become available, you can bring somebody in to help with that. But that’s where it feels like it’s important to come back to that mission, vision, purpose

Jaimee Campanella: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: To say, this is what I’m working towards.

Jaimee Campanella: And there is value in that too. When you’re growing, what goes into it, you’ve rolled up your sleeves, you’ve gotten it done, you’re doing it. What goes into being successful and running this business successfully. And now you’re at a point where you’re like, okay, I’m ready to give this all to someone else, but you’ve done it. You know what to expect. So there is beauty in in starting from the bottom of what you’re creating and making sure you’re clear about your standards and your expectations. So then when you do give it to someone else, you’re really clear what you want of them too.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. One of the things that you talk about is this idea of a time scarcity trap. Can you define what that is and how do people know if they’re in that trap?

Jaimee Campanella: Sure. So this scarcity trap is this limiting belief we have about time. And I see this day in and day out that we talked about this at the beginning of our conversation, people expressing, I wish I had more time. They don’t have enough time in the day. They ran out of time. I’m constantly late because I ran out of time or I forgot to do that. I just didn’t have time. So these common beliefs that they’re holding about time is doing something to me. Time is against me, time’s out to get me. This is constantly living in a time scarcity trap. There’s not enough scarcity, there’s just not enough time. So when I see if people will probably resonate with half those statements I just made, you wish you had more time, you ran out of it, you don’t have enough. That is you expressing that you’re blaming time. If you think about those statements, time is doing something to me time’s out to get me. I’m always running out of it. You’re acting like a victim of time. And that is what I see of people in this trap is I’m trapped in it. I don’t have enough of it, but this is just the way it is. And that was part of my impetus is getting people out of that trap, How to get back more into control of your time. I think when you hear it now, you’ll notice it more in conversations. People blame time all the time as if it’s something this cloud of time that’s just happening to you that you have no responsibility with. And so I feel that even before we talk and when I do work with clients one-on-one before I talk about structure and vision and systems, I talk about time mindset first because if you are in this time scarcity trap, it really doesn’t matter what I teach you about systems or how you’re the most amazing team in the world. If you’re in this trap, nothing will work in the long run. It’s just a band-aid mentality. So I think time mindset is the foundation. If you don’t change the way you think about time, your experience of time will actually not change.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s interesting. Yeah. One of the thoughts I’ve had recently is this idea of time is infinite. And what I mean by that isn’t for me, but there’s, well, I don’t know however many billion people in the world and they all have 24 hours. And if I have a goal to do a thing, one of the considerations is how much time does it take to do it? Not my own time, but just how much time in general. And we have friends who are building a wedding venue as an example. They’re not doing the building. There’s a huge crew of people who are taking their time to build this wedding venue. And that’s an approach to business building where they say, we think this is an appropriate risk given the potential reward. We’re going to use the collective time of these people to build a thing which we think then will be an asset in the world. And so much of what I feel like I do, and really what we do is we need to become expert traders of those two resources of time and money. And are we willing to trade our money for this time? For me today, having my brother-in-law come and help turn over the garage for the winter in Minnesota, get the winter tires out. That was an appropriate trade for me given the restrictions that I have right now. Similarly, we need to figure out if it’s worth it to trade the time that we have for money. Are we going to do this job? Are we going to dedicate our time for it? And if we can start to think strategically about where we are trading and how we are trading, it feels like that’s where there starts to be these opportunities where time doesn’t become this limited thing. I only have four hours in a day. Time is actually unlimited. If you think of it as trading, even in so far as maybe you have a recurring Netflix subscription and you’re paying $20 for it, is there a trade in your life where by canceling that you are trading up by hiring somebody for $20 a month to come and do a thing maybe. Or maybe you work an extra three hours and you’re able to have somebody come and help and do five hours of work that you otherwise would’ve been doing. It seems like there’s a lot of opportunities for us if we start to think about time differently and change our mindset around it.

Jaimee Campanella: And I would take it even a step further because when you’re talking about trading it, you already know you have a choice about it. It’s tradable. So when I think about time mindset, I even go a step further in terms of the way you approach it, because I think one of the most immediate changes somebody can make listening to this podcast today, if they really want to change their relationship with time before you even start trading, is thinking about your language around it. Like you said, thinking it’s infinite. I have a lot of it. I have enough time to do anything I want to do. You can trade it or whatever you decide to do. But if you can stop yourself from saying, I don’t have time, it really changes your whole perspective of your day and of your life. Because when you tell people you don’t have time to do something, you’re usually failing to take responsibility for how you are using your time in your day. You said we only have all have the same amount of time, but the language we use to describe our time really does shape the way we think and feel and interact with the world. So if you could simply just stop saying, I don’t have time, it’s a very powerful action in the experience you have, the more power you have to make a trade, because I know what I have, I know the value of it, and people aren’t really in touch with that. And that’s why we’re stuck in that time. Scarcity. We just keep telling people we don’t have enough of it. We believe that to be the state of affairs. So I could offer a quick tip of just how to reverse that so that you feel like you’re in more control. And it’s really simple and a simple way to replace this vocabulary by not saying, I don’t have enough time. It’s by simply saying it’s not a priority for me, or no, both of these so simple. But these statements bring responsibility back to you. It puts in your seat again how you own and control your time. It’s not happening to me. I’m making a choice about it. So if you think about the most common thing somebody might say in a week, oh, I don’t have time to exercise. If you couldn’t say that and you had to say, exercise is not a priority for me, you have a gut reaction, no pun intended, a gut reaction right away that that’s not true. Exercise is a priority for me. So if I keep telling the world it’s not, I’m never going to make time for it. I’m never going to trade someone doing this admin so I can go exercise the whole trading analogy you made. So before we trade, before structure, before systems value it, stop saying you don’t have it. It’s like the whole law of manifestation. We talk about that when it comes to money. If you speak positively about money, the more you’ll be able to manifest in your life. It’s the same of time. If you make it wrong, if you constantly think you don’t have enough, that will be the experience.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And I like that idea of wrestling with if it actually is a priority or not, because I think if you say you don’t have time for a thing, it allows you to not have to sit with your priorities.

Jaimee Campanella: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And if you start to say, this isn’t a priority for me, and that feels incongruent, then you have to sit with it and say, if it is a priority, then why have I not gotten it done? Maybe I need to change how I’m prioritizing things. And that’s the issue as opposed to how much time that I have, which I think that mental shift is an important one for anybody, but especially for entrepreneurs who have all of these demands on time. We can’t do everything we want to do, and so we need to figure out what are the priorities, what’s most important, and how we going to get those done. Yes. You work with folks that listen to this podcast, people like this on your website. The H one says, revolutionize your relationship with time. I help moms and entrepreneurs take control of their time so they can balance motherhood and their professional life and be great at both without feeling guilt or compromising on their wellbeing. You do it in a few different ways. If anybody’s interested in working with you, can you talk about how that could happen in ways that they could reach out?

Jaimee Campanella: Yes, absolutely. So I have a lot of different programs available depending on where you’re starting, and I’d love to have a consultation call with you if you’re interested in changing your relationship with time, whether it’s through time, mindset, I have online courses available or through doing the work that I described today with Lisa. That’s my signature Time power program where we do that together, we create that life vision together, we prioritize, we create the structure so that you can actualize the blog of your dreams to have the balance of both, and it’s a really hard process to do on your own, and that’s why I love doing this, because you do see results. You do have a new sense of feeling and control. If you’re ready to outsource, if you’re ready to change the way you’re running your business right now to feel like you have more time freedom, then I suggest to you check out my website, Jaimee campanella.com, set up a free consultation, or take one of my free master classes to learn a little bit more about practical ways that you can go from feeling like you never have enough time to feeling like that, CEO who has time for everything that matters.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. Jaimee, thanks so much for coming on, sharing your story. Like I said in the beginning, myself included, and a lot of people listening to this podcast are going to benefit from it because it’s such a common thing that we’re all dealing with. So appreciate your expertise and thanks for coming on.

Jaimee Campanella: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.

Emily Walker: Hi. Hello. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the podcast. Since we are kicking off a brand new year and a brand new month, I wanted to pop on and fill you in on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. We like to kick off every month with just a little summary of what you can look forward to in the membership. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, you can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership. To learn more about joining. We would love to have you there. We have already pressed publish on a brand new coaching call with Penny from the Generations Cook. That coaching call went live on January 2nd, and members can find it in the Food Blogger Pro membership on the Live page or on our members only podcast, Food Blogger Pro On the Go. Next up, we are really excited to be hosting a public Live Q&A with Kate Ahl from Simple Pin Media. This Q&A is open to the general public and anyone can attend. You can head to the link in our show notes to register to attend. It will be on Thursday, January 9th at 1:00 PM Eastern and 10:00 AM Pacific, and that will be with Bjork and Kate, and they’ll be chatting all about how to unlock success on Pinterest in 2025. Last up, we’ll have a brand new course on January 23rd, all about Substack. We know that a lot of food creators who aren’t as interested in SEO are exploring Substack as an alternative to share recipes with their community. So this will be a really great course to learn more about substack, how it works, how to grow your following, everything you need to know. We are really looking forward to this month. Lots of great content coming up, and we will see you back here next week for another episode of the podcast. Make it a great week.

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Ashley, welcome to the podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yeah, Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: “Can you do computer things?”

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: yes, yeah.

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

Ashley Segura: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: In hopes of eventually doing your own?

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

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

Ashley Segura: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yep.

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

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yes.

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah.

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Mm-hmm.

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

Ashley Segura: Totally.

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: But it also depends. Yeah.

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

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah.

Ashley Segura: But the content-

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

Ashley Segura: … structure was so good.

Bjork Ostrom: It was the content structure. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: It depends. Okay.

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

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

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

Ashley Segura: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Hey everybody, excited for you to be tuning into this podcast episode. We’re going to be talking about all things keywords, and for those of you who are like, “Ah, I kind of know what it is, but why is it important? How can I be doing it? What’s the best software?” We’re going to cover it all. We’re going to try and cover both the basics, what it is, why it’s important, how you can strategically think about keywords as it relates to the content you’re including. And we’re going to be covering some of the more advanced things, even the different philosophies around keyword research, and trying to figure out how you can balance inspirational content with strategic content.

Bjork Ostrom: And for those of us who hate the idea of keywords and just love creating content, what are some ways that you can really lean into both the strategy, but also not let go of the inspiration. And for those of you who love to geek out in keyword research is your thing, and it’s the sweet spot for you, and that is your art, we’re going to be talking about how you can do that well.

Bjork Ostrom: The purpose of all of this, the reason that we are having these conversations is because we want to help you figure out how you can do your craft better. In this case, we speak to people who publish content online. It could be a blog, but oftentimes we are talking to people about social media, we’re talking to people about business strategy. We try and cover it all, but all in the food space.

Bjork Ostrom: And the conversation today with Aleka Shunk from Cooking With Keywords, that’s her course, but she’s also a blogger. And she’s going to be talking about how she approaches keyword research from a blogging perspective at Aleka’s Get-Together. We’re going to be talking about that. We’re going to be covering this idea of keyword research and what it is, why it’s important, how you can be using it.

Bjork Ostrom: Whether SEO is the number one thing that you’re thinking about and trying to do, or if it’s a complement to something else that you’re focusing on, all of us will be able to take away different pieces from this interview and apply them to our business. I know it was true for me as I had this conversation with Aleka. There’s a lot of inspiration that came out of it for me and learning as well. So let’s go ahead and jump into this interview.

Bjork Ostrom: Aleka, welcome to the podcast.

Aleka Shunk: Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here. I’ve listened to Food Blogger Pro Podcast for the last five years and it’s what got me started in the first place with blogging.

Bjork Ostrom: Look at that.

Aleka Shunk: So I am so excited to be here, and I feel like I checked off a box of my bucket list being here.

Bjork Ostrom: Totally. One of my favorite things for doing this as long as we have, which five years, it’s like, there’s some podcasts that started out 10 years ago, where it was like super early and we were right in the middle when people started talking about doing podcasts, why it would be an important thing, but we’ve continued to do it.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that’s the one thing, if you look at podcasting stats, it’s like … I’m making this up. 80% of stats are made up on the spot. This is one of them, but it’s like, it’s a high double-digit percentage of podcasts make it like three episodes and then they fizzle out.

Aleka Shunk: Oh wow. Well, you should be proud of yourself.

Bjork Ostrom: So the reason I say that though, is because one of the things that’s really fun about having done something for five years and done something in the space of working with other business owners or creators is I feel like three, four, five years is the mark when it gets to the point where you can actually do something substantial.

Aleka Shunk: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: You can learn something. You can start to work on it. You can get traction. And then you can get to the point where you are, where you’re coming on, because you’ve developed an expertise, you’ve developed a skill. And it’s probably in the category of that 10,000 hours, Malcolm Gladwell talks about that, where you’ve been able to dedicate a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of learning around a skill and now you’re able to come on and teach other people about that and also have a successful business in that space.

Bjork Ostrom: So what did that look like for you when you were starting in that early stage five years ago, listening to the podcast and now where you are now? What did that transition look like? And what were you doing at that time five years ago?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. So I think a lot of bloggers, including myself, can agree that we start off blogging thinking, or I should say food blogging, thinking that all of our recipes are going to get seen right away and they’re better than everybody’s and we’re going to be the exception and we’re going to get all this traffic immediately, which completely didn’t happen.

Aleka Shunk: I think that’s the norm, but it takes a year or so for you to realize that your recipes are not going to rank on their own. They take some work and there’s strategy behind it. And for the first year I wasn’t seeing much success at all. And I think it took me at least two years, if not three, to really get completely comfortable with keywords.

Aleka Shunk: The first, I think it was two years in, I was stuck at about 10,000 monthly sessions. And I know we’re not supposed to compare, but I would always compare with other bloggers and I would think I’m so behind, but I think that’s more normal. But I knew that at that point going on to the three-year mark, I wanted more success. My goal was to make money off of it, which I feel like everybody’s goal eventually is, and to make it my full-time job, right?

Aleka Shunk: So I started to take it a little bit more seriously and really focus specifically on keywords because I’m not a huge blogger and I feel like that is something that smaller bloggers, those that start off have complete control over, unlike backlinks to an extent, and other things involved. So only a little bit control, but keywords, if you know what you’re doing and you have the right strategies, you can really outrank a lot of other bloggers. I was like, I’m going to take this little piece of SEO and I’m going to run with it and learn everything I can about it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. One thing that’s great about that, it actually ties into a question. We have a Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook group. So if anybody’s interested in joining, you can just Google Food Blogger Pro Podcast, and then you’ll see that group. I think you have to apply. I don’t know what it’s called on Facebook. But people-

Aleka Shunk: Request?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, request. Thank you.

Aleka Shunk: Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: But one of the things that we use that for is to get questions from people who listen to the podcast, because otherwise it’s just me asking from my perspective, which works out okay some of the time, but other times I forget perspectives from other people. And one of the questions from Sanilla Cammy, she says, it tied into this, how can smaller bloggers use keyword research to their advantage? And she says, what you talked about here, we know that food blogging is very competitive and there are already plenty of big food bloggers in the food niches that occupy the coveted top spots in Google.

Bjork Ostrom: So you already kind of addressed that, but can you talk about, number one, what is a keyword? We’re going to start basic. And then number two, what is keyword research? This is a three part question, which is a terrible interviewing tactic. But number three, why is it important for people in the early stages who might be beginner bloggers to think strategically about keyword research?

Aleka Shunk: Okay. I’ll try to remember all those questions.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay.

Aleka Shunk: So first, what is a keyword? And it’s so funny you say that or you ask that because you think you know what a keyword is. I talk about it in the course, right away, off the bat in my intro, because no matter how long you’ve been blogging, sometimes you assume things, and you don’t really know, or you’re afraid to ask simple questions like that. So you don’t want to come across like … There’s no stupid questions.

Aleka Shunk: What is a keyword? It’s what users type in Google. It’s a query. And it’s something that took me a long time to figure out, it can be more than one word. Even though keyword is singular, a keyword could be two, three, four words together. So that’s something that took me a little bit to understand. And it’s something that it’s very important because the ultimate search engine, Google is what people use every day, multiple times a day, and it’s how our recipes are going to be organically found by typing in these queries, these keywords.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Aleka Shunk: What was the second question? See, I forgot.

Bjork Ostrom: So a keyword’s basically anytime that somebody’s going in and searching something?

Aleka Shunk: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So a keyword, it could be blueberry muffins, it could be how to make blueberry muffins, it could be best blueberry muffins, it could be healthy blueberry muffins, right? We could go on and on and on.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: To your point, it’s a little bit confusing because it sounds singular, but really it’s a query that people are typing in to get a result. And to draw the full picture, as publishers, one of the strategies, one of the main strategies is figuring out how we can rank for a specific keyword and that being it’s free to get that traffic. And so if for every person that visits, you can make one penny and you get a thousand people to visit, then you’ve made $10, or a thousand page views, however the number’s you want to use.

Bjork Ostrom: So you can start to play the numbers game a little bit. If you’re monetizing the ads, if you have a product, it’s even better because you might get more money or more revenue when somebody visits. So we understand keyword, it’s keyword, it’s queries, essentially something that somebody searches using what we’re going to assume to be Google.

Aleka Shunk: Any search engine.

Bjork Ostrom: In a search engine.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, yeah. That’s the one.

Bjork Ostrom: So then the second part of the question is keyword research. So we know what a keyword is. What does it mean to research a keyword?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. So basically keyword research, I mean, it’s hard to talk about that without talking about a tool, because that’s where we would keyword research. Starting off, I just used Google itself to do research. And fortunately, Google does provide certain things to help give you an idea of what people are searching for, right?

Aleka Shunk: So you, as a user, if you’re typing in a keyword like pizza, Google’s going to recommend keywords or other links, URLs, recipes related to that because they want to serve you as best as possible. So when I started off, I used Google itself to search what other keywords or what keywords are most likely searched.

Aleka Shunk: If you’re not targeting highly searched keywords, you’re not doing it right. A lot of people say, “Well, I’m ranking in a top position for this such and such keyword.” But if that keyword, if nobody’s searching it and the volume’s not there, there’s really no point, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Do you have an example?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. An example of a keyword that no … Yeah. Many of my recipes when I started off, my creamed corn biscuits, I talk about that in the course. Creamed corn biscuits. I loved creamed corn. It was a Thanksgiving side dish recipe, but starting off, my blog was just all bite-size food and all finger foods and I’m like, how can I make creamed corn finger food? So I threw it in a little biscuit cup and I called it that.

Aleka Shunk: Nobody’s searching for that ever. So nobody found it unless I directed them to it using social media, but organically, forget about it. Maybe I can rank for creamed corn, but that would be on the eighth page of Google. No one’s ever going to find it. And if you type in creamed corn biscuit cups, there I am at the top, but that means nothing because nobody’s searching.

Aleka Shunk: So I think that’s important to understand the difference between ranking in a top position for something that’s actually searched versus something that’s not being searched at all.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. And maybe we’ll get here with the next question, it’s maybe a good lead in, but that becomes this complicated in between then because it’s like I could create a recipe called Bjork’s Favorite Peanut Butter Pickle Sandwich, but if only 30 people are searching that month, like one person a day in the entire US let’s say, or globally one person searching that a day, it’s not going to really make a meaningful impact.

Bjork Ostrom: But then if you go to the other end and you are trying to rank for chocolate chip cookies, there are so many people searching for that and so many sites that are really well established. So my understanding is, you have to land somewhere in the middle then. Is that then where, third part of the question, keyword research comes in?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, for sure. The goal is to rank, put yourself in the position to rank for a recipe as quickly as possible with the most search volume, with the least competition. That’s the three things you look for. Really the two things, low search or low competition, high search volume. I think we all know that. If you know anything about keywords, I think that’s pretty obvious, but really targeting something that’s not so competitive and really focusing.

Aleka Shunk: And I know we’ve heard the term long-tail keyword many times before, but it’s basically targeting a keyword that’s not so specific, not so broad, something that will increase your chances of being found. And I talk about in the course using modifiers and really crafting the perfect title tag, because I think that is so often overlooked.

Aleka Shunk: Every word in your H1, in your title, is super important and should be used strategically and not just thrown in there carelessly. So I think that’s super … Something that a lot of bloggers … Initially, I know I did. I just crafted the title that I thought sounded good and was clever. I didn’t really focus on any strategy or any thought behind it.

Bjork Ostrom: So a couple of things that you said there that I think would be good to point out, first, modifier. So can you talk about what a modifier is and maybe give an example of what that is?

Aleka Shunk: So pizza recipe with mushrooms, the modifier can be with mushrooms or it can be homemade pizza recipe. So basically extra keywords that are not necessarily your target or seed keyword, but you’re creating that longer-tail keyword by adding these modifiers or extra keywords onto it.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it.

Aleka Shunk: Do you know what I’m saying?

Bjork Ostrom: Yes.

Aleka Shunk: So homemade pizza recipe with mushrooms, the modifiers will be homemade or with mushrooms or something like that.

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And so the idea is that let’s say you’re just starting out, maybe it’s year one, maybe it’s year two and you’re doing a pizza recipe, one of the things you could do is you could say, hey, that would be really awesome if I could rank for any time that somebody searched pizza recipe because you’d get thousands of people visiting your site.

Aleka Shunk: Oh, for sure.

Bjork Ostrom: But what I hear you saying is you could do that, but you’d probably need to be a super established site, like New York Times is probably the number one or a site like that.

Aleka Shunk: Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: And so you need to think strategically and say, if I can’t rank for that, how do I rank for something that still might get traffic, and it still might be the same recipe, but I’m focusing a little bit more by adding a modifier. So if it was a pizza recipe for me, my favorite is pineapple pizza. And also probably long tail in that, there’s not as many people doing pineapple pizza as pepperoni pizza. And so you would add a modifier and there’d be less people searching for it, but also less competition.

Aleka Shunk: Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: The other things that you had mentioned that relate to that are being really intentional, you said with your H1 and your title tag. So can you talk about what those are?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Why that’s also important when you’re thinking about keywords?

Aleka Shunk: Sure. Well, your title tag is basically the result that comes up in the SERPs, in Google on the pages. That’s what shows up and-

Bjork Ostrom: Sorry, SERPs being, just as a real quick explainer, search engine result page?

Aleka Shunk: Yep. Yep.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep? Okay, great.

Aleka Shunk: Search engine results. So the results that Google’s providing all the pages. And then your H1 is your actual recipe title, what shows up on your post itself. And usually they’re the same. A while ago, I would encourage people to tweak your title tag a bit to entice people, to click on your recipe by adding certain words, which sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, but I’d encourage them to keep them as similar as possible, but crafting it so that …

Aleka Shunk: And you have to think about things, like the title tag, I think it’s like 60 characters they give you. You don’t want it to cut off. And especially if it’s an important keyword that people are looking for, if you cut off the pineapple on your pizza, people don’t see that, they’re not going to click. So trying to keep it short and sweet, but still add those long-term keywords and make it the perfect length and targeting the perfect keywords is important.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk a little bit about adding in the items that encourage people to click? Because I think that’s a little tip that not as many people know about. And is that something that you do? Is that something that you see a lot of other people doing?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, it is.

Bjork Ostrom: And how do you do that in a way where it separates from the blog post versus a search result?

Aleka Shunk: So it’s something that I do occasionally when I feel like it’s super necessary and maybe I feel like something that will make it pop from the other results, the other 10 results on the first page. It does, for example, a word like the best, right? Well, first of all, you better make sure it’s the best. You don’t want to just throw this into every recipe title, but that, obviously if I’m the user, I’m going to probably click on the best pizza recipe, as opposed to just a general pizza recipe. It’s going to make me more interested in that.

Aleka Shunk: Easy, quick, from scratch, five minute, those are those keywords that are going to really make your result pop, stand out. And I usually will examine all the results on the first page first and the titles and see. And I don’t want it to blend in and look just like everyone else’s. So that’s usually the cases where I will add a word or something to my title tag.

Bjork Ostrom: And it reminds me of in the early days when I was figuring out what does it look like to be an entrepreneur, I would wholesale shoes from Chicago. So I’d get shoes shipped up and then would list them on eBay. And then eBay, you’d have to pay additional for putting a little star by it or getting it bold or to change the result in a way that looks-

Aleka Shunk: Gives you a leg up.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And the nice thing is with this it’s you can do that and it’s free. If you’re intentional about adding some of those things to your title tag, then it might encourage people to click, which obviously is a great thing because more people are then coming to your site. So are you doing that with Yoast and how do you do that in a way where it doesn’t also update your blog post because the title in the H1, the blog post title wouldn’t include that, but what I hear you saying is the title would. Is that right?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. I know that it’s something recently that we’re encouraged as bloggers to keep the title tag in H1 as closely related as possible, but if we were to change and add a word or something, then … And if you’re not a food blogger, I feel like with a food blogger it gets a little bit tricky. But even if you’re not a food blogger, it’s something that you can take advantage of.

Aleka Shunk: The Yoast plugin on the bottom gives you the opportunity to change it, or in that bottom window, above the meta description. And you can easily just change it there and it will not affect your H1 at all. But more recently I’ve been thinking if I’m going to add quick and easy in my title tag, most of the time, I’ll just throw that in my H1, too. Really, what’s the difference? So, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Love the little tips, the tricks, and I think those are the things where if you add those up over time, if you think strategically about how you’re titling something, if you look at other search results and see what are other people saying, how are they structuring things, if you do keyword research and find, hey, here’s something that has the potential to have a decent amount of traffic and isn’t super competitive, all of those things add up over time.

Bjork Ostrom: And the one thing we haven’t really dug into yet, which is kind of the sweet spot of this interview is the actual keyword research process. So what does that look like? Do you brainstorm once a month, all the different recipes you could create and then go in and research ones and try and find ones that are in your sweet spot? How do you go about doing keyword research? What is it and how do you do it?

Aleka Shunk: So do I do it in advance? I wish I was that organized. I do not. I literally will keyword research words every day just because I love doing it. And if I find a keyword, and I randomly come across them every day, I’ll search it up quickly and see if it’s something I’m going to add to my … And I do have an ongoing list. Then I do it every day.

Aleka Shunk: But you don’t have to, you can do it in monthly increments because I know it takes time. To do quality, thorough, deep keyword research should take you a couple hours, and I feel like people don’t. And it does depend, the recipes. Some recipes are a little bit more to the point and you don’t need to dig that deep. If there’s more variations of the keyword, then you definitely want to spend time looking through it.

Aleka Shunk: So what I would do is, say, talk about how there’s three phases of keyword research. The first phase is the best phase to research, that is from scratch, when you don’t have any recipe idea in mind. You’re just starting with a clean slate and you have a wider net to cast of keywords and you can target whatever you want, according to your niche, and you go from there.

Aleka Shunk: And you can do your research ahead of time and collectively write down all the keywords that come up for, maybe you start with a chicken recipe and you notice that these keywords keep popping up, or this cooking method keeps popping up, or this flavor, this something keeps popping up, or this ingredient, and you’re writing it down, and then afterwards you craft and put together.

Aleka Shunk: It’s so much easier to target that way because you’re not held back or restrained by a recipe, whereas in phase two, is what I call it, is after you already have a recipe. So it could be a recipe that you’ve been making for your family over the last few weeks or one that’s been passed down and you want to share it with your users. And in that case, that phase is a little bit harder to keyword research after the fact that the recipe’s already developed and you already have a set ingredients and cooking method.

Aleka Shunk: I mean, if say it’s a chicken marsala recipe and it’s delicious and you definitely know you want to share it, what direction are we going to just target chicken marsala, because I’m sure that’s super competitive. If you’re a larger blogger, maybe you can rank for it, but definitely not if you’re starting off.

Aleka Shunk: So it’s harder to tweak the title and your keywords when a recipe’s already developed. So that’s not the ideal phase to be in, but it’s still possible. You can maybe research certain cooking methods, and if you happen to do it in a cast iron skillet, and that looks like a keyword that is highly searched for that recipe, you can throw that in your title. And it happened, coincidentally, it worked out that way.

Aleka Shunk: And then the third phase is the worst phase to be in, but it’s still possible to do research, that’s after your recipe’s already published and on your site and has been sitting there. Then you have to think about, well, I have to go back and I have to update it. And I realize it’s not really ranking for any keywords, so how can I update it and optimize it to target a better keyword?

Aleka Shunk: Do I need to change the entire post? Do I need to delete it and just start over? Do I need to just tweak the recipe title of it? Do I need to add some more subsections or maybe some other questions addressed to better optimize for another keyword that I originally didn’t think of?

Aleka Shunk: And that’s definitely the hardest and something that a lot of people ask me about when I do my coaching sessions is we go through all those older posts and think about, well, what’s worth updating? How can we update it? Is it even possible to update this and target any keyword? And if not, then we go in a different direction.

Aleka Shunk: So that’s really the ideal process or phase is the first phase from scratch. And when I do that, I use a keyword research tool. It’s a must. If you’re not using a tool, you should definitely consider investing in one. There’s Keysearch out there, which is I think $30 a month. Very manageable, it’s not super expensive, like the other ones are. Don’t buy some Starbucks coffees for a couple days and you can afford that. It’s not going to break the budget and it’s very user-friendly and just a must when you’re keyword researching. So you use that. You get an idea of the competition level and if it’s really worth going after.

Aleka Shunk: And use Google, always use the actual results to compare and see if it’s actually worth it, because I think we rely too much on keyword research tools. Although, and I’m on it every day, I’m on multiple tools, it’s super helpful, it should not be the end-all, be all for deciding whether you should target a keyword because it’s just a machine. It’s just going to tell you things based on numbers. You are going to be the best person to evaluate whether that keyword is worth targeting. And you can see if the recipes are meeting user intent. If they’re helpful, if they’re optimized well, which the tool doesn’t do that.

Aleka Shunk: So I think a lot of people just look at a score and they’re like, “Oh, there’s no way I’m going to be able to rank for this keyword.” And you do a little bit deeper research and you actually read what’s on the first page, and you’re like, “Oh, just because they have, say, a high domain authority doesn’t mean I’m not going to be able to outrank them.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So you mentioned tools and I think that would be one thing that people would be really interested in hearing about. You mentioned Keysearch is one, a lower-cost entry-level one that can do the job. What are the other ones, just so people know the lay of the land? And if you could rank order them, or are they all pretty similar in terms of what you’d need?

Aleka Shunk: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Is one like a Lexus and the other’s like a Ford Focus? What is the landscape of actual tools that you’d use?

Aleka Shunk: So there are so many tools, some free, some paid, and I literally break this down in my course, the free tools, the paid tools, and I do a side-by-side comparison and a chart and tell you what the pros and cons and what I like from each tool, because I think that’s super important to understand before you invest in a tool, what it’s going to offer you and what’s going to be the best one.

Aleka Shunk: The most popular and the most used are going to be Keysearch, Semrush, and Ahrefs. Keywords Everywhere is also a tool that a lot of people use, which is an extension and is pretty reliable, but I feel like it’s not as popular. It doesn’t give you as much as the other tools do. I use a extension, Keyword Surfer, that also helps and it’s free. While you’re on Google, it’ll just give you a quick idea of an approximate search volume. And those are really the top four that I talk about in my course. Well, really just those three.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. And then can you talk about data as it relates to those tools? Because I think one thing that I found to be true for myself as I started to just get more into the world of all things online was I had this belief around all data being accurate. And I think, especially in this world, you start to realize, oh, this is incomplete data. And you reference that a little bit by saying you need to check and look on your own to verify when you search that keyword, what does that look like, what are the results like.

Bjork Ostrom: So to the extent that you know, how do these tools get this data? How much do you trust it? And what should publishers have in mind when they think about using a keyword research as it relates to the accuracy of the data?

Aleka Shunk: Well, what’s recommended is Keysearch because apparently it does use Google APIs, which is basically an interface that talks with Google and gives just more knowledge and more accuracy directly from Google. I think Keywords Everywhere also uses APIs. But from my experience I’ve seen across, compared to Semrush and Ahrefs and Keysearch, which I’ve used them all and compared, just out of curiosity, they’re pretty close most of the time to each other. So I haven’t seen a huge difference in those.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Aleka Shunk: You had asked about …

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think that addresses it. Is one considered more premium than the other? And the nice thing about a tool like Keysearch is it’s created with, I think solopreneurs in mind a little bit more, whereas the Semrush, I think Semrush is a public company.

Aleka Shunk: Companies, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s more enterprisey in terms of its pricing. It’s a department that would not blink at spending $500, whereas if you’re early in your blogging, you probably don’t want to pay $500 for a tool.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. But with that said, and I agree, I think when you start off, you have a small budget and you need to invest wisely. But I do think if you really want to bring your keyword research game to the next level and you’re serious about this whole blogging thing, Semrush and Ahrefs are hundred percent worth the money, in my opinion. They can do so much more quicker, give you so many more. They have so many more features.

Aleka Shunk: My favorite thing is really I’ll very often research a competitor. So if Keysearch says you can maybe rank for this keyword, and this gives me an approximate volume, I will check out the top results, really the first or second result in Google for that keyword and then pop that URL into an Ahrefs or Semrush and see what traffic they’re actually getting, what keywords they’re actually ranking for.

Aleka Shunk: And you can do this in Keyword Explorer as well in Keysearch, but it doesn’t give you as much information as Ahrefs and Semrush. It’s really awesome, they can tell you your keyword history and if you’re trending upward and on the right track, because a lot of us wonder, should we update a post, we’re not getting traffic, where does it lie in the SERPs, is it ready to update?

Aleka Shunk: All of us are so anxious to update posts, but sometimes if you see that keyword history just going up like a rollercoaster, just hold off a little bit longer, because sometimes it takes longer than 12 months or so, which is usually the recommended time to wait before updating and it’s on its way up. And Ahrefs allow, Semrush … Keysearch is starting to allow things like that as well, but I find they’re not as user friendly as the more expensive tools.

Aleka Shunk: So I do love them. And if you can afford that, you definitely want to. And even if you can’t afford it for 12 months straight, I encourage people to just buy one month subscription and do as much keyword research in that month as you can, and then you can cancel it. At least you’ll get a good amount of knowledge or information from there.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, batch it.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Bjork Ostrom: And to be clear, those tools, the default isn’t $500 a month. That would be more the more expensive plans. I think they’re-

Aleka Shunk: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I’m looking at Semrush and it looks like 120.

Aleka Shunk: 199.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, 119.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think Ahrefs is similar and to your point, come with more features and functionality and whatnot. This is more of a less technical, but just a curiosity. So in this world, people are doing similar things like publishing content on a blog, on social media, but they’re all coming to the table with different skills and interests. And I think for some people, the idea of keyword research is in their sweet spot. They love the idea of doing that, finding something that ranks well or has a potential to rank well, spending time creating a recipe around that and seeing it perform well. Like I have friends who, not in this niche, but they love that. That’s what they do. If they could just spend all day in Ahrefs, they would.

Aleka Shunk: Me too. Me too.

Bjork Ostrom: And then there’s people on the other side, who it’s like, “Please no. What I want be doing is I want to be in the kitchen, working on a recipe that is inspired by a meal that I had when I was traveling in Italy last week. And I just want to create that recipe and not do keyword research against that.” Do you have advice for the people who would fall in that latter camp around inspired creation? How can they still do that, to not give up on the thing that gives them joy, but to still be smart about it from a strategy perspective?

Aleka Shunk: That’s a great question. When I started food blogging, I would literally lay asleep or awake in bed at night just thinking of all the different recipe creation possibilities. And once I realized that those ideas weren’t being found and that keyword research sucks the inspiration out of us a bit, it was a little bit disheartening and made me a little bit sad about the whole idea of food blogging. I’m like, “I really have to strategize? Why can’t I just publish everything and anything that I want? Why can’t I be creative?”

Aleka Shunk: But that’s the reality of it. We are competing with so many other people, so many other blogs, so many other websites, and this is the way it is. Do you have to sacrifice all creativity and inspiration? No, for sure, definitely not, but think about maybe doing a balance. I still create and share recipes that I truly love, even though I know that there’s not much volume out there.

Aleka Shunk: I will be honest, I rarely create a recipe that has zero search volume. I will somehow try to get in some type of keyword and there are ways around it. If you’re doing the right research, you can still share that amazing, nostalgic recipe that you had when you were a child and still target certain keywords, you just have to do the right research.

Aleka Shunk: And even if it involves maybe throwing one extra ingredient in, or maybe cooking on the grill, as opposed to in a skillet or using an Instant Pot as opposed to a Dutch oven, certain things just to tweak it just so you get the traffic, it’s completely worth it. And that motivation is going to keep you going, if the inspiration is not always there. You know what I’m saying?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think that idea of balance is a great one where you’re not maybe necessarily doing things that are a hundred percent inspiration and you’re also not doing things that are a hundred percent search, unless you are somebody who loves that process, doing keyword research and creating content around that.

Bjork Ostrom: I think the other thing that’s important to point out is it’s like, what game are you trying to play? And if you’re trying to play the game of search engine optimization, but you don’t love the process of optimizing for search, then as a creator, it’s probably worth looking at a different game to play or strategy, if you want to say that.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s lots of different ways that you can be successful as a creator online, like I see a lot of incredible, artistic, wonderful creators doing Substack. Their strategy is they know that they have followers, they know that they don’t want to play the game of search and try and outrank, and so what they do is they say, “I’m going to speak to my followers and create in a way that feels really organic, and it’s an email.” You don’t have to optimize an email for search.

Bjork Ostrom: So I think it’s an important thing to point out as we, as creators, think about what is our best path. And if we’re like, our only path is search, I think it’s important that we remember there’s lots of different ways that you can play the game. Search obviously is a really important one, people talk about it a lot in this niche, but lots of other avenues to explore as well.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. I think it’s also important to point out that there are recipes that will go viral or get a lot of traffic on other social media, like Pinterest and those. It’s funny because the more unique you are on Pinterest, the more successful I found. So it all depends. If you really like a recipe, it could … I’ve had recipes that zero keyword, but Pinterest traffic is still, even though Pinterest stinks right now, I think the traffic still is coming from those pins.

Aleka Shunk: And then, if you do publish a recipe that you really like, and you had zero keyword research done, you can analyze what keywords Google thinks is good for that recipe in matching user intent and you can work off of that. And when you update it the next time, tweak it according to what Google is ranking you for.

Bjork Ostrom: Can you talk about user intent? What does that mean?

Aleka Shunk: It’s so tricky because with recipes, and this is the biggest confusion when it comes to food bloggers and probably the most common question I’ve had in regards to certain recipes and ranking and updating. It’s basically creating what the user is looking for and what they’re expecting. So if you’re not giving the user what exactly they want or are searching, they’re not going to click on your recipe, or they’re not going to spend a lot of time on your recipe. So the dwell time will be super low, right?

Aleka Shunk: And you can check that in Google Analytics if you want, but that’s a sign that it’s not matching the right intent. Meaning, if say somebody is searching meatball sandwich and maybe you’re using maybe frozen meatballs and they don’t want frozen, they want homemade meatballs or from scratch. And you can compare with the other recipes on the first page, and if it’s not matching up, you’re going to fall in the rankings.

Aleka Shunk: And I see this so often, especially with dietary niches and vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free niches all the time where bloggers will think that they have the right keyword down, but they’re not realizing that somebody may be ranking for … What was one of the …

Aleka Shunk: I was working with somebody one on one a few months ago and the keyword was so specific and they basically took two modifiers or two long-tail keywords and put it together. And I said, “Well, people may be looking for gluten-free scones with blueberries, but are they …” Well, that was a bad example.

Aleka Shunk: Basically, the idea is that the user needs to know what to expect, and if you’re not giving them what they expect, it’s not going to be found. You got to make sure both keywords together are being found. Yes, they may be searching for this type of recipe, this type of muffin, gluten-free, but are they searching for gluten-free pistachio scones? Do you know what I’m saying? Pistachio scone recipe could have a super high search volume, but if gluten-free pistachio scone recipe doesn’t have a high search volume, the users are not going to be staying on the result and Google’s going to push you down. Does that make sense?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s almost like I think a lot of times come back to this core foundational piece of what we’re trying to do and what Google’s trying to do. And what Google’s trying to do, what any good search engine’s trying to do is successfully match a search term to a result that’s going to be the most helpful. In our world, it’s like, how do we give people the best recipe? Or maybe it’s a food process, how do we give them the best explainer for how to make tofu? And that’s what Google’s trying to do.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think sometimes we get lost as publishers by thinking about what does Google want, but that’s what Google wants is how to best serve the piece of content that is going to fulfill the intent of what the user is searching. And I think if we can keep that at the front of our minds, you can layer that with technical best practice around search, which is important, it’s foundational.

Bjork Ostrom: But I think that as an explanation of user intent, to your point of, hey, give somebody what they’re looking for. And if you are going after a keyword, just because you see it’s really good, but then the content that you’re serving doesn’t match that, then Google is going to through whatever means, figure out this actually isn’t-

Aleka Shunk: Yeah, Google’s smart.

Bjork Ostrom: Even though you’re saying by all the technical things you’re doing that this is the keyword, when it comes to it, that’s not actually what that person needs or what they’re finding helpful. And what I hear you saying is in those scenarios that will be impacted by your ranking being pushed down or not as performing as-

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. Yeah. I use the results. I mean, Google tells you what it wants, right? Just look at the results on the first page and get an idea of what other bloggers are offering. If they’re offering most of the recipe cooked in the oven and yours isn’t in the oven, yours is maybe in the air fryer, maybe that’s not what users are going to like, because either they don’t have an air fryer or they weren’t planning on that. So certain things like that I think is often overlooked by a lot of bloggers, especially in the food niche. It’s right there and it’s free information, so take your time and analyze all the competition.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So Chelsea from the Facebook group asked when should I be worried about competing with my own recipes, for example, if I’m trying to rank for blueberry muffins, shooting myself in the foot for also making a lemon blueberry muffin recipe.

Aleka Shunk: Oh boy. So that’s a great question. I feel like something that I used to always get confused, because we’re encouraged, I feel like to keep doing similar things. So I think we think in the food blogging niche, similar recipes, right? But that’s not necessarily true.

Aleka Shunk: I mean lemon blueberry muffins and blueberry muffins are very similar, but if you think about it and keep in mind that our recipes are going to rank for the same keywords, many of our recipes, and it’s inevitable. And that’s okay to happen when it happens, but it’s important that our target keywords are not competing with the other target keywords, right?

Aleka Shunk: So lemon blueberry muffins, we could be ranking for blueberry muffins with lemon, lemon blueberry muffins, blueberry muffins, just blueberry muffins lemon without the with. So different variations of that keyword. And they all could have high search volume.

Aleka Shunk: And most of the time, your blueberry muffin recipe won’t rank for lemon because that’s a key ingredient. You can see the results on Google are going to be all blueberry muffins, no lemon. And the results for lemon blueberry muffins will be most likely all lemon blueberry muffins. So there’s so much competition out there that Google’s not going to rank your blueberry muffin recipe for lemon because you’re targeting an entirely different keyword even though the recipe’s similar.

Aleka Shunk: So to answer her question, I wouldn’t be so concerned. It’s very difficult to compete unless it’s super similar. But just to be safe, I probably wouldn’t do or create a recipe that similar just because there’s bound to be other smaller volume keywords, like homemade muffins that essentially both recipes could rank for that keyword or moist muffins or from scratch muffins.

Aleka Shunk: So do you want those keywords to compete? They could. And usually we don’t want that to happen. So it depends on the recipe. I haven’t found it to be much of an issue, but it is something that you have to keep in mind. And when you can control it, try to make them a little bit more different than that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. Variety is probably going to be a good thing compared to something that is so close. You don’t want to do 10 iterations of blueberry muffins unless they’re-

Aleka Shunk: No, probably not.

Bjork Ostrom: … drastically different.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: So let’s say that somebody comes to you and they say, I’ve never done any of this, I don’t know where to start. Obviously your course, which we can talk about is going to be super helpful in walking people through that, but just at a high level, where would you say the outline of how people can navigate next steps for starting to dip their toe into keyword research and start to learn a little bit? What would the outline of those next steps be?

Aleka Shunk: So I think there’s, other than purchasing a tool, Keysearch, we can start off with that, get to learn and know the tool as best as you can and become an expert at the tool because a lot of us will use the tool and we’ll only use one feature over and over again. But there’s so many things and the tools are constantly being updated with new features that you’re never going to be able to be an expert in keyword research or anything if you’re not really fully learning it to its fullest capabilities.

Aleka Shunk: And I am going to create a course on just Ahrefs and Semrush, because I feel like those two tools are super complicated and you almost need some guidance with that. But know the tool that you use. And you learn by doing and learn from your own rankings and your own blog.

Aleka Shunk: Once you have recipes that have been up and you think that you’re doing a good job of keyword research, go back and revisit them and check out your traffic on Google Analytics and see if it’s worth what you’re getting. Check out your keywords, what you’re ranking for.

Aleka Shunk: And the most important thing, a lot of us will be satisfied with ranking on the first page of a mediocre keyword that brings us decent traffic, but we fail to pursue that top, highest volume keyword and it’s sitting on the second page and we don’t even know, say it’s in the 11th spot. So it’s at the top of the second page and we don’t even know it’s there because we don’t analyze and track our keywords, which I talk about in my second course.

Aleka Shunk: It’s so important and something that a lot of people don’t just … I don’t know if they don’t think it’s worth it or they don’t know how to do it, but it’s so important because if that keyword is hanging out in the 11th spot, it’s so close to being on the first page. And once it’s on the first page, now it’s going to start getting exposure and hopefully move up.

Aleka Shunk: And you can do things like push it out, maybe promote it on Pinterest or push it out to social more or update it a little bit or add more links to it, to just give it a little boost. Don’t give up until that keyword is in the top spot on Google. Don’t be satisfied with just ranking mediocre keywords.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think that’s where the strategy piece comes in. And if you are thinking strategically, and even if you just layer in. If it’s not the kind of thing you’re super excited about doing, but hey, you’re going to get your favorite drink and sit down at Starbucks and look at what piece of content is on the second page of Google for a keyword.

Bjork Ostrom: And simply going through that process once a month, you’re going to be able to save a lot of energy around generating traffic by thinking strategically how you can move that from the second page to the first page. So I think that’s a great point. And one of the ways that you could use those tools is to say, hey, where is this sitting right now, when I look at where rankings are? And how do I strategically then lift that ranking? And that could be an entirely different podcast episode with all the strategies.

Aleka Shunk: Yes, I know, rather than just-

Bjork Ostrom: Strategies with that-

Aleka Shunk: … blindlessly updating. Blindlessly? That’s not a word.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

Aleka Shunk: Blindly. Aimlessly. I combined-

Bjork Ostrom: Aimlessly and blindly.

Aleka Shunk: I made my own word.

Bjork Ostrom: Which I’m sure we can relate to feeling like we’re blindlessly working sometimes.

Aleka Shunk: Oh my gosh. But yeah, rather than just doing it with no strategy behind it. You’re wasting your time essentially. So yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So you had mentioned your course a couple times. Are there places that … Or there are places. Where are the places that people can check those out? If they want to dive deep on this, how do they do that? Would love for you to be able to give a promo on that so people can find that.

Aleka Shunk: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Cooking With Keywords is basically the umbrella of the school. So I have a keyword research course that I launched a year and a half ago. And that really is for beginner bloggers, advanced bloggers, everyone in between. It’s my master course on keyword research. And you can find that on my blog. There’s a link directly to the Teachable site.

Aleka Shunk: And then I have my second course that I launched this year on rank tracking and analyzing keywords, which I think is a nice segue from the first course. After you’ve been established for a year or so, I think that course would really be perfect for you because like we said, you have to know where your rankings are sitting or else you’re putting your effort into posts that really aren’t worth it.

Aleka Shunk: And then I also offer coaching one on one to go and go through your keywords one at a time and see what’s worth putting effort in, what keywords may need a little tweaking, what keywords really are not doing it for you, and if user intent is being matched, all of that. So all of that can be found on my website, at alekasgettogether.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. And we’ll include it in the show notes as well. Aleka, so great to chat with you. Thanks for all the information. Really appreciate it.

Aleka Shunk: Yes. It was so great to be here. Thank you guys so much and reach out if you have any questions.

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI.

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Ann Morrissey: Hey there, Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team here. Thanks for tuning in to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. In today’s episode, Bjork is sitting down with Echo and Erica Blickenstaff from Favorite Family Recipes. In this episode, echo and Erica dive into the ups and downs of running a family business. They discovered that the key to their success was delegating responsibilities and playing to each other’s strengths. They also discussed the challenges of growing a business while staying true to your roots. After taking a hit from Google’s algorithm updates, they realized the importance of diversifying the revenue streams and not relying too much on search traffic with 2 million monthly page views and a focus on authentic family-driven content, they’ve learned to balance growth with staying genuine, whether you’re running a family business or just trying to keep things organized. This episode is full of actionable tips and inspiring insights. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom:: Echo and Erica, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you here.

Echo Blickenstaff: Great to be here. Thank you. Thanks.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, we’re going to be having a dual conversation. There’s actually three people who are part of your business. You are all equal owners in the business, and the unique thing about this business partnership is you also have grown up as life partners because you are all sisters. So tell us quick about how you came about as sisters owning a business together. And I’ll just say our girls are six and four and I really love the idea of them someday running a business together. Maybe you can speak from the other side around the complexities of it, but as a parent I feel like it would be a really wonderful thing to see. But you guys have a business, you run this business together. So echo, take us through what that looked like for you to get to this point where you have a really successful business and your three sisters together running it.

Echo Blickenstaff: Okay. First I have to say, I wonder what my dad would, how he would respond to how it has been having three daughters work together.

Bjork Ostrom:: Sure, yeah. He is unofficially on the team as a mediator. Is that his role?

Echo Blickenstaff: I think at first all of us would do a little bit of complaining back and forth to him, and then we decided this is not good. We just need to separate.

Echo Blickenstaff: There are some subjects around the rest of the family that are taboo.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, this being one of them. If you’re all on Thanksgiving, you’re probably not going to be talking about SEO tactics around the Thanksgiving table. Yeah.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes, exactly. So Erica and Emily actually started it before I joined, probably about five years before I joined, just as a hobby. And they had the idea, they’re the youngest two of the family, and when they both moved away, got married, our mom was a fabulous cook and we were all constantly, this was before the internet calling her asking for a recipe. She this cute little recipe box, all of her,

Bjork Ostrom:: One of those classic wood recipe boxes.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes. And they had our grandmother’s recipes, her recipes. So it was the constant calling, jotting it down on a scrap piece of paper, losing it. So they had the idea, let’s start putting all of our family recipes online. And they did that for a few years and mostly at first it was just our family accessing recipes. And then we started noticing, oh, people are,

Bjork Ostrom:: Somebody else is coming. Yeah,

Echo Blickenstaff: Are coming. And I remember the first time they talked to one of them and they said we had 60 people outside of family visit. And it was just amazing. Wow, this is so cool.

Bjork Ostrom:: And it’s that time when you’re building a thing where it’s pretty magical to be able to say, there are 60 people and we don’t know who those people were. They somehow found your site. I think we get kind of conditioned as it grows where 60 becomes millions and you forget like, wow, that’s a really cool thing that somehow people found our site and discovered it. And so that’s where the name favorite family recipes comes from is because you had these favorite family recipes and you just decided to post those online. Eventually people started to discover those. And so that was in 2007. So you came on in 2012 then Echo, is that right?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yeah, and when I came on, it was kind of funny. I was working full-time as an accountant and Erica came to visit me. There was a blog conference in Salt Lake City and she had just had a baby and she asked me if I would just come hold the baby in the back of the room while was

Bjork Ostrom:: That was your first role within the company?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Childcare.

Echo Blickenstaff: Babysitter.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yep. Yep.

Echo Blickenstaff: Remember standing in the back of this conference room and hearing that people are making money, putting recipes online and listening to some of the processes and experiences that people had. And I thought, wait, we can do this. We can totally do this. And we talked about it after the conference and that’s when we started doing it intentionally as a business from that.

Bjork Ostrom:: And Erica, tell me about 2012. So it’s this period of time where people are starting to think about, hey, this could be a thing. There’s other people who are building online businesses and blogging is kind of a new thing. What was it like for you at that time and then in 2012, was it enough for you for all of you to go in working on it full time or was it kind of a side hustle for everybody at that point?

Erica Blickenstaff: So like she said, in 2012, I just barely had a baby and I was actually working full-time as a speech pathologist, so I kind of had my hands full and had my baby. I was actually on maternity leave and I was like, I don’t really want to go back to work. And really we weren’t making a whole ton, especially when we put ads and everything on there, CPMs and everything weren’t super high. So it was definitely a risk to be like, I think I’m going to just go all in on this and see what happens and quit my full-time job. My husband was going to law school at the time, so we were already in debt and like Echo said, we went to this conference and we were like, oh my gosh, people are putting these ads on and actually making money. Maybe we can do this and I can quit my job so I can be with my baby. And it was scary and it was a risk, but it’s one I’m so glad that I took and that Echo took and Emily definitely paid off.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. So tell me about that early stage. So you are all siblings. I think this could also apply to friends or just generally business partners. You have this idea, you’re excited about the potential of a thing, you can see other people doing it and you go, you say, let’s go in on this together. First of all, from how do you make decisions around the company? One of the things we talk about on the podcast is I think a lot of us get into building an online business, whether it be a social following a blog, a CPG, food product, whatever the business is, we get into it because we initially think, Hey, my goal is to replace my income. But when you’re building a business and you replace that income, that income is then valuable because a business it, it’s transferable in a way that a salary. So I think a secondary thing, not always but for a lot of people is they get into it and they realize, oh, not only is it valuable because it’s creating income for me, it’s also valuable because you’ve created a business, but then you have to be intentional to say, what’s the ownership structure for this business? And my guess is a lot of people listening might be in similar conversations with a sibling, a friend, a business partner, and going through the process of trying to understand how do we go about doing this? So what did that look like for you all in the early stages or was it a pretty simple conversation of like, Hey, let’s divide the pie equal?

Echo Blickenstaff: In the early stages we struggled to get to a place where we could effectively move forward. I think so many things were coming at us and everyone who has a food blog knows there are so many different elements. They were at that time starting to push video, not dealing with, but taking care of all the social media platforms, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and then also, oh, we need to get an email going. There were so many different things and we really struggled at the beginning with all of us were creating content, all of us were taking photos, all of us were writing our own blog posts. I think a couple of us started fiddling around with trying to make video and then trying to, I think we even had to divided it up, you do Facebook posts on this day, I’ll do ’em this day. And I think that was a difficult time. It was a struggle because we’re all trying to do it all.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. And what time, when you say that time, what season was that?

Echo Blickenstaff: This was probably 2012 to 2000, I dunno, probably the first couple of years I was still working for at least the first year, maybe first 18 months. And so I was trying to do my stuff at night on the weekends and we weren’t meeting regularly, it was just kind of like, okay, you throw your new post up this day, I’ll do this day. And we’ve kind of evolved into, okay, we should probably have a meeting, step one. And then initially I think we started evolving into each of us really focusing on what our strengths were and also our weaknesses, things that we enjoyed doing, things that we didn’t like to do because it kind of became a grind for a little while of do it all each of us individually. And we don’t live well. Eric and Emily do live in the same city and then I live about six hours away from them. So it’s not like we were physically getting together. And that was before Zoom. So a lot of it was just phone calls. So it took a while to figure out who enjoys this the most and is that their strength and dividing up responsibilities. And then the challenge was staying in your own lane, especially as sisters, I think you’re just feel more like you can be more open about things you like and everything. Yeah. A little too honest sometimes.

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, right.

Echo Blickenstaff: More than regular business partners. I dunno, maybe it’s just you feel more safe saying

Bjork Ostrom:: The lines are blurred.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yeah. And so we tried to establish some boundaries there too. We were talking to each other all weekend, texting, talking on the weekends, late at night, and we set some boundaries of, look, let’s make this a real business where we work business hours and we’re not taking over each other’s lives with this business.

Bjork Ostrom:: So kind of formalizing it a little bit. I just had a conversation with a connection, somebody that I know yesterday talking about for Lindsay and I, what does that look like through the years and this organic process of us realizing what departments we are in within the business and starting to own those and to not, like you said, step on the toes of somebody else who’s in that department. And I think that even goes so far in so as not a business partner, but just somebody who you hire and just letting them kind of do their thing and finding that balance of weighing in on it versus letting them work in their zone and own the thing that they’re owning. So how about, and I think of two books, one that we talked about before we press record E Myth, and it sounds like Erica, that was a book that you read that was influential. And another book that I’ve read kind of in the similar vein is called Slicing the Pie and it’s all about how you define actual equity ownership building of a business. So first, what did that look like to have the conversation around equity ownership of the business? Was that a pretty simple thing to say, Hey, we’re all going to go in on this equal?

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, I think that was a pretty easy decision to make because we were all working hard. We all agreed that we were all working about the same hours and we’re like, let’s just split up the equity in the business. That part I think was pretty easy. And then splitting up the roles themselves. We literally met in person halfway between our houses in a hotel room. We just got a hotel room for a weekend. We’re like, we’re done. We have to get away from our families, we have to just hash this out. And we had whiteboards and sticky notes and we all wrote every single thing that needed to be done in the business and just put sticky notes all up on this board. Drew three lines and we’re just like, let’s just put these sticky notes where they go and group them together and this is how we’re going to split things up. And then we could see as far as equity goes, all of these deserve equal partnership.

Bjork Ostrom:: These are all valuable, these respective departments are all valuable. And then when you talk about writing everything that needs to get done, it reminds me of there’s this business framework called EOS that some people use. And one of the things that’s really helpful that I learned in going through the training with EOS is this idea of you get away from an org chart. So it’s not like you have an org chart that lists people. You have a, I forget what they call it, but it’s essentially a responsibilities chart and what are all the things that need to get done. Like you said, Erica, within the business, you name all of those things. And for somebody who’s listening that doesn’t have any partner or doesn’t have anybody on their team, you list all those things out and then you are the name in the seat for that role. You are doing everything or there’s maybe something and it just doesn’t get done. The great thing about then starting to bring people in, whether it’s an employee or a contractor freelancer or a business partner is then you can go from your name being on everything to start to say, Hey, okay, this is, you own this, you’re in that seat and I own this. And you can start to separate those out. And my guess is for you guys coming out of that meeting, it was helpful to say, okay, now we’re starting to see these clear lines. If there’s an opportunity on social media, I’m not going to try and figure it out on my own. I’m going to email the idea and to whoever owns that and then they’re going to maybe look into it or they’re going to make a decision on it. Does that echo basically what came from that meeting was allowing to have some clarity around roles.

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes. I think for each one of us, we left that experience just feeling relieved. I know I did. Instead of feeling like I was responsible for everything, and I think Emily and Erica felt the same way, it was so nice to think, oh, I just have to focus on my things, my responsibilities. And then I felt like that allowed me to really dive in deeper to each of those responsibilities and learn more about, one of my responsibilities is SEO, so that’s been a huge focus of mine. So it’s been great to learn more about that and not be so scattered across so many different things. But that’s exactly what happened. And then we still meet, meet weekly and when new ideas come up and it’s not my lane exactly something on social media, we pass it on to Emily or we get an email about a new affiliate program we pass to Erica handles that and

Bjork Ostrom:: You know where to route those things, which is super helpful. We’re going to talk about SEO in a little bit in that world because everybody’s always interested in talking about SEO. But one of the things that it sounds like was influential was the book, the E-Myth. And it’s a book I’ve read. I know a lot of entrepreneurs have read it, but Erica, what did you learn in the process of reading the E-Myth that was helpful to help shape up the conversations around who owns what? And even maybe just shifting how you think about the business,

Erica Blickenstaff: It’s interesting that you say that because when I was reading the book as I was reading, it’s broken up into different roles, the entrepreneur and the manager and the technician. And as I was reading this, I’m like, each of us, all of our personalities where we line up in the family, each of us fit perfectly into each of these roles. It was not hard to decide who was each role. I mean Echo, she’s very business-minded and managerial. She obviously takes that manager role. Emily is really good being task oriented and she can complete things and get things done and follow through on different projects. And so obviously she’s a really good person to be in that technician role. And I always like looking to the future and looking for different revenue streams. And I’m just all over the place since I’m like, well, clearly I’m the entrepreneur. And again, it kind of fits in the family. I’m the youngest, I’m the one that’s

Bjork Ostrom:: All over. Yeah, birth order, you all fit.

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, Emily’s the middle child and so she’s a people pleaser. She just likes to get things done and just make sure things are organized and things are happening. And Echo being the oldest,

Bjork Ostrom:: She’s managing telling everybody what to do.

Erica Blickenstaff: So I’m really fortunate that there’s three of us and there are these three clear roles within the book. And so when I was reading that, just the light came on and I was like, clearly we need to step into our roles and stop crossing over these lines and beginning each other’s lanes. And once we did that, I think our productivity went so much more smoothly. And I think it went through the roof. I feel like we were working harder, smarter, not harder.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Yep. The impact of the work that you’re doing was probably deeper because you had a focus area, you knew what it was. There wasn’t overlapping work. Two people weren’t working on the same thing. So I’m going to try and remember the E myth and let me know if this feels accurate, Erica, based on what you remember and echo if you’ve read it as well. But the basic idea, the basic premise is it’s a pie shop owner. And the pie shop owner loves making pies, which fits well with our world. It’s easier to take that analogy and apply it to what we’re doing because a lot of people literally are making pies. But the idea is they build this pie shop and it’s successful because this baker bakes incredible pies. But then eventually that baker becomes a manager because it has grown and then they just don’t like the job because they’re no longer doing the thing that they love, which is baking because the business requires management. And the idea is that as much as possible you want to move from, if you are an entrepreneur, you want to move out of that role of manager execution and stay in that entrepreneurial role because that is unique and it’s something that can’t be offered in the world and find somebody who’s managerial. Or if you are naturally managerial, you want to find the other roles like somebody who’s more visionary entrepreneur. And then remind me the idea of the technician. So the technician is somebody who is more project management oriented as opposed to manager who would be more like people management.

Echo Blickenstaff: So the technician is the one who continues to make the pie.

Bjork Ostrom:: Oh yeah. Like implements the vision of the Yeah. So it’s almost like we think of the world of individual in corporate speak, individual contributor, the person who’s making the pie. We just went to, in Minnesota, I did this trip up north with two good friends and we went to my friend’s cabin, shout out to the Minne Stuga, short-term rental, if anybody ever wants to go up north on the way there. On the way back, we stopped at this place called Betty’s Pies, and they do pie shakes. That’s one of the things they do, which is essentially like a piece of pie and ice cream and then they blend it up into a shake. It’s delicious. But I always think of, when I think of E-Myth, I think of that story and when I looked back in the kitchen, my guess is the person that I saw, I don’t know, there were maybe 20, a 20-year-old that probably wasn’t the business owner. That was the technician implementing probably an idea that the entrepreneur that owned the place had, but it’s not like they’re the ones actually making it. And potentially there was somebody who was then managing that team of the technicians, the people who are implementing it. And so it’s fun for me to be able to think about the application of that within an actual pie shop. So what would your advice be to people who are navigating a similar situation? Echo would be interested in hearing your thoughts around how to divide their labor and divide the areas of focus within a business. And then maybe insofar as you’re comfortable, any advice for people around thinking about compensation within that? I know that’s an element as well.

Echo Blickenstaff: Well, for your first question about how to divide is that yeah, I feel like I don’t have in the business world probably the best answer for that within a family, with us working with sisters and everyone who works for us is a friend. That’s just how our business has evolved or a family member. My daughter’s worked for us and I think we’ve really tried to focus on what you enjoy and maybe that’s not always the most profitable way to do it, but what you enjoy, what you’re good at, and not that everything we all do is we love doing it, but just tried to focus on the strengths of those people. And the people that we’ve brought in are people that we are already seen those strengths in them and said, Hey, would you like to work for us? We see how this could really benefit our business and I’d love to work with you and have your input. So does that answer your question?

Bjork Ostrom:: It’s great. And I think it applies a little bit to this idea of they talk about where your great passion and the world’s great need meet is where you should try and find your work. But I think it also works within the context of a business where your great passion, the thing that you enjoy and the need for the business where that overlaps as much as possible. If you can be working within that zone, that’s great. We should all be seeking to do that, not just for ourselves, but also for our team members and the people that we work with. Because the end result of that is somebody’s going to be doing a thing that they like they’re interested in learning about, they enjoy doing it, they’re not going to dread it the next day if they have to get up and do it again. That just feels like a healthy pursuit for any business or individual. How about when it comes to, and some background on this is, so Lindsay and our friend Nate have this side hustle project they’re working on called Snackdive. And it’s like they just review snacks. It’s like a show and one of ’em will pick out a snack and then they’ll review it and rate it one through five. And it’s just been a really fun thing for them to work on. But one of the questions is what does that division look like in terms of business ownership as trying to navigate, it’s working more, who’s paying for what? There’s a lot of considerations around how to divide that up. Would you have any advice for people who are trying to navigate that? And then the secondary question within that is advice for people on how to figure out how do you get paid within the business? Then as you have partnerships or people that are working together, and you don’t have to share specifics about your scenario, but just advice that you’d have for people that are navigating partnerships and divvying up the pie and allocating the salary or the income that’s coming in.

Echo Blickenstaff: I think that is just where a lot of people, some people that we know of, and it’s just you run into trouble because it’s very hard to say What I’m doing is more valuable than what you are doing. Especially with the food blog, obviously the person who is creating content, that role is very important and very valuable because, excuse me, because that’s how we get traffic in. And then people who are working on dating posts, is that as valuable as someone who’s doing a new post? And we found that it is. And then is the traffic coming from social media maybe isn’t as much. It’s really hard. And what we have decided to do, and I won’t claim that we are perfect at it, we’ve just said we’ve just had to the three of us together decide, like Erica said, divide it up three ways and try and make it where we’re each spending the equal amount of time. And I think we probably focused on time more than the actual revenue responsibility.

Bjork Ostrom:: Well, and it’s impossible. You can get, it could be become a full-time job to manage and allocate and track hours. And so at some point you have to be like, alright, do we all generally feel like this is fair? Yes, let’s move forward knowing that we all generally feel like this is fair because if not, you can get bogged down forever in the specifics around what is the value of this hour that I’m spending here? And if you can get past that, it’s like anything in the marketplace, does a buyer agree and the seller agree, great, then a match is made. And I feel like the same could be a said for business ownership. It’s a little bit different I think when you’re navigating it with a family, but we’re just in that world a little bit. We’re having those conversations more because it’s always just been Lindsay and I and it’s like, well, that’s easy. We’re just marriage partners. And so it’s like 50/50 on everything. But now for the first time it’s like, Hey, what does that look like if we start a thing with somebody else and divide that up before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. If you’re a food blogger or if you have a social media following and you’re looking to boost your income and grow your business, you need to check out member, full member full seamlessly integrates with your website, giving you full control and ownership of your brand, which we all know is so important. You can create tailored membership offerings like exclusive content, cooking classes, meal plans, private podcasts, so much more. It’s a fantastic way to provide more value to your audience and create new revenue streams for your business. And the good news is it handles the tough stuff like content protection, payment processing, subscription management, so you can focus on what you love, which is creating amazing content. Plus, you can build a loyal community with private spaces like a Discord chat or exclusive member forums. And there’s also in-depth analytics and super easy payouts through Stripe, which is awesome because then you have these valuable insights and you also have a reliable way to get paid. And if you ever need any help, the wonderful thing is they have real humans there to help you. No chat bots guiding you through support forums. It’s real people who understand membership sites, who understand content creators, and they are there to help and to lift the burden of some of the technical stuff, which not a lot of us love to deal with. So if you’re ready to monetize your passion, take your business to new heights, head over to memberful.com/food, that’s M-E-M-B-E-R-F-U-L.com/food. Moving on. One of the things we talked about that we’re going to share about is this idea of SEO. I know that that’s an important part of what you’re doing. So tell me a little bit about the landscape of the site right now. What does it look like? If you were to say percentage of revenue, is it primarily advertising? Do you work with brands? If you can talk about page views, just tell us a little bit about what the site looks like today. And then we’re also going to talk about helpful content and everything that came along with that. And maybe this would be a question for you, Echo.

Echo Blickenstaff: Okay, I was going to ask Erica to answer.

Bjork Ostrom:: Okay. Maybe it was Erica, I didn’t know within the roles, if the entrepreneur is the one that knows the data or the manager, which one is it? Erica, we will send it to you, Erica.

Erica Blickenstaff: We both like to keep tabs on how things are going with the website. And it’s funny because earlier when we were talking about this altogether, I wish you would’ve asked us this before. The helpful content update was not very helpful to us.

Bjork Ostrom:: Well, and we’re going to talk about the before and after with it, which will be great. So let’s start with the now and then we’ll rewind to hear a little bit of the season you guys have navigated with that

Erica Blickenstaff: Right now, we have, as far as page views, we have between one and a half and 2 million people coming to our site every month. I dunno, what was your other question?

Bjork Ostrom:: Oh, in terms of the business as a revenue allocation, is it primarily advertising from the site? Do you do any brand partnerships or product or anything like that? You have cookbooks if you were to look at the pie of revenue for the business?

Erica Blickenstaff: Yeah, definitely. Very. On the ad-heavy side, that’s probably the most prominent source of income. We do have cookbooks. We actually just released our third cookbook.

Bjork Ostrom:: Cool.

Erica Blickenstaff: In October.

Bjork Ostrom:: Congratulations.

Erica Blickenstaff: Thank you. And then we have worked with brands. I feel like a lot of the brand work was more in the past. I feel like those connections and the big affiliate partnerships with brands, I feel like we did that a lot more maybe five, 10 years ago. But now we’ve become a lot more picky who we work with, and that’s really slimmed down a lot. Just the amount of work that it takes to put in to sponsored content and stuff, how much they’re willing to pay. A lot of times it’s just not worth the work. So that’s kind of how it all shakes out. I’m trying to think of any other, I mean, of course Amazon affiliate links, there’s some revenue there.

Bjork Ostrom:: So take us back a year, maybe this is a painful revisiting of the results of the Google gods, but what did that look like a year ago from a page U perspective or sessions?

Erica Blickenstaff: So since the Helpful Content Updates, which we actually hit the hardest in September of 2023, that’s when we really started to start seeing decreases. And we’ve probably gone down like 30%, but lately we have been recovering, these last updates have been helping out. So hopefully we’ll keep seeing that upward trend going as we’re going further into Q4.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, so September of 2023 before that, was it kind of just a process of continual slow and steady growth with the site? And then is this the first time that you’ve navigated for Pinch of Yum? We had this season’s pre helpful content, but we had a season of continual slow decline. It was like, oh my goodness, what do you do? You try everything. It’s like what works? It’s hard, especially after season of just kind of growing. But was that your case where it’s like, hey, generally speaking month over month, there’s a little bit more this month when compared to the same month, the year before, was it the first season of navigating an extended period of decline?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yes, it really was. So it’s been frustrating because we’ve continued to add content over the last 12, 13 years. Well, ever since in 2012 regularly ad content and update content. And I felt when you look at the numbers, we just had this gradual growth and probably most food blog we really took off during C when people were cooking at home and saw great traffic, 20 20, 20 21. And then even into 20, 22, 23, we’re still seeing growth until the September update.

Bjork Ostrom:: And can you talk about, maybe this is less of, there’s two ways to focus on this. One would be tactics like, hey, what are some of the things that you’re doing and what do you think some of the things that you’re doing that are working? The other is Headspace, mentally, what is that like to navigate that? So maybe Erica, you can talk a little bit about for that last year, you look back and you’re like, it would’ve been more fun to talk about page views in September of 2023 than we’re recording this in November of 2024. How have you individually or collectively navigated a situation where it feels like we’re doing good work, we’re showing up, we’re doing the same things we’ve always done that have rewarded us, but now that it feels like the game has changed, how have you navigated that from a Headspace perspective?

Erica Blickenstaff: And I don’t know if you feel this way, but a lot of it is just like, don’t panic, Start seeing those numbers going down and we’ll get on meetings every week and we’re like, okay, don’t panic. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be fine. We just have to navigate this and figure out what Google is looking for and supply that to our readers. And a lot of that is just doing a lot of testing and trying to be productive that way. Trying to figure out, okay, what were we doing before that doesn’t like anymore? And then just doing lots of that AB testing and trying something new. And some of it was working with different SEOs and getting advice and trying things. And I mean, you probably know this, working with SEOs some advice was great and advice was not so great.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally. Well, and it’s like maybe it’s the exact opposite of the advice that you got from somebody else. Hey, you need to do this. Yeah.

Erica Blickenstaff: I mean there would be conflicting advice all the time. And I think a lot of it is when you’re an owner of your blog, you just kind of know, just have that feeling and you also have to trust yourself and trust that you know what you’re doing. And there were a lot of times that we would stop and be like, listen, we’ve been doing this for 17 years and we’ve navigated this before. We are professionals. And sometimes it’s hard to admit that to yourself to be like, no, I know what I’m doing. I’m a professional, we can figure this out.

Bjork Ostrom:: Well, especially you have developed a sixth sense around what works, what doesn’t work. And I feel this way in the world of finance where it’s like I’m continually interested in learning about finance, personal finance, opinions on things. But I would say for every 10 pieces of advice I take in from a content perspective around finance, there’s maybe one that I’m like, oh, I’m going to hold onto this. And I think if it was 20 years ago, I would kind of be holding onto everything. I haven’t really developed an opinion or an edge around my beliefs as it relates to personal finance. I feel like in our world of search and content, it’s probably similar. You all have been at this 10, 15, 17 years and you’ve taken in a lot of content. And in the early stages you kind of take it all as gospel. And then over time you start to realize, wait, this doesn’t feel like it applies to either what we’re doing. Maybe it’s like industry specific or maybe just seems a little bit off, or maybe it’s a way to get a result, but it feels temporary as opposed to long-term beneficial. So you start to develop these opinions, but it takes time to your point, and you probably don’t even realize the depth of your own expertise. So from a tactics perspective, you have gone through the process of learning a lot of different things, hearing from a lot of people. Echo, can you speak to right now, what does it look like for you in terms of what you’re doing day to day and maybe some things you could point to that are working well if you do have those things?

Echo Blickenstaff: One of the tactics I think that we’ve employed over the past year is going back to our roots. And when I say that, just when we first started out, we would write about where we got the recipe, how we came up with it, add some more personal touches. I mean that’s really all it was. There wasn’t a lot of information about the recipe within the content of the post. And over time, as you know, all the changes and the things we’ve been told from SEO experts in the field do this and then the next year, no, you need to do this. And I felt for a long time we were just chasing that, oh, we’ve got to go through all of our posts and posts and change this, and then something else comes up. We’ve got to go through all of our posts and change this and hire people on to help us get everything fixed for this new way to rank higher on Google. And I think this process with the Google updates has taught us, let’s stick with what we feel good about instead of what everybody else is telling us to do. And

Bjork Ostrom:: Do you have an example of that when you say something, an example of something you feel good about?

Echo Blickenstaff: Well, I think, and I could be wrong, but I think a lot of the people who followed us, especially from the beginning, enjoy hearing a little bit. And I’m not saying the whole life story. I personally enjoy when I read on Pinch of Yum or their website where they came up with the recipe or was this a family recipe? Where did it come from? Or we like to do a lot of copycat recipes on our site and I think people would like to know why did we pick that recipe to copycat? What’s our experience with that dish and why we would go to the trouble of trying to copycat it? Those kinds of things I think people find interesting. They don’t necessarily need a repeat of a bunch of things that are already in the recipe cart. So I think that seems to be something that Google prefers to see.

Bjork Ostrom:: It’s one of the hard things is like we talked about, you have almost two decades now of running the site, and so you have an intuition around readers, engaging with readers, interacting with readers. And what Google is trying to do long-term is serve content that is most helpful for the people that are using Google. Now, there’s a lot of questions around the long-term play of AI overviews and how much content is Google going to include in their search results. But generally speaking, the goal of Google is to give people helpful content outside of the context of helpful content update, but content that is truly good fit for people that people want. But the hard part, to your point echo, is it felt like there was a long history for a couple years of creating content that it kind of felt like people didn’t want, but Google rewarded. And then the question is, what do you do? Do you do the thing that you know is working in the moment or do you do the thing that you feel like is more aligned from a user perspective that feels a little bit maybe more organic, but maybe more engaging or useful or helpful for somebody coming to a piece of content at the risk of that thing not performing as well within Google. And so you kind of are forced to make this decision around how do you want to show up and how do you create content? Do you create it just for Google? Do you create it for just for people without Google or do you kind of find that middle ground? And it sounds like that’s where you’ve landed is this middle ground of creating user forward content from a ui ux and just what the content is about perspective, but then also keeping a search engine in mind from best practices standpoint. Does that feel accurate as to what you’re trying to do now?

Echo Blickenstaff: Yeah, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do now.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Wrapping the content with, yeah, go ahead.

Echo Blickenstaff: I think that’s what we tried to do all along, but I think we got a little too distracted with what everybody else was doing.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Which is I think everybody can relate to that, especially when you see a thing and it’s working, it’s like, oh, maybe that’s something that’s worth pursuing. So as we close out here, you have been doing this for a long time and you’ve been doing it successfully for a long time. Erica, you alluded to that as you’re working with these SEOs and it’s like getting some great advice, but also then getting some advice maybe in certain situations it’s like, oh, it doesn’t feel like necessarily something you’d say, yeah, we’re going to do this, no questions asked and move forward with it. Point being, you have a lot of insights, expertise, you have a lot of success. Tell me about when you look out another five years or 10 years, how do you guys think about the site that you’ve built, the strategy that you have? Erica, you’re in that entrepreneurial role, so maybe you’re thinking ahead a little bit, looking at new opportunities, anything that you’d point out or shine a light on for other creators as you think about what’s to come down the line?

Erica Blickenstaff: I’m always looking for different ideas. I mean, we’ve been looking into different product ideas or different, just a lot of different revenue streams, especially because of these last updates, how quickly Google can just take something away. So focusing on email and just different revenue opportunities, but also doing what we’ve been doing and really providing good content for our readers because I feel like people are always going to be wanting to find the recipes that they knew when they were growing up, those true favorite family recipes that they had. And I don’t think that’s going to go away. I don’t think that’s something that AI can take away. AI has never had those feelings and experiences around food we have, and I think people are always going to search for that genuine content. And so looking down the road, that’s what we want to keep providing is genuine content. And like Echo said, maybe even getting more back to our roots and being more genuine and building more for our readers instead of always trying to please the SEO gods.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally. Which there’s something that’s really nice about that to be writing for readers first before search. I think especially for people who enjoy the process of less structured content that’s not 17 sections on all the different ingredients and the history of those ingredients, it feels like a good way to be creating content. Last thing that I want to ask about, it’s a section that we’re trying to talk about more. I think it’s fun for people to hear about, and part of this comes back to Echo. We were at a conference, we were sitting across from each other and you were like, do you guys know a tool that brings in Google Analytics data, Google Search Console data, WordPress data? And for a minute I thought you were joking, you essentially read off the header of Clariti, the tool that we’ve been working on. And so I was like, oh my gosh, we either need to do a better job of marketing or we need to position things better. So you don’t have to say clarity, I dunno if you’re still using the tool, but this made me think of that moment. But what are the tools that you are using in your day to day that you especially, and it could be communication tools for your team, it could be an AI tool that helps you think of new ways to create content. Anything that you’re using that is kind of a fun thing that you think other people might find helpful. Echo, you can start and then Erica, if you have thoughts too.

Echo Blickenstaff: Okay. Well we have used Clariti and we use Clariti almost every day. It has been.

Bjork Ostrom:: Okay, great. Shameless plug. Yeah, glad to hear it. Yeah, I’m glad that we, it’s the most in-person marketing I’ve ever done. It’s just like sitting across from you explaining the tool.

Echo Blickenstaff: That was such an amazing experience because it was so on my mind and I’m glad that I brought it up to you and you had a great answer for it. And it’s something that we’ve used. We were actually in a meeting yesterday and all three of us, I said, okay, you look up this, you look up, you look up this on Clariti and let’s compare. And it’s been

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, awesome.

Echo Blickenstaff: A great tool for us. So thank you.

Bjork Ostrom:: Great.

Echo Blickenstaff: We also use SEMrush, and that’s been a good tool for us, just mostly for researching keywords for new posts, trying to, if there’s a recipe that we’re wanting to explore, what are the keywords around it, what’s the volume people are searching? Is it already completely washed out on the internet? There’s no way we would ever rank for it. And sometimes we still create content even if just because we feel like it’s a good fit for our site and it’s something that we want to have on there. For example, Erica just went to Switzerland and brought back some recipes.

Bjork Ostrom:: Awesome.

Echo Blickenstaff: That have been fun that we’ve put on the site. I don’t know how they’ll do, but we’ll see.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Great.

Echo Blickenstaff: And then for delegating responsibilities, a tool that we’ve used a lot with our team is Asana, just the free version, and that’s worked really well for us. I really like that tool for just making assignments to the team.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah. Cool. That’s great. Erica, anything you’d add?

Erica Blickenstaff: I think she covered it pretty well. Just back to Clariti. I remember when we were at that conference, I remember Echo came bursting through the hotel room and she’s like, Erica, it’s like what I found,

Bjork Ostrom:: We talked about the tool and we created it on the spot. It manifested itself.

Erica Blickenstaff: I know. And we’re like, where was this a year or two years ago? How come we didn’t know about this?

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s really funny. And it’s so funny. It was a really fun story for me to bring back to the team, I think partly because it’s like, oh, this is the tool that’s needed for people in your position. It’s the exact tool that we built and now it’s just our job to market to get it in front of people.

Echo Blickenstaff: Just one more plug for it. Really enjoy looking on Clariti and finding broken links. That’s something one of the first steps with Clariti. We went through and fixed a bunch of broken links that we had no idea where those broken links were there. The thing we love about it is that it showed us alt tags that were missing. We thought we had covered alt tags,

Bjork Ostrom:: Everything. Sure.

Echo Blickenstaff: Everything. And that was so helpful. And just going in and changing a few of those things on a post makes a big difference in traffic.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. Even for Pinch of Yum, and I feel like we’re relatively aware of all this stuff, right? It’s like I talk about it every week on the podcast, we had a decent amount of orphaned content, so content that wasn’t linked from any other post or page on the site. Obviously there’s going to be deep archive pages on the blog archive, but there was no organic text link within other pieces of content. So that’s been a huge project for us and one that we probably wouldn’t have done if not for the tool. So that’s super great. Asana, we use Asana. I’ve actually started using it personally. I’m starting to work with my brother-in-law on projects. And so it’s like my mantra is everything in Asana, all processes, all tasks, all projects, putting that into Asana. So yeah, definitely a great tool. Echo, Erica, it’s great to connect. It’s fun for me to have these conversations when I have a first touchpoint in person and then it transitions into digital. That’s a rare thing. And it was so fun to sit down with the two of you when we had that dinner at the conference. And just a huge amount of respect for what you’ve done, the business that you’ve built, and also to do it as a family. And it’s a uniquely wonderful and challenging thing. And so appreciate you sharing your story there as well. This will be the actual last question. One piece of advice that you’d have for somebody who’s interested in doing a thing for a decade, we talk about all the time, it’s showing up, getting a tiny bit better every day forever. And people underestimate what they can do in a decade. They overestimate what they can do in a year, and you’re a testament to that. Having worked on a thing for a really long period of time, echo, what would you say? And then Erica will go to you, that one piece of advice to encourage somebody to show up for a decade and continue doing the work.

Echo Blickenstaff: I think my advice would be start out with your goal in mind and then break it down. That’s a tool that has really helped me a lot in this business is starting having the big vision and returning to the big vision. There’s a lot of motivation there to keep going. And then breaking down, what am I going to do year one, year two, year three? I’m a very visual person. I like to see things mapped out. And then when that’s broken down into what does that look like every week that needs to be accomplished. It’s like taking a bite of the elephant one at a time. It really breaks it down and makes it more doable. And you see the rewards when you do that. I remember one of our first, when Erica was talking about when we kind of put all of our responsibilities into individual lanes, one of the things we did at that meeting too is we set some goals of what we wanted to see next year. And in five years, I don’t think we went as far as 10 years, but that was really helpful. And then we track, are we keeping up with what we wanted to do year one, year two, year three. So that was it.

Bjork Ostrom:: That’s great. And it sounds like something that somebody in your role should say, when you talk about, you all naturally line up with what you do, somebody who’s kind of in that manager position, that is ideal answer. Take a big vision, divide it up into manageable tasks, spread it out over a long period of time, take one little step each day. I love that. And I think it’s a great way to look at it. You can cover a lot if you do a little bit every day. So Erica, how about you?

Erica Blickenstaff: For me, I would definitely say set boundaries for yourself. When we were first starting, like Echo said, we were just working all hours and weekends and it was a lot of hard work and we were just burning the candle at both ends and it was too much. And I feel like just a couple years in, we were all feeling burnout And we weren’t being as productive as we could have been. And so drawing those lines for yourself and those boundaries and just saying, when the kids get home from school, I’m done. I’m done. I’m not going to be working on stuff until they go to bed or I’m going to focus on my family while they’re here so they don’t feel like they’re second to the business. And I found that that has brought me a lot more joy in what I do. And I think that because I set those boundaries, we’ve been able to be, I mean all of us have, I think we’ve been more successful because we’re not burning out and we’re putting our priorities in order, starting with our families. And I think that by doing that, it’s ultimately helped the business.

Bjork Ostrom:: Yeah, totally. And there’s this idea of you give to the business, but you also want a business that gives to you. And if you’re only giving to the business, that’s going to be like any other relationship. It’s probably going to be unhealthy if you are the only one investing into that relationship. And I think about that from our relationship with the business. There needs to be situations where it gives to us as well. We can’t always just be giving to it. So that’s great. And I think a really good reminder, Erica Echo, thanks so much for coming on. It was a joy to talk to both of you and really appreciate your time.

Erica Blickenstaff: Thank you. Okay, thanks.

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

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

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

Bjork Ostrom: Stephan, welcome to the podcast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Interesting.

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

Stephan Spencer: Hit the play button, and then

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah.

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, great

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephan Spencer: Yep, likewise. Thank you.

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

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

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

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Raeanne Sarazen. She is the author of the book, the Complete Recipe Writing Guide, mastering Recipe Development, writing, testing, nutrition Analysis, and Food Styling. This book is over 400 pages filled with everything you need to know to develop and write a really good recipe. Rand argues that the quality of the recipe is what differentiates really successful food creators from the rest of the pack. And she says that just because somebody can cook it doesn’t mean they can write a recipe. In this interview, she walks listeners through the recipe development process and shares her tips for writing a user-friendly recipe and discusses the importance of recipe testing. Bjork and Raeanne also share their thoughts on artificially generated recipes and how food creators can use AI when developing recipes and writing content. The whole interview really is about how to differentiate yourself as a recipe creator, and it’s a good reminder that the fundamentals of recipe development are really, really critical to what we do as food creators. As a reminder, if you enjoy this episode, please share it with your followers on social media or email. We really appreciate it, and without further ado, I let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Rayann, welcome to the podcast.

Raeanne Sarazen: Thank you Bjork for having me here today. I’m super excited.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s high fidelity, I can tell you’re in the Midwest. There’s no internet delay here in Chicago. We’re in the Twin Cities. This is going to be a great conversation. We’re going to be talking all about recipes makes sense for the world that we are in and that we talk about, but also recipes as they relate to digital platforms. We’re going to be talking about AI, but before we get into that, what is your background? We’re going to be talking about the book that you published, which is, it’s called the Complete Recipe Writing Guide, and it really is complete, it’s hundreds of pages about recipes and for people who create content, like anybody who listens to this, they need to read books like this. It’s kind of their textbook on how to approach recipes. But how did you get to the point where you could write hundreds of pages about recipes,

Raeanne Sarazen: Like over 400 pages on one single topic? Yeah. Okay. So I’m Raeanne Sarazen, and I know sometimes my name is a little difficult to pronounce, so I said it again,

You and I both. And so I am a registered dietitian nutritionist and classically trained chef. And I’ve worked in the food industry in a variety of different roles in capacities for over 25 years. So I have worked in hospitals as a clinical dietician. I’ve worked in restaurant kitchens as a cook. I have worked in food publishing as a food writer editor and test kitchen professional and in different capacities and food companies, nonprofits and healthcare organizations as a culinary nutrition consultant. And the thing that has been a common denominator throughout all these different roles has been the use of recipes in recipe content. And so that is sort of how my background came to be that made me of interest by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, who’s the publisher to be the author of this book.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So one of the things I like thinking about in the world of digital media is that a lot of what we’re doing is creating a digital version of the thing that we’ve always done. An example is on a website, they talk about this idea is the content above the fold, and it’s like, well, what does above the fold mean? Well, it actually is talking about when you had a newspaper and you’d fold it and then you would put it on the newspaper stand. It was really important for things to be above the fold because that’s what people would see when they walk by in our world right now, they talk about a recipe card and what is a recipe card? Well, a recipe card is the digital version of the literal card that you’d give somebody if you wrote down a recipe. I’m curious to hear your reflections on 25 years of being involved with recipes and the importance of recipes, sharing recipes like documenting recipes. Well, what are the things that you see as the through line that have continued through those 25 years? And then we’re going to talk about things that are maybe different today than they would’ve been 20, 25 years ago.

Raeanne Sarazen: So I guess the through line that I would see is that there’s somebody always out there creating really good recipe content. And a long time ago, which you can say 25, 30 years ago, there were gatekeepers and those gatekeepers kept only a certain type of person writing. And that could have been back then food writers test, kitchen professionals, cookbook authors, home economists. They were the ones that were creating mostly good content, I would say, but not always. And so I think today the difference is is that anybody can write a recipe, but I think it still holds true that you have to ask yourself is what is produced today always good, and do they have what used to be done, which is copy editors and several lines of people editing. So yeah, I guess the through line is I do think there’s really good recipe content today, but I think it’s because there is a lot of focus and importance to that creator on what the actual recipe, what it really is doing for their audience.

Bjork Ostrom: So you have these people who have great recipes 20, 25 years ago that might’ve been my grandma or Lindsay’s grandma, really loved cooking. And we have some of those recipes that are still such great recipes, but they wouldn’t have necessarily been a publisher of recipes unless they knew somebody who is one of these gatekeepers, cookbook publisher, something like that where they’d be able to then say, Hey, you have a bank of enough of this that we think that we can invest in you. In that scenario, there’s also then going to be a team that reviews the recipe that does testing of the recipes. One of the good things is with the internet, anybody can share a thing. And so now you’re able to get access to some of these recipes that maybe you wouldn’t have been able to get access to 25 years ago. But with that reduced friction in publication, there’s also the reality of I could publish a recipe and that’s not going to be good because I’m not going to be able to produce a recipe like my wife Lindsay would. And so as friction is reduced, output is increased, and then now the user maybe has to do a little bit more filtering of those recipes. Is that the downside of it? Or on the flip side, what are some of the negatives of the change in the ability for anybody to publish a recipe?

Raeanne Sarazen: Well, I guess this is what I would like to be super clear on. I think that just because somebody can cook doesn’t mean that they can write a recipe. And I think what is super clear on that is I’ve worked with a lot of incredibly well-known chefs, super talented creative people who can create something in the kitchen, but that’s cooking or development. And then there’s the actual translation of what their creation is onto the page. And that’s the recipe. And I think that even if our grandmothers, which my grandmother owned a restaurant in Ottumwa, Iowa, and she was a fabulous cook, and I spent so much time trying to document and work with my brother who’s a filmmaker, to translate and watch her and put it onto the page to keep it for future generations. It’s sort of documenting your food heritage. But I think that what differentiates really good people and their content, I think is their recipes because there is the entertainment which you could tell me all about, and I get that, and there is the creative part. But to write a really good recipe, that recipe has to be written well, there’s the importance of testing the recipe, which no recipe could be written. Well, if it’s not tested, that’s very clear to me on the recipes. I see. And yeah, I would say that I think content was not always perfect back then or today, but it’s the importance of understanding that cooking is different than writing.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think of, we have friends who live in Indianapolis just recently interviewed them. I’m not sure when the episode’s coming out, their site’s called a Couple Cooks. But one of the things we often talk about on the podcast is sometimes people will look to do a career change and their career change will be into, Hey, I want to produce content online. I want to figure out how to either grow a social following or grow a website. In our world, it’s within the realm of food. And one of the things we always talk about is, Hey, look at what you were doing, even if it seems completely unrelated, and how can that benefit you? And I think of Alex and Sonia because they were worked within both of them. It was the same company. They were technical writers, and so it’s not recipe documentation, but they understand and understood as they transitioned into this career how to write documentation around steps really well. And my guess is I haven’t ever really talked to them specifically about it, but my guess is that probably served them well to have gone through the process of a decade or however long it was of writing instructional information for people that get, I don’t know what some product, and then have to understand how to use it to then apply that to the world of recipes and to give people really clear instructions to follow. So let’s say somebody is really skilled at cooking, and that’s kind of the artistry of it. It feels like it’s a little bit left brain, right brain. Whereas then you kind of take some of that abstract, almost like in music, you can have people who can play music really well, they can jazz or blues. But then if you would be like, alright, now we’re going to put that, we’re going to document that, they’d be like, well, don’t, that’s not what I do. That would

Sound terrible. And it’s not exactly the same, but I would imagine that to be true in the world of food a little bit as well. So if you are somebody who has that kind of right brain, you like to cook, you like the process of coming up with a new recipe, how do you get that into a form that then is actually really helpful? So somebody in the music world could look at it and be like, Hey, I understand what this is. Do you think people should try and be that? Should they try and do that or does it make more sense to bring somebody in who is good at that and let that person do it?

Raeanne Sarazen: That’s exactly what I was just going to say. I think what has changed in the food industry and food publishing is that there used to be segmented roles. You were a developer, you were a tester, you were a writer, editor, copy editor, you were the graphic design, you were the photographer or videographer. I think today it’s sort of taking note of what you do well and where you should hire out for where you’re not as good. And also using a book like mine as a resource, especially when you’re starting out, because it’s really hard to be able to afford to hire out people, and at least you can educate yourself. Even in terms of the writing of the recipe where it’s true, a lot of creative people can’t translate and document to technical clear, succinct writing. They’ll take something like making a pie dough that’s three paragraphs long and I can edit it down to one paragraph that’s more clear and helpful to the end user. But I’d say you hire somebody to do it for you or you sort of learn and read some of the common things that you yourself need to know on how to write clearly. For an example, the cardinal rule of writing the recipe ingredients and the order that they’re used in writing the directions in that same order of how they’re used in the ingredient list, it seems so clear. But again, that’s something that I’ll get a recipe where they’re out of order, they’re missing ingredients. The use of divided ingredients is super unclear. The use of a description, like a modifier in the ingredient list where it would be something like canned or chopped cooked, diced, the word is put into a place that makes it very confusing for the reader. And I know what that chef or that cook wants to say, but the end user could just be scratching their head wondering, wait, what am I supposed to do? Or what am I supposed to buy at the grocery store?

Bjork Ostrom: So I think that’s a great one and just a good reminder. I’m guessing a lot of people kind of have that in their mind as they’re going through the recipe development, but you have the list of instructions and then you have the list of ingredients. Those are sort ordered by when they’re used. And then the other thing that you said that I think is really valuable, and it reminds me of the Mark Twain quote, I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one instead. I feel like sometimes that can happen to people just in general, like any instructions, but especially if there’s a lot there and it feels like part of the hard work is removing the unnecessary information. Do you feel like that’s another kind of core pillar of communication within a recipe?

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, I mean, I think in general to write short is so much harder than to write long, and that goes for other type of writing and definitely for recipe writing. And I think to be clear is just, it’s hard today. I mean, first of all, we’re all bouncing around all over the place. And to actually sit down and actually think about how you’re going to write something and actually give a visual and a time and do those indicators that really are helpful. And as I say, to always write your recipe for the person who doesn’t know how to cook. And the reason why I say that is that I know there’s so many different ways that people can write a recipe. There’s no exact one right way, but what I feel is important is the person who’s going to improvise and not really follow your recipe and be that person at the end saying, oh, well, I use this instead of that and I know this and I would toss it in corn starch. It doesn’t really matter because there’s equally, as a number of readers who are going to take it and really want to follow that recipe to the T, they need to have their handheld, they need to really be able to be taken through it. And I feel like a successful recipe writer is going to write it so that person is successful.

Bjork Ostrom: To use music analogy again, it’s not like you’re going to leave a note out. It’s like, no, you have to document every note and it has to fit within the structure of whatever the key is. So in the world of recipe, we’re kind of entering into this unique stage where we have forever people create recipes. Now we’re kind of getting into a world where maybe it’s not a person that creates a recipe, maybe it’s created by a machine. And I’m perpetually fascinated by AI, everybody who listens is aware of it. And there’s this weird balance of is this a threat? Is this an opportunity? And there’s all those classic examples of there’s a pizza recipe that was created by ai, and it talks about using glue as one of the steps. And it’s like, okay, that’s not good, obviously, and people like to talk about

Raeanne Sarazen: That, but

Bjork Ostrom: That will happen less and less over time. But I also think there will always be a place for human-created content. So you talk about writing this book, it was over a long period of time, years and years, and the period of time that you’re writing it, AI kind of started to become a thing. What has that been like for you as you’ve come up against the world of artificially generated content as it relates to recipes?

Raeanne Sarazen: Okay. Well, my first answer is it took me almost five years to write this book. This book was peer-reviewed by other professionals. Each chapter went out to anywhere from three to nine reviewers and I interviewed, which I loved because I love talking to people and getting the knowledge from their head and bringing it down into tips for the people who are going to go into a chapter and look. And I say that because I feel like so many great people out there who are very knowledgeable, have so much knowledge in their head, and I love to be able to get it out and be able to help that person who’s reading and teach others. And I think that that was a very long process. But in this process, and the reason why I led up to saying this long thing, I knew AI was coming out. I knew people at the end of when this book was published that that topic was starting to sort of churn, but not really talked about like it is today. So AI is not talked about in my complete recipe writing guide, but I have

Bjork Ostrom: In the revised version,

Raeanne Sarazen: In the revised version, it’ll be the lead in. Well, okay, this is with most people in the field. Of course, I’ve tried it myself and I have come up with asking very specific questions to things, asking for very specific author or content creators. Give me Ina Garten’s lentil soup recipe or give me your lentil soup recipe. And probably the same things that everybody else is trying out. And I think that in a way, it is a fast way for content creation. So I think it is a great assistant for any of us, whether we’re just food writing, we’re going to go give a presentation, we need a content outline, we need a short quick answer on the history of something food related. But as it relates to recipes, this is, I think that it does work, and maybe this is something that will morph and keep iterating into something that maybe even I’ll use, but I don’t know, because I think what I feel like is missing, even from Google asking Chat GPT or lentil or gluten-free muffin is that it’s so dry, there’s no voice, there’s no person behind it. I have no idea. And I’m assuming it’s not tested because I ask for who is the content creator, who’s the author, and it says it’s like an amalgam of whatever number of the best gluten-free blueberry muffins or something. So I don’t know. I do think it’s going to be something that we have to embrace and something that I’m sure I will use in some way or form. I do use Chat GPT for myself already for other purposes, not recipes, but I think that it has a very blurry line between fact and fiction, whereas the critical thinking, where’s the voice? So I’d say use it maybe as a starting point, but it’s not something that I’m using myself right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I guess I haven’t thought about this, but the key variable of testing, and it feels like if you were going to do something that is the average of multiple recipes, you aren’t testing that. And it feels like in the world of recipes, that’s a really critical step. Is the step of testing from start to end? Was it successful? And who knows over time how it evolves? But it feels like that’s one of the things that’s a little bit of a moat in the world of recipe content is one thing could be a little bit off salt. I remember in high school we made homemade ice cream where you put it in the coffee tin and you roll it back and forth, and it was like instead of teaspoons, we read tablespoons, it was user error. It wasn’t the recipe it is the whole lack of a copy editing team. But that as an example, if that’s just off a little bit, you’ll be able to see that and taste that. Whereas if it’s asking about some, tell me what price to earnings ratio means when you’re investing in a stock, it’s like, oh, it’s going to be able to nail that really well. So that’s an interesting analysis. Have you found that? And I think your point about the assistant makes a lot of sense. I was having a conversation with my brother-in-Law who’s a pediatric doctor asking him about AI, and he’s like, I don’t think it’s ever going to replace doctors, but it’s going to be a really great assistant. It’s going to help you think better and quicker. And the example that I thought of that we’ve talked about is like, Hey, you have a paragraph. You have three paragraphs and saying, Hey, can you help me get this down to one paragraph of really clear instructions to me? And then you still are looking at it, revising it, but it maybe saves you 45 minutes of work of remixing those three paragraphs down to one, and then you’re still putting the final touches on it. Is that kind of what you mean when you talk about being an

Raeanne Sarazen: Assistant? Oh, for sure. And I even think your example of a three paragraph long set of instructions that you are looking at and your brain is just numb and you’re like, I can’t even figure out something. And then you put it in and you’re like, say, nope, do it again. Do it again. You revise it, do it again. So it can act as an assistant to make your workflow faster. And I think that is super helpful. But I agree about the testing part and just because you can go Google and pull up whatever number of gluten-free blueberry muffins, I can tell you for sure from having tested and created many that they are different. And just because I can pull up 25 and give you one, that doesn’t mean that’s the one you’re going to want to make for your wife or for brunch or something. It does, the testing part matters. And I think if a recipe works, that’s ultimately what the person wants, not just that it can spit out a recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so that’s great. And I think of in this interview I had with Alex and Sonia, Alex talked about how he had created a GPT within chat GBT that does his editing. And again, it’s the kind of thing where it’s like you don’t just not read it and then publish it right away, but it acts as an assistant and it says like, Hey, look at this, or maybe this should be changed or adjusted. And that to me feels like today at least the sweet spot is like, Hey, this is an incredible tool. It can help you in the content creation process, but you will be at a competitive disadvantage if you remove the humanity

From the thing that you are creating, whether it be like you said, the voice or just multiple times testing and coming to understand that content that you are creating.

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Do you have any other thoughts around, in a world that is very saturated with content being recipes that are published online, how else can people differentiate themselves? Not even necessarily from AI, but how can people differentiate themselves as a recipe creator online?

Raeanne Sarazen: That is a really good question, and I’ll tell you why. Because I feel myself though, I did this book because I really wanted to have people who are creating content, new people, and people who’ve been around a long time have a resource that’s modern and could help them create better content to make them more confident to differentiate themselves. And I think what differentiates somebody is somebody who takes, and I know this just doesn’t spit out constant contact and constant content, meaning that I do find things entertaining, and I think that’s the focus. But I think the places that I really care about just when I read a novel is really good recipes that actually work.

So how do you differentiate yourself? It’s sort of like there’s so many people self-publishing novels now. How do you differentiate? I mean, I guess it’s story, it’s entertainment, but I think in the end, if that’s all you want, that’s right. But for somebody like myself, I care about you, Bjork giving me a recipe that I’m going to make tomorrow night for dinner and it’s going to work because I’m going to invite my neighbors over and it’s something that I want to taste delicious and that you tested it and you’ve tried it out and you’ve given me something that’s solid. That’s what I want.

Bjork Ostrom: And a huge part of that is number one, baseline are the ingredients, are the instructions accurate? Do they have everything they need? Number two, are they easy to follow? Am I going to understand this as I go through it? And then I think like you said, number three, this is really important and becoming more important. Am I drawn to it from an artistry perspective? Is their voice, is their story? Are the pictures good? And that feels like it’s a combination of those multiple things. Plus I would maybe add a fourth, especially in the world of digital content, which is does this person have me in mind and the problems that I have,

Raeanne Sarazen: And

Bjork Ostrom: Are we working together to solve those problems? It could be a diet, it could be for Pinch of Yum. Right now we think a lot about like, Hey, are there people with kids? We have a three-year-old and a six-year-old. And so we’re, and I say we, it’s like Lindsay, but I’m just drafting off of her success. Okay.

Raeanne Sarazen: Everything in a marriage is we,

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right, exactly. But what does it look like to create this thing for a family that have kids and both of the parents are working and it’s going to be successful? And that feels like where it starts to get kind of exciting.

Raeanne Sarazen: Well, that’s why I feel so strongly, it’s your audience. I think you need to know your audience. If you’re saying a family who has a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old is different than a couple who are now empty nesters, or somebody who is single and is trying to cook for one or occasionally two people. And I find it interesting as a dietician when I see recipes out there that are saying that something is healthy and there really isn’t a standard. And then they have the nutrition information and I’m like, okay, is that the way you’re educating that’s healthy? Or something that’s really fast and then buried in step two is an overnight marinade or something that’s really fast. But gosh, you just forced me to mess up three bowls and two sheet pans. And I’m like, I’m like, who is it fast for you? Do you have the sous chef and the kitchen cleaner in your kitchen? So I think that what is important is to really understand who your end user is, who’s making your recipe. And that is a successful recipe is when you make them successful, not to show somebody how much. Yeah. So it can include who’s your audience. For people who don’t cook are with limited resources.

Bjork Ostrom: And

Raeanne Sarazen: That’s a successful recipe too.

Bjork Ostrom: I think of a friend Beth who started Budget Bytes and every recipe that she’s creating, and there’s a team now, so it’s multiple people, but it’s like, here’s how much this costs per serving, and that’s their angle. But then they also have all of those additional elements of really clear instructions and story behind it. And I think the piece that you talked about with adding some of these modifiers quick or healthy, it’s where there starts to be some tension in the worlds that we operate, which is like somebody’s going to go out and they’re going to do SEO, they’re going to do keyword research, and they’re going to see like, Hey, if I add the modifier of easy or quick to this recipe, it’s going to be a little less competitive. There’s going to be a little more opportunity for me to do that. But if it’s not actually that

And people aren’t successful or it’s not quick, or it takes longer than you said, there’s a person on the other side who’s showing up and they’re going through the process of making that thing. And if you don’t deliver on the promise of the branding of the recipe, what happens is you’ve maybe cashed in on a really quick hit from a search result, but over a long period of time, what you’re not going to get is people who continue to show up and people who, instead of just doing a Google search, come to your site to start their search or your social account or whatever it might be. And I think that’s one of the things that we, as content creators need to be aware of is especially in a world where how people discover content is shifting, one of the most important things that we can establish is trust with somebody that they know that we say that they’re going to get. And oftentimes that means all of those different things we’ve talked about, it’s clear, it’s been tested it, it’s

Raeanne Sarazen: Reproducible.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s reproducible. Yeah. It’s all of those things. So as we’ve been talking, I’ve kind of thought about this within the context of a website, and I think a lot of people who are creating those recipes think about it within the context of a website. People come, they cook off of a set of instructions and ingredients. What do you think about different platforms and how recipes are presented on those? You can think about TikTok, you can think about Instagram, short form video, maybe Facebook. Are there considerations that we as digital creators should be thinking about as the way a recipe is presented changes? 20 years ago, it would’ve been a recipe card, it would’ve been a cookbook. It maybe would’ve been a grandparent scratching it down on a piece of paper, but now it might be like a 62nd TikTok video. What does that mean for people who are creating recipes?

Raeanne Sarazen: Well, I don’t know if this is going to not sound super positive for me, but I feel like there’s a difference. I mean, that to me is entertainment, and I don’t know. So it almost doesn’t matter if the recipe works anyway, because if somebody is scrolling on TikTok and they’re looking, learn how to make a gluten-free pasta dough, it’s got to be entertaining. And whether the recipe works or not, I think is less important because there’s so much content and noise out there. I don’t know if everybody who goes on these platforms, and maybe you can tell me, are they actually going to use that gluten-free pasta dough to make that meal at the end of the day, or even on the weekend? I don’t know. I think it’s more about entertainment than actually anything else.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I think yes. And I also think there’s probably people who are making crescent roll wrapped hot dogs from TikTok, and part of it is almost like, can you achieve the recipe in a way where it’s easy enough to communicate in a 62nd video? I think for a recipe that is, and some people probably would even say, that’s not a recipe, that’s just putting some pre-made stuff together.

Raeanne Sarazen: It’s a recipe. Sure.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s,

Raeanne Sarazen: There’s still no shame in that. I think we all have to do things fast. But again, it’s a visual recipe and the visual is teaching. And so if you actually want to give somebody that crescent roll that you’re making for dinner and rolling it out or whatever else the talker is going to show, it’s like there’s the actual cooking which you’re filming, and then there’s the actual written on the page or something that somebody can print out that’s like a separate instruction. So I just think of them as two different things and they can both work together. And I think actually working together on a lot of blogs and other things where you can actually have the recipe and you could click on a video and watch somebody make something, I think it’s really helpful.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s almost like one of the nice things about a blog or an article or a recipe post is it’s easy to pair multiple forms of media. You can have the written stuff in a really nice way. You can have a video that goes with it. But one of the things I’m curious about is I was talking to different brother-in-Law, younger brother-in-Law, not the Doctor who, and we were talking about investing, and he was like, oh, yeah, I was talking about you should really think about whatever Roth IRA or something like that. And he was like, oh, yeah, that’s where you can put it in. After you get paid, you can take that money and then put, and I was like, how did you know about that? He’s like 21. He’s like, oh, TikTok, TikTok Finance. So I think that, and my guess is there are, I don’t know, hundreds of thousands of people who are hungry at the end of the day and pulling up TikTok and being Taco recipe. And so part of it is, I think our challenge is as creators, not only how do we be entertainment on these platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, but also if somebody is using that as their content to produce the recipe, how can it also then be functional in a way where they’re able to make it? And that feels like, I have never done that. Lindsay does it all the time. It’s what she’s doing. A lot of it is, it’s almost like a promotional piece

Raeanne Sarazen: To

Bjork Ostrom: Say, Hey, if you want the full recipe, go here.

Raeanne Sarazen: And

Bjork Ostrom: So that’s a little bit of the approach that we’re taking. It’s not like we’re trying to hit every step along the way and give people out the other side. But it’s almost like a curiosity for me. Is there an opportunity for people to create a piece of content where from start to finish you can watch it and have success with it just through the video itself. But it seems like maybe that would be a difficult thing, especially with a complex recipe. So

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, I think so. But I think one thing about the Roth IRA, which that sounds interesting, but I’m still old fashioned in the way that I have lots of friends in real life and I know who to call on what subject and what topic. And so if somebody wants a recipe on something for a specific holiday or for a party, or if they have a new dietary restriction with their father’s, got to reduce sodium or someone’s got diagnosed with Celiac, can you help me? Can you help me? I think of that Roth IRA thing as when you’re watching TikTok and you’re doing these videos, it’s like, where do you really want to get your content from a true financial advisor

Or somebody who’s just sort of talking on TikTok? If you have a newly new dietary restriction or something diet related, where do you want to get your content told? Do you want to scroll through TikTok and trust a lot of the things that I see I don’t kind of misleading or confusing and just sort of add to that anxiety of, I don’t know, I’m not saving enough or I’m not following the right diet. So I think to me, sometimes it could just be an overwhelming amount of a fire hose of information. Totally. And I’d rather pick up the phone and call the person. That’s how I wish cooking would go back to, in some ways just you pick up the phone and say, Hey, what am I supposed to do with X? But I know I’m, that makes me sound like a Luddite, but I’m just saying I think that you have to be really careful about the information that you’re getting on these platforms,

Bjork Ostrom: Especially as a consumer. It speaks to the, there is no, there’s much less friction. And so anybody can produce a piece of content. If that’s true and people are incentivized by creating the thing that is most viewed, then what you have is a scenario where you’re going to be tapping into potentially some of the worst parts of the human brain, whether that be fear or greed or anger. And so as consumers, I think we need to be aware of that. But as creators, there’s this weird opportunity then where it’s like, how do you do that in a way where if you were to create the comparable piece of content from a financial advisor, he’d be like, well, dollar cost average into index funds over a long career and prioritize tax sheltered. And nobody would watch it.

Raeanne Sarazen: No, it would’ve.

Bjork Ostrom: But if you were Bitcoin to the moon and you’re going to be a millionaire in a year, lots of people would watch it. And so it is maybe just an observation as creators that we need to balance that trust piece that we talked about where people can feel, and Lindsay talks about this, she got an email from a doctor who is, I feel comfortable sending my patients to your site because I know that I can trust the voice that you use, how you talk about content. That’s really, and that comes from years of making decisions around how to talk about content and how to talk about recipes. But also it’s hard when you can get a quick hit on some of these social platforms. So if nothing else, just like an observation on how hard it is as a creator to walk that balance

Raeanne Sarazen: And to capture the attention of people who are moving all over the place. And I think in terms of nutrition that I see, even doctors that are selling supplements or doctors that are selling courses and how to be in a healthy aging, they come at it, do you want to know the best foods that you can eat to avoid Alzheimer’s, heart disease, Diabetes, whatever. And so it’s

Bjork Ostrom: Like you just eat grapes, grapes and almonds.

Raeanne Sarazen: So it’s sort of like they get you with this idea of that there’s this magic answer, and every consumer wants that magic answer, that elixir, that’s going to make us healthier, live longer, prevent all these diet related diseases. But I just think that there’s marketing and then there’s just real life. And so it depends on if you need advice financially or you need to know what you’re going to have for dinner tonight, when two people work, that is really quick. I think people who are good at what they do, it shows, and I think even if it’s online or in real life, it’s where you go to for your information.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So let’s talk about the book a little bit more as we close out here. The complete recipe writing guide, five years of working on it, decades of knowledge that have gone into it. When somebody picks this up, what would your recommendation be? Do they work through it, cover to cover? Do you jump to a chapter that feels like it’s most applicable? And if you did have to point, let’s say online content creators who are writing recipes for a site or maybe social, where would be a good place for those people to start with the book?

Raeanne Sarazen: So the book has six chapters dedicated entirely to recipe development that focus on health and wellness. So anywhere from plant-based recipe development to food allergies for gluten, for celiac, fodmap, which is really big right now.

So if you’re really interested in understanding how to develop recipes, modify ingredients, understand if an ingredient, for an example, I see it all the time. People say that MSG has gluten in it, it does not. And I use it and I think it’s a great ingredient to reduce sodium and recipes. So if you really want to double check and really understand recipe development and ingredients, how to modify them, that’s where I would go. And if on your blog or on how you want to create your substack, you want to kind of put up a shingle as to being that health and wellness specific person set nutrition standards for your recipes, and those chapters will help you do that. The recipe writing chapter is the AP style guide, but just for recipes. So there was once, well, there is an AP style guide. It hasn’t been revised in a while, and there’s an old book that I think my book has replaced on recipe writing. That chapter is super helpful if you want to have testers either that I have lots of examples of testing sheets. So if you want to hire people to test your recipes or give them to your friends and your family, go to that chapter, you can kind of take what I’ve done, make it better for yourself, and look at how I’ve suggested on how you test your recipes and keep track of them. That’s a really

Bjork Ostrom: Useful, what you mean by keep track of them,

Raeanne Sarazen: Meaning that I’ve created Excel spreadsheets on all these different recipes. Who’s sending it out? What are the common ingredients? So how you can sort of the process of it and professional guidelines from, I used to run the test kitchen at the Tribune, how to actually do this because the testing is so key for your success in the recipes you write. And then the nutrition analysis chapter is super interesting because when I was writing it, I used to do a lot of nutrition analysis for food companies, and I do less of it now partially by intention. And I used to do it for a lot of publications, which now use a lot of automated calculators in their nutrition analysis. And I look at the nutrition analysis on blogs, and that’s a whole separate blog. We could do a podcast just on this topic. Yeah, totally. But I would say that’s a really good chapter to understand how to evaluate software programs to really understand the accuracy of your nutrition analysis. And if you ever have products that you’re trying to promote with a food company that’s a nutrition analysis in a deep dive. Super nuanced, it does talk about evaluating the software, which automated plugins to use. And then the last chapter I think would just be helpful if you’re sort of starting out in terms of really understanding the food styling photography and video part, and especially the food styling, which I think is really, really detailed and gives you the bottom line.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Yeah, that’s great. I think of the nutrition, we actually had a business a couple of years ago that did nutrition analysis and it’s really hard.

Raeanne Sarazen: Oh, it’s super hard.

Bjork Ostrom: And trying to do it in a way where it lifts the burden off of the creator from having to do a lot of it, but also then continues to be accurate. And I think a lot of times what happens is you have somebody who’s creator, you’ll bunch in the numbers and just kind of be on your way, but it’s like, oh, you actually have to spend some time with it making sure it’s all accurate. And there’s things like sauteing a thing and that changes

Raeanne Sarazen: Everything. I think about brining and marinating and deep frying and making things for their salt in the water, how much salt was absorbed. And that’s why it’s a label, FDA label. That’s one type of analysis. But I think for recipes, it could be less exact. It’s just

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not on the back of a product. It’s a

Raeanne Sarazen: Product tactic,

Bjork Ostrom: But you still want to be as accurate as possible. And it kind of goes back to that trust thing. It’s like you want to make sure that stuff is as tight as possible and complicated business, we sold it. We no longer own it, but still something important to think about. And especially in our world, there’s this thing called structured data and nutrition information is a part of that. And so you are incentivized in some way to include that, but you don’t want to do it as just kind of an afterthought or you’re just throwing the stuff in there and putting it up quickly because you want it to be as accurate as possible.

Raeanne Sarazen: And I think that chapter kind of will explain to people a bit about the nutrition analysis to understand why you shouldn’t be making claims about things or why even as a content creator, you don’t want to say that a pumpkin loaf in a nine by five pan has 16 servings just to get the nutritionals down because it’s not realistic and it’s sort of deceptive as a professional to be doing that.

Bjork Ostrom: You mean if it’s actually eight, don’t say it’s 16.

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, but I’ve seen that and I’ve seen a pound of cost to serve eight too, or

Bjork Ostrom: Process. I went to crumble cookie once, crumble, eat, crumble, and I was like, oh my gosh, this cookie only has like 350 calories in it. This is so good. And I was like, wait a minute, this doesn’t check out. Oh, a fourth of a

Raeanne Sarazen: Cookie

Bjork Ostrom: Has 350 calories in it.

Raeanne Sarazen: I mean, this is very funny because just last night I was looking at a package of, well, Garrett’s popcorn in Chicago, which everyone knows that is such a great place. Well, they have them in little individual bags. And I looked on the back and I’m like, oh, this is super interesting. And it was a serving for two. I’m like, it was barely a serving for 1. And so I thought, okay, it’s just sort of deceptive. So I always like to give people what is real life and accurate and not to sort of skew the numbers to sell something. And one other thing I was going to say that’s in my book that I think is helpful is that at the end there’s really good appendices. So there are sample style guides and I think style guides work for a food company as I gave a food company example, but they work for people when they’re creating content, even if it’s for a Substack newsletter, like how they want all of their content to appear. So when you hire somebody that or do it yourself, you’re following it and you’re creating it and sort of a form that you can use or just take mine from the book.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. We’re just getting to the point now where we’re kind of looking at building out a team to test recipes. Previously Lindsay would make multiple recipes or if we have ideas that we’re workshopping, so that would be super valuable. When you talk about the Excel spreadsheets, I didn’t see this. Is that something where there’s a link to download? Is that how that works with the,

Raeanne Sarazen: That would be a link to email me and I am always happy to share.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, perfect. Can we include your link in the show notes? Is that okay? Yes.

Raeanne Sarazen: Yeah, no, that’s fine.

Bjork Ostrom: Or include your email. We’ll do that if anybody has any interest in that. So super comprehensive, obviously a great guide for anybody who listens to this podcast. And I think also, there’s not going to be as many people listening to this, but you talked about this idea of maybe you want to document some maybe your family recipes, or maybe you’re not approaching it from a business standpoint, but you just want to get good, some people want to get good at writing, not because they’re going to accomplish a novel, but they just want to be a good writer. And I

Raeanne Sarazen: Think

Bjork Ostrom: Similarly, there’s an opportunity here to get good at recipes and documenting recipes

Raeanne Sarazen: And make a family cookbook.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, love

Raeanne Sarazen: That. It’s a source for people like that. And I do think the information on the nutrition part is super helpful because I just find myself super confused by things that I get in my e email box every day. I’m like, what? There’s a new study and it’s sort of, I always say the advice in that way is try to eat the way your grandparents say it. Dietary advice has not really changed that much, but the problem I would say also for content creators, maybe that won’t sell very well.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure, yeah. Right. Which is back to that conundrum that

Raeanne Sarazen: We talked back to, that we’ve talked before. Right.

Bjork Ostrom: Maybe time for, we could cover that in another podcast. Rand, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. It’s called the Complete Recipe Writing Guide, and you cover 400 pages of information that’s really valuable and really helpful, so appreciate your time. And last question, where’s the best place for people to pick this up?

Raeanne Sarazen: I would say Amazon is probably the easiest. I know for book publishers that are not always loving that, but that is the easiest and fastest way to get it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We’ll link to it in the show notes. Raeanne, thanks so much for coming on.

Raeanne Sarazen: Thanks, Bjork. It’s been my pleasure.

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