138: How to Get the Most Out of Your Content with Ashley Ward

On this podcast, I'm going to be sharing a story about somebody that got 10 million views the first time they created a recipe video. And then we're going to talk to Ashley Ward from SEM Rush about how to be smart with your content. Hey everybody, this is Bjork Ostrom and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast brought to you by WP Tasty, which is the ultimate go to resource for anybody looking to add high quality plugins to their WordPress recipe site or food blog. And if you haven't been to WPTasty, you know that or I will let you know that we have two plugins and the two plugins we have are called Tastypins, which allows you to optimize your images for both Pinterest and SEO and and tasty recipes for all of the food bloggers and recipe bloggers out there. And that allows you to optimize your recipes so your posts show up high on search results. And we have been doing that now for about a year building WP tasty in those two plugins. TastyPins is a little bit more recent and we actually went through the process of building that plugin because we were solving a problem on Pinch of Yum. We know that we wanted to optimize both for Pinterest with the Pinterest description and and for SEO with the alt text for an image. So that's why we created tastypins and we created Tasty recipes because we wanted to continually update a recipe plugin and make sure that it was fully supported and a really high quality plugin. So that's wptasty. And WP Tasty sponsors the Tasty Tip each and every week. We do the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Kind of a funny sponsorship because it's technically another business that we have, but it makes the most sense because it's really close to what we do here on the Food Blogger Pro podcast, which is talking about advice for people that are building blogs and specifically food blogs. What is today's Tasty Tip? Well, it's actually about an upcoming bootcamp that we have and last year around this time we did a bootcamp for Food Blogger Pro. And a boot camp is essentially a free day long digital training camp for a certain subject. And this year we are doing the same boot camp subject that we did last year, which is recipe videos. And one of my favorite outcomes that we heard from last year's recipe video Bootcamp was an individual from Australia who followed up. It was maybe two or three weeks after we did the bootcamp and said, I created a video. I was inspired. After the bootcamp, I created a recipe video for the first time using my phone and I posted that to Facebook and within a few days it's had 1 million views. And recently that individual followed up and said, explained a little bit more and said, I took Food Blogger Pro's recipe video bootcamp. The course was addictive to follow and eventually convinced me to create my first recipe video ever. They made it look so easy. Well, now in 2018, that same video is at nearly 10 million views and it literally changed my life. What an awesome email to get. And why I love that email is because this individual took action. It wasn't like they went to the bootcamp. They learned the material and then just decided not to do anything. They got into it and they said, I'm going to use what I learned and then take action to create something. They created their first recipe video and it had a huge impact. Now, obviously everybody's not going to come out of this being able to create videos that get 10 million views. I think that was an exception. But the point is that this person took action from the things that they learned and they knew that they wanted to start making recipe videos but needed a little bit more context for how that was done. And that's what the Boot Camp is all about. So if you are interested in attending again, It's a free one day event. You can go to foodbloggerpro.com bootcamp and when you do that, you will be redirected to a page where you can sign up to attend the digital bootcamp, which means that you can show up in your pajamas. You don't have to go anywhere. It's going to be live, but there's also going to be recordings available for a couple days after we do the live presentation. Now, the advantage with attending live is that you can chat and interact with us as the sessions are going on. And we're going to be in the chat area, but if you can't make it, then you can go ahead and watch the replays of that after the fact. There's going to be four sessions throughout the day. Lindsay's going to be sharing about how she shoots videos using her iPhone, which some of the most popular videos from Pinch of Yum back in the day were iPhone videos that Lindsey shot and then edited as well. And some of the same concepts will apply if you don't have an iPhone Android. The next two sessions are going to be featuring Alana, who's the video specialist at Pinch of yum. And the last session of the day is a live Q and A. And those are going to be action packed. Bring a notebook and be sure to jot down all of the big takeaways that you have because there's going to be a lot. Again, that is foodbloggerpro.com Bootcamp we'll put the notes in the show notes. We'll put a link as well. And that's the tasty tip. Today it is attending this free boot camp that we have for Food Blogger Pro. And when is that happening? It is happening Thursday, February 22nd. And more information is all about that when you go to that page and it will outline how it all happens and how you can sign up one last time. Foodbloggerpro.com Bootcamp. All right, let's jump into the interview today with Ashley Ward. Ashley comes from a speaking background, which is always great to have somebody that is a speaker come on the Food Blogger Pro podcast. And she's going to be sharing about Semrush, which is a tool that she speaks on behalf of and educates people on. And it started out as an SEO tool, but now it's essentially a marketing and content strategy tool. So it allows you to understand your content better and understand ways to leverage your content and really make sure as many eyeballs as possible see that content. So that goes across the board, from search engines to social to repurposing strategies. And that's one of the things that she's going to talk about today, which I think is really, really a smart thing to think about. How can you not just publish something and then go on to the next thing? How can you think strategically about each piece of content is really valuable and really juicing that content for all that it's worth. So it's going to be a great interview. Ashley, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, it'll be great to check in here and talk about a few different things. But before we get too deep into the tips and tricks and advice, I always love to hear a little bit about people's story and how they got where they are. And one of the things that was interesting about your story is what your title is. So you are a corporate speaker for SEM Rush. And there's two things I want to break out from that and get a better understanding so our audience knows a little bit more about you. First thing is corporate speaker. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is and what your job looks like?

Yes. Yeah. It's actually a question that comes up quite frequently whenever I introduce myself as a corporate speaker. Speaker people are usually like, so what do you do? So what I do essentially is I go to conferences, I host events, workshops, I teach social media and content marketing tactics. So I travel all around the world, go to a variety of cities, whether I'm going for a conference or whether I'm going to host a workshop or meet up myself. And then I get a bunch of people together and teach them as much as I can about the latest and greatest in either content marketing or social media marketing.

Awesome. And both of those things I would love to dive into and talk about a little bit. And one of the great advantages you have as a corporate speaker is that you're traveling around, you're at these conferences. And I feel like it's kind of comparable to. This is maybe a terrible analogy, but I'm thinking of it on the fly. So I'm going to use it like a bee going around to each little flower. And it's like a lot of us just stick in our same garden, right? And we're in, we're working away, and the context that we have is the other garden flowers around us. But as a corporate speaker, you're going to each one of those places, you're making a stop there, you're getting a feel for it, and you have a really good background and knowledge because of all of those different places that you touch along the way. So I'd love to dig into that a little bit, but the other thing that I wanted to understand a little bit better, I know and am familiar with it, but maybe some people in our audience aren't familiar with it is this tool called Semrush. So can you talk about what that is and your involvement with that company?

Certainly. First of all, that was not a terrible analogy. That was actually fantastic.

Okay, good. Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that. Okay, good.

So Semrush, you can think of it as an all in one toolkit for your digital marketing needs. So, so originally we focused very heavily on SEO and ppc. So anything and everything you need to do for your SEO efforts, you could do within this tool. And it's expanded into an entire toolkit to where it covers anything you need within digital marketing. So we have content tools inside of there which help you come up with topics, which help track your backlinks, your traffic sources, as well as develop new content ideas. And then we also have the social media aspect now, which some of the social media part is fairly new and really Exciting. We're able to schedule your social media posts within the tool now, as well as track all of your mentions. So you can do some PR analytics with your social and then you can also get all of your engagement data as well. So any kind of data that you need for your brand, your blog, your company, you can get within Semrush. But my favorite aspect is the competitor data. You can literally see just about anything and everything that your competitors are doing. So if there's another food blogger that is just killing it and you're trying to implement all the same things, you have great content, you just don't get why you're not hitting the mark. And they are, you can go in and you can put in their URL. You can see are they running PPC campaigns with it, Are they promoting their content in certain ways? What are they doing socially, what kind of SEO tactics are they doing? And then you can kind of get a better idea. Maybe they're getting a bunch of traffic sources from this one website and that's what's helping them so much. So, hey, I should probably reach out to this website and partner with them as well to get that kind of exposure.

Got it. So one of the things that you mentioned was ppc. That's something that probably the majority of people that listen to this podcast aren't implementing. Can you talk about what PPC is and when it would make sense for a business or a blog to implement that?

Of course, of course. So PPC stands for pay per click. These are the ads that we see in search results, whether you're on Google, Yahoo being they're the first ones to display at the top, sometimes on the side, sometimes in the middle. And generally you're going to need a decent budget if you're going to join the PPC game. Because there's a lot of competitors out there. Something like food bloggers is going to use PPC to gain traffic to a new post. So that may not be as aggressive as if you're trying to compete with Amazon on selling a new food product. That's going to be incredibly costly. And your average cost per clicks are going to be so high you won't even believe it. And it'll cost so much just to get one click that it's not even worth playing. But something for food bloggers. I think it would be appropriate to start joining in on PPC in terms of AdWords when you have a hefty piece of content that you want to promote. So did you just create a brand new infographic did you just partner up with a bunch of different companies to create a piece of content that you want a lot of eyes to see? Then you're doing a PPC campaign that's based on traffic and not necessarily based on direct sales. That's when you're going to be able to have a little bit more affordability if you're more of a small budget.

Got it. And so what you're saying is, even if you don't have a product that you would be able to potentially use ppc? Because I usually think of PPC as like, well, you'd probably want to only be doing that if you have a direct dollar type product associated with it. But would there be times where maybe it's just PR or you're just looking to get traffic? And if so, how do you, how do you keep track of that and make sure that you're not just kind of throwing money to Google as if Google needs more money?

Yeah, of course, most definitely. So one of the biggest ways to do that is to take the breaks, slam them down hard and go back about five steps and figure out, okay, what's your main goal? So, yes, you have this blog, you're producing content regularly. Is it that you want a hundred thousand people to go to your website each year, each month, each week, do you want people to contact you? Do you want advertising opportunities to come out of it? You need to define what you're doing real goal is. And one of those goals, no matter how many you have, what level or what priority it is, it's going to be that you're going to want traffic. And so as a traffic source, PPC would be a great option, especially if you're trying to get more advertisers to help partner with you on your blog. That's where you're going to get direct revenue. Advertisers are only interested in numbers. So if you have a blog that's only getting maybe 10, 10,000 unique visitors every six months, that's not that aggressive, they'll go to the next blog who's getting those 10,000 unique visitors a week. So in order to up your data and up your stats for your Google Analytics, and to have something aggressive to approach to different advertisers to help give you some kind of revenue, PPC would be an option for that.

Got it. Yeah. And one of the easiest places to start, I think would be for content creators or bloggers or business owners. If you can calculate how much on average that you earn from somebody coming to your site, then you'll be able to know how much you can spend per click. And obviously there's a lot of different variables that go into that. But if we're gonna be really simple with it, let's say that if you only create an income from ads on your site and let's say it's a $10 cpm, so you're earning, you know, $10 total every time, or RPM you could call it, then you would have to have the per click be less than $0.01, which is like as you said, really hard to do if you're doing ppc. Uh, but if you have a page on your blog, like on Pinch of Yum, we have an ebook and it's $29, we know that we can experiment with that a little bit more and maybe we can pay a dollar or $2. We haven't set this up, but per click when somebody's searching for Learn food photography. And we could test that out with PPC to see if it works. So takeaway for people that are listening would be if you have a product or something that you know would be a higher dollar amount, that would be something you could look into and experiment with from a PPC side. But a lot of what we do is on the organic traffic side of things, or a lot of the people think about organic traffic. And I know that that's a really important piece of semrush. And the things that you talk about is how you get that organic traffic both from social media as well as search engines. And one of the things that you mentioned was doing this competitive analysis. And can you talk a little bit about that? You mentioned some of the things that a competitive analysis would reveal, but what are those metrics that are revealed and what are some common things that bloggers or content creators can be thinking about or implementing to when it comes to being strategic about tracking certain metrics as it relates to organic traffic, certainly.

So some of the most important metrics to track are your unique visitors, what's your bounce rate, what's your time on page? If you're seeing that your time on page for a 5,000 word blog post that you just came up with is only 18 seconds, that's a huge red flag that's telling you right there that you're not writing for your audience. That content piece is not working because they're not reading it. They're barely getting through the title and the first paragraph before they leave. So that's a huge metric to measure, especially when you're trying to figure out, say you're new to blogging and you're trying to figure out what's your real niche, what's your actual topic that you want to zone in on? The time of page is going to be huge. You also want to look at your position tracking and see how's your rankings. Are you trying to be the number one food blogger for vegans? Well, who else is out in that space? You need to know what kind of keywords your competitors are using. Are they using it throughout all of their blog posts? Are they using it on specific pages and which pages are getting them the most traffic. So that way you can analyze those pages and see, okay, think if I want to be number one for vegan bloggers and my top competitor has the word vegan four different times on his about page, okay, maybe I need to implement something like that. And then also I need to dive in. And what are some more similar keywords with vegan? Because we don't want to stuff our content, we still want our content to be readable and enjoyable as well.

Got it. So to go back, you had mentioned time on page and can you talk about why that's important, what it means? It's kind of self explanatory what it means and why that's important. And then the third part would be how do you go about improving that if it's. If it's on the lower end?

Gotcha. Okay, so time on page is exactly what it sounds. It's how much time is the average user spending on a specific page on your website? So say you want to analyze your contact page. How many people are spending time on your contact page? Are they getting to it and then leaving it right away? Is your goal that you want people to fill out your contact form more often? If so, that means they're going to need to actually spend time on your contact page because they need to manually fill in their information. So you're looking at probably at least 25, 30 seconds, if not more for those who takes longer to type. If you're getting results back that are more like the average time on page for Your contact is 3 seconds, 4.2 seconds. That's telling you there's something wrong with your contact page. People don't want to engage with it. So perhaps it's a layout and a user experience issue. I'd also then go look at your page load speed. Is it taking two seconds just for your page to load and then within two seconds they're leaving? Because they're only there for 4.2 seconds in total. That's a huge issue that you also need to check in when you're looking at. When you're looking at low time on page stats, how fast is it taking, how slow is it taking for your page to actually load?

Got it. It's interesting to think through that because my assumption would be that it really what the norm is for that isn't universal. So like you said, I feel like the contact page is a great example. If somebody's looking to contact contact you and that's what they search for, the bounce rate for that is going to be pretty high probably. And I think we're in a niche and would love to hear your thoughts on this where the bounce rate probably trends towards higher and a lot of that has to do with the nature of the content. So like in the case of Pinch of Yam, if somebody's looking for a chocolate chip cookie recipe, they find that and they like it, they're probably not going to go certain searching around for other types of content on the, on the blog. So I'll just throw some of these numbers out there for listeners just so they have a little bit of a metric to go off of. And I'm not saying this is the worst nor the best, but would love to hear your thoughts on it, Ashley. And maybe if we could even think strategically, are there ways that this could be improved? So Pinch of Yum, the food blog that my wife Lindsay and I run. Uh, so the average pages per session is 1.45. The average time on page or the session duration. Now that's a little bit different than time on page. Right? So that's the average time that somebody is on the site entirely. Um, okay, so that's 1 minute and 18 seconds. And then the bounce rate is 80.73. And those numbers I would guess would be on the higher end for bounce rate and the lower end for average session duration. If you looked at the web in general, but I don't know that for sure. Does that sound right?

Yes. Yeah, that sounds about right. If you're having a bounce rate down from like 26 to 40, that's absolutely amazing. That's, that's goals. A higher bounce rate like that, it could literally come down to the industry. And that's where using something like competitor data and, and a tool that will grant you access to that info, then you can kind of see, okay, well my competitor's bounce rate is 60 and mine's 70, 80. So I'm not too far off. It might just be an industry thing. So how can I Be unique. How can I set myself apart? Because what you're talking about with the chocolate chip cookie, I mean, looking at my own user behavior, I'll go to Pinterest and I'll look up a recipe that I want to make for dinner that evening. Once I find that recipe on that blog, I make the dinner and then I probably don't ever go to that blog again because I've used the recipe. So food bloggers really need to kind of step into the user experience and figure out within that recipe, within that One Stop page, how can we take it a step further and fully grasp our users attention and introduce them to the rest of our page so that the next time I, I don't have to go to Pinterest, I just go straight to your blog.

Got it. So introducing that other content, maybe it's similar or complementary recipes, maybe you have a roundup post that talks about other cookies that you love, but figuring out ways to impact that. And you can test that too, right? So you could implement something and then track along with that specific page. Just as a way to contrast a different niche in a different site. Food Blogger Pro, which is a membership site that we have that's connected with this podcast, the average session duration is 4 minutes and 42 seconds and the bounce rate is 60% and the average pages per session is 3.51. So that just to compare and contrast, that looks a little bit different. And the interesting thing with that is that's the site overall. I'm guessing what happens with Food Blogger Pro, and I haven't really dug into this, is a lot of people that aren't members will come to the homepage, maybe sign up for the waiting list, or maybe leave. And so while members would have a really high average session duration and a really low bounce rate, we also contrast that with the fact that if you're not a member, there's not a lot you can do. So you're coming, you're maybe looking at the homepage, signing up for the waiting list and then leaving. So like you said, there's a lot of it that depends on the, on the industry or the niche. And you said you can look at the competitive analysis and is that something with Semrush that's available within the tool to see the. It would have to be estimated, I would assume estimated bounce rate and average time on page for other sites.

Yes. And then you're also looking at time periods. So around the holidays you can zone in on what month or what over a certain data range. Just like you do within Google Analytics. And so it's always really interesting to see around the holidays when you're looking at your competitor data, how it changed. So especially with food bloggers, you're going to see a spike over certain holidays because people need more recipes, people are hosting more parties, they're hosting more events. Around summertime, you're also going to see a spike. So when you're looking at this competitor data, you don't want to just look at it overall time, I would look at it at individual increments and, and as you're planning your campaigns and you're planning your content strategy down the next quarter, 2/4 a year down the line to go back and see what happened last year for our competitors during summer. If you're starting to plan your fourth of July barbecue recipes and your content strategy, go back for last year and see what happened with your competitors during that time. Compare it with what happened to you and see what you can do differently.

Awesome. Uh, so I'm guessing that time on page also probably in some ways impacts bounce rate. Although you. There's probably some things you could do to increase time on page that wouldn't decrease bounce rate. Like include a video in a post would increase the time on page, usually because it's another piece of content that people interact with, but they still stay on the page and then they have that bounce rate. So they, they might come, they look at the content and then they leave. And that's what bounce rate is. So it's your, you're coming, you're looking, you're not going anywhere else and then you're leaving. So those kind of complement each other, but it's. But they're a little bit different as well. So are there things that people can be doing other than just including similar content within that page that would impact the bounce rate? Or including more links or any other advice that you'd have for people to help get people to stick around when they are reading their content.

Yes, links would be the biggest tips. So tell me a little bit more about your website. What else can I get from you? Think of it like a cookbook. I just went to the library the other day and purchased a cookbook of very specific types of recipes. And I'm always going to go to that cookbook for these specific recipes. It's for Indian food. And so if you can get very niche and this is something that I see a lot of food bloggers don't do, they open themselves up to everything because they're amazing cooks and they can produce great recipes. But if you can narrow down into I just do cookies or I just do vegetarian food or Indian food, whatever the focus is, then I'm going to be able to not just trust you more, but know when I click on those external links on the original piece of content that I went to, that I'm going to get the same quality from this original post that I was drawn and attracted to. So you're reaching your audience to begin with to get me on there and then you're keeping your correct demographic by just zoning in on one main focus.

Yeah, there's something to be said about that. Especially as the as content becomes more prevalent and high quality, it becomes more competitive. And so then you need to figure out, how do I stand out in such a competitive market and this content in general, not just food blogs. And I think that piece that you said is so important of landing on a niche and really owning that. And I feel like we do that in a way with Food Blogger Pro. And food blogging is becoming more and more prevalent and bigger, but it's also, in terms of the Internet, it's a pretty tiny niche. But one of the tricks I feel like is this idea of land and expand. And with Food Blogger Pro, we're a little bit tied to food blogging, to our name. So do you have any advice for people that are starting out in how they can own a niche but not restrict themselves over the long run? That allows them to, like, land on a niche, but later on expand. I think of Amazon with books and Zappos with shoes as examples of companies that did that really well. And what would that look like on a micro level? When it comes to content.

Really, I think what can be the most successful is your story. So say you want to focus on just Indian food or just cookies, that's great. But what's your story? Some of the food blogs that I've subscribed to the most have been because as I'm reading, I'm hearing about the family, I'm hearing about the history behind this recipe. There's some kind of emotional connection that this blogger is either going through the same thing I went through, they have similar circumstances, they're unique in a certain aspect. And so I feel like I can actually connect to this person and not just Google. Search a recipe real quick, get a recipe from allrecipes.com and then I'm done. I'm actually ready to engage. And now I'm willing to follow this blogger on Instagram. I'm willing to Follow them on Facebook when they start partnering with other companies and run campaigns, I'm more likely to trust the products that they sponsor because now I've developed this relationship with them. I'm watching them go through life as I'm going through life. So it's more than just food, really. Yeah, it's who you are in Food Blog.

I love that. Yeah, we talk about that quite a bit and it's interesting, I think, you know, we've heard all sorts of differing opinions. One from like, hey, you build your brand and your brand is the business, and maybe you don't have as much personality folded into it and you think of the brand as the story. And from where we come from, we're like, hey, we share our story as people. So people that listen to this podcast maybe know a little bit about us. You know, they know that Lindsey and I live in Minnesota and we have a food blog called Pinch of Yum and you know, a dog called Sage and know about our personal story and know us then and. And I think people are connected to other people. So I think that's so great to think about that. I know for other people it's a little bit intimidating to talk about who they are, but I love the idea of also including story within a brand. So maybe you're talking about the story of your brand, some personality in that, but not necessarily as much if it's something that you're not as comfortable with. One of the things that you talk about that you do is you teach master classes. And I would love to know what either your favorite masterclass is or your most popular one, or maybe it ends up being the same.

It actually ends up being the same. And it's funny because it's a lot of what we've talked about so far. It's content roi. So how to measure if your content is producing results? It's one of my most chosen classes. And it makes sense because most of us produce content regularly. We're content producing machines. But we forget the simple step of, oh yeah, we actually have to measure the content that we produce and see if it's even doing anything for us. Is it even hitting our goals or are we just content machines?

Yes, and I think a lot of people will be able to relate with that because we understand it, we know what we're doing. We go, we produce content. We know that content will help drive traffic, but you can go so much deeper on that, which I would. I would love to do. So let's start up high and define roi. So what is that for people that aren't as businessy and maybe not as familiar with that term?

Yes. So it's a return on investment. So if you do A and B, what's the C going to be? What do you get out of your efforts?

Got it. And the investment part would usually be equated to some type of, you know, economic exchange. It could be time or. And it could be money. For a lot of people that are listening to this, it's probably both. A lot of time and maybe some money as well. So how do you, starting with the investment piece, how do you really get a good understanding on how much you're putting into it in order to then take a closer look at what the return is? Right. Because we need to first understand what the actual investment is. So do you have any advice for how people can understand that better?

Yes, and I'm so incredibly happy that you said time, because most people just focus on what investment usually looks like. And that's dollars, that's money. And they forget how much time they're spending. So what I do is I look at content as a whole. Whether you're the one producing the content, you're hiring an agency to help you with it, or you have a freelancer to do it, all of those, whether you have someone else write it or you write it themselves, there's still your management time. There's the time that it takes for you to edit the content, there's the time that it takes for you to upload the content, to track all of the metrics for it, and then there's communication time back and forth. Whether you're co partnering with someone on a piece of content, or you're talking back and forth with a freelancer who's helping you build a bunch of content, there's so much time that's put into creating content. So you really need to look at go all the way back from when you're first looking at the strategy, the idea behind the content. How many people were on that idea? How many people are helping you? You and your wife work together, so that's two people. Now that this is twice as much time than if just one individual was doing it. So how much time did you guys take drafting out the idea? Did you outline things? How much time did it take for you to produce it, to edit it? And then you also have to look at it? Am I spending more time producing the content than what it's worth for me to hire someone else to produce it and for me to come back and edit it and add my personal touch. Those are things that sometimes we forget about because as you grow bigger, your cost per time grows tremendously.

And say that part, last part again.

You start spreading yourself thin at that point.

Yeah. And I think there'll be people that can relate to that. So how do you know when that point is? Do you just arbitrarily assign a dollar amount to what you're, you know, hey, I'm on average earning $25 an hour. And then once I get to the point where I can find somebody to, you know, hire and help for $15 an hour, then I do that. Or like, what, where, where's the break even point? And then also, how much do you factor in? This is maybe getting into the philosophical end of things. How much do you factor in the enjoyment? I really, for instance, I love podcasts and maybe there are times when it's like, well, it makes sense to have a guest person host these, but it's like, hey, I love doing these. I love connecting with people. I love having a conversation with Ashley on a, you know, random Wednesday afternoon. So do you factor that in as well?

Yes, I do. And there really isn't a black and white answer for these questions. It really varies drastically depending upon what your goals are, how long you've been in it. I can give you an example of my experience. I had been writing for a blog for years and years and years, and it was taking me about five to six hours to produce each post. And I finally got to a point to where I had so many new clientele coming in that this got pushed back into the late night hours. And so going from 50 to 60 hour weeks, returning into 70 to 80 hour weeks. But my heart was in writing. So that's when I had to sit back and analyze. Okay, if my heart's in writing and this is what I want to do the most, how can I factor this in? And that's when I actually started hiring freelancers in a different way to help with some of the clients client work. So I can continue writing. Then as things continue to progress and business continue to change, as it always done, I eventually had to get to a point to where, all right, I can have freelancers do two of these posts for me, and then I can do the other two. And that way, these two, I can still put my heart into it. I still have my passion, I'm still doing what I'd like to do, but I'm also able to get my checklist out at the end of the day.

Got it. So that makes sense. So you have this idea of. Or you're. I think the biggest takeaway is being aware of how you're spending your time and when your blog or your business gets to the point where you have margin to put back into it. I think the biggest takeaway is thinking about what the. A couple factors, probably what you least enjoy and what the least return on your time is. And, you know, an example would be for Lindsey, who does the Pinch of Yam and creates the food content for Pinch of Yam and the recipes. She really loves the process of creating the content and doing the photography. And there's people that we know that have built a blog and they outsource all of that to somebody else. But for her, that's a really important piece of what she does and she doesn't want to grow into manager of Pinch of Yum, even though that's a little bit of what she does. So she said, okay, what are the areas that are not as interesting to me and wouldn't be as good at and wouldn't have a big, big return? And has started to bring team members on to help with that. So we have Alana that helps with video, and Jenna that helps with a lot of the sponsored content that we do. So like you said, it's this constant kind of adjustment and analysis and. And sometimes you have to grieve a little bit as you give up the thing that you really like in order to do the thing that is more important that you like even more. But constant evolving. So that's kind of the investment piece, understanding that. How about the return piece? So now that we have an understanding of like, what we're actually putting into our content, how do we go ahead in or. Or move forward into like really digging into the return on investment and tracking the actual return and increasing that. So how do we get more out of the investment that we're creating?

So you get more by tracking what's working and then multiply those efforts by about 50. But in order to even track what's working, you need to define what's your ultimate goal. So if you're just starting, you need views, or if you're established, you need engagement to start happening. So are you getting engagement on social from your content? And if so, is it shares, Is it comments, is it likes? Likes are great. It's good for the algorithm, but that's about it. Comments, as long as they're tagging people, increasing views, or having a conversation with you, those are only time comments are great. If you're Getting comments like nice or this was yummy. Sure, it's awesome for the algorithm, it's nice fluff, but it'd be a lot better if they're tagging people and being like, hey, you've gotta try this chocolate chip recipe. It was amazing. And they tagged their mother.

When you say the algorithm is that for Instagram or Facebook or Pinterest or social media in general.

Social media in general. Facebook and Instagram's algorithm is a lot more hectic and scrambled up than any other social media algorithm is. And so in order to complement their algorithm, you need as much engagement as possible or they're just not going to get your posts seen by anybody whether or not you have 10,000 followers or 10 followers.

Right. Basic idea being the algorithm, the said holy algorithm is tracking along. And one of the most important metrics is is this a piece of content that when people see it, they interact with it. And if it is interactions and engagement means that people will stay longer on the platform, which all of the accounts want you to do, all the platforms want you to do. So the more people that engage and interact with it, the more people stick around, which then it rewards that content by showing it to more people.

Exactly, exactly.

And your point was a general comment isn't as valuable as if somebody were to tag somebody else, because that is getting that person then to engage with the content.

Yes. And that person may be your exact demographic, but they just haven't stumbled upon you yet because there's so much content out there. So if you can get people to actually share your post or comment on your post, that's a great metric. That's a great goal to have.

Got it. Okay, so we talked a little bit about return on investment, understanding what the investment is, and then in order to get a better return, doubling down on the thing that's working. So can we do a real life example, walking through like a hypothetical food blog?

Certainly. So let's go with the chocolate chip cookie blog. The cookie blog, they have a new recipe coming up for spring and the goal of it is they want a hundred shares on social and 100 unique visitors to go to it. So this, again, this is not direct money. With blogging, you're not always looking at direct dollars because you don't have products. You're looking more at advertiser, sponsored content, things like that. So we're looking at different metrics here. So in order to get that, I'm going to publish this spring post on Friday. On Monday, I'm going to start tracking the Metrics. The following Monday, I'm going to look back at the metrics to see how has it changed, how has it increased? If you start tracking metrics five hours after you post, it's not enough time. You really need to give your content five to seven days of fully running before you can gauge this worked or this didn't. If you're producing it on Friday, start looking at the metrics on Monday. Give yourself an idea of what's happening. Don't just give it 24 hour notice. After you've hit the weak point, then you can see, okay, this isn't picking up traction or this is picking traction. If it isn't, take note of why it isn't. Maybe you got 10 shares and 10 unique visitors and the post that you just posted the week before hit that 100 mark. So I would go back to that post and I would go back to something that's come close to whatever this goal is and see, okay, if that hit the mark. What is it so different about this post? Well, the post that hit the mark was talking about cookies in winter and how you can do it as a gift and it focused on gifts. It had 10 different photos inside of it, whereas your spring post only had four different photos. This is where you're going to want to ab test in order to hit your goal. Produce the post again, change the title, still let that original post run, but reuse a bit of that content, add in those 10 photos and see if that helps you hit your goal.

So when you say republish the post, that would be, are you saying the same post? Are you saying iterate on it? Create a new piece of content that's a little bit similar.

Exactly, exactly. You never want duplicate content on your website, but you can still use the same topic idea. Change up the title, change up the content. I mean, we're, we're blotters, we're writers, we can do this. We can write about spring cookies in 50 different ways.

Sure.

So the first way you did it clearly didn't work. Try it again.

Got it. And the interesting thing is that it's this combination of art and science where it's not, I think for the people that are engineering, slash science oriented, it's not a perfect, you know, ab test in that there is some gut and intuition and guessing involved. But that comes from, I think this is the important piece that comes from intentional analysis of those metrics. And in your experience with people that are doing this type of content iteration, what are the most common variables with content that impact the traffic or shareability or success of the content.

I'm going to say video content, having videos, having images, images are great. But if you, you can add video to any piece of content that you produce, that's going to help reach your goal, regardless of what your goal is. Specifically because social engines like it and search engines like it, users like it. So you're hitting every single algorithm need, you're hitting the user need, you're getting the intent, you're getting the user experience checked and it's where everything is going. Not everyone has the time to read anymore, but we're taking the time to watch videos as we're in transit, as we're listening to podcasts, things to where we don't have to be so self absorbed into the content, such as reading, watching, hearing. That's where everything is moving.

Yeah, that's one of my favorite things. And people that have listened to this podcast a long time probably roll their eyes. But when I talk about it, I love thinking about the history of, of the Internet and how at one point it was literally just words and links and it was just, you know, like you would read something and it would have a link and that would go to other words. And then it was like they published these super low end images and it was the most incredible thing ever. It's like we can have images and so that was like the new evolution of the Internet. And it's interesting to be at a point now where video, the next evolution of the Internet is becoming more prevalent and we've seen that over the past five to 10 years as bandwidth increases and the availability of streaming becomes easier, live video becomes easier. Just naturally we always bend towards the more real life type of content as the way that people consume that. So it's fun and interesting to use, hear, to hear you say that and to see that actually playing out. As, you know, the Internet evolves, which is, you can insert the nerd emoji there. If this was. That's the only problem with audio content is that you can't have emojis, you just need to speak them. So yeah, would totally agree on that. I think that's a really important piece and we've seen that too with what we do. Do you have advice for people that are creating video? What does that look like in terms of like, do you put that right at the top of the blog post? You put it at the bottom? Is that something that you need to test and see? That's something that I think of often with the videos we're creating and wondering like where are the best places to use those?

Yeah, initially I would say the top and then you have the content at the bottom. For the die hard readers who they don't care how, what stats say about videos they still want to read, but it's really something that you're going to need to ab test because for the food vertical, it can be completely different from the tech vertical, from the flower wedding travel, it could all be completely different. So I would test both at the top and then I would test about two to three paragraphs down. So it's not necessarily in the middle, but it's right in the meat of the content.

Got it. And I'll say this for those that are listening, Google just recently, and maybe was within the last year, I don't know, recently is relative, released an ab optimizing tool. I forget the name of it, but it's like a really easy way to do AB testing. And there's other tools as well. Like I'm going to think, yeah, optimizely. Yep, Unbounce. But Google recently released one for free, which is great. So it'd be a good thing to check out. So one of the last questions that I wanted to run by you has to do with these classes that you're teaching. And maybe it could be this ROI one or maybe not. But curious to know what the most common breakthrough that you see students have. Whether you're speaking or in a masterclass, what is the one thing where that you know with a pretty high level of probability that you're going to talk about it and they're going to have a breakthrough or they're going to realize something that they didn't realize before and then be able to implement that and have a positive outcome from it. So something that you can think of?

Yeah, it kind of comes down to the type of content. When we say the word content, we immediately all think about blog posts. It's universal content. We're all creating it. It's words. It looks the closest thing to what content definition should be. But then when you really break it down and start thinking about how you can reuse that type of content, not republish it, reuse it. So at Semrush, we have a Twitter chat that we do every Wednesday morning. After that Twitter chat, we then create a blog post about it and then it can go a step further, create a video about it, a video interview, talking to some of the people that we did Q and A with during the chat. It can get turned into a podcast A lot of times, people, we get stuck at just the blog post or just the Twitter chat, just the video, and we don't move past that. So one of the biggest breakthroughs that I see with students or attendees at conferences, things like that, is when they think about and they kind of run through a little mental content audit and look at the types of content that they've produced and some of the most successful ones, how they can keep that content alive and recreate it in one, two years, even one to two months later, into a different type of content. Let's make a case study out of it. Let's do an infographic on it. Let's get it on Pinterest. I mean, there's so much that you can do with successful content. It shouldn't just die at the end of that.

Yeah, I think that's a great takeaway and something that we've been thinking about with Food Blogger Pro. Even this podcast, you know, we have these great interviews that have so many valuable nuggets in them and we've been thinking about how can we break that up and repurpose that in other areas. And people that follow along with Food Blogger Pro on social or on the blog will maybe start to see that a little bit as we start to experiment more intentionally with it. But for food bloggers, I think that's a great idea in thinking about, or obviously just bloggers in general, but thinking about, thinking about what are the most successful pieces of content that I've had. And not then going and creating a brand new blog post, but thinking about, I've had this thing that's super successful. How do I double down on that and continue to build on that success? Kind of like an artist that has a, you know, a really popular song. It's not like they're going to just go out and write a bunch of other songs. They're really going to lean into that popular song for a long time and make sure that they can really juice that for all that it's worth. And I think it's worth doing that and thinking about from a content perspective for content creators as well, which is a great note to end on. But before we do, I have one last question and then would love to hear you talk about where people can follow along with you, Ashley. But my last question would be, for those that are listening to this podcast, what, what would your one piece of advice or encouragement be to these people? You see a lot of content creators, you see a lot of business owners, you see a lot of bloggers. If you're going to speak directly to the people listening to this podcast and have kind of an ending, encouraging word or piece of advice for them. What would that be?

To be you in your content. It's so scary. It's so intimidating. And we can come up with a million reasons why we shouldn't do it. But the most successful content producers are the ones who brand themselves. They're not afraid to be quirky, nerdy, sarcastic, funny, whatever it is that makes you. You put that into your content. Because there's so many pieces of content that are out there nowadays that they all look the same. They're all black and white. They're the. Here's the four steps you need to do. Here's the ingredients. Figure out a way to incorporate yourself into everything you do.

That's great. Lindsey and I were having a conversation last night, and she was, I'm gonna botch this, so don't quote me on this. But the general idea was there was this survey, and people were surveyed, who would you be most apprehensive about spending time with? And it was like, somebody who's extremely introverted, somebody who's extremely extroverted. And it went list through all these things that you would think of as, like, personalities, where it's like, oh, that would be. May be hard to be with somebody. And the last thing was somebody who is. Isn't authentic, who is, you know, fake or not themselves. And that, above everything, was the number one response for who people would be apprehensive about spending time with. And it's interesting to hear you say that, because I think sometimes people feel like I need to be super extroverted or I need to have this certain voice. But the most important thing is just being yourself and being that as fully and as much as possible. So I think that's super good advice and a great note to end on. But before we do, Ashley, where can people follow along with you and learn more about what you're up to?

Yeah, definitely. Follow me on Twitter. It ishleymadhatter. A S H L E Y Mad Hatter. Just like Alice in Wonderland.

Awesome. Cool. And we'll be sure to link to that and Semrush as well. And huge thank you to coming on the podcast today, Ashley. Really fun to chat.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was a great time. Thank you so much, Ashley, again, for being on the podcast. And Ashley is a superstar and is offering our listeners of this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast a free trial to semrush so if you're interested there is a discount code you can use and it is all caps foodbloggers one word T2B O O1BZ and if you didn't catch that, no worries. Just shoot us an email@podcastoodbloggerpro.com and we can hook you up. And now it's time for the Reviewer of the Week. And this one comes from Holly from the fabulous blog A baker's house@abakershouse.com and it says I cannot thank you enough for sharing your knowledge and valuable information on this podcast. It's a treat to listen in on Bjork picking the brains of people who have excelled in their fields. Whether that may be photography, social media, writing or other blogging strengths. I am motivated to learn more and to improve with each podcast topic. I love that you mentioned the different kind of topics that we cover here on the podcast, Holly. If any of you out there have an idea for a topic for an upcoming episode, please let us know. We would love to hear it. Just email podcastoodbloggerpro.com with your idea. And if you want to be featured at this Reviewer of the Week section of the podcast in an upcoming episode, all you need to do is leave us a review on itunes and leave your name and blog URL in the review. We would love to feature your review. Thank you again for tuning in this week. We really appreciate you from all of us here at fpphq. Make it a great week.

Sam.