146: $75,000 in Year 2 with Kate Kordsmeier

In this episode, I talk about how to check yourself out on Pinterest and we chat with Kate Kordsmeier about how she earned $75,000 from just her second year of blogging. Hey there everybody. This is Bjork Ostrom and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast brought to you by WP Tasty, which is the go to place for WordPress plugins. WP Tasty has two WordPress plugins right now, Tasty Recipes and Tastypins. Tasty Recipes is for all of you food bloggers out there, and Tastypins is for all of you that want to optimize your Pinterest pins and specifically optimizing your images both for Pinterest as well as Google. And we talk about that in previous podcasts. So we won't dive deep into how that works because today the Tasty tip is all about optimizing your Pinterest account, not necessarily using Tasty Pins, but that's a piece of it. So how do you check yourself out on Pinterest? There's this really cool URL that you can use, and if you go to this URL, it allows you to see all of the images, all of the pins that are happening in real time on Pinterest associated with your URL. And you can get there simply by going to Pinterest.comSource now, obviously you wouldn't type in your URL, you'd put that in. So in our case we'd go pinterest.com source pinchofyom.com now the other great thing that's nice about this URL, where you can check yourself out is you can also check out other people. So first what I'd recommend doing is going in and making sure that your content is optimized. Now, what is an optimized Pinterest pin? A couple things that are important. Number one, you want to make sure that it is a rich pin. And a rich pin has additional information around the pin. And for food blogs, that's ingredients. You want to make sure that your recipe that is being pinned has the ingredients on Pinterest. And there's lots of different reasons why that's beneficial, but it helps people engage with it. It adds some discoverability within Pinterest. So Pinterest has a better understanding of what that pin is all about. And Pinterest has said that they're going to place an emphasis on these rich pins because of the searchability and the additional information that's provided with these. So you want to make sure that you have rich pins. If you have a food blog and you don't yet have a recipe plugin, make sure that you get that installed and added. It's kind of a 101. But I always want to mention that just in case you don't have that installed yet. That's going to help you get some rich pins for Pinterest. The other thing that you want to make sure that's optimized as you're checking yourself out on Pinterest using that source URL is you want to make sure that the strong description for Pinterest is included on that pin. And a strong description is really good for searchability. But it's also good to include the hashtags for that given recipe. So you might want to include things like healthy or dinner. You could include cleaneating if it's a clean recipe, or maybe it is for a certain diet, like whole 30 or something like that. You want to include those hashtags. And Pinterest has come out and said it's important to include those hashtags in your descriptions. Now how do you make sure that your description is optimized? Well, there's multiple different ways you can do it. Number one, the really basic way is to use that as the alt text for your image. Now, this was kind of the old way to do it where you'd optimize your image's alt text for Pinterest. But what's happened is people have started to change and they've realized we don't want to optimize the alt text for Pinterest because we want to make sure we're optimizing that for Google, describing what the image is instead of putting in a Pinterest description. So the second option would be in your image. You can use the title area. Now, for every image, there's a title and then there's an alt text. The title is what shows up when you hover over the image. And it's meant to be kind of an explainer or a guide for people that are navigating your website. That's kind of the next best option. You're dividing the title text and the alt text. So the alt text is used for Google and the title text can be used for Pinterest. But if you want to take it even a step further, you can use a plugin like Tastypins, which puts in a very specific Pinterest description area on WordPress. And we show you exactly how that happens on the explainers and tutorials that we have on wptasty. But that will allow you to have this really clean separation. And you can use the Pinterest text for the Pinterest description and you can use the alt text to describe what the image is to optimize that for SEO. And what that allows you to do is what once you go to the source URL for your blog, again that's pinterest.comsource your blogurl. So in our case pinchofyum.com, we can click on an image and then we can see that those images now unless somebody has changed the description, but almost always people are going to use the default description, especially if it's really well written, those descriptions on Pinterest when they're pinning those images are going to be really strong descriptions because you have optimized those using a custom Pinterest description. So the nice thing about the source URLs, you can check out other blogs. So if you want to scroll through and look at what we've done with Pinch of Yum, you can just go to source pinchofyum.com when you're on Pinterest to get a look at what that is. Now, all of those won't be optimized, but what I think will happen is as you scroll through and look at those, you'll see a lot of those are optimized. And then you can go over to your URL and check it out as you're making updates to see those optimized descriptions and those rich pins start to come through and that will improve your Pinterest traffic and engagement. And you start to get more traffic on Pinterest by implementing the optimized Pinterest strategies that we talked about here in the tasty tip for this episode. Speaking of Pinterest, Kate is actually going to be talking about some of the strategies that she used to improve her Pinterest account and actually how she did that when she didn't really even like social media. She's talked pretty blatantly about not liking social media, but bringing people in, including a lot of Food Blogger Pro experts bringing people in to help her in those areas that she's not excited about. And all of that has helped her her to grow really intentionally. In just her second year of blogging, she published a report where she talks about how much she earned in her second year of blogging, outlines what the expenses were and the income was, and talks about some of the intentional decisions she made as she grew her blog. We actually interviewed Kate previously on the Food Blogger Pro podcast where she talked about freelancing, and in this podcast she talks about kind of getting burnt out with freelancing and wanting to make that switch over into blogging for herself, being her own boss and being really intentional in doing that. It wasn't something she stumbled into. She said, I'm gonna set out. I'm gonna do this. And she has done it. And in 2018, she's getting even more traction, which she's talking about. And she was nice enough to come on and share her tips and advice with you on the podcast today. It's gonna be really encouraging and I know you're gonna get a lot out of it, so let's go ahead and jump in. Kate, welcome back to the the podcast.

Thanks for having me. I'm so glad to be. To be back.

Yeah. So for those that haven't listened to the Food Blogger Pro podcast for a while, back in May of 2016, so almost two years ago, we talked to you about freelance journalism and how you can double your income doing freelance writing. And for you, you were writing in kind of the same niche as the food and recipe world. But for those that didn't listen to the podcast, can you talk about some of the things we talked about in that podcast and what it was that you were doing at that time when you were doing freelance journalism?

Yeah, absolutely. So I went to journalism school for college, and then after I graduated, I basically started freelancing full time right away. And what that meant was that I was getting paid to write stories for magazines and newspapers. And this was like 2010. So there was some websites, but it's still, it's nothing like it is today. So it's mostly print publications. And I just basically picked a niece, a niece, a niche and decided to go with food because that was what I was passionate about and what I love to do was eat. So I kind of had that as my beat. And for the next, I'd say about eight years or so. Well, that would put us today. So I guess it's a little less than that. I did that full time. And so I traveled around the world and literally just wrote about what was happening in the food scene. It was mostly about restaurants and hotels and chefs and food trends and that kind of stuff for magazines and newspapers. And then when I also on the side freelance recipe developed. So I would write recipes for magazines like Cooking Light and Shape and Fitness and that kind of thing. Thing. So kind of in the healthy recipe realm. So it was just kind of a combination of food and travel writing and recipe development.

Yeah, and there's a part in, we're going to talk about a report that you did, kind of a recap of 2017 and the income that you created from your blog and expenses. And we're going to kind of dig into that as a fun way to explore what the potential is for somebody in their second year of blogging. But before we do that, one of the things that you talk about early on is you talk about doing freelance journalism and kind of getting this point where you were burnt out, where you had to report to an editor, there was advertisers that you had to be beholden to. And then you talk about just eating rich restaurant food five times a week and traveling so much. But I think for a lot of people, if they hear that the idea of traveling and getting to eat out at restaurants and, you know, getting to do that for quote, unquote free sounds like the best thing ever. So what was it about that time where you eventually got burnt out with it and knew that you needed to change?

Yeah, I mean, honestly, it was the perfect storm of things because at the same time, so I had been doing it for, I don't know, at this point, I guess six, seven years. And while it was so much fun and I'm so grateful for the experiences I got to have, the places I got to see that I would never have been able to afford on my own, and especially with how frequently I was traveling, you know, it was amazing and it really was like a dream job, but it was also exhausting. And I was gone like half the year and on the road and sometimes it was like, you know, they take care of you, but sometimes I was sitting in the backseat on a 30 hour flight to Australia and kind of sucks for sure. So there was. There were some things that were exhausting about it. At the same time, I was also going through a lot of health issues and really had to change my diet. And so eating out at restaurants became really difficult for me, especially when I was doing things like elimination diets and trying to figure out if I had food triggers for things. And it's not like I could just go to a restaurant and get the healthiest thing in order to really write with authority about a place. And especially if I was ever doing reviews, I had to try like a whole menu. And so that just started becoming impossible. So, yeah, it was kind of a combination of being exhausted, you know, at the same time. I was in my early and mid twenties when I was doing this in the beginning, and I had very little responsibilities and you know, a lot of energy and that kind of thing. And by the end of it, I was 30 and, you know, got married and bought a house and wanted to be home more. And my lifestyle and goals and interests were changing. And so, you know, it's just kind of a lot of different things at once.

It's interesting to hear people talk about, you know, kind of some of those big decisions they make with their life and having a pivot, some people would call it a pivot where you're not necessarily doing something completely different, but you're kind of shifting directions. And so often it's related to something like that where you have this big life change, whether it has to be with a health related thing or relationship. So you have, you know, you get married, you buy a house, like all of these things impact kind of, you know, in your case, going from traveling around, eating out at restaurants to this next possible phase where there's this evolution. You take what you learn, right? These things that you know and have come to become an expert at and evolve on those a little bit. So when you looked at the different paths to evolve to, were you looking at multiple different things or did this idea of blogging come forward and then you're like, hey, I want to go into this, or did you pick it as one of the paths that you were looking at?

I would say more so the latter. For about the last year, maybe two, that I was freelancing full time, I realized that I wasn't enjoying it as much anymore for a lot of the reasons we just discussed. I also moved from Washington D.C. to Atlanta and which made it more difficult to get work because there was so much more work in D.C. and D.C. is so much more of a travel destination in itself than Atlanta is. And so there was some of that going on as well. And so I really, I was just thinking, like, what could I do? But I knew that I didn't want to go work for somebody else and work in an office. So I explored, like, what if I started my own restaurant PR firm? What if I started, I had at the time I started doing a bunch of on campus camera work for places like CNN and the state of Georgia's like, tourism department and some other places. And so then I thought I actually had a audition with the Food Network. And so then I'm like, maybe this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to be like a TV personality. And that kind of fizzled out. And I realized that wasn't really what my interest was. And honestly, it was that I had been following Pinch of Yum just as a regular reader for years, and I must have just skipped over the income reports or not checked back off. I just. I don't remember ever really seeing them until one day I did and then got sucked down the rabbit hole and spent, like, the entire weekend reading every report you ever wrote and was like, this is what I should do. This is, like, the perfect way to transition, where I still am getting to write and work for myself and work from home and be in the food kind of world, but I can do it more on my own terms. And I am a huge control freak. And that was one of the things that really started getting to me after a while with freelancing was, like you said before, having to report to an editor, having to. To get a story, I had to pitch editors, which means I have to convince them that the story is worth telling. And sometimes they wouldn't agree with me. And that was so frustrating. And so I was like, well, if it's my blog, I can write whatever the heck I want to write. It's mine.

Right? For sure.

Yeah. So eventually I said, okay, I think this blogging thing is going to be what I'm going to do. Which, honestly was a huge shift for me because I had this really snobby attitude about bloggers before because I felt like I was this legitimate journalist, you know, And a lot of the restaurant bloggers I had worked with in the past were sort of just in it to get a free meal. They just did it on the side, had no business acumen, and just didn't do it with a lot of integrity. And so that's sort of what I thought of as blogging until I really started looking into it and realizing, oh, my gosh, no, there's plenty of amazing bloggers out there that don't sell their soul and are really helpful to people and provide great content and service and all of that.

Yeah. So you looked at the income reports. You said, okay, I see somebody else doing this. But the hard transition is to go from, I see somebody else doing this, and now I think that I can do this. Cause I think usually what people do is they'll see something and then they'll create, like, walls that say, here's why it's not possible. But it sounds like for you, you jumped in and said, no, here's why it is possible, and then started moving on it. So how did you, from a mindset perspective, how did you have kind of the optimism and positive thinking and the action oriented outlook in order to move forward with building your blog.

Oh, man, that's a good question. And I feel like my answer is kind of cheating because it sort of just comes naturally to me when I'm not necessarily a confident person in my personal life, but in my business life, I do feel like I'm very like, if they could do it, I could do it. So some of it I think was just like, okay, this is possible. I see that here's this blog that I like, and they make good money from this, so so could I. But I also knew that I knew nothing about blogging and that I would need help, especially if my plan was to make it a business, which it was. I never started it as like, oh, this is just a hobby. We'll see how it goes. It was always like, this is my next business step. So I joined Food Blogger Pro and literally watched, like, every video before I even launched my blog, and then went back and sort of did certain courses again as I was setting it up to make sure that I was doing everything right the first time around. I just really didn't want to have to, like, wing it and then a year later go back and redo everything.

It reminds me it's one of the things I've tried to do whenever I'm doing any type of furniture assembly is take out the instruction manual and read it all the way through before doing anything, and then go back and then step by step, assemble it. And it sounds like that's, in a way, what you did. Using the course content on FoodBlocker Pro is like, I'm just going to go through this, then I'm going to go back, and now that I know the landscape, what's there, I'm going to, as needed, go through these and apply them as I build my site.

Yeah, exactly. And that's such a good analogy. And that's actually exactly the way, too, that I do recipes. People always say, read the recipe in full first, make sure you understand, then go back and kind of put your own twist on it, which is, I'm incapable of following a recipe to a T. So I feel like that was very much the same approach that I took with this and just tried to learn as much as I could and make sure I was doing things. I mean, there is no one right way, of course, but that I was doing things from an informed place and not just like, let's try this.

So in going through all the course content and doing this learning period that you had, what do you feel like that did for you in terms of informing the decisions that you were going to make as you jumped into it, knowing that the whole time your intent is to do this as a business, you're not doing it as a hobby. You're not just stumbling into it. You're saying, I'm going to do this and I'm going to be really intentional with it. So what did you pick up, whether it be from Food Blogger Pro or just in general as you got into it, that helped you in those early stages?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the first things was that I realized how much freaking work it is. I think I knew it was going to be a lot of work, so sort of. But I sort of was like, well, you know, you write, I've been writing recipes for years, that's no problem. I'll just snap a couple photos and throw it up there. And it was like, yeah, but if you really want anybody to be able to find it and, you know, to drive traffic to the blog and make sure, you know, there's. There were so many little things behind the scenes that I would never have known about or thought of. So I feel like that was a big thing, like alt text on photos, using a recipe plugin instead of just writing your recipe in the post. And now some of these things feel so basic, but at the time I didn't know any of it. So I feel like I got a lot of the nuts and bolts and the basics down and then. Let's see. I feel like there was a second part to your question, but I've forgotten it.

Yeah. Well, the other piece that I would be interested in hearing you talk about is the decision that you made in launching the blog as a business as opposed to a hobby. And how did that inform how you went about building it and spending time on it and even spending money on it.

Yeah. So two main things come to mind. The first is that I started monetizing from day one and I think a lot of people feel like they should wait. I was actually just having this conversation with one of my coaching clients the other day and they were saying, yeah, I just feel like I shouldn't have ads or anything until I have like 100,000 follow page views a month or something like that. I was like, why would you leave that money on the table? So I had an ad network from day one. I started using affiliate links from day one. Pretty much as soon as I had like a couple thousand page views per month, I started doing some sponsored content, usually with like, agencies that paid a lot less I mean, I think the first sponsored post I got was like $100 or something, you know, So I just tried to be kind of fearless about approaching people and just say, like, the worst they could say is no, thanks, and. And just, yes, kind of start monetizing it from day one. And then the second thing I would say, which I think there's a lot of controversy about this, but I went through a phase, and you and I actually talked about this a few times, like, do you have to spend money to make money, or should you wait to spend money to make money? And ultimately, I just personally decided that if I was starting any other business, I wouldn't expect to have zero expenses. I would probably pay for advertising, and I would probably hire some employees and that kind of thing. And so while I didn't need to spend $50,000 in the first year or something like that, I did hire contract help, whether that was for social media or for photography or the website. I really just felt like I needed to invest in the business if I wanted it to grow quickly. So that was, I would say, the second biggest thing that approaching it from a business standpoint, that's interesting.

And I think that's something I would love to talk about because it's an intentional decision. Right. So you. In your post here, you talk about 2017, and we'll link to this in the show notes for this podcast. And so you outline all the income that you had for 2017 and then the expenses that you had. And this is your second year of blogging, is that right?

Correct.

Okay, so in your second year of blogging, you had a total of $75,000 in income, and then a total of $39,000, almost $40,000 in expenses. And I think it would be great because you've published this and it's available. I think it'd be great to dig into that a little bit, especially given that it's your second year of blogging. That's really impressive, and that's really cool. So let's start with the income side of it. You had mentioned that right from the start you had started with an ad network. Which ad network did you start with and who are you using now?

Yes, so I started just with Google AdSense because it was the easiest and there were no minimums. And. Yeah, so I started with that. After probably six months or so, I switched to, I'm never really sure how you say it. Sovereign. Yeah, yeah, I switched to that network, which also didn't have any page view minimums. And then as soon as I got to 30,000 page views a month, I applied for Mediavine.

Great.

And I think that's still their minimum, although I'm not sure if they've changed that at all. And it was crazy because with basically the same number of page views, I went from making like $50 a month with ads to $500 a month from ads. And I didn't change anything else. So it was a huge. I love mediavine. They were a huge boost to my income and they're super helpful.

And you.

Can really customize how many ads you want displayed and where you want them and that kind of stuff. So now I probably make around $1,500 a month from ads.

Awesome. Yeah, what I love about that is you have this kind of stair step approach where you're slowly increasing and kind of juicing the page views for what you can in terms of ad income. And these ad optimization companies, mediavine Ad Thrive is another one, are really good at optimizing that. They take a cut of the total income that you're making, but they do a really good job, like you said, of increasing that potential, doing a lot of different things, just generally optimizing ad placements and things like that. They also do this thing called header bidding, which is a type of ad optimization. It's an ad optimization technology, which is something that you wouldn't want to do on your own, but it's great for. For. Because it's complicated, but it's great for these ad networks to be able to do it. So cool to hear you make that switch. I'm interested to hear you talk a little bit about starting with ads right away. And one of the things that people ask us a lot is like, hey, at what point should I start trying to monetize my site? And my response is usually if you are somebody that would be excited about the income, even if it's a small amount that you're getting month to month, then it's probably worth doing. If you like the idea of having ads and kind of optimizing those a little bit and just seeing like, hey, today I made, you know, $3 from my site. And you just kind of start building that up. But there's also the other side of maybe it makes sense to wait. There's kind of a performance hit that comes along with ads. It slows down your site and you could delay that as well a little bit longer. So I'm interested to hear where you stand with that. And it sounds like in general you'd say, hey, why don't you jump in and start earning income as long as you can?

Yeah, I definitely lean more towards that mindset. And I think any money, if your goal is to monetize the site, even if it starts off really small, it's still motivating to see. Even if it's just $3 a day or something like that, like, okay, I'm making money. So if I can turn this $3 into 30 into 300, you know, like, then that's really motivating for me. And I also feel like if, you know, it would be such an arbitrary number to decide when you would start advertising. I mean, I think there's an argument to be made whether you want to have ads at all ever. But if you are saying, okay, at some point I want to have ads, I just think, well, why wait and leave that money on the table? And even if it's just $20 a month, that's paying for. For hosting and your domain name, and maybe like a social media scheduler or something like that.

Yeah. There's this concept in startups and they call it ramen profitability. I've talked about it a couple times on the podcast, but the idea being that right from the start, you're profitable because you are. You have a little bit of income and then you have tinier expenses. So, like, you're keeping expenses super low and you're creating an income. And it could be in the first month where you have a profitable site, but it might mean that, you know, you're spending 200 and making 300. So you're still profitable, but you're also putting back into your business, but not so much that you are running it at a loss. So in your first year, you have $7,800 from ads that's growing now in 2018, that will be more, as you mentioned. And then you have this long list of different affiliates that you've earned an income from. So can you talk about your approach to affiliate marketing and how you went about doing that?

Yeah. So to start, I just joined Amazon because that seemed like such an obvious place to join and especially because I do have a big food focus on my blog, but I also do a lot of beauty and home and other lifestyle topics. So there was plenty of stuff for me to link to on Amazon. And that was like a great start because. Because even if only one person bought something from you, you could still end up making like a couple hundred dollars. I'm sure you've. I know you've talked about this in the past too, on Other podcasts. But it's like with Amazon specifically, you know, you get credit for everything they buy in that purchase, not just what they bought from your site.

Right. So if they buy, if they click on a $5 product that you recommend, you know, a $10 book, but then their total cart is $2,000, then you actually get a commission on that total cart, which is one of the great things about Amazon.

Yes, exactly. So that's where I started. And then very slowly I started adding other programs when I felt like they were a fit for my site. And my site is very, I don't know how to phrase it exactly, but I feel like we have sort of these standards because we're very focused on clean, pure, non toxic ingredients and foods and brands. And so because we take this very holistic, natural approach to things. I couldn't just partner with anybody. Otherwise I feel like I would be doing my readers a disservice and selling my soul. So I was very intentional about making sure that I would only recommend products that A, I had personally used and B, I really did recommend recommend and felt like they were a great fit with sort of the mission of root and Revel. So yeah, I just sort of started slowly adding it in. And actually it wasn't until I hired my assistant who came from the affiliate marketing world that I really started to ramp up my efforts. In the past I was kind of just like including links within blog posts where it made sense. I had started growing an email list and having a few affiliate emails. But once she came on, she really convince me of the value of affiliate marketing. And so we said, okay, let's really put a focus here and see what we can do. And it was like, once we started doing weekly affiliate emails, my affiliate income went from like 500amonth to like 4,000amonth.

And can you talk about that when you say weekly affiliate email, what does that look like? And how could people implement something that would be similar?

Yeah, so on my email list, everybody first get put into a welcome sequence. So I have a lot of like opt in freebies that are kind of content upgrades and free downloads and that kind of thing within my blog post. So if somebody opts into that, they get their freebie and then they get put into this welcome sequence. And so to start, I have, I think like the welcome sequence is maybe two weeks long or something like that. It's an email every day for two weeks. And I would say like maybe four or five of those emails are affiliates. And so it's me recommending A product that I think would help my readers with. We focus a lot on holistic health. So with their health and so that's how it starts. And so I don't necessarily sell a ton during that time because people are just getting warmed up to me. They don't know who I am yet. You know, it can take a few times of recommending a product and also time for them to just get to know and trust you. But it sort of gets them primed like, okay, you've heard me mention this product before. And then after they are in their welcome sequence, I send everybody. There's kind of three emails a week that I send out and one of them is called Favorite Finds. And it's pretty much always an affiliate product. And it's basically like, I think every Tuesday we send out an affiliate Finds email and it will be like, you know, my favorite place for grass fed meat or something like that. And then we're recommending it again. And a lot of times like, actually Butcherbox is one of my best affiliate programs and they have promos every month. They are great to work with affiliate wise because there's always something to entice readers to try it out. And they work really closely with their affiliates to come up with these programs and help you optimize them. So like once a month we'll send out an email to our butcher box or to our email subscribers about Butcherbox. And now I make about $2,000 a month from Butcherbox alone.

That's awesome. And so this is a big takeaway. I think this would be worth recapping for people that are listening. So you have this really smart thing that you're doing with your site, which is you are capturing or having people sign up for an email list. And it sounds like. So you use ConvertKit for that or what is your email provider? Okay, yep. So ConvertKit, which is a email marketing service, will allow you to get an email from somebody and then tag them. So then you know in general where they're coming from. So are you tagging people based on like, if they signed up for like business related stuff versus clean eating versus clean makeup versus are you taking people like that?

Yeah, absolutely. So I have several different, well, dozens of tags, honestly that I use at this point. Everybody that everybody that downloads a freebie, whatever that freebies category is, they'll get tagged with that interest. So if you downloaded a recipe, cookbook, you'll get tagged with food versus exactly like you said, all the different categories. And then I also have, because we focus on Health a lot. I also have symptoms. So maybe you downloaded or maybe you took a quiz to see if you had pcos. And I collect emails through that quiz. So then anybody that emails I received through that quiz will get tagged with the PCOS tag. And yeah, so I have a ton like that. You know, each form has its own. Then I have. And then I have exclusion tags. So, like in the emails. So let's say somebody's like, yeah, I like getting your emails, but I don't want all these product recommendations every week. They can opt out of just those emails. So they don't get my favorite finds emails on Tuesdays, but maybe they still want my whole soul list emails on Sundays, which is another kind of series that we do. So then I have tags to exclude people who have chosen to opt out of specific emails.

Got it. And that's. It's like a case study for how to do email marketing. Everybody is a custom user in your account where you know what they're interested in and what they're not interested in. And if the great thing with that is they can unsubscribe from certain categories as opposed to having to unsubscribe in general from your email list. So maybe they don't want to get the emails on Tuesday, so they just say, hey, I want to opt out of these. But you'd still send, you know, blog updates or whatever it might be.

Right.

Um, and super, super smart way to not only do email, but to do affiliate marketing as well, which is awesome. And the other thing that you mentioned, which I think is important, is that with just naturally, when people sign up, they're onboarded, or there's this welcome sequence that goes out to every single person. So the nice thing about that is there's a little bit of a system there. So you have a process when somebody signs up, and then they have these emails that are automatically sent out after somebody signs up. So for somebody that's looking to set that up and maybe they're kind of intimidated by it, it seems a little bit overwhelming. What would your advice be? To get started setting up email sequences and to kind of intentionally tackle some of the affiliate marketing through email that can happen.

Well, I will say I can't take credit for. For all of these ideas because I actually got the welcome sequence idea from Melissa Griffin, who runs a course called Blog to Biz Hive, among many other courses, and I took that, and I walked through her course, I guess, about how to do an email sequence. And so that was exponentially helpful to me. When I was setting up mine, I will say one of the things about setting up an email sequence is that it can take a lot of time up front, but then once it's done, it's on autopilot and you don't have to think about it again. And if you have affiliate links, you can be selling stuff. If you have your own products, like if you have write ebooks or if you sell hard products of something, whatever it may be, courses, etc. You can tell people about those. And then what I really like to do in mine is just direct people to some of the top posts on Root and Revel, because maybe you came because you found a recipe for chicken soup, but you also have pcos and you didn't know that. I have a whole section of the blog devoted to PCOS stuff. And so I really use it as a way to kind of like introduce people to me, My story, the top content, my favorite products. And so I just spent like a weekend, I think, going through the blog, seeing, okay, what are the places I really want to direct people, what are my favorite posts and products, et cetera. And then I just started setting up emails. And I think at first it was like seven days and I decided to do it once a day because I felt like people would maybe get into this groove of every day that they get an email from me and they start expecting it and hopefully looking forward to it and that kind of thing. But now it's grown and now it's like maybe a 21 day sequence or two. It's longer than that now. I can't remember exactly where it is, so I've added on. So I would say to get started, you could always just start with like two or three emails and then add on as you go or as certain posts come out that you think, oh, okay, this would be great to add to my email sequence. Or, you know, you learn about a new product or something like that and just kind of grow with it.

Yeah, that's awesome. And it doesn't have to be something you do, you know, 30 emails in a week. Like you said, it can kind of be like a post where maybe you say, hey, I want to do one email email every week. And so you take time and you build out that sequence and after two months you'll have eight different emails that are part of that sequence.

Yeah, exactly.

Great. That's awesome. And a huge takeaway for people. The last thing that I wanted to dig in on the income side of things was sponsored content. And that was a big Part of the income that you had in 2017, so $54,000. You have some experience not with sponsored content necessarily, but with working with different companies and brands. And so I would assume that some of that experience has been able to roll over into your experience with freelance journalism has been able to roll over into sponsored content. Is that true or is it an entirely different beast?

No, it's very similar. While I have never worked with brands specifically, my job as a freelancer was to pitch editors to get work. And so it's the same concept. I'm just pitching a different type of person, a different type of service, but it's kind of. It's so similar. And I'm so used to pitching myself and getting rejected or not hearing back. So I've developed really thick skin to know it's not personal. And so, yeah, I definitely think my years of pitching helped me pitch brands. And certainly in the beginning and even still today, a lot of our sponsored content comes because I sought it out, not because they came to me.

Got it. Yeah. And that is actually going to be a good lead in to something you had mentioned before was working with your. Somebody that was helping with affiliate side of things. And that will be kind of a transition into the expense side of the profit and loss income income report that you did. And one of the things that I find so fascinating is how intentional you were with putting money back into your business. So talk to me a little bit about why you decided to do that and has that helped you grow right away? Like, have you seen a payback for that right away, or do you think that'll trickle down later?

Certain things I saw an immediate payback and it was like, oh, my gosh, that was the best decision I could have made. I've already earned what I spent back. And then some. And other things were trial. I mean, it's all trial and error. Some things I was like, yeah, that really didn't work out. I'm going to stop paying for that and try something else. So there's definitely been some experimentation with that.

Before we get too far, what were those things? What was the thing that was the immediate payback?

One of the things was I first started, I hate social media. I literally despise spending any amount of time on my phone documenting my every move. I don't. Anyway, I could go on a rant about it and I won't. So social media was something that I knew that I was like, I'm gonna have to outsource this because it does seem like I need to have a social media presence as a blogger, but I really don't want to do it myself. And so one of the first things I tried was working with an Instagram manager who was somebody that wrote and posted all of my posts and then also had some growth techniques that they did to try to help me gain followers. I did not see a return on that at all. And it was expensive, like 600 bucks a month or something like that. So that was something that after a few months I said, you know what, this isn't really working. They had a really hard time getting my voice and I felt uncomfortable sometimes with the way they would say things like, oh gosh, they would just never say that. So that was one of the things that I stopped doing. But then for Pinterest, I actually had come across Kate all's stuff through Food Blogger Pro Simplepen Media and I started working with her and my Pinterest traffic went from like 5,000 page views a month to 30,000 page views a month in the first month of working with her. So that was like, well, that was a no brainer. That was definitely money well spent. And so yeah, there's certain things that I feel like worked really well. Some things that maybe take a little bit more time to show you the return and some things that just flopped.

Yeah, that's great. And Kate, for those that don't know, is a Food Blogger Pro expert. So she's active in the community forum with Food Blogger Pro members and she's also been on the podcast talking about Pinterest. That was way back in episode number 26, which you can get to by going to foodbloggerpro.com 26. And then she's been part of a lot of The Q&As that we do as well on Food Blogger Pro. So be sure to check out those if you're a FoodBlogger Pro Member. We have all of the archives for those that are available if you want to check those out and is just kind of showing up here and there throughout the Food Blogger Pro community and podcasts and things like that. So a really great business owner in person and happy to hear that you had a good experience with her. So the how did you find some of these people? So one of the areas that I see is a virtual assistant and the social media management category. I see that as kind of a big category expense as well. It's one thing to say, okay, I want to put back into my business, I want to invest in my business. It's another thing to Find somebody that would be a good fit to help. Help you do that. So where did you go to find these people?

Yeah, it was really tough. And it ended up being from a variety of ways. At first I started looking on sites like Upwork and Ulance or something like that. And I did not have good luck with that because most of the people that work there, while it is very cheap, don't speak English as their first language. And so I had a hard time communicating. I felt like they were definitely couldn't write in my voice because some of it wasn't even grammatically correct. And so I would not recommend going to those places. I feel like I am a spokesperson for Food Blogger Pro, but I did find a lot of contacts on there. You know, like, I did an SEO audit with Casey, who's one of your other experts. I worked with Kate for Pinterest and sometimes even just asking in the forums, like, hey, does anybody have somebody they like for this? And then for my virtual assistant, I tried to find somebody a different way and thought, like, I just want somebody, like on LinkedIn or something, like a really professional way of finding somebody. And then Pat Flynn actually told me that I should just ask my audience, tell them that I'm hiring and see what they think. And I've noticed that that's something that you guys do at Pinch of Yum, too. And I was just like, I don't want to do that. I feel like people think that's weird or nobody would want to work for me. That's so awkward. And so I fought it. And then I finally was like, all right, well, I'm not finding anybody the other way. So I ended up sending out an email to my list and posting something on social media. And I ended up hiring somebody that was already a reader, which was so awesome because they were already a fan. They knew the brand. They were familiar with my mission. They were passionate about. They agreed with it. So it was a really great place to start where now I have somebody who takes way less training and getting up to speed.

Yeah, that's awesome. And like you said, that's something that we've found with Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro. The first place we always look is within our community when we're looking to hire. And Food Blogger Pro is a great example that Pinch of Yum, too. But like the. We are super honored to have this incredible team of people, and they have all come from in some way, shape or form the community that we have. And you don't have to have a Massive community. You have followers. If you have followers on Instagram, it means you have followers, right? If you have page views on your blog, it means that you have people that are following along and a lot of those people could be a really good fit for the position that you're looking to fill. So great tip. And we've seen that to be really consistent with how we've connected with and found people. Any other advice for people that are looking to build some support into what they're doing? Whether that mean just somebody helping in a part time capacity with social media or kind of a virtual assistant type person to help with email or something like that. Any other things that you've learned along the way that have been helpful?

Yeah, definitely. I think the first is when you're trying to figure out, okay, well, what should I outsource? Source, where should I spend the money? To ask yourself a what do you like doing and what are you good at? Or the flip side, what do you hate doing and what are you not good at? And then to outsource those things, because if you love blogging, because you love the actual writing, then don't outsource that part. That would be a waste of money. Then you're left doing some of the stuff that maybe you hate. But if you are like me and you hate social media, great. There's plenty of people out there that run social media firms and growth agencies and that kind of thing. And so I would look at it from that perspective to figure out like kind of where to start.

Yeah, I think that's great. And one of the things that's most empowering and exciting when I take the time to do it is to create a things I do and things I don't do list. And it sounds like that's similar to what you did. And one of those things was social media. And I think sometimes people that listen to this podcast or in this space think I need to be a social media expert because that's what an online business is. It's social media and Instagram and Facebook. But if you don't enjoy it, that doesn't have to be true. It can still be a component of your business, but it doesn't have to be something that you are doing right. You don't have to do everything. And I think that's going to be really encouraging for people that aren't excited about that or another facet of building a blog that they might not be excited about. There's always going to be somebody that is excited about that and you can look for those people to help fill that in and to be okay putting that money back into your business. So I think that would be a good note to kind of transition into and to maybe wrap up on is as you look ahead 2018 and beyond, what are some of the things that you are going to continue to do and what would your advice be? Kind of a two part question. What would your advice be to people that want to download the things that you have learned really quickly and apply them to their blog?

Okay. Yeah, well, it's weird because sponsored content was 75% of my income in 2017. So you would think that I would be all about the sponsored content. But actually what I found with that is that while it can be great and when you're working with brands that you really have a good synergy with, it's awesome. It is a lot of work. It kind of goes back to feeling like you're sort of beholden to somebody else's vision and you don't have as much control always. Which was what I didn't like about freelancing at the end. And it's not scalable. Right. You can only produce. I mean, unless you can start outsourcing all of your sponsored content and have somebody else write the post and do the photos and all of that. I had just found that like, okay, I feel like I sort of have capped out how much I can make with sponsored content without having my blog grow exponentially in traffic. So I'm really focusing less on sponsored content and more on some passive ish income streams like affiliate marketing, things that are a little bit more like you put in the work up front and then it sort of runs on autopilot. So I'm also doing more ebooks and I'm thinking of, thinking of I'm in the middle of doing a course on food writing and blogging and so I'm hoping that those things will help me still provide a lot of value to my readers without necessarily having to trade time for dollars.

Yeah, that's awesome and fun to hear a little bit about the strategy with the affiliate marketing as it relates to that. And for those that are interested in following along with and maybe checking out the course that you're doing, I know it's not out yet, but how could they be in the loop on that? And then also one of the other things I wanted to mention you had mentioned doing coaching with certain people. Is that something that you're continuing to do and people could contact you, you about.

Yeah, I am still coaching, thank you for asking that I do both wellness coaching and business coaching. So both of those. There's links on the navigation bar on my blog. So if you go to the four Bloggers section, there's like a one on one coaching. And yeah, I love working with people and a lot of what I am doing with coaching right now is kind of figuring out what people need help with and obviously helping them, but it's helping me in turn to kind of inform my course and what it's going to be about, what people are most interested in. So yeah, if you want to, if you're interested in that coaching or just reading free posts about blogging and my income reports and that kind of thing, there's just the four Bloggers tab on Root and Revel that has a lot of that information. And if you opt in for my free toolkit which has like 30 resources that I use for blogging, then you'll be added to my email list and you'll be tagged as an interest in blogging and then you will be given updates as courses and other things come out that are relevant to that.

Awesome. Great. And super excited for your success, Kate. It's so fun to hear an update and to hear you moving on the things that you wanted to move on and having success with that. I know it will be inspiring for other people too as they listen to this and then follow along with your journey. So you mentioned a couple different places, but in general, where can people follow along with you online?

Yeah, so rootandrevel.com is my blog and like I said, it's you know, real food, natural living, holistic health kind of blog and I have started doing some more business posts so you can see those there. But yeah, it's social media. I'm justoot and Revel pretty much everywhere and that's about it.

Cool. Awesome. Kate, thanks so much for coming on the podcast again. Really fun to connect with you and excited to continue to watch you grow, Root and Revel.

Thank you, Bjork. I appreciate it.

Hello wonderful listeners. Hey guys, it's Alexa here and I'm here to bring you the reviewer of the week and also tell you about a really exciting thing that we just launched on Food Blogger Pro. So if you know anyone who would make an awesome guest for the Food Blogger Pro podcast, maybe it's you, maybe it's one of your favorite bloggers, we'd love for you to let us know. And we have a new fancy schmancy forum on Food Blogger Pro where you can fill out the interviewee's name, the blog name and the topic that you think they would be really good to speak about and then you just hit submit and we can easily go through those and contact people as we see them fit into our schedule. So if you're interested in submitting an idea for the Food Blogger Pro podcast, you go to foodbloggerpro.com podcast request and just fill out that form, hit submit and we will get it on our end shortly. And now it's time for our reviewer of the week. And this one comes from a huge advocate of Food Blogger Pro, Kitty from MyKatieBlue.com and it says hi Kitty here. Just listen to Food Blogger Pro podcast number 76 again. This podcast is so full of helpful information on analytics. I was previously getting lost on what to focus on, but learned of tools that I could use within Google Analytics, reports I should be looking at and so on. If you haven't listened to to this podcast yet, do it. Quality content abounds. And read the show notes for links to info they discussed during the podcast. Can't say enough about this podcast and the Food Blogger Pro and Pinch of Yum Teams. Thank you so much Kitty. We really appreciate you and thank you so much for your support and for all of you out there listening right now, thank you so much for tuning in this week. Until next Tuesday. Make it a great week.

Sam.